Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged northern ireland

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
hannahcarter11

Boris Johnson, Seen as a Trump Ally, Signals Alignment With Biden - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...boris-johnson-joe-biden.html

World Johnson trump biden

shared by hannahcarter11 on 30 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson rolled out ambitious, back-to-back initiatives on military spending and climate change this week, which have little in common except that both are likely to please a very important new person in Mr. Johnson’s life: President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • The prime minister, whom President Trump has embraced as a like-minded populist, is eager to show he can work with the incoming president as well as he did with the outgoing one.
  • That is important, analysts said, because Brexit will deprive Britain of what had historically been one of its greatest assets to the United States: serving as an Anglophone bridge to the leaders of continental Europe.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Mr. Biden has pledged to reinvigorate America’s climate policy by swiftly rejoining the Paris climate accord. Analysts said he would also try to heal strains in the NATO alliance, which has been under relentless attack by Mr. Trump, who has accused other members of not paying their fair share of its costs.
  • Mr. Johnson cast his initiatives as gestures of support to allies, even at a time when the pandemic has busted public finances.
  • “Britain must be true to our history, to stand alongside our allies, sharing the burden, and bringing our expertise to bear on the world’s toughest problems,” Mr. Johnson said in introducing the defense spending plan to the House of Commons.
  • the Biden team will look favorably on this announcement because Biden will be as sensitive as Trump was, and Obama was, to the willingness of allies to shoulder more of the burden.”
  • Mr. Johnson has yet to deliver on another challenge that would please Mr. Biden: a trade agreement with the European Union. Mr. Biden has already voiced concern to Mr. Johnson that if the negotiations go awry, it could jeopardize the Good Friday Accord, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
  • The defense budget, Mr. Johnson claimed, will be the largest expansion of military spending since the Cold War: an increase of 24.1 billion pounds ($31.9 billion) over the next four years. That is nearly triple the increases his Conservative Party promised in its policy manifesto during the 2019 election.
  • The climate package, which claims to do nothing less than ignite a “green industrial revolution,” sets a goal of making Britain a net zero emitter of carbon dioxide by 2050. It would change the way people heat their homes and invest in alternative energy sources, in addition to banning the sale of new fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2030.
  • The climate package lacked the levels of investment pledged by Germany and France to reach their emissions-reduction targets. The military budget contained no information on what the money would be spent on; that is to be decided by a review of foreign, defense, security and development policy that will concluded early next year.
  • Mr. Biden’s defeat of Mr. Trump has radically reshaped the landscape for Mr. Johnson, confronting him with an American leader who opposed Brexit and is unlikely to make an Anglo-American trade agreement a priority, as the pro-Brexit Mr. Trump did.
  • Britain’s emphasis on defense, Mr. Fraser said, plays up a competitive advantage over France and Germany. Both spend proportionately less on their militaries and are not as closely integrated in security matters with the United States.
  • Britain confirmed the creation of a National Cyber Force, a joint venture of the Defense Ministry and GCHQ, the electronic surveillance agency.
  • Still, as several experts noted, Mr. Johnson’s bid to be useful to Mr. Biden will mean far less if Britain fails to strike a trade deal with Brussels. A yearlong transition period is set to expire on Jan. 1, and economists warn that not having a new agreement to take its place would do serious harm.
Javier E

