The air war's been going on for 14 months but this is the first time news cameras have been allowed into its nerve center.
"The weapon of choice here is information because the more information we have both about the enemy and about our friendlies, the better we're able to make decisions."
From just that one airplane, scheduling-wise, about a three-day process and some of those targets we've looked at for, you know, for days, weeks and sometimes months.
President Barack Obama will ask the U.S. Congress for more than $1.8 billion in emergency funds to fight Zika at home and abroad and pursue a vaccine, the White House said on Monday, but he added there is no reason to panic over the mosquito-borne virus.
Zika, spreading rapidly in South and Central America and the Caribbean, has been linked to severe birth defects in Brazil, and public health officials' concern is focused on pregnant women and women who may become pregnant.
Obama's request to Congress includes $200 million for research, development and commercialization of new vaccines and diagnostic tests for the virus.
At least 12 groups are working to develop a vaccine.
European Medicines Agency (EMA), Europe's drugs regulator, said it established an expert task force to advise companies working on Zika vaccines and medicines, mirroring similar action during the two-year-long Ebola epidemic that started in December 2013 and the pandemic flu outbreak in 2009.
There are no vaccines or treatment for Zika and none even undergoing clinical studies. Most infected people either have no symptoms or develop mild ones like fever and skin rashes.
"The good news is this is not like Ebola; people don't die of Zika. A lot of people get it and don't even know that they have it," Obama told CBS News
Most of the money sought by Obama, who faces pressure from Republicans and some fellow Democrats to act decisively on Zika, would be spent in the United States on testing, surveillance and response in affected areas, including the creation of rapid-response teams to contain outbreak clusters.
Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she was not expecting "large-scale amounts of serious Zika infections" in the continental United States as warmer months bring larger and more active mosquito populations.
Obama's funding request to Congress includes $335 million for the U.S. Agency for International Development to support mosquito-control, maternal health and other Zika-related public health efforts in affected countries in the Americas.
Fauci said he anticipated beginning a so-called Phase 1 trial this summer for a Zika vaccine that would take about three months to test if it is safe and induces a good immune response before further studies can be conducted.
The CDC said its Zika emergency operations center, with a staff of 300, has been placed on its highest level of activation, reflecting a need for accelerated preparedness for possible local virus transmission by mosquitoes in the continental United States.
Much remains unknown about Zika, including whether the virus actually causes microcephaly, a condition marked by abnormally small head size that can result in developmental problems.Brazil is investigating the potential link between Zika infections and more than 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly. Researchers have identified evidence of Zika infection in 17 of these cases, either in the baby or in the mother, but have not confirmed that Zika can cause microcephaly.
Word that Zika can be spread by sexual transmission and blood transfusions and its discovery in saliva and urine of infected people have added to concern over the virus.
The World Health Organization declared the outbreak an international health emergency on Feb. 1, citing a "strongly suspected" relationship between Zika infection in pregnancy to microcephaly.
Brazil is grappling with the virus even as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August, with tens of thousands of athletes and tourists anticipated.The U.S. Olympic Committee has told U.S. sports federations that athletes and staff concerned about their health due to Zika should consider not going to the Olympics.
Former Olympian Donald Anthony, president and board chairman of USA Fencing, said, "One of the things that they immediately said was, especially for women that may be pregnant or even thinking of getting pregnant, that whether you are scheduled to go to Rio or no, that you shouldn't go."
Several Republicans have suggested that they'd be open to torturing suspected terrorists if elected — especially New Hampshire primary winner Donald Trump.
"Waterboarding is fine, and much tougher than that is fine," Trump said at a Monday campaign event in New Hampshire. "When we're with these animals, we can't be soft and weak, like our politicians."
Previously, Trump promised to "bring back" types of torture "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding" during Saturday's Republican debate. The rest of the GOP field took a somewhat more nuanced position. Marco Rubio categorically refused to rule out any torture techniques, for fear of helping terrorists "practice how to evade us."
This debate doesn't have much to do with the merits of torture as an intelligence-gathering mechanism: The evidence that torture doesn't work is overwhelming. Rather, the debate among four leading Republicans over the practice is all about politics, both inside the Republican Party and more broadly.
Cruz, for example, has said that waterboarding does not constitute torture, but also that he would not "bring it back in any sort of widespread use" and has co-sponsored legislation limiting its use.
Well, under the definition of torture, no, it's not. Under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, it is not. It is enhanced interrogation, it is vigorous interrogation, but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture.
international law, under both the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, considers waterboarding a form of torture and thus illegal.
