Despite being small enough to fit in your pocket, a tape measure is one of those tools that is almost impossible to use by yourself. Laser measuring devices are far easier to wrangle if you don’t have an assistant—even with just one hand—but it’s taken decades for a company like Bosch to finally create a version that’s as compact as roll of metal tape.
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T-Mobile USA is expanding its family plans and allowing Simple Choice subscribers to add a tablet to their plans, as the carrier continues its aggressive price war. The changes mean that family plans will now support up to ten lines, rather than the five of before, which T-Mobile says comes after requests from larger families and small businesses. After the … Continue reading
The time has come. Back from the grave that was Pokemon Stadium comes Pokken Tournament, a game that matches the world of Pocket Monsters with the classic fighting game Tekken. It’s not the same as Marvel VS Capcom, but it’s not entirely different, either. Nintendo is out for punches! What you’re about to see is early footage of the game … Continue reading
Samsung’s Galaxy Alpha looks set to be the first of a family of more premium-bodied smartphones from the company, the latest whispers indicate, with at least three more versions said to be in the pipeline. Revealed earlier this month, the Galaxy Alpha at least partially eschews Samsung’s fondness for all-plastic bodies with a metal frame, leading to hopes of more … Continue reading
Every year on this day, we celebrate the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote in the United States. With the right to vote, women gained one of the most important responsibilities and privileges a democracy can bestow. Thankfully we’ve used it and become a powerhouse in elections across the country. Since 1980, the proportion of eligible women who voted in presidential elections has exceeded the number of eligible men who voted. There’s women power at its best.
Women’s Equality Day, however, is as much an opportunity to recognize past achievements in the women’s movement as it is to look at the work we have left to achieve gender equality in this country. Universal suffrage was an essential step, and yet almost a century later we still don’t have full equality in educational institutions, in the workplace, on the battlefield, and in our personal health care decisions.
As I reflect upon recent Supreme Court decisions and listen to the harsh rhetoric that is rampant in our political system, it is clear that women are caught in a cruel game of moving one step forward to be pushed two steps back. 94 years after securing the right to vote, it is time for another Constitutional revolution for women. It is time for a renewed commitment to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
We have seen a disappointing picture of what can happen because women are not acknowledged in the Constitution. Pay discrimination across sectors has resulted in women earning 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man doing similar work. Compounded over her career, this pay gap has disastrous consequences on a woman’s retirement savings and Social Security benefits. The pay gap means older women are more vulnerable to falling into poverty.
We have seen that legislative protections are not guarantees. They are weak in the face of challenges when the protections are not enshrined by the Constitution. Women need their rights to be explicit and unmistakable.
The Hobby Lobby decision this summer was a shocking reminder that a woman’s autonomy is not the same as a man’s. Access to contraception was a keystone of the Affordable Care Act, but the strength of that mandate has been eroded by legal challenges, resulting in less access and greater financial burden. Women’s rights – even those we believe are well-established by law – are in jeopardy when the Constitution is silent about them.
Alice Paul, the great suffragist and the author of the original ERA, once said, “I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me, there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.” And yet after decades of efforts to pass a Constitutional amendment declaring the rights of women in this country, “ordinary equality” still eludes us.
Last year, House Democrats launched the “When Women Succeed, America Succeeds” initiative to bring greater attention to the persistent inequalities in our society. Study after study shows that women’s equality is not simply a women’s issue. The gender wage gap, pregnancy discrimination, paid family leave, and reproductive choice affect both women and their families. Addressing these injustices and ensuring gender equality will allow families to maximize household income and make decisions about what works best for themselves and their children. And helping American families, benefits the nation as a whole.
This Women’s Equality Day let’s urge our leaders to take a giant step toward gender equality and fairness. It’s time to pass the ERA so that next year, we can celebrate the next great constitutional achievement for women.
Almost a decade ago, I spent more than a year freelancing for a major metropolitan newspaper — one of the biggest in the country. I would, on an intermittent basis, work out of a newsroom that appeared to be in a state of constant churn. Whoever wasn’t being downsized seemed to be jumping ship or madly searching for a life raft. It looked as if bean counters were beating reporters and editors into submission or sending them out of the business and into journalism schools where they would train a new generation of young reporters. For just what wasn’t clear. Jobs that would no longer exist?
Before the special series I was working on was complete, my co-writer — the paper’s Washington investigative editor — had left for the friendlier confines of academia and the editor who greenlit the series had resigned in the face of management’s demands for steep cuts to newsroom staff. It seemed as if the only remaining person associated with the series was a gifted photographer (who left for greener pastures within a year).
I thought I was witnessing the end of an era, the death of an institution.
At the same time, I was also working for a small but growing online publication that managed to produce three original articles each week — a mix of commentary, news analysis, and original investigative reporting. More than a decade into that gig, the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com is still going strong, still publishing three original articles per week, and syndicating that content out to dozens and dozens of online publications, reaching hundreds of thousands of potential readers.
