Browsed by
Category: Politics

Israel wages a growing war in Syria

Israel wages a growing war in Syria

Comments 0 Comment

Robin Wright writes: Jihad Mughniyah is buried under the same black marble slab as his father, Imad Mughniyah, the legendary Hezbollah military commander, at a special cemetery created by the Lebanese militia for its “martyrs” in Syria. Life-size posters of both men, dressed in fatigues, stand above it. During a recent trip to Beirut, I counted the number of the graves in the cemetery, a barometer of the price Hezbollah is paying to prop up Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad. Mughniyah’s…

Read More Read More

Russia’s anxious northern neighbors toughen up

Russia’s anxious northern neighbors toughen up

Comments 0 Comment

Politico reports: With relations between the West and Moscow at a post-Cold War low point, Russia’s closest EU neighbors are turning to tougher military and financial measures to send a message to Vladimir Putin. At a White House meeting last week, the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania asked Donald Trump to do more to deter Russia by bolstering U.S. forces in Eastern Europe. Trump didn’t give a clear answer. He praised the Baltic countries’ robust defense spending in recent…

Read More Read More

The logic of Assad’s brutality

The logic of Assad’s brutality

Comments 0 Comment

Thanassis Cambanis writes: This latest [chemical] attack in Ghouta, if it holds to the pattern, makes perfect sense in the calculus of Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The successful trio wants first and foremost to subdue the remaining rebels in Syria, with an eye toward the several million people remaining in rebel-held Idlib province. A particularly heinous death for the holdouts in Ghouta, according to this military logic, might discourage the rebels in Idlib from…

Read More Read More

In America’s new civil war, one side must win

In America’s new civil war, one side must win

Comments 0 Comment

Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira write: This is no ordinary political moment. Trump is not the reason this is no ordinary time — he’s simply the most obvious symptom that reminds us all of this each day. The best way to understand politics in America today is to reframe it as closer to civil war. Just the phrase “civil war” is harsh, and many people may cringe. It brings up images of guns and death, the bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers….

Read More Read More

Russia threatens ‘gravest consequences’ if U.S. crosses red line by taking military action in response to alleged chemical attack in Syria

Russia threatens ‘gravest consequences’ if U.S. crosses red line by taking military action in response to alleged chemical attack in Syria

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Dozens of Syrians choked to death after a suspected chemical attack struck the rebel-held suburb of Douma, east of Damascus, and aid groups on Sunday blamed President Bashar al-Assad’s government for the assault. The attack after dusk on Saturday sent a stream of patients with burning eyes and breathing problems to clinics, medical and rescue groups said. Western governments expressed alarm at the attack, with the British Foreign Office calling for an urgent investigation and…

Read More Read More

How democracy became the enemy

How democracy became the enemy

Comments 0 Comment

Roger Cohen writes: Hungary had a horrendous 20th century of lost territory and freedom, but Budapest, a handsome city set on a broad sweep of the Danube, suggests its wounds have healed. Trams hum along boulevards lined with elegant cafes and clogged with the cars German companies manufacture here. The country has escaped what Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, called the “kidnapped West,” the great swath of Europe yielded to the Soviet empire after World War II, and has returned…

Read More Read More

Roger Stone can’t stop claiming he was poisoned by polonium

Roger Stone can’t stop claiming he was poisoned by polonium

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: For more than a year, Roger Stone has asserted that he spent Christmas 2016 trying to survive an assassination attempt — most likely radioactive polonium poisoning — by someone trying to frame Russia. Tests were conducted; doctors were baffled, the longtime political operative and adviser to Donald Trump told journalists. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was contacted. But from the moment he made the claims, Stone has deflected questions when asked to back…

Read More Read More

Palestinian video journalist was among the nine people killed during the ‘Great March of Return’

Palestinian video journalist was among the nine people killed during the ‘Great March of Return’

