CityLab: Venice Mayor to Tourists: Stop Whining and Pay Up

Over the past few weeks, news of scams against visitors to the city have been ricocheting around the European press, with complaints that tourists’ naïveté and limited language skills have led to them being parted from their money in dishonest if not openly illegal ways. Exhibit A: a recent lunch for four British tourists at a place called Trattoria Casanova, near St. Mark’s Square. After the table was piled with dishes the group claims they didn’t order, the bill ended up coming to €525 ($612). This is taking a liberty, but for a tourist town, it’s sadly a case of so far, so normal. The spin in this familiar tale takes place a little higher up: Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro has waded into the bill dispute—and he’s on the restaurant’s side.

When it comes to general tourist manners, he has a point. You can’t arrive in a city without a single word of the local language and expect everything to run smoothly. You can, nonetheless, hope that your lack of language skills do not make you the target of a scam—and that looks like what we’re discussing here. [...]

Firstly, there’s the bad PR for the city. Implying that language non-proficiency makes you a viable target for price gouging in Venice is a bad message for a city that relies almost entirely on tourism—and it’s also offensive to the vast majority of Venetian traders. The group says that the attitude is a symptom of a wider problem.

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The Atlantic: 'It's a Mistake to Underestimate China'

But there are few signs that Washington has the political appetite to compete with the kinds of investments China has been making around the world. The most visible aspect of Beijing’s ambition to extend its economic and political influence around the world is the Belt and Road initiative, a massive infrastructure plan that aims to connect China to its Asian neighbors and farther afield. Think of it as a hub-and-spoke model: China, the hub, builds infrastructure in countries around the world, the spokes, in order to facilitate trade. China is building roads, bridges, seaports, and airports in more than 60 countries to facilitate the import of raw material in order to further fuel its own economic growth while it searches for new markets. Unlike the West, China offers cheap loans, doesn’t ask questions about human rights or the environment, and doesn’t export its political ideology. [...]

To be sure, there are challenges to China’s ambition. For one thing, the market logic underpinning some Belt and Road projects is questionable. One example: China’s investment in a Sri Lankan port didn’t get the traffic or cargo it had expected, saddling the Sri Lankan government with massive debt that it had trouble paying off. For another, the reaction to Belt and Road-funded projects isn’t always positive. Vietnam and Burma are good examples. In those countries, China is accused of importing workers, degrading the environment, building shoddy infrastructure, and eroding sovereignty. Meanwhile, regional rivals like India, Japan, and Russia, which fears China’s influence in Central Asia, are wary of Belt and Road. [...]

But, ultimately, Kilman pointed out, “none of these challenges are insurmountable” for China. Indeed, if Beijing has shown one thing, it’s the ability to learn from its mistakes. For instance, while some of its projects may be white elephants, such as the one in Sri Lanka, they serve an important geopolitical goal; following complaints and protests in other countries, China has built local capacity and provided jobs. “Not all of what China is doing is market-driven, but there are infrastructure needs in the Indian Ocean area,” Kliman said. China is meeting those needs.  

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Quartz: Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts

Rather than fake news or alternative facts, the primary danger of these times are selective facts. Selective facts are “true” facts that only tells us part of the story, and they influence our views on every issue from gun control to Islamic terrorism to free trade. [...]

Business leaders of media organizations therefore consciously focus on what readers want, not what they need to make the best decisions—even though most of us use news for the latter purpose. Sam Zell, the former CEO of Tribune, is characteristically blunt, telling journalists, “You need to help me by being a journalist that focuses on what readers want and therefore generates more revenue.” Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch echoes him, saying “Stop writing articles to win Pulitzer Prizes…Give people what they want to read and make it interesting.” On the social media side, Mark Zuckerburg, likely the most powerful news editor in human history (though, of course, he wouldn’t call himself that), designed an algorithm that focuses on featuring news we’re most likely to engage with. [...]

This is why some Americans might think there is a “war on the West” by the Muslim world. American news sources like the New York Times cover Western terrorist attacks by Muslims more than any other terrorist attacks, even though most victims of Islamic terrorist incidents are Muslim. As one American accurately observed in an article in the New York Times, “I don’t begrudge my grandma who never met a Muslim in her life—but all she sees on TV are Muslims blowing things up. It is not irrational that people are worried.”

