provinceorstate:wisconsin

Disability rights groups seek intervention on Wisconsin teen’s plans to die | Fox News
▻http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/09/09/disability-rights-groups-seek-intervention-on-wisconsin-teens-plans-to-die.

Disability rights groups said on Thursday they have asked child protective services to intervene in the case of a severely disabled Wisconsin teenager who suffers chronic pain from her disease and wants to die.

Hepatitis A outbreak linked to smoothies spans 5 states; 51 sick | Food Safety News
▻http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2016/08/hepatitis-a-outbreak-linked-to-smoothies-spans-5-states-51-sick

More than 50 people in five states are confirmed with Hepatitis A infections in an outbreak associated with frozen strawberries from Egypt that were served at Tropical Smoothie Café locations in Virginia.

The vast majority of the infected people — 44 — are Virginia residents, according to the Virginia Department of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are also four confirmed victims in Maryland and one each in North Carolina, Oregon and Wisconsin, a CDC spokeswoman said Tuesday.
[…]
Virginia officials notified the Tropical Smoothie Café chain at that point, but did not alert the public for another two weeks.

“On Aug. 5 the Virginia Department of Health contacted us about a potential link between Hepatitis A cases and frozen strawberries from Egypt,” CEO Mike Rotondo says in a YouTube video posted Sunday by Tropical Smoothie Café.

The restaurant chain immediately removed the implicated fruit from all of its locations, Rotondo says in the video. Tropical Smoothie is now sourcing strawberries from California and Mexico.

While pulling the implicated strawberries may have reduced the number of outbreak victims, some Tropical Smoothie customers likely could have been spared infection if Virginia officials had not waited 14 days before alerting the public.

That two-week delay is key because of the narrow window of opportunity for post-exposure vaccination. The post-exposure Hepatitis A vaccine, or immune globulin (IG) injections, must be administered within 14 days of exposure or they are not effective, according to Virginia health officials and CDC.

#Etats-Unis : #manifestation_anti-police à #Milwaukee après le décès d’un suspect
Des manifestations ont éclaté samedi 13 août dans la soirée à Milwaukee, dans le Wisconsin, après la mort d’un suspect armé, tué par la police. Un policier en uniforme a abattu un homme de 23 ans lors d’une poursuite à pied, rapporte la police de Milwaukee.
L’homme avait été arrêté à un feu de circulation dans l’après-midi par les autorités et s’était enfui. Le suspect, qui était connu des services de police, était armé d’un pistolet volé. Les autorités ne précisent pas s’il a utilisé son arme face aux policiers.
Une centaine de personnes, selon les médias, se sont réunies à Milwaukee quelques heures après. Des manifestants ont incendié une voiture de police, ainsi qu’une station essence et une banque. Les manifestants ont tiré des coups de feu et lancé des projectiles sur la police. Un policier a notamment été atteint à la tête par une brique lancée sur sa voiture. Au moins trois personnes ont été arrêtées.
De nombreuses manifestations ont éclaté récemment dans plusieurs villes américaines, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Ferguson, New York ou Oakland, contre les #violences_policières.

source : le monde 14/08/16

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1.4 Million Adults Identify As Transgender In America, Study Says : The Two-Way : NPR
▻http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/30/484253324/1-4-million-adults-identify-as-transgender-in-america-study-says

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The numbers fluctuate by state, but they also double the findings from a decade ago: An estimated 1.4 million people – around 0.6 percent of U.S. adults — identify as transgender, according to a new study.
[…]
The fully urban District of Columbia has the highest percentage of adults who identify as transgender, with 14,550 people — around 2.77 percent of the federal district’s population.

Several states have 100,000 or more people who identify as transgender, according to the researchers: California, with 218,000; Florida, with 100,300; and Texas, with 125,350.

The highest percentages of adults identifying as transgender per state were found in Hawaii, California, Georgia, and New Mexico — all with 0.8 percent — followed by Texas and Florida with 0.7 percent, according to the study.

Five states were found to have the lowest percentages of transgender-identified adults, all with 0.3 percent: North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota.

