Author Archives: News Sources

Trump to track ‘honor killings’ by Muslim men while proposing cuts to Violence Against Women grants

ThinkProgress reports: President Trump’s second Muslim ban, signed on Monday, includes a provision directing the Department of Homeland Security to collect and make public “information regarding the number and types of gender-based violence against women, including so-called ‘honor killings,’ in the United States by foreign nationals.”

According to numbers from a Department of Justice-sponsored study conducted in 2014, there are less than 30 such “honor killings” in the country each year. The killings — which are “perceived by the perpetrator to be a way to restore honor to the family in the face of a perceived damage,” according to the report — are sometimes “motivated by a radical and dark interpretation of Islam,” as Fox News wrote in late 2015.

The inclusion of the “honor killings” provision in the new Muslim ban marks the second time in a week the Trump administration has outlined a plan to use federal resources “to whip up as much racial panic as possible,” as Matt Yglesias of Vox puts it. The first instance was Trump’s vow to create the Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement office, or VOICE, during his speech to Congress last week, even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

In a similar vein, the number of “honor killings” in the U.S. stands in stark contrast to the roughly 1,500 women who are murdered as a result of domestic violence in a given year. But according to numerous reports, Trump’s budget proposal will eliminate the Department of Justice’s Violence Against Women grants. Those grants had a $480 million budget last year and funded 25 grant programs helping domestic violence victims, according to Mother Jones. Trump and chief strategist Steve Bannon have both been accused of domestic assault. [Continue reading…]

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Roger Stone claims he has ‘perfectly legal back channel’ to Julian Assange

The Guardian reports: Roger Stone, a former adviser to Donald Trump, wrote on Saturday night that he had a “perfectly legal back channel” to Julian Assange, whose organization WikiLeaks published emails related to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign that intelligence agencies say were hacked by Russian intelligence. Stone then deleted the message.

While tweeting his support of the president’s unsubstantiated claims that Barack Obama tried to undermine the Trump campaign, Stone directed a series of angry and abusive messages at a scientist who questioned him.

In one post, later deleted, Stone said he had “never denied perfectly legal back channel to Assange who indeed had the goods on #CrookedHillary”.

He also invited challengers to file libel suits against him, saying: “Bring it! Would enjoy crush u in court and forcing you to eat shit – you stupid ignorant ugly bitch!”

Stone sent similar, profanity-laced messages to other critics of the president, including author JK Rowling, whom he suggested should take refugees and migrants into her own home. Stone then deleted the tweets. [Continue reading…]

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Inside the fringe national security worldview that now shapes U.S. policy — led by controversial adviser Sebastian Gorka

Business Insider reports: On a panel titled “When did World War III Begin?” at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, former Army special-forces commander Mike Waltz was talking about the long road ahead in the fight against terrorism.

“We’re in for a long haul, and I think our nation’s leadership needs to begin telling the American people, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have a choice, we are 15 years into what is going to be a multigenerational war, because we’re talking about defeating an idea,'” Waltz said.

During his government career, Waltz was an Afghanistan policy director at the Defense Department and worked in the White House for Vice President Dick Cheney. He has since worked for think tanks such as New America and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

“It’s easy to bomb a tank, very difficult to defeat an idea,” Waltz said, referring to extremist ideologies. “And that’s exactly what we have to do.”

To this an audience member shouted out, “It’s impossible!” The crowd started to applaud.

But one of Waltz’s fellow panelists, senior White House official Sebastian Gorka, politely disagreed.

“I have to disagree mildly with my colleague and especially with the gentleman who just shouted out from the audience, ‘It’s impossible to defeat an idea,'” Gorka said. “Wrong, sir. Wrong.”

Gorka went on to reject an assertion that’s been common among counterterrorism analysts in previous administrations — that the West is in a multi-generational fight against terrorism.

“We jettison the idea that this is a generational war,” Gorka said. “We will defeat ISIS and we will defeat them rapidly. To undermine the ideology will take a little bit longer, but not generations, because remember one thing: In 1987, a man called Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and he said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'”

“Eighteen months later,” Gorka continued, his voice rising, “without a shot being fired, the people imprisoned on the other side of that wall took … it … down.”

The crowd cheered as Gorka concluded: “Ideas can be defeated!”

National-security analysts who emphasize the importance of defeating Islamic extremist ideology say they have struggled under several administrations to get a seat at the policymaking table and push their ideas into the mainstream.

But that’s changing under President Donald Trump.

This turning tide is illustrated by Gorka, a former editor at Breitbart News who is now a deputy assistant to the president for the Strategic Initiatives Group, a new White House organization that US officials have said is like a parallel National Security Council. Gorka has faced an onslaught of negative media attention in recent weeks.

