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carolinehayter

What We Know About Russia's Latest Alleged Hack Of The U.S. Government : NPR - 0 views

  • Russian government hackers are believed to be responsible for infiltrating computer systems at multiple U.S. agencies in recent months, including the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of the Treasury, according to government agencies and media reports. Russia has denied the accusations.
  • The hack hinged on a vulnerability on a software monitoring product from SolarWinds, a company based in Austin, Texas.
  • the list of affected U.S. government entities includes the Commerce Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the Treasury Department, the U.S. Postal Service and the National Institutes of Health.
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  • SolarWinds has some 300,000 customers but says "fewer than 18,000" installed the version of its Orion products earlier this year that now appears to have been compromised.
  • Microsoft has now taken control of the domain name that hackers used to communicate with systems that were compromised by the Orion update, according to security expert Brian Krebs. The company's analysis, he added, should help reveal the scope of the affected companies and agencies.
  • Many U.S. national security agencies made major efforts to prevent Russia from interfering in this year's election. But those same agencies seem to have been blindsided by news that hackers — suspected to be Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR — were digging around inside U.S. government systems, possibly since the spring.
  • The intruders were careful to cover their tracks, Gerstell said. "You couldn't tell that they came in, you couldn't tell that they left the back door open. You couldn't even tell necessarily when they came in, took a look around and when they left."
  • The incident is the latest in what has become a long list of suspected Russian electronic incursions into other nations – particularly the U.S. – under President Vladimir Putin.
  • So far, some U.S. government departments and agencies have acknowledged they are investigating the breaches but have provided few details. The White House has been silent about the suspected Russian hack.
  • "This SolarWinds hack is very problematic, very troublesome, because it's not at all clear exactly how we should respond," Gerstell said. Part of the problem, he added, is that it's not clear what the hackers did after gaining access.
  • The intrusion could simply be a case of espionage, he said, of one government trying to understand what its adversary is doing.
  • The company said, "We have been advised that this incident was likely the result of a highly sophisticated, targeted, and manual supply chain attack by an outside nation state, but we have not independently verified the identity of the attacker."
  • The cybersecurity firm announced last week that a "highly sophisticated state-sponsored adversary" stole its "red team" tools, which are used to test security vulnerabilities in its customers' computer networks. FireEye's clients include government agencies.
  • "We believe this is nation-state activity at significant scale, aimed at both the government and private sector," the company said as it shared some details about what it called "the threat activity we've uncovered over the past weeks."
  • The agency said Sunday that it "is aware of active exploitation of SolarWinds Orion Platform software" that was released between March and June. The agency is urging any affected organizations to take steps to detect intrusions and to take countermeasures.
carolinehayter

Biden Makes Historic Picks In Naming Foreign Policy, National Security Teams : Biden Tr... - 0 views

  • President-elect Joe Biden has named six leaders of his foreign policy and national security teams, showing a continued push for historic firsts in his administration.
  • He's also set to name former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen as his treasury secretary
  • Yellen, 74, was the first-ever female Fed chair and would be the first-ever female head of the U.S. Treasury.
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  • Alejandro Mayorkas, who was a deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, is the first Latino and immigrant nominated as DHS secretary
  • Mayorkas was born in Havana, Cuba, and his family fled as political refugees to Miami.
  • he worked on the development and implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and headed the department's response to the Ebola and Zika health crises.
  • Avril Haines is tapped to serve as director of national intelligence, and if confirmed, she would become the first woman to lead the intelligence community.
  • She previously was deputy national security adviser and deputy director of the CIA, the first woman to hold the position
  • Additionally, former Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the negotiations over the Paris climate accords, has been named as special presidential envoy for climate to sit on the National Security Council. It will be the first time the NSC has included a member solely devoted to the issue of climate change.
  • Jake Sullivan, another close Biden aide, has been announced for the position of national security adviser in the new administration.
  • Sullivan previously was the former vice president's national security adviser and worked at the State Department under Hillary Clinton.
  • Linda Thomas-Greenfield for the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The role would mark Thomas-Greenfield's return to public service after retiring from her 35-year career with the Foreign Service in 2017.
  • Biden is elevating the ambassadorship to a Cabinet-level position. The announcement also puts a Black woman in a highly visible role.
  • The staffing announcements come after reporting that Biden had selected longtime adviser Antony Blinken for the coveted secretary of state post. Blinken was deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.
  • Four of the six roles require Senate confirmation, with Sullivan's and Kerry's positions not needing such a vote.
  • "These individuals are equally as experienced and crisis-tested as they are innovative and imaginative," Biden said in a statement.
  • they also reflect the idea that we cannot meet the profound challenges of this new moment with old thinking and unchanged habits — or without diversity of background and perspective. It's why I've selected them."
  • And dozens of House Democrats are urging Biden to name their colleague, Rep. Deb Haaland, as interior secretary. She would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.
clairemann

