The Guardian: May’s Brexit pledges have turned to ashes. Was she deluded or dishonest?

Exactly one year ago, the prime minister stood in Lancaster House and gave a speech setting out her Brexit plan. Following an embarrassing series of flip-flops, it now reads like a long list of broken promises and empty threats. [...]

The prime minister said she wanted the greatest possible access to the single market without being a member of it, her version of Boris Johnson’s cake-and-eat-it approach. She also knew this was going to be tricky to get. That is why she threatened to turn the UK into a Singapore-style tax haven while hinting that we would abandon cooperation with the EU on fighting terrorism if she didn’t get her way. [...]

The same goes for her “no deal … is better than a bad deal” mantra, which was given prime billing in the Lancaster House speech, and her promise that “the days of Britain making vast contributions to the European Union every year will end”. As it is, May has ended up promising £39bn to the EU to settle our past bills, and abandoned her “no-deal” bravado. [...]

We are told that she is preparing another big speech next month setting our her vision for our future relationship with the EU. If Lancaster House is anything to go by, we should expect the same combination of delusion and dishonesty – when the least the public deserves is realism.

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Al Jazeera: Why Russia refuses to give refugee status to Syrians

Although he qualifies for refugee status according to the Geneva Convention, which Moscow is a party to, it is not what Baibers and the thousands of Syrians who have sought asylum in Russia received.

In fact, since 2011 when the war started in Syria, only one Syrian national has been granted refugee status in Russia. [...]

According to numbers obtained by CAC, as of October 2017 there were 589 people with refugee status in Russia, most of them Ukrainians who fled the recent war and Afghans who arrived after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the late 1980s. [...]

That same month, Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, dismissed the idea of hosting Syrians, saying countries that caused the refugee crisis should bear the costs of it.

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The Atlantic: The American far-right is crashing after its Trump victory high

Within the White House, the far right has been practically decimated. With Steve Bannon’s departure, and recent excommunication, the Breitbart faction has become marginalized. Clowns like “Dr” Sebastian Gorka have been kicked out, while others, including his wife, Katharine Gorka, work under the shadow of being purged, too. The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has fallen out of Trump’s favor, but remains influential within the Department of Justice and a continuing threat to the rights and protections of minorities. [...]

Outside the White House, the situation of the far-right movement is not much better. The extreme right, hiding behind the term “alt-right”, of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer has expressed great political ambitions, but has been unable to bring together more than 100 people since the deadly demonstration in Charlottesville in August. They remain an online troll army, which mainly survives because of the disproportionate attention of the (mostly liberal) media. They have no political relevance outside of their violent potential. [...]

Within the Republican party, longstanding radical right politicians like Dana Rohrabacher of California and Steve King of Iowa might have become even more open about their nativism and support for Vladimir Putin, but they remain fairly marginal within both Congress and the White House. At the same time, at the local and state level, many establishment Republicans now run radical right campaigns, hoping to profit from the illustrious Trump effect, but it is doubtful they will actually vote as radical rightists (if they get elected). And even if they do, it is doubtful it will be enough for the still radicalizing base, who in 2016 considered former “Tea Party warriors” as “establishment Republicans”.

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MapPorn: The distribution of the languages in Northeastern Italy

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MapPorn: Change in rail as mode of transport in Europe, 2002-2014

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