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from ABC News (& affiliates)
TV Network in New York, New York
The United States and Russia have agreed to hold a summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, both sides announced Wednesday. The announcement came after White House National Security Advisor John Bolton met with Putin and other senior Russian officials Wednesday at the Kremlin. The summit appears likely to take place in mid-July, with reports that U.S. officials have been looking into holding it during an already-planned trip to Europe. Trump is currently scheduled to attend a NATO summit and visit Britain next month. On the eve of Bolton's visit to Moscow, Reuters and Politico quoted that an anonymous senior U.S. official as saying that Helsinki, the capital of Finland, was being considered as the venue for the meeting.
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from Asia Times Online
News & Media Website
Family values: the growing alliance between Putin and Western populism
The fixation on the ongoing World Cup, during which an estimated 1 million foreign soccer fans, many from Europe and the United States, are expected to converge on Moscow and other Russian cities, risks masking the extent to which Russia and the West have drifted apart. In fact, relations between the two sides nowadays are purely functional; a new Cold War has started. Was the hope that post-Soviet Russia would “join the West” always a delusion? Some dig deep into Russian history to find support for this conclusion, invoking the Tartar yoke and the absence of an “enlightenment.” Others view the estrangement more contingently.
What is fueling social unrest in Vietnam?
The detention of an American citizen in Vietnam, arrested while participating in a protest in Ho Chi Minh City, has again drawn international media attention to social unrest in this fast-growing nation of close to 100 million. The protesters gathered on June 9-11 in several cities, including Hanoi, Da Nang, Nha Trang, and Phan Thiet – where rioters burned the provincial People’s Committee building and several vehicles. Many were protesting proposed changes in law to create special economic zones available for a 99-year lease, alarming some Vietnamese who argue Chinese control over land impinges on their sovereignty.
Cut oil imports from Iran to zero, or else, warns State Department
Senior US official tells reporters that buyers will face harsh sanctions if they don’t comply by November.
Family values: the growing alliance between Putin and Western populism
The fixation on the ongoing World Cup, during which an estimated 1 million foreign soccer fans, many from Europe and the United States, are expected to converge on Moscow and other Russian cities, risks masking the extent to which Russia and the West have drifted apart. In fact, relations between the two sides nowadays are purely functional; a new Cold War has started. Was the hope that post-Soviet Russia would “join the West” always a delusion? Some dig deep into Russian history to find support for this conclusion, invoking the Tartar yoke and the absence of an “enlightenment.” Others view the estrangement more contingently.
The detention of an American citizen in Vietnam, arrested while participating in a protest in Ho Chi Minh City, has again drawn international media attention to social unrest in this fast-growing nation of close to 100 million. The protesters gathered on June 9-11 in several cities, including Hanoi, Da Nang, Nha Trang, and Phan Thiet – where rioters burned the provincial People’s Committee building and several vehicles. Many were protesting proposed changes in law to create special economic zones available for a 99-year lease, alarming some Vietnamese who argue Chinese control over land impinges on their sovereignty.
Senior US official tells reporters that buyers will face harsh sanctions if they don’t comply by November.
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from BBC News (UK)
France's Macron brings back national service
The French government has introduced a plan to bring back national service for all 16-year-olds. It was an idea put forward by Emmanuel Macron in his presidential campaign, to promote a sense of civic duty and national unity among French youth.
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from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, non-profit organization
Supreme Court Strikes Down Mandatory Union Fees for Public Employees
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Wednesday that nonunion government workers can’t be forced to pay dues or other fees to support a public employee union, further diminishing the power of organized labor and setting up what right-to-work proponents called the “hard work” of protecting free speech rights for the nation’s government employees. The union argument did not carry the day at the Supreme Court because the lines between collective bargaining and political activism have become blurred in recent years.
What Our Political Culture Can Learn from 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’
C. S. Lewis had some interesting things to say about humanity in his children's fantasy series Chronicles of Narnia, and what he spoke of in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe might probably be the most important of all. This is the sad reality of the world which we live in. The White Witch, the accuser, is ever present within us. She often manifests when we are formed as a collective—a mob, ready to pounce on the numerically disadvantaged, drowning out the victim's defense and overpowering the target with waves upon waves of judgment.
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from HumanProgress.org Education Website
Flawed Assumptions of China's Disastrous Childbearing Lawseo
The Chinese government is finally considering ending all of its cruel and pointless limits on childbearing, after softening its one-child policy to a two-child policy in 2016. To increase the birth rate, a recent South China Morning Post editorial even recommended that China adopt an “at least one child” policy. That is because, in a dramatic reversal, the government is now worried that its citizenry is producing too few, rather than too many, children. Not long ago, the government feared just the opposite. China’s birth limits were intended to shrink the population, based on the idea that “too many” people spelled disaster. Overpopulation fears became popular among Chinese officials in the 1970s, when the central arguments behind the Club of Rome’s report The Limits to Growth were translated into Chinese and promoted by a mathematician named Song Jian. The book warned that population growth could deplete resources and lead to a “collapse” of global society. It relied largely on computer simulations based on a dubious set of assumptions. Anti-population paranoia was not new. Thomas Malthus published an essay in 1798 expressing much the same fears, although without the elaborate calculations. But helped by alarmists like Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and the members of the Club of Rome, overpopulation hysteria underwent a renaissance in the 1970s. The Limits to Growth also promoted the idea that planners could use “systems analysis” to compute a country’s sustainable population size. In 1978, Song Jian calculated that China’s ideal population was between 650 million and 700 million people — in other words, 280 million to 330 million less than its actual population at the time.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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