Hillary Clinton, un « loup déguisé en loup » pour le Moyen-Orient ? | Middle East Eye
▻http://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/analyses/hillary-clinton-un-loup-d-guis-en-loup-pour-le-moyen-orient-198314457

Clinton, âgée de soixante-sept ans, a aussi des critiques. Jennifer Loewenstein, chercheuse à l’université de Wisconsin-Madison, a raconté à MEE que Clinton est « un loup déguisé en loup » avec des réflexes interventionnistes et peu de considération pour la souffrance des Palestiniens.

« Elle s’efforce de sembler un faucon, même si elle est une démocrate », affirme Loewenstein. « Elle veut apparaître pro-israélienne et dure envers l’Iran, et elle n’a aucune intention de faire quoi que ce soit qui puisse être instrumentalisé par ses adversaires pour la décrire comme faible ou ”féminine”. »

Légaliser la chasse au #loup accroît le #braconnage
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/biodiversite/article/2016/05/11/legaliser-la-chasse-au-loup-accroit-le-braconnage_4917102_1652692.html

De même que la légalisation des drogues est parfois présentée comme la meilleure parade aux trafics clandestins, l’autorisation de la chasse aux #grands_carnivores est considérée, par certains gouvernements, comme le moyen le plus sûr de lutter contre le braconnage. Cette approche est notamment en vigueur dans les pays scandinaves, Suède, Norvège et Finlande. Elle est aussi préconisée par l’Union internationale pour la conservation de la nature (UICN) qui, dans un « manifeste pour la conservation des grands carnivores en Europe », estime que « la chasse légalisée et bien régulée, à des niveaux soutenables, peut être un outil utile », en particulier en faisant « diminuer la chasse illégale ».

Cette hypothèse n’a pourtant jamais été étayée par des travaux scientifiques. Or, elle est en réalité erronée, d’après une étude publiée, mercredi 11 mai, dans les Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, une revue éditée par l’Académie des sciences britannique. Ses auteurs, Guillaume Chapron (Université suédoise des sciences agricoles) et Adrian Treves (Université du Wisconsin), ont passé au crible l’évolution des populations de loups gris (Canis lupus) dans les deux Etats américains du Wisconsin et du Michigan, entre 1995 et 2012.

Occupy Activists Launch ’Battle of New York’ to Counter Media Bias about Sanders and Clinton
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/occupy-activists-launch-battle-of-new-york-to-counter-media-bias-abo

“The corporate media and establishment keep counting us out, but we keep winning by large margins,” the Bernie Sanders campaign tweeted triumphantly, after the Vermont senator won the Wisconsin...

Sanders Is Right: Clinton Not Qualified to Be a Progressive President
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/sanders-is-right-clinton-not-qualified-to-be-a-progressive-president

The Democratic primary has dramatically intensified in the wake of Bernie Sanders resounding double digit victory in Wisconsin earlier this week. With the delegate rich battleground of New York...

De Panama au Wisconsin et retour
▻http://www.dedefensa.org/article/de-panama-au-wisconsin-et-retour

De Panama au Wisconsin et retour

7 avril 2016 – Il y a une certaine similitude qui est de l’ordre du diluvien entre les deux événements : les révélations soigneusement soignées du point de vue journalistiques pour faire extrêmement postmodernes dans le souci d’une transparence pré-empaquetée du Panamagate (ditto Panama Papers) et l’épisode du revers présenté comme un événement essentiel du “vilain” absolument insupportable (The Donald) de l’élection primaire du Wisconsin. Des secondes et s’attachant aux seuls résultats des républicains, Edward Luce écrit, dans le très sérieux Financial Times, en conclusion de son article du 6 avril : « Mais ce qui est arrivé dans le Wisconsin [victoire de Cruz sur Trump] est destiné à rester dans le Wisconsin. Mr. Cruz a proclamé que les résultats du Wisconsin étaient un (...)

Pendant que vote le Wisconsin...
▻http://www.dedefensa.org/article/pendant-que-vote-le-wisconsin

Pendant que vote le Wisconsin...

C’est un signe indubitable de l’exceptionnalité de cette élection présidentielle US, comme nous l’avons d’ailleurs déjà dit plusieurs fois et selon l’évidence même de cette remarque : il ne cesse d’y avoir des “primaires” qui sont considérées comme “décisives”, comme “un tournant”, etc., sans pourtant qu’aucune ne règle le sort de ces élections. C’est également le cas du Wisconsin, qui connaît aujourd’hui ses “primaires” (résultats demain à cause du décalage horaire). Ces dernières semaines, la situation a évolué dans le sens de la complexification, sans qu’aucune certitude ne se dégage dans aucun cas, tant pour les candidats que pour les formes de procédure de désignation qui sont, – c’est aussi une espèce de “première” et un signe du climat révolutionnaire, – toutes soumises à des (...)

