Trump cancels Latin America trip ahead of expected Syria decision

France says it will retaliate against the Syrian government if evidence emerges that it was behind the Douma gas attack

A child is treated in a hospital in Douma, Eastern Ghouta in Syria, after what a Syria medical relief group claims was a suspected chemical attack (Reuters)

Tuesday 10 April 2018 

US President Donald Trump has decided to cancel his first official trip to Latin America this week in order to focus on responding to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, the White House said on Tuesday.

The United States, backed by Britain and France, has said it is ready to act with or without support from the United Nations, where the Security Council is expected to vote on Tuesday on rival US and Russian proposals to probe chemical attacks in Syria.

And France and Turkey also joined in the intensifying rhetoric against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday.

Paris said it will retaliate against the Syrian government if evidence emerges that it was behind a recent suspected chlorine gas attack in a rebel-held enclave, government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said.

"If the red line has been crossed, there will be a response," he told Europe 1 radio, adding that intelligence shared by President Emmanuel Macron and Trump "in theory confirms the use of chemical weapons".

In a phone call on Monday night, the two leaders again discussed the latest alleged chemical attack in Syria's civil war, in the city of Douma near Damascus on Saturday.

Rescuers and medics in Douma say more than 40 people died after the suspected poison gas attack in the last rebel-held pocket of the one-time opposition stronghold of Eastern Ghouta.

France has repeatedly warned that evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria is a "red line" that would prompt French strikes on Syrian government forces.

Fact-finding mission

The global chemical weapons watchdog said on Tuesday that it will "shortly" deploy a fact-finding team to Douma.

Coinciding with a request from both Syria and its ally Russia to investigate the allegations, "the OPCW technical secretariat has requested the Syrian Arab Republic to make the necessary arrangements for such a deployment", the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement.

We have a lot of options militarily and we'll be letting you know pretty soon... probably after the fact

- US President Donald Trump

Trump for his part said on Monday that "we have a lot of options militarily and we'll be letting you know pretty soon... probably after the fact".

The statement came following a warning on Sunday night that a chemical weapon attack by Assad would be "met forcefully".

"We're making a decision as to what we do with respect to the horrible attack that was made near Damascus and it will be met and it will be met forcefully," Trump said, surrounded by his national security team.

May and Trump to talk

British Prime Minister Theresa May said she would talk to Trump later on Tuesday.

"I'll be continuing to talk with our allies and partners as I have done, speaking to President Macron this morning, and I'll be speaking to President Trump later today," she told reporters.

When asked whether Britain would join the United States if Washington decided on military action in Syria, May declined to answer the question directly but said: "We believe that those responsible should be held to account."

May said she would chair a meeting of Britain's National Security Council later on Tuesday.

"This attack that took place in Douma is a barbaric attack. Obviously we are working urgently with our allies and partners to assess what has happened on the ground," she said. 

And Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday vowed those behind the killings of civilians in Douma would pay a "heavy price".

"I curse those who carried out this massacre. Whoever has done this, the perpetrators will be brought to account and certainly pay a heavy price," Erdogan told a meeting of his party in parliament.

In April last year, Trump launched a cruise missile strike against a Syrian air base after a previous chemical weapons attack UN monitors later pinned on Assad's government.

The UN Security Council, gathered in New York, is expected to vote on Tuesday on rival US and Russian proposals to probe chemical attacks in Syria.

Moscow has denounced the claims as "fabrications", with its UN envoy warning Monday that the possibility of military action was "very, very dangerous". 

Russian officials warn of possible military clash with US over Syria

Deputy minister says threat of US strike ‘extremely dangerous’ but direct clash unlikely

The USS Donald Cook, a guided missile destroyer, was deployed to the eastern Mediterranean this week. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Andrew Roth in Moscow-Tue 10 Apr 2018 14.20 BST

Russian officials and analysts have warned of the dangers of a military clash with the United States if Donald Trump orders a military strike in Syria in response to the chemical attack in rebel-held Douma at the weekend.

One Russian politician involved in defence policy called it the most dangerous moment in US-Russian relations since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The chief of staff of Russia’s armed forces said last month that Russia would shoot down incoming missiles and attack their launching platforms if a US strike on Syria threatened Russian military personnel.

“The US and Russia are now closer to a direct collision between their military forces than at any time since the cold war,” Dmitri Trenin, the head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre and a former Soviet military officer, wrote on Monday. “The only question on my mind: will Russia hit back at the US when it launches strikes against Damascus?”

Similar concerns of a direct clash were raised after the Khan Sheikhun chemical attack that killed dozens of people a year ago, when Trump ordered a Tomahawk missile strike against the Syrian regime’s al-Shayrat airbase.

