Trust your aha! moments, experiments show they’re probably right

When a solution to a problem seems to have come to you out of thin air, it turns out you’ve more than likely been struck with the right idea, according to a new study. A series of experiments conducted by a team of researchers determined that a person’s sudden insights are often more accurate at solving problems than thinking them …

Tanya Basu – What Tasers Do to the Brain

Tasers aren’t known to be the gentlest things, to put it mildly. The devices deliver 50,000 volts of electroshock, and though deaths after use of electroshock weapons — Taser is the brand name — are relatively rare, in 2015, at least 48 people died during interactions with police who used Tasers. Now, a team of scientists at Drexel University and Arizona State …

Klaus Marre – US Builds a $43-Million Gas Station in Afghanistan and Nobody Seems to Know Why

These are the facts. At some point, someone somewhere in the US government had an amazing idea: why not build a compressed natural gas (CNG) filling station in Afghanistan? Forty-three million taxpayer dollars later, the city of Sheberghan, in the far north of the country, got its gas station. But, according to the watchdog agency probing Afghanistan reconstruction spending, nobody …

Leid Stories – 08.20.15

Police Killings: The Problem That Won’t Go Away

Election 2016: Leid Stories Measures the Political Temperature

Leid Stories discusses the fatal shooting yesterday of a black teenager by white police officers in St. Louis, Missouri, which once again has ignited a firestorm over police use of force and the racial dynamic that persists in the policing of communities of color throughout the United States.

Eighteen-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey was shot and killed after fleeing a house where two white police officers were conducting a search, St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said yesterday. Ball-Bey pointed a gun at them as he fled, Dotson said, of the killing, which prompted local protests that recalled the police killings a year ago of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis and Michael Brown in Ferguson.

A “poll” of Leid Stories listeners registers the political temperature of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Damning New Analysis Reveals Deadly Lack of Police Training on Mental Illness – Deirdre Fulton

One quarter of the men and women shot and killed by police in the first six months of 2015 were “in the throes of mental or emotional crisis,” according to a new analysis published by the Washington Post on Tuesday, suggesting that law enforcement officers lack training on how to deal with the mentally ill. “On average, police shot and killed someone who was …

America Is #1 in Police Killings Among Western Democracies, Yet We’re Only Just Discovering How Bad the Situation Is By Terrell Jermaine Starr

Even before the Washington Post [3] published its startling report this weekend on the astronomically high number of Americans shot and killed by police in the first five months of 2015, the U.S. was already easily number one. Number one among highly advanced western democracies with fully developed economies for police killings of citizens: at least 400 people a year, according to a …

In a Cop Culture, the Bill of Rights Doesn’t Amount to Much – John Whitehead

Police officers are more likely to be struck by lightning than be held financially accountable for their actions.–Law professor Joanna C. Schwartz (paraphrased) If you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is never held accountable for violating your rights and his oath of office …