Russian, French FMs talk about Syria, Ukraine National Post MOSCOW The top diplomats of Russia and France have met to discuss Syria, Ukraine and the troubled Russia-EU ties. Speaking after Tuesday's talks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian emphasized ... |
See the original post:
Russian, French FMs talk about Syria, Ukraine - National Post
MONTREAL Patrice Bernier goes back 17 years when the topic turns to the Montreal-Toronto soccer rivalry.
For Bernier, the Montreal Impact's loss toToronto FC in the Major League Soccer Eastern Conference final last November was merely the latest chapter inthe on-again, off-again battle between Canada's two largest cities.
The next will come Wednesday night when TFC visits Saputo Stadium for the first leg of the two-game Canadian Championship final.
"In the A-League (circa 2000) we played against the Toronto Lynx a lot," said 37-year-old Bernier."I know that there were a lot more Toronto guys ontheir side and a lot more Montreal guys on our side, so there was no love when you played their team.
"I remember them a lot. Adrian Serioux, Lynden Hooper, Marco Reda. Those guys came up with the Lynx. It just carried over for me (in MLS). The name might have changed but TFC or Toronto (Lynx), it's the same for me."
The rivalry wasa natural when Montreal joinedMLS in 2012 (Toronto had already been there since 2007), but it only really took hold when they startedfacing each other in playoff games.TFC's first-ever post-season game was alacklustre 3-0 loss in a first round knockout game in Montreal in 2015.
Last season, it went through the roof as the Impact won the opening match of the two-legged conference final3-2 before 61,004 at Olympic Stadium only to lose5-2 in the return match before a sellout 36,000 at BMO Field, with TFC scoring two goals in extra time in the highest-scoring MLS playoff series ever.
Toronto lost the MLS Cup final to Seattle on penalties, but Greg Vanney's squad is back with a vengeancethis season, leading MLS with a 9-2-5 record. Montreal was slow off the mark but has levelled its record at 4-4-6 and is 2-0-2 in its last four.
"I like that rivalry aspect, I like that it's a little bit unfriendly," said Vanney."It becomes you and your team, and us against them.
"And I think that's what it should be about. That's why these rivalries are so special. So I'm not discouraged in any way about having to go there and play a game."
The return leg is June 27 in Toronto.
At stake is the Voyageurs Cup, which Montreal won seven times before joining MLS and twice after. Toronto won five times, including last year. There are also bragging rights, which may be as big a factor as skill or tactics in this matchup.
"I don't really say hate butI know that my focus and attention when the name TFC pops up is very high," said Bernier.
Toronto players remarked this week how much theydespise the goal bell at Saputo Stadium that is rung each time the home team scores.
Both teams want the trophy, especially because it gives the winnerentry intoin the CONCACAF Champions League, although if Montreal wins it will also have to win a one-game playoff in Toronto later this summer due to a scheduling change that deprived TFC of this year's CONCACAF berth.
Toronto is in win-now mode with designated players Sebastian Giovinco, Michael Bradley and Jozy Altidore in their prime, backed by a strong supporting cast, and feel they can go far in CONCACAF. Montreal is eager to get back in after making a run to the final in 2015.
Vanney has lineup decisions to make because his club has a league match Friday night against New England, making for two games in three nights. He confirmed only that Clint Irwin will continue his Canadian Championship run in goal.
The Impact play Saturday in Columbus.
A new rule this season requires teams to start at least three Canadians, which may be all the homegrown talent Montreal coach Mauro Biello has. Forward Anthony Jackson-Hamel is a question mark after a bout of gastro-interitis and forward Ballou Tabla is doubtful with a sore ankle.Louis Beland-Goyette (knee) and David Choiniere (ankle) areout.
That leaves Bernier, defender Wandrille Lefevre and goalie Max Crepeau as the healthy Canadians.
As much as they are rivals, some Impact and TFC players are also teammates on the national squad who were together onlylast weekfor a win over Curacao at Saputo Stadium.
