Chief Justice Appears To Take Shot Across Gorsuch’s Bow

Trouble brewing among SCOTUS conservatives?

Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron Continue Their Ideal Bromance at the G20

Good news: French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are still buds.

In new footage from the annual G20 summit of world leaders taking place in Hamburg, Germany this week, the two Internet-beloved heads of state have been spotted enjoying a friendly hug and spending a cocktail gathering catching up together, clearly uninterested in spending time with any of the other power players in the room.

This isn’t the first time that Trudeau and Macron have given their supporters a reason to stan for a friendly revival in the longstanding Canadian-French connection. Back in May, they rendezvoused photogenically at the G7 summit in Sicily, making these events a kind of routine foreign meet up opportunity for the pair. In Sicily, they enjoyed a pleasant stroll through a lush garden. In Germany, it looks like garden opportunities were thin on the ground, although at least they got to pose in photos jointly.

Behold: a power couple that shows us exactly how political bromance can — and should — be done. And it’s not just social time; the two also held a private bilateral meeting, ostensibly to talk shop, while at the summit.

The Trudeau-Macron bromance is still going strong. pic.twitter.com/1hjkfhMPVs

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 7, 2017

The bromance continues 💕 #Macron #Trudeau pic.twitter.com/rmKhQIfQCx

— Ellie Charton (@elliechart) July 7, 2017

How Kesha Recovered from Her Jerry Seinfeld Hug Denial Trauma Thanks to Bob Dylan

It was one of those awkward red carpet moments: singer Kesha went in for a hug with Jerry Seinfeld, and he firmly rebuffed her.

The footage of the encounter at the David Lynch Foundation’s National Night of Laughter and Song in early June quickly went viral. But luckily, Kesha — who just released a brand-new song “Praying” and announced an upcoming album — is bouncing back from the trauma of being let down by the comedian, all thanks to the healing powers of one Bob Dylan.

“Hugging is magical, hugging is beautiful, it’s this beautiful exchange of wonderful soul energy,” she said during an interview on Sirius XM radio of her affinity for the act.

She went on to describe how she got over the snafu: “My idol in life, Bob Dylan, agreed to meet up with me because we were playing the same festival. And I was like so scared, because I had just got hug denied. So I was a little hug traumatized… And he just opened his beautiful arms and gave me the most wonderful, healing Bob Dylan hug that I had ever dreamt of, and I just could care less about anything else.” She added that he even gave her a hug after their conversation, too, making her twice-blessed by the folk legend.

As for that Seinfeld-esque moment?”

“I should’ve known better,” she admitted. “I’ve seen the hugging episode. That was my fault.” She noted that she’s a huge fan of the show, even carrying out DVDs with her when she traveled in the past. Looks like she’s well on her way to recovery, though.

 

Some Cases of Gonorrhea Are Now Untreatable Due to Drug Resistance

Some cases of the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea are now untreatable due to resistance to antibiotics, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Every time we use a new class of antibiotics to treat the infection, the bacteria evolve to resist them,” said WHO medical officer Dr. Teodora Wi in a statement.

About 78 million people get gonorrhea infections every year, according to the WHO, which also notes complications from the STI have a larger impact on women.

Complications of #gonorrhoea disproportionally affect women: pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy & infertility, ↑ risk of #HIV

— WHO (@WHO) July 7, 2017

WHO Director of Antimicrobial Resistance Dr. Marc Sprenger said in a statement that corralling the infection requires new tools for better prevention, new antibiotics, and in the future, a vaccine against gonorrhea.

Here’s When You Can Try Nintendo’s Online Mobile App for the Switch

Nintendo Switch fans will get their first look at the console’s new mobile companion app starting July 21, the company revealed on Thursday.

During a Nintendo Direct livestream held to further detail Splatoon 2’s launch features, the company also said its Nintendo Switch Online mobile app will premiere concomitant with the quirky, cooperative ink-based shooter’s release. Through the app, Splatoon players will be able to send multiplayer invites to friends over social media, check online battle stats, view gear and — crucially and for the first time on the platform — use voice chat in battles.

