openDemocracy: The politics of being Roma in France

If French citizens enjoy such rights fully, for Roma nationals political rights might be an issue for many reasons. Being part of a specific administrative category called “Travellers” (Gens de voyage), targeted by specific legislation and living in segregated areas, Roma nationals have been isolated for years from the rest of the society; this has had a direct impact on their rights and participation in the political life in France. [...]

After WWII Roma continued to experience institutional racism, which has had a negative impact on their political participation and rights in France. Roma, so-called “nomads”, were kept in internment camps until 1946 where living conditions were not very different to those in concentration camps. [...]

Nevertheless the art.8 of the law of 1969 stipulates that the number of Travellers (Gens de voyage) assigned to a municipality must not exceed 3% of its population according to the most recent census. Local authorities may refuse to grant township to Travellers when the quota is completed. In this case, Travellers need to refer to another municipality which may in some cases be far from their living place, which creates unique obstacles to their participation during elections. [...]

In addition, art. 10 of the Law of 7 July 1969 established an obligation for Travellers to prove three years' residency in a municipality to be allowed to vote, compared to six months for any other citizens, a measure which was repealed by the Constitutional Council (Conseil Constitutionnel) in 2012 because of contradiction with the French constitution.

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Politico: Why Warsaw loves to hate Brussels

This personal attack was unprecedented, but it came only days after an eye-catching speech in the Polish parliament by Prime Minister Beata Szydło. Dredging up the fight over the relocation of refugees across the EU from 2015, she called out “the Brussels political elites … blinded by political correctness” and promised Poland won’t be “blackmailed” by the EU. To a standing ovation from the Law and Justice party caucus, she added, “We will not participate in the madness of the Brussels elites. We want to help people and not the political elites.” [...]

From Warsaw’s point of view, there seems to be little downside to continuing to pick this fight. At least the Law and Justice party appears to think so. The spitballs have kept coming even after Warsaw’s debacle at the EU summit in March, when it lost a fight over the reelection of Donald Tusk to a second term atop the European Council. No one, not even illiberal Hungary, backed Poland’s opposition to native son and PiS rival Tusk. The episode seemed to only revive Tusk’s political fortunes and give his until then demoralized Civic Platform a boost in the polls. “Today there is a clear crisis of principles in Europe,” Szydło said after the Tusk outcome in Brussels, which Waszczykowski attributed to “Berlin’s diktat.” [...]

As Czarnecki suggests, PiS is aware of the EU money on the line and the generally deep support among Poles for the EU, currently near record numbers — at 78 percent according to a March poll by IBRiS or 88 percent in an April CBOS poll, one percentage point below the recorded high in 2014. [...]

By a pragmatic reading of all this, PiS will keep up the harsh rhetoric in public — and, with a view to keeping the EU money coming and in light of the strong popular support for Europe (and the recent trend away from populist parties on the Continent), be open to accommodation and dialogue with Brussels in private. Some EU diplomats say they’re picking up signs of that.

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VICE: Why It Took So Long for Labour to Address Gay Rights

Depending on your views towards illegal wars, the introduction of tuition fees and the expansion of PFI, things largely didn't get that much better. However, in the 13 years that Blair and Brown held office, one thing certainly did: LGBT rights. By the time the Conservatives took back the keys to Downing Street in 2010, the age of consent had been equalised, civil partnerships had been introduced and out gay men were no longer barred from serving in the British Armed Forces.

But is it too easy to look back on those years with glittery, rose-tinted glasses? Labour won in an electoral landslide and yet took years to implement legislation that protected and legally validated LGBT lives. They made no Parliamentary effort to scrap Section 28 – the legislation that banned local authorities from "teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality" – until February of 2000. It remained in place until 2003. What's more, when voters gave Brown's government the boot, equal marriage – and the scrapping of the lifetime ban on men who have sex with men (MSM) from donating blood – was yet to pass through the Commons. [...]

