Political Critique: Citizens Confront Estonian State Over Excessive De-Forestation

In March 2011, a new forestry development plan is put under consideration at Riigikogu (the Estonian parliament), and the National Audit Office, environmental associations, and ordinary citizens alike speak out against it. A popular environmentalist movement, “For the Estonian forest!,” promises to picket at Toompea until autumn. A few weeks earlier, environmental journalist Ulvar Käärt writes on the opinion page of Eesti Päevaleht that the new development plan poses great danger to Estonia’s forests: “By lowering felling ages we spit on many endangered insects, plants, birds, and animal species…the area of old forests in which they make their home will decline steadily.” The National State Audit is critical both towards the plan to increase cutting capacity and the one to loosen conditions for cutting permits, finding that the forest increment has been overestimated and is not based on national stocktaking data. The latter finds that the growing forest reserves have been in constant decline.

The State Audit’s opposition notwithstanding, Riigikogu adopts the development plan. MP Tõnis Kõiv of the Reform Party is straightforward about the matter: “The forest is foremost a source of revenue.” This statement is in direct contradiction with the Ministry of Environment’s official policy, which states that the ministry should strive for balance between the interests of environmentalists and industrialists. [...]

Suddenly, it is revealed that many people have painful stories related to the forest. After all, forest clearings are rampant, and animals and birds become fewer and fewer. All kinds of materials about the bleak situation of forests start circulating on social media. Global Forest Watch, comprised of independent forestry experts, has calculated by comparing aerophoto data, that the forest area of Estonian forests has declined about three times faster than new forest has grown, by measuring the apparent canopy density. . The forest activists groan. National news is quiet.

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CityLab: The Cars That Ate Paris

Last September, the lower quays of central Paris’s two-tiered Seine embankment closed to all motorized vehicles, limiting drivers of the double-decked waterfront highway to the upper quay. Now, at 6 p.m., the upper quay is packed with cars creeping home to the suburbs—still moving, but in a viscous molasses-like flow rather than a steady stream. Meanwhile the lower quays, now reserved for bicycles and pedestrians, are all but empty, with just a cyclist here, a skater there. The landscaping that will eventually turn them into a lush succession of lawns, copses, and flowerbeds is only beginning to emerge, so the quayside still looks like a road—a road you can’t drive on. [...]

Paris City Hall hasn’t shut down the quayside without good reason, however. The move is part of a concerted effort to reduce the number of private cars on its streets. Not only is Paris clearing cars from its quays, it’s banning the most heavily polluting vehicles from the city altogether, having created a system of shields detailing a vehicle’s age and emissions that all cars must display or face a fine. Already it has instigated alternate driving days or total driving bans during pollution peaks. Moving in from the river, Paris will slash the number of lanes on other major axes and turn whole neighborhoods into car-calmed, pedestrian- and bike-dominated zones. It is already in the process of redesigning seven major squares to reduce vehicle lanes and parking while increasing pedestrian space and greenery. [...]

Paris is doing all this because it needs to. The French capital’s reputation for beauty and charm may still be repeated to the point of cliché, but during the 1960s and ‘70s, this city—like so many others—was profoundly reshaped by car-centric planning. The postwar automotive boom turned the city’s quiet avenues into gasoline-filled arteries, flattening historic buildings and throttling the city core with a beltway that has become a byword for congestion and pollution. That inner Paris survived this onslaught in largely good visual shape is remarkable. [...]

That the Gallic car-fighting efforts have been partially successful of late is due in part to the capital’s unusual boundaries. The official city contains 2.2 million residents, while the wider metro area holds 11.8 million. Its frontiers—which frame an area referred to as Paris Intramuros, or “Paris between the walls”—have not expanded since 1860, meaning that even some historic, densely built neighborhoods are deemed suburbs. This means the electorate Paris City Hall has to cater to are all inner-city dwellers, relatively few of whom rely on cars for daily transit. The commuters most affected by car-calming policies cast their votes in suburban municipalities. And they are not happy.

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Jacobin Magazine: Abe’s Japan Is a Racist, Patriarchal Dream

The way Shinzō Abe sees it, Japan has learned all the lessons of war. “Now is the time to make a start on carving out a new era beyond the ‘postwar’ era,” the prime minister said in January in his first policy speech before the Diet. “[We will] take on the challenge of building up our nation anew.” As Japan celebrates the seventieth anniversary of the country’s postwar constitution, part of that “new nation-building” means rescripting it; the first order of business is shedding a shameful past. [...]

The US’s support for Japan remilitarization — longstanding, and reaffirmed by the Trump administration — has emboldened Abe’s militarism. Last December, his administration approved a record defense budget of $42.5 billion, the fifth consecutive increase during his term. The antiwar demonstrations that saw tens of thousands of people gather in front of the parliament have now largely subsided. And this February, the Abe administration moved to draft its first set of constitutional amendments. [...]

But what propelled the scandal into international headlines was not the school’s prewar curriculum or its unabashed xenophobia, but its connection to Japan’s first lady, Akie Abe. When it came out that she accepted a position as “honorary principal” at a new elementary school owned by Kagoike, the focus quickly fell on her husband. An inquiry into the private elementary school, originally named after Abe, soon revealed that the school had bought government-owned land at a discount, spurring accusations that Abe and his wife helped Kagoike with licensing and land acquisition. Last week, Kagoike testified under oath before the Diet that the first lady secretly donated $9,000 to set up the ultra-nationalist school. [...]

Backlash came with a vengeance. Beginning in the mid-1990s, conservative politicians and far-right groups began accusing feminists of being communist sympathizers using “gender” to subvert Japanese tradition. “Feminism and its gender-free movement is working to undermine Japanese culture and to lower our moral standards,” Michiyoshi Hayashi, a professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University and a member of Nippon Kaigi, wrote in 2002. “Formerly the Marxists, feminists now emerge as the power that will destroy our nation.”

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Jacobin Magazine: An Unholy Alliance

This alliance is not exactly new. For some time, the far-right parties of Europe have been outspoken in their support of Israel, all while courting hardline nationalists who often hold racist and antisemitic views. Even in the United States, this alliance has been around for a while. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon — a severe antisemite — provided significant financial and military support for Israel, allowing the country to prevail in the Yom Kippur War. [...]

The alt-right is antisemitic. This point should not be controversial. We can see it when Milo Yiannopolous referred to a reporter as a “thick-as-pig shit media Jew” or when the Trump administration released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that failed to mention Jews (or any other targeted group, for that matter). Antisemitism has been central to the alt-right’s program. When they speak of “global special interests,” they are really just rebranding the old antisemitic trope of a global Zionist conspiracy. [...]

This ideology — that ethnicities should be separate and that minorities should be expunged — is precisely what is driving the alt-right. This allows us to understand why the alt-right can simultaneously hate Jews and love Israel. The alt-right is fine with Jews, as long as they’re over there, far away from the United States.

And because they consider Jews “more white” than Arabs, the alt-right is happy to use them, through the state of Israel, to keep those uppity Muslim states in check. This has been Israel’s historical role. It was the case in 1956, when France and Britain entreated Israel to invade Egypt in order to stop Gamel Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.

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The Atlantic: Benoît Hamon: France's Utopian Candidate?

