Author Archives: News Sources

Sanders: ‘You can’t just be concerned about Israel’s needs. You have to be concerned about the needs of all of the people of the region.’

Think Progress reports: Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spoke out on Sunday against Israel’s military response during the 2014 war with Gaza, calling the country’s actions “disproportionate.”

Sanders, who is the first Jewish candidate in U.S. history to win a major presidential primary, discussed the seven-week armed conflict between Israeli and Gazan forces during a taped interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Was Israel’s response disproportionate? I think it was,” Sanders said. The 2014 conflict, which was sparked after Hamas forces in Gaza launched rockets into southern Israel, resulted in the deaths of more than 2,130 Palestinians — 70 percent of whom were civilians, according to the United Nations. Israel, which lost 65 soldiers and 3 civilians in the fighting, claims only 50 percent of Palestinians killed were civilians. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s vision for America

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In an editorial, the Boston Globe says: Donald J Trump’s vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.

It is easy to find historical antecedents. The rise of demagogic strongmen is an all too common phenomenon on our small planet. And what marks each of those dark episodes is a failure to fathom where a leader’s vision leads, to carry rhetoric to its logical conclusion. The satirical front page of this section [shown above] attempts to do just that, to envision what America looks like with Trump in the White House.

It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it.

After Wisconsin, the odds have shrunk that Trump will arrive in Cleveland with the requisite 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright. Yet if he’s denied that nomination for falling short of the required delegates, Trump has warned, “You’d have riots. I think you’d have riots.” Indeed, who knows what Trump’s fervent backers are capable of if emboldened by the defeat of their strongman at the hands of the hated party elite. [Continue reading…]

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Sheldon Adelson and top GOP donors retreat to the sidelines

Politico reports: Dispirited over a Republican Party primary that has devolved into an ugly, damaging fight, some of the GOP’s biggest financiers are reevaluating whether to invest in the 2016 presidential contest at all.

Among those on the sidelines: Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul who hosted the Republican Jewish Coalition’s spring meeting at his Venetian hotel this weekend. His apparent ambivalence about 2016 was shared by many RJC members here. With grave doubts about the viability of the few remaining Republican contenders, many of these Republican donors have decided to sit out the rest of the primary entirely. And while some are reluctantly getting behind a remaining candidate, others are shifting their attention to congressional contests.

On Friday morning, during a meeting of the group’s board, Arthur Finkelstein, an iconic Republican strategist who has advised numerous politicians over the past four decades, presented polling data that showed Donald Trump sitting at historically low approval numbers among American Jews, according to three attendees who described the off-the-record meeting. Ted Cruz, despite an aggressive recent push to court Jews, fared little better.

Following the nearly 30-minute presentation, the group turned to a discussion about what’s next in the race. While some in the room spoke in favor of Cruz, others expressed reservations about his prospects in the general election. Trump, meanwhile, had little support: Not one person volunteered to raise money for him if he were the nominee. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s counterterrorism strategy ‘an abject failure,’ says former official

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The New York Times reports: The banging on the door jolted Sal Shafi awake. F.B.I. agents were looking for his son. “Where’s Adam?” they yelled. “Where’s Adam?”

Terrified, Mr. Shafi led the agents, guns drawn, up the stairs toward his son’s bedroom. He watched as they led his 22-year-old son away in handcuffs, backed by evidence of Adam Shafi’s terrorist ambitions.

He had come to the attention of officials not by a well-placed informant or a sting operation. His father, concerned and looking for help, had simply picked up the phone and led the government right to his son. For months, over the objections of his lawyer, Mr. Shafi had been talking to the F.B.I., believing he was doing the right thing.

“My God,” he thought, soon after the arrest in July. “I just destroyed Adam.”

Had things been different, Mr. Shafi, 62, a Silicon Valley executive, might have become a much-needed spokesman for the Obama administration’s counterradicalization campaign. Who better to talk to other parents about the seductive pull of terror organizations? Trust the government, he would tell them. They do not want to take away your children.

