After President Trump told NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg over a breakfast of eggs and fruit salad Wednesday that Germany is “captive to Russia” for buying Russian energy – even as it relies on the United States for its security from Russia – German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered a personal retort.

“I myself experienced a part of Germany that was controlled by the Soviet Union, and I am very happy today that we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany,” Ms. Merkel said as she arrived at NATO headquarters for this week’s summit. “We decide our own policies and make our own decisions.”

More pointed was German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who told reporters, “We are not prisoners, neither of Russia nor of the United States. We are one of the guarantors of the free world.”

Mr. Trump’s summit broadside at Germany over low defense spending and trade with Russia captured both the president’s fixation on NATO members’ military spending and his particular style of transactional diplomacy.

But it also reflected, if in a more blunt and harsh manner, a decades-old dichotomy in US relations with Europe – between wanting and encouraging a stronger and more independent Europe, and bristling at a Europe that stands more as an equal on its own two feet.

European countries should spend more on defense and security and develop the diplomatic heft to match their economic weight, many Europe analysts say. But if they did so, they add, it would inevitably mean a Europe less dependent on the US.

“The belligerent style of Donald Trump and the way he brings together security and trade issues may be new, but those things also reflect the eternal ambiguity of the US position towards Europe,” says Sven Biscop, director of the Europe in the World Program at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels. “If you want an ally to do more, you also have to accept that eventually [that ally] won’t be a docile one.”

Presidents since the end of the cold war have wrestled with an increasingly independent Europe – whether over Europe’s rejection of the Iraq war, or as the European Union has developed as an economic power. But the US has also recognized the overall benefits of having stronger allies.

Trump’s Brussels tirade against Germany and its energy links to Russia suggests to some Europeans more of the same from the US – it wants Europe to be beholden to the US, many suspect.

Contradictions on Russia

And they see contradictions in US positions: Trump criticizes them for dealing with Russia – even as he is set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki Monday, and on seemingly friendlier terms than those Trump set for his two days with European allies.

On Friday, meanwhile, that Trump-Putin summit was given a dramatic complication, when the US Justice Department announced new charges were being filed against 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking Democratic Party emails. Among the charges were conspiracy against the US and attempts to break into state boards of election.

Mr. Putin has denied Russian government meddling in the 2016 elections. While Trump has spoken dismissively of the probe headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller into the alleged meddling, he told reporters Friday that he planned to tell Putin to stay out of this fall's midterms.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

President Trump takes his seat as he attends the multilateral meeting of the North Atlantic Council, Wednesday, July 11, 2018 in Brussels.

“Europeans can’t help but see the inconsistency in criticizing Germany for doing business with Russia on the eve of Trump’s own meeting with Putin, where Europeans fear he will do exactly that – do business with Russia, without taking into account the European interest,” Mr. Biscop says.

Trump’s tone toward Europe shifted sharply by the time he departed Brussels Thursday for meetings in London Friday before a weekend of golf at one of his resorts in Scotland.

Trump's self-evaluation

In freewheeling form at Thursday’s press conference concluding the summit, Trump said that “because of me” a summit that he had predicted would be difficult ended up “a great success.” NATO members other than the US have committed to spending tens of billions more on defense since his election, he said. (Mr. Stoltenberg has assured Trump he is indeed the reason for much of the new spending, while many NATO allies say it was in fact an interventionist Putin who gave the wake-up call that Europe must reverse declining defense budgets.)

Echoing his declaration following his Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un that he had ended the North Korean nuclear threat, Trump said that because of his pressure, “We now have a very strong NATO, much stronger than it was two days ago.”

Trump made it clear over two days of NATO meetings that he expects “wealthy Europe” to take on more of the cost of defending itself – from Russian aggression, among other things. But he also suggested the US has some role to play in influencing Europe’s actions and determining how Europe conducts its affairs.

At the summit’s close he spoke of the $11 billion Nord Stream II pipeline Germany is developing with Russia to carry natural gas through the Baltic Sea to German ports. “I’m very concerned with the pipeline, I don’t like the pipeline,” Trump said. “How do you trade so much with the people you’re protecting against?”

At his breakfast with Stoltenberg, Trump said the German-Russian pipeline project is “something that NATO has to look at.”

On trade with Europe, Trump issued a veiled threat to the European Union – whose trade representatives travel to Washington later this month for talks – saying either the EU opens up wider to American farmers and other producers, or there will be swift consequences. “If they don’t negotiate in good faith, we’ll do something about the millions of cars coming into the US” from Europe, he said.

