Master Feed : The Atlantic |
- Why Does a Country With Few Roads Have a Growing Airline Industry?
- Stay Classy Robert Zimmerman
- '20 Feet From Stardom': Go See It
- How International Justice Is Being Gutted
- When Do Women (and Men) Stop Leaning In?
- On The Killing Of Trayvon Martin By George Zimmerman
- Law and Justice and George Zimmerman
| Why Does a Country With Few Roads Have a Growing Airline Industry? Posted: 14 Jul 2013 03:45 PM PDT  A Somali woman sweeps a red carpet near Turkish and Somali national flags before Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's arrival at Aden Abdulle International Airport in Mogadishu in August 2011. (Ho New/Reuters) Pirates command its coast. Traffic along the country's few pockmarked roads is often disrupted by militias and criminals. Of more than 22,000 km of roadway, only 2,608 km are paved. And though Somalia's war-torn capital city, Mogadishu, has made small security improvements since the terrorist group al Shabaab was forced out about two years ago, anarchy still reigns. One of the organization's operatives managed to slam a bomb-packed vehicle into a peacekeeping convoy there on Friday, reportedly killing eight civilians. Al Shabaab claimed another life earlier last week, when it detonated an explosive in the city's marketplace. But in the country's skies, high above a landscape torn by civil war, business is running more smoothly. According to the New York Times magazine, the Nairobi-headquartered Jubba Airways, "the unofficial national carrier of Somalia," is aggressively growing its fleet of leased Soviet Antonov propeller planes and old Boeing jets, and expanding its domestic and international flight routes. The airline serves Somalian business people with interests abroad and an increasing number of Somalian expatriates lured back on the premise of declining volatility. "Road insecurity is bad for Somalia, but it's good for airlines," Abirahman Aden Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister, told the Times. Jubba's managing director Abdullahi Warsame, who left his native country 25 years ago, flies from his home in Dubai to Mogadishu monthly. The Somali-owned airline is currently selling about 85 percent of its seats and is beginning to post a small profit. At least 60 aircraft leased or owned by Somalian carriers are presently operating, according to Ibrahim's estimate. Fly540 and African Express, like Jubba, are providing daily service into the country. Air Uganda was recently granted permission to fly into Mogadishu on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. Back in March 2012, Turkish Airlines became the first major international carrier to offer regular flights into the capital city. Landing in and taking off from Mogadishu's single-lane Aden Abdulle International Airport, which lies near districts that were within full control of Al Shabaab less than two years ago, can be an erratic experience. "Pilots were instructed to ascend and descend rapidly over the ocean, and to avoid flying at low altitudes over the warrens of the city. The rebels have since been mostly driven out, but pilots still perform the same maneuver," the Times' Joshua Hammer writes. All aviators navigating though Mogadishu's air have probably stopped themselves at least once from dwelling on the fact that it is home to the notorious 1993 Black Hawk Down incident. With good reason, Jubba provides its pilots combat pay whenever they operate at the airport. According to Jubba's sleek website, a passenger can book a direct one hour and 30 minute morning ride from the capital city to Berbera, a northern seaport on the opposite end of the country, or a number of other similarly short flights to destinations across the country. The domestic trips are usually piloted by Ukrainians or Russian speakers who are familiar with the outmoded controls of the old Soviet planes. After boarding and indulging in an orange juice served by a crew of Kenyan flight attendants, the traveler -- once up at an elevation outside the range of rocket propelled grenades -- might be able to recline and relax, reflecting on Jubba's claimed "brilliant zero accident credential" and its simple slogan: "THE HAPPY WAY TO FLY." Despite the progress, Jubba flights might still be rougher than what the average traveler is accustomed to. Although no passengers died, Jubba must be discounting in its record an April 2012 instance when a pilot flipped a plane on its side after dodging a stray goat on a runway in the north central city of Galkayo. Internet reviewers and bloggers have lambasted the safety of Jubba and other domestic carriers. One particularly colorful account by British-Somali journalist Hamza Mohamed of a flight from Mogadishu to the southern seaport of Kismayu, Somalia's third largest city, is probably enough to dissuade any potential Somali air traveler:
Still, the capital investment involved in building out a reliable railway or roadway system -- outfitted with heavily armored security checkpoints -- that weaves through Somalia's hostile grasslands and deserts far outweighs the cost and risk of running a reasonable plane-taxi service. But as with any enterprise in Somalia, the airline industry will have to adapt to emerging threats as it continues to grow. Though Jubba's director claims that al Shabaab hasn't hassled the airline since it resumed service to Mogadishu in 2006 because "we are not involved in politics, we are working for the people," that notion of relative safety seems to be unraveling in recent weeks after a spate of attacks in the capital. The site of the car bombing and ensuing gunfire last Friday was close to Mogadishu's airport. And al Shabaab's purported twitter account, @HSMPRESS1, noted that fact, writing, "The location of the attack is not very far from the recently-attacked Praise for the entrepreneurial spirit of Jubba and other Somali air carriers taking obvious risks to provide domestic transport is certainly deserved. However, in a country where airline tickets are reserved for the elite, violence is the norm, and basic infrastructure is lacking, one can only hope that soon another innovator of equal savvy will emerge, and that industries on Somalia's ground will start to see as much success as those in its skies. 
