Hasta La Gadget!

Khir Khan, the father of a slain Muslim American war hero, on Sunday continued to speak out against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his anti-Muslim bigotry.

“He is a black soul, and this is totally unfit for the leadership of this country,” Khan said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union.” “The love and affection that we have received affirms that our grief ― that our experience in this country has been correct and positive. The world is receiving us like we have never seen. They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul.”

Khan last week delivered an impassioned speech at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, challenging the Manhattan real estate mogul, who has proposed banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., to read the Constitution. “You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” Khan said.

The GOP nominee shot back over the weekend, telling ABC News he has made “a lot of sacrifices.” He also suggested Ghazala Khan wasn’t allowed to speak at the convention.

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said.

On Sunday, Khan reiterated his belief that Republican leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) needed to speak out against Trump.

“It is a moral obligation ― history will not forgive them,” he told CNN. “This election will pass, but history will be written. The lack of moral courage with remain a burden on their souls.”

In a separate interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Khan described the outpouring of support he had received around the country ― even from some prominent Republicans. 

“I’d rather not disclose the names. That is a personal trust and faith that they have placed by writing to me, by speaking with me,” he said, praising “the emails and the documents and the calls and the messages that we continue to receive, the flowers we continue to receive at our home.”

“This morning, I was coming to you. And I stepped out the door of the hotel. And two persons came and gave me a hug,” he added. “I don’t know them. And they said, ‘You have done something that our heart always had. You have given words to it.’ Last night, coming into the hotel, the lobby was full of strangers that were standing there, wanting to shake my hand … It is something that shows the goodness of this country, that we should not divide, we should not sow the hatred, the division.”

Trump responded to Khan’s earlier comments on Twitter Sunday morning.

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Fresh off her appearance at the Democratic National Convention, where she spoke in support of nominee Hillary Clinton, Lena Dunham seems to be getting back to work on “Girls.” 

Over the weekend, the writer and director shared a couple photos on Instagram of herself wearing a sporty bikini and an oh-so-millennial bucket hat while cruising on the water in Florida. At the same time, she teased some plot points for the new season of the HBO show. 

“#girlsdoesflorida,” she captioned one pic, while the other read, “I’m a lifestyle blogger now. People love it!!! They love the sporty lifestyle! #girlsdoesflorida.” 

We have so many questions! Why do the girls go to Florida? Does this mean Hannah goes through another career change ? Will she get an Instagram husband to help her new career flourish? Or is Dunham just poking fun at the world of glamorous lifestyle bloggers on her personal account? 

If only so we can watch the self-absorbed protagonist figure out her best angles in the mirror while Hailee Steinfeld’s “I Love Myself” (or perhaps Bif Naked’s “I Love Myself Today”) plays in the background, we hope it’s the former. 

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(This post was originally published as part of the World Economic Forum’s Globalization series.)

In aggregate terms, the human race has never had it so good. Life expectancy has risen by more in the past 50 years than in the previous 1,000. When the Berlin Wall fell, two-fifths of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Now it’s one-eighth. Global illiteracy has dropped from one-half to one-sixth in the same span of time. With a few tragic exceptions, a child born almost anywhere today can expect to grow up healthier, wealthier and smarter than at any other time in history.

And more connected, thanks principally to the end of the Cold War, fresh waves of democratization, China’s emergence from autarky, and the advent of the internet. The political map of the world has been redrawn. Market economics has circumnavigated the globe.

A divided world

At the same time, we have rarely felt so divided. While walls between countries are coming down, within countries they are going up everywhere. Statistical proof of overall well-being is cold comfort to a middle class whose real wages have stagnated, or to poor people in the US and other so-called “rich” countries whose poverty has deepened. The bottom-fifth of Americans were earning more money 25 years ago. They also had a greater chance of moving up the economic ladder, the lower rungs of which have now been sawed off.

And we have rarely felt so vulnerable. As populations, capital and production systems have shifted – massively and rapidly – we as individuals have become ensnared in a transnational tangle of choices and burdens, enablers and obstacles, interdependencies and conflicts. Pensioners and home-owners have seen their savings decimated by unforeseen financial risks. Workers have lost their jobs to overseas strangers escaping from poverty; those whose jobs stayed onshore are losing them to machines. Farmers suffer crop failure due to climate change. Citizens rage against elites who siphon off urgently needed public monies into foreign bank accounts.

