The nightmare of India's tallest rubbish mountain


Sun, October 17, 2021

More than 16 million tonnes of rubbish make up Deonar's waste mountain

The "mountains of garbage" dotting India's cities will soon be replaced with waste treatment plants, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised earlier this month. Author Saumya Roy reports from the country's oldest and tallest mountain of rubbish - some 18 storeys high - in the western coastal city of Mumbai.

Every morning, Farha Shaikh stands on top of a more-than-a-century-old rubbish mountain in Mumbai, waiting for garbage trucks to make their way up.

The 19-year-old waste picker has been scavenging through these heaps in the Deonar suburb for as long as she can remember.


From the gloopy trash, she usually picks up plastic bottles, glass and wire to sell in the city's thriving waste markets. But most of all she looks out for broken mobile phones.

Every few weeks, Farha finds a "dead" mobile phone in the trash. She digs into her meagre savings and gets it repaired. Once it flickers to life, she spends her evenings watching films, playing video games, texting and calling friends.

When the phone stops working again days or weeks later, Farha's connection with the world outside snaps again. She is back to working long days, collecting the remains of the city to resell - and looking for another phone to restore.

The rubbish mountain in Mumbai's Deonar is 18 storeys high

More than 16 million tonnes of trash make up Deonar's rubbish mountains - eight of them spread over a 300-acre sprawl - that are said to be India's largest and oldest. Waste is piled as high as 120ft (36.5m). The sea forms the outer edge of the mountains and slums have been built into the sturdy heaps of rubbish.

The decomposing waste releases noxious gases such as methane, hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide. In 2016, it erupted in fires that burned for months and caused smoke in much of Mumbai. Rubbish fires at landfills contributed 11% of particulate matter, a major cause of air pollution in the city, according to a 2011 study by India's pollution regulator.

The men who make money selling your trash


The activist tackling Mumbai's rubbish mountain

A 2020 study by a Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), found 3,159 such mountains containing 800 million tonnes of rubbish across India.

In Mumbai, a court case has been going on for 26 years to close down the Deonar grounds but the dumping of waste continues.

India's waste mountains have long vexed officials and politicians. On 1 October, Mr Modi announced nearly $13bn (£9.54bn) for a national cleanliness programme that would include setting up a number of sewage treatment plants to gradually replace open air rubbish dumps such as the one in Deonar.

But experts are sceptical. "While it has been done in smaller cities, it is hard to provide a remedy for waste mountains at this scale," says Siddharth Ghanshyam Singh, deputy program manager at CSE.

"There is an acknowledgement that this is a problem but we have accepted that if we are to live in big cities like Mumbai or Delhi, these garbage mountains come with it," says Dharmesh Shah, country co-ordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a coalition of groups that advocate for reduced waste.

The rubbish mountains in Deonar caught fire in March 2016

Since 2000, India has passed rules asking municipalities to process waste. But most states report only partial compliance, and there are not enough waste treatment plants.

Mumbai, India's commercial and entertainment capital and home to some 20 million people, has just one such plant. There are now plans for a waste-to-energy plant at Deonar.

Mr Modi said he expects the plan to create new, green jobs. But that worries waste pickers like Farha who have been doing this job all their lives.

It has become much harder for them to access the waste mountains after the fires in 2016. The municipality has increased security to prevent waste pickers from going in and lighting fires - the flames melt the lighter trash, bringing up metal that fetches high prices.

The waste pickers who manage to sneak in are often beaten, detained and sent back. But some bribe the guards or enter before the security patrols begin at daylight. So, little segregation happens at the grounds in Denoar now - instead, a lot of the waste is segregated in the city itself, and what arrives at Deonar has reduced over time.

Farha hasn't had a phone for months. She has to bribe guards at least 50 rupees ($0.67; £0.49) every day to get in and work at the Deonar grounds. To recover this, she even thought of picking through the rubbish that began arriving from the city's Covid hospital wards last year.

But her family asked her not to pick up the "harmful" Covid waste. So, she hangs close, watching pickers wear protective gear in the rain to keep collecting plastic to resell.

The city was sending new trash, and as they had for years, the mountains had to accommodate it and pickers had to collect and resell it.

"Hunger will kill us if not illness," Farha says.

Saumya Roy is a Mumbai-based journalist and author, most recently, of Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belonging (Profile Books/ Hachette India)

An animal-rights charity is suing YouTube, claiming the site doesn't enforce its ban on animal-abuse videos, a report says

Isobel Asher Hamilton
Tue, October 19, 2021,

John McKeen / Getty Images

Animal rights charity Lady Freethinker filed a lawsuit against YouTube, The New York Times reports.

The lawsuit claimed YouTube had failed to keep animal-abuse videos off its platform, per The Times.

Lady Freethinker said that as of September, 70% of videos it had alerted YouTube about remained live.

An animal rights charity hit YouTube with a lawsuit on Monday, claiming the platform had failed in its duty to remove videos of animal abuse, The New York Times reports.

The lawsuit was filed Monday by animal rights charity Lady Freethinker, The Times reported. The founder of Lady Freethinker, Nina Jackel, told The Times the charity had been asking YouTube to tackle animal abuse on its platform for 18 months.

Last year, the charity alerted YouTube to 2,000 videos with a combined 1.2 billion views, but as of September, roughly 70% of the videos remained live, Jackel told The Times.

"We've tried to have a meaningful conversation with them multiple times, and been shut down," Jackel told The Times, adding, "We're knocking on the door, and nobody is answering. So this lawsuit is kind of a last straw."

"We agree that content depicting violence or abuse toward animals has no place on YouTube," a YouTube spokesperson told Insider in a statement.

