Spiegel: How the European Commission President Won Over Trump

Of course, it's still too early to tell how long that agreement will hold. Many fear all it would take is one nasty tweet from Trump for the whole thing to come unspun again. And then comes the fact that the deal does nothing to solve the many other problems the Europeans have with this unpredictable American president. The man who, for now at least, seems prepared to call a kind of cease-fire in the trade conflict, but still wants to abolish NATO, threatens Iran and dismisses climate change as nonsense largely promulgated by Europeans. [...]

One day before his meeting with Trump, Juncker sent Martin Selmayr, the European Commission's general secretary, to meet with Kudlow. The two drafted a few paragraphs at a hotel in Washington they could agree upon. These were the cornerstones of the deal that would later emerge. [...]

When he arrived at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, Juncker still didn't know whether this plan was also liked by the president. It's a familiar pattern with Trump. In the end, he often follows the advice of the last adviser he has met with. For the Europeans, this raised the question of whether that person this time was economic adviser Kudlow or a hardliner like Commerce Secretary Ross. [...]

Ultimately, the outcome of the Washington meeting turned out to be a victory for moderates in the EU over those urging a hardline trade policy against the U.S., especially in France. Shortly before Juncker's visit, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire had declared: "We're in the midst of a trade war." He refused to discuss any reduction in levies until the U.S. withdrew its punitive tariffs. "We refuse to negotiate with a gun pointed to our heads," he recently said.

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Jacobin Magazine: Let Them Eat Privilege

By forcing the middle class to divert their attention downward (and within) instead of at the real power players above, Vox and Giridharadas are playing into the Right’s hands. It’s an attempt to shame the middle class — those with some wealth but, relative to the top one or one-tenth of one percent, mere crumbs — to make them shut up about the rich and super rich and, instead, look at those below as a reminder that it could all be much worse. [...]

When a cut in capital gains taxes is paid for by hiking state tuition and slashing social services, the one percent benefits while the vast majority of the 99 percent loses. When a new law is passed making it harder to organize a union or wages are squeezed to ring out higher and higher corporate profits, it’s the one percent — and their investment portfolios — that benefits and the majority of the 99 percent who loses. [...]

By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Vox is attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all.

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Jacobin Magazine: The New Conspicuous Consumption

Conspicuous consumption — the display of wealth as an expression of economic power — is not a new phenomenon but it has arguably never been as easy to practice. Social media has helped normalize it, providing a frame of competitive individualism and entrepreneurship in which the experience of affluence must be documented and shared online. Reveling in the thrill of a good purchase, the instinct is to share it with friends and followers online. [...]

These oil paintings were produced in a period marked by the consolidation of the mercantile bourgeoisie, an emerging class benefitting from expanded trading routes with the colonies. It was the age of the Grand Tour, when the noble sons of northern Europe journeyed through France and Italy in search of antiquity and the origins of European culture, on their way encountering art, music, and food, and enjoying occasional bouts of sexual revelry and wild drunkenness. The trips could last a few years, and often relied on seemingly unlimited funds from back home. [...]

The following sketches, which bring together a selection of two distinct image species (European oil paintings from 1650–1750 and Instagram pictures from 2012–14), draw on Berger’s insights. A work of visual analysis rather than art history, the comparisons connect a culture of the present with one of the past — both in order to better understand the selections themselves, and the desperately unequal world that produced them. [...]

But this is not about taste or enjoyment. It is about the spectacle of pleasure — his satisfaction comes not from the wine itself, but from the knowledge that others realize he possesses it. Such is the logic behind “sinking,” the fashionable practice of ordering two bottles of champagne and having one poured down the sink — a display of braggadocio signifying disdain for cost and a gratification in denying others the experience of wealth rather than sharing it.

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Politico: With anti-Muslim laws, Europe enters new dark age

What has become of Europe? New laws targeting Muslims are reminiscent of a time when innocent Jewish children were abducted by masked monks and imprisoned in monasteries to “save” them from the eternal fire of hell. In our blind mistrust of religious differences, we are returning to the Middle Ages, when the only model for integration was the forced conversion of the minority religion to the majority. [...]

Denmark is not the only country to target its minority populations and religious freedom in this way. Austria and Belgium have proposed limiting kosher meat slaughter, for example, and several countries — including France and Norway — have banned religious head coverings in schools or among civil servants. Bavaria and Italy have floated legislation that would require crucifixes to be displayed in public buildings. [...]

Violence and hate speech must be combatted, but security concerns cannot be used to justify discrimination against religious minorities. As long as Jews were the sole targets of Islamic terror, Europe’s response was silence and indifference. But following the attacks in Paris, Copenhagen, Brussels, Berlin and Nice, when every European is a potential victim, Europe has woken up to the threat of religious hatred. The problem is that the policies European countries have put in place to fight the threat of religious extremism are themselves highly damaging.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt is president of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER).

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Reuters: Three liberal prophets of doom

In the past several months, three leading liberal figures, each with international reputations, have given speeches in defense of liberal values and practice. Two of these – the billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros and the French President Emmanuel Macron – have addressed the EU’s present travails and likely future. The third, former U.S. President Barack Obama, as befitted a former leader of the still-hegemonic world power, addressed more global issues. [...]

Europe’s existential danger is “no longer a figure of speech… it is the harsh reality,” said Soros. A passion for austerity had turned the rich countries (especially Germany) into creditors, and the struggling (notably Greece and Italy) into debtors – creating “a relationship that is neither voluntary nor equal.” The Hungarian-born Soros, reviled in his birth country by the government led by rightwing nationalist Viktor Orban (who, in his student days, benefited from Soros’ largesse) is rendered especially pessimistic by the drift towards authoritarian rule of the Central European states, particularly Hungary and Poland. It’s a drift which runs directly counter to Soros’ earlier optimism that, with some assistance, the peoples of the former communist states of Central Europe could become citizens with the same civic and democratic rights as in the Western European countries. [...]

The urgency of Macron’s conviction that the Union must integrate or disintegrate has found few enthusiastic takers in the EU. Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte has said d that the EU could fulfil its basic promise only if individual member states are strong and able to maintain their own identity. In Germany, where voters are concerned about issues like the cost of Macron’s euro zone reform plans, Chancellor Angela Merkel – much damaged by her party’s loss of support in this year’s elections and a quarrel with her main coalition partner, the Christian Social Union – has to be even more cautious than usual. [...]

Poverty, discrimination, violence all remain, sometimes growing – as does inequality. Elites are more closed off from the mass of the people; solidarity in nations wilts; the reckless behavior which precipitated the 2008 banking crisis prompted spikes of mistrust in every kind of leadership – political, financial, corporate. Then there’s politics. “Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth,” said Obama. “People just make stuff up.” The former president did not mention the name of America’s current president, but few doubt that he was referring to Donald Trump when he mentioned “the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more.”

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The Calvert Journal: Afro-Poland A revolutionary friendship, captured in rare photos from 1955-1989

None of this was lost on the Polish Press Agency, whose journalists were tasked with documenting their African guests. The aim was to look beyond stereotypes of exoticism and present sisters, brothers and friends who could just as easily live in Polish society. The festival was the catalyst for a decades-long series of Polish press photographs showing people of African descent (PAD) visiting and living in Poland. Bartosz Nowicki, a Polish photographer and curator who currently lives in Wales, has spent the past few years researching these archive photos from the period 1955-1989. He recently curated an exhibition, Afro PRL, which highlighted the long-standing connections between white Poles and PAD, a memory that is often forgotten in contemporary Poland.

