Salon: Afghans still suffer from U.S. war: Violence, displacement, hunger on rise while Europe deports refugees

The number of Afghans “who have fled violence and remained trapped in their own country, where they live on the brink of survival,” has doubled in just over three years, Amnesty International says.

Today, an overwhelming 1.2 million Afghans are displaced inside their country. This is a rise by roughly 240 percent since 2013, when some 500,000 people were internally displaced in Afghanistan.

This does not even consider the estimated 2.6 million Afghan refugees who live outside of their country’s borders. Afghans make up one of the world’s largest refugee populations. [...]

Now, the Taliban is as strong as it was when the U.S. invaded in 2001. The U.N. reported in September that the extremist group had spread through more of Afghanistan than at any point since the beginning of the U.S. war.

Afghan refugees fleeing this extreme violence and seeking asylum in the West have faced intense discrimination, and even deportation.

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AP: German town turns to Syrian refugees to save its school

The scene last week in the tiny town near the Polish border — population 870 — came a year after Golzow launched what principal Gaby Thomas calls an act of "mutual rescue." The school couldn't get together the 15 students needed to set up a first-grade class, and that had Mayor Frank Schuetz fearing for his town's future. [...]

Golzow has lost nearly a third of its population since German reunification, a phenomenon seen in many parts of the east after communist-era industry and collective farms went out of business or downsized. Real estate is not a booming business — in fact, taking in the families has helped the town tackle another concern by using some of its empty housing.

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Salon: Working at an abortion clinic challenged my pro-choice views — and confirmed them

Abortion is fraught with so much negative sentiment, and in a sense, abortion is plucking a life from existence that has yet to have the opportunity to thrive. No one is claiming it’s pleasant. There is nothing black and white about abortion. It’s every shade of gray. But for us pro-choicers, the woman’s life trumps the embryo or fetus. That’s the bottom line. We place value on a woman’s ability to know what is best for her. It simply needs to be a safe and legal option. When I started at the clinic, all I saw was the individual moment of pain, but over the years I began to see a much richer portrait — women coming out the other side, relieved, even if it was simply a relief to have the procedure behind them. They could go back to their lives.

Seeing every side, the whole complicated and profound process, I came out more pro-choice than ever. I started to see it from a purely biological standpoint. We were removing an unwanted growth to preserve the woman’s chosen course.

Pro-choice isn’t just about being able to choose whether to have a baby or not. It’s also about having choices and opportunities before you dedicate your life to a child, or overwhelm yourself with too many children. What if a new baby means the children you already have will go without? There are myriad variables.

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Foreign Affairs: Ukraine's Uneasy Justice

The definition of a crime of aggression as a so-called leadership crime and Ukraine’s domestic laws explain why Ukrainian officials have discussed prosecuting Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, on charges of aggressive war. It doesn’t explain, however, why the prosecutor’s office chose to try Alexandrov, Yerofeyev, and other relatively low-ranking Russians for the same crime. The extent to which an individual must control the actions of a state to be found guilty of aggressive war remains a subject of debate among legal scholars. But no serious analysis could conclude that Alexandrov or Yerofeyev met the requirements necessary for a conviction: both men are mid-level officers, tasked with carrying out the state’s directives, not designing them. Nevertheless, in its verdict, the court argued that the section of Ukrainian law that criminalizes aggressive war was based on the 1974 UN resolution—an apparent attempt to ground the trial in international law. Clearly, Ukraine is picking and choosing the portions of international law that suit its domestic purposes [...]

The politicization of the trial should come as no surprise: in today’s Ukraine, the executive’s preferences often take precedence over the law. Less than two weeks before the prisoner exchange, for example, the Ukrainian parliament voted to amend a national law in order to allow candidates without legal qualifications to become Ukraine’s prosecutor general so that Poroshenko could appoint an ally to the post. [...]