| Harvard Magazine - 0 views

www.harvardmagazine.com/...who-killed-the-men-england

History genomics evolution demographics archaeology molecular

shared by Javier E on 24 May 18 - No Cached
  • Who Killed the Men of England? The written record of history meets genomics, evolution, demography, and molecular archaeology.
  • more than a million men vanished without a trace. They left no descendants. Historians know that something dramatic happened in England just as the Roman empire was collapsing. When the Anglo-Saxons first arrived in that northern outpost in the fourth century a.d.--whether as immigrants or invaders is debated--they encountered an existing Romano-Celtic population estimated at between 2 million and 3.7 million people. Latin and Celtic were the dominant languages.
  • Yet the ensuing cultural transformation was so complete, says Goelet professor of medieval history Michael McCormick, that by the eighth century, English civilization considered itself completely Anglo-Saxon, spoke only Anglo-Saxon, and thought that everyone had “come over on the Mayflower, as it were.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Working along an east-west transect through central England and Wales, the scientists discovered that the mix of Y-chromosomes characteristic of men in the English towns was very different from that of men in the Welsh towns: Wales was the primary Celtic holdout in Western Britannia during the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxons. Using computer analysis, the researchers explored how such a pattern could have arisen and concluded that a massive replacement of the native fourth-century male Britons had taken place. Between 50 percent and 100 percent of indigenous English men today, the researchers estimate, are descended from Anglo-Saxons who arrived on England’s eastern coast 16 centuries ago.
  • So what happened? Mass killing, or “population replacement,” is one possible explanation. Mass migration of Anglo-Saxons, so that they swamped the native gene pool, is another.
  • Yet no archaeological or historical evidence from the fifth and sixth centuries hints at the immense scale of violence or migration that would be necessary to explain this genetic legacy. The science hinted at an untold story.
  • across entire fields of inquiry, the traditional boundaries between history and prehistory have been melting away as the study of the human past based on the written record increasingly incorporates the material record of the natural and physical sciences.
  • The study of the human past, in other words, has entered a new phase in which science has begun to tell stories that were once the sole domain of humanists.
  • Thomas had found that genetically, not one of the English towns he sampled was significantly different from the others. Welsh towns, on the other hand, were significantly different from each other and from the English towns.
  • Most importantly, he found that inhabitants of  the Dutch province of Friesland were indistinguishable genetically from the English town-dwellers. Friesland is one of the known embarkation points of the Angl0-Saxons--and the language spoken there is the closest living relative to English.
  • The implications are profound: “Suddenly, we have all these genuine historical observations that need to be taken on board by historians and archaeologists and they raise a whole series of new questions, focusing particularly on…what is going on at the intimate level of this new civilization that is being born in the ruins of the Roman empire. The history of Europe will never be the same.”
  • But most archaeologists and historians who understand the economic capacity of the era, he noted, “find such massive contributions to the English gene pool to be completely unacceptable.
  • “But still, the genetic data are quite robust,” Thomas pointed out. “This is where the idea of an apartheid-like social structure comes in.” He has advanced a theory that a sexually biased, ethnically driven reproductive pattern, in which Anglo-Saxon males fathered children with Anglo-Saxon females and possibly Celtic females, while the reproductive activities of Romano-Celtic males were more restricted, is the most plausible explanation for the demographic, archaeological, and genetic patterns seen today. 
  • In an attempt to explain the remarkable similarity between Frisian and English towns, Thomas and colleagues constructed a population simulation model on a computer. He tested many theories: common ancestry dating back to the Neolithic age; background migration over centuries and even millennia; and a mass-migration event that, he calculated, would have had to involve at least 50 percent replacement--the movement, in other words, of a million people.
  • Simulating such an advantage, and choosing an arbitrary figure of 10 percent migration, Thomas found that the Y chromosomes of native Britons could have been replaced in the general population in as few as five generations. 
  • by the 1970s, he continues, scholars began to realize there never was a homogenous “nation” of Germans in northern Europe, just small tribes that coalesced along the Roman frontier in what were political and cultural, rather than biological, federations, as their very names suggest: Alemanni, meaning “all men”; Goths, meaning “good guys.”
  • The Romans, scholars believed, provided a common enemy, and that unified the disparate Germanic tribes. This line of reasoning led historians to a further thought: maybe the Anglo-Saxon identity was similarly socially constructed, and not biological after all
  • More recent historical scholarship, therefore, has increasingly emphasized discovering the extent to which the barbarian migrations were really a process of ethnogenesis--the creation of new ethnic identities, as the merchant’s story illustrates.
  • “There is lots of evidence for it,” McCormick says. “But now you have Mark Thomas telling us that you could actually study mating patterns. That is utterly unanticipated.” The work raises a host of new questions: What was women’s role in the barbarian settlements? Were Anglo-Saxon men mating with Celtic women? Or were there women in those invading boats, and if so, how many? What happened to the Romano-Celtic men? Were they killed? 
  • There is some support for this in ancient English laws, which indicate that Britons and Anglo-Saxons were legally and economically different even in the seventh century, long after the initial migration. Thomas cited wergild (blood money) payments as one example: “Killing an Anglo-Saxon was a costly business, but killing a native Briton was quite cheap.” This points to differences in economic status. And differences in wealth “almost always result in differences in reproductive output,” he said. “Sometimes two- and three-fold differences.” To the extent Anglo-Saxons were able to have and support more children, this could lead to a gradual replacement of the indigenous Y-chromosome over many generations
  • The Y-chromosome can be a particularly revealing signature of the past when compared to other kinds of genetic data. Among African Americans in the United States, for example, Y-chromosomes are about 33 percent European, he says, though the proportion varies from city to city. But those same African Americans’ mitochondrial DNA, which comes from the female line, is only about 6 percent European. And that, says Reich, “tells you about the history of this country, in which men contributed about three-fourths of the European ancestry that is present in the African-American population data. The data speak to a history in which white male slaveowners exploited women of African descent--a fact that is well documented in the historical record. That there is evidence of this in genetic data should be no surprise.”
  • Most Americans associate Medellín with the drug cartels of that isolated region. But the remoteness has also preserved a genetic legacy that can be traced to the conquistadores. As described in a paper by Andrés Ruiz-Linares of University College London, the Y-chromosomes of men in Medellín are 95 percent European, while the mitochondrial DNA of the women is 95 percent Native American. Spanish men and Native American women created a new population--confirming the recorded history of the region.
  • The pattern of sexual exploitation by a dominant group seen in the preceding examples is not at all unusual in the human genetic record, says Reich’s frequent collaborator, Nick Patterson, a senior research scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The Icelandic sagas record that the exiles who settled that island raided Scotland and Ireland, kidnapping Celtic women. And the genes corroborate this account. The mitochondrial DNA of the women is Celtic, the Y-chromosomes are Nordic
  • Fortunately, the science of the human past has progressed in these other areas no less than in the field of genetics. Innovations in archaeological analysis have had a profound impact
  • After the fall of the Roman empire, “you get this layer called ‘dark earth’” in the archaeological stratigraphy, he says. “People thought the empire fell and the cities turned into garden [plots]. That is how dark earth was understood up until about five years ago,
  • “In the Roman excavations,” says McCormick, “there were pots and stone buildings and columns.” But then suddenly you get a layer of nothing but dark, humus-looking soil. What actually happened, Galinié and others have found, is that people shifted to organic building materials. “They had thatched roofs and wooden houses, they didn’t have Roman garbage removal, and they just dumped the ashes and charcoal from their hearths out in the road and all of that compacted. It is extremely rich, extremely dense,
  • Javier E on 24 May 18
     
