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Korean Americans Weigh in on Summit

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The U.S.-North Korea summit is scheduled to be held in Singapore on June 12. For other upcoming events, see accuracy.org/calendar.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes in “Democrats Childishly Resist Trump’s North Korea Efforts” about a letter from Sens. Chuck Schumer, Sherrod Brown, Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Robert Menendez and Mark Warner. Kristof writes they “are on the same side as National Security Adviser John Bolton, quietly subverting attempts to pursue peace.”

For timely updates, see @accuracy Twitter list on Korea.

HYUN LEE, hyunlee70 at gmail.com
CHRISTINE HONG, cjhong at ucsc.edu
Scores of Korean American and allied organizations just released a “Statement of Unity on the Upcoming U.S.-North Korea Summit.” Lee is managing editor of Zoom in Korea; Hong is an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute.

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Activist Just Back from Afghanistan as Ceasefire is Announced

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CNN is reporting: “Afghanistan announces temporary ceasefire with the Taliban.”

KATHY KELLY, kathy at vcnv.org, @voiceinwild
Kelly arrived back to the U.S. from Afghanistan Wednesday night. She is co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. While in Kabul, she is a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers.

She said today: “It’s being reported that this ceasefire is only with the Taliban, but there are other fighting networks in Afghanistan. In 2017, Human Rights Watch reported that 42 percent of the insurgent attacks against civilians were by the Taliban, which was 65 percent of civilian deaths; 12 percent were Islamic State. But for any kind of lasting peace, you need to address the desperation people have in terms of finding work to get food to their families. This desperation is causing many to resort to joining these fighting networks.

“Part of the desperation is also because of the drought. [See piece below.]

“These efforts at lasting peace I think should be done through reparations by the U.S. for all the damage its government has caused Afghanistan. It would probably be cheaper to do that than continue to spend billions on war.

“It should be noted that this ceasefire takes place as the Taliban have been surrounding different cities and even enacting military take-overs for short periods.”

Kelly just wrote the piece “Digging Deeper” for The Progressive: “Rural families in drought-stricken areas watch their crops fail and their livestock die of dehydration. In desperation, they flee to urban areas, including Kabul, where they often must live in squalid, sprawling refugee camps. In the city, an already inadequate sewage and sanitation system, battered by years of war, cannot support the soaring population rise.

“Droughts in other countries have led to violent clashes and civil wars. It’s difficult to imagine that Afghanistan, already burdened by forty years of war, will escape eventual water wars.

“The most sophisticated and heavily armed warring party in Afghanistan is the U.S. military. Despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars on non-military aid to Afghanistan, the United States has done little to improve Afghanistan’s infrastructure or alleviate its alarming water crisis. President Donald Trump’s interest in what’s happening under the ground in Afghanistan is focused exclusively on the U.S. capacity to extract Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, estimated to be worth trillions of dollars.”

Conflating Anti-Semitism and Criticism of Israel

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Today, the Senate is scheduled to vote for President Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus.

The week, the ACLU released a fresh warning: “The Latest Attack on Free Speech in the Israel-Palestine Debate,” which states: “Members of Congress last month introduced the ‘Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.’ The bill purports to address a real problem: According to the FBI, incidents of hate crimes motivated by anti-Jewish bias have significantly increased in recent years.

“But anti-Semitic harassment is already illegal under federal law. The new bill does not change that fact, but its overbreadth makes it likely that it will instead silence criticism of Israel that is protected by the First Amendment.”

The ACLU report caused Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept to comment: “You wouldn’t know it from self-described free speech crusaders, but by far the #1 threat to free speech — on U.S. campuses and in the West generally — are aimed at Israel critics.”

See also from the media watch group FAIR: “With Literal Nazis Running for Office, NYT Suggests Candidate’s Israel Criticism Is Antisemitic” about the candidacy of Democratic candidate Leslie Cockburn.

ABBA SOLOMON, abbasolomon at gmail.com, @Abba_A_Solomon
Solomon is author of The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech “The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews.” His recent pieces include “Portman and Perlman, and the liberal Zionist awakening,” “Identity as pathology,” “ZOA Madness: Bannon Gala” and “The Occupation of the American Mind, Documented.”

He said today: “There is a shocking effort in the United States to label concern for the basic human rights of Palestinians as anti-Semitism. Various state and proposed federal legislation is based on that flawed proposition.”

“In the current administration, Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and current U.S. ambassador to Israel just said in Jerusalem that the press should ‘keep your mouths shut’ because they are reporting Israeli violence against Palestinian protesters in Gaza.”

