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The U.S.-backed Iraqi militarys ground campaign to retake west Mosul from ISIS has been halted as details emerged over the weekend about U.S.-led coalition airstrikes that killed over 200 people in a single day. The U.S.-led coalition has admitted launching the March 17 airstrikes that targeted a crowded section of the Mosul al-Jadida neighborhood.

Some reports say one of the strikes hit an explosive-filled truck, triggering a blast that destroyed nearby houses where hundreds of people were taking refuge amid the citys heavy fighting. Up to 80 civilians, including women and children, may have died in one houses basement alone. The March 17 strikes appear to be among the deadliest U.S. airstrikes in the region since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Over the weekend, witnesses told The Guardian that some of their family members remain trapped under the rubble after days of U.S.-coalition airstrikes battered neighborhoods in and around west Mosul. This is a family member of some of the civilians killed in the March 17 strike.

Witness: "I came to the house to stay with my family, but the owner of the house told me there was no place for me. More than 100 people were inside. Half an hour later, the house was hit in an airstrike. There were neither snipers nor ISIL militants on the street. At least 15 people from this street, that links into the alleyways, have been killed."

The journalistic project Airwars reports as many as 1,000 civilians have died in U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in March alone. The high civilian death toll is leading many to question whether the U.S. military has loosened the rules of engagement that seek to limit civilian casualties. The Pentagon maintains the rules have not changed. Well have more on U.S.-led airstrikes, including the devastating strikes in Mosul al-Jadida, later in the broadcast.

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California: Trump Supporters Attack Anti-Trump Protesters - Democracy Now!

This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

In late February, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerbergpublished an essaythat laid out the social networks vision for the coming years.

The 5,700-word document, immediately dubbed a manifesto, was his most extensive discussion of Facebooks place in the social world since it went public in 2012. Although it reads to me in places like a senior honors thesis in sociology, with broad-brush claims about the evolution of society and heavy reliance on terms like social infrastructure, it makes some crucial points.

In particular, Zuckerberg outlined five domains where Facebook intended to develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us. This included making communities supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged and inclusive.

Silicon Valleyhas long been mockedfor this kind of our products make the world a better place rhetoric, so much so that some companies are asking their employees to rein it in. Still, while apps for sending disappearing selfies or summoning on-street valet parking may not exactly advance civilization, Facebook and a handful of other social media platforms are undoubtedly influential in shaping political engagement.

A case in point is the Egyptian revolution in 2011. One of the leaders of the uprising created a Facebook page that became a focal point for organizing opposition to ousted leader Hosni Mubaraks regime.He later told CNN:

I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him This revolution started on Facebook.

As I have written elsewhere, Facebook and Twitter have become essential tools in mobilizing contemporary social movements, from changing the corporate world to challenging national governments. Zuckerbergs manifesto suggests he aims to harness Facebook in this way and empower the kind of openness and widespread participation necessary to strengthen democracy.

But while hes right that social media platforms could reinvigorate the democratic process, I believe Facebook and its Silicon Valley brethren are the wrong ones to spearhead such an effort.

Theinitial reactionto Zuckerbergs manifesto was largely negative.

The Atlanticdescribed it as a blueprint for destroying journalism by turning Facebook into a news organization without journalists.Bloomberg Viewreferred to it as a scary, dystopian document to transform Facebook into an extraterritorial state run by a small, unelected government that relies extensively on privately held algorithms for social engineering.

Whatever the merits of these critiques, Zuckerberg is correct about one central issue: Internet and mobile technology could and should be used to enable far more extensive participation in democracy than most of us encounter.

In the United States,democracycan feel remote and intermittent, and sees only limited participation. The 2016 election, which pitted radically different visions for the future of democracy against each other,attracted only 60 percent of eligible voters. In the midterm elections between presidential campaigns,turnout drops sharply, even though the consequencescan be equally profound.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gestures while addressing the audience during a meeting of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Ceo Summit in Lima, Peru, November 19, 2016. Reuters

Moreover, whereas voting is compulsory and nearly universal in countries such as Brazil andAustralia, legislators in the U.S. are actively trying to discourage voting byraising barriersto participation through voter ID laws, sometimestargeted very preciselyat depressing black turnout.

Democratic participation in the U.S. could use some help, and online technologies could be part of the solution.

Thesocial infrastructure for our democracywas designed at a time when the basic logistics of debating issues and voting were costly.

