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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On December 03 2014 07:52 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 05:04 QuanticHawk wrote: I know that, but the same can happen to hetero people. While gays do have higher rates of infection than straight people, black people are also by far have the highest rates of infection among ethnicities. Depending where you read, something like 40%+ of all new cases in the states are from black people (who account for ~12% of the population) There's not any kind of limitation on people from at risk ethnicities donating. It's pure statistics. If the same statistic was true for blacks, I'd also support it. Racism sensitivity be damned. Ethnic/cultural sensitivity has no place in science/health.
From the CDC:
'Over the course of their lifetimes, 1 in 16 black men will be diagnosed with HIV infection, as will 1 in 33 Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander men, 1 in 36 Hispanic/ Latino men, 1 in 100 American Indian/Alaska Native men, 1 in 102 white men, and 1 in 145 Asian men.'
Also, as others have noted, all those questions about sex, drug use, travel, etc are all based on the honor system. Again, I don't know anything about the sample testing other than what was mentioned about about AIDS (and other things) taking some time to show up on a test
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Do it or else. Increasingly, that's the message from employers who are offering financial incentives to workers who take part in wellness programs that include screenings for blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass index.
But the programs are under fire from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which filed suit against Honeywell International in October charging that the company's wellness program isn't voluntary and thus violates federal law.
It's the third lawsuit the EEOC has filed this year taking aim at wellness programs. The lawsuits highlight the lack of clarity in the standards these programs must meet in order to comply with both the Affordable Care Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Honeywell, based in Morristown, N.J., got a reprieve in November, when a federal district court judge declined to issue a temporary restraining order that would have prevented the company from proceeding with its wellness program incentives in 2015.
But the issue is far from resolved. The EEOC is continuing its investigations, and business leaders are criticizing those actions. The Business Roundtable expressed "strong disappointment" in a letter to administration officials.
"The EEOC has chosen litigation over regulation," says J.D. Piro, a senior vice president at Aon Hewitt, who leads the benefits consultant's health law group.
In the Honeywell wellness program, employees and their spouses are asked to get blood drawn to test their cholesterol, glucose and nicotine use, and also have their body mass index and blood pressure measured. An employee who refuses is subject to a $500 surcharge on health insurance premiums and could lose up to $1,500 in Honeywell contributions to a health savings account. A worker and spouse are also each subject to a $1,000 tobacco surcharge if they refuse to do the screening. That means a couple could face a combined $4,000 in financial penalties.
"Under the [Americans with Disabilities Act], medical testing of this nature has to be voluntary," the EEOC said in a news release announcing its request for a restraining order. "The employer cannot require it or penalize employees who decide not to go through with it."
Source
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On December 03 2014 07:52 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 03 2014 05:04 QuanticHawk wrote: I know that, but the same can happen to hetero people. While gays do have higher rates of infection than straight people, black people are also by far have the highest rates of infection among ethnicities. Depending where you read, something like 40%+ of all new cases in the states are from black people (who account for ~12% of the population) There's not any kind of limitation on people from at risk ethnicities donating. It's pure statistics. If the same statistic was true for blacks, I'd also support it. Racism sensitivity be damned. Ethnic/cultural sensitivity has no place in science/health.
It's also a multi-billion dollar industry which derives a lot of it's profit from low-income inner-city areas. Outlawing them harvesting blood and plasma from "Black/African American" (not sure trying to legally define this is going to go well) people would mean a hit to their bottom line, angry low-income folks who are out ~$200 a month, and waiting rooms with people very angry after being told they can no longer donate after doing it for years because of the "statistical probabilities related to the color of their skin"
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
when a characteristic takes on an identity it poses more problems politically.
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On December 02 2014 00:42 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +Firstly, not everything a student learns in school is measurable, or even supposed to be measurable. This varies a bit depending on subject, but school is supposed to be an arena to help children become wholesome people, not just capable workers. I think this is a fundamental battle to be had, where I feel the current political climate is too obsessed with school as a way of creating more engineers rather than as an arena for personal growth in every arena. In Norway, this educational change started after the first PISA-tests a little more than a decade ago, where it was showcased that Norwegian students were much worse at math, reading and sciences than students from Finland and South Korea, and not any better than the OECD average (so among comparable countries. ) USA performed disappointingly as well, and I can see how you would be drawing some of the same conclusions. You don't have to strawman your opposition by suggesting that all of them think only of good workers and think nothing of wholesome people. It's just as much hyperbole by coloring the debate that way. Can your 8th graders read and write at an 8th grade level? Not so they can be merry little capable workers (eerily reminiscent of old Communist propaganda), but so they can continue to have academic success in English in high school and know that they're not slipping behind. This applies to purely informational standardized testing administrated periodically. Are the minimums being met? Are you graduating people with the basics of what used to be known in the US as the 3 R's? These are useful questions particularly in my interest area of the circa 1-4% of teachers that get the label "grossly ineffective," but are essentially unable to be fired.
