Haaretz: Tricked Into Marriage, These Arab Women Find They Have Upper Hand

“We know of dozens of cases like this in northern communities,” said social worker Emile Semaan, who heads an administrative forum for welfare workers in Arab towns. Only after the wedding do these women discover that their husbands “don’t function like other people.”

Yet not all these women are unhappy with the results of the conspiracy against them. Some discover that a developmentally disabled husband gives them power, control and freedom that other Arab women can only dream about. [...]

The researchers interviewed 12 women married to developmentally disabled men. They found that 75 percent weren’t aware of their husband’s condition before they married; half said they were pressured into the marriage. [...]

The study was conducted by Prof. Roni Strier of the University of Haifa’s School of Social Work and Ilham Zidan, a social worker in charge of developmentally disabled people at the welfare department of the Arab town of Jadeidi-Makr. It found that most of the women agreed to enter the union because marriage is so important in Arab society and single women have very low status.

All the women said they aspired to be wives and mothers, regarded marriage as an achievement and considered it vital to improving their economic and social status. They also saw it as the only way to have sex and children. Essentially, the women suffered from triple discrimination: as Arabs, as women and as spinsters.

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Al Jazeera: It's high time for a new, multipolar world order

While we should take China's new global role with a pinch of salt, one thing should be clear to all: global governance is in shambles. The recent failure of the G7 meeting in Taormina, Sicily, with the lack of agreement on measures to tackle climate change and the refugee crisis, is only the latest event to signal a breakdown of international cooperation. The unipolar world order of American hegemony is over.

This is not necessarily bad news: the so-called Pax Americana has been anything but peaceful, ushering in an endless string of wars that have inflamed the Middle East. But the risk of moving from a unipolar to an anarchic world system is real. A system where powers vie for influence - in Eastern Europe or in the South China Sea - in a zero-sum game of opposed national interests always one step away from catastrophe. [...]

Multinational corporations are increasingly able to play one state against the other to drive a fiscal bargain all but unimaginable for small and medium enterprises. Well beyond Apple's infamous 0.005 percent Irish tax rate, the scandal stretches to a majority of the largest corporations - from the furniture of Ikea to the toothpaste of Procter&Gamble. Only international cooperation can put a break to such practice. Yet, progress is stalling, at both European Union and global level, with the G7 failing spectacularly to take a position on the issue despite pressure from the Italian hosts. [...]

There is a risk. We should not forget that the policy mix supported by Angela Merkel's Germany over the long years of European crisis - rebranded "austerity" - has brought Europe to the brink of collapse. Nor should we be fooled by Macron's youthful personality, when he seems to be supporting the same market-friendly economic policies that have led to the crisis in the first place.

Without a serious policy rethink - such as a comprehensive New Deal to put the continent back to work and a profound democratisation of EU institutions - Europe's path towards greater integration risks becoming a fast-track to disintegration. This would be a shame for Europe as much as for the world.

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Al Jazeera: Eurogroup approves $9.5bn bailout for Greece

The Eurogroup praised Greece for legislating all 140 prior actions required to pass its second review under the programme – specifically in terms of tax reform, pension reform and labour market reform, all of which aim to make its economy more competitive.

In terms of debt relief, the Eurozone made two concrete concessions. First, it promises to link Greece's rate of debt repayment to its rate of growth. The better the economy does in a given year, the more Greece will pay back. The corollary is that if Greece has little or no growth, it ought to receive a reprieve from creditors. This was a key demand of former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in 2015, who claimed that a depressed economy could not reasonably be squeezed for debt repayment. [...]

Second, the Eurogroup agreed to defer and extend repayment of Greece's second bailout loan by up to 15 years. This loan, which ran from 2012 to 2015, was Greece's largest and $145bn (€130bn) of it is still outstanding. That amounts to almost half of the entire debt.

These two measures will be put into effect between now and the end of the programme, but the Eurogroup will specify further debt relief measures to take effect after the summer of 2018. It has to specify these by July 27, in order for the IMF to become a participant in the third bailout. [...]

