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blaise_glowiak

Denmark Moves to Make Refugees Hand Over Valuables - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gees-confiscate-valuables.html

denmark refugees

shared by blaise_glowiak on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • blaise_glowiak on 15 Jan 16
     
     Denmark is poised to pass a law requiring newly arrived refugees to hand over valuables, including gold or jewelry, to help pay for the costs of lodging them.   Evokes Europe's darkest hours, when the Nazis seized valuables from Jews during the Holocaust. Finland has called on asylum seekers to work without pay, and Sweden introduced identity checks last week for travelers arriving from Denmark, prompting Denmark to do the same along its border with Germany.
magnanma

Palace of Versailles: Facts & History | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/-versailles-facts-history.html

shared by magnanma on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the palace is beside the settlement of Versailles. The town was little more than a hamlet before becoming the seat of royal power. By the time of the French Revolution, it had a population of more than 60,000 people, making it one of the largest urban centers in France.
  • France's kings were first attracted to Versailles because of the area's prolific game. Louis XIII, who lived 1601-1643, bought up land, built a chateau and went on hunting trips.
  • The chateau Louis XIII built was little more than a hunting lodge having enough space to house the king and a small entourage. It was his successor, Louis XIV (1638-1715), the "Sun King," a ruler who chose the sun as his emblem and believed in centralized government with the king at its center, who would radically transform Versailles making it the seat of France's government by the time of his death.
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  • Spawforth notes that the palace contained about 350 living units varying in size, from multi-room apartments to spaces about the size of an alcove. The size and location of the room a person got depended on their rank and standing with the king. While the crown prince (known as the dauphin) got a sprawling apartment on the ground floor, a servant may have nothing more than a space in an attic or a makeshift room behind a staircase.
  • Scholars have suggested a number of factors that led him to build a great palace complex at Versailles and move the French government there. It's been noted that by keeping the king's residence some distance from Paris, it offered him protection from any civil unrest going on in the city. It also forced the nobles to travel to Versailles and seek lodging in the palace, something that impeded their ability to build up regional power bases that could potentially challenge the king.
  • A series of gardens, created in a formal style, stood to the west of the palace (one of them today is in the shape of a star) and contained sculptures as well as the pressurized fountains capable of launching water high into the air. The formality and grandeur of the gardens symbolized Louis XIV's absolute power, even over nature
  • Despite the richness of the palace, the kings had to make do with makeshift theaters up until 1768 when Louis XV allowed the building of the royal opera. It contained a mechanism that allowed the orchestra level to be raised to the stage allowing it to be used for dancing and banqueting. Spawforth notes that the opera required 3,000 candles to be burned for opening night and was rarely used due to its cost and the poor shape of France's finances.
  • After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette would be stripped of power, brought to Paris and ultimately beheaded. The palace fell under the control of the new republican government.Many of its furnishings were sold to help pay for the subsequent Revolutionary Wars. When Napoleon came to power, he had an apartment created for himself in the Grand Trianon, complete with a map room.
  • In 1871, after France had lost a war against Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the French defeat. For several years after this defeat, the situation in France was so bad that its Chamber of Deputies and Senate opted to meet at Versailles, rather than Paris, for reasons of safety.
  • Today, Versailles is one of the most-visited sites in France. Visitors are drawn to its architectural grandeur, the stunning water features (concerts are often played in the gardens during the summer) and its sense of history. 
mattrenz16

Why Blue Places Have Been Hit Harder Economically Than Red Ones - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-economic-recovery.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • different mix of jobs in red and blue places.
  • The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July.
  • Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
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  • Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won.
  • In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016.
  • local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home.
  • Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living — perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher.
  • So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.
  • Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs.
  • The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories).
  • Still, the future looks far more promising than the present for blue states’ economies.
  • mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20
     
    " different mix of jobs in red and blue places. The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July. Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won. In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016. local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home. Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living - perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher. So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living. Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs. The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). Still, the future looks far more promising t
katyshannon

North Korea's largest nuclear test draws condemnation, threat of more sanctions | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...rthkorea-nuclear-idUSKCN11F02N

north korea largest test condemnation threat sanctions reuters politics crisis obama

shared by katyshannon on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • North Korea conducted its fifth and biggest nuclear test on Friday and said it had mastered the ability to mount a warhead on a ballistic missile, ratcheting up a threat that its rivals and the United Nations have been powerless to contain.
  • The blast, on the 68th anniversary of North Korea's founding, was more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to some estimates. It was condemned by the United States, which said it would work with partners to impose new sanctions on North Korea, and by China, Pyongyang's main ally.
  • The United Nations Security Council would discuss the test and whether the 15-member body should punish the reclusive state by imposing further sanctions at a closed-door meeting on Friday requested by the United States, Japan and South Korea, diplomats said.
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  • The test was a "grave threat to regional security and to international peace and stability," Obama said in a statement, adding North Korea should face consequences for its "unlawful and dangerous actions."
  • China said it was resolutely opposed to the test and urged Pyongyang to stop taking any actions that would worsen the situation. It said it would lodge a protest with the North Korean embassy in Beijing.
  • There were further robust condemnations from Russia, the European Union, NATO, Germany and Britain.
  • North Korea, which labels the South and the United States as its main enemies, said its "scientists and technicians carried out a nuclear explosion test for the judgment of the power of a nuclear warhead," according to its official KCNA news agency.It said the test proved North Korea was capable of mounting a nuclear warhead on a medium-range ballistic missile, which it last tested on Monday when Obama and other world leaders were gathered in China for a G20 summit.
sarahbalick

