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Surprise, anger, parenting and Lizzo: That's one way to sum up NPR's list of our most engaging stories in 2019, as those themes drew a huge amount of interest from our readers this year. Other big topics included consumerism and climate change and officials behaving badly.

People often linger for several minutes on these popular pages. Collectively, NPR's readers spent the equivalent of more than 35 years' worth of time reading our top five stories. The top draw was a story about how to help kids handle anger; altogether, readers spent nearly 16 years' worth of time reading that report.

1. How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger

At the top of the world, the Inuit culture has developed a sophisticated way to sculpt kids' behavior without yelling or scolding. Could discipline actually be playful?

2. American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 DiedWhen she was 19, Renee Bach founded a charity that went on to care for more than 900 severely malnourished babies and children. Now she is being sued by two of the mothers whose children died.

3. 'The Best Thing You Can Do Is Not Buy More Stuff,' Says 'Secondhand' Expert"Your average thrift store in the United States only sells about one-third of the stuff that ends up on its shelves," Adam Minter says. His book explores what happens to the things that don't sell.

4. U.S. Charges Dozens Of Parents, Coaches In Massive College Admissions ScandalActresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among 33 parents who paid large sums of money to cheat admissions standards at prestigious schools, federal prosecutors say.

5. Trump Tweets Sensitive Surveillance Image Of IranThe tweet had experts picking up their jaws from the floor when they saw a photo of an Iranian space facility an image that was almost certainly taken by a classified satellite or drone.

6. The Mysterious Death Of The Hacker Who Turned In Chelsea Manning

Adrian Lamo was a hero in the hacker community for years. Everything changed when he began exchanging messages with U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

7. FACT CHECK: Trump's State Of The Union AddressNPR reporters provided context and analysis in real time as President Trump delivered the annual speech to Congress: "Remarkably, President Trump did not acknowledge the new power dynamic in Washington."

8. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline"Even the solutions that we have considered big and bold are nowhere near the scale of the actual problem that climate change presents to us," Ocasio-Cortez said.

9. 'Game Of Thrones' Season 8, Episode 5: 'Let It Be Fear'In the series' penultimate episode, the quality of mercy gets seriously strained. And stabbed. And set aflame. And razed. And several characters meet their final fates.

10. NPR's Book ConciergeThe end-of-year Book Concierge recommends more than 350 great reads across 30 genres hand-picked by NPR staff and trusted critics.

In terms of page views, a slightly different list emerges. While some of the top stories are the same, here are the top 10 most-viewed stories that didn't also appear in the above list. All of the pages drew more than 1 million views on NPR's website, not including traffic on other platforms, such as Apple News or Facebook.

1. Lizzo: Tiny Desk Concert

Backed by a band assembled just for this occasion, the breakthrough pop icon performs three joyfully showy songs from Cuz I Love You.

2. Patient With 'Tree Man' Syndrome Says He 'Can Finally Live A Normal Life'The man, who lives in Gaza, has undergone a pioneering treatment by Israeli surgeons for a severe case of this rare condition.

3. Speaker Pelosi Revokes Vice President Pence's House Office SpaceRepublicans had given Pence, a former House member, a first-floor bonus office in the House side of the U.S. Capitol shortly after President Trump was inaugurated.

4. Court Says Using Chalk On Tires For Parking Enforcement Violates ConstitutionA federal appeals court in Michigan cited the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures.

5. 'Not One Drop Of Blood': Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated In Oregon

Five young, purebred bulls mysteriously showed up dead on the ranch this past summer, drained of blood and with body parts precisely removed.

6. 3 Indiana Judges Suspended After White Castle Brawl That Left 2 Of Them WoundedA fight apparently started when one of the judges raised a middle finger at two men yelling from a passing SUV. The Indiana Supreme Court found that the three had "gravely undermined public trust."

7. Workers Are Falling Ill, Even Dying, After Making Kitchen CountertopsIrreversible lung disease has started to show up among young workers who cut, grind and polish countertops made of increasingly popular "engineered" stone. The material is more than 90% silica.

8. Taylor Swift: Tiny Desk ConcertAs she settled in for the set at NPR's offices, Taylor Swift looked out over the crowd. "I just decided to take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them."

9. Notre Dame Cathedral Fire Extinguished; Spire Collapsed, Towers Still StandingAs night fell on Paris and the fire continued to burn, people knelt and sang "Ave Maria" as they watched the blaze.

10. Florida Governor Declares State Of Emergency As Hurricane Dorian Gains ForceAs the storm neared, the National Hurricane Center said Dorian's winds could top 115 mph making it a Category 3 storm.

