99 Percent Invisible: The Universal Page

In 1786, Haüy printed the first machine-embossed book for the blind. It was a treatise on blind education. It’s written in print — the kind that sighted readers would recognize — but the text was all raised so that blind students could feel the shape of the letters. It was a radical move — not just the first book for blind readers in history, but the beginning of the idea that blind people can be systematically educated… But there were a few problems. [...]

This idea was really important to Howe. He didn’t want blind people to use a system — like braille — that was separate from what sighted people used. He thought it would isolate blind people and prevent them from integrating into the wider world. Long before the concept of “universal design” had been articulated, it was informing Howe’s thinking about how to design for people with disabilities. [...]

Catherine Kudlick directs the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State, where she’s also a history professor. And she doesn’t even really buy Howe’s argument that Boston Line Type was “universal.” “He might have thought of it as universal, but it’s universal in that way that the colonizer thinks things are universal. It’s like you know these poor native peoples need educating and will try to bring them up to my level and make them like me.” Howe failed to pay attention to the expertise of the blind.

read the article or listen to the podcast

Aeon: Marxism and Buddhism

At least since Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, commented on his Marxist inclination in 1993, it is evident that Buddhism and Marxism have something in common:

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability … The failure of the regime in the former Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason, I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist. [...]

From a Buddhist perspective, the capitalist motor is fuelled by humankind’s deepest vice: its trṣṇa. Marx understood that the whole economic system is based on consumption, and marketing agencies know how to push trṣṇa to the realms of utter perversion, thereby warranting a continuum of consumption and labour. The worker is the hamster, consumer culture is the hamster wheel. People are tricked into believing that Furbies, iPads and all those other pointless goods and services are necessary for a happy and fulfilled existence. A sense of ‘meaning’ has been replaced with instant, short-term, on-demand happiness. [...]

If something is empty of substance, then it is relations that define the thing. In other words, everything is what it is in virtue of bearing certain relations to other things and, as those things are related to other things, ultimately in virtue of bearing relations to everything else. Everything stands in a unique set of relations to other things, which thereby individuates it without its having to assume a unique and individual substance. You stand in countless relations to your parents, spouse, but also to your car and bank account. The impression that there are such things as houses, selves, spouses, bank accounts, hammers and so on, all independent of a network of relations, is actually a conceptual illusion. This, in short, is the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The notion of emptiness includes the notion of self. The self, too, is empty in that it is exclusively defined by its relations, not some underlying substance. This is the idea of no-self.

read the article

The Guardian: How the state runs business in China

When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he extolled the importance of the state economy at every turn, while all around him watched as China’s high-speed economy was driven by private entrepreneurs. Since then, Xi has engineered an unmistakable shift in policy. At the time he took office, private firms were responsible for about 50% of all investment in China and about 75% of economic output. But as Nicholas Lardy, a US economist who has long studied the Chinese economy, concluded in a recent study, “Since 2012, private, market-driven growth has given way to a resurgence of the role of the state.” [...]

The relationship between the party and private sector companies is, up to a point, flexible – certainly more so than with state companies. The party doesn’t habitually micromanage their day-to-day operations. The firms are largely still in charge of their basic business decisions. But pressure from party committees to have a seat at the table when executives are making big calls on investment and the like means the “lines have been dangerously blurred”, in the words of one analyst. “Chinese domestic laws and administrative guidelines, as well as unspoken regulations and internal party committees, make it quite difficult to distinguish between what is private and what is state-owned.” [...]

In the early optimistic glow of Xi’s ascension to the leadership, a number of western commentators talked up his appreciation of markets. After all, from 1985 to 2007, Xi had served in two provinces, Fujian and Zhejiang, which were thriving bastions of private enterprise. Starting in the 1980s, Fujian was an important gateway for investors from nearby Taiwan, while Zhejiang was home to a number of China’s most famous private companies, such as Jack Ma’s Alibaba. The arc of Xi’s father’s career, from revolutionary to reformer, reinforced this optimism about China’s new leader. Lu Guanqiu, a businessman who owned and ran Wanxiang, a private car parts group, told Bloomberg: “When Xi becomes general secretary, he’ll be even more open and will pay even more attention to private enterprise and the people’s livelihood. It is because he was in Zhejiang for five years.” [...]

In some ways, codifying in public documents the party’s role in managing companies was both an instance of rare transparency and part of an increasing trend of the party openly displaying its power. In the past, Chinese state-owned listed companies had customarily filed misleading prospectuses ahead of their stock exchange listings, omitting the party’s pivotal role in the hiring and firing of senior executives. Similarly, company boards had long been legally and theoretically independent of the party, but not in practice. “The same individual who is chairing a party committee meeting on a Monday might well be chairing a board meeting later in the week,” notes a 2018 report on Chinese corporate governance.

read the article

TLDR News: What Deal Does the EU Want From Brexit?

There's been a lot of talk, on this channel and elsewhere, about what kind of Brexit deal the UK wants. There's been significantly less conversation about what the EU wants out of it. So in this video, we discuss what the EU27 want from Brexit (and more specifically what France, Germany and Ireland are looking for).

CNN: 100 years ago, white mobs across the country attacked black people. And they fought back

Chicago wasn't the only city besieged by mob violence in the months after World War I. White gangs were eager to maintain Jim Crow-era laws but African-American soldiers returning from the war were demanding their rights and an end to second-class citizenship. Between late 1918 and late 1919, the US saw 10 major anti-black riots, dozens of minor, racially charged clashes and almost 100 lynchings, writes David F. Krugler, author of "1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back."

Scores of black men and women were killed that year in racial violence. Nobody knows how many. The official death toll, Krugler says, was more than 150 people -- the majority of whom were black -- across the country between late 1918 and 1919. The Arkansas State Archives says 200 blacks were killed in Arkansas alone over several days in September 1919. [...]

There were seeds back then, she said, of issues American society is still grappling with today. Issues like racial inequality in the job market, the distrust between the blacks and the criminal justice system and biased news outlets.

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: Why a Thriving Civilization in Malta Collapsed 4,000 Years Ago

To survive, they reared dairy animals rather than prioritizing meat—killing off newborn livestock before they had a chance to graze. They mixed livestock manure back into the soil and may even have made back-breaking journeys carting soil washed into the valleys back uphill to refresh the upland fields. The evidence for this lies in strange, parallel ruts in the ground that may be cart tracks, as well as signs from the skeletons that soft tissue had sometimes been worn completely away by hard, repetitive activity. Oddly, says Malone, they ate almost no fish.

To achieve such complex collaborative effort something powerful must have held the community together: the temples. Until now, the Temple Culture was thought to have centered on the worship of a mother goddess, but Malone thinks it was more of a clubhouse culture, focused on ritual and feasting but where food—rather than a deity—was revered. In the complexes it is now clear that the people displayed their livestock and harvests on special benches and altars, feasted, and also stored food. There is no skeletal evidence of violent death and no fortifications, said Malone. Instead the society appears to have survived through cooperation and sharing. [...]

Islands can be used as laboratories for understanding change in the wider world, Malone says. However, the geographical peculiarities of islands can also present problems by rendering conventional research techniques redundant. In Spain’s Canary Islands, for example, ancient pollen is not well-preserved in the local terrain. What’s more, many important plants on the islands—such as its emblematic laurel trees—produce no, or little, pollen, and the environmental conditions have also eroded other pieces of evidence, such as macrofossils.

read the article

The Guardian Longreads: Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour?

