Monthly Archives: November 2016

Obama expands war with Al Qaeda and greatly extends Trump’s capabilities and authorities

The New York Times reports: The escalating American military engagement in Somalia has led the Obama administration to expand the legal scope of the war against Al Qaeda, a move that will strengthen President-elect Donald J. Trump’s authority to combat thousands of Islamist fighters in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation.

The administration has decided to deem the Shabab, the Islamist militant group in Somalia, to be part of the armed conflict that Congress authorized against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to senior American officials. The move is intended to shore up the legal basis for an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations, carried out largely in support of African Union and Somali government forces.

The executive branch’s stretching of the 2001 war authorization against the original Al Qaeda to cover other Islamist groups in countries far from Afghanistan — even ones, like the Shabab, that did not exist at the time — has prompted recurring objections from some legal and foreign policy experts.

The Shabab decision is expected to be publicly disclosed next month in a letter to Congress listing global deployments. It is part of the Obama administration’s pattern of relaxing various self-imposed rules for airstrikes against Islamist militants as it tries to help its partner forces in several conflicts. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian rebels’ resistance ‘waning’ as thousands of people flee Aleppo

The Guardian reports: Signs that the dogged resistance to the Syrian Army and Russian airforce in eastern Aleppo may be crumbling have started to appear as thousands of people fled to areas under government control, either due to starvation, the continued air assault or the advance of Syrian troops.

The rebel troops retreated on Sunday, faced by the risk of being split into two due to Syrian army advances.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights initially said about 400 people from the Masaken Hanano neighbourhood sought refuge after it was captured by pro-government forces on Saturday, and that an additional 30 families fled to Sheikh Maqsoud, which is under Kurdish control.

However, the numbers fleeing the Syrian government advance has risen sharply, as up to 3,000 fled through the day. [Continue reading…]

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Half a million children are trapped in Syria, UN says

The New York Times reports: With violence escalating in Aleppo and elsewhere across war-ravaged Syria, the United Nations said Saturday that the number of children trapped in besieged areas had doubled in less than a year to half a million.

A report by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, said the children were among hundreds of thousands of civilians in 16 areas under siege across the country who had been “almost completely cut off from sustained humanitarian aid and basic services.”

The report said some of these areas had received little or no aid in nearly two years, despite repeated efforts by international relief agencies to provide food and medicine. “This is no way to live,” Unicef’s executive director, Anthony Lake, said in the report.

The report estimated that 100,000 of the trapped children were among the civilians pinned down in eastern Aleppo, the insurgent-held portion of what had been prewar Syria’s commercial epicenter. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s stealth attack on Mitt Romney?

Politico reports: Top advisers to President-elect Donald Trump escalated their attacks on Mitt Romney on Sunday, catapulting their long-simmering frustrations on to TV news in an extraordinary public airing of grievances.

In a series of interviews on the Sunday political talk shows, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, argued firmly against tapping Romney for secretary of state, echoing internal skepticism among some in Trump’s inner circle.

“I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure that we have to pay for that with the secretary of state position,” Conway said in an interview with CNN. “We don’t even know if Mitt Romney voted for Donald Trump.”

Conway said her comments reflected conservatives’ opposition to Romney, who was a frequent Trump critic during the presidential campaign. “It’s just breathtaking in scope and intensity,” Conway said of the opposition to Romney among Trump supporters, characterizing their reaction as “betrayal.”

The public Romney-bashing comes amid a behind-the-scenes battle for influence among Trump’s top aides, with Conway and incoming White House senior strategist Steve Bannon arguing that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump loyalist, is the best pick for secretary of state. Meanwhile, Vice President-elect Mike Pence is said to be advocating for Romney, arguing that the former presidential candidate can be a bridge to centrist Republicans.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said transition was going smoothly despite the large shockwave rippling through Washington about Trump’s lobbying restrictions.

