Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage. I’m going to start off with my usual conservation theme before turning to some other topics like a kerfuffle over mapping racial tolerance and the World Health Assembly (going on this week).

• Amphibians are in trouble all across the U.S. and world (disease, climate change, farm chemicals), along with bees and bats, nature is trying to tell us something
• Chinese bear bile farms are generating an uproar – in China!
• Fish have been moving to cooler water for decades in reaction to climate change

Did you see the cross-national map of racial tolerance that lit up the blogosphere with back and forth?

• Max Fisher writing for the Washington Post posts a map of cross-national attitudes towards racial tolerance based on the World Values Survey
• Critics question (“the cartography of bullshit“) whether race can be measured cross-nationally, find errors, and hammer Fisher for being a public intellectual
• Drezner and Ulfelder think the critics go overboard
• Saideman weighs in, wonders about a single metric to gauge races and what the questions actually ask
• Aba Muqawama ponders the perils of data journalism

In other news, the World Health Assembly is meeting this week and Laurie Garrett is on it in a two parter (I, II) , for how the World Health Organization is trying to handle a very limited budget, big dreams for global health, lots of money tied up in infectious diseases, and a new big pushes for action on health systems and non-communicable diseases like diabetes.