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bbc--2019-01-18--Spain domestic violence Trail of death shocks society

bbc

Spain domestic violence: Trail of death shocks society

A man convicted of killing his wife is now believed to have murdered his defence lawyer, with whom he had been having an affair, before taking his own life on Friday. Jose Javier Salvador Calvo, 50, jumped from a bridge in the eastern town of Teruel when police confronted him. The case has shocked Spain, prompting debate about domestic violence laws. Reacting to the deaths, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vowed to continue tackling violence against women. His tweet is seen as a retort to Vox, a far-right party influential in the southern region of Andalusia that wants to halt legal aid for women beaten by men, saying it unfairly favours the woman. Jose Javier Salvador Calvo shot dead his wife, Patricia Maurel Conte, 29, in May 2003 in Spain's north-eastern region of Aragon. Released under licence in 2017, the killer began an affair with Rebeca Santamalia Cáncer, 47, the lawyer who had defended him at his trial, Spanish media report. Police found the lawyer stabbed to death at Salvador Calvo's home in Aragon's regional capital, Zaragoza, just after 04:00 (03:00 GMT) on Friday after her husband reported her missing. A few hours earlier, around midnight, the suspected murderer had jumped from a bridge in Teruel, a town 150km (93 miles) to the south, after being spotted by a police patrol. Local government representative Carmen Sánchez told reporters that the lawyer had been a victim of "gender violence". On Twitter, Prime Minister Sánchez said that four women had been murdered in Spain in recent days and there must be no retreat in addressing the "horror". Last year in Spain, 47 women were murdered, four of them in Aragon, in crimes of gender violence. The killing of teacher Laura Luelmo, 26, last month in Andalusia caused a wave of revulsion in the country. Her partially-naked body had been found near a village after five days of searching. A man living locally later confessed to murdering her after attempting to rape her, Spanish newspaper El País reports. The self-confessed killer, 50-year-old Bernardo Montoya, had previously served time in prison for murdering a woman in 1995.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46921214

2019-01-18 22:56:52+00:00

society

social condition

bbc--2019-10-08--Polish election: Leader targets gay rights as threat to society

bbc

Polish election: Leader targets gay rights as threat to society

"We consider two communities fundamental, the family as one man, one woman and the children," said the leader of Poland's ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) at a recent convention. LGBT+ rights have become the single biggest cultural issue in Poland's election campaign ahead of Sunday's vote. In the eyes of Jaroslaw Kaczynski's national-conservative party and the Catholic Church, those rights are a threat to traditional Polish families and values. Mr Kaczynski likes to identify threats to Polish society - during the election campaign four years ago, he said Middle Eastern migrants might bring "parasites and protozoa" to Poland. This time around, according to Mr Kaczynski, the threat comes from LGBT+ people and from Europe, where families can have "two mummies or two daddies", he said. Poland's 1993 constitution states that a marriage is between a man and a woman. Civil partnerships, be they between heterosexual or same-sex couples, are not legally recognised. "Christianity is part of our national identity, the [Catholic] Church was and is the preacher and holder of the only commonly held system of values in Poland," he said. "Outside of it… we have only nihilism." Senior Catholic Church figures have gone further, most notably the Archbishop of Krakow, Marek Jedraszewski, who on numerous occasions has identified the "LGBT lobby" and "gender ideology" as the new threat to Polish freedom following the end of communism in 1989, calling it "totalitarian" and a "great threat to our freedom". • Law and Justice (PiS): Opposes civil partnerships, same sex marriage and adoption of children by same sex couples • Konfederation: Opposes marriage equality and adoption of children by same sex couples The couple who came back to fight for change In the beautiful, medieval city of Torun, birthplace of the astronomer Copernicus, chef Mariusz Godlejewski rejected the notion that he was a threat. During more than a decade living in Ireland, Mariusz married his long-term partner Bartosz before the couple returned to their homeland last year. "My husband and I have been together for 14 years. Who are we, two strangers living together? We are family as well," he said. "Coming back here I knew what I was getting in to. I knew that I will lose all the rights with my husband we gained in Ireland but we wanted to come and help our friends to make the change." Mariusz believes it is only a matter of time before things do change but finds the tone of political debate depressing. Last month, a professor from Torun's Copernicus University, Aleksander Nalaskowski, was suspended after he likened homosexuality to "the plague" and complained that gay men and women were demanding not only tolerance, but acceptance. • The gay mayor shaking up politics in Catholic Poland Government-supporting circles argued his suspension was an abuse of free speech and he was subsequently reinstated. Mariusz was organising the third equality march in Torun, in which more than a thousand people walked through the city guarded on both sides by helmeted riot police carrying shields. A police water cannon I saw parked in the road was not required but violence has broken out during equality marches in the cities of Bialystok, where gangs of angry young men attacked parade participants, and in Lublin, where counter demonstrators clashed with police and two protesters were arrested after they reportedly brought homemade explosive devices. Poland remains more socially conservative than many countries in Western Europe but attitudes to LGBT+ issues are changing. There are more and more equality marches, 32 this year compared to 13 last year. Most, like the one in Torun, are joyful, peaceful events. 'They have to be aware they are sinners' Underneath a statue of Copernicus in the city centre, a small counter demonstration gathered before the equality march. There were several members of the far-right National Radical Camp, holding their green and white flags emblazoned with a falanga sword, which is associated with fascism. There were also banners warning about how the "LGBT lobby" wants to teach pre-schoolers how to masturbate, above the slogan "Stop paedophilia". There was also a photo of an equality parade showing two male marchers holding a rainbow flag from behind, their bare buttocks pixellated. Some people held crosses and handed out white, plastic rosary beads before prayers were said for the souls of the equality march participants. "Everyone has the same rights. For example, they have the same right to marry. I can marry my girlfriend, they can also marry their girlfriends, but they want to marry the same sex," organiser and teacher Radoslaw Duch said. "We don't want to arrest them, we don't want to get rid of them. They have to be aware they are sinners. Me as a Catholic person, I want to show them a better path of their life," he added. If opinion polls are correct, PiS should win the October 13 election comfortably. Attitudes in Poland may be changing, but if Mr Kaczynski's party does win a second term, there seems little chance that homosexual couples will enjoy the same rights as their heterosexual neighbours any time soon.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49904849

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:11:13 GMT

society

social condition

bbc--2019-12-27--Smoking ban: Austria's cafe society calls time on cigarettes

bbc

Smoking ban: Austria's cafe society calls time on cigarettes

Austria was once dubbed "the ashtray of Europe" but has finally banned smoking in restaurants, bars and cafes. The decision came after years of controversy. Austria had been on the verge of bringing in a total ban last year, but the plans were overturned because of pressure from the far-right Freedom Party, which was part of the last government. But after the fall of the coalition in May, the ban was reintroduced and came into force on 1 November. Some restaurants and cafes went non-smoking several years ago, but others allowed smoking until the last possible minute. How are they dealing with the change? Wratschko is something of a Vienna institution. A pub with venerable wooden panelling and worn, ancient wallpaper, it serves deeply traditional Viennese food. And until a few weeks ago, it would have been full of cigarette smoke. Customers wishing to eat in the non-smoking area at the back had to walk through the smoky bar to get there. Its owner, Clemens Wratschko, says the atmosphere has improved and it is better for his staff as well. "My employees are nearly all smokers and I told them you will be glad because you will have no more passive smoke; you'll smoke much less than before and the next day you will feel fresher than before." Some bars and nightclubs have complained that fewer customers are coming since the ban and that they have lost between 15% and 25% of turnover. But Clemens Wratschko says he hasn't noticed any drop in numbers. He thinks people will come back to the night clubs, like they did in France, Italy and other countries which have introduced smoking bans. "People want to go out and meet their friends, to enjoy a kind of atmosphere. People prefer to meet their friends in a pub or in a bar," he said. Down the road at Café Rüdigerhof, I met Ricci, who has been a waiter for 25 years. He says that after spending a few days away in protest, all his regular guests have now returned, despite the ban, and they are now smoking less. "Before they smoked one pack of cigarettes at the cafe house, and now maybe they are happy because they smoke only two or three cigarettes because they have to go outside. I think it is not a problem." Ricci says he is very pleased about the ban. "Of course it is better for me and my work. We used to have to work in the smoking area. But it's much better. I can breathe much better." However, Clemens Wratschko, himself a smoker, admits to a certain nostalgia for the smoky old days. "Maybe I am a bit sentimental. In my pub, you had the very old rooms at the front, with the bar, with the taste of smoke and alcohol. And then you had the Speiseraum or eating room, with a little more of a distinguished atmosphere." But he says the smoking ban brings in new qualities. "We have better air. The clothes smell better the next day. And we feel a bit healthier, a bit less of a headache." What public reaction has there been? In general the ban seems to be holding in Vienna. Figures from mid-November say that inspectors carried out more than 2,000 checks of restaurants and reported 27 breaches of the ban. Shisha bars are currently taking legal steps to try to get an exception for their businesses. A survey by an Austrian news magazine suggests that most Austrians are in favour of the ban. But last month, around 700 people protested against it in front of the Federal Chancellery. The demonstration was attended by the disgraced former head of the far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache. How smoking bans have spread in Europe • How has smoking ban changed the UK?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50643586

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 00:47:47 GMT

society

social condition

bbcuk--2019-07-25--Is societys Man up message fuelling a suicide crisis among men

bbcuk

Is society's 'Man up' message fuelling a suicide crisis among men?

Suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 50. What is it about being male in the UK that is fuelling this mental health crisis? After nearly 20 years suffering recurrent bouts of depression - virtually in silence - at the age of 39, James had reached the end The sporty, laddish, joke-cracking executive, had devised a suicide escape plan involving a car, a tree, a hill and high speed. "The clarity I had thinking about it was completely fogged over by what that would do to the people close to me," he says. "Did I think they would be better without me? Yes. "But in the end what stopped me was thinking of my children and my wife, about what it would do to them." Like so many men, James felt unable to reveal how he was feeling. He kept it hidden under a habitual light-hearted facade and did not even tell his wife. Then, something small happened at work. Now, he cannot even remember what it was - but because of how he was feeling at the time, it was big enough for him to decide he had to kill himself. As he thought over his plan yet again, James shut himself in the work toilet, crying, but something made him call a friend. He recalls sobbing into the phone for one and half hours, telling his friend, Claire, how he was "not coping well" - massively minimising how he really felt. And he recalls how she stayed on the phone listening, while he sobbed. He didn't tell her he was planning to take his own life. "She talked me down, so to speak. That was the initial opening of the dam," he says. Reaching out like that for the first time saved his life and he was soon admitted to an intensive treatment centre. Depression had first hit James during his first year at university, at the age of 20, but he had felt unable to let his friends know what he was going through. A member of the football team and the cricket team, he went out drinking with his teammates and appeared to others to be having the time of his life. "I felt I had to be part of it, to fit into the team. To be part of that, I had to have that laddish bravado - I think that's why men can struggle so much," James says. "Then I got caught in this whirlpool of despair - should I be laddish even if I didn't enjoy being laddish? "I was trying to fit into how society thinks young men should act." When he finally sought help from his GP, he was not offered any counselling, just anti-depressants. Prozac had recently arrived in the UK. Would some sort of talking therapy, the preferred treatment option today, have helped him? He is not so sure he would have allowed it to. "Men don't feel comfortable in a situation where they are made to express their feelings," James says. "With therapy, it's a case of sit down in a room and there's no escape. "To be honest, therapy is still a dirty word for most men." And, in a profession vastly dominated by female practitioners, it may be unsurprising that more than two-thirds of people who seek help for a mental-health problem are women. Mental health champion Lee Cambule recently told a committee of MPs investigating the issue: "There's this perception of men that they should 'man up' and 'just get on with it', that they should be strong in the face of this adversity, and this makes it very difficult for them to then open up and seek help. "A lot of the things about being a man or boy in this situation makes it very difficult to reach out and get the help that's needed." Simon Gunning, chief executive of Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm), told MPs masculinity was often equated with having what it took to put food on the table. "It has been defined as this strange conflation of stoicism and strength, meaning the strong silent type," he said. But, for many men, it was actually harder to communicate than to stay silent. Calm has sought to bust these stereotypical messages, with clever campaigning that flips them on their head. Martin Robinson, who edits the Book of Man website, says men can end up going to deeper depths of despair than women before asking for help. This is all about the message society gives boys and men about staying tough, he says. "I do think it's because they've been informed throughout their lives that they are not supposed to have these problems, so many people keep it hidden away until they are at the point of deep distress," he says. Adam Afghan, who was deeply troubled with obsessive suicidal thoughts several years ago, says: "I kept pushing them to the back of my mind, over and over again. "And these thoughts gradually got worse and worse to the point that the only way I could think of getting these thoughts away from me was to commit suicide." Fortunately, he found the courage to break cover and seek help from his mother, who found him a therapist. Some campaigners feel a different approach is needed - that enables men to open up and talk without their mental health issues being the explicit focus. Men's health charity Movember organises themed Mo Running events that bring men together to run but allow them to chat over mental health issues while they do so. James, who as a community champion shares his story during such events, found that running shoulder to shoulder with others made it easier for his fellow runners to open up about their experiences and feelings. But Adam says it's time for men to stop keeping things bottled up and denying their feelings. "I feel that manning up is what men do," he says, "we think we should just take it on the chin. "But it's actually the opposite - that's not a brave thing, to suffer in silence. "The really courageous thing to do is to face your problems, face the pain that you're suffering. "Trying to fix it, that's what's really courageous."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-48940521

2019-07-25 23:41:40+00:00

society

social condition

bbcuk--2019-10-11--Cyber-criminals are threat to society, warns forensics boss

bbcuk

Cyber-criminals are threat to society, warns forensics boss

A senior manager at Eurofins, the UK's biggest forensic services provider which was hit by a cyber-attack in June, has warned the country to "ready itself" for further attacks. A ransomware virus infected the firm's computer systems, laboratory work was suspended for seven weeks and police investigations and trials were delayed. In his first interview since the incident, Mark Pearse told BBC News it could happen to any organisation. "It's a threat to society," he said. "There is no sector that's immune to this," said Mr Pearse, commercial director of Eurofins in four countries, including Britain. "We've got the transport sector, the energy sector, the health sector, other public organisations, the criminal justice system. "We're all vulnerable," he said. • More than half of British firms report cyber-attacks The cyber-attack affected Eurofins' IT systems in the 47 countries where it operates. Mr Pearse said he was first told about it in a call at 05:00, as he was about to catch a flight from Manchester Airport, and spent the day on the phone dealing with the fallout. "The labs are quite dependent on IT and everything these days is either controlled by IT, all the data is stored on servers, and so the processes quickly came to a grinding halt," he explained. Eurofins' forensic science division in the UK, where it has seven sites and 60% of the market, was especially badly hit, so after consulting police chiefs and senior prosecutors, the company decided to stop accepting samples of blood, DNA and other scientific evidence from suspects, victims and crime scenes. "It has huge implications," said Mr Pearse, a molecular cell biologist who used to work for the Metropolitan Police and the state-run Forensic Science Service. "We're the biggest private provider so that was quite a decision to make," he said. "We do many hundreds, many thousands of cases and samples... "So very quickly the job in hand was partly to investigate the cyber-incident, and the consequences from an IT perspective... and to provide continuity of service." The National Police Chiefs' Council co-ordinated emergency measures to manage the flow of specimens submitted for analysis so that the most serious cases were given priority by other providers. "Inevitably, if you take 60% or so of the capacity out of the forensic science sector you can't carry on as 'business as usual'," said Mr Pearse. "The other suppliers can't cope with all the work so backlogs, to a limited degree, did build up in police forces." Towards the end of July a backlog of 20,000 samples had developed but that has now been cut to around 10,000 as services have returned to normal. BBC News was told that Eurofins had paid the cyber-criminals a ransom to restore its IT systems but Mr Pearse refused to comment. "The National Crime Agency is now taking an international lead in the criminal investigation into this crime on Eurofins group and that investigation is ongoing and will probably be ongoing for some months and therefore it's subject to those usual constraints," he said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49972290

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 12:20:21 GMT

society

social condition

cnsnews--2019-04-03--Kamala Harris We Can Judge a Society I Think Always By The Way It Treats Its Children

cnsnews

Kamala Harris: ‘We Can Judge a Society, I Think Always, By The Way It Treats Its Children’

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Kamala Harris said on CBS’s “This Morning” on March 26, that you can always judge a society by the way it treats children. “We can judge a society I think always by the way it treats its children,” Harris said. “And one of the greatest expressions of love of our children is that we invest in their education,” she said. Harris made these remarks while discussing her plan to give teachers an average salary increase of $13,500. “The people who are going to educate our children are our teachers,” she said. “And for too long, they have been paid substandard wages and certainly not being paid their value to us as a society and to our children.” “So, I am proud of our initiative that has been described as the largest federal investment in closing the teacher pay gap in history,” Harris said. “I think that there is no question that we all know there are two groups of people who are raising our children, it’s our parents which can be grandparents, aunties and uncles and it`s our teachers. So let’s pay them their value.” In a March 31 Tweet that she now has pinned to top of her Twitter feed, Harris talked about her plan for a teacher pay raise. “Nearly one of every five teachers in America is leaving teaching within five years of entering the classroom,” Harris said in the Tweet. “That impacts our children, it impacts our school district, and it’s time teachers got the support they deserve. My plan would raise teacher’s pay an average of $13,500.”

CNSNews.com Staff

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/cnsnewscom-staff/kamala-harris-we-can-judge-society-i-think-always-way-it-treats-its

2019-04-03 20:07:19+00:00

society

social condition

conservativehome--2019-07-22--Alan Mak End child hunger in Britain to help build a fairer society

conservativehome

Alan Mak: End child hunger in Britain to help build a fairer society

Alan Mak is MP for Havant and former President & Trustee of Magic Breakfast, which provides healthy school breakfasts to hungry and malnourished children in disadvantaged areas of the UK. Renewing the National School Breakfast Programme must be a key priority for a One Nation Conservative Government. When our next Party leader and Prime Minister is announced tomorrow morning, delivering a successful Brexit will rightly be his top priority. The debate around what success looks like is currently dominated by economic yardsticks – will our GDP rise? Can we sign a trade deal with America? Is our growth rate sustainable? An expanding economy is certainly a vital driver and indicator of Britain’s post-Brexit future, and I have previously written extensively on this site about why leading the Fourth Industrial Revolution is key to our prosperity in the years ahead. However, our next Government must also tackle some of the engrained social challenges that affect communities across the country, especially in inner-city and post-industrial areas. Britain after Brexit must feel different on the ground for families, rather than just look different on economists’ spreadsheets. Our approach to ending child hunger and tackling child poverty are prime examples of what needs to change – and must be at the very top of the next Prime Minister’s to do list.  The child hunger challenge is stark. Around 1.8 million school age children in the UK are at risk of hunger – five pupils in every class of 30, or 17 per cent of all schoolchildren across the country. Hunger affects children’s concentration and behaviour in the classroom, attainment in exams and ultimately their life chances, employability and wider social mobility. Hungry children miss out on success at school, which in turn holds them back for the rest of their lives, often leading to unemployment and poverty. Magic Breakfast is a leading charity working hard to tackle this issue head on, and currently feeds over 40,000 children every school day in 481 schools. In the last school year, the charity provided over 7.8 million breakfasts. Their work delivers results: independent research carried out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that pupils in primary schools offering a free, nutritious breakfast boosted their reading, writing and maths results by an average of two months’ progress over the course of a year compared to children in schools with no such breakfast provision. The improvements at a primary school in Barnsley, South Yorkshire show the transformative impact of breakfast clubs on the ground. The school launched a breakfast club in September 2014, with Magic Breakfast’s support. 170 out of 220 children attended breakfast in the first week. The headteacher says the breakfast provision had a major impact on the school across a range of areas including lateness, behavioural incidents and improved relationships between staff and children and staff and parents. The school also saw a clear improvement in educational attainment with exam results improving dramatically in just one year, with 83 per cent of Key Stage 2 pupils reaching the expected standard compared to 33 per cent the year before, and 85 per cent of Year 1 pupils achieving a pass in phonics compared to 40% the year before. Similar progress has been achieved in other schools across the country. When I first started working with Magic Breakfast over a decade ago, the charity relied entirely on donations, received no Government funding, and operated with a full-time staff of just three people. Nonetheless, it delivered inspirational results and impact, yet we knew even then that child hunger could only be ended if we had both sustained funding and political will from the top for our social mission. After years of lobbying both local government (including Boris Johnson as Mayor of London) and the Department for Education, the Government launched the National School Breakfast Programme (NSBP) to ensure children in the most disadvantaged areas of England have access to a healthy breakfast at school, based on the Magic Breakfast model. The NSBP has proved to be a big success. It provides a free nutritious breakfast in over 1,775 schools every school day, feeding more than 280,000 children daily including 115,000 pupil premium pupils. In a typical week, the Programme delivers 624,000 bagels, 7,224 boxes of cereal and 260kg of porridge oats. A school supported by NSBP that had a level of pupil lateness at double the national average has seen a significant improvement in attendance now that breakfast bagels are now served in the hall, playground and at the three school entrances, ensuring that 95 per cent of children pass a bagel station on the way into school. Funding for the Programme is currently scheduled to end in March 2020, and the incoming Prime Minster should make an early decision to renew it to maintain the momentum of this very successful initiative. Renewal will cost around £12 million a year, reassure schools, and prevent hundreds of thousands of children from falling hungry in the morning and failing in the classroom. It will also mean our Party’s social mission to improve the education and life chances of our young people continues. Delivering Brexit and firing up our economy are all vital to the success of our next Prime Minister and our Party. But we need a powerful domestic agenda too, which signals our Government’s One Nation values and our determination that after Brexit the fruits of economic success will be felt in every community and region of the country. By investing in school breakfast clubs, we give our children fuel for learning at school and send the strongest possible signal that we are committed to building a fairer society by ending child hunger and poverty.

Alan Mak MP

https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2019/07/alan-mak-end-child-hunger-in-britain-to-help-build-a-fairer-society.html

2019-07-22 14:30:33+00:00

society

social condition

drudgereport--2019-05-29--Crackdown on internet will put free Press at risk warns Society of Editors

drudgereport

Crackdown on internet 'will put free Press at risk', warns Society of Editors...

Draconian new rules designed to make the web safer for children will wreak 'untold harm' on newspapers and websites, the Society of Editors has warned. The proposed code will limit online advertising so severely it will drive regional newspapers to the point of collapse and 'severely damage' national newspapers and broadcasters, the influential industry group said. Under the rules, drawn up by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), internet firms will be forced to introduce strict new age checks on their websites – or treat all of their users as if they are children. The code is so stringent that critics fear people could end up being forced to demonstrate their age for virtually every website they visit, or have the services they can access limited as if they are under 18. They may have to log in every time they visit commercial news websites, browse holidays online or access internet shopping sites. Companies that do not stick to the new rule will face fines of up to 4 per cent of their global turnover. In the case of Facebook, this would cost them £1.67billion. The radical proposals, published last month, were supposed to protect children online, according to Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham. Critics have already accused the ICO of 'infantilising' web users. Yesterday, in a strongly-worded letter to Miss Denham, Society of Editors executive director Ian Murray warned that it could also force news providers to water content down to the point that it becomes 'irrelevant'. He added that if they do not do so, they could risk losing readers and advertising because people are 'unable or unwilling' to sign in. Mr Murray said the demands of the ICO code 'would prove virtually impossible to apply without either losing the vast majority of visitors unable or unwilling to provide proof of age, or damaging content to the point where it becomes irrelevant'. He insisted: 'If publishers decide age verification is untenable and stop collecting data as a result, then they would face huge loss of advertising revenue when it becomes no longer possible to provide potential advertisers with essential audience measurement. 'The whole regime, if enacted, would mean a watering-down of editorial content.' He added: 'The effect would be to severely damage the media industry, making many news and media online offerings simply untenable.' The society, whose nearly 400 members include editors, lawyers and other senior figures, also warned the proposed measures could have a negative impact on the children they were designed to protect. It stressed: 'There has always been an encouragement that young adults and teenagers engage with the world through reading newspapers and following news broadcasts. The proposed age-appropriate codes would seem to go against that body of thought.' The final version of the code could come into force as early as the autumn. It applies to virtually every website that makes money online. The ICO said: 'We're aware of media industry concerns. 'We'll be considering all responses we've had, as well as engaging further where necessary once the consultation has finished.'

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DrudgeReportFeed/~3/c9-mGxUCbcc/Crackdown-internet-free-Press-risk-warns-Society-Editors.html

2019-05-29 21:25:40+00:00

society

social condition

eveningstandard--2019-01-03--Jen Brister review Meaningless is an entertaining rage about societyaposs ills and the patriarchy

eveningstandard

Jen Brister review: Meaningless is an entertaining rage about society's ills and the patriarchy

Jen Brister is not happy. If it isn’t the fact that her judgmental Spanish mother has moved into her house, it is the fact that the comic and her female partner haven’t had much sleep since they became parents of twin boys. And that’s just for starters. Luckily, she is well aware that her assured show, entitled Meaningless, is a comedy and channels her anger into some gloriously entertaining raging riffs about society’s ills and the patriarchy. We may be living in a post-feminist era but she has seen how gender clichés live on when she is walking down the street with her sons and other mothers dote on them. As if Brister did not have enough gripes to get her goat, she has recently discovered that at 43 she is peri-menopausal, which at least goes some way to explaining her temper. Though I suspect she would be in a venomous mood even if she was in the first flush of youth. A number of topics here did feel familiar. The observation that women become invisible in middle age is regularly addressed and she is hardly the first to skewer smug mums. Her “if men had periods” routine has been delivered countless times, albeit often by men, from Ben Elton to Daniel Sloss. Though you certainly can’t fault Brister’s memorable image of blokes over-fussing about menstruation. Her brutal impression of neanderthals who can’t get their head around lesbians having children was priceless, as was her explanation that she and her partner are bio and non-bio mums “like boxes of detergents”. This is not a show that will make you see the world anew, but it will touch a nerve. And hopefully this good review will lower Brister’s blood pressure for a few minutes.

Bruce Dessau​

https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/arts/jen-brister-meaningless-soho-theatre-review-a4029381.html

2019-01-03 09:15:00+00:00

society

social condition

eveningstandard--2019-01-15--Approaching Empty review Comes into its own as an exploration of loyalty in a go-it-alone society

eveningstandard

Approaching Empty review: Comes into its own as an exploration of loyalty in a go-it-alone society

The fact that Ishy Din’s drama about a struggling minicab firm in Middlesbrough is set at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death is no coincidence. This very particular period is a cue for reflection on the type of society Mrs T inherited and the one she created, via two long-time friends who used to have jobs in the local steelworks until it closed down. This pair, 55-year-olds of Pakistani origin, are Raf (Nicholas Khan), who owns the cab firm, and its manager Mansha (Kammy Darweish), who wants to buy it from Raf and revive its ailing fortunes. “You don’t have to be ruthless,” says good-natured Mansha who, we suspect, is about to be proven sorely wrong. The first half, flat and static, is essentially at empty, but there’s a welcome top-up of fuel after the interval of Pooja Ghai’s production, which is a collaboration between the Kiln, Tamasha and Live Theatre, Newcastle. It is here that Din gets stuck into an examination of whether good, old-fashioned ethics and loyalty have a time or a place anywhere in our increasingly cut-throat, go-it-alone society. Click here to buy London theatre tickets with GO London Tickets

Fiona Mountford

https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/approaching-empty-kiln-theatre-review-a4038991.html

2019-01-15 09:15:00+00:00

society

social condition

eveningstandard--2019-01-30--No-deal worries me but Iaposm much more fearful about no-heal our society is more polarised than

eveningstandard

No-deal worries me but I'm much more fearful about no-heal — our society is more polarised than ever

I like to see myself as a sunny soul. I have a slightly naive belief that everyone can find a way to get on. I believe the children are our future — teach them well and let them lead the way… I have friends old and new from across the political and social divide and even a few who live south of the river. The morning after the EU referendum in 2016 I felt calm and even oddly positive, even though I voted Remain. I tweeted a photo of London in the dazzling morning sunshine with the cheery caption “A new dawn, in so many ways…” I told my hysterical Remainer friends to calm down. I promised them that everything would be OK, that perhaps this could even be an opportunity to change Britain for the better, that there was no way our politicians would be stupid enough to plunge this great country into some weapons-grade crisis and that we could all come together as one nation eventually and hug it out. Well, I regret to declare that I was completely wrong. Two-and-a-half years later we are in a bigger mess than anyone could have imagined. We face a political, constitutional and looming economic crisis. But the greatest tragedy is how divided we still are. We don’t just have differing views on dry technical concepts or phrases which no one really understands, such as the customs union, the Irish backstop or regulatory alignment (which sounds like a Hoxton osteopath), we have big, raging rows on social media or in real life which reveal fundamental differences about how we see life. And you can’t just dismiss them or shake them off after a Twitter spat or an explosive screaming match on a television panel. They go to the heart of who you are, your vision of society and your core values — and it’s hard to compromise on those things. I’ve had major run-ins on LBC and CNN this week with Brexiteers, and as much I want to be friends with everyone, I cannot change my beliefs. I think it’s wicked to create a man-made economic shock. We are better for having people from all over the world living here in the UK. And I think it’s a thoroughly good thing to strive for greater equality and opportunity. But I also understand that as many people hold the exact equal and opposite view to me and think that all this “Leftie nonsense” has sent this country to rack and ruin. And that’s their right (even though they’re wrong, obviously). But how do you reconcile those views? I’m not sure you can. We need to be honest about it. Brexit didn’t cause all these divisions but it drew them out and we can’t just paper over the cracks. We may well end up with some second-rate deal to patch up the political crisis but these deep, profound social contradictions which have been unleashed will sadly mean there will be a no-heal Brexit for the foreseeable future. I pride myself on being unfashionably late, so months after literally the entire world gushed over Hamilton , I finally took my seat in the theatre on Monday night. I liked it but I had questions. There. Said it. Don’t @ me. Sure, the set, songs, performers and production are all incredible. I loved the diversity and whooped away at all the right messages about immigration — but it was still a tale about a man in politics who found fame, fortune and power, and couldn’t keep it in his pants. Plus ça change. But it’s a fascinating hidden story of a key figure in America’s fight for independence. A Founding Father — “father” being the operative word. It got me thinking about American politics today. While I despair of Trump, I look ahead to what may emerge from the wreckage after he departs and it could be this exciting new era which will need Founding Mothers, Daughters and Sisters. We saw from the mid-terms that a number of brilliant women, many of colour, are stepping up, getting elected and running to be the Democratic presidential candidate, including Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. But the one to watch is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the firebrand young Congresswoman from New York. She’s our modern feminist Hamilton — from a humble background, cocky, brave, smart and talks too much. And she’s not throwing away her shot. *We’re bored of Brexit but more fed up with January. It’s cruel because of all the irritating people tweeting how “shamazing” it is to be booze-free. I applaud you but I don’t need your abstinence trolling me while I nurse a hangover, which I spent good money on. Lots of people are posting boozy before and sober after selfies but I can’t tell the difference. Maybe I’m still slightly drunk.

Ayesha Hazarika

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/nodeal-worries-me-but-i-m-much-more-fearful-about-noheal-our-society-is-more-polarised-than-ever-a4052866.html

2019-01-30 12:17:30+00:00

society

social condition

eveningstandard--2019-02-25--Society dehumanises vulnerable pregnant women and new mothers including aposIsis brideapos Sha

eveningstandard

Society dehumanises vulnerable pregnant women and new mothers — including 'Isis bride' Shamima

When I was pregnant, I had lunch with a taut, snippy writer from American Vogue who had written a dull book about the hair-colouring habits of Manhattan socialites. Her publisher had refused to send it to me, I think out of embarrassment. At the time the papers were full of the Iraq war — indeed, I’d spent the morning ghosting a Comment piece for Andy McNab — but this writer lent across the table, switched off my tape recorder and savaged me for not having read her canon of work on, I don’t know, hemlines. I felt boiling rage as I left the restaurant. I was reminded of it this week when I looked at Luciana Berger and the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle), and the unremitting onslaught of needless bile that both these pregnant women are subjected to. How do they stay sane? And is this dehumanisation of vulnerable women the real marker of how low society has sunk? My first reaction to the fashion troll was to refuse to write the interview. But my editor suggested I let loose. “Write what happened,” he said. Perhaps my anger was infectious: he slapped that particular broadsheet’s first ever use of the word “bitch” in the headline. Now, I am not pretending that boiling rage is an emotion unfamiliar to me, but boiling rage while feeling hormonal and vulnerable is a potent cocktail, as any woman who has been pregnant will attest. (I still wince with guilt when I think of the poor old lady who came over to tell me my toddler was too noisy in a café the day before I gave birth to my third.) And then there’s the hormone switch post-birth, which takes you by the hand to the cliff-edge of emotion. Your boobs feel like a life vest suddenly inflated inside the aircraft, and the idea that something might happen to this small, damp, defenceless creature, wholly in your care, makes you hallucinate. Which brings me to Shamima Begum, the 19-year-old “Isis bride” who left Bethnal Green aged 15 thinking she was heading for the sunlit uplands of the caliphate, and has just had her third baby in the grim surroundings of al-Hol refugee camp. Begum’s British citizenship is being revoked, in part because of interviews she gave (some while still pregnant) in which she said she was “unfazed” by the sight of a severed head in a bin. She was also unwilling to condemn the evil that is Islamic State ideology. I am not excusing her appalling decision to immerse herself in this hell on earth, or gloss over what she has said. But I have covered war. War is trauma. Her instinct to survive is visceral. Camp inhabitants say they have spotted former IS soldiers who have shaved off their beards trying to hide nearby. What do those screaming abuse at her from the comfort of British sitting rooms want her to say when faced with this threat? Nor should they forget the deaths of Shamima’s first two babies — arguably a medieval form of punishment in itself. Surely the mark of a good society is understanding and empathy, especially for those in the thrall of raging hormones and blind fear. When I interviewed him for Friday’s paper, John McDonnell told me he agreed with Labour deputy Tom Watson that there was racist bullying in the Labour Party. There wasn’t room to quote him on this but I was struck by the contrast in mood when I saw Jeremy Corbyn tell Sky News that he did not agree with Watson and would “be speaking to [him] in the near future”. McDonnell and Corbyn are often seen as interchangeable. Certainly they are close — “in and out of each other’s offices all day” as one special adviser put it — and have been since their Seventies demo days. But McDonnell is as awake as Watson to the vitriol in Labour. He said: “I agree with [Watson], he’s expressed real concerns. And we’ve got to deal with it”. On media outriders that stoke fires supposedly on Labour’s behalf, he said: “When you have a big movement like ours, people get attracted to it. Some of those … we don’t want associated with us.” He had a message for them: “Just because someone disagrees with you on something, doesn’t mean they are automatically the enemy.” Half-term in Dorset was cut short by convulsions in Westminster, so I took my son to our Lobby office in the Commons. He had a Twix in Portcullis House (the lunch queue was too long), saw Business Secretary Greg Clark make a statement on Honda, and heard Speaker John Bercow say “or-daaaah”. Then, through Hogwartian passageways and lifts, I swept him up to the “Burma Road” (the third floor corridor where the press sit). He looked impressed. Might he want to be a journalist one day? He nodded, vigorously. “One was watching a Fortnite video and playing Apex Legends.”

Charlotte Edwardes

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/society-dehumanises-vulnerable-pregnant-women-and-new-mothers-including-isis-bride-shamima-a4075756.html

2019-02-25 13:09:02+00:00

society

social condition

eveningstandard--2019-06-18--Anthony Hilton Big companies are not loved but they can fix societyaposs ills

eveningstandard

Anthony Hilton: Big companies are not loved but they can fix society's ills

The business press in this country does not really do business. There is finance aplenty, economics and interest rates by the ton, profiles of the great and the good and reports on markets by the score. Family finance gets a mention too. But it is not business — nothing on marketing or sales, no production or distribution, no product launch, either blockbuster or failure — in spite of these organisations being the economy’s lifeblood. There is some interest in property but again it is not business. Housing is certainly up there but most people have a home, want to own one, or despair of being able ever to afford one, and it is house prices which dominate, not anything else. There is a certain interest in offices and shops and supermarkets but again normally this is because either a landlord has made a pile, or as is now the case, landlords are resisting cuts. There is no mention of warehouse operator Prologis and the way distribution is being transformed by building centres close to towns and with huge extra space to handle returns, in spite of the fact that Amazon wants these and is one of the biggest businesses to have grown up in the past 15 years. The travails of Neil Woodford did not matter to most people. I have no idea how many clients were invested but if he had £10 billion in total, and everyone had £100,000 with him that would give him a clientele of just 100,000, ignoring those institutions with many millions. If he had £5 billion with £25,000 invested it would give him 200,000. He might have more, he might have fewer, but he is only filling Wembley stadium once or perhaps twice, so why the fuss? The reason is that the press still think most people are interested in shares and bonds and are captivated by the daily ebb and flow of the markets. In reality, however, most are not. Business ought to be a different matter because most people are involved in it, even if it is only their own, or as an employee where their primary concern is that it will not go bust on them. True, Boris Johnson was dismissive, but it really does matter. It matters because the negativity contributes to the alienation and lack of involvement of business in some of the critical societal issues of our age — climate change, inequality, healthcare provision, urbanisation and, not least, employment. Business is painted as part of the problem and not part of the solution. Yet none of these issues can be solved without the development and application of technology. Only business, in combination with academic and research institutions, can provide that. Ian Davis, chairman of Rolls-Royce and former head of McKinsey, made these points at the Wincott Press Awards lunch. According to a study of annual reports of large public companies across the world, the words governance and risk were twice as likely to appear in the reports of UK and western European companies as in the reports of US companies. The words growth, innovation and investment were almost twice as likely to be in US company reports. He said the overblown negativity matters. It leads to excessive risk aversion, ever more focus on governance and controls and tighter regulatory regimes. This gets in the way of innovation and increases the incentives to move out of the public markets into private ownership and to encourage the offshoring of business to more accommodating regulatory regimes. One may not be able to prove it but these attitudes probably contribute to the relatively lacklustre performance of British business with the implications for jobs, economic growth and national income and competitiveness. Is the negativity towards big business deserved? And does it matter? Big business is a gift that keeps on giving when it comes to scandalous behaviour or crises. But it needs to be put in context. Carillion and Sir Philip Green and PPI are not great ads but are they representative of the whole? It is not as though the charity sector or NGOs or even the media have not had their challenges. Although the majority of people do not trust business, typically more than 75% of people working in business trust the company they work for. Big business has never been much loved and probably never will be. But its role and contribution to society is crucial, Davis says. It needs to be better appreciated. Failure to do so will not just damage business but will impede and prevent progress on many of the defining societal issues of this century.

