FiveThirtyEight: The World Isn’t Less Free Than It Used To Be

People on Earth were on average about as free at the start of 2016 as they were a year earlier, and the average global resident remained much freer than at almost any time in modern history. [...]

But what does the group mean by “free”? Since the early 1970s, Freedom House has assessed freedom in countries along two dimensions: political rights and civil liberties. To measure political rights, it considers how a government is chosen, how well it functions and how citizens participate in those processes. To measure civil liberties, the group assesses the extent of freedoms of speech, assembly, association and conscience, along with the rule of law. Each year, in-house analysts and expert advisers score nearly 200 countries on more than two dozen questions, and those scores are combined and compared to determine how freedom is changing within countries. [...]

When we consider the freedom of the average person instead of the average country by accounting for these differences in population size, the result we get is heavily influenced by trends in political rights and civil liberties in the relatively small group of very big countries. The plot below shows annual freedom scores for the world’s 10 largest countries since 2002. These scores are the averages of rescaled versions of the raw political rights and civil liberties data, which Freedom House has only published from 2002 onward, instead of the coarser seven-point scales on which the previous chart was based. [...]

That statistic is of questionable value, however, because it arguably focuses on the wrong unit of analysis. When we switch to a lens that considers the status of individual humans instead of the countries they inhabit, we find only a slight decline in freedom over the past decade. A lot of awful things have happened around the world in the past few years, but a sharp decline in the political rights and civil liberties enjoyed by the average person is not one of them.

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FiveThirtyEight: Releasing Drug Offenders Won’t End Mass Incarceration

It’s been a landmark week in the criminal-justice world, as a barnstorming President Obama pushed for broad reforms to the sentencing system and called for an end to mass incarceration. (The U.S. has roughly 5 percent of the world’s population, but a quarter of its prison population.) On Monday he commuted the sentences of 46 federal drug offenders. On Tuesday he addressed the NAACP’s national conference, delivering a sobering and expansive speech with a list of proposed reforms. And on Thursday he became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. [...]

But let’s have some international context. Even in that extreme hypothetical situation, the U.S. would still be an incarceration outlier. Even without its many inmates who are convicted of drug charges, the U.S. still leads the world in imprisoning people. Next is the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a rate of 542 per 100,000 people, followed by Turkmenistan at 522 and Cuba at 510. Russia’s rate is 463. (See the bottom of this post for the full list of international incarceration rates. The international data is from the International Centre for Prison Studies, and I’ve restricted the list to countries with a population of at least 100,000.) [...]

Locking up drug offenders is only part of the larger story behind mass incarceration. Other reasons for the high rates include the severity of nondrug sentencing, the attitudes of judges and prosecutors, a high rate of violent crime such as murder, and rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s. “The increase in U.S. incarceration rates over the past 40 years is preponderantly the result of increases both in the likelihood of imprisonment and in lengths of prison sentences,” the National Research Council wrote in a report last year.

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Deutsche Welle: Poland marks 70 years since Kielce pogrom against Holocaust survivors

Polish President Andrzej Duda has led commemorations to honor the victims of a post-war massacre of Jews in the city of Kielce, south of Warsaw. Duda used the pogrom's 70th anniversary to condemn all forms of racism. [...]

At least 42 Polish Holocaust survivors were bludgeoned to death and dozens more were injured in the Kielce pogrom. According to the Washington-based United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it constituted the worst anti-Semitic attack in postwar Poland. [...]

In the past, leading members of Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party, including Duda, have made contradictory statements on matters of prejudice and xenophobia. The conservative party took a strong anti-migrant stance during the election campaign that saw them clinch power late last year. During that time, party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski accused refugees of carrying "parasites and protozoa" to Europe. In recent months, however, both Duda and Kaczynski have strongly condemned xenophobia and anti-Semitism at a number of events.

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The Telegraph: Ruth Davidson: Next PM should not block Scottish independence referendum

Ruth Davidson has said that she would advise the next Prime Minister not to block a request by Nicola Sturgeon for a second independence referendum in the wake of the vote for Brexit.

The Scottish Tory leader said it was “incredibly premature” and “destabilising” for the First Minister to press for a rerun of the 2014 vote, but she had never thought that one should be denied because she is a “democrat”. [...]

It is hugely significant as it makes it even more difficult for the next Prime Minister to refuse a rerun. Sources close to the Scottish Tory leader argued that doing so would provoke a massive public backlash in Scotland that could further drive up support for separation. [...]

A series of opinion polls conducted since the Brexit result was announced show support for independence has just tipped over the 50 per cent mark.  Alex Salmond said there had been a “seismic movement in opinion.”

But Ms Davidson argued that Scots would be faced with an “utterly, utterly different” series of questions compared to 2014, including a choice between leaving their second biggest export market in the form of the EU or the UK, which is more than four times larger.

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Politico: Netanyahu vs. the Generals

But Netanyahu doesn’t seem to be going anywhere; instead it is Israel’s former generals, like Barak, who are being marginalized while the longest-running prime minister in the Jewish state’s history consolidates his power. Barak wasn't speaking only for himself when he attacked Netanyahu in such strong language. Over the past few months, the top news story in Israel has been the right-wing prime minister's tectonic power struggle with Israel's security establishment. One after the other, Israel's top security chiefs and military leaders have criticized Netanyahu's flagship policies and warned about the direction in which he is leading the country, typically over his refusal to engage in talks with the Palestinians and his push for military action against Iran. [...]

The Jewish state's top generals, spymasters and intelligence chiefs have been the fiercest and most outspoken critics of Netanyahu’s policies over the years; unlike in most Western democracies, where the military is usually considered more hawkish than the civilian leadership, in Netanyahu's Israel, it's usually been the other way around. Out of the 17 most senior security and intelligence chiefs who have worked directly with Netanyahu during his time in office, no fewer than 13 have strongly criticized his flagship policies or the direction in which he is leading the country (of the four that haven't, two are currently still in office). [...]

The roots of the disagreements between Netanyahu and the security establishment can be found in the prime minister’s dismal and pessimistic view of the world. Netanyahu sees military might as the only possible tool to keep his country safe. Most of Israel's security chiefs, on the other hand, envision Israel as a country that derives its strength from arms, but also seeks benefits from diplomacy and peacemaking, when possible. As Ehud Barak explained in his speech, “If you put in one room all the living former heads of the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the Israel Defense Forces, more than 90 percent of them would say that it's simpler to protect Israel from a border that assures our security interests next to a Palestinian state, than to protect a ‘greater Israel’ with millions of Palestinians living under its control. [...]

The Israeli public was exposed to the security establishment's frustration in early November 1996, when the country commemorated the first anniversary of Rabin's murder. The military held its main memorial event at a large concert hall in Tel Aviv, and Lipkin-Shahak was the prime speaker. Standing before thousands of officers and soldiers, he stated that he will “speak directly to Yitzhak today,” and then unloaded. “Yitzhak, it’s been a very hard year since you left us,” he said. “Polarization, hedonism, sectarianism and opportunism have reached the heart of our national consensus, while the IDF has been turned into a punching bag.” Lipkin-Shahak didn't mention Netanyahu by name—there was no need to. Everyone understood exactly what he was talking about. As one senior Mossad operative who was in the crowd recalls, "the air had the smell of a military coup.

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