A federal judge in Brooklyn on Tuesday blasted the Trump administration’s decision not to extend the Oct. 5 deadline for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program as “heartless” and “unacceptable.”
At a hearing earlier this month for challenges to the decision, U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis had urged the administration to allow for an extension so that so-called Dreamers had more time to renew their status.
But the administration was apparently unmoved.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department Brett Shumate told Garaufis, “The Department of Homeland Security has ultimately decided to maintain the deadlines.”
Expressing shock, Garaufis said in court, “I’ve worked in every branch of government … and I’ve never seen a circumstance like this.”
“The president has said he will find a solution for all of these ‘wonderful’ people,” Garaufis said. “What I want to know is, what’s the hurry?”
The impact goes beyond the 800,000 Dreamers themselves, he said. “There are families. There are children. They have jobs. They’re teachers. They work in industry, and they’re making this country strong.”
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“You can’t come into court to espouse a position that is heartless,” he said. “It’s unacceptable to me as a human being and as a person. I’m glad I was born in Paterson, New Jersey and not Mexico City.”
The National Immigration Law Center, which is fighting the administration’s decision on DACA, tweeted this image outside the courthouse:
Advocacy group Make the Road New York also tweeted out many of Garaufis’ comments and concluded that the judge is “skeptical of all govt. arguments” and “shows deep empathy 4 immigrant youth.”
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Amid escalating tensions between North Korea and the U.S., critics were alarmed Tuesday when a South Korean news outlet reported that President Donald Trump will travel to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the neighboring countries next month.
A defense source reportedly told the Yonhap news agency that the White House has sent officials to the DMZ to assess potential sites for a planned “special activity” in which the president is “expected to send a significant message to North Korea, either verbally or ‘kinetically’,” according to a Reuters report.
“Please don’t tweet from the DMZ. Please don’t tweet from the DMZ. Please don’t tweet from the DMZ.” —Kelly Magsamen, Center for American Progress
Last week, the president cryptically told the press that the U.S. may currently be in “the calm before the storm.” The statement, combined with president’s refusal to engage in talks with Kim Jong-un and the news of his planned visit to the DMZ, alarmed critics, with many raising concerns that Trump is seeking to provoke North Korea.
In an email comment sent to Bloomberg, Bong Youngshik, a researcher at Yonsei University’s Institute for North Korean Studies in Seoul, said the trip would fit the “appetite for high theatrics” often exhibited by the U.S. president.
“The image of him narrowing his eyes to stare across the DMZ. It is tweeting by another means,” Bong said. “Mr. Trump may also think that if it provokes Pyongyang, all the better.”
Journalists and other observers also spoke out on social media.
Trump has shown no interest in holding peaceful negotiations with Kim Jong-un’s regime, and has publicly pushed back on statements by Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who have stressed that they are still pursuing diplomatic talks with North Korea.
Former president Jimmy Carter has also urged diplomacy, writing in the Washington Post last week that the growing tension amounts to “the most serious existing threat to world peace,” and reportedly saying he wants to personally meet with Kim to push for peace talks.
Trump is scheduled to leave Washington on Nov. 3 to visit Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines.
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Despite a push by some Democrats that he fully commit to the party, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont confirmed Sunday night that he will remain an Independent as he seeks re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2018.
“I am an independent and I have always run in Vermont as an independent. While I caucus with the Democrats in the United States Senate,” Sanders said during an interview with FOX News. “That’s what I’ve been doing for a long time and that’s what I’ll continue to do.”
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Last week it surfaced that a member of the DNC had introduced a resolution calling for Independents who caucus with the Democrats to either “register or affiliate with the Democratic Party” in 2018 for their re-election bids. Currently Sanders and Sen. Angus King of Maine are the only two members of the Senate who do so. That resolution was voted down by party members on Friday. Sanders is the longest serving independent in the history of the U.S. Congress.
Though Sanders ran in the 2016 presidential as a Democrat he switched his party affiliation back to Independent soon after his primary defeat to Hillary Clinton. Sanders, who remains the nation’s most popular lawmaker from any party, has not said whether or not he will run for president again in 2020, but has not taken the possibility off the table.
New Zealand’s progressive new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern strongly rejected President Donald Trump’s assessment of her recent rise to power, according to her account of their first in-person meeting at the East Asia Summit last week.