How DHS and ICE Are Making The Case for Trump's Re-Election | Time - 0 views

  • In the final weeks leading up to the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have launched a highly unusual publicity blitz to spotlight immigration enforcement actions in key battleground states where President Donald Trump is trailing his opponent Joe Biden in the polls.
  • These public announcements by senior leaders ahead of the election, which former officials tell TIME are abnormal, if not unprecedented, have been held to publicize mostly routine immigration enforcement operations that would usually have been revealed with little fanfare.
  • Instead, DHS and ICE officials have used them as a platform to aggressively make the case for the president’s immigration policies, often taking on a markedly Trumpian tone and echoing parts of his stump speech.
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  • Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli have talked about immigrants taking American jobs, blasted Democrat-run sanctuary cities, touted “America First” and warned of “evil people who seek to travel to the United States with the intent of harming and killing Americans.”
  • In Phoenix last week, Wolf warned that there would be a surge in migration and an “unimaginable public health crisis” at the southern border if Trump were to lose the election — a series of nakedly political statements that stunned many former officials.
  • “The rhetoric that’s come out of Wolf and Cuccinelli is appearing to be a propaganda arm of the White House,”
  • The arrests were part of “Operation OPTical Illusion,” a crackdown on the federal Optional Tactical Training program, which allows international students to work in their field of study while on a U.S. student visa.
  • Cuccinelli directly tied this immigration enforcement action to Trump’s agenda, saying the arrests “will open up those jobs for American workers” and emphasizing that this “has been a very high priority for this President.”
  • Earlier in October, ICE put up bold black and red billboards in several parts of Pennsylvania, featuring the faces of six immigrants and their charges of burglary, robbery, and assault in big lettering. The agency described them as “at-large immigration violators who may pose a public safety threat” and said the campaign was meant to “educate the public about the dangers of non-cooperation policies.
  • “DHS is showing us a textbook example of why we have a federal law against government officials using their positions to support a political campaign,”
  • The politically significant locations of these press conferences, and the presence of senior leadership, means each event has been covered by local news and circulated on social media, likely reaching their intended in-state audience and beyond.
  • “the Trump administration is building [a] new wall and doing so faster than ever before” and “the Trump admin is putting America first by protecting American workers.” On Thursday, Wolf posted an almost 2-minute video about news media raising questions about Trump’s promised border wall in what was effectively a campaign ad, with the message: “They said it couldn’t be done…They were wrong. 400 times and counting.”
  • “These billboards are clearly intended to fuel anti-immigrant fervor one month before the election,”
  • “Top DHS officials are acting more like campaign surrogates than public servants, and they need to be held accountable.”
  • “I am deeply disturbed that ICE is spending government dollars and putting lives at risk in furtherance of what is described as a political messaging campaign,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter to Pham in early October.
  • Immigration lawyers and advocates have raised concerns the agency has also been timing other law enforcement actions for political purposes. In September, ICE announced that 19 non-citizens in North Carolina had been charged with illegally voting in the 2016 election.
  • This time around, the ICE announcement about the charges — which came more than three years after the investigation started — were also “highly suspect, and likely to be politically driven,” says Helen Parsonage, an attorney who represents five of the non-citizens.
  • While Trump’s 2016 rallies were often filled with vivid accounts of immigrant crime, “build the wall” chants and infamous readings of a poem about a snake to illustrate the threat posed by immigrants and refugees, it’s a theme he’s rarely touched on in his 2020 rallies.
Javier E

What the War on Terror Cost America | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

