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Javier E

'The Blood Telegram,' by Gary J. Bass - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-telegram-by-gary-j-bass.html

india pakistan bangladesh foreign policy Cold War kissinger

shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Things came to a head in December 1970, when Sheik Mujib-ur-­Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali leader, and his party, the Awami League, won the elections on the promise of autonomy for East Pakistan.
  • Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, egged on by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the second-place finisher, arrested Rahman and ordered the army to crush the Bengalis. Dominated by Punjabis, the army moved brutally, shooting and detaining Bengali leaders, intellectuals and anyone who opposed them.
  • Yahya, its military leader, became Nixon’s secret liaison with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Yahya helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon. It’s hard to overstate just how earth-changing Nixon and Kissinger regarded their trips to China — and how important they thought they were for bringing them about.
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  • Bass has unearthed a series of conversations, most of them from the White House’s secret tapes, that reveal Nixon and Kissinger as breathtakingly vulgar and hateful, especially in their attitudes toward the Indians, whom they regarded as repulsive, shifty and, anyway, pro-Soviet — and especially in their opinion of Indira Gandhi. “The old bitch,” Nixon called her. “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country but they do,” he said.
  • The men in the White House, however, not only refused to condemn Yahya — in public or private — but they also declined to withhold American arms, ammunition and spare parts that kept Pakistan’s military machine humming. Indeed, Nixon regarded the dictator with genuine affection. “I understand the anguish you must have felt in making the difficult decisions you have faced,” he told Yahya.
  • this meant that Yahya — a vain, shallow mediocrity — was suddenly considered indispensable, free to do whatever he wished in East Pakistan. With the White House averting its eyes, the largely Muslim Pakistani Army killed at least 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus, and forced 10 million to flee to India
  • what is most telling is what they reveal about Nixon’s and Kissinger’s strategic intelligence. At every step of the crisis, the two men appear to have been driven as much by their loathing of India — West Pakistan’s rival — as by any cool calculations of power
  • By failing to restrain West Pakistan, they allowed a blood bath to unfold, and then a regional war, which began when Gandhi finally decided that the only way to stop the tide of refugees was to stop the killing across the border. That, in turn, prompted West Pakistan to attack India.
  • the recklessness of Nixon and Kissinger only got worse. They dispatched ships from the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, and even encouraged China to move troops to the Indian border, possibly for an attack — a maneuver that could have provoked the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the leaders of the two Communist countries proved more sober than those in the White House. The war ended quickly, when India crushed the Pakistani Army and East Pakistan declared independence.
Javier E

Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-roused-by-secession-call.html

libertarian utopianism tech silicon valley secession

shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • a speech this month by a Stanford University lecturer and entrepreneur named Balaji S. Srinivasan. The speech gained attention in technology circles. But it deserves a wider audience, because it was an unusually honest articulation of ideas that are common among members of a digital overclass whose decisions shape ever more of our lives.
  • told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become “the Microsoft of nations”: outdated and obsolescent. When technology companies calcify, Mr. Srinivasan said, you don’t reform them. You exit and launch your own. Why not do so with America?
  • In practice, this vision calls for building actual communities that would be beyond the reach of the state that Silicon Valley’s libertarians despise. But in the near term, Mr. Srinivasan noted, there are piecemeal ways to opt out of the society — like spending unregulated digital currency, sleeping in unregulated hotels and manufacturing unregulated guns. What Mr. Srinivasan called “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” he explained, “basically means build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” said the speech was part of “a resurgence of millenarian thinking in Silicon Valley.” The dream of an extra-societal utopia grows in part out of a “naïve libertarianism” ascendant in the Valley, and in part out of older American cultist traditions dating as far back as the Pilgrims, he said.
  • Mr. Srinivasan cast entrepreneurs as a persecuted people who must flee to survive. The Valley, he argued, is taking over the rest of America’s traditional raisons d’être. Netflix and iTunes challenge Hollywood. Twitter and blogs challenge New York media. The Khan Academy and Coursera challenge Boston’s universities. Uber and Airbnb challenge the regulatory state personified by Washington.
  • His proposed solution is seceding from the society before the “backlash” against the Valley grows.
  • Some of the biggest names in the Valley have variously proposed building a Mars colony, an unregulated zone of experimentation on Earth or floating libertarian islands at sea.
  • “The best part is this,” he said. “The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t follow you out there.”
Javier E