The Greek economy was forecast to grow by 2.7 percent this year, but the Hellenic Statistical Authority reports that it Grew by just 0.4 percent in the first quarter. The Federation of Greek Industry today reports 53.6 unemployed people for every job vacancy. 

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The Atlantic: What If (Almost) Every Gene Affects (Almost) Everything?

They note that researchers often assume that those thousands of weakly-acting genetic variants will all cluster together in relevant genes. For example, you might expect that height-associated variants will affect genes that control the growth of bones. Similarly, schizophrenia-associated variants might affect genes that are involved in the nervous system. “There’s been this notion that for every gene that’s involved in a trait, there’d be a story connecting that gene to the trait,” says Pritchard. And he thinks that’s only partly true.

Yes, he says, there will be “core genes” that follow this pattern. They will affect traits in ways that make biological sense. But genes don’t work in isolation. They influence each other in large networks, so that “if a variant changes any one gene, it could change an entire gene network,” says Boyle. He believes that these networks are so thoroughly interconnected that every gene is just a few degrees of separation away from every other. Which means that changes in basically any gene will ripple inwards to affect the core genes for a particular trait. [...]

Pritchard’s team re-analyzed the GIANT data and calculated that there are probably more than 100,000 variants that affect our height, and most of these shift it by just a seventh of a millimeter. They’re so minuscule in their effects that it’s hard to tell them apart from statistical noise, which is why geneticists typically ignore them. And yet, Pritchard’s team noted that many of these weak signals cropped up consistently across different studies, which suggests that they are real results. And since these variants are spread evenly across the entire genome, they implicate a “substantial fraction of all genes,” Pritchard says. [...]

If Pritchard is right, it has big implications for genetics as a field. Geneticists are running ever-bigger and more expensive searches to identify the variants behind all kinds of traits and diseases, in the specific hope that their results will tell them something biologically interesting. They could show us more about how our bodies develop, for example, or point to new approaches for treating disease. But if Pritchard is right, then most variants will not provide such leads because they exert their influence in incidental ways.

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CrashCourse: Floods in the Ancient Near East: Crash Course Mythology #16

BBC4 A Point of View: A new politics?

"The election has left many people wondering if politics has morphed into a wholly new condition" writes John Gray.

He reflects on whether politics really has been turned upside down by a momentous election.

He argues that the situation is not unprecedented but says "the election has punctured what was the ruling illusion of our age - the belief that we'd left behind the ideological antagonisms of the past".

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Salon: Is Trump launching a new New World Order?

And keep in mind that these are only the first steps the president is considering. Ultimately, he seems to be aiming at the creation of a new world order governed largely by energy preferences.  From this perspective, an alliance of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States makes perfect sense. As a start, authoritarian-minded leaders who detest liberal ideas and seek to perpetuate the Age of Carbon now run all three countries. They, in turn, exercise a commanding role in the global production of energy.  As the world’s three leading producers of petroleum, they account for about 38% of total global oil output.  The U.S. and Russia are also the world’s top two producers of natural gas.  Along with Saudi Arabia, they jointly account for 41% of global gas output. [...]

And lest there be any question about the triangular nature of this incipient alliance, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi deputy crown prince, in Moscow just a few days after Prince Mohammed met with Trump in Riyadh. “Relations between Saudi Arabia and Russia are seeing one of their best stages at the moment,” said the prince, reported Tass, Russia’s state-run news agency. As with Trump’s visit to Riyadh, energy cooperation was a key feature of the Russo-Saudi dialogue. “Agreements in the energy sphere are of high importance for our nations,” Putin declared.

There are, of course, many obstacles to Trump’s plan for a petroleum-based trilateral alliance. Although Russia and Saudi Arabia share many interests in common — particularly in the energy field where both seek to constrainproduction in order to boost prices — they also differ on many issues. For example, Russia supports the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, while the Saudis want to see him ousted; likewise, the Russians are major arms suppliers to Iran, a country the Saudis seek to isolate. Nevertheless, Putin’s meeting with Prince Mohammed in the wake of Trump’s visit to Riyadh suggests that these are impediments that might be overcome. [...]

