Macron condemned the rise of nationalism in front of Trump and Putin, warning that 'old demons are reawakening'
PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron used an address to world leaders gathered in Paris for Armistice commemorations on Sunday to send a stern message about the dangers of nationalism, calling it a betrayal of moral values. With US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting just a few feet away listening to the speech via translation earpieces, Macron denounced those who evoke nationalist sentiment to disadvantage others. "Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism," Macron said in a 20-minute address delivered from under the Arc de Triomphe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One. "By pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others', we erase the very thing that a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and makes it great: its moral values." There was no immediate response from either the White House or the Kremlin to Macron's comments.
David Attenborough Netflix documentary: Australian scientists break down in tears over climate crisis
One of Australia’s leading coral reef scientists is seen breaking down in tears at the decline of the Great Barrier Reef during a new Sir David Attenborough documentary to be released globally on Friday evening. Prof Terry Hughes is recounting three coral bleaching monitoring missions in 2016, 2017 and 2020 when he says: “It’s a job I hoped I would never have to do because it’s actually very confronting …” before tears cut him short. The emotional scene comes during the new Netflix documentary, Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet, and shows the toll the demise of the planet’s natural places is having on some of the people who study them. The film visits scientists working on melting ice, the degradation of the Amazon, and the loss of biodiversity, and looks at a 2019/2020 “summer from hell” for Australia that featured unprecedented bushfires and the most widespread bleaching of corals ever recorded on the Great Barrier reef. “But it’s still deeply saddening,” he said.
From Circe to Clinton: why powerful women are cast as witches
During the 2016 US presidential election, American social media was flooded with images of Hillary Clinton wearing a black hat and riding a broom, or else cackling with green skin. Her opponents named her The Wicked Witch of the Left, claimed they had sources testifying that she smelled of sulphur, and took particular delight in depictions of her being melted. Given that the last witch trial in the US was more than 100 hundred years ago, what are we to make of this? In the late 19th century, the suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage asserted something revolutionary. The persecution of witches, she said, had nothing to do with fighting evil or resisting the devil.
'A torrent of ghastly revelations': what military service taught me about America
My first and only war tour took place in Afghanistan in 2010. I was a US Marine lieutenant then, a signals intelligence officer tasked with leading a platoon-size element of 80 to 90 men, spread across an area of operations the size of my home state of Connecticut, in the interception and exploitation of enemy communications. That was the official job description, anyway. The year-long reality consisted of a tangle of rearguard management and frontline supervision.
I grew up in an off-the-grid Christian commune. Here's what I know about America's religious beliefs
The only time I saw Brother Sam in person, he was marching like a soldier as he preached, with sweat running like tears from his temples and the Bible a heavy brick in his right hand. It was 1978, I was five, and my family had traveled to Lubbock, Texas, for a Body Convention, which was what we called the semi-annual gatherings of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of members of The Body, or Body of Christ, an expansive network of charismatic communities created almost singlehandedly by Brother Sam. My family lived on a Body Farm, a mostly off-grid outpost on the northern shore of Lake Superior, where I grew up singing, clapping, hollering and dancing in the Tabernacle aisles as shamelessly as King David. If this were a face-to-face conversation, you might stop me here, as many have. But, only a couple years ago, Franklin Graham, son of "America's Pastor," Billy Graham, declared any criticism of former president Donald Trump to be the work of demonic powers.
Social media is protecting men from periods, breast milk and body hair
There’s a predictable social media formula for what women’s pictures online should look like. Breasts in barely-there bikinis are good (thumbs-up emoji, even), but breasts with babies attached them are questionable. Women wearing next to nothing is commonplace, but if you’re over a size 10 your account may be banned. Close-up shots of women’s asses and hardly-covered vaginas are fine, so long as said body parts are hairless. And now, in a controversy that once again brings together technology, art, feminism and sex, Instagram is under fire for removing a self-portrait from artist Rupi Kaur that showed a small amount of her menstrual blood.
The Root of All Cruelty?
The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, commenting on this episode on social media, wondered whether its writer had read his book “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others” (St. Martin’s). It’s a thoughtful and exhaustive exploration of human cruelty, and the episode perfectly captures its core idea: that acts such as genocide happen when one fails to appreciate the humanity of others. One focus of Smith’s book is the attitudes of slave owners; the seventeenth-century missionary Morgan Godwyn observed that they believed the Negroes, “though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men” but, rather, “Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly.” Then there’s the Holocaust.
Pocket - Poor teeth click 2x
I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes. I grew up next to Tiffany ‘Pennsatucky’ Doggett, the hostile former drug addict from the prison TV drama Orange Is the New Black. I know her by her teeth. Pennsatucky – a scrappy slip of a woman menacing, beating and proselytising to fellow inmates – stole the show during the first season of the Netflix prison series.
The Strange Effects of Putting an Ordinary Woman Into Glamorous Images
In her book “The End of Love,” an analysis of how avoiding love has become a hallmark of contemporary relationships, the sociologist Eva Illouz writes that “the economic valuation of the female body was made possible by the fact that it was transformed into a tradable visual unit.” In the 20th century, she argues, sexual-liberation movements were subsumed into the consumer economy, and “new norms of attractiveness” — a “mixture of clothing styles, allure and bodily shape” — were codified into images that could be circulated with a value of their own, one independent of the identity or status of the women pictured. Social media has only normalized making a commodity-spectacle of oneself, dutifully reproducing “sexiness,” which Illouz defines as “the result of new ideologies of sexuality as a commodity form and of the self as image.”
John Oliver on Monty Python: 'inspirational idiots who changed comedy'
Writing about the importance of Monty Python is basically pointless. Citing them as an influence is almost redundant. It’s assumed. In fact, from now on it’s probably more efficient to say that comedy writers should have to explicitly state that they don’t owe a significant debt to Monty Python.
Can Religion Guide the Ethics of A.I.?
“Alexa, are we humans special among other living things?” One sunny day last June, I sat before my computer screen and posed this question to an Amazon device 800 miles away, in the Seattle home of an artificial intelligence researcher named Shanen Boettcher. At first, Alexa spit out a default, avoidant answer: “Sorry, I’m not sure.”
America colonisation ‘cooled Earth's climate’
Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, was not involved in the study. He commented: "Scientists understand that the so-called Little Ice Age was caused by several factors - a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, a series of large volcanic eruptions, changes in land use and a temporary decline in solar activity. Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, was not involved in the study.
