country:denmark

  • Survival of the fattest | Smithsonian

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/culture-and-the-arts/survival-of-the-fattest

    Je ne connaissais pas cette œuvre ni le sculpteur Jens Galschiøt, dont le travail est très intéressant

    Photo : Karolos Trivizas.

    Survival of the fattest

    Symbolic sculpture, synthesis in the beautiful seaside town of Ringobing in Denmark. As stated by the Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt, this 3.5 meters high bronze sculpture epitomizes the imbalanced distribution of the world’s resources preserved by means of a biased and unjust world. It is called ‘SURVIVAL OF THE FATTEST’ and shows a huge fat woman from the West, with a pair of scales in her hand, sitting on the shoulders of starved African man. As I was informed there, this controversial statue instigated many arguments among the inhabitants and the visitors of the small town.

    https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest

    #sculpture #représentation #colonialisme #image

  • Space in Videos - 2018 - 07 - From green to brown in a month
    http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2018/07/From_green_to_brown_in_a_month

    As this year’s heatwave continues, the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission reveals once again how the colour of our vegetation has changed in just one month. These two images cover the same area: part of Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, part of Germany and part of France, but the difference between them couldn’t be more striking. The first, captured on 28 June 2018, is predominantly green, depicting healthy vegetation. The second, captured on 25 July 2018, however, is mainly brown, showing just how much the vegetation has changed owing to the long hot dry spell Europe has been enduring over the last weeks.

    These two images were captured by Sentinel-3’s ocean and land colour instrument. See also similar captures over Germany, Denmark and Sweden: European drought.

    https://dlmultimedia.esa.int/download/public/videos/2018/07/045/1807_045_AR_EN.mp4

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-historic-win-and-the-future-of-the-democratic-p

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-eight. She was born in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx and lives there now, in a modest one-bedroom apartment. Parkchester was originally a planned community conceived by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was for decades segregated, predominantly Irish and Italian. Today, it’s largely African-American, Hispanic, and South Asian. Ocasio-Cortez comes from a Puerto Rican family in which the parents’ self-sacrifice has been rewarded by their daughter’s earnest striving, and, now, a historic achievement. Come November, Ocasio-Cortez is almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. As recently as ten months ago, she was waiting tables at a taco place near Union Square called Flats Fix. On June 26th, she pulled off a political upset in the Democratic primary for the Fourteenth Congressional District, soundly defeating the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, the most powerful politician in Queens County and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives.

    We sat down at a table near the window. She allowed that she was getting worn down. “You’re speaking to me when I am still emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and logistically processing all of this,” she said. “The whole thing’s got me knocked a little flat.”

    With good reason. Not long ago, Ocasio-Cortez was mixing margaritas. Today, she is the embodiment of anti-corporate politics and a surge of female candidates in the midterm elections. “It’s a lot to carry,” she said. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she was on the receiving end of Murdoch-media hysteria. The Post greeted her win with the headline “RED ALERT.” Sean Hannity pronounced her “downright scary.” And Ben Shapiro called her a member of the “howling at the moon” segment of the Democratic Party. On the anti-Trump right, Bret Stephens wrote in the Times that “Hugo Chávez was also a democratic socialist,” and warned that, in a national election, the likes of Ocasio-Cortez will be “political hemlock for the Democratic Party.” None of it seemed exactly real. When I asked her where she was going to live in D.C., her eyes widened in surprise, as if it had not occurred to her that she would no longer be spending most of her time in the Bronx. “Not a clue,” she said.

    One of her most effective strokes was a two-minute-long video, the creation of Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, D.S.A. activists from Detroit, who started Means of Production, a media-production company, and set out looking for working-class-oriented campaigns. They learned about Ocasio-Cortez on Facebook and sent her a direct message on Twitter. For less than ten thousand dollars, they produced a soulful social-media-ready film that showed the candidate in her apartment, on a subway platform, in a bodega, talking with a pregnant woman, to kids selling cupcakes. All the while, in voice-over, she speaks directly to the viewer:

    Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office. I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family. . . . This race is about people versus money. We’ve got people, they’ve got money. It’s time we acknowledged that not all Democrats are the same. That a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us. What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.

    The video went viral. Something was afoot.

    On Election Day, in a car on the way to the billiards hall where Ocasio-Cortez was going to watch the returns, some of her advisers were getting encouraging reports from polling places. Shut it down, she said. No more looking at phones, no more guessing: “Let’s see the vote.” That night, cameras captured her expression of shock as she watched the news: a thirteen-point landslide. She had no words. It was a moment of pure joy playing out live on television. Crowley gamely accepted the results and, with a pickup band behind him, took out his guitar and dedicated “Born to Run” to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For a man in six kinds of pain, he sang a creditable version.

    If the Murdoch press was predictably outraged, some establishment Democrats were wary, too. Nancy Pelosi dismissed the win as a local phenomenon. And, while her tone was curt and superior, her larger point was clear: in November, Democratic candidates, no matter what shade of blue, had to beat Republicans. Districts had to flip. At dinner, Ocasio-Cortez bristled at the establishment dismissals. She did not doubt that there were many factors in her win—her identity as a young woman, as a Latina, as a daughter of a working-class family—but she had also out-organized a party boss, hammered away at immigration and health-care issues, and brought out new voters. It was infuriating for her to listen to the condescension.

    “I’m twenty-eight years old, and I was elected on this super-idealistic platform,” she said. “Folks may want to take that away from me, but I won. When you hear ‘She won just for demographic reasons,’ or low turnout, or that I won because of all the white ‘Bernie bros’ in Astoria—maybe that all helped. But I smoked this race. I didn’t edge anybody out. I dominated. And I am going to own that.” The more complicated question was how she was going to own her identity as a democratic socialist.

    When Ocasio-Cortez is interviewed now, particularly by the establishment outlets, she is invariably asked about “the S-word,” socialism; sometimes the question is asked with a shiver of anxiety, as if she were suggesting that schoolchildren begin the day by singing the “Internationale” under a portrait of Enver Hoxha. When I asked her about her political heroes, though, there was no mention of anyone in the Marxist pantheon. She named Robert F. Kennedy. In college, reading his speeches—“that was my jam,” she said. R.F.K., at least in the last chapter of his life, his 1968 Presidential campaign, tried to forge a party coalition of workers, minorities, and the middle class.

    D.S.A., which was founded in 1982, is not a party but a dues-paying organization, and it has seen a bump in membership recently, from five thousand in 2016 to more than forty thousand today. The first co-chairs were Harrington and the author Barbara Ehrenreich. David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York, was a member of D.S.A. There’s no question that some members are Marxists in the traditional sense; some want to see the destruction of capitalism and the state ownership of factories, banks, and utilities. Jabari Brisport, a D.S.A. member from Brooklyn who recently ran, unsuccessfully, for City Council, told me that the group is “a big umbrella organization for left and leftish types, from Bernie-crats to hard-core Trotskyists.” Julia Salazar, a D.S.A. member in her mid-twenties who is running for the New York State Senate with the ardent support of Ocasio-Cortez, told Jacobin, a leftist quarterly, that a democratic socialist “recognizes the capitalist system as being inherently oppressive, and is actively working to dismantle it and to empower the working class and the marginalized in our society.”

    Ocasio-Cortez and, for the most part, the people around her speak largely in the language of Sanders. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, and yet in the most extensive speech he ever gave on the theme—at Georgetown University, in November, 2015—he did not mention Debs. Rather, he focussed almost entirely on Franklin Roosevelt and the legacy of the New Deal. He said that he shared the vision that F.D.R. set out in his 1944 State of the Union speech, what Roosevelt called the Second Bill of Rights. Sanders pointed out that universal health care was “not a radical idea” and existed in countries such as Denmark, France, Germany, and Taiwan. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production,” he said, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”

    Ocasio-Cortez and her circle focus less on the malefactions of the current Administration than on the endemic corruption of the American system, particularly the role of “dark money” in American politics and the lack of basic welfare provisions for the working classes and the poor. When they hear conservatives describe as a “socialist” Barack Obama—a man who, in their view, had failed to help the real victims of the financial crisis, while bailing out the banks—they tend to laugh ruefully. “I think the right did us a service calling Obama a socialist for eight years,” Saikat Chakrabarti, one of Ocasio-Cortez’s closest associates, said. “It inoculated us. But people focus on the labels when they are not sure what they mean. What people call socialism these days is Eisenhower Republicanism!”

    #Alexandria_Ocasio_Cortez #Politique_USA #My_heroin_for_now

  • Europe is using smartphone data as a weapon to deport refugees | WIRED UK
    https://www.wired.co.uk/article/europe-immigration-refugees-smartphone-metadata-deportations

    Smartphones have helped tens of thousands of migrants travel to Europe. A phone means you can stay in touch with your family – or with people smugglers. On the road, you can check Facebook groups that warn of border closures, policy changes or scams to watch out for. Advice on how to avoid border police spreads via WhatsApp.

    Now, governments are using migrants’ smartphones to deport them.

    Across the continent, migrants are being confronted by a booming mobile forensics industry that specialises in extracting a smartphone’s messages, location history, and even WhatsApp data. That information can potentially be turned against the phone owners themselves.

    In 2017 both Germany and Denmark expanded laws that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum seekers’ phones. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium and Austria, while the UK and Norway have been searching asylum seekers’ devices for years.

  • How Grocers in Denmark Became the Key to Refugee Integration

    First, the closure of many welfare institutions in rural areas means that there are unoccupied buildings – often municipally owned and relatively cheap to rent – that can be quickly refitted. Second, rural municipalities are particularly interested in the jobs and secondary economic benefits derived from the asylum centers, such as the creation of demand for other services including remodeling and maintenance, which means more work for locals in a context where the creation of even a small number of jobs has a big impact. Third, the enrollment of asylum-seeking children in local schools can stave off school closures. Similarly, asylum seekers of all ages can support local associational life, for example, by participating in local football clubs.

    Finally, because of the relative isolation of many rural asylum centers, asylum seekers often have little option but to spend their money locally, which in particular means buying their food at local grocery stores. When we asked grocery store managers to rate the importance of asylum centers to their overall business only one felt the center had no positive effect on their business; seven reported a small effect, eight a medium effect and three a powerful effect. Three managers told us that their stores were dependent on the business from the asylum center for their survival.

    https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2018/06/26/how-grocers-in-denmark-became-the-key-to-refugee-integration

    #Danemark #asile #migrations #réfugiés #intégration #économie #économie_rurale

    Au Danemark comme à #Riace, miser sur les réfugiés = solution pour revitaliser l’#économie_locale en difficulté ? Une #solution pour les #déserts_alimentaires (http://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/glossaire/desert-alimentaire), les #déserts_ruraux
    #magasins #écoles #services #magasins

  • In Denmark, Harsh New Laws for Immigrant ‘Ghettos’ - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/world/europe/denmark-immigrant-ghettos.html

    Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.

    Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.

    For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.

    • Some [of the 22 proposals presented by the government] are punitive: One measure under consideration would allow courts to double the punishment for certain crimes if they are committed in one of the 25 neighborhoods classified as ghettos, based on residents’ income, employment status, education levels, number of criminal convictions and “non-Western background.”

      [...] “We call them ‘ghetto children, ghetto parents,’ it’s so crazy,” Ms. Akdogan said. “It is becoming a mainstream word, which is so dangerous. People who know a little about history, our European not-so-nice period, we know what the word ‘ghetto’ is associated with.”

  • Drawing Borders in the Arctic: The Race To Colonise the North | The Market Mogul

    https://themarketmogul.com/drawing-borders-arctic-anthropocene-aided-race-define-distinctive-bo

    Once a region largely overlooked by the international community for its inaccessibility and large ice masses, the Arctic is now at the forefront of some of the world’s most critical questions. As anthropocentric climate change continues to thaw boreal ice at unprecedented rates, the increased accessibility of the Arctic region presents new windows of opportunity for the Arctic nations of the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, and Denmark while simultaneously exacerbating the significance of unsettled borders between these Arctic states. Compelled by rapid environmental change, countries are now mobilising to carve up as much land as possible in the Northern Circumpolar Region; often leading to complex overlapping claims and the potential for disagreement and conflict. The significance of the Arctic is also boosted by # the large numbers of fisheries, natural gas, oil, and rare earth minerals such as nickel, copper, uranium, and diamonds which are becoming increasingly open to exploitation as the ice melts away. Thus, as the Anthropocene continues to alter the physical geography of the Arctic circle, previous treaties, norms, and models of governance have become incompatible with the changing landscape and require a distinct and purposeful drawing of borders to avert tensions and promote a stable and cooperative environment in the High North.