Discrimination and violence against African workers gets worse in Italy with every passing day. In 2018, there were 126 racially motivated attacks recorded in the country, some fatal: in May last year a neo-fascist shot and wounded six black people in Macerata, near the central city of Ancona. A Cameroonian was shot in the city of Aprilia, an hour’s drive from Rome. A few weeks before, in July, a Moroccan man was beaten to death there. The problem is so severe that the Italian intelligence agency warned earlier this year about the rise in far-right groups and “a real risk of an increase in episodes of intolerance towards foreigners”. [...]

Rather than denying the situation, the country’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has repeatedly said immigrants are the “new slaves”. The observation isn’t sympathetic but strategic: publicising their destitution is a calculated attempt to dissuade more from coming to Italy. It serves his political purpose to perpetuate their ghettoisation, and also shores up the far-right narrative that immigrants can never integrate. [...]

Something similar was happening all over the country. The Roman mafioso, Salvatore Buzzi, whose consortium repeatedly won contracts to arrange housing for migrants, was heard in a 2014 police wiretap boasting: “Have you got any idea how much I earn through immigrants? I make more from immigrants than I do from drugs.” His consortium enjoyed annual revenues of €55m. [...]

Many activists believe this modern form of slavery is not a perversion of 21st-century capitalism, but the logical result of putting profit before every other consideration. “Unless you counter the huge power of the multinationals,” Yvan Sagnet told us, “it will be difficult to resolve the problem of working conditions. Because caporalato and modern slavery are the effect of a system, not the cause of it: the effect of ultraliberalism applied to agriculture.”

read the article or listen to the podcast

Curbed: Inside the strange—and misunderstood—saga of Biosphere 2

Escape fantasies have long fueled the search for utopia—that irresistible notion of putting everything wrong in the rear view and casting out to a new world of your own making. In the late 1980s, a motley crew of ecologists, engineers, artists, and an eccentric billionaire embarked on an experiment to see if humans were able to colonize space, presuming that the earth would, at some point, become uninhabitable due to environmental collapse, nuclear war, or some other catastrophic event. And thus, Biosphere 2—one of the strangest research experiments of the 20th century—was willed into existence. [...]

Biosphere 2 was influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic architecture, “Synergetics” systems thinking, and “Spaceship Earth” theories. Meanwhile, the writings of historian and urbanist Lewis Mumford informed Biosphere 2’s explorations of the natural world and technology working harmoniously together to support human life.

When the experiment began, it was met with curiosity and fanfare. But after a series of controversies and mishaps—including a near-lethal loss of oxygen and conflict between researchers and their new manager, Steve Bannon—it was dismissed as a failure in mainstream media. “Biosphere or Biostunt?” read the title of a 1993 Time story on the project. It was lampooned in the 1996 Pauly Shore movie Bio-Dome. But did the experiment actually “fail,” or was it just misunderstood and misinterpreted? It depends on who you ask.

listen to the podcast

UnHerd: Scotland’s drug shame

Data recently published has revealed that in Scotland, drug-related deaths rose by a shameful 27% last year to 1,187. That means the death-toll in Scotland was equivalent to five Lockerbie bombings or fifty 7/7s. It is nearly three times that of the UK as a whole, and, per capita, the drug death rate in Scotland is higher than that of the U.S. Yet no national emergency has been declared. [...]

And the cause has baffled many. Myself included. It may be attributable to a number of factors, including the sharp managed-decline of the industries around which many working-class communities formerly cohered. The mechanisms by which they once lifted themselves out of poverty were sacrificed on the altar of the free-market and replaced with Frankie and Benny’s, American-style shopping malls, casinos and, in Dundee (the drug-death capital) a world-leading design museum — partly funded by the billionaires implicated in the U.S. opioid crisis. [...]

My theory is that the drug problem is worse in Scotland for the same reason the drink, cigarette and life-expectancy problems are worse: the severity of deindustrialisation was that much more acute north of the border because we lacked the political autonomy to mitigate its impact in context-specific ways. Then again, I’m not an academic. Maybe it’s just the weather that’s killing everyone. [...]

Where the U.S. led, Scotland followed. Research published by Scottish Universities in 2018 found that 18% of the Scottish population was prescribed at least one opioid painkiller in 2012 and that “there were four times more prescriptions for strong opioids dispensed to people in the most deprived areas, than to those in the most affluent areas”. Every bit of data available points to a large increase in the prescription of addictive painkillers like co-codamol and tramadol over the last 10-years in the very communities where people are dying.

read the article

TLDR News: What Johnson's Cabinet Reshuffle Mean For Brexit

On Thursday night, Boris Johnson selected his new cabinet in the biggest reshuffle in recent memory. Cabinet selections really indicate what kind of people the Prime Minister wants to surround themselves with, what kind of strategies they will be using. So in this video, we will be discussing who Johnson chose, and what this might indicate about his Brexit plans.

City Beautiful: What is New Urbanism?

BBC4 Analysis: Going the way of the dodo? The decline of Britain's two main parties.

Recent polling data and election results paint a picture of woe for Britain's two main political parties. Of course both Labour and the Conservatives have suffered periods of decline throughout their history. But arguably never before have both parties been so riven by internal divides and suffered such a loss of public confidence at the same time. Edward Stourton looks to historical precedents for guidance on today's political turmoil and asks if the two parties' decline is now terminal. With Tim Bale of Queen Mary University of London; Lord Lexden, official historian of the Conservative Party; Deborah Mattinson of Britain Thinks; Charlotte Lydia Riley of the University of Southampton; John Sergeant, former BBC Chief Political Correspondent; and Adrian Wooldrige, author of the "Bagehot" column at The Economist

listen to the podcast

The Atlantic: Two Crises, One Existential Dilemma for Boris Johnson

Britain’s choice is a difficult one. It prizes its “special relationship” with Washington, largely centered on intelligence-sharing and defense, but as a member of the EU, it is much more closely intertwined with European economies. Throughout the presidency of Donald Trump, London has also showed itself far more willing to strike out against the U.S. position, aligning itself with Brussels, Paris, and Berlin on a range of foreign-policy questions from climate change to tariffs—and, crucially, the Iranian nuclear deal. [...]

There are concerns inside the British government that Washington will in turn use its newfound leverage to pull Britain more firmly into its foreign-policy orbit. The U.S. could push for greater British cooperation in restricting the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, which Washington says is a national-security risk; it could demand favorable terms in any future trade deal; or it could attempt to force London to take a harder line against Iran. This prospect is being taken seriously not only here in London but in other European capitals, according to conversations I have had with three senior U.K. officials at the core of Brexit and Iranian policy making, as well as multiple European diplomats, British politicians, and foreign-policy experts. Many of the officials and diplomats I interviewed requested anonymity to speak candidly about these fears. [...]

Until now, the two issues—that of Brexit, and efforts to save the Iran nuclear deal—have been almost entirely distinct. While Johnson has spoken of the great prize of a rapid-fire U.S. trade deal, he has held the U.K. line opposing the Trump administration’s strategy on Iran, maintaining the European alliance hoping to keep the deal intact despite the uptick in Iranian hostility. However, some of the officials I spoke with said fears have been raised that as prime minister, facing an economic crisis caused by his hard-line Brexit policy, Johnson may prove more susceptible to U.S. leverage to break away from France and Germany to secure concessions on trade. [...]

