37 maps that explain how America is a nation of immigrants

American politicians, and Americans themselves, love to call themselves “a nation of immigrants”: a place where everyone’s family has, at some point, chosen to come to seek freedom or a better life. America has managed to maintain that self-image through the forced migration of millions of African slaves, restrictive immigration laws based on fears of “inferior” races, and nativist movements that encouraged immigrants to assimilate or simply leave.

But while the reality of America’s immigrant heritage is more complicated than the myth, it’s still a fundamental truth of the country’s history. It’s impossible to understand the country today without knowing who’s been kept out, who’s been let in, and how they’ve been treated once they arrive.

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Where we come from

1. 

   US Census Bureau

   We’re all immigrants

   This map from the 2000 census colors each county according to which country most of its residents cite as their “ancestry.” What might be most surprising about this map is the predominance of light yellow in Appalachia; in those counties, more people say their ancestry is simply “American” than anything else. But this is a strikingly recent phenomenon: the number of people saying their ancestry was “American” nearly doubled from 1990 to 2000. It’s amazing that in a country that’s been around for more than 200 years — with many family lineages having lived in the New World for even longer — most people are still able to identify their ancestry based on the countries in which their families lived before they immigrated to the United States.
2. 

   Erika Tamm et al./PLoS ONE

   The very first American migration

   Even the first Americans were immigrants — it’s generally accepted that they came across “Beringia” (the land that’s now the Bering Strait, the body of water between Russia and Alaska) at least 20,000 years ago (and possibly as long as 30,000 years ago). But scientists are still trying to piece together when the first Americans came through Beringia; how many of them there were; and whether they came all at once, or in multiple waves.

   This map, from a 2007 paper, is based on an analysis of mitochondrial DNA — which children inherit only from their mother, making it easier to trace one line back for many generations. The researchers hypothesize that the group that came to Beringia from Asia, approximately 25,000 years ago, actually stayed in Beringia for some time before some of them came through to the Americas. Then, however — according to this analysis — they populated the Americas fairly quickly, spreading as far south as Chile by 15,000 years ago. The analysis also suggests that some early Americans migrated back to Asia from Beringia, while other, newer waves of immigrants crossed to America.
3. 

   Worldmapper.org

   America has more immigrants than anybody

   Later waves of European immigration killed off most of the first Americans (largely through European diseases, which traveled through the Americas much more quickly than European humans did). That set the stage for European Americans to rebrand the United States, in particular (where indigenous populations were almost completely “replaced”), as a “nation of immigrants.” Even today, America is still home to more total immigrants than any other country in the world. In this map, each country’s size is distorted to reflect the size of its immigrant population. It’s based on 2005 data, but a 2013 UN report shows that 19.8 percent of the world’s international migrants live in the United States.
4. 

   OECD

   …but as a share of the population, the US doesn’t crack the top 10

   As much as American politicians pat themselves on the back for representing “the most welcoming country in the world,” there are smaller countries that have been more open to immigrants in recent decades. So on this chart from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which measures the percentage of each country’s population that was made up of immigrants in 2000 (the orange dot) and 2010 (the blue bar), America doesn’t even hit the top 10. Some of the countries that outrank the United States are tiny — it’s much easier for 40 percent of Luxembourg’s population to be immigrants, since the country has only 540,000 people, than it would be for the United States — but medium-size countries like Canada, Australia, and Spain also outrank the United States.
5. 

   Pew Research Center

   The simplest explanation of how immigration to America has changed

   If this feature were called “A nation of immigrants in one map,” this is the one we’d show you. The bottom line: before 1965, Germany sent more immigrants to America than anyone else; after 1965, Mexico did.

   Here’s why: from World War I to 1965, the immigration system was designed, essentially, to keep the United States white. Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg has called it “unbelievable in its clarity of racism.” Each country was given a certain quota of immigrants who were allowed to come to the United States each year, based on who’d been in the country in 1890.

   Combined with existing laws that prevented any Asian Americans from coming into the country, the laws of the 1920s basically froze the demographics of the immigrant population in place until 1965.
6. 

   @MetricMaps

   The Danish Utahns, and other immigrant enclaves

   This GIF, compiled by internet hero @MetricMaps, tracks where immigrants from different countries have settled in the United States. The result is an exhaustive portrait of more than two dozen different native countries and regions. Some ancestry groups pop up in interesting places, revealing forgotten pockets of American history — the Danish population in Utah, for example, is the result of an extremely early wave of Danish conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons).

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Forced migration, then and now

1. 

   David Eltis and David Richardson/Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, reprinted with permission of Yale University Press

   Forced migration built America

   The American myth about “a nation of immigrants” excludes millions of forced migrants to America from Africa, who were brought to the US over two centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It’s hard to overstate how much slaves built America: according to historian Steven Deyle, the value of all slaves in 1860 was seven times the value of all currency then in circulation in the United States. Slave labor built the agrarian economy of the South and fed the cotton mills of the industrializing North. But slaves had no way to become citizens, build wealth, or bring their families — they had no opportunity to practice the self-reliance that America often expects of its immigrants.
2. 

   David Eltis and David Richardson/Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, reprinted with permission of Yale University Press

   The first illegal migrations were of trafficked slaves

   The forced migration of Africans to America also represents the first unauthorized migration to the United States. The Constitution banned the “importation” (trafficking) of slaves into the United States after 1809, but black-market slave trading continued until the Civil War. According to historian David Eltis of Emory University, 1.5 million Africans arrived in the Americas after the countries they landed in had theoretically banned the slave trade. Because there were no restrictions on voluntary migration to the United States until the 1880s, these were the first people to come to the country illegally.

   The Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade documents 78,360 slaves landing in mainland North America from 1800 to 1865 — about 20 percent of all arrivals over the 200 years of the slave trade. (Since slave importation wasn’t banned until 1807, many of those arrivals could have been legal.)
3. 

   Dave Eames and Mark Morris/Kansas City Star

   Modern-day forced migration: human trafficking

   Large-scale human trafficking is no longer legal, let alone widely condoned. But it still happens. This graphic is one attempt to map the global reach of the contemporary human-smuggling industry.

   A report by the Urban Institute in 2014 interviewed 122 victims of labor trafficking in the United States, and found that 71 percent of those traffickedactually had legal visas when they arrived in the country. But because immigrant workers’ legal status is tied to their employer, most victims who escaped their traffickers had lost their legal status by the time they were connected to law enforcement. Furthermore, the report found, public officials often encountered labor-trafficking victims and failed to realize what was going on — or, worse, sided with the traffickers and threatened to report the victims to federal immigration agents.

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A nation of immigrants

1. 

   Library of Congress

   The most famous immigrant in American history

   Give me your tired, your poor;
   Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
   The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
   Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss’d, to me;
   I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
   —Emma Lazarus, 1883

   Of course, the Statue of Liberty was itself an immigrant. It was designed and cast in copper in France over the span of a decade, from 1876 to 1884, as an intended gift from the French government to the United States. But the statue then had to wait in France for several months until the Americans had done enough work on its pedestal. It was then shipped to the United States in 350 separate pieces, housed in 214 crates, to be assembled by American workers once it arrived.
2. 

   Frank P. Sargent/Commission-General of Immigration (via Michigan State University)

   An insanely detailed map of immigrants in America from 1903

   This exhaustive map includes 51 infographics (for each state plus Washington, DC). The right column of the infographic covers how many immigrants settled in the state each year; the left column shows their occupations. The top depicts the ethnic mix, color-coded by race: Teutonic, Keltic, Slavic, Iberic, Mongolic, and “all others.”

   At the time, those racial labels were real — and the source of anxiety. A medical journal article from this era expressed concern about the “preponderance of the Iberic and Slavic races” among recent immigrants, because of “their poorer physical and mental equipment” compared to “Celtic and Teutonic” immigrants.
3. 

   Florence Kelley et al.

   How charities helped immigrants become American

   The organization Hull House (founded by Jane Addams) was devoted to serving Chicago’s urban poor; in the process, it set the template for charity in America. And most of Chicago’s urban poor were immigrants: in 1890, in fact, immigrants made up 77 percent of the city’s population. To better tailor its services to the communities it served (and to assist the federal government in its study of urban “ghettos”), Hull House researchers produced maps like this one, which shows the ethnicity of each immigrant family living in a given tenement block.

   The result was that Hull House increasingly focused on teaching English, civics, and other skills that would help immigrants and first-generation Americans assimilate — what would be called the “Americanization” movement. The existence of organizations like Hull House, which were willing to take the time to help immigrants acclimate to America and learn things (like English) that they needed to succeed, was an important factor in helping the European immigrants of 100 years ago assimilate to the point where they simply counted as “white” Americans.
4. 

   Claude S. Fischer, Mike Hout, Aliya Saperstein

   Are today’s immigrants less Americanized?

   The “Americanization” movement of the early 1900s wasn’t just about how to help immigrants. It was also grounded in the belief that immigrants should be welcomed to the United States only if they wanted to, and could, be successfully assimilated into America. That idea survives today, in everything from the metaphor of the country as a “melting pot” to the demand that immigrants “learn English.” But while “learning English” is shorthand for assimilation, and despite fears that this generation of immigrants is less assimilated than their forerunners, immigrants to America in the late 20th century were much more likely to know English when they got here, or to pick it up quickly, than the immigrants who lived at Hull House. Even Latino immigrants, who lag behind other immigrants (who tend to be more educated) in how long it takes them to speak English, perform much better than the European immigrants of the 1880s.
5. 

