(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Foreign Affairs [1] ['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags'] Date: 2023-02-12 Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post has an exclusive that Number 45’s presidential campaign paid for researchers to look for voter fraud and irregularities in the 2020 presidential election . The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court. About a dozen people at the firm worked on the report, including econometricians, who use statistics to model and predict outcomes, the people said. The work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, before the Jan. 6 riot of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Trump continues to falsely assert that the 2020 election was stolen despite abundant evidence to the contrary, much of which had been provided to him or was publicly available before the Capitol assault. The Trump campaign’s commissioning of its own report to study the then-president’s fraud claims has not been previously reported. Yasmeen Abutaleb, Amanda Coletta, and Marina Dias, also of The Washington Post, report about the meeting between President Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. They came to power amid disturbing political turmoil only two years apart. They both campaigned on promises to return their countries to normalcy after four years of sometimes-chaotic rule by populist-style leaders. And they defeated incumbent presidents who refused to recognize the election results as legitimate, leading to insurrections in both their nations’ capitals — one on Jan. 6, 2021, and the other on Jan. 8, 2023. On Friday, Biden and Lula acknowledged their many similarities — and the similarities between their predecessors — when they met at the White House in what was intended as an important signal that their democracies are resilient. [...] The two were expected to discuss democracy, including “their categorical rejection of extremism and violence in politics,” the senior official said, as well as climate change and economic development. But there could be tension between the two men when it comes to the war in Ukraine, given their differing views. Jenna Krajeski of The New Yorker discusses the politics of Turkey’s response to the last Monday’s earthquake. The earthquakes in Turkey and Syria were, like most earthquakes, both utterly shocking and entirely predictable. The region lies on two major faults, and Turkey’s own history is riddled with earthquakes, dating back to the earliest recorded history of the country—before Christianity, before Islam, before radars and seismology and certainly before the polarizing ascent of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.). I lived in Istanbul between 2011 and 2015, and the threat, and memory, of earthquakes loomed heavily. Metal rods hammered between centuries-old stones in Istanbul’s historic core are evidence of early attempts at earthquake preparation. Images of the city after a series of earthquakes starting in 553, with the iconic dome of the Hagia Sophia collapsed like a deflated balloon, are commonly depicted on postcards. Brightly colored educational vans containing replicas of a child’s bedroom—the furniture and knickknacks secured according to government guidelines—routinely circle Turkish cities, to demonstrate how to prepare. Even with all this history, however, this week’s earthquakes were likely the largest natural disaster the country has ever faced, hitting ten major cities in southern Turkey, as well as parts of northern Syria, which had already been extensively damaged by war and is mostly controlled by rebels. For nearly three days, aid and rescue from the Turkish government stalled, and local communities were largely left to fend for themselves. […] Even before Erdoğan’s Presidency, Turkey’s southeast was a stronghold of anti-government activism and politics. The Kurdish movement was born in Diyarbakir, a city that is not only the cultural and political heart of Kurdish Turkey but the heart of the movement to declare an independent greater Kurdistan. Because of that movement, and the violence it has engendered, Kurds in Turkey have been oppressed by a succession of Turkish leaders. Erdoğan, who used to present himself as a supporter of peace, has in recent years proved himself to be among the most oppressive of these leaders. Turkish jails are filled with Kurdish politicians, activists, journalists, and academics, along with perceived sympathizers with the Kurdish movement. Kurdish mayors, long a force in national politics, have been removed and replaced by “trustees” loyal to the A.K.P. By the time the earthquake hit Diyarbakir, the city had been so beleaguered for so long that the destruction—vast, yet mild compared with other affected areas—blended into the debris left by fighting between protesters and police. The distrust of the A.K.P. is so strong in Diyarbakir that the earthquake was met by what was arguably the swiftest and most organized civilian response. Gonal Tol of Foreign Policy details other recent natural disasters and accidents in Turkey exacerbated by political corruption. The practice of granting government infrastructure projects to Erdogan’s allies, many of whom cut corners on safety, has led to other tragedies in the past. Last year, a snowstorm hit the western city of Isparta, causing extensive damage, leaving residents without power for weeks, and leading to several deaths. The city’s utilities had been privatized by the AKP and sold off to companies owned by Cengiz Holding and Kolin Holding, firms controlled by Erdogan’s closest associates. The companies did not take steps to ensure the infrastructure was