The Power of Social Media

On Sunday the Los Angeles International Airport had to delay, cancel, and divert several flies due to a shooting incident scare. CNN covered the story and said that passenger were running out of terminals and on to the tarmac in the airfield. The south runway of the airport has to stop receiving flights because of people that were on the tarmac. What triggered the scare were loud noises that people thought were gun shots. Originally only one terminal herd these noises but due to social media and word of the mouth the news spread quickly throughout the airport. Airport security officers and Los Angeles Police Department cleared the airport of any type of threat and passenger were finally bussed to safe locations. The fact that some people took loud noises as gunshots makes me wonder is our country on edge due to domestic violence or to the fact that we are receiving Syrian refugees and are not comfortable with the actions that our government is taking to protect this country from ay terror attacks.

President's Misguided Plan to Connect Schools To the Internet

President Obama has recently raised the budget for classroom technology across the nation from $2.25 billion to $4 billion a year. The idea was that because a school in North Carolina received funding from the E-Rate program and the students had showed improved performance in the classroom the President believed that all schools should receive even more money to help students. This however failed miserably. Thomas Hazlett, the author of "Obama's Misguided Plan to Connect Schools to the Internet", and some of his colleagues did a study on whether the E-Rate Program really  helped students or not. The study showed that schools the revived the most funding had students do even worse on the SAT than schools that were in better neighborhoods and received little funding. Schools in L.A. though that it would be nice if each student had received iPads, but schools soon found out that kids became distracted and found ways around the set firewalls. Currently the E-Rate Program still stands but Hazlett believes that the program should be suspended until test and studies are done nationally to determine whether to terminate the program, put the $4 billion in different parts of school systems, or to reinstate.

EpiPen Price Hike

FoxNews covered a story on August 26, 2016 about the EpiPen price hike. Pharmaceutical giant Mylan has raised the price of EpiPen by four hundred percent. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's daughter runs the company which puts him in a difficult situation. Minchin made a big push to permanently shelve Zohydro ER despite the FDA's approval of it being a powerful opiate. Minchin as been meeting with both Democratic and Republican leaders to discuss whether there should be a regulation on prescription drug prices.

Trading $400 Million for Four Americans

CNN writes an article about how the $400 million traded was a ransom. This topic is highly controversial because as a big part of American philosophy, we do not trade or negotiate with terrorists. Reporters on CNN say that a ransom is that money is dropped first and then the prisoners are traded. According to this definition of a ransom, the money that was dropped cannot be considered as a ransom. To me this seems like a negotiation, trade, and ransom all in one. Whether these people are terrorists or not I still do not believe that $400 million was the best option there was.

Social Security May Owe You Money

In an article on the Washington Post website a well known homeless woman finally convinced someone that the government owed her money. Wanda Witter sleeps outside of a cafe in Washington D.C. every night. She sleeps in a blue sleeping bag with a hand cart full of suitcases locked to the patio chairs. Witter lost her job in Corning, New York and went to study law. She moved to D.C. to find a job but ended up becoming homeless. In those suitcases are papers to prove that the government owed her money. A social worker named Julie Turner was finally convinced that Witter was not crazy. She did look at Witter's  papers and confirmed that the government did owe her money. Witter has been to many mental institutions because people believed that she was crazy. Social security was understaffed and in the end stopped contacting Witter. Witter found a lawyer and eventually she did began to receive checks. The Washington Post mentioned how the baby boomer generation has been swelling while there is not enough young younger generations workers to cover for the baby boomers. Turner also believes that many of the capital's homelessness is due to economic issues rather than mental issues. She says that we often write people off as mentally ill instead of really listening to what they are trying to say.

Ex-Con Voting Rights

The New York Times wrote an interesting article about ex-felons and how they should have the right to vote. Virginia's Governor Terry McAuliffe had just signed papers stating that 13,000 ex-felons could gain their voting rights back on a case-by-case basis. As expected many conservatives were skeptical about this idea and Trump himself said that the democrats are releasing more violence into the polls. The majority of the fellows that gained their voting rights were nonviolent felons. There is however suspicion that this restoration of ex-felon voting rights was done to help Gov. McAuliffe ally Hillary Clinton win the presidential election. Most states ban felons from voting but will immediately retire their rights once they completed a prison term, probation, or parole. In some states it requires all three. This goes to show how much power both the federal and state governments both have and how they can overlap.

Social Media Screening on Foreigners

In an article written by Tony Romm on Politico large companies on the internet wanted to screen foreigners social media accounts to eliminate security threats. Companies including Google, Facebook, and Twitter asked the Obama administration to help them out. The Department of Homeland Security has been contemplating whether to ask foreigners arriving on visas to voluntarily give up their social media accounts and usernames on the forms. Many people of the United States feels that this is violating the freedom of speech online and more importantly intimidating visitors. The senior legislative manager of Access Now, Nathan White, says "'But the process to enter the U.S. is confusing, and it's likely that most visitors will fill out the card completely rather than risk additional questions from intimidating, uniformed officers'". Though what the DHS is asking is strictly voluntary people still feel that their first amendment right is being infringed on. This right, freedom of speech, is one of the unique parts of the United States where people feel that even if it is an order and not a law that is coming close to infringing on their right, they put their foot down hard and are very reluctant to say "yes".