Quartz: Data from Texas show that US-born Americans commit more rape and murder than immigrants

Immigrants’ conviction rates are lower than those of natives across a wide range of crimes, including sexual assault and homicide—two types of attacks that Trump has associated with immigrants.

Undocumented immigrants made up about 6.4% of the Texas population in 2015, but accounted for 5.4% of homicide convictions, according to the Cato study. US-born Texas residents, meanwhile, made up 83% of the state’s population, but 93% of homicide convictions.

Conviction rates for sexual assault are also slightly higher for natives than for undocumented immigrants—and much higher when compared to immigrants in the US legally.

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The Guardian: Trump’s presidency is unravelling. But he won’t fall without a push

While all this was going on, voters in south-west Pennsylvania’s 18th district went to the polls in a byelection, in a district Republicans have held for the past 15 years. It was so safe that Democrats didn’t even bother contesting the last two elections. Trump trounced Hillary Clinton there by about 20 points. It should have been a shoo-in for the Republicans. By the end of the night Democrats were celebrating a wafer-thin victory, though this may yet be challenged. [...]

But the problem is not simply that things will get worse. It’s that it’s not at all obvious that, electorally at least, there’s a clear sense of what “better” would look like, beyond getting rid of Trump. Politically the country is clearly shifting leftwards. The nationwide walkouts of schoolchildren against gun violence on Wednesday, the women’s marches and teachers’ strikes, all suggest a swelling resistance to the Trump agenda. Pennsylvania is just the latest evidence that this has had an electoral impact. [...]

Conor Lamb’s victory in Pennsylvania was a progressive advance insofar as it was a setback for Trump. That’s great as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. He was introduced at one rally as a “God-fearing, union-supporting, gun-owning, job-protecting, pension-defending, social-security-believing, healthcare-greeting, sending-drug-dealers-to-jail Democrat”. That, arguably, is what you have to be to get elected in south-west Pennsylvania. But nationally Democrats need a more hopeful message with a broader appeal.

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Social Europe: The Three Mistakes Of Centrism

But doesn’t Corbyn’s victory mean that the UK today needs centrists, because we have not just got a Conservative government, which has morphed into UKIP, but also an opposition led by the hard left? Here is Philip Stephens attacking the Labour leadership peddling snake oil populism of the left variety. If you search my blog you will see that I normally think Stephens gets things right, but I think there are three major problems with this diagnosis of where we are. [...]

But why wasn’t the 2017 manifesto like 1983, given the current Labour leadership? The answer leads us to the second mistake many centrists make: to imagine that any leader from the hard left can impose their will on a soft left parliamentary party. Stephens mentions this, but it is far more central than he suggests. Labour will be extremely lucky to get an overall majority at the next election, and even if they do there are plenty of MPs that will happily vote against their government the moment that Corbyn and McDonnell overstep the centre left mark. Give them 20 years and it is possible to imagine that they might be able to create a PLP more in their image, but they do not have 20 years and those who follow will be from a different generation with different reference points.

There is a third mistake which is in some ways the most important. I cannot beat Anthony Barnett’s way of expressing it: if all you want to do is stop Brexit and Trump and go back to what you regard as normal, you miss that what was normal led to Brexit and Trump. It all goes back to austerity. Even if you like aspects of neoliberalism, as centrists surely do, what happened with austerity and the scapegoating of immigrants is what I describe as neoliberal overreach. It was overreach not just because it was wrong and immensely destructive, but it laid the grounds for Brexit.

