Vox: "We have become obsessed with security": a foreign policy expert on America after 9/11

 You are right on top of something, Sean. We have, both at the strategic level and at the international level and the domestic individual level, pushed toward preventive war, which is quite new. When you look at warfare traditionally, it’s a response to an act of aggression, at least in our recent history. Instead, what we have seen is an articulation of policy positions that say the United States will take preemptive action, preemptive military action, in order to thwart potential terrorist threats and indeed will engage in preventive military operations.

On the domestic side, the fears created by terrorism have made in the eyes of policymakers and the public a traditional reactive criminal investigative response unsatisfactory. Instead, it has pushed the authorities upstream to take action and to prevent these attacks before they occur. That has meant changing the law. It has expanded the area to which people can be prosecuted on the basis of intentions alone. It is moving us also into a dangerous place, I think. [...]

There will be other attacks. My point is that an attack would not have to achieve the scale of the 9/11 to provoke an extraordinary reaction. A terrorist attack does not have to kill thousands. If we experienced in an American city what Paris experienced last fall, that might suffice to propel us into an extraordinary response abroad and in this county. It doesn't have to hit the 9/11 record to provoke the overreaction.

read the article 

CityLab: Which European Cities Have the Most Affordable Housing?

If you want to live in a European city where residents think affordable housing is easy to come by, avoid London and head for Ljubljana. That's one of the possible conclusions to draw from a massive new report on European cities published by the E.U.

According to Eurostat's 2015 Urban Europe report [PDF], published this week, most European big city residents feel that decent housing they can afford is increasingly hard to come by. As the map above shows, only in Athens and Greater Manchester did more than half of citizens agree that decent value housing was easy to find. In slightly smaller cities, however, things get a little easier. Among cities of between 600,000 and 1.2 million inhabitants, more than half of respondents in Ljubljana, Naples, Palermo, and Diyarbakir, Turkey, agreed that affordable housing was easy to find. [...]

Even though residents of Vienna and Munich expressed doubts about whether they can find affordable housing with ease, they are also among the happiest with their incomes in all of Europe, with over 83 percent of citizens in those cities responding that they were satisfied with the financial situations of their households. Meanwhile, the number of Athenians satisfied with their financial situation is far lower, even though the same people consider local housing relatively affordable. [...]

Here we can see that the housing stock in Wales, rural France, French-speaking Belgium, Eastern Germany and Polish Silesia is notably older than elsewhere, with most dwellings built before 1919. These regions all have something in common: they’re industrial heartlands that experienced intense urbanization over a century ago. They are also regions where economic growth has recently been relatively sluggish. The one exception to this rule is of course rural France, where depopulation of the countryside has removed any real pressure for massive redevelopment.

The map also reveals some interesting reflections of Europe's recent history. The effect of two world wars and the global depression, for example, is still writ large in Europe’s housing map. In only two small regions across the map does housing stock built between 1919 and 1945 predominate. By contrast, Great Britain’s and Sweden’s largely green coloring, which denotes housing built between 1946 and 1970, shows how vast those countries’ public housing construction programs were in the years following World War II.

read the article 

CityLab: An Unsteady Future for New England's Suburbs

This has little to do with the housing market broadly speaking: In cities like New York, San Francisco, and Boston, prices are rising and homes are sold within days of listing. Rather, it’s a sign that suburban neighborhoods straight out of Mad Men are no longer as in-demand as they once were. Around Boston, for example, 51 towns and suburbs started the year with price declines while the city’s prices skyrocketed. Indeed, as Blackwood drives me through this picturesque New England town just an hour from New York, we pass dozens of for-sale and for-rent signs outside homes set back from the road. These are homes that, one day, might have been on any family’s dream list, back when suburbs were where everyone wanted to live and there were dozens of companies to work for nearby. Median home values in Fairfield County, where New Canaan is located, are down 21 percent from their peak in 2003, according to Zillow; for the state as a whole median home values are down 18 percent from their 2004 peak. By contrast, home values nationwide are down just 5 percent from their 2005 peak. In urban areas, they are up—often substantially; in Boston, Charlotte, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle, prices this year have set record highs. [...]