And as he has in the past, Trump allowed himself to criticize Europe over its immigration policies, saying immigration is “ruining” Europe.

Both bad cop and good?

Trump deemed his style of knife-in-the-wound criticism followed by flattery “a very effective way to deal.” He appeared to employ the same tactic before and after arriving in Britain, saying of Prime Minister Teresa May in an interview published Thursday that he “told her what to do” on Brexit “but she didn’t listen,” then praising her at a joint press conference Friday for “doing a fantastic job.”

But some European officials reported their leaders to be “aghast” at the American president’s tactics – as when he read to them the name of each NATO member, and the percentage of its gross domestic product it spends on defense.

“Can you imagine a European leader saying any of these things in America, saying this or that policy, especially something as politically sensitive as immigration, is ‘ruining’ America?” said one European official who requested anonymity to more freely discuss Trump’s remarks. “It starts to seem like he really believes he has a right to tell us what to do.”

Indeed Trump does seem to consider that US leadership in NATO – and US military spending that dwarfs that of all other NATO members combined – give the US president a right to demand things of his European counterparts. Clearly he understands there would be no transatlantic partnership without the US.

Yet even though Trump has made defense spending and burden-sharing his overriding theme when it comes to NATO, he has more recently homed in on the Nord Stream II pipeline project as an unacceptable example of Europe dealing with the same Russia from which it wants US military protection.

US LNG for sale

The US has for many years criticized Germany’s energy ties to Russia, but under Trump the strategy has shifted to pressuring Germany (and other Europeans) to buy US natural gas instead. But European officials in Washington say they tell their colleagues in the administration that US LNG is too expensive – because of the cost of transporting it – and that their boss, as a businessman, should understand that European governments cannot simply order private energy firms where to buy oil and gas.

Some in Europe suspect that Trump is also trying to use the energy issue as a means of prolonging Europe’s dependence on the US – and perhaps even dominating it by aggravating divisions between Europe’s east and west.

They note that some Eastern European countries fear the consequences of closer Western European energy ties to Russia – and that it is some of those same countries that feel supported and encouraged by Trump’s nationalist and populist tendencies and by his antagonism toward the EU.

But now many of those who have felt buoyed by Trump’s nationalist views worry about his apparent admiration for Putin – and what might transpire at Monday’s summit. Just days before the NATO summit, a delegation of parliamentarians from Lithuania, Ukraine, and Georgia was in Washington warning members of Congress of the dangers of Nord Stream II.

Yet while Eastern Europe’s nationalists may find solace in Trump’s apparent disdain for the EU, they have also been taken aback to see Trump at times rivaling Putin in disparaging NATO.

“The Euroskeptics in Eastern Europe have been thinking they could stand up to Europe’s traditional leaders and the EU because ‘the US is on our side,’ ” says Biscop. “But now they’re nervous that maybe the US is not so much on their side – and where does that leave them?”

Does Trump tip the scales?

Biscop says the arrival of Trump in the White House may be the weight that shifts Europe’s balance toward the common strength and action the US has both encouraged and, at times, undermined.

French President Emmanuel Macron continues to encourage – sometimes as a lone voice – a common European defense. Germany’s Merkel may have set the stage for Europe in the time of Trump when she proclaimed last year, after the president’s first G7 meeting, that “We Europeans have to take our fate into our own hands.”

“It’s easy to convince yourself that the United States is always going to come to defend Europe, but the arrival of Donald Trump is finally convincing people that maybe the US is not always going to come,” says Biscop. “So in that sense Trump is encouraging some form of European strategic autonomy.”

And just as Merkel underscored that Europe’s development would come “in friendship with the United States,” few Europeans seem to envision a Europe that turns against the US.

“I wouldn’t even frame it as distancing ourselves from the US,” Biscop says. “What it means is a more balanced relationship with the US, more development of the security role of the European Union,” he says, “and more attention to partnership with others.”

Courtesy of Nicolle R. Fuller/NSF/IceCube

In this illustration, a neutrino has interacted with a molecule of ice, producing a secondary particle – a muon – that moves at relativistic speed in the ice, leaving a trace of blue light behind it.

On September 22, 2017, a shock wave of blue light flashed through the crystal-clear glacial ice a mile beneath the South Pole, heralding an entirely new way of looking at the universe.

