Category Archives: Entities

McConnell swats away talk of gun control

Politico reports: Mitch McConnell did not want to discuss gun control on Tuesday.

The Senate majority leader shut down all talk of legislative remedies to gun violence after a man killed 59 people in Las Vegas on Sunday night and injured hundreds more, mirroring the Tuesday morning remarks by his GOP counterpart in the House, Speaker Paul Ryan.

McConnell declared this is simply not the time to be talking about legislation targeting firearms.

Asked if he could support a bill banning the conversion of semi-automatic guns to automatic guns being written by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), McConnell responded: “The investigation has not even been completed. I think it’s premature to be discussing legislative solutions, if there are any.”

The GOP leader similarly parried when pressed on why Democratic efforts have failed to resonate with voters. Senate Democrats put forward a universal background checks bill in 2013 that won the support of four GOP senators but was filibustered by most other Republicans. They lost the Senate in 2014 and the effort has never regained steam. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. defense secretary breaks with Trump in backing Iran nuclear deal

The Guardian reports: The US defense secretary, James Mattis, has backed the nuclear deal with Iran, saying it is in the interests of national security to maintain it, breaking with Donald Trump and potentially making it harder for the president to withdraw from the deal.

The timing and nature of Mattis’s remarks are particularly significant because Trump has threatened to withhold certification of the 2015 international agreement in a report to Congress due on 15 October . Under the relevant legislation, the administration has to certify whether Iran is in material breach of the agreement, or if the deal is not serving the national interest.

Mattis was asked at a hearing of the Senate armed services committee whether he believed it was currently in the US national security interest to remain in the agreement.

After a significant pause, the defense secretary replied: “Yes, senator, I do.”

At the same hearing, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, General Joseph Dunford agreed that Iran was abiding by the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which he said had delayed Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Last week, Dunford said the US should uphold the agreement, in the absence of a clear Iranian breach, or risk losing credibility when it came to signing future agreements. [Continue reading…]

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The EU has tied its own hands. It cannot intervene in Catalonia

Natalie Nougayrède writes: The Catalan crisis presents the EU with an unprecedented conundrum. Spain joined the European project in 1986, and its democratic transition has for decades been hailed as a model. Tensions have not run this high in the country since the 1981 failed military coup, when colonel Antonio Tejero seized the parliament in Madrid at gunpoint. The then king, young Juan Carlos, prevented the nation from entering another dark age by delivering a speech on TV uncompromisingly defending the constitution and identifying the monarchy with the country’s emerging democratic majority.

As Catalonia’s nationalist leadership hurtles towards what may be, in the coming days, a unilateral declaration of independence, the current king, Felipe, also took to the television screens. Can he rally consensus within Spain to prevent a full-on confrontation?

The best option, one would think, would be for the EU to step in. But calls for it to mediate between Madrid and Barcelona have been left unanswered. Not only that, the EU stands accused of complacency in the face of what some Catalan activists describe as state “repression” that carries echoes of the Franco era. Is any of this fair? [Continue reading…]

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How Trump turned the Las Vegas massacre into an America First moment — updated

Even though Stephen Miller looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, it’s often clear that it’s Trump who is the dummy whose lips are getting animated by Miller — no more so than when the president robotically read from his script in an unlikely performance yesterday as America’s impromptu prayer leader:

In times such as these, I know we are searching for some kind of meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness. The answers do not come easy. But we can take solace knowing that even the darkest space can be brightened by a single light, and even the most terrible despair can be illuminated by a single ray of hope.

Melania and I are praying for every American who has been hurt, wounded or lost the ones they love so dearly in this terrible, terrible attack.

We pray for the entire nation to find unity and peace. And we pray for the day when evil is banished, and the innocent are safe from hatred and from fear.

For some cable news anchors this might have sounded “pitch perfect” and yet that perception required overlooking not only the glaringly obvious fact that none of these were Trump’s own words, but most importantly that his speechwriter should choose to single out the American victims of Sunday’s violence.

Even though country music is a quintessentially white American cultural phenomenon, Las Vegas is an international tourist destination and believe it or not there are actually millions of non-American lovers of this musical genre.

