Al Jazeera: Analysis: Does team Trump have an Africa plan?

Nearly eight months into his presidency, Trump has yet to nominate an assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Other jobs lower down in the State Department, Pentagon and White House are vacant; there is no US ambassador in either South Africa or Congo. [...]

"It was a massive and unprecedented decision by the court and, right or wrong, it's made a volatile situation in Kenya even worse. It's a moment like this that you really want high-level officers calling from the White House, and that's not necessarily happening," Felbab-Brown said. [...]

Cuts are already having real-world consequences. In July, Trump pushed back a deadline on whether to lift US sanctions against Sudan by three months, amid divisions in his administration and a lack of staff in key posts, including in the National Security Council.

Trump's lack of enthusiasm for Africa was on display at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, that same month. It was closed-door talks on African development that Trump famously stepped away from, giving up his chair to his daughter, Ivanka. [...]

US exports to sub-Saharan Africa have doubled to $21.81bn from $10.96bn in 2000, according to US Commerce Department data, but they were dwarfed by China's $102bn in exports to the region in 2015. 

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JSTOR Daily: Beyoncé, the Virgin Mary, and the Power of Imagery

Beyoncé and her photographers appear to present her as the Virgin Mary, using recognizable compositions, such as her veiled face and the flower mandorla enveloping her, in both Erizku’s and Poole’s images. The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber wrote, “Beyoncé is continuing in her long dialogue with the high-art world,” noting such varied influences as the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Renaissance Madonnas, Dutch flower paintings, and Kehinde Wiley. Part of the power in such imagery, he argues, is that “it’s recent and yet classical.”

Both photos nod to the ways in which women in positions of power have been represented throughout history. Historian Linda B. Hall has analyzed “images of women and power,” exploring how artists have used the image of the Virgin Mary to emphasize power, suffering, dedication, and endurance while also instilling a sense of maternal wonder. [...]

Hall analyzes the continued relevance and far-reaching reverence for images of the Virgin Mary throughout Spain, Latin America, and the United States. She notes, “In the case of the Virgin Mary, as time passes, the reverence that began centuries ago is constantly renewed and changed by religious leaders, by artists, and through popular reverence.” Historically speaking, Beyoncé’s imagery seems to borrow elements most heavily from those of Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose image first appeared on the cloak, or tilma, of Juan Diego in 1531, after the Virgin Mary’s fourth visit to him. About a century after her image was emblazoned on his cloak, artistic renderings of Our Lady of Guadalupe, complete with the flower mandorla and blue robe of stars, began appearing in print.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Narco-State to the North

The result was, as we could have predicted, an escalation in the violence. Conservative numbers now put the number of dead since 2006 or 2007, when this began, at more than 125,000 people. Something like 30,000 people have been forcibly disappeared. Their families don’t know where they are. The result is massive levels of violence and destruction in places where drug trafficking had been centered: in the north, in Sinaloa, in what we call the Tierra Caliente, where much of the marijuana and opium poppies are grown, in Veracruz, which is a port city on the eastern side of Mexico. [...]

The state is deeply implicated in this and the massacres that we have seen: the disappearance of these students at Ayotzinapa, the killing of twenty innocent civilians at Tlatlaya, another massacre in a town called Apatzingán. There have been multiple places where innocent civilians were killed at the hands of security forces in execution-style killings. We see the Mexican security forces implicated in this violence, in these killings and disappearances. [...]

These Central American migrants are themselves fleeing violence having to do with the destabilization of their societies, which goes back to the US-backed wars in Central America in the 1980s and more recently the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009. The role of the US in creating the conditions of violence in Central America and then militarizing the southern border has created incredible opportunities for the criminal organizations, particularly a ferocious group known as Los Zetas who emerged from the Mexican special forces and recruited Guatemalan Kaibiles, Guatemalan special forces, and are deadly killers. [...]

