Tue: Happy Boxing Day!

What Do Juries Eat?  This Kind of Evidence.

According to MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos, the unearthed recording of Donald Trump and RNC chair Ronna McDaniel plotting with Michigan election officials to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election votes will likely be front and center when special counsel Jack Smith presents his case in Judge Tanya Chutkan's courtroom.

After being prompted about the phone call by "Morning Joe" fill-in host Jonathan Lemire, Cevallos began by noting that "there was a lot of talk this last week about, well, could this expose him to liability in a Michigan court? Maybe. But far more interesting to me, having defended federal criminal cases, I can tell you federal court is not a fun place to be for a criminal defense attorney because the government is very good at what they do."

"If I'm the government I'm thinking they're looking at this Michigan evidence as what we call 404-B, but all it is is prior bad act evidence that sometimes under certain circumstances can come into a prosecution," he added.

"So if I'm Jack Smith, maybe you look at that Michigan evidence or any evidence from any other state and bring that in as evidence in your D.C. court case and say, 'Look, this is what he was doing elsewhere, this was not a mistake. This is his modus operandi. This all should come in,' and it can be devastating evidence," he added. "I can tell you personally that bad act evidence that somebody did something else bad somewhere else is devastating and juries -- they eat it up," he explained.

Death By Private Equity

Patients receiving care at hospitals owned by private-equity firms experience more bloodstream and surgical site infections and they fall more often, a new study by academics at Harvard University and the University of Chicago has found.

The research, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, comes after previous studies that have asserted patients of private-equity-owned health care entities pay higher costs, experience reduced staffing levels and, in the case of nursing homes, have higher death rates.

The new study is by Dr. Sneha Kannan and Dr. Zirui Song, both of Harvard, and Joseph Dov Bruch of the University of Chicago. It focused on patients’ health outcomes in private-equity-owned hospitals, an area, the academics said, where research has been scant. Private-equity firms have bought out more than 200 hospitals from non-private-equity owners, the study noted. In addition, as NBC News has previously reported, an estimated 40% of hospital emergency departments across the country are managed by private-equity-backed staffing companies.

Patients get more infections and fall more often at private equity-owned hospitals

A Global Health Expert Speaks

In January of 2022, when I started this role, Covid was naturally the top priority. Then, in late February, suddenly it was Ukraine. The Russian government’s invasion cut off pharmaceutical supplies, attacked hospitals and the systems they depend on and drove outbreaks of disease among the displaced, potentially endangering even more lives than Russian weapons did. More than 100,000 Ukrainians with H.I.V., for example, were threatened with losing access to the lifesaving antiretroviral medications they needed. We had to move fast to help Ukraine solve how to keep pharmacies, clinics, hospitals and public health capacity functioning.

That same month, a wild-type polio case turned up in Malawi — a major setback after more than five years without a documented case in Africa. Over the following months, we faced deadly cholera outbreaks in more than two dozen countries, the global spread of mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) and an outbreak in Ghana of Marburg virus disease, a deadly cousin of Ebola. By mid-2022, waves of political violence and climate catastrophes forcibly displaced more than 100 million people — the largest number in recorded history — leading to increased disease and death from crowding, unsanitary conditions, malnutrition and the loss of basic health services. This past May, the World Health Organization reported a total of 56 active global health emergencies, a situation that Mike Ryan, the head of the W.H.O.’s health emergencies program, has described as “unprecedented.”

This is now the pattern: one emergency after another, often overlapping, diverting focus away from longer-term public health goals. And there’s no sign of this letting up. Displacement and activities like deforestation have increased contact between humans and wildlife — and thus the incidence of animal diseases leaping to humans. (The Ebola virus, for example, has been linked to bats as a possible source of spread.) The risk of outbreak-causing laboratory accidents is a significant concern as labs proliferate and safety measures lag. On average, between 1979 and 2015, more than 80 laboratory-acquired infections were reported per year, several involving transmission beyond those initially infected, and underreporting is rife. The growing field of synthetic virology has simultaneously generated lifesaving new treatments (mRNA vaccines, for example) and made it easier for bad actors to turn infectious diseases into weapons of mass destruction.

