Category Archives: News

56 percent of Americans disapprove of FBI decision to exonerate Hillary Clinton

The Washington Post reports: A majority of Americans reject the FBI’s recommendation against charging Hillary Clinton with a crime for her State Department e-mail practices and say the issue raises concerns about how she might perform her presidential duties, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Six in 10 voters say the outcome will have no impact on their vote this November, even as those who do largely say it discourages them from backing the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Last week’s decision by FBI Director James B. Comey resulted in the Justice Department’s decision that Clinton would not face criminal prosecution which could have derailed her presidential bid. But Comey’s sharp critique of Clinton’s email practices and systematic dismantling of her public defenses stocked critics with fresh ammunition for the general election campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Tony Blair could face contempt of parliament motion over Iraq war

The Guardian reports: Tony Blair could face a motion of contempt in the House of Commons over the 2003 invasion of Iraq – a motion that Jeremy Corbyn has said he would probably support.

The Conservative MP David Davis, backed by the SNP’s Alex Salmond, has said he will present on Thursday the motion accusing the former prime minister of misleading parliament. MPs could debate the issue before the summer if it is accepted by the Commons Speaker, John Bercow.

Sir John Chilcot said in his long-awaited report on the Iraq invasion that the legal basis for the war was reached in a way that was “far from satisfactory”, but he did not explicitly say the war was illegal.

Davis told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that the motion would say Blair held the house in contempt over the 2003 invasion. He said that if his motion was accepted by Bercow it could be debated before parliament’s summer recess.

Davis said: “It’s a bit like contempt of court, essentially by deceit. If you look just at the debate alone, on five different grounds the house was misled – three in terms of the weapons of mass destruction, one in terms of the UN votes were going, and one in terms of the threat, the risks. He might have done one of those accidentally, but five?”

Salmond said he believed Corbyn’s support would mean the motion had enough cross-party support. “No parliament worth its salt tolerates being misled,” Scotland’s former first minister told ITV’s Peston on Sunday.

He said Blair’s promise to George Bush that he would be “with you, whatever” meant Blair had been “saying one thing to George W Bush in private, and a totally different thing to parliament and people in public”. He said Blair’s actions were “a parliamentary crime, and it’s time for parliament to deliver the verdict”. [Continue reading…]

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Brexit causes resurgence in pro-EU leanings across continent

The Guardian reports: Two weeks after Britain’s EU referendum, Europe has defied predictions that the UK’s vote to leave would inspire a surge in copycat breakaway movements, with establishment parties enjoying gains and populists dropping points in the polls.

In Germany, the Brexit aftermath has seen Angela Merkel’s popularity ratings surge to a 10-month high, almost returning to the level the chancellor enjoyed before the height of the refugee crisis last September. An Infratest Dimap poll published on Friday also marks a two percentage point gain for Merkel’s party, the centre-right CDU, and a one point gain for the centre-left Social Democratic party.

Rightwing populist party Alternative für Deutschland, meanwhile, has seen its ratings drop by three percentage points to 11%. The anti-refugee party’s struggles may lie in its leader’s failure to contain an internal rift over an antisemitism scandal.

“The Brexit debate has fostered a more pro-European climate among the German population,” said Infratest Dimap’s managing director Michael Kunert. “The government is profiting from this trend while populist, eurosceptic parties are suffering.”

In the Netherlands, seen as one of the countries that could potentially follow Britain’s example, support for the Freedom party of far-right politician Geert Wilders has fallen to its lowest level since last autumn. One poll suggests Wilders could win 30 out of the 150 seats in parliament if an election were held now, three fewer than a week ago, though his party remains the most popular in the fragmented Dutch political landscape. [Continue reading…]

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After Brexit vote, immigrants feel a town turn against them

The New York Times reports: A few days after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Monika Baginski was in a supermarket, chatting with a friend on the phone in her native Polish, when a man followed her down the aisle. “You foreigner,” Ms. Baginski recalled him saying. “You’ll be out soon.”

Ms. Baginski, 32, said she was stunned. Until that moment, she had never been the target of abuse, even in Boston, a port town on the east coast of England where rancor between longtime residents and the fast-growing population of recent immigrants has been simmering for years.

But since Britain’s referendum vote to leave the European Union, latent hostility toward the new arrivals — most of whom came to Boston from Central and Eastern Europe under rules that let European Union citizens live and work anywhere in the bloc — has burst into the open, many immigrants say. Many in the Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Romanian communities in the area are anxiously considering whether they should stay in Britain, or whether they even want to.