Blair oversaw government lawyers fighting to defend British statutes that banned gay men from serving in the military at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They tried a similar trick with equalising the age of consent. Labour wasn't in power when these cases started, but, says Tatchell, they failed to retreat. He adds that the prohibition on sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace – eventually passed in 2003 – only materialised after the European Union ordered Britain to end its lack of protection for LGBT employees. When it came to decriminalising gay sex at 16 Blair gave his MPs a free vote. The last Labour government failed to introduce LGBT-inclusive HIV and sex-and-relationship education. Blair presided over a system where queer refugees could be locked away in asylum detention centres for months on end.

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CityLab: The People Left Behind When Only the 'Deserving' Poor Get Help

Kane is one of tens of thousands of Mainers affected by sweeping changes made to the state’s anti-poverty programs by the state’s Republican governor, Paul LePage. His administration has tightened eligibility for Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare, and hopes to do yet more: adding work requirements to Medicaid, removing young adults from public health coverage, and eliminating the state’s general-assistance funds for the indigent. The broad aim of these reforms is to create a safety net that provides help for the disabled, elderly, and children, but prompts able-bodied adults to help themselves. “It is this idea that all welfare should be workfare,” said Michael Hillard, an economist at the University of Southern Maine. [...]

These reforms, along with a number of other changes, drastically reduced the amount of money the state spent on safety-net programs, as well as the number of people helped. Maine dropped health coverage for an estimated 14,500 parents and 10,000 childless adults, with Medicaid enrollment declining by more than 70,000 over time. The food-stamp program shrank by more than 20 percent. The number of able-bodied adults without dependents on food stamps plummeted by more than 80 percent. The welfare program halved in size. [...]

That said, the changes do seem to have intensified poverty in the state. As Maine’s unemployment rate has dropped, its poverty rate has barely dropped. The share of Mainers experiencing food insecurity has remained elevated. The proportion of children living in deep poverty in the state has increased at eight times the national average—faster than in any other state—between 2011 and 2015. [...]

In many ways, her answers stressed a deeper truth about the safety net during a time of political polarization. Republicans tend to focus intently on individual responsibility and separating out “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor. Democrats tend to focus on universal programs and changing the social and economic structures that perpetuate poverty. Both ultimately stress that a job is the best way out of poverty. Yet neither has managed to make the labor market work for people at its very bottom.

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The Atlantic: Trump's Most Drastic Statement Yet

Climate change is the ultimate collective problem and the Paris Accord was the ultimate collective solution. Now the United States joins Syria and Nicaragua as the only nations who have refused to sign on to lower their emissions. Staff writer Uri Friedman argues Trump’s move pushes a dangerous, Darwinian world view that previously led to global war.

ArguingFromIgnorance: Election 2017 — Part 3 — Where Do The Parties Stand On The NHS?

Al Jazeera: Analysts: Leaks could threaten Emirati diplomacy

The latest email leaks from the Hotmail account of the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, could threaten Emirati diplomacy and strain regional relations, analysts say. [...]

On Saturday, hackers released what they claimed was the first in a series of emails taken from the inbox of Otaiba. The leaks have revealed a strong relationship between the UAE and think-tanks closely allied to Israel, along with Emirati efforts to tarnish the images of Qatar and Kuwait; Emirati involvement in the failed coup attempt in Turkey; and the UAE's fight against Islamist movements, particularly Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. [...]

Some of the leaked emails include a detailed agenda for a meeting scheduled later this month between officials from the UAE government and representatives of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think-tank. The agenda includes a joint assessment of the changes that have taken place in Saudi Arabia, which proposes a plan to support Saudi stability and its new policy directions.

The agenda also includes a review of internal Saudi policies, domestic challenges faced by the Saudi leadership, foreign policy and the kingdom's role in stripping legitimacy from worldwide "jihad".

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Vox: Trump pulling out of the Paris climate agreement is great news … for China

With the US stepping away from its role as a leader of the global fight against climate change, Beijing is already moving to fill the void, giving it a chance to benefit both diplomatically and economically. [...]

After Trump withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China inserted itself into trade talks among other nations disappointed by America’s reversal. As Canada and Mexico have felt spurned by Trump during the runup to renegotiating NAFTA, China has emerged as a more reliable trading prospect. [...]