NPR senior manager for digital analytics Christina Macholan contributed to this report.

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The 20 Top Stories On NPR In 2019 - KRWG

You are here: Home / News / University of Phoenix to pay $191 million to settle false advertising claims

December 19, 2019 by Sharyl Attkisson 1 Comment

The University of Phoenix will pay $50 million to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and cancel $141 in student debt to settle false advertising charges, according to Reuters.

In ads targeting military and Hispanic students, the university allegedly falsely claimed to have relationships with several large corporations that could translate to jobs for graduates.

According to Reuters, university representatives denied wrongdoing but said they settled to avoid the distractions caused by lengthy and costly protracted litigation.

Read the Reuters article found in TaskandPurpose.com by clicking the link below:

https://taskandpurpose.com/university-of-phoenix-false-advertising

Fight improper government surveillance. Support Attkisson v. DOJ and FBI over the government computer intrusions of Attkissons work while she was a CBS News investigative correspondent. Visit the Attkisson Fourth Amendment Litigation Fund. Click here.

Filed Under: News, US Tagged With: false advertising, University of Phoenix

Emmy-Award Winning Investigative Journalist, New York Times Best Selling Author, Host of Sinclair's Full Measure

Original post:
University of Phoenix to pay $191 million to settle false advertising claims - Sharyl Attkisson

A Florida prosecutor slammed New England Patriots owner Robert Krafts arguments to suppress surveillance tapes made at a Florida spa allegedly recording sex acts, calling the case a significant Fourth Amendment ruling in filings submitted Tuesday.

Kraft, who pleaded not guilty to two prostitution charges in February for sex acts allegedly recorded in January at the Orchids of Asia Spa in Jupiter, Fla., earned a victory in May when a Palm Beach County judge suppressed police surveillance evidence, calling filming of non-criminal massages unacceptable.

Prosecutors appealed the May decision to suppress video, and Florida Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Paul DeSousa refuted Krafts arguments to support the May decision in a 23-page reply brief filed last night.

(Kraft) urges that massages should not have been recorded at any time other than the end of a massage; but the first of his offenses came at the end of a massage, DeSousa wrote. And he insists that recording was improper when men left on their underwear at the start of a massage; but he removed his own underwear immediately.

DeSousa also argued Jupiter polices nonstop covert surveillance over a five-day period was necessary to gather all facts, and it would have been a difficult burden for police to determine when to film and not film activities for signs of prostitution.

The sides have argued case law surrounding video surveillance in briefs filed since October, and DeSousa wrote in a motion attached to his reply brief the appeals decision in Floridas Fourth District Court of Appeals will be the first state appellate court to resolve the Fourth Amendment questions at play here.

Krafts misdemeanor case has been on hold since the appeal filed in May, and another appeal by the women charged with running the Orchids of Asia Spa is locked in a similar appeal battle.

Also in the brief, DeSousa says third parties have filed at least one federal lawsuit for monetary damage alleging the Orchids of Asia tapes violated their own Fourth Amendment rights.

A civil lawsuit by Kraft in a Florida court alleging denial of investigative documents by prosecutors is also pending a ruling on a motion to dismiss by the state.

The rest is here:
Prosecutor slams Krafts appeal to block Orchids of Asia tapes - Boston Herald

The F.B.I.s investigation of the former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, we can now say with assurance, was a train wreck. In his report, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz cataloged a damning list of egregious errors, omissions or misrepresentations in filings to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approved nearly a years worth of wiretaps on Mr. Page.

Many Republicans have taken this as proof that the investigation was hopelessly contaminated by anti-Trump political bias. That would be the optimistic scenario. Unfortunately, its probably much worse than that.

If the F.B.I. botched its applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Mr. Page because of political bias, after all, problems of the sort Mr. Horowitz identified are most likely unique to this case. The bureau obtains about 1,500 FISA warrants each year, and an overwhelming majority have no connection to domestic politics. The solution is also similarly simple: Toss out the bad apples who acted on political motives and add a few layers of safeguards for the tiny fraction of cases that are designated sensitive investigative matters because they do intersect with politics.

That might be a reasonable response if we were confident the Page investigation represented an outlier or aberration. The chilling reality, however, is that we have no idea whether thats the case.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, zeroed in on this point. When she asked Mr. Horowitz whether finding mistakes in a FISA application was a fairly unusual occurrence, he responded, I would hope so.

Americans deserve a stronger assurance than hope that their Fourth Amendment rights are being respected. The sheer quantity of serious defects in the FISA applications targeting Mr. Page which officials consistently told Mr. Horowitz received far more review than normal, because agents understood the applications would doubtless attract controversy and scrutiny raises an obvious and disturbing question: If theyre this sloppy with a target involved in a presidential campaign, how bad is it in ordinary cases, which the public will never learn about and which are unlikely to ever be the topic of congressional hearings?