Nowicki’s exhibition revealed the myriad ways in which PAD stood alongside white Poles during the communist era. The World Festival of Youth and Students was simply a starting point, after which students from Africa were encouraged to study at Polish universities — as well as elsewhere in the Soviet sphere of influence. This was most keenly emphasised in Poland following the events of 1960, when 17 African countries declared independence from colonial rule. The arrest and murder of the Congo’s first democratically-elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was widely covered in the Polish press, alongside solidarity protests in Warsaw. Photos from these demonstrations show Polish students hand-in-hand with PAD. According to Nowicki, this was — in part — a technique to depict a humane Poland in contrast to a brutal West. “They were really fighting against the Americans on the level of race,” he explains. “You could see how horrible American race rhetoric was, look what was happening to the people — lynching, and so on.” [...]

The photos also highlighted to the Polish public that young people from Africa were now studying and living in Poland. “You realise that most of the images from the period, even if they are not about university or about studying, are actually of African students,” Nowicki tells me. After carrying out a year-long induction at the Polish Language Centre for Foreigners in Łódź, overseas students were free to attend Polish universities. PAD formed a large part of this contingent, starting off with around four students in 1958 and growing to a peak of around 2,000 in the 70s. Their photos were regularly displayed in Polish newspapers, albeit in an exoticising manner. [...]

Omolo suggests that while Poles may have less contact with non-white people — compared to those in countries such as the United Kingdom, France or Germany — this does not entirely explain why PAD experience racism in Poland. Instead, he believes that Polish people have often been exposed to literature and screen media that demean those from the African continent, thereby perpetuating the idea that white people are superior. For Omolo, this makes Poles more likely to believe negative, unfounded stereotypes about PAD, such as those espoused by the PiS party leader, Jarosław Kaczyński. “When Kaczyński said that Europe should not accept refugees from Africa because they’re carrying some diseases that are not in Europe — most of them bought it actually,” Omolo recounts. “What about Poles who visit Africa and come back? Are they not coming with some protozoa?”

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Haaretz: Saudi King Tells U.S. That Peace Plan Must Include East Jerusalem as Palestinian Capital

The Saudi position was expressed by King Salman during a number of recent communications with senior U.S. officials, as well as in conversations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and other Arab leaders in the region. It contradicts many media reports over the past year about a Saudi willingness to adopt Trump’s peace plan even if it is unacceptable to the Palestinians.  [...]

But things have changed in recent months, partly because of the Jerusalem decision that included the moving of the U.S. Embassy to the city — events that were opposed and denounced by Saudi Arabia. [...]

Meanwhile, Jordan and Egypt have also encouraged the administration to only present its peace plan if that plan is fair to the Palestinian side. The Jordanians warned the administration that a plan tilted toward Israel could create unrest in Jordan, forcing Amman to strongly reject it.

“The Trump administration has invested too much in thinking that the Saudis can somehow deliver Middle East peace,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department and Pentagon official who worked on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the Obama administration. The Saudis, Goldenberg added, “don’t have that much leverage over Abbas,” and it was never realistic to expect them to force him into accepting the American peace plan.

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CityLab: Where New York Is Gentrifying and Where It Isn't (MAY 12, 2016)

The map below shows the location of the three types of neighborhoods across the city. The gentrifying neighborhoods (shown in dark blue) are mainly located in upper Manhattan near Harlem and across parts of Brooklyn, especially in areas adjacent to Lower Manhattan. Note the non-gentrifying neighborhoods (shown in light blue) next to many of the gentrifying neighborhoods, which reflects the juxtaposition of concentrated advantage and disadvantage in New York City today. [...]

Gentrification in New York City is the outcome of a series of economic and demographic trends that have transformed the city more broadly—notably, the surge in more educated, affluent, younger, and single people headed back to the city. In recent decades, gentrifying neighborhoods have seen substantial gains in income. Average household incomes rose by 7.3 percent in the 1990s and 6.1 percent from 2000 to 2010-2014 in these neighborhoods. Across the city, average household incomes grew slightly in the 1990s, but declined after the year 2000. [...]

Unsurprisingly, gentrifying neighborhoods have seen a significant racial transformation, losing large numbers of black residents while gaining a substantial white population. In New York, the share of white residents in gentrifying neighborhoods increased from 18.8 percent in 1990 to 20.6 percent in 2010, while the share of black residents fell from 37.9 percent in 1990 to 30.9 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the share of Asian and Hispanic residents in gentrifying neighborhoods grew slightly, compared to much faster growth citywide. Like many cities, New York’s overall shares of black and white residents have declined since 1990, while its shares of Asian and Hispanic residents have increased.

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IFLScience: Study Finds Yet Another Possible Benefit Of Moderate Alcohol Consumption: Sperm Quality

A new study published in the journal Andrology revealed that men who consumed 4 to 7 units (1 unit = 12.5 g of ethanol, which corresponds to 125 mL wine, 330 mL beer, or 30 mL spirits) per week had greater semen volume and total sperm count compared with those who drank between less than one unit and three units per week.

Similar to examinations on heart health and overall mortality, the team found a U-shaped association between alcohol and sperm concentration, meaning that men who drank very little and those who regularly binged tended to have no-to-low benefit whereas those in the middle showed a notable benefit. [...]

“On the other hand, different studies experimentally proved that alcohol has a detrimental effect at all levels of the male reproductive system: it interferes with the function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-testicular axis, impairing gonadotropin secretion with consequent decreasing of testosterone levels.”

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Spiegel: Germany's Anti-Trump Strategy Begins to Take Shape

But the guest from Germany brought more with him in his suitcase than just friendly words. In Tokyo, Maas presented the Japanese leader with his idea for a new alliance between states. It could fill the geopolitical vacuum created by Trump. In the coming months, a network of globally oriented states is to be created that closely coordinates its foreign, trade and climate policies. "We need an alliance of the multilateralists," says Maas -- which is to say, an alliance that stands for the global rules and structures of the postwar order that Trump rejects. "It's better to bend than break" would be the wrong maxim in these times," Maas argues. [...]

The strategy won't likely be fully formed until the end of the year, but the allies have already been determined. In addition to Japan, they are likely to also include South Korea, which Maas will also be visiting this week. Both countries would like to sign wide-ranging free trade agreements with the EU.

Maas is also considering South Africa, Australia and Argentina as strategic partners, as well as, of course, the U.S.'s two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. In late August, Canada's Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is expected to be a guest at the German Foreign Ministry's Ambassadors Conference in Berlin. [...]

Maas plans to float the first trial balloon during the General Assembly of the United Nations in late September. Together with India, Brazil and Japan, the German foreign minister is planning a proposal for a reform of the Security Council. Germany will serve on the Security Council for two years starting in 2019. If Berlin is assigned to chair the council, that would be the point at which the new alliance would appear together for the first time. Maas wants to define the new seat as "European," in "radical alliance" with France.

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Slate: What Is the F--kboy? (AUG. 18 2015 8:29 AM)

A good insult requires no elaboration. We feel it before we understand it. That’s why some slurs resonate even when we’re not sure who or what they’re defaming. Consider the strange case of fuckboy, which plays a central role in Nancy Jo Sales’ controversial article, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’ ” in this month’s Vanity Fair. Here are two true statements about the word: Everyone knows what fuckboy means. And no one knows what fuckboy means. [...]

This array of meanings is almost certainly a consequence of the complicated uptake and appropriation of fuckboy. Sales nods to the term’s history—“The word has been around for at least a decade with different meanings”—though she fails to explore that history at all. In our conversation, Massey claimed that fuckboy had entered her social world sometime in the past year, but acknowledged that it had a fuzzier past. “I was told that we stole it from gay men,” she told me. “I don’t actually know.” [...]

