A Primer On The Complicated Battle For The South China Sea →

China and six other countries have competing and overlapping claims to islands, fishing rights and other resources in the South China Sea. The United States is also deeply involved. It has long been the leading naval power in Asia and has alliances with several countries at odds with China.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled on Tuesday that China's extensive claims to the South China Sea were invalid, but Beijing immediately rejected the ruling.
The Philippines brought the case against China, and while the decision is considered legally binding, there is no mechanism for enforcing it.
The Hague ruling was the first of its kind, but there was no immediate indication it would help resolve a standoff that has grown increasingly complicated.
Here are four key things to know about the dispute...

Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests →

Even if "half" is inaccurate, if it's anywhere close, that's disturbing, especially, as the article points out, of the environmental costs: land and water use, farm run-off, etc.

“It’s all about blemish-free produce,” says Jay Johnson, who ships fresh fruit and vegetables from North Carolina and central Florida. “What happens in our business today is that it is either perfect, or it gets rejected. It is perfect to them, or they turn it down. And then you are stuck.”
Food waste is often described as a “farm-to-fork” problem. Produce is lost in fields, warehouses, packaging, distribution, supermarkets, restaurants and fridges.
By one government tally, about 60m tonnes of produce worth about $160bn (£119bn), is wasted by retailers and consumers every year - one third of all foodstuffs.
But that is just a “downstream” measure. In more than two dozen interviews, farmers, packers, wholesalers, truckers, food academics and campaigners described the waste that occurs “upstream”: scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labour involved in harvest. Or left to rot in a warehouse because of minor blemishes that do not necessarily affect freshness or quality.
When added to the retail waste, it takes the amount of food lost close to half of all produce grown, experts say.

Study shows dramatic drop in painkillers in states which legalize marijuana for medical use →

There's a body of research showing that painkiller abuse and overdose are lower in states with medical marijuana laws. These studies have generally assumed that when medical marijuana is available, pain patients are increasingly choosing pot over powerful and deadly prescription narcotics. But that's always been just an assumption.
Now a new study, released in the journal Health Affairs, validates these findings by providing clear evidence of a missing link in the causal chain running from medical marijuana to falling overdoses. Ashley and W. David Bradford, a daughter-father pair of researchers at the University of Georgia, scoured the database of all prescription drugs paid for under Medicare Part D from 2010 to 2013.
They found that, in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013, prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law...
...

So as a sanity check, the Bradfords ran a similar analysis on drug categories that pot typically is not recommended for — blood thinners, anti-viral drugs and antibiotics. And on those drugs, they found no changes in prescribing patterns after the passage of marijuana laws.

"This provides strong evidence that the observed shifts in prescribing patterns were in fact due to the passage of the medical marijuana laws," they write.

More than 300 dead as South Sudan capital is rocked by violence →

More than 300 people are reported to have been killed, including many civilians and a Chinese peacekeeper, in renewed fighting in South Sudan’s capital Juba, raising fears the country is returning to civil war.
The new clashes originally broke out on Thursday and Friday between troops loyal to Salva Kiir, the president, and soldiers who support the vice-president, Riek Machar. Observers say it is clear that the peace deal concluded last August between the two main factions in the young country is only holding “by a thread”.
After a lull on Saturday, when South Sudan was to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its independence from Sudan, the fighting flared again on Sunday and Monday, raising fears of a return to all-out civil war.

One year later, Iran obeying nuclear deal, despite early doubts →

Iran moved swiftly to dismantle its nuclear program after the deal was signed July 14, 2015, to speed sanctions relief, which would not come until the International Atomic Energy Agency certified Tehran had fully complied with the requirements.
Those also included reducing its stockpile of enriched uranium from 12,000 kilograms to 300 kilograms, filling the core of its Arak heavy-water reactor with cement, removing nuclear material from its Fordow facility and dismantling two-thirds of its 19,000 centrifuges from Natanz.
Opponents of the landmark deal, reached between Tehran and the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia and the U.K, asserted that Iran was sure to cheat given its past illicit nuclear activity. But IAEA monitors have found the country so far has complied, including shipping the bulk of its enriched uranium to Russia.
Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, which supported the deal, said that given the technical complexity of what was required, it is a major accomplishment that Iran has stuck to its obligations.

The Invisible Danger Donald Trump Poses to Our Democracy →

But Trump has completely upended the platonic notion of elections as tools to settle public policy debates. His agenda, such as it is, either can’t or won’t be implemented, even if he wins. Mexico is not going to pay for a wall along the border, and the U.S. government is not going to expel 11 million unauthorized immigrants, much less ban Muslims from entering the country. It is altogether more likely that were he to win, the movement conservatives who still control Congress would present him the kind of plutocrat-friendly legislation that alienated their voters and drove them to Trump in the first place. His supporters would be rewarded for their triumph with a vision of change they don’t share and didn’t vote for.

In the likelier event that Clinton wins, but does not secure majorities in both the House and Senate, the public will have rejected Trump’s ugly vision of a resentful, bigoted America, but will not see that verdict translated into any policy changes that reflect Clinton’s vision of a more inclusive, cosmopolitan society.

At a time when trust in government is at a historic low, this is a worrying outlook. One of the key feedback mechanisms of our democracy has been malfunctioning for many years now. Next year it is likely to fail altogether.

On the recent study which reports showing no racial bias in police shootings →

There's a new study that's made the rounds of major papers over the last week, because it seems to show that there's racial bias in policing outcomes in departments across America,  *except* in shootings. However, as the author of this blog post points out (someone who actually read the paper, unlike most of the journalists who seem to have reported on it), the shooting data was not nationally representative (having been taken only from Houston), unlike the data used for the rest of the study. (And even then, as Sethi notes, the Houston data seems to be a little weird.)

And it's worth pointing out (whatever one's assumptions) that this is just a single study. Real knowledge is gained bit by bit over time, with a lot of different eyeballs and brains looking at and pondering an issue (blog articles included, as it may give someone else an idea for another study which at looks at better/different data).

Update: another, more in-depth look: [50] Teenagers in Bikinis: Interpreting Police-Shooting Data