Category Archives: News

Republicans ready to launch wide-ranging probe of Russia, despite Trump’s stance; Obama orders intel review

The Washington Post reports: Leading Senate Republicans are preparing to launch a coordinated and wide-ranging probe into Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. elections and its potential cyberthreats to the military, digging deep into what they view as corrosive interference in the nation’s institutions.

Such an aggressive approach puts them on a direct collision course with President-elect Donald Trump, who downplays the possibility Russia had any role in the November elections — arguing that a hack of the Democratic National Committee emails may have been perpetrated by “some guy in his home in New Jersey.” The fracture could become more prominent after Trump is inaugurated and begins setting foreign policy. He has already indicated that the country should “get along” with Russia since the two nations have many common strategic goals.

But some of Trump’s would-be Republican allies on Capitol Hill disagree. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (Ariz.) is readying a probe of possible Russian cyber-incursions into U.S. weapons systems, and he said he has been discussing the issue with Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (N.C.), with whom he will be “working closely” to investigate Russia’s suspected interference in the U.S. elections and cyberthreats to the military and other institutions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been apprised of the discussions. Burr did not respond to requests for comment.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) also said he intends to hold hearings next year into alleged Russian hacking. Corker is on Trump’s shortlist for secretary of state, according to the Trump transition team.

Trump transition officials could not be reached for comment.

The loudest GOP calls for a Russia probe are coming from McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Both have taken a hard line on Russia and have been highly critical of Trump, particularly his praise of President Vladimir Putin. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: President Obama has ordered a “full review” of Russian hacking during the November election, as pressure from Congress has grown for greater public understanding of exactly what Moscow did to interfere in the electoral process.

“We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned,” Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland-security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Obama wants the report before he leaves office on Jan. 20, Monaco said. [Continue reading…]

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Hostile states pose ‘fundamental threat’ to Europe, says MI6 chief

The Guardian reports: The head of the British intelligence agency MI6, Alex Younger, has said cyber-attacks, propaganda and subversion from hostile states pose a “fundamental threat” to European democracies, including the UK.

In a rare speech by an MI6 chief while in office, Younger did not specifically name Russia but left no doubt that this was the target of his remarks. Russia has been accused of interfering in the US presidential election and there are concerns it could do the same in French and German elections next year.

He did mention Russia in relation to Syria, portraying Russian military support for the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in the takeover of Aleppo and elsewhere as potentially creating a long-term problem that could increase radicalisation.

“In Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian regime seek to make a desert and call it peace. The human tragedy is heartbreaking,” Younger said.

Russia has moved ever closer to centre stage for the US and UK intelligence agencies over the last year. During the US election campaign Donald Trump said he would seek to engage in some sort of discourse with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. [Continue reading…]

Anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders found guilty of discrimination

The Washington Post reports: A Dutch court found anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders guilty Friday of insulting an ethnic group and inciting discrimination after he led chants against Moroccans, a conviction he promptly denounced as “madness.”

Wilders, the controversial leader of the Netherlands’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV), said he plans to appeal the verdict delivered by a panel of three “hating” judges. His party is leading in polls ahead of the country’s upcoming general election in March.

“Three PVV hating judges declare that Moroccans are a race and convict me and half of the Netherlands. Madness,” he wrote in a Twitter message after the verdict.

In March 2014, Wilders sparked outrage at a rally in The Hague after asking supporters whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands.

After the crowd chanted, “Fewer! Fewer!” Wilders responded: “We’re going to organize that.” More than 6,400 people filed official complaints to the police, a sampling of which were read out in court.

The court imposed no punishment on Wilders, saying the conviction was punishment enough. The prosecution wanted to impose a fine of 5,000 euros ($5,288). [Continue reading…]

Yemen conflict: The view from the Saudi side

BBC News reports: Saudi Arabia is at war.

You wouldn’t know it on the peaceful streets of its capital, Riyadh, but hundreds of miles to the south the civil war that has torn apart neighbouring Yemen is spilling over the border into Saudi towns and villages.

Saudi officials say more than 500 of their citizens have been killed by the Yemen war, a number dwarfed by the thousands killed in Yemen itself, but still a shock for this otherwise tranquil kingdom that is home to the holiest sites in Islam and is also the world’s biggest oil producer.

We visited the ruins of a girls’ elementary school in the village of Khawber, hit by a Houthi missile in the middle of the night.

In the shattered classroom the school clock lay on the floor, its hands stopped at the moment the missile exploded.

