Tag: Premium

The Post-Peace Process Era

Considering the political situation in Israel/Palestine and the total collapse of the negotiations into self-parody, Greg Djerejian believes we are beyond any chance of a peace process, unless the Obama administration is willing to finally stand up to our client:

The ‘peace process’ has become a phrase now almost of ribald derision in many quarters, a moniker for seemingly endless cycles of aimless discussion mired in its own rituals, positions, talking points, coteries of drafters and scriveners that come and go, like the seasons. And beyond this, the conventional wisdom has developed into a burgeoning sense that—with everything else afoot in MENA—does Israeli-Palestinian peace really even matter all that much? Deep down, however, true friends of Israel realize it very much does. … What is needed is a convincing leader of a great power (hello, Barack) to tell his client—politely but firmly—that its many untold billions upon billions of aid come with a small price, meaning, a modicum of respect for its patron.

Here instead, we are being played for fools, negotiating with ourselves for the privilege of trying to help a client who pays us too little heed back. Even the hapless Palestinians ‘waiting for Godot’ in Ramallah could not tolerate this theater of transparent chicanery this go around. A ‘process’ like this is indeed a mockery. What is required is an end to the tyranny of such incremental process obsession, instead tabling firmly before the counterparties what everyone knows are the broad parameters of a deal, and exerting real pressure (including suspension of material components of financial and military aid) until people get serious about inking the real deal[.]

Judis is even more pessimistic, doubting that even mighty Washington can salvage the situation at this point:

The United States can influence Israeli politics. It can threaten to withhold economic or military assistance. The Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush administrations were able to use these kind of threats to force concessions. But the Obama administration appears completely unwilling to undertake this kind of diplomacy toward Israel. Obama and Kerry know that if they tried to withhold aid, they would face an immense uproar on Capitol Hill. J Street has acquired some clout among liberal Democrats, but what support AIPAC and the other groups that back Netanyahu have lost among Democrats, they have more than made up among Republicans.

And if Obama and Kerry wanted to restart negotiations, they would also have a problem with the Palestinian side. Abbas has been a receptive negotiating partner – he made significant concessions during the talks with the Israelis, including agreeing to an Israeli army presence in the Jordan Valley for up to five years – but he is increasingly hampered by old age and illness. As a result of the negotiation’s failure, and the cooperation of the Palestinian Authority’s security force with the Israelis, Abbas has also become increasingly unpopular. One Fatah official estimated his support among Palestinians as ten percent. But he has no replacement in sight.

After the current wave of violence dies down, Keating predicts a return to the unsustainable, but not yet critical, status quo:

Both the withdrawal plans pushed by the international community and the annexation moves favored by the Israeli hard right seem fairly unattractive compared with muddling through with the current state of affairs, which again, for most Israelis, hasn’t been all that bad. Of course, the events of the last few days have been demonstrations that this status quo was extremely fragile and, in the long run, probably not sustainable. But when Israel winds down its strikes on Gaza and the rockets stop flying, as they likely will soon, it may once again become very easy to forget the knife’s edge the country is sitting on. Meanwhile, the settlements will continue to grow, even more radical groups in Gaza may eclipse Hamas if it’s decimated in the ongoing assault, the influence of moderates on both sides will diminish, and the prospects for any sort of workable resolution to the conflict will likely continue to recede.

Shmuel Rosen outlines what Israel hopes to achieve in the ongoing bombardment of Gaza. He sees history repeating itself:

Israel’s goals are not at all mysterious. Israel is long past its era of hopeful thinking about its neighbors. It is well aware that Gaza isn’t going anywhere, and neither is Hamas. So what does it hope to achieve? It wants Hamas to be militarily weaker. It definitely wants Hamas to have a smaller number of rockets, and if a ground operation is launched in the coming days, the mission of many of the forces will be to target the piles of ammunition that are stored, well hidden among Gaza’s crowded civilian population.

