On July 19, Islamist writer Ismail Kilicarslan published a piece titled "Joyful pious girls, unhappy Islamist young men" for the pro-Justice and Development Party (AKP) daily Yeni Safak. The piece became an instant hit, receiving thousands of tweets from all over the political spectrum in Turkey. Several other columnists have chimed in on the issue since and Kilicarsan felt compelled to pen a follow-up piece on July 21 to better explain himself and to respond to some of the critics.
The controversial piece had said, “Today pious girls [young women] are more advanced than Islamist men in the culture of living and finding joy. Girls are better than men in learning about life, respecting differences, developing sensitivities and comprehending life from different perspectives. On top of all these, girls are better at active participation in life than guys.” Kilicarslan continued to explain that although young Islamist men are frequently heard talking about “saving the world” while puffing hookahs, women are the go-getters. They are the real game changers. To make his point, Kilicarslan argued that women today are better educated, more involved in politics and Islamic matters while men act like know-it-alls in colleges and seminar halls. He explained that one reason why there are so many seemingly overconfident yet delusory young men are the false images created. Kilicarslan complained that Islamic teachings boost young men’s egos and they start developing unrealistic expectations about possible future spouses.
Kilicarslan said that devout girls were focused, sociable and hardworking in the causes of Islamic studies and charity, while young men had pumped up egos and high demands, yet were unqualified to fulfill the needs of their families and society. Therefore, these young men are perceived as failures, and hence are unhappy.
While some applauded Kilicarslan, many were extremely critical of him. His analysis, perhaps long overdue, hit a nerve in Turkish society.
Along the banks of the Rhône river, just off of France’s “highway of the sun” that runs past legendary expanses of grape and lavender fields, a parade of battered vans pulls up to a gated campground obscured by pine trees. Dozens of Latin Americans pile out, back from another long day sorting fruit harvested from the many orchards that dot the southern region’s rolling landscape.
Marcia Fiel perches on a boulder near the camp entrance, rapidly texting friends in her native Ecuador and talking with coworkers to debrief after spending the day inside Métral Fruits, the distribution facility that employs her and another hundred Latin American migrants who also call this campground home. Behind her, cars head up the hill into the sleepy French village Chanas, about an hour south of Lyon.
Though they work in France, the Spanish company Terra Fecundis employs Fiel and her colleagues. The temporary contract agency delivers on-demand migrant labor, mostly from Latin America, to farmers throughout Spain and France. The nearby vans shuttle workers like Fiel into Chanas, home to approximately 2,300 people, six days a week to sort fruit for 10 to 12 hours a day. “Sometimes we only have a 15-minute break when we’ve worked all day,” Fiel said.
And coming home to the campground isn’t exactly relaxing: “There’s a lot of people living together in a small space, and that’s difficult,” Fiel said. She and her colleagues live, quite literally, in the middle of a forest. “The worst is that we don’t have water,” Fiel said as a group of several women walk up the hill to the hamlet, toting empty plastic jugs.
Russia’s economy shrank the most since 2009 after a currency crisis jolted consumer demand, while a selloff in oil threatens to drag the country into a deeper recession.
Gross domestic product contracted 4.6 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier after a 2.2 percent decline in the previous three months, the Federal Statistics Service in Moscow said on Monday, citing preliminary data. That was worse than the median forecast for a 4.5 percent slump in a Bloomberg survey of 18 analysts. The Economy Ministry had projected that output shrank 4.4 percent in the period, calling it “the lowest point” for Russia.
The rout on commodities markets has overshadowed the first signs of stabilization in Russia by hammering the ruble and shaking a country that relies on oil and gas for about half of its budget revenue. The nation is enduring its first recession in six years after last year’s currency crisis and a surge in inflation eroded consumer buying power as sanctions over Ukraine choked access to capital markets.
María Guzmán, 63, moved to New York from Puerto Rico when she was 6 years old. She visits the island every year and planned to retire there — she has a house in Guánica on the southern coast. But with the island facing economic crisis, those plans have changed.
“I don’t think so. I’m going upstate, not to Puerto Rico,” said Guzmán, standing outside her apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “Every day, like 400 people leave Puerto Rico. Can’t nobody afford the food there. Everything is expensive.”
Guzmán said she has many family members in Puerto Rico, including her father, who moved back 12 years ago.