    #cartographie #arctique #climat

  • France, Where Age of Consent Is Up for Debate - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/frances-existential-crisis-over-sexual-harassment-laws/550700

    On April 24, 2017, a 28-year-old-man met an 11-year-old girl in a park in Montmagny, just north of Paris, after which, he took her home where he had oral and vaginal sex with her. When it was over, the girl called her mother and described what had happened, and her mother called the police. “She thought … that she didn’t have the right to protest, that it wouldn’t make any difference,” the mother told Mediapart, a French investigative site which first reported on the allegations of the case. The accusations were of an adult raping a child—a crime that, in France, can lead to a 20-year prison sentence for the perpetrator when the victim is 15 or younger.

    But it initially wasn’t charged that way. When the case first went to court in September, the man faced only charges of “sexual infraction,” a crime punishable with a maximum of five years in jail and a €75,000 fine. Under French law, a charge of rape requires “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise,” even if the victims are as young as the girl in the Montmagny case. When the case, initially postponed, went back to court in February, the man’s attorneys did not deny the sexual encounter but argued that the girl had been capable of consenting. “She was 11 years and 10 months old, so nearly 12 years old,” defense lawyer Marc Goudarzian said. Sandrine Parise-Heideiger, his fellow defense lawyer, added: “We are not dealing with a sexual predator on a poor little faultless goose.”

    Such a defense flies in the face of legal and cultural consensus in most Western nations, and much of the world. “With children there is inevitably coercion,” Ernestine Ronai, co-president of the gender-based violence commission at the government’s High Council for Equality between Women and Men, told me. “It is indefensible that a girl of 11 could be considered consenting with a 28-year-old man. This is shocking,” she added.

    Indeed, the judge did ultimately order that rape charges be filed, in what Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, the attorney for the girl and her family, called a “victory for victims.” The case has been postponed to allow for a more thorough investigation into the allegations. But in the meantime, it has also provoked an unprecedented backlash that has resulted in France considering a change to a longstanding, anomalous feature of its laws: Up to now, there has been no legal age of consent for sex.

    Under French law, “rape” is defined as “any act of sexual penetration, of whatever nature, committed on the person of another by violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” Yet unlike elsewhere, there is no presumption of coercion if a sexual minor is involved. Most other countries in Europe, including Spain, Belgium, Britain, Switzerland, Denmark and Austria, have a legal age of consent. Most of the age minimums range between 14 and 16 years of age. Fixing a specific age of consent means that children and adolescents below that age cannot, regardless of circumstances, be considered consenting to sex; their very age renders them incapable. As a result, an adult in most European nations who has sex with someone under this age would be charged with rape, even if violent force is not used.

    • Most other countries in Europe, including Spain, Belgium, Britain, Switzerland, Denmark and Austria, have a legal age of consent. Most of the age minimums range between 14 and 16 years of age. Fixing a specific age of consent means that children and adolescents below that age cannot, regardless of circumstances, be considered consenting to sex; their very age renders them incapable. As a result, an adult in most European nations who has sex with someone under this age would be charged with rape, even if violent force is not used.

    • After May 1968, French intellectuals would challenge the state’s authority to protect minors from sexual abuse. In one prominent example, on January 26, 1977, Le Monde, a French newspaper, published a petition signed by the era’s most prominent intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, André Glucksmann and Louis Aragon—in defense of three men on trial for engaging in sexual acts with minors. “French law recognizes in 13- and 14-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish,” the petition stated, “But it rejects such a capacity when the child’s emotional and sexual life is concerned.” Furthermore, the signatories argued, children and adolescents have the right to a sexual life: “If a 13-year-old girl has the right to take the pill, what is it for?” It’s unclear what impact, if any, the petition had. The defendants were sentenced to five years in prison, but did not serve their full sentences.

      In 1979, Liberation published another petition, this time in support of Gérard R., a man on trial for having sex with girls between the ages of six and 12. It was signed by 63 people, many of them well-known intellectuals like Christiane Rochefort and Pascal Bruckner. It argued that the girls in question were “happy” with the situation. “The love of children is also the love of their bodies,” they wrote. “Desire and sexual games have their place in the relationship between children and adults. This is what Gérard R. thought and experienced with [the] girls … whose fulfillment proved to everyone, including their parents, the happiness they found with him.”

      What the endorsements from prominent French intellectuals suggested was that young children possessed a right to govern their own sexuality. Under this interpretation of liberté, young children were empowered to find happiness in sexual relationships; their ability to consent was a foregone conclusion. Any effort to suggest otherwise would be a condescension, a disrespect to them as fully realized human beings. In a radio interview in 1978, Michel Foucault said of sex with minors that assuming “that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”

      “People have a hard time admitting they were colonized by the discourse of pedocriminals,” Salmona told me. France in the 1970s and 1980s, she said, was an “atrocious” era for children, an active time for a very unapologetic “pedocriminal lobby.”

      Yet it’s hard to know exactly how widespread the so-called pedocriminal lobby’s influence reached. On the one hand, as sociologist and criminologist Patrice Corriveau wrote in 2011, the number of sexual abuse cases involving children in France had been on the rise since 1972. By 1982, he found, sexual offenses against minors had increased by nearly 22 percent—meaning, it seemed as though the stigma against child sex abuse was encouraging victims to come forward. At the same time, while the number of reported cases was on the rise, convictions for homosexual acts with minors were decreasing. As Corriveau explained: “In France … sexual behaviors, homoerotic or not, dropped in importance on the level of judicial intervention as the sexual revolution took hold. In fact, morals offense represented only 0.54 percent of overall criminality in France in 1982.”

      #pedocriminalité #pedosexualité #pedophilie #viol #culture_du_viol #enfance #domination_adulte #domination_masculine #deni #cocorico #liberation_sexuelle #mai68

  • Statewatch News Online: Council of Europe: Prison statistics for 2016: increases in prison population rate and average length of imprisonment
    http://www.statewatch.org/news/2018/apr/coe-prison-statistics-2016.htm

    The Council of Europe’s recently-published annual prison statistics reports cover the year 2016 and show an increase from 2015 in the prison population rate (the number of prisoners per 100,000 of a country’s population), the average length of imprisonment, the number of entries into penal institutions and the proportion of prisoners serving sentences for theft.

    There were decreases between 2015 and 2016 in overcrowding, in the amount spent per day per prisoner, in the number of releases from penal institutions and in the proportion of prisoners serving sentences for drug offences.

    Council of Europe: European prisons are almost full, according to latest Council of Europe survey (press release, pdf):

    “European prisons are on average close to full capacity, with inmates occupying over 9 out of ten available places, according to the Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics (SPACE) for 2016, published today.

    The survey shows that the incarceration rate grew from 115.7 to 117.1 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants from 2015 to 2016. This rate had previously fallen every year since 2012, when it reached 125.6 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.

    The incarceration rate is mainly influenced by the length of the sanctions and measures imposed. In that perspective, the average length of detention, which can be seen as an indicator of the way criminal law is applied, increasing slightly to 8.5 months.

    The countries where the incarceration rate grew the most were Bulgaria (+10.8%), Turkey (+9.5%), the Czech Republic (+7.6%), Serbia (+6.6%) and Denmark (+5.5%). The prison administrations where it fell the most were Iceland (-15.9%), Northern Ireland (-11.8), Lithuania (-11.1%), Belgium (-10.1%) and Georgia (-6.7%).

    On the other hand, overcrowding remained a serious problem in many countries. Thirteen out of 47 prison administrations reported having more inmates than places to host them.”

  • 10 #tools That Will Boost Your #Productivity
    https://hackernoon.com/10-tools-that-will-boost-your-productivity-3231785f9f81?source=rss----3a

    stag beetle and his toolTools I use will #focus on simplifying your life in your communication, grammar, focus at #work or study, little notes and two tools for #google Chrome. Some of the tools you might already know but hopefully not all the functions and features as I try to elaborate on the once not obvious on the first place. Without further ado, please enjoy the tools below.Instant language TranslationAround youGoogle Translate — play.google.com and itunes.apple.comAs this is an obvious one to translate text, many might not know about the app having on-the-fly translation using your camera. See how it work in the video.https://medium.com/media/c61bd72e000660efe09e18ada559ee77/hrefSame goes for pictures. For example, as I am living in Denmark with not speaking Danish at all, I never had (...)

    #productivity

  • European Commission: EU Action on Ship Emissions Helping to Reduce Air Pollution in Ports and Along Coastlines – gCaptain
    http://gcaptain.com/european-commission-eu-action-on-ship-emissions-helping-to-reduce-air-poll

    Air pollution from shipping has been significantly reduced around European coastlines and ports thanks to the concerted action by the European Union and industry to reduce sulphur emissions from ships, the European Commission said in a report released Monday.

    The report is the first European Commission report on compliance with Directive (EU) 2016/802, more commonly referred to as the Sulphur Directive, which regulates SOx emissions from ships in European waters.

    Since 1 January 2015, the Directive has required all ships operating in designated Sulphur Limit Control Areas (SECAs), such as the North and Baltic Seas, to burn marine fuel with a sulphur content no greater than 0.1%. For ships operating outside of SECAs, the Directive lowers the maximum sulphur content for ships from 3.50% to 0.50% by 1 January 2020.

    The European Report report released Monday shows high compliance by ships, particularly in the North and Baltic Seas SECAs where 93% of ships inspected complied with the Directive. This compliance has lead to a significant reduction in harmful sulphur dioxide concentrations in regions bordering the SECAs, including up to a 60% reduction in Denmark, 50% reduction in the German North Sea, and over 20% in the Rotterdam area, according to the report.

  • Boy unearths legendary Danish king’s trove in Germany | News24
    https://www.news24.com/World/News/boy-unearths-legendary-danish-kings-trove-in-germany-20180416

    A 13-year-old boy and an amateur archaeologist have unearthed a “significant” treasure trove in Germany which may have belonged to the legendary Danish king #Harald_Bluetooth who brought Christianity to Denmark.

    Rene Schoen and his student Luca Malaschnitschenko were looking for treasure using metal detectors in January on the northern island of Ruegen [Rügen] when they chanced upon what they initially thought was a worthless piece of aluminium.

    But upon closer inspection, they realised that it was a shimmering piece of silver, German media reported.

    A dig covering 400 square metres (4,300 square feet) that was finally started at the weekend by the regional archaeology service has uncovered a trove believed to be linked to the Danish king, a member of the Jelling dynasty, who reigned from around 958 to 986.

    Braided necklaces, pearls, brooches, a Thor’s hammer, rings and up to 600 chipped coins were found, including more than 100 that date to Bluetooth’s era.

    This trove is the biggest single discovery of Bluetooth coins in the southern Baltic sea region and is therefore of great significance,” lead archaeologist Michael Schirren told national news agency DPA.

    The oldest coin found in the trove is a Damascus dirham dating to 714 while the most recent is a penny dating to 983.

    The find suggests that the treasure may have been buried in the late 980s - also the period when Bluetooth was known to have fled to Pomerania, where he died in 987.

  • Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine. Chapter 17
    http://g-klimov.info/klimov-pp-e/ETM17.htm

    A Member of the Politburo

    Before me lies a yellowing sheet of coarse paper, which looks as though it has been torn out of one of my old school exercise books. Large writing, like a child’s, written in faint ink, which has been watered again and again.

    I have difficulty in reading the carefully formed letters written with a rusty nib: “My dear grandson... I am sitting by the light of a paraffin wick, just like it was in 1921, to write to you. The electricity is switched on for only two hours a day, and that not every day. I have pushed the table over close to the oven, where it is a little warmer. There’s a terrible draught coming from the window, though I’ve stopped up all the cracks with wool...”

    No electricity! No coal for the stove! And this two years after the victorious close of the war. And in the heart of the Donietz Basin, the richest coal field in Europe.

    Yet it is not suprising. Before the war the students at our Institute attended lectures all the winter in fur coats and fur caps. Our fingers froze, but we couldn’t put our hands in our pockets because we had to take notes. The boiler for the central heating of the Novocherkassk Industrial Institute was intended to burn Donietz anthracite, but now it was fueled with useless shale. We were amazed when we saw that the German periodical, Der Bergbau, which was in the Institute library, contained advertisements offering Donietz anthracite for export at cheap rates.

    A friend of mine, Vassily Shulgin, once achieved a temporary fame in the Faculty for Energetics. Somehow or other he got hold of an electrically heated airman’s suit, such as is used by arctic flyers. From the laboratory for electro-technics he obtained a transformer, which he placed under his desk, and it was easy enough to get hold of a long piece of cable. At one touch of a switch he became a celebrity. The first day he tried it out we were more interested in seeing whether he would go up in smoke and flames than in listening to our professor. To be on the safe side, one of his close friends brought in a fire extinguisher from the corridor and put it close to hand.

    Vassily’s triumph was a nine-days’ wonder. Sometimes he proudly switched off the heat, and then the freezing students realized that he was too hot. We were all as proud of that baggy figure on the backbench as if we had shared in his ingenuity.

