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Contents contributed and discussions participated by qkirkpatrick

qkirkpatrick

Triumph or Travesty, US-Iran Ties Warming Over Nuclear Deal - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Diplomatic triumph or travesty, America's relationship with one of its most intractable foes took two giant leaps forward this weekend when Iran released four Americans in a prisoner swap after locking in last summer's nuclear deal and receiving some $100 billion in sanctions relief.
  • Speaking from the White House, Obama on Sunday hailed the "historic progress through diplomacy," long the centerpiece of his foreign policy vision, instead of another war in the Middle East.
  • The Islamic Republic released the prisoners in exchange for pardons or charges dropped against seven Iranians — six of whom hold dual U.S. citizenship — serving time for or accused of sanctions violations in the United States
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  • The International Atomic Energy Agency's declaration unlocked some $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets overseas, and potentially even greater economic benefits through suspended oil, trade and financial sanctions by the U.S. and European Union.
  • One of the last hiccups that delayed the Americans' departure was an Iranian military official's misunderstanding about Rezaian's wife and mother joining him on the flight. After Kerry spoke to Zarif, permission was granted.
  • Israel remains steadfastly opposed to the Iran deal and any rapprochement with Tehran. Sunni Saudi Arabia has had tension with Iran since executing a Shiite cleric on Jan. 2, which led to a severing of diplomatic ties between the two.
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    The relations between Iran and the US continue to get better after decades of hating one another.
qkirkpatrick

Refugee crisis: Human traffickers 'netted up to £4bn last year' | Europe | Ne... - 0 views

  • Human smugglers made a record profit last year of between $3bn and $6bn (£2bn-£4bn) by exploiting the misery of refugees – which means governments must up their game or risk further growth of this ruthless industry, the head of Europol has told The Independent on Sunday. 
  • “We also know that, on average, each migrant is paying between $3,000 and $6,000 to a criminal facilitator for their journey. So you do the simple math, and you’re up to a turnover in 2015 of between $3bn- $6bn.
  • A person fleeing their home will pay different smuggling gangs at different points throughout their journey. A Syrian may have to pay to leave their country without detection by the security forces, then buy fake documents in Turkey, before purchasing their perilous passage on a rubber dingy or boat launched into the waves, towards Greece. 
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  • “If the funds in national budgets and the European budget aren’t enough, let’s agree, for example, to raise a levy on every litre of gasoline,” Mr Schäuble told the daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “Why not agree this at the European level if the task is so urgent?”
qkirkpatrick

Can Germany Be Honest About Its Refugee Problems? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • More than 650 criminal complaints have been filed by women in Cologne regarding that night, and more than 150 in Hamburg, including two cases of rape. A 28-year-old women named Katia said: “Suddenly I felt a hand on my bum, on my breasts, I was grabbed everywhere, it was horrific. I was desperate, it was like running the gantlet. Over the space of 200 meters, I think I must have been touched about 100 times.” Of the 50 suspects identified in Cologne, the bulk are from northern Africa, mostly from Morocco.
  • The news about the Cologne attacks resembled a bomb going off in slow motion, and its effects have been absorbed just as slowly, in less of a panic than a controlled shock.
  • First, the police in Cologne withheld information about the mass sexual assaults (the police chief later resigned). When the details started to emerge, journalists were reluctant to admit the mere possibility that refugees had been involved, although this was pretty obvious from various witness accounts early on.
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  • First, find a way to separate the free riders and criminals from the refugees. Thanks to the lack of identity checks at the borders in the past months, we just don’t know whether many of those who have poured into Germany have done so for good reasons or bad. This has to be established now by all possible means, by taking fingerprints, photos and other personal information and exchanging them with authorities in the home countries.
qkirkpatrick

