“Our proportional election system can distort results as well: last November, Likud, with its smaller partners, won 64 seats against 56 for the opposition. In fact, the right-wing bloc won by only 0.6 percent of the vote. The 0.6 percent government says that it represents the will of the majority and can do whatever it wants. It goes on saying this even though a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute shows that less than one-third of Israelis back its law to end the so-called reasonableness standard, which allowed the High Court to overturn government decisions it deemed unreasonable.” (Benjamin Pogrund/Haaretz)
“President Joe Biden’s top foreign policy advisers have been shuttling to Saudi Arabia in recent months for a mission impossible: the normalization of diplomatic relations between the state of Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The two countries have never had diplomatic relations. Until recently, most Arab states refused to have a relationship with Israel, objecting to the occupation of Palestinian land. But the Biden administration is trying to formalize the fact that Israel and Saudi Arabia in recent years have quietly grown closer, in part due to their shared enmity for Iran’s Middle East influence and through less-public collaborations on technology and the military. And several other Arab states normalized relations with Israel under President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords in 2020. Those transactional deals induced Arab states to make peace in return for the goodies they had sought from the US and Israel. The Biden administration initially distanced itself from that Trump policy but has since redoubled efforts, with Saudi Arabia as the prize.”(Jonathan Guyer/Vox)
”Ecuador is holding six Colombians in connection with the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, police have said, while the US is sending agents from the FBI to aid the investigation. Villavicencio, a 59-year-old centrist former lawmaker and investigative journalist, was gunned down while leaving a campaign rally in Quito on Wednesday, deepening the country’s security crisis ahead of presidential and legislative elections due on August 20.” (FT)
“Sisi promised Egyptians prosperity, but Egypt is flat broke. The statistics are staggering. Inflation is running at almost 37 percent and a single U.S. dollar fetches 30 Egyptian pounds. (It was about 7 pounds to the dollar when Sisi came to power.) The country’s international debt is almost $163 billion, and its overall debt is projected to reach nearly 93 percent of the country’s GDP in 2023. Government officials have been forced to manage Egypt’s finances like a shell game, moving money around in a vain attempt to hide the country’s precarious economic conditions. Sisi has been making the case that the country’s economic tribulations are the result of issues beyond his control, especially the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” (Steven A Cook/FP)
“Paleontologists working in northern Alaska have discovered a tiny fossil mammal that thrived in what may have been among the coldest conditions on Earth about 73 million years ago. The researchers, led by Jaelyn Eberle of CU Boulder, described the Late Cretaceous animal in a study published this month in the ‘Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.’ They gave it the scientific name Sikuomys mikros—from ‘Siku,’ an Iñupiaq word for ‘ice,’ and ‘mys’ and ‘mikros,’ the Greek words for ‘mouse’ and ‘little.’ It’s a fitting title.” (CU Boulder Today)
“It has long been clear to American families that the cost of college has gone up, even at public schools designed to be affordable for state residents. To get at the root cause, The Wall Street Journal examined financial statements since 2002 from 50 universities known as flagships, typically the oldest public school in each state, and adjusted for inflation. At the median flagship university, spending rose 38% between 2002 and 2022. Only one school in the Journal’s analysis—the University of Idaho—spent less.” ( Melissa Korn, Andrea Fuller, Jennifer S. Forsyth/WSJ)
“Most of us are familiar with the theocrats of the religious right and the anti-government extremists, groups that overlap a bit but remain distinct. The Claremont Institute folks aren’t quite either of those things, and yet they’re both and more. In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, they have become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism.” (Katherine Stewart/TNR)
“Is Austria the least safe European country? ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘While we [Bellingcat] were investigating the Austrians, they were surveilling me and I wasn’t aware of that at the time. They were doing so explicitly at the request of the Russians. That is deep penetration.’ He says the Germans advised him not to settle in Germany. He last visited Germany in 2020 under heavy guard as a witness in the prosecution of a Russian who had assassinated a Chechen exile. ‘We are also investigating examples of Russian security services penetrating German political circles,’ he says.” (Ed Luce/ Lunch with the FT)
“Now, as organized labor captures national attention with a summer of strikes, Angis and passenger-service workers across the country are leading a campaign of their own. They say the travel chaos experienced by so many passengers is owed, in part, to their exploitation. In June, contract workers for American Airlines at 14 major travel hubs organized rallies with SEIU to protest low wages and poor working conditions. Angis has spoken at the rallies, though she told me that she ‘is not a good speech person.’ But I’m like, I need to do this,’ she added. ‘This is important not just for me, but it’s for my daughter and for my co-workers and for everybody else, so I need to muster up courage.’” (Sarah Jones/Intelligencer)