Compare the massive effort it took to gather and tabulate paper ballots for national elections during the time of Abraham Lincoln with the instantaneous global participation that takes place every day on social media. Thetransaction costs for political mobilizationhave never been lower. If appropriately designed, social media could make democracy more vibrant by facilitating debate and action.

Consider howone Facebook post germinated one of the largest political protests in American history, the Jan. 21 Womens March in Washington and many other cities around the world. But getting people to show up at a demonstration is different from enabling people to deliberate and make collective decisionsthat is, to participate in democracy.

Todays information and communication technologies (ICTs) could make it possible for democracy to happen on a daily basis, not just in matters of public policy but at work or at school. Democracy is strengthened through participation, and ICTs dramatically lower the cost of participation at all levels.Research on shared capitalismdemonstrates the value of democracy at work, for workers and organizations.

Participation in collective decision-making need not be limited to desultory visits to the voting booth every two to four years. The pervasiveness of ICTs means that citizens could participate in the decisions that affect them in a much more democratic way than we typically do.

Loomioprovides a platform for group decision-making that allows people to share information, debate and come to conclusions, encouraging broad and democratic participation.OpaVoteallows people to vote online and includes a variety of alternative voting methods for different situations. (You could use it to decide where your team is going to lunch today.)BudgetAllocatorenables participatory budgeting for local governments.

As Harvard Law School ProfessorYochai Benklerpoints out, the past few years have greatly expanded the range of ways we can work together collaboratively. Democracy can be part of our daily experience.

This ICT-enabled democratic future is unlikely to come from the corporate world of Silicon Valley, however.

Zuckerbergs own kingdom is one of the most autocratic public companies in the world when it comes tocorporate governance. When Facebook went public in 2012, Zuckerberg held a class of stock that allotted him 10 votes per share, giving him an absolute majority of roughly 60 percent of the voting rights. The companysIPO prospectuswas clear about what this means:

Mr. Zuckerberg has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets.

In other words, Zuckerberg could buy WhatsApp for $19 billion and Oculus a few weeks later for $2 billion (afterjust a weekend of due diligence). Or, a more troubling scenario, he could legally sell his entire company (and all the data on its 1.86 billion users) to, lets say, a Russian oligarch with ties to President Vladimir Putin, who might use the info for nefarious purposes. While these actions technically requireboard approval, directors are beholden to the shareholder(s) who elect themthat is, in this case, Zuckerberg.

It is not just Facebookthat has this autocratic voting structure. Googles founders also have dominant voting control, as do leaders incountless tech firms that have gone public since 2010, including Zillow, Groupon, Zynga, GoPro, Tableau, Box and LinkedIn (before its acquisition by Microsoft).

Most recently, Snaps public offering on March 2took this trend to its logical conclusion, giving new shareholders no voting rights at all.

We place a lot of trust in our online platforms, sharing intimate personal information that we imagine will be kept private. Yet after Facebook acquired WhatsApp, which wasbeloved for its rigorous protection of user privacy, many were dismayed to discover that some of their personal datawould be sharedacross the Facebook family of companies unless they actively chose to opt out.

For its part, Facebook has madeover 60 acquisitionsand, along with Google, controlseight of the 10 most popular smartphone apps.

The idea that founders know best and need to be protected from too many checks and balances (e.g., by their shareholders) fits a particular cultural narrative that is popular in Silicon Valley. We might call it the strongman theory of corporate governance.

Perhaps Zuckerberg is theLee Kuan Yewof the web, a benevolent autocrat with our best interests at heart. Yew became the founding father of modern-day Singapore after turning it from a poor British outpost intoone of the wealthiest countriesin the world in a few decades.

But that may not be the best qualification for ensuring democracy for users.

ICTs offer the promise of greater democracy on a day-to-day level. But private for-profit companies are unlikely to be the ones to help build it. Silicon Valleys elites run some of the least democratic institutions in contemporary capitalism. It is hard to imagine that they would provide us with neutral tools for self-governance.

The scholar and activist Audre Lordefamously saidthat the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house. By the same token, I doubt nondemocratic corporations will provide the tools to build a more vibrant democracy. For that, we might look toorganizations that are themselves democratic.

Jerry Davis isProfessor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan.

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Autocratic Silicon Valley Leaders Won't Save Democracy - Newsweek

Friday afternoon, after a dramatic capitulation, House Speaker Paul Ryan walked out before the press and conceded defeat on what had been his partys primary concern for the last seven years.