In the past few weeks, Socialist leaders like Jean-Yves Le Drian, the defense minister, and Thierry Braillard, the sports minister, have thrown their support behind Hamon’s independent rival Emmanuel Macron, signaling a divide within a party already bruised by the deeply unpopular presidency of François Hollande. This division only widened Wednesday after Valls announced his decision to defect from the Socialists and endorse Macron—a candidate he once dismissed as “populism-lite.” Valls told French broadcaster BFMTV that his decision “isn’t out of love for the candidate” but rather “about being reasonable.”

But for Hamon, the lack of support from his party’s more centrist members may not be such a bad thing. The 49-year-old Brittany native has actively tried to distance himself from the current Socialist government, in which he briefly served as finance and education minister before quitting in August 2014, citing opposition to the government’s more centrist economic policies. In response, Hollande reportedly asked: “What would Benoît Hamon be without the Socialist Party?,” to which he himself answered, “Not much.”

Hamon has long represented the far-left of the center-left party—a role that has earned him comparisons to Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the U.K. Labour party. His more than 100-point platform, which Hamon says aims to “make France’s heart beat,” would reduce the 35-hour working week by three hours, impose a “robot tax” on automatization that replaces workers with machines, and establish a universal basic income of 750 euros ($815) for all citizens—an endeavor opponents say could cost as much as 400 billion euros a year (though Hamon estimates it will cost closer to 300 billion euros). [...]

Though Hamon’s left-leaning platform may successfully distance himself from his deeply unpopular predecessor, it does little to solve another challenge: distinguishing himself from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the similarly far-left candidate. The 63-year-old former education minister and veteran Socialist politician quit the party after 35 years in 2008 to create the Parti de Gauche, or Left Party. In this current presidential bid, however, Mélenchon has no formal party backing, opting instead to run under the banner of a movement he calls La France insoumise, or “Unsubmissive France.”

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CityLab: Berlin Preserves Its Trippy 1980s Subway Stations

The seven stations are all located in western Berlin, part of a city subway network where preservation orders are far from unheard of—with good reason, given their frequent beauty. What’s striking about today’s plans is just how new the stations are. They all date to that bygone golden age for Europe’s architectural heritage, the years 1980 to 1984. The seven newly protected stations are in one of the last sections of the subway system to be constructed exclusively within West Berlin, extending the network into Spandau, a suburban town still sitting within the confines of the Berlin Wall. [...]

Designed by architect Rainer G. Rummler, the stations are postmodernist affairs, their brightly colored tiles, pillars, and occasional splashes of shining metal making clear reference to the late 19th century Vienna Secession. There are art deco-ish dark green and gold accents here, a few ancient Egyptian capitals there, while the bold color schemes are part Gustav Klimt, part psychedelic album cover. Cheerful without being sugary, they are a notable bright spot in an often grey city. As an architect whose work is experienced  daily by thousands of Berliners, but rarely discussed, Rummler could actually be one of the great unsung heroes of partitioned West Berlin. [...]

When there were no obvious local references to guide a station’s style, however, Rummler truly went to town. Paulsternstrasse Station, for example, is in a bit of a no-man’s land with no obvious landmarks nearby. Lacking local sources to draw from, Rummler got especially creative. His design was inspired by imagining the trees, flowers and stars that might have been visible on a carriage ride between Berlin and Spandau 200 years previously, when the inn of a certain Paul Stern, after which the street was named, was serving travellers. The result is charming, odd, and more than a little trippy.

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The Intercept: U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley Doubled Down on Threats to Punish Criticism of Israel

U.N. AMBASSADOR NIKKI HALEY repeated her prior threats to punish criticism of Israel on Monday, boasting about creating a climate of fear at the U.N. in which other diplomats are frightened to speak to her about recent efforts to condemn Israel’s illegal colonization of the West Bank. [...]

Since her confirmation Haley has moved quickly to silence any criticism of Israel at the U.N. In her first speech at U.N. headquarters in New York, Haley promised to “have the backs of our allies,” and added that “for those who don’t have our back, we’re taking names; we will make points to respond to that accordingly.” [...]

Throughout the hearings, Haley claimed her willingness to silence criticism of Israel as a chief qualification. She reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that as governor of South Carolina, she was the first governor to sign a law punishing businesses who participate in boycotts of Israel – a law that inspired dozens of similar bills in other states. She was eventually confirmed by the full Senate by a vote of 96-4.

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The Intercept: You Shouldn't Blame Islam for Terrorism. Religion Isn't a Crucial Factor in Attacks.

Yet according to a report from the New America Foundation, “every jihadist who conducted a lethal attack inside the United States since 9/11 was a citizen or legal resident.” A recent study in Britain, which last week endured its worst terrorist atrocity since 2005, revealed that more than two out of three “Islamism-inspired” terrorist offenses were carried out by individuals “who were either born or raised in the UK.”

The common stereotype of the Middle Eastern, Muslim-born terrorist is not just lazy and inaccurate, but easy fodder for the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam far right. Consider the swift reaction of White House official Sebastian Gorka to the horrific terror attack in London last week. “The war is real,” he told Fox News while the bodies of the victims were still warm, “and that’s why executive orders like President Trump’s travel moratorium are so important.” [...]

“Terrorism is really political violence, first and foremost,” Sageman told me last year. Atran, when I interviewed him for my Al Jazeera English show in 2015, said, “If you dialogue with these people, if you look at how they actually move into ‘jihad’ … there is very little discussion of religion.”

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Motherboard: The Number of Heroin Users in America Grew Five Times in a Decade

Last week we wrote about how rampant opioid addiction is lowering the lifespan of poor, white men in rural America. This week a new study from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health looked at the rising number of heroin users in the country, and most of them, again, are middle-aged white men without a college education.

According to the JAMA Psychiatry study, heroin use increased around five-fold, from .33 percent of the population between between 2001 and 2002, to 1.60 percent of the population between 2012 and 2013. Within that uptick, heroin use was higher among white Americans than non-white Americans, 1.9 versus 1.1 percent, respectively. The people most vulnerable to heroin use and heroin disorders were single white men in their thirties and forties who had either no degree or just a high school degree.

There are several reasons white men could be increasingly turning to heroin. For one, the middle class is shrinking, and white Americans, men and single people have made fewer economic gains than in previous decades, according to Pew Research Center. This dismal economic state has also fueled a mental health problem, and men are less likely to seek social support or medical care, instead turning to drugs to self-medicate, said Silvia Martens, author of the study and an epidemiologist at Columbia University.

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The Atlantic: Make the Anti-War Movement Great Again

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been at war, the longest continuous conflict in its history. Its citizens have witnessed a failed surge into Afghanistan, a catastrophe in Iraq that helped destabilize vast swaths of the Middle East, an unconstitutional war in Libya that created a power vacuum exploited by ISIS, and a drone war that has killed hundreds of innocents in a half-dozen countries. The last two presidents campaigned against dumb wars and won. The more interventionist candidate has lost every election since 2008. [...]

Meanwhile, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Trump has escalated the 16-year-old core premise of America’s foreign policy—that it has the right to bomb any country in the world where people it regards as terrorists are found—and in doing so, has fulfilled the warped campaign pledges he repeatedly expressed. The most recent atrocity was the killing of as many as 200 Iraqi civilians from U.S. airstrikes in Mosul. That was preceded a few days earlier by the killing of dozens of Syrian civilians in Raqqa province when the United States targeted a school where people had taken refuge, which itself was preceded a week earlier by the U.S. destruction of a mosque near Aleppo that also killed dozens. And one of Trump’s first military actions was what can only be described as a massacre carried out by Navy SEALs, in which 30 Yemenis were killed; among the children killed was an eight-year-old American girl (whose 16-year-old American brother was killed by a drone under Obama).” [...]