The light arose from the collision between a remarkably energetic neutrino – a wraithlike subatomic particle moving close to the speed of light – and the nucleus of a hydrogen or oxygen atom deep within the ice. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an array of more than 5,000 basketball-sized sensors suspended thousands of feet beneath the surface, detected the flash and then reconstructed the neutrino’s path. 

According to research published Thursday in the journal Science, IceCube sent out alerts to more than a dozen observatories around the globe, directing their attention to the region in the sky where the neutrino was thought to have originated.

There, about 4 billion light years from Earth, they saw a familiar object. TXS 0506+056, as it is known, is a blazar, a giant elliptical galaxy with a supermassive black hole spinning at its core. As it devours material around it, the black hole spews twin jets of particles moving at hundreds of millions of miles an hour, with one of those jets aimed in Earth’s direction. The event marked the first time scientists have identified the likely origin of a neutrino from beyond our solar system.

“It’s a demonstration that neutrinos can do astronomy,” says Naoko Kurahashi Neilson, a physicist at Drexel University in Philadelphia and a member of the IceCube team. “We’ve been talking about neutrino astronomy for 10 years, but it’s hard to be taken seriously when you haven’t even seen anything definitively from outside the solar system before.”

From the ancient Babylonians through Galileo up through the mind-bending breakthroughs of the 20th century, the history of astronomy has been defined largely by one particle, the photon. All the light in the sky, from the distant stars and nebulae to the sunlight reflecting off the planets, moons, and other celestial bodies, arrives at our eyes, photographic plates, and camera sensors in the form of these subatomic packets of energy.

Beginning in the late 19th century, astronomers began observing invisible wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays, bands on the electromagnetic spectrum that are determined by the amount of energy their photons carry. Observing these photons led to startling discoveries about our cosmos, from the Big Bang to the existence of dark matter.

Neutrinos, which originate in the sun, the Earth, and even from the radioactive decay of elements in our own bodies, as well as from sources outside our galaxy, are vastly more abundant than photons. But they are incredibly harder to detect. About 100 trillion of them pass through your body each second, say scientists. They are believed to have a mass of less than one millionth of that of an electron and no electrical charge, so they travel unhindered and unnoticed, often for billions of light-years.

Neutrinos stop when they collide with a proton or neutron in an atom’s nucleus. But, because neutrinos are so small and because atoms are almost entirely empty space – if the nucleus of an atom were the size of a grape, the electrons would orbit at an average distance of about one mile –  such collisions are rare. 

This is Antarctica calling 

Completed in 2010, the IceCube observatory at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica aims to capture these exceptional encounters between neutrinos from beyond our solar system and atomic nuclei. On average, this occurred once every eight weeks or so in the nineteen months before this particular neutrino was detected.

When that happened, observatories around the world, from an optical telescope in the Canary Islands to a gamma-ray observatory orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth, leapt to action. One of the two papers published Thursday in Science on the findings involves 16 teams comprising more than 1,000 scientists. 

“I can’t remember a time when so many instruments came together to work on a single science case,” says Reshmi Mukherjee, a physicist at Barnard College and a member of the VERITAS observatory, a gamma-ray telescope in Southern Arizona that helped pinpoint the likely source of the neutrino.

“The popular image of the lone astronomers is, I’m afraid, out of date,” says Dawn Williams, a particle astrophysicist at the University of Alabama and a member of the IceCube team. “Science is definitely moving in the direction of more collaboration, larger collaboration, and collecting large data sets.”

Recent years have seen astronomy begin to broaden beyond the photon. In 2016, scientists using data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the United States said they had detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime produced by a black hole collision some 1.3 billion light-years away. It was the first of several observations of gravitational waves that would earn its principal theorists the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

By observing neutrinos, astronomers hope to peer farther into the cosmos than they can with photons. Professor Mukherjee says that photons from high-energy sources tend to get absorbed by infrared background radiation. Neutrinos, by contrast, “don’t get absorbed by this fog of low energy light,” she says, “so they basically have this the best quality in terms of going back directly to the source.” 

“Maybe there are sources out there that we can’t see in any other ways other than neutrinos,” says Professor Neilson. “We have no clue what the universe looks like in neutrinos yet.”

Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai arrives for a meeting in Washington. The FCC is currently reviewing a proposed merger between Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media.

Until recently, most Americans had likely never heard of Sinclair Broadcast Group. But the conservative network, which is seeking a $3.9 billion merger that would make it the most influential player in local TV, set off alarm bells this spring when it required all its anchors around the country to read a statement about the importance of unbiased journalism.

