Thomas Paine's version of "you didn't build that":
"Separate an individual from society,and give him an island or a continent to possess,and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end,in all cases,that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,of personal property,beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,of gratitude,and of civilization,a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came"
Submitted by Leah
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Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Leo Varadkar’s speech on Saturday was a powerful affirmation of what a modern Ireland must look like, says Fergus Finlay.
DEAR Taoiseach, I’m writing, first of all, to thank you. As a citizen — and I know I’m not alone in this — I was proud of the speech you made in front of Pope Francis on Saturday. Proud of its tone, and its content.
I will admit that I became a bit impatient, waiting for you to get to the meat of the speech, and I was beginning to wonder at one point if you were going to cop out of some of the things that needed to be said, directly and honestly.
But you didn’t. By the time you had finished, it was clear to me that you had conveyed an awful lot of what I and many others felt.
And I would have to add a further feeling of pride and gratitude for Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone’s actions when she met the Pope, in ensuring that no blind eye could be turned to the horror and tragedy of Tuam. It cannot have been easy to speak to the Pope as directly as she did, in the circumstances in which she found herself, but in doing so she did a profound public service.
I didn’t go to the Phoenix Park on Sunday. Instead I stood, with thousands of others, at the Garden of Remembrance. We were silent, mostly, except when we were clapping the singers and other artists who expressed our feelings in their songs and poems.
I met survivors I’ve known over the years, and I met people who work alongside them every day of their working lives, like Maeve Lewis of One in Four.
Among them I met a man from Northern Ireland, who has told his story to the commission of enquiry that was set up there. He is due redress, and the main reason it has been held up is that there is no government in Northern Ireland, and apparently no way of processing a lot of outstanding claims. That’s surely a piece of unfinished business that we should be attending to.
One of the speakers at the Garden of Remembrance was a young actress called Grace Dyas, who delivered a long and passionate spoken poem that transfixed most of us.
In the course of it, she mentioned Christine Buckley, and the thing that Christine would always say to any survivor who came to see her. “I believe you,” she would say. “Before you open your mouth, I believe you.”
Even before Grace spoke, I had been thinking about Christine, one of the bravest, funniest and fiercest people I’ve ever known. She was one of the very first people in Ireland to speak about the abuse meted out to children in institutions and had recounted her own experiences as a child in an industrial school in Islandbridge.
Her story was at the heart of the documentary Dear Daughter, one of two groundbreaking films that finally smashed through the wall of silence that surrounded institutional abuse in Ireland. I can still remember Christine, as brave and gutsy as she was, telling me about her terror when she gave evidence to the Ryan Tribunal. Her account of that day, and the tough adversarial encounter it was, is one of the reasons I find it hard even still to take church apologies and expressions of regret seriously.
I can still remember, for example, the Christian Brothers’ apology — heartfelt, sorrowful, all that guff — after the Ryan Report was published. I knew at the time that not one of their victims had ever received an apology in front of the tribunal. Instead they were each in turn treated to a hard and scornful cross-examination.
The Ryan Report itself makes clear that the Brothers treated people who had been abused with “scepticism and suspicion”. Indeed, the main reason that the Ryan Report did not name and shame abusers (as was their original intention) was because of a successful legal challenge by the Christian Brothers, which forced the Commission to assign silly names to abusers to protect their identities.
That sort of history, Taoiseach, is the reason why all of the expressions of sorrow this past weekend, as heartfelt as they appeared to be, have to be accompanied by action if they are to mean anything.
So, actions speak louder than words, taoiseach. And the truth is that there is a lot to be done here at home before we can truly say we have moved on from the dark history you referred to in your speech. There is still too much to be done about the historical actions of the State as well as the Church for any of us to feel satisfied that we are at the end of one chapter and can turn confidently to the next.
The new award celebrates wildlife photo stories and their role in raising awareness about and protecting the natural world. The winners will be announced at Bristol’s Wildscreen Festival and showcased in a free exhibition from 12 Oct to 8 Nov
Peregrine’s are deadly predators, but that could be forgotten when watching them feed their chicks. Delicately picking tiny morsels off of carcasses and offering them to their young.
Photograph: Luke Massey/2018 Wildscreen Panda Awards
A feel-good dirt bath is just the thing in the heat of the day. A coating of soil helps protect sensitive elephant skin by acting as both sunscreen and insect repellent. Shaba (lying down) demonstrates how it’s done for the younger orphans.
