# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
... commit your governments to the realizable objective of a nuclear weapons-free world.

The president of the Bertrand Russell Society, Dr. Timothy Madigan, has written Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on behalf of the Society to encourage them to work together towards eliminating nuclear weapons. Madigan, a philosophy professor at Saint John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, tells both presidents that his organization supports the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's recent plea and " open letter " to the White House and Kremlin regarding nuclear weapons, wherein it asks both presidents to "commence negotiations to reduce the dangers of a nuclear war, by mistake or malice, and immediately commit your respective governments to the realizable objective of a nuclear weapons-free world." The letter was signed by many scholars and luminaries, including members of the Bertrand Russell Society such as Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky.

Madigan also sent the leaders a copy of what might have been Bertrand Russell's shortest book, History of the World in Epitome, which in only a couple of spare drawings and 21 words summarizes human folly throughout history and its ultimate doom in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Russell published the little book on his 90th birthday in 1962, only a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time when the world stood at the precipice of nuclear catastrophe, and, as we now know, a horror that was only barely averted. Russell, a renowned mathematician, philosopher, and Nobel Prize laureate, worked tirelessly to reduce the nuclear threat during the Cold War until his death in 1970 at age of 98. Russell and the great physicist, Albert Einstein, issued their famous Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955 to highlight the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, calling for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict.

The Bertrand Russell Society is an international association of scholars and admirers of Russell, and it seeks to promote the study and furtherance of his ideas and ideals. Information about the Society may be found at its website http://bertrandrussell.org/ and individuals may apply for membership at http://form.jotform.us/form/31117633909151

Share article on social media or email:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Bertrand Russell Society Invites Trump and Putin to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons Once and For All

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rochester, New York (PRWEB) March 03, 2017 -- The president of the association of scholars and admirers of the famous philosopher and anti-nuclear war advocate, Bertrand Russell, writes both presidents to endorse the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's recent open letter calling for negotiations and a nuclear weapons-free world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chemical and biological weapons were first used during World War I.

Amid widespread outrage, the Geneva Protocol in 1925 banned their use, but did not prohibit the development, production or stockpiling of such weapons.

In 1975, the Biological Weapons Convention came into force, expanding on the Geneva Protocol to ban "the development, production and stockpiling of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction".

The two treaties were further reinforced by the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993.
READ MORE: Autopsy 'shows chemical weapons used in Syria attack'
While the use of chemical and biological agents has been rare since World War I, in recent years the Syrian government and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) have been accused of using such weapons as a tool in the six-year-old war.

Most recently, the Syrian government was accused of using chemical weapons on a rebel-held town in Syria's Idlib province, killing more than 80 people and wounding hundreds more. The Syrian government has denied the accusation.

Below is a list of chemical weapons that the Organisation for the Prohibitions of Chemical Weapons says are in use and the harm they cause:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From chlorine to sarin: Chemical weapons in war

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chemical and biological weapons were first used during World War I. Amid widespread outrage, the Geneva Protocol in 1925 banned their use, but did not prohibit the development, production or stockpiling of such weapons. In 1975, the Biological Weapons Convention came into force, expanding on the Geneva Protocol to ban "the development, production and stockpiling of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

President Trump has called an apparent chemical weapons attack in Syria an affront to humanity. His envoy to the United Nations says if the Security Council won't act, the U.S. may have to respond on its own. This is a big test for the Trump administration, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.

MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: At the emergency Security Council meeting she chaired, U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley stood up to show pictures of the victims of what appears to be the latest atrocity by Bashar al Assad's regime. They were images of the bodies of children, some in diapers.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

NIKKI HALEY: We cannot close our eyes to those pictures.

KELEMEN: Haley calls the attack a new low for the Assad regime, saying the chemicals left men, women and children gasping for their last breath.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HALEY: And as first responders, doctors and nurses rushed to help the victims, a second round of bombs rained down. They died in the same slow, horrendous manner as the civilians they were trying to save.

KELEMEN: Russia's deputy U.N. ambassador, Vladimir Safronkov, told a very different story.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

VLADIMIR SAFRONKOV: (Speaking Russian).

