3 things you should know about the new Colombia peace agreement with its rebels →

Some much-needed good news:

Colombia has been fighting the longest-running civil war in the world, and it may finally come to an end very soon...

1. The Colombian government has reached a bilateral cease-fire agreement with the country’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The agreement effectively marks the end of hostilities between two parties at war since 1964. The government and the Marxist guerrillas of FARC have been in talks since 2012 and have reached agreements on each of the five negotiation pillars.

Will the Trans-Pacific Partnership Turn Silicon Valley Into Detroit? →

Ignoring the leading headline...

The connection between Silicon Valley and Detroit (sorry Detroiters) comes in Article 18.78, which requires countries to have laws allowing companies to protect trade secrets and imposing criminal penalties for violators. The language in this section is broad, but it can certainly be interpreted as implying that governments allow for the enforcement of “non-compete” agreements. Non-compete agreements prohibit employees from quitting their job and working for another company in the same industry for a substantial period of time.
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The restrictions on trade secrets are not the only anti-growth provisions in the TPP. The deal also requires stronger and longer copyright, patent, and related protections. These protections raise the price of the protected items in the same way that tariffs on imports raise prices. The big difference is that copyright and patent protection is typically equivalent to tariffs of several thousand percent, not the single digit tariffs on other items that are being reduced or eliminated in the TPP.
While most proponents of the TPP have opted not to look at the cost of these forms of protectionism it is likely to be substantial. The New Zealand governmentestimated that increasing the duration of copyright protection from 50 years to 70 years, as required by the TPP, would cost it 0.024 percent of its GDP annually, the equivalent of $4.3 billion annually in the United States.
This is the cost of just one small provision in a country that already has strong copyright protection. The costs would undoubtedly be much larger in countries like Malaysia and Vietnam, which don’t currently have strong copyright protections.
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And of course, there are the provisions for the pharmaceutical industry that make patent and related protections stronger and longer. In the United States we spend more than $420 billion a year (@ 2.2 percent of GDP) for drugs that would likely sell for around $40 billion a year in a free market. The goal of the TPP is to make the other countries pay as much as we do, and to lock in place indefinitely high drug prices in the United States. In addition to slowing growth, these protections will also jeopardize public health.

Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City →

Amazing essay on the continued difficulty of ending segregation in schools. Number one problem: affluent (mostly white) parents trying to ensure "the best opportunity" for their children. The history of money chasing just the "right" amount of diversity is depressing:

In a city where white children are only 15 percent of the more than one million public-school students, half of them are clustered in just 11 percent of the schools, which not coincidentally include many of the city’s top performers. Part of what makes those schools desirable to white parents, aside from the academics, is that they have some students of color, but not too many...
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...New York, like many deeply segregated cities, has a terrible track record of maintaining racial balance in formerly underenrolled segregated schools once white families come in. Schools like P.S. 321 in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood and the Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene tend to go through a brief period of transitional integration, in which significant numbers of white students enroll, and then the numbers of Latino and black students dwindle. In fact, that’s exactly what happened at P.S. 8.
A decade ago, P.S. 8 was P.S. 307’s mirror image. Predominantly filled with low-income black and Latino students from surrounding neighborhoods, P.S. 8, with its low test scores and low enrollment, languished amid a community of affluence because white parents in the neighborhood refused to send their children there. A group of parents worked hard with school administrators to turn the school around, writing grants to start programs for art and other enrichment activities. Then more white and Asian parents started to enroll their children...

Racism is still deeply embedded in America, though it may not be as heinous a problem as it was fifty years ago. And it hurts everyone's children, as the essay points out:

...By 1988, a year after Faraji and I entered middle school, school integration in the United States had reached its peak and the achievement gap between black and white students was at its lowest point since the government began collecting data. The difference in black and white reading scores fell to half what it was in 1971, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. (As schools have since resegregated, the test-score gap has only grown.) The improvements for black children did not come at the cost of white children. As black test scores rose, so did white ones.

