“The information from the various domains, including the confessions of Hamas terrorists given during their interrogations, indicate a deliberate and planned course of action — they were sent out by their commanders to rape, torture and abuse in the most severe ways. For Hamas, the mistreatment of women became a means of humiliation, spreading terror, feelings of loss and despair in Israeli society. In addition to Hamas’ use of systematic sexual violence as a weapon, there also occurred sadistic rape and violence perpetrated by Gazan men who entered Israel in the hours following Hamas’ organised attack. In the attack on 7 October, sexual violence as an act of war was expressed in a particularly extreme way. First, rape was just one step in an act of murder. The crimes were committed by armed soldiers against unarmed civilian women, and the sexual violence was accompanied by an immediate threat to the lives of the women, most of whom were in fact cruelly murdered following the rape. Second, rape was part of the combat doctrine. The number of victims was high because rape was an element of Hamas’ operational concept. Third, gang rape was widespread. The absolute majority of attacks by Hamas people (similar to other wartime rapes) were gang rapes with the participation, encouragement and in the presence of other people. Fourth, the rapes were carried out using sadistic torture practices with unprecedented cruelty.” (Orit Sulitzeanu/IPS Journal)
“It would take another month and nearly 8,000 more Palestinian deaths for Biden to criticize Israel in any meaningful way. At a closed-door fundraiser last week, he warned that Israel’s ‘indiscriminate bombing’ was costing the country international support. But Biden’s own support for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained largely intact. After saying he favored the eventual creation of a Palestinian state, he reiterated his unwavering backing for the Jewish nation. ‘We’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel,’ Biden said. ‘Not a single thing.’ Much of Biden’s deference to Israel is deeply personal. As his supporters have put it, he identifies with the nation in his kishkes—his guts … A former Biden administration official shared a similar perspective with me. ‘The President does not seem to acknowledge the humanity of all parties affected by this conflict,’ this person said. ‘He has described Israeli suffering in great detail, while Palestinian suffering is left vague if mentioned at all.’” (Noah Lanard/Mother Jones)
“The animating concept behind the Trump campaign will be chaos. This is what history shows us fascists do when given the chance to participate in democratic political campaigns: They create chaos. They do it because chaos works to their advantage. They revel in it because they can see how profoundly chaos unnerves democratic-republicans—everyone, that is, whether liberal or conservative, who believes in the basic idea of a representative government that is built around neutral rules. Fascism exists to pulverize neutral rules. Indeed, fascism insists that republican democracies’ rules are not neutral at all but are rigged against them—the holders of an old, mythic truth that republican democracy was conjured into being to weaken and obscure. So they campaign with explicit intention to instill a sense of chaos. And then comes the topper: They have the audacity to insist that the only solution to the chaos—that they themselves have either grossly exaggerated or in some cases created!—is to vote for them: ‘You see, there is nothing but chaos afoot, and only we can restore order!’” (Michael Tomasky/TNR)
“It is not an understatement to call the Carters’ home and lifestyle modest. We spent hours at a dining-room table surrounded by papers, ate lunch in the kitchen, said grace, and were served sandwiches by the housekeeper, Mary Prince. Prince had been wrongly convicted of murder and was rescued from prison by the Carters, who fought for her release while in the White House. One evening, on the television in their bedroom, we watched President Ronald Reagan squirm his way through a speech explaining how his administration had violated the law by sending arms payments from Iran to right-wing Nicaraguan militias. ‘Whoa, that looks bad,’ I recall Carter observing about the political dilemma his successor was in.” (Peter Osnos)
“This year will be a make or break for several of Africa’s leading economies. Some will exploit the window of opportunity created by the current debt crisis to make lasting positive reforms and strengthen their fiscal capacity. Many more will miss the opportunity and instead implement the minimum reforms needed to keep financial support from the IMF, the World Bank, and other donors flowing. Inflation will ease across the board in 2024, but the lasting effects of the hit on households’ purchasing power will endure. Currency depreciations in countries dependent on food imports will exacerbate the squeeze on household incomes. The projected 4.1% increase in regional GDP, is respectable, but will barely make a dent on per capita incomes. Only Sudan and Equatorial Guinea will see their economies contract. East Africa will be the continent’s growth engine in 2024. Growth will mostly come from natural resource sectors (especially hydrocarbons), transportation and logistics (including infrastructure investments), resurgent tourism in Eastern and Southern Africa, and agriculture. In addition, this might be the year that Gulf cash comes to the rescue in a few of the region’s economies (e.g., Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Tanzania). China’s slowdown, subdued global commodity prices, policy-related barriers to investment and trade, and political risk will continue to weigh down many regional economies.” (The Africanist Perspective/Ken Opalo)
