CONTESTED SPACE

Mali: 'Africa's Afghanistan' sees France withdraw troops and terror groups run amok

Paul Tilsley
Thu, August 18, 2022

It is being called Africa’s Afghanistan, a land where militants linked to both al Qaeda and ISIS jihadists fester, reaping terror, death, displacement and despair. Named the world’s terrorism hotspot, a third of all terrorism-related deaths in 2021 spilled blood over this country’s dusty plains.

Some 2,700 have been killed in West Africa’s Mali in the first six months of this year, up 40% on last year. As the mayhem escalates in this region known as the Sahel, this week the last unilateral Western peacekeeping force was pulled – or was it pushed – out. Mali’s military junta is now letting Russia’s shadowy Wagner mercenary group reportedly run amok, with an ever-growing catalog of human rights abuses against Mali’s people.

"Is Mali Africa's Afghanistan?" Jasmine Opperman, a security consultant specializing in extremism and political violence, discussed with Fox News Digital. "Looking at its history, looking at the complexities of the driving forces, looking at international actors’ involvement aggravating the security situation and acting as a trigger mechanism for extremism, I think we can definitely conclude that based on the similarities, Mali can be considered as Africa's Afghanistan."

A protester holds a placard reading "France, gardener of terrorism" during a demonstration celebrating France's plans to withdraw troops from Mali, in Bamako, on Feb. 19, 2022. The last of the French troops left this week.

(Florent Vergnes/AFP via Getty Images)

AFRICA: THE NEW GROUND ZERO FOR JIHADI TERROR GROUPS, EXPERTS SAY


Former colonizing power France withdrew the last of its 5,100 peacekeeping troops this week, with the insults of an ungrateful Mali regime freshly ringing in its ears, saying France’s President Macron should "permanently abandon his neocolonial, paternalistic and patronizing posture to understand that no one can love Mali better than Malians," spokesman Col. Abdoulaye Maiga said on local TV.

Mali has turned to Russia for help, allowing Moscow’s Wagner PMC or private military company to do its dirty work: "Violence against civilians in Mali has increased significantly since the Wagner Group’s arrival in December 2021," Catrina Doxsee, associate director and associate fellow of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Fox News Digital.

Doxsee added: "The military junta in Mali, which gained power through a coup in 2021, has prioritized its own power and self-preservation above stability or civilian well-being, and it likely views the Wagner Group’s presence primarily as a tool for 'coup-proofing.' Since Russia and its affiliated PMCs have little concern over human rights abuses, they are appealing partners for an illiberal regime like Mali’s junta."

BLINKEN FLIES INTO 'SUPERPOWER' BATTLEGROUND IN AFRICA

The Russians are far from discreet. As the final French troops flew out of the northern Gao airport this week, two cargo planes landed and reportedly Russian military teams openly unloaded weapons.

Mali is said to be the most dangerous assignment in the world for its 12,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force. "Since its deployment in 2013, more than 250 peacekeepers have lost their lives, 159 of them in hostile incidents, including IED attacks," the spokesperson for the United Nations' Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission (MINUSMA) told Fox News from Bamako, Mali.

A U.N. armored vehicle that had been hit by an improvised explosive device

 is parked in the U.N. mission in Mali on Nov. 5, 2021.

 (Amaury Hauchard/AFP via Getty Images)

ISIS and al Qaeda relentlessly attack U.N. troops both out on patrol and back at their barracks. "The biggest threat remains the attacks by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and mines against our convoys and patrols to protect civilians, especially in the northern and central parts of the country," the spokesperson said. "The mission camps have also become targets of terrorist armed groups using direct and indirect fire attacks against the U.N."

RUSSIA WAR WILL HAVE 'SHATTERING' EFFECT ON FOOD SHORTAGES IN AFRICA: 'YOU'RE GOING TO SEE GOVERNMENTS FALL'

MINUSMA’s own so-called explosive ordnance disposal teams search for and deactivate IEDs, but intelligence gathering is perhaps hampered in this deeply devious arena by a United Nations charter that prohibits clandestine intelligence work.

In a 2017 report on peacekeeping in Mali, Researchgate, a scientific research group, noted what it said was a clash of cultures between countries supplying their troops to the U.N.: "Marrying the Western and African capabilities turned out to be challenging due to incoherent procedures, systems, levels of experience as well as reporting mechanisms. In addition, information-sharing from classified NATO databases proved difficult", the report stated.

The Mali government doesn’t make it easy for the U.N. to help them. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused the regime of having "torpedoed time and again" Berlin’s efforts.

Annalena Baerbock, Germany's foreign minister, talks to soldiers 

at Camp Castor in Gao, Mali, where the German military is involved in the U.N. mission. 

(Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance via Getty Images)

This week, Germany suspended most of its operations in Mali, after the government denied flyover rights for Germany’s U.N. aircraft. In the last few days, Egypt has suspended its participation in Mali after seven of its soldiers were killed, and the local regime is still holding 49 Ivory Coast U.N. troops who were arrested when they turned up for duty in Bamako a month ago.

Ominously, last week the Institute for Security Studies’ Martin Ewi briefed the U.N. Security Council that Islamic State fighters fleeing Syria are "finding safe havens on the continent," and that Africa may be "the future of the caliphate".

Opperman is concerned the U.S., as in Afghanistan, may get drawn in: "We have a situation in Mali where superpowers have been sucked in or are withdrawing, we have seen now with France stepping aside, with Russia moving in, and who knows how the U.S. will respond to this."

South Carolina GOP lawmaker chokes up describing teen who was at risk of losing her uterus due to an abortion ban he voted for: 'That whole week I did not sleep'


Kelsey Vlamis
Wed, August 17, 2022 

A man supporting restrictions on abortion holds a sign as abortion-rights supporters hold signs behind him outside the South Carolina Statehouse on Thursday, July 7, 2022, in Columbia, S.C.

Meg Kinnard/AP

State Rep. Neal Collins held back tears Tuesday over the impact of an abortion ban he voted for.

The South Carolina Republican said a 19-year-old's abortion was delayed even though the fetus was unviable.

He said he opposed a proposed bill that would ban nearly all abortions in the state.

A Republican lawmaker in South Carolina held back tears on Tuesday as he described learning about a teenager who was at risk of losing her uterus or even dying due to an abortion ban he previously voted for, video showed.

State Rep. Neal Collins shared the story with the state's House Judiciary Committee as they discussed a proposed near-total abortion ban that would not include exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

Collins said he voted in favor of South Carolina's "heartbeat bill," which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected and went into effect in June after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. He said two weeks after it took effect, he received a call from a doctor.

"A 19-year-old girl appeared at the ER. She was 15 weeks pregnant. Her water broke. The fetus was unviable," Collins explained. The doctor said the standard of care was to advise her to go home or to extract the fetus.

"The attorneys told the doctors that because of the fetal heartbeat bill, because that 15-week-old had a heartbeat, the doctors could not extract," he said, adding they could have admitted the teen until the heartbeat stopped, but there was no way of knowing how long that would take, so she was discharged.

South Carolina's heartbeat bill does have exceptions for rape, incest, fetal anomalies, and threats to the mother's health, but such health exceptions have left doctors in risky legal territory.

The doctor told Collins that the woman would likely pass the fetus in the toilet and that "she's going to have to deal with that on her own." The doctor also said there was a 50% chance the teen would lose her uterus and a 10% chance she would develop sepsis and die.

"That weighs on me. I voted for that bill. These are affecting people," he began, adding as he appeared to get choked up: "That whole week I did not sleep."

He said he continued to follow up with the doctor and learned the teen was able to come in two weeks later and because the heartbeat had stopped they were able to extract the fetus.

"What we do matters," Collins said as he again appeared to hold back tears. He said he would not vote on the near total ban that was being considered until there were significant changes to the bill.

Despite Collins' objections, the bill made it out of the committee in a 13-7 vote, The Associated Press reported. It now heads to the state House floor, where it likely faces a major legislative battle.

Gaza civilians face airstrikes with ‘go-bags’

and comforting cats

Isra Namey 

Wed, August 17, 2022 

When Israeli warplanes roared over her home earlier this month, firing missiles, Gaza resident Maryam El-Derawi knew the drill.

Just as she had done a year ago during similar strikes, she shepherded her two young daughters, Joud and Noor, into a hallway in the center of their apartment in the Gaza Strip, the only room with no windows that could shatter and splinter.

To take her daughters’ minds off the missile explosions, she told them stories of her days as a schoolgirl and, as the hours stretched out, fairy tales. When she ran out of tales, she scrolled the internet on her smartphone to find more child-friendly fables to pass the time.

“I spent my time thinking of how I can both save my children and provide them with comfort and support,” Ms. El-Derawi says.

“We have nowhere else other than this house. We have no shelters here in Gaza to save civilians from sudden Israeli strikes,” she explains. “This is all we have.”

With no safe houses or bomb shelters to flee to, Gazan families must make their own safety in a place where residential neighborhoods can become war zones at any moment and with little warning.

They are finding small comforts and redefining daily life to create a sense of security in lives full of uncertainty.

A fixture in Gaza homes

This month’s 147 Israeli airstrikes on Gaza – targeting the militant Islamic Jihad group in what the Israeli military described as a preemptive bid to prevent an attack – lasted three days and drew retaliatory rocket fire from Islamic Jihad. The fighting killed 22 Palestinian civilians, 17 of whom were children, according to the United Nations; wounded 70 Israelis; and caused destruction in both Israel and Gaza.

