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Resurrecting the Unholy Trinity
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched their forever wars ― under the banner of a “Global War on Terror” ― they unleashed an unholy trinity of tactics. Torture, rendition, and indefinite detention became the order of the day. After a partial suspension of these policies in the Obama years, they now appear poised for resurrection.
For eight years under President Obama, this country’s forever wars continued, although his administration retired the expression “war on terror,” preferring to describe its war-making more vaguely as an effort to “degrade and destroy” violent jihadists like ISIS. Nevertheless, he made major efforts to suspend Bush-era violations of U.S. and international law, signing executive orders to that effect on the day he took office in 2009. Executive Order 13491, “Ensuring Lawful Interrogations,” closed the CIA’s secret torture centers ― the “black sites” ― and ended permission for the Agency to use what had euphemistically become known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
On that same day in 2009, Obama issued Executive Order 13492, designed ― unsuccessfully, as it turned out ― to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, the site of apparently endless detention without charges or trials. In 2015, Congress reinforced Obama’s first order in a clause for the next year’s National Defense Authorization Act that limited permissible interrogation techniques to those described in the U.S. Army Field Manual section on “human intelligence collector operations.”
All of that already seems like such ancient history, especially as the first hints of the Trump era begin to appear, one in which torture, black sites, extraordinary rendition, and so much more may well come roaring back. Right now, it’s a matter of reading the Trumpian tea leaves. Soon after the November election, Masha Gessen, a Russian émigrée who has written two books about Vladimir Putin’s regime, gave us some pointers on how to do this. Rule number one: “Believe the autocrat.” When he tells you what he wants to do ― build a wall, deport millions, bring back torture ― “he means what he says.” Is Gessen right? Let’s examine some of those leaves.
Torture Redux
It should come as no surprise to anyone who paid minimal attention to the election campaign of 2016 that Donald Trump has a passionate desire to bring back torture. In fact, he campaigned on a platform of committing war crimes of various kinds, occasionally even musing about whether the United States could use nukes against ISIS. He promised to return waterboarding to its rightful place among twenty-first-century U.S. practices and, as he so eloquently put it, “a hell of a lot worse.” There’s no reason, then, to be shocked that he’s been staffing his administration with people who generally feel the same way (Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis being an obvious exception).
It should come as no surprise to anyone… that Donald Trump has a passionate desire to bring back torture.
The CIA was certainly not the only outfit engaged in torture in the Bush years, but it’s the one whose practices were most thoroughly examined and publicized. Despite his enthusiasm for torture, Trump’s relationship with the Agency has, to say the least, been frosty. Days before his inauguration, he responded to revelations of possible Russian influence on the U.S. election by accusing its operatives of behaving like Nazis, tweeting: “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
He quickly appointed a new director of the CIA (as hasn’t been true of quite a few other positions in his administration). He chose former Congressman Mike Pompeo, whose advice about torture he has also said he would consider seriously. A polite term for Pompeo’s position on the issue might be: ambiguous. During his confirmation hearings, he maintained that he would “absolutely not” reinstate waterboarding or other “enhanced techniques,” even if the president ordered him to. “Moreover,” he added, “I can’t imagine that I would be asked that.”
However, his written replies to the Senate Intelligence Committee told quite a different, far less forthright tale. Specifically, as the British Independent reported, he wrote that if a ban on waterboarding were shown to impede the “gathering of vital intelligence,” he would consider lifting it. He added that he would reopen the question of whether interrogation techniques should be limited to those found in the Army Field Manual. (“If confirmed, I will consult with experts at the Agency and at other organizations in the U.S. government on whether the Army Field Manual uniform application is an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country.”)
In other words, as the Independent observed, if the law prohibits torture, then Pompeo is prepared to work to alter the law. “If experts believed current law was an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country,” Pompeo wrote to the Senate committee, “I would want to understand such impediments and whether any recommendations were appropriate for changing current law.” Unfortunately for both the president and him, there are laws against torture that neither they nor Congress have the power to change, including the U.N. Convention against Torture, and the Geneva Conventions.
… As the Independent observed, if the law prohibits torture, then Pompeo is prepared to work to alter the law.
