The main reason, Turner has found, is simple — adding road capacity spurs people to drive more miles, either by taking more trips by car or taking longer trips than they otherwise would have. He and University of Pennsylvania economist Gilles Duranton call this the "fundamental rule" of road congestion: adding road capacity just increases the total number of miles traveled by all vehicles.
With Unresolved Health Risks and Few Signs of an Economic Boon, Cuomo to Ban Gas Fracking →
After years of gauging the environmental, medical, economic and political risks of hydraulic fracturing, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is moving to ban this method of extracting natural gas from shale deposits in New York State.
[Update, 9:30 p.m. | See the end of the post for an excerpt from the state health study that underpinned the decision.]
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The natural gas news is nicely summarized by The New York Times and Associated Press. The A.P. story had this excellent section laying out how the decision was unveiled, with the prime factors being “red flag” issues described by the state health commissioner, Howard Zucker, and scant signs of an economic benefit described by Joe Martens, the environmental conservation commissioner:...
Here's Why the Russian Ruble Is Collapsing →
Russia's economy has been hurt by two big things: the falling price of oil and economic sanctions. (Remember Crimea?) The oil and gas industry generates about half of Russia's revenue, so when a combination of the shale boom in the U.S. and weaker demand worldwide pushed the price from $110 per barrel earlier this year to $60, Russia got hammered. The sanctions imposed by Europe and the U.S., designed to punish Russia's companies for President Vladimir Putin's actions in Ukraine, have hurt, too.
Suicide prevention bill likely sidelined until 2015 →
The Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention act, named for a Marine veteran activist who took his own life in 2011, would create new peer support programs for troubled veterans, mandate new online mental health resources, repay student loans for psychiatrists willing to work at Veterans Affairs facilities, and evaluate existing suicide prevention programs to insure their effectiveness.
Veterans groups have touted the measure as a key step forward in veterans mental health care, and blasted the delay in its passage as potentially costing lives.
House lawmakers easily approved the measure earlier this week, but Coburn blocked quick passage in the Senate over concerns about costs and program redundancy.
The measure costs $22 million over five years. Supporters have said VA can absorb those costs within existing budget parameters, creating no new funding need. But Coburn disputed that, saying at best the new effort will drain funds from existing programs.
Dick Cheney’s America: Of course Americans are OK with torture. Look at how we treat our prisoners. →
Americans know this. They know that prisons are horrible. They know that going to jail vastly increases your odds of being raped, attacked, or worse. And yet, this does nothing to shift the overwhelming punitiveness of American public opinion. Indeed, prison rape is a punch line, summed up in don’t drop the soap or watch out, you might become a punk. Americans don’t recoil from assaults in our jails and prisons; they welcome them as deserts for people who commit crimes.
Our prisons, then, are sites for retribution. As Robert A. Ferguson, professor of law and literature at Columbia University, notes in his book Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment, Americans routinely transition from a rational view of criminals (“because your act and your mental state at the time were blameworthy, you deserve punishment”) to a moralized one (“you have a hardened, abandoned and malignant heart” and “you are evil and rotten to the core”), to a scornful one, where the criminal is “scum” and deserves “whatever cruel indignity I choose to inflict on you.” You see this most vividly in the reactions to police shootings of black Americans. It’s not enough for the shooting to be justified, as a grand jury decided in the case of Ferguson’s Officer Darren Wilson. No, the victim must be demonized, hence the chorus of critics against Michael Brown: He was a thug who deserved his fate.
If this is how we treat domestic prisoners—who, despite their crimes, are still citizens—then it’s no shock we torture noncitizen detainees, and it’s no surprise Americans largely support the abuse. After all, these are suspected terrorists. They’re presumptively guilty, and they deserve their fates. And if they’re innocent—if they’ve been swept up or sold out—then next time we’ll have to be more careful, even though we don’t plan to take any steps to avoid making the same mistake again.
The Taliban Massacres Students in Pakistan →
A group of Taliban gunmen attacked a school in Northern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 145 people, most of them students under the age of 15. More than 180 others were injured. Police say the siege, which lasted about eight hours, is now over, with all of the terrorists dead. Other officials said four of the attackers blew themselves up in suicide attacks, though there may have been as many as nine attackers.
The Army Public School is a military-run primary school for the children of army members in Peshawar, in the northern part of the country, near the border with Afghanistan. Pakistani Taliban sources claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was retaliation for an ongoing government offensive against them in the region of North Waziristan.
Iraq’s Premier Narrows Divide, but Challenges Loom →
In nearly every way, Mr. Abadi has so far been a different leader than his predecessor, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, despite their common Shiite political bloc. And though the obstacles facing his government are vast, and he faces political challenges within his own party, his early performance has encouraged a wide array of Iraqi and Western officials.
In his first months in office, Mr. Abadi has already appeared three times before Parliament, something Mr. Maliki did only twice in eight years.
Mr. Abadi has fired incompetent and corrupt military commanders appointed by Mr. Maliki and rooted out 50,000 so-called ghost soldiers, no-show troops for whom commanders nevertheless collect salaries.
In his signature success so far, Mr. Abadi reached a deal to share oil revenue with the Kurds in northern Iraq, an issue that Mr. Maliki had pushed nearly to the point of Kurdish secession.
Obama Announces U.S. and Cuba Will Resume Relations →
In a deal negotiated during 18 months of secret talks hosted largely by Canada and encouraged by Pope Francis, who hosted a final meeting at the Vatican, Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba agreed in a telephone call to put aside decades of hostility to find a new relationship between the United States and the island nation just 90 miles off the American coast.
“We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” Mr. Obama said in a nationally televised statement from the White House. The deal will “begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas” and move beyond a “rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”