TDB Top 5 International Stories: Friday 25th November 2016

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5: Who Exactly Are the ‘Elites’ Rich Populist Politicians Are Complaining About?

We hear dozens of bullshit political buzzwords in the media every day. Boots on the ground, wedge, unify, patriot, extremism, grassroots. Politicians and pundits use them so often it’s easy to not even notice just how often we hear them.

“Elites,” is a recent favourite of populist candidates. On the right, Donald Trump used it, Rob Ford used it, Brexit leader Nigel Farage used it, and on the left, Bernie Sanders used it. Now Kellie Leitch, the alleged frontrunner for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, seems to use it more than almost any other word. When two prominent Conservatives withdrew their endorsements of her citing their concerns about her controversial immigration policies, she wrote them off as “party elites.”

It’s been pointed out that Leitch—and most politicians who use the war on the elites as a campaign strategy—isn’t exactly disenfranchised. Leitch was a paediatric surgeon (translation: rich person) at Toronto’s SickKids Hospital before she became a Member of Parliament for Simcoe-Grey in the Muskoka region of Ontario.

She had more explaining to do when a Postmedia report revealed there was a $500-a-plate campaign fundraiser for her set up by downtown lawyers in Toronto. When she was questioned on CTV’s Question Period about having such an expensive event while campaigning against elites, she said working hard and having “an elite education,” doesn’t necessarily make someone part of the “elite” she refers to.

So who exactly is an “elite” these days? VICE spoke with some experts to find out.

Vice News

4: Trump CIA Pick Mike Pompeo Depicted War on Terror as Islamic Battle Against Christianity

MIKE POMPEO, DONALD Trump’s pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, has at times depicted the fight against terrorism as a war between radical Muslims, on one side, and the Christian faith on the other.

“This threat to America,” Pompeo told a church group in Wichita in 2014, is from a minority of Muslims “who deeply believe that Islam is the way and the light and the only answer.”

“They abhor Christians,” Pompeo said, “and will continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.”

At an event last year sponsored by the Westminster Institute, a Virginia-based think tank, an audience member asked why President Obama wants Iran “to win,” and whether such sympathies came from “new leftism or socialism or pro-Muslim” ideas.

Pompeo didn’t reject the idea. He said he had “made a commitment to my wife that I would stop trying to get into Barack Obama’s head. You know, to reduce our psychiatric care bill.” Still talking about Obama, Pompeo said that “just as with any leader, their intentions and motivations are very important to understand. Right? It requires you to apply a rational approach to thinking about this and I for the life of me cannot come up with a rational approach for him.”

The Intercept

3: Obama administration rushes to protect public lands before Trump takes office

Barack Obama’s administration is rushing through conservation safeguards for large areas of public land ahead of Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House, presenting a conundrum for the new president’s goal of opening up more places for oil and gas drilling.

On Monday, the US Department of the Interior banned gold mining on 30,000 acres of land near the northern entrance of Yellowstone national park. This follows announcements last week that barred drilling in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska and a brokered settlement that cancelled 32,000 acres of mining leases on Montana land considered by the Blackfeet tribe as “like a church, a divine sanctuary”.

The Guardian 

2: Arab-Kurd tensions simmer in shadow of Mosul campaign

The Kurdistan Regional Government has changed course, declaring its commitment to Baghdad to retreat from territory that Kurdish forces have taken from ISIL.

On November 16, Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, said in a press conference that his soldiers would not retreat from the land “liberated with their blood” from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant group, also known as ISIL or ISIS.

“There will be no negotiations about the territories liberated by Peshmerga before the Mosul offensive,” Barzani declared. “This is a new chapter. ISIS is on the path to defeat. Peshmerga shed their blood to free Kurdistan’s land and end the suffering of our people.”

But the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, later retracted Barazani remarks, saying that his comments, originally made in Kurdish, were taken out of context and “mistranslated”.

Aljazeera

1: Standing Rock Special: Historian Says Dakota Access Co. Attack Came on Anniv. of Whitestone Massacre

While reporting from the standoff at Standing Rock in September, Democracy Now! sat down with Standing Rock Sioux tribal historian LaDonna Brave Bull Allard to speak about another attack against her tribe—this one on the same day 153 years before. On September 3, 1863, the U.S. Army massacred more than 300 members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in what became known as the Whitestone massacre. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard is not only the tribal historian, she’s also one of the founders of the Sacred Stone Camp, launched on her land April 1, 2016, to resist the Dakota Access pipeline.

Democracy Now