Daily: 08/09/2018
Latina Press Officer Helen Aguirre Ferre Leaves White House
Helen Aguirre Ferre, one of the most prominent Latinos serving in the White House, has left her job as director of media affairs.
White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said Thursday that Aguirre was taking up a new position as director for strategic communications and public affairs at the National Endowment for the Arts. She said Aguirre would start her new job in the next two weeks.
In a statement, Aguirre said she looks forward to “continuing to advance the President’s agenda in support of American communities through the National Endowment for the Arts which provides support to nonprofit cultural institutions nationwide.”
Aguirre had held the White House job since the start of the Trump administration after serving as the Republican National Committee’s director of Hispanic communications. During her tenure, the White House removed the Spanish-language content from its website, a departure from the two previous administrations.
President Donald Trump’s engagement with Latinos has been complicated. During his campaign, Trump turned off many Latinos with his harsh anti-immigration rhetoric, including disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. He criticized rival Jeb Bush for answering a reporter’s question in Spanish, saying the former Florida governor “should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.”
Aguirre’s departure follows that of another high-profile Latino, Carlos Diaz-Rosillo, who in June left his job at the White House as deputy assistant to the president and director of policy and interagency coordination to become a senior deputy chairman at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Before joining the administration, Díaz-Rosillo had taught at Harvard in the Government Department. He did not reply to a message from the AP requesting comment.
The recent changes leave these Latinos serving closest to Trump: Mercedes Schlapp, White House director of strategic communications; Jennifer Korn, special assistant to the president and deputy director for the Office of Public Liaison; Juan Cruz, senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.
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Десятки дітей загинули і поранені під час бомбардування в Ємені
Близько 60 дітей загинули або поранені внаслідок авіаудару сил міжнародної коаліції під проводом Саудівської Аравії в утримуваному повстанцями північному регіоні Ємену, повідомляє Міжнародний комітет Червоного Хреста.
«Лікарня, яку підтримує наша команда в Ємені, прийняла тіла 29 дітей віком до 15 років і 48 поранених, зокрема 30 дітей», – повідомив МКЧХ у Twitter 9 серпня.
Діти їхали в автобусі, в який влучила ракета біля ринку в Дах’яні у провінції Саада.
Провінція, яка межує з Саудівською Аравією, зараз перебуває під контролем повстанців Хуті.
Штаб коаліції, підтримуваної Заходом заявив, що авіаудари припали на ракетно-пускові установки противника, які використовувалися для нанесення ударів по цілях у Саудівській Аравії. У коаліції назвали авіаудари «легітимною операцією».
Читайте також: У 2017 кількість дітей-жертв конфліктів зросла – ООН
Конфлікт у Ємені триває з кінця 2014 року, після того, як повстанці руху Хуті захопили столицю Ємену, місто Сану. З метою відновлення уряду президента Абд-Раббу Мансура Хаді у 2015 році була сформована коаліція під проводом Саудівської Аравії. В результаті бойових дій загинули близько 10 тисяч людей.
За даними ООН, через конфлікт 22 мільйони людей потребують гуманітарної допомоги. В організації вважають, що гуманітарна криза в Ємені нині є найгострішою у світі.
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CША планують до 2020 року створити космічні війська
Віце-президент США Майк Пенс анонсував створення до 2020 року нового роду американських військ – космічних сил.
Пенс пояснив необхідність їх створення погрозами в цій сфері з боку Росії і Китаю. «Американці повинні домінувати в космосі – так і буде», – заявив Пенс 9 серпня у Пентагоні.
Американське військо зараз складається з армії, флоту, повітряних сил, прибережної охорони і морських сил. Військово-космічні проекти на даний час контролюють військово-повітряні сили США.
План, запропонований президентом США Дональдом Трампом, повинен бути спочатку схвалений Конгресом.
Пентагон вже багато років попереджає про те, що космос стає сферою, через контроль над якою можуть розгорнутися військові дії, – так само, як земля, повітря і море.
