Indonesian court disbands Islamic State-linked group for 'terrorism'

An Indonesian court disbanded the country's largest Islamic State-linked group, Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), on Tuesday for "conducting terrorism" and affiliating itself with the foreign militant organization.

from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2NZHZzs

Nicaragua's Ortega rejects early elections, U.S. rebukes crackdown

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on Monday rejected the idea of calling a referendum on whether to hold an early election, while the United States said it was revoking visas of Nicaraguan officials connected to a crackdown on protesters.

from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2mWMH5t

Vietnam jails 15 more over economic zone protests

A court in Vietnam has handed out prison sentences to 15 protesters arrested during mass demonstrations last month against proposed special economic zones in the Southeast Asian country, state media reported on Tuesday.

from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2Kb6dV2

UK foreign secretary to warn France, Austria of costs of no-deal Brexit

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt will visit Paris and Vienna this week to discuss Brexit and warn of the costs to Britain and the European Union of failing to reach a transition deal, his office said on Tuesday.

from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2Os88I2

Trump says he is willing to talk to Iran's leader without preconditions

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he would be willing to meet Iran's leader without preconditions to discuss how to improve ties after he pulled the United States out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, saying, "If they want to meet, we'll meet."

from Reuters: World News https://ift.tt/2LN1jT4

Cora grieving after death of Miami coach's son

The 16-year-old son of J.D. Arteaga, a former star baseball player at Miami and the best friend of Red Sox manager Alex Cora, died Saturday night in a car crash.

from www.espn.com - NCAA https://ift.tt/2v5vmvJ

Trump administration considers tax cut for the wealthy - Washington Post

Washington Post

Trump administration considers tax cut for the wealthy Washington Post The Treasury Department is considering a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans through a change that would not need approval from Congress, officials said, a move that would follow a package of tax cuts last year that also benefited the super-rich. The ... Trump Wants To Give the Wealthy Another Tax Cut, With No Vote In CongressNew York Magazine Trump administration eyes capital gains tax cut for wealthy: NY TimesReuters Trump Administration Mulls a Unilateral Tax Cut for the RichNew York Times all 94 news articles »

from Top Stories - Google News https://ift.tt/2LH409q

In a new book, Bob Woodward plans to reveal the 'harrowing life' inside Donald Trump's White House - Washington Post

Washington Post

In a new book, Bob Woodward plans to reveal the 'harrowing life' inside Donald Trump's White House Washington Post In the worldwide capital of leaks and anonymous dishing that is Washington, secrets can be almost impossible to keep. But somehow over the past 19 months, the fact that America's most famous investigative journalist was quietly chipping away at a book ... Bob Woodward's new book puts readers 'face to face with Trump'CNN Bob Woodward's New Book Will Detail 'Harrowing Life' Inside Trump White HouseNew York Times Bob Woodward's New Book Will Chronicle Trump's 'Harrowing' PresidencyHuffPost The Hill -Los Angeles Times all 39 news articles »

from Top Stories - Google News https://ift.tt/2NTZYaj

Mollie Tibbetts case investigators keeping details close to the vest, key questions remain unanswered - Fox News

Fox News

Mollie Tibbetts case investigators keeping details close to the vest, key questions remain unanswered Fox News Investigators probing the disappearance of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts were keeping details of the mystifying case close to the vest Monday, refusing to elaborate on the condition of the house where she'd been staying, even amid new ... and more »

from Top Stories - Google News https://ift.tt/2OwVh7F

Forward D.J. Jeffries decommits from Kentucky Wildcats, reopens recruitment

D.J. Jeffries, a five-star forward from Mississippi's Olive Branch High School, announced Monday that he's decommitting from Kentucky and reopening his recruitment.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2mVWqcj

Cornerback prospect Andrew Booth chooses Clemson

Andrew Booth, the No. 3 cornerback prospect in the class of 2019, has chosen to attend Clemson.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2LLGJCp

Forward D.J. Jeffries decommits from Kentucky Wildcats, reopens recruitment

D.J. Jeffries, a five-star forward from Mississippi's Olive Branch High School, announced Monday that he's decommitting from Kentucky and reopening his recruitment.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2mVWqcj

Cornerback prospect Andrew Booth chooses Clemson

Andrew Booth, the No. 3 cornerback prospect in the class of 2019, has chosen to attend Clemson.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2LLGJCp

Georgia Bulldogs land RB John Emery

Georgia landed three ESPN 300 commitments on Sunday, including running back John Emery, who is the 20th-ranked prospect and No. 2 back in the class of 2019.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2v0lVxs

Forward D.J. Jeffries decommits from Kentucky Wildcats, reopens recruitment

D.J. Jeffries, a five-star forward from Mississippi's Olive Branch High School, announced Monday that he's decommitting from Kentucky and reopening his recruitment.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2mVWqcj

Cornerback prospect Andrew Booth chooses Clemson

Andrew Booth, the No. 3 cornerback prospect in the class of 2019, has chosen to attend Clemson.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2LLGJCp

Georgia Bulldogs land RB John Emery

Georgia landed three ESPN 300 commitments on Sunday, including running back John Emery, who is the 20th-ranked prospect and No. 2 back in the class of 2019.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2v0lVxs

Inside the hit that defined Brian Dawkins' Hall of Fame career

The safety's vicious hit on tight end Alge Crumpler set the tone for the Eagles' 2004 NFC title game win over the Falcons.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2uZy4CA
via IFTTT

Guess who: How well do you know the HOF Class of 2018?

Who donated an unopened bottle of Orange Crush to the HOF museum? Who now has hair? Find out how well you know this year's Hall of Fame class.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2AnSWsj
via IFTTT

Swearinger butts heads with helmet hit rule

Redskins safety D.J. Swearinger says the league's new rule on helmet-to-helmet hits is bad for football.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2vlk0Tx
via IFTTT

Raiders CB Conley misses third practice for hip

Raiders cornerback Gareon Conley is expected to miss at least a few weeks with a hip strain.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2Kcglww
via IFTTT

Bengals TE Eifert makes training camp debut

After spending the first week of training camp on the physically unable to perform list, tight end Tyler Eifert practiced with his Bengals teammates on Monday.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2KarT3i
via IFTTT

QB Darnold signs rookie deal, reports to Jets

After a contract dispute, quarterback Sam Darnold has signed his rookie contract and is practicing with the Jets on Monday.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2NSc7wv
via IFTTT

Panthers' Cockrell suffers fractured tibia, fibula

Cornerback Ross Cockrell went down screaming with what turned out to be a fractured left tibia and fibula, becoming the second Panthers player to suffer a serious injury this week.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2NYhcmV
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Big day for Packers D marred by pair of injuries

Two potential Packers starters -- linebacker Jake Ryan and safety Kentrell Brice -- were carted off the field during Monday's practice with injuries.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2ApH7Sr
via IFTTT

The 20 best available NFL free agents: Who's still on the market

It's not just Dez Bryant looking for a job -- there are several talented veterans still out there, including a talented safety group.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2NT2SvW
via IFTTT

Barnwell: Picking six NFL teams most likely to improve in 2018

There's nowhere to go but up for the 0-16 Browns. Here's why Cleveland -- and five more teams -- will take steps forward this season.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2K7nApF
via IFTTT

Tom Brady's 'mental transition' has him charged up for 2018

While the Patriots quarterback is adjusting his work-life balance, his passion for the game is unwavering.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2LGcKNb
via IFTTT

Cam Newton has to be 'drippin' with consistency to get back into MVP talk

The Panthers QB wants more than anything to be the NFL's best player, but he has to focus on changing the course of the downward spiral he's been on.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2M0XUMZ
via IFTTT

Monday's best at NFL training camps: 310-pound Isaiah Wynn fielding punts, Sam's back

Training camps are off and running. Catch up with what's happening across the league.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2LzRsAt
via IFTTT

Roquan Smith's holdout is justified: Why Bears are to blame

The No. 8 overall pick still isn't in camp, and neither side is budging in the contract dispute. Don't fall for Chicago's reasoning, though.

from www.espn.com - NFL https://ift.tt/2NX8LZb
via IFTTT

Mayfield keeping RV access under lock and key

The Browns quarterback RV, an item of interest since training camp began last week, will remain limited to an exclusive group, rookie Baker Mayfield says.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2AlIB0k

5-star forward Jeffries decommits from Kentucky

D.J. Jeffries, a five-star forward from Mississippi's Olive Branch High School, announced Monday that he's decommitting from Kentucky and reopening his recruitment.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2mVWqcj

Real or not? The pitchers' duel isn't necessarily a thing of the past

Blake Swihart had the last word for Boston in extras, but only after David Price and Aaron Nola locked up in a real throwback game.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2NXs4RQ

What could happen on deadline day?

