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      Russian Military Rout in Ukraine has Major Implications for the MENA Region

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against America

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      The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against America Peter Baker and Susan Glasser offer a beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracyThe US labors in Donald Trump’s shadow, the Republican party “reborn in his image”, to quote Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Trump is out of office but not out of sight or mind. Determined to explain “what happened” on 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, the husband-and-wife team examines his term in the White House and its chaotic aftermath. Their narrative is riveting, their observations dispiriting.Trump chief of staff used book on president’s mental health as guideRead moreThe US is still counted as a liberal democracy but is poised to stumble out of that state. The stench of autocratization wafts. Maga-world demanded a Caesar. It came close to realizing its dream.In electing Trump, Baker and Glasser write, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t are the authors’ open questions.Trump spoke kindly of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. He treated Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine as a plaything, to be blackmailed for personal gain.In a moment of pique, Trump sought to give the Israeli-controlled West Bank to King Abdullah of Jordan. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the former and possibly future prime minister of Israel, he had a tart “fuck him”.At home, the US is mired in a cold civil war. Half the country deems Trump unfit to hold office, half would grant him a second term, possibly as president for life. Trump’s “big lie”, that the 2020 election was stolen, is potent.The tectonics of education, religion and race clang loudly – and occasionally violently. The insurrection stands as bloody testament to populism and Christian nationalism. The cross and the noose are icons. The Confederacy has risen.Baker is the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent. Glasser works for the New Yorker and CNN. Their book is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Those who were in and around the West Wing talk and share documents. Baker and Glasser lay out receipts. They conducted more than 300 interviews. They met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, “his rococo palace by the sea”, to which we now know he took more than 300 classified documents.“When we sat down with [him] a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser write, “the first thing he told us was a lie.”Imagine that.Trump falsely claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations. Eventually, he forgot he had spun that yarn. It never happened.Baker and Glasser depict a tempestuous president and a storm-filled presidency. Trump’s time behind the Resolute Desk translated into “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals”. The authors now compare Trump to Napoleon, exiled to Elba.Congress impeached him twice. He never won the popular vote. His legitimacy flowed from the electoral college, the biggest quirk in the constitution, a document he readily and repeatedly defiled. Tradition and norms counted little. The military came to understand that Trump was bent on staging a coup. The guardrails nearly failed.The führer was a role-model. Trump loudly complained to John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”“Which generals?”“The German generals in world war II.”“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”It’s fair to say Trump probably did not know that. He dodged the Vietnam draft, suffering from “bone spurs”, with better things to do. He is … not a reader.In Trump’s White House, Baker and Glasser write, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as some sort of owner’s manual.A week before Christmas 2020, Trump met another retired general, the freshly pardoned Michael Flynn, and other election-deniers including Patrick Byrne, once a boyfriend of Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent. Hours later, past midnight, Trump tweeted “Big protest in DC on January 6th … Be there, will be wild!”In that moment, the fears of Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who saw the coup coming, “no longer seemed far-fetched”. Now, as new midterm elections approach, Republicans signal that they will grill Milley if they retake the House.Baker and Glasser also write of how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump sought refuge from the Trumpian storm, despite being his senior advisers. They endeavored to keep their hands clean but the muck cascaded downward.Not everyone shared their discomfort. Donald Trump Jr proposed “ways to annul the will of the voters”. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, pushed for Republican state legislatures to declare Trump the winner regardless of reality.“HERE’s an AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY,” a Perry text message read.Trump’s increasing tirade against FBI and DoJ endangering lives of officialsRead moreIn such a rogues’ gallery, even the wife of a sitting supreme court justice, Ginni Thomas, stood ready to help. Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, was a child who yearned for his parent’s affection. He would say and do anything. And yet he managed to spill the beans on Trump testing positive for Covid before debating Biden. Trump called Meadows “fucking stupid”. Meadows has since complied with subpoenas issued by the Department of Justice and the January 6 committee.Baker and Glasser conclude by noting Trump’s advanced age and looking at “would-be Trumps” who might pick up the torch. They name Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson.On Thursday, Trump threatened violence if he is criminally charged.“I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before,” he said. “I don’t think the people of the US would stand for it.”As Timbuk 3 once sang, with grim irony: “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”
      The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 is published in the US by Penguin Random House
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      Why Biden blames Trump’s MAGA as a threat to democracy: Politics Weekly America | podcast

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      After Joe Biden delivered a landmark speech a couple of weeks ago warning that the extremism of Donald Trump’s Republican supporters now threatened the country’s democratic foundations, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the journalist Luke Mogelson, who has written a book chronicling the transformation of America in the run-up to January 6

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      Archives: NBC, Al Jazeera, the Guardian Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Biden vows to tackle ‘venom and violence of white supremacy’ and decries Trump over Charlottesville – live