North Korea's 'biggest' nuclear test sparks global outrage - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-37317782

north korea

shared by sarahbalick on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • North Korea's 'biggest' nuclear test sparks global outrage
  • World leaders have reacted with anger after North Korea carried out its fifth and reportedly biggest nuclear test.
  • firmly opposed" the test, Japan "protested adamantly" and the US warned of "serious consequences" including "new sanctions". The UN Security Council will meet later behind closed doors to discuss the issue.
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  • The isolated communist nation has been hit by five sets of UN sanctions since its first test in 2006. Talks involving world and regional powers have failed to rein in the North's nuclear programme.
  • The test came on the country's National Day, which celebrates the founding of the current regime and which is often used as a show of military strength.
  • That would be a drastic step which might halt the economy and cause serious suffering to ordinary people.
  • China's foreign ministry said it would lodge a diplomatic protest and urged North Korea to avoid further action that would worsen the situation.
sarahbalick

India stabbing: Bystanders watch as Delhi woman killed - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-india-37415843

india delhi killed

shared by sarahbalick on 20 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • India stabbing: Bystanders watch as Delhi woman killed
  • Indians have reacted with outrage after passers-by watched a woman being stabbed more than 20 times on a busy street in the capital, Delhi.
  • choolteacher Karuna, 22, who died in the attack.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • He is seen stabbing her repeatedly as people walk by, before hitting her on the head with a stone and kicking her.
  • Locals did eventually intervene when he tried to escape.
  • "She was attacked as she was walking with her cousin at around 9am. It seems that the assailant started liking her when they used to be neighbours earlier, but since he was married, she never paid attention," senior police official Esha Pandey told the BBC.
  • Earlier deputy commissioner of police, Madhur Verma, told reporters that "the family had lodged a complaint four-five months back and both the families had reached a compromise".
  • On Sunday evening, 28-year-old Laxmi was stabbed to death in front of her house in full view of her neighbours by a man who then killed himself, the Times of India newspaper reported .
Javier E

From the Expat Blog, Decoding the Air Quality Index in Beijing - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ty-index-in-beijing-1441654380

pollution china

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • I learned that the Air Quality Index, which is used all over the world, goes from 1 to 500, with 1 being Vermont and 500 being Hades.
  • Here’s how Deb characterized the AQI rankings, in layman’s terms:Advertisement 1 to 50: “Good,” according to the AQI. On such days in Beijing, you look at the sky with an appreciation you’ve never had before. Life is good. 51 to 100: “Moderate.” The sky still looks OK, but stepping outside makes your eyes water. Something is a little off.
  • 101 to 150: “Unhealthy for sensitive groups.” There’s a faint smell in the air. You find yourself sneezing more than usual. There’s gunk in your nose. You get ticked off easily. 151 to 200: “Unhealthy.” You step outside and find a metallic taste in your mouth. Buildings 50 feet away appear in a haze. You clear your throat a lot, as if you’ve been laughing. You’re not laughing.
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  • 201 to 250: “Very Unhealthy.” Throat-clearing brings up a lot of phlegm. The sun looks dim through the haze, like a 30-watt bulb. This must be the way sun looks from Mars, you figure. 251 to 500: “Hazardous.” You can taste the air the moment you wake up, even though you are inside your apartment and the windows are closed. Your cat’s fur smells funny. Outside, the world seems muffled, and the tickle in your throat extends down into your lungs and rests there like a tiny gremlin. You plan a trip to Tokyo or any city outside China.
  • Above 500: Yes, it actually goes beyond the scale. In Beijing, these are called “crazy bad” days
  • In the U.S., on the worst day in the worst city—usually somewhere in California—the AQI is typically about 125.
  • Expats and increasingly Chinese often wouldn’t let their small children outside if the AQI was more than 150. Schools called off games at around 200. I wouldn’t jog above 165, and Deb thought I was crazy for running at that level. When you breathe more deeply, the tiniest particles,─the ones that can do the most damage,─can lodge more deeply in your lungs.
  • On a day when the AQI reached 746, as it did in January 2013, I couldn’t decide whether the sky over Beijing looked more like it was filled with the smoke from an encroaching forest fire or like the residue of a giant cigarette butt.
  • Some people left Beijing, which tied for 21st out of 199 Chinese cities for bad air, for Shanghai, which was tied for 121st in the bad-air rankings
Javier E

The Real Story of How America Became an Economic Superpower - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...384034

