Theresa May expected to announce her resignation – live news

Latest news as prime minister widely expected to bow to pressure from Tory MPs and reveal the date she will leave Downing Street

• Theresa May expected to name exit date on Friday
• ‘Time finally runs out’: what the papers say about Theresa May
• European election predictions: what the pollsters are forecasting

This is an interesting thread from the Guardian’s Paris bureau chief, Angelique Chrisafis, who visited the north west to write this pieceabout the fallout from the Brexit chaos from a European perspective. “No idea how this all ends,” she concludes.

India braces for Kashmir backlash as ‘most wanted’ militant shot dead by security forces

Zakir Musa was leader of an al-Qaeda affiliate in disputed region between India and Pakistan

Adam WithnallDelhi @adamwithnall

India says it has killed the separatist leader Zakir Musa, a man widely referred to as the country’s “most wanted terrorist”, during an operation in southern Kashmir.

Musa was the head of an al-Qaeda linked group in Indian administered Kashmir, and the most prominent armed militant working to oppose Delhi’s rule over the restive region.

Colonel Rajesh Kalia, an Indian army spokesman, said security forces tracked Musa to a village in the southern Tral area of the valley and encircled the civilian home where he was hiding, in what is known as a “cordon and search” operation.

Netherlands poll surprise: Anti-EU parties fall short

Pro-European parties in the Netherlands are predicted to win most of the country’s European Parliament seats, exit polls show. Dutch voters were among the first to take part in four days of voting across the continent.

Dutch pro-EU parties were on track for a surprise win in the European Parliament election, according to an exit poll Thursday that suggested that populist Euroskeptics had failed to make previously forecasted gains.

The Labor party of European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans looked set to win five out of the 26 seats allocated for the Netherlands, according to the Ipsos poll for the Dutch public broadcaster NOS.

After years of fierce debate, Taiwan celebrates the first same-sex weddings in Asia

By Ben Westcott, Matt Rivers and Jo Shelley, CNN

Updated 0828 GMT (1628 HKT) May 24, 2019

Iran vows no surrender – even if bombed by ‘enemies’

War rhetoric ratchets up again as Iranian president says his people will never give up the fight for their independence.

Iran will not surrender to US pressure and will never abandon its goals even if it is attacked, President Hassan Rouhani said on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, Iran’s top military chief said the standoff between Tehran and Washington was a “clash of wills”, warning any enemy “adventurism” would meet a crushing response, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

Tensions are festering between the two countries after Washington sent more military hardware to the Middle East in a show of force against what US officials say are Iranian threats to its troops and interests in the region.

School students walk out in global climate strike

School students in Australia and New Zealand have gone on strike, marking the start of a worldwide day of climate change protests.

Organisers expect more than one million young people will participate in at least 110 countries on Friday.

The protesters are calling for politicians and businesses to take action to fight climate change.

The strikes are inspired by school student Greta Thunberg who protested outside Sweden’s parliament in 2018.

What day is it? How did I get into bed? What are all those empty Tequila bottles?

Actually it wasn’t like that at all. I had family obligations that took most of the day and it’s only going to get more like that as we move deeper into Spring/Summer/Fall travel season. I try to be dutiful for my readers and most times you wouldn’t know anything happened at all because unless it’s funny or newsworthy it’s not relevant to the topics we try and feature here.

On the other hand Internet service can be spotty and sometimes there are simply not enough hours or energy in the day and, well, priorities. If you think I’m going to miss out on Whitewater Rafting in Nova Scotia so I can work on my Prison Pallor and Carpal Tunnel you are mistaken.

My point is that when I lose touch with the flow it’s usually because I’ve been road bound or in social positions where checking your Cell constantly is not possible (it’s never polite, I excuse myself to compose).

And yesterday was one of those days.

As nearly as I reconstruct it, Speaker Nancy Pelosi went into an early morning meeting with her Caucus where sentiment is continuing to build for Impeachment, or at least Impeachment Hearings. She lost Steny Hoyer on the subject Tuesday and if you don’t think that’s a Bombshell you have not been paying close enough attention to Democratic House politics. Steny is Nancy’s Consigliere and this is a serious crack in the family.

Nancy was still making meally mouthed noises after that meeting on the way to another one with her, Schumer, and Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio, supposedly about an Infrastructure Plan.

The Unidicted Co-conspirator, Bottomless Pinocchio, ran one from his failed Government Shut Down playbook. He walked in, had a meltdown about how unfair it is that he’s being caught for all his crimes, and that it’s simply not possible to do any Government business.

Then after holding his breath and stomping his feet, he continued to scream at Chuck and Nancy as he left, slamming the door very, very hard so you could tell he was really pissed off this time.

At least it was brief, 3 minutes or less, the rest of us I’m told by reliable sources were subjected to a drooling, cherry faced, spittle inflected (the right word here, though inflicted would do), Rant in the Rose Garden that lasted about 27 days. Heck, it could still be going on.

