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| Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for 'Day X' Posted: 02 Aug 2020 08:53 AM PDT  GÜSTROW, Germany -- The plan sounded frighteningly concrete. The group would round up political enemies and those defending migrants and refugees, put them on trucks and drive them to a secret location.Then they would kill them.One member had already bought 30 body bags. More body bags were on an order list, investigators say, along with quicklime, used to decompose organic material.On the surface, those discussing the plan seemed reputable. One was a lawyer and local politician, but with a special hatred of immigrants. Two were active army reservists. Two others were police officers, including Marko Gross, a police sniper and former parachutist who acted as their unofficial leader.The group grew out of a nationwide chat network for soldiers and others with far-right sympathies set up by a member of Germany's elite special forces, the KSK. Over time, under Gross' supervision, they formed a parallel group of their own. Members included a doctor, an engineer, a decorator, a gym owner, even a local fisherman.They called themselves Nordkreuz, or Northern Cross."Between us, we were a whole village," recalled Gross, one of several Nordkreuz members who described to me in various interviews this year how the group came together and began making plans.They denied they had plotted to kill anyone. But investigators and prosecutors, as well an account one member gave to the police -- transcripts of which were seen by The New York Times -- indicate their planning took a more sinister turn.Germany has belatedly begun dealing with far-right networks that officials now say are far more extensive than they ever understood. The reach of far-right extremists into its armed forces is particularly alarming in a country that has worked to cleanse itself of its Nazi past and the horrors of the Holocaust. In July the government disbanded an entire company infiltrated by extremists in the nation's special forces.But the Nordkreuz case, which only recently came to trial after being uncovered more than three years ago, shows that the problem of far-right infiltration is neither new nor confined to the KSK, or even the military.Far-right extremism penetrated multiple layers of German society in the years when the authorities underestimated the threat or were reluctant to countenance it fully, officials and lawmakers acknowledge. Now they are struggling to uproot it.One central motivation of the extremists has seemed so far-fetched and fantastical that for a long time the authorities and investigators did not take it seriously, even as it gained broader currency in far-right circles.Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X -- a mythical moment when Germany's social order collapses, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save themselves and rescue the nation.Today Day X preppers are drawing serious people with serious skills and ambition. Increasingly, the German authorities consider the scenario a pretext for domestic terrorism by far-right plotters or even for a takeover of the government."I fear we've only seen the tip of the iceberg," said Dirk Friedriszik, a lawmaker in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Nordkreuz was founded. "It isn't just the KSK. The real worry is: These cells are everywhere. In the army, in the police, in reservist units."Nordkreuz was one of those groups elaborately preparing for Day X. The domestic intelligence service got a tip in late 2016, and prosecutors started investigating in the summer of 2017. But it took years before the network, or a small sliver of it, came before a court.Even now, only one member of the group, Gross, has faced charges -- for illegal weapons possession, not for any larger conspiracy.Late last year, Gross was handed a 21-month suspended sentence. The verdict was so mild that this year state prosecutors appealed it, kicking the case into another protracted round of deliberations.Of some 30 Nordkreuz members, only two others, a lawyer and another police officer, are currently under investigation by the federal prosecutor on suspicion of plotting terrorism.The outcome is typical of authorities' handling of far-right cases, extremism experts say. The charges brought are often woefully narrow for the elaborate plots they are meant to deter and punish. Almost always they focus on individuals, not the networks themselves.But the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.Some Nordkreuz members were serious enough that they had compiled a list of political enemies. Heiko Bohringer, a local politician in the area where the group was based, had received death threats."I used to think these preppers, they're harmless crazies who've watched too many horror movies," Bohringer said. "I changed my mind."Friedriszik, the state lawmaker, tried for years to focus public attention on the building danger of the far right, but found himself a voice in the wilderness."This movement has its fingertips in lots of places," he said. "All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning -- and plotting."Northern CrossThe shooting range in Gustrow, a rural town in a northeast corner of Germany, sits at the end of a long dirt path secured by a heavy gate. Barbed wire surrounds the area. A German flag flutters in the wind."This is where it all started," Axel Moll, a local decorator and Nordkreuz member with a hunting license and gun cabinet at home, told me when I was touring the area earlier this year.Gross, the police officer, was a regular at the range. He had been a parachutist and long-distance reconnaissance officer in the German army before his battalion was absorbed by Germany's elite special forces, the KSK. He never joined the KSK but knows several men who did.Another regular was Frank Thiel, a champion in handgun competitions and sought-after tactical shooting instructor for police and military units across Germany.In the fall of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers from wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan arrived in Germany, the men were appalled. In their eyes, Germany faced a potential invasion from terrorists, a possible breakdown of its welfare system, maybe even unrest.And their own government was welcoming the migrants."We were worried," Gross, 49, recalled in one of several conversations with me this year.In late 2015, while conducting a shooting workshop for the KSK in southern Germany, Thiel learned about an encrypted, countrywide chat network to share privileged information about the security situation in Germany, and how to prepare for a crisis.It was run by a soldier named Andre Schmitt. But everyone knew him as Hannibal.Who wanted in?Soon some 30 people, many of them regulars at the shooting range in Gustrow, joined the northern chapter of Schmitt's network, avidly following his updates. It was not long before Gross decided to create a parallel group so they could communicate and meet up locally. Members lived in towns and villages in the region, shared far-right sympathies and considered themselves concerned citizens.By January 2016, this network had become Nordkreuz.There were two criteria for joining, Moll recalled: "The right skills and the right attitude."Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.Nordkreuz held meetings every few weeks, on the floor above a gym owned by one member or in Moll's showroom, where the two of us also talked. Sometimes they had a barbecue. Other times, they invited guest speakers.Once a retired military officer came and talked about crisis management, Moll recalled. Another time they invited a "Reichsburger," or citizen of the Reich, a movement that does not recognize the postwar German state.Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.They began hoarding enough supplies to survive for 100 days, including food, gasoline, toiletries, walkie-talkies, medicine and ammunition. Gross collected 600 euros from each member of the group to pay for it. In all, he amassed more than 55,000 rounds of ammunition.The group identified a "safe house," where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former communist vacation village deep in the woods.The place was "ideal," Moll said. There was a stream providing fresh water, a small lake to wash themselves and clothes, a forest with wood to build and deer to hunt, even an old septic tank.Didn't all this seem a little far-fetched to them? I asked.Moll smiled at my "Western naivete."The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany."Under communism, everything was scarce,'' Moll explained. ''You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we're used to prepping."And, he said, they had already seen one system collapse. "You learn how to read between the lines. It's an advantage."Through 2016, as hundreds of thousands more migrants arrived in Germany and a number of Islamist terrorist attacks took place in Europe, the planning got more serious.Gross and other Nordkreuz members traveled in the fall to an arms fair in Nuremberg and met Schmitt, the special forces soldier running the nationwide chat network, in person.Members of the group learned how to rappel down the tower of a disused fire station. Two pickup points were designated as Day X meeting spots. Two fully functioning operating theaters were built as makeshift field hospitals, in a basement and a mobile home."The scenario was that something bad would happen," Gross told me. "We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way."Body Bags and QuicklimeThe question investigators are now scrutinizing is what did it mean to "go all the way."Gross insisted to me that the group was only prepping for what they saw as the day that the social order would collapse, for Day X. He said they never planned any murders, or intended to cause any harm.But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story."People were to be gathered and murdered," Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.Schelski is a former air force officer whose account is disputed by the others. It pivots on a meeting he said took place at the end of 2016 at a highway truck stop in Sternberg, a small town about 40 minutes west of the shooting range the men frequented.There, at a coffee stand that today resembles little more than a shed facing a bleak parking lot, Gross met with a handful of other men, in what had become a concentrated cell within Nordkreuz.Among the others present were two men now under investigation on suspicion of plotting terrorism. Under German law, they cannot be fully named. One was Haik J., who like Gross was a police officer. Another was a lawyer and local politician, Jan Henrik H. Both declined to speak with me.Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany's northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.Gross was the most recent winner.Schelski told the police that Jan Henrik H. kept a thick binder in his garage with the names, addresses and photos of local politicians and activists whom he considered to be political enemies. Some had sought to help refugees by seeking real estate to turn into shelters.Much in the file came from publicly available sources. But there were also handwritten notes with information obtained from a police computer.As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to "the people in the file," who he said were "harmful" to the state and needed to be "done away with," Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?After that meeting, Schelski told the police, he distanced himself from the group.By then, the intelligence service was already watching. Some eight months after the truck stop meeting, the authorities conducted the first in a series of raids on the homes of several Nordkreuz members.Over two years, the raids and intelligence work uncovered weapons, ammunition, enemy lists, and a handwritten order list for Day X that included the body bags and quicklime.I asked Gross about the body bags. He told me they were "multipurpose vessels," usable as cheap waterproof sleeping bag covers or for transporting large items.The disclosure that the group had identified political enemies has rattled Bohringer, the local politician. In 2015, two police officers came to sketch his house after he started receiving death threats."We want to know where you can get in, where you sleep, so that we can protect you," they told him.He said he wasn't too concerned. But in June 2018, Bohringer was called to the police station. The homes of two Nordkreuz members had recently been raided, one of them a police officer based in his hometown: Haik J., who had been at the truck stop meeting."They showed me a handmade sketch of my home," Bohringer said. "'Do you recognize this?' they had asked.""It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home," he said."I had to swallow pretty hard," he recalled. "The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.""They didn't just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies," he said. "It was concrete, what they were planning."Meeting With MarkoThe first time I knocked on Gross' door, in the village of Banzkow, about an hour's drive from the shooting range, we ended up talking outside for two hours.The second time, it started raining and he invited me into his red brick farmhouse on "Liberation Street," named for Germany's liberation from the Nazis at the end of World War II.In the hallway his old military badge and uniform were on display. A large map of Germany in 1937 dominated the wall. Images of guns were ubiquitous. On refrigerator magnets. On mugs. On a calendar.It was the same home that the police had raided years earlier, in August 2017, and found more than two dozen weapons and 23,800 rounds of ammunition, some of it stolen from police and military stockpiles.Another police raid in June 2019 uncovered another 31,500 rounds of ammunition and an Uzi submachine gun. This time they arrested him.In court, it took prosecutors almost 45 minutes to read the list of cartridges, guns, explosives and knives they had found. He was only charged with illegal weapons possession. In the ongoing terrorism investigation he is a witness, not a suspect."It's pretty astounding," said Lorenz Caffier, the state's interior minister, who used to shake Gross' hand at the annual special forces workshop in Gustrow. "Someone who hoards that much ammunition at home, is close to far-right tendencies and also makes extremist comments in chats is no harmless prepper.""Marko G. has a key role," he said.Prosecutors have traced the illegal ammunition in Gross home to a dozen police and military depots across the country, indicating possible collaborators. Several of the units shot in Gustrow."We don't know how it got from there to him," said Claudia Lange, a prosecutor.Three other police officers are being investigated on suspicion of helping Gross. Asked during the trial, Gross said he did not remember how he got the ammunition. When I met him, he stuck to that line.But otherwise he was not shy about sharing his views.Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs "in the dock," he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are "the caliphate." The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, "where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Muller."A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Donald Trump's face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president's speeches had been translated into German in the issue. "I like Trump," Gross said.As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Gross' far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion."There is no danger from the far right," he insisted. "I don't know a single neo-Nazi."Soldiers and police officers are "frustrated," he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Merkel works for what he calls the "deep state.""The deep state is global," Gross said. "It's big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates."He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz's planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond."The network is still there," he said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Tammy Duckworth Is Nothing and Everything Like Joe Biden Posted: 02 Aug 2020 08:46 AM PDT  Sen. Tammy Duckworth, like the man she might serve as vice president, prizes loyalty in her ranks and occasional mischief in her workplace.So when a top communications aide prepared to defect last year to the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, Duckworth recognized an opportunity. She recorded a faux media interview trashing Buttigieg for hiring her staff away, recruiting an intern to pose as a journalist on the tape. The file was sent to the departing aide, Sean Savett, who called the Buttigieg team in a panic.Soon, Savett was summoned to the Illinois senator's office, where she fumed theatrically, stalling as other staff members filed in quietly for the reveal: It was all a ruse. Duckworth handed him a parting gift -- a Smirnoff Ice, the centerpiece of a viral drinking game known as "icing" -- and gave a final senatorial directive: "Get down on one knee and chug."A year later, Duckworth is the one thinking about a new job and submitting to the attendant rituals. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is vetting her to be his running mate, and many of his allies see the freshman senator as a model contrast to President Donald Trump: a death-cheating, double-amputee Iraq War veteran whose life story -- whose very appearance, whooshing by wheelchair through the Capitol -- defines the decency and service that the president's opponents have found lacking in this White House.There are more accomplished legislators than Duckworth under consideration. There are more prolific policy thinkers and more electric campaigners.But in bearing and biography, Duckworth, 52, is almost certainly the Biden-est choice -- the would-be lieutenant who has, despite their disparate backgrounds, carved out a public life most evocative of his own. Although both are known as reliable Democrats whose more moderate instincts can sometimes disappoint progressives, they are also the kinds of politicians whose politics can feel beside the point to many voters.Like Biden, who entered the national consciousness as a 30-year-old senator-elect left to mourn his wife and daughter, Duckworth has forged a political identity around trauma and personal resilience, her status as a wounded warrior shadowing every inch of her professional arc since her Black Hawk helicopter was shot down outside Baghdad in 2004.In an interview, Duckworth suggested the two share a perspective that can flow only from confronting unfathomable pain, from sitting with loss and slogging through Plan B anyway."Why did some troops come home from a trauma and survive and thrive? And why do some come home and kill themselves?" Duckworth asked, without answering. "You could almost say that I'm a success story of someone who survived a trauma. But it wasn't easy. And I think that's what Vice President Biden and I have in common. We've been able to face the demons. We've been able to face the fear, the doubts and all of that, and we're still here. But we both know that it's not easy."Less weighty parallels, in style and political substance, likewise imply an intuitive partnership.Like Biden -- whose decades of verbal blunders have not kept him from six Senate terms, the vice presidency and the Democratic presidential nomination -- Duckworth can at times sound less than smooth at a microphone but has rarely paid much of a penalty for it. Past rivals said this owes, in part, to the campaign perils of insulting someone so visibly marked as a survivor of war. Most recently, after Duckworth suggested clumsily that removing monuments of George Washington merited discussion, attacks on her patriotism from conservatives like Tucker Carlson seemed to only boost her reputation among Democrats.And ideologically, Duckworth would appear closely attuned to Biden. She has spent much of her career positioned to the right of liberal Democrats, retaining some centrist muscle memory from her unsuccessful first congressional race in 2006 -- when she pledged fiscal conservatism and punishments for "illegal immigrants" -- and occasionally leading Republicans to wonder if they are looking at a kindred soul."I had a chance to develop a friendship with Tammy about 15 years ago while we were both out at Walter Reed," Bob Dole, the former Republican senator and presidential nominee, said in an emailed statement, recalling his time as a patient at the veterans hospital during Duckworth's stay there. "In hindsight, I wish I had brought up politics. She could have run as a Republican."Yet Duckworth's is a worldview that has long defied easy labeling. She is at once the product of a globe-trotting conservative military family sustained by food stamps in her youth and a soldier who gave her limbs to a war whose wisdom she came to question. She is a woman well acquainted with male-dominated worlds -- fellow pilots called her "Mommy Platoon Leader" long before she became the first sitting senator to give birth, at age 50 -- and a canny politician whose connections helped guide her to the upper reaches of her party.Those close to Duckworth still describe her present career as something of a consolation prize. Plan A was flying helicopters, and she did not surrender the vision easily.Recovering in 2005, Duckworth vowed that "some guy who got lucky one day in Baghdad" would not dictate her future.Nine years later, concluding her first congressional term, she reconsidered."I mean, it did," she conceded to a reporter. "I'm in politics."Plan A: Flying HelicoptersThe campus misogynist was enjoying his soapbox. Duckworth wanted to keep it that way.It was the early 1990s at Northern Illinois University, where Duckworth was pursuing a doctorate in political science, and a traveling evangelist had been lamenting the evils of skirt-wearing women in a public square."I came in and said, 'I wish somebody would shut that guy up,'" recalled Patricia Henry, one of Duckworth's professors. "She said, 'No, no, no. You can't do that.'"Friends said such earnest alarm over would-be speech infringement reflects Duckworth's itinerant youth across Southeast Asia, which often exposed her to repressive governments and introduced her to the tenets of U.S. democracy through the rose-colored lens of a child expat.Born in Bangkok to a white American veteran father and a Thai mother of Chinese descent, Duckworth did not learn English until she was 8. (Some Democrats suspect that the president and his allies would make an issue of her birthplace if Biden chooses her, recalling Trump questioning the presidential eligibility of Sen. Ted Cruz, another U.S. citizen born outside the country, when the two competed for the Republican nomination in 2016.)Some of Duckworth's earliest memories involve the Khmer Rouge seizing control of Cambodia, where her father was working for the United Nations. She remembers watching bombs go off in Phnom Penh from their rooftop. Her upbringing, she said, gave her "an idealized version of America."More than that, these seminomadic years seemed to enforce a certain comfort level with short-notice upheaval."There's a built-in flexibility with children who've grown up as expats," said Alison Parsons, a close friend who attended school with Duckworth in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Bangkok. "You have to be able to reinvent yourself. I'm not talking about flip-flopping, but you have to be able to make friends, to make connections on a dime."Facing financial distress, Duckworth's father moved the family to Hawaii in her teens, finding space in a down-market hotel and leaning on public assistance.Imagining a life in the foreign service, she graduated from the University of Hawaii before moving to the mainland for an international affairs program at George Washington University. She held up Madeleine Albright as a role model.But while in school, Duckworth joined the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps, partly because she noticed that many of her friends had military backgrounds.She found herself taken with the ostensible meritocracy, she said, that allowed a "little Asian girl" to rise so long as she could shoot straight, even as one fellow cadet, Bryan Bowlsbey, tested her nerves."He made a comment that I thought was derogatory about the role of women in the Army," she told C-SPAN years later. "But he came over and apologized very nicely and then helped me clean my M16."They have been married since 1993. Bowlsbey now works as an information technology consultant.Although Duckworth moved to Illinois to pursue a doctorate, she went through flight school and entered the Illinois National Guard in 1996.Before her deployment eight years later, Duckworth had been working at Rotary International, helping to manage offices in its Asia-Pacific region. When the Guard sought out commissioned officers for a mission to Iraq, she volunteered, arriving in March 2004. (Duckworth has said she always believed the Bush administration "started this war for themselves," but as a soldier, "you keep your personal opinions to yourself.")Duckworth spent much of her time there inside an operations center, coordinating missions. She flew herself about twice a week.Her last waking day in Iraq, Nov. 12, 2004, began unremarkably. Duckworth's crew was conducting "taxi service," in her telling: shuttling people and supplies, with a stop at a base in Baghdad to acquire Christmas ornaments.She had been at the controls all day. A colleague, Dan Milberg, playfully called her a "stick pig," requesting to take the lead on a final flight. She obliged.They were about 10 minutes from their destination when an explosion scorched through the right side of the cockpit, where Duckworth sat.A rocket-propelled grenade. A fireball blast at her lower body.She does not remember feeling pain immediately. She does remember the black smoke -- and an aircraft suddenly impervious to her prompts. By this point, Duckworth learned later, she had no feet.Milberg was able to land on a plot of open woods. Duckworth, on the cusp of losing consciousness, has retained a snapshot from the haze of her rescue: a cluster of tall grass poking through the base of the Black Hawk. She wondered how it had gotten there.Plan B: PoliticsDuckworth awoke more than a week later at Walter Reed. Her legs were gone.The next days passed in a whir of continuous trauma: surgeries, hallucinations from morphine, flashes of guilt that she had somehow crashed herself.Duckworth's mother and her husband took turns counting to 60 at her side, guiding her from one minute to the next. And soon, there was another patient on the hospital grounds: Her father, who had suffered a heart attack in Hawaii shortly before his daughter's injuries, had another after traveling to see her. He died a few weeks after Christmas.Around the same time, a new mentor figure entered Duckworth's life. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., had been looking for local veterans to invite to President George W. Bush's State of the Union address. Duckworth attended with an IV drip running beneath her clothes.The senator asked her to stay in touch. "I gave her my personal cellphone number," he remembered, "which she greatly abused by calling me -- I say that in jest, of course -- by calling me incessantly to do constituent work for all of her fellow vets at Walter Reed."The rehab process was painful and often slow-going. Her left leg was amputated below the knee. Her right was an inches-long stump that Duckworth had asked doctors to leave, despite the complications of fitting a prosthetic to it, because she believed it would help her fly again.It was not until later that year, she said, that a call from Durbin made her consider an alternate path. There was a congressional seat coming open in the Chicago suburbs with the retirement of a long-tenured Republican, Henry Hyde."I said, 'Tammy, would you ever consider running?'" Durbin recalled. "She didn't say no."By the summer, with a full return to combat looking remote, Duckworth had been casting about for her next "mission," she said. A campaign seemed as good an option as any.The transition was not frictionless. Like many first-time candidates, Duckworth could be tempted to act as her own campaign manager, former advisers said, seeking to impose military efficiency on overlong phone calls. Unlike many first-time candidates, she was still learning to walk in her new legs.One focus group of Democratic primary voters bristled when Duckworth wore a skirt, saying that the prominence of her prosthetics felt like the calculating work of operatives."There was a big negative reaction," said John Kupper, an adviser to the campaign. "They thought they were being manipulated." (Duckworth has said she prefers skirts because they make bathroom visits less logistically complicated.)Her military background was more of an asset in the general election for a right-leaning district. She remarked to voters that she had been shot down "18 months after the mission was accomplished," nodding at the Bush administration's infamous premature victory lap.She patiently identified herself in calls to would-be donors, who often interrupted her health care pitch with questions about her life."Yes," she would tell them, "I'm the one who was injured."Duckworth would ultimately lose, narrowly, to Peter Roskam, a local Republican legislator. But the contest drew national attention and enshrined Duckworth as a potential star in the party.Rod Blagojevich, the not-yet-jailed governor of Illinois, appointed her to lead the state's veterans department. Her name was floated as a possible Senate replacement as Barack Obama chased the presidency.And at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, Duckworth was invited to speak in prime time on the night Biden accepted the vice presidential nomination. She joined the Biden family backstage beforehand, convening "soldier to soldier" with Beau Biden, she recalled, just shy of his own deployment."It was a family moment," she said, "and they allowed me to join."The speech seemed to erase any doubt that Duckworth was a politician now -- or, at least, that she would be again before long. After joining the Obama administration in 2009 as an assistant secretary for Veterans Affairs, she took notice as a favorable district redrawing supplied a cleaner shot at a House seat.When Duckworth decided to run again, in 2012, she was the one picking up the phone."There are some candidates you have to recruit," said Steve Israel, then the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "She called me."The Plan From Here on OutDuckworth's years in Congress since then -- four in the House, nearly four in the Senate -- have done little to eclipse the central facts of her biography.Perhaps this was inevitable. Major policy feats can be elusive in the minority party. Voters who know much about Duckworth nationally seem likelier to recall her path to Washington than her work while there. Since defeating Mark Kirk, the incumbent Republican senator, in 2016, she has probably received the most attention for another personal turn: bringing her newborn to a Senate vote, a first for the chamber.Colleagues praise Duckworth as a forceful advocate for veterans and people with disabilities but sometimes struggle to name her signature legislative triumphs.She is not considered a foremost national voice in some policy areas of particular significance in this moment, like policing and the economy -- a potential weakness in her case to be vice president.Duckworth has generally opposed the legislative priorities and high-profile nominations of this White House, with a handful of exceptions, including a vote supporting Wilbur Ross for commerce secretary, which a majority of Democrats opposed, and another for John Kelly as homeland security secretary.Trump has signed into law legislation that Duckworth pushed involving veteran entrepreneurship and expanded access to lactation rooms in airports. Her office is quick to cite an analysis last year identifying her as the most effective freshman Democratic senator.Some peers said she has been especially valuable during private sessions on foreign policy. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. and a fellow member of the Armed Services Committee, recalled Duckworth's lacerating questions recently at a classified briefing about intelligence community assessments of apparent Russian bounties on U.S. troops."She was pummeling them," Blumenthal said.Among staff, Duckworth can be more puckish, known to celebrate "Talk Like a Pirate Day" and razz communications aides by suggesting that she has just uttered something damaging to congressional reporters: "Don't really know what I said," she has bluffed upon returning to the office. "You might want to track them down."It is true, though, that Duckworth can seem less practiced than some other senators when speaking to the press, mixing self-deprecation with political self-assessments that might dishearten the left.In the interview, Duckworth by turns explained why the vetting process had been uncomplicated ("I was a soldier for 23 years, and I don't have a lot of money"); said she remained a fiscal conservative (with an aside about wasteful defense contracts); and appeared to acknowledge that her coordinates on the ideological spectrum were difficult to track."People talk to me, and they're like, 'So, are you lefty, or are you ultraconservative and a hawk?'" she said. "I'm like, 'I'm just about the strength of America.'"Duckworth is not the sort of senator who had been discussed as an instant presidential hopeful, like Kamala Harris, another freshman. Many Democrats believe that vice presidential contenders with more experience in a national race, like Harris or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, would be wiser picks.Yet in recent weeks, Duckworth said, she has been compelled to consider a life one septuagenarian's heartbeat away from the presidency -- and whether she might be ready for the highest promotion, if required.She defaulted to military imagery ("Every soldier is taught to be able to pick up the rifle of a fallen comrade in front of them") and ticked through her credentials, sounding for the first time like a job applicant: Senate, House, VA, doctorate, speaker of "a bunch of languages."And then Duckworth cut herself off, abandoning the hypothetical with a promise: "I'm going to do everything I can to keep Joe Biden as healthy as he can possibly be."She let a long laugh fly, imagining her place in the command."I'll be the one like, 'Here, here, take your vitamins,'" she said. "'Let's go work out together.'"This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Protests in the long term: How is a lasting legacy cemented? Posted: 02 Aug 2020 08:30 AM PDT  What sort of staying power does it take for a protest movement to be judged a success? This year, without a centralized team of senior leaders, perhaps the largest protest movement in U.S. history has been unfolding nationwide since the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. "It's important to see the changes over time and not be discouraged," says Beth Robinson, a history professor at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.
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| Protests in the long term: How is a lasting legacy cemented? Posted: 02 Aug 2020 08:26 AM PDT  What sort of staying power does it take for a protest movement to be judged a success? This year, without a centralized team of senior leaders, perhaps the largest protest movement in U.S. history has been unfolding nationwide since the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. "It's important to see the changes over time and not be discouraged," says Beth Robinson, a history professor at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.
