America Magazine: Why are so many people fleeing Honduras?

Honduras has endured years of economic and political crises. The November 2017 election results, endorsed by the U.S. government but widely perceived as fraudulent, led to mass protests and dozens of deaths of demonstrators at the hands of security forces and police. The U.N. Office of the High Commission for Human Rights reported that military police and army “used excessive force, including lethal force, to control and disperse protests, leading to the killing and wounding of protesters as well as passers-by.” [...]

Karla Rivas, the coordinator of the Jesuit Migration Network, spoke with America by phone from Queretaro, Mexico, where she was accompanying a separate caravan of mothers who were searching for their children—young migrants who had gone unaccounted for after heading north. “The humanitarian exodus [from Honduras] is the culmination of several crises that have been manifesting themselves over time with the implementation of an unjust economic model.” She called it “an inhumane economic model that is based on extracting [resources] from communities.”[...]

The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that Honduras has “the most unequal distribution of income in Latin America,” a inequity that has been accelerating since President Manuel Zelaya was deposed in 2009. In the two years after the coup, “over 100 percent of all real income gains went to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hondurans,” according to the report. [...]

Violence is another key driver of immigration from Honduras, which endures one of the world’s highest homicide rates. Much of the violence has been associated with drug trafficking and acts of extortion—criminal gangs can essentially control entire urban communities—but some of the violence results from collusion among gang members, police and security forces, sometimes in acts of intimidation directed at community or environmental activists.

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Quartz: Putin picked a very Putin time to seize three Ukrainian ships

When Russian president Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, his approval ratings were at record lows and the world was watching the Sochi Olympics. When he went to war with Georgia in 2008, the world was consumed by the Beijing Olympics. [...]

On the back of controversial pension reforms, Putin’s ratings are again in a deep trough. In fact, they’re at the lowest point since 2014. After the seizure of Crimea, Putin’s ratings climbed dramatically and he rode extraordinary levels of support for four years.[...]

More conflict in the east is the last thing Europe needs. Among European countries, the UK is traditionally the most hawkish on Russia—but Brexit negotiations are at their busiest point in two years, consuming both Britain and the continent. Amid all that, Britain and Spain are having their own territorial dispute over Gibraltar. [...]

Now is a good time to mess with Ukrainian politics. It’s just four months until the 2019 election, and polls for president Petro Poroshenko—a Putin foe—are looking dire. The Kremlin is unlikely to be happy with whoever wins—former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, who has a long and bitter history with Russia, is in pole position at the moment.

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Quartz: Taiwan’s vote against same-sex marriage illustrates the problem with referendums

The high court decision did not legalize same-sex marriage; it only declared that the legislature would have to make marriage equality law within two years. That meant it was up to Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which gained power in 2016, to follow through. It failed to do so. [...]

That is a low bar. Even though Christians make up just 5% of Taiwan’s population, they were able to collect the paltry 280,000 signatures needed to make their referendum happen. Their proposal to define marriage as “between a man and a woman” received over 7 million “yes” votes—more than a counter-referendum endorsing same-sex marriage, but far less than half of Taiwan’s over 18 million registered voters. [...]

The decision on marriage law in Taiwan reveals an even bigger problem with referendums, though: they turn politics into a popularity contest. Democracy is not just about voting, but also pluralism and the protection of minority rights. In deciding to call marriage discrimination unconstitutional, the court was acting to protect those rights for the LGBT community. Plus, given Taiwan’s law that a referendum needs only 25% of voters to say “yes,” it doesn’t even meet the standard of majority rule.

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Axios: Defying Trump, key GOP senator to sharpen focus on Saudi prince

In a phone interview, Graham told me he and some of his colleagues have requested an intelligence briefing this coming week to find out whether the reporting is correct that the CIA has "high confidence" MBS ordered the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. [...]

Why it matters: It doesn't look like the Khashoggi story is going away. It's unlikely new sanctions on Saudi will pass in the lame duck. That means this fight will likely carry over into next year — potentially pitting Democratic senators and a smaller group of Republicans against the president. [...]

The bottom line: Graham is arguing the opposite. "We cannot have a normal strategic relationship with somebody this crazy," Graham told me. Graham said "everything would be on the table" to punish Saudi Arabia, including blocking arms sales.

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The Guardian: The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit

The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonisation and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated. (Boris Johnson, in the Telegraph of 12 November, claimed that “we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony.”)[...]

Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war. [...]

The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” Boris Johnson told the Telegraph on 14 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and “various people” were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European monetary system being introduced by the EU was “all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.” [...]

Yet the paper went on to contrast the fate of Britain since the war with that of the six members of the existing common market, all of whom had been invaded: “The contrast between their experiences in recent years as members of the Communities, and ours outside, when our resources have not been growing sufficiently to do all we should like to do at home and abroad, suggests that they chose the right road … All the Community countries enjoyed rates of growth of gross national product (GNP) per head of population, or of private consumption per head, roughly twice as great as Britain’s.” It was not entirely ridiculous at some subliminal level to see these two things – being invaded and growing twice as fast as the country that wasn’t – as cause and effect. The “right road” to prosperity did not seem to lie through successful self-defence – on the contrary, invasion worked well for the six.

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