Over that time, online outlets have come and gone, venerable newspapers have closed up shop, predictions of doom — of the death of print publications, the demise of investigative reporting (maybe even of journalism itself) — have been aired repeatedly. And it’s true that in this new era it hasn’t been easy to make a living as a journalist or keep a media outlet afloat. Yet, as a reader, I notice something else: I can’t even hope to read every eye-catching article that flashes by on my Twitter feed or piles up in my inbox from one listserve or another. I end up with 25 open windows in my taskbar — top-quality journalism from legacy media outlets and new digital magazines that I hope I might be able to skim later that day or the next or sometime before my laptop slows to a crawl under the weight of so much groundbreaking reporting.
It turned out that, 10 years ago, I actually was witnessing the end of an era while living through the formative stages of another. It’s been a moment in which stories published on a relatively tiny website like TomDispatch circle the globe in a flash and a writer like me, who never went to journalism school, can see his articles almost instantly translated into Spanish, Japanese, Italian, and languages I don’t even recognize, and then reposted on websites from South America to Africa to Asia. In other words, they sometimes reach the sort of global audience that once might have been a stretch even for a reporter at a prestigious mainstream media outlet.
Over these years, I’ve also watched others who have passed through the Nation Institute wade into a scary media market and find great success. TomDispatch’s own former intern Andy Kroll, for example, has gone on to break one important story after another at Mother Jones, a print publication that now thrives online, while former Nation Institute program associate Liliana Segura has taken a top post at First Look Media, one of the most dynamic and talked-about new media ventures in years. And they are hardly anomalies.
In her new book, Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World, Anya Schiffrin, the director of the media and communications program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, chronicles the brave new world of global journalism in the age of the Internet (and how the stage was set for the new golden age of the reader we’re living in). In her inaugural article for TomDispatch, “The Fall and Rise of Investigative Journalism,” the longtime foreign correspondent reveals the investigative exposés by today’s top global muckrakers that you missed and explains why investigative journalism is on the rise, not the decline, worldwide.
From Asia to Central America, a new generation of Nellie Blys and Ida Tarbells, Seymour Hershes and Rachel Carsons, is breaking one big story after another with equal parts old-fashioned shoe leather and 21st-century knowhow. “The fact that journalists have been calling attention to some of the same problems for more than a hundred years might make one despondent, but it shouldn’t…” Schiffrin writes in her book. “That the battles are still going on should remind us that new abuses, new forms of corruption, are always emerging, providing new opportunities and new responsibilities for the media.” Luckily, there is a new generation of reporters around the world, she points out, rising to the challenge.
As you stroll along the clifftops of this stunningly beautiful town in western Ukraine, gaze at the river in the ravine below languidly looping back on itself beneath the forested slopes, wander through the historic streets and up to the fairy-tale castle, there is little to reveal that this is the place where the Germans and their allies perpetrated the first major massacre of the Holocaust.
Ravine at Kamyanets-Podilsky
Smotrich River
Yet 73 years ago this week, in the space of three days, 23,600 Jews were slaughtered in the forests, fields and copses surrounding Kamyanets-Podilsky, as duly reported in bureaucratic mission-accomplished fashion by local SS leader Friedrich Jeckeln to his boss back in Berlin, Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler.
The castle
On August 26, 1941, between 12,000 and 14,000 Jews, who had already been deported to this thousand-year-old town from then Hungarian-ruled Carpathia, were assembled at the train station after being told they were going home or would be resettled in Palestine. They were then herded to Europe’s first major killing fields of WWII near a munition’s depot on the city’s outskirts.
There, stripped of their valuables and sometimes clothes, they were mowed down by the relentless machine-guns of German SS troops and their Hungarian and Ukrainian abettors, their bodies left in pits.
View over town
On the following two days it was the turn of some 10,000 members of a Jewish community that had called the narrow streets and evocative buildings of this hilltop town home since the middle ages. Rousted from their houses by German troops and their local allies on the same tale of being resettled in Palestine, they were marched to the previous day’s killing fields and massacred.
A castle view
Away from the Auschwitz death camp and the massive industrial slaughter houses of the Holocaust that still stand as memorials to the murderous evil of Nazi Germany, away from official monuments like those in the pulverised Warsaw Ghetto, here in the literal killing fields of Europe scant markers bear witness to atrocities at the site where they were perpetrated.
Before there was the Babi Yar massacre immortalized by Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, before there was the Odessa massacre perpetrated by Germany’s Romanian allies, there was Kamyanets-Podilsky.
An orthodox church
The historic old town atop a ridge in the Carpathian Mountains above the Smotrich River, where it wends its way in an almost complete loop through the steep tree-carpeted ravine, is today much as those Jews would have seen it on their last day.
Another river view
The ruins of the castle with several round turrets march straight out of the brothers Grimm or Disneyland, and impressive churches and buildings painted in pastel yellows, greens, blues and pinks give the flavour of old Central Europe. Jews had lived here since the 15th century, at times forming 50 percent of the population.
