Politico: For EU reforms, watch Germany, not France

The generally accepted thesis is that everything depends on Macron. The French president will need to overhaul France’s labor markets and improve its fiscal situation as a pre-condition for any Franco-German cooperation over eurozone reforms. But this is only half true. More important for the fate of the eurozone will be Merkel’s choice of coalition partner — and the party that assumes control of the finance ministry. [...]

In practice, only three reforms are really in play: first, the amount of fiscal space countries have to exploit before bumping into EU-wide fiscal ceilings; second, the completion of the eurozone’s banking union, especially in the area of a pan-European deposit insurance; and third, repurposing the eurozone’s bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, to give it a bigger mandate and potentially more powers. [...]

To say that the ball is firmly on the French side of the court would be to misread the situation. Merkel, who is facing an election in September, will have her own constraints. Opinion polls predict that she will secure a fourth consecutive term as chancellor, but with her center-right Christian Democrats polling at 38 percent, she will need a coalition partner.

Merkel’s Bavarian beer tent speech, in which she warned that Europe could no longer rely on the U.S., and the CDU’s “stronger Europe for a stronger Germany” slogan, both seek to create a bigger mandate for Merkel, for “more Europe.” Just how much more, however, will depend in large part on her partners in the government.

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Politico: Mongolia First

The statue’s face is full of grim, almost caricature, resolve — and it was built by the newly elected president of Mongolia, Khaltmaa Battulga, a martial arts champion turned tycoon turned politician, a man who named his first company “Genco” after Marlon Brando’s firm in “The Godfather,” and whom I met on a trip to Mongolia several years ago when he was already a minister with grand plans for the country. [...]

Battulga’s journey from yurt to the presidency is a modern Mongolian adventure. He spent his childhood staring enviously through the window of Ulaanbaatar’s elite “dollar store,” where Communist functionaries could buy Western goods unavailable to ordinary Mongolians. On making it into Art High School to study graphic design, Battulga was bullied by street kids who picked on the soft Art School boys. He turned to sambo for self-defense. [...]

After Communism ended, Battulga had more international connections than most Mongolians. He traveled to Moscow to buy Ladas and set up one of Mongolia’s first taxi services. “Moscow was run by Chechen gangsters at the time,” said Battulga. “But they were all former wrestlers and knew me. I didn’t get any hassle from them.” Over the next decade, Battulga imported and exported feverishly, trading everything from Singaporean TVs to Hungarian ties, and selling them at UB’s huge open-air market, where locals say you can find “anything but human eyes.” [...]

What is perhaps most curious about Mongolia is that it is a democracy at all — corrupt and rambunctious for sure, but just about functioning. In virtually all the countries around Mongolia, from Russia through Central Asia and China, a truly free and fair vote is unthinkable. Mongolia is a democracy in a desert of dictatorships. Whether it can remain so, while overcoming its corruption, inequality and geopolitical suffocation adds an extra dimension to the Mongolian story. Resource rich former communist states have tended to go the other way.

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Haaretz: Israel's Gay Paradise Lost

The passage of the law by the Texas legislature was hailed as a victory for freedom of religion. It is part of a nationwide rearguard action by Evangelicals, Catholics and other conservatives to limit the scope of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 recognition of same-sex marriages. To their credit, unlike Israel’s Social Affairs Ministry, these reactionaries don’t hide their opposition to same-sex adoptions behind bogus assertions of the child’s best interest. They take pride in their principled objections to granting genuine full equality to families of gays, lesbians, transgender people and anyone else who deviates from the biblical blueprint of man and woman, preferably believers in Jesus. [...]

The Israeli government’s response to a petition to the High Court to formally allow same-sex adoptions initially cited a debunked claim that children adopted by gay and lesbian couples are bound to suffer because of the stigma attached to their families. They then changed tack and tried to blame Israeli society itself. “It isn’t legitimate enough,” they claimed, citing a well-worn excuse for preserving discrimination: After all, it “wasn’t legitimate enough” in the American south for African-Americans to wash their hands in the same sinks as white people. “There are some areas, like Tel Aviv, in which it is more acceptable,” they added, “and other areas in which it isn’t.” By this logic, ultra-Orthodox Jews shouldn’t be allowed to adopt either, because they would stand out in secular Tel Aviv suburbs, and leftists should be barred from adopting as well, because they would be completely ostracized if they chose to move to a radical Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Gay and lesbian people, like most other human beings, tend to live in places in which they and their children are received warmly and are not considered “deviant,” unless the Israeli government portrays them as such.

As in Texas, fundamentalists and reactionaries who view members of the LGBTQ community as “perverts,” as a respected national religious rabbi recently said, wield enormous political power. In Israel, on the other hand, members of the LGBTQ community can console themselves with the thought that they are not alone. On matters of birth, death, marriage, conversions and a whole range of other issues, their country discriminates against mixed marriages, people disqualified from Orthodox marriages, Reform and Conservative U.S. Jews and more – never mind Arabs and Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.

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The Atlantic: Republicans Aren't Turning on Trump—They're Turning on Each Other

On Monday, the Republicans’ tortured health-care effort hit a seemingly permanent snag. But that was only the latest blow; after half a year of consolidated GOP control, not a single major piece of legislation has been enacted. With other priorities similarly stalled, legislators’ frustration is mounting. [...]

