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By Nigel Young Following the funeral, the British radio waves are full of Amy Winehouse music. Those of us who learned as teenagers about great women blues and soul singers from listening to the voices of Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith, had no such contemporary singers of our own “Beatles” generation, white or black. The emergence of great new talents in this genre was something remarkable.

By Toril Moi Like other Norwegians I am in shock at the terrible events in Oslo and at Utøya on 22 July. My heart goes out to the victims and their families. I was not in Norway when the horror happened. On 22 July, I was giving a talk about Ibsen’s 1873 play Emperor and Galilean at the National Theatre in London. I only learned about the bombing in Oslo and the massacre at Utøya later that night. When I discovered that the terrorist in Norway saw himself as

By Elvin Lim America is the only country in the world that that has the luxury of creating an economic crisis when there isn't one. Ours is the only democracy with a debt ceiling, with the exception of Denmark, which raises its ceiling well in advance of when it would be reached. Economists say that our "debt crisis" is an unforced error, because people are more than willing to lend us money, at pretty good rates. This is the benefit of having a really good credit score.

Tweet BREAKING: The first videos from today’s explosion in Oslo The UN has officially declared a state of famine in Somalia, 10 million affected by drought What is the heat index, exactly? It was developed in 1978 by George Winterling and was originally called “humiture.” This man is the world’s foremost gnome collector COLOR pictures of WWII London How the [...]

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By F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk

 
After fighting each other for over a decade, the egg industry and the largest animal advocacy organization came to an agreement, one which will increase the welfare of egg-laying hens but also increase egg prices.  The United Egg Producers, under persistent pressure from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), has agreed to transition hens out of battery cages and into enriched colony cages.  The HSUS certainly believes the higher welfare standards are worth the increase in egg prices, but do consumers agree?  My research says that when consumers are informed about the issue, yes, they applaud the move—even when they know higher egg prices will follow.

Most consumers do not wish to see farm animals crammed into small cages, but if they take the time to discover the source of their pork and eggs, these cramped animal cages are what they will see.  Chickens raised for egg production are placed in groups of 4-6 birds and raised their entire lives inside a cage so small that they cannot turn around without bumping into another chicken.  Spreading their wings is out of the question.  Sows (female hogs used for breeding) are confined even tighter, spending most of their lives in a stall so small the sow cannot even turn around.  There are more farm animal welfare issues than just space allotments.  Both layers and sows desire to forage for food, scratch or dig, socialize, and find comfortable places to rest.  All of these “behavioral” needs are neglected in the typical egg and pork production facility.  By transitioning from battery cages to enriched colony cages, the egg industry goes a long way towards meeting these space and behavioral needs.

Why are animal cages used in the first place, when the average person finds them disturbing?  In the competitive marketplace for food, farmers must employ confined production facilities to keep their costs low, because consumers generally emphasize low prices over animal welfare at the grocery store.  Yet, at the same time, consumers who purchase food from so-called “factory farms” donate money to the HSUS, who uses some of this money to ban the same animal cages used to produce most eggs and pork.  In surveys, referendums, and economic research, consumers consistently support the banning of the same cramped animal cages used to produce the food they purchase.

One reason the farm animal welfare debate cannot be quickly resolved is that consumers have difficulty resolving the issue for themselves.  They want livestock to be treated kindly, but they also want low food prices, and it is difficult to reconcile the tradeoff between animal well-being and food prices in the grocery store and/or in referendums.  For these reasons, the farm animal welfare debate is a messy, contradictory debate—the trademark of a democratic process.

Although consumer attitudes can be elusive to identify, research has revealed a few facts.  The most important fact to stem from consumer research is that, when consumers are informed about how layers and sows are raised, they consistently state they are willing to pay the higher food prices that would result from better animal care.  This does not imply that regular grocery store shoppers will reflect this level of concern in their willingness-to-pay for food, because the regular grocery store shopper is uninformed. 

However, the farm animal welfare debate is largely a policy debate.  Should we ban colony cages for layers?  Should we ban gestation stalls for sows?  It would seem prudent to base policy on the opinions of informed consumers, as opposed to uninformed consumers.  When employing this prudent procedure, there is little doubt that the ban on cramped animal cages occurring in the European Union and US states is justifi

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By Peter Gill

International responsiveness to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa has relied again on the art of managing the headlines.  Sophisticated early warning systems that foresee the onset of famine have been in place for years, but still the world waits until it is very nearly too late before taking real action – and then paying for it.

