BBC4: The French Culture War

A year after last November's terror attacks in Paris, journalist Nick Fraser explores the deeper culture war taking place between a new generation of French Muslims and the defenders of hard-line secular Republicanism in France.

As a country and a civilization, France prides itself on its own model of Frenchness - non-ethnic, republican, integrationist, based on legality and citizenship and, in cultural terms, emphatically secular.

It's based on a concept unique to France - laïcité.

But aversion to laïcité is now widespread among banlieue and Muslim young, and it would seem that integration on the scale advocated by its supporters hasn't happened. By common consent, French secularism has hidden the country's real and growing race and culture divisions - some argue it's exacerbated them.

The government takes matters seriously enough to be spending millions on a new programme of civic education designed explicitly to counter apathy and hostility to republican values, and promote secularism. This summer, PM Manuel Valls called for a pact. "Our country must prove boldly to the world that Islam is compatible with democracy," he told the press. Meanwhile the hard right talk of the Grand Remplacement - effectively a cultural takeover and an 'Islamisation' of France.

Even in mainstream cultural and political debate many Muslims feel laïcité and secularism are being targeted specifically against them - from the ban on the veil in public space to the burkini row earlier this summer. Secularism is being used as a weapon of anti-Islamic sentiment, they argue, even as a cover for racism. Liberal defenders of laïcité point out that this is a political misuse of the idea but not its truth - arguing that separation of religion from the public space remains necessary and desirable in France.

Talking to writers, satirists and cultural activists, Muslim and secular, Nick Fraser asks if the French Republican idea can survive.

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Deutsche Welle: Berlin public and corporate Wi-Fi block LGBT-friendly websites

On a recent family shopping trip to the Ikea outlet in Berlin's Schöneberg district, one father noticed something strange. As he went to look up the schedule for an upcoming family picnic hosted by the German Association for Lesbians and Gays (LSVD), he noticed the website was blocked.

Out of curiosity, he tried several other portals for LGBT resources; articles about homophobia, advice columns on coming out. None of them worked. Queer.de, a website that advocates for homosexuals' rights, was similarly blank.

Apparently, the websites were "labeled as pornography and disabled under Germany's child protection laws," said LSVD Director for Berlin and Brandenburg, Jörg Steinert, in an interview with DW. [...]

The source of the issue, however, is likely not an anti-LGBT agenda on the part of the Swedish furniture giant, which itself has taken flak for putting gay families in its ads for decades. The problem is a truly German one: bureaucracy. Certain keywords are automatically blocked by Wi-Fi providers in public places, and unfortunately, the word homosexual has "sex" right there in the middle of it.

Then the business or public office that hosts the Hotspot has the unenviable task of clearing every individual website one by one. It could also mean that reports about themes that have nothing to with pornography, like assault or medical issues, could also be blocked.

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Deutsche Welle: Why a small German museum is showing Nazi art

What exactly is it that is depicted on these "compliant" works? Is it all propaganda?

Yes and no. We initially believed that all these works of art had been created for propaganda purposes. However, portraits of Hitler, of war and of other Nazi party values only make up about 10 percent of all the works. Americans kept large parts of the propaganda items for themselves. But 90 percent and even more of what you get to see in this exhibition looks like harmless pictures at first sight.

In truth, they also fuel propaganda, but for a kind of reality that didn't exist at that period of time. You will see healthy families with blond children, idealized depictions of industrial landscapes, mythological images, and harmless portraits. But the problem is that they were created at a time, between 1939 and 1945, when everything around them was being bombed to smithereens. People were actually dying and six million were killed in the Holocaust. This is something that, as we now know today, was widely known at the time as well. [...]

As a second location, we planned a collaboration with a museum for contemporary art in Wroclaw, Poland. The city is a European Capital of Culture in 2016. The director of the museum, Dorota Monkiewicz, was committed to showing the exhibition in her museum. However, the ruling PiS government fired her. Her contract was not extended. All agreed projects were canceled.

When we asked how we could help, she said, "I was kicked out because I'm a left-leaning liberal." When I asked her whether it had anything to do with the exhibition, she said it wasn't a problem to show original works by Nazi artists, but that the works were being shown in a critical light. It's deeply concerning that something like this should happen in 2016 in Poland - a country that was invaded by the Nazis in 1939.

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SciShow: The Science of Hypnosis

Hypnosis: that's just a fun gimmick for stage shows and plot twists, right? Well, turns out there might be more to it.

CityLab: Europe's Disposable Income, Mapped

A new map published this month by the cartographer Jakub Marian gives a far more balanced impression. It does so by presenting figures using an artificial currency unit called the Purchasing Power Standard, created by the E.U. purely for statistical purposes. This measure adjusts for price differences, so that one theoretical unit of PPS can purchase the same amount of goods or services across the continent. The results below show that artificial currency converted back into Euros, in order to create a significantly different picture that is adjusted to show purchasing power parity (PPP) across Europe.

The adjusted picture shows that once tax is deducted, residents in central and southern Germany actually have the most consistently high disposable income from region to region. They’re closely followed by North Germans and Austrians, with East Germans notably lagging behind. Nordic countries, by contrast, have lower disposable incomes, especially in Denmark. France, Sweden, and the U.K. all show sharp regional divides, with clear islands of high disposable income around Paris, Stockholm, and the London region. It’s Italy, however, that shows the starkest divides. From northern Lombardy to Sicily and Calabria, average disposable income drops by more than €8,000.