Will Bernie Sanders Win the Platform? →

The left wing of the party has never been given more power to shape the platform. Sanders appointed five of the 15 members of the platform drafting committee, with six allotted to Hillary Clinton and the other four to the DNC. That’s a big variation from past practice: Clinton lost by a smaller margin to Barack Obama in 2008, and got zero slots on the platform committee.
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This gives a serious presence to avowed liberal activists on the platform committee, compared to the mostly elected officials and policy advisors of 2008. (Warren Gunnels, Bernie Sanders’ policy director, also is a non-voting committee member.) On controversial issues like fracking or Israel/Palestine negotiations, Sanders’s choices bring career-defining positions into the debate.
Clinton’s allies, if they’re intent on seeking the typical broad coalition heading into the general election, could simply outvote the Sanders faction and brush aside their viewpoints. But on several issues, that would put Clinton at odds not just with Sanders supporters, but with the mainstream of the party.

The Split [in the Democratic party] →

Some great, wide-ranging thoughts on the causes and consequences of this moment in the Democratic party.

To help make sense of what’s causing the split, and where it’s headed, we turned to 23 leading historians, political scientists, pollsters, artists, and activists...

The Fallibility of DNA Evidence →

DNA identification, like all science these days, relies on probability and statistics. If the public is being kept from knowing how any company's DNA ID process works, justice is very literally blind:

It's the same problem as any biometric: we need to know the rates of both false positives and false negatives. And if these algorithms are being used to determine guilt, we have a right to examine them.

Will Democrats Pay a Price for Obama’s Deportation Raids? →

...In other words, there are lots of things the Obama administration is doing to make life miserable for survivors of extreme violence, going way beyond merely enforcing the law. And that brings us back to politics, because it cannot help but have an indelible impact on how those communities feel about Democrats over the long term.

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But considering Clinton spent the entire primary positioning herself as the natural heir to the Obama coalition, separating herself could prove difficult. At the most basic level, the raids will hinder her campaign’s efforts to contact Latino voters, as even naturalized immigrants in mixed-status families don’t want to give out their information. A fresh round of headlines about families ripped apart and even killed could dampen Latino voter enthusiasm even more.

Latinos certainly don’t consider Trump a better option. But the horror stories might discourage many in the Latino community from believing that there’s any hope of receiving respect and dignity from either party. They may tune out of politics, considering both sides equally belligerent. And that matters way beyond one election.

All of which begs the question of why the White House is embarking on this—and why now?...

The Truth About China’s Missing Daughters →

Fascinating, occasionally horrifying, account of the effects of the one child policy on families, how it wasn't as simple as we've often heard here, and how that interacted with the adoption industry.

...The Dying Rooms brought attention to the warehouse-like conditions in some of these orphanages. But it did something else too: It popularized the image of deeply patriarchal Chinese families who blithely discarded their daughters in pursuit of a son, and of a Chinese culture so hostile to taking in other parents’ children that Chinese girls faced no other option than being adopted abroad.
What Johnson and her research associates found, however, as they interviewed thousands of Chinese families, was that this picture was far from complete. Talking to rural Chinese parents who relinquished daughters, other rural families who took those daughters in, and a third, almost entirely unrecognized category of parents—those who hid over-quota, unregistered children from population control officials—Johnson learned that few families in the region used the expression “more sons, more happiness” that was supposedly typical of Chinese son preference.
By contrast, many of those two thousand families spoke extensively of their desire for both a daughter and a son, since having both, they said, would “make a family complete.” This idealized family was so important that, for years before and even during the one-child policy, many parents who only had sons adopted daughters in order to thus “complete” their families. And where daughters were given up, among the families Johnson met, it was never casual, but almost always an agonized decision that, in the context of government repression, could hardly be called a choice. It wasn’t the people, in other words, so much as the policy.