#thanks for being an ally to stressed Germans on election day

[darkacademiaarchivist]

how are the politics going

theres a tiny bit of hope that the far right party will remain under 20% when I was kinda scared they'd get 30% so yay!!!

[180abroad]

Days 158-160: Salzburg & Berchtesgaden

On the border between Austria and Germany is a small corner of the Alps whose fame far exceeds its size. It is German and Austrian and also not quite either at the same time. It's been settled since the Stone Age and grew fabulously wealthy thanks to the local salt deposits, a commodity as valuable in historical times as oil is now. For hundreds of years it was ruled by an eccentric system of elected prince-bishops. It is the extremely proud birthplace of Mozart--though Mozart himself hated it and moved to Vienna as soon as he could afford to.

More recently, it has earned renewed fame as a place of extraordinary beauty--both natural and architectural. And in the 20th century, it was sadly tarred with infamy as the innermost sanctum of the Nazi regime.

The train ride from Vienna to Salzburg was so easy as to be entirely forgettable aside from the verdant alpine scenery. Salzburg is right between Vienna and Munich, so there's no shortage of high-speed commuter trains to choose from.

We were staying in an Airbnb on the outskirts of town, so we took a bus out from the central station. Got to see a glimpse of the city's spectacular Baroque architecture along the way.

Much like our place in Liverpool, our place in Salzburg was a minimally furnished room in a house we'd be sharing with other guests. One improvement was that this room had a proper bunk bed. I offered to take the top bunk, but after a nervous night with me tossing and turning above her--and the fact that one of the top bunk's four support posts came out of joint during the night--Jessica kindly requested that we swap places for the next two nights.

I had to hunt downstairs for the for the wifi router, which was unplugged. Other than that, though, the home was charming if austere. We spent a fair few hours during our stay here at the windowed dining nook, jotting out plans under the gaze of epic mountains.

We had originally planned to spend the afternoon wandering around Salzburg, but neither of us was much condition to follow through. Jessica hadn’t really slept at all the previous night, and I had only done a little better. In the end, it was all we could do to have me walk down the block for food at a local grocery store.

At least the backdrop was spectacular.

Berchtesgaden is a beautiful alpine resort town just across the border into Germany. It is home to some of the rich salt mines that made Salzburg so wealthy, and in the 19th century it became a popular throughout Europe as a destination for tourists and artists.

If an American knows about Berchtesgaden, however, it is probably in relation to Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler adored Berchtesgaden and the surrounding countryside. He finished writing Mein Kampf at a cabin he rented in the area, and later he bought a home in the nearby mountainside of Obersalzberg, which was later colonized by top-ranking Nazi officials wanting to be as close to Hitler as possible. Hitler spent most of his time in office during the 1930s ruling from his home in Obersalzberg.

And the most famous building in the Nazi complex in Obersalzberg is the one Hitler spent the least time at--the Eagle's Nest.

There are plenty of other sights around Berchtesgaden that don’t have to do with that dark chapter in its history. There are the salt mines, the famously beautiful Königssee lake, and innumerable hiking opportunities. But seeing even one of those as well as the Nazi sites would have require a very long day with a very early start. So instead, we slept in and contented ourselves with exploring the town itself.

We had booked spaces on the Rick Steves-recommended Eagle’s Nest Tours, which runs daily four-hour tours from Berchtesgaden starting at 1:00 pm. After a quick breakfast at the station, we caught the #840 bus from Salzburg to Berchtesgaden. We were supposed to arrive at 11:00, giving us an hour for lunch and an hour for wandering the town.

But due to traffic, we didn’t get into town until nearly 11:30. Rather than rush ourselves and risk stressing ourselves out, we decided to just have a nice slow lunch instead. We tried Bacchus wine for the first time, and it was delicious. It is a hybrid grape varietal that was invented by crossing a Sylvaner-Riesling hybrid with a Muller-Thurgau--itself a cross of Riesling and another varietal called Madeleine Royale. It was delicious, combining the richness of Chardonnay with the refreshing fruitiness of a Pinot Grigio.

(Jessica noted the irony of enjoying a hybrid wine in countryside where much of Hitler’s plans for racial purity were conceived and written down.)