It might not be too big of a jump to suggest that these parts of New England are starting, slightly, to resemble the Rust Belt. Connecticut, for instance, faces $26 billion in unfunded pension liabilities as retirees lived longer and the state failed to contribute an adequate sum. Three of the four major ratings agencies maintain a “negative” outlook on Connecticut’s credit. Manufacturing jobs have been trickling out for years; in cities such as Bridgeport and New Britain, graffiti-covered empty warehouses with broken windows haunt the skyline, reminiscent of Detroit. [...]

The trend of companies moving to cities also hasn’t helped. Between 1975 and 2005, 90 percent of the jobs created in the New York region, which includes suburban Connecticut and New Jersey, were created outside New York City, according to Chris Jones, chief planner with the Regional Plan Association, a research group that studies the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region. In the last 10 years, 90 percent of the jobs created have been in New York City. In the past decade, New York City has added 600,000 jobs, while the entire rest of the region has added just 88,000. “It’s a reversal of what it was through most of the postwar period,” he said. “You have very slow economic growth and at the same time you have high prices, particularly housing prices” in the suburbs, Jones said.

read the article 

Al Jazeera: Thousands in Spain's Madrid call for bullfighting ban

Thousands of people have rallied in the Spanish capital Madrid to call for a ban on bullfighting, adding their voices to a growing animal rights movement that has prompted some administrations to clamp down on the centuries-old tradition.

PACMA, a Spanish political party that promotes animal rights, said that Saturday's rally was the biggest protest yet against the gory sport, in which a matador brandishing a sword and cape battles a bull in an effort to kill the animal as a public spectacle. [...]

Surveys show public support for bullfighting has waned in recent decades in Spain. An Ipsos Mori poll from January carried out for animal welfare organisation World Animal Protection, found that only 19 percent of adults in Spain supported bullfighting, while 58 percent opposed it. [...]

Politically, the issue has been divisive. Spain's parliament, under the centre-right government of the People's Party (PP), moved to protect bullfighting in 2013, declaring it a cultural asset and enabling it to draw on public funding.

But some regions have cracked down on elements of the festivals, including northeastern Catalonia, which banned bullfighting outright in 2011.

read the article 

Al Jazeera: In Canada, Syrian refugee children head back to school

In November, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to take in 20,000 refugees. That number, though, has grown to nearly 30,000 so far. About half of those are sponsored by the government, including the Muhammed family. [...]

"There are so many people willing to help in Canada. I'm probably the only minister of immigration in the world who can't produce refugees quickly enough for the demand of private sponsors."

Canadian citizens and permanent residents can sponsor refugees and help them resettle in Canada under the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Programme. [...]

Seventy-five percent of Syrian refugees to Canada are under the age of 18. Zeina Adra, a school settlement worker for the Peel District School Board, works directly with Syrian refugee students, many of whom have come from rural areas and refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey.

read the article 

Politico: How ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Built Modern Conservatism

In modern America they also seem like escapism—a welcome relief from the welter and conflict of today’s politics. Actually they’re anything but. The Little House books, conceived during the Great Depression as a family project to honor the nation’s tough old pioneers, blossomed during the writing into something else. Woven into the story of Laura’s life were then-new ideas about the value of individual freedom, unfettered markets, and limited government. During the writing of each new book, as the series expanded in answer to the fans’ clamors for more, the Little House books became anti-New Deal political parables. They helped lay the groundwork for the modern libertarian strain of modern conservatism—and to an extent few people realize, they helped fund its rise. [...]

Amidst the images of stoic optimism displayed by the Ingalls and Wilder families as they ride through storms and survive locust plagues, the authors deliver little lessons in vignettes and dialogue, extolling free-market economics (“You work hard, but you work as you please. ... You’ll be free and independent, son, on a farm”) and raising skepticism about government overreach (“Why do they make a law that he’s got to stay on a claim, when he can’t?”). For a country in the throes of the Depression, the Little House books delivered a clear and consistent message about the virtues of rugged individualism and not taking handouts from Washington. [...]

