Le regole di bilancio europee si basano ora sui piani fiscali di medio periodo e sulle traiettorie della spesa netta dei paesi. Ma come si distingue la parte del disavanzo dovuta alle decisioni del governo da quella prodotta dalla congiuntura economica?
L'articolo La trappola nascosta nelle regole fiscali europee proviene da Lavoce.info.
Hoje, dia 12 de agosto, irá decorrer um eclipse solar parcial, com a lua a cobrir até 93,4% do disco solar.
Com previsão para ocorrer das 18h42, com o sol a pôr-se pelas 20h25, ainda eclipsado.
O eclipse é um raro fenómeno natural que ocorre quando a Lua se interpõe entre a Terra e o Sol, projetando uma sombra na superfície terrestre que transforma o dia em noite.
Para ver o eclipse solar parcial corretamente, deve seguir as seguintes recomendações da Direção Geral de Saúde e da Proteção Civil:
– Nunca olhar diretamente para o sol sem a proteção adequada (óculos certificados – marcação CE e ISSO 12312-2);
– Confirmar que os óculos não apresentam riscos, furos, fissuras ou outros danos;
– Não utilizar óculos danificados ou cuja origem seja desconhecida;
– Não utilizar alternativas aos óculos certificados:
– Os óculos de sol, mesmo muito escuros, não protegem contra os danos causados pela observação direta do Sol;
– Não observar o Sol através de telescópios, binóculos, máquinas fotográficas ou outros equipamentos óticos sem filtros solares especificamente concebidos para esse efeito;
– Manter os óculos colocados durante toda a observação
– Procurar um local com vista completamente desimpedida para oeste-noroeste, sem serras, prédios ou arvoredo.
Para proteger as crianças:
– As crianças pequenas ou bebés não devem observar diretamente o eclipse, mesmo utilizando óculos certificados, uma vez que podem retirá-los inadvertidamente;
– Nas crianças mais velhas, explicar previamente a forma correta de utilização dos óculos e assegurar supervisão permanente durante a observação;
– Pode observar através de outros métodos, como a projeção do eclipse solar parcial utilizando uma folha e uma caixa de sapatos.
Cuidados a ter com equipamentos:
– Não apontar equipamentos como binóculos, máquinas fotográficas e telescópios diretamente ao sol, sem filtros solares específicos na abertura frontal.
Se observar o fenómeno sem os óculos recomendados, a queimadura solar pode provocar, entre outros:
– Visão turva ou desfocada;
– Aparecimento de uma mancha ou ponto cego no centro da visão;
– Alteração da perceção das cores;
– Sensibilidade anormal à luz.
Em caso de sintomas deve ser contactado o SNS 24 para devido aconselhamento e encaminhamento.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was shortly hospitalized in the general hospital of Chania on the island of Crete after an accident with his bicycle yesterday Monday. According to information from local media zarpanews.gr, the accident occurred when the front wheel of the bicycle “slipped”, causing the Prime Minister to lose his balance and fall to […]
The post PM Mitsotakis in hospital after accident with his bicycle appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)
This is an excerpt from Are They Dead Yet? by Sam Roberts, which was published on August 11, 2026, by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. But Tuck and her other novels endure as Babbitt’s legacy for readers. So does my obituary, which in 2016 revealed her motivation to become an author: She was inspired to write Tuck, she said, when her four-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of dying. Babbitt had intended to become an illustrator, not an author, but pivoted after taking one writing course in college. She had enrolled because her husband hoped to become a novelist and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced.
Back at the Daily News, obituaries weren’t the best way to achieve immortality. We mostly ran one-paragraph squibs for members of the paper’s family, of printers, pressmen, and their immediate relatives. Instead, like most tabloids, the News thrived on the reported details of murders, assassinations, and suicides. Few news stories generated more of a sensation than death in all its dimensions. No less an authority once defined “news” than the ancient newspaper deliverer—a beloved man known as Bo Gee, who was decades too old to be described as a newsboy—weaving up Second Avenue with a wire shopping cart brimming with Chinese-language newspapers, calling out the headlines as he delivered the papers to Chinese bars and restaurants on Manhattan’s East Side. He began his route in Chinatown, where the papers were printed. Subscribers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were often a day or two behind the headlines because the last stop on his evening route depended largely on the number of drinks he had finagled from bartenders along the way before he was too wobbly to walk any farther. When a colleague of mine, the columnist Jimmy Breslin (who described him as “a small, thirsty man”), asked him which headlines sold the most papers, he responded unhesitatingly. He didn’t need a public opinion poll or a focus group of readers or a real-time digital analysis of clickbait: Two were surefire circulation boosters. One was war! The other: big guy dies!
Taken separately, obits constitute an individual’s legacy. In aggregate, they can capture the social and cultural currency of an era. Which people are worth remembering? Which values are worth celebrating? How do we measure success and failure, good and evil, achievement and defeat, social rank and professional standing? How many of the one hundred thousand people now immortalized in the periodically printed historical compilation Who Was Who were deemed worthy of obituaries at the time of their death? How many of the more than 33,000 contemporary notables included in the latest editions of Who’s Who will get obituaries when they die? (That the titles of those reference books don’t include question marks suggests that the listings themselves are indisputable, a questionable supposition when the price of inclusion by some publishers seems to be for the “whos” to buy at least one copy of the book. An entry for Michael Fowler Cullis, a former British diplomat, describes his recreation as “writing obituaries for friends.”)
People want to be remembered, and we want to remember them, or, at least, we do. “Obituaries commemorate a life at the point where it is completed by death. Yet the completion is also depletion, in the sense that the life is constructed as meaningful precisely at the point where it stops,” Professor Clare Brant, who teaches literature and culture at Kings College London, has written. “They act as the first version of a biography—sometimes the only one, although Wikipedia has closed the gap with each life story seemingly waiting for a death sentence.” But as valuable as Wikipedia can be, the New York Public Library notes, “Obituaries provide an important tool to researchers by offering biographical information on individuals that may not be readily available elsewhere. In many cases, the obituary supplies the only biographical data extant on a person.” Philip Sutton, a genealogy librarian at the library, told Legacy.com, the self-proclaimed world’s largest commercial provider of online memorials and guest books, that obituaries may reveal the married name of a daughter identified years earlier in the census only by her maiden name; that by identifying an immigrant’s specific birthplace, obituaries can also invigorate research on a family’s roots.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words.
Especially in small towns and midsize cities, local newspaper obituaries bond one generation to the next. By recalling where the deceased went to school and whom they married and who survived them, those obits provide the frames that form a moving picture of continuity, a narrative of cohesion. They describe whether, and how, the departed outpaced their parents in personal and professional achievement, their legacy to contemporary readers, and the promise of their progenitors—grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are still blank slates with the potential to add to the story.
To me, obituaries evoke the heartrending backstories of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the unfulfilled promise of Joe Crowell, who got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated first in his class: “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing.” Emily is dead, too, but so consumed by nostalgia—before being persuaded that “live people don’t understand, do they?”—that she descends from the town’s cemetery and wants to return to her past life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, until the Stage Manager reminds her, “You not only live it but you watch yourself living it. And as you watch it, you see the thing that they, down there, never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards.” “When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University who was the interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society, told Molly Birnbaum of Atlas Obscura. But “hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.” Gilbert added, “Now, if it’s on Legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.”
Well, not everyone.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words. And for all the beloved and respected and cherished and valued that punctuate paid obituaries, don’t forget that families can try to perpetuate irreverent descriptions unilaterally to settle scores when one is no longer in a position to retaliate or respond. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm declaims of the repentant Thane of Cawdor, who was executed for treason, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” If the Thane got the benefit of ambiguity, Florence Harrelson of Chelsea, Maine, had no such luck when she died in 2024 and her daughter, Christina Novak, placed a paid obituary in the Kennebec Journal. Wasting no words, the four-line obit read that the 65-year-old Henderson died “without family by her side due to burnt bridges and a wake of destruction left in her path.” It continued, “Florence did not want an obituary or anyone including family to know she died. That’s because even in death, she wanted those she terrorized to still be living in fear looking over their shoulders. So, this isn’t so much an obituary but more of a public service announcement.”