DIMA KHALIDI, dkhalidi at palestinelegal.org, @pal_legal
Khalidi is director of Palestine Legal, which recently released the statement “Lawmakers Reintroduce Federal Bill Aimed at Censoring Palestine Advocacy on Campuses.”

The group also just released “Kenneth Marcus’ Anti-Free Speech, Anti-Civil Rights Record,” which states his appointment “would be a disaster for freedom of speech and civil rights.

“Marcus has a long record of targeting First Amendment-protected speech and scholarship of people with whom he disagrees.

“Marcus’ history also reflects a hostility towards civil rights, including making racially-charged accusations and opposing affirmative action.

“Reasons to oppose the appointment of Kenneth Marcus:

* “He has a history of attempting to dismantle policies aimed at remedying racial discrimination, including affirmative action.

* “As Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he opposed investigating violations of the rights of LGBT persons.

* “He filed baseless Title VI complaints in order to censor and chill speech supporting Palestinian rights on college campuses.

* “He lobbied Congress to defund Middle East Studies programs not sufficiently supportive of Israeli policies.

* “He lobbied for state and federal legislation that would redefine antisemitism to include criticism of Israeli policies, a move that would encourage universities to violate the First Amendment.”

Is Google Really Ending its Military Contracts?

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YASHA LEVINE, [in NYC] mail at yashalevine.com, @yashalevine
Levine is an investigative journalist and author of the new book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. He recently wrote the piece “Know your history: Google has been a military-intel contractor from the very beginning,” which includes excerpts from the book that document specific contracts Google has with the CIA; and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, in partnership with Lockheed Martin.

He has been commenting on the scandal surrounding Google’s military contracting work on Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative to develop AI visual recognition capability for drones and was quoted in the recent Wired piece on the story.

He said today: “The public should not fall for Google’s announcement that it will not be renewing its contract for Project Maven, which came as a result of public criticism and the resignation of dozens of Google employees. The company is still a military contractor. …

“Sure, Google might not renew this specific AI drone contract. But what about the rest of the company’s military contracting work? What about its work with predictive policing outfits?

“Head of Google’s AI (who also runs Stanford’s AI lab) doesn’t mind building weapons for the military. What she worries about is the optics.

“Co-founder Sergey Brin wants Google to be a military contractor. Says it will be better for peace if Google does this military work rather than traditional military contractors.

“It’s great that Google employees are protesting their company’s Pentagon AI drone research, but that’s hardly the only work Google does for militaries and law enforcement. Google has been building more efficient systems of surveillance and death for generals, spies and cops for 15 years and counting.”

Truth Commission to Investigate 43 Missing Mexican Students

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The New York Times reports: “A federal court in Mexico ordered the government on Monday to investigate the 2014 disappearances of 43 college students again, but this time under the supervision of a truth commission to be led by the nation’s top human rights body and parents of the victims.”

JOHN GIBLER, john.gibler at gmail.com
Gibler is the author of  I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa and Torn from the World: A Guerrilla’s Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico. He has been published in California Sunday Magazine and featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

He said today: “Last Monday, June 4, a Mexican federal court invalidated the government’s investigation of the attacks against the students of Ayotzinapa, citing evidence that the detained made false confessions under torture. The ruling also noted the government’s failure to investigate the participation of the federal police and the Army in the attacks. The court ordered the government to form an independent truth commission and to restart the investigation within a period of ten days.

“This recent court ruling supports what the families of the disappeared students as well as independent journalists and human rights investigators have been arguing and documenting for years: That the federal government has been orchestrating a massive ‘cover-up’ operation based on torture, lies, the destruction of evidence and the planting of false evidence. …

“In addition to truly investigating the intellectual and material authors of the attacks against the students in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26-27, 2014, it remains essential to fully investigate the command structure and participants in the federal ‘cover-up’ that has been ongoing since the first moments after the violence in the streets. In cases of forced disappearance involving state actors, a ‘cover up’ is never a secondary, external operation, but instead an essential, constitutive part of the atrocity itself.”

Gibler’s past books include Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt and To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War.

Tenant Rights Ballot Measure Wins in San Francisco

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The San Francisco Chronicle reports: “A ballot measure to give tenants facing eviction lawsuits the right to taxpayer-funded legal representation won Tuesday.

“With 99 percent of precincts counted, Proposition F, ‘Defend SF Against Evictions,’ won with nearly 56 percent in favor, and 44 percent opposed.

“Takeaway: Tenants’ rights groups that back the measure have been fighting to keep renters in their homes during the tech boom, which since 2010 has resulted in a steady increase in evictions.”

See also from the SF Weekly: “Yippee! Prop. F Passes.”

