In 2011, UN-HABITAT and Project for Public Spaces signed a 5-year cooperative agreement to aspire to raise international awareness of the importance of public space in cities, to foster a lively exchange of ideas among partners and to educate a new generation of planners, designers, community activists and other civic leaders about the benefits of what they call the “Placemaking methodology.” Their partnership is helping to advance the development of cities where people of all income groups, social classes and ages can live safely, happily and in economic security and in order to reach these ambitious goals, the duo recently released 10 informative steps that cities and communities can take to improve the quality of their public spaces.

To find out what these steps are, read on!

UN-HABITAT Executive Director Joan Clos i Matheu believes that “what defines a character of a city is its public space, not its private space. What defines the value of the private assets of the space are not the assets by themselves but the common assets. The value of the public good affects the value of the private good. We need to show every day that public spaces are an asset to a city.”

Building inclusive, healthy, functional, and productive cities is perhaps the greatest challenge facing humanity today, but when done right, they can jumpstart economic development, help build a sense of community, civic identity and culture, facilitate social capital and community revitalization. Investing even a little bit into the quality of a public space delivers a significant return to a city that has the foresight to see its value.

Because urbanization is the definitive reality of the 21st century and because it is occurring most rapidly in places with the greatest lack of urban planning, UN-HABITAT and PPS came up with the Placemaking method in order to create places where the community feels ownership and engagement, and where design serves function, meeting basic human needs. The process will identify and catalyze local leadership, funding and other resources, drawing on the assets and skills of a community rather than on relying solely on professional “experts.”

Their 10 Steps to Success are:

1. Improve Streets as Public Spaces

Streets are the fundamental public space in every city, but many are choked by traffic, so Placemaking encourages the planning of cities for people and places, not just cars. The ideal street will be able to sustain different modes of transportation, whether it be car, rail, tram, bicycle or pedestrian, and all will work parallel with each other. Planning out a hierarchy of corridors ranging from major boulevards to quiet neighborhood streets will also affect what develops on that street and create more appropriate street-building interactions. Creating more pedestrian-friendly streets in general will provide spaces for interpersonal interaction and foster a sense of community that is impossible in a primarily vehicular road.

2. Create Squares and Parks as Multi-Use Destinations

if public squares and parks are planned around major public destinations, they build local economies, civic pride, social connection and human happiness. These spaces serve as “safety valves” for a city, where people can find either breathing room and relaxation in a well-planned park space or fear and danger in a badly-planned one. The most successful public spaces are “multi-use destinations” with many attractions and activities, where citizens can find common ground and where ethnicity and economic tensions can go unnoticed.

3. Build Local Economies Through Markets

Historically, the essential function of any urban center has been a crossroads where people have come together to exchange goods and ideas and public markets have been at the heart of most cities since ancient times. Markets are traditionally the most productive and dynamic places in our cities and towns, where the exchange of news, politics and gossip takes place and where people solidify the social ties that are essential to a healthy society. Markets do many things for cities, including but not limited to encouraging entrepreneurship, sustaining farmland around cities, strengthening ties between urban and rural areas and improving access to fresh food. Replacing the traditional market with a supermarket – a staple in the US – has proven to have no social value and has only deteriorated existing community ties.

4. Design Buildings to Support Places

Buildings with interesting interiors may be architecturally successful to some but it is the architecture that permeates outwards beyond the facade and towards the street level where it engages the city fabric that is the most successful because it is built with the human scale in mind. It is especially important to invest in public institutions like museums, government buildings and libraries so that they engage their surrounding urban environment and foster more opportunities for interpersonal interaction.

5. Link a Public Health Agenda to a Public Space Agenda

It’s nothing new that a healthy city offers citizens basic infrastructure like clean water, ablution facilities, sewage treatment, access to healthy food and safety in public areas. Healthcare facilities should serve as community centers, libraries should provide health education and services, public markets should be a source of fresh, affordable and nutritious food and transportation systems should encourage walking and reduce car traffic and air pollution. Where people feel a sense of ownership in their cities, they are more likely to take better care of the common environment and of themselves, resulting in a reduction in daily stress and less neighborhood crime thanks to an active public realm.

6. Reinvent Community Planning

When planning projects within an established community, it is very important to identify talents and resources in that community – people who can provide historical perspective, insights into how the area functions and an understanding of what is truly meaningful to local people. Planners should always partner with local institutions and involve them from start to finish because communities have a more holistic vision for their public space than the more limited outside professional and can act as valuable facilitators and resources. Good public spaces are flexible and respond to evolution of the urban environment, so keeping the community in long-term control ensures that the space will adapt to their changing needs.

7. Power of 10

The principle of the Power of 10 is the importance of offering a variety of things to do in one location – making a place more than the sum of its parts. For example, a park should not only be a park, but a park with a fountain, playground, food vendor, nearby library, etc. If a neighborhood has 10 places that each have 10 different things to do, then that neighborhood is on the right track; but if that city then has 10 neighborhoods of this nature, all citizens will be guaranteed excellent public spaces within walking distance of their homes.

8. Create a Comprehensive Public Space Agenda

Both top-down and bottom-up strategies are needed to develop, enhance and manage public space – leadership at the top is essential but grassroots organizing strategies are also integral to its success. A city must honestly assess public spaces and their performance and make bold decisions based off of this analysis. For example, New York City decided to carve a public plaza out of all of its 59 community board districts, Chicago decided to implement a small tax on new development to fund improvements of surrounding public areas and, internationally, Brazil launched an ambitious initiative to build 800 “public squares” in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities across the country over the next 3 years.

9. Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper: Start Small, Experiment

On the other hand, big is not always better – or the only strategy. Small moves like creating places to sit, a sidewalk, a cafe, planning a community event, organizing a container garden or painting crosswalks all have positive effects on a community and its public space. Informal settlements in particular are already accustomed to lightweight, innovative strategies that can rethink their environment, so implementing small changes here and there can really add up.

