Tag: United States of America

Sputnik/Reuters WASHINGTON — At 9:34 on the November morning after Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2016, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and an informal envoy for President Vladimir V. Putin, sent a text message to a Lebanese-American friend with ties to the Trump campaign. But his report made clear how vigorously Mr. Putin sought to find points of contact and influence with Mr. Trump’s team — and how many people on the American side were willing to participate to one degree or another in discussions that touched on topics as varied as Mr. Trump’s desire to build a Moscow hotel to United States policy toward Ukraine. It is not clear that the Russians had much, if any, success in influencing American policy through the back channels they established, although Mr. Trump’s comments often strike foreign policy experts as remarkably sympathetic to Mr. Putin. According to the Mueller report, Mr. Putin wasted no time enlisting Russian oligarchs to carry the Kremlin’s message after Mr. Trump’s election. On the American side, a varied cast of characters was fielding overtures and proposals from Russians or pro-Russian Ukrainians during the campaign and transition, including: Mr. Gerson; George Nader, the Lebanese-American with Trump campaign connections; Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman; Michael D. Cohen, the president’s longtime fixer and lawyer; and Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and brother of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s pick for education secretary. An American investment banker with many contacts in Russia, Robert Foresman, said that Mr. Gorkov told him before the meeting that Mr. Putin had approved his trip and that he would report back to Mr. Putin afterward, the special counsel’s report states. Mr. Gorkov publicly suggested it was business, while Mr. Kushner said it was diplomatic issues. As the special counsel’s report noted in recounting the meeting between Mr. Kushner and Mr. Gorkov, there “had been public reporting both about efforts to secure lending on the property and possible conflicts of interest for Kushner arising out of his company’s borrowing from foreign lenders.” The template of Russia trying to advance its policy goals through the business interests of people in Mr. Trump’s orbit was set in mid-2015, almost as soon as Mr. Trump announced his candidacy. Instead, Mr. Nader connected the Russian official to Mr. Gerson, Mr. Kushner’s hedge fund friend, and to Mr. On Jan. 11, 2017, Mr. Dmitriev and Mr.

After 20 years in power and weeks of mass protests, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria’s ailing president, resigned. Dozens of people have been killed in the past two weeks, during Iran’s worst rains in years. Iranian officials blamed American sanctions for impeding their aid efforts. Four Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers. Over 1,400 people have been infected, up from the 249 cases reported recently. Activists in Thailand questioned the opaque conduct of the Election Commission, which has not yet announced the results of last month’s election. Thousands of people marched against it, saying it could be used as a pretext to hand over people who are wanted for political reasons. America had appealed to China to adopt tougher controls. Lori Lightfoot won a run-off election to become Chicago’s mayor, and will be the first black woman and gay person to hold the office. The prime minister held talks with the opposition in an effort to break the deadlock.

"We cannot allow racist and armed vigilantes to kidnap and detain people seeking asylum," the ACLU said in a letter to state authorities denouncing the actions and asking the government to step in. Pelosi's comments are likely to annoy members of the ruling Conservative party who insist that a hard Brexit — which include the UK leaving the bloc's single market and customs union — is necessary in order for the country to strike trade agreements with third countries. And Lyra McKee was killed on the cusp of Good Friday. Good Friday. Later, these would break apart into hydrogen molecules and helium atoms. Is it a good day for dinosaur news, SciNews.com? It's always a good day for dinosaur news! He'll make this another argument about open borders, instead of what it is, another example of how dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now. The Committee is always happy to learn new things. So the members enjoyed Top Commenter Jack Schroeder's little lesson in Alabama legislative history.

FBN’s Gerry Baker interviews Cardinal Timothy Dolan about the important role religion plays in politics. When it comes to mixing politics and religion, New York's most prominent Catholic leader says it's a must. “A public square where religious values are absent is perilous,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York told "WSJ at Large" host Gerry Baker on FOX Business on Friday. As we move closer to the 2020 presidential election, political and religious controversies dominate headlines. From gay marriage, abortion and contraception, to divorce and the sanctity of marriage, many in the U.S. find the Church’s position irrelevant or harmful and offensive. But Cardinal Dolan believes that those negative perspectives are "caricatures of the Church” which need to be replaced by a more affirmative view. "That’s a Catholic value, it’s also a very American value.” This becoming ever more prevalent as political discourse takes on more theological overtones. Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg, an openly-married gay man, who was baptized Catholic but is now an Episcopalian, frequently references faith in his campaign and criticized Vice President Mike Pence's cultural and religious conservatism a “fanatical” ideology. It is no surprise that there is very little consensus on how religion should be integrated with politics. A new survey suggests Americans are rejecting religion in their own lives at a record pace.

Meanwhile, Chinese scientists planning to attend conferences or meetings in the United States have told Nature that they are experiencing significant delays in obtaining short-term visas. Last August, Collins wrote a letter to the more than 10,000 US institutions that it funds, stating that the agency was concerned that “some foreign entities” were interfering in the funding, research and peer-review of NIH-supported projects. Then, last week, Collins said that investigations at 55 US universities had found some “egregious” breaches of rules governing the agency’s grants — including grant recipients not disclosing foreign government money or diverting intellectual property from their US institution to other countries such as China. “If students are told they cannot do cutting-edge research at US institutions, they are going to go elsewhere,” Mowery says. What about visas? Pan told Nature that he has missed two conferences in the United States this year, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, at which he was to have collected the prestigious Newcomb Cleveland Prize for an outstanding paper published in the journal Science, because he was not granted a visa in time. Several major scientific conferences in the United States have also reported visa delays for Chinese nationals. An official at the Chinese embassy in Washington DC, who asked not to be named owing to the sensitivity of the situation, said the embassy is aware that increased numbers of Chinese students and academics have been unable to obtain US visas for China–US student exchange programmes, conferences and meetings over the past 12 months. Are the tensions affecting science in China? Universities need to be more vigilant against foreign interference in research, Smith says, but also to balance that with the need for academic openness and international collaboration.