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Jacobin Magazine: Defending Afrin

But Kurds in Turkey have mounted considerable resistance to this process since the foundation of the Turkish nation state — be it in form of regional rebellions in the early years of the republic, attempts at participating in civil politics after the introduction of the multi-party system, or with the formation of an armed liberation movement, the PKK. Finally, the emergence of the HDP, an umbrella for anti-establishment left-wing parties and organizations with a focus on women’s liberation and the Kurdish question, marked a significant shift in combating state-led Kurdophobia in Turkey. Not only was 2015 a year where the HDP’s vision of a radically democratized Turkey found an electorate and denied Erdoğan the absolute majority he needed for his attempts to establish authoritarianism through constitutional amendments. But also, on the other side of the Syrian-Turkish border, the resistance of Kobanê against the darkness of the so-called Islamic State (IS) echoed across the world. This resistance explicitly exposed the foreign policy of the Erdoğan government, forcing its alliance with jihadist militias to become public. [...]

After the two-day meeting, a declaration was made that expressed the Rojavan and Northern Syrian people’s will to not engage in the establishment of national independence in the classical sense. The declaration proposed a federative system as part of the wider conflict resolution. Grassroots democracy, women’s liberation, and a full representation of all groups in society organized in a council system were determined as the constitutive principles of the new social contract. In September 2017 the first federal elections were held in the Democratic Federation Northern Syria-Rojava, with co-chairs of 3,700 communes across the three cantons being elected, followed by local councils in November and an assembly in January. Grassroots democracy was developed out of the ashes of war. [...]

Russia was also prepared to authorize Turkey’s military intervention because there is a Russian-Western competition for good relations with Turkey. Russia has an interest in breaking Turkey out of the Western bloc, and in the long term, placing it in its sphere of interest. Western countries want to keep Turkey a member of the NATO family, hence its strategic rapprochement with Russia, which Erdoğan repeatedly references, does not sit well with the United States.

No wonder then that the West has decided to tolerate Turkish aggression in northern Syria. With the exception of France, although perhaps here only in the role of a fig-leaf, no government has explicitly taken a stance against Turkey’s breach of international law and crimes against humanity. Not to mention against Turkey’s outspoken cooperation with the ideological inheritors of Al-Qaeda. The United States tried to disassociate itself from the Canton of Afrin in attributing influence over the region to the Russians. However, they continue to find themselves in a difficult situation, as Erdoğan has already announced he will pursue an attack on Menbic, an area where US soldiers are stationed, once Afrin is “done.”

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FiveThirtyEight: These Researchers Have Been Trying To Stop School Shootings For 20 Years

It’s difficult to say definitively how many school shootings have happened in the years since Columbine — or in the years before it. It’s harder still to prove how many would-be shootings were averted, or how many others could have been if additional steps had been taken. But the people who have spent the last two decades trying to understand this phenomenon are still here, and still trying to sell politicians and the public on possible solutions that are complicated, expensive and tough to sum up in a sound bite.

Any research into school shootings is made more difficult by how uncommon such shootings are. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight wrote about the more than 33,000 people killed by guns in America every year. Of those deaths, roughly one-third — about 12,000 — are homicides, but hardly any are due to mass shootings.1 If you define mass shootings as as an event where a lone attacker indiscriminately kills four or more people, in a public place, unrelated gang activity or robbery, then mass shootings account for a tiny portion of all gun homicides — probably a fraction of a percent. [...]

Randazzo found that the project’s findings echoed what she was learning about school shootings. For instance, the Secret Service had once focused its energy on threats made by people with a history of violent crime or who had a mental illness that caused them to act irrationally. But the Exceptional Case Study Project analysis showed that most people who actually carry out attacks didn’t meet either of those criteria. Instead, a better way to figure out who was a really a threat was to talk to friends, family and coworkers — most attackers had discussed their plans with other people. [...]

But those systems seem to break down over time. Randazzo told me that her team had trained numerous school districts in school shooting prevention back in the early 2000s and, as of this year, many of those districts no longer had prevention systems in place. Thanks to staff turnover and budget reprioritization, that institutional knowledge simply withered away. And ironically, that happens precisely because school shootings are so rare. “It takes time and effort for a school to create a team and get training,” Randazzo said. “And, fortunately, threatening behavior doesn’t happen often enough” to spur schools to action.

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