Pennsylvania's prison system is banning all tobacco products inside every facility's secure perimeter, starting July 1.

Corrections Secretary John Wetzel announced the new policy Monday, citing the success of existing tobacco prohibitions in three state correctional institutions and Quehanna Boot Camp.

After July 1, all tobacco products in the possession of inmates or staff will be deemed contraband.

The policy applies to cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, tobacco substitutes, lighters, pipes, pipe cleaners, filters, rolling papers, roller aprons and rollers.

Inmates and employees will be allowed to use nonrefillable e-cigarettes that have been approved by the prison system, within designated areas.

Inmates will be given access to smoking cessation programs, educational materials and support to help them quit. They'll be able to purchase nicotine replacement therapy patches.

In a stunning reversal, Cook County prosecutors on Tuesday dropped all charges against "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett for allegedly staging a phony attack and claiming he was the victim of a hate crime.

Calling it "a whitewash of justice," Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted the decision, emphasizing repeatedly that a grand jury had chosen to bring 16 counts of disorderly conduct against Smollett.

"From top to bottom, this is not on the level," Emanuel told reporters at an afternoon news conference.

Why the state's attorney's office made the sudden about-face wasn't immediately clear. The office issued only a one-sentence statement.

"After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett's volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case," the statement said.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was compared to Donald Trump in her "ability to galvanize [her] supporters through social media." To this she replied: "In order to resonate with people, you have to tell them what you mean, you have to be willing to make mistakes, you have to be willing to be vulnerable and learn as you go."

Ocasio-Cortez has indeed garnered a lot of attention since upsetting Joe Crowley in the race to represent New York's 14th district in the U.S. House of Representatives last year. With over 3.5 million followers on Twitter, an initialism (AOC) that has caught on with cable news, and an audacious personality, she has become a vociferous presence in the contemporary social discourse - particularly on issues like race, taxes, health care, Amazon, economic inequality, and climate change.

In the latest example, AOC sparked controversy when she took former U.S. President Ronald Reagan to task, as related by Huffington Post, by bringing up "one of [his] favorite anecdotes from his 1976 presidential primary campaign...about a Chicago woman who was accused of fraudulently collecting public benefits under a variety of names." AOC remarked: "So you think about this image, 'welfare queens'...and what [Reagan] was really trying to talk about... He's painting this really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing, [who] were sucks on our country, right? ... That's not explicit racism, but it's still rooted in racist caricature. It gives people a logical - a "logical" - reason to say, 'Oh, yeah, no. Toss out the whole safety net.'"

More than 360 refugees left the Rukban camp, located at the US-controlled zone in Syria, for the area held by the Syrian governmental troops, head of the Russian Defence Ministry's Center for Syrian Reconciliation Maj. Gen. Viktor Kupchishin said on Sunday at a press briefing.

"On March 23, more than 360 refugees left the Rukban camp for the territory controlled by the Syrian government via the Jleb crossing point. They received necessary aid, they are provided with food and accommodation," Kupchishin said.

"Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy", read the front page headline of Sunday's New York Times. Bit by bit, mainstream American consciousness is slowly coming to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and with the stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two and-a-half years monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any underlying truth to it.

There are still holdouts, of course. Many people invested a tremendous amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief that Robert Mueller was going to arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of Trump's own family, leading seedy characters to "flip" on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing evidence that will lead to impeachment. Some insist that Attorney General William Barr is holding back key elements of the Mueller report, a claim which is premised on the absurd belief that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the investigation without speaking up publicly. Others are still holding out hope that other investigations by other legal authorities will turn up some Russian shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller's sweeping subpoena powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they're coming around.

Violent fascist students doxxed Peyton Lofton, a chapter leader for Turning Point USA and YAL chapter officer at Tulane University, then lit his dorm room door on fire on Friday.

Mr. Lofton was doxxed by an anti-YAL (Young Americans for Liberty) social media account, according to a fellow YAL member.

Charlie Kirk, the leader of TPUSA sounded the alarm on Saturday.

