| Trump smirked at idea of shooting migrants at rally three months before El Paso massacre Posted: 04 Aug 2019 10:34 AM PDT  Donald Trump laughed and joked after a supporter suggested shooting Mexican migrants at a rally in May 2019.The clip of the interaction is once again spreading across social media, as the US reels from the El Paso massacre."When you have 15,000 people marching up, and you have hundreds and hundreds of [immigrants], and you have two or three border security people that are brave and great – and don't forget we don't let them and we can't let them use weapons," Mr Trump said, to an audience of thousands in Florida."We can't. Other countries do, we can't. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people?"In response someone from the audience shouted: "Shoot them!"Mr Trump then appeared to laugh before shaking his head and saying: "That's only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement."The crowd then erupted into laughter and cheers, and Mr Trump added: "Only in the Panhandle!"The Florida Panhandle is a region in the north west of the state.The interaction was remembered with anger online, in the aftermath of the El Paso massacre.At least 20 people were killed when a white male opened fire at a Walmart in the Cielo Vista mall on Saturday.Several people are injured and being treated in hospital. Police said that at least three Mexicans were among the dead.The suspected gunman, Patrick Crusius, is an alleged white supremacist.In the wake of the massacre politicians condemned Donald Trump's racism and Congress' failure to take action on gun control.Pete Buttigieg, a presidential primary candidate, said the US was "under attack from white nationalist terrorism".He said that the attacker was "abetted by weak gun laws" and added: "If we are serious about national security, we must summon the courage to name and defeat this evil."Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke, who represented the district where the attack took place, said the US president bore some responsibility for the attack which left 20 people dead."He is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country," he added."It does not just offend our sensibilities; it fundamentally changes the character of this country and it leads to violence."
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| Ohio shooting: Police have identified 24-year-old man as suspect who killed 9 in Dayton shooting Posted: 04 Aug 2019 05:03 PM PDT  A 24-year-old man has been identified as the shooter who killed nine people, including his 22-year-old sister, Megan Betts, in Dayton, Ohio.
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| 31 dead, 62 rescued after boats capsize in Philippines Posted: 04 Aug 2019 03:08 AM PDT  Rescuers recovered more bodies in rough seas where three ferry boats capsized after being buffeted by fierce winds and waves off two central Philippine provinces, bringing the death toll to 31 with three missing, the coast guard said Sunday. Coast guard spokesman Armand Balilo said the dead were mostly passengers of two ferries that flipped over in sudden wind gusts and powerful waves Saturday off Guimaras and Iloilo provinces. Sixty-two other passengers and crew were rescued.
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| Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, spokesman leave her office Posted: 02 Aug 2019 06:34 PM PDT  Saikat Chakrabarti to work for climate change non-profit
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| Teen arrested after 'throwing' boy from London's Tate Modern Posted: 04 Aug 2019 11:59 AM PDT  A teenager was arrested on Sunday after allegedly throwing a six-year-old boy from a tenth-floor viewing platform of London's Tate Modern gallery, police said. The boy was airlifted to hospital and is in a critical condition, while the 17-year-old male suspect is being held on suspicion of attempted murder. The Tate Modern, a leading contemporary art museum on the banks of the River Thames, was initially locked down but visitors were later allowed to leave.
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| PHOTOS: Ohio mass shooting leaves 10 dead including the gunman Posted: 04 Aug 2019 06:56 AM PDT  A gunman wearing body armor and carrying extra magazines opened fire in a popular nightlife area of Dayton, Ohio, killing nine and injuring dozens, authorities say, in the second U.S. mass shooting in less than 24 hours.
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| Russian opposition plans new protest despite over 1,000 arrests Posted: 04 Aug 2019 07:24 AM PDT  Russia's anti-Kremlin opposition said it was planning a nationwide protest next weekend despite police forcibly detaining over 1,000 people on Saturday for attending what they said was an illegal march in Moscow to demand free elections. Saturday's protest, conceived by opposition activists as a peaceful walk to protest against the exclusion of their candidates from a Moscow election next month, was systematically and sometimes violently dispersed by police. Russian investigators had initiated a criminal case against one man, accusing him of injuring a police officer, the TASS news agency reported.
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| Day care worker charged after four toddlers suffer broken legs Posted: 03 Aug 2019 11:27 AM PDT  A Florida day care worker was charged with child neglect two months after fourtoddlers were found with leg fractures, the Northwest Florida Daily Newsreports
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| Republican officials point to video games after El Paso mass shooting Posted: 04 Aug 2019 11:08 AM PDT  After a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas left 20 people dead, Republican officials partially blamed the attacks of terror on violent video games.
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| 3 family members killed in California sea cliff collapse Posted: 03 Aug 2019 04:19 PM PDT  Three women killed when a Southern California sea cliff collapsed were members of a family gathered on a beach to celebrate one of them having survived breast cancer, authorities and relatives said Saturday. Anne Clave, 35, and her mother, Julie Davis, 65, died at hospitals after tons of sandstone were unleashed Friday at Grandview Beach, the San Diego County Medical Examiner said. A family email obtained Saturday by KNSD-TV identified the third victim as Elizabeth Cox, Clave's aunt.
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| Canadian police divers search river for missing teen murder suspects Posted: 04 Aug 2019 02:23 PM PDT  Canadian police divers are searching a river for two missing teenagers suspected of a double murder, after finding an abandoned boat on its shores.The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has been chasing Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, for weeks since the pair were connected to two separate killings in British Columbia earlier this month.Authorities announced on 31 July that they were scaling back the search, which had taken officers to the remote town of Gillam in northern Manitoba.On Friday RCMP officers, travelling in a helicopter, spotted a damaged aluminium boat on the shores of the Nelson River, near Gillam.RCMP divers have now travelled to the town to search a section of the river.Their hunt began on Sunday."RCMP Underwater Recovery Team (URT) will conduct a thorough underwater search of significant areas of interest today," the force said on Twitter.The teenagers have been tracked in a series of stolen cars as they have travelled thousands of miles across Canada, from its Pacific coast in the west all to the way east to rural Manitoba.RCMP units believe the pair have been cornered in this region of rural Manitoba.The manhunt began on 12 July when Mr McLeod and Mr Schmegelsky, childhood friends, left their home in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island and travelled 1,500 miles north to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, claiming that they were looking for work.But on 15 July police discovered the bodies of a young couple near Liard Hot Springs, back in British Columbia. The RCMP has said the teenagers are suspects in the case and are wanted for questioning.A few days later a burnt-out truck driven by the pair was discovered, along with the body of Leonard Dyck. Mr McLeod and Mr Schmegelsky have been charged with his murder and chased across Canada by the RCMP ever since.The father of Mr Schmegelsky has told reporters he believes his son is on a "suicide mission" and expects him to eventually die in a confrontation with the police."A normal child doesn't travel across the country killing people," he said. "A child in some very serious pain does."
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| Footage shows Bangkok bombing in mall minutes from ASEAN summit Posted: 03 Aug 2019 02:31 AM PDT  Footage emerged Saturday of the moment a bomb exploded in a Bangkok mall as the city hosted a major summit, the device apparently hidden inside a cuddly toy animal. There were nine successful or attempted bomb blasts on Friday throughout Bangkok which left four wounded as the city hosted a regional summit attended by top diplomats, including US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Footage showed an explosion in a shopping mall minutes from the summit venue in the early hours of Friday morning, after it was apparently planted by a man dressed in a student's uniform about 12 hours earlier.
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| Chicago shootings leave 40 shot, 3 fatally; Mt. Sinai Hospital closes emergency room Posted: 04 Aug 2019 01:01 PM PDT  A West Side hospital is not accepting any more patients to its emergency room after a violent weekend in which 40 people were shot, three fatally, across the city.
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| U.S. Defense Secretary says he favors placing missiles in Asia Posted: 03 Aug 2019 11:40 AM PDT  U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Saturday that he was in favor of placing ground-launched, intermediate-range missiles in Asia relatively soon, a day after the United States withdrew from a landmark arms control treaty. Esper's comments are likely to raise concern about an arms race and could add to an already tense relationship with China. "Yeah, I would like to," Esper said, when asked whether he was considering placing such missiles in Asia.