"There was some banter," said Bernier, who wore the captain's armband against Curacao. "Raheem (Edwards), Jonathan (Osorio). Tosaint (Ricketts)wasn't there but I've known him for a while now.
"They're doing very well so Reheem wasn't afraid to talk about his team. For a young player, he's not shy of talking, whichI like because it means he has confidence in himself and that's good for the men's national team. But we're not on the same team now. It's 2017 and whatever we did in 2016 doesn't exist anymore. We have to prove that we're the best team."
With files from Neil Davidson in Toronto
Bill Beacon, The Canadian Press
Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version misspelled Tosaint Ricketts' name.
Continued here:
Growing rivalry highlighted as TFC visits Impact in Canadian Championship play - BarrieToday
He may have been the 44th president of the United States, but theres one role that Barack Obama cherishes above all: Dad.
The former commander-in-chief shared an endearing throwback photo of him squeezing his two daughters, Sasha and Malia, back when they were tiny girls.
Of all that Ive done in my life, Im most proud to be Sasha and Malias dad, he wrote while linking to the photo. To all those lucky enough to be a dad, Happy Fathers Day!
Former first lady Michelle Obama, who was first to post the photo, also expressed the familys ongoing love for him in its caption:
Happy #FathersDay @BarackObama. Our daughters may be older and taller now, but theyll always be your little girls. We love you.
Sasha and Malia were just 7 and 10 years old, respectively, when they moved into the White House in 2009. The girls have since grown up in the public eye, with Sasha recently turning 16 and Malia turning 19 in July.
REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci and REUTERS/Jim Bourg
Happy Fathers Day to all the dads out there!
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Malia as the youngest. She was in fact 10 when she moved into the White House and her sister, Sasha, was 7.
Originally posted here:
Barack Obama Just Posted The Sweetest Father's Day Throwback ...
The NSCinformed Judicial Watch in a letter dated May 23 that materials related to Rices requests to know the identities of Americans swept up in surveillance of foreign targets, including any Trump campaign or transition officials, have been moved to the library.
The NSCs Director of Access Management John Powers said in the letter:
Documents from the Obama administration have been transferred to the Barack Obama Presidential Library. You may send your request to the Obama Library. However, you should be aware that under the Presidential Records Act, Presidential records remain closed to the public for five years after an administration has left office.
Judicial Watch earlier this year filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for those documents, including of communications between Rice and any intelligence community member or agency regarding any Russian involvement in the 2016 elections, the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers, or any suspected communications between Russia and Trump officials.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the group will seek to find out when the records were moved, and warned of legal actions. He said:
Prosecutors, Congress, and the public will want to know when the National Security Council shipped off the records about potential intelligence abuses by the Susan Rice and others in the Obama White House to the memory hole of the Obama Presidential Library. We are considering our legal options but we hope that the Special Counsel and Congress also consider their options and get these records.
In April, blogger Mike Cernovich, Bloomberg, and Fox News revealedthat Rice had requested to unmask or unveilthe hidden names of Trump transition officials who were caught up in surveillance of foreign targets.
Typically, in surveillance of foreign targets communications, U.S. citizens mentioned or participating in them would have their names masked, or hidden, due to ethical, legal, and privacy concerns. However, government consumersof the intelligence can request to have their names unmasked if it is important to understanding the communications.
According to Cernovich, The White House Counsels office identified Rice as the person who had requested the unmasking, after examining her log requests, Cernovich reported on April 2. Bloomberg and Fox News would later corroborate the report. The revelation lent credence to Trumps assertion that the Obama administration had been surveilling his transition team.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board has argued Rice had no reason to request the unmaskings. Since then, the House intelligence committee has also subpoenaed theintelligence community for information on unmasking requests by Rice, former CIA Director John Brennan, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.
Themisuse of unmasking came under media scrutiny afterU.S. officialsillegally leaked to the Washington Post a private conversation between formerTrump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 24. Flynnresigned after those communications, not because anything inappropriate was found, but because he had misrepresented those communications to Vice President Mike Pence.
