Chelsea Manning’s release puts Donald Trump and conservative media in a bind

Callum Borchers writes: For most of the past seven years, Chelsea Manning has been a tailor-made villain for the conservative media. Her disclosure of secret diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks allowed folks such as Sean Hannity to do two of their favorite things: remind everyone of how ferociously they support the military and to blame President Obama for something at or beyond the limits of his control.

On his Fox News show in 2010, Hannity declared that Manning “needs to be held accountable” for putting “our brave men and women in the military overseas in danger,” and he wondered: “Why can’t Obama do something about the WikiLeaks?”

Now, though, things are more complicated. Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence Tuesday, which in an orderly universe would have triggered a fresh round of outrage at the president, WikiLeaks and the former Army private, who is transgender and served as Bradley Manning. To be sure, there has been some outrage on the right.

But the twist is that many in the conservative media have been singing a different tune about WikiLeaks ever since the site published hacked emails that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party — and especially since WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Hannity in an interview this month that Russia did not supply the emails, bolstering President-elect Donald Trump’s assertion that he did not receive any significant help from the Kremlin during the election. [Continue reading…]

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Assange backpedals on his offer to be extradited to the U.S.

The Hill reports: The attorney for Julian Assange said President Obama’s commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence does not meet the conditions of the WikiLeaks head’s offer to be extradited to the United States if Manning were pardoned.

Obama on Tuesday commuted Manning’s sentence for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, leading many to wonder whether that meant Assange was ready to surrender to the Department of Justice.

“Mr. Assange welcomes the announcement that Ms. Manning’s sentence will be reduced and she will be released in May, but this is well short of what he sought,” said Barry Pollack, Assange’s U.S.-based attorney, via email.

“Mr. Assange had called for Chelsea Manning to receive clemency and be released immediately.” [Continue reading…]

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Edward Snowden’s asylum in Russia extended opening option of citizenship

The New York Times reports: A day after President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Russian government clarified on Wednesday the fate of Edward J. Snowden, the other main source of secrets about United States surveillance in recent years.

Mr. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who was granted asylum in Russia in 2013, will be allowed to remain in the country for “a couple more years,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, said on Facebook.

He and his supporters have been campaigning for a pardon from Mr. Obama, but the chances of clemency appear to be vanishingly small given that his name did not appear on a list of pardons on Tuesday. [Continue reading…]

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Earth sets a temperature record for the third straight year

Greenland ice sheet melting

The New York Times reports: Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor’s efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.

The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away. The Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinian parties Fatah and Hamas agree to form unity government

Middle East Eye reports: The main Palestinian parties on Tuesday announced a deal to form a national unity government prior to the holding of elections, after three days of reconciliation talks in Moscow involving rival groups Fatah and Hamas.

“We have reached agreement under which, within 48 hours, we will call on (Palestinian leader) Mahmoud Abbas to launch consultations on the creation of a government” of national unity, senior Fatah official Azzam al-Ahmad told a press conference, speaking in Arabic.

Ater the government is formed, the Palestinians would set up a national council, which would include Palestinians in exile, and hold elections.

“Today the conditions for (such an initiative) are better than ever,” said Ahmad.

The non-official talks in Moscow began on Sunday under Russian auspices with the goal of restoring “the unity of the Palestinian people.” Representatives came from Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other factions. [Continue reading…]

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Russia is the only country in the world where Donald Trump is popular

A WIN/Gallup poll conducted last August and September in 45 countries covering nearly 75% of the world’s population found only one country where Donald Trump was more popular than Hillary Clinton: Russia.

Anna Nemtsova reports: Preparations for the Donald Trump inauguration party are well under way at the newly opened restaurant and nightclub Arbat 13 in the very heart of Moscow.

For what must be the first time in history, Russians are treating the day an American president swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” as their own significant event.

Igor Khaletsky, whose club is frequented by businessmen, government officials, and wealthy lovers of what’s known as gangster-jazz, is following a new Russian trend. “The Trump cult is growing because the new U.S. president seems loyal to Russia,” Khaletsky told The Daily Beast. “So we decided that The Trump Band [a newly named ensemble] and its gangster-jazz music would be relevant to the night of the inauguration.”

