Group items tagged

MOSCOW—Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny urged supporters to take to the streets as he was ordered to be held in pretrial custody for 30 days, while Russia’s foreign ministry warned Western countries not to interfere in a case that is already worsening tensions with the U.S. and Europe.

He was remanded in custody until Feb. 15, and now faces a court decision that could turn a suspended sentence he received for an embezzlement case in 2014 into a real prison term. Authorities say he violated the terms of his parole while he was abroad recovering from August’s attack.

In short videos from the courtroom distributed among supporters, Mr. Navalny, 44 years old, said his detention showed that Mr. Putin fears his opposition movement, which will seek to make gains in a parliamentary election in September. He also called on supporters to hold public protests in a show of force.

WASHINGTON—President Trump is expected to issue as many as 100 pardons and commutations on his final day in office, but is leaning against some of the more controversial grants of clemency at the urging of his advisers, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The coming round of pardons, expected Tuesday, has been the talk of Washington in recent days, as allies on Capitol Hill and close to the White House have traded tips on how soon the list might come and who might be on it. Mr. Trump is also working to firm up his defense team for his second impeachment trial as he heads into his last full day of the presidency.

Democrats will have a hard time persuading 17 Republicans to join them in voting to convict Mr. Trump, but the president has grown increasingly worried about possible defections after 10 Republicans—a historic number—voted to impeach him in the House last week.

Adherents of the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers have been charged for alleged roles in the riot. Several of the groups used violent rhetoric urging members to attend the D.C. rally the day of the Capitol riot.

An Indiana man, Jon Schaffer, identified as a member of the heavy metal band Iced Earth, was arrested on charges of engaging in violence in a restricted building, disorderly conduct and other crimes, and was photographed wearing a baseball cap at the riot bearing the words “Oath Keepers Lifetime Member,” according to an affidavit for his arrest filed on Saturday. The Anti-Defamation League calls the group an “antigovernment right-wing fringe organization.”

“We’re not going to merge into some globalist, communist system, it will not happen. There will be a lot of bloodshed if it comes down to that, trust me.” The other members of Mr. Schaffer’s band have said they didn’t condone or support the riot.

Russian security forces detained opposition leader Alexei Navalny on his return to the country, heightening a confrontation between the Kremlin and its most vocal critic after he recovered in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning attack last summer.

His followers, who had congregated at a different airport west of Moscow, were barred from entering the arrival area by dozens of security officials, many in riot gear, who swarmed the area.

Russia’s federal prison service said in a statement that Mr. Navalny, who has been on the agency’s “wanted list” since Dec. 29, was detained for repeated violations of his probation. Further measures would be determined by a court, the agency said. Until then, Mr. Navalny would remain in custody, officials said.

Three human rights activists went on trial Wednesday in Poland for alleged desecration and offending religious sentiment by adding the LGBT rights movement’s rainbow symbol to posters of a revered Roman Catholic icon and publicly displaying the altered image, including on garbage bins and mobile toilets.

One of the defendants, Elzbieta Podlesna, said in court Wednesday that their 2019 action in Plock was spurred by an installation at the city’s St. Dominic’s Church that associated LGBT people with crime and negative behavior.

The three don’t deny putting the posters on walls and elsewhere around the church, but do not admit putting stickers with the image on garbage bins and toilets. They deny wrongdoing.

They were doctors and lawyers, florists and real estate agents, business executives, police officers, military veterans, at least one elected official and an Olympic gold medalist. They’d all come to coup for America

The fantasists did not achieve their objective last week, and it may look as if the conspiracy is reeling. President Trump is gone from Twitter and soon from the White House. Rioters are being arrested and charged by the dozens. QAnon — the collective delusion alleging that America is run by a cadre of pedophiles whom Trump is fixing to take down — a major presence in the crowd, has been kicked off the respectable web, and hate-filled redoubts like Parler are on their heels.

Many were shocked that the police put up any resistance at all. “We backed you guys this summer!” a man can be heard shouting at the police, probably in reference to Black Lives Matter protests. “When the whole country hated you, we had your back!”

As old as the Capitol itself, the Capitol Police began in 1801 with the appointment of a single guard to oversee the move of Congress from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. His task, according to a court filing, was to “take as much care as possible with the property of the United States.”

