FT chief political commentator Philip Stephens says the US president and the Tory leadership favourite share a common politics that ignores truth.
8 June 2019
CNN: I was married with 2 kids when I realized I'm gay
There's a price of admission for coming out as gay later in life. Over the course of several months, I paid the price daily. It was like I was watching a movie about myself but unable to control what was unfolding. Everything fell apart. [...]
He felt unsettled and scared about the uncertainty of our future. He asked several times if I was a lesbian. It was a question that felt impossible to answer because I knew what that answer would mean. [...]
By early 2018, my husband and I separated in an effort to give me some perspective. I lost time with my children as we began a shared custody schedule. I was consumed by the pit in my stomach -- the shame of ending my marriage because I was gay was like lugging a sandbag over my shoulders and having a rock in my stomach at the same time. I couldn't eat. My weight dropped by the day. For the first time since I met my husband, we went a full day without speaking. [...]
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg -- who, like me, is in his late 30s and, like me, came out publicly just a few years ago -- put it this way: "It's hard to face the truth that there were times in my life when, if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife. If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would've swallowed it before you had time to give me a sip of water."
Associated Press: From loss to liberation: Germany's evolving postwar attitude
When Chancellor Angela Merkel thanked the Allies for the D-Day invasion and the “liberation” of Germany in World War II, she might have raised some eyebrows internationally. To those at home, the statement was unremarkable. [...]
While the leaders of France, Britain, the United States and Canada went to England to commemorate the troops’ sacrifice and duty on Wednesday, Merkel listened quietly. After the ceremony was over, she told reporters that she considered her invitation “a gift of history.” [...]
“After 1945, Germans first referred to the end of World War II as ‘collapse,’” said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center. [...]
In 1985, then-West German President Richard von Weizsaecker called the Nazi defeat Germany’s “day of liberation” in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the war’s end. His words were supported by most Germans, and to this day it is often cited by politicians and taught in schools. [...]
Another key moment came in 2004, when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder marked the 60th anniversary of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed attempt to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb. Schroeder called von Stauffenberg a hero — erasing the Nazis’ “traitor” label that had lingered after the war.
IFLScience: A New Mysterious Virus Is Creeping Across China
A mysterious new virus is slowly but surely creeping through rural corners of China. Up until recently, the cause of the illness was not clear, but a new study may have pinned down the culprit: a nasty blood-sucking tick. [...]
Reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine, their discovery is based on a sample of the virus taken from the blood of a 42-year-old female farmer from Alongshan who became ill with a fever, headache, and nausea. After the virus was isolated from her blood, genome sequence analysis and electron microscopy showed that it was, indeed, a virus that had never been documented before. Importantly, doctors also noticed she had a history of tick bites. [...]
Lo and behold, they discovered the virus was found in the ticks. More surprisingly, evidence of the virus also showed up in mosquitoes collected in the province of Jilin, meaning they cannot be excluded as possible vectors too. While the virus has only been reported in northeastern China so far, the researchers argue it could potentially spread elsewhere as the tick is found across East Asia, Siberia, Eastern Europe, and Northern Europe.
7 June 2019
The Atlantic: Syria’s New Assad Statues Send a Sinister Message: ‘We Are Back’
Hafez’s statue was also returned, in October 2018, to the center of the eastern city of Deir Ezzor after being removed by the regime in 2011, for fear it would be smashed by protesters. In August 2018, Hafez’s statue in Homs was feted by regime loyalists after it underwent a major refurbishment that included installing new lights and water fountains around it. The city, once called “the capital of the revolution,” reverted to the Assads in 2014 following a crippling siege and military campaign that left much of central Homs in ruins and emptied of its original residents. On April 15, a new bust of Bassel al-Assad, Bashar’s older brother and Hafez’s handpicked successor who was killed in a car crash in 1994, was unveiled in Deir Ezzor; this one was smaller than the one of him riding a horse that was toppled by protesters in April 2011. There are no statues yet of Bashar, who inherited power from Hafez in 2000, but billboards of his face along with defiant slogans are plastered everywhere in Syria. [...]
Using statues as expressions of power, control, and hegemony is not unique to Syria; it is a mainstay of practically all authoritarian regimes, including the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and many Central Asian republics. But while there’s an attempt in these places to rally the nation around a symbol or a leader, in Syria the intent seems to be different: The statues are meant to reinforce fear of a regime crackdown on dissent, especially during and after a crisis. The closest parallel is neighboring Iraq, where statues of Saddam Hussein multiplied in the 1980s and ’90s as he faced internal and external pressures. [...]
Manaf Tlass, Bashar’s childhood friend and a former Republican Guard general who defected in 2012, had his own take on the return of the statues. “Bashar has declared victory, but so far he has not been able to harvest its fruits,” Tlass told me when I met with him in Paris, where he has lived for the past seven years. Tlass points to the fact that the European Union and the U.S. recently increased—not relaxed—sanctions on Assad’s regime, as well as the widespread domestic discontent among large segments of the population over miserable economic conditions and recent fuel shortages. “[Bashar] knows in his heart of hearts that he has not really won, and the statues are a way of convincing himself otherwise.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)