"While we've always had strict policies prohibiting animal abuse content, earlier this year, we expanded our violent and graphic policy to more clearly prohibit content featuring deliberate physical suffering or harm to animals, including staged animal rescues. As with any significant update, it takes time for our systems to fully ramp up enforcement. Our teams are working hard to quickly remove violative content and just this year alone, we've removed hundreds of thousands of videos and terminated thousands of channels for violating these policies," the spokesperson added.

Per The Times, a video of a python constricting a puppy, one of a baby monkey being pinched and prodded, and another of a monkey being forced to fight off a snake we all live on YouTube on Monday.

YouTube removed nine out of the 10 animal videos The Times shared with the company, per the report. It did not remove one showing a live rabbit being fed to a python, and declined to explain why the video didn't violate the platform's rules, The Times reported.

The Times reported that Lady Freethinker also sent a letter to the Justice Department saying YouTube had aided violations of the "animal crushing" law, which bans people from creating videos of animals being crushed.

Earlier this year, Lady Freethinker shared an investigation with Insider into videos on YouTube of staged animal rescues, in which animals such as dogs and cats were placed near animals like snakes before being taken away by humans.

Lady Freethinker and Insider found ads for major brands including Facebook, Disney, and Land Rover running next to the videos, and YouTube subsequently updated its policy on animal cruelty to include staged rescues.

Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs? The century long search for the elusive answer shows why economics is so difficult – but data sure helps



Veronika Dolar, Assistant Professor of Economics, SUNY Old Westbury
Mon, October 18, 2021

The fight over the minimum wage continues. AP Photo/John Raoux

For decades it was conventional wisdom in the field of economics that a higher minimum wage results in fewer jobs.

In part, that’s because it’s based on the law of supply and demand, one of the most well-known ideas in economics. Despite it being called a “law,” it’s actually two theories that suggest if the price of something goes up – wages, for example – demand will fall – in this case, for workers. Meanwhile, their supply will rise. Thus an introduction of a high minimum wage would cause the supply of labor to exceed demand, resulting in unemployment.

But this is just a theory with many built-in assumptions.

Then, in 1994, David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of this year’s Nobel winners, and the late Alan Krueger used a natural experiment to show that, in the real world, this doesn’t actually happen. In 1992, New Jersey increased its minimum wage while neighboring Pennsylvania did not. Yet there was little change in employment.

When I discuss their work in my economics classes, however, I don’t portray it as an example of economists providing a definitive answer to the question of whether minimum wage hikes kill jobs. Instead, I challenge my students to think about all the ways one could answer this question, which clearly cannot be settled based on our beliefs. But rather, the answer requires data – which in economics, can be hard to come by.

Using models to study behavior

Economics studies the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. And so, like other social sciences, economics is fundamentally interested in human behavior.

But humans behave in a wide variety of often hard-to-predict ways, with countless complications. As a result, economists rely on abstraction and theory to create models in hopes of representing and explaining the complex world that they are studying. This emphasis on complicated mathematical models, theory and abstraction has made economics a lot less accessible to the general public than other social sciences, such as psychology or sociology.

Economists also use these models to answer important questions, such as “Does a minimum wage cause unemployment?” In fact, this is one of the most studied questions in all of economics since at least 1912, when Massachusetts became the first state to create a minimum wage. The federal wage floor came in 1938 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

And it’s been controversial ever since. Proponents argue that a higher minimum wage helps create jobs, grow the economy, fight poverty and reduce wage inequality.

Critics stress that minimum wages cause unemployment, hurt the economy and actually harm the low-income people that were supposed to be helped.
A tale of two theories

Most students in my introductory microeconomics class can easily show, using the standard supply and demand model, that an increase in the minimum wage above the level that the market sets on its own should drive up unemployment. In fact, this is one of the most commonly used examples in introductory economics textbooks.

However, this result assumes a perfectly competitive labor market in which workers and employers are abundant and employees can change jobs with ease. This is rarely the case in the real world, where a few companies frequently dominate in what are known as monopsonies.

And so others theorized that because monopsonistic companies had the power to set wages artificially low, a higher minimum wage could, perhaps counterintuitively, prompt companies to hire more workers in order to recover some of their lost profitability as a result of the increased labor costs.

How can economists tell which of these two theories may be right? They need data.

David Card won the Nobel Prize for his work on the minimum wage. 

AP Photo/Noah Berger

Data trumps theory

Studying the real world is difficult, and it’s constantly changing, so it is not easy to obtain all the relevant evidence.

Unlike in medicine or other sciences, economists cannot conduct rigidly controlled clinical trials, a method vacinologists used to test the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Due to financial, ethical or practical constraints, we cannot easily split people into treatment or control groups – as is common in psychology. And we cannot randomly assign a higher minimum wage to some and not others and observe what will happen, which is how a biomedical scientist might study the impact of various treatments on human health.

And in studying the minimum wage, we cannot simply look at past times when it was increased and check what happened to unemployment a few weeks or months later. There are many other factors that affect the labor market, such as outsourcing and immigration, and it’s virtually impossible to isolate and pin down one factor such as a minimum wage hike as the cause.

This is where the pioneering work of natural experiments like the ones Card and Krueger have used over the years to study the effects of raising the minimum wage and other policy changes comes in. It began with their 1994 paper, but they’ve replicated the findings with other studies that have deepened the amount of data that shows the original theory about the minimum wage causing job losses is likely wrong.

Their approach isn’t without flaws – mostly technical ones –- and in fact economists still don’t have a clear answer to the question about the minimum wage that I posed earlier in this article. But because of Card, Krueger and their research, the debate over the minimum wage has gotten a lot less theoretical and much more empirical.

Only by studying how humans actually behave can economics hope to make meaningful predictions about how a policy change like increasing the minimum wage is likely to affect the behavior of the economy and the people living in it.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Veronika Dolar, SUNY Old Westbury.