A January 2005 Gallup poll found that 82 percent of Americans believed "strapping prisoners on boards and forcing their heads underwater until they think they are drowning" was an immoral interrogation tactic.
In 2007, 40 percent of Americans favored waterboarding suspected terrorists in a CNN poll, while 58 percent opposed. By 2014, 49 percent told CBS that they believed waterboarding could be at least sometimes justified, while only 36 percent said it never could be.
Today, 73 percent of Republicans support torturing suspected terrorists, according to Pew.
Any Republican who took a strong stance against waterboarding or other torture techniques could be pegged as weak on terrorism — a damning charge in a Republican primary that's been preoccupied with ISIS.
Reminder: Torture is morally abhorrent and also doesn't work
Some proponents will claim that while morally regrettable, torture is nonetheless necessary to keep us safe. But the best evidence suggests that it this is a false choice: Waterboarding, and other forms of torture, does not work.
In most cases, torture is used by authoritarian states to force false confessions
The evidence that torture did not aid the hunt for Osama bin Laden is particularly compelling.
In other words, some GOP candidates' pro-torture sentiment isn't just a relic of Bush-era partisan debates — it's also totally out of whack with everything we know about the practice of torture today.
Alice Tanaka Hikido clearly remembers the bewilderment and sense of violation she felt 74 years ago when FBI agents rifled through her family's Juneau home, then arrested her father before he was sent to Japanese internment camps, including a little-known camp in pre-statehood Alaska.
The 83-year-old Campbell, California, woman recently attended a ceremony where participants unveiled a study of the short-lived internment camp at what is now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.
Her father eventually joined his family in Idaho in 1944. They spent more than a year there together before the war ended and they returned to Juneau.
HILLAH, Iraq - A suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden fuel truck into a security checkpoint south of Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 47 people and wounding dozens, officials said.
It was the third massive bombing in and around Baghdad in a little over a week, and appeared to be part of a campaign by ISIS to stage attacks deep behind front lines in order to wreak havoc and force the government to overextend its forces.
Iraq has seen a spike in violence in the past month, with suicide attacks claimed by ISIS killing more than 170 people. The attacks follow a string of advances by Iraqi forces backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, including in the western city of Ramadi, which was declared fully "liberated" by Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition officials last month.
IS still controls large swaths of Iraq and neighboring Syria and has declared an Islamic "caliphate" on the territory it holds. The extremist group controls Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, as well as the city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry hailed the newly passed international climate change agreement as a major achievement that could help turn the tide on global warming, but got a quick reminder that Republicans will fight it all the way.
Obama said the climate agreement made Saturday night by almost 200 nations "can be a turning point for the world" and credited his administration for playing a key role. He and Kerry predicted it would prompt widespread spending on clean energy and help stem carbon pollution blamed for global warming.
The immediate reaction of leading Republican critics was a stark reminder of the conflict that lies ahead.
Obama said the agreement is not perfect, but sets a framework that will contain periodic reviews and assessments to ensure that countries meet their commitments to curb carbon emissions.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Obama is "making promises he can't keep" and should remember that the agreement "is subject to being shredded in 13 months." McConnell noted that the presidential election is next year and the agreement could be reversed if the GOP wins the White House.
And Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma said that Americans can expect the administration to cite the agreement as an excuse for establishing emission targets for every sector of the U.S. economy.
Kerry said from Paris: "I have news for Senator Inhofe. The United States of America has already reduced its emissions more than any other country in the world."
In an interview taped for CBS' "Face the Nation," Kerry called the climate pact "a breakaway agreement" that will change how countries make decisions and "spur massive investment."
He acknowledged that a Republican president could undo the agreement, but said there is already plenty of evidence that climate change is having a damaging and expensive impact with more intense
storms, wildfires and melting glaciers.
Several Democratic lawmakers applauded Obama's efforts.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi hailed it as a "monumental moment" and praised Obama for his leadership on the issue.
Donald Trump wins more support in US as petition to ban him from the UK passes half million signatures
"There is somebody called Donald Trump running in your presidential campaign, and he again spoke this morning about the UK, saying that we were busy disguising a massive Muslim problem," he said, despite the accepted diplomatic norms that prevent ambassadors commenting on domestic politics - particularly during a campaign. “That’s not the way we see it. We are very proud of our Muslim community in the United Kingdom.”
Meanwhile, the number of signatures on a petition calling for Mr Trump to be banned from the UK continued to grow, passing the half million mark just after 5am GMT.
Several hundred protesters turned out at an event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Mr Trump was speaking to a police union.
“When I made my announcement in June I mentioned immigration and the heat was incredible,” he told a cheering crowd. “But within two weeks people started saying: ‘Wow this is a problem, he is right.'"
