The real problem with 'pink Viagra' →

Society favors "out-of-the-blue" desire. But why? Most people (especially women, to make matters much worse, in the case of this drug) don't experience sexual desire that way; that's just how we are. Flibanserin tries to "solve" the "problem" of normal human sexuality. That's not to say some women who can't experience desire, but want to, wouldn't benefit from a drug like this. But that's not how this is being marketed. Nor is this pill good science; most people (men and women) with low desire will benefit far more from therapy (and for far less money than the ongoing cost of a pill).

Like many women, the two flibanserin Guinea pigs were taught to believe that if they don't experience a "craving" sensation, there must be something wrong with them. But that's simply not true.

Research over the last 20 years has found that there is another totally legitimate way to experience desire. It is called responsive desire, because it emerges in response to pleasure, whereas spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure.

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The FDA's analysis of the data showed that only about 10% of the research participants taking flibanserin experienced "at least minimal improvement," while the remaining 90% experienced nothing at all.

This is a drug with such potentially serious side effects that the FDA is requiring special training and certification before providers can prescribe it.

And the "disorder" it treats (or, 90% of the time, fails to treat) isn't a disorder at all but a normal, healthy variation in human sexual response.

The pharmaceutical industry has millions — billions? — of dollars riding on all of us, including our doctors, ignoring 21st century science and reverting to a model of sexual desire that made really good sense in 1977. I think women deserve better.

Syrians cross Norway's Arctic border on bicyles →

The Storskog border station -- just two hours drive from the Arctic City of Murmansk in Russia's far north -- is Norway's only legal border crossing with Russia.

According to border agreements, it is illegal either to cross the border on foot or to give someone without papers a lift, a problem Syrian refugees have sidestepped by using bicycles. 

"It is not news to us that tourists cross the border on bicycles, but recently we've also started to see some asylum seekers coming by bicycle," Gøran Stenseth, one of the border officials, told the local Sør-Varanger Avis newspaper. 

So far this year, 133 asylum seekers have entered Norway though Storskog on bicycles. According to local police, most of them are Syrian refugees.

Where Black Lives Matter Began: Hurricane Katrina exposed our nation’s amazing tolerance for black pain. →

When we look at the first 15 years of the 21st century, the most defining moment in black America’s relationship to its country isn’t Election Day 2008; it’s Hurricane Katrina. The events of the storm and its aftermath sparked a profound shift among black Americans toward racial pessimism that persists to today, even with Barack Obama in the White House. Black collective memory of Hurricane Katrina, as much as anything else, informs the present movement against police violence, “Black Lives Matter.”

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Support for the racialized view of Katrina can be seen in the way news outlets and commentators talked about the victims. One study, published a year after the storm, found a connection between mentions of race in news stories and references to survivors as “refugees,” a description opposed by many black commentators at the time. Analyzing stories from the period, researchers found exaggerated claims of violence amongKatrina victims, as well as grossly inaccurate reports of crime and disorder...

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In addition to disbelief that Katrina was a racial story, research and polling also showed a white public that held survivors in contempt. In a 2006 study that examinedwhite and black attitudes toward Katrina victims, political scientists Leonie Huddy and Stanley Feldman found that 65 percent of white respondents blamed residents and the mayor for being trapped in New Orleans. In a CNN/USA Today survey, half of all whites said that people who broke into stores and took things were “mostlycriminals,” compared to 77 percent of blacks who said they were “mostly desperate people” trying to find a way to survive. (Pew had similar findings.) If you turned to right-wing media, you’d find unvarnished disdain for those left behind in the city.

The idea that black Americans had a legitimate grievance was dismissed. The result was a collapse in black racial optimism. The year before Katrina, according to Gallup,68 percent of blacks said race relations were either “somewhat good” or “very good.” The year after Katrina, that declined to 62 percent. The next year, it declined to 55 percent, the lowest point of the decade. In broader surveys from the Pew Research Center, the period after Katrina is an inflection point, where the percentage of blacks who say they are worse off finally overtakes the percentage who say their lives have improved. Black optimism stayed on a downward trajectory for the three years after Katrina. In another Gallup trend-line, black satisfaction with society dips from a steady 41 percent in 2005, to 37 percent in 2006, to 30 percent in 2007.

H&R Block snuck language into a Senate bill to make taxes more confusing for poor people →

H&R Block's entire business model is premised on taxes being confusing and hard to file. So, naturally, the tax preparation company has become — along with Intuit, the company behind TurboTax — one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. For example, the Obama administration has pushed forautomatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. The main reason? Lobbying from H&R Block and Intuit.