The big aid organisations, official and non-government, are right to say they have been underlining the gravity of the present emergency for months, at least from the beginning of the year.   On June 7 FEWS NET (the Famine Early Warning Systems Network funded by USAID) declared that more than seven million in the Horn needed help and the ‘current humanitarian response is inadequate to prevent further deterioration.’ Two seasons of very poor rainfall had resulted ‘in one of the driest years since 1995.’   Still the world did not judge this to be the clarion call for decisive intervention.

Three weeks later, on June 28, OCHA (the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) said that more than nine million needed help and that the pastoral border zones of Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya were facing ‘one of the driest years since 1950/51.’  Six decades!   Two generations!  A story at last!  The media mountain moved, and the NGO fund-raisers marched on behind.

I have The Times of July 5 in front of me.  ‘Spectre of famine returns to Africa after the worst drought for decades,’ says the main headline in World news.  On page 11 there is a half-page appeal from Save the Children illustrated with a picture of a six-week old Kenyan called Ibrahim ‘facing starvation.’  On page 17 Oxfam has its own half page saying that ‘more than 12 million people have been hit by the worst drought in 60 years.’  The Times that day also carried a Peter Brookes cartoon of a hollow-faced African framed in the map of Africa, with his mouth opened wide for food.

So, for 2011, an image of Africa has again been fixed in the western consciousness. It is an image of suffering – worse, of an impotent dependence on outsiders – that most certainly exists, but is only part of the story, even in the Horn.

The western world may understand something of the four-way colonial carve-up and the post-colonial disaster that overtook the Somali homeland, but it certainly has no proper answers to the conflicts and dislocation that lead to starvation and death. In northern Kenya, to which so many thousands of Somali pastoralists have fled in recent months, the West does have an answer of sorts – it can feed people in the world’s largest refugee camp, in the thin expectation of better times back across the border. Then there is Ethiopia, with several million of its own people needing help, its own Somali population swollen by refugees, and the country for ever associated with the terrible famine of 25 years ago which launched the modern era of aid.

Here it is possible to make some predictions. There will be no widespread death from starvation in Ethiopia, not even in its own drought-affected Somali region where an insurgency promotes insecurity and displacement. New arrangements between the Ethiopian government and the UN’s World Food Programme have insured more reliable and equitable food distribution, and the Government presses on with schemes to settle pastoralists driven by persistently poor rains from their semi-nomadic lifestyles.

The government of Meles Zenawi, which has just marked 20 years in power, has on the whole a creditable record in response to the prospect of famine.In 2003/4 the country faced a far larger food crisis than it did it in 1984, but emerged from it with very few extra deaths. In the former famine lands of the North where there is an impressive commitment to grass-roots development there is almost no chance of a retu

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By Marko Milanovic

 
Last week the European Court of Human Rights produced a landmark decision in  Al-Skeini v. UK, a case dealing with the extraterritorial application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). What a mouthful of legalese this is, you might think – so let me try to clarify things a bit. The main purpose of human rights treaties like the ECHR is to require the states that sign up to them, say the UK, France or Turkey, to respect such things as the right to life and legal due process, and prohibit the torture, of people living within the UK, France or Turkey.

But what happens when the US detains foreigners on foreign soil (Guantanamo), or kills people in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan with unmanned drones, or a former Russian spy is poisoned in London ostensibly at the orders or with the collusion of the Kremlin? The question that then arises is whether all these individuals have rights under human rights treaties against the US, the UK or Russia, even though the alleged violations of their rights did not take place in the US, the UK or Russia.

This question might appear to be counterintuitive. Human rights are, after all, supposed to be universal—why should it matter whether a state violates a person’s rights by acting within its territory or outside it? At the legal level however it is a matter of treaty interpretation.  The scope of application of many major human rights treaties, including the ECHR, is defined by a very similar clause: the persons concerned must fall within the state’s jurisdiction for that person to be able to raise his or her rights against the state.

Courts both international and domestic have produced mounds of conflicting case law on how this is different from the state’s territory, with two main strands of decisions defining ‘jurisdiction’ either in spatial terms, as state control over territory, or in personal terms, as control over individuals, with a number of deviations from these two models in between. These contradictions flow partly from the vagueness of the legal concepts, but, also more importantly from conflicting policy considerations. On one hand, courts want to follow their human rights-friendly impulse and protect the individual affected by extraterritorial state action. On the other, courts fear political fallout, and therefore choose to unduly restrict the extraterritorial application of human rights instruments, often on seemingly completely arbitrary grounds.