Russian forces did not engage the US Tomahawk missiles using its air defence systems stationed in the region, either because they would have been ineffective in repelling the attack or because they had been told to stand down. The US gave Russia advance warning of that attack through a deconfliction notice.

Russian military brass have signalled that the response may be different this time. In March, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, said that if the US sought to strike Syria in response to a chemical attack, Russia would use its air defence systems and other weapons to respond in case of a threat to Russian servicemen in the region.

Gerasimov said Russian military advisers and members of several Russian missions to Syria, including military police and conflict resolution specialists, were based in Damascus at the headquarters of the Syrian defence ministry and at other Syrian military sites.

“In the case of a threat to the lives of our servicemen, the Russian military armed forces will take response measures against both the rockets, and the platforms from which they’re fired,” he said.

Moscow has made similar threats in the past, including last September as US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces troops met Russian-backed Syrian government forces on territory held by Islamic State in eastern Syria.

On Tuesday the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow would propose a UN security council resolution on investigating the chemical attack in Douma, which Syrian forces have denied carrying out. Russia has previously vetoed a joint investigative mechanism between the OPCW and the UN into chemical attacks in Syria, citing bias.

Lavrov’s deputy, Mikhail Bogdanov, called the threat of a strike “extremely dangerous” but said he did not think a direct military clash with the US was likely. “I think it does not exist,” he told journalists. “I believe that common sense should prevail over insanity.”

 On Monday Trump promised “major decisions” by Wednesday on a response to the Douma attack. Russian officials at the UN have said both that there is no evidence any chemical attack took place and that it was a “false flag” provocation to give a pretext for the US to launch strikes.

The USS Donald Cook, a guided missile destroyer, was deployed to the eastern Mediterranean this week after a port call in Cyprus. The Black Sea fleet announced on Tuesday that crews manning its advanced S-400 air defence systems were holding training drills.

A former Russian admiral told Interfax that the ship’s presence was “an escalation” but he believed the US was mainly trying to scare Russia.

“I think that the United States will not openly decide to launch a strike against Syria with our ships and submarines in the Mediterranean Sea, along with the recent warning issued by our chief of staff [Gerasimov],” he said. 

‘A bomb on Trump’s front porch’: FBI’s Cohen raids hit home for the president

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, is under federal investigation. The Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger explains what you need to know.(Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Costa April 9 at 8:16 PM

President Trump has howled in all caps for nearly a year as the Justice Department has delved deeper and deeper into his orbit. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III indicted his former campaign chairman. Then he secured a guilty plea from his former national security adviser. All the while, Mueller and his investigators have spent hours questioning White House officials about whether the president had sought to obstruct justice.

But the FBI’s seizure on Monday of privileged communications between Trump and his private lawyer, Michael D. Cohen — as well as documents related to a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who has alleged a sexual affair with Trump — was a particularly extraordinary move that opens a whole new front in the converging legal battles ensnaring the administration.

Cohen is Trump’s virtual vault — the keeper of his secrets, from his business deals to his personal affairs — and the executor of his wishes.

“This search warrant is like dropping a bomb on Trump’s front porch,” said Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama.

Mark S. Zaid, a Washington lawyer, said the seizure of Cohen’s records “should be the most concerning for the president.”

Michael D. Cohen, personal attorney for President Trump, arrives on Capitol Hill on Sept. 19. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

“You can’t get much worse than this, other than arresting someone’s wife or putting pressure on a family member,” he said. “This strikes at the inner sanctum: your lawyer, your CPA, your barber, your therapist, your bartender. All the people who would know the worst about you.”

The president spent much of Monday afternoon glued to the television. Aides said Trump watched cable news coverage of surprise raids on Cohen’s Manhattan office, home and hotel room by FBI agents, who took the lawyer’s computer, phone and personal financial records after a referral from Mueller.

As the sun began to fall in Washington, Trump offered reporters his initial reaction: “It’s a disgraceful situation.”

“I have this witch hunt constantly going on,” Trump said. “That is a whole new level of unfairness,” he added, leaving no doubt that he views Monday’s actions as a personal affront. Trump called Cohen “a good man” and went on to criticize Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying he had made “a very terrible mistake for the country” by recusing himself from the Russia probe.

Asked why he had not fired Mueller, Trump left the door open. “We’ll see what happens,” he told reporters. “Many people have said, ‘You should fire him,’ ” the president added.

Shortly after the raids began Monday morning, Trump received a heads-up at the White House. He huddled in the Oval Office with Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer who oversees its handling of the Mueller probe, as well as with White House counsel Donald McGahn and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, officials said.