What trades are still in play as Tuesday's 4 p.m. ET deadline approaches? Here's what teams are discussing now.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2LAJ8AL

Olney: Astros must own all that comes with acquiring Osuna

Houston has yielded all rights to the moral high ground after welcoming Roberto Osuna, whom other teams opted to pass on.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2LAMnYG

MLB trade deadline buzz: The latest moves and rumors

The July 31 MLB trade deadline is fast approaching. Stay up to date with the latest deals, rumors and analysis as your team contemplates its next big move.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2urHgzF

Top NFL free agents on market: It's not just Dez

There are several talented veterans -- headlined by Dez Bryant -- still out there, including a talented safety group.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2NT2SvW

Barnwell: Picking six NFL teams most likely to improve in 2018

There's nowhere to go but up for the 0-16 Browns. Here's why Cleveland -- and five more teams -- will take steps forward this season.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2K7nApF

Rookies who could start for each NFL team

NFL Nation reporters assess which first-year players have the best chance of cracking starting lineups across the league.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2LAf7RD

From cannabis to Chick-fil-A, former CFB coaches find new careers

Marketing weed, working a fast-food grill, becoming a pastor -- coaches from Oklahoma State, Houston, Iowa and USC find their experience works in a new life with less stress.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2M2MLLN

Guess who: How well do you know the HOF Class of 2018?

Who donated an unopened bottle of Orange Crush to the HOF museum? Who now has hair? Find out how well you know this year's Hall of Fame class.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2AnSWsj

Inside the hit that defined Brian Dawkins' Hall of Fame career

The safety's vicious hit on tight end Alge Crumpler set the tone for the Eagles' 2004 NFC title game win over the Falcons.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2uZy4CA

Matthew Berry's Draft-Day Manifesto

Here's how to build and manage a winning fantasy football team by truly taking it one week at a time.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2AbCzPx

Contenders clash in climb toward No. 1

The Red Sox and Phillies both have a chance to expand their leads in their divisions, but they'll have to go through each other first.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2LAl4xS

Mariano and who else? Looking ahead to the 2019 Hall of Fame Class

Now that the 2018 crop is in, we shift our focus forward. Mariano Rivera is a lock, but will other first-timers join him? And what about Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens?

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2K849Ni

Scenes from Cooperstown, where the game is always good

While much discussion has centered on how to fix baseball, on Hall of Fame weekend, it seemed the game might not be broken after all.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2vaHhYa

Future stars? Sons of Antonio Brown, Big Ben connect on pass

The families got together after practice, and the cuteness commenced as Roethlisberger's oldest son threw a pass to Brown's son Auto.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2vghT3p

Power Rankings: Martinez moves Atlanta into top spot

Atlanta United moved three points closer to the Supporters Shield after another inspiring Josef Martinez display. Can any team in MLS catch them?

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2M2kQvt

Mark Henry accepts '1,000 percent' of blame for Eddie Alvarez loss

Mark Henry, coach of UFC lightweight contender Eddie Alvarez, said he deserves the blame for his fighter losing on Saturday to Dustin Poirier.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2v32cNB

Garcia daring to be great in aim to fight Spence Jr.

After beating Robert Easter Jr. this weekend, Mikey Garcia now looks to jump two weight classes to fight welterweight titlist Errol Spence Jr.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2v24tsu

How London changed course to win the Overwatch League title

From a crushing opening-match defeat in the quarterfinals, to dominant glory in the finals, here's a statistical look at how the London Spitfire landed the first-ever Overwatch League championship.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2LDuQyY

Hamilton thanks Bottas for Hungary display

Lewis Hamilton has praised Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas for his role in helping him secure a sixth victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2OsudWQ

Vettel: 2018 title race won't go same way as 2017

Despite suffering setbacks at the last two races, Sebastian Vettel is confident he can deliver Ferrari its first drivers' championship since 2007.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2mYgniE

Kyle Busch ties Tony Stewart with 49th Cup Series victory

Kyle Busch tied Tony Stewart in career wins by triumphing at Pocono, but to compare the two diminishes the skill and expertise Busch has shown.

from www.espn.com - TOP https://ift.tt/2M0btMX

Pens sign backup goaltender Jarry to 2-year deal

The Pittsburgh Penguins have signed goaltender Tristan Jarry to a two-year contract.

from www.espn.com - NHL https://ift.tt/2LDFXHt

Mario Lemieux's $22M Quebec chateau for sale

NHL legend Mario Lemieux has put his 50-room Quebec summer home on the market. The price? He is asking for $21,999,066, the last few dollars an ode to his famous No. 66.

from www.espn.com - NHL https://ift.tt/2JYw4z6

Canucks, Linden 'amicably' split after four years

The Canucks said president of hockey operations Trevor Linden is leaving the organization to "pursue different endeavors."

from www.espn.com - NHL https://ift.tt/2LBDxt2

Johnson dons Gretzky's No. 99, co-leader hat

Dustin Johnson, perhaps hoping to tap into greatness bound by family ties, pulled on a "Gretzky 99" Oilers jersey before teeing off on the par-3 seventh hole at the Canadian Open. He ended the day tied with five others for the lead.

from www.espn.com - NHL https://ift.tt/2NNkbPc

Canucks re-sign F Virtanen to 2-year contract

The Vancouver Canucks have re-signed forward Jake Virtanen, who set career highs in games played, goals, assists, points and penalty minutes. It's a two-year deal with an average annual value of $1.25 million.

from www.espn.com - NHL https://ift.tt/2LOgnwa

Forward D.J. Jeffries decommits from Kentucky Wildcats, reopens recruitment

D.J. Jeffries, a five-star forward from Mississippi's Olive Branch High School, announced Monday that he's decommitting from Kentucky and reopening his recruitment.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2mVWqcj

Cornerback prospect Andrew Booth chooses Clemson

Andrew Booth, the No. 3 cornerback prospect in the class of 2019, has chosen to attend Clemson.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2LLGJCp

Georgia Bulldogs land RB John Emery

Georgia landed three ESPN 300 commitments on Sunday, including running back John Emery, who is the 20th-ranked prospect and No. 2 back in the class of 2019.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2v0lVxs

Georgia Bulldogs land RB John Emery

Georgia landed three ESPN 300 commitments on Sunday, including running back John Emery, who is the 20th-ranked prospect and No. 2 back in the class of 2019.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2v0lVxs

Jeffery Carter, Class o 2019 cornerback, commits to Texas A&M Aggies

Jeffery Carter, the country's No. 4 cornerback in the Class of 2019, will stay in Texas, committing to play for the Aggies.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2mPg5u7

College football recruiting class of 2020 fast starts

Signing day for the 2020 class is a long way away, but these programs are already picking up junior class talent.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2LJlNMn

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Trump offers to meet with Iranian President Rouhani with “no preconditions”

07/30/18 2:47 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Rand Paul says he will support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh

07/30/18 11:48 AM

Forward D.J. Jeffries decommits from Kentucky Wildcats, reopens recruitment

D.J. Jeffries, a five-star forward from Mississippi's Olive Branch High School, announced Monday that he's decommitting from Kentucky and reopening his recruitment.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2mVWqcj

Cornerback prospect Andrew Booth chooses Clemson

Andrew Booth, the No. 3 cornerback prospect in the class of 2019, has chosen to attend Clemson.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2LLGJCp

Forward D.J. Jeffries decommits from Kentucky Wildcats, reopens recruitment

D.J. Jeffries, a five-star forward from Mississippi's Olive Branch High School, announced Monday that he's decommitting from Kentucky and reopening his recruitment.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2mVWqcj

Cornerback prospect Andrew Booth chooses Clemson

Andrew Booth, the No. 3 cornerback prospect in the class of 2019, has chosen to attend Clemson.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2LLGJCp

Watch Stephen Colbert Do a Spit Take Over the Les Moonves News

This Stephen Colbert segment is mostly about Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-then-gnaw-off-the-foot legal strategy, and Colbert gets in a few good licks over the course of his monologue. But the highlight is Colbert’s expertly executed spit take upon hearing that the recent New Yorker article about Les Moonves—Colbert’s boss—was written by Ronan “Harvey Weinstein” Farrow.

