Archive by Author

DeSantis snags $10M donation from entrepreneur who said aliens were on earth

Space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow donated $10 million to the reelection campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday, according to the Friends of Ron DeSantis committee.

Bigelow, the founder of Budget Suites of America, has also invested in other projects including Bigelow Aerospace and National Institute for Discovery Science.

The entrepreneur garnered attention after telling a “60 Minutes” host that he was “absolutely convinced” after she asked if he believed in aliens. Bigelow told the show that he believes aliens are “right under people’s noses” on Earth.

Bigelow is a conservative Republican who previously offered words of support for former President Trump, according to The New York Times.

He has previously pledged to award large prizes to anyone who could provide evidence of an after life.

Bigelow sent the DeSantis campaign its largest contribution thus far on July 7, NBC News first reported.

DeSantis is expected to run in the 2024 Republican presidential primary and is considered a front-runner alongside former President Trump, who said that he had made his decision about another run for the White House in 2024.

DeSantis’s war chest for reelection totals $118 million in donations this year from both small and large donors.

Source: TEST FEED1

Webb’s deep insight: Time is of the essence

In matters of “survival of the fittest,” time is the ultimate arbitrator. We are used to short-term thinking as a survival instinct against immediate existential threats.

This week, the front page of newspapers showed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s “deep image” of galaxies from 13 billion years ago side-to-side with stories about corruption in politics and other urgent current events. The Israeli writer, Dror Burstein asked me, “Why do these items attract the same level of attention?”

Consider the biggest item on our agenda: survival of humanity. We are aware of immediate existential risks in the form of nuclear wars, climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence (AI) takeover or asteroid impact. But these items occupy the same short-term horizon as our daily news on a timescale of years or decades. The Webb telescope’s deep image should inspire us to think in terms of billions of years.

The biblical tale about Noah’s Ark avoided a catastrophe with a vessel that preserved life-as-we-know-it on Earth. But rather than loading mature life forms onto that vessel, we could now store their genetic information and material composition, as pages from a recipe book for recreating them out of raw materials elsewhere. The information could be recorded on an AI system equipped with 3D printers onboard a spaceship that would travel for billions of years. A futuristic Noah’s spaceship of this type would be able to replicate life-as-we-know-it on habitable exoplanets throughout our Milky Way galaxy. And when the Milky-Way will merge within a few billion years with its sister galaxy, Andromeda, the number of desired real estate destinations will double.

It is time to recognize that our future might be different from our past. Natural selection for billions of years on Earth could be replaced by technological selection for billions of years in interstellar space. We cannot afford another billion years of gradual biological evolution on Earth, since the sun will boil off all oceans on Earth within that time frame (although it’s worth remembering humans have been around for only a tiny bit of it). Life on this planet is nearing the end of our cosmic journey on this habitable Earth, and frankly — going around the same star, which we call our sun, for so long is rather boring.

From now on, science and technology will determine whether life-as-we-know-it will survive in space and for how long. To promote long-term survival, we must shift attention from short-term risks and focus on what matters in the long run. When contemplating survival plans, we must remember what Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool a part of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

By making additional prints of life-as-we-know-it throughout the Milky Way, we might avoid the risk of extinction as a result of a single-planet catastrophe.

Think of it this way: Building a bunker under the White House that would protect politicians from a nuclear war, but it will not necessarily preserve the best that humanity’s DNA has to offer. The same can be said about sending wealthy individuals to settle on Mars. We do not want to multiply the wrong entities based on William of Occam’s lesser known quote, “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” 

Space travel should not be guided by commercial benefits. Instead, interstellar journeys would reflect humanity’s spiritual quest for exploring the unknown and getting a better sense on how we came to exist.

It is possible that complex life was seeded on Earth by another civilization that reached the same conclusion about its long-term survival. In that case, we have interstellar relatives to search for.