    To the general consternation, one frosty morning in January he turned up in his old overcoat. When we insisted on knowing the reason why he curtly replied that the works had gone wrong. He confided the bitter truth to only a few intimate friends. He had been summoned to the Special Department, the N. K. V. D. representative in the Institute, where he was ordered to stop his ’anti-Soviet demonstration’; otherwise his case would be passed to the ’requisite organs’. To tell the truth, the Special Department showed him a great favor in this instance. Here were all the students freezing and suffering in silence, and one of them tried to get warm: counter-revolutionary agitation and undermining socialist economy!

    That sort of thing continued all through the years before the war. That was the system. The people simply got used to it and didn’t even notice it.

    Now, after the war, the Germans were freezing in their unheated homes. Naturally they cursed the Soviet officers, who had no need to count every briquette. But it did not occur to them that in Russia these same officers’ families were freezing even more than the Germans.

    "... But I keep going. I’m on my feet all day; I manage all the housework. It’s a pity I haven’t got much strength, and my old bones ache. I can have only sweet tea, with a biscuit sometimes dipped in it. I only have two teeth left and I can’t chew anything.

    “Your mother goes off to work every morning at seven. In the evening she can hardly crawl home with the aid of a stick; she helps herself along by the fences. It isn’t so much that she’s tired with work as her nerves. Everybody’s so irritable, they swear at the least thing and won’t listen to you. She’s afraid to go to the post now to get your parcels. Robbers are on the lookout for people receiving parcels from Germany, and they break into their homes at night and kill the people. And in the daytime young boys - ’craftsmen’ - hang around the post office and snatch the parcels in broad daylight.”

    Mention of the ’craftsmen’ recalled to my mind the Molotov automobile works in the town of Gorky. I worked there at the beginning of the war, and I saw these so-called ’craftsmen’, the young recruits to the Soviet proletariat. Soviet industry began to experience difficulty in getting new hands, because the Soviet youth were not prepared to become ordinary workers, so the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree: ’On the mobilization for factory-works and crafts schools’. In these schools millions of adolescents between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were enrolled.

    At Gorky these ’craftsmen’ attending the trade school attached to the works ate in the canteen. Their food was poor enough, but it was better than that issued to the older workers; after all, adolescents are not so class-conscious as adults and you can’t feed them only on slogans. In addition, many of the ’craftsmen’ were sent food from the villages where most of them had been recruited. So some-times they left their rations, and even, boy-like, littered the inedible food about the tables.

    As soon as the ’craftsmen’ had left the dining hall the workmen rushed in for their meal. Some of them hurried to the queue for food; others sat down at the table, for otherwise they would not have got a place until the more energetic proletarians had eaten; others went to the tables and surreptitiously ate the remains which the youngsters had left.

    On one side of the hall was a small room from which came the smell of eggs and bacon. That room was the canteen for the factory management: the director, the Party organizer, and other leaders. The workers were not particularly envious of the leaders; the bosses changed so often that the workers hardly had time to remember their names. And they were just as little interested in their further activities after they had gone. The workers knew that the stork brought them and the crow, the black N. K. V. D. prison van, took them away.

    During those war years a group of British sergeants and technicians worked at the Gorky Automobile Works, supervising the assembly of tanks sent to the U. S. S. R. under lend-lease. Of course they got a very favorable impression of the works.

    “... Yesterday your mother bought two glasses of Indian corn in the market. I crushed them in a mortar and we’ve been having maize porridge. It would have been very tasty if we could have got some butter to go with it. But it is cold now and the peasants aren’t bringing much to market. Potatoes, peas and milk are dear, and we mustn’t even think of meat or butter.” Here followed several lines blacked out by the censor.

    Two glasses of maize....

    In the early spring of 1945 I graduated from the Military College, and as I had exemption in certain subjects, I got through my state examination quickly and managed to obtain a week’s leave. I spent this at home, on the pretext that I was carrying out official duties in my home district. I went to the Kazan railway station in Moscow and, with a rucksack on my back, wandered about trying to find a way of getting a seat in a train. That was pretty hopeless, for some-times people tried for weeks, and even then had to give it up. I began to study the layout of the station, to see whether I could get a seat by a trick. My only advantages were that I had no heavy luggage, but plenty of youthful energy and all a Soviet citizen’s experience in such matters.

    “Brother, if I’m not mistaken you’ve got a T-T.” I heard a hoarse deep voice behind me, and a powerful hand clapped me on the shoulder. I looked round and saw a brawny sailor in the usual black blouse, his cap thrust to the back of his head. Despite the cold, his shirt was wide open at the chest, and his breast was gay with all the decorations of a sailor’s life; he was tattooed right up to his chin. One of those who ’don’t care a damn for anybody’ and always fall on their feet. He smiled at me as if we were old acquaintances and pointed to my pistol holster.

    “Yes, it’s a T-T. What about it?” I asked.

    “What train are you going by? The 11: 20?” he inquired. When I said yes, he gave me an even broader grin. “Well, then, everything’s okay! Let’s go!”

    “Go where?”

    “When I say ’let’s go’, we go! You keep in my wake. Have you just dropped out of the moon, brother?” my new relation demanded. To sailors all men are brothers.

    We went out of the station, crawled in the darkness over a roof or two, and through some fences. At last we reached the farther side of the station and the tracks. Guards were patrolling the platforms. Like diversionists we stole up to a train standing on the lines. All the carriages were locked.

    “Now let me have your T-T, brother,” the sailor ordered.

    “You’re not going to shoot?”

    “Of course not! You hold the magazine. And now look: here’s your railway ticket to the entire world.”

    He drew back the pistol hammer, and fixed it by the safety catch. Then he thrust the barrel into the carriage door lock. One turn and we were inside.

    “I’ve used this ticket more than any other,” my ’brother’ proudly explained, as he handed the pistol back to me. After that I, too, had more than one occasion to exploit this unusual means of unlocking carriage doors.

    On the threshold of my home I halted and looked about me. All the walls were sinking and slanting; the fences had gone; they had all been used for fuel. One could walk right through the town from house-yard to house-yard unhindered. As I opened the rickety door, with its rusty hinges and ingenious latch, I had very mixed feelings. In my heavy boots I stepped prudently over the creaking floorboards in the kitchen. Everything was rickety, neglected, rotting, like the old cottage in the fairy-story. I had to stoop to avoid knocking my head against the lintel as I passed into the next room.

    In one corner of the room, a little, hunched old woman in an apron was sitting by the stove. At one time she had carried me in her arms; now I could have picked her up with ease. Her gray hair was neatly arranged under her white kerchief, she had the same old shawl round her shoulders. At the sound of the door being opened she turned.

    “Grisha!” That one brief word conveyed all the experiences of the long war years: her hopes, her fears, her expectations and joys.

    “Granny!”

    I put my arms round her shoulders; I was afraid she would fall. We remained standing a long time, with her head pressed against my chest; she wept like a little child, but they were tears of joy. I gently stroked her back under her old flannel blouse. I felt her fragile bones, and was afraid my rough hands would hurt her.

    “Where’s mother?” I asked.

    “She’s at work. She gets home at six.”

    “I’ll send a boy to tell her I’m home,” I suggested as I took off my greatcoat.

    “No, don’t, Grisha! For God’s sake!” my old grandmother murmured fearfully. “She’ll be so glad she’ll leave her work and come home, and then they may take her to court.”

    I felt my collar suddenly grow tight as the blood rushed to my head and roared in my ears. So that was how a Soviet mother was allowed to welcome her soldier son after four years of separation!

    My mother came home from work late in the evening. Granny had prepared a festive table in honor of my homecoming. She proudly brought out a tiny tin of honey and set it on the table, then a tiny medicine bottle of homemade cherry wine. When I went to my rucksack and began to hand out all kinds of cans of American preserves my mother’s eyes lit up with joy and relief. They were both hungry, but that was not so bad as the realization that they had nothing to make a feast for their son who had come safely home after a long absence. Now they had American cans of conserves on the table!

    Whenever Russian people hear mention of the words ’lend-lease’ they think of cans piled up like mountains. Those cans were to be found in the wildest and loneliest parts of the famous Bryansk forests, in the marshes of Leningrad, wherever the Soviet army passed.

    Russia is undoubtedly a very rich agricultural country, with inexhaustible natural resources. Yet from 1942 to 1945 that country lived and fought exclusively on American products. We officers were all profoundly convinced that we could have held out without American tanks and planes, but we would have died of starvation without the American food. Ninety percent of the meat, fats, and sugar consumed in the Soviet army was of American origin, and almost the same can be said of life in the rear. Even the beans and the white flour were American. The one article of Soviet origin was the black bread - apart, of course, from water.

    A word or two on water. People in Moscow seriously believed that the American embassy received even water in cans from America. Probably this was due to the amount of grapefruit and other fruit juices the Americans drank from cans. After the war it was said that the Kremlin had provided itself with American foodstuffs for many five-year plans ahead.

    There was one time at the beginning of 1948 when all the shops in all the large Soviet cities were stocked to the ceiling with sacks of coffee beans. Before the war coffee in the bean had been a luxury article in the Soviet Union. But now all the empty shelves of the shops were stocked with sacks bearing foreign inscriptions in red paint. Coffee to be bought off the ration, at 500 rubles a kilo! At that time bread cost 150 rubles a kilo on the free market.

    The people began to buy the coffee by the sack. It wasn’t that the Russians had acquired a foreign taste. Not at all! They cooked the beans, threw the fragrant liquor away, then dried the beans, pounded them in a mortar or a coffee-grinder, and made bread of the flour. Bread from coffee! Previously they had played the same sort of trick with mustard powder! Bread from mustard!

    During the war all the metal utensils in the U. S. S. R. were made from American cans. It will be many years before the Russians forget those cans with their labels: ’pork meat’.

    In an endeavor to diminish the effect of this propaganda by food conserves, the rumormongers of the N. K. V. D. spread stories that the Americans were canning the flesh of South American monkeys to send to the Soviet Union.

    "... Dear Grisha, perhaps you have a cup or something of the sort where you are. I broke mine recently and haven’t any thing to drink my tea out of. If you can send me one I shall be very glad and will always think of you when I drink my tea, my dear boy.

    "You always sew up your parcels in very good canvas, and we don’t throw it away, we make towels from it. Don’t be annoyed with us if we ask you for anything, you’re all we have in the world. I live only for your letters. And I haven’t much longer to live.

    “Keep well, my dear boy. Look after yourself. Granny.”

    I got hold of a sack in which to pack a parcel. I stuffed it full with ladies’ lace underwear, silk stockings, lengths of material, until it weighed the permitted 10 kilograms. In the very center I packed several china cups. And what else could I put in? They needed absolutely everything. They would sell what I sent and buy meat, and would go on wearing rags. You can’t fill a bottomless barrel.

    That evening I had planned to go out, but granny’s letter robbed me of all inclination. I sat at my desk, and scenes from my past life arose before my eyes.

    II

    1921. At that time I was quite an infant. Perhaps the only memory I have is of the jackdaws. Daws hopping about the floor, in the light of the paraffin lamp. One of them was dragging its wing awkwardly, leaving a trail of blood. The lamp flickered, the dark corners were very mysterious, and wretched daws hopped about the floor.

    In the winter they flew about in great black flocks. When they flew over the roofs in the evening dusk, the people said as they heard them call: “That’s a sign of frost. It’ll be still colder tomorrow.” Raspberry streaks left by the sunset on the horizon, the lilac, frosty mist, and the calling daws. They settled like bunches of black berries on the bare poplars in the orchards, and chattered away before retiring to rest.

    My uncle thought of very ingenious ways of getting close to the daws with his gun. Normally they won’t let you come anywhere near. But he went hunting them to shoot them for a ragout. I’ve forgotten what it tasted like. Older people say it doesn’t taste any worse than ragout made from other wild birds. Every wildfowl has its own specific flavor.

    In those days children wrapped in rags sat in the snow in the street and silently held out their hands. They no longer had the strength to ask for ’bread’. If you returned that way a few hours later you found they were no longer holding out their hands: they were frozen corpses.

    People don’t remember 1921 to any extent nowadays. It was followed by many other years, which have been fixed more definitely in the mind. 1921 was something quite elemental, the result of war and the post-war ruin. So it did not seem so terrible.

    1926. The later years of the New Economic Policy. “The period of temporary retreat in order to organize a decisive advance along the entire front,” as we can read in the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

    In those days, when my father gave me ten kopecks I was a rich man and could satisfy all my childish desires. The years 1925 and 1926 were the only time in all the existence of the Soviet regime when the people did not think of bread.

