Midday open thread: Initial jobless comp claims fall to 14-year low, Saudi beheadings ignored

Since January of this year, 59 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia under the country’s antiquated legal system based primarily around sharia law.

Last month saw Saudi Arabia behead at least 8 people—twice the number of Western hostages who have so far featured in IS’s barbaric execution videos. In August those executed by Riyadh were sentenced to death for crimes such as apostasy, adultery and “sorcery.” In one case, four members of the same family were executed for “receiving large quantities of hashish,” a sentence imposed, according to Amnesty International, on the basis of “forced confessions extracted through torture.”

Republican Party of Virginia provides incorrect in-person absentee voting times
For starters, the RPV website refers to “your Official 2012 Ballot.” Of course, it’s 2014 as most of us know.

Worse, the RPV also has the times wrong for Fairfax County (see the correct times at Fairfax County’s website).  Note that the RPV’s listed times for M-F are just 6 hours (2-8 pm), when they are actually 11 hours (8 am- 7 pm). Hmmmmm.

The RPV says “Hours: Monday through Friday 2:00pm to 8:00pm, Saturday 10/20 9:00am to 5:00pm”  

The REAL hours? “Monday thru Friday – October 14th – October 31st Hours: 8:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. Saturdays, September 27th, October 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th and November 1st Hours:  9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.”

If anything, the closest analogy to what Minneapolis is doing with its bike paths is what Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux did with New York’s Central Park. Olmsted and Vaux were all about making the park as attractive as possible, but they were also obsessed with traffic flow. They designed a system of separate pathways for pedestrians, equestrian riders, and carriages (the sections designed for fast-moving traffic were later converted for use by cars). The goal was to make a space where every type of visitor could have their own path: Wanderers could wander, commuters could commute. Olmsted, in particular, was not humble about his plans what he was going for. It would be, in his words, “the first real Park made in this country—a democratic development of the highest significance.”

So why do we keep hearing in the media that mass shootings have not increased?

This view stems from the work of Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who has long maintained that mass shootings are a stable phenomenon. (“The growing menace lies more in our fears than in the facts,” he has said.) But Fox’s oft-cited claim is based on a misguided approach to studying the problem: The data he uses includes all homicides in which four or more people were murdered with a gun. His analysis, which counts the number of events per year, lumps together mass shootings in public places with a far more numerous set of mass murders that are contextually distinct—a majority of which stem from domestic violence and occur in private homes. Fox’s annual count and use of overly broad data including many types of mass killings fail to detect the recent shift in public mass shootings.