Obamacare is the law of the land, Ryan said. Were going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future.

It was stunning. Even though the president insisted on Thursday that there would be a vote Friday, he called the Washington Post one minute after the floor debate was scheduled to end and said: We couldnt get one Democratic vote, and we were a little bit shy, very little, but it was still a little bit shy, so we pulled it.

For someone as vain as Trump, who has prided himself on The Art of the Deal, that must have been a blow. But that was nothing compared to what was coming to the Republicans in Congress when Ryan had to tell them that they were moving on from health care.

Now we're going to move on with our agenda because we have big, ambitious plans" Ryan told the press.

Hole. Lee. Shit.

Theyve been talking about this forever. They control the entire government and they back off of repealing Obamacare barely two months in.

Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains, Ryan confessed, looking even more like a recently spanked Eddie Munster than normal. But neither he nor the president would publicly cast blame on the otheralthough neither has achieved anything of legislative significance yet.

The president gave his all, Ryan said.

I dont blame Paul. He worked very hard on this, Trump told the Post.

Ryan also said he did not want to blame the Freedom Caucus, but made it clear that they had problems with the bill. The alt-right wing of the party that supports the president hates Paul Ryan and called the bill Obamacare 2.0.

But Trump wanted to blame the Democrats.

We couldnt get one Democrat vote, not one. So that means they own Obamacare and when that explodes, they will come to us wanting to save whatever is left, and well make a real deal, Trump said.

The Democratic leaders of the House, who gave a press conference immediately after Ryans, were happy to own it. "We owned it yesterday and the day before and in November," said minority whip Steny Hoyer.

Todays a great day for our country, minority leader Nancy Pelosi said. Its a victory.

Ryan denied that the defeat would hurt the Republicans other legislative efforts, but the Democrats, who only days ago seemed demoralized and defeated, are certainly feeling the momentum and may be encouraged to actually fight against bills that may have previously seemed inevitable.

When asked if she would have imagined on November 9 that Republicans would have abandoned health care by March, Pelosi said, "Quite frankly, I thought they might have accomplished something in the first few months. They have absolutely no record of accomplishment."

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Democracy in Crisis: Paul Ryan's No Good, Very Bad Day - The Independent Weekly

The brand-new festival celebrating American music at the Kennedy Center is hardly a new idea. Look through orchestra schedules this season, and youll find all manner of American festivals, including some of the vernaculars jazz, folk, even hip-hop that fit the popular perception of American music more readily than anything youll find in a concert hall. The twist of the week-long SHIFT festival, which starts Monday, is that it focuses on American orchestras this year, from North Carolina, Colorado, Atlanta and New York (the chamber orchestra The Knights). The festival grew out of the Spring for Music festival, held at Carnegie Hall in New York from 2010 to 2014, whose egalitarian premise was that a low ticket price ($25 per seat) and varied repertory would lure new audiences. It didnt. SHIFTs co-presenters, the Kennedy Center and Washington Performing Arts, are hoping, with their combined marketing muscle, to change that.

What is American music? And, perhaps more to the point, why do we care so much?

I remember being asked in Prague not so long ago, What is your obsession, you Americans, with American music? said Robert Spano, the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which will perform at SHIFT on March 31. The only answer I could give ... was: Its because we dont know who we are, and so were endlessly fascinated, because there are so many things that make up America ... so much to wrestle with and balance and try and understand. ... I was kind of defending our self-obsession.

Indeed, the most telling thing about the question What is American music? may be simply that we keep asking it and asking it and asking it.

Each festival represents a slightly different answer. The San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas have celebrated the composer-as-maverick: outsiders as varied as Lou Harrison and the Grateful Dead. The SHIFT festival is focusing on how orchestras present the music, featuring not only concerts but also distinctive outreach programs. The Boulder Philharmonic, for example, will lead a nature hike in Rock Creek Park on March 27.

Another American element of SHIFT is the democratic approach represented by that $25 ticket. The idea of the orchestra as a democratic institution may seem odd today, when we associate it with elitism, but in the early days of this nation, many people saw a symphony, made up of many people playing together and thus a tangible form of democracy in action, as the quintessential American art form.

We tend to think of American orchestral music as a relatively recent phenomenon. Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter and John Cage leap to mind, Spano says, as somehow defining a distinct American music from European tradition. In fact, though, American composers began writing American symphonies in the early days of the nations history.