The House blames the Senate: At a press conference last week, Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader, waved a chart of 226 House-passed bills that the Senate hasn’t taken up. “We will continue to do our work here, and we hope the Senate continues to do their work as we move forward,” McCarthy said pointedly. [...]

For its part, the Senate blames the House. A Russia sanctions bill passed the upper chamber with 98 votes a month ago, but it has yet to come to the floor in the House. That prompted Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to accuse the House of “dilly dallying” and “a ridiculous waste of time.” [...]

Though little heralded, the sanctions bill could mark a moment of truth for White House-congressional relations. If sent to President Trump’s desk, the bill would amount to a rebuke of the president’s Russia policy, one he would surely be loath to sign. But given the Russia scandal swirling around Trump, a veto would be explosive. And if the GOP Congress overrode such a veto, the president’s clout would be severely diminished.

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Maps on the Web: Percent of Americans Who Attend Religious Services

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Political Critique: From civil society to political society

Civil society is a great idea. In a perfectly liberal-democratic world, where parliament really represents society and its diversity, where politics (and the space between politics and business) is not always populated by the same people, and where political parties articulate interests and develop ideas (or at least take seriously what think tanks are telling them), instead of just serving citizens the daily pulp called ‘message of the day’ – that’s where civil society can do a lot. [...]

At the same time, in our world, we have been persuaded that politics is ugly (or maybe it has itself shown us its ugly face, so that no decent person ventures there?). Civil society was to be strictly non-political, and to keep politics at a healthy distance. This even makes sense, since back in the 90s in Poland we had an opportunity to have true politics, democratic elections and local authorities that were close to the people… And so we understood the division of labour. It was theoretically sound. [...]

I believe that, for years, the arrangement between politicians and civil society in Poland was clear. Politicians did not pick on the NGOs as long as NGOs did their work – work which the State did not want to do. And NGOs did not pick on the politicians too much, because it was clear that sooner or later, one would have to find ways to work together. This was convenient for politicians – the smaller organizations, which often financed their activities from money assigned by a given ministry or the local authority, could barely afford to wage a war with those in power. This characteristic division of labour has been in operation since the1990s, even though it finally turned out that the NGOs took upon themselves more than they should have.

Finally, the political situation that, as Romanians said, turned ‘toxic’, the disillusionment brought by lack of change, and the general dissatisfaction took over. How long can one ‘do’ debates, workshops, festivals, write reports? 25 years of work and very little to show for it. We in Poland have been given some little bits – participatory budgets, election lists quotas, Culture Pact. Some people amongst us got jobs in public institutions and in city halls. Great! Local authorities can learn a lot from activists, and vice versa. But this is all too little, considering the challenges. And when Law and Justice came to power even these little bits became unreliable, and the third sector – excluding the part deemed ‘proper’ – became no longer a nagging petitioner, but an open enemy of the authorities.

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Al Jazeera: This photographer has recreated the horror of Ecuador's clinics that try to "cure" homosexuality

This photographer has recreated the horror of Ecuador's clinics that try to "cure" homosexuality. Protests Spread Across Morocco.
Posted by Facebook on June 12, 2017

The Intercept: Study Finds Relationship Between High Military Casualties and Votes for Trump Over Clinton

Boston University political science professor Douglas Krinera and University of Minnesota Law professor Francis Shen studied the relationship between military casualties and pro-Trump votes. Comparing the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, they concluded that regions that had seen high concentrations in casualties over the past 15 years of warfare saw a swing in support towards Trump. [...]

The researchers controlled for a number of other factors, including race, income, and education; they also controlled for the percentage of the population that lives in rural areas and the military veteran population — both populations tended to support Trump overall, so controlling for these variables means that the number of military casualties was still a statistically significant driver of the vote, even in rural areas that share many of the same characteristics.

Their model also suggests that three swing states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — could very well have been winners for Clinton if their war casualties were lower. [...]

Our results also have important implications for Democrats. Currently the Democratic Party is engaging in a period of fitful soul searching in a quest to understand its inability to connect with many working class and rural voters who abandoned the party of Roosevelt for Trump. Much of this introspection has focused on the party’s position on trade policy, economic inequality, and emphasis on identity politics. However, Democrats may also want to reexamine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by fifteen years of war.

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Motherboard: Bees Can Count to Four, Display Emotions, and Teach Each Other New Skills

And now, thanks to some of Perry's research published this week in PLOS Biology, we now know bees can also learn new skills just by watching other bees. Perry and his team figured this out by first teaching bumblebees a new skill that they wouldn't naturally learn in the wild: pulling a string to free a disc from under a plexiglass covered in order to access the nectar inside. [...]

It was already pretty cool that bees were able to master this tricky (for them) skill, but what was really remarkable was the bees' ability to pass this knowledge on to the rest of the hive. This was accomplished in two methods. In one, an "observer" bee was placed in a small chamber near an actively foraging trained bee, and would watch the trained bee performing the task over and over. After watching the task just ten times, the student bees were released and 60 percent were able to solve the puzzle within five minutes. [...]

"The decline around the world, of both honeybees and bumble bees and pollinators in general, is a serious concern," Perry said. "One of our hopes is that people will have a different perspective on bees and insects. They're more than just behaviorally rigid machines. They do have these complex cognitive capacities, and maybe this can help our conservation efforts because people will view them more as individuals with memories and preferences, and not just nuisances."

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