The Guardian: Angela Merkel takes significantly tougher Brexit stance

Angela Merkel has significantly stiffened her rhetoric on Brexit, telling an audience of German business leaders that any exception to the EU’s single market rules would represent “a systemic challenge for the entire European Union”. [...]

The applause for Merkel’s comments put a further question mark over the argument of British pro-Brexit politicians that German businesses will inevitably pressure their government to preserve their trade links with the UK and resist tariffs.

Markus Kerber, the leader of Germany’s largest industry group, said last week that trade, investments and single market solidarity with the rest of the EU were more important than the volume of business German companies do with Britain. [...]

The tone of Merkel’s remarks in particular stands in sharp contrast to the conciliatory language coming out of Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, when leading politicians pleaded for London to be given more time to think through the consequences of the vote.

Jens Spahn, a senior member of her Christian Democrat Union party, confirmed the tough line, including no pre-negotiations before article 50 is triggered.

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Vox: I’ve spent 30 years counseling priests who fall in love. Here’s what I learned.

The real challenge comes after ordination, when the observing eyes of superiors are far away. Over the past 30 years, the number of priests has been going down dramatically. Young priests are often sent to parishes alone after minimal on-the-job training with an older colleague.

This can be heady, exciting, frightening, anxiety-producing, and even intoxicating. It is also easy in this context to feel lonely, misunderstood, and powerfully desirous of solace beyond the purely spiritual kind.

It is here that love can bloom more easily. Not the theoretical, theological kind of love discussed in training, but the actual, sensuous, immediate, and non-intellectualized power trip of falling for someone. The space where moral imperatives can easily get fuzzy and slip into the background. [...]

Why not? The world of the priesthood as I have observed it is, curiously, a male, even a macho one. Christian values might be called "feminine" (patience, forbearance, gentleness), but the purveyors of those values are expected to carry on often intense work in a solitary way with minimal support.

Bitching? Moaning? Those are for weaker men. It is the job of the priest to be strong in the midst of others' weakness. His own weakness, sadly, is a private affair. [...]

The other issue here is violation of integrity. By "integrity" I mean simply being the person you claim to be. Once a priest presents himself as a chaste, committed celibate but is actually sexually active, he has destroyed one of the pillars supporting his mental health.

The significance of this can hardly be underestimated. While it is fashionable these days in mental health circles to conceive of anxiety as a free-floating condition, it is often related to such profound violations of personal integrity. [...]

A more challenging development would be to expand priests' knowledge of human sexuality and intimacy as well as increase their regard for those critical parts of the human experience. This would require more candid and less judgmental communication about these aspects of life and would reflect a move away from the idealized role of the priest as a person without need. That is, after all, just a facade.

While some efforts have been made in this direction, there is a longstanding tendency in the Catholic tradition to value sexual abstinence over sexual relationships, committed or otherwise. Measures that level the field between priests and parishioners would help bridge the distance between the two, opening up more options for actual friendship and genuine collaboration.

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Vox: Get to know António Guterres. He'll be running the UN for a while.

Guterres had been the rumored frontrunner for months, but the selection still came as a bit of a surprise because many UN diplomats and observers believed that Moscow would only accept a candidate from Eastern Europe. (The current UN head, Ban Ki-moon, comes from South Korea; Ban’s predecessor, Kofi Annan, was from Ghana.)

In the end, Guterres, a consummate UN insider, easily beat out other top contenders like Argentinian Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, either of whom would have been the first woman to lead the world body.

Guterres’s victory was hailed by UN watchers, who describe Guterres in glowing terms. Formerly the UN high commissioner on refugees, Guterres is well-liked, with a reputation for being eloquent and outspoken on human rights. He also has a history of challenging powerful countries to do more to help the vulnerable rather than deferring to them. It’s a bold choice for an organization better known for making the safe one. [...]

“He consistently positioned himself as the voice of world refugees; a sort of moral center who would put his own career prospects on the line by calling out powerful countries,” Mark Leon Goldberg, a journalist at UN Dispatch who covers the world body closely, writes. [...]

A key qualification of Guterres is his skill for public outreach — his ability to make a case for refugees and the need to assist refugees that grabs the attention of the world. Public advocacy isn’t the strong suit of Ban, a soft-spoken diplomat who chooses his words carefully and is, to his critics, far too hesitant to criticize major powers like Washington and Moscow. [...]

“The first UN secretary general, Trygve Lie, describe it as ‘the most impossible job in the world,’” Bosco says. “You have all of this demand that the organization respond — but you don’t have the power to make [it].”

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Business Insider: You may be surprised by the 10 countries that hold over half the world's refugees

Ten countries, accounting for just 2.5 per cent of global GDP, are sheltering 56 per cent of the world’s 21 million refugees, according to a report published on Tuesday.

The rights group criticised the wealthiest countries for showing “a near absence of leadership and responsibility” while the refugee crisis escalates. [...]

The report highlights the contrast in the number of refugees from Syria taken by its neighbours and by other countries with similar populations.

The UK has taken fewer than 8,000 Syrian refugees since the country’s civil war began in 2011, while Jordan, which has a population almost 10 times smaller than the UK and just 1.2 per cent of its GDP, hosts more than 655,000 Syrian refugees. [...]

“It’s disgraceful that the UK hosts less than one per cent of the world’s refugees when our size and prosperity mean we should do so much more. Desperate families are forced into the hands of traffickers precisely because countries like ours have pulled up the drawbridge. Smaller, poorer neighbouring countries are left to try and cope, and when they can’t, more people are forced to try to move on, seeking a basic level of safety

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The Guardian: The murder that killed free media in Russia

Ten years after Politkovskaya was shot in the lobby of her apartment block in Moscow, Novaya Gazeta continues to be one of the few outlets for hard-hitting independent journalism in Russia. Its reporters still work from the North Caucasus, one the most dangerous part of the region. [...]

This September, a number of mothers of victims, who have long campaigned for an independent investigation into the events of the siege, planned a protest to mark the anniversary and wore T-shirts bearing the words: “Putin is the butcher of Beslan”.

Kostyuchenko and a photographer who went to cover the event were followed, intimidated, doused in green paint and beaten up during their time in the town. Kostyuchenko spent a week in hospital with concussion after being hit in the head. [...]

Since 2006, the Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded 20 journalists’ killings, while Freedom House has counted 63 violent attacks on reporters. But for the most part, the threat of closure keeps publications in line and encourages self-censorship.

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