On the surface, the statement sounded fairly reasonable. “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think.…This is extremely dangerous to a democracy,” it said in part. It urged viewers to get in touch if they saw its coverage as unfair. 

But coming from a network that regularly requires its stations to run conservative programming, including segments from former Trump senior adviser Boris Epshteyn, a Sinclair political analyst, the statement was seen by many as a broadside against mainstream media outlets for perceived liberal bias. And the tactic struck some viewers as something drawn from a communist playbook rather than America’s constitutional ideals.

“They acted like the old Soviets, where they had people get up and read a statement,” says Harold Beu, a liberal Democrat and retired teacher in Kalamazoo, Mich., a Democratic city that is home to Sinclair’s WWMT station. “[It] really flies in the face of what journalism should be about.”

Yet even as Sinclair’s political leanings have become a focus of national debate, there is a larger trend afoot that may be of far greater consequence: the consolidation of TV ownership. The deregulation of local TV broadcasters over the past several decades has opened the way for a small number of corporations to control ever-larger swaths of the market – and thus to influence the American public’s views about society, democracy, and their role as citizens.

Sinclair’s proposed merger is symptomatic of a larger trend, says Danilo Yanich, professor of urban affairs and public policy at the University of Delaware, who has been tracking Sinclair and the larger consolidation movement for a decade. As he sees it, the politics involved are in some ways a distraction.

“If you look at that, your eye is off the ball,” he says. “Your eye should be on the consolidation, whoever the consolidator is.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Justice are expected to decide soon on whether to allow Sinclair’s merger with Tribune to go forward.

Opponents of the deal, including the Communications Workers of America union and 22 Democratic senators, as well as some prominent conservatives, are urging the FCC to await the outcome of a related federal court case before making a decision. The US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is reviewing an FCC decision from last year that has made it easier for media giants like Sinclair to control a greater share of the market.

Changing the rules

Under current law, which aims to preserve a diversity of media ownership and thus a diversity of viewpoints on the public airwaves, a company is only allowed to reach 39 percent of the total national audience.

However, in calculating that reach, companies are allowed to count UHF stations as just half a station, a rule that originated when UHF stations had an inferior signal. With the advent of digital TV, there is no longer a technical justification for the “UHF discount” and thus the FCC, under the Obama administration, had done away with it.

After President Trump’s election, the FCC reinstated the discount. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai argued that the UHF discount and the national audience cap were inextricably linked, and it had been a mistake to address one without the other.

But critics said the reinstatement was a politically motivated move to help Sinclair, which just three weeks later announced its merger with Tribune.

Even Chris Ruddy, a close friend of Mr. Trump’s and CEO of the conservative media outlet Newsmax, criticized the deal. In a Washington Post op-ed, he warned that the FCC was embarking on policies “that will lead to the greatest concentration of television media power in history.”

In addition to reinstating the UHF discount, the FCC has eliminated a nearly 80-year rule to require TV broadcasters to maintain a local studio in the communities they serve.

FCC spokesman Neil Grace refutes criticism that Mr. Pai has shown favoritism toward Sinclair. “Given that the FCC under Chairman Pai’s leadership recently proposed a $13 million fine against Sinclair, the largest fine in history for a violation of the Commission’s sponsorship identification rules, the accusation that he has shown favoritism toward the company is absurd,” Mr. Grace said in an email. He adds that recent FCC changes to media ownership regulations are an effort to match the realities of the modern marketplace. Pai has argued that free markets will do a better job of protecting customers than government regulations. 

A trend toward consolidation

The original proposal for the Sinclair-Tribune merger would have increased the number of stations Sinclair owns and operates to 223 and granted it access to 72 percent of American TV households. After applying the UHF discount, however, its reach would be calculated at 45.5 percent, still over the 39 percent cap. The company recently put forward some amendments that would bring down its footprint to 215 stations and 59 percent of households, and a national reach of 37.39 percent with the UHF discount. 

It’s not just Sinclair that is consolidating, however. Just last month, Gray Television Inc. and Raycom Media Inc. announced a $3.6 billion merger that would make them the third-largest TV conglomerate in the country. And Nexstar Media Group, which completed a major merger just last year, has just been approached by Apollo about a possible buyout.

Professor Yanich, who in 2015 produced a study on localism in TV news, found an inverse relationship between consolidation and the amount of local news coverage. In four of six markets he analyzed in depth, the more consolidated stations produced significantly less local news than their counterparts in those same markets.

