The Guardian Longreads: The battle for the future of Stonehenge

Our Stonehenge has none of this grandeur or pathos. Instead, it is at the centre of a peculiarly modern British circus – one that involves an agonisingly long planning dispute, allegations of government incompetence, two deeply entrenched opposing sides, and a preoccupation with traffic and tourism. This absurdist drama, entirely worthy of our times, is a long and bitter battle over whether to sink the highway that runs beside it into a tunnel.[...]

Tempting as it is to suggest that the dispute pits the forces of modernity against the defenders of tradition, the argument boils down to whether you think a major construction project in a world heritage site is absolute madness, or the commonsense solution to a long-term traffic problem. English Heritage, the national body that cares for Stonehenge, insists that doing nothing is not an option. It argues that the A303 will only get busier as new homes are built in the south-west – and that the tunnel, in any case, would significantly improve the “visitor experience” by returning the circle to its intended setting, without the intrusion of the sights and sounds of the A303. They also say that the plans have been carefully drawn up to avoid damage to prehistoric features, and that they are still working hard with Highways England to minimise their impact.[...]

The principle of preserving a “national heritage” in perpetuity can seem as though it has been with us for ever – perhaps because bodies such as the National Trust seem like such timeless bastions of middle England. In fact, the idea is fairly recent – and Stonehenge itself played an important role in its invention. [...]

In 2015, the Conservative government spun off English Heritage – the descendent of the government body that cared for monuments after the 1882 act – into an independent charity, earning its own keep. Its ability to do this is strongly dependent on Stonehenge, which brings in 21% of its annual income of about £112m and which, with its 1.5 million visitors a year, attracts a million more than the next-most popular site, Dover Castle. Kate Mavor, the organisation’s chief executive, told me she thought of Stonehenge as a publisher might a bestseller – a title that supports other, less lucrative, works. While entry is free for English Heritage and Trust members, it otherwise costs £17.50 to buy a ticket to Stonehenge. More than half the visitors are from overseas. A vast coach park at the site decants tourists who will often also take in Bath and Windsor on a day trip from London.

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openDemocracy: The strange connections of Tashkent City’s “British investor”

Corso Solutions LP appears to be an unusual property developer. The Edinburgh-registered company has no website, no contact details and no obvious business activity. And yet it was named last autumn as a foreign investor on the Tashkent City project, a giant property redevelopment in the centre of Uzbekistan’s capital. openDemocracy has found that Corso Solutions has connections to an opaque international network that provides company formation services, including to apparent money laundering vehicles.[...]

According to the UK companies registry, Corso Solutions has not logged any activity or accounts since its formation. As reported by Scottish newspaper The Herald, the company should have disclosed its beneficial owner (“Person of Significant Control”) after new UK legislation on Scottish Limited Partnerships came into force in 2017. Concerns about this situation were raised in September last year. [...]

Corso Solutions was first mentioned in a September 2018 report by Uzbek media on investors in Tashkent City. Since then, we have been unable to find any information on the exact nature of Corso Solutions’ investment, and it is not mentioned on Tashkent City’s official website. When Radio Ozodlik contacted Tashkent City in October 2018 regarding Corso Solutions, an official responsible for foreign investment stated that information on approved foreign investors, including Corso Solutions, was a “commercial secret”. When we contacted Tashkent City project administration to confirm Corso Solutions’ role in the project in January and February 2019, we received no response.[...]

OCCRP and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists report that the GT Group has set up offshore corporate networks used by Russian organised crime, Hezbollah and the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel to launder funds and hide ownership. Companies House records that Ian Taylor has been disqualified as acting as a company director until 2021 under section 6 of the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 (Duty of court to disqualify unfit directors of insolvent companies).

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CityLab: A Second Life for Berlin’s Plattenbau (SEP 6, 2018)

Yesterday, Berlin’s Senate announced a project to add more units on top of already existing buildings in the city’s east, with a possible capacity of up to 50,000 new homes. The plan to add floors isn’t novel in itself, of course, even in Berlin. What’s striking is the specific type of building chosen for the experiment: East Berlin’s Plattenbau. These mass produced, partly prefabricated modernist apartment complexes (the name translates as “slab buildings” in reference to the concrete panels that form their walls) were put up in huge numbers during the Communist era. When a German thinks of a Communist-era building, a Plattenbau likely springs to mind. [...]

