Category Archives: Lands

Jo Cox was working on report on anti-Muslim attacks before her death

The Guardian reports: Jo Cox, the MP who was killed outside her constituency office on Thursday, was going to warn of an increase in anti-Muslim attacks – particularly against women – it has emerged.

She was planning to address parliament later this month to introduce a report she had been working on with the Islamophobia watchdog Tell Mama (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), the group’s director said. The study is expected to conclude that there were about 80% more attacks on Muslims in Britain in 2015 than the year before.

“She met us to talk about how people could report attacks; particularly women in her constituency,” said the founder and director of Tell Mama, Fiyaz Mughal, on Sunday.

The report is the latest in an annual series on the prevalence of Islamophobic attacks. “We were hoping she would highlight the impact on Muslim women; particularly given the targeting [that exists],” Mughal said. “The majority [of incidents] at street level were [on] women and she was going to raise that.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Sayeeda Warsi, the former chair of the Conservative party, has said she will no longer support the campaign to leave the European Union just days before the referendum, accusing it of “hate and xenophobia”.

Warsi said the positive case for leaving the EU had been neglected by the official campaign, though leading leave campaigners have denied she was ever an active participant in the campaign.

“Why is it people like me, instinctively Eurosceptic who feel the EU needs reform … feel they now have to leave leave?” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. “Because day after day what are we hearing? The refugees are coming, the rapists are coming, the Turks are coming.”

Warsi’s intervention came amid a slew of news around the referendum campaign, with car manufacturers, Richard Branson and premier league football clubs urging a vote for remain. [Continue reading…]

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Venezuelans ransack stores as hunger grips the nation

The New York Times reports: With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.

And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.

In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed. [Continue reading…]

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How did Brazil go from rising BRIC to sinking ship?

By Steven M. Helfand, University of California, Riverside and Antônio Márcio Buainain, Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Most of the headlines in recent weeks have focused on Brazil’s troubling political crisis. But the country is also in the midst of a deep economic recession.

The economy has been shrinking since the second quarter of 2014. It contracted by 3.8 percent in 2015 and is expected to shrink by a similar amount this year. Earlier this month, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said it sees the recession continuing into 2017.

Yet it was only in 2009 – in the middle of the global financial crisis – that the Economist magazine featured a story entitled “Brazil takes off,” with a photo of the Corcovado – the iconic statue of Christ that overlooks Rio de Janeiro – launching like a rocket. That article emphasized why Brazil deserved to be one of the “BRICs” – the rapidly growing economies including Russia, India and China that now account for nearly 25 percent of global GDP.

How could the outlook for Brazil have changed so rapidly? Is this sort of boom and bust unprecedented or a recurring theme in Brazil’s history?

In this article, we provide a historical perspective on the current economic crisis, relying on our own scholarship and years of analysis of the Brazilian economy.

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Why the Western-backed assault on ISIS in Iraq and Syria is failing

Shiraz Maher writes: The first signs of a Western-backed attempt to recapture Raqqa, ­Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, came a fortnight ago when fighter jets dropped leaflets over the city telling residents to leave. “The time has come,” the warnings read, alongside an illustration of residents evacuating the city as incoming forces overran IS fighters.

Although up to half of Raqqa’s residents fled when IS first took control of the city in 2014, the militants have made it ­increasingly difficult for the people who stayed behind to leave. Following the US-led coalition’s warnings of an impending attack, however, the jihadis relaxed their restrictions on movement. Citizens were allowed to disperse into the nearby countryside. The idea was to spare them whatever onslaught was planned against Raqqa while keeping them within IS territory.

Ever since the latest offensive against IS began in Syria and Iraq in late May, it has become clear that the group will not concede territory easily around Raqqa – or elsewhere. It might lose small villages from time to time, but all of its major urban centres remain well fortified. Few observers expect them to fall any day soon. IS has too much invested in Raqqa, as well as Mosul in Iraq. Occupying the cities fuels the group’s prestige by projecting the impression of ­viable statehood and by allowing it to house fighters and military equipment. [Continue reading…]

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Brexit is being driven by English nationalism

Fintan O’Toole writes: The Brexit campaign is fuelled by a mythology of England proudly “standing alone”, as it did against the Spanish armada and Adolf Hitler. But when did England really stand alone? The answer, roughly speaking, is for 300 of the past 1,200 years. England has been a political entity for only two relatively short periods. The first was between the early 10th century, when the first English national kingdom was created by Athelstan, and 1016 when it was conquered by Cnut the Dane. The second was between 1453, when English kings effectively gave up their attempts to rule France, and 1603, when James VI and I united the thrones of England and Scotland.