It might turn out that every single one among the hundreds of victims and their thousands of relatives and friends are or were indeed all Americans, but that’s actually very unlikely.

So, at a moment that calls out for human sympathy, why declare we are “praying for every American”? The lives of the non-American victims are surely just as precious and just as deserving of prayer.

And yet, at a time when America could engage in some kind of moral reckoning through facing the culpability that extends through gun dealers, gun manufacturers, the NRA, the GOP, Congress, the president, and all those who value the Second Amendment more than the lives of those around them, what better way of ducking the issue than turning this into a nationalistic America First moment.

Update — CBC News reports: Four Canadians are among the 59 dead in Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas.

On Tuesday it was confirmed that Calla Medig and Tara Roe Smith, 34, both from Alberta, died in the attack.

Medig, who was in her 20s, was from Jasper, Alta. Roe, 34, was from Okotoks, just south of Calgary. She had been reported missing since Sunday.

Jordan McIldoon, 23, of Maple Ridge, B.C., and Jessica Klymchuk, 34, of Valleyview, Alta., were also killed when a gunman opened fire on a large crowd near the end of the outdoor festival on the Vegas Strip. Their deaths were confirmed by their families on Monday. [Continue reading…]

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In San Juan, we wait hours to buy groceries. We’re the lucky ones

Armando Valdés Prieto writes: My pregnant wife and I stood in line for two hours outside our neighborhood grocery store over the weekend. Once inside, we found that most essential products were scarce, and we were limited in the number we could buy of each item.

But we’re in Puerto Rico’s capital city, and we’re middle class, and that makes us pretty lucky. Millions of poor Puerto Ricans are worse off since Hurricane Maria hit, and if the government and aid organizations can’t figure out the best way to deploy lifesaving supplies to the rest of the island, it will only get bleaker.

In San Juan, folks have to choose between different lines: at the supermarket for food, at the gas station for a fill-up or at the bank to access cash — the only form of payment accepted at most stores, since ongoing telecommunications outages make it difficult to accept credit cards or other electronic payment methods. Even the commonwealth’s Nutritional Assistance Program, which feeds 1.3 million people out of Puerto Rico’s population of nearly 3.4 million, operates mostly electronically, which means it’s currently also not accepted at many retail outlets, so poorer residents can’t buy food without cash. Thankfully, many low-lying areas in San Juan do have potable water service. El Nuevo Día, the island’s largest and most influential newspaper, reported on Friday that 45 to 50 percent of the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority’s customers now have service. But that number has barely budged since the first wave of repairs began days after the disaster.

Still, outside the San Juan metro area, reports paint starker choices. In many rural towns there are no lines; stores haven’t been able to open, tanker trucks can’t reach distant gas stations to resupply and many bank branches are still closed. Water service has not been reestablished in many areas, and people I’ve spoken with tell me of hour-long slogs just to get drinking water for their families. Rural residents have no basic goods to buy, and no way to buy them even if supplies arrived. They need help immediately.

This past weekend, I spoke to an aid worker for an international NGO and a high-ranking official in the federal disaster response bureaucracy in Puerto Rico. To my surprise, they both agreed that the island’s current predicament is one of the worst, if not the worst, natural and human catastrophe they’d worked on. [Continue reading…]

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Trump faces political danger in visit to Puerto Rico

Politico reports: President Donald Trump on Tuesday will come face to face with the “politically motivated ingrates” he slammed on Twitter just days before.

The president will land in Puerto Rico after spending much of the past week boasting about a wildly successful response effort that hasn’t matched the reality of the hurricane-ravaged island and after picking a fight over the weekend with the San Juan mayor.

The visit comes as he’s also attempting to be soother-in-chief for the nation after a shooting in Las Vegas left at least 59 dead on Sunday night — the first time he’s had to navigate two disasters of national scope that are politically perilous for any president, but especially one prone to off-the-cuff riffs. [Continue reading…]

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Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters

The Washington Post reports: Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election.

The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.