It was, as Schumer and Hoyer noted, totally scripted in a WWE Improv kind of way and probably intended to mostly cover for the fact that while the Democrats have a Plan (several), Republicans have no Plan any more than they do for Heath Insurance Reform or anything else except their usual- Cut Services, Cut Taxes.

I’m not sure it’s having the effect Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless intended. By late afternoon Pelosi was pointedly not taking Impeachment off the table.

That proceeds apace.

Trump’s Financial Secrets Move Closer to Disclosure
By Emily Flitter, Jesse McKinley, David Enrich and Nicholas Fandos, The New York Times
May 22, 2019

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled against a request from President Trump to block his longtime lender, Deutsche Bank, from complying with congressional subpoenas seeking his detailed financial records. In Albany, New York lawmakers approved a bill that would allow Congress to obtain Mr. Trump’s state tax returns.

Those actions came two days after a federal judge in Washington ruled against Mr. Trump’s bid to quash another congressional subpoena to get his accounting firm to hand over his tax returns and other financial documents.

The court rulings and the New York legislation represent the most serious attempts to pierce the veil that surrounds Mr. Trump’s finances. They increase the odds that congressional Democrats, who have become more vocal in their calls to undertake impeachment proceedings against the president, could enter such a fray with ample ammunition about Mr. Trump’s business dealings.
…
Mr. Trump has already appealed the ruling over the subpoena to his accounting firm, Mazars USA, and will almost certainly appeal the ruling handed down on Wednesday. The committees have already agreed to give any appeals a chance to play out before enforcing the subpoenas, but House Democrats are now closer than ever to securing a vast cache of long-sought documents.

Mr. Trump’s finances have been largely a mystery from the moment he declared his candidacy for president. He broke with decades of precedent by refusing to release his federal tax returns. His company, the Trump Organization, is private, and he has disclosed minimal information about how the company makes money and the sources of that income.
…
The New York legislation, which is expected to be signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat and regular critic of Mr. Trump’s policies and behavior, would authorize state tax officials to release the president’s state returns to any one of three congressional committees.

The returns — filed in New York, the president’s home state and site of his Trump Tower headquarters in Manhattan — are likely to contain much of the same information as his federal tax returns, which the Trump administration has refused to hand over to Congress.
…
In Washington, two congressional committees issued subpoenas last month to Deutsche Bank, the president’s primary lender over the last two decades, and Capital One, where Mr. Trump keeps some of his money. The subpoenas sought decades of personal and corporate financial records, including any documents related to possible suspicious activities detected in Mr. Trump’s personal and business accounts.
…
Since 1998, the bank has lent him a total of more than $2 billion, and Mr. Trump owed Deutsche Bank more than $300 million at the time he was sworn in as president. The bank is by far his largest creditor, and it possesses a trove of financial records — including portions of his federal tax returns — that it is prepared to provide to congressional investigators.

The president has multiple accounts with Capital One. His relationship with the bank came under scrutiny earlier this year when his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, presented Congress with two checks he had received from Mr. Trump’s Capital One accounts. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump wrote him the checks, for $35,000 each, to reimburse him for making a hush-money payment to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
…
Lawyers for the Trumps argued that the congressional subpoenas were politically motivated and had no legitimate legislative purpose.

Patrick Strawbridge, the lawyer for the Trump family, argued Wednesday that the subpoenas raised “serious questions about the outer reach of power of the Congress,” putting members of the legislative branch in the position of law enforcement officials.

“Congress cannot assume the role of the executive branch,” he said. He also lamented the subpoenas’ reach, noting that they sought records relating to transactions by Mr. Trump’s in-laws and grandchildren.

Douglas Letter, the lawyer for congressional Democrats, said the subpoenas were intended to elicit information on potential money laundering and financial fraud and that they were not overly expansive.

Judge Edgardo Ramos of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York appeared to agree. “Lots of people do things, they hide assets, they create dummy corporations, they put their relatives in charge,” the judge said in court before he issued his ruling.

Judge Ramos said he agreed with Mr. Trump’s claim that turning over financial records to Congress could cause him and his family irreparable harm. But, he said, the merits of the congressional committees’ goals outweighed that harm.

After issuing his ruling, Judge Ramos said he thought it was unlikely that Mr. Trump and his family would win in a trial.
…
Under an agreement reached before the hearing on Wednesday, the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees had agreed to hold off on enforcing the subpoenas until seven days after the judge’s ruling, giving Mr. Trump’s lawyers time to appeal the ruling.

“We remain committed to providing appropriate information to all authorized investigations and will abide by a court order regarding such investigations,” said Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman.

Capital One representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The legal setbacks for the president and his family came days after The New York Times reported that Deutsche Bank anti-money-laundering specialists had flagged potentially suspicious transactions involving legal entities controlled by Mr. Trump and his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner. Bank managers overruled those employees and chose not to report the transactions to a federal agency that polices financial crimes.

A little New York centric but as good as any I suppose. What they leave out is that it was a summary judgement. Final oral arguments in the morning, Decision in the afternoon. Decision scathing- case has no legal basis, Congress has an explicit right to investigate. Cites and refers to Mehta. Slam dunk, could hardly ask for better. Downside the 7 day appeal window but it’s pretty much the minimum customary.

