Season 34: Episode 12 How do you change a troubled police department? produced by Anya Bourg / Transcript / Credits / investigations Policing the Police
Imagine you are a shareholder in a big company and the top executives are sitting on huge amounts of cash and are not interested in putting it to work through productive capital investments, research and development, reducing company debt or paying employees a higher wage. What would you want done…
Researchers have cooked up a way to attack mobile devices that relies on a victim doing nothing more than listening to a boobytrapped YouTube video. In the attack, “hidden” voice commands (more like impossible to understand for humans) trick voice-activated assistants like Google Now or Siri into…
In early April, experts at a military lab outside Washington intensified their search for evidence that a dangerous new biological threat had penetrated the nation's borders. They didn't have to hunt long before they found it. Advertisement > On May 18, a team working at the Walter Reed Army…
It’s lasagna cats all the way down. How better to pay tribute to your favorite absurdist comic strip by getting even more absurd? (Photo: Tony Alter/Flickr ) Even by the conventional standards of your local paper’s comics section, “Garfield” long ago achieved a level of mindless predictability that…
Photographs and video of heavily armed police officers wearing body armor and helmets arresting protesters in Baton Rouge over the weekend reverberated on social networks and in the world’s media, focusing new attention on the militarization of police forces across the United States. The image that…
I've never been plagued by the big existential questions. You know, like What's my purpose? or What does it all mean? Growing up I was a very science-minded kid — still am — and from an early age I learned to accept the basic meaninglessness of the universe. Science taught me that it's all just…
For years now, popular publications like Wired and The Economist have chronicled the exploits of "brain hackers" — do-it-yourself-ers who use electrical gadgets to zap their scalps in hopes of benefits ranging from improved math skills to relief from depression. Now, apparently for the first time, a…
On July 5, 2016, the moon passed between NOAA's DSCOVR satellite and Earth. NASA's EPIC camera aboard DSCOVR snapped these images over a period of about four hours. In this set, the far side of the moon, which is never seen from Earth, passes by. In the backdrop, Earth rotates, starting with the…
Last month I watched John Oliver berate the 401(k) industry . It was so good! If you haven’t seen it, you should. He spent the majority of the segment exposing the ridiculous structure of a legacy 401(k) plan. I’ve spent the last few years building the solution. Let me explain… When my wife and I…
If the U.S. presidential campaign has made one thing clear, it’s this: The United States is not Finland. Nor is it Norway. This might seem self-evident. But America’s Americanness has had to be reaffirmed ever since Bernie Sanders suggested that Americans could learn something from Nordic countries…
A few weeks before Britain’s historic Brexit referendum — before John Oliver eviscerated the whole thing on Last Week Tonight ; before Noel Gallagher broke his legendary silence on the matter; long before the results had been announced and countless Britons took to Google, asking, “ What is the EU?…
I n the waning days of summer in 2008, a convicted felon and his business partner leased office space on a seedy block near MacArthur Park. They set up a waiting room, hired an elderly physician and gave the place a name that sounded like an ordinary clinic: Lake Medical. During a single week in…
Like a confectioner trying to reach the right consistency in a sweet concoction, a supermassive black hole is vigorously stirring the gas within a collection of galaxies to keep star formation at a minimum. The new finding, revealed by the doomed spacecraft Hitomi , may help solve the question of…
(Left) The tissue-engineered robotic ray, made of gold, silicone and live muscle cells. (Right) The titanium molds that scientists used to create the rays. Karaghen Hudson and Michael Rosnach Scientists have created a synthetic stingray that's propelled by living muscle cells and controlled by…
(Benjamin C. Tankersley/For The Washington Post) Since 1990, state and local spending on prisons and jails has risen more than three times faster than spending on schools, according to a new Department of Education report released Thursday. Driving that disparity is the unprecedented rise in the…
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images In the early hours of Friday morning, police officers in Texas took what is thought to have been unprecedented action for US law enforcement. Using a bomb disposal robot, they killed the suspect in last night's shooting in Dallas after negotiations with the individual…
Abstract A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years. In contrast to previous work…
We plebes believe there are two parties, but as you climb the ladder, the aisle gets smaller and smaller until you dead end in the same lap of this all powerful being... View the full episode: https://youtu.be/crj8NaootvU @ActOutOnOccupy facebook.com/ActOutOnOccupy occupy.com/actout
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. July 8, 2016, 1:30 PM GMT / Updated July 8, 2016, 8:26 PM GMT By Erik Ortiz Dallas Police Used Bomb Robot to Take Down Gunman Who Shot Cops July 8, 2016 02:35 Police in…
