Burundi ruling party nominates president for third term, risking unrest →

Burundi's ruling party chose President Pierre Nkurunziza to run for a third five-year term on Saturday, a move critics say is unconstitutional and may trigger unrest in the East African country.
Opposition groups promised protests if Nkurunziza runs, saying it would undermine a peace deal that has kept the country calm for a decade since an ethnically-fueled civil war ended in 2005.
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Any flare-up in Burundi threatens broader repercussions. It could draw in neighboring Rwanda, where 800,000 mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in a 1994 genocide, and create turmoil in a region where other presidents, including Joseph Kabila in Democratic Republic of Congo, are nearing the end of their constitutionally defined term limits.
Burundi's Constitution says the president is elected for a five-year term, renewable only once. But Nkurunziza's supporters say his first term should not count because he was chosen by parliament rather than having been voted into office.

We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership →

IT’S OFFICIAL: JOHN Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don’t own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway. 
In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is great for elites. Is it good for anyone else? →

…where powerful interest groups try to use trade rules to overrule democratically elected governments…. The WTO’s dispute-settlement process… puts pressure on countries to actually keep the promises they make in trade deals…. But the complex, secretive, and anti-democratic way the TPP is being crafted rubs a lot of people the wrong way…. 

We expect the laws that govern our economic lives will be made in a transparent, representative, and accountable fashion. The TPP negotiation process is none of these — it’s secretive, it’s dominated by powerful insiders, and it provides little opportunity for public input. The Obama administration argues that it’s important for TPP to succeed so that the United States — not China — gets to shape the rules that govern trade across the Pacific. But this argument only makes sense if you believe US negotiators are taking positions that are in the broad interests of the American public. If, as critics contend, USTR’s agenda is heavily tilted toward the interests of a few well-connected interest groups, then the deal may not be good for America at all…

Walling Ourselves Off →

In the past two weeks, more than a thousand people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe on often-overloaded boats. In 2014, more than three thousand perished on this crossing.
Each individual migrant’s motives are unique and unknowable, but this collective surge in deaths clearly stems, in part, from the disorder engulfing parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Civil war and state collapse have expanded the incentives and opportunities to flee, and the increased flow of migrants along dangerous routes has, predictably, led to a surge in accidental deaths.
Of course, those deaths also owe something to the policies of the countries toward which the overloaded boats sail...
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An article by Sarah Stillman in this week’s New Yorker describes how, over the past 15 years, the U.S. has adopted tougher measures to keep migrants from crossing illegally into the U.S. from Mexico in spite of the U.S. economy’s continued dependence on more immigrant labor than our government will legally allow to enter. These measures, which include the construction of hundreds of miles of fence, apparently have slowed the rate of illegal crossings. At the same time, they have encouraged the expansion of the human-smuggling business, catalyzed the growth of criminal rackets that extort the families of kidnapped migrants for ransom, and, as in the Mediterranean, contributed to a significant increase in the number of deaths occurring en route.
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How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should make economists’ jaws hit their desks. When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.
I hope I live to see that claim tested.

Long-Predicted Death Toll in Nepal Earthquake Reflects Wider Himalayan Seismic Risk →

The Himalayas are one of the world’s most worrisome hot zones for earthquake risk, which is a function of tectonic activity, human population size and the quality (or lack thereof) of construction.
That is why the death toll in the 7.8-magnitude earthquake near Katmandu today is almost certainly going to be far higher than initial reports of hundreds...

Horrifying devastation from this quake, with aftershocks causing damage around the region.

Burying Bill: Why Hillary Clinton must turn her back on parts of her husband’s political legacy to win in 2016 →

If Bill Clinton had a chief political goal in his two terms as president, it was to win working-class whites and restore the Democratic Party as the home for their concerns. To that end, Clinton and his allies were enthusiastic supporters of legislation such as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, and the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996—laws that spoke to the cultural concerns of lower-income whites.
Clinton didn’t succeed in luring working-class whites back, but he stopped the bleeding, strengthening Democrats in Rust Belt and mid-Atlantic states, where they were crucial...
...would she reject that part of her husband’s legacy?
If Hillary’s overarching political task is capturing the Obama coalition while distinguishing herself from him and Bill, the obvious answer to that question is yes, she must. A Hillary Clinton who ran as a political corrective to both presidencies—who refused to pander to social conservatives or bend to Republicans in Congress—might preclude liberal challengers and do well in the general election.
But there’s a downside. A Hillary Clinton who did that—who touted the liberal line on crime and social spending and other areas—would continue the political story of Obama’s presidency; not of shaping the new Democratic coalition, but of ending the old one her husband tried to rebuild.