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US NEWS
Bloomberg
The Pentagon has revealed a few details about a secret Army mission that has Black Hawk helicopters flying missions over the Washington, D.C., area backed by active-duty and reserve soldiers.
The mysterious classified operation was disclosed when the Army asked Congress for approval to shift funds to provide an extra $1.55 million for aircraft maintenance, air crews and travel in support of an “emerging classified flight mission.”
It’s part of a $2.5 billion request this month to “reprogram” funds in the current fiscal year’s budget to programs considered high priorities. “Without additional funding, the Army will not be able to perform this classified mission,” the Defense Department said.
BuzzFeed News
Two unofficial envoys reporting directly to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer have waged a remarkable back-channel campaign to discredit the president’s rivals and undermine the special counsel’s inquiry into Russian meddling in US elections.
In a whirlwind of private meetings, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — who pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican campaigns and dined with the president — gathered repeatedly with top officials in Ukraine and set up meetings for Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani as they turned up information that could be weaponized in the 2020 presidential race.
The two men urged prosecutors to investigate allegations against Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden. And they pushed for a probe into accusations that Ukrainian officials plotted to rig the 2016 election in Hillary Clinton’s favor by leaking evidence against Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair, in what became a cornerstone of the special counsel’s inquiry.
They also waged an aggressive campaign in the United States, staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, and meeting with key members of Congress as they joined in a successful push that led to the removal of the ambassador to Ukraine after she angered their allies in Kiev.
The Guardian
Seven current and former US senators who called for the resignation of Al Franken in 2017 have said their actions were wrong.
The disgraced former Minnesota senator and ex-Saturday Night Live star resigned amid huge pressure, including from his own party, after he was accused by eight women of groping or forcibly trying to kiss them at the height of the #MeToo scandal.
More than a year and a half on, the Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, former North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp, Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, Maine senator Angus King, Oregon senator Jeff Merkley, former Florida senator Bill Nelson and New Mexico senator Tom Udall all told the New Yorker they have regrets about the way the allegations were handled.
The Guardian
Puerto Rico saw more massive protests on Monday as hundreds of thousands lined the streets following Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s attempt to cling on to power despite resigning as president of the ruling New Progressive party and announcing he will not run for re-election next year.
A general strike took place across the US territory on Monday morning, protesters chanting the now familiar cry of “Ricky resign!”, waving flags and banging drums. Demonstrations have gripped the island since hundreds of pages of leaked text messages between the governor and 11 members of his inner circle were published on 13 July.
The messages contain homophobic and sexist slurs against political rivals and cultural figures. They also contain a joke about dead bodies during Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in September 2017.
Puerto Rico’s largest mall, Plaza de las Américas, closed before Monday’s demonstration along with many other businesses. Last week police used teargas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters at a huge rally outside the governor’s residence in the island’s capital, San Juan.
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Monday a two-year deal had been reached with congressional leaders to raise the Treasury Department’s borrowing authority and to set budget spending caps.
“I am pleased to announce that a deal has been struck with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy - on a two-year Budget and Debt Ceiling, with no poison pills,” Trump said on Twitter.
BBC
Iran says it has arrested 17 spies who it says were working for the CIA, and sentenced some of them to death.
The intelligence ministry said the suspects had been collecting information in the nuclear, military and other sectors.
US President Donald Trump has dismissed the Iranian allegations, saying they are "totally false".
Washington and Tehran are at loggerheads over Iran's nuclear programme and tensions have grown.
NPR
The Trump administration announced on Monday it is expanding fast-track deportation regulations to include the removal of undocumented immigrants who cannot prove they have been in the U.S. continuously for two years or more.
The change dramatically expands the ability of the Department of Homeland Security to quickly deport certain immigrants without any of the due-process protections granted to most other people, including the right to an attorney and to a hearing before a judge. It is set to go into effect Tuesday and is the latest escalation of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
"The effect of that change will be to enhance national security and public safety — while reducing government costs — by facilitating prompt immigration determinations," DHS said in a notice.
Additionally, DHS stated part of the purpose for the policy revision is to "harmonize" existing regulations to apply equally to undocumented immigrants who arrive by land and sea.
