News and opinions from many perspectives.
The Batley and Spen by-election was a close contest that went right down to the wire with few commentators risking calling the result before it was announced. At 5:25am it was declared. Kim Leadbeater was the new Labour MP for Batley and Spen, beating her nearest rival, the Conservative candidate Ryan Stephenson, by 323 votes. It was close but a clear victory for Labour.
The amount and variety of news produced today often tests people’s ability to determine its value and veracity. Such a torrent of information threatens to drown news consumers in a river of confusion.
The overabundance also undermines Americans’ ability to decipher fact from misinformation.
But techniques exist for ferreting out what we can trust and what we should question, and there are steps we can take to help determine where the news comes from.
Conservative voters, Second Amendment activists and gun aficionados celebrated the overturn of California’s decades-long assault weapons ban, thanks to a decision by federal Judge Roger Benitez. Now that California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed an appeal, the resulting legal battles may provide even further cause for courtroom warfare – a Supreme Court case.
Greene has two core advantages that are possessed by no other major contenders for the Republican primary. First, she is a true person of the people having risen to prominence by the spirit of her work ethic. Secondly, she currently excites the Republican base in a manner that is only rivaled by the likes of Donald Trump and the late Ronald Reagan.
How does a news agency work? Where does the newspaper get the information from?
We want to know what’s happening around us and why. What we can’t see for ourselves, we like to be told: Online, in the newspaper, on the radio and on television. It’s a long way from the actual event to the news report. Every day, journalists receive countless stories, reports from correspondents and press releases from parties, associations and companies. The majority of the information, however, is provided by a dense network of global news agencies. They collect, select and sell information to the media. But what is the meaning of news agencies?
Karen Levy, University of Washington Kill every human on the planet. This is the first assignment I give students in…
Vaccines have unquestionably been society’s most potent weapon against viral diseases of medical importance. When the new disease AIDS burst onto the scene in the early 1980s and the virus that caused it was discovered in 1983-84, it was only natural to think that the research community would be able to develop a vaccine for it.
At a now famous press conference in 1984 announcing HIV as the cause of AIDS, then U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler predicted that a vaccine would be available in two years. Well, it is now 37 years later and there is no vaccine. The rapidity of COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution puts the lack of an HIV vaccine in stark contrast. The problem is not failure of government. The problem is not lack of spending. The difficulty lies in the HIV virus itself. In particular, this includes the remarkable HIV strain diversity and the immune evasion strategies of the virus.
Nexta, the channel on the social media platform Telegram that Protasevich co-founded and formerly edited, has become one of the main tools in the Belarusian resistance movement that developed since last summer’s disputed presidential elections in which Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory. Pro-democracy campaigners use the channel to inform supporters of the details of protests as well as to publicise reports and images of brutal attacks on protesters by the security services.
The fact that Nexta has its offices in Poland means that Minsk has so far been unable to shut it down. But as Protasevich discovered on Sunday, Lukashenko’s regime is willing to break international agreements in order to catch, punish and silence those who defy him. There are real questions about the safety of leading Belarusian opposition figures living in exile – especially Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the woman widely regarded as the real winner of the August 2020 presidential election.
In the course of their work, police officers encounter people who are intoxicated, distressed, injured or abused. The officers routinely ask for key identifying information like addresses, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers, and they frequently enter people’s homes and other private spaces.
With the advent of police body cameras, this information is often captured in police video recordings – which some states’ open-records laws make available to the public.
Imagine you’re researching something. Whether you’re a fourth grader who needs to find out how volcanoes erupt or you’re an adult looking for more information regarding a news article, you might want to quickly look something up on the internet. What could go wrong?
Google’s search engine may seem to have all the answers to your questions. But where does that information come from? Who selects the websites that display when you enter “volcanic eruption” in the search box? Who decides which item shows up first and in what order the rest will follow?
