Three people were killed and eight others injured when a trainee from the Saudi Arabian Air Force opened fire at the Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida early Friday.Two people died at the scene, and another died after being transported for treatment. At least seven others were taken to local hospitals. Officials said the shooter was also killed.
BETTENDORF, Iowa -- Iowa congressional candidate Bobby Schilling has fired his campaign political coordinator. The blowback comes after an immigration forum at a church in Bettendorf on Monday that featured a far-right activist with links to nationalists. [...]Athena Galbraith, a Davenport mom, was not at the event, but learned about it in the media. She said she felt compelled to speak out."It was scary that it hit close to home." She said her concern was not just Fuentes' presence, but the general rhetoric against immigrants at the forum."They were issuing hate statements against immigrants and illegal immigrants.""If you're Christian, if you go to church, you know that everything that was said that night goes against everything you know, as far as Christianity. This is not the place for that. The Quad Cities are a diverse beautiful inclusive community. This is the place we celebrate each other's differences, we don't hate."She plans to organize a protest against hate on Sunday at 9am at Pleasant View Baptist Church.Pastor Ed Hedding of Pleasant View Baptist Church said a last-minute venue cancellation led to his church being used for the forum."We did not plan nor organize the event. Nicholas Fuentes' presence was a surprise to us and the entire audience. His veiled speech masked ideas that are quite unchristian and unsupported by Pleasant View Baptist Church," he said in a statement.
The day before Jones interviewed then-candidate Donald Trump on his show in 2015, Owens wrote that he traveled to Islamberg, a Muslim community in rural upstate New York, where Jones had instructed him to investigate what he called "the American Caliphate."Though the Muslims that lived in the community had not been connected to any violence and some had publicly denounced ISIS, Jones wanted to push the far-right rumor that the community was a "potential terrorist-training center," Owens wrote.Owens said he and a reporter tried to lie their way into the settlement but were unable to get in after the community had come under threat. Days before the trip, the FBI had issued an alert for a man named Jon Ritzheimer, who had threatened a terrorist attack against Muslims.After a law enforcement agent called to confirm their identities, Jones wanted to spin the incident as "an attempt to intimidate us into silence," Owens wrote."He even went so far as to include Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, in the purported conspiracy, claiming he wanted to abolish the Second Amendment -- and that somehow intimidating us would achieve that," he added.Owens and the reporter did speak to a nearby sheriff and mayor, who both told them that the people of Islamberg "were kind, generous neighbors who welcomed the surrounding community into their homes, even celebrating holidays together.""The information did not meet our expectations, so we made it up, preying on the vulnerable and feeding the prejudices and fears of Jones's audience," he wrote. "We ignored certain facts, fabricated others and took situations out of context to fit our narrative."
I first noticed stories by Solomon when I began tracking down the origin of the smears about the Clinton Foundation. He wrote volumes spreading those lies. As it turns out, one of his sources was Victoria Toensing, a pattern that has persisted to the current impeachment hearings about Ukraine. At the time, Toensing was representing an undercover FBI informant who claimed he could blow the whistle on Clinton corruption.What we eventually learned is that the Justice Department determined that they had "serious credibility concerns" with Toensing's client and that there were inconsistencies between his testimony and the documents they had obtained as part of their investigation.You might, however, notice a pattern here when I point out that, while Solomon was collaborating with Toensing, the same lies about the informant were being repeated by Trump on Twitter and by Representative Devin Nunes on Fox News. The cast of characters looks very familiar, doesn't it?Solomon went on to write about the Trump-Russia investigation. He specifically focused in on the Steele dossier and often quoted anonymous sources that sounded an awful lot like members of the House Intelligence Committee.Since March, Solomon has been writing articles related to Giuliani's Ukrainian racket - including smears against Ambassador Marie Yavanovitch, claims that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, and attacks on the Bidens. He admitted that Lev Parnas is the one who connected him to the source of much of his material--former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko.Documents shared with congress by the State Department inspector general give us an inside look at how these kinds of stories were coordinated.Included in the roughly 50-page packet was an email from Solomon to Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas previewing an article he'd written that was not yet published...After that email became public, Solomon claimed he was simply fact-checking the piece before it was published. But Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas are not mentioned in the article, raising the possibility that the trio, who had been working to find evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens in Ukraine, had been working directly with Solomon on the story.In other words, Solomon was running the article by his handlers to get their input and/or approval prior to publication.Just as we saw with the efforts to smear the Clinton Foundation, the team of Toensing and diGenova would sign on as lawyers to represent people who had dirt on Trump's opponents to sell, usually in exchange for favorable treatment by Trump's Justice Department. Parnas or Toensing connected those people with Solomon, who wrote the stories that were spread by Devin Nunes, Donald Trump, and a whole host of right wing news outlets. In the midst of all of that, Solomon was also a client of Toensing and diGenova.