  • At a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced a new type of war, a “war on terror.” He laid out its terms: “We will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.” Then he described what that defeat might look like: “We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.”
  • If Bush’s words outlined the essential objectives of the global war on terror, 20 years later, the United States has largely achieved them. Osama bin Laden is dead. The surviving core members of al Qaeda are dispersed and weak. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, communicates only through rare propaganda releases, and al Qaeda’s most powerful offshoot, the Islamic State (or ISIS), has seen its territorial holdings dwindle to insignificance in Iraq and Syria.
  • Most important, however, is the United States’ success in securing its homeland.
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  • Since 9/11, the United States has suffered, on average, six deaths per year due to jihadi terrorism. (To put this in perspective, in 2019, an average of 39 Americans died every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.) If the goal of the global war on terror was to prevent significant acts of terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded.
  • But at what cost?
  • Every war the United States has fought, beginning with the American Revolution, has required an economic model to sustain it with sufficient bodies and cash.
  • Like its predecessors, the war on terror came with its own model: the war was fought by an all-volunteer military and paid for largely through deficit spending.
  • It should be no surprise that this model, which by design anesthetized a majority of Americans to the costs of conflict, delivered them their longest war; in his September 20, 2001, speech, when describing how Americans might support the war effort, Bush said, “I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.”
  • This model has also had a profound effect on American democracy, one that is only being fully understood 20 years later.
  • Funding the war through deficit spending allowed it to fester through successive administrations with hardly a single politician ever mentioning the idea of a war tax. Meanwhile, other forms of spending—from financial bailouts to health care and, most recently, a pandemic recovery stimulus package—generate breathless debate.
  • , technological and social changes have numbed them to its human cost. The use of drone aircraft and other platforms has facilitated the growing automation of combat, which allows the U.S. military to kill remotely. This development has further distanced Americans from the grim costs of war
  • the absence of a draft has allowed the U.S. government to outsource its wars to a military caste, an increasingly self-segregated portion of society, opening up a yawning civil-military divide as profound as any that American society has ever known.
  • For now, the military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States and one of the few that the public sees as having no overt political bias. How long will this trust last under existing political conditions? As partisanship taints every facet of American life, it would seem to be only a matter of time before that infection spreads to the U.S. military.
  • From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The United States today meets both conditions.
  • Historically, this has invited the type of political crisis that leads to military involvement (or even intervention) in domestic politics.
  • How imminent is the threat from these states? When it comes to legacy military platforms—aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes—the United States continues to enjoy a healthy technological dominance over its near-peer competitors. But its preferred platforms might not be the right ones. Long-range land-based cruise missiles could render large aircraft carriers obsolete. Advances in cyberoffense could make tech-reliant fighter aircraft too vulnerable to fly
  • It is not difficult to imagine a more limited counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan that might have brought bin Laden to justice or a strategy to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that would not have involved a full-scale U.S. invasion. The long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns that followed in each country were wars of choice.
  • Both proved to be major missteps when it came to achieving the twin goals of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice and securing the homeland. In fact, at several moments over the past two decades, the wars set back those objectives
  • Few years proved to be more significant in the war on terror than 2011. Aside from being the year bin Laden was killed, it also was the year the Arab Spring took off and the year U.S. troops fully withdrew from Iraq. If the great strategic blunder of the Bush administration was to put troops into Iraq, then the great strategic blunder of the Obama administration was to pull all of them out. Both missteps created power vacuums. The first saw the flourishing of al Qaeda in Iraq; the second gave birth to that group’s successor, ISIS.
  • But what makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one.
  • How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative?
  • The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented a familiar type of war, with an invasion to topple a government and liberate a people, followed by a long occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns.
  • In addition to blood and treasure, there is another metric by which the war on terror can be judged: opportunity cost
  • For the past two decades, while Washington was repurposing the U.S. military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.
  • Today, the Chinese navy is the largest in the world. It boasts 350 commissioned warships to the U.S. Navy’s roughly 290.
  • it now seems inevitable that the two countries’ militaries will one day reach parity. China has spent 20 years building a chain of artificial islands throughout the South China Sea that can effectively serve as a defensive line of unsinkable aircraft carriers.
  • Culturally, China has become more militaristic, producing hypernationalist content such as the Wolf Warrior action movies.
  • After the century opened with 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that nonstate actors would prove to be the greatest threat to U.S. national security
  • Nonstate actors have compromised national security not by attacking the United States but by diverting its attention away from state actors. It is these classic antagonists—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—that have expanded their capabilities and antipathies in the face of a distracted United States.
  • it may seem odd to separate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the war on terror,
  • The greatest minds in the U.S. military have now, finally, turned their attention to these concerns, with the U.S. Marine Corps, for example, shifting its entire strategic focus to a potential conflict with China. But it may be too late.
  • Americans’ fatigue—and rival countries’ recognition of it—has limited the United States’ strategic options. As a result, presidents have adopted policies of inaction, and American credibility has eroded.
  • When Obama went to legislators to gain support for a military strike against the Assad regime, he encountered bipartisan war fatigue that mirrored the fatigue of voters, and he called off the attack. The United States’ redline had been crossed, without incident or reprisal.
  • Fatigue may seem like a “soft” cost of the war on terror, but it is a glaring strategic liability.
  • This proved to be true during the Cold War when, at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and when, in the war’s aftermath, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Because it was embroiled in a war in the first case and reeling from it in the second, the United States could not credibly deter Soviet military aggression
  • It is no coincidence that China, for instance, has felt empowered to infringe on Hong Kong’s autonomy and commit brazen human rights abuses against its minority Uyghur population. When American power recedes, other states fill the vacuum.
  • U.S. adversaries have also learned to obfuscate their aggression. The cyberwar currently being waged from Russia is one example, with the Russian government claiming no knowledge of the spate of ransomware attacks emanating from within its borders. With Taiwan, likewise, Chinese aggression probably wouldn’t manifest in conventional military ways. Beijing is more likely to take over the island through gradual annexation, akin to what it has done with Hong Kong, than stage an outright invasion.
  • From time to time, people have asked in what ways the war changed me. I have never known how to answer this question because ultimately the war didn’t change me; the war made me
  • Today, I have a hard time remembering what the United States used to be like. I forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport just 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk through a train station without armed police meandering around the platforms. Or what it was like to believe—particularly in those heady years right after the Cold War—that the United States’ version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time and that the world had reached “the end of history.”
  • Today, the United States is different; it is skeptical of its role in the world, more clear-eyed about the costs of war despite having experienced those costs only in predominantly tangential ways. Americans’ appetite to export their ideals abroad is also diminished, particularly as they struggle to uphold those ideals at home, whether in violence around the 2020 presidential election, the summer of 2020’s civil unrest, or even the way the war on terror compromised the country through scandals from Abu Ghraib prison to Edward Snowden’s leaks. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a distant memory.
  • When I told him that even though we might have lost the war in Afghanistan, our generation could still claim to have won the war on terror, he was skeptical. We debated the issue but soon let it drop. The next day, I received an email from him. A southerner and a lover of literature, he had sent me the following, from The Sound and the Fury:
  • No battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
leilamulveny

