A new study shows that cities that raised their minimum wage did not not see the economic blowback warned of by critics, and the wage raises had little effect on employment rates in traditionally low-wage sectors of their economies.

Top of the Alty World

"As Cities Raise Their Minimum Wage, Where's the Economic Collapse the Right Predicted?"—Mother Jones

Email records show how counter-terrorism officials in California tracked "Black Lives Matter" activists—East Bay Express

Officials struggle to deal with an increase in drowning deaths of undocumented immigrants crossing the Mediterranean sea.—The Economist

Tens of thousands of New York state parents had their children boycott an English Language Arts exam in a protest against standardized testing.—Democracy Now!

Top of Alty Utah

A poll commissioned by a political consultant—who has also been retained by a man likely to challenge Governor Herbert in the 2016 election—shows 56 percent of support for Governor Herbert's Healthy Utah plan, but 47 percent support after pollsters told respondents the plan would impact the federal budget.—Utah Politico Hub

A poll also shows Utahns evenly split on the gas tax hike—Utah Policy

The Salt Lake City Council endorsed a ballot initiative for November to fund transit projects in the city.—SL City News

Salt Lake District Attorney Sim Gill has received cheers and jeers for a new policy to not press felony charges against repeat retail-theft offenders of products or services valued at $50 or less.—Salt Lake City Weekly

Rantosphere

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi looks at Hillary Clinton and the National Democratic party's pitch-perfect faux populism and big-talk over closing tax loopholes.

Promising, and then failing, to repeal the carried interest tax break is fast becoming a Democratic tradition, so much so that I'm beginning to wonder if not fixing this problem is an intentional move, designed to ensure that Democrats always have something to run on in election seasons.

In both the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, Barack Obama either decried the tax "trick" or overtly promised to close the loophole.

Obama's remarks about carried interest pretty much always sound exactly like Hillary's remarks this week. He gave a Rose Garden speech in 2011, in advance of his race against Romney, in which he rejected "the notion that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or teacher is class warfare."  But Obama and the Democrats never really did anything about the loophole, even when they had the power to do so.—Rolling Stone

The Long View

A Huffington Post project looks at the failings of the World Bank to protect the worlds most vulnerable from displacement and abuse at the hands of oppressive governments.

The scope of “involuntary resettlement,” as the bank calls it, is vast. From 2004 to 2013, the bank’s projects physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, forcing them from their homes, taking their land or damaging their livelihoods, ICIJ’s analysis of World Bank records reveals.
The true figure is likely higher, because the bank often fails to count or undercounts the number of people affected by its projects.
A team of more than 50 journalists from 21 countries spent nearly a year documenting the bank’s failure to protect people moved aside in the name of progress. The reporting partners analyzed thousands of World Bank records, interviewed hundreds of people and reported on the ground in Albania, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Kosovo, Nigeria, Peru, Serbia, South Sudan and Uganda.
In these countries and others, the investigation found, the bank’s lapses have hurt urban slum dwellers, hardscrabble farmers, impoverished fisherfolk, forest dwellers and indigenous groups — leaving them to fight for their homes, their land and their ways of life, sometimes in the face of intimidation and violence.—Huffington Post