Read more:
Introducing David Card, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics winner who made the minimum wage respectable

Veronika Dolar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

It may not have started here, but the novel coronavirus became a US tragedy

Gus Garcia-Roberts, Erin Mansfield and Caroline Anders
Mon, October 18, 2021,

·58 min read  LONG READ WELL WORTH IT

Over 300,000 international flights arrived in the U.S. from Jan. 1 through April 30, 2020.

On Feb. 29, 2020, hundreds of people packed into the Pullman Christian Reformed Church, a squat, beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. An attendee began the ceremonies by blasting a shofar, the trumpet made out of a ram’s horn. Somebody played keyboard. And a long line of people waited to speak into a microphone about their memories of Angeli Demus.

The lifelong Chicagoan, who had died a month earlier at age 59, insisted she didn’t want it called a funeral. “Donate, cremate, celebrate,” had been her credo to her family near the end of a gutting battle with lung cancer, and with her eyes donated and her body cremated, all that was left was this party.

Her husband, Earl Demus, billed it as “Angeli’s Joyous Celebration,” and thought that the crowd it gathered spoke to his wife’s beloved nature. “Standing room only,” recounted Demus, who estimated there were more than 450 people there. "I stopped counting after a while.”

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The disconcerting news story that seemed recently to creep into every conversation, particularly after it tanked the stock market the previous week, didn’t make it past the doors of the church. Nobody wore a mask or kept their distance, and for the most part nobody even talked about the novel coronavirus. It had only started to trickle into the United States, as far as anybody knew, and the few cases in Illinois were said to be isolated and controlled.

A top health official had a week earlier assured Chicagoans that “the health risk to the general public from novel coronavirus remains low,” and the outlook from the highest levels of government was that, nationally, the few instances of the virus were disappearing. President Donald Trump had said three days earlier there were 15 cases in the country, and “the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

In a room off to the side of the church, people sipped soft drinks and picked at a spread catered by a neighborhood chef: finger sandwiches, sliders, fruit and cheese, chicken and Angeli’s favorite dessert, cheesecake. This room was where her father, Charles Dungill, spent most of the event.

Everybody called him “Cookie,” a throwback to his days as a drummer in a family band that toured everywhere Black performers were allowed in Jim Crow's America. Cookie shook hands, hugged and chatted with relatives and friends, some of whom had traveled from California, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Nevada. A family friend was fresh off a golfing trip to Arizona and another had recently returned from South Africa.

It was the West Chatham diaspora, a testament to the lasting bonds of the tight-knit Chicago neighborhood in which Cookie and his wife, Barbara, had raised Angeli and her three surviving siblings: brothers Sevil and Kyann, and sister Gina.

A couple of days after the celebration at the church, Sevil stopped by Cookie’s house to check on him. The kids were worried about their dad. They’d noticed little changes in his appearance: a slight droop to his posture, something different in his eyes.

It wasn’t just his daughter’s death with which he was reckoning. Barbara, his wife of 63 years, had died less than a week before Angeli’s celebration, after suffering from multiple ailments, including cancer.

But Sevil found his dad in good enough spirits, having enjoyed the event at Pullman so much that he wanted to plan the same thing for Barbara. Father and son chatted for about three hours, during which Sevil noticed that his dad had a slight hitch in his throat.

Probably post-nasal drip.

The next day after work, Sevil was driving back to his dad’s house, bringing him Barbara’s ashes from the crematorium, when he realized: Now he had a little cough, too.

“You know, just a hee-mmh,” Sevil later recalled.

Domestic airlines completed 2,334,679 flights between Jan. and April 2020.

***

Before the nearly 300,000 deaths, the widespread financial devastation, the isolation from loved ones and the fatigue of a daily disaster with no clear end, there was this: A tickle in a throat in Chicago. A woman’s sudden crash to the floor of her kitchen in the Bay Area. A playwright in Manhattan with three-quarters of a lung left in his chest, sensing doom and fleeing down the coast with his husband.

The virus shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on the United States. The world’s most powerful nation, historically among the most successful at stymieing infectious illnesses, had ample lead time during which the deadly pandemic was rampaging through Asia, and then Europe.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, speaks about the COVID-19 outbreak during a White House press conference Feb. 29, 2020, flanked by President Donald Trump, left, and Vice President Mike Pence.

But in an early vacuum of leadership at almost every government level, with the message from the White House that the virus was not anything to worry about, Americans unwittingly spread the lethal virus to loved ones and strangers alike.

The U.S. squandered its early advantage. Roughly one year after the virus first came into existence, the country has suffered a loss of life far worse than any other.

Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University, said COVID-19’s traits made it a formidable opponent for even those large nations most competent at fighting it.

But, she added, in the United States in 2020, the virus found an ideal victim. “The virus could not have emerged at a better time for spread than this year,” Ranney said. “We were in an election year. We had a president who didn't believe in science. We had underfunding of our public health institutions. It was a perfect storm.”

In an effort to better understand how the virus exploited the country's strengths and exposed its weaknesses, USA TODAY interviewed biologists and studied scientific genomic analysis, federal reports concerning super-spreading events, county medical examiner’s data from around the country, and state-level death and infection data.

Reporters used those sources to find and report the stories, many of them previously untold, of Americans in the path of the virus.

What emerges is a portrait of misinformation and confusion leading to a devastating failure to unite against a common threat.

Piecemeal policies offered a dangerously hollow illusion of control and safety. Scientists, intermittently ignored and villainized, were powerless. As citizens protested and rioted in response to racist police tactics, others detected a more subtle form of prejudice in apathy toward a virus that disproportionately sickened Black and Brown Americans. Early ignorance about the spread metastasized into partisan conspiracy-mongering and threats, leading to that most American phenomenon: a health official with a bulletproof vest.

The novel coronavirus didn’t start in the United States, but we have made it our own.