Nor is Mike Pompeo the only Trump nominee touched by the torture taint. Take, for instance, the president’s pick for the Supreme Court. From 2005 to 2006, Neil Gorsuch worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the wellspring for John Yoo’s and Jay Bybee’s infamous “torture memos.” Gorsuch also assisted in drafting Bush’s “signing statement” on the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. That act included an amendment introduced by Senator John McCain prohibiting the torture of detainees. As the White House didn’t want its favorite interrogation methods curtailed, Gorsuch recommended putting down “a marker to the effect that… McCain is best read as essentially codifying existing interrogation policies.” In other words, the future Supreme Court nominee suggested that the McCain amendment would have no real effect, because the administration had never engaged in torture in the first place. This approach was the best strategy, he argued, to “help inoculate against the potential of having the administration criticized sometime in the future for not making sufficient changes in interrogation policy in light of the McCain portion of the amendment.”
In his brief tenure at the Office of Legal Counsel, Gorsuch provided further aid to the supporters of torture by, for example, working on government litigation to prevent the exposure of further “Darby photos.” These were the shocking pictures from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison that came into the possession of U.S. Army Sergeant Joe Darby. He then passed them up the chain of command, which eventually led to the public revelation of the abuses in that U.S.-run torture palace.
Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is also a torture enthusiast. He was one of only nine senators to vote against the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. The Act limited the military to the use of those interrogation methods found in the Army Field Manual. In 2015, he joined just 20 other senators in opposing an amendment to the next year’s military appropriations bill, which extended the Field Manual rules to all U.S. agencies involved in interrogation, not just the military.
Reviving the Black Sites?
So far, President Trump hasn’t had the best of luck with his executive orders. His two travel bans, meant to keep Muslims from entering the United States, are at present trapped in federal court, but worse may be in the offing.
Trump promised during the campaign to reopen the CIA’s notorious black sites and bring back torture. Shortly after the inauguration, a draft executive order surfaced that was clearly intended to do just that. It rescinded President Obama’s orders 13491 and 13492 and directed the secretary of defense and the attorney general, together with “other senior national security officials,” to review the interrogation policies in the Army Field Manual with a view to making “modifications in, and additions to those, policies.” That would mean an end run around Congress, since it doesn’t take an act of that body to rewrite part of a manual (and so reinstitute torture policy).
It also called on the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, and the attorney general to “recommend to the president whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such program should include the use of detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.” In other words, they were to consider reopening the black sites for another round of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
As in so many such documents, that draft order included a cover-your-ass clause, in this case suggesting that “no person in the custody of the United States shall at any time be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, as proscribed by U.S. law.” As we learned in the Bush years, however, such statements have no real effect because, as in a 2002 memo produced by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, “torture” can be redefined as whatever you need it to be. That memo certified that, to qualify as torture, the pain experienced by a victim would have to be like that usually associated with “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” In other words, if he didn’t die or at least come close, you didn’t torture him.
After the recent draft executive order on these subjects was leaked to the media and caused a modest to-do, a later version appeared to drop the references to black sites and torture. While no final version has yet emerged, it’s clear enough that the initial impulse behind the order was distinctly Trumpian and should be taken seriously.
As soon as the draft order surfaced in the press in late January, the White House disclaimed all knowledge of it and no version of it appears on current lists of Trump executive actions since taking office. But keep in mind that presidents can issue secret executive orders that the public may never hear about ― unless the news spills out from an administration whose powers of containment so far could be compared to those of a sieve.
Déjà Vu, Rendition Edition
Notably, neither of Obama’s Inauguration Day executive orders addressed extraordinary rendition. In fact, this was a weapon he preferred to keep available.
What is extraordinary rendition? Ordinary rendition simply means transferring someone from one legal jurisdiction to another, usually through legal extradition. Rendition becomes “extraordinary” when it happens outside the law, as when a person is sent to a country with which the United States does not have an extradition treaty, or when it is likely (or certain) that the rendered person will be tortured in another country.
In the Bush years, the CIA ran an extraordinary rendition machine, involving the kidnapping of terror suspects (sometimes, as it turned out, quite innocent people) off the streets of global cities as well as in the backlands of the planet, and sending them to those brutal CIA black sites or rendering them to torturing regimes around the world. Rendition continued in a far more limited way during Obama’s presidency. For example, a 2013 Washington Post story described the rendition of three Europeans “with Somali roots” in the tiny African country of Djibouti and of an Eritrean to Nigeria. The article suggested that, in part because of congressional intransigence on closing Guantánamo and allowing the jailing and trial of suspected terrorists in U.S courts, rendition represented “one of the few alternatives” to the more extreme option of simply killing suspects outright, usually by drone.
