Study: Legal marijuana cuts crime, undercuts Mexican cartels Raw Story

> “These laws allow local farmers to grow marijuana that can then be sold to dispensaries where it is sold legally,” said economist Evelina Gavrilova from the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), one of the authors of the study. “These growers are in direct competition with Mexican drug cartels that are smuggling the marijuana into the U.S. As a result, the cartels get much less business.
US plan to back Kurdish soldiers pisses off Turkey BBC
>>> Erdogan vows to “drown” Kurd troops Stars & Stripes
FDA approves method of rapidly making stem cells Futurism
Doctors at the Mayo Clinic have received FDA approval for a platform that can manufacture stem cells by the billions in just days, in contrast to previous methods of making stem cells that took months.
GOP tries to wake up Trump with “blue wave” slide show. Politicus USA
> … a “sobering” slide presentation about the difficult midterm landscape at Camp David last weekend, leading the president to pledge a robust schedule of fundraising and campaign travel in the coming months, White House officials said.
> But the trends have continued, and perhaps worsened, since that briefing, with two more prominent Republican House members announcing plans to retire from vulnerable seats and a would-be recruit begging off a Senate challenge to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.
Inmates strike, say Florida has turned them into slaves Newser
The primary grievance: that they’re forced to work and paid nothing—not even the nominal 15 cents an hour some prisoners see in other states, for instance.