But some Republicans wondered aloud whether Conway’s comments might be orchestrated by Trump himself as part of a campaign to embarrass Romney, noting Trump’s penchant for headline-stealing public fights. Romney had called Trump “a con man, phony and fraud” during the campaign.

“Attacks on Romney not a solo act,” Republican political commentator Ana Navarro, a vocal Trump critic, tweeted. “Trump coordinated payback/humbling.” [Continue reading…]

By dangling the possibility of secretary of state in front of Romney and getting him to bite, Trump was able to show that outspoken critics can be turned in his favor when suitably enticed.

And if Trump is indeed now stoking the internal opposition to Romney, it is, as Navarro suggests, most likely an exercise in public humiliation.

Trump on the one hand gets to posture as magnanimous and pragmatic and at the very same time, exacts revenge.

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Potential conflicts around the globe for Trump, the businessman president

The New York Times reports: On Thanksgiving Day, a Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for.

In October, he had quietly been named a special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Mr. Antonio was nearly finished building a $150 million tower in Manila’s financial district — a 57-story symbol of affluence and capitalism, which bluntly promotes itself with the slogan “Live Above the Rest.” And now his partner on the project, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States.

After the election, Mr. Antonio flew to New York for a private meeting at Trump Tower with the president-elect’s children, who have been involved in the Manila project from the beginning, as have Mr. Antonio’s children. The Trumps and Antonios have other ventures in the works, including Trump-branded resorts in the Philippines, Mr. Antonio’s son Robbie Antonio said.

“We will continue to give you products that you can enjoy and be proud of,” the elder Mr. Antonio, one of the richest men in the Philippines, told the 500 friends, employees and customers gathered for his star-studded celebration in Manila.

Mr. Antonio’s combination of jobs — he is a business partner with Mr. Trump, while also representing the Philippines in its relationship with the United States and the president-elect — is hardly inconsequential, given some of the weighty issues on the diplomatic table.

Among them, Mr. Duterte has urged “a separation” from the United States and has called for American troops to exit the country in two years’ time. His antidrug crusade has resulted in the summary killings of thousands of suspected criminals without trial, prompting criticism from the Obama administration.

Situations like these are already leading some former government officials from both parties to ask if America’s reaction to events around the world could potentially be shaded, if only slightly, by the Trump family’s financial ties with foreign players. They worry, too, that in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business enterprises controlled by the political elite. [Continue reading…]

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Shootout raises fears over Russian ties to Hungary’s far right

Financial Times reports: When plain-clothes police officers came to Istvan Gyorkos’s house early one morning in late October in search of illegal guns, the increasingly paranoid 76-year-old neo-Nazi barricaded himself in.

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A bloody shootout ensued and a police officer was shot dead. Mr Gyorkos has been taken into custody and faces possible charges.

With previous arrests and convictions for gun violations and hate crimes, the moustachioed founder of Hungary’s neo-Nazi National Front movement (MNA) was often pictured in military uniform. He was known nationally for his fascist political views and, in his home town of Bony, the MNA staged regular paramilitary drills in the muddy hills behind his house and even invited townspeople to watch.

What was less well known was the far-right militia’s multiple ties to Russian secret services. “We don’t believe this attack was a plot orchestrated by the Russian government,” said Peter Kreko, director of Political Capital, a Budapest think-tank. “But there are strong suspicions Mr Gyorkos was supported by Moscow.”

In the wake of the October shootout, the police last week raided nine properties, uncovering MNA weapons stockpiles far larger and more sophisticated than expected, although their provenance is unknown.

While Russian support for far-right groups in Europe has been widely rumoured, the recent events in Hungary have brought to light new evidence of Moscow’s long-running attempts to cultivate far-right extremists. [Continue reading…]

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Are business rivals behind online attacks Elon Musk?

Bloomberg Businessweek reports: On Sept. 2 the conservative web magazine the Federalist published an article titled “Elon Musk Continues to Blow Up Taxpayer Money With Falcon 9.” The author was identified as Shepard Stewart. Two days earlier, the Stewart byline appeared on a piece on the Libertarian Republic website called “Here’s How Elon Musk Stole $5 Billion in Taxpayer Dollars.” Two days before that, the Liberty Conservative site carried a Stewart article headlined “Elon Musk: Faux Free Marketeer and National Disgrace.”