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| In Trumpworld, the Grown-Ups in the Room All Left, and Got Book Deals Posted: 02 Aug 2020 08:23 AM PDT  It was the summer of 2016, and the Republican Party was about to nominate Donald Trump for president. Until then, many party members had aggressively opposed his candidacy. "I think he's crazy," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said earlier that year. "I think he's unfit for office."But faced with the inevitable reality of Trump, the party was forced to perform what the British tabloids call a "reverse-ferret" -- a messaging U-turn in which you abruptly take the opposite position of the one you espoused a moment earlier.Contrary to what they said before, Republicans announced, Trump was totally suited for the presidency. He would rise to the occasion. Being president would render him, tautologically, presidential. In any case, at least he would be surrounded by adults who would steer him in the right direction."It began to dawn on me," Anthony Scaramucci, who went on to (briefly) work in the Trump White House, wrote of hearing about the then-candidate's tax proposals. "Donald J. Trump wasn't the extreme, unhinged, unserious candidate that I thought he was."Scaramucci spent just 11 days as the White House communications director in 2017 before being unceremoniously removed, a victim of his own operatic ineptitude as well as the dysfunction of the White House. He now regrets the error, as he sees it, of ever having admired Trump. "The guy stinks," he said recently.As it happens, Scaramucci wrote a book about his brief, unhappy White House experience, joining a large club of Trump administration evictees who have turned their bracingly bad experiences into a new genre of political revenge literature. These include James Comey, former FBI director; Omarosa Manigault Newman, former assistant to the president; Andrew McCabe, former deputy FBI director; John Bolton, former national security adviser; Cliff Sims, former White House communications aide; and Anonymous, current senior figure, at least by his or her own account, in the Trump administration.Taken en masse, the books paint a damning portrait of the 45th president of the United States. But the sheer volume of unflattering material they contain can have the paradoxical danger of blunting their collective impact. After the 10th time you read about Trump's short attention span, your own attention is in danger of wandering."There is only so much the public can absorb," Anonymous writes in "A Warning."There are even more memoirs scheduled for the fall: one by Michael Cohen, the president's disgraced ex-personal lawyer, which federal officials tried to block but then said could proceed, and another by H.R. McMaster, who was Trump's second national security adviser and is no fan of the president.But at this point, nearly four years in, is there anything left to say about Trump that might surprise us? Or, as McCabe writes in "The Threat": "What more could a person do to erode the credibility of the presidency?"Reading all these books, one after the other, is like swimming for days in a greasy, brackish canal whose bottom is teeming with shards of broken-down old industrial equipment. The experience is not pleasant, you might hurt yourself, and it leaves you covered in grime. The picture they paint of their protagonist -- Trump -- is so outrageous that if they were fiction they would be dismissed as too broad, too much of a caricature.As different as the authors are, the books share a number of common observations about the president. And so, with the Republican Party set to renominate him this month, here is a reminder of what sort of leader Trump has turned out to be, according to his growing band of disgruntled former employees.Trump vs. his employeesTrump is universally presented in the memoirs as a flamboyantly mean and intemperately indiscreet boss, wrong-footing and humiliating Cabinet members and aides with constant criticism, sometimes to their faces, sometimes behind their backs.The president dismisses Jim Mattis, his first secretary of defense as "a liberal Democrat," yells at him in meetings and notes that "I never really liked him." ("I felt sorry for Mattis, not to mention the country as a whole," Bolton writes.)He derides Kirstjen Nielsen, his second secretary of Homeland Security as ineffectual and "not mentally able" to handle her job and then, in a fit of pique, futilely attempts to reassign her responsibilities first to Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and then to Bolton.He muses aloud on multiple occasions about dumping Vice President Mike Pence from the ticket in 2020 and replacing him with Nikki Haley, the U.N. ambassador. "Did we make a mistake with Gina?" he asks, referring to his decision to make Gina Haspel director of the CIA."Rex was terrible," he says about Rex Tillerson, his original secretary of state. "What good is he?" he asks rhetorically about Steven Mnuchin, his Treasury secretary. "I thought we had the right guy at Treasury. But now I don't know."He yells at his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, when Navarro attempts to show him a complicated chart outlining a policy point. ("I have no idea what I'm even looking at," the president snaps.) He tells Kushner in meetings: "Jared, you don't know what you're talking about." He mocks his original chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, as a "globalist," elongating the "O" in a sneering tone, as if the word were akin to "antifa member."Just as the president uses derisive nicknames for his political enemies, so he does for his own subordinates. He mocks Jeff Sessions his first attorney general, as "Benjamin Button." He calls Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, "Ditzy DeVos." "This place is really taking a toll on Kellyanne," he says of Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, implying that she looks tired and worn out.The president and the truthThe Trump administration surged into life with a whomping great Trumpian untruth: that Trump's inauguration crowd was the largest in history. Even Spicer did not believe it, though he had to pretend otherwise."It was hard to keep a straight face as Sean proceeded to lie to the American people," Manigault Newman writes.All the memoirists present Trump as supremely untrustworthy. He is "a deliberate liar, someone who will say whatever he pleased to get whatever he wishes," McCabe writes. "People who've known him for years accept it as common knowledge," Anonymous writes.Sometimes Trump asserts one thing and then, a few minutes later, just the opposite.On other occasions, he conjures pieces of misinformation designed to bolster his thesis, as when he insisted that "3 to 5 million people" voted illegally in the 2016 election. He has a habit of plucking figures from thin air -- first $20 billion, for instance, then $38 billion, to drive home his point about trade deficits in a meeting with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea -- regardless of the numbers' relationship to fact.The memoirists have different ways of dealing with all this presidential slipperiness. Comey and McCabe start keeping detailed logs of their encounters with the president, the way you would if you had an unstable spouse and wanted to catalog his erratic behavior for use in future divorce proceedings.Too bad, is the apparent view of Reince Priebus, the original chief of staff."The directive came down from Reince," Manigault Newman writes, "that our default position was to back up whatever the president said or tweeted, regardless of its accuracy."How to describe the experienceStriving for new ways to characterize the head-spinning unreality of the Trump White House, the authors of the memoirs turn to a variety of vivid figures of speech.Spicer: "I sometimes felt like a scuba diver, abandoned in the middle of the ocean, treading water."Comey: "The demand was like Sammy the Bull's Cosa Nostra induction ceremony -- with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a 'made man.'"Manigault Newman: "The selection process for his cabinet was like an episode of 'The Bachelor.'"Bolton: "It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine."Anonymous: Working for Trump was like "showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food."Trump as instigatorTo read these books is to read of a chaotic, paranoiac workplace, where the boss delights in fomenting discord and instability among the employees.He encourages them to keep tabs on one another. "Give me their names," he tells Sims, wielding a Sharpie and a White House note card, vowing to rid the White House of nonloyalists.He praises their rivals. "Keith Kellogg knows all about NATO," the president says airily to Bolton, speaking with ominous intent of Pence's national security adviser. "He never offers his opinions unless I ask.""As Pompeo and I reflected later, this statement told us exactly who my likely replacement would be if I resigned soon," Bolton writes. "I said, 'Of course, if you resign, maybe Keith would be Secretary of State.'" To which Pompeo responds: "Or, if we both resign, Keith could become Henry Kissinger and have both jobs.'")The president's verbal styleTrump likes to talk, the memoirists agree, and he does not like to listen.He meanders from topic to topic, loops back around, adds new topics, repeats himself, boasts, mixes facts with fake facts, throws in his latest obsession, continuing on and on according to some labyrinthine stream-of-consciousness impulse in which whatever is on his mind is worthy of public utterance. He does this in rallies and at campaign events; he also does it in briefings, in one-on-one conversations