This week, America’s most watched cable news host is broadcasting from an authoritarian state — not to criticize its leadership but to praise it. Fox’s Tucker Carlson is currently in Budapest, airing his show from Hungary’s capital city. In his Monday monologue, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary “if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions.” He tweeted out a friendly photo with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and is confirmed to speak at a government-supported conference in Budapest on Saturday. Make no mistake: Fox’s marquee host is aligning himself with a ruler who has spent the past 11 years systematically dismantling Hungary’s free political system. A 2021 report from V-Dem, the leading academic institute assessing the state of global democracy, found that Hungary crossed the line into autocracy in 2018. In March, Orbán’s Fidesz party was pushed out of the EPP, an alliance of center-right European parties, because its European peers felt it had strayed too far into authoritarian territory. We’re in Budapest all this week for Tucker Carlson Tonight and a documentary for Tucker Carlson Originals. Don’t miss our first show here starting tonight at 8pm ET on #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/avZLoc0fD0— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 2, 2021 Despite the increasingly clear evidence that Hungary has abandoned democracy, many conservative intellectuals in America have come to see the Orbán regime as a model for America. These right-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán’s willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz’s authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it’s necessary to defeat the left — a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on American democracy, using tactics eerily reminiscent of the ones Fidesz successfully deployed against Hungary’s democratic institutions. Carlson’s visit to Budapest, a follow-up to previous pro-Orbán coverage, shows that this authoritarian envy is no longer confined to a fringe. Authoritarianism, Hungarian style To understand why the American right’s admiration for a small Central European state is so concerning, it’s important to understand exactly how democracy in Hungary died. For roughly the first two decades of Hungary’s post-communist history, 1990 to 2010, Hungary was a young but stable democracy. When Orbán was elected prime minister the first time, in 1998, he governed as a relatively conventional European conservative; when Fidesz lost the 2002 elections, a new prime minister from the rival Socialist party took over. But though Orbán stepped aside, he and his followers never really accepted the 2002 defeat as legitimate. When Fidesz returned to power after the country’s 2010 election, winning a two-thirds majority amidst the Great Recession and incumbent corruption scandal

Holiday bookings to France have surged after the government announced on Wednesday that its “amber plus” status has been dropped – meaning vaccinated holidaymakers will no longer have to quarantine on their return, according to operators.A Brittany Ferries spokesperson said phones had been “ringing off the hook” since last night. “There’s been a huge spike in interest and bookings. At last there is some good news and some certainty – it’s a silver lining to the dark clouds that have been hanging over us. We suspect it’s a lot of second homeowners who were waiting to book, as well as last-minute holidaymakers.”The government also announced that no further changes to the traffic-light system would be made for at least three weeks. As well as France moving to the amber list, seven countries – Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Latvia, Romania and Norway – were added to the green list. The new rules come into effect from 4am on Sunday, so anyone arriving from France before then will still need to quarantine for 10 days.A Eurostar spokesperson said: “We welcome the removal of quarantine restrictions for passengers travelling to the UK from France. Overnight we have seen a strong increase in bookings on our London-Paris route and traffic to our website has more than doubled.“We are looking forward to welcoming more passengers on board in the coming days and weeks. We have already added services to our timetable for the last two weekends of this month and are ready to further increase capacity to carry as many passengers as possible between the UK and France.”Eurotunnel Le Shuttle saw a 400% increase in sales immediately after the announcement and said it anticipated a substantial demand for last-minute summer holidays.Ravi Sabharwal, co-founder of villa holiday specialist Oliver’s Travels, said it had seen a 43% rise in bookings on Thursday.