The Trump administration has voiced confidence its strategy is working. The president himself has tweeted that the Iranian regime was lashing out because of the U.S. sanctions. “Their Economy is dead,” he said “and will get much worse. Iran is a total mess!” British government officials, however, see scant evidence that U.S. efforts are working. According to the three senior U.K. officials, there remains little motivation for Britain to abandon the European alliance, because London still believes the best way of stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

read the article

TED-Ed: Why are we so attached to our things? - Christian Jarrett (Dec 27, 2016)

After witnessing the “violent rage” shown by babies whenever deprived of an item they considered their own, Jean Piaget – a founding father of child psychology – observed something profound about human nature: Our sense of ownership emerges incredibly early. But why do we become so attached to things? Christian Jarrett details the psychology of ownership.

TLDR News: May's Final Speech to Parliament Explained

Yesterday Theresa May got to address Parliament for one last time, answering MPs questions during Prime Ministers Questions. In this video, we discuss May's last words to the House including reflecting on her time in office and her thoughts on her successor, Boris Johnson.

The Guardian: Boris Johnson can’t be found out: we all know he’s bluffing

As Boris Johnson walked up to the podium at 10 Downing Street to make his first address as prime minister, they should have played Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows as his fanfare: “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied.” For the one thing that can be said in Johnson’s defence is that he is not a conman. Yes, of course, he speaks fluent falsehood as his native language. But he deceives no one. Everybody knows.[...]

Johnson’s fictions have always had a kind of postmodern quality – everybody knows they are fictions. Take the example that Johnson himself has constantly cited, what he called his “foam-flecked hymns of hate to the latest Euro-infamy: the ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp”. Everybody knows and has always known that there was no such ban. Why? Because everybody could walk into a shop and buy a packet of prawn cocktail flavour crisps.

Equally, his more recent brandishing of a kipper to embody another Euro-infamy was a kind of camp self-parody in which the performance is everything and the relationship to truth simply irrelevant. In this sense, there is no more deception than there is at a pantomime. The point is not to make a claim about reality. It is to draw the audience into a knowingly comic complicity with unreality, so that, when the EU says “but we never banned prawn cocktail flavour crisps”, everyone can shout out together, “Oh yes you did!”

read the article

Politico: Germany wary of Macron’s space force

Macron unveiled the broad outlines of the plan during Bastille Day celebrations this month, saying it would help the country “better protect our satellites.”

But the French president's agenda, unveiled in the midst of France's biggest national celebration, sits uneasily with Germany's preference for a multilateral approach to military and defense issues. [...]

In his announcement, Macron was careful to say that the plans should fit with a “European framework” but he also said the move is meant to strengthen France's “strategic autonomy.”

And the president’s insistence that the country must launch an “active” defense of its array of space-based infrastructure — key to communication networks, as well as intelligence, navigation and surveillance — has raised questions over whether he wants to develop offensive capabilities that could be deployed by France alone. [...]

However, Brussels is for the first time launching a significant program to fund defense equipment spending, despite strong opposition from left-wing groups to the idea of using EU cash for military purposes.

read the article

Politico: Sánchez loses bid to be reelected Spanish PM

Spanish lawmakers on Thursday voted down Pedro Sánchez’s bid to be reelected as prime minister — triggering the countdown for a new election to be held in November if the Socialist leader doesn’t manage to assemble a majority within two months.

Sánchez — whose party came first in a general election in April with 29 percent of the vote but fell short of a ruling majority — had been negotiating a potential coalition deal with the far-left Podemos. But the two sides failed to reach an agreement and accused each other of blowing up the talks in a parliamentary session that turned into a blame game. [...]

Ciudadanos head Albert Rivera used the word “gang” to refer to Sánchez’s potential allies among the far-left and regional nationalists, and argued that “the gang just couldn’t agree on how to share the lot.” [...]

It took close to three months after the April 28 ballot for the Socialists and Podemos to start talks, which took place against a backdrop of mutual mistrust, threats and ultimatums aired in media, and leaks of both parties’ negotiating positions.

read the article

Curbed: France’s solar roadway experiment has failed

In 2016, France announced its bold plan to “pave” 1,000 kilometers (around 620 miles) with photovoltaic panels, which would generate 790kWh per day. When completed, the road was supposed to power up to 5 million homes. But that first 0.6-mile stretch, which engineers had originally estimated would power up to 5,000 homes, hasn’t lived up to expectations.[...]

The report claims that engineers didn’t account for the natural deterioration caused by thunderstorms, leaf mold, and heavy trucks and tractors that would be regularly using the road. At its peak, the road only generated 149,459 kWh in a year, making them far less efficient than regular tilted solar panels.

The outcome, while disappointing, isn’t necessarily surprising. Experts have lobbed skepticism at the glitzy promise of solar roadways since they were first announced. Other experiments in the realm have gone similarly awry. In China, one six-foot panel of a 0.6-mile solar highway was stolen, prompting the government to abandon the project. In Missouri, where the company Solar Roadways was meant to test a small patch of sidewalk at a rest stop along Route 66, negotiations between the Department of Transportation and the company broke down.

read the article

99 Percent Invisible: Invisible Women

As researchers dove into the subject, however, they discovered that male and female driving patterns were markedly different. While men mainly commuted to and from work, women drove all over to run errands, take care of elderly family members. They also walked more, trudging across often-unplowed intersections, sometimes with kids in tow. Aside from health and safety, that labor, when tallied up, was found to be worth almost as much to the economy as paid work. “This work contributes hugely to GDP,” explains Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, a book about how women are often left out of design. [...]

The vast majority of medical research, for instance, is based on studies of men. Perez explains that heart attacks are more often misdiagnosed in women, in part because of the symptoms we’re all educated about. For men, chest pain is a common, prominent symptom. For women, heart attacks often present as fatigue or what feels like indigestion, with chest pain appearing in just around one out of eight cases. As a result, fewer women seek medical help during heart attacks and even when they do they are often diagnosed poorly by professionals.

Car crash test dummies are also generally male, based on an average man, which of course means they feature different sizes and proportions than a typical female. The tacit assumption is that the 50th-percentile male is the average person, skipping over the other half of the population entirely. This approach ignores anatomical differences, plus female-specific circumstances, like pregnancy. These tests impact design, and are part of the reason women are far more likely to be injured or die in a car crash. Even in places where “female” dummies are brought in to test cars, these figures are often just scaled-down male dummies with the same basic shape. Sometimes, too, these dummies are only tested in passenger seats.

listen to the podcast or read the article

CityLab: Mapping the Effects of the Great 1960s ‘Freeway Revolts’

The report measures the growing influence of public resistance during the Interstate-building era. The closer to city centers highways were planned, and the later they were built, the less they resembled the routes mapped out in the Yellow Book. Those in the suburbs were more likely to be built according to the original plan. And while freeways constructed between 1955 to 1957 most resembled initial plans, by 1993, the correlation between planned and built highways fell from 0.95 to 0.86, falling especially low among routes in neighborhoods near city centers.

The paper also puts the success of the freeway revolts into perspective. Despite celebrated wins like the unbuilt Lower Manhattan Expressway, the Interstate system was still constructed mostly according to plan, says Lin. The revolts did help usher in federal policy changes that prioritized local input, historical preservation, and the environment. But in most cities, highways came anyway. And when they did, they disproportionately affected those living in communities of color and neighborhoods with lower education attainment: By the mid-1960s, white neighborhoods with more affluent, better educated residents had more success putting new policies to use and keeping highways at bay. [...]