“Taiwan’s election next month has drawn nervous attention from capitals around the world for its bearing on the most sensitive point of friction between the U.S. and China. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has made taking control of Taiwan a centerpiece of his quest to restore his country as a great power. It is a task, the 70-year-old Xi has said, that ‘should not be passed down from generation to generation.’ On Tuesday, Xi told senior officials ‘We will resolutely prevent anyone from making Taiwan secede from China by any means’ … The shifting political winds in Taiwan represent a cold new reality for Communist Party leaders in China. After Beijing crushed dissent in Hong Kong, there is little appetite in Taiwan for an arrangement in which China would peacefully assume political control of the island in exchange for a high degree of autonomy. The proportion of people in Taiwan who identify primarily as Chinese has plummeted to below 3%, prompting even the party that had most ardently pursued peaceful political union with Beijing to do everything it can to shed its “pro-Beijing” label. ‘Young people in Taiwan neither feel they are Chinese, nor do they have affection for anything Chinese—quite the contrary,’ said Andrew Hsia, deputy head of the KMT.” (WSJ via MSN/Josh Chin)
“Think of Mark Burnett, the reality show creator of ‘The Apprentice,’ a capitalist-hero-puppet-show starring a failed New York real estate scion. Burnett styled and then fed a fake businessman to lethargic, overfed, sugar-doped couch potatoes - here at the Freakshow we dispense with the euphemism ‘low-information voters’ - who then voted a sociopathic nepo-baby into the most powerful position on the planet. Mr. Burnett reportedly still maintains ironclad control over a vault of outtake video that shows his fake businessman and America’s 45th President-to-be using racist and sexist language and behaving in curious and atrocious ways (harassing women, snorting Adderall? see here) that might still shock enough of what’s left of the American conscience to sway the so-called independent voters who will decide whether we become an autocracy by January 2025. But besides that Evil Dr. No shit, Mr. Burnett is really a piker at the great game. A British emigre who got his start in LA selling t-shirts on Venice Beach, he is reportedly worth half a billion dollars now.But that’s just a centimillionaire .. not even a uni-billionaire! The king of Underestimating American Intelligence for riches is another son of the Commonwealth who came to America to try his luck, Rupert Murdoch.” (American Political Freakshow/Nina Burleigh)
“The high-altitude hero of the Himalayas, yak are among the few large animals that can survive the extremely cold, harsh and oxygen-poor conditions of the Tibetan Plateau. In the mountainous regions of Asia, yak and yak-cattle hybrids serve as vital sources of meat, milk, transportation and fuel. However, little is known about their history: when or where yak were domesticated. In a study published Dec. 13 in Science Advances, an international team of researchers that includes archaeologists at Washington University in St. Louis report archaeologically and genetically confirmed evidence for domestic yak, dating back 2,500 years, by far the oldest record. The researchers zeroed in on this date using ancient DNA from a single male yak that lived alongside domestic cattle and yak-cattle hybrids in a settlement known as Bangga, a community in the southern Tibetan Plateau located at an elevation of approximately 3,750 meters (12,300 feet) above sea level. ‘Many scholars have speculated that yak was first domesticated in the high-altitude regions of the Tibetan Plateau,’ said Xinyi Liu, an associate professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. ‘It was a well-informed speculation, but up to this point, there hasn’t been robust evidence for that,’ Liu said. ‘This is the first evidence supported by both archaeology and ancient DNA.’” (Talia Ogliore/WuStl)
“Needless to say, none of this happened according to plan, and nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century, liberal democracy is playing defense while authoritarianism is making gains. The past year has brought no shortage of bad news on this front: In March, China’s National People’s Congress unanimously granted President Xi Jinping an unprecedented third term, setting him up for a likely life tenure. In May, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also won a third term, continuing his 20 years in power first as prime minister and then as president. A spike in migration of asylum seekers to Europe has driven right-wing nationalists and populists to election victories in several countries, including the Netherlands, where the Party for Freedom, led by the provocative Euroskeptic and outspoken Islamophobe Geert Wilders, won the most seats in November’s national elections.” (Jonah Schepp/NYMag)
“Where fighting has ended, the quiet owes less to dealmaking than battlefield victory. In Afghanistan, the Taliban seized power as U.S. troops left, without bargaining with Afghan rivals. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed struck a deal in late 2022 with rebel leaders that ended the Tigray war, but it was more a cementing of Abiy’s victory than an accord about the region’s future. This past year, Azerbaijan took back control of Nagorno-Karabakh, its September offensive finishing off what its victory in the 2020 war started, ending a 30-year standoff over the enclave and forcing an exodus of ethnic Armenians. Wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have also wound down but without lasting accommodation among the parties or even, in Libya and Syria, a political track worth the name. In fact, belligerents are mostly waiting for a chance to seize more land or power. It is hardly news that warring parties want to vanquish rivals. But in the 1990s, a flurry of agreements ended conflicts in places from Cambodia and Bosnia to Mozambique and Liberia. The deals were imperfect and often entailed ugly concessions. A period scarred by the Rwandan genocide and Balkan bloodletting can hardly be romanticized as a golden era of peacemaking. Still, the string of accords appeared to signal a future in which calmer post-Cold War politics opened room for diplomacy. Over the past decade or so, such deals have been few and far between. (Colombia’s 2016 settlement of its decades-long civil war and the Philippines’ 2014 deal with rebels in its Bangsamoro region are outliers and, in some ways, legacies of another era.) The past few months’ ghastly turn in Israel-Palestine is perhaps the trend’s starkest illustration.” (Comfort Ero and Richard Atwood/FP)
