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Category: History/Archeology

UN commemorates Palestinian Nakba for first time on 75th anniversary

UN commemorates Palestinian Nakba for first time on 75th anniversary

The National reports: For the first time in 75 years, the UN has officially commemorated the Nakba — the plight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes upon the formation of Israel. The UN passed a historic resolution in 2022, despite Israel’s vehement opposition, to recognise the Nakba, which roughly translates as “catastrophe”. The day brings painful memories of displacement and widely documented reports of torture and mass killings by Israeli forces against Palestinians…

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America’s lowest standard for its highest office

America’s lowest standard for its highest office

Charles Sykes writes: In one of his rare moments of naivete, Alexander Hamilton imagined that the Electoral College would afford “a moral certainty” that the office of the presidency would not “fall to the lot of any man, who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” He hoped that the electors would be a bulwark against men who had a talent “for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.” “It will not be too strong…

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This Supreme Court is slow to issue rulings — glacially slow

This Supreme Court is slow to issue rulings — glacially slow

NBC News reports: Back in 1923, the Supreme Court had issued 157 rulings by May 1 in a term that started the previous fall. On the same date a century later, the current justices, facing a firestorm of scrutiny on multiple fronts, have disposed of just 15 cases, fueling speculation about why they are falling behind. In fact, the court has decided fewer cases at this point of the term — which begins each October and ends in June —…

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Sinn Féin to attend King Charles’ coronation in sign of changed times

Sinn Féin to attend King Charles’ coronation in sign of changed times

Politico reports: The Irish republicans of Sinn Féin — who once supported Irish Republican Army attacks on British royals — announced Wednesday they will send senior representatives to the coronation of King Charles III in a sign of radically changed times. Michelle O’Neill, the party’s deputy leader and first minister-designate for the mothballed Northern Ireland government, said she would represent Sinn Féin at the May 6 ceremony at Westminster Abbey. O’Neill, who wants the Democratic Unionists to end their year-long…

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Forced assimilation of Native American children: ‘Our history has been hidden — the attempted genocide of our people’

Forced assimilation of Native American children: ‘Our history has been hidden — the attempted genocide of our people’

Brandi Morin writes: “The U.S. has some internal searching inside that we have to do as a collective,” says Deborah Parker. The CEO of the Native American Indian Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) — a network of Native academics, researchers, tribal leaders, boarding school survivors and their descendants working to establish a Congressional Truth Commission — Parker, 52, is at the helm of the efforts to expose the damages inflicted by the insidious 150-year program. The purpose of the commission,…

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Gun violence is actually worse in Republican states. It’s not even close

Gun violence is actually worse in Republican states. It’s not even close

Colin Woodard writes: Listen to the southern right talk about violence in America and you’d think New York City was as dangerous as Bakhmut on Ukraine’s eastern front. In October, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed crime in New York City was “out of control” and blamed it on George Soros. Another Sunshine State politico, former president Donald Trump, offered his native city up as a Democrat-run dystopia, one of those places “where the middle class used to flock to…

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AI will soon become impossible for humans to comprehend – the story of neural networks tells us why

AI will soon become impossible for humans to comprehend – the story of neural networks tells us why

Shutterstock/Valentyn640 By David Beer, University of York In 1956, during a year-long trip to London and in his early 20s, the mathematician and theoretical biologist Jack D. Cowan visited Wilfred Taylor and his strange new “learning machine”. On his arrival he was baffled by the “huge bank of apparatus” that confronted him. Cowan could only stand by and watch “the machine doing its thing”. The thing it appeared to be doing was performing an “associative memory scheme” – it seemed…

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Archaeology and genomics together with Indigenous knowledge revise the human-horse story in the American West

Archaeology and genomics together with Indigenous knowledge revise the human-horse story in the American West

Horses are an active part of life for the Lakota and many other Plains nations today. Jacquelyn Córdova/Northern Vision Productions By William Taylor, University of Colorado Boulder and Yvette Running Horse Collin, Université de Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier Few places in the world are more closely linked with horses in the popular imagination than the Great Plains of North America. Romanticized stories of cowboys and the Wild West figure prominently in popular culture, and domestic horses are embedded in…

