"It's really powerful that this discourse has entered the mainstream conversation here in the U.K., and it's inherently connected to the conversations that are happening across America," activist says.
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Friday that his country was "hurt and angry" after a border clash with China that left 20 troops dead, and warned that the army has been given free reign to respond to any new violence. India and China have blamed each other for the high altitude clash on their contested Himalaya frontier on Monday which also left Chinese casualties after brutal fights with nail studded batons, rocks and rods covered in barbed wire. Modi called a rare meeting with opposition party leaders to discuss the simmering crisis hours after China released 10 Indian troops, including two majors, it had seized in the battle in the Galwan valley of Ladakh region.
The U.S. is set to sit down with Russia and possibly China on Monday to discuss limiting all three countries' nuclear stockpiles. CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk spoke to Ambassador Robert Wood, the U.S. top arms control negotiator, about his growing concerns over Russia and China's nuclear arsenals.
Antagonisms between Indian and Chinese troops high in the Himalayas are taking a dire toll on traditional goat herds that supply the world’s finest, most expensive cashmere. This week, a deadly brawl between Indian and Chinese soldiers caused the deaths of at least 20 Indian soldiers in the Galwan Valley, an achingly beautiful landscape that is part of a border region that has been disputed for decades because of its strategic importance as the world's highest landing ground. The months-long military standoff between the Asian giants is hurting local communities due to the loss of tens of thousands of Himalayan goat kids died because they couldn't reach traditional winter grazing lands, officials and residents said.
Navy Capt. Brett Crozier has been vindicated after warning of a dire coronavirus outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt—just not by the Navy, which on Friday announced that it will not reverse Crozier’s firing for the infraction of trying to save his sailors’ lives. Instead, the Navy leadership implied that Crozier was responsible for the outbreak that he loudly warned he needed urgent help from the Navy to redress.“If Capt. Crozier was still in command today, I would be relieving him,” the chief of naval operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, said on Friday. Less than two months ago, Gilday recommended reinstating Crozier. A final report into Crozier’s firing, released Friday, accused the Roosevelt commander and his team of being “biased by groupthink, emotion and a loss of perspective as to the real risk at hand”—as well as an insufficient appreciation of how the fleet commander was working tirelessly to aid evacuation from the ship, something Crozier had challenged. The report, written by Gilday’s second in command, Adm. Robert Burke, levied the extraordinary claim that Crozier’s team “took little to no action within their own span of control to improve the crew’s safety.”The Navy fired Crozier after his Mar. 30 plea to the Navy to evacuate the aircraft carrier’s crew for treatment became public. Crozier had implicitly challenged the Pentagon’s approach to the pandemic, which had been to continue as much military activity as possible, under the rationale of maintaining readiness. “Sailors do not need to die,” Crozier warned in a letter reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. Acting Navy Secretary Resigns After Calling Capt. Crozier ‘Stupid’It was a debacle for the Navy. An initial outbreak afflicting around 100 sailors among the 4,000-strong crew ultimately swelled to 1,273 —including Crozier himself. Yet the acting Navy secretary, Thomas Modly, blamed Crozier for being “too naive or too stupid” to believe his letter wouldn’t become public, even flying to Guam to admonish the cashiered captain to a disgusted crew. Within days, Modly quit in disgrace amid public outrage over his comments. One sailor aboard the Roosevelt, Aviation Ordnanceman Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr., died from COVID-19.An internal Navy investigation, completed in late April, recommended Crozier’s reinstatement. Yet when Defense Secretary Mark Esper was briefed on it, Esper opted to wait until “receiv[ing] a written copy” before “meet[ing] again with Navy leadership to discuss next steps,” Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Rath Hoffman said on Apr. 24. On Friday afternoon, following a broader investigation, Gilday and Modly’s successor, Navy Secretary Kenneth J. Braithwaite, implied variously that Crozier was derelict in his own responsibilities to aid the crew—and even painted him as lethargic in his response. Citing a subsequent investigation, Gilday said that Crozier “should have been more decisive” when the afflicted Roosevelt pulled into Guam, particularly in evacuating sailors into spaces the Navy scrambled to secure ashore. Crozier had been alarmed at the insufficient distance between the beds and pressed for individual hotel rooms for the 4,000-strong crew. The report found that Crozier considered the temporary berthing on Guam “worse than the ship.” Gilday said that Crozier was seemingly unaware that negotiations with the Guam authorities for the rooms were underway at the time of his letter. Yet Gilday also conceded that when Crozier’s superior at the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, Adm. John Aquilino, asked the captain what else he needed, Crozier’s response was “to move faster on the hotels.” Gilday, who insisted “those wheels were well in motion,” said Crozier had not prioritized “safety over comfort,” resulting in what he called an “almost paralysis” from Crozier – in short, the same infractions Crozier had levied at the Navy. “I was not impressed with the slow egress off the ship, the lack of a plan to do so, the Seventh Fleet commander’s demand for a plan that he didn’t receive until the day Crozier got relieved,” Gilday said. That commander, Rear Adm. Stuart Baker, will not be promoted until a further investigation occurs. Asked how to reconcile the Navy’s investigation with the urgency of Crozier’s March 30 letter, Gilday said he didn’t “have a good answer.” Yet he dodged answering whether the new investigation