CNN: Inside Europe's stunning abandoned churches

 Across Europe, hundreds of churches that were once filled with worship and song are now at the mercy of the elements. With religion's role declining sharply around the continent in recent decades, the most promising outcome for many of these centuries-old structures is being reincarnated as residential or commercial properties.

Hoping to capture their faded splendor before it's too late, French photographer Francis Meslet has spent almost a decade documenting abandoned churches, chapels and priories in varying states of disrepair. His stunning images show dilapidated pipe organs, overgrown cloisters, long-empty pews and sunlight pouring into naves strewn with dust and rubble. [...]

Featuring images shot across France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Portugal, his new book, "Abandoned Churches: Unclaimed Places of Worship," offers an eerie tribute to a building type he describes as "very special in the history of architecture and the history of men." Meslet, who once wanted to be architect, has a sharp eye for structural symmetry, with his collection spanning styles from gothic to neoclassical.

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TLDR News: 630 Days Without a Government: Belgiums Complex Politics Explained

 It's been over 600 days since Belgium had a government, yep that's right no government for approaching two years. In this video we discuss the issues that Belgium faces and how the countries history deeply impacts the countries politics and future.

Social Europe: Building an electoral coalition: social-democratic parties in western Europe

 Simply put, the basic strategic paradigm which allowed for postwar social-democratic electoral success during les trente glorieuses no longer exists. The ‘third way’ did attempt to reconcile a globalised economic climate with social-democratic policy-making but in the long-run it turned into an electoral failure. [...]

Using post-electoral data from the Belgian National Election Study, I have shown that this opposition literally cleaves the Flemish social-democratic electorate. Appealing to both left-particularistic production workers and left-universalistic socio-cultural professionals is proving challenging when the new cleavage is salient—especially as populist radical-right parties strategically position themselves to align with production workers, while green parties increasingly specialise in addressing socio-cultural professionals.

Nor do the welfare-state preferences of the two electorates align entirely. While both strongly support an interventionist state, 30 per cent of production workers but a negligible 2 per cent of socio-cultural professionals adopt a populist stance, combining a nativist, exclusionary egalitarianism with a critique of the functioning of the national welfare state. Socio-cultural professionals are more likely to believe in universal, boundary-crossing solidarity than production workers (15 per cent, compared with 7 per cent of production workers) and tend to have a left-wing profile supportive of social investment (52 per cent, compared with 23 per cent). Both production workers and socio-cultural professionals can however agree on the importance of a redistributive and interventionist state. [...]

Higher perceived ethnic discrimination is linked to a vote for the radical left, instead of the social democrats, at least partly explaining the surge of minority voters behind the PVDA in recent elections. In trying to recover some of their former electorate of left-particularistic production workers, social democrats thus stand to lose their ethnic-minority electorate, which has arguably been the only consistently loyal section in recent decades.

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Reuters: Steve Bannon’s effort to export his fiery popularism to Europe is failing

 After Bannon was charged with fraud for his role in an effort to raise money to help build Trump’s wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, two people working with him said an effort to found an academy for right-wing Roman Catholic activists in Italy faces a criminal inquiry by the Rome criminal court and a project aimed at ending the European Union has closed up shop. [...]

Along with Bannon, the institute has been trying to set up a two-track program: an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West” with a Bannon-designed curriculum and the Cardinal Martino Academy, which will promote Catholic social teachings, said Benjamin Harnwell, a former British Conservative party activist who leads the institute and works with the former Trump aide.[...]

Separately, a Brussels-based Bannon-backed project aimed at undermining the European Union shut up shop last year, said Mischael Modrikamen, the Belgian lawyer who teamed up with Bannon to promote the anti-EU “The Movement.”[...]

Populist candidates from France, Italy and Britain did well, but their counterparts in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Spain did not. And Bannon’s “Movement” found little support from right-wing leaders.

