Chris Hedges's Blog, page 650

High-Tech Devices Offer No Panacea Against Police Abuse

RALEIGH, N.C. — A white police officer shown on video beating a black pedestrian has been charged with felony assault in a North Carolina case that sparked outrage over use of excessive force.

The case against former Asheville police officer Christopher Hickman stems from an August 2017 encounter but became public only last week after a leaked body camera video showed Hickman subduing and punching the pedestrian, who was accused of jaywalking.

The violent encounter happened shortly after Asheville implemented rules against excessive force, demonstrating how even a well-meaning policy can be limited by the officers carrying it out. The delay in making the footage public also shows that body camera technology being adopted across the country can’t always guarantee the level of transparency many have hoped for.

“We need to be very cognizant of how difficult police supervision actually is. It’s difficult enough that we can’t just throw a piece of technology at it and expect to substantially change police supervision,” said Seth Stoughton, who teaches law at the University of South Carolina.

Hickman, 31, was arrested late Thursday on a felony charge of assault by strangulation, as well as misdemeanor counts of assault and communicating threats, according to the prosecutor. A phone listing for Hickman, who resigned in January, had a full inbox that wouldn’t take messages.

The Aug. 25 encounter came months after the city implemented the use-of-force policy that included training on de-escalating tense situations. The policy was drafted in the aftermath of a white officer killing an armed black man after a high speed chase.

Despite the policy, Hickman was shown on video published last week by The Citizen-Times subduing Johnnie Jermaine Rush, then punching and shocking him with a stun gun. Rush was stopped on a dark street because officers accused him of crossing outside a crosswalk near a minor league ballpark and cluster of breweries popular with tourists.

An arrest warrant for Hickman said Rush, 33, suffered head abrasions and swelling and that he lost consciousness when Hickman pressed his arm on his throat.

James Lee, a black minister and member of the Racial Justice Coalition, said the episode erodes trust in a community that hoped the use-of-force policy would bring change.

“What this has done is pause that level of trust,” Lee said.

Still, Lee said Hickman is being held accountable, and he believes Police Chief Tammy Hooper should stay in her job.

“Hopefully she’ll continue to learn from this,” he said.

On Wednesday, Hooper was interrupted by an angry audience as she spoke about the case at a citizen’s police advisory board meeting. Hooper said she put Hickman on administrative duty immediately after the altercation, and started an administrative review. But people attending the meeting demanded to know why a criminal investigation wasn’t sought for months.

Obstacles to resolving the case began after Hickman’s supervisor arrived on scene. The supervisor didn’t immediately review footage of the scene and did not give interview notes to superiors in a timely manner, according to city documents.

Weeks later, after reviewing nearly 60 hours of Hickman’s body camera footage from numerous encounters, the department identified four other instances of rude behavior toward members of the public. Hickman resigned in January.

Asheville’s body camera policy requires department technology officers only to review a sampling of body camera footage from officers around the department each month. Susanna Birdsong, an ACLU lawyer who studies body camera policy, said even when departments require footage review, the rules aren’t always followed. She said the debate needs to go beyond technology to efforts to “stop racially biased policing before it starts.”

The department’s administrative review ended in December, and authorities didn’t seek an outside criminal investigation until January. The State Bureau of Investigation declined to lead it, citing the time lapse. An Asheville investigator then began probing whether criminal charges were warranted. The FBI is also conducting a criminal investigation of Hickman.

Complicating transparency efforts, state law generally requires a judge to sign off on public release of body camera video. City officials are petitioning a judge to make more footage public.

Asheville’s City Council released a statement saying that members were “furious” that they weren’t told about the case until the video surfaced. The panel now wants a third-party audit for racial bias among the police serving a city of nearly 90,000 with a population that’s about 82 percent white and 12 percent black.

At Wednesday’s meeting, activist DeLores Venable questioned the city’s image as welcoming, progressive and a tourist haven.

“Where’s the progress when we tell tourists to come here,” she asked, “but black tourists gotta face getting beat down on Biltmore Ave. because you’re jaywalking?”

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Follow Drew at www.twitter.com/JonathanLDrew

Nuclear Contradictions, Hypocrisy and Absurdities

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer, American nuclear scientist, after observing an early U.S. nuclear weapons test

The year was 1983. I was still in the womb, as an earlier celebrity president, also obsessed with television, sat down to view a highly touted TV movie, “The Day After.” Ronald Reagan, like Donald Trump, was a star—a famous actor—and also a well-known Republican foreign policy hawk with an aggressive nuclear weapons posture. The movie was a dystopian portrayal of the aftermath of a Soviet nuclear attack in the small college town of Lawrence, Kan., where I now live.

Reagan (like Trump) wasn’t keen on briefing books or detailed memos. He was a visual learner, and “The Day After” deeply affected President Reagan. It wasn’t quite a “road to Damascus” moment, but soon afterward, Reagan began to rethink his combative nuclear posture.

In the ensuing years, Reagan proved willing to work with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to dampen Cold War tensions and begin a process of gradual nuclear disarmament. For a president, Reagan, who had run on a policy of rolling back communism and had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the shift was profound.

