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We had three different political stories submitted. In the interest of trying to keep political discussions from spilling over into other stories, I have merged them all into this one story. If you are not interested in politics, you are free to ignore this story — another story will be along presently. --martyb
Tories Turned Over in UK General Election
FTFA:
Theresa May will visit Buckingham Palace at 12:30 BST to seek permission to form a new UK government, despite losing her Commons majority.
She is seeking to stay in office on the understanding that the Democratic Unionists of Northern Ireland will support her minority administration.
With one seat left to declare, the Tories are eight seats short of the 326 figure needed to command a majority.
BBC
The Guardian
Telegraph (beware awful ads, but it's a Tory broadsheet)
In other news:
* The UK stock market is up but the pound is down
* European leaders react with a mix of incredulity, conciliatory statements; Brexit plans in tatters
* Record number of female MPs returned; overall high turnout
Fired FBI Director James Comey Lays out the Case That President Trump Obstructed Justice
Former FBI director James B. Comey on Thursday essentially laid out an obstruction of justice case against President Trump and suggested senior leaders in the bureau might have actually contemplated the matter before Trump removed him as director.
Comey did not explicitly draw any legal conclusions. Whether justice was obstructed, he said, was a question for recently appointed special counsel Robert Mueller. But he said Trump’s request to terminate the FBI’s investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn left him “stunned,” and senior FBI officials considered it to be of “investigative interest.”
Of particular concern, Comey said, was that Trump asked other officials to leave him alone with his FBI director in the Oval Office before saying of Flynn: “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
“Why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office?” Comey said. “That, to me as an investigator, is a very significant fact.”
President Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Christopher A. Wray to be Director of FBI
June 7, 2017 at 7:05 PM ET by The White House
Today, President Donald J. Trump announced he will nominate Christopher Asher Wray as the new Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Wray graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1989, then continued on to receive his law degree from Yale Law School in 1992. He started his legal career as a clerk to Judge J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals.
In 1997, Wray began his extensive public service career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. In May 2001, Wray became the Associate Deputy Attorney General of the Department of Justice and within five months he was appointed the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. He was a vital member of the DOJ’s operations during and following the 9/11 attacks.
Wray was appointed to serve as the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the U.S. DOJ’s Criminal Division by President George W. Bush and was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. He led federal criminal law investigations in areas, including: securities fraud, healthcare fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and trade sanctions violations, bank secrecy and money laundering offenses, public corruption, and intellectual property piracy and cybercrime. While he was head of the Criminal Division from 2003 to 2005, Wray worked tirelessly to counteract the wave of corporate fraud scandals and to restore trust in the U.S. financial system. At the end of his term, Wray was given the Edmund J. Randolph Award, which is the DOJ’s most prestigious award for leadership and public service.
Since leaving the DOJ in 2005, Wray has worked as a litigation partner at King & Spalding. He chairs the King & Spalding Special Matters and Government Investigations Practice Group, which specializes in white-collar crimes and regulatory enforcement. He has represented Fortune 100 companies and ranked as a leading litigator by Chambers USA, Best Lawyers in America, and Legal 500. Wray has performed successful oral arguments in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
His wealth of experience in government enforcement and jurisprudence makes Christopher A. Wray an outstanding choice as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday June 09 2017, @10:08PM (2 children)
No. Seriously.
The only questions that have been answered are:
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday June 10 2017, @09:47AM (1 child)
Put all that together with May's disasterous campaign strategy, failure to appear on the debates, and a manifesto that included hard Brexit, stealth taxes, more austerity (needed, but people are still fed up with it), proposed scrapping of human privacy and rights (seriously, WTF!?), and there's not many core Conservative demographics left she's not alienated in some form. The only thing they successfully managed to do in all that was render UKIP defunct by promising a hard Brexit. The LibDems are still out in the weeds, the Greens are not a realistic prospect, and unless you are in Wales, Northern Ireland or are an independance seeking Scot, there's only one viable option left. That their leader turned out to be surprisingly charismatic what it counted absolutely played a part, but I *really* hope that there's a lot more to it than just a cult of personality because that's absolutely the last thing that should be a major factor in a national election.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Saturday June 10 2017, @01:23PM
Actually, no - I suspect that was the tories' big misjudgement - assuming that the UKIP votes would come back to them. People really don't seem to have gotten their head around the fact that there was a lot of support for Brexit from traditional labour voters. Labour helped nail UKIP just as much by accepting Brexit ("don't throw me into the briar patch" for Corbyn, but a harder pill to swallow for the rest of the party). Mostly, though, UKIP are a busted flush anyway now that Brexit is pretty much inevitable.
Watching the result, it seemed pretty clear that the UKIP deserters were going back to Con and Lab in pretty much equal quantities and, surprise surprise, its back to a hung parliament.
Trouble is, I still see "Soft Brexit" as a fairy tale that was dreamed up by Boris and co on the basis that they'd never have to deliver it - and is being perpetuated by the Labour party because an embarrassingly large proportion of their turkeys voted for Christmas in the referrendum. The inconvenient truth is that we won't get full control over immigration (not my priority*, but it seems to be the Brexiteers' red line) and the right to grow bent cucumbers (joke) and access to the single market, because if Brussels let us have that, half the other EU states would demand the same thing and they might as well dissolve the entire EU.
I'd have much preferred to remain, but since that ship seems to have sailed I'm very cautious about any "kludge" which leaves us mostly still subject to EU regulations (in order to stay in the single market and customs union) but without a seat at the table. The UK is not Switzerland and it isn't Norway. If we're going to have Brexit then the negotiators need to go in ready to play hardball, not fenced in by a maze of red lines that they can't even credibly threaten to cross.
Point in case: the status of EU citizens living in the UK and UK citizens in the EU. It's very, very unlikely that it will end in mutually assured mass deportations, but there will be a lot of fine detail to be bargained over and, going by the history of every EU negotiation in history ever, it will be shaped by brinkmanship, posturing and counting coup. That will all be much harder for the UK negotiators if they go in with a legal obligation to allow EU citizens to stay in the UK. Anybody who doesn't like using human beings as bargaining chips should have thought of that before they either supported Brexit or meekly "accepted the democratic decision".
Much as I dislike May and the tories, they've already won onemassive concession out of the EU that nobody seemed to notice: amongst all the mudslinging about the "divorce bill", expats and Gibraltar (of fucking course any agreement over that will have to have Spanish backing unless you want a war zone) was the statement that progress on those needed to be made before trade deals could be discussed. Previously, the official (and logical) line was that trade deals couldn't be discussed until after the 2-year Article 50 process was complete.
Hopefully, unless the opposition parties are actually prepared and able to push through a "stop brexit" vote, they'll refrain from throwing token spanners into the brexit works and concentrate on stopping the tories from trying to turn the UK into a tax haven through their policies at home. Many of Corbyn's state-supported-industry dreams would be impossible under either EU membership or "soft brexit", anyway (probably why he kept his head down during the referendum).
(* So we move the "soft" EU/UK border, and all its problems, from France to the potential powder keg that is the N. Ireland/Eire border... absolutely fucking brilliant plan! Why the weren't Cameron and Osbourne screaming about this sort of thing during the referendum campaign instead of waving around iffy accountants' reports?)