As Congress begins its new session, youth advocates are looking forward to the passage of a bipartisan bill that would strengthen protections for young people involved in the juvenile justice system. The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Reauthorization Act of 2014, or S. 2999, introduced late last year by senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), aims to reauthorize and update the only federal law that sets national standards for how states administer juvenile justice.

That law, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), was passed in 1974 and has been updated and strengthened several times throughout its 40 years. In addition to establishing federal oversight for the states, it also set up core requirements for how states treat their youthful offenders – things like keeping kids out of adult prisons and addressing entrenched racial disparities – as well as a grant program to facilitate and incentivize states to meet those requirements. Since 2002, however, Congress has failed to reauthorize the law, and advocates say it’s long overdue for an update. “We think those standards should be substantially strengthened, and that they should really reflect more of the pressing issues of juvenile justice today,” says Liz […]

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Pope Francis

Pope Francis remains as busy as ever. This week he announced it was time for his flock to stop the rapid-fire procreation Catholics are known for. During a news conference the Pope said, “Some think, excuse me if I use the word, that in order to be good Catholics, we have to be like rabbits — but no.” He added that the Church should instead be promoting “responsible parenthood.”

However, the Pope stopped well short of suggesting that Catholics use contraception for family planning, something the church still frowns on. Instead the Pope reiterated that the Church only approves of natural methods of birth control, principally abstinence from sex during a woman’s fertile period (the rhythm method).

But the Pope may have raised more eyebrows when he compared ridiculing a person’s religion to cursing someone’s mother. He said anyone who makes such an insult can “expect a punch” in return.

The comments were made in response to questions regarding Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, which were not only insulting to Muslims, but to Christians as well.

“You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the […]

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People think that catching terrorists is just a matter of finding them – but, just as often, terrorists are created by the people doing the chase.

While making our film (T)ERROR, which tracks a single counter-terrorism sting operation over seven months, we realized that most people have serious misconceptions about FBI counter-terrorism efforts. They assume that informants infiltrate terrorist networks and then provide the FBI with information about those networks in order to stop terrorist plots from being carried out. That’s not true in the vast majority of domestic terrorism cases.

Since 9/11, as Human Rights Watch and others have documented, the FBI has routinely used paid informants not to capture existing terrorists, but to cultivate them. Through elaborate sting operations, informants are directed to spend months – sometimes years – building relationships with targets, stoking their anger and offering ideas and incentives that encourage them to engage in terrorist activity. And the moment a target takes a decisive step forward, crossing the line from aspirational to operational, the FBI swoops in to arrest him.

The targets of FBI stings […]

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A Saudi Arabian oil installation

As the ruler of a country that sits atop 300 billion barrels of oil, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah was no fan of proposals to limit the burning of fossil fuels. During most of his reign, the king’s chief envoy to climate talks was a ­global-warming skeptic who boasted of his success at scuttling climate treaties.

But it was in the monarch’s final months that Saudi officials hit upon a more effective way to knock the clean-energy movement off its tracks: cheap gas.

Since Abdullah’s death last week, Saudi officials have recommitted themselves to recent policies that have helped drive oil prices to their lowest levels in a decade. The kingdom’s efforts to manipulate oil markets are wreaking havoc with Saudi Arabia’s chief oil rivals, from Iran and Russia to the tar-sands mines of western Canada. Now energy experts are seeing evidence that the oil bust is helping Saudi Arabia achieve another long-term goal: undermining global efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

Lower oil prices already have spurred demand for gas-guzzling SUVs and prompted a spike in […]

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“I think, therefore I am” is perhaps the most familiar one-liner in western philosophy. Even if the stoners, philosophers and quantum mechanically-inclined skeptics who believe we’re living an illusion are right, few existential quips hit with such profound, approachable simplicity.  The only catch is that in Descartes’ opinion, “we” – our thoughts, our personalities, our “minds” – are mostly divorced from our bodies.The polymathic Frenchman and other dualist philosophers proposed that while the mind exerts control over our physical interaction with the world, there is a clear delineation between body and mind; that our material forms are simply temporary housing for our immaterial souls. But centuries of science argue against a corporeal crash pad. The body and mind appear inextricably linked. And findings from a new study published in Cancer by a Canadian group suggest that our mental state has measurable physical influence on us – more specifically on our DNA.Lead investigator Dr. Linda E. Carlson and her colleagues found that in breast cancer patients, support group involvement and mindfulness meditation – an adapted form of Buddhist meditation in which practitioners focus on present thoughts and actions in a non-judgmental way, ignoring past grudges and future concerns — […]

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