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2LGw38P

Michelle Wolf Has Found a Way to Revolutionize Transportation While Saving the Planet, and You’re Going to Hate It

One of the main things late night talk show hosts do, especially in the Trump era, is criticize our disaster of a society, country, and species, occasionally with the goal of provoking change.
And yet wintery, sarcastic, Juvenalian satire is not usually one of the tools in their toolbox. Maybe the premise of late night talk shows—“viewers invite us into their homes”—precludes approaches that might alienate the audience, maybe those kinds of jokes are so open to misinterpretation that they don’t work at broadcast network scale, or maybe it’s just a matter of comedic sensibilities. But whatever the reason, this Michelle Wolf segment, which borrows the relentlessly upbeat smarm of business-speak to describe something awful and unconscionable, is difficult to imagine running on anyone else’s show:

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2v09JMW

U.S. Intelligence Says North Korea’s Nuclear Program Still Active Despite Trump Declaring Mission Accomplished

Despite President Trump’s “mission accomplished” good vibes after his summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last month, after which he declared “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” it turns out, there is a still a nuclear threat from North Korea. That’s according to U.S. spy agencies, which the Washington Post reports, have gathered evidence complete with satellite imagery that suggests Pyongyang is actively at work on its nuclear program. At least one liquid-fueled ICBM, the variety capable of hitting the U.S., is under construction at a facility outside the capital city, according to U.S. intelligence, indicating that the country continues to manufacture weapons, despite its public statements to the contrary.

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2mUc7ka

They’re More Bad Than We Are Good

Listen to Episode 1045 of Slate’s The Gist:

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2viZQtp

White House Reportedly Considering Bypassing Congress to Grant $100 Billion Capital Gains Tax Cut for Wealthy Americans

Every once in a while the Trump administration does—or seriously considers doing—something that’s so on the nose, you wonder if there is, in fact, a cartoon villain living in the White House. On Monday, we got the latest example of President Trump and his rich buddies’ shamelessness in trying to enrich themselves and their golfing partners with the New York Times report that Trump’s Treasury Department is pondering ramming through a $100 billion tax cut almost exclusively to the very wealthiest in America by overhauling how the capital gains tax is calculated. To make matters even more underhanded, the White House is studying whether it can bypass Congress and make the move by executive fiat by arguing it’s a simple regulatory change rather than a legislative one.

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2LNO9Fm

Les Moonves and the Limitations of “No Means No”

When the New Yorker confronted CBS Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves with six women’s allegations of sexual harassment and assault, he offered a conciliatory response. “I recognize that there were times decades ago when I may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances,” he said in a statement. “Those were mistakes, and I regret them immensely.”

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2LQTxay

Rick Scott Is Having a Really Difficult Time Hiding From Donald Trump

Donald Trump will be in Tampa on Tuesday to stump for a handful of GOP candidates.
Conspicuously absent, however, will be the most notable Florida Republican running in the midterms: Rick Scott, the state’s term-limited governor challenging Democrat Bill Nelson in a battleground race crucial to control of the U.S. Senate.

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2Aq3eIJ

How to Track the Wildfires Raging Across the Western U.S. Online

The Carr fire raging in Shasta County, California has already claimed the lives of six people, with another seven people reported missing. It’s responsible for the destruction of 966 structures, making it the ninth most destructive wildfire in the state’s history according to Cal Fire statistics. While firefighters have gained some ground in Shasta county, according to a Reuters report, there are still more than 60 wildfires that are considered uncontained, mostly concentrated on the western side of the country.

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2LM9yP1

Uber Closes Its Self-Driving Truck Division

Uber announced Monday that it would be shutting down its self-driving truck program in order to focus on self-driving cars.

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2K6NB8B

The Angle: This Was Us Edition

Now it can be told: Six Slate-orbit writers and podcasters share the stories of their abortions in this extremely personal piece, which is maybe even better in audio form.

from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2uXlQur

IndyCar's Iowa race returning to night start

Iowa Speedway and the IndyCar Series announced Monday that next year's race in Newton will be at night.

from www.espn.com - RPM https://ift.tt/2vk75B3

Renault: We stopped listening to Horner years ago

Following criticism from Red Bull at the Hungarian Grand Prix, Renault F1 boss Cyril Abiteboul has said his company has no interest in dealing with their soon-to-be former engine partners any more.

from www.espn.com - RPM https://ift.tt/2mS6931

Alonso: I felt like Grosjean stole my wallet with overtake

Fernando Alonso has retracted his complaint towards Romain Grosjean after suggesting the Haas driver had illegally overtaken him under the Virtual Safety Car period at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

from www.espn.com - RPM https://ift.tt/2Api6XI

Hamilton thanks Bottas for Hungary display

Lewis Hamilton has praised Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas for his role in helping him secure a sixth victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

from www.espn.com - RPM https://ift.tt/2OsudWQ

Vettel: 2018 title race won't go same way as 2017

Despite suffering setbacks in the past two races, Sebastian Vettel is confident he can deliver Ferrari its first drivers' championship since 2007.

from www.espn.com - RPM https://ift.tt/2mYgniE

Ricciardo keen to 'escape' Red Bull problems over summer break

Daniel Ricciardo admits Formula One's August break has come at a perfect time to give him a way to forget about Red Bull's spluttering 2018 campaign.

from www.espn.com - RPM https://ift.tt/2K5Ljqk

Wolff: Budapest was Bottas' best drive for Mercedes

Toto Wolff feels his comments about Valtteri Bottas being a "sensational wingman" to Lewis Hamilton were taken out of context.

from www.espn.com - RPM https://ift.tt/2Lzki4c

NBA MVP Harden meets the Drew League MVP

The NBA offseason might be winding down, but don't tell that to James Harden -- or the Drew League champions with their own impressive MVP.

from www.espn.com - NBA https://ift.tt/2mQbgRr

Lowe: How to fix the NBA supermax

Lots of All-Stars have changed teams lately. Is something wrong, or is the NBA just getting smart?

from www.espn.com - NBA https://ift.tt/2NQe5NQ

Jimmer Fredette takes his shot at $2 million payday

Fredette is the most famous of the bevy of former NBA players and college stars playing for a winner-take-all cash prize at The Basketball Tournament.

from www.espn.com - NBA https://ift.tt/2OnX8LJ

NBA free agency: Latest buzz, news and reports

NBA free-agency news is coming in fast. Stay up to date with the latest deals and rumblings.

from www.espn.com - NBA https://ift.tt/2MDpiAy

Uni Watch's Flashback: The history of The Lake Show

The Lakers are set to unveil a new look soon, so here is the evolution of the iconic purple and gold.

from www.espn.com - NBA https://ift.tt/2LDagOy

Setting the stage for this year's Team USA minicamp

Team USA has a new coach and a new player pool heading into this week's minicamp in Las Vegas.

from www.espn.com - NBA https://ift.tt/2LELtJR

Georgia Bulldogs land RB John Emery

Georgia landed three ESPN 300 commitments on Sunday, including running back John Emery, who is the 20th-ranked prospect and No. 2 back in the class of 2019.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2v0lVxs

Jeffery Carter, Class o 2019 cornerback, commits to Texas A&M Aggies

Jeffery Carter, the country's No. 4 cornerback in the Class of 2019, will stay in Texas, committing to play for the Aggies.

from ESPN Feed: - recruiting https://ift.tt/2mPg5u7

Whitney Houston and the Persistent Perils of the Mainstream

In less than a year, moviegoers have been presented with two different Whitney Houston films: Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal’s Whitney: Can I Be Me last fall, and Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney this month. Arriving five years after the music icon’s death in 2012, the former looks at her career and personal life, specifically examining Houston’s anxieties around her own race and sexuality. It was, notably, made without the blessing of Houston’s estate (Broomfield said in an interview that the estate was “aggressive and sent emails to people telling them not to take part”). Whitney, meanwhile, was completed with the cooperation of her family and other important figures in her life. It has similar ambitions as Can I Be Me, also attempting to untangle Houston the person from Houston the persona—sometimes, as critics have pointed out, at the expense of celebrating her musical genius.

This revisiting of Houston’s legacy comes at a time when the artist’s presence still resonates throughout pop culture. Earlier this year, the gay coming-of-age movie Love, Simon featured Houston’s music in a moving dance sequence. On a more painful note, Kanye West attracted criticism in May for his decision to use a photo of Houston’s bathroom—filthy with signs of apparent drug use—on the cover of a new Pusha T album he produced. The recent documentaries shed new light on many of the particulars of Houston’s life and death: her upbringing in the church, her turbulent marriage to Bobby Brown, her shortcomings as a parent. But at a moment when musicians, generally, have greater control than before over the production and distribution of their work, the films also consider the immense pressures Houston navigated in order to appeal to a white mainstream—pressures still faced today by black and queer artists seen as crossover pop acts.

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When Houston died from a drug-related accidental drowning in a Beverly Hills hotel room at age 48, fans were stunned. Gone suddenly was the superstar beloved around the world as the Queen of Pop and The Voice. By the time Houston released her third album, 1990’s I’m Your Baby Tonight, she’d already churned out a string of hits, including 1987’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).” In terms of memorability, the song is second perhaps only to Houston’s 1992 cover of “I Will Always Love You,” whose free-floating, melismatic Is and yous kept it hovering at No. 1 for 14 weeks—a record at the time.

