Global
The REDCAT revival of Wallace Shawn’s 1996 The Designated Mourner is eerily timely, opening amidst the tyrannical Trump regime’s ongoing attack on its critics, ranging from el presidente’s firing of the FBI chief for his investigation of a citizen above suspicion (but beneath contempt) and the May 10 arrest of a reporter in West Virginia for the heinous thought crime of trying to ask “Health” Secretary Tom Price a question.
In Mourner, Larry Pine (a veteran of the big and little screen and stage with endless credits, including House of Cards and Dead Man Walking) portrays the poet Howard, a scion of the ruling class who turns against them and champions the "dirt people" (working class) in opposing the "rats" (elite). Daughter Judy (writer Deborah Eisenberg) is among Howard’s literary and political acolytes. As opposition to the rulers mounts leftist intellectuals are arrested and executed by the oligarchy.
The collapse of a tunnel at the massive nuclear waste dump at Hanford,
Washington, 200 miles east of Seattle, has sent shock waves through a nuclear power industry already in the process of a global collapse.
The Constitution suddenly seems to have bestirred itself and declared itself, through its many Washington spokespeople, to be in crisis.
I’m sorry, interjects the world, but what the hell took you so long?
FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz started investigating FBI Director James Comey and other FBI officials no later than January 12, 2017, in response to “requests from numerous Chairmen and Ranking Members of Congressional oversight committees, various organizations, and members of the public.” In his May 3 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey said he welcomed the investigation, because if he’d done something wrong, he wanted to know about it. Comey also confirmed again that the FBI was investigating the nature of the relationship between representatives of the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
I attended a meeting in Moscow on Friday with Vladimir Kozin, longtime member of Russia’s foreign service, advisor to the government, author, and advocate for arms reduction. He handed out the list of 16 unresolved problems above. While he noted that the United States funds NGOs in Russia, as well as Ukraine, to influence elections, and described that as a reality in contrast to U.S. stories of Russia trying to influence a U.S. election, which he called a fairy tale, the topic did not make the top-16 list.
He added to the top of the list as something that could be obtainable, and something he considers very important, the need for an agreement between the U.S. and Russia on no first use of nuclear weapons, an agreement that he thinks other nations would subsequently join.
On Wednesday, I flew out of a New York airport around which armed soldiers in camouflaged uniforms wandered — a New York area that had long ago hidden in the hardest to reach corner of New Jersey the monument that Russia gave the United States in sympathy with the horror of September 11, 2001. I left a country where the corporate media used “ties to Russia” as the equivalent of “servant of Satan,” and treated financial and criminal corruption as honorable or offensive depending purely on whether anyone Russian was involved.
The United Nations Charter, to which all member states are signatories and which prevails over all other treaties and agreements, states that the organization is obligated to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and to take military and nonmilitary action to “restore international peace and security.”
The justices at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 concluded that “to initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
The firing of FBI Director James Comey may have been a surprise to some, most particularly in the media, but there was a certain inevitability about it given the bureau’s clear inability to navigate the troubled political waters that developed early last summer and have continued ever since. The initial reaction that it may have been triggered by Comey’s recent maladroit comments regarding the Huma Abedin emails would appear to miss the mark as that issue was not raised either by Attorney General Jeff Sessions or by the White House in their written explanations of what had taken place and why.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- A devastating car bomb exploded in front of a
shopping complex on May 9 in southern Thailand, minutes after a
smaller blast lured security forces and rescuers to the site, injuring
at least 56 people in the one of the worst attacks on a civilian
target this year.
Suspicion immediately fell on Muslim Malay-Thai insurgents fighting
for autonomy or independence from Buddhist-majority Thailand.
The stalemate conflict has killed 6,800 people on all sides since 2004.
Unidentified people parked the car bomb in front of a shopping
center in downtown Pattani, capital of Pattani province and exploded
it on May 9 at about 2:30 p.m. when the area was thronged with buyers
and sellers.
Some early reports said assailants first threw "fireworks" into the
Big C Supercenter and fled.
Other reports described the first attack as a motorcycle bomb
exploding in the entrance of Big C, causing minimal damage.
While trying to determine what occurred, security forces, rescuers