When Paul St. Louis voted as a juror in 2017 to convict Frederick Turner for his role in a methamphetamine dealing ring, St. Louis had no idea that prosecutors would stack the charges in such a way that Turner, a first-time offender, received a 40-year mandatory minimum sentence.

The judge presiding over the trial declared Turner's sentence "excessive" and "wrong," but had no choice but to impose it. Less than a year later, Turner, 38, was found dead in his cell at a high-security federal prison in Colorado.

Ever since, St. Louis has been haunted by Turner's death, and the knowledge in hindsight that there may have been more he could have done in his role as a juror.

"If I could go back in time, and if I knew Frederick faced 40 years, I would vote to acquit him," St. Louis said in a new jury-education campaign launched this week by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "I could have asked what sentence would be imposed. I could have drawn my own conclusions if no one would answer. And I could have voted my conscience."

The nonpartisan initiative, Your Verdict Counts, aims to educate jurors on three things the Cato Institute says they should know but are rarely, if ever, told: that jurors have the right to decide if a law is unjust or being applied unjustly, the right to ask what the consequences of a conviction will be, and the right to vote their conscience based on those factors without fear of punishment.

"Jurors are not just called to go in and check boxes and determine if somebody technically violated the law," says Matthew Cavedon, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice. "Their job is to use their conscience and their sense of justice, to figure out whether somebody deserves to have their lives, their liberty, or their property denied. That's a completely different task than the one that judges and lawyers often insist is all that a jury is supposed to do."

In addition to the website, the Cato campaign will include a series of in-person events in Richmond, Virginia. Cavedon said the Cato Institute chose Richmond for the initiative because Virginia allows convicted defendants to ask to be sentenced by a jury, rather than a judge—a rare if not wholly unique feature of its criminal justice system. Richmond also has a particularly zealous defense bar.

The act of acquitting or refusing to indict a criminal defendant based on moral objections to the laws or charges in question, regardless of whether the defendant is technically guilty, is commonly called "jury nullification," and it's a controversial subject in the legal profession.

As George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote at The Volokh Conspiracy in 2018, nullification undermines the rule of law in a system where the criminal codes are more or less uniformly applied, but in the real world it has become, unfortunately,  "a counterweight to the enormous discretionary power already wielded by government officials."

The Cato campaign conspicuously avoids the term nullification, which Cavedon says gives a rebellious shade to a proper and traditional check on government overreach.

It's more important than ever for juries to exercise that power, the Cato Institute argues, because juries so rarely can anymore. A Pew Research Center report found that in 2018, only 2 percent of federal criminal cases went to trial. Lengthy mandatory minimum sentences give prosecutors so much leverage over defendants that turning down a plea deal and going to trial becomes an irrationally risky choice. Defendants who turn down plea deals and get convicted, such as Turner, get hammered at sentencing, a phenomenon that criminal justice advocates call the "trial penalty." The result is that the constitutional right to trial has largely vanished.

The Cato Institute argues that emboldened juries would be a safeguard in a justice system that has mostly taken away judges' ability to consider individual defendants at sentencing.

However, although jurors can't be punished for voting their conscience, it's practically verboten to talk about inside courthouses. Attorneys are usually barred from talking about nullification with juries, and doing so can be grounds for a mistrial.

In 2019, a divided 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals panel chastised a federal judge who complained about an overzealous prosecution and said the case before him "call[ed] for jury nullification."

Over the years, activists have even been arrested and convicted on jury tampering charges for handing out flyers about nullification outside courthouses, leading to First Amendment lawsuits. In 2022, the 2nd Circuit ruled that a New York man's free speech rights were violated when he was arrested outside a Bronx courthouse for doing so.

Despite courts' deep uneasiness with the concept, the Cato Institute argues that there is a long and strong tradition of American juries using their power to resist unjust laws and charges, from the acquittal of Peter Zenger in a famous 1735 libel case to northern juries' refusal to convict defendants of aiding fleeing slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Likewise, Reason's Damon Root wrote in 2018 on the originalist case for jury nullification, finding that there's "good evidence that many 18th and 19th century Americans understood juries to possess the lawful power to reject guilty verdicts when the jurors believed the underlying law was unconstitutional."

The concerns that motivated those Americans, Cavedon says, are much the same as today's.

"There's such a feeling in America today that government is distant, and that especially lawyers and judges are just part of the elite class, making decisions without the good sense of the people. That's been a concern all throughout American history, and the jury is supposed to be the antidote," Cavedon says. "The jury is literally government by the people, and we have lost something in shifting the most important function of the government, criminal punishment, to behind closed doors, to negotiations between lawyers, to a quick sign-off by a judge. That is not the freedom and the democratic order that we were promised."

