New head-to-heads in national @CNN poll just out:
— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) January 22, 2020
Biden 53%, Trump 44%
Bloomberg 52%, Trump 43%
Sanders 52%, Trump 45%
Warren 50%, Trump 45%
Buttigieg 49%, Trump 45%
Klobuchar 48%, Trump 45%
Three alleged members of a white supremacist group were plotting to murder demonstrators at Monday's gun rights rally at the Virginia Capitol before they were arrested by the FBI last week, according to court documents.The men were caught discussing their plans on a hidden camera set up in their Delaware apartment by FBI agents."We can't let Virginia go to waste, we just can't," said Patrik J. Mathews, one member of the hate group "the Base" that promotes violence against African-Americans and Jews.According to authorities, the 27-year-old former Canadian Armed Forces reservist also discussed creating "instability" in Virginia by killing people, derailing trains, poisoning water, and shutting down highways in order to "kick off the economic collapse" and possibly start a "full blown civil war."
President Donald Trump left the door open to overhauling Social Security and Medicare in a CNBC interview on Wednesday, calling any attempt to rein in entitlement spending "the easiest of all things."
Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella - the CIA analyst whose name was recently linked in a tweet by the president and mentioned by lawmakers as the anonymous "whistleblower" who touched off Trump's impeachment - was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues. [...]Democrats based their impeachment case on the whistleblower complaint, which alleges that President Trump sought to help his re-election campaign by demanding that Ukraine's leader investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter in exchange for military aid.
In a Friday interview on "Fox & Friends," President Donald Trump admitted to holding up military aid to pressure Ukraine's government to investigate a baseless conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election.
The Republican party I joined on the eve of the Reagan era brought different people and ideas together. That was the secret of its widespread support. But although it was diverse, it was not unprincipled. When Republicans remember the good old days, we remember the values we share.What do we share? First, Republicans are conservatives. We value order, stability, prudence, honesty, and the preservation of our republic. We have always put a premium on respect for established institutions: they can be improved, but they should not be denigrated or assaulted.What else are we? We are patriots. We love the Constitution, revere the Madisonian system for the political work of art that it is, respect those who defend our way of life, and are watchful against those who would threaten it.We love freedom, and our heritage of freedom. I've always said I want the government out of your pocketbook and out of your bedroom. That basic American tradition of individual liberty--and personal responsibility, because to be free you must run your own life--goes back to Madison, Jefferson, and the Founders, who gave us not only our laws, but our greatest words.We are capitalists. We might differ on any number of policies, but we firmly believe there is no such thing as "government money," only taxpayer money. In my time as governor of Massachusetts, I was named one of the two most fiscally conservative governors in the United States by the Cato Institute. But I don't consider it just a matter of pinching pennies. It's about a genuine belief that people are wealthiest and happiest when the government stays away from micromanaging their work, and that if you produce something, it's yours to keep.And we are republicans, in the original sense: We believe, as Lincoln put it, in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not that government is a separate entity that dominates its citizens. There's a place for government, but fundamentally it is there to protect your rights, not to dictate what they are.
The heavily indebted state has been without an effective government since Saad al-Hariri quit as premier in October, prompted by protests against politicians who have collectively led Lebanon into the worst crisis since the 1975-90 war.New Finance Minister Ghazi Wazni said Lebanon needed foreign aid to save it from an unprecedented situation that had forced people to "beg for dollars" at the banks and fear for their deposits. He also described forthcoming foreign currency sovereign debt maturities as "a fireball".The Iranian-backed Hezbollah and allies including President Michel Aoun nominated Diab as premier last month after efforts failed to strike a deal with Hariri, Lebanon's main Sunni leader and a traditional ally of the West and Gulf Arab states.Weeks of wrangling over portfolios among Hezbollah's allies held up an agreement until Tuesday when the heavily armed group delivered an ultimatum to its allies to make a deal or suffer the consequences, sources familiar with the talks said.
"It's what you would build if there were no cars," said Cruise CEO Dan Ammann. He told the crowd that once the shared service is up and running, it will save users $5,000 a year over the cost of owning a car and driving themselves. He didn't offer details on the math, but the driverless service would likely have to offer significantly cheaper fares than human-powered ride-hail services to make that happen. According to a 2018 AAA study, using Uber or Lyft costs about $20,000 a year--double what it costs to own a car. And given how the ride-hail giants have struggled financially, it's not obvious that ride-hailing, robotic or not, is a great business. Ammann did not offer details on how the service will work, but positioned it as a competitor to the likes of Uber and Lyft.Ammann also showed an image of the Origin configured to carry packages, with a roll-up metal door in lieu of the metal and glass sliding doors on the passenger version. He offered no details on when Cruise might launch a delivery service, but that could offer another source of revenue if the people-moving business doesn't prove lucrative.Designing a custom vehicle sets Cruise apart in the self-driving space. For the most part, its competitors have only shown off heavily modified existing cars, like Waymo's Pacifica minivan and Argo's Ford Fusion. Zoox is developing its own, yet to be revealed vehicle, but hasn't said much about how it will take on the complexities of manufacturing.GM acquired Cruise as a startup in 2016 for a reported $500 million, when it had just 40 employees. Since then, the San Francisco-based outfit has grown more than 20-fold and raised more than $7 billion in funding from GM, Honda, and SoftBank's Vision Fund. It raised its last round, in May, at a $19 billion valuation. That cash has fueled Cruise's massive growth, and helped it field a fleet of modified Chevy Bolts (with human operators up front) that logged a million autonomous miles in San Francisco last year.
A huge power cut in Paris that left businesses in the dark and residents stuck in lifts was just the latest of over 100 militant acts by workers fighting the French government's pension reform. And there may be more to come if the words of union chiefs are anything to go by.In all France's electricity providers have lodged over 100 formal complaints linked to "malicious" power cuts since the start of the strike movement against pension reform.But there may be more to come as the more radical of France's trade unions become more militant in their battle against the government."It's not criminal," (ce n'est pas de delinquance) said CGT union chief Philippe Martinez on Wednesday.When asked on BFM TV if he would urge those militant workers who have been cutting power to residents and businesses to stop Martinez said "no".
During the recent flare-up between the United States and Iran, US President Donald Trump tweeted that he was prepared to bomb "52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago)." Some of these targets, he added, would be "important to ... the Iranian culture," suggesting that he was willing to strike Iranian national heritage sites.Trump's tweet suggests that his entire Iran policy is rooted deep in the past, as if actions taken today represent a belated response to wounds inflicted long ago. If so, his administration has something in common with the Iranian regime, which has long dwelled on the real and perceived wounds of bygone eras.After all, Iranians (and many others) point out ad nauseam that the US had a hand in the 1953 coup that deposed the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and installed the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, which itself was toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Likewise, Iranians note repeatedly that the US assisted Saddam Hussein during Iraq's ruthless war against Iran in the 1980s.Listening to the litany of grievances on both sides, it is difficult to avoid the impression that both the US and Iran are hostages of history.