The Atlantic: 12 Million Extra Votes for Putin's Party

When liberal-rights activist Ella Pamfilova was named the head of Russia’s election commission in March, she promised to clean house and oversee transparent, democratic elections. [...]

However, a statistical analysis of the official preliminary results of the country’s September 18 State Duma elections points to a familiar story: massive fraud in favor of the ruling United Russia party comparable to what independent analysts found in 2007 and 2011.

“The results of the current Duma elections were falsified on the same level as the Duma and presidential elections of 2011, 2008, and 2007, the most falsified elections in post-Soviet history, as far as we can tell,” physicist and data analyst Sergei Shpilkin said to The Atlantic. “By my estimate, the scope of the falsification in favor of United Russia in these elections amounted to approximately 12 million votes.” [...]

Moreover, Shpilkin shows that almost all “extra” votes from polling stations reporting higher-than-average turnout went to United Russia. That is, a party such as ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDPR received virtually the same number of votes from polling stations reporting a turnout of 95 percent as it did from stations reporting turnouts of 65 percent. United Russia, by contrast, received about four times as many at the 95 percent stations. [...]

In addition, Shpilkin’s graph is spiked because there were an improbable number of polling stations at the high end of the turnout scale reporting round-number turnouts ending in 5 or 0, such as 75, 80, or 85 percent. This is a phenomenon Shpilkin and other analysts noted in previous elections and dubbed “Churov’s saw,” after former CEC head Vladimir Churov.

In 2008, Shpilkin estimated that United Russia actually won 277 seats in the Duma instead of the constitutional majority of 315 that it was awarded.

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The Atlantic: Why North Carolina Judges Can Still Refuse to Perform Same-Sex Marriages

North Carolina is one of the only places in the United States where judges can refuse to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies. If magistrates have a religious objection to same-sex marriage, state law says, they can tag themselves out of issuing any marriage licenses, for either gay or straight couples, for at least six months. In the past year, various groups have sued the state over religious accommodations for North Carolina judges. But as two decisions this week show, they haven’t been very successful so far. [...]

Not many states have put laws like this in place, even if legislators have wanted to. North Carolina’s law was passed in June of 2015, shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage to be legal. Some legislatures, like Florida, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Virginia, have introduced similar legislation but have not yet passed it. Others have been thrown out: A sweeping law in Mississippi, for example, created exemptions for judges, along with select exemptions for other people who have religious objections to same-sex marriage or gender-reassignment surgery, but a federal judge blocked it from going into effect in July. The other major state that has taken up this issue is Kentucky, where the Rowan County clerk Kim Davis was jailed for refusing to sign same-sex-marriage licenses or affix her office’s name to the certificates. A law signed in April addressed that issue by removing the requirement that a clerk’s signature or office name be included on marriage licenses.

North Carolina’s judge law doesn’t affect a huge number of public officials: One of the suits alleges that “at least 32 magistrates across North Carolina who had previously performed marriages for opposite-sex couples invoked religious beliefs to recuse themselves.” But it has become a symbol in a much bigger fight. Now that same-sex marriage is legal in the United States, what rights should religious people have to avoid involvement in the ceremonies based on moral objections? Legislatures are also dealing with this question when it comes to other LGBT rights: Less than half of states forbid discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in housing, hiring, and public accommodations, and LGBT advocates are pushing for new legislation in the states where those protections don’t exist.

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FiveThirtyEight: The GOP’s Jewish Donors Are Abandoning Trump

In recent years, Republicans have made inroads into the overwhelmingly Democratic constituency of American Jews. But this year, Republican Jews — or Jewish donors to the Republican party, at least — are abandoning their party’s nominee at a stunningly high rate.

In 2012, 71 percent of the $240 million that Jewish donors gave to the two major-party nominees went to President Obama’s re-election campaign; 29 percent went to Mitt Romney’s campaign, according to our analysis of campaign contributors, which used a predictive model to estimate which donors are Jewish based on their names and other characteristics. This ratio of support mirrors how Jewish voters cast their ballots in 2012.

So far in 2016, of all the money given to major-party candidates by donors who appear to be Jewish, 96 percent has gone to Hillary Clinton and just 4 percent has gone to Donald Trump. [...]

In 2008 and 2012, about 70 to 75 percent of voters identifying as Jewish supported President Obama. A recent poll of Jews suggests that 76 percent of those voting for a major-party candidate are leaning toward Clinton. These numbers make Jews one of the most pro-Democratic constituencies in American politics.

But there are also active constituencies of Republicans, including Orthodox Jews, the majority of whom favor Republicans, as well as Jews who are dissatisfied with Obama’s handling of Israel, though there is overlap between these groups. And as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has moved to align himself with Republicans in the U.S., Jews who are supportive of Netanyahu’s policies in Israel may be following suit.

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Al Jazeera: Ghana: Call to remove Gandhi statue over 'racist views'

A group of Ghanaian academics, students and artists is calling for the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from a university campus, saying that the leader of India's independence movement was racist towards black people.

The statue of Gandhi, who spent 21 years (1893-1914) in South Africa and fought for the rights of Indians living there, was erected at the University of Ghana in mid-June during a visit to the country by India's President Pranab Mukherjee.

In an online petition, professors at the university cited a series of Gandhi's own writings during his time in South Africa to illustrate his "racist identity". [...]