While not as long or as devastating as last year’s war between Israel and Hamas, the August strikes have reinforced fears of how war can suddenly explode in the midst of daily life.

Conflicts between Gazan militants and Israel instill fear, destroy homes, and disrupt life in Israeli border towns too, but people’s ability to cope and adapt to the violence is much more limited in Gaza. There families, still living amid the destruction of the 2021 war, are hemmed in by an Israeli naval blockade, a shuttered border to the east, and an Egyptian-imposed border closure to the southwest.

Should missiles strike close to her home, Ms. El-Derawi, like most Gazans, has one emergency resource at the ready at all times: her “go-bag,” a backpack full of emergency supplies and family documents, including medicines, a first-aid kit, birth certificates, ID cards, leases, rental contracts, and even bank statements.

For many Gazans, the bag has become a fixture in their homes, almost like a family member.

“I prepare this bag and keep it in a safe place so that I can easily access it if we have to evacuate the house,” Ms. El-Derawi says. Often such evacuations are to the street.

Teenager Arwa Salah has her own emergency protocol: find and grab her pet cat, Shujjaa.

Sitting in the center of her family’s apartment during the recent airstrikes, she cuddled and calmed the cat as explosions rocked nearby neighborhoods, settling her pet’s nerves – and, admittedly, her own.

“My cat can’t cope with the sound of the blasts,” she explains sheepishly. “I feel sorry for him.”

Where good views can be dangerous

Weeks after the May 2021 war, when newlywed Hasan Aldawoudi went apartment hunting in Gaza City, like many Gazans he had two criteria in mind: the property’s rent and the likelihood that it might be hit by a rocket.

He looked for a place “far away from the beach” and thus less vulnerable to Israeli naval bombardment, “not in the far east of the strip near the border with Israel, and not in a high building,” Mr. Aldawoudi says.

Since the 2021 war, during which Israeli forces targeted 15 largely residential buildings of five floors or more, residential high-rises once seen as offering affordable apartments with good views are now seen by Gazans as a hazard.

Perceptions that coastal and border areas are unsafe have led to increased demand – and rising prices – for housing in the center of the enclave, though experts warn that the district is no safer than others from potential rocket fire.

For some Gazans, missile strikes mark out the rhythms of their lives.

In the 2021 war, Anisa Blima raced to find the safest room in the house and checked in on her relatives.

When missiles struck this month, though, Ms. Blima’s thoughts turned to a new concern: finding baby formula and diapers for her 2-month-old.

She happened to be visiting her parents in central Gaza, far from the airstrikes, so she could arrange an emergency delivery, fearing that Gaza could enter a multiday war.

“As a mother I need to prepare myself for the worst,” she says. Formula and diapers are now key items in her emergency bag.

Becoming a new father also brought a fresh perspective for Mr. Aldawoudi, who for the first time considered leaving Gaza after the recent strikes.

“In the past, I was only responsible for myself,” he says. “Now, I have a family to think of, a wife and a son. I promised not to let anyone harm them.”

For Gazans far from their families, the telephone can be the only source of comfort in times of war.

Gazan matriarch Faiza Awoda says she feels uneasy until she has spoken with her children and grandchildren to make sure they are all safe. It is a tall order; she has 12 children and 47 grandchildren living across the Gaza Strip.

“I keep in touch with them to make sure they are fine,” Ms. Awoda says. “This puts a lot of pressure on me.”

Gazans’ constant state of insecurity has an outsize impact on children, who are overwhelming a health system already under stress, Gazan mental health experts say.

It has provoked what some call “Gaza syndrome” among young people, an “ongoing traumatic stress disorder” with symptoms such as bed-wetting, hallucinations, and recurrent nightmares, says Dr. Sami Owaida, a consultant psychiatrist at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program.

“We are still working with children who are suffering since last year’s aggression, and now we have to prepare ourselves for another wave of cases,” he worries.

With the prospect of sudden war never far away, Gazans say they will continue to count on each other for emotional safe spaces when physical safe spaces are lacking.

“Like any other woman in the world, I only care about my children’s safety and future,” Ms. El-Derawi says. “But in Gaza this task is getting increasingly difficult.”

Ghada Alhaddad contributed to this report from Gaza City, Gaza Strip. 

Russian paratrooper says it was weeks before he realized that Russia hadn't been attacked and that he had actually invaded Ukraine

Jake Epstein

Thu, August 18, 2022 

A Russian soldier patrols a destroyed part of the Illich Iron & Steel Works Metallurgical Plant in Mariupol, in territory under the government of the Donetsk People's Republic, eastern Ukraine, Wednesday, May 18, 2022.AP Photo

• A former Russian paratrooper said he didn't understand why his unit invaded Ukraine.

