Lesson Plan: Literacy in the Digital Era

https://annmichaelsen.com/2025/09/08/lesson-plan-literacy-in-the-digital-era/

Celebrations in 2025

This year, International Literacy Day (ILD) will be celebrated under the theme of “Promoting literacy in the digital era.”

Digitalisation has been changing ways in which we learn, live, work and socialise, in both positive and negative ways, depending on how we engage with it. While digital tools can help expand learning opportunities for marginalised groups, including 739 million young people and adults who lack basic literacy skills, this digital shift also risks creating double marginalisation – exclusion not only from traditional literacy learning but also from the benefits of the digital age. Digitalisation also raises other concerns, including privacy issues, privacy, digital surveillance, reinforced biases, ethics, the risk of passive consumption, and environmental impacts.

Literacy is a key for making these transformations inclusive, relevant and meaningful. Beyond reading and writing on paper, literacy in the digital era enables people to access, understand, evaluate, create, communicate and engage with digital content safely and appropriately. Literacy is also central for fostering critical thinking, discerning credible information and navigating complex information environments. Unesco

Overview

Grade Level / Audience: Suitable for secondary school students, pre-service teachers, or adult education classes.

Goal: To deepen understanding of literacy’s evolving dimensions in a digital world, fostering critical awareness, meaningful engagement, and actionable strategies.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the lesson, learners will:

Explain the significance of International Literacy Day and its evolving themes.

Analyze the implications of digitalization for equitable access to literacy.

Develop and propose digital-era literacy interventions or initiatives.

Critically evaluate challenges such as digital exclusion, privacy, and misinformation.

Lesson Structure

1. Introduction & Contextual Framing

Activity: Begin with a whole-group brainstorming: “What is literacy beyond reading and writing?” Note emerging ideas.

Present Key Facts:

International Literacy Day has been observed annually on 8 September since 1967, established by UNESCO in 1966 (UNESCO – International Literacy Day).

The 2025 theme is “Promoting literacy in the digital era,” emphasizing the need to enable people to access, understand, evaluate, create, and engage with digital content safely and responsibly (UNESCO 2025 Theme Overview).

Discussion Prompt: What does digital literacy mean for us today as educators and learners?

2. Exploration: Digital Era Challenges & Opportunities

In Groups, participants explore and discuss:

How digital tools can broaden learning opportunities, especially for marginalized communities, and conversely, how they may exacerbate exclusion (“double marginalization”).

Other key concerns: digital surveillance, reinforced biases, ethical implications, and environmental impacts of digital education

Share-Out: Groups summarize insights; facilitator lists key themes visible to all learners.

3. Case Study Analysis & Application

Provide Examples:

UNESCO’s International Literacy Prizes, which highlight innovative projects in digital and community literacy

A literacy fundraiser (“Books Beyond Borders”) aimed at bringing reading materials and digital education tools to children in crisis contexts

Task: In groups, design a mini-project or intervention that promotes literacy in a digital context—this could be local (e.g., community digital storytelling workshops), global (e.g., digital resource-sharing networks), or policy-level (e.g., advocating for equitable internet access).

4. Presentation & Peer Feedback

Each group presents its proposed project.

Peers and facilitators provide constructive feedback guided by questions such as:

Does this project address digital equity?

How does it build genuine digital literacy?

What are potential risks or limitations?

5. Reflective Closing

Prompt: “How has our understanding of literacy shifted in the digital era? What will you take into your own work or classroom?”

Gather reflections as a gallery walk, shared document, or exit tickets.

Optional Takeaway: Encourage learners to explore or nominate literacy projects for the UNESCO Literacy Prizes.

 Resources

UNESCO – International Literacy Day official page and theme overview for 2025

https://www.unesco.org/en/days/literacy

https://en.unesco.org/commemorations/literacyday

https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-calls-nominations-2025-international-literacy-prizes

World Literacy Foundation – Global literacy initiatives and 2025 World Literacy Summit

https://ukreads.org/world-literacy-summit-2025/

https://worldliteracyfoundation.org

Save the Children – Literacy Boost initiative and literacy programs

https://www.savethechildren.org/us/charity-stories/literacy-day

https://www.savethechildren.org/us/what-we-do/education/literacy-boost

Brookings Institution – Reports and articles on the global learning crisis and education reform

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/brown-center-scholars-reflect-on-how-the-pandemic-reshaped-us-education/

https://parentsinternational.org/playful-learning-global-crisis/

Additional background on International Literacy Day history and its significance

https://nationaltoday.com/international-literacy-day/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Literacy_Day

UNESCO International Literacy Day 2025 Concept Note (PDF)

https://www.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2025/08/ild-2025-cn-en.pdf

The post Lesson Plan: Literacy in the Digital Era first appeared on The digital classroom, transforming the way we learn.

Schule

via Teaching English using web 2.0 https://annmichaelsen.com

September 8, 2025 at 01:46PM

Riots and abuse troubled these former prisons. ICE plans to reopen them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/09/07/ice-detention-prisons-immigrants-trump/

The Trump administration plans to reopen several former prisons and detention centers that were closed by the federal government years ago over concerns about violence, medical neglect and systemic understaffing, as part of the president’s plan to carry out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.

Three of the facilities, in Texas, Kansas, and Georgia, are on a government list of detention centers that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to reopen or expand by the end of this year, according to an internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. All three would be operated by the companies that ran them previously.

Congress has approved $45 billion to expand immigrant detention over the next four years. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has stripped away oversight measures and provided limited details on how they plan to address chronic issues that led to past problems at these facilities, including understaffing in remote areas.

The troubled facilities were closed during the Biden administration after serious incidents, and in some cases, years of recurring problems.

At the sprawling Reeves County prison in West Texas, which could hold more than 4,000 people, inmates rioted to protest poor medical care, food and the use of solitary confinement, causing $20 million in damage.

A Senate investigation found that a physician affiliated with the 1,000-bed Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia appeared to have performed “excessive, invasive and often unnecessary gynecological procedures” on dozens of women detained between 2017 and 2020.

And at a prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, with capacity for about 1,000 inmates, understaffing led to such a level of violence and chaos that one federal judge characterized the facility as “an absolute hell hole.”

“The facilities that have been closed in prior administrations were closed for good reason, generally after a lot of thought and negotiation and consideration,” said Deborah Fleischaker, former acting ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden. “And to reopen those without really, really clear mitigation plans and oversight and staffing models is just a recipe for more harm to detainees.”

Reeves was overseen by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Irwin by ICE and Leavenworth by the U.S. Marshals Service. Representatives for the private companies that operate the Reeves and Irwin detention facilities — Geo Group and LaSalle Corrections, respectively — did not respond to requests for comment.

Steve Owen, a spokesman for CoreCivic, the owner of the Leavenworth facility, said in an email that the company meets or exceeds government standards at all its 42 correctional and detention facilities across the country. He said that the Kansas prison faced security challenges related to understaffing during a short period of its 30 years in operation, and that the company has seen a positive response from job seekers as it lays plans to reopen the facility.

“As with any difficult situation, we sought to learn from it,” he said. “Staffing was the main contributor to the challenges, and the COVID-19 pandemic compounded the labor issues.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement that ICE detention centers abide by higher standards than most prisons. She also said that the internal planning document is still subject to changes, and the agency may ultimately decide against issuing certain contracts. DHS noted that funds for staff that would be responsible for medical and detention standards compliance were included in Congress’s spending bill.

The Trump administration said in March that it was closing two watchdog agencies that oversaw detention centers and investigated detainee complaints. DHS reversed course, but lawyers for immigrants and nonprofit advocacy groups assert that deteriorating conditions at some locations are festering unchecked. A federal judge in New York ruled last month that ICE needed to improve conditions at a Lower Manhattan immigration holding facility, where detainees claimed they were held without beds, showers or medical support and received only two small meals a day.

Unlike criminal detention, immigration detention is not meant to be punitive. A Supreme Court ruling and ICE’s website state that those facing civil violations should not be held as a form of punishment; rather, detention for immigration offenses is meant to ensure people show up for proceedings.

Detainees at some facilities are housed in dormitory-style rooms with bunk beds and limited access to a recreational area at certain times during the day. But Eunice Cho, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, says detainees are increasingly being locked in cells with little access to bare necessities.

“Punitive conditions can take place in a number of ways,” Cho said, including “deprivation of medical care, deprivation of access to counsel; abuse of force; severe overcrowding.”

Remote locations, isolated detainees

Many of the facilities that ICE plans to reopen are in remote, rural areas where, historically, few people have been willing to work a difficult job that requires frequent overtime shifts. Many state and local prisons are already experiencing a staffing crisis, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, who researches private prisons as a senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, a nonpartisan law and policy organization affiliated with New York University’s law school.

Nearly 90 percent of ICE detainees are held in facilities run by contract companies in the private sector. These firms shifted away from holding people in federal prisons over the past decade after Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden ordered the Bureau of Prisons to phase out contracts with privately run prisons, citing federal research showing such facilities were more likely to have security problems and do not substantially save taxpayers money.

Trump has reversed these policies, but federal prison contracts have continued to wind down and private prison companies now own many empty facilities. This year, ICE started working with contractors to convert a few of these prisons into immigrant detention centers, including in Michigan and Tennessee, and plans to issue many more contracts in the coming months.

The Reeves County Detention Center, located in the remote Trans-Pecos region of West Texas, was so hard to staff when it received a contract in 2007 to house migrant men that officials eliminated the minimum required staffing levels determined by the federal government, according to a 2015 audit by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. The unusual concession meant Reeves was rarely — if ever — fully staffed.

Reeves’s remoteness contributed to a sense that guards “can act with impunity,” said Lisa Graybill, former legal director for the ACLU of Texas, who sued the federal government and the administrators of the prison over the death of an undocumented immigrant who was denied medical care at the facility. Graybill, who litigated the case on behalf of his survivors, said that he was epileptic and put in solitary confinement merely because he was demanding medication.

Geo Group claimed legal immunity and said it had acted in “good faith" in court filings. The case was resolved in a monetary settlement awarded to the detainee’s family.

“The understaffing was astounding even in a system that flourishes and profits on what I would call planned understaffing,” she said.

These factors contributed to a series of riots in 2008 and 2009 in which inmates set a mattress on fire and destroyed property, demanding better food, medical care and living conditions. Three inmates were hospitalized, according to a CNN report at the time. Graybill described the events as an act of “desperation.”

Two of the three units at Reeves closed in 2017, after the government did not renew its contract. The third unit closed in 2022 after the Biden administration issued its executive order phasing out Justice Department contracts with private prisons, saying they provide “incarceration that is less humane and less safe.”

ICE plans to award Geo a new contract to reopen Reeves by October, and eventually house up to 5,700 immigrant detainees there, according to the internal planning document obtained by The Post. That includes 2,000 beds for unauthorized migrant parents and children, which would make it one of the largest family detention centers in the country.

'Gynecological abuse’

The Irwin County Detention Center is in the tiny town of Ocilla, Georgia, which is more than 100 miles from the nearest major city and has a population smaller than some high schools. In 2020, former Irwin detainees complained that they’d undergone nonconsensual and unnecessary gynecological procedures by an outside doctor that Irwin’s medical staff had referred them to.

Sarah Owings, a Georgia-based immigration attorney who represented some of the women alleging mistreatment, said the facility’s location “in the middle of nowhere” likely constrained its ability to hire qualified medical staff, as well as the failure of authorities to see what was happening to the women there.