It’s not uncommon to locate the origins of fuckboy in prison slang, where, according to some accounts, it refers to “men who are ‘gay for pay.’ ” Other sources directly connect the term to prison rape, or suggest that it operates in the space where those two meanings overlap. The word has also been associated with gay male culture—though there too it takes on a variety of specific connotations. I’ve heard it used to refer to men who take a submissive role in sex. But one acquaintance told me that, “to gay men like me it means a rich and powerful man’s kept boy.” [...]

As the Huffington Post’s Sara Boboltz notes, fuckboy has appeared “in a growing number of rap and hip-hop songs” in the decade since Cam’ron first employed it. Unsurprisingly, listeners started noticing the word before journalists did. A 2009 thread in the Hypebeast forums finds users wondering over the word’s derivation while others mock them for arriving late to the party. Significantly, the commenters evince little agreement about fuckboy’s significance or etymology. They propose a variety of possible meanings, all ugly but widely divergent in the specific onus of their ugliness, except insofar as they tend toward a homophobic register.

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Vox: It’s much safer to back into parking spaces. Why don’t we do it?

Incidentally, the photograph shows cars parked closest to campus being more likely to have backed in. This is a consistent day-to-day trend and suggests that early arrivers are go-getters and more willing to do a little work at the outset so as to have a smooth and clear exit. The go-getter idea is consistent with the thesis of the only academic study of this topic that has ever been undertaken. [...]

“Needless to say, back-in parking takes more time and effort than head-in parking. Yet, it is easier, quicker, and safer when exiting. Thus we may conjecture that people take the trouble to back in demonstrate the ability to delay gratification; they want to invest more time and effort now so they can enjoy the fruits of their labor later. They demonstrate a culture of long-term orientation.” [...]

“Americans are not taught to back into stalls either during instruction or by observation of the habits of other drivers. This results in the average American not being comfortable backing into a parking stall.… Europeans are more often challenged to get cars into and out of tight spaces and learn to back cars into parking spaces at an early age.” [...]

Still, there is a difference between men and women — and more generally, within the overall population — on the skills that go into parking, especially parking while backing up. The most important such skill is what psychologists “mental rotation,” or the ability to imagine objects in other than their actual position. (You can test your own mental rotation skills here.) For reasons that are still widely debated, men are on the whole better mental rotators than women.

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The Atlantic: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period

“Increased spacing has been shown to help facilitate processing in a number of other reading studies,” Johnson explained to me by email, using two spaces after each period. “Removing the spaces between words altogether drastically hurts our ability to read fluently, and increasing the amount of space between words helps us process the text.”

In the Skidmore study, among people who write with two spaces after periods—“two-spacers”—there was an increase in reading speed of 3 percent when reading text with two spaces following periods, as compared to one. This is, Johnson points out, an average of nine additional words per minute above their performance “under the one-space conditions.” [...]

Others were less ecstatic. Robert VerBruggen, the deputy managing editor at National Review, shared the study with the comment: “New facts forced me to change my mind about drug legalization but I just don’t think I can do this.” [...]

Such an argument is extremely difficult to make when it comes to sentence spacing, because the evidence is not there for either case. The fact that the scientifically optimal number of spaces hasn’t been well studied was odd to Johnson, given the strength of people’s feelings on the subject. The new American Psychological Association style guidelines came out recently, and they had changed from one space to two spaces following periods because they claimed it “increased the readability of the text.” This galled Johnson: “Here we had a manual written to teach us how to write scientifically that was making claims that were not backed with empirical evidence!”

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The New Yorker: Can Imran Khan Really Reform Pakistan?

Khan’s tiny political party, Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., expanded rapidly, and it surged in national and provincial elections, ultimately leading a provincial government for a number of years, to mixed reviews. But Khan fell short of winning a high national office and, in recent years, he has largely played a role of opposition agitator and provocateur. Now he appears to be within close reach of his ambition to serve as the Prime Minister. According to results in Pakistan’s general election, held on Wednesday, the P.T.I. won the most seats, by far, in Parliament, although not an absolute majority. The expectation is that Khan will be able to negotiate a majority coalition by attracting support from smaller parties and independent members of parliament. [...]

There can also be little doubt that the office of Prime Minister of Pakistan will remain the country’s second most powerful position, after the Chief of Army Staff, currently held by General Qamar Javed Bajwa. Bajwa and his senior generals exercise authority well beyond their constitutional role, influencing the media, politics, and the judiciary. Their power has only consolidated in recent years, as evidenced in military-sanctioned crackdowns on media outlets critical of the “establishment” (as the military is euphemistically known in Pakistan), human-rights activists, and other sections of civil society. However, for more than a decade, the Army has found it preferable to rule Pakistan indirectly, focussing on national security and foreign policy, and leaving the messy and intractable problems of poverty, energy deficits, and development to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Imran Khan is only the latest in a series of junior partners whom the Army will expect to concentrate on the economy and other domestic matters but tread lightly on foreign affairs. [...]

Khan’s attitude toward the Taliban has shifted over the years, but his current outlook seems aligned with the Army’s. That is, where Taliban factions leave Pakistan alone and seek to be accommodated in Afghan politics, he is sympathetic to, or at least tolerant of, the movement’s legitimacy. (Since the Afghan Taliban emerged, in 1994, the Pakistan Army and its principal intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., has sought to use the movement as a source of influence in Afghanistan, and as a check on India’s ambitions in the country.) Khan also describes Pakistan as a victim of the American-led war in Afghanistan. He has denounced U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan and rejected the premises of U.S. counterterrorism policy in the region. “I never thought the Taliban were a threat to Pakistan,” he told me in 2012, when I interviewed him for a Profile in The New Yorker. Still, it has always been hard to think of Khan as anti-Western, in the sense that he was educated in Pakistan’s finest British-inspired prep school, attended Oxford University, married a British woman (the first of three wives), and thrived as one of the first English-speaking global athletic superstars of the satellite-TV age. His Westernness has always been a part of his identity, and even of his political appeal inside Pakistan. [...]

If Khan does become the Prime Minister, he will inherit an economy in crisis, with debts rising and foreign reserves shrinking, likely presaging yet another painful round of bailout negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. The economy is growing, with the gross domestic product forecast to rise nearly six per cent this year, but corruption, persistent terrorist violence, and decades of bad government have saddled the country with an almost bottomless list of structural problems, such as illiteracy, sectarianism, and public-health crises. It’s no wonder that the Army does not wish to run Pakistan directly these days. Better to let ambitious civilian politicians like Khan take on the intractable problems, while the generals take care of themselves offstage. If Khan actually changes Pakistan in the ways that he has promised, it will be a greater miracle than any of those he achieved on the cricket pitch.

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Social Europe: Why Such Disparity Between Unemployment Rates In Europe?

But the statistics do not explain why some countries have much higher rates of joblessness than others with Greece posting nearly ten times the rate of unemployment as the Czech Republic and Spain, the same size as Poland, having nearly five times as many out of work as the EU’s most easterly member state.

One of the most curious aspects is how well the former communist countries have done in getting unemployment down to very low levels. The transition to a market economy has been rough but with Czechia, Hungary and Poland all posting unemployment rates below that of Britain, where commentators boast endlessly of the UK’s high levels of job creation, it would seem that former communist economies have adapted well. [...]