But Congress won’t assert itself absent a political angle. “The frustrating reality is that both the Obama and Trump administrations have been able to back the war without ever having to face much serious scrutiny from Congress or most of the media, and so they have not had to defend a policy that has shamefully encountered relatively little criticism and minimal resistance,” Daniel Larison writes. “Even when the U.S. role in fueling and arming the coalition’s planes has been acknowledged in reports, it is often mentioned only in passing and then minimized. It is very difficult to organize opposition to a policy that most people in the country may not even know is happening. I suppose it is good that our officers are sickened by what the U.S. has been helping the Saudis and their allies do, but most of our politicians and policymakers don’t appear to be bothered in the least.”

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BBC4: The Origins of the American Dream

The American Dream is back. President Donald Trump says so. Once again every American, regardless of background, race, gender or education, can, through sheer hard work, make it to the very top and become rich. Did the idea of the America Dream, in which nothing is impossible as long as you work hard, evolve with the 'founding fathers' of the nation? Is it intrinsic to the country's identity? Professor Sarah Churchwell argues that the American Dream is much younger than we realise, and it was born as a response to the 'Roaring Twenties' and the devastating stock market crash of 1929, and Depression that followed. She uses history, literature and music to explore the original meaning of The American Dream - which was an appeal for much more modest dreams of a better life for all, not riches for some.

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The New York Times: From Slavery to Freedom: Revealing the Underground Railroad

A clandestine and loosely organized network of activists, safe houses and secret routes, the actual Underground Railroad shepherded as many as 100,000 slaves to freedom in the six decades before the Civil War. Its route would eventually traverse free states from Maine to Iowa, extending as far north as Canada. [...]

Ms. Michna-Bales’s quest has led to an evocative book, “Through Darkness to Light: Photographs along the Underground Railroad” (Princeton Architectural Press). While much has been written about the subject, there has been little visual documentation, an absence that makes the book even more consequential, both from the standpoint of history and of our contemporary understanding of slavery in pre-Civil War America. The book also includes a foreword by Andrew J. Young, a civil rights leader, a history of the Railroad by the historian Fergus M. Bordewich, and a recounting of the journeys of three former slaves, including Frederick Douglass, by the scholar Eric R. Jackson. [...]

Her photo essay progresses dramatically: a ramshackle cabin on the Magnolia Plantation in Louisiana glows against the backdrop of the night sky; a slave cemetery in Jefferson County, Miss.; an upward and hopeful glance at a star-filled sky in Colbert County, Ala.; twisted thicket emerging from the forest floor in Tennessee; the first view of a free state, the gently rolling hills along the Ohio River crossing into Indiana; the “Old Slave House,” which belonged to the Rev. Guy Beckley in Lower Town, Mich.; and finally, freedom, represented as verdant trees photographed against a bright but cloudy sky in Sarnia, Ontario.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Morii: The Desire to Capture a Fleeting Experience

Haaretz: Are Israelis More or Less Violent Than Their Potential?

The national index of violence released by the Public Security Ministry in 2014 found that from 2003 to 2010, some 620,000 crimes of violence were committed every year on average. Between 2010 and 2012, this number may have fallen, according to the index, but they were more serious. The 18-to-44 age group committed most of the violent crimes reported to the Israel Police, and in most of these cases – what a surprise – the attackers were men. In addition, both the attackers and their victims were usually of the same religious background.

We must now wait for the release of the new national violence index in order to see if it proves, or refutes, our subjective emotions, and to again compare our situation to that in the other OECD countries. Based on the 2014 index, Israel’s rate for robbery was lower than in the rest of this prestigious club of developed nations, but the level of violent assaults was much higher: 700 incidents per 100,000 people, compared to only 300 per 100,000 on average in the OECD. [...]

Why should someone who for three years of their lives, at least, the most natural gesture was to load a rifle and aim it at a civilian population, not conclude that attacking women is their birthright, and those who signed demolition and expropriation orders not upgrade them to embezzlement and computer crimes? And why should someone who attacks a nurse or teacher who they feel has caused them injustice expect to be punished, when thousands of armed Israelis who killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are not only not put on trial as murderers, but are defined in spoken Zionism as heroes?

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America Magazine: French presidential candidates are breaking tradition by playing the religion card.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly said religious freedom is one of the key demands they will make of Cuba when they finish reviewing former President Barack Obama's opening with the island. The administration has never been more specific, but outside groups have accused Cuba of systematically repressing the island's growing ranks of evangelicals and other Protestants with acts including the seizure of hundreds of churches across the island, followed by the demolition of many. [...]

Clergy and academics say Cuba's 11 million people include some 40,000 Methodists, 100,000 Baptists and 120,000 members of the Assemblies of God, which had roughly 10,000 members in the early 1990s, when Cuba began easing restrictions on public expressions of religious faith. The church council estimates there are about 25,000 evangelical and other Protestant houses of worship across the country. About 60 percent of the population is baptized Catholic, with many also following Afro-Cuban syncretic traditions such as Santeria. [...]

The Cuban constitution now recognizes freedom of religion, but the law is silent on the issue of church construction. In a system where the government has long monopolized public life, virtually all activities are presumed illegal unless the law says otherwise. Authorities in some areas have prohibited new churches, even as they allow worship in religious buildings erected before Cuba's 1959 revolution.

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America Magazine: French presidential candidates are breaking tradition by playing the religion card.

Two of the most interesting photo ops of France’s current presidential election campaign took place last month 2,000 miles away in Lebanon—and they were all about religious optics.In one, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen called off a scheduled meeting with Grand Mufti Abdellatif Deriane just outside his Beirut office when the Muslim cleric’s staff insisted she don a headscarf before going in for the meeting. With the video cameras rolling, she emphatically refused. 

Later that day, with the same media entourage in tow, she smiled and exchanged pleasantries with Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai, leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Christians and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. [...]

After several deadly attacks by militant Islamists in recent years and sliding support for the main parties, politicians—especially from the right and far-right—are harking back to a secularized version of France’s traditional Catholic identity as one of several ways to mobilize voters. [...]

But Francois Fillon showed in November that there were still lots of votes to win on the right when he swept the primary of the Republicans—the main conservative party—by openly appealing to traditional Catholics angered by the Socialist government’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2013.

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IFLScience: There Is No Word For This Color In English – But There Is Now In Japanese

It might sound somewhat unimportant, but the use of this word actually shows how the Japanese language has evolved over the last 30 years. And it highlights the cultural differences in how we describe color in different countries.

The fact you’re reading this suggests you speak English, so you probably know how to describe colors as red, blue, green, and so on. How we get to those colors and what shades we define, starting from black and white, is somewhat intriguing.

The 1969 book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution suggested that there was a hierarchy of colors in all cultures, starting with black and white, then things like red and blue, and finally more descriptive colors like orange or pink.

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Financial Times: Brexit reinforces Britain’s imperial amnesia

This strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of Britain’s relationship with its past. Rather than being obsessed by empire, the British have largely consigned the whole imperial experience to George Orwell’s “memory hole”. Most British people, including leading politicians, are profoundly ignorant of the country’s imperial history.

This imperial amnesia does, however, have a crucial bearing on Brexit. It means that leading Brexiters and advocates of “Global Britain” misunderstand the past — with dangerous consequences for the future. They speak warmly of returning to Britain’s historical vocation as a “great trading nation”, when it was actually a great imperial nation. That important distinction leads to overconfidence about the ease of re-creating a global trading destiny, in a world in which Britannia no longer rules the waves. [...]

