by JOHN FEFFER

The call is coming from inside…your computer!

The conventional Artificial Intelligence doomsday scenario runs like this. A robot acquires sentience and decides for some reason that it wants to rule the world. It hacks into computer systems to shut down everything from banking and hospitals to nuclear power. Or it takes over a factory to produce a million copies of itself to staff an overlord army. Or it introduces a deadly pathogen that wipes out the human race.

Why would a sentient robot want to rule the world when there are so many more interesting things for it to do? A computer program is only as good as its programmer. So, presumably, the human will to power will be inscribed in the DNA of this thinking robot. Instead of solving the mathematical riddles that have stumped the greatest minds throughout history, the world’s first real HAL 9000 will decide to do humans one better by enslaving its creators.

Robot see, robot do.

But AI may end up killing us all in a much more prosaic way. It doesn’t need to come up with an elaborate strategy.

It will simply use up all of our electricity.

Energy Hogs

The heaviest user of electricity in the world is, not surprisingly, industry. At the top of the list is the industry that produces chemicals, many of them out of petroleum, like fertilizer. Second on the list is the fossil-fuel industry itself, which needs electricity for various operations.

Ending the world’s addiction to fossil fuels, in other words, will require more than just a decision to stop digging for coal and drilling for oil. It will require a reduction in demand for chemical fertilizers and plastics. Otherwise, a whole lot of renewable energy will simply go toward propping up the same old fossil fuel economy.

Of equal peril is the fact that the demand for electricity is rising in other sectors. Cryptocurrencies, for instance, require extensive data mining, which in turn needs huge data processing centers. According to estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, these cryptocurrencies consume as much as 2.3 percent of all electricity in the United States.

Then there’s artificial intelligence.

Every time you do a Google search, it consumes not only the energy required to power your laptop and your router but also to maintain the Google data centers that keep a chunk of the Internet running. That’s not a small amount of power. Cumulatively, in 2019, Google consumed as much electricity as Sri Lanka.

Worse, a search powered by ChatGPT, the AI-powered program, consumes ten times more energy than your ordinary Google search. That’s sobering enough. But then consider all the energy that goes into training the AI programs in the first place. Climate researcher Sasha Luccioni explains:

Training AI models consumes energy. Essentially you’re taking whatever data you want to train your model on and running it through your model like thousands of times. It’s going to be something like a thousand chips running for a thousand hours. Every generation of GPUs—the specialized chips for training AI models—tends to consume more energy than the previous generation.

AI’s need for energy is increasing exponentially. According to Goldman Sachs, data centers were expanding rapidly between 2015 and 2019, but their energy use remained relatively flat because the processing was becoming more efficient. But then, in the last five years, energy use rose dramatically and so did the carbon footprint of these data centers. Largely because of AI, Google’s carbon emissions increased by 50 percent in the last five years—even as the megacorporation was promising to achieve carbon neutrality in the near future.

Foreign Policy In Focus for more

by MAY LING HALIM

“We need to do whatever we can to combat all of this. My research shows we have a huge problem on our hands.”

Over the past year, a friend’s daughter — let’s call her Lily — has repeatedly called herself ugly. When Lily is supposed to be brushing her teeth, she looks in the mirror with a frown on her face, eyes scanning her features with disappointment. Lily has wavy dark-brown hair; she wants straight blond hair.

One morning Lily put pink marker all over her mouth. The day before, a child at school had called her ugly, and she thought the “lipstick” would make her look prettier.

Lily is 4. And she is beautiful.

How has the world warped this child’s view of herself? Why does Lily even need to care about looking beautiful at 4? Is she worried about getting a date for the class field trip?

More attention is finally being paid toward the harmful effects of social media on teens’ body image and mental health. However, a recent study my lab conducted suggests that we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Specifically, we discovered that among girls, a preoccupation with appearance starts as young as age 3.Advertisement

In our study, we interviewed 170 children ages 3 to 5 to examine when kids start to value being beautiful. Across all of the measures that we assessed, girls on average greatly valued their appearances. Girls said that to be a girl they needed to be pretty, and looking pretty was important.

When asked to select from an array of outfits and occupations, the girls in our study tended to select many fancy outfits and appearance-related occupations, like being a model or makeup artist. They showed good memory for pictures of fashionable clothing when these pictures were later hidden from view. When explaining why they liked a pop culture character, girls often said things like, “I like all the princesses because they are pretty.” In a previous study,young girls also tended to purchase many toys that focused on appearance (e.g., a vanity set) with play money.

