1. Stephen
Bannon Out at the White House After Turbulent Run
The New York Times 2017.08.18
Here Are the Top Officials in the Trump White House Who Have
Left
With the departure of Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief
strategist, at least eight top officials are no longer in the White House.
BRIDGEWATER,
N.J. — Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled chief strategist who helped President
Trump win the 2016 election by embracing their shared nationalist impulses,
departed the White House on Friday after a turbulent tenure shaping the fiery
populism of the president’s first seven months in office.
Mr.
Bannon’s exit, the latest in a string of high-profile West Wing shake-ups, came
as Mr. Trump is under fire for saying that “both sides” were to blame for last
week’s deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va. Critics accused the president of
channeling Mr. Bannon when he equated white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the
left-wing protesters who opposed them.
“White
House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today
would be Steve’s last day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press
secretary, said in a statement. “We are grateful for his service and wish him the
best.”
Mr.
Bannon’s outsized influence on the president, captured in a February cover of
Time magazine with the headline “The Great Manipulator,” was reflected in the
response to his departure.
Conservatives
groused that they lost a key advocate inside the White House and worried aloud
that Mr. Trump would shift left, while cheers erupted on the floor of the New
York Stock Exchange when headlines about Mr. Bannon’s ouster appeared. Both the
Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average
immediately rose, though they ended the day slightly down.
His
removal is a victory for Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general whose
mission is to impose discipline on White House personnel. A caustic presence in
a chaotic West Wing, Mr. Bannon frequently clashed with other aides as they
fought over trade, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, immigration and the role of
government.
In
an interview this week with The
American Prospect, Mr. Bannon mocked his colleagues, including Gary D. Cohn,
one of the president’s chief economic advisers, saying they were “wetting
themselves” out of a fear of radically changing trade policy.
Mr.
Trump had recently grown weary of Mr. Bannon, complaining to other advisers
that he believed his chief strategist had been leaking information to reporters
and was taking too much credit for the president’s successes. The situation had
become untenable long before Friday, according to advisers close to Mr. Trump
who had been urging the president to remove Mr. Bannon; in turn, people close
to Mr. Bannon also were urging him to step down.
By
Friday night, Mr. Bannon was already back at the far-right Breitbart News,
chairing an editorial meeting at the organization he helped run before joining
Mr. Trump’s campaign and where he can continue to advance his agenda.
Mr.
Bannon can still wield influence from outside the West Wing. He believes he can
use his perch at Breitbart — which has given a platform to the so-called
alt-right, a loose collection of activists, some of whom espouse openly racist
and anti-Semtic views — to publicly pressure the president.
And
he may still play an insider’s role as a confidant for the president, offering
advice and counsel, much like other former advisers who still frequently
consult with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bannon had formed a philosophical alliance with Mr.
Trump, and they shared an unlikely chemistry.
Mr.
Bannon has indicated to people that he does not intend to harm Mr. Trump and he
has promised to be somewhat reserved about other administration officials,
including Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and his
wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter.
“In many ways I think I can be more effective
fighting from the outside for the agenda President Trump ran on. And anyone who
stands in our way, we will go to war with,” Mr. Bannon said on Friday.
But
his former colleagues in the West Wing are uncertain how long that will last.
Joel
Pollak, a Breitbart executive, tweeted after Mr. Bannon’s departure was made
public a single word with a hashtag: “#WAR.” Mr. Bannon called reporters to
suggest Mr. Pollak had gone too far, but he also acknowledged his own
disappointment at departing the White House.
2. Police
See Wider Plot in Spain and Say Carnage Could Have Been Worse
The New York Times Aug. 18, 2017
Mourners
on Friday on Las Ramblas, the site of a deadly terrorist attack in Barcelona,
Spain.CreditSamuel Aranda for The New York Times
BARCELONA,
Spain — When an earthshaking explosion on Wednesday blew apart a house outside
Alcanar, a town surrounded by olive groves and holiday homes overlooking the
Mediterranean, the police first blamed it on a gas leak.
“Nothing
ever happens here,” Mayor Alfons Monserrat said.
The
Spanish police now believe that tiny Alcanar may have been the incubator for a
conspiracy far more ambitious than even the van attacks in Catalonia that
killed 14 people and injured more than 80. All but one of the casualties
occurred Thursday afternoon on the Ramblas, Barcelona’s colorful central
thoroughfare. It was Spain’s worst terrorist attack in more than a decade, and
the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.
The
Alcanar blast, they suspect, was a mistake by the plotters, who had intended to
make a powerful bomb, place it in a van and detonate it in the crowded center
of Barcelona. That plan disintegrated along with at least 12 butane gas
canisters that were discovered in the ruins of the house in Alcanar on
Wednesday night.
Four
men have been detained in the case, and three more who have been identified
remain at large, according to Maj. Josep Lluis Trapero, a senior police
official in Spain’s Catalonia region. Investigators are still trying to
determine the full extent of the network. Five of the suspects are dead, at
least three of them appearing to be so young that they could not have grown
beards. They were killed by the police during a second attack, in the seaside
holiday town of Cambrils early Friday.
While
some of the other recent European terrorist attacks have been
opportunistic hit and runs by individuals acting on
their own, this was a comparatively complicated plot that the police say
involved at least two cells working in several different locations across
Catalonia.