There seems no correlation either with the colour of the government. Spain was ruled by socialists until 2012 and has just booted out the centre-right PP government but unemployent remains stubbornly high. Greece switched from a conservative New Democracy team in 2015 to Europe’s most left government – at least in terms of the rhetoric of Yanis Varoufakis – but has been unable to tackle unemployment seriously (It was 22.1 per cent a year ago). [...]

Nor is it possible to read across trade union density with unemployment. France has the lowest number of workers paying membership dues to trade unions – eight per cent of the workforce – but twice the level of unemployment as Hungary and Poland where unions organise 12 per cent of the workforce according to European Trade Union Institute figures.

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Social Europe: Turkey’s New Regime And Its Neoliberal Foundations

A very important turning point for Turkey came with the June 24, 2018 elections. These brought a complete change in the Turkish political system. Turkey had gone through a referendum on April 16, 2017 to change its parliamentary system into a ‘superpresidential’ system, which resulted in a small majority (51.4/48.6%) in favour of the change. Later, the government called for early elections in June 2018 to put these constitutional changes into effect. Erdoğan again prevailed over his rivals and officially changed the Turkish regime into a despotic one-man rule. There may be some people who see this regression in Turkey as due to the Republic’s persistent democratic deficiencies since its inception, or this can be seen as simply an ordinary example of eastern despotism. However, I’d argue that the Turkish case should be examined rather in the context of the global rise of right-wing populism which is itself a consequence of failing neoliberal globalisation.

Neoliberal economic governance and the right-wing populist and the authoritarian currents it has generated are posing serious threats to democracies all around the world. Although this regressive trend was already in place, it intensified after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The countries with weak institutions and immature democracies, like Turkey, have been most severely affected by it. The origins of this trend should be sought in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the neoliberal form of capitalism began to emerge and destroy the balance established between the state and the market after the Second World War. [...]

After its 2001 economic crisis, Turkey implemented deeper neoliberal reforms which subsequently brought AKP to power. Since 2002, Turkey has been governed by AKP’s neoliberal regime which has acquired hegemonic characteristics. Although the party brought an end to the military’s tutelage in politics, Turkey radically shifted away from democracy over time. The society was already depoliticised and the organised sections of civil society were effectively neutralized, so it was not difficult for AKP to construct an authoritarian regime. In fact, with the accumulated negative effects of the neoliberal policies, Turkey was already a fertile ground for authoritarian populism. Therefore, AKP and Erdoğan should be seen both as products and promoters of neoliberalism.

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The New Yorker: The 1968 Book That Tried to Predict the World of 2018

Much of “Toward the Year 2018” might as well be science fiction today. With fourteen contributors, ranging from the weapons theorist Herman Kahn to the I.B.M. automation director Charles DeCarlo, penning essays on everything from “Space” to “Behavioral Technologies,” it’s not hard to find wild misses. The Stanford wonk Charles Scarlott predicts, exactly incorrectly, that nuclear breeder reactors will move to the fore of U.S. energy production while natural gas fades. (He concedes that natural gas might make a comeback—through atom-bomb-powered fracking.) The M.I.T. professor Ithiel de Sola Pool foresees an era of outright control of economies by nations—“They will select their levels of employment, of industrialization, of increase in GNP”—and then, for good measure, predicts “a massive loosening of inhibitions on all human impulses save that toward violence.” From the influential meteorologist Thomas F. Malone, we get the intriguing forecast of “the suppression of lightning”—most likely, he figures, “by the late 1980s.”

But for every amusingly wrong prediction, there’s one unnervingly close to the mark. It’s the same Thomas Malone who, amid predictions of weaponized hurricanes, wonders aloud whether “large-scale climate modification will be effected inadvertently” from rising levels of carbon dioxide. Such global warming, he predicts, might require the creation of an international climate body with “policing powers”—an undertaking, he adds, heartbreakingly, that should be “as nonpolitical as possible.” Gordon F. MacDonald, a fellow early advocate on climate change, writes a chapter on space that largely shrugs at manned interplanetary travel—a near-heresy in 1968—by cannily observing that while the Apollo missions would soon exhaust their political usefulness, weather and communications satellites would not. “A global communication system . . . would permit the use of giant computer complexes,” he adds, noting the revolutionary potential of a data bank that “could be queried at any time.”

What “Toward the Year 2018” gets most consistently right is the integration of computing into daily life. Massive information networks of fibre optics and satellite communication, accessed through portable devices in a “universality of telephony”—and an upheaval in privacy? It’s all in there. The Bell Labs director John R. Pierce, in a few masterful strokes, extrapolates the advent of Touch-Tone to text and picture transmission, and editing the results online—“This will even extend to justification and pagination in the preparation of documents of a quality comparable to today’s letterpress.” And it’s Ithiel de Sola Pool—he of the free love and controlled economies—who wonders, five decades before alarms were raised over Equifax, Facebook, and Google, how personal information will be “computer-stored and fantastically manipulative” in both senses of the word: “By 2018 a researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records),” Pool predicts. “That is, he will have the technological capacity to do so. Will he have the legal right?”

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Vox: One chart that shows how much worse income inequality is in America than Europe

From 1980 to 2016, the poorest half of the US population has seen its share of income steadily decline, and the top 1 percent have grabbed more.

In Europe, the same trend can’t be observed. In 1980, the top 1 percent’s share of income was about 10 percent in both Western Europe and the US, but since then, the two have severely diverged. In 2016, the top 1 percent in Western Europe had about a 12-percent share of income, compared to 20 percent in the United States. And in the US, the bottom 50 percent’s income share fell from more than 20 percent in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016. [...]

According to estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the top fifth of earners get 70 percent of the bill’s benefits, and the top 1 percent get 34 percent. The new tax treatment for “pass-through” entities — companies organized as sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, or S corporations — will mean an estimated $17 billion in tax savings for millionaires in 2018. American corporations are showering their shareholders with stock buybacks, thanks in part to their tax savings, and have returned nearly $700 billion to investors this year.

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Ministry Of Ideas: Shifting Blame

We claim to judge people for what they intentionally do, but accidents often influence our judgments. In our justice systems, people can be harshly and unfairly blamed for bad luck—but in our personal lives, taking on blame isn’t always a bad thing.

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Deutsche Welle: What Germans think of friendship and sex

And one in three in Germans were revelaed to think it is "okay" to have friends with benefits, a friendship which includes a sexual component without being a full-blown relationship. 

"Friends with benefits are now apparently accepted by a large section of the general public," said sociologist Janosch Schobin from the University of Kassel.

Also, 69 percent believe that a good romantic relationship can grow out of friendship. [...]

Germans today report having an average of 3.7 close friends among an average of around 11 friends. Friends and acquaintances make up a social circle of 42.5 people per individual, the survey found.

However, only two-thirds of participants say they have a best friend. Also, compared to a similar survey five years ago, the average number of friends is slightly smaller. [...]

On an international level, 42 percent of Germans believe strongest in the friendship between their country and France, putting it way ahead of runner-up Austria with 26 percent and another neighboring country, the Netherlands, with 23. Only 9 percent favored the relationship between Berlin and Washington, although that number is likely negatively affected by the controversial American president, Donald Trump.

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The Guardian: A humiliating Brexit deal risks a descent into Weimar Britain (Timothy Garton Ash)

Am I exaggerating the danger by even hinting at a comparison with Weimar Germany? Indeed I am. I don’t seriously envisage millions of newly unemployed, or a new Hitler coming to power, or a world war started by Boris Johnson. But it’s surely better to overdramatise the risk, to get everyone to wake up to it, rather than do what most of our continental partners have done for the last two years, which is consistently to underestimate the dangers for the whole of Europe that flow from Brexit – especially a mishandled Brexit. [...]