SUSANNA BLANKLEY, susanna at righttocounselnyc.org, @RTCNYC

Last year, a similar measure was passed into law in New York City. Blankley is coalition coordinator for the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, which just released a statement: “We couldn’t be more excited that the tenants of San Francisco voted to make their city the second city in the country to recognize tenants’ right to a lawyer when defending their homes. The vote was an overwhelming referendum — where landlords use the court as a weapon of displacement, tenants are fighting back. We especially commend the amazing work of the San Francisco Tenants Union for making this happen and for getting this referendum passed with no income restrictions! We know more cities will follow suit because this new civil right should not be exclusive to the tenants of NYC and SF.”

Protests Against Austerity Force Jordanian PM Out

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The New York Times reports: “Jordan’s Prime Minister Quits, as Protesters Demand an End to Austerity.”

PETE MOORE, pwm10 at case.edu
Professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University, Moore is author of Doing Business in the Middle East: Politics and Economic Crisis in Jordan and Kuwait (Cambridge University Press) and wrote the in-depth paper “The Bread Revolutions of 2011 and the Political Economies of Transition” for the Woodrow Wilson Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

LAMIS ANDONI, lamisk15 at gmail.com, @LamisAndoni
Andoni is a noted analyst independent journalist based in Amman, Jordan. She was just interviewed by the BBC and Al-Jazeera about the situation in Jordan. She writes to the Institute for Public Accuracy: “Changing prime ministers is no longer sufficient to appease widening discontent as the country is facing a deep economic and political crisis. The new designated prime minister Omar Razzaz is one of the more respected public personalities in the country but he could rapidly lose his credibility if there are no fundamental policy changes.

“Jordan is already bound by an agreement with the IMF [International Monetary Fund] to continue fuel price increases, pass a flawed income tax law and maintain high sales taxes.

“In fact, the middle class is only starting to feel the effects of the austerity measures and price hikes. There is a feeling that the consecutive governments had not sought solutions but bowed to the IMF without making cuts in unnecessary expenditures or presenting alternative plans. It’s important to note that many Jordanians lay the blame at the king’s door as governments have come to be seen as no more than rubber stamps for the palace.

“No doubt there are tremendous pressures on Jordan exercised by the Saudi and the UAE [governments] who attach well-known conditions on aid and investment to and in Jordan. Both countries want the king to totally and fully accept whatever package that Trump includes in the so-called deal of the century [with Israel].

“But this is not enough to get people to rally around the king as there has been a mounting feeling of total disregard to Jordanians as citizens by both the palace and the [successive] governments. Omar Razzaz’s background as a World Bank official is already viewed by suspicion by many activists, so even if he truly tries to make changes he will be under a lot of scrutiny.”

“End This Russophobic Insanity”

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Jack F. Matlock Jr., ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, just wrote the piece “Amid ‘Russiagate’ Hysteria, What Are the Facts? We must end this Russophobic insanity” for The Nation.

He writes regarding Russiagate: “Unless there is a mass shooting in progress, it can be hard to find a discussion of anything else on CNN. Increasingly, both in Congress and in our media, it has been accepted as a fact that ‘Russia’ interfered in the 2016 election.

“So what are the facts?

“It is a fact that some Russians paid people to act as online trolls and bought advertisements on Facebook during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Most of these were taken from elsewhere, and they comprised a tiny fraction of all the advertisements purchased on Facebook during this period. This continued after the election and included organizing a demonstration against President-elect Trump.

“It is a fact that emails in the memory of the Democratic National Committee’s computer were furnished to WikiLeaks. The U.S. intelligence agencies that issued the January 2017 report were confident that Russians hacked the emails and supplied them to WikiLeaks, but offered no evidence to substantiate their claim. Even if one accepts that Russians were the perpetrators, however, the emails were genuine, as the U.S. intelligence report certified. I have always thought that the truth was supposed to make us free, not degrade our democracy. …

“The most important fact, obscured in Russiagate hysteria, is that Americans elected Trump under the terms set forth in the Constitution. Americans created the Electoral College, which allows a candidate with a minority of popular votes to become president. Americans were those who gerrymandered electoral districts to rig them in favor of a given political party. The Supreme Court issued the infamous Citizens United decision that allows corporate financing of candidates for political office. …

“I did not personally vote for Trump, but I consider the charges that Russian actions interfered in the election, or — for that matter — damaged the quality of our democracy ludicrous, pathetic, and shameful. ….

