Advocate: Insightful Poll Reveals Who Opposes LGBT People on Two Big Issues

The survey is also enlightening because it explains what makes people want to deny service to same-sex couples getting married. It’s not an issue of civil rights. To them it’s a “moral” issue. Pew found that among the 35 percent of people who still say homosexual behavior is morally wrong, a whopping 76 percent said businesses should be able to refuse wedding services to same-sex couples.

The moral questions on these issues are more complicated if a person knows someone who is LGBT. Pew found that those who don’t know a gay person are more likely to be OK turning away same-sex couples. The difference was most sharp on the question of access to bathroom. “Knowing someone who is transgender is closely linked with views on the use of public restrooms,” Pew wrote in its analysis of findings. “Most people who personally know someone who is transgender say that transgender people should be allowed to use public restrooms that match their current gender identity (60%).” The problem is only three in 10 Americans said they knew a transgender person.

There was another way to predict whether a person would support refusing service: look at their political party registration. Republicans said businesses should be able to refuse service by a 71-26 margin. On access to restrooms for trans people, Republicans opposed it 67-30.

While Jews and Catholics and those unaffiliated with any religion were more likely to say businesses should be required to serve everyone (64 percent, 54 percent, and 65 percent, respectively), Protestants went in the other direction. Just 36 percent were opposed to discrimination. Then among Protestants, race played a factor, with black churchgoers evenly split on the question, while white churchgoers lined up strongly against serving everyone no matter their sexual orientation. Not surprisingly, white evangelical Protestants were most likely to support refusing service (77 percent).

That phenomenon largely held up on the issue of bathroom access, with one exception. Catholics are evenly split on that question, with 47 percent backing access and 50 percent opposed.

read the article 

The Guardian: Police with body cameras receive 93% fewer complaints – study

Police equipped with body-worn cameras receive 93% fewer complaints from the public, according to a new study that suggests the technology helps to cool down potentially volatile encounters.

Academics at Cambridge University, whose research looked at nearly 1.5m beat hours across more than 4,000 shifts by officers in the UK and California, claim their findings suggest the cameras herald a “profound sea change in modern policing”. [..]

Throughout the year-long experiment, researchers were said to have randomly assigned about half of the officers starting their shifts with cameras. All officers in the forces taking part worked with cameras at some point, the researchers said.

During the 12 months before the study, a total of 1,539 complaints were lodged against police in the areas examined, amounting to 1.2 complaints per officer. By the end, the number of complaints had fallen to 133 for the year across all sites – 0.08 per officer.

The researchers were surprised to find that there was no statistically significant difference between the number of complaints received by officers wearing cameras and those without, a result they said may be a result of “contagious accountability”.

read the article 

CityLab: Protecting the Street Art of Athens

Greece and graffiti go way back: The world’s earliest surviving graffito may in fact be an ancient Greek advertisement for a brothel. More contemporary Greek taggers expressed their political beliefs during World War II and the country’s ensuing civil war and military dictatorship of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the 1990s, a wave of elaborate public street art—an extension of graffiti that’s often more figurative than (and sometimes in tension with) its progenitor—spread throughout Athens. Today, with much of its surfaces coated in images that often comment on the country’s economic crisis, Athens has been hailed as a “mecca” for street art in Europe.

With such a long and storied history, it’s perhaps no surprise that a group has taken it upon itself to preserve the city’s street art. Four years ago, art and conservation students at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens founded st.a.co.—short for Street Art Conservators—to maintain some of their city’s works of public art. The students had been documenting street art for a class, and were so taken with some of the examples that they decided to help protect them from the elements (and other graffiti artists).

read the article 

BBC: The cat man of Aleppo

Mohammad Alaa Jaleel lives in Aleppo, Syria, where he looks after more than a hundred stray and abandoned cats.

Independent: Shimon Peres was no peacemaker. I’ll never forget the sight of pouring blood and burning bodies at Qana

A few days later, Israeli troops inside Lebanon came under attack close to Qana and retaliated by opening fire into the village. Their first shells hit a cemetery used by Hezbollah; the rest flew directly into the UN Fijian army camp where hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Peres announced that “we did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.”

It was a lie. The Israelis had occupied Qana for years after their 1982 invasion, they had video film of the camp, they were even flying a drone over the camp during the 1996 massacre – a fact they denied until a UN soldier gave me his video of the drone, frames from which we published in The Independent. The UN had repeatedly told Israel that the camp was packed with refugees. [...]

There was a UN enquiry which stated in its bland way that it did not believe the slaughter was an accident. The UN report was accused of being anti-Semitic. Much later, a brave Israeli magazine published an interview with the artillery soldiers who fired at Qana. An officer had referred to the villagers as “just a bunch of Arabs” (‘arabushim’ in Hebrew). “A few Arabushim die, there is no harm in that,” he was quoted as saying. Peres’s chief of staff was almost equally carefree: “I don’t know any other rules of the game, either for the [Israeli] army or for civilians…” [...]

Yes, of course, Peres changed in later years. They claimed that Ariel Sharon – whose soldiers watched the massacre at Sabra and Chatila camps in 1982 by their Lebanese Christian allies – was also a “peacemaker” when he died. At least he didn’t receive the Nobel Prize. 

read the article