    Who Killed the Men of England? The written record of history meets genomics, evolution, demography, and molecular archaeology.
brookegoodman

The United Kingdom is too precious to be lost to narrow nationalism | Gordon Brown | Op... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-be-lost-to-narrow-nationalism

Crisis economics

shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • If the United Kingdom is to survive, it will have to change fundamentally, so that Scotland does not secede and our regions can once again feel part of it.
  • Recent events are better understood as resulting from the power of competing nationalisms: Brexit nationalism, seeking national independence from Europe; Scottish nationalism; Welsh nationalism; and Irish and Ulster nationalisms. The risk is that “getting Brexit done” is leaving Britain undone and, by destabilising the careful balance between the Irish and British identities in Northern Ireland, threatening the very existence of the United Kingdom.
  • In this respect, last month’s election result seems less like an enthusiastic endorsement of any party than a plea for radical change. The old postwar social contract, based on times when manufacturing, making a product in which you had pride, and mining which kept the nation’s lights on, gave people dignity and respect, is seen as at breaking point, with each of its four pillars approaching collapse.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This widespread and rising dissatisfaction is the context for today’s populist nationalisms. The 19th- and 20th-century nationalism that underpinned anticolonial movements and the breakup of the imperial dynasties was driven by anger at cultural discrimination, political exclusion and the economic exploitation of one ethnic group by another.
  • Nationalism can exploit these injustices but it cannot end them. While the Conservatives are the current beneficiaries of the revolt of the regions, their promise of a northern renaissance will have to mean more than love-bombing the regions with a few infrastructure projects and an airline rescue.
  • Instead, we must deliver a radical alternative to nationalism. It must start with a plan to address economic insecurity. But it must also recognise that, in a multinational state that is asymmetric (83% of its voters lie in one nation) and where financial, political and administrative power is concentrated in just one city far to the south, the outlying nations and regions require new powers of initiative as decision-making centres – which, given our history as a unitary state, would be something akin to a British constitutional revolution.
  • The Treasury should also devolve decisions about the allocation of regional resources to new councils of the north and Midlands, comprising mayors, councillors and MPs. With proper financial backing, whether in research, science, technology, new industries or culture, cities and towns in every region – not just London – could become leaders for the UK, capitals in their own right.
  • In 2020, that means rediscovering the value of empathy and solidarity between nations and regions and the benefits that can flow from cooperation and sharing in pursuit of great causes: from jointly tackling climate change to offering the same floor of rights to universal health, social care and welfare services in every part of the UK.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
Maria Delzi