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| McDonald's employee fired after allegedly turning away paramedics: 'We don't serve badges here' Posted: 03 Aug 2019 01:31 PM PDT  A McDonald's employee was fired after she allegedly refused to serveparamedics Wednesday night, WFTS reports
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| Bill Maher: Democrats Are ‘Blowing It’ With Open Borders, Free College Talk Posted: 04 Aug 2019 04:36 AM PDT  Comedian Bill Maher said Friday night that Democrats are "blowing" their chances of defeating President Donald Trump in 2020 by proposing open border and free college policies."All the Democrats have to do to win is to come off less crazy than Trump — and, of course, they're blowing it," Maher said in his closing monologue during his HBO show, "Real Time with Bill Maher."More from The National Interest: This Is the Worst U.S. President EverMake Your Pick for the 6 Best Presidents Ever The Best President Ever: Lincoln Democrats are "coming across as unserious people who are going to take away all your money so migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in 'America sucks,'" he said.Maher did not identify any specific candidate in his diatribe, but was referring instead to the leftward lurch of the Democratic field.Some Democrats have embraced the idea of forgiving some or all student loan debt, while others back the decriminalization of illegal border crossings. Ten Democrats onstage raised their hands when asked whether they support providing government health insurance to illegal immigrants at a presidential debate in June.
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| Dayton, El Paso, Gilroy and beyond: You're right to be afraid. Mass shootings are more numerous and deadly Posted: 04 Aug 2019 12:10 PM PDT  A survey found 41% of Americans fear random mass shootings. FBI data shows a rise in shootings – and victims – so that's not an unreasonable fear.
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| You Probably Forgot All about These Great Performing '90s Cars Posted: 04 Aug 2019 01:00 PM PDT |
| Nuon Chea, ideologue of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, dies at 93 Posted: 04 Aug 2019 06:37 AM PDT  Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that destroyed a generation of Cambodians, died Sunday, the country's U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal said. Nuon Chea was known as Brother No. 2, the right-hand man of Pol Pot, the leader of the regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Researchers believe Nuon Chea was responsible for the extremist policies of the Khmer Rouge and was directly involved in its purges and executions.
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| Italian Police Mistakes May Help American Teens in Cop Stabbing Case Posted: 03 Aug 2019 10:13 AM PDT  Ciro De Luca/ReutersOne week has passed since the brutal stabbing death of 35-year-old Italian Carabinieri police officer Mario Cerciello Rega, allegedly at the hands of two San Francisco teens, and the investigation seems to have gone awry. Rome Cops: American Teens Stabbed Police Officer to Death in Drug-Fueled FrenzyReporting that closed camera television footage is missing from the area where 19-year-old Finnegan Elder allegedly stabbed Rega 11 times has raised eyebrows. The manager of the pharmacy directly across from where blood still stains the cobblestones says they only run their cameras when they are open. The stabbing took place around 2:30 a.m. Police now also say the camera on the bank across the street was broken. What we don't know with certainty is who decided where the fateful rendezvous would take place or if it was possible that anyone involved could have known that cameras would not be working. The fatal stabbing took place during a humid Roman night when local residents without air conditioning, of which there are many in Rome, would have been sleeping with their windows open. Italian media reports have already hinted of secret witnesses who may have heard and seen the whole thing. Police contend that they showed their badges and identified themselves as Carabinieri officers before the American teens allegedly launched the attack that would turn fatal. Officer Rega, we now know, forgot his gun that evening. His partner, Andrea Varriale, was unable to access his because Gabe Natale Hjorth, Elder's 18-year-old alleged accomplice, was beating him up. And since it is illegal for police to shoot at suspects running away, Varriale did not use his weapon at all. Natale Hjorth, who is half Italian and speaks the language, allegedly told investigators that he did not know the men who approached them to retrieve a bag they stole over a bad drug deal were cops. In fact, he says he was sure they were not. But without video surveillance tape, it may prove impossible to prove whether the police showed their badges or just how they approached the American teens. Elder told investigators that Rega had grabbed him by the neck. Again, without proper surveillance video, the truth may never come out. Elder's uncle who is acting as a family spokesman confirmed that Elder took part in informal "fight nights" back in San Francisco, so while it is certain he knew how to throw a punch, it remains unclear how he could have so easily overtaken a trained paramilitary police officer who, one would hope, would be equally trained in self defense. Of course the brutal stabbing of anyone is indefensible, but the circumstances leading up to this particular crime will prove crucial as the court drama plays out. If the teens were acting in self defense against older men they did not know were police, as Elder told investigators, they could receive leniency. If footage clearly shows the police showing their badges before the attack, it could prove far worse for the suspects. In a police reconstruction of events presented to the press, investigators say it took only a few minutes for the teens to run nearly two miles from where they allegedly stole a backpack back to their hotel room. That timeline, though, has an empty 24-minute window when the police, the teens and the alleged drug dealer and his interloper were all unaccounted for. Attorneys for both teens are demanding a clearer picture of the evidence. Elder's father Ethan, who is returning to California Saturday after visiting his son in prison Thursday and Friday, said he hoped the video would answer questions about the circumstances of the case. Elder's attorney has so far not tried to deny the confession given during the early hours of the investigation. Natale Hjorth's attorneys now say their client didn't know there was a stabbing at all until after his arrest despite the fact the two teens spent the hours after the attack in the same hotel room. A leaked photo of Natale Hjorth blindfolded before he was interrogated has only further muddied the waters. Police have confirmed they are investigating both why that happened and who leaked the photo. The knife–a seven-inch military-style weapon–was found hidden under the ceiling tile in the Le Méridien Visconti hotel room Elder had rented for his Roman holiday. Natale Hjorth was not listed as a guest at the hotel but was arrested in Elder's room. If Natale Hjorth's claims are true, it would mean that Elder lifted the ceiling tile and hid the knife and both men's bloody clothing without him knowing. Investigators are still collecting forensic evidence from the room which could validate or contradict Natale-Hjorth's claims. Lawyers for Natale-Hjorth have filed an appeal to the court order that will keep the teens incarcerated during the preliminary investigative stage. Under Italian law, police can do so for six months before formally indicting them for a crime and then another six months if they need it. While rarely successful so early in an investigation, the appeal will allow the defense to see certain discovery evidence that they have so far not been provided. Elder's lawyers have not yet filed a similar brief, and given news that the two young Americans are turning agaisnt each other, it seems unlikely that the defense teams will share what they learn. The case continues to draw comparisons to the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher. American student Amanda Knox was at first implicated and eventually convicted and acquitted of that murder, in part because of shoddy police work. In the first days of that investigation, police directed the narrative that Knox had confessed, that there was a bloody knife and that CCTV cameras did not work. That case took nearly a decade to play out. This one could take even longer. Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Hong Kong police fire tear gas at protesters in tourist district Posted: 03 Aug 2019 10:41 AM PDT  Hong Kong riot police fired repeated tear gas rounds on Saturday evening at pro-democracy protesters in a popular tourist district, during the latest violence to rock the global finance hub despite increasingly stern warnings from China. Authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing this week signalled a hardening stance. Dozens of protesters were arrested, and the Chinese military said it was ready to quell the "intolerable" unrest if requested.
