Deutsche Welle: Women conspicuously missing from Japan's upcoming elections

At present, just 38 of the 242 seats in the chamber are occupied by women, a mere 15.7 percent. Those figures are even worse in the Lower House, where 45 of the 475 seats are held by women, just 9.5 percent.

Japan ranks 155 of the 193 member countries for female representation in its lower house, according to a study conducted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a body that facilitates worldwide parliamentary dialogue. Japan is also at the very bottom of the Group of 20 nations. [...]

Indicative of the government's attitudes toward women, Matsumoto says, was the poorly thought-out campaign to promote equality and women's rights. The poster accompanying the campaign showed a line of politicians who would be in the vanguard of improving women's lives.

Every one of them was a man. [...]

And even in East Asia, where male-dominated societies are perhaps considered the norm, Matsumoto pointed out, Park Geun-hye became president of South Korea and Taiwan last year elected Tsai Ing-wen as president.

Japan's failure to elect a representative number of women to its national parliament - a problem that is replicated at the city and regional levels across the country - means that issues that are of importance to women are frequently ignored.

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Politico: NATO’s Germany problem

As many Alliance members become increasingly nervous over Russia’s incursions into neighboring territories and demand a harsher tone with Moscow, powerful voices in Berlin have pushed in the opposite direction.

“What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further with loud saber-rattling and warmongering,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Germany’s Bild last month. “Anyone who believes that a symbolic tank parade on the Alliance’s Eastern frontier will create security is mistaken.” [...]

So far, Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose center-right alliance governs in coalition with Steinmeier’s Social Democrats, has shied away from the debate, leaving it to party colleagues to express annoyance at the “irritations” the foreign minister’s remarks have created with allies. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble accused Steinmeier this week of trying to score political points at NATO’s expense, saying his cabinet colleague’s remarks “were not just a rhetorical mistake.” [...]

Resistance in Central Europe to taking in refugees, and the increasingly belligerent rhetoric of Poland’s nationalist government toward Germany, has done little to win over Berlin. Merkel also likely has an eye on German elections next year and doesn’t want to spend the political capital necessary to argue for a more robust response.

Washington also bears some responsibility for the situation for not engaging more on European security and leaving the Germans to their own devices.“The U.S. has also dropped the ball,” Kornblum said.

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Jacobin Magazine: Why They Left

The minor rift is present within the British ruling class: the majority of financiers, industrialists, merchants, real estate speculators, and others favor staying in the European Union, while a much smaller minority have opted for Brexit. The evidence of the relative size of the two sides is undeniable. [...]

Despite this interdependence, Britain is far less integrated into the EU networks than the core countries of the union. Trade links between Britain and the European Union are actually among the weakest within the twenty-eight-member union, similar by order of magnitude to trade flows between Greece and the European Union as well as Italy and the European Union. In contrast, for both France and Germany trade with the EU accounts for nearly 60 percent of exports and 70 percent of imports. [...]

The true significance of the referendum, however, is that the rift within the British ruling class has acted as catalyst for the emergence of a far deeper rift within British society. This is a common occurrence when great historic events take place. [...]

There is no doubt that the Leave camp made hay with the issue of immigration during the campaign. However, to ascribe up the referendum result to racism or hostility to migrants is nonsensical, and smacks of the contempt toward workers and the poor often exhibited by their social “betters”.

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Sociology Toolbox: POLICE KILLING OF BLACKS: Data for 2015

Which racial or ethnic group in the US is the most frequent victim of deadly force from law enforcement officers? On the surface, the answer is clear, whites. You can see in the chart below that in 2015, in the US, 578 whites were killed by police. This is nearly double the number of blacks at 301. However, we need to compare these rates to the rates of each group in the general population. Of course (non-Hispanic) whites are the most frequent victims, they are the largest portion of the population – 62.2% in 2014 according to US Census estimates. If we lived in a society where one’s race had no impact, then we would expect to see the portion of each racial/ethnic group killed by police equal to that of the portion in the general population. That is not what is evident from the 2015 data. [...]