“’Shameful’ because it is an evasion of responsibility. It prevents the Democrats, and those Republicans who want responsible, fact-based government in Washington, from concentrating on practical ways to reduce the threat the Trump presidency poses to our political values and even to our future existence. After all, Trump would not be president if the Republican Party had not nominated him. …

“I should add ‘dangerous’ to those three adjectives. ‘Dangerous’ because making an enemy of Russia, the other nuclear superpower — yes, there are still two — comes as close to political insanity as anything I can think of.”

Currently available for interviews on these issues:

JACKSON LEARS, tjlears at history.rutgers.edu
Lears is the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University. He recently wrote the piece “What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking” for the London Review of Books.

DNC Suing WikiLeaks: Part of the “Greatest Threat to Press Freedom”

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AVI ASHER-SCHAPIRO, via press at cpj.org, @AASchapiro
Avi Asher-Schapiro is the Committee to Protect Journalists’ U.S. correspondent. His work has appeared in outlets including The Atlantic, The Intercept, and The New York Times. He just wrote a piece titled “By suing WikiLeaks, DNC could endanger principles of press freedom.”

He writes: “In April, the Democratic National Committee, the governing body of the Democratic Party, announced that it was suing WikiLeaks and Julian Assange — along with a number of other defendants, including the Trump campaign and Russian operatives — for their alleged involvement in the theft and dissemination of DNC computer files during the 2016 election. On its surface, the DNC’s argument seems to fly in the face of the Supreme Court’s precedent in Bartnicki v. Vopper that publishers are not responsible for the illegal acts of their sources. It also goes against press freedom precedents going back to the Pentagon Papers and contains arguments that could make it more difficult for reporters to do their jobs or that foreign governments could use against U.S. journalists working abroad, First Amendment experts told CPJ. …

“The notion that journalistic activity such as cultivating sources and receiving illegally obtained documents could be construed as part of a criminal conspiracy is, according to [The New York Times‘ Pentagon Papers lawyer James] Goodale, the ‘greatest threat to press freedom today.’ …

“The case raises a number of important press freedom questions: Where should courts draw the line between source-building and ‘conspiring’? What activities could implicate a journalist in a source’s illegal behavior? Would putting a SecureDrop link soliciting leaks count as illegal conspiracy? And if a reporter asked for documents on an individual while indicating that they think the person deserves to be exposed, would that count as shared motive, or is the only truly protected activity passively receiving leaks, like radio host Vopper? …”Many of the legal experts said they assume the counts that mention Assange and WikiLeaks will be dismissed when the judge assesses if the conspiracy claims in the DNC lawsuit are ‘plausible.’ If the judge moves forward, University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck said, it will be because he finds a way to substantially differentiate what WikiLeaks does from routine reporting practices.

“However, Charles Glasser, a professor at NYU’s journalism school who spent over a dozen years as global media counsel for Bloomberg, said that if the charges against Assange and WikiLeaks survived, it could pave the way for companies or others to label everyone — from those who illegally obtain documents to the press — as co-conspirators.”

Pardoning D’Souza is Trump’s “Blazing Signal”

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LISA GILBERT, CRAIG HOLMAN, via Nadia Prupis, nprupis at citizen.org;
Angela Bradbery, abradbery at citizen.org, @Public_Citizen
Gilbert is vice president of legislative affairs and Holman is government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.

The group just released a statement: “Pardoning D’Souza Is Trump’s Blazing Signal to Associates to Stay Loyal Amid Mueller Investigation”: “President Donald Trump today announced that he would pardon Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative political pundit and filmmaker, who in 2014 confessed to campaign money laundering and was sentenced to five years’ probation and a $30,000 fine. D’Souza devised a scheme to launder $20,000 in illegal contributions to the 2012 U.S. Senate campaign of Republican candidate Wendy Long. D’Souza solicited two ‘straw donors’ each to make another $10,000 contribution to the candidate, which he reimbursed the following day.”

Gilbert said today: “Pardoning someone who breaks anti-corruptions laws is not a subtle message. The president is sending a blazing signal to his surrogates and associates that they will be rewarded if they stay loyal. The precedent is particularly frightening as the important Mueller investigation into obstruction of justice and collusion continues and seems likely to have ongoing indictments and charges of those in the president’s orbit.”

Holman said today: “If there was any lingering doubt left that Trump’s pledge to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington was nothing more than campaign rhetoric, today’s pardon of a confessed campaign money launderer should bring those doubts to a close.

“D’Souza confessed in court that he deliberately violated our campaign finance laws and with full knowledge that it was illegal. Allegations that the prosecution of D’Souza was political were dismissed by the judge as, legally speaking, ‘all hat, no cattle.’

“By pardoning D’Souza, Trump is sending another clear signal that he’s AOK with flagrant corruption.”

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