The Atlantic: Mexico’s Revenge

In August, Peña Nieto invited Trump to Mexico City, based on the then-contrarian notion that Trump might actually become president. Instead of branding Trump a toxic threat to Mexico’s well-being, he lavished the Republican nominee with legitimacy. Peña Nieto paid a severe, perhaps mortal, reputational cost for his magnanimity. Before the meeting, former President Vicente Fox had warned Peña Nieto that if he went soft on Trump, history would remember him as a “traitor.” In the months following the meeting, his approval rating plummeted, falling as low as 12 percent in one poll—which put his popularity on par with Trump’s own popularity among Mexicans. The political lesson was clear enough: No Mexican leader could abide Trump’s imprecations and hope to thrive. Since then, the Mexican political elite has begun to ponder retaliatory measures that would reassert the country’s dignity, and perhaps even cause the Trump administration to reverse its hostile course. With a presidential election in just over a year—and Peña Nieto prevented by term limits from running again—vehement responses to Trump are considered an electoral necessity. Memos outlining policies that could wound the United States have begun flying around Mexico City. These show that Trump has committed the bully’s error of underestimating the target of his gibes. As it turns out, Mexico could hurt the United States very badly. [...]

Once the threat of Soviet expansion into the Western Hemisphere vanished, the United States paid less-careful attention to Latin America. It passively ceded vast markets to the Chinese, who were hunting for natural resources to feed their sprouting factories and build their metropolises. The Chinese invested heavily in places like Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela, discreetly flexing soft power as they funded new roads, refineries, and railways. From 2000 to 2013, China’s bilateral trade with Latin America increased by 2,300 percent, according to one calculation. A raft of recently inked deals forms the architecture for China to double its annual trade with the region, to $500 billion, by the middle of the next decade. Mexico, however, has remained a grand exception to this grand strategy. China has had many reasons for its restrained approach in Mexico, including the fact that Mexico lacks most of the export commodities that have attracted China to other Latin American countries. But Mexico also happens to be the one spot in Latin America where the United States would respond with alarm to a heavy Chinese presence.

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Politico: French election: key questions for the final days

Mélenchon has campaigned on leftist populist themes, giving vent to “the rage” of the people against the rich and calling for a “citizens’ insurrection” against France’s globalized elite. His platform is based on more taxes for the well-to-do, massive public spending, and a promise to push for a major overhaul of the European Union’s founding treaties, with the threat of leaving the EU if he doesn’t get his way. There’s little to no chance other EU governments would agree to his demands, which would make a French exit from the union more than likely. 

The big question is whether increased attacks on his character and scrutiny of his platform will stop his rise in the polls. His suggestion that France should join the so-called “Bolivarian alliance”, an economic treaty between Cuba and Venezuela with Iran, Syria and Russia as “observers,” could give pause to socialist voters who are considering backing Mélenchon because they consider Macron too centrist for their tastes. [...]

It is possible. The National Front leader has fallen from around 28 percent of the vote in early February to about 21 to 22 percent now. She was considered two months ago the favorite in the first round by a comfortable margin. But she is now threatened by both Mélenchon and Fillon, the conservative candidate who has proved surprisingly resilient in the face of multiple scandals. Mélenchon is picking up votes from Le Pen, but her main threat is Fillon, who has based his campaign on hard-right themes, notably on social issues, which appeal to core National Front voters. According to the daily IFOP survey, both Mélenchon and Fillon are still 3 percentage points behind Le Pen, but there is still time for many undecided voters to make up (or change) their minds. [...]

Macron is trying to compensate for the youthful, at times amateurish, nature of his presidential run — he has never appointed a campaign manager — with increased energy. He filled the Zenith, Paris’ largest arena, with 20,000 people for a rally Monday night and is planning to campaign non-stop this week, culminating with three rallies on the same day in his home region of Picardie on Friday. He remains vulnerable to a self-inflicted injury, such as a major gaffe, but has sounded more disciplined in recent days as the race tightens.

