$80 billion
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| — | The amount of money the U.S. spends a year to keep 2 million prisoners behind bars. Get the full story. (via centerforinvestigativereporting) |
Need to know:
More than 100 countries meet today in Parisin a bid to form a united front on the crisis in Syria.Russia and China won’t be among them.
Both countries have shunned the so-called Friends of Syria alliance, where the agenda is set by Western and Arab allies who want President Bashar al-Assad to leave power. Beijing and Moscow baulk at what they claim would be interference with another nation’s sovereignty, especially when talk turns to military intervention.
The absent Friends were in everyone’s mind, nonetheless: addressing today’s meeting, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded that Russia and China “get off the sidelines” and agree to a UN Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Syria’s government.
One unexpected addition to the guest list, however, is Syrian Brigadier General Manaf Tlas: the senior officer and long-time ally (friend?) of Assad reportedly fled Syria last night, and is said to be on his way to France.
Want to know:
George Zimmerman’s defense team is scrambling to raise the thousands of dollars they need to secure his release, after a judge yesterday set his bail at $1 million.His family doesn’t have “anywhere near” that sum, according to Zimmerman’s lawyer. His legal fund contains $211,000 for his entire defense, and donations to it have been slowing, the attorney said.
The man who shot Trayvon Martin has been in jail since last month, when the same judge revoked his bail after prosecutors said that Zimmerman and his wife lied to the court about their finances.
“By any definition, the defendant has flouted the system,” Judge Kenneth Lester ruled. “But for the requirement that he be placed on electronic monitoring, the defendant and his wife would have fled the United States with at least $130,000 of other people’s money.”
Dull but important:
Libyans vote tomorrow to elect a national assembly, their first free ballot in more than 40 years.The 200-member congress they elect will appoint an interim goverment and select a committee to write a constitution, which will then be submitted to voters in a referendum.
It’s the first, crucial step toward political stability in Libya – political stability that will, in turn, bring back foreign investment to the country’s most valuable natural resource, its oil. GlobalPost surveysthe prospects for the oil industry in a new Libya.
Just because:
Two former Argentinian dictators have been sentenced to jail for stealing babies.Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, who presided in turn over Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship, were found guilty of overseeing the systematic theft of children born to political prisoners. At least 400 babies are thought to have been taken from their parents and adopted by members of the regime, in an attempt to stamp out the opposition movement.
Bignone and Videla were sentenced to 15 and 50 years, respectively. The sentence all but guarantees they will die in prison: the two men, both in their 80s, are already serving lengthy jail terms for other crimes committed under their rule.
Strange but true:
Did A Farewell to Arms leave you vaguely unsatisfied? Would you have prefered it if they’d all – spoiler alert – lived happily ever after in their Alpine cabin?Well, it turns out Ernest Hemingway wasn’t entirely sure about the ending either. So not-entirely-sure, in fact, that he wrote it 47 times. Those 47 “what ifs” will be included in a new edition of the novel, to be published next week.
From what we can tell, they’re all pretty much variations on the “we’re all going to die” theme. But fingers crossed, there might be at least one version in which we do so in a full-scale alien invasion.
Autumn Colors In Kyoto
A man ferries tourists under maple trees on the Katsura river in Arashiyama on November 19, 2012 in Kyoto, Japan. Thousands of tourist come to enjoy the autumn colors of the maple leaves every year.
Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images
Rates of U.S. investment in new plants, technology, and research and development began declining during the 1970s, a fall-off that only accelerated in the gilded 1980s. Manufacturing, which accounted for nearly 30% of the economy after the Second World War, had dropped to just over 10% by 2011. Since the turn of the millennium alone, 3.5 million more manufacturing jobs have vanished and 42,000 manufacturing plants were shuttered.
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| — | Columbia University professor and top economic historian Steve Fraser on the fiscal cliff, “debtpocalypse,” Wall Street and the death of industrial America. (via nickturse) |
It is said, Lewis Lapham tells us, that Abbot John Trithemius of Sponheim, a fifteenth-century scholar and mage, devised a set of incantations to carry “messages instantaneously… through the agency of the stars and planets who rule time.” In 1962, Lapham adds, Bell Labs “converted the thought into Telstar, the communications satellite relaying data, from earth to heaven and back to earth, in less than six-tenths of a second.” Magic had become science. Today, the Pentagon is picking up the centuries old gauntlet, asking the brightest minds in academe — through its far-out research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA — to come up with a means for a 20-something-kid-cum-lieutenant or perhaps the military’s much-lauded “strategic corporal” to be wired into unprecedented amounts of information beamed down from the heavens above.
At some level, even the language of DARPA’s solicitation for its SeeMe program seems to conjure up the visions that danced in Trithemius’s head. Its goal, we are told, “is to provide useful on-demand imagery information directly to the lowest echelon warfighter in the field from a very low cost satellite constellation launched on a schedule that conforms to DoD [Department of Defense] operational tempos.” Those heavenly-sounding constellations are, however, tempered by the reality of what the Pentagon is really after.