It's not a strawman at all. Common core perhaps exacerbates some of the problems modern testing and evaluation pose towards education of individuals. What most people don't realize is that "teaching to the test" is just one side of the coin. There is also the less-talked about "testing what you teach." When you test pedagogy, as oneofthem has pointed out, you corrupt the autonomy of the student. Asking for answers related to such a pedagogy, and evaluating based only on a fluency with arbitrary, invented terminology funnels problem solving down a well-defined corridor. It's one thing to pose a problem and ask for the answer. Students may even use a well-defined pedagogy to reach that answer. It's another thing to ask what the answer is AND how one is "supposed" to get there.
One of the best courses I ever took was physical chemistry in college. The instructor posed simple questions looking for simple answers, but there were often more than one way of finding those answers. Students were given a powerful set of tools, taught the relations between things, and then asked to think critically about how those tools can be used in a variety of problems. The tests were designed to evaluate understanding of the tools by asking the student to creatively apply those tools to certain discrete problems. The teaching itself wasn't aimed at hammering home one particular kind of problem over and over, and then changing out the values for that kind of problem on the test and asking the student to solve it. Many of the exam questions posed totally new problems that were solvable with the concepts taught in the curriculum, but the particular solution pattern or algorithm had never been taught explicitly in the classroom. A curriculum that emphasizes that kind of problem solving stands in stark contrast to multiple-choice tests that are based on a limited number of pedagogical devices within well-circumscribed problem types and well-defined algorithms for solving them.
While common core might have a number of interesting pedagogical tools for teaching concepts to students, and might even be better than rote memorization, it seems to me that the evaluation methods built in to the curriculum slowly extinguishes the natural creativity of the students. There is a "right" way to solve certain problems, and the self-inversion of "teaching to the test" and "testing what you teach" reinforces the point that students are to do things a certain way, and the only things that matter are those things that are being tested. After all, that is how you are evaluated. Your performance within these narrow testing protocols becomes your identity. For a democracy that relies on free, educated individuals, having graduated pupils who are able to think about problems through multiple angles, and more importantly, are able to tackle new problems, without reference to some designated problem-solving algorithm or established method, is the most important thing an educational system can provide.
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On December 02 2014 14:18 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On December 02 2014 07:50 oneofthem wrote: disagreement about common core math rests on some divergent perceptions of reality. on one hand if you think traditional math teaching can turn out students who only learn rote application of rules (like engineers or economist "math" huehue etc), there's a deficiency to be addressed by conceptual teaching. on the other hand, and this would require looking at how the theory is put into practice, mathematical rules are a language of their own, and application or memorization of those rules is not automatically rote/nonconceptual. rather, math class should get students acclimated to how the language of math is used in higher level studies.
both sides should agree that, bridging the gap between applying a rule and understanding the mathematical language of the rule is important in learning. but do you do this by forcing kids to go through some explicit visual representation of intuitions, or only tailor demonstrations to the extent that the intuitions are shown, and then internalized? the former method is misguided imo.
at the very least, don't make tests or homework over those representations. test the math not the particular pedagogical tool. Reality: Parent's support of common core dropped 18% in one year (Rasmussen) New York was one of the early adopters of the program. It's African American students in third grade that scored "below standard" in English has grown from 15.5% to 50%. In seventh grade, the same underachiever grouping grew from 16.5% to 70%. (But I'm sure this is just consequences of a change, and not anything about the program itself ... of course) If we were to evaluate its effects thus far, it would not receive a passing grade. We can argue pedagogy all day long. This particular conception of it appears to be idiotic, no need to bend reality to suit needs. The math portion is frequently put into concrete visual representations, yours and my anathema. Forced compliance from state-down forces the selection of these books and these styles, and parent's can't help with their kid's frustrations (most famously, Louis CK's) and it breeds and festers.
I'm actually a big fan of the idea of Common Core as I understand it. Give the teachers and students some standards to achieve and leave it up to them how they reach them. My problem with the Core is mostly execution, as results should be driven by the parent, the teacher, and the student. What happens if a child fails? are they held back? resolved other ways? does the child carry on being a failed statistic?