Other aides said they did not understand what was happening and struggled to pinpoint the significance of the seizures. Many officials sought to keep their distance from the developments, deferring comment until a strategy was determined.

Michael D. Cohen, personal attorney for President Trump, arrives at Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 17. (Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

Aides said they viewed Trump’s late-afternoon comments to reporters as a necessary venting session. He had been grousing privately about Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a Trump appointee who oversees the Mueller investigation because of Sessions’s recusal.

He complained about Rosenstein again Monday in private, a White House adviser said, and stewed all afternoon about the warrant to seize Cohen’s records, at times raising his voice. Trump said that Rosenstein approved the warrant, that he wished Rosenstein was not in the job and there was no one making the prosecutors follow the rules, the adviser said. Trump complained sharply about Sessions and Mueller and asked detailed questions about who was behind the move — and said that people would be more critical of such a warrant if it wasn’t intended to damage the president.

Still, a senior White House official said late Monday that no “imminent” personnel changes were expected.

It was unclear if Trump talked to Cohen, with whom he recently dined at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Trump “won’t like that Cohen is in the crosshairs, but you have to remember: He’d prefer the heat be on Cohen than on him,” said one of the president’s advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “His goal will be to figure out how much vulnerability he has.”

This was Trump’s first crisis without Hope Hicks, the recently departed White House communications director who knew her way around the broader Trump orbit, getting to the bottom of what was happening, counseling the president and intuiting how he would want the situation handled.
Trump also navigated Monday’s turn without a full slate of legal advisers. He has yet to replace John Dowd, who resigned last month as his personal attorney in the Russia matter. Reached briefly Monday afternoon, one White House official sighed when asked about Trump’s strategy, pointing to the “evident” limitations of the current legal team, as well as the absence so far of a public-relations plan to counter the hotly anticipated release next week of former FBI director James B. Comey’s memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.”

There was fear in Trump’s orbit that the president is liable to erupt in anger in coming days, escalating his attacks against Mueller at a time when his attorneys are negotiating a possible interview. And there was concern in some quarters that Trump, who has been shaking up his administration in recent weeks, may also seek to terminate Mueller.

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a friend of Trump, called the Cohen raids “a little heavy-handed.”

“Is this surprising? Yes,” said Giuliani, also a former U.S. attorney. “Is it extraordinary? No. This is the way prosecutors get information — sometimes to convict and prosecute, sometimes to exculpate.”
Criticizing Mueller for veering into “highly personal issues,” such as the alleged Daniels encounter, Giuliani added, “The only thing that’s happening, perhaps, is that Mueller is trying to compel the president to testify.”

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One last week that he did not know Cohen had arranged the $130,000 payment for Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, just days before the 2016 election to prevent her from publicly speaking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump.

The president said he did not know where Cohen got the money and declined to answer whether he had set up a fund for Cohen to use. “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” Trump said. “Michael’s my attorney, and you’ll have to ask Michael.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has said repeatedly that Trump denies Clifford’s allegations.

Without a lead attorney in Dowd’s absence, Trump has absorbed some advice from a number of legal commentators on cable news, including Alan Dershowitz, a retired Harvard Law School professor who has made supportive comments about the president.

“This may mark the end of the kind of cooperation that Trump’s lawyers have been involved with,” Dershowitz said Monday in an interview. “Cooperation doesn’t seem to have much payback. Maybe it’s better to go into a defensive fight mode.”

Dershowitz advised Trump to use “every legal tactic available to him” to fight Mueller and the FBI. He said the president could “assert” his rights as Cohen’s client and “go into court and seek to demand returned every bit of information that is arguably lawyer-client privilege before anybody has a chance to read anything.”

Tim O’Brien, author of the Trump biography “Trump Nation,” said the seizure of records from his private attorney probably would “smell of a mortal threat” by Trump. And, O’Brien added, “He is historically prone not to sit back and let the chips fall where they may. He is historically prone to come out with guns blazing.”

Cohen has long been a fixer for Trump, as well as his family and business, and associates said he was disappointed when he was not brought officially on board the campaign, and again when he was passed over for a coveted White House job.

“He’s done the dirty work that the president hasn’t wanted to do himself, and he’s been doing it for a decade,” O’Brien said.

In the early weeks of the administration, Cohen was spotted unshaven, roaming the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. He has stayed in touch with the president through late-night phone calls.

But now, Cohen is back squarely in Trump’s orbit — though perhaps not in the way he had hoped to be. Cohen himself has become the kind of distraction that he was usually tasked with handling for his boss.

“When it comes to Michael Cohen, anything is possible,” said Louise Sunshine, a former Trump Organization executive who knows Cohen. “Anything and everything is possible.”

Ashley Parker contributed to this report.