The fact that victory in the second world war and loss of empire more or less coincided was also helpful. Victory in Europe was a moment of national triumph that cushioned the psychological blow of the loss of empire. All British opinion formers have 1945 stamped on their memory — the year that marked victory in Europe. Few would be able to tell you that 1947 was the year of the independence of India. [...]

If Prime Minister Theresa May truly wants to forge a future for a “global Britain”, she might consider changing the kind of history that its citizens are taught. It would be helpful if future British politicians understood the significance not just of 1939, the year that the second world war broke out, but also of 1839, the year that the first opium war broke out.

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Political Critique: Poland: Sleepwalking In the EU

But when looking at his actions abroad, one can easily have quite an opposite impression. On the international level, Kaczyński and his party almost without any exception ally with unreliable partners, while they simultaneously disregard potentially natural cohorts. This attitude prompts resentment from all sides. Furthermore, the skillfulness that characterizes Law and Justice (PiS) in domestic politics is absent in the external context – seeing its leaders act either strangely or vulgarly. As many commentators claim, the problem here is two fold. Kaczyński neither likes nor understands Europe. Much indicates that he is not intending to change that attitude in the future, which creates rather a greater problem for the European political mainstream as it would mean that one of the EU largest countries will simply continue to turn its back on the Community. [...]

It is quite possible that Polish government will not have to block or distance itself from anything, as much points to the fact that the leading EU Member States will detach themselves from Poland. This is what was read in the fact that Poland was not invited to join Germany, France, Italy and Spain at the recent meeting organized in Versaille. But what may come as a surprise is that the Polish government has an actual coherent plan regarding what to do in the next months. It entails building local alliances against Germany and lining up with all who will desire “Europe of two speeds”. The volunteers joining them, however, may be not too many, as the strategy is absolutely surrealistic – it is the same establishment that leans towards closer integration and wants to resist populism, and that Kaczyński himself holds in contempt assuming it responsible for the destruction of the EU. He said it directly himself: it is Merkel and Tusk, who devastate the Union. In parallel, the fixed ideas presented by Poland – such as enhancing the weight of the national votes and weakening the position of the European Commission by the occasion of the next Treaty reform can only take place if there is a broad consensus behind them. This is, in essence, the very same consensus that Poland rejects. In that context even the most obvious mechanisms – that politicians of EPP would support an EPP candidate – are taken by Kaczyński as effects of conspiring, international plotting and dirty lobbyism. Hereafter Poland becomes a hostage of a certain paradox, which is a nationalistic diplomacy. At the same time it insists that each country should be entitled to ruthlessly defend its respective interests, and it is disenchanted and furious, when it discovers when others do precisely that.

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Quartz: Conscious consumerism is a lie. Here’s a better way to help save the world

Making series of small, ethical purchasing decisions while ignoring the structural incentives for companies’ unsustainable business models won’t change the world as quickly as we want. It just makes us feel better about ourselves. Case in point: A 2012 study compared footprints of “green” consumers who try to make eco-friendly choices to the footprints of regular consumers. And they found no meaningful difference between the two. [...]

The majority of our food and consumer products come wrapped in plastics that aren’t recyclable. Food that is free of pesticides is more expensive. We’re working ever-longer hours, which leaves little time for sitting down to home-cooked meals, much less sewing, mending, and fixing our possessions. Most of those clothes have been designed in the first place to be obsolete after a year or two, just so that you’ll buy more. And only 2% of that clothing is made in the US—and when it is, it’s 20% more expensive. Palm oil, an ingredient that is the world’s leading cause of rainforest destruction and carbon emissions, is in half of our packaged food products, hidden behind dozens of different names. These are just a few examples of how the government and businesses collude to nudge you into blindly destroying the environment on a regular basis, whether you choose to buy organic milk or not. [...]

Beyond making big lifestyle decisions such as choosing to live in a dense urban area with public transportation, cutting red meat out of your diet, and having fewer children (or none at all), there are diminishing returns to the energy you put into avoiding plastic or making sure your old AAs end up in the appropriate receptacle. Globally, we’re projected to spend $9.32 billion in 2017 on green cleaning products. If we had directed even a third of that pot of money (the typical markup on green cleaning products) toward lobbying our governments to ban the toxic chemicals we’re so afraid of, we might have made a lot more progress by now.

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The Atlantic: When Nuns Tried to Kickstart India's First Transgender School

The six council members approved the lease, with the blessing of the local bishop. It was an important endorsement in Kerala, where the Church is a powerful social and political arbiter in a state that is nearly 20 percent Catholic. The Church has no official doctrine regarding transgender identity, but most Catholic churches (especially in the United States) have distanced themselves from the issue. However, the Carmelites are Catholic nuns whose mission revolves around three elements: prayer, community, and service. For Sister Pavithra and her convent’s council, helping the trans community through education seemed like a natural blend of the latter two elements.

When the school was inaugurated on December 30, 2016, media organizations reported that Sahaj had 10 students and intended to offer accredited online classes through the National Institute of Open Schooling as well as vocational training to trans dropouts in their 20s and 30s. It was the first school of its kind in India, and the first time the Catholic Church had gotten involved in such a capacity with the issue of transgender education.

But three months later, Sahaj has no teachers, no accreditation, and no students. Mallika never got around to hiring teachers, and the few students who briefly attended left, partly due to a lack of direction for the program. Sahaj is now functioning only as a shelter: The dormitory and kitchen are used by four trans people training to become workers for the forthcoming metro system. The school isn’t suffering because of a lack of need in this conservative South Indian state. Instead, various factors have impeded the school’s success: social stigma, weak direction, and a failure to anticipate the needs of the larger trans community. [...]

Faisal believes that the social stigma trans people face in Kerala is partly due to a lack of a hijra community in the state. Hijras are transgender, intersex, and transsexual people who live within a strict hierarchical community, and are found mostly in neighboring Tamil Nadu and further north in states like Maharashtra and Gujarat. While hijras are rarely integrated into society, they are often viewed as divine and are a known entity that does not arouse the same suspicion as trans people in Kerala. (Hinduism has a long tradition of embracing gender fluidity; in myths and religious texts, a god may appear as male and female at different times or even at the same time, and human beings can undergo sex changes through curses or blessings.)

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The Atlantic: What Russia's Latest Protests Mean for Putin

But Sunday’s protest was different. Unlike the rallies in Nemtsov’s memory or even the 2011-2012 protests, this one did not have a permit from the Moscow city authorities. Over the weekend, the mayor’s office warned people that protestors alone would bear the responsibility for any consequences of attending what they deemed an illegal demonstration. But despite those warnings and despite the fresh memory of some three dozen people being charged—many of whom did prison time—for a protest in May 2012 that turned violent, thousands came out in Moscow. The police estimated attendance at 8,000, but given officials’ predilection for artificially deflating the numbers of those gathered at such events to make them seem less of a threat, the number could easily have been double that. People clogged the length of Tverskaya Street, one of the city’s main drags. The iconic Pushkin Square was packed, and people clung to the lampposts, chanting “Russia will be free!” [...]

