Just as the BRICS was overhyped for the past 15 years or so, I’d be wary of dismissing the grouping entirely. The New Development Bank is a tangible accomplishment. And the BRICS does share a genuine resentment about under-representation in traditional global governance structures. That resentment can animate the group’s purpose for a while.
But if the BRICS has lost Goldman Sachs and the D.C. think-tank community, then I think it’s safe to say that its Golden Age has ended.
Though the history of discrimination and segregation looms large over American policing, many police chiefs are eager to hire minorities yet face structural hurdles that make it hard to diversify their departments. Those issues vary by state and city, making any single solution particularly elusive.
In many cities, well-intentioned policies that were not meant to discriminate have become obstacles to hiring a diverse police force. In Inkster, Chief Riley found, a significant problem was something that seemed mundane: how training is paid for.
Other cities face rigid hiring processes that were intended to prevent elected leaders from handing out police jobs as patronage, but that now make it harder to shape the force to mirror the population.
And not anything minor, either:
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated.
Viewed from the outside world, both the video and the op-ed can be distilled into that last sentence. It feeds into a narrative of free speech under assault on college campuses. And to put it gently, it’s a sentiment that did not instill much sympathy among most observers...
That said, I also find the outsize reaction to this campus contretemps — including my own tweet — to be troubling as well.
The problem is local knowledge. As Friedrich von Hayek observed 70 years ago, there is an awful lot of knowledge that is local in character, that cannot be culled from abstract principles or detached observers. What looks like free speech infringement at first glance can turn out to be something different the more one drills down. For one thing, the events of late last week were part of a larger chain of events at Yale beyond the e-mails that suggest a few obvious sources of frustration for minority students there in particular.
...
An additional problem that affects the current generation of college students even more is that it is so easy for these contretemps to balloon so quickly into national debates. That’s extremely unfortunate. One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are. Anyone who thinks that the current generation of college students is uniquely stupid is either an amnesiac or willfully ignorant. As a professor with 20 years of experience, I can assure you that college students have been saying stupid things since the invention of college students.
Thirty million people voted in Myanmar’s general election on Nov. 8, and as the results roll in it appears that Myanmar citizens overwhelmingly chose Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party.
Not only the party expected to win the popular vote, according to early estimates, but it may have grabbed enough constituencies to form the government alone, which would allow it to bypass what might have been months of horse-trading and compromise with other parties to take control of the country. A decisive win for Suu Kyi’s party would be a resounding victory, after a huge 1990 election win was annulled by a military junta, and Suu Kyi placed on house arrest for years.
So despite what the history books have recorded, the 1990 election was by no means free and fair. Most of the opposition leaders were under house arrest or in prison at that time. But of course, as we know, the result was heavily in favor of the NLD [National League for Democracy]. What that means is that the 2015 election could be the first relatively credible election since 1960, and, if all goes well, it will be the first transfer of power in Myanmar through an election since 1960. So that makes it a very big deal. It’s also the first election since 1990 where the opposition has participated nationwide.
Nearly 60 million people are currently displaced from their homes by war and persecution — more than at any time since World War II. Half are children.
...In other words, excessive consumption of soda kills twice as many Mexicans as trade in the other kind of coke that Mexico is famous for.
Amazing story of grassroots groups fighting the soda industry's control of the Mexican government (including the health department).
The decline started slowly but accelerated: by December 2014, soda sales were down 12% from December 2013. And the drop was greatest among the poorest Mexicans – by December they were buying 17% less sweetened soda than the year before. (Terrazas was right – the tax does affect the poor disproportionately. But so does diabetes.) In September, Mexico’s national statistics institute released data on beverage consumption showing that Rivera’s findings actually slightly understated the soda tax’s success.
The battle continues. At the end of October, the lower house of Mexico’s congress, the chamber of deputies, passed an amendment that would have halved the tax for beverages with less sugar. But the political climate has now shifted; after the vote, all the parties scrambled to deny responsibility for watering down the tax – “The industry did it,” said one PRI deputy – and the senate quickly overturned the amendment.