The Atlantic: The Beginning of the End of the Korean War

Indeed, by the estimation of the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh, North and South Korea have already fully implemented about one third of the more than two dozen reconciliation agreements they reached in a pair of summits between the nations’ leaders in April and September. By The Atlantic’s count, of the 13 commitments made during those summits that specified a time frame, the Koreas have successfully hit five deadlines, are on track to meet four more, and missed another by only a month. Having just received the UN Security Council’s blessing to carry out a joint field study on connecting their railroads, they are now scrambling to organize a ceremony inaugurating the project before the end of the year.[...]

Of course, several of the meatiest measures require U.S. consent and are on hold. North and South Korea, for example, can’t collaborate on economic and tourism projects or actually get inter-Korean roads and railways up and running until international sanctions against North Korea are eased. They’ve also encountered resistance in calling for the leaders of the two Koreas, the United States, and perhaps China to formally declare an end to the Korean War, which came to a halt in an armistice in 1953. (Trump-administration officials worry about prematurely reducing the pressure on North Korea and undermining the United States’ military alliance with South Korea.) [...]

The Koreas have suspended certain military exercises near the military demarcation line (MDL) separating the countries, cleared hundreds of land mines in the area (millions remain), and linked a road as part of an effort to excavate the remains of soldiers who died during the Korean War. They have covered up coastal artillery and warship-mounted guns and established a no-fly zone in the vicinity of the border. They are now exploring ways to jointly secure the iconic border village of Panmunjom and allow unarmed guards, civilians, and foreign tourists to move about on either side of the MDL there for the first time in more than 40 years. [...]

Nowhere is this disconnect clearer than with economic sanctions against North Korea. Whereas Pompeo has referred to international sanctions as “the core proposition” that “will give us the capacity to deliver denuclearization,” Moon recently made the case to European leaders that these sanctions should be eased as a form of encouragement when Kim takes significant steps toward relinquishing his nuclear program. (North Korea, which abruptly canceled a November meeting with Pompeo, has threatened to make no further concessions on its nuclear program and even resume its weapons buildup unless sanctions are lifted.)

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Social Europe: Global Debt Is At Its Peak: Italy Stands Better Than We Think

Historically, the debt of a country, both public and private, tends to grow over time in positive correlation with the size of the economy, with the notable exception of sudden defaults that wipe out large portion of debt. Hence the huge size of total debt cannot provide per se enough information about its sustainability. Nor is it possible to infer that low total debt is a sign of financial stability. Indeed, it is more likely that a very low level, or even the absence of debt, would imply a complete lack of confidence such as to exclude all national economic agents from international credit markets, as was the case in Argentina in the five years following the dramatic 2002 default.  [...]

Global rankings, by using this more suitable measure, are reversed: Luxembourg ends up in first place with a total debt equal to 434 percent of GDP, almost all composed of corporate debt. At a distance, we observe Japan’s debt total hovering at 373 percent characterized by a preponderant weight of the public component (216 percent). The high incidence of both public and private debt places France, Spain and the United Kingdom in the top eight while Italy appears only in 9th place, with a well-balanced total debt ratio of 265% percent of GDP, due to low household and corporate debt that offsets the impact of consistent public debt.

But even a limited debt to GDP ratio cannot be considered a sign of virtue or economic health. At the bottom of the rankings stand out the paradoxical cases of Argentina and Turkey. Although both countries have total debts under control (private debt virtually non-existent in Argentine and Turkish public debt at the ridiculous value of 28 percent of GDP) they are still in danger of losing access to markets due to a currency and balance of payments crises. In a glaring apparent paradox, short-term interest rates are at 70 percent in Argentina’s low-debt financial environment and stably negative in the Japan of the monstrous debt.  [...]

There’s more. Official statistics do not consider the troubling issue of “implicit debt”, i.e. the burden represented by the present value of financial commitments made by governments on pensions and healthcare. In general, these future debts do not appear in the national accounts for well-founded reasons connected to the difficulties in estimating costs spread over very long time horizons. If these hidden charges were to be taken into account, US debt would, for example, quintuple to over $100trn. But Spain, Luxembourg and Ireland would be in the worst shape, since they would see their liabilities rise by more than tenfold, up to over 1000 percent of GDP in the Irish case. On the other hand Italy, from the point of view of implicit debt, under current legislation is the most virtuous European country.

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Vox: Jared Kushner is getting an award from Mexico, and Mexicans aren’t happy about it

The Order of the Aztec Eagle — or La Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, in Spanish — is the highest honor Mexico’s government bestows on foreigners. It is awarded to individuals who’ve done a great service for Mexico or for humanity. Previous recipients include and Roberta Jacobson, the former US ambassador to Mexico, Bill Gates, and Queen Elizabeth II. [...]

Enrique Peña Nieto is deeply unpopular in Mexico, and this award for Kushner isn’t likely to win over detractors who already felt Peña Nieto let himself — and by extension, Mexico — get bullied by Trump. Incoming leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who is taking office on December 1, has promised to take a much tougher stance against the US president, but bitterness persists about Peña Nieto’s stance toward Trump. [...]

But Duncan Wood, the director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, said Kushner might have helped stop Trump from tearing up NAFTA altogether — and helped salvage parts of the bilateral relationship that became extremely testy during Trump’s tenure. [...]

Kushner, along with other advisers, helped convince Trump to renegotiate a trade deal, rather than totally scrap NAFTA. In an April interview with the Washington Post, Kushner hinted as much, claiming that he explained to the president the “plusses and minuses” of unilaterally pulling out of NAFTA.  [...]

Which means there’s another reason Peña Nieto chose to honor Jared: to possibly secure future investment in his commitment to Mexico. “By giving this award,” Wood said, “you’re hoping to stay involved in the bilateral relationship.”

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The New York Review of Books: How Trump Fuels the Fascist Right

Everything about Trump’s discourse—the words he uses, the things he is willing to say, when he says them, where, how, how many times—is deliberate and intended for consumption by the new right. When Trump repeatedly accuses a reporter of “racism” for questioning him about his embrace of the term “nationalist,” he is deliberately drawing from the toxic well of white supremacist discourse and directly addressing that base. Trump’s increasing use of the term “globalist” in interviews and press conferences—including to describe Jewish advisers such as Gary Cohn or Republican opponents like the Koch brothers—is a knowing use of an anti-Semitic slur, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League, “a code word for Jews.” Trump’s self-identification as a “nationalist,” especially in contrast to “globalists” like George Soros, extends a hand to white nationalists across the country. His pointed use of the term “politically correct,” especially in the context of the Muslim ban, speaks directly to followers of far-right figures such as William Lind, author of “What is ‘Political Correctness’?”[...]

Building on the ugly history of white supremacy in this country, and on European far-right movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, a new right has emerged in America. The central tenets of this American new right are that Christian heterosexual whites are endangered, that the traditional nuclear family is in peril, that “Western civilization” is in decline, and that whites need to reassert themselves. George Shaw, an editor at a leading new right publishing house and the editor of A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders (2018)—a collected volume intended to give voice to the self-identified “alt-right,” including well-known figures such as the co-founder of AltRight.com Richard Spencer, the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, the founder of American Renaissance Jared Taylor, and a 2018 candidate for the Republican nomination for the US Senate seat in Florida, Augustus Invictus—opens his introduction on the race question: “If alt-right ideology can be distilled to one statement, it is that white people, like all other distinct human populations, have legitimate group interests.”[...]