Despite nascent efforts to steer young people away from terrorism, the government’s strategy remains largely built on persuading people to call the F.B.I. when they first suspect a problem. [Continue reading…]

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The new Europeans

The New York Times reports: Among the first Syrians to show up in Eisenärzt was Yasser, a stocky, 37-year-old seaman from the Syrian port city Latakia. When the bus dropped him off in front of his new home, Yasser told me, he had the sense that none of this strange new reality could be his. He said he had felt that way since a day last summer, when he was working on a ship bound for Tartus, Syria, and received word from a friend back home that uniformed men were looking for him. Until then, life in Latakia had still been manageable, despite the war. The city, a stronghold of Bashar al-Assad, had not seen the kind of fighting that has shattered other parts of the country. Yasser told me that he could still find work at sea to provide for himself and his wife, an architect in her mid 20s. They had lived a good life in Latakia; he had decorated their home with various souvenirs from his international travel — a sword from China, a tiger sculpture from Sierra Leone. In his free time, he rode his Suzuki motorcycle, and the roar of its 1,000-c.c. engine was a source of pleasure and pride. Yasser told me that he completed his mandatory military service years ago, but the men in uniform wanted to re-enlist him to fight for Assad. He could not fathom fighting for any side in the conflict. “I cannot hit a cat,” he told me. Rather than return to Syria, Yasser said he disembarked from his ship off Istanbul and joined the human tide making its way to the European Union. His wife remained in Latakia. (Yasser, like many other Syrians I met in Germany, asked that I withhold his last name to protect the safety of relatives back home.)

[In September, when] Yasser arrived at the Mallersdorfer Sisters’ former residence [which had been sold to the municipality for the purpose of housing asylum seekers], he was shown to his single room on an upper floor and greeted by the caretaker of the residence, Beni Beilhack, a multiple-pierced 36-year-old with thinning hair and a persistent smile. In the following days, Yasser, bored, began to follow Beilhack around, hoping to help with work around the residence. Eventually, Beilhack delegated some tasks to Yasser: repairing a broken doorknob, blowing leaves off the hiking trails near the residence. By October, Beilhack had outfitted Yasser with work clothes and made him his unofficial assistant. The two communicated with a peculiar mix of English, German and Arabic. Under Yasser’s tutelage, Beilhack’s command of Arabic profanities expanded rapidly, and Beilhack dispensed this knowledge liberally throughout his workday, to the delight of many of the young Syrian men. Beilhack, who worked as a truck driver before the Syrians came to town, told me he did not miss his old job, and he seemed to relish his interaction with the Syrians. He started inviting Yasser to family dinners. After school, Beilhack’s son, Luca, then 12, often came by the residence. The Syrians were generally “warmer” than the local residents, Luca told me, adding, “I’d be happy if they lived here forever.”

Beilhack’s 64-year-old mother, Evelyn, also works as a caretaker at the residence, where she lives on the ground floor with her husband. Evelyn held the position previously, when the sisters lived there. When Evelyn learned the Syrians would be moving in, she rejoiced. The nuns nitpicked about the smallest details, she told me, creating an oppressive work environment. She grew up in what she called a “very international” town, a place called Geretsried, south of Munich, which was settled by Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II. Later, Southern European guest workers arrived. Growing up there left her open to seeing what the asylum seekers would be like. “You hear from a lot of different places about what an abominable people they are — not Syrians, but altogether, this whole mass of asylum seekers that are streaming in here,” she told me. People called them “terrible and slobs and poorly raised and primitive.” She wanted to find out for herself, she said. “I thought: I’ll take this on. I want to see this. I want to know this.”

Her experience with the Syrians did not confirm the prejudices. “They are respectful; they’re nice,” she said. Like her son, she seemed to enjoy the Syrians’ company. One evening, a saxophonist from Damascus serenaded her in the former chapel, stripped of religious relics, where the Mallersdorfer Sisters used to worship. The saxophonist stood next to the recently installed foosball table and puffed out a version of Lionel Richie’s “Hello.” One of the young Syrian men sitting next to Evelyn feigned being her companion in a cafe. “Garçon! Two glasses of wine!”

