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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Salon: The deep roots of “white trash” in America: “Not only are we not a post-racial society, we are certainly not a post-class society”

Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash” begins by looking at the characters in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Both the book and the movie play with the divide between Atticus Finch, who is saintly and proper, and the poor white family, the Ewells, whose daughter’s false rape accusation is at the story’s center, as an example that there are two kinds of white people in the South. The book has been on Isenberg’s curriculum for 15 years, as part of a history class called “Crime, Conspiracy, and Courtroom Dramas,” which she teaches at Louisiana State University. [...]

I became interested in figuring out the language: how do Americans talk about the poor? And then I realized that this is connected to the larger problem Americans have about class, that they believe a myth. We are told over and over again by writers, sometimes journalists, but mainly politicians, that we are an exceptional country, that we embrace the American dream. And what’s that rooted to this idea that we believe in social mobility. And we think that that idea, that promise, goes all the way back to the American revolution, that at that moment we broke free from the British system and that somehow we unburdened ourselves from the English class system. Now this is a problem that Americans have – they often prefer the myth over reality. [...]

One of the other really strange things that I think we’ve forgotten about the way in which race and class get intertwined. If you look at the embrace of social Darwininsm and evolutionary theory, and again this is building on the old ideas of animal husbandry, that you can breed people the way you breed dogs, there is the idea that poor whites are evolutionarily backward, they are unevolved people. And this particularly gets attached to those who live in Appalachia, the hillbilly. At the end of the 19th century there’s an attempt to recover these people as a kind of purer Anglo Saxon, that they have been protected from being corrupted. But the dominant theme is that they have not evolved at all. 

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