    I don’t remember tsarist Russia. People of my generation regard the NEP period (New Economic Policy - involved a partial return to free market exchange of commodities. - Tr.) as the equivalent of a normal and affluent life. I heard various stories told by older people, but at this time I was a Young Pioneer and was more interested in playing a drum. Some museum-piece of an old man would throw his arms wide and say rapturously and regretfully: “Under Nicholas a dried fish that size cost three kopecks; and now....” He swallowed back his spittle and waved his hand resignedly.

    1930. 1 was attending school. The name of the school was changed every three months; the curriculum changed accordingly. I was not greatly interested-1 hadn’t time to be, for I spent most of the day queuing for bread. Queues stood outside the bakers’ shops day and night. Six hundred, seven hundred... Often the number written in indelible ink on my hand was over the 1, 000.

    We boys regarded it all as a kind of game. When the cart drove up to the shop and the loaves were unloaded there was a bit of a riot. Women screamed as they were half crushed to death, one heard curses, groans, and tears. Meanwhile we boys tried to find a way into the shops through a window or some other opening. In other countries the children played ’Red Indians’, but we fought for our lives to get bread. That was how the youthful builders of socialism were reared, that was how the steel was tempered.

    We went to school in two shifts; it was as cold inside the building as outside. It was much more pleasant in the street, where you could run and keep yourself warm. What point was there in our teacher telling us stories of the Paris Commune? We stormed not the Bastille but the bakers’ shops.

    1932. General collectivization. People starved to death, their bodies lay about the streets. The living had difficulty in dragging themselves about, for their legs were swollen with famine dropsy.

    My elder brother, who was in the Young Communists, was called up to perform special duties. He and his comrades were given weapons, and they mounted guard all night over the church, which was being used as a transit camp for prisoners. There were not enough prisons; there were not enough guards. Of an evening, hundreds of ragged men and women peasants, arrested as kulaks, were driven into the church. Mothers carried babes in arms. Many of the prisoners could hardly shift their feet. The youngsters who had been issued arms went hungry to the church to guard hungry people.

    Each morning the ragged class enemies were driven on northward. Many dead bodies were left lying on the stone flags inside the church. So far as they were concerned, the problem of liquidating the kulaks as a class was already solved.

    Winter passed, spring arrived. The campaign for collecting the State grain fund began. The peasants were baking bread made from tree bark, but men armed with pistols demanded that they should hand over corn for the spring sowing. During the winter the peasants had eaten tree bark, cats, dogs, even horse dung. Cases of cannibalism were not unknown. Nobody can say how many millions of people died of hunger in 1933: possibly one-third or one-fourth of the agricultural population of southern Russia.

    During the summer the few half-savage dogs still left alive wandered through the deserted villages, devouring human flesh. First man ate dog, and then dog ate man. Many fields were left uncultivated; there was nobody to harvest those that were sown.

    Day after day we scholars of the higher classes were driven out to harvest these fields. The road ran past the town cemetery. Each morning as we went to work we saw dozens of deep, freshly dug pits. When we returned in the evening they had been filled and leveled with the ground. Some of the more inquisitive scholars tried digging up the loose soil with their boots.

    They lost their curiosity when they came upon human hands or feet beneath the shallow layer of earth. Sometimes as we went past the cemetery we saw swollen corpses being thrown from carts into the pits; they had been brought from prisons and hospitals. The wild steppe grass rapidly covered these graves, and nobody will ever know the exact cost of that resounding word ’collectivization’.

    The artificial famine of 1932 - 1933 was a political measure taken by the Politburo; it was not an elemental disaster. The people had to be shown who was the master. The decision was taken in the Kremlin; the result was the loss of millions of human lives. From that time hunger became a new, full member of the Politburo.

    Yet at that same period the Soviet government was dumping! They offered wheat at very cheap prices, much cheaper than the world market price. The principle was simple: grain taken from the collectivized Soviet peasant at 6 kopecks a kilo was sold to the Russian workers at 90 kopecks a kilo. In such circumstances it was easy enough to indulge in dumping.

    The Soviet Union offered its grain at knockdown prices on the world market. The greedy capitalists rushed to buy it. But the Canadian and Australian farmers started to burn their grain, while the Moscow radio howled in delight: “Look what is happening in the unplanned capitalist world.” But after burning their grain the Australians and Canadians had no money to buy the British industrial goods, consequently British factories began to close down and unemployment increased. The British workers had no money to buy the cheap Russian grain.

    But over the sea, in the marvelous land where communism was being built, there was no unemployment, and bread was so cheap that it was being sold abroad for next to nothing. And so there was a wave of strikes and revolutionary movements in the West. “The revolution is continuing. Comrades,” they said in the Kremlin, rubbing their hands.

    In Denmark the pigs were fed on cheap Russian sugar. In the U. S. S. R., people drank their tea with the sugar on the table to look at, or on Sundays and holidays they nibbled a knob as they sipped their tea. The Soviet workers and peasants went hungry, but there was money enough for financing capital construction, while machine tools and machinery were imported. Heavy industry increased proportionately to the rest of the country’s economy. The workers and peasants were told that heavy industry would make the machinery for light industry, and this in turn would make cloth and boots. But meanwhile tanks and aeroplanes were the chief production. There was nothing to be done about it: it was all due to the capitalist encirclement.

    Now there was no room for bourgeois sentimentality. Statistics show that fertility and population increase are in inverse proportion to the living conditions. The worse people live, the swifter they multiply. On the one hand there are India and China, where thousands die of hunger every year, but where millions are born in their place. On the other, the well-fed, enervated countries in the decline of civilization, such as France and Britain, with their falling fertility curve, and where the age-groups past the prime of life play a predominant part. Given these circumstances, Stalin had no need to fear the consequences of the famine policy; whatever happened, he was assured of soldiers and labor. In every respect the State would show an active balance.

    September 1939. Signature of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of Friend-ship. Trainload after trainload of Soviet grain, Soviet butter, Soviet sugar steamed off to Germany. Simultaneously all these articles disappeared from the Soviet shops, which in any case had never had any remarkable stock of them.

    To explain the change of political course the N. K. V. D. rumormongers spread the story that Ribbentrop had brought to Moscow the photocopy of a document, which had been signed by fourteen foreign powers. These powers had offered Hitler aid if he attacked the U. S. S. R. Hitler preferred our friendship: we desire peace. But for that we have got to pay!

    1941. War. Hunger passed into its final, perfected form. The ration-card system. No longer under-nourishment, but out-and-out starvation. In the winter of 1941-2 a kilo of potatoes cost 60 rubles on the free market: the equivalent of a week’s wage. A kilo of butter cost 700 to 800 rubles: three months’ wages. The worker received sufficient on the ration card to keep him on his feet and capable of working. In practice the main, indeed the only food issued was bread - 600 grams daily-the same bread that caused the German prisoners of war to suffer from gastric ulcers and to die off like flies.

    One day I had called on the director of the Lenin radio factory, to discuss some business. A knock at the door interrupted our conversation. His secretary put in her head and reported: “Serdiukova is here; is she to come in or wait?”

    Serdiukova came nervously into the room. Her face was dirty, and it was difficult to tell her age. She was wearing a black, greasy jacket, and her stockings were of sailcloth; she had men’s boots on her feet. She stood at the door, silently waiting. Her expression seemed despondent, yet indifferent, stamped with the apathy of infinite weariness.

    “Why didn’t you come to work yesterday, Serdiukova?” the director asked. “To stay away’s a serious crime, punishable under war legislation. You know what the punishment is for it.”

    “I was ill, Comrade Director. I couldn’t get out of bed,” she answered in a hoarse voice. She shifted from foot to foot. A pool of water formed on the parquet; it was dripping off her boots.

    Absence from work without good reason involved the punishment of forced labor even in peacetime. In wartime it might bring ten years’ imprisonment, on a charge of sabotaging war industry.

    “Have you got a doctor’s certificate?” the director asked.

    “No. I hadn’t anyone to send for the doctor. As soon as I could get up I came to work.”

    Serdiukova was one of those typical Russian women who uncomplainingly endure all the difficulties of life, who accept every-thing as inevitable, as sent from above. In this silent humility there is a kind of religious quality. It is not weakness; it is a source of the Russian’s enormous spiritual strength.

    As I looked at her I recalled an old soldier who was returning from hospital to the front after the latest of his many wounds. As he carried a machine-gun tripod on his back he quite calmly gave expression to his secret desire: “Ah, if only I had lost an arm or a leg! Then I’d be going back to my village.” I was shocked not so much by his words as by the composure with which he said them, his genuine readiness to lose an arm or a leg in exchange for return home. Yet he was an exemplary soldier.

    “You must know the law,” the director went on. “Absent without good reason. I’ll have to send your case to court.”

    She began to mutter in a broken voice: “But, Comrade Director! ... Day after day, fourteen hours at the bench... I haven’t the strength... I’m sick...”

    “I can’t help it. It’s the law. We’re all sick like that.” Her face twisted with anger. “You’re all sick like that?” she shouted, stepping closer to his desk. “But have you ever seen this?” Tears streamed down her face as, in an uncontrollable impulse of fury, she snatched up the edge of her skirt. She was no longer a human being, no longer a woman, but a creature mastered by the courage of despair. “All of you? All as sick as this?”

    I saw her white body, all the whiter against the gray background of the office wall. She did not have a woman’s shapely legs, but two deformed pillars with no curve to the calves, with the knees touching. Two garters of red automobile inner tubing cut deeply into the swollen mass of her bluish flesh.

    “Have you ever seen that. Comrade Director? Have you got legs like this?” she screamed, beside herself with indignation and shame. “For five months I’ve not had a period. I’ve dropped unconscious at the bench again and again....”

    “Is there really nothing to be done?” I asked him when she had gone.

    “What can I do?” he answered, and stared hopelessly at the papers on his desk. “Half the women are like that. Pills are of no use in such cases.”

    “I don’t mean that. I mean referring it to the court. Can’t you overlook it?”

    “Concealment of absenteeism is punished as heavily as absenteeism itself. If I overlook this case the N. K. V. D. will put us both inside. You can’t hide anything from Luzgin,” he answered.

    I had not made Luzgin’s acquaintance, but I had heard a great deal about him. He was the head of the works Special Department: the eyes and ears of the Party.

    While working in the town of Gorky I was crossing Sverdlov Square one day in March. There were puddles of snow and mud lying in the roadways. Just in front of me two young girls, probably students, with document-cases under their arms, were trudging through the water. Suddenly one of them dropped her case; it fell into the muck of the sidewalk and flew open.

    Books and exercise books were scattered in the mud. The girl took a few staggering steps towards the wall of the nearest house, but then her legs gave way under her, and she slowly sank to the ground. Her blue kerchief slipped off, the strands of her chestnut hair were mingled with the melting snow and mud. She had a deathly white face, with blue under the eyes. She had fainted.

    Her friend hurried to her aid. One or two passers-by helped to pick her up and carry her to the gateway of the nearest house. The crowd excitedly asked her friend what had happened, but she answered in some embarrassment: “It’s nothing, only a faint.” An elderly woman in huge boots asked her: “Where’ve you come from? From the center?” Without waiting for the answer she began to lament with all the commiseration of a simple woman: “Poor kids! You’re hungry, hardly able to stand on your feet, yet you’re giving your last drop of blood. You can’t go on like this. You’ll be in your grave before long.”

    A large proportion of the donors attending the blood-transfusion centers consisted of girl students and mothers with little children. In exchange for 450 cubic centimeters of blood they received 125 rubles, which would buy not quite a kilo of black bread. After each transfusion they received an extra ration card entitling them to 200 additional grams of bread each day for a month. They also received one supplementary ration consisting of 250 grams of fat, 500 grams of meat and 500 grams of sugar. These mothers and girls knew their patriotic duty well enough, they knew the blood was for their husbands and brothers at the front. But it was chiefly hunger that drove them to the centers. The mothers tried to feed their hungry children at the price of their own blood; the students preferred to sacrifice their blood rather than their bodies.

    Special letter blanks were obtainable at the blood transfusion centers, and many of the girl donors used these to send letters to the front, to the soldiers for whom they were donating their blood. Frequently these letters marked the beginning of a correspondence and friendship. After the war there were quite a number of cases of the writers meeting and marrying: a marriage sealed in blood.

    In the center of the town of Gorky there is a square: ’The Square of the Victims of 1905.’ One side of the square is bounded by the walls of an old prison, in which the heroes of Gorky’s novel The Mother were imprisoned. On the opposite side is the Municipal Opera and Ballet Theater.

    One evening I stood with a group of comrades in the foyer during an interval. Dancing was going on in the hall, to the music of an orchestra. A slim, good-looking girl dancing with an officer attracted my notice. Her slender form was clothed in a gray dress of matt silk; her hair was arranged in a simple yet original style. Her toilet and all her bearing indicated her good taste, and a sense of her own value.

    “Who is that girl?” I asked a comrade who was well acquainted with life in the town.

    “A student, she’s in the last year of the medical faculty,” he answered curtly.

