EPA Cuts Water Protection, Tighter Travel

Nation: The Environmental Protection Agency released plans yesterday to dismantle an Obama-era rule protecting about 60 percent of the country’s bodies of water from pollution. The current rule protects big waters such as the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, as well as the rivers, small waterways, and wetlands that flow into them. President Trump has called the Obama rule “one of the worst examples of federal regulation.”

Travel and Resorts: The US yesterday announced tighter security measures for travelers coming from 105 countries. Much of the effort will be focused on examining computers and small electronics.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said, “Make no mistake: our enemies are constantly working to find new methods for disguising explosives, recruiting insiders, and hijacking aircraft. We cannot play international whack-a-mole with each new threat.”

Cyberworld: Ukraine, which appears to have been hit hardest by the release of the Petya malware attack, may have been targeted in an effort to take down the country’s computer systems, according to cyber security analysts. The cyberattack appears to have entered the country’s networks through software that accountants are required to use in Ukraine.

The ransomware demanded $300 each from its victims, but Brian Lord, a former deputy director for intelligence for Britain’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, told The NY Times, “This isn’t about the money. This attack is about disabling how large companies and governments can operate.”

Russia is a prime suspect.

Thou Shalt Not: A granite representation of the Ten Commandments erected on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol lasted about 24 hours. An irate man from western Arkansas drove his car into it, shattering the monument with the commandments engraved in its face. The driver, Michael Tate Reed II, 32, showed the incident on Facebook Live, shouting “Freedom!” at the moment of impact. — Australia’s most senior Catholic has been charged with sex offenses. Cardinal George Pell, a top adviser to Pope Francis who controls Vatican finances, has been accused of covering up sexual abuse and sexually abusing minors as a priest right up to his appointment as archbishop of Melbourne. He denies it.

Beyond Words: Martin Shkreli, the odd and widely detested young man who bought the rights to an AIDS drug and jacked up the price from $13.50 a pill to $750, went on trial for securities fraud in an unrelated case. Shkreli’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said to the jury, “Is he strange? Yes.” But, he added, “every single government witness will concur that Martin Shkreli, despite his flaws and his personality, is brilliant beyond words.” The question is his intelligence, but whether he’s a crook.

The Obit Page: Michael Bond, the British writer who created Paddington Bear, the cartoon character who wore a duffle coat and Wellington rubber boots, has died at age 91. Paddington was the subject of a series of books and became a stuffed toy found in children’s rooms all over the world.

Brown was a struggling writer when he got the idea from a stuffed bear he bought in a store one Christmas. “He sat on a shelf of our one-roomed apartment for a while, and then one day when I was sitting in front of my typewriter staring at a blank sheet of paper wondering what to write, I idly tapped out the words ‘Mr. and Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform. In fact, that was how he came to have such an unusual name for a bear, for Paddington was the name of the station.’”

>Anthony Young, who set a Major League Baseball record pitching 27 straight losses for the NY Mets in the early 1990s, has died at age 51. Young was a much better pitcher than that losing streak indicates, but a thing like that clings to your reputation. He had an inoperable brain tumor.

Natural Selection: A young couple seeking fame and followers on YouTube got at least part of their wish. They were aiming to amass 300,000 subscribers and, “The bigger we get, I’ll be throwing parties,” the young man said. “Why not?”

It ended when Pedro Ruiz III held a thick book in front of his chest and his girlfriend, Monalisa Perez of Halstad, Minn., fired a gun at it, thinking the book would stop the bullet. It didn’t and Ruiz is dead.

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It's Been Said

"Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote."

  • Donald Trump courting the vote of the Christian right

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