“Laura Blum-Smith, the Writers Guild of America West’s director of research and public policy, considers the strike a result of a tsunami of Hollywood mergers that has handed studios and streamers the power to its exploit workers. ‘Harmful mergers and attempts to monopolize markets are a recurring theme in the history of media and entertainment, and they are a key part of what led 11,500 writers to go on strike more than 100 days ago against their employers,’ Blum-Smith said on Thursday at an event with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice over new merger guidelines unveiled in July.” (Winston Cho/THR)
“I think the problem with narratives about Africa in the western media in general is that they have so often been simplistic, grounded in colonial-era prejudice — even if unintentionally — and perpetuated a single narrative. All I think many of us ask for is for Africa to be depicted with the same complexity, nuance, humanity and depth as other regions. It matters even more when it comes to the African continent because colonialism was so devastating for African countries, with such extreme ongoing repercussions, and because Africa has played such a uniquely key role in the development of the global economy.” (Alexis Akwagyiram/SEMAFOR)
“The same thing happened in 2016 when Trump skipped a Fox News debate prior to the Iowa caucuses and held his own event a few blocks down the street in Des Moines. Trump claimed that the decision was a winning move for him. ‘I did something that was very risky and I think it turned out great because I’m on the front page of every paper,’ he announced back then. “I’m getting more publicity than if I [was in the debate].’ Trump’s latest ‘will-he-or-won’t-he’ gambit is, again, working out great for him. He’s getting the headlines and, despite what Christie says, looking like the dominant figure that he is in Republican politics. That’s got some Republicans begging him to debate.” (John Nichols/The Nation)
“To use Heidegger’s terminology, we are both bounded and enabled by the world into which we are thrown. Our bodies, our psychologies, and our social and historical milieux unavoidably condition us — although, as Hannah Arendt once wrote, not absolutely.” (Kathleen B Jones/LARB)
“This spring, as the chances of a writers’ strike moved from ‘possible’ to ‘inevitable,’ Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos claimed, with what could easily be construed as smugness, that his streamer could weather a strike because of its growing library of international content. And it is certainly true that Netflix has offered American audiences something rarely seen on the small screen before: films and TV series from all over the world in their original languages (with subtitles and dubbing available). This is not, however, the result of cultural beneficence. Netflix is an international company serving a worldwide audience and the cost of production in many of the countries it serves is much lower than in the United States.” (Mary McNamara/LAT)
“Roughly 1,500 single adult asylum seekers have received notices in recent weeks stating that their shelter stays will expire after 60 days, senior members of Mayor Eric Adams’ administration testified Thursday. “ (Emma Whitford/City Limits)
“‘I’m president already. I’m president of the ghetto,’ says the subject of ‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’ midway through the documentary. That’s not exactly how it worked out, but directors Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo’s account of Wine’s 2021 campaign for president of Uganda suggests that he might actually have been the top vote-getter. And it demonstrates that Wine is more vigorous, charismatic and concerned about the Ugandan people than the declared winner, Yoweri Museveni, the constitution-bending autocrat who’s held the presidency since 1986.” (WashPost)
“In 2016, Georgetown University announced a first-of-its-kind change to its admissions policy. In addition to the long-standing legacy preferences afforded to applicants ‘with an enduring relationship’ to the school, including children of alumni, it vowed to ‘give that same consideration’ to the descendants of hundreds of enslaved people. From its founding, in 1789, the school had been funded by Jesuit-owned plantations in Maryland that were operated with slave labor. By 1838, the plantations had become less profitable, and Georgetown’s leaders arranged the mass sale and transfer of two hundred and seventy-two men, women, and children to businessmen in Louisiana to pay down the school’s debts and secure further funding. In 2016, a university working group that had studied Georgetown’s role in slavery suggested multiple ways to pursue ‘reconciliation’—including admissions preferences for descendants of those sold in 1838. The university’s president, John J. DeGioia, said, in 2021, ‘We live, every day, with the legacies of enslavement.’’ (Jeannie Suk Gersen/TNY)
On Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump’s Toxic Relationship (VF)
“When the leaders of the United States, Japan, and South Korea gather at Camp David on August 18, they will already have met their primary objective, namely to engage in a constructive trilateral dialogue.” (Wilson Center)
On the ECOWAS Standby force. (Paul D Williams)