included an interview with Crozier. Footnotes in the report reference a “statement” Crozier gave to the inquiry on May 15. But Gilday said that Crozier was not being punished for his email, the reason Modly had fired him. The Navy chief also said Crozier had done “a bunch of things right.” In addition to Crozier and Baker, Gilday said the commander of the carrier’s air wing and the Roosevelt’s medical offer would receive administrative reprisal. The report even seems to chide the crew for its famous send-off to the fired Crozier: the sailors were “amassing and then cheering and chanting his name with only a small number wearing masks and with no social distancing.” For all the Navy’s investigations and re-investigations, Gilday also conceded that the Navy still does not know how the novel coronavirus made it to the ship. He said it’s “likely” to have happened during an earlier port visit to Vietnam, though Gilday defended the port visit and said none of the officers responsible for that decision—all of whom, unlike Crozier, are admirals—would face reprimand. In a statement, Hoffman said that Esper “believes the investigation to have been thorough and fair and supports the Navy’s decisions based on their findings. We are proud of the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and am glad that they are back at sea in the western Pacific projecting American power.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday the United States would in future treat Hong Kong as a Chinese city rather than an autonomous one to the extent that China treats the territory as a Chinese city. Pompeo told the online Copenhagen Democracy Summit that elections due in Hong Kong in September would "tell us everything that we need to know about the Chinese Communist Party's intentions with respect to freedom in Hong Kong."
North Korea is gearing up to send propaganda leaflets over its southern border, denouncing North Korean defectors and South Korea, its state media said on Saturday, the latest retaliation for leaflets from the South as bilateral tensions rise. Enraged North Korean people across the country "are actively pushing forward with the preparations for launching a large-scale distribution of leaflets," which are piled as high as a mountain, said state news agency KCNA.
On Tuesday, a Supreme Court majority ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, written to protect against discrimination on the basis of sex, also protects against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. That Trump-nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion (joined also by Bush-nominated Chief Justice John Roberts) helped to occasion on some quarters of the right a bout of despair and fatalism more redolent of eras when Republican-nominated justices did not ostensibly control the Court. The dolor doubled Thursday, when a Roberts-led 5–4 majority in DHS v. Regents of the University of California rejected the Trump administration’s ending of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, essentially a legislative act of executive protection for an otherwise unauthorized group of resident aliens.One person not sharing in the grief, at least concerning the first decision, was Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley. “It’s the law of the land,” Grassley said about Bostock. “And it probably makes uniform what a lot of states have already done. And probably negates Congress’s necessity for acting.” A member of the legislative branch -- what is theoretically the most powerful branch of government -- expressing relief for not having to legislate is a far cry from the design of the Constitution. The Federalist Papers, written before the Constitution’s ratification to advocate its adoption, justify the document’s proposed separation of powers as a means to keep one branch from growing more powerful than any other, thus precluding tyranny. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Federalist No. 51 reads. “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Yet Congress today is ambition-deficient.One of the few ambitions of Republicans in Congress during Trump’s presidency has been to confirm judges. This is partly a reactive measure, responding to the Left’s transformation of the judiciary into a legislative body (one that often legislates in its direction), as most notoriously embodied in Roe v. Wade. It’s partly a product of circumstance: namely, the fact that the legal wing of the conservative movement, especially as represented by the Federalist Society, seems uniquely competent at finding, training, and placing its chosen people, especially compared with other factions on the right. And it’s partly a consequence of Congress’s own defects: the aforementioned unwillingness to legislate, gridlock, etc. The elevation of the Supreme Court and the decline of Congress as a serious lawmaking body have combined to make Congress’s main purpose, for Republicans, to fill the federal judiciary. A not-inconsiderable number of nose-holding votes for Trump in 2016 came from Republicans hoping to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court; a considerable amount of Trump defense continues to come from efforts in which his administration has since participated to shape the judiciary.All of this has led Republicans to accept a greater emphasis on the courts, especially the Supreme Court, as a means to resolve what might once have been political questions. Senators promise to appoint conservative justices; voters dutifully support them as essentially a rubber stamp for judicial appointments and little else. But when Republicans put greater emphasis on the courts, it makes the sting all the more painful when they do not deliver sought-after outcomes (even if failures sometimes get more fanfare than successes). This is the connection between Grassley’s relief and voter anger: Senators are relieved to be relieved of difficult legislation; those who elect them are angry that the people to whom Congress has passed the buck of legislating are not acting rightly.This is an unsustainable position. And it is, to be fair, not one entirely of the Right’s creation. The transformation of the Supreme Court, and of the courts more generally, originated primarily as a phenomenon of the Left, an attempt to re-engineer the Constitution without having to bother with votes. But the degree to which those on the right