The New York Review of Books: A Win Against Homophobia in the Caribbean

Across the Caribbean two realities exist in conflict: the diversity and fluidity of beliefs and lifestyles having to do with sex and marriage within actual communities, and the staid and forbidding values touted by church leaders and politicians. Caribbean queer theorist Rosamond S. King—who just won Lambda Literary’s Lesbian Poetry Prize for her book Rock | Salt | Stone—explains in her 2014 investigation into sexuality in the Caribbean, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, that while sexuality in the Caribbean is diverse—with multiple partnership relationships by both men and women, serial monogamy, informal polygamy, and same-gender and bisexual relationships—politicians and church leaders espouse conservative views to win votes. “If the realities of Caribbean sexualities are so flexible,” she writes, “then why do the region’s political leaders still act as though marital, heterosexual, monogamous nuclear families are—and should be—the norm? This behavior persists in part because the practice of espousing conservative (some would say Victorian, Brahmanic, Catholic, and Mohammedian) ideals allows political and religious leaders to promote a Caribbean cultural nationalism that is markedly different from the ‘loose’ morals perceived in the contemporary laws and  popular culture of the global North.” In a chapter on homosexuality, King disputes the idea that the Caribbean is the most homophobic place on earth. She argues that homosexuality has always operated in the Caribbean region and does so under the structure of el secreto abierto, or “the open secret,” which not only permits but encourages acceptance of homosexuality in the region, as long as discretion is observed. 

In their legal challenge, Jones and his team argued that section 13 and section 16 of Trinidad’s current law are unconstitutional and violate the rights to privacy, liberty, and freedom of sexual expression. Trinidad and Tobago’s constitution was written in 1976, when the country became a republic, severing the ties it had continued to maintain with Britain’s constitutional monarchy after the islands achieved independence in 1962. In 1986, its parliament amended the act, doubling the maximum penalty for sodomy between adults, and in 2000, increased the maximum penalty again to twenty-five years. But the amendment to the law also created an opening for Jones’s action, on the basis that the Sexual Offences Act nullified the “savings clause” written into the constitutions of former British colonies, which decreed that British laws could not be changed after independence. Since the Trinidadian government had amended the buggery law over the years, the law was open to reform. Because of this constitutional argument, Jones’s victory was not just a win for Trinidad and Tobago but has opened the way for similar legal challenges in the seven other Caribbean nations—and the thirty-six other countries in the Commonwealth—that similarly criminalize homosexuality. In fact, just yesterday it was announced that three Barbadians will be challenging their country’s own “buggery” laws, which, they argue, criminalize intimacy between consenting partners. [...]

That proposal never got off the ground. But evangelical church leaders also damned the decision, as expected. Remarkably, though, the Catholic Archbishop of Port of Spain, Charles Jason Gordon, gave the ruling his public support. Days after the ruling, photos of Michelle-Lee Ahye, Trinidad’s track and field star and the gold medalist in the 100 meters at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, with her long-term girlfriend, Chelsea Renee, were leaked online and made front-page news in the Trinidadian press. This aggression backfired, as many of her countrymen and women rallied around her in support. Weeks later, Ahye married her girlfriend in the US. Another national hero, the calypso singer David Rudder, has also openly supported the ruling, an incredible shift in consciousness away from the music scene’s old cultural tropes of machismo and homophobia.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Torture of Solitary

In recent years, city officials have introduced a series of reforms intended to reduce overcrowding and curtail abuse, including the provision of therapeutic programs for prisoners and a ban on the use of solitary confinement on sixteen- and seventeen-year-old prisoners. This week, the city reached a deal with the US Justice Department that includes adding thousands of new surveillance cameras to the prison and developing a computer system to track use-of-force incidences. [...]

A 2013 report from the Government Accounting Office found that the federal system holds about 7.1% of its 217,000 prisoners in some form of solitary confinement, and “from fiscal year 2008 through February 2013, the total inmate population in segregated housing units increased approximately 17% — from 10,659 to 12,460 inmates.” [...]

