The death of democracy" is another fact-free assertion: the world has never been as democratic as in this decade. Pushback, yes, but time to retire the "end of this/death of that/post-something " op-ed cliches. See Global Trends in Governance, 1800-2015. https://t.co/ZNiOTvZSMF
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) April 26, 2018
This month, Israeli snipers shot hundreds of Palestinian protesters -- including one journalist wearing a vest marked "PRESS" -- who posed no life-threatening danger to them, or to the people they're meant to protect. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman then justified these shootings on the grounds that "there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip," suggesting that the area's 1.8 million Palestinian men, women, and children are all legitimate targets of state violence. Meanwhile, Israel reneged on an agreement with the United Nations to grant legal status to 40,000 African asylum-seekers (whom the Netanyahu government had previously intended to jail en masse or deport), leaving those long-suffering refugees in a state of limbo.And then, Natalie Portman did something controversial. [...]Portman's statement is a model of liberal Zionist dissent. It focuses its fire on Israel's elected leadership, while evincing love for its people; insists that one need not choose between the Jewish value of empathy for the marginalized, and support for the Jewish state; and frames her criticism of Israeli policy as a defense of Israel's own best interests -- all while explicitly disavowing the BDS movement.
The Wall Street Journal has a sad example of one of the ways in which Trump has previously embarrassed his fixer. Trump agreed to attend Cohen's son's bar mitzvah, but then showed up late, and Cohen humiliatingly delayed the ceremony to suit his boss's arrival. "After Mr. Trump arrived," the Journal reports, "he gave a speech, telling guests he hadn't planned to come, but he relented after Mr. Cohen had repeatedly called him, his secretary and his children begging him to appear, the attendee said."
His anger was palpable through the phone. He made troubling admissions that could affect him in court. Even the Fox hosts -- who are naturally sympathetic to his talking points -- seemed surprised by the stream of consciousness.Later in the day, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reported that the Fox interview was a cause for concern inside the White House."Trump aides fought for months to keep him from doing what he did this morning," she tweeted.Related: Readers flock to 'A Higher Loyalty,' despite partisan criticism"Just calling Fox and Friends and talking as if it was one of his private conversations" is the way she described it.That's what aides had been trying to avoid.
A Quinnipiac poll released Thursday found that 54 percent of Americans think Comey is more likely to tell them the truth about important issues than Trump. Only 35 percent think the president is more trustworthy. [...]But Americans don't trust Comey because they like him. Forty-one percent view Comey unfavorably, while just 30 percent have a favorable view of the former FBI director.
By firing marble-sized rocks from a giant cannon, scientists have found a way in which the infant Earth might have received much of the water that today makes life possible.
Undoing the nuclear deal would pave the way for a return to punishing international economic sanctions on Tehran--this time, not only for its nuclear program, but for its pursuit of medium- and long-range missiles, and support for the Assad regime in Syria. Such a scenario would restrict trade, discourage foreign investment, and potentially force Iran out of the oil market. This would please Saudi Arabia, whose economy depends on high oil prices. During his visit to Washington, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman predicted that the price of oil could rise to $80 a barrel--a price he would need in order to realize his ambitious economic agenda and fulfill the kingdom's military and political aims. Excluding Iran from oil markets would certainly help realize that prediction.With the Iranian economy on its knees, the Trump administration thinks Tehran would surrender to a better deal--one that the president, eager to flex his deal-making prowess and outshine Obama, would fancy. But this is a risky strategy. Washington led the negotiations for the nuclear deal, and swore off regime change in the process. If Trump scuttled it not only to improve its terms, but also to inch closer to regime change, it will be difficult to persuade other adversaries with dangerous weapons to seriously consider diplomatic engagement. Without credible diplomatic options, war would become the only path available to the United States to address thorny international issues--the very trajectory that the candidate Trump railed against.Even if Trump gets regime change in Tehran, it may not be the sort he wants. Canceling the nuclear deal and increasing economic pressure on Iran would further marginalize the moderates and pragmatists who favor engagement with the West, while empowering the Revolutionary Guards and their hardline allies. But before that happened (if it happened at all) the instability Washington would hope to sow in Iran could instead surface in countries where it craves stability, most immediately in Iraq. This is because the nuclear deal has provided the United States and Iran with the tacit context to cooperate in Iraq in the fight against the Islamic State. Without the deal, Iraq could once again become a battleground for U.S.- and Iran-backed forces.
Even after Cohen started working for Trump in 2006, he boasted that most of his money came from his Russia cab business -- not from his job with the Trump Organization, according to two people who were at the same holiday party in the New York area suburbs with the lawyer in 2008, with about 50 other people. [...]
