Author Archives: News Sources

ISIS’s long game is revealed by Syria’s south

Hassan Hassan writes: For the past three years, ISIL has tried to establish a footing in southern Syria. It tried in the mountainous Qalamoun region near the Lebanese border, but it was expelled after intermittent clashes with Al Qaeda and Hizbollah. Its attempts to co-opt forces near Damascus did not get far either, particularly as rebels preemptively clamped down on the group’s fledgling cells there.

Following its failure to grow organically, it opted last year for a pincer strategy to link up its pockets of control between Palmyra and Homs to ones in Damascus’s north east, such as Dumayr. That effort also failed since its territory in the Homs desert was largely cleared by the pro-government forces in April. The group was also expelled from the Palestinian Yarmouk camp after a brief takeover in April last year.

But there is now bad news. In Deraa, ISIL may see not only an opening but that the opening could be the first of its kind in the whole of Syria since the group was formed in April 2013.

Last month, three local groups in Deraa formed Jaysh Khaled bin Al Walid. ISIL announced the merger on Friday. The groups — namely the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade (YMB), Islamic Muthanna Movement (IMM) and Mujahideen Group – operate mainly in western Deraa. Last Thursday, the US state department designated the YMB as a terrorist group.

For ISIL, the south in general is strategically and symbolically important. Deraa borders Israel and Jordan and has historical resonance. The new formation is named after the historical Muslim figure, Khaled bin Al Walid, who commanded a key battle in the Yarmouk Basin against the Byzantine empire in the 7th century.

Nowhere in Syria has ISIL succeeded in growing organically as it has done in Deraa. This is a remarkable development especially since the Southern Front has been hailed as a good example of international support to the opposition. [Continue reading…]

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Iran steps up recruitment of Shiite mercenaries for Syrian war

Christian Science Monitor reports: With gelled hair spiked high and wearing a Dolce & Gabbana shirt, the young Afghan man looks more like a fashionista than a religious warrior ready to give his life for jihad in Syria.

The man wanted to leave Afghanistan for personal reasons, but the Afghans and Iranians who facilitated his trip to Iran, and hosted him in Tehran, saw a recruiting opportunity. For two and a half months, an Iranian recruiter visited nearly every day to convince him to fight on the Syrian frontline with an all-Afghan unit in exchange for promises of a better life.

As he felt the pressure grow, he finally acquiesced.

“We will send you to Syria; when you come back we will give you an Iranian passport, a house, and money,” the 21-year-old Afghan was promised when he got to Tehran. He was told he would be fighting a “religious war” in Syria.

His is one of many stories heard here in Herat, an ancient and largely Shiite city in northwest Afghanistan, that gives rare insight into how far the Islamic Republic is going to deploy a largely Shiite mercenary force of Afghans in Syria alongside its own troops, Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, and Shiites whom Iran has marshaled from Iraq and Pakistan. [Continue reading…]

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The Orlando massacre: A reminder of the dangers LGBT people live with every day

Michelangelo Signorile writes: We still know very few details about the horrific, heartbreaking mass shooting in an Orlando gay club, Pulse, where 50 people have been killed and over 50 more were injured. Omar S. Mateen of Port St. Lucie, Florida, is reported to have entered the club and soon went on a shooting rampage. It’s not yet been confirmed as a hate crime, a terror attack or random shooting.

Whatever the case, a Pride month night of celebration and fun — the weekly Latin Night at the popular club, focused on Latin music, performances and dancing — turned into a morning of mass death and devastation. It happened in an area where LGBT people feel welcome and accepted. Orlando has a large and diverse LGBT community, one in which, like so many across the country, many LGBT people surely feel comfortable and safe.