“We’ve seen a strong uptick for France, particularly to the Loire and Provence – but it was from a low base, as people were cautious. We have some availability left – which we expect to fill – but there are only three peak weeks left of the summer now. Many people have written off 2021 and are just booking for 2022 instead.” In comparison, bookings for Croatia, which is on the green list, were up 200% year-on-year, he said.Other companies warned that summer availability in France was tight. Gîtes de France said that with many French people choosing to holiday at home this year, 80% of its accommodation for August was already sold out.Sawdays, which saw searches for France double overnight, reported some availability for late-summer self-catering stays, with options including a barn for two in Lerné, in the Loire valley, from €135 a night; and a Provençal house for 10 in Graveson, from €499 a night.For operators offering group tours the situation was more challenging.“The inconsistencies of the traffic-light system have been so difficult to navigate,” said Stephen Brook, co-founder of Ciceroni Travel, which specialises in escorted cultural tours. “A tour to France planned for 21 August has been on hold. It can now go ahead, which it is good news, of co

Given the steep rise in economic inequality in many parts of the world since the 1980s, one might have expected to see increasing political demands for the redistribution of wealth and the return of class-based politics. This didn’t quite happen – or at least not straightforwardly. To make sense of the big picture, we studied the long-term evolution of political divides in 50 western and non-western democracies, using a new database on the vote that covers more than 300 elections held between 1948 and 2020.One of the most striking results that emerges from our analysis is what we propose to call the transition from “class-based party systems” to “multi-elite party systems” in western democracies. In the 1950s and 60s, the vote for leftwing parties in western democracies was “class-based”, in the sense that it was strongly associated with a lower income and less educated electorate. Since then, it has gradually become associated with more highly educated voters, giving rise in the 2010s to a remarkable divergence between the effect that income and education has on how people vote. People with high incomes continue to vote for the right while people with high levels of education (such as those with university degrees) have shifted to the left. This separation is visible in nearly all western democracies, despite their historical, political and institutional differences.What explains this remarkable transformation? First, the classic answer invokes the increasing prevalence of identity politics. As questions related to environmentalism, gender equality, the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities and, more recently, immigration have taken a growing importance in political debates, new green and anti-immigration parties have risen in the polls. While income continues to differentiate social democratic parties from conservative parties, it is education that most clearly distinguishes the supporters of green and anti-immigration parties today.A second mechanism that can potentially explain this long-run evolution has to do with the process of educational expansion itself. In the 1950s and 60s, the majority of voters had primary or secondary education at most. In this context, parties seeking to reduce social inequalities could simply aim to ensure everyone went through primary and secondary school. With the rise of tertiary education, things have become more complicated. Leftwing parties, which were once seen as defending greater equality of access to the education system, have increasingly been viewed as parties defending primarily the winners of the higher education game. This arguably contributed to growing resentment among those who do not benefit from it, and a shift of some of them towards anti-immigration parties or abstention. As a result, the voting bases of social democratic parties have become increasingly restricted to the most educated parts of the electorate.A third related mechanism involves the ascendancy of a global ideology that puts private property interests above all else, abandoning any sense that capitalism can be radically transformed. The moderation of traditional leftwing parties’ platforms since the 1980s