But as the report details, that benefit was enjoyed mostly by those who lived outside the city, helping to spur further suburbanization. Inside cities, commuting benefits were eclipsed by the negative effects on the quality of life for those who lived near freeways.[...]

This grim history isn’t news to the current generation of highway resistors: From Portland to D.C., planners and local electeds continue to pursue Interstate expansions, often in the name of “traffic relief.” Even as cities like San Francisco and Seattle successfully remove urban freeways, others construct new ones. Every year, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group calls out these “highway boondoggles;” this year’s nine worst offenders are set to cost taxpayers $25 billion dollars. Lin hopes that their working paper will give the planners and promoters of these roads pause. “Our goal was be more precise about the cost of highways and to quantify how bad these quality of life effects are,” he says.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: Between Regime and Rebels: A Survey of Syria’s Alawi Sect

The regime’s heavy reliance on Alawis in the army units and militias dispatched to the front-lines, coupled with the community’s relatively small size, have resulted in disproportionate losses of the sect’s young men. At the same time, this predominance of the sect in the military—combined with the atrocities that some fighters perpetrated, at times in front of cameras—have, in the eyes of many Sunni Syrians, tainted all Alawis with guilt by association. In addition, the corruption and war-profiteering, mainly benefitting high-ranking regime officers and mukhabarat (secret police) agents, who are largely Alawi, reinforced the image of Alawis as corrupt, privileged and rich, in the eyes of Sunnis. The Alawis are fully aware of this image and are quick to reject it. [...]

After Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1970, after decades of political instability in Syria and frequent coups, he worked to stabilize the regime and ouster-proof it. One step he took was to purge anyone who appeared disloyal, creating a core of the regime largely made up of Alawi officers and Assad relatives. That system prevailed for the next forty years. Over the decade preceding the 2011 uprising, about 87 percent of high-ranking Syrian Army officers, such as division commanders, were Alawi. The various branches of the Mukhabarat are dominated and commanded by Alawis, as are all the elite military and militia units, including the 4th Mechanized Division, the Tiger Forces, the Republican Guard, and the Air Force. According to the US researcher Hicham Bou Nasif, who interviewed dozens of Sunni officers in the Syrian military in 2014, “since the early 1980s, Alawis have made up 80–85 percent of every new cohort graduating from the military academy.”

Facing a grave challenge to its monopoly of power from 2011 onward, the Assad regime sought to ensure the loyalty or neutrality of Syria’s minorities. Before the war and the demographic changes it wrought, about 65 percent of Syria’s population of 21 million were Sunni Arabs, 10 percent were Sunni Kurds, another 10 percent were Alawis, and about 5 percent were Christian. To ensure the allegiance of Assad’s base, the Alawi community, the regime employed several tactics. First, in speeches during the early days of the uprising, he portrayed the protesters as Sunni extremists and armed terrorists. Second, in a move apparently designed to ensure a radicalization of the opposition and to weaken its secular-democratic elements, in the first months of the uprising, the regime released hundreds of jihadists from prison, while jailing peaceful activists. Third, the regime staged provocations such as sending men to shoot into the air or cut tires of cars in Alawi neighborhoods to instill fear, and then went about distributing guns and sandbags to Alawi inhabitants to reinforce a sense of their being a community under threat from the opposition—even though, at that stage, there were no armed rebels. [...]

The militarization and religious radicalization of the opposition, and the division of the country’s territory between the warring sides, soon hardened sectarian divisions. Members of non-Sunni, minority communities mostly fled opposition-controlled areas. In areas under regime control, where about 70 percent of Syria’s population now resides, members of different sects do live side by side, but relations are strained. Samira adopted the regime’s narrative, blaming the opposition for the rise in sectarian hatred: “They played the sectarianism card on purpose, to make the different components of society hate each other, and killings were based on that to augment the hatred and sectarianism.”

read the article

openDemocracy: Turkish centre-right: soon over-crowded?

Erdoğan’s managerial genius has allowed him to survive several political crises that would uproot most governments. In each crisis, he strengthened and personalized his grip on power. Creating political scenarios reminiscent of Agamben’s state of exception, he targeted the group at the centre of any crisis, turning them public enemies by dehumanizing them in the eyes of his electorate. For the Gezi protests, he blamed secular-leftist groups for organizing a revolt against the elected government, working with – several – foreign governments to this end. For the corruption scandal that followed the Gezi protests, he blamed the Gülenists, his former ally, whom he then subjected to radical recriminations and effectively annihilated. For the resurgence of the decades-old Kurdish issue, he threw the pro-Kurdish and liberal-leftist HDP, a legal political entity in the Turkish Parliament, into the fire. He took on several western governments and portrayed them as global powers with sinister plans on Turkey. In order to exercise political influence he has also instrumentalised some transnational state apparatuses, such as the Diyanet, in many countries.

All in all, Erdoğan survived in power but with the cost of sacrificing major elements of moderate politics and almost all of his former allies. Infusing Islamist and ethno-nationalist elements with his ever-green populism, he skilfully re-positioned himself further on the right and carried – or rather dragged – most of his electorate with him. Yet, Erdoğan has to sustain a huge effort to keep his electoral base in their new position. To consolidate this, he has used illusions of an augmented grandeur and its enemies (including domestic collaborators). [...]

Four potential rivals can be anticipated in forthcoming general elections. Two of them are the established opposition to the AKP, while the other two are from an internal opposition. Let’s start with the latter. As President Erdoğan elevated himself to the status of undisputed leader, he side-lined old comrades but kept them on a leash for quite some time. Yet, not all of them have been terminally silenced. A former president and one of the founding trio of the AKP, Abdullah Gül, together with the former minister of economy, Ali Babacan, having maintained their credibility both in the eyes of the voters and business circles at home and abroad, are on the cusp of forming a political party. Recently Babacan resigned from the party of which he was a founding member, and publicly declared that party policies in recent years were in clear contradiction with the principles to which he had subscribed. Babacan’s resignation is likely to prompt others to follow, yet it is difficult to know how many. The problem for Erdoğan is that Babacan has been at the steering wheel of the Turkish economy during the successful years of the AKP. If the economy is now Erdoğan’s Achilles’ heel, the Babacan-Gül duo will be shooting right at it.

read the article

Quartzy: Why striving for happiness makes people miserable

A huge happiness and positive thinking industry, estimated to be worth $11 billion a year, has helped to create the fantasy that happiness is a realistic goal. Chasing the happiness dream is a very American concept, exported to the rest of the world through popular culture. Indeed, “the pursuit of happiness” is one of the US’s “unalienable rights.” Unfortunately, this has helped to create an expectation that real life stubbornly refuses to deliver. [...]

Humans are not designed to be happy, or even content. Instead, we are designed primarily to survive and reproduce, like every other creature in the natural world. A state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival. [...]

The current global happiness industry has some of its roots in Christian morality codes, many of which will tell us that there is a moral reason for any unhappiness we may experience. This, they will often say, is due to our own moral shortcomings, selfishness, and materialism. They preach a state of virtuous psychological balance through renunciation, detachment, and holding back desire. [...]

