Latest News Clips 2016.08.29

               

1.      Italy’s Fragile Beauty

The New York Times  AUG. 24, 2016

The town of Amatrice in Italy was hit by a strong earthquake on Wednesday morning. CreditStefano Rellandini/Reuters

Milan — If you put a pin right in the middle of a map of Italy, you’re likely to hit Amatrice. A small, historic city known as “the town of the hundred churches,” it lies two hours from Rome and 3,280 feet above sea level, in the scenic Gran Sasso National Park, on the watershed between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas. The area straddles four of our most famous regions: Lazio, Abruzzo, Marche and Umbria. Amatrice is the centerpiece of picture-postcard Italy, for those who find Tuscany too obvious, Rome too noisy and Venice too crowded.

And in the space of just one summer’s night, Amatrice is all but gone.

So are the nearby villages of Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto, wiped out by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that struck central Italy early Wednesday, killing at least 160 people, including children, trapping scores more under debris, leaving thousands homeless and setting off tremors that were felt from Bologna to Naples.

Today, according to one witness, “The area looks like Dante’s Inferno.” But until yesterday it looked like paradise. A lovely corner of the country. Ancient, unspoiled hilltop villages — for many foreigners, the quintessence of their Italian fantasies. For us Italians, a source of pride.

The quake struck Amatrice and the surrounding area at 3:36 a.m. — amazingly, almost the exact same time as the one that devastated L’Aquila and Abruzzi in 2009, which killed over 300. Some of the dead, this time, were tourists. Travelers go to Amatrice in August for the mild climate, an evening stroll and spaghetti all’amatriciana — a dish famous all over the world, invented by local shepherds in the Middle Ages.

This week, the town was getting ready for the 50th annual festival dedicated to the celebrated sauce. Luckily, most visitors had left for the night. But the Hotel Roma had 70 guests, and at the time of writing they are unaccounted for.

We all forget — visitors and residents alike — that Italy is a stunning but shaky land. Since 1861, when the country was unified, there have been 35 major earthquakes and 86 smaller ones. Every region has been hit. Over 70,000 people lost their lives in an earthquake that struck Messina, Sicily, in 1908. The island was hit again in 1968; Friuli in 1976, Campania in 1980, Abruzzo in 2009, Emilia in 2012. The Apennine mountain range, the geological spine of Italy, has been repeatedly battered.

Italy’s beauty is fragile. Ancient buildings are gorgeous but can be dangerous. Its cities are old and dense, and its buildings rendered vulnerable by heritage laws that protect them from modernization, for better and worse. Carmine Galasso, a lecturer in earthquake engineering at University College London, told Time magazine: “The challenge is really to assess the seismic safety of existing old buildings and prioritize interventions for retrofitting and strengthening.”

2.      Discovery of potentially Earth-like planet Proxima b raises hopes for life

Thought to be at least 1.3 times mass of Earth, planet lies within ‘habitable’ zone of Proxima Centauri, raising hopes for life outside our solar system

The Guardian   24 August 2016 

The search for life outside our solar system has been brought to our cosmic doorstep with the discovery of an apparently rocky planet orbiting the nearest star to our sun.

Thought to be at least 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, the planet lies within the so-called “habitable zone” of the star Proxima Centauri, meaning that liquid water could potentially exist on the newly discovered world.

Named Proxima b, the new planet has sparked a flurry of excitement among astrophysicists, with the tantalising possibility that it might be similar in crucial respects to Earth.

“There is a reasonable expectation that this planet might be able to host life, yes,” said Guillem Anglada-Escudé, co-author of the research from Queen Mary, University of London.

Eamonn Kerins, an astrophysicist at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, was among those enthusiastic about the discovery. “Finding out that the nearest star to the sun hosts not just a planet, not just an Earth-sized planet, but one which is in the right location that it could support life - and there are a lot of caveats there - really underscores that not only are planets very common in our galaxy, but potentially habitable planets are common,” he said.

Proxima b may be the closest of the thousands of exoplanets - which are planets orbiting stars outside our solar system - discovered to date, but at 4.2 light years away the prospect of quick visit to find any Proximese aliens is still remote. Based on spacecraft today, a probe launched now would take around 70,000 years to reach the new planet.

Writing in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers describe how they discovered the planet after scrutinising data based on the light emitted by Proxima Centauri, collected using instruments at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. 

 “What we basically do is measure how the star is moving,” said Anglada-Escudé. “If you have a planet around a star, the planet is also pulling the star a bit so you see the star is moving. It is going towards you and away from you, periodically.”

