Why America’s Most Controversial Military Bases Exist
Why America’s Most Controversial Military Bases Exist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf-eHVa-2zE
Tag: United Kingdom
What the Labour Party’s big win in the UK will actually mean
“How exactly Labour plans to accomplish their goals is an open question. Labour doesn’t really have a strong, bold new policy regarding the economy; there isn’t a big, splashy ideological framework.
And on one of the major factors dragging Britain’s economy down — Brexit — Labour plans to negotiate agreements about agriculture and livestock with the EU to bring down food costs, and hopes to make professional services agreements that will help UK professionals work in EU countries. Still, many of the economic pains of Brexit may remain.
And on migration, other than scrapping the Rwanda plan, there’s not too much daylight between Labour and the Tories.
“The current government already has quite a large focus on enforcement,” Ben Brindle, a researcher at the Oxford Migration Observatory, told Vox. Labour’s approach is “still doing many of the things which the current enforcement operation is already doing” to deter irregular migration. And when it comes to migration for students and skilled labor, net migration is likely to go down anyway due to policies already in place, rather than anything Labour is actually doing.
Labour does have proposals on hand to address the housing and transit crises — including by loosening up building restrictions in the immediate term so that new housing, infrastructure, and transit services can actually be built, which could help stimulate the economy.
“We’re using a planning regime that was created in 1948, that is incredibly stringent, and means that we’re just not building things anywhere,” Ansell said. “We have a housing crisis. We have a transportation crisis, and we have a public infrastructure crisis and an energy crisis — it’s all because we can’t build stuff. That gives [Labour] a narrative. It also gives businesses the expectation that actually there’s going to be loads and loads of infrastructure or investment and probably over quite a period of time.”
Ultimately, though, Labour sees building a stable government, especially after the years of uncertainty post-Brexit, as a useful framing — but potentially a part of its mandate. The party’s manifesto is built around the idea that it “can stop the chaos” which has helped exacerbate external problems into national crises when it is in power.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/358985/uk-labour-keir-starmer-tories-migration-politics-elections-july-4-rishi-sunak-boris-johnson
WHAT DOES ‘THE MUSLIM VOTE’ IN BRITAIN WANT?
WHAT DOES ‘THE MUSLIM VOTE’ IN BRITAIN WANT?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RE4gJ5mrPM
Was the Continental army really that damn good?
Was the Continental army really that damn good?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-vk-t4iVCc
European Jews face a surge of antisemitism amid Israel-Hamas war
“In Lyon, France, this weekend, a Jewish woman was stabbed in her home. The authorities said they found a swastika painted on her door. In Berlin last month, assailants threw Molotov cocktails at a synagogue and Jewish community center. Someone set fire to the Jewish section of Vienna, Austria’s, largest cemetery last week, and a violent mob stormed an airfield and hotel looking for Jewish passengers when a flight arrived from Israel in Dagestan, a Russian republic that borders Azerbaijan and Georgia.
Reports of antisemitic incidents are soaring in countries across Europe, following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in response to the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, which killed roughly 1,400 Israelis. Health authorities in Gaza say the bombing has killed 10,000 Palestinians so far, including more than 4,000 children, sparking outrage so intense that Jewish communities in Europe say they’re facing a level of hatred many of them haven’t seen before.
In the United Kingdom, these reports of antisemitic incidents more than quadrupled in the days immediately following the initial attacks, according to the Community Security Trust, an organization dedicated to protecting the British Jewish population. (The reports, it’s worth noting, often include a broad range of behavior, from physical assaults to tearing down posters of Israeli hostages.) In Germany, an organization that tracks antisemitism reported 70 incidents in the 11 days following the Hamas attacks, triple the number in the same period the year before. In France — home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, where Jews make up less than 1 percent of the population — interior minister Gérald Darmanin said there had been more than 1,000 incidents in the last month. “The number of antisemitic acts has exploded,” Darmanin told a French news network.
Stars of David have been spray painted on Jewish homes in Paris and Berlin — an ominous echo of the violence, forced displacement, and genocide European Jews experienced in these same places less than 100 years ago. “I am crying, because I am once again seeing the hate that we received when I was a child,” a elderly woman whose apartment was graffitied told a French television network.”
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“European Jews aren’t the only minority group being targeted due to the violence in the Middle East. An organization dedicated to tracking Islamophobia found that reports of Islamophobic acts in the UK increased five-fold in the days after the Hamas attacks, according to the Financial Times. European Muslims are worried for their safety. “Muslims are really afraid of being stigmatised and blamed, and lumped together with Hamas supporters,” Lamya Kaddor, a German lawmaker of Syrian descent, told the paper. In the United States, too, both Muslim and Jewish communities are being singled out by acts of hatred.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23950628/antisemitism-rise-europe-israel-hamas-war
British policies in colonial India were incoherent and contradictory: Roderick Matthews
Sunak tells Biden UK will stand by cluster bomb ban amid Ukraine tensions
“Britain is one of more than 100 countries who are signed up to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits “the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians.””