Anthony Hilton

https://www.standard.co.uk/business/anthony-hilton-big-companies-are-not-loved-but-they-can-fix-society-s-ills-a4169901.html

2019-06-18 09:53:00+00:00

society

social condition

foreignpolicy--2019-05-01--The Ancient Rites of the Worlds First Postmodern Society

foreignpolicy

The Ancient Rites of the World’s First Postmodern Society

The Ancient Rites of the World’s First Postmodern Society On Wednesday, in Japan’s Imperial Palace, court chamberlains presented Crown Prince Naruhito an ancient sword and jewel. In accepting them, he was formally recognized as Japan’s new emperor, only the fifth in the past 150 years. Along with an equally ancient mirror, the sword and jewel comprise the Imperial Regalia that have been passed down through generations of the world’s oldest continuous monarchy. No one but the emperor and a few senior Shinto priests is actually allowed see the sacred treasures, but in taking charge of them, Naruhito became Japan’s new sovereign. At a later enthronement ceremony (sokui no rei) in October, he will appear in elaborate ancient court robes inside a gazebolike structure topped by a golden phoenix and containing a simple throne. His wife, Crown Princess Masako, will sit in even more elaborate robes inside her own throne enclosure. Unlike much of the modern world, Japan holds fiercely to many of its traditions. In a country often billed as the world’s first postmodern society, the reality is that modernity and tradition dwell side by side, sometimes uneasily but largely in unacknowledged harmony. It is perhaps this stability that has helped Japan navigate the pitfalls of the past 30 years, since the popping of its economic bubble in the late 1980s, when Emperor Akihito ascended the throne. When Akihito was enthroned as emperor in November 1990, his father, Hirohito, had been dead for almost two years. Akihito represented an evolutionary step in Japan’s imperial system. His father had come to the throne in 1926, controversially reigning during World War II. Hirohito’s grandfather, Emperor Meiji, was the first emperor in Japan’s modern period, starting in 1868. He was a constitutional figurehead who nevertheless had great influence over his government. It was his restoration of the imperial system after 700 years of samurai rule that reintroduced a host of real and imagined traditions surrounding the emperor, many of which were used to unify the country and give it an unambiguous polestar through a period of dramatic socio-economic change. It also helped prop up Tokyo’s imperialist policies during the 20th century. Yet in the decades after World War II, both Hirohito and Akihito strove to modernize the image of the emperor, wholeheartedly embracing their constitutionally circumscribed roles in line with the U.S.-written postwar constitution. As Japan rapidly recovered after the war, the imperial house acted as a stabilizing element in a country that was becoming ever more urbanized, technologically advanced, and internationalist. Precisely because the emperor was thoroughly insulated from domestic politics, he was seen as the ultimate symbol of the Japanese nation and a tie to a familiar past that was quickly disappearing. Akihito and his wife, Empress Michiko, broke tradition in other ways, as well. She was the first imperial consort not of royal blood. Rather, she was the daughter of a successful industrialist. Their courtship was played out in public (literally, as they met while playing tennis), and the excitement surrounding the wedding of the dashing young prince and his bride in 1959 equaled the fervor over Charles and Diana’s marriage two decades later. Since then, the emperor has sought to atone for Japan’s World War II atrocities, in part by refusing to visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where Class A war criminals are enshrined, and has been a persuasive representative of the nation abroad. Unlike other royal families, the inner life of Japan’s imperials is tightly shielded from public view. If there are scandals among them, little word, if any, ever gets out. Yet their outside activities have replicated much that the world finds admirable about Japan, such as its focus on education. Like his father before him, Akihito is a recognized marine biologist, while soon-to-be Emperor Naruhito has degrees in history. Naruhito’s younger sister, Sayako (who left the imperial family when she married in 2005), studied ornithology, and their various cousins also have pursued advanced degrees. And all the royals act as patrons of various nongovernmental social, educational, and cultural organizations. It might seem that the imperial system would then be of little overall utility in Japan, simply the object of veneration of conservatives, a reminder of Japan’s imperialist past, and a family almost stultifyingly normal by any other measure. But support for the institution is deep, and the imperial system is an inextricable thread in the fabric of Japan. As one Japanese scholar told a longtime observer of the country, “If there’s no emperor, what is Japan?” It is this tenacious sense of national uniqueness, exclusionary yet modern, that accounts for the continued existence of the Japanese emperor. On the grounds of the Imperial Palace at the heart of Tokyo lie several imperial shrines meant solely for the emperor to carry out his unique duties. He still offers prayers for the nation daily and during auspicious times of the year, such as New Year’s—though as a private citizen, thanks to the postwar separation of church and state. Yet the line between politics and religion is tested in other ways. The emperor both plants the country’s ceremonial first rice seedlings and harvests them every year, offering them to the sun goddess Amaterasu; this year, since it will be the first harvest of the new emperor’s reign, it will have a special name: the daijosai. Here’s how the New York Times described a different daijosai in 1990: It is at his first autumn harvest festival that the emperor supposedly communes with Amaterasu, thereby partaking of part of her divinity. In prewar Japanese thinking, the act led him to become a “living god,” a theologico-political status that was dropped only in 1946 at the insistence of the U.S. occupiers of Japan. As it did in 1990, the continuation of this apparently ancient rite will rile anti-monarchists and those who believe that Japan should still be held accountable for the aggression committed in the name of the new emperor’s grandfather. But for the overwhelming majority of Japanese, such rites are central to their sense of nationality. The emperor and his family have proved to be the unchanging foundations of a country that has struggled since the early 1990s to recover from its economic stagnation and which has seen its role on the global stage usurped by a China far more powerful than Japan ever was at its height. Some observers fear the country is turning more inward—becoming more conservative under long-serving premier Shinzo Abe. But it is equally likely that Japan has simply become comfortable in its postwar, post-bubble reality, that it sees the race between the United States and China for supremacy and knows it will be left behind no matter who wins. In that world, the imperial family is both a link to the past and a reassurance that regardless of what comes next, Japan contains an identifiable, perhaps eternal, kernel of greatness.

Michael Auslin

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/01/the-ancient-rites-of-the-worlds-first-postmodern-society/

2019-05-01 17:56:15+00:00

society

social condition

fortruss--2019-04-04--Why Must Aesthetics Govern a Society Worthy of Political Freedom

fortruss

Why Must Aesthetics Govern a Society Worthy of Political Freedom?

In the mid-1990s, a series of exposés featured on the London Independent and elsewhere brought a dark secret to light. Many were startled by the revelation that the entire evolution of 20th century modern art was directed in large measure by the CIA! This not only included the direct financing of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, whose works now regularly sell for over $100 million apiece, but also powerful literary magazines like Salon and Encounter, interpretive dance schools, and the remarkably ugly a-tonal music of Arnold Schoenberg. The instrument selected to re-shape western cultural tastes in the wake of World War II came to be known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Founded in 1950 with funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the CCF was designed to 1) promote the de-Nazification of Germany and 2) fight the cultural war against the communist world that had just recently been organized by Sir Winston Churchill. The logic of the Cultural Cold War asserted that since communism and fascism relied on “realist/rigid iconography” to advance itself, the “free world” on the other side of the Iron Curtain would rely on abstract, emotional “freedom”. Where communism was based on the sacrifice of the individual for the “good” of the whole, this Cold War democracy asserted that the needs of the whole were separate from the arbitrary freedom of the individual to “do whatever feels good”. The degree to which the new modernism offended order and logic was proportional to the degree to which it defended “democracy and liberal capitalism”. It is noteworthy that the CCF was run largely under the direction of the same Lord Bertrand Russell who had just a few years earlier called for the pre-emptive nuking of the Soviet Union in order to achieve a one world government.  Russell’s active work subverting the arts should not be seen apart from his imperial political views, or his efforts to impose a system of shackles upon the minds of scientists who would forever be rendered creatively sterile due to a belief that fixed mathematics governed the universe as outlined in his Principia Mathematica [1]. Zeus cannot after all tolerate knowledge of fire (science), the freedom to use it (politics) or the instincts to use it well (culture). It is only by thinking in terms of those three interconnected aspects of the human condition, that one can understand the 20th century or history more generally. Describing his view of culture Russell wrote in the 1951 Impact of Science on Society: “I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.” Russell’s leading intellectual collaborators within the CCF included such misanthropes as musicologist Theodor Adorno, sociologist Max Horkheimer, poet W.H. Auden, and philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Adorno, whose theories on music are still considered a gold standard in modern academia and who also ironically created the foundation for the “top 40 hits” as part of the creation of a culture for the masses detached from an “elite culture” for the oligarchy and its managers, described his ideal of the “new music” in the following terms: “What radical music perceives is the un-transfigured suffering of man…. The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks…. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.” Since Adorno exemplified the oligarchical belief in the inevitable decay (entropy) of all existence and the associated belief that the arts should MIRROR that reality, Adorno wrote in his Philosophy of Modern Music that ultimately “necrophilia is the last perversity of style”. It is no wonder that the ultimate enemy of an oligarchy is found in the optimistic belief that moral reason exists within the essence of all human nature as a unique species made in the image of a Good and loving Creator. What types of art reflect that divine sense of humankind? What types of systems of political philosophy express it? Is a system of hereditary power equal to a system that posits that “all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights”? Is it true that Bach’s Jesu Meine Freud or Mozart’s Requiem should be treated as somehow equal to the “sophisticated” atonal music of the 20th century? Should a painting by Rembrandt or Davinci be treated as equal to the ink splatterings of Pollock or the blurry squares of Rothko? What happens to the powers of judging right from wrong, and truth from lies in a society which embraces an art which is animated by love and beauty vs an art animated by pessimistic ugliness? Which type of society would be easier to manipulate? A Return to the Universal in Art: Schiller as Antidote to the CCF The German poet Friedrich Schiller, who was shaped by the global republican movement that spread in the wake of the American Revolution asked in his Aesthetical Letters (1794) “how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age that besets him on all sides? By disdaining its opinion.” If the masses are debased to believe that poison is their drug, then how could a true artist cater to their desires, no matter how popular? To do this requires an extremely advanced moral disposition since both money and fame must be sacrificed in order to challenge a society to become better. Schiller said that for one to be committed to truth and its corollary Freedom in the highest pursuit of Beauty, an artist had to find a way to balance existing in space and time, but always strive to transcend their temporal society’s limitations in a constant search for the eternal. In his sixth letter Schiller wrote: “No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if he is its disciple or even its favorite! He will, indeed, receive his matter from the present time, but he will borrow the form from a nobler time and even beyond all time, from the essential, absolute, immutable unity. There, issuing from the pure ether of its heavenly nature, flows the source of all beauty, which was never tainted by the corruptions of generations or of ages, which roll along far beneath it in dark eddies.” Schiller’s thoughts were not written in an ivory tower, but were driven by his leading efforts as a playwright, poet and founder of a field of research known as the Science of Universal History. Although his life was short, he not only left an incredible opus that inspired some of the most noble works of music such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Verdi’s operas, he also directly shaped a network of other artists, scientists and statesmen through the Weimar Renaissance such as both Humboldt brothers and Wolfgang Goethe to name a few. The need to cure society of its tendency to fall under the sway of either extreme of abstract intellectual matters devoid of emotional growth on the one side and emotional chaos detached uninformed from reason on the other was the basis of Schiller’s own self-development and his guiding light in the creation of a culture capable of attaining true political freedom. It is this spirit that the perverted “end of history” zombies of the CCF wanted to destroy through their manipulation of global affairs leading into World War I, their humiliation of Germany under the Versailles Treaty and their financing of Adolph Hitler through Wall Street and the City of London’s Bank of International Settlements. The fact that these same forces who created the world wars and fascist monsters of the 20th century were also given the authority to offer the “cure” in the form of the CCF de-nazification of Germany and new “democratic” culture of abstract art, modernist music and existential philosophy is akin to allowing the murderer give the eulogy at his victims’ funeral. Now that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is leading a new paradigm of win-win cooperation we are witnessing an inspired re-awakening of popularity in classical artistic standards in music, art, and even architecture. The choice is once again being placed in front of all citizens: Do we wish to continue to swim in the pigsty of cultural decadence and pessimism unleashed by the CCF, or do we want to embrace a future more becoming of a species made in the Creator’s image? [1] Luckily for the world, Einstein’s close friend Kurt Gödel inspired by his studies of Gottfried Leibniz, put an end to this endeavor in 1931 by demonstrating that Russell’s belief in a closed mathematical system was impossible as all systems are intrinsically open and thus susceptible to constant perfectibility. Unluckily for Gödel, Russell never forgave him and made sure that the remaining years of his life were hellish with Gödel finally meeting a tragic end in 1977 convinced that Bertrand Russell and international secret societies were trying to destroy Leibniz and were also trying to poison him. [For a larger presentation by the author on the subject of Schiller’s Philosophy entitled How Painting Liberates Us From the Shackles of the Sense, CLICK HERE.] BIO: Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the  He is a regular author with Fort-Russ and the Duran, and his works have been published in Executive Intelligence Review, Global Research, Global Times, The Duran, Nexus Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Veterans Today and Sott.net. Matthew has also published the book “The Time has Come for Canada to Join the New Silk Road” and three volumes of the Untold History of Canada (available on untoldhistory.canadianpatriot.org). He can be contacted at [email protected]

Matthew Ehret

https://www.fort-russ.com/2019/04/why-must-aesthetics-govern-a-society-worthy-of-political-freedom/

2019-04-04 19:04:08+00:00

society

social condition

foxnews--2019-02-28--Ben Carson warns morality of our society at stake in abortion debate

foxnews

Ben Carson warns 'morality of our society' at stake in abortion debate

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Ben Carson, in an interview with Fox News on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference, warned Thursday that the "morality of our society" is at stake in the abortion debate that has surged back onto the floors of state legislatures and Congress. Speaking to Fox News moments after addressing the conservative gathering, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development said the issue should be at the forefront as the 2020 presidential race starts to take shape. “I think it’s a critical issue because we are talking about the morality of our society,” Dr. Carson told Fox News. FOR THE BEST CPAC MOMENTS, GO TO FOX NATION “Are we going off the deep-end here or are we still loving and compassionate people?” Asked what he would tell Democrats who voted to block a Republican bill that threatened prison time for doctors who don't try saving the life of infants born alive during failed abortions, Carson said: “I would say please stop and spend a little time educating yourself about what life is all about, and about when babies can feel and when they can respond to external stimulation.” BEN SASSE: CUOMO 'PERVERTED' COLOR PINK BY LINKING IT TO ABORTION, NOT BREAST CANCER Carson’s comments come after the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act stalled amid Democratic opposition in Congress. It would have required that "any health care practitioner present" at the time of a birth "exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age." The bill, which would exempt the mother from prosecution, also would have required practitioners to "ensure that the child born alive is immediately transported and admitted to a hospital." It prescribed a possible term of imprisonment of up to five years for violations, not including penalties for first-degree murder that could have applied. ABORTION SURVIVOR: SENATE DEMS ARE 'WILLING TO SACRIFICE LIVES LIKE MINE TO KEEP ABORTION-ON-DEMAND' All Democratic 2020 presidential candidates in the Senate opposed the measure, including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Opponents called the bill unnecessary, considering it's already a crime to kill a newborn, and described it as an "attack" on women's health. In response, President Trump tweeted: "This will be remembered as one of the most shocking votes in the history of Congress." CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP The vote came in the wake of New York easing restrictions on late-term abortions, as several other states including Illinois consider similar measures.

Liam Quinn

http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/politics/~3/zhlrDMpbBFY/ben-carson-warns-morality-of-our-society-at-take-amid-abortion-debate

2019-02-28 21:19:51+00:00

society

social condition

freedombunker--2019-02-16--Why Our Society Has Become a Shame Factory

freedombunker

Why Our Society Has Become a Shame Factory

“Since I am experienced [in sewing], tonight I am working on a special project making rape resistant shower curtains for the prisons.” – Craig Cesal Craig Cesal is serving a life sentence in federal prison for doing body work on trucks that were moving marijuana, a first-time offense. Our public servants would not let him out to see his son's funeral. Rapists and murderers have come and gone during his time in America's prison camps. He often works 16-hour shifts sewing for the US government, he says, making “rape resistant” shower curtains. Craig's exile inside the belly of our government reveals things that remain hidden to us free folks on the outside. What human creatures make others sew rape-resistant showers for fellow captives to hide behind? Who in their right mind made this kind of legal system? Why do millions of Americans take rape-adjacent showers every night in local, state, and federal warehouses for nonviolent choices? Why do Americans think the evil of throwing humans into cages for victimless acts is okay if a majority of group-thinkers complies? Our government is built on the threat of rape. Every law against nonviolent choices—from suspended licenses to raw milk regulations to workplace rules and coming speech codes—are enforced by the threat of deprivation of freedom, family separation, and, ultimately, assault and rape. The more our justice rituals fail to bring prosperity, peace, and fairness, the more unsatisfying their cover stories become. We all know this to some degree but because it is not in our face and because others tolerate it, we remain locked in a societal bystander effect. We are incapable of moving to our neighbors' defense. Just as Stanley Milgram's disturbing experiment showed, most humans tend to go along with the rules of dominance and submission games as long as they are told it is okay by an authority and that they will not be held individually responsible. But the more we see the failure of prohibitions and regulations and taxation to make our world better at the expense of the sacrificed few, the more the shame of our compliance builds. This shame is supposed to be safely contained on the backs of our designated scapegoats: our prisoners and policemen and soldiers sent to unnecessary decades-long wars. But the more our justice rituals fail to bring prosperity, peace, and fairness, the more unsatisfying their cover stories become. The shame is leaking onto all of us. It is seeping into all of our institutions. Social media sites are flooded with daily shame mob battles of rage. Even football has become stained with the shame of concussions, battered wives, and police shootings. We have nowhere to hide from shame. The left was quick to try to quarantine their minds from the shame storm of recent stories of refugee children being placed in cages. When popular images of migrant children wrapped in foil in kennel-like enclosures turned out to be the doing of their adored role model Obama, they quickly shielded their minds from the painful realization that they hired this man, most of them two times, to carry out this behavior on their behalf and largely stayed silent. Nevertheless, many faithful voters persist that the children in cages at the border were solely the shame of Trump voters. Like playing a game of hot potato that can sear a hole through their chests, those who see themselves as morally better than their politically incorrect nemeses feel the need to dump all responsibility for caging and family separation onto their rivals. Just like their Republican rivals before them, when their tribal leaders pitched elective wars for obviously dubious reasons, they submitted. But the shame cannot be contained. Leftists know they supported politicians who destroyed Yemeni, Syrian, and Libyan children for no defensible reason. They know they share the blame for knowingly voting for more mass incarceration-related family separation, drone strikes of children, and other ghastly barbarism in recent elections. And just like their Republican rivals before them, when their tribal leaders pitched elective wars for obviously dubious reasons, they submitted. Now they stand up to their knees in shame with nowhere to drain it. The Covington Catholic schoolboys were a promising target for shame shifting. Their smiles in the face of an elderly Native American's drumming felt like an obvious symbol of unrepentant shame. Finally, millions could relieve their own cauldron of shame for choices like voting for drug war politicians and status quo keepers of political prison camp laborers like Craig Cesal. Then the mob fervor was sabotaged by alternative cameras that revealed the relative composure the teenagers showed in the face of bee-lining grandstanding adults and slurs from another group. Of course, President Trump has been a perennial target of people full of shame. But he fails to be an effective outlet because he is so shameless. He refuses to indicate the posture of guilt for anything. A cleansing requires the accused to admit sin so that the accusers can feel comparatively exonerated. Trump simply will not play this role. Meanwhile, he himself places the shame of creeping debt and socialism onto the backs of his rival party while conveniently doing little to allow young people to opt out of failed socialist schemes like Medicare and Social Security. It is popular in culture to be ashamed of race, gender, family togetherness, marriage, children, wealth, competence, able bodies, technology, language, religion, nationality, fitness, and meat. Each of these categories are occasions for difference and differentiation is where people can sometimes engage in shameful behavior. Shame is driving us to erase all differences and boundaries and thus erase all meaning behind these categories of life. Perhaps the way to relieve our shame is to realize it need not exist at all. Shame exists because we refuse to trust in the sovereign power of love. But if children could vote, and white men became a tiny impoverished minority of the population, and gender became completely fluid, and wealth was equally printed out to every human in the land, and religion was privatized and pluralized, and meat was completely grown in labs, and body shapes had no preference, would we still bomb a country that threatened our world reserve currency? Would we still place dissidents of new regulations and speech codes in cages with rapists and murderers? Would we wrap our jails with barbed wire fences or cotton candy? Would we reform the prisons we kept by forcing misfits of our new undifferentiated glory into reeducation programs meant to reform their minds for their own good? What if they fled the classroom? Would they be tranquilized or hugged by social justice correctional officers? Would we still be submerged in shame? Perhaps the only way to relieve our shame is to realize it need not exist at all. Shame exists because we refuse to trust in the sovereign power of love. Love requires us to unplug from toxic groupthink and reclaim our personhood. When we love ourselves, we can learn to love our neighbors as ourselves. When we care for ourselves, we will not want to initiate physical suffering on others. When we are free of shame, we will have nothing but love left for our neighbors. We will not hide behind collective complacency with violence against misfits. We will be free. Watch my interview with Craig here:

Sean McBride

http://freedombunker.com/2019/02/16/why-our-society-has-become-a-shame-factory/

2019-02-16 18:00:12+00:00

society

social condition

freedombunker--2019-05-28--Why a Free Society Cannot Transform Wishes into Rights

freedombunker

Why a Free Society Cannot Transform Wishes into Rights

Any careful observer of American politics must be struck by the ever-expanding roster of things people have asserted rights to. But when such arguments are seriously considered, there is little to them beyond shared desires or wishes for certain things, which supposedly implies that there ought to be rights to them. From there, it is but one further step to legislative, executive, or judicial attempts to create such rights, promoted as social improvements guaranteed by government. This “ought implies is” argument about rights reverses the claim that “is implies ought,” which David Hume famously shot down. It ignores that in a world where scarcity is inescapable, our desires always outpace what is producible, which means that newly asserted rights may well be impossible delusions. Further, it ignores that making good on any particular newly created right must violate other’s existing rights to themselves and their efforts. And it, too, deserves rejection. Few have thought as carefully about this confusion between wishes and rights as Leonard Read. His insights are particularly well developed in his “Doctor, Whoever You Are,” section in his 1969 Let Freedom Reign. In a world where turning one wish into a political right leads to still more attempts to use the same magic on another wish, and every such step further erodes liberty, Read’s views are worth serious consideration on their 50th anniversary. "Now in vogue is a fearful combination of wishes and methods, as fanciful as Aladdin’s lamp…the transmutation of wishes into rights! Do you wish for better housing? Then better housing is a right. Do you wish for…higher returns for goods and services, shorter hours of labor, protection from competition? Then these are rights. Do you wish for free medical care? Then free medical care is a right!" "And what is the nature of the jinni called upon to transmute wishes into rights?... government. It extorts from all, allocating the legalized loot to those who effectively make their wishes heard." "How do we go about healing this sickness? We must acquire an understanding that wishes, regardless of how numerous, do not constitute a right. I have no more right to your professional attention than you have a claim on me to wash your dishes. We are dealing with an absurdity." "We live and prosper by specialization and exchange…others tend to encourage me to specialize at what is of value to them, and I tend to encourage them to specialize at what is of value to me. This is how people in a free society exert their wishes. But note that these wishes do not carry with them any right on my part to command what others shall produce or any right to force on them the terms of exchange." "When the notion that a wish is a right is put into effect by police force—the only way it can be done—then specialization is no longer guided by consumer wishes nor are the terms of exchange…Other citizens are then forced to perform labor for which they receive absolutely nothing in return. Exchange is by coercion rather than by free choice." "The fact that many of us wish more medical attention than we can afford does not give us a right to your [physician] services or a right to force others to [finance them]…wishes to the contrary notwithstanding!" Benjamin Franklin is said to have written, “If man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.” He was referring to the problems our wishes would cause ourselves. But we go far beyond causing ourselves problems whenever we try to transform our wishes into rights. We cause all our fellow citizens problems because our efforts to create rights for ourselves must pick their pockets—assert our ownership of their resources rather than acknowledging their self-ownership—despite lacking moral or ethical justification. Leonard Read rightly recognized this as no different than looting enforced by a “might makes right” mentality. Only by defending voluntary arrangements, respecting one another’s self-ownership, can we achieve positive progress. If not for the corrupting lure of something for nothing, people would long ago have rejected the idea that wishes imply rights. But as ever-more goodies have been added to bait the lure, most Americans seem to have decided to stop thinking about the burdens borne as a result of these invented rights. Our reasoning has been warped by a too-narrow view of our self-interest, which ignores what we can achieve jointly only by defending voluntary arrangements, which respect one another’s self-ownership. That makes it particularly important to revisit Leonard Read’s wisdom about wishes and rights, for otherwise our coveting will corrupt and punish us further and further.

Sean McBride

http://freedombunker.com/2019/05/28/why-a-free-society-cannot-transform-wishes-into-rights/

2019-05-28 15:00:53+00:00

society

social condition

freedombunker--2019-07-02--Hong Kong Protests Show Dangers of a Cashless Society

freedombunker

Hong Kong Protests Show Dangers of a Cashless Society

It can be easy to take cash for granted, especially in a wealthy, developed economy. Those fortunate enough to live in a stable society usually suffer no lack of payment options. They are getting more advanced all the time, with financial technology (fintech) companies constantly developing new ways to quickly and cheaply make purchases and send money. It sometimes seems the days of old-fashioned cash, with its dormant physicality, are numbered. Allowing cash to die would be a grave mistake. A cashless society is a surveillance society. The recent round of protests in Hong Kong highlights exactly what we have to lose. The current unrest concerns a proposed change to Hong Kong's extradition laws that would allow island fugitives to be transferred to Taiwan, Macau, and mainland China. The proposal sparked mass outrage, as many Hongkongers saw it as little more but a new way for the People's Republic of China to erode the legal sovereignty of Hong Kong. This week, anti-extradition protests reached another crescendo, as Hongkongers took to the streets again to commemorate the anniversary of Hong Kong's handoff to China, highlighting the deep political dynamics at play. Specifically, protestors fear that the Chinese judicial system, with all its attendant human rights baggage, would come to supplant Hong Kong's. This would be no small problem. China isn't shy about cracking down on political dissidents, even those from other states under their control. For example, in 2017, a Taiwanese pro-democracy activist was detained in China and sentenced to five years in prison for "subverting [Chinese] state power" in his home country. So tens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area. So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it. What could protestors do in a cashless world? Maybe they would have to grit their teeth and hope for the best. But relying on the benevolence or incompetence of a motivated entity like China is not a great plan. Or perhaps public transit would be off-limits altogether. This could limit the protests to fit people within walking or biking distance, or people who have access to a private car—a rarity in expensive dense cities. If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice. A chorus of commentators call for an end to cash, whether because it frustrates central bank schemes, fuels black and grey markets, or is simply inefficient. We have plenty of newfangled payment options, they say. Why should modern first world economies hew to such primordial human institutions? The answer is that there is simply no substitute for the privacy that cash, including digitized versions like cryptocurrencies, provide. Even if all of the alleged downsides that critics bemoan were true, cash would still be worth defending and celebrating for its core privacy-preserving functions. As Jerry Brito of Coin Center points out, cash protects our autonomy and indeed our human dignity. We don't even need to contemplate hypotheticals of what a digital financial surveillance system would look like. China's ubiquitous social media and messaging service WeChat doubles as a primary payment method for millions of mainland Chinese. It's easy, it's effective, and it's integrated into every facet of Chinese digital life. But Coin Center's Peter Van Valkenburgh calls apps like WeChat Pay "tools for totalitarianism" for good reason: Each transaction is linked to your identity for possible viewing by Communist Party zealots. No wonder less than 8 percent of Hongkongers bother with hyper-palatable WeChat Pay. Of course, Western offerings like Apple Pay and Venmo also maintain user databases that can be mined. Users may feel protected by the legal limits that countries like the United States place on what consumer data the government can extract from private business. But as research by Van Valkenburgh points out, US anti-money laundering laws afford less Fourth Amendment protection than you might expect. Besides, we still need to trust government and businesses to do the right thing. As the Edward Snowden revelations proved, this trust can be misplaced. Hong Kong is about as first world as you can get. Yet even in such a developed economy, power's jealous hold is but an ill-worded reform away. We should not allow today's relative freedom to obscure the threat that a cashless world poses to our sovereignty. Not only can "it happen here," for some of your fellow citizens, it might already have.

Ed Krayewski

http://freedombunker.com/2019/07/02/hong-kong-protests-show-dangers-of-a-cashless-society/

2019-07-02 12:30:35+00:00

society

social condition

freedombunker--2019-07-20--Libertarianisms Place In Society

freedombunker

Libertarianism’s Place In Society

The thesis here is that libertarianism as a political theory only carries the veneer of importance and centrality due to the strength and power of the democratic, administrative, state in our time. Everywhere we look, we see the influence and effect of the state as an apparatus that guides and oversees the machinations of modern civilization. We speak not merely of the obvious libertarian issues like taxes and regulation but we see in the modern western state a cultural force. We so often push the idea that politics is downstream from culture, that we have lost the culture and therefore the state has followed the path of destruction. But as was hinted on the AL editor’s blog, it is far more likely that Paul Gottfried has it right: the state has morphed into something much more sinister and it now leads the culture toward its own ends. The modern administrative state is the creator of culture and culture is now downstream from the state. Gottfried is especially succinct as to his meaning in his short excerpt: We have entered into a full politicization of society; there is nothing that the state-cultural complex does not touch. It guides the way we interact with others, the way we process and interpret events, and the way we think about social norms and basic social units and institutions. Now then, to bring this back to the thesis: “libertarianism as a political theory only carries the veneer of importance and centrality due to the strength and power of the democratic, administrative, state in our time.” Since the state is everywhere we look, and libertarianism has a set of particular ethical critiques against the state, it seems to follow that libertarianism plays such an important place in our lives. Stated differently, according to the libertarian doctrine, the initiation of aggression against the body or exterior property of others is a breach of ethically-laden rights; and the state is the most systematic, constant, and egregious violator of the principle. And as the state surrounds our every move, so we see libertarianism as a response to so much of our world. This creates the illusion that libertarianism plays a fundamental role in society. That political theory itself is of primary importance for a people who wish for a better world, a world that is both more ethical and more free. And from this, we work to create a libertarian political strategy and a libertarian movement as well. And thus, the disease of modern administrative statism, which takes over our minds as the lens through which we find meaning, produces the impulse that one ought to dedicate himself to libertarianism as a path toward social preservation. But it should be made clear that the only reason libertarianism as such seems to play such a fundamental role in the self-identity and life-meaning of so many in libertarian circles is due to the politicalization of society. We live in the administrative state’s world and thus we even put our path toward social improvement strictly in terms of the political. It is not just that the state formally speaking is everywhere we look, it is that there is hardly any longer a culture that is distinct from the state. When Buck Johnson recently asked Paul Gottfried whether the Left or the State was the chief enemy in our time, Gottfried quickly responded: “what’s the difference?” In times past libertarians correctly and properly held firm that “we” are not the state! Society and the state were separate and the state is an artificial entity as compared to society, which is natural. While importantly and profoundly still true, this does not take into account the extent to which the state has replaced natural and spontaneous society with its artificial one. It is true that the natural society is not born out of the state; the state is not the thing that naturally binds together peoples. But as the administrative, democratic state has come of age, it has created its own artificial society which is of course a society of Egalitarian Terror. Under a free society that is not created by or bound up in the existence of the state, libertarianism plays much more the role of a legal theory, not a political theory. It’s important to remember that libertarianism chiefly speaks wisdom to scenarios of tension and strife between people who want to use scarce resources for their own ends. Libertarianism offers a standard by which we can determine who gets to use which good and in what way. The role of libertarianism is to help us resolve disputes and arbitrate in situations of conflict. In other words, libertarianism is chiefly a legal theory that of course has political ramifications once society faces the creation of the state as an institutionalization of aggression (or as Murray Rothbard described it, “a band of robbers writ large.”). Thus, our good friend Jonathan Goodwin, blogging as Bionic Mosquito, offers: What this means to me is that men are not connected to other men on the basis of libertarianism. Marxist political movements, for instance, purport that classes are held together by their economic status: workers of the world unite. You are neither German nor Russian nor English. You are a worker, or you are a member of the bourgeois. It is not the same with libertarianism, or at least a meaningful and realistic libertarianism over against the more universal libertarianism. Let me be clear here: libertarianism is only the thing that binds us is we presume the state’s politicized world! The Marxist worldview is at its root political so it makes sense that Marxism as an ideology binds them. But libertarianism plays a different role in a free (non-politicized) society; it comes to the picture as a set of principles and guidelines by which we can judiciously determine what is criminal and what is legal, what should be responded to with coercion (such as murder or theft), and what should not be responded to with coercion (such as creating goods and services on the market). In this case, those of us who are beginning to pay particular attention to the rapid and concerning leftist social revolution likely have more in common with each other, outside the bounds of libertarianism as a legal theory. And as the left-libertarians and mainstream libertarians in general either praise these developments as at the culmination of the “libertarian spirit” or at least just watch it all with neutral expressions and ambivalent reaction, they likely have more in common, generally speaking, with the progressive left. The response to this is so often that “libertarians are to connected not by their cultural preferences but by their anti-statism!” But this is only true under a politicized worldview. Putting aside the issue of politics, which presumably all libertarians would eventually want out of the way anyway, there is nothing else that binds us. And thus, our pretending that we are transcendentally bound by our libertarianism is exactly the sort of artificial connections that the state has aimed for! Men form society not on the basis of a unifying legal theory, but the legal theory is adopted post-society. Libertarianism is a helpful tool in the development of peaceful civilization; it is neither the spring nor the engine from which society flows. Libertarianism as a unifying spirit is only conceivable because we operate in a world that has experienced the imposition of a political society. But perhaps, to presuppose this statist-world moving forward, and to subsequently work toward a bigger libertarian political movement, is to have already made the very mistake that continues to undermine our efforts toward a free society. The post Libertarianism’s Place In Society appeared first on LewRockwell.

No Author

http://freedombunker.com/2019/07/19/libertarianisms-place-in-society/

2019-07-20 04:01:00+00:00

society

social condition

freedombunker--2019-11-23--The Conspiracy To Control and Dominate Education in the United States Has Caused the Downfall of Soc

freedombunker

The Conspiracy To Control and Dominate Education in the United States Has Caused the Downfall of Society

What a normal human being often fails to see in light of everyday struggles and strife, of political upheaval, of commitment to false national pride, is the unbelievable majesty of life. In order to discover this singularly unique beauty, love must be present, but love alone cannot sustain the tragedy of life that is the division consuming the human mind, body, and spirit today. Intelligent thought is necessary. The destruction of learning, with the inadequate replacement of commonality, has bred by design a society steeped in an ignorance of life, and an unnatural contempt for others. This intentional eradication of individual intellect brought with it a hostile prejudice toward the sanctity of our souls, and left emptiness in its place. The emptiness I speak of is evident in all of modern society, and fulfillment of lost desires seems out of reach in this current state of chaos. But why did this happen? Why have people come to hate one another? Why has conflict and anger become commonplace, while the golden rule is virtually ignored? An evil exists in our midst, and this evil entity created a nationwide system that allowed a process of mass indoctrination to take root. In order for this phenomenon to capture the psyche of an entire people, a diabolical plan was necessary, and implementation of that plan had to be sold to the public in order to gain popular support. In other words, collusion by the controlling elite and the government was necessary for this deception aimed against the American populace to succeed. And succeed it has. As I wrote in my article: The Ongoing Destruction of the Minds of Children, “The experiment called compulsory schooling, now referred to as “public education,” began in Massachusetts in 1852, and became widespread just after the turn of the twentieth century. By 1910 the majority of children were in public schools. Since that time “education” as administered by the state has been a horrible failure, if learning was the desired end. But learning and knowledge were never the goals of forced schooling; training the young to honor authority, discipline, and nationalism were the true goals sought.” Compulsory schooling began in the mid-nineteenth century, and was the brainchild of the ruling elite monopolists of the day, those led by John D. Rockefeller. The goal was to limit the intellectual growth of the general population in order to create an obedient society of workers without the motivation to question the ruling class. This was necessary in order for the corporate oligarchs to gain and keep control over the people, and by the early part of the twentieth century, this plan was in high gear. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace while plotting this deception had decided after the end of World War I, “they must control education in the United States” in order to accomplish their mission. They realized this was “too big a project to do alone,” so the “Rockefeller Foundation was approached,” and the two began working together to take over the education system. The Rockefeller Foundation was to handle the domestic side, and the Carnegie Endowment was to handle the international side. As time passed, the Ford Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation were also involved. This conspiracy was revealed by the Reese Committee investigation headed by Norman Dodd in 1953. The Committee’s inspection of the Carnegie minutes was staggering to say the least, and exposed the goal sought by tax-free foundations that “America’s future should be one of collectivism administered with characteristics of American efficiency.” In other words, build a mediocre society that could function only at a level that would allow for an elite monopoly control of war, the economy, politics, and education, all with little interference by the voting public. It should be noted that according to Mr. Dodd, “These policies, the foundations’ allegiance to these un-American concepts, are all traceable to the transfer of the funds into the hands of trustees. It’s not the men who had a hand in the creation of the wealth that led to the endowment for what we would call public purposes.” What has happened to this country since the founding is a grim reminder of the fact that evil forces are always with us, and without the capability to think critically or to understand real history, we are left with an ignorant and confused populace. Any society that falls to this level does not have the capability to stop the onslaught of power that will always rise up at every opportunity. The controlling monopolies will most always gain control of the governing system as a way to control the common people. When these elites design the education system, and their puppets in government run it, the commoners have little chance of retaining any freedom or control of their own destiny. That is the state of this country today. The saddest part of this conversation is that all this information, and much more, is available for any to see and understand, but few have any desire to seek out the truth. It seems obvious to me that if people understood the truth, and were able to comprehend the conspiracy that has been used against them, a revolution of sorts would be possible. The tyrants who now control the system are able to do so because they took measures to stifle the natural intellect of individuals. If that dynamic could be reversed, so could the current state of slavery that has a hold on all of us. The post The Conspiracy To Control and Dominate Education in the United States Has Caused the Downfall of Society appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gary D. Barnett

http://freedombunker.com/2019/11/22/the-conspiracy-to-control-and-dominate-education-in-the-united-states-has-caused-the-downfall-of-society/

Sat, 23 Nov 2019 06:45:00 +0000

society

social condition

freedombunker--2019-12-04--The Transformation of Religion and the Control Over Society

freedombunker

The Transformation of Religion and the Control Over Society

“Religion is still useful among the herd – that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else…” ~ H.P. Lovecraft Worship by the human animal began long ago, and has taken many forms. The human species has forever looked for the answers to life, and has looked toward those who claim to speak to God, and has also looked to science. The reverence shown toward those wearing royal robes, vestments of service to God, has never been completely isolated to the claimed devout. Mankind has always been filled with fear and has been gullible, so those he followed and worshipped could be any port in the storm. Fear and gullibility is a dangerous pairing to be sure, and in this progressive and multicultural world of today, the end result of false religious fervor could be one of total societal control. Religion has always been about control. In the church a thousand years ago, the highest member of clergy might claim that he talked directly to God, and that because he had exclusive knowledge of divine power, all should do as he says. They should turn over their money and individual freedom in order to comply with God’s will. At that time, this was accepted, as the masses of common people put faith in such beliefs as these, and due to fear, complied. That is not the case today, as with time, this bowing down to “holy” masters is mostly seen as foolish. So those seeking to control others needed a new religion, one that would be more widely accepted. Rulers by definition seek to rule, and in order to accomplish their mission, control over others is necessary. In modern times, control over society has remained in place, but the basis of that control has dramatically changed. There is an old saying that a “Tiger never changes his stripes,” and this is an accurate description concerning the ruling elites, as money, power, and control have always been their only gods. Instead of magic and superstition, instead of faith-based religious rule, instead of the rule of royalty, and instead of rule by the majority, the planned rule sought will be one guided by “science” and technology. Real science is not considered in this equation, as future rule will be based on politicized science, which is completely immune from steadfast scrutiny, from question, from doubt, and from unrelenting challenge. In other words, the politicized science of today is not science at all, but is merely agenda driven fake science. Legitimate individual scientists understand the concept of extensive and continuous research, of challenge, of new information, and of dissent, but when science is politicized, it is no longer valid. When most all science agrees, it is false. No truth can come from the group, as any group is essentially made up of different individuals, so mass scientific consensus is a certain sign of corruption. That corruption is guaranteed because the bulk of science today is funded from outside sources, and therefore is agenda driven. When scientists are paid to study and research, they are bound to a particular outcome, an outcome that is desired by those funding the research. This is obvious in the entirety of today’s scientific research at the university level, at the corporate level, and at the government level. In fact, all these shameful entities work together to achieve a particular end. The result sought is the control of everything and everybody. Those who have an agenda to control the United States, as well as the rest of the world, are committed to rule administered by a select few experts that relies on science and technology as the basis for curing the human condition. This is a rule called Technocracy, and is now being quietly implemented at a rapid pace. The public at large so far is going along without much resistance, and this is a dangerous precedent to set. While this anticipated rule by the elites is multi-faceted in nature, the single most important aspect of the propaganda necessary to fuel this takeover of human behavior is the con-game called “climate change.” This lie of politicized science is the driver of a technocratic agenda that will allow for domination of the world’s populace. In my opinion, this is the most dangerous type of control possible, as it will be all consuming, and based on capturing the entirety of humanity. This is a plan to affect a total behavioral change through technological means in a system without escape, and on a worldwide scale. The choice now is clear. If the people at large decide to accept technocratic rule, they will be doomed to outright social and societal control. In a society such as this, living in a herd will take on new meaning, as people will voluntarily join the ranks of fenced in farm animals, dependent on their masters for their very lives and existence. Those who resist will be a minority, and a chaotic war of sorts amongst the people will likely follow. This resistance if it fails, will lead to an attempt by the elites to propagandize this failure in an effort to solidify the crowd, so they can hasten the implementation of a top-down technologically dominated system. “Technocracy finds that the production and distributions of physical wealth on a global scale for the use of all citizens can be accomplished only by an accounting of technology – a holarchial style of governance of efficiency and function; A technate.” “The term “Technate” refers to an operational area where the resources, means of production and other technical aspects of a civilization come under the management of technical experts. A Technate works through a distributed, holonic power structure, where technical decisions are made at the local level by those with the necessary technical expertise. All social decisions are being made in a direct democratic, consensus-driven process.” Is this the new authoritative religious paradigm that Americans seek? Will mass ignorance and indifference allow for this systematic takeover of all individual behavior to flourish? Will the new lord of religion be Technocracy, and if so, what will it bring? Only time will tell, but total social and societal control will not be utopia, it will be dystopia. The post The Transformation of Religion and the Control Over Society appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gary D. Barnett

http://freedombunker.com/2019/12/03/the-transformation-of-religion-and-the-control-over-society/

