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National

Belief in democracy is eroding across Latin America, where 71% are dissatisfied with how democracy works and only half believe it's the best form of government, according to a Latinobarómetro survey of 18 countries published by the Economist.

By the numbers: 15% believe authoritarianism is best, while 28% are neutral — up from 16% in 2010. Satisfaction with democracy is lowest in Brazil, which just elected far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro, who has expressed admiration of military dictators.

Confidence in government and the courts is low. "Only the armed forces and the church, powerful institutions before the advent of mass democracy, retain much respect."

Faith in democracy is higher in countries where it is being dismantled (Venezuela, Nicaragua) and those where it has brought relative prosperity (Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile). It is lowest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

How we got here: Economic growth has slowed and concerns about safety have grown. So too has outrage over corruption.

What to watch: "The young are more skeptical than the old, which bodes ill for democracy’s future."

Bolton to praise Bolsonaro, declare "Troika of Tyranny" in Latin America speech

Disgusted by their government, Brazilians look to far right

Why Trump skipping a Latin American summit earlier this year mattered

Faith in democracy fades in Latin America

Fewer people in the region believe it's the best form of government.

A banner in front of the Brazilian embassy in Buenos Aires. Photo: Mario De Fina/NurPhoto via Getty Images

World

Latin America

Latin America and Latinos

Andrew Gillum officially conceded the Florida's governor race to Republican opponent Ron DeSantis — for the second time — after Gillum still trailed DeSantis by more than 30,000 votes after an automatic recount, the AP reports.

The big picture, via Axios' Alexi McCammond: This race was a microcosm of 2018's politics with a young, progressive African American candidate facing off against a Republican who went out of his way to embrace President Trump and, eventually, gained his endorsement. DeSantis had two last minute visits from Trump and Vice President Mike Pence that pushed him to victory. 

Andrew Gillum concedes Florida governor's race to Ron DeSantis

This race was a microcosm of 2018's politics.

Politics

2018 midterm elections

The State Department issued a statement Saturday indicating that the government has yet to make a "final conclusion" on who is responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, despite reports that the CIA concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing.

The big picture: The State Department claimed that there are "numerous unanswered questions" surrounding Khashoggi's murder and stressed that the government will hold those accountable while "maintaining the important strategic relationship" between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Earlier Saturday on Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters that President Trump "certainly has confidence in the CIA," but directed them to the State Department's communique. 

The full statement from State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert:

"The United States government is determined to hold all those responsible for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi accountable. Recent reports indicating that the U.S. government has made a final conclusion are inaccurate. There remain numerous unanswered questions with respect to the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. The State Department will continue to seek all relevant facts. In the meantime, we will continue to consult Congress and work with other nations to hold accountable those involved in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

The U.S. government has taken decisive measures against the individuals responsible, including visa and sanctions actions. We will continue to explore additional measures to hold those accountable who planned,  led and were connected to the murder. And, we will do that while maintaining the important strategic relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia."

Bipartisan Senate bill targets Saudis for Khashoggi and Yemen

Khashoggi's warning on Mohammed bin Salman: "Shoot first, aim later"

The companies who have backed away from Saudi business over Khashoggi

State Dept.: "Numerous unanswered questions" about Khashoggi murder

Despite reports that the CIA concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing.

Jamal Khashoggi

The developed world is aging — in the coming decades, the U.S., Europe and nations across Asia will have hundreds of millions more people who are 60 and older.

The big picture: Much of this coming avalanche of senior citizens won't be playing pinochle at retirement homes. Instead, if technology optimists are correct that advanced economies will continue to need massive numbers of workers despite automation, hiring will continue to be tight. Because they have the most experience, older employees are going to be in huge demand and will work a decade and perhaps longer past 65.

Why it matters: Few companies appear to have made the mental shift to accepting that they need to retain and continue to promote older workers rather than letting them go, according to a recent survey.

Neither has public policy caught up with the aging society, which, unless adjustments are made, will swamp programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Bias runs deep: Across society and business, it's assumed that older workers are less mentally capable, less agile technologically and overall less desirable for hiring and retention than someone younger.

"Our society should be ageless," Paul Irving, chairman of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, tells Axios.

"This is one of the great challenges of the 21st century — everything will change because of this. And the society that gets it right will be the winners," he says.

Irving wrote about the situation in a new piece for the Harvard Business Review.

