Milan, Prato, Rome and Venice, Italy –Wearing
a knee-length winter coat, Xiaoyan* waits for her next client near the
main train station in Venice. Clinging to her bag, she looks like any
other bundled-up passer-by in the evening cold.
But the 45-year-old Chinese woman from
the Zhejiang province, on the country’s eastern coast, has been working
as a prostitute for the past three years.
She arrived in Italy in 2007 and, like many of her compatriots, initially found work in small clothes and footwear businesses.
With an estimated 300,000 Chinese nationals, Italy hosts the largest diaspora community in the European Union.
Xiaoyan is gaunt but has a delicate appearance, with shoulder-length black hair and a short fringe. Shelivedin Civitanova Marche, a central city, before heading north.
“I used to work in small Chinese-run
footwear enterprises, making around 1,000 euros ($1,123) a month,” she
said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Shifts were non-stop. I hardly slept.
When orders arrived, I even worked up to 24 hours. I could not cope with
that any longer. I wasn’t able to keep the pace any more.”
In China, Xiaoyan was a stay-at-home mother, looking after her two children. But her family needed money, so she left.
People of rural origin in China have
reported being denied basic rights and benefits. A household
registration system known as hukou determines citizens’ access to
education and social welfare. Leaving the village becomes the only way
forruralmigrants to secure a better future.
After a challenging trip financed with loans from relatives and friends for a tourist visa, Xiaoyan eventually reached Italy.
“Labourers slept inside the [premises],”
she said. “Our Chinese boss provided food and lodging, I never left the
factory during those years.”
Hours upon hours of bad posture saw a doctor diagnose her with chronic body pain.
Sex work has also impacted her mental and physical health.
Romário Schaefer, 65, stands between the biodigester buried in the ground on the right and the blue tank holding whey that is mixed with the manure of the pigs he fattens in a row of pig pens (top left) to produce biogas, in the southern Brazilian municipality of Entre Rios do Oeste. In the background is his brick factory, which saves about 6,500 dollars a month in electricity by using biogas. PHOTO/Mario Osava/IPS
Romário Schaefer is fattening up 3,300 pigs that he receives when
they weigh around 22 kg and returns when they reach 130 to 160 kg – a
huge increase in meat and profits for their owner, a local
meat-processing plant in this city in Brazil.
Schaefer is not interested in the pork
meat business. What he wants is the manure, which he uses to produce
biogas and electricity that fuel his brick-making factory.
“I’m not a farmer,” he says as he shows us around his Stein Ceramics
company in the middle of a 38-hectare rural property on the outskirts
of Entre Rios do Oeste, a farming town of 4,400 people in western
Paraná, one of three states in Brazil’s southern region, on the border
with Paraguay.
He is explaining the difference between himself and neighbouring pig
farmers who produce biogas and sell it to the Mini-Thermoelectric Plant
inaugurated on Jul. 24 to generate energy that serves the Entre Rios municipal government and all of its facilities in the town itself and the rest of the municipality.
For them it is a new agricultural product, and has been recognised as
such in Paraná for commercial and tax purposes. But for Schaefer it’s
an input for his factory, which makes bricks.
Animal waste, which pollutes the soil and rivers, is becoming an
important by-product in southwestern Brazil, where pig and poultry
farming has expanded widely in recent decades.
The Haacke farm, in the municipality of Santa Helena, south of Entre
Rios, uses the waste produced by its tens of thousands of hens and
hundreds of cattle to produce biogas, electricity and biomethane.
Its biomethane, a fuel derived from the refining of biogas which is
employed as a substitute for natural gas, is used in vehicles at the
giant Itaipú hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay on the
Paraná River, which forms part of the border between the two countries.
In Mariscal Cándido Rondon, a few kilometres to the north, the Kohler family, pioneers in the use of biogas on their large farm, took on another role in the chain of this energy which is more than just clean – it actually cleans the environment.
Abortion rights campaigners attend a rally against new restrictions on abortion passed in eight states, including Alabama and Georgia, in New York City, May 21, 2019 PHOTO/Jeenah Moon/Reuters
“Population control”, as defined by the Collins English Dictionary, is “a
policy of attempting to limit the growth in numbers of a population,
esp[ecially] in poor or densely populated parts of the world, by
programmes of contraception or sterilisation”.
