Albinos in Tanzania

dozens of albinos have been murdered and their bodies dismembered as some witch doctors claim that the use of albino body parts can help people to become rich

Related;
The Hammer Against Witches

Dutch Fact of the Day

In January 2007, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture issued a report in which it took 29 pages to explain "quality standards for onions," complete with 43 photographs

-Europe Debates Perfection It Demands of Its Produce

Islam in Contemporary Societies

MA in Islam in Contemporary Societies - an interesting course from Warwick

Related Podcast;
Maqsood Ahmed, the government’s senior advisor on Muslim communities, talks about being the first student on the MA course in Islam in contemporary societies.

How Germans Love

More here

'Obsessive Sarkosis'- A new mental disease in France

Serge Hefez, a practicing psychiatrist, has identified a new mental illness among the French: obsessive Sarkosis, an unhealthy fascination with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

“As I listened to my patients during consultations, many of them mentioned Sarkozy by name,” Dr. Hefez said. “He’s penetrated some of their deepest fantasies. I noticed all this passion in people speaking of him, and I thought there is something particular about this man — he’s like a reflection of us in the mirror.”

The French project themselves onto Mr. Sarkozy, too, Dr. Hefez said.

“He’s the incarnation of the postmodern man, obsessed with himself, turned toward pleasure, autonomous and narcissistic,” the psychiatrist said. “And he exhibits his joys and sorrows, all his private life, his sentimental doubts and pleasures. He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme, that it’s the individual who counts, not the society.”

A year after taking office, Mr. Sarkozy can appear to be everywhere, at least in the world of television and print. The daily newspaper Le Figaro counts at least 100 books devoted to the French president, his life and loves, with more than a million sold, for $25.1 million.

-A Passion for (and Against) Sarkozy

Eurovision Corruption

Forty years on, we are being asked to believe that General Franco ordered his top television executives to offer bribes to all and sundry to make sure that Spain’s entry won that year’s Eurovision Song Contest, and thus deprive Congratulations and Cliff Richard of the title that should have been his.

-Franco's win at Eurovision...

The industrial revolution and the democratic transition

The industrial revolution and the democratic transition. -- Aubhik Khan

In the 19th century, the United Kingdom began a period of economic transformation known as the Industrial Revolution. It’s commonly believed that this era opened as new inventions improved the technologies used to produce goods and provide services. However, we now know that such improvements affected only a relatively small part of the economy. Nonetheless, output rose during the first stage of the Industrial Revolution because of capital accumulation. One explanation for this increase in capital may be that another revolution occurred in Britain around the same time: the demographic transition. In this article, Aubhik Khan outlines some evidence on the Industrial Revolution and the demographic transition, then presents two economic theories that link the two phenomena.

Dani Rodrik on EU

To me the EU is the most impressive achievement of international economic statecraft in the second half of the 20th century.

-Rodrik

Social Capital and Gender in Italy

Berlusconi publicly mocked spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for hiring too many women, saying, “Zapatero has formed a government that is too pink, something that we cannot do in Italy because there is a prevalence of men in politics and it isn’t easy to find women who are qualified.”

-Gender equality, Berlusconi-style

The Creation of Israel

A three-part series from Al Jazeera examining the origins, violent creation, and modern-day reality of the state of Israel, told through the stories of individual Israelis.

The Enclosures in Brittain

In the early 19th century, the Northamptonshire poet John Clare took a good look at the countryside and didn’t like what he saw. He wrote:

"Fence meeting fence in owners little bounds
Of field and meadow, large as garden-grounds,
In little parcels little minds to please,
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease."

He was referring to the effects of the Enclosures – literally the fencing in of land to stop others from using it. This apparently simple act has been hugely controversial. For some Enclosure underpinned the economic and agricultural development of Modern Britain. For others it was an act of theft – the turning of common land into private property that impoverished the many for the sake of the few.

But what really happened during the era of 18th and 19th century enclosures? Who gained, who lost and what role did Enclosures play in the agricultural and industrial transformation of this country?

Listen to the podcast from BBC.

References;

E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (The Merlin Press, 1991)

Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society, 1707-1830 (Manchester University Press, 2000)

Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689-1798 (OUP, 1991)

Murray G. H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789 (London: Routledge, 1997)

R. C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 (Oxford, 1992)

M. E. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750-1830 (London, 1984)

J. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

G. E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England (London, Longman 1997)

Susanna Wade Martins, Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes: Rural Britain, 1720-1870 (Windgather Press, 2004)

Susac's syndrome

"It might sound funny to others, but suddenly thinking you are French is terrifying,"

- The British woman who woke up thinking she was French

Related;
Susac's syndrome

Economic Prediction of the Day

Comment on tomorrow’s announcement by the Treasury and Bank of England

Catholic Jews of America?

“Catholic Jews” are children or grand children of European immigrants who grew up along side Irish, Italian and Polish Catholic immigrant families in large American cities: think New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland and Newark.

Young Jews and Catholics in those urban centers became fierce rivals as they both struggled to gain admittance to the established American society. Jewish authors have recounted and I have heard personal stories of how gangs of Catholics regularly beat up young Jews as they walked to and from school. That physical violence was often accompanied by yells of “Christ killer” and “you dirty Jews killed our Lord.”

