The BBC has unilaterally chosen not to report the Munich attacker’s full name, in what appears to be an attempt to scrub any Muslim or Islamic heritage link to its coverage of the incident.
Most sources at this point suggest that Ali David Sonboly – the Munich attacker who targeted children and killed nine yesterday – is not connected to radical Islam, but the BBC has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to keep any reference to his heritage out of its coverage, opting to name him only as “David Sonbolyâ€.
The news was enough to have French smokers choking on their morning cigarette: France is considering banning some tobacco brands because they are just too cool.
Among those threatened are Gitanes and Gauloises, beloved of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg, who was said to puff through five packets of filterless Gitanes a day.
The ban, which could also cover the Lucky Strike, Marlboro Gold, Vogue and Fortuna brands, is the logical conclusion of a new public health law – based on a European directive – which stipulates tobacco products “must not include any element that contributes to the promotion of tobacco or give an erroneous impression of certain characteristicsâ€.
Reporting the ban, Le Figaro said that while the directive was “relatively vagueâ€, it clearly covered anything suggesting “masculinity or femininity, physical slimness, youth or sociabilityâ€.
Alarmed cigarette companies have written to the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, demanding a meeting “given the seriousness and urgency of the situation†and asking for clarification and the chance to appeal against any ban before the new health code article, currently being considered by the council of state, is published in 10 days’ time.
I can remember the young Strobe Talbot, then editor of the Yale Daily News, stalking around campus in trenchcoat & beret, smoking a Gauloise.
Trump’s nomination acceptance speech was relatively presidential, but the very next day, Trump became the usual Trump again, responding at great length to Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement, proving all over again just how petty, thin-skinned, and vindictive he is to the world-at-large.
Trying to get Trump under control is a major problem for his handlers.
Right before the big acceptance speech, there was fear in professional GOP circles about what might happen:
When Donald Trump takes the stage in primetime tonight to deliver his acceptance speech, he’ll have an opportunity to reach undecided voters. “Trump, for most of them, is not even on their menu right now,†said Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant. But Murphy isn’t hopeful that Trump can seize the moment, despite his speechwriters’ best efforts:
It’s like being Charlie Manson’s foxtrot instructor. You go out there, you teach him a few moves, and you think, ‘Hey, look at that, he can learn the foxtrot.’ And the next thing you know, he’s trying to put a pen in your eye, because he’s Charlie Manson.
Murphy spoke on an Atlantic panel at the Republican convention in Cleveland, moderated by Ron Brownstein and Major Garrett of CBS News. The panelists agreed, in broad terms, on the challenge now facing Trump.
Starz released the teaser trailer at the current Comic-Con for its new series based on the Neil Gaiman fantasy novel premiering in January 2017. Ian McShane will have an excellent role.
Pericles Lewis, currently the founding president of Yale-NUS College, will assume the combined role of vice president for global strategy and deputy provost for international affairs in the fall of 2017, President Peter Salovey and Provost Ben Polak announced.
Lewis will take up the new position at the conclusion of his five-year term in his current post.
This key post within the University Cabinet has been vacant since Linda Lorimer’s retirement in the spring of last year. Lewis’ appointment “will provide renewed and unified focus to a vitally important area of the university,†Salovey and Polak said in letter to Yale faculty and staff announcing the appointment.
Founded as a Collegiate School in 1701 for the training of ministers for the Congregational Church in the Colony of Connecticut, Yale has come a long way.
We all know that, over time, Yale’s mission evolved into the molding and education of members of the national leadership class, but the question is: When exactly, and how, did Yale acquire a Global Mission and its own Foreign Policy?
If Yale already has a foreign policy of its own, isn’t it perhaps time that Yale begins building its own Navy and training officers to command the Yale Army? How about some Yale colonies to start off the construction of the Yale Empire? …
Ben Shapiro has some choice words about what the Republican Party has done.
The irony of Donald Trump’s nomination for president of the United States is that the same establishment that he supposedly opposes has been praying for a candidate of his ilk for decades: a social leftist, a secular materialist, a big government activist. In other words, the establishment has drooled about nominating a Democrat for years.
They finally did it.
Trump’s new Republican Party has nothing to do with the Constitution or conservatism – he mentioned the Constitution one time this week, conservatism zero times, freedom one time, liberty zero times, the unborn zero times, God zero times, and himself some 83 times. As he said, America is broken and “I alone can fix it.â€
Trump promises to fix your problems; Hillary promises to fix your problems. Freedom means fixing your own damn problems. It’s their job to get government out of your way.
Or at least that used to be the conservative line.
The problem isn’t that Cruz failed to endorse a Constitution-loving conservative, it’s that most of Trump’s followers either don’t care about those things or know in their minds it’s not true yet support him anyway.