But the brutal reality that jarred Orlando’s LGBT community, and the entire nation, is something that LGBT have always experienced, as gay and lesbian bars and clubs have been targeted in the past by those who harbor hate toward LGBT people. And it’s a reminder — whatever the motives — of the animus against us, and the ever present danger, with which we still live. [Continue reading…]

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America has 4.4% of the world’s population, but almost 50% of the civilian-owned guns around the world

Vox reports: America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, and presidential candidates in other nations don’t cook bacon with guns. But America’s relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms. These charts and maps show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix. [Continue reading…]

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Father of Orlando shooter says his son’s homophobia may have been motive behind massacre

NBC News reports: While no one may ever know what was truly going through the head of the man who shot over 100 people at a gay Orlando nightclub on Sunday, his family says he may have been motivated by pure hate against the LGBT community.

Various law-enforcement officials have identified the shooter as Omar Mateen, 29, who was born in New York and lived in Port . St. Lucie, Florida.

Because of his name and heritage, there were immediately questions about Islamic fundamentalism — but his father said it may have been a recent incident involving two men showing each other affection that set the gunman off.

“We were in Downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry,” Mir Seddique, told NBC News on Sunday. “They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, ‘Look at that. In front of my son they are doing that.’ And then we were in the men’s bathroom and men were kissing each other.’

“We are saying we are apologizing for the whole incident,” said Seddique. “We weren’t aware of any action he is taking. We are in shock like the whole country.”

Seddique added, “this had nothing to do with religion.” [Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports: [a] senior law enforcement source reports that Mateen became a person of interest in 2013 and again in 2014. The Federal Bureau of Investigation at one point opened an investigation into Mateen but subsequently closed the case when it produced nothing that appeared to warrant further investigation.

“He’s a known quantity,” the source said. “He’s been on the radar before.” [Continue reading…]

NBC News reports: The gunman who opened fire at a gay Florida nightclub early Sunday, shooting over 100 people, had called 911 moments before to pledge allegiance to the leader of ISIS, law enforcement sources told NBC News. [Continue reading…]

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The soft bigotry of the American Left when it comes to the Middle East

Evan Barrett writes: It has been rightly observed that the Republican Party’s long tolerance of racist attitudes set the stage for Donald Trump’s rise. But Democrats, too, are using expedient prejudice to drive their political agenda this cycle. Consider how the Obama White House has embraced talk about the “backward” Middle East to account for their own staggering foreign-policy failures there.

The first full embrace of this rhetoric by President Obama himself appeared in Jeffrey Goldberg’s remarkable Atlantic profile, wherein he explicitly cited the notion that conflict and the Middle East are inherently linked. Describing the political fallout of his intervention in Libya, Obama bemoaned “the degree of tribal division” amongst the Libyan people, suggesting that a sort of Libyan sophistication deficiency was responsible for the “chaos” that followed the NATO intervention. Through the article, the President contrasts the people of the Middle East with those in Asian and African societies “filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure.” The contrast is, Obama declares, “pretty stark” — leaving the implicit question: What can you do with these people?

This attitude was also reflected in the President’s final State of the Union, when he declared that “The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.” This age-old canard about the “eternal” Sunni-Shia conflict was not only historically inaccurate, but a total departure from the Obama of 2009, the man who made the historic and ill-fated Cairo speech. An intellectual of his sort, and a student of history, surely knows this ugly old lie for what it is, but managed to pronounce it nonetheless in the service of anti-war spin. [Continue reading…]

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Europe ignores Syria at its peril. The country is burning and we must act

Natalie Nougayrède writes: While Europe is transfixed by the UK referendum, the crisis that has arguably done the most damage to the continent continues unabated: the war in Syria. Right on Europe’s doorstep, Syria still burns. It is high time to acknowledge that the peace efforts of the US and Russia have failed dismally. Whether there is any chance of this changing after a new US president takes office in early 2017 is anyone’s guess. But that’s precisely the question Europeans need to start preparing for. And the time to do so is now.

If anyone thought Syria had gone away, look again. Massive airstrikes carried out by Russia and Syrian government forces, some using barrel bombs, have picked up again over the besieged city of Aleppo. More hospitals have been destroyed and children killed: there are pictures of this online but they’re not receiving much attention. Let’s face it: we have slowly become numb to the suffering of Syrians.

