Haaretz: In Tunisia, the Revolution Succeeded - but Where Is the Dignity?

However, the deep unemployment, standing at over 15 percent (and much higher among young people), the lack of jobs for college graduates and the meager salaries stoke frustration and rage, and people are already talking about the need for another revolution.[...]

Video clips posted on YouTube by the Tunisian website “Without a Mask” show that public rage is not restricted to young educated Tunisians who can express their protest on social networks. Older citizens, owners of small businesses, government workers and students are all united in feeling that the revolution did not attain its minimal demands. The price of meat is spiking, vegetables and fruit are becoming luxury items, the standard of education is low, clinics are poorly equipped – these are the issues that are on the minds of Tunisians. [...]

The civil insurrection in 2011 did bring about a coup, but this did not turn into a revolution that changed the standard of living, or gave people a life of dignity. However, it created an active and kicking public opinion that obliges the government to take it into account. Critical video clips could not be published during the era of the deposed president, who was perceived by the West as an ally. Internet users in cafés were under strict surveillance, at risk of being arrested.

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CityLab: The Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work

Drive alone to work: More than three-quarters (76.4 percent) of commuters drive to work alone. But in the New York metro area, the share is just about half. It’s 57 percent in San Francisco; about two-thirds in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Seattle; and about 70 percent in Chicago and Portland. And, as might be expected, a smaller-than-average share of workers drives to work alone in more compact college towns such as Boulder, Colorado; Corvallis and Eugene, Oregon; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Ames and Iowa City, Iowa.[...]

Bike to work: Just half of a percent of Americans nationwide bike to work. But nearly 7 percent do in Corvallis, Oregon, and more than 4 percent in Boulder; Ames; and Santa Cruz, California. Two or three percent of commuters get to work by bike in other college towns: Gainesville, Florida; State College; Ann Arbor; and Madison, Wisconsin. Among large metros (with more than 1 million people), almost 2 percent of commuters get to work by bike in San Jose and San Francisco. [...]

Education is another piece in the picture of how Americans get to work. People are less likely to drive to work alone and to use alternate modes in metros where more adults are college graduates. The share of adults with college degrees is negatively and significantly (-0.41) associated with driving to work alone, and positively and significantly associated with using transit (0.56), biking (0.62), walking (0.56), and working from home (0.50), although it is not statistically associated with carpooling. [...]

The way we get to work is also related to our political cleavages. On the one hand, commuters in more progressive metros—those where Hillary Clinton got a bigger share of votes in the 2016 election—are more likely to walk (0.44), bike (0.44), or use transit (0.59), and less likely to drive to work alone (-0.36). Commuters in more conservative metros, where a larger share voted for Trump, are more likely to drive to work alone (0.44). This reflects the fact, though, that more liberal metros tend also to be denser, more affluent, and more educated.

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Foreign Policy: Defenders of Human Rights Are Making a Comeback

Yet there was also considerable pushback against authoritarianism. Malaysian voters ousted their corrupt prime minister, Najib Razak, the latest representative of a ruling coalition that had been in power for almost six decades, in favor of a coalition running on an agenda of human rights reform. In the Maldives, voters rejected their autocratic president, Abdulla Yameen. In Armenia, whose government was mired in corruption, Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan had to step down amid massive protests. Ethiopia, under popular pressure, replaced a long-abusive government with a new one led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who has embarked on an impressive reform agenda. And, of course, U.S. voters in the midterm elections for the House of Representatives seemed to rebuke Trump’s divisive policies.

In many cases, particularly in Central Europe, the public led the resistance in the streets. protested Orban’s moves to shut Central European University, an academic bastion of liberal inquiry and thought, and to impose a “slave law” to compensate for workers fleeing Large crowds in Budapest Orban’s “illiberal democracy” by authorizing extended overtime with pay delayed up to three years. Tens of thousands of Poles repeatedly took to the streets to defend their courts from the ruling party’s attempts to undermine their independence. Czech and Romanian leaders also faced large anti-corruption protests. [...]

