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Javier E

Aide to Md. lawmaker fabricated article on fraudulent votes for Clinton - The Washingto... - 0 views

  • Del. David E. Vogt III (R-Frederick) said he terminated Cameron Harris “on the spot” after learning that he was the ­mastermind behind Christian­TimesNewspaper.com and its fabricated Sept. 30 article, which reported that there were tens of thousands of “fraudulent Clinton votes found” in an Ohio ­warehouse.
  • Harris, who graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina in May, had worked for the Republican delegate since June. He did not return a call for comment, but he apologized in a Twitter post to “those disappointed by my actions” and called for a “larger dialogue about how Americans approach the media” and other issues.
  • Harris told the Times that he created fake news to earn money. After investing $5 for the domain name, he earned about $22,000 in online advertising revenue.
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  • In an interview with the Times, Harris expressed guilt for spreading lies but also a sense of pride in doing it so well.
  • “At first it kind of shocked me — the response I was getting,” he said. “How easily people would believe. It was almost like a sociological experiment.”
Javier E

Confessions of a Columnist - The New York Times - 0 views

  • a year ago, I imagined that conservatism was sclerotic but ideologically committed, and that liberalism was wrong about the world but pretty good at fearmongering and voter targeting. But my intellect and experience were wrong, and Trump’s Napoleonic intuitions were correct: The Republicans were all low-energy men underneath, and the liberal elites were as vulnerable to him as the Cameron Tories and Blairites were to Brexit.
wgatti

UK isn't welcoming Donald Trump with open arms - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • UK isn't welcoming Donald Trump with open arms
  • Presidential candidates have long used foreign travel to project a statesman-like image, burnish their foreign policy credentials, divert an unpleasant media storyline or take a break from the hyper-vigilant coverage at home.
  • But for every triumph, there are often pitfalls.
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  • While then-presidential candidate Barack Obama basked in the roaring approval of 200,000 Berliners in 2008
  • Trump, who has drawn support from some conservative European politicians, has already ruffled feathers in the UK with statements he's made during his campaign. His comments about Mexicans and Muslims have affected the fortunes of the Turnberry golf course and hotel he'll visit June 24 and drew a rebuke from Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has already announced she won't meet Trump when he comes this month.
  • Cameron had already described Trump's suggestion for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. as "divisive, stupid and wrong."
  • His comments, as well as Trump's labeling Mexicans entering the U.S. "rapists," also seemed to hurt the fortunes of the Turnberry golf resort that Trump bought in 2014 for some $50 million and then spent almost $290 million renovatin
  • The British newspaper The Independent reported that following the candidate's comments on Mexicans and Muslims, a group that governs golf in the UK decided not to go forward with a plan to return a prestigious tournament to Turnberry in 2020.
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    Trump has some conservative support in Europe however most don't support him. It will be interesting to see how this affects our relationship with other countries of he becomes president, especially with the UK. 
Javier E

Scathing report on Blair's Iraq War role prompts contrition, defiance and a reckoning -... - 0 views

  • With exacting detail, the report catalogues a succession of failures.
  • British intelligence painted a flawed picture of Iraqi military capacity, with agencies never doubting the existence of WMDs. In fact, the report concluded, Iraq posed “no imminent threat” to Britain. In making their case to the public, Blair and other British officials described the case against Hussein “with a certainty that was not justified.”
  • In their private deliberations, they ignored warnings that the invasion of Iraq could be a boon to Islamist extremists. Groups such as al-Qaeda gained key footholds amid Iraq’s chaos, and militant offshoots later became the foundation for the Islamic State
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  • The British relied almost exclusively on their American counterparts for postwar planning, then failed to deliver the manpower and resources needed to make good on promises to transform Iraq into a functioning, stable democracy.
  • Yet he stood firm on the question of whether he had deceived the public, saying he had taken the country to war “in good faith,” and that the report had validated his contention that “there were no lies” from his government.
  • Speaking in the House of Commons, Cameron urged politicians to learn the lessons of the inquiry, the first being that “taking the country to war should always be a last resort.”
  • The report does not have a direct bearing on the country’s current political chaos, but it is likely to revive for many Britons memories of a rush to war that has come to epitomize betrayal by the nation’s elites. The cynicism of British voters that the Iraq War helped to spawn was on display last month, when many seemed to blithely ignore the warnings of experts that a British exit from the E.U. could spark economic and political chaos.
  • the reaction in Iraq was relatively muted among people too focused on daily survival to worry about another report documenting the West’s failures in their country. After 13 years of violence, the war to depose Hussein hardly seems worth it even to those who celebrated his fall. world europe Get 2016 Olympics updates by email Our best news and analysis from Rio, delivered to your inbox. post_newsletter333 magnet-olympics2016 true endOfArticle false
Javier E

