99 Percent Invisible: Post-Narco Urbanism

In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the notorious  drug lord, had effectively declared war on the Colombian state. At one point, his cartel was supplying 80% of the world’s cocaine and the violence surrounding the drug trade had become extreme. The bloodshed was focused in the city of Medellin.

As the years went on, Medellin became the most dangerous city in the world. In 1991 alone, around 6,000 people were killed. The murder rate was almost 400 people per 100,000 residents, which is three or four times more than the world’s most violent cities in recent history.

But today, Medellin is very different. In just thirty years, it’s transformed from being the bloody cocaine capital of the world into a place that’s often described as a “model city.” It’s now safer than many cities in the U.S, and, to the surprise of many, one of the things that helped to pull the city out of the violence was a whole new approach to urban planning, including a major overhaul of the city’s public transportation system.

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99 Percent Invisible: Right to Roam

When 99% Invisible producer Katie Mingle’s father Jim Mingle retired, he began walking —a lot. He’d always been a walker, but with more time, he took up long-distance, multi-day trips. And even though he’s an American, he mostly preferred to walk in the UK. In fact, over the course of a decade, he walked the entire length of Great Britain.

On one of his many trips, Jim found he needed to hitchhike (rather than walk) back to the village where he was staying. A jeep pulled up and he hopped in. The driver was dressed in a traditional tweed outfit with a funny cap. He introduced himself as the gamekeeper for Madonna and her then husband, Guy Ritchie. Katie’s dad had been walking across their private estate.

This walk across private land was not unusual. Thousands of distance walkers in Britain, regularly do the same thing , which is different from what people typically do in the United States. If you wanted to walk across America, you’d have to do it on a combination of public trails and roads and you certainly couldn’t cut across Madonna’s property.

In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started in the 1930s by a rebellious group of young people who called themselves “ramblers” and spent their days working in the factories of Manchester, England.

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Aeon: In 2009, a man arrived in an Irish town with a plan to disappear forever

In 2009, a grey-haired man arrived by bus in the seaport town of Sligo in Ireland. Under the name Peter Bergmann, he checked into a hotel and carried three large pieces of luggage to his room. Over the next three days, he was captured by closed-circuit security cameras leaving the hotel with a full plastic bag and returning to his room with nothing. On the fourth day, he went to the nearby seaside village of Rosses Point, where he would later wash up on the shore. A haunting mystery unravelled through a combination of eye-witness interviews and CCTV footage, The Last Days of Peter Bergmann is an existential rumination on a mysterious man’s story – or perhaps on its absence.

Politico: Britain’s middle-class Brexit Anxiety Disorder

For Britain’s pro-European middle classes, Brexit is akin to a psychological trauma which has left many unable to behave rationally, according to two leading experts. Far from being hyper-rational observers concerned only with what is economically sensible, many have morphed into the “Remainiacs” of Brexiteer disdain. [...]

To an extent unparalleled in British political history, Brexit has ripped away the veneer of security that the managerial and professional classes enjoyed, throwing — in their mind at least — almost everything into question, from the U.K.’s place in the world to the future prosperity of their children. It is a threat that many find hard to cope with psychologically.

It is also something many of them feel can be blamed on those over whom Britain’s educated professionals usually have day-to-day political, economic and social control — the working-class, provincial, poor and elderly who were over-represented among Leave voters. [...]

Such a prognosis goes some way to explaining why other EU countries are far less concerned by Brexit than the U.K., even if it could have similar, if less severe, disruptive economic effects. For Britain, Brexit is existential, affecting almost all its political, diplomatic and economic ties with Europe — and therefore more likely to cause anxiety about the future. For other countries, it is just a pain.

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Politico: Italy’s high-speed railway dilemma

“It is necessary to go ahead with the TAV, not go back,” said Interior Minister and Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini, leader of the League. Although the party has indicated in recent days that the project could be scaled back. “The most reasonable thing is to downsize,” said Giancarlo Giorgetti, undersecretary to the prime minister and a key League figure, on Sunday.

The issue became even more fraught for the 5Stars after the Genoa bridge collapse that killed 43 people. Part of the movement’s early appeal was its opposition to infrastructure projects, including a new highway in Genoa — and it is now paying the political price. Its earlier dismissal of warnings that the bridge was fragile as a “children’s tale” has now been scrubbed from the party website (screenshot here). [...]

The 5Stars are now hedging their earlier opposition. Toninelli has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis before he makes a decision. Deputy Prime Minister (and 5Stars leader) Luigi Di Maio promised to “rethink” the project and to renegotiate the terms with Paris. [...]

The 270-km rail line is supposed to be completed by 2030. It includes an €8.6 billion, 57-kilometer tunnel running under the Alps, and is part of the EU’s Mediterranean transport corridor. The goal is to shift some of the truck traffic running between France and Italy onto rail, which would help reduce EU reliance on oil imports and cut emissions from transport.