Germany's refugee crisis turns it ominously to the right - LA Times - 0 views

  • For years Germany has been an outlier in Europe. While far-right agitators gained strength in neighboring countries, including France and Austria, German voters stuck solidly to their traditional postwar parties.
  • No longer. As Germany copes with an estimated 1.5 million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, anti-immigrant sentiment is soaring. New political movements, massive weekly protests and arson attacks on the homes of refugees highlight the nation's doubts and its divisions.
  • On New Year's Eve, hundreds of Arab and North African men allegedly molested and harassed German women in a plaza near Cologne's train station. Police were ineffectual and Germans, outraged
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  • Sound familiar? Just as populism is experiencing a comeback in America, so it's taking hold in Germany. But given the history of German nationalism, it inevitably has a more ominous tinge.
  • The strongest signal of hostility toward the status quo is the precipitous rise of a political party called the Alternative for Germany. It's attracting unprecedented numbers in public opinion polls. According to Bild, a national newspaper, Alternative for Germany would claim 11.5% of the vote if parliamentary elections were held today.
  • Now the attacks in Cologne have crystallized those challenges, and put Germans' doubts on worldwide display. Ever since reunification, their nation has asserted itself in Europe, looking outward, ruling confidently.
qkirkpatrick

Obama Loves America So Much He Wants To Save It From Becoming Fascist - 0 views

  • President Barack Obama put the American people on notice Tuesday night that a dark future awaited U.S. democracy if they didn't begin to come together rather than retreat into ethnic or religious corners.
  • "I remember thinking it's kind of a dreadful prediction for our future," Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told HuffPost. "He was very optimistic about America, but then he laid out a very almost apocalyptic future."
  • "Those with money and power will gain greater control over the decisions that could send a young soldier to war, or allow another economic disaster, or roll back the equal rights and voting rights that generations of Americans have fought, even died, to secure," he added. "
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  • Obama punctuated his speech with direct reminders that America is not in decline, not a victim and not beset by weakness. "The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world."  "Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction." "I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close."
  • Of course, just as Obama was warning about our poisonous politics, he couldn't help himself from taking a few ad-libbed digs at the Republicans in the chamber. They left a mark.
  • Republicans gave it right back. Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) told HuffPost that he's not worried about a future dictator when we already have a lawless leader.
qkirkpatrick

The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan - review | Books | The... - 0 views

  • This set in train the July Crisis, the moves and counter-moves that would lead to general European war, the "great black tornado", as Theodore Roosevelt called it. Sixty-five million men served in the conflict, 9 million of them died and 20 million were wounded
  • It brought down four European empires and weakened the colonial powers that ended on the winning side, Britain and France; it spawned communism and fascism, and changed relations between Europeans and non-Europeans, town and country, governments and peoples, men and women.
  • The victorious allies stuck the blame on Germany at the Versailles Peace Conference, in the "war guilt clause". The idea that Germany was the prime mover has enjoyed a brilliant, if chequered career ever since.
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  • Besides, the rapidly globalising world of the last pre-war years was meshed together by trade and communications. The War That Ended Peace begins with a scene-setting prologue on the Paris Exposition of 1900, a perfect symbol of contemporary pride in material and moral progress, a gathering "destined" – as the Berlin chamber of commerce wrote to its Parisian counterpart – "to bring the civilised nations of the world nearer to one another in the labours common to them all"
qkirkpatrick

Ted Cruz Goes on Multipronged Attack Against Donald Trump - First Draft. Political News... - 0 views

  • Disparaging Donald J. Trump’s temperament, questioning his beliefs and even knocking his polling numbers, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas laid into Mr. Trump in earnest on Saturday and abandoned any reluctance to take on his popular Republican rival.
  • It was a remarkable turn for a candidate who, less than a week ago, was resisting opportunities to tweak Mr. Trump even as he raised questions about Mr. Cruz’s eligibility for the presidency because of his Canadian birth.
  • On Saturday, Mr. Cruz said it was “curious” that Mr. Trump had aligned himself with left-leaning officials in New York in calling for the apology. “It does raise the question of, O.K., if you are offended at my pointing out how much the failed policies have hurt New Yorkers, then which of those policies do you agree with?” Mr. Cruz said.
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  • Mr. Cruz acknowledged that Mr. Trump had begun to sound “fairly conservative” on the campaign trail, but he said voters were “far more discerning.”
qkirkpatrick

Find Germans Are Making Forbidden Planes, Operating Shops in Sweden and Switzerland - A... - 0 views