Through his conversations with the Beilhacks, Yasser began to understand something of life in Germany. Evelyn told him how much money was deducted from people’s paychecks for taxes and health insurance, and the cost of living generally seemed far higher than in prewar Syria. Back at home, his wife did some work in a private office, but he would not allow her to work for a firm. Women in Syria were not supposed to hold down such jobs, he said. In Germany, however, he would have to reconsider. He and his wife probably wouldn’t be able to afford a house and a car if she didn’t work too. “Life here is hard,” he said. If the war in Syria ended, he told me, he would go back in a minute. [Continue reading…]

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How French secularism became fundamentalist

Robert Zaretsky writes: For nearly a century, laïcité [which originally assured “the liberty of conscience” for all French citizens] worked well enough. It ensured public space for both those who believed — not just Catholics and Protestants, but Jews as well — and those who did not. But with the 1980s and 1990s came a growing number of immigrants, most of whom were Muslim, from North Africa. And so a different kind of conflict between the French state and established religion began to take shape.

Emblematic of this new tension was a series of battles over a simple strip of clothing. In 1989, a few Muslim girls were expelled from school when they refused to take off their hijabs, or headscarves, which the principal believed was an assault on the secular character of public schools. Shortly after, the French administrative court, the Conseil d’État, ordered them to be reinstated. But two years after 9/11, when similar incidents were repeated at other schools, the court reversed its original finding. While all “ostentatious” signs of religious faith — be they Jewish yarmulkes or Sikh turbans — were declared verboten in public schools, everyone knew that the principal target of the law was the hijab.

In the subsequent sound and fury, the banner of laïcité was unfurled in ways that would surely have been unrecognizable to the 19th-century statesmen like Jules Ferry and Aristide Briand, who helped write the original law. The once-straightforward guarantees of “freedom of conscience” and “free exercise of religious faiths” — rooted in and restricted to the constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics — were transformed under the forces of political passion and mounting existential anguish into the defining French values, and any form of retreat from a fundamentalist interpretation was a failure to defend the republic.

Today, public intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut, Régis Debray, and Elisabeth Badinter, when discussing laïcité, invoke the very future of France. Badinter, a renowned feminist philosopher, as if in anticipation of the Charlie Hebdo editorial, declared in January that she was not afraid to be called an Islamophobe, arguing that accusations of racism are a weapon against secularism. In a recent essay on secularism, diversity, and national identity titled L’identité malheureuse (“Unhappy Identity”), Finkielkraut confounds myth with history when he declares his sympathy for those “who miss the good old days when native-born Frenchmen and women (Français de souche) mingled with their own kind and who are now shedding a tear over their sepia-colored France that has lost its homogeneity.”

The xenophobic and anti-immigration National Front, too, has weaponized laïcité, turning it into an ideological cudgel to be used against French Muslims. Last year, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the party’s rising star — and granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen — asserted that the National Front is “laïque,” or secular. Yet she then offered an interpretation of the state of religion in France that had very little to do with laïcité as most of the world understands it, exposing the cognitive dissonance shared by the extreme right and left: “If French Muslims wish to practice their faith, they need to accept the fact that they are doing so on soil that is culturally Christian. This means that they cannot have the same rank as the Christian religion.”

Then, last week, the minister for families, children, and women’s rights, Laurence Rossignol, lambasted fashion designers for offering lines of Islamic wear-inspired clothing, including the so-called “burkini,” a full-body bathing suit sold by Marks and Spencer. These brands, Rossignol declared, had “irresponsibly” lent their prestige to clothing designed to oppress women. As for those Muslim women who freely choose to wear religious garb, Rossignol shrugged her shoulders: “There were also American negroes who favored slavery.”