Why are Millennials running from religion? Blame hypocrisy

White evangelicals embrace scandal-plagued Trump. Black churches enable fakes. Why should we embrace this?

By D. Watkins / Salon-April 9, 2018, 11:12 PM GMT

I think we can safely say that President Donald Trump has changed American politics forever. He won the White House with no political experience, didn’t release his tax returns, and the extent to which Russia was involved in tilting the election is still under investigation. In the midst of all of Trump’s deception and corruption, there’s one rule he had to follow: yielding to the word of God.

Be a good person by treating others well, say your prayers, be humble, thank God, and you have a pretty good shot at getting into heaven. That’s how it was explained to me. Now, some of my friends were holy rollers whose families took praise to the next level: They went church ten times in a seven-day week, even on Tuesdays, wore suits, quoted Bible verses and washed away their sins by being baptized in front their congregations. But extreme or not, the majority of Americans are taught one way or another that Jesus died for us and our lives should be devoted to making it up to him.

God is on our money and has been inserted into our Pledge of Allegiance, so don’t even think about running for president without spending huge portions of your campaign explaining your relationship with God and how he found you — we assume God is a he — and distancing yourself from Muslims while pandering to Christians and Catholics up and down the Bible belt. It all seems phony — fake as a $3 bill with George Bush on the front — and especially when it comes to Trump's appeal to conservative Christians.

Seriously, you are going to tell me that Donald Trump, who received 81 percent of the vote from white so-called Evangelicals, is a devout Christian? False praisers and prophets looking for profits aren’t a new thing.

My grandmother was one of those church women who proudly suited up, tied her chalk-polished white shoes up extra tight and went to war for her pastor, baking dinners, working street ministries or attending whatever event he asked her to attend, and at times giving her last to make sure the church kept the lights on. But she lived in a different time. My grandma was a Baby Boomer, so she hailed from a time when religion meant something­, back when the black church was the center of the black community.

Imagine having a place where you can go to meet up and strategize with like-minded people. A place where you can go to eat, celebrate, rejoice, dance and sing until your lungs ache. No money? No problem. This place would never turn you away; in fact, they might even give you some money in a time of need, help you raise funds to start that business or connect you with resources to ensure your success. This place also offered all of that in addition to marriage counseling and programs for children. Most importantly, the black church offered hope.

“The black church was the creation of a black people whose daily existence was an encounter with the overwhelming and brutalizing reality of white power,” theologian James Cone, author of "Black Theology and Black Power," wrote. "For the slaves, it was the sole source of personal identity and the sense of community. Though slaves had no social, economic or political ties to people, they had one humiliating factor in common­­­ — serfdom.”

The black church was an extension of slavery that derived from one of the most powerful tools of white slave masters. Owners and overseers liked to dangle the idea of Christianity to slaves, teaching them that a cocktail of accepting white Jesus, hard work and obedience would prohibit them from being slaves in heaven. Some masters would even allow their slaves to wear their old clothes and worship on Sundays.

“Open up!” my friend Block yelled. He beat on the door until the hinges rattled. I sat on the floor in the next room, nursing a half cup of vodka. The walls were so thin that you could hear dust form. “Open up! Or I’m gonna see dude myself!”My grandma, like many people in her generation, never questioned the origin of the traditions they subscribed to, and why would she? By the time she came of age, the church was the only consistent resource in black communities. She passed that on to her children, who tried to pass it on to us, but our relationship to religion had evolved by the time I was a teenager in the '90s.

Block’s sister came out the room. Her face was puffy and shiny from tears. She flopped her back on the wall and slid to the floor before telling him that her boyfriend told her, “you a stupid b**ch if you think I’m leaving my family for you!”

She was a teenager like us and had been seeing dude for a while.

 “I’m gonna beat his head in,” Block told her. “Come on, D!”

She pleaded for him to stop as he stormed out. I chugged my drink and tripped out of the door behind him.

Block sparked a cigarette, cracked his car window and blew a cloud out. “She been messin with the preacher dude from up the block for a minute. He been gassin her up, making her think they was gonna be together and she just cry all of the time. I'm sick of this clown. I’m a crack his jaw.”“What’s the move?” I asked.

“Haaaaaa, yo, we gonna go fight a preacher?” I blurted, trying to hold my laughter in. “What, you gonna crack him over the head with a stack of Bibles? Drop me off, man. My grandma would roll over in her grave! And I'm not letting you go to jail for assaulting a preacher.”

“What should I do?”