Jessica was feeling a bit under the weather, so she only ordered a sausage and a roll. I was hungrier, so I ordered some roasted chicken with French fries. Somehow, though, it took far longer for her sausage to come out than my chicken. Our waiter seemed far more distraught at the delay than we did; he brought us an extra pot of wine on the house as an apology.

The delay did cost us the time we had wanted to spend exploring the town, but it's hard to complain whilst sipping delicious wine in a sunny garden surrounded by paradisaical Alps.

The tour was everything we had hoped for, but we wished it could have gone on even longer. Four hours is really all you can afford to spend on a tour and still have time to catch the last afternoon bus back to Salzburg. We could have easily spent twice as much time there.

After a quick but interesting tour around Obersalzberg--seeing the ruins of former Nazi mansions, as well as local institutions like the Hotel Zum Turken--we stopped at the Nazi Documentation Center. The center provides a brief but chilling account of Hitler’s reign, from its promising start to its horrific reality.

Even with everything we’ve learned about Hitler and the Nazi policies, we still found more things to learn. For example, we knew that people with birth defects would be sterilized or executed. But what we didn’t know was that their entire families could also be sterilized to prevent the risk of them spreading the same inferior genes.

If such a policy had existed in the States, neither Jessica nor I might have ever been born. One of Jessica's uncles on her dad's side was born with a chromosomal disorder, and his whole family would have certainly been sterilized. And Jessica's mom was born with hip dysplasia. Not nearly as serious, but still a defect--one that could have resulted in my grandparents being sterilized and my dad never being born at all.

Also, when the Nazis invaded Eastern Europe, they fully intended from the beginning to exterminate or drive out the existing Slavic population and replace them with Aryan settlements. The mass starvation that gripped the region almost immediately after occupation began wasn’t the result of logistical failures by the German army. Hitler intentionally sent the army in with insufficient food so that they would have no choice but to take the Slavic population’s food and starve them out.

Also, Hitler presented himself as a Bavarian because he wanted to hide his Austrian heritage and most Germans couldn’t tell the difference between a Bavarian accent and an Austrian accent.

Also, the Nazi government awarded women with medals according to how many pure Aryan children they could give birth to.

There were also plenty of examples of anti-Semitic propaganda and a wall of infamy highlighting the life and crimes of all the top-ranking Nazi officials. High among them was Reinhard Heydrich, whom we'd learned about in Prague.

The exhibits are all in German, but there are English pamphlets in each section that cover the highlights, and a massive construction project is underway to expand the center and provide more multilingual exhibits. For some reason, when the German government opened the center in the early 2000s, they didn’t expect it to be of any interest to foreign tourists.

Unfortunately, because of the construction, we weren’t able to enter the underground bunkers that honeycomb the hillsides around Obersalzberg. Still, our guide gave us an interesting overview of the bunker system, how it was developed, and how it was actually used.

The system was never completed, and new areas of it have been discovered as recently as the 2000s. It appears that Hitler had intended for the bunker system to be integrated into a larger system connecting his Obersalzberg compound to Berchtesgaden and even Salzburg, 12 miles away.

Himmler envisioned the bunkers as a last resort in the event that the Allies captured Berlin. Nazi troops could hide in the bunkers indefinitely, carrying on a guerilla war from their mountain redoubt. Hitler didn't like the thought of that, however, and the bunkers were only made to house Hitler and the other Nazi leaders who actually lived in Obersalzberg.

The system is huge and complex, and it was built in less than two years. The Nazis refused to consider the possibility of the compound being bombed until 1943 when nearby Munich was in flames.

Despite their fast construction, the bunkers were apparently well made. When Obersalzberg eventually did get bombed, not a single person who made it into the bunkers was killed. Hitler was even considering plans to retrofit the bunkers to withstand a nuclear bomb–something that at that point hadn't even been invented yet.

Our guide carried a binder of pictures showing what the area looked like during and after the war. She also pointed out a side entrance to the bunker system that's still visible--though not accessible to tourists.

Even halfway up the mountainside, the view was already spectacular.

Looking up, the Eagle's Nest was a tiny shadow up on the peak still high above us.