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 04:01:00 +0000

society

social condition

globalresearch--2019-01-22--The Socialization of Society

globalresearch

The Socialization of Society

One hundred years ago this month, on January 15, 1919, the great revolutionary thinker and anti-war activist, Rosa Luxemburg, was murdered in Berlin by the Freikorps paramilitary group, with her body dumped into the Landwehr Canal. Her comrade in opposition to the Social Democratic Party of Germany support for German involvement in World War 1, and in splitting from the SPD to eventually form the Communist Party of Germany, Karl Liebknecht, was also murdered in the course of the same events. Luxemburg occupies a special place in the traditions of the global left for her powerful political interventions and ceaseless invocation of revolution to break the hammerlock of capitalism on democracy and development, and for her major economic text, (1913), linking capitalist development to dispossessions, imperialism and militarism. Her searing critique of capitalist democracy was central to a political strategy that combined an insistence on the capacity for revolt and self-organization of the masses with recognition of the role of the socialist party in education, agitation, and parliamentary representation and struggle in the interests of the working classes. One hundred years on, Luxemburg remains a source of political inspiration and integrity for socialists around the world. We reprint here her call (published in December 1918) for political control of the state and socialization of the economic system in the midst of the German revolts of 1918-1919. “While we are enlisting fighters for the revolution, we are creating Socialist workers for the future, workers who can become the basis of a new social state…. There is still an old world to be overthrown. A new world must be built!” The revolution that has just begun can have but one outcome: realization of Socialism! The working class, in order to accomplish its purpose, must, first of all, secure entire political control of the state. But to the Socialist political power is only a means to an end. It is the instrument with which labour will achieve the complete, fundamental reconstruction of our entire industrial system. Today all wealth, the largest and most fruitful tracts of land, the mines, the mills and the factories belong to a small group of Junkers and private capitalists. From them the great masses of the labouring class receive a scanty wage in return for long hours of arduous toil, hardly enough for a decent livelihood. The enrichment of a small class of idlers is the purpose and end of present-day society. To give to modern society and to modern production a new impulse and a new purpose – that is the foremost duty of the revolutionary working class. To this end, all social wealth, the land and all that it produces, the factories and the mills must be taken from their exploiting owners to become the common property of the entire people. It thus becomes the foremost duty of a revolutionary government of the working class to issue a series of decrees making all important instruments of production national property and placing them under social control. But this is only the first step. The most difficult task, the creation of an industrial state upon an entirely new foundation, has only just begun. Today, production in every manufacturing unit is conducted by the individual capitalist independently of all others. What and where commodities are to be produced, where, when and how the finished product is to be sold, is decided by the individual capitalist owner. Nowhere does labour have the slightest influence upon these questions. It is simply the living machine that has its work to do. In a Socialist state of society all this will be changed. Private ownership of the means of production and subsistence must disappear. Production will be carried on not for the enrichment of the individual but solely for the creation of a supply of commodities sufficient to supply the wants and needs of the working class. Accordingly factories, mills and farms must be operated upon an entirely new basis, from a wholly different point of view. In the first place, now that production is to be carried on for the sole purpose of securing to all a more humane existence, of providing for all plentiful food, clothing and other cultural means of subsistence, the productivity of labour must be materially increased. Farms must be made to yield richer crops, the most advanced technical processes must be introduced into the factories, of the mines only the most productive, for the present must be intensively exploited. It follows, therefore, that the process of socialization will begin with the most highly developed industries and farm lands. We need not, and will not deprive the small farmer or artisan of the bit of land or the little workshop from which he ekes out a meager existence by the work of his own hands. As time goes by he will realize the superiority of socialized production over private ownership and will come to us of his own accord. In order that all members of society may enjoy prosperity, all must work. Only he who performs useful service to society, manual or mental, will be entitled to a share of products for the satisfaction of his needs and desires. Idleness must cease and in its stead will come universal compulsory labour for all who are physically capable. Obviously those who are unable to work, children, invalids and the aged, must be supported by society. But not as it is done today, by paltry alms. Bountiful sustenance, socialized education for the children, comfortable care for the aged, public health service for the sick – these must form all important part of our social structure. For the same reason, i.e., in the interest of general welfare, society will be more economical, more rational in the utilization of its commodities, its means of production and its labour power. Waste such as we find today on every hand, must cease. The production of munitions and other implements of warfare must pass out of existence, for a Socialist state of society needs no tools of murder. Instead the precious materials and the enormous labour power that were devoted to this purpose will be used for useful production. The manufacture of useless and costly foolishness for the edification of wealthy idlers will stop. Personal service will be prohibited, and the labour power thus released will find more useful and more worthy employment. While we are thus creating a nation of workers where all must be productively employed for the general welfare, labour itself must be completely revolutionized. Today labour in industry, on the farm and in the office is usually a torture and a burden to the proletariat. men and women work because they must in order to obtain the necessities of life. In a Socialist state of society, where all work together for their own well-being, the health of the individual worker, and his joy in his work must be conscientiously fostered and sustained. Short hours of labour not in excess of the normal human capacity must he established: recreation and rest periods must be introduced into the workday, so all may do their share, willingly and joyously. Proclamation of the Bremen revolutionary republic, outside the town hall, on 15 November 1918. But the success of such reforms depend upon the human beings who will carry them out. Today the capitalist with his whip stands behind the workingman, in person or in the form of a manager or overseer. Hunger drives the worker to the factory, to the Junker or the farm-owner, into the business office. Everywhere the employer sees to it that no time is wasted, no material squandered, that good, efficient work is done. In a Socialist state of society the capitalist with his whip disappears. Here all workingmen are free and on an equal footing, working for benefit and enjoyment, tolerating no waste of social wealth, rendering honest and punctual service. To be sure, every Socialist plant needs its technical superintendents who understand its workings, who are able to supervise production so that everything runs smoothly, to assure an output commensurate with the labour power expended by organizing the process of manufacture according to most efficient methods. To insure successful production the individual workingman must follow his instructions entirely and willingly, must maintain discipline and order, cause no friction or confusion. In a word: the workingman in a Socialist industrial state must show that he can work decently and diligently, without capitalists and slavedrivers behind his back: that of his own volition he can maintain discipline and do his best. This demands mental discipline, moral stamina, it demands a feeling of self-respect and responsibility, a spiritual rebirth of the workingman. Socialism cannot be realized with lazy, careless, egotistic, thoughtless and shiftless men and women. A Socialist state of society needs people everyone of whom is full of enthusiasm and fervor for the general welfare, full of a spirit of self-sacrifice and sympathy for his fellow men, full of courage and tenacity and the willingness to dare even against the greatest odds. But we need not wait centuries or decades until such a race of human beings shall grow up. The struggle, the Revolution will teach the proletarian masses idealism, has given them mental ripeness, courage and perseverance, clearness of purpose and a self-sacrificing spirit, if it is to lead to victory. While we are enlisting fighters for the revolution, we are creating Socialist workers for the future, workers who can become the basis of a new social state. The young people of the proletariat are obtained to carry out this great work as the true foundation of the Socialist state. They must show, even now, that they are equal to the great task of bearing the future of the human race upon their shoulders. There is still an old world to be overthrown. A new world must be built! Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Rosa Luxemburg

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-socialization-of-society/5665947

2019-01-22 01:56:53+00:00

society

social condition

globalresearch--2019-05-01--Predator Cops Guilty of Sex Crimes Against Women and Children Are a Menace to Society

globalresearch

Predator Cops, Guilty of Sex Crimes Against Women and Children, Are a Menace to Society

“Sexual predation by police officers happens far more often than people in the business are willing to admit.”—Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper How could this be happening right under our noses? That’s what readers wanted to know after my column went viral about the extent to which young children are being bought and sold for sex in America. Where are the police when these children—some as young as 9 years old—are being raped repeatedly? For that matter, what is the Trump Administration doing about the fact that adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in suburbs, cities and towns across this nation? I’ll tell you what the government is doing: little to nothing. While America’s children are being menaced by sexual predators, the Trump Administration and its congressional cohorts continue to wage endless wars, run up the national debt, and distract the populace with vitriol and kabuki political theater. The police are not much better. In too many instances, the cops are worse. Indeed, while there are certainly many good cops in this country—and I’ve had the honor of working with a number of them—the bad cops have become symptomatic of a criminal justice system that is deeply rotten through and through. We can no longer count on police to save us from the worst in our society. In many cases, rather than being part of the solution, America’s police forces—riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct and drug abuse—have largely become part of the problem. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex.” In a number of cases, victims of sex trafficking report that police are among those “buying” young girls and women for sex. In other words, as a recent study by the State Commission on the Status of Women and Arizona State University makes clear, “victims are being exploited by the very people who are supposed to protect them: police officers.” In New York, seven NYPD cops—three sergeants, two detectives and two officers—were accused of running brothels that sold 15-minute sexual encounters, raking in more than $2 million over the course of 13 months. Two of the cops, brothers, were charged with holding a bachelor party at one of the brothels where “they got the place for nothing and they used the prostitutes.” In California, a police sergeant—a 16-year veteran of the police force—was arrested for raping a 16-year-old girl who was being held captive and sold for sex in a home in an upscale neighborhood. A week-long sting in Florida ended with 277 arrests of individuals accused of sex trafficking, including doctors, pharmacists and police officers. Sex trafficking victims in Hawaii described “cops asking for sexual favors to more coercive situations like I’ll let you go if you do X, Y, or Z for me.” One study found that “over 14 percent of sex workers said that they had been threatened with arrest unless they had sex with a police officer.” In many states, it’s actually legal for police to have sex with prostitutes during the course of sting operations. While the problem of cops engaged in sex trafficking is part of the American police state’s seedy underbelly that doesn’t get addressed enough, equally alarming is the number of cops who commit sex crimes against those they encounter as part of their job duties, a largely underreported number given the “blue wall of silence” that shields police misconduct. Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper describes cases in which cops fondled prisoners, made false traffic stops of attractive women, traded sexual favors for freedom, had sex with teenagers and raped children. Young girls are particularly vulnerable to these predators in blue. Former police officer Phil Stinson estimates that half of the victims of police sex crimes are minors under the age of eighteen. According to The Washington Post, a national study found that 40 percent of reported cases of police sexual misconduct involved teens. One young woman was assaulted during a “ride along” with an officer, who said in a taped confession: “The badge gets you the p—y and the p—y gets your badge, you know?” For example, a Pennsylvania police chief and his friend were arrested for allegedly raping a young girl hundreds of times—orally, vaginally, and anally several times a week—over the course of seven years, starting when she was 4 years old. In 2017, two NYPD cops were accused of arresting a teenager, handcuffing her, and driving her in an unmarked van to a nearby parking lot, where they raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them, then dropped her off on a nearby street corner. The New York Times reports that “a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio was charged with sexually assaulting the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented Guatemalan woman and threatening to have her deported if she reported the abuse.” One young girl, J.E., was kidnapped by a Border Patrol agent when she was 14 years old, taken to his apartment and raped. Two teenage girls accused a Customs and Border Protection officer of forcing them to strip, fondling them, then trying to get them to stop crying by offering chocolates, potato chips and a blanket. The government settled the case for $125,000. Mind you, this is the same government that has been separating immigrant children from their parents and locking them up in detention centers, where they are easy prey for sexual predators. So far, the government has received more than 4500 complaints about sexual abuse at those child detention facilities. This is also the same government that “lost” almost 1500 migrant children. Who knows how many of those children ended up in the hands of traffickers? The police state’s sexual assaults of children are sickening enough, but when you add sex crimes against grown women into the mix, the picture becomes even more sordid. According to The Washington Post, “research on ‘police sexual misconduct’—a term used to describe actions from sexual harassment and extortion to forcible rape by officers—overwhelmingly concludes that it is a systemic problem.” Investigative journalist Andrea Ritchie has tracked national patterns of sexual violence by police officers during traffic stops, in addition to heightened risk from minor offenses, drug arrests and police interactions with teenagers. Victims of domestic abuse, women of color, transgender women, women who use drugs or alcohol, and women involved in the sex trade are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault by police. One Oklahoma City police officer allegedly sexually assaulted at least seven women while on duty over the course of four months, including a 57-year-old grandmother who says she was forced to give the cop oral sex after he pulled her over. A Philadelphia state trooper, eventually convicted of assaulting six women and teenagers, once visited the hospital bedside of a pregnant woman who had attempted suicide, and groped her breasts and masturbated. According to research from Bowling Green State University, police officers in the U.S. were charged with more than 400 rapes over a 9-year period. During that same time period, 600 police officers were arrested for forcible fondling; 219 were charged with forcible sodomy; 186 were arrested for statutory rape; 58 for sexual assault with an object; and 98 with indecent exposure. Sexual assault is believed to be the second-most reported form of misconduct against police officers after the use of excessive force, making up more than 9% of all complaints. Even so, these crimes are believed to be largely underreported so much so that sex crimes may in fact be the number one form of misconduct among police officers. So why are the numbers underreported? One Philadelphia cop threatened to arrest a teenager for carjacking unless she had sex with him. This is the danger of a police state that invests its henchmen with so much power that they don’t even need to use handcuffs or a gun to get what they want. Making matters worse, most police departments do little to identify the offenders, and even less to stop them. Unfortunately, this is a problem that is hiding in plain sight, covered up by government agencies that are failing in their constitutional duties to serve and protect “we the people.” That thin blue line of knee-jerk adulation and absolute loyalty to police above and beyond what the law requires—a line frequently pushed by President Trump—is creating a menace to society that cannot be ignored. An investigative report into police misconduct illustrates the pervasiveness of the problem when police go rogue. According to USA Today: Hyped up on the power of the badge and their weaponry, protected from charges of wrongdoing by police unions and government agencies, and empowered by rapidly advancing tools—technological and otherwise—that make it all too easy to identify, track and take advantage of vulnerable members of society, predators on the nation’s police forces are growing in number. So where does this leave us? The courts, by allowing the government’s desire for unregulated, unaccountable, expansive power to trump justice and the rule of law, have turned away from this menace. Politicians, eager for the support of the powerful police unions, have turned away from this menace. Religious leaders who should know better but instead have silenced their moral conscience in order to cozy up to political power have turned away from this menace. Distracted by political theater, divided by politics, disenfranchised by a legislative and judicial system that renders us powerless in the face of the police state’s many abuses, “we the people” have also turned a blind eye to this menace. We must stop turning away from this menace in our midst. For starters, police should not be expected—or allowed—to police themselves. Misconduct by local police has become a national problem. Therefore, the response to this national problem must start at the local level. This is no longer a matter of a few bad apples. The entire system has become corrupted and must be reformed. Greater oversight is needed, yes, but also greater accountability and more significant consequences for assaults. Andrea Ritchie’s piece in The Washington Post provides some practical suggestions for reform ranging from small steps to structural changes (greater surveillance of police movements, heightened scrutiny of police interactions and traffic stops, and more civilian oversight boards), but as she acknowledges, these efforts still don’t strike at the root of the problem: a criminal justice system that protects abusers and encourages abuse. It’s difficult to say whether modern-day policing with its deep-seated corruption, immunity from accountability, and authoritarian approach to law enforcement attracts this kind of deviant behavior or cultivates it, but empowering police to view themselves as the best, or even the only, solution to the public’s problems, while failing to hold them accountable for misconduct, will only deepen the policing crisis that grows deadlier and more menacing by the day. Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc. This article was originally published on the author’s website: The Rutherford Institute. Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of  . His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at . Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

John W. Whitehead

https://www.globalresearch.ca/predator-cops-guilty-sex-crimes-women-children-menace-society/5676138

2019-05-01 11:03:53+00:00

society

social condition

globalresearch--2019-10-13--Human Violence: Pervasive Throughout Society. “Strategic Response” to End Violence

globalresearch

Human Violence: Pervasive Throughout Society. “Strategic Response” to End Violence

Violence is pervasive throughout human society and it has a vast range of manifestations. Moreover, some of these manifestations – particularly the threat of nuclear war (which might start regionally), the climate catastrophe and the ongoing ecological devastation, as well as geoengineering and the deployment of 5G – threaten imminent human extinction if not contained. Separately from these extinction-threatening manifestations, however, violence occurs in a huge range of other contexts denying many people the freedom, human rights and opportunities necessary for a meaningful life. Moreover, human violence is now driving 200 species of life on Earth to extinction daily with another 1,000,000 species under threat. For just a sample of the evidence in relation to the threats noted above see, for example, ‘Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe’, ‘Plan A’,‘City on Fire’, ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’, Geoengineering Watch, ‘International Appeal: Stop 5G on Earth and in Space’ and ‘5G and the Wireless Revolution: When Progress Becomes a Death Sentence’. Given the expanding range of threats to human survival that require a strategic response if they are to be contained, is that possible? Well, any candid assessment of the relevant scientific literature coupled with an understanding of the psychological, sociological, political, economic and military factors driving the violence, clearly indicates that the answer is ‘highly unlikely’. Particularly because so many people are so (unconsciously) terrified and incapable of responding powerfully. However, this does not mean that many people are not trying and some of these people perceive the interrelated and synergistic nature of these threats and know that we must be addressing each of them strategically if humanity and an enormous number of other species are to have any meaningful chance of survival in a viable biosphere. These people range from ‘ordinary’ activists, who work passionately to end violence in one context or another, to globally prominent individuals doing the same. Let me tell you about some of them. Ramesh Agrawal is a prominent social and environmental activist in India who has devoted many years to educating and organizing local village people, including adivasi communities, to defend their homes and lands from those corporations and governments that would deprive them of their rights, livelihoods, health and a clean environment for the sake of mining the abundant coal in the state of Chhattisgarh. However, because his ongoing efforts to access and share key information and his organization of Gandhian-inspired grassroots satyagrahas (nonviolent campaigns) have been so effective, he has also paid a high price for his activism, having been attacked on many occasions. In 2011, for example, he was arrested despite ill-health at the time and chained to a hospital bed. A year later he was shot in the leg, which required multiple operations. He still has difficulty walking with six metal rods inserted through his thigh. The Jan Chetna (‘peoples’ awareness’) movement started by Ramesh has spread to several parts of Chhattisgarh as well as other states of India. For the latest account of his efforts including the recent ‘coal satyagrapha’ focused on coal blocks owned by state power companies but being developed and operated by Adani Enterprises, see ‘Thousands Hold “Coal Satyagraha”, Allege Manufacturing of Consent at Public Hearing’. For his nonviolent activism, Ramesh was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2014. See ‘Ramesh Agrawal: 2014 Goldman Prize Recipient Asia’ and ‘Chhattisgarh activist, Ramesh Agrawal, bags Goldman prize’. In Ghana, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) continues its work under the leadership of President Dr. Ayo Ayoola-Amale, a certified mediator and peacebuilder. One recent activity was a two weeks training course on negotiation and mediation as a tool for conflict resolution for women in the Upper West region of Ghana, particularly three districts: Lawra, Nadowli and Lambussie. The training was aimed at providing local NGOs, community elders, administrators and others with the skills and knowledge to further improve their capacity in the work they do. In such courses, Ayo emphasizes the importance of trust, identity and relationship building issues, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: But Ayo has also conducted other courses, such as a three day workshop on peacemaking and mediation skills for the teachers and students at Okyereko Methodist Junior High School which taught skills such as communication (listening, speaking, silence), cooperation, trusting, empathy, responsibility, reconciliation and problem solving. Ayo also used her storytelling skills to convey an understanding of what it means to be a responsible person and how that puts us in charge of our lives. Through the storytelling she reveals some of the personal benefits that come from being honest, reliable, trustworthy and principled and how treating people with respect helps us get along with each other, avoid and resolve conflicts, and create a positive social climate. She told workshop participants that every choice they make helps define the kind of person they are choosing to be and their character is defined by what they do, not what they say or believe. Professor René Wadlow, President of the Association of World Citizens headquartered in France, has been involved for decades in efforts to engage people in world events rather than leave these events to be mismanaged by elites with a vested interest in a particular outcome. In this article, for example, he reflects thoughtfully on the ‘Iran Crisis: Dangers and Opportunities’ by drawing attention to opportunities for citizen engagement through NGOs to influence how the conflict plays out. As he notes: ‘The dangers are real. We must make the most of the opportunities.’ René also continues to examine issues and throw light on subjects well outside the spotlight of the corporate media, such as conflicts in Africa. See, for example, his article ‘Sahel Instability Spreads’. Since 2017 Dr Marthie Momberg in South Africa has been working with international colleagues to address Zionism amongst Christians. Along with a colleague from Kairos USA, Marthie offered, for example, a seminar entitled ‘Christianity and the Shifting of Perceptions on Zionism’ at Stellenbosch University’s Beyers Naudé Centre. ‘With some other colleagues we are also in the midst of a research project at this Centre to understand how to sensitise Christians on the nature of Zionism and how it serves as an important lens on so many other struggles in our world. I am also in the process of writing a number of scholarly articles on ethics and religion in the context of Israel and the Palestinian struggle.’ And while on Palestine, US activist journalist Abby Martin recently completed her debut feature film Gaza Fights for Freedom. Directed, written and narrated by Abby, the film had its origins while Abby was reporting in Palestine, where she was denied entry into Gaza by the Israeli government on the accusation she was a ‘propagandist’. Connecting with a team of journalists in Gaza to produce the film through the blockaded border, this collaboration shows you Gaza’s protest movement ‘like you’ve never seen it before’. Filmed during the height of the Great March Of Return protests, it features riveting footage of demonstrations ‘where 200 unarmed civilians have been killed by Israeli snipers since March 30, 2018’ and is a thorough indictment of the Israeli military for war crimes, and a stunning cinematic portrayal of the heroic resistance by Palestinians. You can watch a preview of the film here: Gaza Fights for Freedom (preview). And if you would like to buy or rent the film (and support Abby’s work) you can do so here: Gaza Fights For Freedom. In Guatemala, Daniel Dalai continues his visionary work providing opportunities for girls to develop their leadership capacities at ‘Earthgardens’. If you haven’t previously been aware of their work, including in Bolivia and Nicaragua, you will find it fascinating to read how girls – including Carmen, Angelica, Reyna, Katiela, Yapanepet, Zenobia, Deysi, Rosalba, Charro, Katarina and Marleni – in this community each changed their society, often by forming ‘Eco-Teams’, with a remarkable variety of initiatives. The Asia Institute ‘is the first truly pan-Asian think tank. A research institution that addresses global issues with a focus on Asia, The Asia Institute is committed to presenting a balanced perspective that takes into account the concerns of the entire region. The Asia Institute provides an objective space wherein a significant discussion on current trends in technology, international relations, the economy and the environment can be carried out.’ Focused on research, analysis and dialogue, and headed by president Emanuel Yi Pastreich, the Institute was originally founded in 2007 while Emanuel was working in Daejeon, Republic of (South) Korea. Emanuel writes extensively on culture, technology, the environment and international relations with a focus on Northeast Asia. He also serves as president of the Earth Management Institute, a global think tank dedicated to developing original approaches to global governance in this dangerous age. But for more on The Asia Institute, see the website above. While the individuals and organizations mentioned above are just a sample of those directly involved, they are part of an expanding worldwide network in 105 countries committed to working to end human violence in all of its manifestations. Whatever the odds against it, they refuse to accept that violence cannot be ended, and each has chosen to focus on working to end one or more manifestations of violence, according to their particular circumstances and interests. If you would like to join these people, you are welcome to sign the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’. If your own interest is campaigning on a peace, climate, environment or social justice issue, consider doing it strategically. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. If your focus is a defense or liberation struggle being undertaken by a national group, consider enhancing its strategic impact. See Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. If your preference is addressing the climate and environmental catastrophes systematically while working locally, consider participating in (and inviting others to participate in) ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. If you would like to tackle violence at its source, consider revising your parenting in accordance with ‘My Promise to Children’. If you want the evidence to understand why this is so crucial, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. If you are self aware enough to know that you are not dealing effectively with our deepening, multifaceted crisis, consider doing the personal healing necessary to do so. See ‘Putting Feelings First’. Perhaps ending human violence is impossible. If that is true, then human extinction is inevitable and it will occur as a result of one cause or another. Moreover, it will happen in the near term. But every person who believes that human violence can be ended, and then takes strategic action to end it, is participating in the most important undertaking in human history: a last ditch strategy to fight for human survival. Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc. Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Robert J. Burrowes

https://www.globalresearch.ca/human-violence-pervasive-multi-dimensional-extinction-threatening/5691800

Sun, 13 Oct 2019 16:40:01 +0000

society

social condition

hitandrun--2019-07-02--Hong Kong Protests Show Dangers of a Cashless Society

hitandrun

Hong Kong Protests Show Dangers of a Cashless Society

Protesters attempt to storm the legislature Monday while thousands march in protest of Hong Kong's handover to China from the British. (Todd Darling/Polaris/Newscom) Protesters attempt to storm the legislature Monday while thousands march in protest of Hong Kong's handover to China from the British. (Todd Darling/Polaris/Newscom) It can be easy to take cash for granted, especially in a wealthy, developed economy. Those fortunate enough to live in a stable society usually suffer no lack of payment options. They are getting more advanced all the time, with financial technology (fintech) companies constantly developing new ways to quickly and cheaply make purchases and send money. It sometimes seems the days of old-fashioned cash, with its dormant physicality, are numbered. Allowing cash to die would be a grave mistake. A cashless society is a surveillance society. The recent round of protests in Hong Kong highlights exactly what we have to lose. The current unrest concerns a proposed change to Hong Kong's extradition laws that would allow island fugitives to be transferred to Taiwan, Macau, and mainland China. The proposal sparked mass outrage, as many Hongkongers saw it as little more but a new way for the People's Republic of China to erode the legal sovereignty of Hong Kong. This week, anti-extradition protests reached another crescendo, as Hongkongers took to the streets again to commemorate the anniversary of Hong Kong's handoff to China, highlighting the deep political dynamics at play. Specifically, protestors fear that the Chinese judicial system, with all its attendant human rights baggage, would come to supplant Hong Kong's. This would be no small problem. China isn't shy about cracking down on political dissidents, even those from other states under their control. For example, in 2017, a Taiwanese pro-democracy activist was detained in China and sentenced to five years in prison for "subverting [Chinese] state power" in his home country. So tens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area. So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it. What could protestors do in a cashless world? Maybe they would have to grit their teeth and hope for the best. But relying on the benevolence or incompetence of a motivated entity like China is not a great plan. Or perhaps public transit would be off-limits altogether. This could limit the protests to fit people within walking or biking distance, or people who have access to a private car—a rarity in expensive dense cities. If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice. A chorus of commentators call for an end to cash, whether because it frustrates central bank schemes, fuels black and grey markets, or is simply inefficient. We have plenty of newfangled payment options, they say. Why should modern first world economies hew to such primordial human institutions? The answer is that there is simply no substitute for the privacy that cash, including digitized versions like cryptocurrencies, provide. Even if all of the alleged downsides that critics bemoan were true, cash would still be worth defending and celebrating for its core privacy-preserving functions. As Jerry Brito of Coin Center points out, cash protects our autonomy and indeed our human dignity. We don't even need to contemplate hypotheticals of what a digital financial surveillance system would look like. China's ubiquitous social media and messaging service WeChat doubles as a primary payment method for millions of mainland Chinese. It's easy, it's effective, and it's integrated into every facet of Chinese digital life. But Coin Center's Peter Van Valkenburgh calls apps like WeChat Pay "tools for totalitarianism" for good reason: Each transaction is linked to your identity for possible viewing by Communist Party zealots. No wonder less than 8 percent of Hongkongers bother with hyper-palatable WeChat Pay. Of course, Western offerings like Apple Pay and Venmo also maintain user databases that can be mined. Users may feel protected by the legal limits that countries like the United States place on what consumer data the government can extract from private business. But as research by Van Valkenburgh points out, US anti-money laundering laws afford less Fourth Amendment protection than you might expect. Besides, we still need to trust government and businesses to do the right thing. As the Edward Snowden revelations proved, this trust can be misplaced. Hong Kong is about as first world as you can get. Yet even in such a developed economy, power's jealous hold is but an ill-worded reform away. We should not allow today's relative freedom to obscure the threat that a cashless world poses to our sovereignty. Not only can "it happen here," for some of your fellow citizens, it might already have.

Andrea O'Sullivan (aosullivan@mercatus.gmu.edu)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reason/HitandRun/~3/T-o08M83xqc/

2019-07-02 12:30:35+00:00

society

social condition

humansarefree--2019-06-21--Why Is Everything So Fake in Todays Society

humansarefree

Why Is Everything So Fake in Today's Society?

The more I look at the world around me, the more I realize the fakery of everything , from the food I eat to the beauty of the women I’m att... **The more I look at the world around me, the more I realize the[fakery of everything](http://humansarefree.com/2015/09/everything-is-fake-top-40-pieces- of.html), from the food I eat to the beauty of the women I’m attracted to. ** And yet, no one else seems to mind. People run away from what is natural and authentic to dive straight into the fake, and they seem to enjoy it. The food is fake. The animals we eat are fed industrial filler and the meat is processed to appear natural in color. Tomatoes in the supermarket are genetically modified and gassed to appear red. Other Frankenfoods resemble nothing like they did a few decades ago. Even Coca-Cola, which was originally a sugar-based beverage, no longer has sugar in it but corn sweetener. To top it off, the entire food chain is polluted with [glyphosate](http://humansarefree.com/2018/06/the-dangers-of-glyphosate- roundup-based.html) ( [RoundUp weed killer](http://humansarefree.com/2016/08/the-real-reason-wheat- is-toxic-its-not.html) ), which is present even in [beer and wine](https://uspirg.org/feature/usp/glyphosate-pesticide-beer-and- wine) . Almost no one is getting the proper nutrients and vitamins they need, because the food they eat is not real, and they try to compensate by taking dubious supplements, but that’s mostly in vain since your body was not designed to extract life-giving nutrients from pills. The appearance of men and women are fake. Men inject themselves with hormones and puff their muscles up in a way that does not translate to strength in real-life dangers that no longer happen. Women put chemicals on their face to simulate sexual arousal and wear high- tech pants to shape their bodies like clay. Many use fake hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Everyone bleaches their teeth to the color of porcelain dinnerware. All photographs of humans are fake by default, photoshopped to perfection, and “deep fakes” will soon ensure that videos will also be fake. The personas of men and women are fake. Everyone is deeply dissatisfied with who they are, so they have embarked on a [journey of “self-improvement”](https://www.rooshv.com/why-its-folly-to- design-your-own-lifestyle) where they destroy their natural essence for a persona or ideal they believe will allow them to be materially successful in the wreckage we call modern society. When you talk to someone, you talk to a filter that is desperate to act in a “cool,” high-status, or attractive manner. Every laugh, statement, and joke is a product of deliberation and calculation. Only a tiny percentage of human communication is based on the truth, and for some people, absolutely none of it is. The mental states we experience are fake. Most of it is under caffeine, alcohol, marijuana, illegal drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, legal supplements, and psychedelics. Most people don’t know what it’s like to be on completely nothing and exist [in a wholly natural state](https://www.rooshv.com/the-purity-challenge) . We’re scared to death of how we really are. [The news is fake](http://humansarefree.com/search?q=fake+news+examples) . All of it is filtered through the agenda of [oligarch owners](http://humansarefree.com/2016/03/there-were-88-media- companies-now-there.html) that have an agenda of increased wealth and power. [ [Propaganda is also legal in the USA](http://humansarefree.com/2016/08/us- government-propaganda-use-against.html) ] By default, most of history is also fake. If they can’t get the news today right, I doubt they got the events of 75 years ago right. [The weather is fake](http://humansarefree.com/2016/03/the-rothschilds-and- geoengineering.html) . [Governments are](http://humansarefree.com/2014/05/us-air-force-admits-in- defense-hearing.html) injecting [heavy metals and other substances](http://humansarefree.com/2017/09/the- ultimate-weapon-of-mass-destruction.html) in the atmosphere while [conducting space-age electromagnetic experiments](http://humansarefree.com/2019/03/haarp-project-it-can-deliver- very-large.html) . The fabric that composes your clothes is fake, made in a factory instead of shorn from an animal. The music you listen to is fake, made by a computer instead of a musician. The [money you earn is fake](http://humansarefree.com/2018/06/the-money-masters- behind-global-debt.html) , backed by nothing of value. The flowers on the restaurant table are fake. Her romantic interest in you is fake. The conversations you have with your co-workers are fake. The craftsmanship that goes into high-priced “authentic” consumer goods, made in a factory like everything else, is fake. With [everything fake](http://humansarefree.com/2015/09/everything-is-fake-top-40 -pieces-of.html) , and people so eager to either be fake or consume what is fake, could it be that we are also fake? How else can you explain our rush for fakery, to glorify what is fake, to produce the fake for rewards that are also fake? No, I reject that notion. The truth is we are living not in the World of God but in the World of Man, a world created by other men to monitor, weaken, and control us, to fill our minds [with disgusting lies](https://www.rooshv.com/the-inversion-agenda) , to encourage us to commit all manner of inhuman behavior. I’ll consider that tonight when I shower with fake soap, moisturize with fake chemicals, and sleep on my fake feather pillow. _By[Roosh Valizadeh](https://www.rooshv.com/why-is-everything-so-fake), the author of "[Lady: How To Meet And Keep A Good Man For Love And Marriage](http ://aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com/x/c/Qt7INgc59Z- NScz49WtqxKgAAAFrdTVQdwEAAAFKAVLTSIc/https://assoc- redirect.amazon.com/g/r/https://amzn.to/2Ip1rW6?linkCode=w61&imprToken=EIN5VasEqyyALphOsbYe2Q&slotNum=0)"_

Alexander Light (noreply@blogger.com)

http://humansarefree.com/2019/06/why-is-everything-so-fake-in-todays.html

2019-06-21 02:00:00+00:00

society

social condition

humansarefree--2019-11-08--Google in Court Documents: Free Speech is “Disastrous” for Society

humansarefree

Google in Court Documents: Free Speech is “Disastrous” for Society

U.S. should appoint third-party judicial commission to review censorship cases

Alexander Light (noreply@blogger.com)

http://humansarefree.com/2019/11/google-in-court-documents-free-speech.html

2019-11-08T04:00:00.000+02:00

society

social condition

inquisitr--2019-12-23--Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says United States Is ‘Not An Advanced Society’

inquisitr

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says United States Is ‘Not An Advanced Society’

Progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently spoke out against the current direction of United States society while campaigning with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. Speaking in Los Angeles Saturday, the New York City representative suggested that creating a “loving society” in the U.S. is not an “irrational, overly feeling, sympathetic statement,” Breitbart reports. Ocasio-Cortez said that such a goal is necessary to achieve an “advanced society” before taking aim at the current state of the country. “What we are living in now is not an advanced society,” she said, adding that President Donald Trump is pushing the country toward fascism. The 30-year-old congresswoman also addressed Sanders’ campaign, suggesting that his “movement” puts the interests of the working class above society’s elites. “We can’t go back to the way things were before, because the way thing were before is how we got to where we are now. We cannot go back to a world where the rich are put first and working people are put last in Washington day in and day out.” Ocasio-Cortez also appeared to take a jab at Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who has come under fire for representing corporate interests and controversially hosting a big-money fundraiser at a wine cave. “I go into work all the time and I hear people saying, ‘What will my donors think?'” she said, seemingly claiming that some members of Congress are tied to billionaire donors and noting that she is not. Ocasio-Cortez has drawn a great deal of support and attention for her outspoken views and focus on fighting for working-class Americans. As The Inquisitr previously reported, the former waitress outperformed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with her third-quarter donations, raising a total of $1.4 million, with the majority coming from contributions under $200. The impressive haul puts Ocasio-Cortez ahead of not just Pelosi’s $1.26 million but all of her Democrat colleagues in the House of Representatives. According to the freshman congresswoman, who does not take money from large PACs or special interest groups, she built her campaign to rely on small-donor support because she believes it’s the “best way” to remain accountable to the “everyday people” she represents. Ocasio-Cortez claims that her campaign model has had a positive impact on the way that she operates in Congress. She also took aim at the influence of money on lawmakers, claiming that it prevents lawmakers from spending the time they should on lawmaking and providing an opening for special interest groups to exert their influence.

Tyler MacDonald

https://www.inquisitr.com/5808204/aoc-united-states-advanced-society/

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 20:26:11 +0000

society

social condition

instapundit--2019-01-10--JOHN HAWKINS ON THE FAME TRAP How the Pursuit of Fame Is Warping American Society

instapundit

JOHN HAWKINS ON THE FAME TRAP: How the Pursuit of Fame Is Warping American Society….

JOHN HAWKINS ON THE FAME TRAP: How the Pursuit of Fame Is Warping American Society.