Many well-respected national-security experts have come out publicly against Gorka holding a high-level position in the White House. They say he doesn’t have the qualifications or knowledge to be influencing government policy, and some say his ideas are even dangerous and Islamophobic. [Continue reading…]

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Russian hackers said to seek hush money from liberal groups

Bloomberg reports: Russian hackers are targeting U.S. progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations’ emails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms.

At least a dozen groups have faced extortion attempts since the U.S. presidential election, said the people, who provided broad outlines of the campaign. The ransom demands are accompanied by samples of sensitive data in the hackers’ possession.

In one case, a non-profit group and a prominent liberal donor discussed how to use grant money to cover some costs for anti-Trump protesters. The identities were not disclosed, and it’s unclear if the protesters were paid.

At least some groups have paid the ransoms even though there is little guarantee the documents won’t be made public anyway. Demands have ranged from about $30,000 to $150,000, payable in untraceable bitcoins, according to one of the people familiar with the probe. [Continue reading…]

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A violent attack on free speech at Middlebury

Peter Beinart writes: My fellow liberals, please watch the following video. It suggests that something has gone badly wrong on the campus left.

The events leading up to the video are as follows. One of the student groups at Middlebury College is called The American Enterprise Club. According to its website, the Club aims “to promote … free enterprise, a limited federal government, a strong national defense.” In other words, it’s a group for political conservatives.

This year, the AEI Club invited Dr. Charles Murray to speak. That’s crucial to understanding what followed. When leftists protest right-wing speakers on campus, they often deny that they are infringing upon free speech. Free speech, they insist, does not require their university to give a platform to people with offensive views. That was the argument of the people who earlier this year tried to prevent ex-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. And it was the argument of those who opposed Murray’s lecture at Middlebury. “This is not an issue of freedom of speech,” declared a letter signed by more than 450 Middlebury alums. “Why has such a person been granted a platform at Middlebury?”

The answer is that Middlebury granted Murray a platform because a group of its students invited him. Those students constitute a small ideological minority. They hold views that many of their classmates oppose, even loathe. But the administrators who run Middlebury, like the administrators who run Berkeley, consider themselves obligated to protect the right of small, unpopular, minorities to bring in speakers of their choice. Denying them that right—giving progressive students a veto over who conservative students can invite—comes perilously close to giving progressive students a veto over what conservative students can say. If it is legitimate for campus progressives to block speeches by Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Murray, why can’t they block speeches by fellow students who hold Yiannopoulos or Murray’s views? [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon plan to seize Raqqa calls for significant increase in U.S. participation

The Washington Post reports: A Pentagon plan for the coming assault on Raqqa, the Islamic State capital in Syria, calls for significant U.S. military participation, including increased Special Operations forces, attack helicopters and artillery, and arms supplies to the main Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighting force on the ground, according to U.S. officials.

The military’s favored option among several variations currently under White House review, the proposal would ease a number of restrictions on U.S. activities imposed during the Obama administration.

Officials involved in the planning have proposed lifting a cap on the size of the U.S. military contingent in Syria, currently numbering about 500 Special Operations trainers and advisers to the combined Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. While the Americans would not be directly involved in ground combat, the proposal would allow them to work closer to the front line and would delegate more decision-making authority down the military line from Washington. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s Twitter feed is a gateway to authoritarianism

Ishaan Tharoor writes: Seemingly prompted by Trump’s Twitter outburst — where, to be clear, the current president accused the former president of committing a crime — the White House has now called for a full investigation into whether its own unsubstantiated allegations are true.


Needless to say, Trump’s critics are unimpressed.

“This may come as a surprise to the current occupant of the Oval Office, but the president of the United States does not have the authority to unilaterally order the wiretapping of American citizens,” said Josh Earnest, a former White House press secretary under Obama. He accused the Trump administration of trying to distract from the controversy surrounding its alleged contacts with Russian officials.

“We know exactly why President Trump tweeted what he tweeted,” said Earnest to the Post. “There is one page in the Trump White House crisis management playbook, and that is simply to tweet or say something outrageous to distract from a scandal. And the bigger the scandal, the more outrageous the tweet.”

Earlier this year, George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, crafted a “taxonomy” of how Trump uses Twitter to shift the conversation from unwelcome reports and subsume the news cycle with his own agenda. [Continue reading…]

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Knives are out for Reince

Politico reports: With the White House struggling to gain its footing almost two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, administration officials are increasingly putting the blame on one person: Reince Priebus.

In interviews, over a dozen Trump aides, allies, and others close to the White House said that Priebus, the 44-year-old chief of staff, was becoming a singular target of criticism within the White House.

