Mexican telecommunications titan Carlos Slim Helu now tops Forbes’ list of world’s richest people, with a net worth of $53.5 billion.
For the second time since 1995, Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ name was not at the top of the list. Gates came in second with a net worth of $53.0 billion.
Turkey has recalled its ambassador to the United States “for consultations” after a US congressional panel narrowly voted to brand the mass killings of Armenians by Turkish forces in World War One as genocide.
The move came despite warnings from both the White House and Turkey that it could harm US-Turkish relations and impede efforts to normalise ties between Ankara and Armenia.
The measure now goes before the full House of Representatives, but it is not clear whether it will actually go to a vote there.
In Armenia, the country’s foreign minister says the vote’s a boost for human rights.
Zimbabwe began as a liberation from colonialism. 30 years on, white farmers are being violently driven from their land. Is it a question of land redistribution, a way to reverse the injustices of the past? Or is it about wiping out the white population, a political game ensuring that a controversial leader remains in power?
A new documentary entitled The Last White Man looks at the ongoing racial strife in Zimbabwe and the systematic persecution of white farmers in the country.
The last time United States Congress passed a bill with the title “Declaration of War” was in June 1942, against Romania. Given that the United States military has engaged in actions that clearly meet the standard of war in Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, the question is why haven’t we had a Congressional declaration of war since then?
In this segment from a recent lecture from the Berkeley Arts & Letter Series, historian Garry Wills, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, discusses the transformation of American politics, and of the Presidency itself, that occurred in the decades since the nuclear bomb was developed and the importance of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (pdf.) in understanding the development of the Imperial Presidency.
“The Bomb,” he writes, “altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots,” redefining the presidency in ways that the Constitution does not intend. “It fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized. It redefined the government as a National Security State, with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control. It redefined Congress, as an executor of the executive.”
The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, also known as the McMahon Act after its chief sponsor Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, was signed by President Truman on August 1, 1946. While the primary purpose of the Atomic Energy Act was to establish the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to safeguard and aid in regulating atomic resources, and to creat a five-person committee to oversee the activities of the AEC, the Act began to redefine the Constitutional powers of the Presidency usurping from Congress its Constitutionally mandated power to declare war by giving the President the extraordinary power to initiate and wage nuclear war.
The notes to the lecture:
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills examines how the atomic bomb transformed our nation down to its deepest constitutional roots — by dramatically increasing the power of the modern presidency and redefining the government as a national security state — in ways still felt today. A masterful reckoning from one of America’s preeminent historians, Bomb Power draws a direct line from the Manhattan Project to the usurpations of George W. Bush.
The invention of the atomic bomb was a triumph of official secrecy and military discipline — the project was covertly funded at the behest of the president and, despite its massive scale, never discovered by Congress or the press. This concealment was perhaps to be expected in wartime, but Wills persuasively argues that the Manhattan Project then became a model for the covert operations and overt authority that have defined American government in the nuclear era. The wartime emergency put in place during World War II extended into the Cold War and finally the war on terror, leaving us in a state of continuous war alert for 68 years and counting.
The bomb forever changed the institution of the presidency since only the president controls “the button” and, by extension, the fate of the world. Wills underscores how radical a break this was from the division of powers established by our founding fathers and how it in turn has enfeebled Congress and the courts. The bomb also placed new emphasis on the President’s military role, creating a cult around the commander in chief. The tendency of modern presidents to flaunt military airs, Wills points out, is entirely a postbomb phenomenon. Finally, the Manhattan Project inspired the vast secretive apparatus of the national security state, including intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA, which remain largely unaccountable to Congress and the American people.
Wills recounts how, following World War II, presidential power increased decade by decade until reaching its stunning apogee with the Bush administration. Both provocative and illuminating, Bomb Power casts the history of the postwar period in a new light and sounds an alarm about the continued threat to our Constitution.
The full lecture is at Fora TV.
The last known speaker of the Bo language in the Andaman Islands has died. The Andaman & Nicobar Islands are a group of volcanic islands in the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory of India.
There are 576 islands in the group, only 26 of which are inhabited. The length of the island chain is 352 km and its greatest width is 51 km. The total land area of the Andamans is 6408 square kilometre|km². Though part of India, the islands are closer to Sumatra (part of Indonesia) than to India.
The Bo language forms part of an ancient family of human language found in the Andamans called Great Andamanese. These languages, ten in all, are believed to have originated in Africa, with some possibly 70,000 years old. In other words, they date back to pre-Neolithic times. The Bo language was part of the Northern Group and was spoken on the east central coast of North Andaman and on North Reef Island.
The story on the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of yet another human language from the UK Guardian:
The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.
Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.
Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.
“Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology,” Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. “To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else.”
The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India. The indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.
Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling deep in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries and documentary makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges of remoteness ended with the construction of trunk roads from the 1970s.
According to the NGO Survival International, the number of Great Andamanese has declined in the past 150 years from about 5,000 to 52. Alcoholism is rife among the survivors.
“The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence,” said Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry. “With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”
Boa Sr appears to have been in good health until recently. During the Indian Ocean tsunami, she reportedly climbed a tree to escape the waves.
