Yussef Dayes (drums) and Kamaal Williams (keyboards)
Music: Yussef Kamaal — ‘Calligraphy’
Following latest terrorist attack in UK, Trump remains silent
The Guardian reports: A man has died and eight others have been injured after a van ploughed into a group of people near a north London mosque in an attack police are treating as terrorism.
A 48-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Two people hit by the van were said to be “very seriously injured”.
The prime minister, Theresa May, who was woken to be told of the early morning attack in Finsbury Park, said in a statement from Downing Street that the “hatred and evil” of the kind seen in the attack would never succeed.
May said the attack had “once again targeted the ordinary and the innocent going about their daily lives – this time, British Muslims as they left a mosque, having broken their fast and prayed together at this sacred time of year”.
She added: “Today we come together, as we have done before, to condemn this act and to state once again that hatred and evil of this kind will never succeed.”
May said the attack on Muslims was “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as the recent string of attacks apparently motivated by Islamist extremism, adding: “We will stop at nothing to defeat it.”
It is the fourth terrorist attack to hit the UK in the past three months. [Continue reading…]
Time between London van attack by Muslims & angry Trump tweet: 1 hour
Time between London van attack killing Muslims & any Trump tweet….?
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) June 19, 2017
17-year-old Muslim girl assaulted and killed after leaving Virginia mosque
The Washington Post reports: Police found remains Sunday thought to be those of a missing Virginia teenager who they say was assaulted and disappeared overnight after leaving a mosque in the Sterling area, and a 22-year-old man has been charged with murder in connection with the case.
The mosque, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) in Sterling, and relatives identified the girl as 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen of Reston.
Fairfax County police identified the man charged with murder in her death as Darwin Martinez Torres of Sterling.
According to accounts from police and a mosque official, a group of four or five teens were walking back from breakfast at IHOP early Sunday when they were confronted by a motorist. All but one of the teens ran to the mosque, where the group reported that the girl had been left behind, according to Deputy Aleksandra Kowalski, a spokeswoman for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.
“Immediately thereafter, the ADAMS’ personnel notified both Loudoun County and Fairfax County authorities who immediately began an extensive search to locate the missing girl,” the mosque said in a statement. [Continue reading…]
Tillerson’s latest blow in his on-going assault on the State Dept targets minorities and women
The Washington Post reports: Dozens of young minority and female State Department recruits received startling and unwelcome news last week: They would not be able to soon join the Foreign Service despite having been promised that opportunity. Their saga is just the latest sign that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s rush to slash the size of the State Department without a plan is harming diplomacy and having negative unintended effects.
The recruits, who are part of the State Department’s Rangel and Pickering fellowship programs, have already completed two years of graduate-level education at U.S. taxpayers’ expense plus an internship, often in a foreign country. The deal they struck with the federal government was that after completing their educations they would be given an inside track to become full-fledged U.S. diplomats abroad if they also satisfied medical and security requirements. In turn, they promised to commit at least five years to the Foreign Service.
These minority and female candidates already went through a competitive application process, meaning they are some of the best and brightest young graduates around. It also means they have other options. Young stars don’t join the State Department for the money or the glory; they want to serve and represent their country and are willing to make sacrifices to do it.
Many were shocked when they received a letter telling them they had one week to decide if they wanted to take a much less appealing job — stamping passports in a foreign embassy for two years — with the prospect but no guarantee of becoming a Foreign Service officer even after that.
“This is no way to treat our next generation,” one Foreign Service officer serving overseas told me. [Continue reading…]
Memo shows Watergate prosecutors had evidence Nixon White House plotted violent attack on peaceful protesters
NBC News reports: Watergate prosecutors had evidence that operatives for then-President Richard Nixon planned an assault on anti-war demonstrators in 1972, including potentially physically attacking Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, according to a never-before-published memo obtained by NBC News.
The document, an 18-page 1973 investigative memorandum from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, sheds new light on how prosecutors were investigating attempts at domestic political violence by Nixon aides, an extremely serious charge.