“What people don’t understand is that the product is not the newscast, the product is the people watching it,” says Yanich. “We’re being sold to advertisers.”

While that may provide a path to business success for a struggling media industry, some see it as a corporate perversion of a public good – the airwaves. If those airwaves are used to promote corporate interests or ideological agendas rather than highlighting issues of concern to local citizens, the argument goes, then they’re not really serving the community well – and are more susceptible to becoming partisan.

Barry Shanley, a retired WWMT TV anchor who was once ranked the most trusted newscaster in West Michigan, sees corporations like Sinclair as playing an active role in eroding the overall quality of journalism and the public’s trust in the media.

“Our own industry is undermining us to the public,” he says. “I hope that the audience is discerning, and saying, ‘Look, I’m not going to watch the news on a station whose management I don’t trust.’ ” 

‘I wouldn’t change a thing’

In February 2017, Randy Lubratich, a veteran TV journalist with 26 years of experience, was fired as executive producer at Sinclair’s WWMT station in Kalamazoo, after writing a pair of tweets critical of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Mrs. Lubratich, who had worked at many stations including Fox News in New York, says she knows she violated Sinclair’s policy disallowing personal political expression on social media. Nevertheless, she accepts the consequences of having taken a moral stand against the Trump administration.

“I think to stay silent in the face of anything you might see that’s dangerous is repeating history,” says Lubratich. “Even if I had known that that would cost me my job, I wouldn’t change a thing.” 

Shortly after her firing, on Feb. 10, Sinclair executive Scott Livingston sent out an internal memo to staff warning them against political bias, according to FTLive, which published a copy of the memo.

“I want to remind everyone of our policy regarding personal political postings and fairness with our reporting,” wrote Mr. Livingston, citing a “troubling trend” of one-sided coverage. “I want to make sure you’re taking time to review with your team the importance of understanding our commitment to tracking the truth and challenging the accepted narrative in the mainstream media.”

Lubratich sees Sinclair’s policy as hypocritical, coming from a network known for its conservative leanings. 

Mr. Livingston, who was promoted to senior vice president of news several weeks later, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. (Editor's note: This section was updated to clarify the timing of events.)

A decline in quality

To some viewers, the demise of local TV news wouldn’t be the end of the world. With a mix of consumer features and soft news reports, many stations are not exactly holding local governments accountable, instead leaving that job largely to newspapers. 

Jim Connell, a veterinarian in a small town north of Kalamazoo who is heavily involved in his community, commends the Kalamazoo Gazette for its coverage – despite massive staff cuts in recent years that have reduced the paper to publishing just three days a week. 

“When we do have something happen locally that is significant, the Kalamazoo Gazette does a magnificent job covering it,” he says. “When I watch television ... there seems to be an agenda,” says Dr. Connell, who watches WWMT in Kalamazoo as well as CBS, and speaks wistfully of the days of Walter Cronkite.

Peter Battani, a public official in the Kalamazoo area from 1995 to 2015, also says he has more respect for the print media. But he sees a troubling decline in the quality of coverage across the board.

“It’s disturbing, because when you’re in public office, you need the public to be educated,” says Mr. Battani, a Democrat who served as the Kalamazoo County administrator as well as on the county board. “The corporations, they buy up the media – and then all you get … is where the best pumpkin pie is.”

“I can’t tell you at this point that I have experienced Sinclair as a dogmatic or ideological station. I’ve just experienced them as crappy news,” he says, adding that citizens are complicit in the declining quality of media. “We’re all busy with our lives – the kids, the job, the Super Bowl, the basketball game. We’re sold what we want to buy.”

Małgorzata Gersdorf didn’t sign up for this role.

The head of Poland’s Supreme Court is not known as an ideologue, or a born leader. She has rarely sought the spotlight, and a colleague says she is “not a revolutionary.”

But she now finds herself the face of the resistance to the latest move by Poland’s ruling party aimed at increasing its control of the judiciary. In defiance of a new law that effectively remakes the court – including her own position – she showed up for work on July 4, vowing to supporters to continue her constitutionally mandated six-year term. For First President of the Supreme Court Gersdorf, it is not a choice, but a duty, and at stake is not just her own term on the court but the future of Poland.