Next year, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, will start filming a video of the Southern Sky with 3.2-billion pixels per frame. The unprecedented sensitivity of the survey could potentially lead to the discovery of many new interstellar objects in the vicinity of Earth that do not resemble familiar asteroids or comets, like `Oumuamua. Observing such an object with telescopes on Earth as well as the Webb telescope a million miles away, will allow them to accurately trace its three-dimensional motion and identify any excess propulsion that it exhibits.

The best way to demonstrate that we are intelligent is by not allowing the short-term arbitrary and mundane to dictate our long-term future. Thinking on timescales of billions of years is the first message delivered by Webb’s “deep image”.

The second message relates to what you look at in first images captured by the Webb telescope. It is entirely natural to focus on the luminous islands of starlight. However, these bright regions represent the “tail of the dog.” The dark regions between them are full of dark matter which dominates the mass budget and therefore controls how the luminous islands move. The dark regions represent our ignorance, since we still do not know what the dark matter is.

This brings to mind the second message delivered by Webb’s “deep image.” We must explore what we do not know, because it often carries more weight than what we know. Only by exploring the unknown, will humanity become aware of the full scope of its existential risks, beyond corruption in politics, and survive them.

Avi Loeb is head of Harvard’s Galileo Project, a systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts. Loeb is the founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and he chairs the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot project. He is the author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Five takeaways from Biden's Middle East trip

President Biden on Saturday capped his first trip since taking office to the Middle East, a four-day visit that saw both progress and controversy.

The president met with Israeli officials to promote ties between the U.S. and the Jewish state, as well as Palestinian officials amid efforts to maintain peace and foster collaboration in the region.

And Biden, who pledged on the campaign trail to make Saudi Arabia a global pariah over human rights violations, met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other officials about energy and defense issues, highlighting the way political realities have necessitated cooperation between the U.S. and the kingdom.

Here are five takeaways from Biden’s trip.

Biden wades into controversy with Saudi crown prince

Biden and his team had for weeks disputed that he was meeting with the Saudi crown prince, instead arguing Mohammed bin Salman would merely be present at meetings with other leaders.

But one of the defining images of the trip depicted Biden fist-bumping the crown prince, prompting outrage from critics who raised concerns about Salman’s involvement in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

U.S. intelligence had concluded in a report released this year that Salman was involved in the plot to kill Khashoggi, an outspoken critic of the country.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) tweeted that the fist bump was a “visual reminder of the continuing grip oil-rich autocrats have on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.” Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan called the fist bump “shameful.”

A short time after the greeting, the president sat across a table from the crown prince as part of a meeting with Saudi leaders.

Biden later told reporters he raised Khashoggi’s murder at the very start of the meeting, and that he told the crown prince that he believed him responsible for Khashoggi’s death.

“I said, very straightforwardly, for an American president to be silent on the issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am,” Biden said. “I’ll always stand up for our values.”

A White House fact sheet said that Biden in his meetings “received commitments with respect to reforms and institutional safeguards in place to guard against any such conduct in the future.”

No immediate breakthroughs on oil 

Biden emerged from his meetings in Saudi Arabia without an immediate deliverable on oil production, but he expressed optimism that oil-producing nations would take steps to boost the global supply in the coming months. 

White House officials downplayed the significance high gas prices would play in Biden’s trip, but high gas prices in the U.S. and global energy disruptions from Russia’s war in Ukraine were widely seen as primary motivators for the trip to Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest oil producers.

The president said in remarks Friday evening that he and Saudi ministers, as well as the crown prince, “had a good discussion on ensuring global energy security and adequate oil supplies.”

“I’m doing all I can to increase supply for the United States of America, which I expect to happen,” Biden said in remarks from Jeddah. “The Saudis share that urgency and based on our discussions today I expect we’ll see further steps in the coming weeks.”

The White House also emphasized a new framework between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia on clean energy production.

Experts said Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia was unlikely to produce any major announcement on oil production on its own, but that the president could nudge the kingdom in the hopes of a future move to free up more supply.

The White House is eyeing an August meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC+), a group of roughly a dozen nations that influence global oil supply, saying any major announcement would likely stem from that meeting.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Friday that any concrete action on oil supplies would need to result from a decision by OPEC+, of which Saudi Arabia is a de facto leader. 