Recently, there was news that a Trump associate might have been involved in planning a rendition of his own. Former CIA Director James Woolsey told the Wall Street Journal that, last September, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn discussed arranging an extralegal rendition with the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. At the time, he was serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign. He later ― briefly ― served as President Trump’s national security adviser.
The target of this potential rendition? Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric who has lived for decades in the United States. President Erdogan believes that Gulen was behind a 2016 coup attempt against him and has asked the U.S. to extradite him to Turkey. The Obama administration temporized on the subject, insisting on examining the actual evidence of Gulen’s involvement.
Flynn’s foray may have been an instance of potential rendition-for-profit, a plan to benefit one of his consulting clients. At the time, Flynn’s (now-defunct) consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, was working for a Dutch corporation, Inovo, with ties to Erdogan. The client reviewed a draft op-ed eventually published in the Hill in which Flynn argued that Gulen should be extradited, because he is a “radical cleric” and Turkey is “our friend.” In addition to lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the election campaign, it turns out that Flynn was probably working as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkish interests at that time.
Mike Pompeo also appears to be bullish on renditions. In his written testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he indicated that under him the CIA would probably continue this practice. When asked how the Agency would avoid sending prisoners to countries known to engage in torture, his reply could have come straight from the Bush-Cheney playbook:
“I understand that assurances provided by other countries have been a valuable tool for ensuring that detainees are treated humanely. In most cases, other countries are likely to treat assurances provided to the United States government as an important matter.”
Asking for such assurances has in the past given the U.S. government cover for what was bound to occur in the prisons of countries known for torture. (Just ask Maher Arar rendered to Syria or Binyam Mohammed rendered to Morocco about what happened to them.)
We’ll Always Have Guantánamo…
“We’ll always have Paris,” Rick reminds Ilsa during their bittersweet goodbye in the classic film Casablanca. Our Guantánamo lease with Cuba (which reads, “for use as coaling [refueling] or naval stations only, and for no other purpose”) is a permanent one. So it looks like we’ll always have Guantánamo, with its memories of torture and murder, and its remaining 41 prisoners, undoubtedly stranded there forever.
As it happens, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s fingerprints are all over the Bush administration’s Guantánamo policy, too. While at the Office on Legal Counsel, he helped the administration fight a major legal challenge to that policy in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In that case, the government argued that detainees at Guantánamo did not have the right of habeas corpus, that the president has the authority to decide not to abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that detainees could be tried by military “commissions” in Cuba rather than by U.S. courts. Given that history, it’s unlikely he’d rule in favor of any future challenge to whatever use President Trump made of the prison.
While on the campaign trail, Trump made it clear that he would keep Guantánamo eternally open. In a November rally in Sparks, Nevada, he told a cheering crowd:
“This morning, I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantánamo Bay, which by the way, which by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open… and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.”
In mid-February, Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer reiterated his boss’s affection for the prison, when he told the White House press corps that the president believes it serves “a very, very healthy purpose in our national security, in making sure we don’t bring terrorists to our seas.” Perhaps Spicer meant “our shores,” but the point was made. Trump remains eager to keep the whole Guantánamo prison system ― including, we can assume, indefinite detention ― up and running as an alternative to bringing prisoners to the United States.
It seems that the head of the Pentagon agrees. In December 2016, retired Marine General (now Secretary of Defense) James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that any detainee who “has signed up with this enemy” and is captured wherever “the president, the commander-in-chief, sends us” should know that he will be a “prisoner until the war is over.” Given that our post-9/11 military conflicts are truly forever wars, in Mattis’s view, pretty much anyone the U.S. captures in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, or who knows where else will face at least the possibility of spending the rest of his life in Guantánamo.