Минулого року деякі члени Конгресу пропонували створити «космічний корпус» всередині ВПС, за аналогією з корпусом морської піхоти у складі ВМС. Високопоставлені представники Пентагону виступили проти цієї ідеї, і її зняли з розгляду.
У березні цього року президент США Дональд Трамп заявив, що хоче, аби американські військові створили новий підрозділ «космічних сил», що діятиме окремо від армії, флоту і ВПС Пентагону.
your ad hereУ справі про вбивство Бузини визначили склад присяжних
Шевченківський районний суд Києва визначив п’ять присяжних для розгляду справи про вбивство українського журналіста Олеся Бузини і призначив наступне засідання на 21 серпня.
Троє з них будуть основними, ще двоє – запасними.
Попереднє засідання суду відбулося 15 червня. У прокуратурі заявили, що суд мав вручити присяжним повідомлення про виклик з переліком їх прав та обов’язків за сім днів до засідання, однак цей термін не витримали – автоматизована система суду визначила присяжних 8 червня.
Тоді сторони розкритикували рішення суду перенести засідання майже на два місяці.
7 червня відбулося підготовче засідання в цій справі. Колегія суддів вирішила призначити обвинувальний акт до розгляду по суті судом присяжних. Перед цим засідання переносили кілька разів.
Бузину вбили 16 квітня 2015 року в Києві у дворі багатоквартирного будинку, в якому він жив. 18 червня 2015 року за підозрою у вбивстві затримали Андрія Медведька й Дениса Поліщука. Їх арештували. У грудні 2015 року Печерський райсуд Києва змінив запобіжний захід для них на домашній арешт.
Обидва не визнають своєї провини. Адвокати Медведька й Поліщука заявляли про фальсифікацію ДНК-експертизи в цій справі і про алібі обвинувачених.
Їм загрожує від 10 до 15 років позбавлення волі або довічне ув’язнення за обвинуваченням в умисному вбивстві й незаконному зберіганні зброї.
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Experts: Americans Vulnerable to Malign Social Media Messaging
While U.S. lawmakers press Twitter and Facebook to better police their platforms against Russian social media trolls and ponder tougher sanctions against Moscow, American voters remain vulnerable to divisive messaging and misinformation before midterm elections in November, experts told VOA.
“All of us, left and right [politically], are all very susceptible to being fooled by disinformation,” said Claire Wardle, director of First Draft News, a project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy that provides tools to fight false content on the Internet and social media.
“There are many people who are trying to spread misinformation.We all have to be much more skeptical of the information we are consuming and to be aware, particularly if it’s content that makes us have an emotional reaction,” Wardle added.
Last month, Facebook shut down 32 fake accounts that posted polarizing messages on race, gender, and fascism. In 2016, Russian trolls flooded Facebook, Twitter and other platforms with similar content, reaching millions of Americans.
One Russia-linked Twitter handle, 4MYSQUAD10, now deactivated, posted: “White America Does The Crime, Black America Gets The Time. WTF? #BlackLivesMatter #racism.”
Another, TEN_GOP 2545, posted: “Muslim bus driver throws all passengers out of the bus, so he has space and time to pray.”
“As humans we respond to fear,” Wardle said. “A lot of disinformation is driven by fear — other people you should be fearful of and then wanting to protect yourself, our family and your community.”
Last week, social media researchers told the Senate Intelligence Committee Russian efforts to polarize the American people are as pernicious as ever.
“Russian manipulation did not stop in 2016. After Election Day, the Russian government stepped on the gas,” New York-based Graphika CEO John Kelly said.
“Foreign actors will continue to aim future disinformation campaigns at African-American voters, Muslim-American voters, white supremacist voters,” Oxford University researcher Philip Howard told the panel. “I expect the strategy will remain the same: push disinformation about public issues and prevent particular types of voters from participating on Election Day.”
Political scientist Keneshia Grant may have had a firsthand brush with Russia’s use of social media to inflame racial tensions in the United States before the 2016 election, and believes American voters are still in Moscow’s crosshairs for malign messaging.