NBC News is publishing the memo, and an accompanying memo about an interview prosecutors conducted with GOP operative Roger Stone, as part of special coverage for the 45th anniversary of the Watergate break-in.
A plot to physically attack Ellsberg is notable because the former Pentagon official has long alleged that Nixon operatives did more than steal his medical files, the most well-known effort to discredit him. [Continue reading…]
The return of famine as a weapon of war
Alex de Waal writes: In its primary use, the verb ‘to starve’ is transitive: it’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase ‘man-made famine’ as if such events were unusual.
Over the last half-century, famines have become rarer and less lethal. Last year I came close to thinking that they might have come to an end. But this year, it’s possible that four or five famines will occur simultaneously. ‘We stand at a critical point in history,’ the head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the former Tory MP Stephen O’Brien, told the Security Council in March, in one of his last statements before stepping down: ‘Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.’ It’s a ‘critical’ point, I’d argue, not because it is the worst crisis in our lifetime, but because a long decline – lasting seven decades – in mass death from starvation has come to an end; in fact it has been reversed.
O’Brien had no illusions about the causes of the four famines, actual or imminent, that he singled out in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. In each case, the main culprits are wars that result in the destruction of farms, livestock herds and markets, and ‘explicit’ decisions by the military to block humanitarian aid. In Nigeria, villages in the path of the war between Boko Haram and the army have been stripped of assets, income and food. As the army slowly reduces the areas under Boko Haram control, they are finding small towns where thousands starved to death last year. The counter-insurgency grinds on, and the specialists who compile the data fed into the blandly named ‘integrated food security phase classification’ (IPC) system, worry that in this year’s ‘hungry season’, approximately June to October, communities in the war zones will again move up the IPC scale: from level four (‘humanitarian emergency’) to five (‘famine’). Last year in Nigeria, the UN and relief agencies could say that they didn’t appreciate the full extent of the crisis. This year we have been given due warning.
In South Sudan, the government and the rebel armies have fought much less against each other than against the civilian population. In the summer of 2016, evidence from aid agencies showed nutrition and death rates in the region that met the UN criteria for determining that a food crisis has reached famine levels. Fearing that declaring famine would antagonise the South Sudanese government, already paranoid and cracking down on international aid agencies (aid workers were being robbed, raped and murdered), the UN prevaricated. By February, even veterans of South Sudan’s horrendous famines of the 1980s were saying that this was as bad as anything in their experience, perhaps worse. The UN duly declared a famine.
Yemen, however, is the biggest impending disaster. Don’t be fooled by pictures showing hungry people in arid landscapes: the weather had nothing to do with the famine. More than seven million people in Yemen are hungry; far more are likely to die of starvation and disease than in battles and air raids. The military intervention led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has strangled the country’s economy. [Continue reading…]
Trump’s lawyer clear as mud about whether he wants us to think his client is or is not under investigation
How Michael Flynn’s disdain for limits led to a legal quagmire
The New York Times reports: Michael T. Flynn was a man seething and thwarted. In the summer of 2014, after repeatedly clashing with other Obama administration officials over his management of the Defense Intelligence Agency — and what he saw as his unheeded warnings about the rising power of Islamic militants — Mr. Flynn was fired, bringing his military career to an abrupt end.
Mr. Flynn decided that the military’s loss would be his gain: He would parlay his contacts, his disdain for conventional bureaucracy, and his intelligence career battling Al Qaeda into a lucrative business advising cybersecurity firms and other government contractors. Over the next two years he would sign on as a consultant to nearly two dozen companies, while carving out a niche as a sought-after author and speaker — and ultimately becoming a top adviser to President Trump.
“I’ve always had that entrepreneurial spirit,” Mr. Flynn said in an interview in October 2015. In the military, he added, “I learned that following the way you’re supposed to do things isn’t always the way to accomplish a task.”
