Spiegel: Two Years in a German Teen Refugee Home

In the months that have passed, the boys have dreamed of having a career, perhaps even a girlfriend. They have dreamed of a future. But they have also been living in fear that they might get deported back to Afghanistan. The home is available to the boys for a total of two years. By the time that period has elapsed, they will all be legal adults and decisions will have been made on their asylum applications. Karim agreed to be shadowed during that two-year period for the purposes of this story, along with Ashraf, Abdullah, Jamil and Masoom -- as did those responsible for them at the youth welfare office. Because of the teenagers' concerns that this article might somehow affect their chances of being granted asylum or that they might have trouble back at home because of it at some point in the future, their names have been changed in the text and their photos have been pixilated so that their faces are obscured. [...]

Even after five months, he often feels like he's living with strangers. And it isn't questions like whether the refugees may have falsified their ages when entering the country that trouble him. He's a counselor, the young men need help and they're behaving like teenagers -- he gets all that. But he knows little about their backgrounds. Counselors aren't supposed to pry too deep to avoid reawakening past traumas. All he can do is observe and listen attentively, Mr. Sameeian says. He has only managed to collect fragments. [...]

By November 2017, all the young men have been informed of the decisions in their asylum cases. A delay of one year has been ordered in the deportation of Abdullah and Jamil because they would face considerable mental duress if they were immediately forced to return to Afghanistan. Masoom has been granted subsidiary protection because he could face torture or death in Afghanistan. It gives him the right to stay in Germany for at least another year. Nicole Cramer says that Ashraf and Karim are also safe for the moment despite the rejection of their asylum applications. With the exception of Masoom, all are at this point learning a vocation. This provides them with a temporary exception from deportation for three years. If the refugees can find jobs after their training, it's possible for they will be allowed to stay longer in Germany.

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Political Critique: The Italian elections were a victory for Trumpism

On paper, and taken at face-value, much of the M5S programme sounds appealing. Testament to this is the sheer variety of their public supporters including alt-right commentators, radical left intellectuals like Dario Fo and Bifo Berardi (the latter retracted his support), and even Bill Emmott, ex editor of the Economist, who despite some reservations was surprisingly enthusiastic about M5S when I interviewed him in the run up to the vote. Few indeed could argue with the idea that that Italy’s notoriously corrupt republic needs a new force to clean up the system, to “drain the swamp” in Trump’s words. What M5S have done so cleverly is to occupy this space with an additional commitment to tackling all the other things that the incumbent parties have failed on: environmental commitments, democratic participation, technological innovation to name just three. As for the economy, meanwhile, while un-costed, M5S has campaigned in favour of a basic income as a measure to protect an increasingly precarious working class that has been abandoned by the system. Looking at the strong support in the country’s impoverished southern regions like Sicily, Campania and Puglia, as well as with the chronically unemployed young, this gamble seems to have paid off.

The appeal is easy to understand, at least in theory. So why has the movement been so criticized? And why, following their most recent success, are so many in a state of panic? First, of course, are the realities behind these pretty words. It is hard to take M5S’s remarks on direct and internal democracy seriously when candidates have historically been forced to tow the party line to such an extent that members have been expelled for ‘crimes’ such as talking to the ‘fake news’ on mainstream TV. Then there is the question of ownership. For a movement that prides itself on transparency, the non-profit organization that manages the M5S digital platform, Rousseau, is remarkably cagey about where the presumably vast advertising revenue ends up. More tangibly still the movement has seemed on the back foot thanks to the unambiguous ineptitude of several local representatives. In the past year alone Virginia Raggi, the Five Star mayor of Rome, has presided over several corruption scandals and a dramatic worsening of public services, from transport to the now infamous garbage crisis. None of this however has affected their anti-political appeal at the national level.  

One of the most important aspects to note about M5S, however, leaving aside all superficially attractive aspects of their programme, is the movement’s gradual but definite shift towards the right. In reality glimpses of this were visible from the very beginning, in what were passed off as occasional rhetorical gaffs as when one candidate likened gay sex to bestiality, or, more recently when the movement’s leader Luigi Di Maio made the bizzare claim that Italy is importing 40% of Romania’s criminals. More recently this kind of talk has translated into actual policy. Under Raggi there have been several evictions of shelters hosting refugees in Rome, as well as widespread talk of deportations at a national level, not to mention consistent fear mongering about rising crime due to immigrants (in fact, as ISTAT data shows, crime in Italy is actually decreasing and there is no easy correlation with areas of dense immigration.)

