Darwin (1859, 2001), Charles, and Ernst Mayr, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Harvard University Press 2001 Amazon review: 'It was a very happy idea to publish a facsimile of the first edition of On the Origin of Species; the price of copies of the original edition has reached the thousand dollar bracket, and in contemporary literature all page-references are to the original pagination, which was not followed in previous reprints of the first edition. Now, with this very reasonably priced and beautifully produced book, not only historians of science but also biologists will have the opportunity of following the fascinating thought-trails, still far from fully explored, of that remarkable man Darwin. Few if any persons are so well qualified as Harvard's Ernst Mayr to execute so helpfully and gracefully the delicate task of writing a worthy foreword to such a classic.' --Sir Gavin de Beer (Science ) 
Amazon   back

Agence France-Presse (2025_04_29_, Amnesty accuses Israel of ‘live-streamed genocide’ against Gaza Palestinians, ' Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Israel of committing a “live-streamed genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza by forcibly displacing most of the population and deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe. In its annual report, Amnesty charged that Israel had acted with “specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide”. Israel has rejected accusations of “genocide” from Amnesty, other rights groups and some states in its war in Gaza. The conflict erupted after the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s deadly October 7, 2023 attacks inside Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an Agence France-Presse tally based on official Israeli figures. Militants also abducted 251 people, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead. Israel in response launched a relentless bombardment of Gaza and a ground operation that according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory has left at least 52,243 dead. “Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes against Israeli citizens and others and captured more than 250 hostages, the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide,” Amnesty’s secretary general Agnes Callamard said in the introduction to the report.' back

Alex Brandon/AP (2025_04_29), How ICE is becoming a secret police force under the Trump administration , ' Since US President Donald Trump took power in January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become a far more visible and fearsome force on American streets. Though ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits, the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making. As an expert on authoritarian regimes, I’ve studied historical and contemporary secret police forces extensively across Africa, Asia and Europe. They typically meet five criteria: they’re a police force targeting political opponents and dissidents they’re not controlled by other security agencies and answer directly to the dictator the identity of their members and their operations are secret they specialise in political intelligence and surveillance operations they carry out arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, indefinite detentions, disappearances and torture. How close is ICE to becoming a secret police force? Let’s consider each of these criteria. [. . .] Overall, the evidence shows ICE meets most of the criteria for being a secret police force. It has yet to target political opponents, which I define narrowly as members of the Democratic Party. And it is not directly controlled by Trump, although the current structure provides him with plausible deniability. While the agency is far from resembling history’s most feared secret police forces, there have so far been few constraints on how it operates. The worst may be yet to come. A budget bill making its way through Congress would provide ICE with up to US$175 billion (A$274 billion) in funding over the next decade. (Its current annual budget is US$9 billion, or A$14 billion.) This would supercharge its use of surveillance, imprisonment and physical violence. When combined with a potential shift towards targeting US citizens for dissent and disobedience, ICE is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism.' back

Alex Lo (2025_04_28), My Take | We are witnessing the end of the United States as we know it, ' Since its inception, the United States has prided itself on its liberty, prosperity and security. Following its rise to global dominance, its self-legitimising claim is that it has been spreading and realising all three ideals around the world. That’s why it calls itself “the shining city upon a hill” – its exceptionalism. It denies being an empire. But even if it were one, it’s been exceptional because no great empire in the past, not even the British version, had ever offered such public goods for the enrichment and betterment of the world. The veracity of such claims, I think, very much depended on where you were born, raised and spent your adulthood in the last century. It was mostly true after the second world war if you had lived in western Europe, the so-called Anglo-American sphere Canada, Australia, Britain and New Zealand – and pockets of Asia and the Middle East such as Japan and Israel. For such allies, there were generous post-war reconstruction, technology transfers, an open American market and the anchoring almighty dollar to stabilise global trade and the economy. But outside of such places, America could make no such claims, rather the opposite. During the Cold War and then “the war on terror”, it was more in the business of spreading dictatorships and far-right governments, suppressing democratic movements, exploiting poor nations for their resources and obstructing their development. That was true across Africa, and much of Latin America and the Middle East. Unlike the core of the geographical and ideological West which must be protected, the rest of the world became contested places to be freely turned into battlegrounds and conflict zones. There was the zone of creation and prosperity in the West, and the zone of destruction and poverty for the rest. But what is shocking now, and why world opinion, read Western opinion, has suddenly turned against the US is that what America has been doing to the rest of the world, it is now doing to the rest of the once-privileged West.' back

Alex Winter (Director), The YouTube Effect, YouTube grows from humble beginnings to become one of the most ubiquitous and powerful media platforms in the world. back

