Good morning! On this date in 1897, 19 striking miners were shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies at the Lattimer mine near Hazelton, Pennsylvania. Many were shot in the back. Several dozen others were wounded. It had been a long, hot summer of strikes, and local mine owners had offered concessions to entice their workers back to coalmines. The Lattimer Massacre occurred after several of them had reneged on the promises they had made of better pay and working conditions.
Stat of the day, shiny new iPhone edition: $36.4 billion — the amount of taxes that Apple is not paying the US government on $111.3 billion in profits it has booked offshore — more than any other company, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.
Strategy –> Obama will give a primetime address tonight to lay out a strategy for dealing with the Islamic State. Some observers expect him to announce his intention to expand the current US air campaign to Syria. Justin Sink reports for The Hill that the White House told Congressional leaders that Obama doesn’t need additional authorization to do so. AND: Salon’s Jim Newell urges caution, writing that the strategy shouldn’t merely be “an overreaction to the beheading videos of two American journalists.”
Our drug war too –> Rafael Castillo reports for Vice that a new Amnesty International report finds that “alleged cases of torture by Mexico’s security forces and military increased at least six-fold in the last decade,” fueled “by the US-backed, transnational drug war.”
Rally around the flag –> At The Monkey Cage, Sam Greene and Graeme Robertson note that Russians’ approval of Vladimir Putin has gone through the roof since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, and argue that “his support is no longer limited to the poorer, more rural, less-educated Russians that we (and others) have argued have been his traditional constituency.” ALSO: Keith Gessen, writing from Donetsk, has an excellent #longread about Ukraine in the London Review of Books.
Injustice –> At CNN, Jeffrey Toobin looks at a case of a prominent man who was caught on tape beating his wife. It wasn’t Ray Rice; Toobin writes that Mark Fuller, a sitting federal judge in Alabama, got “a plea deal so generous that [his] arrest record will be expunged — totally clean, as if the whole thing had never happened — if he receives some counseling in the next few months.”
Deadly –> “Once-in-1,000-years rains” in Arizona and Nevada killed at least two people on Monday. Andrew Freedman writes for Mashable that global warming “is leading to a greater proportion of rainfall falling in very heavy bursts.”
Priorities –> Elise Viebeck reports for The Hill that House Republicans are cutting the White House’s funding request for fighting ebola from $88 million to $40 million. To put that in perspective, one F-35 fighter costs around $180 million.
Frivolous lawsuits and their real-world consequences –> Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress: “Meet Jennifer, A Woman Who Could Die If An Anti-Obamacare Lawsuit Succeeds.”
“Male birth control would completely transform the ways in which we understand reproductive health” –> Non-hormonal, reversible contraception for men could be on the market as soon as 2017. But Samantha Allen reports for The Daily Beast that “the medical industry’s investment in the multibillion-dollar female birth control industry might block men’s access” to the new technology.
Bizarre –> Gawker’s Adam Weinstein has the story of a former Navy Seal who had become a darling of the conservative media, making multiple appearances on Fox News and speaking at tea party groups across the country. He claimed that he got into an altercation with several black men who shot him in the stomach. But police say they have overwhelming evidence that he made the whole story up, and now he’s facing charges. There’s much more detail about this weird tale at the link.
You can get our Morning Reads delivered to your inbox every weekday! Just enter your email address below…