After Trump said Ardern’s win had “upset” many New Zealanders, the Labor Party leader remarked that “nobody marched” in response to her victory, as millions did all over the globe when Trump was inaugurated in January.
Ardern offered a full account of her meeting with Trump to New Zealand’s Newsroom:
At 37, Ardern became New Zealand’s second-youngest and third female prime minister in October, just three months after becoming the leader of the center-left party, when the head of the New Zealand First party announced he would support Ardern in a coalition government.
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A month earlier, New Zealand’s election had resulted in a hung parliament, with the left-leaning contingent winning 54 seats and the center-right National Party gaining 56—falling short of the 61 needed for a parliamentary majority.
Many were surprised when the anti-immigration New Zealand First party, which won nine seats, threw its support behind Ardern’s leadership, giving her enough seats to become prime minister.
During her election campaign earlier this year, Ardern focused largely on childhood poverty, environmental protection, and affordable housing.
Ardern has advocated for a drop in immigration to New Zealand by 20,000 to 30,000 per year, citing insufficient infrastructure and housing for a large influx of new arrivals. Currently, the country accepts about 70,000 annually. However, Adern also plans to double the country’s refugee quotas and offered to resettle 150 refugees currently in detention centers on Australia’s Manus Island, on humanitarian grounds.
The new prime minister was one of thousands of New Zealanders who participated in the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration.
Raising concerns about possible ethics violations and corruption, the Paradise Papers revealed two top members of the Trump administration, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have ties to tax havens, and that during Ross’s confirmation hearing, he failed to disclose business dealings with Russians who are directly connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Paradise Papers are a trove of more than 13 million leaked documents, published Sunday, detailing tax avoidance and shady deals among some of the world’s richest individuals and multinational companies. The documents include decades of corporate records from the offshore law firm Appleby. They were obtained by a German newspaper and shared with journalists associated with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other media organizations.
The files show that while Tillerson, the former CEO of fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil, directed a Bermuda-based joint venture that conducted gas and oil operations in Yemen, Ross still holds stake in a shipping company that is partially owned by Putin’s son-in-law and “a Russian tycoon sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as a member of Putin’s inner circle.”
The revelations have raised concerns among lawmakers and ethics experts.
The watchdog group Common Cause has called on the Commerce Department’s inspector general to launch a full investigation into Ross’s offshore investments. The group’s president Karen Hobert Flynn said Monday, “These latest revelations are part of a disturbing pattern of Trump administration officials seeking to hide their links to Russian business interests and members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.”
The records and related reports come less than a week after it was revealed that the first federal charges were filed in the ongoing investigation into whether the Trump administration colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Richard Painter, who served as the ethics chief under former President George W. Bush and is currently vice chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said, “It’s a very, very troubling situation.”
In an episode of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal podcast published Sunday, Painter explained, “If United States government officials have offshore entities, it may be very difficult to detect payments from foreign governments or sovereign wealth funds, and profits from dealings with those entities that are a violation of the Constitution.”
“We want good relations with China and Russia,” Painter added, “but we don’t want our senior government officials dealing with large companies in those other countries at the same time as they’re holding positions of trust in the United States government.”
Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State
In the late 1990s, before rising to the position of CEO, Tillerson served as president of Exxon Yemen as well as director of Marib Upstream Services Company, which was incorporated in Bermuda in 1997. Marib Upstream Services’ partners included the state-owned Yemen Gas Company and a company owned by ExxonMobil and the Texas-based Hunt Oil, which was run by Tillerson’s close friend Ray Hunt.
The Guardian, which received access to the records, reports ExxonMobil and Hunt Oil “ran a $5bn venture to export 61m barrels of natural gas a year from fields in Marib, western Yemen. Hunt had discovered the fields in the mid-1980s and brought in ExxonMobil to help develop them.”
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“Yemen later moved to nationalize the gas-drilling operation, banishing the ExxonMobil-Hunt firm when its 20-year exploration contract expired in 2005,” the Guardian notes. “The Texans claimed they were entitled to an extension and sued Yemen for $1.6bn. The case was arbitrated at the International Chamber of Commerce, where Yemen prevailed.”