“There were minority communities targeted. I believe that targeting is still happening and that it has been getting more sophisticated over time,” said Grant, who teaches at Washington’s Howard University, a predominantly-African American institution.
In 2016, Grant noticed her Twitter account suddenly gained a group of mysterious and silent followers. She believed they were studying her posts to learn to craft messages to effectively target black Americans.
“There were 20-30 accounts of individuals who were trolling to see what I might say and, I suppose, to use that information to seem credible with other black users of Twitter,” she said. “I was one of the people who got an e-mail [from Twitter] saying you have interacted in some way with someone we believe to be fraudulent.”
Weeding out fake accounts
Social media companies have trumpeted their efforts to weed out fake accounts and bad actors. While commendable, Grant said it’s not enough.
“Americans have a responsibility to know that Russians are attempting to interfere in elections, and then to take the additional steps to figure out where information comes from that they are consuming.Not just consume it, but think about it,” she said.
Wardle concurred, but noted that social media trolls exploit a basic human tendency: giving credence to information or messaging that supports one’s outlook or ideology.
“People want to believe information that supports their worldview, whether that’s a belief on gun control or immigration or whether you’re more a dog person than a cat person,” she said, adding that counteracting that tendency will require holding people to account when they wittingly or unwittingly spread erroneous content.
“If we want to drive on roads that aren’t covered in garbage, we have to take responsibility for not throwing Coke cans out of the window,” she said.
“I want to see people recognize that when they click share’ [on social media], they have a responsibility for the information they are putting out,” she added. “So when crazy Uncle Bob is sharing false information, rather than saying, ‘well, that’s just crazy Uncle Bob,’ we should call him out and say that it’s not healthy for us to live in a society where we are sharing false information.”
The Harvard researcher noted that other regions of the world, like Eastern Europe, have been grappling with false information campaigns for far longer than the United States.
“After the election of 2016, when Americans all of a sudden woke up to misinformation, I think the rest of the world did a slow hand-clap and said ‘welcome to the party, America.'”
Some American schools have introduced curriculum to teach students to think more critically about the information they receive and to identify propaganda and malign messaging. Such classes should become standard, according to a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“We are asymmetrically vulnerable [to disinformation campaigns] because of the First Amendment and democracy, our whole system is based on information,” Maine independent Senator Angus King said.
“Our kids are growing up with these [high-tech] devices,” he added, “but not necessarily taught how they can be manipulated by their devices. I think there ought to be standardized courses in high school called digital literacy’ and increasing the public’s awareness that they are being conned.”
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У Конгресі США закликають звільнити журналіста Асєєва
Конгресмени наголошують, що, за повідомленням, Асєєв на початку липня оголосив голодування й тому «його ситуація стає жахливою»
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Chinese Media Say US Tariff Moves Reflect ‘Mobster Mentality’
Chinese state media on Thursday accused the United States of a “mobster mentality” in its move to implement additional tariffs on Chinese goods and warned that Beijing had all the necessary means to fight back.
The comments marked a ratcheting up in tensions between the world’s two largest economies over a trade dispute, which is already affecting industries including steel and autos and is causing unease about which products could be targeted next.
Beijing late on Wednesday said it would slap additional tariffs of 25 percent on $16 billion worth of U.S. imports, in retaliation against news the United States plans to begin collecting 25 percent extra in tariffs on $16 billion worth of Chinese goods beginning August 23.
“The two countries’ trade conflict, which is merely push and shove at the moment, is likely to escalate into more than just a scuffle if the U.S. administration cannot marshal its mobster mentality,” state newspaper China Daily said in an editorial.
“China continues to do its utmost to avoid a trade war, but in the face of the U.S.’s ever greater demand for protection money, China has no choice but to fight back,” it said.
So far, China has now either imposed or proposed tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. goods, representing the vast majority of its annual imports of American products. Big-ticket U.S. items that are still not on any list are crude oil and large aircraft.
“China has confidence in protecting its own interests [and] has many means,” state broadcaster CCTV said on its early-morning news show.
