5: People Spent the Weekend Showing Their Contempt for the UK Government
Unsurprisingly, the disaster at Grenfell was at the forefront of protesters’ minds.
Most campaign slogans are discarded after elections, since they no longer serve a purpose. If they are picked up afterwards, it is either as an ironic rejoinder to the successful government (so much for the “change”!) or to cast retrospective gloom on the losing side. “For the Many, Not the Few” is peculiar. Nine days after the election returned a hung parliament, at a protest outside Whitehall yesterday – “No Coalition of Chaos with the DUP” – you could still hear the slogan on Labour supporters’ lips: reprised into speeches, in conversation, on placards.
This is partly because, with another general election on the horizon, Jeremy Corbyn has instructed the party to stay in “permanent campaign mode”, but it’s also because the slogan, taken from the end of Shelley’s poem “The Masque of Anarchy”, describes a distribution of power and wealth in British society that remains true independent of election results – one that feels all the more visceral at the end of a week like this, with the blackened remains of Grenfell Tower in everyone’s mind.
The protest was supposed to express opposition to the Prime Minister’s plans to form an informal coalition with the far-right Democratic Unionist Party, but it naturally felt centred around recent events. The Prime Minister’s craven, pitiful reaction to the fire in west London has alienated figures in her party and even usually supportive newspapers: “Tories Tell May: You Have Ten Days”, was The Sunday Times‘s headline. There was a sense amongst the few thousand protesters that Grenfell represented both the “bankruptcy” of the “social order” that enabled it to happen, to quote the speech from co-organiser Owen Jones, and the fact that Theresa May’s premiership appears to have lost popular consent. Her departure is now considered a self-evident truth. (Although, like all those other self-evident truths that have been proved wrong, it won’t happen until it happens.)
Vice News
4: Turkish troops arrive in Qatar for military exercise
The Qatari defence ministry has announced the arrival of the first group of Turkish soldiers in the capital, Doha, to take part in joint military exercises.
The forces conducted their first training at Tariq bin Ziyad military base on Sunday, the ministry said.
The exercises, which had been long planned, are part a mutual agreement aimed at strengthening the defence capabilities of both sides, as well as boosting efforts to combat armed groups and maintaining stability in the region.
Aljazeera
3: THE HISTORY CHANNEL IS FINALLY TELLING THE STUNNING SECRET STORY OF THE WAR ON DRUGS
starting Sunday night and running through Wednesday the History Channel is showing a new four-part series called “America’s War on Drugs.” Not only is it an important contribution to recent American history, it’s also the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past fifty years.
That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham. For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the world’s largest drug cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America.
On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising. The voluminous documentation of this fact in dozens of books has long been available to anyone with curiosity and a library card.
The Intercept
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has won a major legal victory in federal court which may have the power to force the shutdown of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration failed to conduct an adequate environmental review of the pipeline, after President Trump ordered the Army Corps to fast-track and greenlight its approval. The judge requested additional briefings next week on whether the pipeline should be shut off until the completion of a full review of a potential oil spill’s impacts on fishing and hunting rights, as well as environmental justice. The pipeline faced months of massive resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, members of hundreds of other indigenous tribes from across the Americas, as well as non-Native allies. We speak with Standing Rock Sioux Chair Dave Archambault II and Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.Democracy Now
1: ‘The helpline is hopeless’: Grenfell relatives criticise lack of information
Relatives of a family missing after the Grenfell fire believe their loved ones did not make it out of the tower, but have been unable to confirm this and are critical of the lack of information from authorities.
Abdulaziz and Fouzia El-Wahabi, 52 and 42, and their three children, Yasin, 21, Nurhada, 16, and eight-year-old Mehdi, lived on the 21st floor.
Five days on, Sanaa Jones, 28, from south London, said she feared her uncle and his family were dead, but said this had not yet been officially confirmed.
“It was me asking [the police] direct questions [that] led our family to come to the conclusion that they didn’t make it out,” she said. “It’s a total mess, the way the authorities handled is disgraceful.”
The Guardian