We met badly injured villagers, maimed by flying shrapnel when a Houthi rocket struck their mosque, and we were given rare access to a Saudi army Patriot anti-missile battery, placed in the desert facing Yemen, that has been intercepting ballistic missiles fired at Saudi Arabia’s southern towns.

These Soviet-era missiles are aimed at the towns of Najran, Abha, Gizan, Khamis Mushayt and even, according to the Saudis, at the holy city of Mecca.

These ageing but still deadly Russian-made missiles belong to a stockpile amassed by the Yemeni army over the years and now taken over by the Houthis.

The weapons include Scud B missiles with a payload of nearly one tonne of high explosives, and the smaller Tochka with a payload of 482kg of explosives.

Saudi officers showed us the remnants of a downed Tochka, still bearing Cyrillic writing on its fuselage.
Between 6 June 2015 and 26 November 2016 the Saudi authorities have recorded 37 ballistic missiles fired from Yemen across the border into Saudi airspace.

Yet the damage to Saudi Arabia pales before the destruction next door in Yemen. [Continue reading…]

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s climate-denying EPA pick, is worse than you think

Jay Michaelson writes: Every scientist not on the corporate dole is upset about Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Like Betsy DeVos, who wants to destroy public education, and Jeff Sessions, who wants to destroy the Voting Rights Act, Pruitt is against the very laws he will soon be in charge of enforcing.

And the more you know about environmental law, the more you know that the Oklahoma attorney general and his minions could be way, way, way worse at the EPA than pundits and scientists have said. Yes, he’s a climate denier. Yes, he’s sued the EPA five times to prevent regulations (and lost every time). And yes, he has openly defied court orders on same-sex marriage and abortion, investigated the Humane Society for daring to back an animal welfare law, and opined that public schools should distribute religious materials to children. But he’s about to enjoy free rein to gut environmental regulations, without Congress or the courts to stop him.

That’s because environmental laws are deliberately broad, delegating massive authority to the EPA, which then has broad discretion to determine how to implement them. If you think about it, this makes sense. Congress isn’t populated by scientists but by politicians. So they set policy goals — clean air, clean water, toxin-free environments — and leave it up to the experts to determine how to meet them.

Most of the nuts and bolts of environmental law have thus been created not by Congress but by generations of EPA regulations and implementations. Clean air standards for factories, thresholds for pesticides in fuels or toxic chemicals in detergents and fuels, pollution levels for rivers — all of these, and many more, exist in regulations contained in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Usually, it’s conservatives who have complained about this. First, of course, they tend not to like anything that restricts unfettered capitalism, and environmental law certainly does that. Second, they tend not to like big government and unaccountable bureaucracy, and reams of agency-generated regulations are exactly that. And they tend to be wary of executive power in general.
Thus, for the last 40 years, corporations, industry groups, conservative think tanks, and Republican lawmakers have sued the bejeezus out of the EPA (and other agencies), challenging just about every regulation the agency puts out.

And usually, they have lost. Over several decades, the Supreme Court has tended to side more with the EPA than with its challengers. There have been exceptions — one of Justice Antonin Scalia’s last opinions required the EPA to limit mercury emissions only when it is cost-effective for corporations to do so. But in general, the court has observed that the “enabling statutes” passed by Congress deliberately cede authority to the EPA. Without congressional authority, the EPA couldn’t make up regulations and decide how to enforce them. But with it, the agency can.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Now it’s arch-conservatives who will be controlling the EPA, with exactly the same level of authority as the environmentalists who preceded them. [Continue reading…]

Trump launches war on unions

Politico reports: The war between Donald Trump and the nation’s labor unions is on.

Labor leaders, who spent almost $100 million campaigning against Trump, said after the election they’d give him a chance to deliver on his pro-worker agenda. But the cease-fire eroded in the last two days.

First, Trump blasted an Indiana union boss personally on Twitter, prompting a blistering response from labor leaders. Then he announced his choice for secretary of the Department of Labor is fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, a union critic who’s even floated the idea of automating his restaurants to avoid worker costs.

“It’s part of a larger agenda, and you can see it playing out in terms of his picks, which is to destroy the labor movement,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United. “They want to do away with democracy. That’s the problem. Labor is a check on the balance of power with corporations and they want labor out of the way.”

The emerging battle could set the tone between Trump and unions — and affect the future of the U.S. labor movement itself. Trump won the election with the help of union household voters in key states, such as Ohio and Michigan. In the soul searching after the election, labor needed to decide whether to stand with or against him.

