Full moon over the pyramids of Giza at night
The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which has evaluated federal judicial candidates since 1953, says Walker “does not presently have the requisite trial or litigation experience or its equivalent.”
Neither Walker nor U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who recommended him for the appointment, immediately responded to requests for comment, but in a statement, McConnell said: “In the courtroom, Justin is known for immersive preparation, fervent advocacy for his clients, and all-around excellence in trial and appellate litigation.”
McConnell’s statement didn’t address the ABA’s finding, which is not binding on the Senate Judiciary Committee, before which Walker appeared Wednesday.
Bloomberg Law reported in December that six of Trump’s judicial nominees rated not qualified were confirmed in his first two years as president, more than any of his four most recent predecessors through the same point in the first term.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond who follows judicial nominations, said Senate Republicans and the White House “pretty much ignore” the ABA committee’s findings.
Walker, 37, a conservative intellectual who clerked for Brett Kavanaugh when he sat on the U.S. District Court of Appeals and championed his controversial nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, was himself nominated in June for a seat on U.S. District Court in the Western District of Kentucky.
Walker has practiced at Dinsmore Shohl in Louisville since January and is co-director of University of Louisville’s new Ordered Liberty Program, which promotes “federalism, separation of powers, originalism, natural rights, and the common good.”
If Walker is confirmed, he would succeed Judge Joseph H. McKinley, who took senior status.
The chairman of the ABA committee said in a letter Tuesday that it has no questions about Walker’s temperament or integrity and that it believes he has great potential to serve as a federal judge.
But the panel said a nominee to the federal bench ordinarily should have at least 12 years’ experience in the practice of law.
It said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsay Graham, the ABA committee said that even crediting the time Walker spent in judicial clerkships, his practice experience is less than his 10 years since graduation from Harvard Law School.
The Planetary Society, a non-profit organization focused on space exploration, has successfully transferred their LightSail 2 spacecraft from one orbit to another using only the power of sunlight, a first. The recent success not only proves the effectiveness of solar sailing technology, but also opens up a new, more cost-effective way to propel small spacecraft.
The Planetary Society has been working on a solar sailing technology for roughly two decades. The idea behind solar sailing is that instead of using propellant to maneuver a spacecraft, engineers can use the radiation pressure of sunlight to push the spacecraft around, with the help of a large (340 square feet) Mylar sheet as their sail.
Earlier versions of the project had a rough go of it, with two attempts in the 2000s destroyed by rocket malfunctions. But because the Planetary Society was simply purchasing a ride aboard other companies’ rockets to get to orbit, this wasn’t their fault, even if it did set back their efforts a number of years.
In 2015, LightSail 1 launched and successfully deployed its solar sail, unfolding the thin Mylar sheets into one large sail. But that was as far as the first test went. This year, LightSail 2 launched on June 25, deploying its sail a month later on July 23. And today, it has used that sail to harness the power of sunlight and successfully change its orbit.
Bill Nye, science communicator and CEO of the Planetary Society, said “For me, it’s very romantic to be sailing on sunbeams.”
Sail Away
In the modern era of space exploration, it’s not just government agencies getting in on the action. While companies like SpaceX and Boeing often get press for building the large rockets of today and tomorrow, it’s also important for other organizations to learn how to maneuver a spacecraft once it’s in orbit.
Most vehicles carry propellant to adjust their trajectories when needed. But over time, many of their orbits will degrade, bringing them to the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere. Here, the drag of air particles, if left uncorrected, will siphon off energy, pulling the craft closer to Earth. Other times, minor corrections are needed to avoid close encounters with other spacecraft. And of course, many spacecraft are first deposited into a convenient orbit by a rocket before they maneuver into their final, preferred orbital path.
But propellant is a consumable resource, so eventually all spacecraft will run out of fuel — that is, unless they can use a renewable resource, such as sunlight, to power their movements. By using Earth’s magnetic field to orient itself and angle its sails toward our star, LightSail 2 can control its own movements.
Olaf Scholz, the German vice-chancellor, publicly confirmed on Wednesday that his country would not take part in a US-led naval taskforce.
Mr Scholz, who is who is deputising for Angela Merkel while she is on holiday, warned of the danger of the world “sleepwalking into a much larger conflict”.
“We want to talk about how to address the situation with our French and British partners in Europe, but there is no discussion of a mission as requested,” he said.
Calls for the joint taskforce have intensified following the seizure of the British-flagged Stena Impero tanker in the Strait of Hormuz last month. The tanker remains in Iranian hands, with the commander of the British warship that is already accompanying UK-flagged ships on this route saying yesterday that Tehran appeared to be testing the Royal Navy’s resolve.
“The Iranians seem to be keen to test our resolve, test our reactions most of the time,” William King, commander of the HMS Montrose, told the BBC, adding that over 27 days patrolling the region he had experienced 85 “interactions with Iranian forces”.