10. Restructure Government to Support Public Spaces

There’s no getting around it: you need local leaders, funding and other resources in order to create successful public space. There is hardly ever an official power structure in a community that focuses on creating successful public realms – the existing public structure sometimes even impedes successful public space. Each governmental department usually has a specific, narrow approach – transportation deals with traffic, parks with green space, etc – but if the ultimate goal of governance, urban institutions and development is to make places, communities and regions more prosperous, civilized and attractive for all people, then government processes need to change to reflect that goal. Cities need consensus-building, city consultation processes and institutional reform that enhance citizenship and inclusion and work for the public good, removing bureaucratic obstacles to quickly add value to a place and demonstrate future potential.

With these strategies in mind, it is the hope of UN-HABITAT and PPS that more communities around the globe will take on the responsibility of creating better public spaces for their people and will make it into a real priority that will fuel smarter urban development.

Reference: PPS Publication

When do we stop just thinking about ourselves and instead start working together? I am not talking about saving the world; I am writing about preserving and advancing ambitious film and media culture. It’s threatened, and no one individual will ever rescue it. My wish for the future is for the creative community, locally, nationally and globally, to work together to build the better indie infrastructure that is now possible.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of The New York Times’s reporting for this article, but the company, which has a reputation for secrecy, declined to comment.

This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors — many of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs — as well as economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.

Privately, Apple executives say the world is now such a changed place that it is a mistake to measure a company’s contribution simply by tallying its employees — though they note that Apple employs more workers in the United States than ever before.

They say Apple’s success has benefited the economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products. And, ultimately, they say curing unemployment is not their job.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

In its early days, Apple usually didn’t look beyond its own backyard for manufacturing solutions. A few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, for instance, Mr. Jobs bragged that it was “a machine that is made in America.” In 1990, while Mr. Jobs was running NeXT, which was eventually bought by Apple, the executive told a reporter that “I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” As late as 2002, top Apple executives occasionally drove two hours northeast of their headquarters to visit the company’s iMac plant in Elk Grove, Calif.

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

In Foxconn City

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”

The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.

Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device’s software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.

But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple’s North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.

“If you scale up from selling one million phones to 30 million phones, you don’t really need more programmers,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, who oversaw product development and marketing for Apple until he left in 1990. “All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.”

It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

Middle-Class Jobs Fade

The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.

It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.

“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”

At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”

Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.

There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.

After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.

Paydays for Apple

As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.

A person close to Apple argued that the compensation received by Apple’s employees was fair, in part because the company had brought so much value to the nation and world. As the company has grown, it has expanded its domestic work force, including manufacturing jobs. Last year, Apple’s American work force grew by 8,000 people.

While other companies have sent call centers abroad, Apple has kept its centers in the United States. One source estimated that sales of Apple’s products have caused other companies to hire tens of thousands of Americans. FedEx and United Parcel Service, for instance, both say they have created American jobs because of the volume of Apple’s shipments, though neither would provide specific figures without permission from Apple, which the company declined to provide.

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.

After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

Innovation’s Losers

Toward the end of Mr. Obama’s dinner last year with Mr. Jobs and other Silicon Valley executives, as everyone stood to leave, a crowd of photo seekers formed around the president. A slightly smaller scrum gathered around Mr. Jobs. Rumors had spread that his illness had worsened, and some hoped for a photograph with him, perhaps for the last time.

Eventually, the orbits of the men overlapped. “I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future,” Mr. Jobs told Mr. Obama, according to one observer. “This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.”

At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

Economists debate the usefulness of those and other efforts, and note that a struggling economy is sometimes transformed by unexpected developments. The last time analysts wrung their hands about prolonged American unemployment, for instance, in the early 1980s, the Internet hardly existed. Few at the time would have guessed that a degree in graphic design was rapidly becoming a smart bet, while studying telephone repair a dead end.

What remains unknown, however, is whether the United States will be able to leverage tomorrow’s innovations into millions of jobs.

In the last decade, technological leaps in solar and wind energy, semiconductor fabrication and display technologies have created thousands of jobs. But while many of those industries started in America, much of the employment has occurred abroad. Companies have closed major facilities in the United States to reopen in China. By way of explanation, executives say they are competing with Apple for shareholders. If they cannot rival Apple’s growth and profit margins, they won’t survive.

“New middle-class jobs will eventually emerge,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. “But will someone in his 40s have the skills for them? Or will he be bypassed for a new graduate and never find his way back into the middle class?”

The pace of innovation, say executives from a variety of industries, has been quickened by businessmen like Mr. Jobs. G.M. went as long as half a decade between major automobile redesigns. Apple, by comparison, has released five iPhones in four years, doubling the devices’ speed and memory while dropping the price that some consumers pay.

Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application — a driving game — with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s lights. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.

There wasn’t even a tiny scratch on the screen.

The Internet has transformed knowledge. An expert explains why it’s launched the greatest period in human history

by Thomas Rogers

The last two decades have completely transformed the way we know. Thanks to the rise of the Internet,  information is far more accessible than ever before. It’s more connected to other pieces of information and more open to debate. Organizations — and even governmental projects like Data.gov — are putting more previously inaccessible data on the Web than people in the pre-Internet age could possibly have imagined. But this change raises another, more ominous question: Is this deluge overwhelming our brains?

In his new book, “Too Big to Know,” David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, attempts to answer that question by looking at the ways our newly interconnected society is transforming the media, science and our everyday lives. In an accessible yet profound work, he explains that in our new universe, facts have been replaced by “networked facts” that exist largely in the context of a digital network. As a result, Weinberger believes we have entered a new golden age, one in which technology has finally caught up with humans’ endless curiosity, and one that has the potential to revolutionize a wide swath of occupations and research fields.

