Monday, February 15th, 2016
James Traub, Contributing Editor and Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation - Foreign Policy
Stephan: If you read SR regularly you know my views on the critical importance of the twin trends of migration and the assimilation of minorities. Here you see it clearly played out. It would be very foolish not to learn from Sweden's experience.
The Swedish Migration Agency in Malmo, the southern port city on the border with Denmark, occupies a square brick building at the far edge of town. On the day that I was there, Nov. 19, 2015, hundreds of refugees, who had been bused in from the train station, queued up outside in the chill to be registered, or sat inside waiting to be assigned a place for the night. Two rows of white tents had been set up in the parking lot to house those for whom no other shelter could be found. Hundreds of refugees had been put in hotels a short walk down the highway, and still more in an auditorium near the station.
When the refugee crisis began last summer, about 1,500 people were coming to Sweden every week seeking asylum. By August, the number had doubled. In September, it doubled again. In October, it hit 10,000 a week, and stayed there even as the weather grew colder. A nation of 9.5 million, Sweden expected to take as many as 190,000 refugees, or 2 percent of the […]
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Monday, February 15th, 2016
Katie Valentine, Deputy Climate Editor - Thinnk Progress
Stephan: When I was a boy, I was sent to study hall, to be honest it happened more than once. Actually studying was of no interest that day, and more or less at random from the bookshelves there I pulled down and began to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and was instantly fascinated. In history class we were then covering the 'Dark Ages." The one thing I couldn't really comprehend even with the book and class, was the loss of knowledge. How could you choose to be stupid, why would you do that? And yet I could see that it had happened. My boy's mind consumed with curiosity about nearly everything could not comprehend willful ignorance. Now I do, because I am living it happening. Over 60 per cent of American children are being taught either that climate change is a natural cycle, or that it is unsettled science. Here is the data.
Credit: Shutterstock
Most students in the U.S. are learning about climate change in schools, according to a new survey. But the quality of that climate science education is, for many students, questionable.
The survey, published Thursday in Science by researchers at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), collected data from 1,500 science teachers across the United States. It found that three out of four science teachers — including 70 percent of middle school and 87 percent of high school teachers — spend at least an hour on climate change instruction. That, said Minda Berbeco, programs and policy director at NCSE and a co-author of the study, is good news.
“Most teachers are covering climate change. That means that most students are going to leave high school with at least interacting with climate change once, an that’s fantastic,” she told ThinkProgress.
But the challenge arises, Berbeco said, when you look at how these teachers are teaching climate science. Thirty percent of the teachers surveyed report teaching students that climate change is […]
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Sunday, February 14th, 2016
Paul Campos, Professor of Law at the University of Colorado at Boulder - Salon
Stephan: The entire election just changed. The Republicans, Congressional leaders and Presidential candidates, all are clamoring that Obama should wait; the next president should nominate the new Associate Justice. It is typical Republican obstructionism and I think could be turned by the Democrats into a big lever to elect a Democrat.
The reality is that it is 11 months until the next President is inaugurated and if we waited until then to begin it would take many more months to nominate and hold senate hearings before a new justice was seated.
It could be 18 months before we had an effective Supreme Court and, until then, on all 4/4 decisions the ruling at the Appellate level would be sustained. That is not the way the country is supposed to operate. This article spells out some of the issues that flow from Scalia's death.
Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
What are the legal and political implications of Antonin Scalia’s sudden death? First, in regard to the legal status of all cases currently before the Supreme Court, all of Scalia’s votes on those cases no longer count.
Justices cast their initial votes on cases in a conference, and the task of writing the majority opinion is assigned to a particular justice. Drafts of this opinion then circulate among those justices who voted in the majority, for comments and potential revisions.
But until the decision is formally issued, any justice is free to change the vote he or she cast in the conference. (For example, there is strong evidence that the Affordable Care Act was saved when John Roberts changed his mind after the initial conference vote, thus transforming what was originally the majority opinion in the case into the dissent).
This fact has serious practical implications for several important cases the Court is currently considering.
For example, it now seems likely that a crucial labor law case […]
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Sunday, February 14th, 2016
SABRINA TAVERNISE, - The New York Times
Stephan: Wealth inequity produces many negative consequences. It is much more than just can you buy a yacht or a box of diapers? It literally means how long will you live. Here is the truth of this reality.
Patients at the Free Clinic in Newton, N.J. Researchers debate whether expanding access to health care will shrink the gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor.
Credit: Joshua Bright /The New York Times
Experts have long known that rich people generally live longer than poor people. But a growing body of data shows a more disturbing pattern: Despite big advances in medicine, technology and education, the longevity gap between high-income and low-income Americans has been widening sharply.
The poor are losing ground not only in income, but also in years of life, the most basic measure of well-being. In the early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same […]
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Sunday, February 14th, 2016
Jenny Rowland and Matt Lee-Ashley, - Reader Supoorted News/Think Progress
Stephan: To really understand how committed the Koch brothers are to buying the government and distorting America to fit their very strange vision of what they think the country should be one has to dig down into the weeds. Out there in the weeds one finds the Christian terrorists. Here is a report on how the Kochs and the Theocratic Rightists terrorists have found common ground. I think this is very scary stuff with very negative long range implications for the U.S. in the future.
Lavoy Finicum and Ammon Bundy occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon.
Credit: Rob Kerr
The political network of the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch signaled last week that it is expanding its financial and organizational support for a coalition of anti-government activists and militants who are working to seize and sell America’s national forests, monuments, and other public lands.
The disclosure, made through emails sent by the American Lands Council and Koch-backed group Federalism in Action to their members, comes as the 40-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is winding to an end.
The occupation came to a head Wednesday night, with the FBI moving in on the four remaining militants at the refuge and arresting scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy at the Portland airport under charges of conspiracy to impede federal officers. Occupation leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy were previously arrested under the same charge […]
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