Citizen Cartwright

Note to readers

Because of the Labor Day holiday, Citizen Cartwright will publish next on Tuesday, Sept. 2.

Unsurprisingly, going into the holiday weekend, there isn't much new news. My usual Internet search has turned up nothing of note beyond the item below.

So I'll save your time and mine — and wish you a great end-of-summer weekend!

Obama on Islamic State: 'We don't have a strategy yet'

The president tried at a press conference Thursday to give himself "a bit more political space" to make a decision about whether to expand the U.S military campaign against Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria, but "in so doing he may have dealt himself a significant political blow by suggesting that his policy on the issue is adrift," says Politico.

Obama’s comment that "we don't have a strategy yet" was in response to a question about whether the president planned to seek congressional approval for any military action in Syria.

Later in the press conference, Obama said, “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. And in some of the media reports, the suggestion seems to have been that, you know, we’re about to go full scale on an elaborate strategy for defeating ISIL. And the suggestion, I guess, has been that we’ll start moving forward imminently, and somehow Congress, still out of town, is gonna be left in the dark. That’s not what’s gonna happen.”

So it appears that Obama's no-strategy comment may have been an effort to assure Congress that it would be consulted before policies are locked in.

At the same time, Obama's tone was "strikingly different" from his own advisers on the Islamic State — and on whether Russia has invaded Ukraine, says The New York Times.

On Ukraine, Obama said Russia's actions were “not really a shift” but just “a little more overt” form of longstanding Russian violations of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Adding to the dissonance of Obama's restraint and events on the ground, a video posted on social media appeared to show that Islamic State militants killed more than 150 Syrian government troops who had been captured in recent fighting.

And as far as media reports that the Obama administration is working to put together a coalition of international allies against the Islamic State, "many of those potential partners" say they don't know what Obama has in mind and "some have expressed impatience about the length of time the administration is taking to figure it out," says The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the United Nations says the number of Syrian refugees now exceeds 3 million people, out of a prewar population of 23 million.

"The Syria crisis has become the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era, yet the world is failing to meet the needs of refugees and the countries hosting them," says U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.

Note to readers

The federal trial for which I had been summoned for jury duty today has been canceled. So, back to the news ...

Russia's apparent 'stealth invasion' of Ukraine

Sudden reverses for the Ukrainian military appear to confirm the arrival of Russian forces to support rebels who have in recent weeks been under pressure from government forces in their strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk, the east's two main cities, says Reuters.

Russia, which has denied that it's helping the insurgents, hasn't acknowledged the military movements.

But the Russians have signaled that they wouldn't countenance a defeat of an insurgency in the heavily Russian eastern part of Ukraine, which would amount to a significant domestic political setback for Russian President Putin in his increasingly fractious relationship with the United States and its European allies, says The New York Times.

Obama's immigration order expected in coming days

With the president's self-imposed, end-of-summer deadline to act on immigration rapidly approaching, the White House is putting together a blame-it-on-Congress legal justification for the action, says The Associated Press.

Both political parties are in a "state of high anxiety" about the possibility that Obama will allow millions of illegal immigrants to remain in the country, fearing that the action could change the course of November’s midterm elections, says The Washington Post.

And Republicans are threatening to force a confrontation over what they describe as Obama's power grab by refusing to finance some or all of the moves, says The New York Times.

Obamacare's 'vast expansion' of mental health coverage

The coverage is in place, but there are shortfalls in people's actual access to services, says The New York Times in a series on the impact of the law in Louisville, Ky.

Also in the news

Amid outcry over police shootings, departments are considering cop cameras

JPMorgan, other banks hit by cyberattack

Environmentalists sue Forest Service to block Alaska old-growth timber sale

Government designates 20 coral species as threatened

Doctors may be repeating colonoscopies unnecessarily after finding low-risk polyp

Scientists manipulate brain cells in mice to switch negative emotions to positive ones

Note to readers

Citizen Cartwright will not be published on Thursday, Aug. 28.

This has been my summer of summonses: On Thursday, I'll be heading to federal jury service at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, following jury service at D.C. Superior Court earlier in the month.

Scientists warn of climate risks in draft report

Climate change is here, it's caused by humans, is probably already dangerous and is increasingly likely to be irreversible, according to a draft report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report combines three earlier documents, but the language is more stark, media report.

The report finds that past emissions, and the failure to respond to scientific warnings about the risks, have made large-scale climatic shifts inevitable.

But lowering emissions still would slow the expected pace of change, the report says, providing critical decades for human society and the natural world to adapt.

The final report will be issued after governments and scientists go over the draft line by line at an October conference in Copenhagen.

Obama to avoid Senate ratification of climate pact

The president's climate negotiators are working on what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their greenhouse gas emissions, The New York Times reports.

But the agreement, to be signed at a U.N. meeting in 2015 in Paris, wouldn't be in the form of a treaty, which would require Senate ratification.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there's no chance that the gridlocked Senate would ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially with many Republican lawmakers skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.