How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war | News | The Gua... - 0 views
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In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
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But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
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In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power
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When Covid Hit, China Was Ready to Tell Its Version of the Story - The New York Times - 0 views
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In the fall of 2019, just before global borders closed, an international journalists’ association decided to canvass its members about a subject that kept coming up in informal conversations: What is China doing?
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What it found was astonishing in its scope. Journalists from countries as tiny as Guinea-Bissau had been invited to sign agreements with their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese government was distributing versions of its propaganda newspaper China Daily in English — and also Serbian. A Filipino journalist estimated that more than half of the stories on a Philippines newswire came from the Chinese state agency Xinhua. A Kenyan media group raised money from Chinese investors, then fired a columnist who wrote about China’s suppression of its Uyghur minority. Journalists in Peru faced intense social media criticism from combative Chinese government officials.
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What is China planning to do with this new power?
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China Is a Paper Dragon - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.
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aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”
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As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”
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Facebook and Twitter Face International Scrutiny After Trump Ban - The New York Times - 0 views
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In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Facebook kept up posts that it had been warned contributed to violence. In India, activists have urged the company to combat posts by political figures targeting Muslims. And in Ethiopia, groups pleaded for the social network to block hate speech after hundreds were killed in ethnic violence inflamed by social media.
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But last week, Facebook and Twitter cut off President Trump from their platforms for inciting a crowd that attacked the U.S. Capitol. Those decisions have angered human rights groups and activists, who are now urging the companies to apply their policies evenly, particularly in smaller countries where the platforms dominate communications.
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David Kaye, a law professor and former United Nations monitor for freedom of expression, said political figures in India, the Philippines, Brazil and elsewhere deserved scrutiny for their behavior online. But he said the actions against Mr. Trump raised difficult questions about how the power of American internet companies was applied, and if their actions set a new precedent to more aggressively police speech around the world.
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China's New Silk Road | JSTOR Daily - 0 views
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China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.
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Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.
American Imperialism: This Is When It All Began | The Nation - 0 views
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This is the fact that the American republic, based upon the doctrine that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, proposes to change the government of a distant country without asking the consent of the governed in any way whatever.
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Perhaps with the able Hawaiian representatives delivering their case in person, enough opinions would be swayed to consolidate the position of the anti-imperialist forces so that the movement toward annexation could be stopped.
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is about principles, particularly the right of a people to the government of its own choosing. Lofty, rhetorical and a little abstract, it is a sermon against the hypocrisy that enabled annexationists to ignore an inconvenient truth: “that the American republic, based upon the doctrine that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, proposes to change the government of a distant country without asking the consent of the governed in any way whatever.”
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Hard Times in the Red Dot - The American Interest - 0 views
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Deaths per million in Singapore equal about 4; the comparable U.S. figure, as of June 15, is 356.
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traits with cultural roots planted deep from experience that run through all of East Asia to one degree or another. Unlike most Americans, East Asians retain some imagination for tragedy, and that inculcates a capacity for stoicism that can be summoned when needed.
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Stoicism here wears off faster now, along with any vestigial passion for politics, in rough proportion to the burgeoning in recent decades of affluence and a culture of conspicuous consumption
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What Can History Tell Us About the World After Trump? - 0 views
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U.S. President Donald Trump largely ignores the past or tends to get it wrong.
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Whenever he leaves office, in early 2021, 2025, or sometime in between, the world will be in a worse state than it was in 2016. China has become more assertive and even aggressive. Russia, under its president for life, Vladimir Putin, carries on brazenly as a rogue state, destabilizing its neighbors and waging a covert war against democracies through cyberattacks and assassinations. In Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, a new crop of strongman rulers has emerged. The world is struggling to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and is just coming to appreciate the magnitude of its economic and social fallout. Looming over everything is climate change.
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Will the coming decades bring a new Cold War, with China cast as the Soviet Union and the rest of the world picking sides or trying to find a middle ground? Humanity survived the original Cold War in part because each side’s massive nuclear arsenal deterred the other from starting a hot war and in part because the West and the Soviet bloc got used to dealing with each other over time, like partners in a long and unhappy relationship, and created a legal framework with frequent consultation and confidence-building measures. In the decades ahead, perhaps China and the United States can likewise work out their own tense but lasting peace
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Trump's Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance - The New York Times - 1 views
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The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
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Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
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How did 9/11 change the way the world sees the United States? | History Today - 0 views
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‘With Iraq in flames, America’s standing in the world was at rock bottom’ Fawaz Gerges, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of Making the Arab World (Princeton, 2018)
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The morning after the terrorist attacks on the US, the French newspaper Le Monde ran a headline which summarised a widespread sentiment in Europe and the world at large: ‘We are all Americans.’