“There’s no oversight,” she said. “When you combine that with the absolute powerlessness of the people you are talking about detaining, that makes it possible for bad things to happen in the dark.”

Studies have shown numerous deficiencies in the health care that ICE and its contractors typically provide detainees, from ineffective mental health screenings to improper surgical procedures. One report last year by the ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights found that over 95 percent of the deaths that occurred in ICE custody between 2017 and 2021 could have been preve

Postversand in die USA wegen Zöllen um 81 Prozent eingebrochen

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amerika/usa-postservice-100.html

Wegen US-Zöllen Postversand in die USA um 81 Prozent eingebrochen

Stand: 06.09.2025 16:42 Uhr

88 Postdienstleister aus verschiedenen Ländern haben die Sendung von Briefen und Paketen in die USA ganz oder teilweise eingestellt. Hintergrund ist der Wegfall vom Zollausnahmen für Sendungen unter einem gewissen Warenwert.

Wegen der von US-Präsident Donald Trump verhängten neuen Zölle ist der Brief- und Paketverkehr in die USA nach UN-Angaben um mehr als 80 Prozent eingebrochen. 88 Postdienstleister aus aller Welt hätten den Versand in die USA seit dem Wegfall einer Ausnahmeregelung für kleine Pakete Ende August ganz oder teilweise eingestellt, teilte die UN-Sonderorganisation Weltpostverein (WPV) mit.

Die Zahl der Sendungen in der USA sei beispielsweise am 29. August - dem Tag des Inkrafttretens der neuen Regeln - im Vergleich zur Vorwoche um 81 Prozent zurückgegangen, erklärte der WPV. Es werde nun eine "neue technische Lösung" gesucht, um eine "Wiederaufnahme der Postdienstleistungen in die Vereinigten Staaten" zu ermöglichen.

15 Prozent Zölle für Sendungen aus der EU

Die USA hatten mit Stichtag 29. August bisher geltende Zollausnahmen für Pakete aus aller Welt mit einem Wert von unter 800 Dollar (rund 700 Euro) abgeschafft. Mit dem Wegfall der sogenannten De-minimis-Regel wird für viele Pakete nun der gleiche Zollsatz fällig wie für andere Einfuhren aus dem jeweiligen Herkunftsland - also beispielsweise 15 Prozent für Sendungen aus der EU.

Die neuen Regeln sorgten in vielen Ländern für Einschränkungen, darunter auch in Deutschland. Die Deutsche Post und DHL hatten den Warenversand aus Deutschland in die USA wegen Unklarheiten bei den neuen Regeln schon vor dem Wegfall der Zollbefreiung für kleine Pakete eingeschränkt. Für einige Privatsendungen gelten aber weiter Ausnahmen.

Verschiedenes

via tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD https://www.tagesschau.de/infoservices/alle-meldungen-100.html

September 6, 2025 at 04:48PM

The Anti-Trump Strategy That’s Actually Working

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/trump-legal-resistance-lawsuits-norm-eisen/684071/

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Days after Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to put an end to the Justice Department’s revelations about Jeffrey Epstein, captains of the legal resistance gathered by Zoom. Norm Eisen, a former attorney for Barack Obama’s White House, had convened lawyers, Democratic communications strategists, a neoconservative Trump critic, and a former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. This one was big, Eisen said from his parked car in Baltimore, where he had traveled for a lawsuit to overturn President Donald Trump’s cuts to AmeriCorps. They should move quickly.

“The Trump-Epstein story is the story of the Trump administration—corruption benefiting his rich and powerful cronies at the expense of vulnerable people,” Eisen explained as I lurked on the July call with everyone’s permission.

The plan was to file a Hail Mary lawsuit to force the Department of Justice to release any documents in its possession that tie Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, to Trump. Eisen’s team had already filed the request for anything that connects the two men, under the Freedom of Information Act. The FOIA is normally a weak tool for unlocking investigative records gathered for criminal investigations, but Eisen had a legal theory: Because the DOJ had argued under pressure after Bondi’s announcement that the extraordinary public interest in the Epstein case required the unsealing of grand-jury testimony, they could argue the same thing. And that was just the beginning.

Eisen, who has pursued more than 100 legal matters against Trump since his second inauguration, explained that he wanted to try the case in the court of law and the court of public opinion. He asked for an update on an op-ed he had written raising questions about “a potential cover up” of Trump’s dealings with Epstein. He wanted a plan from Lavora Barnes, the former Michigan party chair, about how they would get elected leaders to discuss the Epstein records. He wanted a press plan to publicize the requests they had already filed, and the lawsuit they would file a few weeks later. A discussion followed about whether they should also try to intervene in the Justice Department’s effort to unseal grand-jury testimony, how many of the Epstein records they should demand to release, and how the Epstein issue fit with other arguments against Trump. “We have an extremely strong horse right now. Let’s just ride that,” said Bill Kristol, the resident neoconservative. “We want to know what’s going on with the Epstein files.”

The first seven months of Trump’s Oval Office do-over have been, with occasional exception, a tale of ruthless domination. The Democratic opposition is feeble and fumbling, the federal bureaucracy traumatized and neutered. Corporate leaders come bearing gifts, the Republican Party has been scrubbed of dissent, and the street protests are diminished in size. Even the news media, a major check on Trump’s power in his first term, have faded from their 2017 ferocity, hobbled by budget cuts, diminished ratings, and owners wary of crossing the president.

One exception has stood out: A legal resistance led by a patchwork coalition of lawyers, public-interest groups, Democratic state attorneys general, and unions has frustrated Trump’s ambitions. Hundreds of attorneys and plaintiffs have stood up to him, feeding a steady assembly line of setbacks and judicial reprimands for a president who has systematically sought to break down limits on his own power. Of the 384 cases filed through August 28 against the Trump administration, 130 have led to orders blocking at least part of the president’s efforts, and 148 cases await a ruling, according to a review by Just Security. Dozens of those rulings are the final word, with no appeal by the government, and others have been stayed on appeal, including by the Supreme Court.

“The only place we had any real traction was to start suing, because everything else was inert,” Eisen told me. “Trump v. the Rule of Law is like the fight of the century between Ali and Frazier, or the Thrilla in Manila or the Rumble in the Jungle. It’s a great heavyweight battle.”

The legal scorecard so far is more than enough to provoke routine cries of “judicial tyranny” by Trump and his advisers. “Unelected rogue judges are trying to steal years of time from a 4 year term,” reads one typical social-media complaint from Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller. “It’s the most egregious theft one can imagine.”

But Miller’s fury was, in part, misdirected. Before there can be rulings from judges, there must be plaintiffs who bring a case, investigators who collect facts and declarations about the harm caused, and lawyers who can shape it all into legal theories that make their way to judicial opinions. This backbone of the Trump resistance has as much in common with political organizing and investigative reporting as it does with legal theory.

“It should give great pause to the American public that parties are being recruited to harm the agenda the American people elected President Trump to implement,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told me in a statement.

Even those at the center of the fight against Trump view their greatest accomplishments as going beyond the temporary restraining orders or permanent injunctions they won. Without the court fights, the public would not know about many of the activities of Elon Musk’s DOGE employees in the early months of the administration. They would not have read headlines in which federal judges accuse the president’s team of perpetrating a “sham” or taking actions “shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” Kilmar Abrego Garcia would not have become a household name. Even cases that Trump ultimately won on appeal—such as his ability to fire transgender soldiers, defund scientific research, and dismiss tens of thousands of government employees—were delayed and kept in the news by the judicial process.

In Trump immigration cases, it’s one thing in public, another in court

Since Inauguration Day, executive orders have been defanged or blocked, agency closures delayed, government-employee firings reversed. Deportation flights have been delayed, law firms have freed themselves from Trump’s retaliation, and foreign students have won the ability to continue studying at U.S. universities. Courts have forced the president to restore cut services and spending to AmeriCorps, the U.S. African Development Foundation, the CDC, and other agencies. They have upended an effort by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to make it more difficult to release unaccompanied minors from government custody and forced Trump to pay for foreign-aid bills he had hoped to stiff-arm. A federal appeals court ruled Friday that many of Trump’s tariffs were illegal, setting up a likely hearing by the Supreme Court.

“The biggest victory, I think, has been in terms of highlighting the egregious nature of what Trump is doing,” Rushab Sanghvi, the general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, told me. “It is getting the public to understand how terrible it is.”

The groundwork for these victories was laid before Trump was even reelected, in a series of summits in 2023 and 2024. Universities hosted symposiums. Organized labor held private meetings. International experts, who had been studying Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, warned that Trump would move quickly and try to overwhelm his opponents. “We needed to flood the zone with rule-of-law shock and awe,” Eisen told me after the Zoom call.

The plan that emerged was not focused on centralizing a response, but on running a barrage of coordinated efforts. Attorneys general would represent states, advocacy groups such as Public Citizen and the ACLU would focus on their areas of expertise, and the unions would gather stories from their members and identify plaintiffs who could show harm. Atop this infrastructure, new organizations took shape, bringing in tens of millions of dollars to pay for it all.

The offices of Democracy Forward, the single largest source of Trump’s legal troubles, look from the inside like those of any corporate Washington law firm. From the building’s corner windows, the group’s more than 130 staff members—about half of them attorneys—can just make out the White House a couple of blocks down the street. By their count, they have also filed more than 100 legal actions so far this year against Trump, often with union, nonprofit, or local-government partners.

Since 2021, the group had been operating on the assumption that American democracy was backsliding, and that the outcome of the 2024 election would merely determine whether it sped up or slowed down. By early 2024, it had established working groups with other organizations to begin sketching out the “threat matrix” of a second Trump term, placing particular focus on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Trump distanced himself from while campaigning but has largely embraced while in office. “We knew that if the federal landscape were to regress, people would have very few levers of power left,” Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s president, told me. “They would be able to go to the streets and to vote, and they would be able to use litigation.”

Democracy Forward’s first filing, to gain access to the deliberations of DOGE, hit the docket of the D.C. district court within hours of Trump taking the oath of office. Eisen’s Democracy Defenders Fund, which has about two dozen attorneys, and three other legal groups filed similar suits at the same time. The decision to sue so soon was controversial. Perryman remembers some elected Democrats, among others, urging her to hold ba

The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/trump-parade-china-putin-xi-kim/684113/

The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.

Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.

But the parade was worse than a mere snub. Putin, Xi, and Kim stood in solidarity while reviewing China’s military might only weeks after Putin came to Alaska and refused Trump’s pleas to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. The White House tried to spin that ill-advised summit into at least a draw between Putin and Trump, but when the Kremlin’s dictator shows up with no interest in negotiation, speaks first at a press conference, and then caps the day by declining a carefully planned lunch and flying home, that’s a humiliation, not an exchange of views.

Nor has Trump fared very well with the other two members of this cheery 21st-century incarnation of SPECTRE. In the midst of Trumpian chaos, Xi is adroitly positioning China as the new face of international stability and responsibility. He has even made a show of offering partnership to China’s rival and former enemy India: Chinese diplomats last month said that China stands with India against the American “bully” when Trump was, for some reason, trying to impose 50 percent tariffs on India.

[Tom Nichols: Who’s running American defense policy?]