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Flandersnews: “Virus was probably present among the young much earlier ”

The country’s got a thousand confirmed cases but only two deaths. Prof Herman Goossens, a microbiologist from Antwerp University, points to Iceland’s higher testing capacity. It means more people can be tested even people without symptoms. This shows us that more people are infected than we thought. Young people appear to be carriers and spreaders of the virus without even displaying symptoms. [...]

Iceland was able to carry out more testing thanks to a unique project: the deCODE company registers the genetic code of the entire population, some 360,000 souls. It reveals who is related to who. The genetic research means the company can carry out molecular tests. The whole company has now been reoriented to map out the corona outbreak in the island. [...]

Prof Goossens: “If you look at the age curve, you see the same picture as in South Korea: most of those infected are aged between 20 and 40. Half of these people are unaware of it.”

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Social Europe: Moving beyond coal: policy lessons from across Europe

The transition from coal to renewable energy is gaining pace throughout Europe. In 2015, the United Kingdom was the first country in the world to announce an explicit end to burning coal for energy production. Since then, an additional 14 EU member countries have announced that they will phase out electricity generation from coal—and a few, including Finland, France and the Netherlands, have enshrined this in law. While its end date of 2035-38 remains inadequate, Germany will also legislate a coal phase-out early this year. [...]

1. Ambition is key: we cannot address climate change or the extremely heavy cost of its impacts without a rapid phase-out of coal. The ambition of announced phase-out dates and pathways must be judged against the backdrop of the scientific findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and national coal dependence. No matter how attached they are to coal, all European countries must be coal-free by 2030 if we are to keep the temperature rise below 1.5C. While this demands major changes in infrastructure, policies and finance, a decade is more than enough time to make it happen. [...]

5. Gas and biomass are not bridges: the climate benefits of gas and bioenergy are not what they promise—natural gas is still a climate-damaging fossil fuel, which leaks methane, and biomass life-cycle emissions are far from zero. Due to the high Dutch renewables target, no new fossil-gas plants will need to be built there, and the use of existing gas plants will likely reduce by 2030. [...]

The Finnish experience shows that polluters cannot count on compensation. In a significant ruling, its Constitutional Law Committee decided that companies and other traders could not reasonably expect the legislation governing their business to remain unchanged. Furthermore, it ruled that ‘responsibility for the environment’ overrode commercial claims brought forward by the energy companies.

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TLDR News: Europe's Top 10 Richest and Poorest Places - Data Dive (Sep 11, 2018)

The is a lot of difference between rich and poor areas all over the world, and Europe is no exception. We run down the richest and poorest areas in Northern Europe and discuss the issues which arise from income inequality in Europe.

Politico: Belgium’s democratic experiment

Nowhere else in the world will everyday citizens be so consistently involved in shaping the future of their community. In times of massive, widespread distrust of party politics, German-speaking Belgians will be empowered to put the issues they care about on the agenda, to discuss potential solutions, and to monitor the follow-up of their recommendations as they pass through parliament and government. Politicians, in turn, will be able to tap independent citizens’ panels to deliberate over thorny political issues. [...]

As manifested by Brexit, the Yellow Jacket protests in France and climate activists across Europe, citizens no longer feel trusted or taken seriously. Ticking a box on a ballot paper every five years no longer feels like enough. And some topics are simply too toxic to be solved by party politics alone — or too complex to put to a Yes or No referendum. The Belgian experiment is an opportunity to take seriously the idea of involving citizens in our institutions before political discontent tears down our democratic processes. [...]

Its Bürgerrat (Citizens’ Council), which will consist of 24 members who each serve 18 months, will set the agenda. Its members will define the questions, but not give the answers. They will instead organize regular Bürgerversammlungen (citizens’ assemblies) made up of at most 50 people who will meet for three weekends over three months. These panels will be allowed to invite experts to help them learn about the topic and draft independent policy proposals. Parliament will be bound to organizing two hearings with the assembly’s participants and then to respond to their recommendations.

