A year of Taliban gains shows that ‘we haven’t delivered,’ top Afghan official says →

With control of — or a significant presence in — roughly 30 percent of districts across the nation, according to Western and Afghan officials, the Taliban now holds more territory than in any year since 2001, when the puritanical Islamists were ousted from power after the 9/11 attacks. For now, the top American and Afghan priority is preventing Helmand, largely secured by U.S. Marines and British forces in 2012, from again falling to the insurgency.
As of last month, about 7,000 members of the Afghan security forces had been killed this year, with 12,000 injured, a 26 percent increase over the total number of dead and wounded in all of 2014, said a Western official with access to the most recent NATO statistics. Attrition rates are soaring. Deserters and injured Afghan soldiers say they are fighting a more sophisticated and well-armed insurgency than they have seen in years.
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“When the foreigners were here, we had plenty of facilities and equipment,” said 1st Lt. Naseer Ahmad Sahel, 30, a civil-order police company commander who was wounded last month in a firefight in Marja. “There were 100 cameras overlooking Marja alone.”
Faqir, the commander of the 215th Corps, said, “We don’t have the air support that we should have.”
As the fighting intensifies, the stakes are growing higher for the United States in its longest war. “I will not allow Helmand to fall,” Campbell told the Afghan officials in the recent meeting with the Afghan National Security Council. “But I can’t make you fight. You’ve got to want it more than we do.”

Using Law Against Technology →

On Thursday, a Brazilian judge ordered the text messaging service WhatsApp shut down for 48 hours. It was a monumental action.
WhatsApp is the most popular app in Brazil, used by about 100 million people. The Brazilian telecoms hate the service because it entices people away from more expensive text messaging services, and they have been lobbying for months to convince the government that it's unregulated and illegal. A judge finally agreed.
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All this is part of a massive power struggle going on right now between traditional companies and new Internet companies, and we're all in the blast radius.
It's one aspect of a tech policy problem that has been plaguing us for at least 25 years: technologists and policymakers don't understand each other, and they inflict damage on society because of that. But it's worse today. The speed of technological progress makes it worse. And the types of technology­ -- especially the current Internet of mobile devices everywhere, cloud computing, always-on connections and the Internet of Things -- ­make it worse.

Why Police Need Constructive Criticism →

The trial of Officer William Porter, the first of six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, ended in a mistrial last week after the jury heard sharply conflicting accounts about the inner workings of the Baltimore Police Department. The prosecution emphasized the department’s comprehensive and clearly written policies and procedures, while the defense asserted that, in practice, officers ignore the formal rules as a matter of course. The two accounts revealed the limitations of a legal approach to police reform, and the necessity for departments and officers to self-critique their practices.
Often, when another officer provides critical feedback that does not affirm the officer’s decisions, such feedback falls on deaf ears. Comments like “You weren’t there” or “You don’t know what you would have done in that situation” are a common refrain...
In many departments, officers have developed a pathological aversion to “second-guessing.” There is a pervasive belief that scrutinizing officer’s use-of-force decisions will lead officers to hesitate, exposing them to dangers that swift action might have averted. The result is a reluctance to engage in an in-depth, critical review of incidents in which an officer injures or kills a civilian and resentment when an outsider calls for such a review. That’s a problem. When an incident ends badly, it should be critically dissected to identify what contributed to that result, as is done when an officer is seriously injured or killed. The primary purpose is not to blame an officer, although poor judgment and failures to follow policy and training must be addressed, but to learn how best to avoid a similar situation in the future.
The aversion to what officers derisively refer to as “second-guessing” does not only make officers less receptive to a critique of their actions, it also makes them reluctant to provide their own complete and honest critiques. That, too, is a problem. Informal interactions between officers shape agency culture and affect officer actions at least as much, and often more, than formal rules. But while empowering officers to engage in peer conversations may help in the effort to self-critique, policing culture also needs to be addressed.

Why Airlines Want to Make You Suffer →

This fall, JetBlue airline finally threw in the towel. For years, the company was among the last holdouts in the face of an industry trend toward smaller seats, higher fees, and other forms of unpleasantness. JetBlue distinguished itself by providing decent, fee-free service for everyone, an approach that seemed to be working: passengers liked the airline, and it made a consistent profit. Wall Street analysts, however, accused JetBlue of being “overly brand-conscious and customer-focussed.” In November, the airline, under new management, announced that it would follow United, Delta, and the other major carriers by cramming more seats into economy, shrinking leg room, and charging a range of new fees for things like bags and WiFi.
It seems that the money was just too good to resist. In 2013, the major airlines combined made about $31.5 billion in income from fees, as well as other ancillaries, such as redeeming credit-card points...
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The various costs described here will not appear on any bottom line but can be easily witnessed in angry families, exhausted flight attendants, and the general sense of defeat emanating from passengers exiting coach. At best, it can be said that more people are able to fly for less; but, as JetBlue demonstrated, there need not be so much misery along the way. Ultimately, the fee models and the distinctions they draw make class inequality, which may be felt less in other places, painfully obvious. The conditions of carriage may lack the importance of other, more pressing social issues. But when an airline like JetBlue is punished for merely trying to treat all of its passengers decently, something isn’t right.

The shocking difference in how blacks and whites are killed by guns →

The gun control debate often plays out in monolithic fashion in this country. The traditional understanding is that there's one overarching problem — gun violence — that can be addressed by a more or less uniform set of solutions: better background checks, improved technology, etc.
This approach makes a lot of sense. Many researchers argue that we should treat gun violence as just as much of a public health issue as a criminal justice one. That is, after all, the way we successfully reduced deaths from things likeautomobile accidents, cigarettes and the like.
But one shortcoming of this approach is that it elides over the sometimes drastic differences in how different populations experience gun violence and gun ownership in their lives. The Brookings Institution's Richard Reeves highlighted one stunning example of this in a recent blog post: Among whites, 77 percent of gun deaths are suicides. But among black Americans, 82 percent of gun deaths are homicides.

Will scammers hide behind new law for private tax collectors? →

Congress, in a law that took effect this month, instructed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), against its objections, to use private collection agencies for “outstanding inactive tax receivables.” Before the legislation passed, the IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service pointed to a number of problems with this approach, including that it loses money and had failed twice before – a characterization that congressional proponents reject.
But since those attempts, there has been a growing menace that makes the use of bill collectors even more problematic. Generally, the IRS does not contact taxpayers by phone. But legitimate bill collectors and tax scammers do. Once the private collection program begins, which Congress says should be early next year, it will be even more difficult to distinguish between the real and fake bill collectors.

Merit vs Equality? The argument that gender quotas violate meritocracy is based on fallacies →

One of the sticks used to beat gender quotas with is the argument of meritocracy. This is being repeated time and again; the use of gender quotas in Ireland and the appointment of a gender-balanced cabinet in Canada are two recent examples. The argument is underpinned by three fundamental assumptions. The first is that recruitment without gender quotas is meritocratic. The second is that there is a clear, objective definition of meritocracy in political recruitment. And the third is that gender is an inherently unmeritocratic criterion for political representation. I argue that none of these assumptions is true, and hence that the argument is fundamentally flawed.

The Serial Swatter →

SWATting: prank-calling major threats into police departments to try to get them to harass unwitting victims, showing up in force, on high alert. Police are finally catching on to this kind of dangerous pranking. Unfortunately the entire legal system is far behind the times on this, as it is on a lot of internet-based crime.