The Austerity Agenda - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • why is Britain doing exactly what it shouldn’t? Unlike the governments of, say, Spain or California, the British government can borrow freely, at historically low interest rates. So why is that government sharply reducing investment and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger
  • I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.
  • The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?
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  • The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.
  • So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.
  • these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria.
  • there’s a clear moral to this story: When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.
  • when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”
  • The great American economist Irving Fisher explained it all the way back in 1933, summarizing what he called “debt deflation” with the pithy slogan “the more the debtors pay, the more they owe.
  • So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.
  • The big question here is whether the evident failure of austerity to produce an economic recovery will lead to a “Plan B.” Maybe. But my guess is that even if such a plan is announced, it won’t amount to much. For economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it. And it still is.
Javier E

Niall Ferguson: Great Britain Saves Itself by Rejecting the EU - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • This, in sum, is the founding charter of the United States of Europe. Notice two problems however. First, it is not clear how the European Commission, Council, and Court can act in this way, policing a 23-member fiscal union that is not covered by any treaty. Second, the balanced-budget rule is nuts. As it stands, it’s a recipe for excessive rigidity in fiscal policy
  • In the past few months, incompetent leadership has brought the euro-zone economy, and with it the world economy, to the edge of a precipice strongly reminiscent of 1931. Then, as now, it proved impossible to arrive at sane debt restructurings for overburdened sovereigns. Then, as now, bank failures threatened to bring about a complete economic collapse. Then, as now, an excessively rigid monetary system (then the gold standard, now the euro) served to worsen the situation.
  • For some time it has been quite obvious that the only way to save the monetary union is to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s. That means, first, massive quantitative easing (bond purchases) by the European Central Bank to bring down the interest rates (yields) currently being paid by the Mediterranean governments; second, restructuring to reduce the absolute debt burdens of these governments; third, the creation of a new fiscal mechanism that transfers resources on a regular basis from the core to the periphery; and finally the recapitalization of the ailing banks of the euro zone.
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  • the euro zone is about to repeat history. In the absence of sufficient resources for the new federal model, the new rules about budgets (and bank capital) are going to lead to pro-cyclical fiscal and monetary policies, deepening rather than alleviating the economic contraction we are witnessing.
  • if David Cameron can succeed in isolating Britain from the disaster that is unfolding on the continent, he deserves only our praise.
  • Last month I warned that the disintegration of the European Union was more likely than the death of the euro. You now see what I meant. The course on which the continent has now embarked means not just the creation of a federal Europe, but a chronically depressed federal Europe. The Eurocrats have exchanged a Stability and Growth Pact—which was honored only in the breach—for an Austerity and Contraction Pact they intend to stick to. The United Kingdom has no option but to dissociate itself from this collective suicide pact, even if it strongly increases the probability that we shall end up outside the EU altogether.
julia rhodes

