The New Yorker: The Long View

Burtynsky had hired our helicopter for four hours, at a rate of two dollars per second, to document the ravages of oil theft in the estuaries along Nigeria’s southern coast. Since crude was discovered in Nigeria, in 1956, it has brought wealth and corruption, impoverishment and armed conflict—a global symbol of squandered possibility. “Wherever there is oil, especially in developing countries, by and large there is a lot of pilfering, and society doesn’t really enjoy the profits,” Burtynsky had told me. “In the Niger Delta, the pushback from the have-nots has been to go in there and start pirating the oil.” In recent years, parts of the delta have taken on the atmosphere of a war zone: hidden among mangroves and low bush, villagers and local militias have established countless makeshift distilleries to refine crude stolen from pipelines, while dumping tons of oleaginous waste back into the ground. The government has estimated that two hundred and fifty thousand barrels are stolen daily, but nobody really knows. Last year, Nigeria’s newly elected President, Muhammadu Buhari, vowed to end the theft, noting, “The amount involved is mind-boggling.” [...]

The helicopter descended to four hundred and fifty feet. “I always had this rule,” Burtynsky told me. “Shoot at no higher than seven hundred feet—eight hundred, max—because as soon as you go past that all the details become insignificant. The landscape starts becoming more pattern, less recognizable.” We were hovering over our first destination: a canal that Burtynsky had nicknamed Snoopy, for the shape of a large patch of oil in the water. The canal was lined with rows of homemade distilleries—rusted cube-shaped ovens that sprouted long pipes, some ending in runoff pools. Since Buhari came to office, a military task force had begun to crack down on the theft, and many sites were charred black from attacks. But a few, apparently rehabilitated, demonstrated activity: a faint plume, a nearby tent. Before takeoff, the pilot had warned Burtynsky that men on the ground might fire at the helicopter. If that happened, he said, he would take evasive maneuvers. [...]

Like Watkins, Burtynsky has built a reputation on ambitious projects that double as tests of stamina. “Oil,” a six-pound book published in 2009, contains a decade’s worth of work, exploring the effect of crude upon the earth. He started his most recent project, “Water,” in 2008, and it took five years, and travel to ten countries, to finish. Burtynsky shot mesmerizing vistas of mountain reservoirs, desiccated lakes, agriculture, and suburban sprawl. He also joined with the filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal to co-direct “Watermark,” a documentary that combines his stills from the series with cinematography. “I see myself as a filmmaker in training,” he told me. The storytelling in “Watermark” is low in exposition and high in visual splendor. In one shot, the frame is filled with the body of a worker; as the camera pulls back, we see that he is facing Xiluodu Dam, on the Yangtze River—one of the world’s tallest dams. Over the course of a minute, the shot subverts our sense of scale. As Burtynsky put it, “That thing just keeps getting bigger, and the guy is just diminishing and diminishing.” The scene ends in a terrifying panorama of engineering that reduces the sole visible person to insignificance.

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Quartz: Photos: Malaysia inaugurates its new king in a lavish ceremony

The country’s unique constitutional monarchy ensures there’s a new ruler at the throne every five years. The ceremonial ruler is rotated among nine of 13 states that have hereditary royal rulers.

In a lavish ceremony at Kuala Lumpur’s national palace on Dec. 13, 47-year-old Sultan Muhammad V became the 15th king of Malaysia. The ceremony, which was attended by prime minister Najib Razak (who is currently embroiled in a massive corruption scandal) and hundreds soldiers and Islamic prayers, was televised nationally

.Educated in the UK, the new king has a love of extreme sports such as four-wheel drive expeditions and shooting. He married Tengku Zubaidah Tengku Norudin from a royal family in Thailand’s Pattani in 2004, but the marriage ended in a divorce.

Here are photos from the ceremony

CityLab: A Complex Portrait of Rural America

With the election of 2016, the dam holding back this mounting tide of rural resentment has broken, and in its wake we have two Americas cast upon opposite ends of the political spectrum. Donald Trump, perhaps the most citified candidate in American political history, ran a campaign that denigrated cities and the people who have historically lived in them. But it worked—and he won the votes of rural U.S. counties (and some small urban ones) overwhelmingly. Hillary Clinton, who dominated big cities and grabbed the national popular vote, still lost the election. [...]

The Census defines “rural” as anything that exists outside of “urban clusters” with upwards of 2,500 residents or “urban areas” with 50,000 or more.

Around 78 percent of residents in these areas identify as white. The remaining segment contains a mix of races and ethnicities—Native Americans, African Americans in the South, and Mexicans near the US.-Mexico border, along with seasonal workers from other parts of Latin America. Some rural counties in Texas, North Carolina, Idaho, and Kansas have large concentration of immigrants. In Gaines County, Texas, for example, foreign-born residents make up 24 percent of the population. What’s often overlooked is that these sub-groups have their own set of economic and social challenges that are seldom discussed in the larger conversation about rural neglect. [...]