Saigon's Fall Still Echoes Today - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-still-echoes-today-1430348832

vietnam lessons war politics propaganda

shared by Javier E on 04 May 15 - No Cached
  • the two most decisive factors in the outcome of the war were incompetent micromanagement by PresidentLyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
  • and Hanoi’s brilliant propaganda campaign, which fueled a gullible—and often disingenuous—global peace movement. Protesters, as angry as they were misinformed, ultimately persuaded Congress in May 1973 to prohibit spending on further U.S. combat operations in Indochina.
  • As Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2005, “Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.”
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  • Perhaps the cruelest myth was that—in the long-ago words of the current U.S. secretary of state while addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971—U.S. military personnel in Vietnam were regularly committing “war crimes” and behaving in a “fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”
  • a brilliant psychological warfare campaign by this country’s enemies misinformed and divided the American people, with tragic consequences—a reflexive hostility, in many quarters, to the use of U.S. military power anywhere in the world—that still weaken the nation today.
  • Congress ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory
  • By resisting Communist insurgencies in the region the U.S. bought time for vulnerable targets such as Thailand and Indonesia to become stronger
  • the real tragedy is that on almost every major point of contention war protesters got the facts wrong. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a nationalist who would likely be a buffer against Chinese expansion if we supported him. This ignored Hanoi’s official biographies, which acknowledged Ho’s role as a co-founder of the French Communist Party in 1920, his subsequent training in Moscow, followed by years traveling the world on behalf of the Communist International.
  • we would do well to clear away the myths that still adhere to that bloody conflict and understand why America got involved, what went wrong and what the consequences were.
  • We went to war because by ratifying the United Nations Charter in 1945 and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (Seato) treaty a decade later, the U.S. pledged to oppose armed international aggression
Javier E

Amazon.com: Worlds of History, Volume Two: Since 1400: A Comparative Reader (9780312549886): Kevin Reilly: Books - 0 views

www.amazon.com/...pe_113430_18859900_pd_re_dt_t5

history world sources

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • excellent selection of useful primary sources from all eras and regions. Some are classics like the Code of Hammurabi. Others are unusual and interesting like descriptions of the court of Genghis Khan or eyewitness accounts of what Tenochtitlan (future Mexico City)looked like when the Spanish first arrived.
Maria Delzi

Afghanistan's Worsening, and Baffling, Hunger Crisis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-baffling-hunger-crisis.html

shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Nonetheless, the numbers are still worrisome. Dr. Mohammad Dawood, a pediatrician at Bost Hospital, said there were seven or eight deaths a month there because of acute malnutrition from June through August, and five in September. Doctors around the country have reported similar rates.
  • In January 2012, for instance, Unicef and the Afghan government’s Central Statistics Organization released a survey of more than 13,000 households showing that some provinces had reached or exceeded emergency levels, with more than 10 percent acute severe child malnutrition.
  • While acute malnutrition can be fatal, chronic malnutrition can cause multiple health and developmental problems.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Unlike malnutrition crises elsewhere in the world, this one has not been connected to specific food shortages or crop failures. In addition, parents are not showing up malnourished, even when their children are.
  • His colleague Dr. Khan blamed another problem. “The main cause of malnutrition in Afghanistan is lack of breast feeding,” he said. “They see beautiful pictures of milk cartons, and they think it’s better.”
  • In addition, where women commonly have many children, often with less than a year between them, it is difficult for mothers to provide enough nourishment, by breast or bottle. Ahmed Wali, the 2-year-old Bost Hospital patient with kwashiorkor, is the ninth of 10 children of his mother, Baka Bebi, who is in her mid-30s. She weaned him onto powdered milk mixed with stream water as soon as she could.
  • Poverty is another factor. In Afghanistan, the poverty line is defined as a total income sufficient to provide 2,100 calories a day to each family member. Some 36 percent of Afghans are below that threshold, according to the Health Ministry.
  • In 2013, Unicef raised its target for providing therapeutic foods to severe acutely malnourished Afghan children, to 52,144 from 35,181. Therapeutic foods are specially made for the severely malnourished, who have difficulty digesting normal food.
  • “Managing a feeding system is difficult; there is a long way for Afghanistan to go,” he added. “But even countries like Sri Lanka, with an outstanding health system, are still struggling to manage therapeutic feeding supplies.”
  • Cases of acute severe malnutrition are running at more than 100 a month, including five to 10 deaths, at Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, and such cases have doubled since 2012, said Dr. Aqa Mohammad Shirzad, who is in charge of pediatric malnutrition programs there.
  • Each of the hospital’s 17 beds for severely malnourished patients has at least two patients, and some have three. The malnutrition intensive care ward there has an incubator that does not work, one suction pump and oxygen bottles, for respiratory masks, propped up without stands or proper connection
  • A 5-year-old boy who weighs less than 20 pounds was being treated recently on a bench because the infusion line would not stretch to a bed. Two window panes nearby were missing glass.
lenaurick

