Gaza’s unhealed wounds

Muhammad al-Najjar lost 19 members of his family in a single Israeli strike in 2014. Since then, he has remarried and welcomed two daughters to the world.Abed Zagout

Sarah Algherbawi-27 August 2018

Israeli military prosecutors have just closed yet another internal probe into the conduct of soldiers during the army’s assault on the occupied Gaza Strip in summer 2014.

More than 2,200 Palestinians, the majority civilians, were killed during the 51-day operation.

For Muhammad al-Najjar, who lost much of his family in a single Israeli airstrike during the onslaught, there is little closure even as life moves on.

“Before I say anything, I want to say sorry to anyone born on the 26th of July because I call it the Black Day,” Muhammad said at the outset of our interview.

“I try to keep my eyes and head closed this day every year; when I wake up on this day I only see darkness, smoke and blood.”

On that day in 2014, Muhammad, then 20, and his wife Iman, then 19, were due to go to the hospital for the birth of their second child.

Muhammad and his wife had returned to their three-story home in eastern Khan Younis, southern Gaza, before sunset on 25 July, finding it crowded with women and children from their extended family who had fled houses destroyed by Israeli tank fire.

“Nobody answered”

It was the tail end of Ramadan. Nearly two dozen members of the family gathered before dawn to eat the suhour meal before the day of fasting.

“We finished our suhour and then went to sleep,” Muhammad recounted. “I took my teacup and sat in the kitchen. Suddenly, I felt a huge block of fire hit my face. I think I lost consciousness for a few minutes and then started to screaming for my mother, wife, brother and uncle. But nobody answered.”
Muhammad saw a dim light and screamed for help. Neighbors had come to the site of the bombardment to help recover any survivors. They removed rubble from around Muhammad and once they reached him, the rescuers evacuated Muhammad and transferred him to the ambulance that arrived after them.

“This was the last thing I remember. I then woke up in hospital,” Muhammad told The Electronic Intifada. “When I woke up, I called the doctor to ask about the fate of my family. He calmed me down and told me that they’re OK, they were receiving help in the next room and that I’d see them soon.”

Despite the doctor’s reassurances, Muhammad, who sustained third degree burns across his body during the blast, did not believe believe him and soon began to scream.

Muhammad’s cousin Said al-Najjar, now 28, heard him and entered his room. When Said looked into Muhammad’s eyes he began to cry and said, “They’re all gone.”

Of the 22 members of the family who had gathered in the house, only Muhammad, his brother Hussein, now 31, and his uncle Suleiman, now 65, survived.

Gone were Muhammad’s father Samir and his mother Ghalia; his wife Iman, their baby daughter Ghalia and their unborn son Anas. Gone was Iman’s sister Baraa, 11, his brother Majid and sisters Kifah and Ikhlas and Ikhlas’ small children, all under the age of 5: Islam, Amira and Amir.
Gone was Khalil – Ghalia’s brother and Muhammad’s uncle – and Khalil’s wife Sumaya and their teenage daughter Rawan and sons Ahmad, 16, and Hani, 7.

Gone too was Hussein’s pregnant wife Riham and their small children Samir, 1, and Muataz, 5. (Hussam and Olfat, Hussein and Riham’s other two children, were staying with other relatives and were spared.)

In all, 19 of Muhammad’s family members were killed, among them six women – two of them pregnant – and 10 children, in addition to Muhammad and Iman’s baby who was supposed to be born days later.

Memories

When Muhammad asked the doctor to allow him to see his slain relatives, the doctor refused, due to his frail condition. His cousin Said helped him sneak out of the hospital to go to the cemetery before their burial.

Said took Muhammad on his motorcycle, following the municipal vehicle that was transferring the torn apart bodies to the cemetery.

During the burial, memories of his loved ones came to Muhammad: “I remembered how I used to comfort my wife during her labor pains, my daughter’s beautiful laughter, my jokes with my uncle, the kids and their games, and many other moments with each one of them.”

Muhammad’s sister Kifah, 23, had cerebral palsy. “I can’t imagine how my sister felt when she was not even able to try and escape,” he said.

Muhammad holds photos of his loved ones who were killed.Abed Zagout

Muhammad’s family was one of dozens who suffered such catastrophic loss during the 51-day bombardment.

“At least 142 families lost three or more members in an attack on a residential building during the summer of 2014, resulting in 742 deaths,” a United Nations commission of inquiry found.

“The fact that Israel did not revise its practice of air strikes, even after their dire effects on civilians became apparent, raises the question of whether this was part of a broader policy which was at least tacitly approved at the highest level of government.”

It took Muhammad half a year to physically recover from his injuries. Muhammad moved in with his uncle, Ibrahim al-Najjar, who works as a livestock trader.

Long recovery

“After six months of medication, my body started to recover but my heart didn’t; I was suffering from deep depression,” Muhammad said.

