The Guardian: Ireland's shame: the death of Savita Halappanavar – The Story podcast

In 2012, a pregnant Indian woman died in an Irish hospital. Her death shocked people all over the world. The circumstances of her final days outraged the Irish public, leading to the launch of a movement that would eventually play a role in the recent, historic referendum announcement.

Who was Savita Halappanavar? How did she die? And what can her tragic story tell us about abortion laws in Ireland?

In this episode of The Story, Danielle Stephens speaks to Kitty Holland, the social affairs correspondent at the Irish Times who broke the story, Savita’s friend Dr CVR Prasad, the chair of one of the inquiries into Savita’s death Prof Sir Sabaratnam Arulkumaran and a legal expert, Eoin Carolan.  

listen to the podcast

BBC4 Profile: Staffan de Mistura

As the United Nations' Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura is said to have one of the toughest jobs in the world. Edward Stourton talks to the people who know him best to find out what drives him and how he is navigating one of the most complex conflicts in recent history.

Born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother and an Italian father, de Mistura went to primary school on the island of Capri, where he was taught by Catholic nuns who instilled in him a strong faith and a desire to help other people.

Growing up in a privileged and aristocratic family, he went on to attend a prestigious Catholic secondary school in Rome, where friends say he knew from an early age that he wanted to work for the United Nations.

His diplomatic career includes stints in some of the world's trickiest war zones - from Sudan to Kosovo, Iraq to Afghanistan, and now Syria. He has a distinctive sense of style and is known for his charm and love of the finer things of life. We also hear about the 'linguistic acrobatics' and the wry sense of humour that have helped him survive in hostile situations.

listen to the podcast

The New York Review of Books: The Threats, Real and Imagined, of Mexico’s Election

Although López Obrador has moved toward the center during the campaign, his Morena party has a left-wing base that resembles some of the movements and governments that Washington has opposed since they began to spread through Latin America in the early years of the twenty-first century. López Obrador was a popular mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005; he ran for president in 2006 and 2012 as the candidate of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). When López Obrador formed Morena in 2014, he took a large part of the PRD’s support with him. [...]

Like Bernie Sanders in the 2016 US presidential election, López Obrador is running as an outsider, in this case against what he claims is a corrupt elite represented by all the mainstream parties that cannot provide either economic or physical security for the country’s citizens. He promises to “clean out corruption in government from top to bottom, like you clean the stairs.” And he proposes the reallocation of about 4 percent of Mexico’s GDP to infrastructure and social programs, including a universal pension—since a similar policy for Mexico City residents was one of his most popular and influential achievements when he was the city’s mayor. [...]

Many people believed that Mexico began a transition to democracy in 2000, when the PRI lost the presidency. But this has turned out to be something of a myth. The promise of that transition never materialized, and Mexico became an increasingly violent and still deeply corrupt narco-state. The failed neoliberal economic reforms that the PRI initiated, beginning in the 1980s, were consolidated with the NAFTA agreement, which helped to draw Mexico closer to the US, economically and politically. [...]

The twenty-three years since NAFTA have been an economic failure, by any historical or international comparison. The national poverty rate is higher today than it was in 1994, and real (inflation-adjusted) wages have barely risen. Over the period, Mexico ranked fifteenth of twenty Latin American countries in GDP growth per person. Nearly five million farmers lost their livelihoods, unable to compete with subsidized corn from the US. Although some found employment in the new agro-export industries, the displacement contributed to a surge of emigration to the US from 1994 to 2000.

read the article

The Economist: Is the pope head of the world's most powerful government?

Is the pope head of the world's most powerful government? The pope represents over one billion people, his government has a permanent presence at the United Nations and he runs the oldest diplomatic service on earth. 

The Guardian: We understand the solar system, so why do people still struggle with gender?

The middle-ages model was based on the principles of Ptolemy, and hundreds of years of celestial observation. Everything worked perfectly well until Copernicus and Galileo gave us the new and exciting heliocentric model. Copernican thought was revolutionary, but then we had Newton, and then Einstein, Bohr and Hawking. We keep observing the universe, and we keep changing the model to fit the observation, not ignoring the data that doesn’t fit. We could also still use geocentrism if we wanted – we would be able to predict solar and lunar eclipses, roughly, but nothing would work properly.

The model of male and female is based on thousands of years of observation of genitalia and the binary qualities of sexual attraction and reproduction. Those were the externally observable facts. They correlated. And, yes, we could remain happy with that.

But now we are gathering observations from people who feel profoundly uncomfortable presenting as the gender they are classified in. We know that somewhere between 0.3% and 0.5% of the world’s population experience gender dysphoria and don’t feel they “fit” with a binary model. Are millions of such people wrong? Or is the current model wrong? [...]