Israel wants Hamas to be less cocky. But Israel isn’t likely to set the bar higher than that. It isn’t likely to want Hamas completely gone. Not even if the price for it to stay is having a round of mild violence every now and then. Because Hamas, illogical and violent as it is, is the only force that even wants to rule that miserable area. It is currently the only force preventing Gaza from turning totally chaotic. And chaos, as recent Middle East developments keep teaching us, is worse than even despotism.

So I’ll see you in approximately two years for this same column again.

Putin’s Splendid Little War

The Ukrainian government drove pro-Russian separatists out of Slovyansk this weekend and is now vowing to retake the major industrial city of Donetsk. David Patrikarakos reports that the fighters of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” are getting ready to make their last stand:

On July 7, separatists started work protecting the city from attack. They blew up three bridges on key roads leading to Donetsk to slow the advances of the Ukrainian army. (This also damaged the railway lines.) Two other bridges on roads from Slovyansk to Donetsk were also destroyed. The rebels are insulating the city as they get ready to hunker down and prepare for an extended battle.

A siege or stalemate looks like the most likely option.

Poroshenko is determined to recover the east, but shelling Ukraine’s most important industrial city would be disastrous both for the economy and for any hope of reconciling in the future. Meanwhile, the separatists can defend their positions, but the chances of making gains are now unlikely in the extreme. The only real chance now for the rebels to fight back would be if their allies in Moscow accepted separatists’ demands for direct military assistance. But this is equally unlikely, and even the otherwise confident rebels know it.

In fact, Moscow appears to have abandoned the rebels entirely. Ioffe passes along reports that Russia has even closed its border to them:

Not only are they not letting men and materiel into Ukraine from Russia, but they’re also blocking men and materiel from flowing in the opposite direction. That is, the very men that Moscow has riled up to the extent that they have taken up arms and are ready to die in order to get the region out of Ukraine and into Russia are not welcome to seek refuge in Russia. (Not even, it seems, the ones originally from Russia.) A group of 300 fleeing rebels reportedly even came under fire by the Russians as they tried to escape into Russia.

The Russians haven’t confirmed or denied these Ukrainian reports, but it would not be out of step with Russian military history: The Red Army was notorious for its use of so-called barrier troops that were stationed behind active combat troops to prevent retreat. They became especially notorious in World War II when, drowning in the meatgrinder of the German advance, ill-equipped and poorly trained Soviet soldiers (many of them volunteers) were shot for retreating.

But Simon Shuster questions whether Putin can back off from Ukraine without paying a hefty political price:

The rebels were not the only ones to see this as a sign of duplicity. Russian nationalists have begun to turn on him as well, posting diatribes and even music videos that seek to goad Putin into war, juxtaposing his pledges to “defend the Russian world” with images of bombed-out villages and Russian corpses in Ukraine. “We gave them hope,” Alexander Dugin, one of the leading nationalist ideologues in Russia, said during a television appearance last week. “When we said we’re a united Russian civilization, this didn’t just come from a few patriotic forces. It came from the President!” And it will not be easy for Putin to back away from those promises. A nationwide poll taken at the end of June suggested that 40% of Russians supported military intervention in Ukraine, up from 31% only a month earlier.

Drum sees the Russian strongman cutting his losses:

That Putin. He’s quite the guy, isn’t he? It appears that he eventually figured out that Ukraine wasn’t going to fall neatly into his lap, and the cost of fomenting an all-out war there was simply too great. It turned out that Ukrainians themselves didn’t support secession; Western powers were clearly willing to ramp up sanctions if things got too nasty; and the payoff for victory was too small even if he had succeeded. So now he’s had to swallow a new, more pro-Western Ukraine—the very thing that started this whole affair—along with the prospect of renewed anti-Russian enmity from practically every country on his border. But he got Crimea out of the deal. Maybe that made it worth it.

Well, maybe it did. David Silbey still believes Moscow’s meddling in Ukraine was “a pretty deft piece of great power maneuvering”:

Russia has neatly acquired the Crimea, stirred up enough trouble in Ukraine that Western governments have largely stopped talking about that annexation, and all without committing any substantial forces or getting pulled into a Ukrainian civil war. Ukraine is more pro-west, now, sure, but it’s weakened by the loss of the Crimea and the political chaos. Russia’s other neighbors are suspicious of Putin, but, realistically, they’re also aware of their own vulnerability, and are likely to believe (as with the invasion of Georgia) that the west will reconcile with the Russians after a decent interval. What are the statute of limitations for territorial annexation?