Reading the Tea Leaves
As far as we know, President Trump has yet to green-light his first case of torture or his first extraordinary rendition, or even to add a single prisoner to the 41 still held at Guantánamo. All we have for now are his ominous desires and promises ― and those of his underlings. These are enough, however, to give us a clear understanding of his intentions and those of his appointees. If they can, they will resurrect the unholy trinity of torture, rendition, and indefinite detention. The future may not yet be inscribed in Trumpian gold anywhere, but on such matters, we should believe the autocrat.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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Dear future self, do yourself a favor and skip this Meghan Trainor profile if you’d prefer to avoid details about her sex life with Juni Cortez — aka your “Spy Kids” childhood fave, actor Daryl Sabara.
The “All About That Bass” singer is Cosmopolitan’s May cover star and nine months deep into a relationship with Sabara, who’s now 24 years old and all grown up. In the interview, Trainor doesn’t exactly play coy regarding the couple’s connection in and outside the bedroom.
“I never really felt sexy with guys before. No one expressed how they liked my body out loud in the bedroom until I met Daryl,” she said. “He is obsessed with it — every inch. And that has improved my confidence more than even ‘Bass’ did. He’s a champion, so we’re in heaven.”
And how did the greatest romance of our generation begin? At a bowling alley, of course. That’s also where the two shared their first kiss, which Trainor would like us all to know was really something.
“We went on a double date — bowling and karaoke. He kissed me at the bowling alley,” she said. “I told my security to step outside ‘cause I didn’t want to be watched. LOL. He was the best kisser ever. I know I’m really good at kissing, but I was shocked when he was.”
Sabara is also apparently the inspiration for a handful of songs on Trainor’s upcoming new album. The title of one may even hint that the two could be heading down the aisle in the future.
“I wrote six songs on the road about him in front of his face. One is called ‘Marry Me,’” she teased.
Aside from all those juicy details, our favorite part of the interview is definitely that Trainor apparently used a text robot to give her answers, as she was on strict vocal rest.
To read Trainor’s full interview, head over to Cosmopolitan.
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BALTIMORE ― Attorney General Jeff Sessions has “grave concerns” about the proposed consent decree between Baltimore and the federal government that would reform the city’s troubled police department, a Justice Department official told a federal judge here on Thursday.
John Gore, the Trump administration’s No. 2 official in the Civil Rights Division, told U.S. District Court Judge James K. Bredar that Sessions was concerned about a recent spike in crime and how proposed reforms could affect crime rates. Sessions’ concerns, Gore said, are “not simply limited to Baltimore, it applies nationwide.”
Bredar, a former federal public defender overseeing the pending agreement, pointed out that the United States government had already signed it following an extensive civil rights investigation into Baltimore’s police force. But Gore said the Trump Justice Department wanted more time to see if there “may be better ways” to bring about reform.
The Justice Department “certainly agrees” there is a “crucial need” for police reform, Gore said, noting that the city of Baltimore had the DOJ’s “continued commitment” to “work cooperatively and productively” on reform. But, he added, policing was “really the job of local officials” and “reasonable minds may differ” on whether the Baltimore agreement was the best way forward. (Gore, who represented Republicans in redistricting cases, also appeared on behalf of the Justice Department in late February when the Trump administration backed away from its previous claim that Texas lawmakers acted with discriminatory intent when they passed one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation.)
Thursday’s court hearing was unusual. The United States government is the plaintiff in this case and the city of Baltimore is the defendant, but it was lawyers representing the city who were pressing the judge to move forward and approve the proposed agreement.
David Ralph, the interim city solicitor of Baltimore, said the agreement would both protect civil rights and help fight against crime.
“There are those who seem to believe that these two interests are opposed, that they are at odds with one another,” Ralph said.
But, he said, a better trained police force would support public safety and foster “mutual respect” between police and the community. He called the proposed consent decree a “heavily negotiated document” that took all concerns into account. Ralph also said Baltimore would move forward with reform “with or without this consent decree,” but that it was crucial for the federal court to be involved to help rebuild trust in the community. “All the reforms in the world” won’t matter if the public doesn’t believe there are actually changes, he said.
Bredar, the federal judge, had denied the Trump administration’s request to delay Thursday’s public hearing.
“The primary purpose of this hearing is to hear from the public; it would be especially inappropriate to grant this late request for a delay when it would be the public who were most adversely affected by a postponement,” he wrote in an order on Wednesday afternoon.
Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior said the delay would have allowed the DOJ to review the current draft of the consent decree to “ensure that the best result is achieved for the people of the city and ensure that the BPD can carry out its mission of fostering trust with community members, safeguarding life and property, and promoting public safety through enforcing the law in a fair and impartial manner.”