Look, it wasn’t a perfect process. I’m not even a Reagan fan—all in all, I think he was a terrible president. Nevertheless, Reagan did come to see some of the absurdity of nuclear brinksmanship. His successor, George H. W. Bush—the elder—helped bring the Cold War to a speedy conclusion and promised Gorbachev that the U.S. would not dance on the Soviet Union’s grave or expand the NATO alliance into Eastern Europe. Gorbachev left power in December 1991, Bill Clinton defeated Bush the following November, and the U.S. proceeded (and still proceeds) to renege on all those promises. NATO expanded right up to the very borders of Russia, U.S. military bases encircled the old Soviet Union and, just a few months ago, President Trump’s National Defense Strategy all but declared a new Cold War with Russia and China.

Our present moment, with the doomsday clock ticking closer to midnight, seems like an appropriate time to reevaluate the contradictions, hypocrisy and absurdities at the heart of U.S. nuclear strategy. The realities are shocking and staggering.

***Officially, the U.S. insists on a zero-tolerance policy regarding nuclear proliferation—the spread of nuclear weapons technology. In reality, the world has nine nuclear-armed powers today, and the U.S. accepts or objects to these weaponized powers on a case-by-case basis. And guess what? We’re not always consistent.

The first five nuclear powers are the victorious nations in World War II: the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China. These countries also hold permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. The U.S. doesn’t object to France and Britain, of course. They’re longtime allies. Russia and China are scarier, but after 50 years we’ve learned to live with them as nuclear-armed powers. Then there’s India and Pakistan. These two South Asian regional powers are more disturbing, since they’re mortal enemies with significant arsenals pointed at each other. The U.S. is concerned about Pakistan’s so-called Islamic bomb, because Pakistan is a Muslim-majority country (and those are scary) and it has had a nuclear scientist—A.Q. Khan—collude with al-Qaida in the recent past.

The final two, I call the “rogue” nations. The first is North Korea. That’s an obvious one. The other? Israel. That’s right. Controversial as that’s certain to be, Israel refuses to confirm or deny whether it has nuclear weapons (it does) and insists on remaining the only nuclear power in the Middle East. All the while, it illegally occupies sovereign Palestinian territory in contravention of international law.

Here’s where the hypocrisy starts to creep in: Officially, the U.S. deplores all nuclear proliferation. Unofficially, we look the other way when “friends” and “allies” break the rules and develop an arsenal of their own. That’s why Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger looked the other way when Israel developed nukes (I’ve read their declassified meeting minutes), and President George W. Bush actually signed a nuclear agreement with India. Well, we like India and Israel. North Korea (and dare I say, Iran) not so much.

Look, countries have to look out for their best interests and form strategic coalitions. Still, it would behoove U.S. policymakers to understand why our ongoing nuclear policies might come across as hypocritical in many parts of the world. Furthermore, America’s alarmist proclamations about nuclear proliferation often come across as hysterical, racist and unrealistic.

Consider the rhetoric surrounding North Korea and Iran (which hasn’t even gone nuclear yet). The Trump administration flexes its muscles to intimidate both countries and even threatens to unleash “bloody nose” strikes and “fire and fury” against one or the other power. The prevailing assumption is that if North Korea has even a few missiles, or if Iran builds even one nuclear weapon, that their leaders would inevitably start flinging nukes at New York, Washington, D.C., or Tel Aviv. That’s insane. I’m not a big fan of Kim Jong Un or Ayatollah Khamenei, but it dehumanizes Korean and Iranian leaders to categorically assume they are suicidal and irrational. Believe me, a nuclear war doesn’t end well for Iran or North Korea, or anyone.

Americans don’t seem to see the hypocrisy (but you can bet the rest of the world does) in the fact that, to this day, only the United States has dropped nuclear bombs on the heads of real, live human beings, mostly women and children, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nonetheless, the world is forced to listen to America’s insufferable rhetoric about how no one else (besides our friends) could possibly be trusted with nukes. Let me be clear. I’m by no means in favor of widespread nuclear proliferation. I’d prefer these suicide machines be gradually abolished, but I’m merely deflating the myths and pointing out widespread hypocrisy.

***The danger of nuclear war remains staggeringly high to this day, and it doesn’t have to be so. Calmer heads could prevail, various players could cool down the hysterical bombast and world leaders could deescalate the situation. Instead, we’re right back at the brink. Today, neither the U.S. nor Russia (though Gorbachev did once agree to it) will pledge a “no-first-use” policy regarding nuclear weapons. Why the heck not? Because, as always, each side is too busy jockeying for advantage to realize that nuclear weapons are unusable if human life is to continue on planet earth.