One of the biggest problems in Mexico is impunity. Something like over 95 percent of crimes aren’t investigated. People don’t call the police because often the police are corrupt and on the payroll of cartel members. When a family member disappears, for instance, it’s difficult to know who can help you because often the security forces are on the payroll of the people you suspect may have disappeared your loved one. [...]

That’s something that has been pointed out by observers across the political spectrum to Donald Trump. Mexico could stop agreeing to cooperate with the US. They could decide that they do not want to be the proxy militarization of the southern border, for instance. They could decide they no longer want to prosecute a militarized drug war. They could stop cooperating with the US in any number of ways, and that would have incredible consequences for the US, particularly the opposite of what it is that Donald Trump thinks that he is here to do.

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The Atlantic: The Link Between Animal Abuse and Murder

Until recently, animal cruelty was categorized as a simple misdemeanor, not an indication of a perpetrator’s likelihood to commit other crimes. But research over the past few decades increasingly has backed Merck’s conviction. Back in 1986, a study in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry found that almost half of rapists and a third of child molesters reported committing animal abuse during childhood or adolescence. In 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reviewed the existing research and determined that nearly two-thirds of inmates who commit crimes of aggression might also abuse animals.

More recently, a study by the Chicago Police Department “revealed a startling propensity for offenders charged with crimes against animals to commit other violent offenses toward human victims.” A survey of women in domestic-violence shelters indicated that 71 percent had partners who abused or threatened to abuse pets. [...]

Animal abuse is beginning to be interpreted as the first outward sign of distress in a household (a child who hurts animals may be acting out scenarios they’ve encountered at home), but remedial work is only slowly starting to proliferate. Some schools include “humane education” on their curricula, designed to teach children empathy. There’s only one nationally recognized cognitive-behavioral intervention for child animal abusers: Based on psychodynamic and attachment theories, AniCare is meant to help perpetrators accept responsibility for their actions and respect for animals. Judges in seven states have specified AniCare Child in sentencing.

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The Atlantic: How John Muir Is Revolutionizing the Farm-to-Table Food Movement

“Farm-to-table has failed to transform the way most of our food is grown in this country,” he writes in his new book The Third Plate: Field Notes for the Future of Food. Local, organic meals basically resemble what Americans have been eating for generations—a large hunk of meat in the center, veggies pushed off to the side. The sourcing’s better, but the diet hasn’t really changed. [...]

I went back to visit Klaas’s farm, thinking I’d write about him for my book, which was then in its earliest stages. On that visit, I had a second culinary epiphany—one that took place not in the kitchen, but in the field. Looking out from the middle of Klaas’s farm, about 2,000 acres, I realized there wasn’t any wheat—at least, not at that time of year. I was surrounded by millet, and oats, and barley, and buckwheat, some mustard greens, some kidney beans—but no wheat. All these crops, I learned from Klaas, had very specific functions. The beans gave the soil nitrogen, and the barley was there to build soil structure, the mustard plants helped cleanse the soil of pathogens and diseases. They were planted in this carefully timed sequence throughout the year. All of this was to prepare the soil, to create the best possible conditions for that great, amazingly flavored emmer wheat. Klaas couldn’t grow his healthy, vigorous, chemical-free wheat without those rotating those other crops in, too. [...]

I began to rethink my relationship to food, understanding that each isolated ingredient in my kitchen is implicated within a complex network of relationships. If I want Klaas’s wheat, I should try to find a way to support his beans and his rye and his mustard greens, too. We talk about nose-to-tail eating of animals—to waste less, to innovate, by finding inspired culinary use for all the gamy, complex, less “choice” cuts of meat. Well, we need nose-to-tail eating of the whole farm. We’ve got to learn ways to give these “undesirable” crops some mojo through really creative cooking. [...]

I don’t think the local foods movement, as it currently stands, has the power to change our food system in this way. You cannot transform the landscape with a chef who gets excited about a tomato and then decides to support a local tomato farmer. That’s a good beginning, but it’s not enough. Because any kind of good agriculture—especially organic agriculture—does not allow you to plant a lot of the same crop without chemicals, or without sacrificing plant health.

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