• Pavel Filatyev told the Guardian that it took him weeks to realize Russia wasn't under attack.

• The Kremlin peddled a propaganda narrative that it started the Ukraine war to defend itself.

A former Russian soldier who invaded Ukraine as part of an airborne unit said it took him weeks to realize the war was unprovoked and that his homeland was not under attack.

Pavel Filatyev served with the Russian military's 56th Airborne Regiment, part of the country's elite airborne forces based in Crimea. He spent weeks fighting in southern Ukraine and recounted his experiences in a 141-page memoir titled "ZOV" in reference to Russia's pro-war symbol. He published his experiences on social media in early August.

In a recent interview with the Guardian from Moscow, 33-year-old Filatyev described how his VDV unit entered Ukraine in late February with no information about logistics or objectives and little understanding about what had ignited the war in the first place.

"It took me weeks to understand there was no war on Russian territory at all, and that we had just attacked Ukraine," Filatyev told the Guardian.

In the lead up to the Russian invasion, the Kremlin's propaganda operation worked overtime trying to peddle quite a few baseless narratives they could use to justify military action against Ukraine.

False narratives from Russian President Vladimir Putin included blaming NATO expansion and characterizing it as a security threat, claiming without evidence that Ukraine was committing genocide against ethnic Russians, arguing that Ukraine is not a real country, and unsubstantiated concerns over nuclear weapons.

For weeks, Western intelligence and leaders warned that Russia would use these false narratives to justify invading Ukraine, which Putin's troops went on to do.

In his newly released memoir, Filatyev described how his elite unit was tired, underfed, and poorly equipped when they stormed into Ukraine. He said he was deployed to the war with a rusty rifle that jammed and came with a broken strap.

Filatyev said that when his unit arrived in Kherson — the first major Ukrainian city to fall to Russia, his fellow soldiers acted "like savages" and looted food, computers, valuables, and clothes.

"We didn't give a damn about anything, we'd already been pushed to the limit. Most had spent a month in the fields with no hint of comfort, a shower or normal food," the ex-paratrooper said.

"Everything around gave us a vile feeling," he wrote. "Like wretches, we were just trying to survive." Insider has not been able to independently verify the details of what happened in Kherson from Filatyev's memoir, though the Guardian was able to review documents reportedly proving his service.

Filatyev recounted that he was wounded during an artillery fight and evacuated out of the conflict after his eye became dangerously infected. Amid concerns that he could face some sort of punishment for his revelations, he left Russia this week.

'Soulless': NYT publishes scathing Jared Kushner book review

Dylan Stableford

·Senior Writer

Wed, August 17, 2022 

The New York Times on Wednesday published a scathing review of Jared Kushner’s upcoming memoir.

“Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo,” Dwight Garner, a Times book critic, writes in his review of “Breaking History,” due out next week.

Garner describes Kushner’s writing as “soulless” and compares it to a “college admissions essay.”

Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, served as his senior adviser in the White House.

In the memoir, Garner writes, Kushner appears to be unaware that “he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law, the erratic and misinformed and similarly mercenary leader of the free world.”

Jared Kushner looks on as President Trump speaks in the Oval Office, Sept. 11, 2020. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Pool/Getty Images)

“‘Breaking History’ is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office,” Garner writes. “Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering … with issues he was interested in.

“This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox,” Garner continues.

The Times review mocks Kushner for including in his memoir “every drop of praise he’s ever received” for his work in the West Wing.

“A therapist might call these cries for help,” Garner writes.

HarperCollins Publishers

The Times review also mocks Kushner for his recollection of wooing Ivanka Trump while he was in Europe on Rupert Murdoch’s yacht:

We were having lunch at Bono’s house in the town of Eze on the French Riviera, when Rupert stepped out to take a call. He came back and whispered in my ear, “They blinked, they agreed to our terms, we have The Wall Street Journal.” After lunch, Billy Joel, who had also been with us on the boat, played the piano while Bono sang with the Irish singer-songwriter Bob Geldof.

“You finish ‘Breaking History’ wondering: Who is this book for? There’s not enough red meat for the MAGA crowd, and Kushner has never appealed to them anyway,” Garner concludes. “He’s a pair of dimples without a demographic. What a queasy-making book to have in your hands.”

Pope Francis’ Man in Canada Marc Ouellet Accused of Sexual Abuse by Former Intern

Barbie Latza Nadeau
Wed, August 17, 2022 a


Remo Casilli/Reuters

ROME—A prominent cardinal who has been short listed as pope in the last two conclaves has been accused of sexual abuse by a former intern. Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who most recently accompanied Pope Francis on his apostolic voyage of penance to Canada, has been accused of massaging, kissing, and groping the buttock of a 23-year old female who was his pastoral intern in 2008.