At the top of Russia’s establishment many say of Trump, “He is a deal maker — he is one of us!” And the most famous fan of President-elect Trump is Russia’s number one decision maker, President Vladimir Putin.

On Tuesday, commenting on the “golden showers” or “pee-pee tape scandal,” President Putin said that he could not imagine Trump hiring prostitutes (“our girls of lowered social responsibility”) for the Miss Universe beauty contest that the U.S. billionaire organized in Moscow in 2013.

“He’s a grown-up for a start and, secondly, a man who spent his whole life organizing beauty contests and meeting the most beautiful women in the world,” said Putin. “I doubt Trump fell for that, although they [Russian hookers] are of course the best in the world.” Putin was joking as if he and Trump were best buddies.

Meanwhile Moscow’s official media have kicked into high gear condemning “the black time” of Barack Obama’s presidency. Some reports refer to him ironically not as the white dove but “the black bird of peace.” [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: After a tumultuous campaign and transition, President-elect Donald Trump will take the oath of office Friday as the least-popular incoming president in at least four decades, but a majority of Americans nevertheless express optimism that he will be able to fulfill campaign pledges to boost the economy and deal with threats of terrorism, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Amid controversy and calls for additional investigations into possible Russian interference in the election, most Americans disapprove of Trump’s response to the hacking and other activities. But they are divided on the question of whether the president-elect has been too friendly toward Russia or taken the right approach in his public comments and posture.

On ethical matters, a bare majority say the steps Trump and his attorney outlined last week to turn over control of his sprawling business enterprise to his children create adequate separation while he serves as president. But the public is split almost evenly on whether he and his family are fully complying with federal ethics laws, and an overwhelming majority say he should release his federal tax returns, which he has long declined to do. [Continue reading…]

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Why hundreds of thousands are joining the Women’s March on Saturday


As the Trump inauguration boycott escalates, it’s interesting that Trump would highlight the imminent arrival in Washington of Bikers for Trump — his reason, no doubt, that he hopes to scare away protesters. Somehow I doubt that a few old farts on Harleys will have that effect.

Rolling Stone reports: A few weeks before the Women’s March on Washington, Linda Sarsour and Carmen Perez, two of the four national co-chairs of this weekend’s planned demonstration, appeared on CNN Newsroom. “There are signs that [Donald Trump] is listening, right? He has nominated four women out of 23 positions to serve in his administration,” said host Carol Costello. “Ivanka Trump supposedly is going to have this big role in the Trump administration, as far as promoting women’s issues like child care. So does that give you hope that he is listening?”

This premise – that women, who represent 51 percent of the population, should be grateful for 17 percent representation in Trump’s cabinet – gets to the heart of why hundreds of thousands of women and men are poised to descend on Washington, D.C., and cities around the world, in protest Saturday.

Those who plan to march are not grateful; they are not satisfied. They’re rightfully insulted by the election of an unrepentant misogynist who’s filling his administration with more of the same – and, to Costello’s point, they’re insulted that in August, when Trump was asked which women he’d invite to help him run the country, the single name he could come up with was his daughter’s. Leaving aside the anti-nepotism laws Ivanka would violate by joining her father’s administration (laws her husband may already be in violation of), many women also recognize that she’s no hero to them, as evidenced by her woefully inadequate child care plan, which does particularly little to address the needs of low-income mothers.

What the organizers of the Women’s March will tell you is that the upcoming action is not about Trump; it is about addressing the systemic inequities he highlights with every decision he makes.

The march, the organizers declared via an ambitious platform released last week, is for gender equality, racial equality, LGBTQIA equality, economic justice and reproductive freedom; for equal pay, paid family leave, labor protections, clean water and air and access to public lands; and for an end to violence against women, police brutality and racial profiling. If that seems like a lot, well, that’s the point.

Sarsour, who serves as executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, tells Rolling Stone that the message the marchers want to send is that “from climate justice to racial justice to immigrant rights, reproductive rights, Native rights, we are united. We are committing to work together.