The only way up to the Eagle's Nest is a road too narrow, steep, and winding for ordinary buses and drivers to traverse. The only way to visit is by taking a special bus driven by specially trained local drivers. The buses run on an extremely precise schedule so that they always cross paths at specific points where the road is wide enough for them to pass each other. You have to buy timed tickets for both journeys before you go up, and if you miss your bus down, you have to wait until the next bus that happens to have an extra seat. And the Eagle's Nest is extremely popular, so you could be waiting a very long time.

On the only-slightly-scary ride up, we were treated to yet more fantastic views of the area, including the nearby Königssee lake and the craggy white mountainside.

And even once you reach the top of the road, you're not done. The last bit is so steep that there are only two options--a long, steep hike or a quick ride in a bronze elevator buried deep inside the mountain. We chose the elevator ride.

I think it's fairly common knowledge--at least among WWII aficionados--that the Eagle’s Nest was mostly just a display piece that Hitler rarely visited and never used his office at. It is even rumored that the Allies intentionally missed it during the bombing of Obersalzberg because they knew it wasn’t strategically important and wanted to be able to take it as a prize.

A common story is that Hitler didn’t like the Eagle’s Nest because he was scared of heights. But our guide dispelled this as a myth. Hitler apparently loved the Eagle’s Nest and visited it over a dozen times in the year following its completion. But it was time-consuming to get to the Eagle's Nest from Obersalzberg, and once the German forces invaded Poland later that year Hitler spent most of his time up in Berlin directing the war effort.

And for that handful of visits, an exorbitant price was paid in both money and blood. Filled with the most luxurious materials and modern conveniences, the house itself cost well over 100 million dollars in today’s money. And that doesn’t cover what it took to build the road.

The road took the better part of a year to build, with two 12-hour shifts working around the clock and through the winter. Several people died during the construction, and countless more suffered crippling injuries. Despite being very well paid, most workers only lasted a few weeks before resigning. And for the  Czechoslovakian laborers conscripted to do the grunt work, that usually meant reassignment to a concentration camp.

Today, the Eagle’s Nest is a fancy restaurant with hardly a mention of its original purpose. Our guide took us into a side room, where she showed us pictures of what the place looked like with its original furnishings.

It isn’t a large building–just a few sitting rooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, and a basement. It doesn’t have any bedrooms and wasn’t meant for living in. Before getting the nickname “Eagle’s Nest” by a visiting ambassador, it was simply referred to as Hitler’s tea house on the mountain.

Outside, we got to walk up onto the summit of the mountain, with spectacular views for miles and miles in every direction. Clouds were starting to come in from the south, creating a very dramatic atmosphere over Königssee.

Because of the crowds and rushed schedule, however, we only had about fifteen minutes to enjoy the summit before having to head back down to the bus for our ride down. On the way, we enjoyed a chat with a young Canadian woman doing her own two-month European journey.

As we left the elevator access tunnel to catch the bus down, we made sure to look for some carvings on the inner doors that our guide had told us about. They were made by 101st Airborne troopers who were occupying the Eagle’s Nest. They had hiked up to the summit and took the building from the top. When they then took the elevator down, they found the doors snowed shut. So they left their mark and headed back up.

Back in Berchtesgaden, we had just enough time to rush up the hill, walk around the old market square for photo ops, then rush back down to catch the last bus of the day back to Salzburg.

We’re glad we did this day trip, but if we visit here again, we’ll definitely try to stay in the town of Berchtesgaden itself. Unless you have a car and can stay as late as you want, there just isn’t enough time to get to the town, see the sights properly, and head back.

Plus, Berchtesgaden is absolutely stunning in its own right. It is an absolute abomination that the Nazis stained it with their touch, and I’m glad that people still flock here for the nature and not just the history. Hopefully, that part of the story will eventually become just an interesting piece of trivia that visitors learn from a plaque when they come here for a hiking trip.

On our last day in Salzburg, we finally visited Salzburg itself.

To be honest, I didn’t have the highest expectations for Salzburg. For American tourists, at least, it seems like it mainly draws two types of people: Mozart fans and Sound of Music fans. And while I don't have anything against them, I'm not especially passionate about them either. And after the imperial majesty of Vienna and the scenic grandeur of Berchtesgaden, I was preparing myself for Salzburg to be a mediocre hybrid of the two.

