Music: João Gilberto — ‘Samba da Minha Terra’
Trump’s spat with the UK reveals the bottomless depths of his insecurities
A+ trolling… https://t.co/mufVj0IoBF — Keerthik Sasidharan (@KS1729) July 9, 2019 The Guardian reports: Theresa May faces a full-blown diplomatic standoff with the US after Donald Trump condemned Britain’s “stupid” ambassador to Washington over leaked memos critical of the White House, as Downing Street insisted Sir Kim Darroch had its full support. [Continue reading…] Richard Wolffe writes: Inept and dysfunctional are two of the more diplomatic words you could choose to describe the Trump administration. Colossally moronic and self-defeating might be…
Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest shows the power of one newspaper’s investigation
Brian Stelter writes: In the past year the Jeffrey Epstein case was catapulted onto the national news radar by one newspaper, the Miami Herald, and by one reporter in particular, Julie K. Brown. The paper’s “Perversion of Justice” series came out last November, and Brown has stayed on the story ever since. As soon as The Daily Beast broke the news that Epstein had been arrested on Saturday evening, fellow journalists and other observers credited Brown and thanked her for…
The real origins of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory
Michael Isikoff reports: In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found. Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read…
Trump can’t block critics from his Twitter account, appeals court rules
The New York Times reports: President Trump has been violating the Constitution by blocking people from following his Twitter account because they criticized or mocked him, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday. The ruling could have broader implications for how the First Amendment applies to the social-media era. Because Mr. Trump uses Twitter to conduct government business, he cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he…
Proroguing parliament would be end of democracy in UK, says former attorney general
The Guardian reports: Proroguing the House of Commons to achieve a no-deal Brexit would be “the end of parliamentary democracy” in the UK, Dominic Grieve has said in defending his move to seek to remove the option. Grieve’s amendment, which has cross-party support including from a handful of fellow Conservative MPs, is to the Northern Ireland bill going through the Commons, and would require fortnightly reports on that country’s formation of an executive, which has been vacant since 2017. Speaking…
It took Jared Kushner 874 days to put together a great big glossy Middle East nothing-burger
Daniel Levy writes: Jared Kushner’s long-awaited “Peace to Prosperity” gathering at the Manama Four Seasons Hotel in Bahrain generated just about the level of serious coverage that it merited—precious little. For all its borderline pantomime-style imbecility (Kushner himself put in a performance as someone pretending to care about the Palestinians), this convening actually matters. Coming at a time in the region when the U.S. is inching closer to an armed confrontation with Iran and endorsing Israel’s permanent annexation of more…
What does anthropology say about the emotional lives of others?
Andrew Beatty writes: In his classic thought experiment set out in ‘What Is An Emotion?’ (1884), William James, pioneer psychologist and brother of the novelist Henry, tried to imagine what would be left of emotion if you subtracted the bodily symptoms. What, for example, would grief be ‘without its tears, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breastbone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.’ James’s resonant conclusion that ‘a purely disembodied human emotion…
Music: João Gilberto — ‘Estate’
Elizabeth Warren has raised more money than any other 100% grassroots-funded campaign
The New York Times reports: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts raised $19.1 million in the past three months, her campaign said on Monday, a total that places her firmly in the top echelon of the Democratic money race and ahead of her main rival for the party’s progressive wing, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The fund-raising haul represents a turnaround for Ms. Warren after she raised just $6 million in her campaign’s first three months, before her strategy of eschewing…
Trump and the oligarchs against the rest of America
Robert Reich writes: I keep hearing that the Democratic party has moved “left” and that Democratic candidates may be “too far left”. But in an era of unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power at the top, I can’t help wondering what it means to be “left”. A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” sought stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads and research. Those on the…
What a U.S.-Iran war could look like
Alex Ward writes: A deadly opening attack. Nearly untraceable, ruthless proxies spreading chaos on multiple continents. Costly miscalculations. And thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — killed in a conflict that would dwarf the war in Iraq. Welcome to the US-Iran war, which has the potential to be one of the worst conflicts in history. Washington and Tehran remain locked in a months-long standoff with no end in sight. The US has imposed crushing sanctions on Iran’s economy over its…
Trump rages at Fox News, says it’s now worse than ‘Fake News CNN’
HuffPost reports: President Donald Trump lit into his once-favorite network on Sunday, saying Fox News is now even “worse” than his longtime bête noire, CNN. Trump said the network “forgot the people who got them there.” He griped Fox News was “loading up with Democrats” and complained it was citing The New York Times as “a ‘source’ of information,” an apparent reference to the newspaper’s Sunday article about disease, hunger and overcrowding at a Texas center holding migrant children. [Continue…
UK ministers defend ambassador to U.S. while apologizing for his views on Trump getting leaked
Reuters reports: Britain’s trade minister said on Monday he would apologize to U.S. President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka for a leak of confidential memos in which the UK ambassador describes the U.S. administration as “dysfunctional” and “inept”. [Continue reading…] The Guardian reports: Britain’s ambassador to the US has done nothing wrong and is held in high regard, the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, has said following the leak of confidential internal memos that gave an unflattering portrait of Donald…
Music: João Gilberto — ‘Undiú’
One climate crisis disaster happening every week, UN warns
The Guardian reports: Climate crisis disasters are happening at the rate of one a week, though most draw little international attention and work is urgently needed to prepare developing countries for the profound impacts, the UN has warned. Catastrophes such as cyclones Idai and Kenneth in Mozambique and the drought afflicting India make headlines around the world. But large numbers of “lower impact events” that are causing death, displacement and suffering are occurring much faster than predicted, said Mami Mizutori,…