Trump’s assault on the Antiquities Act signals trouble for national parks and monuments

Adam Markham writes: Without the Antiquities Act, now under attack by the Trump administration as part of its strategy to roll-back environmental protections and open public lands to increased exploitation for coal, oil and minerals, we might never have had the benefit of the Grand Canyon, Olympic or Acadia national parks.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president of the United States the power to designate lands and waters for permanent protection. Almost every president since Teddy Roosevelt has used the Act to place extraordinary archaeological, historic and natural sites under protection and out of reach of commercial exploitation.

Many sites originally designated as national monuments were later upgraded by Congress to become national parks, including Bryce Canyon, Saguaro and Death Valley. In many cases in the past, the Antiquities Act allowed presidents to protect vital natural and cultural resources when congressional leaders, often compromised by their ties to special interests representing coal, oil, timber and mining industries, were reluctant or unwilling to act.

A new Executive Order signed by President Trump on April 26th, 2017 puts this important regulatory tool for conservation and historic preservation at risk. The clear intention of the Executive Order is to lay the groundwork for shrinking national monuments or rescinding their designation entirely, in order to open currently protected public lands for untrammeled growth in coal, oil and minerals extraction. [Continue reading…]

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North Korea’s Special Operations forces are numerous, mysterious and formidable

The Washington Post reports: Dozens of Special Operations troops marched in North Korea’s military parade this month, covered from head to toe in green, brown and black camouflage. Carrying variants of the Kalashnikov rifle with high-capacity “helical” magazines, they shouted slogans in support of Kim Jong Un, seemingly delighting the North Korean leader as he watched.

The scene underscored a long-held understanding about Pyongyang’s military: Special Operations troops have an outsize role. An assessment of those forces will likely come up Wednesday when the Trump administration hosts an unusual White House briefing for lawmakers about North Korea’s military capabilities, as Washington pressures Pyongyang to halt its advancing nuclear weapons program.

In the past few years, national security analysts and senior defense officials have suggested that it may not be North Korea’s ballistic missiles or artillery that are used to launch a large-scale attack on South Korea or U.S. installations, but North Korean commandos potentially armed with chemical or biological weapons. [Continue reading…]

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Critics in Turkey question credibility of judges who oversaw vote

The New York Times reports: The credibility of the judges who oversaw Turkey’s referendum last week is being called into question because most of them were hastily appointed when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purged the judiciary after last summer’s failed coup.

A narrow majority of Turks voted on April 16 to change the Constitution in a poll that formally granted vast new powers to the office of the Turkish presidency beginning in 2019 and informally validated the already-authoritarian mind-set of Mr. Erdogan.

But the legitimacy of Mr. Erdogan’s victory has been tainted by accusations of voter fraud at polling stations across the country — and by an odd series of erratic decisions on the day of the vote by the judges who head the electoral commission. Eight of the 11 judges on the panel had been recently replaced.

The opposition has questioned the results of thousands of ballot boxes, after videos showed evidence of ballot-box stuffing and voter intimidation on the day of the vote, and opposition campaigners faced prolonged intimidation during the campaign that preceded it.

But the single biggest controversy was the last-minute decision by the electoral commission to override electoral law and allow officials to count what the opposition says are millions of votes that lacked an official stamp proving their authenticity. [Continue reading…]

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Obama accepts $400,000 fee for a speech

The New York Times reports: Former President Barack Obama has agreed to accept $400,000 to speak at a health care conference this year sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment bank.

The lucrative engagement, reported earlier by Fox, was confirmed by a person familiar with the speaking agreement. A spokesman for Mr. Obama declined to comment on the speech.

Out of office for about three months, Mr. Obama has begun the process of cashing in. In February, he and his wife, Michelle, each signed book deals worth tens of millions of dollars. And Mr. Obama’s spokesman confirmed last week that he is beginning the paid-speech circuit.

A $400,000 speaking fee for addressing the Cantor Fitzgerald conference is a sharp increase from the amounts typically paid to his predecessors. Former President Bill Clinton averaged about $200,000 per speech while former President George W. Bush is reportedly paid $100,000 to $175,000 for each appearance.