Huff Post for more

by JAYATI GHOSH

The popular insurrection that ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League government offers important lessons for the international community and neighbouring India. While the unrest was undoubtedly fueled by the regime’s repressive and increasingly anti-democratic tactics, exemplified by its brutal crackdown on largely peaceful student protesters, the underlying causes of public discontent are often overlooked.

The student protests initially focused on ending the job-quota system that reserved 30% of government jobs for veterans of Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Independence and their descendants. Although Hasina’s government abolished all quotas through an executive order in 2018, the High Court reinstated it in June this year, triggering mass demonstrations. A month later, the Supreme Court intervened, overturning the lower court’s decision and ruling that quotas must be reduced to 5% and that 93% of government jobs must be filled on the basis of merit.

The sad irony is that Hasina – the daughter of Bangladesh’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – was once a student leader and pro-democracy activist opposing a military regime. During her four terms as prime minister, she presided over a remarkable economic transformation, driven by a dramatic surge in garment exports and significant infrastructure investments that also spurred a sharp increase in women’s employment. Over the past two decades, poverty rates have been halved, and Bangladesh’s per capita GDP (in current US dollars) surpassed that of India in 2019. The country is poised to graduate from “least developed country” status in 2026.

But Hasina’s authoritarian tendencies ultimately overshadowed her economic achievements. The execution of alleged “extremists,” along with the arrests and disappearances of lawyers, journalists, and indigenous-rights activists who dared to criticize the government, creating a climate of fear that intensified during the 2018 election.

The country’s sputtering economy also played a pivotal role in the recent uprising. Over the past decade, rising inequality and unemployment, together with skyrocketing prices for essential goods, have intensified public anger over nepotism and rampant corruption. The government’s stubborn refusal to confront or even acknowledge these issues aggravated popular sentiment further.

A key lesson from Bangladesh’s experience is that rapid GDP growth and robust exports alone cannot ensure broad-based prosperity. When the benefits of economic growth are concentrated at the top, most citizens see little improvement or even find themselves worse off, frustrating their rising expectations and underscoring the need for a fairer distribution of wealth and income.

Another crucial lesson is that employment matters. Creating jobs is important, especially for young people, but so is ensuring fair wages and decent working conditions. When most people’s incomes stagnate or decline, the public tends to lose faith in official narratives of economic dynamism.

Crucially, analysts often overlook the role that the International Monetary Fund has played in Bangladesh’s recent economic struggles. In 2023, Bangladesh secured a $4.7 billion bailout from the IMF, a move that some observers argued was unnecessary. Initially, these funds were intended to shore up the country’s foreign-exchange reserves, which had been depleted by the COVID-19 shock and the global spike in food and fuel prices. But the conditions attached to the IMF loan, which included greater exchange-rate flexibility, led to a sharp depreciation of the Bangladeshi taka and the introduction of a new pricing policy for petroleum products, both of which triggered a surge in domestic inflation.

The IMF also demanded that Bangladesh reduce its budget deficit, leading to fiscal retrenchment that affected essential public services, including critical social programs. Meanwhile, the central bank tightened monetary policy and raised interest rates to curb inflation, putting enormous pressure on small and medium-size enterprises and exacerbating the employment crisis. In June, the IMF approved the loan’s third instalment, totalling $1.2 billion, and imposed 33 new conditions that Bangladesh must meet to receive the remaining disbursements.

While these measures are purportedly designed to enhance economic “efficiency” and bolster investor confidence, history suggests that such outcomes are highly unlikely. On the contrary, the austerity policies championed by the IMF have fueled economic insecurity and public anger across the developing world. The mass protests and political instability that have roiled countries like Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana – all of which have implemented IMF programs – underscore the urgent need for the Fund to reconsider its approach.

The Quint for more

by GERALD HORNE

Cyril Lionel Robert James was a man of paradox. The Trinidadian-born revolutionary was a lanky 6-foot-3—“lean as a pole,” with “long pianist fingers” that one could easily imagine flying across a typewriter keyboard as well. However, as we learn in John Williams’s new biography, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries, he “never learned to type and relied on women to type up his handwritten articles and manuscripts,” of which there was a veritable tsunami. Likewise, while James cared little for money and possessions—other than books and albums—he was a connoisseur of exquisite wine and tasty meals. A fierce “anti-Stalinist,” he still collaborated fruitfully in 1930s London with the decidedly Russophilic Paul Robeson, widely suspected of being a member of the Communist Party, and he recommended the writings of US Communist historian Herbert Aptheker and hailed the later work of W.E.B. Du Bois, even after he joined the US Communist Party in 1961.