READ ON 

It may not have started here, but the novel coronavirus became a US tragedy (yahoo.com)

Welp, Now We Have Robo-Dogs With Sniper Rifles


Kyle Mizokami
Sun, October 17, 2021

Photo credit: Sword International

A new autonomous weapon system combines a quadruped robot with a sniper rifle.

SPUR is armed with a ten-shot rifle and a 30-power zoom.

The weapon can only fire at a human operator's command, but it does remind us of a certain Black Mirror episode.

Science fiction has seeped into science reality this week, as a robotics company showed off its sniper rifle-equipped robo-dog at the Association of the U.S. Army's annual convention in Washington, D.C.

Sure, the quadruped robot might resemble a good boy, but it's packing a built-in sniper rifle capable of engaging targets from three-quarters of a mile away. The service could operate this robotic weapon system remotely. Importantly, it would only engage targets with permission from a human being.

This robo-dog, known as "Vision 60," comes from Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics, a startup focused on legged robots. Previously, we've spotted Vision 60 robots in U.S. military service during a 2020 U.S. Air Force exercise at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. There, the machines helped to establish a security cordon. Air bases—which often require runways that are thousands of feet long—can be difficult to patrol effectively, and the robo-dogs make it easier to rely on fewer humans for the job.

This new, armed version of the Vision 60 is equipped with the Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR). It's a ten-shot rifle chambered in a 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor—a new, medium-caliber, high-velocity, long-range precision round. The Creedmoor is known in shooting circles for having a relatively flat ballistic trajectory, making it more of a "hit-what-you-see" round at longer ranges than older cartridges like the .308 Winchester. The robot's human controller is in charge of SPUR; a 30X electro-optical thermal scope assists in the weapon's target acquisition and aiming.

Photo credit: Airman 1st Class Shannon Moorehead

The Vision 60 looks a lot like Spot, the internet-famous robo-dog from Waltham, Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics. Both quadruped robots were involved in the September 2020 exercise at Nellis Air Force Base. The similarities don't stop there, either: Both can climb staircases, navigate complicated terrain, and right themselves if they fall over. Vision 60 and Spot each have a maximum payload of 31 pounds. The two robots have the same top speed of 5.24 feet per second, but Ghost Robotics claims Vision 60 will eventually gain the ability to sprint at 9.84 feet per second, or 6.71 miles-per-hour.

Vision 60 is capable of remote-controlled or autonomous operation. In remote-controlled mode, a human operator would select a target and then open fire. However, current U.S. military policy on autonomous systems prohibits automatic target engagement. So, an autonomous weapon system like Vision 60 could line up its sniper rifle against a target (and compute a firing solution), but it cannot open fire. Only a human can do that.

That's a huge relief to anyone who has seen the Black Mirror episode "Metalhead." In the episode, killer robo-dogs pursue humans with ruthless efficiency, tirelessly pursuing them across a bleak apocalyptic landscape. So rest assured that if a robo-dog does start to chase you, it won't be able to employ weapons on its own. For now, anyway.

  

SEE KILLER BOTS

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: GOTHIC CAPITALISM 

Robot cats mobilised to solve Japan's waiter shortage


Danielle Demetriou
Mon, October 18, 2021

Skylark has been testing the robot waiters at family restaurants in Tokyo

Japan's largest family restaurant chain plans to deploy robot waiters with cat ears across the country to counter chronic staff shortages and lower the risk of spreading coronavirus.

Skylark Holdings, said they would roll out more than 2,000 Chinese-made 'BellaBots', wheeled robot waiters with tiered trays, an array of facial expressions and 3D obstacle-detecting sensors.

The move aims to reduce the work burden on staff during peak hours, amid a growing shortage of restaurant staff, fuelled by both the pandemic as well as Japan’s rapidly aging population.

The black and white machines, with a digital display for a face, will be able to carry food for up to four people, before removing their dishes when they have finished eating, according to leading financial newspaper Nikkei Asia.

It follows the launch of a trial programme at Skylark’s restaurants in August, which found that robots halved the number of steps taken by human waiters during peak hours.

Covid has brought many complications to Japan's restaurant industry

The global restaurant industry has been deeply impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, with months of lock-down closures and shortened opening hours fuelling chronic staff shortages.

The initiative also taps into a growing demand for contactless service in the current pandemic climate, with the emergence of a growing number of innovations in restaurants, from smartphone payments to digital menus.

Skylark’s new fleet of robo-waiters will be phased into the workforce at thousands of restaurants over the coming year, including its famed chain of Syabuyo hot pot restaurants.

Skylark, which operates 3,000 restaurants across Japan, is one of a string of Japanese companies embracing robotics, as a means to counter staff shortages and create a contactless environment.

Saizeriya, which operates 1,5000 low-cost Italian-style restaurants in Japan, has been testing robotic waiters since spring last year, while popular fast food chain Mos Burger is also trialling robots.

Meanwhile, Softbank Robotics announced a partnership last month with China’s Keenon Robotics, in a joint venture aimed at installing robot waiters in restaurants across Japan and Singapore.

Japan’s robotics industry has boomed during the pandemic, as consumers and businesses explore ways to minimise human contact across the spectrum, from medical firms and logistics to the hospitality industry.

The nation’s surge in robotic innovations has gone hand in hand with a chronic worker shortage in Japan, with the service industry hit particularly hard since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Testimony to this is the decline in the number of Japan’s tourism and restaurant sector workers – dropping from 4.05 million workers in February last year to 3.82 million in June this year, according to government data.

The pandemic is worsening an already sensitive labour situation in Japan, due to its famously fast-aging population and dwindling birthrate, combined with a long-standing reluctance to bring in overseas workers to fill vacant positions.

