Political Critique: Our silence supports the perpetrators of child abuse within the Church

Government agencies, independent from the Catholic Church, in many countries have begun up to investigate claims of sexual abuse of children in the Church. Unfortunately, the influence the Church in Polish politics means that children in Poland cannot count on such protection from paedophiles in cassocks. Two facts from the last year may attest to the difficult situation facing child victims of sexual abuse by priests. Firstly, the new head of the Parliamentary Commission of Justice and Human Rights is a prosecutor who, in 2001, decided to dismiss the charges against a priest accused of molesting young girls. As prosecutor he decided that the defendant had, in fact, been using his skills in bioenergy therapy. Secondly, In 2002, during another pedophilia scandal, the newly appointed Archbishop of Kraków, and the head of Polish Church, failed to support the victims, despite the insight he had into the particulars of the case. ‘Have No Fear’ (Nie lękajcie się), founded in 2015, is the first Polish organization that brings together victims of paedophile priests. It is supported internationally by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). [...]

There was no one that I could tell. Everyone admired this priest. I could not tell my parents, my teachers or my friends, so I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even realize it was affecting my life. I grew up, moved away and went on with my life. However, as an adult I began having nightmares and flashbacks. I was haunted by what had happened to me as a child. I went to the Church officials to get help.  I had thought that they would care about my family and me. I had thought that they would want to get him out of the Church so that he could not do the same thing to another other child. I was told that I was the only victim and advised to keep quiet instead of reporting him to the police. I was told that reporting the abuse would be detrimental to my family and me, and also harmful to the reputation of the Church. They said that they knew I did not want to damage the community’s respect for the Church. So I kept silent for seven more years. [...]

Over the years, we have spoken to the heads of many religious communities; Franciscans, Augustinians, Benedictines… and also to the cardinals. But it has been in vain. Meeting with them does not bring about any change in the cycle of abuse. Only the pressure of exposing such abuse in the media, and the pressure from the public to put an end to this abuse can effect real change. The Church will only change under real external pressure Pope Francis has made grand statements condemning this abuse, but he has not taken any action that would protect children. If he were sincere in his desire to protect the children of the Church, he would punish the bishops responsible for enabling the crimes of perpetrators of sexual abuse among the clergy: ‘If you hire or transfer a perpetrator, you will be removed from you post’. The perpetrators themselves should be excommunicated.  In 2014, even UN recommended this course of action to the Vatican! Whistle-blowers should be held up as examples to follow. Finally, the Church should publicize the names of all known perpetrators so that parents are able to consult this list and ensure that their children are not at risk. Under John Paul II and Benedict XXVI, all the cases of child abuse were sent to the Vatican – and they are still there. These files should be made public and should be dealt with by the police. Bishops should not be investigating crimes any more than the chief of police should be telling the cardinal what to say in his homily on Christmas day.

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Jacobin Magazine: When Abstention Is Progress

On December 23, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2334 with fourteen affirmative votes, no negative votes, and Washington’s abstention. By withholding its veto, the United States allowed the resolution to be adopted. The resolution declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be in “flagrant violation” of international law and demanded that all settlement activities “immediately and completely cease.”

Strong words. But they were entirely toothless.

The resolution neither provided nor threatened consequences should Israel violate the resolution — just as the US government made sure that no consequences have resulted from Israel’s continual violation of similar Security Council resolutions from as far back as 1979 or from its flouting of the 2004 opinion of the International Court of Justice. [...]

If Obama had wanted to make a clear statement on behalf of Palestinian rights, he could have followed the lead of 137 UN members and the urging of former president Jimmy Carter and recognized the state of Palestine. Or, less symbolically, he could have put forward a resolution declaring that all states should refrain from supplying military aid to Israel as long as its illegal settlements remain — which, of course, would apply mainly to the United States. Just three months ago, President Obama approved an unprecedented $38 billion in military aid over ten years to Israel. [...]

In 2011, the Security Council considered a resolution calling for a settlement freeze. The fourteen affirmative votes (and the wishes of the resolution’s 120 co-sponsors) were overridden by the Obama administration’s veto. Though this was Obama’s only UN veto, the ever-present threat of a US veto assured that his was the only presidency since 1967 under which there was not a single Security Council resolution critical of Israel.

