By A.C. Thompson and Ken Schwencke/ProPublica

In 2015, the authorities in California documented 837 hate-crime incidents, charting a surge in offenses motivated by religious intolerance toward Muslims and Jews, while crimes against Latinos grew by 35 percent.
Last week, shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected the country’s next president, the Southern Poverty Law Center put up a form on its website encouraging people to share details about potential hate crimes. By the next day, they’d received about 250 reports – more than they’re used to seeing in six months.
Then on Monday, the FBI released its latest national tabulation of hate crimes, data that showed an overall uptick of 6.8 percent from 2014 to 2015. The accounting, drawn from information passed on to the bureau by state and local law enforcement agencies, charted a 67 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes.

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Posted on November 16, 2016

By Deirdre Fulton/Common Dreams

From penning puff pieces to “pivoting to ‘Trump as our kooky uncle‘” to glossing over his promotion of white nationalist Steve Bannon, the media is helping to normalize President-elect Donald Trump, critics charged this week.
It was a trend that began during the campaign, FAIR’s Adam Johnson wrote on Sunday, and it has only accelerated since the election.
“Oprah Winfrey, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, said Trump’s recent visit to the White House gave her ‘hope’ and suggested he has been ‘humbled’ by the experience,” Johnson wrote.

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Posted on November 15, 2016

By Mark Miller/Reuters

Retirement security already looked like a looming train wreck for most U.S. households before Election Day. Now, the consolidation of Republican control of government threatens to accelerate the crash.
It is too early to predict the agenda Donald Trump will bring to the White House on retirement policy, or where it might fit on his priority list. We live in a rapidly aging nation, but retirement policy never received a serious airing during the hot mess of a campaign that just ended.
It is also impossible to predict how Trump’s priorities will match up with those of Republican leaders in Congress, considering their deep divides on many issues during the campaign.
But previous Republican proposals and Trump’s campaign pledges point toward a range of possible GOP retirement initiatives between now and the 2018 midterm elections.
The economic frustrations of older, middle-class voters played an important role in Trump’s upset win over Hillary Clinton. Exit polling reveals that voters above age 45 favored him, especially among middle-class households.

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Posted on November 14, 2016

By Mark Newman

Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and websites use to show the results of presidential elections. Here is a typical map of the results of the 2016 election:

The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, or the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, respectively. There is significantly more red on this map than there is blue, but that is in some ways misleading: the election was much closer than you might think from the balance of colors, and in fact Clinton won slightly more votes than Trump overall. [Editor’s Note: By the time all the ballots are counted, Clinton’s winning margin in the popular vote is expected to grow to about 2 million.]
The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election.

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Posted on November 12, 2016

From: Interim Provost Edward Feser Date: Nov 10, 2016 7:02 PM
Subject: MASSMAIL – Information on Campus Resources
Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:
Many campus units and departments have set up post-election discussion sessions that provide an opportunity for all who are interested to gather and talk about the issues related to the election. Some of the sessions have been held, but more are being added. A full list can be found at https://oiir.illinois.edu/post-election-discussion-spaces.
We are aware that some students are reporting incidents of intimidation. We have campus policies in place to ensure the physical safety of everyone in the community. We work with campus and local public safety officials to ensure people may gather safely and express their views.
There are campus resources to address incidences of bias and discrimination.
Violence or threats of violence should be reported to the University of Illinois Police Department at 217-333-1216, http://police.illinois.edu.
Acts of intolerance should be reported to the Office of the Dean of Students at 217-333-0050, tolerance@illinois.edu or http://go.illinois.edu/intolerance (for anonymous reporting), or the Office of Diversity, Equity and Access at 217-333-0885, http://diversity.illinois.edu.
As Chancellor Robert Jones emphasized yesterday, we are a university and a community that is built on the values of inclusivity, mutual respect and the free exchange of ideas.
Edward Feser
Interim Provost
Renee Romano
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs
Assata Zerai
Associate Chancellor for Diversity
Jeff Christensen
Executive Director of Public Safety
This mailing approved by:
Office of the Chancellor
sent to:
Everyone