I am very skeptical that the standards are useless if they don't have teeth, especially in a society that is increasingly shy about voicing shortcomings and tolerating failure. I think it is incredibly inconsistent to have more rigorous testing in math while at the same time playing soccer without score and handing out participation medals to everyone because you don't want to hurt self esteem.
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WASHINGTON -- Congress may use must-pass legislation in the next two weeks to slip through a controversial land deal that would help a company that jointly owns a uranium mine with Iran, sources told HuffPost.
The company, the international mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, has been trying for nearly a decade to acquire 2,400 acres of the federally protected Tonto National Forest in southeast Arizona -- land that sits atop a massive copper deposit.
Under legislation offered in the House and Senate, the company's subsidiary, Resolution Copper -- which Rio Tinto co-owns with another international mining giant, BHP Billiton -- would get land originally set aside during the Eisenhower administration to conserve the environment and protect sacred Native American sites.
The deal foundered in the mid-2000s when then-Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who was convicted in 2013 on charges of conspiracy, racketeering and a number of other felonies, tried to use it to score his own real estate windfall. It has since run into opposition from Native Americans, conservationists and people concerned about the company's ties to Iran.
The Iran link comes from Rio Tinto's Rossing uranium mine in Namibia, in which Tehran owns a 15 percent stake. That connection hasn't bothered many members of Congress, but the linkage has become more important in recent years as legislators have ratcheted up their rhetoric against Iran and called for even tighter sanctions to stop the Islamic Republic from becoming a nuclear power.
But Rio Tinto and Resolution Copper have spent millions lobbying Congress and donating to lawmakers, according to data from federal election records and the Center for Responsive Politics. And according to opponents of the deal, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and backers in the House are trying to attach the deal to must-pass legislation -- most likely the National Defense Authorization Act, which comes from the Armed Services Committee that McCain will chair starting in January.
Source
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On December 03 2014 10:14 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On December 02 2014 00:42 Danglars wrote:Firstly, not everything a student learns in school is measurable, or even supposed to be measurable. This varies a bit depending on subject, but school is supposed to be an arena to help children become wholesome people, not just capable workers. I think this is a fundamental battle to be had, where I feel the current political climate is too obsessed with school as a way of creating more engineers rather than as an arena for personal growth in every arena. In Norway, this educational change started after the first PISA-tests a little more than a decade ago, where it was showcased that Norwegian students were much worse at math, reading and sciences than students from Finland and South Korea, and not any better than the OECD average (so among comparable countries. ) USA performed disappointingly as well, and I can see how you would be drawing some of the same conclusions. You don't have to strawman your opposition by suggesting that all of them think only of good workers and think nothing of wholesome people. It's just as much hyperbole by coloring the debate that way. Can your 8th graders read and write at an 8th grade level? Not so they can be merry little capable workers (eerily reminiscent of old Communist propaganda), but so they can continue to have academic success in English in high school and know that they're not slipping behind. This applies to purely informational standardized testing administrated periodically. Are the minimums being met? Are you graduating people with the basics of what used to be known in the US as the 3 R's? These are useful questions particularly in my interest area of the circa 1-4% of teachers that get the label "grossly ineffective," but are essentially unable to be fired. It's not a strawman at all. Common core perhaps exacerbates some of the problems modern testing and evaluation pose towards education of individuals. What most people don't realize is that "teaching to the test" is just one side of the coin. There is also the less-talked about "testing what you teach." When you test pedagogy, as oneofthem has pointed out, you corrupt the autonomy of the student. Asking for answers related to such a pedagogy, and evaluating based only on a fluency with arbitrary, invented terminology funnels problem solving down a well-defined corridor. It's one thing to pose a problem and ask for the answer. Students may even use a well-defined pedagogy to reach that answer. It's another thing to ask what the answer is AND how one is "supposed" to get there. One of the best courses I ever took was physical chemistry in college. The instructor posed simple questions looking for simple answers, but there were often more than one way of finding those answers. Students were given a powerful set of tools, taught the relations between things, and then asked to think critically about how those tools can be used in a variety of problems. The tests were designed to evaluate understanding of the tools by asking the student to creatively apply those tools to certain discrete problems. The teaching itself wasn't aimed at hammering home one particular kind of problem over and over, and then changing out the values for that kind of problem on the test and asking the student to solve it. Many of the exam questions posed totally new problems that were solvable with the concepts taught in the curriculum, but the particular solution pattern or algorithm had never been taught explicitly in the classroom. A curriculum that emphasizes that kind of problem solving stands in stark contrast to multiple-choice tests that are based on a limited number of pedagogical devices within well-circumscribed problem types and well-defined algorithms for solving them. While common core might have a number of interesting pedagogical tools for teaching concepts to students, and might even be better than rote memorization, it seems to me that the evaluation methods built in to the curriculum slowly extinguishes the natural creativity of the students. There is a "right" way to solve certain problems, and the self-inversion of "teaching to the test" and "testing what you teach" reinforces the point that students are to do things a certain way, and the only things that matter are those things that are being tested. After all, that is how you are evaluated. Your performance within these narrow testing protocols becomes your identity. For a democracy that relies on free, educated individuals, having graduated pupils who are able to think about problems through multiple angles, and more importantly, are able to tackle new problems, without reference to some designated problem-solving algorithm or established method, is the most important thing an educational system can provide. I don't think you understood what I pointed out his post, but the person I quoted responded to my point directly. It was just a misunderstanding.
