Business Insider: Article 50 author: Britain will get a 'hard, unpleasant Brexit'

Lord Kerr, who has served as an ambassador both to the US and EU for the UK government, was a panellist for a discussion hosted by the Institute for Government on Thursday morning, which Business Insider attended.

Talking about Brexit, Lord Kerr said "evidence-based" policy-making has been abandoned and replaced by policy-making based on emotion and appeasing the will of the public majority.

"For governments, it would be good to get back evidence-based policy," Kerr said.

"But in this country that's very difficult at the moment as Whitehall is charged with delivering a policy (Brexit) it doesn't actually believe in — and the evidence suggests it is right not to believe in.

"I can't think of an example like Brexit where the government was working to a single aim that so few people in government actually believe in."

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The Guardian: Literal interpretation of Bible 'helps increase church attendance'

Churches that are theologically conservative with beliefs based on a literal interpretation of the Bible grow faster than those with a liberal orientation, according to a five-year academic study.

“If we are talking solely about what belief system is more likely to lead to numerical growth among Protestant churches, the evidence suggests conservative Protestant theology is the clear winner,” said David Haskell, the Canadian study’s lead researcher.

The findings contradict earlier studies undertaken in the US and the UK, which attempted to discover the underlying causes of a steep decline in church attendance in recent decades but concluded that theology was not a significant factor. [...]

“Conservative believers, relying on a fairly literal interpretation of scripture, are ‘sure’ that those who are not converted to Christianity will miss their chance for eternal life,” he said. “Because they are profoundly convinced of [the] life-saving, life-altering benefits that only their faith can provide, they are motivated by emotions of compassion and concern to recruit family, friends and acquaintances into their faith and into their church.

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Atlas Obscura: Why Catholics Built Secret Astronomical Features Into Churches to Help Save Souls

Heilbron’s book, published in 1999 by Harvard University Press, was the first major English-language study to take this advice seriously, exploring the origins, meaning, and transformation of these early astronomical instruments hidden in plain sight, disguised in the very architecture of European cathedrals. Bologna’s Basilica of San Petronio is not the only example of a meridian line, although it was considered to be the most accurate. Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome has a beautifully realized and particularly grandiose example cutting through its nave; Saint-Sulpice in Paris hosts its own, as does Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence; a church tightly nestled in the packed streets of Fossombrone, Italy, bears a meridian line; the heavily worn remains of a line are still visible in the cloisters of England’s Durham Cathedral; and the duomos of Milan and Palermo also contain their own meridian lines. [...]

The very fact that there is a longstanding connection between astronomical observation and the Catholic Church would surprise many modern readers. If anything, the relationship between these institutions—that is, between the altar and the telescope, the cathedral and the meridian line—would appear to be antagonistic, even contradictory. After all, the Church rather infamously persecuted Galileo in the 17th century for suggesting that the Earth is not, in fact, at the center of the cosmos, and that, by extension, Church doctrine relating to God’s orderly plans for the world were inherently flawed. Galileo’s rejection as a heretic has become emblematic of the popular belief that there is an abyss separating religious faith from rational scientific inquiry. [...]

The stakes of getting the date right were unusually high, Heilbron writes. If the faithful were to worship Easter on the wrong Sunday, out of sync with the rest of Christendom, then their very souls could be at risk. This was not merely an academic concern: at the height of the Church’s calendar problem, in the second half of the 16th century, the eastern Church and the western Church were an incredible ten days out of sync with one another. This was only reconciled in 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII implemented what has become known as the Gregorian calendar reform.

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Independent: Professor who predicted Donald Trump's win says he will be impeached

The 'Prediction Professor', otherwise known as Allan Lichtman, has accurately predicted every presidential election since 1984 – including this one. Hence the cool nickname. That’s a total of nine elections.

Now he says there is a "very good chance" President-elect Donald Trump will be removed from office. [...]

"First of all, throughout his life he has played fast and loose with the law. He has run an illegal charity in New York state. He has made an illegal campaign contribution through that charity. He has used the charity to settle personal business debts. He faces a RICO lawsuit." [...]

Only two presidents have been impeached before, but neither Andrew Johnson or Bill Clinton were convicted, having been later acquitted by the Senate.

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The Atlantic: The Microbe That Could Fight Fires

In the summer of 2015, a wildfire scorched 280,000 acres along the border of Idaho and Oregon. The spark came from lightning. The tinder came from cheatgrass, an invasive plant from Asia whose dry, straw-like stalks are almost too perfect as kindling.

“After cheatgrass invades,” says Matthew Germino, an ecologist at the United States Geological Survey, “spaces are much more prone to wildfires.” And cheatgrass has been an enormously successful invader, crowding out native plants and leading to ever more and bigger wildfires. [...]