Perhaps I was just hoping I wouldn't like it so that I wouldn’t feel bad about only getting a single day to see it.

In any case, Salzburg was absolutely charming. A bit like Prague, Salzburg’s Old Town largely escaped damage during World War II, so it retains an authentic medieval feel. But whereas Prague was charmingly chaotic, Salzburg is elegantly organized.

There are winding, shop-lined streets like we’ve seen in any other medieval old town or Gothic quarter. But much of the old town is occupied by a dense network of courtyards between church and government buildings. Which were closely linked throughout much of Salzburg’s history.

From the Middle Ages up until the fall of the Holy Roman Empire to Napoleon, Salzburg was one of several German city-states run directly by Catholic archbishops. Whereas other monarchs of the time often had to balance their political strength against that of the church, these “prince-archbishops” had sweeping authority over the affairs of church and state alike.

We saw the Salzburg Cathedral, which was stunning. The outside is surprisingly plain apart from the western facade, but the inside is magnificently ornamented with beautiful paintings and intricate plaster decorations. At first, we thought that we were seeing painted decorations that only looked three-dimensional–like what we’ve seen in a lot of places across Europe. But no, this was all actual sculpted plaster.

The cathedral’s windows were intentionally designed to keep the nave dark but the main altar brilliantly lit up from large clear windows in the central dome. The effect is extremely impressive.

We also saw this very old baptismal font, which may be the very one that was used for Mozart’s baptism.

In a square on the west side of the cathedral, there is a statue of Mary that if you look at it from the right angle appears to be getting crowned by angels on the cathedral's façade.

From the south cathedral square, there is a fantastic view of the hulking Hohensalzburg Fortress. The foundations are almost a thousand years old, and it is one of the largest medieval castles in all of Europe.

We continued on through the church complex, seeing St. Peter’s Abbey and its cemetery. All of the graves were impressively well maintained, but we soon learned why. In Austria, graves aren’t sold, only rented in ten-year increments. At the end of each period, if no one can be found to pay for the next ten years, the grave is dug up so that it can be used for someone else whose kin can pay. The gravestones of the unfortunately ousted dead are then mounted on the wall of the abbey.

I'm not entirely sure if it was meant as a way to continue showing respect for the dead or more akin to a display of bad checks in a convenience store window.

Lining the cemetery are private gated mausoleums for the most wealthy and respected families.

The church of St. Peter’s Abbey is suitably impressive, with a grand Rococo design. There are some places on the walls and arches where the whitewashing has been removed to expose the colorful frescoes underneath.

Also in the abbey complex, next door to the church, is a fancy restaurant that claims to have served Charlemagne in 803 AD. That would make it the oldest still-operational restaurant in all of Europe, if not the world.

Leaving the abbey complex, we entered the street markets. We picked up some delicious spicy sausages in toasted kaiser rolls. For desert, Jessica got an apricot pastry from one street vendor, and I got a giant pretzel from another.

We saw one of the main medieval shopping roads, the Getreidegasse, which is still adorned with traditional-looking iron symbols over the doors--though most are clearly not medieval.

Getreidegasse is also home to Mozart's birthplace, around which buskers and tourists alike swarmed like flies. We took a few quick pictures and moved along.

And after a quick coffee break, we decided to finish our day with a hike up to the top of the steep hill that divides the city in half. It was a steep climb up stairs and pathways, but the view was worth it.

Even from here, though, the fortress was quite a ways up and a long walking tour once we'd gotten there. Not wanting to exhaust ourselves before a travel day–and knowing that we definitely wanted to return someday–we decided to save the fortress for our next visit and head home for a relaxing evening and plenty of time to pack up for the next day’s trip to Munich.

