So. Last December – after the election, before the inauguration. Some people got together at Trump Tower in Manhattan; among them were Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, and Sergey Kislyak. After the eggnog and mince pie and the exchange of prezzies, Kushner suggested “establishing a secret communications channel between the Trump transition team and Moscow to discuss strategy in Syria and other policy issues.”

Yes that’s right, the president-elect’s daughter’s husband, age 36, a real estate hustler, tried to set up a secret communications channel with the Russians, i.e. a hostile foreign rival.

News of the discussion was first reported by The Washington Post. The revelation has stoked new questions about Mr. Kushner’s connections to Russian officials at a time when the F.B.I. is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into Russia’s attempts to disrupt last year’s presidential election and whether any of Mr. Trump’s advisers assisted in the Russian campaign.

Current and former American officials said Mr. Kushner’s activities, like those of many others around Mr. Trump, are under scrutiny as part of the investigation. But Mr. Kushner is not currently the subject of a criminal investigation.

In the days after the meeting with Mr. Kislyak, Mr. Kushner had a separate meeting with Sergey N. Gorkov, a Russian banker with close ties to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

The Post reported that the direct line between the transition team and the Kremlin in concept would have been conducted through Russian diplomatic facilities to avoid being monitored in American communication systems. The Post also reported that Mr. Kushner had proposed the communications channel and that it took Mr. Kislyak by surprise. The New York Times could not immediately confirm these details.

Well this all seems a bit messy. Maybe we could have a rethink. Maybe Trump could dig deep and come up with some childhood friends or classmates or drinking buddies who could fill these jobs instead of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump and other relatives.

On Friday, Reuters reported that Mr. Kushner had at least two previously undisclosed phone calls with Mr. Kislyak between April 2016 and Election Day. The calls focused on how to improve economic relations between the United States and Russia, and how the two countries could better cooperate in the fight against Islamist extremism, Reuters reported, citing six current and former American officials.

Why wouldn’t we want an ignorant young real estate hustler doing homemade amateur diplomacy in his garage? What could possibly go amiss?

It’s entirely understandable that Trump is doing such a terrible job as president – he’s so busy promoting all his golf clubs. What’s he supposed to do, stop promoting them? That’s crazy talk. Now the Senior P.G.A. Championship is happening at one of his clubs. Big bucks for President Pig!

Over the past decade, the Trump Organization has stockpiled golf courses, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy, remake and upgrade a dozen different clubs and resorts from the Hudson Valley to Doonbeg, Ireland. Golf resorts and clubs have accounted for roughly half of Mr. Trump’s revenue, according to his personal financial disclosure last year.

…

Just four months into his presidency, Mr. Trump has visited his family-owned golf clubs 25 times, giving them the kind of media exposure that advertising could never buy. Six of those visits have been to the Virginia course while the P.G.A. marketed tickets to the event. And this week, Mr. Trump courted the senior P.G.A. club professionals in town by arranging a private tour of the White House, despite promising in his ethics plan that “the Office of the Presidency is isolated from the Trump Organization.”

He’s multitasking. He does an hour of ranting about Mooslims and shoving heads of state out of his way, and then an hour of showing golf pros around the White House. Win-win; everybody’s happy.

Greg “Bodyslam” Gianforte won election to Congress despite having slammed a reporter to the floor and then jumped on top of him and punched him at least twice. Welcome to Trump’s America.

Republican Greg Gianforte won the special election for Montana’s lone congressional seat on Thursday despite an election eve misdemeanor assault charge for allegedly body-slamming a reporter.

Gianforte had been silent following the allegations, with his campaign only releasing a statement claiming that The Guardian‘s Ben Jacobs had been the aggressor. But speaking at his victory party in Bozeman shortly after the race was called, Gianforte admitted he was in the wrong and apologized to Jacobs.

What next, perps elected to Congress hours after their latest murder?

In his victory speech, Gianforte echoed many of the themes of Trump’s campaign.

“Tonight, Montanans are sending a wake-up call to the Washington, D.C., establishment,” Gianforte said. “Montanans said Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi can’t call the shots. Montanans said, ‘We’re going to drain the swamp.’ “

And assault anyone we take a dislike to.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Cop on Comrades.

This is something I have been seeing more and more. Well, you (meaning me) have a college degree and a job as a professional, while I (meaning the man speaking) am [unemployed, underemployed, uneducated – fill in the blank]. And I lost my chance at a job because a [black woman, Native American, Mexican] was hired instead of me, even though I was more qualified.