Opinion | Don't Let QAnon Bully Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Allowing the U.S. government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
  • While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.On March 2, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warning that militia extremists might be plotting to overrun the Capitol complex and “remove Democratic lawmakers.” The details of the possible plot were hazy, but the threat unnerved enough people that House leaders canceled Thursday’s session. The voting schedule was condensed, and lawmakers left town early for the weekend.Although March 4 came and went without a bloody coup attempt — that is, without another bloody coup attempt — damage was still done. Lawmakers abandoned their workplace out of fear of politically motivated violence. This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOf course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.The current security threat is not expected to dissipate any time soon. If anything, the intelligence community has cautioned that the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol may have emboldened extremists. Having sacked the Capitol, the lunatic fringe is now dreaming of a bigger, bloodier encore.
  • Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida delegation’s mini-Trump, is in full froth. “Pelosi hired a bigot to hunt MAGA,” he charged last month. Last Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the speaker, arguing that General Honoré’s criticism of the police and lawmakers was “disqualifying.” On Thursday, Tucker Carlson told viewers: “Honoré is an unhinged partisan extremist. He’s nuttier than anyone affiliated with QAnon.”
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  • Of course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.
  • Trump toadies should not be allowed to turn this issue into a partisan game. Steps must be taken to safeguard the seat of government. Going forward, lawmakers cannot be seen as bowing to political thugs, their work upended whenever there is a semi-credible threat. That is not the American way.
  • March 4 was just one target. The acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, recently warned that extremists have been talking about possibly blowing up the Capitol during President Biden’s first address to a joint meeting of Congress, which has not yet been scheduled, with an eye toward killing “as many members as possible.”
  • On Monday, lawmakers were briefed on the findings of the security assessment that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, requested in the wake of Jan. 6. Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the task force, recommended a variety of permanent enhancements. These include beefing up the Capitol Police force, in terms of increased staffing, improved training, enhanced authority for its leadership and a new emphasis on intelligence work; creating a quick-reaction force to be on call 24-7 to handle imminent threats; installing a retractable fencing system; and adding protections for rank-and-file members of Congress at home and while they are traveling and back in their districts.
  • This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.
  • Last Thursday was not Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power after all.While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.
  • This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.
  • In the wake of Jan. 6, enhanced protections were put in place around Capitol Hill. There is an increased police presence along with thousands of National Guard troops. Last week, Chief Pittman requested that the Guard presence, originally set to expire Friday, be extended 60 days. (The Pentagon has yet to issue a final decision.) Inside the Capitol building, additional metal detectors have been installed. The grounds are ringed by security fencing. Lawmakers from both parties have complained that “the people’s house” now has the grim vibe of an armed camp — or a low-security prison.
  • Republicans, many of them desperate to downplay the Jan. 6 tragedy, are already attacking General Honoré as biased.
  • The general has not been shy about criticizing lawmakers and others he regards as having fed the postelection chaos, and he has suggested that some Capitol Police officers may have been complicit in allowing rioters into the building.
grayton downing

Foreign Students Will Face New Checks When Entering United States - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Department of Homeland Security has ordered new security checks for all foreign students entering the United States,
  • The new check was added after the authorities discovered that a foreign friend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, had left the United States and returned in January using a student visa that should have been canceled
  • arriving students now will also be checked through a database known as the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System,
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  • A lapse occurred because Customs and Border Protection inspectors did not have the latest information on Mr. Tazhayakov, officials said. The new entry checks, which were first reported by The Associated Press, would give airport customs officers the most recent
johnsonma23

House GOP intensifies immigration standoff | MSNBC - 0 views

  • House GOP intensifies immigration standoff
  • the task before Congress is quite simple: fund the Department of Homeland Security.
  • either President Obama accepts GOP demands to effectively dismantle his entire approach to immigration policy or Congress will gut Homeland Security funding when it expires at the end of February.
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  • the far-right plan isn’t going to work.
  • either fold and pass a clean bill before the deadline or force a partial DHS shutdown next month. The latter wouldn’t derail Obama’s policy, but it would undermine domestic border security, which the right claims to care deeply about.
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    Mass immigrations in the US 
johnsonma23