Will Feminism End Circumcision?

There’s a long, engaging and fascinating piece in Tablet on the growing movement among American Jews to abjure male genital mutilation in favor of a less draconian way of bringing a Jewish infant boy into the traditions and community of his family and ancestors. The variations – which do not involve permanently cutting the genitals – are called brit shalom and brit atifah. I found out in the article that even a small minority of Israelis are now leaving their infant boys unmutilated – up to “4.8 percent of Israeli boys weren’t circumcised, for reasons including parents’ objection to disfiguring the body — the reason cited by actress Alicia Silverstone — and not wanting to cause the baby pain.” But what intrigued me was the idea that women and feminism may have played a part in Jewish moves away from the ritual. The analogue in female genital mutilation has played a part, according to one reformer:

Consider the anatomy of the penis. If you deprive the penis of its covering, it externalizes what should be an internal organ. Some people are uncomfortable comparing circumcision to female genital cutting, but removing the external labia, while it may be more complicated, is not entirely dissimilar to removing the foreskin; you’ve changed mucosal tissue into non-mucosal tissue. If you know this, it’s hard to defend the practice.

The fact that Maimonides himself defended circumcision as a way to tame excessive lust by blunting male sexual pleasure only adds to the parallels. And then this observation about the rise of female rabbis:

Wechterman enumerated some of the reasons people choose not to do brit milah: “One of the biggest impetuses is the growth of the natural childbirth movement; parents are questioning a whole bunch of previously held conceptions, for good reasons. And I think the impact of feminism can’t be understated. A core predicate of contemporary feminism is the notion of bodily integrity and physical self-determination.” … The resistance to opting out of brit milah, she thinks, has manifold reasons. But one of them is that the deciders have always been men who are circumcised. “Men who are circumcised can’t imagine not doing it, just as men who aren’t circumcised can’t imagine doing it,” she pointed out. “But with significant numbers of women rabbis, things are changing.”

May the change continue.

Meep Meep Watch

President Obama Departs White House En Route To Colorado

I’m sure my Republican readers will wince at that headline – or mock it. The news narrative of the summer is the floundering of the president in any number of ginned-up stories: he “lost” the Middle East (as if that’s a bad thing); he’s created a crisis in illegal immigration (even though the bulk of the blame goes to a Bush-era law); he’s responsible for total gridlock (as if Ted Cruz did not exist); he’s been snookered by Putin; he’s been humiliated by Netanyahu; he’s the “worst president since World War II”, and on and on.

But let’s revisit last fall when Obama was in his first second term swoon. At that point, with the implosion of healthcare.gov, the very survival of the ACA, his signature domestic achievement, was in serious doubt. In the wake of Obama’s sudden bait-and-switch in Syria, when he threatened a strike and then accepted a Putin-brokered deal with Assad on WMDs, his foreign policy skills were about to get systematically downgraded by the American public. The economy was still sluggish, with no guarantee of a robust revival. Here’s Gallup’s picture of the president’s stark reversal of polling fortune, almost rectified before Iraq exploded a month or so ago:

Screen Shot 2014-07-10 at 10.04.06 AM

In April of last year, his approval ratings were exactly the inverse of what they are today. And with every passing day in his second term, his ability to leverage his power attenuates.

But let’s return to last year’s crises. Less than a year after the ACA was regarded as near-dead, the implementation has exceeded most expectations. Today’s Commonwealth Fund report tallies the results:

The uninsured rate for people ages 19 to 64 declined from 20 percent in the July-to-September 2013 period to 15 percent in the April-to-June 2014 period. An estimated 9.5 million fewer adults were uninsured. Young men and women drove a large part of the decline: the uninsured rate for 19-to-34-year-olds declined from 28 percent to 18 percent, with an estimated 5.7 million fewer young adults uninsured. By June, 60 percent of adults with new coverage through the marketplaces or Medicaid reported they had visited a doctor or hospital or filled a prescription; of these, 62 percent said they could not have accessed or afforded this care previously.