The post The Right to Trial is Vanishing. Could Bolder Juries Save It? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

This month, there will be over 400 Chinese officials in New Delhi—more than double the previous delegation in 2019—to discuss the future of Sino–Indian relations. For China, those relations have never been more favorable; India’s position on the world stage has declined, though not in ways caused by China, making the prospect of resumed and increased trade between the two nations increasingly likely.

A key development came in March 2026, when the Indian Union Cabinet amended Press Note 3, a rule in place since 2020 that required government clearance for investment from any country sharing a land border with India (the largest of course being China, which shares a 3,500-kilometer border with India). The removal of this barrier proved its effectiveness by the end of August: investors had brought ₹4,896 crore ($512 million) across 29 projects. This is a proof of concept that cannot be easily ignored.

But the greater significance is in where investment did not come from: China. After relaxing a rule that primarily affected China, investment instead came from Mauritius, Korea, Japan, Singapore, and the United States.

From the two factors—the small inflow, and the source nations—a reasonable conclusion can be drawn: global funds carrying incidental Chinese shareholders had been caught by mistake, and they were now unblocked.

The conclusion that should be drawn is that formal (“hard”) blockages to trade are only ever one part of a greater picture and should be understood alongside the informal (“soft”) blockages. India’s trade problem with China is habitually described as a deficit to be narrowed by negotiation—the lifting of tariffs, increasing market access, joint ventures, and so on. It is better understood as an asymmetry that negotiation cannot alter: India’s constant attempts to address this gap seem to have made it wider.

Bilateral goods trade reached $151.1 billion in the fiscal year ending March 2026, and, of that, imports to India from China were $131.63 billion, the highest India recorded from any country; meanwhile, exports to China were only $19.47 billion. The new fiscal year is following the same trend: June’s deficit alone was $15.3 billion.

What India buys from China falls into roughly four broad categories—electronics, machinery, organic chemicals and plastics—as well as the pharmaceutical agents upon which India’s generic drug industry depends. What India sells in return is very much the raw end of things: ores and slag, mineral fuels, and marine products. Exports have been growing—up 37% in the previous year—but that growth seems less impressive when the actual numbers are considered: from $14 billion to $19 billion.

The Sino–Indian trade profile is not, therefore, one between two comparable advanced economies, but between a supplier and a manufacturer, and because the Indian economy supplies the very items that China exports to India, it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. As Indian industry grows, and the country becomes wealthier, it will buy more of the products China produces using the very raw materials it has bought from India.

This yawning deficit is, in large part, a product of two of India’s own policies that have pulled in opposing directions.

The first is security-focused: Press Note 3, mentioned above, was first introduced at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was originally aimed at preventing opportunistic pandemic-era acquisitions. As a consequence, hundreds of Chinese investment applications were banned, and business visas for Chinese engineers were subject to layer upon layer of vetting, at the ministerial level. The cost of doing business simply skyrocketed. In a strict sense, it achieved its goal: Chinese direct investment collapsed to a mere $67.34 million between 2021 and 2024.

The second was an industrial policy designed to build a modern industrial base for India at speed. The first industries to benefit from this were the assembly-based industries: phones, appliances, solar panels, and so on. Naturally, these industries are resource-intensive and require more components as they grow; as a result, the trade deficit with China, the main supplier for these components, ballooned from $44 billion in 2021 to nearly $85 billion in 2024 and even further to $112 billion in 2025.

Delhi has been laser-focused on course correction since late 2025. Former cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba proposed dismantling the visa-vetting system, and shortly after in December the government launched a digital sponsorship platform, simplifying the process and no longer requiring ministerial recommendations. On the FDI side, Press Note 2, which was approved in March and has been in effect since May 2026, automatically processed noncontrolling stakes of up to 10%, while introducing a 60-day approval window for priority manufacturing sectors (including electronics, capital goods, and solar cells).

These are real liberalization efforts, noted approvingly by the Carnegie Endowment, which wrote, “The practical argument for reform was genuine. The system was deterring not just Chinese capital but also legitimate global investment.”

The problem persists, however: the barriers to Chinese investment have been lowered, but Chinese investment has not automatically flowed through.

The forthcoming BRICS summit, held in Delhi from September 12–13, will be a real opportunity for India to address this. Xi Jinping himself will be coming, his first visit to India since 2019, with the aforementioned 400 expected delegates. The size of the delegation speaks to the seriousness of the summit and the potential for both sides (in fact, all BRICS nations) to take advantage of the global trend among manufacturers to pursue a “China Plus One” policy of diversification in response to a fragile global economy.

As it stands, trade will grow between the two nations, because both economies are growing and complement one another. Unfortunately for India, the trade deficit will grow, too, unless some serious rebalancing is made.

“Dance won’t pay well. You should choose a real job.”

“There aren’t many jobs in the dance world, and it’s really hard to get into. You should have a backup plan.”

And my personal favorite: after I shared with my high school counselor that I planned to dance as long as I could and then go to law school, she jokingly replied, “That’s just what the world needs—more dancing lawyers.”

