1150: Gender Justice

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 11:44

A t a South Bend council meeting last week, Tyree Bonds, the brother of Eric Logan, a black man shot and killed last week by a white police officer, stood up with a message for this Indiana city, whose mayor has emerged as an unexpected force in the 2020 Democratic race.

''Stop using [the shooting] for your own personal agenda,'' he said.

''Our family wants justice. We don't want yelling at the board, yelling at the government,'' he added, though he then turned to the council and told it: ''Do y'all's job '' that's all we want.''

The emotional outburst followed days of intense confrontations among black residents; the mayor, Pete Buttigieg; and the city's police leadership. Tensions peaked on Sunday when a town hall meeting devolved into near chaos as those in the audience shouted down Buttigieg and showered him with obscenities after he broke away from the campaign trail to return to the city he runs to deal with the crisis.

The shooting of Logan follows a long trend of black men killed by white police officers in the US, but the fact that it happened in South Bend has helped upend Buttigieg's unlikely emergence as a power player in the 2020 race.

So far the young gay military veteran has been mostly portrayed as a fresh voice in politics, often drawing huge crowds in key early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. His message has been simple: his successes in revitalizing the rust-belt city of South Bend can be replicated across the US.

But Logan's death has spotlighted another area of Buttigieg's record: his troubled relationships with the South Bend police and his city's large minority population.

While South Bend residents and community leaders have sought to show respect for Logan's family in the wake of the shooting, they also point out that their burning outrage runs deeper than one tragic incident. They say it's rooted in eight years of Buttigieg's economic policies that have often left people of color behind. Meanwhile, alleged instances of police brutality and subsequent coverups or inaction has sowed deep distrust.

''If you go over the last eight years, it's about all of this '' the lack of resources in the African American community, the alleged police brutality. All of these are symptoms of a larger issue of injustice,'' South Bend resident Tiana Batiste-Wadell said. ''So now you are hearing cries from people wanting something to change.''

The 16 June shooting occurred outside an apartment building after police responded to a call about someone breaking into cars. The white officer who shot Logan said Logan had come at him with a knife, though the officer hadn't turned on his body camera. Critics say Logan didn't match the suspect's description and questioned why police would shoot to kill someone with a knife. At the council meeting, the city announced an independent prosecutor would handle the investigation.

But even before the incident, Buttigieg's perceived difficulties winning over black voters presented a challenge. And his clumsy handling of the shooting won't improve his standing with the demographic.

But the events also suggest that South Bend may not be quite the picture of success and prosperity that Buttigieg paints when it comes to its minority residents. Instead, there's a sense that his policies are failing lower-income and minority residents, and South Bend is a reflection of the nation's larger problems.

''The injustices here are the injustices of the country,'' said Batiste-Wadell.

Blu Casey, founder of the Nu Black Power Movement of South Bend, praised Buttigieg for working to improve parks and helping launch youth programs. But he said the mayor ''drags his feet on important issues that happen to deal with minorities, though he has a good heart''.

Among the most pressing issues are those involving the police, which Casey labeled ''corrupt'' and charged have unfairly targeted black activists during Buttigieg's tenure.

The department's composition is one of the main points of contention. In a city that's 27% black and 15% Latino, 90% of South Bend's police officers are white. Last week, six new officers were sworn in and all were white.

Major incidents involving race and the police are nearly an annual occurrence in the city of about 100,000. Soon after he was elected in 2011, Buttigieg faced strong criticism for demoting the city's first black police chief, Darryl Boykins, after learning of a federal investigation into the department allegedly illegally recording officers' phone calls. The calls revealed white officers using racial slurs, some of which were directed at Boykins.

That same year, South Bend officers beat 17-year-old DeShawn Franklin and shot him with a stun gun, mistakenly believing the black teen was a domestic battery suspect. While a federal jury found the department had violated Franklin's constitutional rights, it only awarded the teen $18 '' a case brought up repeatedly last week.

Buttigieg's campaign did not respond to the Guardian's requests for comment. But during last Sunday's town hall, he said he accepted responsibility for some failures.

''As mayor of this city, I want to acknowledge those last two lines of effort '' efforts to recruit more minority officers to the police department and efforts to introduce body cameras '' have not succeeded,'' Buttigieg said.

A new wrinkle in the situation appeared Monday when the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 36 issued a statement in which it criticized Buttigieg for using the shooting ''solely for his political gain and not the health of the city he serves''. It condemned him for saying that police work could be affected by racism.

Outside the Monday common council meeting, Jesse Davis, a white man who described himself as a local activist, criticized Buttigieg for what he characterized as ''pandering'' to the black vote.

''It appears to a lot of people that he is using this for his political gain, trying to get the black vote. And I think that's horrible,'' Davis said.

He added that questions remained about why the officer killed Logan, but he was not confident that Buttigieg's administration would provide the public with clear answers. Like black activists, Davis charged that the administration was often secretive about controversial issues.

''If it's something that they don't want going public, then they hide it,'' he said.

>>But Casey said there was little that would satisfy some of South Bend's black residents because the department could not legally immediately fire and charge officers, which is what many want.

He offered some advice to Buttigieg: ''Do what you got to do to make it right, but you got to go through the fire, because you set the fire ablaze.''

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 11:57

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Tue, 25 Jun 2019 14:12

Image copyright Reuters Image caption The disruption originated from the network of national carrier KPN The Netherlands has been hit by its largest telecommunications outage in years, with the 112 emergency number knocked out across the country.

The disruption, which lasted four hours, originated from national carrier KPN, and affected other providers linked to its network.

KPN said the cause was still unclear but it did not appear to be a hack.

"We have no reason to think it was (a hack) and we monitor our systems 24/7," a company spokeswoman told Reuters.

Landlines and mobile phones linked to the KPN network were also affected, but it was the failure of the national emergency line that was most worrying. Emergency services responded by putting out alternative contact information on social media.

Speaking to public broadcaster NPO, KPN board director Joost Farwerck said the network had been backed up to prevent any malfunction, but the backups had not worked.

KPN has been told to explain to Justice and Security Minister Ferdinand Grapperhuis on Tuesday what went wrong. It has also emerged that the company's chief executive, Maximo Ibarra, is to step down, although KPN has stressed it has nothing to do with the outage.

How bad was the outage?During the disruption, additional police were sent on to streets around the country.

Authorities also advised people to go directly to hospitals or to police or fire stations for any emergencies.

Firefighters also announced they were going out into key areas, with one fire brigade appearing at a key harbour in a Rotterdam suburb in case people needed help.

It took more than an hour for authorities to find an alternative emergency number, and even then the NL-Alert service designed to get in touch with people via their mobile phones during an emergency had problems.

The popular Telegraaf newspaper revealed that the justice and security ministry had used NL-Alert to send out the paper's WhatsApp tips-line as an alternative to 112 by mistake.

An alert was later sent out with the correct number, images of which have been posted by social media users.

Mr Grapperhaus told De Telegraaf that the ministry was investigating how the wrong number was given out.

"Was it an office prank or was there really no plan?" Dutch Green politician Kathalijne Buitenweg tweeted.

What has reaction been?Political reaction to the failure of the 112 emergency number has been one of shock.

"This just shouldn't be possible," complained centre-right MP Chris van Dam, who said it was simply incomprehensible that the 112 line was "so vulnerable".

Commentators pointed out that national security co-ordinator NCTV had warned only this month that "dependence on digitised processes and systems has become so big" that it could disrupt society and it called for "fallback options and analogue alternatives".

Many others were bemused by the failure. One social media user noted drily that politicians had been trying for years to get more police on the streets, and KPN had managed to do it in a couple of minutes.

KPN is not the only telecoms provider to suffer network problems recently. Earlier this month, Vodafone experienced a "disruption" to its mobile and fixed-line broadband services, affecting subscribers in the UK and several other countries.

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Tue, 25 Jun 2019 13:52

Updated Verizon sent a big chunk of the internet down a black hole this morning '' and caused outages at Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon, and others '' after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, USA.

For nearly three hours, web traffic that was supposed to go to some of the biggest names online was instead accidentally rerouted through a steel giant based in Pittsburgh.

It all started when new internet routes for more than 20,000 IP address prefixes '' roughly two per cent of the internet '' were wrongly announced by regional US ISP DQE Communications: this announcement informed the sprawling internet's backbone equipment to thread netizens' traffic through DQE and one of its clients, steel giant Allegheny Technologies, a redirection that was then, mindbogglingly, accepted and passed on to the world by Verizon, a trusted major authority on the internet's highways and byways. This happened because Allegheny is also a customer of Verizon: it too announced the route changes to Verizon, which disseminated them further.

And so, systems around the planet were automatically updated, and connections destined for Facebook, Cloudflare, and others, ended up going through DQE and Allegheny, which buckled under the strain, causing traffic to disappear into a black hole.

Diagram showing how network routes were erroneously announced to Verizon via DQE and Allegheny ... Click to enlarge. Source: Cloudflare

Internet engineers blamed a piece of automated networking software '' a BGP optimizer built by Noction '' that was used by DQE to improve its connectivity. And even though these kinds of misconfigurations happen every day, there is significant frustration and even disbelief that a US telco as large as Verizon would pass on this amount of incorrect routing information.

Routes across the internet change pretty much constantly, rapidly, and automatically 24 hours a day as the internet continuously reshapes itself as links open and close. A lot breaks and is repaired without any human intervention. However, a sudden large erroneous change like today's route change should have been caught by filters within Verizon and never accepted and disseminated.

"While it is easy to point at the alleged BGP optimizer as the root cause, I do think we now have observed a cascading catastrophic failure both in process and technologies," complained Job Snijders, an internet architect for NTT Communications, in a memo today on a network operators' mailing list.

That concern was reiterated in a conversation with the chief technology officer of one of the organizations most severely impacted by today's BGP screw-up: Cloudflare. CTO John Graham-Cumming told The Register a few hours ago that "at its worst, about 10 per cent of our traffic was being directed over to Verizon."

"A customer of Verizon in the US started announcing essentially that a very large amount of the internet belonged to them," Graham-Cumming told El Reg's Richard Speed, adding: "For reasons that are a bit hard to understand, Verizon decided to pass that on to the rest of the world."

He also scolded Verizon for not filtering the change out: "It happens a lot," he said of BGP leaks and misconfigurations, "but normally [a large ISP like Verizon] would filter it out if some small provider said they own the internet."

Time to fix this Although internet engineers have been dealing with these glitches and gremlins for years thanks to the global network's fundamental trust approach '' where you simply trust people not to provide the wrong information '' in recent years BGP leaks have gone from irritation to a critical flaw that techies feel they need to fix.

Criminals and government-level spies have realized the potential in such leaks for grabbing shed loads of internet traffic: troves of data that can then be used for a variety of questionable purposes, including surveillance, disruption, and financial theft.

AWS DNS network hijack turns MyEtherWallet into ThievesEtherWallet READ MORE And there are technical fixes '' as we explained the last time there was a big routing problem, which was, um, earlier this month.

One key industry group called Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) has four main recommendations: two technical and two cultural for fixing the problem.

The two technical approaches are filtering and anti-spoofing, which basically check announcements from other network operators to see if they are legitimate and remove any that aren't; and the cultural fixes are coordination and global validation '' which encourage operators to talk more to one another and work together to flag and remove any suspicious looking BGP changes.

Verizon is not a member of MANRS.

"The question for Verizon is: why did you not filter out the routes that were coming from this small network?" asked Cloudflare's Graham-Cumming.

And as it happens, we have asked Verizon exactly that questions, as well as whether it will join the MANRS group. We have also asked DQE Communications '' the original source of the problem '' what happened and why. We'll update this story if and when they get back. ®

Updated to add Verizon sent us the following baffling response to today's BGP cockup: "There was an intermittent disruption in internet service for some [Verizon] FiOS customers earlier this morning. Our engineers resolved the issue around 9am ET."

Er, we think there was "an intermittent disruption" for more than just "FiOS customers" today.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for DQE has been in touch to say:

Additional reporting by Richard Speed. Disclosure: The Register is a Cloudflare customer.

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 11:36

Late on Wednesday we reported that Boeing's woes had escalated dramatically, when the FAA announced that tests on grounded Boeing 737 MAX planes revealed a new, and unrelated safety risk in the computer system for the Boeing 737 Max that could push the plane in an uncontrolled nosedive the FAA announced; the discovery could lead to further lengthy delays before the aircraft is allowed return to service.

As CNN reported, in simulator tests, government pilots discovered that a microprocessor failure could push the nose of the plane toward the ground. While the original crashes remain under investigation, preliminary reports showed that "a new stabilization system pushed both planes into steep nosedives from which the pilots could not recover." The issue is known in aviation circles as runaway stabilizer trim.

''The FAA recently found a potential risk that Boeing must mitigate,'' the agency said in an emailed statement on Wednesday, without providing any specifics.

As we said last night, "the good news for Boeing is that despite the disastrous track record of flawed executive decisions and cut corners, its stocks has so far managed to recover every single time, if a little longer than "seconds." Even so, it remains well below the level it hit after its second plane went down, following the infamous MCAS failure."

Well, on Thursday morning the signs were ominous, and the market was clearly unhappy with the latest revelation, sending Boeing shares tumbling more than $20 in the premarket, before stabilizing in the mid-$350s.

And with regulators finally doing their job - one wonders why none of these discoveries were made years ago when the MAX was initially being rolled out - one wonders how long until an activist emerges and demands that Boeing spin off its commercial airline group from the core of the company, the part that makes weapons of death and destruction, and whose profitability is assured for decades to come.

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 15:12

Image The bodies of 'scar Alberto Mart­nez Ram­rez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, were found in the Rio Grande on Monday. Credit Credit Julia Le Duc/Associated Press MEXICO CITY '-- The father and daughter lie face down in the muddy water along the banks of the Rio Grande, her tiny head tucked inside his T-shirt, an arm draped over his neck.

The portrait of desperation was captured on Monday by the journalist Julia Le Duc, in the hours after 'scar Alberto Mart­nez Ram­rez died with his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, as they tried to cross from Mexico to the United States.

The image represents a poignant distillation of the perilous journey migrants face on their passage north to the United States, and the tragic consequences that often go unseen in the loud and caustic debate over border policy.

It recalled other powerful and sometimes disturbing photos that have galvanized public attention to the horrors of war and the acute suffering of individual refugees and migrants '-- personal stories that are often obscured by larger events.

Like the iconic photo of a bleeding Syrian child pulled from the rubble in Aleppo after an airstrike or the 1993 shot of a starving toddler and a nearby vulture in Sudan, the image of a single father and his young child washed up on the Rio Grande's shore had the potential to prick the public conscience.

As the photo ricocheted around social media on Tuesday, Democrats in the House were moving toward approval of an emergency $4.5 billion humanitarian aid bill to address the plight of migrants at the border.

[Our editors discuss why they decided to publish the image.]

Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas and the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus, grew visibly emotional as he discussed the photograph in Washington. He said he hoped that it would make a difference among lawmakers and the broader American public.

''It's very hard to see that photograph,'' Mr. Castro said. ''It's our version of the Syrian photograph '-- of the 3-year-old boy on the beach, dead. That's what it is.''

The young family from El Salvador '-- Mr. Mart­nez, 25, Valeria and her mother, Tania Vanessa valos '-- arrived last weekend in the border city of Matamoros, Mexico, hoping to apply for asylum in the United States.

But the international bridge was closed until Monday, officials told them, and as they walked along the banks of the river, the water appeared manageable.

The family set off together around mid-afternoon on Sunday. Mr. Mart­nez swam with Valeria on his back, tucked under his shirt. Ms. valos followed behind, on the back of a family friend, she told government officials.

Video A rising number of families, often with young children, are crossing the Rio Grande to enter the U.S. We spoke with migrants who are making this risky decision and surrendering to Border Patrol. Credit Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times But as Mr. Mart­nez approached the opposite bank, carrying Valeria, Ms. valos could see he was tiring in the rough water. She decided to swim back to the Mexican bank.

Back on the Mexico side, she turned and saw her husband and daughter, close to the American bank, sink into the river and get swept away.

On Monday, their bodies were recovered by Mexican authorities a few hundred yards from where they were swept downstream, fixed in the same haunting embrace.

''It is very unfortunate that this happens,'' President Andr(C)s Manuel L"pez Obrador of Mexico said at a news conference on Tuesday. But as more migrants were being turned away by the United States, he said, ''there are people who lose their lives in the desert or crossing the Rio Grande.''

Recent weeks have brought home the dangers along the border, though none quite as graphically as the death of Mr. Mart­nez and Valeria.

On Sunday, two babies, a child and woman were found dead in the Rio Grande Valley, overcome by the searing heat. A toddler from India was found dead in Arizona earlier this month.

And three children and an adult from Honduras perished when their raft overturned two months ago while crossing the Rio Grande.

Deterrence has been a favored strategy among American officials seeking to stem the tide of migration, even before President Trump took office.

In 2014, President Barack Obama pressed Mexico to do more after tens of thousands of unaccompanied children turned up along the southern border searching for loved ones in the United States.

Detentions in Mexico soared under the so-called Southern Border Plan.

But Mr. Trump, from the outset of his election campaign, has made a crackdown on illegal immigration a centerpiece of his presidency.

His administration has attempted to criminalize those entering the United States illegally, separated parents from their children and drastically slowed down the ability of migrants to apply for asylum in the United States.

More recently, his administration has imposed a plan to send thousands of asylum seekers back to Mexico to await their court proceedings.

Under sustained pressure from Mr. Trump, Mexico has been stepping up its own migration enforcement in recent months.

Image Authorities along the Rio Grande bank where the bodies of Mr. Mart­nez, a Salvadoran migrant, and his daughter were found after they tried to cross from Mexico. Credit Julia Le Duc/Associated Press This effort accelerated in the past two weeks as part of a deal that the L"pez Obrador administration struck with Washington to thwart potentially crippling tariffs.

As of Monday, the Mexican government had deployed more than 20,000 security forces to the southern and northern borders to try to impede the passage of undocumented migrants toward the United States, officials said.

But human rights experts, immigrants' advocates and security analysts warned that the mobilization could drive migrants to resort to more dangerous routes in their effort to reach the United States.

For all the hard-line policies, hundreds of thousands of migrants continue to embark on the dangerous journey to the United States from Central America and elsewhere.

But for every migrant who chooses to take the journey, whether on foot, packed into cargo trucks or on the top of trains, the fear of what lies behind outweighs that which lies ahead.

Some are fleeing gangs that cripple the region and kill wantonly. Others are seeking an economic lifeline.

Such was the case with Mr. Mart­nez and his wife, who left El Salvador in early April intent on starting fresh in the United States, according to Jorge Beltran, a reporter for El Diario de Hoy in El Salvador who interviewed some of the couple's relatives.

''They went for the American dream,'' Wendy Joanna Mart­nez de Romero, said from her home in El Salvador.

Mr. Mart­nez quit his job at Papa John's, where he had earned about $350 a month. By then, his wife had already left her job as a cashier at a Chinese restaurant to take care of their daughter.

The couple lived with Mr. Mart­nez's mother in the community of Altavista, a massive housing complex of tiny concrete houses east of San Salvador, according to Mr. Beltran.

Though Altavista is under the control of gangs, the couple was not fleeing from violence, Rosa Ram­rez, Mr. Mart­nez's mother, told him. Rather, the grind of surviving as a family on $10 a day had become unmanageable.

Indeed, members of the family issued a plea to the public on Tuesday, seeking money to help repatriate the bodies of Mr. Mart­nez and Valeria. The cost was expected to be about $8,000 '-- an unimaginable sum for the relatives to manage.

Hours later, the Salvadoran government agreed to cover the costs.

Paulina Villegas and Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting from Mexico City. Emily Cochrane contributed reporting from Washington. Mihir Zaveri, Jacey Fortin and Elisha Brown contributed reporting from New York.

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 11:09

Image Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California rejected the Senate's bill even before the vote was taken. Credit Credit Tom Brenner for The New York Times WASHINGTON '-- The Senate on Wednesday approved $4.6 billion in emergency humanitarian aid for the southwestern border, rejecting House legislation approved on Tuesday that sought to rein in President Trump's immigration crackdown by setting much stronger conditions for how the money could be spent.

The action set up a stalemate over the border spending, even as tragic images of the migrant crisis and reports of children and families in squalid and overcrowded detention centers fueled an urgent push to reach an agreement.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California rejected the Senate's bill even before the vote was taken, setting up a clash over immigration policy just days before Congress leaves Washington for a weeklong July 4 recess. Ms. Pelosi on Wednesday afternoon called Mr. Trump, who has threatened to veto the House bill, to discuss how to reconcile the dueling measures.

''They pass their bill; we respect that,'' she said. ''We passed our bill; we hope they would respect that. And there are some improvements that we think can be reconciled.''

In a 15-minute telephone call, Mr. Trump appeared to indicate to the speaker that he was willing to consider some changes to the Senate measure, according to a senior Democratic aide who described the conversation on the condition of anonymity.

Ms. Pelosi has found herself in a difficult spot: Many liberal lawmakers in her ranks agreed to support the House measure on Tuesday only because she added strict new conditions on the money. If those provisions are dropped in a compromise with the Senate and the White House, the resulting measure could pass with Republican votes, but it would badly divide her caucus, where many lawmakers fear the humanitarian aid package only enables Mr. Trump's harsh immigration agenda.

After huddling with lawmakers in her office, Ms. Pelosi said late Wednesday that House Democrats would move on Thursday to modify the Senate bill by adding some provisions that members on her liberal flank had insisted upon earlier this week as a condition of supporting the aid.

The revisions include language setting stricter health and safety standards for facilities, a requirement that migrant children be released from temporary shelters after three months, a provision allowing lawmakers to visit facilities without notice and an assurance that the funding cannot be reprogrammed elsewhere.

Image Tents outside the border station in Clint, Tex. Reports of children and families in squalid and overcrowded detention centers fueled an urgent push for Congress to reach an agreement. Credit Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times The overwhelming margin of the Senate vote, 84 to 8, underscored the contention by Senate Republicans that only their bill stood a chance of winning the president's signature. Six Democrats and two Republicans voted against it.

''The House has not made much progress toward actually making a law, just more resistance theater,'' Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said on the Senate floor Wednesday morning. ''The Senate has a better and more bipartisan way forward.''

''It's a productive compromise that would go a long way to begin to address the border crisis,'' Mr. McConnell added. ''No poison pills, just a clean bill.''

Mr. Trump voiced his displeasure with the House bill on Wednesday morning, saying on Fox Business Network that he was ''not happy with it because there is no money for protection.''

To make their point, Republican Senate leaders put the House's $4.5 billion bill to a test vote; it failed, 37 to 55, with three Democrats voting against the measure. Seven Democrats, all presidential candidates, were not present ahead of the first Democratic debate in Miami on Wednesday night.

But Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, suggested a few changes to the Senate bill could win support among House Democratic leaders in time for quick final passage.

The Senate legislation would allocate about $1.3 billion to improve facilities at the border and $2.9 billion for the care of migrant children. The measure prohibits the Department of Homeland Security from adding more beds at detention centers or migrant processing facilities, ostensibly to slow the immigration crackdown. The Senate would require the department to allow congressional visits to facilities housing unaccompanied children with two days' notice; the House bill would permit them with no notice at all.

House Democrats say the Senate measure does too little to ensure that conditions improve at detention facilities or at centers caring for children that are run by government contractors. The House bill includes language that would require Customs and Border Protection to establish plans and protocols to deliver medical care, improve nutrition and hygiene, and train personnel to ensure the health and safety of children and adults in custody.

It would mandate that the secretary of health and human services disclose which requirements were being temporarily waived to deal with a sudden influx of migrants. And the bill would limit the detention-center stay of any unaccompanied child to 90 days unless written notification was submitted to Congress attesting that no other facilities were available.

Image ''No poison pills, just a clean bill,'' Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said of the Senate bill. Credit Tom Brenner for The New York Times Democrats also attached requirements for translators at Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

[Here are the differences between the House and Senate bills.]

Administration officials have warned Congress that they will run out of funds to house and care for migrants at the end of the month. Accounts of horrific conditions facing unaccompanied migrant children, as well as a wrenching photo of a drowned father and daughter on the banks of the Rio Grande after trying to seek asylum, have fueled a sense of urgency surrounding passage of the emergency aid. But they have also stiffened the resolve of Democrats pushing for tougher oversight on the administration and its facilities.

''The problem we're having is that we keep giving money to an administration that doesn't use it for the purposes we gave it to, or they steal money from other things and say that they're going to use it for their priority,'' said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the co-chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus, who pressed for stricter standards before agreeing to support the House bill.