Cool your jets: Why the West is making Ukraine wait for fighter planes
“The West isn’t really saying “never” on fighter jets for Ukraine — it just wants to focus first on getting Kyiv weapons for a looming offensive.
That’s the sentiment emerging in the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden’s blunt “no” — echoed to various degrees by leaders in Germany and the U.K. — to the question of whether he would be sending Ukraine the fighter jets it is requesting. While officials have publicly remained relatively unequivocal that no jets are forthcoming, private discussions indicate it may actually just be a matter of time.”
The U.K. Competition Authority ‘Wins,’ but Consumers Lose
“Competition regulators around the world are attacking some of the most successful and innovative entrepreneurs in the world—American companies. Strangely, they can’t seem to agree on what markets these companies are “monopolizing” or what they have done wrong. And regulators sometimes contradict each other with their complaints.
The most recent example of this behavior comes from the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority. It decided to force Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to sell GIPHY—a popular tool that makes short, animated and looped videos (GIFs) that users love to share in their social media posts—to an “approved buyer.”
But were U.K. consumers harmed by the previous integration of this service? And will they be better off when a different, likely also large, company owns a mostly free online tool that people use for fun on social media?
The short answers are no and no. Much like the dog that finally catches the car, this “win” for proponents of breaking up American tech businesses will actually be a loss for the consumers they’re supposed to protect. The U.K. decision will hurt the biggest benefactors of the GIPHY-Meta merger: creators and users. And because of the nature of many internet services, it is unlikely the impact will only be felt in the U.K.”
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“So how does a Meta-GIPHY acquisition actually help consumers? It’s easy to think of it just as a fun way to drop Real Housewives into your text banter with friends or to show your fandom for a favorite sports team or artist. Users benefit from the ease of inserting these fun graphics through a service like GIPHY rather than having to create them on their own. Still, there are other GIF generators users could reach for, and they typically do when they can’t find what they want on GIPHY.
Social media users, however, are not GIPHY’s only consumers. Brands, creators, and artists use GIPHY to design digital products that increase the awareness of their brands. Since most of GIPHY is free, that allows folks to do so at a very low cost. Still, these same creators have many other options when it comes to how to gain similar awareness, such as Snap filters or Instagram stickers. And this current model has resulted in minimal costs for its clients.
However, with a new company purchasing the service, or if it is forced to go independent, GIPHY’s revenue model could completely change. Instead, GIPHY’s new owner could seek a pay-per-use each time a person posts a GIF or charge a subscription fee to users. Even if the pricing model doesn’t change, creators of sponsored content that supports GIPHY might not find as much value in a new owner or a less integrated service. They might then spend their resources elsewhere, leaving GIPHY to languish.
Given the lack of clear harm from a Meta-GIPHY merger, why did the U.K. decide to intervene? U.K. regulators feared that Meta was getting too big, and they wanted their “approved buyers” to own it instead. This “big is bad” rhetoric is especially ironic given that Meta is not the behemoth it once was.”
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“There is a concerning, deeper message here, and in actions like the FTC’s decision to challenge Meta’s acquisition of Within, that is alarming for the future of free markets, innovation, and business. Regulators are telling successful American companies not to innovate without permission, and that even if an acquisition benefits consumers, it still may not be approved.”
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“Do we want consumers to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, or do we want to permit politicians to prop up the companies they like, at the expense of American businesses?”
New prime minister, same old battles over Brexit
“A former Liberal Democrat and Remain supporter, she fully embraced Brexit after the 2016 referendum, becoming one of its most ardent backers. As foreign secretary in Johnson’s government, she shored up her Brexit credentials with her confrontational stance toward the European Union.
Her reinvention allowed her to ascend to the top of her party, and now the premiership. That rise says a lot about where the UK’s Conservative Party (or Tory party) is right now: Even though the UK officially broke with Europe, Brexit has also ballooned into an entrenched domestic political and culture war issue. Truss is the embodiment of this, which also says a lot about how she may lead — when it comes to the European Union, and beyond.”
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“Johnson ultimately negotiated a Brexit deal that would mean some goods from the United Kingdom bound for Northern Ireland would have to undergo checks before they arrived there, over concerns they might end up in the EU single market. That is a source of tensions for unionists in Northern Ireland (who don’t want much distance between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK) and for the Conservative government, who say the deal is creating this divide and complicating commerce within the country.
But the EU says the UK isn’t implementing the deal as agreed, and has launched legal proceedings to get them to comply. The UK, meanwhile, with this Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, is threatening to tear up the entire agreement. Truss has also threatened to trigger a formal mechanism within the Brexit deal that can be invoked when “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist” come up — something the EU will be forced to respond to, if that happens.”
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“The EU has said it’s willing to talk, but within the framework of original protocol; the UK has indicated it wants more radical changes.”