11 May
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
World Politics
United States
In closed-door meeting, Kelly Sadler reportedly said McCain’s opposition to Trump’s CIA nominee didn’t matter
The White House did not dispute the remark attributed to Kelly Sadler. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
A White House official reportedly made what some saw as an insensitive comment about the ailing Arizona senator John McCain at a staff meeting on Thursday, and McCain’s wife quickly came to his defense on Twitter.
The official, Kelly Sadler, was discussing McCain’s opposition to Donald Trump’s nominee for CIA director, Gina Haspel, when she allegedly claimed “it doesn’t matter” because “he’s dying anyway”.
That is according to a person in the room who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door meeting.
The White House did not dispute the remark but said in a statement: “We respect Senator McCain’s service to our nation and he and his family are in our prayers during this difficult time.”
The Hill newspaper first reported the comment.
Cindy McCain responded a few hours later with a tweet tagged to Sadler: “May I remind you my husband has a family, 7 children and 5 grandchildren.”
Sadler is a special assistant to the president. She did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday evening.
The 81-year-old senator was diagnosed in July with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. He left Washington in December and underwent surgery last month for an infection.
Eighteen GOP members signed a petition to force an immigration debate in the House but Paul Ryan said it would only produce legislative ‘show ponies’
Paul Ryan told reporters on Thursday: ‘Going down a path and having some kind of a spectacle on the floor that just results in a veto doesn’t solve a problem.’ Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
A renegade group of centrist Republicans in Congress are maneuvering around their leadership in an effort to introduce immigration reforms to secure legal protections for young, undocumented people in the United States.
The Republican-led effort follows a failure of Congress to act on immigration reform after Donald Trump cancelled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), an Obama-era program that extended protections from deportation to nearly 700,000 immigrants brought to the US as children.
Federal courts have ordered the administration to temporarily continue the program while the legal challenges to Trump’s decision move forward. The court rulings removed almost all urgency in Congress to act on immigration.
The House speaker, Paul Ryan, said the effort would only produce legislative “show ponies” that would be simply wiped out by the president’s veto.
But Ryan did say he wants to see a bipartisan immigration bill pass the House before the November midterm elections that would provide certainty for the so-called Dreamers.
“Going down a path and having some kind of a spectacle on the floor that just results in a veto doesn’t solve a problem,” he told reporters during a press conference on Thursday.
“We actually would like to solve this problem and that is why I think it’s important for us to come up with a solution that the president can support.”
As of Thursday afternoon, 18 Republicans had signed a discharge petition filed by Carlos Curbelo, a Republican congressman from Florida, to force an immigration debate on the House floor.
A handful of vulnerable Republicans running for re-election in swing districts are facing fierce pressure to support immigration reform. Almost all of the Republican signatories represent large Latino constituencies, are in districts Democrats are targeting in the 2018 midterms, or are retiring at the end of their term.
If the petition is signed by a majority of House members, the petition has the power to trigger votes on a suite of immigration bills following a so-called “queen-of-the-hill” rule. That means the bill with the most support above a majority would pass the House.
“The message from the … House Republicans that so far have signed the discharge petition is that we want action,” Curbelo said on CNN’s New Day on Thursday. “The president was right to call on Congress to act and that we find it unacceptable many months later, the House has done absolutely nothing. Our patience has run out.”
Discharge petitions are relatively unusual because members of the majority party are usually wary of sidestepping their leadership.
Curbelo, who is the son of Cuban immigrants, conceded that the petition was an “aggressive legislative maneuver” and called the process “historic”. But he argued that the petition was written in a way to “empower” leadership, arguing that the speaker can use the opportunity to offer his own immigration legislation.
The process would allow votes on four immigration proposals. Those include a conservative bill that would offer a limited path to citizenship for Daca recipients while imposing limits on legal immigration and new restrictions on hiring; a bipartisan solution that would pair a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers with border security measures; a Dream Act, which would codify the Daca program; and a placeholder bill of Ryan’s choosing.
If a bill were to secure enough support to pass the House, it would still have to pass the Senate – and then be signed by President Trump. Earlier this year, the Senate failed to advance several immigration bills, including one that had the White House’s support.