Houston’s success helped pave the way for the rise of other black female artists like Anita Baker and Janet Jackson at the height of the MTV era. “Because of what Whitney and Sade did, there was an opening for me,” Baker told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “For radio stations, black woman singers aren’t taboo anymore.” Houston continued to chip away at cultural barriers. In 1991, she performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl, one of the most-watched television programs in the country. Her rendition came at a tenuous political moment: The “tough on crime” policies of the ’80s were tormenting black communities across the U.S., and the country had just entered into the Gulf War. That it was a black woman—from the race riot–roiled city of Newark, New Jersey, no less—who sang the national anthem was no small thing. In fact, her performance was arguably the symbol of strength and unity the country was looking for at the time: “Hearing her sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ she made people proud that they were Americans,” Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds recalls in Whitney.

But as the documentaries underscore, record moguls groomed Houston for public consumption, to devastating effect. In Can I Be Me, Kenneth Reynolds, a former executive at Houston’s label, Arista Records, says, “the company had this image in mind that they were going to create a pop icon—an artist that was accepted by the masses.” He goes on: “Her music was deliberately pop. Anything that was too black-sounding was sent back to the studio.” Or as Pattie Howard, Houston’s bass singer, puts it: “That’s who white America was presented. They weren’t presented [with] Newark, New Jersey, Whitney.” Likewise, the music-business legend Clive Davis, who in 1983 signed a 19-year-old Houston to Arista, once reportedly protested that she looked “too ethnic” on her debut album cover.

While Arista’s efforts to make Houston less “black-sounding” were commercially successful, they took a psychological and professional toll on the singer. During an infamous moment at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards, some members of the audience booed her, allegedly because she and her pop sound were too polite—too white. Hurt, she later insisted on a reversal of sorts, and was adamant that her next album skew toward R&B. In both films, Houston’s friends and colleagues proffer that they don’t think that she ever fully recovered from that humiliating denunciation.

In addition to difficulties she faced for being black, Houston was stalked by the rumor that she was in love with her longtime best friend, Robyn Crawford, who later became her executive assistant. But the pieties of the ’80s—a decade of ambient and state-sanctioned homophobia—meant many Americans looked askance at even the suggestion of queerness. In early interviews, Houston was often asked about, and just as often rejected, speculation that she was anything other than straight. Still, reported fighting between Crawford and the rest of Houston’s inner circle for the singer’s attention, along with the pressure on Houston to project a wholesome image, eventually led to Crawford’s resignation. In Whitney, Houston’s older half-brother, Gary Garland-Houston, says of Crawford: “She was a nobody. … I knew she was something that I didn’t want my sister to be involved with.”

It can be easy, in some ways, to see Houston’s professional troubles as a relic of another time. After all, Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar have been lauded recently for putting out bold, distinctly black music, with the latter winning a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year. And despite an administration with a record of scaling back hard-won LGBTQ rights, openly queer musicians like Sam Smith, Sia, and Janelle Monáe regularly top the charts in the U.S. For many, Houston herself endures as a gay icon, as alluded to in the aforementioned Love, Simon sequence: In it, the titular character glams up his imagined college dorm room with a poster of the chanteuse, nodding to his embrace of his own sexuality.

But black female musicians who’ve come up after Houston have inherited some of the problems she struggled with in the late ’80s and early ’90s. After rocketing to fame in the mid- and late-’90s, Lauryn Hill surprised listeners by disappearing from the public eye for years. In 2006, Hill said to Essence magazine: “[Audiences] need to understand that the Lauryn Hill they were exposed to in the beginning was all that was allowed in that arena at that time.” Hill, like Houston, was squeezed by, in her words, “a small space designed for consumer mass appeal and dictated by very limited standards.”

More recently, in a 2015 New York Times profile, Rihanna discussed industry expectations that there’s a “right” way to be a black person. “When I started to experience the difference—or even have my race be highlighted—it was mostly when I would do business deals,” Rihanna said. She added that she has to be mindful of the fact that people “are judging you because you’re packaged a certain way.” Her observation—that not all kinds of blackness are perceived as desirable—fits with Houston’s experiences of being made to downplay certain expressions of her racial identity to achieve mass success.

Despite the acclaim and fandom she’s secured, Beyoncé has been buffeted by similar expectations. In 2008, the cosmetics company L’Oréal Paris was roundly criticized over allegations that it had digitally lightened the megastar’s skin in an advertisement—a rather literal example of “whitewashing” for the seeming purposes of catering to mainstream tastes. And in April, after Beyoncé’s show-stopping Coachella performance, her mother, Tina Knowles-Lawson, wrote on Instagram that, initially, she “was afraid that the predominately white audience at Coachella would be confused by all of the black culture and Black college culture because it was something that they might not get.”

While the Beyoncé of 2018 doesn’t need to pander to white audiences to sell records, she spent years building up the influence she holds in the industry today. Knowles-Lawson, in her post, said that Beyoncé told her: “I have worked very hard to get to the point where I have a true voice,” such that she doesn’t need to do what’s “most popular.” That it took Beyoncé more than a decade, as a solo artist, to procure her “true voice”—that she wasn’t singing “I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils” in the early 2000s—comes back to the narrow standards of acceptability that afflicted black artists like Houston.

Those narrow standards, in their own way, also led to public scrutiny over Houston’s rumored sexuality. In 2018, female musicians who are queer can face different challenges. As The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber wrote of the backlash to the Rita Ora track “Girls,” “Music’s most famous depictions of same-sex female romance typically treat it as a dare, a dalliance, a performance—rather than an expression of real desire.” The industry, and the American public, has grown more accepting of LGBT musicians since Houston debuted in 1985, but unevenly so. Monáe, who this year came out as queer, has acknowledged her skittishness about discussing her sexuality, among other things. “It had to do with the fear of being judged,” she told Rolling Stone in an April profile of her early-career insecurity. “All I saw was that I was supposed to look a certain way coming into this industry, and I felt like I [didn’t] look like a stereotypical black female artist.”

Though Houston sought to balance her sense of identity with the demands of music executives and audiences, she never tried to fit perfectly into the rigid box of a “stereotypical black female artist.” “And don’t say I don’t have soul or what you consider to be ‘Blackness,’” Houston said in a 1991 Ebony magazine story. “I know what my color is.” It was the sort of guarded, self-aware sentiment she expressed often—a declaration of individuality, a pointed dismissal of the endless judgments she heard from her detractors. Just as the memory of Houston’s excellence—of her singular talent, of the way she could cast a spell—hasn’t faded, neither should attention to the insidious systemic forces that wore her down, and that loom today.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2AlsJuK

The Fight for Iowa’s White Working-Class Soul

The Family Weekly: Are Parents Responsible for Their Children’s Choices?

This Week in Family

A historic number of women are running for office in this fall’s midterm elections, and the moms among them are promoting their motherhood as a strength, reports Annika Neklason, an assistant editor at The Atlantic. Women in politics have long struggled against the perception that being a mom stands in the way of a successful career, but it says something about this particular moment—for mothers and for politics—that some are now framing it as a strength.

The theme of gender also played a central role in a story this week by Caroline Kitchener, an associate editor at The Atlantic. Kitchener noted the enduring gendered expectations about whether someone will change his or her surname after marriage: In a 2011 study, 72 percent of adults polled said they believe a woman should give up her maiden name when she gets married. In her piece, she wonders what’s stopping more men from taking on their wives’ last names.

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Other Highlights

Are parents responsible for the choices their kids make when they grow up? A new documentary based on Andrew Solomon’s 2012 book, Far From the Tree, explores the complicated relationship between nature and nurture. The film suggests that parents could stand to blame themselves less for a child’s behavior, even when it comes to children with violent tendencies.  

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Dear Therapist

Every Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.

This week, a mother struggles to forgive her adult son for walking out on Mother’s Day after a fight. “I cannot get over this hurt … I feel we have to do a do-over,” she writes.

Lori’s advice? Think about a repair instead of a do-over:

All healthy relationships go through rupture and repair. There’s a rupture—a misunderstanding, an unfortunate interaction, hurt feelings—followed by a repair. The repair might involve one person or both people taking responsibility for their actions, making a genuine apology, or working through a difference. I have a feeling that your son was also upset by what happened on Mother’s Day but instead of taking into account his experience and what you can do to repair your part, you’re insisting that he re-create the Mother’s Day you wanted—as if a do-over consisting of him grudgingly restaging the day’s festivities would repair this for either of you.

Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.