Otherwise – and this includes all of the past 400 years – England has always been part of at least one larger entity: an Anglo-French kingdom, the United Kingdom in its various forms, a global empire, the European Union. The English are much less used to being left to their own devices than they think they are.

English nationalists can quite reasonably point out that many emerging nation states have even less experience of being a standalone, self-governing entity – my own country, Ireland, being an obvious example. The big difference is that other countries actually go through a process – often very long and difficult – of preparing themselves politically, culturally and emotionally for the scary business of being (to borrow a term from Irish nationalism) “ourselves alone”. In England, there is no process. A decisive step is about to be taken without acknowledging the path ahead. [Continue reading…]

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Why has the far right made West Yorkshire a home?

The Guardian reports: In late January, a column of demonstrators marched in driving sleet through the West Yorkshire town of Dewsbury, chanting: “Britain First, fighting back.”

Although the group has amassed more than 1.4m Facebook likes, greater than any other UK political party, the number of actual boots on the ground for Britain First, a relative newcomer on the far-right scene, was not that impressive. Just 120 supporters assembled to march from the train station to the town hall, escorted by many police and jeered by many residents.

Yesterday Thomas Mair from the West Yorkshire town of Batley, a mile north of Dewsbury, appeared at Westminster magistrates court and was charged with the murder of MP Jo Cox.

There has been considerable speculation that the 52-year-old may have had links to far-right groups. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that an extreme right-wing element has established a disturbing foothold in the post-industrial social landscape of West Yorkshire.

According to experts, at least seven far-right groups united by racist ideologies are active in the region, an area dominated by Leeds and Bradford. Activists pinpoint a hardcore cohort of 100 prominent individuals able to cite the broader backing of thousands of social-media supporters.

Among the far-right organisations in West Yorkshire are the virulently anti-Muslim English Defence League (EDL), which claims to have established “divisions” in Leeds, Huddersfield, Halifax and Dewsbury, along with the British Movement (BM), a small but ultra-violent group considered extreme even by the standards of the British far right.

Other organisations include National Action, a neo-Nazi nationalist youth movement that openly advocates violence and whose strategy document reportedly makes reference to Hitler.

The neo-Nazi National Front, which advocates repatriation for non-whites, has a presence. Anti-racism activists also point to the Britain Democratic Party, a modest organisation founded by a group of former BNP politicians including Andrew Brons, former MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, who has hosted seminars on racial nationalism. The Yorkshire Infidels belong to a regional network of far-right nationalists whose marches have descended into violence. [Continue reading…]

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Jo Cox, Brexit and the politics of hate

Daniel Trilling writes: The main threat of far-right attacks in recent years has come from men acting alone or in small groups. They may sympathize with fascist ideology, or they may have passed through the ranks of a far-right party at some point, but they are not acting on orders.

An attack like this, or a plot for one, is uncovered every few years — rare, but more common than many Britons would like to admit. In June 2015, a member of the neo-Nazi group National Action was convicted of the attempted murder of a South Asian man at a supermarket in Wales. In 2007, a former B.N.P. candidate was jailed for stockpiling explosives in anticipation of a coming “civil war” caused by immigration. In 1999, David Copeland, a neo-Nazi lone wolf, set off three nail bombs in London, targeting the black, gay and South Asian communities, killing three people and injuring more than 100.

These people may act independently, but their behavior and ideas are not shaped in a void. Far more people move through the periphery of far-right politics than formally join a party or organization. The details that have emerged about Mr. Mair’s life place him in this periphery: The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that he was a longtime customer of Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the National Alliance, an American neo-Nazi group. The police have reportedly found Nazi regalia and far-right literature at his house.