The goal of the app, per Nintendo’s website, is to enhance the online experience for compatible Switch games. The version of the app launching on July 21 will have limited features, and at this point only appears to support Splatoon 2 (it’s even dubbed “SplatNet 2”), though expanded functionality and game compatibility down the road are implicit.

Nintendo’s paid online service is still listed as launching in 2018, though the company has yet to divulge feature specifics. It’s only said the service will allow subscribers to download classic Nintendo titles and access special eShop discounts.

Read more: 8 Things We Learned After Playing Super Mario Odyssey

The basic service, which includes online gameplay and voice chat (for designated games), will remain free until the paid version debuts next year. Nintendo will charge $3.99 for a one-month membership, $7.99 for three months and $19.99 for a year subscription.

The companion app is among Nintendo’s first smartphone releases, following the launch of the Switch’s parental control app and mobile games such as Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes.

Ivanka Trump is defending her paid leave plan. Neither party seems to like it

Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio met last month to discuss child-care policy. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

Ivanka Trump thrust her paid family-leave plan back into the spotlight this week, writing a defense of the White House’s proposal for the Wall Street Journal. The program, she wrote, would not be an entitlement, as her critics have charged, but “an investment in America's working families.”  

The missive came after an editorial in the newspaper slammed her proposal in May, arguing it would open the door for future Democrat administrations to beef up the benefit at great expense.

But the president’s eldest daughter, who is also one of his official West Wing advisers, faces a bigger political hurdle than unfavorable opinion columns. Liberal lawmakers won’t back the plan, arguing it doesn’t go far enough to support low-income parents. And Republicans aren’t getting on board, either — not even the GOP leaders who support the idea of paid leave.

Take Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who met with Trump last month to discuss child-care policy. Rubio has praised the first daughter for tackling an issue Republicans have only recently begun to address — the party’s traditional stance is that a healthy economy would support families better than a broad government mandate — but he has not endorsed Trump’s particular proposal.

“Ivanka Trump has been a leader on making pro-family issues an essential piece of tax reform,” his office said in a June statement. “The meeting between Ivanka Trump and members of Congress demonstrates the momentum for this push.”

Applauding momentum for Trump’s pro-family efforts, however, isn't the same as explicitly supporting her plan.

“Ivanka faces a major dilemma in having to construct a plan that appeals to both Republican lawmakers and the longtime advocates of paid leave on the left,” said Samuel Hammond, a policy analyst at the libertarian Niskanen Center. “Too generous, and the plan will be dead in the water. Too weak, and the left will excoriate her. It's not an enviable position to be in.”

Currently, the United States doesn’t guarantee a single day of paid time off for new parents.

The White House plan that Trump is promoting would provide six weeks of paid family leave to new mothers and fathers whose employers do not supply the benefit, to be paid through the nation’s unemployment insurance system.

The estimated cost would reach $25 billion over 10 years, and the president’s proposed budget cuts from other national programs would cover it, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

“We wanted to take the initiative to present a strong proposal in our budget as a stake in the ground,” a White House official said. “This is a high-priority issue and the administration is exploring all options, meeting weekly with Congress and leaders from outside the government on the ultimate paid leave proposal that will work for all working families. We know how hard it is going to be and that for all the talk on the issue, nobody has been able to get it done before, but we are committed to it.”

Rubio’s approach to paid leave is starkly different from Trump's proposal. Two years ago, he pitched a new Child Tax Credit worth $2,500 per child, becoming the first GOP presidential candidate to release a proposal on the issue. He has also backed tax cuts for companies that provide paid leave to their employees. (Rubio’s office would not comment on Trump’s plan.)

Then there’s Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), who has advocated for more support of working parents for years. Trump met with her last month, too.

Fischer, however, has other thoughts on how the country should handle paid leave.

Earlier this year, she introduced a bill that would create a tax break for businesses that cover paid leave for employees after the birth of a child. As for Trump’s plan — well, she doesn’t seem to be wild about it.

“Senator Fischer appreciates Ivanka’s work on the issue and is continuing to push her proposal (the Strong Families Act) that she introduced three years ago,” her press secretary Brianna Puccini said in an email.

Another conservative lawmaker Trump has reportedly met with is Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), who last year proposed allowing workers to prepare for maternity or paternity leave with a tax-free savings account.

