More damage Trump is determined to do, this time to a wilderness area in northern Minnesota:

Today this region, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, looks almost exactly as it appeared 10,000 years ago when Paleo-Indians lived there. Sigurd Olson, the naturalist and writer who guided there for three decades, called it “the most beautiful lake country on the continent.” Few who see it would disagree. Today it is the most visited wilderness area in the United States.

But now this special place is at great risk.

Late last year the Interior Department concluded that the two expired leases held by a Chilean-owned company, Twin Metals Minnesota, should be reinstated for copper and nickel mining near the border

Huh. Speaking of absurd moral panics over “black identity politics,” here’s an item from Foreign Policy, also last October, that I saw not via the ravings of Sam Harris but via Trump’s “they’re not people, they’re animals.”

As white supremacists prepared to descend on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, the FBI warned about a new movement that was violent, growing, and racially motivated. Only it wasn’t white supremacists; it was “black identity extremists.”

Amid a rancorous debate over whether the Trump administration has downplayed the threat posed by white supremacist groups, the FBI’s counterterrorism division has declared that black identity extremists pose a growing threat of premeditated violence against law enforcement.

Oh no, it’s the black identity extremists coming to … Read the rest

Trump watches his morning Fox, flips out, composes wrathful tweet.

President Trump marked the first anniversary of the special counsel’s Russia investigation Thursday by repeating accusations that the FBI had a confidential informant inside his 2016 campaign and by calling the probe “disgusting, illegal and unwarranted.”

Trump tweeted: “Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI ‘SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.’ Andrew McCarthy says, ‘There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.’ If so, this is bigger than Watergate!”

I’m not sure Watergate is the analogy he’s looking for.

Giuliani told The Washington Post and other news organizations Wednesday that the special counsel’s team

The new Jesus and Mo:

J and M on Patreon… Read the rest

Life in the US of A:

[Jessica] Mock was about to check out Sunday at the Publix near Lake Jackson when she realized she’d forgotten to pick up Tupperware. She left her cart in the lane to get some and found another woman trying to check out ahead of her when she returned.

The two argued, and the victim moved to a different lane. They both checked out about the same time and left the store only seconds apart. Before leaving, the victim used an expletive and said, “I’ll meet you outside.” Mock replied, “I’ll see you outside.”

The victim unloaded her groceries and returned her cart, running into Mock again along the way. Mock pulled a small handgun

Vanity Fair asks: is China straight-up bribing Trump?

So it was a bit odd to see Trump pull a complete 180, suddenly insisting that the company and its 75,000 Chinese jobs must be saved, though to be fair, tweeting “Look, China just pumped $500 million into a Trump Organization project so I had to do them a solid” might not have gone over so well.

Oh, that’s right—according to multiple news outlets, the president’s total about-face on China came just 72 hours after the developer of a theme park outside Jakarta, known as MNC Lido City, with whom the Trump Organization has an agreement to license its name, signed a deal to receive $500 million in Chinese government loans,

North Korea appears to have sprung the trap on Trump.

North Korea is casting doubt on next month’s summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump over joint Air Force drills taking place in South Korea, which it says are ruining the diplomatic mood.

…

North Korea suggested that the drills were putting the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, scheduled for June 12, in jeopardy.

“The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities,” said KCNA, the North’s Korean Central News Agency.

Aw. Donnie was all excited about his Nobel Peace Prize.… Read the rest

Back in May 2015 I wrote this post about the Cannes film festival’s banning women from film screenings if they were not wearing high heels.

Annals of Gender Policing. Anna Merlan at Jezebel reports:

The Cannes Film Festival is reportedly not allowing women into screenings if they’re wearing flat shoes.

Into screenings. It would be bad enough if it were the Top Gala Codfish Ball, but it’s screenings. People go to screenings as part of their work, as well as for entertainment and enlightenment. The Cannes Film Festival is a professional event as well as social and festive and so on.

And then there’s the issue of what high heels are, which is a form of

Meanwhile at the UN:

The United States blocked a United Nations Security Council statement drafted Monday that called for an independent investigation into Monday’s killing of at least 58 Palestinians along the Israeli-Gaza border. The deaths, alongside some 2,700 people who were injured, made Monday the deadliest day in Gaza since 2014. The protests erupted on the same day as the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem—a move that outraged Palestinians and many in the Muslim world. The statement, vetoed by the U.S., said in an initial draft: “The Security Council expresses its outrage and sorrow at the killing of Palestinian civilians exercising their right to peaceful protest. The Security Council calls for an independent and transparent investigation

MSF issued a statement on the bloodbath in Gaza yesterday:

MAY 14, 2018—As teams from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treat people wounded today in Gaza, Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, MSF representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, provided the following statement:

What happened today is unacceptable and inhuman. The death toll provided this evening by Gaza health authorities—55 dead and 2,271 wounded—including 1,359 wounded with live ammunition, is staggering. It is unbearable to witness such a massive number of unarmed people being shot in such a short time.

Our medical teams are working around the clock, as they have done since April 1, providing surgical and postoperative care to men, women, and children, and they will continue to do

Not just trolling:

In December 2016 Diep Saeeda, an outspoken human rights activist from the Pakistani city of Lahore, received a short message on Facebook from someone she didn’t know but with whom she had a number of friends in common: “Hy dear.”

She didn’t think much of it and never got round to replying.

But the messages weren’t coming from a fan of Mrs Saeeda’s activism – instead they were the start of a sustained campaign of digital attacks attempting to install malware on her computer and mobile phone to spy on her and steal her data.

She got many more messages from that account, which pretended to be that of a young woman who worked for the … Read the rest

Who cares about Ebola, anyway? Not Trump.

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Tuesday that a new Ebola outbreak has emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — and thanks to the Trump administration, we are woefully under-equipped to deal with it.

Just as news broke about the resurgence of the deadly disease, the Trump administration made a series of moves that could severely hamper America’s capacity to respond to disease outbreaks.

Hours before the announcement from WHO, Trump called on Congress to rescind $252 million that had been set aside specifically for the purpose of dealing with Ebola outbreaks. The money was left over from the funds that Congress appropriated to fight the 2015 Ebola