Category Archives: News

Where the undocumented immigrant population grows, crime goes down

Tom Jacobs writes: Pandering politicians regularly insist that undocumented immigrants are a danger to society.

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime,” Donald Trump famously declared in announcing his candidacy for president. A decade earlier, Iowa congressman Steve King said 13 Americans die each day as a result of undocumented drunk drivers.

A just-released study suggests such claims are hacia atrás—exactly backwards. Looking at state-level data, it finds three major drug-related problems are apparently mitigated as the population of undocumented immigrants grows.

Specifically, states with an increasing concentration of non-citizen residents lacking proper papers experienced “reductions in drug arrests, drug overdose deaths, and DUI arrests,” writes a research team led by sociologist Michael Light of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. [Continue reading…]

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Trump, GOP senators introduce bill to slash legal immigration levels

The Washington Post reports: President Trump on Wednesday endorsed a new bill in the Senate aimed at slashing legal immigration levels over a decade, a goal Trump endorsed on the campaign trail that would represent a profound change to U.S. immigration policies that have been in place for half a century.

Trump appeared with Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and David Perdue (Ga.) at the White House to unveil a modified version of a bill the senators first introduced in April to cut immigration by half from the current level of more than 1 million foreigners each year who receive green cards granting them permanent legal residence in the United States.

The outlines of the legislation reflect the aims Trump touted on the campaign trail, when he argued that the rapid growth of legal immigration levels over five decades had harmed job opportunities for American workers. [Continue reading…]

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White Trump voters think they face more discrimination than blacks. The Trump administration is listening

Christopher Ingraham writes: Trump appointees at the Justice Department will soon launch an investigation of affirmative action programs at the nation’s colleges and universities aimed at rooting out alleged anti-white bias, according to documents obtained by the New York Times.

On its face, the notion of widespread anti-white bias in the higher education system appears farcical. White Americans obtain bachelor’s degrees at significantly higher rates than blacks or Hispanics. A 2012 Stanford University study found that while whites comprised 60 percent of the nation’s graduating high school class in 2004, they accounted for nearly three-quarters of admissions to the nation’s most selective colleges. At elite schools, wealthy white families have traditionally used donations and legacy admission preferences to tip the scales in favor of their children.

Nevertheless, the Justice Department’s move appears to be linked to a widespread belief among white conservatives that “anti-white bias” is a serious problem in society today. Recent polling underscores the point. A Huffington Post/YouGov survey from last fall, for instance, found that Trump voters believe that whites are more discriminated against than Muslims, blacks, Jews and Latinos. [Continue reading…]

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Justice Dept. to challenge affirmative action in college admissions

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities. [Continue reading…]

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Extreme heat will hit India’s most vulnerable the hardest

Climate Central reports: A flurry of studies in recent months have laid bare the significant threat posed by extreme heat in a warming world. Perhaps nowhere is this threat more apparent than in India and other parts of South Asia, where intense heat waves collide with a large, vulnerable population.

If greenhouse gas emissions aren’t brought under control, global warming will boost heat waves in the region to the limits of what humans can endure on a yearly basis, a new study finds. But if action is taken to curb climate change the threat could be substantially reduced.

The expected future impacts also raise important questions of environmental justice, as the population that will be most impacted by extreme heat has contributed the least to climate change. It also highlights the contradiction between India’s reliance on coal to fuel its economic boom and the impacts its citizens might see. [Continue reading…]

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Bill Browder’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Bill Browder, the driving force behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, writes: I had always thought Putin was a nationalist. It seemed inconceivable that he would approve of his officials stealing $230 million from the Russian state. Sergei [Magnitsky] and I were sure that this was a rogue operation and if we just brought it to the attention of the Russian authorities, the “good guys” would get the “bad guys” and that would be the end of the story.

We filed criminal complaints with every law enforcement agency in Russia, and Sergei gave sworn testimony to the Russian State Investigative Committee (Russia’s FBI) about the involvement of officials in this crime.

However, instead of arresting the people who committed the crime, Sergei was arrested. Who took him? The same officials he had testified against. On November 24, 2008, they came to his home, handcuffed him in front of his family, and threw him into pre-trial detention.

Sergei’s captors immediately started putting pressure on him to withdraw his testimony. They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds, leaving the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat and no windowpanes, and he nearly froze to death. They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor and sewage bubbling up. They moved him from cell to cell in the middle of the night without any warning. During his 358 days in detention he was forcibly moved multiple times.

They did all of this because they wanted him to withdraw his testimony against the corrupt Interior Ministry officials, and to sign a false statement that he was the one who stole the $230 million—and that he had done so on my instruction.

Sergei refused. In spite of the grave pain they inflicted upon him, he would not perjure himself or bear false witness.