Ed Driscoll

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pjmedia/instapundit/~3/mR4G5geH7nY/

2019-01-10 01:14:48+00:00

society

social condition

labourlist--2019-02-18--From charity runs to coffee mornings civil society is key to shifting power

labourlist

From charity runs to coffee mornings, civil society is key to shifting power

When we started a two-year inquiry into the future of civil society, we were bold about the breadth of organisations we were talking about. We argued that civil society is all of us. When we act, it’s not for profit nor because the law requires us to, but out of love or anger or creativity, or principle, we are civil society. When we bring together our friends or colleagues or neighbours to have fun or to defend our rights or to look after each other, we are civil society. Whether we organise through informal friendship networks, Facebook groups, community events or protests; through formal committees, charities, faiths or trade unions; whether we block runways or coordinate coffee mornings, do charity runs or make music for fun; when we organise ourselves outside the market and the state, we are all civil society. We travelled around the country listening carefully to what people had to say to us. We heard a story that we might have expected. A story of deep division between generations, between towns and cities, between north and south, people with wealth and those without. We heard a lot of anger. We heard of local groups that felt austerity had hit them particularly hard, and that the current model of commissioning was ignoring and failing to value their unique and important contribution. We heard of levels of distrust within civil society, and between organisations. We met people who felt disconnected from the organisations established to meet their needs, and major charities working hard to reassess their purpose in a time of such change. But we also heard so much that brings hope. We heard about the dense network of groups, organisations, networks and movements that are together essential for the survival and well-being of communities. Without that network of support and care, the NHS, local authorities and government would not be able to operate. And we know that civil society is continuing to develop. That there are groups of people providing a bed for the night for homeless young people, offering their spare room to refugees, training as ‘dementia friends’, doing what they can to address the scourge of loneliness. We learned that associational life is the biggest and most precious asset that we have. Changing family structures, the changing world of work, the decline of the high street, the powerful digital revolution, deep and bitter political divisions are all challenges faced by civil society and, in our report, we argued that to rise to these challenges civil society must look at how it operates. We argued for a new PACT – [a focus on shifting power](https://www.labourtogether.uk/power) to engage people, a new and more appropriate approach to accountability, focused work on building deep connections both between and within organisations, and the development of a new and more enduring trust within and around civil society. We focused on four themes because they resonated everywhere: * **Places and spaces**. Everywhere, we met people who were passionate about the place they lived. Place matters, and it matters more than many in national politics have sometimes acknowledged. And spaces matter too. In far too many places, we found community spaces that were dilapidated and unloved, an absence of shared spaces to meet, to discuss and to plan. * **Work and purpose**. The changing labour market leaves people without a sense of association, of belonging, of purpose. This is a huge challenge to civil society, which also frequently offers a sense of purpose. * **Identity and belonging**. Civil society as the place people belong, and they show and develop their identity. * **Ways of organising**. We heard so much about the need for different forms of organisations – of the tensions and possibilities – between institutions, networks and movements. This requires a fundamental change both in the way civil society behaves, and the way the ecosystem supporting civil society operates. Our current times require a determined and effective response. If we are to restore trust in our dented democracy, stitch up the torn social fabric and essential action on environmental degradation we need a healthy, re-energised and respected civil society. That will require all of us to change – but it is non-negotiable if we are to forge a future in which people, and their communities, thrive. _This piece was commissioned by_[ _Labour Together_](http://www.labourtogether.uk) _, which is_[ _guest editing LabourList_](https://labourlist.org/tag/labour-together-guest-edit/) _this week._ ### Julia Unwin Julia Unwin was chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust from 2007 to 2016. She chairs the Independent Inquiry on the Future of Civil Society, which reported in November 2018. [ @juliaunwin ](https://twitter.com/@juliaunwin) [View all articles by Julia Unwin](https://labourlist.org/author/julia-unwin/) ### Value our free and unique service? LabourList has more readers than ever before - but we need your support. Our dedicated coverage of Labour's policies and personalities, internal debates, selections and elections relies on donations from our readers. [Support LabourList](/donate)

Julia Unwin

https://labourlist.org/2019/02/from-charity-runs-to-coffee-mornings-civil-society-is-key-to-shifting-power/

2019-02-18 07:45:38+00:00

society

social condition

labourlist--2019-02-22--Our societys future mental health must be at the heart of our political decisions today

labourlist

Our society’s future mental health must be at the heart of our political decisions today

As technology progresses, the nature of work changes and we become ever more interconnected, the challenges that we face as a more mental health-aware society become even more diverse. Whilst a key focus of mental health should be around crisis care, early intervention and proper support for those with long-term conditions, we must also consider the state of the nation’s mental health as part of a greater societal context. And our mental ill health is shaped by the conditions in which we work, live and interact. Undoubtedly, the focus of the vision for future mental health must be for comprehensive and effective frontline and bespoke services that are properly funded and staffed. Mental health and physical health must realise the parity of esteem as part of a fully functional and well-funded health service. Services should be capable of treating both those with chronic, ongoing illness and those in need of short-term and immediate treatment. This means staff, funding, beds and a range of unique care pathways. Whilst the government’s £2bn for the creation of a 24-hour Mental Health hotline is welcome, it by no means deals with the chronic shortage of beds, the massive understaffing of vital services and a waiting list that is costing lives every single day. Any interest in mental health as a contextual result of societal issues must therefore run concurrent to the struggle for better mental health services. But as policy makers and activists, we must consider mental ill health in much wider contexts than before. From our home lives to our work lives, the factors that contribute to poor mental health cannot be boxed off conveniently in a single policy area. For the sake of our society’s future, let’s try to see the bigger picture. For example, [in work](https://www.labourtogether.uk/work), to which we commit over 90,000 hours over our lifetime, much more can and should be done. We need to think about how our workplaces can become healthier environments that better supports workers’ mental health. In the recent Fabian publication _Minds At Work_ , Josh Abey and Kate Dearden [recommend](https://labourlist.org/2019/01/lets-make-mental-health-a-priority- in-the-changing-world-of-work/) a review of the Equality Act “to ensure sufficient protections for those with mental health conditions”, a reform of statutory sick pay, and advocate for better training, awareness and planning on the part of the employer for employee mental ill health. But we also need to think beyond what we can just do today. Let’s consider the benefits of a four-day working week, in which the balance between time out of work and time in work would level. How can we make sure labour is properly compensated at a rate that allows us to live without the financial anxiety that grips so many? These are the questions our movement should be asking while striving to adopt a radical new approach to our work lives that guarantees a healthy and supported workforce. This sort of long-term approach to societal ill health cannot advance without ending the roll-out of universal credit, a policy designed to punish and condemn vulnerable people to bureaucracy and financial insecurity. We need a system that is properly funded, flexible and responsive to those who need and use it. Teachers grappling with rising child mental health issues don’t need a larger workload and to be asked to do more with less. They must be supported with a national mental health network to which they can refer children who need the extra support, to help those that need the care on a day-to-day basis as they develop. Instead of fuelling an overheated housing market and cutting night shelter services, homelessness must be eradicated, ensuring that each and every one of us has a secure place to stay each night. As we look to shape policy and think about the way we treat mental ill health, we must take a combined approach: both properly funding and staffing frontline mental health services for those who need them, and aiming to create a more compassionate society in which positive mental health is a goal for all its citizens. _This piece was commissioned by_[ _Labour Together_](http://www.labourtogether.uk/) _, which is_[ _guest editing LabourList_](https://labourlist.org/tag/labour-together-guest-edit/) _this week._ ### Andrew Mitchell Andrew Mitchell is deputy director of Labour Campaign for Mental Health. [ @am_hc ](https://twitter.com/@am_hc) [View all articles by Andrew Mitchell](https://labourlist.org/author/andrew-mitchell/) ### Value our free and unique service? LabourList has more readers than ever before - but we need your support. Our dedicated coverage of Labour's policies and personalities, internal debates, selections and elections relies on donations from our readers. [Support LabourList](/donate)

Andrew Mitchell

https://labourlist.org/2019/02/our-societys-future-mental-health-must-be-at-the-heart-of-our-political-decisions-today/

2019-02-22 06:20:25+00:00

society

social condition

lewrockwell--2019-07-20--Libertarianisms Place In Society

lewrockwell

Libertarianism’s Place In Society

The thesis here is that libertarianism as a political theory only carries the veneer of importance and centrality due to the strength and power of the democratic, administrative, state in our time. Everywhere we look, we see the influence and effect of the state as an apparatus that guides and oversees the machinations of modern civilization. We speak not merely of the obvious libertarian issues like taxes and regulation but we see in the modern western state a cultural force. We so often push the idea that politics is downstream from culture, that we have lost the culture and therefore the state has followed the path of destruction. But as was hinted on the AL editor’s blog, it is far more likely that Paul Gottfried has it right: the state has morphed into something much more sinister and it now leads the culture toward its own ends. The modern administrative state is the creator of culture and culture is now downstream from the state. Gottfried is especially succinct as to his meaning in his short excerpt: We have entered into a full politicization of society; there is nothing that the state-cultural complex does not touch. It guides the way we interact with others, the way we process and interpret events, and the way we think about social norms and basic social units and institutions. Now then, to bring this back to the thesis: “libertarianism as a political theory only carries the veneer of importance and centrality due to the strength and power of the democratic, administrative, state in our time.” Since the state is everywhere we look, and libertarianism has a set of particular ethical critiques against the state, it seems to follow that libertarianism plays such an important place in our lives. Stated differently, according to the libertarian doctrine, the initiation of aggression against the body or exterior property of others is a breach of ethically-laden rights; and the state is the most systematic, constant, and egregious violator of the principle. And as the state surrounds our every move, so we see libertarianism as a response to so much of our world. This creates the illusion that libertarianism plays a fundamental role in society. That political theory itself is of primary importance for a people who wish for a better world, a world that is both more ethical and more free. And from this, we work to create a libertarian political strategy and a libertarian movement as well. And thus, the disease of modern administrative statism, which takes over our minds as the lens through which we find meaning, produces the impulse that one ought to dedicate himself to libertarianism as a path toward social preservation. But it should be made clear that the only reason libertarianism as such seems to play such a fundamental role in the self-identity and life-meaning of so many in libertarian circles is due to the politicalization of society. We live in the administrative state’s world and thus we even put our path toward social improvement strictly in terms of the political. It is not just that the state formally speaking is everywhere we look, it is that there is hardly any longer a culture that is distinct from the state. When Buck Johnson recently asked Paul Gottfried whether the Left or the State was the chief enemy in our time, Gottfried quickly responded: “what’s the difference?” In times past libertarians correctly and properly held firm that “we” are not the state! Society and the state were separate and the state is an artificial entity as compared to society, which is natural. While importantly and profoundly still true, this does not take into account the extent to which the state has replaced natural and spontaneous society with its artificial one. It is true that the natural society is not born out of the state; the state is not the thing that naturally binds together peoples. But as the administrative, democratic state has come of age, it has created its own artificial society which is of course a society of Egalitarian Terror. Under a free society that is not created by or bound up in the existence of the state, libertarianism plays much more the role of a legal theory, not a political theory. It’s important to remember that libertarianism chiefly speaks wisdom to scenarios of tension and strife between people who want to use scarce resources for their own ends. Libertarianism offers a standard by which we can determine who gets to use which good and in what way. The role of libertarianism is to help us resolve disputes and arbitrate in situations of conflict. In other words, libertarianism is chiefly a legal theory that of course has political ramifications once society faces the creation of the state as an institutionalization of aggression (or as Murray Rothbard described it, “a band of robbers writ large.”). Thus, our good friend Jonathan Goodwin, blogging as Bionic Mosquito, offers: What this means to me is that men are not connected to other men on the basis of libertarianism. Marxist political movements, for instance, purport that classes are held together by their economic status: workers of the world unite. You are neither German nor Russian nor English. You are a worker, or you are a member of the bourgeois. It is not the same with libertarianism, or at least a meaningful and realistic libertarianism over against the more universal libertarianism. Let me be clear here: libertarianism is only the thing that binds us is we presume the state’s politicized world! The Marxist worldview is at its root political so it makes sense that Marxism as an ideology binds them. Anatomy of the State Murray Rothbard Best Price: $2.84 Buy New $5.77 (as of 02:20 EDT - Details) But libertarianism plays a different role in a free (non-politicized) society; it comes to the picture as a set of principles and guidelines by which we can judiciously determine what is criminal and what is legal, what should be responded to with coercion (such as murder or theft), and what should not be responded to with coercion (such as creating goods and services on the market). In this case, those of us who are beginning to pay particular attention to the rapid and concerning leftist social revolution likely have more in common with each other, outside the bounds of libertarianism as a legal theory. And as the left-libertarians and mainstream libertarians in general either praise these developments as at the culmination of the “libertarian spirit” or at least just watch it all with neutral expressions and ambivalent reaction, they likely have more in common, generally speaking, with the progressive left. The response to this is so often that “libertarians are to connected not by their cultural preferences but by their anti-statism!” But this is only true under a politicized worldview. Putting aside the issue of politics, which presumably all libertarians would eventually want out of the way anyway, there is nothing else that binds us. And thus, our pretending that we are transcendentally bound by our libertarianism is exactly the sort of artificial connections that the state has aimed for! Men form society not on the basis of a unifying legal theory, but the legal theory is adopted post-society. Libertarianism is a helpful tool in the development of peaceful civilization; it is neither the spring nor the engine from which society flows. Libertarianism as a unifying spirit is only conceivable because we operate in a world that has experienced the imposition of a political society. But perhaps, to presuppose this statist-world moving forward, and to subsequently work toward a bigger libertarian political movement, is to have already made the very mistake that continues to undermine our efforts toward a free society.

No Author

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/07/no_author/libertarianisms-place-in-society/

2019-07-20 04:01:00+00:00

society

social condition

nationalreview--2019-02-12--The Society of Tattletales

nationalreview

The Society of Tattletales

Esquire runs an article about a working-class white boy, and an online mob pretends to be outraged. Esquire magazine launched a series of reported essays this morning with an article titled “The Life of an American Boy at 17.” It featured a tall, handsome, but not particularly dynamic white kid from Wisconsin who thinks he’s likely to end up working at a “water plant.” Thousands of people who don’t subscribe to Esquire, or normally read Esquire, or fit in with Esquire’s target demographic are furious about the choice of subject. Or at least they are pretending to be. Our future water-plant worker is just too unbearably privileged for the leading minds of New York media. He shouldn’t be represented this way. For reasons that aren’t altogether clear. The outrage that this article exists in is recursive in quality. It begins with a presumption that this particular subject, a tall white teenager who vaguely supports the president, should not be “centered” — or given attention at all, that he has earned too much attention. Again, these aren’t Esquire subscribers or regular readers. The question occurs: “Aren’t you in control of your attention? Couldn’t you just ignore this article?” Apparently not. And because there is outrage that he got attention, the controversy itself becomes the cause of further controversy. The people claiming they don’t want to “center” Esquire’s cover subject draw him into the center of a hurricane. Some of the excuses for the outrage are made up. How many women were in the decision-making process for this article? (The article’s author is a woman.) “Why are you centering whiteness? Are you defining American as white and male?” (It’s only the first in a series looking at white, black, and LGBTQ teen subjects). “Why did Esquire do this in February, which is Black History Month?” (It’s the March cover subject). But March is Women’s History Month! Although my favorite complaint is when people say, “Who thought this was a good idea?” Why isn’t someone an acceptable answer? Seriously, why can’t someone be interested in this? Why does a men’s magazine that creates journalism jobs by selling ad space to luxury brands aimed at men have to cater to everyone but privileged males? Why should it be having BuzzFeed’s conversation imposed on it? Like much of the anger directed at National Review, boycotts and canceled subscriptions aren’t a threat when they come from people who decided they hated you decades ago. Most of the critics, if they could read (and we shouldn’t presume), would find that a great many of their preferred topics and narratives about the world are subtly represented in the story, which looks at American society through this young man’s eyes. As he sees it, the world is ready to lash out at him for being what he can’t help being, for reasons that are unintelligible to him. The reaction to the article more than proved the point. And by the way, if it wasn’t Esquire, the outrage would have been about Bloomingdale’s. The department store stocked a T-shirt with the words “Fake News” on it. If it weren’t liberals leading the outrage, it would be conservatives, moaning about the Oscars or something. Because we live in the age of the tattletale. And worse, we don’t even tattle to the authorities. How many real attempts at persuasion were sent to Esquire’s editor? Instead, we tattle to the anonymous online mob. Or, occasionally, we tattle to mega corporations that advertise, hoping that they see the mob and dole out the real punishment that matters. You would think that an age of diversity would be less anxious and vindictive. You’d think that it would privilege institutions that make judgments and stand behind them, rather than complaints made by randos who can’t. You would think that the forces that a diverse age called upon would be reasonable, full of liberality. Instead it’s thousands of idiots, pretending to be mad, pretending that the March issue is about February, that a men’s magazine should be about anything other than men, and that a kid destined for the local plant in Wisconsin is privileged.

Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-society-of-tattletales/

2019-02-12 21:58:25+00:00

society

social condition

nationalreview--2019-09-10--Did Social Work Kill Civil Society

nationalreview

Did Social Work Kill Civil Society?

If civil society is dead — and evidence of its decay abounds, from the derelict exurban brownstones that were once home to orphanages and industrial schools to the ever-dwindling numbers of community organizations — Howard Husock’s question is one worth asking. In his new book Who Killed Civil Society? he explores the confluence of cultural, political, and economic developments that destroyed the “mediating institutions” that once imparted “middle-class values” to the poor and destitute. It is a story told through anecdote, first through the eyes of Husock’s orphaned father, on whose behalf “a private organization called the Juvenile Aid Society, staffed in large part by volunteers, stepped in and provided a solid foundation for his life.” The Juvenile Aid Society “sought to shape his values — to inculcate the norms that are sometimes mocked as ‘bourgeois.’” These norms have been abandoned, in his eyes, to the great peril of the poor. The book chronicles the evolution of social services from the late 19th century to the present, using emblematic figures — philanthropists, reformers, and ideologues — as vehicles to chart its development. This is Husock’s means of personalizing what is, in part, an impersonal plot: Whatever the role of individual social-service agents, it was the whirlwinds of legislative and cultural revolution that would destroy value formation and civil society in turn. Husock presents Charles Loring Brace, a 19th-century philanthropist, as a model of voluntary charity’s best features. Brace created a series of programs under the Children’s Aid Society umbrella that, by 1890, included “twenty-one industrial schools, thirteen night schools for general education, four summer camps, a typing school, a print shop, and three reading rooms.” While Brace received small contributions from local governments, he was almost exclusively funded by donors who embraced his mission to the poor, which included promoting bourgeois norms: “The principal value of our Enterprise,” Brace wrote, “is that our influence is moral and in no respect coercive . . . [aspiring philanthropists will] soon see how superficial and comparatively useless all assistance or organization is which does not touch the habits of life and the inner forces which form character.” Brace’s imposition of norms on impoverished children and insistence upon thrift and virtue might, to the modern ear, sound like “moralizing.” To Husock, if propagating bourgeois norms counts as “moralizing,” then our institutions ought “not shrink from just such moralizing because . . . it can actually empower people.” Husock invokes the so-called “success sequence” to defend the importance of norms. The “success sequence” is a social-science concept that has seen various expressions spanning several decades, but its essential claim is thus: If an individual finishes high school, gets a job, and gets married before having children, he is highly unlikely to live in poverty. This basic schema has been confirmed by subsequent research, though it’s not without its dissenters, who charge it to be overly reductive and a means of blaming the poor for their poverty. Husock sidesteps these objections, insisting that the success sequence confirms the importance of norms for those in adverse economic or social circumstances. “In my father’s time,” Husock laments, “it was acknowledged that bourgeois norms were an essential key to upward mobility.” What would happen when society thought otherwise? The success sequence is, if nothing else, practical, which is part of what attracts Husock to Brace’s approach. Brace had an Oakeshottian distaste for ideology, skeptical of those “with a pet theory of reforming the world in ninety days which he forces on all occasions.” It was “Brace’s goal,” Husock writes, “to help individuals acquire the personal tools to prosper within the system,” not to overhaul the system itself. Brace’s successors were not so modest; Husock contrasts Brace’s approach with later social workers who made “a pivot from the formative to the reformative, and increasingly to the ‘wholesale’ approach to social work, more and more tied to government action.” The ascendance of professional social work was, to Husock, the death knell of civil society, though not the lone culprit for its demise. Husock identifies professional, state-contracted “social work” as something of a scavenger, picking away at what remains of the voluntary institutions between civilian and government. Social work began as “friendly visiting,” a practice made famous by the reformer Mary Richmond, where concerned members of the upper classes would periodically check in on poor households to engage, per Husock, in the “retail dissemination of social norms.” These “friendly visitors,” by the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, had become the progenitors of the modern social worker, and things once reserved for civil society were farmed out to the burgeoning class of well-credentialed practitioners of what was once called “scientific charity.” Social workers became hyper-rational intermediaries between the federal government’s menu of social programs and the poor bound to receive them — “eligibility for aid,” Husock demurs, required that the recipient accept “individual counseling, provided by trained professionals rather than concerned neighbors and citizens.” The professionalization of social work, to Husock, was the ultimate abdication of civil society. “Volunteers,” Husock says, “became a disadvantage as nonprofits sought to comply with government requirements to hire social workers with master’s degrees, whose education in many cases had been supported by the government itself.” More to the point, social work, by its nature, demanded responding to already-manifest social ills. The formative work that might prevent social ills outright, of the sort performed by Charles Loring Brace, would necessarily be lost. Husock accepts the value of the former but takes issue with those who would dismiss the importance of the latter. “It is this view,” Husock insists, “that this book disputes.” One never gets the sense that Husock disdains social workers themselves — indeed, he readily acknowledges good work done by some in the field — but he does abhor what he calls the “scaling of the social service state,” where charity devolved from a personal act to one marred by bureaucracy and mechanization. Husock details the life of health, education, and welfare secretary Wilbur Cohen, the man who he claims “did more to steer the expansion of the social service state” than almost any public official in history. Cohen was “the consummate federal bureaucrat,” one who, unlike the other reformers that Husock details, spent most of his life in government, removed from the actual delivery of services to the poor. “Wilbur Cohen’s legacy,” Husock charges, “is based on public policy for the poor, not personal involvement with them.” Cohen was one of the principal actors involved in the passage of the 1962 amendments to the Social Security Act, a series of ambitious expansions of federal power that would, in effect, usurp services “once funded and delivered locally, and overseen by local citizens on local boards of directors who were accountable for the results.” And as governmental actors, the “formative” services of Charles Loring Brace were inevitably to be delivered in a supposedly “value-neutral” fashion. What, then, would happen to norms? Husock does not provide much in the way of solutions; he in part resigns himself to lamenting what has been lost and the culture that now loathes the norms so instrumental in his father’s life. He hastily provides a series of modern actors who he feels are engaging in work that vaguely evokes Charles Loring Brace, but sees them as islands in a sea of bureaucracy and dispassion. “What,” he dirges, “would . . . renaissance mean for the multibillion-dollar social service state?” This is the foremost question raised by his book, and it’s one to which he dedicates but a paragraph to answering. “That would entail returning social work to its roots of friendly visiting: exposing households to the idea that life choices improve life chances, rather than compensating them with services for being victims of an unjust social structure.”

John Hirschauer

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/book-review-who-killed-civil-society-role-social-workers/

2019-09-10 10:30:45+00:00

society

social condition

newspunch--2019-12-25--Ocasio-Cortez: America Is a Fascist Society

newspunch

Ocasio-Cortez: America Is a Fascist Society

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that America is a “fascist society” in a speech to thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters. AOC told the audience America is not an advanced society. She then added, “It is fascism what we have here!” Thegatewaypundit.com reports: The liberal audience ate it up.

Sean Adl-Tabatabai

https://newspunch.com/ocasio-cortez-america-fascist-society/

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 11:06:20 +0000

society

social condition

newswars--2019-05-20--Does Society Feel Like a Circus to You

newswars

Does Society Feel Like a Circus to You?

This clever video breaks down why today’s society might feel like a circus to you: The tide is turning against the conspirators behind the Russiagate hoax.

Infowars.com

https://www.newswars.com/does-society-feel-like-a-circus-to-you/

2019-05-20 16:31:58+00:00

society

social condition

newswars--2019-10-06--We Live in a Society

newswars

We Live in a Society

Gone are the days in which a movie is just a movie. Cultural critics and the outrage media have achieved such prominence in contemporary culture that today, a simple comic book movie can inspire panic amongst even the likes of the NYPD. Moviegoers in New York who are rushing off to see Joker afterits triumphant start at the Venice Film Festival will be accompanied by undercover officers deployed to select locations for the film’s opening weekend. The NYPD, reacting no doubt to the alert issued by the U.S. Army about the potential for a mass shooter during screenings of the Warner Bros. film, warn that the film could incite another event like the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. The U.S. Army claimed to have issued its warning as a precaution in response to “credible intelligence” pertaining to “disturbing and very specific chatter” that threatened the “targeting of an unknown movie theater during the release.” Both the military and the police are reacting to concerns that Joker is, in fact, a call to arms for violent, alienated men. As noted by Time Magazine, critics who saw Jokerduring its run at the Venice and Toronto film festivals have called it “dangerous”, “deeply troubling” and “a toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels.” Director Todd Phillips refuted the claim that the film is an attempt to rationalize or empathize with white male violence—correctly pointing out that the panic (which has, if nothing else, served as excellent, free publicity for the film) is largely a product of left-wing outrage culture. In the instance of Joker, outraged journalists , not internet memelords—or even “incels”—are the agents of chaos and fear. WHAT EVEN IS AN “INCEL”? The term “incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate.” It originates from the PUA or “pick up artist” movement that rose to prominence in the mid-2000s following the publication of Neil Strauss’ personal autobiography, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. By the late 2000s, fewer young men were in romantic relationships than ever before. Self-proclaimed pick-up artists or “gurus” found a willing audience in lonely young men who desired female companionship. They held bootcamps and selling books laden with “techniques” for seducing women. The tricks they were taught included things like “negging,” or undermining the confidence of the female “target” and increasing her need for personal approval from her pursuer. These men joined online forums dedicated pick-up artistry, where they shared tips and posted results of their various attempts to put into action PUA tactics. As some of these men’s efforts yielded disappointing results, so too did their disillusionment and hatred—both of pick-up artists, as well as women in general. This led to the creation of numerous forums, including SlutHate (formerly PUAHate) and ForeverAlone—both of which were frequented by the 2014 Isla Vista mass shooter, Elliott Rodger, whose life and online activities were the subject of media attention following the massacre. Prior to the slayings, Rodger justified his actions as a retaliation against women who refused to provide him with the attention to which he felt entitled. He openly identified himself as an “incel” in his manifesto. In this offshoot of the PUA community, members developed their own vernacular to help define their outlook on reality. Sexually successful men were termed “Chads,” and women who were out of their league were reduced to “Stacys.” Other, less attractive women who were nonetheless sexually successful were called “Beckys.” Racialized variants of these terms also took hold, as did the concept of the “blackpill,” which, much like the “red pill” in the Matrix, is a metaphor for a subscription to the incel mindset—a way to view reality through a darkened lens of inherent sexual hierarchy and entitlement. The concept of the “incel uprising” took form after 25-year-old Alek Minassian, another self-described incel, committed mass murder in April 2018. Hours before he drove a van through busy Toronto sidewalks, killing 10 people, Minassian took to Facebook to post his intentions. Like Minassian, blackpilled individuals purportedly seek to overthrow the existing social order through a “beta uprising,” or “incel uprising,” openly advocating for acts of mass violence on these forums. Elliot Rodger’s actions were glorified by members of the incel community as a sort of blueprint for initiating an inept mode of social revolution. Rodger became referred to as the “Supreme Gentleman.” “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161,” he wrote. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” Today, incel terminology has grown to accommodate ironic memes about the gaming community, which, while distinct from the manosphere, has some demographic crossover. In April 2015, someone made an image macro of the Joker with the words “when the nice guy loses his patience (sic) the devil shivers.” In 2017, ironic image macros of Jared Leto’s Joker from Suicide Squad were accompanied by cringeworthy text that associated gamers with incel sexual entitlement. Much of these memes were then regurgitated, often by gamers themselves, to mock the such statements, as an active criticism of incel philosophy. This in turn spawned mutations—the beta uprising became “Gamers Rise Up,” and both “Stacy” and “Becky” became “Veronica,” a girl who friend-zones the gamer in favor of a jock. The phrase “We live in a society” was a common refrain that preceded most ironic (or unironic) statements about the gamer joker, who, true to the ironic nature of the meme, is both deliberately sexist and racist—and feels incredibly entitled to sexual attention. It is a stereotype of toxic masculinity in gaming, in other words. It’s all tongue-in-cheek, but that hasn’t stopped an out-of-touch media from conflating the ironic Gamer Joker with unironic incel-dom. Given the occasionally violent outlook of the incel community, the mainstream media has aligned the motives of the 2012 Aurora mass murderer James Holmes with that of Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian. At the time, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly remarked that Holmes claimed to authorities that he was the Joker. Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates could not confirm this to be the case and says that Holmes did not wear makeup to look like the Joker. The Joker has green hair—Holmes’ hair was dyed bright red. Incels have come to be defined not by their ideology as “involuntary celibates” but by the actions of at least two individuals who received massive attention from a media that seeks to manufacture a narrative of the dangerous, lonely white man. But the reality is that these incels have found in the “community” the only place where they can commiserate their sense of shared victimhood. Rather than isolate them further, the responsible thing to do would be to pull them back from the edges of society, back into the mainstream—which is precisely what psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson is trying to do. And in doing so, he has been unfairly maligned by the press as a “gateway to the alt-right” as well as by extremists who seek to influence and use the untapped anger of the incel community toward their own ends. WHO IS THE JOKER HERE? The derisive connotations of the term “incel” have allowed it to become the catch-all term used by the left and their outrage-prone media to insult anyone with whom they disagree. Both the media and politicians like Ilhan Omar, who stated in 2018 that people should be “more fearful of white men” than jihadists, have successfully manufactured the mythical threat of an “incel-gamer-joker” whose violent predisposition will be inflamed by the release of the Joker movie, which centers around a disenfranchised white male who “rises up” against the broken society that has marginalized him. This irresponsible narrative ignores important aspects of the DC Comics supervillain, who himself is not an incel, to create genuine social fear and stigmatize a great film. Moreover, this strategic conflation allows the media to collapse distinct social media events into one general category of “male toxicity.” Gamergate becomes Incels, becomes rape culture, becomes mass shooter attacks, becomes anything and everything the left finds problematic. This catch-all category then justifies treating the most mundane cultural threat—playing a first person shooter game, for instance—as though the individual is responsible for mass shooter violence. As the saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Outrage and fear sell newspapers. Much like the media scare of violent video games in the ‘90s, the fear of incels provides the media endless fodder from which to profit. Beyond potentially impacting the movie’s sales, this media’s efforts have the effect of further stigmatizing the average young white male, many of whom already feel disenfranchised and alienated by a media hostile to their existence—and in doing so, are driven into the open arms of white nationalists. White nationalists have successfully used the identity-based disenfranchisement of white men to recruit others into their agenda. Pandering to the incel mindset, women—“feminists”—are rendered the source of all their problems. Not only are women unwilling to sleep with them and give them social company, they’re also actively working against all men to put them down. Add a bit of bona fide bigotry from politicians like Rashida Tlaib and it can seem like the whole world is conspiring to put down white men—with the outrage media is sowing the seeds of social discontent. Ironically, the media is behaving very much like how the Joker would were he an institution. The Joker is a free radical, a force of nature that sows chaos and discord wherever he goes—and benefits from it. Just like the Joker, the Fourth Estate is operating as a force unto its own, creating its own narratives about dangers to society, and then reporting on those dangers after they manifest—all for the sake of views, clicks, and engagement metrics on a quarterly sheet. Joker will cause incel violence, they argue, and then goad the violence: “hey, incels, don’t do anything violent. Wouldn’t it be terrible if you did, and we gave you the infamy you wanted all along?”

Ian Miles Cheong Human Events

https://www.newswars.com/we-live-in-a-society/

Sun, 06 Oct 2019 13:02:52 +0000

society

social condition

breitbart--2019-11-11--Report: Google Secretly Accessed Millions of Personal Health Records in 21 States

breitbart

Report: Google Secretly Accessed Millions of Personal Health Records in 21 States

Google has secretly accessed the personal health records of tens of millions of individuals in 21 states, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The tech giant has partnered with St. Louis-based Ascension, the country’s second-largest health system, in an initiative called Project Nightingale to gain access to lab results, doctor diagnoses, and hospitalization records, as well as other categories. Google is reportedly using the data in part to design new software that helps suggest different avenues of care for individual patients. Neither patients nor doctors have been notified about Google’s activity, according to the Journal. An anonymous source said that at least 150 Google employees already have gained access to “much of the data on tens of millions of patients.” Privacy experts told the Journal that Google’s actions appear to be legal under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). HIPAA rules allow hospitals to share data with business partners without telling patients, as long as the information is used “only to help the covered entity carry out its health-care functions,” according to the Journal. A Google spokeswoman told the newspaper that the project is fully compliant with federal health law and includes “robust protections” for patient data. The Journal noted that some Ascension employees have raised questions about the way the data is being collected and shared, according to documents. Google has come under fire over its privacy practices that critics say often leaves users’ personal information exposed. The search engine was recently ordered to pay between $150 and $200 million to resolve a Federal Trade Commission investigation into YouTube regarding its potential violation of a children’s privacy law. Google has also pledged to do more to protect the privacy of users of its voice-activated Google Assistant devices after reports said that company contractors listened in on parts of private conversations. Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com

David Ng

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breitbart/~3/k00jxYfY74E/

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 20:07:34 +0000

politics

non-governmental organisation

21stcenturywire--2019-03-13--How Sanctions Against Russia Expose Cracks in Britains Political Class

21stcenturywire

How Sanctions Against Russia Expose Cracks in Britain’s Political Class

Bill Browder was invited to the Foreign Affairs public session in February so that he could promote his well-polished narrative of malign influence, human rights abuses and aggression by the Kremlin. This will be used to help frame British sanctions policy towards Russia. But two weeks later, the grilling of  Gregory Barker on his role in overcoming the sanctions against Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska – reveals an emerging rift in the British establishment over Russian sanctions. The Western establishment loves Russian money.  Russian treasures, including state assets, were bought at basement-bucket prices through Yeltsin’s loans-for-shares programme.  It is claimed that opportunists such as Mikhail Kordokhovsky made money by rigging auctions of state assets, paying a fraction of the value, then passing the proceeds to offshore shell companies.  Money made through individuals such as Kordokhovsky and other championed ‘capitalists’ of Russia, eventually made its way back into Europe and London. When Vladimir Putin first came to power in 1999, UK leaders Tony Blair and David Cameron rode the wave of opportunity that Russia was open to business, and yachting with oligarchs or taking large party donations were just perks of the time.  All types of Russian money seemed welcome. However, geoolitical winds change, and today we are told money-laundering is a very big problem. Money is passed directly into the UK or via offshore accounts from unnamed sources, and is used to buy British property and assets, or provide capital for high yield investments and hedge funds.  But it is not only funds from Russian money-laundering and tax avoiders.  And it is not just the UK that is affected.  It is a worldwide problem originating from many different sources many of which may affect the UK. However, Russia does not deny that there is a problem in London, and has suggested it is not incidental: The willingness of the UK to provide a “safe haven” to criminal money from around the world has been consistently criticised by Russia. The fact is the Russian authorities have asked the British government for assistance in several cases involving Russians accused of corruption, money laundering, and embezzlement committed in Russia. Yet the UK has refused to cooperate, as in the case of Andrei Borodin who lives in a house in Henley worth £140m, dubbed ‘Britain’s most expensive house.’  He was awarded political asylum in the UK, ‘a fugitive from persecution,’ after being accused by the Russian authorities of massive fraud. And this takes us back to the love of money;  there are those who just love Russian money and those who are trying to advance an adversarial political and geopolitical agenda regarding Russia.  This is has become a very real schism inside of the British establishment, and what was apparent during the Foreign Affairs questioning during which Gregory Barker was described as: very rich, smart Western facilitators have been helping people to get around sanctions.  Effectively, it is a legal form of sanctions-busting. ….There is a question of whether it is in the public interest…..especially because you are a parliamentarian. The right type of oligarch Oleg Deripaska is clearly the type of oligarch a certain part of the British establishment does not like: he is the wrong type of oligarch.  Why? He is the type that still made money from his business in the UK despite sanctions.  More crucially, he is the type not soliciting the West’s help in liberating Russia from Putin. In contrast, there is a type of oligarch that is very popular with the Foreign Affairs committee.  This is the type that asks the West to help them ‘modify the behaviour’ of the Russian government, that claims their human rights have been abused, the type promoted by Bill Browder.  This is the right type of oligarch.  It is no coincidence then that the current sanctions inquiry has included evidence by GML, the company of the majority shareholders of what was Yukos Oil Company. The story of Yukos is described by the International Centre for Legal Protection (ICLP) of the Russian Federation as follows: In 1995 and 1996 a handful of oligarchs took control of Yukos, a vast Russian energy company with huge oil and gas reserves. They achieved control by paying $600m to the government officials who were at that point running Yukos and managing the privatisation process, and by rigging the privatisation auctions. The Yukos oligarchs then went on to evade billions (USD) in tax by routing oil production through Russia’s low tax regions, despite having no operations in these places. When presented with a tax demand they rapidly shifted further Yukos cash into tax havens overseas, including by paying an unprecedented $2bn dividend to themselves. Following this Yukos went into liquidation. In 2005, by way of arbitration proceedings instituted in The Hague, the Yukos oligarchs, acting through three offshore companies controlled by Group Menatep Limited (GML), claimed that Yukos was misappropriated by Russia in a politically motivated move. In 2014 they were awarded an unprecedented $50bn by an arbitral tribunal comprising three arbitrators – an amount equivalent to more than 20% of the Russian government‘s annual spending budget in 2016. These awards were overturned by the Dutch court in 2016. The Yukos oligarchs still seek to enforce the (overturned) $50bn awards and are appealing the Dutch court decision. This is not the version that the UK government will consider when making its foreign policy towards Russia.  Instead, it will use the evidence provided by the men asking for ‘justice’ and claiming the Russian state took their business.  The report they submitted to the committee leaves out the fact the Hague overturned the ruling and the Russian state is no longer found guilty of misappropriating Yukos and is no longer required to pay $50bn to Yukos former shareholders. What is more, the individuals accusing the Russian State:  Nevzlin, Lebedev, Brudno, Shaknovsky, Dubov and Khodorskovsky are wanted for numerous crimes.  Apparently, this must be the type of oligarch which is in the UK’s public interest to have around. Hence, the UK government believes that Russia owes five wealthy individuals, wanted for serious crimes, the equivalent of more than 20% of Russia’s 2016 annual spending budget, although these men were asking for $100bn – approximately half of their country’s national budget. The motivation behind the decision of the Hague Tribunal Court in 2014 must be questioned given the extortionate amount awarded and the fact this would punish the entire Russian national economy.  Subsequent to the overturning of the Hague Court decision, other courts have also overturned tribunal awards to the Yukos oligarchs. While the right type of oligarch has the support of the British political class, the wrong type has its contempt.  Oleg Deripaska is the wrong type: he is a ‘close ally of Putin.’  The ‘allies of Putin’ or “Putin’s inner circle’ narrative, has been pushed most aggressively by the government and corporate media since the US and EU-backed coup in Ukraine and the subsequent reunification of Crimea with Russia in March 2014.  Sanctions were imposed to register US and EU dissatisfaction that Russia reacted to an existential threat on its borders. The narrative of ‘malign Russian influence’ through money-laundering by oligarchs has been systematically pushed by the media and political establishment after Theresa May accused Russia of carrying out a chemical weapons attack in Salisbury last year.  The issue of money-laundering is now closely tied to narratives about the ‘Russian threat’ to the UK, and sanctions and money-laundering policies are the primary tools currently being wielded in preparation for UK foreign policy following Brexit. The US sanctioned Deripaska in April 2018 for being in cahoots with the Russian government’s ‘malign activity’.  At the time, Deripaska was the majority owner of the energy firm En+, which had a main stake in Rusal, a large Russian aluminium firm. When the sanctions were imposed, Gregory Barker, En+’s independent chairman, helped to engineer a way to have them lifted.  Barker, who was made a Lord in 2015, had been Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change between 2010 to 2015, and in the late nineties he had been the head of corporate finance at Sibneft, the Russian oil company.  Under Barker,  Deripaska’s stake lowered from 70% to 44.95%, with an additional 10% put in trust, leaving Deripaska with voting rights for 35% of the company shares. With Deripaska’s influence diminished, Barker then removed shareholders from the board, making it majority-independent. Sanctions and the narrative of national security This raises the question for sanctions hawks as to whether there should be individuals like Barker, a man of the establishment: who is negotiating oligarchs’ way around sanctions, and therefore …undermining our ability to deal with the oligarchs, through whom President Putin operates in the west and uses some of that malign influence Legally engineered ways around sanctions are therefore possible, but are being resisted, certainly by the Foreign Affairs Committee that influences foreign policy.  It also views the legal floating of En+ on the London Stock Exchange in 2017 as a threat, as a way of navigating around difficulties caused by sanctions against Russia: We call on the government to investigate the gaps in the sanctions regime that allowed a company such as En+ to float on the London Stock Exchange, … MI6 and Washington national security officials were also concerned about the floating of the company: The floatation has provoked controversy in London where intelligence officers at MI6 have raised questions about why they were not consulted about the float given the potential implications for British security. One senior British official described the decision to allow the float to take place as a ”scandal”. This indicates that it is the intelligence services that are the primary forces pushing the hybrid warfare narrative, and therefore influencing the government policy, with neocon politicians naturally getting on board and falling into line with US instructions.  And in regard to money-laundering, are we to believe that is now a ‘national threat’?  As pointed out, the UK has been willing for years to provide a warm home for untraced money, Russian or other, via London’s many financial institutions.  Are we to believe that suddenly there is a new threat derived from this money that should make us all fearful?  The question is: is there a genuine desire to address the problem of money-laundering or is the narrative of security around Russian money-laundering a geopolitical pretext to target Russia with punitive action or seize Russian assets located in the West? It’s important note here also how this theme ties into the graduation of Washington’s supposed ‘anti-corruption’ legislation, the Magnitsky Act, to the new Global Magnitsky. SEE ALSO: Darling of the Commons, Bill Browder, Helps Frame Britain’s Faux Human Rights Agenda It is not just the British establishment that is divided, as shown by the January vote in the US senate on whether sanctions on En+ should be lifted.  A Democratic-backed resolution blocking Trump’s plan to lift the sanctions also on Rusal and the power firm JSC EuroSibEnergo was held and defeated by 57-42.  This, despite a global aluminum shortage, coupled with new US tariffs which have had adverse economic consequences in industries in a number of US-aligned countries including Canada. But the US establishment is still not giving up on its anti-Russia agenda.  A bill is being put forward by a bipartisan group of senators to punish Russia for ‘interfering in U.S. elections,’ ‘malign influence’ in Syria and ‘aggression in Ukraine.’  It includes sanctions on Russian banks and new sovereign debt. It is unlikely to be passed given that last year Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary claimed the US would not sanction Russian sovereign debt as it might trigger unwelcome economic turmoil all round.  However, this would not seem to deter Washington’s most hawkish Russophobes.  And it is an idea being floated by part of the British government post-Brexit, with a view to bilateral sanctions with the US and even the EU.  The question should be asked as to whether such a punitive, coordinated sanctions policy would be imposed on any other country’s sovereign debt or whether this would be another mechanism through which to target Russia. Either way, this is a potentially dangerous precedent. UK Foreign Policy increasingly tied to the US The raising of this suggestion in parallel with the US legislation indicates some kind of coordinated thinking between UK and US neocons.   The eagerness with which the British government drives sanctions inside the EU, and is currently crafting its sanctions policies indicates it is likely to ally closely with the US on leaving the EU.  Last year the UK attempted to add names to the EU sanctions list created after the Crimea ‘annexation’ by the Russian Federation, but this was rejected by Italy.  What’s important is that this shows a willingness by the Foreign Office to aggressively push the Ukraine/Crimea narrative and lead with punitive sanctions against Russia, most likely in collusion with the US. Russian interference in American politics is totally welcome so long as it helps turn public opinion against a “multipolar” Russia, glorifies American democracy, and serves U.S. interests This is also true in the case of Britain.  The establishment treats Russian oligarchs very generously as long as they are the right type of oligharch, while it vilifies any that associate with Putin as the wrong type. Whichever side of the divide they are on, in the world of western media and politics, oligarchs serve the same purpose – a narrative for demonising Russia. Beneath this we see the clash inside the political class and the British elite, between those who want Russian money and those with a political agenda manipulated by US and UK military interests. *** Author Nina Cross is an independent researcher and writer and is a special contributor to 21WIRE. See more of Nina’s work here.

Nina Cross

https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/03/13/how-sanctions-against-russia-expose-cracks-in-britains-political-class/

2019-03-13 14:06:02+00:00

politics

political process

21stcenturywire--2019-04-25--Western Media Politicians Ignore Saudis Sectarian Mass Execution of Shias

21stcenturywire

Western Media, Politicians Ignore Saudi’s Sectarian Mass Execution of Shias

While the western media and politicians rail over the killing of Christians during the horrific terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka this past weekend, there was little if any reaction or righteous indignation over Saudi Arabia’s brutal mass execution of 37 Shias Muslims only a few days later. On Tuesday, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded 37 Saudi citizens, 34 of whom belonged to the persecuted minority Shi’ite (Shia) sect, executed for supposed “terrorism-related crimes” and for what has been described by some journalists as mere “terror thinking.” According to political commentator and dissident Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Gulf Institute in Washington, it was the largest mass execution of Shiites in the kingdom’s history. Amnesty International said they believed the men were convicted “after sham trials” which relied on confessions extracted by torture. As the global outrage over the supposed violent killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi fades, the Saudi authorities seem to be wielding their sword more confidently – and even attracting new direct foreign investment. In addition to the Shia killings, the government lived-up to its barbaric reputation by publicly pinning the executed body and severed head of one convicted Sunni extremist to a pole. Tuesday’s violent purge marked the largest mass execution in the Kingdom since January 2016, when 47 people were executed for alleged “terrorism-related crimes”. Among those executed were four Shias, including prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. His death triggered mass protests across the Muslim world, including Iran where angry Shias sacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran, leading to a chilling of relations between the two regional hegemons. The Wahhabi establishment in Saudi Arabia hated and feared al-Nimr because of his popularity and potential to generate a political following which might ultimately challenge the ruling families theocratic dictatorship. It is also believed that this current wave of Saudi persecution and murder of Shias is connected to the Trump Administration’s hawkish stance on Iran and Yemen, with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman feeling even more emboldened to target Shias due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s unrelenting diplomatic and economic attack on Iran. “This is political,” said Ali Al-Ahmed. “They didn’t have to execute these people, but it’s important for them to ride the American anti-Iranian wave.” Many in the west are unaware that the majority of victims of religious or sectarian persecution and killing are in fact Muslim, and not Christian which the western media seem to infer. A study conducted by Center for Strategic and International Studies entitled, Islam and the Patterns in Terrorism and Violent Extremism, shows that Muslims, and particularly Muslim minority sects, suffer more than any other demographic when measuring global patterns of violence. The numbers may be much higher than this study shows, as it does not include Saudi Arabia’s four year-long massacre (backed by US and UK) of Shias in Yemen, or the continuous Israeli killing and ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Palestine. “It is far too easy for analysts who are not Muslim to focus on the small part of the extremist threat that Muslim extremists pose to non-Muslims in the West and/or demonize one of the world’s great religions, and to drift into some form of Islamophobia—blaming a faith for patterns of violence that are driven by a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims and by many other factors like population, failed governance, and weak economic development.”