First, I would like to comment on that last sentence – I have never heard of any white male (who is self-reporting) that has lost out on a job to someone more qualified. They always lost it to a woman or a person of color, and that person is always less qualified for unspecified reasons (which probably is that they are female or a person of color, but the left-leaning individual does not wish to express/understand this).

I have lost out on jobs to less qualified people – people with fewer years of experience, in some cases people who did not meet the minimum job requirements – because I was female, and as a female, I had to have requirements higher than I could achieve (in short, I had to be a male). I may have landed on my feet in the end, but it took a lot more than the men who have achieved the same status. I found fewer doors open to me, and fewer chances to excel. Perhaps someone should ask why there are so many women teaching in our college? Most people assume it’s because women are getting such a sweet deal. It isn’t. I teach at a community college, and because many of us have difficulty finding a position in the higher levels of academia, the community college is able to get women with doctoral degrees very easily – and they are willing to hire.

Why do I consider that a result of being a woman? Because in my experience in college (and I know this will not be everyone’s experience, so please don’t come in and mansplain this to me) – women were in a different position. The men were being supported by someone, someone who was paying the bills, taking care of the kids, cleaning the house, cooking the meals, and letting them do what they needed to do. The men in my college rarely graduated as quickly as the women, but this was because the women had to get out of college and get a job. Whoever was paying the bills (if it wasn’t them, which it usually was) was not about to tolerate long stays in college and long post-doc work that would allow for the amount of published papers needed to even get your application past the first stage of the process in a four-year college or a university. Our whims about educating ourselves had been humored and tolerated, but we had that piece of paper, now could we, for Chrissake, go do something useful? Which means in many cases get married and have children, but in the case of a lot of women, it means go get a job right now, and I mean yesterday. Not a post doc, which pays very poorly, but a job, a real job.

In the entire time I was in school, I saw only one woman go off for a post-doc, and she was a woman who had been left enough money when her parents died that she was able to support herself, and put her husband through college. And her husband, who held no full time job, stayed in college four times longer than she did, and spent a lot of time in Mexico doing research that earned him publications he needed to go further.

Yes, I achieved more than the men who are working class (by the way, I started pretty low myself, living most of my life in poverty). But…and this is a huge but…the obstacles that were thrown in my way were larger than men going the same path I was going. In some cases, insurmountable. And more than just what I detailed above. I also had to deal with sexual harassment, condescension, refusal to accept that my work was really my work, failure to consider me when looking for someone to fulfill an important project, etc. Meanwhile, I was in the field with the best of them, doing ecological field work that requires physical ability to complete. I was more fortunate than most on that, because my field assistant in my masters was a woman, and in my doctorate, my husband stepped into that role, so sexual harassment was not an issue in that one particular space in my life.

Now I have reached the place in my life where I am past 50, and I can be totally ignored by everyone, because I am an “old” woman. In other words, I still have to face that societal construct that says I am somehow lesser, now not only than men but also lesser than younger women, because I no longer fulfill the major status in the life of a woman – someone who is attractive to men. I should stay home and bake cookies and dust, but I refuse to stop doing science, and for that I am to be punished by being ignored.

A week ago the Irish Times published an opinion piece by Frankie Gaffney that apparently was an instant hit with the Pepe crowd. It’s not difficult to see why.

I grew up in Dublin’s inner city, an environment where poverty, violence, and addiction were normal. Given the odds I had to overcome to get where I am today, I thought I’d meet a lot of allies among those who preach equality. But instead, I was often met with open hostility, despite the fact I campaign on a variety of related issues. Why? Because I happen to be straight, white, and male.

“Straight white male” is an identity I didn’t choose. I mean it wasn’t a decision I had any say in, what sexuality, race, or gender I am. I was born this way. But also, “straight white male” was never something I chose to “identify” as. At various times if you’d asked me about my identity, I might have said “Irish”, “a Dub”, or “working class”, but never straight, white, or male – let alone the arbitrary combination of all three. But people who talk a lot about “choice” and “freedom” chose for me, and decided that’s what my identity should be reduced to.

Well, no. That’s not how that works. Of course it’s not a choice, but the advantageous place on the hierarchy is what it is just the same. It’s not about choice. I didn’t choose to be white, but that doesn’t mean I get to deny that I have the advantages that being white bestows. I have them. I didn’t choose them, but I have them. It would be unbearably precious of me to insist that because I didn’t choose to have them I get to ignore them or brush off other people’s lack of them.