Furthermore, the U.S. has expanded its NATO (by definition anti-Russian) alliance right up to the borders of Russia. That means the U.S.—because of the mutual defense commitments of the alliance—has extended its nuclear umbrella to, well, Latvia, for example. How many Americans could find Latvia on a map? How many know the U.S. is legally committed to defend Latvia from Russian incursions, up to and including with nuclear war? Think on that for a second. I mean really think. Should the U.S. fight a major (potentially nuclear) war over Latvia? Would it? If the answers to both questions are “no”—and I’ll submit they likely are—what does that say about the brinkmanship of U.S. policies and NATO commitments? Folks, this is serious business.

And Russia, well, it’s got a ready (and equally dangerous) response to NATO expansion. Putin, boasting an economy about the size of Italy or Spain, knows he can’t field an army to overwhelm Western Europe. So in response to NATO expansion, Russian strategists are discussing a new potential policy known as “escalate to deescalate.” In other words, fire off “small,” “tactical” nuclear weapons to convince NATO to back down and back off. Sound crazy? That’s because it is. It’s also a Russian fantasy to believe a first use of nukes, of any size, won’t escalate to outright nuclear war. That’s a heck of a bet, and too rich for my blood.

The U.S. response is to consider increasing its own stocks of “non-strategic” (read: lower-yield) nuclear weapons in and around the Russian periphery. You see how this works? Each side attempts to one-up the other, raising the stakes until we’re all on a hair-trigger war alert. The irony here is that smaller, lower-yield, shorter-range nukes tend to be more dangerous, because they give the country’s leaders the crazy idea that it might just be possible to safely employ these horrific bombs. It isn’t.

***In addition to all this madness, there are three other, not-so-small, absurdities about U.S. nuclear weapons “strategy”:

1. Despite all the alarmist rhetoric (even on the MSNBC-“Russiagate”-conspiratorial left), neither Russia, China nor any other nuclear-armed adversaries are actually bent on world conquest. That’s right, all the hysteria and close calls and nuclear bluffs are for nothing. They’re unnecessary and unhinged. Not only are these “adversaries” not out for global empire, they’re also not irrationally suicidal—which you’d have to be to send a nuke flying at an American target. What makes these powers dangerous is their (justified) feeling of military encirclement by the United States. They fear for the survival of their regimes (not an absurd sentiment given what happened to the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi recently), which makes them likely to act like cornered, wounded animals. It’s best to calm the rhetoric and not provoke these folks.

2. The whole hyper-masculine, Trumpian schoolyard-bully analogy is immature and inapplicable to serious, fate-of-the-world foreign policy decisions. President Trump loves this sort of simplistic rhetoric. Standing up to a bully sounds great and all, but—in a nuclear armed contest—no one walks away with just a bloody nose. We’re talking millions dead or the extinction of life on earth. Ever heard of nuclear winter? The reality is that violence begets violence, so let’s cool the grade-school-platitudes.

3. One man, the sitting president of the United States, holds the unilateral power and decision to launch a nuclear apocalypse. Congress doesn’t have to declare war, there aren’t any checks or balances, and that’s that. A recent article referred to the president of the United States—whether it’s Trump or even Barack Obama before him—as a “nuclear monarch.” That’s because he is. The U.S. Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress (something it hasn’t done since World War II), and those 18th century patriots couldn’t possibly have foreseen the rise of nuclear technology. Nuclear war could kick off within minutes. Congress couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to retaliate fast enough. So, absurd as it seems, one man (and it always seems to be a man) holds the power of life or death (or human extinction) in his hands.

Let’s review. President Donald Trump (the self-proclaimed stable genius) has the unilateral power to launch a life-on-earth-ending nuclear strike. Reports indicate the man doesn’t read, so he may not understand the nature, and absurdity, of nuclear strategy.

President Trump needs his own “The Day After” moment (just as Reagan did all those years ago) to scare him straight. If only “Fox & Friends” would rebroadcast that old made-for-TV movie some morning.

All kidding aside, there’s an inconvenient truth here: Despite the president’s—and official Washington’s—obsession with the minuscule threat from terrorists, immigrants and other foreign, brown folks, there are only two existential threats to human existence: nuclear winter and climate change.

Tragically, the U.S.—the most powerful and well-armed country in the world—now has a president who possesses god-like powers over the former, and doesn’t believe in the latter.

The takeaway? We aren’t scared enough.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

Stormy Daniels Beats Trump at His Own Game

The president who boasted of treating women like sex objects is being outplayed at his own tabloid-warfare game by a porn star. Maybe there’s justice in the world after all.

You might have missed it in the ceaseless fusillade of news, but on Wednesday the White House all but confirmed the story that actress and director Stormy Daniels is dying to tell: Shortly before the election she was paid $130,000 in hush money to keep quiet about an “intimate relationship” she had with Donald Trump in 2006, soon after Melania Trump had given birth to the couple’s son, Barron.

Daniels filed a lawsuit Tuesday arguing that she should be free to speak about the affair, since a nondisclosure agreement laying out the terms of the payment was never actually signed by Trump. Asked about the payment at a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump denies the allegations and that, in any event, “this case has already been won in arbitration.” She later added that “the arbitration was won in the president’s favor.”

