Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

No one thinks it's a good idea to protect American interests? I wonder at what point such an unpatriotic sentiment becomes treasonous.

Angela Merkel led Germany for 16 years. She was in office during the financial crisis, the 2015 migrant crisis and, significantly, Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking to the BBC in Berlin, Mrs Merkel is robust in her defence of her time in office. She says she believes the war in Ukraine would have started sooner and would likely have been worse, if Kyiv had begun the path to Nato membership in 2008.

"We would have seen military conflict even earlier. It was completely clear to me that President Putin would not have stood idly by and watched Ukraine join Nato. "And back then, Ukraine as a country would certainly not have been as prepared as it was in February 2022."

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky disagrees. He describes Mrs Merkel’s Nato decision, backed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, as a clear "miscalculation" that emboldened Russia.

Selbstkritik übt die Autorin allenfalls, wenn es um schlecht vorbereitete Interviews oder das Rauchen geht.

The UK government is hiring a new negotiator to help deliver a “reset” of relations with Europe.

The job posting says the role will lead the government's relationship with the European Union and negotiations with the EU "on key UK interests", with mentions of trade, security and border policy.

The salary range is £153,000 to £200,000.

Haiti’s government has summoned the French ambassador to the country to protest about “unfriendly and inappropriate” comments from Emmanuel Macron, who was caught on camera calling the country’s leaders “morons”.

The French president had on Wednesday described the decision of the Caribbean country’s transitional presidential council to oust the prime minister earlier this month amid an escalation in gang warfare as “completely dumb”.

(erc :nick "mynick" :full-name "mynick" :port "6667" :server "irc.servername.org")

The court said that there were reasonable grounds to find that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defense minister, bear responsibility for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s office rejected the assertions, calling them “absurd and false” and accusing the court of being motivated by antisemitism and hatred of the Jewish state.

I guess tax rules (and lack of convenience) killed them. Any economic advantage, including subsidised lunch, is taxable income. Which is reasonable, really.

When the first lockdown was announced, including, unthinkably, the closing of pubs, Boris Johnson said he found it wrenching to be “taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub”.

The Norwegian parliament has apologised unreservedly to minority groups and Indigenous people for more than a century of historical injustices committed against them as part of its “Norwegianisation” policy.

The forced assimilation policy – which included state-run boarding schools that banned minority languages and the forced relocation of whole villages – pursued by Norwegian authorities dated back to the 18th century and became official policy from 1851. Although parts were phased out in the 1960s, much of the policy continued into the 1980s.

The apology on Tuesday to the Sami, Kvens and Forest Finns by the Norwegian parliament, known as Storting, came after the publication of a report by the truth and reconciliation commission last year.

“Quite frankly, there is no excuse that this apology took 150 years to make,” Biden said in Laveen, Arizona, after calling for a moment of silence to “remember those lost and the generations living with that trauma.”

 At least 18,000 children were taken from their families and forced to attend more than 400 boarding schools across 37 states or then-territories between 1819 and 1969. Three years ago, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, commissioned the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to review the schools’ impacts on Native Americans.

Their final report, issued this summer, found at least 973 Native American children died while attending these federal boarding schools.

“As president,” Biden said on Friday, “I believe it is important that we do know there were generations of native children stolen, taken away to places they didn’t know, with people they never met, who spoke a language they had never heard.”

Biden’s remarks were made at the Gila Crossing Community School outside of Phoenix. It’s the first time he has visited Indian Country as president and the first time in 10 years a sitting president has visited tribal lands. Then-President Barack Obama paid a visit to the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in 2014.

Biden acknowledged that “no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy.”

"Removing targeting restrictions will allow the Ukrainians to stop fighting with one hand tied behind their back," Alex Plitsas, senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, said.

"However, like everything else, I believe history will say the decision came way too late. Just like the ATACMS, HIMARS, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Abrams Tanks and F-16. They were all needed much sooner," he added.

Through the 1930s, Vereshchagin had personally supervised the introduction of an initial community of 213 giant South American rodents – known as coypu, nutria, swamp beavers, swamp rats or river rats – whose durable hides could be used to make fur hats and coat trims. Without realising, Vereshchagin and his team had proudly brought to the Caucasus an animal that would, by the 21st Century, be recognised as one of the world's 100 worst invasive species.

The coypu's journey to becoming an invasive pest began with Spanish colonists in the 18th Century. Conquistadors sailing the Rio de la Plata, the river that divides Argentina and Uruguay, mistook it for otter and gave it the name "nutria", the Spanish word for "otter". The name "coypu" comes from the indigenous Mapuche word used in Chile and eastern Argentina. Under the Spanish, coypu hides began to be exported to Europe, mainly for hats and neck-warmers, and by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, live coypu were shipped to breed in fur farms in Europe and North America. The rodents readily adapted to domestication.

[T]hey are eaten by red fox and grey wolf in Italy, by golden jackals across the Balkans, and by a white-tailed eagle in Croatia. Humans have sometimes followed – in the 1960s coypu meat was reportedly sold in British restaurants disguised as "Argentine hare" and a Moscow burger restaurant has sold it in the past decade as a healthy meat (it is leaner than beef).

In 1997 and 1998, Louisiana attempted to encourage the public to consume nutria meat. Nutria meat is leaner with a lower fat content and lower in cholesterol compared to ground beef.[57] In an effort to encourage Louisianians to eat nutria, several recipes were distributed to locals and published on the internet.[58] People in poor and rural Louisiana have trapped and consumed nutria meat for decades.