   Pew Hispanic Trends Project

   The grandchildren of today’s Latino immigrants barely speak Spanish

   Second-generation Latinos — the children of immigrants — tend to be fully bilingual; this might mean they’re used to speaking with their parents in Spanish but using English outside the home, or just that they’re in situations where they deal with Spanish and English speakers pretty much equally. And with the third generation, who are grandchildren of immigrants, bilingualism fades quickly. In fact, the proportion of immigrants who speak mostly English (35 percent) is bigger than the share of Latinos who are thoroughly bilingual in the third generation.
6. 

   Pew Charitable Trusts

   Immigrants are saving the Midwest

   More Americans are leaving Middle America than moving there (with the exception of North Dakota). But immigrants are forestalling Middle America’s demographic decline. A Chicago Council study in 2014 found four metro areas (including Davenport, Iowa, on the Illinois border, and Duluth in eastern Minnesota) that grew between 2000 and 2010 solely because of the immigrant population, and another five where immigrants made up more than 50 percent of the metro area’s total growth over that time. But immigrants might be having an even bigger impact in rural areas in Middle America, where the demographic crunch is most acute. In Kansas, immigrants make up 5.3 percent of the rural population; in Nebraska it’s 4.8 percent. Just as importantly, immigrants are making these areas demographically younger. The Chicago Council report found that Wichita, Kansas, for example, lost 24 percent of its 35- to 44-year-old, native-born population from 2000 to 2010 — but its immigrant population in that age range grew by 87 percent.

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A nation of (immigration) laws

1. 

   Natalia Bronshtein

   200 years of immigration in one gorgeous visual

   It’s easy now to assume that Mexico has always been among the main sources of immigration to America. But as this wonderful chart by Natalia Bronshtein (using 200 years of government data) shows, that’s not even close to true. There’s an interactive version on Bronshtein’s website: you can hover over any color, at any point, and see the exact number of immigrants who became residents from that country in that decade. But taken as a whole, the chart tells a very clear story: there are two laws that totally transformed immigration to the United States.
2. 

   The New York Times

   The 1920s law that made immigration much less diverse — and created illegal immigration as we know it

   Because the quota laws were passed in the early 1920s, but were based on immigration flows from 1890, they actually rolled back immigration from certain countries. Politicians were worried that new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (largely Italians and Jews) were genetically “inferior” immigrant stock was threatening Americans’ quality of life. This pair of maps, from the New York Times, shows the effects of the primary quota law: the National Origins Act of 1924. The map to the left of the slider shows annual immigration to America from various European countries before the law was passed; the map to the right of the slider shows the quotas imposed for each country under the law. The National Origins Act forced the legal immigrant population to plummet — and made “illegal immigration” a widespread phenomenon for the first time in American history. It hasn’t stopped since.
3. 

   Smithsonian Institution

   How America began to rely on Mexican labor

   With World War II causing labor shortages, the United States started to encourage seasonal labor from Mexico. As the map shows, the 2 million braceros who came under the program (from 1942 to 1964) migrated from all over Mexico to most of the United States. Most worked in agriculture, under punishing conditions: according to some reports, braceros were sprayed directly with DDT (an insecticide now known to be carcinogenic and toxic to humans). The bracero program was supposed to prevent migrants from settling in the United States by sending 10 percent of their paychecks back to Mexico. But many braceros returned to Mexico only to discover their money had not. Many Mexican Americans are descended from braceros, and the memory of their mistreatment colors their opinions of guest-worker proposals today.
4. 

   Migration Policy Institute

   America’s only been a global destination for the past 50 years

   The modern era of immigration to America began in 1965, when the restrictionist quotas of the National Origins Act were replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act. It’s only in this era that immigration to the United States has really become a global phenomenon — with European and Mexican immigrants joined by Asian, Central and South American, and African immigrants. There are still more immigrants from some countries than from others — in 2013, there were twice as many naturalized US citizens from Mexico as from any other country — but as this chart shows, immigration to the United States has never been more globally balanced.
5. 

   Mike Flynn, Shikha Dalmia, Terry Colon/Reason Magazine

   How to come here the right way

   From one perspective, there are plenty of ways to come to the United States legally — there’s an alphabet soup of visas, not to mention immigrant Americans’ ability to sponsor family members for green cards. But the overwhelming majority of the world’s non-American population isn’t eligible for any of these paths. In other words, there’s no legal immigration “line” for them to get into. Furthermore, there are far too many qualified applicants for most available visas — causing years-long (or even decades-long) backlogs for Mexican, Chinese, Indian and Filipino immigrants hoping to bring their parents, adult children, or siblings to the United States. This flowchart, from Reason Magazine, shows who’s able to come “the right way” and who isn’t. Spoiler alert: most aren’t, and most of those who are will have to wait a long time.

1. 

   Joe Posner/Vox

   The era of unauthorized immigration: 1996–2006

   This chart documents the biggest wave of unauthorized migration in US history: from 1996, when the economy was booming and a law made it harder for unauthorized immigrants to “get legal,” to the US recession of the late 2000s. The line graph (and the left y-axis) shows how many immigrants entered the country illegally each year; the bar chart (and the right y-axis) shows the estimated number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States at that time.

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Nativism, then and now

1. 

   Ipsos MORI via Quartz

   One reason some Americans fear immigrants? They overestimate how many there are

   Americans have an unfortunate tendency to overestimate how many people in the United States are immigrants — possibly because many white Americans assume that most Latinos in the United States are immigrants (and some assume most Latinos in the United States are unauthorized immigrants). Fears of America being overrun by immigrants make a little more sense if you think that a third of people living in the United States are immigrants already.
2. 

   National Atlas of the United States

   America’s first single-issue party was anti-immigrant

   The American Party of the 1840s and 1850s was often called, and is remembered today as, the “Know-Nothing Party.” In the 1856 presidential election, as shown here, Maryland sent its electoral votes to the party (which had nominated former President Millard Fillmore). The leading Know-Nothing in Congress, Lewis Charles Levin of Pennsylvania, was also the first Jewish member of the US Congress. American nativists have usually been more afraid of some kinds of immigrants than others — and one way for an immigrant to assimilate into American life is to play the “good immigrant,” attacking the bad ones.
3. 

   The Public I

   When Louisville rioted against Catholic immigrants

   In 1855, the Know-Nothing Party was beginning to take over politics in Louisville, Kentucky. The night before a local election in August, Know-Nothings armed with torches paraded through the city’s Catholic areas, telling voters to “keep their elbows in.” That day — fueled by rumors that hundreds of armed Germans were taking over polling places, and that an Irishman had killed a Know-Nothing — the Know-Nothings exploded into wholesale rioting in the Irish and German sections of town. At least 22 people were killed — and probably many more. From the blog the Public I: “The death toll would have been higher but in the German district one of the first buildings looted was Armbruster’s brewery. The rioters got so drunk they could only satisfy themselves with torching the building before passing out.”
4. 

   W. B. Farwell, John E. Kunkler, E. B. Pond/San Francisco Board of Supervisors

   An 1885 “vice map” of San Francisco’s Chinatown

   The first immigration restrictions in US history were passed in 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act more or less eliminated legal immigration from China. This created a market in human smuggling and trafficking — especially of young Chinese women. The US Customs and Border Protection website is still proud of the agency’s work in “kidnapping” Chinese women “in order to save them” from brothel owners and human traffickers. But as this “vice map of Chinatown,” created by the City of San Francisco, shows, attempts to “save” immigrant victims from their traffickers often bled into prejudice against the immorality of the immigrant community itself.
5. 

   Karl Gotz

   Fears of an immigrant “fifth column” bought into Nazi propaganda

   One of the recurring themes in American nativism is the fear that immigrants will be more loyal to their native countries than to their adopted ones — including in times of war. This map, from a book of Nazi propaganda, tried to exploit those fears. It sent the message that every one of the 20 million German Americans in the United States could be counted on to stand with their homeland rather than with the country that their families had lived in for (in some cases) generations. But the fear was groundless. The United States never had a substantial Nazi-sympathizer movement — and the closest thing to it were the “isolationists,” who were interested in staying out of World War II not because they were loyal to Germany, but because they didn’t feel any connection to Europe.
6. 

   All Aboard Magazine

   Japanese internment camps

   During World War II, fears of an immigrant fifth column led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to order 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps in the western United States. The majority of internees were American citizens, and many were born in the United States. Internment ended in 1944, before Japan surrendered to the United States. But many internees had lost their homes and belongings. Several thousand German Americans and Italian Americans, among others, were also put into camps during World War II. But the scope of the Japanese internment is striking — especially because no Japanese American was ever found guilty of espionage.
7. 

   Emma Bourne/Council Against Intolerance In America

   Langston Hughes’s doodles turn a pro-immigrant map into an anti-Jim Crow one

   While other Americans worried that immigrants were a threat to a country at war, the Council Against Intolerance made this illustrated map to argue the opposite: that prejudice itself would weaken the United States against its enemies. It’s a relatively early example of an idea that’s become popular in recent decades: that diversity itself is what makes America strong, and that difference is something to be celebrated rather than eliminated. This particular copy of the council’s map was owned by Langston Hughes, who penciled in a couple of illustrations of his own — including a burning Ku Klux Klan cross near Louisiana — making the point that the people most interested in preserving differences between groups tend to be the ones least interested in tolerance.

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A bordered country

1. 