After six months of this mistreatment, Sergei’s health seriously deteriorated. He developed severe abdominal pains, he lost 40 pounds, and he was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones and prescribed an operation for August 2009. However, the operation never occurred. A week before he was due to have surgery, he was moved to a maximum security prison called Butyrka, which is considered to be one of the harshest prisons in Russia. Most significantly for Sergei, there were no medical facilities there to treat his medical conditions.

At Butyrka, his health completely broke down. He was in agonizing pain. He and his lawyers wrote 20 desperate requests for medical attention, filing them with every branch of the Russian criminal justice system. All of those requests were either ignored or explicitly denied in writing.

After more than three months of untreated pancreatitis and gallstones, Sergei Magnitsky went into critical condition. The Butyrka authorities did not want to have responsibility for him, so they put him in an ambulance and sent him to another prison that had medical facilities. But when he arrived there, instead of putting him in the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell, chained him to a bed, and eight riot guards came in and beat him with rubber batons.

That night he was found dead on the cell floor.

Sergei Magnitsky died on November 16, 2009, at the age of 37, leaving a wife and two children. [Continue reading…]

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Is Trump scheming to kill the Iran deal?

Steve Andreasen and Steven Simon write: As if the steeply rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula weren’t enough, President Trump seems determined to kill the Iran nuclear deal, against the near unanimous opinion of his closest foreign policy advisers.

According to a recent article in Foreign Policy, after he grudgingly agreed to recertify the deal a few weeks ago, Mr. Trump assigned a team of White House staff members to develop a case within the next three months for declaring that Iran had violated the agreement.

With this new initiative on Iran, Mr. Trump puts the world, and his presidency, at great risk.

For one thing, it brings to a boil the simmering conflict between the president’s official foreign policy advisers on the National Security Council staff and in the State and Defense Departments, and a circle of advisers led by the radical unilateralist Stephen Bannon. The latter group will handle the president’s Iran assignment, and while anything could happen, it’s a good bet that they will cherry-pick facts to give the president what he wants: an excuse to scuttle the Iran deal.

Will Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, or Gen. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, let this happen? Some might resign; these are not men known for their willingness to tolerate such shenanigans. But whether they resign or try to stick it out, a political decision to decertify Iran would signal a clear defeat for the administration’s foreign policy professionals, and a victory for the ideologues. [Continue reading…]

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Iran says new U.S. sanctions violate nuclear deal

The New York Times reports: Furious over new American sanctions, Iran said on Tuesday that it had lodged a complaint with the commission that polices possible violations of the Iranian nuclear agreement.

The complaint, disclosed by the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, accused the United States of breaching the 2015 agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, between Iran and six world powers, including the United States.

Some analysts interpreted the move as posturing aimed at ensuring that if President Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement, as he has threatened, then his administration would be blamed and not Iran. [Continue reading…]

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Afghan Taliban: Qatar plays major role in peace talks

Al Jazeera reports: Qatar played a major role in facilitating peace talks between Afghan officials and the Taliban by opening an office for the group in Doha, a senior Taliban offical told Al Jazeera.

The Taliban official’s comments on Tuesday come as a series of leaked emails from UAE diplomats suggest the Emirati foreign minister was disappointed that US officials had chosen Doha over Abu Dhabi to host the office.

The June 2013 opening of the unofficial embassy allowed for talks to develop, said the Taliban official, who is based in the Qatari capital.

“We got a chance to discuss with Afghan diplomats, journalists and analysts face-to-face on how peace can be achieved in Afghanistan,” he told Al Jazeera, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

In 2016, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international crisis group, organised a meeting in Doha bringing Afghan diplomats, analysts and journalists to the table with the Taliban to discuss how to achieve peace. [Continue reading…]

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Scuttling the Iran deal will lead to another North Korea

Jeffrey Lewis writes: If you like North Korea’s nuclear-armed ICBM, you are going to love America walking away from the nuclear deal with Iran.

On this week’s episode of the Federal Apprentice, the staff forced Donald Trump to certify that Iran is complying with the terms of the nuclear deal brokered by his predecessor. None too happy with that outcome, Trump is reportedly exploring ways to collapse it. That’s a terrible idea. Two rocket tests launched last week in a single 24-hour span by Iran and North Korea help explain why. They offer a useful opportunity to compare two very different possibilities: what Iran looks like today, with the nuclear deal in place, and how things have turned out with North Korea following the collapse of efforts to negotiate limits on Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.

Last week, Iran launched a rocket called the “Simorgh” as part of a program to place satellites in orbit. The Simorgh itself is not an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, but the technologies are broadly similar.

Space launches do not, however, violate the terms of the nuclear deal, contrary to the claims of some of the deal’s opponents. The text of the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is silent on the subject missile launches. Accordingly, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which implemented the deal, toned down the tough language in previous resolutions. Iran is merely “called upon” — the diplomatic equivalent of a suggestion — to refrain from activities related to “ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.” (And the term “designed to be capable” is so ambiguous as to be almost meaningless.) Indeed, the fact that the deal contained no limits on Iran’s missile program was something opponents highlighted and supporters, like me, lamented.