A 16-yr-old boy died in Border Patrol custody. He had the flu
— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) December 5, 2019
They didn't take him to the hospital
They didn't release him
They didn't even seem to check on him as he was dying on the floor of his cell, contrary to the govt's account
We have the videohttps://t.co/DE0BDzyviI
Patrick Boland, the top spokesman for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Daily Beast on Thursday that investigators "did not subpoena call records for any member of Congress or their staff... or for any journalist," including--Boland added--the committee's ranking member, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) or John Solomon, a columnist formerly of The Hill whose reporting formed much of the public case for Rudy Giuliani and others to do their muckraking in Ukraine."Any questions about the fact that Members, congressional staff, or journalists appear in call records released by the Committee should be directed at those individuals, who were in contact with individuals of investigative interest to the impeachment inquiry," Boland added.In the impeachment report released on Tuesday, a number of call logs were made public showing conversations between Giuliani, officials at the White House and other agencies, and Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani's who is now indicted on campaign finance violations. The records appear to have been obtained via a subpoena of AT&T, which released a statement on Wednesday saying that it is "required by law to provide information to government and law enforcement agencies."The report indicates that all of the call records obtained by the committee belonged to Parnas or Giulini. Every call mentioned in the report includes one or both of them. And the numbers assigned in the report's footnotes to each document that AT&T produced to the committee appear sequential and grouped according to calls involving Parnas and Giuliani--in the case of the latter, numbers 02131 through 02139, and for the former, 00909 through 00914.
Turning our attention to the American economy, you've heard about the low unemployment rate. What you may not have heard is that the workforce participation rate for those between 25 and 54 years old is up to 80.1 percent -- the highest since early 2007.If that's eleven, then twelve would be the U.S. Census Bureau's latest report on income and poverty, which came out in October. That report found real median family income up 1.2 percent from 2017 to 2018, real median earnings up 3.4 percent, the number of full-time, year-round workers increased by 2.3 million, and the poverty rate declined from 12.3 percent to 11.8 percent, with 1.4 million people leaving poverty.Thirteen: Despite predictions that Amazon was going to put bookstores out of business, the number of independent bookstores keeps rising each year -- the most recent figures are 1,887 independent bookselling companies running 2,524 stores.Fourteen: The cost of lithium-ion batteries is down about 87 percent over the past decade -- which makes electric vehicles a more cost-effective option for transporting goods and people.
To be fair, Europe faces no external threats and can safely disarm completely.[E]uropean liberals have come to understand that American democracy no longer produces a consensual politics with a predictable foreign policy. The change of president means not only a new figure in the White House but also, in fact, a new regime. Were the Democrats to triumph in 2020 and a Europe-friendly president to take the helm, there is no guarantee that in 2024 Americans will not elect a president who, like Mr Trump, will see the European Union as an enemy and will actively try to destabilise relations with Europe.The self-destruction of the American foreign policy consensus was powerfully demonstrated not only during the recent impeachment hearings, which have seen the politicisation of policy towards Ukraine, but also by the fact that the spectre of Russian subversion did not provoke a bipartisan allergic reaction. When Trump voters were told that President Vladimir Putin of Russia supported their candidate, they started admiring Mr Putin rather than abandoning Mr Trump.
When presidents trade public actions for political favors, the proper punishment is not a matter of opinion; it's a matter of law. President Donald Trump solicited a bribe. And the Constitution makes clear that a president who engages in bribery "shall be removed from office." In fact, along with treason, it is one of only two crimes specifically mentioned as conduct that would necessitate impeachment and removal.Before I joined the Senate, I spent decades in law enforcement deciding when bad conduct rises to the level of illegality. Any good lawyer starts with the legal text, and when the Constitution was drafted, bribery was defined broadly as any "undue reward" for a public action. As illustrated during the House impeachment inquiry, which moves to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, a political investigation ginned up to reward Trump for providing needed military aid would certainly fit the bill.But even under the narrower definition of bribery currently in the criminal code, Trump's actions clearly qualify. Federal law defines bribery as the solicitation of "anything of value personally" by a public official "in return for" an official act. It also specifies that a bribe can be a reward for an act the public official would have done anyway. In short, merely soliciting a bribe is bribery.
In a shift that analysts said reflects progress in Saudi talks with Yemen's Houthi rebels to end the Yemen war, State Department Iran envoy Brian Hook said today that Iran does not speak for the Houthis, whom he described as playing a more constructive role in issuing a cease-fire proposal."We should recall that the Houthis proposed a cessation of missile and air attacks with Saudi Arabia just days after the Iranians struck Saudi oil installations on Sept. 14," Hook told journalists at the State Department.