The Guardian: Britain is leaving the EU – just as Europe is on the up

Today’s European leaders are, by contrast, confronted with an especially adverse set of circumstances. Trump, Putin, Erdoğan, terrorism, unprecedented flows of migration, unemployment, the rise of populism and, of course, Brexit. But, just as Kohl and his French contemporary François Mitterrand relaunched the European project in the early 1990s, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron are, as Britain prepares to leave, readying their ambitions and vision for the continent.

At stake is no less than Europe’s role in defending liberal democratic values and a rules-based international order at a time when – as one former Obama administration official put it to me recently – Trump’s America is “missing in action and the UK is disappearing into oblivion”. The words may be harsh, but they underscore that Britain’s central weakness lies not only in its internal political confusion – but also with a dangerous ignorance of what its European neighbours are setting their sights on.

The Franco-German engine is not focusing on Brexit but rather on consolidating the 60-year-old European project through further integration and cooperation. At the heart of this stands an emerging Macron-Merkel deal, intended to act as Europe’s new powerhouse. On 15 May, the French and German leaders met and spoke of a new “roadmap” for the EU. The thinking goes like this: in the next two to three years, as France carries out structural economic reforms to boost its credibility, Germany will step up much-needed European financial solidarity and investment mechanisms, and embrace a new role on foreign policy, security and defence. [...]

Across the continent, citizens’ support for the EU is on the rise, according to Eurobarometer surveys. Polls show Europeans are increasingly in favour of a “multiple speed” or “flexible” EU, in which ad hoc groups of member states would forge ahead with new projects. For all the headlines about a populist movement eating away at the EU’s foundations, it seems all the shockwaves the continent has felt in recent years have brought a renewed sense of belonging, and an appetite for better, if not more, integration.

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Haaretz: Secret Room in Buenos Aires Home Hid a Trove of Suspected Nazi Artifacts

In a hidden room in a house near Argentina's capital, police believe they have found the biggest collection of Nazi artifacts in the country's history, including a bust relief of Adolf Hitler, magnifying glasses inside elegant boxes with swastikas and even a macabre medical device used to measure head size.[...]

The investigation that culminated in the discovery of the collection began when authorities found artworks of illicit origin in a gallery in north Buenos Aires.

Agents with the international police force Interpol began following the collector and with a judicial order raided the house on June 8. A large bookshelf caught their attention and behind it agents found a hidden passageway to a room filled with Nazi imagery. [...]

The main hypothesis among investigators and member of Argentina's Jewish community is that they were brought to Argentina by a high-ranking Nazi or Nazis after World War II, when the South American country became a refuge for fleeing war criminals, including some of the best known.

As leading members of Hitler's Third Reich were put on trial for war crimes, Josef Mengele fled to Argentina and lived in Buenos Aires for a decade. He moved to Paraguay after Israeli Mossad agents captured Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who was also living in Buenos Aires. Mengele later died in Brazil in 1979 while swimming in a beach in the town of Bertioga.

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Haaretz: Iranian Clerics and ultra-Orthodox Rabbis Agree: Zumba Is Sinful

The banning of Zumba dance exercise by Iranian authorities has grabbed headlines worldwide. Authorities in the Islamic Republic condemned the popular fitness classes for women as “contravening Islamic ideology,” and the head of the country’s sports federation declared that the dangerous Latin movements of the Colombia-originated exercise craze are “not legal in any shape or title.”

But Tehran-based cleric Hossain Ghayyomi was quoted by the LA Times as explaining to the objectors that Zumba fell under the rubric of dancing, not exercise.

He said that under Islam, “any harmonious movement or rhythmic exercise, if it is for pleasure seeking, is haram (forbidden),” and “even jobs related to these rhythmic movements are haram. For instance, since Islam says dancing or music is haram, then renting a place to teach dancing or cutting wood to make musical instruments is haram too.” [...]

Four years ago, the rabbinical court judge of the Ashkenazi community in Betar Ilit issued an edict explicitly forbidding Zumba “after having established that, both in form and manner, the activity is totally at odds with both the ways of the Torah and the holiness of Israel, as are the songs associated to it. I hereby announce that the organization and participation in such classes is forbidden.” [...]

Ultra-Orthodox objections with the Zumba craze haven’t been restricted to the Middle East. In 2013, Rabbi Zecharia Wallerstein, founder and director of Ohr Naava – a New York-area Women’s Torah Center – took to the pulpit to preach against it as a slippery slope to sinful behavior. Respectable Jewish women, he said, were not meant to gyrate to “goyish provocative” music and “dance like an animal” or “monkeys in the jungle” to “Latin garbage.”

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Jacobin Magazine: June 19 Should Be a National Holiday

Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery had finally come to an end in Texas. That day — June 19, 1865 — would come to be celebrated by black Americans all over the country, who remember Juneteenth as the anniversary of their historic triumph over the planter class. [...]

A pro-slavery insurrection against Mexico established the Texas Republic in 1835, and Southern elites seized the opportunity to add a vast new slave territory to the union, pressuring the Federal government into annexing the territory in 1845.

Once Texas became a state, its enslaved population skyrocketed as planters relocated to the region. Just five years after its annexation, the enslaved population had jumped from 11,000 in 1840 to more than 58,000 in 1850. [...]

The mass exodus of freed slaves from Texas and other Southern states would only gain momentum over the next few decades, eventually culminating in the Great Migration of the twentieth century, during which as many as 6 million black Americans relocated to the North and West. [...]

In Texas, the years following General Granger’s announcement were characterized by a violent counterrevolution — between 1865 and 1868, more than four hundred freedmen were murdered by white settlers, and a delegate to the all-white constitutional convention in 1866 characterized “the permanent preservation of the white race” as “the paramount object of the people of Texas.”

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Vox: How 2 academics got the Supreme Court to reexamine gerrymandering

A divided three-judge panel of the US District Court for Wisconsin ruled last year against the Wisconsin map, concluding that the plaintiffs are correct and that the map’s gerrymandering is unconstitutional. Kenneth Ripple, the author of that opinion, wrote, "We conclude … that the evidence establishes that one of the purposes of [the district map] was to secure Republican control of the Assembly under any likely future electoral scenario for the remainder of the decade, in other words to entrench the Republican Party in power." [...]

While the Supreme Court has ruled on many aspects of the districting process — banning state legislative districts with unequal populations and banning districts intended to disenfranchise black voters — it has issued muddled opinions on the question of whether partisan gerrymanders are unconstitutional. There’s extensive case law on racial gerrymanders, which has established that racial discrimination in districting is subject to strict scrutiny by courts. [...]

The efficiency gap is key to the plaintiffs’ arguments in Gill v. Whitford. They proposed setting a threshold of 7 percent: If a districting plan produces a larger gap than that, if one party is getting a wasted-vote advantage of more than 7 percent of the total vote, then it’s getting a huge leg up, which will continue for a long time. As Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken noted in a Vox piece following the initial district court decision, a gap above that amount indicates that the disadvantaged party “would have almost no chance of taking control of the legislature during the 10-year districting cycle.”

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