The Guardian: Leaked TTIP energy proposal could 'sabotage' EU climate policy

A leak obtained by the Guardian shows that the EU will propose a rollback of mandatory energy savings measures, and major obstacles to any future pricing schemes designed to encourage the uptake of renewable energies.

Environmental protections against fossil fuel extraction, logging and mining in the developing world would also come under pressure from articles in the proposed energy chapter.

Paul de Clerck, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth Europe, said the leaked document: “is in complete contradiction with Europe’s commitments to tackle climate change. It will flood the EU market with inefficient appliances, and consumers and the climate will foot the bill. The proposal will also discourage measures to promote renewable electricity production from wind and solar.” [...]

The Green MEP Claude Turmes said: “These proposals are completely unacceptable. They would sabotage EU legislators’ ability to privilege renewables and energy efficiency over unsustainable fossil fuels. This is an attempt to undermine democracy in Europe.”

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AP: NAFTA a sore spot for some Democrats on Clinton in Michigan

Bernie Sanders beat her in the state's Democratic primary by railing against the North American Free Trade Agreement. Republican Donald Trump is more popular with Michigan's working-class white voters than past GOP candidates, and has pledged to back out of the treaty that some blame for the loss of countless Rust Belt jobs.

While Clinton's history of supporting free trade may not cost her the state, it is costing campaign staff and money to defend its 16 electoral votes. [...]

Hillary Clinton supports renegotiating NAFTA, signed in 1992 and in effect since 1994, with Canada and Mexico. She also has said she opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious agreement with Asian nations. [...]

A solid third of union members typically vote Republican in presidential elections. But Clinton's advantage among union members in surveys over Trump is the same as Obama's was over Arizona Sen. John McCain at the same point in the 2008 campaign, said Michael Podhorzer, political director with the American Federation of Labor.

He acknowledges Trump is stronger than past GOP nominees, at least with nonunion, working-class whites.

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FiveThirtyEight: Science Won’t Settle The Mammogram Debate

If you’re a woman living in the U.K., the National Health Service will invite you to come in for mammography screening for breast cancer every three years from age 50 through 69.1 In Australia, women ages 50 through 74 are advised to undergo screening every two years. Women in Uruguay ages 40 to 59 are obliged to get mandatory mammograms every two years, and in Austria, women are told, “Participation is entirely up to you!” [...]

All of these guidelines claim to be “evidence-based,” yet they differ on when women should start getting mammograms and how often they should be screened.

How could these expert scientific panels look at virtually the same evidence and come to different conclusions? The answer is that the evidence offers only a starting point. Studies provide statistics, but it’s up to researchers to interpret them. What a group chooses to accept as evidence will shape its conclusions, and the way the ACS and USPSTF panels considered and weighed the studies on mammography led them to disparate recommendations. [...]

Underneath the debate about at which age and at what frequency we should urge women to get mammograms, another important question looms: Is it reasonable to recommend a test that will produce false positives for something like half of the people who take it? Is it OK to risk harming hundreds of women in hopes of helping a handful avert a breast cancer death? The ACS and USPSTF have concluded yes, but that’s a value judgment, not a scientific one.

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Salon: There will be another Trump: His views alienate some, but the ideas behind them represent every American’s worst fears

Writing off Trump might be presumptuous at this point, especially since the media and other experts missed almost every salient facet of Trump’s seemingly improbable rise. Yet even if his campaign encounters electoral bankruptcy in November, the specter of another Trumpian figure emerging in the future remains highly probable. [...]

“The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about ‘globalists’ and — odious, stupid term — ‘the Establishment,’ but nobody did this to them,” Williamson wrote. “They failed themselves.”

Did they? Or did the people for whom they voted fail them? Starting with Ronald Reagan and continuing through the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, recent presidents of both political parties arguably have championed America’s globalizing business interests over those of its workers. [...]

The real danger is that the Democrats will win a runaway victory in November and fail to heed any of the lessons behind Trump’s rise. With Clinton’s campaign actively wooing disaffected Republicans, chances are considerable that the populist strands of both Trump and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns will receive little lip service. “If Hillary Clinton goes for the Republican support,” remarked longtime journalist Robert Scheer, “she will not be better. And then four years from now what Trump represents will be stronger.” Paul Ryan’s doubling down on austerity politics — the same ones thoroughly rejected by Republican voters in the primaries — will add fuel to the fire.