KELEMEN: He says the Syrian air force hit a warehouse where rebels stored chemical weapons. Western experts have debunked that. So, too, did British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, who blasted Russia for blocking any meaningful diplomatic response.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MATTHEW RYCROFT: That is the sad reality that the world has gotten used to. They view us as the table of diplomats doing nothing, our hands tied behind our backs, beholden to Russian intransigence.

KELEMEN: Ambassador Nikki Haley also had tough words on that, saying it's clear that both Russia and Iran, which back the Syrian regime, have no interest in peace.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

HALEY: When the United Nations consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.

KELEMEN: She didn't elaborate, though, and a Syrian opposition negotiator says Haley and others have been sending the wrong signals on Syria by suggesting that Assad's ouster is no longer a priority. Bassma Kodmani calls this a test for the new administration.

BASSMA KODMANI: The use of chemical weapons on civilians at a moment when this administration has just stated that it is willing to put aside the issue of Assad I think is a provocation and a test.

KELEMEN: Kodmani says the Obama administration lost credibility when it didn't strike Syria after a 2013 chemical weapons attack, having drawn a clear red line against that. She has some thoughts on what the Trump administration could do to change this.

KODMANI: A strike against one military target, maybe that airport from which that aircraft took off to go and bomb and spread chemical weapons. I think that might be one way of saying this cannot continue.

KELEMEN: She says the U.S. should also press Russia to ground the Syrian air force and to distance itself from Iran, which she says has its own sectarian agenda in Syria. President Trump wouldn't say what options he's considering to respond, but says the chemical attack was unacceptable and crossed many red lines for him. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
U.N. Security Council Holds Emergency Meeting To Discuss Syria Attacks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: President Trump has called an apparent chemical weapons attack in Syria an affront to humanity. His envoy to the United Nations says if the Security Council won't act, the U.S. may have to respond on its own.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Unit 7 Handout - Post-Modern Age SET OF HANDOUTS.docx

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
British author Doris Lessing reacts to Nobel win

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here be dragons. The words supposedly contain every difference between ancient maps and our own. Where old maps were illustrated and incomplete, ours are accurate and photographed from the sky. Old maps were pricey and precious; ours are nearly free and ubiquitous.

Most importantly: Old maps-early modern European maps-contain uncharted territory, across which beasts rumble and serpents writhe. They have dragons.

Our technology might be indistinguishable from magic, but it does not contain magical creatures. Google Maps does not have dragons.

Or that's the story, anyway. But I'd always wondered: Do any old, original maps actually say those words, "Here be dragons?"

The answer, it seems, is ... No.

Not a single old paper map presents those exact words-"Here be dragons"- in the margins or otherwise. Nor does any paper map include " Hic sunt dracones," the words' Latin equivalent.

But a globe does.

That's right: One globe-just one-contains the words Hic sunt dracones. Called the Hunt-Lenox Globe, it was built in 1510, making it one of the first European globes ever made. It's tiny and made of copper-you can see it pictured above. Now in the possession of the New York Public Library, the Hunt-Lenox Globe contains the famous warning on the southeast coast of Asia:

No dragons are near the words themselves, but the globe hides various sea beasts throughout.

The Lenox globe wasn't the only old European map, though, to feature beasties. The Ebstorf map, for instance, created in the 13th century, has all manner of animals in the south of Africa, including a dragon (it's near the top):

Other maps included real animals, accounts of which had perhaps only reached the makers secondhand. The Carta marina navigatoria, for instance, has this elephantine thing with massive teeth hanging out around Norway:

(That beast, by the way? Almost certainly a walrus as described by sailors. The German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller made the Carta marina- he also first dubbed the continents across the Atlantic "the Americas.")