economic history WWI WWII international financial US relations foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire.
  • The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end.
  • “Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916,
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  • what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,”
  • as World War I entered its third year—and the first year of Tooze’s story—the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States
  • His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind.
  • That staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production; American farmers planted food and fiber to feed and clothe the combatants of Europe
  • But unlike in 1940-41, the decision to commit so much to one side’s victory in a European war was not a political decision by the U.S. government. Quite the contrary: President Wilson wished to stay out of the war entirely. He famously preferred a “peace without victory.” The trouble was that by 1916, the U.S. commitment to Britain and France had grown—to borrow a phrase from the future—too big to fail.
  • His Republican opponents—men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root—wished to see America take its place among the powers of the earth. They wanted a navy, an army, a central bank, and all the other instrumentalities of power possessed by Britain, France, and Germany. These political rivals are commonly derided as “isolationists” because they mistrusted the Wilson’s League of Nations project. That’s a big mistake. They doubted the League because they feared it would encroach on American sovereignty.
  • Grant presents this story as a laissez-faire triumph. Wartime inflation was halted. Borrowing and spending gave way to saving and investing. Recovery then occurred naturally, without any need for government stimulus. “The hero of my narrative is the price mechanism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand,
  • It was Wilson who wished to remain aloof from the Entente, who feared that too close an association with Britain and France would limit American options.
  • Wilson was guided by a different vision: Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether. Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.”
  • Wilson hoped to deploy this emerging super-power to enforce an enduring peace. His own mistakes and those of his successors doomed the project,
  • What went wrong? “When all is said and done,” Tooze writes, “the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security. … Given the violence they had already experienced and the risk of even greater future devastation, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain could all see this. But what was no less obvious was that only the US could anchor such a new order.”
  • And that was what Americans of the 1920s and 1930s declined to do—because doing so implied too much change at home for them: “At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future.”
  • The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21. As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history.
  • Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment.
  • “By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory,” computes Tooze (relative to America’s estimated GDP of $50 billion in 1916, the equivalent of $560 billion in today’s money).
  • the central assumption of his version of events is the same one captured in Rothbard’s title half a century ago: that America’s economic history constitutes a story unto itself.
  • Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain.
  • Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most.
  • But the gravest harm done by the depression to postwar recovery lasted long past 1921. To appreciate that, you have to understand the reasons why U.S. monetary authorities plunged the country into depression in 1920.
  • Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered
  • But 1920-21 was an inflation-stopper with a difference. In post-World War II America, anti-inflationists have been content to stop prices from rising. In 1920-21, monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels
  • James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet.
  • When the U.S. opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard (and what respectable country would not?) an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match U.S. deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own, accepting increased unemployment along the way. Alternatively, you could re-peg your currency to gold at a diminished rate. But that amounted to an admission that your money had permanently lost value—and that your own people, who had trusted their government with loans in local money, would receive a weaker return on their bonds than American creditors who had lent in dollars.
  • Britain chose the former course; pretty much everybody else chose the latter.
  • The consequences of these choices fill much of the second half of The Deluge. For Europeans, they were uniformly grim, and worse.
  • But one important effect ultimately rebounded on Americans. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks.
  • American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. In 1921 and 1923, they raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States.
  • Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did.
  • The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use. Germany lacked workers, so it plundered the labor of its conquered peoples. By 1944, foreigners constituted 20 percent of the German workforce and 33 percent of armaments workers
  • “If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark.” So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States.
  • From the start, the United States was Hitler’s ultimate target. “In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower,” Tooze writes. “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.”
  • Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity: There were just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932, and one-quarter of all Germans still worked as farmers as of 1925. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first.
  • That way was found: more debt, especially more German debt. The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower.
  • On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy.
  • The foundation of this order was America’s rise to unique economic predominance a century ago. That predominance is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could: rise toward economic parity with the United States.
  • t is coming, and when it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze's profound and brilliant grand narrative
jlessner

Charlie Hebdo Attack Chills Satirists and Prompts a Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...irists-and-prompts-debate.html

charlie attack prompts debate

shared by jlessner on 10 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The killing of a dozen people in Wednesday’s attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has prompted an outpouring of tributes from cartoonists around the world, who have flooded the Internet with images ranging from the elegiac to the scabrously rude.
  • But amid all the “I Am Charlie” marches and declarations on social media, some in the cartooning world are also debating a delicate question: Were the victims free-speech martyrs, full stop, or provocateurs whose aggressive mockery of Islam sometimes amounted to xenophobia and racism?
  • uch debates unfold differently in different countries. But the conversation could be especially acute in the United States, where sensitivities to racially tinged caricatures may run higher than in places like France, where historically tighter restrictions on speech have given rise to a strong desire to flout the rules.
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  • But it wasn’t just the powerful who felt the sting of cartoonist’s pens. In 19th-century Europe and America, minority groups who felt maligned, like Jews or Irish-Americans, also lodged frequent complaints against what they saw as stereotypes, only to be largely ignored.
  • Continuing censorship battles in the 20th century gave rise to underground comics, with their nothing-is-sacred sensibility. And Charlie Hebdo, which arose in the wake of the 1960s battles over France’s then-restrictive speech laws, did outré political satire better than just about anyone, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman said.
  • When it reprinted the Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad in 2006, “they were the only magazine to do it for absolutely the right reasons,” Mr. Spiegelman said. “The others that published the cartoons were baiting Muslims, but for them it was part of their self-perceived mission to be provocative, to provoke thought.”
  • But not everyone in the comics world has taken such an admiring view. Mr. Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter said that when he posted some of what he called Charlie Hebdo’s “ugly, racist” covers in a show of solidarity on Wednesday, he got a number of emails from cartoonists challenging the decision.
  • “Some people questioned such work as simply cruelty hiding behind the idea of free speech,” Mr. Spurgeon said.
  • “In the face of a really horrible attack on free speech, it’s important that we don’t blindly disseminate super-racist material,” he said in an interview, referring to some colleagues’ decisions to repost some of Charlie Hebdo’s particularly extreme cartoons.
Javier E

Airbnb CEO: Cities Are Becoming Villages - Uri Friedman - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373676

cities urbanism village community trust

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • trust, mediated by technology, is making a comeback, along with the paradigm of the village. It's what's motivating millions of people in tens of thousands of cities around the world to book lodging with semi-screened strangers through his service. Choose your buzzword: the sharing economy, the peer-to-peer economy, the trust economy. Whatever you call it, it's what's propelled not just Airbnb, but also new car services like Uber and Lyft and labor services like TaskRabbit.
  • the Internet moving into your neighborhood," Chesky said. "And what it really means is that people, for the first time, can become micro-entrepreneurs. They can actually build a reputation, and they can offer goods and services."
  • "At the most macro level, I think we're going to go back to the village, and cities will become communities again," he added. "I'm not saying they're not communities now, but I think that we'll have this real sensibility and everything will be small. You're not going to have big chain restaurants. We're starting to see farmers' markets, and small restaurants, and food trucks. But pretty soon, restaurants will be in people's living rooms."
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  • the United Nations predicts that two-thirds of the global population will be urban-dwellers by 2050.
  • In 2011, there were 23 "megacities" of at least 10 million people around the world. By 2050, there will be 37.
katyshannon