This video shows what ancient Rome actually looked like - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...rome-reborn-video

rome history

shared by lenaurick on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • It's impossible for anyone to see what ancient Rome looked like in all of its splendor, since we've failed to invent a time machine. But the above video, which shows a 3D rendering of Rome in 320 AD, is about as close as we can get
  • Rome Reborn, an academic research project whose central mission is to create a full model of Rome at its greatest heights, working in conjunction with the Khan Academy and Smarthistory. The goal is to take historical depictions of the city and create a true-to-life model of every period of Roman development, ranging from 1000 BC to 552 AD.
  • they chose to use 320 AD for this visualization because it was "the peak of Rome's urban development." Ten years later, the emperor, Constantine, moved the capital to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), and the city of Rome began to decline. (The Roman Empire itself went on to survive, in various forms, until roughly 476.)
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  • At this point, Rome had somewhere between 1 million and 2 million residents. For perspective, 2 million residents would make Rome bigger than every American city today except for New York, LA, Chicago, and Houston. And this was 1700 years ago!
  • nterestingly, Rome itself isn't built near potable water. According to Frischer, the Romans managed to support a modern-size metropolis using an absolutely massive system of aqueducts — literally "roads for water" that brought in clean stuff from nearby mountains and rivers.
  • The video shows the Colosseum as it would have looked at its full size, which is truly colossal. We also learn that the Colosseum wasn't what Romans called it (that name dates to later, in the Middle Ages). It was actually called the Flavian Amphitheater, built by the Emperor Vespasian in a bid to gain popularity after his mad predecessor, Nero, allowed huge portions of the city to burn down.
sgardner35

Facebook Meets Skepticism in Bid to Expand Internet in India - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...-expand-internet-in-india.html

facebook india

shared by sgardner35 on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • are deliberately stripped down to minimize data usage and the cost to the phone company
  • Mr. Zuckerberg declined several requests to discuss Internet.org. But he remains passionate about his crusade. “Internet access needs to be treated as an important enabler of human rights and human potential,” he told the United Nations last month.
  • Last month, he hosted a live-streamed chat with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, from Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters. And this week, Mr. Zuckerberg will be in New Delhi, where he will take questions from some of Facebook’s 130 milli
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  • Phone-card sellers also tend to push whatever makes them the most money. Mr. Khan noted that another carrier had recently awarded him his choice of a Hero motorcycle or 45,000 rupees — nearly $700 — for signing up 1,000 customers. Reliance offered nothing similar.
  • “This is a program that is working to bring people online, and working incredibly well.” Mr. Daniels said. “Connectivity is something that improves people’s lives. It’s an enabler for people to be able to help themselves find jobs, help themselves improve their health situation, improve their education for themselves and their children.”
  • The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is still mulling potential regulations. In a recent interview, however, the agency’s chairman, Ram Sewak Sharma, was skeptical of Internet.org. “Maybe they have wonderful objectives, but the way it is being implemented, that’s not really appropriate,” he said.
anonymous

Syria: Russia vetoes extension of chemical weapons inquiry - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-41740432

