June 30, 2018

The Latest: Saudi Arabia not confirming Trump's 2M barrels

Source: Associated Press



49 minutes ago

8:50 a.m.

Saudi Arabia says that King Salman has spoken to President Donald Trump, but gave no mention of the 2 million barrels of extra production the American leader tweeted about earlier in the day.

A statement on the state-run Saudi Press Agency on Saturday afternoon said: “During the call, the two leaders stressed the need to make efforts to maintain the stability of oil markets and the growth of the global economy.”

It added that there also was an understanding that oil-producing countries would need “to compensate for any potential shortage of supplies.” It did not elaborate.

Trump tweeted earlier Saturday that he has received assurances from King Salman that his kingdom would increase oil production, “maybe up to 2,000,000 barrels,” in response to turmoil in Iran and Venezuela.

Read more: https://apnews.com/8054651dc2ef4200bf89336dd29d4505

June 30, 2018

Conservative Hugh Hewitt makes surprise announcement MSNBC has pulled plug on his show

BOB BRIGHAM
30 JUN 2018 AT 08:46 ET

MSNBC has cancelled that weekly television show hosted by right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt, the conservative explained at the end of his final show on Saturday.

“This has been the last Hugh Hewitt Show on Saturday mornings,” Hewitt explained.

He said that NBC News would continue to employ him as a contributor and he said he expects to continue to be a guest on MSNBC shows.

“It’s been great fun to host this show, I’ll see you on MSNBC again soon” the former anchor said.

Watch:

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/conservative-hugh-hewitt-makes-surprise-announcement-msnbc-pulled-plug-show/

June 30, 2018

Trump Admin Issues Report Telling Other Countries Not to Separate Children From Families

by Colin Kalmbacher | 4:33 pm, June 28th, 2018

The Trump Administration released a report on Thursday warning that children removed from their families and placed into state care are at greater risk of extreme harm than if they had stayed with their parents.

The report is produced by the State Department each year. Under the section titled “Child Institutionalization and Human Trafficking,” this year’s report begins:

The 468-page report continues, noting, “Yet, about eight million children worldwide live in these facilities, even though an estimated 80 to 90 percent of them have at least one living parent. The physical and psychological effects of staying in residential institutions, combined with societal isolation and often subpar regulatory oversight by governments, place these children in situations of heightened vulnerability to human trafficking.”

In language somewhat redolent of the ongoing national immigration debate, the report goes on, “Children in institutional care, including government-run facilities, can be easy targets for traffickers. Even at their best, residential institutions are unable to meet a child’s need for emotional support that is typically received from family members or consistent caretakers with whom the child can develop an attachment.”

more
https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/trump-admin-issues-report-telling-other-countries-not-to-separate-children-from-families/

June 30, 2018

U.S. Senate Committee Proposes $50 Million to Prevent Mothers Dying in Childbirth

Full article posted with the permission of ProPublica -- Don

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After years of Congressional inaction, legislators in both parties want to back efforts by states and hospitals to reduce the U.S. maternal mortality rate, the highest in the developed world.

by Nina Martin June 28, 4:06 p.m. EDT

Tackling an issue that Congress has largely ignored for decades, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee voted Thursday to request $50 million in new funding for programs aimed at reducing the comparatively high U.S. rate of women who die in pregnancy or childbirth.

More than three-quarters of the proposed funding — $38 million — would go to the federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau to expand life-saving, evidence-based programs at hospitals and increase access to the Healthy Start program for new mothers and babies. The remaining $12 million would go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to enhance data collection and research as well as support state boards that count and review maternal deaths.

“I’m kind of blown away,” said Charles Johnson, a maternal health advocate whose wife Kira died from a hemorrhage after giving birth in 2016. Maternal mortality, he added, has come to be seen as “not a black issue, not a white issue, not a liberal issue, not a conservative issue, not even just a woman’s health issue, but what it truly is, which is a human rights issue — that’s the big shift.”

The funding is included in the appropriation committee’s $179.3 billion budget bill for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and related agencies, which was approved on a 30-1 vote. On Tuesday, a different Senate panel — the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee — unanimously passed the Maternal Health Accountability Act, sponsored by Democrat Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Republican Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.

Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state who sits on the Senate health and appropriations committees, was instrumental in pushing the two bills forward. “It is absolutely unacceptable that so many mothers in this country are dying in childbirth, and it’s long past time that we address this issue,” Murray said at the Tuesday hearing.