BBC News - UK storms: Fresh flood fears for coming days - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/uk-25606031

shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • People are being warned to brace themselves for floods on England's coasts and rivers, with further severe weather forecast.
  • More than 90 flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected, are in place in England and Wales, with 10 in Scotland.
  • The search for a teenager in Devon who has been missing since Thursday has been called off for a second night.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The Environment Agency said parts of England's north-east coast could see flooding while parts of the south coast - including Portsmouth and Newhaven - were also at risk over the weekend.
  • Spokesman Jonathan Day added: "The risk of flooding to the coast will continue over the next few days, especially on the south and west coast and along the Severn estuary."
  • A man was rescued by police in Newquay after going into the sea in the early hours of Saturday morning
  • Part of a cliff has collapsed into the sea on the East Sussex coast after being undermined by rough seas
  • In Scotland, flooding was less severe than expected after warnings of a tidal surge on the east coast
  • There are currently no severe flood warnings - indicating danger to life - in place across the UK.
  • However, more than 240 flood alerts - meaning flooding is possible, be prepared - are in place in England and Wales, in addition to more than 90 flood warnings.
  • Prime Minister David Cameron praised the agencies involved in dealing with the storm threat.
  • He tweeted: "Great work by emergency services & @EnvAgency helping people flooded. 200,000 properties have been protected by flood defences in last 36hrs."
  • Forecasters have warned of heavy rain in southern England, south-east Wales, Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland.
  • There is an increased risk of flooding risk to Weybridge and Guildford on Sunday and into Monday and people living along the non-tidal Thames, including Oxford and Osney, could be at risk from Sunday, the EA said.
qkirkpatrick

100 years after WWI, poppy lives on as symbol - Washington Times - 0 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...r-wwi-poppy-lives-on-as-symbol

wwi culture history

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • William Sellick pinched the tiny scarlet petals with deft ease, turning them into paper poppies and pressing them into a wreath. The flowers are a potent symbol of remembrance and patriotism that sprang up in the aftermath of World War I to honor the war dead and raise funds for survivors.
  • Each handmade flower evokes the image of poppies springing up from destruction and decay in Belgium’s Flanders Fields, home to many of the Great War’s bloodiest battlefields. The haunting scene was immortalized in a war poem by Canadian army doctor John McCrae: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses row on row.”
  • For Sellick, who suffered combat stress after an army tour to Northern Ireland in the 1970s, making poppies is a way to move on from a life shadowed by depression and alcoholism. He doesn’t like to recall his army days, but every November he makes an effort to help plant crosses decorated with poppies outside London’s Westminster Abbey.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Although the poppy is most commonly worn today in Britain and Commonwealth countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it was a woman from the U.S. state of Georgia who was responsible for turning it into a symbol of the Great War. Moina Michael, a teacher, was so moved by McCrae’s poem that she vowed always to wear a poppy as a way to “keep the faith with all who died.”
  • To this day, the factory in west London’s Richmond makes the bulk of the 45 million poppies, wreaths and crosses sold across Britain
  • There are also those in Britain who avoid the tradition, saying the poppy has become too politicized and nationalistic, or even a symbol that glorifies war. Margaret MacMillan, a historian at Oxford University, said she once reluctantly pinned a poppy when appearing on television because producers insisted she do so.
  • qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15
     
    Poppy flower continues to be symbol of WWI throughout Britain and Canada. 
qkirkpatrick

