The Guardian: Two months on from the failed coup, Turkey seems more divided than ever

It’s been two months since a deadly coup attempt stunned Turkey, leaving some 240 dead and the country reeling. The physical scars are still raw – outside the parliament building in Ankara, which was hit by bombs and gunfire where helicopters fired into a crowd of protesters who had gathered to defend their democracy, the tarmac is still pockmarked with bullet holes. Dark, iron-coloured stains on paving slabs betray the final moments of the brutally slain. Yet the psychological damage, the paranoia and fear that permeate public life, is still being done. [...]

Over 100,000 people have been purged from positions at government ministries, airlines, schools and universities; and independent business owners have also been targeted. The blanket sackings have been so widespread that many have wondered how the remaining institutions will now run. Some 160 media outlets have been closed and more than 2,000 educational institutions shut down. With a state of emergency declared almost a month ago, there is little to temper the guilty-by-association crackdown. [...]

Yet despite the hard line on the official story of events, paranoia is still rife. The US and EU have been accused of backing the coup and, on the weirder end of the scale, America was said to have prepared an “earthquake machine” to attack Istanbul after its failure. Positive reinforcement has been dished out to reward the people for stopping the coup through street celebrations – for almost a month people stayed on the streets to protest, encouraged by calls from the minarets of local mosques and text messages from President Erdoğan to protect their country from a follow-up coup. It was part-street party, part-nationalist muscle-flexing. One province even removed speeding penalties during a recent national holiday as a reward; 15 July has been immortalised with a national day; and key points such as Istanbul’s Bosphorus bridge and Ankara’s Kizilay square have been renamed in honour of the resistance.

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The Guardian: Religion in US 'worth more than Google and Apple combined'

The faith economy has a higher value than the combined revenues of the top 10 technology companies in the US, including Apple, Amazon and Google, says the analysis from Georgetown University in Washington DC.

The Socioeconomic Contributions of Religion to American Society: An Empirical Analysis calculated the $1.2tn figure by estimating the value of religious institutions, including healthcare facilities, schools, daycare and charities; media; businesses with faith backgrounds; the kosher and halal food markets; social and philanthropic programmes; and staff and overheads for congregations. [...]

Grim and his co-author Melissa Grim of the Newseum Institute in Washington came up with three estimates of the worth of US religion. The lowest, at $378bn, took into account only the revenues of faith-based organisations. The middle estimate, $1.2tn, included an estimate of the market value of goods and services provided by religious organisations and the contributions of businesses with religious roots.

The top estimate was based on the household incomes of religiously affiliated Americans, and placed the value of faith to US society at $4.8tn annually.

The analysis did not take account of the value of financial or physical assets held by religious groups. Neither did it account for “the negative impacts that occur in some religious communities, including … such things as the abuse of children by some clergy, cases of fraud, and the possibility of being recruitment sites for violent extremism”.

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The Guardian: Bigots feel they have a mandate to hate. We have to speak out

These are just a handful of the stories I’ve been sent. These crimes are a matter of national shame. Figures released last week by the National Police Chiefs’ Council revealed that hate crime reports, after a jump of 58% in the week following the nation’s endorsement of Brexit, are still 14% higher than a year ago. But note: these are reported incidents. Almost none of the people who got in touch with me reported their abuse to the police. One said the process took too long; another said the police were “actively unhelpful” when they had previously reported mugging and homophobic abuse; another: “It was late, and I just wanted to get home and forget it had happened, to be honest.” [...]

Discussing the post-referendum wave of racist and xenophobic abuse can provoke a rather dispiritingly defensive reaction. The issue is being politicised – so the retort goes – in order to undermine the referendum result. So let this column be clear: nothing of the sort is happening. The British people voted to leave the EU, their verdict must be respected and accepted, and the debate now focuses on ensuring a just Brexit. [...]

And here is what happened. The small minority of people in this country who believe it is acceptable to yell racist abuse at strangers getting on with their lives felt emboldened. Their intolerance now seemed to have official sanction. They believed that, given the politicians’ rhetoric, the British people had voted to drive foreigners out of the country – that, for the first time, they had a democratic mandate.