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| German far-right party ahead in east before regional votes Posted: 04 Aug 2019 01:10 AM PDT  The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has taken the lead in the east of the country ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), just a month before regional elections there, an opinion poll showed on Sunday. The AfD is favored by 23% of voters in the former east, ahead of the CDU on 22%, the far-left Linke on 14%, the Greens on 13% and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) on 11%, according to a poll in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
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| Zimbabwe Reaches ‘Tipping Point’ as Inflation Blacked Out Posted: 03 Aug 2019 10:00 PM PDT ![Zimbabwe Reaches 'Tipping Point' as Inflation Blacked Out]( "Zimbabwe Reaches 'Tipping Point' as Inflation Blacked Out") (Bloomberg) -- Zimbabwe's finance minister responded to the country's worsening economic crisis last week by blacking out inflation statistics for the next six months, boosting the price of the little power that's available five-fold and admitting what the International Monetary Fund told him in April: the economy will contract for the first time since 2008.At the same time he spoke of fiscal surpluses and a relaxation in local ownership requirements for the key platinum industry. This all happened in a country with daily power cuts of up to 18 hours and shortages of everything from bread to motor fuel. People are receiving food aid in cities for the first time and a drought has necessitated the import of hundreds of thousands of tons of corn.When Robert Mugabe was ousted after four decades in power in late 2017 his replacement, Emmerson Mnangagwa, promised economic regeneration and declared that Zimbabwe is "open for business." Instead things have gone from bad to worse with the effects of rapidly expanding money supply through the sale of Treasury bills under Mugabe's rule coming home to roost and this year's outlawing of the U.S. dollar in favor of a local quasi currency that can't be traded outside the country causing panic."Zimbabwe is at a tipping point and if it falls over the edge it's going to be quite a long way in coming back," said Derek Matyszak, a Zimbabwe-based research consultant for South Africa's Institute for Security Studies. "The wheels are falling off. There is no way out of a Ponzi scheme other than a massive infusion of cash to pay off your creditors."The country with the world's highest inflation rate after Venezuela also suspended annual consumer-price data for the next six months. The authorities need to collect comparable data since the introduction of the new currency in February. That marked a return to 2009, when the country abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in favor of the U.S. dollar and other currencies after inflation surged to an estimated 500 billion percent.If the more commonly used black-market exchange rate is used, Zimbabwe's annual inflation is currently 558%, about three times the official rate, while Venezuela's is 35,004%, according to Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.Scrapping the official annual rate is "no real loss from an analytical perspective," said Jee-A van der Linde, an economist at NKC African Economics in Paarl, South Africa. "These elevated inflation readings did little more than create panic and damage what little confidence was left."Still, the decision evokes other countries in crisis. Venezuela halted publication of inflation data and while it periodically releases figures, it isn't operating on a regular schedule. In 2013, Argentina was censured by the IMF for tampering with its data.A de-linking of the country's quasi-currencies from parity with the U.S. dollar in February and the re-imposition of the Zimbabwe dollar overnight in June has fueled depreciation with the currency officially trading at 9.28 to the dollar on Aug. 2. The black-market rate was 10.8, according to Marketwatch.co.zw, a website run by analysts. While the government has argued that in the face of foreign-currency shortages it has no choice but to reintroduce its own currency, Hanke disagrees."The Achilles heel is the introduction of the new currency to the exclusion of the dollar," he said. "They have decided to go in the completely opposite direction and claimed it's the best thing since sliced bread and it's going to be an absolute disaster."While the cost of basic services has climbed 400% this year, pay rises have been around 10%, said Japhet Moyo, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, which has 130,000 members.Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube tried to highlight the country's first positive current-account balance in a decade as a sign of progress. Since his appointment last year, the government has sold only marginal amounts of Treasury bills. And earlier this year, the Cambridge University-trained economics professor forecast that month-on-month inflation, which surged to 39.3% in June, would be close to zero by year-end.The fundamental problem is that the government has failed to attract significant investment and hasn't substantially changed the policies of the Mugabe era, said John Robertson, an independent economist in Harare, the capital."People are very angry" and even though a quarter of the population has already emigrated, more may follow, said Matyszak."The Zimbabwe I once loved has become a cemetery for my son's future" said Ashley Randen, an unemployed single mother of a 12-year-old boy in Harare.\--With assistance from Daniel Cancel and Carolina Millan.To contact the reporters on this story: Antony Sguazzin in Johannesburg at asguazzin@bloomberg.net;Prinesha Naidoo in Johannesburg at pnaidoo7@bloomberg.net;Ray Ndlovu in Johannesburg at rndlovu1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Rene Vollgraaff at rvollgraaff@bloomberg.net, Antony SguazzinFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Cory Booker compares Trump 'spouting racism' to segregationists George Wallace and Bull Connor Posted: 03 Aug 2019 10:02 AM PDT  Sen. Cory Booker says why he thinks President Trump's remarks are "deeply disturbing" and compares the strategy of "spouting racism" to the infamous segregationists George Wallace and Bull Connor.
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| Man, nanny found dead in double murder at suburban New Jersey home Posted: 04 Aug 2019 11:13 AM PDT  Police confirmed that they started investigating the murders of a man and a woman at a home on Walton Road near Jefferson Avenue in Maplewood around 6 a.m.
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| In 1981, a British Submarine Crashed into a Nuclear Russian Sub Posted: 04 Aug 2019 12:30 AM PDT  Immediately ordering the boat to periscope depth, the Delta III's sonar team detect propeller noise on a bearing 127 degrees. The contact was judged to be a submarine.On May 23, 1981 the Soviet submarine K-211 Petropavlovsk cruised quietly at nine knots, one hundred and fifty feet below the surface of the Arctic Barents Sea. The huge 155-meter-long Delta III (or Kalmar)-class submarine was distinguished by the large boxy compartment on its spine which accommodated the towering launch tubes for sixteen R-29R ballistic missiles, each carrying three independent nuclear warheads. K-211's mission was hair-raisingly straightforward: to cruise undetected for weeks or months at a time, awaiting only the signal that a nuclear war had broken out to unleash its apocalyptic payload from underwater on Western cities and military bases up to four thousand miles away.British and American nuclear-power attack submarines (SSNs), or "hunter-killers," were routinely dispatched to detect Soviet ballistic missiles subs (SSBNs) leaving from base to discreetly stalk them. The quieter SSNs also awaited only a signal of war, an event in which they would attempt to torpedo the Soviet subs before they could unleash their city-destroying weapons.(This first appeared in July 2019.)
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| Iraq's Yazidi women must abandon kids born in IS captivity Posted: 03 Aug 2019 09:44 AM PDT ![Iraq's Yazidi women must abandon kids born in IS captivity]( "Iraq's Yazidi women must abandon kids born in IS captivity") Yazidi women and girls who were enslaved and raped by Islamic State militants have few choices. Five years ago Saturday, IS militants launched attacks on Yazidi villages in northern Iraq, kidnapping, enslaving and massacring thousands. In April, a month after the final military defeat of IS, Yazidi religious leaders made an apparent bid to protect the insular and still-grieving community by decreeing that they will embrace survivors of militant attacks.
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| Canada resident home after Iran jail escape: ministry, family Posted: 03 Aug 2019 11:36 PM PDT  An Iranian serving a life sentence on a conviction of designing a pornographic website has fled the country while on short-term release from prison and has arrived in Canada, the foreign ministry and his family said. "Canada welcomes the news that Saeed Malekpour has been reunited with his family in Canada," a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement received by AFP. "We have advocated for Mr Malekpour's release and are pleased that he is now in Canada," the spokesman said, without elaborating due to privacy considerations.
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| This is the gun control legislation Mitch McConnell won't allow senators to vote on Posted: 04 Aug 2019 02:38 PM PDT  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked background check legislation that had previously passed the House. Here's what that legislation would do.
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| EU must change its negotiating terms for Brexit, says Britain's Barclay Posted: 04 Aug 2019 06:36 AM PDT  The European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, must go back to the bloc's leaders to change the terms of the talks because Britain's parliament will not accept the current deal, British Brexit minister Stephen Barclay said on Sunday. Writing in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, Barclay said the "political realities" had changed since Barnier's instructions were set after Britain voted to leave the EU more than three years and that his mandate should reflect those differences. Britain's new prime minister Boris Johnson has pledged to leave the EU on Oct. 31 with or without a deal, and has told the bloc there is no point in new talks unless negotiators are willing to drop the so-called Northern Irish backstop agreed with his predecessor Theresa May.