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| Posted: 14 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT On CNN Don Lemon asks Robert Zimmerman how he plans to "start a dialogue." Zimmerman responds as follows: I want to know what makes people angry enough to attack someone the way that Trayvon Martin did. I want to know if it is true, and I don't know if it's true, that Trayvon Martin was looking to procure firearms, was growing marijuana plants... I want to know that every minor, high-schooler, that would be reaching out in some way for help, and they may feel it's by procuring firearms or whatever they may be doing, that they have some kind of help. I think that's what George was trying to do when he mentored two black children. It is good to know that there are heroic mentors of black children out there who will--at all costs--make sure guns only find their way into the responsible hands of our most level-headed citizens. Thank you Robert Zimmerman. I feel safer already. 
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| '20 Feet From Stardom': Go See It Posted: 14 Jul 2013 11:24 AM PDT [My wife and I and a friend went to this movie last night, and in my enthusiasm I hammered out the item below as soon as we got home. Then I got distracted by the George Zimmerman outcome. About that, I will refer you to my colleagues TNC and Andrew Cohen: I agree with them that the real problem revealed here is not with the jury or the trial or even the verdict but with the law itself, and related matters. On reflection I've decided just to post this as it was. It's a great movie, in general and perhaps especially at this particular moment. Original item follows.] I know, you might have sources other than me for your pop-culture guidance. But trust me on this one: you will be glad to have gone out of your way to see Twenty Feet From Stardom. Thanks to one of my sons for having given me the same "You've got to see this movie" pitch. There are lots of themes that are evident from the movie, notably the pure joy of human artistry and endeavor. I will give a shorthand for an aspect other than the music that resonated most with me. This is the kind of movie I hope everyone outside the U.S. could see, for its role as window onto, and revelation of, the real nature of America. I am officially of plain-old-whitebread WASP American origin (plus Neanderthal). But the more years I spend outside the country, the more obvious it becomes that America's distinctive culture, and strength, is the wild/chaotic melange of elements it manages to include, as almost no other society or nation can. And -- the part that becomes much more obvious when you're outside the country and viewing all of its people as "us" -- the entire range of elements included in that mix also becomes part of the identity of each one of us. Even though I am white and male and from the Baby Boom-era small-town West etc, the parts of American culture that are black and Latino and Asian and Jewish and Italian and Greek and German and Muslim and urban and Southern and Northeastern etc have shaped the national identity and therefore are significant parts of me. That's what I was reminded of watching this movie. Its leading figures are African-American, and in one case African-Asian-American, and some (not all) of their stories involve unfair barriers they faced. But I know that if I were watching this movie in Shanghai or Yokohama or Berlin I'd want to say to any foreigners who would listen, This is America! Look how great and capacious it is, and how great and talented these singers are, and -- again -- how remarkable it is that the "us" of the American identity bears such clear marks of all the different people who, despite inevitable friction, come together and pursue their hopes here. The film is also about youth and age, and about luck good and bad, and about individual versus collective satisfactions, and lots more. You could think about that, or you could just take it as a great 90-minute immersion in music. By whatever standard, you'll be glad to check it out. 