Russia politics US weapons

shared by anonymous on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Russia has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution extending the mandate of the only official mission investigating the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
  • Russia has rejected a separate report from UN human rights investigators blaming the Syrian government.
  • But Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzia accused the US and others of trying to embarrass Russia.
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  • The attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April left more than 80 people dead and prompted the US to launch missile strikes on a Syrian airbase.
marleymorton

Why Pakistan won't share intelligence with the US - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-42664019

politics US pakistan

shared by marleymorton on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Pakistan's defence minister Khurram Dastgir Khan has announced that he has suspended intelligence sharing with the US - the latest twist in the US-Pakistan row. But how much does it matter?
  • Relations between Washington and Islamabad have been in the spotlight since US President Donald Trump's New Year's Day tweet, where he accused Pakistan of "lies and deceit".
  • US officials have said that the suspension in security assistance is temporary, and that funds may still be reimbursed on case-by-case basis, depending on measurable co-operation extended by Pakistan. Meanwhile, few expect Mr Khan's announcement to be of more than of just symbolic value.That's because Pakistan has already limited much of the intelligence it shared with the US over the last two decades.
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  • Conflict of interest emerged after 9/11The US and Pakistan have been allies since the early 1950s when American aid arrived to cater to Pakistan's economic and security needs.Between 1959 and 1970, Pakistan provided a base near Peshawar for the CIA to use as a listening post for radio transmission intercepts from the Soviet Union.
  • But a conflict of interest between the two countries emerged after the 11 September 2001 attack on the US. The Americans set up a physical presence in Afghanistan and began to use Pakistan as its supply route as well as a source of ground intelligence.
  • So while Pakistan publicly announced that it was siding with the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, in reality it created conditions for those groups to infiltrate Pakistani territory and carve out sanctuaries in its Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), along the border with Afghanistan.
g-dragon

The Taj Mahal - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/the-taj-mahal-1434536

taj mahal History Mughal Empire

shared by g-dragon on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • The Taj Mahal is a beautiful, white-marble mausoleum built by Mughul emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
  • It was in 1607, that Shah Jahan, grandson of Akbar the Great, first met his beloved. At the time, he was not yet the fifth emperor of the Mughal Empire.
  • Sixteen-year-old, Prince Khurram, as he was then called, flitted around the royal bazaar, flirting with the girls from high-ranking families that staffed the booths.
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  • Although it was love at first sight, the two were not allowed to marry right away. First, Prince Khurram had to marry Kandahari Begum. (He would later marry a third wife as well.)
  • The public was enamored with her, in part because Mumtaz Mahal cared for the people, diligently making lists of widows and orphans to make sure they received food and money.
  • The plan was that the Taj Mahal (“the crown of the region”) would represent heaven (Jannah) on Earth. No expense was spared to make this happen.
  • when the feud with Khan Jahan Lodi was won, Shah Jahan had the remains of Mumtaz Mahal dug up and brought 435 miles (700 km) to Agra. The return of Mumtaz Mahal was a grand procession, with thousands of soldiers accompanying the body and mourners lining the route.
  • Although no one, main architect for the Taj Mahal is known, it is believed that Shah Jahan, who was already passionate about architecture, worked on the plans himself with the input and aid of a number of the best architects of his time
  • The couple had 14 children together, but only seven lived past infancy. It was the birth of the 14th child that was to kill Mumtaz Mahal.
  • At the time, the Mughal Empire was one of the richest in the world and thus Shah Jahan had the means to pay for this huge venture.
  • Most pictures of the Taj Mahal show only a large, white, lovely building. What these photos miss is the intricacies that can only be seen up close.
  • Shah Jahan stayed in deep mourning for two years but even after that, the death of Mumtaz Mahal still deeply affected him. That is perhaps why the third of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan’s four sons, Aurangzeb, was able to successfully kill off his three brothers and imprison his father.
  • Shah Jahan spent his last eight years staring out a window, looking at his beloved’s Taj Mahal.
  • When Shah Jahan died on January 22, 1666, Aurangzeb had his father buried with Mumtaz Mahal in the crypt beneath the Taj Mahal. On the main floor of the Taj Mahal, above the crypt, now sits two cenotaphs (empty, public tombs). The one in the center of the room belongs to Mumtaz Mahal and the one just to the west is for Shah Jahan.
  • By the 1800s, the British ousted the Mughals and took over India. To many, the Taj Mahal was beautiful and so they cut gemstones from the walls, stole the silver candlesticks and doors, and even tried to sell the white marble overseas.
  • It was Lord Curzon, the British viceroy of India, who put a stop to all that. Rather than looting the Taj Mahal, Curzon worked to restore it.
Javier E

