Politico: Belgium’s identity crisis isn’t about migration

The gamble Michel is making, therefore, isn’t so much about domestic policy as it is about Belgium’s credibility in Europe. It’s about choosing its camp: either among the cheerleaders of Europe and liberalism, like Emmanuel Macron, or among the populist opportunists, like Viktor Orbán and Sebastian Kurz. [...]

The road ahead is still uncertain. For now, he still holds the keys to Rue de la Loi 16, the official seat of the Belgian government. A new minority Cabinet will replace his old team. He’ll take his jet to Marrakech, where he’ll join other leaders in signing the U.N.’s Global Compact for Migration — the non-binding text that proved to be a bridge too far for his biggest coalition partner. [...]

It was a bold move, in 2014, for Michel, a Francophone liberal and part of a younger generation of Belgian politicians, to team up with the conservative Flemish nationalists. Their leader, Antwerp mayor Bart De Wever, who dreams about Flemish independence, was never an ideal partner for the federal government. [...]

In his four years as prime minister, Michel has made a show of his unconditional support for the European cause, for multilateralism, the U.N. and, of course, his close friendships with young leaders like Macron or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Theirs is a club Michel wants to belong to.

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Politico: A weakened Merkel still gets her way

The scale of Kramp-Karrenbauer’s challenge in uniting the CDU is clear from the margin of her victory — she squeaked home with less than 52 percent of the vote in a run-off against Friedrich Merz, a veteran Merkel critic who wanted to shift the party to the right. Another right-winger, Health Minister Jens Spahn, was eliminated in the first round of voting but, at the age of 38, his influence is likely to grow in the years ahead. [...]

AKK has been portrayed as a mini-Merkel. But she is much more of a traditional CDU politician than the chancellor. A Catholic, she joined the party in her late teens and worked her way up through local and regional politics to become premier of Saarland, in Germany’s far west. She is socially conservative, opposed to gay marriage, and has taken a tougher line than Merkel on migration — the issue that has become a lightning rod for the chancellor’s critics.

She also advocates bringing back military service as part of a plan for young people to spend a year working for the benefit of society. Merkel abolished conscription — a decision she defended in Hamburg, to only a smattering of applause. [...]

Not only did the party choose Kramp-Karrenbauer as its leader, delegates also supported the new U.N. pact on migration — an accord that has been attacked by right-wingers across Europe.

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Vox: Leaving Baltimore behind

It’s called the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program (BRHP). It started in 2002, and has since moved more than 4,000 people out of the city. Some see it as a way to give low-income Baltimore residents new opportunities in neighborhoods that would otherwise be out of reach. [...]

Baltimore gets a lot of attention for its problems. In addition to its crime rate, nearly a quarter of its residents live in poverty. Baltimore and its surrounding suburbs are starkly segregated by race and class — a pattern set in motion by policymakers in the early 20th century that continues to this day.[...]

The vast majority of BRHP participants live in Baltimore, often in public housing, and always in neighborhoods with a great deal of poverty. Nearly all of them are black. They’re moving to “Opportunity Areas,” determined by the program through a mix of census data and other metrics. These areas have a lot more wealth, including job opportunities and resource-rich schools. Residents tend to be white.

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Quartz: Amazon and Microsoft claim AI can read human emotions. Experts say the science is shaky

“The problem is now AI is being applied in a lot of social contexts. Anthropology, psychology, and philosophy are all incredibly relevant, but this is not the training of people who come from a technical [computer science] background.” says Kate Crawford, co-founder of AI Now, distinguished research professor at NYU and principal researcher at Microsoft Research. “Essentially the narrowing of AI has produced a kind of guileless acceptance of particular strands of psychological literature that have been shown to be suspect.”

Crawford and the AI Now report refer to the system commonly used to codify facial expressions into seven core emotions, originating with psychologist Paul Ekman. His work studying facial expressions in communities separated from modern society suggests that facial expressions are universal. The idea of universal facial expressions is convenient for AI researchers, since much the artificial intelligence in use today must categorizes complex images or sounds. [...]

But the way emotions are expressed on the face could be much more contextual than previously believed—calling the validity of Ekman’s categories into question. ”A knitted brow may mean someone is angry, but in other contexts it means they are thinking, or squinting in bright light,” wrote psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett Barrett (paywall) in the Financial Times in 2017. “A hypothetical emotion-reading robot would need tremendous knowledge and context to guess someone’s emotional experiences.”

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statista: Where People Do And Don't Believe In Human Rights

A new Ipsos MORI poll of 23,249 adults in 28 countries has explored feelings about human rights across the world. One of its core findings is that 43 percent of people globally agree that everyone in their country enjoys the same basic human rights. When asked if there is such thing as human rights, opinion varied hugely by country, with a selection of countries polled visualized on the following infographic.

In Turkey, 92 percent of those polled said there is such thing as human rights while only five percent said there is not. 85 percent of Chinese respondents also agreed there is such thing as human rights, along with 80 percent of Americans. Interestingly, 29 percent of people in Poland say there is no such thing as human rights.

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