Gaffney talks about cultural appropriation for a bit and then gets down to his real business, complaining about feminism.

A recurrent theme of this ideology is patronising people. It’s a nice word, “patronise” – kind of similar to “mansplain”, except gender-neutral.

Ha, no. Consider the root. If you’re stumped, think “patriarchy.” Patronize could be rudely translated as daddyspeak.

The further irony is the most patronising people I’ve ever encountered are the people who explain to me why it’s fine to use words and phrases such as “mansplain”, “manspreading”, “toxic masculinity”, “fragile masculinity”, and to use “straight white male” as a pejorative, while simultaneously decrying gender stereotyping and the use of negative genderd terms. The proponents of identity politics discuss these concepts as if they were talking about the second law of thermodynamics, the periodic table of elements, or the disciplinary handbook of the GAA.

In other words there are plenty of dopey obnoxious feminists, just as there are plenty of dopey obnoxious people on the left generally. No kidding. There are plenty of dopey obnoxious people everywhere. We just have to soldier on somehow.

These people don’t want to separate church and state, they want to institute a new religion, just with themselves at the helm. And just like with Eve and the apple, they demand that individuals should be held responsible for the sins of their gender.

And so on and so on and so on, getting crosser as he goes. So Mary McAuliffe wrote a response:

#coponcomrades

Cop on Comrades

We are a group of activist women from a wide variety of backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Last week, a good number of the left-wing men we work and organise with seriously disappointed us. These men – our friends, our fellow trade unionists, activists, writers, organisers, and artists – shared and commented on a reductive and damaging article written by Frankie Gaffney, which was published in the Irish Times.

We live in a world where our advantages are tangled up with the things that disadvantage us – some of us are working class, some queer, some of us are poor, some of us come from minority ethnic groups or have disabilities or don’t enjoy the security of citizenship. As well, some of us have had a multitude of opportunities in our lives while some of us have had to fight our way through. It is an obligation on all of us to honestly look at our different positions within the structures of oppression and privilege under patriarchal racial capitalism. It is only by acknowledging all these differences that we have any chance of imagining and building a better world that includes us all.

Working-class ‘straight white men’ in Ireland don’t have it easy these days. They never did. They are ignored by a political class that couldn’t care less about them. They should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, but they often don’t.

However, that doesn’t make them immune to critique. We all have to examine ourselves as oppressor as well as oppressed – because we are all both. The response to the article felt like a silencing to us and we are writing this because we are way past putting up with that. You will see from the names on this letter that we are women who have been in the thick of things. Whether in political parties and organisations, education, trade unions, or grassroots and community-based movements, we are tired of being accused of ‘bourgeois feminism’ and of betraying the struggle when we raise our voices. No campaign in this country could survive without women, without us – our work and energy and knowledge and organising have been instrumental in all the progressive movements in this country. When we say we need to be recognised and respected within our movements, we need you to listen.

The article expressed the view that identity politics is good for nothing except dividing movements, using language and narratives that have been made popular by MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) groups and the alt-right. According to such narratives, straight white men are the new most oppressed group. This ignores the struggles of women and others at the sharp end of misogyny, racism, anti-trans and anti-queer violence. It aims to silence those who will no longer tolerate the violence, abuse and marginalisation we have suffered for so long. These alt-right arguments have been used by people on the left to support the view that women, and feminists in particular, are to blame for the rise of the far right – for instance, for Trump’s election – and for neoliberal capitalism, which is seen as having damaged working class men in particular.

In this version of events, straight white men are made to feel uncomfortable about being ‘born this way’ by social media-fuelled ‘political correctness’. They are too afraid to say what they think or express opinions for fear of online retribution. Men who claim to be silenced in this way might try a week or even a day as a vocal woman or person of colour online and see how they deal with the rape threats and threats of racist violence that follow.

We are not concerned here about one opinion piece by one person. Rather we have all been aware of the increasing trend towards this particular new type of silencing of women from our supposed fellow activists on the left. The arguments mounted here and elsewhere are apparently to criticise some of the worst aspects of ‘call-out culture’, as well as the lean-in type of so-called feminism that disregards class and race. Yet they seem to be used now by some of our left-wing activist comrades as an excuse not to deal with the complexities of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation in our political organising. These excuses, when accepted, prevent us from seeing clearly the state of our movements – who is taking part in them, who is heard and represented, who is doing the work. These are massive issues that have to do with how we are creating mass movements, which need to be addressed and faced to ensure that people of different classes, races, ethnicities, sexual orientation and gender have not just a voice but leading roles in our struggle. Without this solidarity in working together, we are simply imitating the oppressive structures we want to fight – the structures that say “not now, your life comes second.” It is not the straight white men who are being silenced when this argument is made.