His uncle Ibrahim said: “Muhammad’s whole personality changed. He used to be active and talkative, but after the incident he became a silent and isolated man who stays up all night and sleeps all day.”
Muhammad hates the night to this day. “When I close my eyes I imagine that I’ll lose everyone with me in the house,” he explained.

Ibrahim eventually took his nephew to a psychologist who recommended that Muhammad engage in new activities.

Taking the reins of his slain father’s poultry business gave Muhammad a new sense of purpose.Abed Zagout

Ibrahim tried to convince Muhammad to remarry and begin anew. Muhammad refused, fell out with his uncle and left the house. Two weeks later, Ibrahim found Muhammad at his late father Samir’s abandoned live poultry store.

“When I found Muhammad there, I changed my mind about pushing him to get married,” Ibrahim said. “Instead I equipped the store for him to start selling poultry like his father. It was a good chance for Muhammad to see and talk to people again.”

Khamis Ridwan, a friend of Muhammad’s father Samir who works in the store, said that Muhammad was moody and walled off when he began running the business. But the two men eventually grew close.

“Khamis became a source of relief to me,” Muhammad said. “He listens to me all the time even though I fired him several times from the store.”

Khamis succeeded where Ibrahim failed, convincing Muhammad to marry again and start a new family.

New beginnings

Muhammad had met a young woman by chance on the street while he was returning home from work. He followed her to find out where she lived so that his uncle could visit the family to propose to Rawan on his behalf.

“When Muhammad told me that he wanted to marry, I was shocked and went to the girl’s house the next day,” Ibrahim said.

On 23 July 2015, Muhammad wedded Rawan al-Najjar, now 23. There was no ceremony or party.

“When I learned Muhammad’s story, I wanted to be beside him and help him overcome his ordeal and start a new life,” Rawan said. “This is why I agreed to marry him.”

In November 2016, four years to the month after the birth of his first daughter, Muhammad and his wife Rawan welcomed their first child. She was named Ghalia in honor of Muhammad’s first daughter and his mother, killed together two years earlier.

Last year Muhammad received a grant from Gaza’s housing ministry to build a new home, this one two floors instead of three. By the end of 2017, he and Rawan had a second baby girl named Ghazal.
But Muhammad’s psychological wounds have not healed.

“Sometimes he screams while he’s sleeping, but he’s a good husband and takes care of me and my children,” Rawan said.

For Muhammad’s part, he said, “Life goes on and I’ll have more children.”

Sarah Algherbawi is a freelance writer and translator from Gaza.

In Sanaa, community solidarity helps needy Yemenis survive wartime

Restaurants in the Yemeni capital donate food to thousands of people, as the conflict worsens an already precarious humanitarian situation

Like many Yemenis, Abdul Rahim Mohammed relies on the goodwill of local restaurants for his subsistence and that of his family (MEE/Nasser al-Sakkaf)

Nasser al-Sakkaf

Tuesday 28 August 2018

SANAA - When Abdul Rahim Mohammed lost his job working as a guard for a warehouse in the Yemeni capital Sanaa in 2016, the middle-aged man was left struggling to provide for his wife and six children.

Without a regular source of income amid a three-year war that has ravaged what was already the poorest country in the Arab world, Mohammed, who lives in a small house in the al-Mahwa neighbourhood at the heart of the city, has had to look for outside assistance for help.

"This war has not left anything beautiful in Yemen, but it leaves thousands of people in dire need of food,” he said.

Unable to subsist on modest aid rations alone, Mohammed and many other Yemenis have instead turned to charitable schemes run by restaurants, as many credit such solidarity for easing the hardships of thousands of impoverished citizens.

Lines for rice and soup

Al-Taizi, found on Amman Street in the centre of Sanaa, is one such restaurant.

Often bustling with customers, who flock to taste the restaurant’s famous aseed – a dish from southern Yemen’s Taiz consisting of a large dumpling served with broth – it’s also common now to see dozens of Sanaa’s poor lining up outside.

Some of them have bags in their hands to carry donated food, while others bring their children with them.

For an hour every morning, al-Taizi’s owner Lufti al-Azazi and his staff serve around 50 families aseed, rice, soup and, on occasion, chicken. On Thursdays, they cater for an additional 250 families who come from the outskirts of Sanaa.

"It is a crime to see hungry people and not help them. God commands us to help needy people,” Azazi told Middle East Eye. “This is part of our religion, so we do it to go to heaven.”

"All Muslims should feel the suffering of needy people and help them, and they will find that positives in their lives will only increase through charity.”

Yemenis line up for food in front of al-Taizi restaurant in Sanaa (MEE/Nasser al-Sakkaf)

Azazi used to help people even before a Saudi-led military coalition intervened on behalf of Yemen’s government against Houthi rebels in 2015.