   ACLU

   This is what the border actually is

   Popularly, “the border” is a line between United States and Mexico. But officially, it’s a 100-mile area that stretches all the way around the United States — covering as much as two-thirds of the nation’s population. The legal definition of the border matters because the government has long said it can do things “at the border” to track down unauthorized migration and smuggling that it can’t do other places, from setting up “checkpoints” within the United States to check drivers’ citizenship to straight-up racial profiling. As recently as 2011, Border Patrol officers were boarding buses in upstate New York to ask passengers for IDs, and responding to police calls in Forks, Washington. New guidance from the federal government, which came out in December 2014, has opened the door to narrowing the definition of the “border” — but it’s not clear whether it will.
2. 

   Joss Fong/Vox

   The militarization of the US/Mexico border

   Increasing border security is a very recent phenomenon: the number of Border Patrol agents on the United States/Mexico border has more than quadrupled from 1995 to 2014. The militarization of the border hasn’t been evenly spaced: it’s concentrated on the areas that people are most likely to cross. The buildup was supposed to stop unauthorized entrances, but it also made it harder for unauthorized immigrants to leave the United States if they ever wanted to return. Immigrants who were used to splitting time between their jobs in the United States and their families at home moved their families to the United States instead — and the unauthorized population grew, and settled.
3. 

   Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants

   A volunteer effort to identify immigrants who died crossing the border

   The more agents there are on the high-traffic sectors of the border, the more immigrants try to brave the stretches too dangerous for Border Patrol. That’s made the border more lethal: immigrants often die of thirst or heat exposure when crossing the desert. Some citizen groups attempt to provide water stations to keep migrants safe, though they’ve had to face court cases arguing that they’re trying to encourage people to come to the United States illegally. Officials in Pima County, Arizona, working with a human rights group, use GIS mapping to track deaths of migrants along the border. They’ve recorded 2,187 deaths in Arizona alone from 2001 to 2014.
4. 

   El Informador

   La Bestia

   Mexican freight trains carry cargo-like cars and plastics northward to the United States. They also, for years, have carried Mexican and Central Americans hoping to cross. Hopping “La Bestia” (the popular term for immigrants stowing onto Mexican freight trains) has become a symbol of unauthorized migration to the United States — not just in politics, but in American popular culture. It’s also an illustration of just how far “border security” can stretch outside of the United States’ own territory. In 2014, the Mexican government agreed to force the major freight lines to travel more quickly — a plan that will take a few years — in the hopes that it will be harder for would-be migrants to catch rides. But just as border militarization in the United States simply made the journey more dangerous for desperate migrants, the question will be whether a faster Bestia will deter migrants or punish them.
5. 

   Diego Valle-Jones

   The maps you need to understand the 2014 “border crisis”

   Scholars of immigration agree that people make the decision to migrate based on two types of reasons: “push factors” that lead them to leave their country of origin, and “pull factors” that lead them to come to one new country in particular. When tens of thousands of Central American families and unaccompanied children presented themselves to border agents in Texas in the spring and summer of 2014, many Americans and politicians blamed “pull factors” like President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But a map created by the Department of Homeland Security, depicting where unaccompanied child migrants were coming from, told a different story: migrants were leaving some of the most dangerous communities in the most dangerous countries in the world.

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A borderless world

1. 

   Migration Policy Institute

   Immigrants come from everywhere

   As noted above, since 1965, immigration to the United States has become a truly global phenomenon. It’s one thing to know that, but it’s another thing to see it in front of you.
2. 

   Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends Project

   Remittances: the foreign aid program bigger than foreign aid

   Many immigrants send money back home — called remittances — either to help them save up and buy property to return to their home countries or to support family members who can’t come to the United States themselves. Immigrants officially sent $51 billion in remittances home in 2012 — far larger than the US government’s foreign aid budget of $39 billion that year. This map shows that the countries that receive the most remittances aren’t always the countries with the most emigrants in the United States — they’re the poorest countries with large US-emigrant populations.
3. 

   Andy Kiersz/Business Insider

   The hidden diversity of America’s immigrants

   The stereotypical face of immigration to America in 2015 is a Latino one. Americans routinely overestimate how many Latinos are immigrants, and particularly how many are unauthorized immigrants. And it’s true that Latin American countries send more immigrants to the United States than other regions. Because of that, it’s sometimes necessary to dig a little deeper to see how diverse the immigrant population really is. If this map of New York showed the most popular non-English language in each neighborhood, it would likely be monotonous. But by showing the most popular language that isn’t English or Spanish, it shows that New York is still a quilt of dozens of different immigrant communities.
4. 

   Jesse Allen/NASA

   The twin cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez

   El Paso and Ciudad Juarez might be the world’s strangest twin city. The separation of the US border helps create vastly different environments in the two cities: El Paso is far more affluent than its Mexican twin; Juarez is a global crime capital, while El Paso has long been one of the safest cities in the United States. But they’re undoubtedly two halves of the same metropolitan area. In 2011, 14,000 people crossed one footbridge between the two cities on a daily basis. This colorized NASA photo shows buildings in gray and vegetation in red. The band of vegetation in the lower right of the photo might be the first thing you notice: evidence of a visible barrier separating Mexicans and Americans. But in the heart of the city, in the center of the photo, it takes tracing the Rio Grande to tell where Mexico ends and America begins.

By Dara Lind on June 10, 2015

 

Hospitals in Gaza Overwhelmed as Attacks Continue

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — It was clear from the bod­ies laid out in the park­ing lot of the ma­ter­ni­ty hos­pi­tal here that it had as­sumed new du­ties: No longer a place that wel­comed new life, it was now a make­shift morgue.

Oth­er bod­ies lay in hall­ways and on the floor of the kitchen at Hi­lal Emi­rati Ma­ter­ni­ty Hos­pi­tal. In the walk-in cool­er, they were stacked three high, wait­ing for rel­a­tives to claim them for burial.

Sat­ur­day was the sec­ond day of heavy bom­bard­ment by Is­raeli forces on this city on Gaza’s bor­der with Egypt af­ter Is­rael’s an­nounce­ment that one of its of­fi­cers had been cap­tured by Pal­es­tin­ian mil­i­tants here dur­ing a clash.

But ear­ly Sun­day morn­ing, the Is­raeli mil­i­tary an­nounced that the of­fi­cer, Sec­ond Lt. Hadar Goldin, 23, was now con­sid­ered to have been killed in bat­tle.

Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Medics at a field hospital in Rafah, Gaza Strip. More than 120 Palestinians were killed in Rafah alone on Friday and Saturday.

Is­rael’s of­fen­sive had emp­tied neigh­bor­hoods, shut­tered the city’s cen­tral hos­pi­tal and killed more peo­ple than its re­main­ing health fa­cil­i­ties could keep up with. But for the res­i­dents of this dusty city of 150,000 peo­ple — un­til re­cent­ly fa­mous as the end­point for hun­dreds of smug­gling tun­nels un­der the bor­der with Egypt — the as­sault had un­leashed such a wave of ter­ror and death that Lieu­ten­ant Goldin, whose fate was un­known when the as­sault be­gan on Fri­day, was scarcely con­sid­ered.

“It is just an ex­cuse,” said Dr. Ab­dul­lah She­hadeh,

di­rec­tor of the Abu Yousef al-Na­j­jar Hos­pi­tal, the city’s larg­est. “There is no rea­son for them to force the women and chil­dren of Gaza to pay the price for some­thing that hap­pened on the bat­tle­field.”

Af­ter two days of Is­raeli shelling and airstrikes, cen­tral Rafah ap­peared de­serted on Sat­ur­day, with shops closed and res­i­dents hid­ing in their homes. The pres­ence of Is­raeli forces east of the city had caused many to flee west, crowd­ing in with friends and rel­a­tives in neigh­bor­hoods by the Med­i­ter­ra­nean.

More than 120 Pales­tini­ans were killed in Rafah alone on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day — the dead­li­est two days in the city since the war be­gan 25 days ago. Those deaths, and hun­dreds of in­ju­ries, over­whelmed the city’s health care fa­cil­i­ties.

Mak­ing mat­ters worse, Is­raeli shells hit the cen­tral Na­j­jar hos­pi­tal on Fri­day af­ter­noon, Dr. She­hadeh said, lead­ing its em­ploy­ees and pa­tients to evac­u­ate.

To con­tinue re­ceiv­ing pa­tients, his staff mem­bers moved to the small­er Ku­waiti Spe­cial­ized Hos­pi­tal, al­though it was ill equipped to han­dle the large num­ber of peo­ple seek­ing care.

Am­bu­lances screamed in­to the hos­pi­tal’s park­ing lot, where medics un­loaded cases on­to stretch­ers some­times bear­ing the blood of pre­vi­ous pa­tients. Since the hos­pi­tal had on­ly 12 beds, the staff mem­bers had lined up gur­neys out­side to han­dle the over­flow.

The city’s cen­tral hos­pi­tal had al­so housed its on­ly morgue, so its clo­sure cre­ated a new prob­lem as the ca­su­al­ties mount­ed: where to put the bod­ies.

At the Ku­waiti Spe­cial­ized Hos­pi­tal, they were put on the floor of the den­tal ward un­der a poster pro­mot­ing den­tal hy­giene. In a back room lay the bod­ies of Sa­di­ah Abu Taha, 60, and her grand­son Rezeq Abu Taha, 1, who had been killed in an airstrike on their home near­by.

