Talks on forming a new coalition government in the Netherlands collapsed again on Monday evening, when chief negotiator Herman Tjeenk Willink said the four parties involved ­­­­­­­had decided not to pursue the alliance. The ruling VVD, Liberal democratic party D66 and the Christian Democrats met for a second series of talks with the left-wing green party GroenLinks over the weekend and on Monday but soon decided to call a halt.

Tjeenk Willink told a news conference said the stumbling block proved to be a motion about reaching deals on returning refugees with North African countries which GroenLinks leader Jesse Klaver rejected. `GroenLinks could not agree to my final proposal,' Tjeenk Willink said.

#Kurz sieht Model Schließung Balkanroute als Vorbild für #Mittelmeerroute.
Zeit, diese Grafik wieder auszupacken. https://t.co/YahYK8iVur pic.twitter.com/S7pz5QjI6i

— Doc Josiah Boone 🚲 (@docboone71) 13. Juni 2017

New refugees in Germany. Balkan route closed at the second line, Turkey pact at the third.

It is, with this in mind, notable that many of the recent figures of left-wing revival have been older politicians - Mélenchon is sixty-five, Sanders is seventy-five, and Corbyn is sixty-eight. The difference between those politicians and their, sometimes younger opponents, is that they are completely unsullied by the betrayals of the centre. Corbyn's record as a principled opponent of British foreign policy, anti-nuclear campaigner and proponent of Irish republicanism was of a piece with a general incorruptibility. Those politicians implicated in the hacking scandal, or the expenses scandal, or in betrayals such as Clegg's reversal over tuition fees, appealed to a cynical subjectivity: this is just how politics works. Corbyn was being demonised for breaking with this pact, which had been part of what turned millions off parliamentary politics altogether.

Experten analysieren sein Verschärfungspaket, Innenminister hält Nickerchen #Innenausschuss #gelebterParlamentarismus pic.twitter.com/98jwSlCgoA

— Alev Korun (@AlevKorun) 13. Juni 2017

French President Emmanuel Macron says the possibility of the UK remaining in the European Union is an option until Brexit negotiations have concluded.

He was speaking at a joint news conference with UK PM Theresa May.

But he said he acknowledged and respected that a decision to leave had been taken by the British people.

He echoed the words of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who also said the UK could change its mind about Brexit.

"If they want to change their decision, of course they would find open doors, but I think it's not very likely," Mr Schaeuble told Bloomberg Television.

Trolling?

The True Finns - aka the ugly party - elected a new party leader, and the "let's not hide our racism" wing won. The other two parties in government declared that they could not work with the new party leader. Then the True Finns parliament group split down the middle and a new party was born - New Alternative. New Alternative has all the ministers that the True Finns had and will continue in government.

Remains to be seen is how the voters split. Brand name or old leader?

It's not just that centrism is unpopular; there's simply no such thing. The center is a fiction, believed in only by politicians and the people who would like to become them; political science majors and the people who teach them; journalists and the people who imitate them. Nobody else has ever identified themselves with something as vapid and empty--an ideology of no ideology, the plan to keep everything the same, the residue of class power disguised as a doctrine. It's the imaginary space between parties, a desert, a wasteland. For most people, the world doesn't revolve around a happy stable core: it's a nightmare, in which the rich want to fill their veins with the blood of the poor, in which the old promises of health and security are vanishing, in which everything has gone and continues to go monstrously wrong.

That's actually not true. I do know one (1) real life centrist who is no journalist.

That's the difference right there pic.twitter.com/nc9rJgabHJ

— Ben Jolly (@Benjo_86) 15. Juni 2017

Neoliberalism is many things but most glaringly it's just dull as ditchwater pic.twitter.com/sQaSOt8YuB

— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) 15. Juni 2017

pic.twitter.com/fSz4jbBJGi

— ιδιώτης (idiot) (@prostgrad) 15. Juni 2017

In her reshuffle this week, Prime Minister Theresa May promoted the MP to a junior role in the Department for Work and Pensions.

During the 2013 exchange, Labour MP Alison McGovern asked Mr Opperman to consider the reality of working on a contract that did not guarantee hours "perhaps not in his own life, but in reality, in our economy now."

Mr Opperman replied: "As a barrister, I spent two and a half years without a contract. With respect, I therefore suggest I do have some experience of that, with no contract whatsoever."

Rodman said earlier in a tweet: "I'm back! Thanks to my sponsor Potcoin." The company bills itself as a digital crypto-currency [!] provider for the legal marijuana industry. Rodman added in the tweet that he would "discuss my mission upon my return to the USA".
[...]
The heavily tattooed Rodman has developed an unlikely relationship with Mr Kim since making his first trip in March 2013, when he declared the leader a "friend for life".

At the time, Mr Trump tweeted: "The only American who has met with the North Korean man child is Dennis Rodman. Isn't that frightening and sad?"

In a new legal challenge to President Trump, the Democratic attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit on Monday claiming that the president's failure to shed his businesses has undermined public trust and violated constitutional bans against self-dealing.

The complaint, filed in a Maryland federal court, makes many of the same arguments as a lawsuit filed this year by a Washington watchdog organization in a New York federal court. But some legal experts said the new suit may progress further because the plaintiffs were government entities, which could have stronger standing to sue the president.

It is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump's critics to force him to defend his continued ownership of his business empire. Some congressional Democrats are expected to file a third suit as early as this week arguing that his behavior is also unconstitutional.

The Constitution prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts or emoluments from foreign governments. It also prohibits the president from accepting economic benefits or emoluments from the federal or state governments, other than his salary. But in 230 years, no court has interpreted what exactly constitutes an emolument.

Brian E. Frosh, the Maryland attorney general, said if the lawsuit progressed to the discovery phase, he and Karl Racine, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, would seek to obtain the president's tax returns to gauge the extent of his business dealings.

