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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Trump’s actions raise ‘urgent concern’ inside the intelligence community

Trump’s actions raise ‘urgent concern’ inside the intelligence community

In an editorial, the New York Times says: It’s not every day that a whistle-blower in the intelligence community files a complaint about the president of the United States. But it seems to have happened last month, when an unidentified intelligence employee alerted the inspector general of the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, to multiple acts by President Trump, including a promise he is said to have made to a foreign leader during a phone call. The complaint alarmed Mr. Atkinson…

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The West’s self-proclaimed custodians of democracy wrongly imagined its only enemies lurked abroad

The West’s self-proclaimed custodians of democracy wrongly imagined its only enemies lurked abroad

Pankaj Mishra writes: Anglo-American lamentations about the state of democracy have been especially loud ever since Boris Johnson joined Donald Trump in the leadership of the free world. For a very long time, Britain and the United States styled themselves as the custodians and promoters of democracy globally, fighting a great moral battle against its foreign enemies. From the cold war through to the “war on terror”, the Caesarism that afflicted other nations was seen as peculiar to Asian and…

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Why the Republican Party poses a threat to democracy

Why the Republican Party poses a threat to democracy

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win. The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a Court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would…

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Brazil’s army wants to ‘occupy’ the Amazon

Brazil’s army wants to ‘occupy’ the Amazon

The Intercept reports: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is planning to push industrialization and development in the interior of the country’s Amazon basin. It is far from a new project. For more than a century, a series of Brazilian governments have sought to move into the country’s interior, developing — or, to be more precise, colonizing — the Amazon. From the populist president-turned-dictator who made one of the early industrial pushes into the forest in the 1930s to the military dictatorship…

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Mass migration begins as Florida faces the biggest threat from climate-driven flooding

Mass migration begins as Florida faces the biggest threat from climate-driven flooding

Bloomberg reports: Lori Rittel is stuck in her Florida Keys home, living in the wreckage left by Hurricane Irma two years ago, unable to rebuild or repair. Now her best hope for escape is to sell the little white bungalow to the government to knock down. Her bedroom is still a no-go zone so she sleeps in the living room with her cat and three dogs. She just installed a sink in the bathroom, which is missing a wall, so…

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Whistle-blower’s complaint said to involve multiple actions by Trump

Whistle-blower’s complaint said to involve multiple actions by Trump

The New York Times reports: A potentially explosive complaint by a whistle-blower in the intelligence community said to involve President Trump was related to a series of actions that goes beyond any single discussion with a foreign leader, according to interviews on Thursday. The complaint was related to multiple acts, Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for American spy agencies, told lawmakers during a private briefing, two officials familiar with it said. But he declined to discuss specifics, including whether the…

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The United States doesn’t want to go to war with Iran to protect its Arab allies

The United States doesn’t want to go to war with Iran to protect its Arab allies

Robert F. Worth writes: Gulf leaders have become uneasy about the mismatch between Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and his actions. In June, he threatened Iran with “obliteration” after it shot down an unmanned American drone, and then backed away from a planned retaliation at the last minute. His decision to fire John Bolton, his hawkish national security adviser, has strengthened a belief that Mr. Trump does not want war. But many feared he would stumble into one. The Emiratis now appear…

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I researched Uighur society in China for 8 years and watched how technology opened new opportunities – then became a trap

I researched Uighur society in China for 8 years and watched how technology opened new opportunities – then became a trap

Uighurs wait in line at a face scan checkpoint in Turpan, Xinjiang in northwest China on April 11, 2018. Darren Byler, CC BY By Darren Byler, University of Washington The Uighurs, a Muslim minority ethnic group of around 12 million in northwest China, are required by the police to carry their smartphones and IDs listing their ethnicity. As they pass through one of the thousands of newly built digital media and face surveillance checkpoints located at jurisdictional boundaries, entrances to…

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