A world dominated by green powers, on the other hand, is likely to be less ravaged by war and the depredations of extreme climate change as renewable energy becomes more affordable and available to all. Those, like Trump, who prefer an oil-drenched planet will fight to achieve their hellish vision, while those committed to a green future will work to reach and even exceed the goals of the Paris agreement. Even within the United States, an impressive lineup of cities, states, and corporations (including Apple, Google, Tesla, Target, eBay, Adidas, Facebook, and Nike) have banded together, in an effort dubbed “We Are Still In,” to implement America’s commitment to the climate accord independently of what Washington says or does. The choice is ours: allow the dystopian vision of Donald Trump to prevail or join with those seeking a decent future for this and future generations.

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Vox: A UK politician was torn between his progressive party and his Christian faith. So he quit.

But the stated reason for Farron’s resignation was somewhat less predictable: his Christian faith. Farron, who is an evangelical Christian, said in a statement that he has found himself “torn between living as a faithful Christian and serving as a political leader,” and that he found the demand to be a “political leader — especially of a progressive liberal party in 2017 … to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.” [...]

The Liberal Democratic Party’s official platform on LGBTQ issues has been consistently among the most supportive in the UK. Its manifesto includes the intention to introduce a non-binary “X” gender option on public documentation, and to reinforce the granting of asylum to LGBTQ refugees, for example.

Farron himself has been vocally supportive of most LGBTQ issues, but speculation on his personal views has dogged him in the UK press. When asked by the UK Channel Four in 2015 whether he thought homosexuality was a sin, he replied, “We are all sinners” (although, following a media backlash, he later clarified matters to say he did not, in fact, think gay sex was sinful). In April, Farron saw another wave of media scrutiny after avoiding the same question several times during a week of interviews with Channel Four and others. [...]

As progressive Christian author and thinking Jim Wallis noted in a Washington Post editorial, a “tolerant, liberal” society should fairly ask pressing, even harsh questions about how a candidate’s faith would inform their public behavior; it would be the rare person of any faith who would argue it should have no effect. But if society is unwilling to accept the answer, we run the risk of undermining the very equality we are trying so hard to preserve.

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The New York Review of Books: Afghanistan: It’s Too Late

Yet Trump—and Mattis’s—solution to this unwinnable war seems to be once again to send more troops. On Tuesday, Trump announced that the military itself would be given full authority to decide how many troops it needs. (By leaving all decisions in the hands of the military, he has abandoned the usual inter-agency consultations, especially with the State Department.) And Mattis is talking about a review to be completed in July that could add as many as 5,000 troops. It may be too late.

Afghanistan now faces a far deeper crisis than many seem to understand. Warlords and politicians—including cabinet members—are calling for the resignation of President Ashraf Ghani and his security ministers, accusing them of incompetence, arrogance, and stirring up ethnic hatred. There are as many as ten public demonstrations a day in the streets of Kabul, carried out by young people and by relatives of those killed in recent bomb attacks. [...]

Afghanistan’s neighbors, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly restive about the US-led counterinsurgency: Pakistan continues to give sanctuary to the Taliban leadership, including the Haqqani group—the most vicious arm of the Taliban—while Iran and Russia are also providing support (the exact amount is unknown) to the Taliban. These regional powers believe that the Taliban could provide a bulwark against the spread of ISIS into their territories and do not want Pakistan to monopolize influence over the Taliban. They want to limit US power in the region. The influence of ISIS in Afghanistan, which was once relegated to the single eastern province of Nangarhar, is now expanding, and the group claimed responsibility for a horrendous early March attack on Kabul’s military hospital in which fifty patients and doctors were killed and ninety wounded. [...]

Ghani is deeply unpopular. Many Afghans now regard the government as illegimate, a regime that would not survive at all if it were not propped up by the US and NATO, who jointly have some 13,000 troops in the country. Two years ago the US brokered a coalition government between Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah in order to paper over a heavily rigged election. (It was rigged by both candidates and the two candidates bickered for months about who actually won, before the Americans stepped in.)

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