The Atlantic: What Is Trump Trying to Hide in His Tax Returns?

The habit of candidates universally releasing tax returns runs back to the 1970s. Even before then, there’d been some releases. George Romney famously released 12 years of returns ahead of the 1968 election. During the 2012 election, George’s son Mitt dragged his feet on releasing returns, earning some unflattering comparisons. At the time, Politifact investigated and found that since 1972, only seven presidential nominees had refused to release their returns: Democrat Jerry Brown (1992); Republicans Pat Buchanan and Dick Lugar (1996), Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and Romney (2008), and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader (2000).

One thing sticks out about those candidates: None of them won a major-party nomination, or for that matter really came especially close. Trump, as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, is a different situation. [...]

Moreover, Trump appears to already be lying about his taxes. He claims that he can’t release them now because he is being audited. Yet that claim is false: The IRS says there’s no reason a citizen can’t release returns that are under audit. If Trump stands behind the returns he signed, why not just put them out there?

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The New Yorker: The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement

Soon, the United States, along with Germany, was at the forefront of the movement to improve the human species through breeding. Scientific American ran articles on the subject, and the American Museum of Natural History hosted conferences. Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and many other prominent citizens were outspoken supporters. Eugenics was taught in schools, celebrated in exhibits at the World’s Fair, and even preached from pulpits. [...]

Forced or coercive sterilizations never entirely went away either. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that at least a hundred and forty-eight female prisoners in California were sterilized without proper permission between 2006 and 2010. Last year, a district attorney in Nashville was fired for including sterilization requirements in plea deals. [...]

Despite these contemporary remnants of America’s involvement in eugenics, and despite the fact that the movement shaped national policy and held sway in the upper reaches of society for many years, this chapter of American history is surprisingly absent from the common conception of the country’s past. It’s not that it has been ignored by historians or journalists. [...] Yet it seems that the collective forgetfulness is not a matter of some well of information remaining untapped but of our inability or unwillingness to soak up what is drawn out of it.

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Business Insider: An unlikely alliance against ISIS is forming in a remote corner of Iraq

The unlikely alliance between an offshoot of a leftist Kurdish organization and an Arab tribal militia in northern Iraq is a measure of the extent to which Islamic State has upended the regional order. [...]

While the Arab militia wants to restore Baghdad's authority over this arid hinterland, the YBS is on a mission to establish its own model of society based on the philosophy of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

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BBC4: The Deobandis

The Deobandis are virtually unknown to most British people, yet their influence is huge. As the largest Islamic group in the UK, they control over 40% of mosques and have a near monopoly on Islamic seminaries, which propagate a back-to-basics, orthodox interpretation of Islam.

Founded in a town called Deoband in 19th Century India, it's a relatively new tradition within the Islamic faith, but has spread throughout the world, with the UK being a key centre. Migrants from India and Pakistan brought Deobandi Islam to the UK during the 1960s and 1970s, setting up mosques and madrassas in the mill towns of Bury and Dewsbury, from which a national network grew.

The Deobandi movement is large and diverse: from the quietest and strictly non-violent missionary group the Tablighi Jamaat to the armed sectarian and jihadist groups of Pakistan.

The BBC's former Pakistan correspondent Owen Bennett Jones investigates which strands of Deobandi opinion have influence in the UK, speaking to people from within the British Deobandi community, from scholars to missionaries to madrassa students

In the first of two programmes he explores claims that Deobandi Islam is intentionally isolationist and that its strict beliefs put it at odds with mainstream British culture, leaving the community segregated from wider British society. Though if true, is that really the fault of Deobandi Muslims?

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FiveThirtyEight: Gay Marriage Won, But Other Liberal Causes Will Probably Struggle To Copy Its Success

Social contact is a particularly effective way of reducing anti-gay sentiment because gay and lesbian identity is independent of the socio-economic, ethnic, racial, religious and regional divisions that separate Americans on other issues. While coming out is more complicated in certain parts of the country and within certain communities, gay and lesbian people are members of every social class, ethnicity, religion and race. White Americans are much more likely to have a close friend or family member who is gay than black, even though black Americans vastly outnumber gays and lesbian people. (I know these groups are not mutually exclusive.) Since the early 1990s, Americans collectively met and welcomed many more gay and lesbian people into their families and social circles. [...]

Even some political opponents of same-sex marriage signaled an early retreat on the issue. In 2013, for instance, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., indicated he would not have a problem supporting a presidential candidate who was for same-sex marriage, saying, “I think it’s inevitable.” Few things are more demoralizing to any effort than thinking you’ve already lost. [...]

Few of the factors that helped push same-sex marriage over the finish line would seem to benefit those seeking to keep abortion legal or to prompt government action on climate change.

First, the millennial generation is not a slam dunk for those advocates. Despite being more diverse and socially liberal, millennials are not more likely than Americans overall to believe abortion should be legal or to say climate change is a priority.

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Jezebel: Catholic School Teacher Faces Backlash Over Flyer Comparing Planned Parenthood to the KKK

A theology teacher at a private Catholic girls’ school in Phoenix is facing backlash after he handed out a flyer in class comparing Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan. A petition from school parents and alumni say it’s the latest example of the teacher’s “misogynistic rhetoric against women.” [...]

The flyer calls abortion “genocide” and a plot to kill “black babies,” and begins: “Maybe the Klan didn’t invent abortion, but you have to believe they were pretty happy with the results.” It features questionable, non-sourced statistics on how many abortions are performed as a result of rape or incest or for health reasons.

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The Telegraph: Mapped: Where are the homeless households in England?

Homelessness continues to be a growing problem in the UK - particularly in England, where rough sleepers have increased in the last five years - and a new report from the House of Commons gives a detailed view of how many English homeless households there are. [...]

A report released last month by the Commons library found that a "disproportionate number" of those sleeping rough had been in local authority care, prison or the armed forces.

"Around 30-50% of rough sleepers have been found to suffer from mental health problems, although very few of these people have ever been in a long-stay hospital and have become homeless upon discharge," the report said.

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The ABC: The Gender Paradox: Why both Misogyny and Feminism are on the Rise

Israel has some of the most progressive feminist legislation in the world: mandatory 14 week parental leave, free state-funded child care up to age three, a prohibition against firing pregnant women, and far reaching laws against sexual harassment. And interestingly, to its shame and credit, Israel is the only country in the world where a former president is sitting in jail for crimes of rape. It's a shame that a president can be a rapist, but enormous credit that he was caught, tried, convicted and treated just like every other sexual predator.

On the other hand, many indicators show Israeli women falling behind. Women make a paltry 66% of what men make - a figure that hasn't moved significantly in over thirty years, placing Israel at seventy-first in the world out of 135 countries on the World Economic Forum's gender index of economic equality (Australia ranks fourteenth in economic equality, and twenty-fourth overall). Although Knesset representation is high, on the local level women's political level is appalling with only six women mayors for 256 municipalities. And there are only three women out of 22 cabinet members, a far cry from the 50% women of Canadian Prime Minister Justin ("because it's 2015") Trudeau. [...]

To try and understand how it is that advances for women coexist with an overall portrait of falling behind, we need to understand where Israeli sexism comes from in Israel. It has two primary sources: the army and Orthodox Judaism. Both of these are deeply patriarchal institutions that are founded on centuries-long boy-club machismo. And both are very powerful forces in Israeli society and in Israeli power structures.

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