“Something is broken in this town,” said Paul Gleeson, a Labour Party councilor in Boston, where 76 percent of voters supported leaving the European Union, the highest pro-“Brexit” proportion in the country. “This veneer of propriety has suddenly disappeared.’’

In this new environment, some immigrants say they have stopped speaking their native tongue in public. Nervous mothers say they worry about their children being bullied at school. Young immigrants say they fear discrimination over jobs and university admissions.

Gregory Pacho, who is Polish-Italian, runs a thriving taxi company. For the first time in the 16 years he has lived in Boston, he said, he has given serious thought to moving out, prompted by a leaflet on his car’s windshield that read, “Did you pack your bags yet?” [Continue reading…]

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With a hint of regret, Obama describes new kind of endless quasi-war

The Washington Post reports: President Obama, who had pledged to end America’s wars, described the landscape he was leaving to his successor as a state of quasi-war that could extend for years to come.

Obama, who was speaking Saturday to reporters at the NATO summit here, noted with pride that he has cut the size of the U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan from 180,000 troops to fewer than 15,000.

But U.S. drones and fighter jets are striking targets in seven countries on a regular basis, a span of geography that is virtually unprecedented in American history outside of major wars. U.S. Special Operations forces are still conducting dangerous raids in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. [Continue reading…]

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War reporter Marie Colvin was tracked, targeted and killed by Assad’s forces, family says

The Washington Post reports: American war correspondent Marie Colvin was deliberately targeted and killed by artillery fire in 2012 at the direction of senior Syrian military officers seeking to silence her reporting on civilian casualties in the besieged city of Homs, according to a civil lawsuit filed Saturday on behalf of her sister and other heirs.

Based on information from high-level defectors and captured government documents, the 32-page complaint alleges that the military was able to electronically intercept Colvin’s communications from a clandestine media center operating out of an apartment in the densely populated Baba Amr neighborhood in Homs. Syrian officials paired the intercepts with detailed information from a female informant to pinpoint the location of the reporter who worked for the Sunday Times of London.

Then, the suits says, military forces under the direction of President Bashar al-Assad’s brother, Maher, commander of Syrian army’s 4th Armored Division, launched a series of “bracketing” artillery attacks that came progressively closer to the media center, a classic artillery targeting tactic. [Continue reading…]

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The bomb Dallas police used to kill alleged shooter

Lily Hay Newman writes: Three suspects have been apprehended after Thursday night’s Dallas shooting, which resulted in the death of five police officers and injured six more, plus one civilian. Following a prolonged standoff and negotiation with police, one suspect was killed by an explosion detonated by a bomb robot.

Robots have been proliferating in local policing over the last few years. The technology was largely developed for military and large-scale disaster response scenarios, but has obvious applications in local policing as well. It is used to diffuse or detonate bombs, scout locations with cameras, work in rubble, and do other jobs that are dangerous for officers. The Dallas shooting appears to be the first time a police robot has been used to kill.

Dallas police chief David Brown explained in a press conference Friday morning:

We cornered one suspect and we tried to negotiate for several hours. Negotiations broke down, we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect, we saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was. Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb.

The suspect who was killed claimed that he had planted bombs in the area, but the New York Times reports that officials said they swept the area and didn’t find any. The explosive the robot was carrying that killed the suspect was a police explosive. [Continue reading…]

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Death toll from Sunday Baghdad bombing nears 300

The Wall Street Journal reports: The death toll from the deadliest single car bombing in Baghdad since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has reached at least 292 people, Iraq’s health ministry said Thursday.

The attack by Islamic State, which also wounded more than 200 others, struck the Iraqi capital’s busiest commercial areas early Sunday as shoppers and diners crowded the streets following the daily dawn-to-dusk fasting that marks the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. On Monday, authorities said 151 people had been killed in the blast.

Islamic State said its attack in the Karrada district targeted Shiite Muslims, whom it regards as apostates. It was the Sunni Muslim extremist group’s first major attack on the city since Iraqi forces ousted it from Fallujah in late June. [Continue reading…]

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‘Brave New World’: Russia’s new anti-terrorism legislation

Anna Borshchevskaya writes: On June 7, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed controversial anti-terrorism legislation known in Russia as the “Yarovaya law,” named after its leading co-author, prominent member of Putin’s United Russia party Irina Yarovaya.