“White genocide is underway,” Shaw warns, and those responsible are Jews, Muslims, leftists, and non-whites. Note how these claims of white genocide and Jewish power resonate in Trump’s discourse. His last campaign ad in 2016 vilified three opponents, all Jewish: George Soros, the former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, and the CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein. Last August on Twitter, Trump adopted white nationalist propaganda that the South African government is engaged in a genocidal campaign against white farmers.[...]

A central strategy of the European new right is to argue that anti-racism, even multiculturalism itself, is actually racist because it encourages “dissolution of European identity” and “the multi-racialization of European society.” As Faye argues, “anti-racists use their fake struggle against racism to destroy the European’s identity, as they advance cosmopolitan and alien interests.” Friberg adds that “to be ‘anti-racist’ is […] to be part of a movement which is directly linked to a reckless hatred for Europe and her history.”

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Spiegel: A Series of Miscalculations Has Brought Britain to the Brink

For some it's anger at a political class that has made so many promises and kept so few of them. For others, it's anger at the nationalist tempters gambling away the country's future in a quest to reclaim past glory. There is anger at a government that no longer has the power to solve critical social problems. Anger that it's not over yet. And yes, also, self-directed anger. [...]

For non-Brits, the Brexiteers' chauvinist rhetoric may be hard to understand, but it is part of a long tradition. The Brits only hesitantly joined a united Europe in 1973. At the time, the plan's opponents had similar arguments to today's Brexiteers. Labour Party lawmaker Peter Shore later explained: "What the advocates of membership are saying is that we are finished as a country; that the long and famous story of the British nation and people has ended; that we are now so weak and powerless that we must accept terms and conditions, penalties and limitations almost as though we had suffered defeat in a war." [...]

The nostalgic nationalists told them so nonchalantly because none of them seriously expected that a majority of Brits would vote to leave the EU. It was easy to make these mistakes because their primary aim had been to exploit the referendum to win a fight within the Tory party. Ultimately, the people voted 52 to 48 percent in favor of Brexit. While the rest of the Europe unloaded its frustration with the status quo by swelling the ranks of right-wing populists, the Brits found their scapegoat in Brussels. [...]

May would later say that her stance represented what "British people want." But that wasn't true. The people were asked whether they wanted to leave the EU -- not how. Clearly, there wasn't just one way people wanted that to happen. And the more time that passed, the more it became clear that these many potential ways of exiting the EU were irreconcilable. [...]

The battle over Brexit has poisoned the United Kingdom. At some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be taught as a case study for political failure. Planning for a Brexit museum is likewise underway. Several activists have joined forces for the project, hoping to show how the United Kingdom took back its "sovereignty." Or not. Who knows, perhaps the museum will ultimately be home to a blue bus and a red bus.

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The New Yorker: The White House Coverup of the Saudi Coverup of the Jamal Khashoggi Murder

Congress has been outraged over the Administration’s response to the Khashoggi murder, especially Trump’s willingness to give the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a pass. “I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted recently. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis went to the Hill to explain U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia—in the context of the Khashoggi murder—and U.S. military support propping up the kingdom’s brutal four-year war in Yemen. Moves to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder by curtailing its war have rapidly gained momentum in recent weeks. Mysteriously missing from the briefing, however, was Haspel. [...]

The C.I.A. later issued a statement denying that Haspel had been blocked from the briefing. “The notion that anyone told Director Haspel not to attend today’s briefing is false,” a spokesman, Timothy Barrett, said. The C.I.A. response kind of fudged the issue. The White House may not have told Haspel not to go, but it also didn’t invite her to accompany Pompeo and Mattis, even though she has, by far, the most firsthand intelligence about the Saudi killing. [...]

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, was furious. He vowed not to vote on any key legislation pushed by the White House—including government-funding bills and judicial nominations—until Haspel fully and candidly briefs Congress on the Khashoggi assassination. “I’m not going to blow past this,” he told reporters. “I’m talking about any key vote. Anything that you need me for to get out of town, I ain’t doing it until we hear from the C.I.A.” His threat is real. A government-funding bill is due to be voted on next week; without its passage, the government could be shut down. [...]

But on Wednesday, Pompeo, who was Haspel’s predecessor at the C.I.A., never even mentioned Khashoggi’s name in his opening remarks. He instead digressed from the event that has galvanized Congress to frame Riyadh’s importance in terms of countering Tehran. “Degrading ties with Saudi Arabia would be a grave mistake for U.S. national security,” he said. U.S. military exports help the kingdom deter regional rivals. He even dismissed the impact of U.S. bombs, warplanes, and intelligence on the Saudis’ four-year war in Yemen, which has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the twenty-first century. “The suffering in Yemen grieves me,” Pompeo said, “but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot worse.”

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Politico: Europe’s Russia sanctions are not working

The motives behind the Kremlin’s operation are not mysterious. Moscow is seeking to reinforce its position in the Azov Sea and limit Kiev’s access to Ukraine’s eastern ports. In doing so, the Kremlin appears to be pursuing a similar strategy to what it did in Georgia, where its creeping annexation also took the form of constantly changing “borders” between Georgia and South Ossetia.

Intervening violently in Ukraine also shifts the Russian public’s focus away from domestic politics and back to the war in the east, at a time when Putin’s popularity has dropped to its lowest point since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, following a controversial pension reform. Today, some 58 percent of Russians say they support Putin, down from a 75 percent high last year, according to a recent Levada Centre survey published in October. [...]

Starting in 2016, the EU added another strand to its Russia strategy: selective engagement on issues of common interest. This two-pronged strategy had the double merit of securing political unity — to Moscow’s surprise — among EU member countries, while also arguably preventing the conflict from escalating further. [...]

This political unity will not be a response to violations of the Minsk agreement. It’s become crystal clear over the past few years, in fact, that the Minsk agreement will not be fully implemented. Neither Moscow nor Kiev is likely to budge first in fulfilling their side of the deal. They don’t see the point.

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Jacobin Magazine: What Is a Jacob Rees-Mogg?

Rees-Mogg’s background is comically elitist: the son of a former Times editor, William Rees-Mogg, he attended the private boarding school Eton, then studied history at Oxford. Rees-Mogg the Younger is fully aware of the class privilege he exudes; indeed, he emphasizes and plays it up: opting for anachronistic outfits, an Instagram account stuffed with photographs of himself in double-breasted suits, or his young children dancing on a Union Jack rug. In parliament and in media interviews, Rees-Mogg appears to have been invented purely to act as a living example of pleonasm: his speeches and remarks are long-winded and reliant on stuffy, antiquated and obscure vocabulary, deliberately obfuscating meaning in an attempt to appear more intelligent than his opponent.[...]

Class allows both Rees-Mogg and Johnson to propose outlandish right-wing ideas with less fear of repercussion: by playing into the stereotypes of the bumbling but erudite elite gentleman, they provide a necessary psychological distance between the ideas and the man beneath them. When they go too far, they’re merely dismissed as acting eccentrically; if others agree with them, the far-right thinking is whitewashed as mere upper-class fun, packaging it in far more palatable clothing. The messaging of Rees-Mogg rarely differs from that of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, but they speak to different people: Farage playing into the “man of the people” charade, and Rees-Mogg remaining aloof, playing a caricature of an English toff, and insisting his political stances are the result of both serious intellectual endeavor and straightforward common sense.