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from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2OpWP2X

Cambodia Eviscerates Its Free Press—And the Whole Region Suffers

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — It is the final stretch of campaign season in Cambodia. The dark-blue posters for Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party are ubiquitous, seen from the sides of buildings in Phnom Penh to the billboards along the main roads in the Cambodian countryside. Yet somehow it still doesn’t feel like a parliamentary election is happening on Sunday in this country of 16 million. In large part, that’s because there are effectively no longer any independent news outlets left in Cambodia to cover it.

The descent has been rapid. In less than a year, more than 30 radio stations and The Cambodia Daily, one of Cambodia’s two independent, English-language newspapers, were shuttered; Radio Free Asia was chased out of the country and two of its reporters were arrested and charged with espionage; and The Phnom Penh Post, regarded as the country’s last remaining independent newspaper, was sold to Sivakumar S. Ganapathy, a Malaysian businessman with reported ties to Hun Sen’s government.

Cambodia is hardly the only country in Southeast Asia experiencing a crackdown on the free press. Never known as a bastion of journalistic freedom, the region has taken a sharply repressive turn, from the jailing of two Reuters journalists in Myanmar, to assaults from armies of online trolls in the Philippines, to the now-infamous Anti–Fake News Act in Malaysia, which imposed harsh penalties on anyone discovered to be spreading what the government deemed “fake news.” “When you take a glance across the region, all these threats and apparent deterioration in the press-freedom environment seem to be popping up all over the place,” Shawn Crispin, the Southeast Asia representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me. “The situation was already pretty dire in many countries across the region, and oftentimes what we’re seeing is just kind of a piling-on effect.”

When the presses stop

For roughly two decades, the press in Cambodia was relatively free. At the Daily and the Post, expat journalists and local reporters could get a crash course in covering Cambodia and in foreign correspondence, alums of both papers told me. They could report on touchy subjects, such as corruption, or other stories critical of Hun Sen’s ruling party. “It was always pretty free: You could be very, very critical and you would be allowed to do whatever you wanted to do without any repercussions,” Alex Willemyns, a former editor at the Daily, told me. “Maybe you’d get an angry statement from the government, but that’s normal in any country.”

The beginning of the end came last June, after the opposition party finished nearly even with Hun Sen’s CPP in local elections. In August, the government began shutting down more than 30 radio stations across the country, including those run by the U.S.-backed Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. It also slapped the Daily with a $6.3-million tax penalty for allegedly failing to properly register with the government, forcing the financially strapped paper to close up shop last September. The headline on its final issue, which was published on the same day that the opposition leader Kem Sokha was thrown into jail: “Descent Into Outright Dictatorship.” “If you look at Cambodia … the situation is really alarming because there really were pockets of press freedom there,” Crispin said. “That space has just been abruptly closed.”

For the Post, change came more gradually. When its staff published an investigation into the new owner’s decades-old ties to Hun Sen and the Cambodian government, the editor in chief and the reporters who worked on the story were fired or resigned after refusing to take down the article. A subsequent exodus of staffers, particularly the expats, depleted the newsroom. Since then, the reporters who remained have had controversial stories spiked or have had to censor their own articles in order to comply with the new owner’s wishes. “The real tragedy of what has happened to free press in Cambodia in the last year or the last 18 months is that it used to be this kind of free-media haven,” Erin Handley, an Australian journalist who was among those who resigned from the Post this spring, told me. “The fact that the Post and the Daily were able to exist at all was something of an anomaly … We’re losing a lot of that free press.”

Some foreign journalists have left Cambodia entirely, while others are freelancing for foreign outlets. Many out-of-work local journalists either began working as fixers for visiting foreign correspondents or took jobs at NGOs or embassies. Others joined news organizations seen as aligned with the government in order to continue providing for their families. Of the dozen journalists and civil-society staffers I spoke with, several asked not to be named. Some were willing to speak in general terms about the situation journalists face, but, fearing retribution from their employers or the government, declined to get into specifics about what’s happened within their newsrooms.

Even the last organization seen as remotely independent, the Cambodian Center for Independent Media and its affiliated station, Voice of Democracy, feels pressure to avoid hot-button topics in order to stay off the government’s radar. “We are still operating our daily job, but we try to avoid some critical issues,” such as the election, corruption, and border issues with Vietnam, Sek Sophal, a staffer at CCIM and VOD, told me. “We try to think of long-term consequences … We know that we are not going to win if we confront directly with the government, so we are not going to do it … But it does not mean we are going to retreat, so we try other ways that are not really direct.” The organization’s journalists are frequently turned away from government ministries and offices; out of an abundance of caution, colleagues will text one another after work to make sure they have arrived home safely.

In Cambodia and across Southeast Asia, it’s become increasingly difficult for reporters to do their jobs. International assessments reflect this trend: In Reporters Without Borders’ 2018 press-freedom index of 180 countries, no Southeast Asian country ranks higher than 124 (Indonesia)—and one, Vietnam, ranks in the bottom 10 countries worldwide (175). Cambodia, ranked at 142, has dropped an impressive 10 places in just one year.

Reporters in the Philippines, though still relatively free compared with their Cambodian counterparts, face an onslaught of abuse both from their ever outspoken president and an army of state-aligned online trolls. After her organization’s critical reporting on Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly drug war, Maria Ressa, the head of the online news outlet Rappler, received repeated rape and death threats from those trolls. Rappler’s Duterte correspondent has been banned from the presidential palace, and Duterte himself has threatened to revoke the publication’s license. Sometimes the violent threats go beyond social media: Reporters Without Borders ranks the Philippines as the deadliest country for journalists in Asia, with four journalists killed in 2017 alone. “It’s enough to make us cry,” Ressa said at a conference in Singapore late last month.

The thug appeal of Rodrigo Duterte

In Malaysia, the Anti–Fake News Act drew headlines for the harsh penalties it imposed on anyone discovered to be spreading disinformation: up to six years in prison and a fine of about $125,000, for Malaysians and foreigners alike. “It’s not a nice distinction to be the first country to actually put a law to Donald Trump’s fake news term,” Darshini Kandasamy, an assistant editor at Malaysiakini, the country’s largest online news organization, told me. It’s not just the Anti–Fake News Act, either: six national-security-related laws from when the country still faced communist threats have been used to prosecute journalists. Still, Malaysian journalists say there’s reason to believe a positive change is on the horizon. The country’s new prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has pledged to repeal the Anti–Fake News Act and increase access for independent news outlets.

In Cambodia, there’s some hope—though not much—that things could also improve once Hun Sen has secured his party another five years in office. But in the meantime, many in the Cambodian media scene are holding their breath. In the lead-up to election day, Hun Sen’s government has been doing everything it can to ensure a smooth victory: The CPP has been instructing voters on how to cast their votes for the party (complete with diagrams) and has promised to extract steep fines from anyone who encourages voters to boycott the polls. (Five members of the outlawed opposition party have already been fined approximately $2,500 each for their boycott efforts.)

Journalists, who always risk being detained or turned away from government offices, are aware that tensions remain high. “Will it be better? I don’t know,” one Cambodian journalist, who asked not to be named for fear of jeopardizing his and his news organization’s position, told me. “We see all the fear among our Cambodian colleagues. We see in their eyes that they’re scared, that they’ve lost their job, that they don’t know what they’re doing right now—so it’s a scary situation.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2NSUaxL

American Farmers Are Still Worried About Trump's Trade War

When the Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it’s setting aside $12 billion in aid for farmers affected by the international trade war, the underlying political motivation seemed obvious: It was a move aimed at shoring up support in the white farming towns that had overwhelmingly voted for Trump. The president was scheduled to speak in Iowa two days after the announcement, and reports suggested that Department of Agriculture officials were scrambling to announce details of the aid package weeks earlier than planned.

But the play doesn’t seem to be working as well as the administration might like. So far, both the aid package and Wednesday’s announcement that the European Union will increase imports of American soybeans have been met with lukewarm responses from farming communities across the country, including in key swing states.

“The general consensus that my producers have is that it’s a Band-Aid,” said David Hemesath, the general manager at Farmers Union Cooperative in Ossian, Iowa, an hour and a half away from the site of the president’s Thursday visit. “They’d just prefer to have their markets back and not have to get handouts from the government. They had spent years developing those overseas markets and it seems like they collapsed in 30 days.”

The Sidney Daily News in Shelby County, Ohio, where 78 percent of voters went for Trump, reported “mixed reactions” from local farmers to the proposed aid. An op-ed by Christopher Gibbs, a local farmer, called the package “hush money.”

“Let me tell you a riddle,” Gibbs wrote. “I slept with a billionaire because he said he loved me. I expected to make love, but in the morning I realized I was getting screwed. When I went to tell the world, I was offered cash to keep my mouth shut. Who am I? No, I’m not a model or someone named Stormy. I’m the American farmer.”