''It was very clear that some of the things we got shouldn't be revolutionary,'' Ms. Jayapal added. ''Should we have to say to an administration that you've got to get food and water to a child, or a medical exam, within 48 hours? That's what they're objecting to? I mean, let's just point out the absurdity of that.''

Republican senators remain adamant that the emergency aid, widely seen as a temporary response to a more complex immigration crisis, needs to be stripped of policy provisions.

''Our goal is to get a good bill, keep it clean as we can and try to have the president on board,'' said Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. ''If it's loaded up with a bunch of House amendments, he will not sign it.''

Mr. Shelby said that Vice President Mike Pence had been designated as a point person for the White House in the final negotiations.

Even as they promoted their bill, Ms. Pelosi and Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, acknowledged publicly and privately that the Senate bill was not necessarily a nonstarter in their chamber.

''The Senate has a good bill,'' Ms. Pelosi told her caucus during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, according to a senior Democratic aide who was not authorized to discuss the private meeting. ''Our bill is much better.''

Mr. Schumer noted in floor remarks that while the House version ''is a much better bill than the Senate version,'' the broad bipartisan support in a Senate committee vote last week indicates that ''there is room for compromise to get something done here.''

Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 11:37

What is the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)?The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) helps new populations maximize their potential in the United States by linking them to critical resources that assist them in becoming integrated members of American society.

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 11:24

Text: H.R.3401 '-- 116th Congress (2019-2020)All Information (Except Text)There is one version of the bill.

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Shown Here: Introduced in House (06/21/2019) [Congressional Bills 116th Congress][From the U.S. Government Publishing Office][H.R. 3401 Introduced in House (IH)]<DOC>116th CONGRESS  1st Session                                H. R. 3401Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending               September 30, 2019, and for other purposes._______________________________________________________________________                    IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES                             June 21, 2019  Mrs. Lowey introduced the following bill; which was referred to the  Committee on Appropriations, and in addition to the Committee on the  Budget, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in    each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the                 jurisdiction of the committee concerned_______________________________________________________________________                                 A BILL Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending               September 30, 2019, and for other purposes.    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,  That the following sums are appropriated, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes, namely:                                TITLE I                         DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE                         General Administration                executive office for immigration review    For an additional amount for ``Executive Office for Immigration Review'', $15,000,000 to be used only for services and activities provided by the Legal Orientation Program: Provided, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.                     United States Marshals Service                       federal prisoner detention    For an additional amount for ``Federal Prisoner Detention'', $155,000,000 to be used only for the necessary expenses related to United States prisoners in the custody of the United States Marshals Service as authorized by section 4013 of title 18, United States Code: Provided, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.                                TITLE II                    DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY              Security, Enforcement, and Border Protection                   U.S. Customs and Border Protection                         operations and support    For an additional amount for ``Operations and Support'' for necessary expenses to respond to the significant rise in aliens at the southwest border and related activities, $1,217,931,000, to remain available until September 30, 2020; of which $702,500,000 is for migrant processing facilities; of which $92,000,000 is for consumables; of which $19,950,000 is for medical assets and high risk support; of which $8,000,000 is for Federal Protective Service support; of which $35,000,000 is for transportation; of which $90,636,000 is for temporary duty and overtime costs; of which $19,845,000 is for reimbursements for temporary duty and overtime costs; and of which $50,000,000 is for mission support data systems and analysis: Provided, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.              procurement, construction, and improvements    For an additional amount for ``Procurement, Construction, and Improvements'' for migrant processing facilities, $85,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2023: Provided, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.                U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement                         operations and support    For an additional amount for ``Operations and Support'' for necessary expenses to respond to the significant rise in aliens at the southwest border and related activities, $128,238,000; of which $35,943,000 is for transportation of unaccompanied alien children; of which $11,981,000 is for detainee transportation for medical needs, court proceedings, or relocation to and from U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody; of which $5,114,000 is for reimbursements for overtime and temporary duty costs; of which $20,000,000 is for alternatives to detention; of which $45,000,000 is for detainee medical care; and of which $10,200,000 is for the Office of Professional Responsibility for background investigations and facility inspections: Provided, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.                  Federal Emergency Management Agency                           federal assistance    For an additional amount for ``Federal Assistance'', $60,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2020, for the emergency food and shelter program under Title III of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 11331 et seq.) for the purposes of providing assistance to aliens released from the custody of the Department of Homeland Security: Provided, That notwithstanding Sections 315 and 316(b) of such Act, funds made available under this section shall be disbursed by the Emergency Food and Shelter Program National Board not later than 30 days after the date on which such funds becomes available: Provided further, That the Emergency Food and Shelter Program National Board shall distribute such funds only to jurisdictions or local recipient organizations serving communities that have experienced a significant influx of such aliens: Provided further, That such funds may be used to reimburse such jurisdictions or local recipient organizations for costs incurred in providing services to such aliens on or after January 1, 2019: Provided further, That such amount is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.                     GENERAL PROVISIONS--THIS TITLE    Sec. 201.  Notwithstanding any other provision of law, funds made available under each heading in this title shall only be used for the purposes specifically described under that heading.    Sec. 202.  Division A of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019 (Public Law 116-6) is amended by adding after section 540 the following:    ``Sec. 541. (a) Section 831 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 391) shall be applied--            ``(1) in subsection (a), by substituting `September 30,         2019,' for `September 30, 2017,'; and            ``(2) in subsection (c)(1), by substituting `September 30,         2019,' for `September 30, 2017'.    ``(b) The Secretary of Homeland Security, under the authority of section 831 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 391(a)), may carry out prototype projects under section 2371b of title 10, United States Code, and the Secretary shall perform the functions of the Secretary of Defense as prescribed.    ``(c) The Secretary of Homeland Security under section 831 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 391(d)) may use the definition of nontraditional government contractor as defined in section 2371b(e) of title 10, United States Code.''.    Sec. 203. (a) The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security shall establish policies and distribute written personnel guidance, as appropriate, not later than 60 days after the date of enactment of this Act on the following:            (1) Providing private meeting space and video         teleconferencing access for individuals returned to Mexico         under the Migrant Protection Protocols to consult with legal         counsel, including prior to initial immigration court hearings.            (2) Efforts, in consultation with the Department of State,         to address the housing, transportation, and security needs of         such individuals.            (3) Efforts, in consultation with the Department of         Justice, to ensure that such individuals are briefed, in their         primary spoken language to the greatest extent possible, on         their legal rights and obligations prior to being returned to         Mexico.            (4) Efforts, in consultation with the Department of         Justice, to prioritize the immigration proceedings of such         individuals.            (5) The establishment of written policies defining         categories of vulnerable individuals who should not be so         returned.    (b) For purposes of this section, the term ``Migrant Protection Protocols'' means the actions taken by the Secretary to implement the memorandum dated January 25, 2019 entitled ``Policy Guidance for the Implementation of the Migrant Protection Protocols''.    (c) The amounts provided by this section are designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.    Sec. 204.  None of the funds provided in this Act under ``U.S. Customs and Border Protection--Operations and Support'' for facilities shall be available until U.S. Customs and Border Protection establishes policies (via directive, procedures, guidance, and/or memorandum) and training programs to ensure that such facilities adhere to the National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention, and Search, published in October of 2015: Provided, That not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, U.S. Customs and Border Protection shall provide a detailed report to the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate, and the House Judiciary Committee regarding the establishment and implementation of such policies and training programs.    Sec. 205.  No later than 30 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall provide a report on the number of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers assigned to Northern Border land ports of entry and temporarily assigned to the ongoing humanitarian crisis: Provided, That the report shall outline what resources and conditions would allow a return to northern border staffing levels that are no less than the number committed in the June 12, 2018 Department of Homeland Security Northern Border Strategy: Provided further, That the report shall include the number of officers temporarily assigned to the southwest border in response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis, the number of days the officers will be away from their northern border assignment, the northern border ports from which officers are being assigned to the southwest border, and efforts being made to limit the impact on operations at each northern border land port of entry where officers have been temporarily assigned to the southwest border.    Sec. 206.  None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act or division A of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019 (Public Law 116-6) for the Department of Homeland Security may be used to relocate to the National Targeting Center the vetting of Trusted Traveler Program applications and operations currently carried out at existing locations unless specifically authorized by a statute enacted after the date of enactment of this Act.    Sec. 207. (a) Of the additional amount provided under ``U.S. Customs and Border Protection--Operations and Support'', $200,000,000 is for a multi-agency, integrated, migrant processing center pilot program for family units and unaccompanied alien children, including the following:            (1) Ongoing assessment and treatment efforts for physical         or mental health conditions, including development of a support         plan and services for each member of a vulnerable population.            (2) Assessments of child protection and welfare needs.            (3) Food, shelter, hygiene services and supplies, clothing,         and activities appropriate for the non-penal, civil detention         of families.            (4) Personnel with appropriate training on caring for         families and vulnerable populations in a civil detention         environment.            (5) Free telephonic communication access, including support         for contacting family members.            (6) Direct access to legal orientation, legal         representation, and case management in private areas of the         center.            (7) Credible fear and reasonable fear interviews conducted         by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers in         private areas of the center.            (8) Granting of asylum directly by U.S. Citizenship and         Immigration Services for manifestly well-founded or clearly         meritorious cases.            (9) For family units not found removable prior to departure         from the center--                    (A) release on own recognizance or placement in                 alternatives to detention with case management; and                    (B) coordinated transport to a respite shelter or                 city of final destination.            (10) For family units found removable prior to departure         from the center, safe return planning support by an immigration         case manager, including a consular visit to assist with         reintegration.            (11) On-site operational support by non-governmental         organizations for the identification and protection of         vulnerable populations.    (b) The Secretary shall notify the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and the House of Representatives within 24 hours of any--            (1) unaccompanied child placed in the pilot program whose         time in Department of Homeland Security custody exceeds 72         hours; and            (2) family unit placed in the pilot program whose time in         such custody exceed exceeds 9 days.    (c) Prior to the obligation of the amount identified in subsection (a), but not later than 30 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall submit a plan for the implementation of the pilot program to the Committees on Appropriations of the Senate and the House of Representatives which shall include a definition of vulnerable populations.                               TITLE III                DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES                Administration for Children and Families                     refugee and entrant assistance                     (including transfer of funds)    For an additional amount for ``Refugee and Entrant Assistance'' $2,881,552,000, to be merged with and available for the same period as funds appropriated in division B of Public Law 115-245 and made available through fiscal year 2021 under this heading, and to be made available for any purpose funded under such heading in such law: Provided, That if any part of the reprogramming described in the notification submitted by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (the ``Secretary'') to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate on May 16, 2019, has been executed as of the date of the enactment of this Act, such amounts provided by this Act as are necessary shall be used to reverse such reprogramming: Provided further, That of the amounts provided under this heading, the amount allocated by the Secretary for costs of leases of property that include facilities to be used as hard-sided dormitories for which the Secretary intends to seek State licensure for the care of unaccompanied alien children, and that are executed under authorities transferred to the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) under section 462 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, shall remain available until expended: Provided further, That ORR shall notify the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate within 72 hours of conducting a formal assessment of a facility for possible lease or acquisition and within 7 days of any lease or acquisition of real property: Provided further, That not less than $866,000,000 of the amounts provided under this heading shall be used for the provision of care in licensed shelters and for expanding the supply of shelters for which State licensure will be sought, of which not less than $27,000,000 shall be available for the purposes of adding shelter beds in State-licensed facilities in response to funding opportunity HHS-2017-ACF-ORR-ZU-1132, and of which not less than $185,000,000 shall be available for expansion grants to add beds in State-licensed facilities and open new State-licensed facilities, and for contract costs to acquire, activate, and operate facilities that include small- and medium-scale hard-sided facilities for which the Secretary intends to seek State licensure in an effort to phase out the need for shelter beds in unlicensed facilities: Provided further, That not less than $100,000,000 of the amounts provided under this heading shall be used for post-release services, child advocates, and legal services: Provided further, That the amount made available for legal services in the preceding proviso shall be made available for the same purposes for which amounts were provided for such services in fiscal year 2017: Provided further, That not less than $8,000,000 of the amounts provided under this heading shall be used for the purposes of hiring additional Federal Field Specialists and for increasing case management and case coordination services, with the goal of more expeditiously placing unaccompanied alien children with sponsors and reducing the length of stay in ORR custody: Provided further, That not less than $1,000,000 of amounts provided under this heading shall be used for the purposes of hiring project officers and program monitor staff dedicated to pursuing strategic improvements to the Unaccompanied Alien Children program and for the development of a discharge rate improvement plan which shall be submitted to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate within 120 days of the date of enactment of this Act: Provided further, That of the amounts provided under this heading, $5,000,000 shall be transferred to ``Office of the Secretary--Office of Inspector General'' and shall remain available until expended for oversight of activities supported with funds appropriated under this heading: Provided further, That none of the funds made available under this heading may be transferred pursuant to the authority in section 205 of division B of Public Law 115-245: Provided further, That the amount provided under this heading is designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.                     GENERAL PROVISIONS--THIS TITLE    Sec. 301.  The Secretary of Health and Human Services (the ``Secretary'') shall prioritize use of community-based residential care (including long-term and transitional foster care and small group homes) and shelter care other than large-scale institutional shelter facilities to house unaccompanied alien children in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Secretary shall prioritize State-licensed, hard-sided dormitories.    Sec. 302.  Funds made available in this Act under the heading ``Department of Health and Human Services--Administration for Children and Families--Refugee and Entrant Assistance'' shall remain available for obligation only if the operational directives issued by the Office of Refugee Resettlement between December 1, 2018, and June 15, 2019, to accelerate the identification and approval of sponsors, remain in effect.    Sec. 303.  Funds made available in this Act under the heading ``Department of Health and Human Services--Administration for Children and Families--Refugee and Entrant Assistance'' shall be subject to the authorities and conditions of section 224 of division A of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019 (Public Law 116-6).    Sec. 304.  None of the funds made available in this Act under the heading ``Department of Health and Human Services--Administration for Children and Families--Refugee and Entrant Assistance'' may be obligated to a grantee or contractor to house unaccompanied alien children (as such term is defined in section 462(g)(2) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 279(g)(2))) in any facility that is not State-licensed for the care of unaccompanied alien children, except in the case that the Secretary of Health and Human Services (the ``Secretary'') determines that housing unaccompanied alien children in such a facility is necessary on a temporary basis due to an influx of such children or an emergency: Provided, That--            (1) the terms of the grant or contract for the operations         of any such facility that remains in operation for more than         six consecutive months shall require compliance with--                    (A) the same requirements as licensed placements,                 as listed in Exhibit 1 of the Flores Settlement                 Agreement, regardless of the status of the underlying                 settlement agreement;                    (B) staffing ratios of 1 on-duty Youth Care Worker                 for every 8 children or youth during waking hours, 1                 on-duty Youth Care Worker for every 16 children or                 youth during sleeping hours, and clinician ratios to                 children (including mental health providers) as                 required in grantee cooperative agreements; and                    (C) access provided to legal services;            (2) the Secretary may grant a 60-day waiver for a         contractor's or grantee's non-compliance with paragraph (1) if         the Secretary certifies and provides a report to Congress on         the contractor's or grantee's good-faith efforts and progress         towards compliance;            (3) not more than three consecutive waivers under paragraph         (2) may be granted to a contractor or grantee with respect to a         specific facility;            (4) ORR shall ensure full adherence to the monitoring         requirements set forth in section 5.5 of its Policies and         Procedures Guide as of June 15, 2019;            (5) for any such unlicensed facility in operation for more         than three consecutive months, ORR shall conduct a minimum of         one comprehensive monitoring visit during the first three         months of operation, with quarterly monitoring visits         thereafter; and            (6) not later than 60 days after the date of enactment of         this Act, ORR shall brief the Committees on Appropriations of         the House of Representatives and the Senate outlining the         requirements of ORR for influx facilities.    Sec. 305.  In addition to the existing Congressional notification requirements for formal site assessments of potential influx facilities, the Secretary shall notify the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate at least 15 days before operationalizing an unlicensed facility, and shall (1) specify whether the facility is hard-sided or soft-sided, and (2) provide analysis that indicates that, in the absence of the influx facility, the likely outcome is that unaccompanied alien children will remain in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security for longer than 72 hours or that unaccompanied alien children will be otherwise placed in danger. Within 60 days of bringing such a facility online, and monthly thereafter, the Secretary shall provide to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate a report detailing the total number of children in care at the facility, the average length of stay and average length of care of children at the facility, and, for any child that has been at the facility for more than 60 days, their length of stay and reason for delay in release.    Sec. 306. (a) The Secretary shall ensure that, when feasible, no unaccompanied alien child is at an unlicensed facility if the child is not expected to be placed with a sponsor within 30 days.    (b) The Secretary shall ensure that no unaccompanied alien child is at an unlicensed facility if the child--            (1) is under the age of 13;            (2) does not speak English or Spanish as his or her         preferred language;            (3) has known special needs, behavioral health issues, or         medical issues that would be better served at an alternative         facility;            (4) is a pregnant or parenting teen; or            (5) would have a diminution of legal services as a result         of the transfer to such an unlicensed facility.    (c) ORR shall notify a child's attorney of record in advance of any transfer, where applicable.    Sec. 307.  None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to prevent a United States Senator or Member of the House of Representatives from entering, for the purpose of conducting oversight, any facility in the United States used for the purpose of maintaining custody of, or otherwise housing, unaccompanied alien children (as defined in section 462(g)(2) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 279(g)(2))): Provided, That nothing in this section shall be construed to require such a Senator or Member to provide prior notice of the intent to enter such a facility for such purpose.    Sec. 308.  Not later than 14 days after the date of enactment of this Act, and monthly thereafter, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall submit to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate, and make publicly available online, a report with respect to children who were separated from their parents or legal guardians by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (regardless of whether or not such separation was pursuant to an option selected by the children, parents, or guardians), subsequently classified as unaccompanied alien children, and transferred to the care and custody of ORR during the previous month. Each report shall contain the following information:            (1) The number and ages of children so separated subsequent         to apprehension at or between ports of entry, to be reported by         sector where separation occurred.            (2) The documented cause of separation, as reported by DHS         when each child was referred.    Sec. 309.  Not later than 30 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall submit to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate a detailed spend plan of anticipated uses of funds made available in this account, including the following: a list of existing grants and contracts for both permanent and influx facilities, including their costs, capacity, and timelines; costs for expanding capacity through the use of community-based residential care placements (including long-term and transitional foster care and small group homes) through new or modified grants and contracts; current and planned efforts to expand small-scale shelters and available foster care placements, including collaboration with state child welfare providers; influx facilities being assessed for possible use; costs and services to be provided for legal services, child advocates, and post release services; program administration; and the average number of weekly referrals and discharge rate assumed in the spend plan: Provided, That such plan shall be updated to reflect changes and expenditures and submitted to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate every 60 days until all funds are expended or expire.    Sec. 310.  The Office of Refugee Resettlement shall ensure that its grantees are aware of current law regarding the use of information collected as part of the sponsor vetting process.    Sec. 311.  The Secretary is directed to report the death of any unaccompanied alien child in Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody or in the custody of any grantee on behalf of ORR within 24 hours, including relevant details regarding the circumstances of the fatality, to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate.    Sec. 312.  Notwithstanding any other provision of law, funds made available in this Act under the heading ``Department of Health and Human Services--Administration for Children and Families--Refugee and Entrant Assistance'' shall only be used for the purposes specifically described under that heading.                                TITLE IV                      GENERAL PROVISIONS--THIS ACT    Sec. 401. (a) Fiscal Year 2017.--Funds made available by the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2017 (division J of Public Law 115-31) that were initially obligated for assistance for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras may not be reprogrammed after the date of enactment of this Act for assistance for a country other than for which such funds were initially obligated: Provided, That if the Secretary of State suspends assistance for the central government of El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras pursuant to section 7045(a)(5) of such Act, not less than 75 percent of the funds for such central government shall be reprogrammed for assistance through nongovernmental organizations or local government entities in such country: Provided further, That the balance of such funds shall only be reprogrammed for assistance for countries in the Western Hemisphere.    (b) Fiscal Year 2018.--Section 7045(a) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2018 (division K of Public Law 115-141) is amended by striking paragraph (4)(D) and inserting in lieu of paragraph (1) the following paragraph:            ``(1) Funding.--Subject to the requirements of this         subsection, of the funds appropriated under titles III and IV         of this Act, not less than $615,000,000 shall be made available         for assistance for countries in Central America, of which not         less than $452,000,000 shall be for assistance for El Salvador,         Guatemala, and Honduras to implement the United States Strategy         for Engagement in Central America (the Strategy): Provided,         That such amounts shall be made available notwithstanding any         provision of law permitting deviations below such amounts:         Provided further, That if the Secretary of State cannot make         the certifications under paragraph (3), or makes a         determination under paragraph (4)(A) or (4)(C) that the central         government of El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras is not         meeting the requirements of this subsection, not less than 75         percent of the funds for such central government shall be         reprogrammed for assistance through nongovernmental         organizations or local government entities in such country:         Provided further, That the balance of such funds shall only be         reprogrammed for assistance for countries in the Western         Hemisphere.''.    (c) Fiscal Year 2019.--Section 7045(a) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2019 (division F of Public Law 116-6) is amended by striking paragraph (2)(C) and inserting at the end, between paragraph (4)(B) and subsection (b), the following new paragraph:            ``(5) Funding.--Subject to the requirements of this         subsection, of the funds appropriated under titles III and IV         of this Act, not less than $540,850,000 shall be made available         for assistance for countries in Central America, of which not         less than $452,000,000 shall be made available for assistance         for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to implement the         United States Strategy for Engagement in Central America:         Provided, That such amounts shall be made available         notwithstanding any provision of law permitting deviations         below such amounts: Provided further, That if the Secretary of         State cannot make the certification under paragraph (1), or         makes a determination under paragraph (2) that the central         government of El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras is not         meeting the requirements of this subsection, not less than 75         percent of the funds for such central government shall be         reprogrammed for assistance through nongovernmental         organizations or local government entities in such country:         Provided further, That the balance of such funds shall only be         reprogrammed for assistance for countries in the Western         Hemisphere.''.    Sec. 402.  Each amount appropriated or made available by this Act is in addition to amounts otherwise appropriated for the fiscal year involved.    Sec. 403.  No part of any appropriation contained in this Act shall remain available for obligation beyond the current fiscal year unless expressly so provided herein.    Sec. 404.  Unless otherwise provided for by this Act, the additional amounts appropriated by this Act to appropriations accounts shall be available under the authorities and conditions applicable to such appropriations accounts for fiscal year 2019.    Sec. 405.  Each amount designated in this Act by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 shall be available (or rescinded or transferred, if applicable) only if the President subsequently so designates all such amounts and transmits such designations to the Congress.    Sec. 406.  Any amount appropriated by this Act, designated by the Congress as being for an emergency requirement pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 and subsequently so designated by the President, and transferred pursuant to transfer authorities provided by this Act shall retain such designation.    This Act may be cited as the ``Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Humanitarian Assistance and Security at the Southern Border Act, 2019''.                                 <all>

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Archived Version

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 13:36

(Video screenshots)Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Mark Morgan confirmed Saturday that blame for the unexpected delay in the agency's planned immigration raids partially rests with the media.

''The media got a hold of some operational specifics, and they reported it,'' he said to Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro. ''It's egregious and it puts the lives of the officers and agents at risk. The men and women at ICE are true American heroes. The president recognized that. He postponed it to protect them.''

He issued the confirmation hours after President Donald Trump announced an unexpected two-week postponement of immigration raids that were originally slated to occur Sunday.

In a series of tweets posted Saturday afternoon, the president claimed that he'd delayed the raids ''[a]t the request of Democrats'':

At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!

'-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2019

While this is certainly true '-- Morgan confirmed it later in the interview Saturday '-- reports have emerged suggesting that this was a secondary, less important reason, and that the primary reason the raids were delayed was because somebody within ICE leaked details of them to the press.

And as usual, the press rushed to publish the details to the entire world '-- just like they did roughly a week earlier when they outed potentially classified information about the Pentagon's cyber operations against Russia. The president responded to that leak by screaming ''treason.''

While it remains unclear who exactly leaked information on ICE's raids, both former acting ICE Director Thomas Homan and five other anonymous Trump administration officials believe acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan may be responsible.

Dovetailing back to the discussion on FNC's ''Justice with Jeanine,'' the host, a staunch illegal immigration opponent, pressed Morgan about whether something will ever be done.

''The American people are fed up,'' she said. ''Every time we like hit the peddle, we pull back. The president, you know I absolutely support him totally '... Now he puts the pressure on Nancy Pelosi, says give us a couple weeks. Do you have any faith that something is going to happen in two weeks when nothing has happened since 1986?''

