CityLab: The Global Tourism Backlash

The past decade or so has seen a surge in tourism, driven by a rising middle class across the world, especially in large emerging economies like China. Tourism has also become more affordable and accessible, with cheaper airfares and accommodations made possible through online booking services such as Airbnb. International tourism rose from fewer than 300 million trips in 1980 to some 500 million in 1995, before exploding to 1.3 billion trips in 2017—a number that’s expected to rise to 1.8 billion in 2030. [...]

Tourism is highly concentrated in a handful of destination cities around the world. Today, roughly half (46 percent) of all global tourism is concentrated in the top 100 cities, where tourism grew almost 25 percent faster than the worldwide rate. The world’s leading hotspots include Hong Kong, Bangkok, London, Singapore, Paris, Dubai, Istanbul, and New York. In 2016, New York City hosted more than 60 million tourists, up from 35 million in 2002. Tourism in London has also grown by 20 percent over the past several years, while tourism in Berlin more than doubled from 2005 (15 million) to 2016 (31 million). [...]

In truth, scapegoating tourism deflects attention away from the realities of the new urban crisis. Restricting the number of tourists or tourism-related activities will do little to solve the root problem of inequality. And on the most basic level, tourism and hospitality are a huge source of low-skill, port-of-entry jobs. Tourism accounts for roughly 10 percent of the world’s economic output. In many smaller and struggling places, it brings badly needed resources. This financial stimulus often comes in the form of hard currency, which can help alleviate distressed economic conditions.

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The New York Review of Books: What’s the Right Way to Legalize Prostitution?: An Exchange

As in most service jobs, the women working in Nevada’s brothels endure better and worse bosses, good and bad customers, and selling sexual services is not for everyone. But the thirty-eight women we interviewed in one multiyear study told us these jobs had far more advantages than their previous straight jobs in restaurants, office management, or medical services. One woman came to the brothels to pay for medicine for her autistic child; another was the first in her family to own a house. One third of the women we interviewed had previously sold sex in underground markets, and they found Nevada’s system to be a far safer option, and were happy to have the police on their side. One woman told us she was able to leave an abusive pimp thanks to the legal brothels. [...]

Peer-reviewed research certainly does not find that all prostitution is “empowering.” But the overwhelming body of global evidence shows that workers are better protected from exploitation and trafficking in systems, like Nevada’s, where prostitution is decriminalized and/or regulated. Health professionals in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet and organizations including Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization have recommended decriminalization. A wide range of scholars, sex workers, and politicians in Bindel’s home country also support decriminalization, including the Liberal Democrats (a mainstream political party) and a parliamentary report co-authored with the English Collective of Prostitutes. In New Zealand, where prostitution is not a crime and brothels are regulated, bad behavior by brothel owners is subject to disciplinary action, and one brothel worker won a sexual harassment case against her employer. [...]

The only way that the women in Nevada brothels are safer is that they are not arrested by law enforcement for prostitution. That is a good thing. Brents dismisses Farley’s study as self-published, but her survey, which involved interviewing forty-five women, remains one of the largest surveys to date of Nevada’s legal brothels. Farley found that 81 percent of the women interviewed said they wanted to escape prostitution but could not, often because of poverty or homelessness (almost half reported having been homeless); nearly a quarter had entered prostitution as children. [...]

Brents’s insistence upon the prevalence of condom use is also misleading. In Nevada, and everywhere else, men who buy sex pay extra for sex acts without a condom. Several Canadian studies found that about 50 percent of all sex buyers report non-condom use with women in prostitution, endangering the women’s health. Women from the Lyon County brothels reported that it is common to agree not to use a condom in exchange for a generous tip, according to Melissa Holland of Awaken in Reno, an agency that offers services to women exiting and thinking about exiting prostitution. The State Department of Public Health may never see a positive test for a sexually-transmitted disease, since the brothels can use private labs for testing and are essentially on an “honors system” to let the licensing boards know if they have prostituted women who have tested positive.

