Al-Qaida’s wretched utopia and the battle for hearts and minds

Driving east out of Aden, we were just a few hundred metres past the last army checkpoint when we saw the black al-Qaida flag. It flew from the top of a concrete building that had been part-demolished by shelling.

From here into the interior, all signs of control by the government of Yemen disappeared. This is the region of newly proclaimed jihadi emirates in south Yemen that are run by affiliates of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemeni franchise of the movement founded by Osama bin Laden.

AQAP has existed in this ragged, mountainous terrain for years, but in the last 12 months the jihadis have moved down from the high ground to take control of cities in the lowlands. They are in the process of setting up an al-Qaida utopia here, where security is provided by jihadis, justice follows sharia law and even the administration of electricity and water supplies is governed by the emir.

Azzan, a market town in Shabwa province a year ago, is one of the three proclaimed Islamic emirates in south Yemen. When the Guardian approached it, the town entrance was defended by more than a dozen fighters equipped with armoured vehicles that had been commandeered from the government. We were met by three young jihadis and taken to the spot where the 17-year-old son of AQAP’s spiritual leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed, presumably by an American drone. Awlaki himself was killed in a separate strike last year.

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The majors with the best pay include Engineering, Economics, and Physics. Typically, the worst paying majors are Social Work, Theology, Elementary Education, Music, Spanish, Horticulture, Education, Fine Arts, Hospitality/Tourism, and Drama. – Provided by RandomHistory.com

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The city of St. Louis dedicated the world’s largest chess piece, a king standing 14.5 feet tall and weighing 2,280 lbs., on Monday. The sculpture is located outside the city’s World Chess Hall of Fame.

“This piece serves as a monument to the chess culture we are creating in St. Louis,” said Mike Wilmering, spokesman for the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis.

Your move, St. Louis Arch.

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The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine

The last line of a 17th century poem by John Donne prompted Louise Noble’s quest. “Women,” the line read, are not only “Sweetness and wit,” but “mummy, possessed.”

Sweetness and wit, sure. But mummy? In her search for an explanation, Noble, a lecturer of English at the University of New England in Australia, made a surprising discovery: That word recurs throughout the literature of early modern Europe, from Donne’s “Love’s Alchemy” to Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” because mummies and other preserved and fresh human remains were a common ingredient in the medicine of that time. In short: Not long ago, Europeans were cannibals.

Noble’s new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of England’s University of Durham, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. There were few vocal opponents of the practice, even though cannibalism in the newly explored Americas was reviled as a mark of savagery. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts.

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Injection offers Alzheimer’s hope

Hopes have been raised for new Alzheimer’s treatments after scientists found an injection could stop the body from killing brain cells by “cutting off” their protein supply.

Researchers found that by injecting a protein into the brain, they could protect nerve cells in the brains of mice with prion disease, a condition which normally causes the brain to slowly die.

Because the process by which prion disease affects the brains of mice is similar to some degenerative brain conditions in humans, it is hoped that the findings could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

In each case the death of brain cells is linked to the build-up of misshapen proteins, which form the plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers and Lewy bodies in the nerve cells of people with Parkinson’s disease.

In the mice with prion disease, researchers found that when the faulty proteins begin to accumulate their cells activated a natural defence mechanism which stopped them from producing any more.

The halt ought to be temporary, but in the diseased mice the production of proteins – which are crucial for the survival of cells – did not start up again.

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Psychopaths’ Brains Abnormal

Brain scans of men convicted of violent assault, rape, and murder reveal that psychopaths’ brains differ structurally from those of regular people as well as those of non-psychopathic violent offenders. Specifically, psychopaths were found to have less grey matter—a type of brain tissue—in areas of the brain connected with empathy. This suggests that there is a physiological basis for the lack of empathy characteristic in psychopathy, which perhaps necessitates a specifically tailored treatment approach. Furthermore, the findings raise questions about whether such offenders may be deemed criminally insane. More …

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Howard Carter (Born on this day in 1874)

An experienced archaeologist and Egyptologist, Carter began searching for the long lost tomb of the ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamen in the early 1900s, excavating Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, through funding by his financial backer, Lord Carnarvon. In 1922, Carnarvon gave Carter one last season to make a discovery. He did, unearthing the pristine, treasure-filled tomb that became world famous. What fact about Carter’s life is often used to refute the so-called Curse of the Pharaohs? More…

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The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps

“I am not a welfare queen,” says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.

That’s how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.

“I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare,” she says.

Watch: Tony Yang, a history lecturer, describes the toll of having no steady source of income. |

Photos

From Graduate School to Welfare 2

Jeff Haller for The Chronicle

Elliott Stegall, 51, who teaches English courses, picks up food assistance at the WIC office in DeFuniak Springs, Fla. “The first time we went to the office to apply, I felt like I had arrived from Eastern Europe to Ellis Island,” he says. “We all had that same ragged, poor look in our eyes.”

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As a self-aware Predator drone, I get my share of criticism. “You’re flying lost-link again!” “You vaporized a playground!” “You’re trying to usher in a post-human robo-dystopia!” Some of this is valid, some of it…okay, most of it is valid. But sometimes, the public discourse over drones like me becomes so turgid and dramatic that it obscures reasonable discussion of my pros and cons. And when the hyperventilating gets most hyper, when the language becomes most overwrought, when the prognostication gets most preposterous, I see it stemming from the conflation of two very different issues. And I don’t think that that’s an accident.

