euronews: This report tallied the human and economic toll of gun violence in all 50 states. The cost is staggering.

U.S. teens and young adults, ages 15-24, are 50 times more likely to die by gun violence than they are in other economically advanced countries, according to the 50-state breakdown.

In 2017 — the year of a mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 and injured hundreds — nearly 40,000 people died from gun-related injuries, including 2,500 school children, the report said, noting that six in 10 gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides. [...]

Rural states, meanwhile, have the highest rates of gun deaths and bear the largest costs as a share of their economies. Nationally, the cost of gun violence in the U.S. runs $229 billion a year, or 1.4 percent of the gross domestic product, the report said. [...]

The report noted, however, that the economic toll of gun violence is difficult to measure because of a decades-old federal prohibition on funding for research into the problem. Since 1996, Congress has added a little-known amendment to spending legislation that prohibits the use federal funds to advocate or promote gun control. While lawmakers clarified the provision in aspending package last year, stating that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can conduct research on the causes of gun violence, no money was allocated for such research. [...]

It also found economically deprived areas outside of rural America are also hit hard. About 7,500 African Americans die from gun violence every year, the report said — making it 20 times more likely that a young black male will die by a firearm homicide than a white peer.

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The Guardian: Arlene Foster signals DUP shift on Northern Ireland border issue

In a break with previous rhetoric where she has strongly opposed treating the region differently to the rest of the UK, Foster said the final deal would have to recognise Northern Ireland’s unique historical and geographical position and the fact it will be the UK’s only land border with the EU.

Asked by reporters if it was possible to see Northern Ireland-only solutions that would not affect the constitutional link with Great Britain, she replied: “Well I hope so.” [...]

She made clear that her idea of an acceptable Northern Ireland-only solution was different to mooted proposals for a Northern Ireland-only backstop, which she said “would bring about customs [checks] between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and that is unconstitutional and undemocratic”. [...]

Echoing words of the party’s chief whip Sir Jeffrey Donaldson earlier this week, she said the solution lay in a joint letter she co-authored with the late leader of Sinn Féin, Martin McGuinness, in August 2016, a document rarely referred to by the DUP in the past two years.

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Politico: Kamala Harris bets it all on Iowa to break freefall

The re-engagement in Iowa — where the California senator held a 17-stop bus tour in August but hasn’t returned since — is part of a broader acknowledgment inside the campaign that she hasn’t been in the early states enough. It's designed to refocus her campaign and clarify her narrowing path to the nomination.

Harris has been backsliding since her summer confrontation with Joe Biden, dropping so far in recent surveys that her once-promising campaign appears in danger of becoming an afterthought. [...]

Campaign officials and top surrogates said that she’s unlikely to claw out of the rut with a single breakout moment. They described her upcoming efforts as an attempt at a slow reemergence they hope materializes by stringing together consistent performances. [...]

Harris, who held recent fundraisers in New York, Connecticut and Baltimore, has prioritized fundraising during the third quarter of the year. She didn’t start her campaign with the advantages of her higher-polling rivals, including Biden and Sanders, who came in with massive donor networks, or Warren, who transferred more than $10 million from her 2018 Senate campaign. Warren has since sworn off big-dollar events for the primary, giving her time to stretch the primary map and spend hours and hours with supporters in selfie lines.

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The Guardian: Justin Trudeau: the rise and fall of a political brand

One of the extraordinary things about Trudeau is that he is famous in part because he is Canadian – a remarkably rare kind of fame. Most Canadians who are famous outside of the country have been processed through Hollywood or the US-dominated recording industry. Part of Trudeau’s appeal within Canada, then, is that he assuaged a dual sense of cultural insecurity and superiority, especially with regard to the country’s belligerent southern neighbour. (The majority of Canadians see Trudeau’s fame as a net benefit to the country, according to the Angus Reid Institute.) On the global stage he presented a sort of ideal form – likable, handsome, virtuous – in which the country could see its best self. [...]