At first glance, Rees-Mogg appears to be little more than a complex joke: peel away the layers, and it becomes clear he has no plans to become Conservative leader — who would want to when the party and country are in such disarray? Instead, he’s playing a far longer game. As the far right — traditionally found in fringe groups like the British National Party, English Defence League, and recently formed Football Lads Alliance — gains ground in the UK, Rees-Mogg and his fellow travelers are working within the Conservative party to steer it further to the right, undoing David Cameron’s long appeal to the center. For Rees-Mogg, politics remains a low-stakes affair: he has nothing to lose, and a huge mountain of cash to support him should he retire early. That makes him all the more dangerous.

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The Guardian: Senate vote on Yemen rebukes Trump administration's pro-Saudi stance

The Republican-majority chamber voted 63-37 to allow the measure, which invokes the War Powers Resolution, stopping all involvement of US armed forces in the Yemen war, to proceed to the floor of the Senate for a vote, expected next week.

The bipartisan measure was introduced by the independent senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Republican senator Mike Lee and Democrat Chris Murphy. It may yet be significantly amended, it would not stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, and would face an uphill challenge to be passed by the House of Representatives.

But the moment represented a highly symbolic act of defiance, coming a few hours after the administration had wheeled out two of its biggest guns, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and defence secretary, James Mattis, to brief the entire Senate on the essential importance to US national security of US support for the Saudi-led coalition.

It also marked an assertion of Congress’s constitutional prerogative to decide whether the country goes to war – and an expression of alarm over the actions of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. [...]

However, the Democratic senator Dick Durbin emerged from the morning briefing in the Senate’s secure chamber, used for classified discussions, saying that Mattis and Pompeo had told the senators that the White House had blocked the CIA director’s attendance.  

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Haaretz: How Cremation Became a Hot Israeli Business

The reasons for its secrecy are understandable: 'Aley Shalechet,' the oldest and best known cremation company in Israel, saw its crematorium set aflame and destroyed in 2007, at the height of the ultra-Orthodox war against the right to cremate bodies in Israel. Following this incident, the company relocated the crematorium, and since then, it has insisted on even more stringent secrecy than it did before. [...]

Thus Meshi-Zahav has abandoned the active fight, which in the past included complaints to the police and reports in ultra-Orthodox newspapers. “We thought it was a mistake to give them all the publicity, because most of the Israeli public doesn’t connect to this, isn’t familiar with it and doesn’t do it,” he said. “Only a tiny minority.” [...]

Let's be honest: in economically weaker communities High Spirit has fewer clients than it does in upscale neighborhoods. And yet, cremation is generally something embraced by people who grew up in a non-Jewish environment. Farewell ceremonies in front of an open casket are usually found in Christian families. They say it’s more of a religious-communal issue, not a financial one. “I don’t think a family’s financial situation plays a role” says Sharon. [...]

“But I was always bothered by ordinary burials, how they threw the body into the grave [in a shroud]. As far back as my grandfather and grandmother, when I saw that, I thought, why is it like that? Why not in a coffin? Why are soldiers and government ministers buried in a coffin, but not ordinary people? Are they less valuable? Personally, this is something that always bothered me.”

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CityLab: With GM Job Cuts, Youngstown Faces a New ‘Black Monday’

But local residents recognize the cruelty of optimism—and they’re tired of trying to adapt to a changing economic landscape. In the late 1970s, economic apologists called deindustrialization “creative destruction” and described plant closings as part of the “natural economic order.”[...]

The fall of Youngstown since the 1970s offers a textbook illustration of what happens when a significant portion of local workers lose their jobs. Businesses across the community suffer—not just suppliers or service providers who directly supported a closed plant, but also restaurants and bars and retailers of all kinds. Stores close, windows get broken, storefronts get boarded up, and downtowns empty out. Cities lose the tax dollars to pay for street repairs, police patrols, fire departments, and more; crime rises, the built environment deteriorates, and populations decline. Between 2001 and 2010, the population of Youngstown dropped from 82,026 to 66,982; the Mahoning Valley had the largest population decline of any of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. Since then, the region has lost another 23,000 people, 4.1 percent of its population. In May, the Wall Street Journal listed the area as one of the fastest-shrinking cities in the United States. 

The social costs of deindustrialization may be even worse. Population decline breaks apart families and shatters neighborhoods. You can see this on the streets of Youngstown, in the thousands of abandoned homes and empty lots. While the city has seen a decline in vacant properties over the last decade, much of that comes not from reclaimed homes but from the nearly 600 that have been demolished.

Deindustrialization also hurts individuals. Rates of addiction, suicide, domestic violence, and depression rise, as do rates of heart attacks and strokes. That human harm has social consequences. Residents may blame themselves for the decline of their community, and that undermines their ability to stand up for themselves and pursue new opportunities, and their faith in the institutions that people rely on for support.

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Aeon: Love in a time of migrants: on rethinking arranged marriages

In his book In Praise of Love (2009), the French communist philosopher Alain Badiou attacks the notion of ‘risk-free love’, which he sees written in the commercial language of dating services that promise their customers ‘love, without falling in love’. For Badiou, the search for ‘perfect love without suffering’ signifies a ‘modern’ variant of ‘traditional’ arranged-marriage practices – a risk-averse, calculated approach to love that aims to diminish our exposure to differences: ‘Their idea is you calculate who has the same tastes, the same fantasies, the same holidays, wants the same number of children. [They try] to go back to arranged marriages,’ writes Badiou. The philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek subscribes to similar ideas about arranged marriages, referring to them as a ‘pre-modern procedure’. [...]

Due to the growth of international migration, the question of how Western states treat arranged marriages bears very serious consequences in terms of how we perceive the emotional lives of migrants and diasporic community members. The prevalent Western perception of illegitimacy is unwarranted, based both on ignorance of arranged marriage and on a lack of insight into Western norms.

Badiou criticises both libertinism (superficial and narcissistic) and arranged-marriage practices (empty of that organic, spontaneous and unsettling desire that inspires emotional transgressions). He argues that love is real when it is transgressive – a disruptive experience that opens people to new possibilities and a common vision of what they could be together. It possesses the power to floor the ego, overcome the selfish impulse, and transfigure a random encounter into a meaningful, shared continuity. To Badiou, love is not simply a search for an adequate partner, it is a construction of an almost traumatic transformation that compels us to look at the world ‘from the point of view of two and not one’. [...]

Postcolonial feminist theory has demonstrated that women who opt for arranged marriages are not passive subscribers of patriarchal traditions, but engaged in negotiating the practice to shift the balance of power in their favour. Arranged marriage might not be the perfect solution to the problem of love, but it isn’t a fossilised holdover from archaic times. It’s an ever-evolving, modern phenomenon and should be understood as such.

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Like Stories of Old: The Philosophy of The Fountain – Escaping Our Mental Prisons

Revisiting The Fountain; this video essay pushes beyond the various interpretations of the plot to explore the deeper themes at the heart of Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious film.

The Guardian: Free education is disappearing before our eyes

The mass evacuation of children from British cities to rural areas laid bare the abysmal lack of education many had received. The government response was the 1944 Education Act, which established what we now call state-maintained comprehensive schools and free, compulsory education to the age of 15. Free, as in not requiring parental fees. It was a change the then education minister, Rab Butler, would describe in the House of Commons as characterised by “dignity”; but 75 years later, under cover of Brexit, this basic pillar of our postwar order is being quietly eroded, with “free” schools asking parents if they can make a contribution to help meet the chronic funding shortfall they are facing. Money for the “little extras”, as the chancellor, Philip Hammond, in his recent budget, described the luxuries our pampered snowflakes enjoy these days – things like toilet paper, textbooks and stationery. [...]

