Vox: The abortion rate is at an all-time low — and better birth control is largely to thank

US women are having abortions at the lowest rate on record since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion, according to a new report. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, the abortion rate has been steadily declining for decades.

The new report comes from a massive census of US abortion providers taken every three years by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization that supports legal abortion. It’s surprisingly difficult to get accurate data on abortion in the US (more on that later), but Guttmacher’s census is the most comprehensive available on the subject. [...]

The abortion ratio — the proportion of abortions to live births — is also down to historic lows. In 1995, the abortion ratio was about 26 abortions for every 100 live births; in 2014, it was 18.8.

The abortion rate and the abortion ratio tell us different things. The abortion rate is a bigger-picture snapshot of how common abortion is among women every year, while the abortion ratio gives us a sense of how many women who get pregnant decide to stay pregnant. [...]

Abortion rates have been falling for three decades in the developed world, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff has explained. But in developing African, Asian, and Latin American countries, rates have either held steady or increased since the 1990s. That’s because women in developed countries, such as in Europe and North America, have much better access to higher-quality methods of birth control, and live in a culture that treats contraception as less of a taboo.

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Quartz: This Holocaust remembrance project is tweeting the names of refugees who died because the US turned them away

The United States’ approach to immigration is changing dramatically under president Donald Trump. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order targeting illegal immigrants, and is soon expected to sign another that could indefinitely block certain refugees.

A new Twitter account is highlighting another example of the US denying entry to refugees. Using data from the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum (USHMM), a Holocaust Remembrance Day project is tweeting out the names and stories of passengers from the St. Louis Manifest, a German transatlantic liner carrying 937 passengers, the vast majority of whom were Jews fleeing the Third Reich. The ship was forced to return to Europe after Cuba and the United States denied its passengers entry.

The Manifest was originally headed for Cuba, where most of its passengers planned to stay until the US approved their visas. But by the time they arrived, the Cuban president had issued a decree invalidating passengers’ recently issued landing certificates, forcing the ship to turn around with most of them still on board. Although the liner sailed close to the United States, and some passengers had contacted president Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask for refuge, the US did not take measures to permit the refugees to enter the country.

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Politico: Theresa May Is a Religious Nationalist (DECEMBER 6, 2016)

As a Conservative politician, May’s appeal depends largely on her apparently apolitical common sense. Her manner and rhetoric always suggest that things are pretty much all right as they are, that reasonable people don’t want to rock the boat, and that there is something wrong with the people who want large change. She expresses distrust of ideologues and chancers — the two labels that most naturally attach to her political rivals at the moment. [...]

The link with May should be obvious. The lack of explicit theological distinctiveness in her church coheres with an almost complete lack of ideology in her politics. She seems to have no large vision of how society should be organized or the economy run: She sees problems in her nation and fixes them, without worrying too much about how everything might fit into a grand scheme. If she had a slogan, it might be “common sense without stupidity.” The Brexit vote would seem to contradict both halves of the slogan. But we still have no clear idea how she intends to deal with it — except that she does not intend to let anyone outside the government know anything until the last possible moment. The attempt to negotiate what is supposed to be a return to parliamentary sovereignty without a vote in Parliament is one example. Another is her repetition of the phrase “Brexit means Brexit” until its lack of meaning became embarrassingly obvious. [...]

Generally, however, May’s political career is given coherence by her supposition that her Christian duty is to the people of England rather than to humanity in general or even to other Christians. This is another thing that distinguishes state churches, on the European model, from congregational ones, on the American model. The state church is not something you join, or leave, any more than the nation is. It is run as a kind of public utility: a national spiritual health service, if you like. In Germany and Scandinavia, the churches are paid for out of taxation collected by the state, as the English church once was, even if the church taxes in Europe are now voluntary. Because there is no special membership status, no one is excluded either, and there is an obligation to serve everyone. May’s father was legally obliged to marry or bury any resident of the parish who demanded this service — the assumption being that they were members of the church.