Neo-Nazis gain parliamentary seats in Slovakia - 0 views

  • Neo-Nazis gain parliamentary seats in Slovakia
  • The leftist ruling party has won the parliamentary election in Slovakia, after campaigning on an anti-migrant ticket, but will need coalition partners to form a majority government, according to results announced on Sunday.
  • In a surprising development, a neo-Nazi party gained parliamentary seats for the first time.
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  • The prime minister favors a strong state role in the economy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Russia and is known for strong anti-Muslim rhetoric.
  • The party says NATO is a terrorist organization and keeps attacking the European Union and Europe's common currency, the euro, which Slovakia uses.
  • The ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party, Fico's potential partner, returned to Parliament after a four-year-absence with 8.6 percent while the traditional party in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of 5.4 million, the Christian Democrats, didn't get enough votes to be represented.
  • neo-Nazi People's Party — Our Slovakia — got 8 percent, or 14 seats.
  • The pro-business Freedom and Solidarity became the second strongest party with 12.1 percent, or 21 seats, ahead of another center-right party, the Ordinary People with 11.0 percent.
  • Fico said it is his duty as the winner to create a meaningful government. He said he will open a first round of informal consultations with other parties Sunday.
  • Mitt Romney jumps on #NeverTrump: Our view
  • Donald Trump's strong showing on Super Tuesday put prominent Republicans in a tight spot. They have three distinct choices: Jump on the Trump bandwagon. Stay silent, and try to save their own skins if they end up on the November ballot beneath Trump. Or denounce Trump as unfit for the GOP nomination or the presidency.
  • Only a few prominent Republicans have had the courage to take that third path, and on Thursday they were joined by Mitt Romney, the GOP's candidate in 2012
  •  Calling Trump "a phony" and "a fraud," Romney said the billionaire businessman is unsuited by temperament, character and judgment to occupy the Oval Office and represent America on the world stage.
  • Shortly before Romney spoke, dozens of Republican national security experts, including former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, added their voices to the emerging anti-Trump drive by the GOP establishmen
  • , bullying and bigotry is as familiar as it is appalling, and practically every day brings a new outrage. Early in the campaign, he denigrated Mexican immigrants and Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of the nation's iconic war heroes and the party's standard-bearer in 2008.
  • y, he talked about loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations, and on Sunday, two days before several primaries in the Deep South, he waffled over denouncing David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who had endorsed Trump.
  • Taking on a bully is much more unpleasant business, as Trump's rivals have discovered. After Romney's speech, Trump fired back with his usual fusillade of schoolyard insults, calling Romney a stiff, a choke artist, a lightweight, and a disaster as a candidate who ran a horrible campaign and begged for his endorsement in 2012.
  • But Americans can hope Romney's speech has the same effect as the confrontation that Army counsel Joseph Welch had in 1954 with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, another demagogue who took America down a dangerous and ugly road before a demand for decency stopped him.
brookegoodman

REAL ID delayed by at least one year due to coronavirus - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Washington (CNN)The deadline to obtain a REAL ID, federally mandated identification that will be needed for passengers to board aircraft, will be extended until October 1, 2021 -- a year past the current deadline, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
  • As of last month, only about 35% of US IDs complied with the REAL ID Act, a post-9/11 law that establishes security standards for licenses. Once in effect, travelers flying commercially in the US will need to have a REAL ID, which is marked by a star on the top of the card.
  • The Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for the identification program, is delaying the deadline to allow state and local authorities to focus on the coronavirus response.
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  • President Donald Trump said Monday the fall deadline for states to comply with REAL ID requirements would be extended.
katherineharron

FBI warns 'armed protests' being planned at all 50 state capitols and Washington DC - C... - 0 views

  • The FBI has received information indicating "armed protests" are being planned at all 50 state capitols and the US Capitol in Washington, DC in the days leading up to President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20, according to an internal bulletin obtained by CNN.
  • According to a senior administration official, the interagency rehearsal aimed to ensure a seamless chain of command in the event of a national emergency in the days leading up to the inauguration and on that day itself.
  • the bulletin highlights concerns that the US Capitol siege was perhaps just the beginning of potentially violent actions from supporters of President Donald Trump
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  • "Armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols from 16 January through at least 20 January, and at the US Capitol from 17 January through 20 January," the FBI bulletin states. It also suggests there are threats of an "uprising" if Trump is removed via the 25th Amendment before Inauguration Day.
  • "On 8 January, the FBI received information on an identified group calling for others to join them in 'storming' state, local and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event POTUS is removed as President prior to Inauguration Day. This identified group is also planning to 'storm' government offices including in the District of Columbia and in every state, regardless of whether the states certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump, on 20 January," the bulletin adds.
  • The FBI is also tracking reports of "various threats to harm President-Elect Biden ahead of the presidential inauguration,"
  • The FBI said in a separate statement that its "efforts are focused on identifying, investigating, and disrupting individuals that are inciting violence and engaging in criminal activity," and that its "focus is not on peaceful protesters, but on those threatening their safety and the safety of other citizens with violence and destruction of property."
  • The news comes as security measures are being stepped up ahead of Inauguration Day, with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies preparing for the possibility of more violence after rioters stormed the US Capitol last week
  • Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser on Monday urged Americans to avoid the city during Biden's inauguration next week and to participate virtually following last week's deadly domestic terror attack on the US Capitol.
  • "Trumpism won't die on January 20," said Bowser, who has asked Trump and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to declare a pre-disaster declaration for DC. The White House said in a statement Monday night that Trump approved the emergency declaration requested by Bowser.
  • "In light of events of the past week and the evolving security landscape leading up to the inauguration and at the recommendation of Secret Service Director James Murray, I have instructed the U.S. Secret Service to begin the National Special Security Event operations for the 2021 Inauguration effective Wednesday, January 13th instead of January 19th," Wolf said in a statement.
  • "Now that it happened people will take it much more seriously," the official said, referring to last week's violence. "Now, the planners, they are all going to take it much more seriously."
  • Law enforcement agencies in Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey that deployed to the US Capitol Wednesday to assist propel pro-Trump rioters expect to send officers to Washington, DC, for the inauguration.
  • The National Guard has plans to have up to 15,000 National Guard troops to meet current and future requests for the inauguration, Gen. Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, said Monday. The dramatic increase in troops comes as law enforcement in the nation's capital and around the country brace for further extremist violence amid the transition of power.
  • "Our security planning is fluid and adjustments are made as needed, from day-to-day," Banner said. "Security enhancements that can be put in place include both seen and unseen measures. In general, we don't discuss security measures, but I can confirm that out of an abundance of caution, we are increasing our visible presence at the Capitol for the next couple of weeks starting today."
Javier E

