Protesters flooded downtown Hong Kong over the weekend, winning concessions and even adding to their demands. Experts say protests like these have proliferated around the world in recent years. But can they lead to lasting change? On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, Richard Youngs, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and and the author of “Civic Activism Unleashed: New Hope or False Dawn for Democracy?,” discusses what the explosion of civic activism says about the state of citizen discontent with Co-Host Ray Suarez.
16 July 2019
Today in Focus: The real Boris Johnson: politician or journalist?
Before entering politics, Boris Johnson made his name first as a reporter and then a columnist rising to fame with the Daily Telegraph and then the Spectator. But it was not always a smooth ascent: he was sacked from the Times as a graduate trainee for making up a quote and as a Brussels correspondent generating dozens of controversial stories that poked fun at the EU institutions and refashioned Euroscepticism in the UK years before the Brexit vote.
But one particular incident stands out: so-called ‘Guppygate’. In 1990, Johnson was secretly recorded agreeing to provide the address of the News of the World reporter Stuart Collier to his friend Darius Guppy, who wanted to arrange for the journalist to have his ribs cracked as revenge for investigating his activities. Collier has told the Guardian he wants a full apology from Johnson.
Attempting to separate fact from fiction in Johnson’s journalistic career has not been easy: his biographers Andrew Gimson and Sonia Purnell both worked with him and between them have spoken to hundreds of his former colleagues. They describe to Anushka Asthana the rise of a highly ambitious man who once wrote two opposing columns before the EU referendum campaign before choosing to back leave.
Also today: Sabrina Siddiqui on Donald Trump’s weekend tweets, which have been widely condemned as racist.
TLDR News: 5 Reasons Trump Will Be Re-Elected in 2020
In 2016 a lot of people were shocked to see Trump win the US Presidential Election. This time around we wanted to be a bit more prepared, so in this video, we explain the 5 reasons we think Trump hs a good chance at getting a second term.
TLDR News: What Boris Johnson Doesn't Understand About Brexit
In a recent interview, Boris Johnson admitted to not understanding GATT Article 24 Paragraph 5(c). Now that sounds very very niche, but it's actually fundamental to his Brexit plan. In this video, we explain what it is that Johnson doesn't understand and what this means for him and his plan.
UnHerd: Could homophobia be on the rise?
Still, a version of the progressive fallacy seems almost embedded in the modern Western mind. For such people when a piece of territory is conquered and occupied by liberal attitudes it is then held for all time. It is not hard to see the idea’s attraction. What is hard to see is why it is so little refuted. Or rather, why when evidence emerges for its possible refutation, it is reacted to as though it is no evidence at all. [...]
Until now. At the end of this 30 year movement in one direction, there has been a change. The data suggests acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships.[...]
Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.
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