FiveThirtyEight: Can Clinton Move Left To Get Sanders On Board And Still Win?

As the Democratic primary season came to an end on Tuesday evening, Bernie Sanders met with presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. According to the Sanders campaign, the two candidates discussed a variety of issues for which Sanders has fought hard during the election, including raising the minimum wage, campaign finance reform, universal health care and college affordability. Sanders wants to make sure that Clinton represents his platform. But just how much can Clinton concede to Sanders and his left-wing base without hurting her chances among more moderate voters in the general election? On most of these issues, polls show, Clinton has some room to shimmy to the left, but her current position is safer electorally. [...]

Clinton and Sanders are both progressive Democrats. They don’t differ all that much on the issues. If Clinton were to take up Sanders’s more left-leaning positions, it probably wouldn’t hurt her campaign all that much. It would, however, be riskier than where she currently stands.

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Quartz: Scotland hit its ambitious emissions-cutting target six years early

Emissions fell by 12.5% in 2014 alone, making for a 46% reduction versus the 1990 baseline. Scotland has been a pioneer in renewable energy; the government has plans to build the UK’s first floating wind farm and huge, sunken turbines in Scotland’s wild seas.

In comparison, the UK as a whole has reduced emissions by 30% over the same period. [...]

Though climate campaigners welcome the news, some are critical about the government’s role in achieving the target. The recent reduction in emissions may be down to a warmer winter than usual, which resulted in people turning down their heating. Critics also want officials to come up with bolder policies to tackle emissions from transport, which have changed little.

Scotland isn’t alone in meeting its target early. Bulgaria, Estonia, and Sweden did it in 2014, followed later by Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, and Romania, and following suit. The European Union as a whole has met its greenhouse gas-reduction target ahead of schedule, too. That said, the EU’s target to reduce emissions by 20% by 2020 has been criticized as lacking ambition.

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The Guardian: China's debt is 250% of GDP and 'could be fatal', says government expert

China’s total debt was more than double its gross domestic product in 2015, a government economist has said, warning that debt linkages between the state and industry could be “fatal” for the world’s second largest economy.

The country’s debt has ballooned to almost 250% of GDP thanks to Beijing’s repeated use of cheap credit to stimulate slowing growth, unleashing a massive, debt-fuelled spending binge. [...]

The debt-to-GDP ratio is not the highest in the world. The US has a ratio of 331%, for example, much of which is accounted for by federal debt.

But part of the concern about China’s massive debt binge is that the most worrying risks lie in the non-financial corporate sector, where the debt-to-GDP ratio was estimated at 156%. This sector includes the liabilities of local government financing vehicles, Li said.

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Los Angeles Times: After its own mass shootings, Germany beefed up gun control laws. The number of shootings dropped

“In the 19th century, guns were really popular in Germany, and the situation was similar to the way it is in the United States now. But tough laws changed all that. On top of that, there has been widespread social repudiation of guns in Germany. Since World War II and the Red Army terror wave of the 1970s, guns have not been seen as anything masculine at all but rather reactionary and in a really negative light,” Ellerbrock said. [...]

Gun homicides in Germany fell from 106 in 2002 to 75 in 2009 and 51 in 2010 before climbing to 61 in 2012, according to the most recent data from GunPolicy.org.

By comparison, there were 10,945 gun homicides in the United States in 2014. This May, 66 people were shot dead just in Chicago. [...]

The crackdown on guns also contributed to a 25% reduction in the number of crimes committed with guns from 2010 to 2015, the country’s crime office said.

Yet Germany is one of the world’s leading countries when it comes to people owning firearms. There are 5.83 million registered guns in Germany belonging to 2.31 million owners, ranking it 14th in the world in gun ownership.

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The Washington Post: The Dalai Lama: Why I’m hopeful about the world’s future

Today, there is no end in sight to the horrific violence in the Middle East, which in the case of Syria has led to the greatest refugee crisis in a generation. Appalling terrorist attacks — as we were sadly reminded this weekend — have created deep-seated fear. While it would be easy to feel a sense of hopelessness and despair, it is all the more necessary in the early years of the 21st century to be realistic and optimistic.

There are many reasons for us to be hopeful. Recognition of universal human rights, including the right to self-determination, has expanded beyond anything imagined a century ago. There is growing international consensus in support of gender equality and respect for women. Particularly among the younger generation, there is a widespread rejection of war as a means of solving problems. Across the world, many are doing valuable work to prevent terrorism, recognizing the depths of misunderstanding and the divisive idea of “us” and “them” that is so dangerous. Significant reductions in the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons mean that setting a timetable for further reductions and ultimately the elimination of nuclear weapons — a sentiment President Obama recently reiterated in Hiroshima, Japan — no longer seem a mere dream.

The notion of absolute victory for one side and defeat of another is thoroughly outdated; in some situations, following conflict, suffering arises from a state that cannot be described as either war or peace. Violence inevitably incurs further violence. Indeed, history has shown that nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and peaceful democracies and is more successful in removing authoritarian regimes than violent struggle.

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Reuters: Israeli official praises Saudi king for stance on Iran, economy

Israel's top intelligence official offered Saudi Arabia rare public praise on Wednesday for what he deemed its efforts, under King Salman, to lead "pragmatic" Sunni Muslim states confronting Iran and to overhaul Riyadh's oil-dependent economy.