The Next TIme Someone Brags About How the Cost of Living is Lower in Red States ...

Workers in 22 states and dozens of localities will see a wage hike on New Year’s thanks to cost-of-living adjustments baked into minimum wage laws.

In all, 65 cities, counties and states will hike their wage floors at the start of 2024, the majority of them hitting at least $15 per hour, according to an analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a group that advocates for higher minimum wages.

Another three states and 22 local jurisdictions will boost their minimums later in the year, including 15 that will set a floor of at least $17 for some workers.

The near-record number of increases is the result of years of organizing by workers and labor groups pushing state and local governments on the issue, particularly through the union-backed Fight for $15 campaign that began in fast food in 2012.

“In many areas, the mandated wage floor is starting to rise above the $15 that long served as a rallying cry for low-wage workers.”

Although Congress hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage in well over a decade, activists have succeeded in raising base wages around the country through ballot referendums and state legislation. Most recent measures included scheduled increases or tied the rates to an inflation index so that they adjust each year as consumer prices rise.

In many areas, the mandated wage floor is starting to rise above the $15 mark that long served as a rallying cry for low-wage workers.

Yannet Lathrop, a researcher and policy analyst who authored the NELP analysis, said new ballot initiatives and legislative campaigns are percolating in at least nine states, including efforts to raise the minimum wage to $18 in California and $20 in Massachusetts.

I see Five Red States ib the List

State increases slated for Jan. 1, 2024:

Alaska: $10.85 to $11.73
Arizona: $10.85 to $14.35
California: $15.50 to $16.00
Colorado: $13.65 to $14.42
Connecticut: $15.00 to $15.69
Delaware: $11.75 to $13.25
Hawaii: $12.00 to $14.00
Illinois: $13.00 to $14.00
Maine: $13.80 to $14.15
Maryland: $13.25 ($12.80 for small employers) to $15.00
Michigan: $10.10 to $10.33
Minnesota: $10.50 to $10.85 (large employers); $8.63 to $8.85 (small employers)
Missouri: $12.00 to $12.30
Montana: $9.95 to $10.30
Nebraska: $10.50 to $12.00
New Jersey: $14.13 to $15.13
New York: $15.00 to $16 (New York City area); $14.20 to $15 (Upstate)
Ohio: $10.10 to $10.45
Rhode Island: $13.00 to $14.00
South Dakota: $10.80 to $11.20
Vermont: $13.18 to $13.67
Washington State: $15.74 to $16.28

Is climate change speeding up? Here’s what the science says.

For the past several years, a small group of scientists has warned that sometime early this century, the rate of global warming — which has remained largely steady for decades — might accelerate. Temperatures could rise higher, faster. The drumbeat of weather disasters may become more insistent.

And now, after what is poised to be the hottest year in recorded history, the same experts believe that it is already happening.

In a paper published last month, climate scientist James E. Hansen and a group of colleagues argued that the pace of global warming is poised to increase by 50 percent in the coming decades, with an accompanying escalation of impacts.

According to the scientists, an increased amount of heat energy trapped within the planet’s system — known as the planet’s “energy imbalance” — will accelerate warming. “If there’s more energy coming in than going out, you get warmer, and if you double that imbalance, you’re going to get warmer faster,” Hansen said in a phone interview.

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth, has similarly called the last few months of temperatures “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” and noted, “there is increasing evidence that global warming has accelerated over the past 15 years.”

But not everyone agrees. University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann has argued that no acceleration is visible yet: “The truth is bad enough,” he wrote in a blog post. Many other researchers also remain skeptical, saying that while such an increase may be predicted in some climate simulations, they don’t see it clearly in the data from the planet itself. At least not yet.
The Washington Post used a data set from NASA to to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2023.

The record shows that the pace of warming clearly sped up around the year 1970. Scientists have long known that this acceleration stems from a steep increase in greenhouse gas emissions, combined with efforts in many countries to reduce the amount of sun-reflecting pollution in the air. But the data is much more uncertain on whether a second acceleration is underway.