More recent studies have been similarly arresting. One looking at California’s prison system discovered that almost half of all suicides were prisoners in solitary confinement. Another examining the federal prison system “found that 63 percent of suicides occurred among inmates locked in ‘special housing status,’ such as solitary or in psychiatric seclusion cells.” [...]

Most of the available data regarding the mental and physical health repercussions of solitary confinement corroborate Gassian’s conclusions. In some cases, the effect of this isolation on people’s mental health is irreversible, persisting even after they’ve been released. Often those prisoners are juveniles, many whom are already at risk of developing mental health issues stemming from things like poverty and abuse.

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Social Europe: Will Defunding Hungary And Poland Backfire?

In both Poland and Hungary, the ruling parties have brought the opposition into line through nationalist blackmail. Any criticism of the Polish or Hungarian government is spun to look like criticism of Poland or Hungary itself. And, in Poland, the fear of being labeled unpatriotic has pushed opposition politicians to concede that the country belongs to the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) and its chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński.  [...]

Opposition members who criticize the idea of suspending EU funds for populist governments may make public appeals to morality, but what they really want is efficiency. They assume the suspension of EU funds would be broadly unpopular, and would strengthen populist rule rather than weakening it. Similarly, the moralizing manifestos of Verhofstadt and Macron are not entirely unselfish. Politicians and journalists often mistakenly read this situation as if it were simply “about Poland,” or “about Hungary,” while in fact criticism of these countries forms part of a bigger picture. Both the ALDE and the European People’s Party Group (Christian Democrats) are expected to suffer severe losses, owing to Brexit and the larger collapse of the political mainstream in France, Germany, and Italy.  [...]

But if the principle of “EU funding in exchange for the rule of law” is indeed implemented, the costs might not even be borne by Kaczyński or Orbán, but rather by the next Polish and Hungarian governments. This is particularly true in Poland: although the PiS is still at the top of the polls, a coalition of non-populist opposition parties could well overtake it. The more the EU Commission sours on what was once Eastern Europe’s model student of democracy, the clearer it becomes that Brussels will not be as favourably disposed to Poland as it once was, regardless of who is in power.  

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VICE News: Michel Barnier Is Negotiating Brexit For The 500 Million EU Citizens That Remain (HBO)

The EU AND UK will soon launch the latest round of Brexit talks next week, and one man will be speaking for the 27 remaining countries: Michel Barnier.

The future rights of 500 million citizens and and the world’s most powerful trading bloc are riding on the deal his team brokers with the UK.

Barnier has a reputation as a hardliner, which stems primarily from the strong banking reforms he introduced as the EU internal market commission between 2010 and 2014. And his opponents have seized on that reputation to paint him as a villain in current Brexit talks.

With Brexit’s deadline looming, VICE News sat down with Barnier to discuss the the status of the world’s largest divorce proceedings.

“Right now, I have no certainty,” Barnier tells VICE News. "I can see the difficulty and the intensity of this debate. We’re waiting for the British to have a clear position and choices."

Quartz: Why the solar revolution is in grave danger—and how it can be saved

The trouble is that fossil fuels continue to exert a stranglehold on the global economy. Coal and natural gas are still burned to produce most of the world’s electricity and run most of its factories, spewing carbon dioxide and other climate-warming gases into the atmosphere. And oil still fuels a majority of cars and trucks, as well as almost every single airplane and ship on the planet, further polluting the air. [...]

Part of the problem was that even as the cost of producing electricity from solar PV fell, the value of that electricity—the amount that a utility, for instance, was willing to pay for it to then send via the grid to meet the needs of homes and businesses—decreased even faster. The value diminished because a power source tied to unreliable sunshine quickly becomes a nuisance as it grows. PV panels produce power only when they receive sunlight, so even a passing cloud can sideline them. In California, for example, solar PV quickly rose to meet most of the state’s power needs around lunchtime, when the sun was overhead. But then, adding a new solar panel, no matter how cheap, was worthless because when the state needed power—at dinnertime—the sun was setting. As a result, the gently declining cost of existing silicon solar PV technology was soon overtaken by the swift erosion of the value of the power the panels could produce. [...]

