Wildfires on moorland near Manchester, elections in Turkey and Germany’s exit from at the World Cup – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists
Jim Powell
30 Jun
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.
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France charges 10 ultra-right suspects over plot to attack Muslims
Text by NEWS WIRES
French authorities have charged 10 suspected far-right extremists in connection with an alleged plot to attack Muslims, a judicial source said Thursday.
The nine men and one woman aged 32 to 69 were arrested in raids across France on Saturday.
They appeared before a judge on Wednesday evening and were charged with “criminal terrorist conspiracy”, the source said.
Several were also charged with violations of firearms laws and the manufacture or possession of explosive devices.
Police have linked the ten to a little-known group called Action des Forces Operationnelles (Operational Forces Action), which urges French people to combat Muslims, or what it calls “the enemy within”.
The suspects had an “ill-defined plan to commit a violent act targeting people of the Muslim faith”, a source close to the investigation told AFP on Monday.
Rifles, handguns and homemade grenades were found during the raids in the Paris area, the Mediterranean island of Corsica and the western Charentes-Maritimes region.
Prosecutors said in a statement Wednesday that 36 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition were seized, as well as items in one suspect’s home that could be used in the manufacture of TATP explosives.
The suspects include a retired police officer, identified only as Guy S., who was the alleged leader of the group, according to a source close to the investigation. The group also includes a former soldier.
France remains on high alert following a wave of jihadist attacks which have killed more than 240 people since 2015.
Officials have urged people not to confuse the actions of radicalised individuals with those of France’s estimated six million Muslims — but anti-Islamic violence is on the rise.
The “Guerre de France” (War for France) website of the shadowy Operational Forces Action depicts an apocalyptic battle scene under the Eiffel Tower, and claims to prepare “French citizen-soldiers for combat on national territory”.
France’s TF1 television has said the group planned to target radicalised imams and Islamist prisoners after their release from jail, as well as veiled women in the street chosen at random.
France registered 72 violent anti-Muslim acts last year, up from 67 in 2016.
The killing of five journalists at the Capital Gazette in Maryland is merely the latest massacre driven by misogyny
A makeshift memorial near the Capital Gazette offices in Annapolis, Maryland. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Apparently it’s important to be civil. Whatever pageantry of violent intolerance is playing out in the news, liberals and women and people of colour must moderate our language so that certain sensitive Caucasian gentlemen in the room aren’t made uncomfortable. We must remember that their feelings matter. We must not, for example, point out that violent misogyny – from online harassment and stalking to domestic abuse – is the live wire running through the machinery of mass murder, white supremacy and far-right mobilisation in Trump’s America and beyond.
Yesterday, Jarrod Ramos allegedly murdered five journalists at the offices of the Capital Gazette in Maryland. Ramos had sent countless threats to the paper, after one journalist reported on his harassment of a former classmate. The woman went through what she called a “year-long nightmare” of intimidation and threats before Ramos was convicted of misdemeanour harassment. Ramos was apparently furious that the Capital Gazette wrote about him as if he’d done something wrong.
Of 95 mass shootings carried out in the US between 1982 and 2017, 92 of the perpetrators were male, and 57% of mass-shooting perpetrators from 2009 to 2015 included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims. “In many of these mass shootings,” Jennifer Wright observed at Harper’s Bazaar, “the desire to kill seems to be driven by a catastrophic sense of male entitlement.” That sense of entitlement may well be the greatest threat to what remains of civil society.
I’m sorry if that hurts to hear. I know that calling prejudice by its name makes people uncomfortable, and whatever happens, those of us who believe in silly things such as shared humanity are supposed to be civil, to be polite, to mitigate and manage hurt male feelings. After all, we know what might happen if we don’t.
Six weeks ago, Shana Fisher was murdered by Dimitrios Pagourtzis in Santa Fe, Texas. For months beforehand, according to her family, the 16-year-old was harassed by her killer: “He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.” Finally, she stood up for herself. Days later, he came to school and shot her, along with nine others.
Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015, was accused of domestic violence by two of his ex-wives.
Omar Mateen, who massacred 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, had a long history of domestic violence.
Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 17 people, 14 of them teenagers, in Parkland, Florida, in February, was allegedly so abusive to his ex-girlfriend that she could not travel alone to school.
He was also a member of a white supremacist group. So was Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, telling his victims: “You’re raping our women.”
That same swivel-eyed paranoia about a perceived threat to white femininity stretches from street-marching European fascist groups to the White House, with scaremongering about “Mexican rapists” being used to justify the inhumanity on American’s southern border, where thousands of children remain in holding camps, torn away from their families.
Mere days before the Capital Gazette killings, rightwing “provocateur” Milo Yiannopoulos quipped that he could not “wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight”. Yiannopoulos insists that this was just a joke. Like many grifters in the gig economy of modern rightwing extremism, Yiannopoulus has long been regarded as a harmless clown, even after a protester was shot at one of his rallies. His ugly harassment of women of colour such as Leslie Jones won him a reputation as a valiant free-speech defender. Of course women and people of colour may not exercise our free speech to call out oppression and abuse. That would be uncivil.
