When the BBC published its series of interviews with Gaza residents talking about Hamas, they pushed the most compelling conversation (and the only comments by a woman) to the bottom of the page. It’s a conversation with Tihani Abed Rabbu. Her teenage son Mustafa, her brother and her closest friend were killed during Israel's January assault, codenamed "Operation Cast Lead."

Journalist and Middle East analyst Helena Cobban took issue with the placement of Abed Rabbu’s story. On her blog, Just World News, she protests the placement of this woman’s story:

Too frequently decision makers in the [mainstream media] simply marginalize women's experiences. But women's work in holding families together in very tough times lies at the heart of the social resiliency that can either save or break a community that's in conflict. So it is not only a compelling 'human interest' story—it is also at the heart of the big 'political' story regarding whether, for example, the people of Gaza or South Lebanon end up bowing to Israel's very lethally pursued political demands, or not. Maybe the BBC could, at the very least, elevate Ms. Abed-Rabbu's story to the top of that page?

Here’s a profoundly unsettling excerpt from the interview with Abed-Rabbu:

"I'm afraid that after I have lost Mostafa, that I will lose somebody else as well. When my children go to sleep, and I look at them, I start to think 'who is next—is it Ahmad's turn, or his brother?'

"What worries me is the safety of my family, my sons and my husband. My husband is going through a difficult time, a crazy time. He wants to affiliate with Hamas, he wants to get revenge after what they have done to us.

"How do you expect us to be peaceful after they have killed my son and turned my family into angry people—as they refer to us, "terrorists". I cannot calm my family down.

Sources: BBC, Just World News 

Image by  Amir Farshad Ebrahimi , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Yesterday we wrote of Chinese police blocking television cameras with umbrellas at Tiananmen Square. Here's what that hilarious and infuriating low-tech censorship looked like (cheers to the BBC correspondent, who played this one like a pro):

Source: BBC 

When parents talk about the birds and the bees, it’s usually a metaphor. When scientists talk about the sex lives of animals, the conversation tends to get interesting.

Researchers recently discovered that male chimpanzees give pieces of meat to females in exchange for sex, the BBC reports. For some time, scientists hypothesized about food-for-sex deals, but previous studies tended to look for short-term, payment-on-delivery exchanges. The researchers form the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany found that such exchanges can take place over time. Researcher Cristina Gomes told the BBC that males “might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later.”

The researchers found that male chimpanzees who shared food with females were able to mate twice as often as the more selfish apes. Gomes thinks the findings could give clues into human evolution, and may provide a link between “good hunting skills and reproductive success.”

Similar food-for-sex exchanges have also been observed in flies. In fact, according to National Geographic, male flies have been known to cheat the system by presenting females with worthless gifts—wrapped up to look like food—to fool females into copulation. The strategy may work in the short-term, but the National Geographic reports: “the female dance flies that received the largest nutritious gifts copulated for a significantly longer amount of time than when given either a small nutritious gift or a larger worthless one.”

Though the strategies are similar, flies tend to be more indiscriminate about their sex lives than the chimpanzees. In Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini said flies “have sex several times a day: any opportunity, any female.”

To see Rossellini’s exploration into the sexual lives of flies, watch the video.

A dramatic BBC report finds Vélib, Paris’ extensive bike-share program, in dire straits. The article claims that half of Vélib’s 15,000 bikes have “disappeared” and that many others have been vandalized, “[h]ung from lamp posts, dumped in the River Seine, torched and broken into pieces.” The director of JCDecaux, the company that runs the rental system for the city, warns that the program can’t be sustained without some serious changes.

How accurate is the story? Kottke.org found a smart posting on Streetsblog that challenges the BBC’s more sensational assertions. It quotes sources—including Paris’ Deputy Mayor of Transportation—who say JCDecaux is renegotiating their contract and encouraging the negative coverage to get the city to pay more into the program.

Apparently, JCDecaux zealously guards data on the costs and profits associated with Vélib, so it's a bit hard to objectively assess how it's doing. Since its launch, though, it's generally been regarded as a success. So, as more cities plan similar intiatives—The Bike-sharing Blog counts 92 existing programs and notes that the number's growing quickly—it'll be important to keep tabs on the public's perception of Vélib.

Image courtesy of Luc Legay, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources:  BBC , Kottke.org , Streetsblog, The Bike-sharing Blog.     

Drinking too much coffee could make people hear voices or sense things that aren’t there, the BBC reports. The research doesn’t prove a “causal link” between coffee and hearing voices, but the study found that people who drink more than seven cups of instant coffee per day were three times more likely to experience hallucinations.

(Thanks, Neatorama.)

Joseph Stalin, one of the biggest mass murderers in human history, is cool again in Russia. In a recent poll to decide who was Russia’s greatest historical figure, Stalin came in third, behind medieval prince Alexander Nevsky and former prime minister Pyotr Stolypin. Stalin led the tally for months, according to the BBC, “until the show's producer appealed to viewers to vote for someone else.”

Some believe that Russia’s leaders under despotic Prime Minister Vladimir Putin are pushing for Stalin’s resurgent popularity. In December, the BBC reports that police raided the offices of the human rights organization Memorial and seized a digital archive of Stalin’s atrocities. Irina Flige, office director of the organization, believes the raid was politically motivated. Flige told the BBC, “if the terror of Stalin is justified, then the government today can do what it wants to achieve its aims.”

“Since the 1990s those in political power have been looking to the past to justify their own legitimacy,” Arseny Roginsky writes for Open Democracy. Roginsky writes that Russians have trouble reconciling the atrocities that took place under Stalin with the glory that came after defeating the Nazis in World War II. Though Stalinism can be defined as “terror as a universal instrument for solving any political and social tasks,” the memory of that terror has largely receded in modern Russia.