Earlier in the day he cancelled a trip to Israel, shelving what was shaping up to be an awkward visit following comments that managed to offend Muslims and Jews alike.
Three polls showed Republican voters broadly backing his stance on banning Muslims entering the US until security can be improved.
Can Donald Trump actually win?
The New York Times has a new poll showing that fear of a terrorist attack has risen to its highest level in the US since the aftermath of 9/11, helping explain how Donald Trump has managed to ride the polls so well.
Ruth Sherlock, our US editor, reports from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Donald Trump spoke to police union leaders:
Hillary Clinton took aim at fellow White House hopeful Donald Trump over his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, saying the joke had worn thin.
Throughout history, governments that have started from a place of panic and frenzy soon end up in chaos.
"Everybody knows John McCain is going to endorse Marco Rubio."
. In an interview with a Phoenix CBS affiliate on Wednesday, McCain said questions raised by GOP front-runner Donald Trump over Cruz's eligibility are plausible.
"I think there is a question," McCain explained in the interview. "I'm not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it's worth looking into. I don't think it's illegitimate to look into."
Cruz says he anticipates Rubio will get an endorsement from McCain, which is why McCain brought up his birthplace as a potential stumbling block.
"Their foreign policies are almost identical. Their immigration policies are identical," Cruz continued. "So it's no surprise that people who are supporting other candidates in this race are going to jump on the silly attacks that occur as we get closer and closer to this election."
"It was a very wise move that Ted Cruz renounced his Canadian citizenship,"
"No, it's not going to happen," Cruz said. "I won't be taking legal advice anytime soon from Donald Trump.
"This is the silly season of politics," Cruz said. "Three weeks ago every Republican was talking about Donald Trump. Today, just about every Republican in the field is attacking me."
joking that members of the press will be "checking themselves into therapy" after he becomes president.
"With all due respect to our friends in the news media, elections are not won in newsrooms in Manhattan and D.C.," Cruz said to dozens of assembled media outlets on Thursday afternoon. "They are won talking to voters one on one. Answering their questions, their hard questions, not through a whole army of press surrogates who protect a candidate."
Hartnett, 33, was shot three times in the arm and will require multiple surgeries.
Archer confessed to the shooting and told investigators he was following Allah, and had pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS
The 30-year-old is being held without bail.
The tip said Archer is "part of a group that consists of three others." She went on to say that Archer "is not the most radical of the four" and that "the threat to police is not over."
As Bernie Sanders edges closer to Hillary Clinton in the Iowa polls, one thing is becoming clear: Instead of being a liability, his socialist platform may be his strongest asset.
The new Selzer & Co. Iowa poll found that 43 percent of likely voters in the Feb. 1 Democratic Iowa caucuses would use the word “socialist” to describe themselves
Interestingly enough, “capitalist” also proved to be a partisan label. While a considerable portion of Democratic Iowa caucus-goers were eager to label themselves socialists, fewer would described themselves as capitalist – only 38 percent.
In The New York Times/CBS News poll conducted November, 56 percent of Democratic primary voters nationally said they felt positive about socialism as a governing philosophy, versus 29 percent who took a negative view.
When New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof traveled North Korea recently, the five-day trip turned out to be "very different" from his prior two visits.
"North Korea is always a bizarre place and there's always a certain amount of over-the-top rhetoric. But this time the country has really galvanized for war," Kristof said
like those filed by the mysterious HNA Group conglomerate and prominent Chinese journalist Hu Shuli.
Judge Eileen Bransten dismissed that case, saying a New York court was an inappropriate forum for an investment that was negotiated and took place in Hong Kong.
Porn star Stormy Daniels said in an email on Sunday “we will see what happens” to a taped segment she did with the CBS news show “60 Minutes,” as reports suggested that lawyers for Preisdent Trump are trying to block the broadcast.
Daniels, in a brief email to The Washington Post, declined to comment on any legal discussions. “All I can say is it was never going to air tonight and I guess we will see what happens,” she said.
The specter of a president who has made no secret of his hostility to the media trying to silence the porn star also raises constitutional concerns. Now that Trump is president, the existence of an extramarital relationship becomes a matter of public concern, according to C.J. Peters, dean of the University of Akron School of Law.
During the campaign, Trump threatened legal action against the New York Times for printing two articles about women who accused him of sexual misconduct. Both stories, Trump said, “will be part of the lawsuit we are preparing against them.” A lawsuit was not filed.
Since filing suit, Los Angeles-based Avenatti has attempted to win public support for Daniels, claiming that his goal is to “shed light” on her story.