She told linguists afterwards that she had been forewarned. “We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us the Earth would part, don’t run away or move.”
There are some 7,000 languages worldwide. At least half of these are expected to disappear in this century marking the greatest extinction of human knowledge in history. At present, a human language disappears once every 14 days. India has a particularly rich linguistic tapestry accounting for 10 percent of all the world’s languages.
Eighty percent of people living in the world today speak the just 83 languages with Han Chinese having the most speakers. Only two-tenths of one percent interact in rare 3,500 languages.
Languages are under pressure worldwide. In Australia, there are 153 languages down to under 100 speakers. In Central and South America 113 languages are in danger of immediate extinction. Even in North America’s Northwest Pacific Plateau that includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon there are 54 under pressure.
About a half of all world languages have never been written down. When the last person speaking a language dies, an entire body of knowledge is lost. Learn more at National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project.
Why Is It Important?
Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.
Studying various languages also increases our understanding of how humans communicate and store knowledge. Every time a language dies, we lose part of the picture of what our brains can do.
101 East looks at the Ainu, Japan’s indigeneous people, and their fight for cultural survival and acceptance. Over the last century, they have seen their traditions and their language stripped away, along with their ancestral lands. But after generations of oppression, racism and forced assimilation, change is in the air for the Ainu.
The Empathic Civilization is the first book to explore how empathetic consciousness restructures the ways we organize our personal lives, approach knowledge, pursue science and technology, conduct commerce and governance, and orchestrate civil society. The development of this empathetic consciousness is essential to creating a future where we think and behave like the whole world matter.
Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the author of seventeen bestselling books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. One of the most popular social thinkers of our time, Rifkin is the bestselling author of The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy, The Age of Access, The Biotech Century, and The End of Work.
This lecture is part of the @Google series of talks and took place on January 25, 2010.
Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist, best known for his A People’s History of the United States has died of a heart attack while traveling in Santa Monica, California. An eternal optimism, he was a true progressive that understood the links between the rise of militarism and the decline of American democracy. He was 87.
From an obituary in the Boston Globe:
“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”
For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.
Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before joining the Army Air Force during World War II. Serving as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Air Medal and attained the rank of second lieutenant.
After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University as a 27-year-old freshman on the GI Bill. Professor Zinn, who had married Roslyn Shechter in 1944, worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.
Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were the novelist Alice Walker, who called him “the best teacher I ever had,” and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children’s Defense Fund.
During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.
Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.
The focus of his activism now became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at countless rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and another leading antiwar activist, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.
Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience and Democracy” (1968). He had previously published “LaGuardia in Congress” (1959), which had won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Prize; “SNCC: The New Abolitionists” (1964); “The Southern Mystique” (1964); and “New Deal Thought” (1966).
Dr. Zinn was also the author of “The Politics of History” (1970); “Postwar America” (1973); “Justice in Everyday Life” (1974); and “Declarations of Independence” (1990).
As Barack Obama marks his first anniversary as US president, Al Jazeera is looking at the impact of his presidency inside the US and around the world.
Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and he has been hailed by some there as a local hero. But one year on, his popularity has dipped.
Bay kou bliye pote mak sonje .
He who strikes the blow forgets, he who bears the bruises remembers.
— Haitian Proverb
The libertarian economist Tyler Cowen who blogs at Marginal Revolution asks why is Haiti so poor and posits a few hypotheses:
1. Haiti cut its colonial ties too early, rebelling against the French in the early 19th century and achieving complete independence. Guadaloupe and Martinique are still riding the gravy train and French aid is a huge chunk of their gdps.
2. Haiti was a French colony in the first place and French colonies do less well.
3. Sugar cane gave Haiti some early characteristics of “the resource curse,” dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries.
4. Haiti was doing OK until the Duvaliers destroyed civil society, thus putting the country on a path toward destruction. It is a more or less random one-time event which wrecked the place.
5. Hegel was correct that the “voodoo religion,” with its intransitive power relations among the gods, was prone to producing political intransitivity as well. (Isn’t that a startling insight for a guy who didn’t travel the broader world much?)
6. For reasons peculiar to the history of the slave trade, Haitian slaves came from many different parts of Africa and thus Haitian internal culture has long had lower levels of cohesion and cooperation. (The former point about the mix is true, but the cultural point is speculation.)
7. Haiti has higher than average levels of polygamy (but is this cause or effect?)
8. In the early to mid twentieth century, Haiti was poorly situated to attract Chinese and other immigrants, unlike say Jamaica or Trinidad. It is interesting that many of the wealthiest families in Haiti are Lebanese, such as the Naders.
Leaving aside the absurd suggestion that Haiti is somehow to blame for casting off slavery too early, some of these hypotheses are plausible if incomplete explanations for the enduring poverty of Haiti. Still and not surprisingly Dr. Cowen leaves out one of the more recent ones – the failure of free markets – and a more traditional one – an enduring racism that has pervaded the world’s relationship with the world’s first black republic. Dr. Cowen can blame voodoo culture but voodoo economics is the greater problem.