Trump administration weighing retaliatory action against Iran after Saudi oil attack – CNBC
Trump administration weighing retaliatory action against Iran after Saudi oil attack – CNBC

That could entail a strike by Saudi Arabia, whose oil facilities were hit Sunday in an unprecedented attack, that the U.S. would support with intelligence, targeting information and surveillance capabilities — but without the U.S. actually firing any weapons at Iran, one person familiar with the planning said.

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Still, in the wake of Sunday’s attack, U.S. military planners have revisited a long-identified list of potential Iranian targets that could constitute a proportional response. Those include a strike on Iran’s Abadan oil refinery, one of the world’s largest, or Kharg Island, Iran’s biggest oil export facility. Attacks on either location would significantly impede Iran’s ability to process and sell oil, which the Trump administration has already been working to restrict after pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.

Other possibilities include hitting missile launch sites, bases or other assets belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite Iranian military unit blamed for much of Iran’s paramilitary operations against adversaries outside of the country.

There were no indications that any U.S. military action was imminent, and officials said that no decision has been made. But the Defense Department is also working through options to increase its presence in the region by sending more forces and military assets to the Persian Gulf, officials familiar with the planning said.

Trump’s desire for more options comes amid growing confidence by the U.S. intelligence community that Iran was behind Sunday’s unprecedented attack on Saudi oil facilities. Some of that intelligence pointing to Iran as the culprit has now been made available to U.S. senators in a classified reading room, senators and their aides said Tuesday.

“I’m, like, 100 percent convinced,” Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said after reading the intelligence report. He said the intelligence made available was about three pages long. “It’s very brief, which means to me it’s pretty cut and dry.”

Although Trump has both he and the Defense Department are deeply reluctant to get drawn into a military conflict with Iran. Those concerns have prompted a renewed look at non-military responses to Iran, such as a covert cyber action or increased sanctions that would be coordinated with other countries.

Bradley Bowman, a former Army officer and Senate national security aide, said the goal for U.S. military planners as they review longstanding options should be to re-establish the threat of deterrence without inflicting significant Iranian casualties, which could be exploited by Iran’s government.

“Clearly those who conducted this attack were not deterred. That means inflicting pain,” said Bowman, now a senior director at the hawkish think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “But we want that pain to be inflicted in a wise way that does not increase the credibility in the eyes of the Iranian people of a regime that is not credible.”

Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/trump-administration-weighing-action-against-iran-after-saudi-oil-attack.html

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Trump administration to revoke California’s power to set stricter auto emissions standards – The Washington Post
Trump administration to revoke California’s power to set stricter auto emissions standards – The Washington Post

Juliet Eilperin

Brady Dennis

September 17 at 9:44 PM

The Trump administration plans this week to revoke California’s long-standing right to set stricter air pollution standards for cars and light trucks, the latest step in a broad campaign to undermine Obama-era policies aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, two senior administration officials said.

The move threatens to set in motion a massive legal battle between California and the federal government, plunge automakers into a prolonged period of uncertainty and create turmoil in the nation’s auto market.

The Environmental Protection Agency declined to comment on the matter. But in a speech Tuesday to the National Automobile Dealers Association, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler made his intentions clear.

“We embrace federalism and the role of the states, but federalism does not mean that one state can dictate standards for the nation,” he said.

Already, 13 states and the District of Columbia have vowed to adopt California’s standards if they diverge from the federal government’s, as have several major automakers. California leaders on Tuesday said they will fight any challenge to their autonomy.

“While the White House has abdicated its responsibility to the rest of the world on cutting emissions and fighting global warming, California has stepped up,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said. “It’s a move that could have devastating consequences for our kids’ health and the air we breathe, if California were to roll over. But we will not.”

Echoing the governor, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who has sued the Trump administration on a range of issues, vowed to head back to court, saying California’s clean car standards are “achievable, science-based, and a boon for hard-working American families and public health.”

The official announcement had been scheduled for Wednesday, during President Trump’s trip to California, but after the news broke Tuesday, the administration postponed the policy rollout by at least a day.

Trump’s move is likely to be unpopular nationwide and in California, with Americans widely supportive of stricter fuel efficiency standards. A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Friday found 66 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s plan to freeze fuel efficiency standards rather than enforce the Obama administration’s targets for 2025.

A nearly identical 67 percent majority says they support state governments setting stricter fuel efficiency targets than the federal government.

Among Californians, the survey found 68 percent oppose Trump’s relaxation of mileage standards, while 61 percent support California’s stricter standards.

Emissions from transportation, including cars and trucks, are the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States.

The standoff began last year, when the EPA and Transportation Department proposed taking away California’s waiver as part of a rule that would freeze mileage standards for these vehicles at roughly 37 miles per gallon from 2020 to 2026. The Obama-era standards had required these fleets to average nearly 51 mpg by model year 2025.

In July, California forged an agreement with four companies — Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW of North America — under which they pledged to produce fleets averaging nearly 50 mpg by model year 2026. The Justice Department has opened an inquiry into whether the accord violated antitrust law.

[Justice Dept. launches antitrust probe of automakers over their fuel efficiency deal with California]

One of the central arguments in the White House’s proposal is that the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act gives only the federal government the right to set fuel standards, said the two senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement was not yet public.

By seeking to strip California of its autonomy, Trump officials are forcing auto companies to choose whether they will side with the state or with the federal government. As part of July’s deal with the California Air Resources Board, the four carmakers agreed to support the state’s right to set its own tailpipe standards.

Environmentalists promised to join California in its legal opposition.

“There’s nothing in the Clean Air Act or EPA regulations providing for this unprecedented action,” Martha Roberts, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in an interview. “The legislative history is explicit about broad authority for California. This is very well established legal authority that’s firmly anchored in the Clean Air Act.”

Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, predicted in an interview that the move actually could make it easier for automakers to embrace the White House’s proposed rollback of gas mileage standards.

“The only reason the automakers are not on board with Trump is because they’re afraid of the retaliation from California if Trump loses,” Lewis said.

It is unclear who would prevail in a legal fight over California’s waiver. The state’s air regulators have consistently argued that they are limiting carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, rather than overtly setting mileage standards.

Margo Oge, who directed the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality from 1994 to 2012, said in an interview that California can make a strong case that it needs to curb these pollutants because climate change worsens ozone, which helps create smog.

“California has demonstrated that by getting a greenhouse gas emissions waiver, it can also reduce ozone pollution, because the data is very strong,” she said.

But even Obama administration officials acknowledged that efforts to curb CO2 emissions from autos are inextricably linked to stricter mileage standards. The 2010 rule published by EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration noted that nearly 95 percent of emissions from cars and light trucks stem from motor fuel combustion.

Auto industry officials said they continue to hope that federal and state officials can compromise on a single national standard, despite no evidence of a deal in sight.

“Automakers have said many times that we support year-over-year increases in fuel economy standards that align with marketplace realities,” said Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, “and we support one national program as the best path to preserve good auto jobs and keep new vehicles affordable for more Americans.”

In an interview with The Post last week, Wheeler said the Trump administration plans to separately finalize scaled-back mileage standards for the nation’s autos by the end of the year. He said he remained optimistic that the industry would embrace the latest version of the rollback. “I’m still hopeful that people will see that the changes we made from the proposal to the final [rule], that everyone would get on board and be supportive of what we’re doing,” Wheeler said.

California’s long-standing ability to write its own emissions standards has seldom been questioned in Washington. In part, that’s because of the history that led to the state’s unique authority.

Smog in Los Angeles had become crippling at times throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. As scientists focused on motor vehicle exhaust as a key culprit, state officials worked to develop the nation’s first vehicle emissions standards in 1966.

The following year, the state’s new Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, established the California Air Resources Board to undertake a statewide effort to address widespread air pollution.

As it crafted landmark clean-air legislation for the country, Congress granted California special status, saying the state could request a “waiver” to require stricter tailpipe standards if it provided a compelling reason for why they were needed. The auto industry, then as now, expressed concern over the idea of having to meet different standards in different states, but California eventually prevailed.

[Major automakers strike climate deal with California, rebuffing Trump on proposed mileage freeze]

Congress has repeatedly reaffirmed that right. And in 1977, lawmakers said other states could legally adopt California’s stricter car emissions standards.

Over time, emissions control strategies first adopted by California — catalytic converters, regulations on oxides of nitrogen, and “check engine” systems, to name a few — have become standard across the country.

In late 2007, the George W. Bush administration denied California a waiver on the grounds that capping carbon dioxide emissions did not address a specific air pollution problem for the state.

“The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution, not a confusing patchwork of state rules, to reduce America’s climate footprint from vehicles,” said Stephen L. Johnson, the EPA’s administrator at the time.

California, along with other states, challenged the denial in court. In July 2009, after President Barack Obama took office, the EPA granted the state its waiver.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/trump-administration-to-revoke-californias-power-to-set-stricter-auto-emissions-standards/2019/09/17/79af2ee0-d97b-11e9-a688-303693fb4b0b_story.html

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Israel election: Exit polls show Netanyahu trails rival Gantz – Aljazeera.com
Israel election: Exit polls show Netanyahu trails rival Gantz – Aljazeera.com

Tel Aviv, Israel – Polls have closed in Israel and ballots are being counted after millions took part in an election widely seen as a referendum on the fate of incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister in July, is seeking a record fifth term in office. He is competing against his toughest challenger in years, former army chief Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Blue and White party. 

According to the first round of exit polls, Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition bloc have failed to secure the 61 seat majority they needed.

Two exit polls put Gantz’s party in a narrow lead. A Channel 12 exit poll said it would win 34 seats, with Netanyahu’s Likud one seat behind. The poll had Arab Joint List on 11 seats with eight for former Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu. 


Meanwhile, an exit poll on Channel 13 put Likud at 31 seats, trailing Gantz’s party by two seats.

Speaking to cheering supporters in Tel Aviv early this morning Gantz said it was necessary to wait for the official results, but was clearly confident.

“Netanyahu has not been successful in what he set out to do,” he told the crowd. “We have proved that the idea is Blue and White; that we established a little over a year ago was successful and is here to stay.”

Speaking shortly afterwards, Netanyahu took the stage at Likud’s party headquarters in Tel Aviv. 

He told his supporters that coalition talks had already begun.