Ami Ayalon (2025_04_29), I used to run Israel’s security agency – now I’m sounding the alarm about our extremist government , ' I spent close to 40 years working as a public servant for the state of Israel, including as commander of the navy and head of the Shin Bet, protecting Israel and defending it from external and internal threats. Several weeks ago, along with 17 other colleagues who have also dedicated their lives to Israel’s security and welfare, I made a decision that the future of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state is so under threat that it is not just my responsibility, but obligation, to sound the alarm. The 18 of us took out a full-page advert in two major Israeli broadsheet papers. In it, we made clear that the very fabric of the state of Israel and the values on which it was founded are being eroded. The truth is that our hostages in Gaza have been abandoned in favour of the government’s messianic ideology and by a prime minister in Benjamin Netanyahu who is desperate to cling to power for his own personal gain. Our government is undermining the democratic functions of the state to shore up and protect its own power. It is forcing us into a perpetual war with no achievable military objectives and which can only result in more loss of life and hatred. [. . .] The crisis we are facing is existential. If we cannot build enough momentum to create a course correction, the very existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state is under threat. Silence is a show of support for the Israeli government. Punishing and berating friends that speak out is undermining our struggle. I call on our allies – governments and diaspora Jewish communities – to hear the plea of the Israeli public and in particular the hostage families, who are demanding an end to the war and a new dawn for Israel. We all share the same commitment to Israel’s future safety and security, but to be a true friend is to be a friend of the Israeli people – and not its disastrous government.' back

Anne Applebaum & Peter Pomerantsev (2025), Autocracy in America; Episode 1: Start With a Lie, ' Applebaum: This is not a show about America’s future. It’s about the present. Pomerantsev: There are authoritarian tactics already at work in America, eating away at the guardrails that prevent a leader from usurping power, and we are going to show you where. [. . .] Pomerantsev: And in this episode: psychological corruption. Applebaum: Peter, when did you start to see things in the United States shift—shift away from a democratic culture? Pomerantsev: Look, it’s a slightly personal issue for me. My parents were Soviet dissidents in Soviet Ukraine, where I was born. They were arrested by the KGB. We were exiled in the late 1970s (I was still a baby at the time), and after the fall of the U.S.S.R., I went and lived in Russia and Moscow from 2001 to 2010. That was the first 10 years of the Putin era and, in that time, I saw Russia degrade from a really rotten democracy to a really aggressive dictatorship. And I actually remember one moment quite clearly: This must have been still during the Obama era. I was visiting the U.S. on holiday or for a work trip or something, and I suddenly found myself among groups of people who subscribed to this idea of birtherism, that Obama had not been born in America. Applebaum: Exactly. And if he wasn’t born in America, then he’s not qualified to be president. Pomerantsev: But it was the way they were talking about it. I mean, the evidence was not important to them. I mean, you could provide loads of evidence that Obama had been born in America—that wasn’t the point. The way they were using this conspiracy was kind of a real warning sign. This wasn’t like, I don’t know, the Kennedy assassination, where people try to find the truth out. Here, people I met who signed up to the birther conspiracy didn’t care about evidence. They said things I heard in Russia when it was fading into dictatorship. They would say, I don’t know. The truth is unknowable. There are no such things as real facts or even evidence. But what did matter was how you signaled your political affiliation by making a conspiratorial statement. Applebaum: Yep, and this is exactly how a conspiracy theory—a big lie—functions in an autocratic political system. It helps the leader, the autocrat, establish who’s loyal, who’s on our side, and who’s not. You know, if you promise to believe in the made-up story, then you can work for the government or the party or whatever, and if you don’t, you’re out. And so this then, not merit or hard work, determines who gets promoted and who runs things.[. . .] Pomerantz: It was around 2014. I remember the moment very clearly: Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and people that I knew who worked in state media and the bureaucracy—who’d always been so cynical, sort of smirking when they repeated the government’s lines, signaling that they knew that all the propaganda was a stupid game, that they were just playing along—suddenly, when the war started, they had this completely blank look and this total seriousness as they repeated the government lies, that the revolution in Ukraine, which was this incredible act of heroism by the Ukrainian people, was, I don’t know, all a CIA plot. I kept on looking for their old smirk—the little glint in the eye—but suddenly they were just delivering it like zombies. Something had changed. They knew now that they had to inhabit these lies fully if they were going to survive in a new paradigm.' back

AnneApplebaum & Peter Pomerantsev (2025), Autocracy in America; Episode 2:Capture the Courts, AppleBaum: In a democracy, we have something called rule of law, and that means that the law exists independent of politics. There are lawyers. There are courts. There are prosecutors, who at least, in theory—they are trying to legitimately find out who’s broken the law, who’s guilty, who’s not guilty. [. . .] That’s right. Whereas in a dictatorship, that’s not what the law is for. The law is not to find out what happened. It’s not to establish the truth. It’s not to find out who’s guilty and who’s not guilty. The law is to pursue politics by a different means. Pomerantsev—to serve the interests of the rulers, to protect them from justice and torment their enemies. back