The accusation is part of two class-action lawsuits brought by 193 victims against 116 members of the Brothers of the Christian Schools of Francophone Canada on Tuesday. A judge in Quebec has already authorized the suits to go forward, prompting the Arsenault Dufresne Wee Avocats law firm of Montreal to present documentation, including accusations against Ouellet.

The prominent Canadian cardinal is named in the first of the two lawsuits, which accuses another 87 prelates and staff at the school of rampant abuse. The woman who accuses Ouellet is identified only as “F.” in the brief.

The Vatican Welcomes Back Cardinal Pell After Stunning Sex Abuse Reversal in Australia

The alleged victim described Ouellet as being the “most important person in the diocese” at the time they met at a dinner at the Sisters of Charity in Beauport, Quebec in August 2008. At some point after the dinner, F. said Ouellet massaged her shoulders and back, which left her “frozen in the face of this intrusion and didn’t know how to react,” the lawsuit states.

A few months later, F. said Ouellet kissed her cheek and hugged her with “familiarity, even though they had only seen each other once or twice before, and held her firmly against him, caressing her back with his hands.”

Two years later, in 2010, the lawsuit alleges Ouellet told her that he could hug and kiss her again because there is “no harm in spoiling yourself a little.” It was at that time he “slid his hand along F.’s back to her buttocks,” according to the suit. “That day, more than during previous meetings, F. understood that she must flee Cardinal Marc Ouellet as much as possible. The uneasiness she feels is more present than ever.”

Then 25, the alleged victim said she complained about the cardinal’s unwanted advances but was rebuked, told that he was just “very friendly” and that she was by no means the first or only woman to have this sort of “problem” with the high-ranking cleric.

It would be 10 years later, in 2020, when F. said she started having flashbacks during a sexual assault training session and then understood that Ouellet’s advances “constitute non-consensual touching of a sexual nature and therefore, sexual assault.”

Before joining the lawsuit, F. said she wrote to Pope Francis personally as she watched Ouellet’s trajectory advance in the Holy see. She was told that the matter was assigned to Father Jacques Servais, but, according to the lawsuit, that to date “no conclusion concerning the complaints against Cardinal Marc Ouellet has been transmitted to F.”

The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for a comment about Ouellet or Francis’ reaction to the lawsuit.

The head of Canada’s survivor network, known as SNAP, said the latest accusation was predictable. “Ouellet oversees the Dicastery of Bishops, meaning he’s the guy picking new Bishops. What hope do we have for leadership in the church?” Leona Huggins, leader of SNAP Vancouver, said in a statement. “We also must question who among the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops knew of his behavior and said nothing? Did some of them want to, but were afraid it would have repercussions on their career? Imagine then what it would be like for victims to step forward.”

It is unclear if Ouellet will face a similar fate as Cardinal George Pell, another high-ranking cardinal who was removed from his duties while the investigation into his alleged sexual assault played out in court. Pell was convicted and later acquitted of historic sex abuse and remains a close confidante of Pope Francis in Rome.

Biden can still stop Trump, and Trumpism – if he can find a bold plan and moral vision

The US president has been struggling and his divisive rival still has the Republican party in his grip. But there are reasons for hope

Illustration by Guardian design; Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty; Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

Robert Reich
Mon 8 Aug 2022

Will Joe Biden be re-elected in 2024? With his current approval rating in the cellar, most pundits assume he will be toast by the next presidential election. At 81, he would also be the oldest person ever elected president, slightly exceeding the typical American’s lifespan.

So, the conventional thinking goes, Biden will be demolished by Donald Trump (or a Trump surrogate such as the Texas senator Ted Cruz or the Florida governor Ron DeSantis), thereby subjecting the US and the world to an even crazier authoritarian than Trump 1.0.

But that’s way too simplistic. In reality, Biden’s current approval rating isn’t much different from Ronald Reagan’s about this point in his presidency when he was grappling with inflation and the inevitable buyer’s remorse that voters feel a year and a half into a presidency. Two and a half years later, Reagan had won 49 states in his re-election bid against Walter Mondale. (Reagan was then 73, just short of the typical American’s lifespan at the time.)

Trump’s popularity has plummeted since the 2020 election – a casualty not just of most Americans’ outrage at his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and his role in the January 6 insurrection, but also of the poor showing (and terrifying
characteristics) of many of his endorsees in recent Republican primaries. The televised hearings by Congress’s select committee investigating January 6 have also reduced Trump’s standing with most voters.