I told him to tell his sister to stay away from the guy. He didn’t beat her or anything, he just broke her heart. That’s what religion represented to me at that time in my life: heartbreak. Church people prayed, suffered and never really had anything, just like in the slave days. And my perception of a lot of church dudes was lower than the chances of that preacher leaving his family for Block's sister. We drank, blew weed, hustled, chased girls and ran the streets because we were young criminals. Church people from the neighborhood did all of the same things, but looked down on us because they put on suits and prayed on Sundays. Knowing preachers and deacons who dipped into our dating pool wasn’t a strange thing; they drove cars like ours or better and wore designer clothes and jewelry like us. We basically looked the same to outsiders.

I don't think all churches are bad. A lot of pastors do great work. However, rogue preachers are everywhere, and a lot of people who are blinded by the need for that hope our grandmas talked about can't tell the difference.

I have no personal experiences with white churches other than I heard that their services aren't as long. A black church sermon could easily be eight hours of songs and preaching­ — throw your whole Sunday away — whereas I think white church only lasts 20 minutes. But again, I don’t know; I've never been. I do know that white church people who identify as Christians are responsible for every major American war, bombing other countries, the genocide of Native Americas, the horrific mid-Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, and now Donald Trump, who probably has had more scandals than any other president in the history of our country.

Trump collects scandals like trading cards­: championing sexual harassment and assault, calling entire countries full of black Christian s**t holes, allegedly hiding a string of affairs with women like adult film star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. Through all of this, the evangelicals, the holy rollers­ — the white Christians — are silent. I remember them demanding Bill Clinton’s head during the Monica Lewinsky affair in the '90s. Is it because Trump is pro-life and Clinton wasn’t? Because a sin is a sin, right? Or is it just hypocrisy?

Either way, unlike in the days of slavery, the Civil Rights movement, my grandma's day and Clinton's, information is everywhere. We are in the era of the 24-hour news cycle where everyone has access to everything, which means evangelicals are definitely watching and choosing to remain silent­­, thus uniting many people who represent the modern black church and white church with their actions and forcing me to see them as one and the same: phony. The talk doesn't match their actions.

Millennials are definitely taking note, and continue to abandon the church. A 2015 Pew Research Center study found 35 percent of millennials identify their religion as "none" — that's twice the percentage of Boomers. If Christian hypocrisy isn't addressed, organized religion won't last.

D. Watkins is an editor-at-large for Salon. He is a professor at the University of Baltimore and founder of the BMORE Writers Project. Watkins is the author of The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America and The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir.

Anti-trust case against Google in India goes to appeal

A man stands in front of a screen during a Google event in New Delhi, India September 27, 2016. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi/Files

Jennifer Saba-APRIL 9, 2018

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI (Reuters) - Google has appealed against a ruling by India’s competition watchdog that found it guilty of “search bias”, while the website that brought the case also challenged the outcome, complaining the online search giant had got off too lightly.

In February, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) fined Google 1.36 billion rupees ($21 million), saying it was also abusing its dominance by giving its own online airline flight search product an unfair advantage over rivals.

Google, the core unit of U.S. firm Alphabet Inc, said on Tuesday it had filed an appeal.

“We disagree with aspects of the CCI’s decision, so we have filed an appeal and sought a stay on those findings,” a Google spokesman told Reuters.

After the February ruling, Google had referred to the issues raised by the Commission as “narrow concerns”. It noted the order indicated that on the majority of issues the CCI examined, Google’s conduct complied with Indian competition laws.

However, a lawyer with knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday that Matrimony.com, the Indian matchmaking website that had filed the case against Google was dissatisfied with the outcome and had lodged its own appeal.

Matrimony.com, according to the lawyer, has appealed against both the size of the fine, which it says is too small, and the CCI’s ruling that neither Google’s specialised search design or its advertising service, AdWords, were breaking competition rules. Google did not comment on that development.

A CCI official called the watchdog’s judgement “robust” and said it would defend its ruling at the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT).

“Google was found to be indulging in practices of search bias and by doing so, it causes harm to its competitors as well as to users,” the CCI had said in its 190-page ruling.

Search bias refers to the propensity for a search engine to favour certain websites over others in response to user queries, due to biases in their search algorithms or other factors. This can unduly hurt businesses that often rely on search engines to draw customers to their portals.

 

The appeal filed by Matrimony.com will be the latest anti-trust headache for Google, which remains mired in similar cases elsewhere in the world.

Last year, the European Commission imposed a record 2.4 billion euro ($3 billion) fine on the company for favouring its shopping service and demoting rival offerings. Google has appealed against the verdict.

Is London really deadlier than New York?

By Georgina Lee-9 Apr 2018

For the first time in modern history, London’s murder rate is higher than New York’s. At least that’s what was reported last week.

But FactCheck has received new figures from the New York Police Department that suggest otherwise.

What did the early reports show?

The original reports were based on figures seen by the Sunday Times on or before 1 April.