And the rate of increase in per capita healthcare costs has moderated substantially since the Bush administration. Perspective is everything, of course, and politically, the ACA is still (on balance) a loser, especially among the older, whiter Medicare recipients who are over-represented in mid-term elections. But still: isn’t this by the measure of last fall a pretty stunning comeback? And the purist “repeal!” chorus has dimmed to a faint version of replace or fix.

So turn your gaze to Syria, where the entire foreign policy establishment moaned in concert at Obama’s fecklessness last September. We were all told that it was unbelievably naive to think that Assad would ever fully cooperate and relinquish his stockpile of WMDs as a reward for not getting bombed. It was a pipe-dream to think Putin was serious about being constructive as well. Well: a couple weeks back, the last shipment of WMDs was removed from the country, with very limited use in the intervening period, and is now undergoing destruction. I don’t know of any similar achievement in non-proliferation since Libya’s renunciation of WMDs under Bush. No, we didn’t resolve the sectarian civil war in Syria/Iraq, but we did remove by far the biggest threat to the West and to the world in the middle of it. Why is that not regarded as an epic triumph of American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force?

Now look at the economy where Obama has been stymied by the GOP for a very long time – both federally and in the states where local government austerity put an unprecedented drag on the recovery. Well: again, we have an unemployment rate back to where it was before the Great Recession hit. If the momentum continues, we could have an unemployment rate below 6 percent before too long. It’s taken for ever – but the hit was deep and the debt overhang large. And speaking of debt, we also have this data to chew on:

usgs_line.php

No, there hasn’t been any progress in reducing our long-term debt or our unfunded liabilities in entitlements. But when the GOP refuses to countenance any new revenues, I can’t blame the president. And to have reduced a budget deficit from 10 percent of GDP to just over 2 percent in the wake of a massive recession is something a Republican president would be bragging incessantly about.

There’s still a lot in play. The critical negotiations with Iran remain as tricky as ever – but that we have a chance of controlling Iran’s nuclear program without war is already a remarkable fact. Again: a function of skilled, relentless diplomacy backed by serious sanctions. The menace of Putin has not gone away – even though a very good case can be made that in that head-to-head, Putin is now licking his wounds a little, after Ukraine has signed that trade deal with the EU, and Ukraine’s military is regrouping. Immigration reform is in limbo. But I’d argue that on the wider political plain, Obama has been winning the strategic war with the GOP. The last twelve months have been an unmitigated disaster for Republican outreach to Hispanics; the Republicans have hurt themselves with many more women on the question of contraception, than they have helped themselves with orthodox Christians; the Palin impeachment chorus is poison to the middle of the country; and the Democrats have a clear and female front-runner against a divided and small-bore GOP bench in 2016. If Clinton were to win, it would be as decisive a strategic advance as when George H W Bush cemented Reagan’s legacy.

I’m applying the criteria that Obama has applied to himself. Is his long game bearing fruit? So far, it seems to me, the question answers itself.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama departs the White House July 8, 2014 in Washington, DC. Obama was scheduled to travel to Denver, Colorado. By Win McNamee/Getty Images.)

Will Utah Be The Big One?

Another marriage equality case is headed for the Supreme Court:

In June, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Utah’s ban on same-sex couples’ marriages is unconstitutional. Wednesday is the deadline for the state to ask the full appeals court to rehear that case, a process called an “en banc” rehearing, and Attorney General Sean Reyes’s office announced it will not do so. The attorney general’s office will, however, take the case directly to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to hear the appeal. The case, if taken by the justices, would present a second opportunity in recent years for the justices to declare that all state bans like the Utah one are unconstitutional, leading to nationwide marriage equality.

The court doesn’t have to take the case, of course, but Denniston explains why they might choose to:

With the case going to the Justices via such a petition, the Court will have complete discretion whether to review the Tenth Circuit ruling, or pass it up.  Utah officials are almost certain to argue that the Court should take up the issue promptly based on the argument that there is now a conflict among federal appeals courts on the constitutionality of such bans.