In 2023, Gayle Harvey Heckman took the trouble to announce the death of her mother, Linda Lernal Stull, in her Michigan hometown newspaper, the Three Rivers Commercial-News, even though they hadn’t spoken in 24 years. “As a mother, Lernal was violent, hateful and cruel,” Heckman wrote. “She physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and financially abused Gayle.” After going into excruciating detail, the obituary concluded, “Gayle and her family forgive Lernal and hope that she has found peace. They also hope to find peace within themselves. Lernal will not be missed by Gayle or her family. They all understand that the world is a much better place without her.”
Blunt isn’t always bad. If writing can be a cathartic, it can also offer an object lesson. In 2015, a nine-hundred-word paid obituary in Maine’s Bangor Daily News (down-easters seem less inhibited about publicly evaluating their kin) began, “Coleen Sheran Singer (born Coleen Sheran Clark) would have turned 33 this August 31, but she died in Lewiston in an unsuspecting suburban professional couple’s home of a heroin overdose on the morning of December 25, 2014.” The obit was written by Singer’s former husband. It detailed her considerable assets—intellectually gifted, creative, and spirited—without concealing her hefty baggage as a woman who was addicted and suffering from borderline behavioral disorder. Brent Singer attributed the life his former wife led to her broken childhood home but blamed her death on Maine’s governor for denying her access to the methadone clinic she had relied on to stay straight.
In 2008, the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming reported that Jim Adams died at 53. Weary of soppy obituaries of patients who had courageously struggled against one disease or another until the bitter end, Adams went through his son to provide an unvarnished premortem verdict on his abbreviated life. And he had no compunctions about belatedly exercising personal responsibility and admitting that he lost his battle for less inspiring reasons entirely: “It was primarily as a result of being stubborn and not following doctor’s orders or maybe for just living life a little too hard for better than five decades.” He did lament, however, that he “was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.”
In 2019, the family of Joe Heller (not that one) playfully celebrated his life in the Hartford Courant. They described him as “a frequent shopper at the Essex Dump” who “left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants.” Heller was so practiced a consummate napper that “there wasn’t an occasion too formal or an event too dour that Joe didn’t interrupt with his apnea and voluminous snoring.” The obituary added, “The family is seeking donations to offset the expense of publishing an exceedingly long obituary which would have really pissed Joe off.” (It then appealed generously for contributions to the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association.)
The Hellers weren’t kidding. Those paid “obits” aren’t cheap. The New York Times doesn’t accept paid obituaries, but their paid death notices, depending on the edition and the day, cost about $1,000 for a bare-bones nine lines of type and $50 for each additional line, which verbose encomiums and fervent eulogizing can raise into the thousands of dollars. (In memoriam notices in newspapers that wish the departed “Happy Birthday in Heaven” remain a testament to the enduring value of print advertising.) While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death. So far, though, it’s one area in which even a buzzworthy website can’t always live up to its name (such as when Michael Jackson’s death was announced on MichaelJacksonLive.com).
The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina used to publish brief obituaries of local figures for free—until executives discovered that printing a full page of them daily was costing $350,000 annually for newsprint alone. When the paper imposed a fee, readers revolted; the editors relented in some editions. MyGoodbye.com was started by Stephen Miller (definitely not that one), who grew up next to a cemetery and, after escaping from his bank’s eightieth-floor office in 2 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, decided to become an obituarist full-time. Legacy.com partners with hundreds of newspapers and thousands of funeral homes worldwide to account for about 70 percent of the deaths in the United States alone. A prototype called EPOCH—Electronically Preserving Obituaries as Cultural Heritage—created by the Orange County, Florida, Library System enabled people to publish an obit online for free. Another website, MyObits.com, also lets anyone publish a free memorial. Facebook even allows users to designate an executor to manage their profile after they’ve personally logged off this mortal coil for good.
While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death.
Paid death notices have been wielded as much to ward off the living as to get the last word on the dead. In the early 1920s, Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel, became so fed up with fame that she tried to fake her death by paying to run a phony death notice in her local upstate New York newspaper. Her gambit failed; she was so celebrated that the clerk she approached refused to accept the advertisement because he recognized her. Rudyard Kipling may have done her one better: When a newspaper reported his death prematurely, he wrote to the editor, “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
Six months before Oliver Sacks died of cancer at 82 in 2015, the London-born neurologist who lived in Manhattan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that amounted to an auto-obituary. Sacks was galvanized, he wrote, by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who, learning he was mortally ill at 65, penned a short autobiography in a single day in 1776. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective,” Sacks wrote. “There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at ‘NewsHour’ every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.” He explained that his shifting priorities were influenced less by passion than perspective: “This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.”
Kelly McMasters, the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir, started writing her obituary when she was 12; she has refreshed it almost annually since then. Her ritual was inspired by an assignment her mother was given while training as a volunteer at a local hospice. “I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones,” McMasters wrote in a New York Times opinion essay. “I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.” Her private accounts produced an album of verbal snapshots, unreachable versions of herself that seemed as good as the dead about whom obituaries are otherwise published. “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves,” McMasters wrote. “Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”
By inspiring the “Portraits of Grief” series of intimate minibiographies of the victims of 9/11 in the New York Times, the attack by fanatical al-Qaeda suicide bombers on the World Trade Center in 2001 may inadvertently have made the obituary more egalitarian than any event since the Civil War. These 200-word vignettes with thumbnail photographs weren’t standard obits or news stories. Volunteer reporters interviewed families and friends of the victims and the missing to sketch some 2,500 hundred profiles. Overseen by Jon Landman and Christine Kay on the Metro Desk, the portraits were published over nearly five months. “Terrorism rather than the internet democratized the obituary,” Professor Clare Brant wrote. Roy Harris wrote for the Poynter Institute of the project, “The portraits identified one aspect of life—a woman gardening, a man taking his daughter to ice-skating lessons, or perhaps indulging in a fondness for cigars.” The obituarist Nigel Starck said, “Each day’s pages would renew a sense of the tragedy’s scope, while the individual portraits made each person intimately real.” Our exercise in mining the unremarkable found a larger-than-life common denominator, one that challenges the novelist W. P. Kinsella’s conclusion that “the lives of ninety percent of the population are so dull that no one would care in the least about them, the lives of the remaining ten percent are so bizarre that no one would believe them.”
Some of the deaths in those “Portraits of Grief” were preceded by chivalrous acts of courage and self-sacrifice. Those heroics worked their way into news articles. The portraits were not about how people died, not about their last moments of life, no matter how gutsy, but how they lived and what their loss meant to their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The gruesome, grisly details were superfluous, unlike an earlier obituary style in which the how sometimes seemed to predominate over the who, what, when, where, and why.
When Louisa May Alcott died in 1888, for example, the New York Times explained in the first paragraph of her obituary, “For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis.” The first five paragraphs of Teddy Roosevelt’s Times obituary in 1919 left nothing about the cause of death to the reader’s imagination: “His physicians said that the immediate cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.” In 1892, reporting the death of Caroline Harrison, the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, the Atlanta Constitution described her corpse in clinical detail: “She shows in her emaciation the effects of the long wasting illness of eight months that has reduced her large, matronly figure to a thin, frail form.” Then again, as recently as 2000, the paper, now called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran an obituary by Kay Powell of a local church-choir tenor, who had also written a manuscript on the philosophy of religion, beginning this way: “David Robeson Morgan was a brilliant man whose future looked good, until he had a frontal lobotomy in 1947.”
