5: A Trip to France’s Post Industrial Heartland to Work Out Who’s Going to Win the Election
In Amiens, a dishwasher plant is closing, taking jobs with it – and the far-left and right are filling the vacuum.
As you leave the station in Amiens, the first thing that greets you is Gotham City: a slate grey skyscraper a hundred metres high. This is the Tour Perret. Dreamed up in 1944 by its architect as a symbol of rebirth after a huge bombing raid, it was finished in 1954 and, for nearly a decade, stood as Europe’s tallest building, thrusting Amiens out into a bright, brash new world.
The French have a name for the period until 1975 – Les Trente Glorieuses. The Thirty Glorious Years. That golden moment of Orangina and sleek modernism, of nouvelle vague films and full employment, Charles de Gaulle and Serge Gainsbourg, and knowing basically what you were doing anything for.
Well that’s fucked now.
Vice News
4: UN raises famine alarm in Yemen
The UN has warned that 17 million Yemenis will be in famine unless the world sends urgent humanitarian help.
Antonio Guterres, the UN chief, issued a call to action on Tuesday at the aid conference held in Geneva where donor countries pledged almost $1.1bn.
But UN says the amount is half of what is needed to combat what it is calling “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”.
More than two million children are acutely malnourished in Yemen. Aid workers say almost half a million of them are suffering from severe acute malnutrition which is a life-threatening condition.
Aljazeera
As more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners have entered their ninth day on a massive hunger strike inside Israeli jails, we are joined by the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, who has come to the United States to receive the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award for his work as co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement. At the award ceremony, Barghouti dedicated the prize to Palestinians on hunger strike. He was almost prevented from attending after Israeli police arrested him, seizing his passport and forbidding him from leaving the country. An Israeli court eventually temporarily lifted the travel ban.
Democracy Now
2: North Korea conducts live-fire drill with US submarine nearby, raising tensions
The North Korean army conducted a live-fire drill with massed artillery hours after a US submarine armed with cruise missiles docked at a South Korean base for naval exercises, further raising tensions in a volatile battle of nerves in north-east Asia.
Between 300 and 400 long-range artillery pieces, capable of hitting Seoul, took part in the drill on Tuesday, according to the Yonhap news agency quoting government officials.
The exercise, on the anniversary of the founding of the North Korean army, was a clear reminder that North Korea could destroy large swaths of the South Korean capital.
However, the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, chose not to use the occasion to conduct the nation’s sixth nuclear test or launch a long-range missile – actions which the Trump administration said would trigger an unspecified US response.
The Guardian
1: KOCH INDUSTRIES AND OTHER CORPORATIONS LOBBIED FOR DONALD TRUMP’S CABINET PICKS, FILINGS SHOW
MANY OF DONALD TRUMP’S cabinet nominations faced vocal opposition from constituents and public interest groups. But well-connected corporate lobbyists stalked the halls of Congress to make sure Trump’s team was confirmed by the Senate, new filings show.
Koch Industries, a fossil fuel conglomerate that owns a variety of business interests that have clashed with environmental regulators, directly lobbied to help confirm Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
The firm’s latest disclosure form reports that its in-house corporate lobbying team spent $3.1 million to influence lawmakers over the first three months of the year on a variety of issues affecting its bottom line, including the EPA’s Clean Power Rule on carbon emissions, carbon pricing, the Clean Air Act and “nominations for various positions at the Department of Energy.”
Other groups with a vested stake in the administration’s agenda also disclosed they had lobbied senators to confirm Trump’s nominees.
The American Apparel & Footwear Association, a trade group that lobbies largely on trade and labor standard issues on behalf of clothing manufacturers and retailers, lobbied in support of Andrew Puzder, Trump’s initial pick to lead the Labor Department — and, after Republican senators balked at the fast-food executive, in support of replacement nominee Alexander Acosta. The group’s filing showed it spent $176,485 on advocacy in the beginning of the year, though it did not specify how much of the lobbying total was spent on the confirmation efforts.
The Intercept
