Haaretz: Ex-Israeli General: Settlements Do Not Serve Security Needs

Citing opinion polls in which over half the Israeli public believe the settlements augment state security, Sasson-Gordis wrote: “Even if the idea that the settlements contribute to security had some validity in the past, today it has none. The presence of civilians across the West Bank does not assist defense and strains security forces, sucking up much of their resources, adding endless points of friction and extending the army’s lines of defense.” [...]

Based on conversations with Kaplinsky and other senior officers, Sasson-Gordis estimates that almost 80 percent of the forces located in the West Bank are involved in direct protection of the settlements, with the remainder scattered along the Green Line (the pre-1967 borders). [...]

Kaplinsky told the study “the perception that the settlements serve security is an anachronistic one, suitable for the prestate period before borders were defined; this was the conception of seizing territory. In the first decades of the state, we didn’t have the technologies we currently possess for achieving security. A country that at any given moment operates three satellites, has the 8200 SIGINT unit and many other intelligence units, makes the settling of one hill or another meaningless in terms of our defensive capabilities, for deterrence or for early warning advantages.”

read the article 

BBC4 Crossing Continents: Banishing America's 'Bad Hombres'

President Donald Trump has pledged to chase what he called the 'bad hombres' out of America. One of the organisations the President is targeting is the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, better known as MS-13 whose members deal in drugs, human smuggling and underage prostitution. They aggressively recruit young Latino immigrants in U.S. cities and suburban communities and have recently been responsible for a number of shockingly brutal murders, including the killing of two teenage girls with machetes and baseball bats. Lucy Ash travels to Long Island in New York and to Maryland to investigate. She asks what impact such crimes have on the heated debate about illegal border crossings and she asks if tougher immigration policies will really make America safe again.

listen to the podcast

The New York Review of Books: The Abortion Battlefield

Women couldn’t vote in the United States until 1920 (fifty years after African-American men), and until 1936 they could lose their citizenship if they married a foreigner and lived abroad. As for their children, citizenship was conferred by the father, not the mother. Until 1968, job ads could specify whether men or women would be hired, and that year women were paid on average 58 cents for every dollar earned by men. Remarkably, women could be denied credit without a man’s signature until 1974, and until 1978 they could be fired from their jobs if they became pregnant.

Not surprisingly, controlling sexuality and reproduction was central to keeping women in their place. For most of the country’s history, motherhood was considered women’s highest calling. They were expected to submit to their husbands sexually, and marital rape did not become a crime in all states until 1993. Abortion was illegal in most of the country for most of its history. Desperate women would take various folk remedies to end a pregnancy, try to end it themselves with some contrived implement, or find an illegal abortionist—all risky. There are no reliable figures for how many women died from illegal abortions but almost certainly there were many. [...]

According to Haugeberg, the initial public opposition to abortion, which began even before Roe v. Wade, came from priests and bishops in the Catholic Church, as well as Catholic women, often nuns, whose opposition frequently grew out of their general reverence for life (many had been involved in antiwar activities in the 1960s). It was only later that the term “pro-life” became more a political label than a statement of purpose, since it tended no longer to encompass the loss of life from wars or executions. [...]

By the 1980s, the antiabortion movement had undergone another major shift. It became dominated not by Catholics but, over time, by evangelical Protestants, and its methods increasingly included direct confrontations at abortion clinics to block access. The movement also became increasingly associated with the right wing of the Republican Party, which as far back as the Eisenhower administration had set out to win over religious and social conservatives. The 1980 Republican platform called for a constitutional amendment to protect the life of the unborn, and the new president, Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, had once favored abortion, now, like Trump, opposed it.

read the article 

SciShow Psych: Why Do People Riot?

Vintage Everyday: Berlin Wall in the Cold War: Powerful Pictures From the Birth of a Brutal Divide

In the early 1960s, LIFE magazine's photographers chronicled the construction of the Berlin Wall and, once it was built, its effect on residents living in the newly divided city. The Soviets and East Germans built the Wall, in part, to stop the flight of Eastern Bloc citizens who frequently used Berlin as the point from which they tried to escape to the West.

With the crude bulwark in place, the ideological divide between Eastern and Western superpowers grew sharper, more frightening and (seemingly) more intractable. Here, LIFE offers powerful pictures of the construction and earliest days of the Wall—photos that offer a glimpse into an era that today feels at once profoundly alien, and disturbingly familiar.

see the photos 

ArguingFromIgnorance: Election 2017 — Part 5 — Environment, Energy and Climate Change

The Atlantic: Theresa May's Incredible Shrinking Poll Numbers

When Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May stepped out onto Downing Street on April 18 to call a snap election for June 8, no one expected it. Since becoming prime minister in July 2016 after David Cameron’s sudden resignation, she had made clear, on six separate occasions, that she would not call one. It was obvious, she insisted, that Britain’s departure from the European Union required stability, a spell free from the demands and distractions of an election campaign when “the will of the British people” could be fulfilled. [...]