    “An interesting girl,” I said.

    “I’d advise you not to go running after her.”

    “Why, what’s wrong?”

    “I just advise you not to, that’s all!” He would not say more.

    His words aroused my curiosity, and I asked another acquaintance the same question.

    “The girl in gray?” he said, taking a glance at her. “If you’re interested in knowing her for a night, it’s very simple: one can of conserves or a loaf of bread.”

    I stared at him incredulously. I was fond of student life, and still thought of myself as belonging to it. His words seemed like a personal insult. In pre-war days the students had been the morally cleanest and most spiritual group in society. Could one year of war have brought about such a change?

    “Don’t talk bosh!” I retorted.

    “It’s not bosh, it’s the mournful truth. She lives in a hostel, in one room with five other friends. They have two or three visitors every night. Chiefly officers. Who has anything to spare these days, apart from officers?”

    Before the war there was practically no prostitution in the Soviet Union. The average Soviet man’s budget did not include this item of expenditure. There was only prostitution for political purposes,

    under N. K. V. D. protection, in the neighborhood of the Intourist hotels and restaurants and wherever foreigners congregated. And some commerce in human bodies went on, to a small extent, among the higher circles of the new ruling class, who had the means to buy such articles.

    But now, during the war, hunger was driving women on to the street. Not for silk stockings, Parisian perfumes, or luxury articles. Only for bread or a can of preserves. And worst of all, the first victims were the students, who would form the future Soviet intellectual and professional classes. They paid a high price for their higher education.

    Two old men, Nikanor and Peter, were employed in the constructional department of Factory No. 645. They had both been pensioned off long before, but hunger had driven them back to work, for they found it impossible to live on their pensions. At one time Nikanor had been a well-known engineer aircraft constructor.

    Before the First World War he had worked at the Bleriot works in France, where he had helped to build the first aeroplanes in the world. He had known all the fathers of Russian aviation personally: Zhukovsky, Sikorsky, and Piontkovsky. Under the Soviet regime he had worked hard in the field of aviation and was proud of his many letters of congratulation and praise, his awards, and newspaper cuttings in which his name was mentioned. Now he was only a helpless ruin of a man. He had been taken back into the works mainly out of pity, for he was really too old to work.

    From early morning Nikanor and Peter would sit at a table in a. quiet corner and barricade themselves off with a drawing board, while they talked about all the various kinds of food they had had in their long lifetime. Every day they told each other of some new dish, which they had recalled, out of the mist of the years. Thus they sat, hour after hour, day after day, capping each other’s stories, and Sometimes even quarreling over the method of preparing some sauce or the details of a recipe for mushrooms: The other members of their department thought them a little funny in the head.

    One day I happened to overhear Nikanor complaining to Peter: “This is the third day I’ve gone without porridge. We’ve eaten all the mallows in our street, and I shan’t find any more anywhere else. Porridge made from mallows is very tasty, I assure you, Peter. Just like sucking pig with chestnut stuffing. Now I shall have to look up the books again; they say there are other edible roots to be found.”

    Two hours before the midday break Nikanor took a pocket watch on a heavy silver chain, two more tributes to past services, out of his waistcoat pocket and laid them on the desk before him. Every few minutes he looked expectantly at the slowly moving hands. Fifteen minutes before the break he began to rummage through his drawers in search of his spoon and fork. Then he made sure his goloshes were firmly over his boots. All this was in preparation for the start, for at the age of seventy he was not very fit for the coming race. At last he even obtained permission from the factory management to go to dinner five minutes before time.

    After all these preparations he trotted across the yard to the dining hall, with one hand holding his pince-nez on his nose. There he would have his dinner: a first course of boiled green tomatoes, and a second course of water-gruel made from oatmeal, and without seasoning - a serving only sufficient for a cat. He scraped his aluminum plate thoroughly, licked his spoon carefully, then back to work - and after work the search for edible roots.

    1944. The Soviet army struck like a battering ram at the most important sectors of the German front. Soviet territory was almost completely freed of German troops. The tank wedges thrust towards the frontiers of the Reich. The soldiers in the reserve regiments waited impatiently to be sent to the front - not out of patriotism, but simply because of hunger. In the reserve regiments the rations were so low that many of the men went rummaging in the dustbins in search of cabbage leaves or a frozen potato.

    “The way to the soldiers’ hearts lies through their stomachs,” Napoleon said. Stalin modernized the remark to meet his own needs. In the Soviet army there were twelve ration standards: front ration No. 1, front ration No. 2; immediate rear ration No. 1, immediate rear ration No. 2; and so on, down to the twelfth, called the sanatorium ration. Only the first and last of all these ration scales could be regarded as normal; the others simply connoted various stages of hunger.

    The difficulties of wartime! Again and again I have tried to find this justification for all the misery that was to be seen at every step. I was a Soviet officer; I should know what I sent men into battle for. In those days I often asked myself what would happen after we had driven the last German off our soil. Everything as before? I had no wish to recall the ’heroic workdays of socialist construction’. In Soviet Union hunger has been elevated into a system. It has become a means of influencing the masses; it is a full member of the Politburo, a true and faithful ally of Stalin.

    Leningrad. It is a proud name. I was there shortly after the city was freed from the blockade. Nobody knows the exact total of victims from hunger during the siege. As the Germans advanced, all the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside flocked into the city, swelling its population to almost eight millions. At least three million died of hunger.

    One day I and another officer were walking along the shore of a lake just outside Leningrad. Right beside the water was a small cemetery; young grass was growing among the neglected graves. A block of red granite attracted my attention. ’Flight-Lieutenant... died the death of a hero in the battle for the city of Lenin.’ I read the inscription carved in the stone.

    “Lucky blighter!” said my companion, who had taken part in the defense of the city from the very beginning. “Those who have survived the blockade are only husks of men today.”

    “I’m a passive murderer,” another inhabitant of the city once told me. “I saw a man lying in the snow in the street; he had fallen and was too weak to get up. He asked me to help him; otherwise he’d freeze to death. But I couldn’t, I’d only have fallen myself and been unable to get up again. I’d only have frozen at his side. I staggered on, leaving him to freeze in the snow.”

    I would give every citizen of Leningrad the highest decoration possible. Since the days of Troy, history knows no similar case of mass civic heroism. Was it all a strategic necessity, or simply a question in which Stalin’s prestige was involved?

    ’When one man dies, it is a tragedy; when millions die, it’s only statistics.’ Especially when the death of millions is contemplated from behind the Kremlin walls.

    Shortly before the end of the war I traveled back to Moscow from Leningrad by train. At every station, every wayside halt, crowds of ragged women were standing with children in their arms. The infants’ faces were translucent, bluish white, their eyes were glittering with hunger, and their faces were aged, joyless, and serious. Other children stretched out their thin hands and asked for ’Bread, bread!’

    The soldiers undid their rucksacks and silently handed their rations of hard tack or bread through the windows. Each of them was oppressed by thoughts of his own wife and children. They gained a momentary feeling of relief as they handed out their food, but they were left with a nagging sense of shame and bitterness. Can you feed a whole starving land with bits of bread?

    As the German prisoners return home from Russia they will doubtless tell of the desperately low food rations in the Soviet prisoner of war camps. And as they see it they will be justified. By European standards the prisoner of war conditions were murderous, the soggy black bread was simply poison to a European digestive system.

    I myself have been in camps for German prisoners of war and have seen the conditions. But I can only ask: did the German prisoners notice that the Russian people on the farther side of the barbed wire were fed on even lower standards? Did any of them think that these so-called ’Russian’ conditions were the result of the Soviet system and that in due course they will flourish in Eastern Germany?

    Moscow. The last days of the war. A lively trade was going on in the city markets. Pale, exhausted women huddling in corners, a few knobs of sugar or one or two herrings in their extended hands. They were selling their meager ration in order to get milk or bread for their children. Bread, bread! In all eyes was the same mute cry.

    The article that sold best - was the Russian homegrown tobacco called ’mahorka’ - 15 rubles a glass. The markets swarmed with war-wounded, without legs, without arms, in front-line greatcoats and tunics, with red wound stripes on their chests. The militiamen turned a blind eye to these violators of the Soviet trade monopoly.

    If any of them did try to take away one of the war-wounded, the air rang with indignant shouts: “What did he fight for?” "What did he shed his blood for?" His comrades came hurrying up, waving crutches and sticks.

    Berlin capitulated. A few days later all Germany unconditionally surrendered. People thought that things would be easier literally the very next day. That was the hope of people who had nothing but their hopes.

    Now the first post-war year had passed, the second was drawing to its close, and we members of the Soviet occupation forces in Germany were reading our letters from home. As we read they acted on us like poison. Our bitterness was intensified by all that we saw around us.

    One day Andrei Kovtun and I were discussing the situation in Germany. Little by little the conversation turned to comparisons between ’here’ and ’there’.

    “The Berlin Underground is really rotten,” Andrei said. “When I compare it with the Moscow Underground I feel really good. These days I often catch myself looking for things in Germany that tell in our favor. It’s difficult to get used to the idea that all our lives we’ve been chasing after shadows.”

    “Yes,” I commented; “here people live in the present, whereas we have lived all our lives in the future. Or rather, for the future. I quite understand how you feel. It’s a violation of the inward harmony, as the psychiatrist would say. The only remedy is to recover faith in the future.”

    “Look, Gregory!” Andrei replied. “We’ve got splendid aeroplanes and tanks, a powerful heavy industry. Let’s leave out of account the price we’ve paid for all these things, let’s forget all the blood, the sweat, and the hunger. You’d think that now the time’s come to exploit all these achievements for our own benefit. After all, we haven’t seen anything of life yet. It’s always been nothing but aims and ideals for us: socialism, communism.

    But when shall we really start living? D’you remember what Professor Alexandrov said at the Higher Party School of the Party Central Committee? ’If the proletariat of other countries cannot achieve their own emancipation, we shall stretch out our hands to help them.’ We know what that ’helping hand’ means. What if all the promises of wartime are only unsecured bills of exchange? I didn’t know what fear was during the war, but I do now. Yes, I’m afraid all right now.”

    He was expressing the same thoughts and fears that possess the majority of the young Soviet intellectuals and professional people. We are proud of our country’s achievements, we are proud of our victory. We do not regret all the difficulties and deprivations we have experienced, the price we paid for the victory and for our country’s glory. But we who were living in the West were beginning to feel keenly that all the things which Soviet propaganda claims as the exclusive achievement of the Soviet regime are colossal lies. We used to have our doubts, but now the doubts have been transformed into certainties, and we cannot fight them.

    We have come to the realization that we haven’t started to live yet, that we have only continually made sacrifices for the sake of the future. Now our faith in that future is shattered. As the post-war situation develops we are increasingly filled with alarm. What is it all leading to?

    In those early post-war years Berlin was the political center of the world. And we were sitting in the front rows at the chess tournament of international politics. More, we ourselves were pawns in the tournament play. The post-war experience showed that there was no basis whatever for the hopes and expectations which Russian soldiers and officers possessed in the war years.

    And what now?

    “Politics is politics, but life is life.”

    Andrei’s voice sounded in my ears.

    “But what have we got out of life? The Germans are having a thin time at present, but they have a past they can recall, and they still have a hope of the future. They can at least hope that one day we shall clear out and they’ll be able to live again. But what can we hope for... we victors?”

    Two years had passed since the end of the war. Now our worst fears were being confirmed. Once more hunger was stalking our country, a still worse hunger than in wartime. Once more the Party had decided to take the people firmly in hand, had decided to make the people forget and turn from the illusory hopes which the Party itself had cleverly stimulated and encouraged in the critical period of the war. The Party had once more decided to show the people who was the real master, and had summoned its first servant, famine, to its help.

    In past days famine had been an elemental disaster; today it is an instrument deliberately wielded by the Kremlin.

    A clock struck; I rose and looked round my room, at my feet, shod in leg-boots, at my blue breeches with their crimson stripes. My gaze passed over the gilt buttons of my green tunic. I had gold epaulettes on my shoulders. It was all so close and so well known - yet it was all so alien.

    The walls of my room dissolved to reveal the dark, starry night over Europe. And somewhere beyond, far to the east, was the frontier of my native land. But there it was dark and still, like a leaden tomb.

    Sommaire https://seenthis.net/messages/683905
    #anticommunisme #histoire #Berlin #occupation #guerre_froide

  • Egypt court orders suspension of Uber, Careem services in victory for taxis: sources

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-uber/egypt-court-orders-suspension-of-uber-careem-services-in-victory-for-taxis-

    Forty two Egyptian taxi drivers filed a lawsuit a year ago against U.S.-based Uber and its Dubai-based competitor Careem, arguing they were illegally using private cars as taxis. They also claimed that the two firms were registered as a call center and an internet company, respectively.

