99 Percent Invisible: Billboard Boys: The Greatest Radio Contest of All Time

The year was 1982, and in the small city of Allentown on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania sat an AM radio station called WSAN. For years, it had broadcast country music to the surrounding Lehigh Valley — an area known for malls, manufacturing and Mack Trucks.

WSAN was about to undergo a complete identity change, from a country station and to a “nostalgia” station — meaning Big Band, and soft hits from the 1950s. They wanted a gimmick to hook new listeners, so WSAN decided to launch a good old-fashioned endurance contest, reminiscent of the pole sitting stunts or dance marathons popular in the 1920s. They secured a local sponsor, Love Homes, to donate a prize: a single-wide modular home worth $18,000.

For the contest, three people would ascend 30 feet up a ladder to a platform running under a WSAN billboard. Whoever stayed up the longest would walk away with the new home. They called it the “You’ll Love To Live With Us” contest. It seemed like a simple marketing strategy, but WSAN had grossly underestimated just how much people would endure for a little economic security.

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Spiegel: The Nuclear Agreement Is Not a Love Affair'

Zarif: The Europeans and other signatories must take action to compensate for the effects of the U.S. sanctions. In May, they presented us with a package. That was an important commitment. Now, it must be translated into action. The most important thing is that Europe shouldn't do it for Iran, but for its own sovereignty and its long-term economic interests. [...]

Zarif: Our first priority is to ensure that Iran can continue to sell reasonable amounts of oil and to bring the proceeds back to Iran. In addition, we are interested in investment and cooperation in a variety of areas like science, technology and trade. But the litmus test is oil and banking. [...]

Zarif: Europe has said that the nuclear agreement is in their own security interest. Europe must be prepared to pay for its security. Nothing is for free. Europeans must decide whether they are prepared to put their money where their mouth is. [...]

Zarif: We have never threatened Israel with violence. We say that the policies pursued by the Zionist regime will lead to its annihilation. That isn't something that we will do. [...]

Zarif: Iranian foreign policy is determined neither by me nor by Mr. Soleimani, rather by the Supreme National Security Council. That is where discussions are held and decisions are made. When we negotiated the nuclear agreement, it was also said: Zarif is just a mouthpiece, the deal will never be implemented because the government has no power. But we did implement the agreement.

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Aeon: Not just a pretty boy

A parrot’s imprinting with a human surrogate follows a predictable script: utter fidelity expressed through its natural mating behaviour. Unlike dogs, which parted from their grey wolf ancestors about 30,000 years ago, and house cats, whose domesticated origins are murkier and perhaps even more ancient, a pet parrot, no matter where it is born or how tenderly hand-raised, is a wild animal. A sustained historical encounter with people has profoundly shaped canine and feline behaviour and physique. But apart from introducing a few new colour schemes through mutation, human interaction with parrots hasn’t changed so much as a beak or a foraging technique. A human-weaned parrot — ‘psittaciformes’ is the parrot’s scientific nomenclature — is tame, but its behavioural repertoire is still wild, a true descendant of the dinosaurs. Thanks to our selective breeding, dogs and cats not only have infantilised behaviour but also neotenised faces — the big baby eyes and cute snub noses that stimulate our nurturing impulses and flood our brains with feel-good oxytocin hormones. Parrots have none of that. [...]

And yet many people forge a profound bond with birds, and love their winged animals with a fiercely felt reciprocity. This is especially true of parrots. Talk to dedicated parrot owners, especially owners of the bigger parrots, and they will tell you that their avian relationship has changed their lives. ‘I like birds for their flights and non-flights,’ wrote the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. ‘For their diving into waters and clouds. For their bones filled with air.’ There is, undeniably, something paradoxical about our love affair with birds. [...]

