Reading archive 2024-12-29

He faced charges for tearing down their Pride flag. The couple forgave him.: Matthew Henshaw participated in the Heart of Safety Restorative Justice Conferencing Program, which included meeting with the couple.

Legalizing sports gambling was a terrible bet: With societal ills and sports scandals on the rise, Congress should rein in the betting industry. - "Legalized sports betting was supposed to enable gambling companies to identify and weed out problem bettors. Instead, the opposite has happened: High rollers who lose are targeted and courted as VIPs, showered with quick credit and other perks, and encouraged to gamble more — to 'chase' their losses, in industry parlance. Those who actually win big get limits imposed on how much they can bet."

Trump backs H-1B visas, aligning with Musk on immigration: “I’ve always liked the visas,” he said, siding with tech leaders against anti-immigration hard-liners.

A South American waterway becomes a cocaine superhighway — to Europe - "Following a story in The Washington Post that reported on the planned end to cooperation, the Paraguayan government reversed its decision, saying it plans to strengthen collaboration with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration."

The Cyber Sleuth: Geraldine Brooks on Jarod Koopman of the Internal Revenue Service - "It was through a fellow accounting student at Nazareth that Koopman found his calling. 'I knew she had an internship with the IRS, and she came back to the dorm one day saying she’d just accompanied a team executing a warrant on a drug dealer, and I’m like, wait, the IRS does that?' He’d always been attracted to a career in law enforcement, and here was a job that could couple that ambition with his accounting skills. Koopman applied for the internship his senior year and was hired into the Rochester field office after he graduated in 2001. His early cases were white-collar crimes such as investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. 'I’m 20 years old, sitting across the table from people in their 80s who are crying because they’ve trusted someone with their hard-earned retirement savings, and they’ve lost everything. You want to get the person responsible for that.'

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"Everyone knows that Al Capone was nailed for tax evasion, but it’s Eliot Ness and the FBI who are lionized. The real hero of that bust was an IRS agent named Michael Malone, who lived undercover with Capone’s men, collecting evidence for nearly three years."

Man accused of attacking TV reporter, saying ‘This is Trump’s America now’