But enough of what we don't have in common with Common Core, let's look at what is really shared. I enjoyed physical chemistry very much as well in college, in fact I had a professor that had taught that and only that for the last 30+ years. It is due to his skill and dedication that I enjoyed the class so much, in comparison to others that I knew struggled with pchem extraordinarily.
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So anyone taking bets on whether the government shuts down again or not?
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another tentacle of the techoctopus is being unearthed:
...
I’m still poring through the amended complaint (embedded below), and some of the other court materials that backed it up. For now, all I can say for sure is that this bombshell new material seems to demonstrate that the collusion among VFX industry executives to fix and suppress their workers’ wages was at least as shocking and crude as anything arranged in the wage-fixing cartel led by Apple, Google, and the other Silicon Valley tech titans.
... src
under scarcity of labour capitalists conspire to avoid competition... hm, i think i read about this somewhere... can't remember the author though. something m... mar... marps?
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On December 03 2014 15:04 GreenHorizons wrote: So anyone taking bets on whether the government shuts down again or not?
I think the bet is...will the compromise be a short term (~3 months)... or will they push it longer through October 2015 to hamsting the new Congress and limit what they can do right away.
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I wonder why this bomb of a story does not receive more attention.
Carmen Segarra, in the spirit of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden before her, is like the greengrocer who said no. Segarra, a former employee of the New York Federal Reserve, was fired after she refused to tone down a scathing report on conflicts of interest within Goldman Sachs. She sued the Fed over her sacking but the case was dismissed by a judge without ruling on the merits because, he said, the facts didn’t comply with the statute under which she had filed. Segarra is now appealing.
Before she left she secretly recorded her bosses and colleagues, exposing their “culture of fear” and servility when dealing with the very banks they were supposed to be regulating. The Fed is the government agency charged with overseeing the financial sector – a task it singularly failed to achieve in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. What emerges from Segarra’s tapes – released by the investigative website ProPublica – is a supine watchdog wilfully baring its gums before a known burglar so that he may go about his business unperturbed
It’s as though all the Fed employees were told to put a small sign on their desk saying “Under Capitalism Everyone is Equal Before the Law”, and Segarra took hers down. She has disrupted the game, and now everyone can peer behind the curtain; the Fed is the system, and lives within the lie.
The Guardian
ThisAmericanLife.org
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On December 04 2014 04:12 Doublemint wrote:I wonder why this bomb of a story does not receive more attention. Show nested quote +Carmen Segarra, in the spirit of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden before her, is like the greengrocer who said no. Segarra, a former employee of the New York Federal Reserve, was fired after she refused to tone down a scathing report on conflicts of interest within Goldman Sachs. She sued the Fed over her sacking but the case was dismissed by a judge without ruling on the merits because, he said, the facts didn’t comply with the statute under which she had filed. Segarra is now appealing.
Before she left she secretly recorded her bosses and colleagues, exposing their “culture of fear” and servility when dealing with the very banks they were supposed to be regulating. The Fed is the government agency charged with overseeing the financial sector – a task it singularly failed to achieve in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. What emerges from Segarra’s tapes – released by the investigative website ProPublica – is a supine watchdog wilfully baring its gums before a known burglar so that he may go about his business unperturbed
It’s as though all the Fed employees were told to put a small sign on their desk saying “Under Capitalism Everyone is Equal Before the Law”, and Segarra took hers down. She has disrupted the game, and now everyone can peer behind the curtain; the Fed is the system, and lives within the lie. The GuardianThisAmericanLife.org
Someone already posted this episode many pages back, close to when it aired.
