Hasta La Gadget!

Deep down, everyone wants to present their best self to the world, and preferably at all times. So while I often have the desire to belt out Kander and Ebb’s “But the World Goes ‘Round,” I typically refrain from singing as I walk down my block. Chances are someone is trying to sleep and would want me to… you know, not sing aloud.

In a similar scenario, I find myself annoyed when “headphone singers” come out to play at my gym. I’m sure you’ve seen and heard them before: the people who are clearly awaiting their Carnegie Hall debut and want all the other weightlifters and treadmill-runners to know what their listening to. Even though I am annoyed, I do not go up and tell them so. I don’t want them to think I’m a jerk.

I have a friend, perhaps my best friend, who would not hesitate to tell anyone to stop doing anything that irks her. She’s the one who gets the manager if an audience member is talking at the movies. I envy her sometimes, but even after five years of knowing her, all I’ve managed to pick up from her is a snort when I laugh. I have not taken on a skill that I hope comes with age: the mastery of not caring if people like me.

You might say at first that this is not a bad thing. Being a nice person isn’t a bad thing, that is for certain. You should be nice to people- within reason. You should not, though, care if they care.

I would be wholly embarrassed if I were to count the number of times I thought, “what do they think of me?” Whenever I argue with a friend I almost immediately apologize, even if I don’t think I should. When I was a teenager, a kid punched me in the gut and said, “Gay!” as if it were the most mortal of sins. My only concern was that others would think the same thing. I thought, at the time, it was the worst thing that I could ever be. Some night we’ll have a fireside chat, and I’ll go through that whole story of regression with you. For now, we’ll talk about how much I just wanted that guy, and everyone else I’ve ever encountered, to think favorably of me- whatever my definition of that was at the time.

This is not a good quality to have when dating. You become too agreeable, which automatically makes you less interesting. You try too hard, even as you see you’re putting in too much effort. Realizing you’re coming off bland or, in some cases, too strong, only leads to a feverish, and typically failed, attempt to correct the issue.

In Los Angeles, a city that thrives on false niceties and plastered (and often botoxed) smiles, learning to stop caring is difficult. Everyone pretends in this town of make-believe. They pretend to be successful, they pretend to be well-off, they pretend to be happy. The more you dig, the more you find broken dreams and functional alcoholism. Because LA, like every other corner of the Earth, is filled with humans. We humans want to be liked and accepted by the other humans – even if we ourselves don’t like them. We lie to ourselves and others in the pursuit of acceptance.

Those who succeed in tough places don’t do so because they worry about what others are thinking about them. They succeed because they learn to stop giving a crap about it.

My friend is happy because she doesn’t care what those rule-violating film-goers think. She came to enjoy the movie, and she thinks everyone in the theater should have that opportunity, too. She doesn’t care what the loud-mouths think about her.

But I… I still want people to like me. In my quest for personal growth in this dog-eat-dog world I have to reconcile that fragile desire while still managing to be humane to the people who waltz by me on my path.

There are probably a wealth of people who feel I’m, like Bette Davis once described herself, “just too much.” There are likely others who would rather I keep walking if I see them on the street. The lesson of the day is that it doesn’t matter. They have as little to do with my story as I do with theirs. We can both keep walking toward our own little slice of self-worth and confidence. And the world goes ’round.

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The National Rifle Association on Friday endorsed presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, saying that gun owners and supporters must unite to block presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“The damage that would be done by [Clinton’s] policies and her Supreme Court picks would destroy individual freedoms, and therefore destroy the America we all love,” said the group’s top lobbyist, Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Affairs. “We cannot let that happen. We have to unite, and we have to unite right now.”

The endorsement came after a fiery speech by NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, the group’s longtime leader. LaPierre railed against Clinton, promising that she would strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights. Trump took the stage after Cox.

The NRA’s Trump endorsement came earlier than previous NRA presidential endorsements, which typically take place later in the election cycle. And it wasn’t always a sure thing. Unlike most Republican candidates for national office, Trump endorsed a ban on assault weapons earlier in his career.

“I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I also support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun,” Trump wrote in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve.

But at the gun rights group’s 2015 annual meeting, Trump offered a preview of his future platform, telling the crowd, “I love the NRA. I love the Second Amendment.”

