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Republicans’ financing of white vigilantism
Republicans’ financing of white vigilantism, Renée Graham, The Boston Globe
Too many Republicans nationwide seem to have abandoned any objective sense of what is wrong so long as it aligns with their own ideology. When Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020, Tucker Carlson, Fox’s now-deposed most hate-filled mouth, declared Rittenhouse “had to maintain order when no one else would.” After Rittenhouse’s acquittal, he was feted like a right-wing rock star.

More recently, Carlson claimed the media was treating Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified military documents, “like Osama bin Laden, maybe a little worse.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who never misses an opportunity to say the stupid part out loud, claims Teixeira is being targeted by the Biden administration for being “white, male, christian, and antiwar.” [...]

This is modern Republicanism at its most rancid, with violence as an acceptable tool. That tracks with a 2021 poll conducted after the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection that found 40 percent of Republicans surveyed agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.”
The Movement to Stop Dollar Stores From Suffocating Black Communities
The Movement to Stop Dollar Stores From Suffocating Black Communities, Aallyah Wright, Capital B News
Over the years, dollar stores have expanded their food options, which tend to be mostly packaged, higher in calories, and lower in nutrients, a Tufts University study found. Researchers wrote that the dollar stores may be filling food voids where local grocers do not have enough businesses to support maintaining a store, leaving residents with fewer food options, especially in rural areas.

For more than a decade, dollar stores have been the fastest-growing food retailers by household expenditure share, with an increase of nearly 90% from 2008 to 2020 according to Tufts University. In rural areas, the increase was 103%.

In rural and low-income areas, people, on average, spend more than 5% of their food budget at dollar stores. In rural Black households, they spent nearly 12%. One reason: They are likely to be located further from grocery stores.

The limited healthy food offerings is a major criticism of the stores. It is why some Black leaders have been leading the charge to stop dollar stores from suffocating their communities.
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Denials of health-insurance claims are rising — and getting weirder
Denials of health-insurance claims are rising — and getting weirder, Elisabeth Rosenthal, The Washington Post
Millions of Americans in the past few years have run into this experience: filing a health-care insurance claim that once might have been paid immediately but instead is just as quickly denied. If the experience and the insurer’s explanation often seem arbitrary and absurd, that might be because companies appear increasingly likely to employ computer algorithms or people with little relevant experience to issue rapid-fire denials of claims — sometimes bundles at a time — without even reviewing the patient’s medical chart; a job title at one company was “denial nurse.”

It’s a handy way for insurers to keep revenue high — and just the sort of thing that provisions of the Affordable Care Act were meant to prevent. Because the law prohibited insurers from deploying a number of previously profit-protecting measures such as refusing to cover patients with preexisting conditions, the authors worried that insurers would compensate by increasing the number of denials.

A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) of plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace found that even when patients received care from in-network physicians — doctors and hospitals approved by these same insurers — the companies in 2021 nonetheless denied, on average, 17 percent of claims. One insurer denied 49 percent of claims in 2021; another’s turndowns hit an astonishing 80 percent in 2020. Despite the potentially dire impact that denials have on patients’ health or finances, data shows that people appeal only once in every 500 cases.

Sometimes, the insurers’ denials defy not just medical standards of care but also plain old human logic...
They Watched Jordan Neely Die. Did They Have a Duty to Intervene?
They Watched Jordan Neely Die. Did They Have a Duty to Intervene?, Chelsia Rose Marcius, The New York Times
The legal standard is clear: No U.S. state explicitly requires civilian strangers to physically intervene when they see an adult in danger, though some impose a duty to report wrongdoing and two set an ambiguous standard of rendering assistance. The value of such legislation has been debated for years, according to people who study the intersection of ethics, the law and bystanderism — the phenomenon of being less likely to intervene when there are others present.

In New York, where residents rub shoulders in corridors, crowded sidewalks and packed subway cars, the decision of how to respond to an uncomfortable situation is a daily dilemma.

There is an unspoken code in the city: “You do not get involved, you cannot solve every person’s problems. We learn to be very guarded,” said Ken Levy, a professor at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University, who studies bystanderism and who lived in New York for years.

“The closest we can come to undoing a tragedy like this is by blaming the people who did it, and those who didn’t stop it,” he added.
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Serbians hand in guns and question culture of violence after two shootings
Serbians hand in guns and question culture of violence after two shootings, Guy Delauney, BBC News
The public and political reaction to such a disarmament programme in the country which tops the list, the United States, can be imagined. In Serbia, says Bojan Elek, it has been a different matter.

The amnesty has been mostly positively accepted, he says, and by the second day of the amnesty, more guns and ammunition had been handed over than in the previous three amnesties put together.

"The number of illegal guns is definitely being reduced - even some weapons from World War II have been handed in. But we haven't got a credible figure of how many there were to start with, so it's hard to say how many are remaining." [...] Given the government's swift action to reduce the number of weapons in circulation and the lack of widespread objections to their proposals, the question is: why are tens of thousands of people still motivated to hit the streets in protest?
DeSantis plans to officially enter presidential race next week
DeSantis plans to officially enter presidential race next week, Hannah Knowles and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
The second-term governor, widely considered at present to be the most viable GOP challenger to former president Donald Trump, has been laying the groundwork for a campaign for months. In speeches around the country, he has touted his landslide reelection win last year and his sweeping legislative agenda in Florida — passed this spring by GOP supermajorities — and also implicitly pitched himself as a better bet than Trump in the general election.

Representatives for DeSantis’s political team declined to comment. DeSantis is also expected to hold an event launching his candidacy in Dunedin, Fla., his hometown, according to one of the people familiar with the plans and another familiar with the kickoff gathering. That event is expected to take place after Memorial Day, according to the first person. [...]

Doubts about DeSantis’s presidential prospects have grown in recent months as Trump has surged in national polls of the GOP race and attacked DeSantis, and as some donors have voiced concerns about the governor’s policy moves. But the governor has rebuilt some momentum over the past week, rolling out large slates of endorsements from state lawmakers in Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida.

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