It’s worth remembering, then, that we are not designed to be consistently happy. Instead, we are designed to survive and reproduce. These are difficult tasks, so we are meant to struggle and strive, seek gratification and safety, fight off threats, and avoid pain. The model of competing emotions offered by coexisting pleasure and pain fits our reality much better than the unachievable bliss that the happiness industry is trying to sell us. In fact, pretending that any degree of pain is abnormal or pathological will only foster feelings of inadequacy and frustration.

read the article

Vox: The surprising thing about older voters: they’re moving more to the left

In the last presidential election, 71 percent of Americans over 65 voted, according to US Census Bureau data — more than any other age group. Older adults are also much more likely to participate in primary elections than their younger counterparts. [...]

Like any demographic group, voters 65 and older are no monolith. But there are certain characteristics that have come to define older Americans: that they’re generally more conservative, they really care about issues like Medicare, Social Security, and drug prices, and they vote. But advocates for seniors see an electorate actually more fluid than these tropes suggest. They’re also interested in what world they’ll leave for their grandchildren, from climate change to education access and income inequality. And broadly they’re shifting ideologically to the left. [...]

Republicans have relied on older Americans’ support since the 2000 presidential election. In 2016, 53 percent of adults 65 and older voted for President Donald Trump, who campaigned on protecting Medicare and Social Security and lowering drug prices. But those dynamics could be changing. [...]

In the months leading to the 2018 election, a Morning Consult poll showed that among the voters that prioritized issues most important to seniors — like Social Security and Medicare, 52 percent preferred a Democrat. Only a third said they would vote for the Republican candidate. And there’s more openness to more progressive ideas.

read the article

BBC4 Analysis: A shorter working week

What happened to the dream of working less? Sonia Sodha investigates the four-day week.

listen to the podcast

Today in Focus: Is Trump using racism to win the 2020 presidential election?

On 14 July, Donald Trump used Twitter to tell four unnamed Democratic congresswomen to ‘go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came’. His racist language shocked many around the world, but he has refused to back down. The Guardian’s Jamiles Lartey looks at Trump’s history of racism while David Smith discusses how it may affect the 2020 presidential race. And: Julian Borger on the Iran crisis.

Although Donald Trump did not name the targets of his racists tweets on 14 July, it was clear the attack was directed at a group of progressive Democratic congresswomen: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Only Omar, who is from Somalia, was not born in the US. Pressley is African American, Tlaib was born to Palestinian immigrants and Ocasio-Cortez comes from a New York-Puerto Rican family.

While many were quick to criticise the president, Republicans mostly defended Trump against charges of racism. Several days later, lawmakers passed a resolution condemning his tweets – though this was approved along mostly partisan lines, with only four Republicans joining Democrats in condemning the president’s racism.

The Guardian US reporter Jamiles Lartey talks to Anushka Asthana about Trump’s history of racism, while the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, David Smith, looks as how it will affect the 2020 presidential race.

listen to the podcast

Collaborative Fund: The Psychology of Prediction

1. The distinction between “wrong” vs. “early” has less to do with analytics than the social ability to prevent listeners from giving up on you. [...]

2. Credibility is not impartial: Your willingness to believe a prediction is influenced by how much you need that prediction to be true. [...]

It’s crazy to think you can impartially judge a prediction if the outcome of that prediction will impact your wellbeing. This is especially true if you need, rather than merely want, a specific outcome. [...]

3. History is the study of surprising events. Prediction is using historical data to forecast what events will happen next. [...]

Historical data is a good guide to the future. But the most important events in historical data are the big outliers, the record-breaking events. They are what move the needle. We use those outliers to guide our views of things like worst-case scenarios. But those record-setting events, when they occurred, had no precedent. So the forecaster who assumes the worst (and best) events of the past will match the worst (and best) events of the future is not following history; they’re accidentally assuming the history of unprecedented events happening doesn’t apply to the future. [...]

4. Predictions are easiest to make when patterns are strong and have been around for a long time – which is often when those patterns are about to expire. [...]

9. Predicting the behavior of other people relies on understanding their motivations, incentives, social norms and how all those things change. That can be difficult if you are not a member of that group and have a different set of life experiences.

read the article

openDemocracy: The European demos and Ursula von der Leyen’s democratic quandary

The system of parliamentary representation in Europe was always opaque because there is no such thing that we could call a European demos; instead we have a loose collection of numerous national demoimanifesting little coherence and solidarity. Besides, the European Parliament was never allowed to control the European government. Paradoxically, this might be a blessing for an integrated Europe. The EP hosts ever more politicians determined to bring power back from Brussels to their own national capitols. They may have failed to take over the EP during the May elections, but they are now able to block important decisions within the Parliament and the Council, as Frans Timmermans has learned lately. [...]

She should start with the issue of transparency, an issue without which people can hardly control any government. The EU has cosier relations with lobbyists than with citizens, it shows more determination in curbing “excessive” social spending than tax dodging, and its communication strategy is highly selective. We recently learned that the EP snubbed a proposal to make contacts with lobbyists more transparent while the Commission for months refused to disclose the results of emissions tests it did on diesel vehicles produced by Porsche. Details of tax havens used by Europe’s firms were revealed by WikiLeaks and not by Mr Juncker or Tajani. These are probably only the symbolic tips of the icebergs, and Von der Leyen should start cleaning up this mess quickly, reassuring Europe’s public about its unbiased and transparent conduct. [...]

Creating a second chamber of the European Parliament featuring representatives of cities, regions, NGOs and business associations could also bring citizens closer to the EU. This chamber would chiefly feature local activists and sectoral representatives who are closer to ordinary citizens than professional politicians currently sitting in the EP. Of course, Von der Leyen is not in a position to create a second chamber, but she can wholeheartedly embrace the idea. She can also propose to give Europe’s citizens meaningful ways for contesting decisions directly affecting them. The prerogatives and the budget of Europe’s Ombudsman could increase and the scope of private litigation in the European Court of Justice could be broadened.

read the article

The Guardian: Think Republicans are disconnected from reality? It's even worse among liberals

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the study’s findings: the wilder a person’s guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

This much we might guess. But what’s startling is the further finding that higher education does not improve a person’s perceptions – and sometimes even hurts it. In their survey answers, highly educated Republicans were no more accurate in their ideas about Democratic opinion than poorly educated Republicans. For Democrats, the education effect was even worse: the more educated a Democrat is, according to the study, the less he or she understands the Republican worldview. [...]

What could be going on? Bubble-ism, the report suggests. Even more than their Republican counterparts, highly educated Democrats tend to live in exclusively Democratic enclaves. The more they report “almost all my friends hold the same political views”, the worse their guesses on what Republicans think. [...]

There are other promising signs of middle ground. In response to the violence and death in Charlottesville, Virginia, big donors to the feuding parties, George Soros and David Koch, jointly funded the After Charlottesville Project to curb online calls to violence. The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Texas senator Ted Cruz have co-sponsored a congressional bill preventing lawmakers from entering lucrative second careers as corporate lobbyists. Conservatives and liberals united to push for ex-felons in Florida to win the right to vote in 2018, and, this year to push modest but significant reform of our draconian criminal justice laws through Congress.

read the article

The Guardian: Breaking up is harder to do in Denmark after divorce law changes

Until recently Danes could divorce by filling out a simple online form. But under a package of legislation that came into force in April, couples determined to split must wait three months and undergo counselling before their marriage can be dissolved. [...]