But Ashwin Desai, a sociology professor at the University of Johannesburg and co-author of The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, told Al Jazeera that Gandhi never acknowledged nor appreciated the long struggle of African people against dispossession and "their dragooning into mines" under slave-like conditions.

"There is a misrepresentation of Gandhi by court historians who want to present a largely sanitised and universalist Gandhi; as South Africa's first and foremost anti-apartheid fighter," he said, adding that his racist views towards black people had widely been chronicled.

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Al Jazeera: Honduras: Blood and the Water

In early March 2016, Honduras's most prominent and outspoken environmental activist, Berta Caceres, was killed in her home. While shocking, her murder did not come as a surprise to her colleagues or family.

For years, Caceres had received thousands of threats because of her work, fighting for the rights of indigenous communities and for her attempts to stop a hydro-electric dam from being built on indigenous land.  [...]

Her death is the latest in a string of assassinations that have made Honduras one of the world's most dangerous places for environmental activists.

"Knowing what my mum was fighting for, I always understood that there are dangers because there are bad people, business and powerful economic interests,"  Laura Zuniga, Caceres's daughter says. 

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Business Insider: The wage gap between blacks and whites is the largest since 1979

The report found that black men make 22 percent less money than do white males, while black women make 34.2 percent less.

Factors such as experience, location, and education were controlled for in the report, which also found that the racial wage gap is growing primarily because of discrimination, or "racial differences in skills or worker characteristics that are unobserved or unmeasured in the data." Growing income inequality is also a contributing factor.

Of all the groups evaluated by the EPI, it found that black women with less than 10 years of experience have been affected most by the racial wage gap. It also found that black male college graduates who entered the workforce in 1980 had less than a 10 percent disadvantage compared to white college graduates; today, black male graduates are at approximately an 18 percent disadvantage.

The report found that wage growth has lagged significantly behind productivity growth for everyone except those in the top 5 percent since 1979. For workers in the top 1 percent, wage growth has exceeded productivity growth. And while lagging wage growth has affected workers across all demographics, growth has been even slower for African Americans, compared to white men and women. [...]

While the report also found that the racial wage gap is smaller between women than between men, it notes that this does not necessarily imply that black women do not face as many obstacles as black men, but that the disadvantage they experience may be more associated with the gender pay gap.

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Alternet: Court Rules Black Men May Be Justified in Running From Police

In its Tuesday ruling, the high court determined that police were not justified in stopping Warren. “Lacking any information about facial features, hairstyles, skin tone, height, weight, or other physical characteristics, the victim's description 'contribute nothing to the officers' ability to distinguish the defendant from any other black male' wearing dark clothes and a 'hoodie' in Roxbury," the decision states.

In perhaps its most far-reaching determination, the court then argued that Warren and other black men in Boston may be justified in running from law enforcement, given the city's poor track record with racial profiling:

We do not eliminate flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion analysis whenever a black male is the subject of an investigatory stop. However, in such circumstances, flight is not necessarily probative of a suspect's state of mind or consciousness of guilt. Rather, the finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO [Field Interrogation and Observation] encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. Such an individual, when approached by the police, might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity. Given this reality for black males in the city of Boston, a judge should, in appropriate cases, consider the report's findings in weighing flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus.

The text references a report released two years ago by the Massachusetts ACLU, which found that, while black people make up less than a quarter of the city’s population, they were targeted by 63 percent of all Boston police encounters with civilians between 2007 and 2010.

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Independent: Theresa May committed to introducing the 'Alan Turing Law'

Sources close to the Prime Minister confirmed to The Independent that Ms May's government is “committed” to introducing the legislation, which will effectively act as an apology while the Ministry of Justice added they would “now find the right legislative vehicle to push this through”. [...]

Mr Turing, the Enigma code breaker responsible for decrypting Nazi messages, was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013 – 61 years after he was charged at Manchester police station over homosexual activity.

The pioneering mathematician, whose code-breaking skills are said to have shortened World War Two by two to four years, lost his job with the secret service following a conviction for gross indecency and was forced to undergo chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. Two years later Mr Turing took his own life – and it is estimated that around 49,000 were convicted under similar outdated laws until homosexuality was decriminalised in England in 1967. [...]

It comes after campaigners, and the family of Mr Turing – who according to Winston Churchill “made the single biggest contribution to the allied victory" in World War II – delivered the petition to Downing Street in 2015 before the general election. Public pressure led to the major political parties pledging to right the wrongs of the past and introduce what was dubbed as the 'Alan Turing law', in memory of the Bletchley Park codebreaker.

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Reuters: German government alarmed by rising xenophobia in east

"Right-wing extremism in all its forms poses a very serious threat for the social and economic development of the new states," Iris Gleicke, the federal government's commissioner for eastern German affairs, said, referring to the five states that comprised Communist East Germany from 1945 to 1990.

Germany recorded 1,408 violent acts carried out by rightist supporters last year, a rise of more than 42 percent from 2014, and 75 arson attacks on refugee shelters, up from five a year earlier, according to an annual report by the BfV domestic intelligence agency published in June.

Attacks were more frequent in east German states. There were 58.7 cases of far right-motivated violence per 1 million inhabitants in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern last year, compared to the average of 10.5 cases in west German states, the report said.

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