It was just seven years ago that the DEA left Bolivia — and only three years after that, progress was finally made. The strategy employed by the Bolivian government may be a surprise to many prohibitionists because it did not involve any strong-arm police state tactics. Instead, they worked to find alternative crops for farmers to grow that would actually make them more money.

Antonino de Leo, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s representative in Bolivia, told VICE News. “It’s not only about making money off a crop. In the old fashioned alternative development approach, we substitute one illicit crop for a licit crop. It’s about a more comprehensive approach that includes access to essential services like schools, hospitals, and roads in areas that traditionally have been hard to reach,” Leo added.

The story of this gradual change is one of legal changes (court rulings and legislation), behavior, and popular belief — with each of these influencing the other two in a vicious cycle. You can’t quadruple a prison population in 40 years without instituting a different belief system. You can’t ship black prisoners to be guarded by rural whites employed by for-profit companies, or lock up immigrants indefinitely while they await hearings, and not alter the belief system further. You can’t run several successive election campaigns as contests in meanness and not see changes in policy and behavior.

You can’t give police military weapons and not expect them to adopt military attitudes, or give them military training and expect them not to want military weapons. You can’t give crime 10 times the coverage on the “news” and not expect people to imagine crime is increasing. You can’t start smashing in doors without alienating the police and the people from each other.

Balko quotes former Maryland police officer Neill Franklin on what changing police attitudes will require:

“Number one, you’ve signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you’ve agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don’t get to start stepping on others’ rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on.

And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it’s to protect those you’ve sworn to protect.” But that would mean not being at war with people.

Jesse Rau, who has worked for Calgary Transit as a driver for about a year, says he’s a Christian and can’t support homosexuality. Rau hopes Calgary Transit and the Amalgamated Transit Union will support drivers who don’t want to drive the rainbow bus. “I’m a Christian so, as a Christian, there are things like homosexuality that I just can’t condone. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, the accusation is that you hate the person.”

Doug Morgan, director of Calgary Transit, says drivers can only refuse to work based on safety issues. Calgary Pride’s director of government affairs, Craig Sklenar, says the bus is a symbol of progress. “It’s a sign of the change in Calgary,” said Sklenar. “There’s still much to do in as much as LGBTQ rights are concerned but we are excited there are such public displays of pride across the city over the next few weeks.”

"When tolerance is demanded, when orthodox Christianity is deemed intolerant and when government and even society fails to extend tolerance to people of faith, we are headed down a perilous path," he said. His main point was that freedom of conscience has long been understood as important for religious freedom, but recently there has been a trend of violating the conscience protections of conservative Christians, particularly over the issues of abortion and marriage.

Citing a resolution passed by the Continental Congress to protect the conscience rights of pacifists, Wolf argued, "our conscience is not ultimately allegiant to the state, but to something, and for many people, Someone, higher." And this is important "because if our conscience belongs to the state, the state can choose to violate it or compromise it at will."

Recently, however, there has been a "subtle but insidious trend" in which the government is expanding into areas that are more likely to infringe upon conscience rights. This trend was "at the heart" of the recent Supreme Court case involving Hobby Lobby, a Christian-owned craft supply chain, and the Obama administration's birth control mandate. While the owners of Hobby Lobby, the Green family, are pro-life, the Obama administration sought to require them to pay for health insurance coverage for contraceptive pills that could cause an abortion.

Citing a Yuval Levin article, Wolf argued "we are witnessing the imposition of a new state religion" called "progressive liberalism." Wolf ended by quoting the Manhattan Declaration's implied promise of civil disobedience in the face of religious conscience violations: "I will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will I render to Caesar what is God's."

That labor is used for a variety of trades, including making uniforms for popular restaurants like McDonalds and Applebee’s. But if the private prisons don’t have enough inmates locked up then production goes down correlative with the decrease in free labor (ie slavery).

It comes as a surprise to many Americans, but slavery was never actually abolished in the United States. That’s not a metaphor, it’s a matter of careful reading of the 13th amendment to the Constitution. That amendment – often lauded for abolishing slavery – actually makes an exception for prisons. Slavery is still completely legal as “punishment for a crime.”

California guarantees that prisons will be filled to 70% capacity at all times. Arizona promises almost 100% occupancy. With crime dropping, the private prison industry is losing money and they are none too pleased. In order to avoid these lawsuits, judges will have to dish out extra-long maximum sentences – not because the defendant deserves it, but because the state wants to keep these contracts in good standing with the private prison industry.

The ruling came on Thursday from the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals in a case brought by Captain Paul Fields, who had been ordered by Tulsa police officials to either go to a special event at the local mosque himself, or order others to do that. Fields refused based on religious freedom objections and was punished for that. The judges on the 10th Circuit panel said that was perfectly appropriate.

The police department executives had promised they would send officers to the mosque for Muslims to talk to them about the Quran, Muhammad and their other beliefs, but were unable to find volunteers. So they issued an order making attendance mandatory. Fields objected, telling officials, “Please consider this email my official notification to the Tulsa Police Department and the City of Tulsa that I intend not to follow this directive, nor require any of my subordinates to do so if they share similar religious convictions.”