The initiatives, which in some countries might be seen as unwelcome state intrusion in citizens’ private lives, have been broadly welcomed by both the public and politicians in Denmark, with only the small Liberal Alliance party criticising them as over-reach. [...]

The government’s three-month waiting period and “cooperation after divorce” course, taken online or via an app, aims to smooth the process for divorcing couples and children by helping them improve communication and avoid pitfalls.

Parents can tailor their course individually from 17 half-hour modules offering concrete solutions to potential areas of conflict during the divorce process, including how to handle birthday parties or how to talk to an ex-partner when angry.

read the article

CNN: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are building very different progressive coalitions

Progressive activists and strategists routinely applaud these demonstrations, in part because they fear an open rift between Sanders and Warren could divide a movement they fought for years to build. But the near-absence of any major policy gaps between the two, despite their different approaches to campaigning and divergent ideological backgrounds, has created a mix of risk -- over dividing the vote -- and opportunity -- to broaden the progressive coalition. [...]

Sanders's support, as seen in a recent Fox News survey in South Carolina, drew more from black voters (15%) than white voters (12%). Warren did about the same with white voters, at 11%, but was only the first choice for 2% of black voters, whom she has gone to great lengths to court with a series of plans tailored to address concerns specific to the African American community.

In another CNN poll, this one conducted by the University of New Hampshire in the Granite State, Sanders and Warren were deadlocked overall -- with 19%, behind only Biden. They shared the highest favorability numbers, both at 67%, and came in first (Warren at 22%) and second (Sanders at 20%) when voters were asked to name their second choice for the nomination. But Warren's numbers have been mostly ticking up, while Sanders' are largely staying level or trending slightly downward.

read the article

EURACTIV: Ukraine president on course for unprecedented majority after election win

A pre-election survey by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute said 45% of voters expected Zelenskiy to negotiate a peace in the Donbass within 12 months — the biggest single priority among voters.

But 57% would not accept peace at the cost of allowing Crimea to become a recognised part of Russia — something Moscow is likely to insist on — and 62% would not accept peace if Donbass did not return to Kyiv’s full control.

More than half of respondents also expected Ukraine to be a member of the European Union by 2030. [...]

Another new pro-Western party, Voice, fronted by rock star Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, also passed the 5% threshold to enter parliament. Voice is the only party to which Zelenskiy has offered coalition talks.

read the article

The Guardian: The invention of Essex: how a county became a caricature

More than just brashly consumerist, Essex was also painted as a hotbed of bigotry, the place where white people moved to escape parts of London that were no longer white enough for them. In 1994, Lord Inglewood, a pro-European Conservative MEP, told a newspaper that the “Essex view of conservatism” was threatening the “more generous, less xenophobic historic tradition”. (Inglewood also blamed the influence of Essex for increasing “public bad manners, aggressiveness and yobbishness” in the party.) Essex came to represent “white flight” in the UK, and there is much evidence of xenophobia and racism in Essex: the county was a hotbed of BNP membership during the first decade of the 21st century. [...]

Today, Basildon is a poster child of inequality. It contains a quarter of the most deprived areas of Essex, despite housing an eighth of its total population, and is the sixth most unequal town in the country. Pitched against such evidence, the myth of Essex as the great Thatcherite success story says more about the will of the Conservative commentariat than anything else. In the mid-1980s, my parents bought the Southend council house my sister and I grew up in, but we didn’t feel like triumphant beneficiaries of some economic miracle. A microclimate of inequality existed on our street, separating homeowners from council tenants. I remember my mum and dad refusing to sign one London-born homeowner’s petition to have his sister, a renter, evicted for being the mother of a “problem family”. No one seemed any richer, just further apart. [...]

The persistent rhetorical power of this invented Essex – as a land of a million Marks Francois, ready to die for No Deal – requires that we continue to overlook the reality of the actual place. “There is still a conversation, even today, black folk in London saying to me, seriously: ‘What are you doing in Essex?’” says Southend-based artist Elsa James, whose work addresses stereotypes of people of African-Caribbean heritage and those of Essex women. Parts of Essex, James says, are more diverse than is widely acknowledged: there were 50 mother tongues among the students at the Southend primary school her youngest daughter attended. [...]

This, finally, is the magic power of “Essex”. For it allows Jenkin – the Cambridge-educated son of a lord – to confidently proclaim that he knows the desires of the “common man”, merely by the mention of this most misunderstood of counties. If Essex did not exist, they would need to invent it.

read the article or listen to the podcast

Curbed: Herland: Reimagine Utopia

What have all of the utopias we've covered so far had in common? They were all largely driven by the will and power of a charismatic leader - usually a man, usually white. How do you build a utopia, then, for people in society who really need it? In our season finale, we visit worlds where there are no men. In fiction, and real life.

listen to the podcast

The Conversation: Erdoğan’s control over Turkey is ending – what comes next?

When Turkey’s currency, the lira, dropped by 20% last year, the slide risked a global crisis. Turkey is also an important NATO ally, allowing its land and air bases to be used for the alliance’s military operations into places such as neighboring Syria and Iraq. [...]

Istanbul, a city of 16 million people, accounts for one-third of Turkey’s gross domestic product and is larger than many national economies. Whoever controls Istanbul’s massive municipal budget also controls its patronage. [...]

Earlier this year, more than 1,000 Turkish academics and their colleagues overseas signed an open letter condemning Erdogan’s bombing of more than 100 targets in Kurdish areas in Syria near its borders. [...]

Whether or how quickly the end for Erdoğan may come will be determined by how united the opposition remains. It is also possible a new political party will emerge, created by former allies of Erdoğan who said their current party under his leadership “caused a serious slide in rhetoric, actions, morals and politics.”

read the article

Vox: The Ice Bucket Challenge and the promise — and the pitfalls — of viral charity

To be clear, the ALS Association did a pretty good job at putting the money to use. Local chapters, she writes, were able to purchase equipment for ALS patients, like “power wheelchairs, walkers, and shower benches. ... The waitlist that had existed throughout the loan program’s 20-year history has evaporated since the Ice Bucket Challenge.”

While local chapters got a significant share of the money, and spent it largely on support for the patients they serve, most of the money — $80 million — went to research. (It should be noted that in drug development, even $80 million is a drop in the bucket — taking a drug from the idea stage to approval in FDA clinical trials can easily cost $2 billion). [...]

The Red Cross raised $500 million for Haiti in 2010 and accomplished very little, and it remains nearly impossible to tell where the money went or what happened. In 2012, the group Invisible Children made an incredibly successful viral video about central African warlord Joseph Kony, raised more than $30 million, and immediately ran into a host of problems: Ugandans protested the video, critics called it racist and imperialist, the producer had a breakdown, the charity nearly went bankrupt, and Kony was never found.[...]

Most existing programs can’t absorb that much money, so there’s pressure to launch new programs. But trying to launch new programs just because you can afford them isn’t necessarily the best reason for starting them. Even if a charity’s existing work is highly effective, if new donations will be shuffled off to new, less promising projects, then the effect of the additional donations is likely to be small.

read the article

Intelligencer: Trump’s Racism Is Pushing Away the Voters He Needs in 2020

The latest such evidence comes in a new study released today by Navigator Research, a consortium of Democratic research and advocacy groups. The report, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, examines a group that many analysts in both parties believe could prove to be the key bloc of 2020 swing voters: Americans who say they approve of Trump’s management of the economy, but still disapprove of his overall performance as president. And it shows Trump facing significant headwinds among that potentially critical group, partly because of the divisive language and behavior he’s taken to new heights, or lows, since last weekend—tweeting about the congresswomen and encouraging his supporters to attack them as well. [...]

