The Wall...

Asssylum Mills...

NPR's Planet Money has learned that more than 13,500 immigrants, mostly Chinese, who were granted asylum status years ago by the U.S. government, are facing possible deportation due to fraud claims.

Immigration officials are moving against these immigrants in a sweeping review that federal authorities say is related to a 2012 investigation into asylum mills. During that probe, federal prosecutors in New York rounded up 30 immigration lawyers, paralegals and interpreters who had helped immigrants fraudulently obtain asylum in Manhattan's Chinatown and in Flushing, Queens. The case was dubbed Operation Fiction Writer.

Authorities accused them of dumping boilerplate language in stories of persecution, coaching clients to memorize and recite fictitious details to asylum officers, and fabricating documents to buttress the fake asylum claims.

The saga continue.

Backfired...

It turns out that a fitness tracker can do more to betray you than showing your friends and families you're a couch potato. It can also undermine your claims about being a victim of a crime.

A Florida woman traveled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where she stayed at her boss's home. Police were called to the home where they found overturned furniture, a knife and a bottle of vodka. Jeannine Risley told police she'd been sleeping and that she was woken up around midnight and sexually assaulted by a "man in his 30s, wearing boots." However, Risley was wearing her Fitbit band at the time. She initially said that the Fitbit had been lost in the struggle, but police found it in a hallway and when they downloaded its activity, the device became a witness against her.

The device showed Risley was awake and walking around at the time she claimed she was sleeping.

No footprints in the snow around the home. Her boss, telling police that Risley was about to lose her position with the company.
Local authorities charged her with "false reports to law enforcement, false alarms to public safety, and tampering with evidence" for upending the furniture.  

Vin Diesel..

Connie Dabate was shot dead in her home December 2015. Her husband, claimed he left for work around 8:30, only to return a half-hour later to see “a masked man — about 6-foot-2 and stocky with a Vin Diesel voice.”  

When the police started inspecting the couple’s digital footprints they found the husband’s story more full of holes than a Swiss cheese firing range.

First, the home security system recorded no signs of a struggle, and the alarm only went off an hour after the alleged altercation. Second, forty minutes after she was supposed to be shot, Connie posted two videos to Facebook.

Finally, the smoking gun, Connie’s Fitbit, which she’d worn to the gym, showed her walking around her home an hour after her husband said she’d been killed. She walked 1,217 feet total. The husband was arrested.

Blessed...

My Doll...

Dissonance...

Many describe situations in which people find themselves hating the person they love.  

Love and hate are not diametrically opposed.  First, love is broader in scope than is hate. While in hate the object is considered to be basically a bad agent, in romantic love the object is perceived to be both good and attractive. Second, there are many varieties of each emotion, and each kind cannot be the exact opposite of all other kinds of the other emotion.

Our desire for exclusivity arises in romantic love but not in hate. In hate we want to see our negative attitude shared by others. It seems natural that we want to share our negative fortune with others while wanting to keep the positive part merely to ourselves.  

Hating the one we love is possible from a logical point of view. This phenomenon, however, entails profound emotional dissonance.

Zone...

Bills...

Scared...