'Human safaris' pose threat to uncontacted Amazon tribe

An increase in economic activity and tourism in the Manú region has led to a dramatic rise in the number of reported sightings of the Mashco-Piro – one of around 15 indigenous groups in Peru who have no regular contact with outsiders, and one of only 100 or so such tribes left in the world.

Gender and gender identity. Intersex.

Anne Tamar-Mattis calls into question conventional notions of gender and gender identity; she also describes what happens to people born with so-called intersex conditions.

Ayn Rand

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.

Selfishness is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power.

Naomi Klein -Climate Change and Free-Market

“After years of recycling, carbon offsetting, and light-bulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis.”

Market-based solutions are not going to meet the needs required to address climate change.Ideologies have hampered the left and right in climate action.

The Occupy movement has been "a game-changer."

There is a way forward, and it involves "changing the mix in a mixed economy."

In 2007, 71 percent of Americans believed in climate change and in 2009 only 51 percent believed—and now we’re at 41 percent. The denial movement on the right, see climate change as a threat to the Right’s worldview, and to the neoliberal economic worldview. It’s seen as a Marxist plot. They accuse climate scientists of being watermelons—green on the outside and red on the inside.

Ideology is the main factor in whether we believe in climate change.

A Separation –Iranian film that cuts across boundaries of gender and class

An unhappily married couple break up in this complex, painful, fascinating Iranian drama by writer-director Asghar Farhadi, with explosive results that expose a network of personal and social faultlines.A Separation is a portrait of a fractured relationship and an examination of theocracy, domestic rule and the politics of sex and class – and it reveals a terrible, pervasive sadness that seems to well up through the asphalt and the brickwork. In its depiction of national alienation in Iran, it's comparable to the work of Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. But there is a distinct western strand. The film shows a middle-class household under siege from an angry outsider; there are semi-unsolved mysteries, angry confrontations and family burdens: an ageing parent and two children from warring camps appearing to make friends. All these things surely show the influence of Michael Haneke's 2005 film Hidden. Farhadi, like Haneke, takes a scalpel to his bourgeois homeland.

Do not tell us it is not a class war

The entire world seems to be one huge advertisement for The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein showed in her book how the corporate-political-military-media complex exploits crises to further impose their harsh right-wing agenda – even when they themselves created the crisis. In a sane world, the economic meltdown and deep recession of the past four years would have led at minimum to stringent regulation of financiers and speculators plus programs to assist their victims. But in this world, you have to be nuts to believe in a sane world.

Pakistan celebrates documentary Oscar win

Saving Face, a short documentary about acid attacks on women and those who help them recover.

The film by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy follows survivors among hundreds of people attacked every year, and focuses on Mohammad Jawad, a British Pakistani plastic surgeon who returned to his homeland to help restore their faces and lives.

The attacks are often carried out by angry husbands or spurned lovers.

In 2010, at least 8,000 acid attacks, forced marriages and other forms of violence against women were reported.

Because the group relied mostly on media reports, the figure is likely an undercount.

Mistreatment of women is widespread in Pakistan, a nation of some 175 million where most people are poor, only half the adults can read, and extremist ideologies such as that of the Taliban are gaining traction.

A new law mandates that convicted attackers serve a minimum sentence of 14 years, and pay a minimum
fine of about $11,200. It also criminalises other common abuses, such as marrying off young girls to settle tribal disputes and families preventing women from inheriting property.