The records reveal the details of just one instance of ExxonMobil operating subsidiaries in tax havens. Last year, Citizens for Tax Justice released a report (pdf) that found while Tillerson served as ExxonMobil’s CEO, the company’s 35 tax haven subsidiaries held an estimated $51 billion offshore.
This case is similar to one detailed in documents leaked late last year—shortly before Tillerson became the United States’ top diplomat. Those records divulged that in 1998, Tillerson directed ExxonMobil’s Russian subsidary, which was based in the Bahamas, a well known tax haven. The revelation elevated concerns about Tillerson’s commitment to U.S. interests and his ties to the Russian government and Putin, who bestowed upon him an Order of Friendship in 2013.
Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce
Ross helps to guide U.S. trade and manufacturing policies—including sanctions—as head of the Department of Commerce. When he was nominated, the billionaire investor vowed in an ethics filing that he would divest from 80 companies and partnerships, while keeping his stake in nine others that held assets in “real estate financing and mortgage lending” and “transoceanic shipping.”
Though the assests were not specified at the time, the leaked records reportedly reveal that Ross retained his stake in the shipping company Navigator Holdings, which is incorporated in the Marshall Islands and counts among its biggest customers Sibur, a Russian gas and petrochemical company.
Using information from the files, the BBC mapped Ross’s relationship to Navigator and Sibur, the company shareholders’ ties to Putin.
Ross told the BBC that he’s never met the Sibur shareholders and that because the U.S. has not sanctioned Sibur, “there’s nothing whatsoever improper about Navigator having a relationship with Sibur.” A Commerce Department spokesperson told ICIJ reporters that Ross “recuses himself from any matters focused on transoceanic shipping vessels, but has been generally supportive of the administration’s sanctions.”
Other Trump Ties
Ross and Tillerson were among several of U.S. President Donald Trump’s advisers, cabinet members, and donors who, according to the leaked records, used offshore tax havens to conduct business. While the Guardian published a report describing how several wealthy individuals with connections to the U.S. president have utilized tax havens, ICIJ illustrated 13 influencers’ ties to Trump with an interactive:
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The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the opening arguments on Monday in a case that workers and labor leaders fear could deliver a serious blow to public sector unions.
In Janus vs. AFSCME, the court will reconsider its 1977 decision stating that public employees who choose not to join unions can still be required to pay partial union dues, to help fund unions’ collective bargaining negotiations, which hold benefits for all workers.
While AFSCME is the union that represents state and municipal workers, supporters fear that a decision in favor of Mark Janus—the individual plaintiff backed by a network of billionaires, corporate interests and right-wing ideologues determined to undermine organized workers—would threaten labor in all sectors across the country. As Andrew Hanna and Caitlin Emma wrote at Politico on Sunday:
Wealthy conservative donors including the Bradley Foundation and the Koch brothers have contributed to the “right to work” cause represented by Janus for decades. The National Right to Work Foundation and the Illinois Policy Institute, which represent the plaintiff, have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the groups.
Public sector unions and labor advocates including the National Education Association (NEA), Jobs with Justice, and AFSCME rallied in front of the Supreme Court on Monday, keeping up the momentum started by protests in cities across the country on Saturday’s Working People’s Day of Action.
Using the rallying call, “Unrig the system,” leaders including Sarita Gupta of Jobs with Justice spoke out at the Supreme Court against the corporate power behind efforts to weaken unions.
“This case is a culmination of years of attacks on working people,” Gupta told the crowd. “It’s an assault by wealthy elites on our freedom to create better lives and sustainable futures for our families. Greedy billionaires, divisive extremists, and the corrupt politicians who do their bidding are rigging the rules in their favor in an attempt to gain more power. And we’re not going to let that happen.”
A ruling in the Janus case is expected by June.
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The COVID-19 track and trace app in Scotland | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Coronavirus apps were supposed to be the answer to COVID-19. They are not
As the UK rolls out its app, it’s time to get real about what we can really expect from these digital tools.
Digital Politics is a column about the global intersection of technology and the world of politics.
Coronavirus cases are again on the rise. Governments are scratching their heads about what to do next. Many are relying on digital apps to track the spread of the pandemic.
They shouldn’t get their hopes up.
As England and Wales on Thursday became the latest countries to roll out a coronavirus smartphone tool (in the United Kingdom, Scotland and Northern Ireland had already done so), the track record of these apps across Europe and elsewhere is, at best, patchy and, at worst, a distraction to more analog attempts to corral a pandemic that has so far killed almost 1 million people worldwide.
