Various Reads Out of My In-Box

Each day, I am inundated with articles coming from various locations. Some are informative, some are informative and others not so. These make for a good Sunday review if you have some time to do so. They cover a broad span of topics. At each site you may find other articles which may be of more interest.

Some easy reads . . .

– How a dead raccoon touched the heart of a city, Carbon Upfront. “Ten years after his death, Heritage Toronto has installed a plaque in memory of Conrad the Raccoon.”

– Transform a Curb, Change a City, The New Urban Order, “the City of Boston is hiring a Curbside Transformation Manager.”

– Another major source of particulates: Tire wear, Carbon Upfront! “the PM10 and PM2.5 emissions from vehicles come mostly from tire and brake wear.”

– Poll finds bipartisan agreement on a key issue: Regulating AI, The Conversation, Are concerns about AI a bridge across the polarization divide?

– Undaunted Mayor Bass, The Contrarian, “Mayor Karen Bass has dealt with it all—homelessness, devastating fires, and the federal invasion and lawless ICE raids that are terrorizing her residents, damaging the local economy, and inciting understandable anger.”

– Stephen Colbert and I: The Tightening of Right-Wing Censorship, Informed Comment, Juan Cole (fellow Michiganer), “The Trump administration gets to decide whether the Skydance – Paramount – merger goes through.” This makes sense to me now! Plus other departures.

– Trump Admin Hands Over Nation’s Medicaid Enrollee Data to ICE, MedPage Today “Handover – personal data of 79 million Medicaid enrollees, including home addresses and ethnicities. All to track down immigrants who may not be living legally in the U.S.”

– AMA President: Healthcare Cuts Have Left Us with Few Options, MedPage Today, “When you reduce access to affordable health insurance, you create a future where Americans can’t get the timely care they need, contributing to poorer health outcomes.”

– 50+ Dems Slam Rubio Plan to Burn 500 Metric Tons of Emergency Food Aid, Common Dreams, “This action is not only morally indefensible, but also wasteful, strategically shortsighted, and completely counter to the entirety of your work while in the Senate.”

– Trump Eases Pollution Rules for 100+ Facilities, Including Chemical and Coal Plants, Common Dreams, “Trump’s action on behalf of big corporate polluters will cause more cancer, more birth defects, and more children to suffer [from] asthma,”

– Health System Ownership of Medicare Advantage Plans Has Increased Over Time, Health Affairs, “there has been substantial consolidation of practitioners and provider organizations into larger organizations across the health sector.”

– Dogs Successfully Detect Parkinson’s Disease, MedPage Today, “Trained dogs detected Parkinson’s via sebum swabs with up to 80% sensitivity and 98% specificity.”

– Street Vendors Hit Hard by Trump’s Assault on L.A., THEBULWARK, “an attack on working immigrants is also an attack on the local economy, and while the economic effects of such actions might be less photo-ready than the scenes of violence, ICE’s abduction of street vendors (and intimidation of others) threatened their livelihoods.”

– Trump’s Department of Labor is dismantling key workplace protections, Economic Policy Institute, Trump and his Department of Labor (DOL) recently announced a massive deregulation effort, robbing U.S. workers of dozens upon dozens of rules that protect them from being forced to risk illness and injury on the job and ensure that they are paid for their labor.

– Link round-up for 19 July 2025, Infidel753

– System-Affiliated Hospitals Associated with Higher Prices, Health Care Cost Institute, “Per-person spending on hospital care among the ESI population grew by 13.5% from 2018 to 2022, driven by increasing prices.”

– What Really Happened to Jimmy Hoffa, Jack Lessenberry, And why do we still care? Someone, I know fom Michigan.