Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Leader of Arab Palestinian Joint List: We are ending Netanyahu’s grip on Israel

Leader of Arab Palestinian Joint List: We are ending Netanyahu’s grip on Israel

Ayman Odeh writes: The Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel have chosen to reject Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his politics of fear and hate, the inequality and division he advanced for the past decade. Last summer, Mr. Netanyahu declared that Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up a fifth of the population, were to be second-class citizens, officially. “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” Mr. Netanyahu wrote on Instagram after passing the Nation-State law. “According to the…

Read More Read More

Russian trolls love targeting U.S. veterans

Russian trolls love targeting U.S. veterans

The New Republic reports: The post popped up in select Instagram feeds shortly before the election in 2016. Its photo depicted an anonymous black-clad woman on an airport tarmac, crying over a metal casket covered in an American flag. “Killary Clinton will never understand what it feels like to lose the person you love for the sake of your country,” the caption began. “Honoring the high cost paid by so many families to protect our freedom. Buy a T-shirt—help a…

Read More Read More

The right’s latest attack on academic freedom might succeed

The right’s latest attack on academic freedom might succeed

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The Trump administration has threatened to withdraw federal funding from the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies because it does not portray Christianity or Judaism in a sufficiently “positive” light. A letter from the Department of Education—sent on Tuesday and reported by the New York Times on Thursday—directed the program to emphasize “positive aspects” of these and other non-Islamic religions in the Middle East. If it refuses, the department may strip the program of hundreds of…

Read More Read More

Should the story of early humans’ dispersal out of Africa be rewritten?

Should the story of early humans’ dispersal out of Africa be rewritten?

By Richard Kemeny Giancarlo Scardia was in Jordan in 2013 as the Syrian Civil War ground on. He recalls seeing refugees gathered in giant camps and military aircraft moving toward the border. But Scardia, a geologist based at São Paulo State University in Brazil, wasn’t there to observe the conflict—his interest was in a much older story. Buried within layers of sediment in the Zarqa Valley in northern Jordan was a large cache of chipped rocks. Scardia and his colleagues,…

Read More Read More

One skill that doesn’t deteriorate with age

One skill that doesn’t deteriorate with age

Reading and writing can prevent cognitive decline. AJP/Shutterstock.com By Roger J. Kreuz, University of Memphis When Toni Morrison died on Aug. 5, the world lost one of its most influential literary voices. But Morrison wasn’t a literary wunderkind. “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison’s first novel, wasn’t published until she was 39. And her last, “God Help the Child,” appeared when she was 84. Morrison published four novels, four children’s books, many essays and other works of nonfiction after the age of…

Read More Read More

This isn’t extinction, it’s extermination of nature

This isn’t extinction, it’s extermination of nature

Jeff Sparrow writes: We know that, as far back as the late 50s, researchers for the oil industry understood the effects of carbon on the atmosphere but did nothing about it. In 1988 George HW Bush promised on the campaign trail to fight climate change. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect.” There was, of course, no White House effect. In…

Read More Read More

If this isn’t impeachable, nothing is

If this isn’t impeachable, nothing is

Tom Nichols writes: The president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately. Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of…

Read More Read More

Scrutiny over Trump’s Ukraine scandal may also complicate Biden’s campaign

Scrutiny over Trump’s Ukraine scandal may also complicate Biden’s campaign

The Washington Post reports: Joe Biden intended to spend Friday talking about climate change and his long-standing support for the gay and lesbian community. Instead, he was thrust into the center of the latest White House scandal — that President Trump allegedly urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son Hunter. Suddenly, Biden faced two dueling realities: The president he is hoping to defeat next year — and who he describes as morally unfit for office — is under scrutiny…

Read More Read More

Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?

Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?

Hannah Natanson writes: They look nothing alike. Frederick Douglass — a black man campaigning for the abolition of slavery in the 1840s — appears alone in almost every photograph, staring down the camera in isolated, thoughtful splendor. Elizabeth Warren — a white woman campaigning for the presidency in 2019 — features today in countless iPhone photos and Instagram feeds, her arm around voter after voter, always bearing the same wide grin. The two are separated by race, gender and more…

Read More Read More

How Netanyahu’s campaign against Israel’s Arab citizens backfired

How Netanyahu’s campaign against Israel’s Arab citizens backfired

NBC News reports: If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign for re-election will be remembered for one thing, it will likely be the unabashed vilification of Israel’s Arab citizens, who represent a fifth of the country’s population. He accused Arabs of stealing the inconclusive April vote. Five days before last week’s election, his official Facebook page said that Arabs “want to annihilate us all — women, children and men,” although the Likud Party later disowned the statement. Yet, these efforts to…

Read More Read More

Rare protests against Egypt’s dictator erupt in Cairo and elsewhere

Rare protests against Egypt’s dictator erupt in Cairo and elsewhere

The New York Times reports: Rare protests against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi erupted in central Cairo and several smaller Egyptian cities on Friday night as hundreds of young people, responding to online calls for demonstrations against government corruption, chanted “Down with Sisi” and “Leave now.” The protests, although small, occurred as Mr. el-Sisi flew to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly next week — and they were unusual for taking place at all. Mr. el-Sisi, who came…

Read More Read More

Do human beings have an instinct for engaging in warfare?

Do human beings have an instinct for engaging in warfare?

David P Barash writes: The most serious problem with [the American anthropologist Napoleon] Chagnon’s influence on our understanding of human nature [through his study of the Yanomami people of the Venezuelan/Brazilian Amazon] is one familiar to many branches of science: generalising from one data set — however intensive — to a wider universe of phenomena. Academic psychologists, for example, are still reeling from a 2010 study by the University of British Columbia which found that the majority of psychological research…

Read More Read More

Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement

Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement

Eric Beinhocker writes: Human-induced climate change is a moral wrong. It involves one group of humans harming others. People of this generation harming those in future generations. People in the developed world harming those in the developing world. Each of us is emitting carbon that is harming those caught in climate-driven superstorms, floods, droughts and conflicts. And there’s the greatest moral wrong of all – the mass extinction event we have triggered that harms all life on Earth. Yet until…

Read More Read More

Trump admin ignored its own evidence of climate change’s impact on migration from Central America

Trump admin ignored its own evidence of climate change’s impact on migration from Central America

NBC News reports: Research compiled one year ago by Customs and Border Protection pointed to an overwhelming factor driving record-setting migration to the U.S. from Guatemala: Crop shortages were leaving rural Guatemalans, especially in the country’s western highlands, in extreme poverty and starving. An internal report that was circulated to senior Homeland Security officials and obtained by NBC News showed that migration surged from those areas of Guatemala without reliable subsistence farming or wages from commercial farming jobs. More than…

Read More Read More