Likewise, the North Koreans, after playing to Trump’s ego and his ignorance of international affairs during meetings in the president’s first term, have continued their march to a nuclear arsenal that within years could grow to be larger than the United Kingdom’s. Trump was certain that he could negotiate with Kim, but the perfumed days of “love letters” between Trump and Kim are long over. Pyongyang’s leadership seems to know that it costs them little to humor Trump politely, but that they should reserve serious discussion for the leaders of serious countries.

Trump responded to his exclusion from the gala in Beijing by acting exactly like the third-tier leader that Xi, Putin, and Kim seem to think he is. As the event was taking place, Trump took to his social-media site—of course—to express his hurt feelings with a cringe-inducing attempt at a zinger. “May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”

Now, the reality is that Russia, China, and North Korea are conspiring against America, but it is beneath both the dignity and the power of an American president to whine about it. Trump continued his unseemly carping with a demand that China recognize the valor of the Americans who died in the Pacific:

The big question to be answered is whether or not President Xi of China will mention the massive amount of support and 'blood' that The United States of America gave to China in order to help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader. Many Americans died in China’s quest for Victory and Glory. I hope that they are rightfully Honored and Remembered for their Bravery and Sacrifice!

This message does not exactly project confidence and leadership; instead, it sounds like the grousing of a man beset by insecurities. A more self-assured commander in chief would have ignored the parade and, if asked about it, would have said something to the effect that the United States has always respected the sacrifices of our allies in World War II. But not Trump: He petulantly declared that he would not have attended even if the cool kids had invited him.

Authoritarians are unfortunately in good company in treating Trump as an incompetent leader. Even America’s allies have recognized that Trump may be their formal partner, but that they mostly get things done with the American president by soothing his ego and working around him. After Trump emerged from the summit in Anchorage essentially parroting Putin’s talking points, seven top European leaders rushed to Washington to tell Trump that he had done well and that they truly, really respected him, but that perhaps he should hold off on being a co-signer of Kremlin policy.

[Jonathan Lemire: How Putin humiliated Trump]

Trump’s damage to American power and prestige would be less severe if the president had a foreign policy and a team to execute it. He has neither: Trump ran for president mostly for personal reasons, including to stay out of prison, and his foreign policy, such as it is, is merely an extension of his personal interests. He holds summits, issues social-media pronouncements, and engages in photo ops mostly, it seems, either to burnish his claim to a Nobel Prize or to change the news cycle when issues such as the economy (or the Jeffrey Epstein files) get too much traction.

Worse, Trump is no longer surrounded by people who care about foreign affairs or can competently step in and create consistent policy. In his first term, Trump had a secretary of defense, James Mattis, who helped to create a national-defense strategy, a document that Trump might have ignored but was at least promulgated to a national-security establishment that needed direction from someone, somewhere. Now, at the Pentagon, Trump has Pete Hegseth, who shows little apparent inclination or ability to think about complexities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was supposed to be one of the new “adults in the room,” but he has instead become a man in a Velcro suit, with the president sticking jobs and responsibilities onto him without any further guidance. He has been reduced to sitting glumly in White House press sprays with foreign leaders while Trump embarrasses himself and his guests. Meanwhile, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is spending her time trying to root out the spies she thinks hate the president. Unfortunately, the agents she’s hunting are Americans, which must bring a smile to Xi’s face and perhaps even produce a belly laugh from former KGB officer Putin.

America is adrift. It has no coherent foreign policy, no team of senior professionals managing its national defense and diplomacy, and a president who has little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him. Little wonder that the men who gathered in Beijing—three autocrats whose nations are collectively pointing many hundreds of nuclear weapons at the United States—feel free to act as if they don’t even think twice about Trump or the country he leads.

via Best of The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/

September 5, 2025 at 04:11PM

Alberta Backs Off on School Library Book Ban

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/world/canada/alberta-canada-edmonton-school-book-ban.html

Alberta ordered schools to pull “inappropriate” books, but paused its plan after a large school district banned scores of books in an apparent effort to make a point.

via NYT > Top Stories https://www.nytimes.com

September 3, 2025 at 01:26AM

Margaret Atwood: Schriftstellerin veröffentlicht ironische Kurzgeschichte gegen Bücherbann in Alberta

https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/margaret-atwood-schriftstellerin-veroeffentlicht-ironische-kurzgeschichte-gegen-buecherbann-in-alberta-a-82aa93dc-0f6e-444a-bdcd-1a498174296e

Margaret Atwood ist nicht die Einzige, die gegen die Verbannung der zahlreichen Bücher aus den Klassenzimmern und Bibliotheken Edmontons aufbegehrt – offenbar mit Erfolg. Wie die »New York Times« und andere Medien berichteten, ruderte die Provinzregierung nach dem öffentlichen Aufschrei zurück. Am Dienstag wurde die Anordnung der Entfernung der Bücher zunächst ausgesetzt.

Demnach hatte sich Danielle Smith, die Premierministerin der Provinz, darüber beschwert, dass die Schulbehörden offenbar absichtlich zu weit gegangen waren, um gegen die Anordnung ihrer Regierung zu protestieren.

Verschiedenes

via DER SPIEGEL - Kultur https://www.spiegel.de/

September 3, 2025 at 10:33AM

Lesson Plan: Recognizing Democratic Erosion and Authoritarian Shifts

https://annmichaelsen.com/2025/09/02/lesson-plan-recognizing-democratic-erosion-and-authoritarian-shifts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lesson-plan-recognizing-democratic-erosion-and-authoritarian-shifts&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lesson-plan-recognizing-democratic-erosion-and-authoritarian-shifts

Text: Garrett Graff, “America Tips Into Fascism” (August 25, 2025)

The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed. I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different. Today, August 25, 2025, is that morning. Something is materially different in our country this week than last. Garrett Graff August 25, 2025 •

Discussion: Meaning of the Opening Paragraph

Graff’s first paragraph conveys shock and disbelief at the speed with which the United States has slipped from democracy into authoritarianism. It stresses that the erosion of democracy is rarely marked by one dramatic event; instead, it often happens subtly, through the gradual destruction of norms, unchecked power grabs, and blurred boundaries between democratic and authoritarian practices.

Prompt students:

What emotions, warnings, or historical echoes do you hear in these sentences?

How might citizens recognize when a democracy is eroding?

What does Graff mean when he says, “Then you wake up one morning and our country is different”?

Learning Objectives

Students will be able to:

Identify core signs of democratic erosion and authoritarian tendencies.

Analyze rhetorical strategies that frame political change.

Critique historical analogies that compare regimes and transitions.

Reflect on civic responsibilities in protecting democratic institutions.

Lesson Flow

1. Introduction

Read and discuss the opening paragraph, unpacking tone, urgency, and implications.

Have students highlight specific phrases that reveal alarm or resignation.

2. Exploring Definitions & Analogies

Define democracy and authoritarianism, noting key features and vulnerabilities.

Brainstorm democratic “guardrails” (free press, rule of law, checks and balances, civil liberties).

Discuss how these can weaken over time.

3. Media Framing

Compare how different outlets report on democratic decline.

Identify language that suggests either crisis or reassurance.

Discuss how framing affects public trust and civic response.

4. Group Analysis: Text and Video Rhetoric

Students will examine both the written excerpt and Garrett Graff’s interview “America Tips Into Fascism.” In groups, instruct them to:

Identify emotional appeals (shock, urgency, fear), metaphors (e.g., “roller coaster,” “tipping point”), and juxtapositions (authoritarianism vs. democracy).

Analyze historical analogies (e.g., Watergate, Putin, Declaration of Independence). Discuss how these comparisons shape perspective and evaluate their accuracy.

Observe discourse framing: Is the shift described as irreversible, gradual, or open to resistance? How do tone and evidence selection influence perception?

Each group should prepare two key analytical insights drawn from both the text and the video. Encourage them to cite specific phrases or moments to support their findings.

New Essay Questions (for final assessment)

Graff suggests that democratic backsliding does not occur in one dramatic moment but through incremental erosion. To what extent do you agree with this interpretation? Use historical or contemporary examples to support your argument.

Compare Graff’s description of America’s shift with at least one historical example of democratic collapse (e.g., Germany in the 1930s, Chile in the 1970s, Hungary in the 2010s). What lessons can be drawn from these parallels, and what limitations exist in making such analogies?

In times of democratic crisis, what civic responsibilities fall on citizens, educators, journalists, and political leaders? Which of these responsibilities do you believe is most urgent today, and why?

The post Lesson Plan: Recognizing Democratic Erosion and Authoritarian Shifts first appeared on The digital classroom, transforming the way we learn.

Schule

via Teaching English using web 2.0 https://annmichaelsen.com

September 2, 2025 at 01:07PM

epitome

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epitome

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 1, 2025 is:

epitome • \ih-PIT-uh-mee\  • noun

Epitome means "a perfect example." It is usually used in the phrase "the epitome of," as in "the epitome of elegance."

// In his tailored suit and fashionable haircut, he was the very epitome of style.

See the entry >

Examples:

"The image of Diana standing on a polo field in a white British Lung Foundation sweatshirt is one of the most iconic images of the late princess. Dressed in jeans, a baseball cap, cowboy boots and a blazer over the logo crewneck, Princess Diana—who served as patron of the foundation—looked the epitome of '80s cool." — Kristin Contino, Marie Claire, 27 June 2025

Did you know?

Epitome first appeared in print in the early 16th century, when it was used to mean "summary." If someone asks you to summarize a long paper, you effectively cut it up, mentioning only the most important ideas. The etymology of epitome reflects this process: it comes from Greek epitemnein, meaning "to cut short." Your summary probably also presents all the key points of the original work, which may explain why epitome eventually came to be used for any person or object that is a clear or good example of an abstraction, as in "the epitome of grace" or "the epitome of health."

Englisch

via Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

September 1, 2025 at 06:00AM

‘I have done’ VS ‘I have been doing’ – what’s the difference? #shorts #englishlearning

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uXinD12IXDs

The present perfect (I have done) and the present perfect continuous (I have been doing) are often confused! Do you know the difference? Sian is here with a quick explanation of one of the differences between these tenses - and some useful examples to help you! Watch the video and then try this quiz 👇.

✍️ Sorry I haven’t called you! I _ a really good book – I only have one chapter left to read! 📖

a) have read b) have been reading

learnenglish #grammar #speakenglish #examenglish #presentperfect #presentperfectcontinuous #tenses #bbclearningenglish #confusingwords #englishgrammar

Englisch

via BBC Learning English https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHaHD477h-FeBbVh9Sh7syA

September 1, 2025 at 12:05PM

Fact check: Ten debunked lies Donald Trump has repeated in the last week alone | CNN Politics

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/29/politics/fact-check-trump-ukraine-inflation

Email

President Donald Trump keeps saying the same false things over and over.

Trump’s lying has always been notable for its audacity – his willingness to make obviously untrue claims that can be very quickly debunked. But it has also been distinguished by its repetitiveness – his unwillingness to stop deploying an exaggerated statistic, baseless accusation or fictional tale after months or even years of debunkings.

Trump has for years had persistently poor poll results on the question of whether he is honest and trustworthy; part of the reason may well be his unwavering devotion to assertions that many Americans already know aren’t true. But his relentlessness also works for him in a way. Because news outlets are naturally focused on new material, some may fact-check a falsehood the first time Trump says it but not the 10th or 100th time. By shamelessly persevering, Trump can eventually get his greatest hits out there with little pushback.

The president’s recent public remarks have featured many old lies. In the interest of not letting them go uncorrected, here is a look at 10 debunked claims he repeated over the past week alone.