We are working-class women, women of colour, migrant women, trans women, Traveller women, disabled women, queer women, women who are sex workers, women with children, and women who are none of these, active in our communities and committed to an anti-capitalist struggle. We are well aware that a right-wing, neoliberal distortion of feminism and what is called ‘identity politics’ exists. We know this because it erases our experiences and struggles and we resist this erasure through our work as activists every single day. It is distressing and enraging that we also have to fight against the bad faith of fellow activists on the left – mostly men, sometimes women – who, for their own reasons, blur the distinction between this kind of middle-class neoliberal faux-feminism, and a truly radical feminist politics that has class struggle at its very core. This hurts us because it erases and undermines our realities, our suffering, our analyses, and our organising, and gives more strength to the powers that are ranged against us. For many of us, it is heart-breaking to look at some of the men around us and realise that they are nodding in agreement with this erasure of their working class women friends and comrades.

Most of us have grown up learning to appease men. How to give them our space, how to deal with the fact that they dominate any political discussions, that they are paid more, heard more and believed more. However, most of us expect that the men we work with in all the social justice movements we are part of should have at least considered how they are complicit in this domination when they refuse to recognise that it exists. Patriarchy forces men into roles that damage them as well as us. Most of us have men that we love, admire and respect in our lives and for that reason, not only because it damages and diminishes the life experiences of women, we should all be fighting patriarchy together.

There are many signatures.

I thought so. The Post reports that the White House official identified as a person of interest last week is Kushner.

Jared Kushner has just been revealed as the senior White House adviser who is under investigation in the Russia probe — which is news that comes as little surprise. Indeed, when The Washington Post reported last week that a then-unnamed top Trump adviser was a focus, many quickly assumed it was Kushner.

But while those assumptions were based on his known contacts with Russians and his status as one of few senior White House aides, there’s another reason his naming fits the puzzle: He’s related to Trump.

My guess was based on all three of those, definitely including the relationship with Bullyboy Trump.

I wish they would all go back to Queens and stay there forever.

Europe doesn’t like Trump.

When President Donald Trump lectured NATO members on their contributions to the trans-Atlantic alliance, he demonstrated a lack of understanding about how the group works and potentially alienated the US’ closest allies, analysts said.

The speech comes at a time when Washington’s longstanding partnerships with the UK and Israel have endured friction over intelligence gaffes by the new administration.

“Diplomatically, the speech was inept at best and deliberately insulting at worst,” said Jeff Rathke, deputy director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

I’m going to go with both inept and deliberately insulting. That’s very Trump, after all.

Trump’s remarks Thursday, alongside his continued misrepresentation of how the alliance works and his failure to reaffirm US commitment to the group, is likely to further unsettle US allies, sowing doubt about US leadership and possibly making it harder for NATO leaders to convince their people of the need to spend more on defense.

Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO, said that “this was a perfectly scripted event to deliver a very simple message that every president of the United States has delivered at the first possible opportunity, which is that the United States stands firmly behind its commitment to the defense of NATO.”

“We signed a treaty, we uphold it. It was really easy,” Daalder said. “And the fact that he didn’t do it was disturbing and will take a long time to overcome in Europe.”

They did their best. They were warned that he’s a giant baby, so they arranged things for a giant baby.

NATO leaders had envisioned this summit as an introduction to the new US President, adjusting the format to make it more accommodating for Trump, changing the date, shortening the day-long proceedings — in part by telling leaders to make speeches briefer — and making a casual dinner the centerpiece of the gathering.

They had someone pre-chew his food for him; they put stuffed animals in his chair; they ordered gallons of Diet Pepsi and all the ice cream in Belgium.

In Brussels, Trump charged that “many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years” and implied that these countries owed that money to the United States.

“This idea that countries owe money is flat-out wrong,” said Rathke. Countries commit to the 2% target for defense spending — a goal only five NATO members currently meet — within their own countries. The money is not paid to a central fund, though Trump continues to allude to a system like that, raising questions about his ability or willingness to listen and learn.

