Deutsche Welle: With TTIP talks stuttering, free trade is reaching its limits

Arbitration tribunals, for instance, are a hot-button issue in Europe, especially in Germany. Such private tribunals give investors the opportunity to sue a government if they feel that a country's laws restrict their "legitimate expectations." The EU and Canada were able to overcome this hurdle in their CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) negotiations by agreeing to nix arbitration courts in favor of a permanent dispute settlement tribunal. But it remains unclear whether TTIP negotiators can strike a similar compromise.

The same goes for rules concerning government bids. There is a lot of money at stake, said Laura von Daniels of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. "Inside the EU, public bids amount to 16 percent of GDP," she said. "In the US, it is up to 12 percent." [...]

At the moment, too much seems up in the air to foresee an end to negotiations. On a visit to Germany in April, US President Barack Obama said he expected the agreement to be hammered out by the end of the year. But since then, the prospect of free trade has grown more and more unlikely.

It is even uncertain whether the already finalized agreement between the EU and Canada will enter into force, after it was decided that it will have to be independently ratified by all national EU parliaments.

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Vox: How Vladimir Putin is being outfoxed by a Chechen warlord

This year has seen a sometimes bizarre battle of wills between Kadyrov and the Kremlin, though. Kadyrov has been Putin’s man in rebellious Chechnya since 2007. He has made Chechnya a haven of relative stability in the turbulent North Caucasus.

This is, however, a stability bought with Russian money and Chechen human rights. More than 80 percent of the Chechen Republic’s budget is provided by subsidies from Moscow, which have turned downtown Chechnya into a shining, high-rise (and virtually empty) architectural testament to Kadyrov’s vanity and enriched him and his cronies no end. [...]

By daring the regime to try to find a new Chechen leader, he was in effect forcing them to acknowledge that they could not. At the time, a Russian security official told me that "if anyone there even hints that he’d be willing to take Ramzan’s place, the Kadyrovtsy would throw his body in the Sunzha [River] next morning."

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Politico: Polish media goes back to pre-1989

The larger fear among political opponents is that the government will next look to bring private broadcasters and publishers to heel, and is already eyeing foreign-owned media in Poland.

The changes at TVP came quickly. Journalists out of step with the new authorities were pushed out. Newscasts are now unapologetically pro-government. On Saturday, TVP responded to criticism of its news agenda by condemning those who had pointed out Poland’s constitutional problems during the NATO summit, with commentators calling it “foul” and “shocking.” Poland has been embroiled for months in a crisis over which rules the country’s top constitutional court should follow.

The new-look state television is bleeding viewers, but those who’ve tuned out aren’t the people PiS is trying to influence. Its main evening news program has shed 750,000 viewers since the beginning of the year, falling to 2.7 million people. Overall, TVP saw a 19.8 percent fall in viewers since Jacek Kurski took over as TVP boss in January, putting it behind two private rivals.

“I don’t deny that some of the viewers, especially those with liberal views, have stopped watching us,” Kurski, a former MEP and PiS politician, said in a recent interview. “At the same time, many conservative viewers from right-wing areas of Poland have returned to TVP.” [...]

What PiS is doing is not unusual. Even after the end of communist rule in 1989, democratic governments of both the Left and Right sought to influence radio and television. But the scale of PiS’s overhaul is deeper than anything that has come before.

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Fusion: How Bernie Sanders lost black voters

Demoralized by police killings, left even further behind by economic inequality, held back for generations by structural racism, black people were primed for a political revolution.

Sanders was ready to lead one. From the time he announced his campaign, in April 2015, his crusade against economic inequality galvanized a sleeping sector of the populace that felt left out of the political process.

But Sanders seldom trained that same impassioned rhetoric on the problems that so many black voters wanted addressed: police brutality, white supremacy, and the ways in which economic inequality is inextricable from race.

It may have been white privilege, or simple cultural ignorance of black people and our plights. The Vermont senator, who built a movement on lofty promises like universal health care and free college, dismissed reparations for black people as “very divisive.” [...]

What makes the accounts of the former Sanders staffers particularly troubling is that the senator, according to his liberal and mostly white supporters, was supposed to be the ideal candidate for black people. [...]

Sanders’ response reminded some people of the language of “All lives matter”: “It’s not just black,” he said in part. “It’s Latino. In some rural areas, it is white.”

Sanders was in a staunchly activist, anti-establishment environment full of people who were very much open to a candidate who wasn’t afraid of speaking truth to power. Yet he didn’t seem able, or willing, to speak about race beyond citing statistics on discrimination against black people.