and at policy meetings."I don't use the word 'conversation' because the term doesn't apply when one person speaks nearly the entire time," Comey writes of the experience.The presidential attention spanIt is true that Trump successfully repeated the words "person, woman, man, camera, TV" on television in an effort to demonstrate the superiority of his mental acuity, but it is also true, the books argue, that he rarely reads, gets bored easily, is irritable and distracted, has trouble remembering complicated things, has no intellectual curiosity and is ignorant not just about his job but about things generally considered common knowledge.With his short attention span, he is averse to learning anything at briefings if he finds the information difficult to follow, boring, or in contravention of what he already thinks. Staff members are told to stick to a single point and repeat it often, and to boil complex proposals down to a single page -- or, better, a single paragraph. They are told not to present Trump with too-long briefing papers, lest he shout at them, or with too many slides, lest his eyes glaze over."Any time somebody new came in to brief him, he'd get angry and say, "Who's that guy? What's he want?" Manigault Newman writes.The presidential scheduleThe president keeps unconventional office hours, is often late to meetings and events and watches a lot of TV."At 9:35 I called Trump, who was as usual still in the residence," Bolton writes."He often doesn't start the day in the Oval Office until 10 or 11 a.m.," Anonymous writes. He is "channel-surfing his way through the presidency.""His official schedule was more of a loose outline than a strict regimen," Sims writes.The presidential egoIn "Too Much and Never Enough," Mary Trump describes her uncle as "a savant of self-promotion" with a "delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority" stemming from a bottomless insecurity that needs to be assuaged with a constant stream of ego-boosting compliments.That is why the president often asserts that he is the best at everything."It was the most presidential act in decades," he says, after he directs the Pentagon to bomb Iran and then calls it off at the last minute. (Bolton has a different take: "In my government experience, this was the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any president do." )"They say I might be the world's greatest brander," he says to Sims, before unveiling his marketing idea for his tax-cut plan: calling the legislation the "Cutting Cutting Cutting Bill" (it ended up being called something else).Several memoirists describe how Trump, to soothe a wounded psyche bruised by his failure to win the popular vote in 2016, continually invited visitors to admire posters illustrating how he had won the election anyway."Trump kept big charts in his private dining room, in his den, in his study, that showed the electoral map color coded in red and blue," Manigault Newman writes. "When anyone walked in, he'd point to the chart and talk about the election results."Anonymous was familiar with the maps, as well. "Trump carried around maps outlining his electoral victory, which he would pull out at odd times," he writes. "He would beckon guests, as well as aides, advisers and incoming cabinet officers, to gaze at the sea of red on the map."Does Trump use a tanning bed?"His face appeared slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles," Comey writes.Manigault Newman mentions the tanning-adjacent chatter around the abrupt firing of Angella Reid, chief usher of the White House, several months into Trump's administration."Allegedly, Trump didn't approve of her handling of his tanning bed," she says. "I'd heard he was unhappy with her efforts to procure the bed, to bring it into the East Wing securely, to find a discreet place for it, and to set it up properly."Aides on the president's conductThe memoirs paint a picture of the West Wing as a place of baroque workplace dysfunction, where workers gather to trade "Guess what he did now" stories about their boss and to save him (and themselves, and the country) from his worst impulses.And so, in "A Warning," Anonymous writes that Cabinet-level administration officials contemplated "a midnight self-massacre," which would entail "resigning en masse to call attention to Trump's misconduct and erratic leadership."Many staffers are perpetually on the brink of quitting, keeping resignation letters on hand should the time come. And if his colleagues hate working for the Trump administration, John Kelly, the president's second chief of staff, apparently hates it the most."This is the worst" (insert expletive here) "job I've ever had," Kelly tells Sims."You can't imagine how desperate I am to get out of here," he tells Bolton. "This is a very bad place to work."Things Bolton claims people said to himA striking aspect of "The Room Where it Happened" is how frequently Cabinet-level officials confide incredulously in Bolton about the president's irrationality and narcissism, as if they and the former national security adviser formed a gang of rebellious high school students, quietly plotting resistance against the incompetent autocrats running the school."As McGahn often whispered to me," Bolton writes, speaking of Donald McGahn, who served for a while as White House counsel, "This is not the Bush Administration.""Has there ever been a presidency like this?" Kelly asks Bolton, mentioning that the president has just said, apropos of nothing, that it would be "cool" to invade Venezuela. ("I assured him there had not," Bolton responds.)"This is getting pretty silly," Mattis says to Bolton as the men listen to Trump rail at Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, about how America's allies mock it behind its back because it pays too much in annual dues.As for Pompeo, Bolton describes how the secretary of state passed him a snarky anti-Trump note in the middle of the president's summit with Kim Jong Un of North Korea in 2018. And he describes how, after listening to the president yell at Nielsen about border security in a particularly fruitless meeting, Pompeo whispers to Bolton: "Why are we still here?"Leaving Trump's orbit"What Donald can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is punish the rest of us," Mary Trump writes.This is clear by the way he behaves when he has fired someone or they have quit, frequent occurrences in an administration with such a high turnover. After he fires Comey, the FBI director, while he is in California, for instance, Trump is incensed to learn that Comey has returned to Washington on the same government plane that he traveled out on."That's not right! I didn't approve of that!" he rants to McCabe. Then he decrees that Comey should never be allowed to enter the FBI headquarters again, not even to clean out his desk. "I'm banning him from the building," the president says.After Mattis resigns as defense secretary, Anonymous writes, the wounded president throws "a temper tantrum," insists that Mattis leave the job immediately, before his successor has been named, and then falsely claims that in fact he fired Mattis, rather than the other way around.How the Trump administration said 'you're fired'Comey: Saw the news reported on TV in the back of the auditorium while he was in the middle of making a speech in California.McCabe: Saw the news on TV, followed by a presidential tweet: "Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI."Manigault Newman: Called into the Situation Room before the 2017 White House Christmas Party, was informed by Kelly that "there are significant integrity violations related to you," and was not allowed to leave until the stress of the encounter triggered an asthma attack and she went home.Sims: Submitted his resignation after being told by Kelly: "In the past 40 years, I don't think I've ever had a subordinate whose reputation is worse than yours."Priebus: Idling in the presidential motorcade after a trip to New York on the day after he had submitted his resignation, learned that his removal was effective immediately when he read on Twitter that Kelly was replacing him. The motorcade went on to the White House; his car peeled away and drove off into oblivion.Trump on the authorsComey: "A weak and untruthful slime ball"McCabe: "A major sleazebag."Manigault Newman: "Vicious, but not smart."Mary Trump: "A seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn't stand her!) and me, and violated her NDA. ... She's a mess!"Sims: "A low level staffer that I hardly knew. ... He is a mess!"Bolton: A "sick puppy."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Iran arrests leader of militant California-based opposition group Posted: 02 Aug 2020 07:55 AM PDT  Iran says it has detained the leader of a California-based militant group that is accused of being behind a deadly attack on a mosque in 2008. Iran's intelligence ministry claims Jamshid Sharmahd is the head of "Tondor", the militant wing of the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, an opposition monarchist group based in the US. It is not clear how the California-based 65 year old, who Iran claims directed armed and terrorist acts in Iran from the US, was arrested. The 2008 bombing killed 14 people and wounded more than 200. The intelligence ministry called his arrest a "complex operation" without elaborating further. They later published a photo on their website of a blindfolded man they say is Mr Sharmahd. The US State Department said that Mr Shamahd had previously been targeted for assassination. The alleged Iranian government operative who was said to have hired a hit man to kill Mr Sharmahd was due to face trial in California but disappeared in 2010, likely having returned to Iran.