For years, Yiannopoulos and others like him, spurned by the mainstream, polished their personal brands in the trenches of the online culture wars, whipping up hate-mobs against female games journalists before expanding their franchise to stage-managed attacks on trans women, women of colour and “social justice warriors”, which is an odd thing to call your enemy, unless social justice itself makes you uncomfortable. This was the demographic courted by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former right-hand manchild and svengali of Breitbart news. Bannon was not the first to recognise the power of wounded male pride and sexual entitlement as recruiting tools. It’s the theme that connects the “incel” movement with Islamic State, the refrain that runs from 1930s Berlin to Washington in 2018.
There is nothing in men’s nature that obliges them to behave like this. The problem is not masculinity but misogyny. There are plenty of shy, lonely men living in their parents’ basements who have not taken up violent woman-hatred as a way to relax after work. There are plenty of worried, white, straight chaps nursing private anxieties about their place in the world who have somehow managed not to drink the crypto-fascist Kool-Aid, refreshing though it surely looks to anyone lost in the directionless desert of modern masculinity. Racism and misogyny are chosen. You don’t catch them like a cold; you catch them like you catch a train to somewhere dark and terrifying. And a great many men seem to have bought their ticket long ago.
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World Politics
United States
Mass events, spurred by immigration policy and supreme court, urge unity in trying times: ‘It’s not about red or blue’
Protesters in Washington demonstrate against family separations. Hundreds were arrested on Thursday. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Organizers of demonstrations expected to take place across all 50 states on Saturday are calling for Americans outraged by Donald Trump’s immigration policies and the prospect of a supreme court swinging sharply right to put aside party differences and protest with one voice.
“This is an all hands on deck, stop the madness moment. It’s not a red or blue thing,” the national protest organizer, Ai-jen Poo, told the Guardian.
More than 750 events are planned across the country on 30 June, under the slogan “Families belong together”, to protest against the separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents in recent weeks after they crossed the border illegally under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown.
Poo said the protests were primarily for people who had been horrified at the news of the separations and detentions, but she said the cause would widen into a show of opposition against Trump’s travel ban, which targets five Muslim-majority countries and was upheld by the supreme court this week, as well as the threat of Trump nominating a hard-right conservative for the supreme court seat vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy.
“What you are seeing is the downright refusal to accept this administration’s policies,” she said.
With the Fourth of July holiday approaching “this is a time when we reflect on where we are as a country and, right now, what we are going to do to take it back as the multiracial democracy we know and deserve”, she added.
Most children have not yet been reunited with their parents despite the president halting the summary separation policy and a judge this week ordering the administration to reunite families.
The largest demonstration is planned for Washington DC, with many thousands expected to gather close to the White House, including Poo, who is a union leader and the director of the national domestic workers alliance, the Hamilton musical creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and other figures such as the actor and activist America Ferrera. There will be a rally addressed by a mother who was separated from her child by the border patrol. Mass protests are also expected in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and other big cities.
“But the beautiful thing about this day is that there are 10 events in Indiana, [vice-president] Mike Pence’s home state, protests in Lubbock, Texas, events in Alabama, rural Pennsylvania and many places like that,” Poo said.
This is a time when we reflect on where we are as a country
She dubbed the administration’s immigration policy “zero humanity” and “a moral atrocity” and said the main thrusts of Saturday’s events were to demand that families be reunited, call for an end to “zero tolerance” and an end to immigration detention, even where families are kept together.
Beyond the issue of family separations, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced earlier this month that domestic or gang violence, which is rife in many parts of Central America and Mexico, will no longer be regarded as valid reasons for seeking asylum in the US.
The union and the progressive advocacy body MoveOn are the principal organizers of Saturday’s events, along with more than 150 smaller groups across the country.
On Capitol Hill Thursday, hundreds of activists, including actress Susan Sarandon, center left, and Linda Sarsour, center, challenged the separation of families. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
The Women’s March is also an event partner, and its organizer Linda Sarsour is taking part in the planned event in LA, fresh from rallying a mass sit-in over immigration at a US Senate building in Washington on Thursday, at which about 600 women were arrested.
“We need a combination of direct action, mass mobilization and electoral power,” she told the Guardian.
Sarsour said plans for the demonstrations on Saturday had been given new impetus by the news last week that the supreme court had upheld Trump’s travel ban. That news was quickly followed by the announcement that Anthony Kennedy will retire, and is set to be replaced by a conservative, which presages heightened threats to legal abortion and to workers, gay rights and immigration rights.
“I think news of the Kennedy retirement really shook people up,” she said.
Asked if she thought many Trump voters might regret their choice as Republican politics shift further right, she said: “Absolutely.”
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