Yesterday’s future of high-tech satellites that would allow our thoughts to slip “the surly bonds of Earth,” while connecting the far reaches of the planet and linking minds globally in ways even Trithemius couldn’t imagine, is now being exchanged for a low-bid, low-rent system of military satellites. These will be capable of allowing a kid just out of high school to more efficiently target a kid who probably never went to high school — all courtesy of a well-educated university scientist who never bothered to think of the implications of his tenure-producing, tax-payer-funded research. This can’t be what Trithemius had in mind. And yet, that’s where we’re at.
If the Pentagon has its way, SeeMe will eventually fill the skies with cheap, disposable “satellites at very low altitudes, networked to existing fielded communications systems and handheld platforms.” So much for the “the high untrespassed sanctity of space.” But let Lewis Lapham explore further the borderlands of science and magic that have somehow been fused into the very center of our lives. The famed former editor of Harper’s Magazine now edits Lapham’s Quarterly, which, four times a year, brilliantly unites some of the most provocative and original voices in history around a single topic. (You can subscribe to it by clicking here.) TomDispatch thanks the editors of that journal for allowing us to offer an exclusive online first look at Lapham’s elegant history of unreason in this techno-age of ours. To read it, click the link below
“The big threat is that if they arrest me, they will behead me from the back of the neck,” said Mawlawi Pir Mohammed Rohani, a former member of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“Any person who is working for peace is under threat from different sides, not only from one side,” he told GlobalPost’s Chris Sands.
![siddman:
Manhattanhenge Rises This Monday!: Gothamist
New Yorker’s favorite urban phenomenon is almost upon us—the first date for Manhattanhenge 2011 is happening this Monday. And it’s the perfect excuse to head into the abyss of Manhattan this Memorial Day weekend!
The visually stunning event occurs twice a year, when the sun sets in perfect alignment with Manhattan’s street grid—it will fully illuminate every single cross-street for the last 15 minutes of daylight. It will take place on Monday at 8:17 p.m. according to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. There will also be a half-sun effect on Tuesday at 8:25 p.m. The second date this year will take place on Monday, July 11 at 8:25 p.m., and there will be a half-sun on Tuesday July 12 at 8:25 p.m.
NY Daily News photographer John Taggert, gave some tips for Manhattanhenge enthusiasts who want to capture the event: “[Manhattanhenge] passes by very quickly, so you’ll want to set a high aperture of about 11, a shutter speed of 1/2500 of a second, and shoot the sun from an overpass…the sun is moving quickly; you have to keep shooting until it’s perfectly centered between the buildings.”
For newcomers to the event, he suggests you position yourself as far east in Manhattan as possible, while making sure when you look west across the avenues you can still see New Jersey. Ideal streets include 14th, 23rd, 34th. 42nd, and 57th.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llx36hyDFN1qz7ywso1_500.jpg)
Manhattanhenge Rises This Monday!: Gothamist
New Yorker’s favorite urban phenomenon is almost upon us—the first date for Manhattanhenge 2011 is happening this Monday. And it’s the perfect excuse to head into the abyss of Manhattan this Memorial Day weekend!
The visually stunning event occurs twice a year, when the sun sets in perfect alignment with Manhattan’s street grid—it will fully illuminate every single cross-street for the last 15 minutes of daylight. It will take place on Monday at 8:17 p.m. according to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. There will also be a half-sun effect on Tuesday at 8:25 p.m. The second date this year will take place on Monday, July 11 at 8:25 p.m., and there will be a half-sun on Tuesday July 12 at 8:25 p.m.
NY Daily News photographer John Taggert, gave some tips for Manhattanhenge enthusiasts who want to capture the event: “[Manhattanhenge] passes by very quickly, so you’ll want to set a high aperture of about 11, a shutter speed of 1/2500 of a second, and shoot the sun from an overpass…the sun is moving quickly; you have to keep shooting until it’s perfectly centered between the buildings.”
For newcomers to the event, he suggests you position yourself as far east in Manhattan as possible, while making sure when you look west across the avenues you can still see New Jersey. Ideal streets include 14th, 23rd, 34th. 42nd, and 57th.
Forty-five years ago today, March 16th, roughly 100 U.S. troops were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam. Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.
But that’s only a fraction of the story. For more on the unknown atrocities of Vietnam and beyond, please take a look at my new op-ed for The Daily Beast: “My Lai 45 Years Later—And the Unknown Atrocities of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan”
Forty-five years ago today, March 16th, roughly 100 U.S. troops were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam. Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.
But that’s only a fraction of the story. For more on the unknown atrocities of Vietnam and beyond, please take a look at my new op-ed for The Daily Beast: “My Lai 45 Years Later—And the Unknown Atrocities of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan”
Forty-five years ago today, March 16th, roughly 100 U.S. troops were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam. Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.
But that’s only a fraction of the story. For more on the unknown atrocities of Vietnam and beyond, please take a look at my new op-ed for The Daily Beast: “My Lai 45 Years Later—And the Unknown Atrocities of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan”