"It is unprecedented that the American people must question day after day whether decisions are made and actions are taken to benefit the United States or to benefit Donald Trump," he said. "The president's conflicts of interest threaten our democracy."

Complaint file

By Ana Nicolaci da Costa and Charlotte Greenfield

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump told his top diplomat that the dispute over probes into links between his inner circle and Russia should not undermine U.S. efforts to rebuild relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Tuesday.

Speaking in New Zealand after a trip to Australia, Tillerson reiterated the U.S. commitment to the Asia-Pacific region as global leaders have expressed growing mistrust over the Trump administration, which has withdrawn from key international agreements since taking office.

At home, Trump's administration has been plagued by questions over links to the Russian government. Tillerson said Trump told him to try to improve ties with Russia regardless of the U.S. political backdrop.

"I can't really comment on any of that because I don't have any direct knowledge," Tillerson told a news conference in Wellington, when asked how worried he was that the U.S. political crisis could take down the Trump administration.

The US is considering sanctions on countries that do illegal business with North Korea, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has warned.

He said the White House would soon have to decide whether to impose "secondary sanctions" on those nations.

The Trump administration has sought to increase pressure on North Korea over its nuclear and missile activities.

Pyongyang's recent missile tests - which are banned by the UN - have sparked international alarm.

North Korea is believed to be making progress toward developing a ballistic missile capable of reaching the US.

This experience should haunt Democrats as they pursue a byzantine investigation into Trump's alleged Russian ties. In a world that still hasn't recovered from the 2008 crash, most voters simply do not care about geopolitical conspiracy theories; they want politics that will make a difference to their own lives. And the Democrats can't offer that either: whatever its merits, the Russian probe offers a distraction from the fact that the mainstream offers no ideological alternative to Trumpism. After all, if Trump is impeached, the country is left with Mike Pence, and then after him a catalogue of further monstrosities, degenerating and without end. Even if the collusion narrative is true--and it's become so vast and convoluted it seems unlikely to prove Trump's undoing--this is not the terrain on which modern conservatism should be fought. Political change doesn't come out of Senate hearings; it comes from the people, and people are far more receptive to good progressive policies than they are to shrieking about treason.

NSA Director Mike Rogers asserted that his agency "watched" Russia hack the French election infrastructure. For the last month establishment media outlets and establishment loyalists have been repeating this allegation as unquestionable fact, in the exact same way they repeat the Russian hacking narrative of the 2016 US elections as an unquestionable fact. And yet they were all dead wrong. Guillaume Poupard, the head of France's cyber security agency, told the Associated Press that there was "no trace" of Russian meddling and that the hack of the Macron campaign "was so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone."

Links in the original. There are some dubious points before this for example Snowden's assertion that the NSA is absolutely certain to have evidence proving Russian involvement if there exists such evidence (How? suppose they track the hackers to an internet cafe in front of the Kremlin. Does that prove without a doubt that the Russian government is involved?), but this is spot on.

Look at this disgusting nightmare country jesus christ pic.twitter.com/RBmZWnWurQ

— red (@sustinaanford) 14. Juni 2017

Malignant narcissism is a psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, aggression, and sadism.[1] Often grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines organizations in which they are involved, and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate

From wikipedia.

And this clown has the nuclear buttons.  Feel better now?

They tried to assimilate me. They failed.

Donald Trump has reportedly been yelling at TV sets in the White House as he becomes "increasingly angry" about an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the US presidential election.

The US leader thinks he is the victim of a conspiracy aimed at discrediting his leadership and ending his time in the White House, according to the Associated Press.

Confidants and advisers close to Mr Trump said his fury was mounting at the probe and he had been yelling at TV sets about its press coverage.

eet Jim Messina, the reverse Midas of campaign strategy https://t.co/jTjc4hDliY via @FT pic.twitter.com/o9ifp094fr

— Tobias Buck (@TobiasBuckFT) 12. Juni 2017

Voters for decades were conned into thinking they were noisome minorities whose best path to influence is to make peace with the mightier "center," which inevitably turns out to support military interventionism, fewer taxes for the rich, corporate deregulation and a ban on unrealistic "giveaway" proposals like free higher education. Those are the realistic, moderate, popular ideas, we're told.

But it's a Wizard of Oz trick, just like American politics in general. There is no numerically massive center behind the curtain. What there is instead is a tiny island of wealthy donors, surrounded by a protective ring of for-sale major-party politicians (read: employees) whose job it is to castigate too-demanding voters and preach realism.

A tourist resort in Mali popular with Westerners is under attack by gunmen, a spokesman at the security ministry has told Reuters.

Nearby residents reported hearing shots fired at the luxury destination.

The spokesman said the attack was ongoing at Le Campement resort in Dougourakoro, to the east of the capital Bamako.

Malian troops and soldiers from France's Bakhane counter-terrorist force are at the site.

There was no information immediately available on casualties.

This is a Pharaoh Cuttlefish and it's able to perfectly mimic a hermit crab https://t.co/bgSsAHEwHK pic.twitter.com/t2VH7dTgBs

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) 14. Juni 2017

In a landmark study, a team of Chinese scientists using an experimental satellite has tested quantum entanglement over unprecedented distances, beaming entangled pairs of photons to three ground stations across China--each separated by more than 1,200 kilometers. The test verifies a mysterious and long-held tenet of quantum theory, and firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning "quantum space race" to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network--that is, a potentially unhackable "quantum internet" that would be of immense geopolitical importance.

Today -100: June 13, 1917: Of conscription, abdication, and rumors

King Constantine I of Greece abdicates, forced out by Allied threats to bomb Athens if he doesn't. His younger son Alexander will now be king, because the Allies didn't like older son Crown Prince George either.