By Shaun King @ TheIntercept.com, Aug. 19
If the Democratic Party was smart, they would be out front leading and owning the effort to make criminal justice reform happen, but they aren’t.
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Shaun King @ TheIntercept.com, Aug. 19
If the Democratic Party was smart, they would be out front leading and owning the effort to make criminal justice reform happen, but they aren’t.
By William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess & Maggie Haberman @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 19, 9:19 pm
By Avery Anapol @ TheHill.com, Aug. 19
Former President Obama on Sunday shared a list of some of his recent summer reads. In a post on Facebook, Obama listed five books, both novels and nonfiction, that he has read in recent months.....
By Rebecca Morin @ Politico.com, Aug. 19
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock on Sunday said he would support a ban on semiautomatic weapons — the strongest stance the Democratic governor has taken on gun control as he weighs a possible run for the 2020 presidential election.
Bullock told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” that firearm owners and those who want more gun control have the same goal: keeping their families safe.
“If we really step back for a minute, I think most folks that live in Montana and elsewhere that are firearm owners want to keep themselves and their families safe. It’s not unlike folks who say that all these school tragedies and everything that’s been happening,” he said. “What do they really want? Those same values.”
Bullock in May wrote in an op-ed in the Great Falls Tribune that he would support universal background checks. That stance was much stronger than a statement he made in his 2016 reelection campaign, when [....]
President Trump tweeted in December that the U.S. Postal Service isn’t charging Amazon enough to deliver merchandise. But it’s not Jeff Bezos who is getting the lowest rates. In fact, it’s a major economic competitor of the United States—China—that is getting a sweetheart deal from the USPS.
Moshe Lax and members of his family allegedly conspired to deprive the U.S. of $60 million.
By Ben Schreckinger @ Politico Magazine, Aug. 17
[....] At a time when Democrats are working to make corruption a midterm campaign issue and a jury deliberates over whether to convict President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager for tax fraud, the suit threatens to further the perception that the Trump family and their closest associates operate in a corrupt milieu.
Though the complaint does not mention the president's daughter or accuse her of wrongdoing, Madison Avenue Diamonds, the business that she helped run for years under the name Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, figures prominently in the government’s case [.....]
A community of New Yorkers has formed around controlled, costumed combat.
Photographs by Devin Yalkin; Text by Ben Detrick; Produced by Eve Lyons @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 18
By day, Jake Gomez works as a special-education teacher in Downtown Brooklyn. But on a Friday evening in June, the stocky, mohawked 31-year-old was professionally elbow-dropping opponents in the ring. Within the cinder-block recreation center of Most Precious Blood Church in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn, he was Logan Black, the King of Chaos.
Mr. Gomez is part of New York’s underground wrestling scene, a D.I.Y. community of performers, referees, managers and fans who embrace the violent pageantry of a sport usually seen on pay-per-view or in arenas.
For a few hours a week, they congregate in gyms, nightclubs and social clubs to perform under the guises of brutish and flamboyant personae, before returning to their otherwise routine lives [....]
By Dan Bilefsky @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 18
QUEBEC CITY — He has claimed that police officers accused of raping indigenous women could not have done so because the officers were young and handsome and the women had “rotten teeth” and “sniff glue.”
He was accused of mocking a man whose teenage son had committed suicide.
He praises President Trump’s unfiltered style of communication.
Jeff Fillion, 50, is among the most prominent and provocative talk radio hosts on Quebec airwaves, dominating what his critics call “radio poubelle,” or trash radio. His critics revile him. His fans adore him.
At a time when Mr. Trump’s tirades on Twitter and beyond are changing global political discourse, Mr. Fillion and his fellow shock jocks are drawing legions of listeners in this picturesque political capital, propagating a cocktail of anti-immigrant, anti-environment and anti-feminist views [.....]
The former UN secretary general became a proponent of diplomatic interventions to alleviate human suffering. Annan died Saturday at the age of 80.
By Krishnadev Calamur @ TheAtlantic.com, Aug. 18
Kofi Annan, who died Saturday at the age of 80 in Bern, Switzerland, will be remembered as the UN’s first secretary-general from sub-Saharan Africa, a courtly figure who oversaw the global organization during a period of tumult, and as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. But in many ways, Annan’s legacy will be defined as much by his failures, and what he did with them, as by his many successes [....]
