A new CNN-ORC survey of 1,000 Americans finds that the public supports Obama's plan by a 2-to-1 ratio: 67 percent of respondents favored the executive actions, while 32 percent opposed them. Even more striking, a similar share of people in gun-owning households -- 63 percent -- supported the measures.
Even more striking: 51 percent of Republicans support Obama's executive action on guns. When's the last time 51 percent of Republicans agreed with Obama on anything?
The fact that Americans remain fearful of terrorism is surprising in several respects. Judged in purely probabilistic terms, terrorism poses a far less significant threat to human life than a host of hazards, from lightning strikes, to collisions with animals, to falling household furniture. “An American’s chance of being killed by a terrorist,” note Mueller and Stewart, “has been, and remains, one in four million per year with 9/11 included in the calculation, or one in 110 million for the period since 2001.” More Americans have been killed by weather incidents in the last two weeks than have been killed by attacks by Islamist extremists on U.S. soil in the last 14 years.
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But we generally refuse to assess the costs and benefits of different counterterrorism measures. Our reactions to terrorist events that claim tens or hundreds of lives differ from other horrific events, from hurricanes to wars, which kill thousands or millions. Extreme anxiety about terrorism leads to far greater tolerance for public policies that impinge on individual liberty, even though they may or may not actually reduce our likelihood of being killed or injured by a terrorist attack.
Responsible counterterrorism policy, therefore, must not merely disrupt terror cells, impede their planning, and thwart their ability to attract new recruits; it must also tackle the fear that terrorists seek to induce.
Wind and solar power appear set for a record-breaking year in 2016 as a clean-energy construction boom gains momentum in spite of a global glut of cheap fossil fuels.
Installations of wind turbines and solar panels soared in 2015 as utility companies went on a worldwide building binge, taking advantage of falling prices for clean technology as well as an improving regulatory and investment climate...
More broadly, police are empowered to take control of all situations by any means necessary, even those that aren’t criminal. They have no obligation to survey a situation to seek the least violent resolution. Taken together, these prerogatives—established time and again, by departments across the country—encourage police to use lethal force as the first resort.
It’s tempting to see this with sympathy. Police, after all, are just ordinary people. They want to go home to their friends, partners, and children. Blue lives matter, goes the mantra, police have a right to go home safely. This is true, but only to an extent. Part of policing is risk. Not just the inevitable risk of the unknown, but voluntary risk. We ask police to “serve and protect” the broad public, which—at times—means accepting risk when necessary to defuse dangerous situations and protect lives, innocent or otherwise. It’s why we give them weapons and the authority to use them; why we compensate them with decent salaries and generous pensions; why we hold them in high esteem and why we give them wide berth in procedure and practice.
What we see with Tamir Rice—and what we’ve seen in shootings across the country—is what happens when the officer’s safety supercedes the obligation to accept risk. If “going home” is what matters—and risk is unacceptable—then the instant use of lethal force makes sense. It’s the only thing that guarantees complete safety from harm.
It’s also antithetical to the call to “serve and protect.”...
It's largely about making sure background checks take place (closing loopholes, adding staff to run more checks in a timely manner).
...Police officers don’t steer clear of these kinds of consequences merely because they stay quiet about the misdeeds of other cops. They have help. Not only are there structural standards for legal killings that favor an officer’s “objectively reasonable” survival instincts over the life of an unarmed citizen, but also the very lawyers charged with seeking punishment for the officers can enforce those standards. The Tamir Rice investigation is the clearest example yet of why independent investigators and prosecutors must be assigned by state authorities to every case of police violence.
That was made clear at Monday’s press conference, where Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty announced that a grand jury had determined that no criminal charges would be filed against Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, the two Cleveland police officers involved in Rice’s death. Given the lack of success lately in that arena, the Rice family had been girding themselves for this outcome. But the grand jury got a big push from McGinty himself, who revealed that he’d recommended that no charges be filed, in direct contradiction to the mandate of his elected office: to faithfully seek indictments and prosecute cases so as to make his jurisdiction a safer place to live. “That was also my recommendation and that of our office after reviewing the investigation and the law,” he said on Monday.
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It was a presser you might see a defense attorney give. Their performance lent credence to earlier criticisms from Tamir’s mother, Samaria, and her attorneysconcerning the behavior of McGinty and his office before the grand jury: badgering and mocking expert witnesses provided by the family, weakening their own case while defending the officers’ due process. Having committed this obvious a dereliction of duty and then crowing about it, McGinty should resign immediately.
Criss gave a preview of his paper, published later in the Journal of Earth Science, arguing that the statistical methods used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to define flood risk are outdated. Talk of 100-year or 500-year floods is meaningless, as are some of the flood plain maps, Criss said. The frequency of major flooding events, in part due to climate change but greatly due to bad river management, are increasing. The old math, he argued, needs some new equations.
Months later, as rising water tops interstates, threatens levees and swallows towns such as Pacific and Union and West Alton, Criss has another message that many won’t want to hear:
This is our fault.
Achin is one of four districts that Afghan officials say has come under IS control in recent months. Government forces have returned to the region to try to dislodge the IS extremists, who also fought fierce battles with the rival Taliban during the summer months.
IS has also established a presence in other volatile regions of Afghanistan, but Nangarhar appears to be their main powerbase.