Haaretz: 90% of Polish Jews Died in the Holocaust. So Why Are Poland's Nationalists Chanting 'Get the Jews Out of Power'?

This Saturday, 60,000 hard-right nationalists took to the streets of Warsaw to affirm their commitment to a "white Europe," "clean blood," and to “Get Jews out of power.” Some held banners reading "We Want God" - a quote from an old Polish religious song that U.S. president Donald Trump invoked during his visit to Poland this past July. [...]

Yet instead of impartially describing what happened at Auschwitz, tours drift into nationalistic bias. Encomia to Polish heroism and selflessness abound, with the resistance movement and the preponderance of Poles in the Avenue of the Righteous Among Nations at Yad Vashem, taking pride of place. Even as righteous Poles are glorified, their less-than-righteous counterparts - perpetrators of atrocities like the Jedwabne massacre and the Kielce pogrom - are simply ignored. [...]

In July 2016, Education Minister Anna Zalewska disavowed Polish responsibility for both Jedwabne and Kielce, leading to condemnations from Jewish organizations worldwide. Zalewska’s statements came days before the controversial appointment of journalist and historian Jaroslaw Szarek, another public denier of Polish complicity at Jedwabne, to the Presidency of the Institute of National Remembrance, a government-affiliated research organization. [...]

According to a 2005 public opinion poll, 51% of respondents believed that the majority of the victims of Auschwitz were Jewish. A poll from January 2015 revealed that only 33% of Poles currently associate Auschwitz with Jewish deaths, with 47% believing it to be primarily a site of Polish suffering. 

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The New York Review of Books: Poems from the Abyss

Miłosz’s earliest memories were of fear. He remembered sitting on a bench with a friendly Cossack who suddenly jumped to give a hand to his fellow soldiers, who had caught and were about to slaughter a white lamb that the young Miłosz was attached to. Back in Lithuania, he did not attend school, so his mother took charge of his early education. Unlike writers and intellectuals he knew later in life, most of whom were raised in cities, he spent his childhood in a small farming community, which he idealized later as an earthly paradise, playing with peasant children and roaming the countryside alone or in their company. As is often the case, the way he saw the world as an adult was closely related to the place where he was born and grew up. If Miłosz retained in his poetry the traces of a pantheistic strain in Lithuanian folk culture—which holds that the divine is dispersed throughout nature—that ought not to come as a surprise. [...]

Miłosz held a job as a literary programmer and commentator for Radio Wilno until he was dismissed because of his leftist views and his willingness to allow Jews to broadcast. Like others in Europe and the United States, he was appalled by the suffering inflicted on workers under capitalism and open to the idea of a radical change. Though he wanted to see the old order destroyed, he grew uncomfortable as his friends moved further to the left since he had no idea what new system could replace the old and was repulsed by the supporters of both Soviet communism and Polish nationalism. “I was governed,” he said, “less by reason than by a sense of smell…and this, in turn, put me on guard against any ‘ism.’” [...]

Once he became a free man, Miłosz was ostracized by the Parisian literary world; Stalinism was in vogue with many of the writers he’d gotten to know at parties at the Polish and Russian embassies, and they took every opportunity to tell their hosts how fortunate it must be to live in such enlightened societies back home. Now these same intellectuals turned their backs on Miłosz and called him an American agent. Polish expatriates were even nastier. “If Miłosz has an ounce of honesty, he ought to hang himself,” a fellow poet wrote to an émigré paper.

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The Atlantic: The Prime Minister of Lebanon's Unnerving Interview

Saudi Arabia, it seems, is bent on exacting a price from its rival Iran for its recent string of foreign-policy triumphs. Israel and the United States appear ready to strike a belligerent pose, one that leaders in the three countries, according to some reports, hope will contain Iran’s expansionism and produce a new alignment connecting President Donald Trump, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The problems with this approach are legion—most notably, it simply cannot work. Iran’s strength gives it a deterrence ability that makes preemptive war an even greater folly than it was a decade ago. No military barrage can “erase” Hezbollah, as some Israel war planners imagine; no “rollback,” as dreamed up by advisers to Trump and Mohamed bin Salman, can shift the strategic alliance connecting Iran with Iraq, Syria, and much of Lebanon.

Saudi Arabia, as the morbid joke circulating Beirut would have it, is ready to fight Iran to the last Lebanese. But the joke only gets it half right—the new war reportedly being contemplated wouldn’t actually hurt Iran. Instead, it would renew Hezbollah’s legitimacy and extend its strategic reach even if it caused untold suffering for countless Lebanese. Just as important, a new war might be biblical in its fire and fury, as the bombast of recent Israeli presentations suggests. But that fire and fury would point in many directions. Iran’s friends wouldn’t be the only ones to be singed. [...]

The Saudis have fanned the flames of war, seemingly in ignorance of the fact that Iran can only be countered through long-term strategic alliances, the building of capable local proxies and allies, and a wider regional alliance built on shared interests, values, and short-term goals. What Saudi Arabia seems to prefer is a military response to a strategic shift, an approach made worse by its gross misread of reality. In Yemen, the Saudis insisted on treating the Houthi rebels as Iranian tools rather than as an indigenous force, initiating a doomed war of eradication. The horrific result has implicated Saudi Arabia and its allies, including the United States, in an array of war crimes against the Yemenis.