But instead of lofting him into the upper ranks of Beltway bandits, where some other top soldiers have landed, his foray into consulting has become a legal and political quagmire, driven by the same disdain for boundaries that once propelled his rise in the military. His business ties are now the subject of a broad inquiry by a special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump associates. That investigation now includes work Mr. Flynn did for Russian clients and for a Turkish businessman with ties to that country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. [Continue reading…]
Why Republicans won’t work for the Trump administration
The Washington Post reports: The array of legal and political threats hanging over the Trump presidency has compounded the White House’s struggles to fill out the top ranks of the government.
Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey last month and the escalating probe into Russian interference in the presidential election have made hiring even more difficult, say former federal officials, party activists, lobbyists and candidates who Trump officials have tried to recruit.
Republicans say they are turning down job offers to work for a chief executive whose volatile temperament makes them nervous. They are asking head-hunters if their reputations could suffer permanent damage, according to 27 people The Washington Post interviewed to assess what is becoming a debilitating factor in recruiting political appointees. [Continue reading…]
Russia renewed unused Trump trademarks in 2016
The New York Times reports: Amid a broadening investigation of Russian contacts with his associates and his own role in trying to stop it, President Trump fired off another angry tweet this past week repeating his assertion that he has no business interests in Russia.
But while no Trump Tower graces the Moscow skyline, the Russian authorities recently made sure that another piece of valuable property — the intellectual kind — bearing the same name remained safely in Mr. Trump’s portfolio.
Last year, while hacking Democrats’ emails and working to undermine the American presidential election, the Russian government also granted extensions to six trademarks for Mr. Trump that had been set to expire. The Trump trademarks, originally obtained between 1996 and 2007 for hotels and branding deals that never materialized, each had terms that were coming to an end in 2016.
Despite their inactivity, the Trump Organization sought extensions for the trademarks from Rospatent, the Russian government agency in charge of intellectual property. In a series of approvals starting in April 2016 and ending in December, Rospatent granted new 10-year terms for the trademarks, the agency’s records show.
Four of the approvals were officially registered on Nov. 8 — Election Day in the United States. [Continue reading…]
A U.S. aircraft has shot down a Syrian government jet over northern Syria, Pentagon says
The Washington Post reports: A U.S. strike aircraft shot down a Syrian government fighter jet shortly after it bombed U.S.-backed Syrian fighters in North Syria, the Pentagon said in a statement Sunday.
The Pentagon said the shoot-down came hours after Syrian government-backed forces attacked U.S.-backed fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the village of Ja’Din. As the attack unfolded, the U.S. military used a deconfliction channel to communicate with the Syrian government to stop the skirmish, according to the Pentagon statement.
U.S.-led jets stopped the fighting by flying close to the ground and at low-speed in what is called a “show of force,” the Pentagon said.
Roughly two hours later, despite the called-for stand down and the U.S. presence overhead, a Syrian Su-22 jet attacked the Syrian Democratic Forces, dropping an unknown number of munitions on the U.S.-backed force. A U.S. F/A-18 promptly shot the Syrian aircraft down “in accordance with rules of engagement and in collective self-defense of coalition partnered forces,” the Pentagon statement said. [Continue reading…]
France polls: Macron’s party wins clear parliamentary majority
BBC News reports: French President Emmanuel Macron’s party has won a clear parliamentary majority, results show, weeks after his own presidential victory.
With nearly all votes counted, his La République en Marche, alongside its MoDem allies, won more than 300 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly.The winning margin is lower than some expected, with turnout down from 2012.
The party was formed just over a year ago, and half of its candidates have little or no political experience.
The result has swept aside all of the mainstream parties and gives the 39-year-old president a strong mandate in parliament to pursue his pro-EU, business-friendly reform plans. [Continue reading…]
Music: Tarkovsky Quartet — ‘Nuit Blanche’
We shall overcome
Rebecca Solnit writes: The resistance is an oft-used shorthand for all the forms of opposition, though many of them are institutions – the judiciary, the states, cities – that would probably not embrace the term. But they are opposing, overturning, and interfering. In several cases this spring, state courts and the Supreme Court have ruled against gerrymandering and other forms of discrimination against voters of color and voting rights.