Next Post: Munich

Last Post: Vienna (The Habsburg Hustle)

[ericfruits]

China frees the widow of a Nobel peace-prize winner

LIU XIA, the widow of China’s most renowned dissident of the 21st century, Liu Xiaobo, had been facing the grim prospect of commemorating the death a year ago of her husband while herself still having to endure house arrest in Beijing. But on the morning of July 10th, three days before the anniversary, the authorities allowed Ms Liu to board a Finnair flight to Helsinki for a connection to Berlin, where she has friends (she is pictured during her stopover in Finland). Germany had taken the lead among the many Western countries that had been pressing for her release. China’s prime minister, Li Keqiang, happened to be visiting Germany when news broke of Ms Liu’s long-awaited freedom.

Her confinement began in 2010, days after her husband, then a year into an 11-year sentence for subversion, won the Nobel peace prize. Though never formally charged with any crime herself, she was usually prevented by security agents from leaving their apartment in Beijing, except under escort to buy groceries. She was allowed only limited access to telephone and internet services. Journalists who tried to visit were turned away.

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Officials said Ms Liu, 57, had gone abroad to seek medical treatment. This is often the reason given for allowing people in political disfavour to leave the country. Sometimes it is merely a face-saving excuse for freeing someone whose release could help China’s diplomatic efforts (in this case a likely aim was to butter up Germany as a potential ally in China’s battle with America over trade). “Thank you, Germans. Sorry for having delighted in your [World Cup] football loss,” wrote a blogger in Beijing to her nearly 50,000 followers on Weibo, a Chinese social-media platform. Censors deleted the message.

But Hu Jia, a prominent dissident in Beijing, says Ms Liu’s medical needs are real. He says she has been suffering badly from stress and depression. In May a Berlin-based friend of Ms Liu released a recording of his phone call with her in which she sobbed and spoke of wanting to die. She was, the friend wrote then, approaching “the brink of mental collapse”.

It is remarkable that the authorities devoted so much effort for so long to silencing Ms Liu. She was not an activist herself, preferring other passions: art, photography and poetry. It was her husband who had angered the government with his long history of criticising the Communist Party’s rule. He was first jailed after being labelled a “black hand” behind the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His most recent incarceration was for organising the distribution of Charter 08, a manifesto that called on the party to respect human rights and allow truly democratic elections. His death was the first in custody of a Nobel peace-prize winner since that of an anti-Nazi dissident in 1938.

Ms Liu’s release may remove an irritant in China’s relationship with Germany, but it will do nothing to convince it or other Western countries that China is easing up in its treatment of dissidents. A day after Ms Liu was freed, a court in the central city of Wuhan sentenced another dissident, Qin Yongmin, to 13 years in prison for subversion. It was one of the toughest punishments imposed for this offence in recent years. Mr Qin stayed silent throughout his trial, knowing what he faced. He has already spent 22 years behind bars for demanding democracy.

The anniversary this week of the “709” crackdown of 2015, named after the date when hundreds of civil-rights lawyers and other activists were rounded up, was a reminder of how tough life remains not only for political dissidents, but even for those who try to use China’s laws to defend people against abuses of power. Many of those detained remain in custody. Even members of their families are sometimes harassed by officials.

Such suffering, merely for kinship with someone disliked by the government, is unlikely to be over for Liu Xia’s family. She has left two brothers in Beijing. The younger one, Liu Hui, has been repeatedly jailed on fraud charges in recent years. Activists believe the real reason for his punishment is simply his ties with her. Hu Jia says the brother will be used as a hostage to ensure that Ms Liu minds her tongue in exile.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "Freedom for one"

https://ift.tt/2NGN00h

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Good news for the housing market, at least for now (Bloomberg) Armed with the lowest mortgage rates in history, Americans are feeding a suburban buying frenzy, one driven by urban exiles hunting for space to quarantine in comfort, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. The effort however is being helped by policymakers who have temporarily frozen foreclosures, cut borrowing costs and flooded the economy with bailout cash.

