Monday News Bits

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” — Steve Jobs

California’s rate of firearm mortality is among the nation’s lowest, with 8.5 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, compared with 13.7 per 100,000 nationally and 14.2 per 100,000 in Texas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported. And Californians are about 25 percent less likely to die in mass shootings, compared with residents of other states, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California analysis.

U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet faced her most important test last week — and she failed miserably. Her visit to China in May — as the world waited for her to release a long-overdue U.N. report on human rights abuses in the Uyghur homeland — summarily undercut more than five years of efforts by Uyghur activists and our allies to tell the world what is happening to our people. Bachelet had the opportunity to confront this Orwellian police state. Instead, she repeated talking points from China itself, offering soft words that do not match the thousands of testimonies of survivors and families in the diaspora.

The California health system that employed her was scouring health histories of thousands of elderly Medicare patients, then pressuring doctors to add false diagnoses it found to their current medical records. The point of larding the medical records with outdated and irrelevant diagnoses such as cancer and stroke — often without the knowledge of the patients themselves — was not providing better care, according to a lawsuit from the Justice Department. The maneuver translated into millions of dollars in inflated bills to the federal Medicare Advantage insurance program, the government alleged in its false-claims lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California.

People with mental health disorders are more likely than those without such conditions to commit acts of mass violence, but many mass shooters do not have mental illnesses. It has not been shown that mental illness is the primary cause of mass murder.