Civilians In Mosul Remain Trapped As ISIS Digs In

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Law professor Charlie Dunlap, a retired major general in the U.S. Air Force, talks about U.S. military operations and urban warfare in Mosul, where some 400,000 civilians remain trapped. More than 100 civilians were reportedly killed in a recent U.S. air strike, and Dunlap and military officials have noted that ISIS is using civilians as human shields. “In the case of Mosul the enemy has had 2 1/2 years to prepare for this assault” and they have burrowed in, Dunlap says. He added that urban combat is always very dangerous for civilians. “Every civilian casualty is a tragedy and the military has to work very hard to avoid them.”

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Admiral: U.S. Relies Heavily On Allies in Latin America

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The biggest security challenge facing the U.S. in in the Caribbean and Central and South America is monitoring the smuggling networks that operate there and have connections to other parts of the word, says Adm. Kurt Tidd, the U.S. Navy admiral in charge of the region. Also speaking at the event this week at Duke were U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and a Duke alum who’s now a researcher at the university. Political scientist Peter Feaver moderated the talk.

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Fuqua Study Finds Alumni Power in Statehouses

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A new study from the Fuqua School of Business found that legislatures where more lawmakers have ties to in-state colleges and universities provide more funding to those public institutions. “While we can’t show that adding another University of North Carolina graduate to the North Carolina General Assembly is going to result in higher funding, it does make you question whether universities should be more actively encouraging their graduates to run for public office and advocate for public education if they believe that will benefit their lives,” says Aaron Chatterji, a report author and associate professor of business and public policy.

Read More at Inside Higher Ed

Business and Political Worlds are Colliding

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Bill Boulding, dean of The Fuqua School of Business, talks about how business leaders are reacting to political activism. Some of the recent examples include the NBA cancelling its all-star game in North Carolina because of HB2, the state’s so-called “bathroom bill.” Adds Boulding: “The thing that I think is critical that I think the business community brings that’s lost in the political world, is the business community knows how to bring people together with common purpose and we seem to have lost that on the political side of things where there’s so much divisiveness.”

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Why the Foreign Policy Sky is Not Falling

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“In my view, it’s vitally important for national security law professionals to separate whatever personal dislike they may harbor for the president from their assessments of what the U.S. government writ large is doing. Moral outrage has its value, but it can also be counter-productive,” writes law professor Charlie Dunlap, a former deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force. “Likewise, we need to recognize that reflexively and indiscriminately opposing every initiative of the Trump administration creates the very real danger of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water.”

Read More in Just Security

How the U.S. Protects the Environment, from Nixon to Trump

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“The concept of the environment in our sense — an interdependent system that almost amounts to a planetary organism, that’s interconnected at every point and fragile as well as resilient — people don’t really talk that way until the middle of the 20th century,” says law professor Jedediah Purdy, author of “After Nature,” an intellectual history of the environment in America. “Even the concept that you need extensive management of resources, like forests and water and soil … that doesn’t get taken seriously in the U.S. until the decades after the Civil War.”

Read More in The Atlantic

How Will Trump’s Moves on Coal Affect the Industry?

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Coal’s share of the U.S. power market has dwindled from more than 50 percent last decade to about 32 percent last year. Gas and renewables have both made gains, and hundreds of coal-burning power plants have been retired or are scheduled to shutter soon — trends over which Trump has limited influence. Utilities “are not going to flip on a dime and say now it’s time to start building a whole bunch of coal plants because there’s a Trump administration,” says Brian Murray, director of environmental economics at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

Read More in The Denver Post

 

NC Lawmakers Move To Limit Renewable Energy’s Impressive Gains

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“Despite the good news about renewable energy, over the last few years, our state legislators and the Utilities Commission have allowed these smart policies to erode, and in some cases, have worked to slow the growth of renewable energy. For example, North Carolina state law prohibits consumers from purchasing electricity from anyplace other than the utility company,” writes School of Medicine professor Dr. H. Kim Lyerly, director of the Environmental Health Scholars Program, with a  colleague.

Read More in The News & Observer

Equitable Growth in Conversation: An interview with William Darity Jr.

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“I think that the run-up in inequality that we’ve observed in recent years is closely tied to a set of social policies that have produced virtually unlimited capacity to generate extraordinary levels of wealth. … In short, I think we can look directly at a set of policies and, more recently, at the advent of the Great Recession to understand the rise in economic inequality,” says economist William “Sandy” Darity,  the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy.

Read More From The Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Trump Moves Decisively To Wipe Out Obama’s Climate-Change Record

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President Trump will take the most significant step yet in obliterating his predecessor’s environmental record Tuesday, instructing federal regulators to rewrite key rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions. Tim Profeta, who directs the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, says regulators from more than half-dozen states in the Southeast are now talking about how to chart their own path forward. “We are now talking about the evolution of the power sector in an environment of uncertainty,” Profeta says. “We’re seeing the beginning of states taking control of their destiny.”

Read More in The Washington Post

Sadly, We Have To Expect More Civilian Casualties If ISIS is to be Defeated

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“The truth is that even with the most precise weaponry, restrictive rules of engagement, and meticulous adherence to international law, it’s inevitable that more civilians are going to be killed if ISIS is going to be ousted from Mosul and put on the path of complete destruction,” writes law professor Charlie Dunlap. “It’s a grim reminder that there is no such thing as immaculate war if evil is going to be stopped.  Let’s have the fortitude to see the mission through even as we grieve the cost.”

Read More in Lawfire

Can President Trump Handle the Truth?

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Since winning the White House, Donald Trump has employed the weapon of spreading falsehoods at specific times, often when he is losing control of the national story line. “These big falsehoods are different,” explains professor Bill Adair, who created PolitiFact, the fact-checking journalistic site that won a Pulitzer Prize. “They are like a neutron bomb. They just take over the discussion and obliterate a lot of other things that we should be discussing.”

Read More in TIME