“How does it look, not only legally but politically?” Tynan said. “If they succeed it is a prior restraint of speech. If they fail, they look like they lost.
The fatal crash last week in Tempe, Ariz., involving an Uber autonomous vehicle is bringing new scrutiny to both the quality of Uber’s technology for avoiding collision and the efficacy of its backup system of so-called safety drivers.
The company said the second operator wasn’t officially responsible for maintaining car safety, but some drivers said the two people in the vehicle relied on each other since an accident or traffic violation could cost them their jobs.
One former Uber driver said he couldn’t imagine driving alone because it was “stressful enough” monitoring the road to ensure the car doesn’t perform in dangerous or unexpected ways. Being additionally responsible for logging unusual activity, which Uber drivers may type into a device in their cars, would only increase that, he said.
Still, other drivers said the job wasn’t overly difficult. “It’s about being alert, if you can’t be alert for a few straight hours then you’re not a very good driver,” a former Waymo test operator said. Video taken from inside the Uber vehicle, released by Tempe police, appears to show the vehicle heading straight into the pedestrian without slo
It is the second time in a year that Uber has temporarily halted testing following an accident involving one of its autonomous cars.
Uber began making the transition to using single test operators nearly three years after embarking on self-driving vehicle development.
General Motors
Co.’s
Cruise Automation self-driving unit, which was founded in 2013, still has two test drivers in every car. Waymo—which has logged more than five million testing miles, by far the most of any company—began using one safety operator in many of its cars in 2015, about six years after its program began. Waymo now runs most vehicles without humans behind the wheel in the Phoenix area and plans to launch a commercial robot service later this year.
d under stress. California, where a lot of testing occurs, requires companies to disclose such “disengagements” of the autonomous technology, and unnecessary disengagements can interfere with learning and improving the technology.
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"A MASTERPIECE OF INVESTIGATIVE nonfiction moviemaking," wrote the film critic of the Boston Globe. "Rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument," opined the New York Times. The "masterpiece" referred to was the recently released Inside Job, a documentary film that focuses on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.
THE STORY RECOUNTED in Inside Job is that principles like safety and soundness were flouted by greedy Wall Street capitalists who brought down the economy with the help of certain politicians, political appointees and corrupt academicians. Despite the attempts and desires of some, including Barney Frank, to regulate the mania, the juggernaut prevails to this day, under the presidency of Barack Obama.
This version of the story contains some elements of truth.
Yet it's impossible to understand what happened without grasping the proactive role played by government. "The banking sector did not decide out of the goodness of its heart to extend mortgages to poor people," commented University of Chicago Booth School of Business Finance Professor Raghuram Rajan in a telephone interview last week. "Politicians did that, and they would have taken great umbrage if the regulator stood in the way of more housing credit."
Rajan, author of Fault Lines, a recent book on the debacle, speaks with special authority to fans of Inside Job. Not only is he in the movie—one of the talking heads speaking wisdom about what occurred—he is accurately presented as having anticipated the meltdown in a 2005 paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" But the things he is quoted as saying in the film are restricted to serving its themes.
We get no inkling that Rajan's views on what made the world riskier, as set forth in his book, veer quite radically from those of Inside Job. They include, as he has written, "the political push for easy housing credit in the United States and the lax monetary policy [by the Federal Reserve] in the years 2003-2005."
I asked Ferguson why Inside Job made such brief mention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even then without noting that they are government-sponsored enterprises, subject to special protection by the federal government—which their creditors clearly appreciated, given the unusually low interest rates their debt commanded.
Ferguson replied that their role in subprime mortgages was not very significant, and that in any case their behavior was not much different from that of other capitalist enterprises.
As has been documented, for example, in a forthcoming book on the GSEs called Guaranteed to Fail, there was a steady increase in affordable housing mandates imposed on these enterprises by Congress, one of several reasons why they were hardly like other capitalist enterprises, but tools and beneficiaries of government.
On the outsize role of the GSEs and other federal agencies in high-risk mortgages, figures compiled by former Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto show that as of mid-2008, more than 70% were accounted for by the federal government in one way or another, with nearly two-thirds of that held by Fannie and Freddie.
Amy Wax, a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, had made disparaging remarks about the school’s black students and suggested that some of them should not be at the school. After the video of her remarks came to light earlier this month, the school announced that she was barred from teaching first-year students and would only teach her specific areas of expertise – but would also maintain her tenure, salary and seniority.
In an interview last September on the online video chat platform Bloggingheads, Wax told host Glenn Loury that Penn’s affirmative action policies had negative consequences for beneficiary students themselves.
“Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half,” she said. “I can think of one or two students who scored in the first half of my required first-year Civil Procedure course.”