Now, however, the number of impoverished in the Yemeni capital has swelled.

The United Nations estimates that an alarming 22.2 million out of Yemen’s 29 million-strong population are in need of some kind of humanitarian assistance.

Around 17.8 million are food insecure, 8.4 million of which are at risk of starvation. Some 16 million, meanwhile, lack access to safe water, which has contributed to a cholera epidemic estimated to have affected as many as a million Yemenis.

“Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in April.

Life-saving charity

Employment has also been badly affected by the war, as the economy worsens and competing authorities wrangle over who controls the central bank and other state institutions.

As a result, many have been out of work or found their salaries unreliable or insufficient to make a living.

Around 1.25 million civil servants have either failed to receive their salaries or only been paid sporadically since August 2016. Meanwhile, prices of essential goods have doubled compared with before the war.

Mohammed and his family spent several weeks suffering intense hunger when the pharmaceutical company he was working for shut down, leaving him unemployed.

International NGOs have helped them over the past two years with food donations - rice, wheat, oil, sometimes sugar – but they remained insufficient to eke out a living for his wife, two sons and four daughters.

"I lost my work as a guard and my body is weak, so I cannot work hard jobs,” he said. “Some people like me resorted to begging, but I prefer not to beg. Death is better than begging for me.

'It is a crime to see hungry people and not help them'

- Lufti al-Azazi, restaurant owner in Sanaa

"But then a friend told me that there are some restaurants that provide needy people with free food and he gave me their names."

When Mohammed first visited a charitable restaurant, he was too embarrassed to ask for food. Luckily a waiter approached him and told him not to be shy and stand in the queue to receive something.

Now he stands alongside hundreds of others every day outside restaurants across Sanaa.

"The waiters do not insult needy people, rather they respect them and provide everyone with food, so I do not feel embarrassed to receive my food from them," he said.

First he waits outside al-Taizi, then moving on to other restaurants – such as al-Raqi and al-Moaalem - to obtain enough for his family of eight people.

"Each restaurant provides us with enough food for three people maximum, so I receive food from two or three restaurants each day,” Mohammed said.

Displaced swell the ranks of the needy

Impoverished natives from Sanaa aren’t the only people to find respite at these restaurants.

"I have been receiving food from restaurants for two years, and every day more people come to the restaurants," Mohammed said.

As of March, the United Nations estimated that more than two million people were displaced by fighting in Yemen.

Many of them have fled to Sanaa, especially since pro-government forces began an operation to take the strategic Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, 150km to the capital’s west.

Around 50,000 households have been displaced from around Hodeidah, according to the UN.

Um Salem, a displaced woman in her 30s, fled Hodeidah with her three children in late June when fighting reached her neighbourhood near the airport.

'If not for those restaurants, many people would starve to death'

- Um Salem, displaced from Hodeidah

Though she does not have any relatives in Sanaa, Um Salem travelled to the city with her neighbours, who told her that there would be organisations there to help displaced people.

When she arrived, she was shocked to find a lack of international NGOs providing aid, and struggled to secure food and shelter for her family.

Displaced Yemenis who fled the war-torn city of Hodeidah receive food provided by a charity in Sanaa on 9 July (AFP)

Instead she has had to rely on local kindness and initiatives.

"A philanthropist rented a small house in Sobahah area for my family, but there is no one to help us to get enough food. Organisations have provided us with food, but it is not enough for the whole month," she told MEE.

"Some displaced people told me that restaurants help needy people, so I visit those along with my children to get enough for all of us."

Another woman displaced from Hodeidah, Um Mohammed, stands in the queue to receive food with her three children, because some restaurants distribute food only to those who come in person.

"If not for those restaurants, many people would starve to death,” she said.

Um Mohammed's husband divorced her and married a new wife, and now refuses to support his children, so she alone is responsible for providing for her family.

When she was in Hodeidah, she used to work as a housekeeper for around 1,000 Yemeni rial per day ($3.10), a job she hopes to resume in Sanaa once she has developed the right contacts.

"There is community solidarity in Sanaa, which is a good trait of Yemeni people,” she said.

But once she does find work, Um Mohammed intends on never standing in line outside a restaurant for free food again.

Community solidarity as a guardrail

In times of war, expressions of solidarity and charitable initiatives are hugely important, according to Fadhl al-Thobhani, a sociology professor at Taiz University.

“The wealthy have to help the needy during war, or the number of people starving to death will hit unbelievable heights,” he told MEE.

“Yemenis empathise with the needy’s suffering,” he added. "Community solidarity also prevents many people from joining the fighting or engaging in bad behaviour such as stealing."

'There is community solidarity in Sanaa, which is a good trait of Yemeni people'

- Um Mohamed, displaced from Hodeidah

Walking between restaurants seeking sustenance for his family, Mohammed also acknowledged the schemes’ key role in keeping the most vulnerable Yemenis alive.

