A team of economists offers America a new way to look at economic growth. It’s a sort of GDP prototype that tracks the well-being of different income groups.
North Macedonia and Albania are a step closer to membership after Skopje resolved its disputes with Bulgaria
The European Union has initiated accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Tuesday.
Speaking at a press conference in Brussels, von der Leyen hailed Skopje and Tirana for their progress on the path to joining the bloc, including strengthening the rule of law, fighting corruption, and implementing a range of reforms.
She said the governments of the two Balkan nations have been making headway to become EU members because those steps are “good for your countries and are already delivering a better quality of life for your people.”
“This historic moment is your success. The result of your hard work,” she reiterated.
“We have taken another important step towards bringing the Western Balkans closer to the EU. It’s a great success of our presidency,” Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala tweeted on Monday.
North Macedonia (then Macedonia) was granted candidate status back in 2005, but it took Skopje years to resolve some of its disputes with neighboring countries, including Bulgaria, which had blocked the nation’s accession to the EU over linguistic and historical issues.
This opposition also hindered Albania’s progress, given that the EU treats the issue as a part of a single package. Notably, the two nations go together in the EU’s 2021 enlargement package, a comprehensive strategy that sets priorities in removing obstacles for EU membership for the Western Balkans.
On Sunday, however, Bulgaria and North Macedonia managed to strike a deal allowing Skopje and Tirana to formally initiate accession negotiations with the EU. North Macedonia, in particular, agreed to amend the nation’s constitution to acknowledge its Bulgarian minority, protect minority rights, and fight hate speech.
Before that, however, the French-led “compromise solution” on the matter sparked fierce protests in North Macedonia, which saw crowds of nationalists rallying outside the parliament and clashing with the police.
It may take years before the two Balkan countries actually become fully fledged EU members, with no deadline set for the process. To join the union, the candidates must undergo a screening process of national legislation in order to align it with EU law.
BROMLEY, UK, Jul 19 (IPS) – Sri Lanka is officially bankrupt and a failed state in all but name. How did a country of 22 million people with a level of literacy on par with most of the developed world end up in such a dire position where the state coffers did not have the measly sum of 20 million dollars to purchase fuel to keep the country functioning beyond the next working day?
NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with author Ingrid Rojas Contreras about her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, and how writing it helped her rediscover herself after losing her memory.
Only one in six trust newspapers and TV fares even worse, a new Gallup survey shows
One out of six Americans trust the newspapers and just one out of ten trust television, according to a recent Gallup survey. These are the lowest numbers since 1973 and 1993, respectively, with a drastic drop over the past year. There is also a widening gap in media trust between Democrats and the rest of the country.
Only 16% of respondents said that they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, while 43% said they had “very little” trust in the press. This marks the first time that this number went below 20% since 1973, when Gallup began tracking data.
Things looked even worse for television, with only 11% – the lowest percentage on record since 1993 – having a great deal of confidence in TV news, compared to the 49% with “very little” trust.
Overall trust in both newspapers and TV news has dropped significantly since 2021, by five percentage points in both cases. While the trend has been uniform across all political persuasions, the poll revealed considerable gaps.
Despite a three-point loss, 35% of Democrats still trusted the newspapers, compared to just 5% of Republicans and 12% of independents. Democrats’ trust in TV news dropped by six percentage points to 20%, while the independents slid five points to just 8%. Meanwhile, Republicans actually began trusting TV news slightly more than in 2021, going from 6% to 8%.
The overall decline of trust in the media was part of a trend with most major American institutions, Gallup found.
“Americans are less confident in major US institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any,” Gallup said, commenting on the result of the survey. It involved 1,015 participants, polled between June 1-20.
Trust in the US Supreme Court slid by 11 points overall, going from 31% to 13% among the Democrats and from 40% to 25% among the independents in the aftermath of controversial rulings on abortion and gun rights, while gaining a mere 3% among the Republicans.
Confidence in the military was down by 10 points among Republicans and up by four points among the Democrats. Americans of all political stripes lost trust in the police, with a pronounced 11-point loss among Republicans.
Losing faith in the White House under President Joe Biden, however, seemed to unify the country. While Republican trust in the presidency was down ten points to just 2%, it collapsed among the independents (from 31% to just 18%) and was in free fall among Biden’s fellow Democrats, going from 69% in 2021 to just 51% today.