21wire

https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/04/25/western-media-ignores-saudi-arabias-sectarian-mass-execution-of-shias/

2019-04-25 23:13:48+00:00

politics

political process

21stcenturywire--2019-05-20--Iran Power Politics Behind Americas March to War

21stcenturywire

Iran: Power Politics Behind America’s March to War

War with Iran has been proposed and promoted as an option, by various factions within the United States for decades. Various factions, particularly Washington Neoconservatives, have promoted the idea as beneficial to the security interests of the United States and its closest ally Israel. Shockingly, Neoconservative Patrick Clawson joked at an AIPAC meeting in 2015 that “Crisis initiation is really tough, it’s very hard for me to see how the United States President can get us to war with Iran.” He goes on to discuss previous contrived events as catalysts for war on target nations, events colloquially known as ‘false flags’. He says; “If in fact it appears the Iranians aren’t going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war,” he continues, “We are in the game of using covert means against the Iranians, we could get nasty with that.” . In 2009 there the Brookings Institute compiled a paper entitled, ‘Which Path to Persia – Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran’, and of course there’s the ‘Clean Break‘ document prepared by Richard Perle and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 proposing, among other things ‘Re-establishing the principle of pre-emption’, resulting in pre-emptive wars against Iraq, Libya and support of proxy terrorists in Syria. The debacle with regard to Iran’s nuclear facilities, which the US and Israel proposed had become weaponised, has caused tensions to rise. Iran acquiesced to the stringent measures put in place by the Iran Nuclear Deal created in 2015, but last year President Trump withdrew from that deal. Nine months later in May of this year Iran also withdrew from certain requirements of the deal. All of this discussion of Iran’s nuclear capabilities while the elephant sits squarely in the centre of the room, Israel’s estimated 200-500 nuclear warheads at Dimona and other secret nuclear facilities. Israel’s refusal to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allows it to continue its weaponised nuclear programme free of scrutiny, Iran was not afforded this luxury. So war with Iran has been on the cards for a long while with tensions rising and falling but mostly on an upward trajectory thanks to aforementioned protagonists. On Sunday 12th May, in an incident reminiscent of Patrick Clawson’s proposal for ‘crisis initiation’ – four ships, including two Saudi oil tankers were attacked in the Gulf waters just off the UAE port of Fujairah. The media reported in a frenzy of misinformation that explosions had occurred. There were no explosions, four tankers suffered damage, no one was injured and no oil spills occurred. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson; “warned against plots by ill-wishers to disrupt the regional security” and called for “vigilance of regional states in the face of any adventurism by foreign elements.” This attack came shortly after the US stressed an increased threat from Iran, this despite a  British General, Chris Ghika, the second in command in the US Coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq, denying the existence of any such increased threat level. My friend and colleague Terry Gardiner who lived and worked in the Middle East for 30 years, much of it in Iraq, shared with me an interesting insight. He stated, “Two months ago Iraq and Iran signed an agreement in Baghdad to develop a payment mechanism facilitating banking ties between the two countries, this would include plans to eliminate US dollars in Trade Transactions using local dinar currency instead. Iran is also increasing natural gas sales to Iraq with sales increasing by 13% through a 270 kilometre pipeline which in effect means Iraq are ignoring the American sanctions imposed by Trump. Iraq has also given Iran the opportunity to participate in oil deals inside Iraq.” To support his analysis, Terry sent a link discussing the opening of a new Iranian oil ministry in Baghdad.  It states: “The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) decided May 4, to open an economic representative office in Iraq. The decision was made during a meeting bringing together executives at Iraq’s Oil Ministry and Iranian oil industry equipment producers, on the side lines of the Iran Oil Show 2019.” It continues: “Since the second wave of the US sanctions against Iran in November, Tehran has focussed its attention on promoting economic cooperation with Iraq to mitigate the US blockade’s impact on Iran’s economy.” This is supported by an article in the Iraq Business News, “The governor of the Central Bank of Iran unveiled plans for using non-dollar accounts for oil and gas trade with Iraq. The top Iranian banker unveiled a new mechanism to continue Iran’s trade with Iraqi businesses, saying the CBI is going to open euro and dinar-based accounts to process transactions for trade in oil and gas.” He also stated that Iraqi companies can reciprocally open accounts in Iranian banks and conduct transactions in dinar.” The proposals would effectively sidestep US sanctions on Iranian trade – and partially side line the US dollar. This could be one of the key factors for the sudden urgency in the escalation of rhetoric by the US against Iran, and the ramping up of US military presence in the region. Having said all of this, as an optimists (and usually disappointed one), I still have faith that this is a Cuban missile crisis moment and that all parties will come back from the brink. President Trump has stated that the New York Times assertion that 120,000 US troops have been deployed to the Middle East is untrue and has, in his usual style, labelled it ‘fake news’. Trump has also tweeted earlier this week: “The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot, poorly sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn’t know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!” Some in establishment media are now, after decades of bellicosity from John Bolton, beginning to be alarmed at his warmongering. Too late for Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians and those murdered in the US/EU Ukraine coup, but if media’s newly found concern for Bolton’s warmongering ways enables Trump to drain the swamp of at least this very dangerous man, that can only be a good thing. Let’s hope that Trump is able to reign in Washington NeoCons and the Pentagon, but also be prepared if he does not. Regardless of whether he does or not, we still need to recognise that economic warfare is war. Iran has suffered years of crippling US sanctions, including those which prevented international aid agencies from assisting victims of floods in Iran earlier this year. This is inhumane, it has no place in the 21st century which claims to have in place international legislation on human rights and it need not be said that war with Iran will not only target more innocent civilians in Iran but could be the final war for all of us. We have to hope that finally the unipolar world of US hegemony will recede just as former empires receded, and that sovereign nations will be allowed to act peacefully in cooperation with each other. We have to hope that Iran and Iraq will be permitted to trade and evade US sanctions, and we have to hope that sense will prevail and that those slavering for another devastating war in the Middle East will be thwarted in their goal this time. Note: Special thanks to author and Iraq analyst Terry Gardiner for his input in this report. Author Sheila Coombes is an activist and founder of the UK antiwar organisation Frome Stop War.

21wire

https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/05/20/dark-forces-behind-washingtons-march-to-war-on-iran/

2019-05-20 14:11:33+00:00

politics

political process

21stcenturywire--2019-08-07--UK COLUMN Boriss Brexit Blag Tulsi vs Twitter Politics of Mass Shootings

21stcenturywire

UK COLUMN: Boris’s Brexit Blag, Tulsi vs Twitter, Politics of Mass Shootings

This week: Boris’s Brexit blag, and Brussels’ new ‘EU Army’ becomes reality. Also, election meddling by Twitter as the Silicon Valley attempt to derail Tulsi Gabbard’s insurgent presidential run. Also, two back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton set the stage for an artificial civil war in America. All this and much more. Watch as UK Column News hosts Mike Robinson and Patrick Henningsen break down this week’s top stories. 21WIRE.TV MEMBERS CAN ALSO WATCH OUR SPECIAL EXTRA SESSION HERE: UKC Extra Time: Off-Air Discussion with Patrick & Mike

21wire

https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/08/07/uk-column-boriss-brexit-blag-tulsi-vs-twitter-politics-of-mass-shootings/

2019-08-07 15:46:29+00:00

politics

political process

21stcenturywire--2019-08-21--Geopolitical Collusion Turkey and US Work to Control Northern Syria

21stcenturywire

Geopolitical Collusion: Turkey and US Work to Control Northern Syria

Based on its own actions and irrational moves over the last 8 years, it has become more obvious that Turkey may be harboring secret territorial and energy extraction ambitions in Syria. Will they succeed? Turkey’s fascist despot/wannabe sultan Recep Tayip Erdogan aims to annex northern Syrian territory, especially its oil-rich area. He has similar aims for northern Iraq, an area far more oil-rich than Syria. He’s part of the problem in the Syrian Arab Republic, not the solution, supporting ISIS, al-Nusra and other jihadists, supplying them with heavy weapons and other material support, along with letting them pass freely back and forth across Turkey’s border with Syria. His involvement in years of war makes resolution much harder. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad earlier called him a “butcher,” his regime “fascist,” his hostility toward Syria prolonging endless war. On Tuesday, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) accused jihadists, supported by Turkey’s occupation of Syrian territory, of “continu(ing) their terrorist and repressive practices which are represented in the acts of killing and kidnapping against the locals in the areas which have been occupied by the forces of the Turkish regime…” Ankara is imposing its will over Syrians in territory it controls the way Israel represses Palestinians and operates illegally in Golan, SANA explained, adding: “The regime of Erdogan has also worked on obliterating the cultural and historical identity of the area through destroying all the archeological monuments in it which are icons that refer to the Arabism of the area.” “The Turkish forces and warplanes have destroyed many archeological sites in Afrin city such as Ain Zara temple and the archeological sites of  al-Nabi Houri and Tal Jandares, in addition to destroying the archeological site of Barad to the south of Afrin City which is registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List.” On Monday, Fars News reported that “(t)he Turkish army dispatched huge military convoys to Southern Idlib to stop the Syrian Army advances in the region” — in its own territory, Turkey a hostile invader. On the same day, Fars News said US aircraft supplied aid to ISIS terrorists at their “most important base in Iraq’s Salahuddin province,” citing unnamed Iraqi sources. The US, NATO, Turkey, Israel, the Saudis, UAE, and Jordan support jihadists in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — pretending to be combating the scourge the Pentagon and CIA use as proxy foot soldiers in US war theaters. On Monday, Ankara’s Anadolu news agency accused Syria of bombing an area in the country’s north close to where Turkish forces illegally occupy Syrian territory. The report failed to mention that Russian warplanes were involved, nor explain that the illegally occupied area is infested with US/Ankara supported terrorists. In September 2018, Putin and Erdogan agreed on establishing an Idlib province deescalation zone bordering Turkey. The country’s military breached it straightaway, failing to disarm terrorists as promised. The Turkish news agency falsely accused Syrian forces of breaching what was agreed on — Ankara and jihadists it supports the guilty parties, not Damascus. On Monday, Syria’s Foreign Ministry reported that Turkish forces invaded the country’s territory, heading for Khan Sheikhoun — to rescue jihadists the Syrian Arab army is combatting. US aggression in Syria is in its 9th year with no prospect for resolution — because bipartisan hardliners in Washington want pro-Western puppet rule replacing overwhelmingly popular Assad. VISIT HIS NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected]. Also, see his newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

21wire

https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/08/21/geopolitical-collusion-turkey-and-us-work-to-aid-isis-control-northern-syria/

2019-08-21 10:15:53+00:00

politics

political process

21stcenturywire--2019-09-13--Israel Directing Policy Through US Treasury Sanctioning Hezbollahs Political Allies in Lebanon

21stcenturywire

Israel Directing Policy Through US Treasury: Sanctioning Hezbollah’s Political Allies in Lebanon

SANCTIONS MILL: President Trump with his pro-Israel Secretary of Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, allowing the US Treasury Department to be virtually commandeered by Israeli interests. Nearly three years into the Trump administration, one thing is clear: as it struggles to wage any direct military or proxy wars, Washington has instead relied on economic warfare against its perceived enemies, and largely on behalf of the state of Israel. Rather than hamper its supposed enemies, this policy is actually driving sanctioned parties into closer alliances, and hastening the inevitable geopolitical realignment of the region and the world. Through the U.S. Treasury Department and its own openly pro-Israel agents of influence, namely Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Sigal Mandelker, Israel has been able to attack and undermine all of its own geopolitical enemies and region rivals. The chief mechanism for achieving this is by informally directing the US government through the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), to label any person, politician or state agency – as a “terrorist,” or as a terrorist entity, which is used to apply sanctions against any person or entity which Israel designates as its enemy, or even potential enemy. It’s also no secret that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly boasted convincing Trump to withdraw from the JCPOA Iran Nuclear Agreement of 2015, a policy move which triggered a seemingly endless raft of sanctions.  As a result of this new runaway policy, the list of sanctioned persons and organisations by the Trump administration is the most in US history. Firmly in its crosshairs are Lebanon’s well-established political and military wings of the Hezbollah organisation. However, there is a fundamental flaw in the western framing of Hezbollah.  Firstly, it’s a historical fact that Hezbollah was born out of Israel’s illegal occupation of southern Lebanon. Had Israel not invaded and occupied this region and prosecuted its long and violent military campaign during and after the Lebanese Civil War, then it’s possible that the Hezbollah movement would never had formed in the way that it did. It was born out of Israel’s occupation. Indeed, Iran has been a traditional supporter of the group, which has naturally drawn the ire of Washington and Tel Aviv, both of whom view both Iran and Hezbollah as a joint obstacle to US-Israeli strategic security objectives in the Middle East. In order to elevate Hezbollah to ‘most targeted status,’ US officials have had to repeatedly recycle fabricated claims that Hezbollah is acting as a major global terrorist organisation. In the same breath, US officials, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, will enthusiastically drift out the well-worn fable that ‘Iran is the world’s number one state-sponsor of terror’.  Earlier this year, the US also announced that henceforth, Iran’s leading military divisions, the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Quds Force, are now designated as a “terrorist organisation.” The cold irony here is that Hezbollah militias are presently fighting (and defeating) actual terrorist organisations like al-Qaeda and ISIS (terrorists created, as well as armed and financed by numerous western and gulf states, including the United States) in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. This poses a serious problem for western powers with neocolonial designs because militarily speaking, Hezbollah has upgraded itself from a largely national defense force, to a bona fide region player. Since 2013, Hezbollah has played a pivotal role in ejecting al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists from their enclaves in Syria, thus thwarting the regime change objectives of US, UK, France, NATO member states, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and also Israel, too. Likewise IRGC and Quds special forces and military advisors have been deployed in Iraq and Syria – invited by those governments – in order to help subdue the invading terrorist brigades. The same is true for Iranian-backed militias in Iraq like the Hash’d Shaabi (People’s Mobilization Units), predominantly Shia, and who were pivotal in Iraq’s ultimate victory over ISIS in 2017. This did not stop US officials from repeatedly threatening the Hash’d and demanding the Iraqi government disband the new 120,000 strong defense force. Veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn summed it up when he concluded that the greatest threat to building peace in Iraq was not ISIS, but rather, Trump’s determination to ‘pick a fight’ with Iran. Documentation on the number of casualties is still difficult to determine, but on the aggregate, between Hezbollah, Hash’d, Iranian forces, the losses sustained in the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda number in the tens of thousands – and likely far more than the combined US soldier death toll over the course of its 18 year-long War on Terror in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Regardless of general western ignorance of what has actually transpired in Syria since 2011, and in Iraq since 2014, the people who actually live in the Middle East know the severity of this largely foreign-backed terrorist usurpation. Regardless of the facts on the ground, neoconservatives and war hawks in the Beltway are still happily pressing ahead with their policies. With Tel Aviv carefully leading from behind, Washington has successfully pressured many of its allies to obey its geopolitical dictates, with the UK, Argentina and Paraguay all falling into line this year by designating Hezbollah – both its political and military wings – as a terrorist organisation, as well as pressuring Brazil to follow suit. Of deeper concern for Washington though, is that Hezbollah is defending Lebanon’s borders from what is undoubtedly the region’s most prolific aggressor – Israel. In just the last few weeks, Israel has attacked no less than 4 of its neighbours, including unprovoked military strikes against Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestinians living under illegal Israeli occupation in Gaza. Hezbollah also poses another threat to Israeli hegemony in the region because of its unflagging support for resistance against Israel’s violent occupation and ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian people. Similarly, the Islamic Republic of Iran also supports the Palestinian resistance cause.  This is also a predicate for Israel’s various and sundry fabricated claims about a ‘secret Iranian nuclear arsenal,’ and imagined conspiracy that ‘Iran is occupying Syria’ – all of which are designed to garner leverage in Washington whereby US officials can view Hezbollah an accomplice to “Iran’s threat world peace.” This is the sort of geopolitical gymnastics which Israel is attempting to perform on a daily basis in order to justify the longest-running, most brutal and inhumane apartheid regimes in modern history – being waged against Palestinians and Arabs in the Middle East. This week, the US announced it will increase its sanctions against Hamas (placing them in the same frame as ISIS), one of Palestine’s largest political bodies, and which was elected by Palestinians to govern Gaza. How Hamas (or Hezbollah) threatens US security is anyone’s guess. This move, announced by Mnuchin himself, is clearly designed for the benefit of Israel, as it further isolates and cuts-off any significant international support for Palestine. Like with Hezbollah, Hamas is an elected political party in government – now reduced to a “terrorist” organisation. Along with its militia wing, it is resisting an illegal occupation by Israeli forces according to numerous UN Resolutions. These are all inconvenient facts which are casually brushed aside by most American political and mainstream media pundits, because they do not suit the object of the exercise – to deplatform and ultimately dehumanise any local resistance to what is now widely regarded as a post-WWII neocolonial debacle. Still, Washington insists on basing its international relations on numerous fabricated claims about Iran and Hezbollah, much of which has been drafted by Israel’s J Street lobbyists and the Prime Minister’s office in Tel Aviv. Now the Trump administration is taking this method a step further by threatening to sanction any political allies of Hezbollah in Lebanon. After his visit last April to Lebanon, Secretary Pompeo told delegations that the US would sanction political “individuals” linked to Hezbollah in order to counter their ‘military and political growth,’ with the idea that this will somehow deter Iran as well. Al Jazeera also reported on that visit: “Hanin Ghaddar, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Al Jazeera that, according to her sources, Pompeo warned President Michel Aoun of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) and Speaker Nabih Berri of the Amal movement, with personal sanctions.” With military options practically off the table, sanctions are one of the only remaining options for Washington and Tel Aviv to undermine Hezbollah. But will it work?  Washington often claims it is only levying sanctions in order to extract concessions, or to “encourage good behaviour,” only its record in extracting any concessions from its enemies as a result of punitive sanctions ranges from poor to nonexistent. Unfortunately, this lagging counter-move by Washington may be a day late and dollar short – because like it or not, Hezbollah is now a political force in Lebanese politics who along with its allies, have a working majority in the Lebanese Parliament, as well as holding key ministerial and cabinet positions. Assistant Secretary of State David Schenker says that the US is “reviewing” its list of sanctions targets in Lebanon, based on a desire to expand sanctions in the country against individuals who are “aiding and assisting Hezbollah.” While this has often been proposed in the past, in keeping with US hostility toward Hezbollah, it is wildly problematic, given Hezbollah exists within Lebanon as a perfectly legitimate political party operating within a major coalition. Hezbollah is, after all, part of the March 8 Alliance, which controls the majority of the seats in parliament. If this allies-of-Hezbollah position is applied politically, it would necessarily mean US sanctions on the entire elected coalition government. That wouldn’t necessarily be out of keeping with US stated positions, as they’ve threatened Lebanon ahead of virtually every election in recent memory not to vote for the Hezbollah bloc. It would, however, derail recent US interest in trying to build up its influence with the Lebanese government, and alienate the country’s Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Christians in equal measures. The reality is that his policy of unrestrained, headlong US sanctions have only driven Washington’s perceived enemies closer together, by providing targeted individuals, organisations and states with the impetus to form even tighter cooperative alliances. This is no more evident than the US-led collective punishment and economic embargo of Syria, Iran, and also Iraq too (something which will not disappear from the Iraqi collective memory for the foreseeable future). As a result, the arch of resistance to the last 50 years of US-Israeli dominance over the region has grown significantly, stretching from the Mediterranean to Persia, and buttressed by committed support from world powers like Russia and China. There can be little debate as to the provenance of such a historic realignment. It is a direct result of ham-fisted and perennially deficient US and Israeli policy in the region and globally, and it’s only pushed the world towards instability and war, and never towards stability and peace. One might expect the self-described realists in Washington to understand this fait accompli – that targeted parties will simply act in their own self-interest in the face of such an arbitrary and blunt policy instrument. In short, by allowing Israel to commandeer its US Treasury Department, Washington continues to look like it is held hostage by the demands of Israel. This will only exasperate their desperation as the US struggles to marshal any meaningful support for what many are increasingly regarding as an incoherent foreign policy. What this US administration has yet to realise is that America’s only actual power in the wider world was its ability to be perceived as an honest broker of international affairs. That, unfortunately, died with Iraq. Trump’s sanctions tirade is only accelerating the inevitable. The longer they carry on the charade, the closer the rest of the world will move towards a new multi-polar order. Whether the world can then find any stability in a multi-polar framework will depend largely on the behaviour of America and its allies, more than anyone else’s. *** Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq.

21wire

https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/09/12/trump-administration-now-threatens-to-sanction-hezbollahs-political-allies-in-lebanon/

2019-09-13 03:42:17+00:00

politics

political process

activistpost--2019-01-21--Study Reveals Three Quarters Of People Are Dissatisfied With Undemocratic Self-Interested And

activistpost

Study Reveals Three Quarters Of People Are Dissatisfied With “Undemocratic”, “Self-Interested” And “Divided” Political Parties

Research by the University of Sheffield has revealed more than three quarters of people are dissatisfied with political parties and has identified the seven main qualities people want to see in parties today. Gathering data through a survey administered by YouGov and three public workshops, research led by Dr Kate Dommett and Dr Luke Temple asked people about their attitudes towards parties, including how people believe parties are behaving now and how they would like to see parties work. The top words used to describe political parties by workshop participants included ‘unrepresentative’, ‘undemocratic’, ‘self-interested’ and ‘divided’. Seventy-seven per cent of those surveyed said they were fairly or very dissatisfied with parties. Forty-six per cent of people said parties need major reform, 26 per cent said that reforming parties is pointless and they can’t be made to work, while 25 per cent said parties need minor reform and three per cent said they work well and do not need reform at all. The report – What People Want to See in Parties Today – can be used by political parties to make changes to bring their party more in line with public desires, promote the ways they already do these things, or challenge people’s ideas and offer an alternative set of benchmarks against which they feel they should be being judged. The study found that people want: Dr Kate Dommett, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Politics, said: “As widely disliked organisations seen to be essential to contemporary democracy, parties are often under pressure to reform. “But whilst some parties have been quick to roll out new initiatives or try new ideas, there has been less attention devoted to what it is that people actually want from parties, and where they would like to see reform. “This report has shown that there isn’t a single or simple solution, but that parties can usefully think about seven principles that the public wish parties display when they consider how to respond. “By thinking about these principles we argue that parties can review their current processes to decide whether there is a case for reform, a need for improved communication, or a shift in the focus of existing debate.” The report considered what people think about how parties provide opportunities to participate, with 59 per cent of people saying there should be more opportunities for people to get involved in political parties. However, in both the survey and workshops, researchers found considerable evidence that people did not see engagement to be worth the time and effort as they felt they had little impact on what parties did. Survey data showed that while 80 per cent thought that when people like themselves get involved in political parties they should be able to make a difference, only 20 per cent thought they actually can have an impact. The study also explored what people thought about parties’ governing performance – asking them how they felt parties delivered their promises, delivered good policy outcomes, managed the day-to-day running of government and managed crises. Dissatisfaction was high across all areas, but parties were seen to perform worst when it comes to delivering promises, with 87 per cent saying parties don’t do this well. In contrast, they were seen to perform best when managing crises – with 47 per cent saying parties did this well. Dr Luke Temple, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Geography, said: “There was a perception that parties mislead the electorate and, once in office, could not be trusted to deliver their promises. “They were also seen to suffer minimal consequences because, by the time of the next election most people have forgotten and therefore didn’t vote them out. “From this perspective, people desired parties that were trustworthy, reliable and stick to their promises; feeling that these were essential characteristics given people’s inability to hold parties to account between elections.” He added: “When parties did change position, people also wanted them to explain why they had changed, offering accounts of why a promise could not be delivered and what would be done instead. “Greater transparency and accountability therefore featured prominently in participants’ ideas.” A series of blog posts by politicians and think tanks responding to the report, produced in collaboration with Involve, will be published this week. They include contributions from Lord Blunkett, Dr Tim Bale, Alex Runswick, Simon Woolley, Dr Mark Pack and others.

Activist Post

https://www.activistpost.com/2019/01/study-reveals-three-quarters-of-people-are-dissatisfied-with-undemocratic-self-interested-and-divided-political-parties.html

2019-01-21 21:30:13+00:00

politics

political process

activistpost--2019-02-22--Revolutionary Bill Will Force Politicians to Wear Body Cameras to Stop Corruption

activistpost

Revolutionary Bill Will Force Politicians to Wear Body Cameras to Stop Corruption

Rockford, IL — Transparency among US politicians is all but non-existent in modern day America. It seems that every piece of information the citizens wish to obtain from the state must come through begging the government in the form of a Freedom of Information Act request. Many times, these requests are denied and the citizens remain in the dark despite political crimes. However, a new bill out of Illinois is seeking to shift that paradigm of unaccountable lawmakers by forcing them to wear body cameras while conducting public business. Rep. John Cabello, R-Machesney Park, has proposed a revolutionary bill that would require all elected officials in Illinois to wear a body camera if they are working. Cabello’s intent behind the bill is to mitigate the rampant corruption currently plaguing Illinois politics. “We see the dealings going on in Chicago with some of the wiretaps and some of the corruption that’s been going on for decades,” Cabello said. “We hear of the state lawmakers that get themselves into trouble with bribes and so on and so forth. So, I just thought that since the state was looking at making all police officers wear body cameras, I figured this might be a good way to have records of what lawmakers are doing.” The bill, HB3447 will treat the body camera videos in the same way police use them. The legislation allows the recordings to be used as evidence in any administrative, judicial, legislative, or disciplinary proceeding. The bill also notes that if anyone finds “by a preponderance of the evidence that a recording was intentionally not captured, destroyed, altered, or intermittently captured in violation of the Act, then the court or other finder of fact shall consider or be instructed to consider that violation in weighing the evidence, unless the State provides a reasonable justification.” The measure is extensive and would cover all elected officials in the state, including county officials as well as those in state office. “If they want to be an elected official, they should be following the law,” Cabello said. “If they don’t want to, I think they ultimately shouldn’t be an elected official. We would find ways of being able to remove them.” Naturally, Cabello has critics who are calling the bill a charade and claim that it would cost the state too much money. But if it stopped the rampant looting of the people by their elected officials, this could end up saving tons of money in the future. Also, it’s what already happens with cops. Cabello, who was a former Rockford police officer, explained that it’s really no different than police officers. “It’s going to be the same as what law enforcement will have to do,” he said. “There’s not going to be one person going through all of the recordings. It’s more of if someone makes an allegation or a complaint, you’ll at least have some footage to go through.” Unfortunately, because the corruption is so rife within the state—and all other states, for that matter—Cabello expects that most lawmakers will vote it down. After all, why on Earth would criminals vote to hold themselves accountable? “I think there will be some elected officials that will support it but I doubt it’s even going to get a committee hearing in Springfield,” Cabello said. “The majority party, they won’t want to hear this. I can’t see (House Speaker Mike) Madigan letting this see the light of day.” Still, the idea has merit, Cabello said, according to Rockford Register Star.  “It’s time we start getting public trust back for the elected officials and the only way that’s going to happen is we have to root out the corruption,” he said. We agree, and it should go much further. This measure should be implemented nationwide, starting with the federal government. And, all the footage should be available for the public to see. After all the politicians have on body cameras, we then need them to be required to wear the logo of any entity which has given them money. Just like NASCAR drivers do, the more money they get, the bigger the logo they’d have to wear. One can dream. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project, where this article first appeared. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds.

Activist Post

https://www.activistpost.com/2019/02/revolutionary-bill-will-force-politicians-to-wear-body-cameras-to-stop-corruption.html

2019-02-22 17:53:42+00:00

politics

political process

activistpost--2019-04-19--Chase Bank CLOSES ACCOUNTS of Political Activists Without Explanation

activistpost

Chase Bank CLOSES ACCOUNTS of Political Activists Without Explanation!

It’s official…we have entered a technocratic tyrannical dictatorship where at the flip of a switch enemies of the state can be “shut down” at any given moment. Case in point Chase Bank decided it no longer wants to do business with certain conservative leaning customers so without notice or explanation they pulled the plug on their accounts! Laura Loomer, Joe Biggs, Martina Markota and Enrique Tarrio have all been falsely lumped into the category of “alt right” and they are now suffering financially as a result by literally being cut off by the bank! In this video Dan Dicks and Leigh Stuart of Press For Truth explain how the term “alt right” has become a useful tool for the left and how shadow banning and censorship just took a major leap to a whole new level with Chase Bank financially cutting off individuals from society. Visit Dan Dicks at Pressfortruth.ca, subscribe to his YouTube channel, follow him on Twitter, support Dan via PayPal or Bitbacker. Provide, protect and profit from what is coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.

ActivistPost

https://www.activistpost.com/2019/04/chase-bank-closes-accounts-of-political-activists-without-explanation.html

2019-04-19 16:49:22+00:00

politics

political process

activistpost--2019-08-26--Poll 70 of Americans Angry at Political System for Only Serving Insiders With Money and Power

activistpost

Poll: 70% of Americans “Angry” at Political System for Only Serving Insiders With Money and Power

“A deep and boiling anger” is the sentiment behind a recent poll conducted this month, showing just how utterly pissed off Americans are with their government. Despite Americans being pitted against each other with divisive partisan tactics rammed down their throats on a daily basis by the political establishment and the media, this recent poll shows they agree on one thing—the government serves the connected elite and no one else. This latest poll, conducted by NBC News/Wall Street Journal paints a picture of an angry America. But these Americans aren’t angry at one another, they are angry at the political and financial establishment that continues to fleece them in the name of “Freedom.” This anger doesn’t stem from Trump either as it’s been there since before him. “Four years ago, we uncovered a deep and boiling anger across the country engulfing our political system,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which conducted this survey in partnership with the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies. “Four years later, with a very different political leader in place, that anger remains at the same level.” As NBC points out, the poll finds that 70 percent of Americans say they feel angry “because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington.” Forty-three percent say that statement describes them “very well.” This brings us to the question of why so many Americans feel that they are being spied on, controlled, and stolen from by shadow government officials who operate in secret? The answer is quite simple: because it’s true! As the torrent of Podesta emails from WikiLeaks exposed the crimes of the Clinton dynasty in 2016, the FBI followed up by releasing their own documents that were just as damning. Buried inside 100 pages of heavily redacted interview summaries from the FBI’s investigation into Clinton, Americans were exposed to a series of allegations that were nothing short of bombshell — documenting an ultra-secret, high-level group within the government, who were actually referred to as “The Shadow Government.” This Shadow Government has long been kept in the dark realms of conspiracy theory. However, thanks to the efforts of WikiLeaks and the push by Americans for more transparency, the truth has now become stranger and even more corrupt than fiction. Make no mistake, it is for this reason that Julian Assange is currently rotting in a cage. With every action recorded, phone tapped, innocent family surveilled, right stripped, and citizen killed by their government, the term “Freedom” has become a mere symbolic representation of the brittle shell of America left behind after being gutted by unelected operatives in the deep state hell bent on total control and perpetual war. Those who thought electing Donald Trump could somehow change this paradigm are beginning to figuring out that no matter what puppet resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, those who lurk behind the scenes are the ones shaping US policy. No matter how much you may disagree or even like Donald Trump, the idea of a secret and unelected government forcing change without the public’s consent behind the scenes should shock the conscience. And now, after flip-flopping on promises not to start wars, not to attack state’s rights, not to go after the second amendment, and to expose Saudi Arabia’s crimes, it appears that Trump has simply become part of that very same apparatus. The US political system is set up in such a manner that it allows for anyone with enough money to steer policy that benefits them personally. Politicians are hardly particular when it comes to who’s throwing money at them, so ownership is constantly in a state of flux. The controlled politicians, the rigged system, and the elite are not some vast conspiracy as much as they are a tendency of the state in general. As long as a system exists that allows government force to be bought and sold for the benefit and privilege of a few, these atrocities will continue. The money shoved into the pockets of politicians on behalf of special interest groups, aka bribery, has become so mainstream and widely accepted that no one even bats an eye at the billions doled out to their elected officials on behalf of lobbyists. Republicans and Democrats alike sit back in their plush, taxpayer funded offices in white marble buildings, rubbing elbows with elite businesspersons who pay them to write laws that create unfair advantages for their industries. In the extremely rare case that a politician resists this corruption and refuses to conform, they are ridiculed by fellow lawmakers, painted as kooks by the MSM, and their supporters labeled as radical nutjobs, i.e. Ron Paul. Meanwhile, We The People argue over the various privileges granted, and how much of our paychecks can be stolen by the almighty rulers on high. The reason it’s so hard for people to break out of their two-party shells and see that there are no differences between politicians with a ‘D’ and politicians with an ‘R,’ is a complex one. However, much of the reason we refuse to see things as they are is that humans have a naturally tribalistic tendency. Democrats and Republicans know and employ multiple techniques to keep you on their team, aka tribe. The main technique used is ‘Us vs. Them’ manipulation, as seen by this current poll. In spite of the heavy desire to elect someone else, Americans are force fed only two options. Constantly pointing out the flaws of the perceived ‘them’ group makes the ‘us’ group easily dismiss logical information without applying any critical thought. This is how both Democrats and Republicans can pass freedom shattering police state laws, bipartisanly, and the masses continue to support their party. All the blame from such horrid policy is easily written off and passed on to the “other guy.” This method of ridicule invokes the “Black and White” constraint of thinking; there are only two choices, and one is detrimental while the other is our savior. MSM and politicians love this constraint on your mind because they can simply convince you that you must go their way, and not with this utterly ridiculous choice. In the meantime, however, Republicans are for big government, if with war, and the democrats are for war, if with big government. And, the only “change” people see is their dwindling bank accounts. Seeing outside of the two-party paradigm is a difficult task. It can take years for people to break their conditioning and see the political system for the rigged game that it is. The good news is that this poll shows it is continuing to happen and once you see the system for what it is, you cannot unsee it. No one goes back to sleep, despite the fact that waking up to the system can be particularly stressful. And, if this poll shows us anything, it’s that people are beginning to see the two-party paradigm for the sham that it is. The number of people waking up to the controlled two-party system is ever-increasing and those people, in turn, wake up others. If you are one of those people who sees Washington DC as the Don King boxing match that it is, then you are doing something right. You are likely a reader of the alternative media, you probably don’t watch massive amounts of television, and you likely have a thirst for a lesser ignorance. If you are accused of being a liberal and a conservative in the same conversation, it’s probably because you have broken free from the cult-like constraints placed on you by the system. However, only waking up is not enough. If you want to effect positive change in this world, then you have to become that change. This doesn’t mean that you have to go out, buy a bullhorn and begin screaming in the streets. Simply changing your purchasing habits can force a change far greater than any bullhorn. Voting with your dollars is far more effective at inciting change than a voting booth. The radical and peaceful change that society needs will most assuredly not originate from the center of the very system that is designed to prevent it. You can quite literally ‘be the change that you want to see in this world,’ and you can start this now. Do not be discouraged by the establishment who attempts to silence your radical and peaceful views and keep them on the fringe. They do it out of fear, it’s merely an act of self-preservation, and it shows that open-mindedness and peace are overcoming cruelty and ignorance. Always remember, no army can stop an idea whose time has come. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project, where this article first appeared. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds. Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Follow us on Minds, Twitter, Steemit, and SoMee. Become an Activist Post Patron for as little as $1 per month. Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.