NSC Unmasking Records Response by Kristina Wong on Scribd
P.S. DO YOU WANT MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE DELIVERED RIGHT TO YOUR INBOX?SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY BREITBART NEWSLETTER.
Go here to read the rest:
BRAZEN POLITICAL MACHINATION BY OBAMA: NO ONE ... - breitbart.com
Apart from journalists assigned to review it and a book editor who considered publishing it, I have yet to meet anyone who has read, or is reading, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, the phenomenal new biography of the former president by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David J. Garrow. Although the book made No. 14 on the New York Times best-seller listno mean featit stayed there just one week. This is a little surprising, because Rising Star has got to be one of the most impressive and important books of the year. Its a masterwork of historical and journalistic research, Robert Caro-like in its exhaustiveness, and easily the most authoritative account of Obamas pre-presidential life weve seen or are likely ever to see. Its also a terrific read.
Garrows research alone makes his book essential for anyone who wants to understand our recently departed president. Early headlines pounced on his discovery of, and interviews with, a previously unknown Obama girlfriend: Sheila Miyoshi Jager. Now a professor at Oberlin College, Jager was a graduate student in anthropology (just like Obamas mother) when she lived with Obama in his community organizing days. He proposed marriage to her and even continued to see her a bit after he began dating Michelle.
Story Continued Below
But the revelations about Jager are just the most sensational of innumerable new and often fascinating details Garrow reveals. He interviewed more than a thousand of Obamas friends and colleagues, and Obama himself for eight hours, and unearthed documents from every stage of the presidents life: his undergraduate poetry and his law school exams, an unpublished policy manuscript he co-wrote, his evaluations as a professor at the University of Chicago, his annual tax payments to the IRS, an opposition-research dossier from his 2004 U.S. Senate primary campaign, letters he wrote to his most serious girlfriends and even the diaries they kept of their years with him, including frank (though not lurid) accounts of sex. Whats more, Garrows meticulous reconstructions of Obamas formative years in Chicago organizing and of his political education as a state senator are unparalleled. Its a stunning and indispensable work of history.
So why isnt the book on everyones nightstand? No doubt some readers have been deterred by its formidable length; at 1,460 pages, 1,078 of them narrative text, its not so much a doorstop as a nightstand itself. But some would-be readers have mentioned to me a prominent pre-publication dismissal by the dean of book reviewers, the New York Times Michiko Kakutani, who trashed Rising Star (in her lead paragraph no less), as a dreary slog of a read bloated, tedious andgiven its highly intemperate epilogueill-considered. Four days later, a caustic viral tweet by the Washington Posts David Maraniss (a Pulitzer-winner in his own right whose admirablethough brieferBarack Obama: The Story Garrows volume effectively supersedes), probably scared off more readers: Will say this once only. David Garrow, author of new Obama bio, was vile, undercutting, ignoble competitor unlike any Ive encountered. Maraniss, whom I know a bit, is a decent and generous man; he doesnt lash out lightly.
Sign up for POLITICO Magazines email of the weeks best, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
No question, Garrows jabs at his rivals, especially the two other Davids whove authored major Obama biographies (Maraniss and Remnick), are unnecessarily sharp, and probably altogether unnecessary. Rising Star quotes from the negative or mixed reviews those writers books received and folds in some cutting asides for good measure: Jager tells Garrow shes glad to hear from a first-rate historian (that would be Garrow) instead of a journalist; elsewhere, Garrow bemoans that scores of journalists looked into Obamas high school years and yet no more than two would take the trouble to even telephone, never mind visit, the only other black male student at Punahou, the academy he attended. Garrow also subtly drops in mentions of his own previous books, touting their appearance, for example, in the footnotes of the never-published manuscript that Obama wrote with his law school friend Rob Fisher. This coy self-referencing is more wry than grandiose, but it surely didnt charm adversely inclined reviewers. (Garrow, I hasten to add, is often magnanimous, too; throughout Rising Star he praises many writers whose books and articles he finds illuminating.)