Local news outlets across the South also reported simmering discontent with the administration’s approach to ameliorating the effects of international tariffs. Arkansas television station THV11 reported that the tariffs could cost 24,000 jobs in the state. “Trade not aid,” a rice farmer told the station. “Nobody wants aid. I don’t. We would just like to have free market access around the world.”

Similar sentiments were expressed in Tennessee and eastern North Carolina, where farmers told local news outlets that they preferred open and free markets over government aid. “I think what farmers need is strong trade agreements and not trade wars,” one farmer told WITN in North Carolina.

Hemesath and Gibbs both cultivate soybeans, which are the United States’ top agricultural export. They’re also arguably the crop most negatively affected by the trade war. China imposed 25 percent retaliatory tariffs on U.S. soybeans—along with several other of America’s biggest agricultural exports—at the beginning of the month after the White House announced steep tariffs on Chinese imports. Soybeans are planted in late spring—June at the latest—so when the trade war began, this year’s crop was already in the ground. Farmers had no opportunity to adjust the amount they’d plant to compensate for the sudden decline in demand.

Trump made an overture to soybean farmers on Wednesday when he announced the new trade agreement with the EU. But just two days later, the tentative deal hit a road bump: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross claimed that “all agricultural products” would be included in the ongoing trade negotiations, something the EU quickly denied. It’s still unclear whether the announced deal will result in any significant amount of increased exports.

“Any deal they can reach is a good thing,” Hemesath said, “but on the other hand, I’m not sure Europe had much choice anyways.” After China imposed its steep tariffs on American soybeans, Chinese importers began turning to other markets, especially in South America. That has two major consequences, Hemesath said. First, the sheer volume of soybeans China imports would make it difficult for the EU to find any beans left to buy in South America, forcing them to turn to the next-cheapest source, the United States. And Chinese importers are quickly building international markets, making it more likely they will abandon American soybean farmers in the long term, even after the trade war is over.

“Once China finds markets in South America, then they won’t come back and buy all the beans they bought before, all the corn they bought before, the pork, because they have other markets in place,” he said. “They’re already investing in infrastructure in Brazil, they announced this year, so it looks like they’re digging in for the long run down there.”

John Boyd, a Virginia farmer who’s also the founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, foresees dire effects for small local farmers. Black-owned farms are almost entirely small-scale, with nearly 50 percent of black-operated farms under 50 acres, according to a 2012 census report. Only 1 percent of black-operated farms are over 1,000 acres. “The tariffs will certainly run small-scale soybean farmers out of business,” Boyd said. “It reduces local markets. If there’s nowhere for local markets to unload their grain elevators, then there’s going to be nowhere to sell your local commodities.” And the USDA, he says, has historically not been favorable to black farmers—something he’s worried will keep the $12 billion aid package out of their reach. “Generally, the big boys, the good old boys, they get in there and they know how to work the system and they make the system work for them, and they survive,” he said. “This is a system that hasn’t been user-friendly to black farmers. They deter them, and it just hasn’t been a friendly process.”

Boyd’s cash crop is soybeans. He’s already seen his projected profits take a hit, and he’s nervous that if the trade war continues, the hits will just keep coming. “I don’t want a handout, I want a hand-up, which is a free market price for my commodity,” he said. “I’m very nervous about what the outcome is going to be.”

Not everyone is so concerned about the long-term effects of the trade war. Lynn Condreay is the general manager at a relatively small farmer’s co-op in Lindsey, Nebraska, which handles about 2.5 million bushels of corn and soybeans. Lindsey’s farmers weren’t as affected by the soybean tariffs as other farmers, he said, because 80 percent to 90 percent of their beans had already been marketed to soybean-meal-processing plants in the state. And he’s not worried about losing the Chinese export market for soybeans.

“They ain’t got no place else to get them but us anyway, so they’re gonna have to buy them from us eventually,” Condreay said. China tends to go to South American markets first before coming to American farmers, he said, and the tariffs haven’t changed the market pattern enough to be a cause for concern.

Above all else, though, Condreay isn’t worried about the tariffs or the aid because he’s confident that the trade war will have a long-term positive effect on agriculture. “Before it’s all said and done, I think it’ll be a good thing. It’s something we should have done years ago, but evidently everybody else just dropped the ball on it,” he said. “[Trump] might not get everything he wants, but if he gets part of what he wants, should work out pretty good. That’s the way our customers all look at it, too.”

So will the tariffs have a measurable impact on the midterms, or on President Trump’s reelection bid? Historically, as Michael Wolraich wrote Thursday in The Atlantic, tariffs have been political poison for the president who imposes them. But, as Iowa radio producer Robert Leonard noted recently in The New York Times, “most rural Republicans aren’t farmers, and many are Fox News devotees. So when they turn on Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, the hosts will likely extol the ‘virtues’ of Mr. Trump’s farm policies and tariffs rather than the reality of their failures.”

Still, if the trade deal with the EU falls through or isn’t as comprehensive as the administration has promised, it wouldn’t bode well for party unity because it would gut the economic fortunes of so much of the Republican base. “The president is hurting his base—white male farmers,” Boyd said. “They helped raise money for him, helped campaign for him, put big poster boards outside their farms, and really helped to elect Donald Trump.” And the $12 billion USDA package wouldn’t even come close to covering their losses.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2OoV8TG

Pakistan’s Post-Ethnic Election

This article was updated on July 28 at 9:41 p.m.

On July 25, Pakistanis went to the polls to elect a new government in what would be only the second transition of power from one civilian government to another in the country's seven-decade history. That might be cause for celebration, except that the vote was hardly a peaceful or squeaky-clean affair. Despite the 371,000 soldiers stationed at polling places around the country—five times the number out in force during the previous vote—bloodshed still marred the day. The worst bombing took place in the city of Quetta, where a suicide attack killed 31. Moreover, accusations of vote rigging in favor of the winning party, the former cricketeer and man-about-town Imran Khan’s PTI, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome. Should PTI’s victory be understood as further proof that this volatile republic, traumatized by decades of war and impoverished by a self-dealing elite, is doomed? Or is it an indication that this youthful country, with a median age of under 24, is ripe for a post-ethnic politics of reform?

In the short time since the party's founding, the PTI and Khan have been accused of many things. Whereas some observers, and at times Khan himself, have characterized the movement as a modernizing—even liberalizing—anti-corruption force, others have pointed out Khan's appeals to Islamism and purported ties to the military, which has ruled the country for much of its history. During the latest vote, according to C. Christine Fair writing for Foreign Affairs, “the army was hell-bent upon securing Khan’s victory and even encouraged political parties with overt ties to terrorist groups to field several hundred candidates, alongside some 1,500 candidates tied to Pakistan’s right-wing Islamist parties.”

There is little doubt that Pakistan’s powerful military was involved in securing Khan’s victory, and of course his ties to Islamist parties are deeply worrisome. However, his party's popularity portends at least one positive development for Pakistan: the decline of political parties rooted in ethnicity. To understand how, some history is helpful.

In previous decades, when Pakistan had a civilian government, that government would most likely be led by one of two parties: the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) or the Pakistan Muslim League (PML). These parties did, of course, have official ideological platforms. The PPP was founded as a socialist party. And the various versions of the PML that have contested elections characterized themselves as center-right parties. Yet the ostensible ideologies of those two parties have never been as important as their ethnic affiliations. As a general rule, the PML would win with Punjabi voters in the country’s most populous province, Punjab, and the PPP would take Sindh, a province with a distinctive ethnoreligious identity. Smaller parties could appeal to ethnic groups in Baluchistan, in the teeming city of Karachi, and so on.

There is nothing intrinsically objectionable about ethnic politics, and parties that defend the interests of distinct cultural communities play a valuable role in many flourishing democracies. But in Pakistan, the main parties’ reliance on ethnic ties has badly undermined state-building efforts. Before this decade, no democratically elected leader had every completed a full term; instead, they were generally dismissed or overthrown by the military, judiciary, or both. There was no expectation, therefore, that rule by one party could lead peacefully to rule by another, or that the ruling party would have any cause to appeal to voters outside its ethnic base during its (usually brief) stint in power. As Adam Prezworski has written, democracy can only persist in situations where “political forces that lose in contestation comply with the outcomes and continue to participate rather than subvert democratic institutions.” And, since Pakistani voters on the losing side had little reason to comply, politics became a fraught affair. Elections frequently ended in tensions or violence between partisans of the main parties—that is, in ethnic violence, even if it was described otherwise by officials desperate to keep it from spiraling out of control. It was then that the military would step in.