Social media has extended the far right’s reach. Sources tell me that Britain First has only a few hundred members. But its Facebook page has more than 1.4 million likes and churns out nationalist, Islamophobic and anti-immigration memes. “Saying UK borders are secure, open to 500 million people,” declares one meme, which displays a photo of the European Union’s flag, “is like saying my home is more secure with the doors and windows left open.” Another shows Muslims praying in the street in London and asks: “Is this what our war heroes died for?” Many of these are widely shared — and they often echo the coverage of immigration and ethnic minorities found in much of the British press.

This points to an uncomfortable truth: Far-right politics cannot be as easily cordoned off from the mainstream as people would like to believe. Fascists attach themselves to popular causes and drag the debate in their direction. Populists and parties of the center take note and then try to appeal to voters susceptible to the far right’s messages by taking xenophobic positions of their own. [Continue reading…]

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Possible link to Jo Cox killing puts U.S. neo-Nazi group back into focus

The Guardian reports: Roaring up the gravel track on a Yamaha Grizzly ATV, Dave Pringle is wearing a long beard, ponytail, a camouflage hunting cap and shorts. His dark blue T-shirt says “Hillary for prison 2016”. His right arm has a tattoo with the words, “molon labe” – the ancient Greek battle cry, “Come and take them”.

Pringle, a gunsmith, is chief of staff at the National Alliance (NA), a fascist group that apparently sold books to Thomas Mair, the man charged with the murder of British MP Jo Cox. On Saturday, speaking to the Guardian over a padlocked gate at the organisation’s 364-acre “campus” in the Appalachian mountains, he denied all knowledge of Mair.

“If he bought the books from Amazon.com, could he be linked to [its founder] Jeff Bezos?” he demanded. “Lots of people buy books. I’ve been buying from New Vanguard [the NA’s propaganda arm] since 1989 and guess how many crimes I’ve committed? Zero.”

Pringle, 47, married with two teenage children, said of Cox’s death: “It’s a terrible thing. She was white, an Englishwoman with two children. What else can I say? Do I agree with her politics? Of course not. Do I think you guys need more Syrians in Britain? No.”

Once the most feared neo-Nazi group in the world, the NA is now something of a spent force. It never recovered from the death in 2002 of its founder, William Pierce, a leading white supremacist who advocated racial apartheid in America and was banned from the UK. His 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, about a survivalist who blows up the FBI and triggers a purge of Jewish and black people to create an Aryan fantasy world, inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and British “nail bomber” David Copeland. It was described by the FBI as “the bible of the racist right”. [Continue reading…]

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Syria is Obama’s shame

Hisham Melhem writes: It was a moral rational Cri de Coeur for taking steps to end the carnage in Syria, but it was also grounded in equally clear and compelling strategic imperatives. For weeks, scores of State Department officers in Washington and in U.S. embassies in the Middle East have been circulating a draft of a sharply critical “dissent cable” of the Obama administration’s fickle policies towards the tragic war in Syria, and forcefully urging the United States to end its dithering and carry out military strikes if necessary to compel the Assad regime to end its systematic mass murder of Syrian civilians.

About two weeks ago the message titled Syria Policy was posted on the “Dissent Channel” signed by fifty one mostly middle ranking and junior officers who worked over the last five years on aspects of Syria policy, and who were exposed to the daily gut-wrenching accounts that came across their desks of the demoralizing and very depressing depredations, mostly from the Assad regime.

The Dissent Channel was set up during the Vietnam War as a vehicle for officers who had strong political and moral disagreements with official policies, to express their dissent to their senior officials without fear of retaliation.

Although the military recommendations in the dissent message are thoughtful and the signatories believe that “perhaps most critically, a more muscular military posture under U.S. leadership would underpin and propel a new and reinvigorated diplomatic initiative,” it is very unlikely that President Obama, who pursued half-heartedly and with stunning detachment several tentative, incomplete and contradictory approaches to Syria will fundamentally alter his current policy, which involves only criticizing the Assad policies but steering away from undermining him or his regime, and focus instead on containing the threat of ISIS. [Continue reading…]

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Former Ambassador Robert Ford on the State Department mutiny on Syria

Robin Wright: What does the letter of dissent reflect?

