openDemocracy: Eight lessons from Barcelona en Comú on how to Take Back Control

In Barcelona, there is a relative absence of public discourse that blames the social crisis on immigrants, and most attempts to do so have fallen flat. On the contrary, on 18 February over 160,000 people flooded the streets of Barcelona to demand that Spain takes in more refugees. Whilst this demonstration was also caught up with complexities of Catalan nationalism and controversy over police repression of migrant street vendors, it highlighted the support for a politics that cares for migrants and refugees.

The main reason for this is simple – there is a widespread and successful politics that provides real explanations of why people are suffering, and that fights for real solutions. The reason you can’t afford your rent is because of predatory tourism, unscrupulous landlords, a lack of social housing, and property being purchased as overseas investments. The reason social services are being cut are because the central government transferred huge amounts of public funds into the private banks, propping up a financial elite, and because of a political system riddled with corruption. [...]

BComú’s vision of a “feminized politics” represents a significant break with the existing political order. “You can be in politics without being a strong, arrogant male, who’s ultra-confident, who knows the answer to everything”, Colau explains. Instead, she offers a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions. This is backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and the common good – as well as policies designed to build on that vision. [...]

This process resulted in a political platform that stressed the need to tackle the “social emergency” – problems such as home evictions on a huge scale, or the effect of uncontrolled mass tourism. These priorities came from listening to citizens across the city rather than an echo-chamber of business and political elites. BComú’s election results reflected this broader appeal: it won its highest share of the vote in Barcelona’s poorest neighbourhoods, in part through increasing turnout in those areas.

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BBC4 Beyond Belief: Thomas Becket

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the man who was Henry II's Chancellor and then Archbishop of Canterbury and who was murdered by knights in Canterbury Cathedral (depicted by Matthew Paris, above). Henry believed that Becket owed him loyalty as he had raised him to the highest offices, and that he should agree to Henry's courts having jurisdiction over 'criminous clerics'. They fell out when Becket agreed to this jurisdiction verbally but would not put his seal on the agreement, the Constitutions of Clarendon. The rift deepened when Henry's heir was crowned without Becket, who excommunicated the bishops who took part. Becket's tomb became one of the main destinations for pilgrims for the next 400 years, including those in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales where he was the 'blisful martir'.

With

Laura Ashe Associate Professor of English at Worcester College, University of Oxford

Michael Staunton Associate Professor in History at University College Dublin

Danica Summerlin Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield

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Politico: Why Europe needs US-style primaries

Introduced in 2014, the process amounts to little more than putting democratic lipstick on a pig. The candidates are put forward by their own European Parliament political groups, with hardly any open consultation. The choice ultimately depends more on backroom negotiations between political groups and a handful of key member countries.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this if you believe national leaders are best placed to decide who should lead the Commission. It is also reassuring for national governments who feel they still keep a controlling hand on the EU institutions. But the process also opens Brussels up to heavy criticism at a time when Euroskepticism is rampant. [...]

European elections suffer from a chronic lack of participation, with turnout falling from 62 percent in 1979 to 42.54 percent in 2014. Some have put forward proposals to reform the vote. But Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s idea for a directly elected president of the European Council is unlikely to see the light of day anytime soon. And French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a transnational list is too symbolic — as it would represent only 20 to 30 seats — to fundamentally change European politics.

Holding primaries within each political group ahead of the European election would be a game-changer. It would encourage each political family to engage with their voter base early on and allow them to be more open about how they choose their leaders. Parties willing to take the risk of holding primaries would significantly raise their profile across Europe; those too afraid would be seen as retrograde.

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Vox: How smart is today's artificial intelligence?

Something incredible has taken place in the past 5 years: a revolution in artificial intelligence. After decades of little progress, the combination of big data and advances in computer hardware have brought AI applications to life: from self-driving cars to home assistants to augmented reality and instant language translation. If some of these applications feel like science fiction it's because deep learning algorithms are powering a true breakthrough in machine intelligence. But with these truly impressive advances comes a great deal of hype: fears of terminator-type bots turning on humans and stealing all our jobs. In this video we sort out the fact from fiction in this very exciting field. 

SciShow Psych: Are Repressed Memories Real?