Other people’s everyday choices on the other side of the world – about what energy they use, what products they consume, what medicines they take or how they secure their data – threaten us unintentionally. Equally, our choices impact them. In an increasingly open world, we’ve begun to blame more and more of our frustrations on each other.

Looking to the past for fresh courage

Europe’s “age of discovery” in the 15th and 16th centuries was likewise a time of historic connections and divisions, of singular achievements and shocking new dangers, of bold genius and violent rejection. Columbus’s ships found the New World – and spread conflicts and pandemics in their wake. Vasco da Gama found a sea route to the spice riches of the Indian Ocean – and caused the collapse of Silk Road economies that had flourished for centuries. The Gutenberg press shifted human communication to a new normal: information abundance, cheap distribution, radical variety and wide participation. But it also put scribes out of business and enabled a single disillusioned friar (Martin Luther) to ignite a century of religious wars. Copernicus flipped Europe’s very notion of heaven and earth with his new sun-centered theory; when Galileo pushed it, he was excommunicated.

Through three decades of feverish connecting, integrating and tangling together – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the rise of social media – we have built a precious but, history tells us, fragile new world. In so many ways, we are starting to flourish. But equally, we are starting to fray. An age of discovery, then and now, is a time of upheaval. And upheaval makes both winners and losers.

But it does not make us powerless. This extraordinary age of discovery is not simply the condition of our lives, but the contest as well.

In the 1990s, many people bought into a simplistic fantasy that the benefits of greater openness and connectedness – of “globalization” – would trickle down to everyone equally. Today we’ve replaced such naïveté with a sober realization: when some walls are flattened, the world’s precious resources pool into those places and into those hands that hold an advantage along whatever dimensions of difference remain. Popular usage of the term “globalization” has plummeted.

Where next?

We’ve outgrown the fantasy. That’s a healthy step. Now the question is: will we abandon the dream? One option is to seek to smash the global agreements, protocols, supply chains and exchanges we have built with one another, and in their place build new, higher walls. From the surging popularity of Donald Trump, to Britain’s shockingly close vote on Brexit, to the electoral successes of nationalist, protectionist and xenophobic politicians in democracies worldwide, this project is well under way.

Or we can seek to make our entanglement work. For ourselves. For poor people and poor countries. For the planet. The great service that Donald Trump, Brexit and similar campaigns in Germany, France, Greece, Brazil, Austria, the Philippines and other countries have performed is to shock us all into remembering that our new openness and connectedness cannot be taken for granted. Globalization was never merely a trend; it is also a test of the human character. In an age of discovery, change is rapid. How change unfolds depends on us. Will we allow the weight of unearned gains and undeserved losses to break society, or will we shape outcomes to deliver on the promise that opening and connecting with one another is in all our best interests? Not least because we need to work together to solve climate change, transnational crime and corruption, migration crises and other great global challenges.

Anxiety in a time of rapid change is understandable. Pessimism is in vogue. Anger and despair are infectious. Middle-class wage stagnation is real, and the list of fixes is difficult.

But courage is infectious, too. The present age is a contest. We’re all being drawn into it, more and more. Some are harnessing a prevalent pessimism to seize power for themselves, to tear apart the open society we’ve built and shorten our reach so that we do not exceed our grasp.

Who will dare to stoke our optimism? To accept responsibility, to start fixing the mistakes we’ve made, and with bold actions remind us all that, while we may be more vulnerable, our collective potential has never been greater?

This post draws on a new book, Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance. Published in North America by St Martin’s Press and in the rest of the world by Bloomsbury.

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In the opaque world of diamond dealing even an elevator encounter has its unwritten rules.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a movie. Being one of the few women in the world who can call myself a diamond dealer, I was recently standing in an elevator in the Diamond Exchange Building in Antwerp, Belgium. After passing 15-20 CCTV cameras, handing over my passport, leaving my finger prints and announcing myself to the security guards, I proceeded to the elevators.  
I was only going up five floors. Just before the elevator doors closed, a man jumped in.
Neither of us batted an eyelash, but we did, however, nod distantly to one another in recognition of the fact that we were occupying the same space. Without turning towards me and still starring straight ahead, he suddenly asked:
“Buyer or seller?”