“Anybody with NATO expertise knows that there is no such thing as ‘debts’ owed by NATO allies for what they haven’t spent in the past,” Rathke said.

Well you’ll have to excuse him: he’s very stupid.

Sean Hannity is losing advertisers because of his relentless flogging of a nasty made-up conspiracy theory about the random murder of Seth Rich last summer. Good.

The automotive classified site Cars.com and several other companies pulled advertising from Sean Hannity’s Fox News show after he came under fire for promoting a conspiratorial account of the slaying of a former Democratic National Committee staffer.

“We don’t have the ability to influence content at the time we make our advertising purchase,” Cars.com said in a statement Wednesday. “In this case, we’ve been watching closely and have recently made the decision to pull our advertising from Hannity.”

The mattress maker Leesa Sleep, the exercise company Peloton, and the military financial services company USAA said they, too, were no longer advertising on Hannity’s show. Crowne Plaza Hotels, online mattress retailer Casper, and the video doorbell company Ring told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday that they were backing out as well.

Money talks.

Hannity had been one of the main purveyors of a widely discredited theory that DNC staffer Seth Rich was shot and killed near his home in Northwest Washington last year because he had supplied DNC emails to WikiLeaks. District police say Rich died in a botched robbery. His parents have pleaded with news outlets to stop speculating about his death.

Newt Gingrich helped Hannity flog the claim over the weekend. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Contract With America Newt Gingrich.

Rich, a 27-year-old data analyst, was gunned down in the early hours of July 10 in Washington’s Bloomingdale neighborhood. Later that month, WikiLeaks published a cache of DNC emails, leading some commentators to speculate that Rich’s death was somehow related.

Later that month. How is that not good enough for you libtards? Obviously later that month means connected. That’s science.

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Teaching about sexual and reproductive anatomy.

Belief in word-magic is certainly alive and well in the 21st century. In my militant atheist days I frequently ran into some version of the following “argument” (this is going to be pretty philosophically sophisticated, so you better be ready):

1. The word “God” refers to X (X = Life, the Universe and Everything etc.).

2. X exists.

3. Therefore the word “God” refers to something that exists.

Of course by the time we arrived at 3, Life, the Universe and Everything had invariably mutated into a supernatural, intelligent creator of the universe who, by the way, was the father of Jesus, had authored the Bible etc. After all, we had already established that something called “God” existed, and the biblical Yaweh was indeed something called “God”. Never mind that this rather obvious redefinition directly contradicted 1, thus invalidating the argument that got us to 3 in the first place.

But this idea that you can take whatever’s applicable to X and make it applicable to Y by renaming Y as X is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine how modern ideological newspeak could possibly go on without it. We see the same thing with “free will” and pretty much anything to do with “gender”. As I have previously written it’s a bit like arguing that clubs for hitting baseballs (let’s call them “bats₁”) can fly because Chiroptera (let’s call them “bats₂”) can fly. After all Chiroptera prove that things called “bats” can fly, and clubs for hitting baseballs are indeed things called “bats”.

There is a major difference between talking about a specific (kind of) thing whatever you prefer to call it, and talking about whatever it is that people call “[insert name here]”. E.g. in the case of bats₂ we’re referring to a specific order of mammals that just happens (in this particular context and for this particular purpose) to be called “bats”. They share certain anatomical and genetic features as well as a common evolutionary ancestor that they don’t share with any non-bats₂ etc. The fact that people in the English speaking world happen to call them “bats” rests on an arbitrary cultural convention and doesn’t say anything about the actual animals themselves, therefore “Fledermaus”, “chauve-souris” etc. are neither more nor less “correct” ways of referring to them. If English speakers collectively decided to start calling them “abts” or “tabs”, they would still be talking about the same creatures. And, conversely, no amount of (re)labeling other things (clubs for hitting baseballs etc.) as “bats” can turn them into instances of the kind of thing we are talking about, or even make them relevant to our topic. If you change the definition of “bats”, then a statement like “bats can fly” no longer applies. If, on the other hand, we’re referring to whatever it is that someone happens to call “bats”, then all those bets are off, and it’s hard to see how any non-circular/non-trivial statement can be generally true, or even meaningful, on the subject.