In the elections of 1970, for example, the PPP won the majority of the vote in West Pakistan, while the Awami League won the Bengali vote in the East, ultimately leading to a bloody war of secession. In 1977, the sitting PPP government won elections, but the opposition’s refusal to cede the vote led to protests that ended with a coup by Zia ul-Haq. Even the coup by Pervez Musharraf, which is often seen as a response to the embarrassment the Pakistani military suffered at Kargil at the hands of India, followed a decade of democratic breakdown. Ferocious conflict between the PPP and PML, in which each forced exchange of power led to more ethnic tension, more protests surrounding a delayed census, and more radicalization among smaller ethnic parties, particularly the MQM in the city of Karachi, paved the way for military rule

As power-hungry as the military is seen to be today—and as damaging as its frequent takeovers has been—it makes sense, then, to view its forays into governance through the framework that the political scientist Barbara Geddes set out in 1999:It is neither the job nor the goal of militaries to govern countries forever. They become more likely to step in when they see threats to stability, national integrity, and law and order that could undermine their ultimate objectives: the “maintenance of hierarchy, discipline, and cohesiveness within the military; autonomy from civilian intervention; and budgets sufficient to attract high- quality recruits and buy state-of-the-art weapons.” Moreover, it is worth keeping in mind that, painted as efforts to restore order, coups in Pakistan have generally been accepted by at least some portion of the public and legitimated after the fact through the courts.

That brings us to Imran Khan’s PTI. Strikingly, the party does not have an ethnic base at its core, which is why, through careful tailoring of messages, the party has managed to appeal in previous electoral attempts to both urbanites who were sick of the corruption and inefficiency plaguing the two main parties and, at the same time, to Islamists in the northern areas. As of the latest reports (the full official results have not been released), the PTI has secured at least 115 seats in the National Assembly, compared to around 42 for the PPP and 65 for the PML. That is a stunning result in and of itself—it would be as if a charismatic American third-party candidate had soared to victory by appealing to cosmopolitan socialists in the nation’s gentrified urban neighborhoods and socially conservative nationalists in the heart of Appalachia.

An electoral map compiled by Al Jazeera reveals something even more astounding: The PTI won big in Khyber Paktunkhwa and the Tribal Areas; made a strong showing in Balochistan, where parties representing ethnic Baluch preferences have historically be strong; won 122 seats in the provincial assembly in PML’s stronghold in
Punjab (the PML squeezed out 127 which, for it, is a very poor
showing); and even made a dent in Sindh, where the PPP has typically dominated the rural regions and the MQM has taken the city of Karachi. Most shockingly of all, PTI won Karachi outright, after an incredible three decades of dominance by the MQM, a party created to further the interests of the Mohajir ethnic group, the name given to the migrants who left India for Pakistan during partition and their descendants.

The PPP and, especially, the PML have good reason to protest the result, as the election was plagued by irregularities. And there is no gainsaying that PTI’s connection to Islamist groups and to the military is cause for concern. A militantly Islamist Pakistan could wreak havoc in the region and the wider world, and one hopes that Khan will prove more moderate and pragmatic in office than his rhetoric on the campaign trail would suggest—rhetoric that arguably served the purpose of allowing PTI to outflank more extreme religious parties, which saw their support plummet. Nevertheless, it is notable that, for the first time in its history, Pakistan could well be ruled by a party not beholden to any one ethnic group. Though that won’t solve the country’s problems, it could chip away at the big problem that has allowed the military to step in, again and again: the deadly persistence zero-sum ethnic politics.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2vemdjl

Canada Is Raging Against Gun Violence—But Not Like America

Like so much else in Canada, the debate over guns typically happens more quietly than it does in the United States. But on rare occasions, a tragic moment will come along and propel the issue to the top of the public agenda. When that happens, the country abandons the decibel range of polite discourse and begins to argue—loudly—about gun control.

That’s what happened this week after a lone gunman, Faisal Hussein, allegedly opened fire in Toronto’s Danforth neighborhood Sunday night, killing two and wounding 13 more. The ensuing days have been incredibly busy ones for gun-control advocates in Canada. The tragedy has sparked a national conversation, with officials as prominent as Toronto’s mayor pushing for a ban on the sale of handguns. Advocates have seized the moment of increased public attention to argue for tighter gun laws.

But the debate sounds very different there than it does in the U.S. There’s no Second Amendment in Canada, and the Supreme Court has explicitly said that nobody in the country has a right to bear arms—instead, it’s a privilege granted only to those who make it through an intense screening process. Canadians also don’t have a gun lobby as politically powerful as the National Rifle Association. In fact, it’s entirely possible to live in Canada for years without ever hearing of the country’s smaller, grassroots gun-lobby groups.

The last time the Canadian government showed serious resolve about overhauling its gun laws was after a gunman opened fire at a Montreal college, École Polytechnique, killing 14 women. That was in 1989, after which the government imposed new screening and training requirements on gun buyers. A national gun registry was also established to enable police to track individual firearms—but a few years later, under the conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, it was dismantled.

“Now you have a moment when you can attract people’s attention,” said Wendy Cukier, the president of the Coalition for Gun Control, whom I caught in between interviews she was rushing to give to various media outlets. “The fact that the mayor of Toronto, who himself was leader [of a center-right conservative political party] at one time, is calling for a ban on handguns—that’s starting to suggest that perhaps the party lines are eroding, and people who in the past might not have been vocal supporters of gun control are now speaking up.”

As Toronto’s city council passed a motion Tuesday to urge the government to ban handguns, the mayor, John Tory, said, “Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”

Canada’s ‘incel attack’ and its gender-based violence problem

About 2 million Canadians own guns, out of a total population of 30 million. Handguns are usually obtained either through legal purchase or through illegal smuggling from the U.S. (Authorities have not yet announced publicly whether the Toronto shooting suspect legally obtained the handgun he used in the attack.) “Our problem is, because we share a border with you,” Cukier said, referring to the U.S., “even if we ban handguns, we would still have a problem with smuggled guns.” A ban on guns only impacts the legal stream; the illegal steam can continue unabated.

That’s partly why Solomon Friedman, an Ottawa criminal-defense lawyer who has acted as counsel for the National Firearms Association and who identifies as a target shooter and firearms advocate, argues that “further efforts to tighten gun laws have little to no effect on crime and simply penalize the law-abiding.”

Friedman noted that any Canadian who wants a license to own a gun has to complete a safety course, supply two references to the police, submit to a background check and spousal notification, and wait 28 days. “My view is that the people who can legally possess guns in Canada already come from a subset who have been investigated and cleared,” he said, adding that the sorts of people inclined to commit murder will just find another way to do it if they haven’t got a gun. “The burden of proof rests on the party that wants to change the status quo, to show that this will have some positive outcome.”

Cukier believes she has that proof. “Most mass shootings in Canada are committed by legal gun owners,” she said, citing the Polytechniqe massacre and the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting among several other examples. (Mass shootings are far rarer in Canada than in the U.S.) It’s not just that those who legally own guns sometimes use them to commit crimes. Those owners also sometimes sell their guns to people who can’t obtain them legally, and those people go on to use them in a criminal context. This practice, called “straw purchasing,” accounts for about 50 percent of all handguns used in crimes that have been traced, according to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.

As for Friedman’s claim that keeping a gun out of someone’s hands won’t disincline them to commit murder, Cukier said, “The evidence doesn’t support that. Look at the numbers.” She went on to analyze homicide statistics from 2016: “If you look at the rate of murders not caused by guns and you compare Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, what you see is that it’s roughly the same in all four countries, although the U.S. rate is slightly higher,” Cukier said. In other words, in a scenario without guns, the four populations exhibit roughly similar rates of homicidal behavior.

That changes when you look at the rate of murders that were caused by guns. “As soon as you add guns into the mix, you see that the U.S. has six times the rate of gun murders as Canada has. And Canada has 15 times the rate of gun murders as the U.K., and four times the rate of Australia. It’s very clear that the difference in the murder rates between those countries is a function of the availability of firearms, period.” She added that in 2016, the U.K., with a population of 60  million, had only 27 gun murders. Why? It’s at least partly because, after the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, the U.K. banned handguns.   

Although a majority of Canadians support a total ban on guns in urban areas, the country has never enacted one. This may be in part because its gun-violence problem is minor relative to that of the U.S., but it’s also because the anti-gun majority rarely mobilizes politically around the issue, while the minority makes its voice loudly heard among politicians (though not among the general public). In that regard, the NRA has had a major impact on Canada.

“The president of the NRA comes up here once in a while to provide advice and encouragement to the Canadian gun lobby, and there are formal relationships between some of the lobby groups and the NRA,” Cukier said. “What is very profound is the impact of the rhetoric and the strategies, which you can almost cut and paste from the U.S. You find many Canadian gun owners now talking about their rights to own guns in Canada, but there are none! And we see constant, constant, constant rhetoric about our need for self-protection.”