What was most remarkable, though, was that the protests happened not just in protest-loving Moscow, but in over 90 cities across the country. People came out by the hundreds in Vladivostok, in the Far East; in Siberian Tomsk; in Krasnodar, in the south; and in Kaliningrad, a tiny Russian enclave in the middle of Poland. They came out in cities like Chelyabinsk, in the Ural Mountains; southern Samara; and in Novosibirsk. (Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet, has a compelling photo essay here.) This is significant because “the regions,” as everything outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg is known, are significantly more conservative and Putin-friendly than the two biggest cities. They are much poorer, much less developed, and people living there are often more dependent on the state to make their living. There is almost no independent media there, except what can be found online, and information critical of the government can be hard to come by. Going against the authorities can result in serious repercussions, both economically and in terms of personal safety, sometimes more so than in Moscow, where people have more money, political connections, and the savviness to solve their problems. [...]

First and foremost, it was a tremendous show of power by Navalny, who has declared that he is running for president of Russia in 2018. He is a longshot at best, and the Kremlin may not even allow him on the ballot. Yet he showed he has real political power and that tens of thousands of people across the country see him as a legitimate leader, despite the Kremlin’s assiduous work to marginalize him by keeping him off government-controlled television—still Russians’ main source of news—and inventing a half-dozen criminal cases against him.

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Broadly: 'We Sell a Lot of Dicks': Inside a Factory Making Male Sex Dolls for Women

In 2016, Sinthetics wants to further revolutionize sex with manikins marketed towards women. The Kellers first started designing male manikins for gay customers, according to Bronwen. "The gay market felt underrepresented," she explains. Then a woman purchased a doll, and Sinthetics decided to produce silicone men specifically for women. Now they'll see if women can surpass the stigmas surrounding sex dolls. They see the risk as worth it. But they're also creating the manikins for more personal reasons: "This is a passion project," Bronwen says.

Matt designs each manikin based on clients' custom orders. Like most people in sex industries, Matt did not originally intend to go into this specific career path. He went to school for industrial design. For nearly a decade, he worked in the "Halloween industry," designing life-size scary decorations, which he loved doing. "We started out high-end," Matt explains. Then, according to him, his employer began outsourcing to China and selling to Wal-Mart. Matt's handmade art had been turned into mass-produced pieces of shit, so he quit. [...]

The couple has altered their product for women. Matt builds gay customers silicone men that weigh 108 pounds and stand at 5'9", but Bronwen says female buyers need smaller dolls. "Imagine a very heavy man you have to carry and clean," she says. "A crushing stigma [surrounds sex dolls]... Nobody is gonna call her girlfriend and ask her to help her move a doll."

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The Telegraph: Canada expected to legalise cannabis by July 2018

Prime minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government will introduce legislation to legalise recreational marijuana the week of April 10th and it should become law by July next year, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to lack of authorisation to discuss the upcoming legislation.

Mr Trudeau has long promised to legalise recreational pot use and sales. Canada would be the largest developed country to end a nationwide prohibition of recreational marijuana. In the US, voters in California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada voted last year to approve the use of recreational marijuana, joining Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska. Uruguay in South America is the only nation to legalise recreational pot. [...]

The task force recommended adults be allowed to carry up to 30 grams of pot for recreational purpose and grow up to four plants. It also recommended that higher-potency pot be taxed at a higher rate than weaker strains. It also said recreational marijuana should not be sold in the same location as alcohol or tobacco. Under the task force proposals, alcohol-free cannabis lounges would be allowed.

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The Conversation: New research shows immigration has only a minor effect on wages

Economic arguments against immigration often take two forms – immigrants either suppress the wages of workers, or immigration creates higher unemployment. But our research shows that the impact of immigration on the labour market in Australia over the last 15 years is negligible. [...]

Past attempts at gauging the impact of immigration on the labour market compared geographical areas with different percentages of immigrants. The problem with this approach is that it assumes that geographic labour markets are fixed and distinct. It rules out the selectiveness of migrants and whether incumbents react to new migrants by moving to other neighbourhoods.

To get around this we used an approach pioneered by George Borjas, who found that immigration significantly impacted low-skill US workers who were at the same skill level as new immigrants. We looked at changes in immigration rates into different skill groups in Australia to identify the effects of immigration on the earnings and employment prospects of Australian workers. [...]

In our study we looked at six outcomes – annual earnings, weekly earnings, wage rates, hours worked, participation rate and unemployment. We explored 114 different possibilities in all. We estimated the model for both HILDA and the SIH data across the whole population and separately by male and female. We restricted it to young people and broadened our definition of skill groups. We also controlled for overall macroeconomic conditions.

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JSTOR Daily: The Recipe for Secession: What Makes Nations Leave

Political Sociologist Michael Hechter has explored what the ingredients to a true secession are. His conclusion: secession doesn’t come from one event, but is borne of economic disparities, identity crises, legislative failure, and bad blood.

Different economic interests: In theory, nations work for the betterment of their populations. But if different regions feel that their contributions outweigh their benefits (as was the popular sentiment in Brexit, substantiated or not), calls for separation naturally follow.

Cultural identity: As with any major decision, there is an emotional component. A nation’s identity isn’t purely (or even necessarily mostly) tied to economic shared interests. Rather, it’s a shared sense of affinity and similarity. There are numerous ways a shared cultural identity can form—and numerous ways it can fracture. [...]

A failure to negotiate an alternative. Unless military action is considered an option, seceding states must come to an agreement with their parent state. And as Hechter notes, “If there is one constant in history apart from the universality of death and taxes, it is the reluctance of states to part with territory.” Unless the seceding territory is a clear liability, there are multiple ways—legislative, economic, political—to appease a disgruntled population.

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Independent: Clever teenagers twice as likely to smoke cannabis, study finds

Students who are high academic achievers at the age of 11 are also more likely to drink alcohol as teenagers, but less likely to smoke tobacco cigarettes, a nine-year study by University College London found.

Analysing data for 6,059 young people from state-funded and fee-paying schools in England, experts deemed bright children less likely to smoke cigarettes as teenagers but more likely to smoke cannabis.

This is thought to be a result of middle-class parents being more likely to warn their children of the dangers of tobacco and smoking traditional cigarettes. [...]

“These associations persist into early adulthood, providing evidence against the hypothesis that high academic ability is associated with temporary ‘experimentation’ with substance use.”

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BBC4 Analysis: How Voters Decide: Part Two

What makes us change our mind when it comes to elections? We are all swingers now. More voters than ever before are switching party from one election to the next. Tribal loyalties are weakening. The electorate is now willing to vote for the other side.

Professor Rosie Campbell from Birkbeck University finds out what prompts voters to shift from one party to another. Quentin Davies had been a Tory MP for decades when he crossed the floor of the house. He believes his views stayed the same - but the world changed around him. Journalist Janet Daley was once too left wing for the Labour Party - until Margaret Thatcher came along. Meanwhile Daryll Pitcher felt as though no party wanted his vote. Today he is a UKIP campaign manager.

Does age make us become more right wing? Have the main political parties alienated their core vote? And what does this mean for democracy?

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BBC4 Analysis: How Voters Decide: Part One

What does the story of the Downing Street cat reveal about the way voters decide? We are not taught how to vote. We rely on intuition, snap judgments and class prejudice. We vote for policies that clash wildly with our own views. We keep picking the same party rather than admit we were wrong in the past.

Rosie Campbell, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck University, sets out to become a rational voter. Class and religion have a huge impact. But our political views have become less polarised even as the parties have moved further apart. Rosie asks whether discussions of "left" and "right" have become irrelevant. In a neuropolitics lab Rosie undergoes tests to uncover her implicit biases. She learns that hope and anger make her want to vote - but blind her to the truth.