“I am facing a huge challenge, but I cannot accept what is happening. This is because upon assuming this prestigious office I swore on the Constitution, that I will defend and protect the Constitution and the law,” she says in an interview. “I cannot react in a different way because that would mean that I have no honor. I am not defending myself, contrary to what some say. I am defending the Supreme Court. I cannot approve this destruction of our state.”

Gersdorf is not alone in her assessment. The move by the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) to lower the retirement age of Supreme Court justices, potentially forcing out more than a third of the court, has drawn thousands of protesters in the capital. It has also provoked strong condemnation from the European Union, which has initiated legal proceedings that could end up in the European Court of Justice. Gersdorf is now in a standoff whose resolution could have implications for Poland’s relationship with the EU – and for the rule of law and even democracy in the country.

An ‘unwilling hero’

Since PiS took power in 2015, the conservative party has waged a campaign to centralize power and increase control of the judiciary, with significant results. PiS officials claim the judicial reforms are needed to fight corruption and rid the courts of communist-era influence. Critics call it a smokescreen to reduce the judiciary’s independence to ensure the increasingly authoritarian party’s grip on power. The party’s latest target, the Supreme Court, is tasked with validating election results. A party ally, President Andrzej Duda, will appoint the replacements for those forced into retirement. Since the new law came into effect, 18 judges have left the court, and 12 others have requested to be allowed to stay on past the new retirement age of 65.

Gersdorf’s colleagues say it is her consistency and commitment to the Constitution that have put her in this position, not her eagerness to be in the spotlight. She is an “unwilling hero,” says her colleague Robert Grzeszczak, a law professor at the University of Warsaw, where Gersdorf also teaches. “She never admitted that she is a type of revolutionary.”

But, he added, “she is not a person who will shut the doors and walk out. She will stand up for what she believes in, and she believes in the Constitution, and that her term in office should last six years, which is written in the Constitution”

Czarek Sokolowski/AP

Małgorzata Gersdorf, first president of the Polish Supreme Court, speaks to reporters in Warsaw on July 4 about a new law forcing her into retirement.

Michał Laskowski, a judge and spokesman for the Supreme Court, says the chief justice will not back down. “Judges are not fighters, people who engage in civil disobedience, but we are dealing with extraordinary times in the Supreme Court's history. And the first president of the court, Mrs. Gersdorf, has a strong character and a strong sense of responsibility for the court and the country,” he says.

That sense of responsibility to the court and Constitution may have been cultivated from a young age by her parents: Her father was a law professor, and her mother a judge. Gersdorf was born in Warsaw, where her parents moved after World War II.

In a twist of fate, she was childhood neighbors with the Kaczyński twins – who later founded the PiS. President Lech Kaczyński, who died in a plane crash in 2010, appointed her to the court in 2008. His twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński, is the current head of the party, and exerts power behind the scenes in Poland, though he has not held government office since 2007. The brothers were older than her, so they didn’t play together as children, she says.

As adults, she knew Lech well because they both specialized in labor law, though she does not personally know the head of the ruling party. “I don't think that these attacks on me have any personal backgrounds, as I didn’t fight with Kaczyński brothers in a playground when we were kids,” she joked.

Living in a different world?

Gersdorf has not escaped controversy. She has at times been criticized by the opposition for appearing to support some PiS moves. Last year she took part in the nomination ceremony of a judge appointed to the Constitutional Tribunal by PiS, which many saw as legitimizing his controversial appointment. And she presented her own bill on Supreme Court reform, in which she borrowed some ideas from PiS like creating a new disciplinary chamber in the court. Iustitia, the Polish judges’ association, strongly criticized her plan.

Professor Krystian Markiewicz, president of Iustitia, says though he had differed with Gersdorf on that issue and others, she was willing to listen. “We don't agree on everything, but she is always willing to talk with people,” he says. “She is not stubborn, and she listens to others even if she doesn't agree with them.”

Gersdorf incited significant backlash with a 2017 interview in which she complained that the monthly salary of district court judges – 10,000 zloty, or about $2,700, a generous salary in Poland – was enough to live well “only in a province.” Remarks like that have fueled criticism that Gersdorf is elite and out of touch. That’s a sentiment echoed by some of the supporters of the judicial reform.

Michal, a young lawyer at the University of Warsaw’s law faculty, says the reforms hadn’t gone far enough – the ruling party should fire and replace all the judges, he says. “Of course, we are not sure if they are better than the current judges, but I am ready to take a risk.... Most judges are arrogant, they ignore ordinary people, they are not interested in their good. They feel like they are the elite, they live in a different world.”

