The war on drugs is a war

The war on drugs doesn't begin at U.S. borders.

Here's a dispatch from Ecuador, in the WSJ:

Ecuador Is at War With Drug Gangs, President Says. Troops patrolled the country’s largest city a day after a series of attacks against the new government  By Kejal Vyas and Ryan Dubé

"Ecuador is at war with drug gangs, President Daniel Noboa said Wednesday, as troops patrolled the country’s largest city, Guayaquil, a day after gunmen took over a TV studio and launched a series of attacks against the Andean nation’s new government.

“We are in a noninternational armed conflict,” Noboa said in a radio interview. “We are in a state of war. We cannot give in to those terrorist groups.”

"The armed forces and national police scrambled to bring order to Guayaquil, and shops and schools were closed after a series of coordinated attacks Tuesday on shopping centers, hospitals and a university left at least 11 people dead.

"Drug-trafficking gangs in recent years have turned Ecuador into one of the world’s most violence-plagued nations as they battled over the cocaine trade.

...

" Once relatively peaceful, Ecuador has seen the homicide rate shoot up from less than six per 100,000 in 2018 to more than 40 in 2023, said police."

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And here's one from Belgium, in the Washington Post:

A Belgian port seized tons of cocaine. Criminals tried to take it back.

Belgian customs officers seized three times as much cocaine in the port of Antwerp last year as U.S. customs and border officials seized in all of the United States.  By Gerrit De Vynck

"The head of Belgium’s customs service said in an interview that especially big seizures in the fall appeared to have prompted a violent backlash, along with a new issue: Authorities haven’t always been able to destroy what they’ve confiscated before drug gangs try to steal it back.

“Attacking the police, attacking the customs, this is not something you see in Europe,” said Kristian Vanderwaeren, director general of Belgium’s customs agency. “I was really afraid that my people would be killed if this would continue.”

...

"“The criminal organization was not afraid to come to a facility and capture their cocaine, even if it meant they would kill a customs officer,” Vanderwaeren said.

...

"According to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, Ecuador and its main port of Guayaquil have been the biggest sources of cocaine destined for Europe, reflecting how Mexican and Albanian gangs have infiltrated the country. This month, the president of Ecuador declared a “state of war” against drug gangs, after a series of assassinations, prison breaks and bombings there."

Medical aid in dying: access for children, and for mental illness

Two recent articles discuss whether there should be categorical limits on medical aid in dying (MAID).  In the Netherlands, the law now permits euthanasia for children in certain horrific situations, and in Canada, a debate continues about the status of patients with mental illness.

 From The Conversation:

Dutch government to expand euthanasia law to include children aged one to 12 – an ethicist’s view  by Dominic Wilkinson

"Ernst Kuipers, the Dutch health minister, recently announced that regulations were being modified to allow doctors to actively end the lives of children aged one to 12 years who were terminally ill and suffering unbearably.

"Previously, assisted dying was an option in the Netherlands in rare cases in younger children (under one year) and in some older teenagers who requested voluntary euthanasia. Until now, Belgium was the only country in the world to allow assisted dying in children under 12.

...

"Dutch paediatricians and parents had reported that in a small number of cases, children and families were experiencing distressing suffering at the end of life despite being provided with palliative care.

"That included, for example, children with untreatable brain tumours who developed relentless vomiting, screaming, and seizures in their dying phase. Or children with epilepsy resistant to all treatment with tens to hundreds of seizures a day.

"The study recommended improvements in access to palliative care for children, as well as altering regulation to provide the option of assisted dying in these extreme cases.

"It has been suggested that five to ten children a year might be eligible for this option in the Netherlands.

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From the NYT, an opinion piece:

Medical Assistance in Dying Should Not Exclude Mental Illness By Clancy Martin

"I am a Canadian, where eligible adults have had the legal right to request medical assistance in dying (MAID) since June 2016. Acceptance of MAID has been spreading, and it is now legal in almost a dozen countries and 10 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. To my mind, this is moral progress: When a person is in unbearable physical agony, suffering from a terminal disease, and death is near, surely it is compassionate to help end the pain, if the person so chooses.

"But a debate has arisen in Canada because the law was written to include those living with severe, incurable mental illness. This part of the law was meant to take effect this year but was recently postponed until 2024."

Jacques Drèze (1929-2022)

Jacques Drèze, the eminent Belgian economist who was the founding director of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) at UCLouvain has died.

Aside from his considerable professional contributions as a researcher, he was an institution builder.  CORE was a center of game theory when game theory was young, and played an important role in its development.

Here is the memorial page at CORE.

Here is the Econometric Society memorium: IN MEMORIAM: Jacques Drèze

"CORE and its prestigious visitors’ program, thanks initially to the support from the Ford foundation, was his initiative as well as the European Doctoral Program in Quantitative Economics(EDP)."