"We know that (Michael) Cohen came into the Trump organization because he was a conduit for money from Russia, from the Ukraine and immigrants from Russia, immigrants from the Ukraine," said Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo, in a podcast. TPM has reported extensively on Cohen.Indeed, some of Cohen's Russian contacts may have in fact been "organized crime figures," Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson testified before Congress late in 2017, about 11 months after his partner Christopher Steele's bombshell dossier was published by BuzzFeed. The report, according to this transcript of his testimony, laid out the extent of Trump's potential connections to the Kremlin that could compromise his presidency.Cohen "was first bragging about medallions in New York City and then said, 'but the real money is in the cabs in Russia,'" according to another source at that 2008 party. "He seemed dirty. He seemed sleazy. It stuck with me all this time."Cohen started to acquire cab licenses in the U.S. in the late 1990s after marrying Soviet emigre Laura Shusterman, whose father, Fima Shusterman, was already in the cab business and had pleaded guilty to defrauding the IRS, according to reports as well as state and federal records. Federal investigators told a Rolling Stone reporter that Cohen met Trump through an introduction by Shusterman.
On April 12, just now, Robert Faurisson suffered one more minor legal defeat in a French court, which is good news, in a small way, for the world, and, in a bigger way, for the newspaper Le Monde. The court ruling means that, in France, you can denounce Faurisson as a "professional liar" and a "falsifier of history." And you do not have to worry about a defamation suit--which is good news for Le Monde because, back in 1978, the editors made the insane error of judging Faurisson to be a man-with-an-idea-worth-debating, and they welcomed him into their pages. Faurisson is of course the theoretician of Holocaust denial. He contributed to Le Monde an "ideas" piece titled "The Debate Over the 'Gas Chambers,' " with the extra quotation marks signifying his belief that Nazi gas chambers are a Zionist lie. And Le Monde has needed, ever since, to make the point over and again that publishing his article was a big mistake, and Faurisson is, in fact, a professional liar and a falsifier of history. The judicial ruling reinforces the point yet again. It is good. We should applaud. But it is sobering to reflect that, 40 years later, the point does need reinforcement, and Faurisson, who is a minor screwball, has had major successes in different corners of the world. And falsification of history turns out to be a factor in history.The provenance of Faurisson's ideas is altogether curious. He derived them principally from a sad-sack leftwing pacifist in France named Paul Rassinier, whose misfortune during World War II was to be arrested and tortured by the Germans, which permanently ruined his health. He was jailed in two camps, Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora, where conditions were bad. He was beaten by the SS. When he emerged, though, he explained and re-explained at book length that, even if conditions in the camps were less than good, neither were they especially terrible, and Germany's conduct during the war was no worse than any other country's. Germany ought not to be demonized. And the truly evil people in the camps were the Communist prisoners. And the Jews were responsible for the war. [...]Then again, Faurisson's successes came on the ultraleft, chiefly in France. A group of well-known veterans of the 1968 uprising in Paris, the Vieille Taupe or "Old Mole" group, led by someone named Pierre Guillaume, began to see in Faurisson's writings a tool for advancing the anti-imperialist cause (on the grounds that Western imperialism was the largest crime of the 20th century, but its criminality has been concealed under a cloud of accusations about the crimes of Nazism--which means that, if Nazi behavior can be shown to have been no worse than anybody else's, the scale of the imperialist crime can at last stand fully revealed). Guillaume ran a small publishing house, which he dedicated to bringing out Holocaust-denial literature, beginning with Rassinier's writings (which, in English, are best-known under the title Debunking the Genocide Myth: A Study of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Alleged Extermination of European Jewry). And he published the dossier of the Faurisson affair that I have just quoted, together with Faurisson himself and still other authors on similar themes in a more classically Nazi vein. Faurisson's struggle was not a lonely one, then. Nor is it lonely today. In France and the United States both, he has enjoyed a small but fervent institutional backing.But mostly his success came about among mainstream journalists and intellectuals--among people who were prompted to adopt their positions by the Old Moles, but knew how to avoid the shrill tone of the marginal ultraleft. Faurisson's triumph in persuading Le Monde to publish "The Debate Over the 'Gas Chambers' " marked the sensational high-point of this particular success. But the deeper success was to attract a number of well-known intellectuals and to convince those people to treat him as one of their own--as a thoughtful man, scientifically inclined, brave, and capable of seeing through the bigotries of the age. One of those well-known intellectuals was a scholar of Third World matters named Serge Thion, who was a specialist on Cambodia (with a subspecialty in arguing that Cambodia did not undergo a genocide under the Khmer Rouge). It was Serge Thion who edited the dossier of the Faurisson affair for Pierre Guillaume's publishing house. And, in Paris in 1979, at a conference on Cambodia, Thion succeeded in recruiting Noam Chomsky, who in those days was more than well-known--was, indeed, already a world figure. Chomsky struck up an alliance with Guillaume, as well. And he made a number of interventions into the affair, oddly and insistently sympathetic to Faurisson--which meant that Faurisson, the minor screwball, found himself, at last, standing at the absolute center of intellectual debate in France and in various countries around the world, reviled by some, admired by others, with the debate revolving not only around himself but also around his celebrated American champion, Chomsky, the genius.