Trump was reportedly “very unhappy” with Sanders’ performance, but come on, give her a break. How is she supposed to keep all the lies straight as they multiply, overlap and at times contradict? She’s good at it, but every once in a while, a little truth is bound to slip out.

What she inconveniently seemed to confirm is that Trump is a party to arbitration proceedings regarding a nondisclosure agreement involving Daniels. Obviously, there would be no such agreement unless there were something Trump wanted to hide. And if Daniels’ silence was worth $130,000, it must have been something Trump really wanted to hide.

The Daniels affair is of more than just prurient interest: It would appear that Trump may have violated federal campaign law by failing to disclose the payment on his reporting forms.

Any attempt by Trump to stick to his blanket denial—he claims all the women who say he harassed them, assaulted them or had affairs with them are lying—is now moot in the Daniels case, because in an appendix to her lawsuit she included the entire nondisclosure agreement. The filings offer a glimpse of how Trump is accustomed to operating—and suggest why special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly taken an interest in Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen.

The agreement—in which Trump and Daniels are identified by pseudonyms, “David Dennison” and “Peggy Peterson”—was negotiated at the end of October 2016, days before the election, when Trump’s campaign was reeling from the impact of the “Access Hollywood” tape. The $130,000 payment, which Cohen has said he “facilitated” with personal funds, was not reported as a campaign donation or expenditure.

Daniels says in her suit that in January of this year, when reports of the hush-money payment surfaced, Cohen used “intimidation and coercive tactics” to force her to sign a “false statement” denying any relationship with Trump. In the past week, according to the suit, Cohen has used “an improper and procedurally defective arbitration proceeding hidden from public view” in an attempt to keep her silent—an apparent reference to the arbitration that Sanders claimed had been “won in the president’s favor.”

The agreement, as appended to the lawsuit, shows that Cohen formed a company, Essential Consultants LLC, to make the payment to Daniels. It provides for arbitration in the case of disputes, and it requires Daniels to pay “David Dennison” $1 million per instance if she breaches the contract. It is signed by Daniels, using her legal name, Stephanie Clifford; and by Cohen, for Essential Consultants. The line for “David Dennison” to sign is indeed left blank.

Thanks to Daniels, her lawyer and an unforced error by Sanders, the story Trump has tried so hard to squelch is out. Take a minute and think about it.

The personal lawyer of the president of the United States, days before the election, paid $130,000 to apparently buy the silence of a porn star. Said porn star credibly describes an affair she had with the president and the ham-fisted attempts by his lawyer to keep her from talking about it. All of this unquestionably speaks volumes about the president’s character and morals.

Republicans who regarded Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky as the end of civilization as we know it are serenely untroubled. Evangelicals who rail against sin and cloak themselves in piety offer nothing but a worldly, almost Gallic shrug. Daniels has taught us much about their character and morals, too.

‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli Gets Seven-Year Sentence

NEW YORK—Martin Shkreli, the smirking “Pharma Bro” vilified for jacking up the price of a lifesaving drug, was sentenced Friday to seven years in prison for defrauding investors in two failed hedge funds.

The self-promoting pharmaceutical executive notorious for trolling critics online was convicted in a securities fraud case last year unconnected to the price increase dispute.

Shkreli, his cocky persona nowhere to be found, cried as he told U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto he made many mistakes and apologized to investors.

“I want the people who came here today to support me to understand one thing, the only person to blame for me being here today is me,” he said. “I took down Martin Shkreli.”

He said that he hopes to make amends and learn from his mistakes and apologized to his investors.

“I am terribly sorry I lost your trust,” he said. “You deserve far better.”

Prosecutors argued that the 34-year-old was a master manipulator who conned wealthy investors and deserved 15 years in prison. His lawyers said he was a misunderstood eccentric who used unconventional means to make those same investors even wealthier, and deserved 18 months or less in prison.

The judge insisted that the punishment was not about Shkreli’s online antics or raising the cost of the drug.

“This case is not about Mr. Shkreli’s self-cultivated public persona … nor his controversial statements about politics or culture,” the judge said, calling his crimes serious.

He was also fined $75,000 and received credit for the roughly six months he has been in prison.

The judge ruled earlier this week that Shkreli would have to forfeit more than $7.3 million in a brokerage account and personal assets including his one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album that he boasted he bought for $2 million. The judge said the property would not be seized until Shkreli had a chance to appeal.

Attorney Benjamin Brafman told Matsumoto Friday that he sometimes wants to hug Shkreli and sometimes wants to punch him in the face , but he said his outspokenness shouldn’t be held against him.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis said Shkreli deserved the stiffer sentence not because he is “the most hated man in America,” but because he is a criminal convicted of serious fraud. She said the judge had to consider his history and said he has “no respect whatsoever” for the law, or the court proceedings.

“I also want to make clear that Mr. Shkreli is not a child,” Kasulis said. “He’s not a teenager who just needs some mentoring. He is a man who needs to take responsibility for his actions.”

Unapologetic from the beginning, when he was roundly publicly criticized for defending the 5,000 percent price increase of Daraprim, a previously cheap drug used to treat HIV, Shkreli seemed to drift through his criminal case as if it was one big joke.