During his meeting Saturday with the Gulf Cooperation Council, Biden said the nations agree on the need to ensure “adequate supplies to meet global needs” adding he was looking “forward to seeing what’s coming in the coming months.” 

Saudi Arabia, Israel inch toward normalization

Biden tired to carry on the work of his predecessor, former President Trump, to help Israel normalize relations with other Arab nations. His trip to the Middle East saw a modest, but meaningful, step in that direction. 

Saudi Arabia opened its airspace to all airlines, including those flying to and from Israel. The step was hailed by the White House as an important sign of progress toward normalization. Saudi Arabia is also reportedly going to allow direct flights from Israel transporting Muslims making the pilgrimage to Mecca. 

“This is the first tangible step on the path of what I hope will eventually be a broader normalization of relations,” Biden told reporters on Friday following meetings with Saudi officials. 

Biden in Israel also said he strongly supports the Abraham Accords, promoting the Trump-era normalization declarations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain that the Biden administration hopes to expand to other Arab nations. 

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid called the Saudi announcement a positive “first step” and said the Israeli government would “continue working with necessary caution, for the sake of Israel’s economy, security and the good of our citizens.” 

Biden tries to display toughness on Iran

Biden sought to assure Israel that the U.S. is committed to its security and preventing a nuclear Iran, while vowing to continue diplomatic efforts to piece back together the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.  

Speaking alongside Yapid at a press conference Thursday, Biden affirmed his belief that diplomacy remained the best path to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon but said the U.S. wouldn’t “wait forever” for Iran to return to the deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

“We’re not circling a date on the calendar. The deal is on the table. Should the Iranians choose to take it, we’re ready for a compliance-for-compliance return,” Sullivan told reporters on Friday, adding that the U.S. was not waiting to put “further economic pressure” on Iran even as Biden seeks a return to the deal. 

Israel is opposed to the Obama-era nuclear deal, from which former President Trump withdrew the U.S. in 2018. The cracks between the two countries over Iran were on display at Thursday’s press conference, as Yapid said at the same press conference that “diplomacy will not stop them.”

“The only thing that will stop Iran is knowing that if they continue to develop their nuclear program the free world will use force,” Lapid said. 

In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Biden said the U.S. was willing to use force to prevent a nuclear Iran but only as a “last resort.” In a joint declaration signed by Biden and Lapid, the U.S. said it is “prepared to use all elements of its national power” to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. 

Biden’s domestic agenda takes hit while he’s overseas

Biden’s trip came as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) delivered a tough blow to his agenda, saying he would reject the climate spending and tax hikes on the wealthy in the budget reconciliation package.

The president in response called on the Senate to move forward with the slimmed-down health only reconciliation package before August recess since Manchin said he would only support a provision to lower prescription drug prices and a two-year extension of expiring health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.  

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is pushing to move the reconciliation package to the floor before September. Biden vowed while on his trip to move on his climate agenda through executive action if it doesn’t pass in the Senate, which came during his conversations with Saudi leadership over energy security.

Gas prices in the U.S. have remained high, although are declining, but new inflation data this week showed that annual inflation hit 9.1 percent in June, the highest rate of price growth since November 1981. 

Biden returns to Washington with a sinking approval rating and support for his reelection in 2024 reaching record-lows among Democrats.

Source: TEST FEED1

Post-Roe tectonic shifts: Abortion could be headed back to the Supreme Court

Throughout its history, the Supreme Court has overturned long-standing precedents, as it did recently in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Such changes are like the shifting of tectonic plates, triggering earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the legal lithosphere. In the law, the adjustment can take years, as collateral doctrines and applications shake out along new fault lines. 

That process has begun with new litigation in the post-Roe period bringing these conflicts into sharper focus, including a fight over who ultimately controls the doctors and health providers in the United States.

As intended by the court, much of the debate over abortion will now fall on citizens to decide in the democratic process. However, there also will be legal challenges — and, roughly a month after the Dobbs ruling, the legal “ring of fire” is taking shape with a major eruption in Texas this past week.