“Israel is entitled to a strong government, a stable government, a government which ensures Israel is the nation of the Jewish people, and that it cannot, will not, be a government which is formed of parties which hate the nation,” he said, apologising for a croaky voice and sipping on water.

Al Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett, speaking from the Likud headquarters, said Netanyahu’s speech was one of “bruised defiance” and that he would face significant hurdles in building a coalition.

“His grip on power has weakened,” Fawcett said.

Some 31 parties were competing for the 120 seats in the country’s 22nd Knesset. 

Turnout rises 

Although many observers expected election fatigue to set in as voters headed to the polls for the second time in less than six months, early turnout was the highest in decades and long queues formed during the afternoon on Tuesday outside polling stations in the capital Tel Aviv.

The more than 11,000 polling stations across the country closed at 10pm local time (19:00 GMT).

Israel’s election commission says the final turnout was 69.4 percent, compared with 68.5 percent in April, with a total of 4,440,141 votes cast.

Netanyahu rallied his supporters throughout the day, using various social media platforms, phone messages, and direct engagement with voters on the streets of several major cities.

“We are fighting to the last minute. Every vote is important. Get out and vote for Likud. Bring everyone you can to the ballot box,” Netanyahu told his followers via Twitter in the final hour before voting closed.

Netanyahu is also facing a pretrial hearing in connection with three separate corruption cases – bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He denies wrongdoing.

In a statement, Israeli police said they detained or arrested 20 people for various offences, including one man in the Negev Region who allegedly tried to disrupt voting at a polling station.

Preliminary results will be announced on Wednesday with final results on September 25.

Netanyahu vs Gantz

Coalition governments are the norm in Israel as no single party has won a majority of seats in the Knesset and the negotiations ahead are likely to be difficult.

Lieberman has said he would not join an alliance that included ultra-Orthodox parties – Netanyahu’s traditional partners.

Gantz has ruled out participating in an administration with Netanyahu, if the veteran politican is indicted on the corruption charges.

Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin will decide who will be given the mandate to form a new government – usually the leader of the party that wins the most seats.


If Rivlin thinks this person is unlikely to garner enough support from smaller parties to control at least 61 seats of the Knesset, he may give the task to someone else.

Fawcett said it was likely to take several months of manoeuvring before the next government could be formed, and noted that nobody wanted to see a third election.

“It’s going to be an extremely confusing and intriguing period coming up,” he said.  

Israel may even find itself in a unity government for the first time since Netanyahu came to power in 2009.

“If Netanyahu doesn’t clear the 61-seat threshold tonight, Rivlin may still give him the mandate to form a government,” Eli Nissan, an Israeli political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

“But if he fails to form a government within the next few weeks – like what happened after the April vote – the president may give Gantz the opportunity to do that instead. If he fails as well, the president may push for a unity government.”

Palestinian vote

According to experts, voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel was expected to be higher than the April vote which saw only 49.2 percent of eligible voters among Palestinians cast their ballot. 

“There was a higher voter turnout among Palestinian citizens this time, most of whom voted for the Arab Joint List,” said Haifa-based analyst Diana Buttu.


“We also saw a large number of Jewish voters support the Joint List,” she added referring to the alliance of four Palestinian parties which split into two competing groups in April, but regrouped again in advance of the September election.

Oudeh Bisharat, a Nazareth-based political analyst, agreed.

“Palestinian voters went out in bigger numbers this time because the Arab Joint List was united again and because they wanted to challenge Netanyahu’s racism and incitement against them,” Bisharat told Al Jazeera.

Source Article from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/09/israel-election-exit-polls-show-netanyahu-trail-rival-gantz-190917190950163.html

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Cokie Roberts Dies; Veteran Broadcast Journalist Was 75 – The New York Times
Cokie Roberts Dies; Veteran Broadcast Journalist Was 75 – The New York Times

“I was very well aware of the influence of these women,” she said, adding, “I very much grew up with a sense, from them, that women could do anything, and that they could sort of do a whole lot of things at the same time.”

It was a theme she teased out in her 1998 book, “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.”

“For years my mother kept telling me that it’s nothing new to have women as soldiers, as diplomats, as politicians, as revolutionaries, as explorers, as founders of large institutions, as leaders in business; that the women of my generation did not invent the wheel,” she wrote. “In the past women might not have had the titles, she painstakingly and patiently explained, but they did the jobs that fit those descriptions.”

Ms. Roberts attended Catholic schools in New Orleans and Bethesda, Md., and graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1964 with a degree in political science. In 1966 she married Steven V. Roberts, who was a correspondent then for The New York Times. Journalism was a largely male world at the time, something driven home to her when she went job hunting.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/obituaries/cokie-roberts-dead.html

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Fox News twists Kavanaugh scandal into an attack on the New York Times – Vox.com
Fox News twists Kavanaugh scandal into an attack on the New York Times – Vox.com

A New York Times story from over the weekend contains a third, previously undisclosed sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The report was later updated to make it clear the new allegation is not as strongly corroborated as readers of the first version of the story may have been led to believe. Fox News is capitalizing on the revision to dismiss all the sexual misconduct allegations Kavanaugh faces — and doing so in a misleading way.

Over the past 24 hours, Fox News hosts and reporters have described changes the New York Times made to Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly’s story as a “correction” at least a dozen times. This supercut of clips illustrates how the network is framing things:

But there’s just one problem — the Times did not, in fact, “correct” anything.

To make a “correction” to a story indicates something was factually wrong. The newspaper did not acknowledge anything of this sort. Instead, the Times story — based on a forthcoming book Pogrebin and Kelly are writing about the Kavanaugh allegations — was updated to say that friends of the student who may have been assaulted say she does not remember the alleged incident.

Here’s the relevant passage of the Times piece, with the clause that was added in the second version in bold:

We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier; the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.

To be clear, the change is a significant one. If the student doesn’t recall the episode, the accusation that Kavanaugh and others may have assaulted her is arguably weaker than if she did. But, contrary to what Fox News would have you believe, the change to the Times story does not prove that the alleged incident didn’t happen.

As the above excerpt details, one of Kavanaugh’s classmates, Max Stier, claims to have witnessed the alleged misconduct, and told the FBI and US senators about his recollections. The allegation also tracks closely with a separate sexual misconduct allegation made by another Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s, Deborah Ramirez, who came forward during Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS confirmation process last year to accuse him of thrusting his exposed penis at her, prompting her to inadvertently touch it, during a drunken college party.

Furthermore, in a Q&A piece addressing criticisms of the Times’s presentation of the story, Times deputy editorial page director James Dao notes that Pogrebin and Kelly corroborated Stier’s allegation “with two government officials, who said they found it credible.”

A fixation on the Times’s process has helped obscure new information about existing allegations

Ramirez’s accusation was the second sexual misconduct allegation made against Kavanaugh last year. It came on the heels of an allegation from Christine Blasey Ford shortly after Kavanaugh’s nomination, accusing him of sexually assaulting her during a party when the two of them were high school acquaintances in Maryland.

In the New York Times article adapted from their forthcoming book, Pogrebin and Kelly write that months of reporting indicated to them that both Ford and Ramirez’s accusations are credible. From their piece:

But while we found Dr. Ford’s allegations credible during a 10-month investigation, Ms. Ramirez’s story could be more fully corroborated. During his Senate testimony, Mr. Kavanaugh said that if the incident Ms. Ramirez described had occurred, it would have been “the talk of campus.” Our reporting suggests that it was.

At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time.

The significance of this part of the Times piece has been obscured by controversy surrounding the Times’s revision — one Pogrebin attributed during an MSNBC appearance to “the haste of the editing process,” with Kelly adding that their book “has a much fuller context.” Fox News, however, has already twisted the story into an opportunity to attack the New York Times in particular, and media outlets that try to hold Trump accountable in general.

On Tuesday morning, for instance, Fox News host Sandra Smith’s interviewed Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), largely about the Kavanaugh story. But instead of engaging with the substance of any of the allegations, Smith and Tillis teamed up to trash the New York Times, with Tillis dismissing the story as “another liberal media mob hit” and Smith falsely characterizing the piece as “corrected” and “botched.” This has been the vogue talking point both during the day and on Fox News’s primetime shows — to cite another example, on Monday night, host Sean Hannity accused the Times of “intentionally and willfully” misleading its readers, despite the fact that the Times has not retracted its reporting about the new allegation.

It should be noted that Fox News is not alone among media outlets in conflating “correction” with clarification. And certainly the New York Times bears responsibility for not being careful to provide the full context for the allegation from the start. But the network is the most prominent voice among using the “editors’ note” to cast doubt upon all the allegations Kavanaugh faces — a tactic that has been taken up by the president himself. Fox News’s handling of the situation illustrates how willing the network is to seize on any opportunity to defend not only the president, but those aligned with him — even if its anchors must distort the facts to do so.

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Source Article from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/17/20870689/kavanaugh-scandal-new-york-times-fox-news

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Trump cringingly courts Latino vote: “Who do you like more: the country or the Hispanics?” – Slate
Trump cringingly courts Latino vote: “Who do you like more: the country or the Hispanics?” – Slate

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Source Article from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/trump-latino-hispanic-vote-new-mexico-rally-speech-video-adviser.html

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Protesters Want Gates Foundation To Rescind Award To India’s Modi, Citing Human Rights Concerns : Goats and Soda – NPR
Protesters Want Gates Foundation To Rescind Award To India’s Modi, Citing Human Rights Concerns : Goats and Soda – NPR

In this March 28 photo, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a campaign rally in Meerut. One of his efforts as prime minister has been to construct millions of toilets to reduce open defecation.

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In this March 28 photo, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a campaign rally in Meerut. One of his efforts as prime minister has been to construct millions of toilets to reduce open defecation.

Altaf Qadri/AP

A protest is mounting over one of the recipients of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Goals Award, to be presented next week in New York City, as part of events surrounding the U.N. General Assembly. The award is given to individuals who have contributed to efforts to improve the lives of the poor.

The individual is India Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is being cited for building toilets for millions of rural Indians as part of his Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission). His award was announced by an Indian government minister on Twitter earlier this month but the other recipients have not yet been made public.

Activists are calling for the Foundation to rescind the award because of Modi’s human rights record.

The protesters say that Modi’s government has created a humanitarian crisis in Kashmir, which has been under lockdown for six weeks. And Modi has long been criticized by human rights defenders for inciting violence against minorities, silencing dissent and undermining human rights.

