The concept of mandarin is Ringer's shorthand for "influential educated elite." Humanistically educated in a system that emphasized literature, classical languages, and philosophy, the mandarins played the role of the educated and powerful elites of late nineteenth-century Germany, as officials, professors, and other highly educated professionals. These were men of letters who played key roles in German social and political life. Ringer concentrates on one important segment of this elite group: Germany's professors and university leaders, primarily in the humanities and social sciences.

The first kind of intellectual influence is unconscious and invisible. The second is closer to being conscious to the thinker. And the third is analytical and intentional on the part of the thinker. These frameworks bear some analogy to the three perspectives mentioned above -- "logical", "traditional", and "ideological" explanations. But the correspondence is not exact. We might say that the three perspectives correspond to the three different ideas about how thought corresponds to the world: that thought reflects social reality; thought advocates for social position; and thought interrogates social reality. Ringer echoes this in his coda on Weber by suggesting that Weber was able to transcend the limitations of perspective and interest to some degree, permitting him to exercise some independent critical intelligence:

Max Weber and a few other leading social scientists in the modernist camp hold a special place in the intellectual history of the mandarin community. They apparently shared some of the emotions with which the majority of their colleagues viewed the social transformations of their time. But their intellectual response to these changes far surpassed the orthodox norm in subtlety, critical control, and precision. Though never without a certain pessimism, they put their ambivalence at the service of analysis. They became at least partly conscious of their own situation. (180)

What is particularly tragic in Ringer's account is how poorly this mandarin culture prepared universities and academics for the onslaught of National Socialism and antisemitism in the 1930s. The nostalgia and pessimism that were the dominant themes of the mandarin social psychology left intellectuals unequipped for the struggle against fascism within the university and within German society. Their ideas and emotions left them ready for "conservative revolution" during the Weimar period, and provided no positive basis for mobilizing society against fascism when the time came.

Some 57.5 percent of voters supported the ban. The initiative was also supported by the required majority of cantons, with 22 of Switzerland's 26 cantons voting in favor of the ban. The two city cantons of Geneva and Basel-City rejected the proposal, as did two French-speaking cantons, Neuchâtel and Vaud.

[. . .]

the organizers of the campaign managed to turn the dispute over minarets into a symbolic referendum on the influence of Islam. They did not speak much about minarets. Instead, they talked about Sharia law, burqas and the oppression of women in the Islamic world. In the end, even the prominent feminist Julia Onken supported the initiative.

The poster which the organizers used for their campaign showed a number of black minarets resembling rockets standing closely together on a Swiss flag. In front of the flag, a woman stared angrily out from beneath a black burqa. It was an image of a Switzerland that had been taken over by Islam. Minarets are "symbols of power" of a foreign religion, argued politician Ulrich Schlüer, who belongs to the SVP's right wing. The ban, he said, represents a clear statement against their spread.

The debate was largely divorced from the reality of Switzerland. Although around 22 percent of the population is of foreign origin, the country has so far had relatively few problems with its roughly 400,000 Muslims. Most of them are liberally minded Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians and Turks and their approximately 160 mosques are practically invisible. Burqas are seldom seen on Swiss streets and there have never been serious calls for the introduction of Sharia law.

The decision, therefore, does not reflect real problems in Switzerland, but rather a general feeling of unease toward Islam. The issue revolves around a deep-seated fear that society's values could be in danger.

All detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons were likely tortured by Afghan officials and many of the prisoners were innocent, says a former senior diplomat with Canada's mission in Afghanistan.

Appearing before a House of Commons committee Wednesday, Richard Colvin blasted the detainees policies of Canada and compared them with the policies of the British and the Netherlands.

The detainees were captured by Canadian soldiers then handed over to the Afghan intelligence service, called the NDS.

Colvin said Canada was taking six times as many detainees as British troops and 20 times as many as the Dutch.

He said unlike the British and Dutch, Canada did not monitor their conditions; took days, weeks or months to notify the Red Cross; kept poor records; and to prevent scrutiny, the Canadian Forces leadership concealed this behind "walls of secrecy."

[. . .]

According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was a standard operating procedure," Colvin said.

He said the most common forms of torture were beatings, whipping with power cables, the use of electricity, knives, open flames and rape.

[. . .]

