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As U.S. President Donald Trump ramps up his attack on immigration, his executive order to cut federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities” protecting immigrants could face a number of legal and logistical loopholes.

The executive order signed on Wednesday orders federal agencies to withhold grant money from around 300 cities and counties that block local law enforcement from targeting undocumented immigrants, or as White House Press Secretary Sean Spice put it, “harbor illegal immigrants.” Spicer said that Trump will look at means to strip funding to cities and counties that “willfully refuse to comply” with his new plan to crack down on immigration, which also included ordering the construction of the infamous border wall between Mexico and the U.S. and increasing immigration authorities' power to deport people from the U.S., often without due process. These measures have sparked outrage among many immigrant rights organizations and caused city mayors to speak out against them. Opponents likely have the law on their side. Politico reported that the White House failed to consult the proper federal agencies and lawmakers before signing the executive orders. This means the orders are likely fraught with contradictions to current laws that can be easily exploited by opponents to dismantle them. The legal fight has already begun. Mayors of targeted cities are teaming up with immigration advocacy groups and attorneys to gear up for a legal battle against the presidential orders. Opponents of Trump’s order say that federal money allocated to cities can only be cut if the funding is directly linked to behavior that opposes the federal government’s plan for immigration.

“The president has very limited power to exercise any kind of significant defunding,” Peter L. Markowitz from the Immigration Justice Clinic told The New York Times. Referring to a 2012 Supreme Court ruling, Markowitz argued that Congress cannot coerce states or localities to unwillfully participate in federal programs. “You can’t say ‘if you don’t use your police officers to go after unauthorized immigrants, you don’t get any money for your hospitals.’ They can’t impose conditions that are totally unrelated,” Markowitz said.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will reportedly participate in the World Economic Forum of St. Petersburg after being invited by Russia on Monday to become the sixth member of the BRICS Development Bank. The Greek prime minister was invited to join the BRICS after a phone call conversation with Russian Finance Vice-minister Serguéi Storchak, RT reported. Tsipras has shown interest in the proposal and will join the BRICS countries in June at the forum in St. Petersburg to discuss the possibility. If Greece agrees to join the new Development Bank, the country would become its sixth member alongside Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The BRICS Development Bank is a new initiative that will help BRICS member states lessen their dependence on the IMF. The bank will have a $100 billion foreign currency reserve for the BRICS, which would protect national currencies from the volatility of global markets.

"A large part of the fund [International Monetary Fund] goes toward saving the euro and the national currencies of developed countries. Given that governance of the IMF is in the hands of western powers, there is little hope for assistance from the IMF in case of an emergency. That is why the currency reserve pool would come in very handy," said Russian ambassador-at-large Vadim Lukov. The currency reserve pool would ensure that, in the event of a financial emergency - such as a crisis in the banking system - the BRICS countries would no longer have to depend on the IMF. The BRICS group of nations includes five of the world's largest developing economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Last spring, we launched the first version of Just Security’s guide to the 2016 presidential candidates’ positions on national security matters. We’re relaunching that guide below with interactive features designed to make it easier use. For this version of the guide, we’re focusing on candidates who, according to Five Thirty-Eight’s forecasts, have a better than 10 percent chance of winning a primary. As a result, this version includes Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. As the field shifts over the coming weeks, we may add or remove candidates from this list. We’ll also be periodically updating the information about the candidates’ positions as they wind their way through primary season and move into the general election. This guide features sources for each summary and, whenever possible, cites official government websites or the candidates’ websites. In our research, we relied on their own statements and records rather than commentary on the candidates’ positions.

The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents, leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, also indicate that the agency has used “under cover” operatives to gain access to sensitive data and systems in the global communications industry, and that these secret agents may have even dealt with American firms. The documents describe a range of clandestine field activities that are among the agency’s “core secrets” when it comes to computer network attacks, details of which are apparently shared with only a small number of officials outside the NSA.

with vast amounts of customer data, including phone records and email traffic. But documents published today by The Intercept suggest that even as the agency uses secret operatives to penetrate them, companies have also cooperated more broadly to undermine the physical infrastructure of the internet than has been previously confirmed. In addition to so-called “close access” operations, the NSA’s “core secrets” include the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to weaken their encryption systems; the fact that the NSA spends “hundreds of millions of dollars” on technology to defeat commercial encryption; and the fact that the agency works with U.S. and foreign companies to penetrate computer networks, possibly without the knowledge of the host countries. Many of the NSA’s core secrets concern its relationships to domestic and foreign corporations.

Sentry Eagle includes six programs: Sentry Hawk (for activities involving computer network exploitation, or spying), Sentry Falcon (computer network defense), Sentry Osprey (cooperation with the CIA and other intelligence agencies), Sentry Raven (breaking encryption systems), Sentry Condor (computer network operations and attacks), and Sentry Owl (collaborations with private companies). Though marked as a draft from 2004, it refers to the various programs in language indicating that they were ongoing at the time, and later documents in the Snowden archive confirm that some of the activities were going on as recently as 2012.