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Jacobin Magazine: The End of ETA

Basque nationalism has deep roots in the autonomy enjoyed by the provinces of Araba, Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia in the Middle Ages. Even after these provinces came under the rule of Navarra and Castile, and eventually the unitary Spanish state, they maintained their own traditional laws and fiscal privileges, the so-called fueros (charters). Only in 1839, at the end of a bloody civil war, were these fueros finally subordinated to the national constitution, as liberal forces promoted the creation of common Spanish institutions. When Sabino Arana founded the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) in 1885, it harked back to this lost autonomy. Even today members of the PNV, a centre-right party representing the biggest force in the Basque Autonomous Community, are known as “jelkides,” followers of “Jaungoikoa eta Lege Zaharrak” (“God and the Ancient Laws”). This name also highlights the cultural thrust of the early Basque nationalist movement, and in particular its devout Catholicism.

Early Basque nationalism was also shaped by the industrialization that took place in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, notably in the Bizkaia province and later in neighboring Gipuzkoa. These changes drove inward migration and a radical change in the Basque Country’s cultural, linguistic and national identity, at the same time as the central state was trying to galvanize a common Spanish nationality. This also set the terms of the opposition between the PNV and the Socialist PSOE, founded in 1879. While this latter party arose in reaction against the exploitation and terrible living standards in the mines and the steel industry, the PNV emerged in reaction against the Basque people’s loss of cultural identity and national political institutions. [...]

If at first ETA did not declare itself socialist, this changed considerably over subsequent years. The revolutions in Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba over the 1950s – socialist-hued national liberation movements, centering on the armed struggle – deeply impressed ETA. At its Third Assembly (April-May 1964) it asserted that the Basque Country, like Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba, was a colony subject to a foreign state. This projection of ETA’s own aspirations onto distant examples also allowed it to adopt a vaguely-defined “socialist” perspective, and most importantly a strategy focused on armed struggle. Since these far-flung insurrectionary models were hardly practicable under the Franco regime, at first ETA’s “direct action” was limited to propaganda and graffiti, or a few occasional homemade bombs chucked at government buildings. In practice, the most important consequence of the Third Assembly line was that ETA adopted the perspective that national liberation would first require a common front of nationalist organizations to create an independent Basque homeland, only after which it would be possible to begin the transition to socialism. [...]

Even in this period of Transition from Francoism, ETA’s armed activity intensified. Between 1978 and 1988 ETA pm and ETA M claimed a combined total of 513 victims, compared to 75 in the previous decade. This was also a time of significant mobilisations in the factories (and indeed among education workers) as well as around questions like opposition to nuclear power stations and Spain joining NATO. Faced with severe police repression, the nationalist Left was an important part of all such movements and gained major popular recognition for its role. This was also the period in which the LAB trade union federation stepped up its activity, rapidly gaining shopfloor influence. The context of continuing violence and repression in the Basque Country highlighted the limits of the “democratic” transition from Francoism. The state continued a paramilitary Dirty War against the nationalist Left, combined with direct police repression. If in late 1977, the end of the dictatorship allowed for the release of ETA’s political prisoners, by 1987 some 504 of its members languished in jail.

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IFLScience: Bizarre Video Shows Ants Performing A Strange Ritual Around A Dead Bee

The video in question features a sadly-expired bee surrounded by pink petals. As you watch, you realize the petals are rustling, and are actually covered in ants. As you continue watching, you see that the ants are the ones dragging the petals over to the bee and placing them in a circle around it. [...]

For ants, once they have detected a dead or dying comrade by the chemicals released from them, the undertakers will carry the dead outside the colony and take them a safe distance away, often to the same place – an ant cemetery if we're being anthropomorphic. For bees, it's not quite so romantic. The undertakers drag them out of the hive and then fly off and dump them, which could be what happened here. [...]

"[It's] hard to say as the locality and type of ant is not clear, but most probably they are harvester ants (vegetarian) taking petals back to their nest as food, and a dead bee has somehow ended up on top of the nest entrance," he told IFLScience. "That is to say the bee may be more of an obstacle for the ants if it is preventing them taking food down their burrow."

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Think Progress: Cardinal blames ‘homosexual culture’ for Catholic Church’s child sex abuse problem

“It was clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were in fact homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men,” Cardinal Raymond Burke said in an interview Thursday. “There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this.”

Burke went on to emphasize that he believes there is “a very grave problem of a homosexual culture” both among the clergy and within the Church’s hierarchy that “needs to be purified at the root.” He added, “It is of course a tendency that is disordered.”

Downplaying the possibility there is any systemic problem within the Church, he claimed that Pope Francis bore direct responsibility for the scandal, calling on the pontiff to “take action” to enforce the Church’s disciplinary procedures.

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The Guardian: Evidence in the bones reveals rickets in Roman times

Researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada examined 2,787 skeletons from 18 cemeteries across the Roman empire and discovered that rickets was a widespread phenomenon 2,000 years ago.

Rickets is caused by vitamin D deficiency, often because of a lack of exposure to sunshine. It was a particular problem in the crowded, polluted towns and cities of 19th-century Britain and is often assumed to be a Victorian disease. [...]

“The big surprise to me was how young most of the sufferers were,” said Mays. “Some were suffering even in the first few months of life. The inescapable conclusion was that people were keeping their infants indoors too much.”

Quite why mothers might have been staying inside with their children is open for debate. “One tends to assume most women would have gone out and worked in agriculture: this throws open the possibility that that did not happen.”

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