Without turning towards him, I instinctively answered:
“Buyer.”

“Size?”

“1-5.”

The fact that he even addressed me in the elevator was a rare break with diamond district etiquette. But his hunt for new clients was apparently more important than his scruples. And he was enough of a professional not to hand me his business card. His not giving me one signifies that he doesn’t specialize in the diamond size in which I normally deal, which is 1-5 carat.

It is all about security
Antwerp Diamond District is the area where 80% of the world’s diamond trade takes place. It is a small area, less than one square kilometer. With 4 diamond stock exchanges and 1500 trading offices, this translates to a turnover of more than $ 42 billion a year. The diamond trade covers 8% of Belgium’s exports and about 30,000 people are directly or indirectly involved in the Belgian diamond sector.

Why Antwerp?
It was in this area that special abrasive -and polishing techniques originally were developed. 8 out of 10 rough diamonds are currently traded on the 4 diamond bourses. It is estimated that half of all polished diamonds are passing through here.

Since the area is classified as ‘high risk’ for both political and economic reasons, the safety precautions are developing all the time. It is forbidden to drive in the street that even has a small police post at each end. It is also forbidden to run. Although it looks very much like any other dull and narrow street in a big city, the specially trained security forces, that are armed with machine guns and the military police as well as the cameras on the office buildings, reveal that this is one of the most protected and monitored areas in Europe.
Each building has security guards at the gates and all offices are monitored and locked with several security codes.

Breach of etiquette
As a diamond dealer, there are a number of unwritten rules that must be observed within the diamond bourses. First of all, there is no manual or code of conduct, but you quickly come to understand how to behave, if you wish to be accepted as a pro. To be considered for a license to deal on the diamond bourse, one must:
Present two letters of recommendation from two “godfathers” (two full members of the bourse, residing in Belgium, “who are deemed to be well informed of the good moral and financial reputation of the proposed candidate and will supply, upon request, all necessary information to the Board of Directors”). You must never have been convicted of a crime and you must have been active in the diamond trade for several years.

And no matter what you do, you do it discreetly. One of the unwritten rules appears to be: “If you act as if you’re not here, then I’ll act as if I don’t see you.” And after our business transaction is concluded, I’ll pretend I’ve forgotten all about you.  

Integrity above all
When I left the elevator I couldn’t help but smile. This is one of the reasons why I appreciate my job so much. No small talk – no nonsense. You just go straight to the point. Had this been any elevator in any other business, I wonder how he would have managed – before we arrived on the fifth floor – to ask about my nationality, my profession, the duration and purpose of my visit, who I was going to see and how many children I have.

Once in a while it’s rather liberating to be on home turf where integrity, trust and traditions are the hallmark qualities, where all superfluous talk is unnecessary and an elevator pitch can be pared down to just four words.

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On October 19, 1942, Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) parachuted four young Norwegian saboteurs onto the bleak Hardangervidda plateau overlooking the magnificent but precipitous Vestfjorddalen valley near Rjukan in southern Norway on a mission of vital importance – to prevent Hitler from getting the atom bomb.

For the massive Vemork hydroelectric station perched on a steep mountainside above the sheer gorge of the Måna River not only provided power but also produced heavy water, a vital A-bomb component. The mission, codenamed Grouse, aimed to eke out intelligence and prepare the ground for a British explosives unit to blow up the plant.

A month later, disaster struck the 34-strong British unit. The two gliders and planes towing them crashed in bad weather and the men died on impact or were later killed by the Germans. For some reason Grouse was renamed Swallow and the four endured a terrible winter atop the plateau, surviving on reindeer meat and half-digested vegetation in the reindeer’s stomach for essential nutrients.

On February 27, 1943, SOE parachuted in half a dozen more Norwegians, known as Gunnerside, 30 miles from their target area in a blinding blizzard. But Swallow and Gunnerside met up, descended the now-called Saboteurs’ Trail from the plateau, scaled down the gorge’s precipitous 300-foot walls and up the other side, blew up the heavy water plant, and safely withdrew, some skiing to Sweden despite a humongous German manhunt.

Their tale is now told at the power plant in a half-hour film entitled ‘If Hitler had the bomb.’ It’s a fascinating tale to follow, but one thing Yours Truly will not be following is their tail along the Saboteurs’ Trail – a five-mile hike from the plateau involving some 2,000 feet of upping and downing and culminating in scaling the gorge’s precipices. I’d fall to my death at each freaking foot.