Imaginary sub-$2 gasoline

Trump, talking about gas prices, said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, “There’s some places it’s $2. It’s even – it broke $2 in a couple of locations in the South.”

Not true, just as Trump’s numerous previous claims of $2-or-less gas haven’t been true.

There was no state whose average price for regular gas on Tuesday was below Mississippi’s $2.69 per gallon, according to data published by AAA, and the firm GasBuddy said it did not see a single station, out of the tens of thousands it tracks across the country, that was selling a gallon for $2 or less at the time Trump spoke. (Some drivers get special discounts.) The AAA national average on Tuesday was $3.19 per gallon.

An impossible “1,500%” reduction in prescription drug prices

Trump claimed in early August: “You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%. I don’t mean 50%. I mean 14-, 1,500%.” CNN and others pointed out that this is not only inaccurate but does not make mathematical sense, since a 100% price cut would make the drugs free and a cut of 1,200% or more would presumably mean Americans would be getting paid to buy medications.

Trump has continued using the fake figures anyway.

He promised Monday that “I’m going to be reducing drug prices by 1,400 to 1,500%,” then Tuesday that “we’re not talking about a 25% cut or a 50 – we’re talking about a 1,500% cut.”

“No inflation” amid continued inflation

There is inflation in the United States. Prices were 2.7% higher in July than they were a year prior and 0.2% higher than they were in June. One can debate how good or bad those figures are. But Trump said Tuesday, as he has repeatedly this summer, that “there’s no inflation.”

Trump briefly used softer rhetoric in mid-August, declaring that “our inflation is down to a perfect number, a beautiful number, hardly any at all.” This subjective language didn’t hold. The very next day, Trump returned to his regular assertion that “we don’t have inflation.”

The (non-)uniqueness of US mail-in voting

To support his proposal to eliminate the use of mail-in ballots, Trump last Monday revived his false claim that the US is the world’s only country where mail-in voting exists. The claim was promptly debunked, again, by CNN and others; dozens of countries use mail-in ballots, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Switzerland.

Trump then repeated the claim in an interview with a supportive radio host three days later. “We’re the only one in the whole world that uses them,” he said.

The water Trump says he sent to Los Angeles (he didn’t) by turning a “valve” (that doesn’t exist)

On Tuesday, Trump told his usual story about how “now they have water” in Los Angeles because he “turned the valve” to send the city water instead of having that “valve” direct the water to the Pacific Ocean.

The story is nonsense – as experts in California water policy have pointed out for months.

First, there is no single “valve” that controls California water flows. Second, what Trump actually did in late January and early February was send billions of gallons pointlessly released from two dams in one part of the state’s Central Valley to another part of that valley, more than 100 miles north of Los Angeles. The water did not go to Los Angeles, which has no automatic connection to the dams.

The 2020 election, again

Approaching five years after he legitimately lost the legitimate 2020 election, Trump continues to lie about it. He referred Monday to former President Joe Biden as “a guy that got in there with a fraudulent election,” and said Thursday that “I knew the election was rigged and now we found that out definitively, as you can see.”

Nobody has found that out because it is definitively false.

That nonexistent monument law

Trump also repeated another lie he has been telling since 2020 – his assertion that he signed a “law” or “statute” that year that imposed an automatic sentence of “10 years in prison” to people who damaged monuments.

CNN and others have been reporting since 2020 that this is not what happened. Trump actually issued an executive order that directed the attorney general to prioritize investigations and prosecutions of people who damaged government-owned monuments and to prosecute offenders “to the fullest extent” allowed under existing federal law, which allowed judges to impose a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Trump has kept telling the false story anyway. Upon signing an executive order Monday telling the attorney general to try to find a way, without violating the First Amendment, to crack down on people who have burned the American flag, the president claimed without any apparent basis that offenders would now “get one year in jail” – and he repeated his old fiction about signing harsh monument legislation. “Just like when I signed the statute and monument act,” he said. “Ten years in jail if you hurt any of our beautiful monuments.”

A phony Ukraine aid total

For months, Trump has claimed the US has given “$350 billion” in wartime aid to Ukraine even though numerous fact checks noted that this is a wild exaggeration. Trump made the “$350 billion” claim five times at a single event on Monday.

The real figure is much smaller than what Trump’s number.

A German think tank that has closely tracked wartime aid to Ukraine says the US allocated about $133 billion to Ukraine (and had committed about $5 billion more) from late January 2022 through June 2025. The website of the US government inspector general overseeing the federal Ukraine response says the US had disbursed about $90 billion for the response through March 2025 (and had appropriated about $95 billion more), including money that was spent in the US and in broader Europe rather than Ukraine itself.

When CNN asked the White House earlier this month about Trump’s claims that the US had provided Ukraine itself with “$350 billion,” an official tried to justify the figure by adding in a bunch of things that are not actually aid to Ukraine – including, absurdly, the cost of US inflation to American households after the Russian invasion.

A fictional story about Biden and South Korea

Trump repeated his long-debunked “$350 billion” Ukraine-aid figure while sitting beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week. Then, this Monday, he repeated his long-debunked story about US relations with South Korea while sitting beside South Korean President Lee Jae-myung.

Speaking of the presence of more than 26,000 American military personnel in South Korea, Trump said, “As you know, South Korea agreed to pay for that during my last term. And then when Biden came in, they complained to Biden that I wasn’t a nice person and he agreed not to pay. He gave up billions of dollars. We were getting paid billions of dollars, but then Biden ended that for whatever reason. It’s unbelievable that he did.”

This is a reversal of reality.

Biden didn’t agree to let South Korea stop sharing the cost of the US military force in the country. Rather, under Biden, South Korea signed two cost-sharing agreements with the US, one in 2021 and one in 2024, that both included substantial South Korean payment increases.

A disproven tale Trump claimed had been proven

Trump told a story on Monday in which he claimed a Democratic governor with whom he has been trading public barbs this month, Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, told him during a behind-the-scenes conversation last year, “‘Sir, you’re the greatest president of my lifetime.’” The story was disproven by Trump-friendly Fox News the very same day: it turned out that a Fox documentary show had recorded the conversation, in which Moore didn’t say anything close to what Trump claimed.

Trump was undeterred by the footage. He told a similar story on Tuesday, this time falsely saying Moore had told him, “Sir, you’re the greatest president” – and adding, “They caught him on camera.” In reality, it was Trump who the camera had caught in a lie.

via News - Trending on BuzzSumo https://app.buzzsumo.com/rss/trending/MGtqaGFrc2RoYWto/bmV3c2tqaGFrc2RoYWto

August 29, 2025 at 03:29PM

The Unreal Spectacle of Trump’s Authoritarianism

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/opinion/trump-visual-symbols-authoritarian.html

It’s an unreal spectacle.

via NYT > Most Recent Headlines https://www.nytimes.com/timeswire

August 30, 2025 at 05:38PM

Why is Trump so much more powerful this time?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/29/trump-republicans-democrats-supreme-court-power/

There are at least two measures of a president’s power. The first is how many prerogatives he claims. The second is how much resistance he faces.

In his first term, Donald Trump was a weak president — maybe even historically weak. When he made even modest assertions of power, the blowback from other institutions was intense. One example: The president clearly has the power to fire the director of the FBI. Yet when Trump did so in 2017, it prompted a special-counsel investigation that threatened for nearly two years to consume his administration. He wanted to fire the special counsel but couldn’t because the blowback would have been even greater.

via Opinions https://www.washingtonpost.com

August 29, 2025 at 12:04PM

Do I feel lucky? (Ways of talking about luck)

https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2025/08/27/do-i-feel-lucky-ways-of-talking-about-luck/

Listen to the author reading this blog post.

d3sign / Moment

by Kate Woodford

Today’s post has a rather positive feel to it as I’m looking at the language we use to describe luck and feeling lucky.

Let’s start with the noun luck itself, which has a few useful phrases. For example, you might say with any luck before saying what you hope will happen:

With any luck, it will be sunny and we’ll be able to eat outside.

In British English, we talk about a bit of luck, meaning ‘a small amount of luck’:

With a bit of luck, we’ll be there before midday.

We use the phrase beginner’s luck to refer to the unexpected success that a person who is new to a particular activity sometimes experiences. Meanwhile, we talk about a stroke of luck meaning ‘a lucky event’:

I won this game the first time I played it, so I guess it was just beginner’s luck.

By a stroke of luck, James saw my message and responded.

The word ‘luck’ is used as a verb in two informal phrasal verbs that were originally American but are increasingly heard in British English, too. If you luck out, something happens to you that is very lucky, and if you luck into something good, you get or achieve it by chance:

We really lucked out with our accommodation. It was perfect and not at all expensive.

I lucked into the job – I just happened to apply when they needed someone.

Moving on to the adjective lucky, we talk about a lucky escape, meaning ‘a situation in which someone avoids harm or difficulty’ and if someone strikes it lucky, they suddenly have a lot of luck:

It turns out that not getting the job was a lucky escape, as the boss is apparently awful.

We really struck it lucky with our last recruit – she’s absolutely brilliant.

And what about synonyms for the adjective ‘lucky’? Fortunate is a slightly more formal alternative to ‘lucky’, and we sometimes say that we are or feel blessed, meaning that we feel lucky. (Note that in this sense, the pronunciation is /blest/):

I’m very fortunate to have a job that I enjoy so much.

I feel so blessed to have such wonderful friends.

I’ll finish with a nice idiom in this area. If someone is in the right place at the right time, they are able to take advantage of an opportunity that they get simply by chance:

Often, it’s not about talent so much as luck – you just have to be in the right place at the right time.

That concludes today’s post on luck. By the way, can anyone tell me which old movie the title of this post comes from? Answers below, please!

Englisch

via About Words – Cambridge Dictionary blog https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/

August 27, 2025 at 01:02PM

Londons Kampf gegen die Insel der Feuchttücher in der Themse

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/london-feuchttuecher-themse-100.html

Toilettenabfälle in der Themse Londons Kampf gegen die Insel der Feuchttücher

Stand: 26.08.2025 06:26 Uhr

"Wet Wipe Island" gilt als Schandfleck der Themse. Massen von Feuchttüchern, die Londoner über die Toilette entsorgt haben, hatten sich wie eine Insel am Flussufer aufgetürmt. Jetzt wird sie aufwändig abgetragen.

Sogar einen eigenen Eintrag auf Google Maps hat Londons berüchtigte Feuchttücher-Insel über die Jahre bekommen: "Wet Wipe Island" ganz in der Nähe der Hammersmith-Brücke im Südwesten Londons sei ein "kulturelles Wahrzeichen", steht dort. Darunter zahlreiche ironische Bewertungen, was für eine wunderbare Sehenswürdigkeit die Insel doch sei, gepaart mit Kommentaren wie "eklig", "einfach nur schockierend" oder "da muss doch mal aufgeräumt werden".

Genau das passiert jetzt - und zwar im Auftrag der London Port Authority, der Hafen- und Wasserstraßenbehörde der britischen Hauptstadt. Seit Mitte August ist täglich ein Bagger an diesem Abschnitt des Themse-Ufers im Einsatz. Wann immer es die Gezeiten erlauben, tastet er sich langsam vorwärts auf den Abschnitt zwischen Ufer und Flussbett und lässt dann seinen gitterartigen Baggerlöffel herunter in die schwarze, weiche Masse.

Die Insel aus Toilettenabfällen veränderte sogar den Verlauf der Themse in London.

