I have to say – 50 years later – I never really got over the deaths of Martin and Bobby. I was living and going to college at American University in Washington, D.C. at the time. In an improvised speech 50 years ago, Kennedy broke the news of King’s death to a largely black crowd. Two months later, he too was killed.
Wednesday Open Thread | Mueller preparing report about potential Trump obstruction of justice
Keep a Knocking till you get in!
Special counsel Robert Mueller is preparing a report on President Trump’s actions during his tenure in office and anything that could be considered obstruction of justice, according to The Washington Post.
Sources told the Post that Mueller relayed the information to Trump’s legal team, and emphasized his team’s need to sit down with the president in order to determine if he had any intent to foil the federal probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
More info: Mueller team wants to release report on Obstruction investigation, incidents during President’s time in office this June or July. AND THEN they continue with collusion probe. Hot Summer. pic.twitter.com/tFQHd9yZ4y
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 4, 2018
The publication also reported on Tuesday that Mueller told Trump’s lawyers last month that he does not consider the president to be a criminal target at this point in his probe.
Trump was reportedly relieved to hear that Mueller had not considered him to be a criminal target, and has expressed more willingness to agree to a future interview.
The president has said in the past that he would be willing to sit down with Mueller’s team.
However, the special counsel still considers the president to be a subject of his investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s advisers have warned that the special counsel could potentially put the president at risk of becoming a criminal target.
Trump has repeatedly denied that there was any collusion between his campaign and Russian election meddling and has referred to Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”
The Father of Three Bracing for Deportation
read this
Illustrated by Daniel Rowell












The post The Father of Three Bracing for Deportation appeared first on Guernica.
A Two-Way Street: How Immigration Shapes Everyday Life in Silicon Valley | migrationpolicy.org
Source: A Two-Way Street: How Immigration Shapes Everyday Life in Silicon Valley | migrationpolicy.org
While research shows immigrants in the United States become integrated over time, this is only a partial account of the changes that immigration brings. As newcomers reshape their communities, longtime residents themselves adjust to shifting social, economic, and political contexts—sometimes re-engaging with their own ethnic or cultural identities. This article explores this process of relational assimilation in Silicon Valley.
Boko Halal – sister-hood magazine. A Fuuse production by Deeyah Khan.
Opinion | For Russia, Trump Was a Vehicle, Not a Target
via aleksey godin
Last week, in a sentencing memorandum for the lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, the special counsel’s office noted that Rick Gates and “Person A” — an unnamed figure who has ties to a “Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016” — “were directly communicating in September and October 2016.”
What coverage there was of this staggering claim — evidence of a direct link between a member of Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence — and the Van Der Zwaan filing was quickly overtaken by controversy over the president’s relationship with an adult film star.
It’s been a year since I testified to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016. The revelations from Robert Mueller’s indictments since then have provided so much clarity on how Russia interfered in our democracy — yet Americans seem more confused about the question of possible collusion with Russia.
That is, in a way, by design — Russia’s design. Its infiltration and influence on America is difficult to understand, even with vastly more detail about Russia’s influence efforts.
A lot of the focus on the Mueller investigation has fallen on Donald Trump: Did he obstruct the investigation? Was he a “Manchurian Candidate” or just a Russian ally, by ideology or business interests?
In my view, as a former F.B.I. special agent who has watched the Kremlin’s infiltration of America since 2014, the answer may be neither. A standard Russian approach would have been to influence Mr. Trump through surrogates like Mr. Gates and Paul Manafort rather than through direct command through an individual — in this case, the candidate and then president.
Russian intelligence develops options and pathways over many years; as objectives arise — like the election of Mr. Trump — they focus and engage all available touch points.
The revelation last week about Mr. Gates’s connection is another piece of evidence to support that view. Russia’s efforts to influence, known by the Kremlin moniker Active Measures, did not seek a single pathway into the Trump team. Instead, they targeted a wide spectrum of influential Americans to subtly nudge their preferred policy into the mainstream and sideline foreign opponents. Russian intelligence services establish campaign objectives and compromise foreign targets through espionage, but their principal focus is to recruit agents of influence.