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| How International Justice Is Being Gutted Posted: 14 Jul 2013 06:26 AM PDT  Former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic appears in court at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague, June 3, 2011. (Reuters) Over the last eight months, a series of surprise rulings at the international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has sparked extraordinary controversy in the staid world of international law. Critics say the decisions weakened World War II-era precedents that hold commanders responsible for war crimes. Supporters say their impact is being exaggerated and the judge associated with them is being unfairly maligned. In interviews, two former tribunal officials said the decisions reversed years of progress in the field and endangered the recent war crimes convictions of former Liberian President Charles Taylor. They said they feared that the United States and Israel pressured judges to reverse precedents that could limit both countries' counter-terrorism operations. "We are taking steps back," said one of the former officials. The epicenter of the controversy - and a mystery - is Judge Theodor Meron, the 83-year-old president of the U.N. tribunal. A holocaust survivor, Meron has worked for decades to create international war crimes tribunals. But Meron is being harshly criticized for writing recent appeals court decisions that overturned the convictions of two top Croatian and a senior Serbian general for aiding and abetting war crimes. After Meron's rulings, other tribunal judges acquitted two top Serbian secret police officials, Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, of aiding and abetting war crimes as well. This surprise decision found that the two Serbian secret police leaders had trained, paid and supervised Serb paramilitary combat units that for years carried out widely-publicized war crimes across Bosnia and Croatia. Yet the judges said a conviction required evidence that the leaders "specifically directed" their aid be used to commit war crimes, something critics say virtually no commander is foolish enough to do. A spokesperson for the tribunal said that Meron, like all judges at the tribunal, declined to comment on specific decisions. Critics accuse Meron, who was born in Poland and worked as an Israeli diplomat before immigrating to the U.S. in 1977, of pressuring other judges to endorse legal precedents that make it virtually impossible to convict senior commanders for human rights abuses. Defenders say he exerted no such pressure and is being unfairly attacked for decisions reached by a majority of judges in each case. In an extraordinary breach of protocol, a Danish judge who serves at the tribunal emailed a scathing letter criticizing Meron to 56 lawyers, friends and associates. In the letter, which was leaked to the Danish press, Judge Frederik Harhoff accused Meron of putting "tenacious pressure" on judges to acquit commanders and speculated that U.S. and Israeli military leaders could now "breathe a sigh of relief." "Have any American or Israeli officials ever exerted pressure on the American presiding judge (the presiding judge for the court that is) to ensure a change of direction?" Harhoff wrote. "We will probably never know." Before the acquittals were issued, the CIA and some former American military officials submitted letters of support for some of the defendants, citing their close work with the United States during or after the conflict. But U.S. officials denied pressuring Meron or other judges to make the rulings. The two former tribunal officials said there was no evidence that Meron acted at the behest of American or Israeli officials. Instead, they argued, the judge was implementing his conservative view of international humanitarian law. "It's about ego," one of the former tribunal officials said. "Leaving his mark on how the law will be interpreted for generations to come." David Kaye, a University of California at Irvine law school professor who has worked with Meron, said it was unfair to label him "conservative." Kaye said Meron and his peers were interpreting laws crafted by states that wished to limit the court's reach. "The law was developed originally by governments, and in that sense, that's what's conservative," Kaye said. "Asking Meron or others to be especially progressive in this area is easier said than done." Eric Gordy, a professor of politics and sociology at University College London who follows the tribunal's work, said the visceral reaction to the rulings reflected deep disagreement in the international legal community. "People in international law are divided," he said. "Divided over how much oversight international law ought to have over military activity." International war crimes prosecutions expanded rapidly throughout the 1990s, but the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks vastly altered the debate. In a 2001 essay, an American military lawyer, Charles J. Dunlap Jr. coined the term "lawfare" -- a practice where militarily weak opponents use "law as a weapon of war" against superior military power. Former Bush administration official John Bolton and other American conservatives say Palestinians and their allies use "lawfare" to falsely accuse Israeli forces of war crimes. They warn that international courts could target American military and intelligence officers and eventually limit the U.S.'s ability to use military force and support allies. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticized the personal attacks on Meron and speculation about American and Israeli government pressure. "I've known Ted for decades to be a man of principal," he said. "These personal attacks are just wrong. " Roth said he disagreed with the aiding and abetting ruling, but believed it was an attempt to protect the court from attacks from the American right. "My guess is that the tribunal was trying to narrow the concept of aiding and abetting," Roth said, "to avoid far right fears in the United States that U.S. military aid would lead to criminal liability if the recipients unexpectedly committed war crimes." Diane Orentlicher, a war crimes expert who teaches at American University, said she too was troubled by the personal attacks on Meron, who she said had "made singular contributions to humanitarian law." But Orentlicher criticized the secret police ruling, which she called "a road map for how to provide indispensable assistance to mass murderers and still beat the rap." Whatever the motivation, the recent decisions are major setbacks that create unrealistic standards of command responsibility. They weakened a system of international law that should be strengthened. This Thursday, thousands of mourners gathered in eastern Bosnia to mark the 18th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre where 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered. Families buried the remains of 409 victims which had been exhumed from mass graves and recently identified through DNA analysis. The dead included 44 boys between the ages of 14 and 18 and a baby girl who perished after being brought to a U.N. compound for safety. In neighboring Serbia, meanwhile, the two secret police commanders, Stanisic and Simatovic, enjoyed their new freedom. They had trained, funded and supervised the paramilitary units involved in the brutal killings around Srebrenica -- but judges ruled that they had no responsibility for the executions. The legal battle is not over. The Tribunal will issue additional decisions on command responsibility before it closes its doors in 2016. Reversing the destructive precedents recent rulings established would further the cause of international justice and honor Srebrenica's victims. This article also appears at Reuters.com, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| When Do Women (and Men) Stop Leaning In? Posted: 14 Jul 2013 06:19 AM PDT One big reason more moms (and dads) don't "lean in" at the office is that they just don't want more work. As Catherine Rampell at the New York Times has been reminding us for the past week, that's true for the majority of workers. According to the Families and Work Institute, just 37 percent of working women and 44 percent of working men said they wanted more responsibility at the office in 2008, the last year of data (see below).
