Ben Shapiro- too much hate?

I’m sure this would be much more impactful if I had any impression at all of Ben Shapiro other than random Republican asshole.

Gangnam: The scandal rocking the playground of K-pop

Earlier this year, the meticulously managed world of K-pop was rocked by scandal.

Seungri, a singer in one of the world’s most famous boy bands, Big Bang, was questioned by police over allegations he was procuring prostitutes for his business and had embezzled funds at Burning Sun, a nightclub he part-owned in the exclusive Gangnam district of Seoul, South Korea.

Several of his celebrity K-pop friends were also caught sharing sex videos and bragging in a chat room about raping women. One by one, Korean heartthrobs more used to being mobbed by fans found themselves fending off reporters as they made their way to the police station to face questions from drug-taking to rape.

‘Climate apartheid’: UN expert says human rights may not survive

Right to life is likely to be undermined alongside the rule of law, special rapporteur says

Damian CarringtonEnvironment editor

Tue 25 Jun 2019 09.00 BST

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.

Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law.

Iran says new US sanctions mean ‘permanent closure’ of diplomacy

Iran said on Tuesday that new US sanctions targeting the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials meant a “permanent closure” of diplomacy between Tehran and Washington.

Intense heat wave to hit northern Europe

Record temperatures are predicted in northern Europe this week, with authorities in Germany and France on alert. Experts have said heat waves are on the increase worldwide, calling it further evidence of climate change.

A searing heat wave has begun to spread across Europe, with Germany, France and Belgium likely to experience extreme temperatures in the coming days.

In Germany, temperatures are expected to exceed 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, topping the country’s previous June record of 38.2 degrees Celsius set in Frankfurt in 1947.

The short life and long journey of the 6-year-old girl from India who died near the US-Mexico border

By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN

Updated 0119 GMT (0919 HKT) June 25, 2019

Ethiopia mourns after officials killed during failed coup bid

A day of national mourning observed and the government announces military funeral as the alleged coup leader is killed.

Ethiopia held a day of mourning on Monday in the wake of a failed coup bid in the country’s Amhara region that saw the killing of five senior officials.

Flags in the capital Addis Ababa flew at half-mast after a day of mourning was announced on state television.

“All of us will remember the people who lost their lives for our togetherness and unity,” a television announcer said, reading a statement from parliament speaker Tagesse Chafo.

Somewhere swimming out there is a quote from a D.C. Insider that goes something like “I wish the whole Russia thing never happened. We’d be impeaching him today.”

Probably apocryphal and I mostly disagree. I do think there are plenty of buckets full of Impeachable Behavior that don’t necessarily intersect except in the Criminal Activity of Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio.

Conditions at migrant detention centers are ‘horrendous.’ Trump, Pence blame Democrats.
By Meagan Flynn, Washington Post
June 24, 2019

Concerns about CBP facilities reached a fever pitch this weekend after Binford and a team of several other attorneys traveled to the Clint facility to interview dozens of detained children.

The attorneys were investigating Clint as part of ongoing litigation monitoring whether the Trump administration is complying with a 1997 consent decree. Known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, it requires that the federal government keep immigrant children in “safe and sanitary” conditions while they are in custody and that they are transferred out of detention quickly.

The attorneys typically do not speak to the media about what they find inside these facilities because of the pending litigation — but after visiting Clint, they felt they could not remain silent, Binford said.

Some children had been detained for as many as three weeks, she said, although by law, child migrants are supposed to be transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services within three days. They should then be placed with a parent, relative or guardian already living in the United States. The failure by the federal government to do so — rather than Congress’s failure to send aid, Binford argued — has left children languishing in overcrowded facilities meant for adults, with some sleeping on cold concrete because there are not enough beds and mats, she said.

“By the end of the second day, we were on the phone with the legal counsel on the case saying, ‘These kids are at risk. There’s gonna be another kid who dies if we don’t do something.’ This is not just about complying with the Flores agreement,” she said. “This is inhumane.”

Binford saw a 4-year-old with hair so matted and dirty she thought it would have to be cut off. The child had not bathed in more than a week, she said. She witnessed a 14-year-old caring for a 2-year-old without a diaper, shrugging as the baby urinated as they sat at a table because she did not know what to do.

