Politico: Democratic Unionists’ price for keeping Tories in power

Unlike a majority of Northern Irish voters, the DUP backed Brexit in last year’s referendum. The unionists have said that they want to ensure there is no hard border with the Republic of Ireland and that cross-border trade remains “as frictionless as possible” — something that is crucial to the economies on both sides of the border.

But the DUP also opposes any change to the unfettered movement of people between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. “People in Northern Ireland, for all sorts of practical reasons, want ease of access across the border. Easy movement is good for everybody,” Nelson McCausland, a former DUP minister in the power-sharing executive in Belfast, told POLITICO. “How you reconcile that with all the other considerations is key. We have to do that in a way that does not effectively create a new border at Larne or Belfast harbor.” [...]

The DUP’s Brexit campaign in Northern Ireland was, at best, lukewarm. The DUP received over £435,000 in donations during the campaign – an unheard of sum in Northern Irish politics – but spent barely £10,000 there. The rest was spent on the British mainland. The source of these donations is still unknown due to Northern Ireland’s donor secrecy legislation. [...]

The DUP is likely to prioritize investment in Northern Ireland as its price for propping up May. “There is a desire within the DUP to rebalance the economy — investment in research and development, investment in the university [Queen’s University Belfast],” said McCausland. “What we are talking about here is a need to create opportunities for people.”

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FiveThirtyEight: Donald Trump Is Making Europe Liberal Again

The beneficiaries of the right-wing decline have variously been politicians on the left (such as Austria’s Van der Bellen2), the center-left (such as France’s Emmanuel Macron) and the center-right (such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, whose Christian Democratic Union has rebounded in polls). But there’s been another pattern in who gains or loses support: The warmer a candidate’s relationship with Trump, the worse he or she has tended to do. [...]

So if you’re keeping score at home, right-wing nationalist parties have had disappointing results in Austria, the Netherlands, France and the U.K., and they appear poised for one in Germany, although there’s a long way to go there. I haven’t cherry-picked these outcomes; these are the the major elections in Western Europe this year. If you want to get more obscure, the nationalist Finns Party underperformed its polls and lost a significant number of seats in the Finnish municipal elections in April, while the United Patriots, a coalition of nationalist parties, lost three seats in the Bulgarian parliamentary elections in March.

Despite the differences in electoral systems from country to country — and the quirky nature of some of the contests, such as in France — it’s been a remarkably consistent pattern. The nationalist party fades as the election heats up and it begins to receive more scrutiny. Then it further underperforms its polls on election day, sometimes by several percentage points. [...]

While there’s no smoking gun to attribute this shift to Trump, there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence. The timing lines up well: European right-wing parties had generally been gaining ground in elections until late last year; now we suddenly have several examples of their position receding. Trump is highly unpopular in Europe, especially in some of the countries to have held elections so far. Several of the candidates who fared poorly had praised Trump — and vice versa. He’s explicitly become a subject of debate among the candidates in Germany and the U.K. To the extent the populist wave was partly an anti-establishment wave, Trump — the president of the most powerful country on earth — has now become a symbol of the establishment, at least to Europeans.

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openDemocracy: Liberal democracy: a hard choice for Ukraine

Since war broke out in 2014, Ukraine has experienced a difficult period both for its citizens and liberal values, which are the bedrock of any democratic state. The war has affected almost everybody in the country, and the conflict has become a justification for illiberal initiatives undertaken by Ukraine’s state apparatus. For Ukrainian society, the choice in favour of liberal freedoms is becoming more and more difficult. At first glance, restricting them seems to be necessary. [...]

These worrying trends are visible across the Atlantic ocean, from Ukraine. Indeed, Ukrainian citizens support the women who come out to protest, Muslims who face discrimination and suspicion, and the newspapers whose correspondents have been refused entry to presidential press conferences. But this support seems to reflect an opportunity to observe the crisis of liberal democracy elsewhere. And this begs the question: are liberal values merely an object to be observed at a distance for Ukraine? Is this just an opportunity to sympathise with the crisis of democracy in Europe and America?

It’d be wrong to say that Ukrainian citizens cannot see illiberal tendencies in their country. But there is one factor that restrains our reaction to them: the external threat. In discussions of liberal democracy — from freedom of speech to the right to peaceful assembly — the importance of observing human rights is not placed first. [...]

