Yes, there are other things happening in the world. But sometimes you have to just take a breath and wonder what the hell is going on and why it won’t stop.
(WorldMusicCafe/’When You Sleep’ – My Bloody Valentine)
Meanwhile, on the other side of what passes for a political divide, this would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. No, on second thought, it wouldn’t be funny at all. Except to one person, I guess.
Junta chief Prayut Chan-O-Cha on Tuesday branded the bombing the “worst ever attack” on Thailand, as he gave the first indications of who authorities believed were responsible.
“Today there is a suspect… we are looking for this guy,” Prayut told reporters, adding the man was seen on closed circuit television at the blast site.
But the proposed reforms are likely to face huge resistance from many within FIFA and from six regional soccer confederations, who currently wield a lot of influence because they nominate members of the executive committee. The move would remove the direct link between the continental confederations and FIFA’s power structure. A new Reform Committee, headed by former International Olympic Committee director general Francois Carrard, could take a different view, and although Scala is supposed to be overseeing its efforts he isn’t in a position to control it.
The AP reports that some 135,000 people turned out in 16 towns and cities – and while the anger over a stalled economy and an ongoing corruption scandal is real, they were “relatively modest crowds, likely giving the president some breathing room. Huge numbers had come out for two earlier rounds of demonstrations this year.”
Less than a year into her second term, Rousseff is all but a lame duck, with the opposition considering controversial impeachment proceedings, and the country’s elite caught in a vast embezzlement scandal centered on state-oil company Petrobras.
“We can’t take this corruption any longer,” said Rogerio Chequer, leader of the Vem Pra Rua (Go on the Streets) group, which helped organize the protests.
“If Congress has even a minimum of sense, it will decide on impeachment,” he said at the Sao Paulo march, where many in the crowd wore the national football team’s famous yellow shirt.
A downgrade of Brazilian debt to junk status remains a real possibility. If that happened, even more investment would leave the country, and the economy would get worse still. In the meantime, there are no obvious ways to break the gridlock. Furthermore, even if Ms Rousseff is removed, it would likely only see another mediocre politician replace her — and then try to implement the same economic stabilisation that she is trying to do.
Some perspective is required. Brazil is far from being in the kind of mess that exists in Argentina or Venezuela, even if its fall from grace has been remarkable.
In Greece, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras continues to face opposition over the bailout agreement from his own party and others in the Athens parliament.
Trigana Air is a small airline established in 1991 that operates domestic services to around 40 destinations in Indonesia. It has suffered 14 serious incidents since it began operations, according to the Aviation Safety Network, which monitors air accidents.
The airline is on a blacklist of carriers banned from European Union airspace.
“..workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)”
NYT piece on Amazon wasn't flattering, and this "defense" by a rookie manager makes it even less so https://t.co/z62KnR1mXn
Defending Premier League champions Chelsea have had a rocky start to this year’s campaign. An emphatic defeat to Manchester City on Sunday meant the Blues are the second reigning Premiership champions to fail to win either of their first two games the next season.
On top of medical duties, Mourinho is now writing the match reports as well http://t.co/tz4Zboo51O
The other, though, was a Manchester United side that in 2007 went on to retain the title and win the Champions League, so all might not be lost for Jose Mourinho just yet, although you’d be forgiven for thinking so from Monday’s papers.
Candidates of both parties are set to descend on the Iowa State Fair on Saturday – quite literally in the case of Mr Trump, who has promised to give rides in his helicopter to visiting children…
As John Kerry raises the U.S. flag above America’s newly re-established embassy … many hope his historic visit — the first by a secretary of state since 1945 — will help lead to a post-Cold War mentality on the island.
But despite major changes in the relationship, the U.S. still won’t have unfettered access to the communist-led country and its people, and it will have to balance its ties to the Cuban government with those to dissidents seeking faster change.
Chinese authorities are investigating the cause of yesterday’s explosions in the port city of Tianjin, but are also trying as best they can to keep a lid on anyone else’s investigations.
Mr Abe does not think imperial Japan did much wrong that other warring nations did not do, and he believes that a gruel of Japanese guilt and apologies has been a poor diet for Japanese now lacking a sense of pride and patriotism.
And so a lot of people, from Chinese and South Korean leaders to Western academics, have been worried sick about what he might say. Yet as one of his people puts it, rather condescendingly, Mr Abe has recently grown up as a politician—that is, his political head has overridden his heart.
