The US has killed a high profile Iranian military leader in a missile strike near the Baghdad airport.

The White House said Donald Trump ordered an air strike that killed powerful Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad in the early hours of Friday, in a dramatic escalation of an already bloody struggle between Washington and Tehran for influence across the region.

Suleimani, who ran Iranian military operations in Iraq and Syria, was targeted while being driven from Baghdad airport by local allies from the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU). The deputy head of the PMU, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, a close Suleimani associate, was also killed in the attack.
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Iran confirmed Suleimani’s death, saying the US would be responsible for the consequences.

“The US’ act of international terrorism, targeting & assassinating General Soleimani—THE most effective force fighting Daesh (ISIS), Al Nusrah, Al Qaeda et al—is extremely dangerous & a foolish escalation,” the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said on Twitter. “The US bears responsibility for all consequences of its rogue adventurism.”

This is a major, major provocation by Trump. I cannot tell what this will lead to but it is not going to be good.

Pete Buttigieg’s campaign has just announced impressive fundraising results. Sam Finkelstein has taken a close look at the people who have endorsed, funded, and supported Buttigieg’s presidential candidacy and does not like what he finds.

Two questions continue to loom large over the 2020 Democratic primary field: Who is Pete Buttigieg? And what is he doing there?

Seemingly overnight, the once obscure mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city was vaulted to national prominence, pockets stuffed with big checks from billionaire benefactors.

The publication of a list of 218 endorsements from “foreign policy and national security professionals” by Buttigieg’s campaign deepened the mystery.

Some observers have raised questions about Pete Buttigieg’s intimate relationship with the national security state, after it was revealed that his campaign had paid nearly $600,000 for “security” to a Blackwater-style military contractor.
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This is going to be one hell of a year in the US as we have deranged, narcissistic, vain, lying, cruel, mean, insecure, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, racist, petty, (did I miss any descriptor?) person running for re-election as president, solidly backed by a Republican party filled with sycophants who abjectly grovel before him, evangelical Christians who have given up on all their principles, and wealthy people who care more about increasing their already massive share of the wealth than doing anything of value with it.

It is going to be a really ugly year.

My wish for everyone is that we manage to stay sane during this tumultuous year and that it ends with us replacing this sociopath in the White House with Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or, failing that, with a halfway decent person who cares at least a little for those who are at the bottom of the economic and social ladder.

Chelsea Manning is currently being held in prison since May 16 for refusing to testify to a grand jury against WikiLeaks and her treatment amounts to torture, according to the UN’s special rapporteur on torture.

In the missive, [Nils] Melzer says Manning is being subjected to “an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

Manning, who was detained on 16 May after refusing to testify before a grand jury, is currently being held at the Alexandria detention center in Virginia until she agrees to give evidence or until the grand jury’s term expires in November next year. She also faces fines currently running at $1,000 a day.
[Read more…]

This is the time of year when we get bombarded with ‘best of’ and ‘worst of’ lists, increased by the fact that it could be for the year or for the decade. The only lists I pay attention to are of films by critics I respect to get tips on what might be worth watching.

This list of Things We Hope Will Die in 2020 is a little more interesting but the item that really jumped out at me and I wholeheartedly agree with is the suggestion by Jacob Rosenberg.

Malcolm Gladwell’s career: Let’s thinslice: Malcom Gladwell needs to stop writing. Gladwell’s theories are wrong (stop and frisk) or obvious (1,000 hours) or dumb (talking to strangers is the problem with everything). He made his bones at a time when glib, crypto-conservative contrarianism was the reigning media ethos. Today, the shtick has been worn so smooth as to be transparent. Flip through his latest book and you’ll find an easy-pass treatment of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State and a determinedly apolitical reading of the death of Sandra Bland—two cases of institutional pathologies that Gladwell turns into parables about a quirk in human nature. Powerful people thus get excused for their mistakes, under the guise of Gladwell’s interrogating some orthodoxy or another. You don’t need to be a bestselling author of pop-science airport books to come up with a word for this stuff: bullshit.

I have long been mystified by Gladwell’s popularity.