The FT's politics editor George Parker sketches a profile of Conservative politician Sajid Javid, who seemed set for the sack a year ago but is now thriving as home secretary and has become favourite to succeed Theresa May as UK prime minister.
10 August 2018
CNN: 10 reasons Americans go to church -- and 9 reasons they don't
African-Americans are more likely than whites or Latinos to say that becoming closer to God, being a better person and finding spiritual solace in tough times are top reasons for attending religious services. The weekly sermon is less a draw for Catholics than other Christians.
More women say there are a variety of reasons for going to religious services, while men more commonly say they sit in the pew to please their spouse.
A healthy slice of adults younger than 30 say they visit the sanctuary mainly to socialize. Perhaps coincidentally, they are also less likely than older churchgoers to say they feel God's presence at services. [...]
And why so many women failed to find a house of worship they like? More than 6 in 10 said it's because they have poor health or difficulty getting around. More than half (54%) said it's because they haven't felt welcomed by congregations.
That's especially true of African-Americans, both men and women, who are more likely to say they don't go to religious services because they don't feel welcomed or there is no worship space in their area.
9 August 2018
Nautilus Magazine: When Climate Change Starts Wars
This has been the situation in this borderland since March, when Uzbek troops cut off the road to the town of Ala-Buka, near the reservoir. This move was sparked after Kyrgyz authorities denied an Uzbek request to repair the reservoir in Kyrgyz territory using Uzbek engineers. The security situation escalated from there and culminated in August with the seizure of a Kyrgyz communications relay tower on a disputed mountaintop by helicopter-borne Uzbek police, who detained a number of Kyrgyz technicians. [...]
But this is all in flux. Climate change will continue to increase the area’s “environmental insecurity,” with the densely populated Fergana Valley being the most vulnerable, reads a 2014 report by the World Bank, which is funding economic research into how climate change will alter how people live around the world. Some 22 million people in the valley depend on irrigation for their livelihoods, and shortfalls in water—due to increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures and because glaciers are disappearing—are predicted to become a bigger problem. [...]
“We keep telling these guys about climate change,” Kadyrov, the USAID agricultural specialist, said. “There are some good farmers who understand they need to worry about it, but they do nothing.” Because their plots are small, most farmers in the Fergana do not have the money to invest in new equipment or infrastructure, and they are not trained in water conservation. [...]
Besides ethnicity, evaporation, misuse, population, and poverty, the issue of water is further complicated by the borders in the region. Before the Soviet Union’s breakup, water ran through a united country. Now the water courses through independent countries, crossing disputed borders. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control most of the sources, while Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have to either accept what their upstream neighbors give them, pay, negotiate, or try to take it.
The Guardian: Boris Johnson is auditioning to lead a grim, insular Britain | Martin Kettle
That’s because Johnson’s decision tells us – if we needed reminding of it after his resignation as foreign secretary last month – that he is positioning himself for the next Conservative leadership contest. He is doing so, what’s more, as the candidate of the populist right rather than the liberal centrist guise he adopted when running to be London mayor. Johnson has moved to the right since then: over Europe, over Trump and now over pluralism and tolerance. He is positioning himself to be the leader of a more insular, less moderate and harder-faced Conservative party and a more insular, less moderate and harder-faced Britain. [...]
There are many in the Tory party who still think Johnson is the answer to the party’s problems – in spite of having been a third-rate foreign secretary (second-rate is too generous), of bottling out of the Heathrow vote, of dismissing Theresa May’s negotiating tactics by praising Trump’s, and of many other offences. Just before he resigned, Johnson trailed fourth behind Sajid Javid, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg in the ConservativeHome website’s regular “best next leader” surveys. Now he’s back on top of the pile for the first time since 2016. [...]
It nevertheless raises a larger and deeper question, which lurks behind all attempts to understand the place of leadership in modern politics. No leader is ever perfect. Yet all leaders in modern western democracies seem to be struggling more than in the past to maintain the levels of political support, respect and effectiveness that would enable them to carry out their projects. This is true of May and Brexit. It would probably be true of Corbyn and his economic rebalancing project. And it would also apply to Johnson and his reawakening of lost English greatness.
BBC4 Analysis: What's Fair?
As well as marking the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service, this year marks a similar milestone in adult social care. But whereas our notions of fairness in treating those who fall ill are simple and straightforward - free to those who require care at the point of delivery in the NHS - with social care it is different: means testing remains the device by which assistance with care is decided. When it comes to helping the aged and the infirm, then, we struggle with decidedly different ideas of fairness - and have done so since the advent of National Assistance - the forerunner of today's social care - in 1948.
What should the individual contribute and how much should the state provide? What ideas of fairness properly apply in providing social care? And how can agreement on them be reached?
Paul Johnson - the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the respected economic research body - asks why politicians should find it so difficult to agree on simple ideas of equity and fairness in this area. From Labour's so-called "death tax" in 2010 to the Conservatives' alleged "dementia tax" last year, attempts to come up with ways to reform a system that is widely considered to have broken down, have collapsed in failure and left both main parties reluctant to get their fingers burnt again with proposals for change.
So with the pressures on available services continuing to grow as the proportion of the population that is elderly rises and its needs become more specialised and as numbers of working age adults with social care needs increase, Paul Johnson considers what principles a fair social care system should enshrine and what likelihood there is that policies to give effect to them will be implemented.
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