What happens to former ISIS fighters? “In the last few years, more than four thousand Europeans have abandoned their home countries for the jihadi battlefields of Syria and Iraq, and close to a thousand have quietly returned. Many are questioned by police and intelligence services, but the number of prosecutions among the European Union’s twenty-eight member states remains shockingly low. A memo penned by Gilles de Kerchove, the E.U. Counterterrorism Coördinator, says that, as of December, there had been “around ten convictions” of foreign fighters with European citizenship or residency. “The judicial response,” he noted dryly, “does not reflect the scale of the problem.””
Friday, September 4th
Migration crisis: Germany presses Europe into sharing refugees “In a major policy speech on Europe’s worst migration emergency, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, is to table proposals next Wednesday for the mandatory sharing of 160,000 refugees between 25 of the EU’s 28 countries. Britain, Ireland and Denmark are exempted from having to take part, but Dublin has already agreed to participate and David Cameron is under increasing pressure for Britain to pull its weight as the migration crisis escalates with scenes of chaos and misery on Europe’s borders.”
(Also: the New York Times’ editorial Australia’s brutal treatment of migrants, and from the Atlantic Syria, Europe, and the boy on the beach)
The Guardian
The New Yorker
Let’s all go to Mars “[Elon] Musk is indeed a big-talking bully and boaster, an over-promiser, but he is also something very close to a genius, not so much in physics or in business but in the fusion of the two. Nobody creates the two most successful clean-energy companies and first commercially viable private space company by chance. However, Musk’s innovations could all come to pass, with SpaceX heading for Mars by the end of the next decade, and electric cars increasingly popular in the first world, and solar energy increasingly practical, and yet how different would the world really be for most of its seven billion inhabitants? His businesses employ 15,000 people, which is quite a few, but on the other hand is also less than half as many as work in a single Hyundai factory in South Korea.”
London Review of Books
On the pleasures of not reading “Not all of us, thankfully, have the gall to write a piece blasting our favorite not-reads, but all of us harbor, somewhere, a list of those toward which we feel an inexplicable animus. At the top of my list, ironically enough, is Charles Bukowski, who Jones singles out as “a voice from hell with the talent of an angel.” I have for many years now actively enjoyed not reading Charles Bukowski. I want to say with conviction that Bukowski is not so much a voice from hell as a voice from Hell-Lite™, a kind of flimsy, adolescent imitation of true misanthropy – but I have no evidence to furnish in my case against him. How could I? I’ve never read him.”
The Paris Review
China stages a massive military parade to commemorate the end of World War II (photos) “The spectacle involved more than 12,000 troops, 500 pieces of military hardware, and 200 aircraft of various types, representing what military officials said were the Chinese military’s most cutting-edge technology.”
The Atlantic
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