Theresa May has signed the letter that will formally begin the UK’s departure from the European Union.
Giving official notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, it will be delivered to European Council president Donald Tusk later.
In a statement in the Commons, the prime minister will then tell MPs this marks “the moment for the country to come together”.
And pretend it wasn’t a huge mistake.… Read the rest
White House press secretary Sean Spicer got into a heated exchange with American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan during Tuesday’s press briefing, telling the reporter to “stop shaking your head” and to “report the facts.”
Well hey! At least he didn’t ask her to set up a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus for him.
She asked him what the admin was doing to repair its image, and he had a meltdown.
… Read the rest“If the president puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that’s a Russian connection,” he continued.
“I appreciate your agenda here,” he added. “Hold on. At some point, report the facts!”
Spicer said Republicans and Democrats alike have claimed
Apparently groping schoolgirls is a big thing on Tokyo subway trains.
Tamaka Ogawa was about 10 years old when she was sexually assaulted for the first time. It was a public holiday and she was on the subway. A man standing behind her pulled down the band of her culottes and underwear, touched her bare bottom, then pressed himself against her. She recalls feeling shocked and physically sickened. When she reached home, she repeatedly washed the spot where he had pressed himself against her, although she was conscious of not spending too long in the toilet, in case her family noticed that something was wrong.
Apparently she didn’t feel able to tell her family it had happened, which is … Read the rest
The Trump gang tried to stop Sally Yates testifying.
According to letters The Post reviewed, the Justice Department notified Yates earlier this month that the administration considers a great deal of her possible testimony to be barred from discussion in a congressional hearing because the topics are covered by the presidential communication privilege.
Yates and other former intelligence officials had been asked to testify before the House Intelligence Committee this week, a hearing that was abruptly canceled by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
Who worked on Trump’s transition team. That Devin Nunes.
… Read the restYates and another witness at the planned hearing, former CIA director John Brennan, had made clear to government officials by Thursday that their testimony to
Photos like this?
Appreciated joining @POTUS for meeting with the Freedom Caucus again today. This is it. #PassTheBill pic.twitter.com/XG6lQIy5a6
— Vice President Pence (@VP) March 23, 2017
They’re not “gaffes.” They’re “suck it up, buttercup.”
For liberals, the photo seemed like an inadvertent insight into the current Republican psyche: Powerful men plotting to leave vulnerable women up a creek, so ensconced in their misogynistic world they don’t even notice the bad optics (not to mention the irony of the “pro-life” party making it harder for women to afford to have babies). Political analysts treated the photo as a gaffe, the kind of rookie mistake we’re used to seeing from the Trump White House.
Ah no. They’re … Read the rest
But at least he’s working hard!
The alert from Fox News went out at 5:30 p.m. Sunday.
“PRESIDENT TRUMP SPENDING WEEKEND WORKING AT THE WHITE HOUSE,” the chyron announced, under an image of the White House presumably captured just minutes before.
The timing of the tweet alert was curious: After all, the weekend was nearly over.
Also…how is that news? Presidents are expected to put in a lot of hours.
But also also, of course, it’s not even true. How he really spent the weekend: furtively playing golf and watching golf on tv while his minions told the press he was in “meetings.” Yeah meetings with a golf ball.
… Read the restAccording to pool reports, the president spent
President Donald Trump on Monday signed new legislation repealing a regulation protecting workers from wage theft. The new law undercuts the Obama-era policy that encouraged businesses to follow workplace safety guidelines and pay their workers fairly by terminating federal contracts with companies that accrued too many violations. The new Trump-era legislation, however, undoes those employee protections, as Republicans in Congress said the Obama rules were restrictive and job-killing. Trump referenced the bill in a Monday tweet: “Today I’m signing 4 bills under the Congressional Review Act that cancels regulations & eliminates unnecessary, job-killing rules,” he wrote. “#MAGA”
Yeah, because what worker doesn’t want a dangerous job working for a boss who steals her wages?… Read the rest
Hmm.
Senate investigators plan to question Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a close adviser, as part of their broad inquiry into ties between Trump associates and Russian officials or others linked to the Kremlin, according to administration and congressional officials.
The White House Counsel’s Office was informed this month that the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, wanted to question Mr. Kushner about meetings he arranged with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, according to the government officials. The meetings, which took place during the transition, included a previously unreported sit-down with the head of Russia’s state-owned development bank.
Ah. Previously unreported, eh. The head of Russia’s state-owned development bank, eh.… Read the rest
Guest post by Natasha Chart.
“How liberal feminism became all about the D, and therefore not any kind of feminism.”
“Why narcissists aren’t oppressed, and why you should dislike them harder if you have any sense.”
“The left never stopped hating women, they’re just trying to get into your votes.”
“Perverts and abusers feel no shame: learn to spot and reject their open-air mendacity.”
“Women are male, biology is fiction, and other stupid things I got told on social media.”
“How the sex industry bought mainstream feminism while liberal men cheered.”
“Rich men buy poor men by giving them women: you shouldn’t stand for it.”
“The Lexus and the Knowledge Tree: How feminism got replaced by pastiche and no … Read the rest
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was on his way to an event in Washington late Tuesday when the evening’s plans abruptly changed. After taking a brief phone call, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) swapped cars and slipped away from his staff, congressional officials said. He appears to have used that unaccounted-for stretch of time to review classified intelligence files brought to his attention by sources he has said he will not name.