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Politico: Belgium’s identity crisis isn’t about migration

The gamble Michel is making, therefore, isn’t so much about domestic policy as it is about Belgium’s credibility in Europe. It’s about choosing its camp: either among the cheerleaders of Europe and liberalism, like Emmanuel Macron, or among the populist opportunists, like Viktor Orbán and Sebastian Kurz. [...]

The road ahead is still uncertain. For now, he still holds the keys to Rue de la Loi 16, the official seat of the Belgian government. A new minority Cabinet will replace his old team. He’ll take his jet to Marrakech, where he’ll join other leaders in signing the U.N.’s Global Compact for Migration — the non-binding text that proved to be a bridge too far for his biggest coalition partner. [...]

It was a bold move, in 2014, for Michel, a Francophone liberal and part of a younger generation of Belgian politicians, to team up with the conservative Flemish nationalists. Their leader, Antwerp mayor Bart De Wever, who dreams about Flemish independence, was never an ideal partner for the federal government. [...]

In his four years as prime minister, Michel has made a show of his unconditional support for the European cause, for multilateralism, the U.N. and, of course, his close friendships with young leaders like Macron or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Theirs is a club Michel wants to belong to.

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Politico: Three out of four Europeans say the euro’s a good thing

A big majority of people in all 19 eurozone countries support the common euro currency and think it’s a good thing for the bloc, an annual Eurobarometer survey found — as first reported by Brussels Playbook.

Ireland, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Spain are the leading euro supporters, with 80 percent or more of respondents saying it’s a “good” thing for their country. Italy, Cyprus, Belgium and France are the least convinced. [...]

In Italy, 70 percent of respondents no longer convert euros back to the lira — up 4 points from last year. In France and Germany, 60 percent and 58 percent, respectively, have weaned themselves off their old francs and marks.

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Politico: Green wave set to sag ahead of 2019 election

At present, the Greens and their EFA partners (parties pushing for either full political independence or greater sovereignty) make up the fifth biggest group in the Parliament, with 52 lawmakers. Expectations aren’t exactly high of improving on that, especially with six British Green MEPs on their way out the door. [...]

In the European Parliament, the Greens have often collaborated with other left-wing forces, including the Socialists or the far-left GUE-NGL group, to pass legislation. But Green leaders say they will not join any group with the Socialists or Liberals, even in the face of a populist surge across the Continent. [...]

Green parties have done well in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands but they are almost nowhere to be seen in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. In Germany, their approach to issues like migration has won praise from conservative parts of society, while in other places they are affiliated with traditionally left-wing parties. [...]

The big unknown is France, where Europe Ecologie is still relatively low in the polls. A survey conducted in September by IFOP put the party at just 7.5 percent in the European election — lower than the 9 percent they won in 2014 and much lower than the 16.28 percent their list won in the 2009 European election.

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Politico: Italy’s post-fact immigration debate

Ask an average Italian what percentage of the country’s population was born abroad and the answer you’ll get — according to the research firm Ipsos Mori — is 26 percent. The actual number is 9.5 percent.   

Similarly, 11 months after a sudden, lasting drop in irregular sea arrivals to Italy, 51 percent of Italians still believe the number of migrants arriving in Italian ports is “similar or higher” than before, according to a recent survey published by the newspaper Corriere della Sera. The truth: Arrivals are almost 80 percent lower than they were nearly a year ago.

The problem is not unique to Italy. Across Europe, and indeed the world, the dominant political discourse has become increasingly dissociated from reality. The Ipsos Mori survey found similarly inflated perceptions about the foreign-born population in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. And, according to another recent study, Germans estimate the unemployment rate among immigrants at 40 percent. The true figure is less than 8 percent. [...]