“A writer may bear the same name as the subject of his memoir, but he is hardly the same person,” Robert W. Fuller, the former college president and self-styled dignitarian, surmised in the epilogue to his own memoir. “He has long since morphed into the subject’s successor, and then the successor of the successor.” Bridget Fowler, a sociology professor at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Obituary as Collective Memory, wrote, “The auto/biography as such is under the expressive control of its author and is thus as profound (or simplistic) as he or she is. In contrast, one characteristic of the obituary is that these lives are selected as particularly memorable, distinguished, or newsworthy.” She adds, “The obituary offers the rare accolade of public recognition, the first step toward posthumous memory. Yet it is not just a store of value, it is also a measure of value: the obituary as a biographical form illuminates the social reality of dominance and distinction, whilst only rarely shedding light on the world of subordination.”
The onset of the AIDS epidemic presented editors with a sensitive dilemma: Merely having the virus implied vulnerable behavior—either drug use or homosexuality—that society was far from accepting. In 1986, the fashion designer Perry Ellis died of AIDS at age 46, as stated in his obituary in the Washington Post. In the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, his cause of his death was reported to be viral encephalitis. In early May 1987, Charles Ludlam, a playwright, parody actor, and admired figure in New York’s East Village underground arts scene, withdrew from the New York Shakespeare Festival’s scheduled Central Park production of Titus Andronicus. On May 28, Ludlam’s publicist announced that he had died of pneumonia. The New York Times‘s Jeremy Gerard assumed correctly that the pneumonia was a complication of AIDS, and believed the refusal to acknowledge the disease compounded the tragedy of Ludlam’s death by validating the stigma attached to gay people, who were among its most prominent victims.
As Leah Rosenzweig reported in Slate, for hours Gerard desperately tried to persuade Ludlam’s parents to confirm the actual cause but failed. “They were working-class Catholics from Long Island; as far as they were concerned, their son had died a shameful death,” Gerard recalled. But fifteen minutes before his deadline, the family’s lawyer called back. The Ludlams agreed to confirm the cause. On May 29, 1987, Gerard’s obituary of Charles Ludlam was the first that identified AIDS as the cause of death in the Times, on the front page.
“Obituaries contribute to national myths or collective memories of contemporary heroes by symbolically ‘reflecting what, in death, was most valued about the lives of individual citizens,'” Janice Hume wrote. “An obituary distills, publishes, and thus legitimizes something more abstract than mere facts. It also reveals values, highlighted in the attributes of the deceased, and should be examined not just as an indifferent chronicle but as a commemoration, a representation of an ideal, with its own distinct contribution to the understanding of history. Those ideals, part of obituary coverage, become safeguarded by their publication.”
To quantify those values, Lux Narayan, a social media analyst, conducted a statistical survey of some 2,000 New York Times news obituaries that were published in 2015 and 2016. Not surprisingly, the fields of academics, science, politics, film, theater, music, dance, and art predominated among those deemed worthy. On average, they achieved the thing that made them worthy of a Times obituary when they were 37 years old—athletes more likely in their twenties, politicians in their forties. The prototypical obituary subject lived to be 81, which meant 44 years had elapsed between the accomplishment and, in the cases of the many obscure and quirky characters, their public aggrandizement. “Talk about having to be patient,” Narayan said. In a TED Talk, he explained his obsessive reading of the daily paper over scrambled eggs this way: “If you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news and cues man’s failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries.”
What were the most common denominators among those obituarized, and what do they suggest society—or, more to the point, the Times—valued? If your name was John, you didn’t necessarily have a better chance of being the subject of an obituary, but it was more likely that a man whose first name was John would appear in one. That’s not so surprising, given that John (along with James, Robert, Michael, and David) has been among the most popular names for American men born in the last 100 years. Narayan was struck by another commonality, though. The language-processing program revealed that the one word that leapt out everywhere was help, as a noun or verb. The most universal value, it seemed, that elevated the famous and not-so into those the Times editors considered worthy of obituaries was how much people helped. “They made a positive dent in the fabric of life,” Narayan said.
For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity.
Journalists understand, or should, that statistical surveys of subjective material are fertile ground for as many question marks as answers. Patrick Nolan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, wondered whether the cult of celebrity has blossomed over the last century, as the anecdotal evidence suggests. Has the public become so starstruck that somebodies in less glamorous professions have been overshadowed? One way to measure the trajectory of society’s fascination quotient, he figured, was to enlist New York Times obituaries as a cultural barometer. Nolan’s canvas was every “notable death” that was published in the Times during the entire twentieth century.
“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” Nolan and Timothy J. Bertoni reported in the journal Sociation Today. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we’ve turned increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.” After dividing the century into quarters, Nolan and a doctoral student, Timothy Bertoni, randomly selected 20 days from 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000 and ranked the professions of the dead by the number of obituaries run.
The number of obits of entertainers and athletes, grouped together, rose, from seventh most in 1900 to fifth in 1925, third in 1950, and first in 1975. By 2000, they remained in first place and accounted for 28 percent of obituaries. In 2000, the researchers didn’t find a single notable religious figure who was memorialized. The category had plummeted from fourth place when the 20th century began to last when the millennium ended. During the same period, the number of obituaries of notable individuals from the fields of business, finance, manufacturing, and industry declined by half. Americans, Janice Hume has written in her study of grief, “value each other and, indeed, value life for collective reasons. They value a long, robust, and full life, a life that is uniquely American, and a life that ensures social preservation. A typical Victorian obituary would carry the statement, ‘in life we are in the midst of death,’ but as this study suggests, at least on the obituary pages of historic mainstream American newspapers, in death we are in the midst of life.” Nigel Starck, too, argues that obituaries provide a glue that bonds society not in grief but in an aspirational reevaluation of our own lives.
“There is nothing inherently gloomy about the newspaper obituary page,” he writes. “Done well, it should capture life rather than wallow in death.” Clare Brant recalled her euphoric reaction to reading of the death of Martin Wells, the grandson of the English writer H. G. Wells, in the Guardian in 2009. He was an 80-year-old biologist with a passion for cephalopods and was also a novelist, painter, and yachtsman. “Though marine biologists don’t have dry lives in a literal sense, and people who love octopus usually have a sense of play, he was really lively,” Brant wrote. “I rejoiced that an academic could have such a full, happy and entertaining life—there’s hope for the rest of us! It wasn’t that I wanted to know him or even to have known him, but I was glad he’d existed, and I still want not to forget the implications of his existence.”
And that was an obituary about a total stranger. For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity. “The greatest investigative piece I ever wrote when I thought I was really important never survived more than a few weeks in terms of being kept around,” said Jim Nicholson, the Philadelphia journalist who regularly chronicled deaths of the common man, the nobodies, as he put it. “But these obituaries, they’re laminated. They’re put under glass. They’re hung on walls or in family Bibles. In fact, they’re even put into the inside coat pocket of the deceased. And, yeah, they’ll be around long after you and I are gone.” Nicholson’s obituaries were indelible. “My words give readers thousands of moments to remember of little lives lived well,” he said. “Perhaps I even gave them the secrets of how to live one well.”
What readers cherish about obituaries, Casey Cep wrote in the New Yorker, is “the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc. So much of the news is ongoing and unsettled, but obituaries by definition have a kind of alluring finality.” In the two weeks after Victoria Chang’s mother died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2015, the Los Angeles–based poet feverishly wrote seventy poems. Her goal: to recast the newspaper obituary to identify what had been lost (“civility, language and the future,” she wrote) and death’s cultural impact on the living. She described writing an obituary as a wake-up call. “This person is dead,” Chang wrote. “You’re alive.”
Copyright © 2026 by Sam Roberts. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sam Roberts, a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, is an obituaries reporter and formerly the Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times. He has hosted the New York Times Close Up on TV and the podcast Only in New York, anthologized in a book of the same name. He is the author of The New Yorkers, A History of New York in 27 Buildings, A History of New York in 101 Objects, Grand Central, and The Brother, among other books. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail. Before joining the Times in 1983, he was the youngest city editor of the New York Daily News. He lives in New York with his wife.