Although James is associated in the popular imagination with Trotskyism, when he met with Trotsky during the latter’s exile in Mexico before his 1940 assassination, the defrocked Soviet leader was unimpressed, dismissing James as a “freelance bohemian.” James’s erstwhile Trotskyist comrade, James Cannon, referred to him similarly as an “irresponsible adventurer.”

Whatever his fellow Trotskyists thought of him, the fact remains that James was one of the most brilliant thinkers and writers among them, a man whose books, including The Black Jacobins, proved to be of staggering profundity. Although for generations, revolutionaries and thinkers of various sorts had championed movements of the dispossessed, James was one of the first to point out the world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution—a precedent-shattering development spearheaded by unpaid workers. The Black Jacobins alone guaranteed James a slot in the Pan-African—and revolutionary—pantheon. As a playwright, he stirred London audiences in the 1930s with his dramatization of the life of Toussaint Louverture. His only novel, Minty Alley, published after he arrived in Britain, is a sensitive depiction of the poor—especially poor women—and an adroit evocation of the trickster, with echoes of Shakespeare’s Puck and Twain’s Tom Sawyer. His fecund Beyond a Boundary is not just a memoir of his Caribbean boyhood, a celebration of cricket, and an indictment of colonialism; it also served to inspire the thriving academic field that is cultural studies. As a philosopher, while he was in a self-imposed exile in Nevada in the late 1940s, James grappled adroitly with Hegel and his reverberations in the work of Marx and Lenin. As a literary critic, his excavation of Melville continues to repay attention. Assuredly, James was one of the 20th century’s foremost radical intellectuals.

C.L.R. James was born in 1901, as Queen Victoria’s life was coming to an end, and died in 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time of his birth, his homeland—the archipelago of Trinidad and Tobago—was still an uneasy component of the British Empire. James’s melanin content represented a legacy of the African slave trade: Apparently, he was partly of French ancestry, which may shed light on why he studied the language of Robespierre and Toussaint, even though English was his native tongue. As a young athlete, James set the high-jump record in Trinidad and Tobago, and would hold it for years after he left the islands—a harbinger of the heights to which he would soar.

James was also a voracious reader from an early age, and it proved to be a lifelong habit: The lengthy list of his frequently consulted journals included The Nation, which he pored over in the public library.

By 1932, at the age of 31, James had arrived in Britain. He had left the Caribbean partly to escape an unfulfilling marriage and partly to seek his fortune in a land that offered more opportunities for the budding writer that he had become. In Britain, he was deeply influenced by the atmosphere of intellectual and political ferment generated by a bevy of exiles there, including Robeson and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. It was in Britain that James encountered Trotsky’s newly published History of the Russian Revolution, which inspired his own work on Haiti. By 1933 and ‘34, he was spending months at a time in France working on his magnum opus. His research assistant was Eric Williams, a former pupil during James’s brief time teaching in Trinidad, whose own book Capitalism and Slavery would later have an importance comparable to that of The Black Jacobins in recovering the history of exploitation and revolutionary resistance in the Caribbean. While in France, James also consulted with Alfred Auguste Nemours, the legendary Haitian general, diplomat, and military historian, and with Léon-Gontran Damas, the poet, politician, and cofounder of the “Negritude” movement.

Evidently, it was James’s French sojourn that led him ever closer to the ideas of Trotsky, though in a glaring omission in this otherwise relatively well researched biography, Williams doesn’t offer us a clear explanation of why, among the luminous coterie of Black intellectuals and activists in this period—not just Robeson and Kenyatta but James’s fellow Trinidadian Claudia Jones; Langston Hughes; W.E.B. Du Bois and his spouse, Shirley Graham; Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana; Nelson Mandela of South Africa; and others—only James failed to be attracted by the then-hegemonic Communist parties and instead remained a Trotskyist for years. Perhaps this is a result of Williams’s own highly skeptical views on Trotskyism, which he calls a “marginal faith” involving “endless splits over points of genuine principle, leading to an array of tiny parties….largely impotent in the face of the great events around them.” But if Williams had dug a bit deeper, he might have ascertained that Trotsky had resided in France as early as 1902 and had returned there while James was in the country for his research. The Socialist Party, which has intermittently been a ruling party in France, was also influenced by this Ukrainian’s ideas and presence as a united front against fascism developed. (Indeed, the former Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin, who narrowly lost a race for the French presidency in 1995, had his own Trotskyist ties, and even today, the former Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon has mounted a credible challenge during the recent presidential elections for the Élysée Palace.)