So far, Trump is making that decision easy. The president-elect seems to be assembling a pro-business Cabinet that could clash with unions at every turn. [Continue reading…]

UN scrambling for land to shelter displaced outside Mosul

The Associated Press reports: The U.N. is scrambling to find enough land to shelter those displaced by the fighting to retake Mosul from the Islamic State group as humanitarians brace for the exodus of as many as 700,000 people from the city, an official said Wednesday.

Bruno Geddo, the U.N.’s top humanitarian official in Iraq, told The Associated Press that there is currently enough space in camps for 180,000 people.

“That is the thing that makes us somehow sleepless at night. You cannot be complacent when you still one million people inside the city. It is bound sooner or later that you may have tens of thousands of people who come out in flash outflow,” he exlained.

Geddo said he and his colleagues were haunted by the memory of Fallujah where some 65,000 people fled the city over three days during an operation to retake the city from IS in June, quickly overwhelming humanitarian efforts. [Continue reading…]

China pushes back on Michael Flynn’s ‘radical Islamist’ remarks

The New York Times reports: A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman pushed back on Wednesday against assertions by Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who is President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, that China was allied with “radical Islamists.”

The spokesman, Lu Kang, was asked at a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing about Mr. Flynn’s accusations, which were made in a book released in July that he wrote with a co-author, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.”

“I hope everyone who takes a responsible attitude and is devoted to safeguarding China-U.S. relations and boosting China-U.S. cooperation can base their opinions on facts when taking a position,” Mr. Lu said. “Only in this way can mutual trust be enhanced.”

Mr. Flynn has said the United States must lead a global campaign against “radical Islam.” He has on occasion pushed conspiracy theories. For example, after the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, he kept asking intelligence officers working under him at the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon to look for involvement by Iran in the assault. There was no evidence of any ties to Iran. [Continue reading…]

Push for Aleppo aid drops using GPS-guided parachutes faces military and political resistance

The Guardian reports: Western diplomats have conceded that there are no technical obstacles to a plan to deliver airdrops of food and medicine to Aleppo using a GPS-guided parachute system, but the scheme has been stalled in the face of reluctance among military commanders and an absence of political will.

Diplomats and military from six governments – including the UK, US, France and Germany – have now seen the detailed operational plan proposed by an aid agency, which has been circulating among western officials for over a month.

The plan, which has been seen by the Guardian, relies on technology known as the the Joint Precision Airdrop System (JPads), which has been used by the US military since 2001 to supply troops in forward-offensive positions in areas of Afghanistan too difficult or dangerous to reach by road. It uses pallets dropped by parachute and guided by GPS navigation and a rudder.

According to the plan there are three identified feasible landing points inside east Aleppo. The main aim is to get some humanitarian supplies into the embattled and shrinking enclave to keep people alive in the hope that talks would lead to a longer-term solution. [Continue reading…]

Inside President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign in the Philippines

Daniel Berehulak writes: I have worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa’s Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death. What I experienced in the Philippines felt like a new level of ruthlessness: police officers’ summarily shooting anyone suspected of dealing or even using drugs, vigilantes’ taking seriously Mr. Duterte’s call to “slaughter them all.”

He said in October, “You can expect 20,000 or 30,000 more.”

On Saturday, Mr. Duterte said that, in a telephone call the day before, President-elect Donald J. Trump had endorsed the brutal antidrug campaign and invited him to visit New York and Washington. “He said that, well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way,” Mr. Duterte said in a summary of the call released by his office.

Beyond those killed in official drug operations, the Philippine National Police have counted more than 3,500 unsolved homicides since July 1, turning much of the country into a macabre house of mourning. [Continue reading…]

Keith Ellison isn’t an anti-Semite. He’s the victim of a vicious smear

Jesse Myerson writes: Which is the more bitter irony: That the Anti-Defamation League’s specialty should have become defamation, or that its latest target, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), should be among the country’s most important opponents of political anti-Semitism?

Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress and a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter, is now a leading candidate for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. However, since he is also a measured critic of U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine, he has fallen victim to the same accusations of anti-Semitism that the ADL has promiscuously dispensed in recent years.

It all happened so suddenly. Two weeks ago, the ADL’s national director Jonathan Greenblatt regarded Ellison as “a man of good character” in emailed remarks to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Now, per an official ADL release, Ellison’s views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are “both deeply disturbing and disqualifying.” What changed? Greenblatt claims the U-turn happened when he became aware of a 36-second clip of taped remarks Ellison made to supporters in 2010. “The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people,” said Ellison on that occasion. “A region of 350 million all turns on a country of 7 million. Does that make sense?”