Two distinct constituencies use UAVs as a touchstone. One is concerned with the national security and foreign policy implications of drones, and the other with their privacy and domestic law enforcement applications. For brevity’s sake, I’ll call the first group “Oppenheimers,” after a guy who got a good look at a new kind of warfare and spent the rest of his life championing international institutions to make sure it never took place. They feel that remotely-piloted aircraft represent a qualitative shift in the ability of a nation, and a chief executive, to use force. And not a shift for the better.

Oppenheimers think drones will usher in an Imperial presidency. The capitalization there is important, because we’re talking Imperial as in Palpatine at the helm of the Galactic Empire. They fear that through technical means, drones are reducing or eliminating the political impediments to war, and blurring the line about what kind of conflict constitutes war in the first place. (Nobody puts a flag over drone wreckage, let alone puts it on the nightly news.) Oppenheimers also deplore the role that drones play in the larger framework of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, which the Obama administration interprets as giving them clearance to use force (whether under Titles 10 or 50) against al-Qaeda or its affiliates anywhere on the planet.

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–Combining cutting-edge analysis with first-rate storytelling, The Globalist covers the most important issues, people, companies and organizations shaping the global economy, politics and culture.
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England’s Lincoln Cathedral Is Consecrated (This day in 1092)

Not long after William the Conqueror named Remigius de Fécamp bishop of what was then the largest diocese in the country, he decided to move the seat of the diocese to a more central location. For the next 20 years, Remigius oversaw construction of a magnificent new cathedral in Lincoln, only to die days before its consecration. Today, its architecture is considered to be priceless. When Queen Eleanor died nearby in 1290, which parts of her body were buried at the cathedral? More…

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The entrance to the Australian War Memorial from ANZAC Parade

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The global fight to end capital punishment

First published online by Maya Wolfe-Robinson and Owen Bowcott.

“If we needed to hang someone tomorrow,” Martin Martinez, Trinidad and Tobago’s commissioner of prisons, says, grinning wolfishly, “we would grease up the gallows and buy some new rope.” Death by hanging is the penalty for anyone convicted of murder in Trinidad and Tobago, although no one has been executed here since 1999.

From his air-conditioned office, minutes from the cemetery in the capital, Port of Spain, Martinez reels off the four witnesses needed: a doctor, a priest, a court official and himself, the prisons commissioner. “It is traumatising to take a man’s life,” he explains. “It’s an emotional issue, as there is such a high murder rate here. The death penalty sends a message, but it may or may not solve the problem.”

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As difficult as it is to find good writing about religion, it is harder still to find good television about religion. Most televangelists do not do good (challenging, nuanced) religious television: one of their goals may be to educate, or win converts, but they have to raise money, and offering sophisticated portraits of religion is as likely to close people’s wallets as open them. Religious television series tend to be unwatchable: no Touched by an Angel for me. And talk-show hosts are rarely any better when it comes to religion. The skepticism of Bill Maher can be as simplistic as the basest prosperity gospel, and we should all be glad that the eager gullibility of Oprah is now quarantined on her own network. Except for public television’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, it is hard to find intelligent talk about religion on TV.

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In November 2010, a police lieutenant from Parma, Ohio, asked Vanguard Defense Industries if the Texas-based drone manufacturer could mount a “grenade launcher and/or 12-gauge shotgun” on its ShadowHawk drone for U.S. law enforcement agencies. The answer was yes.

Last month, police officers from 10 public safety departments around the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area gathered at an airfield in southern Maryland to view a demonstration of a camera-equipped aerial drone — first developed for military use — that flies at speeds up to 20 knots or hovers for as long as an hour.

And in late March, South Korean police and military flew a Canadian-designed drone as part of “advance security preparations” for the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul where protesters clashed with police.

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Two things here: She is watering with too small a container and what do the neighbors below think of this hanging flower pot?

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Behold The Forbidden Flu: A Loom Explainer

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a very important part of a very special flu virus. It may look like an ordinary protein, but in fact it’s been at the center of a blazing debate about whether our increasing power to experiment on life could lead to a disaster. Not that long ago, in fact, a national security advisory board didn’t even want you to see this. So feast your eyes.

For those who are new to this story let me start back at the beginning, in 1997.

In that year, a child in Hong Kong died of the flu. Doctors shipped a sample of his blood to virus experts in Europe, but they didn’t bother taking a look at it for months. When they did, they were startled to discover that it was unlike any flu they’d seen in a human being before.

Read more HERE.

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It was in a moment of exasperation, one imagines, that Kant discovered what he named ‘the scandal of reason’ – reason’s tendency to get entangled in its own contradictions and thus degenerate into either dogma or uncertainty – a tendency that has haunted modern history.

Politics perpetually faces the unfortunate choice between taking action but doing wrong, and incurring harm by failing to opposing it. Any political decision confronts this dilemma, the choice between what Hannah Arendt called ‘crimes of commission’ and ‘crimes of omission’. Should we sit back and watch the carnage in Syria or intervene, with the risk of creating another debacle, like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan? If we don’t have the guts to intervene, will we not be creating another Serebrenitsa? Faced with hard choices, how do we know what is the right thing to do? Is there a theory of justice that can help political judgment?

Contaminated by reason’s scandalous quality to waver between doubt and grand but futile gestures, philosophical endeavors have rarely been of use to politics. My recent book, The Scandal of Reason sets out a search for a politically relevant theory of justice. This search confronts what I describe as “the paradox of judgment”: the higher our moral aspirations, the less realistic, and therefore politically useful, the theory is. The more down-to-earth our thinking, the more we risk becoming complicit to existing injustice.

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One in six cancers ’caused by treatable infections’