The current “pro-life” regime of United States President Donald Trump, of course, is no fan of such programmes. But it is all about controlling human
populations and behaviour worldwide in accordance with unhinged
religio-imperialist visions – many of them especially damaging to the
poor.
In 2017, for example, the Trump administration dramatically discontinued financial support
for that diabolically radical outfit known as the United Nations
Population Fund, which is allegedly attempting to overthrow civilisation
by promoting abortion and other evils.
That same year hosted the unveiling of the “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance” policy, which cuts US government funding to foreign NGOs considered to be involved in abortion work.
A vastly more punishing version of the so-called “global gag rule”
that has been regularly implemented by Republican presidents since
1984, the policy now also applies to organisations that work across a
range of health issues. In short, this means that an NGO dealing with HIV/Aids, cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, gender-based violence,
and so on cannot receive US funds for these activities if it also
chooses to inform patients about the existence of abortion as a possible
method of family planning.
So much for “protecting life” – not that such a noble concept would ever really be expected of a government that specialises in slaughtering people around the world.
More reasons to gag
In April, a Foreign Policy exclusive reported that the Trump administration had “pressured
Germany into watering down a United Nations resolution aimed at
preventing rape in conflict situations, forcing it to remove language on
sexual and reproductive health that key Trump administration officials
say normalizes sexual activity and condones abortion”.
All that is missing on the international scene, it seems, is Andrew Bremberg, Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to the UN in Geneva. Among his sacred beliefs is that rape victims should not be permitted to abort.
Now, two years after the launch of the new-and-improved global gag rule, Trump is bringing it home with the US’s very own domestic gag rule,
which will prohibit health clinics that receive funds from the federal
Title X family planning programme from referring women for abortions and
otherwise assisting them in the pursuit of their constitutional rights.
As the New York Times notes, Title X “serves about 4 million women a year, and many low-income women also get basic health care from the clinics”.
So while the anti-abortion campaign constitutes an
obvious assault on women everywhere, it is a particularly brutal
assault on the poor. After all, both in the US and abroad, females in
higher socioeconomic echelons will often have the means to procure a
safe abortion, regardless of the obstacles erected.
‘Women will die’
Consider the recent finding that 75 percent of abortion patients in the US are “poor or near-poor”.
In the present milieu of obscene economic stratification, forcing poor
women to shoulder the gigantic financial responsibility of unwanted
offspring pretty much amounts to a conscious perpetuation of poverty – a
vicious cycle that also disproportionately affects poor women of colour, such being the reality of race-class divides in US “democracy”.
Anyway, it all works out fine for a capitalist system that thrives on keeping poor people poor.
What to do, then, if you are a poor woman in Alabama, where in May the State Senate voted to criminalise abortion even in cases of rape or incest and prescribed up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform the procedure?
In a Guardian dispatch
on the pernicious effects of US abortion bans on the “most vulnerable”,
the president of Planned Parenthood Southeast Staci Fox is quoted as
stressing that, denied legal abortions, females in rural areas are
likely to endeavour to terminate their pregnancies themselves: “The
outcome of that is clear: women will die.”
Memories make us who we are. They shape our understanding of the world and help us to predict what’s coming. For more than a century, researchers have been working to understand how memories are formed and then fixed for recall in the days, weeks or even years that follow. But those scientists might have been looking at only half the picture. To understand how we remember, we must also understand how, and why, we forget.
Until about ten years ago, most researchers thought that
forgetting was a passive process in which memories, unused, decay over
time like a photograph left in the sunlight. But then a handful of
researchers who were investigating memory began to bump up against
findings that seemed to contradict that decades-old assumption. They
began to put forward the radical idea that the brain is built to forget.
A
growing body of work, cultivated in the past decade, suggests that the
loss of memories is not a passive process. Rather, forgetting seems to
be an active mechanism that is constantly at work in the brain. In some —
perhaps even all — animals, the brain’s standard state is not to
remember, but to forget. And a better understanding of that state could
lead to breakthroughs in treatments for conditions such as anxiety,
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and even Alzheimer’s disease.