They showed that in January this year, the New York Police Department investigated twice as many murders as London’s Metropolitan Police did.

But in February, the positions were reversed: New York investigators opened 11 new homicide cases, while the Met started 15 murder probes. March saw a rise in both cities’ murder count, with 21 and 22 homicides in New York and London respectively.

On that basis, there were widespread reports that London’s murder tally was higher than New York’s in February and March.

The two cities have roughly the same number of inhabitants (New York at 8.5 million, London at 8.8 million).

It was reported that, even accounting for the slight difference in population size, London’s murder rate was higher than New York’s in February and March.

What do the latest figures show?

It was perfectly reasonable for the Sunday Times and others to use the figures they had been shown on or before 1 April. That was the most up-to-date information available.

But they didn’t know that just a few days later, the New York Police Department would revise up its own estimate of the number of murders in the first three months of the year.

On 6 April, the NYPD told FactCheck that there were 22 murders in New York in January, not 18 as they’d previously thought. The same figures show that February saw 14 murders, not 11. The murder toll for March remains unchanged.

This is not that surprising: it can often take a few days or weeks to determine whether a death was suspicious, and until then, it won’t be included in the official list of murder cases.

When we combine those revised New York figures with what’s been happening in London, we get a slightly different picture to the one that’s hit the headlines over here.

We can see that in February, London suffered two more murders than New York (rather than three, as originally reported).

In March, the death toll was actually higher across the Atlantic than in the British capital.

By the way, the London figures we’re using for March do not include the deaths of two children whose bodies were found in Sussex for which the Met retains primacy over the investigation.

And of course, it’s possible that either police force could update their own figures again. But for now, these remain our best estimates.

New York is relatively safe

But even if the original reports had remained accurate, it’s important to remember that the Big Apple isn’t as dangerous as you might think.

In fact, with a murder rate of 3.4 homicides per 100,000 people, New York is only the 67th most deadly city in the US.

America’s most dangerous cities – St Louis, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland – suffer murders at nearly 20 times that rate.

The murder rate in London is still lower than it was in the 1990s and 2000s

We should also keep in mind the fact that the murder rate in London is still much lower than it was in the 1990s and 2000s.

It reached a peak in 2003, when 204 people were killed. Compared to the population at the time, that meant London was suffering 2.7 homicides per 100,000 people. By 2017, that figure had dropped to 1.48 per 100,000.

And that’s still much lower than New York. In 2017, London saw 166 murders, while New York’s death toll was 292.

Economic Rights Are Human Rights

U.S. foreign policy has exacerbated many of the evils it set out to eradicate. It needs an overhaul.

Eleanor Taylor illustration for Foreign Policy

BY SAMUEL MOYN-

APRIL 9, 2018, 8:00 AM
The United States has promoted human rights internationally for decades. But today, at a moment when support for authoritarian leaders who claim to speak for those left behind by globalization is spiking abroad and at home, the U.S. government must rethink those policies. The rise of populism threatens human rights — and the promotion of certain basic rights without a broader effort to combat the inequality that endangers them is shortsighted.

For 40 years, America’s human rights policy has focused narrowly on political and civil liberties and has been coupled with a free market libertarian agenda for the world. By neglecting social and economic rights and the vast disparities both within and among nations, U.S. policy has exacerbated many of the evils it set out to eradicate. It needs an overhaul.

It was only in the midst of World War II, and after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, that Americans first started to think seriously about how to improve people’s lives in the rest of the world. If there were to be a global New Deal, many assumed, Americans would have to think boldly about economics, committing to providing basic goods and also fair distribution of them.

“When the war ends,” Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles noted in his Memorial Day address in 1942, “only the United States will have the strength and the resources to lead the world out of the slough in which it has struggled so long, to lead the way toward a world order in which there can be freedom from want.”

Welles was alluding to one of the “Four Freedoms” Roosevelt had famously promised to promote in a 1941 speech: protection from the miseries of poverty. Now Welles argued that inequality elsewhere mattered, too. Indeed, in his view, remedying inequality within and among nations beckoned as a task of peace.

In 1944, in his penultimate State of the Union address, Roosevelt looked back to the Four Freedoms speech and imagined a second Bill of Rights for Americans that would include the economic and social protections of a welfare state. But Roosevelt never translated this soaring rhetoric into policy. And a worldwide New Deal that concerned itself with subsistence — as well as a modicum of material equality as a global norm — never came to pass.

As World War II wound down, the United States agreed to include human rights in the Charter of the United Nations and participated in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. But Washington was careful to ensure that none of the new international institutions would be empowered to protect economic and social rights by providing fundamental entitlements. Spooked by the looming communist threat, President Harry Truman did expand U.S. development assistance, but such aid was meant to serve political (i.e., anti-communist), not humanitarian, ends.