Irish President Michael D Higgins honours WWI soldiers - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-northern-ireland-28584476

irish wwi soldiers history culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Irish president has paid tribute to Irish soldiers who fought in World War One.
  • "But we honour them all now, even if at a distance, and we do not ask, nor would it be appropriate to interrogate, their reasons for enlisting.
  • Historians have estimated that more than 200,000 Irish-born soldiers served in the British Army and Navy from 1914 to 1918.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The names of 49,400 Irish casualties of WW1 are listed on the Republic of Ireland's National War Memorial at Islandbridge, Dublin.
  • "It represents a lasting tribute to their sacrifice and it is my hope, in the years to come, that memorials such as these continue to inspire successive generations to remember," he said.
  • "It is fitting that they now have access to a site where they can come together in quiet contemplation to pay tribute to the memory of those who gave so much for our freedom."
sgardner35

British Labour Leader Offers Compromise on Trident Program - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...romise-on-trident-program.html

shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • British Labour Leader Offers Compromise on Trident Program
  • Stirring a divisive internal debate over defense, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, suggested on Sunday that he might support the continued existence of the country’s Trident submarine fleet if it were sent on patrol without carrying nuclear
  • warheads.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Mr. Corbyn, who was elected as the party’s leader last year, is trying to shift Labour leftward on a range of economic issues, such as opposition to inequality and government spending cuts,
  • As a lifelong opponent of nuclear weapons, Mr. Corbyn has opposed Labour’s support for the Trident submarine system
  • Prime Minister David Cameron would be unlikely to order the use of Trident missiles, and when asked about the point of keeping submarines on patrol, Mr. Corbyn replied, “They don’t have to have warheads on them.”
  • a channel of communication to Islamic State militants should be created, and cited the secret contacts between the British government
  • Trident is a highly sensitive issue for Labour.
  • For Mr. Corbyn’s internal opponents, the issue is totemic because, while out of power in the 1980s, Labour shifted away from a unilateralist position on nuclear disarmament as part of a change championed first by Neil Kinnock and later by Tony Blair.
  • Some military figures have also argued that, in an era of strained budgets, Britain could be better off spending its scarce resources on conventional capabilities.
  • “keeping the capability to launch nuclear weapons, and therefore the ability to cause catastrophic and unimaginable destruction, is not a suitable solution, and Trident should be scrapped altogether.”
  • protection of employment in the defense sector as a priority, suggesting that his position was designed at least partly to allay concerns among union leaders
  • and the Irish Republican Army during the decadeslong conflict in Northern Ireland
  • Mr. Corbyn also said there should be a “discussion” with Argentina about the future of the Falkland Islands, and on domestic issues, suggested a repeal of laws outlawing labor action by trade unions in sympathy with other workers
Javier E

May's desperate pitch for cross-party unity is a leap into the dark | Rafael Behr | Opi... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...theresa-may-labour-brexit

brexit tories

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • The specific challenge that posed for Northern Ireland was identified and baked into the commission’s negotiating mandate in May 2017. But in February 2019 Dominic Raab, a man who briefly led Brexit negotiations, and fancies himself as a potential prime minister, admitted he had not read the Good Friday agreement. It is only 35 pages long.
  • The prospect of Britain ending up in a customs union with the EU has been at the forefront of Brexit argument for nearly two years. On Monday around 50 Tory MPs attended a training seminar organised by colleagues on what a customs union is and how it works. At least they were curious. Breathtaking, wilful ignorance of facts has been a routine feature of the debate
  • Last week Boris Johnson told Telegraph readers that May should “drop the deal” and, in the next line, that she should “extend the implementation period to the end of 2021”. The implementation period is part of the deal. Drop one and you lose the other. Johnson is not stupid, but he has affected stupidity for so long that the difference no longer matters.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • a large minority still want to saddle up unicorns and ride back to lost terrain. They cry “WTO transition”, “Malthouse compromise”, “Brady amendment” as if these were negotiable concepts and not exotic acts in the clammy circus tent of Eurosceptic imagination.
  • Another frustration is that British politicians are incapable of telling their voters the truth about difficult trade-offs. Some officials and leaders think the value of EU partnership will only be grasped once the benefits of membership are lost and the task in hand is buying them back
  • Continental leaders thought the pragmatic diplomat they dealt with in Brussels was the real Britain and the spittle-spraying nationalist was a stock character, strutting the repertory stage. It turns out to be the other way around. Or rather, the Conservative party has strapped the grimacing mask so tightly to its face that it is no longer a mask. Those are now the distorted features we show to the world.
Javier E