Activist Post

https://www.activistpost.com/2019/08/poll-70-of-americans-angry-at-political-system-for-only-serving-insiders-with-money-and-power.html

2019-08-26 22:00:08+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-01-04--German politicians targeted in mass data attack

bbc

German politicians targeted in mass data attack

Hundreds of German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, have had personal details stolen and published online. Contacts, private chats and financial details were put out on Twitter that belong to figures from every political party except the far-right AfD. Data from celebrities and journalists were also leaked. It is unclear who was behind the attack, which emerged on Twitter in the style of an advent calendar last month. German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said the authorities were working hard to find the perpetrator. There was, he said in a statement, as yet no evidence that German parliamentary or government systems had been compromised. The leak appears to have originated on a Twitter account operated from Hamburg and the authorities in the north German city say they are now working with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to stop the spread of German politicians' data. As Twitter's European headquarters are located in Dublin, the leak falls under the remit of the Irish data protection authority, national broadcaster RTE reports. The true extent of damage caused by the leak is not yet known although Justice Minister Katarina Barley said it was a "serious attack". "The people behind this want to damage confidence in our democracy and institutions," she said. A government spokeswoman said no sensitive data from the chancellor's office had been published. MPs, Euro MPs and MPs from state parliaments were affected, said Martina Fietz. She said the government was not yet certain that the data had been stolen by cyber-hackers. Some reports suggested a lone leaker might have had access to sensitive data through their work. Although nothing politically explosive is known to have been leaked, the sheer volume of personal data involved suggests the consequences could be considerable, says Michael Götschenberg, a reporter for German broadcaster RBB, who researched the attack. The now-suspended Twitter account, identified by German media as @_0rbit, was followed by more than 17,000 people. Although documents had been posted on the account from 1 December to 28 December, it was not until Thursday evening that officials became aware of the theft. Bild newspaper said all the data stolen in the attack dated back to before October 2018 but it was not clear when it began. Interior Minister Seehofer said preliminary analysis showed the data had been obtained through "wrongful use of log-in information for cloud services, email accounts or social networks". A cyber analyst told the BBC there was speculation that hackers might have exploited weaknesses in email software to get hold of passwords that those targeted had also used on social media accounts. Data was published in Advent calendar-style daily releases on Twitter. The first "doors" at the start of December featured TV presenters, then rappers, and from 20 December it focused on politicians. National and local political figures as well as some TV personalities had their details stolen: Immediate suspicion fell on right-wing groups in Germany as well as Russia. German cyber-security analyst Sven Herpig said Russia was a suspect, first because of the method used but also because Germany was facing four state elections in 2019 as well as elections to the European Parliament. However, the fact that no right-wing politicians were targeted while prominent figures who had criticised them had been, suggested domestic right-wingers may also have been responsible, he told the BBC. Russia has been accused of cyber-attacks in Germany before. In 2015, data was stolen from computers in the Bundestag. And last year the government's IT network came under attack amid reports that Russian hackers were also to blame. UK-based expert Graham Cluley said the breadth of the latest attack suggested it was a co-ordinated effort involving a determined group over many months. "This hack clearly isn't about extortion or financially motivated. This is about attempting to destabilise Germany society," he told the BBC.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46757009

2019-01-04 18:54:15+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-01-10--US shutdown Border politicians oppose Trumps wall

bbc

US shutdown: Border politicians oppose Trump's wall

Politicians in Washington have had a lot to say about the merits or otherwise of a border wall thousands of miles away. But why are so many lawmakers based there against it? There are nine members of the House of Representatives whose districts lie along the US-Mexico border. It is perhaps not surprising that the eight Democrats oppose President Donald Trump's signature campaign pledge. But the one Republican congressman - whose district stretches for 820 miles (1,320km) along the border - is also hostile. Most of his party, including some senators and governors of states at the border, back the president. These nine House representatives have intimate knowledge of the border and the issues arising from the movement of people - legal or otherwise - across it. So what have they said? "I think building a concrete structure sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security," said Will Hurd, a Republican congressman whose district has the longest border with Mexico. Congressman Hurd's 23rd Congressional District, which stretches from El Paso to San Antonio, shares the largest border with Mexico of any member of Congress. Mr Hurd, a former CIA agent who happens to be the only black Republican in the House of Representatives, has argued for a "smart border wall" which would be composed of sensors and other technology. "A Smart Wall would use sensor, radar and surveillance technologies to detect and track incursions across our border so we can deploy efficiently our most important resource, the men and women of Border Patrol, to perform the most difficult task - interdiction," he wrote in an op-ed in 2017. Mr Hurd, who broke rank with Republicans to vote on a Democratic-led bill to reopen government, said after Mr Trump's speech on Tuesday: "If this is a crisis, the people that are dealing with this crisis should get paid." Federal workers who are deemed "essential" such as border patrol agents, have been forced to work without pay as the shutdown continues. "It's a 4th Century solution to a 21st Century problem," said Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, whose district includes the border town of McAllen, which Trump plans to visit during the funding impasse. "Nobody wants stronger border control than me," he told CBS. But he opposes adding to the existing border wall because he does not "think it brings real border security and it comes at a major cost to taxpayers". Congressman Henry Cuellar, who represents Texas' 8th congressional district, believes $4bn is needed to modernise ports of entry, not for a wall which he says would only delay migrants by "a few minutes or a few seconds". He adds that modern telecommunications for border agents, and funding to help Mexico secure its own southern border, would also be helpful. The new Arizona congresswoman took office in early January as the representative for Arizona's 2nd District and has pledged not to vote for border wall funding. "We don't want a wall in southern Arizona. A third of our economy comes from Mexico. We want to build bridges not walls," she told Arizona Public Media as she was sworn in. Mr Grijalva has been a vocal critic of Mr Trump's proposal. "Not a single cent should go to funding Trump's monument to hate," he tweeted after Mr Trump addressed the nation on primetime TV to argue that there is a "crisis" at the border. "This is a terrible, terrible mistake that Trump is making," he told CBS, calling it "a fantasy" and "not a solution". "It would be devastating to my district," said Mr Grijalva, whose own father came emigrated from Mexico in the 1940s. In her first act as a newly elected member of Congress, Veronica Escobar of Texas' 16th District chose to cast her vote for "Nancy 'no wall' Pelosi" - the Democratic House leader who has opposed budgeting for Mr Trump's wall. "Donald Trump is trying to portray border communities as these open, lawless areas where a wall will solve problems," she said in a Twitter video for MoveOn.org, a Democratic advocacy group. Mrs Escobar, who represents the border city of El Paso, blamed Republicans for wrongly and "needless fear mongering about communities like mine". Congressman Juan Vargas, who has represented California's 51st District for the last five years, said there is no crisis where he lives along the border. "I live along the border, about a little over 10 miles from the border. It's San Diego. I mean, it's basically paradise," he told CNN. "The notion that we have a crisis there, security crisis, is absolute nonsense." "The reality is, yes, there are people sneaking into our country," Mr Vargas said. "We can stop that if we have smart solutions, and that's only going to be reliant on technology." New Mexico's newly elected Congresswoman Xochitl Torres Small visited the border earlier this week with other members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. While visiting a Border Patrol station where a Guatemalan migrant child died on Christmas Eve, she called for first responders along remote and rural areas of the border to carry emergency medical equipment. "The border is my home, and I am committed to fighting for and implementing policies which will help to make it #strong #smart and #fair," she tweeted after the visit. Texas Congressman Filemon Vela Jr has said in the past that he agrees with President Trump on trying to tackle the Mexican drug cartels and deporting criminals. But he is deeply opposed to the wall. In a scathing open letter to candidate Trump in 2016, he said: "Why any modern-thinking person would ever believe that building a wall along the border of a neighbouring country, which is both our ally and one of our largest trading partners, is frankly astounding and asinine." been an outspoken critic of Mr Trump's immigration policies, and criticised his decision before the mid-term elections in November to deploy troops to the border, which he said "inspired white national vigilantes" to flood the region. After US troops arrived in Brownsville, a city he represents, he condemned their defensive manoeuvres as "direct attacks on our border economy [which] provide no security value whatsoever".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46815569

2019-01-10 18:18:08+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-01-23--Priyanka Gandhi launches political career ahead of key India polls

bbc

Priyanka Gandhi launches political career ahead of key India polls

Priyanka Gandhi, the charismatic sister of Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, has formally joined politics months ahead of general elections in India. Ms Gandhi has been appointed the party general secretary for the eastern part of the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh. She has campaigned extensively for her brother and mother Sonia Gandhi in earlier elections, but had refused a formal political role for herself. Analysts say she will infuse fresh energy into the Congress campaign. The main opposition Congress party was routed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the last general election in 2014 and has found it hard to recover. Ms Gandhi has always been considered more popular of the Gandhi siblings with many blaming the "lacklustre leadership" of her brother for a string of Congress defeats between 2014 and 2018. The party has gained some ground in recent state elections and Mr Gandhi's stock has risen, but Congress still faces a tough challenge to beat the BJP and regain power. Social media had been awash with rumours of Priyanka Gandhi's impending political launch in recent days and on Wednesday, the Congress officially confirmed the news with this tweet: Through the day, all but one of the top trends on Twitter in India were about Ms Gandhi's plunge into formal politics with thousands of people tweeting about her. Mr Gandhi told reporters on Wednesday that he was "very happy" that his sister would be assisting him in the general elections and that she was "very capable". Many in the party had clamoured for a larger role for her for years, but the 47-year-old mother-of-two has been reluctant until now to take centre stage. In previous elections, she had restricted her campaigning to Amethi and Rae Bareli - the parliamentary constituencies of her brother and mother - and is held in high esteem by the voters there. The Gandhi family has enjoyed cult status in these underdeveloped areas where her father Rajiv and grandmother Indira Gandhi - both former prime ministers - also won several elections. Her appointment has been greeted enthusiastically by Congress party leaders, workers and supporters, who have often compared her to her charismatic grandmother. A BJP spokesman, Sambit Patra, said Ms Gandhi's appointment was an admission by the Congress that Rahul Gandhi had failed as the party leader. But analysts say the move has the potential of improving the party's showing in Uttar Pradesh, which sends the largest number of MPs to parliament. Ms Gandhi is married to businessman Robert Vadra who has been accused of wrongdoing in his real estate business in the states of Haryana and Rajasthan and is under investigation. Mr Vadra and the Gandhis have denied the allegations and accuse the BJP of a "political witch hunt".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-46970730

2019-01-23 12:33:42+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-01-28--Dog whistles The secret language politicians are using

bbc

Dog whistles: The secret language politicians are using

Politicians are using coded language to "manipulate people" into making decisions they wouldn't normally be "morally comfortable with," a political language expert has told the BBC. This kind of political message – which only a particular target audience is meant to understand – is known as a "dog whistle," Professor Jennifer says. Some have claimed these tactics were used to make people think Barack Obama was a foreigner. Others said UKIP's "Breaking Point" poster was a racist dog whistle. So how does it work?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46922909

2019-01-28 00:31:59+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-02-04--Nigeria election 2019 How godfathers influence politics

bbc

Nigeria election 2019: How ‘godfathers’ influence politics

"Godfathers" in Nigerian politics don't usually run for office themselves, but many believe they are the ones who decide the election winners and losers. With campaigning well under way for general elections on 16 February, these are the men - and they invariably are men - who pull the strings behind the scenes. They are political sponsors, who use money and influence to win support for their preferred candidates. Their "godsons", it is believed, are not always selected for their political acumen, but rather on their ability to repay and enrich their godfather. These arrangements have spawned the term "godfatherism", says Dr Dele Ashiru, a senior lecturer at the department of political science at the University of Lagos. "It refers to a situation where there's a big man who wields enormous political power and then anoints a godson, who he adopts as a candidate for the election. "And the godfather will do all that is reasonably possible to get the godson appointed into political office. "The godfather must be influential, most often they are, or were, a political office holder." In the southern state of Akwa Ibom, the country's largest oil-producer, many people believe the main godfather is Godswill Akpabio, who holds a senate seat. A former governor of the state, he still wields significant power in local politics. So powerful in fact that his defection just a few months ago to the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) is seen as pivotal to the party's hope of winning its first victory in the state since Nigeria's return to democracy in 1999. A hope reiterated by President Muhammadu Buhari when he chose Akwa Ibom to launch his campaign for re-election in December. And Mr Akpabio certainly seems to deliver in numbers. During a recent rally I spoke to followers who said he would bring more than 300,000 voters over to the APC. But Senator Akpabio denies he is a kingmaker: "If anyone wants to say that I am a godfather I want to disagree with them. "The only time you could say I played a godfather-like role was in 2015. I nominated the current governor [of Akwa Ibom] and when I presented him to the people they supported him," he told the BBC. Yet a member of his own party says that 2015 victory was marred by violence and irregularities, orchestrated by Mr Akpabio. Umana Okon Umana, who was aspiring to be governor at the time, has accused Mr Akpabio of using state resources, including security forces, to install his candidate. He describes it as a situation where a godfather sits down with his wife "and writes down all who will contest the governorship elections… all the way down to the house of assembly positions. "He writes these names before the primaries take place. And then if you're not one of those candidates they make sure that you have no access to the venue [of the primaries]." A Supreme Court ruling from 2015, however, declared the election in the state to be free and fair. But "godfatherism" can get messy. Onofiok Luke, now the speaker of the Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly, was one of Mr Akpabio's former godsons. A deeply religious man, he attributes his success in politics to God, but many would say he owes far more to his former godfather. Previously a personal assistant to Mr Akpabio, he admits to having received financial support for his wedding and 40th birthday, and that Mr Akpabio "mentored' him through his rise in politics. However the relationship has soured and the Akwa Ibom parliamentary speaker, who says he was offered $5.5m (£4.2m) last year and the deputy governorship to switch parties, does not hold back about what he thinks his former boss is capable of. "I have worked with him, and I know that he knows how to use state power." In a written response from his media team, Mr Akpabio denied all allegations against him, stating: "We understand that this is a season for campaigns and these wild and unsubstantiated allegations will be thrown about by opponents to gain political mileage." In a very different part of the country, the political future of the majority Muslim state of Kano in the north may also be defined by a larger-than-life godfather. Kano has the second-biggest number of registered voters in the country, making it a key state for either of the two main parties to secure victory. Rabiu Kwankwaso, a former governor, has built a loyal and dedicated following there, partly built through a free education programme implemented during his tenure. Whichever candidate gets his blessing is guaranteed a lot of voters. He even has his own political fan club, known as the Kwankwasiyya movement, whose members are easily recognisable in their uniform of red caps and white gowns. He is backing Abba Kabiru Yusuf, a candidate from the People's Democratic Party (PDP), after falling out with a former ally. On many campaign posters, Mr Kwankwaso's image is larger than that of the PDP contender. "In all the states you go today, especially in northern Nigeria, you'll hardly get a house without a member of Kwankwasiyya, either the father or the mother or one of the children, or the worker in the house," Mr Kwankwaso told the BBC. In the last elections he successfully endorsed Abdullahi Ganduje, his former deputy for governor. But since Mr Ganduje became governor, he has been locked in a bitter dispute with Mr Kwankwaso. The feud is so fierce that for some time Mr Kwankwaso avoided the city of Kano where there has been an attempt to counter his popularity with the so-called Gandujiyya movement, whose members wear blue hats. As godsons become political players in their own right, it is inevitable that they fall out with their godfathers. Mr Ashiru says this is because in developing societies like Nigeria, the state is the most important source of revenue and wealth accumulation, which both will want to access to. But it is also a question of ego, according to Emmanuel Onwubiko, from Human Rights Writers Association Of Nigeria. "Some of the godfathers are not really out to get money, they just want respect, they want to be venerated if they come into the state; they want to be recognised as the most important person in that society," he says. For Mr Ashiru this is a key problem with godfatherism: "Godfather culture is more about the individual than the collective. "Democracy is about the people, but here you have a few individuals across the country who take critical political decisions, particularly that have to do with the recruitment of public officers. "So it goes without saying that such a system cannot make democracy thrive." All the politicians I spoke to shied away from the term "godfather" as it has become loaded - associated with bullish tactics and undemocratic practices. And as godsons gain their confidence, it is not clear how much longer godfathers will be able to keep their hold on power. For Mr Akpabio and Mr Kwankwaso, it will not be long before they find out if their influence is waning.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-47089372

2019-02-04 09:10:57+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-02-08--Blackface scandal How should politicians apologise

bbc

Blackface scandal: How should politicians apologise?

Two of the most senior politicians in the US state of Virginia are engulfed in a "blacking up" scandal. How should public figures confront transgressions that are decades old, asks writer James Jeffrey. Skeletons seem to be making a mass exodus from public figures' closets of late. One of the most high-profile cases is Virginia Governor Ralph Northam being implicated by a racist photo suddenly unearthed from 35 years ago. Days after that story emerged, another Democrat, Attorney General Mark Herring, released a statement describing, and apologising for, attending a college party as a 19-year-old undergraduate in 1980 dressed up as a black rapper. The ensuing ruckus, and conflagration of polarised politics and the public court of social media increasing the spread and intensity of news, has generated more questions than answers. They involve what the governor knew and didn't know about the photo, but also about where the line is drawn between what requires an apology and how to deliver one. "We all believe in the tradition of personal growth, for ourselves and for other people; there is an acknowledgment that people change, and that storyline is built into our culture and belief systems," says Arthur Markman, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. "But that is overlaid with how politics is always competitive, and part of it is to exploit the weaknesses of opponents - so knowing that, there is a fine line to tread for politicians about how much to admit and address specific allegations." Northam initially apologised last Friday for the photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook before holding a press conference the next day when he announced that, upon reflection, he didn't believe he was in the photo. In an almost surreal turn of events, he also volunteered that in the same year he blackened his face to impersonate Michael Jackson for a dance contest. And days later a Republican, Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment, faced questions over a 1968 publication he edited that contained blackface photos. Suddenly voters in Virginia - a state with a pronounced racial history; it housed the capital of the Confederacy - were left judging whether the governor should remain in office. "A key issue has become how we assess and calculate these sorts of things for public figures," says Jeremi Suri, a historian and author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office, which analyses how successful presidents of the past created unrealistic expectations for subsequent presidents, with enormously problematic implications for American politics. "Now there is less and less tolerance, both in the US and UK, of evidence of character deficiencies, which formerly might have been brushed over, but are now unacceptable because of concerns those attributes could be carried into one's older years." To apologise or not to apologise, that is the question. "Given [the] simultaneous politicisation and devaluing of apologies, it is little wonder that public figures apologise so reluctantly and so poorly, with vague conditional regrets, wordy passive language, and out-and-out excuses," says Edwin Battistella, a linguistic and writing professor and author of Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology. Battistella notes how throughout the history of apologies in American politics it has gradually become both a stigma and expectation for those in public life, resulting in contrasting apologising strategies: the apology tour, a series of speeches and interviews pursued as an expedient opportunity to express regret, versus the non-apology, such as when Oregon Senator Bob Parkwood apologised in 1992 for "the conduct that it was alleged that I did". At the same time, Battistella says, a more dignified middle ground was struck by the likes of Ronald Reagan, who in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal accepted responsibility. "You take your knocks, you learn your lessons and then you move on," Reagan said at the time. "That's the healthiest way to deal with a problem." And by George W Bush who faced rumours of a wild, dissolute youth by stating he was a changed man who had rediscovered God. Nowadays, politicians - and society at large - appear to find themselves at another stage in the development of the politics of forgiveness. "There's always been skeletons in everyone's closet, but it used to be that if something became an issue, often a public figure did and said something, and then it faded away - but the intensity of social media keeps it in front of us more," Battistella says. "Also, when it comes to taking responsibility, now public figures seem less willing to accept it, while the public are less willing to let the issue go." The furore over Northam's photo and his conflicting explanations of it, coming so soon after the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Brett Kavanaugh that included criticisms of comments from his high school yearbook, indicates old yearbooks are now firmly in the cross hairs, especially in relation to certain issues. "This is how attitudes advance - once there were concerns over anti-Semitic attitudes, because that was one problem in the 1960s," Suri says. "Now it is about race and sex: this reflects the spread of democracy, because those issues are now better represented by powerful voices." But it's also been noted by some that, the photo notwithstanding, Northam has been a progressive governor, across all communities, and appears to have not put a foot wrong during the 35 years since the photo. For now, none of that appears to make much difference to the deluge of criticism over the photo. "The public have a right to know about someone's background," says Walter Robinson, editor at large for the Boston Globe, and who led the team that revealed the local Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal (dramatised in the Oscar-winning film "Spotlight"). "Not a right to know everything, but a right about issues relating to character." But does that include the public having a right to an apology? "If you don't apologise, it's hard to indicate you've changed," Markman says. "Part of any apology is acknowledging what you did wrong and explaining how you know why, and what you will do differently in the future." That said, politicians face a particular conundrum in relation to this, Markman notes, especially in America. "What fascinates me about US politics in the last 25 years is the degree to which politicians are held accountable for consistency as opposed to growth," Markman says. "You can't change your thinking, otherwise you are flip-flopping." There is some logic behind this, Markman grants - when you vote for politicians, you want to be able to rely that they won't suddenly pivot on issues you care about and voted over. But it also misses an essential human reality. "I look at all my students who live online and wonder what are going to be the new standards for them when they are older," says James Vaughn, a professor in the British Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin. "They may be debating issues such as transgender now, but which in the future will be totally settled, and thus any concerns they aired earlier could appear like racism." For now, Northam insists he won't resign, and so the spectacle rumbles on - quite likely watched by other politicians ruing the existence of photos from their pasts and considering their options. "My advice would be time travel, but in the absence of that, I would say cop to everything upfront and make it part of a narrative, such as I am the sum total of all the things I have done, this one thing doesn't represent me, and I will strive to be better," Markman says. This approach appears to have been adopted by Mr Herring, who came forward before any journalist had gone public with his admission of impersonating Kurtis Blow. "It sounds ridiculous even now writing it," Herring said in his statement. "But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes - and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of others - we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup. That conduct clearly shows that, as a young man, I had a callous and inexcusable lack of awareness and insensitivity to the pain my behaviour could inflict on others," Herring said. "It was really a minimisation of both people of colour, and a minimisation of a horrific history I knew well even then." But this sort of pre-emptive owning up carries its own risk too. Actor Liam Neeson is having to do his own emergency apology tour - clarification tour might be more accurate - to explain that he is "not racist" after volunteering information in a recent interview that nearly 40 years ago he once wanted to "kill" a black man for revenge. America is in a unique position currently when it comes to admitting fault or distancing oneself from it, Vaughn notes, due to its history and issues such as race informing the current polarised political climate. In countries like the UK, the demand for so-called "virtue signalling" as a form of compensation isn't as great, Vaughn notes, though he says he doesn't know whether this is because it is a condition particular to the US or because other countries are yet to follow suit. "I would much prefer there was more recognition that people can change," Markman says. "After all, that's what government is all about: enabling ordinary people to have the opportunities to be better versions of themselves."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47152109

2019-02-08 19:15:37+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-03-19--US politician Devin Nunes sues Twitter over insults

bbc

US politician Devin Nunes sues Twitter over insults

A US politician has accused Twitter and three of its users of running an "orchestrated defamation campaign" against him. Republican congressman Devin Nunes of California has said that tweets from the parody accounts @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow violate the platform's Terms of Service. Their tweets accuse him of federal crimes and describe him engaging in sexual activities with US president Donald Trump. He is suing for $250m (£188m). "Twitter knew the defamation was (and is) happening. Twitter let it happen because Twitter had (and has) a political agenda", he wrote in a 40-page complaint. He says he has suffered "substantial insult, humiliation, embarrassment, pain, mental suffering and damage to his reputation" from the Twitter insults. Mr Nunes served as the chair of the US House Intelligence Committee until 2019. He became a controversial figure for his vocal support of President Trump during the investigation into Russian interference in the US presidential election. He was also the centre of an investigation of the House Ethics Committee in 2017, after he released a memo claiming that the intelligence community monitored communications between members of Trump's transition team (of which he was a part). He was cleared of any wrongdoing. He is now claiming that Twitter "selectively amplified" tweets that attempted to distract him from that investigation. Mr Nunes says that the the accounts @LizMair, @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow led a coordinated smear campaign against him - although fringe accounts such as @fireDevinNunes and @DevinGrapes also dished up insults. Tweets from the accounts have accused him of crimes such as obstructing justice and perjury. Some posts have referred to him as "Dirty Devin" and described him engaging in sexual activities with President Trump. Mr Nunes has said that these allegations are false. It isn't uncommon for public figures - particularly politicians - to have to contend with parody accounts. PM Theresa May has inspired @Theresa_May_Not, @TheresaGoogling, @DowningStVogue and @emayji (a play on "emoji"). President Trump has also prompted sarcastic spin-offs mocking his policies, such as @donaltrumparody and @realDonaldTrFan. According to Mr Nunes, Twitter suspended the @DevinNunesMom account in 2019, before he filed the complaint. The @DevinCow account is still active, and has reached more than 48,000 followers since Mr Nunes filed his complaint on Monday. Although Mr Nunes claims that the @DevinNunesMom account "hijacked Nunes' name" and "falsely impersonated Nunes' mother", Twitter's policies do not ban parody and fan accounts - so long as the biography and account name clearly indicate that the user is not affiliated to the subject. In his complaint, Mr Nunes suggests that they are part of a larger conspiracy, and that an investigation will help determine whether members of the Democratic Party were involved. Mr Nunes says that Twitter "shadow-banned" his account, using algorithms to make certain posts invisible to other users. Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey has come under fire from politicians in recent years, including US president Donald Trump, for censoring conservative voices. In a hearing before US senators in 2018, Mr Dorsey admitted that the company's algorithms inadvertently reduced the visibility of 600,000 accounts - but that the company "does not use political ideology to make decisions". Although some accounts weren't appearing in search results on the platform, this was due to follower behaviour on the platform, not political affiliation. Mr Nunes does not describe how Twitter shadow-banned his account in the complaint he filed. Most of the complaint instead focuses on the three accounts that he claims posted defamatory content, and Twitter's failure to enforce its Twitter Rules and Terms of Service. "Twitter, by its actions, intended to generate and proliferate the false and defamatory statements," he said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47624326

2019-03-19 15:38:31+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-04-24--Can Indias political prince unseat the PM

bbc

Can India’s political prince unseat the PM?

India's main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi was all but written off after his crushing defeat in the last elections. But he has energised a struggling Congress party and increasingly set the agenda with a combative campaign. The BBC's Geeta Pandey visits his constituency to assess whether he can unseat the prime minister this time. The main roads in the small town of Amethi were choked with supporters when Rahul Gandhi turned up to file his nomination papers last week. Mr Gandhi - smiling and waving on an open truck, accompanied by his sister Priyanka - was greeted all along the 3km route to the district collector's office by party workers. Many waved flags, others carried their photographs and town residents showered them with rose petals. A man in a horse costume danced to drum beats, a brass band played welcoming tunes and groups of supporters ran alongside the convoy shouting slogans in his support. "Mr Modi's days are numbered," says Mustaqim Ahmed, who has travelled 125km (78 miles) from his village with his 12-year-old son to see the Congress chief. Anokhelal Tiwari, a resident of Amethi, adds: "Wait and see, once the votes are counted on 23 May, Mr Modi will known as the ex-prime minister of India. The Congress will form the next government and 'Rahul bhaiya [brother]' will become the prime minister." It's a dream Mr Gandhi's supporters in Amethi have had for a long time. In fact, ever since he made his political debut 15 years ago. The 48-year-old is a three-term MP from this town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. He is now seeking a fourth term. This time though, he's also standing in Wayanad in the southern state of Kerala - leading to the BJP alleging he's scared of losing Amethi to their candidate Smriti Irani, who put up a tough fight in 2014. Congress leaders have defended the move, saying it will help widen their base in the south. I followed Mr Gandhi's campaigns closely in 2004, 2009 and 2014 - and each time I was told by supporters they were electing the PM, not an MP. That sentiment is now being echoed in Wayanad too, says my BBC Hindi colleague Imran Qureshi, who's covering the election there. That's because Rahul Gandhi has the right pedigree: he is the scion of India's political royalty. His great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first prime minister of independent India, his grandmother and father also served as prime ministers, while his mother, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, was the Congress chief until poor health forced her to hand over the reins to her son 16 months ago. Even before that, there never was any doubt that he was being groomed for the top job. In 2013, he was elevated to the second most senior position in the party and campaigned extensively in the 2014 general election. So when Congress suffered its most humiliating defeat that year, winning just 44 seats in the 545-member parliament, his political career hit rock bottom. For a while after that, nothing seemed to be going right for him or the Congress. The party faced electoral setbacks in several state elections; he was seen as "remote and inaccessible" and critics and rivals ridiculed him on social media as a bumbling, clueless leader prone to gaffes. Narendra Modi, who comes from a humble background, repeatedly criticised him for rising to the top not on merit, but because of belonging to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. But then things began to change: Mr Gandhi started to emerge from the shadows, his social media campaigns became smarter and he began arguing convincingly about the government's controversial currency ban, a lack of employment opportunities, growing intolerance in the country and the slowdown in the economy. The proverbial cherry on the cake came in December when he led the Congress to victory in important state elections in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. And now, as he traverses the length and breadth of the country, addressing up to five rallies daily, his campaign is beginning to get some traction. Senior journalist Aarthi Ramachandran, author of a 2012 book on Mr Gandhi, says he's displayed leadership potential on the campaign trail by consistently taking a stand against Mr Modi, demanding answers from the government on alleged corruption in the Rafale fighter jet deal and arguing forcefully that the currency ban hit people's lives hard. "The political acumen he's displaying now was largely absent from his politics earlier," she says, adding that his ability to speak too is "vastly improved". "He does these meetings in colleges and universities with young people, he tells them, 'ask me whatever you want'. He connects very well with them. In the parliament too, rather than reading out prepared speeches, he speaks extempore, with confidence. "He's come into his own, worked hard over a period of time on acquiring skills." In recent weeks, there's also been a lot of chatter about the party's minimum income guarantee scheme that promises to give cash handouts to 50 million poor families if the Congress is elected to power. One analyst described it as a "perfect disrupter" which could help the party improve their election tally. It was certainly well-timed - the scheme was announced just as pollsters began suggesting that India's air strikes in Pakistan may help the BJP to victory. The announcement brought the conversation back to poverty and lack of jobs and made the BJP fairly uncomfortable. But it's not going to be a game-changer in 2019, says Prof Sanjay Kumar of research organisation CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies). "It's come a bit too late. Also, the party doesn't have the communication skills or the resources to take it to the people." "Their leaders don't have the language skills, they are carrying huge baggage because many in the majority community believe that Congress follows the policy of minority appeasement and when they question the government's honesty and accuse it of corruption, not many are ready to buy that because the Congress have had so many corruption allegations against them in the past." The biggest disadvantage though, he says, is that it's not just their support base that's eroded - they also lack the party workers required during an election. "So I won't put my money on the Congress now," he says. "But that doesn't mean that there is no future for the Congress. Losing one or two elections doesn't mean a party has no future. Remember the 1984 elections when the BJP was reduced to two seats? And it bounced back to 282 in the last election." Several Congress leaders, too, have hinted that 2019 is really not a "do-or-die" battle for the party and that 2024 is perhaps a much more realistic goal. In 2004, just as Mr Gandhi had embarked on his political career, I caught up with him during his campaign in Amethi and asked him to assess his chances. "You win some, you lose some. Maybe I'll win this, maybe I won't," he'd said. I then asked him what he would do if he lost. "Just because you lose one battle doesn't mean you turn around and close shop and say, 'I can't do anything.' If I lose the election, would I say let's pack our bags and go home? No, no, no." So in his own words, he's in it for the long haul. Don't write him off yet.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-47978944

2019-04-24 23:17:51+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-06-19--Mohammed Morsi Egypt accuses UN of politicising death

bbc

Mohammed Morsi: Egypt accuses UN of 'politicising' death

Egypt has lashed out at the United Nations for "politicising" the death of the country's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. The UN called for an investigation on Tuesday after Morsi collapsed and died during a court appearance this week. In a statement, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Hafez "condemned" the suggestion, insisting it was "a case of natural death". Morsi had been in custody since his removal in a 2013 military coup. His family have long raised concerns over his treatment in prison, and say that the authorities refused a request for him to be buried in his home town. The former leader was instead laid to rest in eastern Cairo early on Tuesday morning, reportedly under tight security. Mr Hafez accused the UN of trying to "[obscure] the institutions of the Egyptian state and the integrity of the Egyptian judiciary." He added that any suggestion of foul play was "not based on any evidence." A statement earlier this week from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights pointed to Egypt's obligations to treat its prisoners humanely. "Concerns have been raised regarding the conditions of Mr Morsi's detention, including access to adequate medical care, as well as sufficient access to his lawyers and family, during his nearly six years in custody," a spokesman for the office said. "He also appears to have been held in prolonged solitary confinement." Morsi died while appearing in court on spying charges. He was already facing decades in jail after being convicted in previous trials on separate charges. A forensic report has been ordered into his death. His former party, the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – a close ally of Morsi – are among those who have blamed the Egyptian leadership for his death. Human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also called for an independent investigation into Morsi's death.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-48689563

2019-06-19 09:31:18+00:00

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political process

bbc--2019-06-25--West Bengal protests Politicians hounded to return bribe money

bbc

West Bengal protests: Politicians hounded to return bribe money

People in India's West Bengal state are up in arms against politicians for an unusual reason - they are demanding their representatives repay bribes. The state's chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, has told ministers to return bribe money they were paid by citizens seeking access to government schemes. The home of a local leader of her party was "raided" by residents on Monday who wanted their money back, police said. Now similar incidents are being reported across the state. "The money they have taken... they will have to return it to the victims. We will teach these leaders a lesson," a protester told the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS). Bribery is fairly common in Indian politics, but this scenario is unexpected, says BBC Bengali's Amitabha Bhattasali. Reports of protests organised across the state are coming in every day, our correspondent adds. Ms Banerjee, a hugely popular and fiery leader, first came to power in 2011. But there is some indication that her popularity has been waning in recent months, which correspondents say has left her rattled. It could be that this latest statement is an attempt to regain some of the ground she lost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the recently concluded general election. Her party won only 22 of West Bengal's 42 seats - a big drop from the 32 she won in 2014 - in an election marred by violence which saw a number of political activists in the state killed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48741456

2019-06-25 09:11:35+00:00

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political process

bbc--2019-06-27--Twitter will hide rule-breaking politicians tweets

bbc

Twitter will hide rule-breaking politicians' tweets

Twitter says it will hide tweets by world leaders and politicians that break its rules but have been left online "in the public interest". Tweets from prominent government officials that break the platform's rules but have been left online will be hidden behind a notice. The company accepted it had not clearly communicated many of the decisions it had made in the past. But the new notice will only be applied to tweets sent after 27 June. Twitter's critics say the platform does not enforce its rules evenly, allowing politicians to break its rules on abuse, harassment and incitement. In the past, Twitter has defended some of its decisions by saying the tweets in question were "newsworthy". For example, in September 2017 the company said it had decided to leave a controversial tweet by US President Donald Trump online. In the tweet, Mr Trump said: "Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at UN. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won't be around much longer!" Many people interpreted the message as a threat to North Korea. Although Twitter decided the post was newsworthy, there was no indication of this on the Twitter app or website. Twitter did not say whether any particular politician had inspired the change to its rules. Tweets placed behind the new notice will no longer appear in search results and will not be promoted by the platform's algorithms. The new policy will only apply to people who: However, Twitter said in some cases - such as direct and immediate threats of violence - the tweets would still be removed. The company said most users were "unlikely to encounter" the new notice often. "This is a step, although a small step, in the right direction," said Dr Zoetanya Sujon from the London College of Communication. "Of course, it doesn't stop soft racism or active political disinformation. And it will not have any visible impact on Twitter's harassment problem. "Let's hope it can spark much better practice around the regulation of disinformation, hate speech, and incitement in political and public discussion on Twitter." However, the platform is likely to face accusations of censorship when it places the first politician's tweet behind its new notice. The company said old tweets would not be hidden behind the notice, and it could not predict when the new tool would first be used.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48791094

2019-06-27 17:38:01+00:00

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political process

bbc--2019-07-06--Former MI6 head UK in political nervous breakdown

bbc

Former MI6 head: UK in 'political nervous breakdown'

The UK is going through a "political nervous breakdown", a former intelligence chief has told the BBC. Sir John Sawers said the UK could have a prime minister who does "not have the standing that we have become used to in our top leadership" - a criticism of the two Tory leadership contenders. The former MI6 boss was also critical of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Boris Johnson ally Iain Duncan Smith countered Sir John's remarks, saying "democracy may well frighten him". Sir John's intervention comes as Jeremy Hunt and Mr Johnson battle it out to be the next leader of the Conservative Party. It also follows an article in the Times newspaper, quoting unnamed senior civil servants, which suggested Mr Corbyn was "too frail" to become prime minister, "physically or mentally". Speaking on the Today programme, he said: "We are going through a political nervous breakdown here in the UK. "We have potential prime ministers being elected by the Conservative Party now, [and] in the shape of the leader of the opposition, who do not have the standing that we have become used to in our top leadership. "Whether people can develop that when they become prime minister, we will have to wait and see, in terms of the candidates for the Conservative leadership." Sir John's comments come after reports Downing Street tried to withhold sensitive intelligence from Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary. It is understood there were concerns about Mr Johnson's ability to keep information confidential. The Tory leadership frontrunner said the reports were "not true". In the surprisingly frank exchange, Sir John said there were concerns in Whitehall about the direction the country is heading. "I think there is a lot of anxiety as we leave the European Union, we take a huge risk to our international standing, to the strength of the British economy." He said former prime minister David Cameron had been "unwise" to call the EU referendum in 2016, adding that it had left the country "badly divided" and the UK's standing in the world "severely diminished". Sir John Sawers' views on Brexit are well-known. He's warned in the past that leaving the EU would make the UK less safe. His intervention will have little impact on the outcome of the Conservative leadership race. Most Tory members are pro-Brexit and many will likely dismiss his opinions as more 'project fear'. Both leadership contenders say they'd be prepared to take the UK out of the EU, deal or no deal, on Halloween. However if the views of the former head of MI6 are reflected in the upper echelons of the current civil service, it suggests the new prime minister won't just face resistance in Parliament, but in Whitehall too. As well as the two would-be Tory leaders, Sir John questioned whether Jeremy Corbyn is of sufficient standing to become PM. The Labour leader's had his own recent run-in with the civil service, after officials reportedly questioned his health and fitness to lead the country. No matter who's in power, it seems relations between politicians and civil servants are becoming increasingly strained. "It is not surprising that the people who have devoted themselves to serving the interests of this country are concerned about the direction in which the country is going." Before the 2016 referendum Sir John said leaving the EU would make the UK "less safe" because it would be shut out of decisions on the "crucial" issue of data sharing. "Actually I think he might be going through a political nervous breakdown," he told the Today programme. "The reality is that the expression of democracy may well frighten him slightly." Mr Corbyn's office said it would not be commenting on Sir John's remarks.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48892102

2019-07-06 14:18:12+00:00

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political process

bbc--2019-08-07--Australian bureaucrat loses landmark case over political tweets

bbc

Australian bureaucrat loses landmark case over political tweets

Australia's highest court has made a landmark ruling that a public servant was lawfully sacked for writing tweets which criticised government policies. Michaela Banerji was fired in 2013 for her criticisms - expressed under a pseudonym - of the nation's controversial immigration programmes. The court rejected her claim that she had been denied a right to free speech. The ruling could have far-reaching implications for employees who express political views, lawyers say. Ms Banerji had been working for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, now part of the Department of Home Affairs. Using the Twitter name LaLegale, she wrote posts which often criticised Australia's immigration policies and its overseas detention of asylum seekers. The posts were sent from a personal device and almost exclusively in her own time. After learning Ms Banerji operated the account, her employers sacked her for breaching the Australian Public Service Code of Conduct - which states bureaucrats cannot express political views. Ms Banerji later took her case to an appeals tribunal, which found her sacking had violated her right to freedom of political communication. The government then challenged that decision in the High Court of Australia. It found Ms Banerji's dismissal had not breached the constitution, citing rules that public servants "must take reasonable steps to avoid any conflict of interest (real or apparent)" with their employment. Those rules require bureaucrats to be "apolitical", the court determined. In doing so, it rejected Ms Banerji's argument that she had been unreasonably sacked because her Twitter profile had never disclosed "that it was operated or endorsed by a member of the public service". Ms Banerji left the court in tears after the decision, telling reporters: "It's not just a loss for me, it's a loss for all of us, and I'm very, very, very sorry." The decision has implications for Australia's approximately two million public servants and what they can post on social media, says the Community and Public Sector Union. The union's spokeswoman, Nadine Flood, said public servants "should be allowed normal rights as citizens rather than facing Orwellian censorship because of where they work". But outside court Ms Banerji's lawyer, Allan Anforth, asserted the implications could go further. "The implication is that for any employee-employer relationship, if the employee is critical of the employer's position on some politically relevant social issue, they can be sacked," he said, reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "This is a really naive decision in terms of the political realities of what exist in the community."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49259942

2019-08-07 04:04:29+00:00

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political process

bbc--2019-08-28--What just happened in UK politics

bbc

What just happened in UK politics?