Detailed in the piece should you click through is some rumination about the possible flaws in the New York State Law. I suppose your optimism should be based on your faith in Albany to craft a Constitutional law.

My personal expectations are not high but I’m willing to be proven wrong.

The KISS Army

It was in fact, Wolverhampton Wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1

Get Out

Narendra Modi’s BJP eyes landslide in India vote count

By Ayeshea Perera, Aparna Alluri, Krutika Pathi, Simon Fraser, Vikas Pandey, Courtney Subramanian and Kevin Ponniah

Traditionally, the BJP has found its strongest support in India’s populous Hindi speaking states in the north. (Of the 282 seats the party won in 2014, 193 came from these states.)

The exceptions are Gujarat, Mr Modi’s native state and a BJP bastion, and Maharashtra, where the BJP has ruled in alliance with a local party.

Under Mr Modi, the BJP has expanded geographically.

They have formed governments in key north-eastern states like Assam and Tripura, which are primarily Assamese and Bengali speaking.

No voice, no future? Roma ignored as Europe goes to polls

Madam Zelda! Madam Zelda!

In common law legal systems, black letter laws are the well-established legal rules that are no longer subject to reasonable dispute.

Confidential draft IRS memo says tax returns must be given to Congress unless president invokes executive privilege
By Jeff Stein and Josh Dawsey, Washington Post
May 21, 2019

A confidential Internal Revenue Service legal memo says tax returns must be given to Congress unless the president takes the rare step of asserting executive privilege, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post.

The memo contradicts the Trump administration’s justification for denying lawmakers’ request for President Trump’s tax returns, exposing fissures in the executive branch.

Trump has refused to turn over his tax returns but has not invoked executive privilege. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has instead denied the returns by arguing there is no legislative purpose for demanding them.

But according to the IRS memo, which has not been previously reported, the disclosure of tax returns to the committee “is mandatory, requiring the Secretary to disclose returns, and return information, requested by the tax-writing Chairs.”

The 10-page document says the law “does not allow the Secretary to exercise discretion in disclosing the information provided the statutory conditions are met” and directly rejects the reason Mnuchin has cited for withholding the information.

“[T]he Secretary’s obligation to disclose return and return information would not be affected by the failure of a tax writing committee . . . to state a reason for the request,” it says. It adds that the “only basis the agency’s refusal to comply with a committee’s subpoena would be the invocation of the doctrine of executive privilege.”

“Executive Privilege”, in the best case, is designed to protect the ability to give honest and straightforward advice. Hard to see how it applies here, it might to a detailed discussion of how to prepare his returns with Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio’s Accountant but not the returns themselves which are (presumably) a neutral, factual, document; explicitly designated I might add as subject to precisely this kind of inspection and oversight by Congress in Law that has not been contested or challanged (successfully) in about 100 years.

Executive privilege is generally defined as the president’s ability to deny requests for information about internal administration talks and deliberations.

On Friday, Mnuchin rejected a subpoena from the House Ways and Means Committee to turn over the tax returns, a move that probably will now lead to a court battle. Mnuchin has criticized the demands as harassment that could be directed against any political enemy, arguing Congress lacks a “legitimate legislative purpose” in seeking the documents.

Breaking with precedent, Trump has refused to provide tax returns, saying without evidence they are under audit.

Mnuchin and other senior staff members never reviewed the IRS memo, according to a Treasury spokesman. But the spokesman said it did not undermine the department’s argument that handing over the president’s tax returns would run afoul of the Constitution’s mandate that information given to Congress must pertain to legislative issues.

The spokesman said the secretary is following a legal analysis from the Justice Department that he “may not produce the requested private tax return information.” Both agencies have denied requests for copies of the Justice Department’s advice to Treasury.

Some legal experts said the memo provides further evidence that the Trump administration is using shaky legal foundations to withhold the tax returns.

“The memo is clear in its interpretation of the law that the IRS shall furnish this information,” said William Lowrance, who served for about two decades as an attorney in the IRS chief counsel’s office and reviewed the memo at the request of The Post.

Daniel Hemel, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who also reviewed the memo for The Post, said the document suggests a split over Trump’s returns between career staffers at the IRS and political appointees at that agency and the Treasury Department.

“The memo writer’s interpretation is that the IRS has no wiggle room on this,” Hemel said. “Mnuchin is saying the House Ways and Means Committee has not asserted a legitimate legislative purpose. The memo says they don’t have to assert a legitimate legislative purpose — or any purpose at all.”
…
“One potential basis” for refusing the returns, the memo states, would be if the administration invoked the doctrine of executive privilege.

But the IRS memo notes that executive privilege is most often invoked to protect information, such as opinions and recommendations, submitted as part of formulating policies and decisions. It even says the law “might be read to preclude a claim of executive privilege,” meaning the law could be interpreted as saying executive privilege cannot be invoked to deny a subpoena.

Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service published a review of Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code that found the code “evinces no substantive limitations” on the Ways and Means Committee’s authority to receive the tax returns.