This movement affects the colour of light detected from the star - as it the star moves slightly towards us we see the light as being slightly bluer - as it moves away the light appears a little redder. The frequency of this motion relates to the duration of the planet’s orbit, and hence its distance from the star, while the magnitude of the motion provides information about the planet’s mass.

While analysis of data collected before 2016 hinted at the presence of a planet, it took a further intense round of data collection earlier this year before the discovery could be confirmed.

Taking 11.2 days to travel around Proxima Centauri, the planet orbits at just 5% of the distance separating the Earth and the sun. But, researchers say, the planet is still within the habitable zone of its star because Proxima Centauri is a type of red dwarf known as an M dwarf - a smaller, cooler, dimmer type of star than our yellow dwarf sun.

Whether the planet could harbour life, however, is matter of debate. 

Red dwarfs are generally very active stars, emitting powerful solar flares, with Proxima b receiving greater doses of high-energy radiation than reaches Earth from our sun. “Because they tend to have a lot of these flares and things like that, it makes it very difficult for [planets] to keep an atmosphere - these flares just blow the atmosphere away,” said Don Pollacco, professor of astrophysics at the University of Warwick, who was not involved in the research. But, he adds, Proxima Centauri is only a moderately active red dwarf, potentially making its environment less hostile than other such stars. Whether the star’s activity when it was younger could have stripped Proxima b of an atmosphere remains to be discovered, while it is also unknown if the planet has a magnetic field which could potentially protect it from such radiation.

3.      The burkini ban: what it really means when we criminalise clothes

France is tearing itself apart over a swimsuit but it’s not the first time an item of clothing has caused a political storm. What we wear has always hidden deeper fears about sex, race and class

The Guardian   24 August 2016 

This is what happens to my skin in the sun. After a few minutes, it goes a mottled pink. Give it an hour or so, and it goes the colour of a ripe tomato. Shortly after that, it burns really badly, and the next day I develop full-body dandruff. Not a good look.

So I go to the beach well equipped. I wear sunscreen, of course. But also a hat, a scarf to cover my neck and my head as well if it’s too windy for the hat, a long-sleeved tunic, and light trousers to pull on somewhere between the mottled pink and tomato stage. I long ago accepted that I am never going to go brown, so I cover up, and I’m comfortable that way. But on a growing number of French beaches, it seems that covering up is now against the law.

On Tuesday, we saw photographs showing four armed policemen on a beach in Nice bullying a woman by forcing her to strip off layers. Another woman – a mum of two, identified only as Siam, aged 34 – was also fined on a Cannes beach for dressing in a similar way, and so apparently not wearing “an outfit respecting good morals and secularism”.

My current beach trousers and tunic are remarkably like those the woman was wearing on the beach in Nice, but we all know how unlikely it would be for me to attract police attention. This legislation is aimed at the burkini, clothing that apparently “overtly manifests adherence to a religion at a time when France and places of worship are the target of terrorist attacks”. Nor am I likely to get into trouble for wearing a T-shirt with an image of the Buddha, another of my favourite coverups: the only religion being targeted here is Islam.

A woman’s right to choose her own beach outfit has long been an area of controversy. In 1907, record-breaking Australian swimmer Annette Kellermanwas arrested on Revere beach in Boston for wearing a sleeveless one-piece swimming outfit remarkably similar to the burkini. It was then considered to be so revealing it was obscene, though a judge later allowed a compromise whereby she could go into the water wearing her revolutionary suit, as long as she was covered by a cape until submerged.

Still, when the bikini was introduced in the 1950s, Kellerman declared it was a mistake. “Only two women in a million can wear it,” she said. “And it’s a very big mistake to try. The bikini shows too much. It shows a line that makes the leg look ugly, even with the best of figures. A body is at its most beautiful when there is one beautiful, unbroken line.”

The Pope also condemned the two-piece, although for rather different reasons. It was banned in Italy, Spain and Portugal and, despite Brigitte Bardot posing on a Cannes beach in a bikini in 1953 and Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in an iconic white bikini in Dr No in 1962, it took a surprising amount of time to catch on. But now, it seems, it is our civic and moral duty to display as much bare flesh as possible while sunbathing, and it is hard to find a women’s magazine in spring that isn’t hectoring us to get “bikini-ready”, to starve, wax, salon tan and exercise our bodies into the desired condition.