Police officials immediately launched an internal affairs investigation which resulted in a two-week suspension for Fields, and a permanent demotion.

The AFLC noted that Fields just prior to the religious event, “was one of the primary officers involved with helping to protect this mosque from a criminal suspect intent on doing harm.” The Tulsa Islamic organization has featured speakers such as Imam Siraj Wahhaj, “a Shariah-adherent Muslim who promotes the destruction of Western civilization and the creation of an Islamic caliphate,” according to the lawsuit.

He added the euro's policymakers could no longer force "integration by crisis” - a mantra that has dictated the single currency project since its inception, but has never gained the support of its citizenry. "Since 2010, the integration of the euro area has progressed under the pressure of the crisis, with agreements often reached at the last minute.

"We all have in mind Jean Monnet’s remark that 'Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises'. But some of these solutions, improvised in a hurry, are not always long lasting."

However, the eurozone remained an "irreversible" project and should move from emergency solutions to providing permanent institutions to shore up its credibility, he added. The Frenchman suggested the bloc's emergency bail-out mechanism, the ESM, could form the blueprint for a "treasury of the euro area". "We need to use the confidence in the single currency to build institutions that will reinforce the cohesion of our economic and political union," said Mr Coeuré.

"Many observers have concluded that Pakistan's rate of fissile material production (and assumed construction of nuclear weapons) gives it the fastest-growing nuclear weapons stockpile," according to the report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Stimson Center.

Its growth rate would make Pakistan's nuclear arsenal twice the size of neighbor India and larger than the United Kingdom's, China's and France's nuclear weapon stockpile in the next five to 10 years, according to the report. Estimates were used to gauge the nuclear proliferation within notoriously secretive India and Pakistan.

The report, authored by two US analysts, warns that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal growth "goes well beyond the assurances of credible minimal deterrence provided by Pakistani officials and analysts."

William Dudley said the recent market turmoil and questions over global growth had created more "downside risks" for the world's biggest economy. "From my perspective, at this moment, the decision to begin the normalisation process at the September meeting seems less compelling to me than it was a few weeks ago," Mr Dudley said during a press conference on Wednesday morning.

While Mr Dudley said he remained hopeful that the Fed would raise interest rates this year, he said tougher financial conditions meant rate hikes could be delayed for longer if the turmoil persists. However, Mr Dudley cautioned that it was "important not to react to short-term market developments". He said it remained unclear if the recent volatility reflected a "temporary adjustment or something more persistent for US growth and the inflation outlook".

He also said the gyrations in the stock market would have to be "persistent" to "impinge" on policymakers' outlook for global growth. Fed policymakers will meet on September 16 to discuss monetary policy. Analysts at Morgan Stanley said on Tuesday that waiting too long to raise rates risked sending "the wrong message to markets".

The multinational drug corporations behind the two vaccines, Merck & Co and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), respectively, say the vaccines are perfectly safe and come with minimal risk of side effects. But the many thousands of young girls throughout the world who've suffered serious side effects, including several hundred recently featured in a Danish documentary that aired on Denmark's TV2 network, claim otherwise, reporting major health failures almost immediately following the jab.

HPV vaccines have already been administered to some 70 million women worldwide, but their safety and effectiveness is questionable at best. The science used to justify their commercial approval simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and yet many countries throughout the world have adopted HPV vaccines as a preventative medicine for preventing cervical cancer.

Canadian researchers published a study in 2013 revealing that the industry-sponsored trials used to justify commercial approval of HPV vaccines are "largely inadequate" and present "evidence of selective reporting of results from clinical trials," meaning vaccine companies cherry-pick data to suit their own agenda.

The claim that HPV vaccination will result in approximately 70% reduction of cervical cancers is made despite the fact that the clinical trials data have not demonstrated to date that the vaccines have actually prevented a single case of cervical cancer (let alone cervical cancer death), nor that the current overly optimistic surrogate marker-based extrapolations are justified."

The reason for this was the Pope’s “realistic view that theological dialogue alone will not get us any further”. Friendly relationships were an essential condition for even beginning to discuss difficult theological questions, Koch said. The Pope wanted an evangelising Church that would take the gospel message out into the world and he “wants us [Christians] to do everything together that we can do together”.

Asked if ecumenism had the same high priority for Pope Francis as it had had for his predecessors, Koch replied, “Ecumenism has the highest priority for Pope Francis as it has had for all popes since the [Second Vatican] Council. Perhaps Pope Francis approaches it with a slightly different emphasis. He continually underlines that we cannot wait until we are one [Church]. We must work together now; we must walk along the same path, bear the same witness and pray together. Sisterliness and friendship between the different Christian Churches and church communities as well as bearing witness are very high priorities for Pope Francis.”

Asked to explain the way that “the emphases in ecumenical dialogue appeared to be shifting”, Koch replied: “Something is changing in so far as new doors for dialogue are being opened which have been closed up to now and that is most significant.” He went on to say that relations with Pentecostals were particularly important. This was particularly important as Pentecostalism has become the “second-largest reality in Christianity after the Catholic Church,” Koch said.