Personally I wouldn’t know

In other adaptations from the book

We lost many of our fighting boys at the arena that day. Not enough, but many.

Border Party

Let’s Starve 3.1 Million United States Citizens… again

Democrats plot post-Mueller plans without clear path to impeachment

By Jeremy Herb, Manu Raju and Alex Rogers, CNN

Updated 0629 GMT (1429 HKT) July 25, 2019

‘All Hong Kongers are scared’: protests to widen as rural residents fight back

Inside the hunt for Iraq’s looted treasures

Decades of war and instability made Iraq a thief’s paradise. Richard Hall meets the archaeologists fighting to retrieve their country’s treasure

Deep in the back offices of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad, at the end of a long corridor set away from the Babylonian obelisks and Assyrian winged bulls, an international treasure hunt is under way.

Wafaa Hassan is sitting at her desk, poring over a large stack of papers, sighing as she turns each page. She holds in her hands a catalogue of ancient relics that were originally discovered in Iraq, and are now scattered across the world.

“They are in the US, Britain, Switzerland, Lebanon, the UAE, Spain, everywhere,” she says. “They belong to us, and we are trying very hard to get them all back.”

Germany’s Muslims demand better protection amid increased threats

Germany’s Muslims feel increasingly threatened after a number of recent bomb scares at mosques. Now, the heads of the country’s leading Muslim associations want the government to take protective action.

In July alone, bomb threats have been made on mosques in the cities of Iserlohn, Villingen-Schwenningen and Munich, along with Cologne’s Central Mosque — the largest Muslim place of worship in Germany. In recent days, similar threats have been made on mosques in Duisburg, Mannheim and Mainz.

Enough is enough, says 49-year-old lawyer Nurhat Soykan, the spokeswoman for Germany’s Coordination Council of Muslims. The organization was established in 2007 as a platform to bring together Germany’s four major Islamic organizations: the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (known as DITIB), the Islamic Council for the Federal Republic of Germany and the Association of Islamic Cultural Centers.

Puerto Rico governor announces resignation after mass protests

Ricardo Rossello says he will resign on August 2 amid public anger over obscenity-laced text messages.

Puerto Rico‘s embattled Governor Ricardo Rossello has announced he will resign after nearly two weeks of mass protests triggered by a leak of crude and insulting chat messages between him and his top advisers.

A crowd of thousands outside the governor’s mansion in San Juan erupted into cheers and singing after Rossello’s announcement late on Wednesday.

“I announce that I will be resigning from the governor’s post effective Friday, August 2 at 5 pm,” Rossello said in the video posted on Facebook. The protesters’ demands “have been overwhelming”, he said, adding: “And I’ve received them with highest degree of humility.”

Why Native Hawaiians are fighting to protect Maunakea from a telescope

The mountain is among the most sacred sites in Hawaiian cosmology.

By Trisha Kehaulani Watson-Sproat 

On the morning of July 15 — the day Hawaii Gov. David Ige said construction would begin for the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project on the Big Island — a line of elders, known as kūpuna, positioned themselves in the roadway leading up to the summit of Maunakea. Each elder was assigned a caretaker to tend to their health and nutritional needs while they awaited and blocked access to the construction trucks. Farther up the road, a group of seven Native Hawaiian protectors chained themselves to a cattle guard as a second line of defense in case law enforcement arrested the kūpuna.

The group’s first and second days on Maunakea, among the most sacred sites in Hawaiian cosmology, ended without incident. But arrests began on the morning of July 17. Despite pleas from younger activists to protect the kūpuna, the elders insisted on remaining on the front line and being the first arrested, asking the younger protectors to stand down and remain silent while they were taken.

What is clear about Brexit is that Boris Johnson thinks crashing out of the EU with no special arrangement to ease the transition is a fine idea that will unleash the “animal energy” of the mighty British Economy to carry Europe and the World in front of it in a golden age of English dominance.

Ok, those of you who have suffered Lucas Electrics can stop laughing now.

Johnson is no more legitimate than May except he cares less about appearing a buffoon and Parliament is no more likely to accept a ‘No Deal’ that it was (which is to say ‘not at all’). I don’t see a solution without a General Election and I only hope Corbyn’s dithering has not screwed up things too much to pull out a Labour victory. Even a re-invigorated Tory Party is not going to be able to paper over the profound fissures in their caucus.

We Wargamed the Last Days of Brexit. Here’s What We Found Out.
By Luke Cooper, openDemocracy
23 July 2019

A group of us recently participated in a simulation game to model the future of the Brexit process. By assuming different roles amongst the forces in conflict over the future of the United Kingdom, we hoped to gain a greater understanding of the process and what might come next. We solicited the help of Richard Barbrook, an academic at Westminster University, and director of Digital Liberties, a UK-based cooperative that has pioneered the use of participatory simulations to anticipate political scenarios. His book, Class Wargames, applies the ideas of the French situationist, Guy Debord, who advocated the use of strategy games as performative, even theatrical, exercises to understand one’s political opponents and their strategic thinking. Barbrook designed the game, which he called, Meaningful Votes: The Brexit Simulation.

