On Sunday, more than 100,000 Poles took to the streets of Warsaw as well as in cities and towns in Poland in support of its membership of the European Union (EU). A recent controversial ruling by the country’s court could jeopardize Poland’s EU membership. The court ruled that important EU laws were “incompatible” with the constitution of the nation. There were protests in approximately 100 towns and cities.

On Thursday, the court declared that EU law did not have primacy over the Polish constitution. This has been the biggest challenge to the supremacy of EU law by a member of the bloc. It created fear among the people of the nation in what has been termed as “Polexit” after the famous or infamous (depending on how you look at it) Brexit.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said that the court’s decision was correct. However, he also said that his ruling party had not planned to leave the EU. In a Facebook post he wrote that it was a “harmful myth” that was used by the opposition.

On Monday, Thierry Breton, who is the industry chief of the European Commission, said that he did not believe that Poland would leave the EU after the court’s ruling. He said the Commission would analyze the ruling before taking action.

There has been tension between Poland and the EU after the Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) Party came into office in 2015. Brussels and Warsaw have tussled over issues including LGBT rights, judicial independence and more.

One of the four people detained in the Sunday protests was Franek Broda, who is the Prime Minister’s nephew. He said that he was kicked on the head by an officer when he was detained while he was on the ground.

Sylwester Marczak, a spokesman for Warsaw police, confirmed that Broda has been temporarily detained and handcuffs were used. However, he did not speak of the allegations of police brutality. The eighteen-year nephew of the current prime minister has been a government critic as well as an activist for LGBT rights in Poland.

Source BBC News, Al Jazeera

On Sunday, a top trending topic was ‘Civil War.’ In case you wondered why an incident that took place centuries ago went viral, it was a result of remarks of an attendee of Trump’s rally in Iowa on Saturday. The attendee told a news outlet that her belief was that the nation was headed towards a “civil war.”

On Saturday, Donald Trump was at the Fairground in Des Moines at a rally, with supporters. A supporter told spoke to MSNBC and remarked on air that she believed that the U.S. was heading towards a civil war.

She criticized both the Democrats and the Republicans. The ardent Trump supporter said his loyalists including Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and a few more whose names she didn’t mention were “worth their salt” and the rest were “as weak as” they could possibly be “in Congress.”

As expected there were quite a few hilarious memes depicting Trump supporters and his supposed army. There were more than 76,000 tweets by Sunday afternoon. Many posts openly made fun of his supporters. They also poked fun as they compared them to “soldiers.”

There were other opinions on her comments as many people replied to her sentiments with some people seriously commenting on it. These tweets focused on the national divide in the nation which seems to be increasing from 2016 onwards.

Media persons posted their opinions. One spoke of the possibility of violence by some supporters which was not been taken seriously. It should be remembered that the Make America Great Again (MAGA) protesters had stormed the Capitol on January 6, just over nine months ago and took the nation by surprise while another said if there was a Civil War the Blue States would not fight this time around if the Red states wanted to leave and would give them a “check out time.

The Brookings Institute reported in September that a civil war is unlikely. However, many Americans think that such a conflict could take place in future. About 46 percent said that an actual war was possible and 43 percent said that it was unlikely.

Image Credit Alicia Smith Twitter

   

On Saturday afternoon, during an interview on CNN, Jim Acosta used an expletive as he questioned Andrew Yang for appearing on Tucker Carlson Today. The CNN host did not spare the entrepreneur who is also a politician. Andrew Yang is on a makeover as he projects himself as the right person to head a third party that would not only be new but would also be inclusive. However, his recent appearance Carlson’s show had a profound effect on Acosta.

According to a report by the Daily Beast, Acosta told Yang, “Tucker Carlson…I mean, let’s just say he’s a bad person.” Acosta added that Tucker represented all that was wrong in television news and that he “spouted white nationalist talking points.” and asked why Yang appeared on his show.

Earlier, Yang had discussed leaving the Democratic party to take a new path forward during his appearance on the daytime show hosted by Tucker Carlson. Carlson responded by speaking highly of the Unabomber and said that although he was a “bad person,” he had a “smart analysis” according to Carlson, “of the way systems work.”

Carlson added that the Unabomber’s argument was that large organizations became self-preservation projects after a period of time. Carlson also said that a big system in the end protected itself and “that’s kind of all it does.”

This response by Carlson made Acosta ask Yang another question on why he “didn’t go after” Carlson when he was “citing the Unabomber and just talking about crazy stuff?”

Andrew Yang replied to Acosta and said that he was working to bring down the temperature of the country and to meet folks “where they are.” Yang added that Tucker had a huge audience. Yang said that if a person wanted to attempt to “build a unifying popular movement” that made it a point to show that the present system was not working for anyone, then a person had to “reach out.”

He explained that he was “doing” that on the show as he wanted to have Republicans who were discontent to channel this emotion in a “positive way.” Yang said that his view was that things were not going in a positive direction and he would “like to help change that.”

Source The Daily Beast

On Sunday, President Tsai Ing-wen said that Taiwan would not bow to pressure from China. Her strong speech, during the National Day celebrations has followed recent remarks by Chinese President Xi Jinping who had promised to “fulfill reunification.” While Taiwan considers itself to be a sovereign state, Beijing calls it a breakaway province of China.

Ms. Tsai won the elections, once again, last year by a landslide as she had indicated that Beijing would not pressure the nation when she was in office. On Sunday, she described Taiwan as “standing on democracy’s first line of defense.”

She added that although they would not act in a rash manner, they would increase their defense systems so as to take their own path forward and not a path that was laid out by Beijing, which she described as being neither “free” nor “democratic” for 23 million Taiwanese. She mentioned that the nation favored more pressure from China as its achievements were increasing.

Tsai also touched on a recent difficult incident when Chinese military flights came very close to Taiwan airspace, a while ago. She termed this as more complex and fluid that anything else that had occurred at nay point of time “in the past 72 years.” There was a show of military strength of Taiwan, as military trucks passed the stage, during her speech.

The Taiwanese president has offered to talk to Beijing as equals. However, Chinese leaders dub her as “separatist” and have rejected her offer of talks, to date.

Tsai also spoke of “maintaining status quo” and said that they would do their best to ensure that it remained, despite Beijing’s talks of reunification with mainland China, similar to what took place with Hong Kong.

This year, celebrations were held outside the office of the presidency in Taipei, due to the pandemic. Hundreds gathered for the celebrations but the numbers, of both members of the public as well as foreign guests, were much less than yesteryears due to COVID-19 precautionary measures.