That logic was echoed in February 2015 by Irina Lutsenko, a deputy in Poroshenko’s parliamentary faction, who offered a revealing explanation of Kiev's decision not to ratify the Rome Statute, which would have brought Ukraine under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Asked why Ukraine had not ratified the statute, Lutsenko responded, “for one, simple reason. Because Russia has the so-called ‘white book,’ [a widely disputed record of Ukrainian activity in the Donbas in which the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs] has fixated on the alleged crimes of Ukrainian soldiers, generals, and leaders… our soldiers will be called to The Hague to offer evidence, so that their morale will be somehow depressed.” (Although Ukraine still has not ratified the Rome Statute, in September 2015, the country accepted the ICC's indefinite jurisdiction over the conflict in the Donbas, exposing itself to potential prosecution at the court.)

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Ostpol: The lonely life

According to Jan Sowa it's not conservatism, xenofobia or strong Catholicism is the most important feature of a typical Pole, it is rather his loneliness. Although in terms of material good Poland is becoming more and more like the Western Europe, yet behind the modern facade hides a very different country from other members of the EU. It's ironic that the country which ones was the most ethnic and religious diverse in the whole of Europe is now understanding its identity to be based on national, ethinic and religious homogeneity. It is so ironic, as this ahistoric lack of diversity is a result of Hitler's and Stalin's decisions, something that most Poles would not want to acknowledge. This homogeneity unknown in other European countries can be seen not only in terms of its popualtion, but also in terms of its built enviroment, which tends to be very undiverse as well. This lack of diversity has been deepened since Poland joined the EU, because the most edcuated and active Poles have left the country in search of better perspective. 

Poland has one of the lowest rates of trust towards others in the whole of Europe and that, according to Sowa, takes a heavy toll on how people function in the society and their life standards. Furthermore, this also overshadows foreign relations of the country. Poland is basically insolated from its neighbours, none of the relations can be described as really good. It is practically striking in case  of Lithuania and Ukraine, with whom Poland shares a very long history. Yet, the unwilingess to accept the point of view of the others, acknowledge that Poles in the past were perpetrators (as well as victims) makes the impossible to built healthy relationship with any of the neighbour states. 

The difference to the rest of the EU is also due to the fact that Poland is one of the last bastions of neo-liberalism on the continent. That is linked with superficial modernisation, which is limited only to the infrustructure (symbolised by Pendolino trains), but seems to have little or no effect on the mentality or ideas. This is why Poland refuses to give up its coal (which is of very bad quality), to take any refugeese or to give rights to sexual minorities. The neo-liberal dogma also results in Poles working longer than almost all other nationalities in the EU, despite being paid siginificantly lower wages. 

The author, however, believes that it is possible that things will change in Poland and the mentalities will also change.

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The Washington Post: The forgotten story of European refugee camps in the Middle East

Tens of thousands of refugees fled a war. They journeyed across the Eastern Mediterranean, a trip filled with peril. But the promise of sanctuary on the other side was too great.

No, this is not the plight faced by Syrian refugees, desperate to escape the desolation of their homeland and find a safer, better life in Europe. Rather, it's the curious and now mostly forgotten case of thousands of people from Eastern Europe and the Balkans who were housed in a series of camps across the Middle East, including in Syria, during World War II. [...]

A British-led scheme known as the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration, launched in 1942 and facilitated by officials based in Cairo, helped provide for some 40,000 Poles, Greeks and Yugoslavs. (By 1944, the initiative would be subsumed under the auspices of the "United Nations," the formal term for the Allied alliance.) The refugees were spread out between camps in Egypt, southern Palestine and Syria — yes, Syria. Aleppo, an ancient and thriving metropolitan center, was already a veritable hub of emigres, exiles and spies in the 1940s.