On the plus side, Japan’s explorations into robotics innovations in the workplace were already advanced ahead of the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis due to its demographic challenges. Since the pandemic, a number of Japanese robotics companies have recalibrated their focus from aging workforces to a wider range of social uses.

Among them is Mira Robotics, which initially developed the “ugo”, a remote-controlled avatar robot, to help boost Japan’s shrinking workforce, before switching its focus to becoming a tool to fight the pandemic.

While the ugo was initially created to perform a range of roles, such as security patrol or equipment inspections, after the pandemic, the company created a hand attachment for the robot, which uses ultraviolet light to kill viruses on door handles.

Don't blame Sharia for Islamic extremism -- blame colonialism


Mark Fathi Massoud, Professor of Politics and Legal Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
Sun, October 17, 2021, 

Warning that Islamic extremists want to impose fundamentalist religious rule in American communities, right-wing lawmakers in dozens of U.S. states have tried banning Sharia, an Arabic term often understood to mean Islamic law.

These political debates – which cite terrorism and political violence in the Middle East to argue that Islam is incompatible with modern society – reinforce stereotypes that the Muslim world is uncivilized.

They also reflect ignorance of Sharia, which is not a strict legal code. Sharia means “path” or “way”: It is a broad set of values and ethical principles drawn from the Quran – Islam’s holy book – and the life of the Prophet Muhammad. As such, different people and governments may interpret Sharia differently.

Still, this is not the first time that the world has tried to figure out where Sharia fits into the global order.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when Great Britain, France and other European powers relinquished their colonies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, leaders of newly sovereign Muslim-majority countries faced a decision of enormous consequence: Should they build their governments on Islamic religious values or embrace the European laws inherited from colonial rule?
The big debate

Invariably, my historical research shows, political leaders of these young countries chose to keep their colonial justice systems rather than impose religious law.

Newly independent Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Somalia, among other places, all confined the application of Sharia to marital and inheritance disputes within Muslim families, just as their colonial administrators had done. The remainder of their legal systems would continue to be based on European law.


To understand why they chose this course, I researched the decision-making process in Sudan, the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from the British, in 1956.

In the national archives and libraries of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, and in interviews with Sudanese lawyers and officials, I discovered that leading judges, politicians and intellectuals actually pushed for Sudan to become a democratic Islamic state.

They envisioned a progressive legal system consistent with Islamic faith principles, one where all citizens – irrespective of religion, race or ethnicity – could practice their religious beliefs freely and openly.

“The People are equal like the teeth of a comb,” wrote Sudan’s soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Hassan Muddathir in 1956, quoting the Prophet Muhammad, in an official memorandum I found archived in Khartoum’s Sudan Library. “An Arab is no better than a Persian, and the White is no better than the Black.”

Sudan’s post-colonial leadership, however, rejected those calls. They chose to keep the English common law tradition as the law of the land.
Why keep the laws of the oppressor?

My research identifies three reasons why early Sudan sidelined Sharia: politics, pragmatism and demography.

Rivalries between political parties in post-colonial Sudan led to parliamentary stalemate, which made it difficult to pass meaningful legislation. So Sudan simply maintained the colonial laws already on the books.

There were practical reasons for maintaining English common law, too.

Sudanese judges had been trained by British colonial officials. So they continued to apply English common law principles to the disputes they heard in their courtrooms.

Sudan’s founding fathers faced urgent challenges, such as creating the economy, establishing foreign trade and ending civil war. They felt it was simply not sensible to overhaul the rather smooth-running governance system in Khartoum.


The continued use of colonial law after independence also reflected Sudan’s ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity.

Then, as now, Sudanese citizens spoke many languages and belonged to dozens of ethnic groups. At the time of Sudan’s independence, people practicing Sunni and Sufi traditions of Islam lived largely in northern Sudan. Christianity was an important faith in southern Sudan.

Sudan’s diversity of faith communities meant that maintaining a foreign legal system – English common law – was less controversial than choosing whose version of Sharia to adopt.
Why extremists triumphed

My research uncovers how today’s instability across the Middle East and North Africa is, in part, a consequence of these post-colonial decisions to reject Sharia.

In maintaining colonial legal systems, Sudan and other Muslim-majority countries that followed a similar path appeased Western world powers, which were pushing their former colonies toward secularism.

But they avoided resolving tough questions about religious identity and the law. That created a disconnect between the people and their governments.

In the long run, that disconnect helped fuel unrest among some citizens of deep faith, leading to sectarian calls to unite religion and the state once and for all. In Iran, Saudi Arabia and parts of Somalia and Nigeria, these interpretations triumphed, imposing extremist versions of Sharia over millions of people.

In other words, Muslim-majority countries stunted the democratic potential of Sharia by rejecting it as a mainstream legal concept in the 1950s and 1960s, leaving Sharia in the hands of extremists.

But there is no inherent tension between Sharia, human rights and the rule of law. Like any use of religion in politics, Sharia’s application depends on who is using it – and why.

Leaders of places like Saudi Arabia and Brunei have chosen to restrict women’s freedom and minority rights. But many scholars of Islam and grassroots organizations interpret Sharia as a flexible, rights-oriented and equality-minded ethical order.
Religion and the law worldwide

Religion is woven into the legal fabric of many post-colonial nations, with varying consequences for democracy and stability.

After its 1948 founding, Israel debated the role of Jewish law in Israeli society. Ultimately, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his allies opted for a mixed legal system that combined Jewish law with English common law.

In Latin America, the Catholicism imposed by Spanish conquistadors underpins laws restricting abortion, divorce and gay rights.

And throughout the 19th century, judges in the U.S. regularly invoked the legal maxim that “Christianity is part of the common law.” Legislators still routinely invoke their Christian faith when supporting or opposing a given law.

Political extremism and human rights abuses that occur in those places are rarely understood as inherent flaws of these religions.