Growing scale of Cologne attacks stokes German debate on migrants | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...tigation-idUSKCN0UO0G920160110

growing scale cologne attacks german debate immigration crisis culture policy

shared by katyshannon on 11 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Attacks on women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year's Eve have prompted more than 600 criminal complaints, with police suspicion resting on asylum seekers, putting pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open door migrant policy.
  • The attacks, mostly targeting women and ranging from theft to sexual molestation, have prompted a highly-charged debate in Germany about its welcoming stance for refugees and migrants, more than one million of whom arrived last year.
  • The sudden nature of the violent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Hamburg to Frankfurt prompted Germany's justice minister Heiko Maas to speculate in a newspaper that they had been planned or coordinated.
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  • Merkel's popularity has dwindled as she refused to place a limit on the influx of refugees.
  • In Cologne, police said on Sunday that 516 criminal complaints had been filed by individuals or groups in relation to assaults on New Year's Eve, while police in Hamburg said 133 similar charges had been lodged with the north German city.
  • Frankfurt also registered complaints, although far fewer.
  • The investigation in Cologne is focused largely on asylum seekers or illegal migrants from north Africa, police said. They arrested one 19-year-old Moroccan man on Saturday evening.
  • In Cologne, where a 100-strong force of officers continued their investigations, around 40 percent of the complaints included sexual offences, including two rapes.
  • The attacks, which prompted violent far-right protests on Saturday, threatens to further erode confidence in Merkel, and could stoke support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of three key state elections in March.
  • The debate on migration will be further fueled by the acknowledgement by the authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia that a man shot dead as he tried to enter a Paris police station last week was an asylum seeker with seven identities who lived in Germany.
  • A survey sponsored by state broadcaster ARD showed that while 75 percent of those asked were very happy with Merkel's work in April last year, only 58 percent were pleased now.
  • Almost three quarters of those polled said migration was the most important issue for the government to deal with in 2016.
  • The Cologne attacks also heated up the debate on immigration in neighboring Austria.
  • There had been a handful of similar incidents in the border city of Salzburg. "Such offenders should be deported," she said, backing a similar suggestion by Merkel.
  • Swiss media contained numerous stories about sexual assaults on women by foreigners, fuelling tensions ahead of a referendum next month that would trigger the automatic deportation of foreigners convicted of some crimes.
  • The anti-Islam PEGIDA, whose supporters threw bottles and fire crackers at a march in Cologne on Saturday before being dispersed by riot police, will later hold a rally in the eastern German city of Leipzig.
  • The far-right will likely seize on reports that the Paris attacker, who was shot last week as he wielded a meat cleaver and shouted "Allahu akbar" (God is Greatest), was known to police for drug dealing and harassing women.
  • He had an apartment in an accommodation center for asylum seekers in Recklinghausen, north of Cologne, where he had painted the symbol of Islamic state on the wall of two rooms.
alexdeltufo

In Search of American Fascism - The New York Times - 0 views

douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-search-of-american-fascism

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • he is more fascistic, at least, than most of the populist candidates (Wallace, Perot, Buchanan) to whom he’s reasonably been compared.
  • genuine-article fascism, it seems worth digging a little bit into the ways in which Trump doesn’t deserve the fascist label,
  • hich riffed on Umberto Eco’s famous essay laying out various hallmarks of the fascist style. As Bouie noted
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution
  • his revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages
  • founding boast that ours is a novus ordo seclorum, and assumes that any pre-18th century wisdom cannot fully match the glories of our brave new republican experiment.
  • incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically,
  • … If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know
  • However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface
  • In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
  • But that’s a digression: My main purpose in quoting Eco is to point out how poorly these two descriptions fit Trump,
  • But then, of course, these two descriptions make a poor fit for nearly every American political tradition,
  • Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”;
  • Whether or not a conservative tradition is possible in this landscape, a traditionalist tradition does seem well-nigh-impossible.
  • but then the South’s Protestant/agrarian/localist distinctives cut against fascism in all sorts of other ways.)
  • Nor does a mere politics of nostalgia, of the kind that both right and left can manifest, really resemble the kind of traditionalism
  • But what he’s nostalgic for is not some sort of deep, pre-modern antiquity or a pre-1789 ancien regime.
  • co himself might say yes, since his essay suggests that just one hallmark of fascism in a political movement or culture suffices “to allow fascism to coagulate around it,”
  • And if we want to actually place fascism somewhere on the political spectrum,
  • contretemps this was one of the assumptions held by a number of Jonah Goldberg’s critics, and one of the major claims lodged against his thesis
  • This argument wasn’t completely persuasive: As Goldberg countered — and as Eco’s line about Saint Augustine and Stonehenge suggests
  • was a bastion of a certain kind of syncretistic traditionalism.)
  • American conservatism as well. If fascism is ultimately defined by a cult of tradition, t
  • Which means in turn that whether the figure being accused of fascist tendencies is Woodrow Wilson or Donald Trump, t
  • approaching and approaching and approaching, but because of our shared American-ness, never quite getting all the way.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Ross Douthat 
proudsa

UN: World's Refugees And Displaced To Exceed 60 Million This Year - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...risis_5673c581e4b0b958f6562ecd

shared by proudsa on 18 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide is likely to have "far surpassed" a record 60 million this year, mainly driven by the Syrian war and other protracted conflicts, the United Nations said on Friday.
  • Nearly 2.5 million asylum seekers have requests pending, with Germany, Russia and the United States receiving the highest numbers of the nearly one million new claims lodged in the first half of the year, it said.
  • Developing countries bordering conflict zones still host the lion's share of the refugees, the report said, warning about growing "resentment" and "politicization of refugees."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Syria's civil war that began in 2011 has been the main driver of mass displacement, with more than 4.2 million Syrian refugees having fled abroad and 7.6 million uprooted within their shattered homeland as of mid-year, UNHCR said.
  • Many refugees will live in exile for years to come, it said. "In effect, if you become a refugee today your chances of going home are lower than at any time in more than 30 years."
sgardner35