Trump took the opportunity of Friday’s endorsement to denounce gun-free zones, saying that they contributed to the carnage in the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris. But Trump himself has a mixed record on this policy too. The Huffington Post called up a few of Trump’s properties to see if someone could carry a firearm there. 

His private resort at Mar-a-Lago said it was a gun-free club. A receptionist at his hotel in Chicago said the same thing about that property. Officials at Trump’s hotels in Miami and Las Vegas did, however, say that you could bring a licensed firearm to their locations under certain security specifications. 

Sam Stein contributed reporting.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar,rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

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In the concluding part of our series on female refugees, we explore the challenges of identifying abuse and exploitation of lone women on the move – who are highly susceptible to sex trafficking and sometimes coerced into “transactional sex” to pay their way forward.

This is a three-part series on the cycles of sexual violence experienced by refugee women, especially from Syria – from forced labor and sex slavery inside their own country to years of harassment and destitution in countries neighboring Syria and falling prey to sex trafficking while in transition to Europe.

Part One of the story was published here.

Part Two of the story was published here.

When Samira, a refugee from Morocco, arrived on the shores of Lesbos, she was thankful for the fresh start that the calm waves on that particular day had allowed. The tide had been in her favor, she thought, until she reached into her bag to check that her savings were safe.

Much to her dismay, all of her money was gone.

Physically drained and psychologically fatigued by the adrenaline-pumping boat journey, she felt disoriented and on the brink of losing consciousness. Her onward travel to northern Europe would not be possible without her savings.

“They told me to continue the trip with them,” she says, referring to a group of Moroccan men who had shared the dinghy with her. “When I refused, they became aggressive and said I would be on my own.” Taking her solitary journey as an opportunity to make some quick cash, they bullied her into going with them. Samira believes that the men stole from her. But her fate could have been even worse had they wanted to sell her to traffickers – an increasing risk for lone female refugees entering Europe.

Identifying refugees at risk of exploitation is often impossible in overcrowded places such as registration hotspots. As most migrants do not wish to file an asylum application in the country of first entry, vulnerable women are unlikely to come forward and request assistance. Reaching their final destination becomes their sole concern.

In collaboration with Frontex, national authorities receiving the migrants try to establish the authenticity of purported family ties among refugees during their registration at reception centers. The cross-questioning is at times efficient in debunking fake claims. But the high number of applicants and the limited amount of time allocated to each person limits the effectiveness of this measure.

According to Anna Panou, a psychologist working for Doctors Without Borders at the Moria detention center on Lesvos, little can be done even when a woman is found in a state of mental distress that could put her at further risk of exploitation.

“If they are not underage and they do not want to ask for asylum in Greece, there is nothing we can do to protect them,” says Panou. “We try to persuade them to stay, but they usually want to continue their journey and there is nothing we can do to stop them.”

Samira was among the many lone women who wanted to move on quickly, despite being robbed and intimidated.

NGO workers at Moria took her to the Pikpa open refugee camp, the only facility providing mental counseling to vulnerable refugees. “I have no money to continue my journey but I have to. I cannot go back,” says Samira, who decided to cross into Europe after her husband divorced her and left her unable to provide for their two children.

There have also been an increasing number of reports of women engaging in “transactional sex” as a last resort to pay for their journey or to obtain the necessary travel documents. Most of these cases go unheard, as services provided by the U.N. and host states for sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) survivors are limited. Victims are often reluctant to seek medical attention to avoid delays.

This cumulative silence has had a negative impact on verifying the extent of sexual violence, harassment and threats that female refugees, especially those on the move, experience. The concrete numbers are missing.

The Forced Migration Review (FMR) concludes that “there is no quantitative data in respect to violence against women but many displaced Syrian women and girls report having experienced violence, in particular rape.”

According to interviews conducted by Amnesty International, women feel threatened and unsafe during their journeys to Europe. Many report physical abuse and financial exploitation, being groped or pressured to have sex by smugglers, security staff or other refugees.

Some of these women have already experienced sexual violence in different forms in their own countries and in neighboring countries where they first sought refuge. The same FMR report points to rampant “sexual exploitation or non-consensual ‘survival’ sex,” whereby “women and girls exchange sexual favors for food or other goods, or money to help pay the rent, especially in Lebanon.”

