This move to war was fast. Details likely on Wednesday.
Scots, What the Heck? →
The Scottish independence movement has been very clear that it intends to keep the pound as the national currency. And the combination of political independence with a shared currency is a recipe for disaster. Which is where the cautionary tale of Spain comes in.
This is the one big question I had, and I'm flabbergasted. Overall, a great primer on combining politically disparate entities under one economic roof.
Lesotho 'coup': Sadc rejects Thabane's troop request →
Mr Thabane fled to South Africa on Saturday, claiming the military had staged a coup - a charge it denied.
South Africa's President Jacob Zuma hosted emergency talks with Mr Tabane and others on Monday.
Lesotho, a mountain kingdom surrounded by South Africa, has experienced several coups since independence in 1966.
"surrounded by Africa", the fate of the country is linked to South African politics.
Pakistan’s Sharif clings to power as protesters step up assault →
Over the weekend, the demonstration took an ominous turn as three people were killed and 400 wounded when police used tear gas and rubber bullets to prevent protesters from reaching Sharif’s residence in Islamabad. On Monday, the protesters stormed the state television station and knocked it off the air for more than an hour.
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The protests spread to other major Pakistani cities over the weekend, and there is rampant speculation in Pakistan that military leaders could intervene and force Sharif to resign.
Strife in Libya Could Presage Long Civil War →
...The ideological differences are blurry at best: both sides publicly profess a similar conservative but democratic vision. What is clear is that Libya is being torn apart by an escalating war among its patchwork of rival cities and tribes.
Eighty Years Of Fergusons →
There's a lot to like in this article. As the subtitle suggests, violence is most often counterproductive. However, as the article details, protests and riots are complex affairs, springing suddenly, dramatically, without warning, from seemingly small events, and they indicate deep, hidden injustice.
Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws →
Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they’re immune from open records requests. Let’s be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.
Autor Paper at Jackson Hole: Automation Is Polarizing the Labor Market →
Wonkish, but an important trend to keep an eye on, and speaks to the "shrinking middle":
David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor, argues in a paper to be presented Friday to central bankers at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium that automation is creating a different kind of problem for the economy. Rather than destroying jobs broadly, it is polarizing the labor market. While thinning out the ranks of middle-class jobs easily replaced by machines, he argues automation is increasing the ranks of low-skilled workers who perform tasks that can’t easily be displaced by machines — like cooks or home health workers — and the ranks of high-end workers with abstract thinking skills that computers can’t match.