Video released of deadly Chicago police shooting - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

chicago police shooting

shared by sgardner35 on 17 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • On Thursday, a judge released video of the deadly shooting. In its wake, a group of activists who have organized previous protests over shootings called for more on Friday.
  • The police department fired Davis, he said, after he ruled Officer Kevin Fry's shooting of 17-year-old Chatman, who was unarmed, unjustified. But he had been at odds with the department over the internal assessment of police use of force for a while.
  • "I pay most attention to Officer Fry. Mr. Chatman is simply trying to get away. He's running as fast as he can away from the officers. Officer (Lou) Toth is right behind him; he's doing the right thing. He's pursuing him. He's trying to capture him, while Officer Fry, on the other hand, has both of his hands on his weapon. He is in a shooter's position. He is looking for a clear shot."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • After Davis' firing, a new investigator was assigned, who ruled the shooting justifiable, and police accounts given after Chatman died told a story that differed in important points from Davis' assessment
  • He runs across the street and squeezes between two parked cars as Fry's partner, Officer Lou Toth, gives chase. Chatman then hits an all-out sprint along the sidewalk toward an intersection. Toth sprints behind him.Fry draws his handgun in the middle of the street, plants his feet near the intersection in a firing stance as Chatman appears to still be running away. Chatman is out of camera shot at the time, and it does not reveal his moves.
  • In ordering the videos' release, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Gettleman indicated Fry might have put his partner's life in danger, saying Toth was running so close to the teen when shots rang out "you might say he was in the line of fire."
  • He has had 30 complaints lodged against him over the years, including 10 allegations of excessive use of force. The police department found every complaint against him to be unwarranted.In one case in 2007, Fry and a partner shot a 16-year-old black male in a school alcove after seeing a shiny object around his waist and fearing for their lives. The object wasn't a weapon but a "shiny belt buckle," according to an independent investigation of the shooting.
  • Both were about 10 blocks away at the time of the shooting. The law in Illinois allows for anyone who sets in motion a chain of events that results in the death of another individual to be charged with murder.
  • Outrage over police shootings have rumbled through Chicago since the November release of the fatal police shooting video of Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times. Attorney's for his family accused police of threatening witnesses and falsifying their accounts.Chicago Alderman Anthony Beale has criticized investigations into police violence as being flawed."For years we've had a systemic problem with the police officers protecting one another. And that's why you have such distrust in the community," he told CNN's Don Lemo
  • n.But he also sees police as an essential part of the community and wa
  • s worried that they might feel intimidated by the scrutiny.
  • Judge Gettleman scolded the city and mayor's office, saying it was "irresponsible" to waste taxpayers' money and the court's time with its previous opposition. "I'm very disturbed at the way this happened," he said. "This should not have happened the way it did."He blasted city attorneys for the December motion in which they stated it was not clear from the videos who fired at Chatman. Gettlemen said that wasn't true: "It's clear to me who fired the shots."
johnsonma23

Amnesty is not immigration reform - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...78943240

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Voting rights advocates observe somber King holiday
  • While most of the country will spend the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday remembering the peaceful nature and civil rights successes lodged by the late leader, voting rights advocates say this is a dark time for them.
  • Many might spend Monday reflecting on King's 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march to push for voting equality for black Americans,
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • voting rights advocates note that there has been a major setback in their world.
  • Also, 33 states now have Voter ID laws in place with increased identification requirements for people seeking to cast ballots
  • controversial one for civil rights advocates, who maintain that some groups of Americans, including older people and minorities, are less likely to have the sort of identification that would be required.
  • acts of civil disobedience and even a mid-April march from
  • What many view as the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has prompted civil rights advocates to take action. A coalition of 100 organizations including the NAACP will stage a string of protests
  • “I anticipate arrests, in and outside the Capitol,” Brooks said. “Congress allowing the Voting Rights Act to be gutted has disrupted our democracy … so our democracy should get back to functioning as it should.”
  • Rights that had appeared to be resolved as matters of controversy in American politics are unfortunately once again up for grabs. It’s hard to imagine what’s more American than insuring the right to vote for all Americans, and what could be more un-American than impeding it?”
  • "We are making it very clear that we're protecting the right to vote, insuring the integrity of the right to vote and getting out the vote. This is not all of us registering people to vote and waiting for November with polite patience."
  • Citizen Cruz: Our view
  • Legal case against the Canadian-born senator's eligibility is weak, but not non-existent.
  • The most boisterous exchange in Thursday night's Republican debate was not over terrorism, guns or the economy. It was over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s eligibility under the Constitution
  • to run for president because
  • “Democrats are going to be bringing a suit,” Trump predicted, adding, “There’s a big question mark on your head.”
  • the chances of any litigation proceeding and succeeding on this are zero.”
  • Cruz is as American as anybody born on U.S. soil.  And Trump, by suggesting that the Constitution’s “natural born” citizen clause could actually keep Cruz out of the White House, is trying to eliminate an oppone
  • the founders wrote that only "a natural born citizen" is eligible to be president. They  did not define the phrase further.
  • Cruz was born in Canada, but there is no doubt that he is an American citizen because his mother was a U.S. citizen.
  • 1787, the founders feared that some foreign-born interloper, perhaps from England, might come to the USA and seek the presidency for nefarious reasons
  • candidacies of others have been challenged on this point. Former Michigan governor George Romney, who was born in Mexico to two American parents and ran for the 1968 GOP nomination, was threatened with legal action before he dropped out for other reasons.
  • The overwhelming weight of legal scholarship is on Cruz’s side. Many scholars assert that an infant born to an American parent, regardless of location, acquires citizenship “at birth” and therefore passes the “natural born” test
  • They argue that the meaning of “natural born” should be viewed in the context of the 1700s, when where you were born was the controlling factor.
  • In 2008, a bipartisan Senate resolution was passed by unanimous consent, asserting that McCain was indeed a “natural born” citizen
  • If the problem can't be fixed legislatively, a constitutional amendment would be necessary. Those are hard to pass, as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, discovered after he introduced one in 2003 that would have allowed anyone who has been a citizen for 20 years, and is otherwise eligible, to become presiden
  • Amnesty is not immigration reform: Opposing view
  • There have been several legislative attempts to overhaul U.S. immigration policy over the past decade. All of them failed
  • how immigration affects the economic, social and national security interests of the American people — was, at best, an afterthought.
  • Immigration has taken center stage in the 2016 campaign because many Americans have come to recognize that it is a policy without any definable public interest objective
  • Granting amnesty — euphemistically called “a pathway to citizenship” — is not immigration reform
  • institutionalizes the government’s failure to protect the interests of the American people, and encourages still more illegal immigration.
  • amnesty benefits illegal aliens, it does not promote any public interest. Nearly half of all adult illegal aliens have not completed high schoo
  • high-productivity, high-earning workers. What it will do, over time, is make them eligible to add to the 51% of immigrant-headed households in the U.S. that rely on some form of welfare.
  • Amnesty would also exacerbate the already alarming erosion of America’s middle class, as former illegal aliens would be eligible to compete legally for all U.S. jobs and petition for millions more similarly skilled relatives to join them here.
  • The American people are seeking a new direction in the long simmering debate over immigration.
Javier E

