The New York Times: Gay and Lesbian High School Students Report ‘Heartbreaking’ Levels of Violence

The survey documents what smaller studies have suggested for years, but it is significant because it is the first time the federal government’s biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the gold-standard of adolescent health data collection, looked at sexual identity. The survey found that about 8 percent of the high school population describe themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, which would be 1.3 million students.

These children were three times more likely than straight students to have been raped. They skipped school far more often because they did not feel safe: at least a third had been bullied on school property. And they were twice as likely as heterosexual students to have been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property.

More than 40 percent of these students reported they had seriously considered suicide, and 29 percent had made attempts in the year before they took the survey. The percentage of those who use various illegal drugs was many times greater than heterosexual peers. While 1.3 percent of straight students said they had used heroin, for example, 6 percent of the gay, lesbian and bisexual students reported having done so.

read the article 

The Atlantic: Europe's History of Terror

France and the rest of Europe have endured this near state-of-siege before. Older Europeans can recall a time when communists, nationalists, anarchists, Islamists, and international criminals wrought havoc on the continent. Palestinian terrorists shattered the harmony of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, taking hostage and murdering 11 Israeli athletes. Italian communists kidnapped and murdered a former prime minister in 1978. In 1988, Libyan terrorists brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, warring Palestinian factions and Iranian revolutionaries turned Europe into a battleground for settling internal feuds and assassinating enemies, opening fire on the Rome check-in counter for the Israeli airline El Al, and hijacking planes. In France itself, an Algerian Islamist group that had fought the Algerian government during the civil war in 1991 bombed Paris metro stations, a Jewish school, and L’Arc de Triomphe. Hezbollah, as part of its declared aim to expel any French or American presence from Lebanon, conducted at least five bombings on French soil between 1985 and 1986. Armenian terrorists, seeking vengeance for the Armenian Genocide, struck the Orly airport in 1983, killing at least five people. [...]

But the lessons of TREVI seem not to have stuck. Across the continent, security agencies are once again starting to communicate and share information. For the most part.  Josef Janning, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and long-time expert on European policy and global affairs, said that the new slate of threats is “something Europeans are ready to live with as a fact of life.” Since the coordinated attacks by ISIS in November, French secret service officers have launched their own operations in Brussels, the nerve center for the November plot and home to many of its attackers. But officials have stopped short of sharing everything they’ve uncovered with the Belgians, Janning said. [...]

In the past, local informants and amnesty programs worked with law enforcement and intelligence officials to root out militants, helping bring down groups like the Red Brigades, a left-wing Italian militia. Modern terror cells would be dismantled in the same way that underground organized crime rings are, Janning said, with law enforcement drilling down into communities and neighborhoods and working their local connections to gather intelligence. Ideologies would need to be combatted in classrooms and online chatrooms. Agencies, he said, would need to talk to each other to track the movement of people, goods, and weapons, across districts, cities, and borders. But this all remains a work in progress.

read the article 

Los Angeles Times: Battle over women praying at Jerusalem's Western Wall continues as compromise stalls

In recent months, tensions over women’s prayer have been escalating, and a compromise aimed at ending the dispute has stalled. Under the deal approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet in January, Women of the Wall and liberal Jewish denominations would be given a new prayer space at a nearby spot along the Western Wall. However, the government hasn’t started implementing the compromise and ultra-Orthodox parties oppose it.  [...]

The dispute over women’s prayer at Western Wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, has roiled relations between Netanyahu — who relies on ultra-Orthodox religious parties to stabilize his coalition — and religiously liberal Diaspora Jews who complain that Israel’s conservative government is impeding religious freedom at Judaism’s most revered prayer site. [...]

The Jewish Agency, a nonprofit group promoting Jewish immigration to Israel, which helped broker the Western Wall compromise after three years of negotiations, warned in a statement that failure to provide a space for pluralist prayer at the wall would have “far-reaching implications” for Israel-Diaspora ties.

Tensions over religion and state in Israel stretch back to the country’s founding, when Israel’s secular founders promised to defer to Orthodox Jewish leaders on public Jewish ritual, marriage and Sabbath observance in order to secure their support for the new state. 

read the article 

The Washington Post: Flying while Muslim is not a crime

Muslim passengers are escorted off U.S.-based airlines with alarming frequency these days, and while the circumstances of each incident vary, there is also a sameness to them. More often than not, someone on the plane — a seatmate, a passenger a few rows away, a flight attendant — feels “uncomfortable.” The trigger for that discomfort is a passenger who looks or seems to be from a Muslim-majority country (even if the person happens to be Italian). And the outcome, as far as is generally known, is a bland statement from the airline setting forth its policy of nondiscrimination. [...]

That small sampling of recent senselessness raises the question of whether airline employees are getting the message from management that discrimination based on race, religion or national origin is unacceptable and illegal. If any airline employees have been disciplined for having mishandled passengers — either by indulging the prejudices of some or training groundless suspicions at others — the airlines aren’t saying.

To the contrary, it’s fair to ask, as advocacy groups representing American Muslims have done, if the airlines, with a wink and a nod, are tolerating the occasional ugly and unjustified conduct of some employees and passengers. The unfortunate truth is that, in the absence of no-nonsense enforcement policies by the airlines, deplorable acts of profiling are likely to proliferate. It’s up to the airlines to ensure that blameless passengers can travel freely, without fear of harassment, removal or reckless accusations.

read the article 

The School of Life: An Instruction Manual To Oneself