The Huffington Post: Why Poland's ruling party don't like popular mayors

The ruling party proposes that the limit would take place “immediately”, and include currently acting city mayors. As a result, in the coming local elections, out of a total of 107 mayors of big Polish cities and towns, as many as 66 of them would have to resign and never be able to apply for the office. Since out of 107 bigger Polish cities and towns, only 10 mayors belong to the currently governing party, the move is obviously designed to oust the popular city mayors with different party affiliation in order to promote their own candidates.

There has been an outcry of indignation in Poland. Many agree that this is not the beginning, but the continuation of a dismantling and demolition of a democratic legal system. It aims at disciplining the society into subjects of the omnipotent power. [...]

In Europe, there is no lack of mayors, whom people had entrusted with the function to act as their leaders for 3, 4 or even more terms. Herbert Schmalstieg was the mayor of Hanover for 34 years, from 1972 to 2006. Michael Häupl has been serving as mayor of Vienna since 1994 till today. The Hanseatic city of Lübeck has been enjoying the same mayor, Bernd Saxe for 17 years now. And in Hungary, whose practices are so dear to Polish ruling party PiS, there are city mayors with long experience. In Pécs - 12 years with a break between terms ruled Zsolt Pava, and in Szeged for 15 years - Laszlo Botka.

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Quartz: To defeat Marine Le Pen, France’s center-left must put their nation ahead of party politics

As a result, growing numbers of mainstream liberals are frantically plotting to abandon their radical Socialist wing to block the anti-immigrant, Muslim-bashing, and far more electable Le Pen junior from qualifying for the May ballot. (The French presidential election has two rounds, one on April 23 and the decider on May 7, with the two first-place getters in the first ballot qualifying for the final). Ahead of Sunday, senior Socialist party figures are signaling they will, if required, break away from the hard-left tax and spend candidate Benoit Hamon. Hamon is favored to defeat ex-prime minister Manuel Valls for his party’s nomination but seems unlikely to vanquish Le Pen.

Enter Emmanuel Macron. The 39-year-old independent candidate is a dynamic if relative newcomer to French politics whose centrist, modernizing stance could, according to his backers, unite the moderate left faithful and pull votes away from the embattled center-right. Macron resigned in 2016 as outgoing president Francois Hollande’s economy minister after pushing through landmark labor law reforms. He is running on an economically liberal, pro-Europe platform under the banner of his political grouping, “On the Move.” [...]

Macron already has the friendly ear of former Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal. Other sympathizers include supporters of Valls. A group of MPs allied with Valls’s push for the nomination have started circulating a communique to release early next week, paving the way for a mass defection to Macron. Even France’s Green party has signaled it may be willing to join forces. Dany ‘The Red” Cohn-Bendit, co-founder of the ecologist party EELV, said he was ready to vote for Macron because he was “the only candidate” who could avoid the impossible dilemma of a Le Pen-Fillon duel. Cohn-Bendit explained (link in French) Macron’s vertiginous rise in the polls as evidence of “a desire for renewal, new faces, new ideas, new personalities.”

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Mashable: Rebuilding Dresden

Over two days and nights in February 1945, American and British bombers dropped 2,400 tons of high explosives and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the German city of Dresden.

The barrage turned the cultural jewel of Saxony into a hellish inferno. A firestorm raged across the city, generating hurricane-force winds and temperatures near 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Civilians sheltering in basements suffocated as the city above them was consumed by flame.

When the fires were finally extinguished, an estimated 25,000 people had died and the baroque city center had been reduced to rubble.

A few months later, the war in Europe ended. Under Soviet occupation, the survivors began the daunting task of cleaning and rebuilding their city.

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Vox: Trump says his refugee ban is about protecting America. It's really about Islamophobia.

If you take a close look at Trump’s executive order, you see that it contains a major loophole — an exemption from its ban on refugee entry to the United States for “religious minorities” being persecuted by their governments. Who’s going to qualify for these exemptions? A lot of Christians — according to Trump himself. Here’s what he said in a Friday interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody: [...]

The text of Trump’s executive order never uses the words “Islam” or “Muslim.” Perhaps that’s for legal reasons. But it’s so full of code words that it’s impossible to mistake the intent. [...]

Which “violent ideologies” are those? Surely it’s not white nationalism — the executive order doesn’t ban Scandinavian skinheads from entering the United States. Instead, it bars anyone and everyone from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya, making clear that the theory behind this order is that Muslims, specifically foreign-born Muslims, are seen as an especial kind of threat of violent extremism.