Britain Orders Inquiry Into Muslim Brotherhood - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered an inquiry into the activities in Britain of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most prominent Islamic organizations, to determine in part whether it is using London as a base for planning extremist attacks following the military crackdown in Egypt, officials and media reports said on Tuesday.
  • “Given the concerns now being expressed about the group and its alleged links to violent extremism, it’s absolutely right and prudent that we get a better handle of what the Brotherhood stands for, how they intend to achieve their aims and what that means for Britain,”
  • Word of the inquiry first emerged in The Times of London, which said leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood met in London last year to plan their response to Mr. Morsi’s overthrow.
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  • The issue of foreign extremists using London as a base is particularly sensitive here. In the days surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the intelligence agencies of some other European countries derisively labeled the British capital Londonistan — a reference to the ease with which Islamic militants were able to operate there.
  • Since Mr. Morsi was overthrown, jihadists operating mostly in the northern Sinai have carried out hundreds of bombings, assassinations and at least one attack using a rocket-propelled grenade.
  • The British inquiry followed behind-the-scenes pressure from Egypt and Saudi Arabia for Britain to outlaw the organization — but an official said the aim of the inquiry was “not about establishing evidence to proscribe” the group. Mr. Morsi, along with hundreds of his followers, is facing trial in Egypt on an array of charges.Last month, when Saudi Arabia branded the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, the group’s response came in a statement from its London office, which said it was surprised and distressed by the Saudi decree.
Javier E

The Center-Right Moment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • there are a few broader trends to be observed. The first is that the cutting-edge, progressive economic arguments do not seem to be swaying voters.
  • Over the past few years, left-of-center economic policy has moved from opportunity progressivism to redistributionist progressivism. Opportunity progressivism is associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s and Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago today. This tendency actively uses government power to give people access to markets, through support for community colleges, infrastructure and training programs and the like, but it doesn’t interfere that much in the market and hesitates before raising taxes.
  • The conservative victories probably have more to do with the public’s skepticism about the left than with any positive enthusiasm toward the right.
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  • Redistributionist progressivism more aggressively raises taxes to shift money down the income scale, opposes trade treaties and meddles more in the marketplace. This tendency has won elections in Massachusetts (Elizabeth Warren) and New York City (Bill de Blasio) but not in many other places. Ed Balls, the No. 2 figure in the Labour Party in Britain, co-led the group from the Center for American Progress that wrote the most influential statement of modern progressivism, a report on “inclusive prosperity.” Balls could not even retain his own parliamentary seat in the last election.
  • First, they have loudly (and sometimes offensively) championed national identity
  • there are a few things center-right parties have done successfully.
  • Second, they have been basically sensible on fiscal policy
  • Third, these leaders did not overread their mandate. Cameron in Britain promised to cut the size of government, and he did, from 45.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2010 to 40.7 percent today,
  • But he made these cuts without going overboard. Public satisfaction with government services has gone up. And there have been some sensible efforts to boost those at the bottom. As The Economist pointed out, “The richest 10 percent have borne the greatest burden of extra taxes. Full-time workers earning the minimum wage pay a third as much income tax as in 2010. Overall, inequality has not widened — in contrast to America.”
  • Cameron’s win suggests the kind of candidate that would probably do well in a general election in this country. He is liberal on social policy, green on global warming and pragmatically conservative on economic policy. If he’s faulted for anything, it is for not being particularly ideological, though he has let his ministers try some pretty bold institutional reforms to modernize the welfare state.
  • Globally, voters are disillusioned with large public institutions. They seem to want to reassert local control and their own particular nationalism (Scottish or anything else). But they also seem to want a slightly smaller public sector, strong welfare state reform and more open and vibrant labor markets as a path to prosperity.
Javier E

Netanyahu Makes Quick Pivot From Loss on Iran Deal - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Though Mr. Obama this spring threatened in international forums to revisit the United States’ longstanding defense of Israel against Palestinian moves, many experts now see that as unlikely. With the president having secured a legacy-defining foreign policy achievement with Iran, the world focused on the refugee crisis and the rise of the Islamic State, and Palestinian internal politics in turmoil, the long-shot prospects for progress on peace do not seem worth the political risk as the 2016 presidential campaign intensifies.
  • Mr. Netanyahu has already started saying things his allies like to hear. After his session on Thursday with David Cameron, the British prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu said he was ready to meet with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank even though it is “a nightmare for my security people.”“I’m willing right now, without any preconditions, any preconditions whatsoever, to sit down with President Abbas and negotiate this peace,”
jlessner