    Khaled al-Gammal, a lawyer acting for the taxi drivers, said

    the court suspended the two companies’ licenses, banned their apps and suspended the use of private cars by the two ride-hailing services.

    Tuesday’s decision was effective immediately, meaning the companies must suspend services pending a final ruling, although the companies have 60 days to appeal, the judicial sources said.

    Uber said it would appeal and it was not immediately clear when a final ruling would be issued.

    Careem said it had not yet received any official request to stop operations in Egypt, and continued to operate as normal.

    Uber intends to appeal any court decision to suspend ride sharing licenses in Egypt, an Uber spokesperson said.

    “We will do all we can to ensure millions of Egyptians can continue to enjoy the benefits of on-demand transportation,” the Uber official said.

    “We are fully committed to working with the entire sector – including taxis – to improve mobility in Egypt together. We will appeal this decision, and continue to be available in Egypt in the meantime.”

    Uber said Egypt is its largest market in the Middle East, with 157,000 drivers in 2017 signed up and 4 million users having used the service since its launch there in 2014.

    The San Francisco-based company said last year it was committed to Egypt despite challenges presented by sweeping economic reforms and record inflation. In October Uber announced a $20 million investment in its new support center in Cairo.

    It has had to make deals with local car dealerships to provide its drivers with affordable vehicles and adjust its ride prices to ensure its workers were not hit too hard by inflation.

    Egypt is one of Uber’s fastest-growing markets, its general manager in the country, Abdellatif Waked, has said, according to state news agency MENA.

    Related Video
    Egypt’s investment ministry said last year that a draft law regulating web-based transport services would provide a legal framework for companies like Uber, but did not say when that bill was likely to be passed.

    Uber has faced regulatory and legal setbacks around the world amid opposition from traditional taxi services. It has been forced to quit several countries, such as Denmark and Hungary.

    Last year, London deemed Uber unfit to run a taxi service and stripped it of its license to operate. Uber is appealing against the decision.

  • The UK lecturer’s dispute and the marketisation of higher education - World Socialist Web Site
    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/01/lect-m01.html

    The UK lecturer’s dispute and the marketisation of higher education
    By Thomas Scripps
    1 March 2018

    University and College Union (UCU) lecturers remain engaged in a major strike against planned cuts to their pensions. The significance of this struggle must not be underestimated.

    Contrary to what the union says, this is not simply an avoidable dispute over the single issue of pensions. The attack on university lecturers is one element in a far advanced programme aimed at the destruction of higher education as it has been known for decades.

    #royaume-uni #éducation #université

    • Diary by #Stefan_Collini

      ‘But why have they done this?’ Standing in the foyer of the National Theatre in Prague, having just taken part in a debate on ‘The Political Role of Universities?’, I had fallen into conversation with a former rector of Charles University, who was asking me to explain the dramatic and – as we both thought – damaging changes imposed on British universities in the past decade. It wasn’t the first time I had been asked some version of this question during visits to European universities in recent years. From Prague to Porto, Bergen to Geneva, puzzlement bordering on disbelief had been expressed by academics, journalists, officials and others. Diverse as their local situations may have been, not least in the financial or political pressures they experienced, they had been united in their admiration for the quality and standing of British universities in the 20th century. They weren’t just thinking about Oxford and Cambridge. These people were knowledgable about the recent past of British universities, sometimes having studied at one of them, and their view was that a high level of quality had been maintained across the system in both teaching and research, underwritten by an ethos that blended autonomy and commitment, whether at London or Edinburgh, Leeds or Manchester, Leicester or Swansea, Sussex or York. They knew this wasn’t the whole story: that the quality varied and there was an informal pecking order; that not all teachers were diligent or all students satisfied; that British academics grumbled about their lot as much as academics anywhere else. But still, British universities had seemed to them an obvious national asset, imitated elsewhere, attracting staff and students from around the world, contributing disproportionately to the setting of international standards in science and scholarship. So, I was asked again and again, why have they done this?

      I didn’t find it an easy question to answer. I couldn’t deny the accuracy of their observations (other than a tendency to neglect or misunderstand the distinctiveness of the situation in Scotland). Successive British governments have enacted a series of measures that seem designed to reshape the character of universities, not least by reducing their autonomy and subordinating them to ‘the needs of the economy’. ‘#Marketisation’ isn’t just a swear-word used by critics of the changes: it is official doctrine that students are to be treated as consumers and universities as businesses competing for their custom. The anticipated returns from the labour market are seen as the ultimate measure of success.

      Last year the government imposed a new wheeze.

      Universities are now being awarded Olympic-style gold, silver and bronze medals for, notionally, teaching quality. But the metrics by which teaching quality is measured are – I am not making this up – the employment record of graduates, scores on the widely derided #National_Student_Survey, and ‘retention rates’ (i.e. how few students drop out). These are obviously not measures of teaching quality; neither are they things that universities can do much to control, whatever the quality of their teaching. Now there is a proposal to rate, and perhaps fund, individual departments on the basis of the earnings of their graduates. If a lot of your former students go on to be currency traders and property speculators, you are evidently a high-quality teaching department and deserve to be handsomely rewarded; if too many of them work for charities or become special-needs teachers, you risk being closed down. And most recently of all, there has been the proposal to dismantle the existing pension arrangements for academics and ‘academic-related’ staff, provoking a more determined and better-supported strike than British academia has ever seen.

      My European colleagues are far from complacent about their own national systems. They are well aware of the various long-term constraints under which their universities have operated, not least in those countries which try to square the circle of combining universal post-18 access to higher education with attempts to strengthen institutions’ research reputations. Universities are further handicapped in countries, notably France and Germany, that locate much of their research activity in separate, often more prestigious institutions such as the CNRS and the grandes écoles or the Max Planck Institutes, while universities in southern Europe are hamstrung by the weakness of their parent economies. European commentators also realise that extreme market-fundamentalist elements in their own political cultures are keeping a close eye on the British experiments, encouraged to imagine what they may be able to get away with when their turn in power comes (to judge by recent policy changes, the moment may already have arrived in Denmark, and perhaps the Netherlands too). But still, Britain is regarded as a special case, and an especially poignant one: it is the sheer wantonness of the destruction that causes the head-shaking. And European colleagues ask what it means that the new policies excite so little public protest. Has something changed recently or did universities in Britain never enjoy wide public support? Is this part of a longer tradition of anti-intellectualism, only ever kept in partial check by historical patterns of deference and indifference, or is it an expression of a newly empowered ‘revolt against elites’?

      My answers have been halting and inadequate. Familiar narratives of the transition from an ‘elite’ to a ‘mass’ system of higher education fail to isolate the specificity of the British case. The capture of government by big corporations and the City goes some way to identifying a marked local peculiarity, as does the extent of the attack in recent years on all forms of public service and public goods, allowing the transfer of their functions to a profit-hungry private sector. But that general level of analysis doesn’t seem to account for the distinctive animus that has fuelled higher education policy in England and Wales, especially since 2010: the apparent conviction that academics are simultaneously lofty and feather-bedded, in need on both counts of repeated sharp jabs of economic reality. There seems to be a deep but only partly explicit cultural antagonism at work, an accumulated resentment that universities have had an easy ride for too long while still retaining the benefits of an unmerited prestige, and that they should now be taken down a peg or two.

      Visiting a variety of European universities, I have found myself wondering whether, for all the material disadvantages many of them suffer, they haven’t succeeded rather better in retaining a strong sense of esprit de corps and a certain standing in society, expressive in both cases of their membership of a long-established guild. An important manifestation of this sense of identity in the majority of European systems – something that marks a significant contrast with Anglo-Saxon traditions – is the practice of electing the rector of a university. Over time, and in different institutions, the electorate has varied: it might consist only of professors, or include all full-time academic staff, or all university employees (academic and non-academic) or, in some places, students. In Britain, by contrast, a subcommittee of the university’s court or council (bodies with a majority of non-academic members), often using the services of international head-hunting firms, selects a candidate from applicants, practically always external, and then submits that name for rubber-stamping by the parent body. (The ‘rectors’ still elected in the ancient Scottish universities, usually by the student body, have a much more limited role than the vice-chancellors or principals of those institutions.)

      In encouraging a sense of guild identity and shared commitment to a common enterprise, the Continental system has some clear advantages. First, it ensures the occupant of the most senior office is an academic, albeit one who may in recent years have filled an increasingly administrative set of roles. Second, the rector will be familiar with his or her particular academic community and its recent history, and therefore will be less likely to make the kinds of mistake that a person parachuted in from some other walk of life may do. Third, where the rector is elected from the professorial ranks, the expectation is that he or she will revert to that status when their term is over (though in practice some may end up pursuing other administrative or honorary roles instead). This makes a significant contribution to collegiality.
      It is easy to ventriloquise the business-school critique of this practice. The individuals chosen are, it will be said, bound to be too close, personally and intellectually, to the people they now have to manage. They will be unable to make the hard decisions that may be necessary. The institution needs shaking up, needs the benefit of the view from outside. Above all, it needs leadership, the dynamic presence of someone with a clear vision and the energy and determination to push through a programme of change. What is wanted is someone who has demonstrated these qualities in turning around other failing institutions (one of the more implausible unspoken premises of free-market edspeak is that universities are ‘failing institutions’). The governing bodies of most British universities have a majority of lay members, drawn mainly from the worlds of business and finance, which ensures that these views do not lack for influential exponents – and that vice-chancellors are selected accordingly.

      For a long time, Oxford and Cambridge had, as usual, their own distinctive practices. Until the 1990s, the vice-chancellorship at both universities was occupied for a limited term (usually two or three years, never more than four) by one of the heads of their constituent colleges. The system, if one can call it that, wasn’t quite Buggins’s turn – some heads of colleges were passed over as likely to be troublesome or inept, and notionally the whole body of academic staff had to confirm the proposed name each time – but in reality this was a form of constrained oligarchy: the pool of potential candidates was tiny, and anyway vice-chancellors in these two decentralised institutions had strictly limited powers. This gentlemanly carousel came to be seen, especially from outside, as an insufficiently professional form of governance for large institutions in receipt of substantial sums of public money, and so by the end of the 20th century both Oxford and Cambridge had moved to having a full-time vice-chancellor, usually selected from external candidates: it is a sign of the times that five of the last six people to occupy the post at the two universities have worked for the greater part of their careers outside the UK, even if they had also had a local connection at some earlier point.

      Across British universities generally, vice-chancellors – and in some cases pro-vice-chancellors and deans as well – are now nearly always drawn from outside the institution, sometimes from outside academia entirely. New career paths have opened up in which one may alternate senior managerial roles at different universities with spells at a quango or in the private sector before one’s name finds its way onto those discreet lists kept by head-hunters of who is papabile. The risk in this growing trend is that vice-chancellors come to have more in common, in outlook and way of life, with those who hold the top executive role in other types of organisations than they do with their academic colleagues. Talking to a recently elected deputy rector in a Norwegian university, I was struck by her sense of the duty she had to represent the values of her colleagues and their disciplines in the higher councils of the university and to the outside world. Talking to her newly appointed counterparts in many British universities, one is more likely to be struck by their desire to impress the other members of the ‘senior management team’ with their hard-headedness and decisiveness.

      These contrasts may bear on two issues that have been much in the news lately. If you think of vice-chancellors as CEOs, then you will find yourself importing a set of associated assumptions from the corporate world. As soon as you hear the clichéd talk of ‘competing for talent in a global market’, you know that it is code for ‘paying American-level salaries’. Perhaps an academic elevated for one or two terms on the vote of his or her colleagues would be less likely to be awarded, or award themselves, salaries so manifestly out of kilter with those of even the highest-paid professors. (The rector of the Université Libre de Bruxelles was at pains to emphasise to me that, as rector, he receives no increase over his normal professorial salary.) Marketisation is a virulent infection that affects the whole organism, and that includes internalised expectations about ‘compensation’. Inflated salaries for vice-chancellors are the new normal, but they are recent: in 1997 the VC of Oxford was paid £100,000; in 2013 the incumbent received £424,000.

      The other issue on which the ethos of university governance may have a bearing is the pensions dispute. Without entering into the contested question of the different ways of assessing the financial strength of the existing pension fund, and of what changes might be required to ensure its long-term viability, it is clear that Universities UK, the association of vice-chancellors, has handled the issue in a particularly heavy-handed way. On the basis of what has been widely reported as an exaggeratedly pessimistic analysis of the scheme’s financial position, they proposed, among other measures, the complete abolition of any ‘defined benefit’ element, thus removing at a stroke one of the few things that had enabled scholars and scientists to persuade themselves that their decision to become academics had not been a case of financial irrationality. It has done nothing to dampen the hostility provoked by the move that it has come from a body of people who are paying themselves between six and ten times the average salaries of their academic staff. One cannot help wondering whether a body of rectors elected by their colleagues, and not themselves in receipt of such inflated salaries, would have taken these steps.