“We think that that hasn’t happened in a very clear way in a long time – bringing all the movements together and … saying, ‘We are watching you. We are ready. We are fired up. And we’re ready to fight back and protect our communities,'” she says. [Continue reading…]

More details on the Women’s March on Washington here and on the 616 “sister marches” here.

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Iran opposes U.S. participation in Russian-backed Syria talks

The Washington Post reports: Iran opposes the participation of the United States in Syrian peace talks backed by Russia that are due to be launched in Kazakhstan next week, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tuesday.

His comments contradicted promises from Russia and Turkey and indications from U.S. officials that the newly installed Trump administration would be invited to the talks, scheduled for Jan. 23 in the Kazakhstan capital, Astana.

They also pointed to the potential for conflict over at least one of the Middle East’s flashpoints between Tehran and the incoming Trump administration, which has consistently indicated that it plans to adopt a more hawkish posture toward Iran than the Obama administration. [Continue reading…]

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Trump could be one of the most corrupt presidents ever — and get away with it — fears John Dean

The Atlantic reports: Sometime early last fall, John Dean says he began having nightmares about a Trump presidency. He would wake in the middle of the night, agitated and alarmed, struggling to calm his nerves. “I’m not somebody who remembers the details of dreams,” he told me in a recent phone call from his home in Los Angeles. “I just know that they were so bad that I’d force myself awake and out of bed just to get away from them.”

Few people are more intimately acquainted than Dean with the consequences of an American presidency gone awry. As White House counsel under President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973, he was a key figure in the Watergate saga — participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history. In the decades since then, Dean has parlayed that resume line into something of a franchise, penning several books and countless columns on the theme of presidential abuses of power.

These days, he’s finding his subject matter more distressing than usual.

“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean, who is now 78, told me. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested.”

With Trump preparing to take the oath of office this week, some of his more imaginative critics foresee a Nixonian demise on the horizon—the corrupt commander-in-chief felled by his own hubris, forced out of office. But if prophesies of impeachment seem a tad dramatic, Dean’s own forecast for the next four years is arguably much grimmer. He is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way — he thinks he’ll probably get away with it.

Dean’s near-panicked take on the incoming president is shaped in large part by his years in the Nixon White House. In Trump, Dean says he has observed many of his former boss’s most dangerous traits — obsessive vengefulness, reflexive dishonesty, all-consuming ambition — but none of Nixon’s redeeming qualities.

“I used to have one-on-one conversations with [Nixon] where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud…’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean unmolested by any such struggle. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: A growing group of Democratic lawmakers will boycott President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration Friday to protest what they described as his alarming and divisive policies, foreign interference in his election and his criticism of civil rights icon John Lewis, a congressman from Georgia.

There are now more than 50 House Democrats — 56, at last count — who have declared that they will not attend the inauguration on Capitol Hill this week. The number rose sharply after Trump tweeted Saturday that Lewis (D) is “all talk, talk, talk” and should “finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities.” [Continue reading…]

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The alt-right comes to Washington

Politico reports: Lounging at the back of his tour bus in a parking lot behind the Springhill Suites, Milo Yiannopoulos, the flamboyant right-wing British provocateur known for his bleach-blond frosted tips and relentless campaign against Islam, munched on a whole cucumber protruding from a paper bowl of raw vegetables and made plans for a party. He had just been asked to host “DeploraBall,” an unofficial celebration planned for the presidential inauguration weekend. Yiannopoulos described his vision for the event: As guests entered the National Press Club, shirtless Mexican laborers would be building a physical wall around them. Instead of doves, Yiannopoulos would release 500 live frogs in honor of Pepe, the cartoon mascot of pro-Donald Trump internet trolls. The room would be lined with oil portraits in gilt frames, each depicting a celebrity who had vowed to leave the country in the event of Trump’s election. At the end of the night, the portraits would be thrown into a bonfire and burned. Yiannopoulos would send a bill for the party to the Mexican Embassy.