resilient to such disasters, failed to respond when the snowstorm hit, and rejected any help from opposition parties in neighboring towns, sparking protests by residents and opposition parties against the corrupt tender system. In 2018, as a result of a lack of maintenance work, a train crash in the northwestern town of Corlu killed 25 people, including children. In 2014, 301 miners were killed in the Aegean town of Soma after an explosion sent carbon monoxide shooting through the tunnels of a mine while 787 miners were underground. The chairman of Soma Holding, Alp Gurkan, is another close associate of Erdogan’s. The company benefited from privatizations during the AKP’s years in power, branching out into the construction sector and receiving contracts worth billions of dollars. The miners and opposition parties said the company did not take necessary security precautions. Only 20 days before the explosion, Erdogan’s AKP had thwarted an opposition-led parliamentary motion to investigate conditions at the mine. The government’s response to Monday’s earthquake was once again slow. In Antakya, my family had to dig out loved ones trapped under the rubble with their bare hands. AFAD staff showed up 48 hours later, only to tell us that they couldn’t help because they had orders to focus their rescue operations elsewhere. The Turkish military could have played a role here, too, but Erdogan did not dispatch troops early enough to help with the search and rescue efforts. Turkish civil society organizations, which played a critical role after the 1999 earthquake, were not there, either. All these failures are the result of Erdogan’s policy of centralizing power in his own hands, sapping institutions of their independence, appointing loyalists who lack the necessary background to key posts, and wiping out civil society organizations that do not back his agenda. Lyse Doucet of BBC News reports about the politics of dispatching desperately needed earthquake aid into northwest Syria. Syria's political map is a minefield for humanitarian work. In the north-west of Syria, it's Syrian Kurdish forces which control large swathes of territory, mainly in opposition to Damascus, but occasionally striking alliances of convenience. Pockets controlled by Islamic State forces further compound the risks embedded in any relief operation. Earthquake aid is also reflecting a new regional political map emerging in recent years, as some Arab states - who once worked closely with Western capitals to support the Syrian opposition - have taken a different tack. The United Arab Emirates, the first among Gulf Arab states to try to draw Damascus back into the Arab fold, partly to try to pull it from its close links to Iran, was quick to establish a humanitarian air bridge to both Syria and Turkey. Saudi Arabia has done the same, with other Arab states providing aid to either Syria or Turkey, or both. Toby Helm of the Guardian files an exclusive report of a cross-party conference in Great Britain to discuss the failings of Brexit. The two-day gathering of some of the country’s most senior Labour and Tory politicians from both sides of the Brexit debate, together with diplomats, defence experts and the heads of some of the biggest businesses and banks, was held at the historic Ditchley Park retreat in Oxfordshire on Thursday afternoon and evening, and on Friday. [...] Those in attendance from the pro-Brexit side included the former Tory party leader Michael Howard, former Tory chancellor Norman Lamont and former Labour Europe minister Gisela Stuart, one of the leading figures of the leave campaign. Among the prominent remainer politicians present were shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, shadow defence secretary John Healey and the former European commissioner and Labour cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, who acted as chairman. From the Tory remainer camp, the ex-cabinet minister and long-serving minister for Europe, David Lidington, attended. [...] Stating that “rejoining the EU will not be on the agenda”, the summit papers nonetheless stressed that the EU and UK “have shared interests on containing Russian aggression, developing new sources of energy and building major technology companies with their capital base on our side of the Atlantic, rather than just the US”, as well as common defence interests. Finally today, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer about controversy over the proper usage of “a” and “an” taking place in a Philadelphia suburb, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, you’ve stirred up a serious cauldron. Some are up in arms about the tiny article An that appears on the signs overtop the school’s coat of arms. One local resident, insisting the signs should read “A SCH Home,” sent me a photo of the offending article, along with a note of exasperation at “an educational institution promoting itself without proper grammar.” On the one hand, this feels like a distinctly first-world controversy — the kind of kerfuffle that could only arise at a private institution whose high school tuition tops $46,000 a year. (For comparison’s sake, Philadelphia’s median household income is $52,649.) On the other hand, no one knows how to use articles with acronyms or initialisms, so let’s dive in. The difference between acronyms and initialisms is pedantic, but here, relevant. Acronyms can be read aloud as words on their own: NASA, AWOL, AIDS, FOMO. Initialisms are read letter by letter: FBI, CIA, YMCA. Some will add periods to initialisms (F.B.I.), but most who do that are psychopaths. Or the New York Times. Have a good day, everyone! 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