Opinion | Down and Out in San Francisco, on $117,000 a Year - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...isco-housing-homelessness.html

San Francisco lodging housing cost of living crisis

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • It’s beyond laughable that a one-bedroom apartment can sell for $1.5 million in San Francisco — and get multiple offers within a day. Or that dumpsters sport satirical “for rent” signs. Or that the asking price for a side order of brussels sprouts at many restaurants is $16.
  • A family of four earning $117,000 a year is now classified as low income in the San Francisco area. This threshold, used to determine eligibility for federal housing assistance, is the highest in the nation
  • now the entire West Coast, from San Diego to Vancouver, British Columbia, is a string of gilded megalopolises. These are the tomorrow cities, the tech cities, the cities of the young and educated. And each of them is struggling with a prosperity crisis that threatens the very nature of living there.
Javier E

Today's Voter Suppression Tactics Have A 150 Year History - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...actics-have-a-150-year-history

vote suppression history gop Politics democracy

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • The tools that broke American democracy were not just the Ku Klux Klan’s white sheets, vigilantes’ Red Shirts, and lynch mobs’ nooses; they were devices we still encounter when we vote today: the registration roll and the secret, official ballot.
  • Along with exclusions of felons and permanent resident aliens, these methods swept the entire United States in the late 19th century, reducing nationwide voter participation from about 80 percent to below 50 percent by the 1920s.
  • turnout in the United States has never recovered; by one 2018 survey, the country ranks 26th of 32 developed democracies in participation.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • Once the war came, hundreds of thousands of Irish and German immigrants enlisted in the U.S. Army. For a time this flood of foreign-born soldiers swept nativism away. In the years after the Civil War, 12 states explicitly enfranchised immigrant aliens who had declared their intention to become naturalized but had not yet been made citizens. Voting by non-citizens who planned to become naturalized was “widely practiced and not extraordinarily controversial” in this period, political scientist Ron Hayduk argues.
  • In the early 1800s, as organized political parties began to fight over issues like banking and infrastructure, that changed; turnout rose to 70 percent in local and state elections. Still, presidential polls remained dull and ill-attended. That changed in Jackson’s second run for the presidency in 1828. Heated debates and even-hotter tempers attracted men to the polls
  • Democracy for white men did not, however, spill over to democracy for everyone; in this same period several states rolled back laws that permitted free black men to vote.
  • For white men, the United States became a democracy by degrees, not by design, and it showed in the chaotic voting systems
  • While colonial Americans cast beans, peas, and corn into containers or called their vote aloud, in the 1800s most men either wrote the candidate’s name on a blank sheet of paper or turned in a ballot helpfully printed for them by the local political party or newspaper. Outside of Massachusetts, almost no one registered to vote
  • Today, the ubiquity of voter registration blinds us to its impact. It is a price we all pay for voting and so no longer think of as a price at all. But nineteenth-century Americans understood the costs. Registering in person months before the election minimized the chance of fraud but doubled the difficulty of voting and the possibility of interference
  • Alexander Keyssar’s excellent history of voting called the 1850s a period of “narrowing of voting rights and a mushrooming upper- and middle-class antagonism to universal suffrage.”
  • the flood of 200,000 black men into the U.S. Army and Navy inspired them — and others — to claim the vote as their due. “If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel armies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting against rebel citizens at the ballot-box?
  • Another way to bar African-American men was to expand the number of disfranchising crimes. Cuffie Washington, an African American man in Ocala, Florida, learned this when election officials turned him away in 1880 because he had been convicted of stealing three oranges. Other black men were barred for theft of a gold button, a hog, or six fish. “It was a pretty general thing to convict colored men in the precinct just before an election,” one of the alleged hog thieves said.
  • By the fall of 1867, more than 80 percent of eligible African-American men had registered. During the subsequent elections, at least 75 percent of black men turned out to vote in five Southern states. Democracy has a long history, but almost nothing to match this story.
  • Smalls and his compatriots tore down racial barriers; established public school systems, hospitals, orphanages, and asylums; revised tenancy laws; and tried (sometimes disastrously) to promote railroad construction to modernize the economy. Reconstruction governments also provided crucial votes to ratify the 14th Amendment, which is still the foundation of birthright citizenship, school desegregation, protection against state limits on speech or assembly, and the right to gay marriage.
  • , South Carolina, the counter-revolution was brewing in the upcountry by summer 1868. Ku Klux Klans and other vigilantes there assassinated Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a wartime chaplain, constitutional convention member, and newly elected state senator, as well as three other African-American Republican leaders. Nevertheless black South Carolinians turned out in force, carried the 1868 election, and helped elect Ulysses S. Grant president.