A Junta de Freguesia de Almancil esteve presente, na passada sexta-feira, dia 31 de julho, representada pela Secretária do Executivo, Célia Fragoso, na entrega dos novos leitores de identificação eletrónica de animais.
A iniciativa, promovida pela Câmara Municipal de Loulé, reuniu as freguesias do concelho neste esforço conjunto pela causa animal.
Com este novo recurso, a freguesia passa a dispor de um meio mais prático para atuar em situações de animais perdidos ou desorientados.
A leitura do microchip permite identificar rapidamente os responsáveis pelo animal, facilitando o seu regresso a casa.
A Junta de Freguesia mantém-se disponível para continuar a contribuir para o bem-estar animal.
Lídia Jorge, Dino D’Santiago e Ricardo Neves Neves são os embaixadores da candidatura de Loulé. O trabalho desenvolvido nos últimos anos no concelho e a Estratégia Municipal da Cultura 2034 são pontos fortes.Candidatura conta com o apoio da RTA, CCDR, AMAL e UALG.
A candidatura de Loulé a Capital Portuguesa da Cultura foi apresentada dia 6, em reunião interna de trabalho no Cineteatro Louletano que juntou o executivo e os trabalhadores da área da cultura do município, juntamente com os três embaixadores da candidatura: Lídia Jorge, Dino D’Santiago e Ricardo Neves Neves.
“O trabalho já vem de trás, o objetivo é reforçar a atratividade anual do Algarve e ao mesmo tempo fazer da cultura o pilar do desenvolvimento da região. Pretendemos que olhem para nós de uma outra forma e que percebam que a Sul também há cultura todo ano. É também um convite para visitar o Algarve e dar a conhecer a cultura algarvia de janeiro a dezembro de 2028”, destacou Telmo Pinto, o presidente da Câmara Municipal de Loulé.
Durante a reunião, o presidente destacou ainda, como ponto forte, o facto de “ser fruto do trabalho que tem vindo a ser desenvolvido nesta área, com o objetivo de a cultura fazer parte da vida das pessoas”. Um dos indicadores do impacto do apoio do Município ao movimento associativo cultural é o crescimento do número de associações no concelho, que passou de 19, em 2013, para 42, em 2026.
Outro ponto forte para a candidatura apresentado pelos louletanos, passa pela Estratégia Municipal da Cultura 2034, um projeto participativo iniciado em 2024, para o desenvolvimento cultural do município, que contempla vários investimentos e melhoramentos nas estruturas existentes.
Nomeadamente, a segunda fase do Quarteirão Cultural de Loulé, um projeto de reabilitação urbana que cobre uma área de cinco mil metros quadrados, que engloba o antigo Convento do Espírito Santo ,o Castelo de Loulé e área adjacente, tendo a primeira fase sido inaugurada em 2022 com os Banhos Islâmicos e a Casa Senhorial dos Barreto. Este complexo cultural é uma das âncoras do Geoparque Algarvensis, Geoparque Mundial UNESCO, um projeto intermunicipal com os concelhos de Silves e Albufeira.
Bem como a ampliação e renovação da Biblioteca Municipal. A ampliação do Cineteatro Louletano.A criação do Centro de Artes de Loulé dedicado às artes visuais. A ampliação do Conservatório de música Francisco Rosado, em fase de projeto de execução. A reabilitação do Casino Velho de Quarteira, com a criação de estúdios de música para gravação e ensaio, secção de desenvolvimento de videojogos, áreas para bailes e encontros comunitários e intergeracionais.
E ainda a criação Centro de Educação de Cultura de Quarteira, com uma sala de espetáculos com fosso para orquestra e capacidade para 500 espectadores, na sala principal, uma black box, entre outras facilidades.
Mais informações disponíveis nas páginas da candidatura @loule28.pt no facebook, instagram, tiktok e youtube, ou sugestões através do email: tenhoideias@loule28.pt.
A apresentação de candidaturas termina a 27 de setembro. A cidade escolhida para Capital Portuguesa da Cultura em 2028 vai ser conhecida a 11 de dezembro.
As Festas em Honra de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, em Castro Marim, vão decorrer entre os dias 13 e 17 de agosto, com uma programação que inclui várias iniciativas religiosas e culturais, sem esquecer as tradições do território.
No primeiro dia, a 13 de agosto, a partir das 21h00, haverá missa na Igreja de Castro Marim e sai para a rua a Procissão das Velas em Honra de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, que vai percorrer várias artérias da vila.
No dia seguinte, a 14 de agosto, a Zona Envolvente à Casa do Sal recebe a abertura da Mostra de Artesanato e um baile com Hugo Madeira e Ângelo Correia pelas 19h00, seguido de um espetáculo do grupo de dança ARUTLA pelas 21h00.
O destaque deste dia é Ana Bacalhau, vocalista dos Deolinda, que apresentará um grande espetáculo em nome próprio, celebrando a música portuguesa. A noite termina com a continuação do baile.
O dia principal destas festas assinala-se a 15 de agosto, começando pelas 09h00 com o Hastear da Bandeira Nacional no edifício dos Paços do Concelho.
À tarde, pelas 17h30, na Igreja de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires decorrerá a Recitação do Terço, seguida de uma missa solene pelas 18h30.
O ponto alto destas celebrações decorre no mesmo dia, pelas 19h30, com a Procissão em Honra de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, um dos eventos religiosos do concelho que tem mais impacto e importância para a comunidade, que se une num momento de fé pelas ruas da vila de Castro Marim.
Já no recinto da Mostra de Artesanato, iniciam-se os concertos pelas 20h00 com André Filipe Duo, seguido de um grande espetáculo com os The Gift às 22h00 e terminando a noite com o projeto Time Travel, assinado por Possessivo e DJ Karussa, pelas 00h00.
A 16 de agosto, o palco da Mostra de Artesanato recebe a atuação da dupla Só Nós Dois, pelas 20h00, antecipando um grande concerto de um dos cantores alentejanos mais conceituados: Buba Espinho. Para terminar, segue-se uma atuação energética da DJ Joana Faria.
As Festas em Honra de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires terminam a 17 de agosto, pelas 21h30, com o habitual Concerto de Verão da Banda Musical Castromarinense, no mesmo local.
O evento é organizado pelo Município de Castro Marim, em parceria com a Junta de Freguesia e a Paróquia de São Tiago.
War stories, new colors, and the joy in getting hands on in art and gardening.
A Avenida 24 de Junho, em Altura, vai transformar-se num autêntico sambódromo no sábado, dia 8 de agosto, com a realização do Carnaval de Verão, a partir das 22h00, com entrada livre.
Inspirado no cortejo de Carnaval, que é um dos mais celebrados no sotavento algarvio, esta iniciativa contará com carros e estruturas alegóricas, com foco no aproveitamento e na reutilização de materiais da edição que decorreu em fevereiro deste ano.
Com o mesmo tema, “Culturas e Tradições do Mundo”, o desfile contará com centenas de foliões e figurantes, que vão encher de cor e alegria a zona central da Avenida 24 de Junho, ao mesmo tempo que decorre o Mercadinho de Verão.
Integrado na programação da Animação de Verão em Altura, o evento termina no palco da Zona de Lazer, com um concerto dos “Pau de Arara”.
A iniciativa é organizada pela Junta de Freguesia de Altura, em parceria com o Município de Castro Marim.
O Jardim Pescador Olhanense volta a ser palco do maior evento gastronómico a sul do país.
De 10 a 15 de agosto, o 38.º Festival do Marisco reúne o melhor da gastronomia da Ria Formosa, um cartaz musical de excelência e várias novidades que prometem tornar a experiência dos visitantes ainda mais confortável e completa.
