[Link: sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com...]
On December 22, 1940, a former Manhattan housewife named Etta Kahn Shiber found herself in Hotel Matignon, headquarters of the Gestapo in Paris, sitting across from a "mousy" man in civilian clothes who said his name was Dr. Hager. Shiber, a 62-year-old widow, planned to follow the advice that had replayed in her head for the past six months--deny everything--but something about the doctor's smile, smug and imperious, suggested that he didn't need a confession.
"Well, the comedy is over," he began. "We now have the last two members of the gang.... And I have just received word that Mme. Beaurepos was arrested in Bordeaux two hours ago. So there really wasn't any reason to allow you to wander around the streets any longer, was there?"
A clerk appeared to transcribe everything she said. Dr. Hager asked hundreds of questions over the next 15 hours. She answered each one obliquely, being careful to say nothing that could be used against her friends and accomplices, and was escorted to a cell at the Cherche-Midi prison.
As he turned to leave, Dr. Hager smiled and reminded her that the punishment for her crime carried a mandatory sentence of death.
Six months earlier, on June 13, 1940--the day the Nazis invaded Paris--Etta Shiber and her roommate, whom she would identify in her memoir, Paris Underground, as "Kitty Beaurepos," collected their dogs, jewelry, and a few changes of clothing and started out on Route Nationale No. 20, the broad that connected Paris with the south of France. The women had met in 1925, when Etta was on vacation with her husband, William Shiber, the wire chief of the New York American andNew York Evening Journal. They kept in touch, and when her husband died, in 1936, Kitty invited Etta to live with her in Paris. Kitty was English by birth and French by marriage but was separated from her husband, a wine merchant. Etta moved into her apartment in an exclusive neighborhood near the Arc de Triomphe.
Now the city streets were deserted and the highway was choked with thousands of refugees--in autos, on foot, in horse-drawn carts, on bicycles. After twenty-four hours Etta and Kitty were still idling on the outskirts of Paris, and they knew the Germans would soon be following.
[Link: sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com...]
In The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron discusses a loosely defined category of expression that he addressed in a review of Anthony Lewis's bookFreedom for the Thought That We Hate in The New York Review in 2008, and in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard University in 2009. Although his references to Justice Holmes in this book are not exactly flattering--Waldron writes that "at one time or another [Holmes] took both sides on most free speech issues," and that Holmes's judgment "that criticizing the military was comparable to shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" is "preposterous"--in her introduction of Waldron at the Holmes Lectures, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow praised Waldron as "one of the two or three greatest legal philosophers of our time." That high praise also applies to one of Waldron's former teachers, Ronald Dworkin, who has criticized Waldron's writing about hate speech.
While references to learned debates among such scholars suggest that the average reader might have difficulty understanding the arguments in Waldron's book, such is not the case. The book is eminently readable and peppered with anecdotes and examples. For one, the instance of hateful speech that some readers may interpret as the proximate cause of Waldron's decision to write the book was this e-mail addressed to him by a reader: "YOU ARE A TOTALITARIAN ASSHOLE."
I suspect that the author of that e-mail may be a person who believes that our Supreme Court has been too willing to seek guidance in the work of foreign judges and foreign lawmakers. Waldron is certainly not such a person. His book provides arguments supporting hate speech prohibitions, to which other countries traditionally have been more amenable than has our own. Yet Waldron apparently does not expect his work to lead to any major changes in United States law. He writes that his purpose is not to persuade readers "of the wisdom and legitimacy of hate speech laws," or "to make a case for the constitutional acceptability of these laws in the United States."
[Link: sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com...]
Germans used to think of Poland as a country full of car thieves and post-communist drabness. On the eve of hosting the European Football Championship, however, the country has become the most astonishing success story in Eastern Europe. Relations between Berlin and Warsaw have never been better.
There are cities that are as uninteresting as the stone they are made of, rigid and heavy, done up as stylishly as if they had been completely untarnished by the vagaries of history. And then there are the other kinds, the raw, rough, unfinished and exciting cities of the world.
Warsaw is one of those cities, a place that seems to crackle and groan in all of its unfinished glory. No one would dream of calling the Polish capital a beautiful place. But how much it breathes history, how many critical, comforting and tragic things it says about the course of time to those who not only contemplate but also scrutinize its building blocks is evident in many of its structures. It is especially evident in the new football stadium in the Saska Kepa quarter on the east bank of the Vistula River, the place that will transfix billions of people on June 8, the day of the opening match of the European football championships.
Warsaw, 68 years earlier, less than a stone's throw away. Resistance fighters with the Polish Home Army are crawling through cellars, sewer tunnels and secret underground passages, rallying against the savage German occupiers. They strike out, armed with the courage of despair, and they manage to capture important parts of the city. They are counting on Stalin's help, after hearing on Radio Moscow that the Soviets have promised to support them militarily. But instead the Soviet dictator orders his troops to sit tight and do nothing, in the exact spot where this year's football championship is to take place. Stalin has no interest in self-confident Poles who liberate their capitals under their own steam. The Nazis massacre 180,000 Poles, and large parts of the city are reduced to rubble. The Russians eventually do liberate the Poles, their "sister people," but not until January 1945 -- on their own terms.
[Link: www.independent.co.uk...]