Pakistan moves to ban single-use plastic bags - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html

plastic ban recycling pakistan pollution

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Each time someone in Pakistan runs out to the store for a carton of milk, a half-pound of loose sugar or an after-school snack, it comes in a flimsy plastic bag that usually gets thrown away
  • If all those bags are added up, officials estimate, they total 55 billion a year. Easily torn and too weak to use again, they end up clogging city drains and sewers, piled up in vacant lots and parks, ingested by grazing goats and dogs foraging for food, and polluting canals and streams.
  • all single-use polyethylene bags will be banned in the capital region of about 1.5 million people. Anyone who uses, sells or manufactures them will face a fine.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The ban is the latest project in Prime Minister Imran Khan’s green initiative, which began last year with a campaign to plant 10 billion trees to fight deforestation.
  • Today, more than 40 countries have either banned or taxed single-use plastic bags
  • “The Kenyans told us a sudden ban is easier to enforce than trying to collect a tax or fee, because there is no incentive to bribe,”
  • The fines in Pakistan will also be steep — $31 for using a single bag, $63 for selling one and up to $31,000 for manufacturing them. The national per capita income is $1,200 per year
  • Shoppers are not likely to be aggressively pursued, but companies that make and supply the bags have been warned that they will be inspected to enforce the ban.
  • To encourage customers to obey the law, officials have introduced colorful cloth tote bags, which they have distributed at weekend markets
  • “We cannot bring change through force,” one federal capital commissioner posted on social media. “Our slight change in habits will do miracles for future generations.”
  • “This is a good step and I support it. People don’t realize how dangerous these bags are for our health,” said Ali Muhammad, 27, who runs a small grocery store
  • “I’m already losing money because no one wants to buy plastic now,” said Qasim Khan, 26, a scrap dealer who usually buys bulk plastic for pennies a pound and sells it for a little more. “But I’m happy this new law will get rid of all the filth in the gutters. That will be good for everyone.
Javier E

How I Learned to Take the SAT Like a Rich Kid - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-the-sat-like-a-rich-kid.html

test SAT test-prep college admission wealth inequality

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • I’m from Flint, Mich., and even though I recently transferred to a private Catholic high school in my city, top tier-education is new to my family.
  • Stanford researchers found, for example, that sixth graders in our town are two to three grade levels behind the national average. They are almost five grade levels behind students in more prosperous counties 30 miles away.
  • The friends I made at Phillips Exeter were from fancy-sounding towns and seemed to have it all. Most attended prestigious private or highly ranked public schools. They were impossibly sporty, charming and intelligent
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • they were clearly affluent, but they also came from diverse backgrounds. They had been on exotic vacations and had volunteered for the needy. They were truly interesting people.
  • So I didn’t understand why so many of them were enrolled in the optional SAT prep section of our summer program. Why would such impressive high achievers spend their summer nights storming through a massive SAT book? Many of them already took weekend SAT prep courses back home.
  • the kids at Exeter saw summer academic programs as normal and enjoyable. I was happy to be around so many fellow nerds. Still, they approached studying for the SAT with a near-professional intensity that was alien to me.
  • I realized that they didn’t just want to score exceptionally well on the SAT. They were gunning for a score on the Preliminary SAT exams that would put them in the top percentile of students in the United States and make them National Merit Scholars in the fall.
  • The majority of low- and middle-income 11th graders I know in Michigan didn’t even sit for the preliminary exams. Most took the SAT cold. Few were privy to the upper-middle-class secret I discovered that summer: To get into elite colleges, one must train for standardized tests with the intensity of an athlete.
  • My newfound friends worked extremely hard, but they also seemed to have access to a formula for success that had been kept from the rest of us.
  • I had opted out of Exeter’s SAT prep. So the following fall, when I posted a so-so SAT score, I went into Super-ZIP-kid mode.I couldn’t afford a $3,000 40-hour prep course or tutor. But I could take out test prep books at the public library. There were very few checkout stamps on the book jackets, so I kept renewing them. I also took a $99 online program I heard about on NPR and Khan Academy’s free SAT section. On Saturdays, I commuted an hour each way to Ann Arbor for a free test-prep program at the University of Michigan.
  • My post-prep score saw a solid pop, and that awarded me access to tens of thousands in automatic merit awards to local colleges. I was encouraged to throw my hat in the ring at some more selective universities.
  • This past month, I watched many of these friends dazzle their social media followers with acceptance letters from Northwestern, Harvard, Williams and Duke, as well as six-figure Presidential Scholarships to various public universities.
malonema1