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The Atlantic: Photos of Abandoned Russia

Across the vastness of Russia—the world’s largest country, at some 6.6 million square miles—and over the span of its long history, countless houses, factories, churches, villages, military bases, and other structures have been built and then left behind: imperial-era palaces, log cabins of pioneers in the Far East, Christian cathedrals, massive Soviet blocks of concrete, speculative-mining camps, and more. For years now, photographers have traveled across Russia finding and photographing these intriguing ghost towns, empty Soviet factories, toppling houses, and crumbling chapels.

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The Guardian: Universal basic income hasn’t made me rich. But my life is more enriching

The Finnish basic income trial, of which I am part, finishes at the end of the year. Having been interviewed by nearly 70 separate media outlets, from the BBC to Le Figaro, the question I have been asked most often has been: how has the basic income trial changed my life? My answer is simple. In money terms, my life has not changed at all. However, the psychological effects of this human experiment have been transformative. I vastly prefer basic income to a benefits system fraught with complicated forms, mandatory courses and pointless obligations. [...]

The idea is that temporary and part-time work is becoming increasingly common, which may mean there is also a growing interest in social security models that support the acceptance of such work. The basic income trial has indeed resulted in work for myself and many other participants, from IT experts, artists and commerce professionals to new graduates. And there is little doubt that the trial benefits people in creative fields, freelancers, people doing expert work and project workers – an ever-increasing number of people. [...]

Basic income models do come with a small increase in taxation. For a large number of employed people this will, however, be compensated for by the basic income. As more people manage to find work while supported by basic income, taxation for everyone can be eased. In terms of purchasing power, basic income would have a predominantly positive effect as it would help people in low-income jobs the most. The critics fear that basic income will make people lazy. However, limited evidence from several basic-income trials from around the world prove that people use basic income to improve their quality of life and not as a licence to do nothing. Research has shown that unemployed people do not have a low motivation for work. Neither is it justified to say that unemployment on a large scale is the result of an unwillingness to work. The isolated cases of lazy, work-averse individuals so eagerly highlighted by the media do not represent the situation accurately.

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The Atlantic: The Double Damage of the President’s Trump Tower Admission

Both Trump and Trump Jr. have at times in the past denied that the purpose of the June 9, 2016, meeting was to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but the president has now flatly acknowledged it. Despite the limitations of the medium, the president packed a great deal of potential trouble into less than 280 characters. First, he seems to proceed from the assumption that by declaring the purpose legal, that makes it so, when in fact the acknowledgement points to the ways the meeting may have broken federal laws.

Second, by contradicting his earlier claims, the president again underscores his prior dishonesty. This is not just a matter of public trust: The changing accounts also get at accusations that the president obstructed justice.

Finally, the tweet is riddled with internal contradictions. If the president is unconcerned about his son, why is he tweeting angrily about the story? And if what happened was entirely legal, why is he so quick to deny that he knew about the meeting? [...]

Sunday’s tweet is the most direct statement yet that the purpose of the June 2016 meeting was to get damaging information from Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has deep ties to the Kremlin. Trump Jr. had also been told in an email ahead of the meeting that the government of President Vladimir Putin supported his father’s candidacy. But declaring the meeting legal does not make it so. Over the last week, the president and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have focused on the claim that “collusion” with the Russians, or anyone else, is not a crime per se.

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Vox: Saudi Arabia is waging diplomatic war on … Canada

But while the vague threat of another 9/11 may have been accidental and not sanctioned by the Saudi government directly, the message coming out of Saudi Arabia over the past several days has been clear: Don’t fuck with us, Canada.

The arrests of Badawi and others that Canada was objecting to are part of a wider government crackdown on human rights, ordered by Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old crown prince who ascended to the position of next in line for the throne just a little over a year ago. [...]

This is a new, bold Saudi Arabia trying to make its mark on global and regional affairs. Led by the young and very brash Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS), this latest move is yet another red line that is being used to rile up nationalists and assert Saudi dominance. Expelling a Canadian ambassador is in keeping with the moves of a crown prince who allegedly took the Lebanese prime minister hostage, rounded up 200 of the most influential and richest Saudis and detained them until they paid part of their fortune back to the Saudi national accounts, and created a diplomatic firestorm with tiny neighbouring Qatar for not toeing the Saudi line on regional affairs. And this in under a year.