Former Ambassador Robert Ford: Frustration at the State Department has come to a boil. People don’t write in the Dissent Channel every day. The cessation of hostilities in Syria has broken down completely. The bombings of hospitals in Aleppo and Idlib are a violation of every human norm — and that’s not including the barrel bombs and the chemical weapons. The effort to get a political deal is going nowhere. The Assad government has refused to make any serious concessions. It won’t let in food aid, in violation of U.N. resolutions. And the Americans are watching it all happen. So the Dissent Channel message is a reflection of frustration by the people who are responsible for conducting policy on the ground. I felt that way when I left—and that was after Geneva II, in January-February, 2014.

The existing policy is failing and will continue to fail. Why? I don’t sense, in the message, dissent from the strategic objective, which is a negotiated settlement of the Syrian civil war, but I sense a sharp disagreement with the tactics the Administration is or is not using. The dissent message says that, without greater pressure on the Assad government, it will be impossible to secure the compromises necessary to win a political agreement and end the war. The message says that the Administration needs to reconsider tactics to generate that pressure.

We all learned from Iraq that regime change is not the way to bring about positive political change. In the case of civil war, there needs to be negotiation between the opposition and the government. The question is how you increase the likelihood that it will succeed. And ever since Secretary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov concluded the communiqué, in June, 2012, Administration policy has failed to create the conditions necessary to succeed. [Continue reading…]

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A war of brothers in Iraq: ‘I will kill him with my own hands’

The New York Times reports: In the days leading up to the storming of Falluja by Iraqi forces, Brig. Gen. Hadi Razaij, the leading Sunni police commander in the campaign, sat on a cot in an abandoned house near the front line. He described the resistance that lay ahead: a determined force of hundreds of jihadists that had months to prepare.

General Razaij’s presence on the battlefield shows that local Sunnis, and not just the Shiite forces that now dominate Iraqi politics, are fighting to liberate their own communities, and has helped tamp down fears that the battle for Falluja would heighten sectarian tensions.

He was dispassionate as he described the challenges, but for him the fight was personal, too. General Razaij’s brother stands accused of being a member of the Islamic State and is in a prison cell after being arrested at a checkpoint with a car full of explosives.

In northern Iraq, Nofal Hammadi, the governor-in-exile of Mosul, is working with the United States to plan for that city’s liberation from the Islamic State. He, too, has family in the fight: Mr. Hammadi’s brother is an Islamic State official, having appeared in a video pledging his allegiance to the terror group and disowning his brother.

Even as the central question of Iraq remains unanswered — whether the country’s Sunni minority and Shiite majority can ever peacefully coexist in a unified state — the experiences of General Razaij, Mr. Hammadi and others add a troubling corollary: It is not clear that Iraq’s divided Sunnis will ever be able to find peace among themselves after a conflict that in many ways is playing out as a war within families.

After all, when Iraqi Sunnis talk about fighting the Islamic State, it is not a discussion of some shadowy and unknowable force. It is about sons and brothers, nephews and neighbors. [Continue reading…]

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Troubled. Quiet. Macho. Angry. The volatile life of the Orlando shooter

The Washington Post reports: After a lifetime of angst and embarrassment, Omar Mateen was on the verge of realizing a longtime dream in the spring of 2007.

He was about to graduate from a Florida training academy that would put him on a path to being a police officer. He had left behind his youth as a pudgy, often-bullied kid to become a bulked-up bodybuilder. He was learning how to shoot a gun. Now it was all about to fall apart.

At a class barbecue, Mateen told a fellow cadet he was “allergic” to pork, and he got teased about it. Mateen blew up, recalled several cadets who were present, and said he couldn’t eat anything off the grill.

“I asked him if he was Muslim and he denied it,” Roy Wolf said. “I said, ‘It doesn’t matter to me if you are.’ . . . He got mad, really angry.”

A short while later — just a week after the Virginia Tech shooting that left 32 victims dead — Mateen asked a classmate whether he would report him if he brought a gun to campus, documents show. The next thing students knew, Mateen had been kicked out of the academy for a pattern of sleeping in class, plus the gun threat, which officials described in documents as “at best extremely disturbing.”