Funny thing, though: Shepard Stewart isn’t a real person. “Definitely a fake,” says Gavin Wax, editor-in-chief of the Liberty Conservative. A chagrined Wax says the “Stewart” character “went totally dark on us after we published him.” Wax discovered that a photograph “Stewart” uses online appears to be an altered version of a former Twitter executive’s LinkedIn headshot.

Musk attracts an unusually large and varied number of shrouded online attacks, including phony op-ed pieces, websites with shadowy backers, and individuals who hide behind aliases. “These are tools used by those who don’t have facts on their side,” says Sarah O’Brien, a spokeswoman for Tesla, the electric car maker Musk co-founded and runs.

The Liberty Conservative has taken down its Stewart article, as has the Libertarian Republic. The Federalist site still has its piece up. Editors with the latter two didn’t respond to e-mails and phone calls seeking comment. [Continue reading…]

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Barack Obama’s contribution to the decline of U.S. democracy

John Weeks writes: The iconic slogan “Yes, we can!” inspired the wave of enthusiasm that swept up millions of Americans during the presidential election of 2008 and carried Barack Obama to the White House. If that slogan epitomized the beginning of the Obama presidency, he had an equally iconic ending: the first African-American president shaking hands with the first president-elect in at least 100 years endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

In November 2008 Barack Obama won the presidency with almost 53% on a voter turnout of 58%. The winning percentage was the highest since 1988 and the turnout the largest for 50 years. The first non-white president took office on a surge of enthusiasm exceeding any since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (by comparison John Kennedy went to the presidency with less than half of total votes and a winning margin of 0.2 percentage points).

The enthusiasm for Obama arose from fervent hope for specific changes: 1) a universal, affordable health system; 2) the end of two disastrous wars (Afghanistan and Iraq); 3) economic recovery from the worst collapse in 80 years; and 4) action against banks and bankers to prevent a recurrence of the collapse.

To fulfil these hopes, Obama had majorities in both houses of Congress, 58 of 100 Senators (largest majority of any party in 30 years) and 257 seats in the House (most since 1992). By any measure the new president enjoyed an overwhelming majority. Under some circumstances the Republican minority in the Senate could prevent voting, but a determined and bold president could force votes within the arcane Senate rules.

It quickly became obvious that Obama would be anything but determined and bold; on the contrary, avoiding conflict through compromise would guide his presidency. In face of a solidly right wing Republican opposition, attempting to compromise was recipe for failure, a disaster foretold and fulfilled. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS: A catastrophe for Sunnis

The Washington Post reports: The Islamic State is being crushed, its fighters are in retreat and the caliphate it sought to build in the image of a bygone glory is crumbling.

The biggest losers, however, are not the militants, who will fulfill their dreams of death or slink into the desert to regroup, but the millions of ordinary Sunnis whose lives have been ravaged by their murderous rampage.

No religious or ethnic group was left unscathed by the Islamic State’s sweep through Iraq and Syria. Shiites, Kurds, Christians and the tiny Yazidi minority have all been victims of a campaign of atrocities, and they now are fighting and dying in the battles to defeat the militants.

But the vast majority of the territory overrun by the Islamic State was historically populated by Sunni Arabs, adherents of the branch of Islam that the group claims to champion and whose interests the militants profess to represent. The vast majority of the 4.2 million Iraqis who have been displaced from their homes by the Islamic State’s war are Sunnis. And as the offensives get underway to capture Mosul, Iraq’s biggest Sunni city, and Raqqa, the group’s self-proclaimed capital in Syria, more Sunni towns and villages are being demolished, and more Sunni livelihoods are being destroyed.

Most Sunnis played no part in the militants’ rise. All are paying a heavy price for the sake of those who did, accelerating and deepening a reversal in the fortunes of the majority sect of Islam that had ruled the region for most of the past 1,400 years.