Ukrainian society’s consensus of justification towards people who have turned patriotism into vandalism is becoming more and more tangible. Indeed, when a country is at war, and the border with the aggressor state remains open, right-wing politicians offer a clear understanding of the situation. This picture is simplified, and is based exclusively on the national idea and ethnocentrism. And it’s possible that right-wing vision of the situation at hand are incompatible with the Constitution, and stretch our understanding of freedom of speech. But they give people an opportunity to solve the problems facing the country and society via very simple methods. 

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The New York Times: Across Russia, Protesters Heed Navalny’s Anti-Kremlin Rallying Cry

An extraordinary wave of antigovernment protests swept across Russia on Monday, as thousands of demonstrators gathered in more than 100 cities to denounce corruption and political stagnation despite official attempts to stifle the expression of outrage.

Riot police officers in large cities and small detained hundreds of participants, with more than 700 apprehended in Moscow and 300 in St. Petersburg, according to OVD-Info, an independent organization that tracks arrests. There were reports of about 100 detentions elsewhere across Russia. [...]

It was difficult to assess the exact number of cities or people involved in the demonstrations across this vast continent of a country with 11 time zones. But the proliferation of protests and the predominantly youthful crowds seemed to indicate that Mr. Navalny had succeeded in broadening his movement beyond the more than 80 cities that took part in demonstrations in March. [...]

The protests were ostensibly focused on government corruption, but other issues, like economic doldrums and the mass demolition of apartments, brought people onto the street. Many participants said they were disgusted at the gradual dismantling of democracy in Russia, and of any semblance of a real opposition. [...]

The latest confrontation between Mr. Navalny, 41, and the Kremlin began on March 2, when he released a video depicting Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev as the crooked beneficiary of palaces, yachts and other luxuries paid for by some of Russia’s richest tycoons.

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Al Jazeera: Will Hamas survive the Gulf crisis?

Over the past few years, Hamas has been able to adapt to the Arab region's reality, in light of the popular uprisings that swept the region, and it survived - albeit with many losses - the sharp turning points that exhausted the movement and affected its alliances and capabilities. The current crisis, however, seems to be the most difficult in the movement's history. [...]

Internally, Hamas is facing mounting pressure with the deteriorating living situation in the besieged Gaza Strip, compounded by the Palestinian Authority's recent decisions to cut electricity supply and medicine as a result of the stalled political crisis between Hamas and the PA. [...]

But the movement was taken aback by the Gulf crisis that has placed the expulsion of its leaders from Qatar on the top of the agenda for solving the crisis. Hamas officials were also shocked by the recent Saudi foreign minister's statements which characterised it as a "terrorist movement". [...]

Hamas has lost its Islamist allies, which formed the backbone of its future hopes and aims; the movement lost its Iranian ally when the Syrian uprising broke out and Hamas chose to ally with the anti-government camp, leaving the movement with its Qatari ally. [...]

As for the second scenario - which is the most likely one - is that Hamas will lean towards political accommodation and reach a compromise deal with Abbas and Fatah that will allow the return of PA power in Gaza again. This option will not mean a disintegration of Hamas' alliance with Iran.

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The Atlantic: The Dangers of Arming Autocrats

These sales, often buoyed by U.S. subsidies known as foreign military financing, have continued despite many of the recipients’ dark records of serious human-rights abuses—such as the torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings carried out by the Egyptian military in its campaign against the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula, or the many possible war crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition in its ongoing bombing of Houthi-Saleh forces in Yemen.

Supporters of these sales argue that while these governments may be ugly, if they don’t buy from us, they will buy from the Russians or the Chinese (or the French), and selling them our weapons gives us greater say in how those weapons are used, and greater insight into how their militaries operate. If war breaks out, we’ll be able to work closely with our clients because they’ll be using our technology. [...]

But arms sales don’t bring home the jobs that supposedly make these deals worth the angst. The Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs has found that “clean energy and health care spending create 50 percent more jobs than the equivalent amount of spending on the military,” while education spending creates more than twice as many jobs. Boeing’s deal to sell 30 passenger jets to Iran will reportedly support 18,000 U.S. jobs, the same number Lockheed Martin touted for the air and missile defense systems, combat ships, and tactical aircraft it may sell to Saudi Arabia. But passenger jets won’t be bombing civilians in Yemen. Nor were Boeing, Raytheon, or Lockheed Martin even willing to hazard a guess as to the number of jobs Trump’s Riyadh proposals might actually create, when asked by The Washington Post.