Texas is suing the Biden administration over new guidance issued after the Dobbs decision. President Biden declared that the “only way we can secure a woman’s right to choose … is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade as federal law.” He then announced unilateral actions designed to blunt the decision’s impact. That mandate was carried out by Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who stated that “we have no right to do ‘mild.’ And so we’re going to be aggressive and go all the way.”

The “aggressive” move included requiring doctors and hospitals to continue to supply abortion services in emergency situations under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The Act was created to prevent “patient dumping,” by which hospitals would turn away patients who could not pay for treatment. It does not mention abortion.  

The change only deals with a provision on “emergency medical care” and “stabilizing treatments” concerning abortion, though the former category can cover any “medical condition manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain)” that could “reasonably be expected to result in — (i) placing the health of the individual (or, with respect to a pregnant woman, the health of the woman or her unborn child) in serious jeopardy, (ii) serious impairment to bodily functions, or (iii) serious dysfunction of any bodily function or part.” 

Putting aside the possible scope of that provision, the Texas lawsuit represents the first major test of who controls doctors and health providers in a given state.

The Biden administration declared that when “a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the life of the pregnant person — or draws the exception more narrowly than EMTALA’s emergency medical condition definition — that state law is preempted.”

That last line may give Texas and other states the strongest claims for legal standing to challenge the law. It also raises a possible conflict with the law itself, which specifies that EMTALA does “not preempt any State or local law requirement, except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with a requirement of [EMTALA].” 

That sets up a new challenge over whether the Biden administration has exceeded its authority after the court struck down climate-control regulations. The administration is not only accused of exceeding its authority again but also failing to comply with federal notice and comment requirements under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

The administration may have undermined its own case by heralding the new policy as part of an aggressive campaign. While dismissing “mild” steps outside of the court, the administration will argue in court that this is part of a preexisting policy — not a major new change requiring congressional approval or notice and comment procedures. Yet Biden’s and Becerra’s words already are being cited in the litigation by the challengers. 

The most significant fight brewing among the states is referenced in a different part of the guidelines. The Biden administration warned retail pharmacies that they must fill prescriptions for pills that can induce abortion under federal law; a majority of abortions are performed at home with the use of those pills. 

That could set up a challenge with sweeping implications. Doctors are subject to both federal and state laws, including state licensing rules. In 2000, the Food and Drug Administration approved the abortion medication Mifepristone and, six years later, approved the drug for use in combination with another widely used drug, Misoprostol. By 2018, more than 3.7 million women had used the medications to end early pregnancies.

Soon after the Dobbs decision, some of us flagged the availability of these pills as the most significant issue going forward. Since most women will likely live in states with available abortion services, the pill could be used by women in states with abortion bans. Indeed, Attorney General Merrick Garland moved quickly after the opinion to declare that “States may not ban Mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has called upon President Biden to make the pills available over-the-counter. 

The problem is that states could prohibit doctors from prescribing the pills and ban their import. For example, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) announced that she will seek a ban on mail-order abortion pills. Conversely, the federal government may rely on telemedicine to allow women to obtain prescriptions. 

Since states generally do not want to prosecute pregnant women, they will focus on state licensing and practice laws for doctors. That will pit the federal interstate authority over medications against the state authority over doctors. The Biden administration again will be in largely uncharted territory; just as the court rejected sweeping agency action in the area of climate control, it could do the same in the area of abortion rights.

This is just part of the litigation movement on the federal level, in which pro-choice advocates will try to reestablish federal protection for abortion. 

On the state level, pro-life and pro-choice groups will flip in orientation. Pro-life attorneys general, who spent 50 years on the offensive, now must play defense to hold the ground they gained in Dobbs. 

On the pro-choice side, some still seek Biden’s “Hail Mary” approach to federalized abortion. This week, the House passed the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022 to codify the decision, but the Senate does not appear likely to pass the law — and, if it did, it would be challenged in light of Dobbs, sending the question back to the states. (The House also passed the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act to protect a patient’s right to travel for legal abortions, a right already protected under the Constitution and not endangered by the Dobbs decision.)