Asked if Katko endorses Trump’s vision on paid family leave, his deputy chief of staff Erin O’Connor replied in an email, “Rep. Katko has introduced his own measure” and provided a link to the details.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), meanwhile, sponsored a measure last year that would have allowed companies and workers in the private sector to convert overtime wages into paid family leave.

He has not offered thoughts on Trump’s proposal. “I'll be sure to let you know if the Leader makes a statement on this,” a representative for McConnell wrote in an email.

Staffers for Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who sponsored the overtime bill with McConnell, were more blunt, asserting that the lawmaker has not thrown his support behind the first daughter’s plan. "We haven’t had enough time to assess how the proposal would impact states and the private sector," spokesperson Amanda Maddox said.

Trump’s proposal might never become a bill, but she has already won a tough battle: sparking a robust, bipartisan debate regarding paid leave, said Aparna Mathur, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

“I think the idea is not to propose a plan but to get both sides first to say that a policy is needed,” said Mathur, who discussed paid leave with Trump at the White House last month, “then work with both sides to decide on the actual plan.”

The fact that lawmakers can’t seem to agree on one approach “makes a lot of sense,” she said. “I think they are wary of offering a concrete plan and then facing pushback on the details, rather than having people support the policy in general.”

Samsung’s Rumored Next Bet Faces An Amazon-Sized Challenge

Samsung’s technological reach is formidable, shipping more phones than any other manufacturer. The company boasts nearly 23% of the global smartphone market, and its Gear VR headset, available since late 2015, is already among the most popular virtual reality devices going.

But when it comes to voice-activated speakers, a medium that some believe is on the cusp of becoming the next major computing platform, there’s reason to question whether Samsung has the wherewithal to keep up.

The South Korean technology giant may be developing a new Amazon Echo-like smart speaker powered by its Bixby virtual assistant, reports the Wall Street Journal. But it’s arrival would likely come long after category pioneers like Amazon, Google and Apple have either released or announced plans to launch voice-activated gadgets of their own.

Samsung’s dominance of the smartphone market speaks well of its ability to keep pace with the volatile tech landscape. But releasing a voice-activated gadget that could prove as popular as the company’s lucrative Galaxy phones poses two fundamental challenges: Samsung would be late to a space already dominated by Amazon and Google, and it has yet to prove that it can make a valuable virtual assistant. (Preliminary impressions suggest that Bixby needs no small amount of refinement.) While Samsung works to improve Bixby, its rivals have already carved out persuasive use cases for their respective voice-controlled gadgets.

Take Amazon. The company’s commanding e-tail empire makes the Echo a prime choice for online shopping, arguably more so than either Google Home, Harman Kardon’s Invoke speaker (powered by Microsoft’s Cortana assistant), or Apple’s forthcoming HomePod device. That, and the Echo is compatible with a broad range of Internet connected appliances, well-positioning it as a smart home hub. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, dozens of key brands, from Whirlpool to Ford, announced they’d support Amazon’s Alexa assistant.

Google Home, meanwhile, has its own edge: the company’s expertise in search, machine learning and online services makes it one of the most integrative home assistants for retrieving answers to questions or managing schedules. Apple’s HomePod hasn’t launched yet, but the iPhone maker is pushing the speaker’s advanced audio technology as a major selling point. And at this year’s Build Conference, Microsoft demonstrated how its own voice-activated aide Cortana can schedule time off from work or patch you into a conference call with a simple request.

That would seem to leave scant room for Samsung to meaningfully differentiate its device. If the competition already checks boxes like hands-free shopping, smart home control, premium audio, information retrieval and workplace communication, it’s hard to imagine what else Samsung might focus on that’s fresh or unexpected. Amazon has already built a sizable ecosystem around its Echo lineup, including an app marketplace with more than 10,000 voice apps (called “skills”) as well as multiple models that offer different price-functionality tiers. If Samsung’s voice-activated gadget arrives at price parity with the competition but has no signature bells or whistles, it risks being perceived as a “me too” knockoff in a market that punishes unexceptional imitators.