Mateen was never charged, and so the incident became one more anecdote in a life punctuated by many such moments, outbursts when his insecurities and inner conflict erupted into rage — a pattern culminating Sunday at a gay nightclub in Orlando in the worst shooting in U.S. history.

Mateen appeared conflicted about his religion and his sexuality, according to dozens of interviews with those who knew him. He married twice, each time to a woman he had met online, even though he also seemed drawn to gay life and culture. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian court sentences two Al Jazeera employees to death

The Associated Press reports: An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced six people, including two Al-Jazeera employees, to death for allegedly passing documents related to national security to Qatar and the Doha-based TV network during the rule of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

Morsi, the top defendant, and two of his aides were sentenced to 25 years in prison for membership in the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood group but were acquitted of espionage, a capital offense. Morsi and his secretary, Amin el-Sirafy, each received an additional 15-year sentence for leaking official documents. El-Sirafy’s daughter, Karima, was also sentenced to 15 years on the same charge.

Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected leader, was ousted by the military in July 2013 and has already been sentenced to death in another case. That death sentence and another two – life and 20 years in prison – are under appeal. The Brotherhood was banned and declared a terrorist organization after his ouster. Khalid Radwan, a producer at a Brotherhood-linked TV channel, received a 15-year prison sentence. [Continue reading…]

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Norway pledges to become climate neutral by 2030

The Guardian reports: Norway’s parliament has approved a radical goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2030, two decades earlier than planned.

On Tuesday night MPs voted for an accelerated programme of CO2 cuts and carbon trading to offset emissions from sectors such as Norway’s oil and gas industries, which are unlikely to be phased out in the near future.

The minority government’s ruling Progress and Conservative parties withdrew their support for the motion at the last minute. But their argument, that ambitious emissions reductions now could interfere with future climate negotiations, was roundly defeated.

Rasmus Hansson, the leader of the Norwegian Green party in parliament, said: “This is a direct response to the commitments Norway took on by ratifying the Paris agreement and means that we will have to step up our climate action dramatically. ‘2050’ is science fiction. ‘2030’ is closer to us now than the year 2000.”

The high profile climate motion followed a zero deforestation parliamentary vote earlier this month, which made Norway the first nation to ban public procurements that contribute to rainforest destruction. [Continue reading…]

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Jo Cox murder suspect tells court his name is ‘death to traitors, freedom for Britain’; new indications of Britain First ties

A photo of anti-Muslim protesters in Dewsbury which includes a man resembling Thomas Mair was posted on the Britain First Facebook page in October 2015. The man's identity has yet to be established.

A photo of anti-Muslim protesters in Dewsbury including a man resembling Thomas Mair was posted on the Britain First Facebook page in October 2015. The man’s identity has yet to be established.


The anti-Muslim, extreme right-wing, Britain First party, has disavowed any connection to Thomas Mair, the man who has been charged with murdering British MP Jo Cox.

When Mair appeared in Westminster magistrates court in London today, he answered the judge’s request to confirm his name by saying: “My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

The Guardian also reports:

The prosecution told the court that Mair told police he was “a political activist” as he was being arrested moments after the fatal attack. This assertion was repeated in a summary of crime released by the prosecution.

Mair also allegedly said “this is for Britain” and “keep Britain independent” as he stabbed and shot the MP for Batley and Spen, prosecutors said both in court and in their printed outline of the case.

Police searching Mair’s property found newspaper articles related to Cox, as well as far-right and white supremacist literature, they claimed.

Whatever assessment is made of Mair’s mental health, there seems to be no question that this was a politically motivated murder.

Witnesses to the murder reported that Mair shouted “Britain first” while attacking Cox.

The photograph above (which is circulating on social media) shows members of Britain First’s Northern Brigade in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, just three miles away from Birstall where Cox was murdered. Whether the man in the baseball cap is indeed Mair remains unknown. But there is mounting evidence of Mair’s long-standing ties to right-wing extremism in the form of Nazi regalia found in his home along with literature on how to construct homemade guns and explosives.

Britain First recently organized an “activist training camp” in North Wales where its members “learned things including self-defence, martial arts, knife defence,” according to a report at WalesOnline.