On Tuesday, a dozen demonstrators with Stop Genocide, a project of the American human rights group Justice For All, marched to the Gates Foundation headquarters in Seattle. They delivered a petition with more than 100,000 signatures, many from people of South Asian descent. In addition, three Nobel Peace Prize winners — Shirin Ebadi, Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman and Mairead Maguire — co-signed a protest letter addressed to Bill and Melinda Gates last week.

The petition states that it is “inconsistent to give a humanitarian award to a man whose nickname is the ‘Butcher of Gujarat’ ” — a reference to the 2002 massacre in which more than 1,000 people were killed in anti-Muslim riots. At that time, Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister, and many hold him responsible for the violence.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, lawyers and human rights activists Suchitra Vijayan and Arjun Singh Sethi warned of the danger of honoring Modi. “This award would legitimize his policies and embolden the ethnonationalist forces he has championed,” they wrote. “If the Gates Foundation really wants to amplify sanitation efforts in India, it should give the award to community workers instead of a far-right nationalist.”

But the Gates Foundation is planning to go ahead with the Modi honor. Asked to comment by NPR, the foundation provided this statement: “Prime Minister Narendra Modi is receiving an award at the Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the progress India is making in improving sanitation, as part of its drive toward achievement of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.” [Editor’s note: The Gates Foundation is a funder of NPR and this blog.]

Since 2014, Modi’s Clean India Mission has worked to eliminate open defecation and promote cleanliness and hygiene in rural areas. Those aims reflect the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations, with 2030 as a target date. Open defecation is directly connected with the incidence of diarrheal diseases.

According to Clean India Mission’s website, the project has built over 10 million toilets.

“Before the Swachh Bharat mission, over 500 million people in India did not have access to safe sanitation, and now, the majority do,” wrote the Gates Foundation to NPR in a statement.

But Modi’s toilet campaign has also come in for criticism. A 2017 report from the U.N.’s Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner gave a mixed review. The report found instances of “some aggressive and abusive practices” from the authorities to coerce people to stop practicing open defecation. This includes revoking food ration cards, cutting off electricity services and publicly shaming or harassing people.

The report also noted that in some “open defecation free” certified areas, elderly people reported that they still practiced open defecation because they preferred it. And only 61% of schools in 2016 had available and usable girls’ toilets, even though the government reported that it had built separate toilets for girls and boys in every school from 2014 to 2015.

Indian government officials rejected the findings, saying they were “either factually incorrect, based on incomplete information or grossly misrepresent the situation.”

Despite the concerns raised by the U.N. report, Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, D.C., says that on the whole, the Clean India Mission has made great strides in tackling the country’s sanitation problem.

“To be very honest, this is the first time that I have seen some tangible change,” says Mukherjee, who has worked on social programs in India for the past 15 years, including efforts to improve access to toilets in schools. “It was absolutely abysmal, the state of sanitation in the rural areas and cities. [Clean India Mission] has turned sanitation into a national movement.”

Asked whether it is fair for the Gates Foundation to give the award to Modi because of his human rights record, Mukherjee says “it’s difficult to answer.”

“The Gates award is about his narrow work on sanitation. And Modi’s government has done more work to improve sanitation in India than any other government before. The government has achieved some measure of success,” he says. “I don’t see why not.”

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/09/17/761664492/gates-foundations-humanitarian-award-to-indias-modi-is-sparking-outrage

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Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski proves to be an uncooperative witness for House Democrats in hearing – USA TODAY
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski proves to be an uncooperative witness for House Democrats in hearing – USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – House Democrats resumed Tuesday what they call an impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump and immediately ran into a roadblock as his former campaign manger, Corey Lewandowski, largely refused to answer lawmakers’ questions and two other Trump aides refused to appear at all.

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Lewandowski to describe what special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded were attempts to thwart the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Investigators said Trump instructed Lewandowski to pass on an order to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prevent meddling in elections, but he never delivered it.

The combative campaign operative, who remains friendly with Trump, instantly proved an uncooperative witness for Democrats trying to shine a spotlight on Trump’s conduct during the investigation that clouded the first two years of his presidency. He quarreled with Nadler and refused to answer a succession of questions about his interactions with Trump. 

“Mr. Lewandowski when you refuse to answer these questions, you are obstructing the work of our committee,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said. “The president is intent on obstructing our legitimate oversight. You are aiding in that obstruction.”

Lewandowski, who was flanked by White House lawyers during the hearing despite never working for the executive branch, told lawmakers that he would not answer questions about conversations with the president if they strayed beyond the special counsel’s report, and sometimes ducked questions about what was in it, too. And while he largely acknowledged that the report’s depiction of him was accurate, he declined even to read portions of it aloud.

Instead, lawmakers traded insults and accusations with him and one another. Lewandowski said Democrats were pursuing their investigation of Trump because “they hate this president more than they love their country.” And in the midst of the hearing, he tweeted a link to a website promoting his potential Senate campaign in New Hampshire.

The committee also summoned two former White House aides, Rick Dearborn and Rob Porter, but they were instructed by the White House not to show up at the hearing.

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Lewandowski said in his opening statement that it was “very unfair” that committee Democrats unilaterally changed the rules a week ago to make the hearing part of an impeachment proceeding. “We as a nation would be better served if elected officials like you concentrated your efforts to combat the true crises facing our country as opposed to going down rabbit holes like this hearing,” Lewandowski’s statement said.

Trump tweeted praise for Lewandowski’s “beautiful Opening Statement.”

The hearing opened with feisty exchanges. Lewandowski stalled at Nadler’s first questions, saying he hadn’t brought a copy of the Mueller report to the hearing, to refresh his memory. Republicans accused Nadler of violating House rules by taking more than his allotted five minutes, but the committee voted 19-13 to allow Nadler to continue. The top Republican, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, moved to adjourn the hearing but was defeated on a 19-12 vote.

When questioning resumed, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and Lewandowski spoke over each other repeatedly as she asked whether the president turned to him after others such as McGahn refused to hinder Mueller’s inquiry.

“He calls you in to do his dirty work,” Jackson Lee said.

But Lewandowski declined to speak about his conversations with Trump or even say how many times he had spoken with the president in office.

“I will not disclose any conversation I’ve had with the president,” Lewandowski said.

Lewandowski was introduced as a sworn law enforcement officer in New Hampshire. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., asked whether it concerned him that Trump asked him to do something illegal.

“I didn’t think the president asked me to do anything illegal,” Lewandowski said.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone told the committee in a letter Monday that the White House directed Lewandowski not to speak about any communications with Trump beyond what is already in Mueller’s report, citing “long-settled principles protecting Executive Branch confidentiality interests.” Cipollone argued that the protections extended to people like Lewandowski, who spoke to the president but did not work for the government. 

Nadler sent a letter Tuesday to Cipollone saying such restrictions would “eviscerate this Committee’s oversight powers.” He called claims of “’absolute immunity’ as entirely without merit.” Nadler said no court decision entitled the president to confidentiality for communications with private political operatives such as Lewandowski.

“Together, these letters reflect a brazen effort by the Department of Justice and the White House to block all meaningful inquiry by this Committee into the President’s  possible violation of federal criminal law and other relevant misconduct,” Nadler said.

Former communications director Hope Hicks earlier refused to answer dozens of questions about her service in the administration and former White House counsel Don McGahn defied a subpoena for his testimony and documents. Trump has vowed to fight all subpoenas he contends represent Democratic harassment of his administration.

The hearing is the latest developing as House Democrats investigate Trump and his administration, to decide whether to recommend articles of impeachment against the president for possible obstruction of justice, abuse of power or unconstitutionally profiting from his namesake business while in office. The Judiciary Committee voted Sept. 10 to set rules for the investigation, such as allowing staffers to question witnesses.

Neither the committee nor the full House has adopted articles of impeachment accusing the president of wrongdoing, but Democrats say they are investigating to build a case. But Republican lawmakers have criticized the inquiry as “impeachment in drag,” in the phrase of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, for being all dressed up with nowhere to go. Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, called the effort a “faux impeachment” and a “charade” during a committee meeting to set rules for the inquiry. “I double-dog dare you to do it,” Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said of voting on articles of impeachment.

According to Mueller’s final report, Trump met one-on-one in the Oval Office in June 2017 with Lewandowski, a trusted adviser outside the government, and dictated a message to deliver to Sessions. Sessions had recused himself from the Russia investigation because he worked for Trump’s campaign. But the president said he wanted his attorney general to declare that the investigation was “very unfair,” that Trump had done nothing wrong and that Mueller should “move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections.”

The next month, Trump asked Lewandowski about the status of his message for Sessions to limit the investigation, according to the Mueller report. Lewandowski told the president that the message would be delivered soon. Hours after that meeting, Trump criticized Sessions in an interview with the New York Times, and then issued a series of tweets making it clear that Sessions’ job was in jeopardy.

Lewandowski did not want to deliver Trump’s message personally, so he asked Dearborn to deliver it to Sessions, according to the Mueller report. Dearborn, former deputy chief of staff for policy, was uncomfortable with the task and did not follow through, the report said.

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said questioning Lewandowski was “like a fish being cleaned with a spoon – it’s very hard to get an answer out of you.” But he asked whether Lewandowski was squeamish about delivering the message.

“You chickened out,” Johnson said.

“I went on vacation,” Lewandowski said to laughter. “I took my kids to the beach. That was my priority.”

More about clashes between Congress and President Donald Trump:

House panel subpoenas Corey Lewandowski, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager

House panel OKs 12 subpoenas for Trump associates, including Kushner, National Enquirer executives

What we learned from Robert Mueller: Seven hours, zero bombshells and everyone declares victory

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Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/09/17/corey-lewandowski-testify-president-trump-house-judiciary-impeachment-investigation/2313866001/

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Cokie Roberts, Longtime Washington Broadcaster, Dies at 75 – NPR
Cokie Roberts, Longtime Washington Broadcaster, Dies at 75 – NPR

Cokie Roberts was one of NPR’s most recognizable voices and is considered one of a handful of pioneering female journalists who helped shape the public broadcaster’s sound and culture. She died Tuesday.

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Cokie Roberts was one of NPR’s most recognizable voices and is considered one of a handful of pioneering female journalists who helped shape the public broadcaster’s sound and culture. She died Tuesday.