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On December 04 2014 04:12 Doublemint wrote:I wonder why this bomb of a story does not receive more attention. Show nested quote +Carmen Segarra, in the spirit of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden before her, is like the greengrocer who said no. Segarra, a former employee of the New York Federal Reserve, was fired after she refused to tone down a scathing report on conflicts of interest within Goldman Sachs. She sued the Fed over her sacking but the case was dismissed by a judge without ruling on the merits because, he said, the facts didn’t comply with the statute under which she had filed. Segarra is now appealing.
Before she left she secretly recorded her bosses and colleagues, exposing their “culture of fear” and servility when dealing with the very banks they were supposed to be regulating. The Fed is the government agency charged with overseeing the financial sector – a task it singularly failed to achieve in the run-up to the recent financial crisis. What emerges from Segarra’s tapes – released by the investigative website ProPublica – is a supine watchdog wilfully baring its gums before a known burglar so that he may go about his business unperturbed
It’s as though all the Fed employees were told to put a small sign on their desk saying “Under Capitalism Everyone is Equal Before the Law”, and Segarra took hers down. She has disrupted the game, and now everyone can peer behind the curtain; the Fed is the system, and lives within the lie. The GuardianThisAmericanLife.org Because it wasn't much of a bomb. From what I've read it is Segarra having differences of opinion with her employer and trying to take some pretty wonky positions to the objection of her superiors. For those who who are angry over Wall St. 'excess' (whatever that means) she is a righteous whistle-blower, but the reality isn't nearly that clear.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/nyregion/grand-jury-said-to-bring-no-charges-in-staten-island-chokehold-death-of-eric-garner.html
A Staten Island grand jury has voted not to bring criminal charges against the white New York City police officer at the center of the Eric Garner case, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday.
The decision was reached on Wednesday after months of testimony including from the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold to restrain Mr. Garner, an unarmed black man who died after a confrontation.
[. . .]
The case exposed lapses in police tactics – chokeholds are banned by the Police Department’s own guidelines – and raised questions about the aggressive policing of minor offenses in a time of historically low crime. The officers, part of a plainclothes unit, suspected Mr. Garner of selling loose cigarettes on the street near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a complaint among local business owners.
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A Staten Island grand jury has voted not to bring criminal charges against the white New York City police officer at the center of the Eric Garner case, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday.
The decision was reached on Wednesday after months of testimony including from the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold to restrain Mr. Garner, an unarmed black man who died after a confrontation.
[. . .]
The case exposed lapses in police tactics – chokeholds are banned by the Police Department’s own guidelines – and raised questions about the aggressive policing of minor offenses in a time of historically low crime. The officers, part of a plainclothes unit, suspected Mr. Garner of selling loose cigarettes on the street near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a complaint among local business owners.
Why are the two highlighted words part of the article? What do they add to the article? Seems like usage like that just adds to tensions without any benefit to the readers.
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On December 04 2014 05:03 IgnE wrote:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/nyregion/grand-jury-said-to-bring-no-charges-in-staten-island-chokehold-death-of-eric-garner.htmlShow nested quote +A Staten Island grand jury has voted not to bring criminal charges against the white New York City police officer at the center of the Eric Garner case, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday.
The decision was reached on Wednesday after months of testimony including from the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold to restrain Mr. Garner, an unarmed black man who died after a confrontation.
[. . .]
The case exposed lapses in police tactics – chokeholds are banned by the Police Department’s own guidelines – and raised questions about the aggressive policing of minor offenses in a time of historically low crime. The officers, part of a plainclothes unit, suspected Mr. Garner of selling loose cigarettes on the street near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a complaint among local business owners.
Just waiting for the apologists to come out on this one and make up bullshit excuses for this guy.
hy are the two highlighted words part of the article? What do they add to the article? Seems like usage like that just adds to tensions without any benefit to the readers.
It adds a lot. This is an extremely prevalent issue for huge sections of the population right now.
Just because you don't like the conversation or you're uncomfortable with it doesn't mean that it's meaningless or unimportant.
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guy gets chokeholded by the police, which is considered illegal, he dies, and after "months of testimony" they decide to not press charges. What exactly changed? Did he come back from the dead? How do you discuss this away? It's simply disgusting.
edit: oh it's also on video. So you can literally choke a guy to death on a television and get away with it.
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Idiotic prosecutor's office, should have been criminal negligence etc. Not murder.
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