  • At a moment when France, in cooperatin with Britain, is negotiating with Germany with a view to lessening the restrictions which the treaty of Versailles placed upon her aviation-activities. French officials are concerned to learn of a further effort on the part of the Reich to build up just outside the borders of the country a formidable chain of German aviation factories.
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    Article written in 1926 talks of politics following Versaille Treaty
qkirkpatrick

Suicide Attack Kills at Least 13 in Afghanistan - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A suicide bomber struck the home of an important tribal elder in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad on Sunday morning, killing at least 13 people, a government official said.
  • Najeebullah Kamawal, head of the Nangarhar public health directorate, said that at least 14 civilians had been wounded and that three of them were in critical condition
  • Jalalabad, about 75 miles east of Kabul, is the capital of Nangarhar, a province bordering Pakistan that has become increasingly violent since the departure of American and NATO combat troops at the end of 2014.
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  • The militant activity has made it increasingly dangerous to travel the road between Kabul and Jalalabad, a key artery linking Kabul with points in Pakistan. The United Nations classifies the stretch between the two cities as “inaccessible.”
  • The violence in Nangarhar is just one of the security threats facing the government of the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani.
qkirkpatrick

Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He Is Leading Us Merrily Down That Pat... - 0 views

  • People who have studied the extremist right as a historical and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth: America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political movements.
  • Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of America's DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars - particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.
  • Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg Race Laws were modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler was "passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." And indeed it was.
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  • Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon
  • In many ways, Trump's fascistic-seeming presidential campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is the one component that has been utterl
  • There is little doubt that Trump is tapping into fascistic sentiments, which is why so many observers are now beginning to finally use the word in describing Trump's campaign.
  • Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump's appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign - the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race, poll-wise, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters - was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States' undocumented immigrants
qkirkpatrick

Whose Fascism Is This, Anyway? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Bath, England — “France’s fascist uprising” screamed the front-page headline of a London newspaper following the National Front’s victory in the first round of the regional elections on Dec. 6. “Trump is a fascist,” asserts the combative neocon commentator Max Boo
  • “the word ‘fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” So has it acquired any more useful meaning in the 70 years since? The latest evidence suggests not.
  • Since then we have been warned about “Islamofascism,” and Al Qaeda and ISIS are denounced by Western politicians and commentators as “fascists.” Although Mideastern zealots have picked up the hate-filled anti-Jewis
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  • rhetoric of European fascists — with the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” enjoying a new lease on life in Arabic — some observers have questioned whether there is any real sense in applying such a specifically European concept as fascism to “the House of Islam.”
  • ISIS fighters are bloodthirsty religious fanatics, but not nationalists at all. Their name supposedly proclaims a “state,” but something pan-Islamic, entirely unlike the central European definition of fascism as ultranationalism.
qkirkpatrick

'Fascist' Di Canio polarizes opinion - CNN.com - 0 views

  • He sports a "Dux" tattoo and has expressed a fascination with Benito Mussolini. Meet Paolo Di Canio -- the new Sunderland manager who is proving a polarizing figure after his appointment by the struggling English Premier League club.
  • As his right-wing sympathies come under intense scrutiny, Di Canio says he only wants to talk about football -- though his controversial views threaten to overshadow his job of trying to keep Sunderland in the top flight.
  • "My life speaks for me so there is no need to speak any more about this situation because it is ridiculous and pathetic," Di Canio
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  • "I'm a fascist, not a racist," after making a straight-arm salute to Lazio fans in a game against city rival Roma.
  • Given Italy's former fascist leader Mussolini enacted anti-Semitic laws and oversaw the deporting of thousands of Italian Jews to concentration and death camps, academic Kevin Passmore disagreed with the feeling of other Sunderland fans that Di Canio's political stance shouldn't have mattered when the club sought a new manager.
qkirkpatrick