Much of it comes down to basic research expenditure. Apple and Google have placed significantly more emphasis on their respective virtual assistants than Samsung has for years. Apple has positioned Siri front and center of every device it makes, from the iPhone and iPad, to the Apple Watch and more recently the Mac, folding in hooks that make it usable with third-party apps. Those moves are doubtless foundational to Apple’s plans for its voice-centric HomePod. Though Samsung debuted its S Voice assistant in 2012, during the Galaxy S3’s unveil, most Android phones including Samsung’s typically come with Google’s digital helper installed (and users have little reason to use both).

Samsung made an important move to advance its artificial intelligence efforts in late 2016 by acquiring Viv Labs, the startup forged by Siri co-creator Dag Kittlaus. Just months before the deal was made public, Kittlaus delivered an impressive demo at TechCrunch Disrupt showcasing how Viv could be used to answer complex compound questions. But the technology has yet to show itself in any of Samsung’s products. Bixby has yet to fully launch in the United States since its voice-enabled features have been delayed due to a lack of data — vital for the assistant to learn English, reports The Korea Herald.

Samsung could of course surprise us. The company has clearly positioned Bixby on its smartphones as an alternative to the Google Assistant rather than a competitor. It’s framed Bixby as a streamlined, voice-activated means of navigating your phone efficiently, less so a digital butler. Its goal is for a Galaxy S8 owner to be able to utter a command like “Take all of the photos I shot yesterday and place them in my vacation album,” and have Bixby do precisely that. That the company manufactures so many other home appliances opens up interesting possibilities for smart home control as well. But its key challenge lies in launching a deeply functional, ideally distinctive in some way smart speaker, before the world gets too cozy handing Alexa or Google its list of daily needs.

This Week in Health: Hiking, Dancing and Armpit Tattoos

If you’ve been searching for the motivation to work out, try clicking around the new TIME Guide to Exercise. There, you’ll learn the science-backed ways to get the most from your workout and make the habit stick for life. Here’s what else caught our attention this week. (Sign up for the TIME Health newsletter for more.)

Why hiking is the perfect mind-body workout

Bethan Mooney for TIME

Take a hike! The uneven terrain of hiking trails and the health benefits of being in nature make it a great mind-body workout. You’ll even use 28% more energy hiking than you will by walking on flat ground.

You Asked: What type of contact lenses should I wear?

They’re pricey. But when it comes to eye health and comfort, daily disposables are tough to beat.

 

Dancing is the best thing you can do for your body

Bethan Mooney for TIME

It burns loads of calories. But dancing—especially with someone else—also comes with more unexpected health benefits, like better mood, less anxiety and a sharper brain.

 

These heartburn drugs are linked to a higher risk of early death

People who use proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) to relieve heartburn and indigestion may be putting their health at risk, suggests a new study.

Can chocolate really help your workout?

Bethan Mooney for TIME

Eating chocolate and drinking chocolate milk have a reputation for helping people recover after a workout. As it turns out, that might just be too good to be true. Here’s what to eat instead.

Armpit tattoos are the most surprising trend of the summer—but are they safe?

They’re popping up all over Instagram. But these eye-catching inkings may come with a disturbing risk.

4 weird ways to work out

Bethan Mooney for TIME

Have you ever wanted to jog through an art museum while dodging priceless statues, or ride a stationary bike underwater? Now, you can. Here are other unusual ways to spice up your exercise routine.

Teen birth rates in the U.S. hit a record low

Last year there were fewer teenage births in the United States than ever before, according to a new government report.

Western values increasingly endangered by terrorism and extremism, Trump warns Europe

WARSAW — President Trump on Thursday reaffirmed the United States' bond with European allies, calling their pact as “strong as ever.” Yet he argued in a speech here that Western values are increasingly imperiled by terrorism and extremism. In a dark and provocative address with nationalist overtones, Trump said that “the fundamental question of our time […]

These Counties Have the Most Opioid Prescriptions in the U. S

Opioid prescriptions in the United States vary widely from county to county, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC’s Vital Signs report, published on Thursday, found that in 2015, 6 times more opioids per resident were doled out in counties with the highest prescribing rates than in the lowest-prescribing counties. Such a wide variation suggests doctors do not have consistent prescribing habits and that patients receive different care depending on where they live, according to the report.

