“On July 7, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to “ensure ratification” of Sweden’s application to join NATO in Turkey’s parliament, according to NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg.
This deal comes amid additional reports of acquiescence to Turkish demands, including Swedish support for the country’s European Union (E.U.) accession process and the U.S. working to provide Turkey with $20 billion worth of F-16s and 79 modernization kits for existing aircraft.
Joining NATO requires each of its 30 member states to vote in favor of Sweden’s accession, allowing Turkey to hold the process hostage.
“Turkey has a weak hand to play in all of this, but they’ve tried to play it to the point where they can extract the most out of this situation,” says James Ryan, director of research and Middle East programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “I really think there’s an understanding between Biden and Erdogan that it’s a quid pro quo, and probably the Swedish accession will go through and the sale will go through shortly thereafter.”
Since confirming their intention to join NATO over a year ago, Sweden has had to conform to Turkey’s complaints—which include claims that Sweden harbors member of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), issues with anti-Islam protests in Sweden, and the lack of arms exports—to gain its support for joining the alliance.
To accommodate these concerns, Sweden has passed a new stricter anti-terror law, extradited a supporter of the PKK, and reversed a ban on exporting military equipment to Turkey. “Sweden has amended its constitution, changed its laws, significantly expanded its counterterrorism cooperation against the PKK, and resumed arms exports to [Turkey],” said Stoltenberg in a press release.”
“Two theories may explain why the biggest shift in Trump’s favorability rating happened after Trump was charged with mishandling of classified material. For one, it is the only crime (so far) that was not known before this year. The Wall Street Journal reported on the hush money payments way back in 2018, and the events surrounding efforts to overturn the 2020 election played out mostly in public, with lots of the evidence presented in the Justice Department’s indictment initially reported by U.S. media outlets and documented in a report from the House of Representatives last year. And while there was some reporting on Trump’s legal efforts to hold onto classified material, including wall-to-wall coverage of a 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago conducted as part of the investigation, the unsealing of Trump’s indictment for maintaining classified documents after he left the White House represented the first time the breadth of the prosecution’s allegations became clear.
That case also deals with matters of national security, which are important both to the average American and average Republican.”
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“Trump’s indictments for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, meanwhile, could have additional political costs, particularly if he wins the Republican nomination. GOP primary voters might not care about allegations of interference, but general election voters are another story: Two studies of election results in the 2022 midterms found that the Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives who received endorsements from Trump or voiced support for his election denialism performed worse than Republican House candidates who did not. In a CBS/YouGov poll conducted Aug. 2-4, a majority of adults said the indictments against Trump were “upholding the rule of law” (57 percent) and an effort to “defend democracy” (52 percent), although more than half also said the indictments and investigations were trying to stop the Trump campaign (59 percent).
And of course, these are just the indictments. Potential fallout from the trials for each series of charges (which could start as soon as January) could be even more significant. Not only will the public see an actual prosecution, Trump will also be forced to divert focus from running for president to appear in court — which could distract from his campaign.”
“When governments try to stop people from consuming politically disfavored intoxicants, they make consumption of those substances more dangerous by creating a black market in which purity and potency are highly variable and unpredictable.”
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“Iran’s ban on alcohol consumption by Muslims forces drinkers to rely on illicit sources that sell iffy and possibly poisonous liquor. In a legal market, people who buy distilled spirits do not have to worry about methanol contamination.”
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“Fentanyl is much more potent than heroin, so it is easier to smuggle, and can be produced much more cheaply and inconspicuously since it does not require opium poppies. Xylazine has similar advantages: It is an inexpensive synthetic drug that can be produced without crops. And unlike fentanyl, it is not classified as a controlled substance, so it is easier to obtain.
The emergence of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute made potency even harder to predict. The consequences can be seen in record numbers of drug-related deaths.
The government aggravated that situation by restricting the supply of legally produced, reliably dosed opioids, which drove nonmedical users toward more dangerous substitutes and left bona fide patients to suffer from unrelieved pain.”
“With his original plan for writing off billions of dollars in student loans undone by the Supreme Court, President Biden has a more modest workaround in mind. But that scheme, based on adjustments to existing income-driven repayment plans, faces not only renewed legal challenges and a bureaucratic gauntlet on its way to implementation, but estimates that the ultimate price tag will be $475 billion—much higher than originally expected. In other words, be ready for an already spendthrift federal government to burden taxpayers with yet more debt.”
“Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel this week announced criminal charges against 16 Republicans who presented themselves as the state’s electors after the 2020 presidential election. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Norman Eisen and New York University law professor Ryan Goodman responded with a New York Times essay headlined “Trump’s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally.” As Eisen and Goodman see it, the Michigan defendants participated in a criminal conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden’s victory by posing as the state’s true electors.
The defendants, of course, do not accept that narrative. As they see it, their conduct was a legitimate way of preserving objections to a contested election, grounded in historical precedent and the advice they received from Donald Trump’s lawyers. The “contingent” Trump electors in Georgia, who have been informed that they are targets of a similar investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, make the same basic argument. Press coverage of these investigations, which routinely describes the targets as “fake” or “bogus” electors, tends to dismiss that argument out of hand. But it is worth a closer look, because it is central to the question of whether prosecutors can prove that would-be electors who followed the Trump campaign’s advice acted with criminal intent.”
“Yes, those publications have liberal biases. And, yes, some progressives are using the Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch reports to undermine the conservative majority’s legitimacy and push dangerous court expansion plans. But all of these nondisclosures, luxury trips, and gift-taking still seem sleazy.”