Few peo­ple ap­proached the main en­trance to the pink-and-white ma­ter­ni­ty hos­pi­tal, in­stead head­ing around back, where there was a con­stant flow of bod­ies. Near­ly 60 had been left in the morgue of the cen­tral hos­pi­tal when it closed, so am­bu­lance crews who had man­aged to reach the site brought back as many bod­ies as they could car­ry. Oth­er bod­ies came from new at­tacks or were re­cov­ered from dam­aged build­ings.

New ar­rivals were laid out in the park­ing lot or car­ried down a ramp to the kitchen, fea­tur­ing a large walk-in cool­er. Some were kept on the ground, and those not claimed right away were added to the pile in the cool­er.

Word had spread that the dead were at the ma­ter­ni­ty hos­pi­tal, so peo­ple who had lost rel­a­tives came to talk to the medics or look in the cool­er for their loved ones.

One short, sun­burned man point­ed to the body of a woman wear­ing pink sweat­pants and said she was his sis­ter Souad al-Tara­bin.

The medics pulled her out, laid her on a ta­ble and wrapped her in white cloth and plas­tic. Some teenagers helped the man car­ry her body up­stairs and lay it in the back of a yel­low taxi. A man in the front seat cra­dled a small bun­dle con­tain­ing the re­mains of the woman’s 4-year-old son, Anas.

Sit­ting near­by, As­ma Abu Ju­main wait­ed for the body of her moth­er-in-law, who she said had been killed the day be­fore and was in the morgue at the cen­tral hos­pi­tal when it was evac­u­ated.

“She is an old woman,” Ms. Abu Ju­main said. “She did noth­ing wrong.”

The move­ment of bod­ies made record-keep­ing im­pos­si­ble, al­though Arafat Ad­wan, a hos­pi­tal vol­un­teer, tried to jot down names in a small red note­book he kept in his pock­et.

He wor­ried that some bod­ies would re­main there for days, be­cause fam­ilies had been scat­tered and might not know that their rel­a­tives had been killed.

“There are peo­ple in here whose fam­ilies have no idea what hap­pened to them,” he said.

Oth­ers knew they had lost rel­a­tives but could not find them.

Mo­ham­med al-Ban­na said an airstrike the morn­ing be­fore had killed nine of his in-laws, in­clud­ing his wife’s fa­ther and four of her broth­ers.

“The ag­gres­sion here is cre­at­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of youth who want re­venge for all the crimes,” he said.

He had looked at the cen­tral hos­pi­tal the day be­fore, to no avail. Then, on Sat­ur­day, he re­ceived a mes­sage sent to lo­cal cell­phones telling those who had lost rel­a­tives to re­trieve them from the ma­ter­ni­ty hos­pi­tal. He had come right away, but had not found them.

“I’ll keep wait­ing for their bod­ies to come in so we can

take them home and bury them,” he said.

Mr. Ban­na added that he had been too wor­ried to tell his wife what had hap­pened to her fam­ily and want­ed to break the news to her grad­u­ally. Ear­lier that day, she had told him that she was start­ing to wor­ry be­cause her fa­ther’s cell­phone had been switched off all day.

“I told her maybe he has no elec­tricity and his phone is dead,” Mr. Ban­na said.

 

BY BEN HUBBARD AND FARES AKRAM (New York Times), August 3, 2014

 

 

Missing Soldier Killed in Battle, Israel Confirms

JERUSALEM — The Is­raeli mil­i­tary said ear­ly Sun­day morn­ing that an of­fi­cer thought to have been cap­tured by Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tants dur­ing a dead­ly clash Fri­day morn­ing, which shat­tered a planned 72-hour cease-fire, was now con­sid­ered to have been killed in bat­tle.

The an­nounce­ment came just hours af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Ne­tanyahu vowed to con­tin­ue Is­rael’s mil­i­tary cam­paign in the Gaza Strip as long as nec­es­sary to stop Hamas at­tacks, while sug­gest­ing a de-es­ca­la­tion of the ground war in Gaza may be near.

The case of the miss­ing sol­dier, Sec­ond Lt. Hadar Goldin, 23, be­came the lat­est flash point in the con­flict, prompt­ing a fierce Is­raeli bom­bard­ment and calls from lead­ers around the world for his re­lease. His dis­ap­pear­ance came af­ter Hamas mil­i­tants am­bushed Is­raeli sol­diers near the south­ern bor­der town of Rafah, at the start of what was sup­posed to have been a pause in the fight­ing.

As the death toll mount­ed Sat­ur­day to more than 1,650 Pales­tini­ans, many of them women and chil­dren, and im­ages of homes, mosques and schools smashed in­to rub­ble filled the me­dia, Mr. Ne­tanyahu was un­der con­sid­er­able in­ter­na­tion­al pres­sure, from Wash­ing­ton and Eu­rope, to end the con­flict. The Unit­ed Na­tions warned of “an un­fold­ing health dis­as­ter” in Gaza with lit­tle elec­tric­i­ty, bad wa­ter and a lack of med­ical sup­plies.

At the same time, Mr. Ne­tanyahu was un­der po­lit­i­cal pres­sure at home to de­liv­er on his promis­es to crush.

Hamas, par­tic­u­lar­ly with 64 Is­raeli sol­diers dead. He in­sist­ed Sat­ur­day that Hamas had been se­vere­ly hurt and he warned that it would pay “an in­tol­er­a­ble price” if it con­tin­ues to fire rock­ets at Is­rael.

His for­mer deputy de­fense min­is­ter, Dan­ny Danon,who was fired by Mr. Ne­tanyahu for pub­lic crit­i­cism of the gov­ern­ment, said in a state­ment Sat­ur­day that “the cab­i­net is grave­ly mis­tak­en in its de­ci­sion to with­draw forces from Gaza. This is a step in the wrong di­rec­tion.”

But Mr. Ne­tanyahu, in a na­tion­al­ly tele­vised speech with his de­fense min­is­ter be­side him, in­sist­ed that Is­rael was achiev­ing its goals and could al­ter its tac­tics. “We promised to re­turn the qui­et to Is­rael’s cit­i­zens, and we will con­tin­ue to act un­til that aim is achieved,” Mr. Ne­tanyahu said. “We will take as much time as nec­es­sary, and will ex­ert as much force as need­ed.”

Is­rael was not end­ing its op­er­a­tion uni­lat­er­al­ly, he said, adding: “We will de­ploy in the places most con­ve­nient to us to re­duce fric­tion on I.D.F. sol­diers, be­cause we care about them.” There were Is­raeli tele­vi­sion re­ports on Sat­ur­day that some Is­rael De­fense Forces troops were pulling out of Gaza, and Is­rael in­formed Pales­tini­ans in Beit Lahiya and al-Ata­tra, in north­ern Gaza, that it was now safe to re­turn to their homes. Is­raeli of­fi­cials have said that the army’s ef­fort to de­stroy the elab­o­rate tun­nel sys­tem from Gaza in­to Is­rael would be fin­ished in the next day or two.

Is­raeli of­fi­cials sug­gest­ed that the army would leave built-up ar­eas and some forces would re­de­ploy in­side Gaza, clos­er to the bor­der fence, to re­spond to at­tacks if nec­es­sary. Oth­er units will re­turn to south­ern Is­rael.

Hamas, for its part, vowed to con­tin­ue fight­ing. Sa­mi Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, told the news agency Maan that “a uni­lat­er­al with­draw­al or re­de­ploy­ment by Is­rael in the Strip will be an­swered by a fit­ting re­sponse by the Hamas mil­i­tary arm.” He said that “the forces of oc­cu­pa­tion must choose be­tween re­main­ing in Gaza and pay­ing the price or re­treat­ing and pay­ing the price or hold­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions and pay­ing the price.”

Mr. Ne­tanyahu thanked the Unit­ed States, which along with the Unit­ed Na­tions ap­peared to sup­port Is­rael’s po­si­tion that Hamas’s ac­tions vi­o­lat­ed the cease-fire, and he asked for in­ter­na­tion­al help to re­build Gaza on the con­di­tion of its “de­mil­i­ta­riza­tion.” Is­rael ap­pears to be hop­ing that with the sup­port of Egypt and the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ab­bas of the Pales­tin­ian Au­thor­i­ty can con­trol Gaza through a uni­ty gov­ern­ment agreed up­on with Hamas and take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for se­cu­ri­ty there and for the Rafah cross­ing to Egypt.

Mr. Ne­tanyahu re­peat­ed that his goal was to re­store “peace and calm” to Is­rael and that he in­tend­ed to do so by what­ev­er means — diplo­mat­i­cal­ly or mil­i­tar­i­ly. “All op­tions are on the ta­ble,” he said. But he in­di­cat­ed that Is­rael would not get caught up again in talk about a ne­go­ti­at­ed cease-fire with Hamas and Is­lam­ic Ji­had and would act in its own in­ter­ests, while seek­ing sup­port from Mr. Ab­bas and the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty for what Mr. Ne­tanyahu de­scribed vague­ly as “a new re­al­i­ty” in Gaza.

Is­rael has de­cid­ed not to send a del­e­ga­tion to cease-fire talks host­ed by Egypt, at least not now, Is­raeli of­fi­cials said. In Wash­ing­ton, Jen Psa­ki, a State De­part­ment

spokes­woman, said: “In the end, this par­tic­u­lar­ly bloody chap­ter will ul­ti­mate­ly re­quire a durable so­lu­tion so that all the fun­da­men­tal is­sues, in­clud­ing Is­rael’s se­cu­ri­ty, can be ne­go­ti­at­ed, and we will keep work­ing with Is­rael and oth­er part­ners to achieve that goal.” She said that Is­rael had a right to de­fend it­self.

