Group items tagged

Will Italy deliver the next shock to the political establishment?

force the prime minister's resignation, spark a banking crisis and ultimately push Italy out of the eurozone

Such a scenario would require a line of political dominoes to fall in just the right way

Turkey detains 9 colonels in north Cyprus for Gulen ties

urkey's state-run news agency says nine Turkish colonels have been detained in northern Cyprus as part of the investigation into the movement allegedly responsible for a failed coup in July.

Ankara accuses the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen of masterminding the violent coup attempt and has launched a sweeping purge of his followers, arresting 41,000 people and purging more than 100,000 from government jobs. Gulen denies the claims. Earlier this week, top diplomats from Turkey, Greece and Britain met in Geneva to discuss ways of providing post-reunification security for the divided island of Cyprus.

The president of the European Parliament, a bit like the U.S. House speaker, has a sweeping ability to dictate the course of legislation that will affect the half-billion E.U. residents.

It is an easy institution to mock. Packed with 751 members, it cannot propose any legislation but can only give a stamp of approval to laws that emerge from the bureaucracy of the European Commission.

The presidency “is still one of the top five jobs that you can have in Europe,” he said. “It’s a big post and you need to respect it.”

“What are the necessary social and psychological conditions that allow populists of Hitler’s ilk to gain a mass following and attain power?”

“There are certain traits you can recognize that Hitler and Trump have in common,” Ullrich says. “I would say the egomania, the total egocentricity of both men, and the inclination to mix lies and truth – that was very characteristic of Hitler.”

Like Trump, “Hitler exploited peoples’ feelings of resentment towards the ruling elite.” He also said he would make Germany great again. Ullrich also notes both men’s talent at playing the media, making use of new technology and their propensity for stage effects.

it’s just possible that Vladimir Putin has done us a great favor. He has alerted us to the true threat of cyberwarfare in a way that — again, just possibly — might prompt us to view it as a serious national danger and begin to take effective countermeasures.

So far, cyberattacks have not endangered our economy or way of life. The breaches mainly represent a new form of crime whose costs are exasperating but manageable. The truth is that most cyberattacks fail.

A 2014 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies puts the worldwide cost of cybercrime at more than $400 billion. Although that’s a lot of money, it’s only about one-half of 1 percent of global output, estimated at $78 trillion in 2014

How Donald Trump captures the White House

The Republican Party is too badly divided. His rhetoric is too incendiary. Republican voters may be "idiots", but the general public is wiser. The US electoral map, which places a premium on winning key high-population "swing" states, is tilted against the Republican Party.

Those states - which account for 67 electoral votes - all went for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Add them to the states Republican Mitt Romney carried in 2012, and it delivers 273 electoral votes - three more than the 270 necessary to win the presidency.

Thailand is now entering its third year under military dictatorship, a reign established when generals seized power from an elected government on May 22, 2014.

The army has vowed to use its sweeping powers to heal a nation torn by class resentment.

When the army seized power two years ago, it justified its takeover by promising a wave of grand reforms. Thailand, the generals said, would become a nation purged of corruption and of the recurring, sometimes bloody street protests that have convulsed the political order for nearly a decade

When the rice shoots began to wither on Lam Thi Loi’s farm in the heart of the Mekong Delta, a usually verdant region of Vietnam, she faced a hard choice: Let them die in the parched earth, or pump salty water from the river to give them a chance.

The Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s premier rice growing region, is suffering its worst drought since French colonial administrators began recording statistics in 1926.

The increasingly dramatic effect of El Niño, the weather phenomenon that causes excessive heat and reduced rainfall in Southeast Asia, is the prime reason for the crop failures in the delta, scientists say. But it is not the only one.

s Five states expected to help Trump and Clinton widen their leads

For Republicans, the race for delegates remains a key focus, with Trump hoping to secure the 1,237 delegates needed before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.

On the Democratic side, polls in recent days suggest that Clinton could win all but one or two of the five states up for grabs —Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware — or potentially sweep the table.

Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not necessarily favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they

Hamid also thinks there’s something lacking in Western democracies, that there’s a sense of overarching meaninglessness in political and cultural life in these countries that can help explain why a young Muslim who grew up in the U.K. might feel drawn to martyrdom, for example.

it’s a note of skepticism about the promise of secular democracy—and the wisdom of pushing that model on other cultures and regions. 

US election 2016: New York primaries crucial for Clinton and Trump

New York is holding presidential primaries seen as key for both Republican and Democratic front-runners after their recent defeats.

Wins will put Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump closer to securing their nominations.

social liberalism’s sweeping victory produced new forms of backlash — less traditionalist and more populist, less religious and more rowdy, not sacred but profane. These forms of resistance take aim at liberalism’s own forms of social-justice sanctimony, which have smothered academic life and permeated notionally apolitical arenas from late-night comedy to sportswriting. The resisters don’t exactly have a program. Instead, they’ve got a posture — a “whaddya got?” rebellion against any rules that the new liberal order sets.

rebels do not necessarily have all that much in common with one another, let alone with the remainders of the religious right. The Trump-voting “deplorable” is likely to be a cultural evangelical but not a churchgoer, or a pro-choice lapsed Catholic who never cared for religious moralists. The typical “manosphere” denizen is something else entirely — younger, tech-savvy, impious, impressed with his own unblinking Darwinism. As constituent parts of cultural conservatism, these groups don’t form a particularly coherent whole; what unites them are common fears (feminism, political correctness, sometimes Islam), not a common cause.

America is becoming more like Europe, where conservatism has been less than religious for some time, and the cultural right has long had a fractured and incoherent quality. (Consider France’s National Front, which draws support from Catholic traditionalists, ex-Communist workingmen and secular — and gay — voters who fear Islam’s encroachments.)

There’s no topic that Trump can’t bring back around to himself, no cause as compelling as his own. And while I and many others have examined his outsize egomania before, its migration into his administration can’t be noted too often or overstated.

It’s everything. It drives policy. It warps diplomacy. And it badly hobbles his leadership, because you can’t inspire others if nearly all of your energy goes so transparently and unabashedly into inflating yourself. At the least you have to do a pantomime of altruism and self-effacement. Trump seldom even tries.

The larger one is that when you’re selling a revolution and convincing yourself of it, you’re obliged to scale your actions to your exaggerations. They must be as sweeping as the supposed circumstances — it’s central to the delusion, integral to the illusion. Hence the wall. Hence the immigration ban. Hence all the executive orders signed and still to come.

President Trump’s sweeping new immigration policies — which include efforts to shine a harsh national spotlight on cities that released undocumented immigrants who went on to be accused of serious crimes — are sharply increasing the legal and political risks confronting local law enforcement officials.

That kind of public-relations warfare is almost certain to escalate. This week, the Department of Homeland Security ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release weekly reports of crimes committed by immigrants who were the subjects of detainer requests that went ignored.

Paul Ryan’s Misguided Sense of Freedom

In his first address to Congress, President Trump made many sweeping pledges, but one of them was familiar to anyone who listened to him campaign. He said that he was “calling on this Congress to repeal and replace Obamacare” and demanding “reforms that expand choice, increase access, lower costs and, at the same time, provide better health care.”

That’s a lot to promise, and Republicans have thus far been unable to get on the same page about how to repeal the Affordable Care Act and what should take its place. But Mr. Trump is not the one who has to deliver on it. It falls to House Speaker Paul Ryan to rally the troops.

“That’s not who we are.” So said President Obama, again and again throughout his administration, in speeches urging Americans to side with him against the various outrages perpetrated by Republicans.

If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.

This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.