Category Archives: Viva!

Two men wounded by far-right gunman in French mosque shooting

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Two men in their seventies have been shot by a fellow pensioner in the Basque region of France. They interrupted the man as he tried to set fire to a mosque. Police later arrested the suspect.

Argentina election: Macri out as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner returns to office as VP

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Victory of Alberto Fernández’s presidential campaign puts an end to the pro-business economic policies of Macri’s administration

In a dramatic comeback, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, one of Argentina’s most popular presidents during her two terms in 2007-2015, has been voted back into office as vice president.

A large crowd of supporters burst into a roar outside the Frente de Todos (Everybody’s Front) party bunker in the Chacarita neighbourhood of the capital city of Buenos Aires at 9pm when preliminary official results gave the victory to the centre left presidential candidate Alberto Fernández and his running mate Fernández de Kirchner.

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Europe is failing to stand up to the bullies who threaten democracy | Luke Cooper

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From Brexit to the Balkans to the plight of the Kurds, EU leaders have refused to defend multilateralism

The rise of nationalism and the historic threat to liberalism sweeping the global system poses big strategic questions for European democracies. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin share an ideological belief in the language of race and nation combined with a winner-takes-all view of international diplomacy. By undermining the multilateral system the new authoritarians threaten a return to the assumptions of a previous era: a world of empires, not institutions.

This makes Europe a central crucible for what happens next. As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder argues, the EU is largely made up of states that were forced to give up their empires and so had no choice but to pursue multilateralism. Europe’s nationalists substitute the realities of this history with the national myth. They have become a major part of the EU’s own internal politics as the likes of Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński develop a fierce challenge to liberalism.

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Bolsonaro says he’s fighting corruption. So why is he surrounded by scandal? | David Miranda

because he is an ass at heart

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Brazil’s president and his family are subsumed by multiple corruption scandals suggesting serious criminality

There is a towering paradox at the heart of Brazilian politics: the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, was elected on an anti-corruption platform – music to the ears of a population that has been victimised for decades by systemic corruption.

Related: Who ordered Marielle Franco’s murder? | David Miranda

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Boris Johnson’s betrayal will leave the DUP with one option – to back remain | Alex Kane

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For Arlene Foster’s party, Brexit is less important than protecting Northern Ireland’s union with Great Britain

Northern Ireland has long been viewed as a “place apart” within the United Kingdom. Now, unionists fear it is about to become a “place apart” outside the UK: separated from Great Britain by a new border in the Irish Sea, pushed closer to the EU and, eventually, into a united Ireland. That’s why they are unsettled right now, and indeed fearful.

Unionists have been here before. In 1972 their parliament at Stormont was prorogued, and direct rule imposed from Westminster. In 1973 the British and Irish governments, with limited input from unionists, concluded the Sunningdale agreement, which replaced majority rule with mandatory power-sharing and an “Irish dimension”. A little over a decade later the British and Irish governments signed the Anglo-Irish agreement, which unionism regarded as a form of joint sovereignty. And in 1993 the Downing Street declaration stated the British government has no “selfish strategic or economic interest” in Northern Ireland.

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Ancestral home of modern humans is in Botswana, study finds

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Other scientists raise questions about results, which were based on DNA samples

Scientists claim to have traced the ancestral home region of all living humans to a vast wetland that sprawled over much of modern day Botswana and served as an oasis in an otherwise parched expanse of Africa.

The swathe of land south of the Zambezi River became a thriving home to Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, the researchers suggest, and sustained an isolated, founder population of modern humans for at least 70,000 years.

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US deploying more troops around Syria oil fields after killing of Isis leader

just follow the money, not the people who backed up your soldiers.

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Trump has said he hopes to secure a US share of Syrian oil revenues, which is potentially a war crime

The US military has started reinforcing its positions around oil fields in eastern Syria, saying the new deployments are part of its continuing counter-terrorist mission after the killing of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said on Monday that US forces would remain in Tanf along the Iraqi border, and more were being sent to the oil fields operated by the US energy corporation ConocoPhillips around Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria.

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