The Eighth Circuit upheld such a ban, but that was in 2006, seven years before the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision — a ruling that many judges have said changed the legal landscape for review of those state laws.  In the Windsor decision, which involved only a federal law, the Court indicated that it was not taking a position at that time on the validity of state laws forbidding same-sex marriages.

But there is no such conflict between courts regarding this particular case, so the justices might prefer to hold off:

While most observers expect the high court to take up the issue of marriage equality within the next few years, the Associated Press notes that the court has a history of declining to consider cases without divergent rulings from lower courts. In the Kitchen case, a federal trial judge and the 10th Circuit both ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. If the Supreme Court declines Utah’s request to hear the case, those lower rulings will stand, definitively declaring Utah’s marriage law unconstitutional and striking down the voter-approved law.

Some legal experts, however, doubt the court will turn it down:

“I think the Court will take the case. Since [U.S. v.] Windsor, all of the lower courts that have ruled have struck down laws prohibiting same sex marriages,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “Perhaps without a split in the lower courts, the Supreme Court will wait. My prediction, though, is that the Court knows the issue needs to be resolved and will take it.” And if the Court does hear the case, all eyes will be on Justice Anthony Kennedy, not simply because he’s the traditional swing vote, but because he has written all three decisions in Supreme Court history that advanced gay rights. “I also predict that the five justices in the majority in Windsor will be the majority to declare unconstitutional laws that deny marriage equality to gays and lesbians,” Chemerinsky said.

Also yesterday, Alito denied without comment a county clerk’s plea to stop same-sex marriages in Pennsylvania. “That appears to remove the last potential legal barrier to Pennsylvania becoming the nineteenth state in which same-sex marriages are permitted,” Denniston adds in an update. And, in other good news, a judge struck down Colorado’s marriage equality ban yesterday, though the decision is stayed pending appeal. The speed of all this is simply staggering.

Who Killed The RomCom? Ctd

Megan Garber has her own theory about why the genre is struggling:

[T]he truth is that romantic comedies are, as works of art and pieces of culture, terrible. They are usually some ungodly, unsexy combination of: stale, trite, silly, and formulaic. They are often offensively anti-feminist. The generous reading of all this is that recent films and their creators became victims, essentially, of the innovator’s dilemma: They got too good at obeying their own, once-successful formulas – and failed to see beyond them.

The less generous reading is that film executives and creators failed to see the culture changing around them. The rom-com industrial complex – the cultural institution charged with capturing romance as a kind of ritual – failed to recognize the evolution of romance itself.

Meanwhile, a reader who writes about box-office trends offers some context, while another offers a few recommendations:

Romantic comedies aren’t weak because the male 18-24 audience dominates the box office. Indeed, the headline over the last year has been the collapse of that group among US moviegoers. Moviegoing is skewing older and a bit more female.

The need to capture a worldwide audience is one reason many genres don’t get fuller attention, but romcoms can be made relatively inexpensively, and several female-oriented films over the last few months have been considerable successes. Remember that there’s a lag of around two years between when films are greenlit and when they hit the screen. So romcoms might come back in the US. Yes, many American comedies don’t translate internationally, but a Pretty Woman would likely be just as big today as it was in 1990 (much bigger, with inflation).

Update from a reader:

I adore the movies and go as often as I can (but not to the multiplexes, which seem to be increasingly dumbed down). I prefer smaller indy films, and there are excellent indy rom coms which are neither trite nor anti-feminist. In the last month I’ve seen two excellent indy rom coms…. The Lunchbox and In a World Where…

The Lunchbox refutes the lie that romcoms cannot bridge cultures. It’s is an Indian film about a uniquely Indian system but which spoke beautifully and intelligently to longing in an unfulfilled life. I, a working American mother, related very much to the young Indian housewife at the center of the story, and her neighbor reminded me a great deal of my Puerto Rican mother-in-law. And all without innuendo about sex. The closest this film came to nudity was the heroine removing her jewelry in the evening.