It’s not necessarily the case that Berlin is falling back in love with the Plattenbau’s aesthetics. The Senate’s plan, which will launch a partnership with social housing association Howoge to identify suitable Plattenbau for trial construction, is essentially pragmatic. The building type makes a great candidate for roof extensions. Plattenbau are almost always flat roofed and usually broader than they are tall, which means that additional floors could provide a lot of new apartments. Unlike the tenements in Berlin’s older districts, Plattenbau were generally set back from the sidewalk and placed among open spaces, so their height can grow without throwing the streets beneath them into permanent shade. And crucially, there are a very large number of them. Howoge estimates that it has 320,000 square meters (3,444,450 square feet) of roof space suitable for more construction, some of which could well host multiple floors.

If all this space was used it would transform the face of East Berlin, a place where it can be a struggle to find a building that doesn’t have a slab-covered façade. Plattenbau are ubiquitous across all East Germany, largely the product of a nationwide housing program launched in 1972 that saw the state build a phenomenal 1.9 million apartments across the country. Following a model that had been developed from the 1950s onwards, this housing program was able to speed up construction by preparing almost all of a building’s components offsite in a factory—even adding windows—before it was slotted together in the chosen location. Popular across the Eastern Bloc, the technique took off in such a big way partly because it fitted so well with the state’s yen for central planning.

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openDemocracy: #ElectionsSpain2019: Populist radicalisation, Catalonia, and the far-right

However the Catalan issue remains plagued with negative emotions, and that inheritance was too heavy to deal with by the new Moncloa palace (siege of the president of the government) lodger. The negotiations for governance, and above all, to pass the annual budget through parliament, have left their mark on Sánchez’s short but sweet stay at the Palacio de la Moncloa, and Catalans ensured its lack of viability towards the end.[...]

Traditionally, governments have governed with either an absolute majority or with minority governments that gained the support of the Basque and Catalan nationalists, that were pragmatic in character. The nationalists often acted as bargaining chips in favour for benefits for their territories, have become kingmakers in Madrid on several occasions, and have heavily invested the gains in nation building at home.[...]

This radical shift in Catalan consevative nationalism, acquiring clear populist traits, inreasingly demanded a referendum to gain territorial independence, putting in the centre of the political agenda something which is not permitted by the Spanish constitution.[...]

An ultra-right reaction to the threat of the breakdown of the Spanis State is certainly taking advantage of the current state of affairs to create a dangerous scenario for Spain, and as a consequence the whole European Union.

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CityLab: An Incredibly Detailed Map of Europe's Population Shifts (JUN 22, 2015)

Look at the Eastern section of the map and you’ll see that many cities, including Prague, Bucharest, and the Polish cities of Poznań and Wrocław, are ringed with a deep red circle that shows a particularly high rise in average annual population of 2 percent or more. As this paper from Krakow’s Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Geography notes, Eastern cities began to spread out in the new millennium because it was their first chance to do so in decades.[...]

We already know from other available data that Europe is experiencing a migration to the northwest, but the BBSR map adds complexity to this picture and reveals some interesting micro-trends. The dark blue coloring of the map’s Eastern section shows that the lean years for Eastern states are by no means over. Residents have continued to leave Albania, Bulgaria and Latvia in particular in search of jobs, while even relatively wealthy eastern Germany has been hollowed out almost everywhere except the Berlin region.

Population growth in the Northwest, meanwhile, is far from even. While large sections of Northern Scandinavia’s inland are losing people, there’s still modest growth on the Arctic coasts. And while the Scottish Highlands contain some the least peopled lands in all of Europe, Scotland’s Northeast shows remarkable population gains, a likely result of the North Sea oil industry concentrated in Aberdeen. [...]

Spain’s trends look a little different from those of Europe as a whole. It’s actually in the country’s Northwest where the population has dropped most sharply, notably in the provinces of Galicia and León, which have long been known to produce many of Spain’s migrants.

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The Atlantic: Germany Is Testing the Limits of Democracy

The AfD is perhaps the biggest test yet for these boundaries. Though the party is hardly the first far-right movement to try to compete in Germany’s postwar political ecosystem, it’s by leaps and bounds the most successful one: More than five million people supported the AfD in the 2017 federal elections, earning it 12.6 percent of the vote nationally and more than 90 seats in the German Bundestag. And as of October, the party is represented in all 16 of Germany’s state legislatures.[...]

When it comes to the party’s rhetoric about refugees and migrants, AfD leaders have even at times run afoul of online hate-speech laws, with one lawmaker finding herself temporarily suspended from Twitter and Facebook last year after posting about “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes.” And the Chemnitz riots, which saw AfD supporters and radical far-right groups such as Pegida marching side by side, showed the extent to which harsh rhetoric about refugees can turn into violent action.[...]

That, combined with some party members’ ties to other monitored extremist groups—the Young Alternative, AfD’s youth wing, was placed under surveillance in part because of its ties to the far-right extremist group Generation Identity, for example—gives the impression that the AfD tolerates, if not advocates for, extremist views. (Even Bernd Lucke, one of the original founders of the party who has since left, recently said that he believes the Verfassungsschutz is right to monitor some parts of the party.)

