IFLScience: The "Mystery" Of The Bermuda Triangle Has Been Solved

During an on-air interview with news.com.au, one Karl Kruszelnicki – a well-known science communicator out of Australia – notes that the number of vessels and aircraft that disappear in the area “is the same as anywhere else in the world on a percentage basis.” [...]

According to Kruszelnicki, the myth behind the Bermuda Triangle began when several high-profile military convoys – and their subsequent rescue missions – went down in the region between the First and Second World Wars. In reality, terrible weather and less rigid boats and aircraft ensure plenty of disappearances. [...]

Bodies and wreckage were never found in most cases, but this isn’t surprising considering that it’s a massive body of water that’s incredibly deep. Even today, the wreckage of planes and boats are rarely located despite massive advances in reconnaissance and tracking technology.

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Politico: ‘Why Germany?’ Trump’s strange fixation vexes experts

n recent months, Trump has complained that he sees too many German cars on American streets. He has falsely charged that crime is spiking in the country. He has reportedly complained about the size of America’s decades-long troop presence in the country. And as German Chancellor Angela Merkel battles a political crisis over immigration, he seems to take pleasure in seeing “the people of Germany … turning against their leadership.” [...]

Theories abound about the reason for Trump’s German fixation — all the more surprising given his own German ancestry — and there may be no single answer. They range from Trump’s seeming belief that Germany has grown wealthy by mooching off the U.S. to the notion that he resents strong women like Merkel, who also happened to be one of President Barack Obama’s closest allies. [...]

The timing of Trump’s outburst — sitting across a table from a surprised-looking NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg — is especially alarming to many observers because Trump is to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday amid concern that he is too close to the autocratic Russian leader. [...]

“Berlin is realizing that we have to think about how Germany gets on with its future without the United States as a strong partner for the remainder of the Trump presidency,” said David-Wilp, who is based in Berlin. “And there’s no guarantee that a post-Trump America will also bounce back to be the partner that Germany once knew.”

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Haaretz: Romania Starts to Confront Holocaust Past, but ‘Cycle of Denial’ Remains

But Antonescu’s regime was more than just any ally: Romania was Germany’s major ally on the Eastern Front after 1941, providing hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the Nazi war machine. As historian Timothy Snyder stresses in his 2015 book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” Romania was the only other state to “generate an autonomous policy of the direct mass murder of Jews.” [...]

His words were heeded. In October 1941, after an explosion at the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa that Antonescu blamed on the Jews, Romanian troops murdered approximately 40,000 of Odessa’s Jews. According to Yad Vashem, 19,000 of Odessa’s Jews were taken to the harbor and burnt alive, while another 20,000 Jews were taken to a an outlying village to be shot or burnt to death. [...]

This “cycle of denial,” in the words of Holocaust historian Paul A. Shapiro, wasn’t broken in Romania until 2003, after then-President Ion Iliescu made several controversial comments about there never having been a Holocaust within Romania’s borders. “The Holocaust was not unique to the Jews,” Iliescu was quoted as telling Haaretz at the time. [...]

The report, as Geissbühler and others note, resulted in some positive steps in Romania. In 2009, a Holocaust memorial was erected in Bucharest, unambiguously stating that “the Romanian state was responsible for the deaths of at least 280,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews.” There have also been changes to school textbooks and education about the Holocaust, as well as a resurgent interest in scholarship in the field.

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openDemocracy: Muslim women’s rights are also women’s rights

According to a recent report by the Open Society Justice Initiative, nearly one in three EU member states have placed legal restrictions on Muslim women’s dress at either local or national level. In addition, bans on headscarves and other Muslim women’s dress by both businesses and public institutions have been increasingly reported in nearly half of the EU countries. This has resulted in preventing these women from accessing jobs. How can this be seriously reconciled with EU principles of non-discrimination and gender equality?

However, there is hope for an inclusive Europe as in most countries, proposals for legal bans have been rejected either by legislators or by the courts. This means that there are many people fighting back against attempts to stigmatise and discriminate against Muslim women, including strong civil society campaigns.

This is all the more important as analysis shows that many of these bans on religious dress, although framed as though they apply to all religious groups equally, in fact clearly and visibly target Muslim women. Indeed, restrictions are often adopted after heated debates on Muslim women’s dress and the presence of Muslims in Europe. The ‘neutrality’ argument is used frequently only as an attempt to legally discriminate against Muslim women. In addition, many far-right parties are increasingly pushing for these bans, using Islamophobic discourses. [...]

EU member states should assess the specific effects of rules on religious dress in public and private institutions on Muslim women. They should also ensure that practices and policies promote fully inclusive workplaces, places of education and public spaces, including by rejecting any new proposals to ban religious clothing in employment and institutions. Why has it been so hard so far to choose inclusion over exclusion in support of women’s emancipation?

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SciShow: Do Animals Appreciate Music?

Animals might be music lovers, but how can we know? Is the ability to perceive and appreciate music a shared human and animal experience?