Hispanics make up victims of lethal police force at about the same rate as they are in general US population, as do Native Americans. The data distinguishes Arab Americans, but the US Census data does not. Asians made up a much lower portion of those killed by police relative to the portion of the general population (2.1% vs. 5.6%). [...]

Through the analysis of this data a pattern emerges. Compared to their portion of the overall population, blacks are disproportionally the victims of lethal force by law enforcement officers, even when they are unarmed. While most of those killed by police were white, the portion of white victims is lower than the portion of whites in the general population, more than 10% lower. The vast majority of those killed by police were men and most died from gunshots. Only about half of the victims were armed with a gun themselves. The victims in 2015 varied widely in age, but most were between 18 and 39 years old. This data further solidifies the concerns and demands of the Black Lives Matters movement; there is a pattern of police using deadly force disproportionally on blacks that needs to be addressed by policy makers and police departments across the nation.

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CityLab: How 19th Century Immigration Made New York City Rethink Its Parks

In 1811, when New York City commissioners laid out the city’s grid, they didn’t put in many parks. Unlike Paris and London, Manhattan was an island, and so didn’t require the same kind of open spaces for leisure, commerce, and circulation of clean air, they argued at the time.

But over the next few decades, New York’s view of urban parks underwent a transformation. Catherine McNeur, history professor at Portland State University and author of Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City documents this shift in a new article in the Journal of Planning History. [...]

It was becoming harder to know who was a part of New York society and who wasn’t. There was a lot of fear of confident men, or conmen, in this period because the city was growing more anonymous and you couldn’t tell where people stood in the hierarchy. The 1830s park boom reflected this, as wealthy New Yorkers looked to secure spaces that were exclusive where they could promenade and mix with people they were certain were their equals. [...]

That vision didn’t quite pan out. The concept for the park, as lofty and noble-seeming as it was, was planned, executed, and maintained via a “top down” approach, McNeur writes. And perhaps that’s because even the most progressive elites at the time considered Central Park to be a place where the poor could be regulated, not a place that they could coexist in equal capacity. The creators of the park (including Olmsted) and city officials made sure that the lower classes were heavily policed there so that it remained a space where the elites felt comfortable—and that practice continues till today. If poor people of color in America even have access to open public spaces, they are punished for being in them. The idea that parks are for all, born with the creation of Central Park, is still waiting to be realized in a meaningful way.

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Deutsche Welle: Why urban wildlife is thriving in Berlin

Foxes and raccoons can be found all over the city. They like to climb houses and play around in gardens and parks, they can even be found next to busy streets. The entire city of Berlin has become habitat for foxes. In fact, studies show that there are now more fox dens in the city than in the forest. But there are also lots of boars, martens and rabbits hopping crossing the streets.

Not to mention birds. Berlin is the city with the largest amount and variety of birds in Germany. We have songbirds, raptors like the white-tailed eagle - and in the past few years, we also have large seagulls breeding here. There is a huge colony of wild grey herons at Berlin's Tierpark that actually love it there because they eat the zoo animals' food. [...]

Take a fox for instance. Usually a wild fox would run for its life when confronted with a human, because they have been hunted so intensively. Not so in Berlin. Berlin's city foxes don't have this so-called flight initiation distance. They'll approach a human very closely, and stare him or her in the eye - and so citizens are often worried that something might be wrong with that fox, that it might have rabies, because they're not used to such behavior. [...]

It's important that we don't just keep building without leaving enough space for animals to survive. Especially the population of small birds like the great tit is rapidly decreasing - because we are overexploiting our green areas, and so the birds have nothing left to eat.

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Mental Floss: Software Flaws May Invalidate 40,000 Neuroscience Studies

Looking at the results of their almost 3 million comparisons, the researchers expected to find a false positive rate of about 5 percent. Instead, they found that the top three fMRI analysis programs—Statistical Parametric Mapping, the fMRIB Software Library, and Analysis of Functional Neuroimages—yielded false positive rates up to 70 percent. That’s right: seven out of 10 scans analyzed using these methods came to inaccurate conclusions. And the authors say that may be a conservative estimate.