The world may well be bound for the first of the two futures laid out here—and that’s terrifying. But there is cause for optimism: the second future is not science fiction, but rather still an achievable goal. To arrive at it, the world must address the many challenges of realizing solar energy’s sky-high potential—and that will require sharply increasing investment in innovation.

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Slate: Masterpiece Cakeshop’s Surprising Breadth

 Although the justices never explicitly said so, the court seems to have quietly established that business corporations have religious liberty rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution. If that is right, then Masterpiece Cakeshop could be a groundbreaking decision with profound reverberations in American law.

As cases like Citizens United remind us, business corporations have won an ever-larger number of individual rights under the Constitution. Religious liberty, however, has remained one of the few constitutional rights corporations had not been held to have. (Hobby Lobby held that corporations have religious liberty under a federal statute, which unlike the Constitution could be repealed by ordinary legislation.) Masterpiece Cakeshop subtly extends this right to corporations. And, in time, the case may well be used by many other business corporations whose owners have religious objections to same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, or birth control. [...]

More recently, in cases like Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Peña, the court has allowed business corporations owned by whites to assert they’ve been victims of racial discrimination by affirmative action policies—once more with not a single sentence devoted to explaining why corporations, which have no obvious racial identity, should be able to assert this right. None of this is to say that these decisions are all wrong. But it highlights a pattern of corporations winning rights without the justices giving the question much thought.

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Vox: Deb Haaland’s primary win means she will likely be the first Native American woman in Congress

Haaland represents the progressive flank of the Democratic Party, touting a pro–abortion rights, pro-immigrant policy agenda focused on fighting climate change and creating a clean energy economy.

She is one of more than 300 women across the United States who registered to run for US House seats in 2018 — a record number. The previous record was 298 in 2012, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.  [...]

If Haaland wins, she will join the only two other Native Americans who currently serve in Congress: Republican Reps. Markwayne Mullin and Tom Cole, both of Oklahoma.

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Quartz: Scientists have developed a new plastic that can be recycled infinitely

But now chemists at Colorado State University have made a new kind of plastic that can be recycled over and over again without losing its quality. The plastic, reported in the journal Science, can be broken down into its building blocks using mild temperatures and chemicals, and then built back up again to be as good as new. [...]

Eugene Chen and his colleagues have found a way to do that. They have developed a plastic that can be produced from a ring-shaped molecule in just a few minutes at room temperature and without the need for harsh solvents. The plastic is as strong as commercial plastics.

Under hot conditions, or at lower temperatures in the presence of a mild zinc chloride catalyst, the plastic returns to its ring-shaped building blocks and can be recycled into new material. “The polymers can be chemically recycled and reused, in principle, infinitely,” Chen said.

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IFLScience: New Study Reveals What The World Would Look Like If Humans Never Existed

The new study, conducted by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark, has concluded that the reason Africa is the only place left where large mammal diversity has remained high throughout our history is not because the environment there is particularly favorable, but because they survived the onslaught of human hunting. They then produced a projection of what the mammal diversity would look like in the rest of the world without us. Notably, the diversity in the Americas is much greater than anything like what we see today.  [...]

The researchers constructed the new world map by predicting the distribution of now-extinct animals based on their ecology, biogeography, and the current natural environmental condition. Their creation provided the first estimate of how mammal diversity would have looked without modern man’s influence. They found that the diversity in the Americas should be much greater, with grasslands not unlike the Serengeti in Africa supporting giant sloths, herds of horses and mastodons, all being preyed upon by short-faced bears and saber-toothed cats. [...]

The study does, however, presume that the changing climate at the end of the Pleistocene was not sufficient to kill the large mammals off on its own and that it was man’s influence that delivered the death blow. This area of research is hotly debated and contested, with arguments flying back and forth as to the real reason the world’s large mammals died out. It's generally thought likely to be a combination of climate change and hunting, but it’s impossible to say whether or not all species of mammal would have been able to adapt sufficiently to a changing environment and survive to present.  

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