To the French minister for women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, wearing as little as possible on the beach has now somehow become a feminist issue. “[The burkini] has the same logic as the burqa: hide women’s bodies in order to control them,” she has said, seemingly unaware of the contradiction of forcing women to show their bodies instead. “It is not just the business of those women who wear it, because it is the symbol of a political project that is hostile to diversity and women’s emancipation.”

Latest News Clips 2016.08.22

                    

1.      Is Our Country as Good as Our Athletes Are?

The New York Times   AUG. 19, 2016

Pessimism has flavored this election campaign. America is in decline. The country is on the wrong track. We’re getting our clocks cleaned in global trade deals. We’re still suffering from the humiliation of Iraq.

The share of Americans who say that democracy is a “fairly bad” or “very bad” system of government is rising sharply. A quarter of young Americans feel that way, according to data drawn from the World Values Survey. A majority of young Americans believe that the United States should stay out of world affairs, according to a Chicago Council on Global Affairs report.

Yet when you watch the Olympics, we don’t seem like some sad-sack country in terminal decline. If anything, the coverage gets a little boring because we’re always winning! And the winners have such amazingly American stories and personality types (Biles, Ledecky, and, yes, Lochte).

American Olympic performance has been astoundingly consistent over the recent decades. With rare exception, we can be counted on to win between 101 and 110 medals Olympiad after Olympiad. The 2016 team seems on pace to win at least that many.

We’re not great when measured by medals per capita (New Zealand, Denmark, Hungary, Australia and Britain are the big winners there), but America does have more medals than any other nation in history, and that lead is widening.

Moreover, America doesn’t win because we have better athletes (talent must be distributed equally). America does well because it has such great systems for preparing athletes. Medals are won by institutions as much as by individuals. The Germans have a great system for training kayakers, equestrians and throwers — the discus or javelin. The U.S. has amazing institutions to prepare jumpers, swimmers, basketball players, gymnasts, runners and decathletes.

The big question is: Is the greatness of America’s sports institutions reflective of the country’s strong institutions generally, or is it more like the Soviet Union’s sports greatness, a Potemkin show masking national rot?

Well, if you step outside the pall of the angry campaign rhetoric, you see that America’s institutions are generally quite strong. Over the past decades, some developing countries, like Brazil, India and China, posted glitzy economic growth numbers. But those countries are now all being hampered by institutional weakness and growth is plummeting.

But America’s economic success is like our Olympic success, writ large. The nation’s troubles are evident, but our country has sound fundamentals. The American dollar is by far the world’s currency. The Food and Drug Administration is the benchmark for medical standards. The American patent system is the most important in the world.

Nine of Forbes’s 10 most valuable brands are American (Apple, Google, IBM and so on). The U.S. is the leading energy producer. We have 15 (at least!) of the world’s top 20 universities, while Hollywood is as dominant as ever.

2.      Turkey: Let's close the chapter of coups

The government should have a well-developed plan for dealing with the country's major issues.

Since the failed coup attempt, Turkey has been struggling to deal with the aftershock, grieving for the loss of more than 250 lives and caring for more than 2,000 who have been injured.

The country, however, has emerged more cohesive, with shows of unity across almost the entire spectrum of political and social classes.

Turkey's overcentralised administrative system creates an incentive for groups first to increase their presence within the state apparatus and then to dominate it

Political classes of all stripes have rejected the coup attempt by the rogue Gulenist network, which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey since 2014, and celebrated the nation's sense of ownership of Turkey's democracy, which contributed to the failure of the attempted coup.

All these are encouraging. The nation's sense of ownership and the maturity of the political classes underpin Turkey's democracy.

Overcentralisation

These are necessary but not sufficient conditions for permanently closing the door on the age of coups, and terminating the shady and illegal activities of rogue elements within the state. More is needed.

Three measures in particular are vital to achieving a coup-free political future for the country and disincentivising any rogue group seeking first to dominate state institutions, and then to abuse the power that it acquires through this domination for its own parochial group agenda.

Structurally, the overcentralised nature of the Turkish state makes it easier for the would-be coup plotters to achieve their goals and for a well-organised rogue element to exercise a disproportionate level of power.

Ideologically, Turkey's overcentralised and ideologically proactive state creates incentives for sociopolitical or religious groups to seek a presence within it and influence it through public institutions and state machinery in order to fulfil their sociopolitical designs for the state and society at large.

Politically - or in terms of political culture - the lack of proper political interaction, dialogue and problem-solving mechanisms between the ruling parties and other opposition groups has paved the way for actors to gain a non-democratic foothold in the political sphere and acquire political power, which they have invariably abused.