Here’s a conundrum. How does a school that struggles to pay for textbooks meet the increasing pressure to demonstrate high performance? Ofsted, the schools regulator, acknowledged last month that schools were limiting their curriculum to focus on end-of-year tests. A primary school teaching assistant I spoke to recently told me about children learning nothing but maths and English in their final year. The children who had no hope of passing were siphoned off into a dud class so that the higher performers could get on with providing the school’s required performance data uninhibited.[...]

Some schools are overtly creating a top tier, where the most academic pupils are groomed for high grades and Russell Group university admissions, and offered experiences – such as residential and theatre trips – that are simply not available to the rest. One state school organised a £3,000 trip to Borneo, for those who could afford to pay – achieving class segregation through seemingly voluntary exclusion.

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Politico: UK worse off under all Brexit scenarios

The government analysis was echoed later in the day by a separate report from the Bank of England, which warned economic output in the U.K. could drop by as much as 8 percent if Britain drops out of the EU without a deal in place, compared to expectations had the U.K. stayed in. That compares to a 6.25 drop during the 2008 financial crisis. [...]

Brexit-supporting MPs were also quick to dismiss the Bank’s analysis, recalling its (so far incorrect) pre-referendum warning that a Leave vote could result in a recession — a prediction that was linked by Brexiteers to an anti-Brexit campaign by the David Cameron government that they branded “Project Fear.” [...]

Likewise, the opposition Labour Party was quick to attack the government. John McDonnell, the Labour party’s shadow chancellor, said: “The Bank has confirmed what other independent reports this week have been telling us: a no-deal Brexit could be even worse than the financial crisis of 10 years ago, and the country would be much worse under Theresa May’s deal. Instead of plowing on with this discredited deal the government should set new priorities that would protect jobs and the economy.”[...]

Regionally, the northeast of England would be the hardest hit economically in a no-deal or Canada-style free-trade agreement scenario, according to the document. Under no deal, the region’s growth would be more than 10 points lower than it would have been inside the EU.

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Politico: Spanish right eyes deep south

While there is plenty at stake for all four main Spanish parties in an election in Andalusia on December 2, the one that stands to gain the most is Ciudadanos. It enters this contest not only hoping to unseat the Socialists (PSOE), who have governed Andalusia for nearly 40 years, but also determined to assert its dominance in Spain’s increasingly crowded political right.[...]

Since 2015, the Socialists have relied on the support of Ciudadanos to govern in Andalusia. But the recent collapse of that partnership reflects Ciudadanos’ shift to the right and its push to make inroads in the region. Originally claiming to occupy the center ground, in early 2017 the party eliminated “social democracy” from its statutes, relaunching itself as a “constitutionalist, liberal, democratic and progressive” force.[...]

That radicalization has been most visible on the issue of Catalonia. Founded as a Catalan centrist party that sought to counter that region’s swelling nationalism, Ciudadanos, which went nationwide in 2014, has hardened its unionist stance as Spain’s territorial crisis has unfolded.[...]

That is unlikely, with the Socialists almost certainly heading for victory once again, albeit requiring a new partner to help them govern. A more realistic target for Ciudadanos will be to overtake the PP, which it is happy to join forces with to form a government if the two parties gain enough seats.

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Politico: Countries reject plan to scrap clock change in 2019

Ministers are poised to call for the EU to postpone the plan to scrap daylight saving time to 2021, according to a draft text prepared by the Austrian presidency and obtained by POLITICO.

The shift follows pressure from countries including Portugal, Greece and the Netherlands to maintain the clock change or provide more information to justify scrapping the twice-yearly shift. [...]

Countries that support keeping the current system do so “mainly due to the lack of plausible available evidence regarding the possible benefits that the abolition of time changes could bring about,” it added.[...]

An EU consultation saw a majority of the 4.6 million respondents back the move to scrap the clock change, an EU standard since 1996. Countries including Finland and Estonia remain strongly in favor of the Commission’s plan.

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Haaretz: CNN Poll Reveals Depth of anti-Semitism in Europe

More than a quarter of Europeans believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance, a recent CNN poll conducted in seven countries found. Additionally, more than one-third of respondents said they have no substantial knowledge of the Holocaust.[...]

Only 5 percent of the 7,092 respondents reported never hearing about the Holocaust, but 29 percent said they had heard about the genocide and that this was the full extent of their knowledge about it. Half of respondents said they know “a fair amount” about the Holocaust.[...]

Forty percent of respondents said that Jews were at risk of racist violence in their countries and half said their governments should do more to fight anti-Semitism. But substantial minorities blamed Israel or Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.

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The Atlantic: Watching Britain’s Influence Shrink in Real Time

Some within Britain’s diplomatic corps, however, have warned that the U.K.’s global role is already not what it used to be, and stands to deteriorate even further after it leaves the EU on March 29, 2019. “We’re not the same country we were in 1945,” Harriet O’Brien, a British diplomat based in New York, says in the BBC series. “In some ways, we don’t have as much influence in the world. So we do, I think, punch above our weight.” [...]

And when it comes to present and future world crises, British leaders have publicly grappled with not being able to command the same foreign-policy authority it once had. “We have to be careful not to overestimate our influence,” Hunt told the House of Commons last week when asked about Britain’s draft resolution calling for a cease-fire in the ongoing war in Yemen.

The last time Britain seemed so unsure of its place in the world, it had lost its empire after World War II. Then the American statesman Dean Acheson warned London against overestimating its power alone. “Britain’s attempt to play a separate power role … apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a Commonwealth which has no political structure or unity or strength and enjoys a fragile and precarious economic relationship,” Acheson said in 1962. “This role is about played out.”

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The Atlantic: Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People's Mental Health

One major stressor, he says, was the requirement that all first-year Ph.D. economics students take the same three courses. But other major stressors are likely to resonate with graduate students in all kinds of disciplines. The doctoral-degree experience often consists of intense labor expectations for little pay and a resulting lack of sleep and social life. In addition, there is the notorious hierarchy of academia, which often promotes power struggles and tribalism.

To make matters worse, the payoff for all that stress may be wanting: A 2014 report found that nearly 40 percent of the doctoral students surveyed hadn’t secured a job at the time of graduation. What’s more, roughly 13 percent of Ph.D. recipients graduate with more than $70,000 in education-related debt, though in the humanities the percentage is about twice that. And for those who do secure an academic post, census data suggest that close to a third of part-time university faculty—many of whom are graduate students—live near or below the poverty line.

A new study by a team of Harvard-affiliated researchers highlights one of the consequences of these realities: Graduate students are disproportionately likely to struggle with mental-health issues. The researchers surveyed roughly 500 economics Ph.D. candidates at eight elite universities, and found that 18 percent of them experienced moderate or severe symptoms of depression and anxiety. That’s more than three times the national average, according to the study. Roughly one in 10 students in the Harvard survey also reported having suicidal thoughts on at least several days within the prior two weeks. (Other recent studies have had similar findings, including one published earlier this year that described graduate-student mental health as a “crisis.”) [...]

