What the Kennedy who lived on had to offer/The Huffington Post

Actor Alec Baldwin remembers a Kennedy who lived on “to face the ebb and flow of an over 40-year political career in the US Senate”. Other men of his family may have died young but Senator Ted Kennedy lived on to “love his country, his countrymen and his family”. Baldwin writes about how after 1980, his presidential aspirations laid to rest, Kennedy began “the slow and deliberate effort to become a great lawmaker”. Kennedy, the “Lion of the Senate”, inspired Baldwin to “remember that politics, though spiritually demoralising much of the time, is really the Great Calling”.

Germany Recalls Myth That Created the Nation/Der Spiegel 

David Crossland looks at the ‘Big Bang’ of the German nation and its first hero, Arminius, or Hermann, a young chieftain who led Germanic tribesmen to a “devastating victory” over three Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. As the 2,000th anniversary of that battle comes up this September, Crossland tells us that playwrights, writers and political leaders of the 18th and 19th centuries portrayed Arminius as a blond, muscle-bound warrior; and how a gigantic statue of his, erected in 1875, became “a focal point for a brand of nationalism that... culminated in the Nazi quest to subjugate Europe and eradicate the Jews.” He also looks at how Germany is marking the event with “noticeable restraint”. 

The Notting Hill carnival is still ours/The Guardian

“London’s black population is a culturally shifting and increasingly diverse demographic”. Lloyd Bradley feels that exactly because of this phenomenon, the Notting Hill Carnival, despite having “changed over its 50-year history” itself, continues to “reflect ‘us’ (the city’s black population) with considerable accuracy.” Inaugurated in 1959, the carnival stuck to the Trinidadian template of mobile steel bands and wildly costumed dancers. By 1974, however, another generation had embraced the carnival and it had become a “manifestation of who they were”; it had also gone from being a strictly Caribbean affair to reflect “the different shades of black in the UK.” Bradley wants to emphasise that black London continues to be at the heart of the carnival: “an equally relevant expression of what it means to be black in London in the 21st century...a far more diverse, mixed up and inclusive state of affairs.” 

... contd.