Vox: Why Eastern European countries aren’t attacking Trump over NATO

For some countries in Western Europe that belong to NATO, which was created during the Cold War to counter Russian expansion, Trump’s erratic behavior was a step too far. But on the other side of the continent, Eastern Europeans who have historically felt the most threatened by Russia were singing an entirely different tune. From Estonia to Romania, current and former leaders said they saw nothing to fear from Trump’s tough talk on NATO. [...]

More spending on NATO’s defenses has been a goal for many Eastern Europeans since Russia’s invasion of the Republic of Georgia in 2008 and the beginning of Russia’s “shadow war” in Ukraine in 2014, so their support of Trump’s demands in Brussels is nothing new. But more surprising were leaders’ reactions to Trump’s summit with Putin in Helsinki, where Trump failed to challenge Putin on a litany of international offenses, such as his annexation of Crimea in 2014. [...]

Eastern European countries’ worst fears about Russia were finally realized when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, bringing its prospects of NATO ascension to a grinding halt. But the Russians weren’t finished yet — in 2014, following the Ukrainian revolution in which pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown, Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and began to foment a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian rebels and government forces.  [...]

Trump has personally questioned the need to counter Russia’s expanding regional reach. But his pro-Putin stance remains at odds with that of the State Department, the US military, and the US intelligence community, all of which continue to maintain that Russia is a US rival that needs to be checked.

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The Atlantic: Atheists Are Sometimes More Religious Than Christians

Second, the researchers found that American “nones”—those who identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular—are more religious than European nones. The notion that religiously unaffiliated people can be religious at all may seem contradictory, but if you disaffiliate from organized religion it does not necessarily mean you’ve sworn off belief in God, say, or prayer.

The third finding reported in the study is by far the most striking. As it turns out, “American ‘nones’ are as religious as—or even more religious than—Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany, and the U.K.” [...]

America is a country so suffused with faith that religious attributes abound even among the secular. Consider the rise of “atheist churches,” which cater to Americans who have lost faith in supernatural deities but still crave community, enjoy singing with others, and want to think deeply about morality. It’s religion, minus all the God stuff. This is a phenomenon spreading across the country, from the Seattle Atheist Church to the North Texas Church of Freethought. The Oasis Network, which brings together non-believers to sing and learn every Sunday morning, has affiliates in nine U.S. cities. [...]

The Pew survey found that although most Western Europeans still identify as Christians, for many of them, Christianity is a cultural or ethnic identity rather than a religious one. Sahgal calls them “post-Christian Christians,” though that label may be a bit misleading: The tendency to conceptualize Christianity as an ethnic marker is at least as old as the Crusades, when non-Christian North Africans and Middle Easterners were imagined as “others” relative to white, Christian Europeans. The survey also found that 11 percent of Western Europeans now call themselves “spiritual but not religious.”

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Spiegel: Exploring the New Saudi Arabia from the Inside

On Tahlia Street, the liveliest boulevard in the capital, coffee shops recently began springing up. The tables outside are also full -- of men. The fact that they are even allowed to sit outside represents huge progress. The streets of Riyadh used to be empty. Women, though, are not allowed to sit with the men, and are required instead to sit in the "family section," behind screens, curtains or sometimes even frosted glass. [...]

The face of MBS stares at you almost no matter where you go in Riyadh, gazing down from gigantic posters at the airport and from the sides of buildings lining the city's boulevards. The prince's image can be found on bumper stickers, on mobile phone cases and on flags used to decorate shop windows. The king remains the all-powerful ruler, but the pictures make it clear: MBS is Saudi Arabia's future.[...]

Men and women sometimes even walk hand-in-hand, something that until recently was inappropriate if the couple was married and strictly prohibited if unmarried. There is a terrace café in an expensive shopping mall where women smoke in public. There are fancy restaurants where lounge music is played. In some of them, men and women are sitting next to each other without a member of the religious police requiring that they prove they are married. Such couples used to stand a good chance of getting arrested.[....]