Until now, no one has tried to use bacteria to tip the entire complex ecology of Western rangelands. Crop fields are relatively simple; they’re monocultures. And the soil bacteria that microbiologists know the most about tends to be soil bacteria in crop fields. “There’s a huge area of semi-arid rangeland and it’s not been studied nearly as well,” says Germino. He’s not sure if the bacteria will work on rangelands, but that’s the whole point of doing the experiment. [...]

If the bacteria works and cheatgrass goes away and wildfires die down, another set of consequences come into play. One of the casualties of frequent wildfires is the greater sage grouse, a bird that has been a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act. If things get worse for the sage grouse, a listing could close off its habitats to grazing or recreation, which are common in rangelands. “It would greatly decrease the ability for humans to work in these rangelands,” says Germino. These tiny bacteria can have a big effect on land in the West.

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BBC: Would you travel 700mph in a tube?

In the deserts of the United Arab Emirates, one of the most futuristic, fantastical technologies could find footing at last. Hyperloop, the proposed series of tubes that could shuttle humans and goods in pods at breakneck speeds — up to 1,130kph (700mph) — could find a golden opportunity for actual realisation in the UAE.

The company, called Hyperloop One, announced this week that it struck up a deal with the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) of Dubai to build a Hyperloop that could link Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and eventually to other Emirates. The company aims to make that 160-kilometre trip in 12 minutes. In this promotional video for Hyperloop One, we get an idea of what that commute could look like. [...]

Hyperloop is far from an inevitability, however. Substantial roadblocks exist, from funding to feasibility. Some projections predict such a project could cost as much as £33 million per kilometre, and the technological demands required to keep people safe when they're being hurled at demon speeds are significant. Further, how practical is it? How often would someone actually need to make an afternoon jaunt to two cities hundreds of kilometres apart? Then there's the matter of securing permissions to build, and some places are difficult to infilitrate: In the US state of Texas, some residents are resisting even building a standard bullet train linking Houston and Dallas, and don't want construction to cut through highways or their own backyards.

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Al Jazeera: The fight for Brazil's future

The recent municipal elections in Brazil confirmed the trend: The left has been comprehensively defeated, with the Workers' Party (PT) reaping their worst results in 20 years.

As that sea change takes place, the government formed after the impeachment of PT's Dilma Rousseff is steamrollering through parliament a constitutional amendment that would put a 20-year cap on public spending that nobody has bothered discussing with society.

As PT's implosion appears set to put the left in disarray for a long time to come, one may wonder why the hurry. Yet, the reasons are not difficult to fathom and have little to do with the justifications the government invokes, namely the ongoing economic crisis. [...]

Almost 95 percent of those who voted in an online consultation opened by the Senate in September supported immediate direct elections - before, that is, the consultation mysteriously vanished from the Senate's homepage. [...]

In direct opposition to the logic that guided Brazil's post-dictatorship constitution, which established a compulsory minimum investment in health and education and tied it directly to raises in revenue as a way of correcting long-standing inequalities, this bill would entail that the next five governments would be constrained by a very low ceiling.

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Politico: A European Pentagon

EU officials raised its budget from €30.5 million to €31 million on Tuesday, an amount that pales compared to the Pentagon’s budget of more than €540 billion. Domecq said it reflected his agency’s job, which isn’t to supplant national militaries but  coordinate the efforts of EU countries to improve security and leverage scarce resources. [...]

Now, with the push to increase military cooperation — a step EU foreign and defense ministers agreed to on Monday — the EDA is expected to gain new relevance. Plans drawn up by Mogherini would give it a central role in boosting the efficiency and the capability of European defense systems.

The tiny budget increase approved on Tuesday is the first for the agency since 2010, though officials acknowledged it was more symbolic than anything.

And there are other efforts underway to potentially ramp up European military spending, including a proposal to establish an EU defense fund, which the Commission aims to outline at the end of this month.

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Deutsche Welle: Wave of protests against sex education reform in Germany

What has brought 1.5 million Germans (according to the group's website) out into the streets in the regions of Hamburg, Hessen, and Baden-Württemberg? Only the government-sanctioned degradation of the family, said movement leader Hedwig von Beverfoerde in an interview with DW.

This school year, several states in Germany passed a raft of school reform legislation that included modernizing the sex education curriculum. In Baden-Württemberg, for example, the regional government incorporated the "acceptance of sexual diversity" into its guidelines for teachers. [...]

But the waves of protests, which have continued unabated for almost a year and have spread throughout the country, represent a very different opinion. And they are not without their own political backing – the more conservative wing of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), have both given the movement their blessing. [...]

"Now they want to promote the idea that a family is not just mother and father and children, but can include lesbians and gays. This runs contrary to an idea set down in our Basic Law that marriage between a man and a woman is the foundation of our society," said the activist.

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