The election cycle in Europe continues and this time it was Angela Merkel’s party which was rebuffed by voters. According to the Financial Times:
“Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union suffered a bruising defeat on Sunday night in the election of a new parliament in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, when the centre-left opposition of Social Democrats and Greens won a clear majority.
“The vote for the CDU slumped to just 26 per cent, according to the first exit polls, by far its worst result in the state in the post-war period, and a serious setback for the German chancellor.”
Merkel herself still remains popular, but austerity as a campaign platform is being defeated all throughout Europe. It also appears as if the effort to create a government in Greece has failed. So we can expect new elections, and the betting is that the new election will bring an anit-austerity party to power.
Americans tend to regard the Taliban as uncivilized, primarily because of their unorthodox fighting techniques and their rejection of the Western ideas of human rights. That assumption is a profound mistake and rests upon a very narrow conception of what it means to be civilized. It is true that most Taliban fighters are illiterate, but most of them can quote thousands of lines of poetry from memory. For the first time, some of this poetry is being made available to English-speaking audiences.
World Politics News 
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