Morgan replied by confirming that, despite the delay, he still has ''the green light'' to remove anyone who's in the states in violation of federal law.

''I've got the green light to anyone that's here in violation of federal immigration law,'' he said. ''I have the authority and the support to go after them, apply consequences, and remove them.''

''When you say you have the green light, are you doing it anyway?'' Pirro replied.

On an individual level, yes, he replied.

''The men and women of ICE are doing this every day. We're going after individuals and removing them every day. So this was not anything new. This was just an overall operation designed to go after and apply consequences to every demographic that's here illegally, including families, something that political will hasn't been there before.''

''The political will of the American people is there,'' the judge retorted. ''But we worry about the political will in Washington.''

Listen to this portion of the discussion below:

Pirro continued by pointing out how Republican administrations have been promising to do something about illegal immigration for literally decades.

''I have been hearing about 11 million illegals in this country for years,'' she said. ''There have been a million who've come in since last October. There's got to be 20 million illegals in this country. Every day they keep coming in and they are working on our social services and everything else. So we've put a halt on this, but in the meantime we still pay for everybody.''

Morgan concurred and further argued that this lawlessness is exactly why ICE needs to start targeting family units and not just aliens with criminal records. Until it's made clear that illegal immigration will not be tolerated, period, nothing will change.

''We need to do interior enforcement against anybody who is here illegally, including families,'' he pointed out. ''If we do that, if we start removing people with final orders, the numbers will go down, this crisis will be positively impacted. We don't talk about it enough.''

''Congress should get together to fix this!'' he added in anger.

HERE'S WHAT YOU'RE MISSING '...

Sadly, the partially Democrat-led Congress has only exacerbated the crisis by refusing to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security and crying foul whenever ICE tries to deport someone.

What's happening as a result is that ICE is having to release illegal aliens into the interior. And not surprisingly, illegals are taking advantage of this to cheat the system.

''When you lead people to the interior, 90 percent don't come back to settle their asylum claim,'' Pirro noted. ''The claim of asylum was BS from the get-go. Is there any way you can just put an ankle bracelet on these people? Why are we just letting them into the interior?''

''We are forced to,'' Morgan conceded.

Forced to because of Congress's inaction, to be exact.

Listen to the rest of the discussion below:

So until Congress does its job, ICE will have no other option but to release illegals into the interior and then go chasing after them after these same illegals essentially give them the middle finger.

''I don't want to go to their house or work site, but they left us no alternative,'' Morgan said as the discussion concluded. ''They refused again and again to comply with our laws. They are forcing me to send men and women of ICE to go out and get them.''

HERE'S WHAT YOU'RE MISSING '...

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Archived Version

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 21:51

PORTLAND, Me. '-- Through the winter, the families streamed into Portland, bringing stories of violence and persecution in their home countries in central Africa. Portland's shelter for homeless families soon filled to capacity, so the city put mats on the floor of a Salvation Army gym for 80 more people.

Then that, too, wasn't enough. This month, 250 migrants from Africa arrived in this northeastern city of roughly 67,000 residents in the span of just a week, overflowing the overflow space and forcing Portland to hastily convert a basketball arena into an emergency shelter. Urgent calls went out for interpreters who could speak French, Portuguese and Lingala, a language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. City Council meetings were given over to grappling with how Portland would pay for all of this '-- and the possibility that still more migrants might be coming.

It is a bit of a mystery in Maine, one of the oldest and whitest states in the country, how Portland has become a focal point for a sudden surge of migrants, mostly from Angola and Congo, who are seeking asylum.

Maine has long wrestled with an aging work force, and some leaders view immigrants as a welcome answer to the state's struggles to lure younger people to live and work here. Still, the sheer numbers '-- and the suddenness of the latest arrivals '-- have opened up a debate about how much Portland should be doing to help immigrants and whether it should entice more of them to come.

''I love the fact that these folks are coming here, and they want a better life, and they've chosen Portland,'' Jon Jennings, the city manager, said. ''But at the same time, I've got to figure out how to pay to pave streets and fix sidewalks and all of the things that are uniquely responsible to a municipal government.''

There is friction over the issue, even inside City Hall.

''If we have discovered the magic wand that will bring young families to Portland to help us build the next generation, why would we want to stop that, especially when it costs us so little money?'' Ethan Strimling, Portland's mayor, said.

The migrants arriving in this city have undergone a grueling journey, traveling by air or sea to South America, and then north on foot and by bus to the southern border of the United States, where most of them were arrested by border officials and released with notices to appear in immigration court after they declared their intention to seek asylum.

Nearly 800 migrants from Africa have been apprehended on one stretch of the Texas border and released by authorities since the beginning of October; the surge surprised and puzzled immigration officials, who are more accustomed to seeing Central American families crossing the border. Hundreds of African migrants arrived just this month and were taken to San Antonio, where Catholic Charities provided bus tickets to Portland and other cities that the migrants named as their destinations.

Among Portland's residents and even some of the families arriving from Africa, it is uncertain how this place became such a draw.

Image More than 200 asylum seekers are now staying at the Expo, a municipally owned basketball arena in Portland. Credit Tristan Spinski for The New York Times Mr. Strimling, the mayor, has been an outspoken advocate for welcoming immigrants. In April, when President Trump wrote on Twitter that his administration was considering sending detained immigrants to so-called sanctuary cities, Mr. Strimling responded: ''If he wants to send more immigrants our way, bring them on.''

But Mr. Jennings, who runs the day-to-day operations of Portland, expressed concern about the costs of aiding everyone, and criticized the mayor for having essentially invited asylum seekers to come here.

Immigrants who are seeking asylum are not permitted to work until at least six months after they file their asylum applications, so Portland has scrambled to provide support. Helped by $400,000 in donations, the city has given emergency assistance to roughly 300 people in recent weeks.

''If you started to see double that or more, I'm not sure how we would be able to handle that,'' Mr. Jennings said. ''That's why I think we've got to be careful with the messaging and everything that we say publicly.''

Inside the Expo, the basketball arena now filled with 200 cots, families gave varying reasons for choosing Portland, a city that is 81 percent white but that already has a sizable community of immigrants from Africa, including from Congo and Angola. About 13 percent of the city's population is foreign born, according to census data, many of those residents from Somalia.

Gloire Kikweta, 24, who came from Congo with his wife and two children '-- the younger of whom was born in Brazil on their way here '-- said he had left his home because he was being pursued by law enforcement for participating in protests against the former president, Joseph Kabila. He said he did not have a plan of where to go in the United States, but when he was in San Antonio, African immigrants there advised him to go to Portland, telling him that it was an aging city that needed more people, and that it was safe.

Vincent Mbala, 32, who is also from Congo, and came with his wife and three children, said that he learned through internet research that Maine provided financial support for asylum seekers. Maine is unusual in providing general assistance, for up to two years, to immigrants who have valid visas or who have applied for asylum. In most states, asylum seekers rely on local nonprofit groups for aid until they can work, and in many cases struggle to afford housing and food.

Portland also has what local officials believe is the only municipal fund in the country that provides support to asylum seekers before they submit their applications. Called the Community Support Fund, the program was created in 2015 when the Republican former governor, Paul R. LePage, was trying to cut off asylum seekers from the state's general assistance program. Maine's new governor, Janet Mills, a Democrat, visited Portland's shelter in recent weeks and has pledged to help the city financially.

Around Portland, many residents have greeted the migrants enthusiastically. More than 1,200 people have volunteered to help at the Expo. Leaders in the city's African immigrant community have mobilized people to serve as interpreters and to cook meals for the migrants.

Complaints, too, have come. Some Portland residents said that the city needed to focus more on local needs. The views reflected strains caused by Portland's recent success in attracting another group '-- young professionals from other states '-- whose presence has driven up rents even as it has fueled the local economy.

This year, Mr. Jennings, the city manager, proposed that Portland phase out the municipal fund for asylum seekers. In a recent interview, he said he believed it was one reason migrants were coming here.

Image Some of the migrants have friends or relatives in Portland. Others said they had heard that the city was welcoming to immigrants. Credit Tristan Spinski for The New York Times The $200,000 fund was already overspent this year by April. The City Council is currently debating whether the fund should be available to anyone who arrives, no matter when, or if it should be limited, given the sudden surge of people.

The city has estimated that it would cost roughly $1.4 million to provide housing vouchers and other support to all the families currently staying at the Expo for a year.

Mr. Strimling, who recently announced he is seeking re-election as mayor, said he wanted to keep the fund open to anyone who needed it. He said that he doubted many migrants were coming to Portland because they had heard about the fund, but that, if they were, it was all the more reason to keep it going.

In East Bayside, a Portland neighborhood where some immigrants have settled in recent years, Roderic Morgan, 74, said the city had enough to deal with in taking care of the homeless population without extending help to asylum seekers. He also expressed concern that there were not enough jobs to go around.

In fact, many businesses in Maine say they struggle to find workers to fill jobs. The unemployment rate in Maine is 3.3 percent, and in the Portland metropolitan region, 2.6 percent. Both are lower than the national rate of 3.6 percent.

Asked how he thought immigrants had changed Portland, Mr. Morgan, a retired newspaper deliveryman, raised a different issue.

''It's not just the immigrants that have invaded Portland,'' he said. Well-off people from other places were moving to Portland and making the city unaffordable, he said.

In Parkside, not far from the Expo, Timothy Goldkin, 29, called it a ''beautiful thing'' to have more diversity in Maine. Mr. Goldkin, who has a housemate who is an asylum seeker, said he would rather have more immigrants in Portland than wealthy people migrating from other states and changing the city's landscape and culture.

''I'm much more worried about the people with lots of money who want to just completely make it their town, with zero regard to what it was,'' he said, ''than the folks who are fleeing persecution and in fear of their life and who are coming here to try to understand our culture and integrate into it, while still holding onto and bringing some of their own loveliness.''

For now, a major challenge for the city is to find permanent housing for the scores of families staying at the Expo and another shelter. Neighboring cities have agreed to help identify vacancies, and Mr. Jennings said that a lumber company in Jackman, three hours north of Portland, had reached out with an offer to house some of the families in Jackman if they were interested in working for the company.

''I've had people all over the state inquire about whether some of these folks could come to other parts of the state, because they need qualified workers,'' Mr. Jennings said. ''They need new people.''

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 11:36

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 10:14

This story is getting very little coverage in the legacy media for obvious reasons. Just like California, Oregon has gone full authoritarian in trying to force its fake science ''climate change'' agenda on everyone. Over the last few days, Oregon's Gov. Kate Brown has ordered the gunpoint rounding up of Republican lawmakers in order to force a vote on a climate change ''cap and trade'' scheme (HB 2020) that only enriches corrupt Democrat insiders.

As BigLeaguePolitics.com reports, the Oregon Three Percenters appear to be getting involved to protect the citizens of Oregon from the authoritarian tyranny of the corrupt Democrats:

The Oregon Three Percenters, who participated in the armed takeover of a wildlife refuge in 2016, was one of many groups to support the Republican legislators' defiance. Apparently this, along with support for the legislators by other right-wing groups, was unsettling to law enforcement. The State Capitol was closed Saturday ''due to a possible militia threat,'' according to a spokesman for Senate President Peter Courtney.

The real threat in Oregon, of course, is the tyrannical governor and her authoritarian Democrat jack-booted thugs (i.e. the Oregon State Police) who are now hunting down Republican lawmakers at gunpoint in order to shove their destructive law through the legislature. As The National Sentinel reports, ''Raising the cost of production and doing business (cause) will have predictable effects: Loss of jobs, loss of revenue, higher prices, higher energy costs. And for some in Oregon '-- farmers, truck drivers, loggers '-- the law would decimate their industries. And worse, there is no real consensus that human activity is causing the climate to change. In fact, the Left's predictions of doom and gloom are routinely debunked by reality. In particular, Republicans say that gas prices alone would rise 22 cents a gallon almost immediately, and much more over the long haul.''

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Does the Oregon citizens' militia have a duty to arrest Gov. Kate Brown?It all begs the question: If the radical left-wing governor of Oregon is willing to dispatch armed hunting squads to round up Republican lawmakers at gunpoint, don't the citizens of Oregon have the right (and possibly the duty) to arrest Gov. Kate Brown and charge her with abuse of power and making threats of violence against lawmakers? Dispatching armed police to round up your political opponents is surely a crime. Is it a crime that will be tolerated by the citizens of Oregon?

This question will likely be debated in the days ahead as things continue to heat up across the political landscape. Just today, Breitbart.com is now reporting that left-wing radicals at UT Austin are threatening to dox students who join conservative groups like Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT). As Breitbart reports, the organized threats are coming from a blog reportedly run by radical left-wing Antifa-class terrorists. The blog is called ''Austin Autonomedia.''

The blog goes on to actively encourage the harassment of conservative students, stating that it is ''extremely important to get organized early, while this [TPUSA] group is in its infancy.''

This is just one of many such hot spots across the country where deranged, lawless Leftists are increasingly resorting to terror-style tactics to enforce their demands for absolute obedience to their left-wing agenda that's rooted in hatred and bigotry.

The day is coming when left-wing radicals will be engaged across AmericaUnbounded by anything resembling morals, ethics or the rule of law, the radical Left in America today increasingly resembles a runaway terror train driven by deranged clowns who nave never been told ''No!'' in their entire lives. Since childhood, they've whined, manipulated and crybullied their way into everything, collecting ''participation trophies'' and perfecting the skills of victimhood while simultaneously bullying everyone around them. All the while, they've been indoctrinated with a dangerous cocktail of authoritarianism and Marxism, and with the censorship of all conservatives by the evil tech giants, radical Leftists now feel emboldened to enforce their Nazi-style obedience demands by threatening everyone who opposes them. This is exactly what's playing out at UT Austin and across nearly every liberal college campus in America.

I predict it's not far off now before the lunatic left-wing terrorists (Antifa and other groups) are met by hardened, determined patriots who are fed up with their country being overrun by pathetic libtard snowflake Marxists. After a single engagement, the left-wing terror pushers will very rapidly come to understand the meaning of the word, ''No!''

For many, it will be the first '-- and possibly the last '-- time they will have ever been disciplined by anyone. And it's a lesson that left-wing radicals desperately need to be taught. Apparently, their parents never had the backbone to set limits on anything, so they're going to have to be taught another way.

As it stands right now, America is just one trigger event away from all-out open warfare in the streets of places like Portland, Austin or Seattle. The tyranny, lawlessness and pure evil of the lunatic Left is so out of control that even once-skeptical Americans are now fully convinced that the radical Left must be stopped if we are to have anything resembling America still remaining in a few years.

The upcoming 2020 elections will likely be the final spark that ignites the real war. If Democrats win the election, it can only have been accomplished by vote rigging, coordinated censorship racketeering and massive voter fraud by illegals. Conservative Americans will simply not accept the fraud. On the other hand, if Trump wins re-election, Leftists will escalate their insanity to a whole new level of mind-boggling mass mental illness that makes The Joker from Batman look like a Boy Scout. Imagine an uprising of rainbow-painted transgender terrorist pedophiles wielding spiked baseball bats and pink dildos, demanding the mass executions of conservatives and Christians in the name of ''tolerance.'' That's no longer a bizarre fictional scenario, especially when we're already living in a society where Leftists self-identify as ''transgender queer clown nuns.''

Seriously, the left-wing media is now pushing ''transgender queer clown nuns'' as the new progressive American family. Here's a partial picture of what they look like:

As you ponder the depths of mass mental illness being pushed by trans-predators across America, ask yourself how this twisted, bizarre chapter of human history finally ends'... and how many innocent children end up mutilated and sexually assaulted in the name of ''progressivism'' before the trans-predators are finally stopped.

The good news about the trans-queer clown nuns is that they will never join with Antifa, since Antifa members refuse to show their faces. The clown nuns want to show their faces. After all, what good is all that clown makeup if they slap an Antifa scarf over it? (If you ever capture an Antifa terrorist, rip off their scarf and see if they're actually a secret trans-queer clown nun underneath!)

Seriously, s##t is crazier than you could have ever imagined. Watch this video and weep:

SOURCE: NATURAL NEWS

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 12:11

1 / 5

The heat has been particularly intense in northern Spain, with temperatures set to rise above 40 degrees Celcius at the weekend (AFP Photo/ANDER GILLENEA)

Paris (AFP) - Europeans braced Thursday for the expected peak of a sweltering heatwave that has sent temperatures soaring above 40 degrees Celsius, with schools in France closing and wildfires in Spain spinning out of control.

Governments warned citizens to take extra precautions, with the high temperatures also causing a build-up of pollution, as emergency calls to hospitals increased.

Exceptional for arriving so early in summer, the heatwave will on Thursday and Friday likely send thermometers above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in France, Spain and Greece.

A forest fire in Torre del Espanol in Spain's northeastern Catalonia region raged out of control, devouring land despite the efforts of hundreds of firefighters who worked through the night.

In the Italian city of Milan, a homeless man aged 72 was found dead at the main train station after falling ill due to the heatwave, the local authorities said.

- Ice cakes for animals -

Across Europe people frolicked in fountains to stay cool while at the Bordeaux-Pessac Zoo in southwestern France, keepers handed out fish or mango ice cakes to keep the animals cool.

At the Serengeti animal park in Hodenhagen near Hanover, northern Germany, keepers even applied sunscreen to some animals.

French Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said people had to be prepared for the peak of the heatwave and expressed irritation that some appeared not to be taking the advice on board.

"We see citizens who are quite irresponsible and continue to go jogging between midday and 2:00 pm," she told France 2 TV.

She complained also of seeing "parents who leave their children in the car to do some quick shopping or leave them without a hat in the open air."

Some four days into the heatwave, Buzyn said French authorities were seeing an increase in the number of calls to emergency services and that she was concerned there would be an influx of people going to hospital.

- All-time record? -

The average maximum temperature recorded Wednesday in France of 34.9 degrees Celsius was already a record for the month of June, said state weather forecaster Meteo France.

Even higher temperatures are expected on Friday, where areas in the south could see peaks of 42 to 44 degrees Celsius.

Meteo France said France's all-time record could be broken -- an August 12, 2003 reading of 44.1 degrees Celsius in Saint-Christol-les-Ales and Conqueyrac in the southern Gard region.

Saturday is expected to be the hottest day for the Paris region with temperatures between 38-40 degrees Celsius expected.

Temperatures are expected to fall next week but will still remain well above the norms for this time of the year.

French hotel group Accor said it would open up its air-conditioned lobbies to the elderly until Saturday to ensure their wellbeing.

There has been no coordinated shutdown of schools but some have closed in parts of France, while others advised parents to keep children at home.

Schools in Paris will stay open until the end of the week when the summer holidays will begin, city authorities said.

In the wider Paris region, authorities have shut some primary schools including in Essonne where around 59 educational institutions have closed.

- Increasing probability -

The increase in temperature has also led to a build-up of pollution in already clogged cities, in particular the gas ozone.

In Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Strasbourg, authorities have banned the most-polluting cars from the roads.

Scientists warn that global warming linked to human fossil fuel use could make such scorchers more frequent.

"Global temperatures are increasing due to climate change," said Len Shaffrey, professor of climate science at the University of Reading.

"The global rise in temperatures means the probability that an extreme heatwave will occur is also increasing."

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 03:03

A new software problem has been found in the troubled Boeing 737 Max that could push the plane's nose down automatically, and fixing the flaw is almost certain to further delay the plane's return to flying after two deadly crashes.

Boeing said Wednesday that the FAA "identified an additional requirement" for software changes that the aircraft manufacturer has been working on for eight months, since shortly after the first crash.

"Boeing agrees with the FAA's decision and request, and is working on the required software to address the FAA's request," Boeing said in a statement.

Government test pilots trying out Boeing's updated Max software in a flight simulator last week found a flaw that could result in the plane's nose pitching down, according to two people familiar with the matter. In both Max crashes, the plane's flight-control software pushed the nose down based on faulty readings from one sensor.

The people said fixing the issue might be accomplished through software changes or by replacing a microprocessor in the plane's flight-control system. One said the latest setback is likely to delay the plane's return to service by an extra one to three months. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss aspects of the review process that are not public.

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said it will lift its grounding of the plane only when it deems the jet safe '-- there is no set timeline.

"On the most recent issue, the FAA's process is designed to discover and highlight potential risks. The FAA recently found a potential risk that Boeing must mitigate," the agency said.

The Max began passenger flights in 2017 and is Boeing's best-selling plane, although fewer than 400 have been delivered to airlines. A Max flown by Indonesia's Lion Air crashed in October, and an Ethiopian Airlines Max crashed in March. In all, 346 people died. Days after the second crash, regulators around the world grounded the plane.

Boeing is scaling back the power of flight-control software called MCAS to push the nose down. It is also linking the software's nose-down command to two sensors on each plane instead of relying on just one in the original design.

It is still uncertain what kind of training pilots will get for flying the plane with the new software '-- either computer-based or in-flight simulators.

Meanwhile, some airlines that own Max jets have had to cancel large numbers of flights while the planes remain grounded.

On Wednesday, United Airlines pushed back the scheduled return of its 14 Max jets until September. Southwest Airlines and American Airlines had already made similar announcements '-- an acknowledgement that the plane won't return to flying as soon as the airlines had hoped.

'--'--'--

David Koenig can be reached at http://twitter.com/airlinewriter

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Source: FCW: The business of federal technology

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 01:51

Social Media

By Derek B. JohnsonJun 24, 2019Two senators have introduced legislation that would require social media companies to calculate the value of the data they collect and provide clear options for users not to share it.

The Designing Accounting Safeguards to Help Broaden Oversight and Regulations on Data (DASHBOARD) Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) would implement a range of new regulations on commercial data providers and services that have more than 100 million monthly users.

The bill would require big social media platforms to send regular updates to their users that outline the economic value of their data, the types of data collected from users and how the company and third parties are using the information. It would empower the Securities and Exchange Commission to develop a formal methodology for calculating such value.

It would also give users "the ability to delete all data, in the aggregate and for an individual field," that the commercial data operator possesses or maintains.

In a statement, Warner said the legislation would "allow consumers to understand the true value of the data they are providing to the platforms," increase market competition and provide antitrust regulators additional insight into potentially anti-competitive practices.

"For years, social media companies have told consumers that their products are free to the user. But that's not true -- you are paying with your data instead of your wallet," said Warner. "But the overall lack of transparency and disclosure in this market have made it impossible for users to know what they're giving up, who else their data is being shared with, or what it's worth to the platform."

One tech group was quick to criticize the bill. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech policy think tank, said that while certain provisions have merit -- such as empowering the SEC to develop a methodology to calculate the value of a user's personal data '' the premise underlying the bill "is wrong" because "consumers always come out ahead by sharing data in exchange for a free service."

The organization also claimed the provisions would create unique burdens on both the platforms and users that aren't placed on other industries.

"This bill would require companies to go through an expensive process of trying to assign a value to each user, an activity which almost certainly would irritate consumers even if required by the government," the group said in a statement. "In no other sector does the government require businesses to reveal which customers are most valuable to them."

About the Author

Derek B. Johnson is a senior staff writer at FCW, covering governmentwide IT policy, cybersecurity and a range of other federal technology issues.

Prior to joining FCW, Johnson was a freelance technology journalist. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, GoodCall News, Foreign Policy Journal, Washington Technology, Elevation DC, Connection Newspapers and The Maryland Gazette.

Johnson has a Bachelor's degree in journalism from Hofstra University and a Master's degree in public policy from George Mason University. He can be contacted at djohnson@fcw.com, or follow him on Twitter @derekdoestech.

Click here for previous articles by Johnson.

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Tue, 25 Jun 2019 11:04

I've spent the last 12 hours travelling back from Dublin to San Francisco, unaware of what was happening on the ground. When I touched down today, and I turned on my phone, I received the shock of my life. I had received an enormous collection of threatening calls, voicemails, text messages and emails, from people I'd never met.

Someone wrote ''Your ideology will be shredded to pieces, just moments before you got executed for treason'...you are living lended time, enjoy till then''. There were plenty more threats like this. I've never been so fearful.

So why did this happen?

In late May, I accepted an invitation to meet with a few people who claimed to be from ''2 Step Tech Solutions''. They said they wanted to chat to me about a mentoring program for young women of color in tech, an area I've long been passionate about. We went for dinner at a restaurant in the Mission, San Francisco.

Unfortunately, I now know that these people lied about their true identities, filmed me without my consent, selectively edited and spliced the video to distort my words and the actions of my employer, and published it widely online. I now know they belong to a group called ''Project Veritas'', which has done this to numerous other people working in the tech and other sectors.

Why did they do this to me? It seems they found that I had spoken publicly at Google I/O on Ethics, and they wanted someone who would give them juicy soundbites about tech's alleged bias against conservatives. Over the course of a two hour dinner, I guess they think I delivered.