have acquiesced merely to working within this framework is beginning to approach complicity in it. It is one thing to demand conservative judges; it is different to make this demand while absolving Congress of its responsibility to legislate for itself. Just because the Federalist Society is a confident and capable organization doesn’t mean that those on the right should give up on expecting Congress to do the rest of its job. To do so is to surrender, in a sense, to the notion that political questions are best resolved judicially, and to further rule by lawyers (though to be fair, Congress has plenty of those, too). This has helped create our current situation, one whose remove from consent and other legitimating pathways seriously threatens our political stability. However one feels about the recent decisions, they properly belong in Congress, not the Supreme Court.But ours is a difficult situation to change. The deck is stacked considerably against Congress, legally, politically, and culturally. Its members are given to grandstanding, consumed by gridlock, and unused to the process of give-and-take that actually produces legislation. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, must deal only with nine members and increasingly takes on an august stature that many of its members have done little, in the past 100 years or so, to restrain, and in fact tend to abet. Voters themselves elect congresses that seem hopelessly at odds, and then abide by their failure to legislate. And a focus on the courts is understandable, given their considerable power; concern for them remains justified. But the degree and extent of congressional dereliction surpass explanation by merely these factors. Much of it is self-willed, though some members see the problem. Perhaps if conservative voters expected more of those they elected than merely to confirm judges to do Congress’s work for it, then members of Congress would rise to the occasion. The alternative is more inaction, a further warping of our constitutional order . . . and more whining.
The two senior commanders on a coronavirus-stricken aircraft carrier didn't “do enough, soon enough," to stem the outbreak, the top U.S. Navy officer said Friday, a stunning reversal that upheld the firing of the ship's captain who had pleaded for faster action to protect the crew. Capt. Brett E. Crozier and Rear Adm. Stuart Baker, commander of the carrier strike group, made serious errors in judgment as they tried to work through an outbreak that sidelined the USS Theodore Roosevelt in Guam for 10 weeks, said Adm. Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations. The Crozier decision was a surprise since Gilday had recommended that the captain be restored to his command less than two months ago after an initial inquiry.
China's plans to impose new national security laws on Hong Kong are raising widespread fears the legislation could lead to profound changes in the former British colony. WILL MAINLAND CHINA'S POWERFUL SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES BE ABLE TO TAKE ENFORCEMENT ACTION IN THE CITY? The initial resolution of the National People's Congress raises the prospect that officers from such agencies could be based in the city for the first time if needed on national security cases.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter Friday morning to warn potential protesters at his Saturday rally that Oklahoma “will be a much different scene” and that they “will not be treated like [they] have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis,” calling them “lowlifes.” The president shortly thereafter shared another tweet that said “THE SILENT MAJORITY IS STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE.”The city of Tulsa, where Trump’s Saturday rally is set to be held, ordered a last-minute curfew Thursday night to mitigate potential violence overnight, according to The Washington Post. The order is in place from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. on Friday and Saturday night. The mayor, G.T. Bynum, declared a “civil emergency” in the city after officials told him “individuals from organized groups who have been involved in destructive and violent behavior in other states are planning to travel to the City of Tulsa for purposes of causing unrest in and around the rally,” according to the order. It remains unclear whether the Trump supporters who have waited in line for days to secure a spot at the rally will clear out for the curfew.Trump’s rally, the first since the start of the coronavirus lockdowns, has faced widespread criticism. Bynum on Tuesday afternoon said he “shares anxiety” about the rally, saying he would have preferred another city to have been a testing ground for such a large event. The rally, originally scheduled for Friday, was moved to Saturday after outcry over the event being held on Juneteenth, the date that marks the end of slavery in Texas.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
Immediately following the Supreme Court’s decision to block President Trump from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a senior Joe Biden campaign adviser received a congratulatory note from a lawmaker in a key battleground state.“The very first text message I got shortly after 10 a.m. when the Supreme Court issued its ruling was from an elected official in Pennsylvania,” the senior adviser told The Daily Beast, “who was proud of the decision and asking how he can help.”“We’re seeing this from around the country,” the senior advisor added.As Democrats and Republicans once again prepare to face off over immigration ahead of November, as they did in 2016 and 2018, Team Biden has been privately crafting an outreach strategy that goes beyond the traditional Democratic election model to target states with large Latino populations. Starting with the launch of a $15 million ad on Thursday, the first of the general election in six states that Trump won, including blue states he flipped, the campaign is expanding outreach to areas with smaller Latino immigrant populations where razor-thin margins could determine who wins the White House.