The Guardian: How can the Brexit stalemate be broken?

Discussions in Brussels will continue over the summer, key leavers including Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom are still onside, and some analysts believe it would do no harm for May to have to abandon aspects of the Chequers deal that the EU27 would always be likely to reject – including the complex “facilitated customs arrangement”.

According to Anand Menon, the director of the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, the ERG has “scuppered a plan that could never have worked: calm down everyone”. [...]

Paradoxically, the article 50 deadline of March next year could also strengthen May’s hand. A good proportion of MPs in her party – though not many of the ERG – and Labour are convinced that leaving the EU with no deal would be a disaster. So as time runs out, it will become less and less practical for MPs to try to send May back to the drawing board.

The deadline also makes it less tempting for the hardliners to throw May overboard, by firing off 48 letters to Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee, and trigger a vote of no confidence in an attempt to replace her.  [...]

Cowley says: “Labour has a four- or five-point lead in some polls. That’s as nothing compared to what I think you’d see if we had a general election fought with the Conservative party in the state they’re in at the moment, because they would just fall in on themselves.”

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Spiegel: Suicide Casts Doubts On German Deportation Policies

The German government has always assured that deported Afghans would be supported by the German Embassy when they made a fresh start back in their home country. But as so often happens, a terror warning was in place on the day of their arrival, and no diplomat made it to the airport. Instead, employees of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and a German police officer were there to receive the returnees. [...]

Seehofer has irritated friends and foes alike with his refugee policy spectacle in recent weeks -- one that came close to bringing down Merkel's government and ending his own political career. His appearance last Tuesday served only to strengthen opponents who have been calling for his resignation. "The line between showing toughness and being downright cynical is no longer blurred for Seehofer -- it's simply gone," says Omid Nouripour, a member of parliament with the Green Party. When he talks about migration policy, Seehofer is fond of boasting about deportation and repatriation statistics. The Mahmodi case now makes clear that there's a personal story behind every deportation, even if Mahmodi isn't exactly an innocent victim. [...]

One thing is certain, though: Interior Minister Seehofer, in particular, wanted to set an example by deporting large numbers of Afghans. Following the attack on the German Embassy in Kabul in May 2017, the German government temporarily refrained from deporting people to Afghanistan, but it resumed the practice last fall.

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The New York Review of Books: The Romanovs’ Art of Survival

For many Romanov exiles—hounded, stripped of their wealth, living under the constant fear of further reprisals—art became, in part, a coping mechanism. Later, as the memory of the massacre gave way in its immediacy, new generations of Romanovs took to art for reasons not so different from the rest of us: to meditate, to understand, and to express.

Over the twentieth century, the Romanovs produced a vast artistic trove that few are aware of, since most of their creative output was meant for family consumption. Because the family was scattered around the world by the events of the revolution, that collection is currently dispersed among private archives, family albums, basements, under-the-bed boxes and, in rarer cases, museums and galleries. When studied as a whole—in as much as its fragmented nature affords—two persistent themes emerge. One is the Romanovs’ intense, penetrating view of nature. For centuries, nature exploration has been a favorite Romanov family pastime. In those inimitable Russian forests, mountains, and steppe, they found aesthetic pleasure, refuge, and, at times, salvation.

The second is the idiosyncratic playfulness with which the Romanovs used art as family entertainment. The colorful vignettes and illustrations that decorate their letters, the doodles and cartoons, the hand-drawn holiday cards and booklets, the tchotchkes and painted pebbles they gifted each other at birthdays and anniversaries amount to a secret language developed and reinvented from generation to generation in ways that even the scattered state of the family in the twentieth century could not undo. Imaginative, often humorous, and at times fantastical, these artifacts paint a different, more authentic portrait of a family whose life and legacy continue to pique our interest, one hundred years after the Romanovs were swept off the world’s political stage. For what is art if not a window into another’s mind?

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The Atlantic: The End of All Illusions

Even Fox News was appalled at President Donald Trump’s performance at his Helsinki press conference alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin. The network, usually only too happy to cheer on the president, responded somewhat differently this time to Trump’s insistence that “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” of Russian involvement in election interference. Neil Cavuto, a Fox Business Network host, called the press conference “disgusting.” Appearing on Fox, Mary Kissel of the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board said, “President Putin scored a great propaganda victory by standing up with President Trump on that stage.” Newt Gingrich declared that Trump’s comments were “the most serious mistake of his presidency.” [...]

But he didn’t. In fact, almost every outrageous comment Trump made at the Helsinki press conference was a variation on something he’d said before. That doesn’t mean those comments weren’t outrageous. But it does mean that the furor over his performance has the echo of Captain Renault’s sudden outrage in Rick’s Cafe: “I am shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here!” [...]

The visual of Trump framed by American and Russian flags, standing alongside a smirking Putin and insisting that Russia had no involvement in his election, was a shocking one. It clarified and distilled into a single frame the president’s appalling lack of care about an assault on the democratic life of the American people and his inability to carry out the duties of his office. As with his comments after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump’s obsequiousness toward Putin ripped away what remained of a very tattered fig leaf. Just as Charlottesville made it no longer quite so taboo to describe the president as sympathetic to white supremacy, perhaps Helsinki will allow mainstream commentators to more comfortably acknowledge the danger of the Trump presidency on the world stage. [...]

Multiple times on the day of the summit, Trump also gestured toward what Representative Liz Cheney—otherwise a strong supporter of the president—decried as a “moral equivalence” between the United States and Russia. Before his meeting with Putin, he suggested that the “Rigged Witch Hunt” was responsible for a decline in U.S. relations with Russia. Asked by a reporter whether he “[held] Russia accountable” for that decline, the president doubled down: “I hold both countries responsible … I think we’re all to blame.” There is more than an echo here of Trump’s comments on Putin to Bill O’Reilly in February 2017: “There are a lot of killers,” he said. “You think our country’s so innocent?”

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The Economist: Putin's Russia and the ghosts of the Romanovs