In contrast to what many might believe, most Saudis are not rich sheikhs. Per capita income in the country isn't even 17,000 euros per year, less than half of what it is in Germany. Citizens may not have to pay income tax, but the cost of living in the country is relatively high. Fresh fruit and vegetables, imported from the U.S. or Egypt, are more expensive than in Europe. Six organic eggs cost fully eight euros.

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Politico: EU shoots down Theresa May’s customs plan

“The EU cannot — and the EU will not — delegate the application of its customs policy and rules, VAT and excise duty collection, to a non-member who would not be subject to the EU’s governance structures,” Barnier said. [...]

While Barnier and Raab reiterated their hope of completing a withdrawal treaty by October, they also said negotiators would not meet again until mid-August — a schedule that calls into question their repeated statements that talks need to be intensified and infused with new energy. Meanwhile, there has been a flurry of increased activity in Brussels and London to prepare for the possibility of a so-called “no-deal” scenario under which the U.K. would crash out of the EU on March 29, 2019 without a formal treaty. [...]

Barnier restated the EU27’s long-declared and brightest red lines: the single market and the four freedoms, including the freedom of movement of workers, are indivisible and non-negotiable. But on Thursday he was more explicit in saying that the EU would not cede “control of our money, law and borders” to the U.K. if it is not bound to the bloc.  [...]

“President Juncker’s visit to Washington yesterday shows the importance of our Common Commercial Policy,” Barnier said. “It shows that we are stronger together.” Juncker’s deal with Trump also illustrated how firmly the EU stays committed to its core principles even in the toughest of negotiations.

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Quartz: “Eighth Grade” shows the difference between how the US and Europe think about teens and sex

in evaluating ratings for children, but tougher on sex and non-sexual nudity (frontal male nudity in particular). As Bramesco writes for Vox, citing the 2006 investigative documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, “Sex scenes are picked through with a fine-toothed comb, any detail—a wiping of the chin, a moan too emphatically acted, any maneuver beyond the most vanilla standards—sufficient to bump a film up to the R zone and limit its reach.” It’s hard to predict what “vanilla” will mean for the MPAA; the rules are so opaque that directors like Bo Burnham often have to guess what it is about their movie that earned them an R rating. [...]

“In general, the US does tend to rate sexuality more harshly than violence, and that is pretty much flipped everywhere else in the world,” Betsy Bozdech, the executive editor of ratings and reviews for Common Sense Media, a non-profit that rates and reviews movies to help parents make decisions about the content their kids watch, tells Quartz. For her part, Bozdech says that Common Sense Media gave Eighth Grade a 14+ rating, and that both parents and kids on their site gave the movie a 12+ rating. “I hope that parents will take their kids to see it,” she said.

For many European movie ratings agencies, including the British Board of Film Classification, scenes that depict sex are deemed more acceptable for adolescents. European attitudes hold that sexual exploration is a normal part of growing up, and that kids should be allowed to see it on screen. That’s part of a broader difference between how Americans and Europeans view sex. For example, a 2013 Pew poll found that 30% of US adults still think that sex between unmarried adults is morally unacceptable, but in Europe, only 6-13% of respondents thought it was unacceptable.

There are some questionable dynamics at stake in the MPAA’s movie ratings. For example, the Classification & Ratings Administration has been accused of being biased against depictions of women’s sexuality and queer sex, much more so than against heterosexual or male sexual pleasure. That bias becomes evident when comparing American and European ratings of movies depicting queer sex: For example, the critically-acclaimed 2013 movie Blue is the Warmest Color had lengthy scenes of lesbian sex between a teenager and her older lover. The film was rated NC-17 in the US, but in France, where the movie was filmed, it was rated acceptable for kids above the age of 12—the equivalent of the American PG-13–by the French National Center for Cinema and Animated Image (CNC). When a Catholic group tried to sue the Ministry of Culture for its rating, saying the movie should not be allowed for children below 16, the country’s highest administrative jurisdiction, the Conseil d’état, ruled in favor of the “12” rating, saying that “Although true that the sex scenes in question, although simulated, present a character of undeniable realism, they are both free of all violence, and filmed without degrading intent.”

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