While the Islamic State no longer has any territory in the Middle East, its ability to recruit soldiers and engage in violence remains. In fact, its newly decentralized nature may make it even more effective in carrying out terrorist attacks. On this week's episode, Ali Soufan, former FBI special agent and author of “The Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State,” and Robin Wright, contributing writer to The New Yorker and fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discuss the future of ISIS and the fate of tens of thousands of captured fighters and their families with WorldAffairs Co-Host Ray Suarez.
30 September 2019
The Guardian: Is fair trade finished?
Back then, the countries that grew these commodities and many others were still known as the Third World, and the habit of not caring about their farming conditions was a legacy of their colonial past. For centuries, trade propelled the colonial project, and exploitation was its very purpose. The farmers of Asia, Africa and South America were forced to raise the crops that the empire’s companies wanted, to work the crops in abject conditions, and to part with them at ruinously low prices. In the last century, the empires melted away but the trade remained lopsided – with the imbalance now rationalised by the market, which deemed it “efficient” to pay farmers as little as possible. In the 1970s, a Ghanaian cocoa farmer often received less than 10 cents out of every dollar his beans earned on the commodities market; as a proportion of the retail price of a chocolate bar, his take was smaller still. Child labour was common. The chocolate companies prospered and their customers shopped well; the farmers stayed poor. [...]
So Fairtrade works by forming a kind of “virtuous triangle” of ethical business. It recruits farmers and farming cooperatives as members, asking them to meet its standards; periodically, Fairtrade sends inspectors to these farms around the world, ensuring they are still compliant. At another vertex of the triangle, Fairtrade enlists companies to pay a minimum price for commodities from these member farms if market prices plunge, and offers to certify products made from such ethically sourced commodities. The final corner is the customer, who can, with a little counsel, be galvanised to shop consciously, and to buy Fairtrade-certified products even if they cost a few pence more. [...]
For shoppers, this promises bewildering times ahead at the supermarket: more and more instances of what people in the industry call “label fatigue”. The shelves already crawl with sustainability logos: more than 460 of them on food and beverage packages, and a third of them created over the last 15 years. There are little chromatic decals to testify that tuna is dolphin-friendly; that coffee is bird-friendly; that “wild-collected natural ingredients” are up to FairWild standards; that a slice of salmon is Salmon-Safe and follows Best Aquaculture Practices; that a bottle of wine is LIVE, which means that it fulfills Low Input Viticulture and Ecology benchmarks. One logo promises a carbon-free product, another a carbon-neutral one, and a third a carbon-reducing one. The more labels there are, the less we know about them – about what they stand for, and about how meaningful they are.
BBC4 In Our Time: The Rapture
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of the idea developed by John Nelson Darby that believers will vanish suddenly, 'to meet the Lord in the air' before the Second Coming.
listen to the podcast
listen to the podcast
Jakub Marian: Map of ‘vegetarian friendliness’ (number of vegetarian restaurants) in Europe by country
The original idea of this article was to create a map showing the percentage of the population following a vegetarian diet, but it turned out to be impossible to find a reliable source of data for more than a handful of countries. Since there is correlation between supply and demand, I decided to create a map of the supply part instead (which, however, is affected by many other factors than just the percentage of vegetarians, e.g. tourism and overall wealth).
The following map is based on the number on entries at HappyCow, the largest directory of vegetarian restaurants in the world, and shows the number of vegetarian restaurants per 1 million inhabitants. It should be noted that the number can be somewhat misleading for tiny countries. For example, according to happycow.net, there is just one vegetarian restaurant in Andorra, but since it has only around 80,000 inhabitants, the figure shown here is “12.6 vegetarian restaurants per 1 million inhabitants”.
Note: The previous version of this map (from 2014) was inaccurate because it included also health food stores (which HappyCow includes in the number of listings shown for each country). To create the updated version, I checked the number of listings for all cities manually to make sure that only restaurants are included.
PBS NewsHour: Is France's groundbreaking food-waste law working?
A third of the world's food goes to waste, but France is attempting to do something about it. Since 2016, large grocery stores in the country have been banned from throwing away unsold food that could be given away. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Christopher Livesay reports from Paris as part of our "Future of Food" series, which is supported in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.
Science Magazine: Turkish scientist gets 15-month sentence for publishing environmental study
The study was commissioned by Turkey’s Ministry of Health to see whether there was a connection between toxicity in soil, water, and food and the high incidence of cancer in western Turkey. Working for 5 years, Şık and a team of scientists discovered dangerous levels of pesticides, heavy metals, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in multiple food and water samples from several provinces in western Turkey. Water in several residential areas was also found to be unsafe for drinking because of lead, aluminum, chrome, and arsenic pollution.
In 2015, after the study was completed, Şık testified that he urged government officials to take action during a meeting to discuss the findings. After 3 years of inaction, Şık testified, he decided to publish his findings in Cumhuriyet, an Istanbul newspaper that has been a high-profile target in the government’s crackdown on media. (Bülent Şık is the brother of Ahmet Şık, an opposition member of Parliament and former investigative journalist at Cumhuriyet who was previously jailed for criticizing the government.) [...]
“[H]iding data obtained from research prevents us from having sound discussions about the solutions,” Şık said in a statement to the court provided to Science by his lawyer. “In my articles, I aimed to inform the public about this public health study, which was kept secret, and prompt the public authorities who should solve the problems to take action.”
Associated Press: Russian minister: West out of step, can’t accept its decline
He pointedly scorned much of the “West,” a term Russian officials typically use to refer to the United States and its traditional allies in Europe. He accused them of manipulating their citizens, disseminating false information, and preventing journalists from doing their work — all charges that the West has long lobbed at the Russian government and its predecessor, the Soviet Union.
“It is hard for the West to accept seeing its centuries-long dominance in world affairs diminishing,” Lavrov said. “Leading Western countries are trying to impede the development of the polycentric world, to recover their privileged positions, to impose standards of conduct based on the narrow Western interpretation of liberalism on others.” [...]
Lavrov accused the West of maintaining a double standard: promoting liberal values where they’re convenient but discarding them when they’re not. “When it is advantageous, the right of the peoples to self-determination has significance. And when it is not, it is declared ‘illegal’,” he said.
Nautilus Magazine: Why Symbols Aren’t Forever
Archaeology is often assumed to be limited to the realm of the ancients. However, the point of archaeology is not to dig up static moments in time from long ago but to use material items to track the ebbs and flows of human culture: to show how things change, how values change. We build statues, then later deface or demolish them. We create symbols, then alter their meanings. Some argue vehemently that monuments, such as Confederate statues, should be left in place—that their part in history should not be “erased.” But change is not an erasure of history; it is a part of it. [...]
People give symbols meaning, and as cultures change, so do the representations of that culture. Archaeologically, the swastika has been found in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, most often representing the cyclical and the positive: sun cycles, well-being, good fortune, auspiciousness, and consciousness. In 2019, we recognize the swastika as a symbol of hate and oppression—a symbol that is sadly being used ever more often in the era of Donald Trump’s United States presidency. To prevent further harm, my community acted quickly to remove the one spray-painted on our local school. [...]
Future archaeologists will find and interpret our community’s symbols to understand the values of our time. Perhaps thinking about the deep mark our actions will leave on the future historical record will hammer home the importance of the signs, names, statues, and symbols that we allow to persist in our society. We should ask what these cultural symbols say about our identity or our comfort with past ideologies. And if we don’t like the answer, then we should invest in a change.
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