IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT in the Maltese search-and-rescue zone of the Mediterranean when a rubber boat originating from Libya carrying dozens of migrants encountered a hulking cargo ship from Madeira and a European military aircraft. The ship’s captain stopped the engines, and the aircraft flashed its lights at the rubber boat. But neither the ship nor the aircraft came to the rescue. Instead, Maltese authorities told the ship’s captain to wait for vessels from Malta to pick up the migrants. By the time those boats arrived, three migrants had drowned trying to swim to the idle ship.
Continue reading Europe Expands Virtual Borders To Thwart MigrantsTag Archives: Policy
Science as a global public good
Elizabeth Blackburn’s work on telomeres, for which she was jointly awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has turned her into a socially minded scientist. In a keynote lecture at the 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in June, Blackburn — a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco — called on scientists young and old to follow the same path: “Let’s use our scientific prowess to be more active, politically.”
Read the rest of this news story in Nature Outlook: [html] [pdf].
India’s Biometric IDs Trigger Privacy Lawsuits
In January, justices of the Supreme Court of India gathered to discuss the country’s national identification system, called Aadhaar. Since 2010, authorities have enrolled 1.19 billion residents, or about 93 percent of India’s population, in the system, which ties fingerprints, iris scans, and photos of Indian citizens to a unique 12-digit number.
Almost a decade later, India is still grappling with the technical, legal, and social challenges of launching the world’s most ambitious government identification program. Aadhaar’s reach and ubiquity has made it a tempting vehicle for centralizing activity, including welfare payments and mobile number registrations. But it has also raised major privacy and security issues. Continue reading India’s Biometric IDs Trigger Privacy Lawsuits
When Ex-convicts Become Criminologists
One fresh, sunny morning this spring, a dozen ex-convicts gathered around a table in a back room down a quiet side street of London. Considering the company, the scene was sedate. Someone with a manslaughter conviction stubbed out a cigarette. Onetime drug dealers snacked on croissants. A man with tattoos covering his substantial forearms shuffled reading material on a table. Someone who once served a prison sentence for embezzlement put a kettle on and offered the others tea.
No police officer would worry about this crowd: It was an academic congregation of so-called convict criminologists.
Over the past few decades, some ex-convicts have turned to academia, aiming to put their experience “inside” to good use. They use their knowledge of the criminal justice system to select research questions and design studies. They use their history to gain prisoners’ trust. And they work to counteract what they see as a strong bias in academic criminology toward the perspectives of authorities in the criminal justice system.
Read the rest of this feature in SAPIENS: [html] [pdf].
Pacific Standard also republished the feature: [html] [pdf].