The tribute by military intelligence chief Major-General Herzi Halevy at an international security forum followed years of veiled references by Israel to back-channel contacts with Gulf Arab powers - despite their lack of formal bilateral ties. [...]

Israel has long talked about a "new horizon" in the Middle East, in which has had common ground with Sunni Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia in their wariness towards Iran. Israel has also talked recently about its openness to a 2002 Saudi initiative for a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians, although there appears to be little momentum in that direction.

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The Washington Post: Europe’s hooliganism problem is escalating, and authorities can’t stop it

European hooliganism never really went away, although it appeared so for a couple of years. What really happened, however, was a shift of hooligan clashes away from stadiums and into more secret venues. Most hooligan violence does not occur spontaneously, but is instead the result of scheduled confrontations that are often captured on videos uploaded by the groups themselves. [...]

For many hooligans, the Euro 2016 might also be the last large-scale international tournament in nearly a decade. The next Euro and World Championships are scheduled to take place in 2018 in Russia and in 2022 in Qatar — two countries where police officers are not expected to hesitate to aggressively confront potential hooligans from abroad or to enforce strict laws. Moreover, the Euro 2020 will be held in over 13 different countries, which likely will prevent large-scale violence. [...]

Whereas hooliganism in other former Eastern Bloc states was strongly connected to criticism of the government, the opposite appears to be the case now in Russia. Following the violent clashes in southern France, a spokesman for Russia's main federal investigating authority implied on Twitter that the English soccer fans had lost against the Russians because "a normal man, as he should be, surprises them. (The English) are used to seeing 'men' at gay parades." Russia might have some of the world's strictest anti-hooligan laws — but when the violence hits English fans, some officials appear to be unconcerned.

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FiveThirtyEight: Our Worst Presidents Came In With A Lot Of Experience

These arguments suggest that which offices and roles presidents have previously held matter in getting elected. The amount of experience is important, but so is the type, and neither work suggests that long years in Congress or in a previous president’s administration are an advantage. [...]

There’s a slight correlation between years of experience and a worse ranking. It’s hardly a clear trend, but it’s not a ringing endorsement for the importance of political experience, either.

So does having lots of national governing experience make you bad at being president? Here’s where the “correlation doesn’t equal causation” warning comes in. Lots of things could be driving the relationship between the kind of politicians that get elected and their success as president. Parties could gravitate toward more experienced politicians when the coalition has been in power awhile and is starting to fray. Also, two of the experienced-but-terrible presidents, John Tyler and Andrew Johnson, became president through succession (they weren’t elected). And for presidents who took office at times of crisis, like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, it might have been an advantage to be unencumbered by political baggage. [...]

But perhaps some of the trouble in drawing a connection between presidential success and experience is difficulty in assessing presidential success in the first place. Buchanan was sympathetic to Southern claims about states’ rights and slavery and is dead last in our aggregate rankings. But while we excoriate Buchanan, slave owners, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (along with notorious racist Woodrow Wilson), grace the top 10. Evaluating presidential success often ends in tying oneself in moral knots over slavery, segregation, war or something else. Or it leads to the question, for conservatives looking at FDR or liberals looking at Ronald Reagan: Does effectiveness matter if he was effective at something you think harmed the nation?

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Los Angeles Times: In China, feminism is growing — and so is the backlash

In recent years, a small number of Chinese feminist activists — most of them outspoken, social media-savvy women in their 20s — have used creative campaigns to protest strains of male chauvinism that run through contemporary Chinese society. Since 2012, they’ve “occupied” men’s public toilets to protest unfairly sized female restrooms; donned faux blood-spattered wedding dresses to protest domestic violence; and shaved their heads to protest education inequality.  [...]

“Another part of this is that the Communist Party has been for a long time very strongly promoting extremely traditional gender norms,” Fincher said. “You look at the propaganda, the state media, it’s strongly encouraging women to return to the home and have babies. The end of the One Child Policy is part of this as well. It’s an attempt to address these very severe demographic crises — the shrinking of the workforce, the aging of the population, falling birth rates.”

In China, women do enjoy a broad range of social and professional opportunities — more than 70% of women are in the workforce, about the same as the U.S. China has more female billionaires than any other country. Yet women remain scarce in leadership roles. In politics, only two women sit on the powerful 25-member Politburo; in business, only about 2% of Chinese women hold managerial roles. 

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Deutsche Welle: Poland's legal framework threatens human rights, says Council of Europe

The Council of Europe, a prominent human rights organization, on Wednesday called on Polish lawmakers and the government to "urgently change course" after analyzing a series of legal measures that endanger human rights in the EU member state.

"Recent far-reaching changes to Poland's legal and institutional framework threaten human rights and undermine the rule of law, on which the protection of human rights ultimately depends," said Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights. [...]

Speaking at a German-Polish business summit in Warsaw, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäub­le touched on the subject of Poland's rule of law, calling on Europe to remain focused on "lessons from our past."

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The Daily Beast: Prince William Graces Cover of Gay Magazine Attitude

However, all that is set to change today, as William graces the cover of the celebrated British gay magazine, Attitude, as part of his campaign against bullying.

The historic issue marks the first time a member of the royal family has been photographed for the cover of a gay magazine. [...]

A Kensington Palace spokesman said: "The Duke of Cambridge is working hard to support the fight against bullying and to help break the stigma around mental health. He has established a taskforce on the prevention of cyberbullying and along with The Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry is leading the Heads Together campaign on mental health and well-being.

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