This was the well-meaning advice I got from most of the adults in my life during my final years of high school. I was recently reflecting on that advice, now with the hindsight of more than 20 years of making a living doing things I love, and I realized where it fell short for me.

Now, who is to say whether my teenage brain would have listened or heeded their advice anyway? But as an adult, I look back at that dreamy-eyed ballerina hopeful and want to tell her this instead:

“There are many ways to make an income that will allow dance to be a large part of your life. Getting a ‘job’ in a dance company is just one of them. Learn how to teach, choreograph, judge competitions, run your own business, sell your curriculum, invest in real estate, and make dance films.”

She would probably stare at me blankly, but I would also tell her about podcasts, freelance writing, short-form video, online courses, and all the other ways people now turn skills and ideas into income. And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to do them or learn them all right now. Build a little at a time.

You see, my high school counselors couldn’t really predict my career path 20 years in advance, and not simply because I was interested in a less traditional industry. Much of the work I eventually got paid to do didn’t even exist in the early 2000s.

I’m not alone. There is a term for the kind of eclectic working life I’ve stumbled into: a portfolio career. Although it was coined in the early ’90s, the term was mostly used for job transition for older professionals, until now. In recent years, there has been a recent increase in the use of this term as well as an increase in the number of young people following this path to build livelihoods. In fact, Gen Z is projected to work 18 jobs across 6 careers in their lifetime. In a portfolio career, rather than relying on one job, one employer, or even one profession, a person builds a livelihood from multiple skills, roles, businesses, clients, investments, and income streams.

In my own experience, very few of the things I’ve been paid to do have been traditional W-2 employment with a salary and benefits. And yet, I’ve been able to pay the bills, save, invest, and, most importantly to that teenage ballerina, do a lot of dancing.

Nobody suggested any of this to me in high school. The general consensus seemed to be that passions that couldn’t provide well-paying employment needed to remain hobbies, and that the safest path to financial security was a college degree followed by a good W-2 job.

I realize now that when educators told me dance wasn’t a good career, what they really meant was that dance wasn’t good employment, and those are not the same thing. If someone had explained that distinction to me, they might have encouraged me to learn about taxes and tax strategy, bookkeeping, business licenses and business structures, multiple income streams, investing, marketing, sales, and how to develop other skills that could also produce income.

They might have taught me how to build a livelihood instead of simply helping me choose a job. And that is something I think about a lot now as both an educator and a parent. Because if we couldn’t accurately predict the jobs that would exist 20 years from now when I was in high school, we have even less reason to believe that we can do it for today’s kids. 

AI is changing the landscape even faster, so I’m increasingly convinced that career preparation should be about helping kids construct a livelihood rather than merely selecting a career path. That requires a different set of skills, so here are some things I plan to focus on.

1. Learn to create value.

Every business is ultimately selling a solution to a problem or helping someone get a job done. When we buy something, we are essentially outsourcing a job to that thing or person. People who can recognize problems and create useful solutions will always have opportunities. You might solve a problem for an employer, a single client, or a whole group of customers, but learn how to offer your skills to others.

2. Be adaptable, and develop a variety of skills.

We need to teach kids that a career may be selected but a livelihood is constructed. This means your work might change over the course of your life, your skills may be valuable in a variety of settings, and your income streams may (and probably should) come from a variety of sources. Rather than finding “the thing” you want to do forever, become someone who can learn, adapt, notice opportunities, and figure out different ways to apply your skills and knowledge.

3. Become financially literate.

We need to question the notion that bi-weekly large paychecks equate to financial security. Without some understanding of taxes, investing, retirement accounts, interest, debt, loans, business structures, insurance, and cash flow, kids can’t understand that a large salary doesn’t always lead to wealth. We need to help them see the trade-offs between a $100,000 job and a $100,000 business, or a $60,000 job without debt versus a $100,000 job with high debt and 60-hour workweeks. Check out some of the personal finance curriculum resources offered here at the Foundation for Economic Education.

4. Develop agency.

I want kids to grow up believing that when the path in front of them doesn’t exist, they can build one. If there isn’t a job for the thing you’re good at, can you create one? If the business you want doesn’t exist, can you start it? If you can’t find a customer, can you learn how to reach one? If technology changes your industry, can you learn something new?

This isn’t to argue that everyone needs to be an entrepreneur, either. But I would like kids to understand that traditional employment is only one way or one part of constructing a livelihood. They are the CEO of their skillset, and I want to empower them to use a variety of opportunities to build the life they want to live.

The post Don’t blame austerity or Brexit for Britain’s economic woes appeared first on spiked.

ANN ARBOR, MI — A highly controversial ending at Michigan Stadium has unfortunately put a slight black eye on the NCAA's otherwise sterling reputation.

ANN ARBOR — In one of the most remarkable technological breakthroughs of the past millennium, scientists at the University of Michigan have successfully traveled backwards in time by one second.