Jews cannot abide positions like Ellison’s, according to Greenblatt’s statement: “His words raise the specter of age-old stereotypes about Jewish control of our government, a poisonous myth that may persist in parts of the world where intolerance thrives, but that has no place in open societies like the U.S.” Per Greenblatt, Ellison’s remarks raise concerns over whether he could “represent the Democratic Party’s traditional support for a strong and secure Israel.”

But Ellison’s statement was a small clip intentionally taken out of context by Steven Emerson of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, a self-proclaimed expert who claims, among other odious lies, that the Obama administration is in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood. [Continue reading…]

Donald Trump picks Scott Pruitt, ally of fossil fuel industry, to lead EPA

The New York Times reports: President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a transition official said, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change.

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

Mr. Pruitt, 48, who has emerged as a hero to conservative activists, is also one of a number of Republican attorneys general who have formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda, a 2014 investigation by The New York Times revealed.

At the heart of Mr. Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change are a collection of E.P.A. regulations aimed at forcing power plants to significantly reduce their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution. It will not be possible for Mr. Trump to unilaterally cancel the rules, which were released under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But it would be possible for a legally experienced E.P.A. chief to substantially weaken, delay or slowly dismantle them.

As Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Pruitt has fought environmental regulations — particularly the climate change rules. Although Mr. Obama’s rules were not completed until 2015, Mr. Pruitt was one of a handful of attorneys general, along with Greg Abbott of Texas, who began planning as early as 2014 for a coordinated legal effort to fight them. That resulted in a 28-state lawsuit against the administration’s rules. A decision on the case is pending in a federal court, but it is widely expected to advance to the Supreme Court. [Continue reading…]

Bob Dole worked behind the scenes on Trump-Taiwan call

The New York Times reports: Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.

Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in successful efforts by Taiwan to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents.

Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, the forms said.

The disclosures suggest that President-elect Trump’s decision to take a call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic gaffe and more the result of a well-orchestrated plan by Taiwan to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Washington. [Continue reading…]

Libya could become even more chaotic after the ISIS loses its stronghold

The Washington Post reports: Libyan militias backed by American airstrikes said they have cleared the stronghold of the Islamic State in Libya, a defeat that would set back the group’s ambitions in North Africa. The country, however, remains very unstable amid battles between rival militias and the remaining militants could still undermine a fragile U.S.-backed unity government, analysts said.

Libyan fighters erupted in celebration in the coastal city of Sirte on Tuesday after a nearly seven month struggle to oust the Islamic State, as the mostly pro-government forces were searching for any remaining militants.

The Islamic State’s hopes of extending their self-proclaimed “caliphate” beyond Syria and Iraq into Libya have been dashed, at least for now. But while their propaganda war and recruiting efforts have also been weakened, analysts said, the group remains active in other parts of the country.

Libya now faces the specter of clandestine cells staging terrorist attacks, much like they’ve done recently in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, after battlefield reverses there. [Continue reading…]

Note to Breitbart: Earth is not cooling, climate change is real and please stop using our video to mislead Americans

Weather.com reports: Global warming is not expected to end anytime soon, despite what Breitbart.com wrote in an article published last week.

Though we would prefer to focus on our usual coverage of weather and climate science, in this case we felt it important to add our two cents — especially because a video clip from weather.com (La Niña in Pacific Affects Weather in New England) was prominently featured at the top of the Breitbart article. Breitbart had the legal right to use this clip as part of a content-sharing agreement with another company, but there should be no assumption that The Weather Company endorses the article associated with it.

The Breitbart article – a prime example of cherry picking, or pulling a single item out of context to build a misleading case – includes this statement: “The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare.”

In fact, thousands of researchers and scientific societies are in agreement that greenhouse gases produced by human activity are warming the planet’s climate and will keep doing so. [Continue reading…]

Flynn under fire for fake news

Politico reports: As Donald Trump’s national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn will have to advise the president of the veracity of foreign and domestic threats, separating those that require immediate policy action from propaganda or misinformation.

But Flynn himself has used social media to promote a series of outrageous conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama and their inner circles in recent months — pushing dubious factoids at least 16 times since Aug. 9, according to a POLITICO review of his Twitter posts. Flynn, who has 106,000 Twitter followers, has used the platform to retweet accusations that Clinton is involved with child sex trafficking and has “secretly waged war” on the Catholic Church, as well as charges that Obama is a “jihadi” who “laundered” money for Muslim terrorists.

Now some say Flynn’s fondness for spreading fake news casts doubt on his fitness to serve as the White House’s national security adviser, suggesting that he either can’t spot a blatant falsehood or is just ideologically bent to believe the worst of his perceived enemies. [Continue reading…]