Hours be­fore the mil­i­tary an­nounced that Lieu­tenant Goldin had died, his par­ents called on the prime min­is­ter and the army not to leave their son be­hind.

The cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing his death re­mained cloudy. A mil­i­tary spokes­woman de­clined to say whether Lieu­tenant Goldin had been killed along with two com­rades by a sui­cide bomb one of the mil­i­tants ex­plod­ed, or lat­er by Is­rael’s as­sault on the area to hunt for him; she al­so re­fused to an­swer whether his re­mains had been re­cov­ered.

As word spread on Sat­ur­day that Is­rael’s lead­ers were con­sid­er­ing pulling all ground forces from Gaza, Lieu­tenant Goldin’s fam­i­ly spoke to jour­nal­ists out­side their home in Kfar Sa­ba, a Tel Aviv sub­urb. “I de­mand that the state of Is­rael not leave Gaza un­til they bring my son back home,” said his moth­er, Hed­va. His sis­ter, Ayelet, 35, added, “If a cap­tive sol­dier is left in Gaza, it’s a de­feat.”

The fam­i­ly said they were con­vinced that Lieu­tenant Goldin was alive.

“I hope and be­lieve in hu­man kind­ness, that the world will do any­thing to bring Hadar with a smile back home,” his broth­er Che­mi, 32, said in an in­ter­view.

When his moth­er called him on Fri­day, Che­mi said, he

knew some­thing ter­ri­ble had hap­pened, but did not know whether it in­volved Lieu­tenant Goldin or his twin, Tzur, who was al­so fight­ing in Gaza. Che­mi said the twins, who at­tend­ed kinder­garten in Cam­bridge, Eng­land, did not talk much about their mil­i­tary ser­vice. In Gaza, the armed wing of Hamas said ear­ly Sat­ur­day that it was not hold­ing the Is­raeli of­fi­cer. The Qas­sam Brigades sug­gest­ed in a state­ment that the of­fi­cer might have been killed along with his cap­tors in an Is­raeli as­sault that fol­lowed a sui­cide-bomb at­tack by Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tants, who emerged from a tun­nel that Is­raeli troops were try­ing to de­stroy near Rafah.

“Un­til now, we have no idea about the dis­ap­pear­ance of the Is­raeli sol­dier,” the state­ment said. Say­ing the lead­er­ship had lost touch with its “troops de­ployed in the am­bush,” the state­ment added, “Our ac­count is that the sol­dier could have been kid­napped and killed to­geth­er with our fight­ers.”

The Is­raeli Army con­tin­ued to pound Rafah in its search for Lieu­tenant Goldin, strik­ing more than 200 tar­gets across Gaza in the 24 hours since the Rafah con­fronta­tion, in­clud­ing what it de­scribed as a “re­search and de­vel­op­ment” lab for weapons man­u­fac­tur­ing at the Is­lam­ic Uni­ver­si­ty, run by Hamas. Five mosques that the mil­i­tary said con­cealed weapons or Hamas out­posts were al­so hit, the Is­raelis said.

Around noon, a bar­rage of rock­ets flew in­to south­ern Is­rael.

The Gaza-based health min­istry, which had re­port­ed 70 peo­ple killed in Rafah on Fri­day, said the ca­su­al­ties had con­tin­ued there overnight, in­clud­ing sev­en mem­bers of one fam­i­ly who died when their home was bombed.

 

BY STEVEN ERLANGER AND JODI RUDOREN (New York Times), August 3, 2014

Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem, and Jodi Rudoren from Kfar Saba, Israel. Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza City, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

 

Graphic Humor 238 (Israel-Gaza-USA)

This section of Graphic Humor in political-economic, national or international issues, are very ingenious in describing what happened, is happening or will happen. It also extends to various other local issues or passing around the world. There are also other non-political humor that ranges from reflective or just to get us a smile when we see them. Anyone with basic education and to stay informed of important news happening in our local and global world may understand and enjoy them. Farewell!. (CTsT)

 

Israeli ‘leftist’ singer cancels show after threats

Singer-songwriter Rona Kenan panned by right-wing extremists after expressing sympathy for Gazan children

An Israeli singer-songwriter canceled her show in Haifa Thursday after she was harshly criticized and threatened by right-wing Israelis who accused her of showing solidarity with the mothers of dead terrorists.

Rona Kenan announced that her acoustic show in Haifa’s Turkish Market, which was scheduled to begin at 9 p.m., would not take place due to what she described as incitement against her.

Kenan said she had been “subjected to severe verbal attacks and threats over a false report” that during a conference with Palestinian women, she had observed a moment of silence in solidarity with Palestinian “martyrs.”

She said that while she had sung two songs at the conference, she had not observed a moment of silence. But this week, right-wing extremists raised the accusations again in comments on Kenan’s Facebook page after she expressed sympathy for the children of Gaza and called for an end to war between Israel and Hamas.

The onslaught began after Kenan posted a message on July 11, three days into the Gaza war, reproaching Israeli society and the Israeli press over their reaction to the offensive in Gaza, which she described as “one of the saddest places in the world.”

Kenan expressed sympathy for the children of both Sderot and Gaza, saying it “fills her with despair” to think that they “wet their beds at night out of fear and will grow up to see each other not as human beings, but as children of the devil.”

Kenan said she was “left speechless” by the knowledge that “any objections to the war, which Israel named Operation Protective Edge, was perceived in Israeli society as treason, as a lack of solidarity.” She ended her post with a prayer for quiet both in Israel and the Gaza Strip.

While many fans echoed Kenan’s sentiments, others criticized her for overlooking the threat posed by Hamas and Iranian-funded terror groups, as well as the suffering of residents of southern Israel and the risks IDF soldiers were taking to ensure Israel’s security. Some urged her to blame Hamas, not Israel, for the plight of the children of Gaza. Yet others said the children were themselves future terrorists, with one poster saying she had thought Kenan was “smarter than that” and another calling her “hypocritical, self-righteous filth.”

One poster wrote, “I’ve never responded to people like you, but to observe a moment of silence for martyrs with whom we are engaged in combat on a daily basis? For shame, and we even provide her livelihood. With people like you among us, we don’t need enemies.”

After the Haifa show was canceled, one Facebook user suggested, “Why don’t you volunteer to sing in Gaza? I think you will find a stage to sing on there without being subjected to criticism. You’re so stupid to voice criticism in wartime.”

The Thursday evening show will still take place, but will be headlined by singer-songwriter Shai Gabso rather than Kenan.

Kenan, the daughter of Lehi underground member, sculptor and journalist Amos Kenan and author and literary scholar Nurith Gertz, has released four albums so far, to critical acclaim.

 

* BY YIFA YAAKOV,  July 31, 2014

 

Graphic Humor 236

This section of Graphic Humor in political-economic, national or international issues, are very ingenious in describing what happened, is happening or will happen. It also extends to various other local issues or passing around the world. There are also other non-political humor that ranges from reflective or just to get us a smile when we see them. Anyone with basic education and to stay informed of important news happening in our local and global world may understand and enjoy them. Farewell!. (CTsT)

 

‘I want my father, bring me my father’

A photo of a desperate young Palestinian boy, badly wounded and screaming for his father as he clutches at the shirt of a paramedic in a hospital, has captured the tragic and bloody tension of the Gazan conflict.

Shirtless and with cuts to his face, torso, arms and legs, the child clings to the hospital worker who is attempting to lay him flat on a girdle.

The Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian publication, reports the photo, taken at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City last Thursday, was captioned with the boy’s desperate cry: ‘I want my father, bring me my father’, according to Fairfax.

The Palestinian paper claims the young boy was one of four siblings brought to the hospital wounded, two of them just three years old.

 

It comes as grinning Israeli tank commanders were pictured flashing the victory signs as they blast their way through Gaza in the bloodiest day of the offensive so far – as one resident of the troubled region said: ‘The gate of hell has opened.’

At least 65 people have been killed since this yesterday’s dawn strike on Gaza City’s Shijaiyah neighbourhood – including the son, daughter-in-law and two small grandchildren of a senior Hamas leader.

Hamas says it has captured an Israeli soldier – a scenario that has proven to be fraught with difficulties for the country in the past – but Israel’s U.N. Ambassador has denied the claims.

The neighbourhood has come under heavy tank fire as Israel widened its ground offensive against Hamas, causing hundreds of residents to flee.

The dead and wounded – including dozens of women and children – have reportedly been left in streets, with ambulances unable to approach.

Source: (July 21, 2014)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2699772/This-desperate-little-boy-face-tragedy-Palestinian-toddler-clutches-shirt-hospital-worker-screaming-I-want-father-bring-father.html?ito=social-facebook

 

US states with higher minimum wages gain more jobs

WASHINGTON (AP) – Maybe a higher minimum wage isn’t so bad for job growth after all.

The 13 U.S. states that raised their minimum wages at the beginning of this year are adding jobs at a faster pace than those that did not, providing some counter-intuitive fuel to the debate over what impact a higher minimum has on hiring trends.

Many business groups argue that raising the minimum wage discourages job growth by increasing the cost of hiring. A Congressional Budget Office report earlier this year lent some support for that view. It found that a minimum wage of $10.10 an hour, as President Obama supports, could cost 500,000 jobs nationwide.

But the state-by-state hiring data, released Friday by the Labor Department, provides ammunition to those who disagree. Economists who support a higher minimum say the figures are encouraging, though they acknowledge they don’t establish a cause and effect. There are many possible reasons hiring might accelerate in a particular state.