“The livelihoods of so many teeter on what happens on Nov. 3,” the senior adviser said. “And that doesn’t just mean in states like Arizona and Florida, but it also means that it will have an outsized influence in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other places with very fast growing immigrant and Latino populations that are poised to be decision makers in this election.”The Biden campaign’s multi-million ad buy will run in English and Spanish and comes as Trump continues to lash out publicly as he plummets in polls and grapples with an unfavorable decision from the top court. The president, himself, even speculated whether the Supreme Court liked him in a tweet Thursday. Shortly after the ruling became public, the Democratic National Committee convened a joint press briefing call with Reps. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Filemon Vela (D-TX) and the Biden campaign to address the party’s pathway to victory and pro-immigration platform, stressing at several junctures that the ruling could be overturned, and that the futures of DACA recipients rest solely on the outcome of the November election.“To me, the message from today is yes, this is a victory, but we are not done,” DNC Member and Dreamer Ellie Perez said. “We’re not even close to being done. This just adds more fuel to our fire.” Asked by The Daily Beast how Biden’s campaign and the DNC plans to maximize the ruling—which has temporarily protected over 600,000 Dreamers from deportation for the time being —in the near future, top Democrats laid out a series of ways they intend to shield it from Trump and the GOP’s expected attacks at dismantling the progress. “We know that the pathway to victory in November really runs through the Latino community,” Julie Chávez RodrÃguez, a senior Biden adviser, told The Daily Beast. Chávez RodrÃguez, who is the granddaughter of famed labor leader César Chávez and the highest-ranking Latina on the campaign, said that they are in the process of dedicating “a lot more investment” and “a lot more state infrastructure” in that area in the next few weeks.Supreme Court Overturns Trump Decision to Rescind DACA, Saving DREAMers for NowThe campaign sees that investment largely as part of their ongoing efforts to build a broad coalition of support. Nearly one year ago, in June 2019, Biden penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald addressing immigration ahead of the first Democratic debate in the South Florida city. In it, he wrote that “DREAMers are Americans, and Congress needs to make it official. The millions of undocumented people in the United States can only be brought out of the shadows through fair treatment, not ugly threats.” On Thursday, he echoed those sentiments, but went a step further, promising to “send a bill to Congress that creates a clear roadmap to citizenship for Dreamers and 11 million undocumented people who are already strengthening our nation” on the first day of his administration. “It’s long overdue,” Biden wrote in a statement. At the party level, which is working in tandem with Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee, chairman Tom Perez told The Daily Beast that the committee now has internal capabilities to engage Latino voters and other immigrant communities through “sub-ethnicity modeling,” a micro-targeting voter outreach mechanism that did not previously exist within their infrastructure. “If you want to persuade a person named Perez in Florida to vote for Joe Biden, it’s really important to know what country of origin Perez is from,” he said. “If you meet Perez in Nevada, you want to know if he’s from Mexico or if he’s from the Philippines. And we have the capacity now to do that.”Senior Biden advisors also point to Republicans as potentially critical components of their follow up outreach on the DACA ruling, pointing to current polling that shows that a majority of Americans support extending protections for undocumented children. A poll from Politico/Morning Consult released last week concluded that 78 percent of registered voters surveyed support allowing Dreamers to stay in the country. While Biden is outperforming Trump with Latinos, surveys show there’s still ground to be made up. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released this week, Biden led Trump 57 percent to 31 percent among that bloc. But he’s down 9 points from the previous poll.And as he continues to tie himself to the merits of the former administration under his old boss, Biden also has to overcome less rosy components of the Obama White House’s record on immigration. During his time in office, Obama deported hundreds of thousands of immigrants without criminal records, a move that negatively contributed to Biden’s performance among some progressives and Latinos during the Democratic primary. In February, Biden said the move was a “big mistake.” Still, throughout much of the primary leading up to voting, Biden also lagged significantly behind his closest rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), with Latinos. Sanders ultimately swept the Nevada caucuses in large part due to his voter registration and outreach in the state. “That’s why he needs to sing from the mountain tops of what he would do,” MarÃa Teresa Kumar, the CEO of Voto Latino, told The Daily Beast, addressing a question about how the former vice president can move beyond the more harmful elements of Obama’s record on the subject. Kumar recalled being impressed by what she described as Biden’s evolution on immigration from watching him for nearly a decade.“In my working with the administration over a period of those eight years, I saw a man who didn’t quite understand the Latino experience to at the very end of those eight years recognizing that [it was] the same treatment, the same trepidation, the same obstacles that his grandfather faced coming from Ireland,” she said about Biden. “And that shook him to the core.”“I would actually venture to say that he may have understood that journey of that immigrant experience of having this perception of America and then coming here and being hurt by it in a different way than I would even the president did at the time,” she said.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
British officials said Thursday the grave of an enslaved African man has been vandalised in an apparent “retaliation attack” after protesters in the city of Bristol toppled the statue of a prominent slave trader. Two headstones in memory of Scipio Africanus, who lived in Bristol in the 18th century, were smashed. A message scrawled in chalk nearby called for the statue of Edward Colston to be put back or “things will really heat up.”
