TDB Top 5 International Stories: Sunday 16th October 2016

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5: Breaking: ND Prosecutor Seeks “Riot” Charges Against Amy Goodman For Reporting On Pipeline Protest

 

A North Dakota state prosecutor has sought to charge award-winning journalist Amy Goodman with participating in a “riot” for filming an attack on Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters. The new charge comes after the prosecutor dropped criminal trespassing charges.

State’s Attorney Ladd R Erickson filed the new charges on Friday before District Judge John Grinsteiner who will decide on Monday (October 17) whether probable cause exists for the riot charge.

Goodman has travelled to North Dakota to face the charges and will appear at Morton County court on Monday at 1:30 pm local time (CDT) if the charges are approved.

“I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting, ” said Goodman. “I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters.”

In an e-mail to Goodman’s attorney Tom Dickson on October 12, State’s Attorney Erickson admitted that there were “legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute.” In an earlier email on October 12, Erickson wrote that Goodman “was not acting as a journalist,” despite that fact that the state’s criminal complaint recognized that, “Amy Goodman can be seen on the video …interviewing protesters.” In that email Erikson justified his quote in the Bismarck Tribune in which he had said that “She’s [Amy Goodman] a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.” The First Amendment, of course, applies irrespective of the content of a reporter’s story.

Democracy Now

 

4:  Tony Abbott Takes to Twitter in Defence of Donald Trump

Just when you thought you’d never have to see an elected politician use the term “haters,” former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has come to the defence of Donald Trump on Twitter.

“Before the Trump haters get too excited,” Abbott tweeted after a controversial interview with Sky News’ Paul Murray Live on Thursday night, labelling Trump’s economic and national defence policies as “classic conservatism.” While the former PM acknowledged some of Trump’s views are “OTT” he was firm that boosting defence spending and lowering taxes were central tenets to conservative politics.

Abbott was hugely critical of a motion that passed through New South Wales’ state Senate, which labelled Trump a “revolting slug.” The former PM told Sky that “many of the Trump positions are reasonable enough.”

Vice News

 

3: Life after Trump: Republicans brace for betrayal and civil war after 2016

Accusations of betrayal. Demagoguery and hatred. The bunker in Berlin. Comparisons with Adolf Hitler have been tempting throughout Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency – never more so than at its mad, destructive climax.

The Republican’s presidential bid appears to have become the campaign equivalent of the last days of the reich, when Germany’s leadership raged at bearers of bad news from the battlefield, ordered non-existent divisions to launch counteroffensives, and embraced a nihilistic plan to burn it all down and take everyone along.

The difference is, unlike then, there seems to be little awareness of impending defeat or understanding of how it came to be. Instead, attitudes are like those after the first world war when Germans on the far right coined a word for their myth of betrayal: Dolchstoßlegende.

The Guardian

 

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2: D.C. Hivemind Mulls How Clinton Can Pass Huge Corporate Tax Cut

TREATING THE WHOLE voting thing as a formality, serious political players are now pondering how exactly President Hillary Clinton can pass what Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called “a giant wet kiss for tax dodgers.”

This discussion isn’t happening on television, where normal people would hear about it. Or on Reddit, where people would freak out about it. To the degree it’s taking place in public at all, it surfaces in elite publications, where only elites are paying attention.

For instance, Peter Orszag, a top Obama economic official before he left to cash in with Citigroup, just wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times on how to make the wet kiss happen.

Few regular Americans read the Financial Times, and even if they did, what Orszag says requires a little deciphering:

What, then, are the prospects for new initiatives in a Clinton administration? … Mrs Clinton has … proposed $275bn in new infrastructure spending over five years, $250bn in direct federal spending and $25bn to set up an infrastructure bank. The question is how to finance this spending.

Deficit financing may be sensible but is anathema to House Republicans. So additional revenue from corporate income tax is commonly proposed. And that is where things become difficult.

There is some bipartisan agreement — for example, that profits already accumulated overseas by US companies should be subject to a tax rate well below the statutory 35 per cent, regardless of whether those profits are repatriated. But there is little consensus on whether such a tax should also apply in future and what the rate should be. …

To create room for the necessary compromises, Mrs Clinton would do well to avoid too many fights with her own party about whom she appoints to her administration. Some senior congressional Democrats on the left are already preparing to oppose “hell no” candidates who have worked in finance. If Mrs Clinton largely defers to them, however misguided their approach, she may end up with more flexibility to negotiate later with a Republican Congress.

The Intercept

1: Syria’s war: Lausanne meeting fails to break deadlock

A new round of diplomatic talks has failed once again to break a tense deadlock on how to end fighting in Syria, as a nine-nation meeting in the Swiss city of Lausanne did not agree on any concrete action to stop the violence.

With clashes still raging in Aleppo, Saturday’s talks, convened by US Secretary of State John Kerry, concluded after more than four hours without any joint statement from the participating countries.
Inside Story – More peace talks over Syria, but can they end the war?
Kerry was seeking a new path to peace after failing to secure a ceasefire in direct talks with Russia amid increasing international outrage over the Russian and Syrian bombardment of Aleppo’s rebel-held east.

Aljazeera

 

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