The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation. [Continue reading…]

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Hundreds of White House emails sent to third Kushner family account

Politico reports: White House officials have begun examining emails associated with a third and previously unreported email account on Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s private domain, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Hundreds of emails have been sent since January from White House addresses to accounts on the Kushner family domain, these people said. Many of those emails went not to Kushner’s or Ivanka Trump’s personal addresses but to an account they both had access to and shared with their personal household staff for family scheduling.

The emails — which include nonpublic travel documents, internal schedules and some official White House materials —were in many cases sent from Ivanka Trump, her assistant Bridges Lamar and others who work with the couple in the White House. The emails to the third account were largely sent from White House accounts but occasionally came from other private accounts, one of these people said. [Continue reading…]

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What Puerto Rico needs

Simon Johnson writes: President Donald Trump and the US Congress are coming under mounting pressure to increase assistance to Puerto Rico. The devastation caused there last week by Hurricane Maria has only exacerbated severe longer-term problems resulting from deferred maintenance on the island’s critical infrastructure. Puerto Rico needs more than short-term assistance (although this is also urgent); it needs bipartisan support to rebuild, with an initial and essential focus on a more robust and cheaper supply of electricity.

The existing electricity grid has substantially collapsed, with the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) estimating that up to 90% of the transmission system may have been destroyed by the hurricane. A major dam is at risk. Damage to the air traffic control infrastructure has severely limited flights to and from the island. As Governor Ricardo Rosselló has stated publicly, there is now a real risk of a major humanitarian disaster. Donations are flowing in, but the total will be small relative to what is needed.

The Trump administration says that FEMA is working hard and effectively. Let’s hope they are right. There will be a lot of questions about whether Puerto Rico’s roughly 3.4 million US citizens receive the same support as Texas and Florida (and other parts of the 50 states) when natural disaster strikes. But the bigger question is this: What will be done – and by whom – to help Puerto Rico really recover?

Puerto Rico – a dependent territory of the US – needs major investment in its essential infrastructure to bring it at least to the level of the 50 states. After the humanitarian situation is stabilized, policymakers should focus on providing Puerto Rico with stable, reliable, and cost-effective electric power, generated primarily by renewables and distributed over a smart, resilient grid. Ensuring energy availability will be indispensable for stability and sustained economic growth. [Continue reading…]

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Las Vegas shooting good news for gun makers

MarketWatch reports: Shares of gun makers rallied Monday, in the wake of what has been described as the deadliest mass shooting on U.S. soil.

Smith & Wesson parent American Outdoor Brands Corp.’s stock AOBC, +0.64% jumped 3.0% in afternoon trade. Volume topped 3.7 million shares, compared with the full-day average over the past 30 days of 2.1 million shares.

Sturm, Ruger & Co. Inc. shares RGR, +3.48% climbed 2.7% and Vista Outdoor Inc. shares VSTO, +2.44% ran up 1.8% toward a 6-week high.

Analysts say the regulatory environment is among the biggest drivers of demand for guns, as fears of tighter regulation have boosted gun sales and share prices in the past. Since President Trump was elected, however, fears of tighter regulations have faded and share prices have dropped. [Continue reading…]

For gun makers, this would have to be the perfect combination: increased fear of gun control boosting gun sales at a time when a Republican president and Congress means there is zero chance of increased gun control. Add to that the fact that the Trump administration is looking for ways to “turn the spigot” on overseas gun sales and there’s never been a better time for trading in deadly weapons.

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GOP effort to ease gun restrictions put on hold

Politico reports: A controversial bill to loosen restrictions on purchasing gun silencers won’t be reaching the House floor anytime soon following a horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas that left at least 59 dead and hundreds more wounded, according to GOP sources.

Another bill to allow concealed-carry permit holders to take their guns with them to another state could also be impacted by the tragedy, the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

In what has become a familiar pattern, President Donald Trump and lawmakers in both parties issued somber statements of condolences following Sunday’s shooting, in which a heavily armed gunman opened fire at a crowd attending a concert. A number of Democrats called for immediate hearings and votes on gun-control measures, while Republicans and conservatives countered that it was inappropriate to talk politics when the tragedy was still fresh.

“Politicizing this terrible tragedy is, I think, beyond disgusting,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Monday afternoon.