A young Barack Obama stands amid shelves of books at Harvard Law School. | Getty Images
More notable than the digs at his competitors are the gratuitous and even petty swipes at Obama himself. Garrow notes, for example, that while Obama was on his modest book tour for Dreams from My Father, his celebrated 1995 memoir, the future president mispronounced W. E. B. DuBoiss surname, wrongly using a French enunciation in one interview. He tells us, too, that the letters Obama sent as a state senator to Illinois housing officials on behalf of the shady real estate developer Tony Rezko were grammatically incorrect. But who among us hasnt split the occasional infinitive? Even Rising Staras fluidly, briskly and engagingly written as it iscontains in its pages a dangling modifier, a misplaced apostrophe and impact used as a verb.
The gotcha tone is most pronounced when Garrow compares his research to Obamas recollections of his own life, which are continually exposed as incomplete, exaggerated or inaccurate. In Dreams and in other retrospective accounts of his past, Garrow finds, Obama overstated his facility in learning Indonesian, misrecalled a disturbing magazine article he read as a kid about a black man bleaching his skin, inflated his own importance to the Punahou basketball team, wrongly described himself as a bad boy during his teens, mischaracterized his post-collegiate work for the New York Public Interest Research Group and fudged or misstated the record in countless other ways.
Garrow seems to take pleasure in catching Obama in these mistakes, and I suspect that Rising Stars critics were put off by his manifest skepticism about the Obama legend. Obama, after all, still has his cheering gallery. In the last year of his presidency, media coverage displayed much of the same solicitous protectiveness toward him that was rampant during the 2008 campaign and never quite disappeared, a sense that this phenom was somehow different from all other politicians. Many of Obamas long-standing admirers seemed during his valedictory months to want to restore the shining vision of him that reigned in 2008the quasi-messianic figure, the rare authentic voice amid a fallen political world. This image was, of course, a carefully crafted illusion; Garrow quotes Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS newsman, conceding, with understatement, that maybe we were not skeptical enough about Obamas candidacy. But that sentiment, however common among workaday Washington journalists, was never widely shared among the literati and the intelligentsia.
If Rising Star comes off at times as captious, its because, I think, Garrow is so doggedly determined to get to the real Barack Obama, to peel away the layers of mythologyincluding self-mythologizingthat surround his now-familiar story. As Garrow shrewdly notes, there have been, at least since the uplifting 2004 Democratic convention address that catapulted him to stardom, two Obamas. The public image of who he is is not who he actually is, Fisher, the law school classmate, explained. Or, as Obama himself put it, Theres me, and then theres this character named Barack Obama. Garrows remorselessness in deconstructing the character, the public personaand in seeking instead to recover and present the real, lesser-known Obamais what makes Rising Star such an unforgettable and valuable book. But its also what imbues the biography with its exacting, sometimes censorious tone.
Allison Davis, a Chicago mentor of Obamas, remembered his friend weeping after Malia displayed her new ballet steps. Im never at home, Obama lamented. Theyre growing up and Im missing out. | Getty Images
A recurring theme of Rising Star is the discrepancy between Obama as he was and Obama as he portrayed himself to othersin love letters, in interviews, in Dreams from My Father. Its no scandal that Obama should prettify his life story for public consumption, especially if, as Garrow persuasively argues, he was eyeing a political career when he wrote Dreams. We all chisel a little in our self-presentations, especially politicians. What gives Garrows exposure of Obamas self-fashioning its special frisson is the prevailing image of the president as a squeaky clean, non-political truth-teller. You expect Bill Clintons My Life or George W. Bushs Decision Points to be a self-serving political document. But a lot of people really thought Dreams was something different. When we read, toward the end of Rising Star, that Obama told Oprah Winfrey, The biggest mistake politicians make is being inauthentic, its hard not to appreciate Garrows irony.