2011 will be remembered as a year of revolution, the beginning of the end for an unsustainable global system based on poverty, oppression, and violence. In dozens of countries across the Arab world, people rose up against broken economies and oppressive regimes, toppling dictators and inspiring the world to action. Popular rejection of austerity measures and attacks on worker’s rights brought millions to the streets in Greece, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, Chile, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

By midsummer, murmurs of “occupying Wall Street” were stirring online, and on July 14th, we registered the domain occupywallst.org and began organizing. The first New York City General Assembly was held August 2nd and the Occupation of Liberty Square began on September 17th.

Fueled by anger at the growing disparities between rich and poor, frustrated by government policies that benefit a tiny elite at the expense of the majority, and tired of the establishment’s failure to address fundamental economic inequalities, OWS offered a new solution. We built a People’s Kitchen to feed thousands, opened a People’s Library, created safer spaces, and provided free shelter, bedding, medical care, and other necessities to anyone who needed them. While cynics demanded we elect leaders and make demands on politicians, we were busy creating alternatives to those very institutions. A revolution has been set in motion, and we cannot be stopped.

As the mainstream media ignored us, we learned from other leaderless resistance movements in places like Tunisia, Egypt, and Iran to use social media and live video streaming to spread our message. We are part of a global movement that has radically democratized how information is created and shared, rendering centralized, corporate-funded mainstream media increasingly irrelevant. The rapid exchange of information allowed us to make collective decisions quickly, discuss information and ideas across the globe, mobilize effective direct actions, and document police brutality. Now more than ever, when we chant “The Whole World Is Watching!” it is not an idle threat.

Today, tens of thousands of everyday people are putting ideals like solidarity, mutual aid, anti-oppression, autonomy, and direct democracy into practice. Individuals are joining together in city-wide General Assemblies and autonomous affinity groups. Through consensual, non-hierarchical and participatory self-governance, we are literally laying the framework for a new world by building it here and now — and it works.

The rest is history. In honor of a new year, here is a run-down of what we accomplished since then. It would be impossible to list every action or mention every place an Occupation has occurred. But let us start a new year by celebrating a few highlights of our victories — along with a sneak preview of what’s to come!

SEPT 17: We Occupied Wall Street.

Over two thousand people descended on Manhattan’s financial district with one goal: to Occupy. We brought tents and gave our new home (Zuccotti Park) a new name: Liberty Square.

SEPT 24: We exposed the violent underpinnings of economic inequality for all to see.

Foreshadowing events to come, over 80 people were violently arrested returning from a peaceful march on Union Square. Video of unprovoked police pepper-spraying protesters went viral, unmasking the brutality necessary for the perpetuation of social and economic inequality. Thousands marched on the NYPD headquarters to express outrage, and the world began to take notice.

SEPT 28-ONGOING: More workers and oppressed communities began to join in solidarity.

Early in the Occupation, OWS had shown support for many causes, including postal workers struggling for better conditions. On Sept. 28th, the Transport Workers Union Local-100 voted to support OWS and encouraged their members to show up. Since then, we’ve received tremendous support from local unions like the American Federation of Teachers and pilots, as well as rank-and-file workers like port truck drivers on the West Coast. On Dec. 1st, we responded to a call from the NYC Central Labor Council to march for jobs and a fair economy, and on Dec. 2nd, OWS marched with farmers to call for food justice. Economists, writers, and musicians have all supported us. We’ve also been joined by students, immigrants, African-American church leaders, transgender liberation activists, Native individuals and First Nations like the Indigenous People’s Council, incarcerated prison hunger strikers, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and countless other oppressed communities struggling to improve their living conditions under an unfair economic and political structure.

SEPT 29-ONGOING: The Occupation grew and spread across the globe.

Protesters in San Francisco began to occupy their own financial district. New memes (“We are the 99%!”) spread rapidly. “Occupy” itself was taken, adapted, and reinvented across the world. Occupy Wall Street became Occupy All Streets. Occupy groups and actions formed on every continent, in over one thousand cities in over 70 countries, and in all 50 U.S. States plus the District of Columbia. To date, at least 5,748 people have been arrested for Occupying. Camps and protests have appeared and survived in the biggest cities and the most rural towns. Although it would be nearly impossible to compile an exhaustive list of every place where Occupations and solidarity actions have taken place, it’s safe to say we are everywhere.

OCT 1: We took the Brooklyn Bridge and inspired the world to Occupy.

Over 5,000 people marched to the Brooklyn Bridge. Police enclosed protesters in netting and arrested around 800. Days later, 15,000 demonstrators marched from Foley Square to Liberty Square. After nightfall, NYPD again responded violently by pepper-spraying bystanders and using kettling nets. The next day, thousands marched in Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tampa, Houston, Austin, Salt Lake City, and elsewhere and began to Occupy Together.

OCT 10-25: We showed determination during the first wave of eviction attempts.

140 were arrested at Occupy Boston. On Oct. 25th, hundreds of police moved to evict Occupy Oakland using an arsenal of teargas, beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets, arresting 85. A Marine and Iraq War veteran was left in critical condition after being shot directly in the head with a teargas canister. The growing movement responded quickly. In New York, OWS marched near Union Square. Nearly 100 people were arrested in Portland, Austin, and Denver, where police fired pepper spray pellets to disperse Occupiers. Nevertheless, new Occupations continued to pop up.

OCT 15: We contributed to a global movement for economic justice.

Thousands in NYC marched to Times Square in a Global Day of Action. Protesters from small towns like Ashland, KY and Ketchum, ID joined with other U.S. cities like Des Moines and Dallas. Globally, protesters stormed financial districts in Amsterdam, Athens, Auckland, Mumbai, Tokyo, Seoul, Ottawa, Sydney, London, and Johannesburg. One million people marched in Barcelona and Madrid alone. Hundreds of thousands marched in Rome and Valencia, and tens of thousands marched in Berlin, Zagreb, Brussels, Lisbon and Porto. In Latin America, the largest Occupations took place in Buenos Aires, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Santiago, Bogota, San Jose, Quito, Mexico City, Lima, and Montevideo.