Spark of Science: Sean B. Carroll - Issue 34: Adaptation
▻http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/spark-of-science-sean-b-carroll

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In his latest book, The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters, Sean B. Carroll tells us the remarkable story of Robert Paine, who revolutionized ecology by throwing starfish out of tide pools. Paine’s bold experiments revealed predators have an ineluctable impact on every animal and plant in an ecosystem. If a writer turned the lens on Carroll, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin, and vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he would have an equally adventurous subject who’s made fantastic contributions to science. Only in Carroll’s case the inspirational animal would not be starfish but snakes. As a kid, Carroll loved everything about snakes, especially the colors and patterns (...)

How a Mathematical Superstition Stultified Algebra for Over a Thousand Years - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/how-a-mathematical-superstition-stultified-algebra-for-over-a-thousand-years

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Hooked on numbers: Pythagoreans celebrate sunrise (1869), a painting by Fyodor Bronnikov (1827–1902).Wikicommons Like most people, my high-school training in mathematics involved next-to-no history, barely touching on the names of a few mathematicians, like Pythagoras, and their theorems. I graduated only vaguely aware that geometry came from ancient Greece and algebra came from the Babylonians. A decade later, as a graduate researcher of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, I realized that by not knowing anything about the origins of these branches of mathematics, I was missing out on something extremely important. I began rummaging through this history to see their elaborate unfolding myself and, to my surprise, found that geometry was far more developed than algebra (...)

Le grand jury Netflix : Making a Murderer

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Des centaines de milliers d’Américains crient au scandale depuis quelques jours, et réclament la libération de Steven Avery, un gars du Wisconsin accusé à tort de viol en 1985, puis blanchi après 18 ans de prison, et condamné à nouveau pour meurtre, en 2005. Le documentaire, réalisé par Laura Ricciardi et Moira Demos, pointe du doigt de nouveaux dysfonctionnements. Steven Avery est-il victime d’une seconde erreur judiciaire ? Y a-t-il eu un acharnement contre lui ? Ou est-il finalement devenu le monstre que les autorités voulaient qu’il soit en 1985 ? La docu-série ne donne pas de réponse tranchée, évidemment, mais après 11 heures de questions et de doutes, on ressort, a minima, perplexe.

▻http://www.premiere.fr/Series/News-Series/Making-a-Murderer-la-serie-docu-de-Netflix-qui-bouleverse-l-Amerique

[...]

Making a Murderer laisse entendre que le garçon a pu être victime d’un acharnement judiciaire, a minima. Et le témoignagne accablant d’un juré du deuxième procès va clairement dans ce sens, a révélé hier la co-réalisatrice du documentaire, Laura Ricciardi, dans l’émission Today NBC. Selon ce juré (qui souhaite évidemment rester anonyme), Steven Avery aurait bien été piégé par les forces de l’ordre : « Ce juré nous a dit être persuadé que la culpabilité de Steven Avery n’a pas été prouvée. Il a été piégé et il mérite un nouveau procès, qui devrait avoir lieu loin, très loin du Wisconsin. » Le juré en question avoue même avoir voté « coupable » à l’époque, « craignant pour sa propre sécurité. »

▻http://www.premiere.fr/Series/News-Series/Making-a-Murderer-un-jure-affirme-que-Steven-Avery-a-ete-piege-le-sherif-se

[...]

L’affaire Steven Avery se retrouve désormais dans les mains de Barack Obama et de son cabinet. C’est assez incroyable et pourtant, après la diffusion du docu-série de Netflix, Making a Murderer, fin décembre, des milliers d’Américains en colère ont réussi à s’unir, pour signer une grande pétition officielle, sur le site de la Maison Blanche.

Ils sont prêts de 130.000 à l’avoir ratifié à ce jour. Or, au-delà de 100.000 signatures, la Maison Blanche est obligée, légalement, de réagir.