As Trudeau took office, his focus on optics was on full display. The often sedate swearing-in of a new government was thrown open to the public and turned into a highly stage-managed, live-streamed event. Trudeau was due to arrive by coach at the prime minister’s official residence, 24 Sussex Drive, where he spent his childhood. (The house has been under renovation since Trudeau took office, and he and his family have been living in a 22-room guest house nearby.) To avoid any inelegant photos or video – “Getting off a bus is such an ugly shot,” Trudeau told his communications director that morning, in comments captured by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – Trudeau’s team misled the media about where they should meet the new prime minister, ensuring that the first images the press got were of him strolling from 24 Sussex to the governor general’s official residence, Rideau Hall, where the ceremony would take place. At another point that morning, Trudeau and his team were preparing to respond to the question of why he was appointing a gender-balanced cabinet. “I think just calling people’s attention to the year is all you really need to say,” Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s right-hand man, told him. The advice yielded one of Trudeau’s most internationally famous lines: “Because it’s 2015.” [...]

A vital part of Trudeau’s brand was the contrast between him and the far-right politicians gaining ground around the world. In the US, Trump was on a journey that in some ways echoed Trudeau’s, parlaying his celebrity status into political power. When it came to optics, though, “Trump was a gift” for Trudeau, says Philippe Garneau, a corporate branding executive whose brother Marc ran against Trudeau for the Liberal leadership and is a minister in Trudeau’s cabinet. “I remember being worried. I said: ‘How can we put a man who has a degree in teaching and [who taught] drama, sit him down with Angela Merkel and across from Putin?’ And in walks Potus and upsets the whole apple cart,” Garneau went on. “So Trudeau got lucky. He was never shown to be the youngest, newest, greenest member at the table, but rather some sort of version of youthful exuberance, enthusiasm, optimism and a lack of cynicism.”[...]

Caesar-Chavannes gave me a number of examples of this sort of policymaking. Trudeau’s government legalised marijuana but rebuffed a call to expunge the records of those convicted of simple possession, even though prosecutions had disproportionately targeted people with low-incomes and Canadians of colour. Trudeau appointed a gender-balanced cabinet, but refused to reform the country’s electoral system, which would have paved the way for more female lawmakers. He promised a “total renewal” of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous communities, but his government has done little to address the mould-ridden housing and lack of clean drinking water that has left many Indigenous communities living in “Haiti at -40C”, as a politician from the New Democratic party has put it. After vowing to prioritise the fight against climate change and criticising Saudi Arabia’s treatment of human rights advocates, Trudeau’s government bought a C$4.5bn (£2.8bn) pipeline to better transport Alberta’s landlocked bitumen to international markets and signed off on the sale of more than 900 armoured vehicles to Riyadh. And, after much of the international hype over its welcoming stance on refugees had died down, the government quietly introduced legislation this April that makes it harder for some migrants to seek asylum. Advertisement

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The Atlantic: A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked

The Bereitschaftspotential was never meant to get entangled in free-will debates. If anything, it was pursued to show that the brain has a will of sorts. The two German scientists who discovered it, a young neurologist named Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his doctoral student Lüder Deecke, had grown frustrated with their era’s scientific approach to the brain as a passive machine that merely produces thoughts and actions in response to the outside world. Over lunch in 1964, the pair decided that they would figure out how the brain works to spontaneously generate an action. “Kornhuber and I believed in free will,” says Deecke, who is now 81 and lives in Vienna. [...]

What the Bereitschaftspotential actually meant, however, was anyone’s guess. Its rising pattern appeared to reflect the dominoes of neural activity falling one by one on a track toward a person doing something. Scientists explained the Bereitschaftspotential as the electrophysiological sign of planning and initiating an action. Baked into that idea was the implicit assumption that the Bereitschaftspotential causes that action. The assumption was so natural, in fact, no one second-guessed it—or tested it.

Libet, a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, questioned the Bereitschaftspotential in a different way. Why does it take half a second or so between deciding to tap a finger and actually doing it? He repeated Kornhuber and Deecke’s experiment, but asked his participants to watch a clocklike apparatus so that they could remember the moment they made a decision. The results showed that while the Bereitschaftspotential started to rise about 500 milliseconds before the participants performed an action, they reported their decision to take that action only about 150 milliseconds beforehand. “The brain evidently ‘decides’ to initiate the act” before a person is even aware that decision has taken place, Libet concluded. [...]

In a new study under review for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schurger and two Princeton researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment.

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