Space travel is the most exciting adventure for humanity, but in an irony of history we may stop ourselves from going into space the more we do it. With every rocket launched we are creating a deadly trap for mankind.
26 November 2018
Deutsche Welle: Opinion: Gibraltar dispute shows the absurdity of Brexit
Sanchez does have a point. The future arrangement for the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is a prominent issue in ongoing Brexit talks and the deadline for reaching a final agreement has been postponed to 2020.
Yet, the border between the British peninsula of Gibraltar and Spain has not featured in the Brexit talks, and nobody knows what will happen to the 10,000 Spanish workers who commute to Gibraltar every day when Britain leaves the EU. [...]
It is possible that the border between the British peninsula and the Spanish mainland could be temporarily closed, like between 1969 and 1985. It is one of the reasons the vast majority of Gibraltar residents voted in favor of Britain remaining in the EU. [...]
The fight over Gibraltar illustrates the utter madness that is Brexit – irrespective of all the bureaucratic efforts being made to achieve a workable split. Leaders attending the upcoming EU summit on Sunday will wave through a Brexit plan that simply postpones reaching a final agreement on numerous contentious issues.
New Europe: The inconvenient truth about Saudi Arabia
What makes the truth inconvenient is Saudi Arabia’s strategic importance. The Kingdom still accounts for over 10% of global oil output. Its sovereign wealth fund sits on an estimated $500 billion. Saudi Arabia is the most influential Sunni Arab country, occupying a special role within the Muslim world, owing to its role as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites. It is central to any policy of confronting Iran. [...]
Israel, too, has indicated support for MBS, owing to his willingness to move in the direction of normalizing relations and, more important, the two countries’ shared interest in countering Iranian influence in the region. And US President Donald J. Trump’s administration is standing by its man, so far refusing to acknowledge his role in Khashoggi’s murder and resisting calls for sanctions against Saudi Arabia.[...]
Consultations should also be held with China and Russia. Unlike the US, both have working relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran, which gives both a stake in preventing such a war from starting and shutting it down quickly if it does.
The Guardian: From Trump to Boris Johnson: how the wealthy tell us what ‘real folk’ want
But when rightwing populists focus on elites they are mostly referring to culture. Their targets are filmmakers, actors, lecturers, journalists, “globalists”, spiritualists, scientists and vegans; the Clintons, Hollywood, Londoners, New Yorkers, Silicon Valley, Sussex and Berkeley. These are the people the right claim are responsible for shaping what people can see or hear, and limiting what they can say. They pillory opinion-formers for looking down on “ordinary people” as being ignorant, bigoted and uncouth. And they are always careful to invent “ordinary people” in their own image. John Kerry’s windsurfing or Barack Obama’s taste for arugula are emphasised as evidence of their lack of connection to basic values. Laying claim to “the real America” or “commonsense values”, they evoke a mythical, homogenous people and culture, only to claim it is being besieged by cosmopolitans, multiculturalists and immigrants. Through what Sarah Igo, in The Averaged American, describes as “the strange slippage between the typical and the good, the average and the ideal”, what masquerades as an embrace of “ordinary folk” is ultimately exposed as an appeal to an ethnically pure, culturally uniform “volk”. [...]
With that conceded and, hopefully, addressed, the left is in a far more solid place to expose and challenge the disingenuousness, hypocrisy and inadequacy of the culture-warriors on three main counts. First, their prescriptions don’t work. Britain does not feel like a stronger, more confident place since it voted to leave the European Union, but more divided, lost and lonely than anyone can remember. It didn’t put the great back into Great Britain but the little into Little England. In short, it has proved an inadequate balm for the post-imperial melancholy so many were apparently experiencing. Denying Muslims and migrants their civil rights or women their reproductive rights doesn’t give other groups more rights. When terrorists kill fewer people than toddlers with guns and are more likely to be white and American than brown and foreign, the threat to your “way of life” is the way you are living it. [...]
Finally, all too often the rightwing cheerleaders for these “ordinary folk” are more embedded in the elites than those they attack can ever be. When George W Bush, who is teetotal, is the man you’d most like to have a drink with, an Old Etonian Bullingdon boy like Boris Johnson is able to get away with posing as a man of the people, and Trump can get the modern equivalent of $140m from his dad and still claim he is a self-made man, something is seriously wrong.
statista: How Many British Euromyths Has The EU Debunked?
When it comes to reporting new legislation planned by the European Union, many British tabloids have a tendency to "overdo it". A story from September 1994 is a notable example. Reported by The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and Daily Express, it stated that "Brussels bureaucrats banned curved bananas with shops ordered not to sell fruit which is too small or abnormally bent". The Commission debunked the story and responded that regulation simply classifies bananas according to quality and size for the sake of easing international banana trade. It added that the minimal rules are applied solely to green, unripe bananas, rather than those destined for the processing industry. It should also improve the quality of bananas on sale in the EU.
In fact, the Commission maintains a webpage solely devoted to debunking "Euromyths" reported by the British press. The banana example is just one of hundreds of myths and others include "Commission to outlaw mushy peas (1995)" and "Queen's corgis to be outlawed (2002)". The number of false stories about the EU reported in the UK reached its height in 1993 with the Commission listing 100 myths in total. The number fell drastically between 2007 and 2012 but it started to climb again in 2013 after Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a Conservative government would hold an in-or-out referendum on EU membership. You can find the European Commission page wth the full A-Z index of Euromyths here.
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