Helping the Rohingya – The New York Times

By Tiffany May
Sept. 29, 2017

Here are some of the organizations responding to the Rohingya refugee crisis. Some are trying to gain access to restricted areas of the western state of Rakhine in Myanmar, where many ethnic Rohingya Muslims remain. Most of the aid has been focused on camps in Bangladesh where hundreds of thousands have fled over the past month.

More information can be found through services that track and rate charity groups, including GuideStar and Charity Navigator.

BRAC, a group founded in Bangladesh, was ranked the No. 1 nongovernmental organization in the world by NGO Advisor. Of the 1,300 staff members directly serving the refugee population in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, many are locals who speak a dialect similar to that of the Rohingya in Rakhine State. BRAC has also trained 800 Rohingya refugees as volunteers. The group is now focused on health, education and the protection of women and girls.

IOM, the United Nation’s migration agency, manages camps and shelters in Cox’s Bazar. In addition to providing healthcare and sanitation, the group is scaling up programs to protect girls, women and others vulnerable to trafficking. IOM employs Rohingya refugees on a casual basis, and most of the 500 employees in Cox’s Bazar are Bangladeshi.

via Helping the Rohingya – The New York Times

Opinion | Trump Immigration Policy Veers From Abhorrent to Evil – by Nicholas Kristof – NYT

“We as a nation have crossed so many ugly lines recently, yet one new policy of President Trump’s particularly haunts me. I’m speaking of the administration’s tactic of seizing children from desperate refugees at the border.

“I was given only five minutes to say goodbye,” a Salvadoran woman wrote in a declaration in an A.C.L.U. lawsuit against the government, after her 4- and 10-year-old sons were taken from her. “My babies started crying when they found out we were going to be separated.”

“In tears myself, I asked my boys to be brave, and I promised we would be together soon. I begged the woman who took my children to keep them together so they could at least have each other.”

via Opinion | Trump Immigration Policy Veers From Abhorrent to Evil – The New York Times

122 Pregnant Whales Were Killed in Japan’s Latest Hunt. Was This Illegal? – The New York Times

By Tacey Rychter      May 30, 2018

“More than 120 pregnant female whales were among 333 killed during Japan’s recent annual summer hunt off the coast of Antarctica, according to a new report.

The report, released by the International Whaling Commission this month, said 122 of the slaughtered minke whales were pregnant and 114 were considered immature.

The last hunting season in the Antarctic for Japan ran from Dec. 8 to Feb. 28.

Conservationists said the new report was further evidence that Japan was killing whales for commercial purposes under the guise of scientific research.”

Source: 122 Pregnant Whales Were Killed in Japan’s Latest Hunt. Was This Illegal? – The New York Times

The Largest Health Disparity We Don’t Talk About – By DHRUV KHULLAR – NYT

I didn’t think our relationship would last, but neither did I think it would end so soon.My patient had struggled with bipolar disorder his entire life, and his illness dominated our years together. He had, in a fit of hopelessness, tried to take his life with a fistful of pills. He had, in an episode of mania, driven his car into a tree. But the reason I now held his death certificate — his sister and mother in tears by his bed — was more pedestrian: a ruptured plaque in his coronary artery. A heart attack.Americans with depression, bipolar disorder or other serious mental illnesses die 15 to 30 years younger than those without mental illness — a disparity larger than for race, ethnicity, geography or socioeconomic status. It’s a gap, unlike many others, that has been growing, but it receives considerably less academic study or public attention. The extraordinary life expectancy gains of the past half-century have left these patients behind, with the result that Americans with serious mental illness live shorter lives than those in many of the world’s poorest countries.

How Trump’s Election Shook Obama: ‘What if We Were Wrong?’ – by Peter Baker – NYT

“And yet despite criticism even from former advisers to Mr. Obama, Mr. Rhodes offers little sense that the former president thought he could have done more to counter Russian involvement in the election. Mr. Obama had authorized a statement to be issued by intelligence agency leaders a month before the election warning of Russian interference, but was thwarted from doing more because Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, refused to go along with a bipartisan statement.

Mr. Rhodes called Mr. McConnell’s refusal “staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic.” But Mr. Obama, whose Supreme Court nomination had been blocked by Mr. McConnell for months, seemed less surprised.

“What else did you expect from McConnell?” he asked. “He won’t even give us a hearing on Merrick Garland.”