▻http://www.premiere.fr/Series/News-Series/Making-a-Murderer-la-Maison-Blanche-est-desormais-obligee-de-reagir

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxgbdYaR_KQ

Saving Suburbia - Issue 32: Space
▻http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/saving-suburbia-rp

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With suburbs, architects gave adults just what they wanted: Affordable houses with lawns and garages, homes where children can be raised free from the threats of urban and natural life. By this measure, suburbs are a success—as long as you can stomach monotony. Suburban streets in Phoenix, Ariz. might as well be those in Alberta, Canada or Florida’s everglades. The monotony does more than crush souls. It takes a lot of energy to maintain a stubborn uniformity amid a range of natural environments. Green lawns in Arizona’s Sonoran desert sap limited reservoirs, and heat runs full-blast for most of the year in Wisconsin’s old wooden houses. Sam Rashkin, author of the 2010 book Retooling the U.S. Housing Industry and a chief architect at the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., (...)

Dispossessed in the Land of Dreams
▻https://newrepublic.com/article/124476/dispossessed-land-dreams

It’s a new chapter in an old story. In his seminal 1893 lecture at the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner summarized the myth of the American frontier and the waves of settlers who created it as an early form of #gentrification: First, farmers looking for land would find a remote spot of wilderness to tame; once they succeeded, more men and women would arrive to turn each new spot into a town; finally, outside investors would swoop in, pushing out the frontiersman and leaving him to pack up and start all over again. It has always been thus in America. Turner quoted from a guide published in 1837 for migrants headed for the Western frontiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin: “Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The ‘settler’ is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise of property, push farther into the interior, and become himself a man of capital and enterprise in turn.” This repeating cycle, Turner argued, of movement and resettlement was essential to the American character. But he foresaw a looming crisis. “The American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise,” he wrote. “But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves.” In other words, we would run out of places for the displaced to go.

#Etats-Unis #mythe

The Hidden Power Laws of Ecosystems - Issue 29 : Scaling
▻http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/the-hidden-power-laws-of-ecosystems

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Here’s how to cause a ruckus: Ask a bunch of naturalists to simplify the world. We usually think in terms of a web of complicated interactions among animals, plants, microbes, earth, wind, and fire—what Darwin called “the entangled bank.” Reducing the bank’s complexity to broad generalizations can seem dishonest. So when Tony Ives, a theoretical ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, prodded his colleagues at the 2013 meeting of the Ecological Society of America by calling for a vote on whether they ought to seek out general laws, it probably wasn’t surprising that two-thirds of the room voted no.1 Despite the skepticism, the kinds of general laws made possible by simplification have remarkable predictive powers. They could let us calculate how many species there are in ecosystems that (...)

Bill allowing Wisconsin hunters to wear pink clears first hurdle - Chicago Tribune
▻http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-bill-allowing-wisconsin-hunters-to-wear-pink-clears-first-hurdle-
▻http://www.trbimg.com/img-5630f30b/turbine/ct-bill-allowing-wisconsin-hunters-to-wear-pink-clears-first-hurdle-20151028

A bill that would legalize blaze pink hunting gear in Wisconsin cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday after a state Assembly committee overwhelmingly approved the measure.

The Assembly Natural Resources and Sporting Heritage Committee passed the bill on a 14-1 vote Wednesday, clearing the way for the full Assembly to take up the bill. A spokeswoman for Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, didn’t immediately respond to an email asking about the bill’s chances.

Under current Wisconsin law, at least half of each article of clothing that gun deer hunters wear above the waist must be blaze orange. The bipartisan bill would allow hunters to wear fluorescent pink as well.

The bill’s authors, Reps. Nick Milroy, D-South Range, and Joel Kleefisch, R-Oconomowoc, maintain that the measure will encourage more women to take up hunting, give hunters more clothing options and give apparel manufacturers a boost.

We Asked Experts About Scott Walker’s Potential Canada-US Border Wall | VICE | United States

▻http://www.vice.com/read/we-asked-experts-to-weigh-in-on-a-potential-canada-us-border-wall

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker thinks building a wall to separate Canada and the US might be a good idea.

The Republican presidential hopeful claimed in an interview with Meet the Press that Americans are concerned about terrorists entering the US through Canada and that physically dividing the two countries was therefore a “legitimate issue for us to look at.”

VICE consulted border security experts and construction folks about the logistics of resurrecting an 5,525-mile fence. (Spoiler alert: Everyone thinks it’s a dumb idea.)

