‘They Will Kill Us’: Afghan Translators Plead for Delayed U.S. Visas →

Congress has dragged its feet on this for years, but now it may be a one-sided partisan problem...

Republican infighting, infused with nativist tones, has left in question whether a special visa program for translators and interpreters who assisted the military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be renewed, a potentially devastating blow to approximately 12,000 Afghans whose immigration applications are in limbo.
“We’ve really been trying to reinforce the fact to Afghans that we are committed to you, and this gives the enemy some propaganda to say, ‘Hey, these people really aren’t committed to you,’ ” said Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan.
“It’s our credibility that is on the line,” he added.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a longtime champion of the visa program, was blunt. “People are going to die,” Mr. McCain said on the Senate floor, challenging a fellow Republican who was blocking more visas. “Don’t you understand the gravity of that?”

It's time to acknowledge the genocide of California's Indians →

I had no idea about this before reading this article. I'm always glad to learn history, even if the knowledge imposes moral burden.

Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Diseases, dislocation and starvation caused many of these deaths, but the near-annihilation of the California Indians was not the unavoidable result of two civilizations coming into contact for the first time. It was genocide, sanctioned and facilitated by California officials.
Neither the U.S. government nor the state of California has acknowledged that the California Indian catastrophe fits the two-part legal definition of genocide set forth by the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948...
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The issue of genocide in California poses explosive political, economic and educational questions for the state, California’s tribes and individual California Indians. It is up to them — not academics like me — to determine the best way forward.
Will state officials tender public apologies, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did in the 1980s for the relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? Should state officials offer compensation, along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion Congress paid to 82,210 of these Japanese Americans and their heirs? Might California officials decrease or altogether eliminate their cut of California Indians’ annual gaming revenues ($7.3 billion in 2014) as a way of paying reparations? Should the state return control to California Indian communities of state lands where genocidal events took place? Should the state stop commemorating the supporters and perpetrators of this genocide, including Burnett, Kit Carson and John C. Frémont? Will the genocide against California Indians join the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust in public school curricula and public discourse?
These are crucial questions. What’s beyond doubt is that the state and the federal government should acknowledge the genocide that took place in California.

The Original Underclass: Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has →

Good essay review of a couple books which get past the stereotypes of the "white working class."

That flattering glow has faded away. Today, less privileged white Americans are considered to be in crisis, and the language of sociologists and pathologists predominates. Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 was published in 2012, and Robert D. Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis came out last year. From opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they made the case that social breakdown among low-income whites was starting to mimic trends that had begun decades earlier among African Americans: Rates of out-of-wedlock births and male joblessness were rising sharply. Then came the stories about a surge in opiate addiction among white Americans, alongside shocking reports of rising mortality rates (including by suicide) among middle-aged whites. And then, of course, came the 2016 presidential campaign. The question was suddenly no longer why Democrats struggled to appeal to regular Americans. It was why so many regular Americans were drawn to a man like Donald Trump.
Equally jarring has been the shift in tone. A barely suppressed contempt has characterized much of the commentary about white woe, on both the left and the right...
The barely veiled implication, whichever version you consider, is that the people undergoing these travails deserve relatively little sympathy—that they maybe, kinda had this reckoning coming. Either they are layabouts drenched in self-pity or they are sad cases consumed with racial status anxiety and animus toward the nonwhites passing them on the ladder. Both interpretations are, in their own ways, strikingly ungenerous toward a huge number of fellow Americans.
They are also unsatisfying as explanations for what is happening out there. Williamson, for one, mischaracterizes the typical Trump voter. As exit polls show, the candidate’s base is not the truly bereft white underclass Williamson derides. Those Americans are, by and large, not voting at all, as I’m often reminded when reporting in places like Appalachia, where turnout rates are the lowest in the country. People voting for Trump are mostly a notch higher on the economic ladder—in a position to feel exactly the resentment that Williamson himself feels toward the shiftless needy. As for liberals’ diagnosis that a major public-health crisis is rooted in racial envy, it fails to square with, among other things, the fact that blacks and Hispanics have hardly been flourishing themselves. Yes, there’s an African American president, but by many metrics the Great Recession was even worse for minorities than for whites.
Two new books—one a provocative, deeply researched history and the other an affecting memoir—are well timed to help make better sense of the plight of struggling whites in the United States...

Baltimore mayor following DOJ report release: 'We have to heal our city' →

Baltimore police routinely violated the constitutional rights of residents by conducting unlawful stops and using excessive force, according to the findings of a long-anticipated Justice Department probe released Wednesday.
The practices overwhelmingly affected the city's black residents in low-income neighborhoods, according to the 163-page report. In often scathing language, the report identified systemic problems and cited detailed examples.
The investigators found that "supervisors have issued explicitly discriminatory orders, such as directing a shift to arrest 'all the black hoodies' in a neighborhood."
They also found that black residents were more likely to be stopped and searched as pedestrians and drivers even though police were more likely to find illegal guns, illicit drugs and other contraband on white residents.

Here’s everything you need to know ahead of Zambia’s election →

Zambians go to the polls Thursday to elect a president for the second time in 19 months. The death of President Michael Sata in October 2014 triggered a special by-election in January 2015. President Edgar Lungu of the Patriotic Front (PF), Zambia’s ruling party, narrowly won that by-election. Lungu hopes to extend his rule five more years.
In addition to electing a head of state, Zambians will choose members of parliament and municipal council representatives, and vote in a referendum on whether to amend the Bill of Rights.
Nine candidates are running for the presidency. There haven’t been any recent nationally representative opinion polls in Zambia, but many believe the competition is down to current president Lungu and Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development (UPND). During last year’s contest, the difference between Lungu and Hichilema was a mere 1.7 percentage points. The Movement for Multiparty Democracy, the party that ruled Zambia from 1991 to 2011, has not fielded a candidate this time around...

Suicide Bombing At Hospital In Pakistan Kills Dozens →

At least 63 people have died and scores more seriously injured after a bomb was detonated in a hospital in Balochistan province, Pakistan, Monday morning.
The bomb exploded at the gates of the Civil Hospital’s emergency department in Quetta, wounding at least 100 people, local media reported.
Many of those hurt or killed were lawyers or journalists who had gathered at the hospital after prominent lawyer Bilal Anwar Kasti was shot dead earlier on Monday morning and brought to the emergency department.

The Return of the Housing Bubble??????? →

Okay, it's not like the good old days of 2002–2007, but there are some grounds for concern in certain markets. In particular, the Case-Shiller tiered price indexes are showing extraordinary increases in the bottom tier (lowest third of house sale prices) in several markets.

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These numbers should provide serious grounds for caution. This is not a story of a bubble whose collapse will sink the economy and cause a financial crisis, but there is a real possibility that a lot of moderate-income homebuyers may get badly burned if prices turn around. The real estate pushers never care, since they make their money on the turnover, but it won't be a pretty picture for the families affected.

BMI, mortality, weight stigma, science… *sigh* →

You could have said, “Look! It’s actually WORSE to have a really low BMI than to have a somewhat high BMI! You can’t assume someone’s health status based on their weight!”
Or, “Look! This matters so much more for men than for women, and yet who gets more crap for it? Women! How unfair is that?”
Or, “Look! The range of ‘healthy weights’ isn’t where the government says it is! They say 18.5-24.9, but actually the population is better off 20-30!”