Arthur Brooks (2025_05_01), Why Are Young People Everywhere So Unhappy?, ' But I am very interested in the change within countries, such as the falling happiness of young adults in America. New research digs deeply into this issue, and many others: The Global Flourishing Study, based on a survey undertaken by a consortium of institutions including my Harvard colleagues at the Human Flourishing Program. [. . .] Most significant to me, the survey shows that although young people’s emotional and psychological distress is more pronounced in wealthy, industrialized nations such as the United States, it is occurring across the world. [. . .] A plausible explanation for the more pronounced happiness problem that wealthy Western countries like the U.S. have is growing secularization—measured in the increasing numbers of so-called nones, people who profess no religious affiliation. In the United States, the percentage of the population with no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 2007, to 29 percent. Scholars have long found that religious people are, on average, happier than nonreligious people. [. . .] This leads to the question of what exactly is missing for so many people in wealthy countries when religion declines. Community connection and social capital are two answers. But a deeper answer is meaning, one of the study’s categories of flourishing, which it measures by asking participants whether they feel their daily activities are worthwhile and whether they understand their life’s purpose. GDP per capita, the survey finds, is inversely correlated with this sense of meaning: The wealthier a country gets, the more bereft of meaning its citizens feel. [. . .] Material comforts are great, but they’re no substitute for what your heart truly needs. Money can’t buy happiness; only meaning can give you that. That last is a truism, I know. But truisms do have the merit of being true—and the flourishing survey reveals how we’re in danger of forgetting these important verities.' [we need the new god] back

Ashley Parker & Michael Scherer, ‘I Run the Country and the World’, ' The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.” back

Dana Millbank (20245_05_02), As wreckage piles up, Trump and his aides retreat to fantasyland, ' This week brought the grim news that the Trump administration’s policies had thrown the economy into reverse, turning the 2.4 percent annualized GDP growth of the last quarter of 2024 into a 0.3 percent contraction in the first quarter of 2025. It was the worst showing since the pandemic, ending nearly three years of steady expansion. “Growth has simply vanished,” Chris Rupkey, chief economist at financial research firm Fwdbonds, wrote to clients. [. . .] Oh No? Soon after the dismal GDP report, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro marched out to the White House driveway and announced that the report “really should be very positive news for America” and was the best negative growth report “I have ever seen in my life.” The rosy adjectives flowed: “very, very good and quite encouraging … huge, literally off the charts ... good, strong news ... all things are good. So we felt really good about that number.” [. . .] This absurdity became the official White House line. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement saying that “the underlying numbers tell the real story of the strong momentum President Trump is delivering” and that Trump’s policies “are fueling an economic boom.” War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. And bust is boom. As the grave consequences of the administration’s policies become apparent, Trump and his lieutenants have retreated to a fantasyland. This absurdity became the official White House line. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement saying that “the underlying numbers tell the real story of the strong momentum President Trump is delivering” and that Trump’s policies “are fueling an economic boom.” back

Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo & Meg Kelly (2021_01_24), Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years, When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection. This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later. back

Hanna Arendt (1967), The Origins of Totalitarianism , ' “For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views".' back