Ariel Zambelich/NPR

Veteran journalist Cokie Roberts, who joined an upstart NPR in 1978 and left an indelible imprint on the growing network with her coverage of Washington politics before later going to ABC News, has died. She was 75.

Roberts died Tuesday because of complications from breast cancer, according to a family statement.

A bestselling author and Emmy Award winner, Roberts was one of NPR’s most recognizable voices and is considered one of a handful of pioneering female journalists — along with Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer and Susan Stamberg — who helped shape the public broadcaster’s sound and culture at a time when few women held prominent roles in journalism.

Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts, photographed around 1979, were among the prominent female voices on NPR in its early years.

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Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts, photographed around 1979, were among the prominent female voices on NPR in its early years.

NPR

Having so many female voices at a national broadcaster was nothing short of revolutionary in the 1970s, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson recalled in an interview with The Daily Princetonian earlier this year.

“[W]e called them the Founding Mothers of NPR, or sometimes we called them the Fallopian Club,” she said.

Liasson said it wasn’t so much that NPR had a mission for gender equality but that the network’s pay, which was well below the commercial networks of the day, resulted in “a lot of really great women who were in prominent positions there and who helped other women.”

By the time Roberts joined ABC News in 1988 — while retaining a part-time role as a political commentator at NPR that she maintained until her death — women were increasingly commonplace at broadcast networks and newspapers.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, left, answers questions from ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts in Denver.

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British Prime Minister Tony Blair, left, answers questions from ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts in Denver.

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Roberts, the daughter of former U.S. representatives, grew up walking the halls of Congress and absorbing the personalities, folkways and behind-the-scenes machinations of the nation’s capital. She became a seasoned Washington insider who developed a distinctive voice as a reporter and commentator.

In a 2017 interview with Kentucky Educational Television, Roberts reflected on her long career.

“It is such a privilege — you have a front seat to history,” she said. “You do get used to it, and you shouldn’t, because it is a very special thing to be able to be in the room … when all kinds of special things are happening.”

Although she was the only member of her immediate family not to run for Congress, Roberts considered her role as a journalist and political analyst as her way of giving back.

“I do feel strongly that informing the voters about what’s going on, trying to explain it in ways that people can understand, and putting the issues out there is a form of participation,” Roberts told KET.

Political journalist George Will, who worked with Roberts on ABC’s This Week, said Roberts was not just born to the political class but was a natural inhabitant.

“She liked people on both sides of the aisle and had friends on both sides of the aisle,” Will told NPR. “If you don’t like the game of politics, I don’t see how you write about it well,” he said. “She liked the game of politics and she understood that it was a game.”

Born in New Orleans as Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs, she was given the nickname Cokie by her brother, Thomas, who had trouble pronouncing Corinne.

Roberts’ father was Thomas Hale Boggs Sr., a former Democratic majority leader of the House who served in Congress for more than three decades before he disappeared on a campaign flight in Alaska in 1972. Her mother, Lindy Claiborne Boggs, took her husband’s seat and served for 17 years. Lindy Boggs also served as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

Roberts split her time between Louisiana and Washington as a child and attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her first job was at the Washington television station WRC-TV, where she hosted a public affairs program called Meeting of Minds.

She married journalist Steven V. Roberts in 1966. After holding a number of other broadcast jobs, she and her husband moved in the early 1970s to Athens, Greece, where he worked for The New York Times and she filed radio stories as a freelance correspondent for CBS.

In 1977, Roberts and her family returned to Washington, where she took a job with a then-almost unknown NPR. She served as NPR’s congressional correspondent for more than 10 years. While in that role, she was also a contributor to PBS’s The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.

Roberts left NPR in 1988 to become a political correspondent for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. She was also a regular fill-in anchor for Ted Koppel on Nightline. From 1992 to 2002, Roberts co-anchored ABC News’ Sunday morning show This Week alongside Sam Donaldson.

Will said that although Washington is a “town of short leases,” with people constantly coming and going, Roberts represented the permanent Washington, a kind of figure who was constant through decades of political change: “The Washington not often denounced by people who denounce Washington because they don’t know it exists,” Will said. “Cokie represented the durable, ongoing Washington that is a custodian of the manners of the city and the sociability of the city that makes it really function.”

Roberts won numerous awards during her long career in journalism, including three Emmys and the Edward R. Murrow award. She was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame. She was recognized by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the 50 greatest women in the history of broadcasting.

“Much of Cokie Roberts’ fame and credibility resides in her image as a rough-and-trouble woman capable of giving as good as she gets in the equally rough-and-tumble world of male dominated politics,” Dan Nimmo wrote in Political Commentators in the United States in the 20th Century.

Roberts said she would often offer this advice to younger women navigating political journalism in Washington: “Duck and file,” Roberts said in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation.

“Don’t get all involved in the politics of your institution, or competition in your institution. Just do your work and get it on the air, and then people will see if you’re good,” she said.

Roberts was the author of six books, mostly recently Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868, which examined the role of powerful women in the Civil War era.

As a commentator, Roberts sometimes walked a line that threatened to eclipse her role as a dispassionate journalist. In a February 2016 op-ed co-authored with her husband, they called on “the rational wing” of the Republican Party to stop the nomination of Donald Trump.

“[Trump] is one of the least qualified candidates ever to make a serious run for the presidency,” Roberts and her husband wrote. “If he is nominated by a major party — let alone elected — the reputation of the United States would suffer a devastating blow around the world.”

In interviews, Roberts often said she might have run for public office herself but thought she would spare her journalist husband the difficulty of what could be an awkward dynamic.

“I have always felt semi-guilty about it. But I’ve sort of assuaged my guilt by writing about it and feeling like I’m educating people about the government and how to be good voters and good citizens,” Roberts told The Washington Post in March.

“In covering Congress, there’s plenty of times when I felt, you know, the mother line: I don’t care who started it, I’m stopping it. So, to be in a position where you could do that,” Roberts told the newspaper.

“It’s a great luxury to sit on the outside and analyze, or even give your opinion about how it could be fixed,” she said.

In a statement Tuesday, former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama called Roberts “a constant over forty years of a shifting media landscape and changing world, informing voters about the issues of our time and mentoring young journalists every step of the way.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Roberts’ death was “a great official loss for our nation and a deep personal loss for all who were blessed to call Cokie a friend.”

“Cokie Roberts was a trailblazer who forever transformed the role of women in the newsroom and in our history books,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Roberts is survived by her husband of 53 years; her two children, Lee Roberts and Rebecca Roberts; and six grandchildren.

NPR’s Barry Gordemer contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/761050916/cokie-roberts-pioneering-female-journalist-who-helped-shape-npr-dies-at-75

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Trump likely to bring up homelessness on trip to California – Los Angeles Times
Trump likely to bring up homelessness on trip to California – Los Angeles Times

President Trump is set to arrive in California on Tuesday with little clarity over his plans to address the state’s homeless crisis and growing doubts about how much the federal government could actually do to change conditions on the streets.

Trump is in the state for a two-day swing with stops for fundraising in Palo Alto, Beverly Hills and San Diego. Although there are no public events scheduled, he is likely to take on the issue of homelessness, which he has used in recent months to bash the deep-blue state in advance of the 2020 election.

Last week, officials from his administration spent several days in Los Angeles meeting with city and county officials and homeless advocates. To the dismay of some local officials, the administration has said little publicly about its plans. Some speculate that the goal is to clear homeless encampments by moving people into government-run shelters on federal land.

On Monday, the Trump administration floated a new goal: deregulation of the housing market to increase the supply of apartments and condos and homes.

Tom Philipson, acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, discussed a new report focusing on the failures of Los Angeles and other coastal cities — most of which are run by Democrats — to quell their rising homeless populations.

Through deregulation of the housing market, he said, homelessness in the United States would drop by 13% overall, 54% in San Francisco and 40% in Los Angeles. He declined to elaborate on those statistics and what “deregulation” might entail. He also declined to detail how the federal government might aid California and refused to address reports about using federal property for new homeless shelters.


“Current deliberations on our policy agenda going forward is not something that this report addresses, and I’m not going to address it today,” Philipson said on a conference call.

He also suggested that law enforcement should play a bigger role in addressing homelessness.

Still, legally, there are certain things the Trump administration cannot do.

“There is no legal basis to force people into shelters,” said Nisha Vyas, directing attorney of Public Counsel’s Homelessness Prevention Law Project. “The state doesn’t have the authority to seize people or their property and both the state and federal Constitution prohibit unlawful search and seizure.”

It is yet another example of a Trump policy that might appeal to his political base, but will be difficult, if not impossible, to implement.

In the past, such efforts have been the domain of local government, which, in recent years, have been prevented by the courts from using law enforcement to enforce “anti-camping” laws on city streets. These laws had been widely used as a cudgel to move homeless people from public spaces.

After a contentious debate, San Francisco in June instituted a pilot program, which allows the city to forcibly remove drug users with an obvious mental illness from the streets. But most homeless people don’t meet the threshold.

Last week, representatives from the Department of Justice discussed possible “workarounds” with Los Angeles law enforcement union officials to deal with court settlements, rulings and lawsuits that have limited the way the LAPD can carry out enforcement efforts at encampments.

Of California’s roughly 130,000 homeless people, some 90,000 were unsheltered as of last year. Within the city of Los Angeles, the number jumped in 2019 to more than 36,000, a 16% increase. In the county, the number is just shy of 59,000 — a 12% bump over last year.

Politicians have been searching for solutions.


Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, co-chairs of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new Homeless and Supportive Housing Advisory Task Force, have proposed enacting a legal “right to shelter.”

The idea is in its early stages, and Newsom hasn’t endorsed the plan. But Ridley-Thomas and Steinberg want to compel cities and counties to build enough large shelters to accommodate any homeless person who asks to come indoors. They also want to require that homeless people be forced to accept that shelter if offered. How that would be enforced is unclear.

For Trump, he has indicated in interviews that scenes of homeless people who appear to be mentally ill and walking around mounds of trash in cities are unacceptable. In fact, he said, they’re “inappropriate.”

During a speech at a Republican conference in Baltimore last Thursday, Trump claimed that his administration has given “notice” to California, though it was unclear what “notice” was given.