The Germans rebuilt the plant and the Americans deemed it such a mortal danger that on November 16, 1943, they unleashed 160 Flying Fortresses in a bombing spree that inflicted virtually no damage on the all-important electrolysis building.

The Germans decided to withdraw all further activities to Germany. Norwegian resistance learned that they were taking the heavy water by regular ferry across Lake Tinn and warned that civilians would be on board. But the nuclear danger was considered so great that they were ordered to sabotage it anyway. The ferry Hydro sank to the bottom, and 18 Norwegian civilians died along with it.

Ironically, at the end of the war the allies learned that the Germans were not nearly as close to an A-bomb as they’d feared.

The silver screen, of course, had to get into the act, and the British film ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris was born in 1965. It was filmed here, so the scenery is authentic despite certain dramatisations and other cinematic ploys – surprise, surprise.

Today, in splendid sunshine, the scenery remains both authentic and superb. And in the souvenir shop they’re selling little glass vials of heavy water. I just hope ISIS doesn’t get wind of this, buy up the whole lot and produce a little bit of dirty improvisation.

For a totally different reason Rjukan, together with Notodden a few dozen miles to the south, is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list for manifesting ‘an exceptional combination of industrial assets and themes associated to the natural landscape,’ standing out as ‘an example of a new global industry in the early 20th century.’ This is due to its use of hydropower for industrial projects.

Along with the exhibition commemorating the heavy water sabotage, there’s another in Vemork’s vast hall of hydro turbines detailing the history of industry and working class culture.

True to Norway’s sterling humanitarian vocation, there’s a new exhibition just beyond the turbines on the current refugee crisis called ‘Crossing Borders,’ dealing with the reasons behind the exodus.

This deals with poverty, with photos of Kibera slum in Nairobi, as well as war and violence. There are photos from Gaza explicitly mentioning the destruction caused by Israeli bombing raids. But when it comes to the millions of Syrian refugees there are photos from Greece of their arrival, but no specific mentions of the cause of their exodus or explicit naming of the perpetrators.

Now I’ve no problem with specifically mentioning Israel’s bombing raids on Gaza, even if you don’t have space to mention the context for them. But how many refugees from Gaza are among the current millions fleeing? If you don’t mention the explicit cause of the exodus of millions of Syrians, however, such as Syrian Government barrel bombing or Muslim extremist atrocities, there’s something awry here.

You have a statement, black on a white panel, by Musallem, aged 28: ‘I just want to live in peace in a safe country.’ But no naming of perpetrators. So you name the so-called perpetrators of a non-exodus, and not those of the real, massive actual exodus.

Norway may be benighted over this, but Rjukan is no longer benighted in winter. It nestles so deep in the Vetsfjord Valley that the 6,000-foot mountains block out the sun’s rays for half the year, subjecting its residents to life in permanent shadow from September to March.

But in 2013 the canny citizens pulled a fast one on cosmic nature. They installed three high-tech mirrors on the mountain top, shifting every 10 seconds and reflecting sunlight down to 6,400 square feet round the town square. It cost a bit more than a light bulb – some $850,000 – though I haven’t yet worked out the equivalent number of bulbs you’d need for 6,400 square feet.

Soaring high above Rjukan the Krossobanen cable car will sway you up to Gvepseborg, just below the Hardangervidda plateau, with superb uncluttered views of 6,178-foot Gausta Mountain, dubbed by Lonely Planet ‘arguably Norway’s most beautiful peak.’

From here there’s an easy hike of a couple of miles or so up onto the plateau to the remains of a WWII German gun emplacement, though it’s a steady 750-foot climb. The views over the lush Rjukan valley and across to Gausta are splendid, especially in contrast to the stark treeless plateau.

From the gun emplacement I could go on another mile and a half or so, but as the last gondola goes down at 4 p.m., and given my propensity to get lost – I mean I can get lost on a straight line with no turn-offs – I retrace my steps.

Another thing I’m not gonna do – Norway’s highest bungee jump, some 276 feet from the bridge across the gorge from Vemork.

[Upcoming blog next Sunday: In the halls of the mountain king – Norway’s silver mines]

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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.

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.

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