In her mythologizing of America, her institution-building, and her long and constant argument for the value of individual liberty over regulation, Lane was helping to reboot conservatism itself at a pivotal moment in its history. Republicans from the 1930s through the early 1960s were confronting the fact that their image was that of plutocrats trying to keep their own pockets lined, and to broaden their appeal they had to define themselves in a new way. “The party in fact did continue to represent the interests of elites,” says Phillips-Fein of the time, “but it tried to find a new and more politically and philosophically palatable way of doing this.”

read the article 

Salon: Homosexuality, a Western vice: In much of the Middle East, it’s getting more dangerous to be gay

“Egypt stands next to the American people in these difficult times, offering sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wishing the injured a speedy recovery,”the ministry said.

Yet the statement didn’t acknowledge that Pulse was a gay club or that many of the victims were members of the LGBTQ community.

Three days later, a court in Cairo sentenced two 18-year-olds to three years in prison on charges of “debauchery”: The young men were apprehended through government surveillance of social media dating apps for gay men, according to court records. [...]

“Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait have all rushed to condemn the crime in Orlando labeling it terrorism while insisting Islam has nothing to do with it,” said a spokesman for Mesahat, an LGBT service organization operating in Egypt and Sudan.

“These same governments keep arresting and torturing gay people and are putting them in jail. Meanwhile they are sponsoring a religious discourse that feeds homophobia.” [...]

But gay people in the region say widespread condemnation of homosexuality came about only in the 1980s, when the rise of the global LGBT rights movement coincided with the expansion of ultraconservative Wahhabism sponsored by Saudi Arabia.

Activities and relationships that were considered normal 30 years ago are now described as haram, an Islamic term to describe religiously prohibited behavior like eating pork or consuming alcohol. Homosexuality is now frequently condemned as a “Western” vice and a threat to Arab and Islamic culture.

read the article

AP: Reviving old traditions, Arab beer brewers make their mark

Jordanian beer pioneer Yazan Karadsheh is now taking his next risky step, sending a first shipment of his Carakale to the U.S., where it will compete with thousands of brands in a $22 billion-a-year craft beer market.

The 32-year-old Karadsheh is part of a small but growing brotherhood of Arab brewers in the Levant who want to nurture local beer-drinking cultures and compete against the brews of large companies, some of them multi-nationals that dominate the region's beer market.

Carakale is the first craft beer in Jordan. The West Bank already has three independent breweries — well-established veteran Taybeh, newcomer Shepherds and tiny Wise Men's Choice, made in a basement near biblical Bethlehem. Lebanese brands include Colonel, made at a large brew pub in the coastal town of Batroun, and 961, named after the country's international dialing code. Small breweries also sprang up in Israel over the past decade.

read the article 

Salon: The enduring damage of 9/11: How the War on Terror gave rise to a bigger threat in the form of ISIS

“Never forget” is the oft-repeated refrain used when talking about the 9/11 attacks. Yet, it often seems an empty phrase brought out yearly for memorial services and invoked by politicians seeking to justify the latest round of new counter-terrorism efforts. Despite the phrase perhaps being overused, the attacks themselves should never be forgotten as they marked a key turning point in modern history and would, arguably, lead to the birth of a much more dangerous enemy in the form of ISIS. [...]

ISIS has since gone on to inspire nearly half a dozen attacks, beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria, in both Europe and the Middle East. It is arguable that had 9/11 never happened, then the specific circumstances which led to the formation of AQI would never have occurred, and ISIS would now not exist. Thus, we should never forget 9/11, partly to remember and honour the victims but also as a reminder that responding to terrorism with force can have far-reaching effects which are hard to predict. Fortunately, we are unlikely to see a spectacular attack like 9/11 carried out again, as ISIS appears to be focused on retaining the land it controls in Iraq and Syria. However, ISIS is more dangerous because of its ability to inspire those with little or no history of extremist violence to carry out low-level attacks, such as Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan and Nice. The legacy of 9/11 is not just memorials to those who died but is an on-going struggle to detect, disrupt and neutralise plots inspired by ISIS.

read the article