“It raises serious questions about the claims that a raise in the minimum wage is a jobs disaster,” said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. The job data “isn’t definitive,” he added, but is “probably a reasonable first cut at what’s going on.”

Just last week, Obama cited the better performance by the 13 states in support of his proposal for boosting the minimum wage nationwide.

“When … you raise the minimum wage, you give a bigger chance to folks who are climbing the ladder, working hard…. And the whole economy does better, including businesses,” Obama said in Denver.

In the 13 states that boosted their minimums at the beginning of the year, the number of jobs grew an average of 0.85 percent from January through June. The average for the other 37 states was 0.61 percent.

Nine of the 13 states increased their minimum wages automatically in line with inflation: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. Four more states – Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island – approved legislation mandating the increases.

Twelve of those states have seen job growth this year, while employment in Vermont has been flat. The number of jobs in Florida has risen 1.6 percent this year, the most of the 13 states with higher minimums. Its minimum rose to $7.93 an hour from $7.79 last year.

Some economists argue that six months of data isn’t enough to draw conclusions.

“It’s too early to tell,” said Stan Veuger, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “These states are very different along all kinds of dimensions.”

For example, the number of jobs in North Dakota – which didn’t raise the minimum wage and has prospered because of a boom in oil and gas drilling – rose 2.8 percent since the start of this year, the most of any state.

But job growth in the aging industrial state of Ohio was just 0.7 percent after its minimum rose to $7.95 from $7.85. The federal minimum wage is $7.25.

Veuger, one of the 500 economists who signed a letter in March opposed to an increase in the federal minimum, said the higher wages should over time cause employers to hire fewer workers. They may also replace them with new technologies.

The Congressional Budget Office cited those factors in its February report. But in addition to job losses, the CBO also said a higher minimum could boost paychecks for another 16.5 million workers.

Sylvia Allegretto, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said that research comparing counties in states that raised their minimums with neighboring counties in states that did not has found no negative impact on employment.

Restaurants and other low-wage employers may have other ways of offsetting the cost of higher wages, aside from cutting back on hiring, she said. Higher pay can reduce staff turnover and save on hiring and training costs.

State and local governments have become increasingly active on the issue as the federal minimum wage has remained unchanged for five years. Twenty-two states currently have higher minimums than the federal requirement.

And 38 states have considered minimum wage legislation this year, the most on record, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. At least 16 will boost their minimums starting next year, the NCSL says.

____

AP Economics Writer Josh Boak contributed to this report, July 19, 2014

 

Faith-Based Fanatics

He’s had a busy summer. As God only knows, he was summoned to slaughter in the Holy Land, asked to end the killings of Muslims by Buddhist monks in Myanmar, and played both sides again in the 1,400-year-old dispute over the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad.

In between, not much down time. Yes, the World Cup was fun, and God chose to mess with His Holinesses, pitting the team from Pope Francis’s Argentina against Germany, home of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Well played, even if the better pope lost.

At least Rick Perry was not his usual time-suck. The governor proclaimed three days of prayer to end the Texas drought in 2011, saying, “I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this.’ ” The drought got worse. Two years ago, Perry said that God had not “changed his mind” about same-sex marriage. But the states have. Since Perry became a spokesman for the deity, the map of legalized gay marriage in America has expanded by 50 percent.

Still, these are pillow feathers in a world weighted down with misery. God is on a rampage in 2014, a bit like the Old Testament scourge who gave direct instructions to people to kill one another.

It’s not true that all wars are fought in the name of religion, as some atheists assert. Of 1,723 armed conflicts documented in the three-volume “Encyclopedia of Wars,” only 123, or less than 7 percent, involved a religious cause. Hitler’s genocide, Stalin’s bloody purges and Pol Pot’s mass murders certainly make the case that state-sanctioned killings do not need the invocation of a higher power to succeed.

But this year, the ancient struggle of My God versus Your God is at the root of dozens of atrocities, giving pause to the optimists among us (myself included) who believe that while the arc of enlightenment is long, it still bends toward the better.

In the name of God and hate, Sunnis are killing Shiites in Iraq, and vice versa. A jihadist militia, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, boasts of beheading other Muslims while ordering women to essentially live in caves, faces covered, minds closed. The two sides of a single faith have been sorting it out in that blood-caked land, with long periods of peace, since the year 632. Don’t expect it to end soon. A majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are peaceful, but a Pew Survey found that 40 percent of Sunnis do not think Shiites are proper Muslims.

Elsewhere, a handful of failed states are seeing carnage over some variant of the seventh-century dispute. And the rage that moved Hamas to lob rockets on birthday parties in Tel Aviv, and Israelis to kill children playing soccer on the beach in Gaza, has its roots in the spiritual superiority of extremists on both sides.

The most horrific of the religion-inspired zealots may be Boko Haram in Nigeria. As is well known thanks to a feel-good and largely useless Twitter campaign, 250 girls were kidnapped by these gangsters for the crime of attending school. Boko Haram’s God tells them to sell the girls into slavery.

The current intra-religious fights are not to be confused with people who fly airplanes into buildings, or shoot up innocents while shouting “God is great.” But those killers most assuredly believed that their reward for murder is heaven.

“It’s not true that all wars are fought in the name of religion, as some atheists assert.”Which atheists assert that? I’ve certainly never…

Of late, God has taken a long break from Ireland, such a small country for such a big fight between worshipers under the same cross. There, the animus is not so much theological as it is historical. If the curious Muslim is wondering why Protestants and Catholics can’t just get along on that lovely island, take a look at the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, when about 20 percent of the population of present-day Germany fell to clashes between the two branches of Christianity.
Violent Buddhist mobs (yes, it sounds oxymoronic) are responsible for a spate of recent attacks against Muslims in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, leaving more than 200 dead and close to 150,000 homeless. The clashes prompted the Dalai Lama to make an urgent appeal to end the bloodshed. “Buddha preaches love and compassion,” he said.

And so do Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The problem is that people of faith often become fanatics of faith. Reason and force are useless against aspiring martyrs.

In the United States, God is on the currency. By brilliant design, though, he is not mentioned in the Constitution. The founders were explicit: This country would never formally align God with one political party, or allow someone to use religion to ignore civil laws. At least that was the intent. In this summer of the violent God, five justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel otherwise.

 

* Timothy Egan, NYT, July 18, 2014

 

Graphic Humor 230

This section of Graphic Humor in political-economic, national or international issues, are very ingenious in describing what happened, is happening or will happen. It also extends to various other local issues or passing around the world. There are also other non-political humor that ranges from reflective or just to get us a smile when we see them. Anyone with basic education and to stay informed of important news happening in our local and global world may understand and enjoy them.

Farewell!. (CTsT)

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South Africa’s Nelson Mandela dies in Johannesburg

South Africa’s first black president and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela has died at the age of 95.

Mr Mandela led South Africa’s transition from white-minority rule in the 1990s, after 27 years in prison for his political activities.

He had been receiving intensive medical care at home for a lung infection after spending three months in hospital.

Announcing the news on South African national TV, President Jacob Zuma said Mr Mandela was at peace.

“Our nation has lost its greatest son,” Mr Zuma said.

“Although we knew that this day would come, nothing can diminish our sense of a profound and enduring loss.”

Mr Zuma said Mr Mandela – who is known affectionately by his clan name, Madiba – had died shortly before 21:00 local time (19:00 GMT). He said he would receive a full state funeral, and flags would be flown at half-mast.

Crowds have gathered outside the house where Mr Mandela died, some flying South African flags and wearing the shirts of the governing African National Congress, which Mr Mandela once led.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was one of the world’s most revered statesmen after preaching reconciliation despite being imprisoned for 27 years.

He had rarely been seen in public since officially retiring in 2004. He made his last public appearance in 2010, at the football World Cup in South Africa.

His fellow campaigner against apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said he was “not only an amazing gift to humankind, he made South Africans and Africans feel good about being who we are. He made us walk tall. God be praised.”

BBC correspondents say Mr Mandela’s body will be moved to a mortuary in the capital, Pretoria, and the funeral is likely to take place next Saturday.

‘Bid him farewell’

Mr Zuma said in his statement that “what made Nelson Mandela great was precisely what made him human. We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.

“Fellow South Africans, Nelson Mandela brought us together and it is together that we will bid him farewell.”

Tributes have come in from around the world. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he was “a giant for justice and a down-to-earth human inspiration”.

“Many around the world were greatly influenced by his selfless struggle for human dignity, equality and freedom. He touched our lives in deeply personal ways.”

US President Barack Obama said Mr Mandela achieved more than could be expected of any man.

“He no longer belongs to us – he belongs to the ages,” he said, adding that Mr Mandela “took history in his hands and bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice”.

Mr Obama, the first black president of the United States, said he was one of the millions who drew inspiration from Mr Mandela’s life. He has ordered that the White House flag be flown at half-mast.

FW de Klerk, who as South Africa’s last white president ordered Mr Mandela’s release, called him a “unifier” and said he had “a remarkable lack of bitterness”.

He told the BBC Mr Mandela’s greatest legacy “is that we are basically at peace with each other notwithstanding our great diversity, that we will be taking hands once again now around his death and around our common sadness and mourning”.

The Elders – a group of global leaders set up by Mr Mandela to pursue peace and human rights – said they “join millions of people around the world who were inspired by his courage and touched by his compassion”.