Who Qualifies for 'Asylum'? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Greeks allowed slaves who ran away from abusive masters and even some criminals to seek sanctuary in certain temples; ‘‘asylum’’ comes from their word for inviolable.
  • The right of asylum might seem as culturally embedded as the ruins of one of the old temples.
  • Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain invoked insects when he warned of a ‘‘swarm’’ of ‘‘illegal migrants.’
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  • The modern right to asylum has roots in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Maria Delzi

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

  • 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.
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  • 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.
jlessner

In Cold Political Terms, Far Right and French President Both Gain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Amid the horrors of the last week, François Hollande is widely judged to have kept his calm, acted decisively and spoken the words of condemnation, defiance and unity expected of a French president, who by tradition is called on to embody the nation.
  • But no one expects this mood of solidarity to last very long; indeed, the attacks have already sharpened his clash with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Mr. Hollande remains the most unpopular French president since World War II. He is troubled by a weak economy, high unemployment and an underlying atmosphere of anxiety and even fear, among both Muslims and Jews, about the impact of homegrown Islamic radicalism.
  • “Hollande has been extremely good in this crisis, showing calm and self-control, and using all the right words,” said Alain Frachon, an editorial writer for Le Monde. “If we do a cold, cynical political analysis, he did rather well. Afterwards, of course, all these questions will be raised about security failures and the future.”
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  • The homegrown terrorism here, with its apparent links to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, will also be used by other far-right, nationalist and anti-immigration movements in Europe, from the United Kingdom Independence Party to the Sweden Democrats and Germany’s Pegida — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. That is another reason so many European leaders from the mainstream parties of the center right and center left, from Angela Merkel of Germany to David Cameron of Britain and Mariano Rajoy of Spain, came to show their own solidarity with France and Mr. Hollande.Continue reading the main story Invitees also included the leaders of all the main French political par
rachelramirez

Pentagon Says 'Jihadi John' Was Probably Killed in Airstrike - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Pentagon Says ‘Jihadi John’ Was Probably Killed in Airstrike
  • in a debate that paralleled the criticism over the Obama administration’s decision to target and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric and a United States citizen, in Yemen in 2011.
  • The leader of this network was Bilal al-Berjawi, who was stripped of his British citizenship in 2011 after he went to Somalia to join the Islamist group known as the Shabab, and was killed by an American drone strike the next year.
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  • Britain is not formally taking part in military action in Syria — its Parliament having rejected such an intervention two years ago — but Britain and France are involved in the American-led air campaign against Islamic State targets.
Javier E

Barring of British Muslim Family Flying to Disneyland Touches Nerve - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group in Washington, said Wednesday that it had asked the Department of Homeland Security to investigate whether its officials had “implemented informally” Mr. Trump’s proposal.
  • That request came amid signs that a number of British Muslims had been stopped without explanation at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick Airports in recent days — not just the 11-member Mahmood family, which was abruptly denied permission to board a Los Angeles-bound jetliner at Gatwick on Dec. 15.
  • Ajmal Masroor, a prominent British imam who has spoken out against Islamic extremism, said on Facebook on Wednesday that he was barred from boarding a flight at Heathrow on Dec. 17 by an American diplomatic official who gave no explanation.
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  • Daniel Hetlage, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection unit of the United States Department of Homeland Security, declined to discuss the specifics of any case, but he denied that religion was a factor in deciding who could enter.
  • An applicant to enter the United States “must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility,” Mr. Hetlage’s statement said, adding that there were more than 60 such grounds, “including health-related, prior criminal convictions, security reasons, public charge, labor certification, illegal entrants and immigration violations, documentation requirements, and miscellaneous grounds.” The statement did not indicate which grounds, if any, caused the British family to be denied entry.
  • The Guardian quoted Mohammad Tariq Mahmood, a member of the family stopped at Gatwick last week, saying, “It’s because of the attacks on America — they think every Muslim poses a threat.”
redavistinnell