***

Three decades later, the human rights rhetoric of the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was rediscovered and made central to America’s foreign policy under President Jimmy Carter. Carter even considered supporting economic and social rights in the face of demands for a worldwide New Deal from the newly independent states emerging from colonial rule. In the early to mid-1970s, after the oil shock and the end of the Bretton Woods system (which maintained fixed exchange rates for more than 30 years), developing nations in Asia and Africa banded together with Latin America to propose a “New International Economic Order” and demanded that wealthy countries support the project at a global level.

Policymakers in Washington briefly acknowledged these demands as they began to pay attention to global poverty, something wealthy countries had not taken seriously as a problem before. In a historic University of Notre Dame commencement address in May 1977, Carter spoke of “new global questions of justice [and] equity.” He reminded his audience that, alongside free speech and other civil liberties, basic subsistence cried out for attention since “the immediate problems of hunger, disease, [and] illiteracy” were not going away. At the University of Georgia that same spring, Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, went further, arguing that U.S. policy should include “the right to the fulfillment of such vital needs as food, shelter, health care, and education.”

Despite their occasional rhetorical gestures, Carter and his administration never fully developed a policy to advance economic and social rights. As State Department official Sandy Vogelgesang later explained, Vance’s passing reference to economic and social rights was a last-minute add-on in a speech meant to fill a “vacuum in the early months of the Carter administration.” The statement was issued before officials “had mapped out a comprehensive policy on human rights.” As that narrower policy crystallized, pressure from developing countries was declining, and efforts to include economic and social rights never again picked up steam. From the Carter administration onward, U.S. human rights policy concerned itself with political and civil rights alone.

Indeed, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, he nearly scuttled the fledgling commitment to human rights by nominating for a State Department post Ernest Lefever, a declared foe of Carter’s policy who, like many conservatives, rejected any role for moral concerns in the midst of the Cold War struggle. Lefever wasn’t confirmed, and a bare-bones U.S. human rights policy survived. But concerns for economic rights were gone for good — in part because the United States was also giving up its own New Deal commitments to contain inequality at home. In the decades since, that new trajectory has allowed economic inequality to spike in many countries — a surge that has helped fuel the rise of populism around the globe.

***

Many human rights activists, including Americans who grudgingly began paying attention to economic and social rights only when the Cold War ended, might think the 1970s were a missed opportunity because these principles were lost. The truth is that the mistake was even graver: No U.S. administration has ever successfully connected human rights to global equity by including economic policies that provide not just for basic subsistence but for equal outcomes.

No U.S. administration has ever successfully connected human rights to global equity by including economic policies that provide not just for basic subsistence but for equal outcomes.

 That’s because Carter’s presidency coincided with the birth of an economic orthodoxy that saw the country prioritize markets above all else, alongside a narrow human rights policy privileging free speech and integrity of the body.

Though there was space for aid to provide the foreign poor with basic needs, it stopped there. As Robert McNamara, steward of the Vietnam War-turned-World Bank president, said in 1977: “[F]or the developing nations to make closing the gap [between them and wealthy nations] their primary development objective is simply a prescription for needless frustration.” But “reducing poverty is a realistic objective, indeed an absolutely essential one,” he added. A genuine effort to redress disparities among nations was off the table — and free market reforms drove a form of growth that exacerbated inequality locally, too.

Starting in the Carter years, and especially under Reagan, the United States set off to promote a free trade agenda through its direct influence and the long arm of the international financial institutions it helped control. It never again came close to a human rights policy that prioritized economic and social rights. As late as 2011, Michael Posner, who led human rights policy at the State Department under President Barack Obama, adopted Roosevelt’s old rhetoric in a speech at the American Society of International Law, declaring that human dignity has a political component and an economic component — and these are inexorably linked.

But the Obama administration never made more than a nod toward such principles. When U.S. officials faced criticism for their practices in the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2010 and 2015, Obama’s lawyers rebuffed pleas to make economic and social rights binding nationally and internationally.

***

Combining the promotion of economic and social rights with a real effort to reduce global inequalities, which once seemed imaginable under Roosevelt and Carter, has since then never reappeared. Those who vote for populists around the world, after all, rarely seem to be among the most indigent. Rather, those who see their wages stagnating while others profit wildly are the easiest prey for contemporary demagogues. The United States has overseen a form of globalization that deserves some credit for a significant reduction in extreme poverty worldwide — though China deserves the most praise for this outcome.

But that same globalization has caused galloping inequality in most countries, which creates dangerous levels of instability.