US faces opposition to demand to ‘snap back’ Iran sanctions (AP) The Trump administration ran into immediate opposition after its top diplomat officially informed the United Nations it is demanding the restoration of all U.N. sanctions on Iran, with allies and opponents declaring the U.S. action illegal and doomed to failure. Russia and China, along with European allies Britain, France and Germany, who often disagree, are united in declaring the U.S. action “illegal” on grounds that you can’t withdraw from a deal and then use the resolution that endorsed it to re-impose sanctions. How this dispute plays out in the weeks ahead remains to be seen, but Thursday’s U.S. move set the stage for a showdown in the United Nations that could lead to a crisis of credibility for the Security Council, its most important and powerful body. As soon as Pompeo delivered the letter invoking “snap back,” Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyansky, tweeted: “Looks like there are 2 planets. A fictional dog-eat-dog one where US pretends it can do whatever it wants without ‘cajoling’ anyone, breach and leave deals but still benefit from them, and another one where the rest of the world lives and where intl law and diplomacy reign.”

Poor Planning Left California Short of Electricity in a Heat Wave (NYT) Everybody had known for days that a heat wave was about to wallop California. Yet a dashboard maintained by the organization that manages the state’s electric grid showed that scores of power plants were down or producing below peak strength, a stunning failure of planning, poor record keeping and sheer bad luck. All told, power plants with the ability to produce almost 6,000 megawatts, or about 15 percent of the electricity on California’s grid, were reported as being offline when temperatures surged last Friday. The shortfall, which experts believe officials should have been able to avoid, forced managers of the grid to order rolling blackouts in the middle of a pandemic and as wildfires across the state were spreading.

Pandemic pushes expansion of ‘hospital-at-home’ treatment (AP) As hospitals care for people with COVID-19 and try to keep others from catching the virus, more patients are opting to be treated where they feel safest: at home. Across the U.S., “hospital at home” programs are taking off amid the pandemic, thanks to communications technology, portable medical equipment and teams of doctors, nurses, X-ray techs and paramedics. That’s reducing strains on medical centers and easing patients’ fears. The programs represent a small slice of the roughly 35 million U.S. hospitalizations each year, but they are growing fast with boosts from Medicare and private health insurers. Like telemedicine, the concept stands to become more popular with consumers hooked on home delivery and other Internet-connected conveniences. Eligible patients typically are acutely ill with—but don’t need round-the-clock intensive care for—common conditions including chronic heart failure, respiratory ailments, diabetes complications, infections and even COVID-19.

Western religious decline (Foreign Affairs) Since 2007, there has been a remarkably sharp trend away from religion. In virtually every high-income country, religion has continued to decline. The most dramatic shift away from religion has taken place among the American public. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. Near the end of the initial period studied, Americans’ mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishingly sharp decline.

Renewing Your Passport (Lifehacker) Given the lingering coronavirus threat and the ongoing travel restrictions, it may be a while before your next international getaway. But that doesn’t mean you should wait to apply for or renew your passport, because there may be a long line ahead of you. As USA Today reports, the State Department cut back on passport operations from mid-March through early June as part of the efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19. As a result, the application backlog ballooned to 1.8 million by the time workers returned in June. The State Department isn’t at full capacity—and those applying for non-emergency passports will still experience a delay. “All applicants should continue to expect processing delays of several months as we work to get through a high volume of applications,” the agency said in a tweet on August 10. Even if your passport doesn’t expire for several months, you should begin the renewal process now. It may save you from the stress of waiting for your passport to come through after you have already booked a trip—and you may avoid paying extra for expedited service later.

Mexico’s Political Elite Engulfed by Scandal as Document Leaked (Bloomberg) Three Mexican presidents and over a dozen former ministers and legislators were accused of bribery, according to a document attributed to a key witness, in another chapter of a growing corruption scandal that is shaking the country’s political elite. Former presidents Enrique Pena Nieto, Felipe Calderon and Carlos Salinas de Gortari are among 17 Mexican politicians and a journalist named by Emilio Lozoya, the disgraced ex-head of state oil giant Petroleos Mexicanos, in his purported testimony to Mexican prosecutors, according to a leaked copy of his deposition seen by several media organizations. While the Attorney General’s office wouldn’t confirm the authenticity of the document, stamped Aug. 11, it opened an investigation into how it was leaked to reporters.

Greenland ice melting (AP) The numbers are in, and in summer 2019 Greenland lost 586 billion tons of ice to melting, the highest on record, or approximately 140 trillion gallons of water. That’s up from the yearly average of 259 billion tons since 2003, and north of the previous record of 511 billion tons in 2012. This would cover the state of California in four feet of water.