In a World Where…, written, directed, starring and produced by Lake Bell, includes many romcom cliches including mistaken identity, the overlooked love interest, etc., but as a humorous side plot in this tale of a woman fighting to make it in a male-dominated industry.

If the big studios only took the time and effort to make movies that were not so dumbed down in the way they have every movie Kate Hudson and Jennifer Anniston ever starred in, maybe they could draw me back to the multiplex.

Good News For Gay Parents

A major Australian study has found that the children of same-sex couples are better off than most:

Researchers from the University of Melbourne surveyed 315 same-sex parents with a total of 500 children. About 80 percent of the children have female parents, while 18 percent have male parents. The children raised by same-sex partners scored an average of 6 percent higher than the general population on measures of general health and family cohesion. They were equivalent to those from the general population on measures of temperament and mood, behavior, mental health and self-esteem.

Researcher Simon Crouch posits that “the structure of same-sex parent families, particularly in relation to work and home duties, plays an important part in how well families get along”:

Same-sex parents, for instance, are more likely to share child care and work responsibilities more equitably than heterosexual-parent families. It is liberating for parents to take on roles that suit their skills rather than defaulting to gender stereotypes, where mum is the primary care giver and dad the primary breadwinner. Our research suggests that abandoning such gender stereotypes might be beneficial to child health.

But stigmatization remains a concern:

According to the study, about two-thirds of children with same-sex parents experienced some form of stigma because of their parents’ sexual orientation. Despite these kids’ higher marks in physical health and social well-being, the stigma associated with their family structure was linked to lower scores on a number of scales. Crouch said stigmas ranged from subtle issues such as sending letters home from school addressed to a “Mr.” and “Mrs.” to more harmful problems such as bullying at school. The greater the stigma a same-sex family faces, the greater the impact on a child’s social and emotional well-being, Crouch said.

Mark Joseph Stern argues that stigma isn’t a gay-parenting problem; it’s an anti-gay-parenting problem:

A study last year by researchers at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Pretoria in South Africa took a deeper dive into the effect of stigma on gay families, finding that:

The children were not upset that their parents are gay. In fact, most of them embraced it. The negativity that children with gay parents experience is rarely the result of having gay parents. Instead, it’s the cultural stigma that causes all the problems. Any concerns they had were the result of how they would be treated in the public sphere. Research constantly shows that children with gay parents are normal, healthy, well-adjusted people. It’s the social scrutiny and stigmatization that children have to negotiate and contend with.

As that quote suggests, the study only confirmed what previous research had borne out: Gay parents don’t disadvantage their children – but conservatives’ smear campaigns against gay parents do.

German Lopez notes some caveats in the study:

The findings are based on reports from the parents who agreed to the survey, which could skew the results. The survey also focused on Australian same-sex parents, so there may be social and cultural factors at play that wouldn’t apply perfectly to America’s gay and lesbian parents. And the study doesn’t compare same-sex parents directly with opposite-sex parents; it instead compares same-sex parents and their children to the general population.

Update from a reader:

German Lopez’s caveat goes further than you may suspect. While it’s true beyond doubt that the study shows that same-sex parenting doesn’t hurt, and that’s important to get on the record, the data can’t say anything useful about whether or not it’s better. For that, you’d need to compare same-sex adoptive parents to opposite-sex adoptive parents, not same-sex parents to the general population.

It comes down to basic experiment design. You want to remove as many confounding factors as possible. Adoptive parents spend a lot of time and money on the process, have gone through a vetting process, and manifestly WANT to be parents. The general population contains a lot of willing parents, to be sure – but it also contains a lot of accidental parents, people with “buyers’ remorse”, and few of them went through any vetting process more discriminating than the mother’s choice of partner.

An interesting result, but more study is needed.

