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Weekend Roundup: Global Rifts Harden Between the West, Russia and China
The military uprising in Turkey and the attack in France signal a world in turmoil. Events elsewhere this week also mark an ominous historic turn of events. From two ends of the globe, geopolitical rifts have hardened. NATO recently announced the deployment of a missile shield and four new battalions in the front line states bordering Russia, prompting former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to say the West is preparing for a "hot war." A U.N. tribunal on maritime disputes declared on Tuesday that China has no legal basis for claiming sovereignty over shoals in the South China Sea also claimed by the Philippines, prompting Beijing, which sees the U.S. maneuvering behind the scenes, to react in anger and defiance.

"It will certainly intensify conflict and even confrontation," China's ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, warned.

Both China and Russia decried America-allied South Korea's planned deployment of a new anti-missile defense system, also announced recently, as a strategic threat to their national security. We may not yet be in a new Cold War, but we have definitely entered a period of hot peace.

Writing from Moscow, Fyodor Lukyanov is blunt: "The spirit of the Cold War is back -- full scale." From Vladivostok, Artyom Lukin sees America's policy of "dual containment" of China and Russia continuing to "push[ ] them together to form an anti-Western quasi-alliance and, possibly, even recreating some conditions that, a century ago, led to World War I."

Writing from Beijing, He Yafei lays out China's view that the tribunal ruling has no binding authority. "The international standards of law and rules embodied in the U.N. Charter," he argues, "clearly stipulate that any disputes on sovereignty should be settled by disputants through consultation and negotiation based on international law and practices while respecting historical facts." In easy to understand graphics, this video produced by the Shanghai-based website Guancha similarly explains why China rejects the U.N. panel's ruling. Harvard's Graham Allison is not surprised that Beijing is ignoring the arbitration ruling. "None of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have ever accepted any international court's ruling when (in their view) it infringed on their sovereignty or national security interests," he says. "Thus, by rejecting the court's decision, China is doing just what the other great powers have repeatedly done for decades." Referring to the island disputes, Jennifer Harris argues that "China's entire strategy is predicated on the belief that exercising a military option in the next decade would simply prove too costly," and thus the only way for the U.S to stop Beijing's "belligerence" is through economic pressure.

Looking at the larger issue of China's role in the region, Richard Javad Heydarian writes from from Manila that, "the verdict puts into question China's claim to being a peaceful, responsible and law-abiding power, which also seeks leadership and respect in Asia and beyond. It now risks being branded as an outlaw." Also writing from Manila, Rommel Banlaoi suggests a bilateral agreement between China and the Philippines may be in the works. "While the ruling may give the Philippines the moral and legal victory on the arbitration," he notes, " the Duterte administration believes only in improving bilateral ties with China can the Philippines enjoy political victory."

Turning to the ongoing implosion of the European Union, Will Hutton writes from London that any Brexit negotiation by the new prime minister, Theresa May, that gives Great Britain access to Europe's single market "will require May's government to accept the freedom of movement of people as the quid pro quo -- precisely the opposite of the referendum result." Citing "Connectography" author Parag Khanna saying, "the EU countries are functionally inseparable, an egg that cannot be unscrambled." And he notes that, already, London's property market is crashing. HuffPost Reporter Daniel Marans explains how Brexit has unleashed new financial jitters across Europe, especially concerning the solvency of Italian banks.

In this video report, HuffPost Reporter Willa Frej joins an EU rescue mission off the coast of Lesbos, Greece that saved 26 people from drowning. Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden report on how African migrants, once numbering as many as 200,000 in Guangzhou, China, are returning home -- both because of stricter immigration laws and because it has just become too expensive to live in China these days. Mercy Corps' Deepmala Mahla pleads for the world not to forget Sudan as other crises overshadow it. "The international community must sustain its interest in South Sudan, " she writes from the capital, Juba. "The headlines will fade, but the needs will not. South Sudan is a country on a precipice, and all of our help and attention is needed now, and in the months to come, if this new country is to realize its bright future."

From Istanbul, WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones looks at the deteriorating condition of journalist John Cantlie, a captive of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, as he appeared in another one of the group's propaganda videos Artists around the world have responded to the terror attack in Nice. See their works below and here.

Une lectrice du @lemondefr nous envoie ce dessin après l'attaque de #Nice. Dire que l'été était arrivé... pic.twitter.com/mJdliTpDGX
-- Clément Martel (@martelclem) July 15, 2016

As part of our continuing series offering a platform for candidates aspiring to the post of U.N. Secretary General, Christiana Figueres, who shepherded the recent U.N. climate summit in Paris to a successful conclusion, presents her case. "People have lost trust that their lives can get better and that institutions are on their side," she writes. "This in turn is leading to apathy, depression, despair and in some cases to the development of radical views. This cycle must be stopped, before it consumes our collective future."