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| Trump tweets as gun violence and white nationalist terrorism stalk America Posted: 04 Aug 2019 10:45 AM PDT  Domestic terrorism now results in more deaths than the foreign kind but the president shows no sign of toning down his rhetoricDonald Trump takes part in a listening session on 21 February 2018 on gun violence with teachers and students after the mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty ImagesTwo menaces have stalked America throughout its history. One is gun violence. The other is white supremacy. In El Paso, Texas, on Saturday they collided.A 21-year-old gunman with a hatred of Hispanic immigrants killed 20 people in a shopping mall in the eighth deadliest mass shooting in American history. The suspect is believed to have posted online an anti-immigrant screed that praised the killing of 51 people in Christchurch mosques in New Zealand in March.Less than 13 hours later, nine people were killed in Dayton, Ohio, in a second mass shooting.The chilling reality of domestic terrorism – which now results in far more deaths than foreign terrorism – was acknowledged by political analysts, Democratic candidates for president and George P Bush, nephew of former president George W Bush.But there was no televised appearance from President Donald Trump, who attempted to wash his hands of the hate crime in a few tweets. His acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, toured TV studios on Sunday expressing righteous indignation. "I blame the people who pull the trigger," Mulvaney told NBC's Meet the Press with Chuck Todd. "Goodness gracious, is someone really blaming the president? People are sick, until we address why people think this way."There is a need for caution when drawing a direct line between politicians and heinous acts: the Columbine high school massacre happened under President Bill Clinton, the Orlando nightclub shooting under Barack Obama. But the lone gunman theory is often a way of refusing to grapple with underlying motives. For those who live with violence and its consquences in their communities every day, context matters.Trump has spent the past month stoking racial resentments, tweeting that four US congresswomen of colour should "go back" to their countries, holding a rally where the crowd chanted "send her back!" and deriding the majority African American district that contains part of Baltimore as "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess".Inflammatory words matter in a country that has more guns than people. Tragically, shootings have become as American as apple pie. Dayton was the 22nd mass killing in America this year, according to an AP/USA Today/Northeastern University mass murder database, which tracks all attacks involving four or more people killed. America has by far the highest gun ownership rate in the world.Time and again Congress refuses to act. Not even the shooting that killed 20 students and six teachers at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 led to meaningful reforms, even though a sympathetic president, Barack Obama, was in the White House.Then came Trump. The National Rifle Association (NRA) was a key part of his coalition, spending $30m to help him beat Hillary Clinton. He has resisted basic measures such as signing background checks for gun sales into law. A promise to defend the second amendment, the right to bear arms, always rouses one of the biggest cheers at his campaign ralles. Trump wildly exaggerates Democrats' plans for gun control.In addition, Trump has fomented a toxic discourse around immigration and race. He questioned Obama's birthplace, launched his election campaign with talk of Mexican "criminals" and "rapists" and drew moral equivalence between white supremacists and anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has used the word "invasion" numerous times when tweeting about the US-Mexico border; the gunman in El Paso, in a "manifesto" being linked to him, complained of a "Hispanic invasion of Texas".White nationalist terrorism is now a real danger, yet it receives a fraction of the attention of Islamist extremism. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, testified last month that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the past nine months; many were linked to white supremacist violence. Trump's critics say he is fanning the flames of bigotry.Presidential candidate Cory Booker told CNN's State of the Union: "I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this. He is responsible because he is stoking fears and hatred and bigotry. He is responsible because he is failing to condemn white supremacy, and seeing it as it is.Trump believes the rhetoric worked for him in 2016, not with a majority of Americans (he lost the popular vote), but with the white-majority states that were crucial to his victory in the electoral college. The past month – where has doubled down on race baiting and launched unprecedented racist attacks on Democrat politicians of color – strongly implies he will try the same approach in 2020 but perhaps go even further. The election looks set to be the most explosive in living memory.But, gun control activists say, this is no time for despair or surrender. The NRA is currently in a state of disarray, plagued by internal feuding and financial strife. House Republicans suffered a hammering in last year's midterm elections, driven by an anti-Trump backlash. Voters can make a difference in 2020, not only in the White House but, crucially, in the Senate. As Nelson Mandela once observed, it always seems impossible until it is done.
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| Malaysia Voices Trust in South China Sea Pact Posted: 04 Aug 2019 03:00 PM PDT ![Malaysia Voices Trust in South China Sea Pact]( "Malaysia Voices Trust in South China Sea Pact") (Bloomberg) -- Malaysia is confident it can reach an agreement with China to settle tensions in the South China Sea after its neighbors warned that incidents in the disputed waters had "eroded trust."The country is "very hopeful" that a code of conduct for the area will be completed within the three-year deadline or earlier, Malaysia's Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said in an interview with Bloomberg Television's Haslinda Amin."We are very hopeful that within three years or perhaps even earlier we can come up with a better understanding of things," Saifuddin said in the interview in Bangkok after the Asean Foreign Ministers Meeting. "We are also hopeful that the U.S. and other superpowers will respect the CoC once its implemented."Saifuddin said he had not seen an increased presence of Chinese navy vessels in the disputed region, which includes a waterway that carries more than $3 trillion in trade each year.His comments come after a joint communique from Asean aired concerns on the same day that China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi touted a preliminary draft of the code of conduct to end the decades-long conflict over the area. Activities in the South China Sea, including land reclamation, "increased tensions and may undermine peace, security and stability in the region," the 10-nation bloc of Southeast Asian countries said in the statement.Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's stance on China has warmed ever since he stepped into power last year and quickly put Chinese-backed projects on hold for review. He has since resumed some of the contracts and looked to Chinese companies from Huawei Technologies Co. to SenseTime Group Ltd. for cooperation in artificial intelligence and transport.As trade tensions between the U.S. and China escalate, Saifuddin is concerned that possible U.S. sanctions against Malaysia could prevent it from trading with China. Vietnam is a cautionary tale, with the U.S. imposing duties on steel imports from the country in July."We are a small player and we would like to trade with both the U.S. and China," Saifuddin said. If Malaysia were to be punished for its trade surplus with the U.S., then "we just have to tell the U.S. that you are just being very unfair and you are being a big bully," he added.To contact the reporters on this story: Anisah Shukry in Kuala Lumpur at ashukry2@bloomberg.net;Haslinda Amin in Singapore at hamin1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Yudith Ho at yho35@bloomberg.net, Ruth PollardFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| America's New AC-130J Ghostrider Gunship Is a Beast Posted: 03 Aug 2019 06:30 AM PDT  The 30mm cannon in particular "almost like a sniper rifle. ... It's that precise, it can pretty much hit first shot, first kill," then-1st SOW commander Col. Tom Palenske told Millitary.com back in 2017, adding that the Ghostrider is "going to [be] the most lethal, with the most loiter time, probably the most requested weapons system from ground forces in the history of warfare."Brace yourselves: the Air Force's newest gunship is officially on the prowl downrange.The AC-130J Ghostrider gunship flew its first combat mission in Afghanistan in late June, deploying to relieve the AC-130U Spooky aircraft following the latter's final combat sorties, an Air Force Special Operations Command spokesman confirmed to The War Zone on Wednesday.According to the Northwest Florida Daily News, which first reported the news of the combat deployment, the mission took place "just days before" the June 28 change of command ceremony for new AFSOC commander Air Force Lt. Gen. James Slife at Hurlburt Field in Florida.This first appeared in Task and Purpose here.