The
story also unfolded in Ripoll, hometown of one of the young men who was killed
in Cambrils. His brother was arrested after his identity documents were found
to have been used to rent the van used to carry out the attack on Las Ramblas.
At least one other person from Ripoll has been detained.
There
were few indications that the two brothers, Driss Oukabir, 28, and Moussa
Oukabir, 17, had come under the influence of radical Islam. Ripoll is a
mountain town northwest of Barcelona of about 10,000 people, and Moussa and
Driss Oukabir, both of Moroccan descent, lived there with their mother.
Among
neighbors, friends, former employers and the local mosque, no one saw any
outward sign of budding extremism. The elder brother, Driss, spoke perfect
Catalan as well as Spanish and was not religious, according to a childhood friend,
Raimon Sánchez, 27. He was known as a small-time marijuana dealer, but nothing
more.
“We
went to school together; after that everyone went his own direction, but when
we saw each other, we would say hello, smoke a joint together,” Mr. Sánchez
said. “He was in my home when he was a child — how can a person change that
much?”
An
overturned Audi A3 on Friday in Cambrils, Spain, where five suspects in a
car-ramming attack were shot and killed. CreditEmilio Morenatti/Associated
Press
Moussa
was well liked by everyone. He also spoke perfect Catalan, said a neighbor. His
sisters, Hafida and Hanane, described him to their former employer at Les
Graelles, a local restaurant, as polite, “having really good marks in school”
and eager to study. “He didn’t go to parties,” said the restaurant’s manager,
Rosa, who said she was afraid to give her last name.
There
was no sign that the family was particularly religious, she added. Neither
sister wore a head scarf except when they were coming from the mosque and never
when they were working.
The
family lived in a nondescript apartment building near the southern edge of town
that serves as social housing for lower-income people.
There
were three Spanish-Moroccan families in the building, and Moussa, the youngest
of the Oukabir children, was good friends with them as well as other children
who lived there, neighbors said. A 15-year-old Catalan boy in the building said
that he used to go swimming with Moussa and played with him by the river that
runs through town, and that they rode their bikes together.
“Moussa
never spoke about religion,” said the boy’s mother, Marche, who lived in the
apartment directly next door. “He was a good kid, just like you or me.”
3.
The Communist Party is
redefining what it means to be Chinese
And is glossing over its own history of mauling Chinese culture
CHILDREN
sit with straight backs chanting in loud voices from the Dizi Gui,
a classic Chinese text about obedience. At the end of class they bow low to an
image of Confucius, hands clasped as if in prayer. A statue of the ancient sage
watches over the playground, too: “Study the Dizi Gui, be a good
Chinese,” reads a red banner. At the Zhengde summer camp in Jinan, in the
eastern province of Shandong, children as young as five spend their day
reciting verses, learning tai chi and watching cartoons with moral messages.
Phones are banned “to prevent contamination of the mind”, says Yi Shugui, the
headmaster, a former management consultant. At similar summer schools across
China children learn calligraphy, traditional Chinese crafts and how to play
ancient instruments. China is undergoing a cultural renaissance, much of it
government-sponsored.
For
most of its history the Communist Party wanted to smash China’s past, not
celebrate it. During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s it sought
to overturn the “four olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits and old
ideas. Temples, mansions and tombstones were ravaged, along with any artefacts
or people associated with the bourgeois way of life. Small wonder that
Communist ideology lost its appeal. The blistering pace of change in recent
decades has kindled an anxiety that China is suffering from moral decay and a
concomitant yearning for a revival of ancient values. The government is
harnessing those feelings, using ancient rites and customs to spread favoured
values.
Latest
updates
Since
coming to power in 2012 Xi Jinping, the president, has intensified efforts to
build what he refers to as “cultural confidence”. In an extraordinary denial of
its legacy, the Communist Party has taken to presenting itself as “the faithful
heir” of traditional Chinese culture. “Our civilisation has developed in an
unbroken line from ancient to modern times,” Mr Xi declared in 2012. In January
the government sought to codify its attempts to “preserve” traditional culture
by outlining a vast array of policies that local and national officials should
advance.
Individual
elements of the policy to promote “the integration of leisure life and
traditional cultural development” sound rather benign. Taken together, however,
they constitute an attempt to infuse daily life with a sanitised and
government-sanctioned version of Chinese culture. The intention, as in so much
that Mr Xi does, is to secure the enduring power of the Communist Party.
The
agenda touches every aspect of life. The white paper calls for an emphasis on
“our festivals”, so local and national holidays are being celebrated with new
vigour. Some people are proposing that China should pick its own Mother’s Day,
rather than copy the American date (China already has a native version of
Valentine’s Day). State media are boosting the use of Chinese medicine when
people fall ill, wearing Han robes when they get married, and keeping fit by
practising tai chi and other ancient sports (a recent viral video lauds “Kung
Fu Granny”, a 94-year-old who reckons she owes her longevity partly to such
activities). The party is trying to bend popular culture to its agenda, too. On
August 5th it announced plans to replace prime-time entertainment and reality
TV shows that “hype” pop stars with programmes of higher “moral” content.
Examples include a much-plugged quiz show about classical poetry and another in
which children compete to write complicated Chinese characters.
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