Good Wednesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today. _____________________ • In his two years in office, Donald J. Trump has become president of the United Base of America, making little effort to expand his coalition beyond the voters who propelled him to the White House in the first place. While other presidents sought to broaden their public support, Mr. Trump is heading into his re-election campaign sticking with his own tribe. • Mr. Trump vetoed a bipartisan resolution that would have forced an end to American military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, rejecting an appeal by lawmakers to his own deeply rooted instincts to withdraw the United States from bloody foreign conflicts. • The Trump administration took another significant step to discourage migrants from seeking asylum, issuing an order that could keep thousands of them in jail indefinitely while they wait for a resolution of their asylum requests. • There’s a real chance Democrats are headed toward a contested convention in 2020. Some members of the party establishment are wondering whether they should try to impede Senator Bernie Sanders’s candidacy before then. • Now that all the 2020 candidates have filed their first financial records, where does everyone stand? Here’s a visual breakdown of their fund-raising and spending, and here are nine takeaways from the reports.

CONWAY — Different, but in a good way. That’s how Democratic presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson comes across, and though she has never held political office, her campaign is championing people over politics. She said all her life she has been a Democrat, but an American first. “I’m running with a lot of smart, good people. "In my case, particularly, I was aware there would be inevitable humiliation, mockery, mean-spiritedness and marginalization. "And what happened in 1980 and has continued essentially unabated and in some cases faster and others slower is a system in which our government has become a handmaiden to a system which (allows its) market forces to go completely untethered to any level of ethical or moral responsibility…This has not only created the largest wealth inequality, not only has it decimated America’s middle class, corrupted our government, not only taken of the people, by the people and for the people and turned it into of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.” Williams, who wants to be an "FDR-type of president', would like to see health care for all, see college loans renegotiated, see universal pre-kindergarten with more care given to children because “millions of children live in domestic war zones.” She would create a U.S. Department of Children and Youth to address these issues. Williams also wants the government to be practical and not kowtow to big business. We’re going to have 100 airplanes at $550 million each that carry nuclear bombs. We’re ordering them for a defense contractor and nuclear industry purposes. For more on Williams, go to marianne2020.com.

How are Americans feeling about President Trump's tax cut bill? Well, not very good. Polls suggests that it remains really unpopular. What's the Dems' biggest achievement in their first 100 days in the House? That'll continue to be their number one role in the House since they don't control the Senate. Will the Mueller report reveal more details of collusion? I'd say it's much more likely to give us details about potential obstruction rather than collusion, but I'm not sure there will be huge blockbusters in there. Is President Trump moving to consolidate power? He's cleared out DHS, he's got acting directors or leaders in six agencies not Senate confirmed. And go deeper on topics like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence Microsoft On The Issues.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Americans are in a state of abject panic amid reports that Donald J. Trump is threatening to dump thousands of fired Cabinet members and aides on cities that do not support him. Harland Dorrinson, who lives in San Francisco, said that “every American should be alarmed” at the spectre of former Trump staffers like Kirstjen Nielsen, Scott Pruitt, and Anthony Scaramucci descending on their towns. “A lot of these people were unsavory to begin with, and their time at the White House only hardened them,” he said. Carol Foyler, who resides in Boston, said that, with Trump staffers being fired at a rate of four hundred a day, she lives in terror at the prospect of these castoffs melting into the general population. “I was on line at Starbucks the other day and I thought I saw Steve Bannon,” she said. “It turned out it was just some other creepy-looking guy, but my heart was racing. The fear is real.” Tracy Klugian, who lives in Minneapolis, has started a petition to create a city ordinance preventing former Trump aides from settling in his town. “This city is full,” he said. As they brace themselves for an onslaught of fired Trump underlings, some Americans are grasping for a silver lining. “As of now, Stephen Miller and Sarah Huckabee Sanders are still employed at the White House, where their movements can be closely monitored,” Foyler said.

High-ranking former European politicians have condemned the Trump administration’s one-sided Israel-Palestine policy and called in a letter for Europe to reject any US Middle East peace plan unless it is fair to Palestinians. The letter, sent to the Guardian, the EU and European governments, was signed by 25 former foreign ministers, six former prime ministers, and two former Nato secretary generals. Europe must stand by the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine | Letter Read more Europe, it said, should reject any plan that does not create a Palestinian state alongside Israel with Jerusalem as the capital for both countries. Since taking office, and amid praise from Israel’s government, Trump has taken measures seen as both punishing to Palestinians and which also stifle the viability of a Palestinian state. Friedman told the pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington last month that Trump was “Israel’s greatest ally ever to reside in the White House” and now was the time to push through a plan as his administration understood Israel should have permanent military control over the Palestinian territories. On Tuesday, Netanyahu won the Israeli election and is expected to secure a fifth term in office by forging a coalition government from rightwing and pro-settler parties. A few days before the polls, the prime minister said that, if he won, he planned to annex settlements in the occupied West Bank, a move Palestinians see as the end of their hopes for a state as there would be no unbroken land on which to build it. There aren’t going to be any settlers or settlements that are going to be torn. Queried about Netanyahu’s annexation plans, Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said they would not damage the undisclosed peace plan, hinting the US proposal did not envision Palestinian statehood. “I think that the vision that we’ll lay out is going to represent a significant change from the model that’s been used,” said Pompeo, who has previously stated he believes, as a Christian, it was possible God made Trump president to save the Jewish people.