She went on to say that the prestigious and exclusive Penn Law Review had a “diversity mandate,” and that some black students face an “uphill battle” because they aren’t properly matched to the high-level school. “We’re not saying they shouldn’t go to college – we’re not saying that,” she said. “I mean, some of them shouldn’t.”
Wax would not talk with the Forward on the record about the controversy. But she did write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week pointing out that Ruger had not actually released data that would have proved her right or wrong – which the petition itself also asked for – and called on him to do so.
She also claimed in a return appearance to Bloggingheads last week that she was a mentor to black students and had never received a bias complaint until last year, and that Penn’s blind grading process prevents her from knowing which grade she is giving to which students until the semester ends.
She also admitted that she did not have data that could prove her original statement about class rank correct.
In an 2015 article explaining her opposition to affirmative action programs, Wax described her childhood as “part of a close-knit, observant, conservative Jewish family in a predominantly Catholic town….Although it was common in our culture to complain a lot — about friends, relatives, business partners, bad luck, and the general cluelessness of non-Jews—we were not permitted to complain that anti-Semitism and discrimination were standing in our way. We knew discrimination was out there, but the discussion was limited to anti-Semitism as a general social problem rather than as a stumbling block in individual lives.”
Her 2009 book “Race, Wrongs and Remedies” argued that cultural-behavioral issues, not racism, are the most important factors preventing African-American progress. Such statements have garnered criticism from black Penn students as far back as 2005.
Nonetheless, according to RateMyProfessors.com, Wax has received mostly high marks from her students in recent years, though one commenter described her as someone who is “obsessed with her own victimization at the hands of forces she believes deserve blame for being victims themselves” but is nonetheless a “decent instructor when she can just stick to the course content.”
But for Penn students, especially students of color, the decision to remove Wax from her introductory class was the right one.
“It’s been incredible to see how black students and alumni came together, grappled with how to handle this, and moved to create a change, and I hope that it continues,” the president of Penn’s Black Law Students Association, Nick Hall, told Philly.com.
Wax, for her part, sees her experience as part of an ominous trend, which could especially affect Jewish students.
“Jews have been harmed by the threats to freedom of opinion and debate, the punishments for candor, and the decline in rigorous standards in the academy that have accompanied progressive hegemony, which insists upon the sacrosanct status of affirmative action and other policies favored by the left,” Wax wrote in an email to the Forward. She added that such pressures were especially powerful on female students.
“Things were so much better in the 1970s, when I was a young women undergraduate at Yale. I am grateful to have come of age during that period. I wouldn’t want to be an undergraduate at an elite college today.”
Hirono regards the traditional moral views of the Knights as “extreme positions.” The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that they are exactly the same positions of the Catholic Church itself
So why wouldn’t a judge’s membership in the Catholic Church — with its all-male clergy, opposition to abortion and belief in traditional marriage — be problematic as well?
The difficulty with a reductio ad absurdum comes when people no longer find it absurdum. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has made the argument bluntly. In raising concerns in 2017 about appeals court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholic faith, Feinstein said, “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”
That sounds like an exaggeration. But here is a question that Hirono asked both Buescher and Paul Matey, another appeals court nominee: “If confirmed, will you recuse yourself from all cases in which the Knights of Columbus has taken a position?”
So is it fair to say that Harris, Hirono and Feinstein would want judicial nominees to quit religious organizations that hold “extreme positions” or recuse themselves from all matters of morality that the senators regard as tainted by religious dogma?
This is not just a liberal excess; it is a liberal argument. Religious liberty, in this view, reaches to the limits of your cranium. You can believe any retrograde thing you want. But you can’t act on that belief in the public square. And you can’t be a member of organizations that hold backward views and still be trusted with government jobs upholding the secular, liberal political order.
The comparison of this view to the United States’ long history of anti-Catholic bigotry has been disputed. Actually, it is exactly the same as this history in every important respect. A 19th-century bigot would have regarded Catholicism as fundamentally illiberal — a backward faith characterized by clerical despotism — and thus inconsistent with America’s democratic rules.
there is a strange twist to this argument in American evangelicalism. Evangelical Christians have largely gotten over their anti-Catholic bias. But many believe that Islam is fundamentally illiberal — a backward faith characterized by clerical despotism — and thus inconsistent with the United States’ democratic rules. Little do they realize that an evangelical institution in Massachusetts is increasingly viewed like an Islamic institution in Mississippi.
The answer to all of this is a great American value called pluralism. The views and values of Americans are shaped in a variety of institutions, religious and nonreligious. No one is disqualified from self-government by a religious test