2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday took a swipe at the number of extremely wealthy people who have entered—or explored joining—the 2020 presidential race, saying that their money makes them able to run “even if you were the dumbest person on Earth.”
The Vermont senator tweeted his thoughts on Monday morning, adding that “billionaires should not be able to buy our elections.”
“If you had a couple billion dollars, you could announce your candidacy for president and be taken seriously, even if you were the dumbest person on Earth,” Sanders tweeted. “Billionaires should not be able to buy our elections and we’re going to change that.”
There are a number of extremely wealthy people who have officially entered the presidential fray, or considered doing so earlier in the process.
Last month, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg officially announced his candidacy with an ad buy in the tens of millions that sparked backlash.
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz drew intense criticism for his idea of potentially running as a centrist independent in the upcoming election.
Schultz said he would not pursue a presidential run in September.
Tom Steyer is still in the race and is spending loads of cash to buy his way onto the debate stages.
Both Sanders and fellow 2020 presidential contender Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have pushed back against Bloomberg in particular in recent weeks, as their campaigns have centered on raising taxes on extremely wealthy Americans to help pay for a number of their policy proposals.
Then again, President Donald Trump himself is also a self-proclaimed billionaire. We all know how Sanders feels about him.
Handcuffing or restraining women during pregnancy, labor and delivery and postpartum recovery by police, courts or prisons would be an interference of civil rights, according to Senate Bill 18. Putting pregnant or postpartum women in solitary confinement would also be prohibited.
The legislation provides for exceptions in cases where the woman presents a serious threat or flight risk.
Restraints would be allowed if the official notifies the doctor or health care professional treating the woman. The professional may object to the restraints if it poses a risk of physical harm to the woman or baby.
The American Medical Association calls shackling women while they’re birthing babies “a barbaric practice that needlessly inflicts excruciating pain and humiliation.”
In written testimony, Lehner and co-sponsor state Sen. Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, said shackling pregnant women puts them at risk of falling and doing so during labor and delivery can delay medical care.
“This legislation is the first step to ensuring incarcerated women in Ohio are given the dignity, health and safety they deserve,” the senators said.
In January, President Donald Trump signed bipartisan criminal justice legislation that includes a prohibition of shacking pregnant prisoners in federal custody.
While he was in town, Zuckerberg met with President Donald Trump for a private dinner that also included the Facebook board member Peter Thiel. Until late November, the dinner of two of the world’s most powerful people went unreported. Facebook confirmed the dinner to NBC News last month.
The details of the dinner remain elusive, but some new information has come out, care of an interview with Zuckerberg on “CBS This Morning” on Monday.
“We talked about a number of things that were on his mind, and some of the topics that you read about in the news around our work,” Zuckerberg told the cohost Gayle King.
Though Zuckerberg didn’t offer further details, he denied that Trump attempted to lobby him on the subject of political ads on Facebook.
“No. I think some of the stuff people talk about or think gets discussed in these discussions are not really how that works,” he said. “I also want to respect that it was a private dinner with private discussion.”
Facebook has faced wide criticism for its stance on political advertising — the social-media giant doesn’t fact-check politicians in political ads or remove false information from them. Competing social platforms like Twitter and YouTube have taken different stances; Twitter outright banned political advertising, and YouTube has removed hundreds of political ads from its platform.
At least one prominent politician has called out the dinner, which was unreported by Facebook and the White House until NBC News reported on it. “This is corruption, plain and simple,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said.
In the interview, Zuckerberg echoed previous statements he’d made about the choice.
“What I believe is that in a democracy it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying so they can make their own judgments,” he said. “I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news.”
“I wonder how much that’s worth?” he muses.
Across the country, attorneys like Slater are scrambling to file a new wave of lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by clergy, thanks to rules enacted in 15 states that extend or suspend the statute of limitations to allow claims stretching back decades. Associated Press reporting found the deluge of suits could surpass anything the nation’s clergy sexual abuse crisis has seen before, with potentially more than 5,000 new cases and payouts topping $4 billion.
It’s a financial reckoning playing out in such populous Catholic strongholds as New York, California and New Jersey, among the eight states that go the furthest with “lookback windows” that allow sex abuse claims no matter how old. Never before have so many states acted in near-unison to lift the restrictions that once shut people out if they didn’t bring claims of childhood sex abuse by a certain age, often their early 20s.
That has lawyers fighting for clients with TV ads and billboards asking, “Were you abused by the church?” And Catholic dioceses, while worrying about the difficulty of defending such old claims, are considering bankruptcy, victim compensation funds and even tapping valuable real estate to stay afloat.
“It’s like a whole new beginning for me,” said 71-year-old Nancy Holling-Lonnecker of San Diego, who plans to take advantage of an upcoming three-year window for such suits in California. Her claim dates back to the 1950s, when she says a priest repeatedly raped her in a confession booth beginning when she was 7 years old.
“The survivors coming forward now have been holding on to this horrific experience all of their lives,” she said. “They bottled up those emotions all of these years because there was no place to take it.”