A inauguração oficial realiza-se na próxima segunda feira, dia 10 de agosto, pelas 19:30, e contará com a presença do presidente da Assembleia da República, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco.
Considerado um dos eventos mais emblemáticos do verão algarvio, o Festival do Marisco volta a afirmar Olhão como capital da gastronomia ligada ao mar, dando destaque aos mariscos e bivalves mais frescos da Ria Formosa, preparados num ambiente único junto à frente ribeirinha.
À componente gastronómica. junta-se um cartaz musical de grande qualidade, com artistas nacionais e internacionais que prometem animar as seis noites do festival:
10 de agosto – Matias Damásio;
11 de agosto – Deejay Telio;
12 de agosto – Némanus;
13 de agosto – Calema;
14 de agosto – Mariza;
15 de agosto – Daniela Mercury.
A edição de 2026 apresenta, ainda, diversas novidades pensadas para melhorar a experiência de quem visita o recinto. Entre elas, destaca-se a criação de um novo espaço dedicado à venda de marisco, permitindo reduzir tempos de espera e proporcionar maior fluidez no serviço.
Na área de street food, para além das já habituais propostas como hambúrgueres e pizzas, estreia-se este ano o Poke Market, alargando a diversidade da oferta gastronómica disponível.
Os visitantes poderão, ainda, encontrar um espaço da pastelaria Kubidoce, que apresentará algumas das suas especialidades inspiradas na tradição e identidade do concelho, como o floripes e o moncarapachense.
Outra das novidades passa pela distribuição de pulseiras com um código QR em praias e outros locais estratégicos. Através desse código, os visitantes poderão aceder a uma comunidade oficial no WhatsApp, onde serão disponibilizadas informações úteis sobre o evento, nomeadamente estacionamentos, acessos, entradas, localização dos espaços de restauração e outras informações práticas. No final, será, igualmente, possível responder a um questionário de satisfação, contribuindo para a melhoria contínua do Festival.
Atendendo ao facto de os Mercados de Olhão serem semifinalistas nacionais da iniciativa Novas 7 Maravilhas de Portugal, o recinto contará, igualmente, com um espaço dedicado à divulgação da candidatura, onde os visitantes poderão conhecer melhor este património emblemático do concelho e receber brindes alusivos à campanha.
Os bilhetes encontram-se disponíveis na Ticketline, nos pontos de venda habituais e também nas bilheteiras do recinto durante os dias do evento.
Durante seis dias, o Festival do Marisco volta a reunir os sabores únicos da Ria Formosa, a melhor música e milhares de visitantes, reforçando o seu estatuto como um dos maiores e mais importantes eventos turísticos e gastronómicos de Portugal.
Mais do que um festival, o Festival do Marisco é uma celebração da identidade marítima de Olhão, da excelência da sua gastronomia e da hospitalidade do concelho.
Hoje assinala-se o Dia Mundial do Teatro. Em teoria, é um dia para celebrar a arte, os
atores, os textos que nos fazem pensar e sentir. O teatro, quando é sério, não é só
entretenimento, é um espelho desconfortável daquilo que somos. Expõe, provoca,
obriga a encarar verdades que muitas vezes preferíamos evitar.
Talvez por isso seja impossível não fazer um paralelismo com aquilo em que se
transformou a nossa vida política.
Há qualquer coisa de profundamente teatral — no pior sentido da palavra — na forma
como hoje se faz política. Não no sentido nobre da representação, mas na encenação
vazia. Nos discursos cuidadosamente ensaiados. Nas indignações seletivas. Nas
conferências de imprensa onde já se sabe, à partida, o que vai ser dito e como vai ser
dito.
Tudo parece coreografado. Nada parece espontâneo.
Os políticos falam, mas raramente dizem. Prometem, mas quase nunca se
comprometem. E, acima de tudo, representam proximidade, representam convicção,
representam firmeza. É uma sucessão de papéis, ajustados ao momento, ao público e
às sondagens.
O problema é que isto já não engana muita gente.
Ao contrário do teatro a sério, onde há talento, trabalho e respeito por quem está a
ver, esta versão política da representação vive de clichés e de frases feitas. É uma peça
repetida vezes sem conta, com pequenas variações, mas sempre com o mesmo fundo:
pouco conteúdo e muita aparência.
E depois há o público — nós. Durante muito tempo, aceitámos este papel de
espectadores. Uns aplaudem, outros assobiam, mas no fundo continuamos sentados, à
espera que a peça melhore.
O mais grave é que, enquanto se representa, o essencial vai ficando por fazer. Os
problemas acumulam-se, as decisões adiam-se, e a realidade — essa, que não se deixa
encenar — acaba sempre por impor-se.
Talvez este Dia Mundial do Teatro sirva, pelo menos, para isto: para nos lembrar que
há uma diferença enorme entre representar bem e fingir mal.
A política não precisa de mais atores. Precisa de menos teatro.
(Aqui tem uma gravação com o texto lido pela autora)
The post Governar ou representar? appeared first on Jornal O DIABO.
This story originally appeared in Professor Richard Wolff’s Substack on July 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
Deeply divided by nationalism and deprived of its vast colonies by the last century’s catastrophic two world wars, Western Europe has been in decline ever since. Recently, that decline has become drastic and desperate as Western Europe falls ever further behind — economically, militarily, and politically — today’s two superpowers: the US and China. Mediocre and unpopular leaders reflect Western European decline. They bet and built their careers on accepting junior partner positions vis-à-vis the United States. But Europe’s decline now threatens to split Europe apart. Inside each nation, rich and powerful minorities use their social positions to sustain their wealth and power while the masses bear most of the burdens of decline offloaded onto them by the rich and powerful. The problems flowing from these cumulative developments are approaching points of social explosion. Despite the lessons taught by the two world wars, many Western European leaders once again provoke and prepare for a war, this time against Russia, notwithstanding the awful risks of nuclear weapons. One key question to ask: why is this happening?
From 1945 to 1990, Cold War set Western European nations against the USSR and its Eastern European allies in many ways and on many levels. Yet that war remained cold. In 2026, after more than three decades of post-Cold War peace, a military war between a largely unified Europe (East and West) and post-Soviet Russia seems imminent. Such a war has been prepared by NATO’s growth, its moving eastward toward Russian borders since 1990; by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine; and by the escalations of their hostilities by both Russia and Ukraine since that invasion. War between much of Europe and Russia now looms.
US President Donald Trump used both his presidential terms to distance the United States from its European allies in NATO. Among his provocative, unilateral statements and actions were heavy tariffs on imports from European countries. In exchange for some reduction of those tariffs, Trump demanded and obtained tribute from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (over $1 trillion in committed purchases of liquified natural gas plus investments by Europe in the United States). He also reduced US support for the war against Russia in Ukraine. That war thus became a mostly European project.
As the US withdrew from its former close alliances with Europe, the latter’s leaders developed an increasing hostility toward Russia. They demonized the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Where Trump notably lessened hostility to Russia, his European counterparts intensified theirs. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Europe and the US rushed to bolster Ukraine’s defense beyond the huge assistance they had already provided to Ukraine since at least 2014. After February 2022, Europeans provided Ukraine with still more support in finance and weapons. By 2026, many observers in Europe and Russia and beyond predicted a Russo-European war as imminent. Our goal here is to explain why this dangerous situation arose.
World Wars I and II fatally weakened capitalist colonialism. The British, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Russian and Japanese colonialisms had especially escalated competitive clashes into two catastrophically self-destructive wars. This allowed movements of the colonized people finally to defeat the weakened colonizers and win political independence. The different anticapitalist movements that had blossomed earlier in 19th century Europe allied themselves with anticolonialism especially in the Soviet revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution of 1949. A complex, shifting relationship between anticolonialism and anticapitalism continues to evolve in both the Global South and the former colonial powers.