“Clean it up,” he said. “You’ve got to do something. You can’t have it. These are our great American cities and they’re an embarrassment.”

Harmeet Dhillon, a member of the Republican National Committee who lives in San Francisco and is attending Trump’s Palo Alto fundraiser, said she’s glad the president is focusing on the issue.

“The quality of life has gone down for everybody,” she said. “It is dystopian.”

When talking about homelessness, Trump’s aides like to cite an executive order the president signed in June to “confront the regulatory barriers to affordable housing development, a leading cause of homelessness.”

While homelessness wasn’t something he discussed regularly on the campaign trail, the issue has become an easy way to criticize the pitfalls of cities with Democratic leaders that didn’t vote for him.

In the past, Trump has pushed the limits of his authority, routinely issuing executive orders and proclamations that have been met with legal challenges or turned out to be hollow. Accustomed to being CEO of a private company, he has occasionally struggled to figure out how to work the bureaucratic levers of a sprawling federal government.

Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, said Trump is taking the wrong approach to homelessness by talking about it as a criminal justice problem, adding that the federal government does not have the legal authority to sweep people up and force them into shelters.

“The reason people are on the street isn’t because people are refusing the shelter,” she said. “It’s because there is literally no place to go. Rounding people up and forcing them into shelter would be a very bad idea, and it would probably violate all kinds of rights.”

California politicians are, however, ready for the federal government to lend a helping hand — if it comes in the form of more housing vouchers for the state’s renters.

In a letter issued Monday and signed by Gov. Newsom, and mayors and county supervisors from across the state, they asked for 50,000 more vouchers that would aid people most affected by California’s housing crisis. They also urged the Trump administration to provide incentives to landlords to accept vouchers.

“That’s a pretty remarkable opportunity, if they’re sincere in their desires,” Newsom said at a news conference. “If they’re insincere and this is, God forbid, about something else — politics, not good policy — then they’ll reject it outright. I hope that’s not the case.”

Times staff writer Phil Willon contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-16/trump-homeless-california-shelter-housing-fundraising

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U.S. Tries to Seize Edward Snowden’s Proceeds From New Memoir – The New York Times
U.S. Tries to Seize Edward Snowden’s Proceeds From New Memoir – The New York Times

In the lawsuit, the Justice Department also complained that Mr. Snowden had been paid for giving speeches without submitting his planned remarks for prepublication review, and said he should be ordered to turn over those profits as well.

The lawsuit also named Mr. Snowden’s publisher, Macmillan, as a defendant, but said it was seeking only to prevent the company from paying royalties to Mr. Snowden that should now instead be turned over to the federal government.

Mr. Snowden has been hailed as a whistle-blower by privacy and civil liberties advocates, while denounced as a traitor by national security officials. His disclosures prompted reforms.

Among them, Congress ended in 2015 the N.S.A.’s collection of logs of Americans’ phone records. It set up an alternative system where the bulk records remain with phone companies and the agency, with a court’s permission, may access certain logs for counterterrorism analysis. The agency has since shut down that program as well, and it is not clear if lawmakers will extend a law authorizing it that is set to expire soon.

Mr. Snowden has said he will not voluntarily return to the United States because he cannot get a fair trial, in his view. In an interview on CBS on Monday, he reiterated that the law would prevent him from arguing to jurors that they should acquit him of violating the Espionage Act because he was a whistle-blower making disclosures in the public interest.

Officials and contractors who seek security clearances routinely agree to submit writings that relate to their work for prepublication review. The censorship system traces back to limits imposed on a handful of C.I.A. officials in the 1950s and has since ratcheted up to cover many more people and agencies.

In a 1980 ruling, Snepp v. United States, the Supreme Court permitted the C.I.A. to seize the proceeds from a former officer who published a book without submitting it to the agency for such review.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/us/politics/edward-snowden-memoir-lawsuit.html

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Ayanna Pressley just filed an impeachment resolution against Brett Kavanaugh in the House – Vox.com
Ayanna Pressley just filed an impeachment resolution against Brett Kavanaugh in the House – Vox.com

Amid politicians’ calls for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s impeachment, Rep. Ayanna Pressley is actually trying to get the process started.

Pressley on Tuesday filed an impeachment resolution that presses the House Judiciary Committee to kick off an investigation that would mark the first step in an impeachment process.

The resolution urges the House panel to look into sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh, and grants the committee subpoena power and resources as part of its investigation. Specifically, the resolution would enable the committee, or a task force it establishes, to conduct a probe into Kavanaugh, subpoena witnesses, and receive funding for this effort. The full House would have to approve the resolution for it to go into effect.

“I believe Christine Blasey Ford. I believe Deborah Ramirez. It is our responsibility to collectively affirm the dignity and humanity of survivors,” Pressley said in a statement to WBUR.

Her push follows a recent New York Times report that detailed a new sexual misconduct allegation against Kavanaugh, who has declined to comment on it. Kavanaugh has also previously denied sexual misconduct allegations brought by Ford and Ramirez.

Though the Democratic-controlled House could begin an investigation of its own, as Pressley is urging, impeachment of President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court justice is pretty much a moot point, given the current make-up of the Senate.

As Vox’s Dylan Matthews writes, impeachment of a Supreme Court justice works pretty much the same way it would for a president:

Impeachment and removal of a federal judge, including a Supreme Court justice, requires meeting a high political bar. Just as with presidents, a majority of the House must approve an indictment to impeach, and a two-thirds supermajority of the US Senate must convict for the judge or justice to lose their office.

Although the chances of impeachment taking place remain very slim, Pressley’s resolution helps send a message about where Democrats stand on Kavanaugh. While Republicans have sought to dismiss the recent allegation that’s been levied against him and undercut the New York Times report, several Democrats have urged further review of the sitting justice.

Some top Democrats have pushed for Kavanaugh’s impeachment

Several Democratic presidential candidates, including Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro, are among those who have pressed for Kavanaugh’s impeachment in the wake of the Times report.

“I said it last year and I’ll say it again: the process that resulted in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh was a sham,” Harris said in a recent tweet.

While the viability of idea has been dismissed by other members of Democratic leadership including Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (“Get real,” he recently told Politico), advocacy groups including Demand Justice and Planned Parenthood are among those who have urged further investigation.

Harris on Tuesday sent House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler a letter on this very subject, suggesting that he should convene a task force to investigate Kavanaugh further.

Pressley’s latest action, at the very least, keeps the door open on this possibility.

Source Article from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/17/20870581/ayanna-pressley-brett-kavanaugh-impeachment-resolution

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Trump’s California fundraisers are drenched in cash — and secrecy – POLITICO
Trump’s California fundraisers are drenched in cash — and secrecy – POLITICO

President Donald Trump’s California fundraisers have attracted a new set of Republican donors and bundlers eager to be in the room with him in Northern and Southern California events. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

White House

Donors are snapping up tickets, even if they don’t know exactly where the events are being held.

By

09/16/2019 06:59 PM EDT

Updated 09/16/2019 11:14 PM EDT


SAN FRANCISCO — Donald Trump remains unpopular in the state where he lost to Hillary Clinton by a landslide: His job approval ratings in California are among his worst in the country.

But among state Republicans here, it’s a different story. And they’ve snapped up tickets to four sold-out, high-dollar fundraisers for the president.

Story Continued Below

The events are shrouded in secrecy to a large extent, necessitated by the deep hostility many in the state feel toward the president.

Still, the tickets have sold “faster than Mick Jagger,’’ laughs former state party chair Shawn Steel, a Republican National Committee member and a Trump bundler.

“There’s a lot of love here for him,” says Steel, pointing to more than 1,000 Republicans, “donors at every level,” who have clamored for tickets to four events within the next 24 hours including a lunch Tuesday in Silicon Valley, two events in the Los Angeles/Beverly Hills area — a dinner Tuesday and a breakfast Wednesday — and another lunch in San Diego on Wednesday.

Already, state donors have given generously to his reelection campaign and the joint fundraising committee with the RNC, ponying up $6.5 million in checks from January to June of this year alone. At the Sept. 17 luncheon stop in the Bay Area, ticket prices range from $1,000 to $100,000.

This week, Trump’s California fundraisers have attracted a new set of Republican donors and bundlers eager to be in the room with him in Northern and Southern California events, which will raise upwards of $15 million, party insiders say.

“My husband and I have maxed out — and I’ve never maxed out for anybody, ever,’’ said San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a former vice chair of the party, who is hosting two tables at the Silicon Valley event. She says she has been deluged by requests for tickets from Republicans — big and small donors — who are desperate to be part of the scene.

“I’ve had to say no to at least 50 people in the last few hours,’’ said Dhillon, as she made the rounds at last week’s state GOP convention in Indian Wells. “I sold out four tables very easily, and a lot of them are big donors,’’ she said. “I could have sold another $100,000 worth of tickets.”

“There are many more people who wanted to attend than we have capacity,’’ noted Dhillon, who was recently introduced by Trump at the White House during an event for social media insiders. “They’re excited because we’ve had surrogates like Don Jr. come out — but this is the real thing.’’

Attendees at Tuesday’s event are not being provided with the address of the actual lunch — they are being told to meet at a shuttle location, sources said.

The concern comes after news of the Hollywood-area fundraiser sparked controversy when actors Debra Messing and Eric McCormack called for outing attendees. Demonstrators have been trying to ferret out locations of the fundraisers, promising to stage protests and appearances by the giant “baby Trump” balloon. The president’s last campaign foray to the Bay Area, at an April 2016 GOP convention in Burlingame, didn’t go so well — it featured the sight of Trump climbing a highway median to avoid protesters who blocked his hotel entry.

Dhillon said the Trump team is “taking no chances after the San Jose situation,’’ a reference to a different 2016 incident when Trump supporters were attacked outside of his rally at the San Jose Convention Center prior to the election. Tuesday’s Bay Area lunch, originally scheduled for tony Atherton, apparently changed venues.

“We originally got word he was coming [to Atherton], and the last update I got was that he was not coming,” Dan Larsen, a sergeant with the Atherton Police Department, told the Mercury News Friday.

The White House and Trump reelection campaign declined to confirm the actual location but Silicon Valley’s affluent communities like Woodside and Atherton have been favorite fundraising locales for presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle.

The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department would not confirm locations and referred calls on the matter to the White House press office, which declined comment.