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| Marines halt search for 8 missing troops, all presumed dead Posted: 02 Aug 2020 07:54 AM PDT  Eight troops missing after their landing craft sank off the Southern California coast during a training exercise are presumed dead, the Marine Corps announced Sunday. The Marines said they had called off the search that started late Thursday afternoon when the amphibious assault vehicle sank with 15 Marines and one Navy sailor aboard.
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| El Paso marks Walmart shooting anniversary amid pandemic Posted: 02 Aug 2020 07:21 AM PDT |
| South Africa hits 500,000 infections but president hopeful Posted: 02 Aug 2020 06:14 AM PDT  South Africa has surpassed 500,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, but President Cyril Ramaphosa said Sunday he sees "promising signs" that the rapid growth of cases has stabilized and that the country's strained health system is managing to cope. Health Minister Zwelini Mkhize announced 10,107 new cases Saturday night, bringing the country's cumulative total to 503,290, including 8,153 deaths. With a population of about 58 million, South Africa has the fifth-highest number of cases in the world, behind the U.S., Brazil, Russia and India, all countries with significantly higher populations, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
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| As school begins amid virus, parents see few good options Posted: 02 Aug 2020 05:46 AM PDT  John Barrett plans to keep his daughter home from elementary school this year in suburban Atlanta, but he wishes she were going. Molly Ball is sending her teenage sons to school in the same district on Monday, but not without feelings of regret. "I definitely think it's healthy for a child to go back to school," said Ball, who feels her sons, William and Henry, both at River Ridge High School in Georgia's Cherokee County district, suffered through enough instability in the spring.
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| Egypt tells Elon Musk its pyramids were not built by aliens Posted: 02 Aug 2020 05:10 AM PDT  Egypt invited the billionaire to visit, after he appeared to tweet support for conspiracy theorists.
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| Ginsburg waited 4 months to say her cancer had returned Posted: 02 Aug 2020 05:08 AM PDT  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is perhaps the most forthcoming member of the Supreme Court when it comes to telling the public about her many health issues. One big difference from her past battles with cancer is that Ginsburg and the rest of the court have been out of the public eye since early March because of the coronavirus pandemic. That's when they decided to close the building except for official business, then later postponed arguments and agreed to meet by telephone. Ginsburg, who was in and out of the hospital last week, said she intends to remain on the court, a decision that likely was influenced by the conservative nominee President Donald Trump would put up to replace her if she were to retire.
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| Clock is ticking on Trump comeback as early voting nears Posted: 02 Aug 2020 05:03 AM PDT  President Donald Trump is privately reassuring Republicans anxious about his deficits to Democrat Joe Biden, noting there are three months until Election Day and reminding them of the late-breaking events that propelled his 2016 comeback. The president's campaign is scrambling for a reset, pausing advertisements while struggling to find both a cohesive message and a way to safely put the president on the road in front of voters. Trump added to the tumult by publicly wondering if the election should be delayed while making the unfounded claim that the tilt toward mail-in balloting would lead to widespread voter fraud.
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| Survivors of slain Ohio-based Marines mark grim anniversary Posted: 02 Aug 2020 04:43 AM PDT  Jason Dominguez remembers vividly his last conversation with David Kreuter, as they were doing an overnight security watch from a rooftop in western Iraq. Dominguez and Sgt. Kreuter usually joked around, but this night 15 years ago was different. "Wow, you're a father!" Dominguez exclaimed.
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| AP PHOTOS: Muslims worldwide mark Eid festival amid pandemic Posted: 02 Aug 2020 03:59 AM PDT  Muslims worldwide have marked the Eid al-Adha holiday amid a global pandemic that has impacted nearly every aspect of this year's celebrations. Around the world, Muslims gathered with relatives or at home on Friday to mark the start of Eid. Kosovo and the United Arab Emirates also closed mosques for Eid prayers to limit the spread of the virus.
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| Israel's Netanyahu rails at media over protests against him Posted: 02 Aug 2020 03:51 AM PDT  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday railed at swelling protests against his rule, saying they were egged on by a biased media that distorts facts and cheers on the demonstrators. Netanyahu has faced a wave of protests in recent weeks, with demonstrators calling for the resignation of the long-serving leader, who is on trial for corruption charges. Netanyahu has painted the protests as dens of "anarchists" and "leftists" out to topple "a strong right-wing leader."
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| Philippines virus cases top 100,000 in 'losing battle' Posted: 02 Aug 2020 01:48 AM PDT  Coronavirus infections in the Philippines surged past 100,000 Sunday in a troubling milestone after medical groups declared that the country was waging "a losing battle" against the virus and asked the president to reimpose a lockdown in the capital. The Department of Health reported a record-high daily tally of 5,032, bringing the total confirmed cases in the country to 103,185, including more than 2,000 deaths. The Philippines has the second-most cases in Southeast Asia after Indonesia, and has had more infections than China, where the pandemic began late last year.
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| In Africa, stigma surrounding coronavirus hinders response Posted: 01 Aug 2020 11:55 PM PDT  After 23 days in quarantine in Uganda — far longer than required — Jimmy Spire Ssentongo walked free in part because of a cartoon he drew. It showed a bound prisoner begging for liberation after multiple negative tests, while a health minister demanded to know where he was hiding the virus. "The impression was that we were a dangerous group and that what was necessary was to protect the rest of society from us," said Ssentongo, a cartoonist for Uganda's Observer newspaper who was put in quarantine when he returned from Britain in March.