EU referendum: Leaving EU 'big gamble' for UK security - BBC News - 0 views

  • EU referendum: Leaving EU 'big gamble' for UK security
  • David Cameron will face MPs later as he presents his case for the UK remaining within the 28-member organisation.But Mayor of London Boris Johnson has again insisted that the country has a "great future" outside the EU.
  • The prime minister will outline details to MPs in a Commons statement, starting at 15.30 GMT, of last week's deal with EU leaders on reforms to the terms of the UK's membership, which paved the way for him to call a referendum on EU membership on 23 June.
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  • He rejected claims by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, one of six Cabinet ministers campaigning for the UK to leave the EU, that the UK's membership actually exposed it to greater security risks, pointing out that the EU had taken the lead in confronting Russia over its annexation of Crimea and Iran over its nuclear programme.
  • "It is through the EU that you exchange criminal records and passenger records and work together on counter-terrorism...We need the collective weight of the EU when you are dealing with Russian aggression or terrorism. You need to be part of these big partnerships."
  • It is less than 48 hours since the referendum date was announced, but already the campaigning is in full swing. The leave campaign has been given a major boost by Boris Johnson, who says the only way to change the EU is to vote to go.
  • In a 2,000-word column for the Daily Telegraph, Mr Johnson said staying inside the union would lead to "an erosion of democracy".
  • "There is only one way to get the change we need - and that is to vote to go; because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says no," he wrote.
  • Several other senior Tories - including Justice Secretary Michael Gove - have already said they will join the Out campaign.
  • Leaving his home in north London, Mr Johnson said his immediate focus was his remaining time in City Hall and there would be plenty of time to discuss the issue of Europe, and the UK's "great future" outside it, over the next four months.
  • The prime minister, who argues EU membership offers more power to the UK, will take his case to the Commons this afternoon.
  • However, his father, Stanley Johnson, told BBC Radio 5 live he disagreed with his son's argument.He denied Mr Johnson's decision had been a "career move", saying he had "completely thrown away" any chance of a post inside Mr Cameron's cabinet by aligning himself against the prime minister.
  • The prime minister announced the date of the in/out referendum outside Number 10 on Saturday, having returned from agreeing a deal in Brussels that he argued gave the UK a "special status" within the EU.
jongardner04