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Posted on November 11, 2016

By M. Zaher Sahloul/The Conversation

There are only 30 remaining doctors in Aleppo, and they have been describing an unimaginable situation, some of which I have seen firsthand.
They have to perform amputations on children on the floor of their rudimentary emergency rooms without anesthesia or proper sterilization. They are running short on blood products, intravenous fluid, antibiotics and pain medications.
The doctors have been struggling to provide health care for a traumatized population of 300,000, while their hospitals are bombed daily and their medical supplies and medications are depleted.
They have been working nonstop for the past three months, dealing with the influx of a large number of polytrauma and crush patients suffering from horrible injuries, pulled from under the rubble.
Hospitals are targeted frequently in Syria, especially in Aleppo, mostly by the Syrian government and lately by Russian jets. Physicians for Human Rights has recorded 382 attacks on medical facilities, of which 344 were carried out by the regime and Russia; they were also responsible for the deaths of 703 of the 757 medical personnel killed in the war so far. Most of Aleppo’s doctors have left.

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Posted on November 10, 2016

By Timothy Aeppel/Reuters

BREMEN, Indiana – James L. Brown tried to hire a dozen workers for his metal foundry here. Half of them flunked the drug test.
Those results are typical, says the president of Bremen Castings, a family-owned employer of 350 workers who make parts for trucks and other equipment. Drug problems are one factor contributing to a labor shortage that delayed filling orders earlier this year.
“We’ve become a recruiting company,” Brown said of the relentless struggle to maintain a strong workforce.
Bremen Castings illustrates the central tension in U.S. manufacturing: Plant managers complain of a talent shortage, while workers see too few acceptable jobs.
The paradox has echoed through the presidential campaign, with both major candidates lamenting the loss of factory jobs – even as unemployment in most industrial regions has dropped to rates usually considered healthy.
The jobless rate in the county surrounding the Bremen plant, for instance, is less than 4 percent, according to state data. The national rate is 5 percent.
Such statistics, however, obscure the struggles of manufacturers and workers, particularly in the Midwest. Factories in the countryside are distant from pools of unemployed workers in cities. Drug tests are disqualifying more applicants. Low wages discourage others from taking jobs that are available, and employers say tougher immigration enforcement makes it difficult to fill many low-wage jobs.

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Posted on November 5, 2016

By P.J. Huffstutter/Reuters

NEWTON COUNTY, Indiana – A third-generation farmer, Matt Gibson eyed a big expansion of his family’s business in late 2011, as grain prices soared in a searing Midwestern drought.
By August of 2012, days before corn prices peaked, the Gibson family had borrowed nearly $18 million in a series of loans from Chicago-based BMO Harris Bank.
The Gibsons took on more debt after the drought broke the following spring, sending grain prices tumbling. By 2015, with grain prices at half their peak, BMO and others creditors sued the Gibson businesses seeking to recoup more than $30 million.
The travails of Matt Gibson, 39, and his family are emblematic of a new class of “go-go farmers,” a term coined by fellow Midwest growers and agricultural economists. Many, like the Gibsons, borrowed heavily to expand their farms, then borrowed more in an effort to plant their way out of a commodity price crash, according to dozens of interviews with Midwest farmers, lenders and agriculture experts.
Their distress could foreshadow broader economic turmoil in the grain sector, which includes corn, soybeans and wheat.
“We’re in for a very, very rough time,” said Jim Mintert, director of Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture. “It’s going to take several years to work our way through this.”
A Reuters analysis of federal data on agricultural lending in the grain-producing “I-states” – Illinois, Indiana and Iowa – shows that delinquency rates on farmland and production loans are rising sharply.
“It’s definitely a red flag,” Robert Johansson, chief economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told Reuters.

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Posted on November 4, 2016

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

The British military has been involved in selecting the targets of the United States’ secret drone campaign, new documents obtained by the U.K.-based rights group Reprieve revealed Sunday.
According to the documents, personnel at U.K. bases leased to the U.S. military play a role in drawing up the “kill list” for the ongoing drone assassinations in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and others.
“These documents are the strongest evidence yet that the U.S. may be conducting its illegal, secret drone war from bases on British soil,” said Reprieve staff attorney Jennifer Gibson. “The U.K. government now needs to come clean on what role the bases we lease to the U.S. are playing in drawing up secretive U.S. assassination lists – and what exactly the U.K.’s own involvement in these lists is.”

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Posted on November 1, 2016