Iva Glisic (2025_04_21), Is Russian misogyny enabling sexual violence in Ukraine? Yes, argues a bestselling author, Review: Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on Women – Sofia Oksanen (HarperCollins) ' Sofi Oksanen has a penchant for difficult subjects. The Finnish-Estonian author established her international reputation with her 2008 novel Purge, which examined sexual violence against women and legacies of the Soviet regime in Estonia. The subjugation of women as part of the complex history of Eastern Europe has been a central theme in her six novels. Her latest work, Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on Women, is a book-length essay that evolved from a speech delivered to the Swedish Academy in March 2023. Its primary concern is the deterioration of women’s rights under the regime of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Oksanen weaves together three narrative threads: the story of her own family, the historical trajectory of post-Soviet Russia, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. [. . .] Oksanen argues that, over the past two decades, the status of women in Russia has been deliberately repositioned to align with the state’s promotion of “traditional values” (however vaguely defined). In 2023, Russian politician Oleg Matveychev drafted a proposed law for the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, describing feminism as “extremist” and feminists as “agents of the West”. In 2017, Oksanen points out, certain forms of domestic violence were decriminalised in Russia. The Guardian reported: The changes mean violence against a spouse or children that results in bruising or bleeding but not broken bones is punishable by 15 days in prison or a fine of 30,000 roubles (£380) if they do not happen more than once a year. Previously, these offences carried a maximum jail sentence of two years. [. . .] Oksanen asserts in the book’s opening pages that, for many Estonians, “the war in Ukraine feels like a rehash of the 1940s, as if someone insists on pressing the replay button, because Russia is up to its old tricks”. The title evokes this sentiment. It inverts ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ quote: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Reflecting on the situation in Ukraine, Oksanen recalls the Soviet past her family witnessed in Estonia – and its silent victims across generations. While historians will point out that history does not simply repeat itself, the Ukraine war has awakened troubled memories and renewed fears of armed conflict across Russia’s neighbouring countries. A seemingly ordinary photograph is Oksanen’s entry point into her family history: a portrait of her great-aunt, who lost her ability to speak after enduring interrogation (and, in all likelihood, assault) by Soviet officials in Estonia in the early 1940s. This family story, at once known and unknown to Oksanen as a child, had an enduring impact. It has served as a compass, silently orienting her creative work. The complexities of 20th-century Baltic and Finnish history – and the long shadow of the Soviet regime across this region – are reflected in the stories of Oksanen’s relatives and their negotiation of familial, national and Soviet allegiances. These were manifested in the languages they spoke (Estonian or Russian), the holidays they celebrated, and the family mementos they preserved. Women’s rights under Putin Intersecting with Oksanen’s family narrative, which spans the interwar years to the late Soviet period, is an account of Russia’s post-Soviet transformation under presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. The 1990s are depicted as a time when newfound political freedoms were juxtaposed with devastating economic crisis. “Twenty years of freedom had not transformed any villages or towns of Russia into a Vienna or a Paris, and no one’s galoshes had turned into glass slippers,” Oksanen observes. According to international development expert Adrian Campbell, the 1990s saw life expectancy fall and birth rates collapse in Russia. There was widespread crime and trafficking. And in 1991-94 and 1998-99, he writes, there were periods of economic crisis. These were the years when Putin’s regime was progressively consolidated. Oksanen addresses familiar themes: rapid enrichment of elites, impoverishment of the general population, social disintegration. Unfortunately, the complexity of these events is undermined by imprecise and at times inelegant prose. Oksanen’s account is highly fragmented: complex historical phenomena are flattened into facile parallels. For example, she compares the fearful response of Russia’s imperial elites to the French Revolution with Putin’s efforts to prevent pro-democratic protests (or “colour revolutions”) that emerged across post-socialist countries in the 2000s and 2010s. More compelling are Oksanen’s reflections on the erosion of women’s rights under Putin. Misogyny, she notes, has become a significant Russian export that, packaged as a restoration of traditional values, has successfully recruited supporters all over the world. She writes that researchers who analysed 7,506 tweets from a troll factory linked to Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin found the factory (and Russia’s military intelligence agency specifically) incited conflict in discussions related to feminism and women’s rights. “Russia got involved in no less than a third of Twitter discussions on those topics.” A former employee of the factory called feminism “an obvious target for internet trolls because it was seen as an enemy of the traditional values represented by Russia and as a Western plot”. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group was found to have incited conflict in discussions related to feminism and women’s rights. AAP The third and central thread of Oksanen’s examination is the ongoing war in Ukraine, particularly the extreme violence inflicted on civilians. Drawing on media reports of intimidation (including online harassment), torture and kidnapping, Oksanen depicts the Russian army’s use of sexual violence as a deliberate military strategy. Between February 24 2022 and August 31 2024, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine documented 376 cases of conflict-related sexual violence against men, women and children. Of course, instances of sexual violence are likely underreported due to the profound stigma surrounding such crimes, which can deter survivors from seeking help or reporting their experiences. The brutality of the examples Oksanen cites is confronting. The courage of victims who chose to speak about their experiences – such as filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko, the first Ukrainian to detail sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Donbas, in 2014 – is nothing short of remarkable. These accounts underpin a clear and incontestable argument that sexual violence must be prosecuted as a war crime, not treated as an inevitable aspect of conflict. Progress has been made, as Okansen acknowledges, through cases at the International Criminal Court in the Hague on sexual violence during the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide. Notably, the first convictions for rape as an act of genocide were made by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1998 – more than a quarter of a century ago. Okansen calls for heightened attention to sexual violence as a war crime and recognition of victims – who, as she poignantly observes, often remain invisible and unrecognised. In our societies, there are indeed no statues and no postage stamps for victims of sexual crimes. No streets named in their honour, no days of remembrance. No flag is raised in their memory. Ackowledging past atrocities Same River, Twice argues that recognising the historical experience of Eastern Europe and the colonial legacy of the Soviet Union is critical for understanding and addressing present-day atrocities. Oksanen overstates a supposed lack of research on this history. Notable works include those by Aleksandr Etkin, Adeeb Khalid, Valerie A. Kivelson, Ronald Grigor Suny and Madina Tlostanova. But there is certainly something to her argument about international indifference towards eastern Europe as a colonised space, historically and in the context of Russia’s current military operations. Oksanen attributes Western indifference in part to economic interests: a willingness to overlook crime in favour of business gains. Against the forces of amnesia and economic opportunism, her book reminds us that acknowledging past atrocities is a crucial act of courage – and necessary to face what historian Mark Edele recently called today’s “age of strategic chaos”.' back