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Haaretz: Separate and Unequal: Inside Israel's Military Courts, Where the Only Defendants Are Palestinians read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.779748

The trials themselves take place in glammed-up trailers, where military and court officials come and go, answering phones, high-fiving and greeting one another. It might have been out of place in many court rooms, but this was Israel’s military court system, a complete justice system that tries only Palestinians, and in 2010 self-reported a 99.74% conviction rate. Israeli settlers, even when committing a crime in the West Bank, are tried in civilian courts

Under the Israeli penal code, individuals can apply for probation after serving half of their sentence. In the military courts, Palestinians must serve two-thirds of their sentence before applying. Israel has also passed laws allowing Palestinians to be held for 180 days without charges, renewable indefinitely. Over 700 Palestinians are being held without charges or trial, what a UN representative calls an “eight-year high”.

Israel is also one of the few countries that allows children to be held under administrative detention. In the military courts, the age of majority is 16, allowing teenagers to be tried as adults, while 18 is the age of majority in Israel. Children in Israel are questioned only by specially trained officers, while in the military courts, officers or members of the Shin Bet security service interrogate minors. [...]

Though many Palestinians see it as a sham court, Israel keeps these courts running in attempt to legitimize its presence in the Palestinian Territories. The UN has repeatedly stated that the court acts in violation of international law. Military courts often lack the impartiality of civilian trials as the judge, prosecutor and translators are all members of the armed forces, rather than independent professionals hired by the state.

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Vintage Everyday: 27 Rare Photos Capture Everyday Life of Italians from Late 19th to Early 20th Centuries

Here is a collection of 27 rare photos that show everyday life of Italians in the late 19th century and years of the 1900s.

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The Intercept: Trump’s War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised

The most recent atrocity was the killing of as many as 200 Iraqi civilians from U.S. airstrikes this week in Mosul. That was preceded a few days earlier by the killing of dozens of Syrian civilians in Raqqa province when the U.S. targeted a school where people had taken refuge, which itself was preceded a week earlier by the U.S. destruction of a mosque near Aleppo that also killed dozens. And one of Trump’s first military actions was what can only be described as a massacre carried out by Navy SEALs, in which 30 Yemenis were killed; among the children killed was an 8-year-old American girl (whose 16-year-old American brother was killed by a drone under Obama).

In sum: Although precise numbers are difficult to obtain, there seems little question that the number of civilians being killed by the U.S. in Iraq and Syria — already quite high under Obama — has increased precipitously during the first two months of the Trump administration. Data compiled by the site Airwars tells the story: The number of civilians killed in Syria and Iraq began increasing in October under Obama but has now skyrocketed in March under Trump.

What’s particularly notable is that the number of airstrikes actually decreased in March (with a week left), even as civilian deaths rose — strongly suggesting that the U.S. military has become even more reckless about civilian deaths under Trump than it was under Obama: [...]

THE CLARITY OF Trump’s intentions regarding the war on terror was often obfuscated by anti-Trump pundits due to a combination of confusion about and distortions of foreign policy doctrine. Trump explicitly ran as a “non-interventionist” — denouncing, for instance, U.S. regime change wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria (even though he at some points expressed support for the first two). Many commentators confused “non-interventionism” with “pacifism,” leading many of them — to this very day — to ignorantly claim that Trump’s escalated war on terror bombing is in conflict with his advocacy of non-interventionism. It is not.

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Quartz: The idea of monogamy as a relationship ideal is based on flawed science

Monogamy is so much a part of the emotional makeup of Western culture that even people who study relationships fail to notice their biases towards it, according to research due to be published this week. And that means the very way we study intimacy has some fundamental flaws.

The primacy given to monogamous unions isn’t surprising given the historically patriarchal societies that dominate the world: An economic system predicated upon handing down property from father to son is invested in certainty about paternity and on clear family lines. [...]

Conley, who runs the Stigmatized Sexualities Lab at the University of Michigan, has often questioned the orthodoxies of research on sexuality in relationships, and says that she has encountered resistance from other researchers, and reviewers of the papers she has published over the past years—with some responding emotionally to her raising the very concept of exploring non-monogamy. In one study, Conley found that consensually non-monogamous couples were more likely to practice safer sex than monogamous couples who were secretly cheating on their partners. One reviewer called the paper “irresponsible.” In another case, a reviewer referred to gay relationships that “deteriorate” into non-monogamy. [...]

In recent years, polyamory and other alternative relationship styles have begun to be normalized, in some quarters, Conley said. But for now, the study found, “the premise that monogamy is superior to other types of non-monogamous relational arrangements continues to permeate the ways in which researchers construct and test theories of love and intimacy.”

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Slate: 2nd Circuit Chief Judge: Anti-Gay Employment Discrimination Is Already Illegal Nationwide

On Monday, Chief Judge Robert Katzmann of the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that anti-gay employment discrimination is almost certainly prohibited under existing federal law. Katzmann urged the 2nd Circuit to reconsider precedent holding that employees cannot sue for sexual orientation discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing recent legal developments that support an expansive interpretation of “sex discrimination.” If Katzmann’s court accepts his challenge, the 2nd Circuit will further a growing consensus among the federal judiciary that Title VII already protects gay employees from workplace throughout the country. [...]

Katzmann first noted that anti-gay discrimination is, in a very literal sense, always sex discrimination: “Such discrimination,” he explained, “treats otherwise similarly‐situated people differently solely because of their sex.” When an employer mistreats a worker because she dates other women, sex is the key factor: If the employer were male, he could date women without a problem—but because she is female, she faces discrimination. That makes sex the “but for” cause of discrimination: But for the worker’s sex, he would not be mistreated.  [...]

“[N]egative views of sexual orientation,” Katzmann wrote, “are often, if not always, rooted in the idea that men should be exclusively attracted to women and women should be exclusively attracted to men—as clear a gender stereotype as any. Thus, in my view, if gay, lesbian, or bisexual plaintiffs can show that they were discriminated against for failing to comply with some gender stereotype, including the stereotype that men should be exclusively attracted to women and women should be exclusively attracted to men, they have made out a cognizable sex discrimination claim.”

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Land of Maps: Paid maternity leave by country

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Associated Press: Non merci: French voters reject corruption in politics

The change is the result of an aggressive new financial prosecutor, an unprecedented anti-corruption drive by President Francois Hollande, and growing public frustration with a political establishment seen as intent on enriching itself even as ordinary people suffer.

Hollande on Thursday inaugurated the French anti-corruption agency, a public organization focusing on business activity — the latest move in government efforts to fight corruption.

Five years ago, Hollande campaigned on the promise to make the French Republic "exemplary." He probably didn't think he would have so much clean up to do in his own camp.

Former Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux on Tuesday became the fifth minister to quit the Socialist government over financial wrongdoing allegations. Prosecutors opened an investigation into a report that he hired his two daughters for some two dozen temporary parliamentary jobs, starting when they were 15 and 16 years old.