Through analysis of county-level prescribing patterns in 2010 and 2015, CDC researchers found that higher amounts of opioids were prescribed in counties that included a larger number of white residents, more dentists and primary care physicians, a higher prevalence of diabetes and arthritis and higher unemployment. The counties also encompassed micropolitan areas, or smaller cities. Check out the map below to see the prescription variation.

CDC Vital Signs

The map shows that several counties where the highest numbers of prescribed morphine milligram equivalents per person, which are the amount of opioids in milligrams, are located next to counties with the least amount of milligrams prescribed.

Counties with the highest milligrams prescribed per person in 2015 — between 959 and 5,543 morphine milligram equivalents — were scattered throughout the country, and formed clusters in areas, such as northern California, southern Nevada and parts of Tennessee going into Kentucky and West Virginia. Counties with the least morphine milligram equivalents — between 0.1 and 453 per person — had a larger concentration in western and southern Texas and parts of the midwest.

How Strength Training Changes Your Body For Good

The following story is excerpted from TIME’s special edition, The Science of Exercise, which is available at Amazon.

Dr. Dena Oaklander, a psychiatry resident—who also happens to be my sister—is the last person you’d ever expect to become a bodybuilder. She’s naturally scrawny and a little bit shy, not the type of person to beast out at the gym—or so I once thought.

In medical school, she’d counsel patients on the importance of exercise and feel like a hypocrite, she says, since she did little but shuttle from home to the hospital, spending her rare free time catching up on sleep. “My body didn’t feel good, and my mind didn’t feel very good either,” she says. But once she started taking her own advice, as a resident at Loyola University Medical Center, Dena quickly became a hard-core strength-training fanatic. Within a month of learning how to lift weights, she noticed she had more energy without needing as much sleep, she felt far less stressed out, and she saw her body tone up fast.

“Strength training is the only way you’re going to truly be able to sculpt the physique of your personal dreams,” says Sue Clark, a Chicago-based strength coach who trains Dena. “Above and beyond the physical changes, though, a whole new persona emerges as people start to feel really confident in their own bodies.”

Clark saw the transformation in Dena, just as she has in many others. “Once I can get someone on board with strength training, they’re good for life, because they’re seeing results like they’ve never seen on cardio.”

The average American flat-out loathes strength training. While about half of people do the recommended amount of aerobic activity each week, only 20% also do the muscle-strengthening moves that work major muscle groups. Yet the scientific benefits are stacking up in favor of it, from bone protection to disease prevention, and it appears to have special benefits for women.

“There are so many misconceptions about strength and resistance training,” says Larry Tucker, a professor in exercise sciences at Brigham Young University. “One is that you’ll become muscle-bound”—so bulked up that your body becomes rigid. That myth was somewhat dispelled when athletes who started strength-training saw that they could hit a ball farther, jump higher and run faster, Tucker says. “Gradually we started realizing there are benefits beyond sports.”

But women in particular are neglecting strength training at their own peril. It’s the only kind of exercise that makes muscles bigger, which lets them generate more strength and force, faster. “Muscle mass allows us to move,” Tucker says. Young people tend to take for granted the day-to-day parts of life that require strength, like walking up stairs or picking up a baby. “But a sedentary lifestyle means that people are gradually becoming weaker over time,” he says. Building muscle can fight back against that process.

MORE: Why Weight Training Is Ridiculously Good For You

It’s also one of the very few ways to make bones denser, a perk that is especially important for women. Lifting something heavy, like a dumbbell, makes bones bear more weight, and in exercise, stressing your bones is a good thing (to a point of course). Bones are constantly remodeling, explains Anthony Hackney, an exercise physiologist at the University of North Carolina. “Your body is always adding calcium to your bones and taking calcium away from your bones,” he says.

This delicate balance starts to tip as people age, and “they lose more mineral from the bone than they’re able to lay down,” Hackney says. Over time, bone gets less dense and more brittle and prone to osteoporosis, a condition that affects about 10 million Americans—80% of whom are female. Women have smaller, thinner bones than men from the start, and after menopause they lose estrogen, a hormone that protects bones.

