Did Human Rights Watch Sabotage Colombia’s Peace Agreement?

On Sunday, Colombian voters rejected the peace agreement that the government, led by President Juan Manuel Santos, worked out with the FARC guerrillas by the slenderest margin possible: 50.21 percent to 49.78, a difference of 53,894 votes. The turnout was 37 percent, out of 34 million eligible voters.

It’s a heartbreaking disaster for the long, intricate peace process, which sought to put an end to Colombia’s more than five-decade-long civil war. That war has claimed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives and has displaced millions upon millions of people. The peace deal, which was worked out during years of negotiations, mostly in Havana, was more aspirational than binding, offering hope that one of the world’s longest-running conflicts would come to an end. Now, that deal is in “tatters.” But keep in mind that “no” won with a sliver of a voting majority (less than 1 percent) of a minority (of eligible voters), with turnout low due to, in many precincts, extreme tropical rain, mostly in coastal departments where “yes” won handily.

Wells Fargo Crooks Stole From Customers, Reaped Obscene Rewards—and Stuck Us With the Bill

“The business model of Wall Street is fraud,” Bernie Sanders proclaimed repeatedly on the stump. Wall Street’s big banks seem intent on proving his case. Most recently, Wells Fargo—whose CEO, John Stumpf, was celebrated as “banker of the year” by American Banker in 2013—has been fined $185 million for abusing its own customers. From 2011 to 2015, the company opened nearly 2 million bank accounts and more than 500,000 credit cards for customers who didn’t ask for them, engaging in fraud, identify theft, and forgery along the way. Its customers, as former Wells Fargo sales manager Beth Jacobson put it, were “all riding the stagecoach to hell.”

Post-Bernie Blaze Fires Up His Democratic-Socialist Delegates

When Tom Gallagher was a Massachusetts delegate for Senator George McGovern in 1984, Democratic National Conventions were a bit different.

“This was before it was just one big infomercial,” Gallagher, now 67 and living in San Francisco, said.

At the convention in 1984, McGovern had only 23 delegates to his name, and Gallagher was one of four who refused to switch his vote to former vice president Walter Mondale, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, despite McGovern’s urging his delegates to do so.

Forget Trump: Peter Thiel Is So Dangerous and Fascinating You Have to Watch Him Tonight

Tonight, Peter Thiel, an openly gay immigrant hailing from San Francisco, will address the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. His speech will close out the coronation of Donald Trump as the nominee of his party, which three days earlier finalized a platform affirming the definition of marriage as “between one man and one woman.”

Thiel may seem an unlikely warm-up act for a raving nativist like Trump. But the pair are actually an impeccable ideological tag-team. In fact, Thiel outmatches Trump both in the preposterousness of his capitalistic ambition and in the sheer pathology of his political inconsistency.

Nigel Farage: Donald Trump Will Win If He Engages ‘Non-Voting Ordinary People’ Like Brexit-Backers

Nigel Farage has claimed there is a “commonality” between voters in the UK who backed Brexit and those who could deliver Donald Trump to the White House later this year.

The ex-Ukip leader was speaking from the Republican Party convention in Cleveland, where Trump was yesterday confirmed as the nominee to run for US President.

Saudi Official Allegedly Brought Slave To London, Foreign Office Diplomatic Immunity Figures Reveal

A Saudi official has been accused of bringing a slave to London, as a string of crimes committed by people with diplomatic immunity are released in new Foreign Office documents.

According to the Foreign Office, 11 “serious and significant” offences were allegedly committed by people immune from prosecution as diplomats in the UK last year.

Among the alleged offences were sexual offences involving children and causing actual bodily harm.

Turkey suspends European convention on human rights in wake of failed coup

Turkey has said it will suspend the European convention on human rights during a state of emergency declared in the aftermath of last weekend’s coup attempt.

“Turkey will suspend the European convention on human rights insofar as it does not conflict with its international obligations,” the deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmus, was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu news agency.

Black Cleveland Residents Tell Tale of Two Cities in the Shadow of Republican Convention

A day after Republican National Convention speakers discussed how to “make America safe again,” a group of young Clevelanders held their own “make America safe again” event at a downtown park.

As police officers on horseback and bikes fended off a small rally down the block and helicopters buzzed overhead, the group of mostly black and Latino college students huddled around a picnic table Tuesday and talked about how irrelevant and offensive the Republican event is to many residents of its host city.

Police Shoot Therapist Pleading For His Life While Helping Patient

Video has surfaced of an unarmed man raising his arms and begging officers not to shoot, moments before they shoot him in the leg. Behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey was laying in the middle of a North Miami road and trying to assist his autistic patient when an officer opened fire.

Kinsey survived the shot, and recounted what happened Monday when officers were called about a gunman threatening suicide. Kinsey’s patient, Rinaldo, escaped from a group home holding a toy car, but the person who called 911 said he was armed. In cellphone footage that captured the moments leading up to the shooting, Kinsey is laying on his back with his arms up, explaining to police that he was unarmed and helping his patient who was clearly holding a toy. At the same time, he tries to convince Rinaldo to get on his stomach.

Who Is Making American Foreign Policy—the President or the War Party?

§ The preceding 40-year Cold War witnessed many instances of high-level attempts to sabotage détente policies of US and Soviet leaders. Considering that US warplanes knew the area very well and that the Department of Defense, headed by Ashton Carter, had openly expressed opposition to the Obama-Putin plan for a US-Russian alliance against terrorist forces in Syria, the American attack on Syrian Army forces, which blatantly violated preconditions of the agreement, may not have been “accidental,” as DOD claims and as US media similarly reports. If the attack was intentional, we are reminded of the power of the American war party, which is based not only in DOD but in segments of the State Department, in Congress, and in the mainstream media, notably The Washington Post. Judging by Ambassador Samantha Power’s tirade against Russia at the UN, not even Obama’s own team fully supports his overtures to Moscow, undertaken, no doubt, to enhance his desultory foreign policy legacy.