"It may be that the majority of the AfD doesn't agree with everything Mr. Höcke says. The decisive thing is that Mr. Höcke isn't marginalized and isn't isolated,” says Axel Salheiser, a researcher who focuses on extremism at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, in eastern Germany.[...]

The AfD “triggers the kind of debate that you want to have in a live democracy, where people have to define the terms on which debate has to be had, again and again,” he told me. “It is also ... a signal that democracy wants to defend itself, no matter how difficult.”

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Politico: Ukraine’s crisis of faith

As the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Kremlin-backed separatists in the country’s east has dragged on, it’s become increasingly difficult to separate the centuries-old ideological conflict from the ongoing political and military conflict. [...]

With his popularity plummeting ahead of Ukraine’s presidential election in March, Poroshenko likely saw the issue as an opportunity to win back public support. With an independent church, Ukrainians would finally gain “spiritual independence that can be compared to political independence” from Russia, he said in December. [...]

Speaking at a Russian Orthodox Church event alongside Kirill in Moscow last month, Putin doubled down, saying Russia “reserve[s] the right to respond and do everything possible to protect human rights, including freedom of religion.” The thinly veiled threat resonated with officials in Kiev who recalled the Russian leader’s justification for annexing Crimea in 2014 and backing pro-Moscow separatists that same year: defending Russian speakers.[...]

Religious leaders from the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine are quick to point out that the 300 or so churches that have changed allegiances in the past month are a relative drop in the bucket, given there are still some 12,000 to 14,000 Moscow-aligned churches in Ukraine. [...]

Some 5,000 parishes that previously adhered to the two unofficial Ukrainian churches — the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kiev Patriarchate — have also become part of the new independent church. Most are located in Ukraine’s predominantly pro-European west and center, while the Moscow Patriarchate’s influence in strongest in the east and south.

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CityLab: There's No Such Thing as a Dangerous Neighborhood

In essence, Kelling and Wilson argued that latent danger loomed everywhere, and everywhere people’s disorderly impulses needed to be repressed, or else. Their “broken windows theory” didn’t stay theoretical: Also known as order maintenance policing, this tactic propelled an entire generation of policing practice that sought to crack down on minor “quality-of-life” infractions as a way to stem violence.[...]

While police departments often recognize that “we can’t arrest our way out of the problem,” the broken windows paradigm remains active throughout policing. Perhaps most significantly, it still colors how the public views violence and demands responses to it: both as a danger that characterizes entire poor communities of color, and as a menace that poses a constant threat.[...]

The knowledge that we’ve gained since 1982 unequivocally tells us something else: Serious violence is extremely concentrated in very particular places and, most importantly, among very particular people. Dispelling the notion of “dangerous neighborhoods,” extensive research on geographic concentration has consistently found that around half of all crime complaints or incidents of gun violence concentrated at about 5 percent of street segments or blocks in a given city. Moving past “violent communities,” sophisticated analysis of social networks have demonstrated that homicides and shootings are strongly concentrated within small social networks within cities—and that there is even further concentration of violence within these social networks. [...]

Rather, to understand violence, our research points again to the context, norms, and dynamics of street groups. Street groups involved in violence are generally composed of young men of color living in communities with long histories of structural discrimination and alienation from state institutions, particularly law enforcement. These areas have generally suffered from both over-enforcement and under-protection. Intrusive, broken-windows-style policing means mass stop-and-frisk interactions, along with tickets and arrests for minor offenses—but it doesn’t come with an equivalent investment in preventing or solving offenses like homicide. Indeed, it often makes it harder to do so, thanks to the cycle of mistrust between police and community members. The near-total impunity for homicides and shootings in distressed communities signals that the state can’t or won’t actually protect people from the most significant harm.

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Politico: French poll: Yellow Jackets down, Macron up

Fifty-five percent of those polled by Odoxa, an independent research institute, now want the broad, anti-government Yellow Jackets movement to call an end to three months of often violent street protests — the first time that support for the movement has dropped below a majority, France Inter reported. That's a rise of 6 points from the previous monthly poll.

The poll also shows a rise in voters' interest in the upcoming European Parliament election in May — the first national ballot since Macron was voted president in May 2017. While interest in the European vote rose to 62 percent in the latest poll, from 54 percent in December, that is still some way below the 83 percent turnout in the presidential election.[...]

The Yellow Jacket "fatigue" is helping Macron return to pre-protest levels of popularity. After slumping 6 points in October-December, to just 27 percent, the president has recouped most of that drop, with 32 percent of respondents in the latest poll saying they think he is a "good president."

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