They described a micro-manager who sprints from one West Wing meeting to another, inserting himself into conversations big and small and leaving many staffers feeling as if he’s trying to block their access to Trump. They vented about his determination to fill the administration with his political allies. And they expressed alarm at what they say are directionless morning staff meetings Priebus oversees that could otherwise be used to rigorously set the day’s agenda and counterbalance the president’s own unpredictability.

The finger-pointing further complicates life in an already turmoil-filled West Wing, one that has been hobbled by dueling power centers and unclear lines of command. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations

The Washington Post reports: President Trump spent the weekend at “the winter White House,” Mar-a-Lago, the secluded Florida castle where he is king. The sun sparkles off the glistening lawn and warms the russet clay Spanish tiles, and the steaks are cooked just how he likes them (well done). His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — celebrated as calming influences on the tempestuous president — joined him. But they were helpless to contain his fury.

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad.

Trump’s young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos. The issue of Russia has distracted from what was meant to be his most triumphant moment: his address last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress. And now his latest unfounded accusation — that Barack Obama tapped Trump’s phones during last fall’s campaign — had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and fellow Republicans.

When Trump ran into Christopher Ruddy on the golf course and later at dinner Saturday, he vented to his friend. “This will be investigated,” Ruddy recalled Trump telling him. “It will all come out. I will be proven right.”

“He was pissed,” said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. “I haven’t seen him this angry.” [Continue reading…]

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Comey asks Justice Dept. to reject Trump’s wiretapping claim

The New York Times reports: The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration. [Continue reading…]

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Federal prosecutors have brought charges in cases far less serious than Sessions’s

Philip Lacovara and Lawrence Robbins write: Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a seemingly false statement under oath during his confirmation hearing. Admittedly, not every potential perjury case gets prosecuted, and Sessions may well have defenses to such a charge. But as lawyers at the Justice Department and attorneys in private practice who have represented individuals accused in such cases, we can state with assurance: Federal prosecutors have brought charges in cases involving far more trivial misstatements and situations far less consequential than whether a nominee to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer misled fellow senators during his confirmation hearings.

Sessions’s problematic statement involves his response to a question by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) about what he would do as attorney general “if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign.” Sessions said he was unaware of any such activities, then volunteered, “I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.” In fact, then-Sen. Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Trump campaign adviser, met at least twice during the presidential campaign with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, The Post revealed.

As any number of witnesses have learned the hard way, it is a federal felony to lie to Congress. Under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Sections 1001 and 1621, perjury before Congress is punishable by up to five years imprisonment. To prove that offense, a prosecutor would have to establish that Sessions’s answer was false, that he knew it was false when made and that the subject matter of the answer was “material” to the congressional inquiry in which he was testifying.

Those elements all appear to be present. [Continue reading…]

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Leashes come off Wall Street, gun sellers, miners and more

The New York Times reports: Telecommunications giants like Verizon and AT&T will not have to take “reasonable measures” to ensure that their customers’ Social Security numbers, web browsing history and other personal information are not stolen or accidentally released.

Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase will not be punished, at least for now, for not collecting extra money from customers to cover potential losses from certain kinds of high-risk trades that helped unleash the 2008 financial crisis.

And Social Security Administration data will no longer be used to try to block individuals with disabling mental health issues from buying handguns, nor will hunters be banned from using lead-based bullets, which can accidentally poison wildlife, on 150 million acres of federal lands.

These are just a few of the more than 90 regulations that federal agencies and the Republican-controlled Congress have delayed, suspended or reversed in the month and a half since President Trump took office, according to a tally by The New York Times.

The emerging effort — dozens of additional rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — represents one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” [Continue reading…]

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After decades in America, the newly deported return to a Mexico they barely recognize

The Washington Post reports from Mexico City: About 500 deported Mexicans, including some who had been picked up when Obama was in office, are arriving here daily.

“Many of these people come not knowing how to speak Spanish,” said Amalia García, secretary of Mexico City’s labor department, which serves as a point of contact for the deportees. “They come feeling very bitter, very ashamed and very hurt.”

More returnees means lower wages for everybody in blue-collar industries such as construction and automobile manufacturing, where competition for jobs is likely to increase, economists say.

Moreover, the loss of remittances from the United States — Mexico’s second-largest source of revenue at roughly $25 billion last year — could have devastating effects, particularly in rural areas. [Continue reading…]

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Rex Tillerson skips State Department’s annual announcement on human rights, alarming advocates

The Washington Post reports: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who during his confirmation hearings repeatedly vowed to promote human rights as a core American value, alarmed human rights advocates when he did not appear in person to present the State Department’s annual human rights report, released Friday.