Fläche zweier Tennisplätze

Auf den ersten Blick sieht sie aus wie schwarz-brauner Schlamm. Doch bei einem genaueren Blick erkennt man, wie tuchartige Fasern - die Rückstände der Feuchttücher - aus dem Flussbett gekämmt werden. Dann rüttelt der Fahrer so lange mit dem Greifer, bis der übrige Matsch wieder auf den Boden fällt.

"Das Rütteln ist der wichtigste Schritt, damit wir nur die Überreste der Feuchttücher entfernen und nichts vom Flussbett oder gar Lebewesen", sagt Emily McLean, die das Projekt vor Ort für die London Port Authority überwacht. "Wir sind froh, die Reinigung hier endlich anzugehen."

Die Insel aus den Toilettenabfällen hatte sich zu einer Fläche von der Größe zweier Tennisplätze angesammelt, stellenweise bis zu einem Meter hoch. Die Insel veränderte sogar den Flussverlauf und belastet durch Mikroplastik die Tier- und Pflanzenwelt. Nun werde sich die Wasserqualität wieder verbessern, meint McLean.

Emily McLean von der London Port Authority überwacht das Abtragen der Feuchttücher-Insel.

Ungefiltertes Abwasser in die Themse

Der Grund, dass die Überreste der Feuchttücher überhaupt hier sind: Die Bewohner Londons haben sie in der Toilette heruntergespült, statt die Tücher über den Restmüll zu entsorgen.

Außerdem gibt es in vielen britischen Städten ein veraltetes Kanalisationssystem, bei dem Regenwasser und Abwasser im selben Kanal laufen. Wenn etwa bei starkem Regen die viktorianische Kanalisation überläuft, leitet der umstrittene Wasserversorger Thames Water einen Teil des Mischwassers ungefiltert in die Themse - und damit auch die heruntergespülten Feuchttücher.

Nun sollen im Laufe mehrerer Wochen schätzungsweise 180.000 Tonnen der Feuchttücher-Masse abgetragen und entsorgt werden. Der Zeitpunkt dafür sei auch deshalb ideal, weil ein neuer, rund 25 Kilometer langer Abwassertunnel seit Anfang des Jahres dazu beitragen soll, dass die Feuchttücher sich in dieser Form nicht noch einmal ansammeln, so McLean. Denn durch den Tunnel, der weitgehend unter der Themse entlang führt, werden die Mischwasser-Überläufe aufgefangen und in eine Kläranlage geleitet.

Felicity Rhodes von der Umweltschutzorganisation Thames 21 fordert eine bessere Abwasserinfrastruktur in London.

Hersteller müssen plastikfreie Alternativen entwickeln

Die Umweltschützerin Felicity Rhodes von der Organisation Thames 21 steht am Ufer und beobachtet die Baggerarbeiten. Thames 21 hat sich auf den Schutz der Themse spezialisiert, und die Feuchttücher-Insel ist den Aktivistinnen und Aktivisten schon seit Jahren ein Dorn im Auge. "Hier in dieser Flussbiegung fließt das Wasser etwas langsamer, und die schweren Feuchttücher häufen sich und türmen sich auf zu kleinen Bergen oder wickeln sich um Zweige und Pflanzen." Dort sammelten sich dann immer mehr der "wet wipes" an.

Regelmäßig haben Aktivistinnen und Aktivsten von Thames 21 in mühsamer Handarbeit gezählt, wie viele Feuchttücher sich exemplarisch pro Quadratmeter angesammelt haben und sie dann entfernt. "Es war immer klar, dass hier ein Bagger ran muss, und es ist großartig, dass das jetzt passiert", sagt Rhodes.

Die Aktivistin fordert: "Jetzt müssen die Menschen aber auch aufhören, Feuchttücher einfach in die Toilette zu werfen." Aber auch das reiche nicht. "Feuchttuch-Hersteller müssen plastikfreie Alternativen entwickeln. Und Abwasserfirmen müssen in bessere Infrastruktur investieren, damit Feuchttücher gar nicht erst in unsere Flüsse gelangen."

180.000 Tonnen Feuchttücher-Masse sollen aus der Themse geborgen und entsorgt werden.

Ekelvideos sorgen für Aufmerksamkeit

Bereits im April 2024 kündigte die britische Regierung, damals noch unter Führung der Konservativen, ein Gesetz zum landesweiten Verkauf- und Lieferverbot von Feuchttüchern mit Plastik-Anteil an. Es soll Hersteller ermutigen, plastikfreie Alternativen anzubieten. Das Gesetz ist aber noch nicht verabschiedet. "Auch gesetzlich muss es endlich Fortschritt geben", sagt die Umweltaktivistin.

Die London Port Authority hofft ebenso wie Thames 21, dass die viele Aufmerksamkeit, die die Feuchttücher-Insel durch die Aufräumaktion in diesen Tagen im ganzen Land bekommt - insbesondere auch durch Ekelvideos in den Sozialen Medien -, mehr Menschen motiviert, Feuchttücher künftig über den Müll zu entsorgen.

Noch bis Anfang September werden die Arbeiten laufen. Aufschub ist schwierig, denn das betroffene Gebiet reicht bis auf das Gelände einer Londoner Privatschule, und dort beginnt dann wieder der Unterricht. Auf Google Maps jedenfalls ist "Wet Wipe Island" bereits kurz nach Beginn der Arbeiten verschwunden - wer die Änderung vorgeschlagen oder veranlasst hat, ist nicht bekannt.

Verschiedenes

via tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD https://www.tagesschau.de/infoservices/alle-meldungen-100.html

August 26, 2025 at 06:28AM

Lesson Plan: Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize

https://annmichaelsen.com/2025/08/26/lesson-plan-trump-and-the-nobel-peace-prize/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lesson-plan-trump-and-the-nobel-peace-prize&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lesson-plan-trump-and-the-nobel-peace-prize

Grade Level / Audience

Upper-level secondary or university-level students—teachers, education professionals, or politically literate learners.

In this day and age, receiving a cold call at any time can be disarming, but Norway’s finance minister reportedly took a most surprising ring on the streets of Oslo earlier this month.

According to Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv, the cold caller was U.S. President Donald Trump, and the request for Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg, was how the American leader could be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. CNBC

Learning Objectives

By the end of the lesson, students will be able to:

Describe the nomination and selection process for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Identify notable past laureates and highlight cases of controversy.

Analyze how awards can backfire or become politically complicated.

Apply these insights to assess Donald Trump’s current pursuit of the Prize.

Lesson Components

1. Warm-Up

Pose open-ended questions:

What purpose does the Nobel Peace Prize serve?

Do you think awards should be based on idealistic intentions, tangible achievements, or both? Students briefly discuss in pairs or small groups to surface their assumptions.

2. Lecture & Guided Notes

A. Nobel Peace Prize Overview

Origin & Intent: Established by Alfred Nobel’s will to honor those “who have done the most or the best to advance fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the promotion of peace congresses.”

Nomination Process:

Eligible nominators include national legislators, university professors, former laureates, and others.

Deadline is late January each year; deliberations are conducted by a five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee, appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. Secrecy is maintained for 50 years.

Selection Timeline:

Review, shortlisting, expert evaluation, and final decision by October; award ceremony in December in Oslo.

B. Past U.S. President Laureates

Theodore Roosevelt (1906) – mediated the Russo-Japanese War.

Woodrow Wilson (1919) – established the League of Nations.

Jimmy Carter (2002) – honored for humanitarian work post-presidency via the Carter Center.

Barack Obama (2009) – awarded early in his first term for extraordinary efforts to strengthen diplomacy; widely regarded as controversial because the prize predated any major accomplishments.

C. Historic Controversies & Backfires

1973: Henry Kissinger & Lê Đức Thọ – awarded jointly for negotiating a Vietnam truce; Thọ declined, two committee members resigned, and the prize was dubbed the “Nobel War Prize.”

1994: Arafat, Rabin & Peres – Arafat’s inclusion sparked outrage; a committee member resigned.

Barack Obama (2009) – again, seen as premature; critics argued the split between symbolism and substance.

General critiques:

Prize seen to favor politics, media visibility, or aspirations rather than concrete achievements. Some argue it can even undermine peace processes by politicizing peacemaking.

3. Case Study: Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize Pursuit

A. Trump’s Current Status

Multiple nominations have been submitted—for example, by Israeli PM Netanyahu (Abraham Accords), Pakistan (India–Pakistan de-escalation), and others.

However, many of the claimed diplomatic successes are contested or fragile.

At least three of the five Nobel Committee members have voiced criticism of Trump’s leadership, citing erosion of democratic norms—one member (Asle Toje) showed some sympathy, but overall, his chances seem limited.

Observers argue that such nominations may be politically motivated rather than grounded in genuine peacemaking—and that the Prize may be undermined by awarding someone with divisive record.

B. Analysis Questions

Do Trump’s diplomatic claims meet the Nobel criteria of fraternity and peaceful resolution?

Are there precedents (like Obama’s early award) that suggest Trump could win based on potential over outcomes?

Could awarding Trump risk discrediting the Prize in the same way past controversial decisions did?

4. Interactive Activity

Option A: Debate Split class into two groups:

Group 1 argues: Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Group 2 argues: Trump should not receive it. Encourage them to draw on criteria, precedent, ethics, and institutional integrity.

Option B: Reflective Writing Students write a brief essay (200 words) evaluating Trump’s candidacy using lessons from past controversies.

5. Wrap-Up & Homework

Wrap-Up: Summarize key points:

Nobel Peace Prize process is structured but secretive.

Several controversial awards in history show how politics and timing can undermine credibility.

Trump’s nominations highlight both the possibilities and perils of premature or politically-charged awards.

Homework: Write a reflective piece comparing Trump’s case with one past laureate controversy (e.g., Obama 2009 or Kissinger 1973), focusing on lessons about timing, peace legitimacy, and political optics.

Sources

Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Here’s how it’s awarded. – Washington Post

The tarnished prize Trump desperately wants – Washington Post Opinion

Trump badly wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Most on the committee oppose him. – Washington Post Politics

Can Trump win a Nobel Peace Prize? – Reuters

What Trump’s Nobel nominations say about the prize – The Hilltop

Has Trump made his case for the Nobel Peace Prize? – IVN

Trump Nobel Peace Prize history explained – TIME

Trump’s “six wars ended” claim fact-checked – The Times

Trump claims to have solved multiple wars – El País

There’s one major problem with Trump’s Nobel dream – The Daily Beast

1973 Nobel Peace Prize (Kissinger & Lê Đức Thọ) – Wikipedia

Nobel Peace Prize overview – Wikipedia

The post Lesson Plan: Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize first appeared on The digital classroom, transforming the way we learn.

Schule

via Teaching English using web 2.0 https://annmichaelsen.com

August 26, 2025 at 03:11PM

El Salvador cracks down on discipline in schools

https://breakingnewsenglish.com/2508/250825-school-discipline.html

Aug 25, 2025. El Salvador is cracking down on discipline in schools.

Englisch

via Breaking News English https://breakingnewsenglish.com/

August 26, 2025 at 10:48AM

NEW SERIES: To-do lists

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0lz1mkr

How long is your to-do list? Beth and Neil talk about the jobs they need to do, and our grammar guru Georgie explains the grammar of your to-do list. Learn to use 'need to', 'have to', 'got to' and 'needs doing'.