These details, though, don’t matter. The Trump administration is already signaling that it intends to sabotage the nuclear deal by insisting on inspections in a transparent and cynical effort to push Iran out of the agreement. The JCPOA already provides for inspections, but Team Trump seems to be envisioning the equivalent of a safeguards colonoscopy, not to catch Iran cheating but to make life under the agreement a constant source of friction. Whether or not a space launch is legally permitted or prohibited, Team Trump is likely to decide that it is one more calumny to launch against what Trump modestly called the “worst deal ever.”

But a casual glance at North Korea helps illustrate why that is shortsighted.

According to Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the Trump administration won’t be talking about North Korea’s missile launch. After all, what’s to talk about? North Korea’s recent tests of an ICBM clearly violate various U.N. Security Council resolutions, and the United States isn’t going to do anything about it. North Korea’s Hwasong-14 ICBM flew more than 3,700 kilometers in altitude, before landing in the Sea of Japan. Had North Korea fired the Hwasong-14 on a normal trajectory, it would have traveled far enough to hit most major U.S. cities including New York and Los Angeles. The people who are promising you a better deal with Iran have exactly no plan to deal with North Korea. It’s the equivalent of repeal and replace, except that stripping 20 million people of health care looks like a walk in the park compared with blundering into nuclear war. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. detects ‘highly unusual’ North Korean submarine activity

CNN reports: The US military has detected “highly unusual and unprecedented levels” of North Korean submarine activity and evidence of an “ejection test” in the days following Pyongyang’s second intercontinental ballistic missile launch this month, a defense official told CNN on Monday.

An ejection test examines a missile’s “cold-launch system,” which uses high pressure steam to propel a missile out of the launch canister into the air before its engines ignite. That helps prevent flames and heat from the engine from damaging either the submarine, submersible barge or any nearby equipment used to launch the missile.

Carried out on land at Sinpo Naval Shipyard, Sunday’s ejection test is the third time this month — and fourth this year — that North Korea has conducted a trial of the missile component that is critical to developing submarine launch capabilities, according to the US defense official. [Continue reading…]

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Kushner on Middle East: ‘What do we offer that’s unique? I don’t know.’

Wired reports: On Monday, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner spoke to a group of congressional interns as part of an ongoing, off-the-record summer lecture series. During the question-and-answer portion of the event, Kushner may have inadvertently offered some insight into the negotiating tactics he is using in the Middle East.

Prior to Kushner’s talk, Katie Patru, the deputy staff director for member services, outreach, and communications, told the assembled interns, “To record today’s session would be such a breach of trust, from my opinion. This town is full of leakers, and everyone knows who they are, and no one trusts them. In this business your reputation is everything. I’ve been on the Hill for 15 years. I’ve sat in countless meetings with members of congress where important decisions were being made. During all those years in all those meetings, I never once leaked to a reporter … If someone in your office has asked you to break our protocol and give you a recording so they can leak it, as a manager, that bothers me at my core.”

WIRED has obtained a recording of Kushner’s talk, which lasted for just under an hour in total.

The speech—which was peppered with self-deprecating jokes, as reported by Foreign Policy—offered a rare insight into the man President Trump has tasked with criminal justice reform, managing the opioid crisis, updating the government’s technological systems, and creating peace in the Middle East, among other tasks. It’s the latter, though, that’s both the most deeply personal for Kushner (a staunch supporter of Israel) and that prompted him to embark on his longest, most rambling answer during yesterday’s question-and-answer session.

While the recording doesn’t catch the entirety of the question, it appears to have centered on how Kushner plans to negotiate peace between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as why he believes he’ll be successful where every other administration has failed. He doesn’t directly answer either question, but he does reveal that, in his extensive research, he’s learned that “not a whole lot has been accomplished over the last 40 or 50 years.” He also notes that he’s spoken to “a lot of people,” which has taught him that “this is a very emotionally charged situation.”

Later in the clip, Kushner expresses frustration at others’ attempts to teach him about the delicate situation he’s been inserted into, saying, “Everyone finds an issue, that ‘You have to understand what they did then’ and ‘You have to understand that they did this.’ But how does that help us get peace? Let’s not focus on that. We don’t want a history lesson. We’ve read enough books. Let’s focus on, How do you come up with a conclusion to the situation?” He then goes on to lament the press’s treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a family friend who he’s known since childhood. [Continue reading…]

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Coast Guard chief to transgender personnel: ‘I will not turn my back’

Politico reports: The head of the Coast Guard is pledging he “will not break faith” with transgender personnel, marking the strongest rebuttal yet by a leader of the armed forces to President Donald Trump’s declaration that he wants to ban all transgender troops.