Raped Into Submission

Sarah Carr takes a disquieting look at how sexual violence has become a frequently employed tool of political repression in Egypt:

Society’s ignoring or belittling of the problem, its socially conservative attitude towards women and sex and a general atmosphere of repression all combine to allow security forces to commit sexual assaults with impunity. What better way to silence opponents in this patriarchal society, where a sex scandal is a huge social stigma, and where victim-blaming is the norm? …

Once women are detained, [psychiatrist Aida] Seif al-Dawla says that the use of sexual violence against them “is massive and systematic. The grabbing of breasts and sexual verbal abuse is routine for women.” She points out that the degree of violence is carefully calibrated, and is less brutal towards seasoned political activists who security force personnel are aware will not remain silent.

“In prison, the location, warden, officers in charge and so on are known. They would not risk this with outspoken detained women who have a say and a wide circle of supporters. They are abusing the unfortunate fact that people are okay with violations against Muslim Brotherhood members — and many still do not believe those stories when they get published,” Seif al-Dawla said.

The Denisovans’ Legacy

Tibetans are more capable than most other people of living at extreme altitudes thanks to a mutation in a gene called EPAS1, which allows them to cope with the oxygen-poor air of the 4,000-meter-high Tibetan Plateau. Now, geneticists have identified the same mutation in the Denisovans, an extinct group of humans with whom our ancestors may have interbred some 30,000-40,000 years ago:

To date, this is still “strongest instance of natural selection documented in a human A Phuwa villager stands for a portrait a few miles from thepopulation”—the EPAS1 mutation is found in 87 percent of Tibetans and just 9 percent of Han Chinese, even though the two groups have been separated for less than 3,000 years. But when the team sequenced EPAS1 in 40 more Tibetans and 40 Han Chinese, they noticed that the Tibetan version is incredibly different to those in other people. It was so different that it couldn’t have gradually arisen in the Tibetan lineage. Instead, it looked like it was inherited from a different group of people. By searching other complete genomes, the team finally found the source: the Denisovans! …

This discovery is all the more astonishing because we still have absolutely no idea what the Denisovans looked like. The only fossils that we have are a finger bone, a toe, and two teeth. Just by sequencing DNA from these fragments, scientists divined the existence of this previously unknown group of humans, deciphered their entire genome, and showed how their genes live on in modern people. Denisovan DNA makes up 5 to 7 percent of the genomes of people from the Pacific islands of Melanesia. Much tinier proportions live on in East Asians. And now, we know that some very useful Denisovan DNA lives on in Tibetans.

But Catherine Brahic deflates some of the excitement, noting that the findings are not conclusive:

The Tibetan EPAS1 probably got there by interbreeding, but more evidence is needed to confirm which archaic humans were the source, says David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston. “There is no proof in the paper that the origin of the [DNA] is Denisovan.” He says it could just as easily have come from Neanderthals, whose EPAS1 looks similar to the Tibetans’. That might make more sense as they were common on mainland Asia, whereas the Denisovan heartland seems to have been in South-East Asia.

It is still unclear how the modified EPAS1 gene helps Tibetans survive 4000 metres above sea level. It seems to cut the number of red blood cells, which carry oxygen, being made. That is odd: most people make more of these cells when they travel to high altitudes, to carry more oxygen. But they thicken the blood, possibly making strokes more likely. Nielsen thinks that, by thinning the blood, the Tibetan gene may help lower this risk.

Regardless, Boer Deng concludes, genetic discoveries such as these should require us to rethink our definition of “humans”:

Denisovans and Neanderthals are called extinct human “species”—a term that used to demark a clear line between two organisms incapable of interbreeding to produce fertile offspring. But the definition is no longer so clear. We know that these hominin cousins did couple with our Homo sapiens ancestors—and some of us have inherited from them valuable modern traits. How we define “humans” past and present is a subject to contemplate—as fitting for scientists as for pilgrims to think about on their journeys across Tibetan plains.

Update from a reader, who bolsters the fact that “the genetic results of the last few years demonstrate pretty clearly that Denisovans and Neanderthals are us”:

See, for example, my take (“Denisovans are us“,  “Neanderthals are us– More evidence“,  “Neanderthals are us?”), Jerry Coyne’s (“How many species of humans were there?“, and John Hawks’ (“Naming archaic human populations“, “The ‘braided stream’ at year-end“, “Is the Biological Species Concept a ‘minority view’?“) . I’m a zoologist who studies lizards, Coyne is a geneticist whose most important work has been on the nature and origin of species, and Hawks is a paleoanthropologist who studies both bones and genes, and we all came to the same conclusion.