The Confession of Kirstjen Nielsen - The Bulwark - 0 views

  • The Department of Homeland Security was created in the wake of attacks from terrorists who wanted to destroy our Republic. I turned my department into an arm of the president’s war against people who want to join it. I have shamed myself and shamed this country by allowing Donald Trump to stain the glorious legacy of our great nation. He is a man without better angels, and I will stand as a warning to others who continue to serve him. My actions have not only destroyed my reputation and dishonored the image of America, but also stand as a profound affront to values and principles for which this country once stood. I stand ready to testify to Congress on this and any other matters, and may God have mercy on my soul.
  • I have played lawyerly word games to hide not only the depravity and cruelty of the policies of this administration but my role in them. I have been responsible for covering up the deaths of children in American captivity.
anonymous

Trump Administration Considering Separating Women, Children At U.S.-Mexico Border | The... - 0 views

  • Trump Administration Considering Separating Women, Children At U.S.-Mexico Border
  • Women and children crossing together illegally into the United States could be separated by U.S. authorities under a proposal being considered by the Department of Homeland Security, according to three government officials
  • Part of the reason for the proposal is to deter mothers from migrating to the United States with their children, said the officials, who have been briefed on the proposal.
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  • Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly last week ordered immigration agents to deport or criminally prosecute parents who facilitate the illegal smuggling of their children.
ethanshilling

Democrats Confront a Surge at the Border - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Democratic-led House on Thursday passed bills that would offer a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, including so-called Dreamers, and eventually grant legal status to almost a million farmworkers and their families.
  • Democratic lawmakers hoped to draw a clear line between themselves and Republicans on some of the more popular and uncontroversial elements of Biden’s broader immigration plan.
  • A flood of asylum seekers and other migrants has arrived since the start of the Biden administration, drawn in part by the new president’s more accommodating tone compared with his predecessor’s.
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  • Republicans have seized upon the surge, labeling it the “Biden border crisis” in a new series of political ads and splashing coverage across conservative media.
  • Mr. Biden and his homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, are balancing their desire to reject Trump’s uncompromising approach — particularly with regard to unaccompanied minors, who have arrived at the border this month at a rate of roughly 400 people a day
  • A month ago, immigration didn’t register as a top concern for most Americans. A Pew Research Center poll in early February found that just 38 percent of the country thought that “reducing illegal immigration” should be a major priority among the United States’ foreign policy goals.
  • But in a CNN poll released last week, immigration was the only issue, from a list of seven, on which Americans gave Mr. Biden meaningfully negative reviews.
  • Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee this week, Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged that the situation at the border “is undoubtedly difficult,” and sought to manage expectations.
anonymous

Biden says "nothing has changed," but numbers of child migrants on record pace : NPR - 0 views

  • President Biden claimed Thursday in his first press conference since taking office that "nothing has changed" compared to earlier influxes of migrants and unaccompanied children at the border.
  • The Biden administration has been grappling with surging numbers of migrants, especially children arriving at the border without their parents. It is true, as Biden states, that numbers often rise during the early months of the year when temperatures begin to warm. But the number of children arriving today without their parents is considerably higher than at the same time in 2019 and 2020.
  • In fact, the number of unaccompanied children being apprehended by the Border Patrol were higher in February than they've been any previous February since 2014, according to data shared with NPR by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
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  • Authorities encountered 9,297 children without a parent in February, a 30% increase from 2019 during the last major influx of unaccompanied children. To be sure, it's still below the peaks of 11,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived in May 2019 and above 10,000 in June 2014, but experts and administration officials expect those records to be broken this year.
  • Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week that U.S. agents are on pace to intercept more migrants on the southwest border in 2021 than they have in the last two decades.The reasons for the influx of migrants from Central America are vast and complex. They are also deeply personal for each family who chooses to leave their home.
  • Jessica Bolter, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, says they involve a mix of longstanding factors, such as poverty and corruption, as well as new factors such as two recent hurricanes and widespread unemployment due to the pandemic.
  • U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended an average of 5,000 undocumented immigrants per day over the past 30 days, including about 500 unaccompanied children, according to a senior Border Patrol official who spoke to reporters on Friday.
  • The official said the influx was "much different" than previous years, citing the large number of unaccompanied children and families traveling. As of Wednesday, more than 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children and teens were stuck in Border Patrol facilities waiting for beds in more appropriate shelters built for children, according to Department of Homeland Security data viewed by NPR.
  • The Border Patrol official told reporters Friday that agents are trying to discharge the children from warehouses and jail-like holding cells as quickly as possible, but there's a bottleneck because the government can't open child shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services fast enough to accommodate everyone who's crossing.
  • The Biden administration is working with other agencies trying find more bed space. They're using places like the San Diego Convention Center to hold unaccompanied minors so they're not sleeping in cells on the border. The challenges in Central America – and at the border – have become cyclical.
  • Like under previous presidents, the Biden administration was not prepared to shelter this many arriving children. But Bolter questions whether this is some kind of a new "crisis." She says this part of the same flow of migrants that the United States has been experiencing over the last decade.
  • Up until 2012, the vast majority of apprehensions at the southwest border were of young Mexican males coming across to find work in the United States. Two years later, the majority of cases coming across the southwest border were from Central America and were a mix people, families and unaccompanied children.
  • The Biden administration also has long term plans to deal more directly with these issues in Central America. They include developing more legal avenues to seek asylum so that migrants don't feel they have to choose illegal avenues. And Biden just sent three top officials to Mexico and Guatemala as part of efforts to tackle the root causes of migration, something he also just tasked Vice President Harris with leading.
  • He told NPR's Steve Inskeep Friday that the administration wants to help countries in the region create the right environment for international investment that drives economic prosperity, but also has ways to encourage better behavior from money launderers and other corrupt officials.
anonymous