Meanwhile, Biden is scoring some legislative victories, including a major bill to subsidise semiconductor chip making in the US. And now, following a hard won Senate vote at the weekend, Biden has substantial bragging rights over a much larger bill to slow climate change, lower the cost of prescription drugs and make health insurance more affordable.
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​The president ​has also been getting kudos for the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaida successor to Osama bin Laden, in a spectacularly discreet US drone strike that resulted in no other casualties.


Yet a basic problem ​remains ​for Biden. ​The Democratic party he knew when he was elected to the Senate 50 years ago, from blue-collar, working-class Delaware, is not the Democratic party that elected him in 2020. It’s now largely composed of young adults, college-educated voters and people of colour.

In the intervening years, many working-class white voters who were once loyal Democrats joined the Republican party. As their wages stagnated and their jobs grew insecure, the Republican party skilfully and cynically channelled their economic frustrations into animus toward immigrants, Black people and Latinos, LGBTQ people, and “coastal elites” who want to control guns and permit abortions.

These so-called culture wars have served to distract such voters from the brute fact that the Republican party has zero ideas to reverse the economic trends that left the working class behind.

The wars have also distracted attention from the near record shares of national income and wealth that have shifted to the top; as well as the Republicans’ role in tax cuts on the wealthy, their attacks on labour unions and refusals to support social benefits that have become standard in most other advanced nations (such as paid sick and family leave, universal healthcare and generous unemployment insurance).

During his 36 years in the Senate, followed by eight as Barack Obama’s vice-president, Biden surely became aware of the loss of these working-class voters. And he must have known of the Democrats’ failure to reverse the trends that left them behind and regain their loyalty.

Democratic administrations expanded public health insurance, to be sure. But they also embraced global trade and financial deregulation, took a hands-off approach to corporate mergers, bailed out Wall Street and gave corporations free rein to bash labour unions (reducing the unionised portion of the private-sector workforce during the past half century from a third to 6%). It was a huge error – politically, economically and, one might even say, morally.

What accounted for this error? I saw it up close: the Democratic party’s growing dependence on campaign money from big corporations, Wall Street and wealthy Americans – whose “donations” to both parties soared.

Bill Clinton styled himself a “new Democrat” who would govern from above the old political divides – “triangulate”, in the parlance of his pollster, Dick Morris. In practice, he auctioned off the White House’s Lincoln bedroom to the highest bidders, made Wall Street’s Robert Rubin his chief economic adviser, advocated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, opened the US to Chinese exports and cleared the way for Wall Street to gamble.

‘The televised hearings have also reduced Trump’s standing with most voters.’ A House select committee hearing on 21 July. 

Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Obama brought into his administration even more Wall Street alumni and made Larry Summers his chief economic adviser. Obama promptly bailed out the banks when their gambling threatened the entire economy, but asked nothing of them in return. Millions of Americans lost their homes, jobs and savings, yet not a single top Wall Street official went to jail.

Small wonder that by 2016 two political outsiders gave dramatic expression to the populist bitterness that had been growing – Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. At the time, they even spoke the same language – complaining of a “rigged system” and a corrupt political establishment, and promising fundamental change.

Biden saw all this unfold. He came to publicly regret his vote to ease banking rules. He never celebrated the virtue of free markets. He has been far closer to organised labour and more comfortable with non-college working-class voters than either Clinton or Obama. “I am a union man, period,” he has repeatedly said.

He’s no free trader, either. Biden proposed relocating supply chains for pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and medical supplies to the US, and imposing tax penalties on companies that relocate jobs abroad and credits for those that bring them home. He has kept in place most of the trade restrictions that Trump placed on China.

During the 2020 presidential campaign Biden was billed as a “centrist” seeking bipartisan solutions. But he had big, non-centrist ambitions. Seeking to be a “transformative” president, he openly sought a New Deal-style presidency. Once in office, he proposed the largest social agenda in recent American history.

That Biden failed to get much of this agenda passed in his first term was due less to his own inadequacies than to the Democrats’ razor-thin congressional majorities, and the party’s own compromised position within the power structure of the US.

But Biden’s and the Democrats’ deepest challenge was, and continues to be, voters’ distrust of the system. All political and economic systems depend fundamentally on people’s trust that its processes are free from bias and its outcomes are fair. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him has contributed to the distrust but is not responsible for it. Only about a third of Americans believe him.

The real source of distrust is the same force that ushered Trump into the White House in 2016: four decades of near stagnant wages, widening inequality, a shrinking middle class, ever more concentrated wealth at the top and growing corruption in the form of campaign cash from the wealthy and corporations.

