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Turkey

How Newspapers Featured Shocking Photos Of Drowned Refugee Boy

How Newspapers Featured Shocking Photos Of Drowned Refugee Boy
Worldcrunch

PARIS — Shocking photographs of the body of a Syrian toddler, whose body had washed up on a Turkish beach after his family's failed attempt to reach Europe, are sparking global outcry. Will the publication of the hard-to-look-at images mark a turning point in raising global consciousness of the plight of refugees?

The series of images that capture the grim reality of the ongoing migrant crisis, come as at least 12 people drowned Wednesday in the Aegean Sea when two boats filled with refugees sank en route to the Greek island of Kos, Turkey's Anadolu official agency reports.

The first of the images taken by photographer Nilufer Demir of Turkey's private Dogan news agency, shows a Syrian boy identified as Aylan Kurdi, 3, face down on the beach of the southwestern resort town of Bodrum. A subsequent shot shows a Turkish police officer carrying the boy's lifeless body.

According to the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR), this latest tragedy adds to the 2,500 migrants who have died this year while trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

The photos, which are already being likened to other famous harrowing shots in history, made the front pages of some newspapers around the world Thursday, though some editors chose not to publish the images in line with longstanding journalistic practices to avoid shocking readers. No top German newspapers chose not to feature the photographs, while Le Monde was the only major French daily to do so:

FRANCE

"Refugees: Europe in a state of shock after a new tragedy" —Le Monde

Italian daily La Stampa"s editor Mario Calabresi had doubts before finally deciding to print the image on the front page: "This photo will become part of history like the one of the Vietnamese girl whose skin burned with napalm or the boy with his hands raised in the Warsaw ghetto. It's the last chance to see if Europe's leaders are up to the challenge of history; and a chance for each one of us to face the ultimate sense of existence," he wrote Thursday in an op-ed.

TURKEY

"World shame" —Milliyet

U.S.

"The little victim of a growing crisis' —The Washington Post

SPAIN

"How much longer?" —El Periodico

UK

"Somebody's child" —The Independent

GREECE

"What don't you understand?" —Ephemerida

ARGENTINA

"Sadness without borders' —La Nacion

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Ideas

Purebreds To "Rasse" Theory: A German Critique Of Dog Breeding

Just like ideas about racial theory, the notion of seeking purebred dogs is a relatively recent human invention. This animal eugenics project came from a fantasy of recreating a glorious past and has done irreparable harm to canines. A German

Photo of a four dogs, including two dalmatians, on leashes

No one flinches when we refer to dogs, horses or cows as purebreds, and if a friend’s new dog is a rescue, we see no problem in calling it a mongrel or crossbreed.

Wieland Freund

BERLIN — Some words always seem to find a way to sneak through. We have created a whole raft of embargoes and decrees about the term race: We prefer to say ethnicity, although that isn’t always much better. In Germany, we sometimes use the English word race rather than our mother tongue’s Rasse.

But Rasse crops up in places where English native speakers might not expect to find it. If, on a walk through the woods, the park or around town, a German meets a dog that doesn’t clearly fit into a neat category of Labrador, dachshund or Dalmatian, they forget all their misgivings about the term and may well ask the person holding the lead what race of dog it is.

Although we have turned our back on the shameful racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of an “encyclopedia of purebred dogs” or a dog handler who promises an overview of almost “all breeds” (in German, “all races”) has somehow remained inoffensive.

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