"I thank all restaurants that help needy people as they are playing a major role in helping many families, but I do not want to continue receiving food forever,” he said, adding that his 15-year-old son Khaled would soon be able to look for work to help provide for his family.

“I trust that God will not forget us in this war," Mohammed said.

Becoming Serfs

The elites divert attention from their pillage by blaming foreign countries such as China or undocumented workers for the economic demise of the working class.

by Chris Hedges- Aug 28, 2018

( August 28, 2018, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) You know the statistics. Income inequality in the United States has not been this pronounced in over a century. The top 10 percent has 50 percent of the country’s income, and the upper 1 percent has 20 percent of the country’s income. A quarter of American workers struggle on wages of less than $10 an hour, putting them below the poverty line, while the income of the average CEO of a major corporation is more than 300 times the pay of his or her average worker, a massive increase given that in the 1950s the average CEO made 20 times what his or her worker made. This income inequality is global. The richest 1 percent of the world’s population controls 40 percent of the world’s wealth. And it is getting worse.

What will the consequences of this inequality be economically and politically? How much worse will it get with the imposition of austerity programs and a new tax code that slashes rates for corporations, allowing companies to hoard money or buy back their own stock rather than invest in the economy? How will we endure as health care insurance premiums steadily rise and social and public welfare programs such as Medicaid, Pell Grants and food stamps are cut? And under the tax code revision signed by President Trump in December, rates will increase over the long term for the working class. Over the next decade, the revision will cost the nation roughly $1.5 trillion. Where will this end?

We live in a new feudalism. We have been stripped of political power. Workers are trapped in menial jobs, forced into crippling debt and paid stagnant or declining wages. Chronic poverty and exploitative working conditions in many parts of the world, and increasingly in the United States, replicate the hell endured by industrial workers at the end of the 19th century. The complete capture of ruling institutions by corporations and their oligarchic elites, including the two dominant political parties, the courts and the press, means there is no mechanism left by which we can reform the system or protect ourselves from mounting abuse. We will revolt or become 21st-century serfs, forced to live in misery and brutally oppressed by militarized police and the most sophisticated security and surveillance system in human history while the ruling oligarchs continue to wallow in unimagined wealth and opulence.

“The new tax code is explosive excess,” the economist Richard Wolff said when we spoke in New York. “We’ve had 30 or 40 years where corporations paid less taxes than they ever did. They made more money than they ever did. They have been able to keep wages stagnant while the productivity of labor rose. This is the last moment historically they need another big gift, let alone at the expense of the very people whose wages have been stagnant. To give them a tax bust of this sort, basically reducing from 35 percent to 20 percent, is a 40 percent cut. This kind of crazy excess reminds you of the [kings] of France before the French Revolution when the level of excess reached an explosive social dimension. That’s where we are.”

When capitalism collapsed in the 1930s, the response of the working class was to form unions, strike and protest. The workers pitted power against power. They forced the oligarchs to respond with the New Deal, which created 12 million government-funded jobs, Social Security, the minimum wage and unemployment compensation. The country’s infrastructure was modernized and maintained. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) alone employed 300,000 workers to form and maintain national parks.

“The message of the organized working class was unequivocal,” Wolff said. “Either you help us through this Depression or there will be a revolution.”

The New Deal programs were paid for by taxing the rich. Even in the 1950s, during the Eisenhower presidency, the top marginal rate was 91 percent.

The rich, enraged, mounted a war to undo these programs and restore the social inequality that makes them wealthy at our expense. We have come full circle. Dissidents, radicals and critics of capitalism are once again branded as agents of foreign powers and purged from universities and the airwaves. The labor movement has been dismantled, including through so-called right-to-work laws that prohibit agreements between unions and employers. The last remaining regulations to thwart corporate pillage and pollution are removed. Although government is the only mechanism we have to protect ourselves from predatory oligarchs and corporations, the rich tell us that government is the problem, not the solution. Austerity and a bloated and out-of-control military budget, along with the privatization of public services and institutions such as utilities and public education, we are assured, are the way to economic growth. And presiding over this assault and unchecked kleptocracy are the con artist in chief and his billionaire friends from the fossil fuel and war industries and elsewhere on Wall Street.

The elites cook statistics to lie about a recovery from the 2008 global financial crash. To gather unemployment statistics, for example, government agents ask people two questions: Are you working? If they answer “yes” they are counted as employed even if they have a temporary job in which they work only an hour a week. If they say “no” they are asked if they have been looking for work. If they have not looked for work in the last four weeks they are magically erased from the unemployment rolls. And then there is the long list of those not counted as unemployed, such as prisoners, the retired, stay-at-home spouses and high school and college students who want jobs. Alternative facts did not begin with Donald Trump.