The law is reminiscent of Soviet-era surveillance. It will also likely contribute to crippling the Russian economy. According to Russian and Western sources, it allows for jailing children as young as 14 for a variety of vaguely-worded reasons, and significantly raises the costs of internet and telecommunications. Russia’s human rights activists and opposition politicians described the law as “unconstitutional.” Russia’s Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights urged Putin not to sign the law.

“Hello, brave new world with expensive Internet, with jails for children, with global surveillance and prison terms for non-snitching,” wrote politician Dmitry Gudkov in his Facebook page after Putin signed the law. Gudkov, one of Russia’s few real opposition parliamentarians, was outspoken in June and urged his colleagues to vote against the law last month. The Duma (lower house of parliament) began the discussion of the bill in May of this year and both the upper and lower houses of parliament approved the bill in late June without genuine debate on the issue.

Among other things, reportedly, the law requires Internet and telecom providers to store recordings of all of their customers’ data and communications for six months. In addition, the law requires them to store all metadata for three years. Russia’s Federal Security Services (FSB) would have access to this information and, as Gudkov pointed out in June, it may easily leak into the black market. This requirement, according to Russia’s cellphone providers, for example, will increase costs for consumers at least two- to three-fold.

The law also introduces criminal liability for “failure to report a crime” that someone “has been planning, is perpetrating, or has perpetrated.” Moreover, under the new law, children as young as 14 can face up to a year in prison for such a “failure” and for other reasons related to extremism, terrorism and participation in massive riots (all of which can be virtually anything in Russia, since the law is vague). As Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director Human Rights Watch Russia program director pointed out in June before Putin signed the law, “it’s not clear what ‘planning’ stands for or what level of knowledge needs to be proved to hold a person liable.” Such ambiguity is the hallmark of Russia’s laws in the last several years when Putin began a massive crackdown on Russia’s civil society when he returned to his third presidential term in 2012 amidst the largest protests since the break-up of the Soviet Union. [Continue reading…]

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The era of the angry voter is upon us

Der Spiegel reports: Paula Heap and Joel Coe live 6,400 kilometers apart. They don’t even know each other, but they share the same sense of outrage.

She voted for Brexit and he intends to vote for Donald Trump in November. She hails from Preston, a city in northwest England that never truly recovered from the decline of the textiles industry. He’s an American from the small town of Red Boiling Springs in northern Tennessee. His textiles factory, Racoe Inc., is the last of its kind still in business in the area.

It’s Heap’s view that globalization has created a lot of winners and a lot of losers, and that Preston is among the losers. She describes the EU as an “empire” that regulates her electric water kettle but doesn’t create any prosperity. She’s riled by the many immigrants, saying the pressure on the labor market and the health system is increasing. “We want to retain control over immigration,” she says.

Heap is a career advisor, whose motto could be “Make the UK great again,” to borrow a line from Donald Trump’s US presidential election campaign.

Coe, the Trump backer with bulky upper arms and a bushy, reddish beard, blames the NAFTA free trade agreement for the fact that jobs in his industry have been relocated from Tennessee to Mexico. A little bit more of the America of the clattering sewing machines — which are still standing behind him, operated by around 50 women who sew jackets and pants for the US military — disappears each year.

Coe says he plans to vote for trump because the candidate has “never been a politician.” Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been “bought by large corporations and is corrupt.” He says if Trump weren’t in the picture, he would probably vote for Bernie Sanders. Both candidates, he says, are running against “the system.”

He says he doesn’t know a lot about Britain, but he has the feeling that the British vote against the EU is somehow related to his own battle. “It’s good that Britain is leaving the EU,” he says. “Each country has its own identity.”

The phenomenon of the angry voter currently appears to be making significant strides toward conquering Western democracies at the moment. The outrage is directed against elites in politics and in the business community, against the established political parties, against the “mainstream media,” against free trade and, of course, against immigration. Many Brexiteers are among these angry voters, as are Trump supporters in the United States or Le Pen voters in France.

“Take back control” was one of the main slogans used by Brexit supporters in the United Kingdom. It could stand is as the cry for help from angry voters all around the world. In an era when increasingly complex free trade agreements or unknown EU commissioners are determining peoples’ own living conditions, voters once again yearn for borders, national legislative control and closed economies.