In a single phrase, Rossignol not only let drop a racial slur, but also let slip the implications of how she — a member of government — sees the meaning of laïcité today: No normal French woman, Rossignol seems to believe, would choose to wear Islamic dress as a sign of her religious faith. Tellingly, Rossignol’s use of the word “négre” sparked more outrage in the media than her claim that burkini-wearing women have no place in a truly secular society. [Continue reading…]

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Panama Papers: How the Seychelles saved Syria

James Denselow writes: Against the backdrop of recent territorial gains, the cessation of hostilities and a peace process in Geneva that is rumbling along, President Bashar al-Assad seems more secure than ever after five years of conflict in Syria.

When people ask how he managed to stay in power despite the country having its economy collapse in half, hundreds of thousands killed, one in two Syrians being forced from their homes and the conflict dragging in four of the five UN P5 members of the Security Council, you wouldn’t necessarily think about the Seychelles.

Yet as the Panama Papers, the biggest leak in global history, has shown, the idyllic archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean off East Africa has played its part in keeping Assad in the Presidential Palace in Damascus.

What this demonstrates is that what appears from a distance to be an insular, authoritarian regime far more proficient in the tools of medieval warfare than modern capitalism, has actually used the levers of globalisation well to protect its interests.

What the 11.5 million leaked documents reveal is that three Syrian companies close to the government – Maxima Middle East Trading, Morgan Additives Manufacturing and Pangates International – used the already infamous Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca to create shadow or shell companies in the Seychelles to avoid the increasing pressure of global sanctions.

Considering how near the regime was to collapse before the Russian intervention, this evasion of sanctions is fairly significant. The Panama Papers suggest it paid for fuel that kept Syria’s Air Force helicopters and airplanes in the air. [Continue reading…]

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Where are the Syrians in Assad’s Syrian Arab Army?

Richard Spencer writes: The video shows the attack on Palmyra, the historic Syrian city reclaimed from Isil for the Assad regime, and as a column of troops heads across the desert behind him a soldier is giving a commentary.

“Despite many casualties, they are moving forward in the advance,” he says.

The oddity is that he is not speaking Arabic, but Persian. The man himself is Afghan, a member of a 10-20,000-strong Afghan army recruited in Iran to fight the war in Syria.

The reconquest of Palmyra was presented to the world as a victory for President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army.

As Islamic State jihadists fled, regime troops forced their way into the town, known for its celebrated Roman ruins. Everyone from Russian apparatchiks to British conservative politicians congratulated Mr Assad for reclaiming the town for civilisation.

The role of the Russian air force in preparing the way for the ground advance was noted: this was the anti-Isil alliance promised at the start of Russian military intervention in Syria but which in practice seemed slow to make gains.

In fact, it is now clear it was an eccentric multinational force that took Palmyra. Analysis of photographs, social media posts and Iranian, Russian and even Syrian media has shown that the path was led by the Russians, with much of the “grunt” work done by Afghan Shia and Iraqi militiamen under generals from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. [Continue reading…]

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Assad’s fateful choice

David W. Lesch writes: This spring marks the fifth year anniversary of the events that launched a civil war in Syria. Typically, there were some huge miscalculations early on that set the conflict in motion, such as the Syrian opposition’s expectation that the West would militarily intervene to facilitate the overthrow of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And then there was the West’s mistaken assumption that Assad would be the next domino to fall following the exits of dictators elsewhere in the Arab spring. Expecting this led to calls for Assad to step down, thus backing the West into a corner regarding a negotiated settlement once it became clear the Syrian president wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. From the regime’s perspective, it made war the only choice.

But it is important to remember that the first — and biggest — mistake occurred at the onset, when Assad made the decision to crackdown harshly on the popular protests rather than offer real concessions. Indicative of this was Assad’s speech to the nation on March 30, 2011, his first to address the rising tensions. This was a seminal moment in modern Syrian history. The whole country, supporters and opponents, waited with bated breath to hear what he had to say. Syrians believed this would be the moment when Assad would finally live up to expectations.