But while funds for securing the EU’s external borders will nearly quadruple (from €5.6 to €21.3 billion), money devoted to integration — an area that experts agree is essential for the long-term management of immigrants — will most likely remain at current levels. This is a direct reflection of pressure created by politicians who have zeroed in on closing the bloc’s external borders, despite the fact that new arrivals are down and a long-term solution requires attention to integrating those who stay.

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Quartz: The LGBT political glass ceiling is cracking wide open

It was only in 2009 that Iceland’s Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was elected, becoming the first openly LGBT person in the world to serve as a prime minister. In 2011, Belgium’s Elio Di Rupo became prime minister. In 2013, in neighboring Luxembourg, Xavier Bettle was voted prime minister—a position he still holds. He has since been joined by two additional LGBT leaders: Serbia’s Ana Brnabić, and Leo Varadkar of Ireland, a country that only decriminalized same-sex relations in 1993. [...]

Today, at city, regional and national levels, several thousand openly LGBT politicians have entered the scene—a trend that shows no signs of slowing down. The 2017 elections in the US, for instance, saw important successes for LGBT candidates around America—primarily, but not exclusively, within progressive voters. The number of American LGBT mayors is up to 23—one of them, Peter Buttigieg, is a rising democratic star serving in conservative South Bend, Indiana who came out on the pages of his local paper while in office. Last weekend he married his partner as his town celebrated Pride with the rest of America. In the same year, in the UK, 35 LGBT representatives were voted into parliament (on both sides of the aisle). [...]

Despite the relative diversity of New York City’s political scene, Johnson rejects the idea that being an LGBT representative shouldn’t matter. “Being gay is not like having blue eyes,” he says. He considers his sexual orientation an integral part of his identity—the way he lives, who he loves—and says it will always be associated with his political persona. [...]

In addition to representation, it’s also important that LGBT candidates aren’t reduced to just LGBT issues. This is a stance Ohana clearly embraces, as a member of the hawkish, right-wing Likud party. Back when he first joined Likud, many members “thought I was the first gay [person] they had ever met,” he says. Yet for them, as well as the larger Israeli society, “when they see me, ‘gay’ isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, but my actions and views.”

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Quartz: Why Europeans should be quick to investigate petty criminals for Islamic terrorism

In 2015, Louise Shelley, a university professor at George Mason University and director of its Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, wrote in the New York Times (paywall) about how “the financial profile of the ISIS inspired terrorists in Europe is very different. Many of them were small-scale criminals before they were radicalized and some continue to commit crimes subsequently. Financing from petty criminal activity allows them to support themselves, buy weapons in Europe’s illegal markets and rent cars and safe houses.” [...]

In 2007, a research report funded by the Danish Ministry of Justice (pdf) delved into how for Muslim boys facing an identity crisis by living in the West can manifest itself “into anger, petty crime, and becoming easily susceptible to extremist ideology.” In addition, one of France’s most prominent Islamic terrorism experts, Olivier Roy, highlighted how “half of violent jihadis in France, Germany, and the United States also have criminal records for petty crime, just like [Manchester bomber Salman] Abedi, who appears to have been radicalized without the involvement of the local mosque or religious community, an element that mirrors patterns in the rest of Europe.” [...]

Experts have warned that in order to understand and therefore tackle this type of terrorism, authorities need to probe into these links. “To better understand the threat faced by the new generation of jihadists in the West, security forces and intelligence services must also look at the micro-level of how lower level trafficking, drug dealing and petty criminal activity, combined with prison radicalization and ties to the black market and illicit underworld, combine to present a new spin on a longstanding threat,” said the authors of a study in the Journal of Strategic Security (pdf).

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Aeon: How nations stay together

Effective nation-building brings important and positive consequences. Alliances that cut across the entire territory of a country depoliticise ethnic divisions. Politics is not perceived as a zero-sum game in which ethnic groups struggle for control of the state. Instead, more substantial policy issues concerning what the state should actually do come to the foreground of the debate. Inclusive political coalitions also foster a sense of ownership of the state and promote the ideal of a collective purpose beyond one’s family, village, clan or profession. Conformingly, citizens who identify with their nation are less resistant to paying taxes, more likely to support welfare policies, and are governed by more effective states. We also know that inclusive coalitions comprising ethnic minorities and majorities alike greatly reduce the risk of civil war and promote economic growth. [...]