This perceived mandate now has to be destroyed. Polling shows, for example, that 77% of leave voters believe EU migrants already living here should remain. We need a coalition of remain and leave figures to come together to confront this tide of racism and xenophobia.

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The Atlantic: Scientists Have Found Another Crow That Uses Tools

In 2013, Christian Rutz travelled to Hawaii, and presented two crows with a log containing several small holes. These had been baited with meat, but were too small and deep for the crows to reach with their beaks. “Within literally seconds, one of the birds came down, looked for a stick, began probing into the holes, and started extracting the food,” he says. The crow had been raised in captivity and had never done anything like this before. And yet, it was wielding the stick like a pro. “I could tell from its dexterity that it wasn’t just a fluke. It was one of those rare moments when you know you’ve made a big discovery.”

You might be thinking that scientists have long known that some crows are exceptional tool users. Let me assure you that, yes, Rutz knows about those crows. He has studied them for a decade in the Pacific island of New Caledonia where they live. He has seen them artfully use sticks to pry grubs from wood. He has seen them care for their tools and fashion new innovative implements. But as far as he knew, their prowess was unique. There are over 40 other species of crows and ravens, and none seem to use tools so readily or skillfully as the New Caledonian crow. [...]

Many animal species can be trained to use tools in captivity even when they don’t do so naturally. That includes the rook—the Hawaiian crow’s closest relative. It can quickly learn to probe holes with sticks (albeit clumsily), but despite decades of regular bird-watching, no one has ever seen a wild rook use a stick tool.

The same could be said of Hawaiian crows, but Rutz says, “I truly believe that in the past, these birds would have used tools in the wild.” The captive adults all did so spontaneously and exactingly. Rutz even tested seven recently hatched chicks, which had never used sticks before and had no chances to observe tool-proficient adults. Their human keepers had been briefed to never use tools in front of them. [...]

Narcissists that we are, we humans like to associate tool use with great intelligence. But the crows tell us that tool use might be a precarious skill, which might only emerge under the right combination of ecological privilege and fortuitous physique.

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Salon: Jews must speak out against Islamophobia: Standing with our Muslim brothers and sisters is critical

“I do have faith that, down the road, just like the Jews faced a lot of negativity in the past in the U.S. — and the Irish, the Italians, the Japanese, you know the entire list— things are going to be the same for Muslims,” she had told me. “It’s going to take a lot of time and effort from the Muslim-American community.”

But the arson at the Orlando mosque served as a reminder to me that the Muslim-American community shouldn’t have to go through this alone. More than ever, Jews and other marginalized groups have a moral responsibility to stand with our nation’s Muslims as they continue to face bigotry and persecution.

The good news is that over the past year many Jews have taken steps to do precisely that. In December Jewish activists held demonstrations on each day of Hanukkah  in 15 U.S. cities to protest anti-Muslim hate speech and public policies. In May, nine Jewish groups joined more than 30 other organizations to support a bill that would forbid the government to turn away immigrants based on religion, a clear response to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration. Around the same time, the American Jewish Community called for The Citadel to let Muslim students wear hijabs, while in New Jersey the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists lent their support to Muslims who are trying to build a mosque in the town of Basking Ridge.

And in recent years some Muslims have clearly demonstrated their rejection of anti-Semitism. In 2013 11 prominent imams, sheiks and religious teachers traveled to Auschwitz from nine nations to counter Holocaust denial. Also that year President Barack Obama personally congratulated a young Swedish Muslim activist, Siavosh Derakhti, for having founded Young People Against Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia to combat prejudice in his country. In November 2015 hundreds of Norwegian Muslims formed a human shield around a synagogue in Oslo to express solidarity with the Jewish community there after an attack on a synagogue in Denmark. And in the March Democratic primary in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with many Muslims and Arab-Americans, a majority of voters voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, who happens to be the country’s first major Jewish presidential candidate.

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