After his Bay Area stop, the president will fly to Southern California for an evening event in the Beverly Hills-Bel Air 90210 area code. The fundraiser, held during Emmy week — when awards celebrating the television industry, a favorite target of Trump’s commentary, are handed out — is hosted by a longtime supporter, billionaire real estate mogul Geoffrey Palmer.

Palmer, who donated more than $4 million to GOP causes in the 2018 cycle, is one of the early donors to Rebuilding America Now, the pro-Trump super PAC founded by former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort — now serving time for fraud — and Trump business ally Tom Barrack.

Tickets go from $1,000 to $10,000 per couple for a photo op at the event which, according to an invite, is also hosted RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, RNC co-chairman Tommy Hicks Jr., campaign manager Brad Parscale and Trump Victory finance chairman Todd Ricketts.

Lanhee Chen, a former adviser to presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, says California Republicans of all stripes are eager to get in on the president’s first big fundraising foray here. One reason is their support for his contentious relationship with the state’s Democratic leaders, who have filed more than 50 lawsuits against his administration.

”They’re energized by these fights between him and the left-leaning Democrats,”’ Chen said, “and they think he’s taking it to them.”

Among those eager Republicans ready to write checks to Trump’s campaign are Celeste Greig, a former head of the California Republican Assembly — one of the most conservative grassroots groups in the GOP — who will be at his event in Bel Air.

“I’m going because he’s done a great job, maybe not perfect — but a great job,’’ said Greig. “Yes, he’s pissed some people off, but that’s what he is … people have to get over that.’’

Greig says attendees have been promised appearances by Clint Eastwood — a movie icon who also served as the former mayor of Carmel, Calif. — and Mel Gibson, another conservative Hollywood voice. And that, she says, is a welcome counter to high-profile Democratic Hollywood voices like Messing.

The next day, the president hits the San Diego area for another sold-out fundraiser that insiders say is slated to raise $4 million for the Trump reelection campaign.

California GOP Chair Jessica Millan Patterson says that Trump’s successful fundraising here underscores how Republicans in solidly blue California are clearly uniting behind the president as 2020 approaches — and how Trump’s popularity has translated into more money for the state party as well.

According to the most recent poll from the Public Policy Institute of California, Trump’s approval rating among Republican likely voters is 89 percent. Among all likely voters, his approvals are just 38 percent.

“We certainly are on the right track. We were obviously outspent in 2018 by $100 million,’’ she said in regards to fundraising. “[But] so far, there’s 6,400 new donors on the smaller level, and 72 large scale major donors … so we’re on the right track. And “we’re $1.3 million ahead in commitments than we were in 2017,’’ she says.

Bill Whalen, a Hoover Institution fellow who advised former GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, says that despite California’s solidly blue status and the state GOP’s collapse here, “people tend to forget that nearly 4 million voted for him in California in 2016 … so it’s not like he’s without friends here.’’

“No sane political consultant thinks that Trump has a chance to win in California in 2020,’’ Whalen says. But the sold-out fundraisers reveal GOP appreciation of the president’s engagement on California issues that matter to them such as homelessness, energy or auto emissions standards.

The question coming out of these event for Trump, he said, will be: “Is this a one-off, or will there be any lingering presence in California?”

Steele predicts that the demand for tickets, and the size of Trump reelection multimillion dollar campaign haul from California this week is “going to be enough to encourage him to keep coming back.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misidentified details of several fundraising events.

Source Article from https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/16/california-republicans-trump-campaign-stop-1497447

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UCLA mom charged with paying $400K to get son admitted as fake soccer recruit – USA TODAY
UCLA mom charged with paying $400K to get son admitted as fake soccer recruit – USA TODAY
CLOSE

The college admissions scam involving Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman shows how some rich families use a “side door” to game an already unfair education system.
Just the FAQs, USA TODAY

BOSTON — A mother from Canada was arrested Monday night in Spain and indicted in the U.S. for paying $400,000 to get her son admitted into the University of California-Los Angles as a fake soccer recruit.

Xiaoning Sui, 48, is the 35th parent and 52nd defendant charged with crimes in the nation’s college admissions scandal.

In a federal indictment unsealed in Boston federal court Tuesday, Sui was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.

Sui is a Chinese national who has been living in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada near Vancouver. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said she is currently detained in Spain and authorities are seeking her extradition to Boston to face the charges.

More: Felicity Huffman sentenced: 2 weeks in prison, $30,000 fine for college admissions scandal

Prosecutors alleged the mastermind of the admissions scheme, Rick Singer, through a translator, told Sui in an August 2018 phone conversation her son would be “guaranteed” entry into UCLA with a $400,000 payment that would require Singer to write his application in a “special way.”

Sui provided Singer with photographs of her son playing tennis and his high school transcript. Prosecutors said Singer then sent the materials to Laura Janke, a former assistant women’s soccer coach at University of Southern California and an alleged co-conspirator he used to help create falsified athletic profiles.  

“This young man will he a soccer player from Vancouver for UCLA,” Singer wrote to Janke in an email. 

Janke’s fabricated profile for Sui’sson described him as a top player for two private soccer clubs in Canada, according to prosecutors. It also included photos of a different individual playing soccer. 

Prosecutors said Singer forwarded the profile to former head USC women’s soccer coach Ali Khosroshahin and Jorge Salcedo, UCLA’s head men’s soccer coach. Salcedo later passed the profile and the student’s high school transcript to UCLA athletic administrators to process the recruitment, according to Sui’s indictment.

Janke and Khosroshahin both pleaded guilty to charges in connection with the college admissions scandal and are cooperating with the government.Salcedo pleaded not guilty to racketeering charges in March.

More: Felicity Huffman is just the beginning: Who’s pleaded guilty in the college admissions scandal — and who’s still fighting

Prosecutors said in October 2018 – after Singer already had started cooperating with federal investigators — he instructed Sui to wire him  $100,000 to be “paid to the coach at UCLA” in exchange for a letter of intent from the UCLA soccer coach.

Sui later wired $100,000 to a bank account in Massachusetts in the name of Singer’s sham nonprofit, The Key Worldwide Foundation, and an additional $300,000 to the organization after her son was formally admitted into UCLA as a recruited soccer player on Nov. 5, 2018. The recruit also was awarded a 25% scholarship by UCLA, according to prosecutors. 

“UCLA took immediate corrective action after this case was initially outlined in the Department of Justice’s March 2019 indictment,” university spokesman Tod M. Tamberg said in an email.

“Although federal law and University of California privacy policy prevents UCLA from discussing the specific actions taken in this particular case, UCLA can revoke the admission and athletics scholarship offer of any admitted student or dismiss any enrolled student who is found to have misrepresented information on their application. UCLA is not aware of any currently enrolled student-athletes who are under suspicion by the DOJ.”

More: College admissions scandal: Parents’ sentences at stake as judge presses prosecution

The Justice Department announced the historic “Varsity Blues” college admissions scheme in March. It started with 50 defendants, but Sui is now the second additional parent to be charged. Prosecutors have alleged wealthy parents paid more than $25 million in bribes to Singer since 2011 to either tag their children as athletic recruits to get them into college or to have someone cheat on their SAT or ACT exams to artificially boost their scores.

Sui’s indictment comes days after actress Felicity Huffman became the first parent to be sentenced in the sweeping admissions scandal. Huffman received 14 days of prison as well a $30,000 fine, supervised release for one year and 250 hours of community service for paying $15,000 to have someone correct answers on the SAT exam of her oldest daughter. 

Singer’s network of clients extended overseas into China. 

Although Sui is the first Chinese national charged in the admission case, a mother from China, Yusi Zhao, admitted to paying Singer $6.5 million to facilitate her daughter’s entry into Stanford University. Zhao, who has not been charged, said she was duped into thinking she was making a donation to the school.

Reach Joey Garrison on Twitter @joeygarrison.

Source Article from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/17/ucla-mom-charged-paying-400-k-get-son-admitted-fake-soccer-recruit/2351878001/

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Donald Trump and Saudi money, explained – Vox.com
Donald Trump and Saudi money, explained – Vox.com

Saudi Arabia announced this weekend that attacks on two of its state-owned oil facilities — launched either by Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen or by Iran itself, depending on whom you ask — had disrupted the country’s oil production.

President Donald Trump’s response was unusual, even for him. Normally, Trump takes a crass, transactional view on foreign policy, rejecting the pro-forma assumptions about maintaining good diplomatic relationships with allies. Instead, he made a glaring exception to those rules on behalf of Saudi interests.

First, the president argued that “we don’t need Middle Eastern Oil & Gas.” Then he made an apparent vow to not only come to Saudi Arabia’s assistance anyway but also to completely defer to the Saudi royal family as to “under what terms we would proceed.”

Saudi Arabia does not have a formal treaty of alliance with the United States — meaning there is no piece of paper obligating the US to do anything whatsoever in response to an attack against Saudi Arabia. And while the US has been intimately involved in the Saudi oil industry going back to the 1930s, nobody has ever claimed there is a deep connection grounded in values between our two countries.

But the Saudi royal family does seem to have a special relationship with Trump, who has repeatedly bucked bipartisan congressional majorities to back the Kingdom on topics ranging from its disastrous war in Yemen to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

It’s a fishy situation that naturally raises questions about Trump’s personal financial relationships with Persian Gulf monarchies — questions he and his allies in Congress have been successfully stonewalling for years.

And his official explanation of the need for a cozy relationship with the Saudis — that they are a valuable customer for American arms merchants — makes very little sense, though it does cohere with his larger nonsensical views about international trade as a whole.

America makes a lot of oil now

After sinking for almost 40 straight years starting in 1970, American production of crude oil and natural gas has skyrocketed for the past 10 years, thanks largely to technological improvements in fracking and horizontal drilling.


Energy Information Agency

As a result of this, the United States is now the world’s largest producer of petroleum and natural gas.


Energy Information Industry

This surge in American oil production means that changes in global energy prices impact the American economy in very different ways today than they did in the 1990s or 2000s.

This is particularly true because while the United States now produces a lot of oil, American oil is still relatively difficult to extract compared to Persian Gulf oil. This means that American oil production is fairly sensitive to global oil prices. In other words, when prices rise not only do US oil producers earn higher profits they also intensify the investment in extracting oil.