As the U.S. presidential race heats up with Donald Trump trailing Hillary Clinton by only four points in a new national poll, some of America's leading tech entrepreneurs signed this open letter saying "Trump would be a disaster for innovation."

HuffPost's Senior Tech Editor Damon Beres reports on the bizarre case of "Pokemon Go" enthusiasts heading to the remote South Korean town of Sokcho, on the North Korean border, because it is apparently the only place in South Korea where the mobile game works. These 360 degree photos of swimming with dolphins in Bimini, Bahamas to touring the Portage Glacier in Alaska immerse you in a virtual vacation without leaving home. Finally, our Singularity series this week shows how a 3-D bioprinter can make artificial bones from scratch.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

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Mental Illness, Violence, And Family Homicides
The topic of mental illness and violence is complicated enough in its own right, but also gets badly distorted by the misleading propaganda generated by the shameless National Rifle Association. The NRA attempts to distract attention from its role in gun murders by unfairly blaming the mentally ill. Their story line is that when murderers kill, it's not because guns are so readily available in the general population (courtesy of the NRA and the gun industry that supports it); but rather it's because all the shooters must have been crazy. But here's the hypocrisy. Only after the murder does the NRA claim the the murderer was crazy, whereas before the murder, the NRA would have fought to the death to allow him all the weaponry money can buy.

This is trying to have it both ways. The NRA argues that it is sane societal policy to have everyone armed with guns, at all times and in all places. Then it blames the tragedies that inevitably occur on the insanity of the individuals, not on the societal craziness and greed that has promoted the ubiquity of the guns.

This is nonsense. The vast majority of the mentally ill are not violent and the vast majority of violent acts are not committed by the mentally ill. Mass murders are a US specialty not because we have more crazy people per capita than other countries (we don't), but because we have the world's craziest policy allowing the accumulation of guns.

But we should not be naively politically correct in the other direction- and act as if untreated mental illness isn't a risk factor for violence. It is, and family members are often the victims.
Fuller Torrey has compiled statistics to put this issue into perspective. Dr. Torrey is founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit dedicated to eliminating barriers to timely and effective treatment of serious mental illness.

Dr. Torrey writes:

"This is the first study of the role of serious mental illness in all family homicides.

There are approximately 4,000 family homicides in the United States each year. Individuals with serious mental illness are responsible for 29% of these, or approximately 1,150 homicides. This is 7% of all homicides in the U.S.

The role of serious mental illness varies depending on the family relationships. Approximately 67% of children who kill their parents are seriously mentally ill, but only 10% of spouses who kill their spouses,

Although total homicides have decreased markedly in the US in recent years, there has been no decrease in the number of children killing parents or parents killing children, the two types of family homicides most closely associated with serious mental illness.

Women are responsible for 11% of all homicides in the US but 26% of family homicides.
Elderly family members, especially women, are disproportionately victimized. Among all homicides in the US, only 2.2% of victims are ages 75 and older. In a sample of 2015 family homicides, 9.2% of the victims were age 75 and older.

Guns are used as the weapon in less than half of family homicides.

The failure of individuals with serious mental illness to take their medication and their abuse of alcohol and drugs are risk factors for family homicides. The majority of family homicides are preceded by warnings and threats that are often ignored. The adequate treatment of individuals with serious mental illness would prevent the majority of family homicides associated with serious mental illness."

Thanks, Dr. Torrey. The full study is available here.

There is nothing more terrifying than living with the constant worry that your family member will harm you- particularly if there is no treatment available for him/her or if he/she refuses whatever treatment is available.

Family violence is the canary in the coal mine of our neglect of the severely ill- just the most extreme manifestation of the many forms of suffering we inflict on them and their families by failing to provide adequate housing, treatment, and social services.

I have observed first hand the mental health systems for, and the housing of, the mentally ill in most of the developed countries in the world and have concluded that the US today is perhaps the worst place and worst time to be mentally ill.

The defunding and privatization of services has led to 350,000 mentally ill inappropriately imprisoned, 250,000 homeless, and to the tragedies of family violence reported here.

There are two necessary solutions. First, and uncontroversial, is better housing and access to treatment. Our country has badly neglected the severely ill- and we, they, and their families are paying the price. Legislation now before Congress may finally help to reform our mental health nonsystem.

Second, and more controversial, is the need for involuntary treatment for those most obviously in need of treatment and most unwilling to participate in it. For a common sense approach that attempts to balance the two crucial values of civil rights and safety, see 'When Is It Justified to Force Treatment on Someone.'

We mustn't blame our uniquely US gun violence problem on the mentally ill. Most are decent, well behaved people who do no harm. If we want to reduce gun violence, we have to tighten ridiculously loose gun laws.

But we also must not neglect the need to treat mental illness when it is a clear risk factor for violence.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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