Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of December 13

Six men arrested in connection with 70 crimes targeting San Francisco Bay Area Asian women, police say

Authorities said the six suspects worked together on more than 70 incidents of robbery, theft and burglary from October 2020 to September 2021. Firearms, including one ghost gun, were recovered during the investigation.

[…]

Over the course of the yearlong investigation, authorities used cell phone evidence, video surveillance, search warrants, interviews and other methods to determine that 177 robberies throughout the Bay Area were connected, according to Shab.

Three of the suspects are in custody and the other three were released, said San Jose Police Captain Brian Shab at the press conference. One of the men faces a maximum sentence of 95 years in prison, according to Shab.

Across the US, school shooting threats on TikTok prompt closures and more police

A wave of school shooting threats in the U.S. circulating on TikTok and other social media is raising concern among school staff and authorities.

Generally the threats don’t name specific schools and local authorities have said many of lack credibility. Still, schools in Michigan, Washington and others across the country have temporarily closed or bolstered police presence as a precaution.

Oxford Community Schools in Michigan, where a shooter killed four students after an attack in late November, closed all buildings district-wide due to a new shooting threat. Seattle police opened investigations into two schools Wednesday morning and closed one school after staff alerted authorities to social media posts warning of shootings, according to a press release.

Tooele County, Utah, officials said they believe the trend originated on TikTok as a way for students to skip school. They said it had spread to other internet platforms like Instagram and Facebook “and has morphed into something much more disturbing,” in a statement Wednesday.

In Glenview, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, police deemed shooting and bomb threats circulating on social media not credible, according to a news release on the department’s Facebook page.

Ashley Gonzalez, police chief for the Austin Independent School District, sent a letter to the community alerting of a “non-specific” school shooting threat on Dec. 17.

Hospitals are collapsing in Afghanistan. At this rate sanctions will kill more people than the Taliban

There are more epidemics in Afghanistan than fully functional covid-19 hospitals. Like almost every other place in the world, Afghans have been battling covid-19, but they also must cope with epidemics of measles, polio, dengue, malaria and cholera while their health-care system is on the verge of collapse.

[...]

When the Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15, Western governments froze all existing assets of the “de facto authorities,” which is the name we are supposed to call the current government in Afghanistan, and stopped all outstanding and future payments to all government programs, including health facilities and schools. The country is in an economic free fall. The health system came to an abrupt halt.

Some basic health services have thankfully begun to function again under the management of the WHO and UNICEF, after many months in which health-care workers didn’t receive their salaries and health facilities didn’t have basic medicines. While Sehatmandi is the core of primary and some secondary health care in Afghanistan, it is part of a much wider system that includes government-run provincial and regional hospitals, including covid-19 hospitals, as well as hospitals in Kabul.

Currently, none of these hospitals can receive any funds from the U.S. government and other bilateral or multilateral donors, directly or indirectly through U.N. agencies or NGOs. Neither can the Ministry of Public Health, which is necessary for the health system to function. The freeze, coming swiftly after the past government’s collapse, has crippled just about everything. More than one-third of the Afghan economy came directly from development aid.