Project Veritas has edited the video to make it seem that I am a powerful executive who was confirming that Google is working to alter the 2020 election. On both counts, this is absolute, unadulterated nonsense, of course. In a casual restaurant setting, I was explaining how Google's Trust and Safety team (a team I used to work on) is working to help prevent the types of online foreign interference that happened in 2016. Google has been very public about the work that our teams have done since 2016 on this, so it's hardly a revelation.

The video then goes on to stitch together a series of debunked conspiracy theories about our search results, and our other products. Google has repeatedly been clear that it works to be a trustworthy source of information, without regard to political viewpoint. In fact, Google has no notion of political ideology in its rankings. And everything I have seen backs this up. Our CEO has said ''We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda.'' He's somewhat more powerful and authoritative than me.

But despite what the video may have you believe, I'm not involved in any of these products, just like I'm not involved in any of the other topics Project Veritas baited me into discussing (whether it's antitrust, Congress, or the dozens of other topics that didn't appear in the video, on which I presumably didn't say anything that could be twisted to their advantage). I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done.

I don't expect this post will do anything to deter, or convince, the people who are sending me abusive messages. In fact, it will probably encourage them, give them oxygen and amplify their theories.

But maybe a few people will read it and realize that I'm not the cartoon cut-out villain that Project Veritas would have you believe.

Maybe someone will read it, be more skeptical about a dinner they're invited to, and avoid the same trap I fell into.

And maybe some people will take a pause and reflect on how toxic and menacing our online discourse has become, about how quick we are to believe the worst of each other, and think about the human cost of demonizing and doxxing people, the way that Project Veritas has done to me.

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Tue, 25 Jun 2019 14:15

BuzzFeed Chairman Ken Lerer is stepping down from his role after overseeing the viral internet publisher for over 10 years, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Why it matters: Under Lerer and CEO Jonah Peretti's leadership, BuzzFeed has grown to become one of the largest digital-native publications in the world. It's redefined online publishing as a business and has pioneered news coverage of internet culture and trends.

Details: Lerer informed the BuzzFeed board that he would officially step down last Thursday.

Lerer's departure is personal, sources said. He is stepping down to pursue other projects, as he feels the publication has reached a stage of maturity.The board has not yet decided if it will name a new chair. according to sources familiar with the matter. Between the lines: Lerer departs as BuzzFeed is undergoing major changes to sustain its growth.

In 2017, reports surfaced that BuzzFeed had delayed its rumored IPO plans after the company failed to hit revenue targets by 15-20%. It cut 100 staffers that year to refocus efforts around licensing content and away from native advertising. In 2018, BuzzFeed shut down its podcasting unit and underwent a restructuring of its business team to explore new types of revenue, like commerce and licensing. This happened as its advertising business became stymied by the same industry headwinds facing all digital publishers. In 2019, the company announced it would lay off roughly 15% of workers, or about 250 people, in an effort to get to profitability faster. BuzzFeed has been dogged by messy union fights ever since. Most recently, BuzzFeed News employees staged a nationwide walkout last Monday to lobby for union representation. The big picture: Lerer oversaw BuzzFeed as it broke new ground, often writing the rules for how digital publishing could work as a business and how it could challenge the conventional notion of what online reporting and content should look like.

BuzzFeed was one of the first online publishers to leverage social media distribution to grow a media brand, redefining what it meant to go "viral" online. It embraced online culture as a part of its aesthetic and vocabulary, popularizing concepts like "memes" and "gifs," while also normalizing the use of online short-hand, like "WTF" and "LOL" in reporting and public online conversation. As BuzzFeed matured, it was the first to experiment with new business models for digital publishers, like licensing online franchises for offline commerce deals through its food brand, "Tasty," and launching TV shows for digital channels, like its "AM2DM" morning show on Twitter. The company is now working toward its goal of becoming profitable. What's next: The former AOL/Time Warner exec-turned digital publishing pioneer will continue to invest in new digital publishing upstarts as a managing partner of his New York City-based venture capital firm, Lerer Hippeau Ventures.

BuzzFeed is the second board that Lerer has exited in order to focus more of his efforts on his venture fund. Lerer exited Viacom's board early last year. Note: Lerer Hippeau is an investor in Axios.

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 15:40

The National Security Agency collected records about U.S. calls and text messages that it wasn't authorized to obtain last year, in a second such incident, renewing privacy concerns surrounding the agency's maligned phone-surveillance program, according to government documents and people familiar with the matter.

The previously undisclosed error, which took place last October, occurred several months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of metadata records it had amassed since 2015 due to a separate overcollection episode. Metadata include the numbers and time stamps of a call or text message but not the contents of the conversation.

The American Civil Liberties Union obtained the documents, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit involving the surveillance program. They are heavily redacted internal NSA memos that discuss oversight of intelligence-collection activities.

''These documents only confirm that this surveillance program is beyond redemption and should be shut down for good,'' Patrick Toomey, an ACLU staff attorney, said in a statement. ''The NSA's collection of Americans' call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many, and evidence of the program's value all but nonexistent. There is no justification for leaving this surveillance power in the NSA's hands.''

It wasn't clear from the documents how many records the NSA improperly collected in October. The NSA's media relations chief, Greg Julian, declined to comment specifically on the episode, but referred to the previously acknowledged incident of overcollection, disclosed last summer, in which telecommunications firms supplied information the NSA hadn't been authorized to obtain.

''While NSA lawfully sought data pertaining to a foreign power engaged in international terrorism, the provider produced inaccurate data and data beyond which NSA sought,'' Mr. Julian said.

The documents obtained by the ACLU suggest a similar situation, where a telecommunications firm, whose name is redacted, furnished call-data records the NSA hadn't requested and weren't approved by orders of the secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The company told the NSA it began delivering those records on Oct. 3, 2018, until that Oct. 12, when the agency asked it investigate the ''anomaly.''

The ACLU said the documents also suggest an individual may have been targeted for surveillance as a result of the first overcollection episode, which led to the deletion of the program's entire database in June 2018. The documents reveal that violation involved ''targeting requests'' that were approved by the surveillance court.

The revelation of another compliance issue is the latest hurdle for the once-secret surveillance program that began under the George W. Bush administration following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. As initially designed, the program sought to collect the metadata of all domestic calls in the U.S. to hunt for links among potential associates of terrorism suspects.

Edward Snowden, a former intelligence contractor, leaked the existence of the program'--along with a trove of documents exposing other surveillance operations carried out by the NSA'--to journalists six years ago. The disclosures ignited an international uproar over the scope of the U.S.'s electronic-spying capabilities.

Following Mr. Snowden's 2013 disclosures, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in 2015, requiring the NSA to replace its bulk-metadata program with a pared-down system under which call records are retained by telephone companies. But that new system is now viewed by many within the intelligence community as more of a burden than a useful tool, in part due to the compliance issues. The Journal reported in April that the NSA has recommended shuttering the program due to logistical and legal burdens.

It wasn't clear if the October episode is a factor in the NSA's current thinking about the program's fate. A national-security adviser for the Republican congressional leadership said in a March podcast interview that the NSA hadn't used the program in the preceding six months, which would roughly align with the reported October collection violation.

Any final decision on whether to push for legislation to renew the surveillance tool would be made by the White House, which hasn't yet reached a policy decision. ''This is an interagency deliberative process that will be decided by the Administration,'' said Mr. Julian, the NSA spokesman.

The NSA report said the impact on civil liberties or privacy of the October overcollection incident was limited due to quick identification of the issue and ''purge processes,'' but it said a further review would be provided once the investigation was completed. The file, from February, listed the investigation into the matter as still active.

The documents are surfacing publicly as Congress is moving closer to debating portions of the Patriot Act that will lapse in December if lawmakers don't pass renewal legislation before then. Congressional committees with oversight of the NSA's surveillance operations were briefed on the October overcollection episode, according to people familiar with the matter.

Late Tuesday, the ACLU sent a letter to Reps. Jerrold Nadler of New York and Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Democrat and Republican lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee, saying the documents showed the surveillance program wasn't operating within the law and should be terminated.

The Judiciary Committee has begun considering legislation to deal with the expiring Patriot Act provisions, and it likely won't include a renewal of the phone-surveillance program, a committee aide said.

Congressional support for the program has been waning in both parties.

''Every new incident like this that becomes public is another reason this massive surveillance program needs to be permanently scrapped,'' Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), a longtime critic of the program, said. ''But it is unacceptable that basic information about the program is still being withheld from the public.''

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 11:28

This article was co-authored by Will Upton.

The Trump era is one where conservative politics are increasingly defined, not by abstract rights or principles, but by ''winning.'' Instead of lofty ideas, it's an era that's all about defining and attacking your enemies. The politicization of neutral institutions and state power, once considered taboo, is also increasingly seen as a valid means to achieve this end.

One early target of this realignment is the tech industry. Congressional Republicans, at one time seen as perhaps too reliably pro-business, are already starting to drop the pretense of free-market rhetoric to pursue policies that would make FDR blush. Worse for the tech industry, this type of messaging has garnered significant traction within the right-wing coalition and is increasingly popular with the Republican base. If tech doesn't change how it approaches the right soon, it's going to be in big trouble (see, e.g., Tucker Carlson's high praise for Sen. Elizabeth Warren's economic agenda).

One such policy that illustrates this point is Sen. Josh Hawley's (R-Mo.) recently proposed legislative changes to Sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act, one of the foundational laws of the modern Internet. This legislation, called the ''Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act,'' aims to address the problem of alleged anti-conservative bias perpetrated by large online platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter by making legal immunity for their users' content conditional on maintaining ''political neutrality.''

Under the proposed regime, large platforms would have to ''earn immunity'' by undergoing periodic audits and certification by the Federal Trade Commission. These audits, which would require a supermajority vote for approval, could force a broad range of social media platforms, apps, games, and other online services to disclose a trove of proprietary data to the government to get the legal protections they currently enjoy. And just like with Mexico, they would have to pay for it!

Understandably, the tech industry and associated pundit class were not fans of the bill, and responded with mockery and outrage. They deconstructed every provision in a barrage of official statements, blogs, and Twitter threads, characterizing it as an idiotic solution to a fake problem promoted by ignorant populists.

This approach '-- which brushes off anti-conservative bias as ''non-existent'' while appealing to conservatives' free market better angels '-- is not a sound strategy to win hearts and minds on the right in the Trump-era. It misses the strategic purpose of the bill, and fails to grasp how much the right-wing coalition has already shifted. They're also giving Sen. Hawley what he wants: lots and lots of attention.

As Sen. Hawley surely knows, a solid majority of Republican voters believe that social media platforms censor political viewpoints. San Francisco, California '-- around which many of the big tech platforms are based '-- is ranked by Pew as the most liberal big city in America. In 2016, only 9.4% of its voters supported Donald Trump for President. While evidence of systemic anti-conservative bias online is mostly anecdotal and often conspiratorial, it is not an unreasonable thing for conservatives to be worried about, given the companies' considerable power and history of getting involved in political causes. Additionally, there is evidence that their workplace cultures are not always tolerant of conservatives.

Significantly, Sen. Hawley's policy approach breaks with the traditional libertarian pro-business canons of the right. In place of adhering to the restraint suggested by traditional limited government principles, the emerging new right is not afraid to use the administrative state '-- in this case the FTC '-- as an instrument of political power. (If you've been following the internal debates within the right-wing coalition, this trend should be no great surprise.)

The ambiguity and poor legislative design of Sen. Hawley's Sec. 230 bill are plain to any policy expert, and it would undoubtedly have disastrous consequences for the Internet ecosystem if enacted. It is, however, unlikely to even pass out of a Senate committee. That's because it wasn't meant to. It's a political document, not a policy document (or what we call a ''messaging bill'' in DC).

The bill was designed as a rallying call for the new coalition on the right, opposing the old libertarian fusionism that has reigned since the Reagan era. This emergent coalition is made of up groups who don't believe the old consensus has delivered for them: social conservatives, economic nationalists, big tech skeptics, and '-- in some instances '-- conspiracy theorists. Its purpose is to shift the Overton Window on the right, and further bind together the Trump electoral coalition into a lasting political force with defined policy views. It also sets up an organized faction that's ready to support broader bipartisan efforts to erode Sec. 230 (get ready for opioids, cyber-bullying, violent extremism, etc.).

If tech companies and their allies want to meaningfully push back against this tide of conservatives turning against them, they need a new strategy. First, they need to recognize what Sen. Hawley's trying to do '-- rather than tilting at windmills. Second, they need to commit to more consistent and transparent practices (see, e.g., the Santa Clara Principles) that are less susceptible to outside pressure and misinterpretation. Third (and most importantly), they need to engage in a more robust dialogue with groups on the right they aren't comfortable talking to, particularly those who have expressed grievances with them. While libertarians and moderates are their natural allies, to quote Danny DeVito, ''the surest way to go broke [is to] keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market.''

In the post-Trump era, tech will need a broader coalition of conservative allies (it isn't going to magically reset to the George W. Bush-era GOP in 2020 or 2024). To get there, they'll need to do more than write a few checks and give Ivanka Trump an award. Rather, tech executives will need to spend serious time and energy doing relationship building with conservative leaders. While common ground may appear elusive '-- and engaging with them may offend Bay Area political sensibilities '-- starting to build stronger bridges now may be what's needed to hold back the growing tide of anti-tech populism.

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Tue, 25 Jun 2019 14:14

Image copyright Etika/YouTube Police investigating the disappearance of YouTuber Etika have found a body in New York City's East River.

The body has yet to be formally identified. Police say the investigation is continuing.

The gamer, 29, whose real name is Desmond Amofah, was reported missing six days ago. His belongings, including his Nintendo Switch, were found on Manhattan Bridge on Monday.

He had uploaded an eight-minute YouTube video in which he talked about suicide.

Etika is popular for playing and discussing Nintendo games on YouTube and the streaming platform Twitch.

His Twitch account has been deleted but other social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram, remain visible.

He has 321,000 followers on Twitter and 252,000 on Instagram.

Who is Etika?Etika joined YouTube in 2012.

He is best known for his reaction videos, where he responded to new releases and products, mainly from games giant Nintendo.

The 29-year-old has worried his followers with his behaviour on social media in the past, with the police called to his home following a suicide threat.

Uploaded at midnight on the evening of the 19 June (19:00 BST), his latest YouTube video, titled I'm sorry, features Etika walking the streets of New York.

In the film, he apologises for pushing people away and confirms he suffers from mental illness.

He also talks about social media, advising "caution" around using it too much.

"It can give you an image of what you want your life to be and get blown completely out of proportion," he says.

"It consumed me."

The original video was removed but copies have been uploaded by other YouTube users.

If you've been affected by a mental health issue, help and support is available.

Visit BBC Action Line for more information about support services.

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 00:10

EDITOR'S NOTE: Facebook is cracking down on Conservative content. Many of you have complained that you never see our content in your news feeds. There's only one way to fight back '-- and that's by subscribing to my FREE weekly newsletter. Click here.

We have a breaking news bombshell to share with you regarding the ongoing attempts by Big Tech to silence Conservatives.

Apple threatened to kick Parler off its App Store if the social media website did not ban content they deemed inappropriate.

Parler, an alternative to Twitter, has become extremely popular among conservatives. By the way, I have already made the jump to Parler and you can follow me by clicking here.

Parler founder John Matze told me on Starnes Country, that last week they received a notice on their account from Apple.

Matze said they were told they had to change their community guidelines so they reflected Apple's. They were also told to remove certain kinds of individuals.

Matze said Apple did not say which kinds of individuals should be banned. However, Parler currently hosts accounts by Laura Loomer and Alex Jones.

''They said if we don't change our community guidelines to match what they'd like '' they were going to remove us from the app store,'' he said. ''I was pretty upset by this.''

Matze said Parler flat-out refused to comply with Apple's demands and now they are unable to push updates to their app.

Later that evening Matze shared the contents of the conversation with a number of congressional lawmakers. Within 48 hours of that dinner meeting, the notice was removed from the account.

''I think it's political and I think it's bigoted,'' he told me. ''They don't want conservatives communicating freely on a platform with people they like.''

''Apple, Google, Facebook '-- all these companies don't want them to exist,'' he said. ''They want to use it to control politics,'' Matze said.

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 16:11

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 22:30

A link aggregator / reddit clone for the fediverse.

Lemmy Dev instance for testing purposes only

This is a very early beta version, and a lot of features are currently broken or in active development, such as federation.

FeaturesOpen source, AGPL License.Self hostable, easy to deploy.Comes with Docker, Kubernetes.Live-updating Comment threads.Full vote scores (+/-) like old reddit.Moderation abilities.Public Moderation Logs.Both site admins, and community moderators, who can appoint other moderators.Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments.Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.Clean, mobile-friendly interface.High performance.Server is written in rust.Front end is ~80kB gzipped.AboutLemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.

For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.

The overall goal is to create an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.

Each lemmy server can set its own moderation policy; appointing site-wide admins, and community moderators to keep out the trolls, and foster a healthy, non-toxic environment where all can feel comfortable contributing.

Why's it called Lemmy?Lead singer from motorhead.The old school video game.The Koopa from Super Mario.The furry rodents.Made with Rust, Actix, Inferno, Typescript and Diesel.

InstallDockerMake sure you have both docker and docker-compose(>=1.24.0) installed.

git clone https://github.com/dessalines/lemmycd lemmy/dockerdocker-compose up -dand goto http://localhost:8536

DevelopDocker Developmentgit clone https://github.com/dessalines/lemmycd lemmy./docker_update.sh # This pulls the newest version, builds and runs itand goto http://localhost:8536

KubernetesRequirementsLocal or remote Kubernetes cluster, i.e. minikubekubectlskaffoldProduction

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 12:16

The Indian government is reportedly planning to build its own WhatsApp-like chat platform to facilitate secure communications for government agencies, according to news outlet Economic Times.

The move is meant to reduce the country's reliance on US technology companies, and ensure that all communication and data transmitted over the service will be stored locally in the country.

This also includes email services like Gmail, which have become the de facto means for official communication.

''We need to make our communication insular,'' an unnnamed official was quoted as saying in the report. ''We should have email, messaging, all sorts of systems, at least for government communication, which doesn't depend on outside players.''

The official also said that the US' decision to add Chinese electronics giant Huawei on the entity list ''set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi.''

''Tomorrow, if the US finds us unreliable for some reason, all they need to do is ask their companies to slow down networks in India and everything here will come to a standstill. We are vulnerable and we must take steps to cover that,'' the official said.

India's decision to move away from popular apps is not the first time a country has restricted the usage of apps developed by foreign players.

France launched its own secure government-only chat app called Tchap earlier this April. The app '-- based on open-source messaging client Riot, and available for Android, iOS, and the web '-- encrypts private conversations end-to-end, screens all attachments using antivirus software, and stores all data generated by the platform in data centers located within the country.

With Facebook-owned WhatsApp becoming the most ubiquitous means of communication in India, the government has repeatedly sought backdoor access to the app to monitor the platform for misinformation and hate speech.

WhatsApp, however, hasn't agreed to its demands, saying it would undermine the privacy of its users.

Viewed in that light, it makes sense that India wants step up its efforts to localize data and step away from major digital platforms like Gmail and WhatsApp. But it remains to be seen if these efforts will come to fruition.

Read next: Dublin crime ring recruited 14-year-olds to hide drugs bought with Bitcoin

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 15:40

The National Security Agency collected records about U.S. calls and text messages that it wasn't authorized to obtain last year, in a second such incident, renewing privacy concerns surrounding the agency's maligned phone-surveillance program, according to government documents and people familiar with the matter.

The previously undisclosed error, which took place last October, occurred several months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of metadata records it had amassed since 2015 due to a separate overcollection episode. Metadata include the numbers and time stamps of a call or text message but not the contents of the conversation.

The American Civil Liberties Union obtained the documents, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit involving the surveillance program. They are heavily redacted internal NSA memos that discuss oversight of intelligence-collection activities.

''These documents only confirm that this surveillance program is beyond redemption and should be shut down for good,'' Patrick Toomey, an ACLU staff attorney, said in a statement. ''The NSA's collection of Americans' call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many, and evidence of the program's value all but nonexistent. There is no justification for leaving this surveillance power in the NSA's hands.''

It wasn't clear from the documents how many records the NSA improperly collected in October. The NSA's media relations chief, Greg Julian, declined to comment specifically on the episode, but referred to the previously acknowledged incident of overcollection, disclosed last summer, in which telecommunications firms supplied information the NSA hadn't been authorized to obtain.

''While NSA lawfully sought data pertaining to a foreign power engaged in international terrorism, the provider produced inaccurate data and data beyond which NSA sought,'' Mr. Julian said.

The documents obtained by the ACLU suggest a similar situation, where a telecommunications firm, whose name is redacted, furnished call-data records the NSA hadn't requested and weren't approved by orders of the secretive U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The company told the NSA it began delivering those records on Oct. 3, 2018, until that Oct. 12, when the agency asked it investigate the ''anomaly.''

The ACLU said the documents also suggest an individual may have been targeted for surveillance as a result of the first overcollection episode, which led to the deletion of the program's entire database in June 2018. The documents reveal that violation involved ''targeting requests'' that were approved by the surveillance court.

The revelation of another compliance issue is the latest hurdle for the once-secret surveillance program that began under the George W. Bush administration following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. As initially designed, the program sought to collect the metadata of all domestic calls in the U.S. to hunt for links among potential associates of terrorism suspects.

Edward Snowden, a former intelligence contractor, leaked the existence of the program'--along with a trove of documents exposing other surveillance operations carried out by the NSA'--to journalists six years ago. The disclosures ignited an international uproar over the scope of the U.S.'s electronic-spying capabilities.

Following Mr. Snowden's 2013 disclosures, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in 2015, requiring the NSA to replace its bulk-metadata program with a pared-down system under which call records are retained by telephone companies. But that new system is now viewed by many within the intelligence community as more of a burden than a useful tool, in part due to the compliance issues. The Journal reported in April that the NSA has recommended shuttering the program due to logistical and legal burdens.

It wasn't clear if the October episode is a factor in the NSA's current thinking about the program's fate. A national-security adviser for the Republican congressional leadership said in a March podcast interview that the NSA hadn't used the program in the preceding six months, which would roughly align with the reported October collection violation.

Any final decision on whether to push for legislation to renew the surveillance tool would be made by the White House, which hasn't yet reached a policy decision. ''This is an interagency deliberative process that will be decided by the Administration,'' said Mr. Julian, the NSA spokesman.

The NSA report said the impact on civil liberties or privacy of the October overcollection incident was limited due to quick identification of the issue and ''purge processes,'' but it said a further review would be provided once the investigation was completed. The file, from February, listed the investigation into the matter as still active.

The documents are surfacing publicly as Congress is moving closer to debating portions of the Patriot Act that will lapse in December if lawmakers don't pass renewal legislation before then. Congressional committees with oversight of the NSA's surveillance operations were briefed on the October overcollection episode, according to people familiar with the matter.

Late Tuesday, the ACLU sent a letter to Reps. Jerrold Nadler of New York and Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Democrat and Republican lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee, saying the documents showed the surveillance program wasn't operating within the law and should be terminated.

The Judiciary Committee has begun considering legislation to deal with the expiring Patriot Act provisions, and it likely won't include a renewal of the phone-surveillance program, a committee aide said.

Congressional support for the program has been waning in both parties.

''Every new incident like this that becomes public is another reason this massive surveillance program needs to be permanently scrapped,'' Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), a longtime critic of the program, said. ''But it is unacceptable that basic information about the program is still being withheld from the public.''

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 00:25

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States hopes to re-launch trade talks with China after President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Japan on Saturday but Washington will not accept any conditions on tariffs, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.

FILE PHOTO: China's President Xi Jinping, first lady Peng Liyuan, U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania attend a state dinner at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, November 9, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File Photo

The two sides could agree not to impose new tariffs as a goodwill gesture to get negotiations going, the official said, but it was unclear if that would happen.

The United States was not willing to come to the Xi meeting with concessions, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The remarks set up what could prove to be a tricky meeting between Trump and Xi, who will sit down together at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka, the first time they have done so since trade talks between the world's two largest economies broke down in May.

Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, who has led trade talks for Beijing, spoke on the phone with his counterparts, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday, according to China's Ministry of Commerce. The three men are helping to pave the way for talks between the leaders later this week.

Expectations for that meeting so far appear to be low, with the best-case scenario a resumption of official talks that could ease fears in financial markets that the already long trade dispute would continue indefinitely.

China said on Monday that both sides should make compromises in the trade talks and that a trade deal has to be beneficial for both countries.