Mr. Obama, who was paid $400,000 a year as president, frequently criticized big banks and warned against what he said was a growing inequality in the country that was undermining civic life and the economic fortunes of the middle class. He also pushed for the Dodd-Frank law that regulated Wall Street. [Continue reading…]

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New study claims hominids were in North America 130,000 years ago

Ed Yong writes: In the winter of 1992, a construction crew in San Diego, California started cutting into the rocks that flanked the State 54 Highway, in a bid to widen the road. Those rocks hailed from the Pleistocene period and were rich in Ice Age fossils, so scientists from the San Diego Museum of Natural History accompanied the crew to recover whatever they unearthed. Among bits of horse, camel, dire wolf, and ground sloth, they found the remains of a single mastodon—an extinct mammoth-like animal. “And we noticed there was something different about it,” says Thomas Deméré, who was part of the team.

Based on several lines of evidence—the way the bones are broken, the way they lay, the presence of large stones that show curious patterns of wear and are out-of-place in the surrounding sediment—the team think that early humans used rocks to hammer their way into the mastodon’s bones. That wouldn’t have been contentious in itself, but the team also claims that the bones from the “Cerruti Mastodon” are 130,000 years old. That would push back the earliest archaeological evidence for humans in North America by a whopping 115,000 years.

To put that in perspective, for decades, the first American settlers were thought to be the Clovis people, who arrived 13,000 years ago. But by discovering older sites with strong evidence of human activity, archaeologists confirmed that the continent had a pre-Clovis presence that dates back 14,600 years—or perhaps even further. Genetic studies have also suggested that modern humans entered America from Asia even earlier, around 23,000 years ago. [Continue reading…]

 

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Scientists keep increasing their projections for how much the oceans will rise this century

The Washington Post reports: A report by a leading research body monitoring the Arctic has found that previous projections of global sea level rise for the end of the century could be too low, thanks in part to the pace of ice loss of Arctic glaciers and the vast ice sheet of Greenland.

It’s just the latest in a string of cases in which scientists have published numbers that suggest a grimmer picture than the one presented in 2013 by an influential United Nations body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The new Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic report presents minimum estimates for global sea level rise by the end of the century, but not a maximum. This reflects the fact that scientists keep uncovering new insights that force them to increase their sea level estimates further, said William Colgan, a glaciologist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, who contributed to the sea level rise section.

“Because of emerging processes, especially related to the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet, it now looks like the uncertainties are all biased positive,” Colgan said.

The assessment found that under a relatively moderate global warming scenario — one that slightly exceeds the temperature targets contained in the Paris climate agreement — seas could be expected to rise “at least” 52 centimeters, or 1.7 feet, by the year 2100. Under a more extreme, “business as usual” warming scenario, meanwhile, the minimum rise would be 74 centimeters, or 2.43 feet. [Continue reading…]

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France says analysis shows Syria regime behind sarin attack

The Associated Press reports: France’s foreign minister said on Wednesday that the chemical analysis of samples taken from a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria earlier this month “bears the signature” of President Bashar Assad’s government and shows it was responsible for the deadly assault.

According to Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, France came to this conclusion after comparing samples from a sarin attack in Syria from 2013 that matched the new ones. The findings came in a 6-page report published Wednesday.

The Kremlin promptly denounced the French report, saying the samples and the fact the nerve agent was used are not enough to prove who was behind it. Assad has repeatedly denied that his forces used chemical weapons and claimed that myriad evidence of a poison gas attack is made up.

But Ayrault said France knows “from sure sources” that “the manufacturing process of the sarin that was sampled is typical of the method developed in Syrian laboratories.”

“This method bears the signature of the regime and that is what allows us to establish its responsibility in this attack,” the top French diplomat added, saying that France is working to bring those behind the “criminal” atrocities to international justice.

France’s Foreign Ministry said blood samples were taken from a victim in Syria on the day of the April 4 attack in the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province in which more than 80 people were killed.

Environmental samples, the French ministry said, show the weapons were made “according to the same production process as the one used in the sarin attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime in Saraqeb” on April 29, 2013.

Ayrault also said that French intelligence services showed that only Syrian government forces could have launched such an attack — by a bomber taking off from the Sharyat airbase. “The regime’s Air Force…. is the only one with these aerial capabilities,” Ayrault said. [Continue reading…]

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Senate confirms Rosenstein as deputy attorney general

Politico reports: Rod Rosenstein was confirmed as the second-ranking official at the Justice Department on Tuesday, giving him the reins of the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election after Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal last month.

