Politico: What Trump gets right about Europe’s trade problem

Far from being a sign of economic well-being, the eurozone’s surplus — $380 billion last year or about 3 percent of the region’s gross domestic product — reflects the monetary union’s deep structural flaws, worsened by the way it addressed its long crisis.  [...]

At their last summit in Brussels last month, EU leaders talked disjointedly about the protectionist menace from the U.S. and about their longstanding plans for eurozone reform. But they should have devoted one session to both problems, which are linked.

Europe’s current accounts — which include both the trade of goods and of services — have shown a rising surplus since 2012, after years of being roughly balanced. The surplus rose to 1.5 percent of GDP that year, then climbed every year to reach nearly 4 percent in 2016.   [...]

The eurozone surplus doesn’t reflect the strength of the German industrial machine or the supposed virtue of its policies — fiscal or otherwise. It is mostly the result of the eurozone’s structural imbalances. [...]

Spain and Italy are now showing significant surpluses. In each of these countries, the balance has improved (from deficit to surplus) by roughly $100 billion since 2009 — the same as Germany’s accounts, which went from a $200 billion to $300 billion surplus.

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Aeon: Phantasmic Phoenicia

To provide a proper prototype and parallel for modern Lebanon, these Lebanists insisted that the Phoenicians were always a separate, single people or even nation, united by geography, culture, religion and a common identity. As Charles Corm, a charmer and a chancer, as well as Ford Motor Company’s sole representative in Syria, bluntly put it in the July 1919 issue of his short-lived nationalist journal La Revue Phénicienne: ‘We want this nation, because it has always taken precedence in all the pages of our history.’ The argument worked: from 1920, Greater Lebanon was administered as a separate state within the French Mandate. But was it true? [...]

All of this, including Smith’s claim, would have surprised the ancient Phoenicians, a disparate set of neighbouring and often warring city-states, cut off from each other for the most part by deep river valleys. They did not see themselves as a single ethnic group or people, the kind that could provide the ‘groundwork’ for a nation. There is no known instance of a Phoenician ever calling themselves a Phoenician, or any other collective term. In their inscriptions, they describe themselves in terms of their individual families and cities. They don’t seem to have had a common culture, either: their dialects fall on a continuum that linked city states across Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine, and the individual ports developed separate civic and artistic cultures, drawing on different foreign examples and relationships: Byblos, for instance, looked more to Egyptian models; Arados to Syrian ones; Sidonian architecture drew on both Greece and Persia; while Tyre cultivated close political and commercial ties with Jerusalem. [...]

Just as British nationalists could deploy the Phoenicians to differentiate themselves from the more ‘Roman’ French, proponents of Irish nationality used a Phoenician past to distinguish the Irish from the more ‘Roman’ British. In this view, the British occupation of Ireland was cast as a great struggle between sophisticated, noble Carthage, ie the Phoenician-Irish, and the savage imperial power of Rome, ie Britain. At the same time, Vallancey’s grasp of Phoenician particularity in the ancient world was hazy, and he did not strongly distinguish them from other ancient peoples: he describes the Phoenicians as absorbing the Scythians on their travels, and he assigns the Irish round towers at different times to Phoenician and Persian construction.

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The Calvert Journal: Take me home

To start with, we look for the keys in our surroundings, in the architecture of the cities which remember further back than we do. In the course of our lives, we walk miles through vast monumental spaces and imposing tower block estates, and rest in the shadows of curved modernist buildings and megalomaniac monuments. The aesthetic of these locations has been widely commodified and exoticised, but they’re much more than a backdrop — they shape the way we think, feel, breathe and remember. They also teach us how to move on. In the new world, the city is open to interpretation, invention and change. In their project Wake Up Nights, photographers Max von Gumppenberg and Patrick Bienert document contemporary Kiev going through subtle yet incredible transformation. In following the city’s burgeoning rave movement and a tightly-knit community of local creatives, they explore disused factories and river banks, graffiti-covered skateparks and hectic streets, idyllic countryside and the intimacy of flats in the early hours of the after-party. Wake Up Nights is a tender love letter to the city. 