#murs #frontières #états-unis #canada

Obama must end support for Israeli apartheid against Palestinian scholars
4 septembre | Radhika Balakrishnan et al |Tribunes

US President Barack Obama, in a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, reaffirmed his support and love for Israel because, as he claims, “it is a genuine democracy and you can express your opinions.”

He further expressed his commitment to protecting Israel as a “Jewish state” by ensuring a “Jewish majority.”

The US government’s support for the “Jewish state” has always been far more than rhetorical, backed by billions of dollars of military funding and consistent pro-Israel vetoes at the UN Security Council.

We are a group of US-based academics, representing diverse ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds, as well as a range of national origins, who recently visited Palestine. We were able to gain firsthand exposure to what Obama described in the interview as Israel’s “Jewish democracy” and to what kinds of infrastructure our tax dollars help to support — walls, checkpoints and modern weaponry.

We had the privilege of traveling through part of the occupied Palestinian territories — the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — where we met with Palestinians.

Double standards

We feel compelled to share a few examples of what we witnessed during our visit with Palestinian scholars, policy makers, activists, artists and others working in the West Bank. We observed numerous double standards with regard to Palestinians’ rights that prompt us to question the claim that Israel is a genuine democracy.

We believe that our government’s assertions that Israel is a democracy obscures the conditions it imposes on the Palestinian people through the occupation and beyond with conditions that amount to apartheid under settler colonialism.

Our concerns began even before we arrived, as a search of the US State Department website for information about travel to Israel returned sobering results.

The US government warns travelers to back up their computers because Israeli border control officials can erase anything at will. This indeed happened to one of us upon leaving Tel Aviv to return to the US.

The site also warns travelers that their personal email or social media accounts may be searched, and so travelers “should have no expectation of privacy for any data stored on such devices or in their accounts.” Equipment may also be confiscated.

The State Department further acknowledges that US citizens who are Muslim and/or of Palestinian or other Arab descent may have considerable trouble entering or exiting through Israeli-controlled frontiers. And this too happened to one of us who had mobile phone contacts searched immediately on entering Tel Aviv.

Profiling

Concerns in entering and exiting pale in comparison to the restrictions placed on US citizens of Palestinian origin, along with all other Palestinians who hold identification documents from the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Before traveling, most of us did not understand that for Palestinians under occupation, there are several types of identification and profiling and each comes with its own restrictions on mobility.

Palestinians from Jerusalem have identification cards they must carry in a blue booklet while those living in the rest of the occupied West Bank hold an ID card in a green booklet, issued to them from the Palestinian Authority with the permission of the Israeli government.

People possessing that identification generally cannot enter Jerusalem or present-day Israel without prior permission, even for a visa interview to attend an academic meeting in the US. Many people we met had only visited Jerusalem, home to many holy sites, once in their lives despite being mere minutes away by car.

In the rest of the West Bank, a US citizen of Palestinian origin who wants to live there long term has to obtain a visa that says West Bank only. They are not allowed to travel in and out of the West Bank and are subject to the same checkpoints as other Palestinians. They cannot leave the occupied territories as a US citizen, as the State Department warns on its website.

A Palestinian in the West Bank who holds US citizenship cannot simply catch a plane from Tel Aviv like any other US citizen simply because he or she is Palestinian and holds a Palestinian ID card. This fact is stamped into the US passport.

They are not allowed to enter the checkpoints into Jerusalem or any other checkpoints as other people with a US passport can. This restriction is not at all applied to the Jewish settlers who are growing in number — thousands of them US citizens who are choosing to live in the occupied West Bank inside illegal settlements financed in part by US tax-exempt organizations.

Academic freedom

As scholars, among the many disturbing things we witnessed was the limited academic freedom and freedom of speech imposed on Palestinians (and many Israelis, whose travel in the West Bank is restricted) by the Israeli government.

We learned that there is a prohibition on most books published in Syria, Iran and Lebanon even though Beirut is a central publishing hub of Arabic literary materials in the region. Regardless, banning books is, in our view, a profoundly anti-democratic act.

Israel’s wall that surrounds the West Bank including Jerusalem — and which snakes deep inside the West Bank in many locations — also functions to limit academic freedom.

One of the starkest examples is in Bethlehem, where the wall cuts through the city, making access to education at Bethlehem University very difficult for those who happen to be on the wrong side of the wall’s many twists and turns.

