Conflict in the Dem. Rep. of Congo Leads to World's Worst Refugee Crisis →

... Last week a joint Ugandan and Congolese military operation killed more than 100 militants of a supposedly Islamic group. It is said that the group was responsible for killing 14 UN Peacekeepers in early December. The attack on the UN Peacekeepers was one of the worst such ever attacks in the history of the UN and it briefly called attention to this part of Central Africa.
Unknown to most, the Democratic Republic of Congo is currently also experiencing one of the world's worst refugee crisis. According to Internal Displacement Monitoring organization 1.7 million people have been forced to flee their homes in 2017 because of the conflict in the Congo. This makes the Congo's internal displacement greater than those in Yemen, Syria or Iraq.

You shouldn't have to give up your right to sue to get a job →

Arbitration can be an effective tool to resolve contract disputes without going to court. But employers shouldn’t be able to force workers into arbitration in contravention of worker protections established in federal laws and regulations, and they certainly shouldn’t make getting a job contingent on giving up the right to seek redress in the courts. Unfortunately, both have become regular occurrences, but a case now being briefed before the Supreme Court can — and should — fix that.
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People or companies entering into an agreement on equal footing, and in circumstances in which they have other options, have a perfect right to decide that they would rather settle potential disputes through arbitration instead of the courts. But people desperate for work, especially in an economy as weak as it was when Hobson was hired in 2008, are not on equal footing with the company offering jobs. And if employers routinely require applicants to sign away legal rights to be considered for a job, then the employees have no other real option even in a robust economy. That is an egregious practice. People should not have to forgo their fundamental right to seek redress through the courts in order to work for a living.

World Bank to cease financing upstream oil and gas after 2019 →

I have no idea how important the World Bank was for financing oil and gas projects, so this may be mostly symbolic. But I think it's likely that this is a sign of change.

The World Bank will no longer finance upstream oil and gas projects after 2019, apart from certain gas projects in the poorest countries in exceptional circumstances,...

The Police Murder of Daniel Shaver →

David French, on the murder of Daniel Shaver, by a police officer who was then acquitted. Supposedly the police officer's bodycam video wasn't released until after the verdict (it's graphic, and infuriating), for what reason, I don't know. This is the kind of thing that decimates trust in police and the courts.

Essentially, what the police told an innocent, law-abiding, intoxicated American was this: Follow my highly-specific, very strange instructions or die. There was no need to make him crawl. The police were in command of the situation. At no point is there a visible weapon. I have seen soldiers deal with al Qaeda terrorists with more professionalism and poise. When a man is prone, his hands are visible, and your gun is trained upon him, he is in your power.

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I’ve written about this before. Juries time and again acquit frightened cops, regardless of whether the cop botched the situation or whether his fear was objectively reasonable. I wrote this after the Philando Castile verdict:

'Legally, it’s not enough for an officer to show that he was actually afraid for his life. He has to show that “a reasonably prudent person” would also have the same fear. Clever defense lawyers twist this standard into a line of argument that goes something like this: The officer was afraid, and he can explain to you the reasons why he was afraid. Therefore, it was reasonable that he was afraid. But real fear isn’t always reasonable fear.'

That’s especially true when the police — through their own incompetence — create their own fear. Philando Castile was shot even as he followed his killer’s instructions. Shaver died trying his best to comply with a highly unusual, complicated set of commands while under extreme duress. Scared cops still need to be competent cops, and members of the public shouldn’t face death because a police officer can’t keep his emotions in check.

Finally, I know that police have a dangerous job, but they’re not at war. As I noted above, it’s infuriating to see civilian police exercise less discipline than I’ve seen from soldiers in infinitely more dangerous situations. Not one of the men I deployed with would have handled a terrorist detention the way these officers treated American citizens.

Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues →

Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday.
About a third of the world's soil has already been degraded, Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a forum marking World Soil Day.
The causes of soil destruction include chemical-heavy farming techniques, deforestation which increases erosion, and global warming.

How Big Medicine Can Ruin Medicare for All →

This is the best summary I've seen of all of the problems with our healthcare system, most of which are due to the fact that NO medical-related market in this country is competitive: not wages for medical professionals, not drugs, not hospitals. Singlepayer could be used to massively reform costs of products and services (which here in the U.S.  are several times their "free market" price), but it would run into these monopolies' power in Washington.

Adopting a single-payer system might have done a lot of good—twenty years ago. But since then, a massive wave of corporate consolidations has transformed the American health care delivery system in ways that make the single-payer approach highly problematic. Most Americans now live in places where there is little or no competition among medical providers. In market after market, hospitals, clinics, physician practices, labs, and other key health care infrastructure have been merged into monopolies controlling nearly all aspects of health care in the areas in which they operate.
Switching to single-payer wouldn’t, on its own, address the fact that the lack of competition leaves these Goliaths with almost no pressure to keep costs down. Since medical monopolies are becoming too big for either party to challenge, a single-payer, Medicare-for-all-type plan would likely degenerate into super-high-cost corporate welfare, rather than achieving lower prices or improved quality. The only sure way to avoid that outcome would be to simultaneously enact aggressive antitrust and pro-competition policies to bust up the monopolies and oligopolies that now dominate health care delivery in nearly every community in America.

"Prison gerrymandering," another problem with our electoral system

Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media. →

We agree that fake news and misinformation are real problems that deserve serious attention. We also agree that social media and other online technologies have contributed to deep-seated problems in democratic discourse such as increasing polarization and erosion of support for traditional sources of authority. Nonetheless, we believe that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself.
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What did all these stories talk about? The research team investigated this question, counting sentences that appeared in mainstream media sources and classifying each as detailing one of several Clinton- or Trump-related issues. In particular, they classified each sentence as describing either a scandal (e.g., Clinton’s emails, Trump’s taxes) or a policy issue (Clinton and jobs, Trump and immigration). They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.
To reiterate, these 65,000 sentences were written not by Russian hackers, but overwhelmingly by professional journalists employed at mainstream news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. To the extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news.