“You don’t have to be a statistical genius to understand that over the last 10 years, a significant number of people gave up looking because it’s too disgusting,” Wolff said. “The jobs they were offered were inferior to what they had before or so insecure that it made their family life impossible. They went back to school, went into the illegal economy or began to live off their friends, relatives and neighbors.”

“The quality of the jobs, the security, the benefits and the impact on physical and mental health have been cascading downward as the wages remain stagnant,” he went on. “We’re not in a recovery. We’re in an ongoing decline, which, by the way, is why Mr. Trump got elected. This is happening to capitalism in Western Europe, Japan and the United States. This is why an angry working class is looking for ways to express and change its circumstances.”

“Society has a responsibility to itself,” Wolff said. “If the private sector can’t or won’t manage that, then the public sector has to step in. It’s what [Franklin] Roosevelt said when he came on the radio: ‘If there are millions of Americans who ask for nothing other than a job, and the private sector can’t provide it, then it’s up to me. Who else is going to do it?’ If we cut back on welfare we are making people depend on the private sector. What happens to people thrown on a private capital sector that cannot and will not function in a socially acceptable way?”

“Instead of creating a middle class, it polarizes everything,” he said of the inequality. “It allows the top executives to go completely crazy with their pay packages. They are paid beyond what’s reasonable, beyond what their fellow capitalists receive in other parts of the world. There is a collapse of the ability to buy things. A company that saves all this money through a tax cut from Mr. Trump is not going to spend its money hiring people, buying machines, producing more. They’re having trouble selling what they already produce. They’re impoverishing the very people they sell to. What do they do with the money? They take it and pay themselves. They give themselves higher pay packages. They buy back their own stock, which they’re legally allowed to do. It pushes the price of the stock up. Their [personal] compensation is connected to how well the price of the stock does. No jobs are created. No growth is created. The price of stock is going up even though the viability of the enterprise—because of the [company’s] collapsing market—is shrinking.”

“Capitalism is hollowing itself out,” he said. “The capitalists refuse to face this because they are making money, for a while. That’s the same logic as the monarchs before the French Revolution building the fantastic Versailles without understanding they were digging their own graves in those lovely gardens.”

The elites divert attention from their pillage by blaming foreign countries such as China or undocumented workers for the economic demise of the working class.

“It’s a classic ploy of crooked politicians stuck with a problem of their own making, blaming somebody else,” Wolff said. “We take the poor 10 or 11 million immigrants in this country with questionable legal status and we demonize them. We scapegoat them. They couldn’t possibly account for the difficulties in this economy. Throwing them out does not fundamentally change the dynamics of the economy. It’s childishly easy to show this. But it’s good theater. ‘I am smiting the foreigner.’ ”

“Tariffs are another way to smite the foreigner,” Wolff went on. “The tariff is a punishment of others. These days, the bugaboo is China. They are the bad ones. They are doing this. I’d like to remind people two or three things about these tariffs. One: Historically, they don’t work very well. It’s very easy to evade. For example, we put a tariff on steel from China. What do the Chinese do? They cut a deal with the Canadians or the Mexicans or the Koreans or the Europeans. Sell it to them, who resell it here. It’s on the same ship coming here. It just has a different flag at the back. This is childish. It’s well known.”

“Number two: It’s political theater,” he said. “It doesn’t change very much. For example, a good half of the goods that come from China come from subsidiaries of American corporations that went to China over the last 30 years to produce for the American market. You are smiting them by closing off their market. They’re going to be angry. They’re going to lose their investments. They’re going to take corrective action. All of this is negative for the American economy. It’s bizarre.”

“Finally, the Chinese, their politicians being not that different from ours, will have to posture in return and retaliate,” he said. “They’re already targeting our farm products. It is chaos. The United States, when we were a young country, was accused by the British and the Europeans of stealing their technology and intellectual property. Never before has it been easier to communicate intellectual property than it is today. The Chinese have been doing their share of this as an up-and-coming economy. It’s not new. It’s not frightening. It’s a part of how capitalism works. To suddenly get people outraged as if something special is going on, that’s just dishonest.”

There is no discussion in the corporate-controlled media of the effects of our out-of-control corporate capitalism. Workers struggling under massive debts, unable to pay for ever-rising health care and other basic costs, trapped in low-wage jobs that make life one long emergency, are rendered invisible by a media that entertains us with court gossip from porn actresses and reality television stars and focuses on celebrity culture. We ignore reality at our peril.

“We’ve given a free pass to a capitalist system because we’ve been afraid to debate it,” Wolff said. “When you give a free pass to any institution, you create the conditions for it to rot right behind the facade. That’s what is happening.”

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years

‘How ya like me now?!’: Stormy Daniels relishes Cohen plea

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on March 7 President Trump told her he was unaware of payments to Stormy Daniels. (Reuters)

By Elise Viebeck-August 22

Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, is relishing her moment of revenge.