In a statement to the press, Miguel Arias Cañete, the European Union commissioner on climate action and energy, made the point even more forcefully: "No one should be left behind, but the EU and China have decided to move forward. Our successful cooperation on issues like emissions trading and clean technologies are bearing fruit. Now is the time to further strengthen these ties to keep the wheels turning for ambitious global climate action.” [...]

To make that a little more concrete, let’s take something like China’s jaw-droppingly ambitious One Belt, One Road initiative. It’s a Chinese-funded infrastructure project designed to connect China to 64 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa that make up around 60 percent of the world’s population.

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The New Yorker: The Renewed Importance of Pope Francis's Encyclical on Climate Change

But the dangerously degraded planet, for Francis, is a manifestation of a deeper problem, for “we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships.” Though the Pope would not say so, Trump is an embodiment of the moral pollution that generates atmospheric pollution, a sign that something has gone gravely wrong in the way we humans relate to one another. Trump, the compulsive tweeter, is a product and exploiter of the digital overload that generates, in Francis’s words, “a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature,” that leaves us blocked from “direct contact with the pain, fears, and the joys of others.” The disorder is widespread; when the President divides the world between winners and losers, many people agree with him. The Paris accord, which upholds the ideal of human solidarity, rejected this paradigm, which, ultimately, is why its maestro rejected Paris. But the zero-sum mode of organizing life—personally and internationally—brings nothing except death, and the planet is telling us so.

Unlike most environmentalists, Francis locates the heart of climate degradation in the economic and social degradation of human beings. As the inverter of hierarchies, he views every problem through the lens of those on the bottom. It is not enough to save Earth. Francis criticizes “economists, financiers, and experts in technology” who, using “green rhetoric,” promote the eco-capitalism and technoscience that might clean the water and the air, or cope with rising sea levels, but would still preserve the cult of unlimited growth, promote open-ended consumption, reinforce an inequitable distribution of goods, and protect a market economy that continues to ravage the poor—an approach that “leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.” [...]

What Trump offers to the nation and the world is only fear. Even those who grasp the urgency of the climate crisis may be tempted to see it as an already lost cause, a deadly eradicator of hope. They might, even in spite of themselves, join Trump in his blatant quitting. But, for Francis, resignation before the obliteration of hope is itself deadly. While the Pope, in “Laudato Si’,” argues that we must accept human responsibility for what threatens human survival, he still insists that we “are also capable of rising above ourselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start.” Faced with a threatened environment, we can do that. Faced with a foolish nihilist for President, we can do that.

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The New York Review of Books: The Paris Catastrophe

Even the most skilled chairperson would have failed at Paris, however, were it not for years of hard work and preparation by some participants. The efforts of Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, representing the US and China respectively and together the largest emitters of greenhouse gases globally, were crucial in this regard, as was the work of many in Europe, India, and the small island nations. Without their efforts, we might still be without an international agreement on climate change.

The fact that the agreement took so long to broker, however, has come at considerable cost. Had the world agreed on an approach to dealing with climate change at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, we would have had a much easier path to decarbonizing the economy and avoiding 2⁰C of warming (which is widely accepted in political negotiations as the threshold of dangerous climate change). Had we reached an agreement in Copenhagen, we might still have been able to stay below 2⁰C simply by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases hard and fast. But the roughly 50 gigatons of CO2 equivalent emitted each year since then have made it all but impossible to avoid 2⁰C solely by cutting emissions. In order to meet the goals agreed to in Paris, we will need to develop ways of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at enormous scale. (The agreement aims at limiting warming to between 1.5 and 2⁰C. My recent book Atmosphere of Hope outlines the technologies and methods available to reduce CO2 at the gigaton scale.) [...]

Even more dangerous for the US, I think, is the opportunity offered to China by Trump vacating the field of climate action. China’s success in cornering the lion’s share of the global solar panel market should act as a warning to the US that success in manufacturing in the modern world requires more than hard work and entrepreneurship. It also requires clear, long-term investment signals from governments that understand the complexities of the energy transition and are willing to work with leading industries to achieve regulation that optimizes the chances of success. Without such government action, Denmark would never have been able to pioneer wind power technology, nor would China have succeeded in dominating the solar panel market.

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