One of the purposes of Political News Items is to bring to your attention important and/or interesting “political” stories you might otherwise miss. Here are eight such stories:
1. Brain Power Begets Political Power:
Chinese cities are rapidly growing in high-quality scientific research while American and European rivals are dropping, according to a global ranking of top science cities by Nature Index released on Wednesday.
The “Leading 200 Science Cities” list – maintained by the academic journal Nature – tracks research output by measuring contributions to academic articles published in 82 of the world’s most influential natural science journals from 2015 to 2022.
A total of 32 cities in mainland China made the 2023 list, and almost all of them climbed up the rankings compared to their positions on last year’s list, with only one exception: Taiyuan, an inland city located in central China.
The top five cities – Beijing, New York, Shanghai, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay Area – remained unchanged.
But there were some notable shifts among the rest of the top-ranked cities. The other 18 mainland Chinese cities that made the top 50 jumped to a higher ranking compared to last year, while most major cities outside China, including Tokyo, Paris and London, fell. The only exception was Seoul, which rose two spots.
The Nature Index measures two different scores – “count” and “share”. A city receives a count value of one for each article with at least one author affiliated with an institution in that city. The sum of these values is the city’s count score.
For the share score, each article is assigned a value of one, which is split equally among all authors. For instance, for an article with 10 authors, each author receives a share value of 0.1. Each city’s share score is calculated by adding up the share values of the authors in that city.
According to both indicators, Beijing overwhelmingly outperformed runner-up New York. The Chinese capital’s share score was 3,734.62 and its count score was 7,841 in the most recent ranking, whereas the figures for New York were 1,924.53 and 4,693 respectively. (Source: nature.com, scmp.com)
2. From The Wall Street Journal:
Rising migration across Europe, including the biggest surge in asylum seekers since a 2015-2016 migrant crisis, is fueling support for far-right and anti-immigration parties, potentially reshaping European politics for years.
Nationalist parties that champion a harder line against immigration are surging in polls and have entered governments in countries from Italy to Finland, as anxiety rises about sluggish economic growth and crises from Ukraine to the Middle East. The far right is polling strongly in the continent’s two largest countries, Germany and France.
This week’s victory in Dutch elections by far-right politician Geert Wilders, who has placed anti-migration policies at the heart of his political platform for the last 15 years, was a powerful sign of how voters are drifting to antiestablishment politicians, analysts said. He will still need to form a coalition in a fractured political landscape, which likely means softening some of his policy goals, but said Thursday that he wants to become prime minister.
Wilders has said he wants strict limits on immigration and no longer wants the Netherlands to accept any asylum seekers. During the election campaign, Wilders tied problems such as the high cost of living and lack of affordable housing to his migration theme, arguing that by slashing the numbers of people who come to the Netherlands, the government could have more money to address other problems.
“It all resonated with his key political message—that it’s time to put the Dutch people first again,” said Rem Korteweg, a senior fellow at the Clingendael Institute think tank in the Netherlands. (Source: wsj.com)
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