10 February 2017
Jacobin Magazine: The Roots of Terrorism
The eighteen-page letter, dated January 8, 2015 and written while Mohammad was serving time in Guantanamo, was obtained by the Miami Herald from Mohammad’s lawyers after a court-ordered thirty-day review period to remove any sensitive information. The letter lays out Mohammad’s grievances against the United States and makes clear what we have long known from other terrorists’ testimonies: that it’s a decades-long, destructive and largely bipartisan Washington foreign policy that drives such men to commit acts of terror, not the supposedly malevolent influence of a fundamentalist version of Islam. [...]
A large part of the letter is devoted to answering the question, “Why did 9/11 Happen? And Why May it Happen Again?” Central to the causes of such attacks, according to Mohammad, is Israel’s nearly seventy-year old occupation of Palestine and its continued apartheid policies against the Palestinian people.
“The war crimes perpetrated in Palestine since 1948, and those taking place in Gaza today, are the clearest indication of why 9/11 happened, and why it may happen again in the future,” Mohammad writes immediately after posing the question.
Indeed, resentment at Israel’s policies, and continued US support for said policies, is shot through the letter. Dozens of angry references to Israel, Gaza, and the plight of the Palestinians line its text, including Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, its slaying of four children on a Gaza beach in 2014, and its continued domination over Palestinian airspace, waters, and movement. Enclosed with the letter is a map of Palestinian loss of land between 1946 and 2010. [...]
As Thomas Hegghammer has pointed out, bin Laden and al-Qaeda spent the years before and after 9/11 railing against Israeli occupation of Palestine, as well as other Israeli actions. His earliest public speeches in the 1980s called for a boycott of US goods over its support for Israel. In a 2008 speech, he said that “the Palestinian cause has been the main factor that, since my early childhood, fueled my desire, and that of the 19 freemen [the September 11 bombers].”
Quartz: Science suggests bilingualism helps keep our brains smart, agile and young
He’s right. Around the world, more than half of people—estimates vary from 60 to 75%—speak at least two languages. Many countries have more than one official national language—South Africa has 11. People are increasingly expected to speak, read, and write at least one of a handful of “super” languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, or Arabic, as well. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority, and perhaps to be missing out.
Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological, and lifestyle advantages. Moreover, researchers are finding a swathe of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia. [...]
We can get some sense of how prevalent multilingualism may have been from the few hunter-gatherer peoples who survive today. “If you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they are almost all multilingual,” says Thomas Bak, a cognitive neurologist who studies the science of languages at the University of Edinburgh. “The rule is that one mustn’t marry anyone in the same tribe or clan to have a child—it’s taboo. So every single child’s mum and dad speak a different language.” [...]
In fact, says cognitive neuropsychologist Jubin Abutalebi, at the University of San Raffaele in Milan, it is possible to distinguish bilingual people from monolinguals simply by looking at scans of their brains. “Bilingual people have significantly more grey matter than monolinguals in their anterior cingulate cortex, and that is because they are using it so much more often,” he says. The ACC is like a cognitive muscle, he adds: the more you use it, the stronger, bigger, and more flexible it gets.
Quartz: Nearly 90% of all new power added in Europe last year was renewable—completely eclipsing coal
Of the 24.5 new gigawatts of power plant capacity built in Europe in 2016, 21.1 gigawatts, or 86%, was in the form of new wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric installations.
For comparison, although the numbers are not yet finalized, about 63% of new energy capacity in the US came from renewable sources, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s about 15 gigawatts of the new 24 gigawatts of capacity added. [...]
That means wind power now has the second largest energy capacity in Europe, after natural gas. But the most capacity to generate energy does not always translate to the most energy actually provided; as the Guardian points out, coal is still meeting more of Europe’s energy demand overall, because wind power in inherently intermittent—when there’s no wind, there’s no power.
Motherboard: This Italian Architect’s Incredible Vertical Forests Are Coming to China
With little space for cultivating plants on a large scale in the Chinese city of Nanjing, this architect has a plan to help an urban garden grow up—literally. By 2018, Italian architect Stefano Boeri will complete his vertical forest installation upon the Nanjing Towers, a pair of skyscrapers each looming 656 feet and 354 feet above the city.
The project will use 1,110 trees, 2,500 shrubs, and a total 23 local tree species, to cover the facade of the two buildings and help revitalize the region's ecology. "Vertical Forest is a model for a sustainable residential building, a project for metropolitan reforestation that contributes to the regeneration of the environment and urban biodiversity without the implication of expanding the city upon the territory," Boeri wrote on his website, discussing the concept of Vertical Forest in general. [...]
The Vertical Forest in Nanjing won't be Boeri's first foray into this kind of project. He executed a similar project for residential towers in Milan, where he vertically planted 900 trees and over 20,000 different plants, distributing them according to best individual placement in relation to the sun. That project, dubbed the "Bosco Verticale," opened to residents back in 2014.