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| Floating nuclear power plant to be towed across Russian Arctic despite 'Chernobyl on ice' concerns Posted: 04 Aug 2019 07:59 AM PDT  The wind and rain whipped by at several feet per second as crew members stepped outside for a quick smoke, but the world's only floating nuclear power plant barely shifted in the choppy waves of the Kola bay. The length of one-and-a-half football pitches, the Academic Lomonosov looks the part as the vanguard of Russia's "nuclearification" of the Arctic, at least now that its rusty hull has been repainted in the white, red and blue of the national flag. Later this month it will be towed 3,000 miles from the northwestern corner of Russia to the Chukotka region next to Alaska, where it will provide steam heat and eventually electricity to the coastal gold-mining town of Pevek, population 4,000. The state corporation Rosatom is trumpeting the Academic Lomonosov as the next big step in nuclear energy and a solution to electricity needs in Africa and Asia. "This is like launching the first rocket into space because it's a pilot project, the first in the world," Vladimir Irimenko, senior engineer for environmental protection, said before showing journalists the reactor control room. But the floating plant took more than a decade to build at high cost and has been dubbed the "nuclear Titanic" over safety concerns. It has been fuelled up and tested in Murmansk rather than its home port of St Petersburg after 11,000 signed an angry petition and Norway objected to two reactors full of enriched uranium being dragged along along its entire coastline. A dinghy of Greenpeace activists unfurled a "no to floating Chernobyl" banner next to the plant on the 31st anniversary of the disaster in 2017. This group and others have wondered about the wisdom of sending what is essentially a giant nuclear barge into some of the harshest and most remote conditions on earth, where any cleanup operation would be exceedingly difficult. Greenpeace Russia activists rolled out a banner before the floating nuclear power plant in St. Petersburghttps://t.co/7d6OPmRdQipic.twitter.com/ApMGOfoEtK— Greenpeace Russia (@greenpeaceru) April 26, 2017 "If there's a storm or something, it can't move anywhere, it's helpless," said activist Konstantin Fomin. "We did an action and boated up to it to show that if we can boat up to it, then terrorists can boat up to it." It's not exactly true that this floating nuclear power plant is the "first in the world," as a US army reactor installed on an immobilised cargo ship provided electricity to the Panama Canal zone in 1968-75. The Academic Lomonosov, however, is the first floating nuclear power plant designed for regular production, as Rosatom has claimed that southeast Asian countries are interested in buying such stations for electricity and South American and Middle Eastern countries for desalination. It has argued that the floating station meets higher safety standards than land-based nuclear plants and said any allusion to Chernobyl is like "comparing a 100-year-old automobile to one today". To be fair, while flammable graphite slowed down the neutrons for fission in the Chernobyl reactors, water performs this function in most reactors today, including on the Academic Lomonosov. Its KLT-40 reactors are similar to those that power three of Russia's five atomic icebreakers. A crew member monitors the reactors in the floating plant's control room Credit: Alec Luhn/For The Telegraph After previously complaining that it was only allowed on board to check the plant once a year during construction, Russia's technology oversight agency issued it a 10-year operating license in June. The floating plant will be protected from waves and ice by a pier, and national guardsmen will be deployed against intruders, Rosatom said. After the Fukishima nuclear disaster in 2011, all Russian nuclear power plants including the Academic Lomonosov were upgraded with new safety systems, it added. The company has declared that the floating plant's reactors are "invincible for tsunamis and other natural disasters". Yet overweening statements like this, as well a Rosatom official's promise last year that the reactors would be tested "at 110 per cent" of their capacity, hardly alleviate safety concerns. (The company later said the official misspoke.) During construction in 2017, a fire started on the Academic Lomonosov and spread over 170 square feet, according to state media. Asked about the incident, director Kirill Torkov said sparks from welding had caused a diesel generator to "start burning," but claimed that what resulted was "smokiness" rather than a fire. "There are several systems for fire safety on the vessel," he said. Hazard tape was stretched across several areas with signs instructing crew to access them through different corridors Credit: Alec Luhn/For The Telegraph But safety precautions can never completely eliminate the risk of human error or natural disasters, and Russia has had a spotty nuclear record in the Arctic. In Soviet times, 14 reactors were simply sunk in the Kara Sea, and thousands of iron containers of spent fuel were dumped overboard. "They might not sink right away, so we'd take a rifle and shoot them," recalled Andrey Zolotkov, who worked for Atomflot for 35 years before joining the environmental group Bellona in the 1990s. The nuclear submarine Kursk sank in the Arctic 2000 and K-159 sank in 2003, and last month a fire on a nuclear deep-sea submersible near Murmansk almost caused a "catastrophe of a global scale," an officer said at the funeral of the 14 sailors killed. While a mishap in Pevek could result in local contamination, what observers really fear is when the Academic Lomonosov is towed the 3,000 miles back to Murmansk for maintenance and refuelling 12 years from now. It will enter the Barents Sea, the source of much of the cod and haddock for British fish and chips shops, full of spent nuclear fuel. "In case of an accident, the reactor can be shut down, but the storage of spent fuel on something like an unpowered vessel is wild to me," Mr Zolotkov said. "That object can't be completely airtight." Steam turbines next to the reactor compartment will provide heat and electricity Credit: Alec Luhn/For The Telegraph Perhaps the most serious issue facing Rosatom's plans to sell floating nuclear power plants around the globe is not "Chernobyl on ice" protests but rather cost. While Rosatom has refused to put a price tag on the Academic Lomonosov as a pilot project, insurance filings and media reports have revealed that it took at least £360 million to build including coastal infrastructure. "The coastline of Siberia is a wonderful spot for developing wind power, during the summer there are 24 hours of sun a day, and there's geothermal energy like Iceland and China are developing. So there are alternatives, and they are probably much cheaper to develop than to build the Academic Lomonosov plant," said Thomas Nilsen, editor of the Norway-based Barents Observer news site. Such alternatives are unlikely, however, now that Rosatom has been put in charge of all new infrastructure along the "northern sea route". Smoking is allowed only on the port deck of the vessel Credit: Alec Luhn/For The Telegraph As global warming melts the sea ice, Russia hopes this route can challenge the Suez Canal for a share of shipping to and from China, and Vladimir Putin has promised its atomic icebreaker fleet will increase to nine by 2035. It's all part of Moscow's grand plans to conquer the Arctic on the back of nuclear power: An extensive new report by the Barents Observer estimated that in the next 15 years, the number of military and civilian reactors in the Russian Arctic would double from the 62 in operation today. Other plans under consideration include autonomous nuclear reactors installed on the sea floor to power gas and oil drilling. Perhaps the greatest nuclear threat to the Arctic environment is posed by the secretive Poseidon underwater nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered drone announced by Mr Putin last year, which has been photographed on a ship near Arkhangelsk. Given its small size, the drone almost certainly can't hold a closed-circuit reactor and will emit nuclear waste directly into the water. A crew member passes through a hatch inside the Academic Lomonosov Credit: Alec Luhn/For The Telegraph In this atmosphere, the Academic Lomonosov looks more like a geopolitical PR stunt than an market-beating power source. Mr Irimenko said six floating nuclear power stations and one replacement would have to be produced for the project to be profitable, but admitted that this was not the most crucial aspect. "A military ship isn't profitable, a space rocket isn't profitable," he said, "but it's important for the country's development."
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| HOA tells veteran's widow American flag has to go. It doesn't fit neighborhood's 'look.' Posted: 04 Aug 2019 03:01 AM PDT  An 82-year-old grandmother doesn't look like your typical rebel. But she's standing up for Old Glory against her HOA and their overbearing rules.
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| Ex-trooper pleads to manslaughter in MSU athlete's death Posted: 03 Aug 2019 01:38 PM PDT ![Ex-trooper pleads to manslaughter in MSU athlete's death]( "Ex-trooper pleads to manslaughter in MSU athlete's death") A former Mississippi Highway Patrol officer has pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the 2017 death of a Mississippi State University track athlete but will not face prison time. Kyle Lee entered the plea Friday in Oktibbeha County Circuit Court, news outlets reported. Lee faced a culpable negligence manslaughter charge for the death of 22-year-old Kaelin Kersh, who was killed when Lee's police unit hit the car in which she was a passenger.
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| Suspect sought after woman stabbed in stomach at Brooklyn subway station Posted: 04 Aug 2019 08:33 AM PDT  Police released video of the suspect wanted in connection with a stabbing on a subway platform in Brooklyn.
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| Five dead, several injured after powerful quake rocks Indonesia Posted: 03 Aug 2019 01:31 PM PDT  Five people died and several were injured after a powerful undersea earthquake rocked Indonesia's heavily populated Java island, triggering a brief tsunami warning, the national disaster agency said Saturday. The 6.9 magnitude quake on Friday evening sent residents fleeing to higher ground, while many in the capital Jakarta ran into the streets. An official from Indonesia's national disaster agency warned the quake could generate a tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet), but the alert was lifted several hours later.