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CityLab: Finding the Poetry in 'Paterson'

All of those “Patersons” may seem like an indie film affectation, but they’re an homage. Paterson, who writes poetry when he’s not ferrying passengers, has a favorite poet: William Carlos Williams, who worked in the nearby town of Rutherford during the first half of the 20th century. Williams is probably best known for his simple, elegant poem, “This is Just to Say.” But he also wrote an epic, five-part poem called, yes, “Paterson.” In a 1943 letter to the author and poet Robert McAlmon, Williams declared that “Paterson” the poem would be “a psychological-social panorama of a city treated as if it were a man, the man Paterson.” [...]

Paterson has been accused (not unaffectionately) of depicting an unrealistic utopia, particularly in terms of racial harmony. Indeed, Paterson the man is friendly with everyone, and aside from a young white girl with whom he converses briefly, he is the only white character in the movie. (His wife, Laura, is Iranian, his friends at the bar are black, his colleague at the bus depot is Indian.) Jarmusch’s city is also a utopia of post-industrial working class life. The mills are long gone, and they’re not coming back; still, Paterson’s life is a good one. [...]

Paterson leaves one with a feeling of appreciation, if not hope. Not just for America, for the working class, and for race relations—but for walkable, dense, public-transport-loving, inclusive cities. If CityLab gave out movie awards, it might very well get Best Picture.

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Political Critique: Seeking a New Metanarrative

The search for the “real” within the paradoxical Russia persists five centuries later. But what is this “real” in the Russian context? For many European travelers, past and present, the “real” stands for the “Russian people” as opposed to the repressive Russian state and its corrupt officialdom. Or the “real” Russia is somewhere out there in the countryside and not in the twin capitals of Petersburg and Moscow. The “real” Russia is also something concealed by the modern facades of the capitals, obscured by the state’s propaganda machine, or silenced by the whims and interests of the foreign observer. More recently the “real” Russia is garbled by a postmodern veneer, absent of grand narratives, and where life is “surreal.”

Two recent books, Anne Garrels’ Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia and Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, both, in their own way, seek to capture the “real” Russia. Garrels wants to understand Russians’ relations to Putin and Putinism from the ground up. She paints portraits of real Russians dealing with real problems. Pomerantsev shuns digging too deep since to him, Putin’s Russia is akin to a surrealist painting where pulling back the curtain only reveals more curtains. His subjects are actors in a big reality show. [...]

This begs the question of what to do with Putin. Garrels’ book is about Putin country, after all. It’s worth noting that for her interlocutors, Putin represents “stability.” Here, stability can be read as more than just economic, but in the figure of Putin a new metanarrative. It’s telling that over the last five years Putin has increasingly concentrated on Russia’s great power status, nationhood, Russian identity, history, and other remedies for fragmented national souls. In this sense, perhaps Garrels and Pomerantsev are not so much pointing to a Russia that is, but one that was as we witness the twilight of the shattered post-Soviet man and the dawn of a consolidated Russian one.

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Al Jazeera: Roma in Kosovo: The justice that never came

Although Milosevic's army began its withdrawal on June 11, 1999, the violence continued in the months that followed. Despite the presence of NATO troops, members of the KLA and other organised groups launched a series of revenge attacks on the Roma community, who were suspected of siding with Serbia.

These attacks varied from harassment and theft to arson, rape and murder. In 2001, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that up to 1,000 Serbs and Roma were missing or unaccounted for since the end of the conflict. [...]

A 1999 report by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) also questioned the idea of a community-wide allegiance. The Roma community was caught in the middle of a conflict that allowed no neutrality, the report suggested, as a consequece of which, the community was targeted by both sides. [...]

Last week, thousands of Kosovar Albanians took to the streets of Pristina to protest against the arrest of Ramush Haradinaj - a former KLA commander. Haradinaj, who was briefly prime minister, had been detained in France on a war crimes warrant issued by Serbia.