By Andrew Rosati & Ethan Bronner @ Bloomberg via LMTOnline.com, August 17, 2018
[....] A participant in the April Bogota meeting said in an interview that he believes the people his group met with were the perpetrators.
His group, which included members of all four armed-service branches, was later infiltrated by the Venezuelan security services. Several dozen were arrested, breaking up the most serious attempt to overthrow Maduro in his five years in office. The plan was called Operation Constitution. The man remains abroad.
His theory about who was behind the drone attack is one of several clues emerging about the perpetrators of the Aug. 4 assault.
The government also knows some things about the plotters. It says their financier is Osman Delgado, a Venezuelan living in Miami who is linked to a 2017 attack on a military base. Delgado couldn't be reached for comment.
The government has released audio recordings of what seem to be the attackers on the day of the assassination attempt. The recordings reveal a chaotic group bickering and scolding one another for failing to report in or not speaking loudly enough or announcing that the military ceremony being attacked was underway. [.....]
With that headline, thought it deserved a new thread! Here's a cross-link to the previous thread by barefooted, started when the Brennan story broke.
By Clare Foran @ CNN.com, Aug. 17
Sixty former CIA officials warned President Donald Trump in a statement on Friday that "the country will be weakened if there is a political litmus test applied before seasoned experts are allowed to share their views."
The letter, which comes after Trump's decision to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance, was signed by former CIA officials who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations in positions such as analysts, senior analysts and officers.
It adds to a growing outcry against the President's recent action and comes after more than a dozen former senior intelligence officials denounced the move as "ill-considered" and "unprecedented" in a separate statement.
"All of us believe it is critical to protect classified information from unauthorized disclosure," reads the statement from the former CIA officials. "But we believe equally strongly that former government officials have the right to express their unclassified views on what they see as critical national security issues without fear of being punished for doing so [....]
Couple also ‘showed great difficulty in answering questions asked by people of the opposite sex’
@ Agence France Presse, Aug. 17
The Swiss city of Lausanne has blocked a Muslim couple’s bid to become Swiss nationals over their refusal to shake hands with members of the opposite sex. The municipality said it refused to grant the couple’s citizenship application over their lack of respect for gender equality, Lausanne mayor Gregoire Junod said.
He said a municipal commission had questioned the couple several months ago to determine if they met the criteria for citizenship, but had determined in the ruling made public on Friday that they missed the mark on integration.
He refused to divulge the couple’s nationalities or other identifying details [....]
"EXCLUSIVE" by Mallory Pickett @ TheGuardian.com, Aug. 17
Trump administration forces some scientific funding to be reviewed by adviser who was high-school football teammate of Ryan Zinke
By Alex W. Palmer @ GQ.com, Aug. 16
Strange how it keeps happening, how the greatest works of Chinese art keep getting brazenly stolen from museums around the world. Is it a conspiracy? Vengeance for treasures plundered years ago? We sent Alex W. Palmer to investigate the trail of theft and the stunning rumor: Is the Chinese government behind one of the boldest art-crime waves in history?
By Rochelle Gurstein @TheBaffler.com, for July 2018 print issue. (Gurstein is the author of The Repeal of Reticence: America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art.)
WHAT DO WE LOSE WHEN WE LOSE OUR PRIVACY? This question has become increasingly difficult to answer, living as we do in a society that offers boundless opportunities for men and women to expose themselves (in all dimensions of that word) as never before, to commit what are essentially self-invasions of privacy. Although this is a new phenomenon, it has become as ubiquitous as it is quotidian, and for that reason, it is perhaps one of the most telling signs of our time. To get a sense of the sheer range of unconscious exhibitionism, we need only think of the popularity of reality TV shows, addiction-recovery memoirs, and cancer diaries. Then there are the banal but even more conspicuous varieties, like soaring, all-glass luxury apartment buildings and hotels in which inhabitants display themselves in all phases of their private lives to the casual glance of thousands of city walkers below. Or the incessant sound of people talking loudly—sometimes gossiping, sometimes crying—on their cell phones, broadcasting to total strangers the intimate details of their lives.
And, of course, there are now unprecedented opportunities for violating one’s own privacy, furnished by the technology of the internet [....]
Given our widespread obliviousness to the current situation, we might be better served by asking: What did people used to believe they lost when they lost their privacy? Surprisingly, it turns out that a large number of people began to speak of privacy in a self-conscious way only toward the end of the nineteenth century [....]