James’s embrace of Trotskyism was paired with an intense survey of European philosophy and social thought. He studied Hegel in these years. He was also drawn to the larger canon of European thinkers interested in the concept of “freedom.” Marx in particular captured his imagination; it was in Marx that Hegel’s ideas of freedom became a sturdy theory of revolution based on the organization and self-assertion of workers, and it also led James to consider the plight of Black workers in particular.

The unifying thread that runs through James’s vast body of work was a focus on this proletarianized “race” and racialized working class whose objective position, he argued, made it the potential locomotive for revolutionary socialism, just as the unpaid workers of Haiti were the true engine of the overthrow of slavery. Adapting Lenin’s byword, James concurred that “Every cook can govern,” those of African ancestry not least.

Reading these European thinkers, however, James was also struck by the fact that, despite their interest in the political and moral progress of freedom, they had little to say about a deeper expression of this idea as embodied in the Haitian Revolution. This was true not only of Marx but of that icon of the American left, Thomas Paine. As the late Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes in his trailblazing Silencing the Past, this muzzling of the profundity of the Haitian Revolution was an important chapter in a larger narrative of global domination.

The Black Jacobins set out to correct this elision. In its riveting pages, James sought to make Africans active subjects of their own history rather than passive objects of others’ history. Building on James’s pathbreaking book, a new generation of scholars have argued that the Haitian Revolution precipitated a general crisis of the entire slave system in the Western Hemisphere—including in the United States—that could end only in its collapse, which I addressed in my book Confronting Black Jacobins. Not coincidentally, the struggle for the eight-hour workday and the drive to organize labor unions both accelerated in the United States post-abolition, suggesting the importance of the victory of unpaid workers in the Caribbean.

The Black Jacobins established James’s bona fides as an important Marxist and historian, but it also demonstrated the magnitude of this revolution in the Caribbean and departed to a considerable extent from the “orthodox” Marxist evaluations of Haiti that did not engage with its significance. The Black Jacobins’ account of revolution may also have further solidified its author’s Trotskyism in that, just as the Ukrainian Trotsky diverged from the “orthodox” Communist parties, the Trinidadian James diverged from the “orthodox” downplaying of the Haitian Revolution. Trotskyists famously disputed the notion that socialism could be built in one nation and thus posited the idea of “permanent revolution,” forever extending its boundaries in order to extend the reach of socialism. Ironically, the debilitated state of Haiti after the revolution—surrounded by enslaving regimes, just as the Soviet Union was encircled, and suffering grievously as a result—arguably served to fortify James’s initial embrace of Trotsky’s foundational idea.

Like his fellow Trinidadian Eric Williams, James sought to deflate the still-prevalent notion that the abolition of slavery represented a triumph of activism in the metropole rather than a triumph of activism by the oppressed. John Williams observes further that James “intended his account of the Haitian Revolution to be both a history and a blueprint for revolutions of the future.”

After spending six years in Britain barely making a living as a writer, James moved to the United States in 1938—specifically to Harlem in New York City—and stayed in the country for the next 15 years. There he was a popular campus speaker, a tireless writer, and a dedicated (though not altogether successful) organizer.

The Nation for more

by DAVID J. LINDEN

What makes touch on some parts of the body erotic but not others? Cutting-edge biologists are arriving at new answers

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I gradually came to realise that my father was not the stereotypical psychoanalyst. Yes, he had an office with enigmatic modern art on the walls, copies of The New Yorker in the waiting room and the requisite analytical couch. It’s true that said couch had a wedge-shaped pillow designed for the client to assume the supine posture so frequently portrayed in the cartoons from those same issues of The New Yorker. And, during psychoanalytic sessions, my father did indeed perch in a black leather Eames chair, notebook in hand. But beyond those trappings, he had the sceptical and logical mind of a physician (in those days, nearly all psychoanalysts were, like my father, MDs).