To avert the danger of a humiliated, divided, angry “Weimar Britain” will require wisdom on both sides of the Channel. On the British side, we need three things traditionally associated with the country but of late in short supply: pragmatic realism, a credible democratic process, and robust civility. With all its faults, Theresa May’s Brexit white paper is a step towards pragmatic realism. All serious people inside government know that Britain will have to compromise some more in order to get a deal with the other 27 member states of the EU. [...]

Yet our European partners could still reasonably say: dear Mrs May, give us a reasonable, detailed explanation of what you want, and we will respond in kind. Well, now she has. Brussels’ initial response has been politely cautious, particularly insisting on clarification of the “backstop” arrangements for keeping an open border on the island of Ireland. But in a notable article, a group of authors including Norbert Röttgen, the chair of the foreign affairs committee of the Bundestag, and Jean Pisani-Ferry, a leading French policy intellectual, have argued that the EU should now stop and think politically, not just bureaucratically, about its response.

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The Atlantic: ‘A Sudden Burst of Movement’ on the Afghan Peace Process

This month, the Trump administration reportedly ordered its diplomats to seek direct talks with the Taliban. That news report came just days after General John Nicholson, the head of the nato mission in Afghanistan, said the United States was “ready to talk to the Taliban and discuss the role of international forces.” The militant group maintains that the Afghan government is illegitimate and that it will talk only to the U.S. It also insists on a withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the country as part of any reconciliation process in Afghanistan. The Taliban has not dismissed the reported offer—but noted it was awaiting a formal offer from the U.S. [...]

The reported U.S. offer of direct talks with the Taliban comes on the heels of the Afghan government’s own unprecedented overtures toward the militant group. In February, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani offered the group unconditional talks; and last month, he offered the Taliban an unconditional cease-fire to coincide with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. If that offer was a surprise, the Taliban’s response to it was a shock: It accepted the offer and ordered its fighters to lay down their weapons for three days. The effectiveness of the truce—as well as the resumption of the fighting after Eid—signaled just how much control the Taliban has over its fighters and the Afghan government over its forces. Not only that, the scenes of public celebrations, Taliban fighters embracing Afghan soldiers and taking selfies together, and a dramatic reduction in bloodshed during those three days showed just how tired everyone in Afghanistan, including those engaged in the fighting, is of their nearly two-decade-long conflict. The Taliban, which is now publicly seeing that the public it claims to represent supports a reconciliation process, has even ordered a halt on attacking civilian targets. The reports of the U.S. offer of direct talks have also strengthened the optimism in the country. [...]

“My interpretation is that the Afghan government sees potential value in a U.S.-Taliban channel with at least two conditions: That it’s coordinated very closely with Kabul and with a great deal of transparency about what’s discussed,” Walsh, who previously served at the State Department as the lead adviser on the Afghan peace process,  told me. “And, second, no talks are going to delve into the political future of Afghanistan without the appropriate Afghan representatives in the room.” He said there is no deal the U.S. could make with the Taliban without “a meaningful agreement between the actual stakeholders who have to live with it, and those are Afghans.”

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Vox: 9 essential lessons from psychology to understand the Trump era

Our teams are lenses through which we interpret the world. In a more recent experiment, researchers showed participants a video of a protest that had been halted by the police. Half the subjects were told the protest was of an abortion clinic. The other half were told it was a protest against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

People inclined to support abortion rights thought the protesters were more disruptive in the abortion clinic condition. People who had strong egalitarian ideals were more likely to express support for the protesters for LGBTQ rights. Again, it was the same exact footage. All the changed were who the participants thought the protesters were. [...]

This is a key point that many people miss when discussing the “fake news” or “filter bubble” problem in our online media ecosystems. Avoiding facts inconvenient to our worldview isn’t just some passive, unconscious habit we engage in. We do it because we find these facts to be genuinely unpleasant. They insult our groups and, by extension, us. So we reject these facts, like our immune system would reject a pathogen.  [...]

This is called “solution aversion,” and it helps explain why many conservatives are wary of the science of climate change; many solutions to climate change involve increasing government oversight and regulations. Similarly, perhaps, this is why so many Trump supporters discredict the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling. The possible conclusion — that Trump’s election was doctored by outside influences — is unsettling. [...]

Past experiments with liberal participants have found a similar effect: Liberals are more likely to support conservative policies when told their leaders support conservative policies. And it’s possible that when people are changing their minds in this manner, they’re not even aware their minds are changing.

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Vox: Why Eastern European countries aren’t attacking Trump over NATO

For some countries in Western Europe that belong to NATO, which was created during the Cold War to counter Russian expansion, Trump’s erratic behavior was a step too far. But on the other side of the continent, Eastern Europeans who have historically felt the most threatened by Russia were singing an entirely different tune. From Estonia to Romania, current and former leaders said they saw nothing to fear from Trump’s tough talk on NATO. [...]

More spending on NATO’s defenses has been a goal for many Eastern Europeans since Russia’s invasion of the Republic of Georgia in 2008 and the beginning of Russia’s “shadow war” in Ukraine in 2014, so their support of Trump’s demands in Brussels is nothing new. But more surprising were leaders’ reactions to Trump’s summit with Putin in Helsinki, where Trump failed to challenge Putin on a litany of international offenses, such as his annexation of Crimea in 2014. [...]

Eastern European countries’ worst fears about Russia were finally realized when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, bringing its prospects of NATO ascension to a grinding halt. But the Russians weren’t finished yet — in 2014, following the Ukrainian revolution in which pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown, Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and began to foment a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian rebels and government forces.  [...]

Trump has personally questioned the need to counter Russia’s expanding regional reach. But his pro-Putin stance remains at odds with that of the State Department, the US military, and the US intelligence community, all of which continue to maintain that Russia is a US rival that needs to be checked.

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The Atlantic: Atheists Are Sometimes More Religious Than Christians

Second, the researchers found that American “nones”—those who identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular—are more religious than European nones. The notion that religiously unaffiliated people can be religious at all may seem contradictory, but if you disaffiliate from organized religion it does not necessarily mean you’ve sworn off belief in God, say, or prayer.

The third finding reported in the study is by far the most striking. As it turns out, “American ‘nones’ are as religious as—or even more religious than—Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany, and the U.K.” [...]

America is a country so suffused with faith that religious attributes abound even among the secular. Consider the rise of “atheist churches,” which cater to Americans who have lost faith in supernatural deities but still crave community, enjoy singing with others, and want to think deeply about morality. It’s religion, minus all the God stuff. This is a phenomenon spreading across the country, from the Seattle Atheist Church to the North Texas Church of Freethought. The Oasis Network, which brings together non-believers to sing and learn every Sunday morning, has affiliates in nine U.S. cities. [...]

The Pew survey found that although most Western Europeans still identify as Christians, for many of them, Christianity is a cultural or ethnic identity rather than a religious one. Sahgal calls them “post-Christian Christians,” though that label may be a bit misleading: The tendency to conceptualize Christianity as an ethnic marker is at least as old as the Crusades, when non-Christian North Africans and Middle Easterners were imagined as “others” relative to white, Christian Europeans. The survey also found that 11 percent of Western Europeans now call themselves “spiritual but not religious.”

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Spiegel: Exploring the New Saudi Arabia from the Inside

On Tahlia Street, the liveliest boulevard in the capital, coffee shops recently began springing up. The tables outside are also full -- of men. The fact that they are even allowed to sit outside represents huge progress. The streets of Riyadh used to be empty. Women, though, are not allowed to sit with the men, and are required instead to sit in the "family section," behind screens, curtains or sometimes even frosted glass. [...]