Outside Tunisia, the president’s sacking of the prime minister and shutdown of parliament looked like a coup. Inside, however, activists and journalists are still struggling to define what is happening to their country – and what to do about it.“The day after the president acted, we had a conversation in the newsroom about whether it was a coup,” said Thameur Mekki, the editor-in-chief of the influential media platform Nawaat. Other news outlets aired programmes debating the “coup” question, and activist groups started worrying. But then, said Mekki, the president, Kais Saied, personally called leading civil society groups and “gave assurances about their freedom to operate”.“I don’t know what that is, but it’s not really a coup … People living through a coup don’t get to debate it on television.”For Mekki, the international approach to looking at Tunisia’s crisis has been lazy. The key context to the power grab, he said, was the dire situation in parliament. The president’s intervention was “risky, he said, “but we couldn’t continue with the parliament as it was. For Tunisians, it was a joke, incapable of respecting even its own laws.”Allegations against multiple lawmakers are widespread and longstanding. IWatch, the local anti-corruption watchdog, has published a list of MPs subject to outstanding legal action, or who have had prison sentences deferred because of their parliamentary immunity, which Saied has now withdrawn.On the list was Zouheir Makhlouf, who was photographed by a 19-year-old woman while parked outside a secondary school with his genitals exposed. Makhlouf has denied all subsequent charges, saying he was urinating into a bottle because he has diabetes.Kais Saied waves to bystanders as he strolls along the Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis on 1 August. Photograph: Slim Abid/APSaied, meanwhile, says he acted under the constitution, which allows the head of state to take unspecified exceptional measures in the event of an “imminent threat”. The president acted after violent protests against Tunisia’s biggest party, the moderate Islamist Ennahda movement.Al Bawsala, an independent parliamentary watchdog, has backed what it said was the president’s legal right to assume his extraordinary powers under the constitution, but not to suspend parliament. Other leading civil society groups have given the president their cautious support, saying his actions remained within the law but that he urgently needed to present a route out of the crisis.Still, there have been worrying developments since the president’s move on parliament. A media union, the Syndicat National des Journalistes Tunisiens, (SNJT) reported a marked increase in assaults upon reporters, and protested about a raid on Al Jazeera’s office in Tunis.Human Rights Watch, writing two days after the president’s intervention, said it was dangerous, while Amnesty, which has a significant presence within Tunisia, urged Saied publicly to commit to protecting citizens’ rights.Activists in Tunisia bristle at reports of complicity, or indifference, to a crackdown on rights and freedoms. “We haven’t gone anywhere,” one activis

Sebastian Coe, world track’s leader, has spent the past five years pushing his vision of a level playing field. Critics say he is violating athletes’ human rights.Credit...Tytus Zmijewski/EPA, via ShutterstockPublished July 30, 2021Updated Aug. 5, 2021, 7:09 a.m. ETFor six years, Sebastian Coe, the president of track and field’s world governing body, has been fighting a battle.Coe, a two-time gold medalist in the 1,500 meters and a former member of the British Parliament, has been on a mission to uphold his vision of a level playing field, even if that put him at odds with increasingly vocal advocates for inclusion.For decades, track and field, which moved to center stage at the Tokyo Olympics when it began on Friday, has focused on doping as its primary existential threat. But a broader understanding of identity in recent years has forced track officials to confront more complex and ambiguous questions, like how society should accommodate the disabled, and what determines gender identity.Coe, who became president of track’s governing body, World Athletics, in 2015, said his predecessors ignored the issue for years, and he had no intention of doing the same. He knew his efforts would force him to make enemies of athletes who have garnered widespread empathy, support and admiration, including runners born without fully functioning legs and women with naturally elevated testosterone levels.“Accessibility and fair competition are not always compatible, and when they aren’t, fair competition has to be the overriding principle,” Coe said in an interview earlier this month, two weeks before the start of the Games.The debate, he said, always returned to a singular question: “What do we need to do to maintain the integrity of sport?”ImageCredit...Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCoe’s vision will be on display during the next nine days in Tokyo. The Olympic track and field meet and road racing events have plenty of stars, including Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the Jamaican sprinter, and Eliud Kipchoge, the Kenyan marathoner. But the competition also will be notable for a few athletes who will be absent.Blake Leeper of the United States, a double-amputee athlete who competes in the 400 meters on running blades that World Athletics deemed too long, and Caster Semenya of South Africa, who has won two Olympic gold medals and three world championships at 800 meters, could not qualify under rules they have claimed are unfair.Several other female middle distance runners with naturally elevated testosterone levels also will miss the competition. World Athletics has banned those runners from competing against other women in events between 400 meters and the mile — distances at which researchers say their biology gives them an unfair advantage — unless they suppress their elevated hormone levels medically.Earlier this month, Namibia removed two of the world’s top female 400-meter runners from its Olympic roster at that distance after medical tests revealed they had natural testosterone levels above the allowable threshold. The runners, Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi, both 18, are instead focusing on the 200 m

