Reuters: Despite sanctions, North Korea prices steady as Kim leaves markets alone

The relative stability of both prices and the currency - in contrast to the volatility seen under his father Kim Jong Il - is partly attributable to the younger Kim's hands-off approach to an increasingly market-based economy and also, experts say, suggests some policy learning in Pyongyang.

Once reliant on a Soviet-style centrally-planned economy, North Korea is now home to a thriving system of semi-legal but policed markets known as "jangmadang", where individuals and wholesalers can buy and sell privately-produced or imported goods.

"Since Kim Jong Un came to power, there has been no control or crackdown on the jangmadang," said Kang Mi-jin, a North Korean defector who works at the Seoul-based Daily NK website and regularly speaks to market sources in the North. [...]

North Korea's centrally-planned rationing system never recovered from a devastating famine in the 1990s. From April to June this year the state handed out just 360 grammes of rations per person per day, the lowest amount for five years, according to a recent World Food Programme (WFP) report.

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The Guardian: Waste of resources is biggest threat to planet, warns Scottish environment agency

Scotland’s environment agency has warned the country’s industries and farmers that their waste and inefficiency is now the biggest threat to the environment, overtaking pollution.

In a marked shift in strategy, the regulator’s chief executive, Terry A’Hearn, will urge businesses, farmers and manufacturers to adopt a “one planet prosperity” policy designed to cut their energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste and resource use. [...]

A’Hearn argues that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) has largely won the battle against so-called gross pollution from onshore sources. Air, water and soil pollution is now far below the levels seen decades ago. [...]

The aquaculture sector would be among the first to be approached by A’Hearn to establish new “sustainable growth agreements” which he said will be central to his new one planet strategy.

Based partly on a similar scheme he rolled out in Northern Ireland, voluntary but formal agreements would be struck with the most successful or progressive companies, or possibly on an industry-wide basis.

Companies which became sector champions would set targets or goals to increase efficiency and cut down waste; it would allow them to publicise that role in their marketing. Some highly integrated sectors such as the whisky industry, which has lately adopted more ambitious environmental policies, could sign industry-wide sustainability deals.

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The Guardian: Same old, same old. How the hipster aesthetic is taking over the world

It’s no accident that these places look similar. Though they’re not part of a chain and don’t have their interior design directed by a single corporate overlord, these coffee shops have a way of mimicking the same tired style, a hipster reduction obsessed with a superficial sense of history and the remnants of industrial machinery that once occupied the neighbourhoods they take over. And it’s not just London and Manchester – this style is spreading across the world, from Bangkok to Beijing, Seoul to San Francisco.

It’s not just coffee shops, either. Everywhere you go, seemingly hip, unique spaces have a way of looking the same, whether it’s bars or restaurants, fashion boutiques or shared office spaces. A coffee roaster resembles a WeWork office space. How can all that homogeneity possibly be cool?

In an essay for the American tech website The Verge, I called this style “AirSpace”. It’s marked by an easily recognisable mix of symbols – like reclaimed wood, Edison bulbs, and refurbished industrial lighting – that’s meant to provide familiar, comforting surroundings for a wealthy, mobile elite, who want to feel like they’re visiting somewhere “authentic” while they travel, but who actually just crave more of the same: more rustic interiors and sans-serif logos and splashes of cliche accent colours on rugs and walls. [...]

Taste is also becoming globalised, as more people around the world share their aesthetic aspirations on the same massive social media platforms, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or Foursquare, with their hundreds of millions or billions of users. As algorithms shape which content we consume on our feeds, we all learn to desire the same things, which often happens to involve austere interiors, reclaimed wood, and Edison bulbs, like a metastasised real-life version of Kinfolk magazine or Monocle.

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Foreign Affairs: National Memory in Ukraine

The charge of censorship derives from one of the four “decommunization” laws that Ukraine’s parliament adopted in mid-2015. It states that insulting the organizations, groups, parties, and movements deemed “fighters for independence” is illegal, but it fails to specify what the legal mechanisms for dealing with such views might be. It’s clear to me and most Ukrainians that the injunction, legally daft as it is, is exclusively exhortative. In any case, Viatrovych’s institute didn’t write that law; the son of one of the commanders of the Ukrainian nationalist underground did. [...]

Especially striking is the way in which these critics implicitly equate Ukrainian national identity, in even its most innocent forms, with a potentially virulent fascism. The historian Stephen Cohen provides a plethora of examples, having fully agreed with the Putin regime’s characterization of the demonstrators during the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests and the post-Yanukovych government as fascist. To be sure, the organized nationalist movement of the interwar period was not democratic. Some Banderites flirted with fascism; others were true believers. But the vast majority were indifferent to questions of regime type and instead were willing to sacrifice their lives for the one tenet that all Ukrainian nationalists, and indeed all nationalists, have in common: the liberation of the nation and the construction of a national state. [...]

By the same token, it is important to remember that Ukrainian nationalists are not just cutthroats and murderers; they are not just victimizers. They are also victims. And most important, although most banal, they are human beings who deserve to have a voice like any other people. Like all marginalized people, the Ukrainians should be able to participate in the writing of their own history. A fully open and frank discussion of all of Ukraine’s history thus requires that the grand narratives that have stifled freedom of expression in the past be reduced to mere points of view that must compete in the marketplace of ideas.

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The Guardian: Turkish authorities hold anti-coup rally in Istanbul

No official estimate has been provided, but Turkish media said millions had gathered for the rally.

Religious leaders and two of Turkey’s three opposition parties were attending, sitting next to the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who arrived in a helicopter with his wife, Emine. The pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy party, or HDP, was not invited. [...]

Erdoğan told the rally he would approve the death penalty if parliament voted for it, following the failed coup. In his speech he said the network of US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, who he blames for the coup attempt, must be destroyed within the framework of the law.

A 60-metre (200ft) stage was flanked by two platforms and draped with massive national flags and banners depicting Erdoğan and Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. A roll call of those who died opposing the coup was read out as the event began. [...]

The government has launched a sweeping crackdown in the coup’s aftermath, targeting followers of Gülen’s movement. Nearly 18,000 people have been detained or arrested, mostly in the military, and tens of thousands of people have been suspended or dismissed from jobs in the judiciary, media, education, healthcare, military and local government.

The scope of the crackdown has alarmed European countries and rights groups, who have urged restraint. Erdoğan has lashed out at such criticism, and complained of a lack of support from the west for his government to survive the coup.

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Reuters: Politicians concerned over Ankara's influence on Turks in Germany

German politicians voiced concern on Sunday about the growing influence of Ankara on people with Turkish roots living in Germany.

Germany has seen violence in the past between nationalist Turks and militant Kurds and officials fret that tensions in Turkish society following last month's attempted coup could spill over onto its soil.

Thousands of demonstrators from Germany's Turkish community turned out in Cologne last Sunday to show their support for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan at a rally that ratcheted up diplomatic tensions between Ankara and Berlin. [...]

Gokay Sofuoglu, chairman of Turkish Communities in Germany, told Reuters last month that a hotline number was circulating on social media that supposedly called on people to notify Turkish authorities about Erdogan opponents.

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