In an illuminating book called Orchestrating the Nation, about American orchestral composers in the 19th century, Douglas Shadle demonstrates that many of the features of American orchestral concert life today the inferiority complex with regard to Europe; questioning what American music is or should be date back 200 years and more. American composers, although often successes with the public, had to fight so hard with the prejudices of the Eurocentric gatekeepers the conductors, the presenters and, especially, the critics that their music was not able to take root. For generations, American audiences have been taught that Beethoven is greater than American works. When it comes to orchestral music, resistance to the new is part of our national musical DNA.

Shadle cant fully make a case for these forgotten works as lost masterpieces. Some of the pieces he describes, created in the name of finding an American voice, sound like curiosities now: a Santa Claus Symphony by William Henry Fry (1853), or a sprawling 14-movement Hiawatha: An Indian Symphony, by Robert Stoepel (1859). In an effort to be distinctively American and to create music that every listener could understand, composers took up American subjects and instrumental sound effects (drums standing in for gunfire in musical depictions of the Battle of Bunker Hill, for instance), only to come under fire from critics who felt that program music was a lower form than abstract music. But when a composer did write abstract music, it was often seen as too derivative of European models. That dynamic hasnt entirely disappeared.

Many of the 19th-century composers have been forgotten (although some of their music is now being revived on, to name one example, Naxoss American Classics series). And many 19th-century assumptions about American music have survived into the 20th and even 21st centuries: American music is still often viewed as lighter than European music, more illustrative and more populist. The tension between populist American music and absolute American music was as alive in 1876, when John Knowles Paine was praised for writing an abstract rather than programmatic symphony, as in 1971, when Leonard Bernstein was criticized for folding Broadway and rock elements into his hybrid Mass.Only in recent decades has it started to soften.

These days, theres a discernible generational American thing going on, Spano says. I think of the composers Im most closely associated with, and he names a few: Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Golijov, Adam Schoenberg and Christopher Theofanidis, who wrote Creation/Creator, a multimedia work involving projections, vocal soloists and several choruses that the Atlanta Symphony is performing at the SHIFT Festival. I always thought of them as very different from each other. [But] they share some things. Writing tunes, for one thing. There is a renewed interest in melodic contour. They all use tonality in some way, even if not in a traditional sense. And theyre all influenced by popular or world music, or both.

Its not only 19th-century American work thats neglected. Last summer, the Aspen Music Festival and School (where Spano is also music director) focused its summer season on midcentury Americans in the hope that turning the spotlight on Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, Peter Mennin and others might help bring them back into the repertory. Similarly, Leonard Slatkin worked hard for years to turn the National Symphony Orchestra into a distinctively American, national orchestra; but those efforts seem to have left relatively little lasting mark on the institution.

Of course, focusing on orchestras glosses over the powerful emergence of non-orchestral American musical expression. Steve Reich, Meredith Monk and Philip Glass who did evolve into a prolific symphonist later in his career were leaders in making important new work performed by their own, non-orchestral ensembles, and many young composers have followed in their footsteps.

Take Caroline Shaw, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013: her piece Lo, which the North Carolina Symphony will play at SHIFT on March 29, and which she wrote at a residency at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington in 2015, is her first-ever work for orchestra. Shaw, 35, born in North Carolina, trained as a violinist and also sings professionally. She doesnt have a career in Europe yet; but she has collaborated with Kanye West.

Lo, she says, is a kind of conversation with American optimism and how it expresses itself in music. But its not a deliberate attempt to be American. The orchestra, she says, is a very particular kind of wood to carve from, and has a whole tradition with it. If I write something that sounds like [Aaron] Copland, thats intentional. Its a conversation with Copland. But its not about a national identity. When Im writing music, Shaw says, I try to block those conversations out as much as I can.

In the 19th century, there was much debate about what authentic American music might sound like. In the 21st century, we have a whole catalogue of examples. Yet stereotypes tend to persist. Copland has been effectively embraced as our national composer, mainly on the strength of Appalachian Spring, and his work is often said to evoke American landscapes. Bernstein offers syncopated athleticism and a stylistic melting pot. Ives is a maverick; Cage, an iconoclast. American music is new and bracing, yet also lithe and melodic.

