29 Aug
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.
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Flint is a city long infamous for poverty, crime, and more recently the water crisis that has plagued people here for four years. It seems everyone in America knows what to expect when they hear the name Flint: economic, political and social dysfunction. Flint is a place of struggle, but that’s not all it is.
For the last six years I’ve been working in Michigan on the Flint is a Place project. It’s an immersive dive into a city that is more layered and nuanced than commonly portrayed, telling the story of a community living on the fringes. After 40 years of economic struggle, Flint is a place where the abnormal has become normal.
In the 1980s, Flint had the highest median income for under-35s in America. Today it has one of the lowest. The city has consistently been on the FBI’s top 10 most violent list and has the highest ratio of abandoned homes in the country. Over four decades it went from living the American dream to an American nightmare.
The water crisis continues, and Flint just shut one of its last remaining high schools. Things have not got better, but there are still people fighting for change.
The faces of Flint
As the water crisis was unfolding, these police cadets were being trained to deal with civil unrest at the Mott Police Academy. The Flint Police Department is barely holding it together. A decade of budget cuts has decreased their number from nearly 300 to fewer than 100 officers as crime continued to increase in a city of 100,000. It’s the lowest ratio of officer to citizen of any comparable city in America.
The officers are disgruntled. They feel overwhelmed and under-appreciated. The veterans, many of whom are from Flint, have endured numerous pay cuts and layoffs and have watched their city decay. The younger officers, who haven’t been around long enough to feel loyalty to the city, are leaving to join other departments that pay better and include a real pension.
Officer Bridgette Balasko was eating breakfast and watching the post-presidential election coverage before heading to work in 2016. “I didn’t know who I wanted to vote for. I didn’t want to vote,” she told me. “I didn’t want to vote for either candidate because I thought they were both terrible.”……………….
Hazel Eiber gets a bath from her grandmother Sabrina, using bottled water
In 2014, the city started drawing its drinking water supply from the Flint river, without using lead corrosion controls. Despite public outcry, city officials insisted the water was safe to drink. It wasn’t, and a public health crisis ensued. By 2015, the water crisis became national news.
One-year-old Hazel Eilber was being given a bath by her grandmother, Sabrina. She would only bathe Hazel in bottled water because she feared that even touching the tap water could make her sick. Sabrina has since moved out of Flint, vowing never to return.
I’d been working with the police department for months and scenes like this were fairly typical. The Catt squad was investigating a call about drugs being sold on this block. In this case, they didn’t find anything and the guys were let go.
World Politics
Russia
President offers concessions but says retirement age must rise to avoid economic ruin
Vladimir Putin underlines the importance of the pension plans in a nationwide TV address. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Vladimir Putin has made a direct appeal to Russians to ask for their support in raising the retirement age, warning that without urgent action, the country risked economic collapse and hyperinflation, as well as threats to its national security.
In a televised address to the nation, the president offered some concessions on the government’s unpopular draft legislation, and detailed a series of measures to alleviate fears that some older people could be left without pensions or jobs.
Putin’s approval rating has slid to a four-year low since the proposed pension changes were first announced on 14 June, the opening day of the World Cup, which Russia hosted. About 90% of Russians are against raising the retirement age, according to opinion polls, and there have been protests across the country involving an unusually broad spectrum of opposition groups.
In a 30-minute speech, Putin diluted the government’s plans, saying the national retirement age for women should be increased from 55 to 60, instead of 63, as previously proposed. “In our country, there is a special, gentle attitude to women,” he said.
The national retirement age for men, however, would still rise by five years, from 60 to 65.
The president also said laws should be introduced to make it an offence for employers to fire workers who are approaching pension age, as well as to clamp down on age discrimination in the workplace.
Putin said he had always been against the “painful” changes to the pension system and reminded Russians that he had pledged in 2005 that there would be no alteration to the age at which Russians can retire and claim a state pension while he was president. But he said “serious demographic problems” meant there was no alternative to the increase, which would represent the first adjustment to national retirement ages established under Joseph Stalin.
While state pensions average just 13,342 rubles (£154) a month, they are a lifeline for millions of Russians without relatives able to support them financially.
According to government statistics, Russia’s population decreased by 164,000 in the first six months of this year, compared with 119,000 during the same period last year. By 2044, the number of pensioners could equal the number of people in work, according to government forecasts, putting massive pressure on the national budget.
Putin said a failure to adopt the pension changes would lead to a rise in poverty and catastrophic consequences for the economy, which would leave the government unable to guarantee national security.
The reforms will not affect members of the state security services or police officers, a controversial decision that some analysts say could spark a rise in anti-Putin sentiment. “If the Kremlin’s opponents manage to exploit this, they will cause the authorities serious political damage,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter who is now a political consultant.
United States
President heard urging Christian ministers to sway voters and alluding to leftwing violence in leaked audio
‘You’re one election away from losing everything you’ve got,’ Trump reportedly told religious leaders. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
In a private meeting with Christian ministers, Donald Trump warned of “violence” if Republicans do not maintain control of Congress in the midterm elections, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by the New York Times.
At a state dinner for evangelical Christian ministers on Monday night at the White House, Trump urged religious leaders to use the power of their pulpits to make sure that “all of your people vote” in November, the New York Times reported.
“You’re one election away from losing everything you’ve got,” Trump reportedly told them.
If Republicans lose Congress, “they will end everything immediately”, the president said, seemingly referring to Congressional Democrats.
He went on: “They will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently. And violently. There’s violence. When you look at antifa, and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people.”
The Times reported that these additional remarks did not make clear “whom he was talking about”.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request to clarify whether the president was referring to congressional Democrats as “violent people”, or to comment on what connection the president was alleging between establishment Democratic lawmakers and young anti-fascist protesters.
Trump’s comments appear to echo the rhetoric of political advertisements from the rightwing National Rifle Association. In a much-criticized video advertisement last year, the gun rights group used footage from street protests to paint the entire American left, and all Americans who oppose president Trump, as violent thugs who “bully and terrorize the law-abiding”. The ad’s incendiary rhetoric was sharply criticized, with one critic calling it “a whisper shy of a call for full civil war”.
Over the past two years, as emboldened neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups have staged public rallies and marches across the United States, black-clad anti-fascist protesters, or “antifa”, have shown up to demonstrate against them. Anti-fascist protesters argue that the best way to prevent American neo-Nazis from growing more powerful is to make them afraid to meet or demonstrate in public.
White supremacists and neo-Nazis exchange insults with anti-fascist protesters at last year’s rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Many of the rightwing groups that “antifa” demonstrators show up to protest are self-described fascists. But the tactics of direct street protest and physical confrontation remain controversial among many Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike.
The protest behavior of “antifa” has become a favorite topic for Republicans looking to deflect attention from the activities of violent white supremacist extremists who greeted Trump’s presidency as a victory, and who advocate publicly for a whites-only nation.
During the violent neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August, white supremacists attacked black residents and protesting local ministers, and clashed with anti-fascist protesters in the streets. Afterwards, Trump repeatedly condemned “both sides” for the violence.
Local Charlottesville residents who had showed up to protest the white supremacists, and found themselves as the targets of violence while police officers stood by, had a different opinion.
“Antifa saved my life twice on Saturday,” the Rev Seth Wispelway, a local minister from Charlottesville, told Slate in the wake of last August’s violence.
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