OCT 16-ONGOING: We altered mainstream political discourse.

Recognizing how well our message resonated, the political establishment tried to co-opt our movement and use our slogans for political gain. On Oct. 16th, President Obama claimed to “work for the 99%.” During the last week of October, mainstream media mentioned “income inequality” more than five times more often than during the week before the Occupation began. On Nov. 10th, a media analysis company announced “occupy” had become the “most commonly used English word on the internet and in print.” Time Magazine named “the protester” its Person of the Year. In 2011, we made General Assembly a household term.

NOV 2: We organized the first General Strike in the United States since 1946.

Occupy Oakland spearheaded a General Strike and shut down the Port of Oakland. Over 100,000 people marched in solidarity. The next day, riot police attacked with flash bang grenades and tear gas. Over 100 were arrested, and another Iraq veteran was seriously wounded.

NOV 5: We hit the bankers where it counts: their wallets.

OWS supported Bank Transfer Day by protesting outside major banks and financial institutions. Over 600,000 people switched from banks to nonprofit community credit unions.

NOV 9-22: We walked hundreds of miles to share the message of justice.

On Nov. 9th, a group of Occupiers left Liberty Square for Washington, D.C. to protest President Obama’s tax cuts for the 1%. Weeks later, the “Walkupiers” arrived in D.C. to a warm welcome and massive media presence.

NOV 15: We survived the violent eviction of Liberty Square.

Mayor Bloomberg’s private army attacked our home. Around 1AM, police moved in a horrific display of force, using LRAD sound cannons and bloodying protesters with batons in the middle of the night. Journalists were barred. Over 5,000 donated books from The People’s Library were wantonly destroyed, along with many Occupiers’s personal possessions. A New York City councilmember was among those arrested. Occupiers in D.C. held a sit-in at the offices of Brookfield Properties, “owners” of Liberty Square. Soon after, Occupiers in Seattle were attacked with pepper-spray and there were hundreds of Occupy-related arrests in Portland, Berkeley, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. We remained nonviolent through it all.

NOV 17: We persevered, fought back harder, and triumphantly returned to the Bridge stronger than ever.

Two days after the Liberty eviction, we held perhaps the largest OWS action to date. In the morning, Occupiers blockaded every entrance to the New York Stock Exchange. A retired Philadelphia Police Captain stood in solidarity and was arrested by NYPD along with hundreds. Over 30,000 people, including organized students and labor unions, marched around Liberty, Union, and Foley Squares before walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Occupations in Portland, Milwaukee, Seattle, Los Angeles, Detroit, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, D.C., Hartford, Houston, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Great Falls, Minneapolis, Kalamazoo, Augusta, Saginaw, Cleveland, Richmond, Iowa City, and more marched on key bridges in solidarity with the Liberty Square Occupiers. In New York, students at the New School established a 24/7 occupation. Solidarity actions also took place across the world in Canada, Japan, the U.K., Spain, Germany, Greece, and more.

NOV 18-ONGOING: In the face of police brutality and disproportional force, we adapted.

Riot police nonchalantly pepper-sprayed a line of UC-Davis students holding a peaceful sit-down. The image went viral, viscerally capturing the state’s attitude toward nonviolent resistance. The pattern of police violence and midnight raids continued in dozens of cities: Seattle, Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Atlanta, Montreal, Amsterdam, and beyond. But we learned to evolve as the circumstances change, proving that “Occupy Will Never Die, Evict Us — We Multiply!” Evicted Occupations continued to hold General Assemblies and maintain busy calendars with daily meetings, events, workshops, teach-ins, marches, direct actions, and demonstrations at their local city hall, bank branch, corporate office, and courts. Some moved indoors, some took over bank-owned homes, some slept in churches, some held 24/7 vigils at their Occupation with no tents to avoid city ordinances, and dozens still maintain physical occupations with tents — but all of us kept organizing. Our new slogan became: You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.

NOV 19: We took back unused public property to benefit our communities.

Occupiers in DC liberated the empty, city-owned Franklin School. In blatant disregard for social services and popular will, the former homeless shelter was slated to become a condo or hotels for the 1% lobbyists on K Street. Before massive police repression, Occupiers had already planned public forums to decide how to put the building to use. There are more empty houses than homeless people in the United States. After the greedy speculation of Wall Street bankers created a housing crisis for their own huge profits, we helped revive many hardest-hit communities by turning vacant buildings into livable, productive,and life-saving resources for those most in need. In London, Seattle, Oakland, Chapel Hill, Portland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Boston and many other places, we continued to occupy bank-owned buildings and turned them into social centers.

NOV 24: We demonstrated new ways of supporting ourselves and each other.

On “Thanksgiving” in the U.S., instead of supporting colonialist holidays, we gave thanks for our spirit of compassion by continuing to provide for our collective needs. In NYC, Occupiers gathered in Liberty Square to share dinner. The People’s Kitchen made food to feed thousands, while Occupy the Hood distributed meals throughout Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, as well as the New School Occupation and Occupiers staying in Far Rockaway. From Oakland to Boston, Occupations sat down for meals and took part in actions in solidarity with First Nations and Native Americans. In Philly and other places, we began to turn vacant lots into small farms for public use to feed their communities. Occupy Boston, Occupy DC, and many other cities hosted “Really Really Free Markets” to share goods with whomever needs them, proving that another world — and an economy where we take care of one another’s needs instead of corporate profits — is possible.

NOV 25: We perfected the People’s Mic.