Passionate believers in the high-tax and (apparently) high-wage governance systems of Europe’s Nordic countries might be a little discouraged by the results. With the exception of Norway, with its vast oil-financed sovereign wealth fund and small population, disposable incomes across the region tend to be noticeably lower than in most of Germany. Average disposable income around Paris is apparently far greater than around Copenhagen or Helsinki, while outside the major cities, average disposable incomes after tax are broadly comparable to those in Eastern Germany, a region struggling with high unemployment.

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International Business Times: China Launches Satellite To Create Deep Space Navigation Map

The X-ray pulsar captures X-ray signals emitted from pulsars. By mapping those signals, they can be used to determine spacecraft location in deep space, which will eliminate the hours-long delays incurred in using ground-based navigation like the Deep Space Network and European Space Tracking network. Some pulsars emit radiation with the precision of an atomic clock.

The satellite is equipped with two detectors that test its functions and outline pulsar contours to create a database for navigation. The sensors need to be able to sort the pulsar blasts from background noise. [...]

China is working to overtake the United States as the world’s dominant space power. It recently put its second space station into orbit, announced the world’s biggest tourist spacecraft and launched its first quantum satellite, Inverse noted.

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The Atlantic: Clinton Couldn’t Win Over White Women

Preliminary exit poll results show that while she won women by 12 points overall (Trump won men by the same margin, a historic gender gap),1 Clinton lost the votes of white women overall and struggled to win women voters without a college education in states that could have propelled her to victory. I wrote Tuesday night about Clinton’s collapse in the Midwest — she saw Ohio, Wisconsin and probably Michigan slip away, all states President Obama won in 2008 and 2012 — and this appears to be in part because of her performance among voters who don’t have a college degree, including women. In Michigan, Trump won those women along with white men, their support for him drowning out white, college-educated women’s votes for Clinton. She won that demographic by 10 points, but these women account for only two in 10 Michigan voters. [...]

While Democrats were banking on the hope that Trump’s crass comments and myriad allegations of sexual harassment would turn off women, there were glimmers of the coalition of women supporters that we saw forming last month after the release of the “Access Hollywood tape” in which he made lewd comments about groping women. At the time, a Morning Consult poll found that Trump had nearly equal support among Republican men and women, and numbers showed that the Republican faithful — men and women — were supporting their nominee at rates similar to what we’ve seen in past presidential elections. In other words, they were treating Trump like a run-of-the-mill Republican nominee; Republicans, men and women, wanted to see their guy win.

The issues raised by Trump’s conduct toward women did not seem to drive women to the polls in unusual numbers. Overall turnout among women was only 1 percentage point higher than in 2012.

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CityLab: The View From Brexitland

The divide is still more complex than that in both the U.K. and the U.S. Many big-city residents in the U.K. are feeling the pinch as much as anyone else, while plenty of areas considered deep in the country in Britain are wealthy, well-connected, and close enough to London to be considered exurban by American standards.

The divide between metropolitan elites and regional discontents has nonetheless been successfully established as a fault line for debate—the public has largely bought it because, though flawed and polemic, it’s not completely divorced from reality. Pro-Brexit voices have succeeded in creating two monstrous scapegoats in the public mind that supposedly congregate around London: the rootless, wealthy cosmopolite and the shifty, job-stealing foreigner. If that funhouse mirror rhetoric doesn’t ring a bell to American readers, I suggest you try cleaning your ears. [...]

It’s not that racism suddenly appeared overnight. British minorities have frustratedly pointed out that the abuse many have received is just a more intense expression of an ongoing problem that’s been disregarded too long by the white and powerful. The problem is that, with a vote for Brexit being interpreted by many as a vote against immigration, racists felt emboldened that the majority was now on their side. Many non-white or non-British-born friends of mine reported being verbally insulted or even pushed out of subway trains. [...]

The Daily Mail branded the judges who ruled “enemies of the people” and in a comment since deleted, damned one for being an “openly gay ex-Olympic fencer,” as if that were a source of treachery. Meanwhile the Daily Express preposterously suggested the case was as serious a crisis for the country as the Second World War. This hyperbole has actually become pretty standard post-referendum fare. Brexit supporters have been screaming traitor at anyone who cast any doubt on the handling of the Brexit process or its likelihood of success, in part because they know their international hand is indeed very weak and loathe having it pointed out. With many Trump policies on key issues pretty hazy and/or tough to deliver, don’t be surprised if this pattern repeats itself across the Atlantic.

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Motherboard: Weed Won the Election

Weed won the election. There were nine states with marijuana legalization measures on the ballot, and eight of them have effectively passed.

California, Massachusetts, and Nevada have officially legalized the adult use of recreational marijuana. And Maine, where results are still rolling in, is on track to do the same. Arizona’s Prop 205, however, failed, even though the polls showed statewide support for the bill.

Meanwhile, medical marijuana passed in all four states where it was on the ballot: Florida, Arkansas, North Dakota, and Montana. That means that more states have now legalized medical marijuana than banned it—a sign of progress for marijuana advocates, and the science behind the benefits of medical cannabis.

With more than a quarter of the country's population now living in adult use cannabis states, the market size for weed is expected to multiply big time. Cannabis retail sales from the states that passed initiatives last night could add another $7 to $8 billion in additional revenue.

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