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Luxleaks whistleblowers trial begins in Luxembourg

Three Frenchmen have gone on trial in Luxembourg accused of leaking thousands of confidential documents revealing corporate tax deals.

Two ex-employees of accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and a journalist are on trial. They could face up to 10 years in jail.

the phone call was troubling because it showed that Trump has not taken the time to learn anything about nuclear policy since the election. “He knows one thing, which is that Obama signed it, so he’s going to rail against it,” Lewis said.

The problem with Mitt Romney’s comments about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay taxes isn’t just that they are highly misleading and damaging politically. They also severely misstate and undermine conservative principles

in Reagan’s view, ordinary people were capable of greatness. There was Lenny Skutnik, who plunged from obscurity into the icy waters of the Potomac to save passengers from a downed flight. There were ordinary GI Joes whose courage on the beaches of Normandy (or, today, in the valleys of Afghanistan) protect civilization.

It wasn’t so long ago that mainstream conservatism represented these values. We indexed income brackets and personal exemptions to inflation in the early 1980s to protect middle- and low-income families. Conservatives created the child tax credit in 1997 and expanded it in 2001 to reduce the tax burden for parents. In the past decade, we championed a flat tax that contained a generous exemption for a family of four, precisely so those least able to pay would not be forced to.

A bill to create a Japanese National Security Council is set to pass in the nation's parliament, as China's rising maritime assertiveness and North Korea's nuclear ambitions give Prime Minister Shinzo Abe greater leeway to tighten his grip on foreign and defense policies.

Seen as an important step in Mr. Abe's push for Tokyo to expand its role in regional security, the new council is also viewed as a backdoor for the premier to ramp up Japan's military, which is strictly bound under the nation's postwar constitution to a self-defense role.

The idea of creating a U.S.-style NSC has gained traction in recent years as Japan experienced a string of national-security related incidents that prompted it to boost its defense spending and capabilities. These policies have been viewed with caution by Beijing and Seoul amid tensions over historical and territorial issues.

Over the holidays, when most Americans were busy buying stuff and trying to stay cool in the December heat, one of the most significant environmental policies of the last several decades was quietly enacted.

The reversal of the oil export ban, along with the expected first shipment of liquefied natural gas to a foreign country ever (expected later this month), is great news for oil and gas producers who've been hit hard by lower and lower prices for their goods in recent years.

"It's a huge deal," Jean Su, a lawyer with the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told VICE over the phone. "It's less than a week after the Paris agreement was signed and Obama said the US was committed, then we go and sign a thing that regresses on everything that happened in Paris. It's horrendous."

The United States and European nations lifted oil and financial sanctions on Iran and released roughly $100 billion of its assets after international inspectors concluded that the country had followed through on promises to dismantle large sections of its nuclear program.

Five Americans, including a Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian, were released by Iran hours before the nuclear accord was implemented.

Early on Sunday, a senior United States official confirmed that “our detained U.S. citizens have been released and that those who wished to depart Iran have left.”

what has also broken out of the vaults of offshore legal specialists Mossack Fonseca is one over-riding sense. The sense that normal rules do not apply to the global elite. In a new gilded age, taxes would – once again – appear to be for the little people.

the understanding of what had gone wrong in the first place has steadily shifted. Initially, there was almost no understanding at all: baffling news reports about credit default swaps suggested only sorcery going wrong. Slowly but surely, however, the world has learned that the banks that busted the global economy were also consumed with old-fashioned skulduggery: rigging rates, ripping off customers, and laundering Mexican drug money. Courtesy of the Lux tax leaks on sweetheart corporate deals, and the HSBC files, documenting Swiss lockers stacked with bricks of cash, the world learned much more, too, about the tax-dodging lengths that private wealth will go to in order to keep public coffers empty.

The people, then, will be sceptical about how the elite responds to the revelations. The UK government will, rightly, be expected to translate some impressive rhetoric on avoidance into reality. Declarations of resolve must now come backed with resources, unlike the recent Channel Island campaign which the HMRC has scaled back because of a lack of resources. Mr Cameron’s 2013 promise of openness must now be imposed on British tax havens, on pain of withdrawing dependency status. The register of beneficial ownership is welcome, but must come coupled with a serious checking mechanism, which – for the moment – is lacking.