“ISIS was a tsunami that swept away the Sunnis,” said Sheik Ghazi Mohammed Hamoud, a Sunni tribal leader in the northwestern Iraqi town of Rabia, which was briefly overrun by the Islamic State in 2014 and is now under Kurdish control. “We lost everything. Our homes, our businesses, our lives.” [Continue reading…]

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What has become of conservatism?

Nick Cohen writes: You may not like conservatives. But you know where you are with them. Or, rather, you knew. Now, Trump, Brexit and the global rise of populism have created a crisis in conservatism across the west. You can tell a crisis is real when the men and women caught up in it duck hard questions. Today’s conservatives don’t want to say who they are and what they mean. They have become shifty operators who hate being pinned down. As Boris Johnson admitted, in one of his occasional moments of honesty, modern conservatives want to have their cake and eat it, too.

When it suits them they remain pragmatists, but that pose does not last for long. Everywhere you look you see conservatives sniffing the air and catching the scent of the radical right. It tempts them with the most seductive perfume in politics: the whiff of power. In Hungary, Poland, Turkey, South America and now, with Trump’s victory, North America, populists, who despise the checks and balances of liberal democracies, are taking control and giving every indication of holding on to it.

Conservatives have learned from Trump that they can break the old taboos. They can abuse women, damn whole races and religions, assault the constitutional order and repeat lie after lie without barely a pause for breath. Far from punishing them, the electorate will reward them. Trump’s victory is a dark liberation. Their suppressed thoughts, their guilty private conversations, now look like election winners. [Continue reading…]

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The media’s normalization of Trumpism

Joy-Ann Reid writes: Trump will, barring circumstances that are at this stage unforeseeable, be sworn in as the country’s 45th president on January 20.

The worst case scenario for the next four years is daunting: a country sinking into kleptocracy, with its natural resources, parks and lands carved up and sold off by Trump and his billionaire cabinet to the highest bidder with fat tax credits to boot; Medicare and other beloved social safety net programs dismantled along with Obamacare and its protections for 20 million people; a Justice Department sowing fear rather than confidence in communities of color; terrified immigrants and Muslims relying on Democratic mayors as their only shield; and an international community left horrified by an America that seems to have lost both its soul and its mind.

If that’s what’s coming, beware of the fictions that are sure to come with it; little lies that salve your discontent, but that obscure the realities that become more and more unpopular to speak of. [Continue reading…]

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Why I left white nationalism

R. Derek Black writes: I could easily have spent the night of Nov. 8 elated, surrounded by friends and family, thinking: “We did it. We rejected a multicultural and globalist society. We defied the elites, rejected political correctness, and made a statement millions of Americans have wanted to shout for decades.”

I’d be planning with other white nationalists what comes next, and assessing just how much influence our ideology would have on this administration. That’s who I was a few years ago.

Things look very different for me now. I am far away from the community that I grew up in, and that I once hoped could lead our country to a moment like this.

I was born into a prominent white nationalist family — David Duke is my godfather, and my dad started Stormfront, the first major white nationalist website — and I was once considered the bright future of the movement.

In 2008, at age 19, I ran for and won a Palm Beach County Republican committee seat a few months before Barack Obama was elected president. I received national media attention and for a while couldn’t go out without being congratulated for “telling them what’s what.”

I grew up in West Palm Beach across the water from Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, and he was always a loud presence in the neighborhood. I would drive a pickup truck with a Confederate flag sticker past his driveway each morning on my way to the beach and my family would walk out into the front yard to watch his fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

It surprises me now how often Mr. Trump and my 19-year-old self would have agreed on our platforms: tariffs to bring back factory jobs, increased policing of black communities, deporting illegal workers and the belief that American culture was threatened. I looked at my white friends and family who felt dispossessed, at the untapped political support for anyone — even a kid like me — who wasn’t afraid to talk about threats to our people from outsiders, and I knew not only that white nationalism was right, but that it could win. [Continue reading…]

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Jo Cox’s murder was followed by 50,000 tweets celebrating her death

The Guardian reports: More than 50,000 abusive and offensive tweets were sent celebrating Labour MP Jo Cox’s murder and lauding her killer, Thomas Mair, as a “hero” or “patriot” in the month following her death, prompting calls for the government to do more to tackle hate speech online.