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| It Was All a Lie review: Trump as symptom not cause of Republican decline Posted: 01 Aug 2020 11:00 PM PDT  A consultant for Bush and Romney laments the fate of his party and sees heavy defeat as the best medicine to hope forStuart Stevens' It Was All a Lie is a sustained attack, both jeremiad and confession, on the Republican party he served for 40 years. His is the hand at Belshazzar's political feast: "All of these immutable truths turned out to be marketing slogans. None of it meant anything. I was the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were really smart and just crushing the market."Stevens, a consultant, is refreshingly frank about his role and responsibility. "Blame me," he writes, adding: "I had been lying to myself for decades." He seeks a new leaf on a "crazy idea that a return to personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility".Unsurprisingly, he starts with race, "the original Republican sin … the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played." Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republicans have had difficulty appealing to African American voters. Stevens is not surprised."What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating non-white voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters." How, for instance, does a black person hear an "avowed hatred of government"?The policy effects are shocking; the electoral effects only recently came into focus as demographics change. Yet the strategy "was so obvious that even the Russians adopted it, attempting to instigate tensions among black voters to help Trump win".> You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try it> > Stuart StevensThis self-deception extends to other areas, notably foreign policy, in which "the Republican party has gone from 'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall' to a Republican president who responds to Vladimir Putin like a stray dog, eager to follow him home". All without much protest from those who know better.Stevens believes Donald Trump "just removes the necessity of pretending" Republicans care about social issues. Instead, it's all about "attacking and defining Democrats". The idea that "character counts", so prominent in earlier decades, is forgotten.In short, stripped "of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy". The first casualty is the truth. "Large elements of the Republican party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth" and that a cause or simple access to power is more important.Rather than saying the sky is green, the new strategy is "to build a world in which the sky is in fact green. Then everyone who says it is blue is clearly a liar." Sadly, it has worked. Stevens notes that once "there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy."He rightly calls this fear and cowardice: "To willingly follow a coward against your own values and to put your own power above the good of the nation is to become a coward." People know better – including Republican members of Congress – but will not speak. Yet Stevens recalls that the "story of Faust is not just that Mephistopheles takes your soul, he also doesn't deliver on what he promised."The remedy is simple. "You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try it".What was Trump's role in all this? Both enabler and someone who took a shaky foundation and crushed it. Trump "brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible". For Stevens, the GOP "rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power."Stevens has high praise for two former clients, George W Bush and Mitt Romney, "decent men who tried to live their lives by a set of values that represented the best of our society". Yet neither could win today. He quotes George HW Bush's impassioned resignation letter from the National Rifle Association after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and realizes few would do so now.Stevens is deeply concerned about the future of American democracy, comparing some tests in the study How Democracies Die with actions under the Trump administration.With one party having failed its "circuit-breaker" role, he cites the "urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy" as Democrats drift left. Though moderate Republican governors remain popular, he is distinctly pessimistic today's Republicans can be that party, as they have "legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a political party in a country with a unique role in the world".Stevens has little hope the GOP will save itself from Trump or rise to the challenge of adapting to an increasingly non-white America. Losing, badly, is his only hope for concentrating Republican minds to the new reality of American demographics. Absent that, his prescription is definitive: "Burn it to the ground and start over."The former may happen. The latter is less predictable.
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| Virus surges in India, Philippines; Australia imposes curfew Posted: 01 Aug 2020 10:11 PM PDT  Surges of new coronavirus cases continued Sunday in India and the Philippines, which recorded another daily high to surpass 100,000 total infections, as officials across the globe considered stricter measures to stymie the spread of the pandemic. A curfew was imposed on Australia's second-largest city, Melbourne, following a spike in infections. Countries including the United States, India and South Africa are struggling to rein in their first wave of infections while South Korea and others where the disease abated try to avert a second wave as curbs on travel and trade ease.
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| Portland police declare unlawful assembly during protest Posted: 01 Aug 2020 09:57 PM PDT  The Portland Police Bureau declared an unlawful assembly Saturday night when people gathered outside a police precinct in Oregon's largest city and threw bottles toward officers, police said. Until that point, federal, state and local law enforcement had been seemingly absent from the protests Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The demonstrations — that for weeks ended with tear gas, fireworks shot towards buildings, federal agents on the street and injuries to protesters and officers — have recently ended with chanting and conversations. Activists and Oregon officials urged people at Saturday night's protest in Portland to re-center the focus on Black Lives Matter, three days after the Trump administration agreed to reduce the presence of federal agents.
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| Isaias strengthens slightly as it crawls up Florida coast Posted: 01 Aug 2020 09:03 PM PDT  Bands of heavy rain from Isaias lashed Florida's east coast Sunday, with the tropical storm strengthening slightly in the evening on its way up the Eastern seabord. Officials dealing with surging cases of the coronavirus in Florida kept a close watch on the storm that was weakened from a hurricane to a tropical storm Saturday afternoon, but still brought heavy rain and flooding to Florida's Atlantic coast. The National Hurricane Center advised at 8 p.m. EDT Sunday that the storm was about 55 miles (89 kilometers) off the east coast of Central Florida, and about 385 miles (620 kilometers) south of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
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| Vaccine Confronts Humanity With Next Moral Test Posted: 01 Aug 2020 09:01 PM PDT |
| Barron Trump's private school to stay closed for now Posted: 01 Aug 2020 08:09 PM PDT  President Donald Trump insists that schools reopen so students can go back to their classrooms, but the Maryland private school where his son Barron is enrolled is among those under county orders to stay closed. Montgomery County Health Officer Dr. Travis Gayles said his order to stay closed for in-person instruction through Oct. 1 and to conduct online classes only will be reevaluated before Oct. 1 to determine whether it should be extended, terminated or amended. Gayles noted increases in transmission rates for COVID-19 — the disease caused by the virus — in Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia, particularly in younger age groups.
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| Tough words but Israel, Hezbollah don't want new war: experts Posted: 01 Aug 2020 05:42 PM PDT  Harsh rhetoric from Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah appeared to threaten further conflict after border unrest this week, but experts predict both sides will try to avoid escalation. As the coronavirus pandemic has deepened Lebanon's economic turmoil and also rocked Israeli politics, the last thing either of the arch foes wants now is a new military conflict, they argue. Tensions spiked last Monday along the UN-demarcated Blue Line after months of relative calm when Israel said it thwarted an infiltration attempt by up to five Hezbollah gunmen, a claim denied by the Iran-backed group.
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| RNC: Decision on private Trump renomination vote not final Posted: 01 Aug 2020 05:11 PM PDT  The vote to renominate President Donald Trump is set to be conducted in private later this month, without members of the press present, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Convention said on Saturday, citing the coronavirus. While Trump called off the public components of the convention in Florida last month, citing spiking cases of the virus across the country, 336 delegates are scheduled to gather in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 24 to formally vote to make Trump the GOP standard-bearer once more. Nominating conventions are traditionally meant to be media bonanzas, as political parties seek to leverage the attention the events draw to spread their message to as many voters as possible.
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