Brutal Destruction Of Iraq’s Archaeological Sites Continues

Buried in Iraq’s clay and dirt is the history of Western civilization. Great empires once thrived here, cultures that produced the world’s first wheel, first cities, first agriculture, first code of law, first base-sixty number system, and very possibly the first writing. A brutal plundering of this rich cultural heritage has been taking place in broad daylight ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These days Ancient Mesopotamia looks more like a scene from the movie Holes.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/brutal-destruction-of-ira_b_290667.html

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NYRB: The Afghanistan Impasse

There were hundreds of foreign observers to watch Afghans go to the polls on August 20. Both UN officials and a European Union delegation were assigned months ago to make sure it would be a creditable election. In fact, for the US and its NATO partners, most of this year has been taken up with preparing for the elections and trying to ensure sufficient security for them. Yet the entire Western community in Afghanistan was caught napping by the widespread fraud. How could the rigging have happened?

Read the article in NYRB

Daily Beast: One Company, 23 Suicides

Since early 2008, nearly two-dozen employees at France Telecom have taken their own lives. Is the communications giant’s corporate culture to blame? Eric Pape investigates.

Read this investigative piece

The Nation: Women Trafficking

A feature published in The Nation magazine:

“A lock on a brothel, for me, represents this element of violence and force,” says Haugen. “The lock is on the outside of the door, not inside.”

For Haugen, the locks are reminders of his calling: to break the chain of human rights abuses, one person at a time. He argues that the main problem facing the disenfranchised is not one of hunger, homelessness, lack of education or disease. Rather, the root cause of much of the suffering in the developing world is the failure of the criminal justice system to protect the poor from violence–the brutality that robs them of food, home, liberty and dignity.

Read the feature article in The Nation

Video: The Girl Effect

Clean Water

By Scott Harrison

Founder and president, charity: water

Nonprofits like ours that are addressing enormous problems (a billion people without clean water) are told to make sure we don’t scare people off by communicating how big the whole problem is.

Author Seth Godin recently wrote that the problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. He said “Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down. Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.”

While all this may be true, it just seems rather boring. Visionless. I have to believe people want to sign up for something bigger than just one. I did.

There’s a proverb in the Bible that says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” People are certainly dying all around us, but could that be because we’re terrified to tackle the enormous? Because we don’t have the faith to see the entire problem solved?

I can’t quite see to a billion people yet, but I’m getting closer. Your generosity has helped us do that. In only three years, 60,000 people around the world have donated $11 million. That means 750,000 lives will change. 750,000 people will get clean water to drink.

So in the spirit of solving enormous problems, we want to step it up this September, and serve our first million people. Then keep going until every single person on the planet has clean and safe drinking water.

McDonalds served a billion people, didn’t they?

We made a video that explains how we want to do that. Please watch it, and share it.

We’ve also built a new website that allows everyone to use birthdays, anniversaries, weddings… to run marathons, swim and dance — do just about anything to help. Every dollar given is tracked to the project it funded, and GPS coordinates and photos are posted on Google Earth when complete. Like always, 100% goes directly to the field.

In only eight days, individuals already raised $80,000 towards our goal.

Read it in the Huffington Post

Amelia Earhart

Researchers are still trying to figure out what happened to aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared while flying over the South Pacific in 1937.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery — that’s TIGHAR for short — is run out of a converted garage in Rick Gillespie’s split level home in suburban Wilmington, Del. Gillespie’s khaki shirt has epaulets and the words “Search Crew” stitched on the front.

The TIGHAR office is crammed with documents and artifacts from downed aircraft found all over the world. The most precious artifact is wrapped in plastic in a blue tub that might ordinarily hold laundry.

Listen to this story on NPR

Also check the movie trailer for Amelia coming out in October

Opposing the death penalty is not about innocence

By Lee Kovarsky

Fighting the death penalty should not hinge on proving that innocent people have been sentenced to die.

As the attention paid to systemic failure grows, so too does the apparent need to posthumously exonerate a capital convict. It is now fair to say that a posthumous exoneration is the pièce de résistance of death penalty opposition. But ardent defenders of capital punishment appear comfortable to defend on this territory. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 2005 Supreme Court opinion that there is not “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.” For at least two reasons I discuss below, we must be careful not to overstate the importance of posthumous exoneration.

