Global Headlines Express | Ireland votes to repeal its abortion ban; The New Yorker examines implicit racial bias

Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.

Agenda Setters

The New Yorker: Starbucks and the issue of white space

Three years ago Elijah Anderson, a sociologist at Yale, published a paper called "The White Space" on the tangled racial life of majority-white cities. A city's public spaces, workplaces and neighborhoods, he wrote, come to be understood as white space, black space and cosmopolitan space; in white space, black people are typically "absent, marginalized, or not expected to be there."

A run of recent episodes bears him out. Besides the now-famous April 12 incident, in which Starbucks staff called the police to remove black customers who had not bought coffee but wanted to use the restroom, an employee at a New Jersey gym called the police days later on two black men he suspected of using the equipment without paying (they had paid). A few weeks after that, a woman in California reported three black women for behaving suspiciously; they were carrying bags out of the Airbnb they had rented. In early May a white student at Yale called the police about someone acting strangely on campus — a black graduate student napping in a chair.

Thousands of people have since described online how they are treated as people of color in white space. "Implicit bias" has lately become the standard way of talking about this, partly because of the term's standing in the academy, partly because it explains a particular kind of racial problem. The popular picture of racism is the mob that drove a car into pedestrians in Charlottesville. But that bar is set so high that a prosecutor who threatened last week to have Spanish-speaking staff in a New York restaurant deported could afterwards issue a statement saying he is not a racist.

Implicit bias pries racism loose from open malice. People are now asking whether the police carry implicit bias too; as in the Starbucks case, officers have become the instrument for measuring whether an individual citizen holds prejudiced attitudes. But the real question is not "does the officer bring bias to the job," it is "was the call that summoned him the product of bias in the first place." What makes the Starbucks case worth attention is not whether a company can train prejudice out of its staff in one session. It is the more troubling thing the case exposes: that such attitudes are now common enough in America that a company has to take on the job of clearing them out of its own premises.

In 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. That act had held that everyone was entitled to equal use of public accommodations, which could not turn citizens away on grounds of race, color or previous condition of servitude; it rested on the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that the amendment's equal protection clause bound only government, not private conduct, and that racial discrimination between private parties was therefore not unconstitutional. Justice Harlan wrote his famous dissent: "Today it is the colored race which is denied, by corporations and individuals wielding public authority, rights fundamental in their freedom and citizenship. At some future time, it may be that some other race will fall under the ban of that discrimination."

Harlan foresaw a state doing its best to turn America into white space. Implicit bias always finds a way to become the explicit kind.

24-Hour News Makers

Ireland has voted to repeal one of the strictest abortion bans anywhere.

Barry Ryan, the referendum's returning officer, announced in Dublin on the evening of the 26th that nearly two-thirds of Irish voters had chosen to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the constitution and legalize abortion.

Turnout was 64.1%, higher than in the same-sex marriage referendum three years ago. Two-thirds of those who voted (66.4%) chose Yes to repeal; 33.6% voted No to keep the amendment. With repeal carrying the day, the government in Dublin will now rewrite the abortion law and loosen its restrictions. The Eighth Amendment had given the pregnant woman and the fetus equal legal standing, and abortion was lawful only in extreme cases — when the woman's life was at risk, or when the fetus had already died. Now a woman up to 12 weeks pregnant may end the pregnancy with a doctor's certification.

Once the High Court certifies the result and it goes to the president and the prime minister for signature, Health Minister Simon Harris will seek cabinet backing on Tuesday and then begin drafting the new bill. It is due to take effect at the end of the year.

Repeal was the mainstream choice across Irish society. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar called the result the successful end of "a quiet revolution," saying the public "trusts and respects women to make their own choices." Foreign Minister Simon Coveney noted that turnout was high and that Yes won a majority in every constituency, proof that this was not "Dublin versus the rest of rural Ireland." Yes campaigners said it was a day to remember for Irish women, and that the country as a whole had rejected treating women as second-class citizens.

Like the same-sex marriage vote three years ago, the result is read as a seismic turn in Irish society. Pope Francis arrives in three months and will find a country very different from the one the last pope saw: John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, and four years later Ireland wrote the Eighth Amendment into its constitution. Since then Irish women have had to travel abroad, mostly to Britain, to end pregnancies — more than 3,000 a year, and 100,000 in all since 1983.

"This is the day we say 'never again,'" the prime minister added. "No more doctors telling patients there is nothing they can do, no more lonely journeys across the Irish Sea, no more secrets and shame and the isolation they bring."

After this vote, Northern Ireland is the only part of Britain and Ireland that still bans abortion; a woman who has an illegal abortion there could in theory face life imprisonment. Irish campaigners carried signs at referendum rallies reading "The North is next." But Theresa May said on Sunday that she opposes MPs voting on their own to repeal the Northern Irish ban, which she believes is for the government in Belfast to decide. She will face heavy pressure in parliament.

What Else Happened in the World

Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, died on the 27th at 86. Bean was a U.S. Navy test pilot, was selected by NASA in 1963, and flew the Apollo 12 landing in 1969. In later life he became a well-regarded painter, producing many works drawn from space. Twenty-four people have flown to the moon, 12 have walked on it, and four of them are still living. Of the first four moonwalkers, only Buzz Aldrin, 88, survives.