Comments 0 Comment

The Observer reports: Hashem Zakout should have been at his local hospital yesterday doing the voluntary work as a clerk that he hopes will lead to a paid full-time job. Instead the 24-year-old was a patient in the emergency room at another northern Gaza hospital, shot in the left knee after throwing “little stones” at Israeli troops across the border, east of the Jabaliya refugee camp where he lives. Zakout was wounded on Friday when he was 10 metres from…

Read More Read More

Department of Homeland Security to create massive database to classify and track journalists and bloggers

Department of Homeland Security to create massive database to classify and track journalists and bloggers

Comments 0 Comment

Bloomberg reports: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.” It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3. The data to be…

Read More Read More

These messages show Julian Assange talked about seeking hacked files from Guccifer 2.0

These messages show Julian Assange talked about seeking hacked files from Guccifer 2.0

Comments 0 Comment

BuzzFeed reports: Twitter DMs obtained by BuzzFeed News show that in the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks was working to obtain files from Guccifer 2.0, an online hacktivist persona linked to by Russian military intelligence, the clearest evidence to date of WikiLeaks admitting its pursuit of Guccifer 2.0. “[P]lease ‘leave,’ their conversation with them and us,” WikiLeaks asked journalist Emma Best, who was also negotiating with Guccifer 2.0 for access to what it had teased on its blog as “exclusive access”…

Read More Read More

The demise of the nation state

The demise of the nation state

Comments 0 Comment

Rana Dasgupta writes: What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to…

Read More Read More

Robert Mercer backed a secretive group that worked with Facebook, Google to target anti-Muslim ads at swing voters

Robert Mercer backed a secretive group that worked with Facebook, Google to target anti-Muslim ads at swing voters

Comments 0 Comment

Center for Responsive Politics reports: As the final weeks of the 2016 elections ticked down, voters in swing states like Nevada and North Carolina began seeing eerie promotional travel ads as they scrolled through their Facebook feeds or clicked through Google sites. In one, a woman with a French accent cheerfully welcomes visitors to the “Islamic State of France,” where “under Sharia law, you can enjoy everything the Islamic State of France has to offer, as long as you follow…

Read More Read More

Foreign visas plunge under Trump

Foreign visas plunge under Trump

Comments 0 Comment

Politico reports: The United States is granting fewer visitor visas to people from around the world — not just Muslims — as President Donald Trump ratchets up his anti-immigration rhetoric. By one measure, the U.S. granted 13 percent fewer visitor visas over the past 12 months when compared with fiscal year 2016, according to State Department data analyzed by POLITICO — a downward trend that appears to have accelerated in the past six months. It’s unclear whether the drop is…

Read More Read More

Thousands of internal documents help explain how ISIS stayed in power so long

Thousands of internal documents help explain how ISIS stayed in power so long

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Weeks after the militants seized the city, as fighters roamed the streets and religious extremists rewrote the laws, an order rang out from the loudspeakers of local mosques. Public servants, the speakers blared, were to report to their former offices. To make sure every government worker got the message, the militants followed up with phone calls to supervisors. When one tried to beg off, citing a back injury, he was told: “If you don’t show…

Read More Read More

Has the world given up on the Palestinians?

Has the world given up on the Palestinians?

Comments 0 Comment

Joshua Keating writes: International attention briefly returned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after 18 Palestinians were killed and at least 750 wounded by Israeli fire during mass protests on the Gaza-Israel border Friday, according to Gaza authorities. It was the worst day of violence in the enclave since the 2014 Gaza war. The idea for the marches originally came from a local social media activist several months ago but was then promoted by Hamas, which rules Gaza, as part of what…

Read More Read More

The guy who wrote the book on the deep state wishes Trumpworld would shut up about the deep state

The guy who wrote the book on the deep state wishes Trumpworld would shut up about the deep state

Comments 0 Comment

BuzzFeed reports: Mike Lofgren wrote the book on the deep state — literally. The longtime Republican aide, who worked for three decades on Capitol Hill, published The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government in January 2016. Its jacket copy touts Lofgren’s “gripping portrait of the dismal swamp on the Potomac and the revolution it will take to set us back on course.” So you might think the 64-year-old Lofgren is gratified that…

Read More Read More