In March, Britain First made clear its deadly hostility to EU supporters:

Deputy leader, Jayda Fransen, admonished their “pro-EU, Islamist-loving opponents” for “ruining our country”.

She added: “They think they can get away with ruining our country, turning us into a Third World country, giving away our homes, jobs and heritage, but they will face the wrath of the Britain First movement, make no mistake about it!

“We will not rest until every traitor is punished for their crimes against our country.

“And by punished, I mean good old fashioned British justice at the end of a rope!”

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England and Wales are in the midst of a working-class revolt

John Harris writes: For the last five days I have been driving around England and Wales, filming scores of people as they talk about which way they’ll vote in the European Union referendum.

From ardent leavers in Merthyr Tydfil and undecided people on the English-Welsh borders to university students in Manchester who were 95% for remain, my Guardian colleague John Domokos and I have sampled just about every shade of opinion, and soaked up an atmosphere of often passionate political engagement. If a common journalistic pose is to roll one’s eyes and pronounce oneself impossibly bored with the whole thing, that is not where most people are at all.

Hardly anybody talks about the official campaigns, and the most a mention of the respective figureheads of each camp tends to elicit is a dismissive tut – but just about everyone agrees that this is a fantastically important moment, and a litmus test of the national mood.

What must David Cameron make of it all? This story is unfolding, let’s not forget, because of his ludicrous belief that a referendum might somehow definitively address the EU-related divisions in his own party and the public at large – as if a month or so of political knockabout under Queensberry rules could sort everything out, and the country could then go back to normal.

Fat chance, obviously: he now finds his Eurosceptic foes emboldened by a sense that many Conservative voters are on their side, while politicians of all parties – and Labour people in particular – are gripped by something that has been simmering away for the best part of a decade. To quote the opinion pollsters Populus: “Both socioeconomic groups C2 and DE disproportionately back the UK leaving the EU.” To be a little more dramatic about it, now that Scotland has been through its political reformation, England and Wales are in the midst of a working-class revolt. [Continue reading…]

 

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Russia bombs U.S.-backed Syrian rebels near Jordan border

CNN reports: Russian warplanes bombed U.S. backed Syrian rebels near the Jordanian border, Pentagon officials say, causing the U.S. to divert armed aircraft to the scene of the strike.

The strikes, which the U.S. says killed some New Syrian Army troops, occurred about six miles from the Jordanian border, according to a U.S. defense official. The U.S. diverted armed FA-18s to the area after the first round of two strikes, and the pilots then tried to call the Russians on a previously agreed-upon pilot-to-pilot communications channel but did not receive an answer.
As soon as the U.S. jets left the area to refuel, the Russians came back for another round of bombing, the defense official said.
“Russian aircraft conducted a series of airstrikes near al-Tanf against Syrian counter-ISIL forces that included individuals who have received U.S. support. Russian aircraft have not been active in this area of Southern Syria for some time, and there were no Syrian regime or Russian ground forces in the vicinity,” a senior defense official said. “Russia’s latest actions raise serious concern about Russian intentions. We will seek an explanation from Russia on why it took this action and assurances this will not happen again.” [Continue reading…]

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Mainstream politicians ‘clueless on migration debate,’ says Jo Cox’s husband

The Guardian reports: The husband of Jo Cox plans to continue with a project that aims to build an international alliance to combat “the dangerous breeding ground” of economic insecurity on which the populist right has fed across European politics.

Brendan Cox has let it be known that he is determined to continue with the work in memory of his wife, who was killed on Thursday, but believes this will only succeed if lessons can be learned from why the right has so far taken the initiative on the migration issue.

In a paper he has circulated – and asked the Guardian to quote from – Cox argues that one of the problems is that those hostile to refugees are better organised, more focused on galvanising public opinion, and better at tapping into human emotions, including over wider economic insecurities.

Mainstream politicians, he writes, “in most cases are clueless on how to deal with the public debate. Petrified by the rise of the populists they try to neuter them by taking their ground and aping their rhetoric. Far from closing down the debates, these steps legitimise their views, reinforce their frames and pull the debate further to the extremes (Sarkozy and the continuing rise of Front National is a case in point).” [Continue reading…]

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