Another study, published in 2006 in the journal Anthrozoös, found that people who prefer birds (and horses) have a higher level of empathy than owners of other pets. Researchers at the University of California in the 1990s found that bird owners are more polite, expressive, and caring than other pet owners. Other recent surveys ­— see Anderson’s 2003 paper ‘A Bird in the House’ — have concurred, finding bird owners to be everything from contented and courteous to unpretentious and, in the majority, communally minded and altruistic. Research has also found that bird-companionship to be a deterrent to suicide, and many parrot owners make formal provisions in their wills for posthumous care. [...]

The most famous investigation into parrot intelligence was the eye-popping research of Irene Pepperberg, adjunct professor of psychology now at Brandeis University, into the psychology of Alex the African Grey Parrot, a bird described as having the cognition-levels of a dolphin, or the intelligence of a five-year-old child. Alex had an extraordinary ability to communicate and reason using sophisticated human language and a vocabulary of 150 words. He had the ability to understand, in his own way, the very advanced conceptual idea of nothing. ‘Alex has a zero-like concept; it’s not identical to ours but he repeatedly showed us that he understands an absence of quantity,’ wrote Pepperberg in 2005 in an email in the journal LiveScience.

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openDemocracy: When is the UK at war?

However, a long-awaited response to a Freedom of Information request that the Remote Warfare Programme submitted to the Ministry of Defence earlier this year has revealed that the government does not actually have working definitions of combat or non-combat. This suggests that the decision on whether a mission is combat or non-combat is left in the hands of political decision-makers who may have an incentive to avoid the enhanced scrutiny and approval that a combat designation would bring, even if it means wrongly defining the mission at hand.

In the UK, Parliament has increasingly secured the right to a vote on the deployment of British troops on combat missions through the War Powers Convention (WPC). This was established when Tony Blair invited the House of Commons to vote on British military intervention in Iraq, and it was strengthened in 2013, when David Cameron respected parliaments’ rejection of a deployment to Syria. [...]

While the UK is not unique in its lack of a definition – NATO, the EU, and allies such as Denmark all fail to define the term – the political repercussions of designating missions as combat or non-combat are hugely significant in the British system as described above, and make the designation particularly relevant for the UK.

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Spiegel: How the Alternative for Germany Has Transformed the Country

The AfD stands for an unprecedented political success, but also for a history of radicalization. Like any new party, breaking taboos is the AfD's lifeblood, but its shift to the right has continued unabated. And anyone who has stood in the party's way has gotten steamrolled. First it hit Lucke, the well-behaved co-founder and former party head; he was overthrown by the much more politically shrewd Frauke Petry. [...]

In January, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published a book titled, "How Democracies Die." In it, they write that in the decades since the end of the Cold War, liberal systems haven't been overthrown through force and military coups alone. More than anything else, democracy has been undermined non-violently through the election of anti-democratic politicians. [...]

For years, politics in Germany had been shaped by the old polarity between left and right. But those days are over. The question of identity now seems to be more important, which seemingly scrambles the party system. Sahra Wagenknecht of the Left Party is creating a new movement called "Aufstehen," German for "Stand Up," that she hopes will be a magnet for voters who would like to see a bigger welfare state and fewer immigrants. The move places additional pressure on the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which has fluctuated between a culture of welcoming refugees and warnings of a loss of control since the refugee crisis. The business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), meanwhile, has morphed into a law and order party. And the only thing still holding the CDU and Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU's Bavarian sister party, together is the fear of losing power. The only parties that seem to be profiting from the new political complexities are the Greens and the AfD. [...]

Slowly but surely, the AfD is also advancing into areas that possess even more powerful weapons than the military: the media and the world of culture. As the third-largest group in German parliament, the AfD has access to a number of administrative bodies, from the Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the Stasi Records Agency, which administers the vast number of files kept by the East German secret police on its own citizens. When it comes to choosing its representatives for such bodies, the AfD sometimes seems to be intentionally trying to provoke. For example, for the board of the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, which fights for gay rights, the AfD chose Nicole Höchst, who believes that homosexuals have an abnormal inclination to pedophilia.

