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Islands Of Garbage Clog Rivers, Threaten Dam In Balkans By ELDAR EMRIC Associated Press January 5, 2021, 9:11 PM • 2 min read Share to FacebookEmail this article VISEGRAD, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Huge islands of garbage floating on some rivers in the Balkans are causing an environmental emergency and threatening a regional hydropower plant. Plastic bottles, rusty barrels and other waste could be seen clogging the Drina River near the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad on Tuesday. Upstream, the Drina's tributaries in Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia carried even more debris after swollen waterways spilled over into landfills. The Balkan nations have poor waste management programs, and tons of garbage routinely end up in rivers, including the occasional washing machine or computer screen. A broken barrier this week caused a massive buildup of garbage on the Drina that has threatened Bosnia's Visegrad dam. Officials say that between 6,000 and 8,000 cubic meters of waste are pulled out of the river each year near Visegrad. Although the problem is not new, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro have done little to address the problem even as they seek to join the European Union. An environmental activist from the Eco Center group, Dejan Furtula, said the garbage in the Drina also is a hazard for the the local community because waste removed from the river is dumped on a local landfill, which is often on fire and produces toxic liquid that flows back into the Drina. “We are all in danger here, the entire ecosystem,” he said. Following a devastating war in the 1990s, the Balkans is still lagging far behind the rest of Europe both economically and with regard to environmental protection. Dangerous levels of air pollution are another huge problem in most of the region's cities. At the Visegrad dam, efforts began Tuesday to clear away the clogging garbage and to avoid potential damage to the power system. In southwest Serbia, the Lim River has created a similar problem at the Potpecko accumulation lake. Images of layers of garbage covering both the artificial lake and the Drina have sparked outrage. “Horrific and shameful,” read a headline in Serbia's Blic daily newspaper this week, describing the Potpecko lake as a “floating landfill.” Both the Drina and the Lim rivers are known for their emerald color and the breathtaking scenery along their banks. Running along the border between Bosnia and Serbia, the Drina is highly popular with river rafters in the region. Garbage Appeals Court Lets Fordham Violate Its Own Promises To Students Based On Their Viewpoint University can do it all over again if every legal challenge takes four years One of the worst court decisions I’ve read came from a trial judge in New York. Now a state appeals court has issued another steaming pile of garbage. Both decisions tell students at private colleges that they have no recourse when their institutions break their contractual promises. Both glance past relevant New York law. Both are under 10 pages long. (Perhaps the jurists were rushing to make a tee time.) Last year Jefferson County Supreme Court Justice James McClusky ruled that Syracuse University’s vague policies on “mental health” and “safety” overrode its detailed policies protecting freedom of expression for students. Hence, it could severely punish fraternity pledges for performing in crass skits in their own house, because the private videos were leaked and offended people on campus. Just before Christmas, the First Judicial Department of the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division ruled that Fordham University could invent a new procedure to deny recognition to a student group based on its viewpoint, ignoring the yearlong procedure the group followed to gain recognition. This was a coup for the Jesuit school, which lost in trial court in 2019. Judge Nancy Bannon said at the time that Fordham’s rejection of Students for Justice in Palestine – after the student government approved the club – was “arbitrary and capricious” and lacked any “rational explanation.” (The university gave shifting explanations, none legal, at oral argument.) What did the five-justice appeals panel think of Bannon’s 21-page ruling? Not much – and by that, I mean they literally had little to say about it. The three-page ruling by David Friedman, Dianne Renwick, Anil Singh, Tanya Kennedy and Martin Shulman is a masterwork of laziness and willful ignorance. It summarily concludes that because the plaintiffs have graduated, the case is moot – four years to the day after Fordham illegally revoked their recognition – and a current student who wishes to join an SJP chapter can apply to start one at Fordham. MORE: Judge lets Syracuse punish students for using free speech they were promised I’ll let Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, which filed a brief in support of the club, take it from here: In New York, Article 78 of the New York Civil Practice Law and Rules — or just Article 78, for short — permits students to challenge decisions at private schools that are “arbitrary and capricious” or “made in violation of lawful procedure.” A decision is arbitrary and capricious when it is made “without sound basis in fact.” A violation of lawful procedure includes when a private university “fails to abide by its own rules.” … Fordham’s determination that SJP could not be funded due to its political nature was arguably without a sound basis in fact because Fordham funded a number of political clubs. And Fordham’s after-the-fact discovery of a different approval procedure functionally meant it did not abide by its own rules — at least, the ones it had given to SJP and had purported to follow from at least July 2015 until December of 2016. The appeals court, however, simply said Judge Bannon was wrong that Fordham didn’t follow its rules – seemingly ignoring the legal record and Bannon’s opinion, which documented “two mutually exclusive procedures promulgated by Fordham,” Goldstein says. If Fordham can really publish two different procedures and only follow the one that censors students, that makes a mockery of Article 