Haaretz: New Study Reveals How Secular Israelis Have Eroded the Religious Status Quo

“The status quo on matters of religion and state is imaginary, but that’s also its advantage,” says the editor of the forthcoming research, Shuki Friedman, the director of the Center for Religion, Nation and State at the Israel Democracy Institute, who is also a member of the law faculty at the Peres Academic Center. “Each side can see in it what it wants, so over the years, the status quo has become a magic term that politicians and even the court have relied on to describe the relationship between religion and state,” Friedman says. “The arrangement between religion and state in Israel, which is included in the imaginary status quo, has constantly changed in every field. The service provided by the state is becoming increasingly superfluous and the arrangement establishing it is becoming emptied of content.” [...]

It is the secular side, at least the study asserts, that is behind the status quo’s erosion. Perhaps the best example is the Shabbat observance issue. Although public transportation in Israel on Shabbat is very limited, there has been a major shift regarding everything related to what is open on Shabbat. There has been a certain distinction in most of the country between places of entertainment, many of which have remained open, and retail establishments, which have traditionally been closed. The study found that 98 percent of movie theaters, 65 percent of museums, and 83 percent of cultural institutions are open on Shabbat. But the study also found that 20 percent of shopping malls are open. [...]

When it comes to Shabbat, not only entertainment complexes have changed but also the street scene. Over the years, Jerusalem’s Bar-Ilan Street had been closed to vehicular traffic on Shabbat. After a bitter battle in the 1990s, the High Court ordered it opened to traffic. The right of the individual and freedom of movement took precedence over religion. “The ruling in the Bar-Ilan Street case constitutes an important landmark in casting aside the value of Shabbat, eroding the status quo, and preferring liberal values,” writes Friedman. “It’s a sign indicating what the trend is.” [...]

So, for example, the high court has accorded recognition to civil marriages performed abroad. The Central Bureau of Statistics reported that by 2013, about 20 percent of couples registered as married had had civil ceremonies abroad. That is in addition to couples who arrange their own private weddings in Israel and forgo state recognition that they are married, though they can be recognized as partners in a civil union (“yeduim batzibur,” in Hebrew).

In addition, in recent years, Israelis have increasingly married abroad in non-Orthodox Jewish ceremonies. In Israel, a breach in the rabbinate’s monopoly on Orthodox weddings was opened through organizations such as Tzohar. “The power of the marketplace is working,” says Rabbi David Stav, Tzohar’s chairman, who acknowledges that the status quo has dramatically eroded. Stav doesn’t view that as necessarily a bad thing. “The idea that we need to get into the veins of secular people over everything and that in the process we are serving Judaism, I think is a mistake.”

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Politico: How China misread Donald Trump

But one of those bad problems isn’t going anywhere, and as a result, Trump’s view of China is quickly turning sour. The reason for his dwindling patience is Beijing’s failure to rein in North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program and escalating series of missile tests, the latest being an intercontinental ballistic missile that might someday carry a nuclear payload that could hit the continental United States. “Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40% in the first quarter,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “So much for China working with us – but we had to give it a try!” [...]

The Chinese miscalculated with Trump in two ways related to North Korea. First, China failed to take significant concrete steps for which Trump could claim credit. China’s announced suspension of coal imports from North Korea, a substantial punishment of North Korea, took place before the Mar-a-Lago summit and in response to U.N. resolutions — and this is a president who needs to be able to take personal credit for concrete things. [...]

The two entities are small, so China would not have lost face by cracking down on them. Most important, going after them would not have brought into play China’s most fundamental strategic concern regarding North Korea: that tightening the screws enough to freeze its nuclear program and bring it to the bargaining table would jeopardize the survival of what Beijing views as a buffer state. The unusual step of going after some Chinese nationals for money laundering that helps finance North Korea would have responded to Trump’s overtures at little cost to China and demonstrated that China was prepared to put new pressure on the North Korean regime.

The second Chinese miscalculation was to assume that President Trump would be patient in waiting for concrete steps and results from China on North Korea. One of China’s finest international relations scholars, Professor Shi Yinhong, was quoted the other day as saying, “The latest situation [has] illustrated that Trump is a leader without patience.” Indeed. But this lesson should have been learned long ago. Not only has President Trump said repeatedly that “the era of strategic patience with the North Korean regime has failed” — he is characteristically an impatient person. Chinese diplomats are exquisitely skilled in tactics of delay, but the more valuable skill in dealing with Trump is managing his impatience.

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Motherboard: We’re a Cheap Battery Away From Phasing Out Fossil Fuels

A study published in January in the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment predicts that the combination of battery storage with renewable energy will make fossil fuels increasingly obsolete. The driving forces of this disruption include the "decline in retail renewable electricity prices," along with plummeting costs of batteries, in which technological efficiencies are improving exponentially.

Fossil fuels are the most widely used source of energy because of base load power, which means they provide energy at all times, night and day. In contrast, renewables have faced the 'intermittency' challenge—the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow.