Additionally, the Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University is completely surrounded by the wall, making travel to and from the campus incredibly arduous despite it being in Jerusalem.

An academic colleague described to us the difficulties she experiences getting to campus on a typical day. She must pass through roadblocks and endure searches and myriad forms of harassment by Israeli soldiers. In the West Bank, we were shocked to witness separate roads for Palestinians and Israelis based on the color of one’s license plate and identity card.

In theory, these roads exist for the protection of Israeli settlers living on settlements built in the West Bank illegally according to international law. In practice, these roads create an apartheid travel system where Palestinians encounter several checkpoints on a given day, some of which may be mobile, unpredictably placed “flying checkpoints.”

As our colleague explained to us, what used to be a very short trip between her village and the university now often takes more than an hour and a half and she is expected to cross through at least three checkpoints. She is often late to teach her classes and some days she is unable to make it to work or back home at all.

Her students are often arrested and jailed using the legal cover of administrative detention — detention without charge or trial for an indefinite amount of time — for their participation in any political activities, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We heard that this process is intensified at exam periods.

This creates an extraordinarily stressful academic environment when on any given day Israeli soldiers might detain students and faculty who are simply traveling to class.

Impunity

We recognize every people’s desire to be secure — and Israel’s supporters will defend its policies and actions in the name of its national security. What we witnessed during our visit is that “security” was offered as a rationale for almost any troubling behavior or policy.

What we witnessed was a slow but deliberate expansion of Israel’s occupation, increased settlements, the taking over of agricultural land and the spread of industrial parks in the West Bank including substantial parts of East Jerusalem — all in the name of “security.”

The United States, as a settler colonial state with its own occupations, police violence, carceral injustice, de facto apartheid and its own brand of border brutality — certainly has its own failings as a democracy, failings we continue to address in our intellectual and political work.

We thus claim no moral high ground. But an ethnocracy is not a democracy ; the State of Israel imposes violent domination of the Palestinian people through colonialism, occupation and apartheid — three prongs of brutal oppression that are the very antithesis of democracy.

As academics, watching attempts to stifle criticism of Israel — as in the case of our colleague, Professor Steven Salaita — and visiting the West Bank has prompted us to speak out publicly about Israel’s injustices. Doing so is imperative.

We implore President Obama to reconsider his rhetoric and policies — and budget appropriations — that support Israel with impunity.

Radhika Balakrishnan is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.

Karma R. Chávez is associate professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Ira Dworkin is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.

Erica Caple James is associate professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is associate professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University.

Doug Kiel is assistant professor of American Studies at Williams College.

Barbara Lewis is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Soraya Mekerta is director of the African Diaspora and the World Program, and associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at Spelman College.

▻http://www.aurdip.fr/obama-must-end-support-for-israeli.html

L’AURDIP (Association des Universitaires pour le Respect du Droit International en Palestine) est une organisation française d’universitaires créée en liaison avec la Campagne Palestinienne pour le Boycott Académique et Culturel d’Israël PACBI et avec l’organisation britannique BRICUP.

Un républicain évoque l’idée d’ériger un #mur entre les #États-Unis et le #Canada

Le candidat à l’investiture républicaine #Scott_Walker estime que l’idée d’ériger un mur entre les États-Unis et le Canada est une question légitime qui mérite d’être examinée.

▻http://images.lpcdn.ca/641x427/201508/30/1050314-gouverneur-wisconsin-scott-walker.cpt635765209514186574
▻http://www.lapresse.ca/international/etats-unis/201508/30/01-4896424-un-republicain-evoque-lidee-deriger-un-mur-entre-les-etats-unis-
#barrière_frontalière
cc @daphne @albertocampiphoto @marty

A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons - Vox
▻http://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9050469/watermelon-breeding-paintings

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James Nienhuis, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin, uses the Stanchi painting in his classes to teach about the history of crop breeding.

“It’s fun to go to art museums and see the still-life pictures, and see what our vegetables looked like 500 years ago,” he told me. In many cases, it’s our only chance to peer into the past, since we can’t preserve vegetables for hundreds of years.