Europe hates Trump. Does it matter? - BBC News - 0 views

  • Europe hates Trump. Does it matter?
  • This is America's choice, not anyone else's. How would British voters feel if Texans weighed in on Brexit? This time, however, the international reaction to Donald Trump is so forceful and so unanimous in its condemnation that it is worth drawing attention to.
  • Back in 2004, Europeans assumed that their own well-publicised opposition to President Bush's Iraq war would make it harder for him to get re-elected. In fact, anti-Americanism had the opposite effect
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  • That same year, Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper ran a public campaign targeting a critical county in Ohio with a letter-writing blitz, urging people there to vote for John Kerry.
  • It was a bid to give foreigners a say in the US presidential election. Clark County was a swing district in a swing state; in 2000 Al Gore won the area by a narrow margin.
  • In 2008 of course the world rallied firmly behind Barack Obama. Two hundred thousand people turned out to see the candidate in Berlin before the election. Italian trattorias started a roaring trade in Obama pizzas, a curious, un-Italian mix of ham and pineapple toppings.
  • So, what does the world make of Donald Trump? Mr Trump has some admirers in Europe. A few on the extreme end of the political spectrum like his tough line on immigration. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French National Front, said if he were American he'd vote Trump.
  • What really matters is whether the 6-10% of voters in the middle of the American political spectrum, the people who actually decide elections here, are swayed by global opinion. And they may be, for two reasons.
  • middle-class and working-class people have been neglected by the existing political establishment,
  • There are echoes of Trumpism in the nationalist parties of Britain, Denmark, Netherlands, Greece as well as France.
  • Here's a sample of the public disapproval. Germany's Der Spiegel has called Trump the most dangerous man in the world. Britain's David Cameron says his plan to ban Muslims is divisive and unhelpful.
  • The French liberal newspaper Liberation has described him as a nightmare turned reality. JK Rowling tweeted that he's worse than Voldemort
  • Will the international reaction make a shred of difference to Trump's chances of getting nominated and then elected? 2004 would suggest not.
  • But the voices of support are drowned out by almost universal condemnation. When it comes to Trump, Europe is apoplectic. Fascinated, but appalled.
  • Invoking global opinion in the context of US elections is a fool's errand. Perfectly understandably, voters in Paris, Pennsylvania, really don't give a damn what voters in Paris, France, think about their political choices. And why should they?
  • At the time, a local newspaper editor told the BBC that it was the well-publicised letter campaign that lost it for the Democrats. It will go down in history as one of the biggest fiascos in foreign meddling.
  • Imagine if your much-respected but slightly annoying older sibling (the US) came home with a fantastically unsuitable date (Trump). Part of you is titillated but part of you is appalled, thinking, "Oh my God, this could go horribly wrong." After Super Tuesday, Europe is fast moving from the former to the latter.
  • Although America still feels under siege from Islamic extremism, American troops are not being killed in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporting Bush was in some ways a proxy for supporting those soldiers.
  • It's hard to know at this stage what impact foreign opinion will have in this race, but it's fairly clear the world is not going to suddenly fall in love with the man Republicans are rapidly choosing to be their candidate for the White House.
qkirkpatrick

Trump's Il Duce Routine - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Europe, the soil on which Fascism took root, is watching the rise of Donald Trump with dismay. Contempt for the excesses of America is a European reflex, but when the United States seems tempted by a latter-day Mussolini, smugness in London, Paris and Berlin gives way to alarm.
  • It’s not just that Trump retweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” It’s not just that Trump refuses to condemn David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who has expressed support for him. It’s not just that violence is woven into Trump’s language as indelibly as the snarl woven into his features — the talk of shooting somebody or punching a protester in the face, the insulting of the disabled, the macho mockery of women, the anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. It’s not just that he could become Silvio Berlusconi with nukes.
  • Trump is telling people something is rotten in the state of America. The message resonates because the rot is there.
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  • Trump is a man repeatedly underestimated by the very elites who made Trumpism possible. He’s smarter than most of his belittlers, and quicker on his feet, which makes him only more dangerous.
  • He’s the anti-Obama, all theater where the president is all prudence, the mouth-that-spews to the presidential teleprompter, rage against reason, the backslapper against the maestro of aloofness, the rabble-rouser to the cerebral law professor, the deal maker to the diligent observer.
  • The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has tweeted that Trump “fuels hatred.” In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has attacked Trump’s proposed ban on non-American Muslims entering the United States, and more than half a million people have signed a petition urging that he be kept out of Britain. This weekend Britain's Sunday Times ran a page-size photo of Trump in Lord Kitchener pose with a blaring headline:
  • As Europe knows, democracies do die. Often, they are the midwives of their own demise. Once lost, the cost of recovery is high.
Javier E