The party is unlikely to proceed in exactly that way, or really anything like it. But the ball is real — a month ahead of the inauguration, the organizers had already booked the room and sold all 1,000 tickets — and it marks a kind of gala debut of a new clique in Washington.

Known until recently as the “alt-right,” it is a dispersed movement that encompasses a range of right-wing figures who are mostly young, mostly addicted to provocation and mostly have made their names on the internet. On the less extreme end, they include economic nationalists and “Western chauvinists” like Yiannopoulos, who wants to purge Islam from the United States and Europe; the movement also encompasses overt white nationalists, committed fascists and proponents of a host of other ideologies that were thought to have died out in American politics not long after World War II. Over the course of Trump’s campaign, these ideas came back to life in chat rooms, on Twitter and on the fringes of the internet—driven by supporters united by their loathing of progressives and their feeling of alienation from the free market Republican Party as it defined itself before Trump’s takeover.

This “new right” is now enjoying something of a moment. It’s not clear whether the movement helped fuel Trump’s rise or just rode its coattails. But energized by his success, this loose confederacy of meme-generating internet trolls, provocateurs and self-appointed custodians of Trumpism has begun making plans to move into Washington’s corridors of power, or at least shoulder their way into the general vicinity. When they look at Washington — a besuited city that moves to the rhythm of lobbying and legislative calendars and carefully worded statements — they see an opportunity for total disruption, the kind of overthrow the movement already takes credit for visiting on American politics. [Continue reading…]

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Lithuania fears a Russian invasion. Now, it wants to build a border fence

The Washington Post reports: After the Soviet Union sacrificed millions of lives to help defeat Nazi Germany, it received a token of gratitude from its allies: a chunk of territory surrounding the Prussian city of Konigsberg on the Baltic Sea. Now called Kaliningrad, the isolated and highly militarized Russian enclave of nearly 1 million people is provoking renewed fears of war in Europe.

Following a Russian military buildup in Kaliningrad over the past few months, neighboring Lithuania announced on Monday that it would build an 80-mile-long border fence equipped with surveillance cameras, scheduled to be finished later this year. “The reasons are both economic to prevent smuggling and geopolitical to strengthen the E.U.’s external border,” Interior Minister Eimutis Misiunas told the Agence France-Presse news agency. The project is expected to be funded mostly by the European Union as a security investment.

The fence is the latest sign of the heightened tensions between Russia and the West along the Baltic Sea. All three of the tiny Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — are members of the E.U. and NATO. They also border Russia and were all once part of the Soviet Union.

After Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of the Crimea, Baltic leaders fear their countries may be the next targets for potential Russian expansion. They have accused Russia of frequently violating NATO airspace, landing covert units on their territory and even practicing invasions of the three small countries. Politicians in Lithuania believe the fence could act as a deterrent against potential Russian incursions. [Continue reading…]

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Putin rejects Trump dossier report as plot against ‘legitimacy’ of president-elect

The Washington Post reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday called reports that Donald Trump has been compromised by Russian intelligence “total nonsense” and said allegations were fabricated to “undermine the legitimacy” of Trump’s presidency.

It was the Russian president’s first direct denial of the contents of an uncorroborated dossier written by a former British intelligence agent hired to compile opposition research. The dossier claimed that Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence agents during a 2013 visit to Moscow to hold the Miss Universe pageant.

“The people who are ordering this kind of false information, who are now disseminating it against the president-elect of the United States, who fabricate it and use it in a political fight, are worse than prostitutes,” Putin told journalists after talks with Moldovan President Igor Dodon in Moscow. “They have no moral boundaries.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama sets date for Chelsea Manning’s release; Julian Assange’s extradition still in question

Time reports: Five days before President Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s prison sentence, WikiLeaks tweeted that the group’s editor-in-chief Julian Assange would agree to be extradited to the U.S. if Manning was given clemency.

Obama’s decision means Manning will be released in May instead of in 2045, when her sentence was originally due to end, the New York Times reports. [Continue reading…]

So far, no word from Assange on whether he intends to fulfill his promise.

