Virtually every day there’s a provocation & no response from the president. Why?

New: US F-22 fighter jets intercepted four Russian Tu-142 reconnaissance aircraft Saturday in Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone, says NORAD. Follows 3 similar encounters earlier this month.

https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1276907387148959745

Winona Ryder’s anxiety attacks were getting worse. She couldn’t sleep at night. She struggled to describe the anxiety attacks, even to the people closest to her, she told The New York Times. “My breathing would get labored, everything would start speeding up, and I’d get very scared,” she said. It was like the prickling shock of swerving out of the way of an oncoming car, a near miss that felt like it would never stop.

Then in the summer of 1993, soon after she’d broken up with Johnny Depp, Ryder said she “hit bottom,” falling into a deep depression that seemed without end. Desperate for relief, she checked herself into in-patient psychiatric care. While she was inside, all she wanted to do was sleep. She wanted help. She wanted answers. She wanted to stop feeling like she was selling her soul. But all she received was structure, four walls filled with the same unknowns.

“No matter how rich you are and how much you pay some hospital or doctor,” she said, “they can’t fix you. They can’t give you a pill or a secret answer to anything that’s going to make you all better.” Still without relief, Ryder left the hospital. Her stay had only lasted a few days, but in that time, she’d come to a familiar realization: she didn’t need to have all the answers. Learning to bend with life’s chaos was better than trying to understand it all.

“Life is just weird, and messy,” Ryder said. “And I just have to get through it, and do my best. Either choose to move on, or stay miserable. And I chose to move on.”

Soon afterward, her father, a rare-book dealer, gave her a galley of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted. Just like her father expected, Ryder saw herself in the story, especially in how Kaysen often found her own mental illness too amorphous to name. Ryder had never read a book like Girl, Interrupted before. It was funny, honest, sensitive. More importantly, it centered the experience of a teenage girl in a dark and insightful story.

https://lithub.com/how-winona-ryder-took-girl-interrupted-from-page-to-screen/

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is preparing to direct the federal government to overhaul its hiring to prioritize a job applicant’s skills over a college degree, administration and industry officials say.

Trump is set to sign an executive order Friday outlining a new direction for the nation’s largest employer during a meeting of the board that advises the administration on worker policy.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, is co-chair of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board and has worked on improving job training to meet employers’ changing needs.

The federal government is the nation’s largest employer with 2.1 million civilian workers, excluding postal service employees.

https://apnews.com/da3c08790765a57a4dc6a258d252acef

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is announcing Thursday he is joining Parler, a social media platform that bills itself as an “unbiased” alternative to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which Cruz and other prominent conservative officials have accused of stifling their viewpoints.

In a YouTube video announcing the move, shared with POLITICO, Cruz rails against industry giants for “flagrantly silencing those with whom they disagree, from conservative media organizations to the president of the United States — and millions of Americans in between.”

“That’s why I’m proud to join Parler,” Cruz adds. “This platform gets what free speech is all about, and I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s speak. Let’s speak freely. And let’s end the Silicon Valley censorship.”

Cruz becomes the latest high-profile Republican to set up an account on the platform as tensions rise between the party and Silicon Valley. Others to recently make the move include Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), according to The Hollywood Reporter.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/25/ted-cruz-joins-parler-339811

Wisconsin police investigating after Black woman suffers burns, says white men tried to set her on fire

The Madison, Wis., police department is investigating a Wednesday assault as a hate crime after four white men allegedly poured lighter fluid on and threw a lighter at a biracial woman.

The police department said in a Wednesday incident report that “the victim believes she was driving on W. Gorham St. when she stopped for a red light at State St. Her driver's side window was down and she heard someone yell out a racial epithet."

The report adds that the victim, who has been identified in local reports as 18-year-old Althea Bernstein, said four white men used a spray bottle to “deploy a liquid on her face and neck, and then threw a flaming lighter at her, causing the liquid to ignite.”

Bernstein told the local outlet Madison 365 that the alleged attackers yelled “the N-word really loud.” She said that she was driving to her brother’s house, and she “just blasted through the red light … I just felt like I needed to get away. So I drove through the red light and just kept driving until I got to my brother and Middleton.”

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/504623-wisconsin-police-investigating-after-black-woman-suffers-burns