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No Old Maps Actually Say 'Here Be Dragons'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here be dragons. The words supposedly contain every difference between ancient maps and our own. Where old maps were illustrated and incomplete, ours are accurate and photographed from the sky. Old maps were pricey and precious; ours are nearly free and ubiquitous. Most importantly: Old maps-early modern European maps-contain uncharted territory, across which beasts rumble and serpents writhe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Eavan Bolands What We Lost - annotation and questions worksheet.docx

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bertrand Russell - Shall We Choose Death - annotation and question worksheet.doc

# data[].attributes.headline
Eavan Boland: Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?

# data[].attributes.subject
Eavan Boland: Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Years ago my father saw the keen, or caoine. It was the 1920s; he was a student at Trinity College. On a trip one Easter, he went a hundred miles west and a whole century back to Connemara and the Atlantic coast of Ireland.

There, one morning, he saw the emigrant boat, about to leave for Liverpool. There was a small group of old women gathered on the pier. They were the keeners. They could be hired for a few pennies to come to a wake or a funeral or, as here, to a final emigrant farewell on the Galway docks. As the passengers disappeared on board and the boat drew out-or so my father told me-the old women put their shawls over their heads and began the keen. He remembered it as eerie, powerful, terrible.

I put forward this small anecdote as a way of trying to answer Sandra Gilbert's important question: "Is poetry in fact consoling as a performance of grief-that is, is poetry a genre that helps mourners confront loss and overcome sorrow?"

The answer has to be as complex as the question. All his life my father remembered the keen. But not, I think, as an expression of grief; more likely as a theater of it. It was a ritual that neither resolved nor diminished the anguish of the Irish losing their sons and daughters. But it noted it. The keen's atonal array of primitive sounds is often mentioned in Irish literature-at the end of Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge, for instance: keening exists there as a rite that gives unquestioned ritualistic and consensual shape to public mourning.

Can poetry do that? This is Sandra Gilbert's other question: How . . . can our poets formulate public sorrow? I would have to add a further question: Can societies trust any longer to the private imagination of the poet what they once trusted to the public theater of elected actors such as the keeners? It's a difficult question. But Sandra Gilbert's formulation of this seems to me to go the heart of a dilemma: if there is not that compact between poetry and society, how can poetry resume and retain its old and hallowed identity as language-maker for essential human feeling?

And here the issue grows more complicated again. A community has little difficulty in agreeing on expressions of grief. The difficulties I feel come in trying to agree on imagining it. The caoine was a customary form: the keeners need only apply the well-made, well-worn acoustic to the occasion, and their job was done. But the poet must imagine it. How can that happen?

When Yeats wrote his essay "The Galway Plains," he said, "There is still in truth upon these level plains a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions." If the poet can stay close to the idea of those imaginative possessions, then undoubtedly he or she can represent their loss. The problem is that poetry has, for almost a hundred years, shown suspicion of those very "imaginative possessions." It has-at least in some quarters-guarded the rights to the private imagination fiercely, and resisted the obligations of the public one. There are reasons for that. 20th-century poetry, in the aftermath of the modernist initiative, was committed to new idioms of experiment and increasingly skeptical of the popular reader. Was that a mistake? Does the cultivation of the private imagination now seem too willful, too insular?

I have no answers. But I do have opinions. If poetry does not address public grief in some way, it runs the risk of abandoning one of its great roles and one of its great genres, which is elegy. The origins of elegy are not private: they are sacred and public. Those origins shaped the poet and gave poetry one of its historic identities. If poets dismantle that series of references-even in the name of the private imagination-they may well desert a constituency and leave unimagined the adventures and ordeals of their generation. I understand that these things change from culture to culture, and age to age. Nevertheless I, as an Irish poet, would certainly want to be there on that dock with the keeners. I would want to feel that those people-on both sides of those farewells-could count on a language for their loss. And if there's some aspect of poetic imagination, craft, or art which is compromised by that, it's not one that I recognize or understand.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public? by Eavan Boland

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Years ago my father saw the keen, or caoine. It was the 1920s; he was a student at Trinity College. On a trip one Easter, he went a hundred miles west and a whole century back to Connemara and the Atlantic coast of Ireland.

# data[].attributes.headline
JSTOR: "Following Seamus Heaney's 'Follower'"

# data[].attributes.subject
JSTOR: "Following Seamus Heaney's 'Follower'"