Deaths Of Migrant Children Haunt Former Official As Border Surge Increases : NPR - 0 views

  • Seeing the growing number of minors held in jail-like facilities near the U.S.-Mexico border, John Sanders can't help thinking of Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez.
  • The 16-year-old boy from Guatemala died in the care of U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the last record-breaking detention of unaccompanied minors during the Trump administration, when Sanders led the agency
  • At least five children died in custody or after being detained by federal immigration agents at the border during that surge in 2018 and 2019, when as many as 2,600 children were being held in border facilities.
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  • The U.S. government had more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in its custody as of Sunday, according to a Department of Homeland Security document obtained by NPR.
  • The children are spending an average of 117 hours in detention facilities before being moved to more hospitable shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services — far longer than the 72 hours allowed by law.
  • Hernandez died of complications from the flu. So did Felipe Gomez Alonzo, 8, another child whom Sanders thinks about a lot. Jakelin Caal, 7, died of a bacterial infection.Sanders said kids who arrive at the border facilities are already physically and emotionally strained after weeks — if not months — of traveling under very difficult conditions.
  • Back in 2019, Long served as a detention monitor for the legal team that advocated for the children in court. She testified to Congress at the time about sick kids sleeping in cells and older children caring for younger ones.
  • She largely blames the Trump administration for hollowing out what little infrastructure existed to handle these cyclical flows of unaccompanied minors.But Long also raises concerns about transparency in President Biden's administration and questions why detention monitors like herself have been blocked from seeing certain areas of concerning facilities.
  • David Lapan, a former senior official in Trump's Department of Homeland Security, said the former president was more focused on sending a message about enforcement than caring for the children.
  • Sanders, the former acting CBP commissioner, quit the Trump administration in the midst of the last border crisis.He described the deaths of children on his watch as a transformational experience and now works with an organization, Glasswing International, that works to address the root causes of migration in Central America.
katherineharron

Immigration: Biden to sign executive orders and establish task force to reunite separat... - 0 views

  • President Joe Biden will sign three executive orders Tuesday that take aim at his predecessor's hardline immigration policies and try to rectify the consequences of those policies, including by establishing a task force designed to reunite families separated at the US-Mexico border, according to senior administration officials.
  • "President Trump was so focused on the wall that he did nothing to address the root cause of why people are coming to our southern border. It was a limited, wasteful and naive strategy, and it failed," one senior administration official said. "President Biden's approach is to deal with immigration comprehensively, fairly, and humanely."
  • Hours into his presidency, Biden moved to swiftly undo many Trump administration policies in a series of executive actions.
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  • On Tuesday, Biden is expected to follow his first-day actions by tackling family separation, the root causes of migration, and the legal immigration system.
  • The Senate is also expected to confirm Alejandro Mayorkas as Homeland Security secretary on Tuesday, after Monday night's vote was delayed due to weather.
  • Biden pledged to set up a task force focused on identifying and reunifying families separated at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration's controversial "zero tolerance" policy.
  • The task force will be chaired by the Department of Homeland Security secretary and work across the US government, along with partners, to find parents separated from their children under the former administration. CNN previously reported that first lady Jill Biden is expected to take an active role in the task force.
  • It will be charged with identifying all children separated from their parents or legal guardians on the southern border, facilitating and enabling the reunification of children with their families,
  • Lawyers are unable to reach the parents of 611 children who had been split from their families by US border officials between 2017 and 2018, according to the latest court filing in an ongoing family separation case.
  • "The Biden administration is committed to remedying this awful harm the Trump administration inflicted on families," a senior administration official said, calling the policy a "moral failure" and "national shame."
  • "The goal of the task force is one to identify, but two to make recommendations as to how the families can be united, taking into account the menu of options that exist under immigration law," the official said.
  • The administration plans to provide aid to the region to support initiatives combating corruption and revive the Central American minors program that had been ended by Trump and allows certain at-risk youths to live in the US, according to a senior administration official.
  • The policy, informally known as "Remain in Mexico," has left thousands of asylum seekers waiting in dangerous and deplorable conditions on the border.
  • The Biden administration has stopped new enrollments into the program, but has not disclosed its plans to address the thousands of migrants still waiting in Mexico, saying only that they will be taken into account as new systems are put in place.
  • "The situation at the border will not transform overnight," a senior administration official said. "This is in large part due to the damage done over the last four years,
  • The order will also call for a series of actions to restore the asylum system, which was drastically changed over the last four years and made it exceedingly difficult for migrants to be granted asylum in the US.
  • Like the other executive orders, it also seeks to reverse Trump-era policies that targeted low-income immigrants, including calling for a review of the public charge rule which makes it more difficult for immigrants to obtain legal status if they use public benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers.
xaviermcelderry