Compounding the pressures is the sense, at least according to the economics Ph.D. candidates surveyed by the Harvard researchers, that their work isn’t useful or beneficial to society. Only a quarter of the study’s respondents reported feeling as if their work was useful always or most of the time, compared with 63 percent of the entire working-age population. Only a fifth of the respondents thought that they had opportunities to make a positive impact on their community.

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The New York Times: Taiwan Asked Voters 10 Questions. It Got Some Unexpected Answers

“Saturday’s referendum furthers a long-held D.P.P. goal to get referendums institutionalized,” said Michael Fahey, a legal consultant based in Taipei. “Major sections of the D.P.P. always wanted to have some kind of referendum law in case there ever needs to be a referendum on self-determination, there will be a mechanism in place for doing that.”

One referendum question that did approach the issue of identity concerned what Taiwan should be called at the Olympic Games and other international sporting events. In a 1981 deal with the International Olympic Committee, Taiwan agreed to compete under the name “Chinese Taipei.” But in recent years the people of Taiwan have increasingly sought to assert their identity, and a referendum question asked if the island should compete as “Taiwan” instead.

That proposal failed after a campaign warning that doing so might lead to Taiwan’s being banned from Olympic competition under Chinese pressure. The referendum result could allow Beijing to argue that the people of Taiwan are quite happy to be identified as Chinese. [...]

The referendum questions on gay rights were the subject of a well-funded and highly organized campaign led by conservative Christians and other groups. The campaign was characterized by misinformation, the bulk of which was spread online, including messages warning of an AIDS epidemic and low birthrates, or that educating students about different sexual orientations would influence their sexual choices. [...]

The government has three months to present bills reflecting the referendum outcomes. While the vote against same-sex marriage does not affect the court ruling, it could make lawmakers more inclined to offer same-sex couples a separate civil union status rather than the same legal status that heterosexual married couples have.

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CGP Grey: What is Federal Land?

The Guardian: The seismic shock of Brexit will change the UK’s politics for ever

One Labour veteran, witness to many a parliamentary rebellion, describes loyalties in the Commons today as the most fluid since the repeal of the corn laws 172 years ago. That tussle over tariffs brought down a prime minister, split the Conservative party and created a new Liberal one.

Today’s Tories look more divided than Labour, but that is because a governing party has to do Brexit, while the opposition only has to talk about it. May has made unpopular choices that Jeremy Corbyn pretends do not need making. Labour’s policy is to engineer a general election, win it, then cook up an alchemist Brexit that keeps the benefits of the single market without the obligations of EU membership. The unavailability of that combination has been proven many times.

If Tory MPs cared only about party unity, they would rally behind May’s deal. Their goal would be to get over the finish line without sweating over the small print, mint the commemorative coins and change the subject – enjoying the respite of a transition period before too many people realised they had been diddled. But neither hardcore leavers nor remainers are prepared to play along. Tory Brexit ultras demand a new deal, knowing there is no time to get one. They are just flapping their arms in anticipation of a run at the no-deal cliff edge. But if that is the way things are heading, many pro-European Tories would take their chances on a referendum with a view to aborting Brexit altogether.[...]

Corbyn has reasons to avoid getting involved in the People’s Vote campaign. It would put him in public alliance with liberal Tories and Blairites, the kind of people with whom he does not share platforms (including the actual Tony Blair). The opposition leader’s team also suspects the People’s Vote movement of incubating a new party and sees no value in political insurgencies outside Labour’s control.

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Politico: Foreign Dark Money Is Threatening American Democracy

The lack of transparency in our campaign finance system combined with extensive foreign money laundering creates a significant vulnerability for our democracy. We don’t know how much illicit money enters the United States from abroad or how much dark money enters American political campaigns, but in 2015, the Treasury Department estimated that $300 billion is laundered through the U.S. every year. If even a small fraction of that ends up in our political campaigns, it constitutes an unacceptable national security risk.

While foreign funding of campaigns is prohibited by federal statute, the body that enforces campaign finance laws – the Federal Election Commission (FEC) – lacks both teeth and resources. Sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China know how to bypass the ban on foreign funding by exploiting loopholes in the system and using layers of proxies to mask their activities, making it difficult for the FEC, the FBI, and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to follow the money. [...]

The fact that we don’t know exactly how much foreign dark money is being channeled into U.S. politics is precisely why we need to reduce our vulnerabilities. There is ample evidence of dark money penetrating other democracies, and no reason to believe we are immune from this risk. In 2004, for example, Lithuania’s president was impeached after the media disclosed that a Russian oligarch who contributed to his campaign later received Lithuanian citizenship. Just this past January, in Montenegro, a local politician was charged with laundering Russian funds to support a pro-Russian political party. In Australia, an intelligence report leaked in 2017 exposed pervasive Chinese financial influence in the country’s domestic politics. Similar allegations recently surfaced in New Zealand.

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Independent: Islamophobia is a form of racism – like antisemitism it’s time it got its own definition

But the absence of a clear understanding of Islamophobia has allowed it to become normalised within our society and even socially acceptable, able to pass what Baroness Warsi described as the “dinner table test”. The consequences have been horrific.

The killing of grandfather Makram Ali outside Finsbury Park mosque in 2017, the murder of another elderly Muslim male, Muhsin Ahmed in Rotherham in 2015 and the brutal stabbing of Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham in 2013, serve as grave reminders of the perils of what can happen when Islamophobia goes unchecked. [...]

Islamophobic hate crime is a growing problem. Recent statistics highlight how attacks on Muslims have seen the highest increase. Nevertheless hate crime is the just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the underlying causes which remain hidden from sight. While we can tackle the overt manifestations of Islamophobia in the form of hate crimes, we are less conscious and less clued up about tackling that which lies beneath the waterline. [...]

This isn’t about protecting a religion from criticism, but about protecting people from discrimination. The APPG on British Muslims received countless submissions detailing the racialised manner in which the Muslimness of an individual was used to attack Muslims or those perceived to be Muslims. The racialisation of Muslims proceeds on the basis of their racial and religious identity, or perceived identity, from white converts receiving racialised sobriquets such as “p*ki”, Muslim women attacked due to their perceived dress, bearded men attacked for the personification of a Muslim identity or even turban wearing Sikhs attacked due to the perception of Muslimness. 

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The Huffington Post: Church Holds Continuous Worship Service To Prevent Family's Deportation

Bethel, a church and community center in The Hague, has taken dramatic steps to protect the Tamrazyans, an Armenian family of five asylum-seekers who have lived in the Netherlands for nine years. The government has reportedly denied the family’s asylum request and approved them for deportation ― even though there’s a law in place that allows children who have lived in the country for over five years to be eligible for a residence permit, if they also fulfill other requirements. The Tamrazyans applied for a permit under that law and were denied, according to Bethel.

Knowing that Dutch law prevents police officers from entering houses of worship during religious services, church members decided to hold a nonstop worship service at Bethel that would allow the Tamrazyans to take shelter in the church.

The continuous worship service started on Oct. 26 at 1:30 p.m. ― and it hasn’t stopped since.

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Quartz: The Auschwitz Museum hits back at Lindsey Graham’s Holocaust mansplaining

Ocasio-Cortez argued that the point of the museum was to keep the era’s lessons alive—including impact of authoritarianism and the forces that drive families to seek asylum elsewhere. Her position was soon reiterated by an organization uniquely positioned to understand the Holocaust’s horrors: the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which maintains the historical site in Poland where Nazis killed an estimated 1.1 million people between 1940 and 1945 through execution and mistreatment.

