Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
RIO DE JANEIRO — Mario Andrada paced through the Olympic press center Monday afternoon, explaining why he has no time to talk just now. “There is an expression we have in Brazil,” he said. “ ‘When you have a hard job, you kill a lion a day.’ I have two lions to kill.” This month, Andrada…
Men got haircuts and shaved their beards. Women lit up cigarettes and burned their niqabs. Residents of Manbij, Syria, who had lived under the Islamic State for nearly two years, came out onto the streets and celebrated, shedding tears of joy. “May God destroy them. They slaughtered us,” a young man shouted in a square…
Image: HBO Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange blatantly lied about publishing only the “last four digits” of credit card numbers from democratic donors during an appearance on the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday. “We did not publish full credit card numbers of donors,” Assange said in response to a torrent of criticism…
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said Donald Trump’s new “expanded” ban would include not just Muslims, but Christians and Jews from countries with a history of terrorism. “We should temporarily suspend immigration from countries that have been compromised by terrorism, which I think is altogether fitting and appropriate,” Pence said. “When you look at the Syrian…
Barrier Status: ‘none’ Among the many questions still unanswered following Friday’s coup attempt in Turkey is one that has national-security implications for the United States and for the rest of the world: How secure are the American hydrogen bombs stored at a Turkish airbase? The Incirlik Airbase, in southeast Turkey, houses NATO’s largest nuclear-weapons storage…
There’s a delicious irony to Remainers’ branding of Leave voters as confused individuals who have simply made a desperate howling noise, whose anti-EU vote was a ‘howl of anger’ (Tim Farron) or a ‘howl of frustration’ (JK Rowling). Which is that if anyone’s been howling in recent days, it’s them, the top dogs of the…
The shadow of Brexit and rising protectionist sentiment loom large as U.S. President Barack Obama meets his North American counterparts to bolster the world’s largest trading bloc. Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto hold the so-called Three Amigos summit Wednesday in Ottawa, with fallout from the U.K.’s vote last week…
Your Twitter handle may soon be part of the US visa process. Yesterday, US Customs and Border Patrol entered a new proposal into the federal register, suggesting a new field in which persons entering the country can declare their various social media accounts and screen names. The information wouldn’t be mandatory, but the proposed field would…
PARIS — On Monday, the Western world may well wake up to the news that, for the first time since the defeat of Nazism, a European country has democratically elected a far-right head of state. Norbert Hofer, of the Austrian Freedom Party, claimed 35 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential…
-Analysis- PARIS — If we measure the world’s many political models as a marketplace, liberal democracy is in a serious recession. The world is less democratic than it was 10 or 20 years ago. In democratic countries, the tide is also ebbing: Some countries are becoming less free. An ominous wind, an old authoritarian tropism…