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Atlas Obscura: There’s an Art Deco Airport Lying Ruined in Brooklyn

Long before JFK and LaGuardia, there was Floyd Bennett Field, New York City’s first municipal airport. Designed in stunning Art Deco style, it was once the most modern airport in the world, a glittering gateway into America’s principal metropolis. Many of the leading aviators of their day started daring adventures here during the golden age of aviation—pilots like Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and Roscoe Turner, the latter of whom flew with a lion cub as his co-pilot. Wiley Post, the man who was the first to fly solo around the world, took off and landed here in front of crowds of 50,000 fans. When Howard Hughes set the world record for flying fastest around the world, it was from Floyd Bennett that he piloted his gleaming Lockheed Super Electra. [...]

The focal point of the roughly 1,400-acre airport was a beautiful terminal, which is still there today. Designed in the Art Deco style with classical Doric columns, it was a suitably grand airport for New York City. In the 1930s air travel was still largely enjoyed only by the wealthy, and well-dressed passengers would arrive at the sweeping drive way in front of the terminal where their luggage was collected by porters and taken underground by twin ramped tunnels which emerged out on the runway. The inside of the terminal was decorated with vast, elaborate murals from the WPA program.

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Salon: Rep. Keith Ellison draws attention to Israeli apartheid in tweet on Palestinian life under occupation

Ellison noted that, while Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation in Hebron may have windows in their homes that open to segregated streets, they cannot walk or drive down them. [...]

Veteran Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist Denis Goldberg, who spent two decades in a South African prison for his activism and briefly lived in Israel before moving away in protest, has also called Israel an apartheid state.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Israel is an apartheid state,” he said in 2015. “Having lived through apartheid in South Africa, I cannot allow in my name the same kind of oppression to go on.” [...]

And it is not just Palestinians living under illegal military occupation who endure apartheid, rights advocates say. Israeli human rights organization Adalah has documented more than 50 laws “that directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel in all areas of life.”

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Quartz: Economists show that boys who grow up around books earn significantly more money as adults

But the researchers were surprised to find that, among kids who benefited from an extra year of school, those who grew up with more than 10 non-school books (that is, books they weren’t forced to read) at home eventually doubled that lifetime earning advantage, to 21%. Factors like whether the boys’ fathers had white-collar jobs, and whether their homes had running water, did not seem to make a difference. [...]

The researchers based their models on data collected from men between ages 60 and 96 from Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden, part of a massive ongoing survey of Europeans. They compared whether the men grew up in rural or urban environments, the years they were in school, roughly how many books they had in their houses at age 10, and their income across their lives. The study was published online in April in The Economic Journal.

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Politico: Russia’s top enemies: US, Ukraine, Turkey and Poland

Russians believe their main enemies in the world are the U.S., Ukraine and Turkey, and 62 percent have a poor opinion of the EU, according to a Levada Center poll that measures sentiments towards other countries.

Belarus, Kazakhstan, China, India and Armenia are Russia’s five best friends in the world, according to the poll. [...]

The majority of those polled said they would either probably or definitely oppose Russia joining the EU, and 65 percent said they wouldn’t be concerned if the EU fell apart as a result of the refugee crisis. While many believed Russia’s relationship with the EU hadn’t changed recently (47 percent), 28 percent were convinced relations were getting worse.

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Salon: Religious extremism in the age of Trump: Empowered radicals are pushing harder than ever to legalize discrimination

These people do not appear to have gotten the memo that once marriage equality was affirmed by the Supreme Court the issue was settled. In fact, that ruling sparked a coordinated effort among conservative religious organizations to  roll back gay rights wherever they can. The report says that in 2016 over 100 anti- LGBT equality bills have already been introduced in statehouses around the country. And there is every indication that these activities are picking up speed. [...]

The lesson here is that even as the Trump craziness dominates the conversation and our civic life seems to be morphing into something unrecognizable, more familiar political activity carries on at all levels of society. I recall the feeling of euphoria when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality being tempered by the knowledge that reproductive rights had been under siege for decades despite Roe vs Wade.  We’re already seeing the battle lines expand on LGBT rights from marriage to bathrooms.

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