Is U.S.-U.K. Relationship Still 'Special' After Trump Spats, Shock Vote - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...ecial-relationship-u-s-n770211

US trump UK

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Is U.S.-U.K. Relationship Still ‘Special’ After Trump Spats, Shock Vote
  • LONDON — The so-called "special relationship" between the United States and Britain was forged on the beaches of Normandy 73 years ago. This alliance, nurtured by presidents and prime ministers for decades, has taken a battering since President Donald Trump took office. Trump criticized London Mayor Sadiq Khan after the most recent terror attack in the city and he has previously suggested British intelligence agencies spied on him during his campaign.
ecfruchtman

Syria's Chemical Weapons Might Start a New Six Day War - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...t-a-new-six-day-war-1496605055

shared by ecfruchtman on 05 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 05 Jun 17
     
    When Syrian forces launched a chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun two months ago, no one was watching more closely than Israel's military elite. Of all the existential threats their country fears, chemical weapons rank high on the list.
ecfruchtman

France: Assad regime was behind Syria chemical attack - 0 views

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

shared by ecfruchtman on 29 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 29 Apr 17
     
    The French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said that samples taken from the attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun matched those from a previous incident. "We have definite sources that the procedure used to make the Sarin sampled is typical of the methods developed in Syrian laboratories," he said.
malonema1

Anger over Donald Trump's UK crime tweet - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-politics-41695667

trump US UK

shared by malonema1 on 21 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has been accused of fuelling hate crime with a tweet erroneously linking a rise in the UK crime rate to "radical Islamic terror".He said crime in the UK had risen by 13% amid the "spread" of Islamist terror - despite the figure referring to all crimes, not just terrorism.
  • US media outlets have speculated whether Mr Trump's tweet followed a TV report on One America News Network, a conservative TV channel, which aired the statistics on Friday morning.
  • Donald Trump is half right. Crime has gone up by 13% - but not in the UK. The increase announced yesterday covered England and Wales whereas Scotland and Northern Ireland publish their data separately.But overlooking that mistake, what about the phrase that appears to connect the increase to the "spread of radical Islamic terror"?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • He had earlier lashed out at Sadiq Khan, tweeting that the London mayor had offered a "pathetic excuse" to Londoners after the London Bridge terror attack by telling people not to be alarmed.The Office for National Statistics said it would not comment on Mr Trump's tweet, but added that the survey relates to all crimes in England and Wales between 2016 and 2017.
krystalxu