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Haaretz: In Israel, Democracy Dies in Daylight

The would-be destroyers of Israeli democracy don’t need a cover of darkness. They are carrying out their mission in broad daylight. They’re not going to liquidate democracy in on fell swoop, which could spark a rebellion, but patiently, in stages, as they lull public opinion into complacency. They are injecting Israeli democracy with small amounts of poison, which they then portray as vital medication. They continue to swear allegiance to democracy until they can safely announce its demise.

Their task is made easier because Israel never had the chance to develop into a healthy and immune democracy. In its first 19 years, it suffered from discriminating and doctrinaire one-party rule that kept the Arab minority under military control. Israel started to develop openness and transparency and to experience a healthy change of government in the first decades after the Six Day War, but it was hobbled by the denial of basic rights to millions of Palestinians that were now living in the territories it conquered. The combination of increasingly harsh security measures and political oppression of the Palestinians, together with the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers who now lived in the same place but in a starkly different reality, made Israeli democracy bleed, infecting it with dangerous viruses with long incubation periods but deadly effects nonetheless. [...]

The feebleness of the gatekeepers encouraged democracy’s enemies to expand and accelerate their assaults. The justice minister took aim at the High Court of Justice while her colleagues in the Knesset diminished its authority. The education minister deters teachers and cows academics as he elevates Judaism in curricula at the expense of civic studies, and promotes theocracy instead of democracy. The culture minister anointed herself as a political commissar who withholds funds from those who don’t adhere to her guidelines. And overseeing all is the prime minister who is waging a personal vendetta against the media while inciting against human rights organizations, portraying them to the Israeli public not as vital cornerstones of a vibrant democracy, but as internal enemies of a state under siege.

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Vintage Everyday: North Sea Flood of 1962: The Biggest Catastrophe Since World War II in Germany

The North Sea flood of 1962 was a natural disaster affecting mainly the coastal regions of Germany and in particular the city of Hamburg in the night from 16 February to 17 February 1962. In total, the homes of about 60,000 people were destroyed, and the death toll amounted to 315 in Hamburg.In addition, three people were killed in the United Kingdom by high winds, which damaged around 175,000 houses in the worst affected city, Sheffield.

The flood was caused by the Vincinette low-pressure system, approaching the German Bight from the southern Polar Sea. A European windstorm with peak wind speeds of 200 km/h pushed water into the German Bight, leading to a water surge the dykes could not withstand. Breaches along the coast and the rivers Elbe and Weser led to widespread flooding of huge areas. In Hamburg, on the river Elbe, but a full 100 km away from the coast, the residential areas of Wilhelmsburg was most affected.

120 square kilometres or a sixth of the city of Hamburg were flooded, destroying 6000 buildings. Streets were unusable and railway operation was suspended, leaving Hamburg unsupplied for an indetermined period of time.

These photos will show you a small part of this terrible disaster.

The New York Times: Losing a Father and Husband to AIDS, and Finding Him Again

My second child was born two days after Father’s Day in 1990. Three weeks later, my husband collapsed, disoriented and feverish, in a restaurant. Soon, he was lying in a hospital bed with full-blown AIDS. [...]

Before he got sick, John was an attentive lover to me, a doting dad to our 2-year-old, a gracious son-in-law to my aging parents and a successful journalist. He was home for dinner every night like clockwork. He was someone it was hard to believe could get AIDS.

In the months before our son was born, John had been experiencing a string of nagging illnesses, including intestinal distress and a persistent cough. The many doctors he consulted, because he was “straight,” married and overworked, did not even consider AIDS. They diagnosed stress. [...]

Relieving John of his ghostly status after he died of AIDS has been a long and, at times, painful process. Some family members and friends have viewed my talking and writing about John truthfully as a form of “outing.” “Why now, after so long?” they ask. Can’t I just get over it? Mostly heterosexual and married, virtually none had walked in my — or his — shoes. They failed to grasp the weight of John’s closeted lifestyle, and how crippling it was, first for him, and then for me, to keep it closeted.

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