Starting when I was a small child and continuing until I left for university, my father and I would eat dinner together at one of several local restaurants every Wednesday night. Over matzoh ball soup at Zucky’s Delicatessen, we’d discuss anything and everything, including the progress of his psychoanalytic clients (with names and identifying details omitted of course). It was an odd way to grow up and I loved it. In our Wednesday night case studies, there would be the expected psychodynamic talk of dream interpretation and early childhood experiences, but it was all tempered by what would come to be known as neuroscience. He would say that, when the talking cure worked (as it did for most of his clients), it did so not in the nebulous realm of id, ego and superego, but rather by changing the cellular and molecular structure of the brain.

In some cases, he dispensed, not just with psychoanalytic theory, but with any form of talking cure. I remember one particular night when I was in middle school when he was delighted to realise that a client’s persistent and unrelenting depression was not rooted in a tormented childhood or conflicted sexuality. Instead, it was a direct consequence of thyroid hormone deficiency and hence best treated with a simple pill. As I grew older, I came to admire his flexibility and breadth of intellect in these matters. He encouraged me to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor, maybe even a psychiatrist, but I knew that would be a poor choice for me.

‘It wouldn’t work. I’m not as empathetic as you, Dad. In fact, sick people kind of annoy me.’

‘Then you could be a pathologist,’ was his reply.

Like my father, I longed to understand human mental life. But, unlike him, I came of age in an era when biological understanding of brain function was beginning to gain some traction. And so, I took a different path towards the same goal and became a neuroscientist, working at the level of molecules and cells in the brain.

Nothing in psychoanalytic theory evoked more scepticism in my father than Sigmund Freud’s conception of sexual sensation and orgasm. Yes, father and son would discuss Freud’s key theory of immature clitoral orgasms transitioning to mature vaginal orgasms in female development. ‘It’s unmitigated bullshit!’ he’d say, his voice rising. ‘No medical evidence exists for this idea at all!’ It’s not surprising that the servers at Zucky’s would give us a wide berth. To make up for it, he tipped well.

Sexual sensation is absolutely central to both our shared human experience and our individual quirks and kinks. It’s exactly the sort of topic that has traditionally had lots of behavioural observation and theorising attached to it (including by psychoanalysts). There’s no question that sexual sensation is sculpted by early life experience. Yet it’s also embedded in a biological matrix, with brain regions and nerve bundles and special molecular machines specialised to transduce pressure on the skin into what is, ultimately, erotic sensation. It’s one of many places where psychology and biology meet.

Until very recently, biology had rather little to bring to the table, and our understanding of sexual sensation had been shockingly incomplete. We have known for some time that touch sensations from the genital region pass through four different nerves on their way to the spinal cord and, ultimately, the brain. Of these, the pudendal nerve is the most important for sexual sensation, carrying signals from the clitoris in cisgendered women and the penis in cisgendered men. In women, the pelvic nerve conveys touch signals from the labia minora, the vaginal walls, the anus and the rectum. In men, the pudendal nerve carries information from the anus and the scrotum as well as the penis. In women, sensations from the cervix and the uterus can also be conveyed by the hypogastric nerve as well as the vagus nerve, which travels directly to the brain stem, thereby bypassing the spinal cord entirely.

Touch signals from the pelvis ultimately arrive at the outer rind of the brain, a region called the neocortex, where they are represented in a distorted and fragmented body map in the primary somatosensory region. You’ve probably seen drawings of these body maps with giant hands and feet and relatively small torsos, corresponding to the density of certain types of touch sensor in the skin. In one study, women with their heads in a brain scanner were given a handheld dildo and asked to self-stimulate various genital regions – the external clitoris, the vagina and the cervix.

Stimulation of the female genitals activated two completely different spots in the neocortical body map: one just where you might expect, at the groin; and another, a bit oddly, adjacent to the representation of the toes. It turns out that men also have this dual mapping of the genitals. More generally, it raises the issue of whether this particular toe-adjacent bit of the primary somatosensory cortex (called the mesial surface of the postcentral gyrus) has a special role in sexual touch. Some people have even speculated that this particular toe/genital adjacency in the brain somehow underlies foot fetish sexual behaviour (I’m not convinced).

