Politico: Emmanuel Macron, anti-European

Among other strikes, they cite the following French-led moves as going against the spirit of the single market: an overhaul of posted worker rules; France’s temporary nationalization of shipyards; its embrace of geographic indicators for dairy products; and plans to allow limited price fixing for agricultural products. [...]

And while Macron has reaped praise for his ambitious approach to Europe — calling for a shared European “strategic culture” — when it comes to trade and the single market, time after time, the French President has taken measures his critics describe as erecting barriers and favoring French interests. [...]

Selimovic, the Swedish liberal, said he understood Macron’s intentions, and could see that the approach is bearing results. But he worried that by the time the French president is finished, there would be little left of the single market as it existed in the early 2000s.

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Vox: Why Japan’s HPV vaccine rates dropped from 70% to near zero

In Japan, coverage rates for the HPV vaccine have plummeted from 70 percent in 2013 to less than 1 percent today. This happened after a preliminary (and allegedly fraudulent) mouse study showing the vaccine caused brain damage was spread by the media, along with unconfirmed video reports of girls in wheelchairs and having seizures after getting immunized.

Anti-vaccine groups also blamed the shot for causing chronic pain and heart and neurological troubles. The government didn’t help matters when it decided to suspend proactive recommendations for HPV vaccines, despite finding no evidence to support the claims parents and anti-vaccine groups were making. [...]

There’s no good data suggesting there are significant safety concerns caused by the HPV vaccine. The largest-ever overview of all the available safety data on the vaccine from 2006 to 2015, published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, as well as another BMJ study involving about a million girls in Denmark and Sweden, found there was no association between the vaccine and a range of harms, including autoimmune, neurological, and cardiovascular adverse events. The European Medicines Agency also recently looked at the scientific evidence and found no link between the vaccine and the pain and other symptoms people are attributing to it.  [...]

“Each year in Japan, 27,000 to 28,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer and around 3,000 die,” she said. “HPV vaccines can prevent this disease. Yet because of the campaigners' videos and the government's decision to suspend recommending the vaccine, many mothers and children do not know this vaccine is safe. The long-term impact will be preventable suffering and death.”

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Haaretz: Are Muslims the 'New Jews' for Today's Far Right? Trump's Tweets Boosted That Claim

Prejudice towards Islam and Muslims is endemic in the Europe of 2017. The "Muslim Question" is central to the politics of the far right, which has achieved success unprecedented since WWII at the polls this year, from France to the Czech Republic via Austria and Germany. 

More significantly, the fear of Muslims as potential terrorists has become an integral part of mainstream European politics and the European security state, as has been identified by Amnesty International, among others. [...]

The similarities between contemporary Islamophobia and 1930s anti-Semitism, in particular, are certainly striking: Panic about a Muslim 'horde' coming from the East; an obsession with Muslim conspiracies against the West; and the generalized depiction of Muslim men as corruptors/abusers of vulnerable Christian women (from sex gangs in the North of England to the sexual assaults in German cities on New Year’s Eve 2016). [...]

And we must not forget that the association between Jews and Communism was a central part of European thinking about Jewry before and after the Second World War (John Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, published in 1961, is testimony to its longevity). The idea of the Judeo-Bolshevik menace, however, has no corresponding concept in contemporary European debates about Islam. [...]

In 2017, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe are on the rise, in different ways. The idea of a global Jewish conspiracy is itself globalizing and has found a new incarnation with, for example, the vicious campaigns against financier and philanthropist George Soros.

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Haaretz: Are Official Bans and Slurs the Start of Full-on Persecution for Turkey's LGBT Community?

A week ago, the governor of Turkey’s capital city banned all events - "cinema, theater, panels, interviews, exhibitions" - relating to the gay, lesbian and transgender community from taking place in the nation’s capital in the name of the wider "community’s public sensitivity [and] to provide peace and security." [...]

It was only a matter of time until the ban reached Istanbul. And so it was: days later an LGBT-related film screening, to be held at the Pera Museum, was also banned by the Istanbul governor’s office, who claimed that the organizers had failed to submit the proper authorization papers.  [...]

Defying the ban, students at Ankara’s prestigious Middle East Technical University screened a gay-oriented film. The university cut the electricity in order to stop the screening. Fortunately, the Turkish police opted not to use force against the students, who went on to march and chant slogans supporting LGBT rights. [...]

The LGBT ban should be seen in the wider context of Turkey’s ongoing clampdown on civil society. The first spike came during the Gezi Park protests, but accelerated since last year’s failed coup, when Turkey came under a State of Emergency that continues up to today. [...]

For the ruling AKP, LGBT issues for years were too much of a taboo to address, both among the party leadership and its constituency. During its long rulethere have been plenty of of homophobic slurs by AKP members. However, these spiked as the LGBT community became more politically ambitious, as was evident during the 2015 parliamentary elections. 

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openDemocracy: Brexit Britain is displaying its old, dangerous delusions about Ireland

The current British political class seem to have next to no understanding that, in the period since both the UK and Ireland joined the then EEC on 1st January 1973, Ireland has been the UK’s closest ally, advocate and interpreter in EU corridors of power. The last twenty years of UK-Irish relations, of which the Good Friday Agreement is but one part, have also been the most harmonious between the two states since Irish independence in 1922. The backdrop of both countries being in the EU has been a part of this. All of these benefits are now under threat and cannot just blithely be assumed to continue unharmed into the future as the most nonchalant Brexiteers claim.

UK politicians and media feel free to comment on Irish politics and politicians, such as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, in ways unhelpful and lacking subtlety. There seems to no awareness that such comments are read in Irish circles and factored into their responses. The Spectator’s Political Editor James Forsyth wrote at the end of last week, without a hint of irony, that: ‘If British politicians talked about a majority of the Irish electorate the way Varadkar does about Brexiteers, they would rightly be chastised.’ It does make you wonder where a Westminster watcher like Forsyth has been since the Brexit vote.

What drives this delusion and derision towards all things Irish? One major factor is the powerful myopia at the heart of the UK. The British political establishment barely understands the complexities, composition and character of the UK. This lack of understanding has a long history but it’s now becoming a chasm that is vitally important to how Brexit pans out.

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