Photograph: Ami Vitale/2018 Wildscreen Panda Awards
A child in Gaza City. The move, announced by the state department on Friday, follows a months-long freeze on promised funds from USAid. Photograph: Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images
Sweeping new US cuts in humanitarian aid to Palestinians are already hitting hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people, amid accusations that the Trump administration is using the issue to “blackmail” Palestinians into accepting a peace deal that critics say will favour Israel.
Fears of a wholesale withdrawal of US development assistance from Palestinians were fuelled by an opaque announcement on Friday suggesting that the US intended to redirect Palestinian aid to other “higher priorities”.
The statement follows a months-long freeze on promised funds from the main US government development organisation, USAid, to agencies on the ground, not least in Gaza.
One agency operating in the coastal enclave, Catholic Relief Services, said the withholding of this year’s US funding for its projects had seen the number of Palestinians it could support in Gaza – largely in food aid and employment assistance – drop from 150,000 to just 200 since January, forcing it to lay off most of its programme staff.
Other agencies hit by the cuts include Mercy Corps and International Medical Corps (IMC), who jointly provide a USAid-funded medical programme in Gaza.
The move, announced by the state department on Friday, said money to be spent by the end of this fiscal year would be redirected to “high-priority projects elsewhere”, amounting to a cut of $200m (£155m).
Last week’s cuts are the latest episode in the bitter and escalating conflict that began in January when, in a tweet, Trump threatened to cut hundreds of millions in American aid to Palestinians he accused of lacking “appreciation or respect”.
The issues over USAid funding come in addition to the Trump administration’s funding cuts to UNRWA, the main UN agency that supports more than 5 million Palestinian refugees throughout the occupied Palestinian territories and the wider Middle East.
Disclosure of the scale of the crisis facing Palestinian aid comes amid reports the US is seeking to redefine which Palestinians should be regarded as “refugees” as part of its ongoing stand-off with UNRWA.
One Palestinian Authority source told the Guardian the latest cuts represented a “full-scale withdrawal of US aid to Palestinians” with only the east Jerusalem hospital network apparently exempted after pressure from US evangelical groups.
Hilary DuBose, the Catholic Relief Services country representative in Jerusalem, detailed the issues they have been facing to the Guardian.
“We have a $50m five-year award from the US which we get in chunks at a time.” Since January, she explained, funds have been on hold until Friday’s announcement.
“The impact of these cuts is going to be felt very deeply in a population of Gaza of 2 million where 80% are dependent on aid.
“With no political solution on the horizon, ending US aid means there will be major humanitarian consequences which could also have an impact on the political and security situation,” she said.
In Gaza this week the cuts were already being felt, including at the Ard El Insan clinic in Gaza City.
“We’ve been badly affected,” said Safaa Isleem, doctor and clinic manager, who said they were already cutting provision. “There was a project funded by IMC that was supposed to last for five years. It was supporting our work on malnourishment, wasting, rickets, anaemia. Last year, it started for 6,000 patients aged 0 to five.
“The main staff, including myself, have lost more than 50% of their salaries. This was the major project we were working on. We’ve reduced the working hours.”
The cuts were also condemned by a meeting of the cabinet of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, as part of “persistent attempts to blackmail the Palestinian leadership to succumb to the meaningless so-called ‘deal of the century’ through drastically cutting more than $200m in aid funds allocated to benefit the Palestinian citizens directly”.
The strong suspicion that cuts were being used to force Palestinians to accept a White House-imposed deal were fuelled by a report in Foreign Policy that Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner is arguing that “ending the [US] assistance outright [to Palestinians] could strengthen his negotiating hand when he introduces his long-awaited Middle East peace plan”.
That view was echoed by Aaron David Miller, who advised six US secretaries of state and now heads the Middle East Peace programme at the Wilson Centre thinktank.
Miller tweeted after the announcement that the Trump White House was the “first administration in history to provide unqualified support to Government of Israel while waging political/economic war on Palestinians”.
New York state governor Andrew Cuomo and actor Cynthia Nixon traded insults in a televised debate in the race to win the Democratic nomination for governor. Nixon was quick to go after Cuomo early on in the debate, calling him corrupt and a liar, before saying ‘experience doesn’t mean that much if you’re not actually good at governing’
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