Legislation pushing for increased gun control, including more expansive background checks, is slated to go to the senate this fall. It doesn’t go so far as to call for a total ban, though. At this point, Cukier said, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government seems “more concerned about what the gun lobby says than about what women’s groups and health-care professionals say. … Politicians are scared silly about what the gun lobby says it will do to them.”

Friedman, for his part, said that politicians might overcome that fear in the wake of the Toronto shooting—but that that’s nothing to cheer about. “Politicians see a tragedy and want to do something. They never want to admit that to a certain extent they’re powerless. They have to be seen to be doing something,” he said. He insisted that enacting laws to limit access to guns is ineffective, and to the extent that it seems like an attractive proposal, it’s only because the alternative is much more difficult.

“If you’re at the point where you’re saying, ‘How did the guy get that gun?’ then you’ve already missed the point. You haven’t asked: ‘Why does he feel disenfranchised?’” Friedman believes the government would be better off investing more in preventing and treating mental-health problems. The Toronto suspect suffered from severe mental illness, according to his parents, who rushed forward to offer that account to the Canadian press even as the Islamic State claimed without evidence that the gunman was one of theirs.

Tightening gun laws and investing in mental-health care are not mutually exclusive, despite their use in opposing narratives about what’s really ailing Canada. Both are arguably urgent. In fact, one of the saddest ironies of Sunday’s attack is that Toronto officials had already set aside the day to discuss the problem of gun violence—which they did just hours before the gunman opened fire. The discussion turned out to be a lot more pressing than anyone had imagined.  

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2K35kgY

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Summer Fights

The Case for a Trump-Russia Conspiracy Just Got a Little Stronger

CNN’s bombshell scoop Thursday night shined a bright light yet again on the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan and raised the specter that President Donald Trump and his surrogates may have been lying about one of the most significant Russia-related episodes of the 2016 election.

According to CNN, the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is willing to testify that Trump approved the meeting between his son, son-in-law, campaign chairman, and a Russian lawyer—despite Trump and Don Trump Jr.’s denials that the president knew about the meeting in advance. As my colleague Adam Serwer pointed out, it’s not clear whether Cohen’s word would stand up in court without corroboration. But legal experts say it could certainly influence prosecutors’ perceptions of Trump—and whether he intended to conspire with Russia and then cover it up.

“There are definite legal consequences to Cohen’s statement,” said Jens David Ohlin, a law professor and vice dean at Cornell Law School. “This reeks of a criminal conspiracy. It doesn’t even matter if nothing came of the meeting [although that’s far from clear]. If Trump knew about the meeting and was okay with it, Trump and those around him could be guilty of an inchoate conspiracy.”

The timeline is intriguing: On June 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. received the first email from Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who had helped the Trump organization bring the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow on behalf of the Russian-Azerbaijani billionaire Aras Agalarov. Goldstone offered the campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government’s “crown prosecutor”—a reference to Yuri Chaika, Russia’s current prosecutor general. The information “is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Goldstone wrote. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” Trump Jr. replied, according to an email chain he released last summer only after The New York Times exposed the meeting. He forwarded the email chain to Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both of whom had also attended the Trump Tower meeting.

It could have been around that time that Trump Jr. told his father about the offer, if Cohen’s accusation is to be believed. Which makes the speech Trump gave on June 7—the day the June 9 Trump Tower meeting was finalized—all the more interesting. “I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons,” Trump told a crowd at a campaign rally. “I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”

But Trump never gave that speech. Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner have all claimed the meeting produced nothing of immediate value. (In an interview with NBC News earlier this year, the Russian lawyer tasked with bringing the information, Natalia Veselnitskaya, said Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner “wanted” the damaging information “so badly” that they seemed to tune her out once she began discussing Magnitsky Act sanctions. The sanctions were implemented to punish Russian nationals accused of corruption and human-rights abuses in 2012.)

Democrats have suggested that three phone calls Trump Jr. placed to blocked telephone numbers before and after the meeting could have been to his father, but Trump Jr. told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that he couldn’t recall. “So you don’t know whether or not this might have been your father?” congressional investigators asked during his interview, according to the transcript released by the committee earlier this year. “I don’t,” Trump Jr. responded.

Sam Nunberg, a Republican operative who worked on Trump’s campaign in its early stages, said he thinks it’s likely Trump was told about the meeting beforehand primarily because of his prior relationship with the Russian billionaire who proposed it to begin with—Agalarov. Trump first met Agalarov in 2013 in Las Vegas, where they discussed bringing Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow and holding it at a mall complex Agalarov owned on the outskirts of the city. But Nunberg said he still believes that the meeting “was ultimately harmless” because “there was no discussion about Clinton’s emails.” Veselnitskaya “exploited that relationship to get a meeting on her niche issue,” Nunberg said.

Still, if Trump approved a meeting with foreign nationals in the hopes of obtaining something of value—i.e., opposition research at the height of the presidential election—the intent alone could provide prosecutors with an important piece in understanding the campaign’s willingness to conspire with Russia, legal experts told me.

“It’s certainly one of the more relevant data points that we’ve had,” said the former federal prosecutor Jeff Cramer. If Trump approved the meeting, it was “clearly a violation of criminal law”—specifically, the campaign-finance laws that prohibit campaigns from soliciting things of value from foreign nationals. “And it gives color to all the cover-ups,” Cramer said.  Trump and his surrogates have denied that the president knew about the meeting approximately 20 times over the last year. Trump also personally dictated a misleading statement about the meeting on his son’s behalf, which left out the fact that the Russians had offered the campaign dirt on Clinton.

Michael Zeldin, a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and a former special counsel to then–Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller, said that if prosecutors “could establish that Trump approved the meeting with foreign nationals to receive derogatory information about his opponent—a thing of value—it would fall squarely within the black letter of campaign-finance laws. It would be difficult to dispute that the campaign received a thing of value when the candidate knew of the purpose and approved of the meeting.”

It also could be “one tile in the larger mosaic” of the alleged conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, Cramer noted, given the discussion of sanctions at the Trump Tower meeting and Russia’s subsequent efforts to undermine the Clinton campaign through hacks and disinformation. “Did the meeting overlap somehow with the Russian hacking? These could have been separate events within the same criminal conspiracy,” Cramer said. Just one day before the Trump Tower meeting, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, set up a website called DCLeaks with the purpose of disseminating Democrats’ stolen emails, according to court documents filed by Mueller earlier this month. Mueller  revealed in those same court filings that Russian hackers began trying to access Clinton staffers’ emails just hours after Trump asked them to. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said in public remarks in July 2016, referring to emails Clinton had deleted from her private server that she’d said were private in nature. It is also worth remembering that, two months before the Trump Tower meeting occurred, a Russia-linked national offered a junior campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, dirt on Clinton from Russia in the form of thousands of stolen emails.

Cohen’s apparent willingness to share information with prosecutors raises questions about what else he could tell them with regard to Trump’s coordination with Russian nationals. Though Cohen has vehemently denied it, the dossier compiled by the former British-intelligence officer Christopher Steele outlining the campaign’s alleged ties to Russia says that Cohen was dispatched to Prague at the tail end of the campaign to pay off Russian hackers in an attempt to keep them quiet. The dossier also alleges a conspiracy between Trump and Russia was managed by Manafort, using the campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page as an intermediary. Cohen told me months ago, and has said publicly, that he believes the dossier is a farce. But Mueller is still examining its claims, a person familiar with the investigation told me on the condition of anonymity, making any corroborating information Cohen may have about a possible larger conspiracy incredibly valuable.

A person with knowledge of the White House’s strategy when news of the Trump Tower meeting broke in 2017, who requested anonymity to discuss it freely, said he didn’t think Trump and his family members and associates were capable of colluding with Russia “in the proactive sense” at that point in the campaign. “Do I think they would have told Trump about the meeting?” this source asked. “Yeah. Do I think he would’ve understood the significance? No.” This person added that while his impression last year was that Trump “did not know” about the meeting beforehand, “my antennae was definitely up. In a professional operation, you’d never let the candidate know about these kinds of offers because it would preserve plausible deniability. But these guys were all amateurs.”

Ultimately, if prosecutors can prove that Trump signed off on the meeting, contrary to his repeated denials, it will make it easier for them to make judgments about Trump’s “character, truthfulness, and culpability,” said Andy Wright, a former associate counsel to Barack Obama. “President Trump’s track record of dishonesty will cast all of the hard evidence in the most negative light in the minds of the prosecutors who decide whether the interests of justice call for charges to be brought.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2OnQuoY