After his arrest in December 2015, he taunted prosecutors, got kicked off of Twitter for harassing a female journalist, heckled Clinton from the sidewalk outside her daughter’s home, gave speeches with the conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and spent countless hours livestreaming himself in his apartment.

He was tight-lipped when faced with a barrage of questions about the price hike from members of Congress a couple of months later, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. After the hearing, he tweeted that the lawmakers were “imbeciles.”

Shkreli insisted he was being persecuted by prosecutors for being outspoken and confidently predicted after his conviction that he was unlikely to be sentenced to jail.

Things abruptly changed, though, last fall after he jokingly offered his online followers a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could get a lock of Hillary Clinton’s hair. The judge revoked his bail and threw him in jail, a decision that she defended Friday.

That didn’t tame Shkreli completely. He corresponded with journalists, ridiculing the personal appearance of one female reporter who asked him for an interview.

Before sentencing him, the judge said that it was up to Congress to fix the issue of the HIV price-hike. And she spoke about how his family and friends “state, almost universally, that he is kind and misunderstood” and willing to help others in need.

She said it was clear he is a “tremendously gifted individual who has the capacity for kindness.”

She quoted from letters talking about generous acts like counseling a rape victim, teaching inmates math and chess, and funding family members.

The defense had asked the judge to consider the letters in its case for leniency, including professionals he worked with who vouched for his credentials as a self-made contributor to pharmaceutical advances.

Other testimonials were as quirky as the defendant himself. One woman described how she became an avid follower of Shkreli’s social media commentary about science, the pharmaceutical industry, but mostly, about himself. She suggested that those who were annoyed by it were missing the point.

“I really appreciate the social media output, which I see on par with some form of performance art,” she wrote.

Another supporter said Shkreli’s soft side was demonstrated when he adopted a cat from a shelter — named Trashy — that became a fixture on his livestreams. Another letter was from a man who said he met Shkreli while driving a cab and expressed his appreciation at how he ended up giving him an internship at one of his drug companies.

In court filings, prosecutors argued that Shkreli’s remorse about misleading his investors was not to be believed.

“At its core, this case is about Shkreli’s deception of people who trusted him,” they wrote.

ACLU Sues Over Separation of Immigrant Families

HOUSTON—The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit Friday accusing the U.S. government of broadly separating immigrant families seeking asylum.

The lawsuit follows action the ACLU took in the case of a Congolese woman and her 7-year-old daughter, who the group said was taken from her mother “screaming and crying” and placed in a Chicago facility. While the woman was released Tuesday from a San Diego detention center, the girl remains in the facility 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away.

Immigrant advocates say the mother and daughter’s case is emblematic of the approach taken by President Donald Trump’s administration. The lawsuit, which asks a judge to declare family separation unlawful, says “hundreds of families” have been split by immigration authorities.

The lawsuit also raises the case of a Brazilian woman who the ACLU says was separated from her 14-year-old son after they sought asylum in August. The ACLU says the woman was given a roughly 25-day sentence jail sentence for illegally entering the country and then placed in immigration detention facilities in West Texas, while her son was taken to a Chicago facility.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not announced a formal policy to hold adult asylum seekers separately from their children. But administration officials have said they are separating parents and children to deter others from trying to enter the U.S.

DHS acting press secretary Tyler Houlton, in a statement last week on the case of the Congolese woman and her daughter, said government officials have to verify that children entering the U.S. are not victims of traffickers and that the adult accompanying them is actually their parent.

In separate court papers filed Wednesday, the U.S. government said it is awaiting the results of DNA testing to confirm the woman is the girl’s mother.

“We ask that members of the public and media view advocacy group claims that we are separating women and children for reasons other than to protect the child with the level of skepticism they deserve,” Houlton said.

It’s hard to determine how often parents and children are placed in separate facilities after they seek asylum, which is granted to people who have a credible fear of persecution if they are forced to return to their home country.

Different government agencies are responsible for holding adults and children. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains adults accused of immigration violations, while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cares for unaccompanied immigrant children.

Immigration advocates criticized President Barack Obama’s administration for opening new family detention facilities in Texas and called for parents and children to be released. The two Texas facilities that it opened were found by a federal judge in 2015 to violate a long-standing 1997 settlement requiring children be released or otherwise held in the “least restrictive setting” available.

That settlement set other standards for the detention of children. The Trump administration has called for ending the settlement as part of its demands for changes to immigration laws.

Top administration officials have said they believe the asylum process is overwhelmed and challenged by people making frivolous claims. Advocates have also accused border agents of unlawfully turning away people who are seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Michelle Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program for the Women’s Refugee Commission, said that through attorneys and social service organizations, she had identified at least 426 immigrant adults and children who had been separated by authorities since President Donald Trump took office in January 2017. Brané said she did not have a comparable figure for Obama’s administration.

But Brané said since the new administration began, her office has received far more reports of adults being held in ICE facilities without knowing where their children are.

“A lot of these kids are already afraid because they’re fleeing something and they know they’re fleeing something,” Brané said. “And to have them pulled away, that can be devastating for a parent.”