Another commentary, written by China Institute of International Studies research fellow Jia Xiudong and published in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily newspaper, said the United States was trying to “suppress China’s development.”
China should consider “unconventional methods” such as the stimulus plan used by Beijing during the global financial crisis if needed to sustain economic growth, the Global Times newspaper, a tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party’s People’s Daily, said in a commentary.
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Palestinian-American Congressional Candidate Source of West Bank Pride
The Michigan primary victory of Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American who is expected to become the first Muslim woman to serve in the U.S. Congress, triggered an outpouring of joy in her ancestral village on Wednesday.
Relatives in Beit Our al-Foqa, where Tlaib’s mother was born, greeted the news with a mixture of pride and hope that she will take on a U.S. administration widely seen as hostile to the Palestinian cause.
“It’s a great honor for this small town. It’s a great honor for the Palestinian people to have Rashida in the Congress,” said Mohammed Tlaib, the village’s former mayor and a distant relative. “For sure she will serve Palestine, for sure she will serve the interests of her nation. She is deeply rooted here.”
Rashida Tlaib, a former state lawmaker, defeated five other candidates to win the Democratic nomination in her Michigan district in Tuesday’s primary. She will run unopposed, setting her up to take the spot held since 1965 by John Conyers, who stepped down in December citing health reasons amid charges of sexual harassment.
While celebrating her win, Tlaib was embraced early Wednesday morning by her mother, Fatima, who briefly wrapped a Palestinian flag around Tlaib’s waist. “My mom is really, genuinely excited,” Tlaib said of her victory.
The eldest of 14 children born to Palestinian immigrants in Detroit, the 42-year-old Tlaib advocates progressive positions associated with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, such as universal health care, a higher minimum wage, environmental protection and affordable university tuition.
As a state lawmaker, she sought to defend Detroit’s poor, taking on refineries and a billionaire trucking magnate who she accused of polluting city neighborhoods. On the campaign trail, she criticized the influence of “big money” on politics and took aim at President Donald Trump, whom she famously heckled in 2016 while he was delivering a speech in Detroit.
While noting her Palestinian heritage, her website makes no mention of her views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a 2016 op-ed explaining why she disrupted then-presidential candidate Trump, she described herself as an “American, parent, Muslim, Arab-American, and woman.”
In an interview on Wednesday, Tlaib said her grandfather emigrated from Palestine to Brazil during the U.S. depression and eventually moved to Detroit to find better opportunities. “My dad grew up in Jerusalem,” she said. “When he was 19, he joined his father here. At 27, my grandmother grabbed him by the ear and took him to Palestine and said, ‘You are going to marry a good Arab woman.’”
While Tlaib would be the first Muslim woman to occupy a seat in the U.S. Congress, she would not be the first Palestinian-American. A lawmaker from western Michigan, U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican, is the son of a Palestinian refugee father and Syrian immigrant mother. He is a Christian.
In the West Bank, family members were jubilant as news of Tlaib’s victory came in early Wednesday. Relatives served baklawa, a sweet pastry, and grapes, figs and cactus fruits from their garden to visitors celebrating her win.
Tlaib’s uncle and aunt were speaking on an iPad with her mother, Fatima, back in Michigan.
“Thank God. Thank God,” her mother said. “This is for the Arabs and Muslims all over the world.”
She said her daughter detests Trump and that “God willing” she will defeat him and become the next U.S. president. “She stood up to him during his campaign. God willing, she will do it again and win.”
The first visitor was Mohammed Tlaib, the former mayor, who predicted his 5-year-old daughter, Juman, will grow up to be like her famous American relative. “Look at her. She is beautiful, smart and strong like her. From now on, I will name her Rashida,” he said.
The family’s story is typical of many Palestinians, with relatives scattered across the West Bank, Jordan and the United States. Mohammed Tlaib said some 50 people from the small village have immigrated to the U.S. and now have children in schools and universities in America. Relatives said Tlaib’s late father was from east Jerusalem.
“They are Americans, like other Americans, and have deep roots here. So we expect them to serve their occupied and embattled country there,” he said.
