Black Lives Matter Coalition Makes Demands as Campaign Heats Up →

More than 60 organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have released a series of demands on Monday, including for reparations.
The list of six platform demands is aimed at furthering their goals as the presidential campaign heads into the homestretch.
The release of the six demands comes a few days before the second anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which set off months of protests and led to a national conversation about police killings of blacks.
As part of the effort, the groups are demanding, among other things, reparations for what they say are past and continuing harms to African-Americans, an end to the death penalty, legislation to acknowledge the effects of slavery, as well as investments in education initiatives, mental health services and jobs programs.

The Fines and Fees That Keep Former Prisoners Poor →

Increasingly, jurisdictions across the country are assessing hefty court fines and fees, called legal financial obligations (LFOs), on  defendants, requiring them to pay thousands of dollars or face more jail time, according to Alexes Harris, the author of A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions for the Poor. Harris talked to one woman who was a victim of domestic violence and spent eight years in the prison system for shooting the father of her son. She’d been assessed $33,000 in LFOs, but 13 years after her conviction, despite minimum monthly payments she made, interest had brought her debt to $72,000.
Legal financial obligations “reinforce poverty, destabilize community reentry, and relegate impoverished debtors to a lifetime of punishment because their poverty leaves them unable to fulfill expectations of accountability,” Harris writes.  Many people who end up in jail are poor already, and unable to pay even the smallest sanctions. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 57 percent of men ages 27 to 42 earned less than $22,500 a year before they were locked up, suggesting that earnings after would be even lower.

Could a third-party candidate win the U.S. presidency? That’s very unlikely. →

But why must this be the debate? Surely, in some alternate universe, lesser U.S. parties could influence the election significantly. So let’s ask a different question: Do third-party candidates have a chance in 2016?
Political science says no.
Why? The answer lies in what is known among political scientists as Duverger’s Law.
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Here’s how it works. First, when each district gets only one legislative seat (known as a single-member district, which we have in the United States) and, second, when the election’s winner takes that seat, then the system tends to have two dominant parties.
In such a system, all a party needs to win is more votes than the other side. That winner-takes-all nature of single-member districts encourages broad coalitions to form before elections. The odds of a party winning such elections are much higher if only two parties exist, enabling each side to work to bring as many people to its side as possible.
In the United States, that’s writ large in presidential races, because the Electoral College is itself a winner-take-all system: Within each state, the candidate who wins more votes takes all that state’s electoral votes. Even in Nebraska and Maine, where electoral votes are allocated by congressional districts, each individual district is winner-take-all.
So what’s the alternative? In many countries, each district gets many seats, and they are allocated in a way that proportionally matches the votes each party receives. In those systems, there will be many parties. That’s because a party has a much lower threshold for gaining a voice in government.

Does Subsidizing Crops We're Told To Eat Less Of Fatten Us Up? →

We — the U.S. taxpayers — help subsidize farmers by paying part of the premiums on their crop insurance. This helps ensure that farmers don't go belly up, and it also protects against food shortages.
But are there unintended consequences? For instance, do subsidies encourage the production — and perhaps overconsumption — of things that we're told to eat less of? Think high fructose corn syrup or perhaps meat produced from livestock raised on subsidized grains.
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He says the findings from this study and prior research suggest that subsidies increase production and consumption of products made from these seven foods. "And [consumption] of those foods is associated with cardiometabolic risk factors."
Narayan acknowledges the study has shortcomings. For instance, the methodology — known as a cross-sectional study — captures the association at just one point, a snapshot in time. It's possible if people had been interviewed about their diets on a different day — or over a series of years — a different picture would emerge.
It's also possible that farm subsidies have less influence on what we ultimately choose to eat than this study suggests. (More on that below.) So, this paper doesn't prove a cause and effect. However, this is certainly not the first time that U.S. farm policy has been implicated in the obesity epidemic.

Changing the conversation: how to break the cycle of gun reform failure →

But what we understand about preventing gun violence has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Slowly, out of the spotlight of Washington politics, states and cities have tested gun violence prevention strategies, and found some that have made a real difference. Gun violence researchers have published key studies, pushing our knowledge forward in an area that’s still hobbled by a lack of data and political battles over researcher funding. Gun control groups have begun to acknowledge that there are successful ways to reduce US shootings without changing anything about gun regulations or gun laws. Local gun dealers and gun rights supporters have begun to step up to tackle the two-thirds of America’s gun deaths that are gun suicides – and trying to find ways to reduce the most deadly toll of guns without infringing on gun rights.
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...There are ways to save lives that have nothing to do with regulating guns. All that’s holding them back is lack of public attention and a little bit of money.

We’ve been fiercely debating gun violence, police violence, and criminal justice reform as if these are three completely separate problems. In fact, community advocates on the ground often see them as deeply interconnected problems – a vicious cycle of mistrust that makes everyone less safe.

What That Election Probability Means →

We now have our presidential candidates, and for the next few months you get to hear about the changing probability of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump winning the election. As of this writing, the Upshot estimates a 68% probability for Clinton and 32% for Donald Trump. FiveThirtyEight estimates 52% and 48% for Clinton and Trump, respectively. Forecasts are kind of all over the place this far out from November. Plus, the numbers aren’t especially accurate post-convention.
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So what does it mean when Clinton has a 68% chance of becoming president? What if there were a 90% chance that Trump wins?
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The probability estimates the percentage of times you get an outcome if you were to do something multiple times. In the case of Clinton’s 68% chance, run an election hundreds of times, and the statistical model that spit out the percentage thinks that Clinton wins about 68% of those theoretical elections. Conversely, it thinks Trump wins 32% of them.
So as we get closer to election day, even if there’s a high probability for one candidate over the other, what I’m saying is — there’s a chance.

Saudi Arabia and Yemen at the Crossroads →

Yemen has been effectively partitioned by the war between the Saudi-backed government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi and the Zaydi Shia Houthi rebels. The United Nations’ new "roadmap" is unlikely to put the country back together, but it may keep the fragile ceasefire in place...