The U.S. and other advanced countries are aging: In a little over 15 years, U.S. retirees will outnumber people 18 and under — the first time this has happened in U.S. history.

And so is the workforce: In just six years, people 55 and older will be 25% of the workforce, double from 12% in 1994.

They are also shrinking: The population of most advanced countries is falling because of lower birth rates and a falloff in immigration.

These are long-range trends: The aging of American society and the workforce will not reverse after boomers are gone — Gen Xers and millennials will continue the shift once they reach 65.

One big fact: Keeping older workers on the job is a potential part of the solution to the social system crisis, as they would continue paying into the social security system.

But embracing older workers will create new problems:

In at least some cases, older workers sticking around could make it harder for young people to move up the career ladder.

The 85 to 94-year-old population is booming

Senior citizens are taking over fast-food jobs

Gig economy senior citizens are typically handymen and wedding officiants

In the coming decades, seniors will work long past 65

Few companies appear to have made the mental shift to accepting that they need to retain and continue to promote older workers.

Future

Aging

There are about 1,500 prisoners doing the grueling work of fighting California wildfires, including the record-breaking Camp Fire, according to the New York Times. This is a long-standing program in which inmates earn up to $3 a day for their volunteer work, but upon release it will be almost impossible for them to get a firefighting job in the state. 

Why it matters: Many prisons offer educational and job training programs for inmates hoping to work in fields like cosmetology, firefighting or even law after serving their time. However, due to complicated occupational licensing laws that often result in denials of former criminals, the training is often useless after incarcerated men and women are released.  

How it happens: It's not always an intentional discrimination against people with criminal histories, but "passivity and unintentionality," Katcher says. To become a firefighter, most departments require an EMT license, but EMT certifying boards have a pattern of denying applicants with a criminal history. Defenders of licensing regimes say they help screen out incompetent or poorly skilled potential employees and ensure minimum skill standards.

What's the point of letting people out ... [if] there's still an invisible prison around them?

Prisoner rights advocate and founder of Root and Rebound Katherine Katcher told Axios

About 21% of California's 19 million workers hold licenses, according to the Little Hoover Commission.

"What we've seen is that not just people in reentry are impacted," Katcher says. "Prison programs across the county are training people for jobs, very well meaning, and then occupational licensing bars them from actually getting those jobs."

It's not just firefighters in California either, in some states, inmates can be trained as cosmetologists, but are unable to receive a cosmetology certification after their release. 

Former convicts often face barriers to construction, tree trimming and truck driving jobs. Women also often face difficulty being hired for care taking professions.

These licensing laws disproportionally affect the lower-level jobs that inmates, who tend to have less formal education, are more likely to qualify for, Katcher says.

People of color with criminal histories are impacted most by licensing laws, according to studies by the National Employment Law Project.

Groups on all sides of the political spectrum, from ACLU to the Heritage Foundation, have been advocating to change how occupational licensing laws work, according to Lee McGrath, the managing attorney at the conservative Institute for Justice.

How inmates who fight wildfires are later denied firefighting jobs

It's due to strict occupational licensing laws.

Firefighters battle flames north of L.A. in this 2008 photograph. Photo: Mike Meadows / AP

U.S. News

Wildfires

Climate change

Breaking climate science and policy coverage as extreme weather events reshape communities. Keep tabs on the race to a low carbon economy, which may be bumpy as governments, climate tech startups and major oil and gas companies race to find their niche amid the changing energy landscape.

Energy & Climate

Responding to questions from Robert Mueller is President Trump’s literal moment of truth. 

Why it matters: Over his decades in public life, Trump has faced scant — if any — serious consequences for saying things that are not true. However, right now, in putting together his answers for the special counsel, that all changes.

Trump told reporters yesterday that he had finished, but not submitted, his answers for Mueller: 

"My lawyers aren’t working on that. I’m working on that. I write the answers. My lawyers don’t write answers; I write answers."

"I was asked a series of questions. I’ve answered them very easily. Very easily. I’m sure they’re tricked up, because, you know, they like to catch people — 'Gee, you know, was the weather sunny or was it rainy?' 'He said it may have been a good day; it was rainy, therefore he told a lie. He perjured himself.'"

"OK? So you have to always be careful when you answer questions with people that probably have bad intentions."