The adult-film star whose alleged affair with Donald Trump was at the center of lawyer Michael Cohen’s plea deal with federal prosecutors took to Twitter in the middle of Tuesday’s firestorm to briefly reveal her delight.

“How ya like me now?!” she tweeted.

Daniels also thanked her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who has become a fixture in media coverage of the Cohen saga. Avenatti has vowed to end Trump’s presidency and is entertaining a White House run in 2020. In the near term, he is seeking to depose Trump in Daniels’s main civil case against the president.

“We’ve tolerated quite a number of personal attacks over the last six months,” Avenatti said in an interview Wednesday, the day after Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges, including tax evasion and violations of campaign finance laws. “I have tolerated a lot of criticism of the way I have approached this case and the fact that I’ve tried it in the media, and it is very satisfying to see the result, which I know would not have occurred but for the efforts of my client and I.”

Daniels and Avenatti, two characters in the national drama over Trump’s alleged affairs and efforts to keep them quiet, celebrated the unequivocally bad day for Trump and Cohen. Of greater significance to the presidency, Cohen’s guilty plea could strengthen one of their civil cases against Trump, increasing the president’s legal vulnerability and echoing the litigation that led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House in 1998.

President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty Aug. 21 to eight violations of banking, tax and campaign finance laws. (Video: Monica Akhtar/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

In an extraordinary statement, Cohen told a federal court Tuesday that Trump directed him to pay off women with whom he had had alleged affairs ahead of the 2016 election to keep their stories out of the media. The plea directly implicated the president, and Cohen said he violated campaign finance law at Trump’s direction “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”

Legal experts said Cohen’s statement could strengthen Daniels’s primary case and accelerate its movement through a federal court, creating the opportunity for Avenatti to depose Trump.

“My sense is that Avenatti is going to be able to get his white whale,” said Andy Wright, a former litigator and an associate White House counsel in the Obama administration.

Daniels is suing Trump to void the 2016 nondisclosure agreement that formally binds her from speaking about their alleged affair. She is also bringing a defamation case over a Trump tweet accusing her of a “con job” after Daniels said she was threatened in 2011 to keep silent about their relationship.

Trump’s “main potential legal liability stems from two things — one, from the information Michael Cohen might be able to provide, and two, the information that I may ultimately be able to disclose to the American public,” Avenatti said.

Daniels did not respond to requests for an interview.

Wright said Cohen’s plea casts the debate over the nondisclosure agreement — NDA, in legal shorthand — in a new light.

“If the NDA was part of a criminal conspiracy, then that’s going to very strongly bolster the idea that the contract itself might be void. . . . The NDA was basically the instrument of the payoff in the illegal scheme to protect the electoral interests, under that theory,” he said.

Trump faces a separate defamation suit in New York state from Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his old reality show, “The Apprentice,” who said he lied after she claimed he forcibly kissed and groped her in Los Angeles in 2007. The president has denied both Zervos’s and Daniels’s allegations.

These civil cases have operated under the radar compared with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and potential involvement of the Trump campaign. But the lawsuits are poised to draw the spotlight as plaintiffs seek to compel testimony from a sitting president.

Trump would be only the fifth president to be deposed while in office, according to legal experts. The last was former president Clinton.

Avenatti indicated this week that he expects U.S. District Judge S. James Otero in Los Angeles to lift his stay in Daniels’s nondisclosure agreement case, allowing their side to begin discovery.

“I would hope to be able to depose Cohen before Dec. 1,” Avenatti said. “We want both of these depositions to take place as quickly as possible. So we’re going to be pushing. I would take the depositions tomorrow if I was permitted to. We anticipate that they are going to oppose our efforts to depose both of them, so it could be a number of months.”

Otero denied Avenatti’s request for Trump to sit for a deposition in March and delayed the case while the federal investigation into Cohen, who is named as a defendant, concluded in New York. The next scheduling conference is set to take place Sept. 10.

Avenatti is likely to face opposition as he pushes for the deposition to actually take place.

“Michael is correct that this type of allegation [by Cohen] can strengthen a demand for a deposition. 

However, it’s very difficult to expedite depositions with sitting presidents,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School.

“It took a considerable length of time to finally get Bill Clinton in that chair,” he said. “The courts are highly deferential to the schedule and the demands of the presidency.”

Trump could be headed for a deposition sooner in New York. In June, a judge there ruled that he could be deposed in Zervos’s case and ordered that the interview take place by early 2019. If that timetable holds, the lawsuit could be headed to trial next summer.

Overshadowing each legal fight is the Paula Jones case, in which Jones, a former employee of the state of Arkansas, sued Clinton for alleged sexual harassment in 1994. The Supreme Court found that Clinton was not immune from civil litigation as a sitting president, and it was Clinton’s false statement during a deposition denying he had sex with a White House intern that led to his impeachment.

