BBC4: The French Culture War

A year after last November's terror attacks in Paris, journalist Nick Fraser explores the deeper culture war taking place between a new generation of French Muslims and the defenders of hard-line secular Republicanism in France.

As a country and a civilization, France prides itself on its own model of Frenchness - non-ethnic, republican, integrationist, based on legality and citizenship and, in cultural terms, emphatically secular.

It's based on a concept unique to France - laïcité.

But aversion to laïcité is now widespread among banlieue and Muslim young, and it would seem that integration on the scale advocated by its supporters hasn't happened. By common consent, French secularism has hidden the country's real and growing race and culture divisions - some argue it's exacerbated them.

The government takes matters seriously enough to be spending millions on a new programme of civic education designed explicitly to counter apathy and hostility to republican values, and promote secularism. This summer, PM Manuel Valls called for a pact. "Our country must prove boldly to the world that Islam is compatible with democracy," he told the press. Meanwhile the hard right talk of the Grand Remplacement - effectively a cultural takeover and an 'Islamisation' of France.

Even in mainstream cultural and political debate many Muslims feel laïcité and secularism are being targeted specifically against them - from the ban on the veil in public space to the burkini row earlier this summer. Secularism is being used as a weapon of anti-Islamic sentiment, they argue, even as a cover for racism. Liberal defenders of laïcité point out that this is a political misuse of the idea but not its truth - arguing that separation of religion from the public space remains necessary and desirable in France.

Talking to writers, satirists and cultural activists, Muslim and secular, Nick Fraser asks if the French Republican idea can survive.

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Deutsche Welle: Berlin public and corporate Wi-Fi block LGBT-friendly websites

On a recent family shopping trip to the Ikea outlet in Berlin's Schöneberg district, one father noticed something strange. As he went to look up the schedule for an upcoming family picnic hosted by the German Association for Lesbians and Gays (LSVD), he noticed the website was blocked.

Out of curiosity, he tried several other portals for LGBT resources; articles about homophobia, advice columns on coming out. None of them worked. Queer.de, a website that advocates for homosexuals' rights, was similarly blank.

Apparently, the websites were "labeled as pornography and disabled under Germany's child protection laws," said LSVD Director for Berlin and Brandenburg, Jörg Steinert, in an interview with DW. [...]

The source of the issue, however, is likely not an anti-LGBT agenda on the part of the Swedish furniture giant, which itself has taken flak for putting gay families in its ads for decades. The problem is a truly German one: bureaucracy. Certain keywords are automatically blocked by Wi-Fi providers in public places, and unfortunately, the word homosexual has "sex" right there in the middle of it.

Then the business or public office that hosts the Hotspot has the unenviable task of clearing every individual website one by one. It could also mean that reports about themes that have nothing to with pornography, like assault or medical issues, could also be blocked.

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Deutsche Welle: Why a small German museum is showing Nazi art

What exactly is it that is depicted on these "compliant" works? Is it all propaganda?

Yes and no. We initially believed that all these works of art had been created for propaganda purposes. However, portraits of Hitler, of war and of other Nazi party values only make up about 10 percent of all the works. Americans kept large parts of the propaganda items for themselves. But 90 percent and even more of what you get to see in this exhibition looks like harmless pictures at first sight.

In truth, they also fuel propaganda, but for a kind of reality that didn't exist at that period of time. You will see healthy families with blond children, idealized depictions of industrial landscapes, mythological images, and harmless portraits. But the problem is that they were created at a time, between 1939 and 1945, when everything around them was being bombed to smithereens. People were actually dying and six million were killed in the Holocaust. This is something that, as we now know today, was widely known at the time as well. [...]

As a second location, we planned a collaboration with a museum for contemporary art in Wroclaw, Poland. The city is a European Capital of Culture in 2016. The director of the museum, Dorota Monkiewicz, was committed to showing the exhibition in her museum. However, the ruling PiS government fired her. Her contract was not extended. All agreed projects were canceled.

When we asked how we could help, she said, "I was kicked out because I'm a left-leaning liberal." When I asked her whether it had anything to do with the exhibition, she said it wasn't a problem to show original works by Nazi artists, but that the works were being shown in a critical light. It's deeply concerning that something like this should happen in 2016 in Poland - a country that was invaded by the Nazis in 1939.

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SciShow: The Science of Hypnosis

Hypnosis: that's just a fun gimmick for stage shows and plot twists, right? Well, turns out there might be more to it.

CityLab: Europe's Disposable Income, Mapped

A new map published this month by the cartographer Jakub Marian gives a far more balanced impression. It does so by presenting figures using an artificial currency unit called the Purchasing Power Standard, created by the E.U. purely for statistical purposes. This measure adjusts for price differences, so that one theoretical unit of PPS can purchase the same amount of goods or services across the continent. The results below show that artificial currency converted back into Euros, in order to create a significantly different picture that is adjusted to show purchasing power parity (PPP) across Europe.

The adjusted picture shows that once tax is deducted, residents in central and southern Germany actually have the most consistently high disposable income from region to region. They’re closely followed by North Germans and Austrians, with East Germans notably lagging behind. Nordic countries, by contrast, have lower disposable incomes, especially in Denmark. France, Sweden, and the U.K. all show sharp regional divides, with clear islands of high disposable income around Paris, Stockholm, and the London region. It’s Italy, however, that shows the starkest divides. From northern Lombardy to Sicily and Calabria, average disposable income drops by more than €8,000.

Passionate believers in the high-tax and (apparently) high-wage governance systems of Europe’s Nordic countries might be a little discouraged by the results. With the exception of Norway, with its vast oil-financed sovereign wealth fund and small population, disposable incomes across the region tend to be noticeably lower than in most of Germany. Average disposable income around Paris is apparently far greater than around Copenhagen or Helsinki, while outside the major cities, average disposable incomes after tax are broadly comparable to those in Eastern Germany, a region struggling with high unemployment.

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