Charlie Kirk posted photos of the burnt dorm room door and Peyton Lofton and said, "This is Peyton Lofton, our chapter leader for TPUSA at Tulane. He was recently doxxed by the violent left for being a conservative," Kirk said. "Last night his dorm room door was literally SET ON FIRE after he was doxxed. The violent left is targeting students!"

Three Russian troops were killed in a gunfight with terrorists in Syria in late February, the Defense Ministry has said. A gang of 30 militants responsible for the attack has since been identified and eliminated.

The Russian servicemen were returning to base in a car after a humanitarian aid delivery in the Deir ez-Zor Province when they were ambushed by a group of gunmen. "After the battle that broke out, the troops were missing in action," the ministry said in a statement.

The search for the troops, which the Syrian military also took part in, started right after their disappearance. The fighters who organized the attack were eventually identified and the death of Russian soldiers was confirmed.

The UW's teacher preparation program is a militant immersion in social justice activism and identity politics that almost entirely neglects the study of pedagogy, intellectual inquiry, and the development of academic expertise.

The University of Washington's Secondary Teacher Education Program (STEP) is a twelve-month immersion in doctrinaire social justice activism and identity politics that awards a masters degree in teaching. Rather than an academic program centered around pedagogy and public policy, STEP is a bizarre political experiment, rife with juvenile requirements and light on academic rigor, in which the faculty quite consciously whips up a fraught emotional climate in order to underline its ideological message. As a consequence, the key components of teaching - pedagogy and the dissemination of academic knowledge - are fundamentally neglected. With no practical training or preparation, students begin their student-teaching practicums woefully unprepared in a sink or swim mentality focused mostly on emotional hypersensitivity. Even for the ardent social justice activist, the program's lack of practicality offers a value to its graduates little more than as a barrier to entering the teaching profession.

Organized according to the standard tenets of social justice theory, those in the graduate school class who do not identify as a straight white male are encouraged from the outset to present themselves as victims of oppression in the social hierarchy of the United States. And so a culture emerges rapidly in the 60-student cohort in which words and semantics fall under constant scrutiny, and ideas contrary to the ascendant ideology are rooted out in order to advance the high cause of social justice. Moreover, instead of imparting knowledge in pedagogy or working with graduate students to develop academic content and lesson-planning for high school courses, the faculty and leadership declare that their essential mission is to break the colonialism, misogyny and homophobia to which the important civic institutions and those at the top of the social hierarchy as they define it (white, male, straight) in American society are currently engaged. The logic being employed here is that an entire profession of teachers fluent in social justice will have the effect of reordering society itself by educating young people at all levels of K-12 and post-secondary education under this framework. This lofty ethos explains why the program focuses so heavily on training students in the discourse of far-left identity politics, and with such serious outcomes at stake why it demands the total intellectual acquiescence of those within it, with a consequently high drop-out rate and a chilling of frank discussion. When you consider that STEP's purpose is to prepare graduates to become novice high school teachers, such an acrimonious and psychologically manipulative environment in a public university is difficult to justify. I have decided to write this account with specific examples of the daily experience, in order to illustrate how social justice activism in the academy has a high opportunity cost, and how the program has become almost entirely untethered from its mission.

Ask a teen today how she communicates with her friends, and she'll probably hold up her smartphone. Not that she actually calls her friends; it's more likely that she texts them or messages them on social media.

Today's teens - the generation I call "iGen" that's also called Gen Z - are constantly connected with their friends via digital media, spending as much as nine hours a day on average with screens.

How might this influence the time they spend with their friends in person?

A Swedish TV commercial showing a man, presumed to be a migrant, reading his daughter a bedtime story in his native language instead of Swedish sparked social media uproar.

Many Swedish TV viewers were left baffled last week after a local broadcaster ran a commercial in a language that most of the viewers could not grasp - and it didn't even have subtitles.

The ad, launched by the local department store Ahlens, shows a father reading a bedtime story to his daughter - a piece from the Swedish children's book Pippi Longstocking - apparently in Dari, a dialect of Persian spoken largely in Afghanistan.