Meanwhile, the White House remains an unpredictable factor in the negotiations. During the height of the immigration debate, Trump sent mixed signals to Congress about what he wanted.
He both called for a generous “bill of love” while saying he would only sign a bill that included unpopular measures, such as restricting legal immigration, that Democrats and some Republicans rejected entirely.
“We laid out several months ago what we wanted to see happen,” Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said when asked about the petition on Wednesday. “We’d still like to see that happen, and we’d love to see a piece of legislation that includes all four of the principles and the pillars that the president outlined.”
If all 193 Democrats join their effort, which is plausible, the Republicans would need to sway seven more members of their caucus to reach the required 218 signatures.
Ida director Pawe? Pawlikoswki’s exquisitely chilling Soviet-era drama maps the dark heart of Poland itself
Wounded love … Cold War. Photograph: Cannes Film Festival
The torn curtain of love is the theme of Pawe? Pawlikowski’s mysterious, musically glorious and visually ravishing film set in cold war Poland and beyond. The crystalline black-and-white cinematography exalts its moments of intimate grimness and its dreamlike showpieces of theatrical display. It is an elliptical, episodic story of imprisonment and escape, epic in scope. A love affair thrashes and wilts in the freedom of a foreign country, and then begins to submit to the homeland’s doomy gravitational pull. Like Pawlikowski’s previous picture, Ida, this is about the dark heart of Poland itself. The wounded love at its centre surfaces from the depths of cynicism, exhaustion and state-sponsored submission and fear.
In Poland of the late 1940s, as the cold war’s snowy chill begins to settle, a musician and a broadcaster are touring remote villages with their recording equipment, earnestly listening to folk songs, hoping to recruit a fresh-faced troupe of young people for a show of authentic traditional Polish song and dance. These youngsters will be billeted in a country house for a month – as if in some prehistoric un-televised reality show – and drilled in picturesque Polish musical forms, with some tested for starring roles, ready to be shown off at theatrical evenings to party officials and maybe even politically congenial foreigners.
The people doing the choosing are the darkly handsome pianist and composer Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and the producer Irena (Agata Kulesza), who appear to have some emotional history together. But Wiktor’s eye is caught by one of his auditionees: the pertly blonde teenager Zula (Joanna Kulig). Immediately, it is clear that Zula is a kind of fake: she is from the city, not the ethnically pure villages the atavistic Polish state prefers. (The supervising party official, Kaczmarek, played by Borys Szyc, is a racist who disapproves of ethnic Carpathian songs in Lemko dialect.)
The chirruping number Zula gives them is not a Polish folk song at all, but is plagiarised from a Russian movie. No matter. She has that authentic-seeming, cherubically Sovietised “look”. Wiktor is further erotically fascinated by the fact that Zula has done prison time for attacking her abusive father with a knife.
Soon, Wiktor and Zula are having a passionate affair and he has made Zula into a star. Their relationship comes to a crisis when they get to perform in East Berlin and there is a perfect opportunity to defect: agreeing to meet in a certain spot at a certain time. Will one of them lose their nerve? It is a story that is to find its strange aftermath in 1950s Paris, where their fates are entwined with a French poet and movie director (elegant cameos by Jeanne Balibar and Cédric Kahn).
Perhaps the most important moment in the film is when a worker is hanging a banner outside the house where the young singers are to stay. It reads: “We welcome tomorrow.” Inevitably, the man falls off his ladder as he is nailing it up. And of course, they are not “welcoming tomorrow” – they are welcoming the past, a hyperreal, state-sanctioned, quaintly fabricated time of “folk” tradition that will combine Soviet obedience and ethnic conformity, this second concept being one that has very much survived the second world war. It is far from the real musical “tomorrow” of western jazz and rock’n’roll, which the Polish authorities fear and dislike.
But their musical ensemble performances are staggering – brilliantly choreographed by Pawlikowski and filmed by cinematographer ?ukasz ?al. They are mesmeric and strange in their glassy-eyed conviction. There is a stunning touch when the colossal, nightmarish image of Stalin appears to drift past the choir’s heads. A wide shot discloses this is a background display, and then another shot shows a stagehand off to the side stolidly cranking the handle that is bringing up Stalin’s face.
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