Almost all of modern gender apologetics seems to boil down to statements of this latter kind. As far as I’m concerned, being “female₁” means something like having physical traits more representative of egg-producers than sperm-producers within one’s particular species, a “woman₁” is a female₁ human being, the word “gender₁ itself refers to a difference in the way women₁ and men₁ (i.e. people with physical traits more representative of sperm-producers than egg-producers) are viewed/treated in a society, and “feminism₁” is a movement that seeks to end the discrimination of women₁ based on such gender₁ differences.

In the vocabulary of gender apologists, on the other hand, being “female₂” generally means something like thinking or feeling about oneself in ways X,Y,Z etc., a “woman₂” is any person who qualifies as a female₂ (i.e. who does indeed think/feel in ways X,Y,Z etc.), regardless of physical traits, the word “gender₂” refers to a perfectly real and vitally important difference in way people think/feel about themselves, and “feminism₂” is a movement that seeks to end discrimination against “women₂” by validating all genders₂.

However, since there are no clearly identifiable “ways X,Y,Z…” of thinking/feeling that are common to all who call themselves “women” while being distinct from the way those who call themselves “men” think/feel, they might as well say that the definition of “female₂”/”woman₂” is whatever it is that people call “female”/”woman”. As I have previously pointed out, gender apologists are also faced with the awkward fact that there is no way of specifying “ways X,Y,Z…” without – that’s right – excluding [insert scary music] anyone who fails to think or feel the required ways about themselves, thus depriving them of a much cherished stick for beating up “TERFs” and “SWERFs” (who are supposedly alone in the exclusion business).

As I have commented on elsewhere, the real problem arises when some people insist on acting as if we were still all talking about the same thing and demand to have it both ways. One example that strikes me as particularly revealing is the demand that women₂ be allowed to compete in sporting events that are reserved for women₁ specifically to make up for biological differences. Why women₂ would need separate sporting events from men₂ (i.e. people who think/feel about themselves in the unspecified ways P,Q,R… rather than the equally unspecified ways X,Y,Z…) is unclear to say the least. And even if one managed to come up with a reason, it would no longer be true that women₁ were automatically qualified to compete, and we would need some kind of screening process to make sure that only people who really did think/feel the required ways about themselves were allowed to participate.

The Manchester police aren’t waiting on what May and Trump say to each other in Brussels; they’ve closed the door themselves.

British police have stopped sharing evidence from the investigation into the terror network behind the Manchester bombing with the United States after a series of leaks left investigators and the government furious.

The ban is limited to the Manchester investigation only. British police believe the leaks are unprecedented in their scope, frequency and potential damage.

Downing Street was not behind the decision by Greater Manchester police to stop sharing information with US intelligence, a No 10 source said, stressing that it was important police were allowed to take independent decisions.

Again, imagine the fury if they did this to us.

British officials were infuriated on Wednesday when the New York Times published forensic photographs of sophisticated bomb parts that UK authorities fear could complicate the expanding investigation, in which six further arrests have been made in the UK and two more in Libya.

It was the latest of a series of leaks to US journalists that appeared to come from inside the US intelligence community, passing on data that had been shared between the two countries as part of longstanding security cooperation.

I have to wonder why they’re leaking it. If keeping the details secret is likely to help find other perps, then what can possibly be the motivation for leaking it?

Whitehall sources reported a sense of deflation among UK security staff at the amount of detail coming out of America. The UK had shared the material with US police and intelligence in the expectation it would remain secret. The amount released is hampering at least part of the investigation, they believe.

Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, said the leaks were arrogant and disrespectful, and police chiefs also criticised the actions.

A national counter-terrorism policing spokesperson said: “We greatly value the important relationships we have with our trusted intelligence, law enforcement and security partners around the world.

“When that trust is breached it undermines these relationships, and undermines our investigations and the confidence of victims, witnesses and their families. This damage is even greater when it involves unauthorised disclosure of potential evidence in the middle of a major counter-terrorism investigation.”

I just read the Times article, and those photos and descriptions certainly do look like potential evidence. I can’t figure out what they were thinking.

Maybe it’s a free press thing run amok:

Ian Blair, who was Metropolitan police commissioner during the London underground bombings on 7 July 2005, said his investigation had also been troubled by leaks from US intelligence.

Blair said he was sure the leaks had “nothing to do with Trump” given that similar leaks had happened during his own time investigating a terror attack.

“I’m afraid this reminds me exactly of what happened after 7/7, when the US published a complete picture of the way the bombs had been made up. We had the same protests.

“It’s a different world in how the US operates in the sense of how they publish things. And this is a very grievous breach but I’m afraid it’s the same as before.”

Not clever.