The Al-Skeini case with which I started this post is a perfect example of this tension. It concerned six individuals, all killed by British troops in Basra, in UK-occupied southern Iraq. One of them, Baha Mousa, was killed while in custody in a British detention facility after much mistreatment. The five others were killed in varying circumstances by British troops on patrol. Some may even have been killed in justifiable or at least excusable circumstances, but their families wanted the UK to conduct an ECHR-compliant effective investigation into their killings. They thus brought proceedings before the UK courts under the Human Rights Act, claiming that the ECHR applied to the killing of their relatives in Iraq. The House of Lords (now rebranded as the UK Supreme Court) held that only Baha Mousa was protected by the ECHR, as his killing took place in a UK military prison, which (I kid you not) was somehow analogous to an embassy (more on that here). As for the other five, they were held not to have been within the UK’s jurisdiction as the ECHR could generally not apply outside the

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By Rana Mitter

This week, the foreign ministers of Japan and China shook hands in public in Beijing, pledging better relations in the years to come.  It was a reminder to westerners that we still don’t know nearly enough about the relationship between the world’s second and third biggest economies (Japan and China having recently switched places, so that Beijing now holds the no. 2 spot, riding hard on the heels of the US).  Relations between China and Japan have been rocky over the past few decades, with an incident over the arrest of the captain of a Chinese fishing vessel by the Japanese authorities causing ructions just last autumn.  And of course for many Chinese, the relationship is shaped by memories of the horrific war with Japan between 1937 and 1945 in which some 15 million Chinese died.  But China and Japan are also profoundly linked economically and culturally.  Japanese companies invest in China; Chinese goods flow into Japan.  And the two countries share aspects of culture, particularly writing systems and religious practice, that come from centuries of shared interaction.  In the twentieth century, Japan was the dominant member of the duo.  But as the century to come seems to be China’s , what does that mean for its closest neighbour, sometime enemy, and now wary partner?

The key player in this diplomatic minuet is the US, still, of course, the world’s biggest economy and a cultural powerhouse.  It may be in relative decline, but it looms large in every region of the world, including the Pacific.  And of course, the continuing security arrangements between the US and Japan are one of the factors that exercise minds in Beijing.  The Chinese see the Pacific as the site of a new regional hegemony: not territorial, but in terms of influence, both military and economic.  Having the United States, with its powerful naval presence, in the Pacific, is a constant reminder that there is a check on their ambitions in the region and that not everyone in that region welcomes every aspect of China’s “peaceful rise.”  And Japan is still a key US ally.  After World War II, Japan was disarmed precisely so that it could never again invade and occupy Asia.  But as a result, Japan’s defence was taken care of by the United States, leaving Japan free to grow its economy (remember, until the 1990s, “Asian economic miracle” meant Japan, not China).    Ironically, the China of today might have preferred it if China had been left to develop its own forces without US assistance in the postwar era, since it would be easier for Beijing to face down an independent military in Tokyo than to do so a force backed by Washington.  The rivalry is not just about arms: both China and Japan compete for influence in the region and beyond with foreign aid and investment.  So the mistrust remains – but also the realization that the relationship will inevitably change as China becomes richer and Japan becomes older (Japan is one of the faster-ageing societies in the world – although so will China be from the 2020s on, because the children of the one-child policy are getting older).

Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford and the author of Modern China: A Very Short Introduction and A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World. The Sino-Japanese relationship is just one area that will be explored at a forum

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This evening, Stephen Colbert will talk with Timothy Garton Ash, author of Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford, has written extensively on modern political history, notably covering Communism and the 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, and his syndicated writing continues to appear in The Guardian and the New York Review of Books. His book, just out in paperback, explores the “oughts”, “the thousands”—whatever colloquial phrase we’ve decided upon—applying his political acumen to the international issues and affairs of the last decade. From 9/11 to the Orange Revolution and various global statuses of Islam to the election of Barack Obama, there was a lot that just passed by us without a common name, even in an age of rising digital interconnectivity. Check it out tonight on Comedy Central.

This is a warning, folks. On June 30th at 7:00 PM a rugged band of children’s and YA authors will be gathering at the Barnes & Noble bookstore at Colonie Center in Colonie, NY.

That’s right, it’s time for the Summer Reading Kickoff Bookfair Spectacular . . . celebrating (wait for it) the Dolly Parton Imagination Library! Because when it comes to Dolly, the first two things anyone thinks of are reading and, erm, I forget the second thing.

So, hey, let’s put the focus on reading this summer. Bring your young readers to pick up their free Barnes & Noble Summer Reading Journal to earn a FREE BOOK and the chance to WIN A NOOK COLOR. Authors will be standing by — sitting, hopefully, on cushy chairs, under a tasteful arrangement of palm fronds — happy to autograph books. Any books.

Check out this list of authors I think will be there . . .

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Julia DeVillers * Aimee Ferris * Rose Kent * Jackie Morse Kessler

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Sarah Darer Littman * Eric Luper * James Preller * Jennifer Roy