Category Archives: Politics

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 20, 2024

Students are escorted by police as they cross a graduation stage to accept their diplomas.

The New Yorker (May 13, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Barry Blitt’s “Class of 2024” – The campus tensions take center stage.

An Israeli Newspaper Presents Truths Readers May Prefer to Avoid

Haaretz consistently attempts to wrestle with the realities of what is going on in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

By David Remnick

A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?

Colleagues reportedly called Lucy Letby an “angel of death,” and the Prime Minister condemned her. But, in the rush to judgment, serious questions about the evidence were ignored.

Sunday Morning: Stories & News From Zürich, Malmö, Helsinki And London

Monocle on Sunday, May 12, 2024: Juliet Linley and Damita Pressl join Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, to discuss the weekend’s hottest topics.

We also speak to Monocle’s Helsinki correspondent, Petri Burtsoff, for the latest news from the Nordics and senior correspondent and music curator Fernando Augusto Pacheco joins us from Malmö to talk all things Eurovision. Plus: Monocle’s North Africa correspondent, Mary Fitzgerald, joins the programme to discuss speaking at the Beyond Words French literature festival event Taste of Marseille.

The New York Times Magazine – May 12, 2024

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (May 11, 2024): The ‘Retirement Issue’ features…

These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement.

Yvonne McCracken stands behind Richard McCracken while he stares at a computer. Pretzel crumbs are scattered across some papers on the table.

For many relationships, life after work brings an unexpected set of challenges.

By Susan Dominus

This spring, Barbara and Joe, a retired couple in their 60s, sat down with me at a bistro in suburban Connecticut to talk about their relationship. That they were sitting there together at all was something of a triumph. In the past few days, they had hurled at each other the kinds of accusations that couples make when they are on the brink of mutual destruction. They were bruised from the words that had been exchanged, and although they sat close to each other, their energy was quiet and heavy.

How to Make Retirement Less Scary

A Times financial columnist and an illustrator share an exercise that can prepare you for life after work.

By Ron Lieb

Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London

Monocle on Saturday (May 11, 2024): The Eurovision final is nearly here. Latika Bourke, Sîan Pattenden and Georgina Godwin discuss the latest news from Malmö as well as Sîan’s eleventh consecutive charity live draw.

Monocle’s resident Eurovision expert, Fernando Augusto Pacheco, speaks to the show’s production designer, Florian Wieder, and the lighting and screen-content designer, Fredrik Stormby, from the competition’s main stage. Plus: David Lammy in the US and the tourist crackdown in the Balearic Islands.

News: U.S. To Withhold Weapons To Israel Over Rafah, China-Nicaragua

The Globalist (May 10 , 2024): Israeli build-up continues outside Rafah despite US warnings that it will withhold weapons if a major invasion is launched.

Then: disappointment for China as Nicaragua cancels a controversial canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific and Malaysia’s plan to offer orangutans to the biggest importers of its palm oil. Plus: we’re in Malmö, Sweden, with the latest from Eurovision.

The Economist Magazine – May 11, 2024 Preview

The new economic order

The Economist Magazine (May 9, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The New Economic Order’….

The liberal international order is slowly coming apart

Kier Starmer holding a rose with his mouth

Its collapse could be sudden and irreversible

At first glance, the world economy looks reassuringly resilient. America has boomed even as its trade war with China has escalated. Germany has withstood the loss of Russian gas supplies without suffering an economic disaster. War in the Middle East has brought no oil shock. Missile-firing Houthi rebels have barely touched the global flow of goods. As a share of global gdp, trade has bounced back from the pandemic and is forecast to grow healthily this year.

“Judge-mandering” and how to cure it

The assignment of judges to cases should be random, not political

Singapore under new management

Under Lawrence Wong, the city-state has a new chance to change

China Shock II

Despite Xi Jinping’s protestations, China does have an overcapacity problem

Gangs on Latin America

How to pacify the world’s most violent region

Politics: The Guardian Weekly – May 10, 2024

The Guardian Weekly (May 8, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Nowhere to call home’ – Inside Europe’s housing crisis…

Elections for the European parliament are less than a month away and far-right parties are predicted to make significant gains in many of the bloc’s 27 member states. The dire shortage of housing, leading to rising rents and property prices, is becoming a unifying focus for voters’ discontent with their current political leaders.

The issue has sparked protests from Amsterdam to Prague and Milan, as the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, Jon Henley, reports. The data is undeniably worrying as young Europeans spend up to 10 times an average salary on rent and mortgage payments, and big cities from the Baltic states to the Iberian peninsula have registered average property price rises of close to 50%. As a result more EU residents live with their parents for longer and put off life-decisions later into adulthood.

While housing does not fall within MEPs’ remit, it is a visible locus for the sense of social unease that has beset the whole bloc and has become a pivot for the far right to turn on racialised minorities. But as European community affairs correspondent Ashifa Kassam discovers, it is those communities that are doubly penalised through discrimination from landlords who, research has shown, turn away potential renters with “foreign” surnames. The political and social ramifications of the housing crisis in Europe is mirrored elsewhere across the globe and is a subject we will return to in the Guardian Weekly in this year of elections.

Report: “Deglobalization Of Finance” – May 11, 2024

Special reports: Worlds apart

The Economist SPECIAL REPORTS (May 8, 2024): The ‘Deglobalization of Finance’ issue features

Worlds apart

The American-led financial order is giving way to a more divided one

Ten years ago your correspondent was fidgeting nervously in a meeting room at vtb Capital, the investment-banking arm of Russia’s second-biggest bank, just across the road from the Bank of England. During the recruitment process for a graduate job, things had taken a worrying turn. A Russian missile had shot down mh17, a passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, while it was passing over Ukraine. Plenty of Russian firms were already under Western sanctions owing to the annexation of Crimea earlier that year. Now sanctions were being ramped up, and vtb Capital’s parent bank was a prime target. Hence the fidgeting: how to ask the slightly alarming man across the table whether there would even be a vtb in a few months’ time?

The global financial system is in danger of fragmenting

How crises reshaped the world financial system

The movement of capital globally is in decline

National payment systems are proliferating

The fight to dethrone the dollar

How the financial system would respond to a superpower war

Sources and acknowledgments

News: Israel Seizes Rafah In Gaza, Russia Nuclear Drills, Xi Jinping In Serbia

The Globalist (May 8, 2024): We get the latest on the Rafah crossing as Israel and Hamas continue negotiations.

Then: Russia is ready to hold nuclear weapons drills, China’s Xi Jinping touches down in Belgrade and we speak with Neil J Young about his new book ‘Coming Out Republican’. Plus: fashion news and the economics behind doner kebabs in Germany.

News: Israel Strikes Rafah, Gaza Ceasefire Talks, India Elections, Putin Sworn In

The Globalist (May 7, 2024): Join Monocle’s Emma Nelson for the current-affairs stories of the day, including the third phase of India’s general election with Maya Sharma, the latest aviation news with Greg Waldron of Flight Global and the papers with Agnes Poirer.