A comparison between Switzerland and Belgium, two countries of similar size, with a similar linguistic composition of the population, and comparable levels of economic development, provides an example. In Switzerland, civil society organisations – such as shooting clubs, reading circles and choral societies – developed throughout the territory during the late 18th and first half of the 19th century. They spread evenly throughout the country because modern industries emerged across all the major regions, and because Switzerland’s city-states lacked both the capacity and the motivation to suppress them. In Belgium, by contrast, Napoleon, as well as the Dutch king who succeeded him, recognised the revolutionary potential of such voluntary associations, and suppressed them. Even more importantly, the associations that did exist in Belgium were confined to the more economically developed and more educated French-speaking regions and segments of the population. [...]

The examples I’ve singled out don’t account for how voluntary associations, public goods provision, and communication interact with each other or substitute for each other. Somalians, for example, all speak the same language, while Switzerland is linguistically more diverse – and yet the two histories of nation-building diverge in opposite directions. There are also additional factors that could hinder or foster nation-building. Many historians would argue that the colonial experience makes a difference. Somalia and Botswana both suffered from the divide-and-rule policies of colonial powers, which should make the task of national political integration more difficult once the colonial powers leave. Neither Russia nor Switzerland were ever under foreign rule during the past centuries. [...]

Finally, we might take a more sober perspective and consider that nation-building succeeds where countries have fought many wars with other countries, binding their populations together through shared sacrifice. Similarly, it could be that European governments could build their nations more easily because centuries of boundary adjustments and ethnic cleansings led to more homogenous populations, easier to integrate into a national polity.

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Aeon: Die like a dog

In human medicine, we’re used to implementing any and every life-saving intervention right up to the very end. As a medical intern 20 years ago, I remember thinking about the futility of that approach with patients in pain and suffering from multisystem organ failure, sustained only by machines and a regimen of some 30 or 40 medications, and unlikely to ever make it out of the hospital. What was the point? Whatever happened to quality of life? But those reservations be damned, we never gave up, and among the interns who transferred care to each other from shift to shift, the dictum of patients ‘not dying on my watch’ was something to which we all held fast. [...]

As a veterinarian, my wife viewed things altogether differently. To her, putting our dog to sleep didn’t represent throwing in the towel as it seemed to me, but a compassionate way to preempt unnecessary but inevitable pain and suffering down the line. As she saw it, we owe this option to our pets as stewards of their care, especially given that animals can’t understand pain or decide for themselves just how much suffering they are willing to tolerate. [...]

In 2009, US legislation that would have allowed physicians to be compensated by Medicare for providing voluntary counselling to patients about options for end-of-life care was defeated due to political uproar over ‘death panels’. And yet, as I discuss in the World Journal of Psychiatry in 2015, human euthanasia is being increasingly considered and sanctioned both in the US and abroad. As life-extending medical advances over the past 50 years have fuelled growing concerns about prolongation of suffering and loss of autonomy, the euthanasia movement of the 1930s has gained momentum, evolving into the modern ‘right to die’ and ‘death with dignity’ movements that challenge us to consider what constitutes a ‘good death’. Today, some form of voluntary active euthanasia – death by administration of a lethal dose of medication to avoid pain and suffering – is legal in several states in the US, as well as in Japan and parts of Europe including Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the Netherlands.  

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Haaretz: Belgian Intel Uncovers Homophobia, anti-Semitism at Brussels’ Great Mosque

An official Belgian intelligence report leaked to the media discloses that Brussels’ Great Mosque, a Saudi-affiliated institution situated not far from the major European Union headquarters institutions, has been teaching hatred of Jews and homosexuals. [...]