The Ninth Circuit court ruled against the travel ban this week, one of several interventions against it in the courts. And 17 state attorney generals filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court against the ban. Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit this week accusing Trump of violating the emoluments clauses by accepting foreign income through his businesses, the subject of myriad lawsuits and complaints filed by Crew (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington).
On June 12, a judge granted a temporary reprieve to Dreamer Jessica Colotl, whose deportation protection had been revoked. More than 2,000 mayors, governors, college presidents, and other leaders have signed a pledge “to declare that we will continue to support climate action to meet the Paris Agreement.”
Democrats in the legislative branch of government has been mocking Trump, from the proposed Covefefe Act (it’s an acronym for Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically For Engagement, but also a joke about a peculiar tweet of Trump’s including that word, or nonword) that would ban him from deleting tweets on the grounds that they’re presidential records to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s videotaped parody of Trump’s cabinet meeting in which all members dutifully praised him. (Writers J.K. Rowling called Trump out for his pettily vindictive response to killings in London. Even Smirmoff Vodka got a dig in with an ad that said “we’d be happy to talk about our ties to Russia under oath.”)
Senator Kamala Harris has gone after Attorney General Jeff Sessions hard (despite male senators who keep trying to hush her up). Congresswoman Maxine Waters is demanding impeachment. And Congress is holding hearings about the Trump administration’s relationship with the Russian government and its coverups.
Last week fired FBI director James Comey ripped the president to shreds as a liar, a creep, and an incompetent manipulator of truth and staff, and since then things have gotten worse for the administration. The Russia scandal could contaminate Pence, as well as Trump, Jared Kushner, and Sessions.
In the media, Rachel Maddow of liberal MSNBC has beat Fox to the number one spot in cable-news prime time. Fox is in disarray, with its star Bill O’Reilly forced out after a series of sexual-harrassment charges. Brilliant organizing by the Twitter-based group Sleeping Giants has pushed advertisers to abandon Sean Hannity’s show after the Fox host pushed conspiracy theories about the death of Seth Rich, despite Rich’s parents pleas to desist.
Breitbart has lost nearly 90% of its advertisers in another Sleeping Giants victory. Teen Vogue has become a feminist beacon, and other women’s magazines have developed superb political coverage. Newspapers, notably the revamped Washington Post, are doing a superb job investigating and exposing the administration.
The bombshells revelations that dropped one after another in May will long be remembered, perhaps as when the Trump administration fell too far to pick itself up. This month already Forbes exposed the Trump family for figuring out how to skim a profit off donations for children with cancer. USA today revealed that in the past year, “about 70% of buyers of Trump properties were limited liability companies – corporate entities that allow people to purchase property without revealing all of the owners’ names. That compares with about 4% of buyers in the two years before.”
Administrations around the world are figuring out how to work around the administration. The European Union and China are working on moving forward on addressing climate change, while cities and states throughout the USA have made their own commitment to honor the terms of the Paris climate agreement, despite Trump (whose pullout is symbolic, since it goes into effect after the next presidential election; many don’t expect him to serve out one term, let alone win another).
The environmental ministers of the Group of Seven nations are moving forward without EPA head and climate denier Scott Pruitt. The Guardian reported: “The greater “bang-for-buck” resulted from plummeting prices for solar and wind power and led to new power deals in countries including Denmark, Egypt, India, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates all being priced well below fossil fuel or nuclear options.” Trump celebrated coal as part of his backward-looing agenda, but India is cancelling plans to build coal-power plants while South Korea is shutting them down.
Britain rejected Theresa May’s rightwing politics in an election she called that shifted power to Labour; it followed on the heels of centrist Emmanuel Macron’s victory over far-right Marine LePen. Angela Merkel and Macron have made it clear they are happy to assume the mantle of leadership the US has dropped. Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, keeps trolling Trump online about the wall.