J Oliver Conroy (2025_04_29), ‘Maga Catholics’ are gaining ground in the US. Now their sight is set on the Vatican, ' Once the papal conclave starts, the cardinals choosing Pope Francis’s successor will be strictly shut off from the world until a new pope is named. But the coming days before the conclave begins on 7 May will see competing factions of Catholics, including many laypeople, campaigning in the Vatican and the US to influence the church’s future – none with more urgency than those discontented with Francis’s liberal reign. [. . .] “The living and vibrant parts of the US church are not those who were most enthusiastic about the Francis pontificate, but those who have embraced the ‘all-in’ Catholicism of John Paul II and Benedict XVI,” George Weigel, a neoconservative Catholic writer, told me by email as he traveled to Rome. “In the main,” he argued, “Francis’s most vocal supporters were the ageing and shrinking parts of the American church.” [. . .] Catholics For Catholics is one of the political faces of a newly militant Catholic right. In March, the organization hosted a prayer event at Mar-a-Lago for the second year in a row. The organization also worked to mobilize Catholic swing-state voters for the Republican party last fall, with a particular focus on millions of “low-propensity” Catholics who don’t regularly vote. [. . .] Faggioli, the Villanova professor, believes that traditionalists overreacted to Francis. “Conservative Catholics got used to a certain kind of papacy and a sympathy for their causes during the 35 years of John Paul II and Pope Benedict, and some of them thought that history was over,” he said. [. . . ] Faggioli believes that “in some sense, this church is already in a situation of soft schism”. But he doesn’t think a full-blown schism is in the cards. “The real goal of [most] neo-traditionalist voices is not to break away and make their own small church,” he said. “Their project is to win back the entire Catholic church, in the long term, to what they think is real Catholicism".' back

Jamie Dettmer (2025_04_29), An ugly Ukraine deal was predictable — but this will merely pause Russia’s revanchism, ' Without U.S. security guarantees and a firm “porcupine strategy” to make sure Kyiv is heavily armed, this deal will just be a way station in Putin’s bid to subjugate the country. Donald Trump will complete his first 100 days in office this week. But despite the U.S. president’s campaign boast about how easily he could settle the Ukraine war in just one day, he still hasn’t managed to broker a ceasefire — let alone a deal to permanently end the conflict. His administration seems hopeful that will change this week. But if the U.S. does manage to engineer a ceasefire, there should be grave doubts it will be the final word on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revanchism. [. . .] Donald Trump will complete his first 100 days in office this week. But despite the U.S. president’s campaign boast about how easily he could settle the Ukraine war in just one day, he still hasn’t managed to broker a ceasefire — let alone a deal to permanently end the conflict. His administration seems hopeful that will change this week. But if the U.S. does manage to engineer a ceasefire, there should be grave doubts it will be the final word on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revanchism.' back

Jonathan Eig & Jeanne Theoharis (2023_02_12), The Man Who Knew Exactly What the F.B.I. Was Doing to Martin Luther King Jr., ' We have long known about the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover’s animus toward the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover built an extensive apparatus of surveillance and disruption designed to destroy King and to drive a wedge between King and President Lyndon Johnson. But historians, journalists and contemporary political leaders have largely portrayed Hoover as a kind of uncontrollable vigilante, an all too powerful and obsessive lawman, and Johnson as a genuine civil rights partner until King broke with the president over the Vietnam War. In reality, as new documents reveal, Johnson was more of an antagonist to King and a conspirator with Hoover than he has been portrayed. By personalizing the F.B.I.’s assault on King, Americans cling to a view of history that isolates a few bad actors who opposed the civil rights movement — including Hoover, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama and the Birmingham lawman Bull Connor. They thus fail to acknowledge the institutionalized, well-organized resistance to change in our society. Americans prefer a version of history in which most decent people did the right thing in the end. It’s time to move past that comfortable story and recognize the power structure that supported the F.B.I.’s campaign. Many Americans — starting with the president — thought movement activists like King posed threats to the established order and needed to be watched and controlled. Members of the press could have exposed the bureau’s campaign. And many government officials who could have stopped, curtailed or exposed the F.B.I.’s attack on King instead enabled or encouraged it. F.B.I. records declassified in the past several years and documents from the Johnson archives released in 2022 force us to reconsider the nature of Johnson’s involvement in the F.B.I.’s campaign against King. The White House documents — part of a huge cache of F.B.I. memos that has only begun to see daylight — suggest that Johnson, from the beginning of his presidency in 1963 to King’s assassination in 1968, was apprised almost weekly by Hoover himself on the F.B.I.’s surveillance of King. [. . .]' “The course of the civil rights movement may have been altered” by the F.B.I.’s campaign against King, wrote Ramsey Clark, Johnson’s third attorney general. “The prejudice may have reached men who might otherwise have given great support — including even the president of the United States.” It surely did, as King understood all too well. “Let’s face it,” King said in a phone call to Mr. Levison days before his assassination. “We do have a great public-relations setback where my image and leadership are concerned.” He added, “It will put many Negroes in the position of saying, ‘Well, Martin Luther King is at the end of his rope.’” Tragically, we know exactly how King felt, because the F.B.I. recorded his call.' back

