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Pakistano vyriausybė skųs teismo nurodymą perkelti buvusį premjerą į privačią ligoninę
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Prokuratūra LAT apskundė sušvelnintą nuosprendį seksualiniam nusikaltėliui Arturui Vasilevskiui
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BBC News
Sacked Ukrainian defence minister calls for presidential election
Martial law has been in place in Ukraine since February 2022, under which elections are suspended.
BBC News
French civil servant drugged us to make us urinate on ourselves, say accusers
More than 200 women accuse Christian Nègre of drugging them to make them urinate - two share their stories.
BBC News
Jump in energy bills drives UK inflation to highest rate for four months
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BBC News
Trainline, Virgin Atlantic and RED Driving School investigated over 'drip pricing'
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POLITICO
Bill Clinton turns 80 today. Does the old man have character?
A full three decades ago, as Bill Clinton turned 50 in the midst of his successful 1996 reelection campaign, he was sounding even then in an autumnal mood. “I have more yesterdays than tomorrows” he used to say often that year, a wistfulness that caused those of us who covered him to puzzle. What’s with this misty nostalgia? It was literally true, unless he expected to live 100, that he probably had more yesterdays than tomorrows. But fifty is typically the point when people realize they are no longer exactly young. It is hardly an age that merits a self-conception as old. Clinton’s perspective, however, doubtless left him with an appreciation of the fragility of life. He never met his biological father — a traveling salesman who married five times and died at age 28 in a car accident, three months before the future president was born. Yet Clinton himself has proved reasonably durable, especially for a man who had serious heart surgery at age 58. The 42nd president turns 80 today — at last at an age that amply justifies a more searching look back on life. Rest assured that no one in 1996 was contemplating the possibility that the president 30 years later would be a man who is actually two months older than Clinton — much less that this man would be President Donald Trump, who at that time had already been famous as a real estate magnate and professional self-promoter for 15 years or so. Above all, I think few people then were imagining that the country in 2026 would itself be feeling so old — or, at a minimum, so surly and so bereft of a unifying vision of the future. The very essence of the most powerful and divisive political movement since former President Ronald Reagan’s is expressly backward-looking — Make America Great Again. Many of the habits that today infuse American politics — the ones that make it so remorseless and infused with indignation and disdain — were present in nascent form in Clinton’s presidency. At the time, those developments seemed exotic — there was scant notion that they represented a shabby new norm. In the early days, this brand of contempt-driven politics often revolved around arguments about Bill Clinton’s public and private character. This was a theme of his 1992 election against George H.W. Bush, his 1996 election against Bob Dole, and it even shadowed the 2004 dedication of his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark. I am hardly a Clinton intimate. I haven’t been in his company in a decade. At one time, however, I probably knew as much about his presidency — its animating ideas, its decisive moments, its distinctive personalities — as anyone who had not actually served in it. This came from six years covering his White House for the Washington Post, and another two working on a book that aimed to synthesize his years in office and take a preliminary cut at assessing their historical weight. In both journalistic and historical terms, much of this time was devoted to thinking about competing appraisals of Clinton’s character. It is an argument without end in part because the positive and negative elements of Clinton’s character, the light and the shadows, seemingly flow from the same source: an intense need to win, to matter, to seduce, to prove himself in the world. Imagine if people around Bill Clinton in 1974, the year he ran unsuccessfully for Congress — Hillary Rodham, then a girlfriend but not yet a spouse, showed up in Arkansas to help — had been given a crystal ball to peer into the future. These people would not be surprised to learn that a future president was in their midst; His talent, ambition, and idealism were that obvious. Nor would they be surprised to learn how his campaigns and presidency would at various turns be nearly derailed. As early biographer David Maraniss documented, even then Clinton had a reputation for sexual vagrancy, and the patterns of heedlessness, deception, and hypocrisy such a lifestyle inevitably requires. He’s been out of political office for more than a quarter-century — as long as he was ever in it, beginning with his first victory as Arkansas attorney general in 1976. By my lights, the years since he yielded the Oval Office to George W. Bush (who turned 80 last month) in January 2001 have abundantly ratified the proposition that the country could do worse — at key junctures plainly has done worse–than Clinton’s character or his record, the strengths and infirmities alike. As he turns 80, and the country contemplates a post-Trump future two years from now, it seems to me there are at least four ways in which Clinton has prevailed in the great character argument woven throughout his life. Responsibility This is a place where my views have not changed much from what I thought at the time and what I think now. A paradox of Clinton’s presidency is that, however reckless he was in his personal life — culminating in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal and Republicans’ unsuccessful attempt to evict him from office through impeachment — he was supremely responsible in his use of power and his willingness to take sober risks for what he thought was right. Yes, he would over-agonize on hard choices — on issues from trade to welfare to war in the Balkans. But at the end of the day — sometimes it could be a very long day — on big subjects there was rarely much variance between what Clinton genuinely thought was the right decision and what he did. A good many of his policies are out of favor now within his own party. But the political and policy landscape he was navigating was much different than today. Clinton was a thoroughly political creature, but he was not an unduly cynical one — he was willing frequently to risk his political self-interest on behalf of what he conceived of as the public interest. Persuasion One reason Bill Clinton and his brand of centrist politics can seem antiquated is that the past generation has been defined by a whole different emphasis: the politics of mobilization. Under this later school of politics, elections are won principally by sharpening divisions and elevating the moral stakes. The aim is not to win over skeptics through the power of reasoned argument. It is to convince your own side that the other side is so repugnant in its character and aims that they should rally behind you and turn out in the biggest possible numbers. Clinton would in most of his campaigns give a nod to trying to explain what the other side believed, and why he believed