All of this is to say that there is tremendous opposition from many kinds of groups, institutions, and individuals, here and abroad. This doesn’t mean there isn’t suffering and loss. I’ve heard from great organizers who are heartbroken and exhausted; I know Muslims who are fearful; an undocumented woman whose father has been imprisoned by Ice. I am horrified by the defunding of programs to prevent Aids internationally, which could result in a million deaths. And the brutality is real.
I’ve also talked to everyday citizens become activists and longtime organizers who are doing extraordinary things, and who are exhilarated by the solidarity and the possibility – of what we have become together, and of what they themselves have become.
Taking action is the best cure for despair. I’ve listed a little of what officials in the judiciary and legislative branch are doing, the shifts in the media, the response overseas. But it’s the residents of the United States whose response will matter most in the end.
Civil society awoken and arisen is a power adequate to counter the power of an increasingly isolated, confused, frightened and bumbling administration. [Continue reading…]
Trump’s silence on Russian hacking says how much he cares about democracy
Politico reports: Democrats are uniting behind a simple message about Russian hacking during the 2016 election: Donald Trump doesn’t care.
Even as the president lashes out at the series of Russia-related probes besieging his administration, Democrats say Trump has yet to express public concern about the underlying issue with striking implications for America’s democracy — the digital interference campaign that upended last year’s presidential race.
The president missed a self-imposed 90-day deadline for developing a plan to “aggressively combat and stop cyberattacks,” stayed silent after Moscow-linked hackers went after the French election and publicly renewed his own skepticism about the Kremlin’s role in the digital theft of Democratic Party emails during the presidential race. Privately, the president questioned a senior NSA official about the truthfulness of the conclusion from 17 intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered with the election, according to The Wall Street Journal. On Capitol Hill, Trump and his team have declined to support a Republican-backed effort to hit Russia with greater penalties for its digital belligerence.
And while the White House received bipartisan praise for a cybersecurity executive order Trump signed in May, administration officials said the directive is aimed at broadly upgrading the government’s digital defenses, not thwarting future Russian election hacking.
Instead, Trump tapped a commission led by Vice President Mike Pence to investigate an issue that elections experts call vastly overblown — voter fraud, something the the president has baselessly alleged resulted in millions of illegal voters casting ballots for Hillary Clinton in November. [Continue reading…]
How Jeremy Corbyn changed the rules of British politics
Gary Younge writes: Our views about the world do not come from nowhere. We begin with preconceptions and personal experiences, and then adjust our opinions on the basis of what we see, know, hear and feel. But those influences are not neutral. They bend to the prevailing winds of power and status, because we pay more attention to sources that possess greater authority. When it comes to political matters, we are more likely to listen to politicians or newspaper columnists than people we talk to on the bus or in the supermarket, because we assume they are more informed about the relevant facts.
There were good reasons to doubt that the election result would turn out the way it did. Labour started more than 20 points behind, by some estimates, after two years of infighting and disarray. Last month, the party was heavily defeated in local elections. The carnage and heartbreak of terror attacks in Manchester and London had stalled the campaign and given May the chance to play the role of prime minister.
But it is also true that the reported predictions of a Tory landslide – and the premises on which they were based – were so dominant and pervasive that people chose to filter what they saw through that lens. These assumptions coloured observations about the election campaign, which were then either dismissed or adjusted to align more closely to the original predictions.
What we saw did not chime with what we thought we knew. But what we thought we knew was underpinned by a political calculus that no longer held.
So when mainstream commentators saw the huge crowds that turned out to see Corbyn speak, they were keen to explain that this did not necessarily mean huge electoral support – which is correct – but they rarely made much effort to think about what it did mean. When they heard reports of masses of young people registering to vote, they were also keen to point out that many were concentrated in places that would be unlikely to affect the outcome of the election (which is, again, correct) and that, in any case, young people could not be relied upon to actually vote (also true).