The face of MBS stares at you almost no matter where you go in Riyadh, gazing down from gigantic posters at the airport and from the sides of buildings lining the city's boulevards. The prince's image can be found on bumper stickers, on mobile phone cases and on flags used to decorate shop windows. The king remains the all-powerful ruler, but the pictures make it clear: MBS is Saudi Arabia's future.[...]

Men and women sometimes even walk hand-in-hand, something that until recently was inappropriate if the couple was married and strictly prohibited if unmarried. There is a terrace café in an expensive shopping mall where women smoke in public. There are fancy restaurants where lounge music is played. In some of them, men and women are sitting next to each other without a member of the religious police requiring that they prove they are married. Such couples used to stand a good chance of getting arrested.[....]

In contrast to what many might believe, most Saudis are not rich sheikhs. Per capita income in the country isn't even 17,000 euros per year, less than half of what it is in Germany. Citizens may not have to pay income tax, but the cost of living in the country is relatively high. Fresh fruit and vegetables, imported from the U.S. or Egypt, are more expensive than in Europe. Six organic eggs cost fully eight euros.

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Politico: EU shoots down Theresa May’s customs plan

“The EU cannot — and the EU will not — delegate the application of its customs policy and rules, VAT and excise duty collection, to a non-member who would not be subject to the EU’s governance structures,” Barnier said. [...]

While Barnier and Raab reiterated their hope of completing a withdrawal treaty by October, they also said negotiators would not meet again until mid-August — a schedule that calls into question their repeated statements that talks need to be intensified and infused with new energy. Meanwhile, there has been a flurry of increased activity in Brussels and London to prepare for the possibility of a so-called “no-deal” scenario under which the U.K. would crash out of the EU on March 29, 2019 without a formal treaty. [...]

Barnier restated the EU27’s long-declared and brightest red lines: the single market and the four freedoms, including the freedom of movement of workers, are indivisible and non-negotiable. But on Thursday he was more explicit in saying that the EU would not cede “control of our money, law and borders” to the U.K. if it is not bound to the bloc.  [...]

“President Juncker’s visit to Washington yesterday shows the importance of our Common Commercial Policy,” Barnier said. “It shows that we are stronger together.” Juncker’s deal with Trump also illustrated how firmly the EU stays committed to its core principles even in the toughest of negotiations.

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Quartz: “Eighth Grade” shows the difference between how the US and Europe think about teens and sex

in evaluating ratings for children, but tougher on sex and non-sexual nudity (frontal male nudity in particular). As Bramesco writes for Vox, citing the 2006 investigative documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, “Sex scenes are picked through with a fine-toothed comb, any detail—a wiping of the chin, a moan too emphatically acted, any maneuver beyond the most vanilla standards—sufficient to bump a film up to the R zone and limit its reach.” It’s hard to predict what “vanilla” will mean for the MPAA; the rules are so opaque that directors like Bo Burnham often have to guess what it is about their movie that earned them an R rating. [...]

“In general, the US does tend to rate sexuality more harshly than violence, and that is pretty much flipped everywhere else in the world,” Betsy Bozdech, the executive editor of ratings and reviews for Common Sense Media, a non-profit that rates and reviews movies to help parents make decisions about the content their kids watch, tells Quartz. For her part, Bozdech says that Common Sense Media gave Eighth Grade a 14+ rating, and that both parents and kids on their site gave the movie a 12+ rating. “I hope that parents will take their kids to see it,” she said.

For many European movie ratings agencies, including the British Board of Film Classification, scenes that depict sex are deemed more acceptable for adolescents. European attitudes hold that sexual exploration is a normal part of growing up, and that kids should be allowed to see it on screen. That’s part of a broader difference between how Americans and Europeans view sex. For example, a 2013 Pew poll found that 30% of US adults still think that sex between unmarried adults is morally unacceptable, but in Europe, only 6-13% of respondents thought it was unacceptable.

There are some questionable dynamics at stake in the MPAA’s movie ratings. For example, the Classification & Ratings Administration has been accused of being biased against depictions of women’s sexuality and queer sex, much more so than against heterosexual or male sexual pleasure. That bias becomes evident when comparing American and European ratings of movies depicting queer sex: For example, the critically-acclaimed 2013 movie Blue is the Warmest Color had lengthy scenes of lesbian sex between a teenager and her older lover. The film was rated NC-17 in the US, but in France, where the movie was filmed, it was rated acceptable for kids above the age of 12—the equivalent of the American PG-13–by the French National Center for Cinema and Animated Image (CNC). When a Catholic group tried to sue the Ministry of Culture for its rating, saying the movie should not be allowed for children below 16, the country’s highest administrative jurisdiction, the Conseil d’état, ruled in favor of the “12” rating, saying that “Although true that the sex scenes in question, although simulated, present a character of undeniable realism, they are both free of all violence, and filmed without degrading intent.”

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The Atlantic: Why Don’t More Men Take Their Wife’s Last Name?

And so it is that, even after generations of feminist progress, the expectation, at least for straight couples, has remained: Women take the man’s last name. Seventy-two percent of adults polled in a 2011 study said they believe a woman should give up her maiden name when she gets married, and half of those who responded said they believe that it should be a legal requirement, not a choice. In some states, married women could not legally vote under their maiden name until the mid-1970s. 

The opposite—a man taking his wife’s name—remains incredibly rare: In a recent study of 877 heterosexual married men, less than 3 percent took their wife’s name when they got married. When her fiancé, Avery, announced that he wanted to take her last name, Becca Lamb, a 23-year-old administrative assistant living in Washington, D.C., told me that, at first, she said no: “It shocked me. I had always expected to take my husband’s last name someday. I didn’t want to do anything too out of the norm.”

But the prospect of a married man adopting his wife’s last name hasn’t always been so startling in Western cultures. In medieval England, men who married women from wealthier, more prestigious families would sometimes take their wife’s last name, says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of marriage and family history at Evergreen State College. From the 12th to the 15th century, Coontz told me, in many “highly hierarchical societies” in England and France, “class outweighed gender.” It was common during this period for upper-class English families to take the name of their estates. If a bride-to-be was associated with a particularly flashy castle, the man, Coontz says, would want to benefit from the association. “Men dreamed of marrying a princess,” she says. “It wasn’t just women dreaming of marrying a prince.”

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Quartz: Republican opposition to climate action is cracking in districts won by Hillary Clinton

Divisions were laid bare this week when Republican representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida announced (paywall) a bill to cut the federal gasoline tax, and impose a new tax on carbon emissions. Revenue would fund low-income housing, coastal flooding relief, renewable energy and aid displaced coal workers. The “Market Choice Act,” the first GOP proposal to put a price on carbon in about a decade, won over the libertarian think tank Niskanen Center and The Nature Conservancy, but failed to impress many Republican colleagues. Just days earlier, all but seven of 236 House Republicans voted for a non-binding resolution calling a carbon tax “detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”(Six voted against the resolution, and one voted present.)

Yet Curbelo is not alone in his climate efforts. Calls by pragmatic moderates and younger Republican voters to take action on climate are now too hard for some in the GOP to ignore. That pressure has been most intense on Republicans in districts won by Clinton in the 2016. Data collected by Ballotopedia show that 60% of Republican officials in congressional districts carried by Clinton have broken with party orthodoxy to join the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. Founded by Curbelo and Florida Democrat Ted Deutch, the group is dedicated to pushing economic measures to slow global warming. It claims 43 Democrats, and 43 Republicans, 15 of whom are in congressional districts won by Clinton in 2016 (see list below). [...]