The Suicide Clusters at Palo Alto High Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The rich middle- and high-school kids Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm.
  • They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average
  • The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania warns of the dangers of insisting that admission to an elite college is necessary for a successful life.
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  • One of the two major causes of distress, Luthar found, was the “pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits.”
  • From their answers, Luthar constructed a profile of elite American adolescents whose self-worth is tied to their achievements and who see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don’t meet the highest standards of success.
  • Middle-class kids, she told me, generally do not live with the expectation that they should go to Stanford or earn $200,000 a year. “If I’ve never been to the moon,” she said of middle-class families, “why would I expect my kids to go there?” The yardstick for the children of the meritocratic elite is different, and it can intimidate as much as it can empower.
  • The second major cause of distress that Luthar identified was perhaps more surprising: Affluent kids felt remarkably isolated from their parents.
  • The kids in the affluent communities she studied felt their parents to be no more available to them, either emotionally or physically, than the kids in severe poverty did.
  • Some of the measures Luthar used were objective: Did the family eat dinner together, or hang out in the evenings? Here, she discovered that some busy parents would leave adolescents alone in the afternoon and evening and often weren’t home at all during those hours
  • Children had the sense that their parents monitored their activities and cared deeply about how they were spending their time, but that didn’t translate into feeling close. Many children felt they were being prodded toward very specific goals and behaviors by parental cues, some subtle, some less so.
  • a feeling of closeness to parents was inversely linked to household income, meaning that the most-affluent kids felt the most alienated.
  • In the past couple of years, other best sellers have sounded a similar note. William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor who contributes to this magazine, argues in Excellent Sheep that elite education “manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.”
  • But it turns out that this combination can be just as hard on a child’s well-being.
  • Since Levine wrote The Price of Privilege, she’s watched the stress in the Bay Area and in affluent communities all over the country become more pervasive and more acute.
  • Now, she reports, the teenagers have no sense of agency. They still complain bitterly about all the same things, but they feel they have no choice.
  • Many have also fallen prey to what Levine calls a “mass delusion” that there is but one path to a successful life, and that it is very narrow
  • Adolescents no longer typically identify parents or peers as the greatest source of their stress, Levine says. They point to school. But that itself may suggest a submission of sorts—the unquestioned adoption of parental norms.
  • Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.
  • The meeting she attended with select parents, scholars, mental-health professionals, and community leaders was academically rigorous and yielded many important insights. But it was “eerie” in its almost complete lack of feeling
  • “There are a lot of very hard truths that are just not being spoken.”
  • Gunn is more than 40 percent Asian, and some non-Asian parents, particularly ones who’d grown up in town when the Asian population was smaller, felt the shift was poisoning the culture of the entire school.
  • Her first semester, Chiu got an F on a geometry test, which “totally traumatized me.” Her relationship with her parents started to fray, “because it just took too much energy to speak in a polite tone of voice.” She began to dread swim practice and even Girl Scouts and band, “but I didn’t want to be a quitter.” She remembers wishing that someone had broken up with her, or that she was anorexic, or that she had some reason to explain to her parents why she felt so sad. “I also felt like I was already saying that I was too stressed, and nobody—neither my parents nor my teachers—seemed to care or take me seriously.
  • well-educated parents are quick to distance themselves from the Tiger Mom. We might admire her children’s accomplishments, but we tend to believe these can be coaxed out of a child through applause, not scolding. In fact, this particular combination of lavish praise and insistence on achievement defines our era of protective, meritocratic parenting
  • In March, after spending two days among Palo Alto’s parents and civic leaders, Luthar came to see the community, still in shock over the suicides, as hovering somewhere between fear and denial.
  • Providing praise and love when a child performs especially well can look like healthy parenting, he says, because the parents are giving the child more of a good thing. But if praise comes only when a child succeeds, the child is likely to develop a sense that his or her parents’ affection depends upon good grades, or touchdowns, or mastery of a religious text, or whatever the parents’ priorities might be.
  • The aim of healthy parenting, Assor says, should not be to shower children only with praise and trophies, or to encourage self-esteem based on no real achievements. It should be to disentangle love from the project of parental or pedagogical guidance
  • Giving specific, positive feedback about something a child has tried hard at, or critical yet constructive feedback when a child fails, is perfectly appropriate. “But being warm and nice is a different matter,” he says. “We want to be nice and warm also when our kids do not achieve and when they do not try hard to achieve.”
  • The hope is that, secure in love, a child can experiment more freely and begin to find his or her own voice.
  • With the help of therapists and time, Chiu could better explain what she had experienced—depression, the dangers of not sleeping enough. She learned that her idea that she could escape by manufacturing a mental-health crisis was itself a sign of a mental-health crisis.
  • Not atypically for people who come to consider suicide, she’d lost her ability to think clearly or solve problems, and ended up trapped in a tunnel ruminating about escape, until self-destruction became the only light she could see.
  • Almost by definition, suicide points to underlying psychological vulnerability. The thinking behind it is often obsessive and then impulsive; a kid can be ruminating about the train for a long time and then one night something ordinary—a botched quiz, a breakup—leads him or her to the tracks.
  • the closer I got to the heart of this story, the less I felt I understood that link. Some details neatly fit the narrative that academic pressure has caused lethal amounts of stress in Palo Alto—Taylor Chiu’s experience, for example. Will Dickens, who died in 2009, had a learning disability, and his mother, Janet Dixon-Dickens, told me he never forgot it at Gunn. Cameron Lee, on the other hand, wasn’t obviously oppressed by schoolwork, and neither was J.P. Blanchard, or Sonya Raymakers, a girl who died in June 2009, soon after being accepted into her dream program at New York University.
  • In these days of assumed meritocracy, where children can be turned into anything, we admire them as displays of remarkable engineering, to be tweaked and fine-tuned into bilingual perfection. What we’ve lost, perhaps, is a sense that there may be things about them we can’t know or understand, and that that mysterious quality, separate from us, is what we should marvel at.
  • Admitting we don’t entirely know why teenagers kill themselves isn’t an invitation to do nothing to prevent it from happening. It’s just a call for humility, a short pause to acknowledge that a sense of absolute certainty about what children should do or be or how they should operate is part of what landed us here.
alexdeltufo