What’s next?

It’s unclear how Gersdorf’s standoff will end. She gave herself some breathing room by taking leave this week, and plans to use the same delaying tactic after briefly returning July 20, she says. But that doesn’t mean she is giving up. “I don't have any weapons,” she says. “I can only fight with my words by continuing to repeat that what is happening is absolutely against the Constitution.”

She rejects the ruling party’s reasoning for the reforms. Though her husband was formerly a member of the Communist Party, she says she has never belonged to it, despite accusations to the contrary. “Such lies are really sad,” she says. “What we are experiencing in Poland is the creeping destruction of the judiciary.” New judges will be screened by the National Council of the Judiciary, a “completely political institution now,” she says.

Gersdorf appears to have support in the country. In addition to the large protests in Warsaw, a recent poll conducted by IBRiS for the widely used Onet.pl website found that she is the fourth most trusted person in the country. Another for the Rzeczpospolita daily found that more than 66 percent of respondents trust or somewhat trust the courts, and 54 percent oppose the reform.

She also has support within the judiciary, says Laskowski. “Inside the court's corridors you can feel bitterness that the government conducts politics against judges, and this politics is based on the collective responsibility – politicians present a few cases of unacceptable behaviors of judges and say that all judges are like this.”

Despite EU criticism, Polish officials have refused to back down. Some Poles are hopeful the outside pressure will influence PiS – but not Gersdorf. “We cannot rely only on the European Commission. Even if Brussels reacts I am afraid it is going to be too late, like with logging the Bialowieza forest – it was stopped when almost all the trees were already logged, it could be the same with us,” she says.

Instead, she hopes judges can help citizens understand why the courts are independent, and why they should stay that way. “It is our fault that we did not explain this earlier to society,” she says. “We've received a hard lesson, but I believe that some day things will get better – they have to.”

The mournful ballads of lost love, an upbeat tune to welcome the harvest, wandering mystical notes contemplating and celebrating God.

For thousands of years these songs came from the ground in the Levant, given voice by the nay, one of the very first reed flutes.

The nay was made from thick reeds that grew wild in the region stretching from Ancient Egypt to Mesopotamia – at the heart of which lies modern-day Jordan.

Rabee Zureikat, like many Jordanians, had long been enamored of the nay, whose soulful, ethereal sound is often used as an intro to classical Arabic orchestral music and mournful solos aired by Egyptian and Syrian TV.

But when he wanted to learn to play the nay in 2005, there was one problem: There were none to be found in Jordan.

Despite Jordan being home to the very same reeds used by ancient Egyptians, he discovered, local knowledge of how to make the flute, which was once a common instrument for Bedouin, shepherds, and peasants alike, had apparently been lost.

While the artform continued to flourish in nearby Egypt, Syria, and even further afield in Turkey, in Jordan the craft fell victim some time in the 20th century to increased urbanization. Jordanians even claimed that the reed that had grown locally for thousands of years had died out.

After searching the capital, Amman, to no avail, the only solution was for Mr. Zureikat to order one from Syria. But he remained determined to find the long lost Jordanian nay.

“If there is no nay available, no one can teach it to the next generation,” says Zureikat, a community activist and organizer. “Our number one goal was to make the nay available again to the Jordanian people.”

“I knew that we must have it somewhere – all it needed was for someone to look for it,” he recounts.

With the help of music experts, Zureikat spent 2015 scouring Jordan, bringing back bundles of reeds to Amman to be tested for their pitch, durability, and quality. Finally, he found the perfect reed growing in the Jordan Valley, near the tomb of the biblical Jethro.

It’s not simply a matter of identifying the correct species or length of reed. For a nay, it has to have not only the right thickness and diameter, but also the exact equidistant notches, horizontal stripes that wrap around the reed, in order to place the correct number of holes – seven for an Arabic nay.

He found it could take a six-hour search through wild patches and agricultural land to come up with seven such reeds.

The next challenge was how to transform the wild reed into a flute. With Syria consumed by war, nearby nay-makers were unavailable to share their expertise, while artisans in other Arab countries and Turkey were less than willing to share a craft passed down through the generations.

Through trial and error, and employing local customs, musical theory, and mathematical equations, Zureikat and others have now mastered the technique of making the traditional nay, one they are now passing on to Jordanians.

Music for the people

Then came their next step: making the nay available to all Jordanians.

