..Rep. Steve King of Iowa asks, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” I thought it became offensive when Nazis started using compulsory sterilization and “euthanasia” to impose a biomedical vision which imagined a racially and genetically pure and productive society. To put this another way, I think Trump wants to deny Puerto Rico any federal funding because he’s a racist. I think he wants a border wall because he’s a racist. So, it’s not hard for me to think he wants to eliminate funding for the Special Olympics because it’s consistent with a ideology based on genetic purity and fitness...

A stunningly successful experiment has the potential to upend the mainstream US approach to deviance.

By Sigal Samuel @ Vox.com, March 26

In 2007, the crime-riddled nation of Ecuador did something surprising: It legalized the gangs that had been the source of much of the violence. Then something even more surprising happened over the next decade: Murder rates plummeted.

Ecuador’s approach to violence reduction is about as far away as you can get from America’s, which tends to criminalize gangs. To be clear, just being a member of a gang is not illegal. But because many gang members are known to engage in illegal activity, US law enforcement targets people it suspects of being members. It uses large gang databases [...] to round up young people [....}They may be deported or imprisoned for years. When we talk about criminalizing gangs, we’re talking about this punitive approach.

In Ecuador, the unprecedented decision to legalize gangs across the country was basically a decision to adopt the opposite attitude. The country allowed the gangs to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming, just like everybody else.

This approach appealed to David Brotherton, a sociologist at the City University of New York who’s been arguing since the 1990s that US policy wrongly pathologizes gang members [....]

Beijing’s U.N. block sent a signal—and a warning—to Pakistan.

By Michael Kugelman @ ForeignPolicy.com, March 23

On March 13, China placed a “technical hold” on a resolution calling on the United Nations Security Council to designate Masood Azhar, the leader of the Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), as a terrorist. Beijing’s intervention effectively torpedoed the measure. This marked the fourth time that China has prevented Azhar, who enjoys long-standing ties to the Pakistani security establishment, from being officially designated a terrorist by the United Nations.

There had been good reason to believe that this time might be different, and that Beijing would step back and let the resolution get approved. The fact that the fourth time wasn’t the charm speaks volumes about how deep the partnership between China and Pakistan still runs, and how far Beijing is willing to go to defend its “iron brother.”

So important is the China-Pakistan partnership that Beijing was willing to stick its neck out in support of a key terrorist asset of the Pakistani state who garners little sympathy outside Pakistan. At home, Beijing has sent hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese Muslims to detention centers under the guise of counterterrorism, but it has bent over backwards to protect an actual Islamist terrorist abroad.

The move came even though global pressure has intensified on Pakistan to crack down harder on India-focused terrorists on its soil [....]

By Lilya  Palveleva @ RFERL.org, March 23

MOSCOW -- Late last month, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky set off alarm bells among culture aficionados when he sent a letter to regional administrations ordering them to bring the museums in their purview into line with "the state's priorities."

The state news agency TASS reported about the letter and quoted a paragraph of it in which Medinsky orders regional officials to pay particular attention to "the embodiment of [state priorities] in exhibitions about the most important events in the history of modern Russia."

According to the TASS report, local officials have been ordered to report back on the progress of their work by April 30 [....]

Ella Briggs, an 11-year-old Connecticut resident, became her state’s first openly gay “kid governor” in January ― and she’s aiming to one day have national and even global impact.