Cleared of Charges, Freddie Gray Officers May Find Returning to Work Difficult

After a Baltimore jury convicted him for shooting a man during a 1996 traffic stop, Sgt. Stephen R. Pagotto said he became a pariah in the community and with top police brass. The Baltimore Police Department fired him, and he became a car salesman in Harford County, where he moved from his Northeast Baltimore home after vandals tagged his van with “killer cop.” When Maryland’s highest court reversed his conviction in 2000, he wanted to get back to policing but said command staff made it…

Do Hillary Clinton’s Democrats Have an Actual Policy Agenda?

For the past two days, I put this question specifically to delegates and staffers, to the people who ought to know: “What, at core, is the Democratic message coming out of this convention?” […] Delegates I spoke to paused, backed up, rephrased. In each case, they settled on general virtues: justice, inclusion, progress, the idea that the party was not so much associated with a particular program but with goodness itself, with a progressive sensibility that will, on the whole, produce virtuous outcomes. […] This…

Sorry Apple Diehards, the iPad Is Still Not a Real Computer

Don’t deny it, folks who prefer the iPad to the Mac or PC: you like the challenge! It was awesome to check out and edit files in my company’s Github repo and make a pull request, all from the iPad. Myke Hurley made an observation on his Analog(ue) podcast that even if you could prove that a given task was easier on the Mac, he’d still rather do it on his iPad because it’s just more fun. I absolutely get that. Yet there’s an irony…

Koch Network Officially Declares It Won’t Back Donald Trump

Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch declared Sunday that his expansive political network would not support Donald Trump, but the 80-year-old conservative icon insisted he would not support Hillary Clinton, either. Koch, a popular target of Democrats, called any rumor that he would back the Democratic presidential candidate “a blood libel.” “At this point I can’t support either candidate, but I’m certainly not going to support Hillary,” Koch told hundreds of donors gathered for a weekend retreat in a luxury hotel at the foot of the Rocky…

Study: Unsanitary Conditions in Prisons, Jails Spreading Diseases Into General Populations

The cycling of inmates in and out of prisons and jails around the world contributes significantly to the global epidemics of HIV, viral hepatitis and tuberculosis, according to new research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. […] The authors reached their conclusions by analyzing nearly 300 scientific papers written about prisoners and infectious diseases by scientists around the world during the past 10 years. They also requested research data from United Nations organizations and from prison officials in countries such as China…