As the sole heir of all other capitalist colonialisms, the US led and organized capitalism’s counteroffensive against the USSR, socialisms and communisms generally, and their alliances with anti-imperialism in particular. It did so by mobilizing Western Europe, Canada, and Japan as major subordinates in a globally hegemonic bloc.
The private capitalist classes atop each colonialist nation had understood the colonies’ importance for their profits and thus for their imperial economies. They went to war in large part to retain their colonies. After the two world wars, they faced, separately and together, momentous challenges to their existence. As their empires dissolved in wars of independence, capitalists’ profits and their national economies were threatened. Worse still was a potential alliance linking ex-colonies, the Comintern nations, and those capitalists’ own domestic socialist and communist parties and unions. Fearing such developments, nothing less than the survival of 20th century European capitalism seemed at stake for European capitalists and their supporters.
To undo this threat, Western Europe appealed to the post-World War II global hegemon: the United States. Within a few years of 1945, the US had scooped up much of what European and Japanese colonialisms had lost. US capitalists moved into newly independent ex-colonies to widen and deepen their economic dependence via the dollar as world currency, through both US trade and investment. European capitalists had to settle for positions as junior partners of their US counterparts, or else lost everything. Europe as a whole followed suit and became the junior partner of the US in most other dimensions (NATO, geopolitics, financial and cultural institutions, etc.).
Keynesian economics added a scientistic rationale — using monetary and fiscal policies to moderate business cycles — to the political necessity of welfare state expenditures.
As the sole heir of all other capitalist colonialisms, the US led and organized capitalism’s counteroffensive against the USSR, socialisms and communisms generally, and their alliances with anti-imperialism in particular. It did so by mobilizing Western Europe, Canada, and Japan as major subordinates in a globally hegemonic bloc. The US could do this because it had suffered far less than any of the other capitalist colonial nations from the two world wars. Indeed, World War II had extracted the US from capitalism’s worst ever crash. Its economy was stronger in 1945 than it had been for many years, whereas in all the former colonizing nations the reverse was the case. That economic strength contributed to its dominant military power.
US hegemony defined itself as a moral crusade against a great evil, the USSR (equated with communism). The US was “the leader of the free world” pitted against an unfree world — the USSR, Eastern Europe, and, after 1949, China. The latter were all demonized as anticapitalist dictatorships, which made them enemies of “democracy” as championed in and by the free world. On that basis, US hegemony followed as the necessary condition to “contain” the unfree world, to prevent its spread. The US-led “free world” could and would guarantee containment by means of global military bases, the world’s greatest military arsenal, ideological campaigns, political isolation, and economic discriminations. The world thus entered into a Cold War between 1945-1990 punctuated by military — hot — wars when the US deemed them necessary (for example, in Korea and Vietnam).
US hegemony also included domestic campaigns inside both Europe and the US aimed at containment. Those campaigns all featured two parts. One was a set of “welfare state” or social democratic benefits for working classes. Leading politicians in North America, Western Europe, and Japan installed those benefits. Many feared that not doing so would influence working classes toward socialism and communism. In the US, this meant perpetuating the 1930s New Deal into the 1970s. Successive leaders, Republican as well as Democratic, added Medicare to Social Security, regularly raised minimum wages, gave special attention to the non-white and non-male victims of systemic discrimination, subsidized higher education via massive public institutions, and subsidized home ownership loans. Such state interventions delivered a much less harsh life for working classes than any prior private capitalism had ever done. Keynesian economics added a scientistic rationale — using monetary and fiscal policies to moderate business cycles — to the political necessity of welfare state expenditures.
capitalists supported government social welfare spending because it came not from more taxes on them, but rather from national budgets’ defense savings. The latter were benefits from European subordination to NATO and its US leadership. That subordination included mostly endorsing US hostility toward the USSR, China and all things “communistic.”
The other part of these containment campaigns involved widespread purges of Communists, socialists, and their “fellow travelers.” In the US, a ferocious “anti-communism” project “cleansed” labor unions, schools, mass media, and government of leftist employees. Capitalist employers’ organizations and many individual capitalists collaborated with the state’s repressive campaigns. They mobilized behind Sen. Joseph McCarthy for a few years. His was a particularly extreme version of the old American political style of demonizing political opponents, foreign and domestic, as “of the devil.” The US House of Representatives established an “Un-American Activities Committee.” Such campaigns’ ostensible objective was to destroy the Communist Party. Mass media circuses, newspaper headlines, arrests, prison sentences, deportations, and getting witnesses to betray others — resulting in losing their jobs — were their means. Guilt by association targeted both socialists and independent left-leaning citizens. Purges identified many victims by citing their activities before 1945. It made little difference that at the time those activities (in unions, political parties, schools, churches, and civic associations) were both legal and often patriotically anti-fascist. The systematic repression of the US left after 1945 left deep political scars.
Western Europe dutifully undertook a similarly two-sided project. However, social conditions there imposed different qualities on it anti-Soviet and domestic anti-left campaigns. Europe’s pre-1945 history gave communist and socialist parties and their millions of members much greater social approval than existed in the US. Leftists’ roles in resisting fascism before and during World War II — often heroic — gave them genuine, widespread popularity. They could defend their political views, and themselves, in ways their US counterparts could not. European welfare states were more generous and lasted longer than their US counterparts.
While nothing quite like McCarthyism swept Europe, most Western European nations joined NATO and aligned their foreign policies to the US-led containment agenda. Their defense budgets and capabilities declined, and they relied instead on US military protection. What each European state saved by means of small defense budgets it could then use to provide public services for their working classes. The latter might otherwise have required higher taxes on corporations and the rich (and not only or chiefly on working people). European capitalists supported their welfare states partly because they endorsed containment. Equally important, capitalists supported government social welfare spending because it came not from more taxes on them, but rather from national budgets’ defense savings. The latter were benefits from European subordination to NATO and its US leadership. That subordination included mostly endorsing US hostility toward the USSR, China and all things “communistic.”
For the last 75 years, European politicians who hesitated to embrace the positions and tones consistent with the US-European “consensus” on foreign and domestic policies saw their career opportunities threatened or destroyed. The British sought and found a special role as the closest friend and imitator of the US in this consensus. The rest of Western Europe sometimes mocked Britain’s fawning subordination, but many jealously and secretly approximated it. European capitalists looked longingly at the US’s steadily shrinking welfare state programs that facilitated tax cuts on corporations and the rich. However, those non-Anglo Europeans accepted the political limits that rendered matching the US and UK impossible. They could only hold back the domestic power of their working classes by providing generous social welfare policies. The same was required to make Western Europe a consumerist bulwark against Russia, thereby to contain it and its Eastern European allies.
Breaking from those limits only became thinkable when it was made necessary. This happened when Trump ended the post-1945 US-Europe deal. His “friendliness” with Russia underscored his evident contempt for Western Europe as a junior partner/dependent that was too costly to carry anymore. His trade and tariff wars, pointedly, did not exempt Europe. The tariffs particularly shocked Western European capitalists who had concentrated during reconstruction (1945-1975) on producing goods and services that could compete in the rich US market. The tariffs also occurred just when Trump reduced support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and sharply criticized NATO. For shocked Western European leaders, Trump broke the US-European deals of the post-1945 world.
Chinese competition added strains to the European and US economies, which were already struggling to cope with the declines of their empires.
Ever since 1945, Western European capitalists had set themselves to rebuild their economies by producing goods and services of better quality and/or cheaper than the US output that dominated both the US and other markets. This included some investments in their former colonies, rendering them economically dependent notwithstanding their political independence. The latter became more performative than substantive. It remains that way in many areas. The crucially important exception was the spectacular economic growth of the People’s Republic of China. China’s growth changed everything, and continues to do so. It is transforming the world economy as it takes an ever more powerful place therein.
