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The Kurdistan Regions political and economic stability has allowedit tomake significant progress indeveloping itshigher education sector since the regions autonomy was established inthe wake ofthe Iraq war in 1991 and andattained constitutional recognition as a state within federal Iraq in 2005.

The regions Ministry ofHigher Education has implemented policies toensure equal access toits 15public and 17private universities for all high school graduates. Already, 57per cent ofthe regions 252,000 undergraduates inpublic universities are female.

The progress is in part thanks to the Kurdistan Regional Government and its efforts to leverage the help of the international community. For instance, its Human Capacity Development Programme has, since 2010, provided about 4,000 scholarships to talented students from the region topursue masters and doctoral degrees at centres of excellence abroad. Returning scholars are now boosting human capital in many sectors in the Kurdistan Region, including holding senior positions in universities and playing major roles in higher education reform.

In addition, serious investments have been made in international staff and student exchange, dual-degree programmes and joint research projects, including via the European Unions Erasmus schemes. One of the most significant internationalisation projects is the Split-Site PhD Programme. Begun in 2012, this provides doctoral students at local universities with two supervisors, one local and one international. After completing their first year in the Kurdistan Region, students travel to the universities where their international supervisors are based and spend about a year there before returning home to write up their theses and to prepare for their vivas.

Another aspect of the Kurdistan Regions commitment to international standards is its decision to embrace the European Bologna Process, with a view to aligning with the European Higher Education Area. The European Credit Transfer System has been adopted, the national qualification framework has been reshaped and quality assurance standards and guidelines have been implemented. The implementation of the Bologna Process, and the accompanying boost in quality and transparency, will help student mobility and employability, as well as increase the competitiveness of Kurdistans higher education institutions globally.

Pedagogical reform has also been undertaken. Experts from Finlands Hme University of Applied Sciences have trained 51 professors, representing universities from across the Kurdistan Region, on student-centred learning and active pedagogy, introducing them to concepts such as project-, problem- and phenomenon-based learning, as well as interdisciplinary education.

The project also taught the professors how to align learning outcomes, assessment, learning environments and pedagogical practices, helping them to develop curricula to meet the needs of communities and employers. The latter aspiration has also involved a focus on entrepreneurship: how to guide students to generate and evaluate new ideas, including learning from feedback. Such processes also help to develop students critical thinking and problem-solving skills, preparing them for the workforce.

Aligning the Kurdish higher education system with the needs of the job market and economic development is a high priority. A new project, the Industry Advisory Board, aims to help universities better connect with industry and understand the requirements of the job market through regular market surveys. This will enable universities to design flexible curricula that remain relevant to the changing job market and technological advances, producing more employable graduates. Itwill also help to accelerate the development of technical and vocational education.

The regions commitment to promoting resilience, flexibility, tolerance and sustainability through inclusive, high-quality higher education will contribute to promoting amore prosperous and peaceful society that makes a positive contribution to the international community.

But the international community also needs to play a further part in realising this aspiration. In particular, the Kurdistan Region needs more help from the European Commission and European universities to implement the objectives of the Bologna Process. Assistance is most needed in capacity-building, to put the regions universities in a better position to implement the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) and to secure official registration in the European Higher Education Area.

With such support, the Kurdistan Region can serve as a successful model for the rest of Iraq.

Aram Mohamad Qadir is the minister of higher education and scientific research of the Kurdistan Regional government, Iraq. Amanj A. Saeed is a advisor to the minister.

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Bologna Process will transform Iraqs universities - Times Higher Education

Six Yazidi women rescued from IS captivity. Credit: Twitter/@NadiaMuradBasee

Source: CSW

Six Yazidi women were rescued from Islamic State (IS) captivity in Syria and flown back to Erbil, Kurdistan, where they were reunited with their families on 3 June, with the help of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

The women were children and teenagers when they were abducted in 2014 after IS took control of large swathes of land in East and Northeast Iraq, including the Yazidi city of Sinjar. The terrorists killed an estimated 5,000 Yazidi civilians for refusing to convert to Islam; between 400,000 and 500,000 Yazidis were displaced, and 6,000-7,000, predominantly women and children, were taken as slaves. Many of them were sold and transferred to Syria, and it is estimated that over 2,000 Yazidi women are still missing.