A deposition “creates real legal risk for Donald Trump,” Wright said.

“They’ve been operating under this idea that it’s not a crime to lie to the American people,” he said. 

“That may be true, but when you have a [deposition] transcript out there showing that you made statements contrary to what you said in the past, you have exposure to perjury.”

No matter what Trump says in a deposition, “even if he says the absolute, 100 percent truth,” he could still be at risk of a perjury indictment, given his past statements, Wright said.

Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report.

Will Trump’s New Mexico Deal Save NAFTA—or Kill It?

The agreement that purports to replace NAFTA does not include Canada for now.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks by phone with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto about a new bilateral trade agreement at the White House on Aug. 27. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

BY KEITH JOHNSON-

 AUGUST 27, 2018, 5:24 PM
The Trump administration on Monday announced what it called a breakthrough in talks with Mexico to fix NAFTA, but it’s not at all clear if Canada—or the U.S. Congress, for that matter—will support the outlines of the new trade deal.

Representatives of all three parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement had been trying for more than a year to renegotiate the deal. But in recent weeks, Washington and Mexico City decided to tackle their own bilateral issues first.

The agreement they reached Monday updates the trade relationship between the two countries, a necessary step on the road to a new three-way NAFTA deal. Trump administration officials said it includes updated terms on contentious areas such as auto manufacturing, dispute settlements, and labor protections.

But it could potentially leave Canada out in the cold and put the White House at odds with lawmakers in Congress who want to include America’s northern neighbor. It could also end up being little more than a public relations stunt by an administration desperate to secure a win after more than a year of failures on trade, according to analysts.

“This is a president with a tendency to take the sketchiest of preliminary agreements and tout them as done deals,” said Phil Levy, a senior fellow on the global economy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “This doesn’t seem like a well-thought-out plan that leads anywhere sensible.”

In announcing the “United States-Mexico Trade Agreement,” U.S. President Donald Trump declared the current NAFTA dead and threatened Canada with tariffs if it didn’t sign on to the revised terms worked out with Mexico. U.S. trade officials described the agreements reached over the weekend with Mexico as a big improvement over the current free trade pact between the three countries.

It would increase the share of automotive components made in North America, strengthen labor provisions, and update the 24-year-old pact to reflect the growth of the digital economy. It would also include a periodic review of the agreement to allow countries to address problems every few years, something the current NAFTA lacked.

“We had a NAFTA agreement that had gotten out of whack, that needed updating and modernizing,” said U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in a call with reporters. “We’ve now come out of the other side of that process with Mexico, and we hope Canada can now join that process.”

One breakthrough seems to have come in U.S.-Mexico energy trade, a sticking point between the two sides until as recently as last week. Mexico recently opened its oil and gas sector to foreign investors, including many from the United States. But incoming Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has long opposed opening the country’s energy sector, and his negotiators had pressed to revise the energy parts of the agreement with the United States. Ultimately, the framework agreement reached between the United States and Mexico seems to enshrine the opening of Mexico’s oil patch and provide guarantees for foreign investors.

“They recognized that NAFTA is critical for Mexico,” said Duncan Wood, the director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. “So if they had to compromise on energy, so be it.”

Although Trump threatened to slap additional tariffs on Canada if it didn’t come to terms on a new pact this week, administration officials said the side agreement with Mexico wasn’t meant to put pressure on Ottawa. “It’s not part of a negotiating strategy,” said one administration official. “Ideally Canada will be in; if not, we will notify Congress of a bilateral trade deal with Mexico.”

Despite the administration’s triumphant tone on Monday, there are numerous legal, legislative, and economic problems with the proposal.

First, though Trump declared NAFTA dead, only Congress can actually undo the legislation that created the three-way trade bloc in 1994. And lawmakers from both parties have been eager to update and preserve—not scuttle—a deal that has turbocharged trade between the three countries in the last quarter-century.

It’s also not clear that Mexico has much interest in a bilateral trade deal with the United States that excludes Canada. Outgoing Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in a televised phone call with Trump on Monday, stressed Mexico’s desire to include Canada in the pact. Peña Nieto reiterated on Twitter his desire for a full update of NAFTA, rather than a bilateral trade deal.

“There is so much work to be done to make it a three-way deal, and a three-way deal is critical,” Wood said. But Mexico’s foreign minister on Monday suggested a bilateral deal without Canada could be acceptable.

U.S. officials, when asked by reporters for clarity, could not say if Mexico is comfortable with a bilateral trade deal instead of the three-way accord they have been seeking for almost two years.
If there is to be an update of NAFTA, Canada will have to agree to the new provisions announced by the United States and Mexico. Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said early Monday that Canada must sign off on any new three-way trade agreement, and she cautioned that it would only sign a new agreement that was good for her country. She will start talks on Tuesday on the revised pact in Washington.