“When we look at Auschwitz we see the end of the process,” the museum replied on Twitter to Graham. “It’s important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence.”

This is not the first time that historians of World War II’s ugliest crimes have spoken out against the Trump administration and its supporters. Japanese-Americans who survived US internment camps vehemently criticized the administration’s policy of family separation at the border earlier this year. In October, a Holocaust historian who specializes in the origins of genocides published an essay in the New York Review of Books noting “troubling similarities” between 1930s Germany and the US today, including a growing policy of isolationism and the failure of lawmakers on the right to curtail or criticize their side’s worst impulses.

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openDemocracy: Lessons on building democracy after nonviolent revolutions

What explains these differences? Why do some nonviolent revolutions end in democracy while others do not? And is nonviolent resistance really that much of a factor in promoting democracy in the first place? These are the questions that I examine in a new monograph from ICNC press: When Civil Resistance Succeeds: Building Democracy after Nonviolent Uprisings. The monograph builds on statistical research into 78 political transitions initiated by nonviolent resistance from 1945 to 2011, as well as interviews and in-depth examination of three particular transitions: Brazil’s transition away from military rule in the 1980s, Zambia’s transition away from single party rule in the 1990s, and Nepal’s transition away from monarchy in the 2000s. It focuses first on building our understanding of these questions using the best tools of social science research, and second on generating practical lessons that activists, political leaders and external actors interested in helping promote democracy after nonviolent revolutions can apply to their own situations.

The first major takeaway from the research is that nonviolent resistance does encourage democratic progress, even in very unfavorable circumstances. Out of the 78 political transitions initiated by nonviolent resistance, 60 ended with at least a minimal level of democracy. This is a much higher proportion than political transitions initiated through any other means. This strengthens the findings of earlier research that found that nonviolent resistance led to more democracy than violent resistance. [...]

The third lesson is to build and maintain a positive vision of the future. Pro-democracy movements often focus on negative goals to mobilize people against dictators. It can be easier to unite a diverse coalition around getting rid of a particularly hated leader, rather than having hard conversations about what the future will look like once the leader is gone. But having those hard conversations is crucial because, once the hated leader or regime is gone, people need a reason to continue to engage in activism. [...]

The third lesson is to not shut out everyone from the old regime. Accountability for past crimes, particularly grievous human rights abuses, is central to any meaningful democratic tradition. But often the focus in political transitions moves beyond accountability to punishment and vindictiveness towards all those associated with the old regime. This creates a whole class of political players who have political skills but now no way of exercising them, and no reason to buy into the new democratic politics. They can thus often turn into a potent force seeking to undermine new democratic politics and preventing the creation of new institutions.

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The Atlantic: Is Trump Compromised by Saudi Money

Although Trump tweeted last month that he has “no financial interests in Saudi Arabia,” he has in the past acknowledged business ties with the kingdom. “Saudi Arabia, I like the Saudis,” he said at a July 2015 campaign rally. “I make a lot of money with them. They buy all sorts of my stuff. All kinds of toys from Trump. They pay me millions and hundreds of millions.” The Associated Press reported that in the 1990s, when Trump was “teetering on personal bankruptcy and scrambling to raise cash,” a billionaire Saudi prince twice closed on multimillion-dollar deals, including one to buy a 282-foot yacht called Princess. More recent business comes through Saudi stays at Trump hotels during his presidency, though PolitiFact reports that the Trump Organization doesn’t appear to own property or invest in the kingdom. [...]

Schiff, whom Trump called “little Adam Schitt” in a tweet last week, apparently is laying the groundwork to dig into the president’s personal finances more than any other investigator. When the Democrats take control of the House in January, he’ll gain control of the Intelligence Committee’s subpoena power and majority staff. The Daily Beast reported a few days ago that the committee has created positions for “money-laundering and forensic accounting experts.”[...]

So, a reporter asked, “who should be held accountable?” The president’s response did not identify any other Saudi officials, military cooperation, arms sales, official visits, or support for the war in Yemen. Instead, Trump seemed to blame universal human depravity.

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The Atlantic: America’s Epidemic of Empty Churches

Many of our nation’s churches can no longer afford to maintain their structures—between 6,000 and 10,000 churches die each year in America—and that number will likely grow. Though more than 70 percent of our citizens still claim to be Christian, congregational participation is less central to many American’s faith than it once was. Most denominations are declining as a share of the overall population, and donations to congregations have been falling for decades. Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated Americans, nicknamed the “nones,” are growing as a share of the U.S. population.

Any minister can tell you that the two best predictors of a congregation’s survival are “budgets and butts,” and American churches are struggling by both metrics. As donations and attendance decrease, the cost of maintaining large physical structures that are only in use a few hours a week by a handful of worshippers becomes prohibitive. None of these trends show signs of slowing, so the United States’s struggling congregations face a choice: start packing or find a creative way to stay afloat.[...]

A church building is more than just walls and windows; it is also a sacred vessel that stores generations of religious memories. Even for those who do not regularly practice a religion, sacred images and structures operate as powerful community symbols. When a hallowed building is resurrected as something else, those who feel a connection to that symbol may experience a sense of loss or even righteous anger. [...]

While this type of sacred-to-secular conversion may be a tough pill for former members to swallow, many are even less satisfied with the alternatives. A large number of abandoned churches have become wineries or breweries or bars. Others have been converted into hotels, bed and breakfasts, and AirBNBs. A few have been transformed into entertainment venues, such as an indoor playground for children, a laser-tag arena, or a skate park.

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The Calvert Journal: A home from home: traces of a shared past in post-Soviet interiors

For her photo series Of Time and Memory, Bulgarian photographer Eugenia Maximova documented homes in Russia, Ukraine and Moldova that still encompass a Soviet style. In these rooms we encounter clocks, calendars and personal archives — various marks of time — but it is her own memories that Maximova projects onto these interiors. “While I was taking pictures for my project, a lot of memories from my childhood resurfaced,” says Maximova. Although the photographer grew up in Bulgaria, she recognised the kitschy household items that were mass produced in the Soviet Union as copies of western luxury goods but were common elsewhere in the world. “At home we had many low-value objects, cutlery, glasses, and ornaments that we handled with great care.” Soviet memorabilia that characterises these rooms reveals a nostalgia for the past. Yet Maximova presents it as a collective memory, not only shared by former Soviet countries. Rather than estrange the viewer, these images make you feel at home. This is why kitsch, although sometimes strange, is timeless and appealing.

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The Calvert Journal: Elena Subach & Viacheslav Poliakov

Ukrainian photographers Elena Subach and Viacheslav Poliakov have been working together since 2012. Their City of Gardens focuses on the Polish city of Katowice, once an important region for coal mining and industrial steel production. Today, Katowice has been rebranded a “city of gardens” following a transformation aimed at the cultural development of the region. Situated within the historic Silesia region, most of which lies along south-west Poland’s Oder River, Katowice retains a strong sense of local identity and tradition. Against a backdrop of globalisation and fears of an increasing consumerist uniformity, City of Gardens reflects a search for a unique Polish aesthetic that lies on the border between East and West. [...]