Romanticism in France (article) | France | Khan Academy - 0 views

www.khanacademy.org/...romanticism-in-france

history culture Romanticism France

shared by krystalxu on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Artists explored diverse subjects and worked in varied styles so there is no single form of French Romanticism.
  • intimacy, spirituality, color, yearning for the infinite, expressed by all the means the arts possess
  • If David’s work reveals the Romantic impulse in French art early on, French Romanticism was more thoroughly developed later in the work of painters and sculptors such as Theodore Gericault, Eugène Delacroix and François Rude.
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  • “the Koran of the so-called Romantic artists.”
  • The first marker of a French Romantic painting may be the facture, meaning the way the paint is handled or laid on to the canvas.
  • The theme of man and nature found its way into Romantic art across Europe.
  • Raft of the Medusa (1819
  • Some artists, including Gericault and Delacroix, depicted nature directly in their images of animals.  
  • Lion and Serpent (1835.)
  • Another interest of Romantic artists and writers in many parts of Europe was the concept that people, like animals, were not solely rational beings but were governed by instinct and emotion.
  • Whatever he thought of being called a Romantic artist, Delacroix brought his intense fervor to political subjects as well.
  • That intensity of emotion, so characteristic of French Romantic art, would be echoed if not amplified by the sculptor François Rude’s Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 (La Marseillaise) (1833-6).
  • French Romanticism remains difficult to define because it is so diverse. Baudelaire’s comments from the Salon of 1846 may still apply:
g-dragon

Black Death in Asia: The Origins of the Bubonic Plague - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/-in-asia-bubonic-plague-195144

Bulbonic Plague asia origins

shared by g-dragon on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • it killed an estimated one-third of the European population
  • started in Asia and devastated many areas of that continent as well.
  • Many scholars believe that the bubonic plague began in north-western China, while others cite south-western China or the steppes of Central Asia.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • an outbreak erupted in the Yuan Empire and may have hastened the end of Mongol rule over China. Three years later, the disease killed over 90 percent of the Hebei Province's populations
  • with deaths totaling over 5 million people.
  • From its origin at the eastern end of the Silk Road, the Black Death rode trade routes west stopping at Central Asian caravansaries and Middle Eastern trade centers and subsequently infected people all across Asia.
  • "The Land of Darkness," or Central Asia. From there, it spread to China, India, the Caspian Sea and "land of the Uzbeks," and thence to Persia and the Mediterranean.
  • The Central Asian scourge struck Persia just a few years after it appeared in China — proof if any is needed that the Silk Road was a convenient route of transmission for the deadly bacterium.
  • Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish
  • The region's population was slow to recover, in part due to the political disruptions caused by the fall of Mongol rule and the later invasions of Timur (Tamerlane).
  • It seems more likely, however, that traders from further east brought diseased fleas
  • He goes on to charge that the Mongol leader "ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside."
  • This incident is often cited as the first instance of biological warfare in history. However, other contemporary chroniclers make no mention of the putative Black Death catapults.
  • European observers were fascinated but not too worried when the Black Death struck the western rim of Central Asia and the Middle East
  • , the holy city of Mecca was hit by the plague, likely brought in by infected pilgrims on the hajj.
  • In 1335, the Il-Khan (Mongol) ruler of Persia and the Middle East, Abu Said, died of bubonic plague during a war with his northern cousins, the Golden Horde. This signaled the beginning of the end for Mongol rule in the region
  • It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed."
  • Perhaps the most significant impact that the Black Death had on Asia was that it contributed to the fall of the mighty Mongol Empire. After all, the pandemic started within the Mongol Empire and devastated peoples from all four of the khanates.
  • The massive population loss and terror caused by the plague destabilized Mongolian governments from the Golden Horde in Russia to the Yuan Dynasty in China. The Mongol ruler of the Ilkhanate Empire in the Middle East died of the disease along with six of his sons.
  • Although the Pax Mongolica had allowed increased wealth and cultural exchange, through a reopening of the Silk Road, it also allowed this deadly contagion to spread rapidly westward from its origin in western China or eastern Central Asia. As a result, the world's second-largest empire ever crumbled and fell.
  • g-dragon on 24 Oct 17
     
    A summary about the route the Black Plague took and the tole it had. It is intesting how they called Central Asia the land of the darkness.
yehbru

Uyghurs in China: What Biden should do about China's atrocities (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

