• Cold case investigators find cops in Nome, Alaska, ignored rape reports: Sexual assault survivors have for years been complaining about the lack police response in the city of 3,900 on the Bering Strait in western Alaska. In 2018, they showed up regularly at city council meetings to press their complaints. So earlier this year, a new police chief announced that his staff would look into 460 unresolved rape cases—mostly of Alaskan Native women—dating back more than a decade. What two cops found during weeks of sifting through the files “squinting at computer screens and stacks of paper ... horrified them,” according to journalists Victoria McKenzie and Wong Maye-e. Time after time, the duo found that not only did Nome police fail to investigate rapes and other sex crimes, in some cases they didn’t even question the suspect. Women would call to report a sexual assault and nobody from the police department would go talk to them. What they found confirmed what the Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has described as “a systemic, decades-long indifference to the safety of Alaska Native women.” Between 2008 and 2017, a review of Nome’s police reports show, just 8% of reported sexual assaults on adults led to arrests and charges being filed.
• With his spending on TV ads already at $80 million just four weeks after he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, Mike Bloomberg hires 200 staff in 21 states.
• Joint Chiefs chairman, other generals, reject report that found military lied about U.S.-Afghan war: In the “Afghanistan Papers” earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that over the 18 years the U.S. has been engaged in the war, officials have lied about making good progress in a fight that they knew early on that they couldn’t win. Said Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley: “I know there’s an assertion out there of some sort of coordinated lie over 18 years. I find that a mischaracterization in my own personal experience. You’re looking at probably hundreds of general officers, State Department employees, CIA, Department of Defense folks. I just don’t think you can get that level of coordination to do that kind of deception.”
MIDDAY TWEET
• Virginia AG shoots down local Second Amendment sanctuary laws: Reports say at least 94 localities in the commonwealth have passed ordinances to shield themselves from any gun law reforms the newly Democratic legislature passes. Many of Virginia’s Democratic candidates in the 2019 elections included support for universal background checks for firearms purchases, the most modest of the major reforms being pushed nationwide by advocacy groups and ever more legislators. “What we’re talking about are the kind of common sense gun safety laws that Virginians voted for just a few weeks ago,” Attorney General Mark Herring said in a statement, pointing to the November election that put Democrats in control of both houses of the state’s legislature for the first time in nearly a quarter century. ”Too many Virginians have lost their lives to guns and it is well past time that we enact these gun safety measures that will save lives and make our communities safer,” he said. Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam has not yet made clear what gun laws will be part of his legislative agenda when the January 2020 session gets underway. After the mass killing of 13 last May in Virginia Beach, however, he proposed an assault weapons ban, a return to the state’s one-gun-a-month purchase law, and other reforms that have ticked off gun rights advocates and the National Rifle Association, which is based in Virginia.
• Analysts say UPS and Alphabet have the lead in the next big move in the global goods delivery market: drones.
• While experts say the economy is booming with more people employed than ever, the U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index shows a lot of those jobs are rotten:
Many observers of U.S. employment have generally failed to recognize the relative quality of the overall pool of existing jobs in the country, and how that has changed overtime. The history of private sector employment in the U.S. over the past three decades is one of overall degradation in the ability of many American jobs to support households—even those with multiple jobholders. The JQI illustrates that part of the reason for this is that the U.S. has, over the relevant period, become more dependent on jobs that offer fewer hours of work at lower relative wages.