The Heitkamp-Capito legislation would establish a grant program to help states and tribal authorities identify and investigate maternal deaths and translate those lessons into policies that reduce health disparities and save mothers’ lives. The funding would come from the $12 million proposed for the CDC.

“In the 21st century, no mother should have to worry about dying during childbirth, especially in a country as advanced as the United States,” Heitkamp said in a statement. “Rising maternal mortality rates must be urgently addressed, and we need to better understand this crisis so we can more effectively tackle it.”

The Senate actions are the latest by lawmakers across the country in response to the “Lost Mothers” project that ProPublica and NPR launched last year. In recent months, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Oregon and the District of Columbia have established committees to examine maternal deaths, bringing the total number of these state and local maternal mortality review committees to at least 35.

As ProPublica and NPR have reported, more than 700 women die annually in the U.S. from causes related to pregnancy or childbirth, and the rate has increased even as it has fallen in other affluent countries. The rate of near-fatal complications has also soared since the 1990s, endangering more than 50,000 U.S. women a year.

More than 60 percent of pregnancy- and childbirth-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable, a CDC Foundation report indicated this past February. Black and Native American mothers are at the greatest risk of dying and nearly dying.

Spurred by media attention and lobbying by maternal health advocates, a total of 37 senators, including four Republicans, have signed on to the Heitkamp-Capito bill as cosponsors. “Congressional staff are calling us — ‘My boss just read another article about maternal mortality and they want to know what they can do about it,’” said Amy Haddad, director of government and policy affairs for the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs.

Still, the prospects for passage before the end of the Congressional session are uncertain, especially in the U.S. House of Representatives. Although the House version of the bill has 144 cosponsors, including 34 Republicans, Rep. Michael Burgess — a Texas Republican who chairs the Energy and Commerce committee’s subcommittee on health energy and is himself an obstetrician/gynecologist — has not yet scheduled a hearing. The full Senate must also approve the $50 million in new funds, which would then have to be reconciled with the House budget request — likely to be considerably lower.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/us-senate-committee-maternal-mortality-prevention-proposal

June 30, 2018

Of Course, It Could Not Happen Here - By Roger Cohen

By Roger Cohen
Opinion Columnist

June 29, 2018

PARIS — The German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel falls, torn apart by demands from her conservative interior minister, Horst Seehofer, that refugees already registered in another European Union state be thrown out of Germany. The xenophobic Alternative for Germany, or AfD, enters a new nationalist governing coalition. The party’s cry of “take back our country and our Volk!” echoes through Berlin.

Congratulatory calls pour in from the nationalist leaders of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Austria — and the United States. The American ambassador to Germany tweets his approval.

European Union leaders, buckling before the anti-immigrant tide, opt for the establishment of large detention centers for all migrants. Asylum seekers whose claims are verified will be admitted, while economic migrants merely in search of a better future will be evicted.

Riots erupt in these vast walled compounds. Rapid triage proves impossible. Conditions fester. Matteo Salvini, the rightist Italian interior minister, declares that a disastrous mistake has been made. The detention centers should have been located in North Africa. He defends his orders to the Italian Coast Guard to ignore calls for help from ships filled with migrants who, he says, may prove to be criminals and rapists.

The abduction of a Russian girl by Moroccan migrants at a Spanish beach resort causes an uproar. It turns out to be “fake news,” the work of Russian cyber-geeks deployed for information warfare, but not before rightist leaders across the European Union have denounced the “foreign animals” holding “little Tatiana.” Spain’s fragile government collapses.

more
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/opinion/europe-immigration-trump-putin-germany.html

June 30, 2018

'Nobody in the bullpen': White House approaches North Korea talks without envoy

Critics argue that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can't give the topic the explicit, sustained attention it requires.

By NAHAL TOOSI 06/30/2018 07:49 AM EDT

The Trump administration is barreling ahead in its high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with North Korea even though it lacks a full-time envoy to oversee the negotiations.

Currently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is serving as the point man on the administration’s effort to convince North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal. But some lawmakers and former officials are urging President Donald Trump to put a special representative in charge, arguing that Pompeo can’t give the topic the explicit, sustained attention it requires.

The calls for an envoy come as Trump aides remain coy about details of their strategy to deal with the isolated Asian country. There have been no formal talks announced since Trump held a much-ballyhooed June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, although there are reports that Pompeo will go next week to Pyongyang.

Kim’s regime, meanwhile, is reported to have upgraded a nuclear facility and stepped up its production of fuel for nuclear weapons, raising questions about its true intentions.

more
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/30/north-korea-white-houseenvoy-pompeo-687898

June 30, 2018

'I snookered them': Illinois Nazi candidate creates GOP dumpster fire

Republicans fear blowback from Holocaust denier’s run for Congress.

