“Upplands-Bro has become the first municipality in Sweden to use robots for recruitment,” The Local reports. “The purpose of the robots, which were developed by Furhat Robotics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in partnership with recruitment firm TNG, is to ensure applicants face the same interview procedure without the interviewer relying on gut feeling.”
Please, Mr Robot, give me a job!
One of the things that really amazed me in Venice—in a bad way—was the constant flow of massive cruise ships going through the old city.
Read more about the accident in The Local.
“Russia has withdrawn key defense advisers from Venezuela, an embarrassment for President Nicolás Maduro as Moscow weighs the leader’s political and economic resilience against growing US pressure,” Thomas Grove of the Wall Street Journal writes.
The bizarre story has dominated Sweden’s news today. Apparently, the parents kept the children hidden from society for ten years. The children never went to school and know little of the outside world.
Plenty of LOLs when Ben Beaumont-Thomas of the Guardian review Madonna’s new album, Madame X.
Britain’s rupture from Europe holds many attractions from a Trumpian worldview, Therese Raphael of Bloomberg suggests.
April Glaser of Slate writes about the new “Sign in with Apple” button.
“Nigel Farage has been given 24 hours by the European parliament to explain in person his failure to declare lavish expenses funded by Arron Banks, an insurance tycoon under investigation by the UK’s National Crime Agency,” Daniel Boffey of the Guardian reports.
“Older men, with their silver hair and laughter lines, are seen as stately and wise,” Fiona Sturges of the Guardian writes. “Women of the same age are past it and embarrassing.”
Super Happy Fun America considers straight people an oppressed majority and is now planning a Pride Parade through Boston.
Personally, I have nothing against straight people. A friend of mine is straight, and he’s cool.
Naomi O’Leary of Politico on Twitter:
A 17-year-old rape victim was NOT euthanised in the Netherlands. @euronews @Independent @DailyMailUK @dailybeast are all wrong. It took me about 10 mins to check with the reporter who wrote the original Dutch story. Noa Pothoven asked for euthanasia and was refused.
Oops!
The day is in honour of the election of Gustav Vasa as the new king in 1523. The problem for me is that he never ruled over my part of the country. It wasn’t occupied by Sweden until 1658.
These are the results of the Danish election.
| Party | Share |
|---|---|
| Social Democrats | 25.9% |
| Liberal Party | 23.4% |
| Danish People’s Party | 8.7% |
| The Social Liberals | 8.6% |
| Socialist People’s Party | 7.7% |
| Red-Green Alliance | 6.9% |
| Conservatives | 6.6% |
| The Alternative | 3.0% |
| New Right | 2.4% |
| Liberal Alliance | 2.3% |
I just arrived in the capital of Estonia, and among the first things I see in Tallinn is this clothes shop called “Nude”. It’s the perfect name for such a shop, I think.
Madonna has expressed strong dislike, but I don’t think Vanessa Grigoriadis’s New York Times article is that bad.
The president went on a twitter rant after the newspaper suggested that Mexico didn’t act against refugees because of him.
Living in this city never gets boring. The man was shot in both his legs by police and then taken to hospital. His identity has still not been established.
The Daily Mail reports that 55 per cent of American women between age 18 and age 54 would prefer to live in a socialist society rather than a capitalist one. Meanwhile, people in Venezuela and other socialist countries starve en masse.
Bromölla in southern Sweden has today decided to ban prayer during working hours, including unpaid breaks. Local politicians say the ban applies to all, but it’s obvious to me that this is specifically targeting the Muslim practice of midday and afternoon prayer. The ban is an answer to a problem that doesn’t exist.
The Swedish Security Service now openly says that the jihadist environments in Sweden have increased from a few hundred people to thousands of extremists, Fredrik Sjöshult of Expressen reports.
These are the ten most peaceful countries in the world right now:
| Rank | Country |
|---|---|
| 1 | Iceland |
| 2 | New Zealand |
| 3 | Portugal |
| 4 | Austria |
| 5 | Denmark |
| 6 | Canada |
| 7 | Singapore |
| 8 | Slovenia |
| 9 | Japan |
| 10 | Czech Republic |
Sweden is at number 18.
These are the ten least peaceful countries:
| Rank | Country |
|---|---|
| 154 | Russia |
| 155 | Democratic Republic of Congo |
| 156 | Libya |
| 157 | Central African Republic |
| 158 | Somalia |
| 159 | Iraq |
| 160 | Yemen |
| 161 | South Sudan |
| 162 | Syria |
| 163 | Afghanistan |
Two oil tankers were attacked in the Gulf of Oman yesterday, Arab News reports. Saudi Arabia and America blame the incident on Iran.
Candi CdeBaca claims that for capitalism to work something has to be exploited. Had it been true, the world wouldn’t have grown richer and healthier under capitalism. The opposite is true for communist countries.
“The number of Sophie the Giraffe toys sold in France in a single year is nine times the number of all the giraffes that still live in Africa,” Brooke Jarvis writes in the New York Times.
Johan Nilsson of the TT News Agency took a spectacular photo of lightning striking a pylon on the Öresund Bridge during a thunderstorm this morning. See the photo at Sydsvenska Dagbladet.