Reem, a 20-year-old from Syria, told Amnesty about her experience sleeping in transit camps. “I never got the chance to sleep in these settlements,” she says. “I was too scared that someone would touch me. The tents were all mixed and I witnessed violence.”

In October 2015, when the number of refugees in Lesbos had peaked, NGO Save the Children expressed concerns, following many testimonies of sexual harassment at Greek registration facilities due to the lack of security surveillance.

At present, Greece is bearing the burden of 45,817 refugees stranded on its mainland and an additional 7,888 on its islands. In Idomeni, on the border with Macedonia, the situation is particularly precarious, with 10,257 refugees trapped in a makeshift camp and unable to continue their journey to northern Europe.

Eva Cosse, assistant researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), explains that the border closure unilaterally enforced by Macedonia is an explicit violation of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

“Women are facing a very tough journey to Europe and are frequently victims of sexual harassment,” says Cosse. “Due to the lack of qualified personnel to identify vulnerable cases and a dysfunctional asylum system, they are currently falling into the cracks of the European protection system.”

While being aware of the threats that they may encounter along the journey, women are often left with no viable alternatives. This is due to the lack of options to seek asylum along the route or the dearth of effective mechanisms to speed up family reunification.

In a 2015 report, the UNHCR estimated that 10 percent of Syria’s refugees in the five main host countries (Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt) meet its definition of “vulnerable” and are in need of resettlement in a third country.

Refugee women may be considered for resettlement under any of the “vulnerability criteria” used by UNHCR, including the category “women and girls at risk.” But sparse data and the confidential nature of resettlement programs, whereby information about the applicants is not available to external agencies, make it difficult to verify the effectiveness, rates and speed of resettlement of refugee women.

In a recent report, Amnesty International charged that the resettlement system is failing to protect women living alone in host countries.

Several sources told Amnesty International that refugee women who are heads of their household and who do not know, or are unable to prove, the fate or whereabouts of their husband (cases considered to be “incomplete families”) have difficulty being accepted by states for resettlement. This is possibly because the host states want to avoid situations in which a woman’s husband is found later and then applies for asylum through family reunification.

The deal signed by the E.U. and Turkey is likely to add further hardships for lone refugee women. In an interview, strategic communications director for the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) Deni Robey expressed her concern for the so-called “one-for-one” provision. “Generally speaking, deterrence just encourages more dangerous routes or more smuggling,” she said.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Groups that work closely with refugee communities in Europe and in countries neighboring Syria have found it challenging to convince the women and their families to share their first-hand experiences of sexual violence. Their direct testimonials are vital in proving the extent of SGBV and, without such information, the possibility of holding the perpetrators accountable is an even more far-fetched notion.

As with most displacement situations caused by conflict and crimes, forging the trust of the displaced individuals and communities is the most challenging part for human rights groups. Helping them understand the impact of every account in mobilizing protection for survivors and preventing such atrocities in future can be a long, uncertain process.

Several groups, including the International Rescue Committee, Doctors Without Borders, advocacy groups and smaller, local NGOs, have continued to collect evidence, believing that there is indeed strength in numbers.

This article originally appeared on Refugees Deeply. For weekly updates and analysis about refugee issues, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.

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On a sultry evening in Varanasi, the spiritual capital of India, smoke from funeral pyres sweeps into a fading azure sky. Wisps of burnt orange float along the horizon where gods greet departed souls. I rush with Hindu pilgrims and other tourists like myself, toward the ritual prayer ceremony on a platform known as a ghat, overlooking the Ganges — the most-worshipped and one of the most-polluted rivers in the world. When Prime Minister Modi was elected to power in 2014, he pledged to clean up the Ganges, but tension between religious tradition and scientific ecology makes this waterway’s decontamination project every politician’s and environmentalist’s nightmare. Progress has been slow despite harsh fines imposed on fizzy drinks factories and leather curing plants. Toxic waste continues to spill into the river. Modern sewerage plants overflow as a result of frequent power cuts so that by the time this revered, defiled waterway has travelled 1,500 miles to the Indian Ocean it will have flowed past over 29 overcrowded cities, 70 squalid towns, and thousands of impoverished villages spewing sewage — over 1.3 billion liters per day, along with animal carcasses and 260 million liters of industrial waste.

