Slate: Obama’s New Medical Marijuana Policy Could Lead to Federal Legalization

Starting Thursday, the federal government will take a new approach to medical marijuana research: The government will allow new research institutions to grow marijuana and conduct clinical studies with the plant, after years of allowing only the University of Mississippi to conduct marijuana research. Even though the Drug Enforcement Administration is not loosening legal restrictions on marijuana, this is actually a pretty big step toward a more compassionate and science-based approach to cannabis after decades of rigid prohibition.

Although a majority of Americans support legalizing marijuana, the Obama administration has been surprisingly reluctant to ease federal restrictions. (His Justice Department has allowed states to experiment with legalization, but it still prosecutes growers and users sporadically.) Cannabis is currently listed as a Schedule I drug, along with substances like heroin. That means that under federal standards, the plant is one of “the most dangerous drugs” and has “no currently accepted medical use.” [...]

By changing the monopoly system on marijuana research, the Obama administration could finally jump-start this long-stalled process. The few reliable studies we do have on marijuana are extraordinarily encouraging: Cannabis appears to be useful in treating arthritis, cancer, chronic pain, anxiety, depression, glaucoma, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s. But the research arguably remains thin enough to allow the federal government to maintain marijuana’s Schedule I status. Until now, this Catch-22 has kept medical marijuana research largely frozen: In order to do research on the drug’s medical benefits, scientists needed access to it; in order to gain access, they had to prove it was medically beneficial. As of Thursday, that loop is no more, and when the results of the news studies begin rolling in, the DEA may feel compelled to take a harder look at marijuana’s proven benefits—and legal status.

read the article 

Business Insider: Half of US jobs could be taken by robots in the next 20 years — here's how likely it is that yours will be one of them

They used data from a recent study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, which found that about 47% of total US employment is at risk of being replaced by machines over the next two decades."

A material shift in the composition of the labour force would result as demand for low skilled labour remains robust as many personal in-person services are not yet replaceable by machines," according to the Morgan Stanley team. 

read the article 

Vox: Why Israel’s Defense Ministry compared the Iran nuclear deal to appeasing Hitler

Henry Kissinger once quipped that “Israel has no foreign policy, only a domestic political system.” Avigdor Lieberman, the new defense minister, has apparently taken this adage to heart: Everything, it seems, is subservient to his own politics, including Israel’s relationship with the United States.

Lieberman was brought into Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, and named as defense minister just over two months ago under contentious circumstances. “Delusional,” an “insult” to the army, and a manifestation of a “budding fascism” within Israeli society were just some of the political reactions to his appointment. [...]

Yet, since taking up the defense ministry portfolio, Lieberman had actually shown a pragmatic and professional approach to the business of running the most powerful military in the Middle East. The controversy surrounding Lieberman’s initial appointment had, prior to last week’s statement, ebbed. [...]

Perhaps the weirdest aspect of the Defense Ministry statement is that Lieberman himself hadn’t previously made the Iran nuclear deal a major political issue — not as a member of the opposition and a fierce government critic, and not in the few months since he became defense minister. Criticism of the deal was usually left to Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who in the past has described the deal in language not much different than that in the Defense Ministry statement.

read the article 

The New York Times: Gay and Lesbian High School Students Report ‘Heartbreaking’ Levels of Violence

The survey documents what smaller studies have suggested for years, but it is significant because it is the first time the federal government’s biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the gold-standard of adolescent health data collection, looked at sexual identity. The survey found that about 8 percent of the high school population describe themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, which would be 1.3 million students.

These children were three times more likely than straight students to have been raped. They skipped school far more often because they did not feel safe: at least a third had been bullied on school property. And they were twice as likely as heterosexual students to have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property.