But we ignore Syria at our peril. Future Arab and Muslim generations, if not today’s, will ask Europeans why they did not do more to help a nation butchered by a dictator’s army and his allies. Europe’s destiny is intertwined with events in its Arab neighbourhood in a way that the US’s is not. For each Syrian refugee who made it to Europe and was treated decently, how many rejected or stuck in the war zone will nurture resentment towards those in the west who preferred to erect barbed wire fences or wring their hands?

Preoccupied with terrorism and refugee quotas, we worry about the spillover effects but have stopped thinking about root causes. These causes are not in Raqqa, the capital of Islamic State’s self-styled “caliphate”. They are in the presidential palace in Damascus. [Continue reading…]

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Besieged Syrian town gets first food aid since 2012, then gets bombed

The New York Times reports: Relief trucks delivered food aid for the first time in four years to Daraya, the rebel-held Syrian town just outside of Damascus that has come to symbolize civilian suffering in the war, the United Nations said Friday.

But even as the relief convoy’s success was announced by the World Food Program, the United Nations anti-hunger agency, residents of Daraya were reporting that Syrian military aircraft were bombing the town, making it difficult to distribute the food. They also said the amount delivered was roughly half of what was needed.

“People didn’t come in large numbers to receive the convoy, they were afraid of the bombing,” Amjad Abbar, a member of a local council in Daraya, said by telephone, with sounds of explosions and aircraft heard in the background. “Several barrel bombs have fallen,” he said.

News of the bombing nearly overshadowed the aid delivery, provoking anger among some Western powers hostile to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

“It is an extraordinary duplicity of the regime which we are witnessing,” Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault of France said at the United Nations, where he was visiting to preside over a Security Council meeting on protection of civilians in armed conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Europe and the unthinkable

Roger Cohen writes: The foundations of the postwar world born from the rubble of Berlin are trembling. The old is dying, the new too inchoate to decipher. The politics of America mystify the world.

From Germany’s “zero hour” in 1945 there emerged in due course two institutions — NATO and the European Union — that together ushered Germany from its shame and Europe from its repetitive self-immolation. They cemented the United States as a European power. They fashioned European security and prosperity through unity.

Now NATO and the E.U. are questioned, even ridiculed. Forces of disintegration are on the march.

In less than two weeks, Britain will vote on whether to quit the Union. The referendum is too close to call. I believe that reason will prevail over derangement — at least one leader of the “Brexit” campaign has contemptibly compared the Union’s designs to Hitler’s — and that Britain will remain where it belongs: in Europe. But the scale of the disaster if Britain votes to leave should not be underestimated. It might mark the beginning of the end of the European Union. A political “bank run,” in the phrase of the political scientist Ivan Krastev, could ensue. [Continue reading…]

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Vigilantes patrol parts of Europe where few migrants set foot

The New York Times reports: The People’s Party-Our Slovakia, after months of stirring up fears about foreigners and Muslim migrants, decided to take action: This spring, the group’s leader proudly stood in front of the main railway station in Zvolen, Slovakia, and announced that a new group of volunteers would begin patrolling passenger trains to keep the “decent citizens” of Slovakia safe from criminals and minorities.

Never mind that vanishingly few of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have reached Europe over the last year ever set foot in the Central European nation, or that only 10 people last year became crime victims on a Slovakian train system patrolled by 600 railway police officers.

The xenophobic Slovakian group has been one of a wave of such extremist organizations across Central and Eastern Europe that have seized on last year’s influx of migrants through Europe to advance their agenda and build popular support. In some cases, the vigilante groups have taken to patrolling borders, streets and other public places to defend against what they portray as a menacing incursion of asylum seekers, many of them Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other poor, war-torn nations. [Continue reading…]

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The child refugees of Africa

Ashley Gilbertson writes: Last year, the news media focused intensely on the European refugee crisis. Some 800,000 people crossed the Mediterranean to Greece, many fleeing wars we had a hand in creating, in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Each segment of their journey was carefully documented by thousands of reporters and photographers.

But there is another humanitarian crisis in Europe we have heard much less about: the roughly 200,000 migrants and refugees who left Africa for Italy since last year. This year alone, some 2,000 have died while making the voyage.