Colvin told the committee that the detainees were not "high-value targets" such as IED bomb makers, al-Qaeda terrorists or Taliban commanders.

"According to a very authoritative source, many of the Afghans we detained had no connection to insurgency whatsoever," he said. "From an intelligence point of view, they had little or no value."

Colvin said some may have been foot soldiers or day fighters but many were just local people at the wrong place at the wrong time.

"In other words, we detained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent people."

[. . .]

Colvin said when a new ambassador arrived in May, the paper trail on detainees was reduced and reports on detainees were at times "censored" with crucial information removed.

He said all of these steps were "extremely irregular."

At the time, the government denied there were any credible allegations of torture.

But Tories questioned the validity of Colvin's sources, saying the information he received concerning the allegations were from second-hand and third-hand reports.

Colvin's testimony "seemed dramatic, but under questioning it was revealed to be filmsy, inconsistent, unreliable," Laurie Hawn, parliamentary secretary to Defence Minister Peter MacKay told CBC News. "[He] did not come across as credible."

While he didn't doubt Colvin's sincerity, "every time something has happened in that mission, we have taken action," Hawn said. "And that's evidenced by the improvements in the prison, the training we've done, money we've invested, the visits we've had organized with the various authorities there."

No longer are they the inward-looking anti-Zionists who only cared that the government provide them with money for their separate schools, welfare and exemptions from military service. These days, many of the Haredim – the word means “those who tremble” in awe of God” – have joined with right-wing religious Zionists to become a powerful political force.

They now are equipped to redefine the country's politics and to set a new agenda.

Two decades ago, they were confined mostly to a few neighbourhoods in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Today, they have spread throughout the country, in substantial numbers in several major communities, as well as building completely new towns only for their followers.

One Haredi leader who almost won Jerusalem's mayoralty race last fall, boasts that, within 20 years, the ultra-Orthodox will control the municipal government of every city in the country. And why not? Of the Jewish Israeli children entering primary school for the first time this month, more than 25 per cent are Haredi, and that proportion will keep growing. There are between 600,000 and 700,000 Haredim in Israel, and they average 8.8 children a family.

A decade ago, there were almost no Haredim in the West Bank settlements. Today, the two largest settlements are entirely ultra-Orthodox, and the Haredim are about a third of the almost 300,000 settlers.

Now that they have tightened the rules on who can be a Jew and have forced the public bus company to provide gender-segregated buses in many communities, a discouraged secular community is starting to emigrate.

Nehemia Shtrasler, a business and political columnist for the Haaretz newspaper, wrote this summer that the country is risking destruction. “We will survive the conflict with the Palestinians and even the nuclear threats from Iran,” he wrote. “But the increasing rupture between the secular and ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel will be the end of us.” Mr. Shtrasler said: “It's a struggle between two contradictory worldviews that cannot exist side by side.

[. . .]

Violence has become so widespread that there are Haredi communities where the police won't go. This summer, a police car was torched and several officers injured when attacked by a rock-throwing mob, when the police responded to a call for help.

It's upsetting to many Israelis, such as the columnist Nehemia Shtrasler, but when Haredi neighbourhoods become no-go zones for authorities, and when people must think twice before opening a private business on the Sabbath, the violence is having its desired effect.

And, as the Haredi community expands and finds government funding harder to come by, growing numbers of Haredi women and men will be compelled to enter the work force. The impact of that, says Prof. Ben Yehuda, is that businesses and workplaces will be forced to comply with the religious demands of their new workers.

Already, he said, in high-tech workplaces, where many Haredim work, the offices are segregated and cafeteria food is kosher.

Even in the Israel Defence Forces, the Haredim are having an effect. An exclusive Haredi battalion has been created, to accommodate a growing number of ultra-Orthodox who want to serve.

In other battalions, religious Zionists have refused to ride in military vehicles driven by women. Their demands have reportedly been met.

With the demographic shift in favour of the Haredim only going up, those in the private sector, government and the military who decline to accommodate Haredi demands will become fewer and fewer.

And with growing numbers of Haredim in West Bank settlements, Israel's conflict with the Palestinians takes on an increasingly religious fervour.

[I]n the Baltics, which suffered German and Soviet occupations, the historical concepts generally accepted throughout Europe and the rest of the world are turned topsy turvy, with the Nazis being regarded as the by-far lesser of the two evils and the Soviets considered the arch-villains.