In a dramatic move on Wednesday morning, Britain's new Prime Minister Boris Johnson set in motion the suspension of the UK Parliament - which means MPs have much less time to debate Brexit, the process of the UK leaving the European Union. Parliament is to be suspended for five weeks ahead of 31 October, the day the UK is due to leave the EU. That's just nine weeks away. People who want the UK to remain in the EU are calling it a coup - and even some in favour of Brexit have criticised the move. Mr Johnson wants to start a new parliamentary session, with a fresh programme, from 14 October. Instead of a normal three-week autumn recess, parliament will now wrap up some time around 10 September. With so little time, MPs would find it difficult to stop the UK leaving the EU without a deal. Parliament always stops work for a few weeks in the autumn. But this isn't a normal recess: Mr Johnson is cutting short the current parliamentary session at a critical time. The UK was originally scheduled to leave the EU on 29 March. After Parliament rejected the deal negotiated with the EU three times, that deadline was extended. Departure day is now 31 October. Mr Johnson, who was one of the key figures in the Leave campaign, has promised to complete Brexit "do or die" - with or without a deal. However, most opposition members of Parliament (MPs) and many from the governing Conservative Party don't want to leave the EU without a deal. They fear it would damage the British economy, putting up prices and limiting access to the UK's biggest market. They've threatened to bring legislation ruling out a no-deal Brexit. Failing that, they could also call a vote of no-confidence in the government. Yes. It's what normally happens between the end of one session and the beginning of the next. However, the circumstances are unusual. A legal challenge would be difficult, since the government isn't breaking any law. It's just using parliamentary procedure, as Mr Johnson tries to fulfil his campaign promise to get the UK out of the EU. MPs could either go along with the suspension, with the risk of a no-deal Brexit, or they could trigger an election with a vote of no confidence in the government. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, has called the suspension a "constitutional outrage" designed to prevent MPs from debating Brexit. She does have a say, but it's limited. Technically, the government had to ask her for permission to suspend Parliament. This is normally a formality: the Queen keeps out of politics. If she had refused, that would have been unprecedented. She did not refuse. Parliament will go back to work next Tuesday 3 September, but will then go into recess. If Mr Johnson gets his way, Parliament returns on 14 October, two-and-a-half weeks before the UK leaves the EU. However, if MPs pass a vote of no-confidence before 10 September, there could be a general election in October. That depends. If the Conservatives win, then yes. They're ahead in the opinion polls, at about 31% last week, after Mr Johnson took over from the previous Prime Minister, Theresa May, in July. The main opposition Labour Party is trailing by 10 to 12 points, on about 21%. Labour is divided between traditional working-class areas, which tend to support Brexit, and voters in cities like London who are more in favour of remaining in the EU. But a Conservative win is not necessarily in the bag. Other parties, including the centre-left Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalists, are all staunchly opposed to Brexit on any terms. And then there's the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage, whose central policy is to get the UK out of the EU. The fluid political situation and tight opinion polls make it difficult to say who might get a majority, if anyone. This makes any election difficult to predict. Just ask Mrs May: she called an early election in 2017 but returned with a reduced majority, dependent on 10 MPs from Northern Ireland. As a result, she had to agree to a deal which would keep the UK aligned with EU rules for longer than Brexit supporters would accept. And so here we are.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49495757

2019-08-28 14:43:04+00:00

politics

political process

bbc--2019-09-26--Chirac Political chameleon who charmed France

bbc

Chirac: Political chameleon who charmed France

Anyone who lived in France around the turn of the century will remember the special persona, a kind of avuncular clan elder, adopted by Jacques Chirac for his presidential broadcasts. With an air of almost pained sincerity, he would furrow his brow at the latest negative turn of events. Then in rich, reassuring tones came the unvarying intro: "Mes chers compatriotes…" (My dear compatriots). How many people fell for his Gallic charm, one will never know. Plenty of French men and women regarded Jacques Chirac as one of the biggest political charlatans of all time. Not a bad man, they said. Not even, for all the Paris city hall scandals, particularly corrupt. No, for his critics the president was something else, but worse. He was a man who was bereft of beliefs, but who played the political game to perfection and numbed his nation through the start of a long decline. But even if we accept the version of Jacques Chirac as a kind of empty-headed hypnotherapist, sleep-walking his country into second-tier status, we still need to explain how he got away with it. Why did his patients, France's voters - his "chers compatriotes" - keep coming back for more? The answer is that the French always had a soft spot for someone who reflected back upon them much of their own self-perception. Here was a man rooted in the countryside, but who adopted with ease the social superiority of the Parisian. His family were secular Republicans, but he married into the Catholic upper strata. The French may have abandoned religion, but they are conservatives at heart and the Church is bound up in their self-image. He was friendly to the United States - he spent time there as a young man - but never lost the instinctive French suspicion of "les Anglo-Saxons". The highpoint of his presidencies was when he refused to kowtow to Washington over the Iraq war. On a baser note, he drank hefty amounts of beer, ate like a true gourmand, and was in true French style faithfully unfaithful to his wife Bernadette. He later had the nickname "Mr Three Minutes - shower included". At the latter end of his second term, with his opinion polls floundering, he was even voted the man most French people would like to have dinner with. Jacques Chirac was old enough to remember World War Two and he came of age at the start of France's long period of post-war growth. He saw service in Algeria, studied at the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration when ENA was still seen as a dynamic agent of change, and entered government in the technological-industrial-scientific heyday of the late 1960s. In other words Chirac came from a time when France radiated self-confidence and economic power. As early as 1976, when he had already served his first term as prime minister, Chirac was being caricatured in the latest Asterix album as the archetypal technocratic high-achiever. Anyone who appears in an Asterix album has clearly touched some affectionate nerve among the French. With Chirac, it was his personal association with a time (under presidents Charles De Gaulle and Georges Pompidou) of energy, modernity and growth. He was never really Charles De Gaulle's man, though he claimed the legacy. He betrayed Valery Giscard d'Estaing in 1981, and preferred political flirtation with the Socialist Francois Mitterand. His politics were all over the place. As a youth he sold Communist party tracts, and when he founded the Gaullist RPR in 1976 it had a distinctly pro-labour feel. In the 1980s he was a free marketeer, before switching back again and campaigning in the 1995 presidential election on a promise to end the "social fracture". Just as inconsistent were his views on Europe. Originally hostile to Giscard d'Estaing's euro-federalism, he gradually abandoned the nation-staters and by 2005 was urging a new EU constitution. The people were asked to vote on it, but said no. The lack of principle became the stuff of jokes. Chirac was Chameleon Bonaparte. When in 2011, after leaving office, he was finally condemned for vote-rigging in his long tenure as mayor of Paris, it was joked (abroad - because it does not work in French) that at least now he had one conviction. But maybe it was also this absence of firm ideological ground that created his appeal to the French. France is a country that over two centuries has been riven over and again by revolution, civil disorder and ideological dissension. Today, more than ever, there are people who would with little pushing take up the cudgel. Chirac's presidential broadcasts were infuriating because behind the earnest frowns and the dark brown tones, there was never the remotest substance. However this instinct to consensus that made him so ineffectual was also Chirac's political touchstone. He may have zigzagged from right to left, totally failed to address the country's economic decline, and botched every meaningful reform. But you couldn't ever dislike the man. He was very French.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37420376

2019-09-26 10:41:27+00:00

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political process

bbc--2019-11-21--Brazil's President Bolsonaro launches new political party

bbc

Brazil's President Bolsonaro launches new political party

Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has launched a new political party a day after leaving the right-wing Social Liberal Party (PSL). His Alliance for Brazil (APB) met in a hotel in the capital Brasilia with hundreds of people in attendance. The party would fight corruption and advance Christian values, he said. Mr Bolsonaro left the PSL following a row with its founder over control of campaign funds. He wants PSL lawmakers and and senators to follow him out. The PSL surged in popularity to become the second-largest in the Brazilian Congress after Mr Bolsonaro joined it last year for his presidential run. • Is the honeymoon period over for Brazil's Bolsonaro? The APB now needs to collect about 500,000 signatures over the next six months to be able to register for next year's municipal elections. Organisers hope to attract support from the country's Evangelical Christian population, many of whom voted for Mr Bolsonaro last year because of his stance on abortion, homosexuality and marijuana use. Mr Bolsonaro, who came to power in January, is a deeply divisive figure who has made racist, homophobic and misogynistic remarks. He will be APB's president while his eldest son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, will be vice-president. "We have the opportunity to unite all Brazilians of good faith for the future of our fatherland," the president said at the event. He added that Brazil had recovered international confidence since he took office last year and now had the lowest interest rates in its history.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-50507996

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 20:27:52 GMT

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political process

bbc--2019-11-21--Impeachment inquiry: Sondland's 'domestic political errand'

bbc

Impeachment inquiry: Sondland's 'domestic political errand'

The big names who had a bad day at the US hearing The US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, points the finger at Republicans in his testimony.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50509798

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 20:34:20 GMT

politics

political process

bbc--2019-11-22--Israel's Netanyahu facing fight of his political life

bbc

Israel's Netanyahu facing fight of his political life

Anyone who thought a decision on the long-running corruption investigation embroiling Israel's prime minister would resolve the country's political turmoil was wrong. On Thursday Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to indictments on charges of bribery and fraud with a vitriolic attack on law enforcement, the judicial system and what he sees as hostile left-wing media. He claimed that police and prosecutors were conducting a grand conspiracy to remove him from power. This was a line of attack he'd taken as the investigation closed in, and one he's expected to continue as the country staggers towards more months of political crisis. And although Mr Netanyahu has been weakened, he has time on his side as he continues to struggle for political survival. Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced the indictment after three years of probes into the prime minister's relationships with wealthy friends. Mr Netanyahu is accused of accepting expensive gifts in exchange for political favours, and doing deals to get good press coverage. Mr Mandelblit insisted he was not politically motivated but had acted professionally to uphold the law. The force of Mr Netanyahu's response alarmed observers of Israel's political scene. "He will set everything ablaze," wrote Ben Caspit of Maariv, a daily newspaper. "He won't stop until all is rubble." Whatever the case, this certainly is uncharted territory. It's the first time a sitting prime minister in Israel has been indicted with criminal charges. And it comes in the midst of an unprecedented political stalemate. Mr Netanyahu and his main political opponent Benny Gantz have both failed to form a government after two rounds of inconclusive elections. The indictment seems to have made the chances of cobbling together a working coalition even more remote, increasing the prospect of another return to the ballot box. A lot will depend on senior members of Mr Netanyahu's Likud party. Until now they have maintained their tribal loyalty to the prime minister, but he is facing a possible challenge from within. The education minister, Gideon Saar, has called for party primaries to replace him. There may well yet be others. There may also be shifts in political alignments as the right-wing parties allied with Likud assess the price to be paid in the event of another election under Mr Netanyahu's leadership. There's little doubt amongst political observers that Mr Netanyahu wants an election, which at the very least would buy him time. • Netanyahu: What are the allegations? He's been preoccupied with efforts to form a right-wing government that would vote to grant him immunity from prosecution. Despite failing to do so, his status as a member of the Knesset gives him 30 days to ask the legislative body to grant him such immunity. The indictment cannot be formally filed unless this process happens. But that request for immunity cannot be made until there is a functioning government. There isn't one now and won't be for even longer if Israelis are forced to vote yet again. That would give the prime minister more room to manoeuvre, but could also increase the pressure on him to step down. His political opponents are making those demands, and even some pro-Netanyahu media outlets are saying it would be a good idea. Israeli law does not require the prime minister to leave office if indicted, but it's never been tested with a concrete case. There are some who fear that an election would be a "civil war without arms" between Mr Netanyahu's energised base and Israelis who are fed up with his legal woes and attacks on the country's institutions. Others see an opportunity. The prime minister's criticism of the media and his call to "investigate the investigators" has drawn comparisons with his close ally, US President Donald Trump. Except for a key difference, writes Gil Hoffman in the right-wing Jerusalem Post: "In Israel a prime minister can be ousted much easier than the president of the United States… because our elections are not limited to every four years." And on Thursday night, a third one in less than 12 months became almost inevitable.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-50516627

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 15:20:13 GMT

politics

political process

bbc--2019-12-09--'No political bias' in FBI probe of Trump campaign

bbc

'No political bias' in FBI probe of Trump campaign

A US watchdog has found no evidence of political bias when the FBI launched an inquiry into the 2016 Trump campaign, despite "serious performance failures". The US Department of Justice inspector general's report concluded the law enforcement bureau had "authorised purpose" to initiate the investigation. But it also found applications to wiretap a Trump aide had "significant inaccuracies and omissions". The 476-page report provides fodder for Trump critics and supporters alike. Inspector General Michael Horowitz sought to assess the basis for the FBI's surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser who had lived and worked in Russia. How did the report criticise the FBI? The inspector general identified 17 "significant inaccuracies or omissions" when the FBI applied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) for surveillance warrants to monitor Mr Page's communications. Mr Horowitz wrote that the errors resulted in "applications that made it appear that the information supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case". The watchdog also found that an FBI lawyer assigned to the Russia case doctored an email from the CIA to a colleague that was used in an application from the bureau to monitor Mr Page. The attorney "altered an email that the other US government agency had sent" with the effect that "the email inaccurately stated that Page was 'not a source' for the other agency", the report said. The watchdog also found FBI personnel "fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a Fisa application are 'scrupulously accurate'". The report said "so many basic and fundamental errors... raised significant questions regarding the FBI chain of command's management and supervision of the Fisa process". How did the report back the FBI? The inspector general found no basis for conservative claims that partisan hostility to Mr Trump had influenced the bureau's probe. "We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations," he said. Mr Horowitz also did not find that the FBI's mistakes were intentional. The investigation was opened "in compliance with department and FBI policies", the report said. Mr Horowitz also found the FBI's use of confidential informants was in compliance with agency rules. What about the 'Steele dossier'? The watchdog faulted how the FBI presented the work of former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who authored the so-called Steele dossier - a series of largely unsubstantiated allegations about Mr Trump. Mr Steele was hired to do the research through a law firm on behalf of Mr Trump's political opponents, including Hillary Clinton's campaign. Mr Horowitz said the FBI "overstated the significance" of Mr Steele's past work. The watchdog also said the FBI left out relevant information about one of Mr Steele's sources, whom Mr Steele himself had called a "boaster" prone to "embellishment". The report noted that the CIA itself viewed the Steele dossier as little more than "an internet rumour". But the watchdog said ex-FBI Director James Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, argued the Steele dossier should not be dismissed. While Mr Trump has often spoken of a so-called deep state plot to undermine his presidency, Monday's watchdog report also makes clear some FBI employees celebrated his victory over Hillary Clinton. One FBI agent said in an instant message he "was so elated with the election" and likened the coverage to "watching a Super Bowl comeback". Another agent sent a message on the morning after the election saying: "Trump!" His colleague replied: "Hahaha." "LOL," the agent responded. Mr Trump has often cited messages previously uncovered by Mr Horowitz that were sent on work phones between two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The messages expressed "statements of hostility toward then-candidate Trump", the watchdog notes. But the watchdog found no evidence that Mr Strzok or Ms Page's investigative actions were influenced by their own political opinions. Agents at the bureau are supposed to be apolitical, but they are now at the centre of a ferocious row. For those at the FBI, it's a nightmare. The "G-men", as the government men were known in the 1930s, were once portrayed as good guys in Hollywood. Overall FBI agents are more white, male and conservative than the general population in the US, and they were known in the past for their aggressive campaign against communists. But now Trump has cast them as "Deep Staters", bureaucrats who seek to undermine his presidency because of supposed Democratic leanings. However much the G-men might prefer to stay above the fray, they've been sucked into the biggest drama in town: the Trump Show. Speaking at the White House on Monday, President Donald Trump said of the report's findings: "It's a disgrace what's happened." "This was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it, and they got caught," he added. US Attorney General William Barr rejected the inspector general's main conclusion that there was enough evidence for the FBI to launch its investigation of the Trump campaign. America's top law official said the probe by the FBI, which he oversees, was launched "on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken". John Durham, a federal prosecutor hand-picked by the attorney general to conduct a pending, separate criminal inquiry into the roots of the Russia investigation, said he did not agree with some of Mr Horowitz's conclusions. Democrats said the report undercuts Mr Trump's repeated claims that he was the victim of a "witch hunt". "It was never a witch hunt," Democratic Senator Mark Warner said on Twitter. "It was the men and women of federal law enforcement doing their jobs." Mr Horowitz reviewed more than one million records and conducted over 170 interviews after launching his investigation in March last year. He scrutinised the FBI's process for launching its 2016 inquiry, known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane, to look for any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government before the US presidential election. That FBI investigation was ultimately taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr Mueller's own 22-month inquiry concluded in April this year there was not enough evidence to conclude the Trump campaign had conspired with the Kremlin to sway the 2016 US presidential election.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50720345

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 21:54:59 GMT

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-02-06--May meets Northern Ireland politicians over Brexit

bbcuk

May meets Northern Ireland politicians over Brexit

Theresa May has held talks about Brexit with Northern Ireland's five main political parties at Stormont. The PM was on a two-day visit to try to reassure people she can secure a Brexit deal that avoids a hard border. Speaking on Wednesday, European Council President Donald Tusk said the EU would "insist" on the Irish backstop. Mr Tusk also said that there was a "special place in hell" for "those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan of how to carry it safely". He was speaking after talks with Taoiseach (Irish PM) Leo Varadkar in Brussels. Mrs May is due to meet European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Thursday in an effort to secure changes to her Brexit deal. The EU has maintained it will not renegotiate the withdrawal agreement, including the Irish border backstop. On Tuesday, Mrs May told business leaders in Belfast that she wants changes to the controversial backstop but she suggested that she is not seeking to remove it from her Brexit deal. Theresa May is in Northern Ireland meeting the different political parties - including the DUP, whose votes she needs in Parliament, who are totally opposed to the current version of the controversial backstop, as well as Sinn Féin, who are just as adamant that it must remain. Tomorrow she will be in Brussels, asking again for the EU to amend the policy, seeking either a time limit or a legal upgrade to the promise that both sides will only use it if they really, really, really have to, and they don't expect it to last for ever. In short, Wednesday's a chance for the PM to test out what she'll ask for; tomorrow is an opportunity to sell it as hard as she can in Brussels. Remember she has asked for these changes before and been turned down. And she's heard before from both sides in Northern Ireland how dug in their positions are. So can she do anything other than take one more turn around the same carousel while the clock ticks down? Mrs May held meetings about Brexit and Northern Ireland's political deadlock with Stormont's five biggest political parties: There has been no functioning devolved government since January 2017, when a row between the DUP and Sinn Féin over a flawed green energy scheme collapsed the power-sharing executive. It sparked a snap election but, since then, various talks processes have collapsed and the Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley had to take control of financial matters and pass Stormont's budget bills through Westminster. For almost 10 years before that, the DUP and Sinn Féin worked together in government under a system of mandatory coalition, where unionist and nationalist parties shared power. Leader Arlene Foster reiterated the party's opposition to the backstop and said Mrs May must "stand strong" in her talks with the EU. Brexit spokesperson Sammy Wilson responded to Mr Tusk's comments by calling him a "devilish euro maniac", and accused the European Council president of having "fanned the flames of fear" to try and overturn the referendum result. President Mary Lou McDonald said Donald Tusk's words were "accurately reflecting the outrage" people in NI feel about how Brexit has been handled. She added that the party's meeting with the PM was direct, but offered nothing new and she accused Mrs May of having "no honour". Ms McDonald also reiterated the party's support for the backstop and that a border poll should take place if there is a no-deal Brexit. Leader Robin Swann said his party would not accept a time-limited backstop, something the PM suggested when his party met her. He added that Mrs May wanted to focus on Brexit and the UUP had to "drag" her to a place where they could raise the restoration of Stormont. Mr Swann said his party told her they wanted direct rule implemented in Northern Ireland if there is a no-deal Brexit. Leader Colum Eastwood said that his party had told Mrs May that it is now time to "put up or shut up". He said it was clear the backstop was the only viable solution, save keeping the UK in the single market and the customs union. He added that he had been "infuriated" when the government voted in favour of an amendment last week that called for alternative arrangements to replace the backstop. Leader Naomi Long said the time for "assurances" about Brexit from the government was over, describing her party's talks with Mrs May as "constructive but very direct". Ms Long reiterated that the party had heard nothing new from Mrs May and that it still backed the Brexit deal that included the backstop. The backstop is a commitment to avoid physical barriers or checks on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, if no UK-EU trade deal is agreed before the Brexit transition period ends. Many people fear the return of customs checks would put the peace process at risk. In Tuesday's speech in Belfast, Mrs May said: "There is no suggestion that we are not going to ensure in the future there is provision for this insurance policy... the backstop." However, she indicated she would seek changes to address concerns raised by MPs about its "potential indefinite nature" when they overwhelmingly rejected her Brexit deal. Last week, MPs voted for an amendment tabled by Conservative grandee Sir Graham Brady - and backed by the PM - which "requires the Northern Ireland backstop to be replaced with alternative arrangements to avoid a hard border". Many fear the "temporary single customs territory" created under the backstop plan would keep the UK tied to EU rules in the long term. Downing Street has insisted the government is still considering alternatives. On Wednesday, the Alternative Arrangements Working Group, comprised of Leave and Remain MPs, will conclude three days of talks aimed at finding other Brexit options that would avoid a hard border. MPs have been looking at "alternative arrangements" to the backstop, which Mrs May has said she will discuss with EU leaders. They include: The UK is due to leave the EU at 23:00 GMT on Friday 29 March, when the two-year limit on withdrawal negotiations enforced by the Article 50 process expires. If MPs approve a deal with Brussels, the parties will then have until the end of 2020 to negotiate a future trade deal. If that is not in place by the end of this transition period, the backstop kicks in. Without a deal, however, there would be no backstop and no transition period. The prime minister has said she is "determined" to deliver Brexit on time but a number of cabinet ministers have indicated they would be willing to agree to a short extension to finalise legislation for Brexit.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-47063078

2019-02-06 13:14:44+00:00

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-02-18--Its time we dumped old-fashioned politics

bbcuk

'It's time we dumped old-fashioned politics'

The seven MPs said they will sit in parliament as an independent group. They explained to the press why they decided to resign. Chuka Umunna, MP for Streatham said the group had taken 'the first step in leaving the old tribal politics behind' and called on other MPs who share their views to follow them.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47277354

2019-02-18 13:02:24+00:00

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-03-29--Independent Group of MPs to become political party

bbcuk

Independent Group of MPs to become political party

The Independent Group (TIG) of MPs has applied to become a political party to take part in European elections in May if they go ahead. The group intends to call itself Change UK, and has named Heidi Allen as its interim leader. The government has warned that unless the EU withdrawal agreement is approved later, the UK risks having to take part in May's European Parliament polls. TIG said it would field a substantial number of candidates if this happened. But the group's choice of name has caused controversy, with the petitions website change.org understood to be considering legal action. The company, which says it has 15 million users in the UK, is understood to have contacted the elections watchdog amid concerns the Independent Group is trying to harness some of its profile and support by deliberately choosing a similar name. The Independent Group, currently made up of eight former Labour and three ex-Tory MPs, has said it had applied to register as a political party in time for it to take part in those polls under the name "Change UK - The Independent Group". If MPs reject the terms of the UK's withdrawal for the third time later, the UK will have until 12 April to come up with an alternative way forward for Brexit. In this scenario, it is thought EU leaders will insist on a longer delay to the UK's departure - which could involve the UK having to put up candidates for European elections between 23 and 26 May. If the elections watchdog approves its application and the polls go ahead, it said it would field a substantial number of candidates from backgrounds outside of politics to try and "shake up the two-party system". Ms Allen, a former Conservative MP, told the BBC that the European elections would be a "weathervane moment for the country" and a "proxy for another referendum". "It is real opportunity," she said. "The country is crying out for someone to lead and say we can just stay." She claimed there was enormous support for a new political movement but she did not underestimate the challenges involved. "This is David and Goliath stuff. We are literally just starting out and building a party together." She said there had no squabbling over her appointment as interim leader and it felt a "nice fit" for her to take the role alongside Chuka Umunna, who is acting as the group's principal spokesman. The group will elect a permanent leader at its first party conference in September. The 11 MPs in the group, who include Mike Gapes, Chuka Umunna, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston, will continue in their current roles in Parliament. Mrs May has said the public would find taking part in European elections unacceptable and has appealed to MPs to support the agreement to ensure the UK is able to leave the EU on 22 May in an orderly fashion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47745166

2019-03-29 14:06:13+00:00

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-05-27--What do the European election results tell us about UK politics

bbcuk

What do the European election results tell us about UK politics?

The leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn has said: "There has to be an agreement with the European Union and there then has to be a public vote."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48428662

2019-05-27 23:13:45+00:00

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-08-08--The rise in political adverts on social media

bbcuk

The rise in political adverts on social media

Social media platforms have become the new campaign battlegrounds for UK political parties. Adverts on sites like Facebook are increasingly being used by parties to target specific voters - but no one is regulating how it's done. The BBC’s media editor Amol Rajan has been exploring the tactics and asks whether anything needs to change.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49284089

2019-08-08 23:02:53+00:00

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-09-06--PM moves political battleground to Scotland

bbcuk

PM moves political battleground to Scotland

Boris Johnson is to move the political battleground to Scotland when he visits Aberdeenshire to announce additional funding for Scottish farmers. The trip marks the end of a bruising week in which the PM lost Commons votes on his general election plan and a bill designed to stop a no-deal Brexit. The SNP said the motion to hold an early poll was a plot to make sure the UK left the EU without a deal. The prime minister's trip will include a visit to the Queen's Balmoral estate. He will also visit a farm, days after the government revealed a £160m funding package for Scottish farmers. The move settled a long-running row over the distribution of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy payments across the UK. And Mr Johnson will use his visit to Scotland to announce an additional £51.4m for Scottish farmers over the next two years. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Mr Johnson says the extra funding would "correct an injustice", but also help Scottish farmers "secure their future" But Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, insisted the money should have been given to farmers and crofters in Scotland in 2016. "Three years too late the case is coming to Scotland," he said. The prime minister - who lost his majority in the House of Commons this week - also used his article in the Telegraph to vow to prevent the break-up of the UK. "I find it hard to comprehend why anyone would wish to break apart a successful country, tear the cross of St Andrew out of the Union Flag and draw an international frontier across our island," he writes. Scotland's first minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon on Thursday said her party would pledge to oppose Brexit and insist on "Scotland having the right to choose our own future". Mr Johnson has said he would "rather be dead in a ditch than delay Brexit", but has declined to say whether he would resign if a postponement - which he has repeatedly ruled out - had to happen. On a visit to Glasgow on Thursday, former prime minister Sir John Major criticised Mr Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament. The ex-Tory leader accused the Government of operating via "bluster and threat in a climate of aggressive bullying" and urged Mr Johnson to ditch his "overmighty advisers" The prime minister's younger brother, Jo Johnson, resigned as a minister and MP on Thursday, saying he had been "torn between family loyalty and the national interest". The prime minister told the BBC he was "very sad to see the loss of Jo", as well as of the group of 21 rebel Tory MPs who were expelled from the party earlier this week. Mr Johnson is expected to cut short his visit to the monarch's summer residence - a traditional prime ministerial trip each summer - because he needs to concentrate on the Brexit crisis. Rather than the usual weekend-long visit, he and his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, are likely to return to London on Saturday. The funding was announced as the UK government confirmed it would work to ensure cash for farmers was fairly allocated across the whole of the UK, and that the industry will be ready for a "prosperous future" outside the EU. Those are key recommendations from Lord Bew's newly-published review of farm funding. NFU Scotland president Andrew McCornick described the money as being the "largest funding uplift for the sector in recent memory". But the SNP's Stewart Stevenson said Mr Johnson was like a "thief returning to the scene of a crime". Labour's Lesley Laird, the shadow Scottish secretary, said the prime minister was "no friend" of Scottish agriculture. "Boris Johnson's disastrous plan for a no-deal Brexit will be calamitous for Scottish farming," she added. While Mr Johnson travels north of the border on Friday, judges across the UK will rule on whether he broke the law by proroguing Parliament. Scotland's highest civil court released documents which suggest he agreed to suspend Parliament two weeks before making it public. Judges in Edinburgh have been hearing an appeal by a group of MPs and peers who want them to overturn a ruling that Mr Johnson had not broken the law. Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett and two other judges at the High Court in London have also been urged to find that Mr Johnson's 28 August advice to the Queen was an "unlawful abuse of power".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-49599334

2019-09-06 04:46:48+00:00

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-09-10--Brexit What will politicians be doing while Parliament is suspended

bbcuk

Brexit: What will politicians be doing while Parliament is suspended?

So, Parliament has been shut down for five weeks. You might think it's the perfect opportunity for MPs to take a breather from Brexit and visit the sunnier shores of Europe. But the prorogation of Parliament - that's the official term - doesn't actually mean that politicians will be going on holiday. They'll still be thinking about Europe - but mainly in terms of Brexit - along with a whole host of other issues. So here's a breakdown of what MPs might be getting up to. Parliament has voted against having an election, not once but twice - so you might be wondering why they will be preparing for an election. Well, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants one to restore the Conservative Party's majority in Parliament - to make it easier for him to deliver Brexit. He lost his majority last week, and after the expulsion of 21 of his own MPs, they only have 288 MPs left in the party - that's 38 MPs below a majority. Opposition parties including the Labour Party may have voted against an election - but they say they still want one once it's clear we are not heading for a no-deal Brexit. So expect the election planning machines of every party to be cranking into gear. If you think a Parliament shutdown means an end to Brexit talk - you'd be wrong. Mr Johnson has said the government would use the time to carry on negotiating a deal with the EU, while still "preparing to leave without one". Meanwhile opposition parties will be trying to prevent a no-deal from happening - a law aiming to stop a no-deal Brexit on 31 October has been passed in Parliament. This means that if a deal is not agreed between the UK and EU by 19 October, and MPs don't vote in favour of leaving with no deal, then the prime minister will be legally obliged to ask the EU for a Brexit delay. But the PM has said his "government will not delay Brexit any further"... So this means there's a big chance you'll be seeing lots of legal battles taking place about - you've guessed it - Brexit. There have been suggestions that the government could ignore the anti no-deal law that was passed - some ministers have called it "lousy" and said they would "test to the limit" what it required of them. But the PM has been warned this could cause a legal challenge. And MPs have also voted for the government to release details of its no-deal plans and the conversations its had about the suspension of parliament. But the Attorney General Geoffrey Cox - the government's top legal adviser - has questioned the legal right of releasing communications. And if that wasn't enough - there's also a legal challenge to the original decision to suspend parliament. Former Conservative PM, Sir John Major, and anti-Brexit campaigner and businesswoman, Gina Miller, had their challenge rejected by the High Court - but an appeal is expected to be heard at the Supreme Court on 17 September. Party conferences are a bit like the Glastonbury of the political calendar. Usually they're about the key issues - with speeches by big political players and plenty of panels, debates and drinks receptions to attend. There's even the odd karaoke session. But this year - it'll be about elections. Speeches and promises by the key leaders will be about pitching their big ideas and making their parties look electable to the public. And of course, during this time, MPs will also be heading back to their constituencies - the areas they represent. Normally, they would be listening to residents speak about the local issues which impact them. But this time - like with most things - they'll probably be faced with questions about Brexit and how that's going to turn out. Parliament is normally prorogued once a year for a short period - usually in April or May. It's different to a recess - a break in the Parliamentary session - which was due to happen this year from roughly 13 September to 8 October. It's normal for new governments to shut down parliament - it lets them hold a Queen's speech - setting out its plans for the future. But the length of time varies - in 2016 Parliament was closed for four working days, while in 2014 it was closed for 13 days. And this year, Parliament will be suspended for 24 working days. But because of Brexit and the choppy political waters - the timing of this suspension has been controversial. And it also means that as much as they might feel ready to, MPs won't be able to kick back and relax on their sun loungers. Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-49647219

2019-09-10 12:23:24+00:00

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-10-09--Hunt: 'The EU don't understand British politics'

bbcuk

Hunt: 'The EU don't understand British politics'

Jeremy Hunt has told the BBC he fears a "catastrophic failure in statecraft" will prevent a Brexit deal being reached. In an exclusive interview with political editor Laura Kuenssberg, the former foreign secretary and Tory leadership contender said the EU does not understand the state of British politics and was beset by "bureaucratic inertia". "If you're trying to get 27 countries to agree a common position the easiest thing is always to do nothing," he said. "And that's the risk we face."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49995014

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 20:59:23 GMT

politics

political process

bbcuk--2019-10-31--Women MPs say abuse forcing them from politics

bbcuk

Women MPs say abuse forcing them from politics

MPs have increasingly become the target of abuse - and some women politicians say they are bearing the brunt of it. Labour MP Rachel Reeves - who has written a history of women in Parliament - recalls how the first female MP to take up her seat, Nancy Astor, had to push past jeering male colleagues in the chamber to get there. But the abuse has intensified in recent years, with death and rape threats "a daily occurrence for women MPs", she says. More than 50 MPs have announced they are standing down at the next general election on 12 December- 18 of them female. But a number of high-profile women have cited abuse as a factor in their decision. • LIVE: Corbyn pledges to transform UK at campaign launch • Which MPs are standing down at the election? • How many threats do MPs receive? • The first 24 hours of social media election ads Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan has been subject to a number of threats, including phone calls from 64-year-old Robert Vidler telling her her "days were numbered". He was jailed for 18 weeks. She said being an MP had had a "clear impact" on her family, and the abuse had "changed enormously" in the past decade "because of how strongly people feel about the current political situation" - in a time when Brexit deliberations have dominated. But the minister is far from alone in her experience. Liberal Democrat - and former Tory - MP Heidi Allen, is also stepping down due to the abuse she has faced. This includes death threats related to her stance on Brexit sent from a fake email address by 51-year-old Jarod Kirkman. He was later jailed for 42 weeks. In a letter to her constituents, the Remain campaigner said: "Nobody in any job should have to put up with threats, aggressive emails, being shouted at in the street, sworn at on social media, nor have to install panic alarms at home. "Of course public scrutiny is to be expected, but lines are all too often regularly crossed and the effect is utterly dehumanising." The abuse is not just targeted at those who want to stay in the EU. Tory Brexiteer Andrea Jenkyns has had a raft of abuse, from emails threatening to sexually mutilate her through to suicide-related graffiti at her constituency office. "The ones that really get to me are the ones that call me a bad mother," she said. But Ms Jenkyns is still standing for her Morley and Outwood seat. "I am here to do a job and I love representing my area," she said. "I am dealing with a number of local cases, including a terrible one to do with child abuse, so that does keep you grounded. "But if I gave up, I would let them win that way." Lib Dem MP Sarah Wollaston - who left the Conservatives at the same time as Ms Allen - has been advised by police not to advertise her whereabouts, putting an end to public meetings in her constituency. But like Ms Jenkyns, she also plans to run again in her Totnes seat, telling BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "You can't respond to [abuse] by giving in to it. You have to confront it and keep going." She said her colleagues had suffered even more serious abuse. Ms Wollaston said: "I look around my select committee table... and I look at [Labour MP] Rosie Cooper, who has had actual plots to murder her, [Lib Dem MP] Luciana Berger, who has several people in prison for threats to her and her family, and I have had threats and one person jailed for threats to myself and others." Labour's shadow home secretary Diane Abbott knows the issue more than most. A study by Amnesty International showed she received almost half of of all abusive tweets that were sent to female MPs in the run up to the last election in 2017. Despite that, she will be a leading voice in her party's election campaign. She told Today: "It is not about weathering [the abuse], it's just about putting one foot in front of the other." A spokesman for the House of Commons said it worked closely with local police forces on the safety and security of MPs, and kept arrangements under constant review. The facts and figures of who is standing down Ahead of the 2019 election, 57 MPs so far have announced they won't be standing. This figure is quite small compared to previous elections, with 149 stepping aside in 2010 and 117 in 1997. But the period since the last election in 2017 is not long. Some have questioned, whether this time it is skewed more towards women. Tory Chairman James Cleverly retweeted statistics showing 32% of MPs standing down were female - in line with the current overall representation in the House of Commons, where 32% of the 650 MPs are women. The figure was right. Of the total leaving, 18 are female - which can be rounded up to 32% or down to 31%. But Lib Dem Sarah Wollaston said those women leaving the Conservatives were much younger and had spent less time as MPs in the Commons - compared to the older men who were at the age of retirement. And that they were leaving sooner because of the abuse. The average age of the male MPs leaving the Commons is 63, compared to 59 for females. It is true, however, that of the Conservative women departing they are on average younger than this - at 51. The average length of service for the Conservative male MP was almost 18 years, compared to 9 and a half for female MPs. Of the MPs standing down, 89% voted to Remain in the referendum. And of the five who voted Leave, three were Labour MPs.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50246969

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 16:26:31 GMT

politics

political process

tass--2019-10-12--Russian senior diplomat, Syrian opposition politician discuss situation in northern Syria

tass

Russian senior diplomat, Syrian opposition politician discuss situation in northern Syria

MOSCOW, October 12. /TASS/. Russian Special Presidential Representative for the Middle East and Africa Mikhail Bogdanov and Qadri Jamil, a leader of the Syrian Opposition’s Moscow Group, held talks on Saturday, focusing on a political solution to the Syria crisis and a military and political situation in the northeastern Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. "The talks focused on the unfolding military and political scenario in Syria, particularly in the country’s northeast, as well as a political solution to the Syria crisis. They placed an emphasis on the goal of ensuring the constitution committee’s sustainable work, in accordance with the rulings of the Syrian National Dialogue Congress held in Sochi and Resolution 2254 of the United Nations Security Council," the foreign ministry said. On October 9, Ankara launched an offensive in north Syria dubbed Operation Peace Spring, which began with airstrikes on Kurdish units. The objective is to establish a safety zone in northern Syria for protection of the Turkish border. In addition, Syrian refugees could return to that area from Turkey, Ankara believes. Syria’s SANA news agency slammed Ankara’s operation as an act of aggression. On September 23, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced the establishment of Syria’s constitutional committee. The first session is scheduled for October 29-30 in Geneva.

https://tass.com/russia/1082847

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 20:13:58 +0300

politics

political process

tass--2019-12-15--Senator says Russia should leave Japanese politician’s remark on Kuril Islands unanswered

tass

Senator says Russia should leave Japanese politician’s remark on Kuril Islands unanswered

MOSCOW, December 15. /TASS/. Russia should not respond to a provocative statement by Chairman of the opposition’s Japanese Communist Party Kazuo Shii on talks about the Kuril archipelago, First Deputy Chairman of the Russian upper house’s International Affairs Committee, Vladimir Dzhabarov told TASS. The Japanese Communist Party leader said in an interview published by Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper on Sunday that at talks with Moscow Tokyo should outline its stance that the entire Kuril archipelago is Japan’s territory. According to the politician, this would help Japan return the Southern Kuril Islands. "I believe we should not react to this statement at all. As far as I know, the Communist Party of Japan is not the ruling party and it does not unite large social groups either. To tell you the truth, I have not even heard about this party before. Their statement is provocative and is aimed at fueling tensions in the relations between our countries," Dzhabarov said. The senator emphasized that Russia’s condition for signing the peace treaty is an absolute recognition by Japan of the Second World War’s outcome. "If it does not recognize it, then probably, the peace treaty cannot be signed. As for dividing the Kuril Islands, Russia is not going to discuss this at all," he stressed. Russia and Japan have been in talks to sign a peace treaty since the mid-20th century. The main stumbling block to achieving this is the ownership issue over the Southern Kuril Islands. After the end of World War II, the Kuril Islands were incorporated into the Soviet Union. However, the ownership of Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan Islands and the Habomai Islands is being challenged by Japan. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has stated many times that Russia’s sovereignty over the islands is beyond doubt. In 1956, the Soviet Union and Japan signed a joint declaration on ceasing the state of war, but no peace treaty has been signed so far. On November 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed at the Singapore summit to accelerate the Russian-Japanese peace treaty talks basing on the joint declaration as of October 19, 1956. The joint declaration between the Soviet Union and Japan stated that the state of war had ended whereas diplomatic and consular relations were restored.

https://tass.com/politics/1099531

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 16:51:38 +0300

politics

political process

france24--2019-04-23--Synagogue that survived Mosul battle now faces reconstruction challenge

france24

Synagogue that survived Mosul battle now faces reconstruction challenge

The owner of a Jewish synagogue that was damaged in the war against the Islamic State group wants to reconstruct the ancient site and preserve the cultural diversity that marked Mosul’s Old City. But it's an uphill challenge.

FRANCE 24

https://www.france24.com/en/20190423-iraq-mosul-jewish-synagogue-damage-reconstruction

2019-04-23 15:43:45+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

newswars--2019-03-13--China Ready to Help Venezuela Restore Electricity

newswars

China Ready to Help Venezuela Restore Electricity

This comes after Venezuelan President Maduro said he would request China, Russia, Cuba and Iran, as well as the UN, to probe a recent attack on the country’s power grids that left the country’s vast territories without electricity for several days. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has voiced Beijing’s readiness to help Venezuela restore its energy supply system. At the same time, according to a statement made by Venezuelan Minister of Communication and Information Jorge Rodriguez on Tuesday, operation of the country’s power grids has almost fully resumed throughout the country, which had experienced a blackout for five days. While Caracas blames the US and the Western-backed opposition for the “sabotage” of the electricity system, President Nicolas Maduro has also announced he would ask the United Nations, Russia China, Cuba and Iran to probe the reasons behind the cyberattack on the energy supply system. According to Maduro, after a five-day nationwide blackout the Venezuelan authorities have managed to eliminate the consequences of the attack that “was carried out from the US territory”. The blackout hit Venezuela on 7 March, as national electricity supplier Corpoelec reported of “sabotage” at a major hydroelectric power plant called Guri. Media subsequently reported about power outages in 21 of 23 Venezuelan states. Maduro has blamed the United States for waging an energy war against Venezuela, while Washington has denied having a role in the crisis. Dr. Nick Begich breaks down the booming middle class in Asia and exposes how the west’s economy has been systematically transferred eastward to allow for this financial boom, especially in China.

Sputnik

https://www.newswars.com/china-ready-to-help-venezuela-restore-electricity/

2019-03-13 12:22:27+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

fortruss--2019-07-05--TEXAS VIDEO Mission to Rebuild Petrovsky June 2019

fortruss

TEXAS: VIDEO – Mission to Rebuild Petrovsky June 2019

We brought surgical supplies to the hospital and donated clothing to the community center free store in Petrovsky District. We also documented another war crime by Ukraine Army- shelling civilian area with prohibited artillery. THANKS to Donbass Human Aid, Novorussia Museum (in St. Pete) and Volunteers of Novorussia!

Russell Bentley

https://www.fort-russ.com/2019/07/texas-video-mission-to-rebuild-petrovsky-june-2019/

2019-07-05 10:30:53+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

hitandrun--2019-10-07--Civil Court Can't Decide What "Torah Law" Means, Even if Contract Calls for Applying It

hitandrun

Civil Court Can't Decide What "Torah Law" Means, Even if Contract Calls for Applying It

From Tilsen v. Benson, decided last month by Connecticut Superior Court Judge Daniel J. Klau, but just posted on Westlaw: "[I]n undertaking … an examination [of religious documents], a civil court must take special care to scrutinize the document in purely secular terms, and not to rely on religious precepts in determining" the parties' intentions…. [C]ourts cannot "take sides" in inherently religious disputes…. "Courts have considered it constitutionally appropriate to resolve cases using neutral principles of law so long as they do not implicate or are not informed by religious doctrine or practice. Courts have properly resolved property disputes … so long as the disputes may be resolved by the application of ordinary principles of property law and without resort to ecclesiastical matters … Similarly, contractual matters, including employment disputes, may be resolved by the secular judicial system in other than religious contexts. Thus, ordinary business contracts may be litigated civilly, as may employment disputes with secular employees." … [It is] apparent that a trial on the validity and interpretation of the Ketubah would involve competing expert rabbinical testimony. That is, the court would have to choose between competing interpretations of the Ketubah's requirement that the parties' divorce should accord with "Torah law." … As noted, the Ketubah states that the parties agreed to divorce "according to Torah law …" It further provides that the parties "agreed to accept upon themselves the Rabbinic Court [the Beit Din of the Rabbinical Assembly] to instruct them in the terms of Torah law … [and to] respond to the summons of the other to appear before above-referenced Rabbinic Court, or one mutually agreed upon, to the end that both of them can live in compliance with Torah law all the days of their lives." {[T]he plaintiff has not asked the court to order the parties to arbitrate their alimony and property division dispute before the Beit Din.} {The court does not decide whether the first amendment would bar the court from granting the types of relief that the plaintiff has not sought. But any request for a judicial order enforcing the Beit Din provision would raise serious first amendment concerns.} … The parties married on December 3, 1989, in a ceremony conducted in accordance with Jewish tradition. Shortly before the marriage ceremony the parties signed their Ketubah—a traditional Jewish marriage contract written in Hebrew and Aramaic. Solely for the purposes of this ruling, the court accepts as accurate the plaintiff's English translation. This memorandum of decision addresses a narrow yet dispositive issue: Assuming, without deciding, that the Ketubah is otherwise a valid prenuptial agreement under Connecticut law, does the first amendment to the United States constitution nonetheless forbid the court to enforce the cited provision? For the following reasons, the court answers that question in the affirmative…. The plaintiff seeks to enforce a Jewish marriage contract, known as a "Ketubah," contending that it is a valid prenuptial agreement. In relevant part, the Ketubah states that the parties "agreed to divorce (or, separate from) one another according to custom all the days of their life (i.e., as a continuing obligation) according to Torah law as in the manner of Jewish people." (Emphasis added.) The plaintiff argues that "Torah law" mandates a 50/50 division of property and relieves him of any obligation to pay alimony to his wife of nearly thirty years. The defendant disagrees and generally contests the validity of the Ketubah as a prenuptial agreement. The court concludes that it cannot interpret the "Torah law" provision of the parties' Ketubah using strictly neutral, secular legal principles. To the contrary, granting the plaintiff the specific relief he seeks based on his preferred interpretation of the Ketubah and Jewish law would excessively entangle the court in a religious dispute and, therefore, would violate the first amendment…. This case appears to be one of first impression among published opinions, certainly in Connecticut, if not nationally. Distilled to its essence, the plaintiff's argument is that the "Torah law" provision of the parties' Ketubah is no different from any other choice of law clause in a civil contract. To educate the court about the parties' chosen law, the plaintiff submitted the affidavit of a rabbi, who would presumably testify at trial, describing his understanding of Torah law as it pertains to alimony and property division. The defendant also submitted the affidavit of a rabbi. However, the defendant's rabbinical expert disagrees with the plaintiff's rabbinical expert. [The court doesn't discuss whether one of the rabbis disagreed even with himself. -EV] It is clear, then, that enforcement of the "Torah law" provision in the Ketubah would require the court to choose between competing interpretations of Jewish law. But resolving such a dispute is precisely what the neutral principles approach forbids a court to do. The first amendment does not permit courts to resolve disputes over the meaning and interpretation of the Torah—or the Koran, the New Testament or any other religious text. This is where the plaintiff's analogy to traditional choice of law analysis breaks down. Construing the civil law of a foreign jurisdiction (other than a pure theocracy) does not require a court to choose between competing interpretations of religious law. In other words, traditional choice of law provisions generally do not have first amendment implications. One … commentator on first amendment issues offers the following hypothetical, which helps clarify the limits of a court's power to interpret documents with religious implications or motivations. "Religiously motivated contracts (and wills and trusts) should be interpreted the same as secularly motivated documents, so long as they can be interpreted using neutral principles and without evaluating religious doctrine. That makes sense as a matter of contract law and wills and trusts law, and required by the Free Exercise Clause principle that people ought not be discriminated against based on the religious nature of their practices. See, e.g., Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993)." "Thus, to take the simplest example, imagine a man dies and leaves a will that provides that 2/3 of his property will go to his son and 1/3 to his daughter, and it's clear that this stems from his understanding of Islamic law, under which sons should get twice the share of daughters. Such a will, it seems to me, must be enforced, even if we think it stems from a sexist religious belief system. People are entitled to be sexist—and religiously motivated—in deciding whom to leave their property to." "On the other hand, if a man leaves a will that provides for division 'according to the principles of Shari'a,' courts can't enforce that, because that requires courts to interpret what Islamic religious law actually calls for, something that they can't do." Eugene Volokh, "Court Refuses to Enforce Islamic Premarital Agreement That Promised Wife $677,000 in the Event of Divorce," last modified September 10, 2012), available at http://volokh.com/2012/09/10/ court-refuses-to-enforce-islamic-premarital-agreement-that-promised-wife-677000-in-the-event-of-divorce. The court shares the view of first amendment law expressed above. The "Torah law" provision in the parties' Ketubah is functionally indistinguishable from the "Shari' a law" provision in the hypothetical will. Interpreting what Hebrew, Islamic, Christian, Hindu, etc. law or religious doctrine requires in terms of alimony and property division is precisely the sort of task that would excessively entangle courts in inherently religious matters. The specter of a civil court being forced to decide which religious experts' proffered interpretation is more "credible" is also troubling. {The plaintiff cites In re Marriage of Goldman (Ill. Ct. App. 1990) as precedent for civil courts to interpret the "Torah law" provision in the parties' Ketubah. The trial court in that case interpreted a Ketubah provision very similar to the one at issue here. Based on "uncontroverted expert testimony," the trial court accepted the wife's argument that the general reference to "Torah law" required the husband to give her a Get. The court ordered specific performance of that obligation. The Illinois [court] affirmed and rejected the husband's argument that the first amendment barred the trial court from ordering him to give his wife a Get. The court agrees with the plaintiff that in re Marriage of Goldman is relevant precedent, but it is not binding on a Connecticut Superior Court. It is also distinguishable because it involved uncontroverted expert testimony. The court declines the plaintiff's invitation to follow that case. More persuasive is Victor v. Victor (Ariz. Ct. App. 1993), in which the Arizona Appellate Court held that a comparable provision in a Ketubah was too vague to be enforceable. "If this court were to rule on whether the ketubah, given its indefinite language, includes an unwritten mandate that a husband under these circumstances is required to grant his wife a get, we would be overstepping our authority and assuming the role of a religious court. This we decline to do."} Finally, this court … is unpersuaded that the distinction under Jewish law between laws governing the relationship between man and God and laws governing relationships between men avoids the first amendment problem in this case. The court acknowledges the distinction within Jewish law. Nevertheless, both categories of laws are rooted in the Torah and other textual sources of Jewish law. Even disputes over the correct interpretation of Jewish civil laws are disputes over the meaning and requirements of Jewish law. From the perspective of an American civil court—state or federal—such disputes are inherently religious…. The neutral principles approach requires civil courts to refrain from deciding disputes involving matters of religious faith, law, doctrine, practice and the "true" meaning of religious texts. Here, enforcement of the "Torah law" provision of the parties' Ketubah would require the court to choose between competing rabbinical interpretations of Jewish law. This the court cannot do without violating the first amendment….