The review of the consent decree is being conducted as the result of a March 31 memo from Sessions that ordered a closer look at whether the agreement would meet administration goals such as promoting officer morale and boosting recruitment and training of officers.
But lawyers for the city said in a court filing this week that it “strains credulity to believe that the release on March 31, 2017 of a two-page AG directive which reiterates long standing principles of federal-local law enforcement collaboration necessitates a ninety-day continuance.”
“The City and [Baltimore Police Department] worked diligently over these months of negotiations with lawyers for the United States to ensure the decree would ‘advance the safety and protection of the public, promote officer safety and morale, protect and respect the civil rights of all members of the public, respect local control of law enforcement … and do not impede recruitment and training of officers,’” lawyers for the city wrote.
Sessions had previously said he hadn’t read the Justice Department’s pattern-or-practice investigations into widespread police misconduct in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Chicago, but said he believed they were “anecdotal” based on summaries he had reviewed. In what seemed like a reference to Sessions’ skepticism of consent decrees, a lawyer representing Baltimore said on Thursday that he wasn’t sure people were actually looking at the text of the consent decree, which include provisions for amendments.
“We think we have a good document that’s ready to go,” Ralph said.
Prior, the DOJ spokesman, declined to comment on whether Sessions had read the Justice Department’s investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, which was released in August 2016. The proposed consent decree between Baltimore and the federal government was reached in the final days of the Obama administration in early January.
Although Sessions has concerns about how Justice Department investigations affect morale among police officers, it’s worth noting that the DOJ’s extensive investigation mentioned the tough work Baltimore cops had to do under difficult conditions.
“We recognize the challenges faced by police officers in Baltimore and other communities around the country. Every day, police officers risk their lives to uphold the law and keep our communities safe,” the report stated. “Providing policing services in many parts of Baltimore is particularly challenging, where officers regularly confront complex social problems rooted in poverty, racial segregation and deficient educational, employment and housing opportunities. Still, most BPD officers work hard to provide vital services to the community.”
Supporters of the consent decree also say it would benefit Baltimore police officers. It is unclear how precisely the process will unfold from here. The court heard from dozens of members of the public on Thursday, many of whom supported the consent decree and some of whom wanted it to be stronger.
“Why is everyone in Baltimore ready to move forward with police reform except Donald Trump’s Department of Justice?” asked David Rocah, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Maryland.
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WASHINGTON — The types of bacteria in your mouth may be linked to your risk of certain cancers.
By studying the links between bacteria and cancer, scientists one day hope to be able to tell a person what his or her cancer risk is based on the bacteria present in his or her body, said Jiyoung Ahn, an associate professor of epidemiology at the New York University School of Medicine. Perhaps more important, Ahn said, these bacteria and microbes, collectively called the microbiome, could give people information about what they can do to lower their risk.
Ahn presented her research about these links here today (April 2) at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting. [Body Bugs: 5 Surprising Facts About Your Microbiome]
Research into the body’s microbiome is relatively new, Ahn said.
In fact, only within the past five years or so have scientists recognized that 80 percent of the bacteria found in the human body can’t be grown in a lab dish, Ahn told Live Science. That means that previous research that focused on growing bacteria from humans in labs provided only a small part of the picture of the human microbiome.
It was only when researchers began sequencing the DNA of the bacteria taken from people that they were able to complete the picture and identify the many missing microbes, Ahn said.
Now, scientists are starting to understand the potential links between the oral microbiome and certain cancers, Ahn said. Her research has focused on several cancers, including pancreatic cancer and esophageal cancer.
All people share a “core” microbiome, Ahn noted. “In this room, I bet everyone” has microbes from the same five main groups of bacteria, she said during her talk. But within these large groups, there’s variability among people; for example, one person may have more bacteria from one genus than another person has, she said.
Researchers now want to know whether this variability may be linked to people’s cancer risk, she said.
In Ahn’s research on pancreatic cancer, her team found that people who had higher levels of one type of oral bacteria, Porphyromonas gingivalis, had a 60 percent higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer compared with people who had lower levels of these bacteria. And higher levels of another type of oral bacteria, Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, was linked to a more than doubled risk of pancreatic cancer, she said.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, in part because it’s very difficult to diagnose at an early stage, Ahn said during her talk. She hopes that, in the future, doctors will be able to identify the disease by looking at a person’s oral bacteria.