These tracking apps — backed, almost exclusively, by technology from Google and Apple — allow people to keep tabs on who they’ve been in contact with and to be notified, virtually and anonymously, if any of those contacts has contracted COVID-19. In most countries, the data is stored only on people’s phones to avoid governments generating a massive database on people’s health records and personal details.
But poor uptake by people wary of handing any of their information to governments and tech giants, technical limits on how these apps can work across borders, and overhype about how these tools can manage a once-in-a-generation health crisis have hamstrung the efforts.
Now, with COVID-19 cases skyrocketing and countries from the United Kingdom to Spain considering broader lockdowns, the failures are more glaring than ever.
At the heart of the problem is trust.
For these digital tools to be successful, some academics estimate that almost two-thirds of a country’s population must download the app to provide blanket nationwide coverage. Others suggest that as little as 15 percent of a country’s population needs to participate to have a meaningful effect on the spread of COVID-19. Either way, the tools require people to willingly download an app (on a smartphone with up-to-date software) and people linking positive coronavirus test results with their online profile so that it can be shared widely.
But in almost all countries, those goals remain aspirational, at best.
In the most successful cases, like Finland and Iceland, uptake has hovered between 30-40 percent — not a bad start in terms of keeping tabs on a country’s population.
Yet elsewhere, particularly in countries with long histories of not trusting government agencies with people’s data, apps have been a lot less popular. In Germany, the usage rate is about one in five, while in France (a country that decided to go its own way and not use technology provided by Google and Apple), less than 8 percent of the population downloaded the tracing service, according to government estimates.
More important, across all countries, the apps still send out few alerts to those possibly infected with the virus, raising questions about whether people are truly being honest regarding their COVID-19 status.
Researchers at the University College London, after reviewing multiple global trials of coronavirus apps, found little, if any, evidence of benefits in combating COVID-19.
In England and Wales, the latest countries to roll the dice, the app development has been mired in false starts; an initial, eventually-scrapped attempt to not work with Google and Apple’s technology; and ongoing concerns that the tracing service hasn’t complied with local privacy laws. Officials say such snags have been worked out, including allowing people to delete their data quickly if they choose to do so.
It’s all well and good to have a COVID-19 app. But if no one uses it — after officials spent millions building the tools — what really is the point?
The next significant blindspot is data, and who has access to people’s coronavirus records.
After Google and Apple forced countries to embrace their so-called decentralized approach (in which all data would solely be stored on people’s phones) in exchange for their technological expertise, privacy campaigners cheered, claiming that such efforts would limit a government data grab.
But what it also did was hamper national efforts to track the spread of the virus. Countries’ health agencies could not get their hands on people’s COVID-19 data because all such information was stored (and encrypted) on people’s devices.
Already, health experts in Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere have criticized their inability to track the pandemic because of a lack of data access from coronavirus apps. The only country to get around this issue, so far, is Ireland where app developers built in a question when people first downloaded the app that asked them to willingly share their data with local health authorities. More than half of Irish app users agreed.
To make matters worse, it’s still an open question how countries’ individual apps can work with each other — a critical problem if people are supposed to (eventually) get back to traveling across Europe and beyond.
Earlier this month, the European Commission started trials to see how apps from six countries could work with each other with the plan for the system to be rolled sometime next month. One big holdout was France, whose app — based on centralizing data in one national server — was not compatible with other digital tools from across the bloc.
Yet alongside the technical issues, health agencies from individual countries must also sign agreements for data to be shared (anonymously) across borders, and questions remain about how such a region-wide system could work, legally, when national governments are still struggling to get their local apps up and running.
With cases spiking across the Continent, even before winter really kicks in, a reliable (and widely-used) coronavirus tracking system is all but essential to avoid the national lockdowns that blighted the region earlier this year.
In theory, digital apps could lie at the heart of this strategy. But the reality has shown they are little more than glitzy gadgets that leave much to be desired.
Mark Scott is chief technology correspondent at POLITICO.
An executive at Cambridge Analytica claims they ran all of President TrumpDonald John TrumpSenate advances public lands bill in late-night vote Warren, Democrats urge Trump to back down from veto threat over changing Confederate-named bases Esper orders ‘After Action Review’ of National Guard’s role in protests MORE’s digital campaign, Britain’s Channel 4 News reported.