According to researchers on the social media site, the tweets were sent from at least 25,000 individuals and have been interpreted by hate crime campaigners as a sign of an emboldened extreme rightwing support base.

On Wednesday, Mair, a white supremacist who resented immigration, was sentenced to prison for the rest of his life for the murder of Cox on 16 June during the lead-up to the EU referendum.

Academics examined more than 53,000 tweets sent over the month after the MP’s murder and found that among the top 20 words used to describe Mair and Jo Cox were the terms “hero”, “patriot”, “white power”, “rapists” and “traitor”. [Continue reading…]

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Amazon’s new ad: A response to anti-Muslim rhetoric

CNN reports: A priest and an imam are sitting down for tea.

It’s not the beginning of a joke. It’s Amazon’s newest ad, and it serves up a healthy dose of anti-Trump messaging.

In the ad, the priest and the imam are friends — and they’re not getting any younger. They share a hug, the imam leaves, and both take out their smartphones and tap on the Amazon app. Two days later, they receive the same package from each other: knee braces. The priest genuflects without pain. The imam kneels for prayer, and he feels just fine.

If the commercial had come out last year, it would have been the usual heart-warming stuff, quickly forgotten.

But the ad has already erupted on social media, even tweeted by Amazon’s Twitter-shy CEO, Jeff Bezos. [Continue reading…]

 

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A candidate rises on vows to control Islam and immigration. This time in France

The New York Times reports: A patriotic sea of supporters, waving red, white and blue flags, greeted the newly ascendant presidential hopeful François Fillon this week at a soulless conference center in this suburb of Lyon.

Mr. Fillon described radical Islam as a “totalitarianism like the Nazis” to the cheers of an enthusiastic crowd, adding that France would need Russia’s help to fight it. Catholics, Protestants and Jews “don’t denounce the values of the Republic,” he thundered — unlike the faithful of a certain other religion.

“We’ve got to reduce immigration to its strict minimum,” he said. “Our country is not a sum of communities, it is an identity!”

In a year when nativist politics have become the ticket to electoral victory, Mr. Fillon, 62, a dark-suited, stern-faced former prime minister has managed to successfully ride the same nationalist and xenophobic currents as that have pushed politicians in Britain and the United States to victory.

For months, Mr. Fillon polled third and even fourth among presidential contenders in France and was largely dismissed. But his defense of French values and identity has suddenly made him the front-runner as France’s right-center Republican Party prepares to vote Sunday in a runoff to choose its standard-bearer in the 2017 elections — and quite possibly the next president of France. [Continue reading…]

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Finger pointed at Russians in alleged coup plot in Montenegro

The New York Times reports: After multiple but unproven accusations that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is working hard to destabilize America’s friends in Europe, a pro-Russian mercenary detained in Montenegro is slowly spilling his guts — and providing the first insider’s account of what the authorities in this tiny Balkan nation say were Russian efforts to sow mayhem.

The man, Aleksandar Sindjelic, a veteran anti-Western activist from neighboring Serbia, has become a key informant — and a suspect — in a sprawling investigation into an alleged plot orchestrated by two Russians to seize Montenegro’s Parliament building last month, kill the prime minister and install a new government hostile to NATO.

Mr. Sindjelic’s account of the events includes a visit to Moscow in September to plan the operation and details of the encrypted phones he was asked to use to avoid eavesdropping. He has not directly implicated any Russian officials but has raised questions about the links between state agencies and a murky network of Russian nationalists active in the Balkans and in eastern Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

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What if jobs aren’t working anymore?

James Livingston writes: Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.

These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face. [Continue reading…]

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