Whether out of necessity or by choice, whenever Turkey's current and previous governments have opted for a partner to deal with major challenges or impending crises, they have chosen their partner from outside the parliament and political sphere.

Turkey's overcentralised administrative system creates an incentive for groups first to increase their presence within the state apparatus and then to dominate it.

In most indicators of centralisation, Turkey is far above the OECD average. For instance, the central government collects almost 70 percent of total revenues, far more than the OECD average of 58 percent (PDF).

Even more strikingly, 85 percent of public servants work for the central governmentin Turkey, while only 15 percent work in local government. This is the highest ratio among OECD countries.

Disproportionate power

In an overcentralised system, it is relatively easier for certain groups to wield disproportionate power over the system.

Once you control key positions in some of the key institutions, you can project influence incommensurate with your actual size or support. The case of the Gulenist network and its actions within the state machinery confirm this point.

As a corollary, decentralisation will by default tame the ambition of groups seeking to infiltrate and dominate the system, as the number of institutions, and the geographic and administrative distribution of these institutions, will be more numerous and wider. The state's power will not be concentrated in the centre. Instead, it will be more defuse.

Moreover, this overcentralised state is also extremely proactive in attempting to influence the identity and ideology of its society through social engineering.

For a long time, the Turkish state encouraged a preferred identity of secular,Western-oriented nationalism, while securitising the Kurdish and Islamist identities.

Those whose identity was securitised believed that the only way to change this was through gaining access to the levers of power within the state structure.

Such a belief - coupled with the nature of the state - gave the state apparatus a strong pull factor for any group that aspired to make its imprint on public life.

In this respect, the Gulenist network was partially the product of Turkey's authoritarian, overly centralised Kemalist state. The government should take a lesson from this experience, and strive to make the state blind to identities and remainideologically neutral.

3.      How to Make Child Care Affordable

The Bloomberg    AUG 19, 2016

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on this much: The federal government should do more to help families pay for child care.

They’re surely right. In many parts of the U.S., putting children in a day-care center has become the single greatest expense parents face, exceeding the cost of housing. And it’s growing: From 2009 to 2016, the cost of child care and nursery school jumped 21 percent, nearly twice the rate of inflation overall.

Trump’s proposed solution is to allow parents to deduct the average cost of child care from their taxes. That may sound like a generous offer, and it would indeed be expensive. The trouble is, it would do nothing for families most in need of help. After all, the median household pays just $9,000 in federal taxes; 45 percent pay no federal income tax at all. (Trump’s campaign says he will also extend the deduction to half of payroll taxes, and will provide details about this plan later on.)

In theory, Clinton’s strategy would help many more families. She promises to limit the amount parents pay for child care to 10 percent of their income. But her campaign hasn’t said how she would achieve that goal, or at what cost.

Some expansion in federal assistance is certainly needed. The existing income-tax credit for child care costs is limited to $600 to $1,050 per child, depending on income.

Yet the average price of home day care for an infant ranges from almost $5,000 a year in Tennessee and South Carolina to twice that in Florida, New York and Massachusetts. Child-care centers are typically even more expensive: In many states, the annual cost to cover an infant and a four-year-old together is more than $20,000.

Beyond enlarging the tax credits, the federal government should pay them in advance -- much as Obamacare provides subsidies for health insurance premiums at the time they need to be paid. And as with Obamacare subsidies, child-care tax credits should be paid directly from the government to child-care centers.

The Center for American Progress has proposed such an approach. Its plan would offer tax credits of as much as $14,000 per child, and limit families’ spending on child care to 12 percent of their income.

Any changes in federal policy would do well to also raise the qualityof child care. The country’s 285,000 child care workers earn less than $21,000 a year on average; even so, only a third of infant care settings meet the staffing ratios that experts recommend. And more than one-third of workers at home-based child care centers have only a high school degree or less. While a four-year college degree isn’t always required, workers ideally should study child development and early childhood education -- courses offered at many community colleges.

Trump’s child-care tax deduction wouldn’t directly affect quality. Clinton says she would improve things with a separate effort to subsidize the pay of child care workers. A better approach would be to also give day care centers an incentive to perform well. Louisiana, for example, gives them a tax credit tied to their state quality rating. It also gives child care workers a separate credit that increases with the amount of training they complete.

Another approach is to make it easier for parents to get information about staff training before enrolling their children in a day-care center.

Of course, none of these strategies would be cheap. CAP says its tax credit proposal would cost taxpayers $40 billion annually. But kids who get quality day care at an early age often do better in school, and their parents are more likely to work. These benefits could be well worth the price.