TRANSCRIPT AND WORKSHEET Find a full transcript for this episode and a worksheet ✔️ https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/features/learning-english-grammar/250826

FIND BBC LEARNING ENGLISH HERE: Visit our website ✔️ https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish Follow us ✔️ https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/followus

LIKE PODCASTS? Try some of our other popular podcasts including: ✔️ 6 Minute English ✔️ 6 Minute Vocabulary ✔️ The English We Speak

They're all available by searching in your podcast app.

Englisch

via Learning English Grammar http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02pc9wq

August 26, 2025 at 12:24PM

The Armed Takeover of US Cities by the President Is Not a “Distraction”

https://kottke.org/25/08/the-armed-takeover-of-us-cities-by-the-president-is-not-a-distraction

Jamelle Bouie on Democratic politicians who maddeningly cannot recognize and acknowledge what is going on in the country.

From my perspective, the story of American politics right now is that the president, who fashions himself a kind of king of America, is attempting to barricade himself in the capital by unleashing a military occupation on its residents. And he’s promised to extend this military occupation to other cities and other states that he views as political opponents.

That to me is the big story of American politics right now: a mad king openly exerting tyrannical power over Americans and threatening further tyrannical power against other Americans, all under a pretext of crime reduction.

Tags: Donald Trump · Jamelle Bouie · politics · USA

Englisch

via kottke.org https://kottke.org/

August 26, 2025 at 03:08PM

trepidation

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trepidation

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 26, 2025 is:

trepidation • \trep-uh-DAY-shun\  • noun

Trepidation refers to a feeling of fear that causes someone to hesitate because they think that something bad or unpleasant is going to happen.

// The students felt a sense of trepidation upon being summoned to the principal's office.

See the entry >

Examples:

"Met by some with cautious optimism, others with trepidation, and others with doomsday predictions, there is no doubt that AI is here to stay and changing work in ways yet to be fully revealed." — Laurel Donnellan, Forbes, 28 May 2025

Did you know?

If you've ever trembled with fright, you know something of both the sensation and etymology of trepidation. The word comes from the Latin verb trepidare, which means "to tremble." (Trepidare also gave English the verb trepidate, meaning "to feel nervous or apprehensive," but that word is now considered archaic.) Early meanings of trepidation, such as "tremulous motion" or "tremor," reflect its "shaky" origins. Over time, however, those senses gave way to our modern meaning referring to fearful hesitancy.

Englisch

via Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

August 26, 2025 at 06:04AM

Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London

https://www.openculture.com/2025/08/a-virtual-tour-of-shakespeares-globe-theatre.html

The story of the Globe Theatre, the ancestral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shakespearean, in all of the ways we use that adjective: it has deep roots in English history, a tragic backstory, and represents all of the hodgepodge of London, in the early 17th century and today, with the city’s colorful street life, mingling of international cultures, high and low, and its delight in the play and interplay of languages.

“The first public playhouses,” notes the British Library, “were built in London in the late 1500s. Theatres were not permitted within the boundaries of the City itself”—theater not being considered a respectable art—”but were tolerated in the outer districts of London, such as Southwark, where the Globe was located. Southwark was notorious for its noisy, chaotic entertainments and for its sleazy low-life: its theatres, brothels, bear baiting pits, pickpockets and the like.”

The Globe began its life in 1599, in a story that “might be worthy,” writes the Shakespeare Resource Center, “of a Shakespearean play of its own.” Built from the timbers of the city’s first permanent theater, the Burbage, which opened in 1576, the Globe burned down in 1613 “when a cannon shot during a performance of Henry VIII ignited the thatched roof in the gallery.” Within the year, it was rebuilt on the same foundations (with a tiled roof) and operated until the Puritans shut it down in 1642, demolishing the famed open-air theater two years later.

In a twist to this so far very English tale, it took the tireless efforts of an expatriate American, actor-director Sam Wanamaker, to bring the Globe back to London. After more than two decades of advocacy, Wanamaker’s Globe Playhouse Trust succeeded in recreating the Globe, just a short distance from the original location. Opening in 1997, three-hundred and fifty-five years after the first Globe closed, the new Globe Theatre recreated all of the original’s architectural elements.

The stage projects into the circular courtyard, designed for standing spectators and surrounded by three tiers of seats. While the stage itself has an elaborate painted roof, and the seating is protected from the weather by the only thatched roof in London since the 1666 Great Fire, the theater’s courtyard is open to the sky. However, where the original Globe held about 2,000 standing and 1,000 seated playgoers, the recreation, notes Time Out London, holds only about half that number.

Still, theater-goers can “get a rich feel for what it was like to be a ‘groundling’ (the standing rabble at the front of the stage) in the circular, open-air theatre.” Short of that, we can tour the Globe in the virtual recreation at the top of the post. Move around in any direction and look up at the sky. As you do, click on the tiny circles to reveal facts such as “Probably the first Shakespeare play to be performed at the Globe was Julius Caesar, in 1599.”

If you don’t have the luxury of visiting the new Globe, taking a tour, or seeing a performance lovingly-recreated with all of the costuming (and even pronunciation) from Jacobean England, you can get the flavor of this wondrous achievement in bringing cultural history into the present with the virtual tour, also available as an app for iPhone and iPad users. This interactive tour supersedes a previous version we featured a few years back.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Related Content:

Behold Shakespeare’s First Folio, the First Published Collection of Shakespeare’s Plays, Published 400 Year Ago (1623)

Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Presented in a Digital Archive

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library

A Playlist of 45 Shakespeare Film Trailers, from 1935 — 2021

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Schule

via Open Culture https://www.openculture.com/

August 25, 2025 at 11:53AM

Trump’s Stunning Power Grab on Elections

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/opinion/trump-voting-mail-in-ballots.html

The president and his allies should not be trusted to ensure the integrity of the vote.

via NYT > Top Stories https://www.nytimes.com

August 24, 2025 at 08:06PM

BOX SET: English vocabulary mega-class! 🤩 Learn 8 'sporting' words!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZHaEg6JIws

Improve your English vocabulary and speaking with this '2-word expressions' compilation box set from our series 'The English We Speak'! 🗣️ Do lots of listening practice and learn LOTS of new vocabulary! 🎧 👂

There are 8 programmes in this collection from BBC Learning English and each one explains the meaning and use of a real everyday British English expression with plenty of examples of how to use the words in real-life contexts!

Chapters: 00:00 Hard pass 01:58 Play a blinder 05:03 Fever pitch 06:50 Win hands down 08:56 Know the score 11:07 Run for the hills 13:12 Mental gymnastics 15:45 Jog your memory

More popular videos to help you improve your English: 'politics' vocabulary English mega-class 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCge2_xfujQ 10 useful English lessons in 10 minutes 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPl8MakNoR4 Formality at work 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fo91QlpeA

🤩🤩🤩 SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel for more English videos and podcast English to help you improve your English 👉 http://tinyurl.com/ps3hplv

✔️ Visit our website 👉 https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish ✔️ Follow us on Instagram 👉 https://www.instagram.com/bbclearningenglish ✔️ Find us on Facebook 👉 https://www.facebook.com/bbclearningenglish.multimedia ✔️ Join us on TikTok 👉 https://www.tiktok.com/@bbclearningenglish

We like receiving and reading your comments - please use English when you comment 😊

learnenglish #bbclearningenglish #englishclass #speakenglish #englishidioms

Englisch

via BBC Learning English https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHaHD477h-FeBbVh9Sh7syA

August 24, 2025 at 12:11PM

What Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘America First’

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/europe-transatlanticism-vance-trump-america-first/683949/

In the summer of 1930, the U.S. secretaries of war and the Navy developed War Plan Red, a 94-page document laying out detailed plans to strangle the naval and trade capabilities of the United Kingdom in a hypothetical future that involved the U.S. and U.K. at war with each other. The centerpiece was a full-scale land invasion of Canada, a seaborne attack on Halifax, a blockade of the Panama Canal, the capture of British possessions throughout the Caribbean and the Bahamas and Bermuda, and a direct challenge of the Royal Navy by U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic.

Far from the sepia-tinted account of transatlantic relations that is so often evoked today, the union between the English-speaking nations that emerged after the First World War was neither fulsome nor uncritical. Rather, the experiences of the war provoked deep antipathy and suspicion among American decision makers toward the British empire. And the plans, though never approved by Congress or the president, were not merely theoretical—the U.S. built air bases, camouflaged as civilian airfields, along the Canadian border. Only after the threat of Nazism emerged in the mid-1930s was War Plan Red quietly shelved. It was not declassified until the 1970s.

War Plan Red’s existence is a useful reminder that so much of what people assume to be the granite-like permanence of the postwar transatlantic community—forged by the horrors of the Second World War and the exigencies of the Cold War—is in fact more recent and, as we are now discovering, more fragile. The misty-eyed nostalgia for a yesteryear of American and European unity has always been based on sentiment as much as reality. From President Dwight Eisenhower’s threat to crash the British pound during the Suez Crisis of 1956 to America’s opposition to French attempts to maintain control in Vietnam and Algeria, the decline of European power while the U.S. emerged as the undisputed hegemon was marked by naked rivalry as much as it was by the amity of “the West.”

So Donald Trump is drawing, however unwittingly, on historical precedent when he brandishes his own imperial designs on Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. When he expresses his suspicions about Europe—the European Union, according to Trump, “was formed in order to screw the United States”—he does so too. The NATO Summit earlier this summer—an “orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump,” as the British journalist Martin Kettle put it—demonstrated how unbalanced the relationship has become. More recently, the Alaska summit at which Trump gave Russian President Vladimir Putin the red-carpet treatment only underscored the point. They discussed Putin’s invasion in the heart of Europe without a single European leader present. European leaders got what looked instead like a school photo in the White House alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a row of school pupils holding hands to confront an overbearing headmaster. Perhaps the past 80 years of American transatlantic leadership—which established one of the greatest security alliances in history and built a democratic bulwark against the threat of Soviet Communism—will turn out to be the exception, not the rule.

Anyone listening attentively to J. D. Vance’s broadsides earlier this year at the Munich Security Conference and the AI Action Summit in Paris will have noticed a new mix of menace and petulance from the U.S. government. In addition to delivering a familiar critique of Europe’s sluggish and overregulated economy, the speeches signaled a willingness to use American power—and European dependency on that power—to interfere in Europe’s internal democratic politics: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia; it’s not China; it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said in Munich. “What I worry about is the threat from within.”

After Vance endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party and met its leader in the run-up to the German election, Chancellor Friedrich Merz did not mince his words: “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”

From the July 2025 Issue: The talented Mr. Vance

At a rally in Poland days before the presidential election there, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem seemed to suggest that the U.S. would continue to support Poland only if Trump’s preferred candidate—the conservative historian Karol Nawrocki—were to win: “He needs to be the next president of Poland. Do you understand me?” Noem said, adding that if Nawrocki was elected, Poland “will continue to have a U.S. presence here, a military presence.” (Nawrocki did win, and was inaugurated earlier this month.)

All of this makes the Trump-Vance agenda very clear. Far from espousing an isolationist “America First” doctrine, when it comes to Europe, the Trump administration is seeking to enforce a doctrine of “America Everywhere,” in which political parties that share the same nativist outlook are actively supported by Washington, and those who do not are ceaselessly criticized.