Today there is a stone pyramidal memorial in the town’s Jewish cemetery, commemorating the murder of some 800 Jewish children and elderly taken a year later from the 5,000 remaining Jews who were forced into a ghetto. At the killing fields two plaques memorialise the ‘fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters tortured to death.’
Another castle view
In the Catholic Cathedral a document posted up on a wall shows that in 1913 Jews were the largest single community, although slightly outnumbered by all Christians taken together. Of 49,500 people, 23,500 were Jews with 31 synagogues, while there were over 17,000 orthodox Christians and 8,000 Catholics. A single synagogue facade remains.
Document on wall of Catholic church
Kamyanets-Podilsky old town
In 1941 the Kamyanetz-Podlisky massacre was overtaken in its enormity within a month by Babi Yar, when 33,771 Jews were slaughtered in a single operation on September 29-30 in a wooded ravine in the northern suburbs of Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.
Babi Yar ravine and woods
The site hosted many later massacres. More than 100,000, perhaps 200,000 people are estimated to have been slaughtered here, including tens of thousands more Jews, Russian prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma, by the time the Germans and their Ukrainian sympathisers were driven out of Kiev in 1944.
Another view
After the end of the war Soviet Communist authorities banned any memorials to the Jews massacred at the site. In 1976 they erected a horizontal concrete column with sculptures in heroic or tormented poses in a memorial to the Soviet citizens and prisoners of war shot here.
It was only after the fall of communism and Ukraine’s independence that a bronze menorah, the traditional seven-branch candelabrum of ancient Israel, was erected in 1991 at the head of the ravine in Babi Yar’s killing field, 50 years to the day after the first massacre was perpetrated here.
Menorah
It looks not all that different from the one Emperor Titus seized from the temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 and portrayed on his triumphal arch in Rome.
Another view
Several crosses commemorate specific Christians killed here, including 621 Ukrainian nationalists and two Orthodox priests.
Memorial to Christians murdered
Another cross memorial
Wandering in Kamyanets-Podilsky and Babi Yar, contemplating the enormity of the horror, you have to wonder what in hell is really behind those who call Israel’s recent campaign in Gaza genocidal, like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who said it was worse than the Nazi atrocities.
Kamyanets ravine view
Kamyanets old town
“You can see that what Israel does to Palestine, to Gaza right now, has surpassed what Hitler did to them,” he told CNN in an interview, while also saying he doesn’t “approve” or “accept” what Hitler did to the Jews.
However horrible it is that Palestinian children and civilians have been blown to pieces in Gaza, and without going into the intricacies of either side’s narrative, it is not Kanyanets-Podilsky or Babi-Yar.
Kamyanets old town
Another view
Whether he wishes it or nor, Erdoğan’s statement seems tantamount to Holocaust denial, since he calls the killing of over 2,100 Palestinians in military actions worse than what the Germans did in these two killing fields – let alone in the massive industrial death camps of Auschwitz and elsewhere. He sees them as paling in comparison to Israel’s Gaza campaign, completely brushing over the huge qualitative and quantitative differences in intent, circumstances and numbers.
Erdoğan earned a high school diploma from Eyüp school and studied Business Administration at the Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences in Istanbul, so presumably he knows how to count and to calculate that more than 2,100 in seven weeks is a somewhat lesser rate than 23,600 in three days or 33,771 in two days.
Castle view
Another castle view
Therefore to rationally justify his rhetoric he would need to join the ranks of the Holocaust-deniers to discount and miscount Kamyanets-Podilsky and Babi Yar, let alone Auschwitz, seeing that proportionality is one of the planks in an argument in which he slammed Israel for ‘disproportionate’ use of force in its ‘Hitler-surpassing barbarism.’
He clearly needs a refresher course in mathematical relativity, let alone those of circumstance and intent. He doesn’t need to go to Auschwitz and the other grim fortresses of death that saw millions slaughtered to meditate on the logic of his statements.
I can suggest no better place for him to begin than here in the glorious tourist-friendly foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, in Kamyanets-Podilsky, at the intersection of natural beauty and horrific history.
Kamyanets-Podilsky
Let him spend a few hours in this spectacular setting, let him gaze at the castle that played a significant role in Europe’s defence against his own invading Ottoman ancestors, and let him contemplate on the qualitative and quantitative nature and intent of what occurred here.
Sunset over Kamyanets-Podilsky
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By the same author: Bussing The Amazon: On The Road With The Accidental Journalist, available with free excerpts on Kindle and in print version on Amazon.
And Swimming With Fidel: The Toils Of An Accidental Journalist, available on Kindle, with free excerpts here, and in print version on Amazon in the U.S here.
Would the Internet even be worth checking if not for adorable feline videos? It’s unclear. So as an ode to the Internet’s MVP, we have scientifically compiled a list that seeks to answer the question, “Which cat is the most outstanding of them all?”
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
