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August 2018

A 33 year old Cambridge, Massachusetts man named Brandon Ziobrowski was arrested this week for a tweet he recently published in which he offered $500 to "anyone" willing to kill an ICE agent. According to reports, he has also used Twitter to call for violence against police officers, and to threaten Senator John McCain.

Despite pressure from Prime Minister Theresa May and the UK Conservative Party, Britain's former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has refused to apologise for his critical remarks about women in burkas, the full-body Islamic veil. The senior Conservative politician stirred a controversy this week after likening burka-clad women to "letter-boxes" and "bank robbers". Johnson "won't be apologizing", reported the BBC citing a source close to the former Foreign Secretary. "We have to call it out. If we fail to speak up for liberal values then we are simply yielding ground to reactionaries and extremists," he reportedly added.

Friday, authorities raided a New Mexico compound on the Colorado border where they Siraj Ibn Wahhaj was reportedly training children to commit school shootings. That claim was made by a foster parent to one of the children. Wahhaj and four other adults were arrested and face charges of child abuse. According to CBS News, Wahhaj, "Wahhaj is the son of a Brooklyn imam who was a possible co-conspirator in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 -- but was never charged."

When competition drags down your product, the smart thing to do is to fix your product and make it better than your competition. Right!? Instead of doing that with the taxi services in New York City, the city council placed a cap on ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft and froze "new licenses for one year while it studies the fallout from the booming industry."

The academic boycott of Israel, part of the broader Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, has been endorsed by approximately 1400 university and college faculty members in the U.S. alone. So far, the only major academic association to endorse the academic boycott was the American Studies Association (December 2013), though there have been failed attempts at the American Anthropological Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association and other major organizations.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos comes from a wealthy family and was independently affluent prior to joining the Trump administration, so clearly, she's probably a terrible human being. Or so thinks Vox contributor Kate Wagner.

Senate Democrats are grandstanding in the worst of fashions, hoping to delay the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh, Trump's second pick for the Supreme Court. Their latest stall tactic is purely political and one that's in the simplest of terms, silly -- they're demanding what amounts to volumes of documents going back decades. These documents, they claim, would provide insight into Kavanaugh's legal mind and also they belong to the people because of democracy and other totally unrelated nonsense.

Federal prosecutors announced an indictment (pdf.) against Rep. Christopher Collins (R-NY) on insider trading charges and lying to the FBI along with his son Cameron Collins and Stephen Zarsky, the father of Cameron's fiancee. The charges stem from the "securities of Australian biotechnology company called Innate Immunotherapeutics, where the congressman served on the board."