In a statement issued following the rescue of the six women, Yazidi Nobel Prize Laureate Nadia Murad said: "Rescuing trafficked and enslaved Yazidi women and children is an on-going humanitarian campaign and the reunification of these six women with their families, after nearly nine years, gives us hope that more can be found. We will continue to search for the remaining women and children who we know are still missing. In this endeavour, we are asking for help with international partners."

Christian Solidarity Worldwide founder president Mervyn Thomas said: "CSW is pleased to report the release of these six women from captivity. Our thoughts and prayers are with them as they recover from the trauma they have been through. We continue to call on the international community to step up efforts to secure the release of all Yazidis who remain in captivity, and to ensure that those responsible for atrocity crimes are brought to justice.

LINK

Christian Solidarity Worldwide: http://www.csw.org.uk

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Iraq: Six Yazidi girls rescued from IS captivity | ICN - Independent Catholic News

TheHolodomor: 27 million dead.

The Gulag: 1.5 million dead.

The Great Leap Forward: 30 million dead.

These are just some of the grisly atrocities documented at theVictims of Communism Museum. Communism has left a trail of blood from Potsdam to Peking. The museum is dedicated to the memory of the some 100 million people who have lost their lives to this odious ideology.

The museum has been open for nearly a year, yet it has received little recognition in the mainstream press. AWashington Poststory on the museumnoted without irony that this philosophy that killed tens of millions also inspired generations of activists in America. Apparently, the museum isnt balanced enough in its history of communism. Next to the exhibit on Stalins crimes they need to note the legions of left-wing labor activists it provided guidance to. Thats a sad reflection of our times: another indication that, at its philosophical foundation, the modern West struggles to contemplate and understand the wreckage that was imposed on millions of people by Marxist communist states. The reasons why are troubling and indicate that certain forms of Marxist ideology seeped into the Western mind, although not to the point that the American-led West was unable to defeat the Soviet Union.

>>>How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United Statesand How Americans Can Fight It

Its easy to think of communism as an unfortunate system afflicting poor souls in the far reaches of the earth. As British historian Arnold Toynbee sardonically put it, History is something unpleasant that happens to other people.

Yet history is never far from us. Substantial forms of the same spirit that animated the Bolsheviks run rampant in the West today.

The hesitancy of news outlets to recognize the importance of the Victims of Communism Museum has been entirely in keeping with the refusal of Western elites to reckon morally with communisms casualties. Why wouldnt leading outlets cover a museum that details the atrocities of communism, one of the biggest human-rights disasters of the 20th century? FromNew York TimescorrespondentWalter Durantyand Vice PresidentHenry Wallaceto Prime MinisterJustin TrudeauandHollywood, there has been no shortage of prominent communist sympathizers. We do not say that media outlets refusing to report on the museum are engaged in the same moral degradation as was Duranty, who lied about the Ukrainian starvation by Stalin. However, many Western thinkers and politicians found the ideology attractive or felt the need to dismiss its opponents. Why?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke to this point eloquently in his famedHarvard commencement address of 1978. While the audience expected a nicely delineated comparison between a wicked communist East and a free, liberal West, Solzhenitsyn excoriated the latter, characterizing it as afflicted with the same sickness that led to the horrors of the surveillance state, the KGB, and the Gulag.

The seed that bore this bitter fruit was planted centuries ago, he claimed, in the soil of Renaissance humanism, when man turned his gaze from God to himself and embraced the aphorism of Protagoras, Man, the measure of all things. Looking upon his own desires, he soon pursued earthly pleasures until everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning.

Mans focus on himself reduced him to the material, temporal world. Whereas before he had seen himself as both spiritual and physical, his worldview was now diminished solely to the latter. Unshackled from piety, he was in his behavior not beholden to a superior being, nor did his ends remain spiritual.

As he further developed the arts of science, technology, and industrial scale, the Renaissance humanist abolished the physical limits that had been present since his beginning. Thus the modern world rose from the spires of Western Europe, destined to conquer the globe.

On this topic, Leo Strauss frequently referred to a quotation of Horace: You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will come back. Modern man rejected that sentiment as he exercised his industrial prowess.

What results are two sides of the same modernist coin. Communism rejects the dignity of the human person, rejects the existence of God, and rejects moral truth itself. In its aim to abolish the family, religion, and private property, which are merely institutions that capital owners control to maintain power, communist ideology casts a totalizing control over the human soul. In the end, communism in practice must violently reject all higher limits that had been placed before it, in the hopes of creating the workers paradise.

