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06 May

News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective

News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective

English Online International Newspapers

Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.

View All>>

Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran

Mark Townsend and Julian Borger in Washington

A Few Thoughts:

Trump the Dump is more set on American hegemony in the Middle East than peace. Bringing Iran to the table won’t deliver what the neocon fascists in the White House really want- regime change.

Iran and Syria’s “independence” (of American power) is the real reason they are America’s enemies in the region, not their despotic dictators. Otherwise Saudi Arabia would face the same sabre rattling that these two have. Nuclear capacity is also a hypocritical standard- considering Reagan helped Pakistan to develop their own nuclear weapons.

The very little that Obama achieved is being undermined by the Dump and Netanyahu. The irony of Israeli secret services being used to dig up dirt is completely lost on them too. Two very pathetic Dictators.

The McGlynn

Donald Trump promised the Israeli leader that Iran would never have nuclear weapons.

Donald Trump promised the Israeli leader that Iran would never have nuclear weapons. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”

Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”

Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli television, describing how Iran has continued with its plans to make nuclear weapons.

Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli television, describing how Iran has continued with its plans to make nuclear weapons. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA

According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

Although sources have confirmed that contact and an initial plan of attack was provided to private investigators by representatives of Trump, it is not clear how much work was actually undertaken, for how long or what became of any material unearthed.

Neither is it known if the black ops constituted only a strand of a wider Trump-Netanyahu collaboration to undermine the deal or if investigators targeted other individuals such as John Kerry, the lead American signatory to the deal. Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them. Rhodes said: “I was not aware, though sadly am not surprised. I would say that digging up dirt on someone for carrying out their professional responsibilities in their positions as White House officials is a chillingly authoritarian thing to do.”

Read Full Article>>

Israel fears ‘explosion of violence’ as US prepares to open embassy in Jerusalem

Decision to relocate into the disputed city in the same week as Israel’s 70th anniversary raises concerns of increased tension

Oliver Holmes Jerusalem

Israeli army fires tear-gas at Palestinian protesters during clashes on Friday 4 May.

Israeli army fires tear-gas at Palestinian protesters during clashes on Friday 4 May. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA

Police in Israel have started patrols and security sweeps of a southern Jerusalem neighbourhood, anxiously preparing for a US embassy inauguration that Israelis and Palestinians fear may launch a week of violence.

The move on 14 May will mark the start of a potentially volatile week when Israel will celebrate its 70th anniversary and Palestinians mark the “catastrophe”, or Nakba, of their displacement on the 15th.

Nakba day has previously seen violence as the Israeli army responds to demonstrations in the occupied territories. This year, tensions are far higher than usual. Six weeks of protests along the Gaza border, during which Israeli soldiers have shot dead nearly 40 people and wounded hundreds, will culminate that week.

There are fears that those attending the rallies may attempt to breach the perimeter, a move that could lead to mass casualties as Israeli snipers are operating under rules of engagement that permit live fire.

“The situation between Israelis and Palestinians could not be more delicate,” wrote Ilan Goldenberg, who served as part of the US team during the 2013-14 Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, in an opinion piece for the Israeli paper Haaretz.

The embassy move, he said, may pass without significant violence, pointing to the lack of anticipated instability following Donald Trump’s December announcement to relocate the embassy. “Or it could explode – and we could find ourselves in the middle of a new war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Nobody knows, but it is irresponsible for the US to be dumping gasoline on this potential fire,” he said.

Israel’s police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said officers were assessing the level of security needed for theopening, including deploying CCTV cameras and guards in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Arnona, where the current US consulate is being retrofitted to become the embassy.

“We’re still waiting to see if the US president will come here for the opening move. The level of security will be raised accordingly,” he said. Trump has hinted he may attend, while Israeli media have speculated he will send his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Israeli police had not received information of any specific warnings, Rosenfeld said, but security forces were “taking into consideration the period we’re going to be in and other events, including Jerusalem celebrations and Nakba day. There are implications around the Gaza strip area, and of course the move with the American embassy as well. We’re talking about an intensive week,” he said.

Read Full Article>>

World Politics

United States

Michael Cohen Wiretap Cold Open – SNL

With the FBI listening in, Michael Cohen (Ben Stiller) fields calls from Donald Trump (Alec Baldwin), Rudy Giuliani (Kate McKinnon), Melania Trump (Cecily Strong), Ivanka Trump (Scarlett Johansson) and Jared Kushner (Jimmy Fallon) and Stormy Daniels.

‘He’ll be forced to resign’ Stormy Daniels’ lawyer predicts Trump’s fall>>

Giuliani: Trump would have had lawyer pay off more women ‘if necessary’>>

Opinion Trump, the huckster, keeps tawdry show going>>

Trump friend Tom Barrack has been questioned by Mueller, sources say>>

The Displaced; Migrant Brothers; Lights in the Distance – reviews

Three powerful, conscience-stirring books use personal testimony to help us see the refugee crisis through the eyes of its victims

Tim Adams

Migrants are rescued from overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean Sea by Libyan coast guards

Migrants are rescued from overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean Sea by Libyan coast guards in January 2018. Photograph: Hani Amara/Reuters

This September it will be three years since the body of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy in red T-shirt and blue shorts, was washed ashore on a beach in Turkey. The picture that ran on the front pages of newspapers across Europe, and prompted calls for politicians to confront with all urgency what even the Sun called the “biggest crisis since the second world war”, was perhaps the only moment in recent memory in which popular empathy for refugees clearly outweighed disregard or antipathy.