It turns out that the Great Mosque, the large and impressive house of worship visible to anyone going from the Brussels airport to the European Quarter – the Brussels neighborhood that is home to the headquarters of the European Union – has been training imams (Muslim prayer leaders) destined to lead mosques around Europe in Jew-hatred, preparation for armed jihad and the need to persecute members of the LGBT community, among other precepts. [...]

Another publication used for instruction, entitled “The Way of the Muslim,” describes Jews as “treacherous, unreliable and swindling, indecent and insolent, cruel and insensitive, greedy people who use violence, force and terror to control the world.” When it comes to members of the LGBT community, the textbook suggests three ways of dealing with them: “Stoning, burning at the stake or finding a tall building in town and throwing them off the roof head first.”

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Vintage Everyday: Believe It or Not: Human Zoos Really Existed in the Past, And There Are Pictures to Prove It

 Have you ever heard of a human zoo? A human zoo was a place (and yes, they really existed in the past) where people were kept for display, just like animals are kept in zoos. The displays often emphasized the cultural differences between Europeans of Western civilization and non-European peoples or with other Europeans who practiced a lifestyle deemed more primitive. Some of them placed indigenous populations in a continuum somewhere between the great apes and Europeans.

Human zoos were quite popular, as many of them were found around Europe during the late 1800s to the mid 1900s. However, they weren’t the only continent that liked to expose humans in this way. North America, specifically the U.S, had their fair share of human zoos; however they stepped up their game from the Europeans.

Ethnological expositions are sometimes criticized and ascertained as highly degrading and racist, depending on the show and individuals involved. It was obviously one of the most horrendous things one can imagine, and these pictures of human zoos are bound to terrify you!

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Politico: Emmanuel Macron’s coalition of the willing

Defense ministers of France, the U.K., Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Denmark and Estonia will sign a letter of intent in Paris in June, officials told me, pledging to develop a common strategic culture, share analysis and foresight on trouble spots that may require intervention and work to coordinate their forces for future operations.

Macron outlined the idea in his keynote Sorbonne speech on European integration last September, calling for a common European intervention force, defense budget and doctrine for action in contingencies where the United States and NATO may not get involved. France wants to recruit allies that could help share its military burden especially in Africa, where it intervened alone in Mali in 2012 to prevent Islamist militants seizing control of a weak state. [...]

British Prime Minister Theresa May quietly endorsed the initiative at a Franco-British summit at the Sandhurst Military Academy in January but did not publicize the step to avoid antagonizing hard-line Brexiteers in her Conservative Party, to whom any idea of an “EU army” is anathema. She did announce a practical move to help the French in the Sahel region, making available three heavy-lift Chinook helicopters to support operations in Mali.  [...]

Paris also approached non-NATO Sweden and Finland and non-EU Norway about the initiative but they chose to stay out at least initially, diplomats said. Under other circumstances, the French would have liked to include Poland, the most serious military player in former communist Central Europe, but that seems impossible as long as Jarosław Kaczyński’s ruling Law and Justice party stays on its authoritarian nationalist course.

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The Guardian: 'Christianity as default is gone': the rise of a non-Christian Europe

The survey of 16- to 29-year-olds found the Czech Republic is the least religious country in Europe, with 91% of that age group saying they have no religious affiliation. Between 70% and 80% of young adults in Estonia, Sweden and the Netherlands also categorise themselves as non-religious.

The most religious country is Poland, where 17% of young adults define themselves as non-religious, followed by Lithuania with 25%. [...]

But there were significant variations, he said. “Countries that are next door to one another, with similar cultural backgrounds and histories, have wildly different religious profiles.”  [...]

In the Czech Republic, 70% said they never went to church or any other place of worship, and 80% said they never pray. In the UK, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, between 56% and 60% said they never go to church, and between 63% and 66% said they never pray.  

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