Shipwreck in the Mediterranean (Foreign Policy) At least 45 migrants died in an Aug. 17 shipwreck off the coast of Libya, the deadliest such incident this year. The boat’s engine exploded off the coast of the city of Zuwarah. More than 300 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya this year, according to the United Nations, but the real figure could be much higher. Local fishermen rescued 37 people from the wreckage, who were detained by Libyan authorities. On Wednesday, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees and the International Organization for Migration called for international search and rescue efforts to be stepped up. The European Union has shied away from launching its own rescue operation.

Boris Johnson is splitting the check with millions of Britons who dare to dine out (Washington Post) They say there’s no free lunch. But in Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is willing to split the check—for the entire country. In an audacious (panicky?) scheme designed to save the country’s flagging hospitality industry and tempt people fearful of the coronavirus out of their home-bunkers, the British government is offering half-off on fish and chips—and everything else on the menu, sticky toffee pudding included. The “Eat Out to Help Out” campaign, as it is officially known, has been wildly popular. In its first two weeks, the government has subsidized more than 35 million meals at 85,000 participating eateries. As the Treasury Ministry put it, that’s “the equivalent to over half of the United Kingdom taking part and supporting local jobs.” One in 10 of the country’s restaurants have signed on. So, if not the New Deal, it’s a Happy Meal. Instead of a make-work program, it’s a make-dinner program.

Navalny flown to Germany after suspected poisoning (NYT) A prominent Russian opposition figure was flown to Germany for treatment of suspected poisoning on Saturday, his spokeswoman said, after a day of delays. The opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, who had been in a coma since Thursday, was flown from the Siberian city of Omsk to Berlin on a Challenger 604 air ambulance arranged by the foundation of a movie producer based in the German capital. The evacuation came after a team of German doctors, who had arrived in Omsk on the air ambulance, stated unequivocally on Friday that it was safe for him to travel. After Mr. Navalny’s arrival at the hospital in Omsk, his family and associates were bitterly critical of the authorities, who refused to release detailed information on his condition, denied he had been poisoned and contended that he was too unstable medically for travel.

‘Telegram revolution’: App helps drive Belarus protests (AP) Every day, like clockwork, to-do lists for those protesting against Belarus’ authoritarian leader appear in the popular Telegram messaging app. They lay out goals, give times and locations of rallies with business-like precision, and offer spirited encouragement. The app has become an indispensable tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have rocked Belarus since Aug. 9, when election officials announced President Alexander Lukashenko had won a landslide victory to extend his 26-year rule in a vote widely seen as rigged. Peaceful protesters who poured into the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities were met with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings from police. The opposition candidate left for Lithuania—under duress, her campaign said—and authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader. That’s where Telegram—which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements—came in. Some of its channels helped scattered rallies to mature into well-coordinated action.

Thailand Police Arrest Activists, Escalating Protest Crackdown (NYT) Dechathorn Bamrungmuang, a member of the Thai collective Rap Against Dictatorship, was arrested on Thursday on charges of sedition, human rights lawyers said, part of a mounting crackdown by a government seemingly allergic to dissent. A day earlier, the authorities took into custody for the second time a lawyer who had publicly called for the Thai monarchy’s powers to be reined in. At least six pro-democracy activists were also arrested on Wednesday and Thursday on charges of sedition, a crime that can carry a seven-year prison sentence, the organization Thai Lawyers for Human Rights said. Another rapper was taken in, too. Yet more student activists were served with papers that appeared to indicate they could be imminently detained. The legal actions followed weeks of protests by students that culminated on Sunday in the largest street rally in Thailand since a military coup six years ago.

Doctors strike in Nairobi over pay, lack of COVID protection (Reuters) Doctors in most public hospitals in Kenya’s capital went on strike on Friday to protest against delayed salaries and a lack of protective equipment when handling patients who may have COVID-19. The strike began at midnight on Friday, said Thuranira Kaugiria, secretary general for the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union. He said 320 doctors employed by the Nairobi County government were taking part in the strike because they had inadequate health insurance, poor quality protective gear and too few isolation wards to treat COVID-19 patients.