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Political Critique: A country of confused millenials

A few weeks ago, the Slovakian NGO Institute for Public Questions (IVO) released the results of a comprehensive quantitative survey focusing on the online behaviour of young Slovaks. It came to quite a few important and staggering conclusions: the media immediately jumped on the revelation that the party with the most support from voters aged between 18 and 39 (although it remains somewhat questionable whether middle-aged people should be considered “young Slovaks”) was the People’s Party of Our Slovakia (Ľudová strana Naše Slovensko – ĽSNS) led by the infamous fascist leader Marián Kotleba. Nevertheless, the survey tells us that around a quarter of young Slovaks would vote for ĽSNS and ninety per cent of them have no qualms about their style, political program and plans. Furthermore, a third of Slovakia’s youth openly sympathizes with the values and activities of the party. During the last parliamentary elections, when ĽSNS gained over 8% of the vote, it had the support of 22% of first-time voters – and their electorate consisted of 70% of people under the age of 39. [...]

The employment policies of Slovak governments have displayed signs of labour precarization for a long time, and together with their investment policy, this resulted in a situation where we can find the sixth richest region in EU, Bratislava, in the same country as the extremely poor areas of central and eastern Slovakia, such as Rimavská Sobota, Revúca, Velký Krtíš, Kežmarok, Gelnica, Trebišov or Sabinov. It is no coincidence that some of these places lie in the Banská Bystrica region, for the last three years led by the fascist Kotleba. These areas suffer from high unemployment as well as the lowest education level and room space per person in the country. Households without fresh running water are a fairly common sight. The poverty line in Slovakia is set to 347 euro and 640 000 people are directly threatened by poverty, many of whom are families with children. [...]

What is also worth our attention amongst the survey results is the lack of an easily defined relationship between political orientation and digital literacy. It turns out the young voters of the fascist ĽSNS are the most active when it comes to looking up information online (right above the voter base of SaS) – although they often resort to sources typologically similar to Breitbart News. Anti-systemic thinking is fueled by false alarms, hoaxes or conspiracy theories; these can entertain and articulate one’s political views in exactly the same way as criticism based on working with mainstream media sources. From the point of view of search engine algorithms and social networks segmenting content for end-users, there are no real differences between these two kinds of infotainment. And it is digital platforms that are becoming the meta-media of today, generating social realities and creating mutually impermeable bubbles. The public, as the nexus of communicative activity in Slovakia, is slowly ebbing out – as society takes a downward spiral towards becoming a constellation of parallel universes that can apparently only be helped by mutual collision.

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The Atlantic: A Short History of the Tomboy

The tomboy conjures an image of a girl in overalls and baseball hats, wearing short hair and nondescript shoes. She probably isn’t into Barbie. When the term “tomboy” first appeared, in the mid-16th century, it actually was a name for male children who were rude and boisterous. But by the 1590s, the word underwent a shift toward its current, feminine usage: a “wild, romping girl, [a] girl who acts like a spirited boy.” [...]

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the tomboy was everywhere, dovetailing with both women’s suffrage and first-wave feminism. But the tomboy’s popularity was confined to a specific demographic: middle and upper-class white women. [...]

During the 1840s and ’50s, when the abolition of slavery began in the U.K. (the U.S. would follow in the 1860s), social elites became concerned about the physical health of white women due to restrictive clothing and a lack of exercise. Amid fears that white people would become a minority as more immigrants arrived and abolition neared, white women were encouraged to lead more active, outdoorsy lifestyles. The tomboy became a perfect cure for white malaise. It would, in theory, better prepare young white women “for the physical and psychological demands of marriage and motherhood,” as Abate writes, and further ensure that the white race would not die out. [...]

Today’s queer tomboy reclaims some of the altered gender norms that were once promoted among (white) antebellum girls. Of course, women of various sexual identities continue to be tomboys into adulthood (and many queer women were never tomboys). But Elise’s take—that adolescent gender ambiguity gets left behind when heterosexual teenage girls abandon tomboy ways—suggests that by providing a label that is free from the mandates and judgment of sexual orientation, the tomboy demonstrates that gender expression is not necessarily tied to sexual orientation.

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Motherboard: The Dawn of Colossal Spacecraft May Be Nearer Than You Think

But for real astronauts, spaceflight is not quite so, well, spacious. Take the International Space Station (ISS), which is the largest spacefaring vessel ever built, as well as the most expensive single construction project in human history, costing the US alone around $100 billion. Its first module was launched in November 1998, and its first long-duration crew, consisting of three people, arrived onboard two years later.

With an internal pressurized volume of 32,898 cubic feet, roughly equal to the interior of a Boeing 747, the ISS is a far cry from the cavernous starships we’re used to seeing in science fiction and fantasy. That said, the station and its predecessors are enormously helpful testbeds in the quest to develop even more massive spaceships down the line. Like the Mir space station, which flew from 1986 to 2001, the modules of the ISS were launched separately and assembled in space, like some high-stakes orbital LEGO kit. [...]