This is a dubious theory. Since 9/11, home-grown white supremacists and similar extremists have killed more Americans in the US than all Islamic extremists, American or non-American, put together. It seems that, if your goal is saving lives and stopping extremism, it makes more sense to look at home than singling out a group of immigrants who come, disproportionately, from one religious group.

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Deutsche Welle: Polish government wins Gdansk World War II museum case

The museum tells the story of World War II by including all the nations involved in the conflict, with a particular focus on civilian suffering instead of military campaigns. Several prominent historians were behind the development of the museum, considered by some as one of the best efforts to explain the global context of the war.

But the PiS has opposed the international angle of the war explained at the museum, preferring instead that it focus on Polish suffering and heroic resistance to Nazi Germany. It is a stance in line with the party's efforts to use the power of the state to develop stronger nationalism and pride.

Shortly after the PiS swept to power in late 2015, Culture Minister Piotr Glinski tried to take over the museum by merging it with the Museum of Westerplatte and the War of 1939, which has not even been built.

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The Telegraph: 'Finding out my priest husband was gay was devastating. It was a death'

13 January 2000 was the date that turned Ruth McElroy's life upside down. On a bleak weekday afternoon her husband of 16 years came home from work to deliver the news that their relationship was not what she had thought. [...]

For many, the new recommendations encourage secrecy, rather than honesty. It's a subject on which Ruth McElroy feels especially strongly, as Larsen's position within the church was another reason he felt compelled to lie to his family for so long.

"No, it isn't right to suppress or ignore it," she says. "It only makes things worse."

The week after Larsen broke the news, McElroy spent three hours a day on the phone to charity Changing Attitude who helped her realise that she didn’t “turn” him gay. Her emotions ranged in the early days and months from seething rage and denial to a profound sadness.

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Quartz: “Mr. President, don’t build this wall”: The Berlin mayor’s powerful message for Donald Trump

In 1987, US president Ronald Reagan famously stood at the Berlin Wall separating the German city—and, symbolically, the world during the Cold War—and spoke to the Soviet Union of peace, prosperity, and liberalization. [...]

Now Berlin’s mayor has invoked that iconic moment in a message for US president Donald Trump, who has vowed to build an expensive wall to keep out immigrants at the US border with its southern neighbor, Mexico. [...]

“Now, in the early years of the 21st century, we cannot let all our historical experience get trashed by the very people to whom we owe much of our freedom: the Americans,” Müller wrote. “I call on the president of the USA not to go down that road to isolation and ostracism. Wherever such divides exist, like in Korea and Cyprus, they cause slavery and pain. I call on the American president: remember your forerunner, Ronald Reagan. Remember his words: ‘Tear down this wall.’ And so I say: ‘Mr. President, don’t build this wall.'”

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JSTOR Daily: The History of the KKK in American Politics

White supremacism is on the rise again. The Ku Klux Klan supported Donald Trump for president. Former Klansman David Duke made a bid for the Louisiana Senate, hate incidents followed the election, and Trump named as White House senior counselor Steve Bannon, former head of Breitbart.com, a website popular with white supremacists. This isn’t the first time that so-called white nationalists have been involved with American politics. In the 1920s, during what historians call the Ku Klux Klan’s “second wave,” Klan members served in all levels of government.

The Klan didn’t start as a political force, but as a lark. Shortly after the Civil War ended, some Confederate veterans got together and played around with hoods and robes, wearing them while riding  horses through town in Pulaski, Tennessee. They formed a secret group with outlandish names for its officials, like “Grand Cyclops” for the leader. When they saw how their costumed rides scared blacks, the group turned to vigilantism. [...]

The Klan was a big issue in the 1872 presidential election, but the group was in its death throes. It rose again after the 1915 release of D. W. Griffith’s pro-Klan movie, The Birth of a Nation, when the country was reacting to many societal changes brought on by the temperance movement and World War I. This second-wave Klan emerged as a morality police to fight immigration, minorities, and the loose morals of speakeasies, bootlegging, and political corruption. While the first Klan focused on blacks, this wave also fought Catholics, Jews, intellectuals, and anybody else it felt was hurting America. At heart, it was a nativist movement that drew sympathy from those who still saw blacks as unequal to whites.

Heavy marketing drove membership in the second Klan to between 3 and 7 million; that added up to a lot of commissions for recruiters, who got a percentage of member fees. The majority of this KKK were mainstream, mostly Protestant, citizens. A portion of the second-wave Klansmen murdered or beat those they considered un-American, but a majority saw the group as a social or even charitable club. Klaverns gave money to churches and helped other community groups such as baseball teams. Members celebrated holidays together and attended one another’s funerals.

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