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There was an outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with the US worldwide, including the Middle East. Even in Iran, which had been under punishing economic siege from the US for two decades, 60,000 spectators observed a minute’s silence during a football match in Azadi Stadium and hundreds of young Iranians held a candlelit vigil in Tehran. Iranian leaders sent sympathetic messages to their American counterparts, the first official contact between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
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How Facebook Failed the World - The Atlantic - 0 views
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In the United States, Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and political polarization. It has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup at the Capitol. That much is now painfully familiar.
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these documents show that the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best. It’s the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too. It’s the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It’s also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources.
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Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world—places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence—the trade-offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.
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Opinion | A new Churchill biography wrongly leans into his faults - The Washington Post - 0 views
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“Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road,” G.K. Chesterton said, “but drawing life from them, like a root.”
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Wheatcroft seems like a single Lilliputian attempting to tie down Gulliver with a single thread. As with Jefferson, the thread will not hold. Such historical figures are more than bit players in our own morality play
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This is a historical case in which “other than that” doesn’t work. You cannot justifiably say: He was a racist — other than saving Western civilization from an endless night of racist tyranny
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Four in 10 young people fear having children due to climate crisis | Climate crisis | T... - 0 views
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Four in 10 young people around the world are hesitant to have children as a result of the climate crisis, and fear that governments are doing too little to prevent climate catastrophe, a poll in 10 countries has found.
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Nearly six in 10 young people, aged 16 to 25, were very or extremely worried about climate change, according to the biggest scientific study yet on climate anxiety and young people
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Three-quarters agreed with the statement “the future is frightening”, and more than half felt they would have fewer opportunities than their parents.
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How American Culture Ate the World: A review of "A Righteous Smokescreen" by Sam Lebovi... - 0 views
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(in 2016, the six largest Hollywood studios alone accounted for more than half of global box office sales)
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Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Jerry Seinfeld’s less-than-classic Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop).
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Compared to 66 percent of Canadians and 76 percent of U.K. citizens, only about four in 10 Americans have a passport and can therefore travel abroad.
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Corruption is getting worse in many poor countries | The Economist - 0 views
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the NGO scores countries from 0 to 100 based on perceptions of corruption in the public sector, with 100 indicating a squeaky clean record. In the latest ranking, released on January 25th, almost 70% of countries score below 50.
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Poor countries tend to do worse than rich ones, partly because poverty makes corruption worse and partly because corruption makes poverty worse.
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Some high-scoring democracies showed “significant deterioration” over the past year too—so much so that America dropped out of the 25 least corrupt countries for the first time.
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The Untold Story of 'Russiagate' and the Road to War in Ukraine - The New York Times - 0 views
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Kilimnik shared a secret plan whose significance would only become clear six years later, as Vladimir V. Putin’s invading Russian Army pushed into Ukraine.
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Known loosely as the Mariupol plan, after the strategically vital port city, it called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead. The new republic’s leader would be none other than Yanukovych. The trade-off: “peace” for a broken and subservient Ukraine.
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Trump was already suggesting that he would upend the diplomatic status quo; if elected, Kilimnik believed, Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality. First, though, he would have to win, an unlikely proposition at best. Which brought the men to the second prong of their agenda that evening — internal campaign polling data tracing a path through battleground states to victory. Manafort’s sharing of that information — the “eyes only” code guiding Trump’s strategy — would have been unremarkable if not for one important piece of Kilimnik’s biography: He was not simply a colleague; he was, U.S. officials would later assert, a Russian agent.
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Climate Anxiety | Harvard Medicine Magazine - 0 views
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A global survey published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021 reported that among an international cohort of more than 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent described themselves as very worried about the climate and nearly half said the anxiety affects their daily functioning.
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Since young people expect to live longer with climate-related crises than their parents will, “they feel grief in the face of what they’re losing,” Pinsky says.
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Young survivors of weather-related disasters report high rates of PTSD, depression, sleep deficits, and learning issues.
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Why China Is Miles Ahead in a Pacific Race for Influence - The New York Times - 0 views
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Eight years after Xi Jinping visited Fiji, offering Pacific Island nations a ride on “China’s express train of development,” Beijing is fully entrenched, its power irrepressible if not always embraced. And that has left the United States playing catch-up in a vital strategic arena.
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All over the Pacific, Beijing’s plans have become more ambitious, more visible — and more divisive. China is no longer just probing for opportunities in the island chains that played a critical role in Japan’s strategic planning before World War II
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hina is seeking to bind the vast region together in agreements for greater access to its land, seas and digital infrastructure, while promising development, scholarships and training in return.
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Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians | Cr... - 0 views
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The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”
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Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.
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It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.
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