BBC: Germany’s tiny geographic oddity

The village’s eastern border lies a mere 700m from the rest of the Federal Republic of Germany. And while politically this town of about 1,450 inhabitants belongs to Germany, economically it’s part of Switzerland. [...]

Still, for residents, living a binational life brings up daily contradictions and choices. Although commerce is typically conducted in Swiss francs and most residents work in nearby, larger Swiss towns, they still must pay the higher German income taxes. Children go to a local (German) primary school, but parents decide in which country they’ll attend high school. Likewise, Büsingen locals have both German and Swiss postal and international telephone codes: callers can dial either Germany’s +49 or Switzerland’s +41, and still ring a resident. And perhaps most notably, the town’s football club is the only German team allowed to play in the Swiss league. [...]

Others have discovered that too. Because Germany offers a tax break for pensioners, Büsingen attracts retired Swiss residents. The result: “The young people go to Switzerland, and the old people come here. The village gets older every day,” said Rainer Krause, whose daughter runs Restaurant Waldheim on the international border.

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Politico: Bolton unloads on Trump’s foreign policy behind closed doors

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s fired national security adviser, harshly criticized Trump’s foreign policy on Wednesday at a private lunch, saying that inviting the Taliban to Camp David sent a “terrible signal” and that it was “disrespectful” to the victims of 9/11 because the Taliban had harbored al Qaeda. [...]

Speaking on an airport tarmac in Los Angeles, Trump introduced his new top foreign policy aide as “highly respected” and hailed their “good chemistry.” The remarks indicated that in O’Brien, Trump sees a more compatible adviser than Bolton, whose disagreements with the president and clashes with other senior officials often spilled into public view.

After the attack in June, Trump was poised to launch a military response against the Iranians — strongly urged by Bolton — but pulled back after Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others warned him that it was a bad idea. [...]

On Venezuela, a focus of his short White House tenure, Bolton claimed there were 20,000 to 25,000 Cuban troops in the South American country. The day they left, he predicted, the Nicholas Maduro regime would fall by midnight.

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The Guardian: 'It has got worse': Boris Johnson 'hamstrung' by rift with Sajid Javid

They said No 10 was becoming increasingly annoyed by what it regarded as Javid’s intransigence, and was sidelining him in favour of Rishi Sunak, the chief secretary to the Treasury, with departments being directed to talk to him rather than the chancellor.

Insiders said Javid was still without a chief media adviser after Sonia Khan was sacked by Johnson’s chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, and marched out of the building for maintaining contact with an associate of the previous chancellor Philip Hammond. [...]

The episode underlined simmering tensions over the summer between Downing Street and the Treasury. Javid was ordered by No 10 to scrap a planned speech on the economy, while Downing Street took the lead in announcing spending plans for health, police and prisons.

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CNN: The US Navy just confirmed these UFO videos are the real deal

(CNN)The US Navy has finally acknowledged footage purported to show UFOs hurtling through the air. And while officials said they don't know what the objects are, they're not indulging any hints either.

The objects seen in three clips of declassified military footage are "unidentified aerial phenomena," Navy spokesperson Joe Gradisher confirmed to CNN.

The clips, released between December 2017 and March 2018 by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, appear to show fast-moving, oblong objects captured by advanced infrared sensors.

In footage from 2004, sensors lock on a target as it flies before it accelerates out of the left side of the frame, too quickly for the sensors to relocate it.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Christian Right Is Helping Drive Liberals Away From Religion

Researchers haven’t found a comprehensive explanation for why the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has increased over the past few years — the shift is too large and too complex. But a recent swell of social science research suggests that even if politics wasn’t the sole culprit, it was an important contributor. “Politics can drive whether you identify with a faith, how strongly you identify with that faith, and how religious you are,” said Michele Margolis, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity.” “And some people on the left are falling away from religion because they see it as so wrapped up with Republican politics.”

Over the course of a single generation, the country has gotten a lot less religious. As recently as the early 1990s, less than 10 percent of Americans lacked a formal religious affiliation, and liberals weren’t all that much likelier to be nonreligious than the public overall. Today, however, nearly one in four Americans are religiously unaffiliated. That includes almost 40 percent of liberals — up from 12 percent in 1990, according to the 2018 General Social Survey.1 The share of conservatives and moderates who have no religion, meanwhile, has risen less dramatically. [...]

To be sure, religious belief and practice can still exist without a label. Many people who are religiously unaffiliated still believe in God, or slip back into the pews a few times a year. But liberals are also cutting ties with religious institutions — since 1990, the share of liberals who never attend religious services has tripled. And they’re less likely to believe in God: The percentage of liberals who say they know God exists fell from 53 percent in 1991 to 36 percent in 2018. [...]

Other research showed that the blend of religious activism and Republican politics likely played a significant role in increasing the number of religiously unaffiliated people. One study, for instance, found that something as simple as reading a news story about a Republican who spoke in a church could actually prompt some Democrats to say they were nonreligious. “It’s like an allergic reaction to the mixture of Republican politics and religion,” said David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and one of the study’s co-authors.

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