Disappointingly, if you were to examine a microscope slide prepared from postmortem tissue of this area of the brain, you’d find nothing unusual about it. The individual neurons and their overall layered structure look almost the same as those in regions processing touch information from less erotic parts of the body. So, despite some tantalising hints, the biology of what makes touch on some parts of the skin feel sexy while other parts not has remained a mystery. Only now, with a recent publication from David Ginty’s and Stephen Liberles’s groups at Harvard Medical School, are some real answers emerging.

If you ask around or do a few spicy internet searches, you will find that there are people who feel a sexual sensation from being touched on nearly any part of the body. Still, while recognising the solid supporting roles of ears and feet and so on, the genitals are clearly the star of this show. In the right context, almost everyone – no matter their sex assigned at birth, their gender identity, their sexual orientation or the particulars of the early life experiences they might recount to a psychoanalyst – finds stimulation of the clitoris or the glans (head) of the penis to be sexually exciting. But how, through the course of evolution, have these body parts become sexual ground zero? Is there something special about the structure of the nerve endings in the penis and the clitoris and the way they ultimately convey electrical messages to the brain?

Aeon for more

by B. R. GOWANI

God = Faiz Hameed
Messenger = Bushra Bibi
Believer = Imran Khan

oracles unveiled!

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by SHARON ZHANG

This is a staggering amount of debris concentrated in a region that’s one-sixteenth of the size of New York City.

Israel’s relentless bombing campaign in Gaza has, over the course of 300 days, created a staggering amount of debris — not only burying Palestinians alive and destroying life-supporting infrastructure, but also putting Palestinians at risk to a number of pollutants that could cause diseases like cancer long after the genocide has ended.

According to an assessment of satellite imagery by UN-Habitat and the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), Israel’s genocide has created approximately 42 million metric tonnes, or about 46 million tons, of debris.

This amounts to 14 times the total amount of debris created in all other conflicts across the globe in the last 16 years, all concentrated in a region one-sixteenth of the size of New York City with one of the densest populations on Earth. This amounts to 114 kilograms of debris for every square meter of the Gaza Strip, or about 23 pounds per square foot.

The assessment additionally found that nearly two-thirds of the structures in Gaza have been damaged, or the equivalent of Israel damaging over 6 percent of the structures in Gaza every month on average.

Aside from the myriad dangers associated with the vast destruction of infrastructure — including waste management buildings, water treatment centers, and hospitals — the debris itself poses many dangers to Palestinians in the short and long term.

Israel’s assault is risking the resurgence of a type of polio that was declared eradicated a decade ago. By Sharon Zhang , Truthout July 29, 2024

Hidden within the debris are an unknown number of unexploded bombs that could detonate on contact. Because roughly 10 percent of bombs don’t explode on contact, and Israel has dropped bombs at a speed unmatched by nearly any other modern conflict, the UN Mine Action Service has estimated that just clearing unexploded ordnance from the region could take 14 years after the genocide ends.

The debris also contains a number of dangerous substances and pollutants that pose major health risks, with some noting that Israel is committing ecocide.

In January, when there was half the amount of debris there is now, UN officials estimated that there was 800,000k metric tonnes of cancer-causing asbestos strewn about in Gaza. Palestinians are forced to navigate this debris to find shelter or other tools for survival, while pollutants are leaking into the water or the ground. Human remains are also mixed in the debris, with at least 10,000 Palestinians buried under the rubble in Gaza — and potentially many more, as the UNEP has noted.

Combined with the fact that Israel has destroyed much of Gaza’s water treatment capacity and that Israel has cut water access to just 6 percent of pre-October levels, this means that Palestinians, scrounging for any water to drink or use for cooking, are extremely exposed to pollution. Health care workers who have worked in Gaza have said that they have witnessed desperate parents mixing polluted water with formula in order to feed their babies.

Israel has long used pollution and destruction of basic resources as a weapon against Palestinians. Water was already extremely polluted in Gaza before the genocide, with the WHO reporting in 2019 that 97 percent of the water from its aquifer was too polluted to meet standards for consumption.

Truth Out for more

by SONALI KOLHATKAR

What will it take to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza? That’s the question confounding people of conscience all over the world since last October. After Israeli citizens, tax-paying residents of the United States have the most leverage over the perpetrators of genocide given that the U.S. is Israel’s biggest weapons supplier. What if our taxes were spent on the things we need rather than on the deadly weapons Israel is thirsting for?

For months, a majority of the U.S. public has disapproved of Israel’s relentless mass killings. College students organized dramatic encampments to demand divestment from Israel. Protesters confronted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visit.

