Haaretz: What Drove a Record Number of Israelis to Suicide in the '60s?

At the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, relative to both the preceding years and the years that followed, and relative to their share in the population – there was a dramatic increase in the suicide rate among Jewish men aged 45 and above. (About 60 percent of this group were from Central and Eastern European countries, and were salaried practitioners of the liberal professions). The number of suicides in these years stood at 14-15 per 100,000 Jews aged 15 and above – a rise of 20 percent compared to the average of the previous decade. The increase of such incidents among European-born men accounted for most of the overall uptick. [...]

One unusual manifestation of the phenomenon in the early 1960s was family suicides. These cases occurred mainly among new-immigrant families from Central Europe. According to the weekly Ha’olam Hazeh, in the wake of these cases, “many army officers in the [neighborhoods of] Tzahala and Neveh Magen had to remove firearms from their homes in the presence of their children in order to calm them.” “Experts,” wrote editor Uri Avnery, “say that spiritual stocktaking and an analysis of the emotional life of the Israeli public are needed in order to reinforce the public’s shattered nerves.” [...]

That said, it is still possible to note several possible causes for the dramatic rise in the number of suicides in Israel of those years. The sociological explanation argues that a connection exists between rapid processes of modernization and suicide. The modern Israel of the state’s second decade, which was “over-stressed,” noisy and edgy, can be characterized as a “society in overload.” This state of affairs was often described in surveys in medical journals and other publications devoted to sociological issues. Physicians and psychologists expressed concern that high-pressured life would provoke suicide among people with that propensity, and especially in those who carried traumas from their past. [...]

The points cited so far can account for the relatively large number of suicides among those who immigrated to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s. But what is the explanation for the many suicides among native-born Israelis? We can assume that many of these victims experienced the local existential tension in Israel beginning in the 1940s: the Arab threat, the danger of a German invasion in World War II, the era of militant underground organizations, the War of Independence and the overall security tension, which lasted at least until the 1956 Sinai war. It’s possible that the relative calm that ensued when the military-security threats and the existential threats passed in the second decade, led to an increase in the suicide rate among them as well.

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CityLab: Tbilisi Comes Up for Air

In 2016, when the International Energy Agency released a report on air pollution (based on data from 2012), it named the small Eurasian country of Georgia as having the highest mortality rate in the world caused by air pollution, with close to 300 deaths per 100,000 people. By comparison, China, which is known for the bad air quality in its cities, reported slightly over 150 deaths per 100,000 people. [...]

Until recently, most Tbilisi restaurants allowed smoking indoors. Smoke emanating from metal garbage cans on street corners as a result of uncontrolled burning is a common sight. An acrid smell from vehicle emissions pervades the major thoroughfare of Rustaveli Avenue.

But two years after the IEA report, a growing number of citizens and organizations in Georgia are fighting for their quality of life. Through street protests and campaigns, television debates, and discussions on social media, Tbilisians are seeking to change the status quo. It seems that their voices are being heard, even if most people aren’t prepared to follow the lead of the Oxygen Ninjas.  [...]

Respiratory diseases caused by air pollution are becoming a public-health crisis. According to statistics released by Georgia’s National Center for Disease Control and Public Health, at the end of 2016, the number of registered cases of respiratory diseases stood at more than 225,000 in Tbilisi alone. In a city with population of 1.1 million, that is a rate higher than 20 percent. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) caused by inhaling tobacco smoke accounted for a large chunk—74 percent—of those respiratory cases.

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CityLab: The Three Rural Americas

Taken as a whole, this group of places lost nearly 14 percent of its population between 1990 and 2015, which is far worse than the 27-percent population gain of the nation as a whole. They lost young people at more than double that rate, their population of 25-to-34 year-olds plummeting by more than 30 percent between 1990 and 2015.

Their median income is far below that of the nation as a whole, $30,000 versus $54,000. Nearly a quarter of working-age men in these areas have a disability, more than twice the national share of 11 percent. Almost four in every 10 children in these places live in poverty, again, almost double the rate of the nation as a whole (20 percent). One in five adults does not have a high-school diploma.

These persistently poor rural counties suffer from chronic joblessness as well. Just 36 percent of working-age adults maintain a full-time, year-round job, and no one works at all in 28 percent of households. They have higher proportions of single-female-headed households than elsewhere, as well as a greater reliance on disability and other government benefits. Drug addiction and abuse are more pervasive. Overall, the situation of these places is comparable to distressed and persistently poor inner-city neighborhoods. [...]

The third kind of rural community is amenity-rich. These places are bestowed with natural amenities like mountains, lakes, and coastlines. As other research has confirmed, such natural advantages have allowed some rural communities to attract more affluent and educated residents and build more stable economies. [...]

Just as some cities and large metros are growing like gangbusters while others are declining, and some suburban areas are booming while others are beset by economic dislocation and poverty, so it is with rural America. Not all rural places fit the mold of decline. A subset of them is performing reasonably well, and many other places are transitioning from the old to the new economy.  

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Independent: Denmark's new burqa ban also covers beards and punishes people for living in 'ghettoes' – this isn't the mark of a secular society

Slowly but surely, Europe is undergoing a move towards restricting religious freedom for non-Christians. The Danish government and media have focused on the burqa ban to get public consent, but the real issue is how minorities are being treated as second-class citizens.  [...]

