Word: humanize
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...Lankan journalists have been permitted to report on these successes--or on their human toll. The war zone is all but off-limits to the media, one of the many security measures imposed by a government with little tolerance for dissent. "I ask this of all political parties, all media and all people's organizations," Rajapaksa said in a speech in 2006. "You decide whether you should be with a handful of terrorists or with the common man ... You must clearly choose between these two sides...
...impunity," says Robert Blake, the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka. "They always say that they're going to investigate these things, but nothing ever happens." The U.S. State Department has condemned the murder and called for a Sri Lankan government probe, adding to a chorus of similar requests from human-rights groups and other nations...
Take these two specimens. Hannah Holmes is a tall, blond, personally assertive science journalist. Temple Grandin is an eminent scholar of animal behavior who also happens to be autistic. These humans have written two books that look very different but are, in their warm-blooded, four-chambered hearts, very similar. In The Well-Dressed Ape (Random House; 351 pages), Holmes attempts to produce a thorough description of Homo sapiens using the kind of language we ordinarily reserve for animals. In Animals Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 342 pages), Grandin does the opposite: she describes animals in terms we usually...
Holmes and Grandin share the habit of putting everyday phenomena under the kind of scientific scrutiny usually reserved for giant squid and black holes, which causes them to notice things that regular civilians wouldn't pick up on in a lifetime. For example, Holmes points out that even though humans are covered in hair follicles--we have more of them than chimpanzees do--most of our fur grows in an "extravagant topknot" on our heads. In the context of the wider animal kingdom, this is a bizarre, even perverse evolutionary innovation. We also have more sweat glands than any other...
...under the sway of a secular dictatorship, while Sudan is under a leadership that has elements both of radical Islamism and of a typical military junta. The remaining worst-rated states are Burma, a tightly-controlled military dicatorship; Equatorial Guinea, a highly repressive regime with one of the worst human rights records in Africa; and Somalia, a failed state...