Ahead of Election, Police Prepare for Violence and Disruption - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “How do you make people feel safe in that environment without creating an overt police presence — that is a challenge for all police departments,” said Andrew Walsh, deputy chief in the Homeland Security division of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. They decided that frequent but random patrols to look for potential trouble was the better choice.
  • “This is such a polarized environment and a lot of people are angry,” said John D. Cohen, a former Homeland Security counterterrorism coordinator with 34 years experience in law enforcement. “I have never seen a threat environment as dynamic, complex and dangerous as the one we are in right now.”
  • In New York City, longstanding local laws mandate that at least one officer be deployed at each of the 1,201 polling stations, but hundreds more will be on standby. Chief Terence A. Monahan said the lesson from the large demonstrations this summer was that police had to reach the scene of disturbances faster, and more officers have been given a refresher course in public disorder training. “There will be a lot of cops out there,” he said.
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  • Many police officials and extremism experts said that they were more worried about the period after Nov. 3, especially if no clear winner emerges.
  • In Chicago, days off have been canceled and officers notified that their shifts might extend to 12 hours.
  • National Guard units were also being called out in various states, including New Jersey, Wisconsin and Texas. Officials in the first two said the dearth of poll-station volunteers amid the pandemic meant a few hundred troops in civilian clothing would be needed to help count absentee ballots and other poll activities.
Javier E

Opinion | The Trump mythology is collapsing. And the 9/11 anniversary shows how. - The ... - 0 views

  • some of the very worst abuses and pathologies of the Trump presidency represent continuations of our overreaction to 9/11.
  • He has exacerbated the Islamophobia it helped unleash to an extraordinarily explicit degree
  • he has politically weaponized the post-9/11 homeland security bureaucracy in just the way its initial critics feared.
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  • we’re seeing this now with extraordinary abuses at the Department of Homeland Security, which was birthed amid the post-9/11 climate of fear. While it committed serious abuses under former president Barack Obama, it has now been corrupted by Trump and his cabal in just about every conceivable way.
  • We just learned from a DHS whistleblower that top officials appear to have manipulated intelligence to help fabricate the existence of an organized leftist domestic terror threat for Trump to run for reelection against. That comes after DHS sent armies of law enforcement into urban protest zones to provoke the civil conflict that Trump believes will boost that case.
  • All this rank Islamophobia and all this corrupt weaponization of DHS to target domestic dissidents and help manufacture Trump’s reelection agitprop are in many ways crucial aspects of our national 9/11 legacy.
  • As the nearly 200,000 deaths help illustrate, Trump and his cronies and GOP enablers constitute a stupider, more corrupt, more incompetent, more dishonest and more depraved elite than even the caricature version of pre-Trump elites he created as a foil to gain power. Trump has carried forward the very worst of our post-9/11 pathologies.
Javier E

Opinion | Trump's ugly law enforcement crackdown is even alienating Republicans - The W... - 0 views

  • critics of the “war on terror” under Bush might point out, as Jamelle Bouie did, that building up a massive militarized force such as DHS has always invited overreaching and authoritarian abuses of the kind we’re seeing now, and that they should prompt a rethink of DHS’s fundamental mission and makeup.
  • Of course, the fact that two of Bush’s homeland security chiefs — both of whom were involved in prosecuting that war on terror — are now condemning what’s happening might also be read as a sign of how far Trump has strayed into such abuses.
  • Chertoff suggested to me that DHS officials might ask themselves whether they have a similar duty, now that Trump has turned to them to create the TV imagery he thinks will help him get reelected.
tsainten

Miles Taylor, a Former Homeland Security Official, Reveals He Was 'Anonymous' - The New... - 0 views

  • Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was the anonymous author of The New York Times Op-Ed article in 2018 whose description of President Trump as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” roiled Washington and set off a hunt for his identity, Mr. Taylor confirmed Wednesday.
  • “undisciplined” and “amoral” leader whose abuse of power threatened the foundations of American democracy.
  • On Wednesday, Mr. Trump claimed not to know who Mr. Taylor is, despite the fact that there are numerous pictures of the president with Mr. Taylor in meetings.
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  • He has been on personal leave from the company for the past several months after endorsing Mr. Biden and has been organizing other Republicans to campaign against Mr. Trump’s re-election.
  • He responded with a short but telling tweet: ‘TREASON?’” Mr. Taylor wrote in his statement.
  • Mr. Taylor’s decision to assail the president anonymously in the Times article created a sensation in Washington because of its claims about the president’s lack of character and inability to govern.
  • In the book, Mr. Taylor said he decided to remain anonymous because he believed revealing his identity would have allowed Mr. Trump and his allies to distract attention from the substance of the critique he leveled against the president.
  • Ms. Nielsen’s resistance to some of Mr. Trump’s demands — including shutting down the border with Mexico and shooting people crossing the border illegally in the legs to slow them down — eventually led to her dismissal.
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