Chomsky has always maintained that, in intervening into the Faurisson affair, he took an abstract position for free speech, and nothing more, and he did not bother much with the affair. Chomsky's defenders and biographers in print and film have repeated the claim, too, which means that probably a great majority of the people who know anything at all about the affair can only think of Chomsky's insistence as fact. And it is true that Chomsky spoke up for free speech. But the free-speech argument never attracted much attention, even if he has liked to pretend otherwise. What attracted attention was Chomsky's oddly respectful tone toward Faurisson. He left the clear implication that Faurisson is a scientific-minded researcher, with conclusions or findings that ought to be accorded the kind of respect that is accorded to any authentically scientific researcher. Chomsky left this impression in a petition that he signed in Faurisson's defense; and in an essay on the Faurisson affair that he composed, which ran as a preface to a book by Faurisson (though Chomsky has insisted that he never wanted his essay to run as a preface, about which there is further controversy); and in a series of responses to his critics, myself included, over several years and in several countries. And at the center of Chomsky's argument was the insistent claim that Faurisson is not, in fact, an anti-Semite.
New York Times reporter Amy Chozick's just-released memoir, Chasing Hillary, offers a detailed and direct admission that major media outlets played into Russian President Vladimir Putin's hands by devoting obsessive coverage to hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. It's a striking acknowledgment, given how defensive the Times and its campaign journalists have generally been about their work. [...]In a chapter titled "How I Became an Unwitting Agent of Russian Intelligence," Chozick, who spent a decade covering Hillary Clinton for the Times and The Wall Street Journal, recounts the October afternoon when WikiLeaks began releasing a new set of documents obtained from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's Gmail account. By then, journalists had reason to suspect that hackers working for Russian intelligence services were the source of the emails. Nonetheless, Chozick writes that she "chose the byline" rather than urging her editors to consider the possibility that the paper was being used by a hostile government. She was not alone -- virtually every major publication devoted significant attention to the hacked emails.Only after the election, when Times national security reporters detailed how the all-consuming reporting had aided the Russian plot, did Chozick come to grips with what she had done: "[N]othing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was they were right."
Kim already won everything he wanted. A meeting is just icing on the cake.North Korea has shown it has the ability to create atomic explosions, and has demonstrated it can launch long-distance missiles, even if they have been a little wayward in their journeys into the Pacific. What we don't know is whether the country has the technology to put these two things together and produce a workable inter-continental nuclear weapon.The new US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, says he thinks that North Korea is nearly at the stage of producing a weapon which could reach the US. There is another interpretation, however: that North Korea is nowhere near doing this, and has pulled back on its nuclear programme before the extent of its competence becomes clear. Unless Kim Jong-un is prepared to dismantle his weapons programme and invite international weapons inspectors to verify this, there will always remain the prospect that design and development will continue, with tests set to resume at a later date. [...]There is no sign that China has suddenly announced that it will address issues of intellectual property and other genuine concerns that the US has had about Chinese industry in recent years. All Trump has achieved is to leave markets jittery, make US firms more concerned about investing in China and vice versa. The global economy began this year on a high point of confidence. Much of that has dissipated with the threats of trade wars.Kim Jong-un has been characterised as an unpredictable, unknown quantity capable of lashing out at other countries without reason and with little thought to the interests of his people. That is not unusual among dictators. Much the same description, however, could be applied to Donald Trump -- which is unusual among leaders of democratic nations.
Research by Chinese geologists shows the mountain above North Korea's main nuclear test site has collapsed, rendering it unsafe for further testing and requiring that it be monitored for any leaking radiation.The findings by the scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China may shed new light on North Korean President Kim Jong Un's announcement that his country was ceasing its testing program ahead of planned summit meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and US President Donald Trump.