Europe's Glorious Years of Peace and Prosperity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-kershaw-the-global-age.html

europe peace prosperity politics economics

shared by Javier E on 05 May 19 - No Cached
  • In synthesizing this period in European history in a long but very readable volume
  • Kershaw reminds us that the Continent has faced other large challenges in the postwar era and survived; that some long-term trends of peace, prosperity and democracy are both robust and remarkable; and that individuals have agency, and can alter the course of events — they are not mere expressions of those events.
  • Today’s Europe, thankfully, is not haunted by the specter of nuclear war. The probability of a Russian invasion of a NATO member is low.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • During this “golden age” for Europe, imperial powers had to navigate decolonization. The French wars in Indochina and Algeria and the Portuguese wars in Angola and Mozambique were difficult, regime-threatening challenge
  • Europe endured domestic violence during this golden age, be it from the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany, nationalists in Northern Ireland or separatists in the Basque region.
  • Kershaw traces several positive, long-term trends in European history from 1950 to 2017 that are downright miraculous. Most important, most of the Continent lived in peace during the Global Age, a sharp contrast to the horrific atrocities chronicled in Kershaw’s previous volume in this series, “To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949.”
  • war, sometimes in the form of ethnic cleansing, erupted in the Balkans in the 1990s. Brexit, immigration, populism and even Jihadist-inspired terrorism seem like much smaller challenges than genocide.
  • Europeans on average became richer than at any time before. In Kershaw’s estimation, the period between 1950 and 1973 was especially prosperous — a “golden age” or an “economic miracle” for the western part of the Continent, and even a “silver age” for the Communist bloc
  • As Kershaw sums up, “Europe is more peaceful, more prosperous and more free than at any time in its long history.” Alongside these three positive trends of peace, prosperity and democracy, cooperation among European countries expanded dramatically, culminating in the creation of the European Union and the euro.
  • It would be premature, however, to predict a new negative trajectory. Peace, prosperity and democracy in Europe still have serious momentum.
  • Kershaw allows for the possibility that individuals — not just innate structural forces — can shape history
  • Kershaw ascribes the greatest agency of all to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “The magnitude of Gorbachev’s personal contributions to the dramatic change, not just in the Soviet Union itself but throughout Eastern Europe, can scarcely be exaggerated.
  • European leaders should read “The Global Age” to be reminded of the incredible progress of the last 70 years — and told that such progress is something they have the power to sustain through their individual actions
oliviaodon

These Protests Defined a Generation in France 50 Years Ago - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-in-france-50-years-ago.html

france crisis

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • Fifty years ago this month, France erupted. Students lobbed cobblestones at riot police in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Millions of union workers went on strike. The government of President Charles de Gaulle tottered. Today, the events of May 1968 are generally regarded as more of a cultural milestone than a political one, a time when the ideals of a rising generation collided with the mores of an older, more powerful establishment. Fifty years later, the legacy of those historic weeks remains a subject of debate between the country’s conservative and progressive factions. It is, as the philosopher André Glucksmann described it in 2008, “a monument, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury.”
  • Mr. Caron’s photographs of joyful, radiant students capture what made the unrest seem to some “a huge collective fiesta,” as the journalist Marc Kravetz once described it. But in his photographs of the turmoil in the Latin Quarter — armed riot police racing through the streets, students hurling projectiles through the air — Mr. Caron appears to be documenting nothing less than urban guerrilla warfare (much like this week’s May Day riots). In these photos, Mr. Caron’s experience as a combat photographer helped give his photos a cinematic immediacy and power that quickly made them among the most widely circulated at the time. The protests fizzled in June, President de Gaulle remained in power, and Mr. Caron moved on to other conflicts. In 1969, he photographed the troubles in Northern Ireland and the anniversary of the Prague spring in Czechoslovakia. In 1970, he was taken hostage for a month while covering the civil war in Chad with a group including Mr. Pledge. Just a few months after their release, Mr. Caron traveled to Cambodia, where, one day, he disappeared in Khmer Rouge-controlled territory, never to be seen again. He was 30.
anonymous