The Senate backed the veteran federal prosecutor as the nation’s deputy attorney general with a 94-6 vote. The chief complaint among the small group of Democrats who opposed Rosenstein was his reluctance to promise to appoint an independent prosecutor to lead the Russia probe.

“He is, in some senses, what we value in the Department of Justice: someone committed to the rule of law,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the most vocal critic of Rosenstein’s nomination. “That’s why I have been surprised and disappointed that he has failed to heed my request.”

Though the duties of the deputy attorney general are broad, Rosenstein was catapulted into the spotlight after Sessions — a top ally of President Donald Trump — stepped aside from any federal probe of Trump’s campaign. Sessions had not disclosed previous communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak despite testifying that he “did not have communications with the Russians” during his confirmation hearing in January. [Continue reading…]

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EU Ankara negotiator calls for suspension of Turkey accession talks

Reuters reports: The European Union should formally suspend Turkey’s long-stalled talks on membership if it adopts constitutional changes backed at a referendum last week, a leading member of the EU parliament responsible for dealings with Ankara said on Wednesday.

Kati Piri said ahead of a plenary debate on the matter that if President Tayyip Erdogan implemented his new charter, giving him even more powers, Turkey would close the door on membership.

Erdogan said on Tuesday that Turkey would not wait forever to join the bloc, just a day after the EU executive’s top official for membership talks asked Europe’s foreign ministers to consider other types of ties with Turkey when they meet on Friday.

Ties between EU states and their NATO ally Turkey soured in the aftermath of a failed coup last July as the bloc was taken aback by Erdogan’s sweeping security crackdown that followed. [Continue reading…]

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North Korea is a long-term threat, not an immediate one. Trump’s belligerence could change that

Fred Kaplan writes: North Korea is a knotty problem, but there’s no cause for the hysteria that President Trump and his aides have been pumping up in recent days, and it’s time to turn down the heat and the noise, before someone gets hurt.

The worry (and it’s a legitimate worry) is that, sometime soon, the North Koreans will test another ballistic missile or nuclear weapon, which would, yet again, violate a U.N. resolution and put them one step closer to threatening American troops and allies in East Asia—and maybe, years from now, the United States itself. But there is no immediate crisis, no threat that must be staved off now or never. And yet President Trump is sending an aircraft-carrier task force and a guided-missile submarine toward North Korean shores. At the same time, he has summoned all 100 U.S. senators to a classified briefing on the subject, to be conducted on Wednesday, at the White House, by the secretaries of defense and state, the director of national intelligence, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

U.S. military exercises in the region are routine, as are top-secret briefings to select lawmakers. But to hold a briefing for all senators, by the administration’s top security officials, is unusual. To hold it at the White House (or, more precisely, the Executive Office Building next door to the White House), instead of in the Capitol, is unprecedented. And to do all this while the deadliest warships in the U.S. Navy’s non-nuclear fleet dart toward the country in question—well, the leaders in the region needn’t be paranoid to infer that Trump might be preparing to launch an attack on North Korea.

Still, it’s unlikely that Trump actually intends to launch an attack. By all accounts, his top advisers, U.S. allies in the region (especially the leaders of South Korea and Japan), and his new best friend, Chinese President Xi Jinping, are counseling against military action. But who knows what Trump is thinking from one moment to the next? His unpredictability and impulsiveness might have a deterring effect, as in an accidental version of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory.” Precisely because he doesn’t know how Trump will react, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might tone down his provocative ways, even adopt a certain caution.

But let’s say Kim ignores Trump’s unwitting stab at the ploy and risks another missile or nuclear test. Will Trump—riled by Kim’s persistence or feeling a need to display “resolve” and “credibility”—launch a volley of cruise missiles and more at the test sites, at some nuclear facilities, or even at Kim’s hangouts in Pyongyang?

Most North Korea–watchers are convinced that, in this scenario, Kim would retaliate with an attack—possibly a bring-them-all-down-with-me attack—on U.S. bases and allies, not necessarily with nuclear weapons but with a barrage of artillery shells. North Korea’s military has thousands of these shells deployed on the border with South Korea (whose capital, Seoul, sits only 35 miles away) as well as on its eastern shore (within firing range of Japan). North Korea’s live-fire long-range artillery drills on Tuesday were no doubt meant as a “signal” of what Trump should expect if he follows through on his own threat.

