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At 81, Jon Hassell is still a pioneer expanding the frontiers of music

At 81, Jon Hassell is still a pioneer expanding the frontiers of music

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  John Lewis writes: In the late 70s, long before terms such as “world music” or “cultural appropriation” were in common usage, the trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell devised the term “Fourth World” to describe his music. It explored what he called “primitive futurism”, where shantytown squalor coexisted with hi-tech western studio technology, fusing Hassell’s early minimalist work with Terry Riley and La Monte Young with his studies of Indian, African and Indonesian music. Brian Eno was an early adopter…

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Putin sees an opening in Europe’s fury with Trump

Putin sees an opening in Europe’s fury with Trump

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The New York Times reports: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived in Austria on Tuesday sensing an opportunity almost unimaginable just months ago: to overhaul frosty relations with a European Union infuriated by President Trump on a host of issues, from climate and Iran to, most recently, tariffs and trade. Never mind that Mr. Putin was until recently virtually a pariah in Europe after his military interventions in Ukraine, Crimea and Syria; after meddling in European elections and working…

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With Mueller closing in, Manafort’s allies abandon him

With Mueller closing in, Manafort’s allies abandon him

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The New York Times reports: The special counsel’s accusation this week that Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, tried to tamper with potential witnesses originated with two veteran journalists who turned on Mr. Manafort after working closely with him to prop up the former Russia-aligned president of Ukraine, interviews and documents show. The two journalists, who helped lead a project to which prosecutors say Mr. Manafort funneled more than $2 million from overseas accounts, are the latest in a…

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Cambridge Analytica director ‘met Assange to discuss U.S. election’

Cambridge Analytica director ‘met Assange to discuss U.S. election’

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The Guardian reports: A Cambridge Analytica director apparently visited Julian Assange in February last year and told friends it was to discuss what happened during the US election, the Guardian has learned. Brittany Kaiser, a director at the firm until earlier this year, also claimed to have channelled cryptocurrency payments and donations to WikiLeaks. This information has been passed to congressional and parliamentary inquiries in the UK and US. Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks are already subjects of special counsel Robert…

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David Miliband: World must step up support for Rohingya refugees

David Miliband: World must step up support for Rohingya refugees

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The Guardian reports: David Miliband has called on the international community to step up its support of Rohingya refugees in southern Bangladesh before the monsoon. During a visit to the refugee camps, the former UK foreign secretary said the issue must be discussed at the G7 meeting in Quebec, Canada this week, saying there was “real fear” among the refugees about the rainy season. Miliband, the chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, said the positioning of the refugee camp…

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Wave of arrests in Egypt sends alarming message at start of Sisi’s second term

Wave of arrests in Egypt sends alarming message at start of Sisi’s second term

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Al Monitor reports: Dozens of politicians, writers and human rights activists were attacked June 5 by unknown assailants at the iftar dinner party for the breaking of the daily fast during Ramadan organized by the Civil Democratic Movement. The assailants crashed the iftar at the Swiss Club in Cairo and overturned the dinner tables while chanting “Traitors! Spies!” The head of the Constitution Party, Khaled Dawoud, who attended the dinner, said in a Facebook post on the day of the…

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What enabled animal life to get more complex and diverse during the Cambrian explosion?

What enabled animal life to get more complex and diverse during the Cambrian explosion?

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Jordana Cepelewicz writes: When Emma Hammarlund of Lund University in Sweden first reached out to her colleague Sven Påhlman for help with her research, he was skeptical he’d have much insight to offer. He was a tumor biologist, after all, and she was a geobiologist, someone who studied the interplay between living organisms and their environment. Påhlman didn’t see how his work could possibly inform her search for answers about the rapid proliferation and diversification of animal life that, half…

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‘Carbon bubble’ could spark global financial crisis, study warns

‘Carbon bubble’ could spark global financial crisis, study warns

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The Guardian reports: Plunging prices for renewable energy and rapidly increasing investment in low-carbon technologies could leave fossil fuel companies with trillions in stranded assets and spark a global financial crisis, a new study has found. A sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2035 is likely, according to the study, given the current global investments and economic advantages in a low-carbon transition. The existence of a “carbon bubble” – assets in fossil fuels that are currently overvalued because,…

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Five myths about the refugee crisis

Five myths about the refugee crisis

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Daniel Trilling writes: The refugee crisis that dominated the news in 2015 and 2016 consisted primarily of a sharp rise in the number of people coming to Europe to claim asylum. Arrivals have now dropped, and governments have cracked down on the movement of undocumented migrants within the EU; many thousands are stuck in reception centres or camps in southern Europe, while others try to make new lives in the places they have settled. But to see the crisis as…

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Under Russian occupation, Crimea’s demographics are being reshaped

Under Russian occupation, Crimea’s demographics are being reshaped

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RFE/RL reports: An important but widely overlooked demographic transformation has been under way in the Ukrainian region of Crimea since it was annexed by Russia in 2014. Ukrainian officials and analysts say hundreds of thousands of people from across Russia have been brought into the disputed region in an effort by Moscow to transform the composition of its population. “Since 2014 there has been a mass movement of people from Siberia,” Sergei, who moved to Crimea from St. Petersburg and…

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Why Trump is winning and the press is losing

Why Trump is winning and the press is losing

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Jay Rosen writes: There is alive in the land an organized campaign to discredit the American press. This campaign is succeeding. Its roots are long. For decades, the Republican coalition has tried to hang together by hating on elites who claim to know things, like: “What is art?” Or: “What should college students be taught?” Or: “What counts as news?” The media wing of this history extends back to Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. It passes through Spiro Agnew’s speeches…

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World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds

World dangerously underestimating economic cost of climate change, study finds

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HuffPost reports: Leading global forecasts widely underestimate the future costs of climate change, a new paper warns. The findings, to be released Monday in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, say projections used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on outdated models and fail to account for “tipping points” ― key moments when global warming rapidly speeds up and becomes irreversible. The IPCC, established in 1988, is the leading international body for assessing climate change,…

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The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required

The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required

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Ephrat Livni writes: Scientists seek to quantify everything—even the ineffable. And so the human search for meaning recently took a physical turn as Columbia and Yale University researchers isolated the place in our brains that processes spiritual experiences. In a new study, published in Cerebral Cortex (paywall) on May 29, neuroscientists explain how they generated “personally relevant” spiritual experiences in a diverse group of subjects and scanned their brains while these experiences were happening. The results indicate that there is…

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