Today, it is in crisis once again, with calls for a full investigation into what lawmakers have called a “severe systemic failure” that allowed an angry mob of Trump loyalists to storm the Capitol last week, an episode that left five people dead, including one Capitol Police officer.

The department is accustomed to being shielded from the type of public disclosure that is routine for ordinary police agencies. But since last week’s rampage, the department’s chief and two other top security officials have resigned, and its congressional overseers have pressed for answers.

With just days left in his time as president, Donald Trump undoubtedly has begun to consider how history will remember him. The early returns aren't promising.

"On several occasions, Trump has suggested that he expects to take his place on the list of former presidents aside Abraham Lincoln, presumably knocking George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and all the others in the top rank down a tick," wrote presidential historian Joseph Ellis in a op-ed for the Los Angeles Times this week. "To put it politely, he needs to adjust his expectations."

"Donald Trump is quite likely to assume the title as the worst president in American history."

As a young student activist in 1980s Communist Poland, Tomasz Siemoniak —like many pro-democracy campaigners world-wide—looked up to America as a beacon of freedom.

China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, has already drawn a parallel between the riot in Washington and Hong Kong’s protests in 2019, accusing the U.S. of double standards as she expressed her “hope that the people of America will enjoy peace, stability and safety soon.”

“These recent events have stunned everyone, and in particularly the Belarusians, who saw the U.S. as an example of a stable, orderly democracy where honest elections are followed by a lawful transfer of power,” said Franak Viacorka, a senior adviser to Mr. Lukashenko’s opponent in the disputed election, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. “We hope it was an aberration rather than the trend.

President Trump was expected to issue as many as 100 pardons and commutations on his final full day in office, but on Monday was leaning against some of the more controversial proposed grants of clemency at the urging of his advisers, said people familiar with the discussions.

The coming round of pardons, expected Tuesday, has been the talk of Washington in recent days, as allies on Capitol Hill and close to the White House have traded tips on how soon the list might come and who might be on it. Mr. Trump is also working to firm up his defense team for his second impeachment trial as he heads into his last full day of the presidency.

In recent months, the president had discussed the prospect of pardoning himself, other members of his family—including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump —as well as his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. But Mr. Trump has been leaning away from those pardons in recent days as advisers have counseled him that they would be unnecessary, the person familiar with the conversations said, while noting that Mr. Trump has been known to suddenly reverse course.

The US has officially determined that China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims and ethnic and religious minority groups who live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

"This genocide is ongoing, and...we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state," US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Tuesday, on the last full day of the Trump administration.

The US State Department has previously estimated that up to two million Uyghurs, as well as members of other Muslim minority groups, have been detained in a sprawling network of internment camps in the region.

For conservatives, the case was exactly reversed: They had some major policy wins, but at the cost of frequent embarrassment and dismay at the president’s offensive behavior and self-defeating logorrhea.

The worst of his conduct took place after the 2020 election and seemed to fulfill progressive commentators’ allegation that Donald Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept defeat, culminating in demands that Vice President Mike Pence overturn a lawful election on no legal authority, occasioned a debacle that may haunt the Republican Party, and the country, for years.

lso during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency

Though the government has declassified some information about Zubaydah’s treatment in CIA custody, it has protected other information as privileged state secrets. Rejecting the government’s argument, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit allowed discovery in the case to proceed.

The district court dismissed the claims on the basis of the state-secrets privilege. The 9th Circuit reversed and remanded for further proceedings, instructing the district court, with restrictions, to review the material over which the privilege was claimed to determine whether the surveillance was authorized and conducted lawfully.

: (1) Whether probable cause or arguable probable cause exists to seek a search warrant when an officer relies upon an informant who turns himself in, admits commission of multiple including unreported/ unsolved crimes, and whose information is partially corroborated; (2)

even more strikingly, the nearly two dozen lawsuits are underpinned by accusations that the industry severely aggravated the environmental crisis with a decades-long campaign of lies and deceit to suppress warnings from their own scientists about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and dupe the American public

for the first time in decades, the lawsuits chart a path toward public accountability that climate activists say has the potential to rival big tobacco’s downfall after it concealed the real dangers of smoking.

“Things have to get worse for the oil companies,” he added. “Even if they’ve got a pretty good chance of winning the litigation in places, the discovery of pretty clearcut wrong doing – that they knew their product was bad and they were lying to the public – really weakens the industry’s ability to resist legislation and settlements.”