“The state of female filmmaking in Hollywood is still tenuous despite the historic success of Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie,’ according to two new university studies. While ‘Barbie,’ distributed by Warner Bros., made history as the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman, the 26th annual Celluloid Ceiling report from San Diego State University and the 2023 Inclusion in the Director’s Chair study from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that female filmmakers — especially female filmmakers of color — are rarely hired by major studios. ‘While Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ reigned supreme as the number one box office film, women remained dramatically underrepresented as directors,’ the Celluloid Ceiling study reads, ‘accounting for just 16 percent of those working on the 250 top grossing films and 14 percent on the 100 top grossing films. It’s the ultimate illusion, Gerwig’s well-deserved triumph belied the gender inequality that pervades the mainstream film industry.’” (Samantha Bergeson/indieWIRE)
“Aside from being cold, snowflakes are well-known for their unique shapes. New research illuminates how these lovely crystals fall to the ground. When the air is still snowflakes gently drift to the surface, but on other occasions they get violently tossed about by wind and other forms of precipitation. While this can be beautiful to observe, it also adds an element of the unpredictable to snowstorms — although a group of researchers at the University of Utah may have helped change that forever.According to a recent study published in the journal Physics of Fluids, scientists can actually anticipate how snowflakes will fall during different types of air turbulence, something that atmospheric modelers previously struggled to do. After much research, the scientists found that they simply had to use the Stokes number for the snowflakes. A Stokes number is a dimensionless figure that determines the behavior of particles suspended in a fluid flow. Such a straightforward solution may seem counterintuitive because, as the authors noted, snowflakes come in so many individual shapes and sizes.” (Matthew Rosza/Salon)
“MANY TIMES A year, as if on a hidden schedule, some tech person, often venture-capital-adjacent, types out a thought on social media like ‘The only thing liberal arts majors are good for is scrubbing floors while I punch them’ and hits Send. Then the poetry people respond—often a little late, in need of haircuts—with earnest arguments about the value of art. I am an English major to death. (You know us not by what we’ve read but by what we are ashamed not to have read.) But I learned years ago that there’s no benefit in joining this debate. It never resolves. The scientist-novelist C. P. Snow went after the subject in 1959 in a lecture called ‘The Two Cultures,’ in which he criticized British society for favoring Shakespeare over Newton. Snow gets cited a lot. I have always found him unreadable, which, yes, embarrasses me but also makes me wonder whether perhaps the humanities had a point. By the time I went to college, in the mixtape days, the Two Cultures debate had migrated to corkboards. In the liberal arts building, people tacked up pro-humanities essays they had snipped out of magazines. A hot Saturday night for me was to go and read them. Other people were trying drugs. I found the essays perplexing. I got the gist, but why would one need to defend something as urgent and essential as the humanities? Then again, across the street in the engineering building, I remember seeing bathroom graffiti that read ‘The value of a liberal arts degree,’ with an arrow pointing to the toilet paper. I was in the engineering building because they had Silicon Graphics workstations. Wandering between these worlds, I began to realize I was that most horrifying of things: interdisciplinary.” (Paul Ford/WIRED)
“The significance of an event often only becomes apparent at a later stage. It seems that precisely such a historic moment is taking place in Guatemala right now: for over 80 days, Guatemalans have been standing up to a coalition of corrupt politicians and economic powers to show that they are sick of being ruled by these structures. The message to those in power is clear: the people will not allow their elections to be stolen. In this June’s presidential election, voters surprised the traditional powers with their decision to make, the outsider candidate, Bernardo Arévalo their future head of government. Since then, the old powers have been fighting tooth and nail against the people’s decision. For fear of losing its previous privileges and power, the Ministerio Público, or the Public Prosecutor's Office, is doing everything it can to prevent Bernardo Arévalo from taking office, as he has declared war on corruption. The country is one of the 30 most corrupt countries in the world and is in the top five in Latin America. The Miniterio Público has been taking all legal steps for months to retroactively annul the election — so far, the procedure has not been successful and has resulted in anger amongst the population, as well as criticism from abroad.” (IFP Journal/Sara Meyer)