Now there is.
AP interviews with more than a dozen lawyers and clergy abuse watchdog groups offered a wide range of estimates but many said they expected at least 5,000 new cases against the church in New York, New Jersey and California alone, resulting in potential payouts that could surpass the $4 billion paid out since the clergy sex abuse first came to light in the 1980s.
Lawyers acknowledged the difficulty of predicting what will happen but several believed payouts could exceed the $350,000 national average per child sex abuse case since 2003. At the upper end, a key benchmark is the average $1.3 million the church paid per case the last time California opened a one-year window to suits in 2003. That offers a range of total payouts in the three big Catholic states alone from $1.8 billion to as much as $6 billion.
Some lawyers believe payouts could be heavily influenced by the recent reawakening over sexual abuse fueled by the #MeToo movement, the public shaming of accused celebrities and the explosive Pennsylvania grand jury report last year that found 300 priests abused more than 1,000 children in that state over seven decades. Since then, attorneys general in nearly 20 states have launched investigations of their own.
A 15-year-old boy was told to “hold your dick and lift your balls up and show me your gooch” and a police officer “ran his hands around” the buttocks of a 17-year-old during two of 25 potentially illegal strip-searches conducted at an underage music festival in Sydney, an inquiry has heard.
On Monday the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) began public hearings into the strip-search of “several young people” at the Lost City Music festival, an under-18s event held in Sydney in February.
The inquiry is investigating the strip-searches of three boys aged 15, 16 and 17 at the festival, none of which found any illegal drugs, as well as the “general question” of how police exercise their strip-search powers in New South Wales.
On its opening morning the counsel assisting the commission, Peggy Dwyer, told the hearing at least 30 strip-searches were conducted on minors at the festival.
In NSW, officers must not conduct a strip-search outside a police station unless the urgency and seriousness of the situation requires it. In the case of minors, a parent or guardian must be present unless an immediate search is necessary to protect the person or prevent the destruction of evidence.
But the inquiry heard only five of the 30 searches were conducted in the presence of a support person. In one case, the support person provided to a 13-year-old girl was herself a minor; a 17-year-old girl from the Red Frog charity.
Dwyer read from statements given to the commission by all three boys, which included one by a 17-year-old who told investigators an officer had “ran his hands around his buttocks” during a search.
The use of strip search powers has been the focus of increasing scrutiny in NSW in recent months. Last month the state opposition called for a review of the legislation underpinning their use after Guardian Australia revealed police had strip-searched 122 girls, including two 12-year-olds in the past three years.
On Monday a senior police officer who had worked on at least 20 music festivals said he believed the legislation was too vague on the question of what constituted serious and urgent circumstances.
“Why are we even speaking about ambiguity with the legislation? It shouldn’t even be there,” the officer said. “It should be spelt out what seriousness and urgency is, because I’m sure everyone in this room would have a different opinion.”
The inquiry also heard evidence that two State Emergency Services volunteers had been organised to act as independent adults for children being strip-searched at the festival.
Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday called for ending virtually all of the Trump administration’s immigration policies and creating a “swift, fair pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants, including by allowing people who have been in the United States illegally for five years to stay without the risk of deportation.
Mr. Sanders’s immigration proposals are among the most progressive offered by a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to date and, should they be enacted, would substantially reshape federal policy.
If elected, Mr. Sanders would, on his first day in office, place a moratorium on all deportations until his administration conducted a “thorough audit of current and past practices and policies,” his campaign said. And he would seek to restructure the Department of Homeland Security, reassigning responsibilities for border enforcement, naturalization and citizenship and customs authority to other cabinet agencies.
In so doing, he would “break up” Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as many liberal immigration activists have demanded, splitting its responsibilities between the Justice and State Departments.
“The Trump administration’s treatment of immigration exclusively as a criminal and national security matter is inhumane, impractical and must end,” the Sanders campaign wrote. “As president, Bernie Sanders would make undocumented immigration a civil matter, and fundamentally reform the government agencies tasked with enforcing immigration law in a way that views immigration as a historically valued process that’s woven into our country’s fabric.”
Mr. Sanders, like his Democratic rivals who have articulated immigration proposals, said he would end President Trump’s policies restricting funding to so-called sanctuary cities, allow asylum seekers to stay in the United States rather than having them wait in Mexico, halt family separations at the southern border and stop efforts to build a wall there. He said he would seek to double funding for immigration judges, though his plan does not specify where those funds would come from.
He also said he would decriminalize unauthorized border crossings, making them a civil offense, an idea pushed by Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, in the first Democratic debate in June. Mr. Castro, who has released an extensive immigration plan of his own, tweeted Thursday that he was “happy to see @BernieSanders join me.”
A President Sanders would not need congressional approval for the raft of executive actions detailed in his immigration proposals. But he would need Congress to pass any plan to offer amnesty to undocumented immigrants. The most recent effort failed in 2013 when the Democratic-controlled Senate passed immigration legislation hammered out by the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators, but the Republican-held House did not vote on it.