Three Weeks After Parkland, Florida Backs Gun Restrictions

Update: Breaking with the National Rifle Association, Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Friday signed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act into law.

After three weeks of hearings, by a bipartisan vote of 67 to 50 the Florida House on Wednesday approved a bill imposing a three-day waiting period for most long-gun purchases, raising the minimum age for purchasing those weapons to 21, and banning the possession or sale of bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire more rapidly.

The vote came after the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people, most of them students.

The legislation, known as SB 7026 or the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, now heads to Gov. Rick Scott’s desk. The Washington Post reports that Scott supported most provisions of the bill but opposed arming teachers. Currently, the bill includes nearly $100 million to improve school security and $67 million to fund a new sheriff program that would allow school districts to voluntarily train and arm employees who pass 132 hours of law enforcement training, a background check and diversity training. The program would not arm employees who teach exclusively, or teacher’s aides.

“I am going to read the bill, and I am going to talk to parents,” Scott told reporters Wednesday. “My goal is that this never happens again to a parent in our state.”

Democratic and some Republican lawmakers in Florida have opposed the provision to arm school staff, which was also present in a previous version of the bill. In the hours before the House vote, several amendments Democrats put forward to remove the provision were voted down. The Miami Herald reports:

Under the amendment, proposed by Sen. Rene Garcia, R-Miami, classroom teachers would not be armed if a school district decides to participate in the so-called ‘school marshal’ program established in response to the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. However, other school personnel, including support staff who provide some instructional work, current or former servicemen or JROTC instructors, would be able to carry firearms.

Regarding arming teachers, NPR’s Greg Allen told “All Things Considered,” “A lot of districts like Miami-Dade and Broward County are not going to take part in it. They say they don’t want to do it. The sheriffs say they don’t want to. But some of the rural counties are already trying it out and I think it will go forward there, but not just with people who are exclusively classroom teachers.”

Here’s the portion of #SB7026 that relates to school safety. ‘Coach #AaronFeis Guardian Program’ does NOT apply to “individuals who exclusively perform duties as classroom teachers.” See exemptions below. @ActionNewsJaxpic.twitter.com/TP7YNkBXP3

— Russell Colburn (@RussellANjax) March 6, 2018

In a letter sent Tuesday, grieving families of the Parkland victims urged Florida lawmakers to approve SB 7026.

“You must act to prevent mass murder from ever occurring again at any school. This issue cannot wait. The moment to pass this bill is now,” the letter reads. “We must be the last families to suffer the loss of a loved one due to a mass shooting at a school.”

South Korea: Trump, Kim Jong Un to Meet ‘by May’

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has accepted an offer of a summit from the North Korean leader and will meet with Kim Jong Un by May, a top South Korean official said Thursday, in a remarkable turnaround in relations between two historic adversaries.

The South Korean national security director, Chung Eui-yong, told reporters of the planned meeting outside the White House, after briefing Trump and other top U.S. officials about a rare meeting with Kim in the North Korean capital on Monday.

No serving American president has ever met with a North Korean leader. The U.S. and North Korea do not even have formal diplomatic relations. The two nations remain in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice and not a peace treaty.

Seoul had already publicized that North Korea had offered talks with the United States on denuclearization and normalizing ties, providing a diplomatic opening after a year of escalating tensions over the North’s nuclear and missile tests. The rival Koreas also agreed to hold a leadership summit in late April.

“He (Kim) expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible,” Chung said. “President Trump appreciated the briefing and said he would meet Kim Jong Un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”

Chung did not say where Trump would meet with Kim.

Trump took office vowing to stop North Korea from attaining a nuclear-tipped missile that could reach the U.S. mainland. He’s oscillated between threats and insults directed at Kim, and more conciliatory rhetoric. His more bellicose talk, and Kim’s nuclear and missile tests, have fueled fears of war.

Trump, who has ramped up economic sanctions on North Korea to force it to negotiate on giving up its nukes, has threatened the pariah nation with “fire and fury” if its threats against the U.S. and its allies continued. He has derided Kim by referring to him as “Little Rocket Man.”

After Kim repeated threats against the U.S. in a New Year’s address and mentioned the “nuclear button” on his office desk, Trump responded by tweeting that he has a nuclear button, too, “but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller, Catherine Lucey, Ken Thomas and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

Fake News Travels 6 Times Faster Than the Truth, Study Shows

WASHINGTON—Twitter loves lies. A new study finds that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people.

And you can’t blame bots; it’s us, say the authors of the largest study of online misinformation.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and the end of 2016 — before Donald Trump took office but during the combative presidential campaign. They found that “fake news” sped through Twitter “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” according to the study in Thursday’s journal Science .

“No matter how you slice it, falsity wins out,” said co-author Deb Roy, who runs MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines and is a former chief media scientist at Twitter.

Twitter funded the study but had no say in the outcome, according to the researchers.

The scientists calculated that the average false story takes about 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users, versus about 60 hours for the truth. On average, false information reaches 35 percent more people than true news.