The ancient model that divides us into two distinct “sexes” is deeply ingrained. As a trans person, I prefer an “all human” model: we all identify individually. We should accept this. If we have to adjust the words we use or build our toilets differently, then we should. I cannot believe that kids should be suicidal because I, as a taxpayer, don’t want schools to change some of their facilities. We know that isn’t the true reason for resistance. It’s because we don’t want to believe the model is broken. We don’t like change. These are structural things. It is this fear of change that manifests in our newspapers each week as a desire for trans people not to exist at all.

read the article

The Guardian: The shambles of Brexit diverts attention from the EU’s democratic deficit

Once the leave campaign was gripped by xenophobia and post-colonial delusion my voting choice became clear. Basic social democratic protections and open borders were the things I liked most about being in the EU. I’ve heard many remainers insist that people who voted to leave weren’t voting against the EU, but other things. Well so was I – I was voting primarily against bigotry. I feared a leave vote would strengthen an ugly, stubborn strain of small-minded British parochialism that needed no encouragement. That fear has proved well founded. [...]

Two years on, this distinction still matters because the Keystone Cops nature of Britain’s departure has diverted attention from a chronic and ever-urgent issue – the EU still needs to be democratised. The lack of accountability and transparency in its institutions leaves it susceptible to a vast array of haters and hucksters, from the far right to eccentric iconoclasts. This became clear again last weekend in Italy, where Eurosceptic parties – who floated the possibility of a referendum on ditching the euro – fared best. Across the continent the institutions associated with the EU are more tolerated than loved, leaving the EU ruling more by ambivalence than consent. In short, it is only because Theresa May has made herself look so ridiculous that Jean-Claude Juncker is looking so good. [...]

Only roughly a third of Europeans have a favourable view of the European Central Bank, European commission and European parliament, according to a 2014 Pew survey, while barely half like the EU as a whole. True, 70% believe the EU promotes peace; but 71% believe their voice doesn’t count in Brussels, 65% believe the EU doesn’t understand the needs of its citizens – and 63% think it is intrusive.

read the article

New York Post: This may be why you can’t remember the first years of life

Of course you don’t — and neither does anyone else. On average, the earliest people can remember is age 3½. Before that is darkness. [...]

A 6-month-old infant can remember something for at least a day, Jabr notes in his article, titled “This Is Where Your Childhood Memories Went.”

At 9 months, an infant can retain a memory for an entire month, and by age 2, for a whole year.

By the time a child is approaching kindergarten, he or she can recall much older memories in long, detailed and adorable spoken passages, reciting, for instance, what they did and saw on a trip to Disney World made 18 months prior, Jabr writes. [...]

In 2005, Patricia Bauer of Emory University in Atlanta, a leading scholar on memory development, found that 5½-year-olds remembered more than 80 percent of experiences they had at age 3. But 7½-year-olds remembered less than 40 percent of experiences they had at age 3. Where were these memories vanishing to? [...]

The secret may lie in the hippocampus — a seahorse-shaped region of the brain that’s essential to memory.

read the article

Social Europe: The People Vs. Democracy?

Such diagnoses are deeply mistaken. By focusing on individual citizens’ beliefs, they miss the structural reasons for today’s threats to democracy. As a result, they are also bound to yield the wrong practical lessons. If one really believes voters are incompetent or illiberal, the obvious next step is to take even more decision-making power away from them. But, rather than retreating to technocracy, we should tackle the specific structural problems that have aided the triumph of populist politicians. [...]

The problem starts when citizens view every issue purely as a matter of partisan identity, so that the credibility of climate science, for example, depends on whether one is a Republican or a Democrat. It gets worse when partisan identity becomes so strong that no arguments from or about the legitimacy of the other side ever get through. [...]

But recall the crucial elections in Hungary in 2010 and Poland in 2015: as my colleague Kim Lane Scheppele has pointed out, voters then did exactly what democratic theory told them they should  do in a two-party system. In Hungary, a dismal economic record and corruption discredited the major left party, so it was time to vote for the other side. In Poland, the center-right Civic Platform had an excellent economic record but was widely perceived as having become complacent after many years in power.  [...]

To be sure, more and better civic education also would help. Such education has been declining for decades, because it does not easily fit curricula that rely heavily on standardized testing. If done properly, it is also very time-consuming and thus detracts from subjects that appear more useful in the short run, in the sense that they are supposed to contribute more directly to economic success. Civic education can be crucial in helping young people to manage disagreements and recognize other citizens as legitimate opponents in democratic conflicts. Cultural differences will not and should not disappear, but if the people themselves have learned to live with them, populists will not succeed in using them as political weapons.

read the article