There are also differences in the oral microbiomes of people with esophageal cancer compared with the oral microbiomes of people who do not have the disease, Ahn said. For example, people with esophageal cancer tend to have much lower levels of a type of bacteria called Proteobacteria, she said. [5 Ways Gut Bacteria Affect Your Health]
In both cases — pancreatic cancer and esophageal cancer — more research is needed to determine if there is a cause-and-effect relationship. In other words, researchers do not know whether the differences in bacteria in a person’s mouth may cause cancer or if they are a sign of some other change in the body.
But other earlier research also suggested a cancer link. Studies in animals, for example, have shown that the bacteria in the mouth can travel throughout the body, Ahn said. Other research has suggested that certain bacteria may interact with receptors on the surfaces of cells in a way that contributes to cancer, she said.
Other factors, including smoking and alcohol, also may play a role. Both smoking and drinking alcohol can change the oral microbiome, Ahn said. And indeed, both are risk factors for esophageal cancer and pancreatic cancer.
Smokers, for example, have much lower levels of Proteobacteria in their mouths compared with people who have never smoked, Ahn said. If a person quits smoking, the levels of Proteobacteria gradually increase over the years, she added.
Furthermore, studies have shown that people who have more than two drinks per day have lower levels of Lactobacillus bacteria, Ahn said. Lactobacillus bacteria are some of the “friendly” bacteria often found in probiotics.
Originally published on Live Science.
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LGBTQ people and their allies will come together this weekend for a celebration of the life and sexuality of George Michael in a park where the artist used to engage in cruising FOR SEX.
Organized by Queer Tours of London and Camden LGBT Forum, The “Sexual Freedom Party” will take place on Saturday, April 8 at Hampstead Heath. Those involved with the event told The Huffington Post that they wanted to honor the legacy of George Michael while simultaneously celebrating his openness and positivity when it came to sex.
“George created space for the rest of us to have the courage to harness our communities rich history of creativity and defiance to continue the journey towards true liberation,” organizer Dan Glass told The Huffington Post. “In the spirit of this we didn’t want George’s legacy to be co-opted by the very homophobic institutions that caused him such misery. We wanted to create a space for the very things that made George happy amongst all the misery inflicted upon him – so a party for sexual freedom with the London LGBTQI+ community in the space he loved so much – Hampstead Heath – it was to be!”
Glass went on to say that there is immense power in the act of cruising, or looking for sexual partners in public spaces, for the LGBTQ community.
“The significance of cruising is huge,” Glass told The Huffington Post. “In a society where homophobic hate crime is on the rise whilst simultaneously heterosexual communities have actively promoted infrastructure for community building and sexual relationships everywhere ― the LGBTQI+ community have had to be subversive, intelligent and feral in our fundamental human need of desire and connection – and Hampstead Heath is one of our cultural heartlands.”
The “Sexual Freedom Party” will take place on April 8 at Hampstead Heath. Head here for more information.
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Is the news uplifting today? You be the judge.
1. Turkey has confirmed that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people. More here. Bonus: Trump now thinks Assad is a bad man. More here.
2. Investigations into the landslides which claimed 290 lives with hundreds still missing are underway in Colombia. More here.
3. Germany is looking to crack down on hate speech online by fining the platforms which host it. Germany is officially more progressive than the United States when it comes to hate speech. More here.
4. While the rest of the world eases restrictions on marijuana, Jeff Sessions is trying to crack down on its use in order to stop violent crime. Those cancer patients, veterans with PTSD, and stoners man, so violent. More here.
5. Maxine Waters continues to be a boss and says Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump are two of a kind. Rich white men should not be able to buy themselves out of punishment for their actions. More here.
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Cave ornaments and artworks discovered during an Indonesian cave dig have cast doubt on the previously held conviction that the Ice Age man lacked cultural clout. The artworks seemingly disrupt the dominant narrative placing Europe as the center of art-making, revealing that early humans migrating from Asia to Australia displayed early talent.