The Trump administration’s Mexico-first approach could also run into problems on Capitol Hill, Levy noted.

Under the president’s trade promotion authority, the White House notified Congress last year that it was renegotiating NAFTA, not seeking a new bilateral pact with Mexico. That means it would have to start from scratch with lawmakers on a U.S.-Mexico trade pact, which would push any deal well into next year. Alternatively, the White House could just ship the new Mexico deal to Congress—but then lawmakers would be able to substantially rewrite the pact, which could scuttle all the agreements already reached with Mexico.

And even if Congress signed off on a trade agreement with just Mexico while nixing the free trade deal with Canada, there would be costs for the U.S. economy. Two-way trade between the United States and Canada, at $673 billion last year, is larger than that between the United States and Mexico, which came to $616 billion. Many key sectors, especially the automotive industry, have supply chains that snake across all three countries. Reaching a deal with only Mexico would throw that industry into disarray, experts warned.

Trump’s threats to slap tariffs on imported cars from countries like Canada (and some factories in Mexico) would cause further uncertainty for businesses that have spent the last two years wondering if NAFTA will survive. The administration’s tariffs on steel and aluminum have already raised prices for consumers and hammered many manufacturing industries in the United States. A fresh round of tariffs on autos would be more painful.

“Companies have no idea what the level of tariffs will be, if we will have free trade or a complete breakdown,” Levy said. “We’ve gone through all this with steel and aluminum, but the auto industry is a lot bigger.”

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband speaks out about her imprisonment in Iran

Cathy Newman-27 Aug 2018Presenter

The husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been speaking about the decision of the Iranian authorities to order her to return to jail.

She spent the weekend with her four-year-old daughter Gabrielle after being allowed out of jail for three days.

The charity worker has spent nearly two-and-half years in Evin prison in Tehran after being accused of spying.

Myanmar military leaders must face genocide charges – UN report

UNHCR/Roger Arnold

Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar flee to Bangladesh after facing brutal persecution that UN officials have said may amount to crimes against humanity.

Top military commanders in Myanmar should be investigated and prosecuted for the “gravest” crimes against civilians under international law, including genocide, United Nations-appointed investigatorssaid on Monday.

27 August 2018

The development follows the release of a report into the circumstances surrounding the mass exodus of more than 700,000 Rohingya people from Myanmar, beginning in mid-August last year – events previously described by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

The crimes committed include murder, rape, torture, sexual slavery, persecution and enslavement, according to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar.

Speaking to journalists in Geneva, the investigators - Marzuki Darusman, Radhika Coomaraswamy and Christopher Sidoti – underlined the horrific and organized nature of the brutality meted out on civilians in Myanmar’s Rakhine state since 2011, as well as Kachin and Shan states.

“The fact-finding Mission has concluded, on reasonable grounds, that the patterns of gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law that it is found, amount to the gravest crime under international law,” Mr. Sidoti said.

“These have principally been committed by the military, the Tatmadaw,” he added, referring to Myanmar’s armed forces. “The Mission has concluded that criminal investigation and prosecution is warranted, focusing on the top Tatmadaw generals, in relation to the three categories of crimes under international law; genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

Included in the list of alleged perpetrators are Commander-in-Chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing and five other commanders.

“In Myanmar, there is a very clear chain of command,” Mr. Sidot explained, and added: “There is no doubt in our minds whatsoever that what we saw happen in Rakhine as a whole, would not have happened without it, firstly, being within the knowledge of the senior military leadership and secondly, under their effective control. And it’s because of the clarity of the chain of command in Myanmar that we have recommended the investigation and prosecution of these six.”

Of well over 800 testimonies gathered, one in particular highlighted the extent of the abuse, that of a survivor who fled to neighbouring Bangladesh. “I was lucky, I was only raped by three men,” she is quoted as saying.

Such was the extent of the horrific violations that Ms. Coomaraswamy – a former UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict – said she was shocked by what she had found.

“The scale, brutality, and systematic nature of rape and violence indicate that they are part of a deliberate strategy to intimidate, terrorize, or punish the civilian population,” she said. “They’re used as a tactic of war that we found include rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, forced nudity and mutilations.”

UN Photo/Violaine Martin

Marzuki Darusman, Chair of the Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar (centre), flanked by Mission members Christopher Sidoti (l) and Radhika Coomaraswamy (r), briefs the press on their report, UN Office at Geneva, 27 August 2018.

Before the fact-finding Mission delivers its findings to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council in September, Chairperson Marzuki Darusman highlighted that one of the panel’s key recommendations required the attention of the UN Security Council:

“The Mission called for the situation in Myanmar to be referred to the international criminal court and that, of course, is the task of the Security Council to undertake. And so, the message to the Security Council is of course, ‘Refer Myanmar to the [International Criminal Court].’”