But H&R Block's latest lobbying effort is even more loathsome than its opposition to automatic filing. At the company's instigation, the Senate Appropriations Committee haspassed a funding bill covering the IRS whose accompanying report instructs the agency to at least quadruple the length of the form that taxpayers fill out to get the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The Iran deal: An epochal moment that Congress shouldn’t squander →

Brent Scowcroft, retired USAF Lieutenant General, and former US National Security Advisor:

In my view, the JCPOA meets the key objective, shared by recent administrations of both parties, that Iran limit itself to a strictly civilian nuclear program with unprecedented verification and monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.N. Security Council. Iran has committed to never developing or acquiring a nuclear weapon; the deal ensures that this will be the case for at least 15 years and likely longer, unless Iran repudiates the inspection regime and its commitments under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and Additional Protocol.

There is no more credible expert on nuclear weapons than Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who led the technical negotiating team. When he asserts that the JCPOA blocks each of Iran’s pathways to the fissile material necessary to make a nuclear weapon, responsible people listen. Twenty-nine eminent U.S. nuclear scientists have endorsed Moniz’s assertions.

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Congress rightfully is conducting a full review and hearing from proponents and opponents of the nuclear deal. However, the seeming effort to make the JCPOA the ultimate test of Congress’s commitment to Israel is probably unprecedented in the annals of relations between two vibrant democracies. Let us be clear: There is no credible alternative were Congress to prevent U.S. participation in the nuclear deal. If we walk away, we walk away alone. The world’s leading powers worked together effectively because of U.S. leadership. To turn our back on this accomplishment would be an abdication of the United States’ unique role and responsibility, incurring justified dismay among our allies and friends. We would lose all leverage over Iran’s nuclear activities. The international sanctions regime would dissolve. And no member of Congress should be under the illusion that another U.S. invasion of the Middle East would be helpful.

South Sudan’s leaders just signed a peace deal. Will it work? →

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir signed a peace agreement on Wednesday, offering a much-needed glimmer of hope in the brutal civil war that has plagued his country for the past 20 months.

But an agreement does not instantly translate to peace. The situation remains dynamic and implementation of the agreement will be a herculean task.

Thinking about how likely it is this agreement, 75 pages in all, will bring peace, I immediately went back to V. Page Fortna’s seminal article on the value of peace agreements. While Fortna examined wars between states, the resonance with the South Sudan civil war is troubling. Fortna argues that well-structured peace agreements can contribute to durable peace. However, there are certain base conditions that render situations more likely to see a return to violence. Unfortunately in South Sudan we see many of these characteristics – no clear armed victory, a long history of hostility between the competing factions, and the existence of at least one of the parties at stake.

So, against these odds, what needs to happen to capitalize on this forward momentum to help South Sudan move toward peace in a positive direction? ...

The politics of China's market decline are much more worrying than the economics →

China's Shanghai Composite Index has fallen catastrophically — by 7.6 percent just on Tuesday. The decline follows a huge Monday collapse dubbed "Black Monday" and is part of a four-day slide; on the heels of another huge decline in July, this has erased the Chinese stock market's 2015 gains entirely. On Monday, stock markets around the world dropped as well following the Chinese losses.

So what does this mean for China? China's stock market is not a major part of the Chinese economy, so it's unlikely that this crash alone will trigger a broader economic crisis there. But the political consequences could be quite serious. There is a big debate going on right now within China's leadership over what to do about the economy, and this turmoil could push that debate in the wrong direction.

The crash could bolster political factions inside China that want to block critical economic reforms, and weaken factions that do want these reforms — which are, make no mistake, very important for the country's future. Without these reforms, China is much likelier to face far more severe economic problems.

Mapping the invisible scourge →

A big consequence of corruption in China is the lack of environmental regulation. And people are upset.

Pollution is sky-high everywhere in China. Some 83% of Chinese are exposed to air that, in America, would be deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency either to be unhealthy or unhealthy for sensitive groups. Almost half the population of China experiences levels of PM2.5 that are above America’s highest threshold. That is even worse than the satellite data had suggested.

Berkeley Earth’s scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day and calculates that air pollution causes 1.6m deaths a year in China, or 17% of the total. A previous estimate, based on a study of pollution in the Huai river basin (which lies between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers), put the toll at 1.2m deaths a year—still high.