Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

D’Eramo is good as usual.  As far as I remember the constant emphasis on your role as an individual in mitigating the environmental crisis has been on for at least 15 years. I was bombarded by the likes of the BBC and the areas where I have worked and lived of messages urging us to take individual actions. Here is the latest example, but it is a French one. Climate crisis and the ‘political class’

  “…the numbers typically attributed to the Tiananmen massacre or the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan were, say, 400 to 800. Here, Human Rights Watch has the names of 817 victims in Rabaa Square, and we say that the likely total count number is above a thousand.” — Kenneth Roth ,  executive director of Human Rights Watch. Documentary on Egypt’s Ra’baa crackdown premiers at Bafta

“ La France est géographiquement comme moralement un pays de fusion et de contraste dans l’unité. […] Elle-même n’est plus qu’une grande mêlée de races, de sang, de langues, de mœurs, de législations, de cultes, qui fond tout ce qu’elle a de divers dans une lente et laborieuse unité. […] La diversité est donc le caractère essentiel et fondamental de la France nationale. […] C’est la pauvreté des autres races nationales de l’Europe, de n’avoir qu’un caractère national   ; c’est le génie, c’est l’aptitude, c’est la grandeur, c’est la gloire de la France, d’en avoir plusieurs.” —Alphonse de Lamartine,  Cours familier de littérature,   volume 2, entretien  VIII , Paris, chez l’auteur, 1856   ; p. 105 sq. “Je suis de la couleur de ceux qu’on persécute   ! Sans aimer, sans haïr les drapeaux différents, Partout où l’homme souffre, il me voit dans ses rangs. Plus une race humaine est vaincue et flétrie, Plus elle m’est sacrée et devient ma patrie.” —Toussaint Louverture, 1850

It can be hard to understand, from the outside, what drives a person to risk their life on a rudder or a rickety boat across the Mediterranean. But the decision comes easy when you have already lost hope, Friday said. Perched on a ship’s rudder

Norman Solomon, a longtime peace activist, explains the magician’s trick.

A secret Pakistan cable

An analysis of related words in 161 languages suggests their shared roots lie in the Middle East – a conclusion that also fits with DNA evidence By  Jason Arunn Murugesu 27 July 2023 The common ancestor of Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by close to half the world’s population, was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 years ago, according to an analysis of related words. Indo-European languages, spanning from English to Sanskrit, have long been thought to share a common ancestor. The first linguist to make this link, William Jones, said in a lecture in 1786 that no linguist could examine Greek, Latin and Sanskrit together “without believing them to have sprung” from some common ancestor. But researchers have struggled to agree on the origin story of this so-called proto-Indo-European language, says  Paul Heggarty , who is now at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. There are two main hypotheses, he says. The first suggests that the language originated in