Trump advisers have said no broad trade deal is expected to be made at the meeting but they hope to create a path forward for talks. Once negotiations resume, they could take months or even years to complete, the senior Trump administration official said.

Washington has imposed 25% tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods, ranging from semi-conductors to furniture, that are imported to the United States, as part of the trade war.

Trump has threatened to put tariffs on $325 billion more of goods, covering nearly all the remaining Chinese imports into the United States, including consumer products such as cellphones, computers and clothing.

A resumption of negotiations could put that threat on hold, at least for now. But neither side has shown a great appetite for changing positions, despite a willingness to meet.

''I think if they go with the tariffs, the trade talks are dead. Period,'' said one person familiar with the talks.

The United States has made clear it wants China to go back to the position it held in a draft trade agreement that was nearly completed before Beijing balked at some of its terms, particularly requirements to change its laws on some issues.

Beijing wants the United States to lift tariffs, while Washington wants China to change a series of practices including on intellectual property and requirements that U.S. companies share their technology with Chinese companies in order to do business there.

Taoran Notes, an influential account on Chinese messaging app WeChat published by China's Economic Daily, said in a post late on Tuesday that ''certain people'' in the United States did not understand China's determination to uphold its position, and had ''illusions'' about forcing China to submit.

''If the US side doesn't change its thinking, doesn't change its methods, then all that will happen on the China-U.S. trade issue is that an 'exchange of views and maintenance of communication' will persist, and there won't be more substantive progress,'' the author wrote.

PRESSURE BUILDING The president has spoken optimistically about the chances of a deal. The administration official said rounds of meetings between top trade officials from both countries likely would begin again after the G20 summit.

He noted that although the vice premier still led China's trade delegation, new names had been added to the list who could be hard-liners.

The official said Trump and Xi were unlikely to get into the fine details of the draft trade pact, although the case of Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co may come up during talks.

Pressure on Huawei, which the U.S. government has labeled a security threat, has increased in recent days.

About a dozen rural U.S. telecom carriers that depend on Huawei for network gear are in discussions with its biggest rivals, Ericsson and Nokia, to replace their Chinese equipment, sources familiar with the matter said.

And the U.S.-based research arm of Huawei - Futurewei Technologies Inc - has moved to separate its operations from its corporate parent since the U.S government in May put Huawei on a trade blacklist, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Trump has indicated a willingness to include the Huawei issue in a trade deal, despite the national security implications cited by his advisers about the company.

Meanwhile, U.S. parcel delivery firm FedEx Corp on Monday sued the U.S. government, saying it should not be held liable if it inadvertently shipped products that violated a Trump administration ban on exports to some Chinese companies.

FedEx reignited Chinese ire over its business practices when a package containing a Huawei phone sent to the United States was returned last week to its sender in Britain, in what FedEx said was an ''operational error.''

Reporting by Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Alexandra Alper, Jane Lanhee Lee, Tarmo Vikri, Andrew Galbraith, Ben Blanchard and Angela Moon; editing by Grant McCool and Michael Perry

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 12:09

The chancellor began shaking while standing next to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was delivering a speech. The shaking stopped and resumed several times.Concerns for German Chancellor Angela Merkel's health grow once more as she was filmed struggling to keep her composure and visibly shaking during an official ceremony for the second time this month.

The incident happened during the formal appointing of the new justice minister in Berlin's Bellevue Palace on Thursday morning. The chancellor began shaking while standing next to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was delivering a speech. The shaking stopped and resumed several times.

Merkel was visibly distraught and placed both hands on her chest, trying to control herself. Nevertheless, she continued with the ceremony, and later shook hands, smiled, and posed for photos with other officials.

At one point, the chancellor was offered a glass of water.

After the ceremony, Merkel's spokesperson said the chancellor ''is feeling well'' and will attend the G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan on June 28-29, as planned.

Angela Merkel was previously spotted shaking two weeks ago when she met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Her condition looked more severe that time, as the shaking seemed more violent. She told reporters then that she was just dehydrated and recovered after drinking several glasses of water.

Legal Expert Robert Barnes joins Alex Jones to talk about the failings of big tech fascism.

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Tue, 25 Jun 2019 20:46

(AP/Susan Walsh) Trump shot back after Iran lashed out at the White House for imposing heavy sanctions on its supreme leaderShira TarloJune 25, 2019 7:38PM (UTC)President Donald Trump threatened Iran with "obliteration" mere hours after Hassan Rouhani, the Gulf country's president, said the White House is "afflicted by mental retardation."

In a series of fiery tweets, Trump shot back at the Iranian leader after he lashed out at the White House in the wake of the administration's decision on Monday to levy fresh sanctions targeting Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his associates.

Rohani on Tuesday said the sanctions were "idiotic" and closed the doors on chances of a diplomatic solution. Trump, in response, argued that Iran's leaders don't "understand reality" or how to be "nice" and compassionate. He also criticized the country's leaders for spending "all of its money on terror."

"Iran's very ignorant and insulting statement, put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality," the president wrote. "Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force."

"In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration," Trump continued. "No more John Jerry & Obama!"

The president's national security adviser, John Bolton, spoke earlier Tuesday about U.S.-Iran relations at a summit in Jerusalem. Bolton reportedly claimed Trump is open to negotiations and "all that Iran needs to do is walk through that open door."

Later, Bolton reportedly said "all options remained on the table" if Iran exceeds the uranium enrichment threshold underlined in the 2015 atomic accord that Trump abandoned last year. He said it would be a "very serious mistake for Iran to ignore those limits." The longtime Iran hawk said Iran "should give up their pursuit of deliverable nuclear weapons."

Iran said it will soon exceed the 300 kilograms limit of low-enriched uranium by June 27, in violation of the agreement, the Associated Press reported.

The administration's decision to levy sanctions against the supreme leader came several days after Iran downed a U.S. surveillance drone. The two adversaries gave conflicting accounts over where the drone had been shot down, although both countries agreed that Iran had shot down the drone. Tehran maintained that the aircraft had entered its airspace, while U.S. Central Command denied that assertion, arguing that the aircraft fell in international waters.

Trump said Friday that the U.S. military "cocked and loaded" to retaliate against Iran, but he called off the operation at the last minute after learning of expected Iranian casualties.

The strike came amid escalating tensions between the two nations. American officials accused Iran last week for conducting attacks against two oil tankers in the the same area. Trump himself last week blamed Iran for the tanker attacks, telling Fox News, "It was them that did it."

Iran has denied the accusations. The country's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, responded to accusations from U.S. officials by tweeting that the Trump administration "immediately jumped to make allegations against Iran [without] a shred of factual or circumstantial evidence."

In an earlier tweet about the tanker attacks, Zarif pointed out that the attacks on the tankers, one of which is owned by a Japanese shipping company, occurred as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, which he described as "extensive and friendly talks."

"Suspicious doesn't begin to describe what likely transpired," he wrote.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan announced earlier this month that the U.S. would send 1,000 additional troops to the Middle East to address what he described as "air, naval and ground-based threats."

Shira Tarlo Contact Shira Tarlo at shira.tarlo@salon.com. Follow @shiratarlo.

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 10:55

Follow Matt on TwitterLooking to get a leg up on her fellow socialists in an effort to set herself apart from the competition, Elizabeth Warren has now thrown her support behind the idea of reparations '' for gay people.

With the first big Democrat debate rapidly approaching, the Massachusetts senator has been buoyed by rapidly improving poll numbers and with a first-night dream match up that spares her from having to duke it out with the heavyweights, is looking to capitalize and build momentum.

Warren has been a veritable fountain of crackpot ideas to promote her redistribution of wealth schemes and has now gone into full pander mode with her support of the forced confiscation of money from taxpayers to give to same-sex couples who were unable to benefit from the same tax breaks that heterosexual married couples received prior to gay marriage being legalized.

In a call to action, the woman who was only months ago left for politically dead after a DNA test fiasco disproved her claims of Native American heritage is demanding that Congress pass the Refund Equality Act and to do so immediately.

I'm glad to introduce the Refund Equality Act in the Senate. Our bill ensures legally-married, same-sex couples can claim the tax refunds they earned, but were denied before marriage equality was the law of the land. https://t.co/01rgfSiXUQ

'-- Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 20, 2019In a statement issued last week, Pocahontas called for an end to the ''discrimination'' and the immediate passage of her legislation.

''The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade''

''We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right '-- Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.''

You can read more from our friends at ILoveMyFreedom.org

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Source: BlackListed News

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 03:18

The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government before publication, to make sure ''national security officials'' have ''no concerns.''

By Ben NortonThe New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from ''national security officials'' before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don't want made public.

On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia's power grid. According to the article, ''the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,'' as part of a larger ''digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.''

In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article ''a virtual act of Treason.''

The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.

''Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,'' the Times communications team said. ''We described the article to the government before publication.''

''As our story notes, President Trump's own national security officials said there were no concerns,'' the Times added.

Accusing the press of treason is dangerous.We described the article to the government before publication. As our story notes, President Trump's own national security officials said there were no concerns. https://t.co/MU020hxwdc pic.twitter.com/4CIfcqKoEl

'-- NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) June 16, 2019

Indeed, the Times report on the escalating American cyber attacks against Russia is attributed to ''current and former [US] government officials.'' The scoop in fact came from these apparatchiks, not from a leak or the dogged investigation of an intrepid reporter.

'Real' journalists get approval from 'national security' officialsThe neoliberal self-declared ''Resistance'' jumped on Trump's reckless accusation of treason (the Democratic Coalition, which boasts, ''We help run #TheResistance,'' responded by calling Trump ''Putin's puppet''). The rest of the corporate media went wild.

But what was entirely overlooked was the most revealing thing in the New York Times' statement: The newspaper of record was essentially admitting that it has a symbiotic relationship with the US government.

In fact, some prominent American pundits have gone so far as to insist that this symbiotic relationship is precisely what makes someone a journalist.

In May, neoconservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen '-- a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush '-- declared that WikiLeaks publisher and political prisoner Julian Assange is ''not a journalist''; rather, he is a ''spy'' who ''deserves prison.'' (Thiessen also once called Assange ''the devil.'')

What was the Post columnist's rationale for revoking Assange's journalistic credentials?

Unlike ''reputable news organizations, Assange did not give the U.S. government an opportunity to review the classified information WikiLeaks was planning to release so they could raise national security objections,'' Thiessen wrote. ''So responsible journalists have nothing to fear.''

In other words, this former US government speechwriter turned corporate media pundit insists that collaborating with the government, and censoring your reporting to protect so-called ''national security,'' is definitionally what makes you a journalist.

This is the express ideology of the American commentariat.

Julian Assange is no hero. He is the devil. https://t.co/LCXdRlTLKG

'-- Marc Thiessen (@marcthiessen) October 24, 2016

NY Times editors 'quite willing to cooperate with the government'The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance Washington's interests.

But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.

In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.

1. #JamesRisen: "A top CIA official once told me that his rule of thumb for whether a covert operation should be approved was, ''How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?'' https://t.co/YIUtpTthe8

'-- stefania maurizi (@SMaurizi) May 8, 2018

Risen detailed how his editors had been ''quite willing to cooperate with the government.'' In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, ''How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?''

There is an ''informal arrangement'' between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials ''regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.''

''At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,'' the former New York Times reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.

''He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,'' Risen said. ''I agreed.''

Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. ''If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,'' he wrote. ''That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.''

This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. ''And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times,'' he said.

''After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more frequently,'' Risen continued. ''They did it so often that I became convinced the administration was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing.''

One year ago: Former New York Times national security reporter James Risen reveals how the paper repeatedly suppressed stories at the request of the Obama and Bush administrations https://t.co/pJ2BAPluqH

'-- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 3, 2019

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently ''clashed'' with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government's lies. But his stories ''stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration's claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.''

The Times' executive editor Howell Raines ''was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,'' Risen said.

In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.

Risen said Rice told him ''to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.''

''The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,'' Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the ''war on the press.''

CIA media infiltration and manufacturing consentIn their renowned study of US media, ''Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,'' Edward S. Herman and Chomsky articulated a ''propaganda model,'' showing how ''the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them,'' through ''the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution's policy.''

But in some cases, the relationship between US intelligence agencies and the corporate media is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one of employment.

In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international communist movement.

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled ''The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.''

Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had ''secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.''

Bernstein wrote:

''Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services'--from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go'‘betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without'‘portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring'‘do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full'‘time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading news organizations.''

Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald'‘Tribune.

However, he added, ''By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.''

These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government '-- or at least for the US national security state.

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The future of wireless technology holds the promise of total connectivity. But it will also be especially susceptible to cyberattacks and surveillance. A Huawei engineer checks on cabling during 5G equipment trials in London, in March. Cybersecurity experts have accused Huawei of being a conduit to Chinese intelligence.

Photograph by Simon Dawson / Bloomberg / GettyIn January, 2018, Robert Spalding, the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, was in his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, when he saw a breaking-news alert on the Axios Web site. ''Scoop,'' the headline read, ''Trump Team Considers Nationalizing 5G Network.'' At the time, Spalding, a brigadier general in the Air Force who previously served as a defense attach(C) in Beijing, had been in the military for nearly three decades. At the N.S.C., he was studying ways to insure that the next generation of Internet connectivity, what is commonly referred to as 5G, can be made secure from cyberattacks. ''I wasn't looking at this from a policy perspective,'' he said. ''It was about the physics, about what was possible.'' To Spalding's surprise, the Axios story was based on a leaked early draft of a report he'd been working on for the better part of a year.

Two words explain the difference between our current wireless networks and 5G: speed and latency. 5G'--if you believe the hype'--is expected to be up to a hundred times faster. (A two-hour movie could be downloaded in less than four seconds.) That speed will reduce, and possibly eliminate, the delay'--the latency'--between instructing a computer to perform a command and its execution. This, again, if you believe the hype, will lead to a whole new Internet of Things, where everything from toasters to dog collars to dialysis pumps to running shoes will be connected. Remote robotic surgery will be routine, the military will develop hypersonic weapons, and autonomous vehicles will cruise safely along smart highways. The claims are extravagant, and the stakes are high. One estimate projects that 5G will pump twelve trillion dollars into the global economy by 2035, and add twenty-two million new jobs in the United States alone. This 5G world, we are told, will usher in a fourth industrial revolution.

A totally connected world will also be especially susceptible to cyberattacks. Even before the introduction of 5G networks, hackers have breached the control center of a municipal dam system, stopped an Internet-connected car as it travelled down an interstate, and sabotaged home appliances. Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime. Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption. ''5G is not just for refrigerators,'' Spalding said. ''It's farm implements, it's airplanes, it's all kinds of different things that can actually kill people or that allow someone to reach into the network and direct those things to do what they want them to do. It's a completely different threat that we've never experienced before.''

Spalding's solution, he told me, was to build the 5G network from scratch, incorporating cyber defenses into its design. Because this would be a massive undertaking, he initially suggested that one option would be for the federal government to pay for it and, essentially, rent it out to the telecom companies. But he had scrapped that idea. A later draft, he said, proposed that the major telecom companies'--Verizon, A.T. & T., Sprint, and T-Mobile'--form a separate company to build the network together and share it. ''It was meant to be a nationwide network,'' Spalding told me, not a nationalized one. ''They could build this network and then sell bandwidth to their retail customers. That was one idea, but it was never that the government would own the network. It was always about, How do we get industry to actually secure the system?''

Even before Spalding began working on his report, the telecom companies were rolling out what they were calling their new 5G services in test markets around the country. In 2017, Verizon announced that it would be introducing 5G in eleven municipalities, including Dallas, Ann Arbor, Miami, and Denver. A.T. & T. was testing its service in a dozen cities. T-Mobile was concentrating on Spokane. For the most part, they were building their new services on top of existing infrastructure'--and inheriting its vulnerabilities. As the Clemson University professor Thomas Hazlett told me, ''This is just the transitional part. You have various experiments, you do trial in the market, and various deployments take place that lay a pathway to something that will be truly distinguishable from the old systems.''

In the meantime, the carriers jockeyed for position. A lawsuit brought by Sprint and T-Mobile, which was settled on Monday, claimed that A.T. & T.'s 5GE service, where ''E'' stands for ''evolution,'' was just 4G by another name. According to Spalding, when the carriers heard that the government was considering ''nationalizing'' the future of their industry, they quickly mobilized against it. ''As I've talked to people subsequently, they said they've never seen that industry unite so quickly,'' Spalding said. ''They have such support in government and on the Hill and in the bureaucracy, and they have such a huge lobbying contingent, that it was across the board and swift.'' The Axios story came out on a Sunday. The following day, Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, roundly rejected any idea of federalizing the Internet, saying that ''the market, not government, is best positioned to drive innovation and investment.'' By Wednesday, Spalding was out of a job. ''There was no 'Hey, thank you for your service,' '' Spalding told me. ''It was just 'Get out. Don't let the door hit your butt.' ''

Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronics and telecommunications equipment, is currently the global leader in 5G technology. Founded, in the eighties, by Ren Zhengfei, an engineer who began his career in the People's Liberation Army, Huawei has been accused by cybersecurity experts and politicians, most notably Donald Trump, of being a conduit to Chinese intelligence. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, the Republican senators Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, and John Cornyn, of Texas, characterized the company, which is funded with subsidies from the Chinese government, as a Trojan horse that could ''give China effective control of the digital commanding heights.'' They tell the story of the African Union, which installed Huawei servers in its headquarters, in Addis Ababa, only to discover that those servers had been sending sensitive data back to China every evening. Although Huawei vigorously denies that it is an agent of the Chinese government, the senators pointed out, the company is subject to a Chinese law that requires companies to co¶perate with the state intelligence apparatus. The Times of London reported that the C.I.A. has evidence that Huawei has taken money from the P.L.A., as well as from branches of the Chinese intelligence service. Australia, Japan, and New Zealand have joined with the United States in banning Huawei hardware from their networks.

So far, though, the Trump Administration's campaign to shut out Huawei is finding limited traction. The European Union is poised to reject American entreaties, with individual countries like Portugal and Germany expressing a willingness to use Huawei equipment. Canada is relying on Huawei for at least one 5G trial. Even A.T. & T., which is bound by the federal guidelines that will go into effect next year in the U.S., continues to use Huawei equipment in Mexico, where it is the third-largest wireless company. Huawei equipment is cheaper than its Western rivals and, in the estimation of researchers at the Defensive Innovation Board (DIB), which advises the Secretary of Defense on new technologies, in many cases, it is superior. By the start of this year, Huawei had cornered nearly thirty per cent of the global telecommunications-equipment market, and its revenue was thirty-nine-per-cent higher than the year before. According to the DIB, its continued growth ''will allow China to promote its preferred standards and specifications for 5G networks and will shape the global 5G product market going forward.''

There are very good reasons to keep a company that appears to be beholden to a government with a documented history of industrial cyber espionage, international data theft, and domestic spying out of global digital networks. But banning Huawei hardware will not secure those networks. Even in the absence of Huawei equipment, systems still may rely on software developed in China, and software can be reprogrammed remotely by malicious actors. And every device connected to the fifth-generation Internet will likely remain susceptible to hacking. According to James Baker, the former F.B.I. general counsel who runs the national-security program at the R Street Institute, ''There's a concern that those devices that are connected to the 5G network are not going to be very secure from a cyber perspective. That presents a huge vulnerability for the system, because those devices can be turned into bots, for example, and you can have a massive botnet that can be used to attack different parts of the network.''

This past January, Tom Wheeler, who was the F.C.C. chairman during the Obama Administration, published an Op-Ed in the New York Times titled ''If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn't It Secure?'' The Trump Administration had walked away from security efforts begun during Wheeler's tenure at the F.C.C.; most notably, in recent negotiations over international standards, the U.S. eliminated a requirement that the technical specifications of 5G include cyber defense. ''For the first time in history,'' Wheeler wrote, ''cybersecurity was being required as a forethought in the design of a new network standard'--until the Trump F.C.C. repealed it.'' The agency also rejected the notion that companies building and running American digital networks were responsible for overseeing their security. This might have been expected, but the current F.C.C. does not consider cybersecurity to be a part of its domain, either. ''I certainly did when we were in office,'' Wheeler told me. ''But the Republicans who were on the commission at that point in time, and are still there, one being the chairman, opposed those activities as being overly regulatory.''

The Trump Administration, keen to win what it has characterized as ''the race to 5G,'' may be more interested in attempting to put a brake on Huawei's'--and, by extension, China's'--progress. In January, the company's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, a daughter of the Huawei founder, was indicted on thirteen counts in the U.S., including breaking sanctions against Iran, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Meng is currently under arrest in Canada and fighting extradition. Ajit Pai, the F.C.C. chairman, recently announced that the commission will block another Chinese company, China Mobile, from operating in the U.S., again citing security concerns. ''If we didn't have these other trade issues with China, it would be easier to just accept the [Administration's] security statements as truth,'' Scott Wallsten, an economist and the president of the Technology Policy Institute, told me. ''But when it gets mixed up with all these other trade issues, it makes it a little more suspect.''

In October, Trump signed a memorandum on ''Developing a Sustainable Spectrum Strategy for America's Future.'' A few weeks later, the F.C.C. auctioned off new swaths of the electromagnetic radio spectrum. (There was another auction last month, with more scheduled for later this year.) Opening up new spectrum is crucial to achieving the super-fast speeds promised by 5G. Most American carriers are planning to migrate their services to a higher part of the spectrum, where the bands are big and broad and allow for colossal rivers of data to flow through them. (Some carriers are also working with lower-spectrum frequencies, where the speeds will not be as fast but likely more reliable.) Until recently, these high-frequency bands, which are called millimetre waves, were not available for Internet transmission, but advances in antenna technology have made it possible, at least in theory. In practice, millimetre waves are finicky: they can only travel short distances'--about a thousand feet'--and are impeded by walls, foliage, human bodies, and, apparently, rain.

To accommodate these limitations, 5G cellular relays will have to be installed inside buildings and on every city block, at least. Cell relays mounted on thirteen million utility poles, for example, will deliver 5G speeds to just over half of the American population, and cost around four hundred billion dollars to install. Rural communities will be out of luck'--too many trees, too few people'--despite the F.C.C.'s recently announced Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. According to Blair Levin, a communications analyst and former F.C.C. chief of staff in the Clinton Administration, the fund ''has nothing to do with 5G.'' Rather, it will subsidize companies to lay fibre-optic cable that, minimally, will provide speeds forty times slower than what 5G promises.

Deploying millions of wireless relays so close to one another and, therefore, to our bodies has elicited its own concerns. Two years ago, a hundred and eighty scientists and doctors from thirty-six countries appealed to the European Union for a moratorium on 5G adoption until the effects of the expected increase in low-level radiation were studied. In February, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, took both the F.C.C. and F.D.A. to task for pushing ahead with 5G without assessing its health risks. ''We're kind of flying blind here,'' he concluded. A system built on millions of cell relays, antennas, and sensors also offers previously unthinkable surveillance potential. Telecom companies already sell location data to marketers, and law enforcement has used similar data to track protesters. 5G will catalogue exactly where someone has come from, where they are going, and what they are doing. ''To give one made-up example,'' Steve Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University, told the Wall Street Journal, ''might a pollution sensor detect cigarette smoke or vaping, while a Bluetooth receiver picks up the identities of nearby phones? Insurance companies might be interested.'' Paired with facial recognition and artificial intelligence, the data streams and location capabilities of 5G will make anonymity a historical artifact.

In China, which has installed three hundred and fifty thousand 5G relays'--about ten times more than the United States'--enhanced geolocation, coupled with an expansive network of surveillance cameras, each equipped with facial-recognition technology, has enabled authorities to track and subordinate the country's eleven million Uighur Muslims. According to the Times, ''the practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.''

The United States is not there yet, and may never be. But, as 5G begins to be rolled out, the pressure to capture and capitalize on new streams of data from individuals, businesses, and government will only grow more intense. Building safeguards into the system seems like an obvious and necessary goal. Spalding is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and also advises corporations and other agencies on the cybersecurity threats posed by China. But, he warns, the danger is not limited to a single nation-state. ''What is existential to democracy is allowing totalitarian regimes'--or any government'--full knowledge of everything you do at all times,'' he said. ''Because the tendency is always going to be to want to regulate how you think, how you act, what you do. The problem is that most people don't think very hard about what that world would look like.''

A previous version of this post misidentified one of the Chinese companies blocked from operating in the U.S.

VideoGovernment Surveillance and Cyber Security: A Panel Discussion

Evan Osnos, a <em>New Yorker</em> staff writer, moderates a panel on cyber-security and privacy. He is joined by Cindy Cohn, an attorney and the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; the journalist and Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, and Barton Gellman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 15:01

Image Messages tailored to black women, who are the most reliable Democratic voters in key Southern primaries, will be critical for presidential candidates in 2020. Credit Credit Audra Melton for The New York Times ATLANTA '-- One presidential candidate was a black female senator from California, speaking with subdued precision and being received like distant kin at what used to be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s church in Atlanta.