Is Donald Trump a fascist? - CNN.com - 0 views

  • To answer that question it is helpful to examine three interrelated phenomena: the history of European fascism, the rise of far-right nationalist parties around the West today and what historian Richard Hofstadter famously termed "the paranoid style in American politics."
  • "A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions." Trump's ascendancy outside the structures of the traditional Republican Party and his clarion calls about America's supposedly precipitously declining role in the world capture this trait well.
  • "The superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason." Trump's careless regard for the truth -- such as his claims that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks, or that Mexican immigrants are rapists and murders -- and the trust he places in his own gut capture this well.
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  • The belief of one group that it is the victim, justifying any action. Many in Trump's base of white, working-class voters feel threated by immigrants, so Trump's solution to that, whether with Mexico (build a wall) or the Islamic world (keep them out), speaks to them.
  • "The need for authority by natural leaders (always male) culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny." This seems like quite a good description of Trump's appeal.
  • In Paxton's checklist of the foundational traits of fascism there is a big one that Trump does not share, which is "the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will when they are devoted to the group's success."
  • Trump has updated the paranoid right for the post-9/11 era: Instead of a communist plot to take over America, the conspiracy theory favored in the 1950s, the threat is now immigrants, whether they are Mexicans or Muslims.
qkirkpatrick

CNN.com - 'Fascist police' jibe angers Italy - March 14, 2002 - 0 views

  • An Italian ambassador has hit back after Turkey's foreign minister accused Italian riot police of acting like "fascists" during a brawl at the Champions League match between Roma and Galatasaray.
  • Both teams face the threat of a fine or even suspension from European football's most prestigious club competition after fighting broke out between players, stewards and police at the end of Wednesday night's 1-1 draw in Rome's Olympic Stadium.
  • But Italy's ambassador in Ankara, Vittorio Surdo, replied on Thursday: "We're talking about individuals who may have made mistakes. There is no need to refer to the Italian police as fascist police. Frankly we find it quite out of place and we hope this description will never be repeated."
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  • Police used batons to push Galatasaray players off the pitch as missiles were hurled from sections of the 60,000-strong crowd. Scuffles continued in the players' tunnel.
  • Some Roma players said Galatasaray players had used intimidation throughout the ill-tempered match.
qkirkpatrick

Why some conservatives say Donald Trump's talk is fascist - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • But it was after Trump started calling for stronger surveillance of Muslim-Americans in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks that a handful of conservatives ventured to call Trump's rhetoric something much more dangerous: fascism.
  • Since launching his campaign this summer, the billionaire real estate magnate has regularly deployed inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants -- particularly regarding Latinos -- and repeatedly raised the alarm about foreigners entering the country. That has escalated following the series of shooting rampages and explosions in Paris this month allegedly perpetrated by ISIS and amid a national debate over accepting Syrian refugees.
  • "Trump is a fascist. And that's not a term I use loosely or often. But he's earned it," tweeted Max Boot, a conservative fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is advising Marco Rubio.
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  • "Fascism sometimes becomes an attribute to describe someone that is intolerant or totalitarian or even racist," said Federico Finchelstein, an expert on fascism at the New School who said Trump is better described a populist. "When dealing with an important part of the nation such as Hispanics, I think he definitely fits those categories."
  • At a Trump campaign rally in Birmingham, Alabama, a black protester was physically attacked by a handful of Trump fans in the crowd. Video captured by CNN shows the man being shoved to the ground, punched and at one point even kicked. The next day, Trump drew fierce backlash when he said that perhaps "he should have been roughed up."
  • "We had the same thing happening in Germany in the 1920s with people being roughed up by the Brownshirts and they deserved it because they were Jews and Marxists and radicals and dissidents and gypsies — that was what Hitler was saying," Ross said. "I'm not saying Trump is Hitler, but the logic of condoning violence against those who oppose you -- you can imagine, a man who would condone it as a candidate -- what would he do as an official president?"
  • "He's good at making astonishing speeches that make people sit up and take notice. So there's some of that manipulation of public emotions that is visible with Trump," Paxton said. "Hitler and Mussolini -- no one had ever seen public rallies like the meetings they'd have. People were absolutely mesmerized."
qkirkpatrick