For now, most GOP members remain committed the status quo. Even the majority of Republicans in the Climate Solutions Caucus, which some have called a fig-leaf for Republicans unwilling to take meaningful climate action, voted to condemn a carbon tax in last week’s House resolution. Curbelo said he had more GOP support for his bill, but declined to name specific backers. But that’s progress, Mark Reynolds of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby told The Washington Post (paywall). In previous congresses, every member of the GOP member voted to condemn a carbon tax.

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The Huffington Post: One Of My Son’s Killers Claimed 'Gay Panic' Made Him Do It. Never Again.

The shocking reality is this: The so-called “gay panic defense” is only explicitly banned in three states – California, Illinois and, as of this month, Rhode Island. In the 20 years since Matt’s death, just these three states have made the move. And, of course, Wyoming, where he was killed, is not one of them. As a further slap in the face, Wyoming, along with four other states, still doesn’t have a hate crime law of any kind in place.

But recently, two members of Congress ― Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Joe Kennedy, both of Massachusetts ― have offered a countermeasure to those attempting to use the “gay panic” excuse. Their legislation, the Gay and Trans Panic Defense Prohibition Act, that would ban the use of the defense in federal court as a legal justification for anti-LGBTQ violence. [...]

Right now in Massachusetts, a local teen is claiming “gay panic” motivated him to allegedly hold a man hostage for days, beating him while shouting anti-gay slurs. In Texas recently, a light sentence given a man prosecuted for stabbing a neighbor to death raised concerns that the “gay panic” defense had come into play. [...]

Most legal professionals actually advise against it. The American Bar Association, which in 2013 unanimously approved a resolution calling for an end to the use anti-LGBT panic defense in court, sent a letter to Markey expressing its support of the proposed legislation: “These defenses have no place in either our society or justice system and should be legislated out of existence.”

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The Washington Post: The Crane Who Fell in Love with a Human

In past years, Crowe would have taken this opportunity to inject Walnut with a syringe of crane semen. Alas, a matchmaker in Memphis — the keeper of the white-naped crane studbook, whose job is to ensure a genetically diverse captive population — has decreed that they don’t need any more babies from Walnut, at least not this year. But that doesn’t stop Crowe and Walnut from going through the motions all summer long, five days a week, sometimes several times a day. “It’s not exactly fun for me, but it keeps Walnut happy,” Crowe says.

More to the point, this strange cross-species seduction has helped ensure that white-naped cranes continue to exist, at least in captivity, says Warren Lynch, a fellow zookeeper at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. “It’s amazing, what Chris has accomplished with Walnut,” Lynch says. “This isn’t something just anyone can do.” [...]

Though it would have been better to return the birds to the wild, international tensions in 1978 made that impossible, Putnam recalls. Plus, no one knew exactly where in China they had been captured, or what the birds might have been exposed to during transit. “We didn’t want to release birds that might carry diseases and put them back into the wild flock,” Putnam says. [...]

In addition to demanding vast areas of untrammeled wilderness, these difficult birds seem almost drawn to marginal places. For instance, one of the white-naped cranes’ most important wintering grounds is the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea. There, in a strange, de facto nature preserve, white-naped cranes and their even-more endangered cousins, red-crowned cranes, root for tubers among the land mines they are too light to trigger. If tensions between the Koreas subside, however, the cranes will be in trouble. Farmers are already clamoring for access to the nutrient-rich land, and developers are planning for a reunification city and deepwater port. [...]

Standards for raising cranes have changed since then. Now, highly trained zookeepers take care of the birds, and chicks are either left with their parents or raised by foster parent cranes, if at all possible. That’s because the job of crane parent is more nuanced than we humans once realized. Cranes have elaborate body language and sophisticated hunting techniques — skills that chicks learn, at least in part, from observing their parents. In addition, if a captive-born chick is slated to be released into the wild, a fear of humans is crucial to their survival.

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BBC: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day. [...]

The result is exciting because scientists have long searched for signs of present-day liquid water on Mars, but these have come up empty or yielded ambiguous findings. It will also interest those studying the possibilities for life beyond Earth - though it does not yet raise the stakes in the search for biology. [...]

Marsis wasn't able to determine how thick the layer of water might be, but the research team estimate that it is a minimum of one metre. [...]

"We are not closer to actually detecting life," Dr Patel told BBC News, "but what this finding does is give us the location of where to look on Mars. It is like a treasure map - except in this case, there will be lots of 'X's marking the spots."

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Crooked Media: Wilderness The Backlash

How do we fight for justice and equality in the face of racism? The struggle to break the cycle of progress and backlash that defines race and politics in America. 

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Politico: Steve Bannon’s European dream is delusional but dangerous

Bannon’s idea betrays a deep lack of understanding of how European politics work. Even if one leaves aside the inherent contradiction of a nationalist American trying to use the European Parliament to undermine national governments, it’s unclear exactly how the mechanics of his operation will function. [...]

Yet Bannon’s effort does put its finger on a weak point of the EU that has persisted for decades: Political parties often deprioritize the European Parliament, choosing to focus their resources and send their best candidates to domestic parliaments instead.

That has allowed fringe groups like the British National Party to sneak into the Parliament, use its platform to reach a wider audience and access its funding opportunities. Far-right groups such as the United Kingdom Independence Party, Le Pen’s National Rally (then called the National Front) and the Alternative for Germany have also used the European Parliament to cannily expand their domestic reach.

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Politico: Europe’s far right doesn’t bear hug Steve Bannon back

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist last week unveiled plans to ramp up a Brussels-based foundation, named The Movement, to coordinate and advise right-wing populist parties campaigning in next spring’s European Parliament election. His plan is to help parties set up a right-wing “supergroup” within the Parliament that could attract as many as a third of the lawmakers after next May’s ballot, he told the Daily Beast. [...]

“Bannon is American and has no place in a European political party,” said Jérôme Rivière, a member of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party who recently met Bannon in London. “We reject any supra-national entity and are not participating in the creation of anything with Bannon.” [...]

But Annemans, who is also president of the Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom, a pan-European grouping, expressed concern that Bannon’s project could be a way to give jobs to his friends, such as former UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Laure Ferrari, a French politician with close links to Farage. [...]

The League, according to a Euroskeptic MEP close to the party who didn’t want to be named, is working on “its own political project, own alliances,” building on partnerships with France’s National Rally, Vlaams Belang and Austria’s Freedom Party, as well as forging new ties to the Alternative for Germany and the Sweden Democrats.

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Politico: Theresa May takes control of Brexit

May’s power grab is confirmation that she has now taken complete control over the process, alongside her chief Brexit adviser, Olly Robbins, and is likely to further fuel accusations that she is moving further away from the Brexiteers in her party who felt reassured by Raab’s appointment.

Speaking at the Brexit Select Committee Tuesday afternoon Robbins said Raab would still be Barnier’s main interlocutor and the prime minister’s statement was simply a reflection that May was in overall charge. [...]

However, it will now fall to Number 10 Downing Street and Robbins’ “Europe Unit” to lead the negotiations with Brussels. “I will lead the negotiations with the European Union, with the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union deputising on my behalf,” May says. “Both of us will be supported by the Cabinet Office Europe Unit and with this in mind the Europe Unit will have overall responsibility for the preparation and conduct of the negotiations, drawing upon support from DExEU and other departments as required.”