By NATASHA KORECKI 06/29/2018 11:57 AM EDT

CHICAGO — Illinois Republicans botched four opportunities to stop an avowed Nazi from representing their party in a Chicago-area congressional district. Now they’re paying the price.

Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier who will appear on the November ballot as the GOP candidate against Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski, has become campaign fodder for Democrats as they seek to defeat Gov. Bruce Rauner. And some Republicans even fear the taint from Jones‘ extremist views poses a threat to the party up and down the ticket.

“First, it’s morally wrong and I think it’s really harmful to the party. The guy’s a complete nutcase. He’s a Nazi,” said conservative GOP state Rep. David McSweeney. “This is an absolute political disaster.”

McSweeney’s comments come just days after the filing deadline passed for qualifying a third-party candidate for the general election — which could have provided a safe harbor for Illinois Republican votes. Prior to that, the party had also failed to recruit a candidate to challenge Jones in the primary election, failed to knock him off the primary ballot and wasn’t able to field a write-in candidate against him in the primary.

Running a third-party candidate against Jones in November was among the options left to Illinois Republicans after Jones clinched the GOP nomination by running unopposed. But the deadline came and went this week and that didn’t happen either.

more
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/29/arthur-jones-nazi-illinois-republicans-686875

June 30, 2018

Feds: Decades-old court decree allows family immigration detention

Source: Politico



By JOSH GERSTEIN 06/29/2018 09:41 PM EDT Updated 06/30/2018 08:32 AM EDT

Just days after President Donald Trump announced that his administration would ask a federal court to permit detention of immigrant families by modifying a longstanding court settlement, Justice Department lawyers told the Los Angeles-based judge handling the case Friday that no change to the decree may be needed.

Trump administration lawyers argued that a separate injunction a federal judge in San Diego issued Tuesday barring family separations effectively wipes out provisions in the decades-old Flores agreement that have been determined to bar detention of most children in immigration custody for more than 20 days.

“The rulings work together to permit detention of parents with their minor children with whom they are apprehended,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in a submission to U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee, who oversees the 31-year-old Flores agreement on the treatment of immigrant children.

The filing appears to leave open one key question: What becomes of the Flores agreement's requirement that children be held in state-licensed day care facilities?

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/29/flores-agreement-immigrant-families-separated-689494

June 30, 2018

Trump Offered Bribe For France To Leave European Union

Emily Crockett

June 30, 2018 5:20 am

Trump never misses an opportunity to insult America’s closest allies in Europe — but the problem is much worse than just trash talk. We now know that Trump is actively trying to destabilize the European Union, two European officials told the Washington Post.

During an April meeting at the White House, Trump offered French President Emmanuel Macron a shocking deal: If France leaves the E.U., the U.S. will give France a much better bilateral trade deal than the rest of the E.U. gets.

Yes, a U.S. president actually offered a bribe to try to dismantle a major organization of U.S. allies. Trump tried to con his way into knocking down a pillar of Western democracy and the international liberal order.

If Trump succeeded at this, it would make Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wildest dreams come true.

“As long as there is a unified Europe that maintains a liberal international order with basic rules of the road, it is a disaster for a dictator like Putin,” former vice president Joe Biden told Rogin. “That’s why Putin is doing what he’s doing.”

more
http://www.nationalmemo.com/trump-offered-bribe-for-france-to-leave-european-union/

June 30, 2018

David Cay Johnston: Federal And State Wiretaps Skyrocketed In Trump's First Year

The number of court-approved federal wiretaps rose 30% during Donald Trump’s first year in office, the latest indicator sign of how his administration is shifting our government from facilitating a healthy society into something closer to a police state.

Not a single wiretap request, federal or state, was rejected by any judge, an annual disclosure report from the federal courts released on Wednesday. Nearly all the taps were of mobile phones.

The report does not include national security intercepts–where, according to a separate report, judges rejected more requests last year than they had, in total, over the 38 years before that.

As for the new wiretapping report, while of 3,813 taps were sought and approved, that almost certainly understates the actual number by close to a thousand. That’s because each year many officials were slow complying with the annual disclosures that Congress requires. Based on reports in the previous decade, which had to be revised because officials were late reporting approved wiretaps, as Congress requires they do annually.

more
http://www.nationalmemo.com/federal-and-state-wiretaps-skyrocketed-in-trumps-first-year/