Trump is widely loathed by the Palestinians following his decision last December to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The Palestinians, who seek the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip for an independent state, see Trump as unfairly biased toward Israel. They have cut off most contacts with the Trump administration and pre-emptively rejected a peace plan expected to be unveiled by the White House in the near future.
The Tlaib family home in the West Bank is located near Road 443, an Israeli highway cutting through the territory that is largely off limits to Palestinian motorists. The home is near a towering military checkpoint, and relatives said that like many Palestinians, they are unable to build on their property because Israel will not give them a construction permit.
Rashida Tlaib’s uncle Bassam, 54, said the family always believed she had a bright future and has high hopes for her career in Washington.
“She told the family that she wants to run for election to defend human rights, women rights, immigrant rights and the Palestinian rights,” he said, adding that the Democrats are much better for the Palestinians than the Republicans. “There is a space in the Democratic party to defend Palestinian issues,” he said
Her aunt, Fadwa Tlaib, who was visiting from Jordan, described her niece as a strong advocate for the weak. “She hates to see anyone take the rights of others. She supports human rights, women’s rights. She empowered girls in the family,” she said.
She said that Rashida Tlaib is part of a new, more powerful and politically involved generation of Palestinian-Americans who are better educated and integrated than their immigrant parents.
“Our kids are having better opportunities, better educations, here and in the U.S., and they have a much brighter and more influential future,” she said.
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German Drugmaker Sues to Halt US Execution
German drugmaker Fresenius Kabi is suing to halt a planned execution in Nebraska, claiming the U.S. state illegally obtained the company’s drugs to use for the lethal injection procedure.
Fresenius Kabi filed the lawsuit Tuesday evening, saying the state was planning to use two of its drugs on August 14 to put to death convicted killer Carey Dean Moore.
Moore is sentenced to death for the 1979 murder of two taxi drivers. He is not contesting his execution order, but it could nevertheless be delayed by the lawsuit.
If carried out, the execution would be Nebraska’s first in 21 years and its first-ever lethal injection.
The state plans to use four drugs — the sedative Diazepam, the powerful narcotic painkiller fentanyl citrate, the muscle relaxer cisatracurium and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
Fresenius Kabi believes it is the source of the latter two drugs and is asking a federal judge to issue an order either temporarily or permanently blocking the state from using the injectable medications.
“While Fresenius Kabi takes no position on capital punishment, Fresenius Kabi opposes the use of its products for this purpose and therefore does not sell certain drugs to correctional facilities,” the company said in its civil complaint.
“These drugs, if manufactured by Fresenius Kabi, could only have been obtained by defendants in contradiction and contravention of the distribution contracts the company has in place and therefore through improper or illegal means.”
The drugmaker claims that with state executions regarded negatively among the majority of the European public, it could suffer “great reputational injury,” if its drugs are used for capital punishment.
The state of Nebraska has released limited information about the drugs and has not disclosed their source — reflecting a general dilemma for U.S. states that continue to carry out the death penalty via lethal injection.
Injectable drugs have become harder to acquire amid public opposition and a reluctance — or outright hostility — among drug manufacturers to sell their products to prisons for use in executions.
“Nebraska’s lethal injection drugs were purchased lawfully and pursuant to the State of Nebraska’s duty to carry out lawful capital sentences,” the state attorney general’s office said in a statement.
Last month, a similar lawsuit by drugmaker Alvogen at least temporarily halted an execution in Nevada.
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New York Moves to Cap Uber, App-Ride Vehicles
New York’s city council on Wednesday dealt a blow to Uber and other car-for-hire companies, passing a bill to cap the number of vehicles they operate and impose minimum pay standards on drivers.
The city of 8.5 million is the biggest app-ride market in the United States, where public transport woes and astronomical parking costs have helped fuel years of untamed growth by the likes of Lyft, Uber and Via.
But that growth has brought New York’s iconic yellow cabs to their knees. Since December, six yellow cab drivers have committed suicide. Those deaths have been linked, at least in part, to desperation over plummeting income.