China’s still-export-driven manufacturing economy competes globally and ever more successfully with what remains of manufacturing in the US and in Europe. China competes, as well as an importer of energy and other inputs. Chinese competition added strains to the European and US economies, which were already struggling to cope with the declines of their empires. Europe already had had a century of decline, whereas the US was new to decline, with many of its citizens steadfastly committed to denial as their coping mechanism of choice.
Western European capitalism had partly offset its decline first by post-war reconstruction, then by explosions of consumer credit. Then, and especially after 1989, Europe welcomed waves of cheap immigrant labor while expanding eastward to re-absorb Eastern Europe into its economic operations, much as it was doing with its former colonies. Pushing NATO eastward and expanding EU membership were the chief mechanisms to accomplish Western Europe’s capitalist neocolonialism. Fantasies swirled about extending those mechanisms eastward to include Russia, perhaps dividing it up into smaller states as manageable as the Eastern European states were. If somehow achieved, that could give Western Europe an immense new geographic expanse to economically colonize. Trump, too, engaged parallel fantasies in his neocolonial gestures toward Panama, Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico.
Pushing NATO eastward and expanding EU membership were the chief mechanisms to accomplish Western Europe’s capitalist neocolonialism.
The great break in post-World War II US-European relations came with Trump’s combination trade and tariff war designed to “make the US economy great again.” Trump had effectively dedicated his second presidential term, begun in January 2025, to waging this economic war. Another part of that war was a broad turn away from neoliberal globalization and toward a systematic economic nationalism (“America first”). Trump’s blunt message was disengagement. Europe could no longer count on the US to provide it with military protection. Trump depicted Europe as an ally who had betrayed and cheated the US economically. He demanded payments as compensation. Those took the form of buying US liquified natural gas (LNG) for its energy needs plus committing to invest $700 billion or more in the US over a few coming years. Von der Leyen formally acceded to Trump’s demands. Such payments amounted to either tribute or reparations, depending on one’s viewpoint.
Europe’s required purchase of US LNG emerged from the Russia-Ukraine war. The economic sanctions of that war (since February 2022) plus the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines (in September 2022) sharply reduced and then ended the flow of cheap energy from Russia into Germany and other parts of Western Europe. Desperate for access to energy, Europe turned increasingly to imports from elsewhere — and especially from the US — at a much higher cost. Meanwhile, steadily growing trade competition from China and more rapid technical innovations achieved in China and the US further squeezed the European economy.
The shock of Trump’s abandonment of Europe as the US economy’s junior partner accelerated Europe’s decline. Once it had been the dominating center of a planet it had colonized. Now it had fallen to a poor third place in a world economy increasingly dominated by what had once been the poor corners of that planet. On one side stood the declining but still strong US; on the other the rising People’s Republic of China. No wonder the Ukraine war drove Russia to declare its identity shifting from European to Asian.
Europe’s political leaders reflected and exemplified its decline. Burnham, Macron, Merz and Meloni especially — like most of their predecessors after 1945 — had built political lives around loyalty and subservience to the post-World War II deal with the US. They relied on the military, financial, and ideological support from the US, on NATO, on the IMF, the World Bank, and myriad NGO missionaries for US “democracy.” They championed their “close alliance” with the US as a key cause of Europe’s prosperity and peace after 1945. Betrayed by Trump, they were forced by Europe’s decline to pay tribute with monies therefore not available to offset that decline. Trump pointedly forced them to begin financing the huge costs of developing their own military defense (already far behind the military capabilities of the US, on one side, and the China-Russia alliance on the other).
European voters know their social democracy and their peace are fragile. Trump’s betrayal threatens both.
Given the deep personal opportunism cultivated in Western European leaders by their subordinate (to the US) situation, they grasped that Trump’s betrayal threatened their careers. Trump’s repeated insults of and disdain for Western Europe risked provoking European voters to turn against leaders seen as slavish toward Trump’s US. Those leaders’ alarm only deepened as much of the US employer class seemed quite supportive of Trump’s anti-Europeanism. Perhaps their greatest fear lay in the possible reactions of European voters once they understood that Trump’s betrayal posed serious economic dangers for them. Voters might ask where the money would come from to finance European rearmament when the US defense umbrella closed. If enhanced, would budget allocations for the military diminish outlays for mass public social services, raise their taxes, or both? Europeans began to wonder out loud whether the Ukraine-Russia war being fought to the last Ukrainian might prefigure a US war with Russia/China fought to the last European. European voters know their social democracy and their peace are fragile. Trump’s betrayal threatens both. How that plays out in European politics provides new opportunities for the left and the right and existential threats to the traditional centrist pro-US political leadership trying desperately to retain power.
Nationalist politicians on the European right see their opportunity. Office-holding conservative leaders (like Burnham, Macron, and Merz, for example) can be voted out via guilt by subordination. They perpetuated the post-World War II programs that made Europe vulnerable to its current economic decline because of their subservience to the US. Western European opportunism now incites the suspicion that maybe it bet on the wrong horse. A similar suspicion now arises in some of the Gulf States in the wake of the US-Israel war on Iran. Having “invited” US military bases to be constructed on their land for security, they now see that those bases actually achieved the opposite. The bases and their host nations have become endangered targets vulnerable to Iranian drones and missiles.
Anticapitalist politicians on the left also see an opportunity. The US was a partner who mostly pushed Europe to the right. The US undid its New Deal sooner and took that undoing further than the Europeans dared to even try to do to their welfare state.
Among the results of Europe’s left: it abolished the death penalty when the US pointedly did not. Military adventures, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine and Iran, were always started, led, and driven by the US with the Europeans marginally along as “coalitions of the [barely] willing.” Left politicians in Western Europe kept seeking to secure, if not advance, social democratic goals and policies. One way to do that was to limit the US connection as a context for more socialistic development in Europe. The European left positions itself as the way for the mass beneficiaries of the social democratic state to protect it from a US-connected old leadership that always seems to threaten social democracy. Europe’s left likewise rejects the nationalist right politicians because of their pro-capitalist, anti-worker and anti-immigrant tendencies.
Europe’s old US-linked political leaders have now found a way to arrest, or maybe even reverse, Europe’s frightening decline. It is the only way to do that they can see or imagine. That way can, they believe, both keep them in power in the short run and give them a new economic growth opportunity in the longer term. That way provides a convenient public justification for shifting state budget expenditures from public social services to big-business defense firms, from social democracy to pro-employer (pro-capitalist) austerity. By minimizing any extra taxes upon their employer classes, Western European leaders serve them very well. They will cover the costs of rearmament and tribute obligated to the US by diverting funds from the welfare state plus state-guaranteed borrowing plus heightened mass-based taxes, if needed, on working classes. Domestic austerity will be intensified across Western Europe while wages are brought downward toward southern and eastern European levels.
The same Western European leaders who criticize Trump lusting after Denmark’s Greenland indulge parallel lusts after Russia’s geographic expanse.
Europe’s leaders believe they can accomplish this by pumping up mass anxiety and fear around urgent preparations for a war against Russia. To that end, they demonize Russia beyond even the levels achieved against Stalin and Stalinism during the Cold War. Those leaders hope that an adequately terrified Europe will keep voting for them for a while. Longer-run hopes entail imagining Russia’s military defeat and consequent de jure or de facto dismemberment. The resulting subunits of old Russia would then offer Western Europe a new colonial opportunity, a vast expanse for profitable investment to obtain food, raw materials, and possibly workers to rejuvenate Western European capitalism. The same Western European leaders who criticize Trump lusting after Denmark’s Greenland indulge parallel lusts after Russia’s geographic expanse.
All wars are overdetermined by both domestic and international causes intertwined. Europe’s current drone and missile warfare against Russia escalated from the Russia’s “special military operation” against Ukraine that began in 2022. Its local overdeterminants began earlier. Local concerns woven into global shifts — NATO toward the east and China toward the west — shaped Russia’s changing international position, concerns, and “red lines.” The whole world watches as China, Russia, and their allies square off against the US and whatever allies it retains. The world sees the wars in Ukraine and Iran today as conflicts among proxies of the two great powers of our time.