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| The DOJ Will Not Prosecute James Comey over Trump Memos Posted: 03 Aug 2019 02:30 AM PDT  A free society cannot stay free for long if the criminal-justice system becomes a political weapon, if that becomes our norm.The most alarming aspect of the Trump–Russia investigation, and of the stark difference between the aggression with which it was pursued and the see-no-evil passivity of the Clinton emails caper, is the way the investigative process was used to influence political outcomes.The way to right that wrong is to prevent it from becoming the new normal, not to turn the tables of abuse when power shifts from one side to the other. We can only make things worse by losing the distinction between rebuking errors in judgment and criminalizing them.Ardent Trump supporters are growling over news that the FBI's former director, James Comey, will not be prosecuted by the Justice Department for the mishandling of memoranda he wrote about his contacts with the president. The news has been reported by The Hill's John Solomon and the Washington Post's Devlin Barrett, among others.Comey's handling of his memos is one aspect of probes related to investigations attendant to the 2016 election, which are being conducted by Justice Department independent counsel Michael Horowitz. Indications are that Horowitz referred the memos issue to the Justice Department for possible prosecution and that, after reviewing the IG's findings, Justice declined to pursue the matter as a criminal case.That is the way things are supposed to work. The inspector general's job is to ensure that colorable allegations of misconduct against Justice Department officials (including FBI officials) are thoroughly examined, so that all of the relevant facts are uncovered. The Justice Department then reviews the IG's report, mindful of two imperatives that are in tension. On one hand, clear criminal misconduct must be prosecuted; otherwise we have a two-tiered justice system in which those we trust to enforce the law can violate it with impunity. On the other hand, poor judgment, while it should be censured and may be the basis for disciplinary action, must not be criminalized; otherwise, we discourage talented, honorable people from taking jobs that are all about excruciating judgment calls.What happened in this instance? We don't know yet -- and that alone calls for restraint. It is no knock on Messrs. Solomon and Barrett, who are excellent reporters with good sources, to caution that we have not yet seen the IG report.To be sure, many relevant facts are known. The Comey memos have been public for some time, the former director has testified about them in congressional hearings, and they were part of the mountain of information from which Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff derived their final report. Still, there is much we do not know. Past experience informs us that IG Horowitz is thorough and careful. His office has interviewed lots of witnesses and scrutinized government reports to which we do not have access. His report is not expected to be released until September. Until then, we won't know what happened, and why. In the meantime, since I have known both Attorney General Bill Barr and former director Jim Comey for many years, I am confident about two things.First, no one is better suited than Barr to weigh the pros and cons of prosecuting alleged government misconduct. He has prioritized the importance of resisting the politicization of law enforcement and he grasps the stakes involved. He is also a big enough boy to tune out the noise from the Trump–Comey feud: the president's nonstop depiction of Comey as the reincarnation of Lavrentiy Beria, and the former director's worn-thin moralizing about how "Trump eats your soul in small bites" -- including Barr's own. The attorney general is not going to authorize a prosecution in the absence of clear evidence of a serious crime.Second, I do not believe that Jim Comey would willfully leak classified information. Unless and until someone can show me he did it, I am going to continue assuming he did not.That does not mean his handling of the memos was model behavior, though. It seems to me that he played with fire.The existence of the memos became known shortly after Comey was fired on May 9, 2017. It is only natural that they raised alarm. One would expect that if a president and an FBI director met several times, memos documenting those conversations would contain at least some classified information. Comey, moreover, brazenly acknowledged that he had orchestrated the leak of at least a portion of one memo to the New York Times. That is not normal.Nevertheless, Comey is very smart. And you don't have to agree with his politics or like his style to realize that he has spent much of his career protecting national security. By definition, when information is classified, that means its unauthorized disclosure could damage American national security. Might Comey mishandle classified information? Sure, it's possible -- plenty of smart, patriotic public officials have done that. But to me, it is implausible that Comey would knowingly do that, much less intentionally transmit classified intelligence to the media.That said, the classified-information facet of this episode has been exaggerated. There were seven memos in all, totaling 15 pages. Our understanding is that Comey tried to avoid putting classified information in them, and believed he had succeeded. Yet after obtaining and accounting for all of them, the FBI designated two of them as "confidential," the lowest level of classification. We do not know at this point (or, at least, I don't know) whether the memo leaked to the Times -- regarding the February 2017 Trump–Comey discussion of the investigation of former national-security adviser Michael Flynn -- was one of the classified ones. But we can easily deduce that Comey neither intended it to be classified nor thought it was. At one point in the memo, Comey wrote, "NOTE: Because this is an unclassified document, I will be limited in how I describe what I said next."We know that Comey shared this memo with a friend (who is also a friend of mine, and who was his intermediary with the Times), and that he shared at least some of the memos with his lawyers (who are also friends of mine). From a classified-information standpoint, however, we are talking about a small number of documents, and it is unclear that Comey knew anything in them was classified. Even if he turned out to be wrong about that, it is highly unlikely that prosecutors could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was grossly negligent in mishandling them, much less that he willfully mishandled them.To my mind, the issue here has never been criminal misconduct in connection with classified information. The relevant matters are the non-criminal but serious impropriety in the handling of non-public government information, and the failure to protect the confidentiality of communications as to which the president has a presumptive privilege -- a privilege that subordinate executive officials are obliged to respect, regardless of whether they respect the president himself.There is no problem with Comey's having chosen to write the memos. Much is made of the fact that he did not trust President Trump and that he felt compelled to document their communications, even though he did not do that when he spoke with President Obama. So what? He is entitled to feel that way. He was under no duty either to write or to refrain from writing memos. As long as he recorded events fairly and honestly when he chose to report them, nothing more was required.The problem, however, is that the former director seems to have regarded the memos as his own property, rather than the government's. To the contrary, these were clearly accounts of government business compiled by a government official using government property on government time. The memos were not Comey's to keep; and they were certainly not his to disseminate to the media.Reports of non-public government business are sensitive, regardless of whether they contain classified information. Conversations between the president and top national-security officials are among the most sensitive. Top executive officers, such as the FBI director, are well aware that those communications are presumptively privileged, and that the privilege belongs to the president. The director can be cut some slack for keeping memos he wrote in his home rather than in his office -- an FBI director is never off duty. But he's got no business leaking government files of any kind to the media, and that goes double for memoranda about communications with the president -- any president, end of story.It makes no difference that, at the time of the leak, Comey was no longer the FBI director. A public official, particularly of such high rank, has continuing fiduciary duties upon leaving government service -- even when the departure is against his will. Of course it was wrong for the administration to give conflicting rationales for Comey's firing. It was also wrong for the president to goad the former director with a farcical, shades-of-Watergate tweet, suggesting there might be White House recordings of their conversations. There are many ways the former director could appropriately have responded to these provocations; leaking a government memo was not one of them.Comey has said he was hoping to trigger the appointment of a special counsel. But he could have done that, in his new capacity as a private citizen, by arranging a press conference at which he called for the appointment of a special counsel. It would have gotten plenty of attention. Comey, a gifted public speaker, would have made a forceful presentation that would have gotten significant traction on Capitol Hill, where Democrats were already clamoring for a special counsel.The former director's decision to proceed by leaking to the media a government memo, documenting a sensitive but probably not classified meeting with the president, was wrong. It was the kind of behavior it is impossible to imagine that Comey, as FBI director, would abide if one of his subordinates had done it. Indeed, in Comey's memo about the Flynn conversation, he describes speaking at length with Trump about the menace of leaks, about how they undermine the president's capacity to do his job. He even recounts telling the president that he was "eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message."To leak the memo was unbecoming conduct. It is worthy of censure. That does not make it a felony.The ongoing Justice Department and congressional inquiries into the investigations attendant to the 2016 election are wide-ranging. In assessing investigative overreach, it is vital to remember that the remedy for politicized law enforcement is not more politicized law enforcement. If officials with a commendable record of service to the country took steps they should not have taken out of lapses in judgment -- including lapses driven by overwrought suspicions of impending danger to the nation -- then there needs to be an accounting. We will also need to implement better oversight procedures to insure against a repetition.That, however, does not mean crimes were committed. The president's fans should remember that their main complaint has been that Donald Trump and his campaign were treated as suspects in heinous, traitorous crimes despite the absence of credible incriminating evidence. The investigators, too, are entitled not to be presumed guilty of crimes, even by those of us who are convinced that there were investigative irregularities.Let's get the facts first, and then we can decide whether laws were broken, and whether there has been misconduct worthy of prosecution. And when we decide, let's bear in mind that a norm against criminalizing political disputes cannot be reestablished unless we commit to reestablishing it. That means keeping the political vendettas out of the investigations.