In a break with long-standing tradition only rarely breached, Tillerson’s remarks were limited to a short written introduction to the lengthy report. Nor did any senior State Department official make on-camera comments that are typically watched around the world, including by officials in authoritarian countries where abuses are singled out in the report.

Instead, a senior administration official talked to reporters by phone and only on the condition of anonymity.

“The report speaks for itself,” the administration official said. “We’re very, very proud of it. The facts should really be the story here.”

But Tillerson’s absence underscored how the former ExxonMobil executive remains more comfortable with an aloof, corporate style of governance than the public diplomacy practiced by his predecessors.

Tillerson drew fire from some members of Congress and advocates who said his decision not to personally unveil the report suggested the Trump administration places a low priority on advancing human rights. [Continue reading…]

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Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portends huge carbon release

InsideClimate News reports: Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles of that vast stretch of earth — an expanse the size of Alabama.

According to researchers with the Northwest Territories Geological Survey, the permafrost collapse is intensifying and causing landslides into rivers and lakes that can choke off life downstream, all the way to where the rivers discharge into the Arctic Ocean.

Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in Alaska, Siberia and Scandinavia, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Geology in early February. The study didn’t address the issue of greenhouse gas releases from thawing permafrost. But its findings could help quantify the immense global scale of the thawing, which will contribute to more accurate estimates of carbon emissions.

Permafrost is land that has been frozen stretching back to the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. As the Arctic warms at twice the global rate, the long-frozen soils thaw and decompose, releasing the trapped greenhouse gases into the air. Scientists estimate that the world’s permafrost holds twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. [Continue reading…]

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This stunningly racist French novel is how Steve Bannon explains the world

Paul Blumenthal and JM Rieger write: Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist. [Continue reading…]

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In Romania, faith in democracy survives

Mircea Geoana writes: A month ago, images of hundreds of thousands of Romanians protesting in front of the government building in Bucharest and in other Romanian cities started to spread around the world. It may have seemed just another popular turn toward right-wing demagogy in a time of receding faith in democracy. But that is not the case.

This protest movement is, in fact, a signal to the world that in this corner of Europe, democracy and its ideals are alive and well — that the civic fabric destroyed during decades of Communist oppression has healed, and the people want to perfect their democracy, not to weaken it.

The protests are aimed at an emergency ordinance from the government that would have reversed a national campaign against corruption, in which Romania has achieved significant but incomplete victories in recent years. Graft and nepotism still exist, and are blamed for high levels of poverty, polarization, social and economic injustice; those, in turn, have sent millions of young Romanians fleeing to other parts of the European Union, the United States or Canada. Still, enough young Romanians remained to take over the streets in freezing cold, and ultimately they forced the government to abandon the infamous ordinance.

These are not the first spontaneous protests here in the name of popular power. Those began three years ago with the end of the discredited presidency of Traian Basescu. They continued in opposition to attempts by foreign corporations to extract gold from Roman-era historic sites in the mountains of Transylvania. And they resumed against the government of the prime minister at the time, Victor Ponta, after a terrible fire in a Bucharest nightclub.

What Romania has been experiencing is an anti-elite political outpouring with a fury that resembles what we see in Europe and America, but whose origins and goals are 180 degrees opposite. These Romanian “indignados,” as the protesters are called, are not the blue-collar, rural, anti-globalization disgruntled who voted for Brexit or helped Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House. They are mainly young, urban, college-educated people with well-paid jobs at multinational corporations and banks, the main employers of local talent. So they are not protesting against globalization or the European Union. The solution they seek would be more globalization, a more solid Europe, more American and NATO involvement in our region. They are instinctively against any walls — physical or invisible — that may be erected in a vain effort to stop the free movement of people, ideas, capital or technology. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s many shades of contempt

Roger Cohen writes: This is a column about contempt. Let’s start with the utter contempt that President Trump has shown for the State Department since taking office six weeks ago. Some 70,000 American patriots across the globe, dedicated to the American idea as a force for good in the world, have been cast adrift.

Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, is a near phantom. He has no deputy, having seen his first choice nixed by Trump. No State Department press briefing, once a daily occurrence, has been held since Trump took office. The president has proposed a 37 percent cut in the State Department budget. An exodus of senior staff members continues. The State Department has taken on a ghostly air.

The message is clear. America has no foreign policy so nobody is needed to articulate it. All we have are the feverish zigzags of the president, a man who thinks NATO is obsolete one day and glorious the next. There is no governing idea, only transactional hollowness. One midlevel officer told Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic: “It’s reminiscent of the developing countries where I’ve served. The family rules everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing.”

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has become the foreign service of the United States of America. [Continue reading…]

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