For a month or more, maybe, after the picture ran, and Alan lay face down in all of our consciences, there was a feeling in European capitals that a different approach was desperately needed; several cities saw rallies in which crowds carried banners reading “Refugees Welcome Here”. In November, however, the Paris attacks happened, and the popular mood once again hardened against “migrants”. That new year the lurid reports of mass sexual assaults from crowds of young men of “north African appearance” in German cities were used to justify a far more alarmist rhetoric, which culminated in the calculated and algorithmed scaremongering leading up to the EU referendum. Weaponised borders became a critical and mythologised issue; deliberately “hostile environments” for “aliens” a matter of political pride. In the 24 months after Alan’s body was discovered on the sand, 8,500 people drowned or disappeared trying to cross the Mediterranean to a place of greater safety; had it not been for the volte face in humanity of the Italian coast guard, the number would have been far higher. Comparable numbers will have perished this year, but not one of their pictures has made lasting front-page news.

Those lost people on Europe’s seas are just the tiniest fraction of those now permanently adrift. When Nigel Farage gurned in front of his “Breaking Point” poster, the aim was to suggest a faceless and ceaseless army of otherness, and in terms of numbers at least, the portrait – if not its pitiless intent – was correct. By the time of Alan’s death, there were more displaced people in the world than at the end of the second world war: 65 million, an uprooted nation almost exactly the size of Britain. These people raise many questions, but a central one remains this: how do you bring the story of their lives home? And how, without that connection, without a picture of Alan, can the relatively settled population of the world, living inside rather than beyond borders, be encouraged or inspired to find the collective will to offer these strangers some kind of life?

Trilling finds out how to cling to the bottom of a lorry on a motorway and how you develop the desperation to attempt it

These three books, each one committed passionately to those questions, try to answer them in different ways. Viet Thanh Nguyen attempts it by way of recent historical example, to show how waves of migration and assimilation have been the natural order of things – not a historical anomaly – and to reveal how cultures, like individuals, depend for their life on novelty and openness. He argues that those who arrive last invariably work hardest, create most fervently, inject most imagination – because their lives depend on it.

Read Full Article>>

Two centuries on, Karl Marx feels more revolutionary than ever

Stuart Jeffries

Visitors snap pics of statues of Marx (left) and Engels in a park in Berlin

Communist front: statues of Marx (left) and Engels in a park in Berlin. Today is the bicentenary of Marx’s birth. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The other day I stood at the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery in north London, wondering if he has anything say to us today, 200 years after his birth, on 5 May 1818. “Workers of all lands unite,” reads the tombstone. But they haven’t – the solidarity of the exploited, which Marx took to be necessary to end capitalism, scarcely exists.

“What the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are its own gravediggers,” he and Friedrich Engels wrote 170 years ago in The Communist Manifesto. “Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” Not really: capitalism today is rampant. In the kind of historical irony that the philosopher Hegel called the cunning of reason, capitalism has even co-opted its gravediggers to keep it alive: China, the world’s biggest socialist society (if only ostensibly) supplies capitalist enterprises with cheap labour that undercuts other workers around the world.

So is Marx finished? Not at all. For me, what makes Marx worth reading now is not his Panglossian prognoses, but his still resonant diagnoses. For instance, he and Engels foresaw how globalisation would work. “In place of the old wants,” they wrote, “satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.” That’s why Chinese workers make products we never conceived would exist, let alone that we would covet, and that would convert us into politically quiescent, borderline sociopathic, sleepwalking narcissists. That’s right – I’m talking about iPhones.

I find it hard to read the first few pages of The Communist Manifesto without thinking that I live in the world he and Engels described. “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” We inhabit a world just like that, only more intensely than Marx and Engels dared imagine. For me, these words don’t just capture how Uber, Deliveroo and the other virtuosos of the gig economy chip away at values and standards to make a fast buck, but also how the planet is relentlessly despoiled in order to satisfy tax-avoiding shareholders.

Consider, as the Marxist professor David Harvey did recently, São Paulo: a city whose economic base is a car industry that produces vehicles that spend hours in traffic jams, polluting streets and isolating individuals from each other – a potent emblem of how free-market economies are inimical to the real needs of real people.

Marx didn’t foresee Facebook, but he grasped the essentials of Mark Zuckerberg’s business model, certainly better than American senators did at last month’s congressional hearings. “The bourgeoisie,” Marx and Engels wrote, beautifully, “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

Facebook, not to mention Amazon and Google, have made humans into exploitable assets. Which is some kind of genius.

Read Full Article>>

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2018 at 1:18 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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