Hawks, who studies the issue most closely, states simply, “Ancient human populations like the Neandertals and Denisovans were not separate biological species.” Here’s how I put it: “The current work tends to confirm the conclusion that archaic humans (Neanderthals and Denisovans) were part of a group of interbreeding populations in nature that included the immediate ancestors of modern humans, and thus were members of the species Homo sapiens.”

That Neanderthals and Densiovans were human can, I think, not be doubted, because they are, under any point of view, fellow members with us of the genus Homo, and thus men in the generic sense (in both the vernacular and technical senses of generic).

But are they members of the same species as us, Homo sapiens? There are, regrettably, quite a few historical instances where two peoples (both of course undoubted modern H. sapiens) met, and one people quickly disappeared, with relatively little gene flow having occurred. That Denisovans and Neanderthals contributed “only” several percent to our genomes before disappearing is no bar to their having been the same species as us moderns; it is, in fact, strong evidence of all of us (modern, Denisovan, Neanderthal) being the same species.

(Photo: A Phuwa villager stands for a portrait a few miles from the Chinese border. Hidden in the rain shadow of the Himalaya in one of the most remote corners of Nepal lies Mustang, or the former Kingdom of Lo. Hemmed in by the world’s highest mountain range to the south and an occupied and shuttered Tibet to the north, this tiny Tibetan kingdom has remained virtually unchanged since the 15th century. Today, Mustang is arguably the best-preserved example of traditional Tibetan life left in the world. By Taylor Weidman/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Syria’s Hidden Suicide Crisis

Lauren Wolfe warns that self-harm is “rapidly becoming a very real fallout of this [Syrian] war — one that is so taboo, it is rarely spoken of within families, let alone publicly”:

“Suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam,” said Haid N. Haid, a Beirut-based Syrian sociologist and Middle East program manager at the Heinrich Boll Foundation. Scholars often forbid the recitation of a funerary prayer for people who’ve committed suicide, as a way to punish the families of the dead and to deter others from taking their own lives. The cause of death is usually obscured — it is called an “accident” or “natural.” Suicide, Haid emphasized, is always “a big scandal that people will talk about for a long time.”

Despite the taboo, doctors I spoke with said they are seeing more and more cases of people with suicidal impulses – a trend confirmed by the number of reported instances in which, because of a feeling of being unable to provide for one’s family as a refugee, or because of the shame of rape, pregnancy through rape, or sexual humiliation, it has been carried out. Hard data are difficult to come by. But while I was unable to find formal statistics on suicide in the Syrian war, the picture painted by doctors working in and near the country is decidedly bleak — and given how precious few mental health services are available to Syrians affected by the war, it is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Meanwhile, a UNHCR report on female refugees from Syria illuminates the unimaginable daily struggles these women contend with:

With their husbands, fathers, and brothers dead, missing, or still in Syria — many of them denied entry to the neighboring countries — these women compose a particularly vulnerable segment of a population caught in a humanitarian catastrophe that the United Nations has described as the worst since the genocide in Rwanda. Tuesday’s report, which is based on interviews with 135 women between February and April, paints a desperate picture of their lives as refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. …

According to UNHCR, 40 percent of refugees in Lebanon live in substandard dwellings, which include both unfinished buildings and makeshift settlements. And female-headed refugee families — which in Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt include on average 5.6 members — are particularly vulnerable to life in an inadequate shelter. When Suraya, a mother of seven, arrived at Jordan’s Zaatari camp, she stood guard outside her tent. “I would dress and act like a man so that my children could sleep in peace and feel safe,” she told the UNHCR. Another woman, Zaina, who also lives in Bekaa, said: “When there is no man, people are like animals.” Their children aren’t the only ones vulnerable to predators. The women must also defend themselves from sexual harassment and gender-based violence, often perpetrated by their landlords.