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Theresa May can think big all she likes. Britain’s about to find out just how small it is

Rafael Behr writes: aybe the European Union is God’s way of teaching the British about Belgium. Specifically, it is a mechanism that forces UK politicians to confront the idea that Belgium matters. And not just Belgium but countries like it – the small countries.

This concept doesn’t come naturally to a nation that is neurotically worried about its greatness. Naming famous Belgians is a parlour game for British foreign secretaries. Cultivating small-state alliances feels like something less ambitious countries do. The UK struggles to see itself in perspective because it is richer and more powerful than most countries, yet so much less influential than it used to be.

We are not alone in suffering from post-imperial angst, but we have tied ourselves in uniquely existential knots where relations with our European neighbours are concerned. Theresa May understands the deep cultural and psychological attraction of Brexit as a great unpicking – a disentanglement from continental ties, the benefits of which feel obscure to much of the public.

Therein lies the emotional cleverness of the prime minister’s formulation of a “clean Brexit”, as laid out in her speech on Tuesday. Pro-Europeans probe the agonising detail of the negotiations to come without recruiting any more of the public to share their pain. If anything, the balance of opinion is swinging the other way. The prime minister’s message was tailored to the large segment of voters, including many ex-remainers, who see the big in/out question as settled and say they want the job done without any more palaver.

The effectiveness of May’s account of future relations with the EU – no “partial membership”, no messy overlaps with the past – is its simplicity. Her Europhile critics want to talk only about complexity, which is the least catchy tune in politics. May paints Britain with the crispness of its outline restored, its place in the world made clearer by the erasure of all those fiddly lines that connect London to Brussels and then to Paris, Berlin, Ljubljana, Tallinn and the rest. She offers liberation from the need to care about Belgians.

That obligation endures whether the prime minister wants it or not. Small states will have a say in the divorce contract terms that Britain signs with the EU. Their voice will be heard in the negotiations and in chambers where the deal must be ratified. It was opposition in Belgium’s Wallonian regional parliament that nearly scuppered a Canada-EU free trade agreement last year. [Continue reading…]

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UK counter-terror laws most Orwellian in Europe, says Amnesty

The Guardian reports: The UK is leading a Europe-wide “race to the bottom” with Orwellian counter-terrorism measures that seriously threaten human rights, according to a comparative survey of security laws by Amnesty International.

A 70-page report, entitled Dangerously disproportionate: The ever-expanding national security state in Europe, alleges that Britain has introduced powers in the name of national security that are “among the most draconian in the EU”.

In more than half the areas of concern highlighted by the report, the UK is judged to be at one end of the spectrum in relation to regulations on “mass surveillance”, use of “diplomatic assurances” to deport people where there is a risk of torture, stripping people of their nationality, controlling their movement and detaining without charge or sufficient legal process.

Amnesty’s stark assessment is a response to widespread changes in counter-terror laws across Europe, enacted in the wake of numerous, Islamic State-inspired attacks. It follows the UK parliament’s vote for the Investigatory Powers Act, nicknamed the snooper’s charter. [Continue reading…]

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Parts of U.S. are heating faster than globe as a whole

The Guardian reports: Global warming obviously refers to temperature increases across the entire globe. We know the Earth is warming, we know it is human-caused, we have a pretty good idea about how much the warming will be in the future and what some of the consequences are. In fact, when it comes to the Earth’s average climate, scientists have a pretty good understanding.

On the other hand, no one lives in the average climate. We live spread out north, west, east, and south. On islands, large continents, inland or in coastal regions. Many of us want to know what’s going to happen to the climate where we live. How will my life be affected in the future?

This type of question is answered in a very recent study published by scientists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The team, which includes Dr. Raymond Bradley and researcher Dr. Ambarish Karmalkar looked specifically at the Northeastern United States. They found that this area will warm much more rapidly than the globe as a whole. In fact, it will warm faster than any other United States region. The authors expect the Northeast US will warm 50% faster than the planet as a whole. They also find that the United States will reach a 2 degree Celsius warming 10–20 years before the globe as a whole. [Continue reading…]

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