CGP Grey: How Machines Learn

Quartz: How a severe drought in Sicily in 1893 created the Mafia

A drought in France in 1788 resulted in widespread crop failure (pdf) and soaring food prices, which historians believe stoked the French revolution of the following year. More recently, four years of drought in Syria between 2006 and 2010 created mass unemployment, contributing to the civil war that rages to this day. [...]

The Mafia first appeared in Sicily around 1860, taking advantage of the island’s weak regional government and its distance from Rome to run local protection rackets. For decades, the organization was made up of unremarkable criminals, concentrated around Palermo, the provincial capital. That changed dramatically in 1893, a year of severe drought in the region, according to research (pdf) from Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist, and his co-researchers, Giacomo De Luca of the University of York, and Giuseppe De Feo Strathclyde Business School, in Glasgow.

The study, released as a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (which means it hasn’t yet been reviewed by other academics) argues that Sicilian peasants were already vulnerable before the draught. Most either rented small plots of land or worked as day laborers at the mercy of the elites who controlled much of the farming estates in Sicily. The drought, which followed a bad harvest the year before, cut the island’s wheat crop in half and similarly crippled olive oil, wine, and barley production. In some regions, 1983’s agricultural production was as much as 65% lower in 1893 than in recent years, according to the paper. [...]

That resulted in weakened local governments, which had serious, long-term negative consequences for Sicily’s economy and the effectiveness of the island’s institutions, the researchers found. For example, in regions where Mafia presence increased from 1 to 2 on their index from 1885 to 1900, literacy fell about 10% by 1921, and high school completion 33% by 1961. The researchers also found that the rise of the Mafia is correlated with an increase in infant mortality and in reduced spending on public infrastructure like water delivery. Weak states are unable to provide public goods, the authors write, and “one of the many factors holding back the development of local state capacity is the impact of various criminal organizations. None is perhaps as famous as the Sicilian Mafia.”

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CityLab: Europe Says Uber Is Officially a Taxi Service

Uber is a taxi company. That’s the ruling today from the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, which interprets the union’s laws and ensures their application across all member states.

Uber, of course, has long resisted that label. It presents itself as a digital platform for connecting people, rather than as a taxi service. But a Barcelona taxi association  challenged that claim in court in 2014, frustrated that Uber’s revenues had been partly and unfairly bolstered by worse pay and conditions for drivers. And Wednesday’s resounding judgement against Uber, who sought to appeal the Spanish ruling at the ECJ, is a bombshell. Not only does it mean the company faces far stricter regulation across the E.U., it also undercuts the very way Uber has tried to define itself globally. [...]

More broadly, there’s a degree of existential threat in the ECJ decision. Uber has largely attempted to sail above the notion that it is a regular company employing actual humans, enabling it to deny such basic employee necessities as sick and holiday pay. Wednesday’s ruling bursts that bubble. Uber’s app-based hailing system may have been the ground-breaking key to its success, but the suggestion that it is not a transportation company is increasingly hard to sustain.

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statista: Where ISIS Gets Its Weapons

When ISIS took over massive swathes of Iraq in 2014, it captured huge amounts of weaponry from the collapsing Iraqi army. Some of the hardware was U.S.-made and the group subsequently attracted headlines for using American M4 and M16 rifles in its propaganda videos as well as humvees in suicide bombings. In 2015, the Iraqi prime minister said that ISIS managed to capture 2,300 humvees when the group took over the city of Mosul.  

Despite its seemingly impressive haul of western weaponry after its conquests in Iraq, about 90 percent of all weapons and ammunition deployed by ISIS are of Warsaw Pact calibers, mainly originating in China, Russia and Eastern Europe. That was the result of an extensive analysis of 40,000 items of ISIS weaponry recovered in Syria and Iraq, conducted by Conflict Armament Research between 2014 and 2017.

The unauthorized retransfer of weapons originally destined for Syrian opposition forces has also turned into a key source of arms for ISIS, particularly anti-tank guided weapons systems. 43.5 percent of all ISIS weapons documented in Syria and Iraq were manufactured by China while Russia only accounts for 9.6 percent. Despite that, Russian weapons still outnumber Chinese weapons in Syria, more than likely due to Russian arms supplies to forces loyal to the Assad regime. Even though ISIS has shown off captured western hardware, American wepons only accounted for 1.8 percent of the total documented. 

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