House Democrats are facing a time crunch to quickly wrap up their investigation into allegations President Donald Trump abused his office in pushing Ukraine to probe his political rivals, prompting growing expectations that votes on impeaching Trump could slip closer to the end of the year.

But that has proven to be more complicated than it initially seemed, according to multiple Democratic lawmakers and sources. The reason: Each witness has so far provided more leads for investigators to chase down, including new names to potentially interview or seek documents from. Plus, Democrats have had to reschedule several witnesses, including some this week in part because of memorial services for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, and others because they needed more time to retain lawyers.

"Every time we have a deposition, it leads us in a slightly different direction," Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, two of the three panels leading the investigation, said Monday. "We don't know how many additional pieces of testimony we may need. We just don't know."

President Donald Trump's taste for history is moving in new and awkwardly divergent directions as he faces the twin challenges of an impeachment inquiry and a 2020 re-election campaign. He's placing himself alongside the titans of US history one day and comparing himself to the victims of the country's collective sins the next.

Early in his presidency he pushed comparisons with his predecessor Andrew Jackson, who was an outsider in Washington and a populist. He was also a racist and anti-abolitionist. Of all the Presidents to put on a pedestal, Trump chose the one that his predecessor, the first black man to hold the job, was trying to take off the $20 bill.

And in Trump's mind, that equals injustice, so hours after comparing himself to the greatest presidents, he said the effort to end his presidency is like a "lynching," an incorrect and supremely insensitive historical comparison. Mobs of racists lynched African-Americans in one of the darker periods of US history, part of an effort intimidate, dehumanize and keep power from those who didn't have it. Trump certainly has power now.

Social policy and law professor Anita Hill said Tuesday that voters should press Democratic presidential candidates on how they will tackle the issue of gender violence, arguing that little attention has been placed on the topic during this election cycle.

"We have been listening to presidential debates and I have been trying to keep track, but I haven't heard one question about gender violence posed to the candidates. That needs to be addressed," Hill said, speaking at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington. "I think this is something that we need to be raising awareness about. If you go to a town hall and you're in a primary state, I hope you'll raise your hand and ask the candidates what they're going to do about gender violence."

Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate last fall after Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor, testified before a Senate panel that he had sexually assaulted her while he was drunk at a party during their high school years -- an allegation Kavanaugh has vehemently denied.

"With doubts rising about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden's ability to finance a multistate primary campaign, persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren's viability in the general election and skepticism that Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., can broaden his appeal beyond white voters, Democratic leaders are engaging in a familiar rite: fretting about who is in the race and longing for a white knight to enter the contest at the last minute."

This hand-wringing, it's worth noting, is a quadrennial rite for Democrats. The party -- or some element of the party -- can always be found fretting as to the alleged weakness of the perceived front-runner for the nomination and voicing concern that unless something changes they could find themselves on the outside looking in, again, on the White House.

But the simple truth here is this: Hillary Clinton isn't going to suddenly leap into the primary. And even if she did, it's far from a guarantee that she would win. Ditto -- and to an even greater extent -- Kerry, Brown, Holder and Patrick. (Michelle Obama actually might be able to get into the race this late and win, but she ain't running.) The Iowa caucuses are now just 104 days away. And there are still 19(!) Democrats currently running for the Democratic nomination.

It was Perry who led the U.S. delegation to Ukraine when newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was inaugurated back in May

The call triggered the whistleblower complaint from an intelligence officer and led to allegations that Trump abused his power for personal political gain.

Trumpism, Perry warned, was "a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued."

President Donald Trump is supposed to be the man who could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing any political support. But the threat of impeachment is constraining the President’s power in surprising ways.

Examples of Trump’s diminished power aren’t hard to find. A series of government officials have defied the White House’s Oct. 8 edict that the Administration would not comply with the impeachment inquiry. Most damaging so far was the Oct. 22 testimony of acting U.S. Ambassador to Kiev William Taylor tying Trump to the alleged quid pro quo at the heart of the Ukraine scandal.

lready angry over Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, the lawmakers were taking fire on too many fronts, they told the White House. So Trump did what he’s rarely done as President: he reversed himself. It wasn’t pretty. Taking to Twitter that night, Trump blamed “both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility” for the climb down. But it’s what he sees as a lack of Republican resolve that is really bothering him.