  • In his March 4, 1869 inaugural, Grant called on states to settle the question of suffrage in a new 15th Amendment. Anti-slavery icon Frederick Douglass said the amendment’s meaning was plain. “We are placed upon an equal footing with all other men.” But the 15th Amendment did not actually resolve the question of who could vote or establish any actual right to vote. It merely prohibited states from excluding voters based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its own language acknowledged that states could legitimately strip the vote away for other reasons
  • proposed prohibitions on literacy, education, property, or religious tests died at the hands of northeastern and western Republicans who feared expanding the power of Irish and Chinese immigrants.
  • Nor did the 15th Amendment protect voters against terrorism. As Smalls and other African-American Republicans gained seats in Congress, they and their white allies tried to defend black voting through a series of enforcement acts that permitted the federal government to regulate registration and punish local officials for discrimination. But the Supreme Court soon undercut those laws
  • Without hope of victory, federal prosecutions for voting crimes fell by 90 percent after 1873.
  • Keeping African-American people away on election day was difficult, and potentially bad publicity, so white Democrats over the 1870s and 1880s passed registration laws and poll taxes, and shifted precinct locations to prevent black people from coming to the polls at all. In 1882, the South Carolina legislature required all voters to register again, making the registrar, as one African-American political leader said, “the emperor of suffrage.
  • To disfranchise rural laborers, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and other Southern states doubled residency requirements.
  • Using data painstakingly compiled by Philip Lampi, historians have discovered that somewhere between half and three-quarters of adult white males were eligible to vote before the Revolution; by 1812, almost the entire adult white male population could cast a ballot.
  • By the 1880s, this so-called “kangaroo voting” seemed the solution to every political problem. Reformer Henry George and Knights of Labor leaders hoped the Australian ballot would free workingmen from intimidation, while reformers in Boston and New York hoped it might eliminate fraud and make it difficult for illiterate men to fill out ballots.
  • Massachusetts leapt first in 1889, and by the 1892 election a majority of states had passed the bill. In Massachusetts, turnout dropped from 54.57 to 40.69 percent; in Vermont from 69.11 to 53.02. One statistical survey estimated that voter turnout dropped by an average of 8.2 percent. The Australian ballot’s “tendency is to gradual disfranchisement,” the New York Sun complained.
  • by stripping political parties’ names from the ballot, the reform made it difficult for illiterate voters, still a sizable portion of the electorate in the late 19th century. But even more profoundly, the effort to eliminate “fraud” turned election day from a riotous festival to a snooze. Over time many people stayed home
  • In New York, voter participation fell from nearly 90 percent in the 1880s to 57 percent by 1920
  • The 1888 election was almost a very different turning point for voting rights. As Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and White House for the first time in a decade, they tried to bolster their party by establishing federal control of congressional elections so they could protect African-American voting rights in the south (and, Democrats charged, block immigrant voting in northern cities). The bill’s dual purposes were embodied in its manager, anti-immigrant, pro-black suffrage Massachusetts Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge. Although the bill passed the House, it died in a Senate filibuster. Democrats swept the House in the fall 1890 elections and soon repealed many of the remaining voting rights provisions.
  • African-American registration in Mississippi soon fell from 190,000 to 9,000; overall voter participation dropped from 70 percent in the 1870s to 50 percent in the 1880s to 15 percent by the early 1900
  • “We have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods,” Alabama’s convention chairman said in 1901, “but in the future we’ll disfranchise them by law.”
  • These laws and constitutional provisions devastated voting in the South. When Tennessee passed a secret ballot law in 1889, turnout fell immediately from 78 percent to 50 percent; Virginia’s overall turnout dropped by 50 percent. For African-American voters, of course, the impact was even more staggering. In Louisiana black registration fell from 130,000 to 1,342. By 1910 only four percent of black Georgia men were registered.
  • Poll taxes, intimidation, fraud, and grandfather clauses all played their part, but the enduring tools of registration and the Australian ballot worked their grim magic, too, and made voters disappear.
  • In the landmark case Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts turned the disfranchisement of the 1890s into a racial and regional exception, one that had since been overwhelmed by the national tide of democracy. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
  • This is part of what political scientist Alexander Keyssar critically called the “progressive presumption” that there is an “inexorable march toward universal suffrage” interrupted only by anomalous, even un-American, regional and racial detours.
  • But the tools that disfranchised Jackson Giles were not all Southern and not only directed at African-American men. When the United States conquered Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it imposed the Australian ballot there, too.
  • in 1903, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Massachusetts native, denied Giles’ appeal on the grounds that the court could not intervene in political questions. If citizens like Giles suffered a “great political wrong,” Holmes intoned, they could only look for help from the same political system that had just disfranchised them
  • The great writer Charles Chesnutt wrote that “In spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States are bound to respect.” It was a “second Dred Scott decision,” white and black activists lamented.
Javier E

Facebook's Push for Facial Recognition Prompts Privacy Alarms - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acial-recognition-privacy.html