The watermelon originally came from Africa, but after domestication it thrived in hot climates in the Middle East and southern Europe. It probably became common in European gardens and markets around 1600. Old watermelons, like the one in Stanchi’s picture, likely tasted pretty good — Nienhuis thinks the sugar content would have been reasonably high, since the melons were eaten fresh and occasionally fermented into wine. But they still looked a lot different.

A Guide to Mass Shootings in America | Mother Jones
►http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map

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Editor’s note, July 16, 2015: We have updated this database with the mass shooting at a military center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which came a month after the one at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The interactive map below and our downloadable database, first published in July 2012, have been expanded with nine additional cases from 2013-2015.* Other public shooting attacks in that period—such as a rampage at Fort Hood, another in Isla Vista, California, and another on a bridge in Wisconsin—have not been added because there were fewer than four victims shot to death in each of those cases. For more about that distinction and its limitations, see this piece and this piece.

It is perhaps too easy to forget how many times this has happened. The horrific mass murder at a movie theater in Colorado in July 2012, another at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that August, another at a manufacturer in Minneapolis that September—and then the unthinkable nightmare at a Connecticut elementary school that December—were some of the latest in an epidemic of such gun violence over the last three decades. Since 1982, there have been at least 71 public mass shootings across the country, with the killings unfolding in 31 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. Thirty-four of these mass shootings have occurred since 2006. Seven of them took place in 2012 alone, including Sandy Hook. A recent analysis of this database by researchers at Harvard University, further corroborated by a recent FBI study, determined that mass shootings have been on the rise.

We’ve gathered detailed data on more than three decades of cases and mapped them below, including information on the shooters’ profiles, the types of weapons they used, and the number of victims they injured and killed. The following analysis covers our original dataset comprised of 62 cases from 1982-2012.

L’homme du commerce

« L’homme du commerce » est une carte détaillée réunissant l’anatomie humaine avec le système de #transport américain. Publiée en 1889 par la société de développement des terres et des fleuves de Superior, dans le Wisconsin, la carte promeut Superior comme étant le centre des transports et présente les tracés de 29 chemins de fer traversant les États-Unis. La carte muette de l’Amérique du Nord se superpose à une vue en coupe du corps humain. La métaphore de la carte fait de West Superior « le centre de la circulation cardiaque ». Les chemins de fer représentent les artères principales. New York est « le nombril grâce auquel cet homme de commerce s’est développé ». La note explicative conclut : « Il est intéressant de savoir que l’on ne peut trouver dans aucune autre partie du monde une telle analogie entre les canaux naturels et artificiels de commerce et circulatoires ainsi que de l’appareil digestif de l’homme ». L’utilisation du #corps_humain comme #métaphore_cartographique date pour le moins du XVIe siècle, avec la carte anthropomorphique, issue de la cosmographie de Sebastian Münster, représentant l’Europe sous la forme d’une reine. Cette carte pourrait être la première application de cette métaphore à l’Amérique du Nord. Le cartographe fut A.F. McKay, qui occupa brièvement en 1889 le poste d’éditeur du journal Superior Sentinel. La carte fut gravée par Rand McNally. La bibliothèque de l’American Geographical Society fit l’acquisition de la carte en 2009, aidée en partie par la Map Society of Wisconsin. La seule autre copie connue de cette carte se trouve dans une collection privée.

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Republicans Welcomed Bernie Sanders to Wisconsin By Calling Him an Extremist. His Response? Perfect.
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/republicans-welcomed-bernie-sanders-to-wisconsin-by-calling-him-an-e

This was just awesome. No wonder so many people love Sander’s message.

The opening minutes of the July 1st rally was a classic #FeelTheBern moment, delivered to a 10,000 person crowd, the largest...

WOODEN computer chips reveal humanity’s cyber elf future • The Register
▻http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/28/wooden_computer_chips_invented_er_really

https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/05/27/biodegradable_chip.jpg

Boffins have developed a #biodegradable semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood in an effort to alleviate the environmental burden of electronic devices.

Technicians from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), have demonstrated the feasibility of replacing the substrate of a computer chip with cellulose nanofibril (CNF), a flexible, biodegradable material made from wood.

In the abstract to the article, titled High-performance green flexible electronics based on biodegradable cellulose nanofibril paper, and published in Nature Communications, the researchers claim to “report high-performance flexible microwave and digital electronics that consume the smallest amount of potentially toxic materials on biobased, biodegradable and flexible cellulose nanofibril papers”.

#electronique