Thus, in contrast to Obamas image as a religious man, Garrow tells us that even in Hyde Park he visited Jeremiah Wrights controversial Trinity Church irregularly and, as far as his Chicago friends could see, he did not have a religious bone in his body. Most of us think of Obamas progressive bona fides on social issues like gay rights as beyond reproach, but Garrow documents ever-shifting stands on same-sex marriage, depending on the political moment. During the 2008 campaign, Obama famously defused questions about the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers by calling him a guy who lives in my neighborhood, whos a professor of English in Chicago, who I know, but Garrow shows the relationship to have been closer than the candidate let on. (Obviously no one should hold Obama responsible for Ayers despicable deeds four decades earlier. The real outrage was what Chicago Magazine called the widespread willingness by Chicago intellectual society to disregard the violent pasts of Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who was the more famous of the pair until 2008.)
Obamas instinct for self-fashioning was evident early in his career. Garrow quotes a young Obama telling his ex-girlfriend, Alex McNear, in a letter that he was one of the promising young men at the financial data analysis firm where he worked after graduating Columbia University in 1983. Without effort, I find I can perform with flawless grace, he wrote to her, patching up their insecurities, smoothing over ruffles among the co-workers. But given his colleagues starkly different memories of himsomeone not interested in other people, really just kind of kept to himself, self-involved, somewhat withdrawnGarrow concludes that Obamas self-rendering to Alex beggared belief.
Garrow likewise finds that Obama consistently denied the strength of his addiction to nicotine. Numerous acquaintances over the years volunteered to Garrow vivid memories of Obamas compulsive smoking. In college, he was remembered as having burned through multiple packs a day, and he did so again in later years when under stress. In law school, he merrily puffed away out in front of Gannett House, home to the Harvard Law Review, because a city ordinance prohibited it inside. In Chicago, he savored a ritual smoke after a workout, a basketball game or a round of golf. He kept a pack in his bag as a law professor (when students saw it, people were like, Ugh!, shattered, a student recalled). And he still enjoyed a lot of cigarettes later in life, until he gave up smoking altogether around 2011. Of course, Obamas downplaying of his smoking is hardly grounds for consternation, and perhaps little different from Franklin Roosevelts attempts to minimize the effects of his polio. But its one more discrepancy between the public and private Obamas, and a symbolic one.
Notwithstanding its persistent skepticism toward Obamas self-portraiture, Garrows book is far from unrelievedly negative. He also fact-checks right-wing biographies like Stanley Kurtzs Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, dispensing with their caricature of Obama as a flaming socialist, and, as a political liberal Garrow seems to have no ideological quarrel per se with his subject. In some instances, his research shows Obama in a decidedly favorable light. He makes clear for the first time just how absent Obama was from his daughters upbringingstuck down in Springfield or on the campaign trail or in Washingtonand how deeply this absence saddened him. A man named Allison Davis, a Chicago mentor of Obamas, remembered his friend weeping after Malia displayed her new ballet steps. Im never at home, Obama lamented. Theyre growing up and Im missing out.
The young candidate for U.S. Senate arrived on the national stage after an electrifying keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. | Getty Images
Garrows debunking goes into high gear when he gets to Dreams from My Father. That book, whose lyrical style and affecting narrative seduced many voters after its 2004 reissue, still furnishes the version of Obamas early life that most people subscribe to. Even though Obama was candid about having altered key details of his life in Dreams, including creating composite characters, the book was nonetheless marketed as a memoir and autobiography and taken by readers to be a reliable account of his life. Garrow, however, dwells on the substantial amount of invented material in Dreams and ultimately pronounces it, maybe too severely, historical fiction. He also discloses that Fisher, Obamas Harvard Law School buddy and frequent collaborator, was considerably more involved in conceiving and shaping the book than has been previously known. As Brent Staples remarked in his Sunday New York Times review, Rising Star is clearly intended to break the 44th presidents monopoly on his personal narrative that he established with Dreams. It certainly does so.