Typically, the Kremlin deploys layers of surrogates and proxies offering business inducements, information or threatened reprisals that can individually be explained away by coincidence while masking the strings and guiding hands of the Kremlin’s puppet masters and their objectives. When called upon by the Kremlin, oligarchs, contractors, criminals and spies (current or former) all provide levers for advancing President Vladimir Putin’s assault on democracies.
In Trump and his campaign, Mr. Putin spotted a golden opportunity — an easily ingratiated celebrity motivated by fame and fortune, a foreign policy novice surrounded by unscreened opportunists open to manipulation and unaware of Russia’s long run game of subversion.
Mr. Putin has succeeded where his Soviet forefathers failed by leveraging money and cyberspace to subtly infiltrate and influence Americans while maintaining plausible deniability of their efforts. And the Kremlin’s ground game “cut outs” — intermediaries who facilitate communication between agents — conducted a more complex game.
Each Mueller indictment and investigative lead illuminates more Kremlin influence avenues into President Trump’s inner circle. Mr. Van Der Zwaan, whose father-in-law is the Russian oligarch German Khan, lied to investigators about his conversations with Mr. Gates, the Trump deputy campaign manager, and a Person A, whom the F.B.I. assessed as a Russian intelligence agent and many believe to be Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of both Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort, a Trump campaign manager.
Evidence of Russia’s intent to interfere in the election is overwhelming, and documentation of Trump campaign members’ collusion not only exists but is growing. The special counsel’s investigation into collusion ultimately comes down to two questions. First, did President Trump or any member of his campaign willingly coordinate their actions with Russia? And did President Trump or any member of his campaign knowingly coordinate their action with Russia?
Trump campaign members certainly colluded with Russian influence efforts, some willingly, some possibly knowingly. The president denies the Kremlin’s hand, either still unaware or in denial of being manipulated by Mr. Putin’s minions. For Mr. Putin, it’s likely everything he hoped for — America riddled with political infighting and mired in investigations, a weakened NATO alliance vulnerable to aggression and a United States president seeking his adoration, obstinate and ignorant of the great caper the Kremlin just orchestrated.
The problem for the president is that ignorance is not immunity. The problem for America is that ignorance of Russian interference is vulnerability.
Netanyahu’s gift to anti-deportation activists
Netanyahu inadvertently told the entire country that there is a better alternative to his policies. Now that the alternative is within reach, the work of anti-deportation activists will become easier.
African asylum seekers protest the suspension of an agreement between Israel and the UN to resettle 16,000 asylum seekers rather than deport them to third countries, south Tel Aviv, April 3, 2018. (Activestills.org)
The terrible thing about Netanyahu’s UN deal, and its subsequent cancellation on Tuesday, is that behind the political flip-flopping are people — thousands of families wavering between joy and despair, buffeted by decisions over which they have no influence. Political drama in Israel is addicting, but those most affected by it are human beings. When an advisor whispers in Avigdor Liberman’s ear that a harsh response to Palestinian protesters will improve his standing in the polls, someone inevitably dies. Whether the soldier’s finger is easy on the trigger pales in comparison to cynicism of this kind.
Nevertheless, I am more optimistic about the fate of the asylum seekers than I was last week. Here’s why.
First, the mass deportations have been stopped — this is the most important thing. The agreement with Rwanda has collapsed — the prime minister admitted this much on live television on Monday. Public debate on the matter is over. It is unlikely that such a scenario, a third world country willing to take in refugees in exchange for money and political support, will happen again — though I doubt this will prevent Israel’s governing coalition from trying.
Holot, the open-air, desert detention facility built for African asylum seekers is closed. This, too, is a major achievement, despite the millions of shekels wasted on the facility. The situation of asylum seekers who refused to leave and were imprisoned there will also improve. There is no longer any legal reason to keep them in prison.
Most importantly, Netanyahu told the entire country that there is a clear, practicable, and better alternative to his policies. The work of those who opposed the deportations will be easier now because the alternative is within arm’s reach — and we know precisely why Netanyahu first accepted it but then reneged. It has nothing to do with the refugees or with the neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv. Rather, Netanyahu’s political fate rests in the hands of a certain segment of the far-right.
The responsibility for finding a solution to the refugee crisis and the poverty of south Tel Aviv now belongs to those far-right forces that torpedoed the agreement with the UN. Every future proposal will be measured according to the potential of what the cancelled deal might have achieved.