Elena: I get my inspiration from stories. If a place or an event has a story attached to it that people want to tell, or that people can listen to until they forget what they were talking about in the first place — that’s how you know it might work for a project. We chose Silesia, where we shot our Polish project, because of the wonderful stories our friend told about it. She spent her childhood there and was able to convince us that not only was it where Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain, even the doves were a brighter shade of white there. [...]

Elena: On the whole, social networks have totally devalued image-making. And that’s an important step, because now you really have to ask yourself what you’re doing and why. They are also an invaluable educational resource for those who don’t live in big cities: if it wasn’t for the internet, we never would have discovered the photography we love, or not to this extent.

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America Magazine: Why are so many people fleeing Honduras?

Honduras has endured years of economic and political crises. The November 2017 election results, endorsed by the U.S. government but widely perceived as fraudulent, led to mass protests and dozens of deaths of demonstrators at the hands of security forces and police. The U.N. Office of the High Commission for Human Rights reported that military police and army “used excessive force, including lethal force, to control and disperse protests, leading to the killing and wounding of protesters as well as passers-by.” [...]

Karla Rivas, the coordinator of the Jesuit Migration Network, spoke with America by phone from Queretaro, Mexico, where she was accompanying a separate caravan of mothers who were searching for their children—young migrants who had gone unaccounted for after heading north. “The humanitarian exodus [from Honduras] is the culmination of several crises that have been manifesting themselves over time with the implementation of an unjust economic model.” She called it “an inhumane economic model that is based on extracting [resources] from communities.”[...]

The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that Honduras has “the most unequal distribution of income in Latin America,” a inequity that has been accelerating since President Manuel Zelaya was deposed in 2009. In the two years after the coup, “over 100 percent of all real income gains went to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hondurans,” according to the report. [...]

Violence is another key driver of immigration from Honduras, which endures one of the world’s highest homicide rates. Much of the violence has been associated with drug trafficking and acts of extortion—criminal gangs can essentially control entire urban communities—but some of the violence results from collusion among gang members, police and security forces, sometimes in acts of intimidation directed at community or environmental activists.

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Quartz: Putin picked a very Putin time to seize three Ukrainian ships

When Russian president Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, his approval ratings were at record lows and the world was watching the Sochi Olympics. When he went to war with Georgia in 2008, the world was consumed by the Beijing Olympics. [...]

On the back of controversial pension reforms, Putin’s ratings are again in a deep trough. In fact, they’re at the lowest point since 2014. After the seizure of Crimea, Putin’s ratings climbed dramatically and he rode extraordinary levels of support for four years.[...]

More conflict in the east is the last thing Europe needs. Among European countries, the UK is traditionally the most hawkish on Russia—but Brexit negotiations are at their busiest point in two years, consuming both Britain and the continent. Amid all that, Britain and Spain are having their own territorial dispute over Gibraltar. [...]

Now is a good time to mess with Ukrainian politics. It’s just four months until the 2019 election, and polls for president Petro Poroshenko—a Putin foe—are looking dire. The Kremlin is unlikely to be happy with whoever wins—former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, who has a long and bitter history with Russia, is in pole position at the moment.

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Quartz: Taiwan’s vote against same-sex marriage illustrates the problem with referendums

The high court decision did not legalize same-sex marriage; it only declared that the legislature would have to make marriage equality law within two years. That meant it was up to Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which gained power in 2016, to follow through. It failed to do so. [...]

That is a low bar. Even though Christians make up just 5% of Taiwan’s population, they were able to collect the paltry 280,000 signatures needed to make their referendum happen. Their proposal to define marriage as “between a man and a woman” received over 7 million “yes” votes—more than a counter-referendum endorsing same-sex marriage, but far less than half of Taiwan’s over 18 million registered voters. [...]

The decision on marriage law in Taiwan reveals an even bigger problem with referendums, though: they turn politics into a popularity contest. Democracy is not just about voting, but also pluralism and the protection of minority rights. In deciding to call marriage discrimination unconstitutional, the court was acting to protect those rights for the LGBT community. Plus, given Taiwan’s law that a referendum needs only 25% of voters to say “yes,” it doesn’t even meet the standard of majority rule.

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Axios: Defying Trump, key GOP senator to sharpen focus on Saudi prince

In a phone interview, Graham told me he and some of his colleagues have requested an intelligence briefing this coming week to find out whether the reporting is correct that the CIA has "high confidence" MBS ordered the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. [...]

Why it matters: It doesn't look like the Khashoggi story is going away. It's unlikely new sanctions on Saudi will pass in the lame duck. That means this fight will likely carry over into next year — potentially pitting Democratic senators and a smaller group of Republicans against the president. [...]

The bottom line: Graham is arguing the opposite. "We cannot have a normal strategic relationship with somebody this crazy," Graham told me. Graham said "everything would be on the table" to punish Saudi Arabia, including blocking arms sales.

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The Guardian: The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit

The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonisation and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated. (Boris Johnson, in the Telegraph of 12 November, claimed that “we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony.”)[...]

Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war. [...]

The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” Boris Johnson told the Telegraph on 14 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and “various people” were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European monetary system being introduced by the EU was “all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.” [...]

Yet the paper went on to contrast the fate of Britain since the war with that of the six members of the existing common market, all of whom had been invaded: “The contrast between their experiences in recent years as members of the Communities, and ours outside, when our resources have not been growing sufficiently to do all we should like to do at home and abroad, suggests that they chose the right road … All the Community countries enjoyed rates of growth of gross national product (GNP) per head of population, or of private consumption per head, roughly twice as great as Britain’s.” It was not entirely ridiculous at some subliminal level to see these two things – being invaded and growing twice as fast as the country that wasn’t – as cause and effect. The “right road” to prosperity did not seem to lie through successful self-defence – on the contrary, invasion worked well for the six.

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The Atlantic: The Changing Ways Parents React to Their Kids Coming Out of the Closet

When Mary Robertson, a sociologist at California State University at San Marcos, interviewed adolescents at an LGBTQ youth center, she was expecting to hear echoes of these stories. Yet the conversations surprised her: While the teens’ lives were far from perfect or conflict-free, they weren’t the tragedies she expected. In some instances, when some kids had come out, their parents in turn came out to them as bisexual. Some were pleasantly surprised by the lack of family drama their revelation caused, despite having worried about getting kicked out of their homes.[...]

Mary Robertson: They were expecting anger. More than one of them expected that they were going to get kicked out of their families, or at the minimum, for it to be a family crisis. And I think some of the most profound findings in the study were hearing from young people who said, “My coming-out story isn’t a tragedy.” That just shows that the expectation is absolutely that it’s going to be bad.[...]

Robertson: It’s important to think about the fact there was no LGBTQ movement prior to the 1970s. It’s a relatively recent thing that we call each other “gay” or “straight.” We’ve been able to kind of see and watch this thing happen in our lifetimes. For the parents of the kids I spoke to, they really didn’t grow up in the context of an LGBTQ movement. But for this generation of kids, it was common parlance. Just that difference of having it be part of your world has a really profound influence on young people today. It broadens the options of how you can name your sexual identity. If [LGBTQ identities are] not even in your realm of thinking or perspective, it’s really that much harder to imagine yourself as a gay person. [...]

Robertson: The study included black, Latino, and white people, and there didn’t seem to be that presence of homophobia based on race. I thought that was profound, that there wasn’t a racialized story about homophobia. I do think that it’s kind of similar to the idea of the rural-urban divide. If you scratch the surface a little bit, I don’t think that’s the story.