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Slate: What Is Going to Happen to Zimbabwe Now?

Michelle Faul: It came as a shock. It came as a shock to everybody, even though I was home for three weeks last month, and everyone was saying, “Something’s got to happen. It cannot continue. People are suffering so much.” People are starving in my country. It’s disgraceful. Mugabe inherited, when we finally got independent black rule in 1980, a country that was self-sufficient. Five thousand white farmers, whatever their politics—and I am black—produced enough food to feed more than 8 million people, and food for export. And he has reduced our nation to one in which one-third of the people need food aid. Another third of the nation has left. We are scattered all over the world. [...]

I said Emmerson Mnangagwa is evil because he is considered the mastermind or what we called, or Mugabe called, Gukurahundi. This means the cleaning of the chaff—when you have wheat and clean it. That was a project to try and wipe out the minority Ndebele people. Nobody knows how many people were killed between 1984 and about 1988. I had to leave the country. I was forced to leave my country as a result of my reporting on Gukurahundi. Perhaps 20,000, perhaps 30,000 people were killed, and Emmerson Mnangagwa is considered the mastermind of those killings. [...]

I think Mnangagwa realizes that for the country to have any kind of positive future it can’t continue in the way it has been ruled. Mnangagwa has indicated that he would be willing to allow white farmers to return to Zimbabwe and farm the land. What happened with that project was that Mugabe accused the white farmers of supporting the opposition MDC party, which we believe has won at least two out of three of the last elections. He said the white farmers were supporting his opponents, which is when he began his program of violently forcing them from the land. The real reason, we think, was that his moneybags—an Indian chap who had done all his laundering of money for him—had taken off with all the veterans’ pension money. Mugabe no longer had money to pay veterans; the veterans were getting angry. So instead he said, “I will give you land. You can go take the farms.” [...]

I would suspect that they will be allowed to retire in disgrace. What I would like to see is someone like Mugabe being sent to the International Criminal Court to face trial for all the killings that occurred and other human rights abuses. Nobody knows how many people have died because of Mugabe’s destruction of everything he built up. He built up a fabulous education system. He was a teacher. He then destroyed it.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Catholic Cure for Poverty

The Catholic Church is often held up as the primary culprit, but it is not the only guilty party in this story. It acted in partnership with the state and elites, creating an institutional nexus that rejected social-democratic solutions to poverty and pushed back against women’s liberation. Instead, the effects of poverty became transformed into moral issues to be solved by institutionalization — a process that undergirded Ireland’s carceral state and profoundly impacted the treatment of women and children in the country. [...]

Yet many of the hopes of this period were dashed. Politically, socially, and economically, the 1920s and ’30s were full of setbacks: censorship was introduced, legal divorce was abolished, women were banned from sitting on juries, the civil service marriage bar was introduced along with quotas for women working in industry, and contraceptives were banned. The radical women of the revolution — like many of their male counterparts — disappeared from public life or were silenced. [...]

Their children were usually adopted illegally from the homes, and as historian Michael Dwyer has demonstrated, some babies were even used for medical testing by universities and pharmaceutical companies. One company, Wellcome, conducted vaccine trials from 1930 to 1977 in children’s institutions in Dublin, Cork, and Tipperary that were sanctioned and overseen by state-salaried medical officers and academics.

Women’s supposed “immorality” was a welcome red herring, distracting from the realities of poverty, unemployment, poor housing, and high infant mortality. In debates on the state provision of a social safety net, women were depicted as “blackmailers” and “temptresses,” and while the married mother was revered in popular culture, the unwed mother was deemed “illegitimate.” Oliver St John Gogarty summed up the situation well in 1928, declaring to the senate: “it is high time that the people of this country find some other way of loving God than by hating women.” [...]

The unwillingness to recognize the central role of class, poverty, and sexism in policing Irish families obscures the connection of past abuses to present ones. The state’s relationship to Ireland’s Travelling community is illustrative. Here again the extraordinary poverty of Travellers has been cast as a cultural and moral issue — eliding the need for state social services, jobs programs, and anti-discriminatory legislation.

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