The study of unique architectural settings is one of the main preoccupations of the new generation of photographers from eastern Europe. At the same time, the visual narrative they construct goes much further than just documentation. It’s not about capturing the existing space, but about contributing to the ever-shifting character of the environment. In her project Disco Polo, Paulina Korobkiewicz studies the urban aesthetics of eastern Poland after 1989, focusing on the peculiar signs of its transition to global capitalism. Plastic palm trees make streets into a globalist non-place. A patchwork of colourful advertising and pastel shades over tower block architecture illustrates the contemporary collision of influences from East and West. [...]

At the same time, in these pictures the sense of locality doesn’t always dominate over broader artistic experiment. Based in Moscow, photographer Masha Demianova incorporates cinematic influences and the iconography of classical art to create a completely dislocated visual space. Through her lens we travel to dark lakes and poppy-coloured fields, places forged by ancient myths, and, most importantly, the inner space she shares with her subjects. Demianova is also one of the pioneers of female gaze photography in Russia, challenging prevailing representations of female sexuality and desire. [...]

The dimension of space, however, is not the only category the new generation of image-makers take on in their work. Time is another preoccupation, the future much more than the past. Portraiture serves as a way of understanding global history and the rise of new national identities. Hassan Kurbanbaev’s project Tashkent Youth was partly inspired by Uzbekistan’s 25th anniversary of independence — he documented the generation that has come to adulthood over the course of this past quarter century. For them, he points out, the Soviet Union is no more than distant history.  

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Broadly: Restricting Abortion Access Is Class Warfare

Abortion is subjected to much harsher restrictions than any other kind of legal medical care, despite being one of the safest surgical procedures in the world. It’s because of these restrictions that accessing abortion is becoming increasingly expensive; for obvious reasons, the rising cost disproportionately affects low-income women. Conservative legislators have enacted hundreds of medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers in the past decade—needlessly mandating that they be outfitted like a surgical center, for instance, or forcing them to enter into agreements with nearby hospitals. Laws like this have contributed to the closing of dozens of abortion clinics across the country—so much so that 87 percent of all US counties have no abortion provider, forcing women to travel incredibly long distances to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

The lack of providers also contributes to longer wait times for appointment availability, pushing some women past the legal time limit to obtain the procedure in their state. Twenty-seven states also require women to receive counseling, then wait a certain amount of time—between 24 and 72 hours—before getting an abortion. Fourteen require patients to get this counseling in-person, meaning they must make the trip to the clinic twice. This has the potential to increase travel costs by hundreds of dollars, or to necessitate an overnight stay, depending on your zip code.

Perhaps the most flagrant offense against low-income women is the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, which prohibits Medicaid from being used to pay for abortion services, making it prohibitively difficult for the 6.5 million American women who obtain health care through Medicaid to get a safe and legal abortion. This legislation is particularly cruel, given that 75 percent of abortion patients are poor or low-income. And it's especially harmful to women of color, who disproportionately rely on Medicaid for coverage. (According to Planned Parenthood, 30 percent of Black women and 24 percent of Hispanic women are enrolled in Medicaid, compared with just 14 percent of white women.)

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Haaretz: It's Not Netanyahu. It's the Nation

Even Netanyahu’s critics admit that he knows how to identify the wishes of the people. He recognized that the majority wants ethnic cleansing in Tel Aviv, ultra-nationalism, racism and cruelty. Netanyahu, being not quite as bad as his supporters, tried another way for a moment — a more humane and rational way. But when he got burnt and realized that he’d disregarded the desire of the people, he recovered in record time and returned to himself. The base, the electorate, the majority want evil. This is what he provided, and this is something that no election will change. The true calamity is not Netanyahu — it’s the fact that any display of humanity in Israel is political suicide.

A straight line of evil and racism runs from the Gaza border to Tel Aviv. In both cases Israelis don’t see human beings in front of them. The Gazan and Eritrean are one and the same – subhuman. They have no dreams, no rights and their lives are worthless. [...]

Opposing all this evil there are, of course, other Israelis as well. There is no reason not to label them by the right name: better, more humane, compassionate, conscientious, moral leftists. They are not a negligible minority but the war waged against them by the majority and its government has paralyzed them. Radio anchor Kobi Meidan’s apology for feeling shame indicates that this camp is defeated. If the massacre in Gaza and the deportation from south Tel Aviv doesn’t bring them to the streets enraged, just like after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, they are a species on the verge of extinction.

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