We neednt worry so much about that, of course, if the defects of the Page warrants were products of political animus against the Trump campaign. But the report provides very little reason to think thats the case. The case for supposing bias is the culprit here leans heavily on the former F.B.I. agent Peter Strzok, now notorious for a voluminous history of text messages denigrating Mr. Trump and suggesting that he would not become president because we will stop it. But while Mr. Strzok played a supervisory role in the earliest stage of the Page investigation, its hard to tie him to the specific problems Mr. Horowitz identifies. As the report notes, Mr. Strzok was not the primary or sole decision maker on any investigative step and at one point opposed FISA monitoring of another Trump campaign staff member that case agents proposed. Moreover, the problems Mr. Horowitz documented in the initial FISA application filed under Mr. Strzoks watch were significantly less serious than the outrageous omissions and misrepresentations to the court that occurred in the subsequent applications to renew the wiretap, after Mr. Strzoks role in the investigation had ended.

With one significant exception an F.B.I. lawyer responsible for improperly altering an email related to the final renewal application Mr. Horowitz didnt find signs of Mr. Strzoks intense animus among others who worked on the FISA warrants. The report notes that among the huge quantity of internal communications reviewed, the inspector general identified a small number of text messages and instant messages in which members of the investigation team discussed political issues and candidates, but that these did not raise significant questions of potential bias or improper motivation.

If theres an explanation for the errors Mr. Horowitz documents suggested by his reports, its not political bias. Its confirmation bias.

The F.B.I.s interest in Mr. Page and its suspicions that he might be a Russian intelligence asset predated his involvement in presidential politics. He had reportedly been the target of a FISA warrant in 2014 and was the focus of yet another counterintelligence investigation opened in April 2016 by the F.B.I.s notoriously Trump-friendly New York field office, months before the bureau started an inquiry into potential links between the Trump campaign and Russias election interference operation. When investigators got wind of Christopher Steeles notorious dossier, which made Mr. Page a pivotal figure in a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between Mr. Trump and the Kremlin, it would have seemed like confirmation of what they already suspected.

Having adopted this theory, investigators began to exhibit classic signs of confirmation bias, readily absorbing new information that fit the model theyd built, while overlooking or explaining away facts that didnt fit. The worst misrepresentations to the court that Mr. Horowitz uncovered are sins of omission new information the bureau obtained as the investigation progressed that should have led it to question previous representations it had made to the court.

The many layers of review FISA applications go through laid out in a set of rules known as the Woods Procedures were ill equipped to detect this sort of problem, because the Woods Procedures focus on confirming that facts in the application match documents in the F.B.I.s case file. But you cant fact check a claim that doesnt exist which means the process is bad at detecting important information that has been left out. Officials who reviewed later applications also told Mr. Horowitz that they typically focused on the new information in each submission. That means assertions theyd made early on ended up effectively being taken for granted: Nobody was revisiting early assumptions to see whether they still held up in the face of new data.

If this explains why the Page investigation went increasingly off the rails, its an explanation that has little to do with partisan politics at its heart. But that would mean theres little reason to think the Page investigation is special in this respect. Theres an urgent need, then, for the inspector general to do more such deep dives and figure out just how pervasive the problem really is.

Fortunately, the inspector general is already taking a first step in this direction, having begun a review that will examine the F.B.I.s compliance with the Woods Procedures in FISA applications that target U.S. persons. But in itself, thats not enough: While Mr. Horowitz found violations of the Woods Procedures in the Page case, they werent the most serious distortions. Those occurred precisely because the Woods Procedures arent well calibrated to catch material facts that get left out. To do that, youd need to do the kind of intensive and comprehensive case-by-case review conducted in the Horowitz review, not just run Woods vetting a second time to see whether the results tally.

Doing this sort of deep dive for a representative sample of FISA applications will, of course, be both expensive and extremely time consuming. But its well worth it to find out just how badly our surveillance state is broken.

Link:
The Chilling Reality of Bias at the F.B.I. - The New York Times

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee debated articles of impeachment drawn from a densely argued, sharply worded 300-page report that the Democratic majority on the House Intelligence Committee produced. It is an investigative tour de force, written for posterity. In considerable detail, using interviews and records, it describes, for example, how President Trumps top personal adviser, Rudolph W. Giuliani, traipsed across Europe, circumventing diplomats as he furthered the presidents direct political interests. It also delves into the circumstances behind Mr. Giulianis repeated contacts with a reporter, John Solomon of The Hill, and marshals a case that Mr. Solomons reporting helped push a false and damaging narrative about the then-serving American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.