“What
is memory without forgetting?” asks Oliver Hardt, a cognitive
psychologist studying the neurobiology of memory at McGill University in
Montreal, Canada. “It’s impossible,” he says. “To have proper memory
function, you have to have forgetting.”
Biology of forgetting
Different
types of memory are created and stored in varying ways, and in various
areas of the brain. Researchers are still pinpointing the details, but
they know that autobiographical memories — those of events experienced
personally — begin to take lasting form in a part of the brain called
the hippocampus, in the hours and days that follow the event. Neurons
communicate with each other through synapses — junctions between these
cells that include a tiny gap across which chemical messengers can be
sent. Each neuron can be connected to thousands of others in this way.
Through a process known as synaptic plasticity, neurons constantly
produce new proteins to remodel parts of the synapse, such as the
receptors for these chemicals, which enables the neurons to selectively
strengthen their connections with one another. This creates a network of
cells that, together, encode a memory. The more often a memory is
recalled, the stronger its neural network becomes. Over time, and
through consistent recall, the memory becomes encoded in both the
hippocampus and the cortex. Eventually, it exists independently in the
cortex, where it is put away for long-term storage.
Neuroscientists
often refer to this physical representation of a memory as an engram.
They think that each engram has a number of synaptic connections,
sometimes even in several areas of the brain, and that each neuron and
synapse can be involved in multiple engrams.
PHOTO/Leslie Groves, Manhattan Project director, with a map of Japan – Public Domain
We like our anniversaries in blocks of 50 or 100 – at a push we’ll tolerate a 25. The 100th anniversary of the Somme (2016), the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain (2015). Next year, we’ll remember the end of the Second World War, the first – and so far the only – nuclear war in history.
This week marks only the 74th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It doesn’t fit in to our journalistic scorecards and “timelines”. Over
the past few days, I’ve had to look hard to find a headline about the
two Japanese cities.
But, especially in the Middle East and what we like to call
southeast Asia, we should be remembering these gruesome anniversaries
every month. Hiroshima was atomic-bombed 74 years ago on Tuesday,
Nagasaki 74 years ago on Friday. Given the extent of the casualty
figures, you’d think they’d be unforgettable. But we don’t quite know
(nor ever will) what they were.
The bombing of the two cities, we are told, left between 129,000 and 226,000 dead. The first US statistics suggested only 66,000
dead in Hiroshima, 39,000 in Nagasaki. But in later years, the
Hiroshima authorities estimated their dead alone at 202,118 – taking
account of those who later died of radiation sickness, rather than just
the incinerated corpses and human shadows left in the immediate
aftermath of the explosion.
In the Middle East, where Aleppo and Mosul and Raqqa count
the dead from conventional bombs – American, Russian, Syrian – in the
tens of thousands, you might think the 1945 statistics would leave the
folk who live there pretty cold. But the book of crises unfolding in the
region – by the chapter, almost every month – is of critical importance
to every soul who lives between the Mediterranean and India.
For India itself is a nuclear power. So is Pakistan. And so, of course, is Israel. None of them have signed the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT). All are threatening war, over Kashmir, or over Iran, the only nation under threat which has not (yet) got nuclear weapons.
In 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault met at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands for their first and only debate. Produced by the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation as a part of their International Philosophers Project, the programme featured discussions with eminent thinkers on the topic of ‘human nature and ideal society’. In recent years, their debate – the fourth and final of the series – has been somewhat overshadowed by events surrounding it. Namely, it’s rumoured that the programme’s host, the Dutch philosopher Fons Elders, paid Foucault for his appearance in hashish, and repeatedly encouraged him to put on a bright red wig to spice up the proceedings.
However, the debate itself – seen here excerpted and translated by the YouTube channel Philosophy Overdose – has appeal beyond the pleasures of watching the provocative Foucault spar with the professorial Chomsky. With the Vietnam War near its height, Chomsky and Foucault agree that contemporary power structures need to be attacked and dismantled. However, while Chomsky advocates for a system of ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ rooted in justice, sympathy and human creativity, Foucault argues that these concepts are products of the same bourgeois system that needs replacing. Probing age-old philosophical questions as well as the politics of the moment, the interview offers a revealing glimpse of the divergent styles, attitudes and outlooks of two enduringly influential thinkers.