White House Memo: On Foreign Policy, President Trump Reverts to Candidate Trump
It’s what #corneredRats #TrumpRats do! Go BatCrap Crazy! Far from learning on the job or modifying his views, Mr. Trump is falling back on the familiar mix of belligerence and isolationism that fueled his campaign.
The Horror of Trump’s America
Henry, who fled MS-13 in El Salvador by moving to join his parents on Long Island, was found by the gang, and decided to inform on them in exchange for a promise of witness protection. The results are all too predictable:
Now that he had helped the police, Henry assumed his witness-protection papers would be coming through any day. When he turned 18, he started telling friends and teachers he trusted that he would soon disappear to California. Then one morning in August, as Henry was making lunch for his shift at the toilet-paper factory, the federales finally came for him. But they weren’t from the FBI or the witness-protection program. They were from ICE. The same unit that Henry had helped to arrest members of MS-13 was now pursuing a deportation case against him, using the information he had provided as evidence.
Confused, Henry told the agents he was already working with the police. He asked them to call Tony. Instead, after interrogating him, the ICE agents put him on a bus. He watched the Long Island streets he knew disappear, replaced by the high-rises of downtown Manhattan, then darkness as the bus was swallowed by a tunnel to New Jersey. He was headed to an ICE detention center full of young men suspected of being MS-13 members — the very same ones he had snitched on.
[…]
One night, as Henry sat in the TV room watching a reality show about aspiring Miami rappers, a half-dozen MS-13 members walked up to him, led by a Brentwood High student who had established himself as the gang’s leader on the ward. The boy called him Triste and demanded to see his detention memo.
Every inmate rounded up in ICE’s anti-gang raids is given a memo explaining why the government has pegged him as a member of MS-13. Most are short and vague. They list things like school suspensions, Facebook posts, and statements by anonymous informants. Henry’s memo is so specific that it amounts to a signed confession. It lists the details that Henry confided to George Politis, the school’s police officer. It quotes his account of the murder he committed back in El Salvador. And most damning, it reveals that he informed on the Sailors to the Suffolk County police. “The subject told SCPD that he has recently had contact with the following confirmed MS-13 members,” the memo says, listing the names of El Fantasma and another Sailor. Instead of protecting his identity as an informant, the police and ICE had effectively signed his death warrant.
[…]
One of the gang members that Henry turned over to Rivera, meanwhile, has been released by ICE. Unlike Henry, he did not admit to being a member of MS-13, and ICE was unable to prove it. All told, a quarter of the 200 immigrants rounded up in ICE’s anti-gang operation on Long Island last year have been released because of insufficient evidence. So Henry is marked for death and slated for deportation, while the gang members he helped his handler target go free.
“Just for having talked, all this is happening,” Henry says. “They were asking for help, and I gave them all these names. So how am I here?”
[…]
Talking about his memories actually seems to ease Henry’s fears as he imagines what will happen next. If he is deported, anyone who takes him in would be putting themselves at risk. Back in El Salvador, he watched gang members stake out the homes of suspected traitors, then kill their brothers and cousins when they stepped outside. Even if he is granted asylum and returns to Brentwood, the gang will likely kill him unless he gets help relocating.
The thing is, Donald Trump and his allies don’t give a shit about MS-13 and its victims. As Drier observes in her extraordinary story, it was mass deportation of Salvadorans from L.A. that led to MS-13 becoming what it is in the first place. It’s a point of demagoguery he can use to justify violence against immigrants, and that’s it. As a wise man observed, God I hate these people.
Egypt horizons…between animals and people…modesty is the key
The animal lover inside me cannot but react especially in front of a dog. My dogs suffered for too long justice Luc by with me In a neighborhood inside a city in a country within a culture that looks at dogs as impure. In Egypt it should not be different . Something I always bow with respect whenever I visit turkey is the status of dogs and cats there. I am will be a happy street dog living in Turkey . Clean, comfortable and very well fed. I strongly believe that a country with such treatment to dogs and cats is a country that builds human beings.
In my country , the moment the dog passes by someone’s side a big scream is heard as if a monster appeared or a plague is hitting in the area. Some months ago , they announced for a prize in Gaza for 10…
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