No one gets excited by an epidemic of despair. Some African refugees — largely from Nigeria, Gambia, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Guinea — are escaping wars, but others are fleeing despots, corruption and poverty, a tapestry of problems that have plagued the Continent for generations. When they arrive here in Sicily, they face an overloaded system that is unable to meet their needs.

In May, I spent a week in Sicily with a team from Unicef taking photographs and interviewing those who have made the journey. In the island’s capital, Palermo, I met Peace, a 17-year-old Nigerian living in a shelter for girls. She fled home after being told she would have to marry a 40-year-old man. “This man took me to his house and made me his house girl,” Peace said. “I said to my aunt, ‘He’s older than my dad,’ but she said, ‘If you don’t marry this man, I will poison you.’ ”

Peace traveled to Agadez, Niger, a waypoint where smugglers load migrants into crowded trucks to cross into Libya. “So many people died in the desert. We saw dead bodies, skeletons,” she said. Upon arriving in Libya, she was locked in a windowless room for six weeks. “There was no water, no changes of clothes, not enough food. There was fighting outside, I could hear shooting.”

Libya is particularly brutal on migrants. Boys are set to work by local residents at backbreaking jobs in construction and in the fields for less than $5 a day until they earn enough to afford the $1,500 passage. Girls are often forced into sex work. “They used to rape us and beat us,” said Tsenga, an Eritrean woman who today lives at a sprawling refugee camp in Sicily. “The girls cried, they cried bitterly. They cried because they are just children.” [Continue reading…]

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How Donald Trump bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos, but still earned millions

The New York Times reports: The Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel is now closed, its windows clouded over by sea salt. Only a faint outline of the gold letters spelling out T-R-U-M-P remains visible on the exterior of what was once this city’s premier casino.

Not far away, the long-failing Trump Marina Hotel Casino was sold at a major loss five years ago and is now known as the Golden Nugget.

At the nearly deserted eastern end of the boardwalk, the Trump Taj Mahal, now under new ownership, is all that remains of the casino empire Donald J. Trump assembled here more than a quarter-century ago. Years of neglect show: The carpets are frayed and dust-coated chandeliers dangle above the few customers there to play the penny slot machines.

On the presidential campaign trail, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, often boasts of his success in Atlantic City, of how he outwitted the Wall Street firms that financed his casinos and rode the value of his name to riches. A central argument of his candidacy is that he would bring the same business prowess to the Oval Office, doing for America what he did for his companies.

“Atlantic City fueled a lot of growth for me,” Mr. Trump said in an interview in May, summing up his 25-year history here. “The money I took out of there was incredible.”

His audacious personality and opulent properties brought attention — and countless players — to Atlantic City as it sought to overtake Las Vegas as the country’s gambling capital. But a close examination of regulatory reviews, court records and security filings by The New York Times leaves little doubt that Mr. Trump’s casino business was a protracted failure. Though he now says his casinos were overtaken by the same tidal wave that eventually slammed this seaside city’s gambling industry, in reality he was failing in Atlantic City long before Atlantic City itself was failing. [Continue reading…]

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Poll suggests six times as many Sanders supporters would shift to Clinton over Trump

The Guardian reports: Nearly six times as many Bernie Sanders supporters are prepared to shift their support to Hillary Clinton than vote for Donald Trump in November, according to an exclusive new poll which suggests Democrats are in a strong position to convert energy from their passionate primary contest into general election success.

However, the research, conducted by SurveyUSA for the Guardian, also shows that if Sanders were to find a way of staying in the presidential race, it could hand the White House to Trump, who would beat Clinton by three percentage points in that scenario.

Carried out the day after the California primary, the polling news comes amid residual pressure from some Sanders supporters for him to continue his struggle – either as an independent or perhaps by replacing Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, on that party’s ticket.

But the survey of 1,408 registered voters reveals limited appetite for this option, which would split the progressive vote. Presented with a four-way choice of Trump, Clinton, Sanders and libertarian Gary Johnson, 35% would vote for the presumptive Republican nominee, versus 32% for Clinton, 18% for Sanders and 4% for Johnson.

