Foreign Policy: Mohammed bin Salman Is Making Muslims Boycott Mecca

In late April, Libya’s most prominent Muslim Sunni cleric, Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani, called for all Muslims to boycott the hajj—the obligatory pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca.In late April, Libya’s most prominent Muslim Sunni cleric, Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani, called for all Muslims to boycott the hajj—the obligatory pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca. He went so far as to claim that anyone who embarked on a second pilgrimage was conducting “an act of sin rather than a good deed.” The reasoning behind the boycott is the suggestion that boosting Saudi Arabia’s economy through pilgrimage continues to fuel arms purchases and direct attacks on Yemen—and indirectly Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, and Algeria. Ghariani added that investment in the hajj would “help Saudi rulers to carry out crimes against our fellow Muslims.”

Ghariani is not the first prominent Muslim scholar to support a ban on the hajj. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, also a Sunni cleric and vocal critic of Saudi Arabia, announced a fatwa in August last year banning the pilgrimage, instead stating, “Seeing Muslims feeding the hungry, treating the sick, and sheltering the homeless are better viewed by Allah than spending money on the hajj.” [...]

Throughout the Middle East and in other Muslim-majority nations, there has been growing concern over the slaying of Khashoggi, as well as the rising death toll in Yemen, which is expected to reach 230,000 by 2020 through the often indiscriminate airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition—which has bombed hospitals, funerals, children’s school buses, and weddings—in what has been described as the “worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time” by U.N. officials. Saudi Arabia’s truculent approach to the Yemen war has isolated itself within its own coalition; even the Emirati government has shown some discomfort toward the Saudi approach.

read the article

Politico: NRA meltdown has Trump campaign sweating

"No organization has been more important to conservative voter education and engagement than the NRA. We all hope they’re able to mount the kind of effort in the 2020 cycle they have in the past,” said Gregg Keller, a former American Conservative Union executive director. “But in case they can’t, given their current situation, I hope they’re being forthright about that within the movement so others can pick up the slack.” [...]

What makes the NRA such a potent force for Republicans, party officials said, are its reach into battlegrounds — such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio — and the sway it holds with its members. The NRA’s appeals play a critical role in turning out sportsmen, many of whom have paid dues to the organization for years and regard it as an important part of their lives. [...]

The organization's troubles are hard to overstate. The most serious threat is an investigation by New York state attorney general's office into its tax-exempt status. In April, NRA President Oliver North was ousted in an ugly public spectacle in which he declared the group was in a "clear crisis." News organizations have also reported that NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre used $275,000 of the group's money to buy luxury clothes at Zegna in Beverly Hills, Calif., and that the organization logged tens of thousands of dollars in other expenses that benefited its officials. [...]

Issues surrounding the Republican Party's outside infrastructure go beyond the NRA. The Chamber of Commerce, a key player in Republican politics over the past decade, spent just $10 million during the 2018 cycle, about a third of what it spent during the previous election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The scale back has led many to believe the organization, a staple of the business community, is preparing to play a diminished role in 2020.

read the article

New Statesman: Why the EU’s new top team is a setback for pro-Europeans

But let's say it goes ahead: what does it mean, and which European leaders have done well out of it? The agreement is a whomping defeat for the Spitzenkandidaten system, where the pan-European parties (the centre-right European People's Party, the centre-left Party of European Socialists, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, soon to be renamed Renew Europe) nominate candidates for the top posts and whoever wins the elections across the bloc gets to have their chosen candidate installed in the top post. In the end, none of the candidates selected by the pan-European parties got the big jobs, with horse-trading among individual member states once again the crucial factor.

Assuming it goes ahead, who are the big winners? Most obviously, it’s a victory for Belgium’s Charles Michel, who has carved out a lifeboat for himself away from the jockeying for power in his country, which could yet see his Reform Movement tossed out of power. It’s a coup for Angela Merkel, who has managed to back a nice little sinecure for von der Leyen, a Merkel loyalist once widely tipped as her chosen successor, whose handling of the defence brief saw her miss out on the top job. And it tilts the balance of European power a little to the left.

It's a qualified victory for Emmanuel Macron. He has frustrated, and quite probably destroyed the Spitzenkandidaten (or “lead candidate”) system, which he dislikes, in exchange for a return to the previous era of European power politics. He has successfully found a top job for his Renew Europe group in Michel's job as Commission President. He prevented Manfred Webber, the EPP's candidate, from taking the EU's top post. And he has bagged a big job for a French national in Lagarde, though the IMF chief has no experience in monetary policy at a fraught time for the global economy. Against that, he failed to secure his first choice as Commission President in the Socialist Frans Timmermans.

read the article

Vox: Expensive wine is for suckers (May 20, 2015)

FiveThirtyEight: The Supreme Court Might Have Three Swing Justices Now

Now that this year’s Supreme Court term is over, we know that Kavanaugh is shaping up to be a solidly conservative justice — he barely beat out Roberts as the court’s new median and voted most frequently with Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. And although Roberts did step several times into the role of “swing” justice, he wasn’t the only conservative justice who joined the liberals over the course of the term. Although he wasn’t in the middle ideologically, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s other nominee, was actually the most likely to join the liberals in closely decided cases.1 In fact, each of the conservative justices joined the liberals in a 5-4 or 5-3 decision at least once. With a newly cemented conservative majority on the court, the days of a single “swing” justice may be over. [...]

