Qasim Rashid writes: On April 12, 1997 I received a call from my brother, Private First Class Tayyib M. Rashid, a newly minted U.S. Marine. He had called to tell us he had just graduated from boot camp. Ours is an immigrant family, and his service was a source of pride and validation for all of us. We were Americans in a new sense now. This year I filed to run for Virginia Senate — an extension of the American…
Mother Jones reports: In March, about a week after a gunman stormed two mosques in New Zealand, killing dozens of Muslim worshipers, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) gave a speech at the banquet of a Muslim civil rights group in California. A short snippet of that speech—in which Omar referred to the 9/11 attacks as “some people did something”—went viral Friday after it was posted online in a video. Pundits accused her of trying to downplay the 2001 tragedy at the…
The Observer reports: Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon advised Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini to attack the pope over the issue of migration, according to sources close to the Italian far right. During a meeting in Washington in April 2016, Bannon – who would within a few months take up his role as head of Trump’s presidential campaign – suggested the leader of Italy’s anti-immigration League party should start openly targeting Pope Francis, who has made the plight…
The New York Times reports: The secrets came directly from the phones of President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador: intimate pictures of him and his family on vacation, text messages from his wife, even a photograph of the president himself in a posh bedroom, eating a lobster in bed. The material, published last month on an anonymous website, was particularly embarrassing because Mr. Moreno was in a bruising national fight over his austerity measures. But rather than mount a defense, the…
The Washington Post reports: White House officials have tried to pressure U.S. immigration authorities to release detainees onto the streets of “sanctuary cities” to retaliate against President Trump’s political adversaries, according to Department of Homeland Security officials and email messages reviewed by The Washington Post. Trump administration officials have proposed transporting detained immigrants to sanctuary cities at least twice in the past six months — once in November, as a migrant caravan approached the U.S. southern border, and again in…
The Washington Post reports: After Bernie Sanders lost his primary campaign for president against Hillary Clinton in 2016, a Twitter account called Red Louisiana News reached out to his supporters to help sway the general election. “Conscious Bernie Sanders supporters already moving towards the best candidate Trump! #Feel the Bern #Vote Trump 2016,” the account tweeted. The tweet was not actually from Louisiana, according to an analysis by Clemson University researchers. Instead, it was one of thousands of accounts identified…
Michael Weiss writes: In the end, the man who reportedly smeared feces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feminists and bespectacled Jewish writers was pulled from the Ecuadorian embassy looking every inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam plucked straight from his spider-hole. The only camera crew to record this pivotal event belonged to Ruptly, a Berlin-based streaming online video streamer, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of RT, the…
Nick Cohen writes: Brexit is being defined by the inability of political leaders and much of the media to be honest with themselves – and indeed anyone else. The result is the greatest outbreak of political lying of my lifetime. You can compare it with Suez, but at least in 1956, Hugh Gaitskell and the Labour opposition clearly stated that Eden’s pretext for invading Egypt was false. Now government and opposition compete to see who can tell the greater lies….
Peter Oborne writes: It’s nearly three years since I, along with 17.4 million other Britons, voted for Brexit. Today I have to admit that the Brexit project has gone sour. Brexit has paralysed the system. It has turned Britain into a laughing stock. And it is certain to make us poorer and to lead to lower incomes and lost jobs. We Brexiteers would be wise to acknowledge all this. It’s past time we did. We need to acknowledge, too, that…
WOW. WOW. President of the BJP vowing to cleanse the country of….Christians and Muslims? And presumably anyone else who is not Buddha (sic), Sikh or Hindu? https://t.co/6JSVdhdZ7Z — Priyamvada Gopal (@PriyamvadaGopal) April 11, 2019 Betwa Sharma writes: Nine hundred million people, just shy of the combined populations of Europe and America, will have the chance to vote as Indians line up to decide who will lead the country for the next five years. The phased polls begin on April 11…
By Indulata Prasad, Arizona State University Statues – big statues, the largest in the world – are being built all across India. Like many public monuments, they attempt to convey history in a concrete form. But India’s new statues convey something else, too: the power and vision of one dominant group – and the vulnerability of others. That’s because India’s biggest new public monuments all pay tribute to Hindu gods and leaders. As a scholar of social change in India,…
Darren Byler writes: In mid-2017, Alim, a Uighur man in his 20s, returned to China from studying abroad. As soon as he landed back in the country, he was pulled off the plane by police officers. He was told his trip abroad meant that he was now under suspicion of being “unsafe”. The police administered what they call a “health check”, which involved collecting several types of biometric data, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, voice recordings and face scans –…
President Trump, who often expressed his love of WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign, says following the arrest of Julian Assange on Thursday: "I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing." pic.twitter.com/smT8o7La95 — NBC News (@NBCNews) April 11, 2019 Trump today in the Oval Office: "I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing." Flashback to the campaign. Trump: "WikiLeaks. I love WikiLeaks." pic.twitter.com/eYfg5zeySI — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 11, 2019 The Guardian reports: Trump celebrated WikiLeaks on the…
Newsweek reports: New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter on Tuesday to highlight one of the driving factors behind global migration that, more often than not, goes ignored by those seeking to quell it: climate change. “The far-right loves to drum up fear & resistance to immigrants,” said Ocasio-Cortez, whose own Green New Deal proposal aims to address climate change and economic inequality. “But have you ever noticed they never talk about what’s causing people to flee their homes…
Tom Kibasi writes: Britain will remain in the EU until the end of October this year, but diminished in power and status, with a review of its conduct set for the end of June. It is the marital equivalent of being sent to sleep in the spare bedroom, if not quite the garden shed. Wednesday night’s humiliation, when 27 other nations decided our fate – a taster of Norway-plus or “common market 2.0”, where decisions are made about the UK…