From interviews I have conducted with current and former Syrian officials close to Assad and involved in the speech preparation, there were pronounced differences and confusion within the regime inner circle over how to react to the crisis. [Continue reading…]

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How Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen has made al Qaeda stronger – and richer

Reuters reports: Once driven to near irrelevance by the rise of Islamic State abroad and security crackdowns at home, al Qaeda in Yemen now openly rules a mini-state with a war chest swollen by an estimated $100 million in looted bank deposits and revenue from running the country’s third largest port.

If Islamic State’s capital is the Syrian city of Raqqa, then al Qaeda’s is Mukalla, a southeastern Yemeni port city of 500,000 people. Al Qaeda fighters there have abolished taxes for local residents, operate speedboats manned by RPG-wielding fighters who impose fees on ship traffic, and make propaganda videos in which they boast about paving local roads and stocking hospitals.

The economic empire was described by more than a dozen diplomats, Yemeni security officials, tribal leaders and residents of Mukalla. Its emergence is the most striking unintended consequence of the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen. The campaign, backed by the United States, has helped Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to become stronger than at any time since it first emerged almost 20 years ago.

Yemeni government officials and local traders estimated the group, as well as seizing the bank deposits, has extorted $1.4 million from the national oil company and earns up to $2 million every day in taxes on goods and fuel coming into the port.

AQAP boasts 1,000 fighters in Mukalla alone, controls 600 km (373 miles) of coastline and is ingratiating itself with southern Yemenis, who have felt marginalised by the country’s northern elite for years.

By adopting many of the tactics Islamic State uses to control its territory in Syria and Iraq, AQAP has expanded its own fiefdom. The danger is that the group, which organised the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack in Paris last year and has repeatedly tried to down U.S. airliners, may slowly indoctrinate the local population with its hardline ideology.

“I prefer that al Qaeda stay here, not for Al Mukalla to be liberated,” said one 47-year-old resident. “The situation is stable, more than any ‘free’ part of Yemen. The alternative to al Qaeda is much worse.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS sent a child to kill children

The Washington Post reports: The suicide bomber who blew up a youth soccer match late last month left barely a dent in the hard, dry earth, and only a faint scorch on a concrete wall nearby.

But he gouged a chasm of grief in the heart of the small community that lost more than two dozen of its sons in a single moment, at 6:15 on the evening of March 25.

A total of 43 people died in the bombing at the game, according to figures provided by the local government. Of those, 29 were boys younger than 17 who had either been participating in the match or watching their friends play.

The bomber also was a teenager, no more than 15 or 16 years old, judging by the picture of him released by the Islamic State, which asserted responsibility for the bombing, and the accounts of those who saw him at the match. The militants’ statement said the target was a gathering of members of the Shiite paramilitary group known as Hashd al-Shaabi, and the local government said two members of a militia were among the adults who died.

Yet that hardly explains the horror of an attack that inevitably would kill children.

The bomber “was a child, and he came to kill children,” said Mohammed al-Juhaishi, one of the sheiks from the area, who lost five relatives in the blast. “It was a children’s soccer game. Of course he knew he was going to kill children.” [Continue reading…]

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Climate change is altering how the poles drift

Climate Central reports: The spin of the earth is a constant in our lives. It’s quite literally why night follows day.

And while that cycle isn’t going away, climate change is messing with the axis upon which our fair planet spins. Ice melting has caused a drift in polar motion, a somewhat esoteric term that tells scientists a lot about past and future climate and is crucial in GPS calculations and satellite communication.

Polar motion refers to the periodic wobble and drift of the poles. It’s been observed for more than 130 years, but the process has been going on for eons driven by mass shifts inside the earth as well as ones on the surface. For decades, the north pole had been slowly drifting toward Canada, but there was a shift in the drift about 15 years ago. Now it’s headed almost directly down the Greenwich Meridian (sorry Canada no pole for you, eh).

Like many other natural processes large and small, from sea levels to wildfires, climate change is also playing a role in this shift.