It’s a phenomenon that didn’t just pop up yesterday. But the rage has reached a boiling point this year, fueled by the financial and euro crises, by destabilization in the Middle East and the refugee flows it has spawned, by the rise of China and by the deindustrialization that has taken place in recent decades in many Western countries. In the Internet, this rage has found a forum where it can thrive. [Continue reading…]

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Van Rompuy: UK must accept free movement to stay in single market

The Guardian interviewed the former EU leader Herman Van Rompuy: Negotiations would be very difficult “because we have conflicting interests”, he said. He stressed that this was “nothing to do with punishment or revenge”, but the UK and the 27 other EU member states had different priorities. “The starting point for each of them is their own interests and the interests are at this stage … rather far away.”

Van Rompuy’s stance reflects the position agreed by 27 EU leaders last week, at a historic summit, where the UK had no place at the table. But other European politicians have raised hopes that compromise on free movement of people is in the offing. Alain Juppé, the frontrunner in France’s presidential elections, told the Financial Times that everything was up for negotiation.

Brussels-based insiders read Juppé’s remarks in a different way. “That doesn’t mean we compromise on basic principles,” said one senior national diplomat, adding that it would be “a mistake” for the UK to rely on talks with small groups of countries.

“It would make the position of the 27 more difficult to formulate and could lead to misunderstandings and illusions on the British side, and would prolong negative consequences,” he said.

Contrary to the claims of leave campaigners, Van Rompuy said Britain had more to lose than the EU from the breakup. “Europe is much more important to the British economy than the British economy is important to the 27,” he said.

Around 45% of British exports go to other EU countries, while the UK buys 16% of the EU27’s exported goods. [Continue reading…]

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In shadow of Brexit, NATO will sound message of unity against Russia

The New York Times reports: Polish leaders have been waiting for years for a NATO summit meeting that would recognize what, to them, is a self-evident reality: that the proper way to respond to an increasingly pugnacious Russia is to plant more alliance troops and weaponry along the eastern front.

But now that this is actually expected to happen during NATO’s two-day gathering here this week, the question is whether — with Britain’s startling exit from the European Union sucking up all the political oxygen — anyone will even notice.

“Militarily, this summit will be about strengthening forces along the eastern front,” said Michal Baranowski, director of the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund. “Politically, it’s a Brexit summit.”

The gathering here on Friday and Saturday — drawing every major leader in the trans-Atlantic alliance, including President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — will be the largest NATO summit meeting in history, with 28 delegations from European Union countries, 26 from other nations, and representatives from the United Nations and the World Bank.

Much of what is expected to be adopted has already been agreed upon in earlier meetings of foreign and defense ministers — “It is pre-cooked,” as Mr. Baranowski put it — so attention is likely to focus instead on how alliance members, including Britain, make an ostentatious show of Western unity despite the shadow of “Brexit” and the weakening of the European Union. [Continue reading…]

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Chilcot condemns Blair’s behaviour, but declines to accuse him of lying

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

Seven years after it was commissioned and 13 years after the Iraq War began, the Iraq Inquiry’s report on Britain’s part in the invasion has been published – and the fallout has begun.

The headlines are already an excoriating verdict on Tony Blair’s actions before, during, and after the invasion: Crushing Verdict on Blair and the Iraq War, Iraq Invasion “Not Last Resort”. And yet, in a most British way, an upper limit has still been imposed on the criticism, first and foremost by Sir John Chilcot and his committee.

Faced with the politics as well as the evidence – dare anyone put Blair in a position to face war crimes charges, or even dare to accuse him of abusing his power? – Chilcot steered clear of the L-word.

In fact, the word “lie” does not appear once in the Executive Summary. The only time that “lying” is used refers not to Blair, but to Saddam Hussein: “When Iraq denied that it had retained any WMD capabilities, the UK Government accused it of lying.” Nowhere does the report invoke a more colourful, if politer, formulation of the conclusion: that the intelligence for the invasion was “sexed up” on the orders of the prime minister’s office.

As David Cameron said of the report after its release: “Deliberate deceit? I can’t find a reference to it.”

So how does Chilcot manage to pull off this balancing act, going just far enough in the criticism to chide Blair while not opening up the full extent of the former prime minister’s actions?

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Unconditional commitment to war in Iraq: ‘I will be with you whatever,’ Blair told Bush

The Associated Press reports: Letters published by the U.K.’s Iraq War Inquiry show that then-Prime Minister Tony Blair assured U.S. President George W. Bush of his support for regime change in Iraq eight months before the U.S.-led invasion began in March 2003.

The report by retired civil servant John Chilcot offered a sweeping condemnation of Britain’s preparations for the war and its aftermath. The newly published documents offer one side of the vital relationship between Bush and Blair — Blair’s letters to Bush are published, but Bush’s responses are not.