Still, in preparatory sessions before meetings with the news media before the election, aides pressed Mr. Obama to respond to criticism that he should speak out more about Russian meddling. “I talk about it every time I’m asked,” he responded. “What else are we going to do? We’ve warned folks.”

He noted that Mr. Trump was already claiming that the election would be manipulated if Hillary Clinton won. “If I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Rhodes writes that neither he nor Mr. Obama knew at that time that there was an F.B.I. investigation into contacts between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, despite Mr. Trump’s recent unsubstantiated claims that the departing president placed a “spy” or multiple spies in his campaign.”

Race Against the Rains- video of Rohingya in Bangladesh – The New York Times

Video trip through the largest refugee camp in the world.

The Rohingya in Bangladesh prepare for the coming monsoon rains.

About this article

 

NYTIMES.COM

Race Against the Rains

The race to rebuild the world’s largest refugee camp, where monsoon rains threaten flooding, landslides and disease.

Source: Race Against the Rains – The New York Times

 

How the Rohingya Escaped – The New York Times.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/21/world/asia/how-the-rohingya-escaped.ht

Opinion | Trump’s Manchurian Trade Policy – by Paul Krugman – NYT

Remember “The Manchurian Candidate”? The 1959 novel, made into a classic 1962 film (never mind the remake), involved a plot to install a Communist agent as president of the United States. One major irony was that the politician in question was modeled on Senator Joe McCarthy — that is, he posed as a superpatriot even while planning to betray America.

It all feels horribly relevant these days. But don’t worry: This isn’t going to be another piece on Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia, which is being ably covered by other people. What I want to talk about instead are Trump’s actions on international trade — which are starting to have a remarkably similar feel.

On one side, the “Make America Great Again” president is pursuing protectionist policies, supposedly in the name of national security, that will alienate many of our democratic allies. On the other side, he seems weirdly determined to prevent action against genuine national security threats posed by foreign dictatorships — in this case China. What’s going on?

via Opinion | Trump’s Manchurian Trade Policy – The New York Times

Opinion | Sounding Code Red: Electing the Trump Resistance – by Thomas Friedman – NYT

With the primary season winding down and the midterms soon upon us, it’s time to point out that this election is not about what you may think it’s about. It is not a choice between the particular basket of policies offered by the candidates for House or Senate in your district or state — policies like gun control, right to choose, free trade or fiscal discipline. No, what this election is about is your first chance since 2016 to vote against Donald Trump.

As far as I am concerned, that’s the only choice on the ballot. It’s a choice between letting Trump retain control of all the key levers of political power for two more years, or not.

via Opinion | Sounding Code Red: Electing the Trump Resistance – The New York Times

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | Pending Approval

Yes, thank you Thomas Friedman. I have one amendment. We do not need multiple Democratic and Independent candidates in California primaries, which have this new, dangerous rule, that the top two vote getters win, even if both are Republicans. The Democrats and Independents in California have to work together, to avoid 5, 10 or 15 candidates ensuring that the only two candidates in November are Republican. I don’t know the solution, but something like a pre-primary would work. David Lindsay Jr. is the author of “The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam,” and blogs at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNewsWorldwide.wordpress.com

How do sea spiders breath without gills or lungs – Video at NYT

via The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

 

How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google – The New York Times

By Scott Shane, Cade Metz and Daisuke Wakabayashi
May 30, 2018

6
WASHINGTON — Fei-Fei Li is among the brightest stars in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, somehow managing to hold down two demanding jobs simultaneously: head of Stanford University’s A.I. lab and chief scientist for A.I. at Google Cloud, one of the search giant’s most promising enterprises.

Yet last September, when nervous company officials discussed how to speak publicly about Google’s first major A.I. contract with the Pentagon, Dr. Li strongly advised shunning those two potent letters.

“Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI,” she wrote in an email to colleagues reviewed by The New York Times. “Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google.”

via How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google – The New York Times

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | Pending Approval

Ugly and complicated, my heart goes out to both sides in this debate. I fear that my hero Barack Obama will go down in history as the man who made drone assignation OK, and in the next few centuries, quality of life could be utterly diminished by a drumbeat of drone assassinations in many countries. Parents will be telling their children not to go outside, because of the danger of drone attacks, because the parent is on someone’s enemies list. A world of assassination drones will make The Hunger Games look prescient. Google might want to joint these contracts, while officially lobbying for all drone killing to be banned as a modernization of the Geneva Conventions for appropriate methods of war.

David Lindsay Jr. is the author of “The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam,” and blogs at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNewsWorldwide.wordpress.com