 

Strength training also comes with the less visible benefit of lowering risk for several diseases. “The only real way we can increase our metabolism, unless we take drugs, is to lift weights and maintain or increase our lean mass,” says Tucker. Doing so makes the body more sensitive to insulin, and therefore more durable against certain diseases.

Recent research suggests that strength training may lower a woman’s risk for Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In a 2016 study, researchers from Harvard Medical School and the National Institutes of Health used data from nearly 36,000 older women, who ranged in age from 47 to 98. The women filled out questionnaires for about a decade detailing their health and exercise levels, and one question asked women to estimate how much weightlifting or strength training they had done per week in the past year. The researchers then tracked which of the women had a heart attack or stroke and which developed Type 2 diabetes.

Whether or not a woman did muscle-strengthening exercises indicated a lot about her health. Compared with women who avoided it, those who did any amount of strength training were more likely to have a lower body mass index and a healthier diet and less likely to be a current smoker.

They also had a Type 2 diabetes risk that was 30% lower and a cardiovascular disease risk 17% lower than those who did no strength training, even after the researchers controlled for other variables like age, diet and physical activity.

Adding aerobic exercise helped drive both risks down even more. Those who did at least 120 minutes a week of aerobic exercise and some strength training had a Type 2 diabetes risk 65% lower than women who didn’t do either.

Most people should do both kinds of exercise for the biggest gains. But if you had to choose one, Clark advises, pick strength training. “Cardio is more digestible, it’s less intimidating, but people also get less and less out of it over time,” she says. As you grow fitter, you have to do more and more aerobic exercise to see the gains, she explains. Strength training, in her view, is the most efficient exercise for those with limited time.

Powerlifting isn’t the only way to get results. Strength training comes in far more accessible forms as well—many of which do not even require a gym membership and certainly don’t require a personal trainer. Resistance bands, cheap strips of elastic that loop around arms or legs, are one good way to build strength without weights, for instance. A 2017 study showed that when frail women over 60 who were obese worked out with resistance bands for three months, they dropped body fat and increased bone density. Another option that involves even less equipment is to use your own body weight. Sitting up and down in a chair many times builds strength, as does jumping, which uses many of the legs’ major muscles. Even walking can count as strength training, depending on the intensity.

The right type and amount will be different for every woman (and man, for that matter), but a little bit every day will do wonders. Just ask Dena, who is planning to enter her first bodybuilding competition a year after picking up her first weight. “Not only do I look better than when I first started, but I also feel really confident,” she says. “Strength training opens up your thoughts for more positive thinking.”

Dena still urges her patients to exercise. But these days, it’s a prescription she really believes. Not everyone will become a bodybuilder, but most can get stronger and feel better by moving just a little bit more. “I find myself really encouraging patients to turn to exercise as an outlet or a way to help them cope with some of the difficult things they’re dealing with in life,” she says. “The message is different now, because I do it myself.”

SpaceX Successfully Launches a Communication Satellite on the Third Try

This is its third launch in barely two weeks

Scientists Have Figured Out How Ancient Rome’s Concrete Has Survived 2,000 Years

Researchers say it could influence modern construction practices

Trump challenges states on voter fraud: ‘What are they trying to hide?&#8217

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Trump on Saturday lashed out at the more than two dozen states that have objected to a presidential commission's sweeping request for voter data, accusing them of circumventing public scrutiny over potential voter fraud. Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying […]

Mika Brzezinski responds to Trump’s Twitter attack: ‘I’m very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president&#8217

“I’m fine,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said on “Morning Joe.” “My family brought me up really tough. This is absolutely nothing for me personally. But I’m very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president of the United States.” The president lashed out at Brzezinski in two vicious tweets Thursday morning, calling her “low […]

Vice President Pence shakes up his staff

Vice President Pence shook up his staff Thursday, announcing that Nick Ayers — the hard-charging Republican operative who served as campaign chairman for Pence's 2016 vice presidential bid — will become his new chief of staff, starting in August. Ayers will replace Pence's current chief of staff, Josh Pitcock, who worked for Pence for 12 years, […]