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| One More Reason Why Lincoln Is Better Than Trump: His Spies Posted: 04 Aug 2019 03:05 AM PDT  Joshua Roberts/ReutersThe resignation of national intelligence director Dan Coats, who publicly contradicted Donald Trump's rosy view of Russian and North Korean threats, opens old wounds. Trump has long publicly denigrated the spy community, which has infuriated seasoned espionage hands. But he isn't the only chief executive who's had run-ins with this nation's intelligence apparatus. Go back to the Civil War and you find that spycraft posed a headache for another Republican president. Although both Abraham Lincoln and Trump struggled to navigate the intelligence landscape during their presidencies, Lincoln ultimately succeeded in piecing together a makeshift information network, while Trump so far has failed, still relying too often on his gut instinct rather than empirical evidence from his spy agencies.Granted it may be a stretch, but there are parallels between these two men. Trump assumed the presidency with no government experience. Lincoln had not much more seasoning—one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and four terms in the Illinois state legislature. Both men inherited a nation deeply divided politically. With members of Congress assaulting one another on the House and Senate floors before the war and 750,000 square miles of the United States cleaved off to form a rebel nation after the fighting started, Lincoln, of course, faced a far worse situation and tried his mightiest to hold the country together at the outset. Trump has been content to further exploit the divisions that existed before he took office.How Lincoln's Compassion for a Gold Star Mom Shames TrumpTrump entered office contemptuous of the CIA, FBI, and the military's intelligence agencies, claiming at campaign rallies that he understood world threats better than the generals or spymasters, and later accusing government agencies of snooping on him when he was a candidate.There was no spy organization for Lincoln to disdain when he became president. At the war's outset, General Winfield Scott, the Union Army's commander, had no intelligence staff and hired off the street a former San Francisco vigilante named Lafayette Baker to spy on the Confederate force gathering at Manassas Junction.In the first year of the war, Lincoln had good reason to be contemptuous of the military intelligence capability that evolved. Neither the White House nor the Union army ever had a centralized spy service. Local commanders, none of whom had any training in the dark arts during their cadet days at West Point, were expected to organize their own spy services for their divisions and corps.The closest to a spymaster the Union force had was Allan Pinkerton, a nationally known Chicago detective who became the secret service chief for the Union's all-important Army of the Potomac commanded by General George B. McClellan. But Pinkerton, who operated under the pseudonym E. J. Allen, ended up being a failure as a military intelligence officer, feeding McClellan wildly inaccurate reports that inflated the number of Rebel troops the Union general faced. Pinkerton also spied on Lincoln for political intelligence he thought might be useful for McClellan.By the winter of 1861, the president suspected McClellan, with Pinkerton's help, was dialing up the Confederate numbers to justify his not moving against the enemy until he had more soldiers. Lincoln reportedly once deadpanned to a visiting New England delegation that he knew the Confederates had a one-million-man army. Why? Because whenever his generals fought the Rebels they always told him they faced two-to-one odds. "Now I know we have a half million soldiers in the field," he said, "so I am bound to believe the rebels have twice that number."Intelligence collection in the Army of the Potomac improved dramatically when it was taken over in February 1863 by Colonel George Sharpe, an erudite New York lawyer who pioneered what spy agencies today call "all source intelligence." Sharpe raked in information not only from his spies but also from prisoner interrogations, aeronauts flying balloons over the battlefield, signal officers intercepting Rebel telegraph messages, and cavalry scouts on reconnaissance patrols—all to produce intelligence reports that outpaced anything the enemy could muster.But even Sharpe had his intelligence failures. In the summer of 1864, he lost track of an entire Confederate corps, whose 12,000 men turned up at the gates of Washington, D.C., embarrassing a president already under fire for lack of progress in the Union war effort.Lincoln and Trump could not be more different in their response to a president's intelligence conundrum. Lincoln checked out books on military strategy from the Library of Congress and paced back and forth in his bedroom at night digesting them for a crash course on how to wage war. Trump doesn't read books.Early in his presidency, Lincoln had the Army begin sending him daily intelligence reports on what it learned about Confederate military movements and throughout his tenure he carved out time in his busy schedule to interview news correspondents on what they learned during visits to the South and to grill Army officers for information they picked up from the front. Trump does not regularly read intelligence summaries that have been prepared for him and sits for relatively few briefings by his spy agencies. He does stay glued to Fox News each morning.When Pinkerton met with Lincoln to milk him for political information McClellan would find useful, the president, realizing what the Chicago detective was up to, turned the tables and pumped the unwitting Pinkerton for intelligence on his general. Such nuance and mental dexterity as president are not Trump's strong suit. Douglas Waller's next book, Lincoln's Spies, will be published by Simon & Schuster on August 6.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| 'Miracle' needed for quick EU-Swiss treaty deal, Swiss minister says Posted: 04 Aug 2019 04:19 AM PDT  It would take a "miracle" for Switzerland and the European Union to clinch a quick deal over a stalled partnership treaty that has disrupted cross-border share trading and strained bilateral ties, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis said. Cassis's comments in an interview in the SonntagsBlick newspaper underscored pessimism over prospects for ending a political logjam over the pact, which Brussels has sought for a decade but the Swiss have failed to endorse after more than four years of negotiations. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has urged Bern to wrap up the accord before his term is due to end on Oct. 31.
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| Russia’s Military Admits It Needs Western Technology Posted: 03 Aug 2019 01:00 PM PDT  When Western nations imposed economic sanctions after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Moscow had an answer: Russia would substitute domestic products for foreign imports.But Russia's defense industry is still using imported parts despite the government ban, according to Russia's top prosecutor."Import substitution in the defense industry remains a problem," warned Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika. "Instances of non-compliance with the ban to purchase foreign equipment whose counterparts are manufactured in Russia continue to be revealed.""In the framework of import substitution in the defense industry, it is vital to ensure compliance with the deadlines for replacing components," said First Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman. "Raw and [other] materials produced by NATO countries and Ukraine, used to manufacture machines, arms, military and special equipment, prevent non-compliance with the ban on the budget-funded purchase of foreign equipment, analogues of which are produced in Russia."Unfortunately, the problem is that equivalents to Western goods are often not produced in Russia. "Russia produces few high value goods that can compete with imports," noted a 2017 Moscow Times article. "Thanks to oil inflating the value of the ruble it has always been cheaper and easier to import finished goods than go through the process of investing money into expensive production and development lines that produce goods that are, at the end of the day, inferior to the imports."