While true news stories almost never got retweeted to 1,000 people, the top 1 percent of the false ones got to as many as 100,000 people.

And when the researchers looked at how stories cascade — how they link from one person to another like a family tree — false information reached as many as 24 generations, while true information maxed out at a dozen.

Concern over bogus stories online has escalated in recent months because of evidence the Russians spread disinformation on social media during the 2016 presidential campaign to sow discord in the U.S. and damage Hillary Clinton.

Social media companies have experimented with using computer algorithms and human fact-checkers to try to weed out false information and abuse online. Twitter earlier this month said it is seeking help from outside experts to better deal with the problem. And Facebook this week announced a partnership with The Associated Press to identify and debunk false and misleading stories about the midterm elections.

“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” tweeted Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”

The MIT study took the 126,285 stories and checked them against six independent fact-checking sites—snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com and urbanlegends.about.com—to classify them as true, false or mixed. Nearly two-thirds were false, just under one-fifth were true, and the rest were mixed.

The six fact-checking websites agreed with each other on classification at least 95 percent of the time, plus two outside researchers did some independent fact-checking to make sure everything was OK, said co-author Sinan Aral, an MIT management professor.

Lead author Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT data scientist, said the three false stories that traveled the farthest and fastest were about a Muslim guard called a hero in the Paris bombings of 2015; an Iraq war veteran finishing as runner-up to Caitlyn Jenner for an ESPN courage award; and an episode of “The Simpsons” that had a story line in 2000 about a Trump presidency. (It was in 2015.)

University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a co-founder of factcheck.org, had problems with the way the study looked at true and false stories. The MIT team characterized a story’s truth on a 1-to-5 scale, with 1 being completely false. Factcheck.org, Jamieson said, looks more at context and does not label something either true or false.

She also suggested that calling this bogus information “false stories” does not capture how malignant it is. She said it would “better be called viral deception. VD. And treated as analogous to venereal disease.”

The researchers looked at obvious bots — automated accounts — and took them out. While the bots tweeted false information at a higher rate than humans, it wasn’t that much of a difference, and even without bots, lies still spread faster and farther, Roy said.

David Lazer, a political and computer scientist at Northeastern University who wasn’t part of the study but wrote an accompanying report, praised the MIT research but said the scientists may have missed a lot of bots and cyborgs — sort of in-between humans. His ongoing, not-yet-published research has found that about 80 percent of false stories come from just one-tenth of 1 percent of users.

The researchers dug deeper to find out what kind of false information travels faster and farther. False political stories — researchers didn’t separate conservative versus liberal — and stuff that was surprising or anger-provoking spread faster than other types of lies, Aral said.

“Falsehood was significantly more novel than the truth,” Aral said. “It’s easy to be novel when you make things up.”

That fits perfectly with previous research on the psychology of fake information, said Yale University’s Dan Kahan and Dartmouth College’s Brendan Nyhan, scientists who study the phenomenon.

“The more strange and more sensational the story sounds, the more likely they are going to retweet,” Kahan said.

Nyhan and Lazer said that while more fact-checking and education of people on how to tell fake from real can be helpful, the more effective solution will have to come from the social media platforms themselves.

Roy said the study results reminded him of the often-cited quotation that essentially says a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots — or pants — on. It’s been attributed to Mark Twain and Winston Churchill. But that would be misinformation. Politifact traced a version of it back to Jonathan Swift in 1710.

A Populist Revolution?

The shambles left by last weekend’s Italian election, the chaotic dysfunction of American government under President Trump, and the attack on liberal democratic institutions in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and elsewhere—all of these are being blamed on the haunting specter of “populism.”

But is populism the villain here? Do we even agree on what the word means?

This is more than an abstract debate. How we respond to what most certainly is a crisis of liberal democracy depends a great deal on how we understand the reaction that’s aggravating it.

A purely negative verdict on populism is especially prevalent among elites. But I’d argue that while authoritarian forms of populism are dangerous and must be resisted, other forms can contribute to democracy’s well-being.

Further, too much focus on populism itself risks mistaking the symptom for the cause. Angry dissidence doesn’t arise by accident. It is typically a response to genuine failures and injustices. The best way to combat the populists’ excesses is to deal with the discontents to which they give voice.

The election in Italy offers instruction both on what we need to fear and on the costs of leaving problems to fester.

On the one hand, it is worrying that the opportunistic Five Star Movement and the far-right, anti-immigrant League party (formerly the Northern League) were seen as the two main victors with 32.2 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively. Both are sympathetic to Russia, could prove disruptive to the European Union, and lack a coherent approach to the country’s finances.

But the League’s strong showing owed in part to a rebellion among conservative Italians against the re-emergence of Silvio Berlusconi, the discredited 81-year-old former prime minister, as the chief center-right figure. Exceeding expectations, the League bested Berlusconi’s party to become the principal force on the right.

And for all its opportunism, Five Star swept southern Italy by speaking to the region’s frustration with its economic marginalization over many decades, the persistence of corruption and the continuing influence of organized crime.