“Our new findings challenge the long-held view that hunter-gatherer communities in the Pleistocene (’ice age’) of south-east Asia were culturally impoverished,” archaeologist Adam Brumm and research fellow Michelle Langley explain. Their findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, a summary of which appears in The Guardian.
According to Brumm, human beings colonized Australia by way of continental Eurasia, journeying through an Indonesian string of island chains known as Wallacea along the way. Archaeologists have long wondered about the details of human life while in Wallacea, believing that during the journey from Africa to Europe and on to Southeast Asia, cultural activity ― after an early peak of complexity ― was on the decline.
Recently dated artworks, however, show that the migration from Asia to Australia in fact piqued cultural curiosity. Specifically, scientists discovered a range of object ornaments in a limestone cave in Sulawesi, the largest island in Wallacea. They include, as listed in The Guardian, “disc-shaped beads made from the tooth of a babirusa, a primitive pig found only on Sulawesi, and a ‘pendant’ fashioned from the finger bone of a bear cuscus, a large possum-like creature also unique to Sulawesi.”
Also impressive were the rock paintings themselves, which incorporated complex tools including ochre pieces, ochre stains on tools and a bone tube that potentially served as an “airbrush” for creating stencil art. These images, illustrating human hands and the babirusa in remarkable detail, date back 35,000 to 40,000 years, rivaling the earliest works made in France and Spain, long believed to be the loci of early cave art.
The findings certainly unseat the Eurocentric view of history framing that continent as the focal point for cultural activity. In fact, some researchers believe the wealth of artwork found in Indonesia means that rock art could have emerged in Africa before human beings even set foot in Europe.
To summarize: Early inhabitants of Wallacea, previously believed to be inferior to Palaeolithic Europeans in terms of cultural know-how, are likely not. And, just as travel can get the creative juices flowing today, so the migration from Africa to Australia seems to have inspired the earliest of globetrotters.
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Quadruplets Zachary, Aaron, Nigel and Nick Wade have more in common than DNA: they’re all friggin’ brilliant.
All four of them have been accepted into Harvard and Yale, among other prestigious colleges including Duke, Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Cornell.
The brothers run track at Lakota East Senior High School in Liberty Township, Ohio, and discovered they’d all been accepted at Harvard and Yale while at practice.
The quadruplets are part of 2,272 students admitted into Yale this year ― for what will be the school’s largest freshman class in history ― out of 32,900 applicants. Harvard only accepted 5.2 percent of its applicants this year.
The Wade brothers told The Washington Post that they weren’t planning on the quadruple admissions.
“The outcome has shocked us,” said Aaron, who was also accepted into Brown and University of Pennsylvania. “We didn’t go into this thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to apply to all these schools and get into all of them.’ It wasn’t so much about the prestige or so much about the name as it was — it was important that we each find a school where we think that we’ll thrive and where we think that we’ll contribute.”
Their decision on which school to attend will be heavily influenced by the financial aid packages they receive.
The news comes just days after New Jersey high school senior Ifeoma White-Thorpe made headlines for being accepted into all eight of the nation’s Ivy League schools.
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Later this month, Margaret Atwood’s classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale ― which has become a staple of high school curriculums ― will be released as a TV adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss and Alexis Bledel. Like the book, the show promises to shed light on how power structures can work to oppress women, and the powerful rhetoric of religious fundamentalism.
These ideas are navigated by Offred, the story’s heroine, who must work as a surrogate to a couple struggling with fertility. In Atwood’s original story, we learn by the end that the story’s narration is actually a found recording, made by Offred and later studied later by an archivist at Cambridge named Professor Pieixoto.
It’s Pieixoto who delivers the book’s last lines, which sum up the heroine’s tragic story with an intentionally glib sort of distance. “Are there any questions?” he asks.
Today, The Washington Post reports that a new audiobook version of the story goes beyond Pieixoto’s conclusion, recording the fictional audience’s questions about the likelihood of tyranny recurring in their own society.
This scene was written by Atwood, who’s been vocal about her story’s relevance to today’s political climate. In a letter distributed by PEN/America, she warned readers against “dictators of any kind.”
Soon, that message will be trumpeted to an even broader audience, as the story makes its way to the screen. Check out a sample of the Audible update below:
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related… + articlesList=58bf30a7e4b0d1078ca1f754,58989258e4b0c1284f26ea2a,58c05330e4b0ed7182696155
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