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      “White supremacist will not have the last word and this venom and violence cannot be the story of our time,” Biden said. Biden listed off a series of attacks against Jewish people, trans people, Asian Americans…He specifically mentioned the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and violence against Asian Americans amid the pandemic, and bomb threats at HBCUs. “All forms of hate fueled violence have no place in America,” he said, adding that we must “silence it, rather than remain silent.”Reality Winner, the intelligence contractor who served more than four years in prison for leaking a report on Russian interference in the 2016 US election, has said she finds accusations that Donald Trump mishandled sensitive documents “incredibly ironic”, given her prosecution under his administration.An FBI search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida last month found more than 300 classified documents.Speaking to NBC News, Winner, 30, said: “It is incredibly ironic, and I would just let the justice department sort it out.”Winner added that it “wasn’t hard to believe” Trump held on to classified documents.Reflecting on her own prison sentence, she said: “What I did when I broke the law was a political act at a very politically charged time.”Winner also said she did not believe Trump should go to prison. She did not comment further on whether the former president should face charges under the Espionage Act, as she did in 2017.“This is not a case where I expect to see any prison time,” Winner said, “and I’m just fine with that.”Winner was released early, on good behavior, in June 2021.The US is expected to announce a new $600m arms package to help the Ukrainian military, Reuters reports:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Two of the people familiar with the deliberations said the package could be announced later this evening
      Several sources said it was expected the package would contain munitions, including more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). Two of the sources said the package would include ammunition for howitzers
      The White House declined to comment.
      Washington has sent about $15.1bn in security assistance to the Kyiv government since Russia’s invasion.Here’s a 2017 interview by my colleague Lois Beckett with Susan Bro: More

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      US hid fears of radiation in Moscow embassy in 70s from staff, documents reveal

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      US hid fears of radiation in Moscow embassy in 70s from staff, documents revealPresident Ford and state secretaries complained to Soviet Union about health concerns over ‘Moscow signal’ The US complained to the Soviet Union for more than a decade about microwave radiation directed at its embassy in Moscow, but kept concerns secret from embassy staff for nine years, according to newly declassified documents.The reported microwave radiation came to be known as the “Moscow signal” and was the source of frequent complaints from Washington. US officials were unsure of either the purpose of the signal or the potential health effects of long-term exposure to low-level microwave radiation.The declassified documents, obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, provide a historical perspective on current anxiety about “Havana syndrome”, a cluster of mysterious neurological symptoms afflicting scores of US diplomats and spies, which the US believes may have been caused deliberately by some form of directed energy weapon.The first reference to the Moscow signal was in a June 1967 state department memo recording a conversation between the then US secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, in which Rusk raised the matter of the “electro-magnetic signal” aimed at the embassy in Moscow. Gromyko expressed scepticism about the claim, but Rusk insisted there was “no doubt whatever about it” and sketched a rough diagram to illustrate his point. Gromyko said he would “look into the matter” but no change in the level of radiation was detected.Over the years that followed, the microwave signals multiplied and intensified.President Gerald Ford wrote to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, in December 1975: “These transmissions have created levels of radiation within the embassy which may, in the opinion of our medical authorities, represent a hazard to the health of the American families living and working in that building. Indeed, in one particular case, they may already have caused a serious health problem for one member of our embassy staff.”Ford was almost certainly referring to the ambassador Walter Stoessel, who became ill with leukaemia at that time, and died of the disease a decade later.In his reply to the president, Brezhnev insisted the electromagnetic field around the US embassy was “of industrial origin”.Despite US fears about the health effects, embassy staff were not informed, apparently because of concerns the story would leak to the media and upset arms control negotiations with Moscow. Stoessel’s illness was kept secret.In a 1975 conversation with the then Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, asked for the signal to be turned off before he made a planned visit to Moscow or, he joked, “You could give me a radiation treatment”.“We really are sitting on it here, but too many people know about it,” Kissinger told the ambassador. If it was discovered that the Nixon and Ford administrations had known about the problem and done nothing to stop it, he said, “we will catch hell”.The embassy staff were finally informed in 1976. A state department telegram from February of that year said employees should be briefed in small groups but they should not pass on the details to their dependants. However, the telegram recommended that pregnant staff or family members be medically evacuated immediately for tests.The Soviet leadership took no heed of the US complaints and it is unclear when the Moscow signal was turned off, if it ever existed. US experts were mystified over the purpose of the microwave radiation, with the two leading theories being that it was intended to neutralise electronic intelligence gathering by the embassy, or to activate listening devices built into the structure of the embassy.When the previous embassy building was demolished in 1964, dozens of microphones had been found embedded in its walls.TopicsUS foreign policyUS politicsRussianewsReuse this content More