The other candidate was a white ex-congressman from Texas, barreling through South Carolina with an improvisational air of empathetic energy, and acknowledging that his whiteness had given him a leg up in life.

For Senator Kamala Harris and former Representative Beto O'Rourke, these recent swings through the South included an overlapping purpose: delivering messages that appeared tailored to black audiences in a region where black women, in particular, will likely be key decision makers in the Democratic primaries.

But the separate appearances by Ms. Harris and Mr. O'Rourke also underscored that no single formula exists for winning over black female voters, who received the two candidates with a mix of enthusiasm and caution.

There are others vying for these voters' attention. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was in the Mississippi Delta earlier this month talking about affordable housing. Senator Amy Klobuchar was in Florida, touting how she had been discussing 2020 strategy with Andrew Gillum, the African-American candidate who narrowly lost the Florida governor's race in November. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey has been a near-constant Southern presence the last couple of years, offering his endorsement and oratorical skills to a range of Democratic candidates.

This activity is a demonstration of the belief among 2020 contenders that the hearts and minds of black female voters are up for grabs in the Democratic primaries. Strong potential suitors are still weighing presidential bids, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Stacey Abrams, the popular black Democrat from Georgia. For now, Ms. Harris, 54, is one of two major black Democratic candidates '-- along with Mr. Booker '-- and many southern black and liberal voters are excited by the idea of the first black woman president.

While Ms. Harris has drawn enthusiastic audiences, she has also faced some criticism that as a former prosecutor and California attorney general, parts of her criminal justice record were insufficiently progressive. And Ms. Harris, whose father is from Jamaica and whose mother is from India, has been the target of offensive online memes about her race that have sparked questions among some voters.

On Sunday, as Ms. Harris prepared to introduce herself at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, a former New York state corrections officer named Lamarr Robinson brought up both matters. He criticized Ms. Harris's handling of a highly-publicized case of a black death-row inmate whose case was tainted by racism. And Mr. Robinson added, ''She's more east Indian than African-American.''

Image Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman, drove himself around South Carolina last weekend trying to make the case to black voters that he was a white male politician they could trust. Credit Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times Amid the swelling voices of church's choir and congregation, Ms. Harris emerged from the wings, joined by Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta's second black female mayor.

''Let me show you how far we've come,'' Ebenezer's pastor, the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, declared from the pulpit. ''Atlanta's got a mayor named Keisha.'' The crowd chuckled and cheered.

He added: ''We've got a presidential candidate named Kamala.''

Mr. Warnock argued that Ms. Harris's campaign was ''the realization of our ancestors' wildest dreams.'' He spoke of the black trailblazers who had made it possible, from Fannie Lou Hamer, the voting rights activist, to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and 1988.

Ms. Harris spoke briefly, telling the congregation that her parents had been civil rights activists in California. She lamented that babies were being ''ripped from their parents'' at the border and that black parents must still give ''the talk'' to their children about the racial bias in policing.

The reception at church was warm, but it was closer to ecstatic in the afternoon at the Morehouse College gym, where school officials estimated Ms. Harris drew a crowd of 3,000.

The audience was an energized, multicultural mix. Some, like Deliska Cooley, an elementary schoolteacher from Talladega County, Ala., and her two teenage daughters, had already decided that Ms. Harris was their candidate. Ms. Cooley said online memes questioning Ms. Harris's blackness were ludicrous.

''I'm a teacher. I have a rainbow in my classroom,'' she said.

Her daughter Skyla Cooley, 17, a high school senior, said that she thought Ms. Harris was unfairly taking heat for simply being a tough prosecutor.

''We don't want people not to be prosecuted '-- we want it to be fair across the board,'' she said.

A few seats away, Naquila Gilchrist-Jalajel, 46, a small-business owner, said she had not made up her mind on a candidate; with so many of them, she said, she still had homework to do.

Image Senator Kamala Harris attended a service and spoke at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church on Sunday. Credit Audra Melton for The New York Times But Ms. Gilchrest-Jalajel, who was worried about health care, education and the shrinking middle class, said that she would definitely get out and canvass once she had chosen a candidate. Ms. Abrams' campaign for governor, she said, had converted her from an observer to a participant.

Ms. Harris took the stage, strolling around comfortably as she spoke, more animated than she was in church. ''What's up Atlanta?'' she said.

She talked about the goal of repealing the Republican tax cut and replacing it with one for the middle class. She talked about addressing climate change more vigorously, and making what she called ''the largest federal investment in closing the teacher pay gap.''

Two days earlier, Mr. O'Rourke, 46, was driving himself around South Carolina in a minivan, trying to make the case to black voters that he was a white male politician they could trust.

His first stop Friday was in Rock Hill, S.C., where he toured the site of the 1961 sit-in staged by a group of African-American civil rights protesters known as the Friendship Nine.

In the afternoon, he was speaking to a modest-sized crowd at South Carolina State University, a historically black campus in Orangeburg, S.C. Standing outside of the student center, clutching a microphone and with sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up, Mr. O'Rourke railed against an economy ''that works too well for too few,'' and a ''prison industrial complex'' that disproportionately affects people of color.

When the mike was passed around for audience questions, the first comment came from a retired nurse, an African-American woman who was worried that the Democrats were presenting too many choices to voters, and thus diluting their power. She wanted to win in 2020.

''As a 63-year-old middle class female, I want to make a note to the Democrats,'' she said. ''It is getting to be too much. We are getting too divided. Divided we will fall. Together we will stand.''

Image ''I'm a white man who's had a privilege in my life; I'm not enduring any one of those things that I've just described,'' Mr. O'Rourke said during his South Carolina visit. ''But I've listened to those who have.'' Credit Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times Later, Mr. O'Rourke spoke of the historic injustices perpetrated against black people, from slavery to racist ''redlining'' that denied them home loans.

''I'm a white man who's had a privilege in my life; I'm not enduring any one of those things that I've just described,'' he said. ''But I've listened to those who have.''

Watching in the back of the crowd were Kadara and Kaywon Nelson, a black couple in their 30s, who had come out to learn more about Mr. O'Rourke. They were anti-Trump, but otherwise undecided. The biggest issue for Ms. Nelson, the campus safety compliance officer, was the cost of health care.

''And student loan debt,'' said Mr. Nelson, who works for a pharmaceutical company. ''I don't care about the wall.''

They both said a candidate who could address the country's issues was more important than finding one who represented their race. Mr. Nelson made reference to the political themes of the first Obama candidacy.

''I think we're past that,'' he said. ''The message has got to be a little stronger, because 'hope' hasn't gotten us much.''

After the presentation, Dr. Tamara J. Jackson, the vice president of student affairs at South Carolina State, said she liked what she heard '-- particularly Mr. O'Rourke's emphasis on gay rights and ensuring H.B.C.U. funding.

She was also impressed, she said, with Mr. Booker and Ms. Harris.

''I'd like to see a black female as president,'' she said, ''But I'm not sure America is ready.''

She added: ''I pray that I'm wrong about that.''

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 14:59

Yes, black men vote consistently for Democratic candidates, but there is no more unshakable bloc than black women. More than 90 percent voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and against failed Alabama Senate candidate and accused sexual predator Roy Moore last year.

In Tuesday's midterms, 94 percent of black women voters supported Beto O'Rourke, Cruz's opponent; in Georgia, 97 percent of African-American women backed Democrat Stacey Abrams. (Her opponent, Kemp, only resigned as secretary of state Thursday, after turning his contest against Abrams into a hot mess of voter suppression. She has refused to concede.)

Only in Florida's gubernatorial race did black men surpass black women in voting for the Democratic candidate '-- Andrew Gillum, the African-American mayor of Tallahassee.

Black women generally don't vote against their self-interests. We vote as if our lives depend on it, because they do.

Much has been made '-- and rightfully so '-- about white women supporting terrible white Republican men at the ballot box. Two years ago, 53 percent of white women shunned Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump, unswayed by the infamous ''Access Hollywood'' audiotape or his other boorish or racist behavior.

For the recent midterms, the numbers were again telling. Yes, Republicans lost support among suburban white women, which allowed Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives. Yet in key races in Georgia, Texas, and Florida, white women still overwhelmingly voted red.

As exit polls revealed demographic breakdowns and voting patterns, they again garnered a lot of social media chatter about white women as ''foot soldiers of the patriarchy.'' But the statistics that caught my eye concerned black men, and their double-digit support for Kemp and Cruz. Even in the Florida race between Gillum and Republican Ron DeSantis, 8 percent of black men voted for DeSantis. That's a low number, but still too high when one considers that DeSantis was endorsed by white supremacists and buoyed by racist robocalls.

How can so many black men still align with a party that, now more than ever, is unified by white identity politics?

During his campaign, O'Rourke spoke passionately in a black church about a young unarmed black man killed in his own apartment by a police officer in Texas. Cruz turned the O'Rourke speech into an attack ad.

One day before the election, Kemp tried to tie Abrams to the Black Panther Party, by tweeting a photo '-- plucked from Breitbart News '-- of armed members holding an Abrams sign. Kemp claimed this as proof that his opponent was ''TOO EXTREME'' for Georgia.

My brothers, don't believe the hype. This Republican Party is not the party of Lincoln. This is unabashedly the party of white supremacy, migrant family separations, racist fearmongering, and Brett Kavanaugh. Even one-time Trump-hugger Kanye West has finally stopped parading around in his red MAGA hat, at least for now.

Recently, The Economist pondered what it would take to make a black voter a likely Republican. For me, this was the most compelling statistic: The younger a black person is, the more likely to skew to the right. Although older white voters tend to be Republican, it's the reverse in black communities. That's because older African-Americans have vivid memories of Jim Crow and segregation.

Meanwhile, Trump is courting young black conservatives. In October, he welcomed hundreds to a leadership summit, where they chanted, ''Build that wall.'' Yes, those were black people joining a racist president to keep brown people out of America.

Look, I get that black people aren't a monolith, and shouldn't be expected to hold the same beliefs and political leanings. But we're in an era when Republicans have swapped their dog whistles for bullhorns. With hate crimes rising, you'll still be targeted for the color of your skin, not the content of your politics.

You are supporting a man who places party (and, really, his own needs and wants) over country. He proudly calls himself ''a nationalist,'' and has repeatedly declined to tone down rhetoric fueling racism and anti-Semitism.

Often, people of color ask white allies to speak to their own friends, relatives, and coworkers about the damage Republican candidates and policies do to our communities. In that spirit, black men, I am speaking to you. Our concerns are your concerns '-- or at least they should be.

Ren(C)e Graham can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.

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Archived Version

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 13:42

Zach WilliamsBoard MemberZachery Williams is Associate Professor of African American History at the University of Akron, Ohio. In 2003, he received his Ph.D. in history from Bowling Green State University, with a focus on Americana and African American policy history and Africana Studies. He is the author of In Search of the TalentZachery Williams is Associate Professor of African American History at the University of Akron, Ohio. In 2003, he received his Ph.D. in history from Bowling Green State University, with a focus on Americana and African American policy history and Africana Studies. He is the author of In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926-1970 (Columbia: U of Missouri Press, 2009) and the editor of Africana Cultures and Policy Studies: Scholarship and the Transformation of Public Policy (Contemporary Black History Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Dr. Williams has also published articles in the Journal of Pan African Studies, Journal of Religious Thought, the Journal of American Studies of Turkey, and the Journal of African American Men. In the Spring of 2009, in a special issue of The Journal of American Studies of Turkey, focusing on African American Studies, he contributed an article entitled, Recovering the African American Past for the Purposes of the Policy Present: The History and Evolution of Africana Cultures and Policy Studies.'' In 2012, Dr. Williams contributed the chapter, ''Dreams From My Father: President Barack Obama and the Reconstruction of African American Men's History and Studies'--A Response to the Ford Foundation Report, Why We Can't Wait,'' to the book, African American Males and Education: Researching the Convergence of Race and Identity, published by Information Age Publishing.

In 2003, Dr. Williams co-founded the Africana Cultures and Policy Studies Institute, a policy think tank group dedicated to the study of African American Policy History and development of sustainable solutions to historic and contemporary problems impacting African Americans. Currently, Dr. Williams is the coordinator of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century's Research Consortium, a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated Committee on Racial Justice, a recent fellow with the Center for American Progress Research Consortium, and also an Associate Minister at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Since arriving in 2003, he has been active in the Greater Cleveland/Akron community, participating in organizations such as the Institute for Restorative Justice and The Sound of the Genuine. He is married to Kesha Boyce Williams, and they are the proud parents of two daughters, Zion Olivet Williams, six, and Zipporah Raye Williams, three.

ed Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926-1970 (Columbia: U of Missouri Press, 2009) and the editor of Africana Cultures and Policy Studies: Scholarship and the Transformation of Public Policy (Contemporary Black History Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Dr. Williams has also published articles in the Journal of Pan African Studies, Journal of Religious Thought, the Journal of American Studies of Turkey, and the Journal of African American Men. In the Spring of 2009, in a special issue of The Journal of American Studies of Turkey, focusing on African American Studies, he contributed an article entitled, Recovering the African American Past for the Purposes of the Policy Present: The History and Evolution of Africana Cultures and Policy Studies.'' In 2012, Dr. Williams contributed the chapter, ''Dreams From My Father: President Barack Obama and the Reconstruction of African American Men's History and Studies'--A Response to the Ford Foundation Report, Why We Can't Wait,'' to the book, African American Males and Education: Researching the Convergence of Race and Identity, published by Information Age Publishing.

In 2003, Dr. Williams co-founded the Africana Cultures and Policy Studies Institute, a policy think tank group dedicated to the study of African American Policy History and development of sustainable solutions to historic and contemporary problems impacting African Americans. Currently, Dr. Williams is the coordinator of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century's Research Consortium, a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated Committee on Racial Justice, a recent fellow with the Center for American Progress Research Consortium, and also an Associate Minister at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Since arriving in 2003, he has been active in the Greater Cleveland/Akron community, participating in organizations such as the Institute for Restorative Justice and The Sound of the Genuine. He is married to Kesha Boyce Williams, and they are the proud parents of two daughters, Zion Olivet Williams, six, and Zipporah Raye Williams, three.

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 13:41

Question 12-19

12. Are you aware of the slander spread on SiriusXM airwaves may by IBW21st/NAARC/N'COBRA associate former MSNBC & SiriusXM Host Mark Thompson? (Video-1 Below)

13. Are you aware of the slander spread and Russian Bot Lies created and spread by Shireen Mitchell & Malcolm Nance as reported on SiriusXM by former host Mark Thompson? (Video-2 Below)

14. Are you aware of the 10's of thousands of instances of Cyberstalking, Online harassment, harm to individuals, businesses, the Doxing of black Advocates parents and Churches that have occurred following the IBW21st/NAARC slandering and mischaracterizations of these patriotic grassroots reparations advocates? (Video-3 Below)

15. Are you aware of the dehumanizing #ADOSISTRASH hashtag which was created following the IBW21st/NAARC slandering and mischaracterizations by IBW21st/NAARC associate ''Old-School-Rapper Talib Kweli'' which has been used to dehumanize and harras the patriotic grassroots reparations advocates (#ADOS) 10's of thousands of times? (Video-4 Below)

16. Are you aware of the constant put downs by Greg Carr Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard? (Video-5 Below)

17. Are you aware of the slander spread by National Urban League President Marc Morial? (Video-6 Below)

18. Are you aware of the Russian Bot Hoax slander spread by Shireen Mitchell on MSNBC's AMJOYSHOW? (Video-7 Below)

19. Are you aware of the news story that revealed the truth about the IBW21st/NAARC altercation? News Story that revealed the truth (Video-8 Below)

21. Are you aware of IBW21st/NAARC associate threats to the credentials of scholars? (Video-9 Below)

20. Are you aware of IBW21st/NAARC associate ''Old-School-Rapper Talib Kweli's'' Mission to take down #ADOS (Video-10 Below)

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Archived Version

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 13:39

June 19, 2019

My name is William Darity Jr. I currently serve as the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. I am honored to have been asked (by Mr. Keenan Keller) to address the 116th Congress on an issue I have been studying for more than thirty years: the matter of reparations for black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States of America. The testimony I will provide today is the culmination of extensive, rigorous, and evidence-based research I have undertaken on the subject of restitution for native black Americans.

The time has come for the United States, finally, to lay to rest the issue of what has been called, variously, the Slave Problem, the Colored Problem, the Negro Problem, the Black Problem, and the African American Problem. The country can ill afford to remain stranded in the mire of injustice, perpetually refusing to resolve the fundamental, historic national dilemma facing all Americans. For too long the nation has refused to take steps to solve an unethical predicament of its own making'--the problem of the unequal status of black and white Americans. This Congressional hearing on HR40, the bill former Congressman John Conyers worked on so tirelessly for three decades, not only should credit his efforts but should lead directly to completion of the goal he and others have worked to achieve: charting a path toward a just and equitable America.

A POLICY OF REPARATIONS IS A SET OF COMPENSATORY POLICIES FOR GRIEVOUS INJUSTICE. THE THREE GOALS OF A REPARATIONS PLAN SHOULD BE:

Acknowledgement

Acknowledgement is the admission of responsibility for the atrocity (or atrocities) by the culpable party, incorporating an apology. The admission must also be accompanied by a guarantee to make restitution in as rapid a fashion as possible.Redress

Redress is the provision of restitution, typically in the form of monetary compensation'--as it has been in the cases of Germany's reparations program on behalf of victims of the Holocaust and the United States' reparations program on behalf of Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated during World War II.Closure

Closure means the agreement by the victimized community and the culpable party that the debt has been paid. The victims would make no further group-specific claims on the culpable party, unless new atrocities take place.A plan for black reparations in the United States must fulfill specific principles and those principles must inform, organically, the deliberations of the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations for African-Americans. In addition to the three central aims of a reparations program described above--acknowledgement, redress, and closure-- there are six principles that must be met:

With respect to black reparations, the United States government is the culpable party that must meet the obligation of awarding restitution to those eligible for reparations.The United States government is culpable for not providing compensation, over the course of 150 years since the end of the Civil War, compensation for enslaved blacks, their heirs, and their descendants.The United States government also is culpable for maintaining the legal and authority framework that sanctioned slavery, legal segregation in the United States, and continues to permit ongoing racist practices.Eligibility for reparations for African-Americans must apply specifically to those black Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States.Black reparations must be designed, at minimum, to eliminate the racial wealth gap.Black reparations also must include a systematic plan to maintain historical memory of the conditions that motivated the inauguration of the program of restitution.With respect to the claim for black reparations, the United States stands as the culpable party. The current text of HR40 makes note of ''[t]he role which the Federal and State governments of the United States supported the institution of slavery in constitutional and statutory provisions,'' ''the Federal and State laws that discriminated against formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants who were deemed United States citizens from 1868 to the present,'' and ''other forms of discrimination in the public and private sectors against freed African slaves and their descendants who were deemed United States citizens from 1868 to the present, including redlining, educational funding discrepancies, and predatory financial practices.'' Indeed, to the extent that federal laws and their enforcement take precedence over both state government and private sector actions, the failure of the federal government to prohibit discriminatory actions by non-federal entities reinforces the national responsibility for making restitution.

Moreover, the federal government abandoned the opportunity to provide immediate compensation to those persons formerly enslaved upon emancipation. The freedmen had been promised allotments of at least 40 acres of land. There is some ambiguity whether this was intended to be 40 acres per family of four or per individual, but even if we take the more conservative condition'--40 acres per family'--the allocation would have amounted to 40 million acres for the four million persons who were newly emancipated. This allocation never took place, and in the subsequent 150 years there has been no act of restitution for the formerly enslaved or their descendants. This is not because the descendants of slavery have been silent on this score. It is because their efforts to this point, actively, have been opposed and blocked. The Commission to be established under HR40 represents an opportunity, finally, to develop a reparations program that will address the nation's unmet obligations.

The case for black reparations must be anchored on three phases of grievous injustice inflicted upon enslaved blacks and their descendants. First is the atrocity of slavery itself. Second are the atrocities exercised during the nearly century-long period of legal segregation in the United States (the ''Jim Crow'' era). Third are the legacy effects of slavery and Jim Crow, compounded by ongoing racism manifest in persistent health disparities, labor market discrimination, mass incarceration, police executions of unarmed blacks (de facto lynchings), black voter suppression, and the general deprivation of equal well-being with all Americans. Therefore, it is a misnomer to refer to ''slavery reparations,'' since black reparations must encompass the harms imposed throughout American history to the present moment'--both slavery and post-slavery, both Jim Crow and post-Jim Crow'--on black descendants of American slavery. It is precisely that unique community that should be the recipients of reparations: black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States.

In a 2003 article written with Dania Frank Francis, and, more recently, in work written with Kirsten Mullen, we have proposed two criteria for eligibility for black reparations. First, an individual must demonstrate that they have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States. Second, an individual must demonstrate that for at least ten years prior to the onset of the reparations program or the formation of the study commission, whichever comes first, they self-identified as black, Negro, or African-American. The first criterion will require genealogical documentation'--but absolutely no phenotype, ideology, or DNA tests. The second criterion will require presentation of a suitable state or federal legal document that the person declared themselves to be black.

These criteria rule out blacks who are post-slavery immigrants to the United States, whose own ancestors are likely to have been subjected to enslavement and colonialism elsewhere. Indeed, they may have substantial claims for reparations themselves, but not from the United States government. For example, Nigerians (and Nigerian Americans) have, in my estimation, a claim for reparations against the United Kingdom; similarly, Haitians (and Haitian Americans) have a comparable claim for reparations against France. However, legitimate claimants for black reparations from the United States government must be those black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved here after having been forced immigrants, rather than voluntary immigrants. This is a unique segment of the nation's black population; it is the segment that will be eligible for black reparations in America.

In our forthcoming book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 20th Century, Kirsten Mullen and I have identified the immense racial wealth gap as the prime indicator of the cumulative effects of the full trajectory of harms thrust upon black Americans. Wealth, the difference between the value of what one owns and what one owes, must not to be confused with income. Wealth is more important than income, at least, insofar as higher levels of wealth are protective against unanticipated losses in income due to unemployment or financial emergencies. Wealth is insurance against economic anxiety and economic disruption for individuals and families. Wealth expands opportunity and possibility for those with larger amounts.

Today, black Americans constitute approximately 13 to 14 percent of the nation's population, yet possess less than 3 percent of the nation's wealth. A core objective of the reparations program must be to move the black American share to at least 13 to 14 percent. Reparations designated specifically for black American descendants of slavery must be enacted and implemented to achieve that aim, moving black wealth, roughly, from less than $3 trillion to $13 to 14 trillion.

While closure is one of the imperatives of any reparations program, arriving at closure does not mean forgetting the record of atrocities. Thus, a key dimension of a black reparations program must be the development and application of a rigorous curriculum, fully integrated into public school instruction at all grade levels, telling the story of America's racial history, in all of its complexity, accurately.

The foregoing six principles should be guidelines that structure the charge of the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African-Americans. In addition, there are several revisions to HR40 that I view as essential to yield the strongest legislation to launch the Commission. The window that is relevant to the American black claim for reparations is 1776 to the present, not 1619 to the present, as the bill currently reads. Since the eventual claim for legislative redress must be made on the United States government, the beginning date must be associated with the founding of the Republic, not the landing of enslaved persons at Jamestown. Furthermore, the array of atrocities that occurred between 1776 and the present are of sufficient magnitude that the case is not weakened by discounting the colonial period.

In its current form, the longevity of the Commission is not specified in HR40. I recommend the Commission completes its report, inclusive of a detailed prescription for legislation to enact a reparations program for black Americans, within 18 months of its impaneling. The Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians opened with 20 days of public hearings that began on July 31, 1980 and the Commission's report, Personal Justice Denied, was published on February 24, 1983. President Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known colloquially as the Kerner Commission) issued its report with recommendations a mere seven months after impaneling.

I also recommend, like the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the reparations proposals Commission should be appointed exclusively by the Congress. The Commission appointees should be experts in American history, Constitutional law, economics (including stratification economics), political science, and sociology. These appointees must have expert knowledge on the history of slavery and Jim Crow, employment discrimination, wealth inequality, health disparities, unequal educational opportunity, criminal justice and mass incarceration, media, political participation and exclusion, and housing inequities. The Commission also should include appointees with detailed knowledge about the design and administration of prior reparations programs as guidelines for structuring a comprehensive reparations program for native black Americans.

