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Investigators are still searching for clues in the Las Vegas shooting; Yahoo's 2013 hack was about three times bigger than previously thought; the FDA approves a new medication to treat hepatitis C.
Congress is slow to tackle America's weak gun laws
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- A few days after the deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas, law enforcement officials are still piecing together their investigation of shooter Stephen Paddock. [Washington Post / Mark Berman and Matt Zapotosky]
- It could be days or weeks before police establish a motive, but what’s clear is that Paddock was planning an elaborate attack. Police found an arsenal of 23 guns in his hotel room, 12 of which were outfitted with a “bump stock” device so that they could fire continuous rounds — making the attack even deadlier. [CNN / Nicole Chavez]
- Paddock’s rampage killed 58 people and injured more than 500. The shooting victims were from all over the country and included medical professionals, law enforcement officials, and college students. [NPR / Bill Chappell, Camila Domonoske, Amy Held, Nurith Aizenman, and Emily Sullivan]
- Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has introduced a bill to ban bump stock devices like the ones used to carry out the deadly attack in Las Vegas. Republicans in Congress have so far signaled a willingness to go along with the narrow bill. [USA Today / Nicole Gaudiano and Eliza Collins]
- But it’s unlikely that Republicans will get on board with any more comprehensive gun control policy solutions. The most recent Republican action on gun policy was to roll back an Obama-era rule that made it easier for the FBI to flag people who were severely mentally ill while doing federal background checks. [Vox / Tara Golshan]
- Fully automatic weapons like machine guns are one of the few types of guns banned by the federal government, but there are still loopholes to obtaining them. Any gun manufactured before the 1986 law went into effect can still be bought, though the guns are expensive. [The Federalist / Sean Davis]
- In addition to federal law, each state has its own gun laws, and the majority of states have laws that are very loose. Nevada is one of these states: It allows people to buy guns without a permit or license, semiautomatic weapons are legal, and the state does not regulate magazine capacity. [Vox / Ella Nilsen]
Ya-hoo boy, this seems bad
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- Yahoo made it official yesterday: If you had a Yahoo account in 2013, it was hacked. [CNN Tech / Selena Larson]
- Three billion (yes, that’s billion with a "b") accounts were hacked in 2013, Yahoo’s parent company Verizon announced. That’s about three times the number of hacked accounts they initially reported back in 2016, and the biggest data breach reported yet. [CNBC / Nick Wells]
- Email accounts weren’t the only ones that were compromised; Tumblr, Fantasy, and Flickr accounts were also breached, Verizon said. [Reuters / Jonathan Stempel and Jim Finkle]
- Hacked information from the accounts includes names, email addresses, passwords, birthdays, phone numbers, and, in some cases, security questions and answers. [Quartz / Karen Hao]
- Since 2013, that information has been sold by hackers to at least three interested buyers, including two spammers and a group reportedly wanting to use them for espionage, a cybersecurity company told the New York Times. [NYT / Nicole Perlroth]
- Meanwhile, America’s other major hacking case — Equifax — got its day in the spotlight during a congressional hearing yesterday, as Equifax’s former CEO Richard Smith answered questions about a $7 million government contract Equifax was recently awarded to protect the IRS against fraud. [Washington Post / Renae Merle]
- The Equifax hack was smaller (about 145 million people were affected), but even more serious because information like names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, home addresses, and, in some cases, credit card numbers was accessed. [WSJ / Robert McMillan and Ryan Knutson]
There’s a new cure for hepatitis C, and it only costs $26,000
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- The FDA just approved a new drug that could cure a lot of people of hepatitis C. The drug is called Mavyret, and its manufacturers say it can cure all strains of hepatitis C in about two months. [Kaiser Health News / Michelle Andrews]
- Hepatitis C is a disease caused by the HCV virus. It primarily targets the liver and can cause serious problems like cirrhosis and liver cancer if it’s not treated. [CDC]
- The reason this is so important now is America’s opioid epidemic. Doctors around the country are starting to see alarming spike in hepatitis C cases among drug users. People who inject drugs and share needles are at high risk, but people can also contract hepatitis C by sharing other paraphernalia used to mix drugs. [Concord Monitor / Ella Nilsen]
- In Appalachian states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, hepatitis C infection rates more than tripled from 2006 to 2012, and about half of new cases were in people under 30 years of age. [CNN / Ray Sanchez]
- This poses an additional problem: the cost of treating all these new cases. In addition to drug treatment, a lot of drug users also need to be treated for health problems that come along with their drug use, including hep C and serious bacterial infections. [NYT / Abby Goodnough]
Mavyret could help make a dent in that. It costs about $26,000, which may seem like an awful lot of money but is considerably less than the price of other hepatitis C drugs on the market, which range from $55,000 all the way up to $95,000. [Kaiser Health News / Michelle Andrews]
Miscellaneous
- In addition to the now-ubiquitous pizza rat of New York City, there may also be legions of pizza mice. [New Scientist / Chris Baraniuk]
- The world’s most expensive bowl: small, ancient, used to wash brushes during China’s Song Dynasty, and worth a whopping $37.7 million. [Agence France-Press]
- As baseball teams have gotten more strategic about their plays to win, players are making fewer high-stakes gambles, and games have gotten a lot slower. [WSJ / Brian Costa and Jared Diamond]
- US Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania has always been a big pro-life advocate, which made it especially awkward when his former mistress revealed he recently pressured her to get an abortion. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette / Paula Reed Ward]
- Vice President Mike Pence has had to step in to soothe White House tensions, as reports surfaced that Rex Tillerson called President Trump a "moron" earlier this summer. Tillerson denied the allegations. [NBC News / Carol Lee, Kristen Welker, Stephanie Ruhle, and Dafna Linzer]
Verbatim
- “To say it’s the safest food is a bit like saying my hand grenade is the safest hand grenade. Ghanaians would be better off eating less KFC. But that is the way of the world I’m afraid.” [Professor emeritus of food and health Mike Gibney to NYT / Dionne Searcey and Matt Richtel]
- "Who would shoot into a concert? She was two feet away from me. How lucky am I? It could have been me. It should have been me." [Las Vegas survivor Kody Robertson to Washington Post / Wesley Lowery]
- “That’s what I get a lot. Like, ‘this isn’t real poetry so I’m just going to enter some spaces and that’s it.’ I’m like, ‘oh, God.’” [Poet Rupi Kaur to the Cut / Molly Fischer]
- "You look at your hand and it looks the same as always. But it's not. It's yours — but it's not. Nothing has changed, yet it's different. And that's what gets you. There's nothing to notice; but you can't help but notice." [Nev Jones to Pacific Standard / David Dobbs]
- “It felt like a regular doctor’s office. There was a receptionist and a waiting room. Naturopaths were wearing white coats and had stethoscopes around their necks. The visual cues were there. They looked like doctors to me.” [Former naturopath Britt Hermes to Quartz / Akshat Rathi]
Watch this: The origins of our open office hellscape
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