If Democrats retain control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections (possible but unlikely, given the usual pattern in which the party in control loses it), Biden could still become a transformative president in the last two years of his first term if he focuses like a laser on reversing these trends. Even if Democrats do not hold on to Congress, Biden could be a moral voice for why these trends must be reversed and the system transformed. It is the president’s best hope for being re-elected in 2024.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley

While Biden is tackling inflation and shaping a green economy for the US, Britain is being left behind

The Inflation Reduction Act is a big win for jobs and the environment, but Truss and Sunak have nothing similar to offer

‘The bill makes the single largest climate investment in US history, with $369bn for climate and clean energy.’ Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

Carys Roberts

THE GUARDIAN
Wed 10 Aug 2022

Over the weekend, US Democrats overcame months of political struggle to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate, marking a major victory for the president, Joe Biden, and for “Bidenomics” before the US midterms.

The bill makes the single largest climate investment in US history, with $369bn for climate and clean energy. It is expected to enable the US to get two-thirds of the way towards its Paris agreement commitments while reducing energy costs. It lowers health costs for millions of Americans. It seeks to tackle inflation by directly reducing costs for individuals and by reducing the deficit through closing tax loopholes and increasing tax on corporates and the wealthy.

The act is far from perfect. It is the diminished descendant of the failed Build Back Better Act, a $2tn package that would have radically extended childcare, free community college and subsidised health insurance, but which ultimately failed to secure the support of the Democrat senator Joe Manchin (a necessity given the evenly divided Senate). Winning political support for the act has required rowing back on climate ambition and more extensive plans to reduce costs for families; allowing further drilling for fossil fuels; and carve-outs to protect private equity profits from the corporation tax element of the act. For this reason, the act will and already has come under intense criticism from activists and climate groups

However, in the face of fierce political opposition it is a major – even landmark – achievement. It is also a win for the activists and economists who have been persistently pushing and providing ideas for the Biden administration to pursue an alternative approach to the economy and environment: market-shaping green industrial strategy to create good, green jobs; social investment; worker power and incentives for employers to offer decent pay, apprenticeships and profit-sharing with communities; higher taxes on the wealthy to reduce inflation and contribute to the costs, including through a new tax on share buybacks which only serve to boost investors’ incomes. These ideas are no longer stuck on the bench.

Historically the US and UK have taken a shared, leading role in the intellectual development and political implementation of new ideas and policy paradigms. Whether we think about the postwar Keynesian consensus, the neoliberal revolution of Thatcher and Reagan or the third way politics of Clinton and Blair, both countries have tended to move in lockstep. Yet right now, in the context of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and the Conservative party leadership race in the UK, our policy paths are diverging.

The US has further to go than the UK when it comes to reducing climate emissions and building economic justice. The US has significantly higher levels of emissions (on an absolute and per capita basis) than the UK and the US is also the world’s biggest producer of fossil fuels. Similarly, inequality in the US is starker, and poverty deeper than in the UK. Put simply: the land of opportunity is not delivering for too many American citizens.

But Democrat leaders are pushing through a bold agenda to break through deep political polarisation and reset the shape and direction of what US economic success looks like. The irony when we compare this with the UK is that the conditions are far more favourable here for action commensurate to the scale of the climate and nature crisis, an economic strategy that prioritises everyday people and places over wealth and profits, and for extending collective provision of the things and services we all rely on. We have a head start in terms of the social democracy basics. In sharp contrast to the US, there is more consensus across parties on the need for the government to take action on the climate and nature crises. Action taken now would be far less likely to be wiped away by an opposition win than the fragile progressive gains in the US.

The Conservatives, who have held power for more than a decade, have in recent years flirted with some of those ideas – from May’s mission-oriented industrial strategy to Johnson’s net zero and levelling up pledges – recognising the electoral benefits of doing so. Yet at this moment, the Conservatives are plunging in the opposite direction to their US counterparts, and debating – in the middle of sharply rising inflation and a cost-of-living emergency – policies that are catnip for the Tory membership such as grammar schools and corporation tax cuts, rather than looking around the world or at the evidence on how to address the pressing problems of our time. Truss, widely seen as the frontrunner, has fallen back on outdated tropes of financial support as handouts and has virtually nothing to say on how she would achieve net zero, both for its own sake and as a response to the cost-of-living crisis. Nothing of substance is being suggested to address the creeping, real privatisation of the NHS as those who can go private rather than languish on a waiting list.

It would be wrong to point at the US and claim it has its house in order or that lessons can be read in a simplistic way. But Biden and the activists and researchers around him are ambitiously forging a new kind of economic policymaking that seeks to rapidly decarbonise, reduce pressures on family purses through collective provision, and tax wealth and profits to fund this and quell inflationary pressures. The UK government – whoever it is headed by – should take note of the new economics rather than be left behind.