Commandant Paul Zukunft, in remarks to a Washington think tank on Tuesday, cited the story of Coast Guard Lt. Taylor Miller, who was featured last week in The Washington Post, to express his support for transgender members of his service.

“I told Taylor I will not turn my back,” Zukunft told the Center for Strategic and International Studies forum. “We have made an investment in you and you have made an investment in the Coast Guard, and I will not break faith.” [Continue reading…]

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Acting DEA chief says Trump ‘condoned police misconduct’ in remarks about handling suspects

The Washington Post reports: The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration said in an email to staff members over the weekend that President Trump had “condoned police misconduct” in remarking to officers in Long Island that they need not protect suspects’ heads when loading them into police vehicles.

Acting DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg wrote that he felt obligated to respond to the president’s comments “because we have an obligation to speak out when something is wrong.” He cited the agency’s core values — among them integrity, accountability and respect and compassion.

“This is how we conduct ourselves. This is how we treat those whom we encounter in our work: victims, witnesses, subjects, and defendants. This is who we are,” Rosenberg wrote. [Continue reading…]

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Islamophobes get spooked by empty bus seats

Adam Taylor writes: Last week, a photograph that appeared to show six women wearing burqas on a bus sparked a heated debate in a private Facebook group for Norwegians critical of immigration.

For many members of the group, which is called “Fedrelandet viktigst” or “Fatherland first,” the image encapsulated the problems Norway was facing after an influx of Muslim immigrants in the past few years.

It also played into a continent-wide debate about Islamic dress across Europe. Norway’s right-wing government recently proposed a law that would ban some forms of dress worn by Muslim women in schools and universities — the first Scandinavian country to do so.

The burqa, a long, loose veil worn by some Muslims in Afghanistan and other parts of South Asia, would be restricted under the law, as would the face-covering niqab more commonly worn in Arab countries. Masks and other items of clothing that cover the face would also be restricted.

Some group members took the picture — posted with the comment, “what do people think of this?” — as proof that a ban was needed. More than 100 soon commented on it. “It looks really scary, should be banned. You can never know who is under there. Could be terrorists with weapons,” one user wrote, according to a translation from the Local website. Others described it as “frightening” and “tragic.”

However, when you look at the photograph above more closely, it may become apparent that the photo itself is irrelevant to any debate about Islam in Norway. Why? Well, those are not burqas. They’re bus seats. [Continue reading…]

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Kushner to interns: Trump team too disorganized to collude with Russia

Foreign Policy reports: Donald Trump’s election team could not have colluded with Russia because they were barely talking to each other, according to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and top White House advisor.

“They thought we colluded, but we couldn’t even collude with our local offices,” Kushner told congressional interns during a private talk at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington on Monday afternoon.

Kushner’s meeting with the interns had been rescheduled from two weeks ago, shortly after which he had to appear before Congress to give testimony about the Russia investigation.

A source provided a copy of written notes on Kushner’s talk and question-and-answer session to Foreign Policy.

For investigators attempting to determine whether Trump’s associates knowingly worked with Russia to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a defense claiming chaos and confusion might be the key difference between criminal behavior and incompetence. [Continue reading…]

Too incompetent to collude in the sense of entering into a mutually beneficial partnership, yet from Russia’s point of view, the team that can’t shoot straight is all the more easy to manipulate and use as a tool for magnifying chaos inside America’s political system.

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Russia’s military drills near NATO border raise fears of aggression

The New York Times reports: Russia is preparing to send as many as 100,000 troops to the eastern edge of NATO territory at the end of the summer, one of the biggest steps yet in the military buildup undertaken by President Vladimir V. Putin and an exercise in intimidation that recalls the most ominous days of the Cold War.

The troops are conducting military maneuvers known as Zapad, Russian for “west,” in Belarus, the Baltic Sea, western Russia and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The drills will feature a reconstituted armored force named for a storied Soviet military unit, the First Guards Tank Army. Its establishment represents the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union that so much offensive power has been concentrated in a single command.

The military exercise, planned for many months, is not a reaction to sweeping new economic sanctions on Russia that Congress passed last week. So far, Russia has retaliated against the sanctions by forcing the expulsion of several hundred employees in American diplomatic posts in the country.

But the move is part of a larger effort by Mr. Putin to shore up Russia’s military prowess, and comes against the backdrop of an increasingly assertive Russia. Beyond Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election in support of the Trump campaign, which has seized attention in the United States, its military has in recent years deployed forces to Syria, seized Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine, rattled the Baltic States with snap exercises and buzzed NATO planes and ships. [Continue reading…]

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Trump dictated son’s misleading statement on meeting with Russian lawyer

The Washington Post reports: On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany this month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.

The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.

But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared a story, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”

The claims were later shown to be misleading.

Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an email promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy. [Continue reading…]

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