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Quartz: Cows are happier setting their own schedules, too

In 2007, the Hallgrímssons rebuilt their barn from the ground up, spending kr160 million ($1.46 million) on technologies such as milking robots, an automatic feeding system, and cleaning robots. The investment quickly paid off, says Aðalsteinn’s son, Einar örn Aðalsteinnson. Within a year, their 80 cows were producing 30% more milk and the rate of infections had plummeted, cutting the farm’s veterinarian bills from kr2 million a year to under kr0.5 million. [...]

When one of their cows wants to be milked, she walks to the center of the barn to one of the three self-milking Lely machines. She enters the machine—a gated, cow-size booth—and first has her teats inspected and cleaned. Next, the robot attaches its equipment to extract her milk while the cow chows down on some cow candy: tasty corn pellets supplemented with various vitamins and minerals. The whole process takes 10 minutes or less.

The door to the barn is left open unless the weather is bad, leaving the cows free to wander outside to graze in the pasture. If they’d rather, they can relax on their 2-inch-thick foam mattresses, which are lined up in a tidy row along one side of the barn. There’s a massage machine when they want to scratch that itch on their back, and fresh grass or hay is always available, delivered via an automatic feeding system. Robots scurry around cleaning the barn, with cow poop dispatched through slats in the floor to be automatically gathered as manure for the farm. An AC system, controlled by a weather station on the roof, automatically opens and closes the windows, ensuring fresh air (which is very important to the operation, says Einar). Another computer-commanded machine feeds milk to the baby calves.

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Haaretz: Now Israel Has a Race Law

As part of this madness, homes owned by Jews before 1948 are returned to their original owners through the Israeli legal system, dispossessing people who lived there for decades. At the same time, stolen or abandoned Palestinian property from 1948 has never been returned to its legal owners. In Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and in other places, Israeli flags multiply, together with the hundreds of Palestinians left homeless after being kicked out of their homes in shame, on the order of the egalitarian and just courts of the State of Israel. If someone has it in their heart to understand how afflicted the Israeli legal system is with moral rot, and how far it is from the fundamental principles of equality and justice, here lies the proof.

But all this is not enough. This week a new record was set. Jerusalem District Court Judge Moshe Drori ruled that a Jew who was injured in a terrorist attack is entitled to additional compensation, because he is a Jew, without proof of any damage, based on the nation-state law, which states that the government will strive to protect the well-being of Jews.

The circle has been closed, completed and perfected. Now it is a real race law, according to the unavoidable interpretation of the court of the nation-state law. From now on, two types of blood exist in Israel: Jewish blood and non-Jewish blood, on the law books as well. The price of these two types of blood is also different. Jewish blood is priceless, it must be protected in every possible way. Non-Jewish blood is terrifyingly cheap, it can be shed like water. A situation that existed until now only de facto, with different standards and punishments for Jews and others, is from today by court decree.

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Quartz: Theresa May’s angry Brexit speech wasn’t really about the EU at all

UK prime minister Theresa May sounded steely today (Sept. 21) as she made a surprise speech in the wake of stalled Brexit talks with the European Union. But despite her fierce tone, analysts pointed out that her speech contained no changes to the current Brexit proposals—and was more about saving political face. [...]

May’s speech seemed largely intended to signal to EU leaders that the UK has no intention of backing down. While the prime minister claimed, “No one wants a good deal more than me,” she also noted, “I have always said no deal is better than a bad deal.” She described the current state of negotiations with the EU as an “impasse,” and said the UK would continue with preparations to leave in the event of no deal. She also attempted to put the onus on EU officials to come up with an alternative plan to Chequers that would satisfy both parties. [...]

Many analysts, including Manulife chief economist Megan Greene and BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, seemed to perceive May’s speech as an attempt to position the EU as a common “enemy” between herself and hard-line Brexiteers ahead of an upcoming Tory party conference.

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