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Politico: Le Pen eyes life outside politics …

Not only is she hugely popular in southern France, where voters prefer her socially conservative brand of politics to her aunt’s nationalist statism, she is also one of only two National Front members of the French parliament. [...]

Despite her youth, she has been active in politics for nearly a decade, urged to add her name to a National Front ticket by her grandfather in 2008. Four years later, she made a bid for a parliament seat while still in law school, becoming the chamber’s youngest member in modern history. Maréchal-Le Pen completed her degree but, unlike her aunt, never worked as a lawyer, choosing instead to launch herself headlong into a political career. [...]

Fêted as a political “rock star” by American alt-right news site Breitbart, the younger Le Pen is working to develop an international profile by speaking more to foreign media. And, unlike her aunt, a major TV talk show devotee, she is partial to print media and off-beat interview formats that let her wax at length on topics such as the idea of a “Great Replacement” of white French people by immigrants. [...]

If Marine Le Pen loses the presidential election, the 2018 National Front congress is almost guaranteed to see a showdown between those who backed Vice President Florian Philippot’s agenda for the party — a statist, anti-European Union approach that Marine has more or less made her own — and those who, like the younger Le Pen, favor a more traditionally right-wing approach focused on conservative social values and less on an all-powerful French state.

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Politico: 5 ways the EU could send a message to Viktor Orbán

They are just the most recent examples of Hungary straying from the EU line: there are 66 pending infringement against Hungary, several of which involve cases of alleged discrimination against non-Hungarians.

So far, Brussels has been unable to lay a glove on Orbán and Frans Timmermans, the Commission’s first vice president, was cautious about taking further steps, saying Wednesday that “we have to be on a very firm legal ground before we start infringement procedures.” Actions taken so far have been mainly on technical issues: but this time the protection of Article 2 of the EU treaties — on core of EU values — is at stake, Timmermans said. [...]

Orbán’s strongest link to Brussels is his Fidesz party’s membership of the European People’s Party. According to the EPP’s statutes, suspending or excluding a party would need to be approved by the European Parliament at the request of either the party’s president — Frenchman Joseph Daul — or by seven MEPs from five different countries. But it’s not in the EPP’s interests to kick out the Hungarians. The EPP has 216 seats in the Parliament — making it the biggest group, ahead of the Socialists and Democrats on 189 — and losing the 12 Fidesz MEPs would shrink its lead. Plus, Hungarian MEPs are seen as loyal and hard working. [...]

In the 2014-2020 budgetary period, Hungary is slated to receive around €29,6 billion in EU funds to finance motorways, railways, energy projects and other schemes in a country whose GDP is around €126 billion a year. It’s an important source of cash for Budapest but the likes of Italy and Sweden are keen to claw back some EU funding if Central European countries are reluctant to host refugees. However, changing the EU’s budget rules before 2020 would be impossible.

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Motherboard: Russia and America Are Collaborating on the Most Ambitious Venus Mission Ever

But given that our sister world experiences average temperatures of 462 degrees Celsius (864 degrees Fahrenheit), crushing 90-bar pressures, and suffocating clouds of carbon dioxide laced with sulfuric acid rain, it's no wonder that Venus has not inspired the same frontier spirit as say, Mars. Indeed, proposed Venus missions have been repeatedly snubbed in favor of others to the red planet, asteroids, and less wholly nightmarish worlds. 

Now, NASA and the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute (IKI) are teaming up on a project called Venera-D, which makes the case that Venus is as valuable an exploration target as any alien world, perhaps more so because the planet's runaway greenhouse gas effect, which generates its harsh conditions, can inform our efforts to prevent a similar problem on Earth. [...]

This Russian/American partnership, formed in 2015, is called the Venera-D Joint Science Definition Team (JSDT). In January 2017, it released a thorough report of the two nations' shared objectives on Venus, which include extended observations of the surface environment over a period of months, precise measurements of atmospheric aerosols and composition, and a solution to the longstanding mystery of atmospheric superrotation, a phenomenon in which wind speeds on Venus outpace the planet's rotation by a factor of 60.

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