No one could possibly want a military conflict, with hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of casualties on both sides. But a mix of mutual bluff, bluster, ego, and insecurity—fueled by heavy firepower and an itchy trigger-finger or two—makes for a potentially lethal concoction. In the annals of history, wars have erupted from less combustive kindling. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon caught off guard by team Trump’s tough talk on North Korea

The Daily Beast reports: The Trump administration launched its week with tough talk aimed at North Korea—barbs all the more remarkable because they caught some senior officials at the Pentagon off guard.

The salvos started with U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley announcing what sounded like a red line that would lead to a preemptive U.S. strike on the regime of Kim Jong Un.

“If you see him attack a military base, if you see some sort of intercontinental ballistic missile, obviously, we’re going to do that,” Haley told NBC News. Those remarks caught senior U.S. defense officials unawares. The Trump administration had previously kept details deliberately vague, saying only that all options are on the table if Pyongyang steps out of line.

President Donald Trump followed Haley’s salvo by telling visiting U.N. ambassadors that the “status quo in North Korea is also unacceptable,” calling on them to step up sanctions aimed at North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile programs—a mild statement compared to that of his U.N. ambassador.

At the Pentagon, there was another ominous sign when officials announced an extraordinary classified briefing for all U.S. senators on Wednesday, to be held at the White House, with the secretaries of defense and state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the director of national intelligence briefing the lawmakers. [Continue reading…]

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Fighting back against Putin’s hackers

Christopher Dickey writes: Looking back on the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton last year, one sees an appalling passivity and helplessness as online attackers stole her campaign secrets and now-President Donald Trump exploited that information without shame or discretion.

But, having learned many lessons from the Clinton debacle, the digital team working for French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron not only took precautions, it decided to fight back.

Next to the U.S. presidential elections, none in the world have had such high stakes riding on them: the future of the European Union, NATO, global commerce—the list is long. And Macron’s team realized early on, as they watched the Democratic Party’s implosion in America, that they too might be the targets of a group of hackers known by many sobriquets, including Pawn Storm, Apt28, STRONTIUM, and rather more colorfully, Fancy Bear.

The group’s hacking operation is most clearly identifiable by its techniques and targets. It’s made up of cyber-criminals with political agendas that fit so closely the priorities of Russian President Vladimir Putin that they are widely believed to be working on his behalf or under his direct orders. (Indeed, the American intelligence community appears to have little doubt on that score anymore.)

And, sure enough, when Macron’s upstart centrist political movement began to gain real momentum toward the end of last year, the “spear phishing” attacks against it started. [Continue reading…]

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Flynn may have broken law by not disclosing Russia dealings, lawmakers aay

The New York Times reports: Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, may have violated federal law by not fully disclosing his business dealings with Russia when seeking a security clearance to work in the administration, the top oversight lawmakers from both parties in the House said Tuesday.

The troubling finding came after Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and chairman of the House oversight committee, and other lawmakers on the panel reviewed classified documents related to Mr. Flynn, including the form he filled out in January 2016 to renew his security clearance, known as a SF-86.

As part of the review, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s senior Democrat, said Mr. Flynn did not disclose in those documents payments totaling more than $45,000 he received from the Russian government for giving a speech in Moscow in 2015.

Mr. Chaffetz also said Mr. Flynn appeared to have inappropriately accepted payments from companies linked to Russia without first getting required approval from the Pentagon and the State Department.

“As a former military officer, you simply cannot take money from Russia, Turkey or anybody else,” Mr. Chaffetz said. “And it appears as if he did take that money. It was inappropriate, and there are repercussions for a violation of law.”

The development shows that Mr. Flynn’s short time as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser continues to be a distraction for the White House, months after he was fired for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak. In March, Mr. Flynn filed papers acknowledging that he worked as a foreign agent last year representing the Turkish government, causing another uproar.

Mr. Chaffetz and Mr. Cummings also said White House officials refused their request to turn over other internal documents related to the hiring and firing of Mr. Flynn.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that “to ask for every call or contact that a national security adviser made is pretty outlandish, if you will.”

In a letter to the lawmakers, the White House cited concerns about disclosing classified information with regard to Mr. Flynn’s interactions as national security adviser — adding it simply does not possess the information predating his time in the administration.