On offense, pro-choice advocates may be left with pursuing the prior pro-life strategy of chipping away at the edges of these laws.

One thing is clear: In announcing his “aggressive” measures, Secretary Becerra insisted that the country “can no longer trust” the Supreme Court. Yet, in this first round of major litigation, that is precisely where we seem to be heading.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.

Source: TEST FEED1

Nikole Hannah-Jones, UNC reach settlement over tenure controversy

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, has reached a settlement with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) following controversy over her tenure status.

UNC confirmed in a statement to The Hill that the settlement resolves a legal dispute that arose after she was denied tenure last year for not coming from a “traditional academic-type background.”

Following the tenure decision, reports surfaced that conservative groups had allegedly pushed back on her hiring at UNC over her work on the 1619 Project. 

Hannah-Jones was subsequently offered tenure at UNC, but rejected it to become a chair in race and reporting at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C. 

Beth Keith, the associate vice chancellor of university communications for UNC, told The Hill that the agreement includes UNC accelerating its investment in “crucial initiatives” in its strategic plan, Carolina Next, to further its work. 

The plan’s initiatives include building a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community, supporting career development and promoting democracy, according to its website. 

“The steps taken to resolve the lingering potential legal action posed by Ms. Hannah-Jones will hopefully help to close this chapter and give the University the space to focus on moving forward,” said David Boliek, the chair of UNC’s board of trustees. 

Hannah-Jones did not immediately return a request for comment through her legal representation, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. 

Hannah-Jones said that she ultimately made the decision to reject the job at UNC because it was offered after she was initially denied status, and came after weeks of protests and legal action.

“This fight is about ensuring the journalistic and academic freedom of Black writers, researchers, teachers, and students,” she said at the time. “We must ensure that our work is protected and able to proceed free from the risk of repercussions, and we are not there yet.”

Source: TEST FEED1

US election deniers promoting democracy abroad defies reason

The power of the more than 200-year-old American model of democracy has encouraged people across the globe to fight for their rights and freedoms, often in the face of brutal authoritarians. We have personally seen the impact of U.S. influence through the more than 100 projects that we have helped design to ensure credible and legitimate elections are conducted in countries around the world. 

Given this experience, we are concerned that efforts to advance democracy abroad may be compromised by board members of publicly-funded U.S. democracy promotion organizations who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 elections. This concern is exacerbated by the presence of an active promoter of the Big Lie sitting on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). 

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) not only voted against the certification of the Electoral College votes for President Biden but has also become a leading promoter of debunked conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election. Concerned NED staff raised the seeming incompatibility of Stefanik serving as a democracy promoter abroad while being associated with the Big Lie at home. Yet this year, the NED board renewed Stefanik for another term.

Forty years ago in a speech to the British parliament, President Reagan heralded the role that established democracies should play in assisting countries moving from authoritarianism toward democracy. Critics questioned the sincerity of this appeal given U.S. support to dictators simply because they identified as anti-communists. Nonetheless, there was no doubt that Reagan accepted the fundamental premise of U.S. democracy: Political power flows through elections and the loser must accept the results if the system is to be sustained.

Following Reagan’s speech, Congress funded the creation of several institutions, including the National Endowment for Democracy, to support efforts to establish democracy. Representatives of these organizations, in their work overseas, have often found themselves having to explain idiosyncrasies of the U.S. system such as the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the oversized role of money in U.S. electoral politics and the fact that chief election officers themselves are selected through partisan elections. 

Nonetheless, drawing on more than 200 years of peaceful transitions from George Washington onward, democracy promoters could cite the reality that election losers always accepted the results, no matter how disappointing.

Indeed, the concession speech became an integral part of the U.S. election cycle. The powerful image of Vice President Al Gore acknowledging the legitimacy of the Supreme Court decision awarding the presidency to George Bush is an eloquent example. Similarly, while working with Jimmy Carter, we have heard him share his personal experience of having been on the short end of a presidential election and stress the importance of the loser accepting the results.