Jonathan Este (2025_04_18), Trump takes a line from ‘world’s coolest dictator’, ' What a difference a dictator makes. Some world leaders get a rough ride in their Oval Office meetings with Donald Trump – most famously, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who the US president and his entourage publicly disparaged in their now-notorious meeting at the end of February. But not El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, the self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” – an autocrat whose country’s incarceration rate is the highest in the world – with whom Trump swapped a few friendly quips this week about authoritarian leadership. “They say that we imprisoned thousands. I say we liberated millions,” said Bukele about his record of jailing people without due process, adding that: “To liberate that many, you have to imprison some.” “Who gave him that line? You think I could use that?” replied Trump to general merriment. Bukele has obliged Trump by incarcerating hundreds of Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants deported from the US on suspicion of being members of criminal gangs – none of whom have had their day in court. One person of particular interest to the journalists was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man deported due to an “administrative error”. The US Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to do everything in its power to “facilitate” his return to his wife and family in the US. “Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said, when asked if he would send Abrego Garcia back to the US, adding that it would be like “sending a terrorist back to the United States”. Smiles all round from the US officials. This apparently makes it a matter of foreign policy rather than a failure of US justice – or, just as crucially, an impending constitutional crisis over the Trump administration’s failure to obey a Supreme Court ruling.' back

Last universal common ancestor - Wikipedia, Last universal common ancestor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the most recent population from which all organisms now living on Earth share common descent—the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. . . . .. While no specific fossil evidence of the LUCA exists, the detailed biochemical similarity of all current life makes it plausible. Its characteristics can be inferred from shared features of modern genomes. These genes describe a complex life form with many co-adapted features, including transcription and translation mechanisms to convert information from DNA to mRNA to proteins. The LUCA probably lived in the high-temperature water of deep sea vents near ocean-floor magma flows around 4 billion years ago.' back

Laura Zhou ((2025_04_28), Katy Perry to perform first shows in mainland China since Taiwan controversy, Image: ' Katy Perry, shown here performing at Windsor Castle near London in May 2023, will join a limited list of Western pop singers permitted to perform in China.' Photo: TNS ' American pop star Katy Perry is expected to perform in mainland China in November, years after she was denied a visa for wearing a controversial sunflower dress in Taiwan. Perry, 40, who made headlines earlier this month when she took a brief trip to space, is set to hold two concerts in an 18,000-seat stadium in the eastern city of Hangzhou on November 21 and 22, according to a notice from Zhejiang province’s culture and tourism bureau. The news comes eight years after Perry was reportedly denied entry for a Victoria’s Secret fashion show in Shanghai in 2017. Beijing has never confirmed the visa rejection, but US celebrity news site Page Six reported at the time that Perry had been banned from performing in mainland China because of controversy over her 2015 concert in Taiwan. During her performance in Taipei, the pop singer wore a bright dress featuring a sunflower – seen as a symbol of a student movement that opposed a trade pact between the self-ruled island and mainland China. back

Marc Jampolsky (2022), Sagrada Familia: Gaudi's Challenge, ' The imposing basilica of the Sagrada Família, a major work by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926), begun in 1882 and never completed, overlooks the city of Barcelona and has become one of its symbols. Its verticality, its organic and curved forms and the brightly colored mosaics that adorn the tops of its towers make it unique. In addition to its aesthetics, this expiatory temple is the product of technical innovations such as the chain arches designed to absorb the load of the immense building without buttresses or the inclined, tree-like columns that follow the trajectory of the building's forces. This complex geometry makes the task of the engineer's heirs all the more difficult as they only have a few original plans and models. back

Margaret MacMillan (2025_04_30), This Is the Way a World Order Ends, back

Mary Sirridge (1999), Quam videndo intus dicimus: Seeing and Saying in De Trinitate XV, ' What is being asserted is that thought has the same form as seeing or speaking respectively, i.e., that it works essentially like seeing or speaking, that thought is a formal and functional isomorph of seeing or speaking.' back

Moscow Times (2025_04_29), Ukrainian Reporter Was Tortured in Russian Prison Before Her Death, Investigation Finds, 'Moscow Returns Body of Ukrainian Reporter Who Died in Russian Detention According to The Guardian, medical examiners documented burn marks on her feet from electric shocks, abrasions on her head and hip, a broken rib and a fractured hyoid bone — a possible sign of strangulation. “Experts have not yet been able to determine the cause of death due to the body’s condition,” Belousov said. Investigators said the body was returned without a brain, eyes or larynx. A Ukrainian law enforcement source told IStories that Russia sometimes attributes missing organs to standard autopsy procedures. “However, this may be a way to hide traces of violence,” the source said. One anonymous medical examiner called it “unusual” to remove the larynx, which can contain evidence of strangulation. “When someone is strangled, the hyoid bone often breaks. If suffocated, bleeding can be found in the eyes, and lack of oxygen in the brain,” they told IStories. Ukrainian authorities opened a war crimes investigation into Roshchyna’s death in March. A freelance journalist, Roshchyna had reported for outlets including Ukrainska Pravda and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Ukrainian service. In 2022, she received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation for her frontline reporting. She was previously detained for 10 days in March 2022 in Russian-occupied Berdyansk. back

Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Nicene Creed (Greek: Σύμβολον τῆς Νίκαιας, Latin: Symbolum Nicaenum) is the profession of faith or creed that is most widely used in Christian liturgy. It forms the mainstream definition of Christianity for most Christians. It is called Nicene because, in its original form, it was adopted in the city of Nicaea (present day Iznik in Turkey) by the first ecumenical council, which met there in the year 325. The Nicene Creed has been normative for the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Anglican Communion, and the great majority of Protestant denominations.' back

Nothing Compares (film 2022) - Wikipedia, Nothing Compares (film 2022) - Wikipedia,the free encyclopedi, ' Nothing Compares is a 2022 documentary feature film, directed by Kathryn Ferguson. It looks at the life and legacy of Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor, focusing on the years 1987–1993. The film had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival on 21 January 2022, after which it was acquired by Showtime Documentary Films. The film was theatrically released in the UK and Ireland by Paramount International on 7 October 2022. Synopsis Nothing Compares is the story of Sinéad O'Connor's phenomenal rise to worldwide fame and how her iconoclastic personality resulted in her exile from the pop mainstream. Focusing on her prophetic words and deeds from 1987–1993, the film reflects on the legacy of this fearless trailblazer through a contemporary feminist lens. back

Pericardium - Wikipedia, Pericardium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The pericardium also called pericardial sac, is a double-walled sac containing the heart and the roots of the great vessels.[1] It has two layers, an outer layer made of strong inelastic connective tissue (fibrous pericardium), and an inner layer made of serous membrane (serous pericardium). It encloses the pericardial cavity, which contains pericardial fluid, and defines the middle mediastinum. It separates the heart from interference of other structures, protects it against infection and blunt trauma, and lubricates the heart's movements.' back

Russell Blackford (2024_04_29), The Christian Right is taking over America, according to Talia Lavin – but what is the best response?, Review: Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America – Talia Lavin (Hachette) ' Talia Lavin’s Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America is an angry response to the rise of American Christianity’s far-right fringe, which she depicts as a theocratic menace to secular government and liberal freedoms. As Lavin shows in abundant detail, the US Christian Right adheres to a worldview based around supernatural struggle between good and evil, where “demons make war every day with the better angels of the human spirit”. This is the same mentality as motivated the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, with its hysterical tales of ritual child abuse in service of the Devil. It continues to influence America’s “politics, punditry, and policy”. Lavin exposes the Christian Right’s political ambitions and social harms, amassing examples to illustrate the point. She cites case after case of apocalyptic fervour, domestic terrorism, patriarchal tyranny, systematic child abuse, anti-science kookiness, and connections with white supremacism. Her central claim is that significant elements within American evangelicalism want to use state power to impose their version of a Christian social order grounded in ideas of faith, obedience and bodily purity. The Christian Right rejects any spirit of mutual tolerance between religious and secular worldviews, pursuing instead absolute political and cultural dominance. This absolutism drives efforts to suppress ways of life viewed as rootless and degenerate, dismantle the separation of church and state, and reframe the United States as an inherently Christian nation requiring an explicitly Christian government.[. . .] Lavin raises a legitimate alarm: a theocratic faction in the US wields disproportionate influence to the point of threatening liberal democracy itself. To bolster that point, she could have cited a wave of recent Supreme Court cases that demonstrate a weakening of constitutional barriers to state-endorsed religion. [. . .]That situation has been a long time coming and other authors have traversed similar ground to Lavin’s book. One might, for example, compare Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism or Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies. [. . .] Both works, though less current than Wild Faith, model a fairness that strengthens their arguments. Lavin’s book benefits from its timeliness, addressing a contemporary landscape of heightened evangelical influence, but it sacrifices objectivity and scholarly depth. It will resonate with Americans who are already frightened by the Christian Right, while alienating many conservatives, or even moderates, who might have been open to concerns about theocracy.' back

Sally Haslanger - Wikipedia, Sally Haslanger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Haslanger has published in metaphysics, feminist metaphysics, epistemology, feminist theory, ancient philosophy, and social and political philosophy. She writes that much of her work has focused on persistence through change; objectivity and objectification; and Catharine MacKinnon's theory of gender. She has done work on the social construction of categories often considered to be natural kinds, particularly race and gender.' back