As the latest installment of it’s ‘Vault 7’ series, WikiLeaks has just dropped a user manual describing a CIA project known as ‘Scribbles’ (a.k.a. the “Snowden Stopper”), a piece of software purportedly designed to allow the embedding of ‘web beacon’ tags into documents “likely to be stolen.” The web beacon tags are apparently able to collect information about an end user of a document and relay that information back to the beacon’s creator without being detected. Per WikiLeaks’ press release:

Today, April 28th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the documentation and source code for CIA’s “Scribbles” project, a document-watermarking preprocessing system to embed “Web beacon”-style tags into documents that are likely to be copied by Insiders, Whistleblowers, Journalists or others. The released version (v1.0 RC1) is dated March, 1st 2016 and classified SECRET//ORCON/NOFORN until 2066. Scribbles is intended for off-line preprocessing of Microsoft Office documents. For reasons of operational security the user guide demands that “[t]he Scribbles executable, parameter files, receipts and log files should not be installed on a target machine, nor left in a location where it might be collected by an adversary.”

The ‘Scribbles’ User Guide explains how the tool generates a random watermark for each document, inserts that watermark into the document, saves all such processed documents in an output directory, and creates a log file which identifies the watermarks inserted into each document. Scribbles can watermark multiple documents in one batch and is designed to watermark several groups of documents.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” These are the words used by the English writer Charles Dickens to describe the world after the Industrial Revolution. Today, we also live in a world of contradictions. On the one hand, with growing material wealth and advances in science and technology, human civilization has developed as never before. On the other hand, frequent regional conflicts, global challenges like terrorism and refugees, as well as poverty, unemployment and widening income gap have all added to the uncertainties of the world. Many people feel bewildered and wonder: What has gone wrong with the world? To answer this question, one must first track the source of the problem. Some blame economic globalization for the chaos in the world. Economic globalization was once viewed as the treasure cave found by Ali Baba in The Arabian Nights, but it has now become the Pandora’s box in the eyes of many. The international community finds itself in a heated debate on economic globalization.

Today, I wish to address the global economy in the context of economic globalization. The point I want to make is that many of the problems troubling the world are not caused by economic globalization. For instance, the refugee waves from the Middle East and North Africa in recent years have become a global concern. Several million people have been displaced, and some small children lost their lives while crossing the rough sea. This is indeed heartbreaking. It is war, conflict and regional turbulence that have created this problem, and its solution lies in making peace, promoting reconciliation and restoring stability. The international financial crisis is another example. It is not an inevitable outcome of economic globalization; rather, it is the consequence of excessive chase of profit by financial capital and grave failure of financial regulation. Just blaming economic globalization for the world’s problems is inconsistent with reality, and it will not help solve the problems.

But we should also recognize that economic globalization is a double-edged sword. When the global economy is under downward pressure, it is hard to make the cake of global economy bigger. It may even shrink, which will strain the relations between growth and distribution, between capital and labor, and between efficiency and equity. Both developed and developing countries have felt the punch. Voices against globalization have laid bare pitfalls in the process of economic globalization that we need to take seriously. As a line in an old Chinese poem goes, “Honey melons hang on bitter vines; sweet dates grow on thistles and thorns.” In a philosophical sense, nothing is perfect in the world. One would fail to see the full picture if he claims something is perfect because of its merits, or if he views something as useless just because of its defects. It is true that economic globalization has created new problems, but this is no justification to write economic globalization off completely. Rather, we should adapt to and guide economic globalization, cushion its negative impact, and deliver its benefits to all countries and all nations.

As the situation in Ukraine continues to fester, a handy history guide -- from A (Argentina) to Z (Zaire)

The U.S. is backing Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power.Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and genocide. The trail of blood from this carnage and chaos leads directly back to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. As historian Gabriel Kolko observed in 1988, “The notion of an honest puppet is a contradiction Washington has failed to resolve anywhere in the world since 1945.” What follows is a brief A to Z guide to the history of that failure.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Thursday the BRICS group of nations will create their own university. “Member states of the bloc have agreed to coordinate their efforts in (the area of) information security, including on the Internet. There will be a network of community universities to bolster scientific and technological exchange between member states,” Putin said. The announcement was made during the bloc's summit in Ufa, Russia.

The last few weeks and months have been awash in media coverage of two cases before magistrate judges involving the federal government seeking to use the All Writs Act to compel Apple’s cooperation with ongoing criminal investigations. The older case, in the Eastern District of New York, involves a drug case where the phone’s owner has pleaded guilty to the charges against him. The more recent case, in the Central District of California, involves an iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the alleged San Bernardino shooters. While the two cases involve different different phone models, operating systems, alleged crimes, and legal postures, they touch on similar questions related to the scope of the All Writs Act. In an attempt to create a one-stop shop for our coverage and the related documents and some useful sources, we’ve compiled this readers’ guide. We will update it as the cases progress to include the latest filings and posts, so check back for more as things unfold.

The United States tripled the number of air strikes on Yemen in 2017 compared with last year.The Pentagon said on Wednesday that the US has dropped 120 bombs on militants in the impoverished country this year. According to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations, the US dropped 34 bombs on Yemen in 2016 and 58 in 2015.The US largely targeted militants from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) group, but also caused civilian casualties.

The "larger dysfunction," as you express it, arises out of a number of factors. The primary one, in my view, is a philosophical and psychological schizophrenia among the American people.