Politico: Britain thinks Germans care about Brexit — they don’t

Brexit is not a political issue in Germany. No election will be won or lost because of it. Angela Merkel’s position — to walk in lock-step with France and the Commission — is not controversial, it is consensus across the political landscape. [...]

A prominent German commentator recently compared May to “a beetle lying on its back, kicking its legs in desperation.” Germany’s politicians have shown little inclination to help turn her back over. May’s failed back-channel effort to convince Berlin to push Michel Barnier to move Brexit talks to the next phase is only the latest example of Germany’s unwillingness to help. [...]

British hopes that Berlin would eventually intervene to try and protect Germany’s industrial interests in the U.K. have proved misplaced. German auto companies are likely to take a Brexit hit. But the growth in migration of financial firms to Frankfurt has convinced Berlin that Brexit might not be as bad as many feared.

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Quartz: A hepatitis A outbreak is killing California’s homeless population

In the past 11 months, 569 people have been infected and 17 have died of the virus in southern California. The US Centers for Disease Control reported that in 2015, there were a total (pdf) of 1,390 country-wide. This is now the second-largest outbreak in the US in the last 20 years. (The largest was over 10 years ago in Pennsylvania due to contaminated onions.)

Hepatitis A is a virus that damages the liver and causes it to swell. Many of the initial symptoms look like a stomach flu, but hep A can also cause the skin and the whites of your eyes to turn yellow, because the liver stops being able to filter out toxins in the blood. It spreads easily between people—especially through shared needles—or through contaminated food or drinking water. It’s an unpleasant virus whose symptoms usually last up to two months, but is only fatal about 1% of the time. [...]

Brown declared a state of emergency in part to increase the supply of vaccines available to the homeless, and other efforts to curb the outbreak are already underway. Last month, San Diego started bleaching city streets to try to disinfect them, and city councilmen have also called for testing to ensure drinking water isn’t being contaminated with feces. In other cities affected by the outbreak, local government representatives have put in requests for port-a-potties as a way of improving sanitation on the streets to stop the spread of the virus.

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Vox: Photos: al-Qaeda-linked militants kill more than 320 in Somalia truck bomb attack

The carnage came Saturday, when a massive truck bomb killed over 320 people and wounded 300 more at a busy intersection in the capital, Mogadishu. The blast destroyed nearby hotels, restaurants, and government offices. Just a few hours later, a second explosion rocked the suburb of Medina, setting dozens of vehicles on fire.

The government has accused al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group that has been waging a bloody insurgency in the country for more than a decade, of carrying out the attacks. Al-Shabaab militants have carried out dozens of high-profile attacks in Somalia and neighboring Kenya in recent years, including the April 2015 massacre at Kenya’s Garissa University in which militants targeted mainly Christian students, killing 148, and the siege of a popular pizza restaurant in Mogadishu just four months ago that left 31 people dead. [...]

The sheer scale of the devastation of Saturday’s attacks is hard to comprehend. Witnesses speaking to the UK’s Guardian newspaper described an area of destruction the size of “two or three football fields” in downtown Mogadishu.

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The New York Review of Books: Is Democracy in Europe Doomed?

Those who believe millennials are immune to authoritarian ideas are mistaken. Using data from the World Values Survey, the political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk have painted a worrying picture. As the French election demonstrated, belief in core tenets of liberal democracy is in decline, especially among those born after 1980. Their findings challenge the idea that after achieving a certain level of prosperity and political liberty, countries that have become democratic do not turn back.  

In America, 72 percent of respondents born before World War II deemed it absolutely essential to live in a democracy; only 30 percent of millennials agreed. The figures were similar in Holland. The number of Americans favoring a strong leader unrestrained by elections or parliaments has increased from 24 to 32 percent since 1995. More alarmingly, the number of Americans who believe that military rule would be good or very good has risen from 6 to 17 percent over the same period. The young and wealthy were most hostile to democratic norms, with fully 35 percent of young people with a high income regarding army rule as a good thing. Mainstream political science, confident in decades of received wisdom about democratic “consolidation” and stability, seemed to be ignoring a disturbing shift in public opinion. [...]

Too many people on the European left scoff at nationalism, mistaking their own distaste for evidence that the phenomenon no longer exists or is somehow illegitimate. If 2016 and 2017 have proven anything, it is that this sort of visceral nationalism, or loyalty to one’s in-group, still exists and is not going away. Those who dismiss this sort of national sentiment as backward and immature do so at their own peril. [...]

The first step in any coherent political project to counter right-wing populists is to reject the fear that fuels their popularity and resist the temptation to adopt their policies. Very few leaders have done this. In Holland and Denmark, the center right and the social-democratic left have largely caved and adopted planks from the populists’ platform. The left has lost much of its old base by appearing to care only about free trade, technological progress, and limitless diversity. This scares many people who used to vote for the Democratic Party, British Labour, or European Social Democrats.

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Politico: Prague poised to turn away from Brussels

Recent polls predict the maverick ANO movement and its founder, former Finance Minister Andrej Babiš, will be the election’s biggest winner with some 25 percent of the vote. Support for Babiš is largely due to his vow to fight political corruption — despite the fact he currently faces charges of subsidy fraud. But he has also denounced EU-imposed migrant quotas and “EU meddling” in Czech politics. [...]

Czech voters are deeply skeptical about both the euro and the EU project itself. According to a 2017 survey by the Czech Public Opinion Research Center, only 18 percent of Czechs “strongly agree” the country should be a member of the bloc, while 38 percent “somewhat agree” — by far the lowest support for EU membership among members of the so-called Visegrad Group of Central European nations, which also includes Poland, Hungary and Slovakia. Another poll by the same organization found that only 21 percent of Czechs are in favor of adopting the euro. [...]

Other party leaders have kept the door open to governing with ANO — while insisting they do not want Babiš to be prime minister. But Babiš has repeatedly insisted that he will not let someone else take the reins if ANO wins the most seats in parliament, and there is no obvious alternative candidate within his party for the premiership. He also has an ally in President Miloš Zeman, who is likely to throw his weight behind a coalition headed by the ANO leader.

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