WORLD NEWS
AFP
Ballots closed in the race to become Britain's next prime minister on Monday, with the favourite Boris Johnson facing more defections by ministers over his Brexit plan.
The country's new leader will take the reins this week and have just three months to attempt to resolve a three-year Brexit crisis that could damage economies on both sides of the Channel and determine the fate of generations of Britons.
Alan Duncan, a junior foreign minister responsible for relations with Europe and the Americas, stepped down saying Johnson was "haphazard" and "ramshackle" and would trigger a crisis of government.
"I have very grave concerns that he flies by the seat of his pants," Duncan told the BBC.
"It is tragic that just when we could have been the dominant intellectual and political force throughout Europe, and beyond, we have to spend every day working beneath the dark cloud of Brexit," he wrote in his resignation letter to outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May.
DW News
The controversial move came after Israel finally won a legal battle against residents of Sur Baher. Israel says the buildings are a safety issue, but Palestinians argue that the government wants the land for settlements.
Israel began demolishing part of a Palestinian village on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Monday, despite strong international criticism and protests. Bulldozers and hundreds of soldiers started tearing down buildings in Sur Baher after forcing residents out.
Sur Baher straddles the city and the occupied West Bank, and Israel has long claimed that many of its buildings were constructed too close to its separation barrier between the city and the Palestinian territory.
After a legal battle lasting years, Israel's Supreme Court ruled in June that the structures did indeed violate a construction ban.
Al Jazeera
The United Kingdom has called on Iran to release a British-flagged tanker and its crew immediately, describing the seizure of the Stena Impero oil tanker by the Iranian forces as illegal.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commandos rappelled from helicopters and seized the tanker in the Strait of Hormuz on Friday in apparent retaliation for the British capture of an Iranian tanker two weeks earlier.
"The ship was seized under false and illegal pretences and the Iranians should release it and its crew immediately," British Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman told reporters on Monday.
"We do not seek confrontation with Iran but it is unacceptable and highly escalatory to seize a ship going about legitimate business through internationally recognised shipping lanes.”
Al Jazeera
Kenya’s Finance Minister Henry Rotich and other treasury officials have been arrested on corruption and fraud charges related to a multimillion-dollar project to build two massive dams, police said.
Rotich, his principal secretary and the chief executive of Kenya's environmental authority handed themselves in to the police on Monday, hours after the country's chief prosecutor ordered the arrest and prosecution of Rotich and 27 other top officials.
"They are in custody now awaiting to be taken to court," police chief George Kinoti told AFP news agency.
"We are looking for [the] others and they will all go to court."
Reuters
But ahead of GDP data for the second quarter due on July 31, a debate has raged over whether all that gloom adds up to a recession.
Several banks say definitely yes - an assessment that could call into question the ability of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s eight-month-old government to deliver on his promises of development and improved fortunes for the country’s poor.
“We estimate GDP will also contract in the second quarter, putting Mexico in a technical recession, two consecutive quarters of negative growth,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a client note in late June.
The government strongly disagrees.
NPR
Jesús Parra spent four years as a police officer in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. He patrolled the streets, provided security at events and even guarded political prisoners. Now, he parks cars at a funeral home for spare change in the Colombian city of Cúcuta.
This is not what Parra, 27, had in mind when he deserted the police force and sneaked across the Colombian border in March.
He made his move after Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself the country's interim leader and called for the ouster of authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro. At the time, Parra said, it seemed like Maduro was teetering. Parra thought he and other defectors would receive military training, then return to Venezuela for the final push to bring down Maduro.
"But that didn't happen," he said in a recent interview. "We were left adrift.”
ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
AFP
Portugal requested the loan of two water-bombing planes on Monday as winds revived massive wildfires in a central region where dozens of people were killed in huge blazes in 2017.
Portugal's civil protection agency had said on Monday morning the wildfires were "90 percent controlled" but officials said they were reactivated when winds picked up in the afternoon.
"During the morning it was practically controlled but weather conditions did not allow a consolidation of the situation," Prime Minister Antonio Costa told journalists.
In response to a demand from Lisbon, Spain sent two heavy amphibious aircraft to help fight the blazes which broke out on Saturday amid scorching temperatures, the interior ministry said.
The European Union said it was willing to offer aid as well if Lisbon asked.