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Politico: Theresa May has no good options

The special relationship, after all, is in a very special quandary. Trump’s “America First” rhetoric has horrified almost all of America’s traditional European allies. His suggestion that NATO is “obsolete” and his happiness to countenance the complete collapse of the European Union threatens to abandon more than a half-century of U.S. foreign policy. Even though Trump has endeared himself to the Brexiteers, who cheered his recent declaration that Britain was “so smart” to leave the EU, Trump is far less popular in Britain than even George W. Bush was at his worst. During the campaign, May herself complained that Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims was “divisive, unhelpful and wrong”; one of her chiefs of staff called Trump a “chump,” and the other said he had no interest in “reaching out” to Trump. [...]

True, there are risks for Trump. If he cannot establish a strong working relationship with Britain, his chances of doing so with any other country (well, except maybe Russia) must be reckoned negligible. A meeting with the British prime minister is, as far as Trump is concerned, diplomacy steadied with training wheels. If he still falls, it will be telling. Americans and foreigners alike will further doubt his statesmanship, and his less-than-steady start in office could get even shakier.

The dangers for May, however, are more significant. It’s not just the clash between Britain’s national interest, which demands a good working relationship with the new American administration, and its national pride, which demands that she keep her distance from Trump. Making matters more awkward is the fact Trump thrives on, and indeed may only respond to, unctuous flattery. May, who has relished being described as “a bloody difficult woman,” is at risk of seeming Trump’s patsy. At the Republicans’ congressional retreat in Philadelphia on Thursday, she already seemed to go all-in for Trump, declaring that it was an honor to be present as “dawn breaks on a new era of American renewal.” “Haven’t you noticed? Opposites attract,” she quipped earlier to reporters. If May has to eat an uncommonly gristly sandwich, then so be it.

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Politico: ‘Penelopegate’ hits François Fillon’s approval ratings

François Fillon’s bid for the French presidency is already suffering from the fallout of a scandal over disputed payments to his wife, according to opinion polls.

According to a poll carried out since the scandal broke, 61 percent of French voters have a “negative” or “very negative” view of the conservative former prime minister, while the proportion of “positive views” of Fillon plummeted to 39 percent from 54 percent before “Penelopegate” became top news.

Fillon, who until recently was the hands-down favorite to win May’s presidential election, is struggling to draw a line under the scandal. On Thursday, he was placed under preliminary investigation on suspicion that he may have abused public funds by paying his wife €500,000 over eight years for a parliament job that she did not actually do. [...]

With the scandal just three days old, Odoxa’s poll is the first sign that Penelopegate is having an impact on the public view of Fillon, so far the favorite for the presidency. It also highlighted widespread frustration with the cozy practice of hiring spouses in parliament, with 76 percent of respondents saying they would like to see the practice banned.

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IFLScience: Website That Tracked Fake Science Journals Has Suddenly Vanished

A website that has kept track of publications falsely claiming to be peer reviewed has vanished, and many scientists are alarmed. In recent years pseudo-peer reviewed journals have become a growth industry. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado had been leading the fight back, working to expose such journals. Suddenly, last week, Beall's website was shut down, reportedly because of legal threats and political attacks.

Science relies on evidence and the capacity to replicate research. Peer review acts as a filter, keeping out many of the most unsubstantiated claims from scientific publications, and providing an indication of credibility for those lacking the skills or time to investigate the quality of research. However, the Internet has opened up space for fake journals, which claim to be peer reviewed but allow anyone willing to pay to have their work published.

Beall refers to this as “predatory open access publishing”, allowing bad scientists to pad their CVs and people pushing dangerous pseudo-science to make their claims look credible. The publishers make a profit, while the community that gets taken in by the lies, and honest scientists who won't engage, lose out. The extent of the situation was highlighted when a paper entirely consisting of the words “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” repeated 863 times was accepted for two such journals.

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