The Human Rights Council made some major advances. For example, the possibility of a Chinese, Russian, or even American veto at the U.N. Security Council appeared to doom any effort to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court for its army’s crimes against humanity that sent 700,000 Rohingya fleeing for their lives to Bangladesh. In response, the Human Rights Council, where there is no veto, stepped in to create an investigative mechanism to preserve evidence, identify those responsible, and build cases for prosecution once a tribunal becomes available. That effort won overwhelmingly, with 35 countries in favor and only three against (seven abstained), sending the signal that these atrocities cannot be committed with impunity.[...]

For the first time, the Human Rights Council condemned the severe repression in Venezuela under President Nicolás Maduro. A resolution led by a group of Latin American nations won by a vote of 23 to seven with 17 abstentions. The U.S. government’s departure from the council made it easier for resolution sponsors to show they were addressing Venezuela as a matter of principle rather than as a tool of Washington’s ideology. A group of Latin American governments led by Argentina also organized in the context of the Human Rights Council the first joint statement, signed by 47 countries, on the worsening repression in Nicaragua, as President Daniel Ortega responded with violence to growing protests against his repressive rule.

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Politico: Mercron’s sound and fury

Echoing that sentiment, Marine Le Pen warned Monday that the deal opens the door to forcing people in the border regions to speak German at school. It is only a matter of time before France would have to share its permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council with Germany, the leader of France’s National Rally predicted.[...]

While the agreement aspires to promote greater cooperation, interaction and exchange along the border, it’s ludicrous to suggest it’s a back door to recreating the German Reich. The declarations in the treaty are formulated in such broad terms that they’re essentially meaningless.[...]

The Treaty of Aachen's greatest contribution might be to put in black and white just how little Macron has won from Berlin on Europe. Following his upstart campaign for president and his fiery Sorbonne speech on Europe in 2017, many hoped Europe’s moment had finally arrived. [...]

Though both Macron and Merkel have been criticized for the lack of ambition in the Treaty of Aachen, most of the blame lies with Berlin. On all the monumental questions of European integration in recent years, whether the eurozone or the military, the German answer has been the same: Nein.

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Politico: Macron and Merkel’s treaty tests European nerves

Probably the most tangible outcomes of the treaty relate to cross-border cooperation, transport and trade: Both sides want to create "a Franco-German economic area" that cuts bureaucratic hurdles and establishes common regulations, laws and taxes for business on both sides of the Rhine.

However, Merkel cautioned this was a long-term project. "Take, for example, business taxes or insolvency law — much is historically structured in very different ways," the chancellor said during the discussion. "We won't change that overnight, it will take two decades."[...]

The French president, who is facing fierce opposition at home from the Yellow Jackets movement — about 100 of them gathered outside the Aachen town hall to barrack him with howling and whistling — also hit back at opponents of the treaty such as National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who has accused Macron of handing the Alsace and Lorraine border regions back to German tutelage.

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The Guardian view on Israel’s democracy: killing with impunity, lying without consequence?

In the last nine months of 2018, according to the United Nations, Palestinians – many of them children – were killed at the rate of around one a day while taking part in protests along Israel’s perimeter fence with Gaza about their right to return to ancestral homes. They included medics and journalists. Most of the dead were unarmed and posed no danger to anyone, with little more than rocks in their hands and slogans on their lips. Yet Israel continued with an immoral and unlawful policy that sees soldiers of its military, which is under democratic civilian control, shoot, gas, shell and kill protesters, including those who pose no credible threat. [...]

The tensions between judicial and public opinion will be tested in the cauldron of Israel’s general election. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, unexpectedly called for early elections in December in what seems a transparent bid to head off possible corruption charges. The decision by Mr Netanyahu to dissolve the Knesset came days after the state prosecutor’s office recommended that Israel’s attorney general indict Mr Netanyahu on charges of bribery, which he denies. Mr Netanyahu is not only running for a fifth term in office, he is also running for his political life. His lawyers, it is reported, are arguing that a possible indictment be delayed; on the campaign trail Mr Netanyahu casts himself as an embattled leader persecuted by a leftwing elite comprised of lawyers, journalists and human-rights do-gooders. Echoing his friend Donald Trump, Mr Netanyahu has told reporters that Israel can choose its leadership only at the ballot box and not through legal investigations, which are a “witch-hunt”. Like the US president, the message from Mr Netanyahu is that democratic norms, those unwritten rules of toleration and restraint, are for the weak, not for the strong. Yet without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances are less mainstays of democracy than a mirage.

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