The State of War in Syria →

What we’re left with is foreign policy as a form of witchcraft. As the warring parties fight, various onlookers mumble incantations, wave herbs, and dole out potions. They have faith in the effectiveness of these traditional practices. When events fail to take the desired turn, evil spirits are to blame, and the answer is more mojo. If events ever do turn favorably, everyone swears it was his last spell that did it.
Personally, I remain unconvinced that a hands-off approach would be worse than the status quo. Instead of investing more in fighting and killing, why not invest in opening our doors wider to refugees from this war and helping them resettle here? I know the answer to that question: because U.S. domestic politics won’t allow it. It’s a fantasy. But then, so is the delusion of control that has us investing in the further destruction of Syria, and only one of those two fantasies involves the U.S. government spending its money and sending its people to kill other people.

Guinea president Alpha Conde wins second term with clear majority →

Final results from the first round of Guinea’s contested presidential election show that incumbent Alpha Conde was re-elected with 57.85% of votes, the country’s electoral commission (CENI) has announced.
“Ahead of the definitive confirmation of the results by the constitutional court, CENI declares that professor Alpha Conde has won in the first round,” said the commission president, Bakary Fofana, on Saturday.
Opposition leader Cellou Dalein Diallo, who has condemned the vote as fraudulent, came second with 31.44%, CENI added.
Turnout in the October 11 election stood at 68.38%, it said, lower than the commission’s initial estimate of almost 75%.

'Great Pause' Among Prosecutors As DNA Proves Fallible →

Science is complicated, increasingly relying on sophisticated statistical methods to find patterns in messy data. When not done carefully...

Over the summer, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which sets standards for physical evidence in state courts, came to an unsettling conclusion: There was something wrong with how state labs were analyzing DNA evidence.
It seemed the labs were using an outdated protocol for calculating the probability of DNA matches in "mixtures"; that is, crime scene samples that contain genetic material from several people. It may have affected thousands of cases going back to 1999.
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Under the old protocol, says defense lawyer Roberto Torres, DNA from the crime scene was matched to his client with a certainty of more than a million to one. That is, you'd have to go through more than a million people to find somebody else who'd match the sample. But when the lab did the analysis again with the new protocol, things looked very different.
"When they retested it, the likelihood that it could be someone else was, I think, one in 30-something, one in 40. So it was a significant probability that it could be someone else," Torres says.

The Forever War Is Entrenched →

Far from ending the Forever War against non-state actor terrorists, the President has significantly extended it.  Special forces are present in more nations than ever before.  Drone strikes are extensively deployed.  Offensive cyberoperations have steadily increased.  And most importantly, over the course of the Obama administration the military, intelligence, legal, and bureaucratic architecture for supporting endless war against terrorists in many countries has matured, normalized, and become entrenched.  It will be with us for a very long time, long past the Obama presidency, even without further authorization from Congress.

Ankara: More than 80 killed in twin blasts Turkey blames on terrorism →

The incident occurred near the exit of Ankara’s main train station, at 10.04am local time.
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Thousands of People’s Democratic Party (HDP) supporters were reportedly expected to take part in a peace march through the capital around the time of the explosions.

The blast killed several of them.

Solar and Wind Just Passed Another Big Turning Point →

Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). It's the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 economy.1
But that's less interesting than what just happened in the U.S...
For the first time, widespread adoption of renewables is effectively lowering the capacity factor for fossil fuels. That's because once a solar or wind project is built, the marginal cost of the electricity it produces is pretty much zero—free electricity—while coal and gas plants require more fuel for every new watt produced. If you're a power company with a choice, you choose the free stuff every time. 
It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. As more renewables are installed, coal and natural gas plants are used less. As coal and gas are used less, the cost of using them to generate electricity goes up. As the cost of coal and gas power rises, more renewables will be installed.