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Politico: Warning signs mount for Trump reelection bid

Unlike most of his predecessors, he’s been persistently unpopular, with approval ratings mired in the 40-percent range — so far, he’s the only president in the modern era whose job approval ratings have never been over 50 percent, according to Gallup.

Some of Democrats’ biggest gains came in the states that powered Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while a president’s base has stayed home in previous midterm elections, leading to losses, the record turnout in this year’s races suggests 2018 was more like a 2016 re-run than Trump voters standing on the sidelines. [...]

Barack Obama’s Democratic Party lost 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats in 2010, but Obama defeated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012. Republicans flipped both the House, where they netted 52 seats, and Senate in 1994, but Bill Clinton slaughtered former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) in 1996. Ronald Reagan’s GOP lost 26 House seats in 1982 — and picked up a seat in the Senate — but Reagan nearly swept the Electoral College against former Vice President Walter Mondale two years later, winning a 49-state landslide.

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Independent: An unexpected new group, Brexiteers against Brexit, threatens Theresa May’s plan

We have gone through the looking-glass to a world in which Philip Hammond, the chancellor and leading Remainer, said this morning we would be better off outside the EU, while a new movement of Brexiteers against Brexit has sprung up to argue, in effect, that we might as well stay in the EU.[...]

The prime minister and her small band of loyalists, now reinforced by another Remainer-for-Brexit, Amber Rudd, will argue that the backstop would be “mutually uncomfortable”. The UK government wouldn’t like the European Court of Justice having a say over parts of the Northern Ireland economy; while EU27 governments think British, especially Northern Irish, companies would have an unfair advantage because they would not be bound enough by EU law. [...]

Then there is the option of postponing Brexit while we have another referendum. Johnson and Raab ought to vote for that, but they won’t, and I still don’t think there are enough pro-EU MPs who would back it if they could have May’s deal instead. Once a final-say referendum has been defeated, the only options left would be May’s deal or leaving without a deal, and we know which way most MPs ought to go on that, even if we can’t be sure they will.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: End of Space – Creating a Prison for Humanity

Space travel is the most exciting adventure for humanity, but in an irony of history we may stop ourselves from going into space the more we do it. With every rocket launched we are creating a deadly trap for mankind.

Deutsche Welle: Opinion: Gibraltar dispute shows the absurdity of Brexit

Sanchez does have a point. The future arrangement for the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is a prominent issue in ongoing Brexit talks and the deadline for reaching a final agreement has been postponed to 2020.

Yet, the border between the British peninsula of Gibraltar and Spain has not featured in the Brexit talks, and nobody knows what will happen to the 10,000 Spanish workers who commute to Gibraltar every day when Britain leaves the EU. [...]

It is possible that the border between the British peninsula and the Spanish mainland could be temporarily closed, like between 1969 and 1985. It is one of the reasons the vast majority of Gibraltar residents voted in favor of Britain remaining in the EU. [...]

The fight over Gibraltar illustrates the utter madness that is Brexit – irrespective of all the bureaucratic efforts being made to achieve a workable split. Leaders attending the upcoming EU summit on Sunday will wave through a Brexit plan that simply postpones reaching a final agreement on numerous contentious issues.

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New Europe: The inconvenient truth about Saudi Arabia

What makes the truth inconvenient is Saudi Arabia’s strategic importance. The Kingdom still accounts for over 10% of global oil output. Its sovereign wealth fund sits on an estimated $500 billion. Saudi Arabia is the most influential Sunni Arab country, occupying a special role within the Muslim world, owing to its role as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites. It is central to any policy of confronting Iran. [...]

Israel, too, has indicated support for MBS, owing to his willingness to move in the direction of normalizing relations and, more important, the two countries’ shared interest in countering Iranian influence in the region. And US President Donald J. Trump’s administration is standing by its man, so far refusing to acknowledge his role in Khashoggi’s murder and resisting calls for sanctions against Saudi Arabia.[...]

Consultations should also be held with China and Russia. Unlike the US, both have working relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran, which gives both a stake in preventing such a war from starting and shutting it down quickly if it does.

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The Guardian: From Trump to Boris Johnson: how the wealthy tell us what ‘real folk’ want

But when rightwing populists focus on elites they are mostly referring to culture. Their targets are filmmakers, actors, lecturers, journalists, “globalists”, spiritualists, scientists and vegans; the Clintons, Hollywood, Londoners, New Yorkers, Silicon Valley, Sussex and Berkeley. These are the people the right claim are responsible for shaping what people can see or hear, and limiting what they can say. They pillory opinion-formers for looking down on “ordinary people” as being ignorant, bigoted and uncouth. And they are always careful to invent “ordinary people” in their own image. John Kerry’s windsurfing or Barack Obama’s taste for arugula are emphasised as evidence of their lack of connection to basic values. Laying claim to “the real America” or “commonsense values”, they evoke a mythical, homogenous people and culture, only to claim it is being besieged by cosmopolitans, multiculturalists and immigrants. Through what Sarah Igo, in The Averaged American, describes as “the strange slippage between the typical and the good, the average and the ideal”, what masquerades as an embrace of “ordinary folk” is ultimately exposed as an appeal to an ethnically pure, culturally uniform “volk”. [...]

With that conceded and, hopefully, addressed, the left is in a far more solid place to expose and challenge the disingenuousness, hypocrisy and inadequacy of the culture-warriors on three main counts. First, their prescriptions don’t work. Britain does not feel like a stronger, more confident place since it voted to leave the European Union, but more divided, lost and lonely than anyone can remember. It didn’t put the great back into Great Britain but the little into Little England. In short, it has proved an inadequate balm for the post-imperial melancholy so many were apparently experiencing. Denying Muslims and migrants their civil rights or women their reproductive rights doesn’t give other groups more rights. When terrorists kill fewer people than toddlers with guns and are more likely to be white and American than brown and foreign, the threat to your “way of life” is the way you are living it. [...]

Finally, all too often the rightwing cheerleaders for these “ordinary folk” are more embedded in the elites than those they attack can ever be. When George W Bush, who is teetotal, is the man you’d most like to have a drink with, an Old Etonian Bullingdon boy like Boris Johnson is able to get away with posing as a man of the people, and Trump can get the modern equivalent of $140m from his dad and still claim he is a self-made man, something is seriously wrong.

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statista: How Many British Euromyths Has The EU Debunked?

When it comes to reporting new legislation planned by the European Union, many British tabloids have a tendency to "overdo it". A story from September 1994 is a notable example. Reported by The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Daily Express, it stated that "Brussels bureaucrats banned curved bananas with shops ordered not to sell fruit which is too small or abnormally bent". The Commission debunked the story and responded that regulation simply classifies bananas according to quality and size for the sake of easing international banana trade. It added that the minimal rules are applied solely to green, unripe bananas, rather than those destined for the processing industry. It should also improve the quality of bananas on sale in the EU.

In fact, the Commission maintains a webpage solely devoted to debunking "Euromyths" reported by the British press. The banana example is just one of hundreds of myths and others include "Commission to outlaw mushy peas (1995)" and "Queen's corgis to be outlawed (2002)". The number of false stories about the EU reported in the UK reached its height in 1993 with the Commission listing 100 myths in total. The number fell drastically between 2007 and 2012 but it started to climb again in 2013 after Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a Conservative government would hold an in-or-out referendum on EU membership. You can find the European Commission page wth the full A-Z index of Euromyths here.

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