If you think your cellphone is safe, have you considered why you believe that? Is it a fact or is it based on carefully crafted messages that you’ve read or heard? For the past few decades, the telecom wireless industry and its enthusiasts have heralded cellphones as the greatest achievement of the late 20th and […]

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In a Washington Post op-ed (June 4), “5G conspiracy theories threaten the U.S. recovery,” Thomas Johnson Jr., the Federal Communications Commission’s general counsel, declared: “Conjectures about 5G’s effect on human health are long on panic and short on science.” The FCC, however, has been “short on science” for more than two decades. Along with the […]

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The view from my condo overlooking the Saigon River includes much of Ho Chi Minh City’s glittery downtown, with its many newly built high rises and the famous Thu Thiem bridge. On a weekday it is crowded with cars and motorcycles. Today, however, that torrent of humanity has, but for a few straggling motorcycles and […]

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It’s too soon to know whether Trump’s slow-motion and deadly response to the coronavirus outbreak will contribute to his political undoing.  But even that enticing prospect offers little consolation, measured against the reality that this rudderless nation has been left flatfooted in the face of an advancing plague. Trump spent months minimizing the known threat. […]

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Back in 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that the practice known as civil commitment was legal. This meant that 20 states—which had passed laws permitting the ongoing incarceration of sex offenders—could continue to keep the men confined even after they completed their prison terms. (See “Sex Crimes and Criminal Justice,” from the May 2018 issue […]

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