Saudi voters elect 20 women candidates for the first time →

One can hope this represents a sea change...

Saudi voters elected 20 women for local government seats, according to results released to The Associated Press on Sunday, a day after women voted and ran in elections for the first time in the country’s history.
The women who won hail from vastly different parts of the country, ranging from Saudi Arabia’s largest city to a small village near Islam’s holiest site.
The 20 female candidates represent just one percent of the roughly 2,100 municipal council seats up for grabs...

The Destination in Paris Climate Talks Was a Journey That Begins Now →

Between the tumultuous breakdown in Copenhagen in 2009 and the cheers and bubbly in Paris on Saturday, climate change diplomacy underwent a grand metamorphosis.
For more than two decades, the world’s variegated nations were — impossibly — trying to undertake a common (but differentiated) journey toward some grand top-down solution. The outcome that emerged in Paris, in contrast, is implicitly a century-long journey, with 195 countries pursuing a safer human relationship with the climate system, but taking varied paths at varied paces to get there.
The new architecture is a far better fit for the momentous, “super wicked” challenges that are emerging in trying to supply societies with adequate, affordable energy without overheating the climate...

How the Justice System Fails Us After Police Shootings →

Two weeks ago, the police officer who shot Laquan McDonald in Chicago was charged with first-degree murder. Since then, the police superintendent was fired, and the Department of Justice announced that it will begin a large-scale investigationinto the Chicago Police Department. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, one of the police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray is standing trial.
You might think these high-profile cases mark a turning point in the nation’s response to fatal police violence. But 1,058 people have been killed by police this year to date alone, and most of the time, no legal charges follow. In my own state of Georgia, 171 people have been shot dead by police since 2010, and there have been zero prosecutions.
As a former federal prosecutor and a criminal procedure professor, I’ve been studying how prosecutors handle police violence cases. How do they deal with the conflict of interest raised by investigating the police departments they work with? Who determines whether a civilian death is justified, as the vast majority are found to be?
The results are not pretty.

Car calls 911 after alleged hit-and-run, driver arrested →

A driver allegedly involved in two hit-and-run incidents was tracked down after her car alerted the police.
As reported by local news outlets, an unusual 911 call to emergency services took place on Friday in Port St. Lucie, Florida. You would usually expect a human voice on the end of the line, but in this scenario, a Ford vehicle alerted the police to a collision.
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The car's safety features, used by by Ford, BMW and other automakers, make use of sensors and Internet connectivity to shave down the time emergency responders take to get to the scene of an accident.

Will the Paris Climate Agreement Save the World? →

For a quick peak at what's been happening in France:

The Paris conference is in its final hours. France pushed the deadline for a new—potentially final—draft text to Saturday morning, and if all goes well, countries could adopt it later in the day. Jonathan M. Katz, reporting for the New Republic in Paris, breaks down who wants what in the final deal.
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Until then, here’s our progress report on COP21. Blue bars indicate progress toward the goals, compared to yesterday, red bars indicate backward momentum, and gray bars indicate no change:...

I am a Muslim. But Trump’s views appall me because I am an American. →

In his diaries from the 1930s, Victor Klemperer describes how he, a secular, thoroughly assimilated German Jew, despised Hitler. But he tried to convince people that he did so as a German; that it was his German identity that made him see Nazism as a travesty. In the end, alas, he was seen solely as a Jew.
This is the real danger of Trump’s rhetoric: It forces people who want to assimilate, who see themselves as having multiple identities, into a single box. The effects of his rhetoric have already poisoned the atmosphere. Muslim Americans are more fearful and will isolate themselves more. The broader community will know them less and trust them less. A downward spiral of segregation will set in.
The tragedy is that, unlike in Europe, Muslims in the United States are by and large well-assimilated. I remember talking to a Moroccan immigrant in Norway last year who had a brother in New York. I asked him how their experiences differed. He said, “Over here, I’ll always be a Muslim, or a Moroccan, but my brother is already an American.”

A pillar of medical treatment is under threat →

When you’re sick, you expect the medicine a doctor gives you to work. But the effectiveness of one of the most important types of drugs — antibiotics — is under threat.
In the United States alone, there are 2 million antibiotic resistant infections causing 23,000 deaths each year. You say that you never get sick, so this isn’t your problem. But what if I told you that antibiotics make modern medicine possible, including surgery, cancer treatment and organ transplants? Half of men and a third of women will get cancer in their lifetimes. Many treatments for cancer weaken the immune system, putting you at risk for infection.
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Doctors are a big part of the problem. We’re prescribing broader and broader big gun antibiotics, and this creates stronger evolutionary pressure on bugs to mutate and become resistant, mostly because we aren’t sure what we’re treating. We figure that if we cover all our bases, we won’t go wrong. Better diagnostic tests that were quick, easy and work well would make us feel more confident we haven’t missed something.