What began as a creative way to avoid NYPD amplification restrictions became an excellent tool for organizing. From making announcements to redirecting marches, 2011 was the year of the mic check. The People’s Mic has been used countless times to confront 1%ers and corrupt politicians. It was used in New Hampshire to interrupt President Obama, in Iowa to call out Newt Gingrich, and in L.A. to voice popular dissent at City Council meetings. But on Black Friday, the People’s Mic was perfected. Occupiers used it to occupy Wal-Marts and other large retailers in dozens of cities like El Paso, Kansas City, San Diego, Atlanta, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago and more.

NOV 28: We fought for accessible education.

In response to police violence, a massive General Assembly of University of California-Davis students called for a system-wide strike and announced their intention to shut down campuses where the U.C. Regents were scheduled to vote in favor of extreme service cuts and raised tuitions. Students at the City University of New York — who had been attacked by police a week prior while protesting tuition hikes — took over Baruch College and barricaded the building to prevent the Board of Trustees from voting to raise tuition. Outside, hundreds of Occupy CUNY students and their supporters chanted, “Education is a right!” while the New School students continued to Occupy their campus.

DEC 1: We took direct action to support the occupiers of Tahir Square.

In Egypt, the military regime that took power after protesters toppled the Mubarak regime continued to attack and murder protesters fighting for democracy and freedom. Many of those in the streets were the same people who had inspired and supported the original Occupation of Wall Street. In solidarity, Occupiers from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and across the Mid-Atlantic joined with Egyptians here in the U.S. to protest outside a company in rural Pennsylvania that manufactures tear gas canisters that have been sold to Arab governments and used against protesters in places like Tahir Square, Cairo. OWS has also protested in front of Egyptian consulates in New York and elsewhere.

DEC 6: We took direct action against foreclosures by putting mutual aid into practice.

During and after our Day of Action, we occupied homes and prevented foreclosures and evictions. In L.A., Atlanta, Bremerton, Reno, New Orleans and beyond, Occupiers disrupted foreclosure auctions. Occupiers foreclosed on bank offices in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Buffalo and elsewhere. In cities like New York, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Rochester, Cleveland, Oakland, and Philadelphia, we helped homeless, poor, working- and-middle class, low-income families and families of color, people who had been foreclosed on, and veterans move into empty, bank-owned homes.

DEC 7: We exposed the corruption of money in politics.

Thousands of Occupiers shut down K Street in Washington, DC — home of the Wall Street lobbyists who control the politicians. Hundreds were arrested for laying down in the intersection of 14th St NW & K St. From there, we marched through freezing winds to the White House chanting “Occupy Wall Street, Occupy K Street, Occupy EVERYWHERE and NEVER give it back!” and “Rain, sleet, ice, or snow — Occupy will never go!” Later, more people were arrested on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court while decrying the government’s collusion with the 1% through acts like the ruling on corporate personhood in Citizen’s United.

DEC 12: We shut down the ports.

In response to the government’s coordinated effort to suppress our movement, we organized a multi-city effort of our own. Nonviolent blockades and other actions occurred at ports in Long Beach, San Diego, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Anchorage, and more. Occupy Houston shut down their port on the Gulf of Mexico, while land-locked Occupy Denver rallied outside a massive Wal-Mart distribution center. Occupy Bellingham nonviolently shut down rail ways used to transport goods from the ports. In New York, OWS picketed the headquarters of Goldman Sachs and flash mobbed the World Financial Center. Solidarity actions also took place in Anchorage, Tacoma, Chicago, Tokyo, and elsewhere.

DEC 17: We celebrated our 3-month anniversary.

Since the eviction of Liberty Square, many homeless Occupiers had been sleeping on the street or in local churches. On Dec. 17th, OWS attempted to re-occupy a new home in Duarte Square, an empty lot in Manhattan owned by one of these churches — Trinity Church on Wall Street. Thousands showed up in solidarity, and we received tremendous support from religious leaders.

DEC 18: We marched in solidarity with immigrants and economic refugees.

On the International Day of Migrants, OWS and members of the immigrant community marched to Foley Square to demand an end to wage theft, detentions, and deportation, and to support the rights of economic refugees and immigrants. Occupiers rallied outside an ICE Detention Center in Birmingham, Alabama. Actions in solidarity with migrant justice also took place in cities and Occupations across the world.

DEC 31: We celebrated the New Year.

After demonstrations to abolish the prison-industrial complex took place in dozens of cities across the U.S. and more throughout the Europe and South America, we took back the place where it all started — Liberty Square — to bring in the New Year. Occupiers danced on top of the barricades the police had tried to use to keep us out of OUR park, and at least 68 were arrested. Occupiers in dozens of other cities also held events to celebrate the beginning of 2012.

2012: We are getting ready.

The spontaneous, leaderless qualities of our movement give us strength. The future is unwritten, and the possibilities boundless. In 2012, Occupiers everywhere will continue to show the strength of the people united. We will keep fighting back against attacks from the 1% and governments. Here is a mere “teaser trailer” for some of the actions that are in the works:

• We continue to Occupy the Iowa Caucuses by occupying campaign offices of Presidential candidates to remind the world that the “liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican dichotomy is a distraction from the real social conflict undergriding American society: the 99 percent versus the 1 percent.”
• Today, OWS in New York will protest the “indefinite detention” authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act
• Also today, Occupy Atlanta will disrupt another foreclosure auction, and then rally against the death penality in honor of Troy Davis, namesake of their main encampment.
• On Jan. 17th, we will Occupy Congress.
• On Jan. 20th, Occupy San Francisco will retake the financial district.
• On April 7th, Occupy Chicago will launch a “spring offensive” along with Occupations across the globe.
• On May 1st, the world will be watching…

by Ayşe Berktay

[An October 2011 report on the so-called “KCK operations,” carried out in Turkey by Prime Minister Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party for the past two years, noted that the Erdoğan government has been using the judiciary, the police, and the media to penalize all civic activism in support of rights demanded by Kurdish citizens in Turkey. Since 2009, as many as 7748 people have been taken under custody on the alleged grounds that they are associated with the KCK—an organization claimed to be the urban branch of the armed organization known as the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party)—while 3895 people have been arrested and imprisoned without even the prospect of a trial in the foreseeable future. Among the recent victims of the Erdoğan government’s assault on public dissent are Professor Büşra Ersanlı of Marmara University, and Ragıp Zarakolu, a founding member of the Human Rights Association and the former chair of the “Writers in Prison Committee” of the International PEN organization in Turkey, both taken into custody on 28 October 2011.

