Deutsche Welle: Russia behind hack on German parliament, paper reports

Germany's "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" (FAS) quoted a high-ranking security official who said it was "highly plausible" that a cybertheft of files from a German parliamentary inquiry in 2015 was conducted by Russian hackers. [...]

FAS reported Sunday that 2,420 secret files published two weeks ago by WikiLeaks were documents that had been stored electronically at parliament in late 2014 and early 2015 for the Bundestag's own inquiry into the NSA. [...]

Wolfgang Bosbach, a conservative ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, told the "Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger" (KStA) newspaper: "The risk of exertion of influence through deliberate infiltration from outside with the aim of manipulating facts or opinion exists generally."

Rolf Mützenich, the Social Democrat parliamentary group's foreign policy spokesman told the KStA: "During campaigning we will have to prepare ourselves for distortion and false stories."

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National Public Radio: The U.S. And China: Two Centuries Of Infatuation And Disappointment

In the 19th century, more Chinese workers started coming because the U.S. signed a treaty with China in 1868, and as Pomfret writes: "By the time the treaty was signed, Chinese had been coming to the United States for almost two decades." They soon represented 10 percent of California's population.

Americans welcomed them. Chinese workers drained swamps to produce millions of acres of the richest farmland in the world. The Chinese were miners, laundrymen, cooks, small merchants and railroad workers. They helped build the West. A Republican who owned mines and built railroads told the California State Senate that Chinese workers were "men of iron" and "hardy, industrious laborers."

But once the Civil War ended in 1865, a huge pool of American men headed west to look for jobs. The economy slowed, and Americans turned on the Chinese. At that time, a higher percentage of Chinese were employed than white men, so state laws blocked Chinese entry to the U.S. and prevented those already here from working.

In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. for 10 years. It was the first time the U.S. specifically denied entry to a particular ethnic group. [...]

Pomfret describes the strange and complex situation as a "never-ending Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Both sides experience rapturous enchantment begetting hope, followed by disappointment, repulsion, and disgust, only to return to fascination once again."

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Slate: Beautiful, Catholic Malta Is the First European Country to Ban Conversion “Therapy”

Malta became the first European country to ban gay conversion “therapy” —also known as torture—when the tiny island nation’s parliament unanimously approved a sweeping bill on Monday that categorized the practice as a “deceptive and unlawful act.” The new law prohibits medical professionals from attempting to alter a patient’s sexual orientation, under threat of fines or jail time. It also lowers the age at which a person may request a change in gender to 16, permitting anyone over that age to legally change their gender without filing an application in court or receiving parental approval. The law declares that no sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression constitutes a disorder or disease and requires the government to recognize the “lived gender” of non-Maltese people detained on the island. [...]

In 2011, the country held a referendum on divorce, and a majority of voters chose to legalize the formal dissolution of marriages. No longer would Western Europeans drawn to the island for natural landmarks like the luminous Blue Grotto be shocked to learn that couples, once married, were forever trapped in their relationship. [...]

In 2016, the government repealed a law that criminalized the vilification of religion “by words, gestures, written matter, whether printed or not, or pictures or by some other visible means.” Tourists and residents alike could finally take in the breathtaking views of the spectacular Maltese countryside while perched atop the walled city of Mdina without fretting that a stray comment could land them in jail. [...]

Malta, of course, retains its proud Catholic heritage and continues to celebrate church traditions that help to define the country’s identity. A majority of its citizens (and legislators) have simply decided that the government has no business enforcing discriminatory beliefs using the heavy hand of the law. In that sense, the country is really an inspiration, simultaneously a haven for LGBTQ rights and a nation of deep Catholic faith. Liberal Western values may be on the decline elsewhere in Europe. But Malta today is proving that a country can adhere to key traditional values, promote its own religious heritage, and recognize the dignity of every citizen—all at the same time.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Success and Luck - Cosmopolitanism and Private Education

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. Laurie Taylor talks to Robert H. Frank, Professor of Economics at Cornell University's Johnson School of Management, about the role luck has to play in life's successes, or failures. Frank argues that chance is much more significant than people give it credit for. Lynsey Hanley, writer and Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, joins the discussion. Also, Claire Maxwell, Reader of Sociology of Education at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London, talks about her co-authored paper looking at the attitudes of privately-educated young women towards the idea of cosmopolitanism. Did they feel like global citizens, or were their aspirations confined to the local and the national?

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The Atlantic: Who Really Lost Iraq?

And yet Obama didn’t turn victory into defeat. For a start, there was no victory. In 2009, the troop surge had helped pull Iraq back from the brink of utter catastrophe, but the country remained extremely fragile and deeply traumatized. “Committing murder in Iraq is casual,” said one Iraqi official, “like drinking a morning cup of coffee.”

Furthermore, when Republicans berate Obama for withdrawing American troops, they neglect to mention that Obama inherited a timetable negotiated by the Bush administration for a complete U.S. exit. Could Obama have convinced the Iraqis to switch direction and accept a follow-on force? Here, opinion differs widely. It’s fair to say that the White House was internally divided about a successor force, and didn’t push as hard as it could have. But a rising tide of Iraqi nationalism made striking such a deal extremely challenging. When I interviewed John Abizaid, the former head of Central Command, for my book on U.S. military failure, he told me that an American successor force was “not in the cards at all.”

Republicans also vastly embellish what an American successor force might have accomplished. In the GOP’s imagination, these troops have grown into supermen who could have held off extremism in the Middle East—as if Obama pulled the Spartans out of Thermopylae. But if 150,000 U.S. troops couldn’t salve Iraq’s sectarian divisions, why would 10,000 soldiers have solved the puzzle? And these troops would almost certainly not have prevented the emergence of ISIS, which mainly arose across the border in Syria. [...]

Plus, the stab-in-the-back myth prevents real reflection about failed wars. After World War I, Germans didn’t come to terms with the price of militarism. Instead, they looked for scapegoats at home and vengeance abroad. The idea that Vietnam was a triumph forsaken prevented the United States from fully recognizing how its Asian adventure had been premised on a series of illusions, including the perception of communism as a monolith. In a bid to blame Obama, Republicans neglect critical questions about why the United States invaded Iraq—about the wild overconfidence, the failures of unilateralism, and the lack of planning for the post-Saddam era.

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