Petition @ Change.org (He needs only a few more signatures at the link for this weekend, if you like this sort of protest. It makes me laugh, so I think it's a good thing in these sad times.)

[....]Trump is coming to Scotland and protestors going to Turnberry have managed to secure the blimp to fly in the area around Turnberry.

Due to the airspace restrictions in place for Trump's visit, the protestors are seeking flight clearance to fly the blimp near the president on his visit to Scotland.

Police on the ground will allow it with the authorisation of pertinent parties. Emails have been sent to the Chief of Police in Scotland, National Air Traffic Control, the Civil Aviation Authority and the First Minister.

The purpose of this petition is to provide the link to these authorities to show that there is clear and substantive public interest in it flying as is the protestors right pursuant to the rights [....]

More here

By Zachary Basu @ Axios.com, July 12

The Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm that was one of three entities indicted by Robert Muellerfor conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election, created 48 Twitter accounts dating back to 2014 that were designed to mimic local news outlets, according to an investigation by NPR.

Why it matters: The now-suspended accounts, which had names like @ElPasoTopNews and @Seattle_Post, gained the trust of thousands of followers over the course of two years by posting real local news headlines. The potential for these accounts to mobilize at any moment and influence a narrative suggests that the Russian misinformation campaign — which was evidently a years-long effort — had an acute understanding of the authority and respect that local news commands in American society [....]

ln-depth article by Radley Balko @ "The Watch" op-ed section @ WashingtonPost.com, July 10, with videos

[....] It’s tempting to blow all this off as a single, insignificant incident in a small town. It isn’t Los Angeles’s Rampart, after all. Or Chicago’s systemized torture. But it also isn’t unique. There’s a steady stream of stories like this one. I was alerted to this particular story by a former police officer who now advocates criminal-justice reform. (He asked me not to use his name, for reasons that will be apparent in a moment.) I asked him: In his experience, how common is this sort of thing? His response:

This is very common in policing. Looking back on my career, I realize just how often I acted similarly and didn’t even realize it. It was subconscious. I was trained and subtly incentivized to do so. You intentionally create conflict and manufacture noncompliance in order to build your stop into an arrest situation. Because that’s what generations of law enforcers who have been steeped in a fear-based, comply or else, us-vs.-them mind-set do. They arrest people. Arrests are a primary measure of productivity and gives the appearance your department has solved a problem.

Most aggressive cops have honed this to an art. They are savvy, know exactly how to weaponize numerous petty laws, ordinances, use-of-force policy and procedure against citizens. This cop was off his game and clumsily went through the motions like a desperate door-to-door perfume salesman. Except when cops manufacture a “sale” like this, the “customer” ends up arrested, criminalized, emotionally and financially devastated, not to mention possibly physically beaten or worse. And the justice system will deem it legal, even when it isn’t.

As far as the police leadership and prosecutors, they knew exactly what they were doing. If someone makes a complaint, you find something, anything to charge them with. [....]

Dana Milbank, WaPo opinion piece, yesterday.  Clearly this qualifies as news.

.....

So Putin is fine, but Europeans are killing us. Using this distinction, we can extrapolate a taxonomy:

Things that Trump thinks will kill us:

● Free markets.

● Free trade.

● Democracy.

● Free speech.

● Free press.

● Opposition parties.

● Independent courts.

● The rule of law.

● Human rights.

Things that Trump thinks are fine*:

(* from the April human rights report on Russia by Trump’s State Department)

● Extrajudicial killings.

● Enforced disappearances.

● Torture.

● Arbitrary arrest and detention.

● Lack of judicial independence.

● Political prisoners.

● Severe interference with privacy.

● Severe restrictions on freedom of expression.

● Violence against journalists and bloggers.

● Blocking and filtering of Internet content.

● Severe restrictions on the rights of peaceful assembly.

● Increasingly severe restriction on freedom of association.

● Restrictions on freedom of movement.

● Severe restrictions on the right to participate in the political process.

● Restrictions on opposition candidates’ ability to seek public office and conduct political campaigns.

● Widespread corruption at all levels and in all branches of government.

● Thousands of fatal incidents of domestic violence, to which the government responded by reducing the penalty for domestic violence.

● Thousands of fatal incidents of child abuse.

● Trafficking in persons.

● Institutionalization in harsh conditions of a large percentage of people with disabilities.

● State-sponsored as well as societal violence against LGBTI people.

As we have seen for some time during the Trump era, the good guys are the bad guys, and vice versa. The world has been upside down for so long that American toilets now swirl in the opposite direction.

...........

By Azadeh Moaveni @ NewYorker.com, July 9

​Last December, an image was posted on Instagram that showed a young woman named Vida Movahed standing on top of a sidewalk utility box on Revolution Street, a crowded thoroughfare in Tehran. Her dark hair was curled around her neck, and she was waving her white headscarf on a stick in front of her. She stood quietly, until she was arrested, an hour later, for not wearing her hijab. The next month [....]

[....] Videos of these confrontations appeared in Iranian media and the international press. Masih Alinejad, a prominent Iranian anti-mandatory-hijab activist based in New York, deemed the moment the start of a real feminist movement in Iran [....]

The protests have served a different purpose in the United States. As headlines across the world have heralded #TheGirlsofRevolutionStreet as Iran’s #MeToo movement, the Trump Administration has deployed the cause as part of its campaign to isolate the Islamic Republic and promote regime change in Tehran. From the moment that the U.
S. pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, has put Iranian women at the center of the Administration’s new strategy. In a major policy speech at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, Pompeo said that Iranian women’s protests were evidence of a growing divide between Iranians and their government. “The brutal men of the regime seem to be particularly terrified by Iranian women who are demanding their rights,” he said. “As human beings with inherent dignity and inalienable rights, the women of Iran deserve the same freedoms that the men of Iran possess.”

Pompeo has since become the most outspoken Secretary of State in U.S. history on the subject of Iranian women’s struggle for equality. On his Twitter account, Pompeo released an eerie graphic of a miniature Movahed [....]

In that, Des Moines and the surrounding area stand as an example of what might be coming for the national economy, both good and bad. Full employment has a remarkable way of improving the lives of low-wage workers and drawing new individuals into the labor force. But it also exposes the scars that even a very hot economy is unable to heal.

The regime's harsh statement illustrates the risk in putting so much stock into last month's ceremonial Singapore summit.

Analysis by Andrea Mitchell @ NBCNews.com, July 7

WASHINGTON — On Saturday, after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo finished talks with North Korean officials in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un's foreign ministry accused the Trump administration of a “unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization." It was an immediate and sharp contradiction to President Donald Trump’s rosy descriptions of his North Korea diplomacy.

[....] This dissonance between fact and fancy was made clear earlier this week. After NBC News first reported that Pyongyang was in fact expanding elements of its weapons program, the president tweeted, “Many good conversations with North Korea — It is going well!” He added: “If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!”

On Thursday, as his secretary of state was flying to Pyongyang, the President again pointed to eight months without a missile or nuclear test by the North as proof of his success. But in fact, Pyongyang also suspended tests for a while under President Barack Obama, and promised to denuclearize. It did not keep that commitment.

All this puts even more pressure on Pompeo and his negotiating team [....]