“Unfortunately I think some of the statements that have been made are fairly predicable. A time with 50-plus people are dead and 500 people are wounded is not a time to be politicizing this. There’s plenty of time to talk after a respectful period,” he added.

While there is virtually no chance that any new gun-control measures will be enacted in a GOP-controlled Congress or with Trump in the White House, the shooting could derail consideration of the silencer bill, known as the Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, at least in the short term. [Continue reading…]

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Did Manafort use Trump to curry favor with a Putin ally?

Julia Ioffe and Franklin Foer write: On the evening of April 11, 2016, two weeks after Donald Trump hired the political consultant Paul Manafort to lead his campaign’s efforts to wrangle Republican delegates, Manafort emailed his old lieutenant Konstantin Kilimnik, who had worked for him for a decade in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

“I assume you have shown our friends my media coverage, right?” Manafort wrote.

“Absolutely,” Kilimnik responded a few hours later from Kiev. “Every article.”

“How do we use to get whole,” Manafort asks. “Has OVD operation seen?”

According to a source close to Manafort, the initials “OVD” refer to Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and one of Russia’s richest men. The source also confirmed that one of the individuals repeatedly mentioned in the email exchange as an intermediary to Deripaska is an aide to the oligarch.

The emails were provided to The Atlantic on condition of anonymity. They are part of a trove of documents turned over by lawyers for Trump’s presidential campaign to investigators looking into the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. A source close to Manafort confirmed their authenticity. Excerpts from these emails were first reported by The Washington Post, but the full text of these exchanges, provided to The Atlantic, shows that Manafort attempted to leverage his leadership role in the Trump campaign to curry favor with a Russian oligarch close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Manafort was deeply in debt, and did not earn a salary from the Trump campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s company had more contact with Russia during campaign

The Washington Post reports: Associates of President Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer possibly traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi­mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the upper house of the Russian parliament, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light. [Continue reading…]

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King of compassion: Trump dedicates golf trophy to hurricane victims

In a display of empathy and concern that fell short of the standard attributed to Marie Antoinette, Donald Trump yesterday dedicated the 2017 Presidents Cup trophy to hurricane victims:

 

HuffPost reports: As Trump spoke at Liberty National Golf Course in Jersey City, New Jersey, someone in the crowd called out: “You don’t give a shit about Puerto Rico.”

Online, the reaction was about the same: [Continue reading…]

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Ripples from Catalan referendum could extend beyond Spain

Simon Tisdall writes: The Spanish government’s attempted suppression of Catalonia’s independence referendum by brute force has raised urgent questions for fellow EU members about Spain’s adherence to democratic norms, 42 years after the death of the fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Charles Michel, Belgium’s prime minister, spoke for many in Europe when he tweeted: “Violence can never be the answer!”

Madrid’s pugnacious stance, while widely condemned as a gross and shameful over-reaction, has nevertheless sent a problematic message to would-be secessionists everywhere. It is that peaceful campaigns in line with the UN charter’s universal right to self-determination, campaigns that eschew violence and rely on conventional political means, are ultimately doomed to fail. In other words, violence is the only answer. Sorry, Charles.

Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, did everything he could to derail a referendum that the courts had deemed illegal, but his pleas and threats were not persuasive. That is democracy. Rajoy’s subsequent choice to employ physical force to impose his will on civilians exercising a basic democratic right carried a chill echo of Spain’s past and a dire warning for the future. That is dictatorship.

Surely no one believes the cause of Catalan independence will fade away after Sunday’s bloody confrontations that left hundreds injured. Rajoy’s actions may have ensured, on the contrary, that the campaign enters a new, more radical phase, potentially giving rise to ongoing clashes, reciprocal violence, and copycat protests elsewhere, for example among the left-behind population of economically deprived Galicia. [Continue reading…]

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In hurricane-hit Puerto Rico, a stunning silence

Chris Gillette reports for the Associated Press: I was stunned as I walked through the darkened and humid arrivals terminal at San Juan’s International Airport two days after Hurricane Maria blasted its way across Puerto Rico.