There are now five weeks until the deadline for a congressional vote on the Iran nuclear deal, and the White House got a boost on Thursday when Minnesota Sen Al Franken and Montana Sen John Tester threw their support behind the agreement.
Franken wrote in an op-ed at CNN:
Diplomacy requires cooperation and compromise. You don’t negotiate with your friends; you negotiate with your enemies. Indeed, no one who’s for this deal has any delusions about the nature of the Iranian regime, any more than American presidents who made nuclear arms agreements with the Soviet Union had delusions about the nature of the communist regime there.
For a long time, it has looked like our only options when it came to Iran would be allowing it to have a nuclear bomb or having to bomb the country ourselves. This agreement represents a chance to break out of that no-win scenario.
But the issue remains divisive and continues to mobilize powerful advocates on both sides.
The idea of spinning BAM [Baseball Advanced Media] out to create a new company has been floated for years, but in the last few months it has hardened into a certainty. Today’s announcement that the NHL will invest in this new venture makes it a fact. Lawyers and bankers are finalizing the details, and [CEO Bob] Bowman is in active discussions with other potential investors, poised to run a new company with a valuation north of $5 billion.
“As everyone thinks about going over the top, about building out a global business, we are looking for a partner to help us double or triple this business,” says Bowman. “Things have been going fine, but to not move on this now, we lose the opportunity to get really, really big.”
Seven Presidential election cycles ago, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau and movie director Robert Altman (Nashville, The Player) teamed up to make the brilliant political satire miniseries Tanner ’88, featuring Michael Murphy as a photogenic idealist on a quest for the Democratic nomination.
But now there are a couple of really real candidates, on either side of the Atlantic, whose wave of popularity has tapped into a widespread yearning for politicians to not be, primarily, politicians, but to speak their minds with candor and consistency and to, above all, appear to be on the side of the – increasingly pissed-off – people.
The latest poll in New Hampshire shows Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton for the first time – doubtless assisted by Hillary’s ongoing problems over her email server and by extension perceptions of her trustworthiness – as the Vermont Independent continues to attract ever-larger grassroots audiences to his campaign stops.
Labour has been taken aback by “Corbynmania,” with large crowds, passionate social media involvement and news coverage of a trim, bearded vegetarian teetotaler who says what he has believed for the last four decades with a disarming clarity.
His views, which were hard-left Labour in the 1970s and ’80s, are finding new supporters among younger Britons who like his anticapitalist, anti-austerity stance — much like those who support Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain — and who dislike rivals’ poll-driven wobble.
A new poll reveals why Britain's Labour Party is likely to elect a hardened socialist leader http://t.co/1H30McqnYt
And as the registration window for party members to vote in the leadership contest closed on Wednesday – the vote begins on Friday and runs until Sept 10th, with the result announced on the 12th – there were stories of prominent left-wingers being barred from voting.
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WORLD
Former US President Jimmy Carter announced that he had cancer. At 90, Carter is the second-oldest former Commander-in-chief, after George H.W. Bush.
But as [Jim] Rutenberg chronicles, from the moment the ink was dry on the Voting Rights Act, there has been a concentrated effort to undermine this historic law and turn back the clock on its progress. His article puts the recent push to restrict Americans’ voting rights in its proper context. These efforts are not a sign that we have moved past the shameful history that led to the Voting Rights Act. Too often, they are rooted in that history. They remind us that progress does not come easy, but that it must be vigorously defended and built upon for ourselves and future generations.
It was also the anniversary of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. described as “the original Black Lives Matter” protest.”
Clinton has said that she and her attorney examined the e-mails and turned over all those that dealt with public business. In her new declaration, she writes that she directed that all e-mails that “were or potentially were” federal records be provided to the State Department. She turned over more than 30,000 e-mails, which are now being vetted and gradually released publicly.
Clinton has said she chose not to keep the remaining e-mails, indicating they dealt exclusively with personal matters.
“All this means is that Hillary Clinton, in the face of FBI scrutiny, has decided she has run out of options,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement. “She knows she did something wrong and has run out of ways to cover it up.”
US official says FBI takes possession of Hillary Clinton's emails, some with classified information: http://t.co/Yd1i5EJ6UI
Arguing that Clinton, as secretary of state, “stood by” while Iraq fell apart and as the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, took root across Iraq and Syria puts Bush on offense, shifting the conversation away from whether the war itself was a mistake. (Bush admits now, after stumbling on this question for four days in May, that the invasion was a bad idea.)
“ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat,” Bush said. “And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this? Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge … then joined in claiming credit for its success … then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away.”
A couple of points about Mr. Trump’s following and its anger: It does not represent a majority of the GOP, much less the country; 23 percent of Americans identify as Republicans, and Mr. Trump is the choice of about a quarter of them, for now. Furthermore, their anger is unfocused and, to the extent it’s rooted in racially tinged perceptions of illegal immigration or of the nation’s first black president, repellent. And finally, even the most justified political anger is not a political program.
Sen Chuck Schumer, however, was reported to be lobbying against the agreement, apparently contrary to the White House’s understanding that he would not do so.
Bad news for the White House: CHUCK SCHUMER is whipping against Obama’s Iran deal http://t.co/9ZO6onilhL
A day of violence swept Turkey leaving nine people dead and several injured, in attacks by apparent Kurdish insurgents, amid fears of growing instability. The Telegraph reports that two female gunmen attacked the US consulate in Istanbul. One was wounded and captured while the other escaped.
“I will never surrender to you. We’ve come here to take revenge for the Suruç [attack],” shouted one of the women, a reference to a deadly bombing on July 20th in the border town of Suruc that killed 32 Kurdish and Turkish Socialist activists en route to help rebuild the Syrian town of Kobani across the border.
Although it did not claim responsibility for the Suruc bombing, The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) was blamed by Turkish authorities, enraging Kurds in Turkey who accuse the government of giving Isil unfettered access along the 500-mile Turkish-Syrian border.
The worst outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease in New York City‘s history has now claimed the lives of 12 people, with more than 100 sickened since the July 10 outbreak. Mayor Bill De Blasio said there had been no new cases reported since August 3rd.
“Some say the only answer to this is war. I don’t believe so,” Schumer said during a press conference in Rochester, N.Y. “I believe we should go back and try to get a better deal,” he added. “The nations of the world should join us in that.”
In the GOP race, after a weekend of publicity, none of it particularly good, Donald Trump may have settled his dispute with Fox, for now. The candidate tweeted:
Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that “Trump” will be treated fairly on @FoxNews. His word is always good!
We did not discover injustice, nor did we invent resistance last August. Being black in America means that we exist in a legacy and tradition of protest, a legacy and tradition as old as this America. And, in many ways, August is the month of our discontent.
This August, we remember Mike Brown. But we also remember the Watts Rebellion, and the trauma of Katrina – three distinct periods of resistance prompted or exacerbated by police violence.
Resistance, for so many of us, is duty, not choice.
Over more than a half-century, television has essentially replaced the party as the modern political boss. Transforming political contests into an on-screen production has the democratic feeling of viewer participation — but it still maintains the reality of corporate control.
Stewart’s long successful run and Trump’s six-week surge demonstrate how American voters have come to expect political discussions and debates to mirror prime-time TV entertainment programming.
Although Schumer indicated that he would not actively encourage others to vote against the Iran deal, the White House moved to marginalize his position, citing his support for the Iraq war in 2003 as part of a long-standing tendency to disagree with Obama on foreign policy and the use of American power.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest dismissed Schumer’s stance, saying it is “not particularly surprising to anybody here at the White House, even if it was disappointing.”
The decision generated immediate venom from liberal activists and from former aides to President Obama. MoveOn.org called it “outrageous and unacceptable that the Democrat who wants to be the party’s leader in the Senate is siding with the Republican partisans and neoconservative ideologues.” Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted, “This is our next Senate leader?” — to which former Obama aide Tommy Vietor added, “He just made that a lot less likely.”
But for a variety of reasons, Schumer’s decision is not that big of a deal. It’s not going to kill the Iran deal. It’s not going to swing many, if any, Senate votes. And it’s not going to keep Schumer from succeeding Reid as the Senate’s top Democrat.
Red State organizer Erick Erickson – later described by Trump as a “total loser” – explained the decision thus: “It is not political correctness. It’s common decency.”
Colorado theater shooter James Holmes will not face the death penalty for the murders of 12 people in 2012. The jury’s decision angered some of the victims’ families.
Grandfather of 6-year-old girl slain by Colorado theater gunmen reacts to verdict http://t.co/TcuxIK3i5a
Saturday night is Wall Street’s “midnight madness” scavenger hunt to raise money for children’ charities. The event was first held in 2002 and this year there are 22 teams participating. The most recent one, in 2013, was organized by Goldman Sachs and raised nearly $3m.
The Overnight Note 