[The First Step Act] would increase the good time credit, insure inmates are placed within 500 driving miles of their families and provide incentives for inmates to complete rehabilitation programs. Trump has pledged to sign the bill. So what could go wrong? The U.S. Senate… It would be great if Kardashian’s appeal for Johnson’s release changed the president’s heart by putting a face on a system that throws small-fish nonviolent offenders in prison until they die. But if it doesn’t, the Senate should go for a win that eases the way for federal inmates upon their release.

First, Senate Democrats and criminal justice advocates immediately downplayed and criticized the bill, calling for more comprehensive legislation that would focus on sentencing reforms and mandatory minimums. The problem is, bolder legislation is likely not to pass this year… I consider it a mistake to oppose The First Step Act… Think about it: The bill would end the barbaric practice of shackling pregnant women in prison; it would enable everyone in federal prison (except those serving life sentences) to earn more time off for good behavior, thereby enabling them to return to their families sooner.

By choosing a tepid approach, the prison bill abandons years of work and risks making it harder for Congress to advance more serious legislation in the future. Meaningful sentencing reform will be less likely to occur if the narrow prison bill is enacted… Nobody is under any illusions: Criminal-justice reform is hard. The White House might scuttle the bill entirely, and wavering members of Congress might balk. But to reform America’s prisons, we must change the laws that send people to them in the first place. Anything less represents a failure of leadership.

Because the number of households surveyed was relatively small in comparison to the population’s size, there was a large margin of error. The true number of deaths beyond what was expected could range from nearly 800 to close to 8,500 people, the researchers’ calculations showed. The widely reported figure of 4,645 was simply the midpoint of that statistical window, known as a 95 percent confidence interval. Including a midpoint figure in such a report is standard academic practice.

Undercounting deaths reduces the attention to the crisis Puerto Ricans live day by day… So why were so many deaths missing from the official count? My colleagues and I suspect it may come down to how deaths are recorded by government officials. In Puerto Rico, deaths are recorded using international classifications. This system doesn’t capture all of the circumstances surrounding a death that happens following a natural disaster.

On Friday night, the Puerto Rico Department of Health… counted at least 1,400 additional deaths on the island from September to December 2017 compared with the same period the previous year. That finding came three days after a Harvard University study was published that calculated some 4,600 additional deaths due to Maria. Both estimates are many times the official death count of 64 and suggest that Maria was one of the deadliest disasters in U.S. history.

The Europeans have acknowledged concerns over Iran’s regional military activities and its ballistic activities, but sought to maintain the accord while creating a separate arrangement on these issues… In addition to discussing the Iranian deal, Netanyahu is likely to hear European concerns about Israel’s use of live fire in mass Palestinian protests along the Gaza’s border with Israel.

Israel needs and will always need friends. The more the better. As supportive as the Trump administration has been of Israel, it is unwise to put all of Israel’s diplomatic eggs in one basket. True, Israel has expanded its reach in Eastern Europe, South America, Asia and Africa, but it’s mostly been on the commercial side, with relatively little diplomatic windfall so far… That leaves our allies in Western Europe… Europe, too, needs to recognize the stark reality in the Middle East. Iran needs to be countered and Hamas needs to feel more isolated

Israel is not a European colony and certainly has no interest in joining the European Union in its present state. If the EU is interested in good ties with Israel, and there are many reasons and motives for this to be the case, it must immediately cease its subversive efforts to impose on Israel arrangements and solutions that are neither to its advantage nor to its benefit. As a sovereign state, Israel must both demand this and make every effort to prevent it from happening.

Nissim said however that the state conversion authority has been “a disappointment” since it failed to reflect the potential crisis of Jewish intermarriage in Israel posed by the large number of non-Jewish citizens from the former Soviet Union. “Is Maimonides invalid? What about Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, and Rabbi Shlomo Kluger who said [accepting] the commandments is not part of conversion?” Nissim stormed, when asked about the chief rabbis’ opposition to his proposals.

Meanwhile, Israel’s chief rabbis presented a united front against the new proposal. “It encourages assimilation,” Chief Rabbi David Lau said during an emergency meeting. “It’s a window to bringing the destruction of Judaism around the world to the Holy Land. They are deluding people that we are solving a problem here, but it’s the exact opposite.”

No legal arrangement can settle the matter of Jewish conversion. On this matter, Israel does not have the authority to dictate to the rest of the Jewish world. It does not even have the authority to dictate to its own citizens. So the fact that a solid, reasonable recommendations for a new conversion law seem dead on arrival is far from tragedy. Maybe, with time, the Jewish people will get to a point when they can, once more, determine who is a Jew. For now, they will have to keep muddle through with half-baked solutions, barely consistent processes, and the occasional eruption of bickering. On our Jewish to-do list there are more important things.

But is Europe ready to become completely cashless? In a hypothetical situation, if MasterCard services also suffered an outage and there was no cash available anymore, we would struggle to make payments… Even though the UK has had the credit card since the 1950s, mobile payments have been the real catalyst when it comes to cash being less and less used, especially in other countries like America, where swiping is as everyday as the European experience of entering a PIN, or now, tapping your contactless card.

The use case for cryptocurrency and decentralized payment networks was reinforced this week as Visa payments throughout Europe were disrupted, leaving thousands of people unable to pay for goods and services. Visa’s centralized payment processing service usually handles 150 million transactions per day. Like any centralized service, Visa runs on a select group of private servers which provide a single point of failure when compared to a decentralized network like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

A decentralized network, resembling the encrypted ledger system behind bitcoin, could potentially provide a useful redundancy against failure. Even that, assuming the system could be build to handle the volume of speedy payments Visa already provides for, would be vulnerable to power outages and major disasters. These types of problems suggest that cold hard cash will be with us for a good while longer.

It’s easy enough to dismiss Peterson, as some of his critics have done, as catering to the sexual frustrations and perceived loss of status of (usually) straight (usually) white (usually) men. But to do so is dangerous because it overlooks the degree to which Peterson has tapped into something very real, very necessary, and very strong: a legitimate spiritual hunger for meaning that, combined with the eroticized trappings of “countercultural” transgression, alchemize into a heady intellectual cocktail.

The first reason Peterson has had such impact is that this is no ordinary psychologist or professor, staying in his narrow lane… unlike most intellectuals’ arrogant pieties that are driven more by resentment than concern, Peterson is obsessed with actual human suffering. He cares deeply about real people, and particularly the unnecessary suffering caused by others, about which he becomes passionately angry.

The fact that the word “masculinity” so often appears next to the word “toxic” says a lot about this cultural moment… Meanwhile, male troubles are met with “What about the menz?” mockery… For all its successes, contemporary feminism’s main message to men is not one of equal partnership. Rather, it’s: Repent, abase yourself, and be an obedient feminist ally — and we still won’t trust you. It’s no wonder that Peterson has found an eager audience in this climate. If feminists don’t like his message, they should offer a better one.