Sixty percent of the rural population lives east of the Mississippi, and almost half lives in the South. The most rural states aren’t lonely and lightly populated Alaska or Wyoming but two New England states: Vermont and Maine. [...]

Overall, rural families are earning as much as urban ones. Median household income in the country is $52,386, compared to $54,296 for city families. But rural poverty levels are lower—only 13.3 percent compared to 16 percent in cities.

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Political Critique: Syrian refugee convicted for ‘terrorism’ in Hungarian bogus trial

During the trial the witnesses of the defense were not heard. There were many foreign journalists claiming that Ahmed H. was not inciting violence, but rather calming the crowd, however, the court refused to hear them, and decided to rely only on the testimony of the police. [...]

Ahmed H. was sentenced to 10 years in prison despite the fact that his only crime was using a megaphone and throwing what might have been a couple of stones at the border police. In turn, the extreme right-wing leader, György Budaházy, whom the authorities charged with repeated acts of terrorism (including detonating bombs) was sentenced for 13 years in prison. [...]

Even more frightening is the fact that this whole thing could be carried out without the opposition from the Hungarian society, without the loud protest of the opposition and the media.

This silence shows that if the propaganda is loud enough, anybody can become a terrorist. The only requirement is for Viktor Orbán to decide so.

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Al Jazeera: Israel: EU labelling rules have 'non-existent impact'

In November 2015, the European Commission published its guidelines, stating that agricultural and food products that originated in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, all territories occupied by Israel since 1967, should not be labelled as if they were made in Israel.

"It's about clarifying what the guidelines are," Lovatt told Al Jazeera. However, due to what Lovatt described as a lack of monitoring and enforcement on the national level, the onus is on civil society to show the authorities "how this domestic legislation is not being followed by retailers, who have less of a case now to plead ignorance of requirements". [...]

Palestinian civil society groups had pressured the EU to explicitly label products from the settlements for decades in an attempt to both increase transparency on the origins of those products and to raise international awareness of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

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Al Jazeera: Qatar introduces changes to labour law

The Arab Gulf state is one of the wealthiest in the world, but its treatment of foreign workers from countries like India, Nepal and Bangladesh has come under scrutiny as it spends billions of dollars on building new infrastructure in the run-up to hosting the 2022 football World Cup.

A work-sponsorship system, known as Kefala, currently requires all foreign workers to obtain their employer's consent to travel abroad or switch jobs, a measure rights groups say leaves workers prone to exploitation and forced labour.

The reforms will establish the creation of state-run "grievance committees" to which workers can appeal if employers deny them permission.

They will also allow workers who have completed contracts to change jobs freely and imposes fines of up to 25,000 riyals ($6,865.87) on businesses who confiscate employees' passports.

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Motherboard: The People Who Don't Want to Have Sex With Anybody Ever

Minerva isn’t a lesbian, she says, but she certainly isn’t straight. At 29 years old, Minerva, who asked that she be identified by the name of her Tumblr, has never had a romantic relationship. She calls herself "asexual" meaning she doesn't experience sexual attraction. To anyone.

To the deep chagrin of some members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, Minerva also uses the word "queer" to define her sexuality. A re-appropriated term of endearment for sexual minorities, "queer" is as emotionally charged as it is oddly exclusive, and there is an ongoing, online debate about whether she should feel comfortable using it to self-identify. In some corners of the internet, that debate has turned to all out war. [...]

The remarks echo a sentiment firmly ingrained in some LGBT circles. Gay rights activists have fought for sexual freedom, often at the risk of physical harm, for more than half a century. Asexuals, an estimated one percent of the population, have traditionally kept a low profile. Why should the LGBT community cede a once pejorative, now defining epithet to a group defined by inaction?

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The Guardian: The press has fallen for fascists before

Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925, he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

The Saturday Evening Post even serialized Il Duce’s autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods”, papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-first world war surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than fascism. [...]

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini”. Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid 20s to early 30s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

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Deutsche Welle: Cherokee nation to legalize gay marriage

The Cherokee Nation's Attorney General has issued an opinion declaring bans on same-sex marriage to be in violation of their tribal constitution.

Attorney General Todd Hembree's 12-page opinion, which was issued Friday, says parts of a 2004 tribal law that defined marriage as "a civil contract between one man and one woman" and prohibited marriage between two persons of the same sex violate the Cherokee Constitution, which requires the equal treatment of tribal citizens.

"The right to marry without the freedom to marry the person of one's choice is no right at all," Hembree wrote in his opinion.

Tribal Assistant Attorney General Chrissi Nimmo said Monday that the opinion carries the force of law and legalizes same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples who are members of the Oklahoma-based tribe. The sovereign Cherokee Nation is the largest tribal nation in the United States, comprising more than 317,000 citizens.

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