Were Neanderthals the mental equals of modern humans?

by Attention to the Unseen 05.17.2013

Tim Appenzeller writes: [D]id the Neanderthals, once caricatured as brute cavemen, have minds like our own, capable of abstract thinking, symbolism and even art? It is one of the most haunting questions about the people who once shared a continent with us, then mysteriously vanished. An early date for the paintings [found in El Castillo [...]

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Music: Avishai Cohen — ‘Aurora’

by Attention to the Unseen 05.17.2013
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America’s hidden agenda in Syria’s war

by News Sources 05.16.2013

The National reports: It was some six months ago that Syrian rebel commanders met US intelligence officers in Jordan to discuss the status of the war and, the rebels hoped, to secure supplies of the sophisticated weapons they need to overthrow President Bashar Al Assad. But according to one of the commanders present at the [...]

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The threat of ethnic cleansing in Syria

by News Sources 05.16.2013

Joshua Landis writes: The likelihood of ethnic cleansing in the coastal regions is high. It will rise even higher should Assad’s troops begin to lose. The Sunni populations of the coastal cities will be the first to be targeted by Assad’s military, if it is pushed out of Damascus. Should the Alawites be compelled to [...]

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Outrage at Syrian rebel shown ‘eating soldier’s heart’

by News Sources 05.16.2013

Time magazine reports: The video starts out like so many of the dozens coming out of the war in Syria every day, with the camera hovering over the body of a dead Syrian soldier. But the next frame makes it clear why this video, smuggled out of the city of Homs and into Lebanon with [...]

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Saudis overtaking Qatar in sponsoring Syrian rebels

by News Sources 05.16.2013

Hassan Hassan writes: Last week, a 12-member delegation from the Syrian opposition visited Saudi Arabia, for an unprecedented two-day official meeting. Saudi authorities had consistently declined to meet the opposition, despite repeated requests. This was partly because the kingdom has opposed Muslim Brotherhood dominance in the Syrian National Council and then the National Coalition, owing [...]

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Video: How do Israelis now view the Palestinian Nakba?

by News Sources 05.16.2013
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How the media and the public overlook threats to the freedom of others

by News Sources 05.16.2013

Glenn Greenwald writes: For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It [...]

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Leak investigations are an assault on the press, and on democracy, too

by News Sources 05.16.2013

Margaret Sullivan writes: The ability of the press to report freely on its government is a cornerstone of American democracy. That ability is, by any reasonable assessment, under siege. Reporters get their information from sources. They need to be able to protect those sources and sometimes offer them confidentiality. If they can’t be sure about [...]

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Khamenei’s plan to prevent the revival of Iran’s Green Movement

by News Sources 05.16.2013

Mohsen Milani writes: In normal presidential elections, it is only the candidates and their platforms that matter. Not so in Iran. There, the key player in the upcoming presidential elections is the septuagenarian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is constitutionally barred from running for the office. He recognizes that the election result will have [...]

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Why sanctions on Iran are not working

by News Sources 05.16.2013

Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi write: As EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iran’s lead envoy Saeed Jalili meet in Istanbul on May 15, the six global powers negotiating with Tehran face an increasingly inconvenient truth: while sanctions are having a devastating effect on Iran’s economy, they have not changed Tehran’s nuclear calculus. Although [...]

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Iraq is unraveling

by News Sources 05.16.2013

Michael Knights writes: As American troops were pulling out of Iraq in 2010, the U.S. effort to stabilize the country resembled the task of an exhausted man who had just pushed a huge boulder up a steep hill. Momentum had been painstakingly built up and the crest approached. Was it safe to stop pushing and [...]

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The community within

by Attention to the Unseen 05.16.2013

Michael Pollan writes: I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and [...]

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Music: Yamandu Costa — ‘Sarará’

by Attention to the Unseen 05.16.2013
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How the Obama administration is strangling press freedom

by Paul Woodward 05.15.2013

Whether or not this has been formulated in written policy, it seems clear that the way the Obama administration attempts to control the release of classified information is by trying to exert as much control over those who receive such information as those who disseminate it. The leaker and the recipient are treated as sharing [...]

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The law behind the A.P. phone-record scandal

by News Sources 05.15.2013

Lynn Oberlander writes: The cowardly move by the Justice Department to subpoena two months of the A.P.’s phone records, both of its office lines and of the home phones of individual reporters, is potentially a breach of the Justice Department’s own guidelines. Even more important, it prevented the A.P. from seeking a judicial review of [...]

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In AP surveillance case, the real scandal is what’s legal

by News Sources 05.15.2013

Timothy Lee writes: On Monday the Associated Press reported that the Justice Department “secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press.” But here’s what’s really scary: The Justice Department’s actions are likely perfectly legal. U.S. law allows the government to engage in this type of surveillance—on media organizations [...]

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Rape culture in the U.S. military

by News Sources 05.15.2013

Belen Fernandez writes: Last weekend, the US Air Force’s sexual assault prevention chief was arrested on charges of sexual battery – a fitting prelude, no doubt, to the Pentagon’s just-released report on soaring sex crimes in the military. According to the report, an estimated 26,000 sex crimes took place in 2012. This beats the previous [...]

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An ongoing displacement — the forced exile of the Palestinians

by News Sources 05.15.2013

Click on image below to enlarge:

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The last of the Semites

by News Sources 05.15.2013

Joseph Massad writes: Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what gentile Europeans called the “Jewish Question”. What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the “solution” to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always [...]

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Video: Ken Robinson — How to escape education’s death valley

by Attention to the Unseen 05.15.2013
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New study examines how individuality develops

by Attention to the Unseen 05.15.2013

EurekAlert! reports: The adult brain continues to grow with the challenges that it faces; its changes are linked to the development of personality and behavior. But what is the link between individual experience and brain structure? Why do identical twins not resemble each other perfectly even when they grew up together? To shed light on [...]

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Music: Bugge Wesseltoft & Sidsel Endresen — ‘You Might Say’

by Attention to the Unseen 05.15.2013
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Obama is worse than Nixon, says Pentagon Papers lawyer

by News Sources 05.14.2013

New York Observer: James C. Goodale, the so-called “father of reporters’ privilege” and the author of a new book called Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 255 pp., $20), was in his office at the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm, where he’s a partner, comparing Barack Obama to Richard M. Nixon. “Nixon and Agnew [...]

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