The Guardian Longreads: How the US has hidden its empire – podcast

The problem with the logo map, however, is that it isn’t right. Its shape does not match the country’s legal borders. Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawaii and Alaska, which became states in 1959 and now appear on virtually all published maps of the country. But it is also missing Puerto Rico, which, although not a state, has been part of the country since 1899. When have you ever seen a map of the US that had Puerto Rico on it? Or American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas or any of the other smaller islands that the US has annexed over the years? [...]

The maps and census reports that mainlanders saw presented them with a selectively cropped portrait of their country. The result was profound confusion. “Most people in this country, including educated people, know little or nothing about our overseas possessions,” concluded a governmental report written during the second world war. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do not know that we have overseas possessions. They are convinced that only ‘foreigners’, such as the British, have an ‘empire’. Americans are sometimes amazed to hear that we, too, have an ‘empire’.” [...]

Then there are the military interventions. The years since the second world war have brought the US military to country after country. The big wars are well-known: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. But there has also been a constant stream of smaller engagements. Since 1945, US armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself. [...]

It wasn’t until I travelled to Manila, researching something else entirely, that it clicked. To get to the archives, I would travel by “jeepney”, a transit system originally based on repurposed US army jeeps. I boarded in a section of Metro Manila where the streets are named after US colleges (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren, Roosevelt, Eisenhower). When I would arrive at my destination, the Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, I would hear students speaking what sounded to my Pennsylvanian ears to be virtually unaccented English. Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it is impossible to miss.

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The Guardian Longreads: Spain’s Watergate: inside the corruption scandal that changed a nation

Besides, most people had other things on their minds, not least the prospect of making money. In the housing boom that lasted from the mid-1990s to 2007, Spain built more homes than France, Germany and the UK combined. And it wasn’t just housing. Towns with populations of tens of thousands built airports, while new roads and high-speed rail lines spread like spiderwebs across the country. And with each development came the opportunity for unscrupulous politicians and businessmen like Correa to rig contracts. Today, many of these dodgy housing developments and infrastructure projects stand abandoned, ruins of an age of excess. Trying to wean Spain off building, quipped one economist following the crash, was like quitting hard drugs. [...]

The revelations came as the economic crisis began to take hold, galvanising anger about corruption. In 2011, unemployment reached 22%. Almost one in two young people were out of work. In May 2011, protesters, most of them young, began occupying plazas in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia to protest bank bailouts, austerity and corruption. They were known as the indignados, the outraged ones. More than 6 million people took part over weeks of protests. National surveys showed overwhelming support for the movement, which transcended traditional party lines. A generation of young people with few job prospects began questioning the assumptions that had underpinned Spain’s young democracy. “Gürtel was the ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment for Spain,” said Carlos Delclós, a former indignados activist and author of a book on the movement and its political inheritor, Podemos. “Gürtel made it clear that it was not specific cases of corruption but that it was systemic. That corruption was the system.” [...]

Between 2012 and 2014, at the height of austerity, it seemed as if everywhere you looked some previously respectable representative was on trial for stealing public money. Even the royal family, it seemed, were at it: a corruption scandal centred on the then king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, threw the monarchy into disrepute. In 2014, the once popular King Juan Carlos abdicated, citing health reasons, amid a sharp decline in popularity. (Last year, Urdangarin was sentenced to six years in jail for tax fraud and embezzlement.) [...]

For the PP, the verdict was devastating: the party itself was convicted as a direct beneficiary of the Gürtel scheme. The court found that ever since the party was founded, it had maintained a parallel accounting system to collect money from kickbacks that could be used to fund the party. The court said the testimony of Rajoy and other PP figures who denied knowing about the existence of the slush fund were “not credible”. The reputational damage was far worse than the actual punishment, which amounted to a fine of just €240,000. (The sentence would have been considerably harsher if the case was tried today, after a 2015 change in the law made illegal party financing a crime.)

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The Guardian Today in Focus: Trump, Brexit and the rise of populism

A team of researchers around the world has been working with the Guardian to measure exactly how global politics is changing – and becoming more populist. From Donald Trump in the US to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, from Narendra Modi in India to Theresa May in the UK, the researchers analysed hundreds of speeches, and what they found surprised them.

The Guardian’s Paul Lewis tells Anushka Asthana about the two-decade surge in populist rhetoric that has upended the global political landscape.

Also: writer and broadcaster Sam Delaney on the problem with men and mental health.

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99 Percent Invisible: The Known Unknown

After the war, Railton advocated for a grave bearing the body of a single soldier to bring the impossibly large tragedy down to a human scale. The soldier’s anonymity would allow each person who came to the grave to project whatever was most important to them onto the mystery. It didn’t matter if you wanted to honor all those who served or merely those who died, those who volunteered or those who were drafted, or even whether you were for the war or against it. Everyone was free to mourn in their own way. [...]

The remains in the tomb are not even technically referred to as an “unknown soldier.” No one knows which service they’re from, so instead of “soldier” or “sailor” or “marine,” they’re simply referred to as the “Unknown.” In fact, anything that narrows the scope of who this person could be — including where exactly they were found is purposely withheld from the public in order to make sure that they represent every possible service member. It’s one of the reasons the tomb has become one of the Washington D.C. area’s biggest tourist attractions. [...]