Brexit: What can UK learn from other external EU borders? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/uk-44054594

culture borders policy uk europe

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • As the British government continues to debate the kind of customs relationship it wants with the European Union after Brexit, one question looms large: how will it solve the Irish border problem?
  • One of the most difficult issues in the entire Brexit process is how to ensure that there is no return to a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, once that border becomes the external border of the European Union, of its single market and its customs union.
  • So being in a customs union doesn't automatically make border checks entering or leaving EU territory disappear; in this case that's partly because Turkey is not part of the single market and its common set of rules and regulations.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • That means that if the UK leaves all the EU's economic structures there is currently no example anywhere around Europe, or further afield, that can keep the Irish border after Brexit as open as it is now.
nrashkind

UK coronavirus death toll under 20,000 would be 'good result', says health chief - Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ays-health-chief-idUSKBN21F0HV

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The United Kingdom will do well if it manages to keep the coronavirus death toll below 20,000, a senior health official said on Saturday after the deadliest day so far of the outbreak saw the number of fatalities rise to more than 1,000.
  • The number of confirmed cases stood at 17,089 on Saturday morning. The death toll rose by 260 in a day to 1,019
  • When asked if Britain was on the same trajectory as Italy, where the death toll has passed 9,000, Powis said that if the public adhered to the nationwide lockdown the total toll could be kept below 20,000.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • the seventh highest toll in the world behind Italy, Spain, China, Iran, France and the United States.
  • Frontline medical staff in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are already being tested.
  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson became the first leader of a major power to announce a positive test result for coronavirus on Friday. He is self-isolating in Downing Street but still leading the UK response to the crisis.
  • “If it is less than 20,000... that would be a good result though every death is a tragedy, but we should not be complacent about that,”
  • The minister for Scotland, Alister Jack, said on Saturday he had developed a temperature and a cough in the past 24 hours and was now working from home in isolation. He has not been tested for coronavirus.
  • Efforts were under way to keep building up the NHS’s ability to cope.
  • “At the moment, I am confident the capacity is there,”
  • “We have not reached capacity.”
  • Health workers, who remain in their cars, are tested by nurses who carry out swabs in the nose and mouth through the windows.
malonema1

Election results 2017: How will this minority government actually work? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...election-2017-40222427

UK

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Election results 2017: How will this minority government actually work?
  • The incontestable truth of this general election is that the Conservative party does not have enough MPs to win votes by itself in the new House of Commons.
  • The incontestable truth of this general election is that the Conservative party does not have enough MPs to win votes by itself in the new House of Commons.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Nothing matters more than the parliamentary numbers and Theresa May's lack of a majority. The politics of the coming months and perhaps years will be dominated by this one fact.
  • The easiest way for the government to ensure regular DUP support in Parliament would be to agree what's called a "confidence and supply" arrangement.
  • They can also be unstable and short lived, if the deal between the parties breaks down and fresh elections have to be called.
  • The Institute for Government think-tank says that for minority governments to last and work, ministers, MPs and the media have to change the way they think. Ministers have to be less majoritarian in their outlook, and be less ambitious and more realistic about what they can achieve. MPs need to learn how to do deals and make compromises.
  • Minority governments can linger on, scrabbling around for votes, spraying around taxpayers' money in return for parliamentary support.
  • This can mean whips - or parliamentary managers - rushing round doing deals with MPs from other parties, threatening some, bribing others. When votes are really tight, it can mean sick MPs being brought from their hospital beds in ambulances so their votes can be counted.
  • They will be in hock to a party whose views and policies they will not always find palatable. Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff in Downing Street, told the BBC: "The Conservatives have made a big mistake. Theresa May has made herself a hostage to the DUP." In terms of the politics of Northern Ireland, it may make it harder for the British government to play its traditional role of neutral mediator.
  • All sides are worried about the potential impact on the political settlement if border posts and guards are reinstated, a reminder of the divisions and violence of the past.
  • Hospital patients and schoolchildren and cross-border workers are among those who have to make the daily journey. How do they see the road ahead?
  • Theresa May called this election because she concluded she could not get Brexit through the House of Commons with a majority of 17. She may struggle to do it with a similar majority that is made up of another party's MPs.
malonema1