Chinese prosecutors said on Friday they have charged two detained Canadians for suspected espionage, indictments that could result in life imprisonment, in a case that has driven a diplomatic wedge between Ottawa and Beijing. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was "very disappointed" and would keep pressing China to release the duo. Former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor were arrested in late 2018 on state security charges, soon after Canadian police detained Huawei Technologies Co's [HWT.UL] chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, on a U.S. warrant.
Ten Indian soldiers captured by China in Ladakh on Monday evening have been released, as evidence grows Beijing “meticulously planned” the ambush. The Indian Army has said no further troops are being held prisoner but 76 Indian soldiers remain injured, after Chinese troops attacked Indian forces with brutal weapons including nail-embedded rods. Indian intelligence agencies flagged the unusual movement of Chinese soldiers to bases on the Tibetan side of the Line of Actual Control, which separates the two superpowers, as early as February. Yet, Indian troops were slow to reinforce after the Himalayan spring snow due to the coronavirus and members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the LAC and annexed 60 square kilometres of Indian territory at four locations - Pangong Tso Lake, Galwan River and Valley, Hot Springs and Demchok. Former leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, tweeted today that it was “crystal clear” that the government was “fast asleep”. The Indian Army has officially declared that 20 Indian soldiers were killed in clashes but on condition of anonymity, sources told the Telegraph this figure was 23, as three bodies were unidentifiable due to the injuries inflicted by the Chinese weapons. The Deccan Chronicle quoted intelligence sources today, saying the actual number of fatalities on the Indian side is as high as 40, as bodies fell in the Galwan River or are buried in deep snow on the mountainside.
Brazilian police on Thursday arrested a former aide to President Jair Bolsonaro's eldest son in a graft investigation threatening to undermine the far-right leader and ratchet up his battle with the judiciary. Fabricio Queiroz, who worked with Senator Flavio Bolsonaro when he was a Rio de Janeiro state lawmaker, was arrested outside Sao Paulo in a home owned by a personal lawyer for the Bolsonaro family, according to prosecutors. Investigators sought Queiroz for questioning over more than 1.2 million reais ($230,000) in bank transactions in a suspected scheme to embezzle the salaries of phantom employees in the Rio state assembly.
NATO said Thursday it has launched an official investigation into a naval incident in the Mediterranean between alliance members France and Turkey that has infuriated Paris. France has complained vehemently about the incident in which it says one of its ships was subjected to radar targeting by Turkish frigates as it sought to inspect a cargo vessel suspected of carrying arms to Libya. The incident is the latest flare-up in tensions between France and Turkey, which have clashed over Ankara's military operation in Syria and more recently over their roles in Libya's civil war.
China's plans to impose new national security laws on Hong Kong are raising widespread fears the legislation could lead to profound changes in the former British colony. WILL MAINLAND CHINA'S POWERFUL SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES BE ABLE TO TAKE ENFORCEMENT ACTION IN THE CITY? The initial resolution of the National People's Congress raises the prospect that officers from such agencies could be based in the city for the first time if needed on national security cases.
Millionaire media tycoon Jimmy Lai knows his support for Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests could soon land him behind bars, but the proudly self-described "troublemaker" says he has no regrets. "I'm prepared for prison," the 72-year-old told AFP from the offices of Next Digital, Hong Kong's largest and most rambunctiously pro-democracy media group. Few Hong Kongers generate the level of vitriol from Beijing that Lai does.