In addition, the Commissioners should not receive payment to minimize the prospect that personal aggrandizement will influence the proceedings. However, there should be a paid professional staff, and the Commissioner appointees' reasonable expenses should be met. In essence, they (nor any organization to which they belong) should not receive a salary, honorarium, or the equivalent for performing this critical national service.

There are also some sections of HR40 that merit revision for accuracy. Unlike the statement in Section 2 (a) many more than 4 million persons were enslaved in the United States between 1619 and 1865, since not all persons enslaved over that interval still were living at the end of the Civil War. It is valid to say there were about 4 million persons emancipated when the Civil War came to a close, but they were not the total number of persons subjected to American slavery.

Section 3.b. (2) indicts the United States government for blocking repatriation of formerly enslaved blacks to the African continent. Arguably, the exact opposite is true, particularly given the United States' role in the creation of Liberia. Even Abraham Lincoln advocated black repatriation until the later years of the Civil War. Alleged obstacles to repatriation are not a justification for black reparations. The core of the claim for reparations is a declaration for the establishment of full citizenship rights and compensation for the sustained denial of liberty for black descendants of American slavery. Of course, it will be their prerogative if some black recipients of reparations choose to use their funds to migrate to their preferred country in Africa, or elsewhere.

In conclusion, in addition to the Commission's report must detail the long and cumulative trajectory of atrocities visited upon black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States and their ancestors, and it must provide a well-designed comprehensive program for reparations that will address the following specifics: criteria for eligibility for reparations and assistance for potential claimants to establish their eligibility, criteria for establishing the size of the reparations fund, details on how the reparations fund will be disbursed (and toward what ends), details on how the reparations program will be administered and monitored, and benchmarks for gauging the long term success of the program and administrative modification if needed. The eventual proposal also should include the hiring of a full staff of accountants and attorneys to track and service each individual claim for compensation. The details of all of these specifics must be framed by the six principles presented at the start of my testimony.

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Tue, 25 Jun 2019 13:22

President Trump Donald John TrumpConway defends herself against Hatch Act allegations amid threat of subpoena How to defuse Gulf tensions and avoid war with Iran Trump says 'stubborn child' Fed 'blew it' by not cutting rates MORE on Monday said he doesn't believe the federal government will pursue reparations for descendants of slaves, an idea that has gained traction among some Democrats.

"I don't see it happening," Trump said in an exclusive interview with The Hill.

The House Judiciary Committee held the first hearing on the issue in a decade earlier this month, and a handful of Democratic presidential candidates seeking to challenge Trump in 2020 have broached the idea.

"I think it's a very unusual thing," Trump said of the possibility of reparations. "You have a lot of '-- it's been a very interesting debate. I don't see it happening, no."

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held the hearing "to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellBiden, Eastland and rejecting the cult of civility California governor predicts 'xenophobic' GOP will likely be third party in 15 years This week: Congress set for clash on Trump's border request MORE (R-Ky.) threw cold water on the idea of reparations earlier this month.

"I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none us currently living are responsible is a good idea," McConnell said. "We've tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African American president."

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee Sheila Jackson LeeHicks repeatedly blocked by White House from answering Judiciary questions Democrats bristle as Hicks appears for daylong Capitol Hill testimony On Juneteenth, demanding that reparations be more than lip service MORE (D-Texas) reintroduced legislation this year initially crafted by former Rep. John Conyers John James ConyersMcConnell: Reparations aren't 'a good idea' This week: Democrats move funding bills as caps deal remains elusive House to hold first hearing on slavery reparations in over a decade MORE Jr. (D-Mich.) that calls for a study on reparations.

In the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Kamala Harris Kamala Devi HarrisThe Hill's Morning Report - Crunch time arrives for 2020 Dems with debates on deck The Memo: All eyes on faltering Biden ahead of first debate 2020 primary debate guide: Everything you need to know ahead of the first Democratic showdown MORE (D-Calif.), Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernie SandersThe Hill's Morning Report - Crunch time arrives for 2020 Dems with debates on deck The Memo: All eyes on faltering Biden ahead of first debate Progressive group launches campaign to identify voters who switch to Warren MORE (I-Vt.) and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke Beto O'RourkeCastro pushes back on O'Rourke criticism of plan to decriminalize border crossings Overnight Health Care: Key Trump drug pricing proposal takes step forward | Missouri Planned Parenthood clinic loses bid for license | 2020 Democrats to take part in Saturday forum on abortion rights Warren pledges to ban private prisons MORE (D-Texas) were among those who voiced support for a bill commissioning a study on reparations.

Brett Samuels contributed.

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Thu, 27 Jun 2019 15:13

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed the first blanket ban on e-cigarette sales in the U.S. on Tuesday.

The measure, which prohibits the sale, distribution and manufacture of e-cigarettes, will now need to be signed by Mayor London Breed.

Many states, cities and counties ban vaping in the same places where regular cigarettes are prohibited,...

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed the first blanket ban on e-cigarette sales in the U.S. on Tuesday.

The measure, which prohibits the sale, distribution and manufacture of e-cigarettes, will now need to be signed by Mayor London Breed.

Many states, cities and counties ban vaping in the same places where regular cigarettes are prohibited, including restaurants and workplaces, but none of those measures goes as far as the San Francisco ordinance.

Aimed at combating the rise in teen vaping, the ban would take effect seven months after the mayor signs the ordinance. Under the measure, violators could be subject to a $1,000 fine or other penalties.

It would remain in place until the Food and Drug Administration approves the marketing of e-cigarettes. The FDA has given e-cigarette companies, including Juul Labs Inc., until 2022 to submit their products for a health review.

Juul is one of San Francisco's fastest-growing startups, and it dominates the e-cigarette industry. The company has criticized the ban, saying it doesn't effectively address underage use.

After the Tuesday vote, a Juul spokesman said the ban ''will drive former adult smokers who successfully switched to vapor products back to deadly cigarettes,'' as well as ''deny the opportunity to switch for current adult smokers.''

High-school and middle-school students' use of nicotine products significantly increased between 2017 and 2018, primarily because of the rise in e-cigarette usage, a joint study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA found in February. The study also showed that e-cigarettes were the most commonly used nicotine product, with 3.6 million students in high school and middle school having used an e-cigarette.

The CDC hasn't endorsed e-cigarettes as an aid to quit smoking and has called them not safe for youth, young adults, pregnant women, or adults who don't currently use tobacco products. But the agency has said e-cigarettes may help nonpregnant adult smokers if used as a complete substitute for all cigarettes and other smoked tobacco products.

Write to Talal Ansari at Talal.Ansari@wsj.com

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Wed, 26 Jun 2019 19:08

A certified medical assistant holds needles full of the HPV vaccination drug Gardasil before administering them to children at a community health center in Texas. (Matthew Busch/The Washington Post) Lindsey BeverGeneral assignment reporter covering national and breaking news

June 26 at 2:50 PMA federal public health advisory panel said Wednesday that people through age 45 could benefit from getting an HPV vaccine and should discuss the possibility with their doctors.

The recommendation, which came during a two-day meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, could expand the pool of people who may have the HPV vaccine covered by their insurance providers.

The vaccine was developed to prevent cancer caused by the human papillomavirus, which is typically transmitted through oral, anal or vaginal sex. The vaccine is currently recommended for preteen girls and boys, to protect them before exposure to the virus, with catch-up vaccinations through age 26. In a 10-to-4 vote, the committee agreed to recommend HPV vaccination for women and men ages 27 to 45 who are not fully vaccinated, through ''shared clinical decision-making.''

According to the CDC, most sexually active people will contract HPV at some point. Some people may never know they have it and the active infection may be short-lived because, in most cases, the body's immune system suppresses the virus. Still, the virus can lead to many types of cancer, including cervical, anal, vaginal, penile and throat cancers.

Each year in the United States, about 17,500 women and 9,300 men get HPV-related cancer '-- many of which, according to the CDC, are preventable with vaccination.

A commonly used vaccine, Gardasil 9, is designed to protect against nine HPV strains, seven of which are responsible for 90 percent of HPV-related cancers. Since FDA approval in 2006, studies show that the vaccine has been effective in reducing the number of HPV infections that can lead to cancer, not only by protecting the immunized individuals from disease, but also protecting those with whom they have sexual contact.

Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expanded its approval for the vaccine to include people in the 27-45 age group.

Public health experts agree that for adults up to age 45, the decision to get the vaccine should be based on each person's sexual experiences and expectations, and should be discussed with his or her doctor. For example, a middle-aged person reentering the dating scene who had few previous sexual partners could become exposed to the virus for the first time, and might benefit from the vaccine.

Christopher Zahn, vice president of practice activities at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said the vaccine is considered a safe and effective way to reduce the risk of HPV, and though it may not be as practical for older adults, that does not mean there is no benefit for them.

That said, the vaccine may not be right for every adult it is approved for, he said, as it is primarily intended to inoculate children before they are exposed to the virus.

The CDC recommends children receive the first dose of the HPV vaccine between 11 and 12 years of age, then the second dose 6 months to a year later. However, the vaccine series can be started as young as 9 or after the target age, but those who receive it after age 15 may require three doses instead of two, according to the agency.

Kathleen Schmeler, a gynecological oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center, noted that the vaccine may protect older adults from HPV strains they have not yet been exposed to, but it will not protect them from previously acquired infections.

Schmeler said one concern she has is that ''if everyone thinks, 'Oh, well, people can get it up to age 45 so we don't need to give it to our kids now,''' she said. ''I just think it's really important to educate the public that it's most effective [for children] both because of the kids' immune response but also because they haven't been exposed yet.''

Schmeler said there are also cost and global vaccine shortage considerations.

The World Health Organization issued a call to action last year to try to eradicate cervical cancer, one of the most common cancers among women around the world.

Researchers say Australia, Rwanda and some European countries have been leading the charge with national vaccination programs that provide the shots to schoolchildren at no cost and, in fact, these countries may become the first in the world to eliminate HPV and, thus, HPV-related cancers.

Since 2007, when Australia implemented its National HPV Vaccination Program, more than 9 million vaccinations have been given to girls and young women, and there has been a 77 percent reduction in HPV strains that cause most cervical cancer, according to Cancer Council Australia. In 2013, the program was expanded to include boys.

In the United States, HPV vaccination rates have been rising, too, but at a much slower pace '-- and not fast enough to curb the rising rates of HPV-related cancers.

Public health experts blame access, education and health-care providers who have shown reluctance in recommending the vaccine as strongly as required vaccinations.

Deanna Kepka, an assistant professor in the college of nursing at the University of Utah and an investigator at Huntsman Cancer Institute, said the issue is the way the vaccine was introduced '-- as a vaccine to protect girls from sexually transmitted disease, rather than one to protect everyone from cancer. She noted oropharyngeal cancers, some of which can be caused by HPV, affect more men each year in the United States than cervical cancer affects women.

Schmeler, the gynecological oncologist, encourage parents to have their children vaccinated, adding, ''I spend my days taking care of women with cancer, many of whom die of the disease."

Read more:

The HPV vaccine is important for preteens and teenagers. What about older women?

Cancer doctors are leading the campaign to boost use of the HPV vaccine

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 09:10

Donald Trump has confirmed that his top foreign policy adviser wants to embroil the US in multiple international conflicts. But the US president insists he retains final say on whether American missiles are to fly into Iran.

In a sit-down Meet the Press interview broadcast Sunday, host Chuck Todd asked Trump if he was ''being pushed into military action against Iran'' by his advisers '' presumably pointing to the aggressive pronouncements from National Security Advisor John Bolton.

''I have two groups of people. I have doves and I have hawks,'' replied Trump. ''John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was up to him he'd take on the whole world at one time, okay?''

WATCH: President Trump tells Chuck Todd that he has doves and hawks in his cabinet. #MTP#IfItsSundayTrump: ''I have some hawks. John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was up to him he'd take on the whole world at one time.'' pic.twitter.com/JKVB2IvMVU

'-- Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) 23 June 2019Trump then brushed away concerns about the influence of Bolton, who also served in the White House during the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

''That doesn't matter because I want both sides,'' said Trump.

Trump went on to defend his record of preserving peace '' including speaking out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the decision to call off a strike against Iran in response to a drone downing this week, because it would not have been ''proportionate'' and would have resulted in ''150 dead people.''

This was the second time in 24 hours that Trump was forced to back Bolton, after saying on Saturday that the official is ''doing a very good job'' but adding that he ''disagrees very much'' with him on the Middle East.

Also on rt.com US military 'ready to go': Bolton warns Iran not to 'mistake US prudence for weakness' Meanwhile, Bolton himself spent Sunday in Jerusalem, warning Tehran not to ''mistake US prudence and discretion for weakness'' and asking his audience to ''stay tuned'' for further developments in the stand-off.

Following his appointment last year, Bolton has used his post to advocate for regime change in Iran and Venezuela, and is considered the architect of the increased American-backed attempts to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro.

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Archived Version

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 21:01

MUST READ Ilhan Omar thread --

The @StarTribune ran a dishonest, cowardly piece of journalism tonight.

For 3 years, the paper ignored the work of reporters Preya Samsundar, Scott Johnson, and myself on @ilhanMN's disturbing past. Ignored our emails offering new evidence. (1x)

Now, Ilhan Omar is a national disgrace. Globally, anti-Semites are emboldened.

We warned them. None of this would have happened if @StarTribune, afraid of a PC mob, had not withheld the facts from local voters.

Covering their tracks, tonight @StarTribune published ... (2/x)

... a piece duplicating work we already did. Our leads, our research. Did they credit us?

No. We are just unnamed ''conservative activists.''

We are not activists. We are reporters; they are frauds. They owe us, MN voters, and the global Jewish community an apology. (3/x)

The

@StarTribune also, inexplicably, failed to put two facts together on a bombshell development mentioned in their article.

@StarTribune appears to have been deliberately vague; I can only surmise that the paper is still covering for Omar. (5/x)

They write: ''Social media posts indicate [Ahmed Nur Said] Elmi is in Africa.''

They also write: ''[Ilhan's sister Sahra Noor] currently runs her own health care consultancy in Kenya.''

But Elmi's posts and Noor's company are clear about a specific location. (6/x)

Elmi's posts show he has lived in Nairobi, Kenya since between 12/21/18 and 1/14/19.

And Noor's company is clearly located in Nairobi, not just somewhere in ''Kenya.''

Further, it's provable Elmi has been working for Noor, apparently helping out with her company website. (7/x)

Look for yourself: Visit

gritpartnersconsulting.com/whoweare, then view the page's source code.

You will see that Elmi was logged into his personal Instagram account while he was creating the link to Noor's company Instagram account. (8/x)

There is no reasonable explanation for this code to exist besides Elmi working for Noor.

And that's a bombshell: In 2017, Ilhan Omar swore, under penalty of perjury while divorcing Elmi, that she had zero contact with him since 2011 -- and no clue how to find him. (9/x)

Just 1 year later, Elmi, having just been divorced without being served, leaves London to work for his ex-wife's sister in Nairobi?

It's absurd. Yet the @StarTribune chose to not even report Elmi and Noor were both living in Nairobi. (10/x)

As for what's next: The

@StarTribune is wasting its time seeking Omar's immigration documents. The documents reveal irregularities -- such as two sisters born only two months apart -- but will not provide proof of a fraudulent marriage.

I will confirm here that ... (11/x)

... I have identified other documentation that, according to sources and additional evidence, will confirm the fraudulent marriage. An attorney is currently assisting me in attempting to obtain them legally.

In the following week or so ... (12/x)

I expect to either have the documents and be publishing them, or will be publishing the information I obtained that led me to seek them. I believe this supporting evidence already places the case beyond a reasonable doubt, and look forward to asking

@IlhanMN for comment. (end)

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Archived Version

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 04:06

See more of the storyNew investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man '-- possibly her own brother '-- to skirt immigration laws.

Omar has denied the allegations in the past, dismissing them as ''baseless rumors'' first raised in an online Somali politics forum and championed by conservative bloggers during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota House. But she said little then or since about Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the former husband who swept into her life in 2009 before a 2011 separation.

The questions surfaced again this month in a state probe of campaign finance violations showing that Omar filed federal taxes in 2014 and 2015 with her current husband, Ahmed Hirsi, while she was still legally married to but separated from Elmi.

Although she has legally corrected the discrepancy, she has declined to say anything about how or why it happened.

The new documents also detail the Omar campaign's efforts to keep the story of her marriage to Elmi out of the press, arguing that detailed coverage would legitimize the accusations and invade her privacy.

Since the recent findings of the campaign finance board that discovered Omar had improperly used campaign money to pay a lawyer to fix her tax filings, the Star Tribune searched public records '-- including available databases, the marriage and divorce filing, business licenses, university records and other documents '-- and could find little publicly available information about Elmi. The search of records could neither conclusively confirm nor rebut the allegation that he is Omar's sibling.

Sent a list of questions and a request to talk to her siblings and father, Omar declined to do so. Hirsi did not reply to multiple calls, texts and e-mails. Social media posts indicate Elmi is in Africa. He did not respond to multiple e-mails.

Omar's reticence is consistent with near total silence she has maintained for three years amid questions raised through public records picked over by conservative opinion journalists intent on proving that she committed immigration fraud. Those attacks, she once tweeted, are the provenance of ''fake journalists on bigoted blogs.''

Omar spokesman Jeremy Slevin issued a statement Friday asserting that the questions about her personal life are illegitimate:

''Since before she was elected to office, Ilhan has been the subject of conspiracy theories and false accusations about her personal life. Emboldened by a president who openly treats immigrants, refugees and Muslims as invaders, these attacks often stem from the presumption that Ilhan '-- like others who share those identities '-- is somehow illegitimate or not fully American.

''Ilhan has shared more than most public officials ever do about the details of her personal life '-- even when it is personally painful,'' he continued. ''Whether by colluding with right-wing outlets to go after Muslim elected officials or hounding family members, legitimate media outlets have a responsibility not to fan the flames of hate. Continuing to do so is not only demeaning to Ilhan, but to her entire family.''

The questions have nevertheless persisted as a political threat over the years while the former war refugee from Somalia made history being elected to the Minnesota House and then winning a seat in Congress.

Her ascent as the nation's first Somali-American lawmaker has won her global praise and given her an international platform to champion human rights, criticize Israel, and challenge the Trump administration's immigration policies '-- positions that have drawn further ire and scrutiny from conservative critics.

Omar's widely condemned statements about the influence of Israel and Jewish money in American politics have only upped the stakes for her critics, who are also often passionate defenders of the Israeli government.

Throughout it all, Omar's public persona has been informed by her biography as a refugee overcoming racial and cultural barriers. Yet she has insisted on silence on some key details.

''It's really strange, right, to prove a negative,'' she told the Star Tribune in an interview in October, before she was elected to Congress. As for Elmi, she said, ''If someone was asking me, do I have a brother by that name, I don't. If someone was asking '... are there court documents that are false '... there is no truth to that.''

Beyond denying the provocative allegation that Elmi is her brother, Omar has shed little light on her married life, which began in 2002, when she wed Hirsi in their Muslim faith tradition.

The Star Tribune has sought to authenticate some of the most egregious allegations, using public records and available social media posts, which make up the bulk of the case against her.

Some of the original social media accounts linking Elmi to Omar after their split in 2011 appear to have been removed, and documents verifying the family relationships of refugees from war-torn countries with limited government record-keeping are notoriously hard to obtain, even by U.S. immigration authorities.

Omar declined to make her tax and immigration records available for this report.

What is known is that Omar, at the age of 19, sought a legal marriage license with Hirsi in Minnesota. Though they had three children together, they would not legally marry until January, 2018, after she had been in the Minnesota Legislature for a year and had dissolved the marriage in 2017 with Elmi.

After reaching what Omar called ''an impasse in our life together,'' she and Hirsi split for a period in 2008. They had two children at the time.

In February 2009, public records show that Omar legally married Elmi, who she has identified as a ''British citizen.''

The relationship was brief. Omar said it ended in 2011, when she reconciled with Hirsi.

She gave birth to their third child the following June. She identified Hirsi as the father.

While Omar said she and Elmi had divorced in 2011 ''in our faith tradition,'' they would not legally divorce until December, 2017 '-- a month before she got legally married to Hirsi.

Imam Makram El-Amin of Masjid An-Nur in Minneapolis said an Islamic marriage must include the officiant and at least two witnesses, preferably one from each side of the family, to be a valid union. El-Amin, who did not perform Omar's marriages, said he has credentials to sign a marriage certificate. But just like any wedding at a church or synagogue, it's not legal in the state of Minnesota until processed by the county.

Similarly, an Islamic divorce requires two witnesses, ideally the same two who witnessed the marriage, plus a three-month waiting period, El-Amin said. The marriage can be then dissolved in the faith, although the divorce would require a Minnesota court to earn civil legal standing.

In her 2017 divorce, Omar attested that she had no contact with Elmi after their 2011 separation. Conservative activists say photos and other social media posted by Omar and Elmi on Instagram and Facebook suggest Omar may not be telling the truth. The Star Tribune has been unable to independently obtain the original posts, although images purporting to be screen grabs continue to populate right-leaning media sites such as Power Line Blog, PJ Media and Alpha News. They remain in public view.

One image featured on AlphaNewsMN depicts an Instagram photo purportedly posted by Elmi on June 12, 2012, the day after Omar gave birth to her third child. It shows a close-up picture of Elmi holding a newborn child the website says is Omar's, based on accompanying text that ostensibly refers to the baby girl as ''nieces.''

That and other Instagram photos have since been removed.

In her divorce, Omar said she had tried unsuccessfully to reach Elmi to respond to her court filings, including through social media. She also said that she did not know any other friends of family members who could contact him.

Omar and Elmi used a Columbia Heights address on the marriage application. Three months later, Hirsi used the same address to obtain a business license for his One-on-One Cafe Lounge, public records show.

Omar declined to offer an account of their living arrangement at that time.

Siblings who petition for a U.S. visa for a noncitizen sibling have typically had to wait more than a dozen years to obtain the document, according to the U.S. State Department. Applications for a spouse carry a minimal waiting period, but Minnetonka-based immigration lawyer Steven Thal said examples of siblings fraudulently marrying to gain immigration benefits are nearly unheard of compared to cases of strangers marrying to get green cards.

''It is so rare that you would think that it would be more easily uncovered,'' Thal said.

Omar's relatives could also clear the air, but they have remained silent about her marriage to Elmi. She declined to make her family available for this story.

In 2016, her campaign provided the names of six siblings, but only their first names, citing their need for privacy. Elmi was not among them.

In October 2018, Omar showed a Star Tribune reporter cellphone photos of family immigration papers but would not share the actual documents.

Omar's sister Sahra Noor was a high-profile executive of the Twin Cities health care nonprofit People's Center Clinics & Services until 2018. She declined interview requests in 2016. She currently runs her own health care consultancy in Kenya. An e-mail to her was not returned and efforts to call her there were unsuccessful.

Over the years Elmi, who attended high school in St. Paul, has had occasional contact over the internet with other friends and acquaintances, including retired DFL activist and Minneapolis city worker Barb Lickness, who lived in the same downtown Minneapolis apartment building with Elmi around 2012, before he moved to London.

She described him as ''friendly in a soft way,'' and a neighbor who participated enthusiastically in the building's social scene. She recalls that he was tall, dapper, and spoke with a pronounced British accent, indicative of a foreign upbringing. He never mentioned being married, Lickness said.

Lickness confirmed Elmi's identity in an Instagram photo purportedly posted by Omar showing the two of them and three others posing in London in 2015. The photo is featured on several conservative media websites, but could not be verified by the Star Tribune.

What's clear from the recently released documents of the campaign finance board is that the young upstart's campaign was unprepared for any potential blowback from the questions surrounding Omar's marriage to Elmi, first reported in 2016 on Somalispot.com, an online public affairs forum.

Omar created a ''crisis committee'' comprising a few DFL veteran operatives to try to respond. Their priority was preparing a dossier on their own candidate '-- a fairly typical task usually completed before a campaign, not after a primary victory.

''There was a lot of frustration that any of these things were not disclosed to any of the campaign staff when I decided to run for office. And so I think everybody who was doing this wanted to put a research file together that had the benefit of making sure that there weren't any other dark things in my closet that I might not have told them about,'' Omar said during a December deposition before the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.

The board would eventually fine her $500 and require her to use her own money to pay lawyers who did personal tax work.

During the deposition, Omar suggested she is disconnected from details '-- unaware, for instance, that she violated tax law by filing a married-jointly return with the wrong husband.

Asked if she amended her tax filings, she replied, ''I don't think so.''

The board's staff asked again. Omar replied, ''I don't recall doing any.''

Asked about using campaign money to take political trips, Omar said they were always approved by the Minnesota House, but then placed responsibility on her staff: ''They always gave me an opinion that said, sure, this looks fine. Or at least that was my understanding that that's what my staff was doing before they would commit me to doing anything.''