Yet when Sanders is removed from the equation and voters are offered the more expected lineup of Trump, Clinton, Stein and Johnson, it is the presumptive Democratic nominee who emerges on top with 39%, followed by Trump on 36%, Johnson at 6% and Stein on 4%. Only 5% of respondents told pollsters they would “stay at home and not vote” in this scenario. [Continue reading…]

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The case for Hillary Clinton, by a Bernie voter

Sally Kohn writes: During the early moments of the Democratic primary, my 7-year-old daughter Willa declared that she wanted Hillary Clinton to win “because she’s a girl.”

“That’s not enough of a reason,” I almost said, but then caught myself. For 270 years, maleness and whiteness was an implicit prerequisite for president. Wanting to vote for a woman candidate isn’t sexist; it’s an act of undoing sexism. It’s a way to symbolically support the equality of women everywhere while substantively putting into office a candidate who personally understands the needs of half of the population who have heretofore not been represented in the White House. That’s not to say that voting for a woman is an implicitly feminist act (see Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina), nor is it to suggest that not voting for a woman is an inherently, entirely sexist decision. But our democracy has always been inextricably entwined with race and gender. We only notice it when the candidate isn’t a white man.

Women make up more than 50 percent of the American population but just 20 percent of Congress — which, incidentally, is the highest percentage of women in Congress in history. Since the United States Senate was established in 1789, there have been just 46 women senators — 20 of whom are currently serving. There has been just one African American woman senator in the entire 227 years of the institution.

India elected a woman head of state. Liberia elected a woman head of state. So did Britain and Israel and Germany and South Korea and Indonesia. Our supposedly inclusive, equitable democracy has never managed to do what Bangladesh and Chile have done. Now, we finally have a chance.

On Tuesday evening, when it became clear that Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee, I looked at my daughter and my eyes filled with tears. She will grow up in a world that is still imperfect, still bending toward justice, but with markedly more opportunity and fairness than my grandmother ever knew. And my little girl, who once looked at the faces of the 44 presidents so far and asked why none are women, may now know not only that the world can change but that there can be a place for a girl like her at the top of it. [Continue reading…]

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Ryan’s honesty about Trump’s racism provokes criticism from fellow Republicans

The Hill reports: Speaker Paul Ryan’s handling of Donald Trump is coming under criticism from Senate Republicans, many of whom prefer the way their leader, Mitch McConnell, deals with the unconventional candidate.

McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, has steadfastly declined to call Trump’s criticism of a federal judge “racist,” a term that Ryan pointedly deployed.

“It sets up journalists to ask, ‘Do you agree with Paul Ryan that it was racist?” said an aide to a vulnerable GOP senator
Trump set off a firestorm last week by claiming that a Mexican-American federal judge handling a lawsuit against Trump University was biased because of his heritage.

Republican lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol swiftly expressed strong disapproval but Ryan ratcheted up the criticism significantly by calling it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Ryan’s remarks quickly became a Democratic talking point used to batter vulnerable Senate Republican incumbents. [Continue reading…]

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Canada is the least xenophobic country in the Western world. Here’s why

Zack Beauchamp writes: While most of the Western world is seeing a surge in nativism and Islamophobia, the Canadian government has become more and more open to minority groups and immigration.

“The only real outlier [to the nativist trend] is Canada,” Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia who studies nativism and far-right politics in Europe, tells me. He continues:

[Trudeau] has handled, so far, the Syrian refugee crisis incredibly well, having taken in 25,000 Syrian refugees against the majority will. Initially, he wasn’t supported by the majority — but when they finally arrived, a majority of Canadians did support it. That’s one of the few encouraging lessons that we have seen over the last several years: that if you have a positive campaign, which is supported by a large portion of the media, that you can actually swing public opinion in a positive direction.

Why? It’s because Canada is genuinely different from other Western countries in terms of its attitude toward immigrants. It’s far more welcoming than basically everywhere else.

“Compared to the citizens of other developed immigrant-receiving countries, Canadians are by far the most open to and optimistic about immigration,” Irene Bloemraad, a sociologist at UC Berkeley and its chair of Canadian studies, wrote in a 2012 study published by the Migration Policy Institute.