“Since about 2000, there has been a dramatic shift in this general direction,” Surendra Adhikari, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. “It is due to climate change without a doubt. It’s related to ice sheets, in particular the Greenland ice sheet.” [Continue reading…]

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It’s amazing what America could do with the money the rich hide overseas

Max Ehrenfreund writes: The documents known as the “Panama Papers” have created a global scandal around the ways the world’s rich conceal their wealth from the authorities. The prime minister of Iceland offered his resignation after the papers reportedly revealed that he and his wife had a fortune on paper hidden away in the British Virgin Islands. British Prime Minister David Cameron is taking criticism as well, and he acknowledged that he profited from a secret family trust.

The Washington Post has not reviewed the Panama Papers or verified their authenticity, but what seems certain is that wealthy people all over the world — and in the United States — pay much less in taxes by moving their income and assets to foreign countries.

In the United States, the Treasury would collect about $124 billion a year in additional taxes — $36 billion from individual taxpayers and $88 billion from multinational corporations — if it weren’t for such schemes, according to estimates by Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

That’s a lot of money — and we’re all paying for it, Zucman said.

When the wealthy pay less in taxes, the rest of the population bears the burden. Either the government spends less money, providing fewer public services, or ordinary citizens pay more to make up the cost. [Continue reading…]

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What the Panama Papers don’t reveal may be more important than what they do

Uri Friedman writes: I did nothing wrong. That’s the gist of how many individuals connected with the “Panama Papers” — the millions of leaked documents exposing how a Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, helped the rich and powerful park their wealth in tax havens and offshore bank accounts or shell companies — are responding to the revelations this week. And in many cases, they may be telling the truth. As The New York Times points out, “Holding money in an offshore company is generally not illegal, although such financial arrangements can be used in illegal ways — for example, to facilitate tax evasion or money laundering.”

Wear a ski mask around town on a warm day, perhaps for a perfectly good reason (you’re a celebrity trying to avoid paparazzi, you ran out of sunscreen), and you’ll probably invite suspicion. Because it looks like you might rob a bank.

The release of the Panama Papers is a bit like the end of The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man, Truman Burbank, who gradually realizes he’s spent 30 years on the set of a reality TV show in which he’s the star. In the last scene, Truman is sailing a boat when its bow pierces the artificial sky — hinting at a world beyond the show’s set. The leaks, from just one law firm in one country, have similarly pierced the screen that normally conceals a vast network of financial secrecy. But on the other side, there’s a much bigger world that, for most people, remains unexplored.

And this elite world has an impact on the world your Average Truman inhabits. [Continue reading…]

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How Joseph McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn became Donald Trump’s mentor

Michael Kruse writes: The reporter from the Washington Post didn’t ask Donald Trump about nuclear weapons, but he wanted to talk about them anyway. “Some people have an ability to negotiate,” Trump said, of facing the Soviet Union. “You either have it or you don’t.”

He wasn’t daunted by the complexity of the topic: “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he said.

It was the fall of 1984, Trump Tower was new, and this was unusual territory for the 38-year-old real estate developer. He was three years away from his first semi-serious dalliance with presidential politics, more than 30 years before the beginning of his current campaign—but he had gotten the idea to bring this up, he said, from his attorney, his good friend and his closest adviser, Roy Cohn.

That Roy Cohn.

Roy Cohn, the lurking legal hit man for red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose reign of televised intimidation in the 1950s has become synonymous with demagoguery, fear-mongering and character assassination. In the formative years of Donald Trump’s career, when he went from a rich kid working for his real estate-developing father to a top-line dealmaker in his own right, Cohn was one of the most powerful influences and helpful contacts in Trump’s life. [Continue reading…]

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Papal official denies report Sanders invited himself to Vatican

Reuters reports: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was invited to speak at an April 15 Vatican event by the Vatican, a senior papal official said on Friday, denying a report that Sanders had invited himself.

“I deny that. It was not that way,” Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo told Reuters in a telephone interview while he was traveling in New York. Sorondo, a close aide to Pope Francis, is chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is hosting the event.

