The Atlantic: Mexico’s Revenge

In August, Peña Nieto invited Trump to Mexico City, based on the then-contrarian notion that Trump might actually become president. Instead of branding Trump a toxic threat to Mexico’s well-being, he lavished the Republican nominee with legitimacy. Peña Nieto paid a severe, perhaps mortal, reputational cost for his magnanimity. Before the meeting, former President Vicente Fox had warned Peña Nieto that if he went soft on Trump, history would remember him as a “traitor.” In the months following the meeting, his approval rating plummeted, falling as low as 12 percent in one poll—which put his popularity on par with Trump’s own popularity among Mexicans. The political lesson was clear enough: No Mexican leader could abide Trump’s imprecations and hope to thrive. Since then, the Mexican political elite has begun to ponder retaliatory measures that would reassert the country’s dignity, and perhaps even cause the Trump administration to reverse its hostile course. With a presidential election in just over a year—and Peña Nieto prevented by term limits from running again—vehement responses to Trump are considered an electoral necessity. Memos outlining policies that could wound the United States have begun flying around Mexico City. These show that Trump has committed the bully’s error of underestimating the target of his gibes. As it turns out, Mexico could hurt the United States very badly. [...]

Once the threat of Soviet expansion into the Western Hemisphere vanished, the United States paid less-careful attention to Latin America. It passively ceded vast markets to the Chinese, who were hunting for natural resources to feed their sprouting factories and build their metropolises. The Chinese invested heavily in places like Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela, discreetly flexing soft power as they funded new roads, refineries, and railways. From 2000 to 2013, China’s bilateral trade with Latin America increased by 2,300 percent, according to one calculation. A raft of recently inked deals forms the architecture for China to double its annual trade with the region, to $500 billion, by the middle of the next decade. Mexico, however, has remained a grand exception to this grand strategy. China has had many reasons for its restrained approach in Mexico, including the fact that Mexico lacks most of the export commodities that have attracted China to other Latin American countries. But Mexico also happens to be the one spot in Latin America where the United States would respond with alarm to a heavy Chinese presence.

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Politico: French election: key questions for the final days

Mélenchon has campaigned on leftist populist themes, giving vent to “the rage” of the people against the rich and calling for a “citizens’ insurrection” against France’s globalized elite. His platform is based on more taxes for the well-to-do, massive public spending, and a promise to push for a major overhaul of the European Union’s founding treaties, with the threat of leaving the EU if he doesn’t get his way. There’s little to no chance other EU governments would agree to his demands, which would make a French exit from the union more than likely. 

The big question is whether increased attacks on his character and scrutiny of his platform will stop his rise in the polls. His suggestion that France should join the so-called “Bolivarian alliance”, an economic treaty between Cuba and Venezuela with Iran, Syria and Russia as “observers,” could give pause to socialist voters who are considering backing Mélenchon because they consider Macron too centrist for their tastes. [...]

It is possible. The National Front leader has fallen from around 28 percent of the vote in early February to about 21 to 22 percent now. She was considered two months ago the favorite in the first round by a comfortable margin. But she is now threatened by both Mélenchon and Fillon, the conservative candidate who has proved surprisingly resilient in the face of multiple scandals. Mélenchon is picking up votes from Le Pen, but her main threat is Fillon, who has based his campaign on hard-right themes, notably on social issues, which appeal to core National Front voters. According to the daily IFOP survey, both Mélenchon and Fillon are still 3 percentage points behind Le Pen, but there is still time for many undecided voters to make up (or change) their minds. [...]

Macron is trying to compensate for the youthful, at times amateurish, nature of his presidential run — he has never appointed a campaign manager — with increased energy. He filled the Zenith, Paris’ largest arena, with 20,000 people for a rally Monday night and is planning to campaign non-stop this week, culminating with three rallies on the same day in his home region of Picardie on Friday. He remains vulnerable to a self-inflicted injury, such as a major gaffe, but has sounded more disciplined in recent days as the race tightens.

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Politico: Le Pen eyes life outside politics …

Not only is she hugely popular in southern France, where voters prefer her socially conservative brand of politics to her aunt’s nationalist statism, she is also one of only two National Front members of the French parliament. [...]

Despite her youth, she has been active in politics for nearly a decade, urged to add her name to a National Front ticket by her grandfather in 2008. Four years later, she made a bid for a parliament seat while still in law school, becoming the chamber’s youngest member in modern history. Maréchal-Le Pen completed her degree but, unlike her aunt, never worked as a lawyer, choosing instead to launch herself headlong into a political career. [...]

Fêted as a political “rock star” by American alt-right news site Breitbart, the younger Le Pen is working to develop an international profile by speaking more to foreign media. And, unlike her aunt, a major TV talk show devotee, she is partial to print media and off-beat interview formats that let her wax at length on topics such as the idea of a “Great Replacement” of white French people by immigrants. [...]

If Marine Le Pen loses the presidential election, the 2018 National Front congress is almost guaranteed to see a showdown between those who backed Vice President Florian Philippot’s agenda for the party — a statist, anti-European Union approach that Marine has more or less made her own — and those who, like the younger Le Pen, favor a more traditionally right-wing approach focused on conservative social values and less on an all-powerful French state.

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Politico: 5 ways the EU could send a message to Viktor Orbán

They are just the most recent examples of Hungary straying from the EU line: there are 66 pending infringement against Hungary, several of which involve cases of alleged discrimination against non-Hungarians.

So far, Brussels has been unable to lay a glove on Orbán and Frans Timmermans, the Commission’s first vice president, was cautious about taking further steps, saying Wednesday that “we have to be on a very firm legal ground before we start infringement procedures.” Actions taken so far have been mainly on technical issues: but this time the protection of Article 2 of the EU treaties — on core of EU values — is at stake, Timmermans said. [...]

Orbán’s strongest link to Brussels is his Fidesz party’s membership of the European People’s Party. According to the EPP’s statutes, suspending or excluding a party would need to be approved by the European Parliament at the request of either the party’s president — Frenchman Joseph Daul — or by seven MEPs from five different countries. But it’s not in the EPP’s interests to kick out the Hungarians. The EPP has 216 seats in the Parliament — making it the biggest group, ahead of the Socialists and Democrats on 189 — and losing the 12 Fidesz MEPs would shrink its lead. Plus, Hungarian MEPs are seen as loyal and hard working. [...]

In the 2014-2020 budgetary period, Hungary is slated to receive around €29,6 billion in EU funds to finance motorways, railways, energy projects and other schemes in a country whose GDP is around €126 billion a year. It’s an important source of cash for Budapest but the likes of Italy and Sweden are keen to claw back some EU funding if Central European countries are reluctant to host refugees. However, changing the EU’s budget rules before 2020 would be impossible.

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Motherboard: Russia and America Are Collaborating on the Most Ambitious Venus Mission Ever

But given that our sister world experiences average temperatures of 462 degrees Celsius (864 degrees Fahrenheit), crushing 90-bar pressures, and suffocating clouds of carbon dioxide laced with sulfuric acid rain, it's no wonder that Venus has not inspired the same frontier spirit as say, Mars. Indeed, proposed Venus missions have been repeatedly snubbed in favor of others to the red planet, asteroids, and less wholly nightmarish worlds. 

Now, NASA and the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute (IKI) are teaming up on a project called Venera-D, which makes the case that Venus is as valuable an exploration target as any alien world, perhaps more so because the planet's runaway greenhouse gas effect, which generates its harsh conditions, can inform our efforts to prevent a similar problem on Earth. [...]

This Russian/American partnership, formed in 2015, is called the Venera-D Joint Science Definition Team (JSDT). In January 2017, it released a thorough report of the two nations' shared objectives on Venus, which include extended observations of the surface environment over a period of months, precise measurements of atmospheric aerosols and composition, and a solution to the longstanding mystery of atmospheric superrotation, a phenomenon in which wind speeds on Venus outpace the planet's rotation by a factor of 60.

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The Conversation: Facts are not always more important than opinions: here’s why

To call something a fact is, presumably, to make a claim that it is true. This isn’t a problem for many things, although defending such a claim can be harder than you think. [...]

It’s not only that facts can change that is a problem. While we might be happy to consider it a fact that Earth is spherical, we would be wrong to do so because it’s actually a bit pear-shaped. Thinking it a sphere, however, is very different from thinking it to be flat.

Asimov expressed this beautifully in his essay The Relativity of Wrong. For Asimov, the person who thinks Earth is a sphere is wrong, and so is the person who thinks the Earth is flat. But the person who thinks that they are equally wrong is more wrong than both. [...]

Matters of opinion are non-empirical claims, and include questions of value and of personal preference such as whether it’s ok to eat animals, and whether vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate. Ethics is an exemplar of a system in which matters of fact cannot by themselves decide courses of action.

Matters of opinion can be informed by matters of fact (for example, finding out that animals can suffer may influence whether I choose to eat them), but ultimately they are not answered by matters of fact (why is it relevant if they can suffer?).

Opinions are not just pale shadows of facts; they are judgements and conclusions. They can be the result of careful and sophisticated deliberation in areas for which empirical investigation is inadequate or ill-suited.

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The Intercept: France's Bernie Sanders Started His Own Party and Is Surging in the Polls

JEAN-LUC MÉLENCHON, an insurgent left-wing candidate for France’s presidency, is surging. His candidacy, organized under the newly-established party La France Insoumise (“Unsubmissive France”) has gone from a quixotic bid to a viable challenge in just a few months.

Railing against growing economic inequality, participation in foreign wars, and political corruption, Mélenchon has skyrocketed in the polls from distant fourth to within a hair’s breadth of the frontrunners. (This rise has been accompanied by the release of a web-based video game called “Fiscal Kombat” where Mélenchon fights corrupt politicians and bankers.) [...]

Many have drawn comparisons between Mélenchon and Bernie Sanders. Raquel Garrido, a spokesperson for Mélenchon’s campaign, told Jacobin Magazine in early April that, like Sanders, Mélenchon is embracing a populist platform that seeks to speak to every portion of society, not just the traditional left. [...]

Mélenchon is probably looking at the ruling Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon — polling at eight percent — and wondering if Hamon’s voters will prevent him from going to the second round of voting. Mélenchon was once a junior minister in the the Socialist Party, which is France’s version of the Democrats. But as the Socialists moved towards neoliberalism, he left the party and for a long time was in the political wilderness. When he announced last year that he would be challenging the mainstream parties in France’s presidential election, he was considered a non-factor.

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CityLab: Focusing on the Hidden Horror of American Lynchings

“It seems that many Americans, especially white Americans, either don't know much about lynchings or are reticent to discuss it,” Oliver Clasper, a London-born photographer and journalist, says via email. Clasper has set out to provoke a conversation with a project he calls The Spaces We Inherit. In photographs and interviews, he is documenting historic sites where African Americans were terrorized and murdered by white neighbors, and how individuals living in the orbit of this buried past are affected by it today.

With logistical support from the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative, as well as research assistance from the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis and others, Clasper has pinpointed and photographed 10 sites so far, in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. That is only a small fraction of the 4,000-plus known lynchings that have occurred throughout the U.S. since the 19th century. But Clasper’s selections testify to the breadth of circumstances and historic moments in which racially-fueled, extra-judicial killings occurred—and the silence and obscurity into which they’ve often been cast. [...]

“There's certainly this notion that lynchings occurred in the distant past, but that's not the case,” says Clasper. In many cases, the town squares, roadsides, and neighborhood streets where these atrocities took place still exist—and remain unmarked, more often than not. [...]

Though Clasper does not advocate for one approach or another, he was inspired after learning about the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based civil rights organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration and “excessive punishment” in the United States. As part of EJI’s research on the history that shaped racial injustices in those systems today, volunteers have been collecting soil from scores of lynching sites throughout the South. Those bottles have already been exhibited at EJI headquarters, and represent a kind of preamble to a national lynching memorial the organization is currently raising funds to build outside Montgomery, Alabama. The design is composed of 800 heavy columns—one for every county where a lynching has been documented.

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FiveThirtyEight: ‘Reluctant’ Trump Voters Swung The Election. Here’s How They Think He’s Doing.

But not every Donald Trump voter was quite so enthusiastic. While we’ve always known his core base was a loyal one, Trump made it to the White House thanks in no small part to a group of voters who didn’t necessarily like him but were willing to give him a chance. Nearly 20 percent of voters in the 2016 presidential election had an unfavorable view of both Trump and Hillary Clinton, according to exit polls, and Trump won that group 47 percent to 30 percent. That made the difference. [...]

We can’t go back and find the voters who cast an unenthusiastic ballot for Trump.1 But FiveThirtyEight partnered with SurveyMonkey to survey more than 7,000 American adults during the first week of April and asked Trump voters how enthusiastic their vote for the president had been. (We gave respondents five levels of excitement to choose, from “very excited” to “not excited at all”.)2 About 15 percent of Trump voters said they weren’t excited to cast a ballot for him. This group differs demographically and has different policy priorities from the rest of the Trump cohort.

Who are the reluctant Trump voters? Like most Trump supporters, they are overwhelmingly white — 85 percent — and middle age and older. Forty-three percent of reluctant Trumpers were 55 or older, as were 49 percent of other Trump voters.

The biggest difference between the two groups is education level: 37 percent of reluctant Trumpers had at least a college degree, while only 25 percent of other Trump supporters had a college or postgraduate degree. This enthusiasm gap for Trump among better-educated Trump voters partly explains why Republicans — most prominently the president — are keeping an eye on the special election today in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, Republican Tom Price’s old seat. Georgia’s 6th has one of the highest levels of educational attainment in the country, and the race is tight, with Democratic newcomer Jon Ossoff making a strong showing in polls and fundraising.

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