People pushing, bodies bumping, and I manage to squeeze in between strangers on a stone bench near a shrine on the bank. Boats decorated with candles and marigolds drift by. Men in loincloths vigorously soap their bodies, which are soon covered in white foam. Then, to wash away their sins, they hold their noses and dunk in the Ganges, as polystyrene cups and pieces of newspaper idle by. Not far away, women draped in magenta and lapis blue saris follow suit. They sink up to their shoulders into the khaki water alongside floating wooden planks, laden with cremated remains wrapped in saffron-colored fabric. Souls in transit.

Safe on terra firma, I hold my breath along with them. Immersion in the Ganges is deemed to rid worshippers of sin, not transmit water-borne diseases — amoebic dysentery, cholera, hepatitis and typhoid. How many people get sick from this water and perhaps die?

I’d read that the Ganges was contaminated, but I didn’t expect to see plastic bottles, pieces of cloth, condoms and tampons, bobbing unnoticed and unheeded — weaving amidst the worshipers near the murky banks. Flotsam from pesticides and residues from chemical factories. I hadn’t expected to smell the caustic effluents from the leather tanneries sulphuric acid and the stench from lime pits. Ammonia from raw sewage.

I try to focus on the two tall, imposing priests in kimono-like robes who step onto a small platform, but I’m distracted by a woman struggling to disentangle a plastic bag from her dripping hair. Then she pushes it away into the fetid current. Framed by the sinking sun, each priest lifts two lanterns, and waves his hands in large circles as if they were gods showing us the path to paradise. A sacred silence subdues the oppressive cacophony. The soft echo of a conch and the evening prayer rites begin.

Millions visit Mama Ganges every year to experience the deep spirituality that enshrouds those sacrosanct crossroads, where life and death embrace each other with so much openness. Varanasi, brimming with sanctuaries and hospices, is known as the best place to die and be cremated to achieve moksha — liberation from the unending cycle of death and reincarnation. Over 200 open-air cremations are carried out daily. Some dead bodies — children, snakebite victims and those in renunciation — are exempted from cremation, bound with stones and immersed in the water.
Mukhagni, (lighting of a fire in the deceased’s mouth) and kapal kriya, (shattering of the skull by a blow from a stick to release the soul) are vital for moksha. Human remains, especially bones, must be submerged in the river so that the soul will not suffer.

An eco cremation — where the wood sits on a metal tray with an overhanging exhaust hood — is now available. This method uses a third as much wood and takes two hours instead of three days, but most families prefer to stick with the centuries-old religious rituals. Although these death rites are not the sole or even the biggest contaminator of the Ganges, they are undoubtedly a contributor.

Now I chant along with the priests willing them to help the endangered species — the blind fresh water Ganga dolphins entangled in discarded fishermen’s nets; the rare freshwater shark; and the unique marsh crocodiles. Would they encourage polluters to change their ways to save bar-headed geese, herons and Indian skimmers?

Through the practice of dharma, the path of righteousness, Hindus believe that they have a moral duty to protect the environment — caring for animals, plants and the natural world. Could these holy men, inspire visitors and locals to become vigilant advocates of the river’s future? Could they bring help back the birch trees and juniper bushes to the plains that have now become a desert? When the pollution conversation is shaped in this manner, people might realize that their actions go against their deepest values. This makes change possible.

Millions of dollars have already been spent on infrastructure projects and sewage systems, with minimal impact. It’s time for Prime Minister Modi to bridge the gap between environmentalists, ecologists and religious traditions so that the Ganges itself can be reborn, be holy, and be whole again.

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We have grown so accustomed to vast collection of our personal data and breaches of our privacy by both government agencies and private companies that new revelations no longer come as a surprise. However, we cannot pass over in silence the secret agreement made in September 2015 (but first reported by New Scientist on April 29), giving Google’s subsidiary DeepMind access to confidential medical records of 1.6 million Britons.