[T]he key measure for Trump next year will be the share of voters who approve of his overall performance, not the (for now) wider group who give him good marks on the economy. “They have to become approvers,” [Republican pollster Gene] Ulm says. For incumbents, he adds, “job approval is your vote—it’s almost like religion.” The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll dramatically underlines that point. It found that in 2020 matchups against any of the four major Democratic contenders—former Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Kamala Harris of California, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—Trump drew support from a minuscule 5 percent or less of voters who disapproved of his overall job performance as president. (Trump led each Democrat by at least 83 percentage points among voters who approve of his performance.) [...]

The other strong possibility, of course, is that it’s a mistake to attribute any real calculation to Trump’s course of conduct. According to this perspective, Trump behaves like a white-nationalist thug because he is one. He’s not playing some sort of multidimensional chess that shows how devilishly clever he is; he’s using the world’s biggest megaphone to act on the insecurity, megalomania, desire to demean other people that defines his character. As the comedian Flip Wilson used to say: “What you see is what you get.” If that’s the case, all the numbers and rational analysis in the world won’t keep Trump from cutting racist capers and threatening his many enemies all the way to November of next year. It will be a wild ride.

read the article

Inverse: Does Age Difference Matter in Relationships? Why It Might and Might Not

While there is variation across cultures in the size of the difference in age-gap couples, all cultures demonstrate the age-gap couple phenomenon. In some non-Western countries, the average age gap is much larger than in Western countries. For example, in some African countries about 30% of unions reflect a large age gap. [...]

Across Western countries, about 8% of all married heterosexual couples can be classified as having a large age gap (10 years or more). These generally involve older men partnered with younger women. About 1% of age-gap couples involve an older woman partnered with a younger man.

The limited evidence on same-sex couples, however, suggests the prevalence rates are higher. About 25% of male-male unions and 15% of female-female unions demonstrate a large age gap. [...]

Although men and women place importance on a partner who is warm and trustworthy, women place more importance on the status and resources of their male partner. This is largely because, with women being the child bearers, the investment is very high on their behalf (time and effort in childbearing and rearing). So they are attuned to looking for a partner who will also invest resources into a relationship and family. [...]

Many people assume that age-gap couples fare poorly when it comes to relationship outcomes. But some studies find the relationship satisfaction reported by age-gap couples is higher. These couples also seem to report greater trust and commitment and lower jealousy than similar-age couples. Over three-quarters of couples where younger women are partnered with older men report satisfying romantic relationships.

read the article

The Independent: Polish cities and provinces declare ‘LGBT-free zones’ as government ramps up ‘hate speech’

Ahead of parliamentary elections this autumn, the Law and Justice party has thrown the full weight of its party apparatus behind a campaign that is marginalising Poland’s LGBT+ community, its critics say.

The party’s new focus on countering what its officials call Western “LGBT ideology” has largely replaced its prior rallying cries against migrants, said Michal Bilewicz, a researcher at the University of Warsaw who tracks the prevalence of prejudices against minorities in public discourse.

In 2015, anti-migrant rhetoric helped the right-wing populist party come to power, according to data gathered by Mr Bilewicz.

But even at the height of Europe’s surge, Poland never saw many non-European migrants, and public attention became more difficult to sustain once the flow to the continent diminished. [...]

Paweł Jabłoński, an adviser to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, noted that the “LGBT-free” declarations had “no actual meaning in terms of regulations”.[...]

With their remarks “on the margins of hate speech,” said Adam Bodnar, Poland’s independent commissioner for human rights, “the government is increasing homophobic sentiments.”

read the article

TLDR News: Will Trump Ever Be Impeached?

Even before Trump was elected people were already talking about how to get rid of him. Over the last year talks of impeachment have become more serious, but it seems like no progress is really being made. In this video, we explain how impeachment works, why some people think Trump should be impeached and if it's likely to actually happen.

PolyMatter: Will Apple Ever Leave China?

euronews: EU debunks Boris Johnson's fishy claims about food regulation

"After decades of sending kippers like this through the post, he's had his costs massively increased by Brussels bureaucrats who have insisted that each kipper must be accompanied by this, a plastic ice pillow. Pointless, pointless, expensive, environmentally damaging. Health and safety, ladies and gentlemen," Johnson said. [...]

But EU officials debunked Johnson's claim on Thursday, with a spokeswoman telling reporters that although the bloc has "strict rules when it comes to fresh fish" they do not "apply to processed fishery products". [...]

"Foods that need refrigerating must be kept cool while they are being transported. This may need to be packed in an insulated box with coolant gel or in a cool bag," the guidelines continue. [...]

He also pointed out that the Isle of Man — a self-governing British dependency located in the Irish Sea — is not in the bloc.

read the article

Quartz: Taiwan is the new home for Hong Kongers seeking political safety

Multiple Hong Kong media outlets have reported that as many as 30 (link in Chinese, paywall) protesters connected to the storming of the city’s legislature during a protest on July 1 have fled to Taiwan. The incident occurred on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, amid a weeks-long series of protests against a much-maligned extradition bill. The reports say that some of the protesters are seeking ways to stay in Taiwan such as applying for school, while others are seeking asylum. [...]

The case of the Hong Kong protesters is a test of Taiwan’s commitment to human rights and progressive values at a time of ever-tightening restrictions on personal freedoms in China, and as many see Beijing’s heavy hand eroding Hong Kong’s autonomy. Tsai herself has been extremely outspoken on the recent protests in Hong Kong, which are also fueling solidarity in both Taiwan and Hong Kong against Beijing. [...]

Another Hong Kong woman, Lee Sin-yi, who was found guilty for her role in the 2016 “Fishball Revolution” riot, left the city for Taiwan in 2017 ahead of a court hearing. Having gone dark for almost two years, a recording purportedly featuring Lee surfaced in May where she warned that more Hong Kongers would be forced to go into exile in the future as Beijing tightens its grip on the city. Taiwanese media at the time said that Lee’s whereabouts were unknown after she had overstayed her visa.

read the article

Associated Press: Germany honors resisters who tried to assassinate Hitler

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will speak Saturday at an annual swearing-in ceremony for some 400 troops before addressing a memorial event, paid tribute ahead of the anniversary to executed plot leader Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators and highlighted their importance to modern Germany. [...]

The resistance against the Nazis only came to be “laboriously accepted” over subsequent decades, said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center, and even in the 1980s many believed its memory would fade away. Only in 2004 did a survey show that a majority of Germans believe the resistance to the Nazis is “important for our political culture,” he added. [...]

Tuchel said von Stauffenberg is a “symbolic figure” of the resistance, an officer who evolved from supporting Nazi policies to becoming a ferocious opponent of the regime after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He acknowledged that the resistance within the German military was, in overall terms, tiny: 200 to 300 people were involved in the July 20 plot. The German military had some 8 million men under arms at the time, and only “a handful or two” of its more than 1,000 generals and admirals participated.

read the article

UnHerd: Does dirty money make the art world go round?