In a massacre of unprecedented savagery that brings Syria close to civil war, some 32 children and 60 adults have been slaughtered in villages in the Houla area of central Syria. Anti-government militants blame pro-regime gunmen for carrying out the butchery in which children and their parents were hacked and shot to death.
The figure for the number of children and adults killed was confirmed in an interview with The Independent on Sunday by General Robert Mood, the head of the team of 300 UN observers which is seeking to reduce the level of violence. "My patrols went into the village," he said. "I can verify that they counted 32 children under 10 killed. In addition, there were more than 60 adults dead."
General Mood would not explain how the villagers died, but horrific pictures posted on YouTube appear to show that they were shot or knifed to death, some having their throats cut. The small bodies of the children were covered in sheets as they were taken by survivors screaming in grief and disbelief from the houses where they had been murdered.
The massacre is the worst single incident in Syria's 14-month crisis because it involved the deliberate murder of children as well as adults. Militants say the perpetrators were pro-regime gunmen, known as the shabiya, who had captured Houla. If true, the shabiya may have been members of the Alawite sect, which is supportive of the government. Alawites inhabit a string of villages south of Houla, which is 25km north-west of Homs. The Syrian leadership is largely drawn from the Alawite sect.
[Link: www.cnn.com...]
Do you know how long your cell phone company keeps records of whom you text, who calls you or what places you have traveled? Do you know how often cell phone companies turn over this information to the police and whether they first ask the police to get a warrant based on probable cause?
No, you don't. Not unless you work for a cell phone company or a law enforcement agency with a specialty in electronic surveillance. You aren't alone: Congress and the courts have no idea either.
The little we do know is worrisome. The companies are not legally required to turn over your information simply because a police officer is curious about you. Yet wireless carriers sell this information to police all the time.
As far as the cell phone companies are concerned, the less Americans know about it the better.
Whom you text and call and where you go (tracked by your cell phone as long as it's on) can reveal a great deal about you. Your calling patterns can show which friends matter to you the most, and your travel patterns can reveal what political and religious meetings you attend and what doctors you visit. Over time, this data accumulates into a dossier portraying details of your life so intimate that you may not have thought of them yourself. In comparison with companies such as Facebook and Google, which collect, store and use our information in one way or another, cell phone companies are less transparent.
[Link: blogs.discovermagazine.com...]
Greens are often mocked as self-righteous, hybrid-driving, politically correct foodies these days (see this episode of South Park and this scene from Portlandia.) But it wasn't that long ago--when Earth First and Earth Liberation were in the headlines--that greens were perceived as militant activists. They camped out in trees to stop clear-cutting and intercepted whaling ships and oil and gas rigs on the high seas.
In recent years, a new forceful brand of green activism has come back into vogue. One action (carried out with Monkey Wrenching flair) became a touchstone for the nascent climate movement. In 2011, climate activists engaged in a multi-day civil disobedience event that has since turned a proposed oil pipeline into a rallying cause for American environmental groups.
This, combined with grassroots opposition to gas fracking, has energized the sagging global green movement. But though activist greens have frequently claimed to stand behind science, their recent actions, especially in regard to genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, say otherwise.
[Link: www.nature.com...]
Climate change, with its associated melting ice caps and shrinking glaciers, is the usual suspect when it comes to explaining rising sea levels. But a recent study now shows that human water use has a major impact on sea-level change that has been overlooked.
During the latter half of the twentieth century, global sea level rose by about 1.8 millimetres per year, according to data from tide gauges. The combined contribution from heating of the oceans, which makes the water expand, along with melting of ice caps and glaciers, is estimated to be 1.1 millimetres per year, which leaves some 0.7 millimetres per year unaccounted for. This gap has been considered an important missing piece of the puzzle in estimates for past and current sea-level changes and for projections of future rises.
It now seems that the effects of human water use on land could fill that gap. A team of researchers reports in Nature Geoscience that land-based water storage could account for 0.77 millimetres per year, or 42%, of the observed sea-level rise between 1961 and 2003. Of that amount, the extraction of groundwater for irrigation and home and industrial use, with subsequent run-off to rivers and eventually to the oceans, represents the bulk of the contribution.
[Link: www.wired.com...]
On a bright May afternoon in 2007, a German artist and printmaker named Hans-Jürgen Kuhl took a seat at an outdoor café directly opposite the colossal facade of the Cologne Cathedral. He ordered an espresso and a slice of plum cake, lit a Lucky Strike, and watched for the buyer. She was due any minute. Kuhl, a lanky 65-year-old, had to remind himself that he was in no rush. He'd sold plenty of artwork over the years, but this batch was altogether different. He needed to be patient.
Tourists milled about the platz in front of the cathedral, Germany's most visited landmark, craning their necks to snap pictures of the impossibly intricate spires jutting toward the heavens. Kuhl knew those spires well. He had grown up in Cologne and painted the majestic cathedral countless times.
On the other side of a low brick wall surrounding the café, Kuhl finally spotted her. Tall, blond, and trim, Susann Falkenthal looked about 30. As was the case during their previous meetings, she wore practical shoes, an unremarkable blouse and pair of pants, and little makeup. Kuhl thought her plain look was something of a contradiction for a businesswoman who drove a black BMW convertible, but no matter.
When they first met a few months earlier, Falkenthal said she was an events manager from Vilnius, Lithuania, and gave Kuhl a card printed with a Vilnius address as well as an address from the German city of Essen. Her German was flawless.