“In one comparative poll, only 27 percent of those surveyed in Canada agreed that immigration represented more of a problem than an opportunity. In the country that came closest to Canadian opinion, France, the perception of immigration as a problem was significantly higher, at 42 percent.”

Why? According to Bloemraad, the Canadian government has spent decades attempting to foster tolerance and acceptance as core national values, through policies aimed at integrating immigrants and minority groups without stripping them of their group identity. [Continue reading…]

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A desperate woman’s email from Iraq reveals the high toll of Obama’s low-cost wars

The Washington Post reports: On small video screens inside their cockpits, the U.S. pilots spotted their target, an Islamic State checkpoint just south of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

In grainy black and white, they could see the enemy manning the barricades and a guard shack. As they prepared to launch their attack, the pilots noticed a potential complication: Two cars approached the checkpoint and stopped. The drivers appeared to be talking with Islamic State fighters.

Other cars moved through the checkpoint, but these two vehicles remained on the side of the road. Five minutes passed. Then 10. Nearly 40 minutes had gone by and the two vehicles still had not moved.

Running low on fuel and time, the pilots concluded that the people in the cars were allied with the militants and asked for permission to strike. After a brief discussion with their headquarters in Qatar, they got their reply: “You’re cleared to execute.”

This was one version of what war had become in the last years of the Obama administration: The pilots made two strafing runs over the checkpoint, their machine guns cutting through the two cars. Then they unleashed a 500-pound satellite-guided bomb that engulfed the area in dust, fire and deadly shrapnel.

As they returned to their base, the pilots offered an in-flight assessment of their mission: guard shack flattened, two vehicles destroyed and four enemy fighters dead. “There are no apparent civilian or other collateral concerns,” their report concluded.

The first sign that they had made a horrible mistake came in the form of an email, sent two weeks after the March 2015 airstrike, to an Iraqi citizen working at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

“I am Raja’a Zidan al-Ekabee . . . ” the email began. [Continue reading…]

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Russia is recruiting the U.S.’s rebel allies in Syria

Mike Giglio reports: The rebel commander was nervous. He had changed phone numbers and been difficult to reach before finally agreeing to meet in Antakya, a city near the border with war-torn Syria that has long swarmed with rebels, refugees, and spies. On the road to an out-of-the-way hotel, he told the driver to avoid the main route through town. “It’s better not to drive among all the people,” he said.

It was an open secret that the commander had once received cash and weapons from the CIA, part of a covert U.S. program that backs rebel groups against both ISIS and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

When his battalion was eventually driven from Syria by its jihadi rivals, like a number of U.S.-backed groups, he pleaded with his U.S. handlers for better support, but it wasn’t enough. So he was, he said, “out of the game.”

Now, he said, sitting at a quiet table at the hotel, he had received an offer that could bring him back in — and potentially make him even stronger than before.

He was being recruited, he said, to work for the U.S.’s rival in Syria: Russia.

“They told me, ‘We will support you forever. We won’t leave you on your own like your old friends did,’” he said. “Honestly, I’m still thinking about it.”

The commander said that five years into a war that has killed some 400,000 people and created nearly 5 million refugees, Russia is recruiting current and former U.S. allies to its side. His revelation was confirmed by four people who said they, too, had been approached with offers from Russia and by two Syrian middlemen who said they delivered them.

The moves come as Russia ratchets up its involvement in Syria with troops and airstrikes. Russia says its military campaign is designed to target ISIS — in reality it has targeted all rebels, including some who are still backed by the U.S., while also wreaking havoc on civilians.

The secret outreach shows that as it works to muscle the U.S. out of Syria, Russia isn’t just bombing the U.S.’s current and former rebel allies — it’s also working to co-opt them, launching a shadowy campaign that seeks to highlight U.S. weakness in Syria. Ultimately, Russia could be hoping to help Assad win the war by dividing the opposition, driving a wedge between rebel groups and their traditional backers, and getting them to turn their guns on his enemies. [Continue reading…]

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