These records from the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) apparently include such details as a person’s full name, HIV status, results of pathology and radiology tests, past drug overdoses, and logs of their hospital stays, including who visited them and when. NHS has given assurances of “anonymity” for these data, but that offers little comfort. In fact, the agreement states that “pseudonimisation is not required,” and besides, even anonymized data may be used to reveal private information.

Concerns have been raised over why DeepMind needs such a wide range of data when its stated goal is to develop an app for the prevention of a specific kidney disease. Furthermore, these sensitive data are given to DeepMind without either informing patients of seeking their consent. Questions have been asked whether in order to have access to these data Google was obligated to receive a regulatory approval under a U.K. law, the NHS Act 2006. Google has not applied for such an approval and has argued that it was not necessary, but critics believe that in fact the law does require it.

What makes this case especially troubling is that Google is the world’s largest information technology company and one of the world’s two biggest companies overall. Today, given our collective addiction to technology, Google wields tremendous power over our tastes, our behavior, and our future.

Health care is surely an area in which technology companies have an important role to play. In particular, properly supervised data analysis using novel learning algorithms has the potential to improve the diagnostics and treatment of major diseases.

Google has done the world much good with its search engine and other products. However, the company’s secrecy and lack of oversight are of grave concern. When it acquired the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind two years ago for a reported $650 million, Google promised to set up an ethics board to deal with the issues of artificial intelligence. Well, I Googled “Google ethics board” — and there is still no information about it. That is troubling.

Artificial intelligence is invading our lives through various programs and devices, but it’s a double-edge sword. For example, a facial recognition program can be used to quickly organize your photo album, but it can also be used in a lethal autonomous weapons system that identifies suspects and strikes them without human supervision. Thus, along with great promise, AI holds the potential for unprecedented risks to the humankind. That’s why transparency and oversight are crucial in this area.

Alas, Google hasn’t been particularly forthcoming with information about its AI projects. But here’s what we know about DeepMind. Founded by three brilliant young scientists, the company was in the news recently because a deep learning algorithm AlphaGo it had developed beat a human Go champion — no doubt, an impressive achievement. Unfortunately, the company’s CEO then proceeded to declare that DeepMind’s algorithms could lead to a “meta-solution to any problem.”

That is a wild exaggeration, given what we know about the limitations of such algorithms. As a mathematician, I can attest that although there are some elements of 20th-century math in them, they are really based on 19th-century mathematics, cleverly adapted. The math itself is beautiful, and I salute my fellow mathematicians and computer scientists pushing the boundaries of what such algorithms can do. But to believe that everything about life can be explained in this way is akin to the exuberance of an 11-year old who has learned trigonometry and is so excited he thinks the whole world is trigonometry.

Pure and simple, this is hubris. And, I am sorry to say, it is reflected in how DeepMind has acted in acquiring the NHS medical data: not bothering to ask for people’s consent and not following ethics rules and regulations. What these actions communicate is that DeepMind views people’s medical histories merely as a bunch of data it wants to feed into a learning algorithm, in the same way as it used the old Go games for training the AlphaGo algorithm. And if a company treats people as pieces in a board game, why would it care about privacy and ethics? Well, that is precisely why we shouldn’t give DeepMind and its parent company a free hand in using our private data without proper supervision.

Unlike a human, a company is an algorithm, set to maximize a utility function: profit. Therefore, companies often become secretive, evading oversight. But we shouldn’t set the bar low. We must demand transparency and oversight — especially of technology companies that exert such profound influence on our lives. Ultimately, it all depends on us. This is not about robots or algorithms. It’s about us, humans; it’s about who we are, who we want to be.

Science and technology are essential parts of our culture, as well as the means for improving our lives. Humans have an insatiable desire to explore and to understand. In this quest for knowledge, we keep pushing the envelope. But life is not a game of Go. Simplistic solutions can, and will, lead us astray, especially when driven by big money.

In his prescient book The Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford has warned us: “On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by ‘going with’ its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man’s vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine’s meaningless existence.”

DeepMind’s motto is “Solve intelligence.” But more than intelligence, we need wisdom. Without it our proverbial “left brain” will run amok, to devastating results.

Technology companies will treat us as pieces in a board game only if we let them do so. It’s time to wake up to the new reality and create a system of checks and balances in which the kind of secret agreement that Google made to access citizens’ private data will not be allowed.

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