Six In The Morning Wednesday 26 June 2019

 

Democrats get their man — Mueller — for blockbuster hearings

Updated 0522 GMT (1322 HKT) June 26, 2019

Robert Mueller’s long-awaited public testiomony next month will give Democrats their best and perhaps last chance to seize on the Russia scandal to try to inflict a decisive political wound on President Donald Trump.

The former special counsel’s appearance on Capitol Hill on July 17, announced late Tuesday, represents a serious blow to a President who has spent weeks misrepresenting Mueller’s final report.
Democrats hope the spectacle of the respected former FBI director testifying on television will move Americans against Trump in a way Mueller’s dense, 448-page report did not.

Hong Kong protesters call on foreign leaders to raise crisis at G20

Demonstrators march on consulates to petition overseas governments to assist in fight against ‘authoritarian regime’

Hundreds have gathered at a rally in Hong Kong and marched to foreign consulates to lobby international governments about the city’s political crisis during the G20 summit this week.

President Xi Jinping of China and the US president, Donald Trump, are expected to meet at the summit in Japan amid heightened trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

The U.S. vs. ChinaIn A Newly Bipolar World, Europe is Caught in the Middle

The trade war between the United States and China is increasingly creating a bipolar world. As U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare to meet at the upcoming G-20 summit, Europe is facing an increasingly tense dilemma: Which side should it choose?

Thailand orders phone users in Muslim-majority south to submit photos

An order for mobile phone users in Thailand’s restive south to submit a photo of themselves for facial recognition purposes is causing uproar from opponents who see it as further curtailing the rights of the Muslim-majority population.

But an army spokesman on Wednesday defended the move, saying the facial identification scheme is needed to root out insurgents deploying mobile phone-detonated home-made bombs.

Thailand’s three southernmost states — Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat — have since 2004 been rife with conflict between Malay-Muslim rebels and the Buddhist-majority Thai state, which annexed the region around a century ago.

Migrant children crisis: Democrats agree $4.5bn aid for migrants at border

Democrats in the US House of Representatives have approved $4.5bn (£3.5bn) in humanitarian aid for the southern border.

Several migrant deaths, coupled with reports of “severely neglected” children at a Texan border patrol station, have helped shape the debate.

But the bill faces a tough path through the Republican-controlled Senate.

It is considering a rival bill with fewer restrictions on how border agencies can spend the money.

The Democrats’ version, in contrast, contains several strict rules setting out that the funds can be used for humanitarian aid only, and “not for immigration raids, not detention beds, not a border wall”, a statement from House appropriations committee chair Nita Lowey said.

How a Fringe Muslim Cleric From Australia Became a Hero to America’s Far Right

FOR ISLAMOPHOBES, Mohamad Tawhidi is something very close to a godsend. A Shia Muslim cleric, raised in Australia and educated in Iran, Tawhidi presents himself as an Islamic reformer who embraces and amplifies far-right warnings that immigration by his fellow Muslims poses an existential threat to Western civilization.

“He’s a hero,” the former New York Assembly Member Dov Hikind said last month, introducing Tawhidi to an audience of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. “He is a super-special individual that God has introduced to this world.”