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CrashCourse: Social Orders and Creation Stories: Crash Course Mythology #5

BBC4 Analysis: Detoxifying France's National Front

Has Front National leader Marine Le Pen really detoxified the party founded by her father 40 years ago? Is it a right-wing protest movement or a party seriously preparing for power? Anand Menon, professor of European politics at Kings College London, analyses the process the French call Dédiabolisation. Le Pen has banished the name of the party and even her own surname from election posters and leaflets. Her party is making inroads into socialist and communist fiefdoms in northern and eastern France. Combining nationalism with a message designed to reach out to the left, she speaks up loudly for the have-nots, people who live in the land she calls "the forgotten France." She targets trade unionists, teachers and gay voters. But widening the party's appeal leads to a tricky balancing act. Can Marine Le Pen manage the process of political exorcism without alienating die-hard supporters? 

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The Atlantic: A Better Way to Argue About Politics

Liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different moral codes, which makes arguing about policy complicated. Many people have found themselves locked in debates surrounding the now-suspended travel ban, with little success in convincing the other. “One reason it’s so hard to reach across the ideological divide is that people tend to present their arguments in a way that appeals to the ethics of their own side, rather than that of their opponents,” says Atlantic writer Olga Khazan in this video. However, there’s a psychological trick that goes a long way to changing peoples minds. According to the Moral Foundations Theory, liberals are more likely than conservatives to endorse fairness-based arguments and are more concerned with principles like care and equality. So, when discussing a contentious topic, liberals should reframe their arguments to appeal the the moral values of conservatives, and vice versa. “At the very least, you can avoid making things worse,” says Khazan. “If you can’t reframe your argument, just get off Facebook.”

This is the seventh episode of “Unpresidented,” an original series from The Atlantic exploring a new era in American politic

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Jakub Marian: Percentage of researchers by region in Europe

Researchers form an important pillar of society, creating long-term value upon which entrepreneurs as well as the public sector can build. The following map, based on Eurostat data, shows the percentage of employees that work as researchers by NUTS 2 region. [...]

In London, most researchers are concentrated in one small (but populous) part (which is barely visible on the map), while all other parts of London have less than 0.6% of researchers. On average, London boasts 1.0% of people employed in research.

The data for the two missing regions of Germany are not present in the Eurostat database, and the entries are marked as “confidential”, whatever that means. Perhaps everybody in Niederbayern and Oberpfalz secretly works on a death ray?

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Independent: We asked a lot of British Political Historians the same question: is this the End of the Labour Party?

But while the Labour Party is unlikely to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet, its condition is certainly serious. There are fewer and fewer working class voters around. And more and more of them – turned off by a party they see as too politically correct and/or too like the Tories to make much difference – are either plumping for populists or not bothering to vote at all. Meanwhile, the country’s growing middle class simply can’t see Corbyn and co providing them with the combination of compassion and competence that New Labour, at least for a while, delivered. 

But all isn’t necessarily lost. First-past-the-post means the party’s unlikely to be replaced by either UKIP or the Lib Dems even when (not if) it’s hammered at the next general election. After that, it might secure itself a more credible, centrist leader who’s capable of communicating and connecting with the public. And the Tories will eventually mess up – governments always do. [...]

But to be the majority party it has to create a coalition of shared interests. At the moment Labour has not got a leader who can do that. He can appeal to only one constituency – liberal, metropolitan types – but not Labour’s more traditional supporters.

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The Guardian: Colourful characters beneath Berlin – in pictures

Berlin is known for its underground scene of artists, DJs and techno, but it was the actual underground that captured the attention of photographer Sebastian Spasic. In his project Berlin Lines, a collaboration with website Pixartprinting, Spasic photographed 20 people in the German capital’s metro stations that had a particular significance to them. “Subway stations are part of people’s daily landscape but in most cases go unnoticed,” he says, “but if people wake up to some elements of the stations, like the rich typography, the colour palettes, they can appreciate a new point of view full of meaning and interesting facts.” To Spasic, Berlin is one of the world’s creative capitals: “It’s an eclectic city with a youthful and tolerant mentality. It’s best experienced and not explained.”

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The New Yorker: A Last Chance for Turkish Democracy

The last time I met Demirtaş, in September, it was at a tea shop in the trendy neighborhood of Taksim. He was surrounded by bodyguards. Things were going badly for him—not because he had given up on democratic politics but because he had succeeded so well; in 2015, the H.D.P. captured an astounding eighty seats in the Turkish parliament. The Party had even begun to attract non-Kurdish voters. Soon, however, Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, began cracking down on the Kurds. Thousands of members of the H.D.P. were detained. In November, two months after our last meeting, Demirtaş, who is forty-three years old, was arrested and jailed. Now, facing what appear to be preposterous charges—supporting an armed terrorist organization—he is facing a prison sentence of as long as a hundred and forty-two years. [...]

But Erdoğan is a master at self-preservation. He beat back his accusers and then, last July, in what must be regarded as a political gift from the heavens, elements inside the Turkish military tried to overthrow his government. Erdoğan—not without some justification—blamed the attempted coup on the movement of Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher who lives in exile in the United States. After successfully putting down the attempted putsch, Erdoğan launched a sweeping, and still ongoing, campaign to destroy the country’s democratic opposition. Since July, more than forty thousand people have been arrested, and a hundred thousand government employees—including judges, prosecutors, and academics—have been fired. Tens of thousands remain in prison, including more than a hundred and fifty journalists and media workers. The government has closed a hundred and seventy-nine newspapers, television stations, and Web sites. Turkey is now the most prolific jailer of journalists in the world. [...]

Polls show that the referendum has the support of only around fifty per cent of likely Turkish voters. A “no” vote would be a crushing rebuke to the Turkish President, and, in the short-term, could provoke a violent reaction from him. But, if the Turkish people are serious about stemming Erdoğan’s drive to dictatorship, this may be their last chance.

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Associated Press: UN: Israel didn't comply with UN call to stop settlements

Israel took no steps to comply with a Security Council call to stop all settlement activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and instead authorized "a high rate" of settlement expansions in violation of international law, the United Nations said Friday.

U.N. envoy Nickolay Mladenov told the council the large number of settlement announcements and legislation action by Israel indicate "a clear intent to continue expanding the settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory."

He was delivering the first report to the council on implementation of the resolution it adopted in December condemning Israeli settlements as a "flagrant violation" of international law. The resolution was a striking rupture with past practice by President Barack Obama who had the U.S. abstain rather than veto the measure as president-elect Donald Trump demanded. [...]

He called "the January spike" in illegal settlement announcements by Israel "deeply concerning." During that month, he said, two major announcements were made for a total of 5,500 housing units in Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank exclusively controlled by Israel.

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The Huffington Post: Canada Passes Anti-Islamophobia Motion In Spite Of Trolls

In a vote split 201-91 in favor of the non-binding motion, the Parliament agreed to “condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination.” The motion, dubbed M-103, also tasks the Parliament with establishing a committee to investigate policies that could be aimed at “reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia in Canada.”

Iqra Khalid, a Liberal member of Parliament who is Muslim, introduced the motion in December as a response to rising anti-Muslim sentiment. It took on renewed significance in January after a mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec City left six worshippers dead. [...]

The motion set off a number of protests and counter-protests across the country as members of Parliament debated it ahead of the vote. A survey published Thursday by polling non-profit Angus Reid Institute found that 42 percent of Canadians said they would vote against the motion. Just 29 percent said they would vote in favor.

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Deutsche Welle: Merkel and the rise of the right

Schwetzingen may represent a turning point for Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The city of 22,000, near Heidelberg, has been selected as the site of a quiet insurrection - a prearranged revolution, so to say. On March 25, members of the party's right wing will seek to end what they see as a shift to the left in the CDU. Their organizational platform: "Liberal-Conservative Awakening in the Union," is designed to unite Merkel critics around the country. [...]