Human rights policy then becomes hostage to whether majorities feel globalization is fair for them, rather than a boon for tiny elites. Indeed, election results across the globe have shown that pledges to fight economic inequality appeal to majorities who are not interested in hearing politicians tell them that the human rights of the worst off matter more than their own, especially when they are living paycheck to paycheck. America’s human rights policy, if it survives the current president, should therefore be reframed to focus on helping the poorest around the world. That may be accomplished through the promotion of economic and social rights, as well as more ambitious policies that combat the disparities that have enabled populists to rise.

Otherwise, the United States risks being remembered as a country that pledged to promote freedom and instead entrenched inequality across the globe.

This article originally appeared in the April 2018 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Pressing for Freedom: Letters from the Field

By Broad Agenda | 10th April 2018

A women right activists raises a toy gun to protest against what they say are misogynistic comments from Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and his treatment of female political opponents, during a celebration of the Women's International Day in Metro Manila, Philippines March 8, 2018. Source: Reuters/Romeo Ranoco

Pressing for Freedom Letters from the Field.docx by Thavam on Scribd

More than half your body is not human

By James Gallagher-10 April 2018

More than half of your body is not human, say scientists.

Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves - our microbiome - is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson's.

The field is even asking questions of what it means to be "human" and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.

"They are essential to your health," says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, "your body isn't just you".

No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.

This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels.

Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: "You're more microbe than you are human."

Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one.

"That's been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you're about 43% human if you're counting up all the cells," he says.

But genetically we're even more outgunned.

The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: "We don't have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own.

"What makes us human is, in my opinion, the combination of our own DNA, plus the DNA of our gut microbes."

It would be naive to think we carry around so much microbial material without it interacting or having any effect on our bodies at all.

Science is rapidly uncovering the role the microbiome plays in digestion, regulating the immune system, protecting against disease and manufacturing vital vitamins.

Prof Knight said: "We're finding ways that these tiny creatures totally transform our health in ways we never imagined until recently."

It is a new way of thinking about the microbial world. To date, our relationship with microbes has largely been one of warfare.

Microbial battleground

Antibiotics and vaccines have been the weapons unleashed against the likes of smallpox, Mycobacterium tuberculosis or MRSA.

That's been a good thing and has saved large numbers of lives.

But some researchers are concerned that our assault on the bad guys has done untold damage to our "good bacteria".

Prof Ley told me: "We have over the past 50 years done a terrific job of eliminating infectious disease.

"But we have seen an enormous and terrifying increase in autoimmune disease and in allergy.

"Where work on the microbiome comes in is seeing how changes in the microbiome, that happened as a result of the success we've had fighting pathogens, have now contributed to a whole new set of diseases that we have to deal with."

The microbiome is also being linked to diseases including inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson's, whether cancer drugs work and even depression and autism.

Obesity is another example. Family history and lifestyle choices clearly play a role, but what about your gut microbes?

This is where it might get confusing.

A diet of burgers and chocolate will affect both your risk of obesity and the type of microbes that grow in your digestive tract.

So how do you know if it is a bad mix of bacteria metabolising your food in such a way, that contributes to obesity?

Prof Knight has performed experiments on mice that were born in the most sanitised world imaginable.

Their entire existence is completely free of microbes.

He says: "We were able to show that if you take lean and obese humans and take their faeces and transplant the bacteria into mice you can make the mouse thinner or fatter depending on whose microbiome it got."

Topping up obese with lean bacteria also helped the mice lose weight.

"This is pretty amazing right, but the question now is will this be translatable to humans"

This is the big hope for the field, that microbes could be a new form of medicine. It is known as using "bugs as drugs".

Goldmine of information

I met Dr Trevor Lawley at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he is trying to grow the whole microbiome from healthy patients and those who are ill.

"In a diseased state there could be bugs missing, for example, the concept is to reintroduce those."

Dr Lawley says there's growing evidence that repairing someone's microbiome "can actually lead to remission" in diseases such as ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease.

And he added: "I think for a lot of diseases we study it's going to be defined mixtures of bugs, maybe 10 or 15 that are going into a patient."

Microbial medicine is in its early stages, but some researchers think that monitoring our microbiome will soon become a daily event that provides a brown goldmine of information about our health.

Prof Knight said: "It's incredible to think each teaspoon of your stool contains more data in the DNA of those microbes than it would take literally a tonne of DVDs to store.

"At the moment every time you're taking one of those data dumps as it were, you're just flushing that information away.

"Part of our vision is, in the not too distant future, where as soon as you flush it'll do some kind of instant read-out and tells you are you going in a good direction or a bad direction.

"That I think is going to be really transformative."

Follow James on Twitter.

Illustrations: Katie Horwich