The unreliability of Dreams is of more than passing interest to Garrow. According to Jager, Obama crossed a line in how he portrayed her, abusing his literary license. Along with his previous girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, and perhaps others, she was folded into a composite character, left unnamed. Dreams described the character as white even though, Jager told Garrow, I dont consider myself exclusively white, as I am half Asian. As Jager saw it, theirs wasnt a relationship between a black man and a white woman but one between two interracial Americans. Barack is as white as I am, she told Garrow.
Jager also told Garrow that the scene, in Dreams, that precipitated their breakupa bitter row about race after they saw a play by an African-American playwrightmisrepresented the issues that actually divided them. In Jagers telling, the searing fight took place after they saw an exhibit at Chicagos Spertus Institute about the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, a very different context. Where Dreams portrayed the lovers rift as at bottom a function of racial difference, Jager, while acknowledging the racial component of their strains, insisted she was mainly upset that day that Obama, in her recollection, was less than unequivocal in condemning black racism; it was at a moment when the overt anti-Semitism of Steve Cokely, a black mayoral aide in Chicago, had become a cause clbre in local politics. To Jager, what doomed their future together was Obamas incorrigible realism, his perpetual readiness to accept and work within given realitiesa trait she saw developing in the course of their relationshipwhile she wanted him to display moral courage.
The lovers disparate accounts may be attributable to differences in memory or even in contemporaneous perception. Still, Jagers observation about Obamas pragmatismratified by so many of Garrows brigades of intervieweesgives Rising Star its other abiding and unifying theme. Eventually, it leads Garrow to his damning judgment about Obama, much quoted, that the vessel was hollow at its core. That verdict is too harsh; indeed, some of those who were left cold by Obamas often vapid hope-and-change rhetoric of 2008 later welcomed signs of his hardheadedness and calculation as proof that he knew how to play politics. But Garrow is persuasive in highlighting this pragmatism as a key element in Obamas bildungsroman.
While in law school, Obama merrily puffed away out in front of Gannett House, home to the Harvard Law Review, because a city ordinance prohibited smoking inside. | Obama campaign
On the whole, Rising Star delivers what its subtitle promises: a new account of the making of Barack Obamaand in two senses of the word. As noted, Garrow unpacks the creation of Obamas public image as we know it today. But he also helps us see the making of the other Obama, the forging of Obamas inner character, and in particular the emergence of the will and drive that he developed in these years, mainly in his time as a community organizer. Obama in this period began to speak to Jager, and occasionally others, of his destinywhich was a reason he gave Jager as to why they couldnt marry. (Jager never says that Obama concluded that he had to marry an African-American woman for his political advancement, but their mutual friend Asif Agha told Garrow, He said that, exactly. Thats what he told me.) What is clear is that around this time, Obama came to feel that he had a calling for greatness, and that sense of destiny transformed him, nourishing his pragmatism and fueling his ambition.
Garrows Obama may be less impeccable than the demigod of popular lore, but he is also more complex, more interesting and, finally, more human. Obamas charisma and sense of destiny, recorded so carefully by Garrow through the words of his interviewees, were vital qualities in his sudden rise to the pinnacle of power, and to win the presidency next time, Democrats will need to find someone else with a touch of the magic he conjured in 2008. But Garrow is a historian, not a political consultant, the historians job isnt to bask in the radiance of charismatic individuals. It is, rather, to limn the complexity that makes them mortal.
Interestingly, Obama himself once addressed the perils for a movement of pinning its political hopes on a single magnetic leader. After leaving Chicago for Harvard, he was invited back to reflect on his community organizing experiences in a roundtable discussion in September 1989. To the jeers of some of the assembled, he said that the election of Chicagos mayor Harold Washingtonstill beloved in his circleshad raised hopes for grand changes. But in the end, he added ruefully, Washington was an essentially charismatic leader whose reforms hadnt gone deep enough to leave a lasting tangible legacy after his untimely death or to hold together his political base once he was gone. Almost alone among the discussants, Obama seemed to understand that to succeed in politicsthe art of who gets what, when and howit was necessary to do more.
David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine. His most recent book is Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.
Excerpt from:
Why So Many Critics Hate the New Obama Biography