|
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
|
By Barbie Latzau Nadeau @ DailyBeast.com, Dec. 29
One man is dead. One team sanctioned for abhorrent racist slurs. How Italy’s love for soccer turned to hate, and its stadiums became fascist circuses.
By John Bowden @ TheHill.com, Dec. 29
A cyberattack Saturday targeting a major newspaper publishing company reportedly affected distribution at prominent newspapers across the United States.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Tribune Publishing was affected by a cyberattack originating outside of the U.S., which caused service disruptions for the Saturday editions of major newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun.
The west coast editions of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times were also reportedly affected by the cyberattack, as the two papers are published by the Los Angeles Times's production facility.
“We believe the intention of the attack was to disable infrastructure, more specifically servers, as opposed to looking to steal information,” [....]
...the risk of a full-scale geopolitical conflagration with China cannot be ruled out. A new cold war would effectively lead to de-globalization, disrupting supply chains everywhere, but particularly in the tech sector, as the recent ZTE and Huawei cases signal. At the same time, Trump seems to be hell-bent on undermining the cohesion of the European Union and NATO at a time when Europe is economically and politically fragile.....Trump is now the Dr. Strangelove of financial markets. Like the paranoid madman in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, he is flirting with mutually assured economic destruction. Now that markets see the danger, the risk of a financial crisis and global recession has grown.
Even Republicans may be deciding that the president has become too great a burden to their party or too great a danger to the country.
By Paul Sonne @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 27
[....] The money failed to deliver Le Pen the French presidency in last year’s election, denying the Kremlin a powerful ally in the heart of Europe. Instead, the 9.4 million-euro loan, then worth $12.2 million, dragged her party into the shadowy underworld of Russian cross-border finance, putting it in league with people accused of having ties to Russian organized crime, money laundering and military operations.
The mysterious saga of the loan offers a rare look inside the Russian influence engine, demonstrating how people, companies and networks outside the Kremlin pursue President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aims, often without a centralized plan [....]
Homicides have soared in Baltimore — and arrests have plummeted — since the death of Freddie Gray. Police and community leaders say the issue has roots in the deep distrust stoked by Gray’s death and in caseloads that are overwhelming.
By Wesley Lowery, Steven Rich and Salwan Georges @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 27
[....] As Baltimore has seen a stunning surge of violence, with nearly a killing each day for the past three years in a city of 600,000, homicide arrests have plummeted. City police made an arrest in 41 percent of homicides in 2014; last year, the rate was just 27 percent, a 14 percentage point drop.
Of 50 of the nation’s largest cities, Baltimore is one of 34 where police now make homicide arrests less often than in 2014, according to a Washington Post analysis. In Chicago, the homicide arrest rate has dropped 21 percentage points, in Boston it has dropped 12 points and in St. Louis it is down 9.
Baltimore is also one of 30 cities that have seen an increase in homicides in recent years, with the greatest raw number increase in killings of any city other than Chicago, which has four times the population. While homicide rates remain near historical lows in most American cities, Baltimore and Chicago are now both seeing murder tallies that rival the early 2000s.
The wave of violence here began not long after the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man arrested in West Baltimore and placed — hands cuffed and legs shackled — in the back of a police van. There, he suffered a severe neck injury and lost consciousness. He died in the hospital about a week later [....]
The suburbs abandoned Republicans in 2018, and they might not be coming back.
By Dylan Scott @ Vox.com, Dec. 26
In 2018’s blue wave, it was suburban Republicans who were swept away.
Of 69 suburban districts held by the GOP before the election, just 32 will remain in Republican hands next year, according to an analysis by the Washington Post’s Dan Balz, one of our preeminent political analysts.. This might not be a temporary aberration, either; President Trump has completely overtaken the Republican Party.
“We are facing the prospect of realignment in your Rockefeller Republican districts,” Rep. Ryan Costello, who retired rather than run for reelection again as a Republican in suburban Pennsylvania, told me. “That’s on the table.”
But what exactly do these newly Democratic voters actually want? After speaking with voters, pollsters, and politicians this year, a portrait of these places and people came into focus [....]
Clayton Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church, with a congregation of about 15 members, is opening its doors to undocumented South Carolina immigrants, becoming the state’s first “sanctuary church.” The tiny South Carolina church is standing up to President Donald Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown that has received backing from Gov. Henry McMaster.
Moscow has taken control of oil and gas fields and has a lien on a major share of Citgo, Venezuela’s oil company in the United States.
By Anthony Faiola & Karen Young @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 24
CARACAS — As allies go, Venezuela is a relatively cheap one for Russia. But the potential returns on Moscow’s investment there could be priceless.
In exchange for modest loans and bailouts over the past decade, Russia now owns significant parts of at least five oil fields in Venezuela, which holds the world’s largest reserves, along with 30 years’ worth of future output from two Caribbean natural-gas fields.
Venezuela also has signed over 49.9 percent of Citgo, its wholly owned company in the United States — including three Gulf Coast refineries and a countrywide web of pipelines — as collateral to Russia’s state-owned Rosneft oil behemoth for a reported $1.5 billion in desperately needed cash [....]
By Vivian Lee & Hawaida Saad @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 24
BEIRUT — The Iranian cultural attaché stepped up to the microphone on a stage flanked by banners bearing the faces of Iran’s two foremost religious authorities: Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, and Ayatollah Khamenei, the current supreme leader.
To the left of Ayatollah Khomeini stood a twinkling Christmas tree, a gold star gilding its tip. Angel ornaments and miniature Santa hats nestled among its branches. Fake snow dusted fake pine needles.
“Today, we’re celebrating the birth of Christ,” the cultural attaché, Mohamed Mehdi Shari’tamdar, announced into the microphone, “and also the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.” “Hallelujah!” boomed another speaker, Elias Hachem, reciting a poem he had written for the event. “Jesus the savior is born. The king of peace, the son of Mary. He frees the slaves. He heals. The angels protect him. The Bible and the Quran embrace.” “We’re celebrating a rebel,” proclaimed a third speaker, the new mufti of the Shiite Muslims of Lebanon, the rebel in question being Jesus.
The mufti, Ahmed Kabalan, went on to engage in some novel religious and political thinking: Christians and Muslims, he said, “are one family, against corruption, with social justice, against authority, against Israel, with the Lebanese Army and with the resistance.”
The proclamations from the stage were applause lines — perhaps against the odds, given that the audience at the Iranian-sponsored event on Saturday consisted mostly of observant Shiites from the Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut. Occasionally, the crowd chanted praise for the Prophet Muhammad.[....]
By David Biller @ Bloomberg.com, December 22, 2018
Teams of marksmen next year will patrol swaths of Rio de Janeiro with high-powered weapons and a license to kill, said a security adviser to Governor-elect Wilson Witzel.
As many as 120 sharpshooters will accompany police incursions into the slums of Brazil’s postcard city to exterminate gun-toting criminals, according to Flavio Pacca, a longtime associate of Witzel who the governor-elect’s press office said will join the administration. The shooters will work in pairs -- one to pull the trigger, one to monitor conditions and videotape deaths [....]
Also see Dec. 16 news item: BRAZIL’S VIOLENT DRUG TRADE OVERRUNS PARAGUAY: ‘SCENES YOU ONLY SEE IN MOVIES’
Earlier related news thread here: SYRIA: TRUMP DECLARES VICTORY & WITHDRAWAL
A lone tree on the side of a highway suddenly was covered in Christmas ornaments, but few people knew why.