Some of the kids had showered or brushed their teeth only once or twice in three weeks, Binford said. Some did not have toothbrushes at all. The warehouse had portable toilets; the main building had toilets in plain view, which humiliated the kids, who tried to cover themselves with blankets as they sat on the toilet, she said.

Some had been separated from their parents and siblings for undisclosed reasons, she said, and some were inconsolable.

“One of the terrible ironies is one of the little girls we interviewed was separated from her mother, her father, her younger siblings,” Binford said. “Her father told her not to worry, that they were going to take her to a place that was better for children.

“And then they brought her to this facility.”
…
The attorneys involved in the Flores case have been demanding in court that the government provide children with basic necessities such as toothbrushes, soap and adequate sleeping conditions since the Obama administration.

Last week, a Justice Department lawyer argued that the government shouldn’t be required to provide those basic hygiene products because none of them explicitly appear in the Flores agreement — a position that astonished all three judges on a panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Moving on to White People Problems, like Rape-

Have we become numb to Trump’s loathsomeness?
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
June 24, 2019

When we look back on June 2019, we’ll say that this was the time when a credible allegation of rape was made against the president of the United States, and he had already shown himself to be such a loathsome character that it was treated as a third-tier story, not worthy of much more than a passing mention here and there in the news.

After New York magazine published author and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s account last Friday of an encounter she says she had with Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman that ended with him raping her in a dressing room, many of our most important news outlets reacted with only minor interest. Most of the nation’s biggest newspapers — aside from The Post — left it off on their front page the next day. None of the five Sunday shows mentioned it at all.

There are many reasons to find Carroll’s allegation credible. She’s a fairly well-known public figure. Her description of what happened to her — him slamming her against a wall, mashing his face against hers, yanking down her tights, and penetrating her — accords not only with the allegations of multiple other women but Trump’s own words on that infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged that he can sexually assault any woman he pleases. “I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
…
Yet Trump’s position on Carroll’s allegation is the same he has taken on all the others: She’s a liar. He doesn’t say it was a misunderstanding or it was consensual, just that she’s a liar. That is also the position taken by his aides, his supporters and pretty much every Republican who has been forced to address the president’s horrific history: These women are all liars.

This is a common and ludicrous myth propagated by alleged sexual predators such as Trump, Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves, and the people who defend them: that women regularly accuse powerful men of sexual assault because doing so is such a great career move. It’s actually a great way to have your life ruined. What woman wouldn’t want to render herself unable to find work and be targeted with hate mail and death threats?

Which is why we have to ask: For every E. Jean Carroll or Natasha Stoynoff or Summer Zervos, how many women experienced something similar at Trump’s hands but made the perfectly rational decision not to go public? How many said, “What’s the point? What does being the 10th or 15th or 20th woman to accuse him get me? I’ll be destroyed, and he’ll get away with it just like he always has.”

That’s what Carroll grappled with right after this incident and in the years since.
…
Weinstein and Moonves paid at least some kind of price; they lost their positions and in Weinstein’s case might face criminal charges. But Trump’s supporters have so much invested in him that they will disbelieve any allegation no matter how compelling, and will do everything in their power to protect him from accountability.

But the rest of us need not acquiesce to their dismissal of these stories out of some supposedly savvy assessment of political realities. We can speak the truth:

If the allegations are true, the president of the United States is certainly a sexual predator, and most probably a rapist. We will never know for sure how numerous are his victims, but at a minimum they might number in the dozens.

To those who say, “That’s awful, but what matters now is what he does as president,” I understand. But this all must be part of the reckoning we eventually make with this sickening era in our history. Not just his boundless corruption, his bigotry, his cruelty, his eagerness to allow hostile foreign governments to twist our elections. This, too: One of our great political parties selected as its champion the single most odious and immoral figure in American public life, then went to every length they could to defend him.

I have no illusions that Republicans will ever face the accountability they deserve for their tireless service to Trump, any more than he will face accountability for his own actions. But we can’t ever stop saying it, crying it, shouting it: This is who you gave us. You are complicit in all he is and all he has done. I’d say you should be ashamed, were it not for the fact that you’ve proved you have no shame.

History, at least, will remember — if we make sure it does. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something.

It Never Gets Old