If these findings are correct, it has a huge impact on neuroscience research. In a literature search, the authors found more than 40,000 neuroscience studies that relied on fMRI results. Still, there may be no point in going back and re-doing these studies. It’s better to look to the future, the authors say: "Considering it is now possible to evaluate common statistical methods using real fMRI data, the fMRI community should, in our opinion, focus on validation of existing methods.”

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BuzzFeed: Support For EU Membership Is On The Rise In Several Countries After Brexit

In Denmark, a Voxmeter poll shows that nearly 7 in 10 Danes now support EU membership, up from 60% a week before Britain’s vote. The same poll found support for holding a referendum dropping to 32% from 41% over the course of the same seven days.

In Finland, a poll released last week also saw a rise in support for EU membership: up from 56% in March to 68%. In Sweden, backing for EU membership has seen a smaller increase compared with earlier levels, but is nevertheless supported by a majority (52%) according to a TNS Sifo poll carried out after the UK referendum. [...]

Meanwhile, in Europe’s largest economy, Germany, 82% of respondents polled by Forsa said they would vote to remain in the EU if a referendum were held in their country. Only 14% would back leaving the EU. More than 70% are opposed to a UK-style referendum, according to the same poll published on the Monday after Britain’s vote. [...]

Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National (FN), who was all smiles on 24 June, has pledged to hold a referendum on EU membership if elected president in 2017. According to opinion polls, Le Pen is currently on track to make the second-round run-off in next year’s presidential election.

However, experts suggest that unless Brexit turns out to be a runaway success for the UK, Le Pen will find it extremely difficult to carve out a path to the presidency on an anti-EU platform because dislike for the EU is not the same as wanting to exit.

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The Washington Post: An introduction to Islam by way of potions and spells, dreams and demons

It isn’t hard to find a book about Islam or Muslims. It is hard, however, to find a really good one. Some of the more popular titles are actually terrible, if not malevolent. Swap out “Islam” for “Judaism,” for example, and Glenn Beck’s “It IS About Islam” reads like a Nazi screed. Part of the problem is authorship: We talk about Muslims frequently, but we rarely hear from Muslims. That’s why Michael Muhammad Knight’s latest book, “Magic in Islam,” is such a treat, both for his perspective and for his scholarship. Finally an introduction to Islam that is entertaining, intelligent and well-informed. Even if you’re well-versed in the religion, you’ll still find Knight’s historical and cultural foray to be powerful, rewarding reading. [...]

“Magic in Islam” is packed with fascinating insights and curious tidbits. Did you know the devil had a granddaughter? Knight even knows her name. Beyond that, who else would think of explaining Islam through magic? From potions to spells, from astrology to numerology, from dreams to demons, “Magic in Islam” unveils the allegedly talismanic and purportedly irrational ways Islam works in real people’s lives. Concise in his language and admirable in his breadth, Knight is remarkably efficient, providing a very nuanced, detailed and almost taxonomic take on Islam over some 1,400 years of human history — all in just 200 pages of text.

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The Guardian: Van Rompuy: UK must accept free movement to stay in single market

Brussels-based insiders read Juppé’s remarks in a different way. “That doesn’t mean we compromise on basic principles,” said one senior national diplomat, adding that it would be “a mistake” for the UK to rely on talks with small groups of countries.

“It would make the position of the 27 more difficult to formulate and could lead to misunderstandings and illusions on the British side, and would prolong negative consequences,” he said. [...]

But Britain had no future as a stand-alone power, he insisted. “There is no country in Europe which is a great power. We are all middle-ranking powers, so there is no future for us to stand alone in this globalised world.”

Despite his concern about the loss of Britain’s diplomatic clout to the EU, he said British influence had already been waning. He pointed out that the British prime minister had not been in Minsk, when European leaders brokered a shaky truce in Ukraine. “France and Germany were there, but Britain was absent.”

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