Unfortunately, the U.S. 2020 election represents a watershed. Former President Trump not only refused to accept the result, even after his court challenges were repeatedly rejected, but sought to fabricate a narrative of fraud, convince state legislatures to falsify election results and call supporters into the streets to prevent the vice president and members of Congress from performing their constitutional duties. If Trump’s actions had taken place in another country, democracy promotion organizations would have denounced them as violating fundamental and commonly accepted international norms of democratic practice.

The arguments in favor of keeping supporters of the Big Lie involved in democracy promotion organizations are varied. Some suggest board members are capable of separating their partisan perspectives from their commitment to support democracy abroad. Others say organizations need individuals from across the political spectrum to project bipartisan support for their work. Taking action against board members based on their political orientations would torpedo their carefully cultivated bipartisan image and, if budget cuts are made, could undermine global pro-democracy efforts.

The problem is most of these arguments reflect a business-as-usual approach at a time when supporters of President Trump have chosen to step outside the country’s democratic political culture. U.S. democracy is in a crisis right now and, as John Stuart Mill said in 1867, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

We recognize that drawing lines for board members’ actions is complicated. Thirty-one Democratic members of the House voted against accepting Ohio’s electors in the 2004 election, as did several in 2016, who sought to contest Trump’s election.

These instances, however, are distinguishable by their scale and their continuous insertion into the political discourse. The current electoral denialism features an ongoing embrace by a large part of the Republican Party’s electorate and is now a central focus of GOP electoral campaigns and legislative efforts at all levels of government. Certainly, everyone should agree that former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s refusal to answer whether he supported the “peaceful transfer of power” reflects a fundamentally anti-democratic viewpoint.

While it is unfortunate that this even needs to be said, board members of organizations committed to promoting democracy abroad should act in a manner that is consistent with adherence to core democratic principles. A range of partisan perspectives is important, but board members should be required to commit to the following principles: not fomenting violence in response to an adverse election outcome; accepting the peaceful transfer of power based on the outcome of an election after judicial remedies have been exhausted and not plotting to undermine the outcome of an election by promoting unfounded conspiracies and disinformation campaigns.

Big Lie proponents have presented us with an ethical dilemma: Do we have a right to support democracy abroad when we don’t react to those who are seeking to suffocate it here at home? By insisting on adherence to core principles, we would revive the Reagan-era bipartisan consensus for the work of democracy activists in this country and overseas.  

Larry Garber has worked on democracy promotion efforts since 1983 at the U.S. Agency for International Development and with several non-governmental organizations. He is the author of “Guidelines for International Election Observing.” Edward McMahon has taught as an associate professor of political science and international development at the University of Vermont, Middlebury College and Binghamton University. He has consulted for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.N. Development Program, the Carter Center and other organizations on global democracy and governance issues. 

Source: TEST FEED1

CNN’s Tapper presses Senate Democrat over Biden-Salman fist bump

CNN anchor Jake Tapper pressed Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) over his defense of President Biden’s interaction with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“He flew to Saudi Arabia and he fist bumped Mohammed bin Salman, the man responsible according to Biden’s own director of national intelligence for ordering a brutal murder of a Washington Post journalist, killing him and then dismembering him with a bonesaw,” Tapper said, according to video published by Mediaite.

American intelligence found that Salman approved the killing of Washington Post journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Biden is currently on a trip to the Middle East, where he met with Israeli officials earlier this week and officials from Saudi Arabia, including Salman, on Friday. Biden greeted the Saudi crown prince with a fist bump, prompting outcry from critics.

Following their meeting, Biden said that he raised the murder of Khashoggi with Salman.

During the segment, Coons said that he was “encouraged” by Biden’s conduct at the meeting.

“And I would expect that we will continue to balance advocating our core principles around human rights with the sustained partnership with the Saudis that is critical for us to sustain the unity of the West that President Biden has played such a central role in pulling together in the months since Russia invaded Ukraine,” Coons, a Biden ally, said.

