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U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday dangled the prospect of completing an initial trade deal with China “soon” but offered no new details on negotiations in a campaign-style speech touting his administration’s economic record. Markets had been on e…
November 12, 2019Read More
A foreign fighter from Denmark has been jailed in pre-trial custody for 27 days, a day after the man was deported from Turkey, which has begun to send home people who fought for the Islamic State group. Prosecutor Sidsel Klixbull told the Copenhagen C…
November 12, 2019Read More
Turkish officials were performing an autopsy and other procedures Tuesday as they tried to understand how a former British officer who helped found the White Helmets volunteer aid group in Syria died. James Le Mesurier’s body was found near his home i…
November 12, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — American prosecutors expanded an election-fraud case against 13 Russians that was first brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, adding details to flesh out how the defendants allegedly defrauded the U.S. by interfering in the 2016 U.S…
November 12, 2019Read More
Andre Perry’s debut essay collection reads like a slightly fragmented memoir focused on the search for identity, the desire to write, and his constant sense of unease as a black man in Iowa City.
November 12, 2019Read More
The gun-maker had appealed to the highest federal court after the Connecticut Supreme Court allowed the lawsuit over the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn., to go forward in March.
November 12, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — What do Spain, Israel, Austria, Belgium and the German state of Thuringia and perhaps, soon, the U.K., have in common? Elections whose outcomes make reasonable, cohesive parliamentary governing coalitions next to impossible. This isn’t just political fragmentation, which is becoming the norm in Europe and beyond. It’s compromise-defying deadlock. Breaking it may require substantial change to political traditions and parliamentary procedures.Spain has just held the fourth inconclusive election in as many years and the second this year. The problem for the plurality winner, caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, is that he’s already tried and failed to make deals with political parties on the leftist flank and in the political center. Policy differences with the remaining parties would probably paralyze a coalition government that included them. Such a scenario is unfolding in Germany now under a reluctant, uneasy coalition of the center-right and the center-left.In Austria, where the election took place on Sept. 29, more than a month of indecision ensued because the plurality winner, center-right leader Sebastian Kurz, had no willing coalition partners except on the far-right. Kurz had already tried governing in that combination and failed at it. On Monday, the Greens announced they’d talk to Kurz, and he launched negotiations with them despite what now appear to be irreconcilable differences on climate-change policies and migration. The talks probably will last well into next year. It’s impossible to predict how long Belgium will go without a government after the May election. Negotiators appointed by the king to explore coalition possibilities resigned last week without getting anywhere because the strongest parties — the Flemish nationalists and the Francophone socialists — have no discernible common interests.In Thuringia, there’s no majority coalition in sight following the state’s October election. The far left, led by incumbent Minister-President Bodo Ramelow, won a plurality, but parties that agree to work with his political force don’t have a combined majority. Nor can his opponents work together without breaking clear promises to their voters.Unless Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in the U.K. can win an outright majority next month, the country will find itself in a similar situation, with any workable coalition difficult to imagine on ideological grounds.In all these places, caretaker cabinets without full parliamentary support are perfectly capable of running the nations’ day-to-day business, keeping government offices open and public employees paid. But politics are as fragmented as they are today because many voters want change, and that’s not possible without powerful governments pushing it. Meanwhile, it’s getting harder to overcome ideological differences simply for the sake of stability and responsibility, since voters tend to dismiss such attempts as self-seeking and ineffective.At least in Israel, which has held two inconclusive elections this year, the biggest parties are willing to try something new to break the deadlock, like a prime ministerial rotation with the current leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, remaining in office for a year and then handing things over to his rival and possible coalition partner Benny Gantz. The Europeans should get more creative, too. Government formation talks are getting more protracted everywhere and junior coalition partners are getting harder to recruit because of mounting statistical evidence that playing the role usually leads to dramatic election losses. Leader rotations are an ingenious solution, but they hardly spell stability. It might be less damaging to move toward the minority government-friendly Scandinavian model. In Norway, appointing a prime minister doesn’t require a confirmation vote by the majority of parliament as in Spain or Germany. The ruling party is usually just the plurality winner in the election, while smaller parties often display a coalition aversion: They can achieve more in opposition, helping form ad-hoc majorities only on measures they can support instead of working inside governments. In Sweden, there is a confirmatory vote, but only to make sure an absolute majority of the parliament doesn’t oppose a new prime minister. In other words, legislators are only required to tolerate rather than actively support a government.A minority-government tradition hands a lot of power to plurality winners in elections, but at the same time, they must work more actively with the opposition than parties ruling in majority coalitions. The advantage is that all the parties can maintain their political identities and only make compromises that they can accept sincerely.Decision-making without stable majorities could be even more efficient with broader use of ranked-choice voting, in which legislators could rank various versions of a bill in order of preference to break deadlocks like the Brexit stalemate that afflicts the U.K. Parliament. The power of this procedure would allow a minority government to push through important legislation, but it wouldn’t completely eliminate the need for compromises. Part of the opposition, no matter how fragmented, could unite against competing measures and assemble a bigger plurality than the government’s.Breaking with political traditions and reforming voting rules is hard: Political systems are stabilized by inertia. But politicians should be able to see that democracy works differently now than it did in previous decades. Unless they make changes today, while responsible, traditional parties are still winning pluralities, voter disappointment with ineffective, constantly bickering governments or months-long cabinet formation processes can lead to outright victories by so-called anti-elite forces, often on the far right. Then, it’ll be too late for reasonable forces to unite against them. To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 12, 2019Read More
Tuesday: We want to hear from people who have experienced homelessness. Also: Catch up on the DACA case before the Supreme Court.
November 12, 2019Read More
School Closings Across Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri as Heavy Snow Hits U.S. Newsweek
November 12, 2019Read More
The Trump administration held a record 69,550 migrant children in U.S. government custody in fiscal 2019, up 42 percent from the previous year, and it detained the children for longer periods of time, The Associated Press and PBS Frontline reported Tuesday. The number of migrant children detained away from their parents also outpaced any other nation in the world, according to United Nations researchers. Canada, for instance, detained 155 separated children in 2018, and Britain sheltered 42 migrant children in 2017; Australia detained 2,000 children during a maritime surge in 2013.The U.S. government has acknowledged that detaining children can lead to long-term physical and emotional trauma. “Some of these migrant children who were in government custody this year have already been deported,” AP reports. “Some have reunited with family in the U.S., where they’re trying to go to school and piece back together their lives. About 4,000 are still in government custody, some in large, impersonal shelters.””Early experiences are literally built into our brains and bodies,” says Dr. Jack Shonkoff at Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. He warned Congress earlier this year that detaining kids away from their parents or primary caregivers rewires their brains. The American Academy of Pediatrics said in the September issue of journal Pediatrics that migrant children who are detained “face almost universal traumatic histories.” The longer the detention and the younger the detainees, the greater chance of serious trauma.When President Trump took office, the Department of Health and Human Services was caring for about 2,700 children, most of whom were reunited with parents or relatives in about a month, AP reports. In June, HHS had more than 13,000 children in custody and they stayed in detention for about two months. On Nov. 5, a federal judge ordered the government to immediately provide mental health treatment and screening to detained migrant families, ruling that there is sufficient evidence government policy “caused severe mental trauma to parents and their children” and U.S. government officials were “aware of the risks associated with family separation when they implemented it.”More stories from theweek.com The coming death of just about every rock legend The president has already confessed to his crimes Why are 2020 Democrats so weird?
November 12, 2019Read More
Nikki Haley says she told President Donald Trump she was uncomfortable with the Vladimir Putin meeting when he played down Russian election meddling.
November 12, 2019Read More
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