While drug use and abuse are not new, the remarkable thing about the Sackler scandal is the allegation that the Purdue Pharma knew about the widespread misuse of the drug. And even pursued it. The company was supposedly also engaged in comprehensive marketing schemes to ensure sufficient OxyContin proliferation to destroy their competition. They had determined that the base clientele of Oxy users were the perfect customers for naloxone, the drug that reverses the effect of opioid overdose. They realised they could increase their profits by selling treatments for the problem their company was creating. The implication is that the Sackler family was aware of and in favour of these profit making motives. [...]

They wanted the Guggenheim to refuse all future funding from the Sackler family foundations, and they wanted the name pulled off buildings and wings built with that money. It was not enough that visitors to galleries and museums funded by the Sacklers should know the corporate misdeeds of its patrons, but that the name and the money itself, should be scrubbed from institutional existence.[...]

Much of the American artistic, cultural, educational and medical infrastructure was funded by robber barons, tycoons of industry, and companies and families that had money to burn (hello, runaway capitalism). The Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and Astor families, to name a few, profited from unfair labour practices, not to mention slavery, the decimation of native tribes, exploitation of natural resources, all of which enabled an ultra-rich class that subsequently felt a noblesse oblige to provide at least some pittance to the lower classes.

read the article

Politico: How Trump Changed After Charlottesville

Nobody understands the attention economy better than President Donald Trump. Whenever he slips from his coveted position as Topic A in the news, or whenever the news angle of the latest reports displeases him, you can count on Trump to bludgeon his way back to control the media agenda. This time it was with a series of tweets hammering four congresswomen of color as un-American, and telling them to go back where they came from. [...]

At a Monday Cabinet meeting, Trump parried the question of whether his tweets being called racist bother him. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” he said. During the week, he escalated his attacks on the Squad. And at a Wednesday evening campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., Trump tore into Rep. Omar for seven minutes, inspiring the crowd to chant, “Send her back! Send her back!” [...]

Why has Trump suddenly come to terms with his racism? It’s always a mistake to ascribe everything Trump does to forethought and calculation. He’s too impulsive for that. But we know from his Wednesday comments (made before the rally) to the Daily Mail that he’s pleased about the noise generated by his attacks. That goes a long way toward explaining why he pressed the racism button all week, and it’s a strong clue that he will put his thumb on it during the campaign. “The only thing they have, that they can do is, now, play the race card,” Trump said, turning the race onus back on the Squad. “Which they’ve always done.” Omar probably delighted Trump on Thursday when she told Washington reporters that he was a “fascist.” Set your watch for his return fire.

read the article

The Guardian: Is FaceApp an evil plot by 'the Russians' to steal your data? Not quite

Concern escalated further when people started to point out that FaceApp is Russian. “The app that you’re willingly giving all your facial data to says the company’s location is in Saint-Petersburg, Russia,” tweeted the New York Times’s Charlie Warzel. And we all know what those Russians are like, don’t we? They want to harvest your data for nefarious purposes. Unlike American techies, of course. Who are always deeply respectful when it comes to personal data, and only use your private information to make the world a better, more connected, place.

By Wednesday things had calmed down a little bit. A French security researcher who uses the pseudonym Elliot Alderson ran a check on the app and found it was not actually uploading your entire camera roll – just the photo you were modifying. Which is what you’d expect from an app like that. Speaking to me over the phone, Alderson said he also couldn’t find any evidence it was stealing all your data; it was just getting your device ID and your device model. Which, again, is pretty much to be expected. The reason the app was causing such a fuss, Alderson hypothesized, was because of fears about Russia. [...]

In May Google researchers also disclosed that they had used 2,000 YouTube videos of people doing the mannequin challenge (the viral challenge where you stay still) to help train an AI model on predicting the depth of a moving object in a video. The researchers also released their data set for future research, meaning there’s no saying how that data will be used in the future. That video you made as a joke might be helping to train anything from a self-driving car to a killer drone.

read the article

The Guardian: The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires

Barely has the fire been put out before some of the richest people in France rush to help rebuild it. From François-Henri Pinault, the ultimate owner of Gucci, comes €100m (£90m). Not to be outdone, the Arnault family at Louis Vuitton put up €200m. More of the wealthy join the bidding, as if a Damien Hirst is going under the hammer. Within just three days, France’s billionaire class has coughed up nearly €600m. Or so their press releases state.

A few folk question this very public display of plutocratic piety, but we are of course professional malcontents. Some of Paris’s 3,600 rough sleepers protest at how so many euros can be found for a new cathedral roof yet not a cent to put a roof over their heads – still, what do the poor know of the sublime? From all other seats, the applause is deafening. “Billionaires can sometimes come in really handy,” remarks the editor of Moneyweek. “Everybody is at our bedside,” says French TV celeb Stéphane Bern. Flush with cash, French president Emmanuel Macron vows the gothic masterpiece will be rebuilt within five years. Front pages scored, studio hours filled, the world moves on. You almost certainly haven’t heard the rest of the story – yet you should, because it comes with one hell of a twist. [...]

Advertisement Whether in France or Britain or the US, the rich give money to the grand institutions at the heart of our cultures to secure their social status in plaques and photo opportunities. In much the same way, they fund our political parties, then enjoy the kickbacks when they form a government. As Julia Cagé, an economist at Paris’s SciencesPo, points out, some of the same people pledging donations to Notre Dame were also among those who funded Macron’s rise to the presidency. In her recent award-winning book, to be published in English next year as The Price of Democracy, Cagé calculates that 600 wealthy people in France gave between €3m and €4.5m to Macron’s election campaign. In other words, 2% of all donors made up between 40 % and 60% of all En Marche funding. Within a few months, the new president cut taxes on the wealthy, giving his richest donors “a return of nearly 60,000% on their investment”. Just as with Notre Dame – a tiny deposit, a lot of influence and one hell of a payout.

read the article

Politico: Trump’s better deal with Iran looks a lot like Obama’s

At times, analysts and former officials say, it sounds like Trump wants to strike a deal that essentially mirrors the agreement that his White House predecessor inked — even if he’d never be willing to admit it. Iranian officials seem willing to egg him on, saying they’ll talk so long as Trump lifts the sanctions he’s imposed on them and returns to the 2015 Iran deal. And as European ministers warn that the existing deal is nearly extinct, Trump may feel like he is backed into a corner and running out of options. [...]

He’s said he’s “not looking for war,” wants to talk to Iran without preconditions and isn’t interested in regime change. He called off a military strike on Iran over its downing of an unmanned U.S. drone, overriding the advice of several top aides. His main public demand is that Iran not build nuclear weapons. In return, Trump has offered to help revive Iran’s sanctions-battered economy. [...]

Several European officials express astonishment at the audacity of the Trump administration demanding that Iran adhere to the deal when the U.S. the one who breached the agreement in the first place. Some said they were not surprised that Iran may have taken actions in the Persian Gulf as payback for the U.S. abandonment of the deal. 

Europeans “know that the original sin causing the current escalation in the Gulf is the U.S. violation of the Iran nuclear deal,” said Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini. “At the same time, they are terribly concerned about the escalation and the threat it poses to the Middle East and to Europe itself.” [...]

Perhaps sensing this, Trump on Tuesday went out of his way to note that he didn’t want to oust the government in Tehran. “We're not looking, by the way, for regime change because some people say [we are] looking for regime change,” he said. “We're not looking for regime change.”

read the article or listen to the podcast