78’s explicit purpose – to protect students in their “somewhat one-sided relationship” with the private university. The appeals court’s explanation for denying legal standing to the new student to continue the case – because he wasn’t a student when SJP was first denied recognition – is no more convincing, according to Goldstein. This is a classic case of a university violation that is “capable of repetition but evading review,” an exception to normal rules for legal standing. That means Fordham could deny recognition to a club based on its views and get away with it again, considering it took four years – an entire undergraduate education – for SJP’s case to be decided by an appeals court. How the First Judicial Department came to the conclusion that “this is not a matter likely to evade judicial review,” given Fordham’s documented stalling tactics, is never explained. The panel simply decreed that Fordham students could “file an application for recognition of a similar club at any time.” The good news is the plaintiffs are filing an appeal with the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights used quite the restraint in calling the reversal “a hasty decision short on analysis.” Since I’m not on the legal team, however, I can call the decision what it is: a steaming pile of garbage by a garbage appeals court. MORE: Judge smacks down Fordham for blocking club recognition over viewpoint IMAGE: Minerva Studio/Shutterstock Read More Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter Why I Finally Stopped Reading Garbage Online An end-of-the-year series about ditching what isn't working anymore, especially generalized approaches to 'self-improvement.' For the first few months of the pandemic, my partner did a recurring bit. He’d look over at me from down the couch, peel his face into a cartoon Grinch-esque smile, and say, “Hey, we should watch the Hillary documentary tonight.” I had no interest in Hillary, a documentary our friends had admonished us against seeing, and which seemed tedious, boring, and way too recent for me to care about. “No, absolutely not, I’m not wasting my time with that,” I told him repeatedly, even as we were swimming in time, had more of it on our hands than perhaps ever before. The amount of time spooling out in front of us was entirely his point: He wanted to watch something—spend hours with a piece of content—that he knew to be bad, because he thought it might be funny. If I can tell something is going to be capital-B Bad—whether it be a documentary, a book, or (most commonly) an internet essay—before I even start it, I don’t entertain it. I adopted a personal No Garbage Policy over two years ago, when, as I was mid-yell over yet another bad take online, my friend told me she stopped reading such things because they never made her feel good. And it was true that I had noticed something similar: It turns out that sucking unfiltered internet flotsam into my brain was making me feel not only annoyance, but actual existential dread over my entire career and life trajectory. I haven’t looked back since. If you’re wondering, Can I do this with any kind of bad thing? You sure can! This policy, I think, can reasonably extend to all “garbage” content: books that feel like punishment each time you open them, movies that can’t keep you from looking at your phone, even stupid tweets. Generally, these things make themselves known, but in case you can’t immediately tell if something sucks, check for the following signs: Is it based on the perspective of someone whose glaringly obvious lack of authority in the topic at hand—say, a startup guy declaring New York City to be 'over'? Is it a clearly contrarian “take” (see: anything starting with the word “actually” or in defense of something stupid) that is, in actuality, breathless bigotry? Are your peers sharing it online with commentary like, “my god how did this get published,” or, “brb poking my eyes out?” If any of these things apply, head for the hills—there's no joy to be found in that thing. Since I enacted my policy, I haven’t read a single “advice column.” Last year, when a slew of folks signed their name to a stupid letter about 'free speech' that I won’t link here, did I deign read it? Absolutely fucking not! That’s poison! More recently, when a website published an excerpt from a minor celebrity’s new book of essays and the first sentence made me want to move to a farm, I committed the kind and radical act of closing the tab and declining to read further. I don’t necessarily spend the time I gain doing something more productive, like reading something good or taking a walk. Instead, I just float around in my warm mental baby pool of blissful ignorance rather than taking part when my timelines devolve into predictable flimflam.  I understand that this seems sort of a priori: If you know you're not going to like something, why would you then engage with it to begin with? As my colleague Katie Way previously explored in an article for VICE, there’s a psychological appeal to willfully consuming content we hate. “If you're looking at somebody, and you're like, I really hate this person, because this person brags about their wealth, or this person exposes themselves in a way I dislike, or this person is rude, that allows you to create self-definition,” Pam Rutledge, a psychologist who founded the Media Psychology Research Center, told Way. “You say, ‘I'm not like that.’” That was the feeling I was once after in reading, say, the six-hundredth essay on “cancel culture,” or yet another advice column addressing a question that was either made up or specifically chosen so the writer could lay into the sort of person who writes into advice columns (read: a nice, probably good person): It was always to find things the writer did “wrong,” things I thought I would never do in my own work or wider life. In hate-reading, I was bending the rules in my own favor rather than engaging critically, or at least without a built-in sense of superiority. Doing this doesn't make you a bad person, but if it's making you feel bad, as it was in my case, it's harder to find any real use in it.  Defining good work by the bad qualities it doesn’t possess can be a useful learning tactic, to a certain point. It was defini