“My father’s about to pack up and come to New York again. He worked so many years here, went to Puerto Rico — that was his dream, buying his house, retired, being there — and he can’t even afford the medicine [anymore]. He’s 75 years old.”
The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by mats of decaying seaweed that attract biting sand fleas and smell like rotten eggs.
Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed up on Caribbean coastlines, but researchers say the algae blooms have exploded in extent and frequency in recent years. The 2015 seaweed invasion appears to be a bumper crop, with a number of shorelines so severely hit that some tourists have cancelled summer trips and lawmakers on Tobago have termed it a "natural disaster."
From the Dominican Republic in the north, to Barbados in the east, and Mexico's Caribbean resorts to the west, officials are authorizing emergency money to fund cleanup efforts and clear stinking mounds of seaweed that in some cases have piled up nearly three metres high on beaches, choked scenic coves and cut off moored boats.
With the start of the region's high tourism season a few months away, some officials are calling for an emergency meeting of the 15-nation Caribbean Community, worried that the worsening seaweed influx could become a chronic dilemma for the globe's most tourism-dependent region
According to new research, bonobos — our closest relatives in the animal kingdom — might be able to give us an unprecedented peek at the evolution of human speech.
This particular species of great ape, scientists now say, uses sound to communicate in a way that’s remarkably similar to a human infant. They may be the only other species which does so.
The study, published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ, focuses on bonobo “peeps.” Those are high-pitched squeaks that bonobos use to communicate with one another. But here’s the cool part: Those peeps may sound simple, but they’re actually closer to human speech than anything else in the animal kingdom.
The researchers say these peeps are a lot like the sounds infants make before they learn to talk (sounds called protophones). Baby babble is distinguishable from your standard animal grunting because it doesn’t vary acoustically based on the emotional context of the babbling.
Beatrice White poses in the starkness of an empty lot, surrounded by fly traps in 1912. She is a smirking teenager, her Edwardian pompadour topped with a big bow, the traps around her swarming with flies. This was the summer when the common housefly was perceived as both a vessel of disease and a get-rich-quick scheme, and Beatrice was the “it” girl, famous for her gruesome contribution to the city’s well-being.
It may seem unusual to send children and teenagers on a slaughtering spree, but the “Swat the fly” contest was a joint crusade by Toronto’s medical health department and the Toronto Daily Star to help rid the city of illness spread by flies.
“The only way for the city to be uniformly safe is to carry on a vigorous war of extermination,” the Star reported that July, adding some bait of its own: $200 in prizes to be split by the top participants.
By the end of the six-week contest, White had killed more than half a million flies. Now, she is a footnote in Toronto history, an obscure folk hero who appears to be buried in a common grave.
Harper Lee is 89. She receives full-time care from the employees of her assisted living facility and visits from friends looking, it seems, to cash in now, while the cashing is good. Her will can’t be revised after she’s dead, you know. Harper Lee is still alive, though, still a person with will and rights and desires. But she is an old person, of less value than those who are still productive, of less importance than those who can stand up for themselves. She is vulnerable, and like so many of our elderly folks, a potential cash cow. In hunting out more Lee books, we are riffling through her papers like hateful descendants going through their distant grandmother’s underwear drawer. Surely she’s got some good jewelry hidden away. It’ll be ours someday, anyway. No sense dragging our feet.
The penalty for lacking an incumbent can be significant. All else being equal, parties without an incumbent have suffered a hit worth about seven per cent of what the party might have otherwise been expected to get in the riding. This is in consideration of how the wider region swung from the previous vote, and based on an analysis of more than 250 cases in recent elections.
Depending on the level of support an incumbent previously had in a given riding, that can represent anything from two to five points — seemingly aligning with the conventional wisdom concerning the value of a local candidate. And this is just the average performance. There are many individual cases where the loss of an incumbent had a much more profound impact (and, though fewer, some where the impact was negligible).
Though the Tories have been hit particularly hard by the loss of some well-known incumbents like James Moore in British Columbia, John Baird in Ontario and Peter MacKay in Nova Scotia, the number of Conservative incumbents who have chosen not to run for re-election is not abnormally high. In fact, it is roughly proportional to the number of seats they won in 2011.
But the locations of those Conservatives not running for re-election could be problematic.
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