It was quiet. No military air traffic control units on the tarmac directing planeloads of aid supplies, no bustling command center sending convoys of trucks to hard-hit areas. No mountains of relief goods stacked and ready to be deployed where needed.

There were a couple of airport employees mopping the still-damp floors of the terminal, the only sign of life in the vast space.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency guy stood at the curb smoking a cigarette as I came out looking for my ride, and we struck up a conversation. The man who gave his name as John said he and a crew from FEMA had been pre-positioned at the Intercontinental Hotel before the storm.

He told me they had spent the night moving from room to room as the ferocious winds tore chunks off the building. They ended up in the stairwell, which he said “was like a waterfall, the water gushing down the stairs like class 5 rapids.”

“Where,” I asked, “is the cavalry?” ″This is it,” he replied, pointing to several dozen National Guard pilots and support people, along with several dozen local and federal officials milling around the Forward Operations Base near the civilian terminal of the airport.

I covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010, among many natural disasters over the course of 30 years in journalism.

Disasters on the scale of Hurricane Maria are usually marked by the inspiring sight of thousands of military and federal emergency personnel flooding into the affected area.

Navy ships offshore, dozens of helicopters and cargo planes flying overhead, military convoys heading into affected areas with supplies and repair crews.

The only traffic on the still flooded highways that Friday consisted of civilians looking for gas, food, water or loved ones in the wake of the storm.

Twenty-thousand troops were sent into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city and surrounding areas. Thousands of foreign aid workers rushed into Haiti after the earthquake there leveled Port-Au-Prince, the capital. Within three days of that quake, the U.S. had dispatched some half-dozen ships and 5,500 soldiers and Marines.

In San Juan on Sept. 22, the only sign of relief efforts were beleaguered Puerto Rican government employees struggling to address the multitude of problems confronting the devastated island, while coping with their own losses from the storm. [Continue reading…]

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Almost two weeks after being devastated by Hurricane Maria, a surge of aid finally starts arriving in Puerto Rico

The New York Times reports: A surge of fuel and food supplies and federal government personnel has begun to arrive in Puerto Rico, the governor of the storm-battered island said Sunday morning.

Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló told reporters that over the next two days, more than half a million barrels of diesel fuel and nearly a million barrels of gasoline would reach Puerto Rico. The fuel is badly needed to power emergency generators and to distribute food and other supplies across the island.

Mr. Rosselló said that the Defense Department had increased its footprint on Puerto Rico to 6,400 people, from roughly 4,600 two days earlier, with more coming, and that other federal agencies were also sending more staff to aid in the island’s recovery from Hurricane Maria, which smashed through the island on Sept. 20.

The Trump administration’s response to the disaster has become a heated political issue. Some Puerto Rican officials, including the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, have made televised pleas for a faster and more robust response. Others, like the governor, have spoken more positively about federal efforts. [Continue reading…]

The Hill reports: The number of Puerto Ricans without access to drinking water has risen sharply, the Defense Department announced on Saturday.

Fifty-five percent of the population did not have access to drinking water, the Pentagon said in a Saturday press release. [Continue reading…]

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‘Very engaged’ Trump spends weekend golfing and hate-tweeting

The Daily Beast reports: While in the midst of hate-tweeting officials in Puerto Rico and accusing the island’s population of being unwilling to help itself, President Donald Trump played a round of golf this weekend, an official familiar with the president’s schedule tells The Daily Beast.

The leisurely golf came on Saturday at the president’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf resort, before Trump’s scheduled conversations with officials from Puerto Rico and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And while White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to confirm that Trump was indeed on the links, she wouldn’t deny it. The schedule of Trump’s tweets also suggest that he went golfing, with a conspicuous 6 hour absence in his posting on the social platform.

A White House official told The Daily Beast that apart from golfing on Saturday, Trump was also briefed by senior officials over the phone on Puerto Rico, North Korea, and other domestic and national security matters. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the president’s schedule. When asked about this on Sunday morning, Sanders simply replied to The Daily Beast that she “can confirm he was briefed on those issues yesterday,” sidestepping the golfing entirely, as is standard practice for this White House press office. [Continue reading…]

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