      Britain’s vice-chancellors include many impressive and sympathetic figures, struggling to do a difficult job amid conflicting pressures. It is fruitless, and in most cases unjust, to demonise them as individuals. But somewhere along the line, any sense of collegiality has been fractured, even though many vice-chancellors may wish it otherwise. Marketisation hollows out institutions from the inside, so that they become unable to conceptualise their own activities in terms other than those of the dominant economic dogma. The ultimate criterion by which CEOs are judged is ‘the bottom line’; the operational definition of their role is that they ‘hire and fire’; their salary is determined by whatever is the ‘going rate’ in the ‘global market’. The rest of the corrosive vocabulary has been internalised too: ‘There is no alternative’; ‘We cannot afford not to make these cuts’; ‘At the end of the day we must pay our way’. Eventually it becomes hard to distinguish the rhetoric of some bullish vice-chancellors from that of Tory chancellors.
      A sense of ‘guild identity’, the ‘dignity of learning’, ‘collegiality’, ‘standing in society’: this vocabulary is coming to sound old-fashioned, even archaic, despite the fact that it is hard to give an intelligible account of the distinctiveness of the university as an institution without it. Yet such language has had something of a revival in Britain in recent weeks, at least on the academic picket lines and union meetings. One of the things that has been so impressive about the strike thus far, apart from the tangible sense of solidarity and the heartening level of student support, has been the universal recognition that this is about more than the details of the pension system. My European interlocutors have repeatedly wondered why there has not been more protest in the past seven or eight years. Students, to their credit, did protest vociferously in 2011, and in smaller numbers are doing so again now. But British academics have traditionally adopted the ostrich position when confronted with unwelcome developments. Perhaps the older notion of being ‘members’ of a university rather than its ‘employees’ still lingers in some places, making all talk of unions and strikes seem like bad form. Perhaps there is still a residual sense of good fortune in being allowed to do such intrinsically rewarding work for a living, even though the daily experience for many is that intrusive surveillance and assessment, as well as increased casualisation of employment, now make that work less and less rewarding. But the mood in recent weeks has been different. Universities UK’s clumsy assault on the pension scheme has been the catalyst for the release of a lot of pent-up anger and a determination to try to do something to arrest the decline of British universities.

      When I travelled from a Universities and Colleges Union rally in wintry Cambridge to that packed discussion in Prague, it was hard not to see the ironies in the contrasts between these two situations and between my own position in each. My contribution to the debate in Prague was a paper arguing against the romanticisation of the university as eternally oppositional, the natural home of heroic dissidence. I urged instead the primacy of universities’ commitment to disciplined yet open-ended enquiry, proposing that this did not issue in a single political role, oppositional or otherwise, except when free inquiry itself was threatened. But I was aware – and the awareness was deepened by some pressing questions from the audience – that my position could easily seem complacent to people who had heard the tracks of Soviet tanks clanking down the street. The older members of that Czech audience had few illusions about the likely short-term outcome whenever politics and universities clash head-on. Perhaps for that reason, they were all the keener to cherish the independence of universities in the good times, buoyed by the belief that these implausibly resilient institutions would always, somehow, outlast the bad times. They knew what it meant to have apparatchiks forcibly imposed on universities, just as the Central European University in neighbouring Budapest is currently feeling the pressure of Orbán’s steel fist. But the present fate of universities in a country such as Britain that had not known these spirit-crushing political extremes puzzled them. Was that good fortune perhaps a source of vulnerability now? Had universities never been really valued because they had never been really put to the test? Or was there some more immediate, contingent reason that explained why a relatively peaceful, prosperous country would wilfully squander one of its prize cultural assets? And so, again, I was asked: why have they done this? I wished then, as I wish now, that I could come up with a better answer.

      https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n09/stefan-collini/diary
      #classement #qualité #ranking

  • CHILDREN AND GENDER INEQUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM DENMARK.
    PDF : https://www.henrikkleven.com/uploads/3/7/3/1/37310663/kleven-landais-sogaard_nber-w24219_jan2018.pdf

    Despite considerable gender convergence over time, substantial gender inequality persists in all countries. Using Danish
    administrative data from 1980-2013 and an event study approach, we show that most of the remaining gender inequality in earnings is
    due to children. The arrival of children creates a gender gap in
    earnings of around 20% in the long run, driven in roughly equal
    proportions by labor force participation, hours of work, and wage rates. Underlying these “child penalties”, we find clear dynamic
    impacts on occupation, promotion to manager, sector, and the
    family friendliness of the firm for women relative to men. Based on a dynamic decomposition framework, we show that the fraction of
    gender inequality caused by child penalties has increased
    dramatically over time, from about 40% in 1980 to about 80%in 2013.
    As a possible explanation for the persistence of child penalties, we
    show that they are transmitted through generations, from
    parents to daughters (but not sons), consistent with an influence of childhood environment in the formation of women’s preferences over family and career.

  • In landslide vote, Denmark excludes settlements from agreements with #Israel - Israel News - Haaretz.com
    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-denmark-approves-exclusion-of-settlements-from-agreements-with-isr

    The resolution passed by a majority of 81-22, with all parties in the Danish parliament voting in favor, except for the far-right Danish People’s Party.

    #Extrême_droite #Danemark

  • Denmark will increase defense spending to counter Russia : PM

    RIGA (Reuters) - The Danish government expects to win backing for a substantial increase in defense spending next month, to counter Russia’s intensified military activity in eastern and northern Europe, the NATO-member’s prime minister said Monday.

    Denmark last week deployed 200 troops to a UK-led NATO mission in Estonia aimed at deterring Russia from attacking the Baltic NATO members.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-security-denmark/denmark-will-increase-defense-spending-to-counter-russia-pm-idUSKBN1F42LT
    #Danemark #armée #armes #armement #Russie #Estonie #pays_baltes

    cc @reka

    –-> un petit air de guerre froidre

  • I cite : This Changes Some Things
    http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2015/03/this-changes-some-things.html
    Jodi Dean : pourquoi l’approche de Naomi Klein ne va pas assez loin.

    How do we imagine the climate changing?

    Some scenarios involve techno-fixes like cloud-seeding or new kinds of carbon sinks. Cool tech, usually backed by even cooler entrepreneurs, saves the day — Iron Man plus Al Gore plus Steve Jobs. In green.

    Other scenarios are apocalyptic: blizzards, floods, tsunamis, and droughts; crashing planes; millions of migrants moving from south to north only to be shot at armed borders. The poor fight and starve; the rich enclave themselves in shining domed cities as they document the extinction of charismatic species and convince themselves they aren’t next.

    And there is climate change as unconscious: the stuff of stress, inconvenience, anxiety, and repression; the relief at not having to manage anymore; the enjoyment of change, destruction, and punishment. There will be a last judgment after all. Here those of us who follow the reports of emissions, temperature increases, and political failure get to enjoy being in the know, being those with access to the truth. We can’t do anything about it, but we can judge everyone else for their blind, consumerist pleasures. We can name our new era, marking our impact as the Anthropocene (hey, we have changed the world after all.) Anticipatory Cassandras, we can watch from within our melancholic “pre-loss,” to use Naomi Klein’s term, comforted at least by the fantasy of our future capacity to say we knew it all along. We told you so.

    The hardest thing is doing something about it. Coming together. Fighting against the multiple centrifugal forces that have produced us as individuals preoccupied with our particular freedoms, preferences, conveniences, and choices. It’s no wonder in this setting that market approaches to climate change have appeared as popular options. They affirm the selves we’ve become and promise to solve the problems all in one new light-bulb or electronic car.

    Some of our present difficulty comes from the challenge of imagining a better future. Does it involve a kind of re-peasantization? The elimination of all industry, of all the advantages accrued to some of us under late capitalism? Or is it closer to what we have now, but with windmills and bicycles, the Dutchification of everything? Or is it really not that big a deal at all, a few tweaks here and there so that society looks pretty much like it did in the 70s (Taxi Driver? New York told to drop dead?).

    Naomi Klein’s bold attempt in This Changes Everything is to take up the challenge of creating an alternative to the grim inequalities of our present trajectory by using climate change as a frame for galvanizing left politics. What the economic crises of the seventies and eighties were for the right (opportunities to deepen and extend neoliberalism), climate change can be for the left (an opportunity to “pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty”). If the left fails to take this opportunity, that is, if we don’t take advantage of the “existential urgency” that climate change provides to develop a more focused left strategy, we are doomed to “climate-change-fueled disaster capitalism—profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized borders” etc (154). What we need, she tells us, is a People’s Shock.

    Rejecting narrow market-based approaches like cap and trade, Klein argues that climate change

    could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deal and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights — all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them. (7)

    Just as Marx and Engels linked communism to the workers movement, making communism the mission of the working class, so does Klein link a vision of a progressive future to the climate movement. If the only way to eliminate the exploitation of the workers is the abolition of capitalism, the only to eliminate the exploitation of the planet is .... multiple, dispersed activities combined within a diffuse policy framework oriented toward long-term planning and inspired by an essentialist, overly romantic vision of locality, indigeneity, and democracy (that is to say, populism).

    Klein’s attempt to make climate change the basis for a stronger left politics is a crucial political move. But she weakens it. She fails to see it through. At the site of this failure is a red hole, a missing communism that distorts her vision. She invokes radical politics, but ultimately pulls back into the formula of the alter-globalization movement: in a movement of movements, multiple communities can solve their problems democratically.

    Klein presents the “core problem” preventing adequate response to climate change as “the stranglehold of market logic” and “unfettered corporate power.” She says that “our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.” (21) We are in the midst of a battle between capitalism and the planet. If capitalism wins, and at this point it is winning, extremely dangerous warming will lock-in, threatening the habitability of the planet. What is to be done? We have to change everything.

    Everything rides on how we understand “everything.” Klein seems to understand it in terms of neoliberalism, where neoliberalism involves privatization, deregulation of the corporate sphere, lowering of taxes within a broader setting of global trade. By rendering the problem in terms of neoliberalism, she doesn’t have to advocate the abolition of capitalism, even when her arguments tend in that direction. So her solution is a kind of global Green Keynesianism, a step back into the time before neoliberalism dismantled the welfare state. It is hard to say exactly what Klein has in mind, though, since she offers so many options in a giant menu of change. It’s like she thinks “everything” should be on the table and we (each “community”) should be able to pick what we want (perhaps in a truer, more democratic market).

    Klein’s sense of “everything” is limited by the absence of a communist alternative. For example, even as she criticizes market fundamentalism, she sometimes seems fully ensconced in it. She wants to “buy time for clean energy sources to increase their market share and to be seen as more viable alternatives, weakening the power of the fossil fuel lobby” (349). But if we have to change everything, why not just nationalize the fossil fuel industries and undertake a 5-10 year process of dismantling them? Or why not nationally fund clean energy and inject so many taxes and regulations into the carbon economy that it withers away? It’s like Klein feels so fully trapped within the economic system we have that she can’t break free even as she insists we must break free. There has been and still is a name for this break — communism.

    Some of the components of Klein’s new Green Keynesianism would likely include: a carefully planned economy; basic annual income; big public sector expenditures; higher taxes on the rich; and tougher business regulations. The Green justification for the higher taxes on the rich is that they are the ones who need to curb their consumption. The big expenditures would include better public transit, energy efficient housing, and changes in land use to encourage local agriculture. Klein also favors doing a lot with taxes, following the “polluter pays” principle applied to corporations and the rich. It was never clear to me who or what was engaged in the long-term planning she advocates and what sort of force these plans would have. I expect that planning would occur on multiple levels. Given Klein’s insistence on local, decentralized communities, it also isn’t clear to me how the plans would be integrated.

    Klein opposes the nationalization of energy. She advocates instead the model of democratically run, community-based utilities — let a thousand renewable energy providers bloom! She treats this as a project of the commons (her models are Germany and Denmark). Governments provide a national framework within which decentralized, small-scale, local providers supply renewable energy.

    Accompanying the core problem of market fundamentalism is a cultural narrative regarding human domination of the earth. This narrative, Klein argues, underlies much of the left as well as the capitalist right. The former Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and contemporary extractivist left-wing governments in Latin America are clear examples, but so are trade unions fighting for “dirty” jobs instead of clean ones, and so are any left Keynesians who continue to think in developmentalist terms. In place of this narrative of domination, Klein’s Green Keynesianism would emphasize regeneration, “relationships of reciprocity and interconnection with the natural world” (182).

    How, then, can we make the change we want to see? Not with big Green: “the ’market-based’ climate solutions favored by so many foundations and adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector as a whole” (199). These include consumer-based solutions (buy Green!) as well as carbon trading schemes, and fracking as a clean energy bridge to renewables. In addition to having done little to nothing to lower emissions over the last twenty years, these approaches, she argues, make the problem worse by failing to challenge the hegemony of the market.

