Al Jazeera: Iranian soldier lauded after risking life to save dog

A young Sunni soldier has become a national hero in Shia-majority Iran after being mutilated while trying to save a stray dog trapped in a minefield.

The story of Mohammad Bakhtar, 19, has gone viral in the country, with supportive tweets and photos pouring in since the incident at an Iranian military base last month.

On the freezing afternoon of December 17, Bakhtar noticed the dog caught in barbed wire around a minefield near an ammunition depot. Hearing the dog's plaintive cries, Bakhtar rushed over to free the injured animal - and seconds later, a mine exploded, shattering his right leg. [...]

Cyclist Kamal Rastkhani said that he had travelled more than 300 kilometres in snow and freezing weather to pay homage to Bakhtar "as the symbol of love for God's creatures".

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Quartz: Less bling, more mass ceremonies: A county in China is banning extravagant weddings

For Chinese of modest means, a big wedding can actually mean bankruptcy. As a result, one county in China is cracking down on extravagant events in order to build a “virtuous and frugal society.”

On Jan. 1, new rules in Taiqian county in China’s northern Henan province went into effect in hopes of curbing extravagant weddings and funerals. The local government is encouraging residents to hold simpler events, according to its rules (link in Chinese, registration required) that dictate guidelines from the value of gifts to the size of banquets. Violations could be punished by public shaming. [...]

Chinese netizens seem to have mixed feelings about the rules. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-esque social media (link in Chinese, registration required) site, one user said “the government is meddling in people’s lives too much.” But some believe it has the right intention. “Many parents are in debt because of the weddings of their sons. These vulgar practices should be abandoned!” said another user.

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Foreign Policy: Poland Was Never as Democratic as It Looked

To be clear, Poland is not yet Hungary, the EU’s other major backsliding headache. Law and Justice has only a small parliamentary majority, not the supermajority needed for a Hungarian-style constitutional rewrite. Protesters have been more assertive and quicker to take to the streets. Nor does Poland have a powerful far-right party like Hungary’s Jobbik waiting in the wings to claim the role of “real” opposition if the ruling party falters. Poland’s opposition may yet manage to use social movements as a rough-and-ready substitute for weakened constitutional checks and balances — and may perhaps eventually make a winning return at the polls. But even in this (far-from-certain) best-case scenario, the country’s institutions are likely to emerge from this period badly damaged. [...]

What this story misses, however, is that while political elites and their electorates may have responded to the EU’s incentives in the desired manner, this process told us almost nothing about whether or not the norms underpinning liberal democratic institutions were being embraced. A decade on from accession, we’re seeing the consequences of this hollowed-out incentivizing: The failure of the EU to foresee that institutional reforms in Eastern Europe had to be accompanied by policies aimed at instilling such norms as political equality, individual liberty, and civic tolerance has left liberal democratic institutions catastrophically vulnerable. [...]

Could things have been done differently? At the time, the union clearly realized the need to set democratic and human rights conditions for Eastern European candidate states. In hindsight, it could have pushed harder for direct social change, giving the reform of high school history textbooks or positive on-the-ground outcomes for minorities the same priority as the detailed monitoring accorded to intellectual property, financial services, and veterinary regulations. Ethical criteria, to be sure, are not as easy to monitor as legal ones, and pressing for satisfying evidence of social change might have made the accession process longer and slower, and local nationalists angrier; in some cases there may have been no accession at all. But as illusions about the EU’s ability to accelerate and anchor democratization in Eastern Europe fall away, the divided union finds itself confronting these cultural conflicts anyway — this time from a position of far less leverage.

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FiveThirtyEight: Fact-Checking Won’t Save Us From Fake News

We’ve used this phrase so many times in the past two months that it’s almost lost meaning — partly because it can mean so many different things. Depending on who you talk to, “fake news” may refer to satirical news, hoaxes, news that’s clumsily framed or outright wrong, propaganda, lies destined for viral clicks and advertising dollars, politically motivated half-truths, and more. [...]

Don’t get me wrong — fact-checking is a start, and some of it may even help. But for all the hand-wringing, hot takes and congratulatory posts about the latest fact-checking heroics, fake news continues to do what it does best: adapt. Google and Facebook may block well-known abusers from advertising networks, but the fake newsmakers will just launch new sites. Facebook is partnering with fact-checkers, but the groups that will do the work — ABC News, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes — already face partisan criticism. [...]

The stakes are high: Fake news has consequences. Take Pizzagate, a conspiracy claiming that a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., houses a child sex ring lead by Hillary Clinton. In early December, a man went to the restaurant armed with an AR-15 rifle, ostensibly to free imprisoned children. He fired the weapon, although he didn’t hit anyone. Then, he saw that there was no evidence of the ring and surrendered.

Despite the consequences, some readers don’t seem to care. In a recent poll from Pew Research Center, 88 percent of respondents said fake news is a source of at least some confusion. But 23 percent admitted to sharing fake news, and 14 percent said they shared a story they knew was fake. Against this backdrop, President-elect Donald Trump can unapologetically make outlandish claims that can be easily proved wrong.

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Vox: Americans — not just liberals — have a religious literacy problem

However, what Powers and others mischaracterize as “religious illiteracy” is really the far narrower category of “unfamiliarity with the practices of certain present-day Christians in the United States.” Yes, many non-Christians have never heard “new King” in reference to Jesus — though, to be fair, some Christians also found it odd. And yes, our body politic would be well served if non-Christian liberals expanded their knowledge of Christian practice and vocabulary.

But that’s only a tiny fraction of religious literacy. True religious literacy requires engagement with the enormous variety of beliefs, practices, and motivations found in different religious traditions, and, for that matter, within a single tradition, or even a single church. Religious literacy requires awareness that religions have changed radically over time, and will continue to do so, often for nontheological reasons. And when it comes to politics, religious literacy requires thinking through the difficulties inherent to disputes over matters of faith in a religiously diverse community, and recognizing how our political system has developed in response to such difficulty. [...]

The Pew survey also provides sobering evidence that Christians, in general, are ignorant about their own tradition. Half of Protestants can’t identify Martin Luther; half of Catholics don’t understand the doctrine of transubstantiation. This is something I see reflected in my students: I teach students who, despite being practicing Christians, don’t know that Jesus harshly criticizes divorce and never speaks about homosexuality, or that the “Old Testament” was originally the Hebrew Bible, a collection of diverse texts compiled over time by ancient Israelites. For many believers it is the classroom, not church, that provides their first opportunity to reflect on the long history of Christian debate over whether Genesis should be taken literally, or the potential problems with having multiple translations of a divine revelation.

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