January 7, 2016
- "More people will get into more trucks. Most of them will get where they're going. But a few of them will die."
- Turkish police raid business making fake life vests—that actually sink—for refugees.
- Hundreds of thousands of indigenous Peruvians were sterilized under a nefarious "family planning" program in the 1990s.
- Iconic North Korean news anchor came out of retirement to announce H-bomb, signaling a return to Cold War ideology.
- Comparing the magnitude of North Korea's 6-kiloton nuke test to the US's 21 in 1945 and the USSR's 58,000.
- Defense industry-funded politicians wasted no time calling for more military spending after DPRK's H-bomb.
- NYPD's claim that stop-and-frisk dropped 93% between 2011 and 2014 is based on suspect record keeping.
- Chicago PD's stop-and-frisk is in full swing, and many times worse than the NYPD's at its peak.
- States that have low gun ownership and tight gun regulations have fewer gun deaths—obviously.
- Montenegrin PM wins dubious "Person of the Year" award from corruption watchdog.
- Between 500,000 and a million extremely poor Americans will lose food stamp waivers in 2016.
- NYer correction of the week: "An earlier version of this post misidentified one of the ships among the wreckage on the planet Jakku."
- When LBJ campaigned across Texas in the summer of 1948, he sweat through six or seven shirts a day.
- "The most pens used by a president to sign a bill is 75, a record set by Lyndon Johnson in 1964."