Read this article published in salon.com

Is Happiness Catching?

FOR DECADES, SOCIOLOGISTS and philosophers have suspected that behaviors can be “contagious.” In the 1930s, the Austrian sociologist Jacob Moreno began to draw sociograms, little maps of who knew whom in friendship or workplace circles, and he discovered that the shape of social connection varied widely from person to person. Some were sociometric “stars,” picked by many others as a friend, while others were “isolates,” virtually friendless. In the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists began to analyze how the shape of a social network could affect people’s behavior; others examined the way information, gossip and opinion flowed through that network. One pioneer was Paul Lazarsfeld, a sociologist at Columbia University, who analyzed how a commercial product became popular; he argued it was a two-step process, in which highly connected people first absorbed the mass-media ads for a product and then mentioned the product to their many friends. (This concept later bloomed in the 1990s and in this decade with the rage for “buzz marketing” — the attempt to identify thought-leaders who would spread the word about a new product virally.) Lazarsfeld also studied how political opinions flowed through friendship circles; he would ask a group of friends to identify the most influential members of their group, then map out how a political view or support for a candidate spread through and around those individuals.

Read the article…

Artist pushing limits teaching in the Middle East

“I went over there with a lot of fear, not knowing anything about the culture,” she says.

The longtime Lawrence-area artist, a 56-year-old journeywoman lecturer at area universities, finally landed a full-time position — teaching at the New York Institute of Technology campus in Amman, Jordan. She started a year ago this week.

After a year of frustrations, triumphs and plenty of education — both students’ and her own — Doner-Hedrick is headed back to the Middle East this week with a renewed sense of purpose both as an educator and an artist.

“I really found my place in life,” she says.

Read more…

For ‘Amreeka’ Director, Life As Inspiration For Art

Writer and director Cherien Dabis drew upon her own childhood experiences as a first-generation Arab immigrant growing up in the Midwest for her feature film Amreeka. The film explores the journey of a single mom and her teenage son as they emigrate from the West Bank to America during the first Gulf War. Amreeka has garnered high praise from both critics and audiences alike.

Listen to this Story

Congo’s ‘Hidden’ War

Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics.

Few realize that a main force driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda, along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda.

Read the article

Powerful Photo: US Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Her family is facing eviction, but Charity Crowell, 9, and her younger brother are enrolled in elementary school in Asheville, N.C

Read the article

Israel, Jordan Find Accord in Finding New Water Supplies

Jordan loses perhaps half of its water supply to leakage and illegal wells

Controversial Projects Include Network Linking the Dead Sea and the Red Sea

Washington Post:

Water is a major source of contention in the Middle East, whether it is tension over Egypt’s concerns about Sudan’s management of the southern Nile or disputes between Israel and the Palestinian Authority over shortages in the occupied West Bank. The water shortage is severe enough to upend some of the region’s traditional dynamics. Jordan and Israel are often pressured by Western nations and international organizations to cooperate in the name of Arab-Israeli peace. Water is one area in which pressure is running in the other direction, with the two pushing quickly on the Red Sea-Dead Sea connection while outside observers urge restraint.

Jordan now views the connection as central to the long-term stability of its water supply. Upset over the years spent discussing the project without concrete action, the country in the spring announced plans to proceed on its own. Israel has since said it would join its neighbor in an initial phase, even as the World Bank and environmental groups foresee perhaps two more years for studies to be completed before deciding whether the project should be built at all.

Read the article in the Washington Post

My Photos of Jordan (Random)

Social Scientists Deployed to Afghanistan?

Why are social scientists being deployed to Afghanistan?

As the White House turns its focus to the war in Afghanistan, President Obama has stressed the need to win over “the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people. That’s the goal of teams of anthropologists and social scientists who are currently embedded with troops in Afghanistan. Washington Post Reporter Vanessa Gezari, who’s writing a book about the ‘Human Terrain System’, explains how it works. And Dr. Karl Slaikeu, a psychologist and conflict resolution specialist currently along side troops in Afghanistan, offers a first hand perspective.

Listen to this story on NPR

Creative Jordanian Website

One of the more creative websites around in the Arab world.

Enjoy browsing: