BBC4: Afghanistan: The Lessons of War

A former commander of British and Coalition forces in Helmand embarks on a personal journey to find out what has been achieved by the thirteen-year campaign in Afghanistan. It is a quest that leads Former Major General Andrew Mackay to some of the key military and political figures of the past decade.He puts searching questions to former US General David Petraeus and ISAF Commanders General John McColl and General David Richards, to discover if there ever was a coherent strategy for coalition troops.

He reflects on what was achieved in Afghanistan with leading politicians including former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband.And he looks to the future of the country with a senior figure from the current Afghan government - Mohammad Mustafa Mastoor, Deputy Minister for Finance.

General Mackay also believes that any future interventions should be based on lessons learnt in the Afghanistan campaign. But what are those lessons? He hears from experts who have studied the campaign to help him consider the role he played and to find out what conclusions can be drawn.

Andrew Mackay : "I think whoever you are when you go to an extreme environment such as Helmand, you are never the same person when you come back. I was interested in considering the role that I played as the commander of British forces in Helmand and the journey that it had taken me on."

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Bloomberg: Eight Maps That Explain France’s Macron-Le Pen Election

For the first time in modern-day France, neither of the two mainstream parties made the second round of a presidential election. In their place, Emmanuel Macron, a former Socialist economy minister who left the party to run for the presidency, and Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Front, will face off on May 7.

Here are eight maps to help make sense of all that’s scrambling the political landscape in France—from anti-establishment frustration to blue-collar angst and urban-rural divide.

In Sunday’s presidential first-round election, Macron won many departments—like counties—that went Socialist in 2012. Le Pen, by contrast, made most of her gains in the heartlands of the center-right. Both were aided by the poor performance of the candidates from those parties. Macron ultimately won 33 departments and territories that current President Francois Hollande had won in 2012, while Le Pen picked up 30 that had gone to UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. (France has 96 mainland departments plus several overseas departments and territories.)

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Political Critique: Shutting the Door Behind Them

But what the British and Polish populist far right share in common ideologically is also what may be dividing their communities from each other within Europe itself. While anti-Muslim attitudes have exploded, ethnic nationalism among individual European nations is also rising. Outside of Poland’s borders, Poles themselves paradoxically sometimes become “the others.” In many communities in the UK, Polish migrants are viewed as “uncivilized” outsiders from the East who sponge off government handouts. Polish right-wingers put the “East” or “the uncivilized” further east, however, and view Poles abroad as “part of the European family,” since they are white, Christian and, as members of the EU, entitled to free movement and employment across borders in other EU countries. [...]

Most Poles can’t see the irony of the situation in which they see immigrants coming to Poland through the same lens Polish immigrants are seen in Western Europe. The far right tries to differentiate Polish emigration to other EU nations, by citing a desire for “special treatment” from richer EU countries due to hardships imposed by economic transformation and the legacy of the Cold War and soviet rule. The belief in “cultural proximity” is also widespread – “we have the right to migrate because, unlike others, we are similar to Western Europeans.” [...]

One thing that xenophobia in the States, Western Europe and Eastern Europe share in common is cultural egotistism: we all know that good days are in the past and whatever remains we prefer to redistribute among ourselves all the while pushing “newcomers” to the social bottom. And even when the newcomers move up in the social ladder, they themselves are quick to marginalize those who follow a few steps behind them.

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The Telegraph: Plastic-eating wax worm 'extremely exciting' for global pollution crisis

Researchers have described the tiny caterpillar’s ability to break down even the toughest plastics as “extremely exciting” and said the discovery could be engineered into an environmentally-friendly solution on an industrial scale.

Around a trillion plastic bags are used around the world each year, of which a huge number find their way into the oceans or are discarded into landfill.

Commonly found living in bee hives, or harvested as fishing bait, the waxworm proved it could eat its way through polyethylene, which is notoriously hard to break down, more than 1,400 times faster than other organisms.

Scientists believe the creature has potent enzymes in its saliva or gut which attack plastic’s chemical bonds, in the same way they digest the complex wax found in hives.

The waxworm’s potential was discovered by accident when biologist and amateur beekeeper Federica Bertocchini cleaned out her hives and temporarily placed the parasites in a plastic shopping bag.

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FiveThirtyEight: Marine Le Pen Is In A Much Deeper Hole Than Trump Ever Was

Although vote counts are still being finalized, the first-round result should be a good one for pollsters, which correctly had Macron and Le Pen in the top two positions. In fact, the pre-election polls — which had shown Macron at 24 percent, Le Pen at 22 percent, the center-right François Fillon at 20 percent and the far-left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon at 19 percent — should come within a percentage point or two of the final result for each of the top four candidates.

The same polls show Macron in a dominant position in the runoff. He leads Le Pen by 26 percentage points in polls testing the two-way matchup, according to data compiled by G. Elliott Morris of The Crosstab. [...]

But in my view, the conventional wisdom espoused by analysts such as Bremmer is more likely to be way more out to lunch. Before the U.S. election, Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by only about 2 percentage points in the average swing state.1 In the Brexit vote, the “Remain” campaign’s lead was at least as narrow: about 2 points according to a simple average of polls, or just 0.5 percentage points according to a more complex averaging method. So while Trump’s victory and Brexit were historic events in world history, they were utterly routine occurrences from a polling standpoint; 2- or 3-point polling errors are extremely common. [...]

However, there’s no evidence that candidates such as Le Pen systematically outperform their polls. Across dozens of European elections since 2012, in fact, nationalist and right-wing parties have been as likely to underperform their polls as to overperform them.

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Political Critique: This is Why Orbán Will Capitulate on the Question of the CEU

It cannot be emphasized enough that Orbán’s politics are powercentric. His decisions are based on whether a policy will strengthen or weaken his position. He only understands force. With regard to the question of the CEU, there are four different groups who are challenging his authority: Hungarian protesters, EU politicians, American diplomats and the academic elite. But it is clear that these ʿattacks’ do not carry the same weight when it comes to whether or not the prime minister will reverse the decision. [...]

The impact of these demonstrations is questionable. Orbán doesn’t waver in the face of a crowd of thousands unless one of his loyal research institutes says that potential voters may also take to the streets (see the demonstrations against a proposed internet tax in 2015). In any case, Fidesz doesn’t rely on Budapest to win elections. The demonstrations held in other cities, moreover, attracted only a couple hundred protesters, so they have not caused much alarm either. [...]

It seems that the CEU scandal, the law on NGOs and the national consultation campaign slandering Brussels has been too much for the European People’s Party (EPP) too. Fidesz has recently received a few unexpected blows from them as well. However, overestimating the power of the EU front would be a mistake. Firstly, the EU machinery reacts very slowly, and secondly, if they were to sanction Hungary too strictly, they run the risk of pushing Orbán into the arms of his new best friend, Putin. Such a blatant break with the EU would likely mean the end of Orbán though, so perhaps the Union has more room to maneuver here than they think. If Brussels were to tighten the leash Fidesz would lose face in Hungary, and lose the favour with Putin which Orbán has recently been courting more openly. Let’s leave that problem to Fidesz though.

The attack against the CEU will likely fail, however, because Orbán had expected the Trump administration, which also considers George Soros a political opponent, to turn a blind eye to this assault upon an American university. However this was a big mistake. Even in Trump’s New World, American interests and the protection of democracy are still more important than political skirmishes. Trump’s administration backed the CEU completely, and Orbán hasn’t yet lost all common sense. He won’t be willing to actually pick a fight with the USA just yet.

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Land of Maps: Percentage of people that rank Europe as the first or second most important group to which they belong

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Nautilus Magazine: The Case For Leaving City Rats Alone

Prior to Himsworth’s work, in fact, the sum total knowledge of Canada’s wild rats could be boiled down to a single study of 43 rats living in a landfill in nearby Richmond in 1984. So, six years ago, she stocked an old mini van with syringes, needles, and gloves and live-trapped more than 700 of V6A’s rats to sample their DNA and learn about the bacteria they carried.

Her research has made her reconsider the age-old labeling of rats as invaders that need to be completely fought back. They may, instead, be just as much a part of our city as sidewalks and lampposts. We would all be better off if, under most circumstances, we simply left them alone. [...]

Which brings into question the constant human quest to disrupt rats and their habitats. As much as rats thrive in disrupted environments, Byers says, they’ve managed to create very stable colonies within them. Rats live in tight-knit family groups that are confined to single city blocks, and which rarely interact. The Rat Project hypothesized that when a rat is ousted from its family by pest control, its family might flee its single-block territory, spreading diseases that are usually effectively quarantined to that family. In other words, the current pest control approach of killing one rat per concerned homeowner call could be backfiring, and spreading disease rather than preventing it. [...]

A significant finding from the project’s original phase, Byers tells me, is that not every rat in V6A carried the same disease. Rat families are generally confined to a single city block, and while one block might be wholly infected with a given bacteria, adjacent blocks were often completely disease free. “Disease risk doesn’t really relate to the number of rats you’re exposed to as much as it does which family you interact with,” says Robbin Lindsay, a researcher at Canada’s National Microbiology Lab who assisted the Vancouver Rat Project screen for disease. If those family units are scattered, diseases could potentially spread and multiply—something Byers is hoping to figure out through her Ph.D. work.

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The Guardian: French polls show populist fever is here to stay as globalisation makes voters pick new sides

One of the forces driving the populist dynamic is the gradual sapping of the social categories which used to form the basis of the middle classes. In France, Britain, the Netherlands, Austria and the US the same people – blue- and white-collar workers, intermediate occupations and farmers – are joining the populist revolt. Moreover, this movement started long ago. Support for Trump is rooted in the rise of financial capitalism which started during the Clinton era. Brexit goes back to the rollback of industry initiated by Thatcher. In France, the (far-right) Front National (FN) began gaining momentum when heavy industry went into decline in the 1980s.

So does this mean that the globalised model is not working? Not at all, but it is absurd to look at the global economy in binary terms, for or against. For or against neoliberalism. The truth is that this model, primarily based on an international division of labour, creates substantial wealth but does nothing to bond society as a whole. The job market has become deeply polarised and mainly concentrated in big cities, squeezing out the middle classes. For the first time in history, working people no longer live in the places where jobs and wealth are created. [...]

All over the developed world the populist vote is gathering strength outside the big cities, in small and middling towns, and the countryside. In France these “peripheral” territories are driving the FN dynamic. In the US, the peripheral states put Trump in power, much as Brexit prevailed thanks to peripheral areas of the UK. In Austria support for Norbert Hofer, the far-right candidate in the recent presidential contest, comes from similar places. They are home to the majority of the working classes, disconnected and increasingly sedentary. Such territorial dynamics gather momentum as more mobile groups – the higher social classes, immigrants and minorities – concentrate in the cities. In this way the new social geography renews the old divide between sedentary and nomadic.

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