Tapper challenged Coons, reminding him that Biden promised during his presidential run to “turn Saudi Arabia into a ‘pariah’ nation.”

“I mean, that fist bump photograph, I think a lot of Americans saw that and were revolted by it,” Tapper said.

Coons responded that the president had to make a “brutal and tough choice” given that Saudi Arabia has oil reserves, and the U.S. needs to replace resources stymied by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“If we cannot secure additional resources for the gas and oil needs to replace Russian oil and gas in the coming months — and bluntly, our president faced tough choice,” he said.

“Given the situation we’re in in the world today, given what changed on Feb. 24, given what we all know about the ongoing murders — the brutal killing of innocent civilians happening every single day in Ukraine, I support our president.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Judge rejects Eastman's request to protect phone from investigators

A U.S. district judge denied former President Trump’s lawyer John Eastman’s motion to implement a temporary restraining order preventing the Department of Justice (DOJ) from accessing his phone.

In an opinion issued Friday, U.S. District Judge Robert C. Brack said that Eastman failed to show “a clear and unequivocal right to relief from an immediate, irreparable harm.”

“Because there is no evidence that the Government has searched the phone … and because the warrant specifies that no search of the phone will occur until further order of the court, Eastman fails to show a likelihood of success,” Brack continued.

Federal agents previously served Eastman a warrant to seize his phone and any other electronic devices as well as the information on such devices as he exited a restaurant.

On July 8, Eastman filed a request in the U.S. District Court of New Mexico to implement a temporary restraining order on actions to obtain his phone.

Eastman’s argument to the court stated that the FBI’s search warrant violated his First, Fourth and Fifth amendment rights due to being nonspecific and lacking probable cause.

The phone will be searched as part of a Department of Justice investigation into the lawyer’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and allegations that he was part of efforts to muddle transition of power from Trump to President Biden.

Eastman featured prominently in the third public hearing of the Jan. 6 committee investigation of the attack on the Capitol for allegedly pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results on the day of the riots.

Brack said that “The Government’s interest in investigating the January 6 attacks on the Capitol is substantial” enough that Eastman’s argument that the First Amendment protects his communication lacks strength.

Brack added that the DOJ had said it would retrieve a second warrant before it began searches of Eastman’s phone.

“The Court is relying to a considerable extent on the assertion in the warrant that the investigative team will not examine the contents of the phone until it seeks a second warrant.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Opportunity in crisis: The case of Nigeria

As goes Nigeria, so goes Africa. That’s not just hyperbole. Nigeria has over 216 million people, meaning one in five Africans is Nigerian — and with population trends indicating that by 2050 every fifth person in the world will be an African, do the math on what that means for Nigeria’s centrality to the future of our planet and to America’s national security interests.   

Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa, and its second largest oil and gas producer. Its creative industry, including Nollywood, is rivaled only by Hollywood, its entrepreneurship culture gives the American dream a run for its money, and Nigeria is fast becoming THE destination for Africa’s promising technology startups.

Tragically, despite abundant natural resources and human ingenuity and capital, Nigeria’s per-capita income has flatlined over the past decade — and the country faces an unprecedented level of violence and instability, threatening to make parts of its north ungovernable. In February of this year, the Nigerian House of Representatives implored the federal government to declare a national emergency because of rampant insecurity, kidnappings and killings.  

Hobbling toward its presidential elections in February of 2023, with the standard bearers of the two main political parties now settled upon — Atiku Abubakar, of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Bola Tinubu of the All Progressive Congress (APC) — Nigerians are in a foul mood. And no wonder. The political class has failed to rise to the moment. Again.

Abubakar, a former vice president, and Tinbu, the former governor of Lagos state, are two wealthy septuagenarians who mobilized dynastic, patriarchal political machines built over 30 years, to claim their party’s top spot. Both are dogged by charges of graft and corruption. The sad operating assumption is that the presidential election, like the primary contests, will go to the highest bidder. 