Those figures got me wondering, though: When, exactly, do women and men stop trying to climb the corporate ladder? And why? Is it just about having children or is it something else? To find out, I asked the Institute to break down its 2008 findings by age group, which produced the graph below. It tells a simple story: By our mid-to-late-20s, the desire to take on more responsibility fades fast for both men and women.
In other words, ambition starts sliding right around the time most Americans start having kids. (The median woman has her first child at around age 26). And though women slide a bit further than men, both sexes become less interested in a promotion as they age.* That's right in keeping with what Pew has found about the converging roles of mothers and fathers. At some point in our 30s, most of us lean back. ____________________
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| On The Killing Of Trayvon Martin By George Zimmerman Posted: 14 Jul 2013 12:22 AM PDT I interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to offer some thoughts on the verdict of innocent for George Zimmerman: 1.) Last year--after Zimmerman was arrested--I wrote something hoping that he would be convicted. A commenter wrote in to object, saying that arguing for his arrest was justifiable. Arguing for his conviction was not. I acknowledged the point at the time. The wisdom of it seems even more appropriate today. 2.) I think the jury basically got it right. The only real eyewitness to the death of Trayvon Martin was the man who killed him. At no point did I think that the state proved second degree murder. I also never thought they proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he acted recklessly. They had no ability to counter his basic narrative, because there were no other eye-witnesses. 3.) The idea that Zimmerman got out of the car to check the street signs, was ambushed by 17-year old kid with no violent history who told him he "you're going to die tonight" strikes me as very implausible. It strikes me as much more plausible that Martin was being followed by a strange person, that the following resulted in a confrontation, that Martin was getting the best of Zimmerman in the confrontation, and Zimmerman then shot him. But I didn't see the confrontation. No one else really saw the confrontation. Except George Zimmerman. I'm not even clear that situation I outlined would result in conviction. 4.) I think Andrew Cohen is right--trials don't work as strict "moral surrogates." Everything that is immoral is not illegal--nor should it be. I want to live in a society that presumes innocence. I want to live in that society even when I feel that a person should be punished. 5.) I think you should read everything my friend Jelani Cobb has written about this case. 6.) I think the message of this episode is unfortunate. By Florida law, in any violent confrontation ending in a disputed act of lethal self-defense, without eye-witnesses, the advantage goes to the living. An intelligent, self-interested observer of this case, who happens to live in Florida, would not be wrong to do as George Zimmerman did--buy a gun, master the finer points of Florida self-defense law and then wait. 7.) Circling back to the first point, it's worth remembering that what caused a national outcry was not the possibility of George Zimmerman being found innocent, but that there would be no trial at all. This case was really unique because of what happend with the Sanford police. If you doubt this, ask yourself if you know the name "Jordan Davis." Then ask yourself how many protests and national media reports you've seen about him. 