The group’s chair, Kofi Annan, said the world had lost “a clear moral compass”.

“While I mourn the loss of one of Africa’s most distinguished leaders, Madiba’s legacy beckons us to follow his example to strive for human rights, reconciliation and justice for all.”

UK Prime Minister David Cameron said “a great light has gone out in the world”.

Earlier this year, Mr Mandela spent nearly three months in hospital with a recurring lung infection.

He was moved to his home in the Houghton suburb of Johannesburg in September, where he continued to receive intensive care.

Robben Island

Born in 1918, Nelson Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1943, as a law student.

He and other ANC leaders campaigned against apartheid. Initially he campaigned peacefully but in the 1960s the ANC began to advocate violence, and Mr Mandela was made the commander of its armed wing.

He was arrested for sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, serving most of his sentence on Robben Island.

It was forbidden to quote him or publish his photo, but he and other ANC leaders were able to smuggle out messages of guidance to the anti-apartheid movement.

He was released in 1990 as South Africa began to move away from strict racial segregation – a process completed by the first multi-racial elections in 1994.

Mr Mandela, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993 jointly with Mr de Klerk, was elected South Africa’s first black president. He served a single term, stepping down in 1999.

After leaving office, he became South Africa’s highest-profile ambassador, campaigning against HIV/Aids and helping to secure his country’s right to host the 2010 football World Cup.

He was also involved in peace negotiations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and other countries in Africa and elsewhere.

* Text by BBC, December 5, 2013

 

Fast Food Workers Walk Off The Job Across The Country

 Fast-food workers and labor organizers marched, waved signs and chanted in cities across the country on Thursday in a push for higher wages.

Organizers say employees planned to forgo work in 100 cities, with rallies set for another 100 cities. But by late afternoon, it was unclear what the actual turnout was or how many of the participants were workers. At targeted restaurants, the disruptions seemed minimal or temporary.

The protests are part of an effort that began about a year ago and is spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union, which has spent millions to bankroll local worker groups and organize publicity for the demonstrations. Protesters are calling for pay of $15 an hour, but the figure is seen more as a rallying point than a near-term possibility.

At a time when there’s growing national and international attention on economic disparities, advocacy groups and Democrats are hoping to build public support to raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25. That comes to about $15,000 a year for full-time work.

On Thursday, crowds gathered outside restaurants in cities including Boston, Lakewood, Calif., Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, N.C., where protesters walked into a Burger King but didn’t stop customers from getting their food.

In Detroit, about 50 demonstrators turned out for a pre-dawn rally in front of a McDonald’s. A few employees said they weren’t working but a manager and other employees kept the restaurant open.

Julius Waters, a 29-year-old McDonald’s maintenance worker who was among the protesters, said it’s hard making ends meet on his wage of $7.40 an hour.

“I need a better wage for myself, because, right now, I’m relying on aid, and $7.40 is not able to help me maintain taking care of my son. I’m a single parent,” Waters said.

In New York City, about 100 protesters blew whistles and beat drums while marching into a McDonald’s at around 6:30 a.m.; one startled customer grabbed his food and fled as they flooded the restaurant, while another didn’t look up from eating and reading amid their chants of “We can’t survive on $7.25!”

Community leaders took turns giving speeches for about 15 minutes until police arrived and ordered protesters out of the store. The crowd continued to demonstrate outside for about 45 minutes.

Later in the day, about 50 protesters rallied outside a Wendy’s in Brooklyn. Channon Wetstone, a 44-year-old attorney ended up going to a nearby Burger King because of the protests.

She said that fast-food employees work very hard. When asked if she’d be willing to pay more for food so they could earn more, she said it would depend on what she was ordering.

“I would say 50 cents, 75 cents more,” Wetstone said.

The push for higher pay in fast food faces an uphill battle. The industry competes aggressively on being able to offer low-cost meals and companies have warned that they would need to raise prices if wages were hiked.

Fast-food workers have also historically been seen as difficult to unionize, given the industry’s high turnover rates. But the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than 2 million workers in health care, janitorial and other industries, has helped put their wages in the spotlight.

Berlin Rosen, a political consulting and public relations firm based in New York City, is coordinating communications efforts and connecting organizers with media outlets. The firm says its clients are the coalitions in each city, such as Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15. Those groups were established with the help of the SEIU, which is also listed on Berlin Rosen’s website as a client.

The National Restaurant Association, an industry lobbying group, said most protesters were union workers and that “relatively few” restaurant employees have participated in past actions. It called the demonstrations a “campaign engineered by national labor groups.”

McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Yum Brands, which owns KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, said in statements that their restaurants create work opportunities and provide training and the ability to advance. Burger King reissued its statement on past protests, saying its restaurants have provided an entry point into the workforce for millions of Americans.

In the meantime, the protests are getting some high-powered support from the White House. In an economic policy speech Wednesday, President Barack Obama mentioned fast-food and retail workers “who work their tails off and are still living at or barely above poverty” in his call for raising the federal minimum wage.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has promised a vote on the wage hike by the end of the year. But the measure is not expected to gain traction in the House, where Republican leaders oppose it.

Supporters of wage hikes have been more successful at the state and local level. California, Connecticut and Rhode Island raised their minimum wages this year. Last month, voters in New Jersey approved an increase in the minimum to $8.25 an hour, up from $7.25 an hour.

___

AP  |  By By CANDICE CHOI and SAM HANANELPosted: 12/05/2013

AP Writer Mike Householder contributed from Detroit, AP videographer Johnny Clark contributed from Atlanta and AP Video Journalist Ted Shaffrey contributed from New York, AP Writer Mitch Weiss from Charlotte, N.C.

 

OBAMA: NUCLEAR DEAL BLOCKS IRAN’S PATH TO BOMB

 Iran struck a historic deal Sunday with the United States and five other world powers, agreeing to a temporary freeze of its nuclear program in the most significant agreement between Washington and Tehran in more than three decades of estrangement.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani endorsed the agreement, which commits Iran to curb its nuclear activities for six months in exchange for limited and gradual sanctions relief, including access to $4.2 billion from oil sales. The six-month period will give diplomats time to negotiate a more sweeping agreement.

It builds on the momentum of the public dialogue opened during September’s annual U.N. gathering, which included a 15-minute phone conversation between President Barack Obama and moderate-leaning Rouhani, who was elected in June.

The package includes freezing Iran’s ability to enrich uranium at a maximum 5 percent level, which is well below the threshold for weapons-grade material and is aimed at easing Western concerns that Tehran could one day seek nuclear arms.

Obama hailed the pact’s provisions, which include curbs on Iran’s enrichment and other projects that could be used to make nuclear arms, as key to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear threat.

“Simply put, they cut off Iran’s most likely paths to a bomb,” he told reporters in Washington.

For Iran, keeping the enrichment program active was a critical goal. Iran’s leaders view the country’s ability to make nuclear fuel as a source of national pride and an essential part of its insistence at nuclear self-sufficiency.

Giving up too much on the enrichment program would have likely brought a storm of protest by Iranian hard-liners, who were already uneasy over the marathon nuclear talks and Rouhani’s outreach to Washington.

In a nationally broadcast speech, Rouhani said the accord recognizes Iran’s “nuclear rights” even if that precise language was kept from the final document because of Western resistance.

“No matter what interpretations are given, Iran’s right to enrichment has been recognized,” said Rouhani, who later posed with family members of nuclear scientists killed in slayings in recent years that Iran has blamed on Israel and allies.

Saying “trust is a two-way street,” Rouhani insisted that talks on a comprehensive agreement should start immediately.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who led his country’s delegation, called on both sides to see the agreement as an “opportunity to end an unnecessary crisis and open new horizons.”

But initial reaction in Israel was strongly negative. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the deal, a “historic mistake.”

Speaking to his Cabinet, Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel is not bound by the deal and reserves the right to defend itself. That is a reference to possible military action against Iran.

Netanyahu has said the international community is giving up too much to Iran, which it believes will retain the ability to produce a nuclear weapon and threaten Israel.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who joined the final negotiations along with the foreign ministers of Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany, said the pact will make U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Israel, safer reducing the threat of war.

“Agreement in Geneva,” he tweeted. “First step makes world safer. More work now.”

The deal marks a milestone between the two countries, which broke diplomatic ties 34 years ago when Iran’s Islamic revolution climaxed in the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Since then, relations between the two countries had been frigid to hostile.

Although the deal lowered tensions between the two countries, friction points remain — notably Iran’s support of the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. The United States also has said Iran supports terrorism throughout the region and commits widespread human rights violations.

The Geneva negotiations followed secret face-to-face talks between the U.S. and Iran over the past year, The Associated Press has learned. The discussions, held in the Persian Gulf nation of Oman and elsewhere, were kept hidden even from America’s closest allies, including its negotiating partners and Israel, until two months ago.

A White House statement said the deal limits Iran’s existing stockpiles of enriched uranium, which can be turned into the fissile core of nuclear arms.

The statement also said the accord curbs the number and capabilities of the centrifuges used to enrich and limits Iran ability to “produce weapons-grade plutonium” from a reactor in the advanced stages of construction.

The statement also said Iran’s nuclear program will be subject to “increased transparency and intrusive monitoring.”

“Taken together, these first step measures will help prevent Iran from using the cover of negotiations to continue advancing its nuclear program as we seek to negotiate a long-term, comprehensive solution that addresses all of the international community’s concerns,” said the statement.

