Mass Public Shooting in Naples, Italy: Killing four (may be five) people and wounding at least five more

It is very unlikely that you have heard of this story.  Article from the UK Daily Mail:

A man armed with a shotgun opened fire in the southern Italian city of Naples, killing four people and wounding at least five more. 

The 48-year-old nurse, Roberto Murolo, killed first his brother and sister-in-law at home, according to Italian police, before killing two more members of the public after he began shooting from the balcony.  

Early reports indicate that he may also have killed his wife in the attack, in the Secondigliano suburb, although these reports have not yet been confirmed.

Boulder, Colorado man shots person high on mushrooms who broke into his and attacked him

This seems like a very straight forward case of self defense.  From the Boulder Daily Camera:

A Boulder man will not be charged with a crime after shooting and killing a University of Colorado student who broke into his house and attacked him last week, according to the district attorney. 

Police say Roberto Zamora, 19, forced his way into 98 Pima Court at about 8:40 p.m. May 4 and attacked resident Jim McCain, whom he had never met.
McCain shot and killed him. 

Boulder County DA Stan Garnett announced Wednesday he will not charge McCain in the case, citing Colorado's "make my day" law and self-defense law. 

"Under those theories, criminal charges would not be appropriate," Garnett said. "This young man broke into the house and attacked the homeowner." . . .

Look at all the Democrats who blamed the Philadelphia Amtrak crash on infrastructure spending cuts by Republicans

Here you have all these people speaking out on the cause of the Amtrak crash before they had any evidence what might have caused it.  Yet, they all seemed to agree it was due to the lack of infrastructure spending.  Put aside that Obama was the one who first suggested the sequester.  Put aside the fact that the so-called stimulus already had a lot of infrastructure spending and the Democrats who controlled everything at the time could have put more of the Stimulus into infrastructure if they really thought it was important.

Luke Russert on MSNBC said: "What you're essentially seeing here are the effects of Sequester."

NBC News: $1.1 Billion Amtrak Funding Cut One Day After Crash: REPUBLICANS PASSED SPENDING CUTS AS THE LONGSTANDING FUNDING BATTLE TOOK A RAW AND EMOTIONAL TURN.

MSNBC: ED RENDELL ON AMTRAK DISASTER: REPUBLICANS CAN’T KEEP SHORTCHANGING INFRASTRUCTURE

Delegate Homles Norton on Amtrak: "Certainly is" a link between safety and funding

The Economist magazine had this in 2010:

Mr Obama called the bill “the largest new investment in our nation's infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s.” But even on the broadest definition of the term, infrastructure got $150 billion, under a fifth of the total. Just $64 billion, or 8% of the total, went to roads, public transport, rail, bridges, aviation and wastewater systems. . . .

Why not put more of this $150 billion into roads and rail if they really thought that was so crucial.

Lessons for why the polls seem to be so wrong lately?

Here are a few interesting notes on the problems that we are experiencing with polling and why the problems aren't going to get any better in the near future.  From Politico:

. . . But changes in communications are threatening the viability of public election polling in many developed countries where the landline phone was once a reliable medium for representative surveys 

Like their counterparts in the United States, Britons are abandoning their landlines. Telephone pollsters have shifted, contacting an increasing percentage of their respondents via mobile phone, but perhaps not enough, according to many pollsters. In the United States, polling mobile phones is far more expensive than relying on landlines, because survey researchers are required by law to enter cellphone numbers manually when dialing. . . .  

Alberto Nardelli, data editor at The Guardian newspaper, noted last month that phone polls tended to favor the Tories, while Labour performed better in Internet polls. That phenomenon existed as late as a week ago, according to the New Statesman’s “May 2015” website. 

“I would be concerned about what looks like systematic errors in the British polling — under-representation of Conservative voters and overestimation of support for the Labour Party,” said University of Michigan professor Michael Traugott. “I haven’t seen any polls that suggested that the Scottish National Party was going to do extremely well in Scotland at the expense of Labour primarily. So, systematic errors like that, patterned errors like that, suggest methodological problems.” 

(Similarly, in Israel, some observers believe Web polling was biased against Netanyahu’s Likud Party and swayed the overall balance of pre-election forecasts.) . . . 

Telephone polls are increasingly unreliable and too expensive, while Internet polling isn’t yet able to replace truly random surveys. . . .