Earlier in October 2011, Ayşe Berktay (Hacimirzaoglu)—a renowned translator, researcher, and global peace and justice activist—was taken by the police from her home in Istanbul at five o’clock in the morning and subsequently arrested. She still remains imprisoned for the foreseeable future. Below is a letter and statement by Ayşe Berktay, addressed to Lieven De Cauter—a philosopher and founding member of the Brussels Tribunal—who has been organizing an international campaign to release Ayşe Berktay from prison. Click here to sign a petition to stop arbitrary detentions in Turkey.]

10 December 2011 [Istanbul Bakirköy Women’s Prison]

Dear Lieven,  

I hope this letter finds you well. I have received your letter. It was a nice surprise and stimulation. Thank you. Please give my greetings to all. The presence of you all out there surely makes us feel stronger. I am—we are—fine. Yes, you can send me books; I’d love it. This prison—for the time being—is one of the better ones in Turkey. I mean, the conditions aren’t horrible like in other prisons. Being deprived of one’s freedom, being behind bars in itself is horrible enough, though. Looking at the direction and speed of developments, conditions here will (may) probably begin to deteriorate as well. We shall see! […]

The situation here is rather critical. Feeling ever more powerful with the support he is getting from “Western powers” as a representative of so-called “Western ideals of democracy and freedom” in the region, Erdoğan has turned his back on—or done away with—all semblance of democracy at home and is preparing to intervene actively in the region. Your action is valuable in the sense that it exposes the true nature of the Erdoğan government. Having the world public question their practices at home, and challenge the façade of democracy he put up abroad, is very important because he feeds on this “democratic prestige” he has abroad to take harsher measures against democratic opposition at home. Such prestige makes his hand stronger against opposition in the country. Anyone who does not agree or go along with his way of solving the problem is a terrorist, an enemy—familiar, no?

Because of efforts to find a democratic, peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue, to democratize Turkey, and because we are members of the BDP [Peace and Democracy Party], a legal political party that succeeded in getting thirty-six seats in the parliament in spite of all their unimaginable anti-democratic obstruction—because of our activities, our work as BDP members, we are accused of “membership in an armed terror organization.” We have been refused access to any further information on the case. They say our “file is restricted.” Our lawyers don’t know on what grounds this accusation has been made. So we haven’t been able to make any statement of defense; we just told them that we cannot defend ourselves or testify because we have not been allowed to read our files and to understand the context.

There are two positions on finding a solution to the Kurdish issue, and on putting an end to the armed conflict. One says keep fighting, defeat and eliminate the “terrorists.” Kill them and the problem will finish. And the other says engage in dialogue, negotiate, stop military operations, and talk. Take steps, change laws—to provide for a truly democratic atmosphere that ensures thorough discussion, where everyone can express his opinions freely, without legal backlash. Free political prisoners and discuss. Because we favor and work for this latter position, they have declared war on us as terrorists. This action to criminalize all legal political activity of the BDP is in fact a conscious choice that opts for limiting and restricting democratic political struggle, thus giving leeway and priority to military options.

This is why protests against this anti-democratic obstruction of political struggle and the arbitrary nature of the detentions, against arbitrary detentions to obstruct political struggle and democratic opposition, is very important. They need to know that the world knows and follows.

I know this letter is not well-structured. It has been rather mixed up. Do forgive the confusion. Please send my greetings to all.

With all my best wishes. Take care.

Ayşe

Ayşe Berktay’s Summary of Her Situation and Proposals

December 2011 [Istanbul Bakirköy Women’s Prison]

Translated from Turkish into English by Amy Marie Spangler

I was taken into custody at 5am on 3 October 2011, when my house was raided by the police. All of us were taken into custody in the same way, at approximately the same hour. My door was not broken down, but the doors of some were. Some of our friends, not at home when the police showed up, went to party headquarters (BDP-Peace and Democracy Party) to find out what was going on and what could be done, and were then taken into custody themselves from there. In fact, one person, upon hearing that the person who generally opens up the BDP’s Istanbul Province Headquarters had been taken into custody, showed up to open the building so that the headquarters wouldn’t remain closed that day. This person too was taken into custody there.

So, I mean, no one attempted escape of any kind. And none of us were summoned for questioning or testimony prior to being taken into custody. The method of raiding houses and forcibly taking people into custody, which should be used only under exceptional circumstances, has now become standard procedure. Being awoken from sleep at five o’clock in the morning to find your house full of armed police is simply unacceptable. Our whereabouts, our jobs, our addresses, our lives are not secret; we can easily be found. If there is an investigation happening, they could easily call us in for questioning. There was absolutely no justification for raiding my house. A thorough search was conducted in my house, which certainly pushed the limits and at least verged upon an invasion of privacy. During the search, books and my computer were confiscated as evidence. The practice of the police and courts thus far indicates that the websites I have visited, articles I have downloaded and read, drafts of articles I have written, and thoughts that I have noted down can all be admitted as elements of crime. Freedom of thought and expression and the freedom to organize have all been completely trampled upon, completely disregarded.

They listened in on our telephone calls. While listening in on private communication is generally something used as a last resort, in our case it happens automatically. Yet I have made no attempt to conceal my actions. Everything I do is completely out in the open.