Like so many Europeans of my generation, I am a product of transatlanticism. My father was one of the lucky few children to be moved to safety in the United States during the height of the Nazi bombardment of London; my Dutch mother was released from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp in Indonesia following the U.S. victory over Japan. I studied as a post graduate at the University of Minnesota, and did a stint as a fact-checker at The Nation magazine in the early 1990s. Later, as an EU trade negotiator and member of the European Parliament, I was part of an effort, working with successive U.S. administrations, to build a rules-based global trading system. As Britain’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, I worked with the Obama administration on an array of shared endeavors, including counterterrorist operations and commercial agreements. And recently I spent seven years as a senior executive at Meta, on the front line of the technological revolution—and blazing controversies—emanating from Silicon Valley.

In short, a world in which Europe and America don’t walk tall and in tandem with each other, even when they disagree, is hard for me to contemplate. I fervently believe that the world is safer, stronger, and wealthier because of this unique relationship. But now is the time to imagine the previously unimaginable: a world in which deep-rooted transatlanticism gives way to shallow transactionalism.

Part of what is pulling the relationship apart is, ironically, the demonstrable nature of America’s supremacy over Europe, a supremacy delivered in no small part by the statecraft of previous U.S. administrations: an open trading system built on the undisputed role of the dollar as a global reserve currency; the deployment of overwhelming defense and security capabilities; the gravitational pull of a world-leading university system (despite, for now at least, the current administration’s attack on American academe); and economic prowess built on American domination of both international finance and technology. The U.S. has, on all of these benchmarks, comprehensively pulled ahead of Europe. When I served as deputy prime minister, the GDPs of Europe and the U.S. were roughly the same; today, the U.S. GDP is almost one and a half times larger.

No wonder some Silicon Valley investors now talk of Europe as a “dead” place—an adjective I’ve heard in various conversations—as if a continent of 500 million people and centuries of scientific and cultural discovery can be dismissed as little more than a hemispheric museum. In many ways, the tech elite is merely repeating the mockery directed at supposed European decadence by generations of American commentators (H. L. Mencken’s caustic assertion that “there are two kinds of Europeans: the smart ones, and those who stayed behind” comes to mind). Of course, their scorn has been fully matched by a long tradition of European snobbery toward supposedly uncouth Americans.

Michael Scherer: Trump says he decides what ‘America first’ means

Yet the divisions seem starker now. Rather than gentle ribbing between Old World and new, or specific disagreements between otherwise aligned allies, they are increasingly framed in zero-sum terms. A new class of American nationalists frets about the end of Western civilization, advancing a blood-and-soil ideology that elevates faith, family, and fealty to the nation over democratic ideals. Rather than seeking cooperation between political systems regardless of who is in power, they seek to elevate their ideological bedfellows at the expense of everyone else. It is the subjugation of diplomacy to virulent partisanship, egged on by outriders in business and politics who smell opportunity and personal advancement in populism.

A persistent theme in the U.S.’s critique of Europe has to do with America’s culture of free speech, derived from the First Amendment. A standard trope among the MAGA faithful is that Europe is a continent cowed by censorship. But this argument reeks of double standards: In Trump’s America, saying the wrong thing can get you defunded—or deported. Everyday travelers to America now nervously expunge anything from their social-media feeds that could be interpreted as criticism of the Trump administration for fear of being arraigned at the border. So much for free speech.

For all the flaws in Europe’s approach to free expression, European universities do not typically advise American and other foreign students to delete private messages for fear of attracting the attention of the authorities. Yet Europeans would be well advised to recognize that there is a significant kernel of truth in some of the critiques. Recent EU laws governing online content are a s

Wachsender Protest gegen Asylunterkünfte in Großbritannien

https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/proteste-asylunterkuenfte-uk-100.html

Großbritannien Wachsender Protest gegen Asylunterkünfte

Stand: 23.08.2025 08:23 Uhr

Die Zahl der Asylanträge in Großbritannien ist zuletzt stark gestiegen. Tausende Asylsuchende sind mangels Alternativen in Hotels untergebracht. Der Unmut in den Gemeinden wächst.

Etwa 250 Protestierende haben sich am Abend in Cheshunt nördlich von London versammelt, um gegen die Asylpolitik der Regierung zu demonstrieren. Die Demonstrierenden schwenkten die britische und die englische Fahne, auf Bannern war zu lesen: "Schützt unsere Kinder". Auch Gegendemonstranten versammelten sich.

Diejenigen, die hier auf die Straße gegangen sind, befürchten offenbar, dass weitere Migranten in einem Hotel im Ort untergebracht werden, in dem bereits Asylsuchende wohnen. Denn ein Gericht hatte in dieser Woche angeordnet, dass die Migranten im Nachbarort Epping aus einem Hotel woanders untergebracht werden müssen - möglicherweise also bei ihnen im Ort in Cheshunt, so die Vermutung. Belege dafür gibt es nicht. Auch in anderen Städten gingen Menschen auf die Straße, die Demonstrationen blieben weitgehend friedlich.

Protestwochenende erwartet

Großbritannien erlebt ein weiteres Wochenende mit zahlreichen Demonstrationen gegen die Asylpolitik der Regierung, für die Schließung der Hotels, in denen Migranten untergebracht sind. Viele auf den Straßen fordern Abschiebungen. Vor mindestens 26 Hotels im Vereinigten Königreich sind Proteste geplant.

Zur Verschärfung der Lage hat ein Vorfall in Epping vor einigen Wochen beigetragen, als ein Asylbewerber gegenüber einer Teenagerin sexuell übergriffig geworden sein soll. Die Behörden ermitteln noch.

In Großbritannien sind etwa 32.000 Asylsuchende in rund 200 Hotels untergebracht. Die konservative Regierung, die bis Juli 2024 im Amt war, hatte diese Politik eingeleitet und Verträge mit Hotelbetreibern ausgehandelt, weil andere Einrichtungen teurer waren und Unterbringungsplätze fehlten.

Das "Bell Hotel" in Epping darf nach einem Gerichtsbeschluss nicht mehr zur Unterbringung von Asylsuchenden genutzt werden.

Abkommen mit Frankreich noch ohne Resultate

Premierminister Keir Starmer hat mit Amtsantritt versprochen, die Zahl der sogenannten illegalen Einwanderung zu reduzieren und vor allem die Überfahrten über den Ärmelkanal nach England zu unterbinden. Doch damit blieb er bislang erfolglos. Er versprach, Schleuserbanden aufzuspüren und hat ein Abkommen mit Frankreich geschlossen.

Die französische Regierung erklärte sich bereit, Flüchtlinge aufzunehmen, die mit dem Schlauchboot nach England kommen. Im Gegenzug soll Großbritannien wiederum Asylsuchende aus Frankreich aufnehmen. So sollen Geflüchtete abgeschreckt werden, die Überfahrt anzutreten.

Doch bislang wurden eben noch keine Personen nach Frankreich zurückgebracht. Viele Britinnen und Briten haben den Eindruck, die Regierung bleibe in der Asylpolitik erfolglos.

Triumph für Rechtspopulisten

Die politische Lage spitzt sich für Premier Starmer nun zu, vor allem nach dem Gerichtsurteil zum Hotel in Epping bei London. Geklagt hatte die dortige Stadtverwaltung nach teils gewaltsamen Protesten. Viele Menschen vor Ort begrüßten den Schritt. Daraufhin kündigten Gemeinden, in denen die rechtspopulistische Partei Reform UK an der Macht ist, an, auch gegen die Unterkünfte im Ort zu klagen.

Die Parteichefin der Konservativen, Kemi Badenoch, empfahl konservativen Stadträten ebenfalls, rechtlich gegen die Unterbringung von Asylsuchenden in den Hotels vorzugehen. Für die Partei Reform UK ist die Situation ein Triumph. Parteichef Nigel Farage sprach von einer "Krise" und forderte Massendeportationen.

Die Labour-Regierung wehrt sich nun gegen die Gerichtsentscheidung und will Einspruch einlegen. Ein Staatssekretär aus dem Innenministerium, Dan Jarvis, argumentierte, auch Labour wolle die Hotels schließen. Er warb dafür, dass für einen geregelten Ablauf Zeit nötig sei.

Deutlich wird, dass der Rückstau bei den Asylentscheidungen im Vereinigten Königreich groß ist. Im abgelaufenen Jahr bis Juni 2025 haben 111.000 Menschen Asyl beantragt - ein neuer Höchststand. 91.000 Personen warten auf eine Entscheidung.

Verschiedenes

via tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD https://www.tagesschau.de/infoservices/alle-meldungen-100.html

August 23, 2025 at 08:30AM

Neue Weltordnung: Das Ende des Westens

https://taz.de/Neue-Weltordnung/!6106064/

I m US-Wahlkampf 1916 warben die Demokraten mit dem Slogan „Er hat uns aus dem Krieg herausgehalten“. Gemeint waren der Krieg in Europa und Präsident Woodrow Wilson, der skeptisch gegenüber globalem Engagement war. Das schloss keineswegs aus, in Nachbarstaaten zu intervenieren. Die USA operierten in Wilsons Amtszeit in Haiti, Nicaragua, der Dominikanischen Republik, Mexiko. Die USA maßten sich laut der Monroe-Doktrin das Recht an, als Regionalmacht willfährige Regime zu installieren. 1917 Wilson änderte seine Meinung und schickte zwei Millionen Soldaten nach Europa. Der Eintritt der USA in den Ersten Weltkrieg besiegelte die Niederlage des Deutschen Reiches – und war der Beginn des amerikanischen Jahrhunderts.

Wilson war überzeugt, dass „die göttliche Vorsehung“ die „friedfertigen“ Vereinigten Staaten beauftragt hatte, global „für Freiheit und Menschenrechte“ zu streiten. An die Stelle des zerfallenden osmanischen und Habsburger Reiches sollten Demokratien, Kapitalismus und nationale Selbstbestimmung treten. Hunderttausende feierten den US-Präsidenten im Dezember 1918 in Frankreich als Retter. Die Umsetzung von Wilsons forschem 14 Punkteprogramm, gedacht als gerechter Frieden, erwies sich angesichts der komplexen europäischen Wirklichkeit als schwieriger als gedacht. Der französische Ministerpräsident Georges Clemenceau bemerkte bei den Friedensverhandlungen in Versailles spitz, Wilson führe sich auf wie Gott – der habe aber nur zehn Gebote erlassen, der US-Präsident gleich 14.

Woodrow Wilson verkörperte jene Mixtur aus Machtwillen und Idealismus, überlegener Feuerkraft und messianischer Moral, die für die USA in den folgenden hundert Jahren charakteristisch sein sollte. Sein politischer Traum, die Gründung des Völkerbunds, der künftig Kriege durch ein Regelwerk überflüssig machen sollte, scheiterte: Der US-Senat lehnte den Beitritt der USA ab. Schon im Moment des Aufstiegs der USA zur globalen Hegemonialmacht war die Spannung zwischen Universalismus und nationalem Egoismus, zwischen Vernunft und religiöser Verklärung spürbar.

Imperiale Überdehnung der USA

Das amerikanische Jahrhundert ist vorbei. Die USA sind im Stadium jener imperialen Überdehnung angekommen, die, wenn man dem britischen Historiker Paul Kennedy folgt, zyklisch den Aufstieg von Großmächten beendet und deren Verfall einleitet.

