Deutsche Welle: Germany: Crime rate drops, but fear rises

"Steepest decline of crime in 25 years," [...]

"It's crazy," he said. "Not a night goes by without some sort of crime movie on TV. We're being flooded with murder and homicide." [...]

According to the criminologist, Germany is currently going through a process that every migrant nation experiences when a lot of immigrants arrive at once. "It's a phase of insecurity because humans have learned for millennia that foreigners could be dangerous."

The sense of insecurity is especially high in large cities, where the proportion of immigrants has increased significantly in recent years. The reason, Pfeiffer said, wasn't an actual rise in crime, but "a perceived loss of "Heimat."

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Reuters: In India, boy victims of sex crimes don't get talked about

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government last month introduced the death penalty for rape of girls below 12 and increased the minimum punishment for those whose victims were under 16, after the rapes of an eight-year-old girl and a young woman in two states ruled by his party led to public protests. [...]

"I have interacted with adult male survivors and social workers who have cited police hostility, ridicule and even lack of trust when it comes to believing that a boy was sexually abused," she said. "The most common perception dished out to male survivors is that they may have enjoyed it."

The Mumbai police investigating the boy's rape, however, said officers are regularly trained on how to handle sexual abuse of children of both genders. The federal government is also running workshops for police that cover all children, said Stuti Kacker, head of the government's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, which advises on child-related policies. [...]

A 2007 survey by the ministry of women and child development, which sampled 12,447 children in families, schools, at work and living on the street, found that more than half had faced sexual abuse, and 53 percent of victims were boys. For the capital Delhi, the figure was 60 percent. [...]

An unidentified father who was resistant to psychological care for his nine-year-old son after he had been raped, was quoted by the journal as saying: "He neither lost a hymen nor will get pregnant. He should behave like a man, not a sissy."

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The Guardian: Trump's decision on Iran is not as black and white as it seems

The US decision on Iran is often seen in Manichean terms of whether Trump pulls out of the agreement or not. This is partly because Trump, unlike his predecessor, does not believe his political base warms to nuance. A president who communicates in 280 characters does not trade in shades of grey. [...]

He says it is possible for the EU to pass legislation stating that any US sanctions on European entities trading with Iran are null and void. The EU did much the same in protest at the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act passed by the US Congress in 1996. The EU passed a blocking statute, arguing as a matter of principle that it was wrong for the US to impose sanctions that had an extra-territorial effect.

But this is largely uncharted territory. It would broaden an EU-US foreign policy dispute into a transatlantic economic confrontation. Only EU banks with no interests in the US are likely to take the risk that the bloc can protect them from massive fines imposed by the US Treasury. The residual anti-Iran sanctions currently in force have already put a chill on nervous EU companies from trading with Iran. [...]

Europe’s chances of acting as an honest broker between Trump and Iran also depend on moderates holding sway in Tehran. Nephew said: “[The Iranian president, Hassan] Rouhani is already starting to take an awful lot of heat for the technocrat who failed, technically.

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Scene On Radio SeeingWhite: That’s Not Us, So We’re Clean

When it comes to America’s racial sins, past and present, a lot of us see people in one region of the country as guiltier than the rest. Host John Biewen spoke with some white Southern friends about that tendency. Part Six of our ongoing series, Seeing White. With recurring guest, Chenjerai Kumanyika.

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The Huffington Post: What Karl Marx Got Right -- And One Big Thing He Got Wrong

The postwar boom, rather than being a permanent refutation of Marx, was more like a fortunate historical blip — when the stars were aligned to regulate capitalism in a broad public interest. But one bad decade, the 1970s, was sufficient to restore both capitalists and the ideology of raw, free-market capitalism to their usual power — despite the verdict of history that raw capitalism keeps generating needless economic catastrophe. [...]

The postwar boom seemed to prove Keynes right. But one of Keynes’ lesser-known colleagues, the Polish-born economist Michal Kalecki, who located himself somewhere between Keynes and Marx, offered the following rebuttal: Even if it were possible as a matter of economics to harness a basically capitalist system to serve the broad mass of people, as a matter of politics the capitalist class would never let policymakers do it. [...]

This is not to say that Marx was entirely correct, however. He got one big thing wrong. Touchingly, he imagined that as capitalism became more and more destructive, the workers of the world would unite.

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