An executive at the company talked about how their work contributed to Trump’s win of “40,000 votes” in three states, Channel 4 News reported, according to an undercover investigation.
“We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy,” said CEO Alexander Nix, regarding Cambridge Analytica’s work for Trump.
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Another executive, Mark Turnbull, managing director of the company’s political division, talked about how the firm could use “proxy organizations.”
“You feed them. They are civil society organizations,” he said.
“Charities or activist groups, and we use them — feed them the material and they do the work.”
“We just put information into the bloodstream, to the internet, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding — so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”
Turnbull also discussed during a meeting creating the “Defeat Crooked Hillary” brand of attack ads, according to Channel 4. The ads were funded by Make America 1 super PAC, according to the publication.
According to Channel 4 News, Nix also talked about how the company did not leave any paper trail.
“No one knows we have it, and secondly we set our … emails with a self-destruct timer … So you send them and after they’ve been read, two hours later, they disappear. There’s no evidence, there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing,” he said, according to the publication.
Nix was suspended by the research firm’s board of directors after a video published by Channel 4 that showed him talking about the use of bribes and prostitutes to sway political elections.
The board said in a statement that Nix would be suspended pending a “full, independent investigation.”
“In the view of the Board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation,” the statement says.
A self-described whistleblower on Cambridge Analytica’s data harvesting practices is slated to give an interview to Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.
Facebook has been under fire since The New York Times and The Observer of London reported that Cambridge Analytica used personal data from roughly 50 million Facebook users for unauthorized political purposes. The firm reportedly received the data from a researcher.
Facebook’s stock price continued to fall Tuesday following the reports.
Shares of Facebook were down 5.7 percent by Tuesday afternoon, falling as low as $162, a nearly $10 drop. U.S. stocks on the whole gained throughout the day.
Rep. Todd RokitaTheodore (Todd) Edward RokitaBottom Line Lobbying world Female Dems see double standard in Klobuchar accusations MORE (R-Ind.), an Indiana GOP Senate candidate, called President TrumpDonald John TrumpSenate advances public lands bill in late-night vote Warren, Democrats urge Trump to back down from veto threat over changing Confederate-named bases Esper orders ‘After Action Review’ of National Guard’s role in protests MORE in a 2016 interview “vulgar, if not profane.”
Rokita — who has worn a “Make America Great Again” hat in a TV ad and has brought a cardboard cutout of the president to campaign rallies — made the comments during a February 2016 interview with Indianapolis-based WXIN TV, according to The Associated Press.
He was talking during the interview about his support for Sen. Marco RubioMarco Antonio RubioHillicon Valley: Georgia officials launch investigation after election day chaos | Senate report finds Chinese telecom groups operated in US without proper oversight Republican Senators ask FCC to ‘clearly define’ when social media platforms should receive liability protections Trump’s tweet on protester sparks GOP backlash MORE (R-Fla.), who was a presidential candidate at the time.
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“When you see Marco contrasted with Donald Trump — I mean, someone who is vulgar, if not profane,” Rokita said in the 2016 interview.
“At some point you have to be presidential. People expect that and you see that in Marco Rubio.”
Spokesman Nathan Brand told the AP in a statement that Rokita was still “the only Republican who steadfastly supported Donald Trump against Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonWhite House accuses Biden of pushing ‘conspiracy theories’ with Trump election claim Biden courts younger voters — who have been a weakness Trayvon Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton qualifies to run for county commissioner in Florida MORE.”
“This is why the 2016 Trump-Pence Indiana team has expressed support for Todd,” Brand said.
Rokita donned a “Make America Great Again” hat in a recently released television ad for his Senate campaign in which he attacks his GOP primary rivals and pitches himself as a top ally to Trump.
The crowded primary between Rokita, Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.) and businessman Mike Braun has turned into a battle over who can show themselves as aligned the closest with Trump.
The president defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by about 19 points in Indiana, where Vice President Pence served as governor before joining the presidential ticket.
Rokita has also highlighted critical comments Messer made of Trump during the 2016 election, a strategy Messer’s campaign has brushed aside by arguing that Messer backed the president in the primary and has always supported him.