This story is part of BBC Earth's " Best of 2016 " list, our greatest hits of the year. Browse the full list . On 30 June 1908, an explosion ripped through the air above a remote forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river. The fireball is believed to have been 50-100m wide. It depleted…
In 1955, a 15-year-old Frank Zappa happened upon a copy of The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse in a hi-fi shop in La Mesa, California. The cover showed a man with frizzy gray hair and a furrowed brow, and Zappa recalled thinking he was “glad a mad scientist had made a record.” It cost $5.95 and…
Human beings try to find patterns to explain the reason behind almost every phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that there is a pattern to rely on. Superstitions are a classic example where spurious patterns were generalized to explain many a phenomena. As Analysts, we are on the lookout for patterns…
These are dry notes I took in the process of setting up a burner iPhone SE as a secure travel device. They are roughly in setup order. I believe iOS to be the most secure platform one can use at this time, but there are a lot of switches and knobs. This list optimizes for security versus…
Brian Brettschneider A 13,235-Mile Road Trip for 70-Degree Weather Every Day John Metcalfe Oct 20, 2015 This year-long journey across the U.S. keeps you at consistent high temperatures. Say you’re a delicate individual who, like a wilt-prone poinsettia, doesn’t do well with temperature extremes. In…
A my Albritton can’t remember if her boyfriend signaled when he changed lanes late that August afternoon in 2010. But suddenly the lights on the Houston Police patrol car were flashing behind them, and Anthony Wilson was navigating Albritton’s white Chrysler Concorde to a stop in a strip-mall…
Virginia Anderlini (right) was the first private client to try out Dr. Sonya Kim's new virtual reality program for the elderly, and says she's eager to see more. Kim's handful of programs are still at the demo stage. Kara Platoni/KQED Virginia Anderlini is 103 years old, and she is about to take her…
The deadly shooting of 32-year-old Philando Castile by a cop during a routine traffic stop in Minnesota on Wednesday just got murkier. Multiple sources have told The Register that police removed video footage of Castile's death from Facebook, potentially tampering with evidence. Castile, his…
In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed a curious pattern among patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Those who had been given rooms overlooking a small stand of deciduous trees were being discharged almost a day sooner, on average,…
Elephants are being killed by poachers at a rate of one every 15 minutes in Africa.Photograph: Morgan Trimble/AP Wildlife officials in nearly 30 African states say they are appalled by an EU decision to oppose a comprehensive global ban on the ivory trade. In a position paper released on 1 July, the…
O n the morning of August 28, 2014, two days after the end of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Sohaib Zahda hopped into a shared taxi in Hebron that was going to Ramallah, where he had a job interview. Thirty-three-year-old Zahda, who owns a paintball company, is an unlikely terrorist. An avid cyclist…
Imagine: You pull out your phone to record police misconduct—suddenly, your camera just doesn’t work. Turns out, your phone’s camera has been disabled by an infrared emitter. Apple’s newly patented technology may make this possible. The technology places an infrared sensor in your phone that has the…
Trump’s energy flows out of him, as if channelled in thousands of micro wires, and enters the minds of his followers. Illustration by Seymour Chwast He Appears Trump is wearing the red baseball cap, or not. From this distance, he is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea…
Inside Satya Nadella’s plan to outsmart Google Satya Nadella bounded into the conference room, eager to talk about intelligence. I was at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA, and the company’s CEO was touting the company's progress in building more intelligent apps and services. Each morning, he…
Heather Meyerend examines Mary, a ninety-two-year-old woman, at her home, in Marine Park, Brooklyn, in September, 2015. Mary died later that month. Heather believes in caring for the whole person, body and mind. Photograph by Eugene Richards for The New Yorker Heather Meyerend is a hospice nurse who…
Photos from inside North Korea reveal how the ecology of the secretive Asian country is preventing the extinction of several once plentiful species of migratory birds. Despite being closed to most foreigner visitors, North Korea may ironically be the saviour of one of the world's greatest…
Image: NOAA As if we needed more evidence that cephalopods are on the verge of a global uprising that will end in humanity’s destruction, our favorite tentacled invertebrates appear to have an insane visual system that allows them to perceive color despite being technically colorblind. This, along…
V aluable intelligence” found by MI6 about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nerve gas arsenal may have in fact been stolen from a Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage action film, the Chilcot Inquiry has disclosed. Intelligence officers circulated a report of deadly nerve toxins being held in glass spheres, until…
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