In a six-page “Secret Personal” memo to Bush written July 28, 2002, Blair says he would do “whatever” with regards to removing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain from power. Blair says toppling Saddam is “the right thing to do” adding that the important question is “not when, but how.”

At the time, Blair was telling the British public and Parliament that no decision to go to war against Iraq had been made.

“I will be with you whatever,” Blair wrote to his U.S. counterpart. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s latest move to delay end of war in Afghanistan

The Daily Beast reports: President Obama announced Wednesday yet another delay in his plan to wind down the war in Afghanistan, saying 8,400 troops would remain there for a list of enemies that has grown from al Qaeda to the Taliban and now to the so-called Islamic State.

But many in the Pentagon are concerned that the president’s new plan isn’t much of a strategy at all. It’s just a holding action, to hopefully keep a lid on Afghanistan until after the election.

“There is no desire to end the war in Afghanistan. There is a desire to keep it off the front pages and make it a problem for the next administration,” as one Pentagon official explained to The Daily Beast.

The U.S. had planned to keep 5,500 troops through the end of the year. At first glance, the change in number may not have seemed particularly significant; the president added only 2,400 troops to the number of forces that will be in Afghanistan by the end of his presidency. But the fact the U.S. had to slow down its withdrawal from its longest war ever was a major acknowledgement by the administration that the U.S. has yet to train local forces that can successfully stop a burgeoning Taliban and the jihadists protected by them. In other words, the cornerstone of the American effort in Afghanistan was still shaky, a decade and a half into the war. [Continue reading…]

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Tony Blair demonstrates once again how he took Britain to war in Iraq

Anne Perkins writes: Prime ministers blamed for catastrophic diplomatic failure tend to go quietly to their country houses to grow roses. Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, paralysed by fear of the cost of war then blamed for failing to rearm in the 1930s, Anthony Eden for the lying deception of Suez in the 1950s, retreated entirely from public life.

In contrast, Tony Blair, although no longer the representative of the Middle East quartet, has a sports foundation, a faith foundation, an Africa governance initiative, a climate change initiative, and of course Tony Blair Associates, whose earnings fund them all.

The criticisms of the Chilcot report were familiar to him from the privileged access given months ago so that he could challenge the conclusions. They had been trawled over by him and, no doubt, his lawyers. Thus, soon after Chilcot had made his statement, at about the time Rose Gentle was accusing him of murdering her son at the press conference for the families, Blair’s office was ready with a rebuttal, insisting the report had exonerated him of all charges of falsification, deception and a secret war pact with George W Bush.

A couple of hours later, in the mid-afternoon, Blair himself launched his press conference with an expression of responsibility for the Iraq war, for which he felt “more sorrow and regret and apology … than you can ever believe”. He looked, and sounded, utterly stricken.

It feels cheap at such a time to doubt someone’s sincerity. But I have seen him look stricken before – and like millions of other voters, I don’t trust him any more. [Continue reading…]

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Reporter calls out Donald Trump’s son-in-law over anti-Semitism

The New York Times reports: On Tuesday morning, Dana Schwartz, a culture reporter for The New York Observer, sent a pitch to the paper’s editor in chief.

After posting a message on Twitter criticizing Donald J. Trump for using an image of Hillary Clinton with a shape resembling the Star of David and a pile of cash, Ms. Schwartz spent the Fourth of July weekend getting trolled by anti-Semitic Trump supporters.

Now she wanted to write about the experience.

“I feel an obligation to use whatever platform is available to me to bring that hatred out of the shadows, acknowledging it and discussing it,” Ms. Schwartz wrote to the editor, Ken Kurson.

Mr. Kurson responded swiftly, she said, with a single word: “Go.”

He didn’t see the piece until it was published online. It may not have been what Mr. Kurson was expecting.

It did not simply criticize Mr. Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters. It called out Mr. Trump’s Orthodox Jewish son-in-law and de facto campaign manager, Jared Kushner — the owner of The Observer. [Continue reading…]

Kushner released a statement in response to Schwartz’s letter, saying:

My father-in-law is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife. I know that Donald does not at all subscribe to any racist or anti-semitic thinking. I have personally seen him embrace people of all racial and religious backgrounds. The suggestion that he may be intolerant is not reflective of the Donald Trump I know.

Unable to face such a courageous expression of dissent from an employee, Kushner (or his loyal underlings) removed Schwartz’s letter from the Observer — but it can still be read here.

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