The danger inherent in both wars is that Europe or the US or Russia or Israel might resort to nuclear weapons if “existentially” threatened. The question is whether global masses and leaders can recognize the danger. This essay is one effort toward that recognition. The solution is a serious commitment to international collaboration. What began as the League of Nations and was rebuilt as the United Nations needs still another incarnation with real powers and real global respect. Otherwise we risk World War III and its mad, mutual assured destruction.
Τhe 26-year-old boxer suspect for the murder of 38-year-old British national Elisabeth Jane Ross has been remanded in custody after appearing before an investigating magistrate on Thursday. The defendant, who entered Greece as an unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan in 2016, has been charged for the offenses of intentional homicide, robbery and weapons possession.. The body […]
The post Suspect for the murder of Elizabeth J. Ross remanded in custody appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
Part of ceiling of the newly renovated Emergency Department (ER) in the General Hospital of Corinth, collapsed less than a month after the inauguration by Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis. According to hospital personnel, the collapse occurred in the exact same area where the inauguration took place, putting employees, patients and attendants at risk. In a […]
The post Ceiling in ER of Corinth Hospital collapses a month after inauguration appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
Four turtles rescued from a fire-stricken area in northern Greece were found to have been abused by human thugs who painted their shells with orange oil paint.The discovery prompted the intervention of the Prosecutor’s Office in Thessaloniki on Tuesday. The unprecedented incident was revealed when members of the Wild Animal Rescue & Reintegration Team arrived […]
The post Turtles painted with oil paint: rescued from fire, abused by humans appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.
Strasbourg, France – Several thousand European farmers protested in the French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday against the European Union’s free trade deal with countries in the Latin American Mercosur bloc.
Around 5,000 protesters and several hundred tractors gathered in the city, according to local officials, where the European Parliament is holding a plenary session this week.
EU lawmakers are to decide on Wednesday if they want to seek an opinion from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on whether the contested Mercosur agreement is compatible with EU law, which could delay the ratification process.
The free trade agreement was signed in Paraguay last weekend and still has to be approved by the European Parliament.
With their protest, the farmers want to keep up the pressure on EU decision-makers. They fear disproportionate competition from cheap imports from South America.
Protesters lit smoke bombs and held up placards with slogans such as “Von der Leyen go home,” directed at European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The demonstration caused major traffic disruption in Strasbourg, with several roads blocked. (January 20)
“Depois do sucesso das edições anteriores, que reuniram milhares de visitantes e dezenas de parceiros, o Existir Summer regressa em 2026 com um programa renovado e a mesma missão: transformar momentos de convívio em oportunidades para apoiar quem mais precisa.”
Nos dias 14 e 15 de agosto de 2026, o Largo do Salão de Festas de Loulé volta a receber um dos eventos solidários mais aguardados do verão algarvio. A Existir – Associação para a Intervenção e Reabilitação de Populações Deficientes e Desfavorecidas promove mais uma edição do Existir Summer, uma iniciativa que une música, animação, gastronomia e responsabilidade social, proporcionando dois dias de convívio, partilha e alegria para toda a comunidade.
Com entrada livre, o evento decorrerá entre as 19h00 e a 01h00, convidando famílias, visitantes e turistas a viver uma experiência onde a diversão se alia à solidariedade. Mais do que um evento de verão, o Existir Summer é uma iniciativa que pretende sensibilizar a comunidade para a importância da inclusão e apoiar o trabalho diário desenvolvido pela Associação Existir na promoção da autonomia, da dignidade e da qualidade de vida das pessoas com deficiência e das suas famílias.
Um cartaz pensado para todas as gerações
A edição de 2026 apresenta um programa musical diversificado, reunindo artistas que prometem proporcionar duas noites memoráveis.
14 de agosto
15 de agosto
Ao longo das duas noites, os visitantes poderão ainda desfrutar de uma ampla zona de comes e bebes, ideal para reunir familiares e amigos, bem como de um espaço dedicado aos mais pequenos, com várias atividades e momentos de diversão, tornando o Existir Summer um evento pensado para todas as idades.
Muito mais do que um evento
O Existir Summer nasceu com um objetivo muito claro: unir a comunidade em torno de uma causa solidária. Todas as receitas obtidas durante o evento revertem integralmente para o desenvolvimento das respostas sociais da Associação Existir, contribuindo para a continuidade dos projetos, atividades e serviços prestados diariamente aos seus utentes.
Ao longo das últimas edições, o Existir Summer afirmou-se como uma referência no calendário de verão do concelho de Loulé, reunindo milhares de visitantes, parceiros, voluntários e entidades que acreditam que a inclusão se constrói através da participação de todos.
A Festa da Ria Formosa – Seafood Festival está de volta a Faro para mais uma edição dedicada aos sabores da Ria Formosa, à música e à animação. Entre 30 de julho e 9 de agosto, o Largo de São Francisco transforma-se num ponto de encontro para celebrar a gastronomia algarvia, com entrada livre e um programa para toda a família.
A partir de 4 de agosto, a festa continua com uma programação musical diversificada:
Durante estes dias, o público poderá ainda desfrutar de comida e bebida, num ambiente de convívio e celebração junto à Ria Formosa.
Local: Largo de São Francisco, Faro
Datas: 4 a 9 de agosto de 2026
Entrada livre
Horário: 18h00 às 01h00
Venha divertir-se e comer bem na Festa da Ria Formosa!
The war in Iran began five months ago. Headline news about the conflict tends to focus on when and how it might end. In the meantime, the impacts of the conflict are felt worldwide—by drivers, farmers, business owners, and families. The Associated Press shares the stories of seven people suffering because of the war. Among them is Edgar Funelas, a jeepney driver in the Philippines who lives with his ten-year-old daughter:
He uses laundry soap—harsher, but cheaper—to wash his body and his clothes in the same motion, stretching what little money he has. Even before the war in Iran, he was living on the margins. A fire took their home and their belongings, forcing them to move into the brightly colored minibus he drove.
He’d hoped to be able to rent a room by now. Then diesel prices surged, and he could no longer afford the fuel to run his jeepney.
He hasn’t earned a single peso in days. There will be no breakfast. Hunger gnaws, but it’s the small rituals of privacy that he misses most: to be able to wash out of sight, to sleep behind walls, to keep his desperation from being laid bare.
Mark Seal is very fond of the phrase “Who Ya Gonna Call? Scam Busters!”—he uses it three times in this piece. Yet it’s still refreshing, despite being from last year, to read a story that focuses on the painstaking effort to trace scammers rather than lingering on the victim’s humiliation (looking at you, Netflix). Seal does explain how a French woman named Anne fell for “Brad Pitt” online and subsequently lost her fortune to the scammers, but her supposed savior, cyber‑detective Marwan Ouarab—sporting a cat‑in‑a‑trench‑coat T‑shirt—gets most of the page time here. Ouarab apparently found the scammers within 48 hours, but no charges have been made, and Anne is still fighting to recover any of her money. You can call the scam busters, but you’re still in for a long wait.
“All during the scam, Anne was suspecting something,” he says over a vanilla flan, a sweet treat for a very determined guy. “But every time, the crooks had fine words, the right words. They were really poetic. They knew what words were right for her. They really understood Anne’s psychological profile.”
It was a classic “sentimental scam,” says Ouarab—a carefully produced, all-encompassing “theatrical event” that uses love as the bait to hook the target and then envelops them completely in the con. (In this case, the divorced interior designer, Anne, whose last name has not been made public, and a convincing facsimile of Brad Pitt, achieved via A.I., deepfake technology, and, according to Ouarab, “ridiculous photoshop tools to create pictures of the fake Brad in his hospital bed.”)
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