When it comes to Muslim-majority countries, however, Sharia takes the blame for regressive laws – not the people who pass those policies in the name of religion.

Fundamentalism and violence, in other words, are a post-colonial problem – not a religious inevitability.

For the Muslim world, finding a system of government that reflects Islamic values while promoting democracy will not be easy after more than 50 years of failed secular rule. But building peace may demand it.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Mark Fathi Massoud, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Trump’s travel ban is just one of many US policies that legalize discrimination against Muslims

Mark Fathi Massoud has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the University of California. Any views expressed here are the author's responsibility.

Trump said 'Ku Klux Klan-dressed protesters' who allege they were beaten by his bodyguards have 'no one to blame but themselves'


Trump said protesters who allege that they were beaten up by his security detail outside Trump Tower in 2015 had "no one to blame but themselves." The former president on Monday sat for a four-hour-long deposition about the case. 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Cheryl Teh
Mon, October 18, 2021

Former President Donald Trump sat for a four-hour deposition in regards to a 2015 lawsuit.

Protesters allege in the lawsuit that they were hit by members of Trump's security detail.

Trump said in the deposition the protesters have "no one to blame but themselves."

Former President Donald Trump said on Monday that protesters who alleged his bodyguards beat them had "no one to blame but themselves."

The former president made these comments after sitting for a four-hour-long deposition on October 18. He was asked to testify in a lawsuit brought by protesters who allege that his bodyguards beat them up outside Trump Tower during a 2015 demonstration.

The incident happened on September 3, 2015, when Trump was on the campaign trail. A crowd of demonstrators had gathered, some dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods, gathered outside Trump Tower to protest then-presidential candidate Trump's comments that Mexicans were "rapists" who were "bringing drugs" and "bringing crime" to America in June 2015.

Trump's security detail was then filmed approaching protesters and wrangling the placards they held from their hands. Five of the protesters filed a lawsuit on September 9, 2015, against Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump 2016 campaign, and several members of Trump's security detail, alleging that they were beaten during the scuffle.

It is unclear if any of the five protesters who are suing Trump were wearing Klan robes.

"The Klu [sic] Klux Klan dressed protester case should have never been brought as the plaintiffs have no one to blame but themselves," wrote Trump in a statement posted to Twitter by his spokeswoman Liz Harrington on Monday. "Rather than protest peacefully, the plaintiffs intentionally sought to rile up a crowd by blocking the entrance to Trump Tower on 5th Avenue, in the middle of the day, wearing Klu Klux Klan [sic] robes and hoods."

Trump added that his security staff tried to "de-escalate the situation."

"After years of litigation, I was pleased to have had the opportunity to tell my side of this ridiculous story - Just one more example of baseless harassment of your favorite President," Trump said in the statement.

Trump avoided sitting for a deposition while president, arguing that he should receive immunity from testifying as president. But earlier this month, New York State Supreme Court Justice Doris Gonzalez ordered Trump to sit for a deposition regarding the case.

Trump also faces several other ongoing civil lawsuits, which are moving through the legal system more quickly now that he is out of office.


Trump Dodges Questions in Marathon Deposition Over Protest Violence, Lawyer Claims

Kate Briquelet, Lachlan Cartwright
Mon, October 18, 2021


David Dee Delgado/Getty

Donald Trump testified under oath for about four-and-a-half hours on Monday over his role in a 2015 incident where protesters allege they were assaulted by his security team outside Trump Tower.

The deposition took place at Trump Tower, from 10 a.m. to about 2:30 p.m., according to the activists’ lawyer, Benjamin Dictor, who claimed that there were a handful of questions Trump declined to answer. The attorney added that he planned to ask the judge in a civil suit stemming from the episode later this month whether the ex-commander in chief must respond to those queries.

Amanda Miller, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization, vigorously disputed the account of the proceedings.

“Mr. Dictor’s claim is completely false,” she said. “President Trump answered every single question that was asked of him at his deposition today. There was not a single question he did not answer. They were just not the answers Mr. Dictor was hoping for.”

Trump was joined by three or four Secret Service personnel and two lawyers, Dictor said, adding that the ex-president was presented with evidence, including documents and videos relevant to the case.

“This deposition was like any other deposition of an employer who was a defendant in a civil matter,” Dictor told The Daily Beast following the proceeding. (Dictor is a labor attorney who also represents the NewsGuild, a media workers’ union that represents staffers at many outlets, including The Daily Beast’s editorial union).

“Everything proceeded professionally,” Dictor added.

A video of the lengthy testimony will be played for a jury when the case heads to trial, which is likely to be scheduled during an Oct. 25 case conference.

“After years of litigation, I was pleased to have had the opportunity to tell my side of this ridiculous story—just one more example of baseless harassment of your favorite President,” Trump said in a statement to The Daily Beast.

Trump’s attorney, Jeffrey Goldman, who was present for the deposition, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As The Daily Beast previously reported, the reality TV maven turned president tried to quash a subpoena that would force him to testify in connection with the suit, but this year, a state appellate court dismissed Trump’s request.

HBO Exposes the Violent Chaos of Trump’s Jan. 6 Rioters in ‘Four Hours at the Capitol’

On Monday, the ex-president was expected to be questioned about whether he authorized or condoned his henchmen to manhandle protesters or otherwise remove activists from his events in general, as well as what role one particular guard—Keith Schiller—played in Trump’s inner circle.

Among the other potential subjects of inquiry on Monday was Matthew Calamari, the Trump Organization’s chief operating officer and former director of security who was present the day of the rally. Last month, sources told The Daily Beast that Calamari was under scrutiny by Manhattan prosecutors as part of a tax fraud probe into the business and its executives.

Since leaving office, Trump has continued to face a wave of litigation, including from his niece Mary Trump and Summer Zervos, who is suing Trump for defamation. Zervos, who was a contestant on The Apprentice, alleges Trump defamed her when he called her a liar after she accused him of sexual assault.

