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Category Archives: Around the World
“By singling out citizens from these countries for exclusion, Trump’s order may well actually increase the risk of terrorism”
The Washington Post: Trump’s revised travel ban is still cruel and still unconstitutional.
“Today, Donald Trump issued a revised executive order barring entry into the US by citizens of six Muslim-majority nations. The new order replaces an old one that was repeatedly rejected by the courts. The new order is less bad than the old one in some crucial respects. But it is still indefensibly cruel, and still unconstitutional for many of the same reasons as the original.
[…]
Despite those improvements, the order still inflicts cruel harm on refugees and others, while creating little if any security benefit.”
““This will be investigated, […] It will all come out. I will be proven right.“ “
Washington Post: Inside Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations.
(The same article is also available at the Independent.)
“Then, a few hours after Trump had publicly defended his attorney general and said he should not recuse himself from the Russia probe, Sessions called a news conference to announce just that — amounting to a public rebuke of the president.
Back at the White House on Friday morning, Trump summoned his senior aides into the Oval Office, where he simmered with rage, according to several White House officials. He upbraided them over Sessions’s decision to recuse himself, believing that Sessions had succumbed to pressure from the media and other critics instead of fighting with the full defenses of the White House.
In a huff, Trump departed for Mar-a-Lago, taking with him from his inner circle only his daughter and Kushner, who is a White House senior adviser. His top two aides, Chief of Staff ÂReince Priebus and Bannon, stayed behind in Washington. “
“Mr. Trump’s mood was said to be volatile even before he departed for his weekend in Florida…”
The New York Times: Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones. By Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt, March 4, 2017.
“It would have been difficult for federal agents, working within the law, to obtain a wiretap order to target Mr. Trump’s phone conversations. It would have meant that the Justice Department had gathered sufficient evidence to convince a federal judge that there was probable cause to believe Mr. Trump had committed a serious crime or was an agent of a foreign power, depending on whether it was a criminal investigation or a foreign intelligence one.
Former officials pointed to longstanding laws and procedures intended to ensure that presidents cannot wiretap a rival for political purposes.
“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,“ said Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.“
Mr. Trump asserted just the opposite in a series of five Twitter messages beginning just minutes before sunrise in Florida, where the president is spending the weekend.
[…]
Ben Rhodes, a former top national security aide to Mr. Obama, said in a Twitter message directed at Mr. Trump on Saturday that “no president can order a wiretap“ and added, “Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you.“ “
“You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it.”
Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media. “With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network.” By Carole Cadwalladr, Sunday 26 February 2017.
“Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.“
This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.
We’re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE news!!!“ But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,“ it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.“
By that definition we’re already there.”
Link via MetaFilter.