Crackdown on peaceful protests

More than 20 US states have proposed bills placing new restrictions on protests in the months since Donald Trump became President.
The potential laws included legislation creating stricter penalties for protesters who are arrested, and in some states, removing liability from drivers who accidentally injure protesters on the roads.
The United Nations (UN) said some of the proposals “would severely infringe upon the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly". The legislation was incompatible with international human rights law, it warned...
Under legislation in Missouri, wearing a mask or disguise while protesting would be a crime. In Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida there are proposed bills to toughen penalties for blocking roads or trespassing.
“Some of these bills are so egregious that you don't need a law degree to conclude they're unconstitutional,” Lee Rowland, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNN.

More dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan

Thanks to the rising tide of cartel violence, Mexico surpassed Iraq and Afghanistan to become the world’s second-deadliest war zone in 2016, according to the annual Armed Conflict Survey by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The reign of terror wrought upon innocent civilians by Mexico’s drug cartels accounted for 23,000 fatalities in 2016, according to IISS’s study of ongoing conflicts around the world. That’s compared with around 16,000 deaths in Iraq and 17,000 in Afghanistan. (All three pale in comparison to the sixth year of the Syrian civil war, which took more than 50,000 lives last year.)

Mercenaries in Iraq

A major American contractor in Iraq is engaging in rampant fraud, waste, and abuse involving prostitution rings, alcohol smuggling operations, and giving militias virtually free rein of a major base, according to two if its former employees.
A big story in the Associated Press details astounding charges of fraud, waste, and abuse surrounding Sallyport Global, a U.S. company that received nearly $700 million in federal government contracts to secure Balad Air Base, ostensibly providing support in Iraq in the fight against the Islamic State....
Perhaps the piece de resistance came in November 2015, when the militia drove two flatbed trucks and a 60-foot crane, loaded up three generators over three hours, and drove off base totally unchallenged by any security.

Remember this? Well now there's this

Borrower fraud in U.S. auto loans is surging, and may approach levels seen in mortgages during last decade’s housing bubble, according to a startup firm that helps lenders sniff out bogus borrowers.
As many as 1 percent of U.S. car loan applications include some type of material misrepresentation, executives at data analytics firm Point Predictive estimated based on reports from banks, finance companies and others. Lenders’ losses from deception may double this year to $6 billion from 2015, the firm forecast.
Those fraud rates are coming closer to the over-1-percent level for mortgages in 2009, when the financial crisis was boiling and more lenders started reporting incidents to one another, Frank McKenna, chief fraud strategist at the firm, said in an interview.
Even so, “We see an extraordinary amount of parallels between the auto and mortgage industries, in terms of the rising levels of hidden fraud,” McKenna said.

Shale can still get cheap credit

U.S. shale explorers are boosting drilling budgets 10 times faster than the rest of the world to harvest fields that register fat profits even with the recent drop in oil prices.
Flush with cash from a short-lived OPEC-led crude rally, North American drillers plan to lift their 2017 outlays by 32 percent to $84 billion, compared with just 3 percent for international projects, according to analysts at Barclays Plc. Much of the increase in spending is flowing into the Permian Basin, a sprawling, mile-thick accumulation of crude beneath Texas and New Mexico, where producers have been reaping double-digit returns even with oil commanding less than half what it did in 2014.
That’s bad news for OPEC and its partners in a global campaign to crimp supplies and elevate prices. Wood Mackenzie Ltd. estimates that new spending will add 800,000 barrels of North American crude this year, equivalent to 44 percent of the reductions announced by the Saudi- and Russia-led group.

DeVos isn't popular

A week after President Donald Trump suggested his administration might cut $25 million in capital funding to historically black colleges and universities, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told Bethune-Cookman University’s class of 2017 that she “is fully committed to your success” -- a line that was met by deafening boos from the students and guests.
DeVos’s commencement address for the Daytona Beach, Florida, school underlined the complicated relationship between the Trump administration and HBCUs, which educate roughly one in five black undergraduates. Her speech, in which she urged students to “embrace serving others with grace,” was repeatedly interrupted by loud booing; at one point, students turned their backs on the secretary. Omarosa Manigault, the former star of “The Apprentice” who has become Trump’s ambassador to black communities, was also jeered.