When they saw the trend of hard-left parties surging and even, at times, eclipsing the soft left across Europe – in France, the Netherlands, Greece, Spain, Portugal – they said Britain was different, and that even if something similar were to happen here, its effects would be blunted by the first-past-the-post system.
On the day of the vote, Labour MPs in safe seats said things were going well in their own constituencies, but that they were hearing terrible things from the marginals. Others were saying that Labour turnout was surging, but only in places where the party already had huge majorities. The pessimism had become so intense and paranoid that one Labour MP told me last year, during the London mayoral election, that the party was only leading because the Tories were deliberately throwing that contest. That way, the MP suggested in all seriousness, Corbyn would be less vulnerable to a leadership challenge, which would mean that the Tories could reign supreme on a national level.
There were signs. Not of the outcome we have witnessed, necessarily, but of a result that defied the predictions of abject calamity. It all depended on who you spoke to. But the trouble is that in a moment of flux like this, the people you would usually expect to know may well have no idea. Labour MPs, many of whom had already shown themselves to be out of touch with the views of their own party’s members and supporters, may not have been the best judges of the national mood. Canvassers, who tend to focus on people whose preferences are already known, would be unlikely to pick up a surge of new voters.
As long as journalists, politicians and party workers were – for the most part – talking to each other, they were only reinforcing each others’ narratives. If events had been unfolding as normal, then everything they said would have made sense. But nothing was normal. And as long as they were tied to the old way of thinking, there was no way for them to know it until the votes came in. [Continue reading…]
In Trump-Russia investigation, Mueller follows the money
Business Insider reports: Robert Mueller in recent days has hired lawyers with extensive experience in dealing with fraud, racketeering, and other financial crimes to help him investigate whether President Donald Trump’s associates colluded with Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.
Mueller, who was appointed as special counsel last month to lead the probe into Russia’s election interference, is also homing in on money laundering and the business dealings of Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, according to reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The developments indicate Mueller is taking a follow-the-money approach to the investigation that could leave Trump’s sprawling business empire hugely vulnerable.
Mueller has hired Lisa Page and Andrew Weissmann. Page is a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s organized-crime section whose cases centered on international organized crime and money laundering, and Weissmann is a seasoned prosecutor who oversaw cases against high-ranking organized criminals on Wall Street in the early 1990s and, later, against 30 people implicated in the Enron fraud scandal.
Mueller has also recruited James Quarles, who specialized in campaign-finance research for the Watergate task force, according to Wired; Michael Dreeben, considered by some to be “the best criminal appellate lawyer in America”; and Aaron Zebley, a former senior counselor in the DOJ’s National Security Division specializing in cybersecurity. [Continue reading…]
‘She’s adrift’: Tories concerned over Theresa May’s Grenfell response
Michael Savage writes: Concern is growing within the Conservative party over Theresa May’s handling of the Grenfell Tower fire, with some fearing it could become “her poll tax moment”.
Several of the prime minister’s allies defended her response to the tragedy on Saturday after she was criticised for her initial failure to meet residents and stilted interviews that left many questions unanswered.
They said there was an unfair narrative that did not reflect efforts she had been making behind the scenes. “There is a story out there and facts are selected to fit it,” said one.
There is concern, however, among Tory MPs that the disaster has again placed the spotlight on May’s difficulties in demonstrating empathy and responding on her feet, weaknesses that were exposed during the election campaign.
“It is an extraordinary tragedy and there will be a lot of questions to ask, but I can’t help feeling that in some people’s minds this might be her poll tax moment,” said one former minister. “You can see real anger.
“Labour may not be able to form a government without an election, but they could get people out on the streets. We have a really difficult problem inside the Commons and tough times with this sort of emergency coming up outside.”
Margaret Thatcher’s plan to introduce the poll tax, officially called the community charge, was eventually abandoned following riots in 1990. [Continue reading…]