The second Fredo album in the space of six months begins in portentous style. There’s a reading of an extract from an 1852 speech given by the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass – a speech that contrasted the celebration of “freedom” on 4 July with the lot of the slave – followed by a churchy sounding organ playing a figure that distinctly recalls Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. “I know labels don’t want it to end this way,” offers the rapper on the chorus, “but I had to tell them it’s independence day.”It’s the kind of bullish declaration of freedom an artist might make had they recently quit, or been dropped by, a major label: a new beginning, free from the interference of A&R men and bean-counters suggesting you round your edges and demanding to know where the next hit is. But the advance stream of Independence Day arrives from Sony, bearing the logo of RCA, which has released every preceding Fredo album.So it clearly isn’t about that. Perhaps it’s linked to the events of the last 12 months in Fredo’s career: 2020 represented a sticky creative patch for an artist who had previously scored two Top 5 albums and a string of hit singles, including the chart-topping collaboration with Dave, Funky Friday. The problem was the single Hickory Dickory Dock. It wasn’t entirely clear whether its “rock it, rock it, mosh pit, mosh pit” refrain was Fredo trying to come up with something designed to be meme-able on TikTok, along the lines of Drake’s Toosie Slide, but whatever his intention, it got a very frosty reception both critically – “what is this shit?” demanded one reaction vlog – and commercially. The track disappeared from streaming services, Fredo disowned it – dismissing it, along with hits he’d released in 2020 with Mist and Young T & Bugsey, as “pop shit”. Tellingly, his next single was called Back to Basics.His subsequent album, Money Can’t Buy Happiness, was a well-received hit, but clearly the opprobrium he endured still rankles (“They say I fell off,” he complains on Freestyle, “them man there are hella haters”), as does the suggestion that he leaned into a more commercial sound at the behest of his label, hence, presumably, Independence Day’s opening.The artwork for Fredo’s Independence DayThe rest of the album seems even more stark than its predecessor, a doubling-down on core values. There’s certainly nothing here like the Auto-Tune-heavy vocals of Do You Right, or the Fugees-sampling Ready. The closest it comes to the latter’s soulful chorus are the disembodied vocal samples that float around Skinny N****s, a track on which Fredo pledges to dial down the braggadocio about his wealth a little: “Thought I was slipping away rapping about them glittery chains … I got to go hard”. It largely deals in dark-hued samples – horror-movie chimes on Mind, sombre piano on My Mother’s Life – over trap beats and lurching bass. That isn’t to say the production isn’t creative. If you are keen for your music to get some action on TikTok, Double Tap’s ghostly repurposing of a vocal from Hayloft by Mother Mother – a minor Canadian indie band u

The Chia cryptocurrency craze is fuelling record sales growth in Europe among distributors of hard disk drives (HDD), according to calendar Q2 shipment data from venerable number cruncher Context. Stats for the three months show sales to end users, via distributors and resellers, went up by 141 per cent year-on-year to 454,512 – the biggest quarter in the regional channel ever, said Context. Nearline HDDs – the highest capacity drives – led the pack. Sales of the 18TB model swelled to 84,726, up 125 per cent from the prior quarter. 