"[D]uring the first Soviet occupation from 1940 to 1941, Estonia lost about 48,000 people. The three years of German occupation resulted in the death of about 32,000 citizens of various nationalities, including 929 Jews and 243 Gypsies who were either killed in concentration camps or in battle. During the second Soviet occupation, which lasted from 1944 to 1994, Estonia lost nearly 121,000 people. In all, the country lost about 180,000 people, or nearly 18 percent of the population." To break the statistics down: In the space of a year and a half, the Soviet Union--in the 1940-1941 occupation--managed to kill half again as many Estonians as in three years of Nazi occupation. In the second occupation, more than four times as many Estonians died under Soviet rule--mainly in the Stalinist era, when the Soviet Union was concerned with eliminating all possible opposition to its rule in its newly annexed territories.

The annual SS veterans reunion is only the tip of the iceberg of sympathy for these men who are considered fighters for Estonian independence even though the victory they sought to achieve was for Nazi Germany, which had no intention of granting them sovereignty. Thus all sorts of souvenirs of the unit are widely available for purchase, its outstanding soldiers are lauded as local heroes and their exploits are memorialized in an impressive album readily available which emphasizes "their selfless courage against communism and for the restoration of Estonian independence," but which begrudgingly admits only in passing that they "had to wear a German uniform to do so" (The Estonian Legion in Words and Pictures, Tallinn, 2008, coedited by none other than former [twice] Estonian prime minister Mart Laar).

DURING MY visit, I encountered several additional examples of the Estonians' reversal of conventional historical wisdom about World War II. The most famous, and the incident which sparked violent riots in Tallinn in the spring of 2007, was the removal of a monument honoring the Soviet soldiers who liberated the country from the yoke of the Nazi occupation, from its central location in the capital to a military cemetery on the outskirts of the city.

Besides grievously insulting the large Russian minority which views the Soviet troops as heroes who achieved a vital victory in the fight against Nazism, the removal of the statue was also a painful blow to the Estonian Jewish community, whose annihilation in 1941 was orchestrated by the Nazis and their Estonian collaborators. Having visited both the monument's original location opposite the national library and its new site, it is clear that Estonians prefer not be reminded that their current narrative is a distortion of the historical events of World War II.

Today [the 22nd of August] will be marked in Estonia as a day of remembrance for the victims of totalitarian regimes. This ostensibly innocuous initiative to commemorate Nazi and communist victims together is actually just a first step towards obtaining official recognition that communism and Nazism were equally evil, a major step toward undermining the current status of the Shoah as a unique tragedy and one which will help deflect attention and criticism from the Estonians' distortion of history and failure to face their Holocaust past. (They have since independence, failed to prosecute a single Estonian Holocaust perpetrator, while bringing to trial numerous communist criminals.)

In an email communication obtained by Embassy, staff at the Department of Foreign Affairs express concern about frequent changes being made to commonly used terms, particularly where such changes are not consistent with accepted Canadian policy, and which may be carried out to minimize international obligations on issues as complex as the Omar Khadr case.

Among the changes identified are the excising of the word "humanitarian" from each reference to "international humanitarian law," replacing the term "gender equality" with "equality of men and women", switching focus from justice for victims of sexual violence to prevention of sexual violence, and replacing the phrase "child soldiers" with "children in armed conflict."

For many observers of Canada's foreign policy, these are distressing language changes that water down many of the very international human rights obligations Canada once fought to have adopted in conventions at the United Nations. As one source said, in the international world of diplomacy—where officials often focus detailed discussions on the language included in documents and policies—wording makes a big difference.

Indeed, the email states "It is often not entirely clear to us why [office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs] advisers are making such changes, and whether they have a full grasp of the potential impact on [Canadian] policy in asking for changes to phrases and concepts that have been accepted internationally and used for some time."

Turner gives a full account of being stopped by two men in Chatham High Street, after he took a picture of a fish bar called Mick's Plaice, which stands between Specsavers and a shop called Mr Flower and advertises jacket potatoes and an all day breakfast in a colour scheme of bold blue and white. The men said they worked for Medway Council.

"I saw a badge attached to one of the men's waistband and saw the logo of Kent Police. The men asked me why I was taking pictures in the High Street.

