Britain remains a nation out of touch with political and economic reality
One and a half million views of @rafaelbehr’s Brexit rant now. I think people may feel he has a point pic.twitter.com/G62NWH9WEq — Alan White (@aljwhite) June 10, 2019
The princes who want to destroy any hope for Arab democracy
Iyad el-Baghdadi writes: Since the Arab uprisings of 2011, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have used their considerable resources to promote authoritarian governments run by military strongmen in the region. They helped crush Bahrain’s uprising, bankrolled a return to military dictatorship in Egypt, armed a rogue military leader in Libya and mismanaged a democratic transition in Yemen before launching a destructive war there. A ghastly new chapter in the Saudi and the Emirati counterrevolution against democratic movements in…
Hezbollah bomb factory in London found in 2015 but kept hidden from public and lawmakers, says report
Middle East Eye reports: A secret bomb factory run by members of the Iran-backed movement Hezbollah was found on the outskirts of London in 2015, with as much as three metric tonnes of bomb-making ingredients, the Daily Telegraph reported on Monday. The case, which was kept “hidden from the public”, unfolded after the British police and the MI5 intelligence service were tipped-off by a foreign government, security sources told the daily. Thousands of disposable ice packs containing three tonnes of…
Elizabeth Warren’s plans that would remake the economy
The New York Times reports: As the 23 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination struggle to distinguish themselves, Senator Elizabeth Warren has set herself apart with a series of sweeping proposals that would significantly remake the American economy, covering everything from tax policy to business regulation to student debt relief. Together, her plans offer a detailed portrait of what her presidency might look like. Many of the proposals from Ms. Warren, a former Harvard law professor and hawk on financial regulation,…
Buttigieg urges end to ‘endless’ U.S. war, return to Iran, climate deals
Reuters reports: Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday urged a stop to the “endless war” that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a return to the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accord scrapped by Republican President Donald Trump. Buttigieg, a Navy reservist who was deployed to Afghanistan, repudiated Trump’s go-it-alone, America First approach to the world in the first foreign policy speech of his 2020 White House campaign. He outlined a policy based on “America at our…
William Barr is ‘the closest thing we have to Dick Cheney’
The New York Times reports: Not long before Attorney General William P. Barr released the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, he strategized with Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, about one of his next moves: investigating the investigators. Over a dinner of steak, potatoes and carrots in a wood-paneled conference room off Mr. Barr’s Justice Department office, the two discussed their shared suspicions that the officials who initially investigated the…
China faces showdown in Hong Kong as mass protests roar back
Bloomberg reports: China has spent much of the past five years tightening its grip over Hong Kong with little challenge. Now, hundreds of thousands in the city are fighting back. Hong Kong is bracing for a potentially historic showdown over extradition legislation that could for the first time subject residents to face justice in Chinese courts, further eroding the city’s autonomy. Opponents on Sunday staged one of the largest protests since the former British colony’s return to China: Organizers said…
The secret to slowing Guatemalan migration
Nicholas Kristof writes: To stop the flow of migrants, Trump has called for a wall at the Mexico border that would cost billions of dollars, has separated children from parents for months, has cut off aid to Central America and, most recently, threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico. The result? The torrent keeps getting bigger, with twice as many migrants seized at the border in each of the last few months as a year earlier. Trump’s strategy so far seems…
Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017
The Guardian reports: A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump. Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that…
‘Hell on Earth’ scenario predicted if climate crisis doesn’t trigger immediate drastic action
Al Jazeera reports: A climate change paper grabbed headlines this week with its terrifying prediction of what the world will be in 30 years’ time – absent drastic and immediate change to human societies. “World of outright chaos,” “Climate apocalypse,” “We’re all gonna die,” the media banners blared. The sobering headlines and equally disconcerting stories beneath described a “scenario analysis” by an Australian think-tank, Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration. The paper portrayed what the year 2050 will look like…
America’s political mood currently the ‘most liberal ever recorded’
Eric Levitz writes: The American public is in the mood for “big government.” According to the distinguished political scientist James Stimson’s “Public Policy Mood estimate” — a widely respected tool for measuring shifts in ideological opinion across time — the U.S. electorate is more sympathetic to left-wing economic policy today than at anytime in the past 68 years (which is as far back as Stimson’s data goes). Tracking ideological change across decades is inherently difficult, since some policy questions fall…
Troubling-to-outright-damning episodes lost in the noise around the Mueller report’s release
Quinta Jurecic writes: After two years of silence, the special counsel Robert Mueller recently made his first public remarks — to complain, it seemed, that no one had read his report. “We chose those words carefully,” Mr. Mueller said, “and the work speaks for itself.” But at a dense 440-plus pages, if the report speaks for itself, it takes a great deal of time and focus to listen to what it has to say. Mr. Mueller tells a complicated story…
In a world full of wars, why are so many of them ignored?
Simon Tisdall writes: Cameroon, a central African state of 24 million people on the Gulf of Guinea, is rarely in the news – which is surprising, given the awful things happening there. In a warring world full of conflict, the country’s troubles barely rate a mention. That’s short-sighted. As Yemen shows, today’s local difficulties have a habit of becoming tomorrow’s international crises. Long-running tensions between Cameroon’s French and English-speaking communities came to a head last week with the arrest of…
U.S. ambassador says Israel has right to annex parts of West Bank
The New York Times reports: Israel has a right to annex at least some, but “unlikely all,” of the West Bank, the United States ambassador, David M. Friedman, said in an interview, opening the door to American acceptance of what would be an enormously provocative act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to begin annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a move that would violate international law and could be a fatal blow to a two-state solution to the…
Doublethink is stronger than Orwell imagined
George Packer writes: No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984. The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc—doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother—they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of…
White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony warning about ‘catastrophic’ climate change
The Washington Post reports: White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.” The move came after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific findings on climate change. The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump administration is debating how best…