16TB drives, the second most favoured spec, grew to 51,515 units. Other HDD categories also continue to be highly prized thanks to Chia. "The tremendous Chia-driven demand for storage capacity has turned the European market on its head, with buyers rushing to snap up HDDs," said Gurvan Meyer, business enterprise analyst at Context. "Although it's having a knock-on effect for SSDs and NAS segments, it's headline HDDs that are really driving this spike. As long as there's money to be made in mining Chia coins, we can't see these trends changing much." BitTorrent protocol author Bram Cohen founded the Chia network in 2017, and the currency launched in May 2021. It is considered to be greener than Bitcoin in that it uses relatively less power. US SEC chair calls for crypto regulation NFT or not to NFT: Steve Jobs' first job application auction shows physically unique beats cryptographically unique Private cryptocurrencies make lousy national currencies: International Monetary Fund Reserve Bank of India official suggests country may soon have a digital currency pilot As Reg readers know, Chia differs from traditional crypto-coins in that it relies on proof of space rather than proof of work, as detailed by our sister publication Blocks & Files. "So, rather than using computing power in a race, it's using a lottery system. This is not only greener (in terms of passive power consumption) than proof of work but also more accessible. The barrier to entry is lower as almost anyone in the world might have unused storage space on their computer – perhaps even their phone – that could be used," Context's Meyer said. Storage vendors such as Seagate and Western Digital have been caught out by this trend, Context told us in April. In its Q4 earnings call in June, Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said the market for storage-centric blockchain, including those used for decentralised storage applications with Chia cryptocurrency had "garnered significant interest." "We saw meaningful increase in HDD demand due in part to the initial buildout of the Chia net space which is comprised of both new and repurposed HDDs... This incremental demand served to tighten HDD supply dynamics and [provide] an increase in the robust demand environment." Economies opening up and continued demand from cloud providers expanding their infrastructure played a role in in HDD demand too. "While the future growth outlook in this space remains unclear, we are excited by the potential applications associated with innovations and decentralised file storage," said Mosley. Desktop network attached storage

“Self-care is important,” the psychiatrist and wife of Aby Rosen told me. “But it can also be a slippery slope to narcissism, an excuse to push away friends.”Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York TimesAug. 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETI was feeling unsettled when I visited Samantha Boardman at her office early last month. We were there to do an interview, but I’d been secretly nursing a hope that Dr. Boardman, a psychiatrist with an Upper East Side practice, would help me resolve some nagging issues. Like many friends and colleagues, I was lethargic, less efficient than I would like to be. Was my listlessness part of a common malaise?“Some of us look back on lockdown as a time of squandered opportunities,” she said. “It’s, ‘I could have completed my screenplay, learned Mandarin or taken up bird watching.’ All these things that I call productivity porn, they can go hand in hand with self obsession.”I was taken aback. I’d lately been given to a bit of navel-gazing, soothing myself with an endless succession of herbal cleanses and long baths and limiting phone time in favor of desultory strolls. Privately I wondered, Was there a point?We were chatting in the office on Madison Avenue where she conducts treatment. “Self-care is important,” Dr. Boardman told me. “But it can also be a slippery slope to narcissism, an excuse to push away friends,.” Practicing its tenets is a reflexive response to “that wellness industrial complex that promises, ‘if we download this, buy that, or go to the country on a silent retreat, we can eat, pray, love our way to happiness.’”Not quite the responses I’d been expecting. But then Dr. Boardman defies rote expectations.There is the professional clout. A cum laude graduate of Harvard, she went on to earn a medical degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.Then there is the pedigree. Dr. Boardman’s father is the Wall Street potentate D. Dixon Boardman, her mother Pauline Pitt, a socially prominent decorator and philanthropist in Palm Beach. Her sister Serena is a high-powered real estate adviser at Sotheby’s International,And at 49, Dr. Boardman is mistress of the art-filled homes in Manhattan, Southampton and St. Bart’s that she shares with her husband Aby Rosen, the real estate developer and art collector who seems to live by the credo, “too much is never enough.”Her intermittent presence at fashion shows, openings and galas in the company of society fixtures including Jamee Gregory, Marjorie Gubelmann and her longtime friend, the designer Tory Burch, has earned her the sobriquet Park Avenue Princess. It’s a label she shucks like an itchy old sweater.ImageCredit...Bill Cunningham/The New York Times“I vaguely remember a photograph of a lot of us sitting at a fashion show,” she said. “I thought it was funny.” She was completing her medical residency at the time, “working all night, doing rotations,” she recalled. “I had already gone through anatomy and biochemistry by then. I was delivering babies.”Hardly the schedule of a social gadabout. “Sam enjoys the lighter aspects of her life