Here’s how Sukhraj Singh, a Sikh man living in Denmark, describes it: “This proposal also enables the police to define the zones where they have the power to issue double punishments. These will be called ‘special punishment zones’. This policy is inherently unjust. It unequivocally targets and punishes people for simply being born into ethnic minority and low income households.” [...]

Let’s call a spade a spade. The controversy over burqas, burkinis and beards isn’t really about clothing. It’s about the fear that immigrants might retain their non-Christian identities even while living in Western countries. But rather than aid integration, all bans like these do it reinforce the view that minorities are second-class citizens. It will make many feel more criminalised, and alienate them from the justice system and the fellow people they’re supposed to be integrating with. [...]

These bans imply that public expressions of faith are inherently dangerous for a modern secular society. In fact, the opposite is true. Allowing Muslims and Sikhs to be proud of their country gives them the freedom to practice their religion and at the same time see themselves as Danish or French. Restricting them says there is one rule for Christians and another one for everyone else. That is not the hallmark of a secular society.

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Haaretz: The Knesset Wants Apartheid

The current Knesset is persistently carrying out a creeping legal annexation of the occupied territories, applying more and more Knesset laws to the West Bank while erasing the Green Line. This week the Interior Committee advanced to the Knesset an amendment that would enable the interior minister to order the transfer of industrial property taxes from wealthy local governments to adjacent ones – even if the latter are settlements beyond the Green Line. [...]

This government is acting for the settlers’ interests on two levels: It is advancing bills intended to blur the distinction between the sovereign state of Israel and the settlements. At the same time, it continues to conduct clear financial discrimination in favor of the settlements, which receive much more generous government funding and have the status of a national priority region. [...]

The equality between citizens on both sides of the Green Line would also by a pyrrhic legal triumph, because it will no longer be possible to launder Israeli reality. Without the Green Line, which symbolizes a future border between two states, there will be one state in which Israeli citizens live in inequality alongside Palestinian subjects deprived of citizenship and civil rights. Each group will be subordinate, according to its status, to a separate legal system and standards. This phenomenon has a name, and Israel will no longer be able to renounce reality and deny to the international community that it is an apartheid state, with all that this implies.

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Politico: Slovenian survivor targets victory à la Orbán

Janša, 59, is campaigning not just as an ally of Orbán but also as a political survivor. Almost 30 years ago to the day, Janša and three others were arrested for spreading military secrets, when Slovenia was part of communist Yugoslavia. The arrests catalyzed the so-called Slovene Spring protest movement, a key episode in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. [...]

Leading in opinion polls, Janša has run a campaign based on his anti-communist past and promising a future free of migrants, with a dose of rhetoric suggesting powerful nefarious forces are ranged against him — much as Orbán often does. Like Orbán’s Fidesz, the SDS is part of the European People’s Party center-right grouping in the European Parliament. [...]

Orbán came to stump with Janša in mid-May at a rally in the eastern town of Celje, declaring, “If Europe surrenders to mass population movement and immigration, our own Continent will be lost … The aim is to settle among us people who do not belong to our culture, and who will want to live here according to their own religions and customs.”

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Politico: 5 takeaways from the overthrow of Mariano Rajoy

Sánchez managed to assemble an unlikely coalition — labeled “Frankenstein” by rivals — with the far-left Podemos, two Catalan pro-independence groups and a Basque nationalist party, all of who had refused to endorse the Socialist for the premiership in the past. [...]

It was a bitter way to go for Rajoy, the first Spanish prime minister to be taken down by a motion of no confidence. It was also an extraordinary vindication for Sánchez, whose chances of getting the top job had been dismissed by polls, rivals and analysts. [...]

It was a particularly unglamorous end. He was sacked because of corruption in his Popular Party, although the PM himself wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing in the courts. Rajoy didn’t even attend most of the marathon parliamentary session called to oust him. On Thursday afternoon, he and his aides went to a restaurant instead. On Friday morning, he arrived late to the Congress of Deputies. [...]

Sánchez didn’t give many hints as to what his government will do, but he vowed to honor Spain’s commitments to its European partners in terms of budget stability and to lead a firmly pro-European government. [...]

With Rajoy out, the more moderate elements of the Catalan separatist movement will have an opportunity to push for a softer approach with Madrid. Direct rule over Catalonia by the central government will be ended within hours and Sánchez has defended greater powers for the region and constitutional change, although he lacks the majority in parliament to amend the constitution.

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Quartz: Denmark’s burqa ban will affect, at most, 0.2% of Muslim women there

The law will affect just 0.2% of Muslim women in the country (at most), according to a 2013 paper estimating the number of Muslim women who wear niqabs and burqas in Denmark. The study said that of the 150 women who wear the Islamic face veil in Denmark, around half are ethnic Danes who converted to Islam. [...]

In 2009, the Danish government reached out to Warburg and her research group at the university’s Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies to carry out a study on the number of Muslim women wearing the burqa or other types of face coverings in Denmark. The report they produced—dubbed the “burqa report”(link in Danish)—concluded that a tiny proportion of Muslim women wear the face veil. A further investigation in 2013 produced the estimate of 150 women, or between 0.1% and 0.2% of Muslim women in Denmark. [...]

The number of Muslim women wearing Islamic face veils is minuscule across Europe. Various studies estimate that the Islamic face veil is worn by 0.03% of the Austrian Muslim population, 0.04% of the French Muslim population, and, at most, 0.05% of the Muslim population in the Netherlands. Despite this, like Denmark, a ban on wearing full or partial face veils in public has passed in all three countries.

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