 

"Rich meet beautiful" site prosecuted in Belgium

The Guardian has the story:

'Sugar daddy' website owner charged with debauchery in Belgium
Norwegian Sigurd Vedal’s site Rich Meet Beautiful promised to help students meet rich men

"The chief executive of a pan-European “sugar daddy” dating site that targeted students with adverts outside Belgian universities last summer has appeared in court charged with debauchery.

"Norwegian Sigurd Vedal, 47, whose website Rich Meet Beautiful claimed to offer a “Fifty Shades of Grey” experience to young women, is being prosecuted following a complaint by the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
...
"After success in Scandinavia, the Norwegian company behind the website said it aimed to recruit 300,000 Belgian registrations by the end of 2018, but it was forced to end its marketing campaign after an outcry. Similar sites have emerged in the UK targeting female students. The US-based SeekingArrangement.com was found in 2015 to be offering premium membership to users with a university email address.

"Vedal appeared in Brussels criminal court on charges of debauchery, public incitement to debauchery and violating anti-sexism laws."
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Earlier post:

Sunday, April 12, 2009  Market for sugar daddies

and see https://www.richmeetbeautiful.com/en_US/

Kosher and halal slaughtering banned in Belgium

The coalition of liberal animal rights activists and European anti-Semites and Islamophobes doesn't make the new laws easy to parse:

Belgium Bans Religious Slaughtering Practices, Drawing Praise and Protest

"BRUSSELS — A Belgian ban on the Muslim and Jewish ways of ritually slaughtering animals went into effect on New Year’s Day, part of a clash across Europe over the balance between animal welfare and religious freedom.

"With both animal rights advocates and right-wing nationalists pushing to ban ritual slaughter, religious minorities in Belgium and other countries fear that they are the targets of bigotry under the guise of animal protection.
...
"Laws across Europe and European Union regulations require that animals be rendered insensible to pain before slaughter, to make the process more humane. For larger animals, stunning before slaughter usually means using a “captive bolt” device that fires a metal rod into the brain; for poultry it usually means an electric shock.
...
"But slaughter by Muslim halal and Jewish kosher rules requires that an animal be in perfect health — which religious authorities say rules out stunning it first — and be killed with a single cut to the neck that severs critical blood vessels. The animal loses consciousness in seconds, and advocates say it may cause less suffering than other methods, not more.

"Most countries and the European Union allow religious exceptions to the stunning requirement, though in some places — like the Netherlands, where a new law took effect last year, and Germany — the exceptions are very narrow. Belgium is joining Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Slovenia among the nations that do not provide for any exceptions.
...
"The idea for the ban was first proposed by Ben Weyts, a right-wing Flemish nationalist and the minister in the Flanders government who is responsible for animal welfare. Mr. Weyts was heavily criticized in 2014 for attending the 90th birthday of Bob Maes, who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Belgium in World War II and later became a far-right politician."

School choice in Belgium and England

School choice remains a hot topic (both academically and politically) in England and Belgium.

Estelle Cantillon will be giving a paper "School Choice Procedures: How They Matter? Theory and Evidence from Belgium," at a June conference in England: School choice in an international context: learning from other countries' experiences .

François Maniquet has written a paper (in French: Inscriptions dans les écoles : quelques enjeux et quelques solutions ) proposing that a centralized choice algorithm using either the deferred acceptance algorithm or top trading cycles should be employed in school choice in Belgium. Here is some coverage in the Belgian press (also in French): D’abord respecter les préférences scolaires; Solution centralisée pour les inscriptions

School choice in Belgium: update

In an earlier post, I discussed some of the problems in the school choice systems in Belgium, and noted that Estelle Cantillon had organized a conference on the subject in Brussels in January.

Estelle's conference has had some effect. She writes "The parliament of the French-speaking Community will adopt tomorrow a new school enrollment decree. The article says that it will be centralized (coordination among networks), that parents will be asked for their preferences, ... The details will be worked out after the elections in June. " Inscriptions: un nouveau décret, trois mesures

School choice in Europe

I've frequently blogged about the design of school choice systems, and that is in part because the problems of school choice are so widespread, and difficult.

In Flanders, where there is a first-come-first-served allocation system, parents have been camped out for a week in winter weather to secure places for their children (here is a story, in Flemish, with a picture).

In England, where lotteries decide many school allocations, the costs of randomness are being felt: Identical twins go to schools 18 miles apart.

We now do better than that in NYC and Boston.

School choice in Belgium

Estelle Cantillon, a leading market designer working in Belgium, writes in LeSoir about the current school choice situation, following the withdrawal on Wednesday of the current system of school-specific lotteries and waiting lists: Mixité : le tirage au sort n'est pas le problème, il pourrait même faire partie de la solution ('the lottery isn't the problem, it could be part of the solution'). She notes that this system was heavily gamed; because you couldn't be sure your child would be admitted to a given school, you had to apply to many schools, so the waiting list system was congested and the allocations were random.

She has organized a conference on the subject in Brussels in January, at which the new, strategy-proof designs in Boston and New York will be described. As she puts it in her column "Parents shouldn't have to break their heads" to try to get their kids into a school.