Carla Kjellberg, an attorney and political adviser during the crisis period, paints a different picture of Omar's engagement level with details: ''I did nothing, I want to make that clear, without Representative Omar's authority. And she was in these meetings where those things were decided upon and I was directed to do that,'' Kjellberg said during her own deposition.

Kjellberg declined to comment.

Campaign e-mails disclosed by the campaign finance board also show a concerted effort to quash the Elmi story. An August 2016 internal e-mail written by campaign spokesman Ben Goldfarb, a veteran DFL operative, suggested reaching out to political newsletter writer Blois Olson ''and shut it down with him as we do with the Strib.''

The Star Tribune wrote about the controversy the next day under the headline, ''Marriage discrepancy clouds Ilhan Omar's historic primary victory.''

Omar expressed frustration over the controversy again last October, telling the Star Tribune in an interview that like many refugees without birth certificates, ''anybody can accuse me of whatever they want and I don't have a way to defend myself.''

Rep. Mohamud Noor, DFL-Minneapolis, lost to Omar in the primary before replacing her at the Legislature when she went to Congress. He compared the attacks on Omar to claims that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Because he took over Omar's state legislative office phone number, Noor's voice mail was getting filled with hateful, racist messages until Google removed the number when people conducted Google searches for Omar.

In the end, Noor said, Omar will be judged by what she does for her district.

''Initially there were missteps, and so much focus on her rather than on what she was doing,'' Noor said. ''She's made some tremendous efforts to reconnect and re-engage and focus on the district.''

Star Tribune staff writers Eric Roper and Torey Van Oot contributed to this report.

Omar's story

1982: Ilhan Omar is born in Somalia, the youngest of seven children.

1997: Omar, still a teenager, settles in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. She and her family had fled Somalia's civil war and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya.

2002: Omar, now 19, marries Ahmed Hirsi, 22, in their faith tradition in Minnesota, but they don't legally marry.

2008: Omar and Hirsi, now the parents of two children, reach an ''impasse in our life together'' and divorce in their faith tradition.

2009: Omar, at 26, marries Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, 23, whom she identifies only as a ''British citizen.'' School records show he attended high school in St. Paul and studied art at North Dakota State University.

2011: Omar and Elmi end their relationship and divorce in their faith tradition, but do not legally divorce until 2017.

2012: Omar and Hirsi reconcile and have a third child together.

2014-15: Omar files joint tax returns with Hirsi, though they are not yet legally married; she remains legally married to Elmi.

2016: Omar, endorsed by the DFL over longtime incumbent Phyllis Kahn, is elected to the Minnesota House, becoming the first Somali-American, Muslim legislator in the United States. But her campaign is rocked by allegations in the conservative Power Line blog suggesting that Elmi is her brother and they married for unspecified immigration benefits.

2017: Omar is granted a legal divorce from Elmi.

2018: Omar legally marries Hirsi and is elected to Congress.

Source: Public records and campaign statements

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Archived Version

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 12:06

Ten people vying to be president on one stage was always going to be messy, and the first Democratic primary debate was just that.

Candidates talked over one another, MSNBC had technical problems, moderators struggled to stop candidates from talking when their time was up, and New York mayor Bill de Blasio yelled a lot. It's not really possible to declare a ''winner,'' especially since there's another debate tomorrow night with an entirely new slate of candidates.

But two candidates seemed to pique a lot of interest among US voters, at least when judged by who Americans searched for on Google: New Jersey senator Cory Booker and Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

A poll by the right-leaning Drudge Report also found Gabbard to be the breakout of the debate with 38% of the vote, well ahead of Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren in second place. Gabbard also topped polls by local news sites including NJ.com and the Washington Examiner.

Booker has long been considered a serious candidate by talking heads in Washington, DC. But Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran, is considered a long shot. That's in part because of her controversial meeting with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad two years ago, and her decision to resign from the Democratic National Convention to support Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in 2016, upsetting mainstream Democrats at the time.

Gabbard's debate performance was up and down. The first question put to her, about equal pay, she never really answered, talking instead about something else entirely (Sept. 11, 2001). But she hit her stride when discussing foreign policy, especially when arguing with Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan about pulling out of Afghanistan, forcing probably the biggest gaffe of the night:

Google search interest in Gabbard may have been because of her sharp answers, but it could just as well have been because of the distinctive gray streak in her hair. Or maybe it was just because no one knew who she was. Well, they do now.

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Archived Version

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 11:39

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June 25, 2019 2019-06-25T10:06:58-04:00 https://images.c-span.org/Files/f03/20190625100816012_hd.jpg The Senate Commerce Committee holds a hearing to examine how technology companies use algorithms and machine learning to influence the public.The Senate Commerce Committee holds a hearing to examine how technology companies use algorithms and machine learning to influence the public.

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Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world's largest international multimedia news provider reaching more than one billion people every day. Reuters provides trusted business, financial, national, and international news to professionals via Thomson Reuters desktops, the world's media organizations, and directly to consumers at Reuters.com and via Reuters TV. Learn more about Thomson Reuters products:

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Tue, 25 Jun 2019 12:53

Portland, Ore. (Flickr Photo / Randy Kashka)People in the Portland metro area with smartphones may not realize it, but they have digital clones.

After months of preparation, the initial phase of Portland's project employing city mobility software from Sidewalk Labs, the controversial startup owned by Google parent Alphabet, is underway.

If all goes as planned, Portland will launch a year-long pilot of the Replica software, costing nearly $500,000 in total. In exchange, Portland gets access to a massive dataset that mirrors how people actually move throughout the city and its surroundings.

The purpose is to regularly query, for example, timely insights into what worker commutes entail, what the impacts of Uber and Lyft are on traffic congestion, and how many cyclists use protected bike lanes such as those along high-trafficked areas like Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park.

''We'll be looking to Replica to explore a number of questions about major issues in our region like equity, safety, and congestion,'' said Eliot Rose, technology strategist at Portland's Metro, one of the three agencies chipping in to pay for the $457,000 project also funded by TriMet and Portland's Bureau of Transportation.

One might expect such an effort to entail surveillance cameras, sensors, or other physical tracking devices, but that's not what this is about. Instead, the Replica software uses deidentified mobile location data showing how people actually move throughout the city to generate a mock modeled populous engaged in simulated travel activities.

The Replica system associates nuanced trip patterns with each persona engaged in home, work, shopping, eating or recreational activities. Sidewalk Labs said its data comes from mobile app publishers, mobile location data aggregators and telcos. Both Sidewalk Labs and Portland Metro confirmed that no sensors, beacons, cameras, IoT devices or WiFi hotspots or WiFi kiosks will be used or installed as part of the firm's partnership in Portland.

Still, there are questions about the specific origins of the data used in Replica.

''If a city is going to use a system, it has a responsibility to have full transparency about where all of the data is coming from, how it is being deidentified and to what level, and if that data is reused again or stored by Replica or Sidewalk or passed to its parent company,'' said Pam Dixon, executive director of Oregon-based nonprofit World Privacy Forum. ''There's too much that we don't know.''

To assess how transportation options affect low-income worker commutes, Replica may include demographic information such as deidentified credit- and census bureau data to estimate age range, race, gender, household size and income-levels. Portland's own data showing vehicle, bicycle and pedestrian counts, TriMet transit ridership data, and estimates from Metro's own travel model can also be added.

Here's how Replica explains its data collection procedure:

De-identified mobile location data: We use de-identified mobile phone location data to generate travel behavior models '-- 'Šbasically, a set of rules that represent how a person makes choices on where, when, why, and how to travel.

Synthetic population generation: Separately, we use aggregate demographic information to create what planners call a ''synthetic population''. This is a virtual population that is statistically representative of the real population.

Computer simulation: We then give each person in the virtual population a travel behavior model and use computer simulation to generate a week of activities''helping us confidently replicate trip patterns across a city or metro area.

In an effort to understand how people travel to and from Portland throughout the region, the Replica system will encompass Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington, and Clark Counties.

Other cities including Chicago and Kansas City will also test Replica.

Pros and cons of a synthetic city population(Replica Photo)Some say they like this synthetic population approach because it provides a reflection of what's likely happening on city streets, arguably without the privacy invasions associated with surveillance and identifiable information. It's especially attractive when compared to how governments historically gather commuter information through studies that generate static data with a limited shelf-life.

Pam Dixon, executive director of Oregon-based nonprofit World Privacy Forum. (Pam Dixon Photo)Now, the argument goes, they can skip the study and tap the replicated database to gauge the impact of a new light rail line or a street closure.

''This is all information that we would otherwise have to collect by sending people out into the field to do counts and surveys, which is very expensive and time-consuming,'' said Rose.

Importantly, with location data from mobile devices in people's pockets, they can track movement patterns of walkers, bikers, skaters and others not traveling in more-trackable vehicles. ''We haven't seen any tools that have offered the kind of information Sidewalk Labs is offering regarding pedestrian and cyclist mobility,'' said Rose.

The city will not receive any actual mobile location data through the pilot; rather, it accesses an online platform that allows staff to query and filter data based on the simulated population.

Despite the privacy-safe assurances, data privacy and security experts question whether mobile location data, even when deidentified, is safe from re-identification if leaked, hacked or obtained by law enforcement. Others worry about the consequences of predictive modeling or machine learning techniques that determine with high levels of accuracy whether a simulated person might visit a particular location at a particular time.

''People who are moving within cities need to be able to trust that their data is truly de-identified and will never come back at them '-- for example, through a judicial process or law enforcement process '-- and would not be used against them in a discriminatory or unfair manner,'' said Dixon.

According to a Portland Bureau of Transportation spokesperson, the contract with Sidewalk Labs prevents law enforcement or any entities other than Metro, PBOT or TriMet from accessing Replica software or data. But lots of data-related questions remain; rules dictating access to the information used to build the synthetic models, or the data reflecting their behavior, are unclear.

Portland City Council voted to use the Replica software in December. The city now awaits an initial dataset from Sidewalk Labs that it will test against criteria the three agencies have devised, possibly by July. If it passes muster, it will begin paying 12 cents per resident to access the software for a year, receiving refreshed data each quarter.

Rose said the city is testing whether Replica can be used to identify people. ''If we find that it can, we intend to terminate the agreement,'' he said.

The Portland City Council intended to vote on a privacy resolution requiring the city to ensure transparency and accountability in its data use and collection on Wednesday, but the vote was postponed.

How Replica got its start(Replica Photo)Research partially funded by AT&T and the State of California Department of Transportation conducted at UC Berkeley and presented in a 2017 paper offers a glimpse into the origins of the Replica system. ''One of our goals is to enable activity based travel demand models that use cellular data to create synthetic agent travel patterns without compromising the privacy of cell phone users,'' states the paper.

Reporter's notebook: How AT&T data led to Replica Software from Sidewalk LabsOne of the researchers involved in the study, Alexei Pozdnoukhov, currently serves as director of research at Sidewalk Labs. Another researcher on the project mentioned his internships at Sidewalk Labs and AT&T in his dissertation.

Not only was the research funded by AT&T, it employed data from the company, as confirmed by a Sidewalk Labs spokesperson. The paper notes the research employed anonymized and aggregated Call Detail Record logs ''collected in Summer 2015 by a major mobile carrier in the US, serving millions of customers in the San Francisco Bay Area.'' CDR logs feature various details of mobile calls including time, duration, completion status, source number, and destination number. AT&T did not respond to requests to comment for this story.

Several companies pool mobile location data over time to build models for things like ad targeting, marketing insights, or to help municipalities plan development. Those data providers rarely reveal where the information comes from.

Sidewalk Labs is not alone in its apparent use of raw cellphone data, which is made available to businesses directly from telcos as well as through third party data firms.

A New York Times article this past December revealed how dozens of companies sell anonymous smartphone location data to advertisers, retailers, and even hedge funds, without the knowledge of individual users.

Toronto's Eastern Waterfront braces for a tech-driven makeover by Sidewalk Labs. (Sidewalk Labs Photo)Sidewalk Labs launched in 2015 but has already drawn heat in conjunction with its highly-scrutinized partnership with a Toronto revitalization group aiming to turn the Quayside waterfront neighborhood into a ''global hub'' of ''urban innovation.''

Despite introducing prototypes of heated hexagonal paving systems and ''building raincoats'' that protect sidewalks from the elements, the plans for Toronto mostly remain a mystery. Local activists there express concerns about Sidewalk's lack of meaningful community engagement, as well as its proposal to fund Toronto land development and garner tax revenue through a controversial bond scheme.

All of the stakeholders have an interest in this data so it needs to be managed with the input of all of the stakeholders. In April, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association filed a lawsuit against Waterfront Toronto and Canadian government entities, arguing that ''the process that resulted in the Quayside agreements was not transparent, reasonable or accountable.'' Sidewalk Labs has also spurred criticism for its efforts to guide government policy for city data management.

Questions around city data use, ownership and security are immensely important. But the Sidewalk Labs partnership in Toronto also demonstrates the need to ensure that citizens can participate in decisions regarding technology use that ultimately affects government policy.

''There's a different level of responsibility for municipalities,'' said Dixon. ''All of the stakeholders have an interest in this data so it needs to be managed with the input of all of the stakeholders.''

Whether Portland city residents are aware of and understand the Replica project is questionable. When asked about government outreach involving Replica, PBOT pointed to the City Council's public hearing on the issue and a Civic Data Forum hosted in January by Smart City PDX, the city's group overseeing emerging tech projects in Portland. That event was intended to ''foster engagement with and outreach to diverse stakeholders in the community impacted by data collection,'' according to the Smart City PDX website.

Though it does not oversee the Replica project, Smart City PDX was created to guide Portland's data and technology investments. Smart City PDX Manager Kevin Martin admitted the city could do a better job of communicating the value proposition for tech projects such as Replica to residents.

''I think that's on us to really figure out how we better communicate,'' he said. ''How innovations around data and technology can make your life better and how you need to work with us to make sure that things that happen with data and technology don't make your life worse.''

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Insider: Google ''is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.'' Google Head of Responsible Innovation Says Elizabeth Warren ''misguided'' on ''breaking up Google'' Google Exec Says Don't Break Us Up: ''smaller companies don't have the resources'' to ''prevent next Trump situation'' Insider Says PragerU And Dave Rubin Content Suppressed, Targeted As ''Right-Wing'' LEAKED Documents Highlight ''Machine Learning Fairness'' and Google's Practices to Make Search Results ''fair and equitable'' Documents Appear to Show ''Editorial'' Policies That Determine How Google Publishes News Insider: Google Violates ''letter of the law'' and ''spirit of the law'' on Section 230(New York City) '-- Project Veritas has released a new report on Google which includes undercover video of a Senior Google Executive, leaked documents, and testimony from a Google insider. The report appears to show Google's plans to affect the outcome of the 2020 elections and ''prevent'' the next ''Trump situation.''

The report includes undercover footage of longtime Google employee and Head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai saying:

''Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she's very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don't have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it's like a small company cannot do that.''

Said Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe:

''This is the third tech insider who has bravely stepped forward to expose the secrets of Silicon Valley. These new documents, supported by undercover video, raise questions of Google's neutrality and the role they see themselves fulfilling in the 2020 elections.''

Jen Gennai is the head of ''Responsible Innovation'' for Google, a sector that monitors and evaluates the responsible implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. In the video, Gennai says Google has been working diligently to ''prevent'' the results of the 2016 election from repeating in 2020:

''We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn't just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we're rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again.''

''We're also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?''

Google: Artificial Intelligence Is For A ''fair and equitable'' StateAccording to the insider, Machine Learning Fairness is one of the many tools Google uses to promote a political agenda. Documents leaked by a Google informant elaborate on Machine Learning Fairness and the ''algorithmic unfairness'' that AI product intervention aims to solve:

The insider showed Google search examples that show Machine Learning Fairness in action.

''The reason we launched our A.I. principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what's fair and what's equitable so we're like, well we are a big company, we're going to say it.'' '' Jen Gennai, Head Of Responsible Innovation, GoogleThe Google insider explained the impact of artificial intelligence and Machine Learning Fairness:

''They're going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda.''

Determining credible news and an editorial agenda. . .Additional leaked documents detail how Google defines and prioritizes content from different news publishers and how its products feature that content. One document, called the ''Fake News-letter'' explains Google's goal to have a ''single point of truth'' across their products.

Another document received by Project Veritas explains the ''News Ecosystem'' which mentions ''editorial guidelines'' that appear to be determined and administered internally by Google. These guidelines control how content is distributed and displayed on their site.

The leaked documents appear to show that Google makes news decisions about what news they promote and distribute on their site.

Comments made by Gennai raise similar questions. In a conversation with Veritas journalists, Gennai explains that ''conservative sources'' and ''credible sources'' don't always coincide according to Google's editorial practices.

''We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we're unfair to conservatives because we're choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don't necessarily overlap with conservative sources '...''

The insider shed additional light on how YouTube demotes content from influencers like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool:

''What YouTube did is they changed the results of the recommendation engine. And so what the recommendation engine is it tries to do, is it tries to say, well, if you like A, then you're probably going to like B. So content that is similar to Dave Rubin or Tim Pool, instead of listing Dave Rubin or Tim Pool as people that you might like, what they're doing is that they're trying to suggest different, different news outlets, for example, like CNN, or MSNBC, or these left leaning political outlets.''

Internal Google Document: ''People Like Us Are Programmed'' An additional document Project Veritas obtained, titled ''Fair is Not the Default'' says ''People (like us) are programmed'' after the results of machine learning fairness. The document describes how ''unconscious bias'' and algorithms interact.

Veritas is the ''Only Way''Said the insider:

''The reason why I came to Project Veritas is that you're the only one I trust to be able to be a real investigative journalist. Investigative journalist is a dead career option, but somehow, you've been able to make it work. And because of that I came to Project Veritas because I knew that this was the only way that this story would be able to get out to the public.''

''I mean, this is a behemoth, this is a Goliath, I am but a David trying to say that the emperor has no clothes. And, um, being a small little ant I can be crushed, and I am aware of that. But, this is something that is bigger than me, this is something that needs to be said to the American public.''

Project Veritas intends to continue investigating abuses in big tech companies and encourages more Silicon Valley insiders to share their stories through their Be Brave campaign.

As of publishing, Google did not respond to Project Veritas' request for comment. Additional leaked Google documents can be viewed HERE.

Other insider investigations can be viewed here:

Facebook insider speaks outPinterest insider leaks documents to Veritas (Big tech insiders can reach out to Project Veritas here to help expose similar newsworthy wrongdoing.)

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 12:24

Follow Matt on TwitterSocialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claims that it's a ''consensus'' that she is correct about her ''concentration camp'' remarks and falsely claims that the United States operated concentration camps during World War II

I'm not even going to sugar coat this. This is going to be the dumbest thing you watch all day. She's an absolute moron.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doubles down on her stupidity and says that the United States even operated concentration camps during World War II.

I'm not kidding, watch the video below.

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claims that it's a ''consensus'' that she is correct about her ''concentration camp'' remarks and falsely claims that the United States operated concentration camps during World War II pic.twitter.com/nMZtQEkKhK

'-- Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) June 19, 2019How has she not been reprimanded or removed from the United States Congress? It's one thing to be a fool, but to be a fool that attacks those who've been wiped out by mass genocide, that's another story my friends.

Do you think AOC should be removed from Congress? Comment below.

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 11:17

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 10:54

Log in Sign up CNN @ CNN The US women's national soccer team has tentatively agreed to go to mediation after the World Cup ends over their pay discrimination lawsuit. The players are suing for wages more in line with the men's national team.

cnn.it/2J1Drre pic.twitter.com/ijdUJsdPm4 3:47 AM - 24 Jun 2019 Twitter by: CNN @CNN Elena Hudson @ ElenaHu45173631

5m Replying to

@CNN Finally..it's about time

View conversation · A Fitz @ afitz66

4m Replying to

@CNN Next: the LFL sues to get paid like the NFL.

View conversation · Steve Watt @ SteveWa15674992

4m Replying to

@CNN Look...I reason you are paid less...is because less people watch you play soccer...Do I have to get my calculator out?!

View conversation · Chunkyness @ ChunkyTWshngtn

2m Replying to

@CNN Is there a revenue difference between the men's and women's league?

View conversation · Robert Cocking @ RobertCocking1

2m Replying to

@CNN Never heard as much nonsense in my life, stupidity at its finest. Do we need to pay Michael Smith at the local pub as much as beyonce?

View conversation · 1DayBetter @ tontonlove

2m Replying to

@CNN For a moment I thought I saw arbitration.Mediation - good.Forced, secretive arbitration - usually not good for the party w/ lesser power & others harmed by similar conduct.

View conversation · Rob Kort @ kort_rob

1m Replying to

@CNN AWESOME ''¤''¤They're better then the men's team...deserve equal pay, if not more

View conversation · RANGERBRAVO @ RANGEBRAVO

1m Replying to

@CNN I want everyone to get paid fairly and equally but the women's World Cup is not as exciting to watch

View conversation · realkenpark @ KenParkDerry

1m Replying to

@CNN The

#USA women

#mustwin.

View conversation · Rob Kort @ kort_rob

1m Replying to

@afitz66 @CNN Depends on revenue...but percentage should be the same.

View conversation · Ndifreke Archibong @ Archtwitz

57s Replying to

@CNN This is appalling. Nigeria will always be in the news for the same ugly things repeatedly, putting no measures to correct it. And this is enough reason to weigh the super falcons down and may not put in their very best.

View conversation · Robert Cocking @ RobertCocking1

57s Replying to

@CNN Challenge the men to a game and if they manage to lose by less than 10 goals, they may have a case

View conversation · Robert Cocking @ RobertCocking1

22s Replying to

@kort_rob @CNN Don't be so stupid

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Mon, 24 Jun 2019 10:02

Log in Sign up Adam Schiff @ RepAdamSchiff The Trump Administration argues that the current treatment of detained children is perfectly acceptable. Why don't they spend a week at a facility sleeping on a concrete floor with an aluminum blanket and see if they still find it so consistent with American values?

pic.twitter.com/yQKkrykBox 9:30 AM - 23 Jun 2019 Twitter by: Adam Schiff @RepAdamSchiff Enter a topic, @name, or fullname

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by: Alex Caprariello , Matthew Prendergast

Posted:

Jun 22, 2019 / 01:15 PM CDT / Updated:

Jun 22, 2019 / 10:17 PM CDTAUSTIN (KXAN) '-- Just when you thought Austin couldn't possibly hold any more scooters, a new company is hitting the scene.

RELATED: Newly passed Austin scooter rules crack down on misbehaving riders

Skip, a California based company, already has its electronic scooters in two cities: San Francisco and Washington D.C. The company is the latest company to bring two wheels to these city streets. It will bring 500 more by Friday.

Skip unveiled their scooters at the Scooter Safety Summit in downtown Austin. The summit was hosted by Austin City Council Member Kathie Tovo to help educate people on proper e-scooter rules and safety requirements.

Multiple scooter companies attended the event as well as representatives from the Austin Transportation Department, Austin Police Department, Austin Parks and Recreation Department.

''Austin is a great choice to expand our services and we're really excited to be here,'' said Greg Stewart, the operations manager for Skip.

''We have worked hard with Austin and city council to ensure that we will be operating as a partnership rather than a company coming in and dropping scooters off,'' Stewart said.

That'll total eight companies with wheels on the ground, with two more on the way. Transportation companies' Razor and Wind Mobility have both been approved to launch in Austin. That'll add 700 more scooters to the market.

The summit was held at Kathie Tovo's District 9 office. Tovo has the highest scooter rate in her district.

''They want to continue operating here and have been really responsive to the ways Austin is regulating their appropriate use,'' Tovo said.

Austinites can expect the new scooters on the streets starting Monday. By the end of the week, Skip is expecting to have 500 new scooters riding through Austin.

The fact of the matter is, people have really enjoyed the ride so far. City data shows Austinites have taken over four million scooter trips since the initiative launched last year.

While Tovo says she hears concerns about a lack of parking, sidewalk clutter and danger to pedestrians and drivers, she thinks there's still room to grow.

''Over time, this will probably balance out as we get a sense of what our market can bare.''

Austin's City Council is currently working with the companies to find a way to limit the speed and usage of the scooters in certain sections of the city, a term called geo-fencing. It's already being used on the UT campus. At this point, the technology isn't developed yet to implement it elsewhere.

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Sun, 23 Jun 2019 21:20

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''We need to talk about the problem with headlines,'' says

@BrianStelter. ''We are 2 1/2 years into the Trump presidency and news outlets are still putting Trump's far-fetched and false assertions right in the headlines and sometimes right on the TV banners.''

pic.twitter.com/nfDOH0qrM0