his approach is better. “I think one of the ways you win elections is by talking straight with people and giving them permission to vote against you,” Clinton said a few years ago on a podcast. What he meant was that effective arguments don’t hector audiences or assert moral superiority, or the other side’s moral iniquity. They invite or even inspire people to think about an issue differently. In short, the politics of mobilization harnesses the power of contempt; the politics of persuasion employs the language of respect. Mobilization politics tends to deal in ideological and cultural abstractions like free markets versus socialism, or “traditional values” versus sexual freedom — the kind of debates that are especially potent at pushing people to decide “which side are you on?” Persuasion politics is more likely to center on the concrete human dimensions of policy choices — here’s what an expansion of childcare tax credits might mean for you. You could argue which brand of politics is more effective, and for the most part advocates of mobilization politics in recent years on left and right have been prevailing. But it’s hard to see how the politics of persuasion is not a more inspiring expression of American character, and also more likely to resolve serious long-term debates. The fight for power When Clinton opened his presidential library in Little Rock in 2004, the late Peter Jennings of ABC News in an interview baited Clinton about a recent survey of historians that rated his presidency reasonably well overall, but second to last (ahead only of Richard Nixon) in “moral authority.” Clinton said curtly that the historians were wrong, adding, “I don’t really care what they think.” Jennings replied: “Excuse me, Mr. President. I can feel it across the room. You care very deeply.” Clinton then snapped: “You don’t want to go here, Peter. You don’t want to go here. Not after what you people did. And the way you — your network — what you did with [Whitewater prosecutor] Kenneth Starr. The way your people repeated every little sleazy thing he leaked. No one has any idea of what that’s like.” The new library had an alcove about Clinton’s 1998 impeachment and subsequent acquittal called, “The Fight for Power.” The scandal, the exhibit argued, was simply the Republicans’ effort to overturn an election they lost. At the time, I believed this was mostly Clinton’s tortured rationalization for his own mistakes. Events since then, however, have swung the historical argument irrefutably in his favor. In the 1990s we spent months and even years covering such inane issues as whether the newly elected Clinton acted properly to fire long-term employees of the office that booked White House charter flights and hotels for the media. Now, Trump asserts the right to eliminate cabinet departments and agencies without congressional approval — and the stories often get lost in the rush of other news. There is not a credible argument that says Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater land investments in the 1970s were a worthy subject for ethics inquiries and criminal probes but the Trump family’s crypto investments and overseas deals while the company founder is in the Oval Office are no big deal. Clinton was right that the attacks on his character were often simply not on the level—but a proxy for other agendas. Perseverance In 2000, as Bill Clinton’s presidency was winding down and Hillary Clinton was waging a successful campaign for New York Senate, there was a political skull session at the White House involving a trusted roster of aides and strategists. As one of them described it to me later, Bill Clinton brought up the elephant in the room. Female voters in particular, he noted, wanted to understand why Hillary had stayed with Bill during the sex scandal. The mood was briefly awkward until Hillary Clinton said good-naturedly that she wanted to know the answer too. “Because you’re a sticker!” the president replied, jabbing the air for emphasis. Actually, it seems to me, both Clintons are. Across many decades, they have stayed married, and stayed in the fight over the issues they care about—amid plenty of victories and setbacks alike. That is a kind of character, too. These days, Bill Clinton’s public appearances are fewer. At times he looks frail. His skeptics include many people in his own party. Yet, on his 80th birthday, the main question seems to be less about his character than the country’s: Is there a pathway to a destination in which more people believed with him that politics can illuminate the best and most generous and inspiring parts of national identity? Clinton may be getting old, but that idea should be made young again.
POLITICO
South Korea admits Trump blindsided Seoul by cutting military drills
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Wednesday that Seoul received no warning of Donald Trump’s plan to slash joint military exercises, a move the U.S. president announced publicly and linked to South Korea’s refusal to help with his war in Iran. “Neither our government nor U.S. officials knew what President Trump wrote on his Truth Social,” Cho told the National Assembly’s foreign affairs committee. “We were not notified in advance.” Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday to “substantially reduce” the annual exercises, calling them costly and “totally inappropriate and hostile” toward North Korea. He tied the move to Seoul’s refusal to assist his effort to strip Iran of its nuclear capabilities and highlighted his “very good relationship” with Pyongyang’s ruler Kim Jong Un. Cho said Trump’s announcement caught Seoul by surprise, but added the eventual changes to the drills were being worked out jointly. Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back was in “close consultations” with Washington, he said. “Since our defense minister was involved in the discussions, I do not think it amounts to a unilateral notification.” He also warned that the smaller drills should not delay the transfer of wartime operational control, or OPCON, to Seoul — a longtime plan that would put a South Korean general in command of the combined U.S.-South Korean forces during a conflict. The drills have anchored the U.S.-South Korean alliance for more than 70 years, born from the aftermath of the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice agreement but no peace treaty. North Korea, which routinely condemns the drills as rehearsals for an invasion, launched another round of ballistic missile tests last week after this year’s exercises were announced. The rollback is already taking effect. South Korea said Wednesday that this year’s exercise will end on Aug. 21 rather than Aug. 27 after a U.S. request, cutting six days from the schedule.
Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera
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Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera
Anti-Muslim protesters call for ‘Christian Crusade’ in Dearborn, US
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July inflation keeps BoE on course to hold rates in September
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France 24 - International breaking news, top stories and headlines
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France 24 - International breaking news, top stories and headlines
Sacked Ukraine defence minister urges path to elections
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Africanews RSS
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