Since taking office 10 months ago, May has forged her name as a fearsome, authoritative leader, adored by the tabloids for taking on the Brexit beacon with glee—“Brexit means Brexit,” she famously declared. She pandered to an older sense of British identity, played up the Margaret Thatcher comparisons, and drove the party to the right, hoovering up UKIP support in the process. These weren’t just tactics: The cheap xenophobia seemed to come naturally. “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” she said to cheers. Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen accused her of stealing their ideas. But despite her divisive drive to cut immigration and reject any responsibility for refugees, she was still heralded as a “unity” figure who would guide Britain through the roiling waters of EU negotiations. [...]

But then suddenly things began unravelling. And how. It started with what many saw as her first campaign policy: an absurd declaration to bring back fox-hunting, revoking a ban on foxes being devoured by dogs that eight out of 10 Brits were said to support keeping in place. Soon followed a U-turn on an unpopular manifesto pledge, dubbed the “Dementia Tax.” The plan was to make seniors pay means-tested contributions towards their own social care—not entirely unreasonable—but without any cap on how much they might have to spend. May swiftly backtracked on the latter part, vaguely alluding to the fact that a cap would be introduced. The press lapped it up: It was framed as the first time a party had reversed on a manifesto policy before an election. [...]

The beauty of May’s meaningless aphorisms is that Brexit can then be used to justify virtually anything. After initially avoiding calling an election because of Brexit, and then going ahead and calling an election because of Brexit, May now says she can’t campaign because of, well, Brexit. So when Corbyn challenged her to a televised leadership debate, hardly an unusual demand in a democracy, Theresa May said no, sneering that “he ought to be paying more attention to thinking about Brexit negotiations than appearing on television—that’s what I’m doing.”

read the article 

The Atlantic: The Trouble With How Liberals Talk About Terrorism

Maybe Murphy didn’t do this because falling objects are not equivalent to three men ramming and hacking people to death on London Bridge. Terrorists attack not just individuals but society, which makes mortality rates a poor measure of the danger terrorism poses. Falling objects “attack” neither. The men behind the carnage in London appear to have been inspired by ISIS, the same organization that has recently motivated young Muslim men to mow down civilians from Minya to Manchester, Berlin to Baghdad, Istanbul to Orlando, and beyond. Telling people not to be frightened by such acts—that fear is what the terrorists want—does not make those acts less frightening. Many people are scared by terrorism, despite the allegedly comforting statistics, because terrorism is scary. It’s designed to be. And most people recognize that while terrorism takes various forms, one of the most virulent strains these days is extremist violence committed in the name of Islam. They distinguish, in other words, between wobbly furniture and jihadist terror. [...]

Murphy’s reaction to the London attack captures a common line of reasoning, particularly on the left, and it recalls some of the clinical rhetoric that Barack Obama used in similar circumstances. In repeatedly resisting (with some exceptions) any language that associated terrorism with extremist interpretations of Islam, the former president provided fodder to right-wing critics who argued that he was misleading people about the nature of the problem. And in his cerebral approach to counterterrorism, Obama could come across as tone-deaf to the public mood. After attackers killed 130 people in Paris , for example, Obama scoffed at reporters’ questions about whether the bloodshed would change his ISIS strategy. [...]

Obama’s stance on terrorism also contained a contradiction. He argued that the terrorist threat was much less severe than other challenges such as climate change and gun violence. But he didn’t scale back his counterterrorism policies to reflect that assessment. After criticizing the excesses of George W. Bush’s war on terror, Obama launched a massive drone war against suspected terrorists in several countries. He urged the government to do more on gun violence, which is responsible for far more deaths per year in the United States than terrorism is, while simultaneously claiming that the U.S. government was right to “spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil.” Either Obama never managed to invest in counterterrorism at the level he felt it deserved, or he was tacitly acknowledging that terrorism is, in fact, a big problem that statistics only partially capture. [...]

Which is why it’s perplexing that, around the time we spoke, during a visit to Yale Law School, Murphy observed that Americans are more likely to be killed in an elevator accident or by lightning than by terrorism. Why ditch the Saudis and unveil a new Marshall Plan to solve a problem that’s less threatening than lightning?

read the article 

IFLScience: Ravens Know When They've Been Cheated, And Remember Who Did It For At Least A Month

Ravens know the difference between fair and unfair, according to a new study, and avoid those who act unfairly towards them. Researchers found that the intelligent birds can recognize when a human cheats them of a food reward and will even shun the person for at least a month later. The results of the study are published in the journal Animal Behavior.

The ravens were tested in an experiment of reciprocity. The birds were given a low-quality food item, in this case a lousy piece of bread, and could exchange it with a human for a high-quality food item, a nice piece of delicious cheese. But there was a catch: Some humans tricked the ravens out of any food by taking the lump of bread from the birds and refusing to give them cheese in return, choosing instead to snaffle it in front of them.

Understandably, the ravens were rather affronted by this behavior and felt so cheated that they avoided the people who had tricked them out of the morsel of cheese. The researchers then decided to see just how long this distrust lasted for and tried the experiment again a month later. They found that the ravens who experienced the unfair exchange remembered and thus preferred to do dealings with people who had held up their end of the bargain.

read the article