Trump just made a week’s worth of headlines in one day
If this was any other time before January 2017, each of these stories would dominate the news cycle for a week. But times are different now: All this happened in one day. Let’s run through it.
First of all: John Dowd, Donald Trump’s lead attorney in the Russia inquiry, resigned from the president’s legal team. Earlier this week, Dowd had to walk back comments he made to the press saying he and the president wanted special counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry shut down.
But then after that: Gen. H.R. McMaster, who was Trump’s national security adviser, left the White House. Trump’s replacing McMaster with George W. Bush’s former UN Ambassador John Bolton.
The story here is: Bolton has been a controversial national security figure with hawkish views for decades.
As recently as 2015, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times headlined “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” Last month, he layed out the legal case for a preemptive strike on North Korea in the Wall Street Journal.
What this means: Trump's new national security adviser thinks, more often than not, that bombing is the answer. We collected the most remarkable John Bolton statements for you. They’re really something.
All this in a day that started with the president saying he can win a fight against Joe Biden. The president was responding to the former VP’s suggestion that he would have "beat the hell" out of Trump if they were in high school. Trump responded and said Biden would “go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”
Stoneman Douglas High School is requiring students to use clear backpacks and people are not happy
As part of the new safety measures being implemented at the Florida school where a shooter killed 17 people, students must carry clear backpacks on campus.
Many students were not happy with the new backpacks. One student told us, “I feel like the clear backpacks are only going to make us more uncomfortable and remind us that our school is not the same.”
Will it fix anything? One student tweeted: “Enforcing students to wear clear backpacks is simply like putting a band-aid on a broken bone.”
Other new safety rules include locking classroom doors at all times and securing exterior doors and gates throughout the day.
More context:
The security measures were announced a day after two Stoneman Douglas students were arrested for carrying knives to school, and two days after Zachary Cruz, the shooter's brother, was arrested for trespassing on school property.
Instagram is finally changing your feed to make it more chronological
It may feel like only yesterday, but it was actually two years ago that Instagram changed its feed from chronological order to an algorithm that feeds you what it thinks you want to see.
People have been complaining about losing the chronological feed pretty much nonstop ever since.
Well, goodbye to all that. Sort of.
Instagram announced it’s tweaking its algorithm to make it “more timely,” so that more “newer posts are more likely to appear first in feed.” Chronological order isn’t returning, but hey, it’s a step.
PSST: You don't have time to read the news. We get it. Don't sweat. You can still get what you need to know before you walk out your front door. Just watch or listen to Reporting to You, our bite-size daily news show.
Quick catch-up:
Shutdown avoided: Congress just avoided another government shutdown by passing a bill that almost no one has read. After a late night of drama, the Senate passed a 2,200-page bill that includes some wins for both parties, but avoids major issues. It will keep the government open through the end of September.
Retailers are concerned: Some of the United States’ biggest retailers, including Target, Gap, and Levi’s, have expressed concern that President Trump’s new plan to impose heavy taxes on Chinese imports will raise prices for Americans.
Sacramento protest: Hundreds of protesters forced the shutdown of a major interstate at rush hour and blocked admission to an NBA game. The protest came a day after Sacramento police released video of officers fatally shooting 22-year-old Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, in his backyard.
Rex Tillerson: The fired secretary of state called DC “a very mean-spirited town” in his final speech to employees. He addressed State Department staffers for the last time, telling them to “never lose sight of the most valuable asset you possess: your personal integrity.”
Big pile of trash: Out in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between California and Hawaii there is a giant floating mass of plastic and debris. It’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which may be a boring name, but it’s quite to the point. Scientists are warning that this mass of debris is getting bigger and bigger — and it’s now three times the size of France.
The data-harvesting scandal is the A-bomb moment for computer science
Physics gave humanity the atomic bomb and chemistry gave us chemical weapons. Both of those fields have already had to confront the consequences of their creations.
However, the cutting-edge fields of today — like machine learning, data science, and computational linguistics — “have yet to face their A-bomb moment.”
This Facebook crisis appears to be that moment of reckoning.
So argues Bryor Snefjella, a PhD student who studies cognitive science of language. “In all the years I’ve been a researcher, I've never once had a class or seminar on the ethics specific to our field.”
Read Snefjella’s smart piece on a moment of confronting consequences that’s long overdue.
PSST: Will software engineering use this moment to look inward? And what would it take to get you to quit Facebook? In the Outside Your Bubble Facebook group, we're sharing stories surrounding the news that are shaping our perspectives — and we'd love for you to join us.
This mom flew across the country because her daughter’s head hurt, and people love it
On Friday afternoon, Grace Li, who lives in New York, told her mom who lives in Texas that she wasn’t feeling well.
So her mom "left work, went home and packed, and arrived in New York that night."
The internet is absolutely in love with this mom — the responses are totally heartwarming, and, hey, if you’ve had a tough week, this story will put a smile on your face.