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The New York Times: Hillary Clinton, as Seen Through a Chinese Prism

As China looks ahead to a new American administration, opinions on the front-running Mrs. Clinton veer from admiration, mostly among women and civil libertarians, to distaste, mostly among male policy makers and an often nationalistic public.

Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has his critics in China, too, but his brand of shock-populism attracts more vocal support in a society where a woman has never sat in the inner circle of power, the Standing Committee of the Communist Party’s Politburo.

Still, China’s leaders would rather see Mrs. Clinton in the White House than the “volatile” Mr. Trump, said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing and an adviser to the State Council, China’s cabinet. [...]

For Chinese policy makers, that familiarity may offer limited comfort.

Although Mrs. Clinton is seen as having pushed for stronger Chinese-United States ties at the beginning of her tenure in 2009 as President Obama’s secretary of state, and is credited in China with facilitating an annual dialogue between top Chinese and American officials, she also angered Beijing by pressing for “the pivot,” Mr. Shi said. This rebalancing of United States power toward the Asia-Pacific region, in response to China’s growing assertiveness, was seen as an effort to “contain” a rising China, and it rankled some top officials.

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NBC News: Democrats Advance Most Progressive Platform in Party History

The draft platform, which still needs to be ratified at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia later this month, showed Sanders' clear influence, even though he lost a battle on his top priority, opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. [...]

The document goes further left than Clinton's position on a number of issues, with Sanders policy director Warren Gunnells saying his campaign achieved "at least 80 percent" of what they came for. "I think if you read the platform right now, you will understand that the political revolution is alive and kicking," he said. [...]

Clinton won the nomination and now effectively controls the party, but it was Sanders who drove the process in Orlando. While many questioned his decision to stay in the primary race long after losing the nomination, none of the progress of his ideas on the platform would have happened if he had dropped out.

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Independent: Barack Obama attacks Polish democracy in a speech... Polish TV changes speech

Obama’s tough message Friday, standing alongside Polish President Andrzej Duda, was that he “expressed to President Duda our concerns over certain actions and the impasse around the Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.” [...]

But viewers of Telewizja Polska, the main public broadcaster, saw a very different suggestion on the evening news.

“Ninety-five percent of the meeting was about issues of NATO and security, but Obama praised Polish efforts at democracy,” the reporter said. “Concerning the issue of the constitutional tribunal, he said he is sure that spreading democratic values in Poland will not stop.”

Then the broadcaster played a clip of Obama’s friendly cushioning of his criticism, while skipping the substance of the message. [...]

More than 100 journalists have been dismissed or have resigned from Poland’s public broadcaster this year, a measure of the major changes underway there. Some journalists say that anyone perceived as critical of the Law and Justice party is now under threat. Shortly after the party took office, it changed laws giving Poland’s Finance Ministry the direct power to appoint the head of the broadcaster. The new head is Jacek Kurski, a member of the Law and Justice party and a former member of European Parliament.

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VICE: The Legal and Ethical Ramifications of Letting Police Kill Suspects With Robots

State laws generally allow law enforcement to legally use lethal force against a suspect if he or she poses an “imminent threat” to the officer or other innocent parties, which is underscored by a standard of whether the force is “proportional and necessary.” A 1985 Supreme Court case called Tennessee v. Garner allows for deadly force if a fleeing suspect poses “a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

Does the means of killing matter for that legal standard? In this case, probably not, according to several legal experts I spoke to. The bomb disposal robot that turned into an improvised remotely triggered killing machine wasn’t autonomous and can, in this instance, be looked at as a tool that was used to diminish the threat suspect Micah Johnson posed to Dallas police officers. [...]

“There’s a road we’re starting to go down here … by taking a robot originally designed to disarm bombs and using it to blow people up, the Dallas Police end up reconfiguring the realm of what is possible,” he continued. “And, as we have seen by their response, expanding the arsenal of possibility in this way makes it easier to recalibrate the calculus regarding which actions are necessary. Very quickly the argument moves from 'we can use a robot to blow him up' to 'we saw no other option but to use our bomb robot.’”

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