Militarism and Humiliation Cast Shadow on Germany - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Might, militarism and humiliation: These are the memories that make Germans today reluctant to project their clout as, once again, Europe’s economic powerhouse. One hundred years on from World War I, German leadership in Europe is both desired and resented, a historically rooted ambivalence that is keenly felt by the Germans and by their wary neighbors.
  • Today, with nationalism and populism on the rise in Europe, Ms. Merkel is central in trying to untangle a tussle over European leadership that may hasten a British exit from the European Union, and she faces demands from two other major partners, France and Italy, to relax stringent budgetary demands.
  • Paradoxically, it was development on land that helped bolster the importance of this natural deep-sea port.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • under Otto von Bismarck and then the kaiser. Numbers alone tell a story: In 1870, as Bismarck unified Germany, Kiel had around 30,000 inhabitants.
  • Always calm, she brooked little criticism and brushed aside anti-German sentiment as she pushed to impose austerity on supposedly profligate European neighbors.
  • When he learned of the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Hapsburg Empire, he hastened to Berlin.
  • Britain and France were alarmed by Wilhelm’s ambition. Britain’s determination to keep its navy supreme only heightened German anxieties, already running high because the kaiser felt beleaguered on two fronts.
  • Wilhelm poured torrents of money into the German Navy. In 1906, Britain’s Royal Navy took delivery of H.M.S. Dreadnought, with its groundbreaking armament of big guns. Wilhelm
  • Naval historians, however, tend to accord more significance to Germany’s U-boats, which were responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, for instance, eventually helping to draw the United States into Europe’s Great War.
  • Wilhelm’s proud Naval Academy, for instance, is now the parliamentary seat of Schleswig-Holstein, the state of which Kiel is the capital.
  • The other is the Flandernbunker, or Flanders bunker, built outside the main surviving military base here. Its name stems from a Nazi campaign to
  • The location was the memorial built for the World War I sailors. It is a tower and flamelike structure of reinforced concrete with an outer layer of north German brick, soaring nearly 300 feet above the coast at Laboe, where
  • there are 200,000 a year — confront a 1936 glass tableau of sailors’ lives on ship and shore, in which a still-discernible swastika has replaced the sun.
  • Mr. Witt and his associates believe that the memorial can carry a message of peace. Standing in a hall that shows every German ship lost in the two world wars, the 35,000 German sailors lost in World War I a
  •  
    Alison Smale
sgardner35

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

  • 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.
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  • 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
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