Politico: Juncker plans radical shake-up to save the EU from itself
In response, Juncker is preparing to hit back. Next week, he is expected to launch an overhaul of the EU’s obscure and dysfunctional decision-making process, which allows countries to saddle the Commission with the final call on critical but potentially unpopular policies.
His goal: to overhaul the so-called “comitology” process and force national governments to take responsibility for decisions made in Brussels.
A stark example of how the EU’s legislative sausage gets made will take place next month when European countries need to decide whether to clear genetically modified crops for cultivation. The countries have been unable to reach a verdict. If they fail to agree in March, the European Commission will be forced to take the decision, leaving Juncker, yet again, to take the flack. [...]
A Commission “options paper” on how to reform the comitology process lays out four ideas. They include changing the voting rules so that abstentions are not counted when calculating the qualified majority needed in a committee. Another option would be to refer decisions back to the Council of Ministers if national experts fail to reach a conclusion.
The other two options are a proposal that would require a positive majority only in sensitive areas surrounding health and food safety, and a scheme in which countries would vote multiple times until a conclusion was reached.
Politico: When a doctor’s right to choose trumps a woman’s right to choose
Health ministry figures show that the proportion of doctors who are conscientious objectors rose 12 percent in the last decade, while abortions dropped from nearly 140,000 in 2004 to 88,000 in 2015. Some 59.7 percent of Italian hospitals perform abortions.
In the southern region of Molise, there is just one doctor, Michele Mariano, left to perform up to 400 abortions a year on his own.
Abortion has been legal, and covered by national health plans, for nearly 40 years in Italy. When approved back in 1978, the law known as “la 194” was considered progressive. Christian Democracy, one of the leading parties at the time, inserted a clause allowing doctors to declare themselves conscientious objectors by simply submitting a formal request to the health ministry. [...]
Italy has among the lowest birth rates across the EU, with an average of 1.4 children born for every woman of childbearing age, compared to the EU average of 1.55, according to the latest figures published by Eurostat. The number of abortions relative to the population across Europe has been dropping over time. [...]
Agatone called into question the health ministry’s data, arguing the government only measures the number of abortion carried out, not the number of abortions requested.
To discourage the practice, the health ministry recently increased the fine for women getting illegal procedures from €5,000 to €10,000. LAIGA condemned the measure as punishment for women, instead of doctors who refuse to fulfill their medical obligations.
Los Angeles Times: The Trumpist future: A world without an exceptional America
Never before has a modern president said he doesn’t believe the United States is special. Barack Obama came close, but when conservatives howled he beat a hasty retreat. [...]
When traditional politicians describe American exceptionalism, they usually talk about values — about democracy, or individual freedom, or entrepreneurship, or racial and ethnic diversity. Trump’s measure of exceptionalism was material wealth — specifically, the trade balance and national debt.
In his inaugural address last month, he barely mentioned American values. He promised to defeat Islamic State (“Make America safe again”) and revive the economy (“Make America wealthy again”). But the word “democracy” wasn’t there at all.
Co.Design: A Dead Simple Tool To Find Out What Facebook Knows About You
That's the question behind the new Chrome extension Data Selfie. Created by developers Hang Do Thi Duc and Regina Flores Mir, the application gives users a peek into what kind of digital footprint they might be leaving behind as they browse Facebook—and makes the hidden mechanisms of Facebook's data collection more transparent. [...]
The different sections of the data selfie are arranged in tiles, each related to specific information about you: your political orientation, religious affiliation, and your relationship to things in the world. Open up the app, and you see your activity on the site by date and time, with small, color-coded crosses indicating that you looked, liked, clicked a link, or typed. Scroll down and it shows you your 10 top friends and 10 top pages based on time engaged with their posts, as well as your top likes. Then it shows you two lists, one of "keywords," which are defined as general topics in the content you looked at, and "entities," defined as people, organizations, and things in the content you looked at. Both are rated in terms of their relevance to you and your positive or negative sentiment toward them. [...]
For Do Thi Duc, the lack of control over her information that Data Selfie made clear was deeply unsettling and gave her a feeling a helplessness—because even if you can see (and delete) data when you're tracking it through the app, you can't escape the nagging feeling that Facebook has such a large amount of data that you can't control. After working on Data Selfie for a year, she now severely limits her time on Facebook and Google, hops from browser to browser, and relies on VPNs for more privacy. Her concerns about digital privacy are related to her background: Do Thi Duc was born in east Germany, where she says that fear over lack of control over personal information is still common. "Historically here in Germany, a lot of people are afraid of the prospect of the wrong people having your information," she says. "There’s a sense, in Europe, that we don’t know what will happen because things have happened in the past."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)