He said it was his idea to invite Sanders.

A Bloomberg report quoted Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, as saying that Sanders had broken with protocol by failing to contact her office first.

“This is not true and she knows it. I invited him with her consensus,” said Sorondo, who is senior to Archer. [Continue reading…]

Bloomberg reported: Archer, an English social scientist appointed the head the pontifical academy in 2014, said that while she “quite liked” Sanders’s program on paper, his failure to contact her first is a breach of protocol. “The president of the academy organizing this event has not been contacted with monumental discourtesy,” she said, referring to herself. [Continue reading…]

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Mossack Fonseca: Inside the firm that helps the super-rich hide their money

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The Guardian reports: In June 2013, two Swiss lawyers held a private telephone chat. They were annoyed. In London, David Cameron had just given a speech. The prime minister had promised to sweep away decades of offshore “tax secrecy” by introducing a central register. Anybody who owned an offshore company would have to declare it to the authorities.

The G8 summit, to be hosted by Cameron on the shores of Lough Erne, in Northern Ireland, was looming. Top of the agenda: how to stop aggressive tax avoidance.

For much of the 20th century hiding your money was simple. You got a lawyer, filled in a form and set up a Swiss bank account or offshore “shell company”.

Nobody asked questions. For a couple of thousand dollars a year, it was possible to hide away profits where governments could never find them.

But in the UK crown dependencies and overseas territories where financial services were the main source of jobs and income times were changing. In tropical tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands a chill wind – or at least the threat of one – was blowing.

One of the Swiss lawyers was Sandro Hangartner, the Zurich boss of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

The other man, his disgruntled caller, was Sascha Züger. Züger’s company looked after the assets of some very wealthy South Americans.

In an email to his head office in Panama, Hangartner wrote: “Sascha is not very pleased about the development in BVI [British Virgin Islands].”

He was now looking for “alternatives”, Hangartner added – in other words other secret jurisdictions where a client might park their money.

For the network of international lawyers and accountants who serviced the offshore industry, these were troubled times.

Cameron’s speech was merely the latest piece of unwelcome attention. Since 2008, and the global financial crisis, cash-strapped exchequers had been trying to get their hands on billions in potential tax revenue hidden offshore.

How serious these attempts were was a matter for debate.

What wasn’t in doubt were the vast sums involved. According to the US economist Gabriel Zucman, 8% of the world’s wealth – a vast $7.6tn (£5.3tn) – was stashed in tax havens.

Zucman estimates the loss in global tax revenues at $200bn per year. That includes $35bn in the US and $78bn in Europe.

Previous attempts to bring about transparency had flopped. But now the world’s leading economies – the G20, G8 and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – were apparently pursuing the theme with zeal.

If Cameron got his way, British overseas territories such as the BVI and Gibraltar would soon have to draw up a register of beneficial owners – the real owners of a company, even though their name may not appear on the shareholder register. The crown dependencies Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man would fall into line, too. [Continue reading…]

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David Cameron’s trust problem

Therese Raphael writes: U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t lie. He’s not accused of being a tax cheat. Unlike his Icelandic counterpart, he didn’t have financial holdings that presented an obvious conflict of interest. Even so, he’s in trouble.

Cameron is under attack for revelations that he benefited, albeit legally, from shares in a fund his stock-broker father had set up in Panama. Cameron is unlikely to lose his job, as Iceland’s Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson did, but his reputation is taking a hammering. That’s no small problem so soon before a critical vote on European Union membership, in which he is asking Britons to trust his judgement and vote to remain inside the bloc.

The ferocity of this reaction may look odd from outside the U.K. Over in Russia, reports that some $2 billion have been stashed in offshore accounts and shell companies by a group of President Vladimir Putin’s closest friends have received a dismissive collective shrug. Russians expect their leaders to enrich themselves. In Britain, the news that a privileged prime minister made 19,000 pounds ($27,000) with all taxes paid has sparked paroxysms of outrage. [Continue reading…]

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