Group items tagged

n April 24, 2017, a 28-year-old-man met an 11-year-old girl in a park in Montmagny, just north of Paris, after which, he took her home where he had oral and vaginal sex with her. When it was over, the girl called her mother and described what had happened, and her mother called the police. “She thought … that she didn’t have the right to protest, that it wouldn’t make any difference,” the mother told Mediapart, a French investigative site which first reported on the allegations of the case. The accusations were of an adult raping a child—a crime that, in France, can lead to a 20-year prison sentence for the perpetrator when the victim is 15 or younger.

But it initially wasn’t charged that way. When the case first went to court in September, the man faced only charges of “sexual infraction,” a crime punishable with a maximum of five years in jail and a €75,000 fine. Under French law, a charge of rape requires “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise,” even if the victims are as young as the girl in the Montmagny case. When the case, initially postponed, went back to court in February, the man’s attorneys did not deny the sexual encounter but argued that the girl had been capable of consenting. “She was 11 years and 10 months old, so nearly 12 years old,” defense lawyer Marc Goudarzian said. Sandrine Parise-Heideiger, his fellow defense lawyer, added: “We are not dealing with a sexual predator on a poor little faultless goose.”

“It is indefensible that a girl of 11 could be considered consenting with a 28-year-old man. This is shocking,” she added.

What’s less evident is how far-reaching and consequential the collapse of American-led order has been in the 15 months since Trump took office.

In multiple miserable corners of the world, where U.S. envoys and aid would normally be helping victims, deterring malevolent actors and seeking political solutions, there is a void.

Start with the Western Hemisphere

I spent years writing for conservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary magazine and working as a foreign policy adviser for three Republican presidential campaigns.

Being conservative used to be central to my identity. But now, frankly, I don’t give a damn. I prefer to think of myself as a classical liberal, because “conservative” has become practically synonymous with “Trump lackey.”

It is hard to imagine anything more cruel and heartless, but for a bottom-feeder like D’Souza it’s all in a day’s work. As he wrote in his 2002 book “Letters to a Young Conservative,” “One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.

In his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” Keynes, seeking to dispel pessimism, predicted that, “assuming no important wars and no important increase in population,” the “permanent problem of the human race” — the “struggle for subsistence” — “may be solved.”

This, Keynes warned, could discombobulate the human race’s neurological wiring, because mankind has evolved through many millennia for toil and stress. Basic “habits and instincts” are unsuitable for a future of leisure and abundance. Because we have evolved as creatures designed by nature “to strive and not to enjoy.” So, work would have to be apportioned, perhaps in three-hour shifts and 15-hour workweeks, to keep people preoccupied.

In 1943, Paul Samuelson, who would become one of America’s leading economists and win a Nobel Prize, anticipated peace with foreboding. Good things — demobilization of more than 10 million from the armed services, the economy no longer busy producing instruments of destruction — would cause bad things. There would be “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” Any economy. Ever.

la politique de transition énergétique (Energiewende), a récemment été épinglée par la cour fédérale des comptes.

le gouvernement allemand aurait "une visibilité insuffisante des conséquences financières de la transition énergétique". De plus, le partage des tâches n'étant pas clairement défini, "les ministères fédéraux mettent en place des mesures de façon non coordonnée, sans cohérence d'ensemble et avec parfois des redondances".

Les producteurs d'électricité "verte" vendent donc celle-ci au prix du marché auquel vient s'ajouter une subvention de l'État qui permet d'atteindre le prix garanti. Cette subvention est exclusivement financée par une surcharge sur la facture du consommateur final. L'opération est donc nulle pour l'État, bénéfique pour les producteurs d'énergie verte et coûteuse pour les consommateurs finaux - entreprises et particuliers

As historian Jean Edward Smith noted in “The Liberation of Paris,” the French people were less than impressed by their government’s gallant response. The political right in that country admired Hitler while the left remained unwavering pacifists throughout the war’s early stages.

Parisians so willingly “opened the gates of Paris to the German army” that the occupation proved to be “embarrassingly simple.”

it is worth remembering that France suffered more than 5 million killed and wounded during World War I. Over half of all Frenchmen mobilized for battle became casualties, and almost 4 of 10 soldiers between 19 and 22 were killed in action.

(CNN)In 2020, Women's History Month comes amid a time of social upheaval and global fear over the coronavirus pandemic and resulting political turmoil. While for many the 2020 presidential race is now an afterthought, this Women's History Month does also mark the departure of the last remaining women candidates from the 2020 presidential field -- during an election year that also marks the centennial of women's suffrage.

Here is a glimpse at those inspiring stories and figures—who they are, what they've meant to these women in the past and what they mean to them now, looking forward in 2020 and beyond. As trailblazing tennis legend Billie Jean King once said to me, "Whatever you care about, you can make a difference. You really can. Don't ever underestimate yourself. Do not underestimate the human spirit."

Madeleine Albright is the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State. She is the author of multiple books, including the shortly forthcoming "Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir."

it’s worth stepping back to remember that this is a recent development, and that the polarization of the media stems in large part from public policy decisions. Such polarization was not inevitable or in any way natural.

In the decades that followed World War II, the big three television networks dominated the news. Together with a few major metropolitan newspapers, they set the tone for the national conversation.

on virtually all these programs, journalists steered clear of a partisan perspective.