Since it was revealed in 2003, Iran’s enrichment program has grown from a few dozen enriching centrifuges to more than 18,000 installed and more than 10,000 operating. The machines have produced tons of low-enriched uranium, which can be turned into weapons grade material.

Iran also has stockpiled almost 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of higher-enriched uranium in a form that can be converted more quickly to fissile warhead material than the low-enriched uranium. Its supply is nearly enough for one bomb.

In return for Iran’s nuclear curbs, the White House statement promised “limited, temporary, targeted, and reversible (sanctions) relief” to Iran, noting that “the key oil, banking, and financial sanctions architecture, remains in place.” And it said any limited sanctions relief will be revoked and new penalties enacted if Iran fails to meet its commitments.

Kerry said the relief offered would give Iran access to $4.2 billion from oil sales. Approximately $1.5 billion more would come from imports of gold and other precious metals, petrochemical exports and Iran’s auto sector, as well as easier access to “humanitarian transactions.”

“The core sanctions architecture … remains firmly in place through these six months, including with respect to oil and financial services,” Kerry said. He said those sanctions will result in more than $25 billion in lost oil revenues over six months.

Those conditions are being highlighted by the U.S. administration in its efforts to demonstrate that Iran is still in pain. The administration has urged Congress to hold off on any new sanctions and give the accord a chance to prove its worth.

But one influential member of Congress was quick to criticize the deal.

Rep. Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, expressed “serious concerns,” saying the United States was “relieving Iran of the sanctions pressure built up over years,” while allowing Tehran to “keep the key elements of its nuclear weapons-making capacity.”

Obama hailed the deal as putting “substantial limitations” on a nuclear program that the United States and its allies fear could be turned to nuclear weapons use.

“While today’s announcement is just a first step, it achieves a great deal,” Obama said. “For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program, and key parts of the program will be rolled back.”

Iran’s currency, the rial, got a small boost after news of the deal, strengthening to about 29,000 rials against the U.S. dollar, compared with about 29,950 in recent days.

 

By  John Heilprin and Jamey Keaten. Geneva/ AP, Nov.24, 2013

Associated Press writers George Jahn and Deb Riechmann in Geneva, Julie Pace in Washington, Robert H. Reid in Berlin and Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report. 

 

Mapping the World’s Most Popular Websites

Sure, it’s not all that surprising that Google and Facebook are the most visited websites in almost every country. But what’s more interesting is where they’re not. Using public data from the web traffic service Alexa, the Oxford Internet Institute’s Information Geographies blog has mapped the most popular websites by country (the colonial-style map above is entitled, “Age of Internet Empires”). And while researchers found that Google and Facebook reigned supreme among Internet users across the globe, there were some notable exceptions.

The al-Watan Voice newspaper, for instance, is the most visited site in the Palestinian territories, while a Russian email service, Mail.ru, dominates in Kazakhstan. Japan and Taiwan are Yahoo!’s last bastions, and in Russia the search engine Yandex tops the list. There are also blind spots in the survey; Alexa lacks information on countries with small Internet populations, including much of Sub-Saharan Africa.

China is a particularly interesting case: The Chinese search engine Baidu is the most visited website in the country, but its success may be engineered in part by the government. As the speculation goes — and some evidence suggests — Chinese officials have colluded with local business interests to limit Google’s share of the market in favor of Baidu and other companies (cases have been reported of Chinese users visiting Google, only to be mysteriously redirected to Baidu, though Baidu deniesthat the government is giving it a leg up on the competition). Today, Baidu controls around 80 percent of the Chinese search market and, according to Alexa data that the Oxford researchers question, recently became the market leader in South Korea as well (Google left mainland China in 2010, but still runs a Hong Kong-based portal). The countries below are sized based on the size of their Internet populations (click to expand the map):

But don’t doubt Google’s supremacy just yet. Not only is Google the top site in 62 countries of the 120 countries tracked, but the researchers note that “among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (currently owned by Google).”

It makes you wonder: Just what are the implications of so few companies controlling worldwide access to so much information?

 

Posted By Catherine A. Traywick (FP),Thursday, October 3, 2013

 

Mathematicians and Computer Scientists Shrug over the NSA Hacking

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has upset a great many people this year. Since June, newspapers have been using documents leaked by former intelligence worker Edward Snowden to show how the secretive but powerful agency has spied on the communications of US citizens and foreign governments. Last month, the media reported that the NSA, which is based in Fort Meade, Maryland, had undermined Internet security standards. The revelations have sparked international outrage at the highest levels — even the president of Brazil cancelled a visit to the United States because of the spying.

 

Yet amid the uproar, NSA-supported mathematicians and computer scientists have remained mostly quiet, to the growing frustration of others in similar fields. “Most have never met a funding source they do not like,” says Phillip Rogaway, a computer scientist at the University of California, Davis, who has sworn not to accept NSA funding and is critical of other researchers’ silence. “And most of us have little sense of social responsibility.”

Mathematicians and the NSA are certainly interdependent. The agency declares that it is the United States’ largest maths employer, and Samuel Rankin, director of the Washington DC office of the American Mathematical Society, estimates that the agency hires 30–40 mathematicians every year. The NSA routinely holds job fairs on university campuses, and academic researchers can work at the agency on sabbaticals. In 2013, the agency’s mathematical sciences programme offered more than US$3.3 million in research grants.

Furthermore, the NSA has designated more than 150 colleges and universities as centres of excellence, which qualifies students and faculty members for extra support. It can also fund research indirectly through other agencies, and so the total amount of support may be much higher. A leaked budget document says that the NSA spends more than $400 million a year on research and technology — although only a fraction of this money might go to research outside the agency itself.

 

Many US researchers, especially those towards the basic-research end of the spectrum, are comfortable with the NSA’s need for their expertise. Christopher Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, is among them. He previously had an NSA grant for basic research on controlling cold atoms, which can form the basis of the qubits of information in quantum computers. He notes that he is free to publish in the open literature, and he has no problems with the NSA research facilities in physical sciences, telecommunications and languages that sit on his campus. Monroe is sympathetic to the NSA’s need to track the develop­ment of quantum computers that could one day be used to crack codes beyond the ability of conventional machines. “I understand what’s in the newspapers,” he says, “but the NSA is funding serious long-term fundamental research and I’m happy they’re doing it.”

Dena Tsamitis, director of education, outreach and training at Carnegie Mellon University’s cybersecurity research centre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, also wants to maintain the relationship. She oversees visitors and recruiters from the NSA but her centre gets no direct funding. She says that her graduate students understand the NSA’s public surveillance to be “a policy decision, not a technology decision. Our students are most interested in the technology.” And the NSA, she says — echoing many other researchers — “has very interesting technology problems”.

 

The academics who are professionally uneasy with the NSA tend to lie on the applied end of the spectrum: they work on computer security and cryptography rather than pure mathematics and basic physics. Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, says that these researchers are unsettled in part because they are dependent on protocols developed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to govern most encrypted web traffic. When it was revealed that the NSA had inserted a ‘back door’ into the NIST standards to allow snooping, some of them felt betrayed. “We certainly had no idea that they were tampering with products or standards,” says Green. He is one of 47 technologists who on 4 October sent a letter to the director of a group created last month by US President Barack Obama to review NSA practices, protesting because the group does not include any independent technologists.

Edward Felten, who studies computer security at Princeton University in New Jersey, says that the NSA’s breach of security standards means that cryptographers will need to change what they call their threat model — the set of assumptions about possible attacks to guard against. Now the attacks might come from the home team. “There was a sense of certain lines that NSA wouldn’t cross,” says Felten, “and now we’re not so sure about that.”

 

* Ann Finkbeiner, Nature,  October 8, 2013

 

Rich People Just Care Less

Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them.

These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less — a distance that goes beyond the realm of interpersonal interactions and may exacerbate the soaring inequality in the United States.

A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.

Bringing the micropolitics of interpersonal attention to the understanding of social power, researchers are suggesting, has implications for public policy.

Of course, in any society, social power is relative; any of us may be higher or lower in a given interaction, and the research shows the effect still prevails. Though the more powerful pay less attention to us than we do to them, in other situations we are relatively higher on the totem pole of status — and we, too, tend to pay less attention to those a rung or two down.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.

Mr. Keltner suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.

While Mr. Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.

This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap. As political scientists have noted, redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,” a theme repeated by Vamik D. Volkan, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who was born in Cyprus to Turkish parents. Dr. Volkan remembers hearing as a small boy awful things about the hated Greek Cypriots — who, he points out, actually share many similarities with Turkish Cypriots. Yet for decades their modest-size island has been politically divided, which exacerbates the problem by letting prejudicial myths flourish.

In contrast, extensive interpersonal contact counteracts biases by letting people from hostile groups get to know one another as individuals and even friends. Thomas F. Pettigrew, a research professor of social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzed more than 500 studies on intergroup contact. Mr. Pettigrew, who was born in Virginia in 1931 and lived there until going to Harvard for graduate school, told me in an e-mail that it was the “the rampant racism in the Virginia of my childhood” that led him to study prejudice.

In his research, he found that even in areas where ethnic groups were in conflict and viewed one another through lenses of negative stereotypes, individuals who had close friends within the other group exhibited little or no such prejudice. They seemed to realize the many ways those demonized “others” were “just like me.” Whether such friendly social contact would overcome the divide between those with more and less social and economic power was not studied, but I suspect it would help.

Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century. This widening gulf between the haves and have-less troubles me, but not for the obvious reasons. Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes. Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.

 

* Text By  Daniel Goleman (NYT, Oct. 5, 2013)