But authors Jemma Green and Peter Newman of Curtin University in Australia show that as storage gets cheaper, renewables will become more competitive with fossil fuels on costs and reliability. By 2050, these irresistible technological and market forces could make oil, gas and coal seem too costly and cumbersome, leading renewables to account for "100 percent of global energy demand." [...]

In three years, he said, it will "begin to transform" the electricity infrastructure of major cities. "Solar storage is pitched to become so cheap it will make relying on natural gas peaker plants pointless…It will lead to rapid adoption of solar by businesses, local governments, and households—not because people are environmentally conscious, but simply because it will make more economic sense." [...]

The next stage in this process will come when these solar households start buying lithium-ion battery systems. The combined price of solar storage, say Green and Newman, could guide us toward grid parity—equal to or less than the price of purchasing electricity from the national grid. When this happens, solar storage "will flood the market, increasing supply and creating a lower market price for electricity," Mayor said. [...]

Another issue is whether the solar storage disruption will survive growing hostility from the fossil fuel industries, and the governments protecting them. The Trump administration, for instance, has openly declared war on clean energy. I asked Mayor whether this will throw a giant spanner in the works of the "new electricity ecosystem".

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Politico: Merkel may be leading, but who’s following?

Internationally, Berlin has increased its engagement — in Mali, the Mediterranean and elsewhere — stepping up where others have stepped down. Perhaps ironically, the nation responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century has — for many — become the defender of global progress in the 21st. [...]

Take the never-ending eurozone crisis. Merkel’s dictum — “if the euro fails, Europe fails” — has remained Berlin’s tautological reply to a perpetual crisis in Greece and beyond. She certainly deserves credit for defending the euro; not every call for reforms is objectionable. But Berlin’s single-minded insistence on austerity and structural reforms is as one-sided as it is self-referential.

“Germans tend to view economics as part of moral philosophy,” former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti liked to quip. The consequences for Europe, however, have been anything but amusing. The German obsession with the thrifty “Swabian housewife” has condemned a Continent in dire need of investment to years of economic stagnation.

Irrespective of its intentions, Berlin’s leadership in managing the crisis has not united the European Union but only deepened its fault lines. Even as southern member countries struggle with record unemployment and waves of populist unrest, Germany is booming. [...]

But there is a difference between political leadership and dogmatic isolation. In the two years since Merkel’s optimistic “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”), Berlin has not only failed to bring about a common European response to the challenges of migration; it has stopped pretending to try. [...]

Merkel’s view is, in fact, shared by her fellow citizens, whose appetite for global leadership remains limited. Berlin’s de facto dominance in Europe notwithstanding, Germans are as reluctant as ever to embrace a prominent international role. According to recent polls, only 42 percent support increasing the country’s minute defense budget, 41 percent favor a more robust engagement abroad, and only 38 percent would like to take a stronger military stance against the Islamic State.

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Al Jazeera: Will the Scottish National Party lose to Corbynism?

At the UK's snap general election on June 8, the SNP shed 21 of its 56 Westminster seats and saw its share of the vote slump by 13 points. Angus Robertson, the party's chief strategist, and Alex Salmond, its former leader, both lost their once rock-solid constituencies in the rural north-east. Towering nationalist majorities across Glasgow and the central belt crumbled. Even the Liberal Democrats enjoyed a modest Caledonian revival, adding three new Scottish MPs, in Edinburgh, Dunbartonshire, and Caithness, to their previous, solitary total of one. [...]

Remarkably, given the scale of its losses, the SNP hasn't collapsed into acrimony, nor is Sturgeon's leadership in any serious trouble. However, a debate is starting to brew within nationalist circles about the exact nature and purpose of SNP strategy - a strategy that is clearly no longer working.

The most urgent criticisms are coming from the left. Some senior nationalists, such as Tommy Sheppard, the MP for Edinburgh East, want the party to embrace a more radical social democratic identity. They are worried that the appeal of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn runs much deeper in Scotland than anyone had initially anticipated and that, in the event of another election, the SNP could haemorrhage seats in its urban and working-class heartlands.  [...]

Davidson's unexpected success capped the resurgence of a party that had been relegated to the fringes of Scottish political life in the late 1990s, but has now navigated its way back into the mainstream on a wave of unionist frustration. For the first time since Holyrood was created 18 years ago, the Scottish right is brimming with confidence. Davidson has cast Sturgeon's referendum U-turn as a personal victory, and is pressing the SNP for additional concessions, notably, that any talk of independence is suspended until at least the next Scottish election in 2021, and that the nationalists get back to their "day job" of running Scotland within the constraints of the current devolutionary settlement. [...]

The numbers are stark. At the 2014 independence referendum, 1.6 million Scots voted "Yes" on a record-breaking turnout of 84 percent. The following year, at the 2015 UK election, the SNP soaked up most of that base, winning 1.4 million votes. At the 2016 Scottish devolved election, the SNP vote dipped to just over one million. In June, it dipped again, to 980,000, on a massively reduced turnout of 66 percent.