The committee chairman, Representative Adam Schiff, believed that a detailed description of Mr. Solomons contacts with Mr. Giuliani and with Ukrainians were germane to the core of the case for impeachment against Mr. Trump, because the report speaks to the flood of misinformation that may have persuaded President Trump to act so recklessly.

But those who care about the vitality of journalism should here take a pause and ask why they dont feel disturbed. John Solomons investigative articles for The Hill may have been wrong, they were often misleading, and they were (judiciously, unwittingly?) used to further a conspiracy to oust a respected American ambassador. Mr. Solomon is a dogged, prideful investigator who worked with The Associated Press and The Washington Post before his political inclinations became more manifest and his penchant for accepting conclusions congenial to Republican partisans became a calling card.

But in revealing whom Mr. Solomon talked with, and when, Mr. Schiff and his committee have created a new pathway for the government to find and reveal a reporters sources and to question his or her motives. That is wrong. The legislative branch should not use its subpoena power to police journalism.

Mr. Schiffs pathway could easily be considered a precedent. And the government does not need more encouragement to out a journalists sources. The executive branch, in the institutions of the Department of Justice and the F.B.I., has used metadata call records and routing information not protected by the Fourth Amendment to document reporters contacts with their sources in a number of cases in which the source has subsequently been imprisoned. The public interest case for prosecuting leakers is easy to make. But we should note that the governments obligation to protect national security and a reporters duty to uncover abuses of executive power often clash. Whom you side with at those junctures depends on which tribe you belong to. Im a journalist, so I often side with the journalists.

I do have a big problem when journalists wittingly or unwittingly collude with foreign governments to degrade the institutions of democracy that we rely on. And while Im tempted to assert that Congress has no business ever poking its nose into reporting, I cant deny the circumstances that collided here; Mr. Solomon is part of this story. But to deny him any First Amendment protection of his work is to fail to see beyond the immediate ramifications of Mr. Schiffs decision. If Republicans regain control of the House, what would prevent them from using the same tactic to pummel the press for stories its members dont like? Ah, but what if the reporters have been consorting with liars and cons, as seems to be the case here?

Well, the worst people often have the best available information, and judgment calls are a humble part of the journalistic enterprise. Congress should recognize this and acknowledge that it is important.

Mr. Schiff did not subpoena Mr. Solomon directly, and his staff seems to believe that this settles the matter. But it should not. Mr. Schiff has effectively punished a reporter for reporting. And punishments that might be levied for errors in reporting and for apparent partisan bias should never come from the government. Journalists who dont object to this investigative practice will conspire to make it much easier for future entities in government to harass reporters who are pursuing the truth.

It pains me to see some of our most respected advocates for press freedom default to the view that Congresss procedures were duly followed and, while there may be some ickiness in the air, Republicans who have complained about Mr. Schiffs methods have no right to complain about intrusive government. This argument does not track, though, especially during a week when the Justice Departments inspector general revealed serious and potentially material deficiencies in the F.B.I.s application to renew a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order against Carter Page, a low-level Trump foreign policy aide whom the F.B.I. suspected might have a been a conduit for the Russian government to control or influence the Trump campaign. (There is no evidence that Mr. Page, a serial entrepreneur with some dubious friends, served in this role.)

Another way to minimize the First Amendment implications of Mr. Schiffs decision is to note that President Trump represents (and indeed has become) a far worse threat to a free press than any consequence of a procedurally appropriate congressional investigation. I agree with the statement of value: that Mr. Trump has beguiled, bewildered and bullied the press to a point of real danger. Labeling the press the enemy, arguing for looser libel laws, threatening broadcast licenses, gleefully encouraging his followers worst assumptions about the role of reporters all but invites us to consider him a national security threat the way some of his own appointees came to. But Trump being Trump is not an excuse for lowering the threshold for First Amendment vigilance elsewhere. Indeed, we should raise our voices even louder when other institutions of government make public a more casual appreciation of the First Amendment. Making sure that Congress passes rules that limit the use of subpoenas to inspect or reveal reporter-source relationships should be a priority.

Much of what the public knows about President Trumps conduct in office comes from journalists who have not been cowed by the enormous power wielded by the executive branch and its investigative capabilities. The civic emergency within which we are working will be exacerbated if we excuse or brush off an abuse of power because it supports our side.

Marc Ambinder (@marcambinder) leads the Annenberg digital security initiative at the University of Southern California. He also teaches national security reporting.

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Originally posted here:
Did Schiff Poke a Hole in the First Amendment? - The New York Times