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Crooked Media: Wilderness The Voters

How do we fix what’s wrong with the Democratic Party? Focus groups of Democratic voters in Texas and Michigan, along with thousands of callers, offer their views.

The Wilderness is a documentary from Crooked Media and Two-Up about the history and future of the Democratic Party. Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau tells the story of a party finding its way out of the political wilderness through conversations with strategists, historians, policy experts, organizers, and voters. In fifteen chapters, the series explores issues like inequality, race, immigration, sexism, foreign policy, media strategy, and how Democrats can build a winning majority that lasts.

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The New Yorker: Theresa May’s Impossible Choice

As a result, it is hard to sense what May is thinking or to predict what she will do next. “No one knows where they are at any point in time when they are working for Theresa May,” one of her former staffers said. May rejects the inevitable comparisons to Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, because Thatcher had an agenda that was overtly ideological. May, unlike Thatcher, would not enjoy being photographed driving a tank. Her definition of politics is “doing something, not being someone.” People say that she would have made a fine lawyer or judge. But she happens to be the leader of the United Kingdom—a divided nation of sixty-five million people, Europe’s second-largest economy, and America’s closest ally—as it chooses how it wants to proceed in the world. This summer, that choice, which is frankly overwhelming, came to rest with May. Britain waited and watched. May made her call, and then her government more or less exploded. And that was before Donald Trump showed up. [...]

Since the referendum, the central task in British politics has been to try to square two conflicting demands: to respect the democratic impulse of Brexit while limiting the economic consequences. It is a version of the challenge posed by populist anger everywhere. How far should governments go in tearing up systems that people say they dislike—the alienating structures of global capitalism and multilateral government—when the alternatives risk making populations poorer, and therefore presumably more furious than before? [...]

And that’s Brexit, in a way. “Every single element in this is connected,” the senior official told me. The mightiest riddles, such as the customs union, have dominated the political conversation, but the truth is that it’s nitty-gritty all the way down. During its forty-five years in the E.U., Britain has imported around nineteen thousand European laws and regulations. The fabric of the acquis, as the legal framework is known, is the fabric of political life. E.U. articles and directives govern everything from equal pay for men and women to the international trade of the hairy-vetch seed. Two days before I went to Dover, a fourteen-page update from the Brexit negotiations included progress on the status of staff employed on British military bases in Cyprus, the ownership of fissile nuclear materials, and the future administration of sales taxes. One of the reasons that people voted to leave the E.U. is its totalizing nature, and the sense that it had penetrated too far into British life. But the years of membership, the weaving of the acquis, have constructed a reality that is hard to change—and even harder to imagine a life outside.  [...]

One of the central difficulties of coming to an agreement is the different way that the two sides imagine politics. The Lisbon Treaty, which serves as the E.U.’s constitution, is two hundred and seventy-one pages long; the U.K. has no such thing. In Westminster, no situation is completely unfixable; the rules can be made to bend. For this reason, Brexiteers have always believed that Britain’s economic and military importance to the E.U. would prompt it—or, rather, its German car manufacturers, or its Dutch oil refiners—to offer the nation a singularly advantageous deal. (May often talks about a “bespoke” Brexit.) But, since the vote in 2016, the E.U. has maintained that Britain can choose only from a menu of trading relationships that already exist. “I explained that to May,” Verhofstadt said. “I said, You have a problem, you try to solve it. We on the Continent are different. We need first a concept. If we have a concept, then we are going to try and put every problem that we have inside that concept.”

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FiveThirtyEight: GOP Criticism Of Trump Is All Talk — But It Still Matters

Political scientists have done a great deal of research to figure out how much the president’s words matter — if they matter at all. Here’s what’s generally agreed upon: Presidential communication matters in a number of important ways. It can shape what issues citizens think about in the first place, how the public views the particular meaning or context of a major event, and provide important cues to partisans about where the party stands on a given issue.

Trump is facing a different dynamic than other presidents, though: He’s regularly contradicted by members of his own party on Capitol Hill. Take the president’s downplaying of Russian interference in the 2016 election. It will be harder for Trump to convince even most Republicans of these arguments as long as senators from his own party, like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, keep saying there was interference. Indeed, a (small) majority of Republicans believe the U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding that Russia interfered.  [...]

On paper, Trump, particularly on foreign policy, can still largely ignore Congress and implement his agenda if he chooses. But in reality, he keeps backtracking. Take his interest in implementing a more pro-Russia foreign policy. We think the criticism from congressional Republicans is a big part of that hesitancy on Trump’s part. The verbal opposition from fellow Republicans tends to lead to an escalation of opposition against Trump. Criticism by fellow Republicans frees the press, always leery of appearing too liberal, to attack controversial Trump initiatives more directly. That bipartisan and media opposition helps move the public in these instances to oppose what Trump is doing. Facing such opposition, the president often retreats. [...]

When the White House said last week that it was considering allowing the Russian government to interrogate Michael McFaul, who was the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama, the Senate passed a 98-0 nonbinding resolution condemning the idea, which the administration had by then disavowed.

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The Telegraph: The Week That Broke Brexit: A Telegraph Documentary

Britain's unexpected vote to leave the European Union on June 23rd 2016 provided enough political upheaval for a generation.

However, in the seven days after 17.4 million Eurosceptics clinched victory, would a series of further tumultuous events go on to have an irreversible impact on the country's departure from the EU

Exploring that very question, 'The Week That Broke Brexit' is a new long-form documentary from The Telegraph featuring exclusive interviews from those at the very heart of the 2016 referendum as well as our own journalists.

Deutsche Welle: Britain's overseas territories brace for Brexit

Anguilla, one of Britain's six territories in the Caribbean, is located some 6,500 kilometers (4,039 miles) from Britain and relies heavily on imports — even for its drinking water.

Most of the goods come in through the EU, via a port just 15 minutes away on the French island of Saint Martin. [...]

If London fails to secure a good Brexit deal, Anguilla's residents are worried they will be among the biggest losers. The territory's dependency on its ties with the EU means most residents would have chosen to stay in the bloc. [...]

The EU plays a significant role in Anguilla. Hurricane Irma devastated the tiny territory last September and many homes still lie in ruins, and with the state having no money to spare, the planned reconstruction is funded by the EU.

The EU is also Anguilla's largest provider of development aid, with much of the money earmarked for education. But for the moment it is unclear whether London will step in to help after Brexit.

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The Atlantic: Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular

You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country’s population using survey data from that country. They also “train” the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures. [...]

Using a separate model, Future of Religion and Secular Transitions (forest), the team found that people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you’re free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education (you’ve got some training in the sciences and humanities). If even one of these factors is absent, the whole secularization process slows down. This, they believe, is why the U.S. is secularizing at a slower rate than Western and Northern Europe. [...]

merv shows that mutually escalating violence is likeliest to occur if there’s a small disparity in size between the majority and minority groups (less than a 70/30 split) and if agents experience out-group members as social and contagion threats (they worry that others will be invasive or infectious). It’s much less likely to occur if there’s a large disparity in size or if the threats agents are experiencing are mostly related to predators or natural hazards. [...]

When you build a model, you can accidentally produce recommendations that you weren’t intending. Years ago, Wildman built a model to figure out what makes some extremist groups survive and thrive while others disintegrate. It turned out one of the most important factors is a highly charismatic leader who personally practices what he preaches. “This immediately implied an assassination criterion,” he said. “It’s basically, leave the groups alone when the leaders are less consistent, [but] kill the leaders of groups that have those specific qualities. It was a shock to discover this dropping out of the model. I feel deeply uncomfortable that one of my models accidentally produced a criterion for killing religious leaders.”

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