“But God, the Ideal of perfection, and hence the principle of cognition, is also, as existing really, the principle of the creation of all perfection” (Immanuel Kant, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World, Paragraph 9).
Le Chevalier in de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom:
All our ideas are representations of objects that strike us: what is to represent to us the idea of a god, who is plainly an idea without object? Is not such an idea, you will add when talking to them, quite as impossible as effects without causes? Is an idea without prototype anything other than a hallucination? Some scholars, you will continue, assure us that the idea of a god is innate, and that mortals already have this idea when in their mothers’ bellies. But, you will remark, that is false; every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. (2016: 2882-3)
It’s important to remind ourselves of the fact that several Balkan countries wants to join our union. Easy to forget in all the Brexit noise.
It’s not a joke. This is for real. A new community in the Golan Heights will be known as “Trump Heights”.
The British doesn’t own English. It belongs to the world. I second The Economist’s Charlemagne.
Elijah Daniel bought a town and renamed it “Gay Hell” to protest Trump. I first thought of it as a joke, but the Guardian, CNN, and BBC all confirm it.
A global survey reveals that only 59% of people in western Europe and 50% in the east think vaccines are safe, Sarah Boseley of the Guardian reports.
This is bad.
The world is for the most part an entertaining place, but sometimes it gets so tiresome.
“A US military surveillance drone has been shot down by Iranian forces while flying over the Strait of Hormuz,” BBC reports.
Bad news for all of us.
Words spoken by Sir Richard Vernon in William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (4:1).
“The EU long-held exclusive focus on a non-existent middle east peace process has subordinated respect for international norms to a fetishised expectation of a two-state solution,” Wadih Al-Asmar writes in an EU Observer opinion piece.
I don’t care much for his opinion, but the quoted sentence is clever.
“Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today,” Kenneth Chang of the New York Times reports.
This is big!
“Kushner made clear in two interviews with Reuters that he sees his detailed formula as a game-changer,” Matt Spetalnick and Steve Holland of Reuters report.
If you have nothing else to do, you can join the speculations about why the Duchess of Cornwall winked during Trump’s state visit to Britain.
“I don’t think the Social Democrats does this because they are anti-Semites, but because they prioritise voices from other electoral groups,” Dan Olofsson writes in an email to Kvällsposten. “Passivity towards the Jews becomes a plus point for other voters.”
Boris Johnson cares for nothing but his own fame and gratification, Max Hastings, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, writes for the Guardian.
Some taxpayers’ money saved. Thank you, IOC!
From The Economist:
In “The Republic”, Plato argued that the most important qualities in a statesman were truthfulness and expertise. A good statesman will “never willingly tolerate an untruth”. […] He will spend his life studying everything that he needs to make him a good captain of the ship of state—“the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds and other professional subjects”. Mr Johnson has spent his life dealing in untruths
I once laughed at every joke Ricky Gervais told, but now I can’t stand him. Isn’t it odd that one’s sense of humour can change?
Madonna lands her ninth number-one album on the Billboard 200 chart, Keith Caulfield of Hollywood Reporter writes.
Good for her.
“A solar-powered winged robot has become the lightest machine capable of flying without being attached to a power source,” Donna Lu of New Scientist reports.
It brings back memories of the day when Omar Mateen killed 49 in a mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Florida. That day, I felt part of a global gay community. We were united in grief and anger.
Watch the video on YouTube.
“At worst the City [of London] could lose a quarter of its business and some of its non-EU international activity,” The Economist writes.
This is bad news for Britain, but probably for the world, too.
“Sweden has the most Pride festivals per capita of any place in the world, with over 30 different celebrations going on throughout the country,” Madeline Tersigni of The Local writes.
Philip Oltermann of the Guardian reports that a group of right-wing extremists compiled a “death list”, stockpiled weapons, and ordered body bags and quicklime to kill and dispose of their victims.
“Firefighters in Spain are battling a major wildfire that probably started after a heap of manure self-ignited,” Ivana Kottasová of CNN reports.
Michael O’Sullivan tells The Economist that we should say goodbye to globalisation and set our minds on the emerging multipolar world dominated by America, the EU, and China.
It’s Friday and sunset, שבת שלום.
The star Arcturus seen from my balcony in Gran Canaria right now. It’s taken the light ≈37 years to travel to Earth. What is seen in the picture is the star as it were that many years ago.
Chris Deacon in CGTN (China Global Television Network):
Given that there are already multiple Remain-supporting Tory MPs who are happy to vote against the government on Brexit—and some who have even committed to bringing down the government by voting against their own party in a “confidence motion” should the new Prime Minister pursue a no-deal Brexit—the next government is already in serious trouble. Losing the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election will only make this situation worse.
Brexit is a stupid and destructive project, so one can only hope that there’s some democratic way to block it.
I normally don’t like Metallica, but these lyrics are superb.
One in ten people thought to be permanently unconscious as a result of brain trauma may actually be aware, Helen Thomson of New Scientist reports.
New York will stage a massive Pride march today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the clash between police and patrons of the Stonewall Inn that sparked the modern gay-rights movement.