So for many players in the American economy, higher oil prices are now a good thing. Fracking communities experience localized economic booms, Alaska gets much higher government revenue, and a broader supply chain of American manufacturers of drilling-related equipment get more orders.

When oil prices dropped precipitously in the winter of 2014-’15, many drivers celebrated cheap gas. But it also contributed to a localized mini-recession as business investment and manufacturing output fell.

Expensive oil used to be a hammer blow to the American economy, and that isn’t quite true anymore. But it’s still the case that for most people the main economic impact of oil prices is on the price they pay at the pump, and that expensive gas is economically damaging.

Gas prices still matter economically

At the end of the day, most Americans do not work in the oil industry or live in a community that has a large oil extraction industry. By contrast, most Americans do rely on their cars for their daily commutes and generally don’t have very good short-term options for switching to more fuel-efficient vehicles or alternative modes of transportation.

Consequently, the main traditional economic impact of high oil prices — rising gasoline prices, rising consumer fuel costs, and falling consumer spending on everything else — are still in place. Even before the fracking boom it was the case that some Americans benefitted from high oil prices even while most suffered. Today the minority of Americans who benefit from expensive gas is larger than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but it’s still a minority.

What’s more, the economic impact of changes in oil and gas employment is different today with the labor market relatively stronger than it was just a few years ago. Back during the generally soft labor market of the Obama years, it was probably right to think of the shale boom as essentially creating employment where there would have otherwise been unemployment. Shale communities enjoyed consistently low unemployment rates and sucked-in idle labor from the rest of the country.

But oil prices also matter because they complicate the work of the Federal Reserve.

For all the recession hype the country witnessed in August, there was genuinely little reason to believe a growth downturn could be in the works. Inflation was low so there was no reason for the Fed to hesitate to provide interest rate cuts to support the economy and thus supported the economy could continue to grow.

High oil prices lead to inflation whether the oil is imported or not. Some of that takes the form directly of high gasoline prices, which the Fed normally ignores. But expensive oil also makes planes and trucks more expensive to operate, which tends to increase the price of everything that moves around which the Fed does not ignore. What’s more precisely because higher oil prices will pull more workers into the oil and gas extraction industries, they’ll raise labor costs across the board for other kinds of construction and shipping work further fueling inflation.

That in and of itself isn’t necessarily a huge problem. But it does mean that the Fed could find itself performing a balancing act between weak global economic conditions and rising domestic prices. And when the Fed tries to balance, it sometimes falls off the bar.

Every recession of the past generation has come amidst high global commodity prices precisely because that’s the kind of situation in which monetary policy mistakes can happen; so it’s still an economic risk, albeit a lesser one.

Trump has murky financial ties to the Gulf

Trump is not, in general, a big believer in the idea that America should play a beneficent global role and help out allies. He has complained vociferously about the financial cost of America’s treaty commitments to NATO and South Korea.

Which is why it’s so strange that he’s so dogmatic about upholding some supposed obligation to Saudi Arabia — again, a country with which we don’t have any formal treaty of alliance and whose regime is much less sympathetic than the democracies of Europe and Northeast Asia.

What’s particularly striking is that back in 2014, Trump took the view that “Saudi Arabia should fight their own wars” or else “pay us an absolute fortune” for coming to their assistance.

Now that Trump is president, he has changed his tune. And while Saudi Arabia does not pay “us” — in the sense of the American people — any kind of fortune, they do seem to pay Donald Trump a fair amount of money.

The manager of Trump’s hotel in New York credited a timely stay by members of the Saudi Crown Prince’s entourage (though not the prince himself) with lifting revenue there by 13 percent in one quarter last year. Lobbying disclosures showed that Saudi lobbyists spent $260,000 at Trump’s hotel in DC back in December 2016 during the transition. Separately, the Kingdom itself spent $190,273 at Trump’s hotel in early 2017.

But the truth is that nobody really has any idea how much money Trump gets from the Saudis or other Persian Gulf regimes. He owns a golf club in Dubai but its membership roster isn’t public information any more than the membership list at any of Trump’s other clubs is public knowledge.

The fact about the crown prince’s entourage’s visit to Trump’s hotel in New York happens to have leaked to the Washington Post, but we don’t know what kind of hotel stays haven’t leaked.

In fact, we know next to nothing at all about Trump’s financial relationships with anyone, other than that Trump refuses to do any kind of meaningful disclosure and shows no interest in avoiding either the appearance or the reality of impropriety.

Trump’s official line on the relationship, however, is that of course it has nothing to do with his personal finances. But while a more conventional politician would cite some kind of strategic or geopolitical rationale, Trump really is focused on Saudi money — money that flows to American defense contractors.

Trump loves Saudi arms sales

Since Republicans have controlled the Senate throughout Trump’s entire presidency, he’s only issued five vetoes and four of them were of congressional efforts to curtail US assistance to Saudi Arabia.

Some of this legislation aimed to curtail sales of American military equipment to Saudi Arabia — a traditional way for the United States to discipline a country whose behavior the US government feels has gone off the rails.

Trump has always criticized such moves by citing the allegedly enormous economic value of the weapons sales themselves, occasionally claiming to believe that “millions of jobs” are at stake — even though there are only about 1.5 million people working in the entire aerospace and defense sector.

Trump continued with this line of thinking at a Monday press availability alongside Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain, claiming that the Saudis “spent $400 billion in our country over the last number of years,” giving them credit for “a million and a half jobs,” and then observing that “Saudi Arabia pays cash.”

Later Trump appeared to suggest that the United States might go to war against Iran on Saudi Arabia’s behalf as a kind of mercenary force, saying that “the Saudis are going to have a lot of involvement in this if we decide to do something. They’ll be very much involved. And that includes payment. And they understand that fully.”

This seems like almost a parody of a leftist reading of American foreign policy — every geopolitical decision is shaped by the narrow economic concerns of the arms industry.

It also inverts the normal thinking about the relationship between arms sales and alliance politics, in which access to American weaponry is considered an advantage you receive for being a country the United States regards as reliable. After all, the Iranians would surely be glad to get their hands on some advanced American defense technology too if we were inclined to sell it to them.

But Trump’s focus on arms exports as a goal of foreign policy, rather than a tool that serves foreign policy, is consistent with his strange thinking about trade policy. He judges all such relationships in terms of the bilateral balance of trade. A world in which the US exports weapons to the Gulf without importing much oil is a world where the US is winning. And if Trump’s private businesses can “win” too, then that’s so much the better.

Source Article from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/17/20868358/donald-trump-saudi-money

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Are Out-of-Touch Twitter Leftists Controlling the Democratic Primary? (No.) – Slate
Are Out-of-Touch Twitter Leftists Controlling the Democratic Primary? (No.) – Slate

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Source Article from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/twitter-left-influence-democratic-primary-2020.html

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NYT reporters behind Kavanaugh story grilled on ‘The View,’ blame ‘oversight’ by Gray Lady editors – Fox News
NYT reporters behind Kavanaugh story grilled on ‘The View,’ blame ‘oversight’ by Gray Lady editors – Fox News
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New York Times faces intense scrutiny over Kavanaugh article

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume reacts to major revision to allegation story.

The New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly appeared on “The View” Tuesday and blamed “an oversight” by Gray Lady editors for the controversial piece on Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh cutting key details during a fiery interview in which they claimed not to have an agenda.

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg immediately pointed out that Pogrebin and Kelly were “under fire” from critics after the Times walked back an explosive report about a resurfaced allegation of sexual assault by Kavanaugh from his college days.

“We just have to start out with the controversy,” co-host Meghan McCain said. “I’m going to try and make this as clear as possible. The New York Times ran an excerpt from your book over the weekend, in the opinion section, that included a new allegation of sexual misconduct against Brett Kavanaugh, but you guys left out a key detail.”

TRUMP RIPS NEW YORK TIMES OVER KAVANAUGH PIECE, CALLS FOR RESIGNATION OF ANYONE INVOLVED IN ‘SMEAR STORY’ 

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The now-revised piece was adapted from Pogrebin and Kelly’s book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” and alleged that there was corroboration of an incident in which Kavanaugh, as a college student at Yale, exposed himself to a female classmate at a party. But the paper was forced to issue an update clarifying that several friends of the alleged victim said she did not recall the purported sexual assault.

“First of all, there was no desire to withhold important information from our readers. We have all of it in the book,” Kelly said. “The essay is an adaptation of the book that, of course, we had to edit for length and clarity.”

Kelly went on to say “the thrust of the essay was about,” before stopping herself and awkwardly noting that “thrust” was a poor choice of words. She then said the focus of the Times story was about a different Kavanaugh accuser, but the new allegation was added because it was relevant to the subject.

“During the editing process there was an oversight and this key detail, about the fact that the woman herself has told friends she doesn’t remember it, and has not wanted to talk about it, got cut,” Kelly said as she smirked. “It was an oversight and the Times adjusted it and we’re very sorry that it happened.”

NYT REPORTERS BEHIND KAVANAUGH STORY SUGGEST KEY INFORMATION WAS REMOVED BY EDITORS

McCain said this is an example of why so many people “don’t trust the media.”

Co-host Abby Huntsman then questioned why the Times did not initially disclosed the political ties of a Clinton-linked nonprofit CEO, Max Stier, who was named as a witness to the alleged misconduct.

“I understand, it’s relevant background; in this case it was a very short mention and we only talked in brief terms about what he’s doing right now,” Kelly said. “We didn’t see all of that context to be necessary.”

McCain then grilled the authors about a recent MSNBC appearance in which they blamed Gray Lady editors for omitting key details.

“We’re a team at The New York Times. We have processes in place. We wrote this, it was edited, there was back-and-forth as there always is, it’s kind of a team effort, frankly, to make sure that everybody’s comfortable with the final product and there was just an oversight here,” Kelly said.

NEW YORK TIMES DELETES TWEET CALLING UNPROVOKED PENIS THRUSTING ‘HARMLESS FUN’

Pogrebin and Kelly reiterated that the key details are in their book and it was only cut from the Times’ excerpt.

“We first had it in the piece so it’s about an editing process which is iterative, it has a lot of different drafts and actually, I think, the way it happened was the editors being concerned about naming [the alleged victim] because the Times has a tradition of not naming victims and really has to deliberate whether or not to do that,” Pogrebin said. “In that sentence, that had her name, it also had that she does not remember it. They took out the whole sentence in removing her name in order to kind of protect her.”