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      Republican backer of Trump’s big lie wins New Hampshire Senate primary

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      Republican backer of Trump’s big lie wins New Hampshire Senate primaryHard-right Don Bolduc, who has vowed to decertify results in 2024, edges out Chuck Morse for right to run in November A far-right Republican who backs Donald Trump’s election fraud lie and has vowed to decertify results in 2024 will be the GOP candidate for US Senate in New Hampshire.Trump says Pence is out as potential running mate, book revealsRead moreDon Bolduc, a retired special forces general who has said he suffered from PTSD and a traumatic brain injury, edged out Chuck Morse, the state senate president, to face the incumbent Democrat, Maggie Hassan, in November.Most if not all forecasters called the race for Bolduc before Morse conceded.The primary was the last in a series that have seen Republicans select candidates aligned with Trump, causing some to fear damage to their chances of winning the Senate in November.Bolduc, 61, has echoed Trump’s lie about election fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden. He has also questioned whether the FBI should be abolished following its search of Trump’s Florida estate, which turned up a cache of classified documents.Though Bolduc has courted Trump, he has not won an endorsement. Trump did call Bolduc a “strong guy”.Last October, Bolduc spoke to the New Yorker. He said he thought his “values and principles as an American, and the constitution, which I served for 33-plus years in the military, was safe with President Trump”, and that Trump’s appeal stemmed from the (notoriously reading-averse) former president’s reading and understanding of the constitution.He also said “there was a tremendous amount of fraud” in 2020, adding: “I very much believe it and I think it exists, and I think it happens and it’s been happening for a long time in this country. When you try to steal the presidency, a lot of people are going to go, ‘OK, wait a minute. What the hell’s going on here?’”On 6 January 2021, nine senators were among 147 Republicans who voted to object to results in key states, even after the Capitol was stormed by a pro-Trump mob, a riot now linked to nine deaths, including suicides among law enforcement.Asked if he would “walk the walk” on certification in the Senate in 2024, Bolduc told the New Yorker: “Oh, absolutely … everybody I talk to believes that in me.”Bolduc also said January 6 represented “a complete failure of the political system”, blaming “the speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader, the minority leader” and the vice-president, Mike Pence, who refused to reject electoral votes.“They failed us,” Bolduc said, “and so, therefore, now they’re trying to politicize it, turn it into something that it’s not.”He said Trump supporters should not have used violence and destroyed property, but “believed that their rights were violated. They believed that they lost their voice.”Morse was endorsed by the popular Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, whose decision not to take on Hassan himself disappointed many Republicans.Sununu called Bolduc a “conspiracy theorist”. Bolduc called Sununu a “Chinese communist sympathiser”. But the governor promised to “endorse whoever the nominee is, and support him, of course I will, no question”.In a newsletter on Wednesday, J Miles Coleman of the University of Virginia Center for Politics said Sununu’s endorsement of Morse had almost been enough to defeat Bolduc. But he also pointed to Democratic efforts to boost the Trumpist Republican, mirroring controversial tactics in other states.Coleman wrote: “Some Republicans complained that the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC intervened against Morse – given the margin, this may have been the decisive factor, although Morse also got some help from Republican outside groups.”One national Republican group spent at least $4.6m in support of Morse.The UVA center rates the New Hampshire Senate contest as “leans Democratic”.Republican governor blasts Trump as ‘crazy’ during Washington roastRead moreLinda Fowler, a political science professor at Dartmouth, told Reuters Morse would have stood a better chance of beating Hassan because he would have appealed to independents, the majority in New Hampshire.“If Bolduc gets the nomination, the independents will go to Hassan,” Fowler said, speaking before the result was known. “If he doesn’t get the nomination, the independents will have a serious choice.”Neil Levesque, director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, told the Associated Press Bolduc was the kind of candidate who would have struggled before Trump’s rise. Bolduc has never held elected office and had just $75,000 in cash on hand last week. But he was able to position himself as an ally of Trump.“If it mirrors the former president, it’s been effective,” Levesque said.TopicsUS politicsNew HampshireDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Revealed: rightwing US lobbyists help craft slew of anti-protest fossil fuel bills