Eugene Volokh

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reason/HitandRun/~3/wz7eYu2S6zs/

2019-10-07T15:31:17Z

religion and belief

religious text

instapundit--2019-02-09--TORAH ON ONE FOOT The Secret to Happiness

instapundit

TORAH ON ONE FOOT: The Secret to Happiness….

TORAH ON ONE FOOT: The Secret to Happiness.

Stephen Green

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pjmedia/instapundit/~3/WcTuzLXC5qM/

2019-02-09 17:05:05+00:00

religion and belief

religious text

sputnik--2019-03-23--Tehran Slams Pompeo for Distorting Torah Holy Text to Serve Iranophobia

sputnik

Tehran Slams Pompeo for Distorting Torah Holy Text 'to Serve Iranophobia'

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has encouraged Mike Pompeo to get better acquainted with the Torah, the Jewish holy text, and educate himself with Jewish religious scholars' writings about the Ancient Persians, the predecessors of modern-day Iran. "Even the Torah is distorted to serve Iranophobia," Zarif wrote on his official Twitter page, before proceeding to list some of the things the scripture actually said, including multiple references to Persian efforts to save Jews from captivity and genocide, and reference to Persian ruler Cyrus the Great's capture of the city of Babylon in 539 B.C. which allowed exiled Jews to return to their homeland and resulting in the king being bestowed the title of 'Messiah' – becoming the only foreigner to be so hailed in Jewish scripture. The tweet followed remarks by Secretary Pompeo last week, when, speaking to the Christian Broadcasting Network during his trip to Israel, the US diplomat said his faith made him believe it was "possible" that President Trump had been chosen by God to help save the Jewish people from what his interviewer described as "an Iranian menace." Pompeo travelled to Jerusalem last week, visiting the city's holy sites and holding a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised Washington over Trump's recent statement about it being time for the US to "fully recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights," a Syrian territory occupied by Tel Aviv since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Tehran earlier expressed its dismay over Trump's statement about the necessity to recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, with Zarif tweeting that Iran and other members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (IOC) were "shocked" by President Trump's move "to try to give what is not his to racist Israel."

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201903231073482947-zarif-schools-pompeo-on-torah/

2019-03-23 11:26:00+00:00

religion and belief

religious text

usnews--2019-11-19--Torah Scrolls Damaged in Synagogue Fire Burned in Garage

usnews

Torah Scrolls Damaged in Synagogue Fire Burned in Garage

DULUTH, Minn. (AP) — Damaged Torah scrolls and prayer books that were salvaged from a Duluth synagogue fire in September have burned again in a garage fire. Officials of Adas Israel Synagogue say the items were being kept in the garage and were to be buried in keeping with Jewish tradition. The garage fire broke out Sunday in Duluth’s Central Hillside. Fire officials say the garage fire is not suspicious, but the cause is under investigation. Former synagogue president Phillip Sher tells WDIO-TV the damaged scrolls still will be buried. A homeless man admitted starting the fire that destroyed the 117-year-old synagogue. Matthew Amiot told police he tried to spit on the fire to put it out, but walked away when that didn't work. Police don’t believe the synagogue fire was a hate crime. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Associated Press

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/minnesota/articles/2019-11-19/torah-scrolls-damaged-in-synagogue-fire-burned-in-garage

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 23:56:28 GMT

religion and belief

religious text

redstate--2019-01-06--No Bible Rashida Tlaib Becomes First Congresswoman to Swear in on a Quran it Wasnt Jeffersons

redstate

No Bible: Rashida Tlaib Becomes First Congresswoman to Swear in on a Quran, & it Wasn’t Jefferson’s

The political landscape is definitely changing. On Thursday, Democratic Minnesota Rep. Rashida Tlaib was sworn in with her hand on the Quran instead of a Bible. I previously covered Rashida with an August 15th article about her expressed hope to deny further aid to Israel. See that story here. She made RedState headlines on Friday (courtesy of Brandon Morse), thanks to the previous day’s post-swearing-in speech, which included an absolutely stunning “expletive-filled Trump impeachment comment”: This is where we are. The civility and class of politics continues down a muddy hill. And more rain is surely on the way (also see here and especially here). As are, no doubt, more erroneous reports: Despite online posts to the contrary, Tlaib has denied she took her congressional oath on former President Thomas Jefferson’s 18th-century Quran: That “photo with Speaker Pelosi” was likely none too warm — as I noted on August 10th, the nation’s first Muslim congresswoman told CNN she wasn’t planning to endorse Nancy as Speaker, suggesting the left-wing Armegeddon-proclaiming goof was a corrupt “sellout” (here and here). Guess she Rashida wanted to oust that mother****er, too. Meanwhile, the political climate is changing like a mother****er. For the proud-as-a-peacock vulgarity, see the uncensored tweet below. See 3 more pieces from me: And please follow Alex Parker on Twitter and Facebook. Thank you for reading! Please sound off in the Comments section below. For iPhone instructions, see the bottom of this page. If you have an iPhone and want to comment, select the box with the upward arrow at the bottom of your screen; swipe left and choose “Request Desktop Site.” You may have to do this several times before the page reloads. Scroll down to the red horizontal bar that says “Show Comments.”

Alex Parker

https://www.redstate.com/alexparker/2019/01/06/rashida-tlaib-swear-in-quran-koran/

2019-01-06 21:13:53+00:00

religion and belief

religious text

sputnik--2019-04-16--WATCH Migrants Brawl After Quran-Throwing Protests in Denmark

sputnik

WATCH Migrants Brawl After Quran-Throwing Protests in Denmark

A manifestation by Rasmus Paludan, the leader of the right-wing anti-Islam and anti-immigration party Stram Kurs ("Hard Line") has led to mass unrest with street fires, tear gas and stones hurled at riot police. A longer movie clip that the party itself has published on its YouTube shows how an African man suddenly attacks Paludan, but gets incapacitated by the police. This happened after the party leader and his associate threw about the Quran, the holy scripture of Islam. From there, the violence escalated. Images published by the daily newspaper BT show masked police with their weapons drawn. BT described how immigrant youth started throwing parked bicycles on Nørrebrogade Street to block the traffic. "Cafe benches are lying on the site, because people have rushed away from there", BT reported. Other clips show the police being attacked, the streets ravaged by flames and black some rising over rooftops. Another clip described the encounter as "war between police and Muslims". ​By his own admission, Rasmus Paludan remained unperturbed by the attack and intends to hold a similar demonstration in Nørrebro at the same square. The new demonstration will take place on 13.30 on Tuesday, Stram Kurs founder told BT. "We were not able to do it yesterday. I could only stand there for two minutes and 43 seconds before it all went to hell", Paludan explained. "Then we were led away by the police. You can see that cops pull me by the arms. It's not that I voluntarily left the place", he pointed out. While many politicians, including Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, called Paludan's actions as a "senseless provocation" intended to stoke division and demolish a sense of belonging, Paludan himself denied the accusations. "It seems to me as if some people just wanted to set the district on fire. Then they just use me as an excuse", he said. Stram Kurs is a fringe party that identifies as "ethno-nationalist", "libertarian" and "Danish patriots". Despite only being founded in 2017 and enjoying a limited membership, the party repeatedly makes headlines in Denmark with its protest actions, which often involve symbolic Quran burnings made possible after the repealing of Denmark's age-old blasphemy law. The party describes these actions as "Bacon a-la Quran".

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201904161074171266-denmark-unrest-quran/

2019-04-16 06:22:00+00:00

religion and belief

religious text

sputnik--2019-09-18--German Serial Quran Desecrator Suspected to Be Iraqi Refugee Despite Allegations Against Right-Wing

sputnik

German Serial Quran Desecrator Suspected to Be Iraqi Refugee, Despite Allegations Against Right-Wing

The German police have arrested a man who allegedly stuffed Qurans into toilets in mosques in northern Germany, local outlet the Weser Kurier reports. The suspect, reported to be a refugee of Kurdish origin from Iraq, was detained in Schleswig last week on suspicion that he had vandalised the holy book of Muslims there. The man admitted that he had also committed similar acts in other cities, including allegedly desecrating 50 copies of the Quran, tearing them apart and urinating on the pages, in a mosque in Bremen in early June. According to the police, he tore down soap dispensers, sinks in the sanitary rooms, and threw pages of the Quran into a toilet in a mosque in Schleswig a month after his suspected rampage in Bremen. Similar incidents also took place in two other cities in northern Germany – in Minden, where Quranic pages and excrements were scattered in a prayer room, and in Muenster. These acts prompted outrage among the Muslim community. Bremen’s Mosque Association Shura branded the incident a "disgusting attack", noting in a statement that it hurt the feelings of Muslims. The Central Council of Muslims in Germany also condemned the act, with its chairman, Aiman Mazyek, describing the act as “a new dimension of perversion” that “clearly aims to further fuel the spiral of hatred and violence against Muslims and their mosques”. He also demanded that the Bremen police investigate the case thoroughly and that mosques in Germany should be better protected. The outlet also points out that almost immediately before the alleged suspect was apprehended, the misdeeds were attributed to the political right. SPD lawmaker from Schleswig Birte Pauls even called on the AfD to finally understand that words can turn into violence. However, police warned against pointing fingers as long as the case is still being investigated. Moreover, the prosecutor in Flensburg, located in Schleswig, ruled out a right-wing background in the incidents. "A xenophobic background can be ruled out. There are no signs at all", the prosecution office’s spokeswoman Stephanie Gropp said, noting that the probe is ongoing.

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201909181076834635-german-quran-desecrator-iraqi-refugee/

2019-09-18 17:25:59+00:00

religion and belief

religious text

sputnik--2019-11-27--Norwegian Flag Torched in Pakistan to Protest Quran Burning as Islam's Opponents Promise New Fires

sputnik

Norwegian Flag Torched in Pakistan to Protest Quran Burning as Islam's Opponents Promise New Fires

The Quran burning that occurred during an event by Stop Islamisation of Norway (SIAN) has sparked strong reactions in the Muslim world. While Turkey and Iran issued their formal condemnations, the Norwegian flag was torched during a demonstration in Karachi, alongside the US flag, Norwegian national broadcaster NRK reported. Hashtags like #Boycottnorway and #Norwayattackonislam are gathering momentum on Twitter, together with calls to ostracise the Scandinavian nation for its perceived lack of respect for religion. Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg received many comments about the Quran burning on her Instagram page, even in seemingly unrelated posts, such as one about women's football. Trude Måseide, the head of communications at the foreign ministry, said the authorities were monitoring the situation closely and distancing themselves from the flag burning. ​“Violation of the Norwegian flag is an instrument that we refrain from precisely because we do not want an increasingly polarised social debate,” Måseide said. She stressed that provocations and incitement with disrespectful actions contributes to conflict. “Although this is legal and within the freedom of speech, we are clear that we disagree,” she told NRK. Telenor, Norway's leading telecom company, said they were closely following the reactions in social media and calls to boycott. Spokeswoman Hanne Knudsen said the company was working fully to maintain regular operations. In a tweet, Telenor stressed that respect for others was one of their core values and condemned acts “that don't respect religion”. ​Meanwhile, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry summoned the Norwegian ambassador to inform him that the Quran burning “hurt the sentiments of 1.3 billion Muslims around the world, including those in Pakistan”. By contrast, the Muslim man who attacked SIAN activists won a lot of praise, including from the Pakistani Armed Forces spokesperson Asif Ghafoor. Within or Outside the Limits of Free Speech? ​The Quran burning in Kristiansand, which ended in a violent clash and arrests, has sparked a heated discussion in Norway, with many politicians and journalists arguing that the police violated the principles of free speech by interfering and stopping it. Justice Minister Jøran Kallmyr stressed to NRK that burning the Quran was “part of the freedom of speech, whether we like it or not” and therefore fully legal. Others, such as Liberal Party heavyweight and former Norwegian parliament vice president Abid Raja, condemned both the Quran burning and the flag-burning response as “destructive actions for the entire society”. His party colleague Odd Einar Dørum, however, went so far as to draw parallels between Quran burning burning and Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass 1938, when Nazis carried out massive pogroms against Jews, the newspaper Dagbladet reported. Meanwhile, SIAN, an organisation set up in the early 2000s to stop the proliferation of Islam, pledged reruns of the Quran burning. At the same time, he admitted that Quran burning is not his preferred course of action. Muslims currently make up about 5.7 percent of Norway's population, following a steep rise amid mass immigration.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201911271077413279-norwegian-flag-torched-in-pakistan-to-protest-quran-burning-as-islams-opponents-promise-new-fires/

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 09:22:00 +0300

religion and belief

religious text

sputnik--2019-12-05--Norwegian Muslims to Distribute Quran in Aftermath of Public Burning

sputnik

Norwegian Muslims to Distribute Quran in Aftermath of Public Burning

Following the uproar created by the recent attempt to set fire to Islam's central scripture, three Muslim organisations will distribute free copies of the Quran to Norwegians in an attempt to prevent future instances of Quran burning. The Norwegian Muslim Arts and Culture Association, the Islamic Literature Association and the Minhaj-ul-Quran Mosque in Oslo intend to distribute a total of 10,000 copies of the Quran at several stands in the Norwegian capital and possibly Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, sometimes seen as the nation's cultural capital, the newspaper Vårt Land reported. The Quran distribution will be funded by the three organisations, as well as donations by private individuals. The action is intended as a response to the burning of the Quran by the organisation Stop Islamisation of Norway (SIAN) during a demonstration in Kristiansand over two weeks ago. “I believe many people are curious about what the Quran contains and what Muslims stand for. We hope this project can help demystify the Quran's content,” Hamza Ansari, board member of the Norwegian-Pakistani Minhaj-ul-Quran mosque in Oslo, told Vårt land. According to the Islamic Literature Association, the Quran teaches how to "show love and spread knowledge", which is why is it seen as an effective vehicle against "hate and racism". Incidentally, a similar idea was set forth by former Labour Culture Minister Hadia Tajik, the first Muslim to serve in the Norwegian government. In 2014, at the height of Daesh's so-called “caliphate”, she proposed giving Muslim youth the Quran before the extremists got to them. The Quran burning in Kristiansand, which resulted in violent clashes and arrests, sparked a heated debate in Norway concerning the border between free speech and religious hatred. While some argued that such actions were destructive, drawing historic parallels with the 1938 Kristallnacht, when Nazis carried out massive pogroms against Jews, others, including Justice Minister Jøran Kallmyr, insisted that Quran burning was indeed covered by the freedom of speech and suggested that police overstepped their powers as it interfered to stop the fire. Meanwhile, the Quran burning has sent ripples across the Muslim world, with Turkey, Pakistan and Iran issuing their formal condemnations. Additionally, the Norwegian flag was torched during a demonstration in Karachi, while calls to boycott and ostracise Norway were made on social media. SIAN, an organisation set up in the early 2000s to stop the spread of Islam, pledged reruns of the Quran burning, which stressing that they would have preferred a debate. Muslims currently make up about 5.7 percent of Norway's population due to mass immigration of the recent decades. In 2013, Norway's first complete Quran translation was accomplished. According to Aqil Qadir of the Norwegian-Muslim Arts and Culture Association, it contains explanations based on the modern world in a “unique interpretive style”.

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201912051077488124-norwegian-muslims-to-distribute-quran-in-aftermath-of-public-burning/

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 09:27:11 +0300

religion and belief

religious text

thedailycaller--2019-01-03--Rep Rashida Tlaib Sworn In On Jeffersons Quran

thedailycaller

Rep. Rashida Tlaib Sworn In On Jefferson’s Quran

Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, was sworn into office Thursday using Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Quran. Tlaib, the first Palestinian woman to take congressional office, insisted on using the Quran, ostensibly to make a positive statement about Islam’s place in U.S. history and the diversity of American society. She also reportedly wore a traditional Palestinian gown, called a thobe, for the ceremony. (RELATED: America’s First Two Muslim Congresswomen Officially Endorse Anti-Israel Legislation) “My swearing in on the (Quran) is about me showing that the American people are made up of diverse backgrounds and we all have love of justice and freedom,” Tlaib told the Detroit Free Press. “My faith has centered me. The prophet Mohammed was always talking about freedom and justice.” Jefferson purchased a copy of the Quran in 1765 while studying the law. He was a collector of books, and historians speculate he might have purchased the Quran because of his curiosity about world religions and because a significant number of the slaves taken from African countries to the U.S. followed Islam. “It’s important to me because a lot of Americans have this kind of feeling that Islam is somehow foreign to American history,” Tlaib said of using Jefferson’s Quran. “Muslims were there at the beginning.” Tlaib also said she is “going to be a voice for” Palestinians. After winning her congressional primary race, she gave a victory speech with the Palestinian flag draped around her shoulders. Many Palestinian women on social media hailed her announcement that she would wear a thobe during her swearing-in. Interestingly, the copy of the Quran on which she made her oaths was translated by British lawyer George Sale for the purpose of Christians evangelizing Muslims. Sale intended his translation to help Christians understand Islam and to enable them to argue against it. “Whatever use an impartial version of the Korân may be of in other respects, it is absolutely necessary to undeceive those who, from the ignorant or unfair translations which have appeared, have entertained too favourable an opinion of the original, and also to enable us effectually to expose the imposture,” Sale wrote in the foreword, according to History. The Koran was also a popular read among Christians at the time due to a desire among Americans and the British to better understand the peoples of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. “The Quran gained a popular readership among Protestants both in England and in North America largely out of curiosity,” University of Texas Professor Denise Spellberg said. “But also because people thought of the book as a book of law and a way to understand Muslims with whom they were interacting already pretty consistently, in the Ottoman Empire and in North Africa.” Despite criticism over her choice to use a Quran and to promote her Palestinian heritage, Tlaib said she is undaunted. “My mere existence, that I’m even of Muslim faith, is going to be a problem for them with or without me swearing in on any Koran,” she said. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Joshua Gill

https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/03/rashida-tlaib-jefferson-quran/

2019-01-03 23:44:48+00:00

religion and belief

religious text

theindependent--2019-03-19--New Zealand shooting Parliament opens session with reading from Quran

theindependent

New Zealand shooting: Parliament opens session with reading from Quran

The Quran was recited during New Zealand’s parliament session on Tuesday, the first since last week's terrorist attack on two mosques that claimed 50 lives. A Muslim imam led prayers in parliament, in what is being seen as a gesture of solidarity with the victims of the shooting. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has received international praise for her response to the attack including offering to pay the funeral costs of victims, started her speech with the phrase “As-Salaam-Alaikum”, an Arabic greeting meaning ‘peace be unto you’. She encouraged people to acknowledge the Muslim community’s grief on Friday – the Muslim day of worship, and one week since the attack, and vowed that the full force of the law will come down on the attacker. The verses come from chapter al-Baqarah (The Cow), which emphasise patience, prayers, and justice on judgement day. This is thought to be the first time the Quran has been read in the New Zealand parliament. Ibrahim Kalin, Chief Counsellor to the President of the Turkish Republic, said: “I commend the [parliament] for this heartwarming and graceful act. It is these acts of kindness and resolution that will defeat terrorism and fascism.” Prime Minister Ardern has been vocal about her refusal to name the attacker, who has been charged, saying: “I implore you, speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them. "He is a terrorist. He is a criminal. He is an extremist. But he will, when I speak, be nameless." We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.

Carly-May Kavanagh

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/new-zealand-shootings-quran-parliament-ardern-christchurch-attack-a8829991.html

2019-03-19 16:07:00+00:00

religion and belief

religious text

zerohedge--2019-11-25--Furious Pakistan Summons Norway's Ambassador After Public Quran Burning & Brawl

zerohedge

Furious Pakistan Summons Norway's Ambassador After Public Quran Burning & Brawl

Over the weekend Pakistan announced it has summoned Norway's ambassador to convey the Muslim country's outrage over a televised Quran burning incident in the southern Norwegian city of Kristiansand. Similar to the controversial Florida-based pastor Terry Jones attempting to hold a Quran burning rally in 2010, this latest rally put on last week by the Stop Islamization of Norway (SIAN) had attracted a local and international media frenzy in the run-up to the event. Local reports further described that some 500 counter-demonstrators showed up, sending tensions soaring. The head of the anti-Muslim group, Lars Thorsen, stood in front of a considerable crowd and torched the Islamic holy book, and that's when chaos ensued, with at least two Muslim men rushing Thorsen after they jumped a police barrier — all of which was captured on film and went viral. Police could be seen subduing the attackers, and in the mayhem the burning Quran fell to the ground, after which the police used a fire extinguisher to put it out. The filmed incident sparked angry protests in Pakistan's most populous city of Karachi, where locals burned Norwegian and American flags. On Saturday Pakistan's foreign ministry said: “Such actions hurt the sentiments of 1.3 billion Muslims around the world,” the Associated Press reported. The Ministry said further that the public burning of a Quran “could not be justified in the name of freedom of expression,” and demanded that Norwegian authorities "prevent" such attacks on Islam in the future. Turkey is also reported to have lodged a formal diplomatic complaint with Oslo over authorities allowing the Quran burning to happen. Meanwhile, the Muslim youth who spearheaded the attack on Thorsen, forcing the Norwegian man to drop the burning book and attempt to flee, is being hailed as a hero inside Pakistan, with even a Pakistani Army official praising him publicly for “displaying courage to stop an absolutely deplorable action,” he wrote on Twitter. Norwegian reports indicated Thorsen was taken by police for questioning, along with five others who were involved in the ensuing brawl. Over the past years a number of right-wing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant groups have gained popularity and large followings in Scandinavian and northern European countries amid growing backlash against lax immigration policies among EU countries. There's also growing frustration over the reality that as birthrates plummet among northern European populations, migrant populations from the Middle East and North Africa are exploding.

Tyler Durden

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/AUcZ6iwlLoo/furious-pakistan-summons-norways-ambassador-after-public-quran-burning-brawl

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 19:15:00 +0000

religion and belief

religious text

therussophileorg--2019-02-03--Germany Reconstruction in Syria

therussophileorg

Germany: Reconstruction in Syria

This [post](https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/02/03/germany-reconstruction-in- syria/) was originally published on [this site](https://www.veteranstoday.com/) VeteransToday []() BERLIN/DAMASKUS/WASHINGTON (Own report) – Foreign policy advisors warn of severe setbacks in Berlin’s attempt to influence political development in Damascus through Syria’s reconstruction. So far, Berlin and Brussels had always insisted on only participating in the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country if significant political concessions were made. Now, however, the first EU states are breaking out of the common pressure front. The reason for this is that reconstruction has long since begun without the EU and Iranian, Indian and Chinese companies are achieving their first successes. European companies, on the other hand, are still out in the cold. The situation is made more complicated by the fact that the United States is working on a new sanctions law that is threatening all companies and individuals with painful punishments who do significant business with Syria’s government, for example carry out construction projects on its behalf. The law could prevent plans of German companies in Syria as well as in Iran; Berlin would remain uninfluenced in Damascus. [](https://www.therussophile.org/linkout/1067590) First major projects Foreign policy advisors in Berlin and Brussels are currently worried that Germany and the other EU states may come too late with the reconstruction of war-damaged Syria and miss not only lucrative business, but above all a possibly last chance to build up a position of political influence in Damascus. Reconstruction has been underway for some time now. They hold a strong position because they supported the government of Bashar al Assad in the war, especially Russia and Iran. According to a recent working paper of the Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS), “the restoration of the energy sector” in Syria “has been driven forward by Iranian consortia in particular since the end of 2017”. These consortia have thus received “surcharges for five major Syrian cities”. According to reports, more than 50 Iranian companies were present at the 60th Damascus International Fair in September 2018; the central theme at the fair was reconstruction. At the end of January, Tehran announced that it would soon be making bank transfers between the two countries possible. This was last prevented by the US sanctions against Iran. Race for orders The reconstruction measures are by no means limited to Russia and Iran. As reported by the BAKS, India, for example, is “working on the Syrian industrial sector”; “Indian funds” are already being used to “build a new thermal power station worth 240 million US dollars south of Damascus”. Chinese companies are also very active in Syria; according to reports, over 200 companies from the People’s Republic took part in the Damascus trade fair. The BAKS states that Beijing is relying “above all on new infrastructure projects” when it comes to reconstruction “as part of its belt-and-road initiative” in which it is seeking to integrate the country.[2] In addition, it has promised Damascus its first billion euro loans. In addition, Arab states are now also pushing vigorously towards Syria. One reason is that the monarchies and emirates on the Arabian Peninsula fear that after the announced US withdrawal from Syria their worst enemy, Iran, could gain a dominant position there; the United Arab Emirates, for example, have therefore begun to normalize diplomatic relations with Syria and are making great efforts to do business within the framework of reconstruction. Jordan, on the other hand, is interested in contracts in its neighboring country in order to set its severely crisis-ridden economy in motion.[3] Europe’s dwindling leverage Against this backdrop, the voices in Berlin are increasing, insisting that Germany and the EU should now finally develop their own activities. The BAKS stated that the EU should “participate in the reconstruction of Syria”: “This is not only desirable, but a real political necessity”[4] In fact, the German government has already promised support in the past, but explicitly linked this to extensive political concessions in Damascus. It has always been said that Moscow and Tehran could not possibly muster the mid-three-digit billion sums needed to repair the war destruction; they could therefore demand massive influence (german-foreign-policy.com reported [5]). So far, however, this calculation has not worked out – not least because countries like India and China are now in a position to step in as financiers and replace the lack of funds from the EU. Western wealth has lost leverage. Highly pokered This complicates the situation for Berlin’s power ambitions. Leading German foreign policy leaders continue to play high poker and demand the fulfilment of preconditions before participating in reconstruction. CDU foreign policy expert Roderich Kiesewetter argues that while Germany and the EU should support the reconstruction measures, they should call for the establishment of a “UN-mandated protection zone” in Syria.[6] Omid Nouripour, foreign policy faction spokesman for Bündnis 90/Die Grünen in the Bundestag, is also in favour of Damascus calling for political advance measures. In addition, he argues that any aids should not be made available to the government in Damascus, but should be handed over directly to “projects” on the ground.[7] Such an approach allowed Berlin to establish its own clientele structures in the middle of Syria. The front is crumbling However, in the meantime the first EU states are beginning to withdraw from the Berlin power poker, unnerved. At the end of October 2018, a delegation from the Polish Sejm visited Damascus to discuss a resumption of mutual economic relations. The chairman of the Chamber of Commerce in Damascus explicitly called on Polish businessmen to explore the “investment opportunities in Syria” offered by the reconstruction.[8] In January the Italian Foreign Minister announced that Rome was in the process of carefully examining the possibility of reopening its embassy in Syria. Foreign policy experts warn. According to a statement from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), the EU front against Damascus threatens to crack or even break apart if individual states continue to press ahead.[9] This must be prevented. To achieve this, however, “Europeans who are trying to maintain a tough stance towards Assad” would have to recognise that under the current conditions it would hardly be possible to force through what had previously not been possible in the long years of the civil war. US sanctions The situation is further complicated by the fact that Washington is preparing new sanctions. Recently, the new “Caesar Syrian Civilian Protection Act” passed the US House of Representatives, which imposes harsh penalties on all those who provide “significant financial, material or technological assistance” to the Syrian government. In particular, sanctions are to be imposed on all persons or companies who “participate in construction and engineering projects controlled by the Syrian government”.[10] In fact, this excludes participation in Syria’s reconstruction for anyone who has business relations with US companies. If the law is passed, then German company activities in Syria would be practically as excluded as in Iran. Berlin would thus be obstructed in the foreseeable future from any serious possibility of exerting influence there. This would be a heavy blow for Germany’s ambitious ambitions to replace the United States, which is withdrawing from the Near and Middle East, in the ring of states around Europe (german-foreign-policy.com reported [11]). _________________________ [1], [2] Stefan Luke, Marius Paradise: A difficult reconstruction. Prospects for European initiatives in Syria. Federal Academy for Security Policy. Security Policy Working Paper No. 2/2019. [3] Ulrich Schmid: Jordan seeks proximity to Asad. nzz.ch 25.01.2019. [4] Stefan Lukas, Marius Paradies: A difficult reconstruction. Prospects for European initiatives in Syria. Federal Academy for Security Policy. Security Policy Working Paper No. 2/2019. [5] See also Reconstruction in Syria. [6] Hans-Jürgen Deglow: Foreign politician Kiesewetter pleads for UN protection zone in Syria. stimmen.de 25.01.2019. [7] Diana Hodali: Reconstruction of a destroyed country. de.qantara.de 09.01.2019. [8] Syria and Poland to enhance economic, trade relations. sana.sy 31.10.2018. [9] Julien Barnes-Dacey: What Europe should do about Syria. ecfr.eu 28.01.2019. [10] Taylor Luck: Rebuilding Syria: Why Arabs and the West are on a collision course. Christian Science Monitor 29.01.2019. [11] See also: Ordnungsmacht im Krisengürtel and Keine Ordnungsmacht. GERMAN-FOREIGN-POLICY.com https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/list/ Share on Facebook Tweet on twitter Share on google+ Pin to pinterest from https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/02/03/germany-reconstruction-in-syria/

VT Editors

https://www.therussophile.org/germany-reconstruction-in-syria.html/

2019-02-03 18:03:48+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

therussophileorg--2019-11-04--Iran dares to help Syria rebuild its power grid defying US sanctions on its 'terrorist' construction

therussophileorg

Iran dares to help Syria rebuild its power grid defying US sanctions on its 'terrorist' construction sector

This post was originally published on this site Tehran and Damascus have signed a preliminary deal on rebuilding Syria’s power grid at a major electricity expo, which by pure coincidence took place in Iran just as Washington sanctioned its construction sector. The deal envisages not only the restoration of the country’s devastated electrical network and construction of additional power generation units – including solar and wind – but also localization of Iranian electrical equipment production in Syria. While little has been revealed, the memorandum of understanding signed Saturday by the states’ energy ministers also outlines a potential three-way link between the power grids of Syria, Iran, and Iraq to boost regional energy stability. The Syrian government delegation also toured the 19th Iran International Electricity Exhibition, which featured products of more than 450 companies from Iran, China, and Russia, and signed a number of additional contracts there. That expo, whether by ironic coincidence or not, kicked off the very same day Washington suddenly discovered that Iran’s entire construction sector is controlled by “terrorists.” Issuing a seemingly deliberately vague pamphlet, the US State Department let the mainstream media fill in the blanks between the ominous “strategic materials,””nuclear and ballistic” programs, and “proliferation-sensitive purposes.” The actual list of those sanctioned “strategic materials,” conveniently swept under the rug, includes such despicable things as anti-corrosion brazing foils, a premium grade stainless steel alloy, and even steel pipes. Saddam’s ‘aluminum tubes of mass destruction’, anyone?

Ashley Bailey

https://www.therussophile.org/iran-dares-to-help-syria-rebuild-its-power-grid-defying-us-sanctions-on-its-terrorist-construction-sector.html/

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 19:56:02 +0000

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

therussophileorg--2019-01-08--Turkey has plan to restore peace in Syria after Islamic State defeat president

therussophileorg

Turkey has plan to restore peace in Syria after Islamic State defeat — president

### Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan © Presidential Press Service via AP, Pool NEW YORK, January 8. /TASS/. Ankara believes that the Islamic State terrorist group (IS, outlawed in Russia) has been completely defeated militarily in Syria and the Turkish government is ready to put forward its strategy of restoring peace in the country, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an article published by New York Times. “Militarily speaking, the so-called Islamic State has been defeated in Syria,” he said. “Turkey proposes a comprehensive strategy to eliminate the root causes of radicalization.” In other media

Michael Sullivan

https://www.therussophile.org/turkey-has-plan-to-restore-peace-in-syria-after-islamic-state-defeat-president.html/

2019-01-08 00:11:49+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

therussophileorg--2019-01-18--Lebanon FM calls on Arab League to restore Syrias membership

therussophileorg

Lebanon FM calls on Arab League to restore Syria’s membership

This [post](http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2019/01/18/586148/Lebanon-FM-calls-on- Arab-League-to-restore-Syrias-membership) was originally published on [this site](http://www.presstv.ir/rss/mrss) **Lebanon’s Caretaker Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil has called on the Arab League to restore Syria’s membership in the regional organization, describing attempts to block the move as a “historic mistake.”** > “We Arab nations don’t know how to look out for each other. Arab states continue to trade blame for suffering across the region rather than assembling plans to alleviate it,” Bassil said as he opened the first session of an Arab economic summit in Beirut on Friday. Among the biggest challenges facing Arab nations, the top Lebanese diplomat said, are war, malnutrition and poverty, in addition to extremism and the denial of women’s basic rights. “Let’s build a united Arab economic vision, based on the political principle of not attacking each other,” Bassil said. > “Syria should return to us… Syria should be in our embrace instead of throwing it into the embrace of terrorism,” he pointed out. Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammad al-Hakim recently said the Baghdad government supports the restoration of Syria’s membership in the Arab League. > “We discussed solutions to eliminate terrorism in Syria and support the Syrian government, its territorial integrity and sovereignty,” Hakim said at a joint press conference with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in Baghdad on Monday. “We also discussed supporting Iraq’s efforts to restore Syria’s (membership) to the Arab League,” he added. On January 8, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said the incumbent Damascus government needs to implement a number of measures toward the political settlement of the ongoing Syrian crisis in order for the conflict- plagued country to reinstate its membership in the Arab League. Speaking at a joint press conference with his Moroccan counterpart Nasser Bourita in Cairo, Shoukry said such measures are required “in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution 2254,” which endorses a road map for a peace process in Syria, and sets out the outlines of a nationwide ceasefire. “There’s a need to get out of the current crisis in Syria within the political framework sponsored by the UN envoy in Geneva,” the top Egyptian diplomat pointed out. The Arab League suspended Syria’s membership in November 2011, citing alleged crackdown by Damascus on opposition protests. Syria has denounced the move as “illegal and a violation of the organization’s charter.” Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry announced in a statement on December 28, 2018 that work at the kingdom’s embassy “in the Syrian Arab Republic was going on whilst the Embassy of the Syrian Arab Republic to the Kingdom of Bahrain was carrying out its duties and flights connecting the two countries were operational without interruption.” It came a day after the United Arab Emirates officially reopened its embassy in Damascus. The Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said the reopening of its embassy “reaffirms the keenness of the United Arab Emirates to restore relations between the two friendly countries to their normal course.” The move “will strengthen and activate the Arab role in supporting the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic and to prevent the dangers of regional interference in Syrian Arab affairs,” the ministry pointed out. On December 16 last year, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir became the first Arab League leader to visit Damascus. Syria’s official news agency SANA said Bashir was greeted by his Syrian counterpart upon arrival at Damascus International Airport, before they both headed to the presidential palace. The two leaders discussed bilateral ties and the “situations and crises faced by many Arab countries,” the Syrian presidency said in a statement. Visiting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (L) meets with his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad at the presidential palace in Damascus, Syria, on December 16, 2018. (Photo by SANA) SANA quoted the Sudanese leader as saying during the meeting that he hoped Syria will recover its important role in the region as soon as possible. He also affirmed Khartoum’s readiness to provide all it can to support Syria’s territorial integrity. Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies have been aiding Takfiri terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the country. from: http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2019/01/18/586148/Lebanon-FM-calls-on-Arab- League-to-restore-Syrias-membership

Michael Sullivan

https://www.therussophile.org/lebanon-fm-calls-on-arab-league-to-restore-syrias-membership.html/

2019-01-18 18:09:05+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

therussophileorg--2019-01-31--Electricity supply in Syrias Daraa province to be fully restored by 2023

therussophileorg

Electricity supply in Syria's Daraa province to be fully restored by 2023

This [post](http://tass.com/world/1042572) was originally published on [this site](http://tass.com/) DAMASCUS, January 31. /TASS/. Electricity supply in the Syrian province of Daraa will be fully restored by 2023 after distibution substations are repaired, head of the provincial government’s electricity department Hasan Zamel told reporters on Thursday. “The ministry of electricity in Damascus has developed a plan for full restoration of electricity in Daraa by 2023. Restoration will take so much time for two reasons: firstly, because power grids were seriously damaged by militants, and secondly, because of insufficient financing,” Zamel said. He added that all residents will get access to electricity this year, but only at certain times of the day. Full electricity supply will be restored only in four years. Zamel noted that “power grids in Daraa will need to be re-built from scratch.” Infrastructure damages in the Daraa province are estimated at around $85 million, whole only $11.6 million were allocated for repairs, he concluded. In other media from http://tass.com/world/1042572

Michael Sullivan

https://www.therussophile.org/electricity-supply-in-syrias-daraa-province-to-be-fully-restored-by-2023.html/

2019-01-31 06:11:02+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction

therussophileorg--2019-02-12--Over 31000 houses restored in Syria Russian reconciliation center

therussophileorg

Over 31,000 houses restored in Syria — Russian reconciliation center

This [post](http://tass.com/world/1044187) was originally published on [this site](http://tass.com/) MOSCOW, February 11. /TASS/. More than 31,000 residential buildings have been restored in Syria by February 10, chief of the Russian Center for reconciliation of the conflicting sides in Syria Sergei Solomatin said on Monday. “We continue to provide assistance in restoring the infrastructure and creating conditions for refugees’ return. As of 10 February 2019, 31,200 residential buildings, 810 educational and 137 medical facilities have been restored, 999.8 kilometers of roads have been repaired,” he said. Solomatin added that Russia continued to render assistance in ensuring the work of 10 checkpoint for refugees, adding that 221,883 people have returned to their homes by February 10. According to the Russian reconciliation center, local residents’ protests against the presence of the US-led international coalition in Syria continued. More than 2,000 people took part in a rally in the city of Deir ez-Zor. In other media from http://tass.com/world/1044187

Michael Sullivan

https://www.therussophile.org/over-31000-houses-restored-in-syria-russian-reconciliation-center.html/

2019-02-12 00:10:00+00:00

conflict, war and peace

post-war reconstruction