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Pogrebin and Kelly were then asked if they read the edited version before it was published in Sunday’s New York Times.

“We thought we had,” Pogrebin said. “And as soon as we realized this, we corrected it.”

McCain then pressed, asking if they understood why critics are so upset about the Times piece but Pogrebin pivoted to why they wrote the book in the first place and added that “Kavanaugh has been a better man” in the 36 years since the allegations.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“He has been an exemplary judge,” Pogrebin said.

President Trump issued a full-throated call for resignations and changes in management at the paper over the essay during a fiery rally in Democratic-leaning New Mexico on Monday night. The authors downplayed Trump’s rhetoric when asked during their appearance on “The View.”

“We appreciate that the president of the United States is paying attention to our book,” Pogrebin said. “What we tried to do is what we always do as reporters, which is seek the facts and put them out there and let people come to their own conclusions.”

Pogrebin also said that Trump and 2020 Democratic candidates have “jumped on” specific aspects of the book but it was not her intent to have an agenda.

Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn and Gregg Re contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/media/nyt-reporters-kavanaugh-view-blame-oversight

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Protesters await Trump as he arrives in California after bashing state for homeless crisis – Los Angeles Times
Protesters await Trump as he arrives in California after bashing state for homeless crisis – Los Angeles Times

President Trump was scheduled to arrive in California late Tuesday morning amid growing questions over his administration’s plans to get involved in the state’s homeless crisis.

Trump is in the state for a two-day visit, with stops for fundraising in Palo Alto, Beverly Hills and San Diego. The fundraisers are expected to bring in $15 million and will benefit Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee comprised of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. Although he has no public events scheduled, the president is likely to address the issue of homelessness, which he has used in recent months to bash the deep-blue state in advance of the 2020 election.

California officials have been wary of Trump’s intentions, concerned he wants to use homelessness and urban ills as a wedge for the 2020 campaign. But they have said they are willing to work with Trump.

In a letter issued Monday and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and mayors and county supervisors from across the state, state officials asked for 50,000 more vouchers to would aid people most affected by California’s housing crisis. They also urged the Trump administration to provide incentives to landlords to accept vouchers.

“That’s a pretty remarkable opportunity, if they’re sincere in their desires,” Newsom said at a news conference. “If they’re insincere and this is, God forbid, about something else — politics, not good policy — then they’ll reject it outright. I hope that’s not the case.”


Last week, officials from Trump’s administration spent several days in Los Angeles meeting with city and county officials and homeless advocates. To the dismay of some local officials, the administration has said little publicly about any plans. Some speculate that the goal is to clear homeless encampments by moving people into government-run shelters on federal land.

On Monday, the White House floated a new goal: deregulation of the housing market to increase the supply of apartments, condominiums and homes.

Last week, representatives from the Department of Justice discussed possible “workarounds” with Los Angeles law enforcement union officials to deal with court settlements, rulings and lawsuits that have limited the way the LAPD can carry out enforcement efforts at encampments.


Of California’s roughly 130,000 homeless people, some 90,000 were unsheltered as of last year. Within the city of Los Angeles, the number jumped in 2019 to more than 36,000, a 16% increase. In the county, the number is just shy of 59,000 — a 12% bump over last year.

For Trump, he has indicated in interviews that scenes of homeless people who appear to be mentally ill and walking around mounds of trash in cities are unacceptable. In fact, he said, they’re “inappropriate.”

During a speech at a Republican conference in Baltimore on Thursday, Trump said his administration has given “notice” to California, though it was unclear what that “notice” was.

“Clean it up,” he said. “You’ve got to do something. You can’t have it. These are our great American cities and they’re an embarrassment.”


In preparation for Trump’s arrival, protesters across the state mobilized Tuesday.

The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday issued a VIP flight restriction, prohibiting planes, gliders, parachute operations, hang gliding, banner towing and “balloon operations” in a 32-mile radius around Palo Alto.

Alan Marling, a San Francisco-based activist helping organize an event at the Embarcadero in San Francisco, where a giant baby Trump balloon is expected to be flown, said protesters will fly their balloons despite the restrictions.

“If Donald Trump spends taxpayer money” to stop activists from flying baby Trump balloons, then “that just proves he is one,” Marling said.

In the South Bay, organizers from Raging Grannies and Vigil for Democracy planned to meet at Rossotti Field in Portola Valley. After Air Force One touches down at Moffett Field, in Mountain View, they’ll follow the president’s helicopters to a fundraising event at a Palo Alto mansion previously owned by Scott McNealy. The former home of the Sun Microsystems co-founder is on the market for $96 million.

A copy of the invitation for the event, which is being organized by the Republican National Committee, shows ticket prices ranging from $1,000 to $100,000. Big spenders will get a photo opportunity with the president, as well as “premiere seating” for the luncheon. A $35,500 donation provides only “preferred seating.” The local organizer is not named.

And in Los Angeles, where Trump is slated to spend the night, the Revolution Club will protest Trump’s visit to Beverly Hills, where he is scheduled to attend a roundtable with supporters and a fundraising committee dinner at the home of real estate developer and Republican donor Geoff Palmer.

Source Article from https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-17/president-trump-arrives-in-california-after-bashing-the-state-for-its-homeless-problems

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Justice Department: Edward Snowden Book Profits Should Go To The US Government – NPR
Justice Department: Edward Snowden Book Profits Should Go To The US Government – NPR

The Justice Department says Edward Snowden, seen here via video feed, breached nondisclosure agreements he signed with the National Security Agency and CIA over the publication of his new book, Permanent Record.

Juliet Linderman /AP


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Juliet Linderman /AP

The Justice Department says Edward Snowden, seen here via video feed, breached nondisclosure agreements he signed with the National Security Agency and CIA over the publication of his new book, Permanent Record.

Juliet Linderman /AP

The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden alleging that his newly released memoir Permanent Record violated nondisclosure agreements he signed with the federal government. Justice Department lawyers say the U.S. is entitled to all of Snowden’s book profits.

The civil lawsuit filed Tuesday in Virginia names the former National Security Agency contractor and his New York-based publisher, MacMillan. The suit argues that Snowden’s failure to receive pre-publication approval from the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency constitutes a breach of contract.

Assistant U.S. Attorney R. Trent McCotter wrote that the alleged violation of nondisclosure agreements Snowden signed with the two agencies undermines public trust in the federal government and endangers national security.

“Additionally, Snowden has been, and will continue in the future to be, unjustly enriched in the amount of profits, advances, royalties, and other advantages resulting from the unauthorized publication of his book,” McCotter wrote.

For the past six years, Snowden has lived in Russia, where he was granted asylum as he faces separate federal criminal charges in the U.S. over allegations of espionage and the theft of government property following the 2013 leak of classified material about U.S. surveillance programs.

The civil suit asks the court to freeze all of MacMillan’s assets related to Snowden’s memoir and for all of Snowden’s profits and royalties from the book to be placed in a special fund on behalf of the U.S. government. It’s not clear what the money would be used for.

The Justice Department said in a statement that it “is suing the publisher solely to ensure that no funds are transferred to Snowden, or at his direction, while the court resolves the United States’ claims.”

Neither Snowden nor any of his representatives has responded publicly to the civil lawsuit.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/761600250/justice-department-sues-edward-snowden-seeking-profits-from-his-book

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The worst US cyclone this year may be a weak tropical storm [Updated] – Ars Technica
The worst US cyclone this year may be a weak tropical storm [Updated] – Ars Technica

1:45pm ET Update: The National Hurricane Center has upgraded the disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico to Tropical Storm Imelda. The naming of the storm, which may bring some tropical storm-force winds to the upper Texas coast, does not change the fact that by far the biggest threat is heavy rainfall.

Original story: It’s possible that the most damaging tropical system to strike the United States in 2019 won’t have a name.

Although Hurricane Dorian brought widespread devastation to the Bahamas, it did relatively modest damage to the Southeastern United States. According to some insurers’ estimates, Dorian caused between $500 million and $1.5 billion in insured losses due to property damage and business-interruption claims.

This week an unnamed low pressure system—it only has a 30% chance to develop into a tropical depression or storm before moving inland into the upper Texas coast, the National Hurricane Center says—will bring a surge of tropical moisture into the state of Texas. Although it is not possible to say where the heaviest rainfall will occur, the Houston metro area falls into the highest risk category.

Forecast models have been all over the place, but it’s possible that widespread areas will see five to 10 inches of rain, with isolated totals of 15 inches or more as the system moves slowly north. This is manageable for most of Houston over two or three days, but the problem with extremely moist tropical air such as this is its capability to generate intense hourly rainfall rates.

One measure of atmospheric moisture is known as “precipitable water,” and this system will likely bring values of 2.4 to 2.6 inches into the Texas coast. This means that, in a column of air from the planet’s surface to outer space, if one were to squeeze out all of the moisture, it would measure more than 2 inches high. Such levels are nearly 200% of normal levels for September in Texas.

This high amount of atmospheric moisture will lead to high hourly rainfall rates. Typically, the roadways of Houston are designed to flood during heavy rainfall, carrying water away from yards, into bayous, and out toward the Gulf of Mexico. However, their capacity is about 1 to 2 inches of rain per hour. During tropical events such as this, rainfall rates of three, four, or even five inches per hour are possible.

This flooding threat comes only a little more than two years after Hurricane Harvey ravaged the upper Texas coast, including Houston, with widespread areas receiving 40 inches or more of rainfall. This tropical system will not approach Harvey in terms of scope or rainfall intensity, but it nonetheless has a flood-weary region on edge.

In 2001, a tropical storm barely worthy of the name (Allison)—so weak were its winds—pushed into the Texas coast and dropped 15 to 25 inches over much of the Houston area. It caused $5 billion in damages, and it remains the costliest tropical storm on record for the United States. Since then, considerable development has occurred in the region. While some have been developed responsibly, other subdivisions have been thrown up in or near floodplains, so the region is more vulnerable than ever to intense rainfall events.

Source Article from https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/another-flood-storm-may-be-coming-for-texas-this-week/

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John Bolton Already Talking With Book Agents: ‘He Has a Lot to Dish’ – The Daily Beast
John Bolton Already Talking With Book Agents: ‘He Has a Lot to Dish’ – The Daily Beast
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