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Quartz: One of the most sought after jobs for rural Chinese women is to become a mistress

Keeping a woman is common among powerful Chinese men. A study by the Crisis Management Centre at Renmin University in Beijing showed that 95 per cent of corrupt officials had illicit affairs, usually paid for, and 60 per cent of them had kept a mistress. [...]

“If you’re an official, you have to have a mistress, or at least a girlfriend,” Xiaoxue said, “otherwise you’re not a real man. I used to have this friend who was a fake mistress. She was best friends with a gay guy—not a “duck” [male prostitute], just a normal gay guy—who was an official’s boyfriend. So the official would pay her to come out with him and pretend to be his mistress.” [...]

The pragmatic approach of rural women leaves them better off than the educated urban girls who can also end up as mistresses. These urban women usually meet older men through regular work, and the relationship begins through genuine attraction. As they’ve maintained their “purity” through not being involved in other sex work, they have a higher market value than the rural girls, and they’re more socially acceptable at high-end occasions. [...]

Chinese men’s penchant for mistresses is sometimes attributed to deep-seated cultural expectations, and it’s true that Chinese culture has rarely paid even lip service to ideas of male fidelity. Yet modern reformers often singled out concubinage as a sign of China’s backwardness, and pressed for stronger roles for women. Some, such as modern China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen, or its first chairman, Mao Tse-tung, did so even as they pressed teenage girls into their beds. Modern mistress-keeping might seem like a step back to the distant past. But this is just an excuse: any society as dominated by male leaders, and with as vast a chasm between the elite and the poor, sees the same exploitation of young women by powerful men.  

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The Atlantic: Two Ways to Read Italy's Election Results

The people have spoken. But what are they saying? There are two main ways to read the results, and both have major consequences for Europe. One—and this is entirely new—is that one of the three pillar countries of the European Union now effectively has a euroskeptical majority in parliament; both Five Star and the League have called for rewriting treaties with Europe to give Italy more sovereignty. (Although it’s a big question whether they would team up to form a government; the election results have produced a hung parliament.) The second is that voters are punishing Italy’s governing elites—Renzi’s Democratic Party, but also Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party—for overseeing the country’s decline.

The results of the vote fundamentally alter Italy’s relationship to the European Union. Five Star and the League haven’t called for an Ital-exit per se, but a loosening of ties that they say have held Italy back. How they’ll accomplish this is anyone’s guess. In a victory speech on Monday, Matteo Salvini, the head of the League—which he transformed from a Northern sovereigntist party into a national one by campaigning on a platform of “Italians first”—said he wanted a “different” kind of Europe, one that gives more power to national interests over pan-European commitments. He praised Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who is famous for his authoritarian bent and for advocating what he has called “illiberal” democracy, and who has pushed back taking in refugees from the Middle East. He also thanked France’s Marine Le Pen for her support and friendship. But he shares some of Le Pen’s contradictions—like her, he is a euroskeptic who has served in the European Parliament; like her, he has said the European Union is a suffocating oppressor, while wanting lots of European Union agricultural subsidies for the farmers that form a key constituency. [...]

In this, the results resemble less Brexit and Trump than the rise of the left-wing Syriza party in Greece, which came to power when the centrist parties were seen as corrupt and complicit in bankrupting the country. Nor did Renzi do himself any favors. In Italy, Di Maio is mocked for making grammar mistakes, especially with the subjunctive mood, used for hypotheticals. Renzi seems to have the opposite problem. He uses the subjunctive too much. In his speech Monday, when he said he’d eventually step down, he barely conceded any errors and instead talked about how Italy should have held elections last year, riding the currents that helped defeat Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and elect Emmanuel Macron in France.

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Salon: In Italy, fake news helps populists and far-right triumph

Five Star — which one commentator described as a party with a “rightist façade over a leftist basement and anarchic roof” — is poised to be the biggest party with more than 30 percent of the vote. The League, an anti-immigrant party in former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition, soared to its best result ever with over 18 percent of the vote. [...]

These trends, combined with Italians’ low levels of trust in media organizations, have made Italy fertile ground for spreading misinformation and propaganda online.

In the last five years, online alternative media platforms and their audience have grown exponentially in Italy. At the end of 2017, BuzzFeed exposed several popular Italian websites and Facebook pages that posed as news organizations but trafficked in misinformation with a focus on anti-immigration content. These outlets had several million social media followers. That is substantially more than Italian newspapers and political leaders who typically attract modest numbers of followers. For example, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has only 410,000 Twitter followers. Compare that to U.S. President Donald Trump with more than 48 million.  [...]

Last month, the Italian daily La Stampa identified several prolific Twitter accounts suspected as being used for Russian propaganda operations in Italy. In a report published last fall, the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, documented extensive links between Russian figures and both the Five Star Movement and the League.

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