Carys Roberts is executive director of the Institute for Public Policy Research

A strong geomagnetic storm is heading toward Earth, space forecasters say

Dylan Stableford

·Senior Writer

Wed, August 17, 2022 

A strong geomagnetic storm caused by the sun could impact Earth later this week, space weather forecasters say.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center on Wednesday issued a geomagnetic storm watch following recent explosions on the sun that have triggered strong solar flares and multiple “coronal mass ejections” that could reach the planet on Thursday.

NOAA defines a geomagnetic storm as “a major disturbance of Earth's magnetosphere that occurs when there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.”

“The largest storms that result from these conditions are associated with solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) where a billion tons or so of plasma from the sun, with its embedded magnetic field, arrives at Earth,” NOAA explains.

While most of this week’s disturbances are expected to have little to no impact, there is a chance that the expected storm could reach a level of 3 out of 5 on the geomagnetic storm severity scale.

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued a geomagnetic storm watch on Tuesday. (NOAA)

That could cause power grid fluctuations and briefly disrupt satellite, radio and GPS communications, NOAA said.

The geomagnetic storm’s arrival also means that the northern lights could be visible as far south as Iowa on Thursday.

According to the official space forecast, the auroras “might be seen over the far Northeast, to the far upper Midwest, across portions of the north-central states, and perhaps over the northwest section of Washington state.”

While auroras are not uncommon, the likelihood of a collision of multiple coronal mass ejections — a celestial event referred to as “cannibal coronal mass ejections” — has some sky watchers anticipating a brighter than usual light show.

In July, the northern lights were “so bright that photographers captured the colorful show even in the heart of Seattle, where light pollution typically mutes visibility,” Fox Weather’s Andrew Wulfeck said.

Solar flares are seen in this composite image of the sun released by NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center on Tuesday. (NOAA)

Others are just excited about the solar eruptions.

“The sun just hurled a plume of cool, dark plasma into space,” astronomer Tony Phillips wrote in a blog post. “Don’t miss the impact.”

If you do miss it, though, don’t worry too much. NASA said last month that in the current solar cycle, “solar events will continue to increase as we near solar maximum in 2025.”

Anti-Putin Investment Banker Found Dead Under Mysterious Circumstances in D.C.

Allison Quinn
Wed, August 17, 2022 

via Facebook

A well-known investment banker who spoke out fiercely against Russia’s Vladimir Putin after opening a popular nightclub in Moscow has been found dead in Washington, D.C.

Dan Rapoport, a Latvia-born American businessman who expressed support for Russia’s opposition while based in Moscow as the managing director of a brokerage firm there, was found dead on Sunday evening in front of a luxury apartment building, according to an incident report provided to The Daily Beast by the D.C. Metro Police Department.

Rapoport, 52, was rushed to a hospital but was ultimately pronounced dead.

The incident report noted that police officers at the scene were responding “in reference to a jumper.” He was found with orange flip-flops, a black hat, Florida driver’s license, and $2,620 in cash. A spokesperson for MPD told The Daily Beast that a death investigation was still underway, and Rapoport’s cause of death has not yet been determined.

His wife, Alyona Rapoport, was quoted telling Russia’s RBC news agency that the couple was due to meet again soon after their plans were disrupted by the all-out war in Ukraine, Alyona’s homeland and where the two had been residing in recent years.

“We were supposed to meet, he had scheduled meetings and made plans,” she was quoted saying. “Dan evacuated us from Kyiv and returned there to help my country. Next we were supposed to meet in the U.S.,” she said.

She disputed claims made by journalist Yunia Pugacheva that Rapoport had left behind a suicide note with cash and released his dog into a nearby park after splitting with Alyona earlier and being spotted in London.

“There was no note, no suicide, no trip to London, no departure,” Rapoport told RBC.

Born in Riga, Latvia, when the country was still part of the Soviet Union, Rapoport worked at several Russian financial institutions in the late 90s and early 2000s before opening the famous Soho Rooms in Moscow in 2007. As Russia’s opposition gained influence after Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2012, Rapoport was linked to the now-imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, whom he is said to have thrown his support behind. Rapoport, who has also been linked to numerous online posts condemning Putin, left Russia in June 2012 and lived for several years in D.C. before famously selling his home there to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner for $5.5 million.

He then moved to Kyiv in 2016 and got involved in local politics. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Rapoport was regularly quoted in Ukrainian media denouncing the Kremlin, and he made his support for Ukraine clear on social media, where he posted a selfie wearing a traditional Ukrainian vyshyvanka in the colors of the American flag and posted a Ukrainian flag as his background photo.

His final post on Facebook, three days before he died, appeared to also reference the senseless war in Ukraine: The photo of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now was captioned with the famous lines, “The horror, the horror.”