Foreign Policy: Leftie Germans for … Merkel?

According to Der Tagesspiegel on Thursday, 20 percent of Germans are considering voting for the center-right CDU/CSU for the first time in this year’s elections. Why? For 19.1 percent of Green Party and 11 percent of SDP voters considering the switch, the reason is the woman known as Mutti.

With a center-left SDP that many think has no chance of winning even by forming a coalition, a rising far-right, a populist far-left, and identity as the central issue for German politics and people, for many, Merkel is not one more choice. She’s the only choice.

Left-leaning Germans aren’t running down the street proclaiming their allegiance to a woman whose party they’ve long opposed. Raphael Peter, a young German in Marburg, says that even though he considers Merkel “the one chance we have,” he still won’t vote for her, though he understands why other left-leaning voters would. “Many are disappointed with the Social Democrats, the Green Party is caught up in discussions on how to react, the Liberal Party is trying to reinvent themselves, and the Left Party is torn apart to some extent,” he explained to Foreign Policy. But he still isn’t sure how he, as a left-leaning German, should vote. [...]

Indeed, the chance for a coalition — and the structure of the German political system — is one reason that Merkel has gained support from the center left. Some voters see her as having moved the party more to the middle. And while that means she’s facing the threat of defection from the Christian Social Union — Bavaria’s variant of the CDU, more conservative and arguably nativist than the CDU — it also means she’s made the CDU a more palatable option for those who couldn’t imagine voting for it 10 years ago.

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The Washington Post: Japan’s trains are in a league of their own. Japan’s subculture of train fanatics is no different.

This country, where a 20-second delay leads to profuse apologies on the platforms and conductors bow to passengers as they enter the train car, has taken train nerd-dom to a new level.

Sure, there are the vanilla trainspotters who take photos of various trains around the country. They’re called tori-tetsu. (Tori means to take, and tetsu means train.)

But there are also nori-tetsu, people who enjoy traveling on trains; yomi-tetsu, those who love to read about trains, especially train schedules; oto-tetsu, the people who record the sound of trains; sharyo-tetsu, fans of train design; eki-tetsu, people who study stations; and even ekiben-tetsu, aficionados of the exquisite bento lunchboxes sold at stations.  [...]

Take Tetsuya Suzuki, a 48-year-old yomi-tetsu who has more than 660 volumes of train timetable books dating back to April 1980. He uses the latest edition — yes, Japan still prints phone-book-size schedules — to map out imaginary journeys just for fun. [...]

In Japan, there are the famous bullet trains that whiz the length of the country in about the same time it takes Amtrak to get from the District to New York, and the slightly slower but perfectly punctual commuter trains. But there are the special trains: the retro, 1950s-style cars, the  cars festooned with leaves in fall or cartoon characters like Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the trains with indoor playrooms or foot spas. 

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Atlas Obscura: The World's Most Beautiful and Unusual Chess Sets

In 1923, the year after the founding of the Soviet Union, the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) produced a unique chess set. Since originating in sixth-century India, chess designs had been inspired by military battles, royalty, even nature; now, the inspiration was ideology.

The chess set produced in Lomonosov had two very distinct sides. For the pieces in white, the king is a skeleton, wielding a femur bone as a scepter. The queen unashamedly displays an abundance of riches. The bishops are the tsar’s imperial guards, and the pawns are bound in chains. These are the pieces for the capitalist side.

The communist side—in red, naturally—is led by the king, who is a blacksmith, and queen, who carries wheat. The pawns are female farm workers and the bishops, red army colonels. The message wasn’t subtle, but it was evidently popular: the Communist Propaganda Set became one of the most copied in the world.

This extraordinary set is just one example of the designs featured in Master Works: Rare and Beautiful Chess Sets. As the book shows, even with the apparent limitations of structure—32 pieces across 64 squares—there is capacity for unusual and inspired design. 

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Al Jazeera: Camerawoman Petra Laszlo sentenced for kicking refugees

A Hungarian camerawoman who caused global outrage after being filmed kicking and tripping up refugees near the country's border with Serbia has been sentenced to three years' probation for disorderly conduct.

Petra Laszlo, who appeared via video link at a court in the southern city of Szeged on Thursday, mounted a tearful defence and said she would appeal. [...]

Judge Illes Nanasi said Laszlo's behaviour "ran counter to societal norms" and said the facts of the case did not support her self-defence claim. [...]

Laszlo, who had earlier said she would sue one of the refugees she tripped, was fired from her job at N1TV, a private right-wing television station in Hungary.

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Al Jazeera: How far is Russia willing to go in Syria?

Russia has arguably sought a political settlement from the outset of its military intervention in Syria as a means both of securing a return on its investment in the Assad regime and of consolidating its claim to global power status. With Turkey now on board and bringing most of Syria's political and armed opposition with it, the main obstacle to Russian aims is the Assad regime and, behind it, Iran.

Visibly buoyed by its success in taking full control of Aleppo, the regime appears determined to subdue remaining opposition enclaves around Damascus. This prompted the armed opposition groups that had signed on to the latest ceasefire to announce it at an end on January 9, 2017. For its part, Iran refrained from sponsoring the ceasefire, although it had joined Russia and Turkey just nine days earlier in the "Moscow Declaration" calling for a truce and peace talks. [...]

But Russia has signalled a potentially important shift simply by endorsing the idea of enforcement, as well as agreeing to joint monitoring on the ground by Turkish and Russian observers. Its air strikes supporting the Turkish-backed Euphrates Shield force battling the Islamic State in al-Bab on December 30, 2016, were also significant: although clearly intended as a positive gesture towards Turkey, they are the only instance in the entire Syrian conflict of direct air support by any power for the armed opposition.

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