The protester case stems from a 2015 press conference, during which security guards allegedly roughed up a group of demonstrators who gathered outside the Fifth Avenue skyscraper to protest Trump’s notoriously racist outburst about Mexican immigrants. Months earlier, when announcing his candidacy, he said Mexico and other countries were “sending people” who were bringing drugs and crime to America. Trump also called immigrants “rapists.”

In response, Efrain Galicia and four other Mexican activists displayed a “Make America Racist Again” banner outside the building on Sept. 3, 2015. They also wore parody Ku Klux Klan costumes after Trump was endorsed by former KKK leader David Duke.

Days after the event, the activists filed a lawsuit in Bronx County Supreme Court alleging Trump’s security team attacked them and destroyed their property, and named Trump, his political campaign, the Trump Organization, and Schiller as defendants.

According to the complaint, Gary Uher, one of Trump’s guards, shoved a protester shortly after he put on his KKK costume. While a second activist filmed the incident, Trump security officer Edward Jon Deck Jr. allegedly shoved her, too, after ordering her to stop recording.

Galicia arrived with three protest signs soon after and set them against cement planters on the sidewalk. Uher and an unnamed guard approached the group and tossed Galicia’s banners to the ground, the lawsuit alleges. When Galicia went to reinstall his posters, Schiller “swiftly and menacingly approached Galicia” before ripping one banner in half and walking away with the other.

When Galicia followed Schiller to retrieve his property, the complaint alleges, Schiller “swung around and struck Galicia with a closed fist on the head with such force that it caused Galicia to stumble backwards.” Galicia says an unnamed guard then put him in a chokehold.

In a 2016 deposition of his own, Schiller testified that he clocked Galicia because he believed the protester was reaching for Schiller’s concealed firearm.

Schiller added, however, that he never discussed the Galicia incident with Trump. When asked if he always obeyed Trump’s orders to remove disruptive activists at events, Schiller replied, “Not always, no.”

“I’m not a robot,” Schiller testified. “It’s been times when it wasn’t appropriate and I didn’t do it.”

Meanwhile, in an affidavit, Uher said he “politely asked just one of the demonstrators (who was dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit) to move away from the main entrance” and that he “escorted this person a short distance so that pedestrian traffic in and out of the Premises would not be obstructed.” Uher, a former FBI agent, added, “Beyond this one very brief interaction, I had no other interactions with any of the many other demonstrators.”

Uher also said he was submitting a photo as an exhibit which showed him “gently guiding this individual down the sidewalk, without force…”

For his part, Deck also denied attacking any of the demonstrators. In a 2016 deposition, Deck said he saw someone “run after Mr. Schiller and jump on his back and grab him around the waist,” so he grabbed the person to protect the fellow guard.

“I saw somebody creating a very, very extremely dangerous situation of going for somebody’s gun on a waistband, underneath his—on his hip,” Deck testified.

“There is no other physical act that occurred which could give rise to any claim of an assault or battery,” Deck stated in a 2017 affidavit, “and I committed no such act.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

COMMUNALIST VIOLENCE
Hindus denounce violence amid attacks in Bangladesh


Bangladesh Religion ProtestHundreds of Hindus protesting against attacks on temples and the killing of two Hindu devotees in another district shout slogans in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Monday, Oct.18, 2021. A viral social media image perceived as insulting to the country's Muslim majority last week triggered protests and incidents of vandalism at Hindu temples across Bangladesh. About 9% of Bangladesh’s 160 million are Hindus. (AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu)

JULHAS ALAM
Mon, October 18, 2021, 5:40 AM·2 min read

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Protests continued Monday in Bangladesh’s capital to denounce a wave of violence against Hindus following an image posted on social media that was perceived as insulting to the country’s Muslim majority.

New attacks took place Sunday night in a northern village, where unidentified people burned up to 26 homes of Hindus despite a warning by the government that such attacks would be firmly punished.

The violence has prompted the United Nations to urge the government to take actions to stop it.

On Monday, the followers of the Hindu group International Society for Krishna Consciousness were joined by students and teachers from Dhaka University in blocking a major intersection in Dhaka to demand justice. Several other Hindu groups also joined the peaceful protest at the Shahbagh intersection.

Attacks on Hindu temples have intensified since last Wednesday after a photo was posted on social media showing a copy of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, at the feet of a statue at a Hindu temple in the eastern district of Cumilla.

Local media reported that six Hindus were killed in separate attacks, but the figures could not confirmed independently. Local media downplayed their coverage of the violence, apparently under pressure from the government to control any new attacks as Hindus celebrated their largest religious festival, Durga Puja, that ended Friday.

Muslims also held street protests after the images came out on social media, especially Facebook.

Mia Seppo, the U.N.'s resident coordinator in Bangladesh, said in a Twitter post on Monday that the attacks on Hindus are against the values of the Bangladesh constitution and need to stop.

“We call upon Government to ensure protection of minorities and an impartial probe,” Seppo said. “We call upon all to join hands to strengthen inclusive tolerant.”

Asif Hasan, chief government administrator of northern Rangpur district, said Monday that attackers torched the homes of Hindus in a fishing village on Sunday night. They also stole cash, cattle and other valuables during the attack, he said. Hasan said 42 people were arrested.

On Monday, the Ministry of Home Affairs transferred seven police officials from troubled areas for failing to control the violence.

About 9% of Bangladesh’s 160 million people are Hindu. Bangladesh follows a largely secular legal system based on British common law.