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      Revealed: rightwing US lobbyists help craft slew of anti-protest fossil fuel billsLegislation drafted by Alec part of backlash against Indigenous communities and environmentalists opposing oil and gas projects Republican-led legislatures have passed anti-protest laws drafted by an extreme-right corporate lobbying group in a third of all American states since 2018, as part of a backlash against Indigenous communities and environmentalists opposing fossil fuel projects, new research has found.The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) helped draft legislation criminalizing grassroots protests against pipelines, gas terminals and other oil and gas expansion projects in 24 states, under the guise of protecting critical infrastructure.Rightwing lobby group Alec driving laws to blacklist companies that boycott the oil industryRead moreAlec, which is funded by rightwing state lawmakers, corporate sponsors and trade groups, and wealthy ideologues, creates model legislation on a range of conservative issues such as gun control, abortion, education funding and environmental regulations.The laws were passed in 17 Republican-controlled states, including Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, Kansas, West Virginia and Indiana, where protesters now face up to 10 years in prison and million-dollar fines, according to a new report from the non-profit Climate Cabinet.The anti-protest bills, which were rolled out in response to the success of mostly Indigenous-led campaigns slowing down fossil-fuel infrastructure projects, have used intentionally vague language to create a chilling effect on free speech and assembly – both constitutionally protected rights, according to the report Critical Infrastructure Laws: A Threat to Protest & the Planet.“Indigenous-led demonstrations opposing fossil-fuel projects have been one of the most successful and effective forms of climate action to date … in an affront to the protected freedoms of our constitution, state legislatures have found a new legislative mechanism to oppress frontline communities and cause further harm and destruction to our planet,” said Jonathon Borja, co-author of the report.The first so-called critical infrastructure bills originated in Oklahoma in 2018, where the Republican state representative Scott Biggs referenced North Dakota’s Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) protests and acknowledged that some anti-pipeline demonstrations had succeeded. “[The bill] is a preventative measure … to make sure that doesn’t happen here.”Other states followed after Alec created a model bill for lawmakers to copy. So far, the bills have not passed in any states where Democrats hold a majority in at least one legislative chamber, though some Democrats have voted in favor of them.In most of the bills, protesters, like those who participated in the DAPL demonstrations, could now face felony charges, while those charged with “aiding” protests could face harsh fines.Fossil fuel expansion projects halted by Indigenous-led campaigns represent the carbon equivalent of 12% of annual US and Canadian pollution, or 779m metric tons of greenhouse gases, according to data gathered by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International.The report comes as the White House and Congress negotiate the final terms of a controversial permitting side deal with the Democratic West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, which could make it harder to legally challenge new pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure.In a statement Alec said: “Alec has long been a leader in promoting and protecting free speech … But protests can and do turn violent. And when they do, our critical infrastructure facilities must be protected.”TopicsUS politicsFossil fuelsEnergynewsReuse this content More

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      Ken Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky affair, dies at 76

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      Ken Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky affair, dies at 76Starr’s Whitewater investigation, which uncovered Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, led to US president’s impeachment in 1998 Ken Starr, the lawyer who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, has died at the age of 76, according to a statement issued by his family.Starr was a prosecutor whose Whitewater investigation led to the impeachment of former Democratic president Clinton, in 1998. He died on Tuesday at Baylor St Luke’s medical center in Houston, of complications from surgery, the statement said.A Reagan judicial appointee and US solicitor general under George HW Bush, Starr presented many arguments before the US supreme court.Starr also served as independent counsel, president and chancellor of Baylor University and dean of the Pepperdine School of Law, the family statement said, and described their loved one as having had “a distinguished career in academia, the law and public service.”He was later stripped of that university chancellorship, however, after the institution under his watch failed to take appropriate action over a sexual assault scandal involving 19 football players and at least 17 women.In January 2020, Starr served as a member of Donald Trump’s legal team in the then president’s first impeachment trial over dealings with Ukraine.Starr came to national prominence as the special prosecutor who investigated the sex-and-perjury scandal that led to only the second impeachment of a president in US history, against the at-the-time hugely popular Democratic president.The investigation into Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky when she was a White House intern produced a book-length official document for the US Congress that became a bestseller when commercially sold as The Starr Report.Offering startling and lurid glimpses of sexual trysts intermingled with the densest legalese, the report found Clinton’s attempt to cover up the affair offered grounds for impeachment.The impeachment charges stemmed from Clinton’s false denial of the relationship in his 1998 grand jury testimony and in a deposition in a sexual harassment case filed against him by Paula Jones of Arkansas, where Clinton had been governor.On December 19, 1998, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton, following which a subsequent Senate trial failed to remove him from office.Starr is survived by his wife Alice Starr, to whom he was married for 52 years, his three children and nine grandchildren, the family statement added. Starr will be buried at the Texas state cemetery in Austin.Kentucky Republican and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement saying: “I am very sorry to learn of the passing of my friend Judge Ken Starr. He was a brilliant litigator, an impressive leader, and a devoted patriot.”Republican congressman Pete Sessions, representing Starr’s native Texas, tweeted that he was saddened, and called Starr “a great man”.Last year it was reported that Starr had waged a “scorched-earth” legal campaign to persuade federal prosecutors to drop a sex-trafficking case against the late sex offender and billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein relating to the abuse of multiple underaged girls, according to a book by the Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown who uncovered how the law had gone soft on Epstein, before his arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.TopicsBill ClintonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More