Democrats’ ‘resistance’ calls for a July 4 recess push to kill GOP’s bill

The moment that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told Republicans that there could be no vote on the party's health-care bill this week, Senate Democrats were in a familiar position — headed to a protest. In the “Senate swamp,” a well-kept lawn across from the Capitol, hundreds of activists from Planned Parenthood, AFSCME, and […]

Extreme Heat Waves Will Change How We Live. We’re Not Ready

'We’ve built entire infrastructures with particular temperatures in mind'

Not the psychology of Joe average terrorist

News reports have been covering a fascinating study on the moral reasoning of ‘terrorists’ published in Nature Human Behaviour but it’s worth being aware of the wider context to understand what it means.

Firstly, it’s important to highlight how impressive this study is. The researchers, led by Sandra Baez, managed to complete the remarkably difficult task of getting access to, and recruiting, 66 jailed paramilitary fighters from the Colombian armed conflict to participate in the study.

They compared this group to 66 matched ‘civilians’ with no criminal background and 13 jailed murderers with no paramilitary connections, on a moral reasoning task.

The task involved 24 scenarios that varied in two important ways: harm and no harm, and intended and unintended actions. Meaning the researchers could compare across four situations – no harm, accidental harm, unsuccessfully attempted harm, and successfully attempted harm.

A consistent finding was that paramilitary participants consistently judged accidental harm as less acceptable than other groups, and intentional harm as more acceptable than others groups, indicating a distortion in moral reasoning.

They also measured cognitive function, emotion recognition and aggressive tendencies and found that when these measures were included in the analysis, they couldn’t account for the results.

One slightly curious thing in the paper though, and something the media has run with, is that the authors describe the background of the paramilitary participants and then discuss the implications for understanding ‘terrorists’ throughout.

But some context on the Colombian armed conflict is needed here.

The participants were right-wing paramilitaries who took part in the demobilisation agreement of 2003. This makes them members of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia or AUC – a now defunct organisation who were initially formed by drug traffickers and land owners to combat the extortion and kidnapping of the left-wing Marxist paramilitary organisations – mostly notably the FARC.

The organisation was paramilitary in the traditional sense – with uniforms, a command structure, local and regional divisions, national commanders, and written statutes. It involved itself in drug trafficking, extortion, torture, massacres, targeted killings, and ‘social cleansing’ of civilians assumed to be undesirable (homeless people, people with HIV, drug users etc) and killings of people thought to support left-wing causes. Fighters were paid and most signed up for economic reasons.

It was indeed designated a terrorist organisation by the US and EU, although within Colombia they enjoyed significant support from mainstream politicians (the reverberations of which are still being felt) and there is widespread evidence of collusion with the Colombian security forces of the time.

Also, considering that a great deal of military and paramilitary training is about re-aligning moral judgements, it’s not clear how well you can generalise these results to terrorists in general.

It is probably unlikely that the moral reasoning of people who participated in this study is akin to, for example, the jihadi terrorists who have mounted semi-regular attacks in Europe over the last few years. Or alternatively, it is not clear how ‘acceptable harm’ moral reasoning applies across different contexts in different groups.

Even within Colombia you can see how the terrorist label is not a reliable classification of a particular group’s actions and culture. Los Urabeños are the biggest drug trafficking organisation in Colombia at the moment. They are essentially the Centauros Bloc of the AUC, who didn’t demobilise and just changed their name. They are involved in very similar activities.

Importantly, they are not classified as a terrorist organisation, despite being virtually same organisation from which members were recruited into this study.

I would guess these results are probably more directly relevant in understanding paramilitary criminal organisations, like the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, than more ideologically-oriented groups that claim political or religious motivations, although it would be fascinating if they did generalise.

So what this study provides is a massively useful step forward in understanding moral reasoning in this particular paramilitary group, and the extent to which this applies to other terrorist, paramilitary or criminal groups is an open question.

 

Link to open access study in Nature Human Behaviour.

The ‘alt-left’ media, memes, algorithms, and the price of the MSM not taking the internet seriously

A couple of very good pieces about the impact of online activity on elections that I recommend you take a bit of time to read. First up, Jim Waterson with “The Rise Of The Alt-Left British Media” It’s a look...