US President Trump’s decision tonight will not change the reality of the city of Jerusalem, nor will it give any legitimacy to Israel in this regard, because it is an Arab Christian and Muslim city, the capital of the eternal state of Palestine.”

Jerusalem history in which the Muslim conquerors felt themselves to be the continuation of the People of Israel.

At the beginning of the Muslim rule, not only didn’t they object to the Jews, but they saw themselves as the continuation of the Jewish people.”

In 1993, as Bill Clinton’s administration arrived jauntily promising a root-and-branch remaking of a health-care sector less complex than today’s, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) was warning: “Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance. The great strength of political conservatives at this time (and for a generation) is that they are open to the thought that matters are complex. Liberals have got into a reflexive pattern of denying this.”

Such denial breeds political recklessness in the deniers, dismay among voters and despair among people who know things. Next year, with the most complex domestic problem — health care — uppermost in many voters’ minds, denial might produce a president’s reelection.

More than a century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart predicted that widespread prosperity would forestall the development of socialism in the United States. As he memorably argued: “On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, socialist utopias founder.”

million Obama-Trump voters in the last election were motivated more by economic anxiety than racial resentment, and were attracted to Trump’s economic populism and opposition to free-trade agreements.

Sanders faces serious obstacles to obtaining the Democratic presidential nomination. The gentle treatment he received in 2016 from the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign (which ran few negative television or media ads against him) means that many Democratic voters haven’t yet learned about the distinctly non-progressive positions he has taken on certain issues throughout his senatorial career.

Janet L. Yellen, collected more than $7 million in speaking fees over the past two years from major corporations and Wall Street banks that have a keen interest in the financial policies she will oversee after her expected confirmation to lead the Treasury Department.

Ms. Yellen’s paid speaking appearances — which included $992,000 from the investment bank Citi for nine appearances — were among the lucrative payments from a range of Wall Street, Big Tech and corporate interests to three prominent prospective members of the incoming Biden administration.

Mr. Biden’s choice for secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, was paid nearly $1.2 million by a consulting firm he helped found, WestExec Advisors, where he advised a range of corporations including Facebook, Boeing, the private equity giant Blackstone and the asset management company Lazard.

The candidates visited two of the key “Blue Wall” states Mr. Trump won in 2016.

The last Saturday before Election Day offered traditional last-minute frantic campaigning in battleground states played against the backdrop of the extraordinary rancor, high stakes and sense of disruption reflecting a pandemic, an economic downturn and recurring protests and unrest at the close of Mr. Trump’s first term. The dueling schedules showed the intensity with which the two campaigns are approaching the final days of the election and illustrated differences once again in their basic approach to the worst public health crisis in a century. Mr. Biden talked about taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously, while Mr. Trump mocked his opponent for his focus on the virus and falsely accused him of favoring “deadly” lockdowns.

“You’re going to be waiting for weeks” as votes are counted, Mr. Trump declared in Newtown.

At the very moment the United States needed its public health infrastructure the most, many local health departments had all but crumbled, proving ill-equipped to carry out basic functions let alone serve as the last line of defense against the most acute threat to the nation’s health in generations.

Epidemiologists, academics and local health officials across the country say the nation’s public health system is one of many weaknesses that continue to leave the United States poorly prepared to handle the coronavirus pandemic

That system lacks financial resources. It is losing staff by the day.

What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?

there is still a host of problems with Sullivan’s question-begging argument. That includes, but is not limited to, an ignorance of selection effects—a substantial cohort of Asian Americans chose to come here and entered the United States with advanced degrees—as well as an invocation of “culture” without any awareness that this image is a construction, a contingent narrative tied to the politics and political atmosphere of the mid-20th century United States.

As historian Ellen Wu explains of these historical realities in The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority, “The United States’ battles against fascism and then Communism meant that Asiatic Exclusion, like Jim Crow, was no longer tenable.” The result, she argues, was the “entrance of Asian Americans into the national fold” and, in the 1960s, a “profound metamorphosis [of Asian Americans] into the model minority: the Asiatic who was at once a model citizen and definitely not-black

We’re increasingly encouraged to dwell on “white privilege” and “systemic racism” as key impediments, if not the key impediments, to Black progress. But we must ask just what purpose fostering white guilt serves.

Of course, there is a visceral sense of power in fostering white guilt: One has made people realize something and made them see you as deserving of recompense, as harmed and therefore owed. There can be a sense of accomplishment in just demanding that white Americans sit with past wrongs.

But presumably, the goal is to make America “a more perfect union,” as the Constitution has it. And if that’s the goal, our collective efforts to reach it presumably would be about addressing societal conditions rather than these more soul-focused endeavors.

Sixteen-year-old Helmuth Hübener couldn’t believe his ears. As he crouched in a closet in Hamburg, secretly listening to his brother’s forbidden short-wave radio, the voice of the BBC announcer painted a picture of Nazi Germany that was dramatically different from the one he had been told to believe.

Germans like Hübener, they spoke of impending victory and praised the greatness of their country. But the Germany the BBC described—and the progress of the war its reporters tracked—sounded like it was on the brink of disaster

übener’s short life was shaped by the rise of fascism in Germany. The Nazis changed nearly every facet of everyday life for Germans, and the boy was no exception. A devoted Boy Scout, he was forced to become part of the Hitler Youth, the youth arm of the Nazi Party, when the Nazis banned the organization in 1935.