BOMBING CIVILIANS
Witnesses: Ethiopian military airstrikes hit Tigray capital


FILE - In this Thursday, May 6, 2021 file photo, the city of Mekele is seen through a bullet hole in a stairway window of the Ayder Referral Hospital, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. Ethiopian military airstrikes have hit the capital of the country's Tigray region Monday, Oct. 18, 2021, according to witnesses. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)

CARA ANNA
Mon, October 18, 2021, 6:13 AM·3 min read


NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Ethiopian military airstrikes hit the capital of the country’s Tigray region and killed at least three people, witnesses said Monday, returning the war abruptly to the city of Mekele after several months of peace.

The airstrikes came days after a new military offensive was launched against the Tigray forces who have been fighting Ethiopian and allied forces for nearly a year.

Mekele hasn't seen fighting since late June, when the Tigray forces retook much of the region and Ethiopian troops withdrew. Since then, Ethiopia's federal government has called all able citizens to crush the Tigray fighters who dominated the national government for 27 years before being sidelined by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. What began as a political dispute in Africa's second-most populous country has now killed thousands of people.

The state-owned Ethiopian Press Agency, citing the air force, reported that “communication towers and equipment” were attacked and that “utmost care was made to avoid civilian casualties.”

One Mekele resident, Kindeya Gebrehiwot, a spokesman for the Tigray authorities, told The Associated Press that a market was bombed. Another resident, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the first airstrike occurred just outside the city and three children from the same family were killed. The resident said at least seven people were wounded in the second airstrike, which also damaged a hotel.

The Tigray region, along with the current areas of fighting in the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions, are under a communications blackout, making it challenging to verify information.

The Tigray forces have said they are trying to pressure Ethiopia's government to lift a deadly blockade imposed on the Tigray region since the dramatic turn in the war in June. But witnesses in the Amhara region have alleged door-to-door killings and other atrocities against civilians by the Tigray fighters — an echo of the atrocities that Tigrayans reported at the hands of Ethiopian and allied forces earlier in the war.

The new offensive rages despite pressure from the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and other African nations for a cease-fire, talks and humanitarian access. The U.S. a month ago threatened a new round of targeted sanctions if steps toward those goals weren't taken quickly.

Instead, the warring sides have shown no sign of stopping.

“The possibility for peaceful dialogue, which the people of Tigray had waited for, has no hope,” the Tigray forces said in a statement on Sunday.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters they were trying to verify details of Monday's airstrikes.

“What is clear is that civilians should never be targeted. Civilian infrastructure should never be targeted. Those are basic humanitarian principles,” he said.

The fighting is reducing U.N. aid operations during a time of growing need, Dujarric said, and the absence of essential supplies such as fuel in Tigray has led several humanitarian groups including the U.N. to reduce their presence in the region in the past week. He did not say how many U.N. staffers are in Mekele; there are several hundred in Tigray and about 1,300 humanitarian workers overall.

An Ethiopian Foreign Ministry statement on Monday said it was “absurd to expect unrestricted flow of humanitarian aid to the Tigray region while the (Tigray forces are) actively attacking neighboring areas.”

The last time the Ethiopian military carried out an airstrike near Mekele was in June, when a market in Togoga outside the city was hit and at least 64 civilians were killed. Soldiers for hours blocked medical teams from responding to victims.

___

Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.

Tigray: Ethiopian government admits Mekelle airstrike


BBC
Mon, October 18, 2021

People within the city of Mekelle reported airstrikes on Monday (stock image)

Ethiopia has admitted it was behind airstrikes in the capital of the conflict-riven Tigray region - hours after it denied it had carried out what rebels say were deadly raids.

The state-run news agency said the attacks had targeted rebel's communications and weapons facilities.

But media controlled by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) said three civilians had been killed.

The rebel group is at war with Ethiopia's federal government.

The government initially denied the allegations it had struck targets in Tigray's capital, Mekelle.

"Why would the Ethiopian government attack its own city? Mekelle is an Ethiopian city," government spokesman Legesse Tulu asked.


EXPLAINER: Ethiopia's Tigray war - and how it erupted


ANALYSIS: Can Ethiopia be pulled back from the brink?


PROFILE: The Nobel Peace Prize winner who went to war

Ethiopia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs went on to accuse the TPLF of killing at least 30 civilians in recent attacks in Amhara and Afar regional states, which both border Tigray.

"Terrorists are the ones who attack cities with innocent civilians in them, not government," Mr Legesse added.

But hours afterwards, state media said it had carried out successful strikes with the aim of preventing civilian casualties.

The TPLF still says this is not the case, accusing the government of deliberately carrying out two strikes on market day.

Meanwhile, the TPLF, which regards itself as the legitimate authority in Tigray, has not responded to the allegations its forces were behind the deaths of any civilians.

It is difficult to independently confirm details as there is a communications blackout in the region.

The Ethiopian army took control of most of the northern region of Tigray in November 2020, after TPLF forces seized a military base.

Since then, the 11-month conflict has caused a humanitarian crisis, with the United Nations warning in July that about 400,000 people were living in famine-like conditions in Tigray.

Thousands of people have been killed in the conflict, and another two million have been forced to flee their homes.

In June 2021, the rebels recaptured Tigray in a surprise attack, and then moved into parts of neighbouring regions like Amhara.

Ethiopia has declared the TPLF a terrorist organisation, but the TPLF insists that it is the legitimate government in Tigray.

Tigray - the basics


Since 1994, Ethiopia has been divided into states, now numbering 10; they are defined on ethnic grounds by the constitution and described as largely autonomous, but with central institutions


In 2018, following anti-government protests, Abiy Ahmed took over as prime minister and introduced reforms


Powerful politicians from Tigray, Ethiopia's northernmost state, accused Mr Abiy of trying to increase federal power


Relations worsened and, after the government accused Tigrayan rebels of attacking military bases, the Ethiopian army moved in in November, backed by Eritrean troops


Mr Abiy declared the conflict over in late November, but fighting has continued