The incumbent center-left Democrats were routed. Although they narrowly outpolled the League with 18.9 percent, they lost a quarter of their electorate. The League, by contrast, quadrupled its share. The Democrats deserved better than they got, having run a rather effective government that restored economic growth. But their leader, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, squandered his popularity on a misguided constitutional referendum and split his party by pushing aside some of its traditional figures. (Memo to Democrats in the U.S.: Sectarian infighting is not conducive to a party’s health.)

The bottom line: Yes, there was a backlash against immigration, but above all, Italians were furious at politicians of the old parties and disheartened over the long-term economic decline of their country. Populism may well get Italy into a lot of trouble, but it’s not hard to see why Italians are sick of what they’ve had. Elites need to pay attention.

The sharpest critique of populism, articulated well by Princeton University’s Jan-Werner Muller, is that in defining “the people,” populists often exclude large segments of the population. They “treat their political opponents as ‘enemies of the people’ and seek to exclude them altogether.” These dangers are captured in the titles of two important new books, one by my Brookings Institution colleague William Galston, “Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy”; the other by Harvard scholar Yascha Mounk, “The People Vs. Democracy.”

The sort of populism Muller describes is indeed a threat to liberal values. For their part, Galston and Mounk in no way overlook the sources of disaffection that have led to populist advances. They take seriously the urgency of easing the social and economic crises that provoked the current upsurge.

Nonetheless, there should be no denying that other populist traditions (I’d insist that the American brand from the 1890s is one of them) maintain faith with democracy, push ruling elites to face up to injustices that undermine free institutions, and create the mass movements that social change requires.

The historian Richard Hofstadter was a critic of the populists, yet in his classic 1955 book “The Age of Reform,” he recognized that ruling classes can be pushed in two quite different directions. “One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time,” he wrote, “is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.”

Populism takes root when those in charge reject the second option.

Trump Announces Stiff Trade Tariffs, Exempts Canada and Mexico

WASHINGTON—Unswayed by Republican warnings of a trade war, President Donald Trump ordered steep new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to the U.S. on Thursday, vowing to fight back against an “assault on our country” by foreign competitors. The president said he would exempt Canada and Mexico while negotiating for changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The new tariffs will take effect in 15 days, with Canada and Mexico indefinitely exempted “to see if we can make the deal,” Trump said. NAFTA talks are expected to resume early next month.

“The American aluminum and steel industry has been ravaged by aggressive foreign trade practices. It’s really an assault on our country. It’s been an assault,” Trump said at the White House. He was joined by steel and aluminum workers holding white hard hats.

American steel and aluminum workers have long been betrayed, but “that betrayal is now over,” Trump said. The former real estate developer said politicians had for years lamented the decline in the industries, but nobody was willing to take action.

As he has indicated previously, Trump said he would levy tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum. But he said during a Cabinet meeting earlier in the day that the penalties would “have a right to go up or down depending on the country and I’ll have a right to drop out countries or add countries. I just want fairness.”

Business leaders, meanwhile, have continued to sound the alarm about the potential economic fallout from tariffs, with the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raising the specter of a global trade war. That scenario, Tom Donohue said, would endanger the economic momentum from the GOP tax cuts and Trump’s rollback of regulations.

“We urge the administration to take this risk seriously,” Donohue said.

The president suggested in the meeting with his Cabinet that Australia and “other countries” might also be spared, a shift that could soften the international blow amid threats of retaliation by trading partners.

“We’re going to be very fair, we’re going to be very flexible but we’re going to protect the American worker as I said I would do in my campaign,” Trump said.

People briefed on the plans ahead of the announcement said all countries affected by the tariffs would be invited to negotiate with the administration to be exempted from the tariffs if they can address the threat their exports pose to U.S. manufacturers. The exemptions for Canada and Mexico could be ended if talks to renegotiate NAFTA stall.

The process of announcing the penalties has been the subject of an intense debate and chaotic exchanges within the White House, pitting hard-liners against free trade advocates such as outgoing economic adviser Gary Cohn.

The fight over tariffs comes amid intense turmoil in the West Wing, which has seen waves of departures and negative news stories that have left Trump increasingly isolated in the Oval Office, according to two senior officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.

Congressional Republicans and business groups are bracing for the impact of the tariffs and the departure of Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who has opposed them.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, appearing at a session with Home Depot employees in Atlanta, said ahead of Trump’s announcement, “I’m just not a fan of broad-based, across-the-board tariffs.” He pointed to the store’s many products that rely on steel and aluminum.

More than 100 House Republicans wrote Trump on Wednesday, asking him to reconsider “the idea of broad tariffs to avoid unintended negative consequences” to the U.S. economy and workers.

Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican, said he plans to introduce legislation next week to nullify the tariffs though he has acknowledged that finding the votes to stop the president’s actions could be difficult.

The president has said the tariffs are needed to reinforce lagging American steel and aluminum industries and protect national security.

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Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Darlene Superville, Zeke Miller, Matthew Daly and Alan Fram in Washington and Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.