The file regarding our case has been declared confidential. Therefore, we are unable to learn what we are being accused of or the hard evidence upon which the case is based. Other than general, roundabout expressions like “strong suspicion” and “the nature of the evidence and accusations stated in the file,” we know nothing about the evidence against us, based upon which we have been arrested. Hence it is impossible for us to defend ourselves. Our right to defense has been obstructed, destroyed. We were told that our lawyers would not be given a copy of the deposition we were to give at the police station, accompanied by our lawyers. Legally it is utterly unacceptable to not give a copy of this document, which both I and my lawyer were to sign, to my lawyer. And so no statements were given at the police station. We were transferred to the prosecution office without having first given a deposition. In the document written by the judge responsible for the decision not to give our lawyers copies of our signed depositions, all of the lawyers who had taken on our legal defense were described as potential criminals. The exact words were: A copy of the depositions is not to be given to the lawyers because they may share it with the terror organization.

The press declared us guilty the very day the operation happened, based upon information served up by the police department. Documents that were not shown to our lawyers, due to the claim that they were “evidence,” were promptly delivered by the police to the press. We were arrested before we even had a chance to prove the evidence wrong. We were not even allowed to question the validity of “the evidence.” The fact that no action was undertaken to prosecute those who published the “information” in the classified documents that comprised our files indicates that their publication happened in collaboration with the police. We were labeled as people who were planning terrorist activities, making plans to bathe cities in blood, planning provocative activities intended to derail the peace and reconciliation process, and conspiring to get the people worked up into a furor by having women “throw themselves” under the police panzers. A defamation campaign of lies, slander, and police scenarios was waged against us. We have been informed of no concrete accusations, no concrete crime based upon concrete evidence, for which we are being held. They are trying to build the legitimacy of the case based upon pronouncements of what a horrible organization the KCK is. And this policy, being put into practice by the AKP and the prime minister himself, is being propagated by the media. Yet the case is not about what kind of an organization the PKK-KCK is or is not, but about whether or not we are involved in said organization. While they need to prove that I and my friends—144 of us plus the thirty-four lawyers also recently arrested—have ties to the organization, they are simply not doing so. And to those who speak up to say that the claims being made have no legal basis, they are accused of being accessories.

I am able to meet with my lawyers, so there are no restrictions in that regard. But as I said before, we face another problem, and that is that the lawyers are being treated as potential criminals, and so, for example, my file is being withheld and deemed confidential. And now to add to this is the recent arrest of thirty-four lawyers.

I’m a member of the BDP. I have chosen to carry out legal, democratic political activities. The same is true for my friends as well. And our actions comply with this. We have thoughts and ideas about what needs to be done to bring about a peaceful, democratic solution to the Kurdish issue, and we have conducted work to this end. We received some three million votes in national elections and have gotten thirty-six MPs into parliament. These thoughts and recommendations of ours regarding peaceful resolution are not secret; they have been declared in parliament and to the public. Of course differing views regarding this issue exist in our country. We do not share the opinions of the AKP in this regard, which is perfectly natural. What is not natural is the effort to “clean” the field, eradicating the democratic opposition and those advocating for a resolution to the Kurdish issue by means of dialogue between the relevant parties together with changes to the constitution, by declaring their activities illegal and them criminals. Right now, some six thousand politicians belonging to our party are under arrest, in cases very similar to ours. The files containing the charges and evidence brought against them have been declared confidential until the official bills of indictment have been written up. It sometimes takes as long as one to two years for such indictments to be prepared. Most recently, they have arrested our lawyers too. Thirty-four people who are also lawyers for Abdullah Öcalan have been arrested. What we are dealing with here is a deliberate political purge of dimensions reminiscent of the McCarthy period.

The BDP is a political party under constitutional protection. Therefore, it is illegal to spy upon it by using listening devices. The “evidence” and “claims” mentioned in the press are all based upon such illegal recordings (of conversations in person and via telephone). Everything carried out within the framework of party activities has been declared illegal. For example, photographs of me entering the headquarters of the party of which I am a member and administrator are amongst the few pieces of evidence that have been shown to us.

