By Robert Pear & Thomas Kaplan @ NYTimes.com, 12:39 pm

• The Senate bill, once promised as a top-to-bottom revamp of the health bill passed by the House, instead looks a lot like it.
• It is likely to come to the Senate floor next week. If it passes, Republicans would be on the edge of a major overhaul of the American health care system.

"We do know, according to the state's reported results, that Democrat Jon Ossoff defeated Republican Karen Handel in GA-06 by a nearly 2 to 1 on the only verifiable ballots used in the race, the paper absentee mail-in ballots."

My biggest concern is they'll blow up Raqqa dam.

By Keith Bradsher @ NYTimes.com, June 21

HONG KONG — After years of predictions that cars sold in the West would bear the “Made in China” label, the time has finally come. Ford Motor’s plans to build its popular Focus compact cars in China, rather than Michigan or Mexico, is a milestone in China’s automotive rise. Chinese auto industry leaders praised the move as long-awaited confirmation that the country’s factories have become as efficient and high-quality as those in the United States and Europe.

The question now is how political leaders greet the development, amid rising skepticism in the United States over Chinese trade policies and the benefits of free trade in general. Though the White House so far has been muted in its reaction to Ford’s move, President Trump in particular was strongly critical of Chinese trade policies during his campaign last year. China’s high tariffs on imported cars and auto parts have already emerged as a potential trade issue.

“Ford’s moving production to China shows China’s competitiveness in manufacturing is continuously increasing and our industrial supply chain is improving,” said Cui Dongshu, the secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association, a government-backed trade group in Beijing. “But this is obviously against Trump’s policies — it is quite complicated and may cause some friction in Sino-American trade in the future.” [.....]

Why do all the corporate media stories describe Republican senators as "wary?" I think they're all eager and enthusiastic about getting about the business of screwing average Americans and giving the rich plutocrats pulling the Republican strings yet another tax cut. Their only hesitancy is figuring out how to do it while keeping their victims voting Republican.

-from a commenter at link.

Trump administration officials, anticipating the defeat of the Islamic State in its de facto Syrian capital of Raqqa, are planning for what they see as the next stage of the war, a complex fight that will bring them into direct conflict with Syrian government and Iranian forces contesting control of a vast desert stretch in the eastern part of the country.

By Tal Kaopan @ CNN.com, June 21

Russian government-linked hackers potentially targeted as many as 21 states' election systems last year, a Homeland Security official warned Congress on Wednesday. None of those systems were involved in vote counting, however.

DHS' acting Director of Cyber Division of the department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Samuel Liles, said that by late September the intelligence community concluded that 21 states "were potentially targeted by Russian government-linked cyber actors" with scanning of Internet-connected election systems. The comments came during a hearing of DHS and FBI cybersecurity officials before the Senate intelligence committee.

Liles said of the 21, a small number were attempted for an intrusion unsuccessfully, "as if someone rattled the door knob and was unable to get in," and in a small number "they made it through the door." But Liles said the intelligence community concluded that a variety of factors "made it likely that cyber manipulation of the US election system designed to change the outcome of the US election would be detected."

He added the community has a "very high level of confidence" in that conclusion.A second DHS official, Acting Director of Undersecretary, National Protection and Programs Directorate Jeanette Manfra, backed up Liles' testimony [....]

The Arab-German journalist Souad Mekhennet narrowly avoided being radicalized. Now she uncovers what motivates fervent believers in jihad.

Book review by Alexis Okeowo @ NewYorker.com, June 20

[....] When we talk about radicalization, the narrative moves from vague discontent to extremism—a journey spurred by alienation, discrimination, and poverty. In the Arab-German journalist Souad Mekhennet’s new book, “I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad,” an enthralling and sometimes shocking blend of reportage and memoir from the centers of jihadi networks in the Middle East and North Africa, Mekhennet interrogates those assumptions, which don’t always hold true. A Frankfurt correspondent for the Washington Post, Mekhennet has a singular perspective on the modern crisis of terrorist violence, intimate and constantly questioning. Mekhennet says that she is someone who narrowly escaped being radicalized herself—owing to the influence of her involved parents and family friends. Instead, she turned to uncovering what motivates the most fervent of believers in jihad, and how they became so unrepentant [....]

If “monopoly” sounds like a word from another era, that’s because, until recently, it was. Throughout the middle of the 20th century, the term was frequently used in newspaper headlines, campaign speeches, and State of the Union addresses delivered by Republican and Democratic presidents alike. Breaking up too-powerful companies was a bipartisan goal and on the minds of many voters. But, starting in the 1970s, the word retreated from the public consciousness. Not coincidentally, at the same time, the enforcement of anti-monopoly policy grew increasingly toothless.

The story of why the word and the movement dropped off the map in tandem carries lessons about how an economic policy’s effectiveness can be its own undoing, and about how people are thinking about corporate power today. Because monopoly is back. As concentration has soared to levels not seen in decades, economists are talking about monopoly again; recent scholarship has linked consolidation with rising inequality and other economic ills. Politicians on both the left and right are talking about it, too—the announcement last week that Amazon is planning to buy Whole Foods has refocused some politicians’ attention on the subject.