I told them photography was a hobby and explained what and who I had taken pictures of and why".

Turner continues, "I asked them under what authority they were making their request. They did not provide a clear answer to this question in that they failed to state the legal authority under which they were making their enquiries."

Because they neither stated their authority nor properly identified themselves, Turner refused to answer their questions. The men summoned uniformed police. Turner took photographs of two officers as they approached him reproduced with blurred faces on his blog – and arrest followed. He was handcuffed held in police van and then questioned by two plain clothes officers. "They spoke about the threat of terrorism. They were keen to seek my agreement with regards to the views they expressed, both about the threat of terrorism and the suspicious nature of people with cameras and especially those who chose not to provide identifying details about themselves when requested to do so."

He was searched while still handcuffed. The officer told him to take off his trainers and patted down the soles of his feet. At some point the officers made a veiled threat about Turner's ability to continue as photographer.

As Bertram notes, alienating the sort of people who regularly keep track of what's going on in their environment isn't very sensible. The comments then veer off in several interesting directions, discussing British law and the sorts of people attracted to policing, among other subjects.

A group of men from Pennsylvania is in Maine this week supporting the concept that marriage is between a man and woman.

The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property is based in Pennsylvania. This week the group is in Maine with signs and handouts about marriage.

The group says gay marriage is harmful to society because children do not have a mother and father. They also claim that marriages performed at City Hall, without God present, are not really marriages. However the group is not arguing that issue while in Maine.

In response to rumors circulating the internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com and CNET News about a “flesh eating” robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets:CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian.

On July 7, Cyclone announced that it had completed the first stage of development for a beta biomass engine system used to power RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™), a Phase II SBIR project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Sciences Office. RTI’s EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling.

RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” stated Harry Schoell, Cyclone’s CEO. “We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous.” (emphasis in the original)

• Pepe Escobar ("Iran's streets are lost, but hopes remain") suggests that the opposition to Ahmadinejad and the religious oligarchy isn't a thing only of the young, but rather includes conservatives and business classes upset by recent economic mismanagement, potentially creating a broad coalition aimed against the Islamic Republic as currently constituted.


• Shahir Shahidsaless' "Miscalculations abound in Iran" also argues that the recent election helped created a broad coalition against the established order, but argues that even if the lowest possible number of Ahmadinejad voters that's still a huge number of people opposed to the anti-government coalition. Culture--and political--wars are ungoing.


• Kaveh L Afrasiabi's "Crunching the numbers" takes a critical look at the criticisms of the election as fraudulent, arguing that many of the claims made by the anti-Ahmadinejad coalition might be inaccurate, and that their nemesis might have won fairly.

Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies.

A senior cleric today urged Iran's protest leaders to be punished "without mercy" and said some should face execution – harsh calls that signal a nasty new turn in the regime's crackdown on demonstrators two weeks after its disputed election.

Hard-liners have ordered long sentences and hangings before, and some fear those awaiting trial by a judiciary whose verdicts reflect the will of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could face the most severe punishments the Islamic system can dish out.

"Anyone who takes up arms to fight with the people, they are worthy of execution," Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami, a ranking cleric, said in a nationally broadcast sermon at Tehran University.

Khatami said those who disturbed the peace and destroyed public property were "at war with God" and should be "dealt with without mercy.''

[. . .]

"What the regime is really saying is that any Iranian citizen who has dared express views which aren't consistent with the views of a small hard-line clique is at risk of the most severe punishment the system can deal out," [Aaron Rhodes, spokesman for the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran] said. "They are really at the mercy of the system at this point.''

In his sermon, Khatami asked the judiciary to "confront the leaders of the protests, leaders of the violations, and those who are supported by the United States and Israel strongly, and without mercy to provide a lesson for all.''

He reminded worshippers that Khamenei, the supreme leader, rules by God's design and must not be defied.

The cleric also lashed out at foreign journalists, accusing them of false reporting, and singled out Britain for new criticism. Earlier this week, Iran expelled two British diplomats, prompting the expulsion of two Iranian diplomats by Britain.

"In this unrest, Britons have behaved very mischievously and it is fair to add the slogan of 'down with England' to the slogan of 'down with USA,'" he said.