How Italy's fascist past echoes in migrant crisis - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Geography is, in part, destiny for Italy: The country will always be a bridge between Africa and Europe, as the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean so starkly shows.
  • A surge of refugees this year, usually transported by smugglers on overcrowded vessels, has sought to reach Europe via the Libyan coast. A boatload of 900 migrants who embarked from Libya are now feared dead in the latest sinking. Over 10,000 were rescued off the coast of Italy in the last week alone. European leaders are scrambling to deal with this emergency.
  • Many of the refugees involved in recent disasters come from some of Italy's former colonies in North and East Africa, namely Eritrea (occupied from 1890-1941) and Somalia (1908-1941). As migrants, Libyans are fewer in number, but Libya (1912-1941
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  • Over 100,000 Libyan men, women, and children were deported to concentration camps deep in the desert in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and much of the ruling class was exiled or exe
  • Libya is an example of the long reach of Italian imperialism. Libya was for a brief period an incorporated province of Italy, on the model of French Algeria, and Libyan families still feel the devastating effects of the fascist dictatorship's persecution of those who resisted Italian occupation.
  • Until his death in 2011, despite deals with Italy and the European Union to control departures from his borders, Gadhafi intermittently used European fears of mass arrivals of migrants from Libya as a political weapon.
  • This climate has encouraged those who wish to rehabilitate the "heroes" of fascist imperialism. In 2012, the town of Affile built a publicly-funded memorial to General Rodolfo Graziani, known as "the butcher of Fezzan" for his brutal repression of Libyan resisters in the 1920s -- and for the massacre of Ethiopian civilians he ordered in response to a 1937 attempt on his life.
qkirkpatrick

Outrage as Charlie Hebdo depicts Alan Kurdi as molester - CNN.com - 0 views

  • After a year in which it has never been far from the headlines, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is back in the news again -- this time for a cartoon that critics say pushes its provocative brand of humor too fa
  • The publication has sparked outrage for a cartoon that suggests drowned toddler Alan Kurdi -- the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose death in September triggered a global wave of sympathy for migrants -- would have grown up to be a sexual molester of the type blamed for a recent wave of mob sex assaults in Cologne, Germany.
  • The cartoon sparked an immediate reaction on social media, with many labeling it offensive and racist, and many questioning whether the masses of people around the world who tweeted #JeSuisCharlie in solidarity after the January 2015 attacks would feel the same way in light of the cartoon.
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  • Maajid Nawaz, chairman of London-based counterextremism think tank Quilliam, argued in Facebook posts that critics missed the point of the cartoon, and others in the issue, as a critique of fickle European attitudes to migrants.
qkirkpatrick

'MUSSOLINI' SETS UP NEW KIND OF REGIME - Broadcast From Reich in His Name Creates 'Repu... - 0 views

  • Broadcast From Reich in His Name Creates 'Republican Fascist Government'
  • September 16, 1943,
  • Italy's ousted and invisible "Premier," Benito Mussolini, apparently attempted to dethrone King Victor Emanuel today in a proclamation read in his name by a radio announcer, recasting defunc
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  • Fascism in Italy as the "Republican Fascist Party," with Mussolini as Its supreme leader.
qkirkpatrick

24 SHOTS FIRED INTO BRONX CHURCH - Police Are Baffied but Think It May Have Been Done b... - 0 views

  • 24 SHOTS FIRED INTO BRONX CHURCH; Police Are Baffied but Think It May Have Been Done by Fascisti Sympathizers.
  • he firing of twenty-four shots through a window in the inside of the Bedford Park Italian Prerbyterian Church at 204th Street and Villa Avenue, the Bronx, early yesterday morning puzzled the police of the Bronx Park Station, who searched houses in the vicinity yesterday in an effort to obtain a clue.
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    fascism comes to US. Headline from 1928.
qkirkpatrick

Navy's role in WWI often overlooked | Plymouth Herald - 0 views

  • WITH the recent Government announcement of the events that are being held in various parts of the UK to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Jutland next year, it is fitting to remember the important part that Plymouth played in the only major clash between the dreadnought fleets of Britain and Imperial Germany in WW1 on May 31 1916 in the grey wastes of the North Sea.
  • Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the German Navy C in C, knowing that the RN was now too powerful to be defeated, recommended to the Kaiser a return to unrestricted submarine warfare resulting in the once proud High Seas Fleet spending most of the remainder of the war confined to harbour, never again to challenge the might of the Grand Flee
  • The courage and sacrifice of all those who took part, over 6,000 RN personnel and 14 ships being lost in total, should never be forgotten and it is appropriate that Plymouth's main commemoration will be held at the Naval Memorial on the Hoe.
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