At first, there were a lot of Unknowns to work with. In World War I there were around 1,648 Unknowns, in World War II there were 8,526, the Korean war there were 848. But thanks to improved battlefield evacuation tactics, the Vietnam War produced only four sets of unidentified remains that could potentially go into the tomb. Then, as more information about those remains was discovered, only one set of remains remained unknown. That single set of remains was known only as X-26, but his actual name was Michael Blassie.

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Wisecrack: Is BANKSY Deep or Dumb? – Wisecrack Edition

Banksy may be one of the most well-known artists in the world - but is he deep or dumb? We'll explore Banksy's influences and goals to see if he lives up to all the hype.

Quartz: What the study of animal emotions shows us about being human

Primatologist Frans de Waal has coined a term for the rejection of anthropomorphism, dubbing it “anthropodenial.” In his new book, Mama’s Last Hug, he argues that anthropodenial—discounting the complexity of other animals— persists because we’ve been able to justify a lot of cruel behavior by claiming that animals don’t really feel like we do.[...]

Our brains are similarly structured, with the same neurotransmitters. The differences between a fish and a person’s physicality and environment account for the fact that our inner lives aren’t identical—but just because a fish lives in water and doesn’t seem to grieve like you and me doesn’t mean the fish has no mental life or self-awareness, or sense of finality.[...]

We have no problem acknowledging that humans are emotional creatures, and that our feelings often stem from knowledge. For example, when a loved one dies, we grieve because we know we won’t see them again—the knowledge informs the sense of sadness. But when it comes to animals, scientists have long been reluctant to attribute depth to emotional expression, relegating everything to primal drives instead. [...]

Amongst some professionals, there’s still resistance to embracing our animal brethren and acknowledging we’re family. De Waal believes it’s because seeing the full range and depth of animal feelings will expose our own animality to us. He notes that we refer to the human drive for power as “leadership” and don’t discuss the fact that we are a hierarchical species and some of us want to dominate, just like some apes want to climb to the top of ape culture. When de Waal once discussed the human power drive at a psychology conference he was taken aback by the negative response. He writes, “You’d think I had shown them pornography!”

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The Guardian: The Islamophobia that led to the Christchurch shooting must be confronted

The temptation is going to be to declare the suspect, who livestreamed himself on Facebook shooting dozens of Muslims while they gathered for Friday prayer, a madman. It would be comforting to think so. Because then we could put aside any recognition that the discourse he appears to have bought into, evident from the manifesto he posted a link to on his now-deleted Twitter account, goes far beyond simply him. [...]

After the 7 July bombings happened in London in 2005, I was appointed as deputy convenor of a UK government working group on radicalisation to look at precisely which factors led to people becoming swept up in extremism. We examined the role of ideas and ideology, and concluded that they played a significant part – that we could not simply cast aside the importance of extremist discourse and dogma. There were, and are, other factors: political dissent, exclusion, and so on – but it would be wrong to minimise the extent to which ideas energised people, and provided their rationalisation for violent acts.

By the same token, it would be outrageous to fail to recognise that the unbridled, nativistic, anti-Muslim bigotry that has become so widespread in our societies has nothing to do with this attack in New Zealand. New Zealand is a part of the west. And, as far as the manifesto is concerned, the west writ large is subject to a Muslim invasion. That sentiment is not limited to a far-right extremist with a gun in a mosque, killing Muslim worshippers. It is popularised by scores of people in far more mainstream arenas.

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Quartz: Out-of-work US men are unhappier than men almost anywhere else

Working-age men who have dropped out of the US workforce were found to be more stressed and sadder than their peers in both poor and rich countries, according to a new study released by the Brookings Institution. The unhappiness gap between out-of-work men and those with jobs is also much wider in the US. [...]

Rather than measuring the economy or employment, well-being measures focus on emotional and physical health and whether people find their lives meaningful. Some countries, including the UK and Bhutan, have started collecting well-being statistics. [...]

She and her colleagues mapped white men’s dissatisfaction. They found it concentrates in places with struggling industries, including coal and traditional manufacturing, and in areas that voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. It also overlaps with places with a high rate of drug overdoses and suicide deaths, which have driven down US life expectancy overall. [...]

Minorities, meanwhile, are used to the challenges of discrimination and other adversity not faced by many whites, which can make them more resilient. Any progress—which blacks and Hispanics have seen over the past few decades, in terms of education, life expectancy and other indicators—seems like winning, even if it still leaves them on an unequal footing with whites.

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CNN: Only six countries have equal rights for men and women, World Bank finds

Only six countries currently give women and men equal rights, a major report from the World Bank has found.

That's an increase -- from zero -- compared to a decade ago, when the organization started measuring countries by how effectively they guarantee legal and economic equality between the genders.[...]

Of those nations, France saw the biggest improvement over the past decade for implementing a domestic violence law, providing criminal penalties for workplace sexual harassment and introducing paid parental leave.

But countries in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa averaged a score of 47.37, meaning the typical nation in those regions gives women under half the legal rights of men in the areas measured by the group.[...]

"Gender equality is a critical component of economic growth," Georgieva wrote in the report. "Women are half of the world's population and we have our role to play in creating a more prosperous world. But we won't succeed in playing it if the laws are holding us back."

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