Kim Jong-un holds a "firm conviction" that the Singapore summit with the U.S. should go ahead as planned. Prospects for the talks kept shifting over the weekend. Trump said on Friday that he was calling off the summit set for the 12th, then said he hoped it would happen after all, and an American team flew to North Korea to prepare it with Pyongyang. On the 27th, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in met without warning and agreed that the Panmunjom Declaration should be carried out as soon as possible to denuclearize the peninsula; both said they hoped the U.S.–North Korea meeting would go well.

Italy's prime minister-designate abandons his effort to form a government; new elections may follow. Giuseppe Conte gave up on the 27th after the president rejected his choice for economy minister, which means Italy may be forced into another general election this year. It has been without a government for nearly three months since the March 4 vote.

Germany's far-right AfD faces twice its number of opponents in Berlin. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany marched in Berlin on Sunday, more than 5,000 people chanting "We are the people," met by roughly twice as many shouting "Nazis out." Police used pepper spray to keep the two sides apart. It was the party's largest rally since it became the biggest opposition force, having taken 13% of the vote in the general election at the start of the year.

A South African team has built ZiBiPen, a cheap alternative to the EpiPen adrenaline auto-injector: the injector costs $80, lasts five years, and needs only a $16 cartridge after each shot. An EpiPen costs $600 for two, keeps for 18 months, and can be used once.

Someone Said

"If they lied about that, who knows what else they've kept from us."

A flat-earth believer, at Britain's first Flat Earth Convention.

More than 200 people paid to attend the convention, a week of lectures and study groups where they could talk over flat-earth theory with "open-minded" people who thought as they did. NASA was the running joke, shorthand for a conspiracy run by elites.

Flat-earth belief has flourished on YouTube for years. Believers hold that the earth is round and flat like a pancake, ringed on every side by Antarctica — an impassable wall of ice — and covered by a dome. Early on, competing theories and ideas jostle and contradict one another in the mind, but before long the believer feels an "awakening," certain he has seen a truth others cannot grasp. "It feels great, you want to tell the whole world right away, and what you don't expect is that the world isn't ready for it."

Chris French, a psychology professor at the University of London, commented: "Science isn't perfect, and it's good that some people question authority, because in a democracy you need that. But you also need the critical thinking to weigh the evidence… A psychological crisis can produce dramatic so-called insights."

Conspiracy theorists are held together by their refusal of, and contempt for, received theory. That refusal is a way of taking back control, and a way of joining a group. "It's like a coping mechanism," said Rebecca Ownens, a psychology lecturer at the University of Sunderland. "Believing 'I can still be on top of this' — once they have that, they think they have worked something out, and the mess of real life seems to have an explanation."

You Might Also Be Interested In

Repin's Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son has been vandalized again.

Ilya Repin, the great Russian painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a leading figure of the Peredvizhniki, painted Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581, which shows the tsar striking his son dead with his staff during a quarrel.

The painting hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery. On the evening of the 25th, just as the gallery was closing, a man pushed past staff into the hall, smashed the glass case with a metal barrier post and struck the canvas several times. The gallery said the blows shattered the thick glass that protects the work from swings in temperature and humidity, tore the canvas in three places across the middle of the prince's body, and damaged the original frame; the faces and hands of the tsar and his son were spared.

The suspect told police he had drunk 100 ml of vodka and was not in his right mind. He destroyed the painting, he said, because the history it shows is wrong. The court put the damage at no less than 500,000 rubles.

Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son had already been attacked once, in 1913, when a mentally ill man slashed it three times with a knife — the first painting in Russian art history to be attacked. Repin, then still alive, spent 12 years restoring it himself.

Quartz has designed a T-shirt that can't start a South China Sea dispute.

Last week the American clothing brand Gap apologized for failing to print all of China's territory on a T-shirt; it had left out Taiwan, South Tibet and some South China Sea islands. In the same week, at a Vietnamese airport, a group of Chinese tourists angered Vietnamese onlookers by wearing shirts printed with a map of China that took in Vietnamese territory. Since maps are so touchy politically that any print could set off a row, Quartz designed a shirt that "definitely won't offend anyone": it includes the territory each of the seven countries and regions around the South China Sea claims for itself. They overlap heavily, but the colors are rather nice.

Hugging cows is the latest way modern people repair their minds.

A farm in New York now offers 90 minutes with a herd of cows to people in search of comfort. Cows, it explains, are "sensitive and intuitive animals" that "can sense what you're thinking, and pick up whether you're happy, sad, low, anxious or excited, and they respond according to their own judgment." The cows are said to help people relax, sharpen their perception, gain confidence and get over their fears. A cow's body temperature is higher than a human's, so leaning against one is like "resting on a giant furry hot-water bottle."

The animal behavior expert Mario Becker is not convinced: cows are not there to be hugged, and hugging people meets no real need of theirs. The New York service is also not cheap. Ninety minutes alone with the cows costs $300 — about $2.50 a minute. Europe is cheaper: 50 euros for three hours.

On This Day

May 28, 1928: Chrysler merged with Dodge.

May 28, 1936: Alan Turing set out the Turing machine.

May 28, 1966: The Central Cultural Revolution Group was founded.

May 28, 1993: Shanghai's first subway, Metro Line 1, opened.

Cover image from Visual China Group