    Klein has more confidence in the “movement of many movements” that she calls “Blockadia.” These include anti-fracking, anti-extractive industry, and pipeline protests all over the world. Klein rightly emphasizes how the contemporary resistance movement is more than a NIMBY struggle. Across multiple sites, activists share the conviction that fossil fuels must remain in the ground. They use local issues (health, safety, livelihood) as instruments for getting at the global problem of climate change.

    The struggles of Blockadia are the flip side of the extreme energy boom going on for the last decade (the one with Sarah Palin’s tagline, “drill, baby, drill!”). In the US and Canada, this boom has made more visible the war that the fossil fuel industry has long tried to hide, namely, that the carbon economy—and the capitalist economy more generally—relies on sacrifice zones. Klein writes:

    for a very long time, sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common. They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacks political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language, and class (310).

    With the “extreme energy frenzy,” the sacrifice zone has expanded. More people—and more people in the north and west, in areas formerly privileged enough to think they were entitled to turn their heads—are now in the zone of allowable sacrifice. From the vast reach of the Bakken, Marcellus, and Utica shale plays, to the Alberta tar sands, to the continent crossing pipelines, to deep-water oil rigs, to the exploding bomb trains, the intensification of the carbon economy has extended the range of expendable people and places.

    Although Klein doesn’t use these terms, climate change makes clear the scale of expropriation underpinning the carbon economy. The surplus value captured by the top— by the owners, shareholders, and executives of the fossil fuel industry — is expropriated not just from the workers in the industry (which it is), and not just from those living nearby (which it is), but from those living hundreds and thousands of miles away (which is a characteristic also of nuclear power). “Sacrifice zone” has the capacity to be a key concept for knitting together anti-capitalist and climate struggles.

    It’s correlative concept could then be the “commons.” For example, we would want to eliminate sacrifice zones and treat the entire planet as a commons. Having disallowed communism, Klein can’t get us to this point. More specifically, in the place in her argument where Klein could — and should — point to an internationalist egalitarian vision such as that championed by communists she appeals to a vague notion of democracy understood as multiplicity combined with a romantic vision of indigenous people. This combination embeds unresolved tensions in her argument.

    The first problem is the equation of the Blockadia movements with a struggle for democracy. Klein writes: this emergent network of resistance is “driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival—the health of the water, air, and soil” (295) and “the fight against violent resource extraction and the fight for greater community control, democracy, and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin” (309). Klein displaces particular struggles (pipeline, fracking, climate) into the political field rather than seeing how the struggles themselves change the field by contesting its terms. Most of the time, activist groups aren’t majorities. They are small groups trying to force a position and bring more people over to their side — as well they should!

    Additionally, Klein implies that communities are somehow unified and that they encounter an external force (state or corporation) that is violently extracting resources from them. But division goes all the way through communities. The communities themselves are divided. The deadlocked political system that we have is both a cause and an effect of this division. Marxists refer to this division as class conflict (which works well enough if we have a loose understanding of ’class’). By omitting the constitutive place of division, Klein can suggest that community sovereignty is a goal, again, as if the community were united against fossil fuels — but the fact that we are not united is precisely the problem the book, and the movement, encounters.

    To use a local example, in the battle against the expansion of methane gas storage and LPG storage in the fragile salt caverns adjacent to Seneca Lake, the Town of Reading — where the facility is located — endorses the gas storage plan. Schuyler County — where the facility is located — also supports the plan, although the vote came down to 1 person in their local board and the community is clearly divided. All the other counties surrounding the lake oppose the plan, but most of this opposition came from votes by city or county boards after petitions from activists. The state is considering the issues, and will make a decision. The federal government has already agreed to let the methane storage proceed, but might reconsider. Which level counts as the community? Why? And what sense does this make in a global setting? No one involved has said that the process has not been democratic. This is what democracy looks like. We just don’t think it has yielded the right outcome.

    The second problem is Klein’s association of communities with indigeneity and land. Klein writes, “communities with strong ties to the land have always, and will always, defend themselves against businesses that threaten their ways of life” (309). Here again she denies division, as if everyone in a community agreed on what constituted a threat, as if they were all similarly situated against a threat, as if they were never too deluded, tired, or exploited to defend themselves, as if they could never themselves constitute a threat to themselves. Cities, towns, states, and regions make bad decisions all the time; they stimulate industries that destroy them. Klein, though, has something else in mind, “a ferocious love” that “no amount of money can extinguish.” She associates this love “with an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice.” She continues, “And though this kind of connection to place is surely strongest in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years, it is in fact Blockadia’s defining feature” (342).

    Participants in my seminar found this description racist or fascist. Even though this is not Klein’s intent, her rhetoric deploys a set of myths regarding nature, and some people’s relation to nature, that make some people closer to nature (and further from civilization) than others. It also justifies an intense defense of blood and soil on the part of one group’s attachment to a place such that others become foreign, invaders, rightly excluded as threats to our way of life, our cultural identity. Given that climate change is already leading to increased migration and immigration and that the US and Europe are already responding by militarizing borders, a language of cultural defense and ties to the land is exactly what we don’t need in a global movement for climate justice.

    Klein’s argument, though, gets worse as it juxtaposes indigenous people’s love of place with the “extreme rootlessness” of the fossil fuel workforce. These “highly mobile” pipefitters, miners, engineers, and big rig drivers produce a culture of transience, even when they “may stay for decades and raise their kids” in a place. The language of rootless echoes with descriptions of cosmopolitan Jews, intellectuals, and communists. Some are always foreign elements threatening our way of life.

    In contrast, I imagine climate politics as breaking the link between place and identity. To address climate change, we have to treat the world itself as a commons and build institutions adequate to the task of managing it. I don’t have a clear idea as to what these institutions would look like. But the idea that no one is entitled to any place seems better to me as an ethos for a red-green coalition. It requires us to be accountable to every place.

    I should wrap this up. The final tension I want to address comes in Klein’s conclusion, as she emphasizes mass social movements. Invoking the abolition movement, Klein is inspiring, properly crediting Chris Hayes for his influential Nation article linking climate change and the emancipation of the slaves in the US. Nonetheless, her argument is strange. She calls for societal transformation but refuses the term “revolution.” Throughout the book, she has said that we are running out of time to stop a warming trend so severe as to destroy civilization as we know it if not eliminate the human species altogether. She invokes Brad Werner’s famous paper announcing that earth is basically fucked. But she writes:

    And let’s take it for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don’t have much to offer in the way of roadmaps (450).

    This lets her completely discount the revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, as if there is nothing to learn from any of the large scale organizing undertaken by communists, socialists, wobblies, and unionists. Her model for the left thus relies on extracting from the left a central component of our history. Frankly, at the level of tactics alone, this is a bad call: why sign on to a political project premised on the rejection of working class achievements (a move which repeats a ubiquitous gesture of erasure since 1989). Wouldn’t incorporating these achievements be fundamental to any effort to reinvent “the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect” (460)? Klein is trying to open up a collective desire for collectivity, but without communism.

    It is also without revolution, which Klein dismisses as vanguardist, as if her Blockadians weren’t themselves at the vanguard of climate struggle. But what does it mean to reject revolution? If the movements are mobilized as she suggests, what will stop them? What would block or hinder the people after they are moving? Perhaps the state, since Klein hasn’t said anything about seizing it. Perhaps each other, since she thinks of us as divided into local communities. Perhaps the capitalist system, since she hasn’t called for its abolition. Or perhaps this isn’t the worry, since we are unlikely to be mobilized enough in time at all — and for enough of us in the north, that will be okay, at least for a while.

    #climat #écologie #capitalisme #politique

  • USA : Viking Ship Discovered Near Mississippi River

    http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/usa-viking-ship-discovered-near-mississipi-river

    Après avoir découvert des pièces de monnaies arabes sur un site archéologique viking en Scandinavie, on découvre un vaisseau viking sur les rives du Mississippi... Il va falloir mettre à jour les livres d’histoire (une fois de plus).

    Memphis, TN | A group of volunteers cleaning up the shores of the Mississippi river near the biggest city in Tennessee, have stumbled upon the remains of an ancient boat encrusted in mud. A team of archeologists from the University of Memphis that was rapidly called to the site, confirmed that the ship is most certainly a Viking knarr, suggesting the Norse would have pushed their exploration of America a lot further than historians previously thought.

  • Restrictive EU policies are putting refugee children at risk, says new report from Save the Children

    In a new report, Save the Children warns that restrictive EU migration policies risk pushing children underground.

    About 800,000 children applied for asylum in the EU over the last two years. 150,000 of them were unaccompanied, arriving in Europe either completely alone or without a family member. In this new policy report, Keeping Children at the Centre, the NGO Save the Children looks at the risks children face both on the way to and inside Europe, and the restrictive measures that make it difficult for them to receive the protection – and investment - they need.

    As the debate around migration heats up again ahead of another EU Council meeting on 19 and 20 October there is much at stake for migrant and refugee children.

    “Two years ago, everybody panicked because 10,000 migrant children allegedly went missing,” says Save the Children’s EU Director, Ester Asin. “Today, national and EU policies have become even more restrictive, and many more children risk not having papers, or going underground.”

    Children trying to cross borders in the Western Balkans are often the victims of violent pushbacks by border staff, making them use even more clandestine and dangerous routes. In the Greek #hotspots children are kept, sometimes in conditions which are similar to prisons, waiting on decisions on their asylum claims, in some cases for more than a year. Save the Children has witnessed #suicide attempts and self-harm among children as young as nine years old in the Greek hotspots (refugee reception centres). Mental health issues are widespread among migrant and refugee children across Europe. In Sweden last February, seven refugee children attempted to kill themselves, three of them succeeded.

    “Whilst we are pleased to see an increased commitment by the European Commission and Member States to protect children in migration, this will have little effect when they are balanced by border procedures leading to children spending long periods in detention centres; being issued temporary permits which offer them more insecurity; or returning them to countries where their safety cannot be guaranteed,” says Asin.

    Reports from Save the Children’s national programmes show that children’s fear of being returned to the country where they came from or, in some cases, to a third country they have never known might push them underground. Many Afghan children living in Sweden, for example, grew up in Iran. They are now being sent back to #Afghanistan, a country with which they have no links, and of which they have no memory.

    Many European countries are taking advantage of the notion of a ‘migration crisis’ and the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment to take in even fewer asylum-seekers than before the crisis started. Today Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Slovenia and Poland take in fewer asylum-seekers than in 2012-2013, while Greece and Italy account for nearly one third of all asylum applications.

    Estin added: “Children pay a huge price for this acute lack of solidarity. They either face hardship and insecurity in the EU, or risk their lives at sea and in the desert by taking more dangerous routes due to a rise in checkpoints and border control, supported by the EU.”


    https://www.savethechildren.net/article/restrictive-eu-policies-are-putting-refugee-children-risk-says-new-
    #mineurs #asile #migrations #réfugiés #MNA #Europe #UE #EU #rapport #Balkans #refoulement #push-back #santé_mentale #réfugiés_afghans #enfants #enfance

    Lien vers le rapport:
    https://www.savethechildren.net/sites/default/files/KEEPING%20CHILDREN%20AT%20THE%20CENTRE%202017_%20DEF_%20LOW_%202__.

  • Border controls extended without justification
    https://euobserver.com/justice/137592

    EU member states must demonstrate a serious threat to public order and internal security to impose temporary border controls.
    But government documents suggest member states are broadly allowed to deny people the right of free movement even when their own available statistics suggest that there is no major problem.

    Earlier this year, the European Commission agreed for Austria, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway to impose border controls for three months following ministerial letters to justify the blockades.

    EUobserver has obtained letters from each of the member states, where they explain their reasons for upholding the border controls. Some admit there is no problem, while others offer scant data to support their arguments.

    The commission has been pressing the states to phase out the controls without much success. The goal was to lift them all by the end of 2016.

    Instead, the commission appears to be granting extensions despite the loose reasons provided to justify them.

    In late January, EU commissioner for home affairs Dimitris Avramopoulos recommended the extra controls given the “unprecedented migratory pressure that Europe is facing”.

  • Inside Denmark’s giant LEGO house | CNN Travel
    http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/lego-house-denmark/index.html

    (CNN) — Get ready to embrace your inner child at Denmark’s new LEGO House — a 12,000-square meter house of fun, filled with 25 million iconic colorful building blocks.
    Designed for the young and the young at heart, the building — located in LEGO’s hometown of Billund, Denmark — is the culmination of four years of hard work and imagination.
    “With LEGO bricks, you can express yourself creatively and make anything imaginable. The possibilities are endless, and nowhere else in the world can you experience it in the same way as in #LEGO House,” says third-generation LEGO owner, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, in a statement.