Es gibt in diesem Prozess ein paar zentrale Stationen, etwa den illegalen Angriffskrieg gegen den Irak 2003. Der damalige Präsident George W. Bush war, wie Wilson 1916, erst skeptisch gegen einen Kriegseinsatz, dann folgte er der Hybris der Neocons und glaubte, die göttliche Vorsehung werde den Irak mit US-Bomben in eine blühende Demokratie verwandeln. Der klägliche Rückzug aus Kabul 2021 und das Desaster in Bagdad zeigten, dass die USA mit der Rolle des Weltpolizisten überfordert waren.



Der Trumpismus ist kein Alptraum, aus dem wir aufwachen werden. Die USA und Europa haben nicht mehr die gleichen Interessen

Das Ende der globalen US-Vorherrschaft hat früher, unblutig und sachlich, begonnen – mit dem Beitritt China zur Welthandelsorganisation WTO 2001. Der politische Westen, die USA und Europa produzierten 2001 mehr als 40 Prozent aller Waren und Dienstleistungen weltweit, China damals nur drei Prozent. Heute ist der Anteil der USA und der EU auf je 14 Prozent gesunken, der chinesische hat sich auf 20 Prozent vervielfacht. Die Wohlstandsexplosion in China hat das globale Machtgefüge tiefer und radikaler verändert als jeder Krieg.

Abgehängt wie Großbritannien

Einen solch atemberaubend rasanten Aufschwung gab es Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts schon einmal. Damals überholten die USA und das Deutsche Reich in extrem kurzer Zeit Großbritannien bei der Stahlproduktion. Das kündigte den Niedergang des britischen Empires und den Beginn des amerikanischen Jahrhunderts an. In gewisser Weise wiederholt sich diese Figur. Die USA heute ähneln mit sinkenden Patenten und gigantischer Verschuldung dem damals im Abstieg befindlichen britischen Weltreich, China mit seinem Innovationsgeist und machtpolitischen Ambitionen den einst aufstrebenden USA.

Es mag nahe liegen, den aktuellen Präsidenten mit seiner Mischung aus Autoritärem und intellektueller Dürftigkeit, Selbstüberschätzung und Kurzsichtigkeit für den Autor des Niedergangs der USA zu halten. Doch das ist analytisch falsch und politisch illusionär. Donald Trump ist das Symptom dieses Niedergangs.

Die Kosten, den globalen Garanten der liberalen Weltordnung zu spielen, sind mit dem Aufstieg Chinas für die USA schlicht zu hoch geworden. Die USA verfügen zwar als einziger Staat über ein globales Netz von Militärstützpunkten. Sie geben mehr Geld für Rüstung aus als alle anderen Nato-Staaten, China und Russland zusammen. Aber sie sind ökonomisch eine Macht im Niedergang.

Trump ist eine weiten Teils deformierte Antwort auf Probleme, auf die die liberalen Eliten keine Lösungen haben. Von der Hyperglobalisierung seit 1990 haben die Superreichen im Westen und die Mittelschichten in China und in den aufstrebenden Staaten profitiert. Den Mittelschichten in den USA hat sie geschadet. Trumps Zollpolitik ist erpresserisch, ökonomisch schädlich, aber auch das Versprechen, die zerstörerischen Folgen der kapitalistischen Globalisierung für die US-Mittelschicht abzufedern.

Außenpolitik wie Roosevelt

Außenpolitisch markiert Trumps Politik des Rückzugs und der ökonomischen Abschottung via Zöllen eine Rückkehr zu Wilson im Wahlkampf 1916, zum Isolationismus. Theodore Roosevelt, einer von Wilsons Vorgängern, begründete 1918 seine Abneigung gegen den Völkerbund knapp und deutlich: „Wir sind keine Internationalisten, wir sind amerikanische Nationalisten“. Trump klingt heute nicht anders.

Mit dem Rückzug der USA aus der Rolle des Weltpolizisten zerfällt auch der politische Westen, die Achse Washington-Europa. Die Nato existiert zwar noch. Noch immer sind rund 80.000 US-Soldaten in Europa stationiert. Aber der Kern, das (atomare) Abschreckungsversprechen der USA für Europa, hat Trump aufgelöst, als er bekundete, Putin könne in Europa machen, was er will.

Oder ist das ein Irrtum? Auf diese Idee konnte man kommen, als Trump kürzlich Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz und die Staatschefs Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer und Wolodymyr Selenskyj im Weißen Haus empfing und Europas Führer in einer spektakulären live Übertragung Einigkeit mit dem gut aufgelegten US-Präsident demonstrierten.

Trump scheint – jedenfalls momentan – von der Idee ergriffen, wie Wilson 1917, Roosevelt 1941 und Clinton 1995, einen Krieg in Europa zu beenden. Waren die Untergangsprognosen also übereilt? Ist der Westen als Machtfaktor doch robuster als es scheint?

Unkalkulierbarkeit als Machtinstrument

Wer genau hinsah, entdeckte hinter der neuen transatlantischen Harmonie etwas anderes: Panik. Merz & Co versuchten fast alles zu vermeiden, was den wankelmütigen US-Präsidenten verstören könnte. Sie waren fluchtartig nach Washington gereist, um zu verhindern, dass Trump nach Putins Einflüsterungen in Alaska Selensky ein weiteres Mal öffentlich demütigen und von Hof jagen könnte. Dies war ein gut choreografierter Notfalleinsatz, geboren aus berechtigtem Misstrauen – aber keine Wiedergeburt des politischen Westens.

Hinzu kommt, dass sich Trump launisch wie ein Kind verhält, das bei jedem neuen Spielzeug das alte liegen lässt. Verlass ist bei Trump nur auf seine Unzuverlässigkeit. Rationaler formuliert: Der US-Präsident setzt, typisch für Autokraten, Unkalkulierbarkeit als Machtinstrument ein. Die USA streifen die Rolle des Welthegemon ab und verwandeln sich in eine Regionalmacht. Trumps territoriale Drohungen Richtung Panama, Grönland und Kanada wirken wie eine Wiederbelebung der Monroe-Doktrin aus dem 19. Jahrhundert.

Entsprechend geringer fällt das Interesse der posthegemonialen USA an Europa und dessen Sicherheit aus. Dass die USA Kiew irgendwann endgültig opfern, ist noch immer wahrscheinlicher als eine Renaissance des Westens in einer Anti-Putin-Allianz.

Sicherheit als Auslaufmodell

Was bedeutet das für Europa? Die USA garantierten seit 1945 die Sicherheit (West-)Europas. Das ist ein Auslaufmodell. Daher nimmt man hierzulande das Ende des Westens – gerade angesichts des russischen Revanchismus – mit einer Mischung aus Nostalgie und Angst wahr. Europa allein zu Haus. Doch sich an ein besseres Gestern zu klammern, ist selten klug.

Der Trumpismus ist kein Alptraum, aus dem wir aufwachen werden. Nüchtern betrachtet haben die USA und Europa in der postwestlichen Welt nicht mehr die gleichen Interessen. Die USA zertrümmern derzeit die internationale regelbasierte Ordnung, die Wilson und Franklin D. Roosevelt mit erschufen.

Trump ist aus der Weltgesundheitsorganisation WHO, dem Klimaabkommen, UNESCO, dem UN-Menschenrechtsrat ausgestiegen. Er hat das Iran-Atom-Abkommen und den INF Abrüstungsvertrag ruiniert. Die USA ersetzen die Stärke des Rechts durch das Recht des Stärkeren.

Europa braucht neue Bündnispartner

Europa aber ist auf eine halbwegs funktionierende rechtliche globale Ordnung angewiesen. Die EU ist selbst ein Regelwerk, das sich ohne akzeptierte Normen in Luft auflösen würde. Europa muss sich künftig Bündnispartner jenseits der USA suchen. Und es muss unabhängig werden, um in der neuen gewalttätigeren Weltordnung weder von den USA noch von Russland wirtschaftlich noch militärisch erpressbar zu sein. Das wird ein steiniger, absturzgefährdeter Weg.

Vielleicht aber ist das Ende des Westens nicht nur ein Verlust. Zur Pax Americana gehörten auch ungerechte Kriege, brutale Machtpolitik, Putsche gegen demokratisch gewählte Politiker. Der Historiker Jürgen Osterhammel hat vor ein paar Jahren bemerkt, dass der Westen von Beginn an immer minderwertige Gegner brauchte: „Kein Westen ohne Zivilisationsgefälle“. Europa nach dem Untergang des Westens ist auch die Möglichkeit, diese finstere Seite, die arrogante Überlegenheit, zu überwinden

How to Use “WOULD” | English Grammar Explanation & Practice

https://www.engvid.com/how-to-use-would-english-grammar-explanation-practice/

“It would be great if someone explained how to use ‘would’ in real life.” I agree! It’s why I made this advanced English grammar lesson. In this class, you will learn (and PRACTICE!) how to use would for offers, preferences, requests, hypothetical situations, reported speech, and more. If I were you, I would watch this video, answer my questions, and do the quiz to double-check your understanding.

Englisch

via engVid https://www.engvid.com

August 23, 2025 at 12:06AM

Classic Stories: Frankenstein

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0lyfbyf

Enjoy a classic story in English and learn 10 uses of ‘make’ - in 5 minutes.

FIND BBC LEARNING ENGLISH HERE:

Visit our website ✔️ https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish

Follow us ✔️ https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/followus

LIKE PODCASTS? Try some of our other popular podcasts including: ✔️ 6 Minute English ✔️ Learning English from the News ✔️ Learning English Conversations

They're all available by searching in your podcast app.

Englisch

via Learning English Stories http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02pc9s1

August 22, 2025 at 10:00AM

Amish Airlines

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Amish+Airlines

Travel by train in [America] on slow clunky [regular] routes [instead] of flying.

Englisch

via Urban Word of the Day http://www.urbandictionary.com/

August 20, 2025 at 01:02PM

RFK Jr.‘s Wi-Fi and 5G conspiracies appear to make it into MAHA report draft

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/08/maha-draft-takes-on-electromagnetic-radiation-echoing-rfk-jr-s-conspiracies/

The Trump administration's plans to improve Americans' health will include a push to review the safety of electromagnetic radiation, echoing long-held conspiracy theories and falsehoods about Wi-Fi and 5G touted by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

On Friday, Politico obtained a draft version of the "Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy," a highly anticipated report from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission intended to steer the administration's health policy. The report, which has not been adopted by the White House, is being viewed as friendly to industry, and it contains little to no policy recommendations or proposed regulations. For instance, it includes no proposed restrictions on pesticides or ultra-processed foods, which are top priorities of the MAHA movement.

Otherwise, the document mainly rehashes the talking points and priorities of Kennedy's health crusades. That includes attacking water fluoridation, casting doubt on the safety of childhood vaccines, pushing for more physical activity in children to reduce chronic diseases, getting rid of synthetic food dyes, and claiming that children are being over-prescribed medications.

Notably, the report does not mention the leading causes of death for American children, which are firearms and motor vehicle accidents. Cancer, another top killer, is only mentioned in the context of pushing new AI technologies at the National Institutes of Health. Poisonings, another top killer, are also not mentioned explicitly.

While the importance of water quality is raised in the report, it's only in the context of fluoride and not of any other key contaminants, such as lead or PFAS. And although the draft strategy will prioritize "whole, minimally processed foods," it offers no strategy for reducing the proportion of ultra-processed food (UPF) in Americans' diets. The strategy merely aims to come up with a "government-wide definition" for UPF to guide future research and policies.

Technologie

via Ars Technica - All content https://arstechnica.com

August 18, 2025 at 07:27PM