She says: when are we gonna meet? I say: after a year and a war She says: when does the war end? I say: the time we meet
—Mahmoud Darwish
They made it plain to everyone, however, and above all to the king himself, that although he had plenty of troops, he did not have many men.
—Herodotus
I would happily claim to be the first in the folds of Arabic science fiction to write Palestinian resistance literature (adab al-muqawama,
??? ???????), but, alas, the Egyptians beat me to it. Muhammad Naguib
Matter, for example, who was an engineer by vocation and a
science-fiction writer by passion, penned “A Weapon Fashioned of Waste”
long before I even began to write.1
(The story begins with Palestinian resistance fighters learning to
trick the pheromone-sniffing Israeli missiles by using urine trails,
after which the Palestinians devise their own phosphorous bombs, also
extracted from urine.)2 Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s Jonathan’s Promise (2015) and The Last Dreamer
(2009) also stand in the resistance genre. (The first text is about an
upside-down world where Arabs live in the diaspora and the United States
decides to give them a homeland of their own. The second is a fantasy
series in which Che Guevara is resurrected from the grave, cloned by
Chinese geneticists, and sent to Iraq to give the United States some
hell. He later makes it to occupied Palestine to do the same but is
apprehended and killed by the Israelis.)
One of the earliest works of Arabic science fiction, the 1962 Algerian novel Qui Se Souvient De La Mer (Who Remembers the Sea)
by Mohammad Dib, was also part of the resistance-literature genre and
was written in the heyday of the struggle for national independence.3
(Instead of speaking explicitly about the French occupation, Dib has
alien robots ransack his homeland up against a few bands of brave men
armed with handguns. Nonetheless, the human protagonists win in the
end.) Sadly, since Qui Se Souvient De La Mer, nothing was
written in the resistance or military science-fiction genres, in Algeria
or elsewhere, until 2001 when Hosam El-Zembely published the dystopian
novella America 2030. (In it, the United States degenerates
politically and ignites a nuclear war as a team of operatives tries
desperately to destroy a secret weapon, tipping the balance of terror.4 And this was written before
September 11—only for Egyptian and most Arabic science fiction to
quietly forget the very real attacks against Arabs and Muslims since
then.)
It is almost a truism now that the history of Arabic science-fiction writing is characterized by fits and starts.5
Tragically and inexplicably, the same seems to hold true of Arabic
resistance literature. I get this from the horse’s mouth, so to speak,
having spoken with the resident expert on resistance literature,
Egyptian author Al-Sayyid Nejm.6
Almost from his first uttered word, he explained that the category
itself is new to Arabic literature, insisting that Palestinian author
Ghassan Kanafani was the one who coined the term. Previously, it only
existed in residual form, under the labels adab al-hamasa (??? ???????) and al-harakat (???????)—the literature of agitation and of movements.7
The same goes for war literature, he added, on which he is also an
expert. What is more, neither resistance nor war literature are parts of
higher education, at least in Egypt.
There are no
specialized courses in either resistance or war literature in Egypt.
Books and stories and poetry on the topic are taught, but in generic
courses about classical and contemporary Arabic literature, the
contemporary Arabic novel, Arabic literature in translation, and so on.
Even the 1973 October War, one of our few victories, has not
received the literary and critical attention it deserves. This has
prompted critics to describe the genre of war stories as almost a
foreign entity that has entered our midst undetected.8
How could this be, when almost the whole Arab world struggled for its
independence against foreign colonizers? When a frontline nation like
Egypt fought so many wars and not just against Israel? After all, the
1956 Suez War was over the nationalization of the canal, primarily in
the face of the British and French empires. If you go to an Egyptian
bookstore, you will find the same telltale pattern of malign neglect. It
will be hard to find anything written by Egyptians on the topic,
whether fiction or nonfiction. I say this having just attended the
fiftieth Cairo International Book Fair. I did not find anything of
Nejm’s there either, except at one solitary (non-Egyptian) bookshop that
had an overly expensive book about him.
