One of the couple dozen survivors of that migrant ship that sunk on the way from Libya to Italy says the smugglers locked hundreds of people in the hold before it went under. Estimates of the dead, all based on survivor accounts, range from 700 to 950 people aboard, with only 28 survivors found so far. As this article notes, the lack of bodies – only 24 have been found so far – makes more sense if they’re all contained locked inside the ship.
Since the Newtown shootings more than two years ago we’ve devoted a great deal of coverage to chronicling the prevalence of guns and firearms violence in the United States. It won’t come as a surprise to many of you that there are far more guns in civilian hands in the US than the UK or Germany, for instance. But even if you’re broadly familiar with the contours of the gun story, it’s still stunning to see just how heavily armed the US is compared to every other country on the planet. Indeed, the only country that even comes close to the US per capita average is Yemen. While the US has only 5% of the world’s population, it has between 35% and 50% of the world’s civilian firearms. These numbers come from a group called the Small Arms Survey based in Geneva, Switzerland. And I have some of the tables from their most recent tabulations after the jump.
McCain relentlessly mocks Cruz over made up claims that he’s pressing McCain to hold hearings on 2nd Amendment rights on military bases.
Poll finds Obamacare is getting more popular, crossing into net positive territory.
Yesterday we heard this odd story out of the small Missouri town of Parma, under a thousand residents. Just after the swearing in of the town’s first black female mayor, most of the town’s police force and several city employees resigned. The police cited ‘safety concerns’ for their group resignation. Now one of those cops say he feared he wouldn’t be able to do his job. “Rather than put my life in danger more than I do now on a daily basis, I decided to walk away,” he told the Post-Dispatch.
Michele Bachmann thanks Obama for speeding up the onset of the apocalypse.
Thanks, Obama.
(See update below.)
There’s been chatter today about Ted Cruz out saying McCain won’t help him hold hearings into protecting people’s 2nd Amendment rights on military bases. (Don’t ask.) He’s out there campaigning on this claim, raising money off it. But McCain gets asked about it and it’s not true.
We just published part three of our five part longform series on the rapid growth of renewable energy sources: Harvesting the Sun in Los Angeles.
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Horrific. From AP …
A ship with experience plucking migrants from unseaworthy smuggler’s boats had arrived soon after the distress call went out. But then the fishing trawler’s navigator made a maneuver that would seal the fate of the 850 people crammed inside: Instead of easing up alongside the merchant ship, he rammed it.
Relief gave way to panic. Terrified migrants rushed to one side, the trawler seized and capsized. What might have been another rescue in a period of unprecedented migrant crossings instead turned into a horrifying statistic: The deadliest shipwreck ever in the Mediterranean Sea.
Read the rest here.
There’s a fascinating little piece in the Times today looking at Ted Cruz’s life as college debate wunderkind as a foreshadowing of his presidential campaign and later public persona. Is past prologue? Believe it or not, yes!
Jason Horowitz finds a young ideologue who was extremely bright when it comes to logical reasoning and brain puzzles but awkwardly short on what psychologists now call emotional intelligence – with the latter often undermining the former in his quest for ultimate debate glory.