For a struggling country with so much potential — where the median age is 18, and which started the continental rallying cry ‘#NotTooYoungToRun’ — it’s a punch in the collective gut.

Earlier this month, I was fortunate to meet with a group of Nigerians, including civic, religious and diaspora leaders. The delegation was in Washington to draw the Biden administration’s attention to this election. Their point was that Nigeria couldn’t withstand another failed presidency.  Unfortunately — if not predictably — they found little interest.

Since 2015, when retiring President Muhammadu Buhari first took office, the number of Nigerians living in extreme poverty has risen to 88 million, and unemployment has quadrupled to 33 percent. The naira, the country’s currency, has lost more than 40 percent of its value against the dollar, spiking the cost of basic commodities. Roughly 85 million people have no access to electricity from the grid. More than 10 million children are not in school, and a third of Nigerian children under five are stunted or malnourished.

Initially, the Buhari presidency was celebrated by the Obama administration as a triumph of democracy because it was the first time that Nigerian opposition party successfully unseated an incumbent, winning on an anti-corruption platform. Some believe this misplaced early euphoria has kept Washington mute on Buhari’s failures.

But as my Nigerian visitors say, “It’s well beyond Buhari now.” 

The group argued passionately that there is an unprecedented historical opening to field a third force in politics in Nigeria that could break the stranglehold held by the political cartels. They cited three reasons for this narrow window of political opportunity: first, the rising of an activist generation in Nigeria, most notably demonstrated by the #EndSars protests of 2020, leading to a more politically engaged youth; second, the misery index for the Nigerian people and an increasing recognition that its bad governance is to blame; and finally, an electoral process that — while still subject to fraud — is under pressure to conform with international standards, and cannot hide from new technologies.   

Their analysis was not new to me. I had been following the work of former Nigerian Minister, World Bank Vice President, and presidential candidate, Oby Ezekwesili, who in 2020, launched a citizen-led movement #FixPolitics to change politics in Nigeria and Africa writ-large. Oby argues that Nigeria’s ruling elite, personified by Tinubu and Abubakar, has entrenched a corrupted political culture that is unaccountable. She warns that the country must free itself from its endless cycle of arrested development or it will be destroyed.

At her program launch two years, Oby suggested that change in Nigeria could happen incrementally, generationally — it is “a marathon,” she said. But after the primaries, Oby — like my new Nigerian friends — sees it as race against time to save Nigeria.

“What will it take to get the United States to pay attention and to care? What can we do?” they asked me.

I told them that the focus on Nigeria is very limited because of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and further, that Washington has never had much of an imagination when it comes to transformative political change in Africa. 

I gave as an example my own experience from 2005, when I was going door-to-door, pleading with the George W. Bush administration to see the possibilities in Liberian presidential candidate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who — if she won, (which she did) — would make history and emerge as the first woman to lead an Africa nation. I was told with authoritative certainty, “You’re wasting your time.”

I counseled the group of Nigerian visitors: “It’s up to you.”

The road map is there: Today, political “outsiders” in Africa — including women and young people — are far greater in number than those captive to the established parties and voting in the elections. Look at Nigeria’s 2018 election: the turn-out was abysmal — between 30 and 35 percent.

In the end, I suggested to them the proposition was straightforward: Are Nigerian citizens awakened, empowered, mobilized, and tactically prepared to disrupt the political order, or — at a minimum — to shake things up? Are the 65 percent in the majority prepared to unify and field a consensus candidate that represents the aspirations of the people, and not accept a leader whose only claim to office is that ‘It’s my turn’?

I told them: “You will have to carry Washington — Washington won’t carry you.”

“But not to worry,” I teased: “Just like in the case of Liberia in 2005, if you succeed, despite the odds, we (America) will celebrate your success as if it were our own.”

K. Riva Levinson is president and CEO of KRL International LLC, a D.C.-based consultancy that works in the world’s emerging markets, award-winning author of “Choosing the Hero: My Improbable Journey and the Rise of Africa’s First Woman President” (Kiwai Media, June 2016). You can follow her @rivalevinson

Source: TEST FEED1