The next morning, Nunes stepped up to a set of microphones in the Capitol complex to declare that he had learned that U.S. spy agencies had “incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”
Trump promptly burst into tweets about how … Read the rest
Robert Reich on Trump’s “billing” of Germany:
… Read the restIt turns out Trump’s meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last weekend was even worse than we thought. According to London’s Sunday Times, Trump handed Merkel a bill for more than $300 billion that Germany supposedly owed NATO — supposedly calculated by adding the amounts by which Germany has fallen short on annual payments to NATO since 2002, and adding interest.
That’s absurd. The United States has a huge stake in a strong NATO, and has no authority “collect” what’s “owed” by other nations.
Besides, German spending on global defense isn’t limited to NATO. “There is no account where debts are registered with NATO,” German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen
Seriously? He really did that?
Donald Trump reportedly gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel a bill for £300bn when the pair met recently to cover contributions he believes are owed to Nato.
The US president made the demand during private talks when the pair met in Washington DC, the Sunday Times reported.
Surely he didn’t. Surely even he can’t be that crude and stupid and inappropriate.
… Read the restNato countries pledged in 2014 to spend two per cent of their GDP on defence, something only a handful of nations – including the UK, Greece, Poland and Estonia – currently do.
The sum being demanded by the US has been backdated to 2002, the year Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, pledged to spend more
The Trump people decided to take the nation’s pulse. They sent out an email Thursday with the subject line “Vindicated.”
It went like this:
Since even before Inauguration Day, Democrats, the media, and the entire opposition have tried to take down President Trump by resorting to nasty attacks and spreading fake news.
But President Trump has fought back and been vindicated time and time again – and he will KEEP FIGHTING to deliver on the promises he made to you, the American people.
Then it asked a super-serious important question:
What happens if you click on the second option, the one for bad stupid people?
They send you here:
Heads they win, tails we lose. We can give them … Read the rest
Russia’s main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, has been arrested at an anti-corruption protest he organised in the capital, Moscow.
Thousands of people joined rallies nationwide, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev over corruption allegations.
At least 500 other protesters were detained in the capital and across the country.
Most of the marches were illegal, organised without official permission.
It’s lose-lose, isn’t it. If they ask for permission, the answer is no. If they don’t, they get locked up.
… Read the restAlexei Navalny was detained as he arrived to join the rally in central Moscow. Protesters then tried to prevent a police van from taking him away.
In a tweet after his detention, he urged
Hmm. So Trump uses “failing” as his standard epithet for the New York Times, the way a poet might talk of Brave Achilles and Wily Odysseus – and yet when his health care repeal goes belly-up, he phones the Times for a chat.
… Read the restJust moments after the Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act was declared dead, President Trump sought to paint the defeat of his first legislative effort as an early-term blip.
The House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, was preparing to tell the public that the health care bill was being withdrawn — a byproduct, Mr. Trump said, of Democratic partisanship. The president predicted that Democrats would return to him to make a deal
Belarus has defended the mass arrests on Saturday during protests against a tax on those seen as under-employed.
Hundreds were arrested and some beaten up as thousands took to the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities.
The foreign ministry said the demonstrations were not peaceful as “petrol bombs and arms-laden cars” were found near the Minsk protest.
How near? A few hundred miles perhaps?
Defending the government, foreign ministry spokesman Dzmitryy Mironchyk said the “actions of law enforcement agencies were completely appropriate” on Saturday.
He said the rallies had been unauthorised, which “bears specific consequence in any country of the world”, and noted that no tear gas or water cannons were used.
Not true … Read the rest
… Read the restA wave of unsanctioned rallies swept across Russia on Sunday to protest corruption in the government of President Vladimir Putin, in a nationwide show of defiance not seen in years, and one the Kremlin had tried in vain to prevent with bans and warnings.
Too angry to be cowed, they poured into the street, fed up with their country’s wide-reaching corruption and a government unwilling, or unable, to stop it. Police responded with barricades, tear gas and mass arrests in cities across Russia.
By Sunday evening, riot police in body armor and helmets hauled in more than 700 demonstrators in central Moscow, as the crowd, numbering in the tens of thousands, cheered and whistled and chanted,
Time for a feel-good story.
A Brazilian teacher has come up with a unique way to help a schoolgirl who was being bullied because of her hair.
Ana Barbara Ferreira, from Sao Paulo, said her student was “sad” after being ridiculed by a boy, who had said her hair was “ugly”.
“At that moment, the only thing I could tell her was that she was wonderful and shouldn’t care about what he was saying,” she wrote in a Facebook post that went viral.
That would be this post.
That was all she could do at that moment, but the next day she did more.
Fran and Dan Keller are out of prison, after 21 years.
… Read the restAmong the atrocities that Frances and Dan Keller were supposed to have committed while running a day care center out of their Texas home: drowning and dismembering babies in front of the children; killing dogs and cats in front of the children; transporting the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army; dressing as pumpkins and shooting children in the arms and legs; putting the children into a pool with sharks that ate babies; putting blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; cutting the arm or a finger off a gorilla at a local park; and exhuming bodies at a cemetery, forcing children to carry