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| For Ireland Plc, Pain of No-Deal Brexit Is Starting to Hit Home Posted: 03 Aug 2019 10:00 PM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Ireland's biggest companies are getting a taste of the pain that could come from the U.K. crashing out of the European Union without a deal.Amid the deepening impasse over how to deal with the Irish border, the country's ISEQ All-Share Index has been the worst performing benchmark in Europe, the Middle East and Africa since Boris Johnson became U.K. prime minister, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Johnson has declared the so-called backstop for the Irish border "undemocratic" and vowed to leave the EU with or without an agreement. The hard-line stance causes uncertainty over how commerce between Britain and the bloc will continue after the Oct. 31 deadline and raises the specter of checkpoints returning to the island.A hard Brexit would see the creation of a border between Ireland and the U.K.'s Northern Ireland "overnight," said Fiona Muldoon, chief executive of insurer FBD Holdings Plc, joining a growing chorus of companies from Ryanair Holdings Plc to Bank of Ireland Group Plc saying the uncertainty around Brexit is biting.Smurfit Kappa Group Plc said British demand is among the weakest in the packaging company's 35 markets and its U.K. spending is about 20% to 25% lower than it would otherwise have been because of the political uncertainty, suggesting no deal would be "disastrous" for the country and hit Ireland's trade with its neighbor."It's a really important issue for us that there is a deal," CEO Tony Smurfit said. "We hope that in the end the adults will take over and make sure a deal happens."Less LendingRyanair, Europe's biggest budget airline, recently revealed plans for one of the deepest rounds of job cuts in years, as Brexit amplifies concerns around low fares and the grounding of Boeing Co.'s 737 Max jetliner.A no-deal Brexit "could have a very damaging effect, particularly on our U.K. bases and on some of our Irish bases, which are heavily dependent on people traveling between Ireland and the U.K.," CEO Michael O'Leary told staff.The concerns over the fallout from a crash Brexit is prompting Irish businesses, especially smaller firms, to refrain from borrowing, according to Bank of Ireland CEO Francesca McDonagh."Brexit uncertainty is creating some reticence," McDonagh told analysts. "A year ago we would have assumed that Brexit would have been resolved."Pound FalloutJohnson's pledge that the U.K. will leave the EU on Oct. 31 "do or die" has prompted the pound to tumble to the lowest level since early 2017. The currency's slump is "a serious threat to many Irish exporters if not sufficiently recognized, managed and mitigated," said Simon McKeever, chief executive of the Irish Exporters Association.Amid all the gloom, some executives do see a potential silver lining. A no-deal Brexit could bolster demand for office space in Dublin "because I think you'll see financial companies, legal companies relocate," said Kevin Nowlan, chief executive of Hibernia REIT, one of the biggest landlords in Irish capital."The longer there is indecision from the U.K., the better for us," Nowlan said after the company's annual investor meeting. Still, he conceded downsides remain, with local companies holding off on taking space as the uncertainty lingers.'No Lifeboats'While the catalog of concerns hasn't yet translated into pressure on Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar to back down, there's an emerging acknowledgment of the risks, and business leaders are looking for more clarity on how the government plans to protect the economy."It's akin to the captain of a ship going to sea without any lifeboats for the passengers," said Joe Healy, president of the Irish Farmers Association. Varadkar's administration is "saying nothing about plans to protect Irish farmers, who are in the front line and the most exposed in Europe."\--With assistance from Richard Weiss.To contact the reporters on this story: Dara Doyle in Dublin at ddoyle1@bloomberg.net;Peter Flanagan in Dublin at pflanagan23@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Chris Reiter, Andrew BlackmanFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| ‘I can’t describe a better father’: Community rallies for grieving man who left twins to die in hot NYC car Posted: 03 Aug 2019 10:05 AM PDT  Less than a week after leaving his twin one-year-old children to die, trapped in a hot car in the Bronx, Juan Rodriguez stood before dozens of his family and friends, and shook.With tears in his eyes, the 39-year-old sighed and hung his head in disbelief. A court officer brought him a cup of water. Then a chair.The room was silent but for those sighs, and the muffled conversation taking place in the corner between a judge and two attorneys.As he shook, dozens of family and friends waited for news on the fate of a grieving father, who had just made the biggest mistake of his life by forgetting his children strapped into car seats on a hot summer day – and one who they otherwise described as a doting, attentive, and dedicated man who would do anything for his kids."I can't lay out a better example of what a good father is. He's an involved father. Loving. Always there for his kids," Marlon Pavon, a family friend who went to college with Rodriguez, says later, outside the courthouse."He would go above and beyond if they needed something," he tells The Independent.The description of Rodriguez is one that seemed to contradict the underlying set of the facts before the state of New York. It has refused so far to drop charges against the father of five who forgot two of them in a hot car for hours after driving to his job at a Veterans Affairs hospital from his home just outside of the city two Fridays ago.But it's an opinion of him that seemed to be shared among the dozens of friends and family who took time out of their days to show support for him, even as he wrestled with the tragedy that is now taking over their lives.It's an opinion that is shared by Rodriguez's wife too; a newly grieving mother who clasped his shoulder at a press conference after court, crying as their four-year-old son smiled at his father, and playing with his face."I will never get over this loss, and I know he will never forgive himself for this mistake," Marissa Rodriguez said in statement distributed by their lawyer last weekend. "This is a horrific accident, and I need him by my side to go through this together."But, even with the testimonials, the question remains: how could such a loving father ever leave his two children in the back seat of a boiling hot car, even if it was accidental?Well, on 26 July, according to court documents, Rodriguez – a captain in the New York national guard who was once deployed in the Middle East – pulled into work just after 8am at the Veterans Affairs hospital, after dropping off another of his children at daycare.Eight hours later, the father was seen returning to that car, and driving off. Moments later, after Rodriguez realised his two children were still in the back seat, he pulled over and jumped out screaming. A bystander called the police. The medical examiner registered the internal temperature of the children at 108 Fahrenheit (42 Celsius).Amber Rowlins, the director of the advocacy group Kids and Cars, says that she sees dozens of similar cases. Parents, in a rush or somehow distracted, simply forget.Rowlins runs a group headquartered in Kansas that advocates for better safety measures on these issues, and compiles what is perhaps the saddest database in America – one that tracks all of these children's deaths.She says that it could happen to anyone, even a father who just months ago threw a lavish party to celebrate his twins' first birthdays in their fence-lined suburban yard."This happens to all different types of people. People of all different ages. People of all different socioeconomic statuses, professions, races, ethnicities," Rowlins says."It truly is one of those things that does not discriminate," she continues.Kids and Cars was established in the early 1990s at something of an inflection point for this particular kind of tragedy, Rowlins says. Before then, children being left unintentionally in cars was relatively rare.The newfound understanding that airbags are deadly for young children that developed at that time changed that. As parents began putting their babies in back seats, so too did they begin to forget them once they were physically out of sight.Since 1990, over 900 children have died from heat stroke after being left in cars in the US, with 25 deaths already recorded this year, according to the database. Just last year, there were 53.But even with the human propensity to forget, Rowlins says that these deaths are all unnecessary. There are, and have been for years, products available that notify parents if they forget something with weight in the back seat and wander away from the vehicle. Those tools just aren't in every vehicle.It's an issue that has attracted the attention of congress, with the first bill aimed at requiring carmakers to put that technology into cars being introduced by now-presidential candidate Tim Ryan of Ohio in 2016. The current version of the bill has a Senate-introduced version too, and six sponsors.Michael Zetts, Ryan's communications director, says it is ridiculous that the bills have not already passed."These kinds of tragedies happen every year, and it's not just one or two. It's in the teens. It's more," he says. "All summer long, and even in the spring, you get these stories."Rodriguez, for his part, now plans on joining in on the efforts to enact legislation that would ensure what has happened to him never happens to another family.At least, that is what his lawyer says his client plans on doing if he can beat the manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges he faces. Rowlins says that from what she has seen in her 15 years advocating on these issues, about half of the deaths result in charges, and about a third of the cases see convictions. It is hard to predict what the results will be, and sometimes seemingly identical cases will yield opposite results.As Rodriguez starts that fight, he has plenty of support from his family and friends, who showed up en masse to support him in the Bronx.But Rowlins says that regardless of the character of the father described by that support network, this doesn't change the fact a parent can be charged with manslaughter. Parents don't leave their children in cars because they don't care about legal repercussions."They have no idea they're leaving them behind," she says. "Fear of going to jail is not going to stop that from happening."Pavon, the friend of the family, says that he is now going to be there for a friend who he says always has his back."Whenever I'm in need, he's always been there. It just shows you the level of character that he has," he says. "I hate to see his family go through this. It's a tragic accident."
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