Lessons from Chile: The Other September 11th

HISTORY 

W. T. Whitney Jr.

People’s World | September 11, 2020

Photographs of victims of Pinochet’s regime, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago de Chile, Carlos Teixidor Cadenas, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

September 11 was also a day of terror—in Chile in 1973. “I’ve been through this before,” Chilean author Ariel Dorfman wrote of the 2001 U. S. terror day. “The world will never be the same,” he recalls Chileans saying after their September 11.

President Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity movement was the product of long, peaceful political struggle on the part of justice-hungry compatriots who came together as diverse leftist currents. Amidst great hopes, Popular Unity took charge of the government in 1970, through elections. Three years later a military-dominated government under General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, fascist in all but name, carried out a violent coup and would reign until 1990.

Oregon Can’t Fight Wildfires Because Its Helicopters Were Sent To Afghanistan

U.S. WILDFIRE 

MintPress News | September 11, 2020

More than half a million Oregonians have been forced to flee their homes, as wildfires continue to ravage the West Coast of the United States. Amid record-breaking temperatures, the wildfires, which have charred one million acres of land, have caused the sky to turn a terrifying shade of red, with many comparing it to Mars, hell, or the apocalypse. Air quality in Portland, the state’s largest city, is currently the lowest in the world, below even that of infamously polluted cities like Delhi and Beijing.

As Trump Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize, Here Are Some of Its Worst Winners

NOBEL PRIZE

Alan Macleod

MintPress News | September 09, 2020

Donald Trump has been nominated for the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. The President of the United States was put forward by the far-right Norwegian member of parliament, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, who insists he is “not a big Trump supporter,” despite nominating him last year as well. Tybring-Gjedde’s stated reason for nominating Trump is for his work in the UAE-Israel deal signed last month, which normalizes relations between the two nations.

Narrow Streets: Publishing and the Class Conundrum

CLASS IN WRITING AND PUBLISHING

Lyndsey Ayre

Culture Matters | September 10, 2020

On the inside cover of the 2019 edition of Tove Ditlevsen’s Childhood – the first of her autobiographical Copenhagen trilogy – there is a short paragraph describing the writer’s class and upbringing. It goes something like this: Ditlevsen, one of Denmark’s most important writers, grew up in the early 20^th century, in a working-class neighbourhood called Vesterbro. From an early age, she knew she was different, that she was going to be a writer with ‘long, mysterious words crawling across her soul.’ ‘Inevitably,’ the bio continues, Ditlevsen came to the realisation that to pursue this dream she would have to ‘leave the narrow streets of her childhood behind.’ The message is clear: her working-class background was a problem that had to be navigated and escaped before she could blossom into the successful author and poet she was destined to become.

The Arctic is Burning like Never Before — and that’s Bad News for Climate Change

CLIMATE CHANGE 

Alexandra Witze

Nature | September 10, 2020

Northern fires (like the one shown here in the Novosibirsk region of south Siberia) released record-setting amounts of carbon dioxide this year.Credit: Kirill Kukhmar/TASS/Getty

Wildfires blazed along the Arctic Circle this summer, incinerating tundra, blanketing Siberian cities in smoke and capping the second extraordinary fire season in a row. By the time the fire season waned at the end of last month, the blazes had emitted a record 244 megatonnes of carbon dioxide — that’s 35% more than last year, which also set records. One culprit, scientists say, could be peatlands that are burning as the top of the world melts.

More Than 100 Scientific Journals have Disappeared from the Internet

SCIENCE

Diana Kwon

Nature | September 10, 2020

Scholarly journals are supposed to provide a lasting record of science. But over the past two decades, 176 open-access journals — and many of the papers published in them — have disappeared from the Internet, according to an analysis published on 27 August¹.

“There shouldn’t really be any decay or loss in scientific publications, particularly those that have been open on the web,” says Mikael Laakso, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, and a co-author of the study, which was posted on the arXiv preprint server. He and his colleagues identified 176 titles whose online presence vanished between 2000 and 2019.