Western liberalism, on the other hand, maintained limits for man as long as religious faith remained its foundation. Solzhenitsyn pointed out that the rights enumerated in the early American republic were granted on the ground that man is Gods creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Divine limits were preeminent in the American Founding and were what allowed for such freedoms to be permitted by the republic.

With the leaps of industrial prowess, though, Man continued his turn from God that began in the humanist age. Increasingly, he eschewed those limits instilled by God and nature and turned toward what he could accomplish materially.

The communist East had violently abolished the limits and duties of man. The liberal West had discarded them voluntarily.

Modern man, impious, statist, and commercial, is left with only earthly ends. This false anthropology of the godlike man has become firmly entrenched in both communist and liberal nations. The former believes that man as the state can achieve all aims; the latter, that man as individual can do the same.

>>>A Politics Worthy of Man

This abandonment of the spiritual ends and limits is why so many in the West cannot condemn the crimes of communism. The ideology provides an end in their temporal world, in which man need not adhere to the natural limits placed on him.

The words of Solzhenitsyn cry out this inevitability: The current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Of course, American military, technological, political, and moral power provided the crucial reserves in defeating the Soviet Union. Reagan invoked spiritual and moral sentiments in his challenge to communism and rallied the opponents of communism to defeat it. The West was not wholly unregenerate, a fact that Solzhenitsyn overlooked. But he still accurately grasped the trends in Western thought that have led it to turn on its biblical heritage.

With those words in mind, we should contemplate the horrors shown at the Victims of Communism Museum not as distant historical facts but as the eventuality of the fallacy of hope that is modernity. This is not a call to return to a premodern age, which is neither possible nor desirable. Rather, we should seek to reignite that piety that understands man as Gods creation, not self-made, that recognizes our limits, and that sees our end not in an earthly paradise of this world but in the everlasting world of the hereafter.

Solzhenitsyn closed with declaring that the world will demand from us a spiritual blaze. If we want a viable alternative to a closed world of abysmal ends, then we would do well to heed him.

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Victims of Communism, Victims of Modernism - Heritage.org

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian court on Tuesday fined the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, 3 million roubles ($36,854) for refusing to delete an article on Ukraine's Azov battalion, the Interfax news agency reported.

Wikimedia did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

It has previously said information that Russian authorities complained about was well-sourced and in line with Wikipedia standards.

The Azov battalion, a unit of Ukraine's military, has been designated a terrorist group by Russia.

Wikipedia is one of the few surviving independent sources of information in Russia since a state crackdown on online content intensified after Moscow sent its armed forces into Ukraine.

Russia has said it was not yet planning to block Wikipedia, but has handed the online encyclopaedia a series of fines.

Wikimedia has previously criticised the penalties as "part of an ongoing effort by the Russian government to limit the spread of reliable, well-sourced information in the country".

"We are against such efforts as pressure tactics, and see them as an attempt to use legal liabilities to try to curb free knowledge," the foundation has said.

Russia fined Meta's messenger service WhatsApp for the first time last week for not deleting banned content.

Rakuten Group's messaging app Viber also faces a first-time fine of up to 4 million roubles over content, TASS reported on Tuesday.

($1 = 81.4025 roubles)

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Alexander Marrow; Editing by Louise Heavens and Sriraj Kalluvila)

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Russia fines Wikipedia owner for failing to delete Azov battalion content - Ifax - Yahoo News

In this bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast, I interview Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a rare survivor from the Internet Hippie Age, coexisting like a great herbivorous dinosaur with Facebook, Twitter, and the other carnivorous mammals of Web 2.0. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jimmy is the most prominent founder of a massive internet institution not to become a billionaire. We explore why that is, and how he feels about it.

I ask Jimmy whether Wikipedia's model is sustainable, and what new challenges lie ahead for the online encyclopedia. We explore the claim that Wikipedia has a lefty bias, and whether a neutral point of view can be maintained by including only material from trusted sources. I ask Jimmy about a concrete examplewhat looks to me like an idiosyncratically biased entry in Wikipedia for "Communism."

We close with an exploration of the opportunities and risks posed for Wikipedia by ChatGPT and other large language AI models.

Download 460th Episode (mp3)

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

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Interviewing Jimmy Wales, Cofounder of Wikipedia - Reason