Nearly 1,300 firefighters backed by 17 water-dropping aircraft were deployed to fight the blazes in the heavily forested Castelo Branco region, 200 kilometres (120 miles) northeast of the capital Lisbon.
DW News
Thousands of apartment blocks across Estonia were built in the 1950s as temporary housing. Now an EU project in Tartu is transforming some into sustainable housing as part of a sustainable cities initiative.
The legacy of Tartu's communist past can be found in the 100 'khrushchyovka' apartment blocks across the Estonian city. Nicknamed after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev they were created from the 1950s onwards as temporary accommodation to deal with a chronic post-war housing shortage.
Nineteen khrushchyovkas built in the 1960s are now the focus of SmartEnCity, a new EU funded project attempting to design sustainable and resource-efficient cities in Europe. In Tartu it is working to rescue the buildings from an uncertain future by turning them into energy efficient 'smart homes' - a move that has earned them the new nickname "smartovkas".
The Guardian (7/21/2019)
A family fishing in Cape Cod Bay had a close encounter with a great white shark when it leaped from the water to snatch a fish they had caught.
Doug Nelson, of Franklin, who caught the leaping shark on video on Saturday, told New England Cable News it “gave us a pretty good scare”.
Nelson’s son Jack can be seen on the video jumping back as the shark breaches the surface to take the fish from the line.
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy confirmed it was a great white, as did Marc Costa, captain of the Orleans-based Columbia Sportfishing vessel involved.
Costa said the boat was about three miles west of Great Island in Wellfleet when the shark made its move.
The captain told the Cape Cod Times the encounter “just left everyone in awe”. One local shark researcher tweeted that it was a “good reminder that they don’t just eat seals and always be cautious when retrieving your catch”.
Great whites have returned to waters off Cape Cod in recent years, thanks in part to federal protections which have also boosted seal populations.
The Guardian (7/21/2019)
The water slithered up while the people went to sleep. No text alerts. No sirens. Just the Lumber River, the color of black tea, carrying out its slow, silent ambush, creeping up to the steps of the Baptist church and the rototillers at the hardware store and the 99-cent greeting cards in the pharmacy.
In her final hours in the home where she grew up, 55-year-old Bonnie Savage pulled a load of warm clothes from the dryer and folded them. She was hardly concerned about Hurricane Matthew. It had come ashore in South Carolina as a category 1 and was a tropical storm by the time it tumbled inland and into her hometown of Fair Bluff in eastern North Carolina.
Before that night – 8 October 2016 – the only major flood in Fair Bluff came in 1928, courtesy of the Okeechobee hurricane. Hurricanes, most people in Fair Bluff believed, were problems for people who lived at the beach. Climate change, they often thought, was hogwash. Most of the 1,000 or so people in Fair Bluff had never seen more than ankle-deep puddles in their streets. No way, they believed, could Matthew drop 13 inches of rain that weekend and leave 71 of their homes uninhabitable.
Certainly it couldn’t happen again just two years later with an even more brutal storm named Florence.
Vox
The good news is meat companies are feeling impinged upon as veggie based products increase in popularity.
Arkansas isn’t the first to try this — similar laws are on the books in Mississippi and Missouri, banning alternative meat companies from labeling their products “veggie burgers,” “tofu sausage,” “vegan bacon,” and the like.
Supporters of such laws say that they’re needed to avoid consumer confusion — a person getting a product labeled “veggie burger” might be confused by the word “burger” and not know that the product was plant-based.
Consumer advocates say that such laws — and the reasoning behind them — are silly. “There is no evidence that consumers are confused by plant-based bacon or veggie burger labels, and federal laws are already in place that prohibits consumer deception,” Jessica Almy, director of policy at the Good Food Institute, told me earlier in July.
I asked Jaime Athos, CEO of Tofurky — which is suing Arkansas over the new law — if this was a common consumer complaint, and he confirmed it was unheard of. “We’ve never gotten a complaint like that,” Athos told me.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
BuzzFeed News
Warning: this is exceptionally wholesome content, and if you don't want to feel all soft and maybe get a little teary and want to call your mom right now, click on over to something else. Got it? OK, moving on.
Click the link for the trailer. I did get a bit teary.