Shada Islam (2025_04_29), The EU can’t replace the US as a globaTue 29 Apr 2025 14.00 AEST , ' Donald Trump has disrupted the global economy with his disastrous tariff wars and appears hell-bent on gutting transatlantic relations. I am hoping he has also unwittingly injected new life into the EU’s struggle to wean itself off overreliance on Washington. A vast network of trade and aid agreements connects the EU with more than 70 countries. The union could become an important standalone global actor and even thrive in a multipolar world. But it must first shed its Eurocentric worldviews, complacent policymaking and double standards. [. . . ] The EU can’t replace the US as a global player until it sheds its own colonial thinking. Eurocentric assumptions and bullying resource-grabs are justified causes of outrage in the global south But some countries, such as Italy, Hungary, Poland and the three Baltic states, still hanker for life under US protection. Moreover, Brussels has yet to disprove a complaint about the EU’s mindset by the Indian foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he said Europe thinks “its problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems”. Many in the global south are outraged, for instance, at the EU’s failure to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza even as it talks up its commitment to human rights in Ukraine. As the South Africa-based academic Carlos Lopes, author of a recent book on EU-Africa relations, told me, the EU retains such a deep-rooted “colonial attitude of superiority that it translates into a sort of patronising charity and altruism”. [. . . ] Since Trump dismantled USAid, European activists are also fighting to maintain EU funding for the world’s most fragile nations. But what hope is there when EU governments, including France and Germany, are slashing their development budgets. As efforts continue to limit migration to Fortress Europe in all its harsh manifestations, the EU’s strategy of relying on neighbouring strongmen who are paid to deter migrant crossings is provoking serious racial strife. [. . .] In many ways, Trump provides European policymakers with an opportunity. They have a chance now to revise some of the EU’s more egregious policies and to truly reinvent the bloc as a credible, relevant presence on the global stage. I am confident that stronger EU engagement with the global south could help bring geopolitical stability to an unsettled world. It would also offer a compelling alternative to Trump’s dystopia. But it will require more than von der Leyen’s rhetoric and wishful thinking.' back

Sinead O'Connor - Wikipedia, Sinead O'Connor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' O'Connor drew attention to issues such as child abuse, human rights, racism, and women's rights. During a Saturday Night Live performance in 1992, nearly a decade before the world became fully aware of the prolific sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church, she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II to protest against the abuse, sparking controversy by those who did not know or who were hiding the truth of the scandal. Throughout her musical career, she openly discussed her spiritual journey, activism, socio-political viewpoints, and her experiences with trauma and struggles with mental health. Having converted to Islam in 2018, she adopted the name Shuhada' Sadaqat while continuing to perform and record under her birth name. In 2024, O'Connor was posthumously nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. back

Stéphane Bégoin, Medina Azahara: Lost Pearl of Al-Andalus, Experts examine the Madinat al-Zahra, often referred to as the Versailles of al-Andalus, which is widely recognised as one of the world's most significant archaeological sites of Islamic heritage. back

Victor Bojinov, The Naked Truth About Zhiguli Band, A music producer tries to assemble his 30-year-old rock band so they can play one last concert to earn the money to pay for his daughter's education. back

Wojciech Hubert Zurek (2008), Quantum origin of quantum jumps: breaking of unitary symmetry induced by information transfer and the transition from quantum to classical, 'Submitted on 17 Mar 2007 (v1), last revised 18 Mar 2008 (this version, v3)) Measurements transfer information about a system to the apparatus, and then further on – to observers and (often inadvertently) to the environment. I show that even imperfect copying essential in such situations restricts possible unperturbed outcomes to an orthogonal subset of all possible states of the system, thus breaking the unitary symmetry of its Hilbert space implied by the quantum superposition principle. Preferred outcome states emerge as a result. They provide framework for the “wavepacket collapse”, designating terminal points of quantum jumps, and defining the measured observable by specifying its eigenstates.' back

Yahweh - Wikipedia, Yahweh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Yahweh was an ancient Semitic deity, the national god of ancient Israel and Judah, and the head of the pantheon of the polytheistic Israelite religion. Although there is no clear consensus regarding the origins of the deity, scholars generally hold that Yahweh was associated with Seir, Edom, Paran, and Teman, and later with Canaan. The worship of Yahweh reaches back to at least the early Iron Age, and likely to the late Bronze Age, if not somewhat earlier. In the oldest biblical texts, Yahweh possesses attributes that were typically ascribed to deities of weather and war, fructifying the Land of Israel and leading a heavenly army against the enemies of the Israelites. The early Israelites engaged in polytheistic practices that were common across ancient Semitic religion, because the Israelite religion was a derivative of the Canaanite religion and included a variety of deities from it, including El, Asherah, and Baal. In later centuries, El and Yahweh became conflated, and El-linked epithets, such as ʾĒl Šadday, came to be applied to Yahweh alone. Characteristics other deities, such as Asherah and Baal, were also selectively absorbed in conceptions of Yahweh.' back