WHAT I AM PROPOSING

• We need to expose how justice and universal rights and freedoms are being trampled upon, and to show that these arrests and the process surrounding them are absolutely unacceptable. The face of the Turkish state and of Erdoğan need to be revealed for what they truly are, by doing away with their phony mask disguising them as defenders of democracy.
• We need to speak up and make it clear that what we currently face is a situation very similar to that of the Hitler regime that preceded World War II.
• They’re trying to clear their names and wriggle their way out of this situation by using propaganda, stressing that the PKK and KCK are terror organizations. But that is not the issue at hand. They are accusing us of being “members and administrators of an armed terrorist organization.” They have no evidence to prove this. They are policing thought. They are saying that BDP=KCK=PKK. The rapporteur on Turkey for the European Commission has said that the BDP needs to distance itself from the PKK-KCK terrorist organization. This approach imitates the mentality of the Turkish government. The rapporteur is defending our arrest. Thus we become the “distance” to which he refers. Meanwhile the unlawfulness to which we are being subjected is obvious. The state has literally taken us hostage; it is both constricting the political field and trying to intimidate us in a blatant act of extortion. Lawyers and members of the judiciary should be encouraged into action by spreading the word about this legal reality and these anti-democratic practices in all their dimensions, in order to put pressure on the European Union and the European Council and to get European and world public opinion to take a stance against it. The Turkish state has created a false image of itself in Europe and throughout the world as an “advocator of democracy.” Drawing strength from this, it applies enormous pressure and oppressive measures against all manner of opposition in the country, and it is currently involved in preparations to further an aggressive, expansionist agenda in the Middle East. Its next step will most likely be to arrest the BDP members of parliament and those mayors who have not yet been arrested.
• This is a mass operation: 144 people and thirty-four lawyers. And it is said that the numbers will increase. This is the number of people arrested in Istanbul alone. All of these people are being subjected to the same process, the same treatment. That is to say, I am not some “innocent” person who has gotten mixed up with a bunch of criminals. Be careful to avoid giving any such impression. This entire operation is nothing but a huge travesty of justice, a scandal, and a disgrace.
• A summary of the course of events: The prime minister blames the BDP. And then these operations are carried out. We are asked why we go to the BDP, why we hold meetings. The prime minister gives speeches in which he targets the BDP Political Science Academies, which have been established in accordance with the BDP bylaws, immediately after which operations against the BDP are carried out. All of the students, teachers, and administrators who have attended the academy are arrested. The political science professor who teaches at the academy, the publisher and author who attended the academy opening are arrested. The person teaching the lesson on gender is arrested.
• The prime minister gives a speech targeting the lawyers, claiming that they are couriering documents to and from Abdullah Öcalan on Imralı Island, and the lawyers are arrested.
• The prime minister gives a talk saying that he supports the KCK operations and adds: The evidence proves the crimes committed. We haven’t seen the evidence, and neither have the lawyers. So how has the prime minister seen it? Whatever happened to judicial independence?
• In late summer, it was announced in the press that the prime minister had a list of 1,400 people who were to be arrested. This is a planned political operation of political arrests. The verdict has already been given. Independent judiciary, fair trial, the right to defend oneself, etc., do not exist. What is happening is extrajudicial execution.
• Illegal organizations may exist. The state can investigate them within a legal framework. But it cannot present and portray legal activities as being the illegal activities of a terrorist organization. It cannot simply “make claims” to that effect. Even expressing it requires very real, concrete, irrefutable evidence. OTHERWISE THE PERSON IS LEFT TO PROVE HIM- OR HERSELF INNOCENT. And that is exactly the situation we are in.
• What’s more, our appeal was denied, based upon article 108 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CMYK), because “due to the nature and type of the alleged crime and the existing evidence, there is reasonable suspicion that the accused could attempt to flee or tamper with evidence.”
• News of what is happening should be more widely disseminated and the situation should be brought to the attention of international institutions and organizations and social movements, who should be encouraged to take action. Concerns about and protests against this operation and these arrests, which are effectively extrajudicial executions and are in violation of the presumption of innocence, should be conveyed to the governments, parties, and parliaments of various countries, to the government of the Republic of Turkey, and to international institutions and organizations by means of writing or fax campaigns.
• Lawyers’ associations should be encouraged to take action. If the World Social Forum Coordination is informed of the situation, they will take action. We were together with them one week before the arrests.
• One important point to stress is this: All countries have these anti-terror laws. I believe that a general campaign against them needs to be undertaken. We already brought this up several years ago at the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI). The debate regarding anti-terror laws and the mentality and logic that uphold them should be actively resumed. I’m of the opinion that the powers that be could resort to these anti-terror laws in the face of pressure that has arisen and will continue to arise due to the ongoing global economic crisis, in order to avoid shouldering the economic burden that comes with it, and in the face of current and future protest of states’ war-perpetuating politics. Campaigns against this mentality are becoming increasingly important.

Sir David Attenborough is England’s finest natural history filmmaker, best known for his Life collection, a series of nine nature documentaries aired on the BBC between 1979 and 2008. It’s widely considered the standard by which all other wildlife programs are measured.

In recent weeks, British and American audiences have been treated to Attenborough’s latest production, Frozen Planet (see trailer below). It’s thought to be his last major program with the BBC, and to commemorate this milestone, the ad agency RKCR/Y&R has produced a moving video that features Attenborough reading lines from “What a Wonderful World” — you know, the Louis Armstrong classic – as scenes from Attenborough’s documentaries fill the screen.

The ad agency introduced the video last week with a little blog post, which concluded by saying: “If you’ve had a shitty journey into work today, I promise, this will put your smile back in place.” We could haven’t have said it any worse or better.

While searching deep space for extra-terrestrial signals, scientists at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have stumbled across signals broadcast from Earth nearly half a century ago.

Radio astronomer Dr. Venn described how he made the historic discovery after analysing a number of signals originating from the same point in space. “I realised the signal was in the VHF Band and slap bang in the middle of 41-68 MHz. It was obviously old terrestrial television broadcasts, but they seemed to be originating from deep space.” After boosting and digital enhancement the resulting video signals are remarkably clear.

Responding to questions, Dr Venn was at pains to explain that little green men are not showing repeats of old Earth shows. “They are signals that left the Earth about 50 years ago and have bounced off an object or more likely a field of objects some 25 light years away”. Radio signals travel at approximately 300,000 kilometers per second. The distance the vintage signals have traveled in the intervening years is vast and whatever they are bouncing off is too far away to see with even the most advanced optical telescopes. “…we asked NASA if they could point Hubble at the centre of what we’ve named the ‘Bounce Anomaly’. NASA were very keen to help once they had seen our data.” However the $3 billion space telescope was unable to produce any clues as to what the signals are bouncing off. One theory is a massive cloud of asteroids is acting like a mirror in space reflecting radio signals from our past, back to us.

A BBC team have been working closely with Dr Venn’s team to help recover the signals. BBC Television historian Peter Wells, explained “We now know these are original broadcasts. So far we have recovered about 7 weeks of old television signals from space. Every day in our lab is like traveling back in time. And speaking of which we have just started the digital recovery of signals that contain lost Doctor Who episodes.

Lost Doctor Who episodes recovered from space.

The BBC will be archiving all the recordings recovered from space and there are plans to broadcast some of the highlights later in the year.

If you think big tobacco companies have been hurt by the virtually indisputable evidence of cigarettes’ negative health effects, think again. Despite selling a product which will eventually kill their customers, tobacco companies still maintain a 26.7% profit margin, 3 times that of Big Oil, and 2 times that of Big Pharmaceutical. With plenty of money to back advertising campaigns, Big Tobacco has raised a brand new generation of smokers. This Infographic from Frugal Dad breaks down the huge numbers behind the “Big Tobacco” brands.