This is the core of what makes the Republican effort to discredit the Russia investigation so utterly insane. They want us to believe there was an FBI conspiracy to prevent Trump from being elected president, and what did that conspiracy do? First, it mounted a cautious investigation of what nearly everyone now acknowledges was a comprehensive effort by Russia to help Trump get elected, an effort that people on the Trump campaign and even in Trump’s own family tried to cooperate with. But then it kept that investigation completely secret from the public, lest news of it affect the outcome of the investigation in any way.

we have no idea what other FBI agents were texting each other, say, about Hillary Clinton. We do know, on the other hand, that as one report said just before the election, “Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.” As one agent put it at the time, “The FBI is Trumpland.”

the idea that the bureau attempted to hinder Trump’s election isn’t just unsupported by any evidence, it is contradicted by everything they did.

The House Intelligence Committee on Friday released a redacted version of the Republican report on the committee's year-long Russia investigation, in which GOP members say they found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and disputed the intelligence community's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to help elect Donald Trump.

House Intelligence Committee rules that there was NO COLLUSION between the Trump Campaign and Russia. As I have been saying all along, it is all a big Hoax by the Democrats based on payments and lies. There should never have been a Special Councel (sic) appointed. Witch Hunt!" Trump wrote on Twitter.

But Democrats say Republicans failed to interview key witnesses and issue subpoenas to obtain necessary information, charging their colleagues were not interested in uncovering collusion. They are now continuing their own investigation without Republicans into Russia's election meddling. They released a 98-page document that pushes back on the Republican conclusions.

The F.B.I. secretly arrested a former National Security Agency contractor in August and, according to law enforcement officials, is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer code developed by the agency to hack into the networks of foreign governments.

The arrest raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, a contractor for the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton managed to steal highly damaging secret information while working for the N.S.A.

In 2013, Edward J. Snowden, who was also a Booz Allen contractor, took a vast trove of documents from the agency that were later passed to journalists

"They are maintained by holding meetings, talks and establishing contacts with officials from both executive and legislative branches of power. I can only quote what the media said today -- this all looks like a witch hunt."

But Russia's Foreign Ministry has angrily rejected allegations that its top diplomat in Washington is a spy amid controversy over meetings he held with US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

"He was deputy minister of foreign affairs in Russia, who has communicated with American colleagues for decades in different fields, and CNN accused him of being a Russian spy ... of recruiting? Oh my God!"

61A data breach at the fringe social media site Gab has for the first time offered a picture of the user base and inner workings of a platform that has been opaque about its operation.

The user lists appear to mark 500 accounts, including neo-Nazis, QAnon influencers, cryptocurrency advocates and conspiracy theorists, as investors. They also appear to give an overview of verified users of the platform, including prominent rightwing commentators and activists. And they mark hundreds of active users on the site as “automated”, appearing to indicate administrators knew the accounts were bots but let them continue on the platform regardless.

showing the entrepreneur seeking direct feedback on site design from a member of a group that promotes a “spiderweb of rightwing internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The idea that the coronavirus could have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China — instead of jumping from animals to humans — was dismissed as a conspiracy theory by many scientists a year ago. That has changed now.

"this needs more investigation," she said Thursday in an interview with NPR's Rachel Martin on Morning Edition. "And saying that this needs more investigation doesn't mean the virus leaked from a lab. But we need to investigate that and figure that out because it really does have implications for how we'll prevent the next pandemic."

Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, a top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed Sunday the origins of the coronavirus pandemic are the "worst cover-up" in human history.

A fierce debate has raged over whether the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan or originated in the wild. Initially, prominent scientists publicly derided the so-called lab leak theory -- embraced by then-President Donald Trump and his allies -- as a conspiracy theory, and the intelligence community put out a rare public statement in late April 2020 affirming that it "also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified."

Other lawmakers have also called for answers regarding the origin of the virus and members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has long been investigating the origins of the pandemic, received a classified briefing on the matter earlier this month, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Washington Post issued a correction 15 months after alleging Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was peddling a "debunked" "conspiracy theory" about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. 

"Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus," the correction read at the top of the report. "The term 'debunked' and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus."

Associated Press White House reporter Jonathan Lemire accused former President Trump and his allies of "practicing revisionist history," while New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman blamed him and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for casting doubt within the media for withholding evidence to back their claims.