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The Guardian: The view from abroad? Britain has lost its balance, but doesn’t realise it

 Theresa May was also in France at the end of last week. She held talks with Emmanuel Macron at the Fort de Brégançon, a Mediterranean retreat for French presidents since Charles de Gaulle. Or rather, she talked and he listened. The disparity in how much was at stake for the two leaders shone through every account. The British prime minister was depicted as desperate for help from European capitals to rehabilitate a Brexit plan that is only a few weeks old but already ailing. There was no sense of Macron needing anything in return; no discussion of how he should play it.

Many French media reports digressed on to the symbolic question of Brégançon, how it was back in play as a diplomatic stage after a period of neglect. The semiotics of presidential power were more of a talking point than anything the president himself might actually do about Brexit. [...]

No one in Paris, Berlin or Brussels doubts that Brexit is dangerous for the EU and that the failure of talks would be disastrous. But what those who seek to mobilise that prospect for leverage in the negotiations fail to appreciate is how the whole threatening idiom – defiant swigging from the bottle marked “no deal” – completes the picture of a nation losing its balance, sliding out of control. British politics has turned crazy and the craziest politicians wave their craziness around as proof that they should be taken more seriously. The red-eyed, slurring drunk offers to demonstrate his sobriety by pouring out another drink without shpilling a shingle drop. [...]

Or maybe we just haven’t hit the bottom yet. Maybe British politics just has to ride out a few more cycles of mania and denial. It resembles an addict’s compulsion to keep going, to repeat the degrading pattern again and again, because carrying on feels easier than stopping; because to stop would mean a brutal audit of harm already done, relationships ruined, money squandered, poison already ingested. It is a painful reckoning, but not one that can be postponed for ever.

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The Washington Post: Long-lost Roman library reemerges in Germany after 2,000 years in darkness

But Germany posed a particular challenge. In the year 9 of our modern calendar system, the Romans suffered an embarrassing defeat in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest near the modern day city of Hanover. They never recovered from it and were permanently pushed back to the western side of the Rhine river, which separates Germany from south to north, 50 miles from Teutoburg. Centuries later, marauders from Germany finally brought an end to the western half of the Roman empire. [...]

Built about 150 years after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, its walls recently reemerged after centuries of darkness during the construction of a new community center next to the city of Cologne’s famous cathedral. At first, when the walls were discovered last year, researchers assumed they had come across a community hall dating to the Roman era. But this summer, a more extensive analysis found the building was most likely used to store up to 20,000 scrolls of parchment. (The estimate would put the Cologne library in the same category as the vast Library of Celsus, which was built in Turkey at about the same time.) [...]

So far, Roman libraries have mostly been found in Egypt or Italy. The Cologne find may be the first such discovery in the Roman Empire’s northwestern regions, which at its peak spanned France, Britain and western Germany.

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The Hindu: 'Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War' review: Death of a city

Hisham writes, the rebels who captured the city from regime forces were directionless. The Free Syrian Army was a loose coalition of different groups and they were incapable of defending the land against Islamist attacks. “Islamists didn’t have to exert much effort to hijack the revolution — it was easily given up by the politically uneducated crowds who had started it.” The revolution which he believed in had now become “an arena of jihad, divided into halves, with believers versus unbelievers on one side, and nationalist believers versus takfiri mercenaries on the other.”

Brothers of the Gun doesn’t offer any analysis of the geopolitical complexities of the Syrian war. It doesn’t say much on how the anti-regime protests turned violent, where do money and weapons come from for the rebels. But the book is a helpless Syrian’s story to the world. He describes with pain how the country was destroyed, neglected and abandoned. Hisham doesn’t make a moral distinction between various actors of the war. The regime comes and bombs the city. The Americans, the French and the Russians all come and bomb the city. The IS, which he says “committed a historic blasphemy against our future,” occupies the city. Raqqans, he says, are at the receiving end. Hisham is not angry. Rather he’s anguished at his own plight and that of his fellow Syrians. “We became believers just when we most needed scepticism. We squabbled when we needed solidarity. In the words of the hadith, “As we were, we were governed,” he writes.  

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