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| Law and Justice and George Zimmerman Posted: 13 Jul 2013 07:54 PM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/zimm-thumb-570x357-127123.jpg) In the next few hours and days you'll likely be inundated with analysis and commentary and solemn expressions of outrage or joy about what the acquittal of George Zimmerman means -- to the nation, to its rule of law, to its politics, to its racial divide, to its deadly obsession with guns, to Florida's ALEC-infused justice system, and to probably 100 other things I can't list off the top of my head. This is what happens when a verdict comes down in a high-profile criminal trial -- when life or liberty are on the line and the country is split, and angrily so, upon the wisdom and the justice of the outcome. To me, on its most basic level, the startling Zimmerman verdict -- and the case and trial that preceded it -- is above all a blunt reminder of the limitations of our justice system. Criminal trials are not searches for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They never have been. Our rules of evidence and the Bill of Rights preclude it. Our trials are instead tests of only that limited evidence a judge declares fit to be shared with jurors, who in turn are then admonished daily, hourly even, not to look beyond the corners of what they've seen or heard in court. Trials like the one we've all just witnessed in Florida can therefore never fully answer the larger societal questions they pose. They can never act as moral surrogates to resolve the national debates they trigger. In the end, they teach only what each of us as students are predisposed to learn. They provide no closure, not to the families or anyone else, even as they represent the close of one phase of the rest of the lives of the people involved. They are tiny slivers of the truth of the matter, the perspective as narrow as if you were staring at the horizon with blinders on, capable only of seeing what was not intentionally blocked from view. Of course the deadly meeting last year between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman had at its core a racial element. Of course its tragic result reminds us that the nation, in ways too many of our leaders refuse to acknowledge, is still riven by race. The story of Martin and Zimmerman is the story of crime and punishment in America, and of racial disparities in capital sentencing, and in marijuana prosecutions, and in countless other things. But it wasn't Judge Debra Nelson's job to conduct a seminar on race relations in 2013. It wasn't her job to help America bridge its racial divide. It was her job to give Zimmerman a fair trial. And she did. So the murder trial of George Zimmerman did not allow jurors to deliberate over the fairness of Florida's outlandishly broad self-defense laws. It did not allow them debate the virtues of the state's liberal gun laws or its evident tolerance for vigilantes (which we now politely call "neighborhood watch"). It did not permit them to delve into the racial profiling that Zimmerman may have engaged in or into the misconduct and mischief that Martin may have engaged in long before he took that fatal trip to the store for candy. These factors, these elements, part of the more complete picture of this tragedy, were off-limits to the ultimate decision-makers. What the verdict says, to the astonishment of tens of millions of us, is that you can go looking for trouble in Florida, with a gun and a great deal of racial bias, and you can find that trouble, and you can act upon that trouble in a way that leaves a young man dead, and none of it guarantees that you will be convicted of a crime. But this curious result says as much about Florida's judicial and legislative sensibilities as it does about Zimmerman's conduct that night. This verdict would not have occurred in every state. It might not even have occurred in any other state. But it occurred here, a tragic confluence that leaves a young man's untimely death unrequited under state law. Don't like it? Lobby to change Florida's laws. If we understand and accept these legal limitations -- and perhaps only if we do -- the result here makes sense. Purely as a matter of law, you could say, it makes perfect sense. Florida's material, admissible, relevant proof against Zimmerman was not strong enough to overcome the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The eye-witnesses (and ear-witnesses) did not present a uniformly compelling case against the defendant. The police witnesses, normally chalk for prosecutors, did not help as much as they typically do. Nor was there compelling physical evidence establishing that Zimmerman had murderous intent and was not acting in self-defense. The case was "not about standing your ground; it was about staying in your car," the prosecutor cogently said during closing argument. But in the end, under state law favorable to men like the defendant -- that is, favorable to zealots willing to take the law into their own hands -- Zimmerman's series of deplorable choices that night did not amount to murderous intent or even the much more timid manslaughter. The defense here wisely understood that and was able consistently, methodically, to remind jurors that prosecutors had not adequately explained (or proved) how exactly the altercation started and how precisely it progressed. Without a confession, without video proof, without a definitive eyewitness, without compelling scientific evidence, prosecutors needed to sell jurors cold on the idea of Zimmerman as the hunter and Martin as the hunted. But when the fated pair came together that night, in those fleeting moments before the fatal shot, the distinctions between predator and prey became jumbled. And prosecutors were never able to make it clear enough again to meet their burden of proof. That's the story of this trial. That explains this result. That's why some will believe to their own dying day that George Zimmerman has just gotten away with murder. Maybe yes and maybe no. Technically speaking, the fact that Zimmerman now has been found not guilty under Florida law of the crimes of second-degree murder and manslaughter does not necessarily exonerate him in the world beyond the court. It does not mean that he is not culpable. This is and can never be a case where the defendant can proudly proclaim his innocence at some later date. But today's verdict, the unanimous result of six women who worked through their longest day to deliver the word, does mean that after 18 tortuous months, this tragic story now can move on to whatever comes next. And what comes next, surely, is a wrongful death civil action for money damages brought against Zimmerman by the Martin family. That means another case, and perhaps another trial, with evidentiary rules that are more relaxed than the ones we've just seen. And that means that a few years from now, after Martin v. Zimmerman is concluded, we'll likely know more about what happened that night than we do today. That's the good news. The bad news is that no matter how many times Zimmerman is hauled into court, we will never know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about what happened that terrible night. 
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