Politico: ‘An avoidable, unforced error’: Trump’s Ukraine trap starts worrying allies

High-level Trump supporters who have stood by the president for years are growing increasingly unsettled by his latest strategy of dismissing the latest fight as Russia 2.0. Half-a-dozen senior Republicans, including those who both talk directly to Trump and advise him on everything from campaign strategy to policy, communications and fundraising, said in interviews that they fear the president's plan to tie Russia and Ukraine could be ineffective because it dismisses the seriousness of the allegations and the fact that he admitted his actions. [...]

None of the advisers think Trump will be removed from office — not enough Senate Republicans would vote for that — but they say he’s hurt himself in what is expected to be a tight reelection campaign. A Republican close to the president said the notion that impeaching Trump will help his campaign, as some are pushing, is ludicrous. “It isn’t a positive,” the person said flatly. [...]

Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, said the Ukraine controversy is much more clear-cut than Russia because Trump was personally involved, he admitted what he did and, perhaps most important, it happened while he already was sworn into office. [...]

A second Republican close to the president said Trump's problem is that he‘s still so fixated on anyone trying to discredit him during the 2016 election — including former President Barack Obama and his vice president — that he went after Biden. “Should he have mentioned Biden? No,” the person said. “I wish he wouldn’t have. ... But I don’t fault him as much as other people.”

read the article

Nautilus Magazine: Your Brain Chooses What to Let You See

And automatic background subtraction, it turns out, can also manifest in intriguing, unexpected ways. Take a counterintuitive finding that Tadin and his colleagues made in 2003: We’re good at perceiving the movements of small objects, but if those objects are simply made bigger, we find it much more difficult to detect their motion. [...]

The team further confirmed this idea with a training experiment conducted in older adults. Other researchers had previously reported that there’s not much difference between how well seniors observe the motion of a small object and the motion of a larger one. Because of this, Tadin and his colleagues predicted that older people would have problems spotting small moving objects against a moving backdrop—and that’s exactly what they found. Still, with a few weeks’ training, the test subjects got much better at recognizing that motion.

read the article

The New York Times: Afghan Town’s First Female Mayor Awaits Her Assassination

Ms. Ghafari is not the first woman to take over a traditionally male job in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society. But she has one of the toughest imaginable positions.

Women have been appointed as governors of Daikundi and Bamiyan Provinces, which are culturally tolerant areas by Afghanistan’s standards. For two years, Nili, a town in Daikundi, had a female mayor. She eventually moved to the United States.

But Wardak is a particularly conservative province, where support for the Taliban is so widespread that many major highways are not safe for civilians.

Maidan Shar’s only high school for girls had just 13 graduates last year. Before Ms. Ghafari became mayor, the only woman in town to have held a government job other than teacher was the head of Wardak’s women’s ministry, and she did not dare live in the city, instead residing in Kabul, the country’s capital. Ms. Ghafari also commutes from Kabul for safety reasons. [...]

After she arrived for work that July day, her office was mobbed by angry men brandishing sticks and rocks. She had to be escorted out by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate for Security, which sent a squad of paramilitary officers to her rescue.

read the article

euronews: Denmark calls for EU ban on all diesel and petrol cars by 2040

Denmark made headlines in October 2018 when its government announced that it would ban the sale of all fossil fuel-powered cars by 2030 but it subsequently scrapped the idea because this would have breached EU rules. [...]

Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and several other countries, however, suggested that more must be done to stop the "carbon leakage" of selling second-hand autos from western Europe to the eastern region.

Jorgensen said it was important to communicate the bloc's long-term policy directions to carmakers and that Denmark's next step was to set up an alliance with the 10 member states that support its proposal.

read the article

euronews: Pope Francis adds 13 like-minded cardinals to Catholic hierarchy

Among the 13 are 10 cardinals who are under age 80 and therefore eligible to vote in a conclave, increasing the likelihood that a future pope might end up looking an awful lot like the current one. These are churchmen who care for migrants, promote dialogue with Muslims and minister to the faithful in poor, far-flung missionary posts.

With Saturday's consistory, Francis will have named 52% of the voting-age cardinals. Many hail from churches in the developing world, a sign of Francis' desire to mirror the universal face of the Catholic Church in its leadership ranks. [...]

The consistory comes at a fraught time in Francis' six-year papacy. Opposition is mounting among conservative Catholics who disapprove of his emphasis on the environment, migrants and other issues rather than the doctrinaire focus of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI.

read the article