Collaborating on this initiative with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) and the ERSTE Foundation in Vienna we assembled a group of participants in Vienna comprised of civil society, journalists, academics and intellectuals.They were a mixture of nationalities, from Austria, the Balkans, the United States and Britain, and held a plurality of political views from left to right. For mainland European participants the game provided an opportunity to empirically rationalise a crisis that many had found inexplicable; for example, the refusal hitherto of the British parties to find a compromise on Brexit in Parliament is highly alien to those used to the political systems with a culture of building consensus (often with proportional representation), that exist in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. Each participant took on the role of a faction within Parliament with the game beginning after the defeat of the heavy defeat of the First Meaningful Vote on 15 January 2019.
…
So what happened? And what did we learn from this exercise?

The outcome of the game eventually resolved itself in a new referendum. By this stage the game had moved into the near future of early autumn 2019. The cross-party negotiations had failed to reach a breakthrough acceptable to both leaderships. Softer members of the Tory Brexit Delivery Group then split away from the party leadership, crossing the floor to support a new referendum. Interestingly, this came as a surprise to the game designer, Barbrook, who had anticipated a stalemate and a further extension of Article 50 at the end of October 2019.

If this suggests the game had a Remain bias, other moments in the scenario serve to refute this. At an earlier moment in the game a majority emerged in Parliament in spite of opposition from Labour and the Remain parties, for the kind of technological solution to the Irish border question favoured by the ERG as an alternative to the troubled ‘Irish backstop’. Assuming the dummy-player function, the EU then intervened via the umpire into the Parliamentary scenario to rule out an agreement without the backstop. With Parliament then voting against leaving without a deal, the political factions were confronted with the same problem they have at the current time.

The crux of this decision is ultimately a narrow one: few options are still available to parties, making the outcome relatively straightforward to model. Leave on the deal May has negotiated with the EU, which is unpopular with Brexit voters and with Labour Remain voters who would like a second referendum. Or negotiate changes to the UK-future relationship document (the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened by the EU) to make the Brexit deal softer, making it more palatable for the Labour Party but even less acceptable to Brexit voters and Brexiters in the Tory party. As the changes are not legally binding on a future Tory prime minister even a Labour Party leadership wishing to ‘deliver Brexit’ has little incentive to support such a deal. This leaves only two further choices. Hold new elections in the hope they might produce a balance in the Parliament more conducive to striking a deal. Or, move towards a new referendum, which includes the opportunity to remain in the EU.

The outcome of the game is not an exact prediction of events in the near future. One player’s calculation that at a certain stage the mainstream of the Tory party will have to try and ‘move on’ from Brexit by peeling off towards a referendum is what Carr called an interpretive hypothesis. It will be tested in the months ahead.

Rather the game offers an insight into the interests that will shape this and the core contradiction underpinning the process: that there is not a tangible, pragmatic form of Brexit acceptable to the people that want Brexit. The vote in the game for ‘technological solutions to the Irish border’ was analogous with, though not identical to, Parliament’s vote on the 30 January 2019 for the ‘Brady amendment’, which mandated the government to seek changes to the Irish backstop as a condition for passing the Withdrawal Agreement. Having passed by 317 votes to 301, Theresa May hailed it as demonstrating a ‘substantial and sustainable majority’ for leaving the EU. When the EU insisted on the Irish backstop, the refusal of the hard Brexiters and the DUP to compromise forced a logic of events that points increasingly to ‘no Brexit’.

Underpinning this is a mistaken conception of how sovereignty operates in the twenty-first century. No state, however powerful, enjoys absolute sovereignty. All states are constrained by economic and political forces beyond their border. Larger states or geopolitical blocs, such as the European Union, China, or the United States, have significantly more power to ‘shape’ the way globalisation works and operates. Britain would have to make steep concessions to these larger blocs to get a trade deal. The game successfully modelled this geopolitical logic by demonstrating – through the existence of the EU as a ‘dummy player’ – the limitations placed on UK Parliamentary sovereignty by the fact of its international relations with the wider world.

Leave campaign rhetoric about taking back control comes into contradiction with this material reality. In all Brexit scenarios, exiting the EU entails a loss of substantive sovereignty for Britain. Even the ‘no deal’ Brexit preferred by hardline Leavers would lead to Britain signing a deal on less advantageous terms shortly after the exit – perhaps in as little as ten days depending on the scale of the economic dislocation. Once the legal uncertainty and accompanying economic turmoil is experienced any government would be under huge pressure to end the chaos by striking an agreement with the EU. On the other hand, the Brexit process has also demonstrated the maximising-effect of EU membership for sovereign states: Ireland has been in a far stronger position to protect the open border with the North and the Good Friday Agreement because of the clear support of 26 other EU member-states.

Russia expresses regret after South Korean airspace violation – Korean officials

Russia has said a military jet’s intrusion into South Korean territorial airspace was not intentional, according to Seoul’s presidential office.

A Russian military official expressed “deep regret” to the South Korean defence ministry and blamed a technical glitch, South Korea said.

On Tuesday, Seoul said a Russian warplane had twice violated its territorial airspace.

The Russian defence ministry had earlier furiously denied this.

But South Korea’s Blue House said in a briefing that Russia had now said the violation was unintended and that it would immediately launch an investigation into the case.

“Moscow said if the aircraft flew according to an initially planned route, this incident would not have occurred,” a spokesman told reporters.

‘We saved ourselves’: Hong Kong train attack victims describe 30-minute ordeal