It’s evident that Trump is acutely aware of the high price he would pay if he lies to the special counsel. His concern about that is entirely grounded in fact, and that’s why the process has dragged on for many months. 

We don't know what Trump has written as answers to these questions. But it’s hard to imagine Trump would tell Mueller anything that would incriminate himself or his family. Without direct knowledge of the contents of his answers, we feel on safe ground saying Trump isn’t handing Mueller any huge bombshells.

More than anything, for Trump, answering these questions — even though it’s in written form, and even though it dragged on — appears to be acquiescing to the legitimacy of the special counsel.

Once that letter gets sent, Trump will have accepted, in act if not in words, that Mueller is running a serious and important investigation, and that it behooves powerful people to give Mueller what he wants.

Between the lines: Rudy Giuliani told The Washington Post that Trump is only answering questions about events prior to his election. If that’s true, it would indicate a certain level of success for the president’s legal team in evading cooperation with inquiries into potential obstruction of justice. 

That said, it’s still a concession on the part of the White House to give answers from the president to Mueller.

The case against Mueller target Roger Stone

Reality check: Trump is wrong to compare Mueller and Whitaker

Trump's moment of truth

Over his decades in public life, Trump has faced scant — if any — serious consequences for saying things that are not true.

Photos: Christian Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images; Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Mueller investigation

A court hands down an opinion: thoughtfully reasoned, forcefully argued, eminently fair. It’s lauded widely — until it comes out that the author wasn't a renowned judge but rather an advanced artificial intelligence system.

The big question: Should the opinion be rejected because of its source, even if it’s indistinguishable from — or better than — what a human would have produced?

Even though today’s AI is woefully unprepared for the job, legal scholars are already debating whether computers should someday be entrusted with enormous legal decisions.

Experts differ on whether it’s sufficient for an AI judge to perfectly emulate a human one, given that it’s not actually capable of "thinking" like a person.

The core issue is AI’s decision-making process — or lack thereof.

Intelligent is as intelligent does, argues Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, in a forthcoming paper for the Duke Law Journal.

A computer should be accepted if a panel of humans thinks the opinions it writes are on par with or better than those written by a human judge — the legal version of the Turing Test, Volokh argues.

"It becomes hard to say why we should prefer judges who are proven to produce a worse work product," Volokh said in a lecture at Stanford last week.

Beyond smarts, said Volokh, "wise, merciful, compassionate, and judicious is as it does." It doesn’t matter if a computer can or cannot possess these human traits — it only matters that a human would say that they are reflected in what it produces.

But University of Ottawa professor Ian Kerr says how a decision is arrived at matters as much as the outcome.

"Everything is in the practice," says Kerr, who co-wrote a 2014 article on AI judges with fellow University of Ottawa law professor Carissima Mathen. "The process is the point of the exercise."

Even when an AI system seems to make thoughtful judgments, it is actually only piecing together elements of cases in its database.

It’s the same way AI-generated artwork or music is really just an amalgam of human-created work, combined in a novel way.

To Kerr, this distinction matters. Citing British legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart, a deceased Oxford professor, he says that machines can know what is — drawing on training datasets — but not what ought to be, which requires a broader moral understanding of the world.

This means an AI judge will at its best perfectly apply existing law — but not push it forward, like Supreme Court justices do in landmark cases.

Without a sense of changing societal norms, a computerized judge would be stuck in the past, capable only of regurgitating the conventions embedded in the common law that existed at the time of its creation.

"An algorithm could've given us Dred Scott or Korematsu," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, referring to a pair of Supreme Court decisions now considered morally wrong. But it would not know, decades later, that it had misjudged.

Can judging be automated?

Scholars are debating if computers can replace human judges.

Axios

Saturday's top stories

Faith in democracy fades in Latin America

Andrew Gillum concedes Florida governor's race to Ron DeSantis

State Dept.: "Numerous unanswered questions" about Khashoggi murder

In the coming decades, seniors will work long past 65

How inmates who fight wildfires are later denied firefighting jobs

Trump's moment of truth

Can judging be automated?

The newest target in political cyberattacks: campaign pocketbooks

Walmart is trying cashierless again

Deep Dive: The drug pricing maze

Why drug prices matter: Lives and livelihoods are at stake

Defining a drug's value

Exclusive poll: Americans don't think Trump will reduce drug prices

A nonprofit drugmaker steps into the fray

71 dead, over 1,000 unaccounted for from California Camp Fire