White House-GCHQ row reveals a leader willing to alienate allies to save face
Sean Spicer’s latest defense of the evidence-free assertion that Barack Obama had the Trump campaign placed under surveillance risks shattering an allegiance dear to both Washington and London
The extraordinary public rebuke by the United States’ closest surveillance partner has revealed an emerging characteristic of Donald Trump’s White House: a willingness to antagonize even its allies instead of admitting error.
GCHQ, the UK surveillance mammoth intimately linked to the National Security Agency (NSA), has taken public exception to an allegation repeated from the White House podium that, if true, would probably shatter the Five Eyes intelligence alliance so dear to both Washington and London.
Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, credulously repeated on Thursday an account by a Fox News pundit, Andrew Napolitano, that GCHQ laundered surveillance on Trump at the behest of Barack Obama. Napolitano, who is in no position to actually know, made the allegation apparently to explain away the emerging consensus, even from senior Republicans on the intelligence committees, that there is no basis to Trump’s claim that Obama ordered that surveillance.
Yemen war: More than half of British people unaware of ongoing conflict seeing UK weapons deployed by Saudis
Exclusive: Poll shows only 49% Britons know of civil war as it enters third year of bloodshed
More than half of British people are unaware of the “forgotten war” underway in Yemen, despite the Government’s support for a military coalition accused of killing thousands of civilians.
A YouGov poll seen exclusively by The Independent showed 49 per cent of people knew of the country’s ongoing civil war, which has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced three million more and left 14 million facing starvation.
The figure was even lower for the 18 to 24 age group, where only 37 per cent were aware of the Yemen conflict as it enters its third year of bloodshed.
By night, Iran’s urban gardens are disappearing
Iran’s trees and gardens are disappearing, causing a backlash on social media and making environmental activists angry. On March 8, an amateur video showed the destruction of an entire garden in Malard, a small town near Tehran. The man who filmed it explains that the stumps of the trees are still visible – and that the city hall being situated only 100 metres away clearly did not prevent the demolition.
Just a few weeks before, on February 13, another amateur video spread through social media showing workers cutting down trees in a famous apple orchard in the Tehran suburb of Mehrshahr.
But who is behind the bulldozing of entire gardens? Usually it is private companies cooperating with local authorities, or even the local authorities themselves, who replace trees and green spaces with buildings, seeking a profit.
Military courts
EDITORIAL
Nine years since the latest transition to democracy began, the elected representatives of the people of Pakistan are set to take the country another step backwards.
The reinstitution of military courts for civilians accused of terrorism is a democratic tragedy presented as a negotiated success — what the PPP and its allies have negotiated with the government amounts to the most feeble of excuses for what will become a continuing, deadly miscarriage of justice.
Simply because the collective institutional wisdom of the country has decided that, at this juncture in the country’s history, the responsibility of sustaining an effective criminal justice system must be outsourced partly to the military does not make it a moral or principled decision.
How is Japan readying itself against an unpredictable North Korea?
Residents of Japan’s northwestern city of Ogo performed a civilian evacuation drill on Friday, the country’s first, in preparation for a scenario in which ballistic missiles – launched by a country that went unnamed by the city’s disaster authorities – were to fall close to shore.
More than 100 residents and schoolchildren of the coastal city of Oga in northern Japan participated in the drill, with loudspeakers warning at 9:30 a.m. of a possible missile threat and urging residents to stay indoors or seek shelter inside a school or community center.
Pentagon Denies Bombing Syrian Mosque, But Its Own Photo May Prove That It Did
THE PENTAGON SPOKESPERSON insisted that the U.S. airstrike in the rebel-held village of Al-Jina in northern Syria on Thursday night did not hit a mosque. “The area was extensively surveilled prior to the strike in order to minimize civilian casualties,” Navy Captain Jeff Davis wrote in an email. “We deliberately did not target the mosque.”
He even unclassified and circulated a photo. And he pointed out that on the left, you can see a small mosque, still standing.
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