Venezuela Getting Worse, Tech Groups Come Out Against Backpage Bill, Scientists Look for Gender-Identity Genome: A.M. Links

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 8.4.2017 9:04 AM

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  Jorge Sanz/ZUMA Press/Newscom

  "There is no denying it now: Venezuela's government has crossed the line and become a full-fledged dictatorship," writes Javier El-Hage at National Review, reporting on the country's recent Constituent Assembly elections.

• Sen. John McCain has joined Ted Cruz and other senators in sponsoring a bill to punish web publishers and platforms for user posts, comments, and interactions. Meanwhile, a wide array of tech groups, web-policy wonks, sex workers, and law scholars have come out in opposition.
• An international consortium of researchers that includes Boston Children's Hospital, George Washington University, and Vanderbilt University are undertaking a massive study—"researchers have extracted DNA from the blood samples of 10,000 people, 3,000 of them transgender and the rest non-transgender, or cisgender," NBC reports—to search for a genetic component to gender identity.
• "Sending weapons to Kiev makes no more sense today than it did two years ago," writes Michael Brendan Dougherty.
• Ugh.

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Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a senior editor at Reason.