Anger over Donald Trump's UK crime tweet - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-politics-41695667

trump US UK

shared by malonema1 on 21 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has been accused of fuelling hate crime with a tweet erroneously linking a rise in the UK crime rate to "radical Islamic terror".He said crime in the UK had risen by 13% amid the "spread" of Islamist terror - despite the figure referring to all crimes, not just terrorism.
  • US media outlets have speculated whether Mr Trump's tweet followed a TV report on One America News Network, a conservative TV channel, which aired the statistics on Friday morning.
  • Donald Trump is half right. Crime has gone up by 13% - but not in the UK. The increase announced yesterday covered England and Wales whereas Scotland and Northern Ireland publish their data separately.But overlooking that mistake, what about the phrase that appears to connect the increase to the "spread of radical Islamic terror"?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • He had earlier lashed out at Sadiq Khan, tweeting that the London mayor had offered a "pathetic excuse" to Londoners after the London Bridge terror attack by telling people not to be alarmed.The Office for National Statistics said it would not comment on Mr Trump's tweet, but added that the survey relates to all crimes in England and Wales between 2016 and 2017.
woodlu

The Economist explains - What is the level playing field and why is it such a problem f... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...s-it-such-a-problem-for-brexit

shared by woodlu on 26 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The EU insisted it could allow Britain to retain its tariff- and quota-free access to its market only if the British government promised not to undercut its social, environmental, labour and state-aid rules.
  • The political declaration that was attached to the withdrawal treaty which Boris Johnson signed earlier this year duly declared that “the future relationship must ensure open and fair competition, encompassing robust commitments to ensure a level playing field.”
  • Theresa May, had sought to respond to these concerns by proposing in July 2018 that Britain and the EU should follow a “common rulebook”,
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Hardline Tory Brexiteers then helped repeatedly to vote down Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement, clearing the way for Mr Johnson to take over the party leadership and to become prime minister in July 2019.
  • Mrs May had at least been prepared to accept the concept of the level playing field in principle, Mr Johnson saw regulatory divergence as one of the main purposes of Brexit, and a key test of whether the EU had accepted that Britain was now a fully sovereign state
  • EU’s determination that Britain should accept “non-regression”, meaning it would not resile from current regulatory levels
  • Britain should promise to abide by all future changes in the rules. It has now partly backed away from this, in exchange for a promise of a robust British domestic regime to police state aids.
  • effort by the EU to keep the European Court of Justice as umpire, a position it has also backed away from in favour of a more neutral arbitrator of disputes.
  • the EU wants a right of instant retaliation through the imposition of tariffs if Britain diverges from its rules in a way that it deems anti-competitive.
  • having a gun on the table that can be picked up at any time.
  • The second is that any settlement of level-playing-field concerns requires mutual trust.
  • Mr Johnson proposed to legislate unilaterally (and illegally) to change the treaty’s provisions on Northern Ireland. He has now withdrawn this threat, but that may not be enough to regain the EU’s trust.
Javier E

Infected blood inquiry: Another state failure - will things ever change? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...c1997z82gdro

state failure candor duty truth bureaucracy UK scandal blood Ireland culture history

shared by Javier E on 21 May 24 - No Cached
  • Blame spread, accountability avoided.And the net result was year after year of stasis, the initial injustice made all the worse by a collective unwillingness to acknowledge it, let alone address it.
  • Mr, now Lord, Cameron said the government was “deeply sorry” after a public inquiry unequivocally blamed the British Army for one of the most controversial days in Northern Ireland's history, when 13 civil rights marchers were shot dead and 15 others were wounded.For 38 years, so many had waited for those words.Obfuscation, delay and denials until finally the truth emerged.
  • So you can be secretary of state, of all things, and still be misled?“It’s incredible. Most serious questions should be asked of Whitehall departments
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The big question, then, is how do you bring about widespread, deep-seated cultural change within the organs of government and institutions connected to it?
  • Can you legislate to change a culture?
  • Sir Brian Langstaff, the report author, thinks you might be able to – or at least make a start.
  • He suggests there should be a so-called duty of candour demanded in law for civil servants and others.It would then become a legal obligation to speak up, rather than a cultural expectation to shut up.Whistleblowing would be mandatory.But will it happen, and will it make any difference?
‹ Previous 21 - 38 of 38
Showing 20▼ items per page