politics China US Biden Uighurs International

shared by yehbru on 07 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • China has since banned BBC World News from airing in the country and denied the abuse, telling CNN that "it is strictly forbidden to insult and abuse trainees in any way."
  • But the women's accounts add to a record that includes reports of forced abortions and sterilizations, high-tech surveillance, and Uyghur children being separated from their parents.
  • Either the United States and the world will finally go beyond tepid criticism and respond with real action, or we can forget about values, universal rights, and international law.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • A clear and consistent position from the US would allow for a whole-of-government response and ensure the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and Section 307 of the Tariff Act are fully enforced. These laws sanction parties involved in human rights abuses, identify where goods produced with forced labor are entering the US supply chain, and bans their import.
  • While former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rightly declared the crimes against the Uyghurs a genocide, the Trump administration's approach to China and to human rights more broadly was spotty and inconsistent at best.
  • Biden raised his concerns over the oppression of the Uyghurs which, while a good step, was insufficient when not backed by uniform US policy. What's needed is a comprehensive strategy that holds China accountable for its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and prioritizes ending violence.
  • In addition, a cross-agency response should focus in particular on allegations of gender-based violence perpetrated against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Biden has already established a White House Gender Policy Council and has made clear that he plans to engage with the UN's Women, Peace, and Security agenda (neglected by the Trump administration) to put gender equality and freedom from gender-based violence at the heart of US diplomacy.
  • Too often in the past, hosting the Olympics has allowed authoritarian regimes to peddle propaganda and gain legitimacy -- from the Nazis in 1936 to the Soviets in 1980 to the Chinese Communist Party in 2008 and Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2014. In response to China's oppression of Uyghur communities and other human rights abuses, over 180 human rights groups and international legislators are calling for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be moved from Beijing or boycotted altogether.
anonymous

Opinion | Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His Power - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cuomo-covid.html

Politics

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His PowerBesieged on multiple fronts, the governor is no longer holding forth; he’s just trying to hold on.
  • ret Stephens: I can’t believe I’m saying this, Gail, but Cuomo may make former Gov. Eliot Spitzer look good by comparison. At least Client 9’s behavior was, well, transactional, as compared to Cuomo’s creepy come-ons. And the cover-up of the nursing home Covid death count strikes me as possibly criminal and definitely worthy of impeachment. Especially since he was also trying to peddle a book about his Covid leadership skills while he was busy fudging the numbers.What’s your view?Gail: Have to admit it makes me sad. But the double whammy seems impossible to overcome. If it had just been the sex part we could have had some interesting conversations about what’s acceptable in an era that combines feminism with a fairly expansive view of what people — at least unmarried people — can and can’t do.Bret: “If It Had Just Been The Sex Part” could have been the title of a memoir by anyone from Caligula to Johnny Rotten. Sorry, go on.
  • ret: My gut reaction to your scenario is that it sounds very “Ooh la la,” like it could be a movie starring Cate Blanchett as Gov. Fatale, whereas Cuomo’s behavior is strictly “Ugh Yuck,” like it could be a movie starring Mickey Rourke. I just don’t think it works in quite the same way.Gail: If young workers in a state capitol started complaining that their female governor was touching them inappropriately, I sorta doubt the voters would see it as a glamorous movie.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Bret: One of the many reasons I despise Donald Trump is that he took perfectly legitimate policy issues, distorted and lied about them to suit his personal needs, and rendered them politically radioactive. Ballot integrity and public confidence in elections is a legitimate issue. In New York’s upstate 22nd district, we had a congressional race that took over three months to resolve because of a lack of uniform ballot-counting standards and a tidal wave of absentee ballots. In Pennsylvania, a state court ruled that the deadline for late-arriving mail-in ballots would be extended, resulting in the addition of about 10,000 ballots to the overall vote tallies and giving fodder to pe
  • Gail: Ballot harvesting is that system where a person receives an absentee ballot, fills it out, and then relies on somebody else to get it returned. That can be a good deed — or a system party workers use to control the voting. We just need to make sure it’s only used for good purposes. There was a big scandal in North Carolina a while back involving (cough, cough) Republicans.
  • Bret: Or Shere Khan from “The Jungle Book.” As for the bill itself, the most I can say on its behalf is that I’m happy Joe Manchin is in the Senate as a Democrat. We should not pay people more money to be on unemployment than to have a job, especially as the economy opens up again. We should not be sending benefit checks to people with upper middle-class incomes. We s
  • Gail: Well, we can still complain a little, right? Otherwise we’d have to change the name of The Conversation to Quiet Contemplation of a Perfect World.Bret: Agreed. Let’s keep finding things to complain about. You know, the masks are about to come off, which means the gloves are, too.
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