It was then, in Königswinter, near Bonn, that 50 representatives from five federal states drafted a 30-point position paper. Among their demands: Germany must be able to better defend itself. And: Financially undisciplined eurozone countries must face the threat of expulsion from the currency union. The paper also called for a limit on the number of refugees allowed to enter the country, and for more control over German and EU borders. Such criticisms had been articulated before. Grumbling within the CDU began back in the summer of 2015, when Chancellor Merkel first opened the country's borders to refugees on a massive scale. [...]

The CDU's right-wing members feel that law and order policies must once again be the essential core of the party. That ignores the fact that the CDU became stronger and more popular under the centrist policies of its then-leader, Helmut Kohl. The former chancellor was seen as a modernizer that brought the party up to date with the world around it. Angela Merkel has continued along that path. Along the way she jettisoned party traditions such as compulsory military service and even abandoned nuclear power - long celebrated as the energy source of the future by the CDU. She gained a lot of ground for the party among urban voters with such moves. Now there is even wide support for same-sex marriage within the CDU.

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Politico: The Man Who Would Beat Bibi

Benjamin Netanyahu is a survivor. He’s beaten back what looked to be near-certain defeat at the polls more than once. He’s outlasted hard-line rivals and liberal critics to become Israel’s longest continuously serving prime minister, and if he can hang on two more years, would even outdo David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s idolized founding father, to claim the overall record in the job. [...]

The late Shimon Peres, the peacemaker behind the Oslo Accords who was beaten by Netanyahu in an election he was widely expected to win, was famous for saying the polls are like perfume, best to be smelled not drunk. Are these latest surveys showing Netanyahu’s vulnerability and Lapid’s surprising strength, for real? And do they matter at a time when Trump and his advisers actually seem to be getting serious about rekindling a peace process just about everyone else had given up for dead? [...]

Labels aside, whatever he’s doing seems to be working, and Lapid’s newfangled politics—heavy on the requisite tough talk about Israeli security but with an emphasis on good governance and boosting Israel’s economy—have improbably vaulted him and Yesh Atid, the party he founded in 2012, to first place in survey after survey over the past several months. The latest polls generally show Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future” in Hebrew), leading Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party by about four seats in parliamentary elections. [...]

Enter Lapid, a polished talker with a lush head of anchorman-silver hair who tells me he is running as “an extreme moderate,” preaching centrism as the new populism and a sort of gauzy patriotic nationalism that tends to give his former colleagues in the world of liberal journalism fits. Lapid, who served a stint as finance minister in a short-lived coalition with Netanyahu, now tours the world as a sort of shadow foreign minister, tangling with increasingly vocal Western advocates of boycotting Israel as a result of its continued occupation of the West Bank and ongoing settlement building there. “With the world of alternative facts, the country is under attack” by advocates of the budding boycott movement, Lapid tells me animatedly, and he is at his most passionate these days taking on those who prefer beating up on what he invariably calls “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

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FiveThirtyEight: How Trump Lost On Health Care

It showed that Republicans — now in control of the House, the Senate and the presidency — couldn’t band together on a major priority. It suggests that the divides among Republicans, a theme of the Obama years, remain a problem for the party. In fact, those divides could be even wider in the Trump era: In the health care debate, not only did the deeply conservative House Freedom Caucus break with party leadership, as it often has (arguing the legislation was not conservative enough), but a bloc of more centrist members emerged from the other side of the political spectrum, arguing that the bill was too conservative. And Trump, who has cast himself as a master negotiator, couldn’t get fellow Republicans behind him, making him look ineffectual in comparison to his three predecessors as president, who all got their first legislative priority through Congress in their first year in office. [...]

Broadly, there were four blocs of GOP members opposed to the legislation: those from the conservative and anti-establishment House Freedom Caucus; those in districts that Hillary Clinton won or almost won in 2016, putting them in some political peril if they backed a bill that is very unpopular; those associated with the Tuesday Group of more centrist House Republicans; and a few who are kind of mavericks, sometimes voting against the position of GOP congressional leaders and Trump. But there were some “no’s” outside of those four blocs, and many members within those four blocs who said that they supported the AHCA. (Some members fall into in more than one of these groups.) [...]

With this defeat, Trump avoids two potentially negative outcomes: getting mired in the details of health care policy for months and months, as he and the congressional Republicans try to write a bill the party can agree on; and secondly, dealing with the political fallout of pushing through an unpopular bill. Former President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, after spending close to a year working on it. And the ACA vote was a major factor in Democrats losing a bunch of congressional seats in the midterm elections later that year.

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Geoawesomeness: Top 30 maps and charts that explain the European Union

Tomorrow European Union celebrates the 60th birthday. On March 25, 1957, leaders of six countries – Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands – met in Rome and signed two treaties that established the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community, later transformed into the European Union.

Although Europe is experiencing growing turbulence related to migration crisis, terrorist attacks, and Brexit, among others, the EU project is still the best thing that happened to the continent after The World War II.  It allowed keeping peace and wealth for long years and we hope that it will stay that way for the next generations.

These maps and charts try to explain the sense of European Union.

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Land of Maps: CO2 emissions: Top 20 emitters in the EU and emissions by member states

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Land of Maps: Languages of Switzerland

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The Atlantic: Steve Bannon's Would-Be Coalition of Christian Traditionalists

The rhetoric of a looming civilizational war has proved persistent. Recent years have seen religious leaders from both the American Christian community and the Russian Orthodox community coming together to bemoan the decline of traditional values. One example is the 2015 Moscow meeting between Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist Billy Graham. The Patriarch lamented to Graham how, after decades of inspiring underground believers in the Soviet Union with its defense of religious freedom, the West has abandoned the shared “common Christian moral values” that are the bedrock of a universal “Christian civilization.” [...]

In Bannon’s telling, the greatest mistake the baby boomers made was to reject the traditional “Judeo-Christian” values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime, because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European fascism, and, subsequently, to create an “enlightened capitalism” that made America great for decades after World War II. The enormous amount of media attention he has received and his various interviews, talks, and documentaries strongly suggest that he believes the world is on the verge of disaster—and that without Judeo-Christianity, the American culture war cannot be won, enlightened capitalism cannot function, and “Islamic fascism” cannot be defeated. [...]

Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West. In the words of Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the West offers “freedom from moral principles, from common human values, from responsibility for one’s actions. We see how this freedom is destructive and aggressive. Instead of respect for the feelings of other people, it preaches an all-is-permitted attitude.”

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The Guardian: Demolishing Dalian: China's 'Russian' city is erasing its heritage – in pictures

Sitting on the Liaodong Peninsula in north-east China, the second-tier city of Dalian has a complex history. Transformed in 1898 from a small fishing village into a major port city under Russian rule, Dalian passed into Japanese hands in the 1930s before falling under Soviet control after the second world war. In 1950, the USSR handed the city over to the Chinese government.

Dalian’s cityscape reflects this history, with Japanese and Russian architecture surrounded by gleaming new commercial skyscrapers. One of the most famous examples is Russian Street, originally called Engineer Street. [...]

Last November, the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) sued the city government in an effort to protect this network of historic streets. A month earlier it has been announced that a reconstruction project would transform the area into a high-end commercial and business district. The move is a familiar one in Chinese cities: according to a heritage survey conducted between 2007 and 2011, around 44,000 heritage sites in China had been demolished since the 1980s.

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