The absurdity of naming Stalin one of the most beloved Russians left comedian John Oliver nearly speechless. On his podcast with Andy Zaltzman, the Bugle, Oliver quipped, “This would be the perfect time for a simile, ‘Voting for Stalin is like voting for…’ but there isn’t one. Because remember, he’s the biggest mass murderer in human history.” Oliver continued, “As he was sending people to gulags, signing death warrants, and forcing the collectivization of farms, I wonder if he was thinking, ‘This could be a real vote getter in 60 years. I’m going to be captain popular.’”

The violence following Kenya’s elections last December left more than 1,500 dead and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. Yet, 11 months on, there still has been no formal action to indict those who may have instigated the bloodshed.

According to the BBC, the European Union has had enough. After investigating the incidents at the behest of the UN, the EU issued a report last month calling for an international tribunal to prosecute the businessmen and politicians accused of organizing or supporting the fighting in some areas. Inaction on Kenya’s part has prompted the EU to threaten withholding millions of dollars of financial aid until the conditions are met.

Kenya’s hesitance comes from complaints of bias and hearsay in the report itself, plus the fear that legal action could bring about another round of hostility among communities. Should they opt out of establishing their own trials, leaders will be forced to hand over a list of ten suspects to the International Criminal Court for trial.

Did hip-hop play a big role in the ascendance of Barack Obama?

Absolutely, hip-hop author Jeff Chang told Eli Lake of the New York Sun on Bloggingheads.tv. It was still before the election—October 29—but Chang already saw change afoot.

“Potentially what [an Obama victory] could mean is the beginning of the undoing of about 40, 44 years of really nasty racialized politics in the U.S.,” he said. “And I think it is in large part due to hip-hop, actually. Hip-hop, in a lot of ways, culturally prepared the way for the U.S. to be able to seriously look at a young, biracial candidate for the highest office in the land.”

It’s a point Chang makes at greater length in the cover story “The Tipping Point” in the November Vibe (excerpt available online).

And it’s one made much more concisely by British hip-hop star Dizzee Rascal in a post-election interview with the BBC. “I don’t think [Obama] could have won it without hip-hop,” Rascal told anchor Jeremy Paxman. “Hip-hop is what encouraged the youth to get involved.”

Rascal also told Paxman Britain could one day follow the U.S.’s example and elect a black leader.

“I think a black man, purple man, Martian man could run the country. Whatever, mon. As long as he does right by the people.”

Having already won over some Republicans and most of the under-25 set, Barack Obama recently conquered another narrow but inspirational voter demographic: the oldest American voter. Sister Cecilia Gaudette, 106, was born in New Hampshire but moved to her Roman convent 50 years ago, BBC News reports. The last president she voted for? Eisenhower, in 1952. After a 56-year hiatus, she has cast her absentee ballot for Obama, a candidate whom she feels fills the presidential requirements of being “a good straight man... honest, politically able to govern.” You can watch the CBS report on her here.

Top-secret government documents outlining confidential information about al-Qaeda were accidentally left on a train in Great Britain, BBC News reports. A civil servant apparently left them there accidentally, before the papers were found by fellow passengers, who turned them over to the BBC, who turned them over to the police. “Such confidential documents should be locked away,” said Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful Home Affairs select committee, “they should not be read on trains.” And they definitely shouldn’t be left there. 

It reminds me of the trailer for the upcoming film by the Cohen brothers, Burn After Reading:

I believe that God, once finished creating the heavens and the earth and the fish of the sea, created nature documentarian David Attenborough’s voice to chronicle it all. The veteran BBC nature lover has filmed much of the world in more than twenty series since his start in 1954. In a pleasant-minded ramble, Laurie Taylor of the New Humanist chats with the oft-decorated Brit about the source of his popularity, why some scientists find him too soft, and the reasons why his shows support evolution. You can also watch a clip from the BBC documentary Life in the Freezer, below.

—Brendan Mackie

Eels frontman Mark Everett has been seriously busy of late. Not only does his band have two new CDs out, but Everett also recently narrated a BBC documentary about his father, Hugh Everett III, a well-known quantum physicist. The defining theory of Hugh Everett’s career was based on the idea that there are innumerable universes paralleling our own. He argued that every time the universe splits, which it is constantly doing on the quantum level, a new universe is born. In 1957, when Hugh Everett released his seminal paper on the subject, his ideas were met with criticism and even derision by the quantum physics community. He was so frustrated with the response that he withdrew entirely from academia and his family. An article for the BBC looks at the estrangement between father and son, a major motivation for Mark Everett in making the documentary. The film follows him across the United States as he interviews colleagues, followers, and critics of his father, who died in 1982, in an attempt to understand his father’s studies and, he hopes, the man he never knew.

—Morgan Winters

If 2007 passed you by and you can’t help wondering where all the trivia went, the BBC has an answer. It’s compiled a list of 100 things it didn’t know last year—little squibs of inconvenient, peculiar, or droll factoids, perfect for whiling away the better part of a drowsy workday or fortifying your dinner-party discourse. Here are a few of my favorites:

Brazil nuts are seeds encased in an outer shell that weighs more than 1kg.

  Sleeping on the job is tolerated in Japanese work culture, as long as you remain upright and obey certain other rules. It's called inemuri.

Only about half of China's population can speak the national language, Mandarin.

Well, there you go. I’m off for some rejuvenating inemuri.

—Brendan Mackie

Photo by eurok, licensed under Creative Commons.