“In short, the White House has refused to provide this committee with a single piece of paper in response to our bipartisan request, and that is unacceptable,” Mr. Cummings said.

Mr. Chaffetz said he did not think it would be necessary to subpoena the documents, calling the administration “cooperative” so far. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s sanctuary cities order blocked by federal judge

Bloomberg reports: A judge in San Francisco blocked President Donald Trump from withholding funds from so-called sanctuary cities that give safe harbor to undocumented immigrants, marking the administration’s second major policy initiative declared likely unconstitutional.

San Francisco and its Silicon Valley neighbor, Santa Clara County, on Tuesday both won preliminary orders shelving the Jan. 25 edict by Trump, who threatened the budgets of cities nationwide that fail to comply with federal immigration demands.

Trump has declared that sanctuary jurisdictions cause “immeasurable harm to the American people and to the very fabric of our republic.” But U.S. District Judge William Orrick agreed with the city and county that the the president’s order violated the Constitution in threatening to deprive them of funding for local programs. The federal government may ask the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco to overturn the ruling.

A victory for the city and county could reinforce similar policies in some of the nation’s largest cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. It’s another blow to Trump’s call to tighten U.S. borders and deport undocumented residents. He’s already lost multiple bids to impose a travel ban against citizens of six mostly Muslim countries, with courts finding that both his original directive and a revised version run afoul of the Constitution’s ban on religious bias. [Continue reading…]

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Workers endured long hours, low pay at Chinese factory used by Ivanka Trump’s clothing-maker

The Washington Post reports: Workers at a factory in China used by the company that makes clothing for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line and other brands worked nearly 60 hours a week to earn wages of little more than $62 a week, according to a factory audit released Monday.

The factory’s 80 workers knit clothes for the contractor, G-III Apparel Group, which has held the exclusive license to make the Ivanka Trump brand’s $158 dresses, $79 blouses and other clothes since 2012. The company also makes clothes for Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and other brands.

Trump has no leadership role in G-III, and the report did not give the factory’s name or location, or say whether it was working on Ivanka-brand products at the time of the inspection.

Inspectors with the Fair Labor Association, an industry monitoring group whose members include Apple and Nike, found two dozen violations of international labor standards during a two-day tour of the factory in October, saying in a report that workers faced daunting hours, high turnover, and pay near or below China’s minimum wage.

The inspection offers a rare look at the working conditions of the global manufacturing machine that helped make Trump’s fashion brand a multimillion-dollar business.

Its release also comes as the president’s daughter has sought to cast herself as both a champion of workplace issues and a defender of her father’s “buy American, hire American” agenda. Trump, whose book “Women Who Work” debuts next week, was in Germany on Tuesday for public discussions about global entre­pre­neur­ship and empowerment. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: A German crowd booed Ivanka Trump on Tuesday after she called her father a “tremendous champion of supporting families.”

Trump was taking her first crack at diplomacy abroad in her new role as assistant to the president, vowing at a women’s economic conference in Berlin to create “positive change” for women in the United States. [Continue reading…]

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Congress is trying to give even more power to Hollywood

Mike Masnick writes: On March 23rd, Reps. Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers introduced a controversial bipartisan bill with over 100 years of history behind it, though you wouldn’t know it from its boring name and seemingly boring topic. It’s called the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017 — the key part is that it makes the Register of Copyright a political position appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. That’s in contrast to the current state of affairs, which has been in existence since the creation of the Copyright Office in 1897.

Right now, the Copyright Office is a part of the Library of Congress, and the head of the office — known as the Register of Copyrights — is appointed by the Librarian of Congress, who, in turn is appointed by the president, and approved by the Senate.

Who cares? Well, you should. This seemingly small change could have a big impact on a variety of different issues concerning how the internet functions. The simple version is that the music and movie industries have always had an uneasy relationship with the internet, and they worry that the Library of Congress might appoint a Register of Copyrights who thinks expanding copyright protections might not be the best thing for the public or individual creators. And one of the best ways to prevent that from happening is to have much more control over who will be in charge of the Copyright Office. The new bill gives the copyright industry the means to do that by lobbying the president and Congress directly.

The long version is a fascinating glimpse at the collision of politics, the internet, and history. [Continue reading…]

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