The broadcaster and natural historian added that ‘the best we can hope is that we will slow it down and slow it down considerably’.
He made the comments during an interview with Channel 4 News.
Jon Snow told the legendary environmentalist an 11-year-old had written in to ask what the worst thing to happen in his life would be ‘if we don’t tackle climate change’.
Sir David replied: ‘I think civil unrest on a great scale, and mass migration on a great scale.
‘I think we will go on finding enough food, though it may not be precisely the choice that we would take freely.’
Asked if it was ‘too late to reverse climate change’, he said: ‘It’s too late to reverse it. Not only in my lifetime, but in the next lifetime.
‘I don’t think you can reverse it. I think the best that we can hope is that we will slow it down, and slow it down considerably.’
Sir David said it was ‘very difficult to detect real action in politicians’, adding that it was ‘really rather sad’ that the first climate debate among party leaders during an election only took place on Channel 4 last week.
He criticised Boris Johnson’s ‘shameful’ decision not to take part in the event, during which he was replaced with an ice sculpture, adding: ‘I don’t know what else he had to do, but it would have to be very, very important to dodge this one.’
When asked whether he thought the public would emerge from such a critical general election ‘with a better understanding of the need to change our ways’, Sir David said he doesn’t.
He said that the problem with short term elections was that politicians ‘think the issues facing the electorate are ones that are going to change their lives tomorrow or the day after, and those are the ones they concentrate on’.
Sir David said: ‘I don’t think things are going to get better. I think we can slow the degree to which they are getting worse.’
A fan of Charles Manson and follower of Hitler, James Mason published essays in the 1980s that now act as the inspiration for a militant neo-Nazi group linked to multiple murders in the U.S.
“Revolutionary discipline must mean that WE will be the single survivor in a war against the System,” Mason wrote in 1985. “A TOTAL WAR against the System.”
But nowadays, Mason isn’t waging war with the system. He is, in fact, dependent on it.
The 67-year-old white supremacist lives in a government subsidized apartment in Denver and eats at soup kitchens.
In a brief interview last week, a few days after he was spotted picking up a meal at a city-run center for “homeless and hungry seniors,” Mason said he sees no contradiction between his writings and his lifestyle.
“Guerilla warfare, man. Guerilla warfare,” Mason told NBC’s Denver affiliate KUSA. “You’ve gotta take what you have to get what you need.”
Mason’s old writings have gained new life with the rise of the Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist group bent on overthrowing the government through terrorist acts and guerrilla warfare tactics.
The extremist organization, whose name means “atomic weapons division” in German, formed in 2015 in the now defunct neo-Nazi online forum Iron March. Experts say it’s a largely decentralized group, small in size but large in ambition.
“Members see themselves as soldiers preparing themselves for an impending race war,” said Joanna Mendelson, senior investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
“They create this apocalyptic worldview that their future is hanging by a thread. They paint a picture of a genocide and that they see themselves as needing to rise up against the tide that seeks their destruction.”
In the past two years alone, men with ties to Atomwaffen have been accused of killings in Florida, California and Virginia.
In the California case, an Atomwaffen Division member named Samuel Woodward was arrested and charged with fatally stabbing Blaze Bernstein, a gay, Jewish student, inside a park in Orange County in January 2018. Woodward pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
Experts say the group has greatly expanded the influence of Mason and his decades-old writings. His SIEGE newsletters, which have been posted on numerous online forums and compiled into a 563-page book, serve as Atomwaffen’s ideological foundation.
As of this year, China has 276 diplomatic posts around the world, compared with the US’s 273. These posts consist of embassies, high commissions, consulates and consulates general, permanent missions, and other representations in countries where there is no diplomatic relationship.
The Lowy Institute’s ranking is based on the number of diplomatic networks of 61 countries belonging to the G20 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and in Asia. It also “indicates strengths and weaknesses in geographic coverage and geopolitical reach.”
The 2019 ranking shows the rapid rise of China over the past decade. In 2017 it had 271 diplomatic posts around the world — three fewer than the US — and in 2016 it had 263 posts, according to the think tank.
The US had 274 diplomatic postings in 2017 and 271 in 2016.
US foreign-policy influence globally has weakened in recent years under President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump has slashed funding for the State Department and struggled to fill key diplomatic roles.
Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, told House impeachment investigators earlier this month that the State Department was facing a “crisis.”
The US risks being overtaken by China in terms of military and economic power as well. The Center for a New American Security warned in June that China was developing advanced weapons at a rapid and secretive pace and figuring out ways to disrupt US battlefield systems.
China could also overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy as soon as next year, Standard Chartered said in January. The American economy could also become smaller than India’s by 2030, the bank said.
These 10 countries have the most diplomatic posts around the world, according to the Lowy Institute:
- China — 276 posts
- United States — 273
- France — 267
- Japan — 247
- Russia — 242
- Turkey — 234
- Germany — 224
- Brazil — 222
- Spain — 215
- Italy — 209