Some are more precise. In 1948 Virgil Thomson, the composer and critic, identified a couple of specific compositional tics he felt were distinctive to American composers (the nonaccelerating crescendo and a steady ground-rhythm of equalized eighth notes, for the record). Yet Thomson was the least prescriptive of observers. The way to write American music is simple, he wrote. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

The SHIFT festival features the Boulder Philharmonic on March 28, the North Carolina Symphony on March 29, the Atlanta Symphony on March 31, and the Knights on April 1, with free outreach events on other days. Tickets are $25; residency events, like the Boulder Philharmonics nature walk on March 27, are free.

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The democracy of American music - Washington Post

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post Writers Group 4:00 a.m. CT March 25, 2017

The chairman of the House intelligence committee said Wednesday that the communications of Trump transition officials, possibly including President Donald Trump himself, may have been scooped up in legal surveillance and improperly distributed throughout the intelligence community. (March 22) AP

FILE - In this Monday, Jan. 23, 2017, file photo, President Donald Trump signs an executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact agreed to under the Obama administration in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. With his rejection of an Asian trade pact, Trump has started tackling policy changes that could inadvertently give China room to assert itself as a regional leader and worsen strains over the South China Sea and Taiwan. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)(Photo: Evan Vucci, AP)

President Trump called himself "instinctual" this week, but the word he must have been groping for was "untruthful." He lies incessantly, shamelessly, perhaps even pathologically, and his lying corrodes and dishonors our democracy.

Of course we've had presidents who lied to name a few, Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam, Richard Nixon about Watergate, Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky. But the key word in these examples is "about." Other presidents had comprehensible though illegitimate reasons for lying about specific things. Trump often lies for no discernible purpose other than to pump up his own fragile ego.

He even lies about his own lies. In an interview with Time magazine, he made the "instinctual" claim and portrayed himself as a modern-day Nostradamus. "I predicted a lot of things," he claimed. "Some things that came to you a little bit later. But, you know, we just rolled out a list."

His list begins with Sweden. At a rally in Florida last month, Trump made an ominous reference to "what's happening last night in Sweden." In fact, nothing remarkable had happened in Sweden the previous night; Trump apparently saw a news report about immigration issues there, and must have mistakenly thought he heard a reference to a specific recent event an honest mistake, for most people.

But Trump can't admit it was a mistake at all. The day following his remark, Sweden did see unrest in immigrant neighborhoods. So he counts that as a win, as if he had somehow seen the future.

Trump often uses clairvoyance as a justification for falsehoods. The most vivid recent example and perhaps the most damaging to the dignity and credibility of the presidency was the string of tweets that began with this: "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"

A host of present and former intelligence officials, including FBI Director James Comey and Trump's handpicked chief of the National Security Agency, Michael Rogers, state categorically that there is no evidence any such thing took place. Trump initially sent press secretary Sean Spicer out to stand by the claim and demand a congressional investigation. The White House finally admitted that one version of the allegation came from a Fox News legal analyst who was promptly refuted by his own network and pulled off the air.

But on Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., dashed to the White House to tell Trump he had learned from unnamed sources that there may have been some "incidental" collection of intelligence from members of the Trump transition team. Asked by reporters if this supported Trump's wiretapping claim, Nunes acknowledged that no, it did not.

Not one of the "facts" Trump claimed was backed up there is no evidence that President Obama ordered anything, no evidence that Trump Tower was wiretapped, no evidence that any of the "incidental" information was collected "before the victory." But the president continues to insist he was right, because "a lot of information has just been learned, and a lot of information may be learned over the next coming period of time. We will see what happens."

Trump offered to Time that same I'm-a-soothsayer defense for his ridiculous claim that millions of people voted fraudulently in the election, thus causing him to lose the popular vote. No election official in any state has reported seeing voter fraud of this magnitude, or in fact of any magnitude. It did not happen.

Except, of course, in Trump's imagination. "You have tremendous numbers of people" who committed fraud, Trump said. "In fact I'm forming a committee on it. ... We'll see after the committee. I have people (who)say it was more than that."

Trump also claimed that "I predicted Brexit," except I can find no record of any such thing. When asked beforehand whether Britain would vote to leave the European Union, he said he didn't know what would happen. That's a shrug, not a forecast.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, a conservative bastion, had this to say on Tuesday: "If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We're not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods."

The president's response: "I thought it was a disgrace that they could write that." But no, Mr. Trump, the disgrace is all yours.

Eugene Robinson's email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

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Trump's incessant lies dishonor our democracy - The Commercial Appeal