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The many myths of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’

The many myths of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’

Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade write: The few uses of “Anglo-Saxon” in Old English seem to be borrowed from the Latin Angli Saxones. Manuscript evidence from pre-Conquest England reveals that kings used the Latin term almost exclusively in Latin charters, legal documents and, for a brief period, in their titles, such as Anglorum Saxonum Rex, or king of the Anglo-Saxons. The references describe kings like Alfred and Edward who did not rule (nor claim to rule) all the English kingdoms. They were specifically referring to…

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A four-decade secret: One man’s story of sabotaging Jimmy Carter’s re-election

A four-decade secret: One man’s story of sabotaging Jimmy Carter’s re-election

The New York Times reports: It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States. It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran…

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Orwell and Camus’ loyalty to truth

Orwell and Camus’ loyalty to truth

William Fear writes: A war still raged in Europe, but the enemy were firmly in retreat. The occupation of Paris had been broken, and France was free, and so were the cafés of the Boulevard St Germain. No longer did the waiters have to serve coffee to SS officers. One afternoon in April 1945, a dishevelled Englishman walked into one such café. He was a war correspondent for the Observer — fond of shag-tobacco and Indian tea. His pen-name was…

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How Stalin enlisted the Orthodox Church to help control Ukraine

How Stalin enlisted the Orthodox Church to help control Ukraine

Kathryn David writes: In September 1943, as the tide of the Second World War was turning in the Soviet Union’s favour, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin called a meeting at the Kremlin. Alongside the foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the head of the secret police Vsevolod Merkulov were three men in Stalin’s office for the first time: Metropolitan Sergius, Metropolitan Aleksey, and Metropolitan Nikolay, three of the few Orthodox Church hierarchs left in the Soviet Union. The fact of such…

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The shortest path to peace in Ukraine

The shortest path to peace in Ukraine

Eliot A. Cohen writes: Any long-term planning for Ukraine and for the West should now also be predicated on the postwar persistence of a malignant and militarized Russia, which may well intend to restart the war once it has had a breather. Potential dissidents have fled the country or are in jail; a societal mobilization built on xenophobia and paranoia is under way; freedom of expression is being stamped out; and any successors to Vladimir Putin are unlikely to be…

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How one Ukrainian woman made the switch from her native Russian tongue to Ukrainian

How one Ukrainian woman made the switch from her native Russian tongue to Ukrainian

Sasha Dovzhyk writes: My mother tongue tastes like ashes. Things scorched by enemy fire, then soaked with rain, touched with rot, smelling of death. I felt the taste of my mother tongue most acutely while driving through Borodianka, Bucha, and Irpin two months after these Ukrainian towns in the Kyiv region were liberated by the Ukrainian army from the Russians’ “brotherly” embrace. Russian is my mother tongue and liberation means ripping it out of my throat. I come from Zaporizhzhia,…

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If we deprive ourselves of history, everything is a surprise

If we deprive ourselves of history, everything is a surprise

Timothy Snyder writes: Teaching a lecture class on Ukrainian history last fall, I felt a touch of the surreal. The war in Ukraine had been going on for half a year when I began. A nuclear power had attacked a state that had given up its nuclear weapons. An empire was trying to halt European integration. A tyranny was attempting to crush a neighboring democracy. On occupied territories, Russia perpetrated genocidal atrocities with clear expressions of genocidal intent. And yet,…

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Those who fetishize ‘peace,’ open the door to greater violence

Those who fetishize ‘peace,’ open the door to greater violence

Vasyl Cherepanyn writes: The “never again” slogan, the EU’s common ideological denominator, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in a perverted sense. Indeed, if one literally accepts the principle that “it should never happen again,” then war is thought of as impossible simply because it’s unimaginable in spite of realities on the ground. The EU has fetishized the idea of peace to the extent that it completely repressed the realities of war—only to be totally unprepared when the repressed came back….

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