Al Jazeera: What the hijab means to me

I wear hijab not because it represents my morality, intellect, backwardness or modernity, but because it makes me feel complete. I choose to wear a hijab and it represents my pride in being a Muslim and somehow makes me fulfil my duties to my religion, but it doesn't give me the liberty to judge those who don't wear it. [...]

My evolution from niqab to uncovered happened in around 2008 when I was dealing with my sexuality and was exploring my feelings about Islam. I felt I couldn't be both Muslim and queer at the same time, so I prioritised being queer and rebelled against everything else. [...]

These days, I miss wearing the hijab for various reasons - familiarity, fitting in and a veil from aggressive eyes and attention. In Nigeria, there's a certain harassment that comes to people who do not wear stereotypical female clothes. Because I sometimes wear masculine clothes, people will say really mean things. [...]

Only after experiencing it did I realise that my hijab gives me an identity as a Muslim woman, devout and respectable. It protects me - not only from the eyes of men, but from anyone who can value me and evaluate me based on anything other than my ability, my intellect, my heart. [...]

Eventually, I stopped wearing the hijab. I put my hair in dreadlocks and have never taken them out, and I show my blackness proudly to the world. Ultimately, uncovering led me to a deeper love of blackness than I'd previously known.

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Atlas Obscura: Fascinating Photos from the Secret Trash Collection in a New York Sanitation Garage

On the second floor of a nondescript warehouse owned by New York City’s Sanitation Department in East Harlem is a treasure trove—filled with other people’s trash.

Most of the building is used as a depot for garbage trucks, but there’s a secret collection that takes over an entire floor. The space is populated by a mind-bogglingly wide array of items: a bestiary of Tamagotchis, Furbies; dozens of Pez dispensers; female weight lifting trophies; 8-track tapes; plates, paintings, sporting equipment and much more.

This is the Treasures in the Trash collection, created entirely out of objects found by Nelson Molina, a now-retired sanitation worker, who began by decorating his locker. Collected over 30 years, it is a visual explosion, organized by type, color, and size. Recently, Atlas Obscura had the chance to visit the collection with the New York Adventure Club, take some photos, and revel in the vast creative possibilities of trash. 

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Quartz: Morocco wants to build a new city from scratch—with China’s help

Morocco is working on a $10 billion project with the Chinese group Haite to develop an industrial city that will host some 300,000 locals.

The project envisions a large Chinese-style industrial park on the edge of the Mediterranean, built on about 2,500 acres with room to expand up to nearly 5,000 acres. [...]

Morocco has made significant improvements to its infrastructure to attract investment. The national highway network grew from 100 kilometers in 1999 to 1,772 kilometers in 2016. Morocco also plans to open Africa’s first high-speed rail line between Tangiers and Kénitra by 2018. The railroad is expected to reduce the travel time from Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, to Tangiers from nearly five hours to a little more than two. [...]

“If the Chinese firms build and finance this infrastructure it is all to the good for Morocco. But chances are it will not happen,” said Deborah Brautigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at John Hopkins University, in a written statement to the American Media Institute. When tentative agreements like this one do move forward, she said, they tend to progress very slowly.

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Quartz: Finland offered a state apology for the pain and abuse suffered by generations of children in its care

The apology follows research (link in Finnish) carried out by the University of Jyväskylä and published earlier this year by the government, which examined mistreatment and abuse in the country’s welfare system between 1937 and 1983. Around 150,000 children are estimated to have lived in child welfare institutions, orphanages, reform schools (which were founded for children with perceived behavioral problems), or foster homes during that period. The researchers interviewed some 300 of them, all of whom had experienced abuse while living there. [...]

“The apology is very significant,” she adds. “Finland does not have much of a culture of apology. This is the first large-scale public apology expressed on behalf of the state.” No decision has been made on whether compensation will be issued.

In the past few years several Western countries have owned up to the mass neglect of children by state welfare bodies. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized to its indigenous population for the physical abuse that occurred in church-run residential schools from the mid-19th to early 20th century. That same year Australia apologized to the “Stolen Generations” of indigenous and mixed-race children taken forcibly from their families during the first decades of the 20th century; the following year, it apologized also to some 500,000 Australians who suffered neglect and abuse in orphanages and children’s homes. In 2010 the UK apologized for its role in sending over 130,000 children to former colonies—Australia among them—between the 1920s and 1960s, where many ended up suffering abuse at the hands of those who were meant to care for them. And in 2013, Irish prime minister Enda Kenny issued an apology to the thousands of women and girls who were forced to perform unpaid manual labour at Ireland’s Catholic-run Magdalene Laundries from 1922-96.

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Quartz: The dark and sordid history behind America’s obsession with cranberries

Ocean Spray is the world’s leading supplier of cranberry-related products, controlling 75% of cranberry farms in the US and Canada since 1930. This includes their cranberry juice, fresh cranberries, craisins (which were created as an Ocean-Spray marketing ploy, by the way), cranberry sauce, and a whole smattering of other products. Ocean Spray sells 20% of their fresh cranberries during the week leading up to Thanksgiving—a whopping 80 million pounds of them. [...]

Cranberries are grown in bogs primarily in the northern part of the US in soft, marshy ground with acid-peat soil. They’re hard to harvest on the vines they grow on, so instead, the bogs are flooded at harvest time, water reels pull them off the vine, and the cranberries float to the top, allowing them to be collected and sent off to market. Those images you see of farmers in waders, up to their chests in water with cranberries floating all around them? Totally accurate. [...]

President Eisenhower did not eat cranberries for Thanksgiving that year, and neither did the majority of the country. In a single year, cranberry sales dropped by nearly 70% (pdf). According to the American Council on Science and Health, the great cranberry scare of 1959 set off the very first carcinogen panic in the United States. This scare was mostly overblown and overhyped: The lab rats would have had to consume truckloads of cranberries treated with aminotriazole before getting any tumor growths. Still, the negative publicity had a direct effect on sales, which should have been enough of an incentive to have Ocean Spray rethink their methods. It wasn’t. [...]

It would make sense for cranberry farms to be held to some US government oversight, such as the Clean Water Act, but due to a confusing loophole, they aren’t. Agricultural run-off from places like cranberry bogs and rice fields is not regulated, and Ocean Spray takes full advantage of that ambiguity. In Wisconsin, for example, cranberry bogs have destroyed more wetlands than all other uses combined, and the evidence is mounting that continuing non-organic farming of cranberries will continue to be an immense environmental hazard.

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