Those are the “Catholic Jews” who were negatively impacted by such bitter experiences. As a result, many Jews perceived the Catholic Church as the tangible symbol of anti-Jewish bigotry and hatred. Indeed, some Jews even refused to walk in front of the feared and mysterious Catholic houses of worship. For them, Catholicism meant ugly taunts, fistfights and a deep suspicion of all things Catholic, including the Pope in Rome.

-Pope Will Meet Two Kinds of Jews

Photo of the Day- Peleş Castle, Romania

Quote of the Day

"Good government in Italy is a by-product of singing groups and soccer clubs, not prayer."- Robert Putnam

Another report to read

House of Lords report on the economic impact of immigration;

Immigration has become highly significant to the UK economy: immigrants comprise 12% of the total workforce—and a much higher proportion in London. However, we have found no evidence for the argument, made by the Government, business and many others, that net immigration—immigration minus emigration—generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population.

Overall GDP, which the Government has persistently emphasised, is an irrelevant and misleading criterion for assessing the economic impacts of immigration on the UK. The total size of an economy is not an index of prosperity. The focus of analysis should rather be on the effects of immigration on income per head of the resident population. Both theory and the available empirical evidence indicate that these effects are small, especially in the long run when the economy fully adjusts to the increased supply of labour. In the long run, the main economic effect of immigration is to enlarge the economy, with relatively small costs and benefits for the incomes of the resident population.

The economic impacts of immigration depend critically on the skills of immigrants. Different types of immigrant can have very different impacts on the economy. The issue is not whether immigration is needed but what level and type of immigration is desirable. In this context, net immigration from the EU—which we expect to remain positive—cannot be controlled. The question then is whether additional immigration from elsewhere carries benefits or disadvantages.

Many businesses and public services at present make use of the skills and hard work of immigrants. But this is not an argument for immigration on a scale which exceeds emigration and thus increases the population of the country. We do not support the general claims that net immigration is indispensable to fill labour and skills shortages. Such claims are analytically weak and provide insufficient reason for promoting net immigration. Vacancies are, to a certain extent, a sign of a healthy economy. Immigration increases the size of the economy and overall labour demand, thus creating new vacancies. As a result, immigration is unlikely to be an effective tool for reducing vacancies other than in the short term.

We also question the Government's claim that immigration has generated fiscal benefits. Estimates of the fiscal impacts are critically dependent on who counts as an immigrant (or as a descendant of an immigrant) and on what items to include under costs and benefits. The overall fiscal impact of immigration is likely to be small, though this masks significant variations across different immigrant groups.

Rising population density has potentially important economic consequences for the resident population, including impacts on housing, as well as wider welfare effects, especially in parts of England where immigrants are most concentrated. Although immigration is only one of a number of factors affecting the demand for housing, it does exert a significant impact on the housing market in particular areas. Some of the wider impacts from rising population are hard to measure and highly regional. Some, such as the impact of increasing population density on the cost and speed of implementation of public infrastructure projects, remain poorly understood.
Arguments in favour of high immigration to defuse the "pensions time bomb" do not stand up to scrutiny as they are based on the unreasonable assumption of a static retirement age as people live longer and ignore the fact that, in time, immigrants too will grow old and draw pensions. Increasing the retirement age, as the Government has done, is the only viable approach to resolving this issue.

There are significant unknowns and uncertainties in the existing data on immigration and immigrants in the UK. There are insufficient data about people leaving the UK and about short-term immigration to the UK. Existing data do not allow for accurate measurement of the stock of immigrants at national, regional and local levels. Inevitably, even less is known about the scale of illegal immigration and illegal employment of immigrants. The gaps in migration data create significant difficulties for the analysis and public debate of immigration, the conduct of monetary policy, the provision of public services and a wide range of other public policies.

Our overall conclusion is that the economic benefits to the resident population of net immigration are small, especially in the long run. Of course, many immigrants make a valuable contribution to the UK. But the real issue is how much net immigration is desirable. Here non-economic considerations such as impacts on cultural diversity and social cohesion will be important, but these are outside the scope of our inquiry.

Against this background, we have identified the following priorities for Government action. The Government should:

* improve radically the present entirely inadequate migration statistics;
* review its immigration policies and then explain, on the basis of firm evidence on the economic and other impacts, the reasons for and objectives of the policies, and how they relate to other policy objectives such as improving the skills of the domestic workforce;
* better enforce the minimum wage and other statutory employment conditions, with effective action taken against employers who illegally employ immigrants or who provide employment terms which do not meet minimum standards;
* clarify the objectives and implications of the new, partially points-based immigration system. It is far from clear that the new arrangements will in fact constitute the radical overhaul of the present system suggested by the Government;
* monitor immigration by publishing periodic Immigration Reports giving details of the numbers and characteristics of non-EEA nationals entering the UK under each Tier of the new system;
* give further consideration to which channels of immigration should lead to settlement and citizenship and which ones should be strictly temporary;
* review the implications of its projection that overall net immigration in future years will be around 190,000 people. The Government should have an explicit and reasoned indicative target range for net immigration and adjust its immigration policies in line with that broad objective.

Tibet 2, Beijing 0

The School of Athens

When the Renaissance learned to live with the risks of reason, a turbaned Averroes would find a place of honor standing behind Aristotle in The School of Athens, Raphael's masterpiece in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican.

-David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, p. 377

Cyprus's sex trade