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Catch a killer with your DNA
In the late 1980s, a young woman named Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend, Jay Cook, were brutally killed near Seattle.
The case remained unsolved for decades. But in 2018, a detective with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office found out about a powerful new tool for tracking down criminals: genetic genealogy.
Until recently, law enforcement’s ability to analyze DNA was limited in two key ways: They could access only genetic material that resided in a national database of people who had been arrested or convicted of a crime, and their analyses usually took into account only 20 genetic markers. Genetic genealogy, on the other hand, enables experts to analyze about 800,000 of these markers and allows them to cast a much wider net: millions of consumers who have voluntarily added their DNA to leading ancestry databases, such as 23andMe.
In 2018, genetic genealogy helped lead to the apprehension of the Golden State Killer, one of the most notorious criminals in California’s history. And after 31 years with no real leads, it led authorities to a suspect in the slaying of Van Cuylenborg and Cook.
Yet despite the technology’s recent successes – it helped crack more than 50 previously unsolved murder and rape cases in under a year – some experts worry that the powerful tool requires more oversight and caution to protect the rights and privacy of individuals.
“We have a balance of values between privacy and crime solving, between liberty and crime solving,” Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland, said in this week’s episode. “After all, law enforcement could solve lots more crimes if they were able to enter anyone's home at any time just because they wanted to. We don't allow that.”
Hear the episode
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Russian-American business exec with ties to Trump is drawn into impeachment inquiry
He was a Russian-American commodities trader who told the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine that he was President Donald Trump’s adviser.
And in a series of phone calls last year, Semyon “Sam” Kislin, 83, a New York-based business executive with ties to Trump – and, according to the FBI, to Russian organized crime – importuned U.S. officials for help recovering $21 million in assets from the government of Ukraine, U.S. State Department records show.
The money Kislin sought was a small portion of the more than $1 billion in assets targeted by prosecutors in their probe of Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt former president, Viktor Yanukovych. He is accused of looting the national treasury before he fled the country in 2014.
According to documents we obtained, Kislin claimed that $21 million worth of government bonds seized by prosecutors in the Yanukovych probe was rightfully his.
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How will Trump’s lax emissions standards save money and lives? By assuming Americans will simply drive less
When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rebuked its own National Weather Service bureau in Alabama for accurately forecasting that the state would see no impact from Hurricane Dorian, the incident provoked a public uproar. It was widely seen as a clumsy move by NOAA to cover for an erroneous forecast from President Donald Trump, at the expense of accurate information about an imminent weather disaster.
The incident underscored a phenomenon that scientists who work in or closely with the federal government have experienced repeatedly under Trump’s leadership: Across many federal agencies, scientific research and technical expertise has been altered, ignored or silenced when it presents impediments to the president’s agenda.
In many instances, the administration has overturned or undermined years of work by government agencies, and longtime civil servants have felt compelled either to bend to political pressure or leave the government.
The interference has been especially strong at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which play prominent roles protecting people and nature from industrial practices and pollution and are hotbeds of Trump’s deregulatory efforts.
“The EPA administration has demonstrated a pattern of cherry-picking scientific evidence, of ignoring rigorous scientific consensus or simply politicizing science to justify its actions,” Deborah Swackhamer, a University of Minnesota professor emerita and former chairwoman of influential EPA science advisory boards, said at a House subcommittee hearing in July. “While regulations can be affected by politics, science never should be.”
The manipulation of technical expertise can have dramatic consequences for the everyday lives of most Americans. For example, the Obama administration’s fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards for cars and light trucks were designed to nearly double the average distance passenger vehicles travel on a gallon of gas – to more than 54 miles – by 2025 and slash greenhouse gas emissions. Trump’s proposal to reverse those standards, which is not yet final, would freeze fuel economy requirements at 37 miles per gallon through model year 2026 and significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions.
The Trump administration justified its proposal with a 1,613-page technical analysis that concluded that weakening the standards would save $200 billion and thousands of lives. This contradicted a 2017 Obama-era analysis that found that those stricter standards would save nearly $100 billion. Critics inside and outside the government say this analysis is full of errors that grossly misrepresent the costs and benefits of the rollback and ignores the years of work and thousands of pages of research that went into the Obama administration’s standards.
“I’ve called it the most spectacular regulatory flip-flop in history,” said Jeff Alson, a longtime EPA engineer. “I’ve never seen anything like it – for a regulatory body to say, ‘Forget everything we told you for seven years about the numbers; we were completely wrong. Now believe us now.’ ”
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What is the Flores Settlement Agreement?
Thirty-five years ago, lawyers representing teenage refugees took on the U.S. immigration system. Now, the Trump administration wants to terminate that deal. Watch our brand-new explainer video on the Flores Settlement Agreement.
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Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.
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Documents show: Forwarding this email to a friend will help you band together to do the right thing.
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