fb face recognition surveillance privacy culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Facial recognition works by scanning faces of unnamed people in photos or videos and then matching codes of their facial patterns to those in a database of named people. Facebook has said that users are in charge of that process, telling them: “You control face recognition.
  • But critics said people cannot actually control the technology — because Facebook scans their faces in photos even when their facial recognition setting is turned off.
  • Rochelle Nadhiri, a Facebook spokeswoman, said its system analyzes faces in users’ photos to check whether they match with those who have their facial recognition setting turned on. If the system cannot find a match, she said, it does not identify the unknown face and immediately deletes the facial data
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In the European Union, a tough new data protection law called the General Data Protection Regulation now requires companies to obtain explicit and “freely given” consent before collecting sensitive information like facial data. Some critics, including the former government official who originally proposed the new law, contend that Facebook tried to improperly influence user consent by promoting facial recognition as an identity protection tool.
  • People could turn it off. But privacy experts said Facebook had neither obtained users’ opt-in consent for the technology nor explicitly informed them that the company could benefit from scanning their photos
  • Separately, privacy and consumer groups lodged a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in April saying Facebook added facial recognition services, like the feature to help identify impersonators, without obtaining prior consent from people before turning it on. The groups argued that Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree that prohibits it from deceptive privacy practices
  • Critics said Facebook took an early lead in consumer facial recognition services partly by turning on the technology as the default option for users. In 2010, it introduced a photo-labeling feature called Tag Suggestions that used face-matching software to suggest the names of people in users’ photos.
  • “Facebook is somehow threatening me that, if I do not buy into face recognition, I will be in danger,” said Viviane Reding, the former justice commissioner of the European Commission who is now a member of the European Parliament. “It goes completely against the European law because it tries to manipulate consent.”
  • “When Tag Suggestions asks you ‘Is this Jill?’ you don’t think you are annotating faces to improve Facebook’s face recognition algorithm,” said Brian Brackeen, the chief executive of Kairos, a facial recognition company. “Even the premise is an unfair use of people’s time and labor.”
  • The huge trove of identified faces, he added, enabled Facebook to quickly develop one of the world’s most powerful commercial facial recognition engines. In 2014, Facebook researchers said they had trained face-matching software “on the largest facial dataset to date, an identity labeled dataset of four million facial images.”
  • Facebook may only be getting started with its facial recognition services. The social network has applied for various patents, many of them still under consideration, which show how it could use the technology to track its online users in the real world.
  • One patent application, published last November, described a system that could detect consumers within stores and match those shoppers’ faces with their social networking profiles. Then it could analyze the characteristics of their friends, and other details, using the information to determine a “trust level” for each shopper. Consumers deemed “trustworthy” could be eligible for special treatment, like automatic access to merchandise in locked display cases, the document said.
  • Another Facebook patent filing described how cameras near checkout counters could capture shoppers’ faces, match them with their social networking profiles and then send purchase confirmation messages to their phones
  • But legal filings in the class-action suit hint at the technology’s importance to Facebook’s business.
  • If the suit were to move forward, Facebook’s lawyers argued in a recent court document, “the reputational and economic costs to Facebook will be irreparable.”
runlai_jiang

At 12 She Joined the Kurdish Militia-Seven Years Later She's Had Enough - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-and-their-families-1520418700

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Four years ago, she joined the war against Islamic State—part of a Kurdish militia allied with the U.S. She has been wounded twice and has shrapnel lodged in her head. During the battle for Raqqa last year, she braved land mines near the front lines. Now, Ms. Ali is done fighting. “I’m tired,” she says, curled up on a sofa in her parents’ home in northeastern Syria, intently chipping away at her pink fingernail polish.
  • Ms. Ali’s mother, Ahin Ali, winces at the details. “It hurts a lot, that she witnessed all this pain,” she said. But even as she mourns the cost to her daughter, she doesn’t regret the sacrifice she made in allowing her to figh
  • Amid the chaos of the war, the Kurds have been fighting for self-rule in Syria. But their aspirations are increasingly under threat. Turkey is determined to reverse Kurdish gains and the U.S., which armed the Kurds’ YPG militia for years so it could fight Islamic State, hasn’t come to the group’s defense.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • A portrait of Abdullah Ocalan —the jailed leader of the PKK Kurdish separatist  movement in neighboring Turkey and founder of its many affiliates, including what evolved into the YPG—hangs in the family’s living room.
  • At first her father, who had been arrested several times by the Syrian government because of his membership in a Kurdish political party, resisted because of her age. But her mother knew she couldn’t stop her daughter from joining a cause they had trumpeted all her life.
  • As the Syrian conflict began to encroach on a corner of the country spared early in the war, the teenager traveled to a training camp in Iraq’s remote Qandil Mountains. Soon Islamic State began seizing large parts of Syria, including some Kurdish areas, and she headed to the war’s front lines.
  • In the years she was away, Ms. Ali only wrote three letters, sending them home via a modern day pony express by pick-up truck rather than horseback. Her mother keeps them carefully folded up in a leather wallet. One she wrote before participating in battle for the first time. The other is a poem of yearning:
manhefnawi

John II | king of France | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...John-II-king-of-France

Prisoner of King Edward III England and conflict with Charles II Navarre

shared by manhefnawi on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers on Sept. 19, 1356, he was forced to sign the disastrous treaties of 1360 during the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between France and England.
  • John continued a truce with the English until later that year
  • By March 1351 King Edward III of England realized the impossibility of remaining at peace; but John committed the first act of hostility
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • John signed a new truce with England on Sept. 12, 1351, but broke it by supporting the partisans of Charles of Blois (a pretender to Brittany, then held prisoner by Edward)
  • John’s other bitter enemy was Charles II the Bad, king of Navarre, to whom John gave his daughter Joan as an offer of alliance; the enmity still remained strong
  • John further irritated Charles by giving the new constable of France, Charles de La Cerda, lands that were claimed by Charles of Navarre.
  • Charles desired an alliance with Edward, which so frightened John that he made another peace with Charles on Sept. 10, 1355.
  • John took his revenge on Charles by having him imprisoned
  • Edward’s son Edward, prince of Wales (later called the Black Prince), attacked southern France. Unable to halt the English invasions because he lacked funds, John gathered the States General to seek money and to impose an unpopular salt tax.
  • The French army was decimated, and John was taken prisoner.
  • John was taken to London in April 1357, where he was lodged in the Savoy palace; there he concluded treaties (January 1358 and March 1359) so harsh that they were repudiated in France.
  • fixed John’s ransom at 3,000,000 gold écus and surrendered most of southwestern France to Edward. On Oct. 9, 1360, John was released to raise a ransom that France could not afford to pay, and hostages were accepted in his place. When one of the hostages (John’s own son) escaped, John, feeling dishonoured, returned to England on his own volition as a prisoner.
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