The bill stipulates a 12-month cap on all new for-hire-vehicle licenses, unless they are wheelchair accessible, as well as minimum pay requirements for app drivers — regulated by the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC).
It makes New York the first major city in the United States to limit the number of app-based rides and to impose pay rules for drivers.
A recent TLC-commissioned study recommended a guaranteed income of $17.22 an hour for drivers — $15, plus a supplement to mitigate against rest time.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, vowed to sign the bill into law, proclaiming that it would “stop the influx of cars contributing to the congestion grinding our streets to a halt.”
“More than 100,000 workers and their families will see an immediate benefit from this legislation,” de Blasio said.
Around 80,000 drivers work for at least one of the big four app-based companies in New York, compared to 13,500 yellow cab drivers, according to the recent TLC-commissioned study.
The increased competition has slashed the value of yellow cab taxi licenses, from more than $1 million in 2014 to and less than $200,000 today.
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Exhibit Documents Revival of Polish Jewish life
American photographer Chuck Fishman was 21 when he began traveling behind the Iron Curtain in 1975 to document a Jewish community on the verge of dying out after centuries of existence in Poland. He couldn’t have foreseen the Jewish revival that would come after the fall of communism in 1989.
A new photo exhibition opened this week in Warsaw that brings together Fishman’s early documentation of a melancholy and declining Jewish world with the revival of traditions by the third and fourth generations after the Holocaust, a transformation that left him astounded.
Titled Re-Generation: Jewish Life in Poland, the exhibition showing at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw will run until October 28 and then go to the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow for several more months.
Fishman, now 65, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that his motivation for documenting Poland’s Jews in the 1970s and 1980s was to record their history before the centuries-old Jewish community died out.
On the eve of the Holocaust, Polish Jews numbered around 3.3 million, the largest community in Europe. Most were killed by Nazi Germany, while postwar violence and an anti-Semitic campaign by the Polish communist regime in 1968 forced most of the survivors into exile.
“It was supposed to be the last of 1,000 years of Polish Jewish life. That’s what everyone was saying — everyone,” Fishman said. “And if it was not for the fall of communism, it would have been the end.”
Fishman did five reporting trips to Poland from 1975 to 1983, often to cover other historical events, like the first visit of Polish Pope John Paul II to his homeland in 1979 and the rise in the 1980s of Lech Walesa’s anti-communist Solidarity movement. On those trips he also turned his camera on Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors who gathered in derelict buildings to pray together. At the time, Jewish life took place in private because of fears of discrimination.
In some cases he managed to capture those praying during Sabbath services. While some opposed his picture taking on the Sabbath, a violation of Jewish law, Fishman recalled that others were willing to overlook it.
“I was this nice Jewish boy from America,” Fishman said, recalling how the sympathetic worshippers with nonverbal language seemed to be saying: “Leave him alone. What’s the difference? When we’re gone, there’s nothing here.”
After a 30-year absence, he returned again to Poland in 2013 — a span of time in which communism collapsed and Poland joined the European Union and NATO. He was blown away by the new wealth of the capitalist era — the ATMs and luxury cars and everything else that had transformed the country — and by an optimistic and growing generation of Jewish families who finally had rabbis and who felt comfortable about celebrating their traditions openly.
While the number of Jews is small, perhaps no more than 20,000 people among 38 million, Poland now has renovated synagogues, Jewish street festivals, a Jewish school, kosher restaurants and even Jewish arrivals from the U.S. and Israel.
“Coming back was beyond trippy,” said Fishman, who lives in the New York area. “Everything was astounding to me.”
Photos from Fishman’s first trip to Poland were featured in a 1977 book, Polish Jews: The Final Chapter. But most of the photos on display in Warsaw now had never been published in print. During communism he made a point of never publishing images of young Polish Jews, fearing that to identify them publicly could have negative repercussions for them.
All of Fishman’s photos are in black and white and were shot with film and developed by him in his darkroom, something that creates a feeling of consistency in the collection despite spanning 43 years and radically different political systems.
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