Last year, we wrote that Roberts would likely land at the ideological center of the court in Kennedy’s absence, and he did — but so did Kavanaugh, who voted in almost total lock-step with Roberts. In fact, Kavanaugh was actually slightly closer to the center than Roberts was, according to their Martin-Quinn scores, a prominent measure of judicial ideology calculated by scholars Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin of Washington University in St. Louis and Kevin Quinn of the University of Michigan using data from the Supreme Court Database.

Kavanaugh’s score this term is very similar to Kennedy’s score from the last term, but Kennedy was somewhat unpredictable in his last few years on the bench, occasionally shifting into liberal territory. The fact that Roberts and Kavanaugh are now at the median means the court’s ideological center will likely be solidly conservative going forward. The shift, though, didn’t put the court in dramatically new territory, since Kavanaugh’s score is still similar to Kennedy’s in many of the years when he was the median justice.

read the article

The Atlantic: Greek Elections Close a Chapter, but Not in Europe

Here in Greece, a cycle is ending, and the country is returning to political normality and stability. On Sunday, it will hold national elections—its first since exiting a bailout regime last year—in which Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s center-right New Democracy party, a pillar of Greece’s pre-bailout establishment, is expected to defeat the left-wing populist Syriza party, led by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Syriza came to power in 2015 demanding an end to the crippling austerity Greece was forced to undertake as a condition of its bailout, but ended up having to implement it anyway—at the behest of the European Union and the country’s other creditors. [...]

In Italy, for instance, few days go by without Matteo Salvini, the country’s right-wing populist interior minister and the man widely seen as a leader-in-waiting, saying that Italy doesn’t want to “meet the same fate as Greece.” In Salvini’s rhetoric, winding up like Greece means ceding national sovereignty to the baddies of the European Union, who in turn would impose an emasculating austerity regime on Italy. His party has long flirted with the idea of exiting the euro, or even creating temporary IOUs as a parallel currency—a notion that fires up the base, but is not likely to happen because it’s illegal and would cause the single currency to collapse. [...]

Europe’s handling of the Greek debt crisis also haunted talks last month about creating a common European budget for handling moments of extreme financial stress, something French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing for, but which Germany opposes. That’s because in much of the German political and popular imagination, Greece has been the ultimate example of a spendthrift country whose soaring debts got it into trouble and that required the thrifty creditor Germany to solve its problems; never mind that for years before the crisis, Germany benefited from Greece buying German goods with money borrowed from German banks.

read the article

Reuters: Size matters: France deflates EU enlargement aspirations

Frustrated at fellow leaders’ inability to agree on who should hold the top EU jobs shaping policy for more than half a billion citizens, Macron on Monday gave a testy “non” to others joining the club for now. [...]

North Macedonia and Albania would be the first victims of Macron’s pique if he follows through - after their desire for membership talks was already waylayed by more than a year.

An ardent Europhile whose party came second to the far-right in May’s European elections, Macron said Europe’s prestige was at stake if the bloc was constantly held hostage by minority groups, with tough decisions needed on issues ranging from climate change to migration. [...]

Enlargement requires unanimity, meaning Macron would have power of veto. The Netherlands also sided with France when the pair first unexpectedly blocked the start of EU talks for Albania and North Macedonia in June, 2018.

read the article

The Guardian: 'A bad trip': Jair Bolsonaro's first six months leave even the right dismayed

Opinion polls show Bolsonaro’s approval ratings have plunged since his 1 January inauguration with 32% of Brazilians now considering his government bad or awful compared with 11% when he took power. [...]

“It is the worst start to a presidency since the return of democracy [in 1990],” said Mauro Paulino, the director of Datafolha, one of Brazil’s top pollsters. “A lot would depend on the opponent … but if there was another election today, I don’t think he would be re-elected.” [...]

Bolsonaro still enjoys considerable support, as demonstrated by two recent pro-government rallies. According to polls, 32% of Brazilians believe their leader is on the right track, with supporters crediting Bolsonaro for a fall in the number of homicides and a recently struck trade deal between the EU and the South American trade bloc to which Brazil belongs.[...]

Edson Salomão, a founder of the Direita São Paulo (Rightwing São Paulo) group, gave Bolsonaro an even sunnier report card, though he struggled, when asked, to list the main achievements of his first six months in office.

read the article

The Guardian: Nicki Minaj to headline music festival in Saudi Arabia

The female rapper is known for her outlandish, provocative style and hits like Anaconda, where she raps about her “big fat” backside. Her lyrics are often laced with profanities and her skin-bearing music videos often include twerking. Christian groups criticised her 2012 Grammy awards performance, which included dancing priests and an exorcism. [...]

Reactions on social media ranged from shock and joy to criticism and disappointment. In a profanity-laced video posted on Twitter and viewed more than 37,000 times, a Saudi woman wearing a loose headscarf accused the Saudi government of hypocrisy for inviting Minaj to perform but requiring women who attend the concert to wear the modest full-length robe known as the abaya. Most Saudi women also veil their hair and faces. [...]

Gender segregation between single men and women is still enforced in many restaurants, coffee shops, public schools and universities, but other rules have been loosened, with women now allowed to drive and attend events in sports stadiums.

read the article