More than 40 percent of these students reported they had seriously considered suicide, and 29 percent had made attempts in the year before they took the survey. The percentage of those who use various illegal drugs was many times greater than heterosexual peers. While 1.3 percent of straight students said they had used heroin, for example, 6 percent of the gay, lesbian and bisexual students reported having done so.

read the article 

The Atlantic: Europe's History of Terror

France and the rest of Europe have endured this near state-of-siege before. Older Europeans can recall a time when communists, nationalists, anarchists, Islamists, and international criminals wrought havoc on the continent. Palestinian terrorists shattered the harmony of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, taking hostage and murdering 11 Israeli athletes. Italian communists kidnapped and murdered a former prime minister in 1978. In 1988, Libyan terrorists brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, warring Palestinian factions and Iranian revolutionaries turned Europe into a battleground for settling internal feuds and assassinating enemies, opening fire on the Rome check-in counter for the Israeli airline El Al, and hijacking planes. In France itself, an Algerian Islamist group that had fought the Algerian government during the civil war in 1991 bombed Paris metro stations, a Jewish school, and L’Arc de Triomphe. Hezbollah, as part of its declared aim to expel any French or American presence from Lebanon, conducted at least five bombings on French soil between 1985 and 1986. Armenian terrorists, seeking vengeance for the Armenian Genocide, struck the Orly airport in 1983, killing at least five people. [...]

But the lessons of TREVI seem not to have stuck. Across the continent, security agencies are once again starting to communicate and share information. For the most part.  Josef Janning, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and long-time expert on European policy and global affairs, said that the new slate of threats is “something Europeans are ready to live with as a fact of life.” Since the coordinated attacks by ISIS in November, French secret service officers have launched their own operations in Brussels, the nerve center for the November plot and home to many of its attackers. But officials have stopped short of sharing everything they’ve uncovered with the Belgians, Janning said. [...]

In the past, local informants and amnesty programs worked with law enforcement and intelligence officials to root out militants, helping bring down groups like the Red Brigades, a left-wing Italian militia. Modern terror cells would be dismantled in the same way that underground organized crime rings are, Janning said, with law enforcement drilling down into communities and neighborhoods and working their local connections to gather intelligence. Ideologies would need to be combatted in classrooms and online chatrooms. Agencies, he said, would need to talk to each other to track the movement of people, goods, and weapons, across districts, cities, and borders. But this all remains a work in progress.

read the article 

Los Angeles Times: Battle over women praying at Jerusalem's Western Wall continues as compromise stalls

In recent months, tensions over women’s prayer have been escalating, and a compromise aimed at ending the dispute has stalled. Under the deal approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet in January, Women of the Wall and liberal Jewish denominations would be given a new prayer space at a nearby spot along the Western Wall. However, the government hasn’t started implementing the compromise and ultra-Orthodox parties oppose it.  [...]

The dispute over women’s prayer at Western Wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, has roiled relations between Netanyahu — who relies on ultra-Orthodox religious parties to stabilize his coalition — and religiously liberal Diaspora Jews who complain that Israel’s conservative government is impeding religious freedom at Judaism’s most revered prayer site. [...]

The Jewish Agency, a nonprofit group promoting Jewish immigration to Israel, which helped broker the Western Wall compromise after three years of negotiations, warned in a statement that failure to provide a space for pluralist prayer at the wall would have “far-reaching implications” for Israel-Diaspora ties.

Tensions over religion and state in Israel stretch back to the country’s founding, when Israel’s secular founders promised to defer to Orthodox Jewish leaders on public Jewish ritual, marriage and Sabbath observance in order to secure their support for the new state. 

read the article 

The Washington Post: Flying while Muslim is not a crime

Muslim passengers are escorted off U.S.-based airlines with alarming frequency these days, and while the circumstances of each incident vary, there is also a sameness to them. More often than not, someone on the plane — a seatmate, a passenger a few rows away, a flight attendant — feels “uncomfortable.” The trigger for that discomfort is a passenger who looks or seems to be from a Muslim-majority country (even if the person happens to be Italian). And the outcome, as far as is generally known, is a bland statement from the airline setting forth its policy of nondiscrimination. [...]

That small sampling of recent senselessness raises the question of whether airline employees are getting the message from management that discrimination based on race, religion or national origin is unacceptable and illegal. If any airline employees have been disciplined for having mishandled passengers — either by indulging the prejudices of some or training groundless suspicions at others — the airlines aren’t saying.

To the contrary, it’s fair to ask, as advocacy groups representing American Muslims have done, if the airlines, with a wink and a nod, are tolerating the occasional ugly and unjustified conduct of some employees and passengers. The unfortunate truth is that, in the absence of no-nonsense enforcement policies by the airlines, deplorable acts of profiling are likely to proliferate. It’s up to the airlines to ensure that blameless passengers can travel freely, without fear of harassment, removal or reckless accusations.

read the article