According to Kirill Grishchenkov, “more than half of the marriages in [the Russian] capital are inter-ethnic,” with a large share of those being between ethnic Russian women and Muslim immigrants and with a sizeable proportion of their children lost to the titular nationality of the country (www.mospravda.ru/issue/2009/06/09/article17616/).

And as a result, he says, these “family unions of Muscovites with arrivals from post-Soviet Asia and non-Russian regions of Russian can influence our life already in the near future.” Indeed, he says, the Russian capital is falling into what he calls “a vicious circle,”
from which it will be difficult to escape.

The number of Muslim immigrants is increasing, and their “non-drinking” lifestyle and “romantic” approach is attracting ever more ethnic Russian women. And as the latter marry the former, the city becomes even more attractive as a place for Muslims to come and settle, thus increasing the likelihood that ethnic Russian women will contract even more mixed marriages.

These trends will accelerate further, Grishchenkov says, if Russia forms some kind of “Euro-Asian Union” with Central Asian states, members of whose indigenous populations would then be able to move to Moscow and other Russian cities even easier than they can do at the present time.

Exactly what impact their arrival in significantly greater numbers than today would have is of course difficult to say, the “Moskovskaya Pravda” journalist continues; “there are many possible scenarios.” But he argues that the “overall tendency is already obvious, and in the worst case, the fate awaiting [Russians] could be like that of contemporary Israel.”

There, the Moscow journalist says, the Palestinians are increasing more rapidly than the Jewish population, not only because they tend to have more children but also because in Grishchenkov’s words some “naïve Jewish girls” are willing to marry them and “in this way increase the Arab population of Israel.”

“It is interesting,” Grishchenkov writes, “that that part of the Israelis who as before believe in the idea of an Orthodox Jewish state are making passionate efforts to limit [such] inter-ethnic marriages.” And no one is upset, he continues, with their frequent and very open discussions about the dangers such marriages pose to the Jewish state.

“But here in Russia,” he continues, “which as before remains true to the ideas of the Communist International, the very raising of such a question is viewed as somehow shameful.” That should change, Grishchenkov says, or in the relatively near future, ethnic Russians will “cease” to feel themselves at home “in their own country.”

Bush, a born-again Christian since age 40, arrives for today's paid speaking engagement at Metro Toronto Convention Centre with fellow former president Bill Clinton amid a series of stranger-than-fiction disclosures, one of which suggests that apocalyptic fervour may have held sway within the walls of his White House.

Bush, who turns 63 in July and was 54 when first sworn into office in 2001, has yet to comment on the reports. They include last week's GQ magazine exposé into the hawkish use of scripture in 2003, when then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld forwarded secret intelligence memos to Bush embroidered with biblical passages.

"Therefore, put on the full armour of God," a verse from Ephesians, and "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter," from Isaiah, are among the messages that adorn reports prepared for Bush by Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

Stranger still are new accounts emerging from France describing how former president Jacques Chirac was utterly baffled by a 2003 telephone conversation in which Bush reportedly invoked fanatical Old Testament prophecy – including the Earth-ending battle with forces of evil, Gog and Magog – in his arguments to enlist France in the Coalition of the Willing.

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins," Bush said to Chirac, according to Thomas Romer, a University of Lausanne theology professor who was later approached by French officials anxious to understand the biblical reference. Romer first revealed his account in a 2007 article for the university review, Allez savoir, which passed largely unnoticed.

Chirac, in a new book by French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, is quoted as confirming the surreal conversation, saying he was stupefied by Bush's reference to biblical prophecy and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs."

[. . .]

"Speculating on what goes on inside George Bush's head is always a bold endeavour. But the sense one gets from this is that biblical prophecy somehow factored in the thinking," said Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Yale University in a recent article for counterpunch.org.

"The most striking thing for me is in the real world, trying to get France to go to war on that basis is crazy. It is hard to imagine a better way to scare off a potential friend."

With consensus growing among Republicans that the party is in its worst political position in recent memory, some conservatives applauded Mr. Specter’s departure. They said it cleared the way for the party to distance itself from its record of expanding government during the Bush years and to re-emphasize the calls for tax cuts and reduced federal spending that have dominated Republican thought for more than 30 years.

“We strayed from our principles of limited government, individual responsibility and economic freedom,” said Chris Chocola, a former Indiana congressman who is head of Club for Growth, a group that has financed primary challenges against Republicans it considers insufficiently conservative. “We have to adhere to those principles to rebuild the party. Those are the brand of the Republican Party, and people feel that we betrayed the brand.”