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CityLab: Confronting the Myths of Suburban Poverty

A lot of our discourse around suburban poverty says, “Well, suburban probably is really a problem for old inner-tier suburbs that are bordering higher poverty neighborhoods in cities.” But poverty is pervasive across the suburban regions of all metro areas, whether they’re new or old. In fact, the rates of change have been more severe in newer suburbs—those built after 1970—than in older suburbs. When you break out the suburban regions, there are more poor people in the newer suburbs combined than in the older suburbs. That’s an important finding. [...]

There are a couple of other demographic changes that are important to realize here, too. One is the increase in the share of households in suburbs that are single-parent households. And we know those households are are most vulnerable to falling into poverty. The places in suburbs where poverty problems have become particularly acute are where a larger share of the population doesn’t have advanced training or education past high school. [...]

One of the common narratives around rising poverty problems in the suburbs is that this is the result of poor families moving from the central city out. Sure, in some places, increases in poverty are related to out-migration from the cities. But those migration trends have been present for more than 50 years. For decades, middle-class and lower-income households have been moving from cities to suburbs, looking for more affordable homes, safer neighborhoods, better schools, and more community amenities. That pattern persists today, but is not likely to be the largest or most important factor in many places. In fact, the most important factor is change in the labor market—the decline of the number of good-paying low-skilled jobs. [...]

One of the false narratives I push back against in the book is that poverty is a problem for cities, and in particular for people of color. That’s a big element of the political rhetoric of this administration. Poverty problems are in all our communities. They affect all types of families of all races and ethnicities. That rhetoric creates an “othering” of poverty, and it undermines our support for safety net programs and services. Rhetoric really matters—it directly shape how we think of our responsibilities and who we think of as deserving of help.

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Al Jazeera: Will Trump strike North Korea?

However, Kim Jong-un has presented himself a hothead in the past, especially during the crisis of 2013, so there is a good chance that he will order a general mobilisation of the North Korean military following the very first strike. He can even order the use of his military's ballistic missile capabilities before the US forces in South Korea are able to persuade their South Korean counterparts that it's time to march north.

How will China respond to all this? Probably not as they did during the first Korean War, but they are unlikely to welcome US forces crossing the demilitarised zone. Indeed, they may well begin supplying their North Korean "allies" with intelligence, satellite imagery, radar data and radio intercepts in order to prolong the conflict and perhaps prevent the final collapse of the North Korean regime on American terms. We do not know how Beijing will respond, but hedging and some assistance to Pyongyang absolutely remain distinct possibilities. [...]

So for all these reasons, and mainly because the US does not want the bloody mayhem that is likely to ensue in the event of strikes, the Trump administration should not hit North Korea. There is still the vague hope that China can be persuaded to heavily sanction North Korea and thus force Pyongyang back to the negotiating table on the nuclear question. Also, China and Russia do not support and are unlikely to ever support US strikes on North Korea.

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Motherboard: France Wants to Ban Diesel and Gas Vehicles by 2040

France could clear its roads of all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, according to the country's environment minister Nicolas Hulot, who on Thursday announced radical environmental directives as part of President Emmanuel Macron's Paris Agreement agenda.

"The threat to our fellow citizens is diffuse, unpredictable, and the exact timeline can not be scientifically determined," Hulot said in a prepared statement from France's Ministry of Ecology, according to France's largest newspaper Le Monde. "Our responsibility is to make this subject dominant over all others."

Between now and 2040, the French government will reduce sales and advertising of petrol and diesel vehicles, seeking to enforce a complete ban on 100 percent diesel, and petrol-reliant vehicles, within 22 years. France joins Germany, India, Holland and Norway in seeking to ban vehicles that rely on diesel and petrol combustion. [...]

To start France's transition, Hulot said that owners of high pollutant vehicles will receive government incentives whereby they will be eligible to trade what they have for cleaner cars. [...]

Other initiatives announced by Hulot include reducing France's usage of nuclear energy to just 50 percent of the country's entire energy mix by 2025, closing excess nuclear reactors in the meantime. Hulot also announced that France would end all coal energy production by 2022, hoping to achieve complete carbon neutrality for the country by 2050. In 2015, 2.2 percent of France's electricity production came from coal.

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Politico: EU identifies the ultimate European city

A new index by the EU Joint Research Centre published Thursday measures 168 cities in 30 European countries and ranks how they perform in 29 areas of culture and creativity.

The ideal city would have the cultural venues of Cork, the cultural attractiveness and knowledge-based jobs of Paris, the innovation of Eindhoven, the new creative jobs of Umeå, the education system of Leuven, the openness, tolerance and trust of Glasgow, the connectedness of Utrecht and the good governance of Copenhagen. [...]

EU researchers found that while capital cities fly high, smaller cities often do better. The capitals of Austria, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, Netherlands and the U.K. all finished in second place or worse within their country.

Amsterdam and Łódź are at opposite ends of the index’s “cultural vibrancy” ratings despite having a similar population. Meanwhile, tiny Weimar in Germany achieved the same score as London and Berlin.

The index represents a major effort to inject “soft” issues such as culture into political debates about the future of Europe. It builds on emerging academic and economic consensus that the “creative economy” is an important foundation for thriving economies.

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