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Salon: U.S.-backed Syrian rebels committing war crimes, torture, abductions; imposing harsh Sharia law: Report

Syrian rebel groups backed by the U.S. and its allies “have committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, including abductions, torture and summary killings,” according to Amnesty International.

A report by the leading human rights organization details how extremist rebel groups have taken over large parts of major Syrian cities, in which they have created repressive theocratic regimes where critics are violently silenced and where religious and ethnic minority groups fear for their lives. [...]

Amnesty documented abuses committed by five armed groups that have controlled parts of Aleppo and Idlib since 2012. These rebels have been supported by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and the U.S. [...]

Armed groups have repressed many Syrians who were themselves once supportive of the rebels.

“I was happy to be free from the Syrian government’s unjust rule but now the situation is worse,” a Syrian lawyer told Amnesty. [...]

The human rights group contacted representatives of Syrian rebel groups, including the Aleppo Conquest coalition and Ahrar al-Sham, asking for responses to its findings. No armed opposition groups answered Amnesty’s questions about specific human rights abuses. [...]

While there has been a lot of attention in the Western media to crimes committed by the Syrian government and its allies, there has been much less attention to the crimes of Western-backed rebels.

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The Atlantic: When Exactly Was America Great?

Nostalgia has been a central theme of the 2016 elections with politicians frequently citing the need to “restore” America to its more stable, prosperous past. But when exactly were the country’s glory days? We interviewed Americans from Texas, Maryland, California, Florida, and other states to find out.

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The Atlantic: Many Americans Want Work, but They Don’t Want to Mow Lawns

Most American homeowners are possessive and protective of their lawns, but they are less picky about who maintains them: One in three Americans who have lawns say they hired landscapers to maintain their yards in the past year. The national obsession with manicured lawns has helped propel landscaping into a $76-billion industry that has grown about 3 percent each year. Whether it means finding the right fertilizer or bagging up stray leaves, Americans are willing to shell out about $600 a year for someone else to handle their outdoor maintenance.

But finding people willing to do yard work is getting harder and harder for professional landscapers. Owners of landscaping businesses are saying that their biggest challenge is finding people who will prune bushes in the middle of the summer, in the heat, for the wages they pay. So it's no wonder, then, that the landscaping industry has become the largest employer of foreign, non-agricultural guest workers. “It's the very nature of the work. The guest workers who come over year after year are willing to put in the hours and difficult labor,” says Paul Mendelsohn, the vice president of government relations for the National Association of Landscape Professionals, a trade group. About 500 or 600 of the association’s roughly 2,500 member businesses use the H-2B visa program, which allows employers seeking seasonal help to bring foreign workers from abroad for up to 10 months at a time (and which is not to be confused with the more well-known H-2A program for agricultural workers). [...]

Because it involves bringing in foreign workers, the H-2B program has drawn the ire of organized labor. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has repeatedly told Congress that there aren’t enough Americans willing to take temporary jobs—at amusement parks, ski resorts, hotels—but unions say that’s just not true, and that companies are trying to save money on labor costs by exploiting cheap foreign workers at the expense of Americans. In June, representatives from North America’s Building Trades Unions said in a Senate hearing that the program is just a tool for roofing companies to pay $8 an hour to a foreigner instead of $22 an hour to a union member. The Southern Poverty Law Center has even gone as far as comparing the guest-worker programs to modern-day slavery. Yet there is hardly any independent research on how temporary workers affect the demand for American labor.

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The Atlantic: Trump Is Whoever You Want Him to Be

Every successful politician succeeds by acting, to some degree, by allowing themselves to look like a blank screen on which a wide range of voters can project their own hopes and dreams. The clumsier politicians risk the appearance of pandering. Smoother ones manage to simply stay vague enough to convince voters they’re with them, although that can cause problems later: Barack Obama campaigned as an inspirational liberal in 2008, only to disappoint many of his more progressive backers with an essentially moderate governing approach.

The Trump candidacy is a more unusual case, though. Seldom has a candidate run on such a clear set of policies, delivered so bluntly: He’s gonna build a wall. He’s gonna rip up trade agreements. He’s gonna stop Muslim immigration. He’s gonna beat China. Yet in spite of the directness of these promises—or perhaps because of them—quite a few of Trump’s supporters in the Republican Party insist that he doesn’t really mean what he says. [...]

There are some signs that Trump himself may not really believe these things, though. He told the editorial board of The New York Times that he uses the wall talk to inject enthusiasm into rallies when energy is flagging: “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.” BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith also reported that Trump told the board something that undermined a core tenet of his candidacy, though it wasn’t clear what. Did he say deportation wasn’t feasible? That the wall wouldn’t be built? The truth hasn’t emerged, but Trump did tell Fox News that “everything is negotiable,” not much of an assurance.

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