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Vox: Why marriages succeed — or fail

It depends. You and I are going to have a particular way of connecting and an array of areas where we're compatible and incompatible, but if I were married to a different person, I would have a different array of characteristics where we're compatible and incompatible. The idea is to learn about yourself, learn about your partner, learn about the dynamics between the two of you, and then calibrate your expectations appropriately. [...]

I do think that sometimes people get divorced and end up happier because of it, and that’s probably not very rare. Or people often get divorced and meet someone else that makes them happier. So I wouldn’t tell people to “stick it out” if they’re miserable in their marriage.

On the other hand, there's something pretty great about building and sustaining a long-term marriage, growing old together, watching your kids have kids. I don't have an answer to your question other than to suggest that people should work hard to try to make the marriage as strong as possible, and if there comes a point where they say, "We do nothing but work. It's just nothing but work, and it's not fulfilling," then they might need to consider plan B. [...]

I think a reasonably good metric is something like this: We’ve spent years really trying to make the marriage work. Both of us have tried, and we don't seem to be able to get aligned. The issue at this point seems to be less about good will and effort, and more about a fundamental incompatibility. That is, the life you want to lead is incompatible with the life that I want to lead. That's when I think people should seriously consider that they might be better off apart.

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Vintage Everyday: Fascinating Snapshots That Capture Street Scenes of Germany in the Early 1950s

These fascinating photos from Mark Susina that capture street scenes of Germany from the early 1950s. Cities include Berlin, Frankfurt, Nuremburg.

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MapPorn: Religions, Map of Euro-Asia 2017

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The New York Times: CO2 Emissions Were Flat for Three Years. Now They’re Rising Again.

Global emissions from fossil fuels and industry are on track to increase roughly 2 percent over last year’s levels, driven in part by a rebound in coal use in China, the world’s largest emitter. While dozens of nations, including the United States, have been reducing their emissions in recent years, those declines have so far been offset by rising pollution from developing countries. [...]

Under the Paris deal, the world’s nations vowed to hold the rise in global temperatures since the start of the industrial revolution to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). For that to happen, scientists say, global emissions from power plants, factories, cars and trucks, as well as those from land use change and deforestation, would need to peak in the next few years and then decline swiftly to zero before the end of the century. [...]

Then came an unexpected twist: From 2014 to 2016, industrial emissions barely grew at all, even as the global economy continued to expand. Some observers wondered if the sharp cost reductions in renewable energy, combined with the growing push to tackle climate change in the United States, Europe and China, had fundamentally altered the world’s carbon trajectory. [...]

On the flip side, the Global Carbon Project found, at least 21 countries have managed to cut their emissions significantly while growing their economies over the past decade, including the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Sweden. These countries have steadily transitioned away from energy-intensive industries — or have outsourced manufacturing to countries like China — while increasing investments in efficiency and cleaner energy.

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Independent: Far from being a global leader, Donald Trump’s Asia trip shows that he is being played

At the outset, he was said to have three objectives, according to General HR McMaster, the US National Security Adviser. First was the promotion of democratic freedom and openness; second was to press for 'fair' trade to boost America's prosperity; third was to deal with North Korea. [...]

Of course, Trump can point to a few macho statements – mostly made about China when he wasn't in the country – which might convince his fans at home that he's still fighting the good fight on behalf of US workers. But the evidence that he has come anywhere near achieving something concrete in the last week and a half is slim to say the least. [...]

Increasingly however it feels as if Trump – the great entertainer-President – is being played. The Chinese roll out the red carpet and thus avoid both tricky questions of the sort usually asked by Western leaders and any sort of confrontation over trade. Putin, meanwhile, appeals to Trump's own inflated notion of ego by complaining that claims of Russian meddling in America's democratic process amount to a personal slight. Trump responds by defending his fellow strongman leader and attacking the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies. [...]

But maybe that is the central problem – that to Trump, the Presidency is simply a game, in which beating losers and vying for personal glory are the key aspects. Worse still, while Trump thinks it's a game for single players, Russia, China and others understand that it's all about teams. And in the last few days they have benefitted from a series of Trump own goals. 

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Deutsche Welle: What do Europeans consider sexual harassment?

That's because the understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment differs widely, among both men and women. What some consider flattering may be seen by others as overstepping the mark. This was highlighted in a recent survey conducted in seven different European countries. The polling institute YouGov surveyed women and men in Germany, Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway. The 8,500 respondents were asked to evaluate different situations: for example, a man whistling at a woman, making bodily contact with her while dancing at a party, or exposing his genitals to her. [...]

The French, reputedly the biggest flirts in Europe, turned out to be particularly strict with regard to winking. One in four felt this already constituted sexual harassment. For 16 percent of people in France, asking for a date was also taboo, a stricter response than was found among respondents in any of the other six countries. [...]

"One of the main findings is the pervasiveness of the problem of sexual harassment," says Joanna Goodey, who led a large-scale, Europe-wide study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) in 2014. It found that half of all women in Europe had at some point in their lives been the victims of sexual harassment. Furthermore, Goodey told DW: "One in five were saying, across the EU, that they had experienced at least one form of sexual harassment in the last 12 months." [...]

"We found that in certain member states it's less likely that women will talk about incidences of sexual violence or harassment with other people," says Goodey. She explains that history has had a hand in the fact that in Sweden, for example, it is normal nowadays to report sexual assaults. Unlike in eastern Europe, gender equality has been a subject of discussion there for many years, she points out.

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