In Jordan, the vast majority of public schools do not offer music classes. Music courses, recitals, and concerts are often strictly activities offered by private schools, where tuition can reach $10,000 a year. At many classical and Arabic concerts in Amman, tickets can reach $50 per person, while private music lessons can range between $20 to $30 a session – out of reach for many Jordanians. Music, many say, has become exclusive.

It is a stark contrast to the roots of traditional Jordanian music, where entire villages would dance, drum, and play the nay for celebrations such as weddings.

“Music was a communal, populist art, it was not exclusive, it was always meant to be inclusive,” says Zureikat. “Musical instruments were made from materials from the land. They were never meant to be grand, expensive, and complicated instruments.”

“In order to reconnect people with their heritage and reclaim music as the art of the people, teaching people to make their own nay is a very important step.”

Zureikat and his colleagues founded Bait al Nay, an organization devoted to the promotion and preservation of the local flute.

For the past year, Bait al Nay has been working in communities across Jordan, hosting workshops that include lessons in how to play and construct the instrument. At the end of the workshop, Bait al Nay provides tools and machines needed to cut, drill, and shape a traditional nay whose sound could rival those of the grandparents’ generation.

Bait al Nay also takes part in concerts across the country to raise the profile of the instrument, and reaches out both to Jordanians from marginalized neighborhoods and villages and to Westernized Jordanians from upscale Amman who may feel distanced from their culture.

Even in rural towns and villages where reeds grow and shepherd’s music originated, the instrument is not well known. Young people easily recognize the guitar, the piano, and even the trumpet – but the nay for them is often a mystery.

At a concert in the town of Salt, 15 miles west of Amman, a performance this year by Bait al Nay spurred young members of the audience to stand, clap, dance, and sing – all surprised that such an instrument came from Jordanian soil.

Workshop organizers say young Jordanians are now researching traditional Jordanian folk songs, the singers who wrote them or made them famous, and the stories and oral traditions behind the tunes.

For Zureikat and Bait al Nay, this is the true goal: not the resurgence of millennia-old flute music, but a rekindling of Jordanian identity.

“There is a disconnect between the people and their culture, and we are trying to rebuild that relationship through traditional music,” Zureikat says.

“When people hold an instrument that grew from their land, there becomes a connection, a feeling that ‘this is my identity,’ as if they are fulfilling a longing inside that they never could articulate.”

Reuters

Croatia's fans watch the July 11 broadcast of the World Cup semi-final match between Croatia and England.

In the final match of the World Cup on Sunday, soccer powerhouse France will go up against a country that, just 25 years ago, was in the midst of an ethnic war in the Balkans marked by genocide, snipers, and concentration camps.

In fact, Croatia wasn’t even a country until 1991, when it emerged from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. To top it off, it has the smallest population (4.3 million) of any country to reach a Cup final since 1950. And so far during the 2018 tournament of the world’s most popular sport (“football”), it has beaten the likes of Argentina and England with grace and gumption.

Even if Croatia loses on Sunday, it is a winner.

Fans back home are preparing a hero’s welcome in the capital, Zagreb. Politicians there have already donned the team’s jerseys. Foreign tourists along Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast are rooting for the team. And even many former enemies in other Balkan states are quietly cheering the fact that a team from Europe’s backwater region has found the legs to crawl onto the promised land.

To put this in perspective, imagine if South Sudan, the world’s youngest country and one now engulfed in civil war, were to be in a Cup final in a decade or so.

Yes, all nations deserve recovery and redemption from a horrid past. And even the meekest can inherit the earthly title of champion or near-champion. Let us remember that the United States and China did not even qualify for this tournament.

Croatia’s team members ascribe their victories to a tough mentality, born of national struggle. Three of their best players were exiles during the conflicts of the 1990s. And like other Cup teams, the players have wrapped themselves in the flag of ardent nationalism.

Yet Croatia itself has also learned that a nation can rise above an ethnic or religious identity. Among former Yugoslav states, it is only the second after Slovenia to become a member of the European Union. Its neighbors – Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina – are patiently waiting in line to join the bloc while steadily improving their democracies and economies. EU membership would help bring stability and peace to a corner of Europe that triggered two wars in the 20th century.

If Croatia does beat France, its people might recall the words of one of the country’s most famous athletes, Mate Parlov, who won an Olympic gold medal in boxing. In a 2004 interview, he said, “How can I be a nationalist if I am the world champion?”

With sentiments like that, we might even be able to retire that tired term: Balkanization.