Yet, President Joe Biden has done little beyond paying lip service to address the public rage over Israel’s murderous assault. Now, his proxy, Vice President Kamala Harris, faces a similar calculus in running for the presidency: pull back U.S. weapons from fueling genocide, as United Nations experts have urged, or risk losing voters in a critical election.

Unfortunately for Palestinians and their allies, Harris appears to be taking a similar approach to Biden’s: using strong terms to uplift Palestinian suffering, while affirming “her longstanding and unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel and the people of Israel.”

When Biden was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, he resolutely refused to budge on funding Israel, even if it meant he might lose the election. Harris may truly believe Palestinian suffering needs to end, but between now and November, she faces a critical choice: to pledge allegiance to Israel or to adhere to basic standards of morality that value human life.

But, given the stranglehold that Israel and its powerful lobby have on the U.S. political system, Harris and her party may feel they risk more by alienating Israel than curbing its genocide.

And, given that Harris’s main election opponent will be no better (or possibly worse) than Biden on Gaza, is there any significant leverage left to end Palestinian suffering?

Can the roughly 700,000 “uncommitted” Democratic voters who have threatened to withhold their ballots over Gaza be loud and strong enough to sway Harris to do the right thing? Perhaps. But she might call their bluff, weighing the aforementioned political risks and touting the dangers of a Donald Trump presidency on the domestic front.

The sad truth is that while Democrats and Republicans have had distinct domestic platforms, they have tended to be relatively united on foreign policy for decades. Democrats have often backed the same wars as their Republican opponents in the Middle East and antiwar organizers have struggled to stop wars even where U.S. soldiers were directly involved in killing civilians, let alone proxy wars such as Israel’s Gaza genocide.

In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama distinguished himself in the 2008 election as an “antiwar candidate” with respect to U.S. involvement in Iraq. But he remained a pro-war candidate over the war in Afghanistan begun in 2001.

Still, Obama’s talking points on Iraq offer a tantalizing way forward on Gaza in 2024. In combating his opponent Senator John McCain, Obama said, “For a fraction of what we’re spending each year in Iraq, we could be giving our teachers more pay and more support, rebuilding our crumbling schools, and offering a tax credit to put a college degree within reach for anyone who wants one.”

MSN for more

by SUZANNE CORDS

A lot of work awaited the German immigrants in their new homeland – Image: Arquivo Histórico Ferreira da Silva

The aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, failed harvests and oppressive tax burdens made life difficult for people in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century.

Then came a tempting offer from the other side of the world — 77 hectares of land for every family willing to settle in Brazil. Plus livestock, seeds and agricultural equipment, as well as financial assistance for the first two years.

It is more than many German farmers, craftsmen and day laborers ever dared to hope for at home. Soon the first of them responded to the call to say goodbye to their old home.

Wanted: Workers in former Portuguese colony

In January 1824, a ship named Argus arrived at the port of Rio de Janeiro with around 280 people on board. It was the first ship carrying Germans “in the service of the Brazilian Empire.”

The new arrivals settled in the states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, and on July 25, 1824, established the city of São Leopoldo, named after the Brazilian Emperor’s Austrian wife Leopoldine. In fact, she had campaigned for the recruitment of Germans to Brazil.

The South American country had moved on from being a Portuguese colony just two years prior and the decision by Emperor Dom Pedro I to take in the immigrants was not just a goodwill gesture. He wanted them to fight, if necessary, against Brazil’s enemies, but above all he needed settlers to farm in the south of the country.

“The end of slavery was in sight, and the question arose as to where to get new workers,” historian Stefan Rinke from the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin said. “People knew that slavery could no longer be maintained in the long term and that it was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain supplies due to the British blockade of the slave trade. And that’s when they turned their attention to the German territories. They knew that there were many poor people there who were also under pressure to emigrate.”

The policy of ‘whitening’ in Brazil

At the time, Brazil’s elite was pursuing another goal with its immigration policy. they wanted to “whiten” their country.

“Progress was equated with Europeanization, both of customs and traditions, but also specifically of the population,” says Rinke. “They wanted Europeans. And not all Europeans, but above all Central Europeans, because they were considered particularly virtuous, hardworking, ambitious and obedient — not unimportant if you wanted new subjects.”

Over the course of the next century, around 250,000 Germans would find a new home more than 10,000 kilometers (more than 6,200 miles) from their homeland.

Brazzil for more