The ability to reuse spacecraft in this way would drastically reduce the cost of robotic deep space exploration, while also spurring the kind of infrastructures crucial for human exploration to more distant worlds like Mars. It will take an enormous amount of money, time, and effort to build these orbital truck-stops, but the back-end payoff of paving a super-roadway in space would be well worth it, according to author and spaceflight advocate Howard Bloom.

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Al Jazeera: Number of refugees reaching Europe plunged in 2016

The number of refugees who arrived on Europe's shores plunged by nearly two-thirds last year, but the number of those who died on the often perilous journey in the Mediterranean Sea rose sharply, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the EU border agency Frontex has said.

About 364,000 people seeking work or refugee protection crossed the sea between January and December, compared to more than one million in 2015, Frontex said in a statement on Friday.

A sharp drop in arrivals to Greece outweighed record migration to Italy, it said.

The decrease was largely owing to a Turkey-EU deal whereby Ankara took back migrants who crossed by sea to the Greek islands and the EU resettled Syrian refugees living in Turkey. [...]

The trend shows that the central Mediterranean route linking the Sahara region to Southern Europe still operates at full capacity despite European efforts to stem the flow, IOM analysts said. 

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CityLab: Africa's First High-Speed Train Is Coming

The train from Tangier to Casablanca currently moseys down the coast of Morocco, making the journey in 4 hours and 45 minutes. When the North African nation’s new high-speed train debuts in June 2018, that trip will take less than half the time—2 hours and 10 minutes. It will be the first high-speed train for both Morocco and the African continent.

There’s much to be celebrated in the successful completion of this $1.9 billion project. Who doesn’t love a high-speed train—especially in comparison to those sucky U.S. trains? The high-tech rolling stock comes from French manufacturer Alstom, which supplied the 12 double-decker models; the funding came from Morocco, France, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The high-speed line is in keeping with the Moroccan government’s focus on attracting foreign investment through megaprojects. From the world’s largest solar plant in the Sahara Desert to a new airport for the capital, recent development has been big and flashy. And it’s worked: Since 2011, foreign direct investment has increased by more than 11 percent. Tourism, which supplies close to 7 percent of GDP (more than twice the percentage in the United States), has also remained strong. [...]

Unemployment remains a major issue for Morocco, with a countrywide rate of over 20 percent. For young people, the figure doubles. Fabiani tells CityLab that the country’s urban/rural divide is particularly stark. “If you go outside the main cities,” he says, “the state of the roads is very poor, as is access to clean water, schools, and hospitals.” A high-speed train linking Morocco’s main urban centers will likely be out of reach, both geographically and financially, for the majority of Moroccans. “The people who will be able to afford it—residents of cities and professionals—are not that many,” he says, noting that the money and effort might be better spent on more effective education efforts.

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Al Jazeera: Iranian soldier lauded after risking life to save dog

A young Sunni soldier has become a national hero in Shia-majority Iran after being mutilated while trying to save a stray dog trapped in a minefield.

The story of Mohammad Bakhtar, 19, has gone viral in the country, with supportive tweets and photos pouring in since the incident at an Iranian military base last month.

On the freezing afternoon of December 17, Bakhtar noticed the dog caught in barbed wire around a minefield near an ammunition depot. Hearing the dog's plaintive cries, Bakhtar rushed over to free the injured animal - and seconds later, a mine exploded, shattering his right leg. [...]

Cyclist Kamal Rastkhani said that he had travelled more than 300 kilometres in snow and freezing weather to pay homage to Bakhtar "as the symbol of love for God's creatures".

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Quartz: Less bling, more mass ceremonies: A county in China is banning extravagant weddings

For Chinese of modest means, a big wedding can actually mean bankruptcy. As a result, one county in China is cracking down on extravagant events in order to build a “virtuous and frugal society.”

On Jan. 1, new rules in Taiqian county in China’s northern Henan province went into effect in hopes of curbing extravagant weddings and funerals. The local government is encouraging residents to hold simpler events, according to its rules (link in Chinese, registration required) that dictate guidelines from the value of gifts to the size of banquets. Violations could be punished by public shaming. [...]

Chinese netizens seem to have mixed feelings about the rules. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-esque social media (link in Chinese, registration required) site, one user said “the government is meddling in people’s lives too much.” But some believe it has the right intention. “Many parents are in debt because of the weddings of their sons. These vulgar practices should be abandoned!” said another user.

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