But Republican leaders in Washington argued that Republicans would be permanently marginalized unless they showed flexibility on social issues as well as economic ones.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he would seek to recruit candidates who he thought could win in Democratic or swing states, even if it meant supporting candidates who might disagree with his own conservative views.

Mr. Cornyn said he was taking a page from Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the last head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who led his party to big gains by embracing candidates who, for example, opposed abortion rights or gun control.

“If you think about it, Schumer has been very good at this; I complimented him this morning in the gym,” Mr. Cornyn said, adding, “Some conservatives would rather lose than be seen as compromising on what they regard as inviolable principles.”

[. . .]

Saying that their party should do more to draw economic contrasts with the Democrats, several Republicans said Mr. Specter’s departure was in effect a purification rite for the party that would make it better able to make its case to the public.

“I’m not hurt by Arlen Specter walking away,” said Michael Reagan, the son of former President Ronald Reagan and a conservative talk show host. “At least now the party doesn’t waste money supporting someone who does not support the party.”

“It’s interesting that people say the right has taken over the Republican Party — but no one can say what we’ve done,” Mr. Reagan said. “We’ve been closeted for the last eight years; it’s time for the right to come out of the closet.”

</li>Acts of Minor Treason speculates on the constellations people might see in the sky from the star HD 98618, a very Sun-like star a hundred light-years away</li>

• James Bow is decidedly unimpressed by the decision of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Recife to publicly excommunicate the mother of a nine-year old who became pregnant with twins after she was raped by her stepfather and had to have an abortion to save her life, and the doctors who performed the abortion.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster refers to interesting computer simulations suggesting that Earth-sized--perhaps even Earth-like--planets can form in close orbits around dim red dwarf stars. Since most stars are red dwarfs, this has obvious implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.


• Edward Lucas reviews an interesting book on Jewish historians in interwar and Second World War Poland who tried to preserve their history in the face of oppression and eventually genocide.


• Marginal Revolution cites the fact that a black man in Washington D.C. is more likely to be HIV-positive than his Rwandan counterpart.


• Normblog's Norman Geras considers the ways in which liberalism and socialism are intimately and necessarily intertwined.


• Slap Upside the Head reports that the Anglican Church of Nigeria wants to punish participants in gay marriages with long jail sentences.


• At Space and Culture, Anne blogs about Mumbaikers' tolerance for random street encounters and how this makes their city livable. (Thoughts?)


• Strange Maps features a map showing how Israeli travel restrictions have helped make Palestinian communities in the West Bank into a disconnected archipelago.


• Over at Noel Maurer's blog, Jussi Jalonen makes a guest post explaining why, after 1815, the autonomous Russian-affiliated states of Finland and Poland experienced such divergent political fates.


• Torontoist reports on someone who's spreading false rumours that the food at Laila, a Middle Eastern take-out restaurant in the Annex, is killing people.


• The Volokh Conspiracy links to Toto's music video for Africa, shot in a law library, and addresses the question of whether or not the Vatican is required by international law to keep its various artistic treasures.


• Windows on Eurasia quotes a Russian scientist who suggests that Russia's population decline might prompt ethnic minorities, like Tatars and Udmurts, to seek independence lest they disappear, and blogs about how Russia's Komi Permyak are very unhappy with the results of the amalgamation of their ethnoterritorial unit with Perm oblast.

james_nicoll

Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution.

“I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

A funding crunch, exacerbated by cuts in the January budget, has left many senior researchers across the county scrambling to find the money to continue their experiments.

Some have expressed concern that Mr. Goodyear, a chiropractor from Cambridge, Ont., is suspicious of science, perhaps because he is a creationist.

When asked about those rumours, Mr. Goodyear said such conversations are not worth having.

“Obviously, I have a background that supports the fact I have read the science on muscle physiology and neural chemistry,” said the minister, who took chemistry and physics courses as an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo.

“I do believe that just because you can't see it under a microscope doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It could mean we don't have a powerful enough microscope yet. So I'm not fussy on this business that we already know everything. … I think we need to recognize that we don't know.”

Asked to clarify if he was talking about the role of a creator, Mr. Goodyear said that the interview was getting off topic.