Dan Gillmor suggests various things you can do if the Trump administration decides to implement a plan where laptops are banned from carry on luggage on all flights and that may be extended to tablets and cameras as well. One of the things that needs to be overcome is the fact that as soon as your laptop leaves your possession, it can be damaged and its contents vulnerable to theft.
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We are by now drearily familiar with the non-apology apology, where instead of coming right out and saying that one is sorry for an error or for doing something wrong, we get a statement along the lines of “I am sorry if you were offended”, which seems to imply that one is sorry for the effect that one caused on some people (and which subtly implies that it is they were wrong for their silly reaction), rather than acknowledging that what one said or did was wrong.
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The US is now a country that is permanently at war with other countries. While the countries that are designated as enemies may change, the state of war has become a fixture. Among other things, these wars serve the purpose of being testing grounds for new weapons systems. But what many people who may be sanguine about unleashing firepower on poor people of color in other countries may not realize is that what the US military uses abroad often later becomes tools for local law enforcement. The increasing militarization of local police departments is often the result of the military providing them with surplus equipment that has been superseded my newer ones.
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It goes without saying that the wealthy get privileges that are denied to the rest of us and so it should not be a surprise that even on the rare occasions when they are convicted of crimes and have to go to prison, they are given preferential treatment. This article in the upscale magazine Town & Country describes some of the facilities where you don’t have to mingle with the riff-raff and some of the rich people who went to each. Just the exterior alone tells you that these are no ordinary prisons.
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Robert Kuttner looks at the sudden rise in the polls of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party in the run-up to the British elections on June 8. Corbyn has had to endure pretty much universal attacks by the British neoliberal and conservative media because he is an unapologetic, old-fashioned progressive who is not afraid to talk about class, and has made a marked shift away from the neoliberal policies that were adopted by his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as Labour leaders and by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the US.
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The US has banned the bringing of laptop computers into the cabins of aircraft arriving in the US from Turkey, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and requires that they be placed in checked luggage. There were reports that the ban may be expanded to include flights arriving from Europe as well but after initially rejecting that plan, just yesterday, the head of the Department of Homeland Security John Kelly said that they were considering extending the ban to all flights entering and leaving the US, irrespective of the other country.
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The forgotten war in Yemen where the US and its Saudi Arabian proxy are mercilessly pounding that country because of the belief that the Houthi rebels are backed by Iran continues apace. Iona Craig of The Intercept continues her excellent reporting on that ignored conflict and her latest report provides a capsule summary of the nature of the conflict that led to the latest attack by the US a few days ago on the region of al Adhlan.
One of those killed in the May 23 raid, Al Khader Saleh Salem al Adhal, was a soldier in the Yemeni army currently fighting on the U.S.-supported side in the country’s complex civil war. Yemen’s conflict pits military units loyal to former president and previous U.S. ally, Ali Abdullah Saleh, along with the predominantly Shia Houthi rebels, against a local Yemeni resistance and anti-Houthi military units backed by a Saudi Arabian-led coalition of regional nations. The coalition is in turn aided by the United States, which has been providing weapons and crucial logistical support to the Saudi Kingdom and its allies in their fight against the Houthi-Saleh forces since March 2015. The Saudis, who view the Houthis as an Iranian proxy, have been the main financial backer and weapons supplier to the military and local tribes fighting in Mareb, including in al Adhlan.
Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner ooze with the kind of upscale celebrity lifestyle as her father. But like so many wealthy people, their luxurious lifestyle is squeezing money out of poor people. Alec MacGillis of the investigative journalism outfit ProPublica has an expose of the practices of Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s real estate business and it is not pretty. It says that the company, through another agency, hounded the poor people who live in the units that qualify for Section 8 vouchers to help pay the rent, taking them to court to squeeze money out of them over the smallest infraction.
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People in the west place a lot of significance on the handshake and what it says about power relationships. Political observers of body language have been discussing for some time Donald Trump’s alpha-male dominance tactic of, when shaking hands, pulling the other person sharply towards him so that s/he is off balance and then shaking the hand vigorously and hard. It appears that word has got around about the Trump maneuver and we saw French president Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and now French president Emmanuel Macron doing counter moves.
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The White House budget director Mick Mulvaney is a rabid tea partier and so it should be no surprise that the budget proposals that he unveiled this week consist of everything desired in the fevered dreams of the US oligarchs: massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deep and wide cuts in programs that benefit the poor and middle class, and increases in defense spending.
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