Germany reportedly rejected calls to take part in the planned taskforce last week, but this is the first time the German government has commented publicly .
Mr Scholz said a naval taskforce would be “getting ahead of events”, and that Germany’s priority was to prevent an escalation in the Gulf.
“The worst thing would be a real military conflict. Then shipping would really be in jeopardy,” he said.
Mr Scholz, the leader of Angela Merkel’s main coalition partner, rejected suggestions the German government is divided over the US request. His centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD) have a track record of opposing German involvement in military operations abroad, while Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) have been more open to the idea.
But in this case Mrs Merkel’s government is believed to be reluctant to back a naval taskforce for fear any incident could be used by hardliners in the Trump administration as a pretext for war with Iran.
Along with Britain and France, Germany has been keen to rescue the nuclear deal agreed with Iran by Barack Obama, which Mr Trump withdrew from last year.
On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was more than 600 miles away from home at Detroit’s ornate Fox Theater, where he’d taken the debate stage with nine other Democratic presidential candidates. But he didn’t escape hometown protesters dissatisfied with his performance on issues of police accountability.
“Fire Pantaleo, fire Pantaleo, fire Pantaleo,” a small group of protesters chanted during the nationally televised debate. Their chants referenced NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo who, on July 17, 2014, used a banned chokehold technique to take down Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man allegedly selling loose cigarettes in front of a Staten Island convenience store. Garner, who died as a result of the attempted arrest, was filmed repeatedly telling Pantaleo and other officers, “I can’t breathe.” His final words became a national rallying cry for Black Lives Matter demonstrators in New York and beyond.
Yet, in the more than five years after Garner’s death, a local grand jury cleared Pantaleo of wrongdoing, the U.S. Department of Justice declined to bring criminal civil rights charges against the officer, and, to the dismay of Garner’s family and activists, de Blasio hasn’t ordered his police chief to fire Pantaleo. At the debate, he promised Garner’s family justice “in the next 30 days,” claiming that his hands were tied until recently because of a federal investigation.
His comment had echoes of one from Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, who fielded a question on Tuesday night from debate moderator Don Lemon over the lack of racial diversity in his city’s police force. Racial tensions in South Bend boiled over after the June 16 fatal shooting of a Black man by a South Bend police officer. Though Buttigieg said his city was revising its use of force policy and rethinking the composition of the board of safety that handles police matters, he also deflected some responsibility.
“I’ve proposed a Douglass plan [named after abolitionist Frederick Douglass] to tackle this issue nationally, because mayors have hit the limits of what you can do unless there is national action,” he said.
But experts on policing say that both mayors may have understated their own power.
“When mayors claim that they have no influence over the discretionary decision-making of a police chief, that is bogus,” Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at New York’s Brooklyn College and the author of “The End of Policing,” told The Appeal. “At the very least, they have the power to send a message to the police chief. And if the police chief is not willing to obey, as a matter of policy, they then need a new police chief overnight.”
As city executives, most mayors oversee their city’s police, and are responsible for their behavior. They often handpick the top brass for their police departments, can influence disciplinary decisions, and can appoint people to civilian oversight boards that independently investigate abuse and misconduct allegations.
The European Union-wide ban will take place for three months, and comes as a result of a July report in which a Dutch media outlet used leaked audio snippets from a third-party reviewer to show that some Google Assistant users had been recorded by their devices unknowingly.
“The use of automatic speech assistants from providers such as Google, Apple and Amazon is proving to be highly risky for the privacy of those affected,” Thursday’s report from the Hamburg Commissioner read. “[The ban] is intended to provisionally protect the rights of privacy of data subjects for the time being.”
According to July’s report, out of the 1,000 audio snippets obtained by the media outlet, 153 were recorded unbeknownst to the user. A Google spokesperson told Business Insider at the time that these instances of “false accepts” — or, having the Assistant triggered without a clear command from the user, like “Hey Google” — were rare and that it puts several protections in place to prevent this from happening. The spokesperson, however, would not comment on the high number of “false accepts” from the Dutch report.
At the time of the report, Google said it was “conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again.”
On Thursday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider that after learning about the Dutch audio data leaks, the company had already halted language reviews for the Assistant while it investigated the matter further. The spokesperson did not immediately confirm whether these reviews were halted worldwide or in Europe only.
In the past, Google has said it works with “language experts around the world to improve speech technology by transcribing a small set of queries.” That work, it has said, is “critical to developing technology that powers products like the Google Assistant.”
Although no immediate action was taken against Apple or Amazon— which both have been found to also listen in on their users — the commissioner’s report “invited” the companies “swiftly review” their policies and procedures.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) on Tuesday said more civilians were killed by the US and allied forces than by the Taliban and other militant groups during the first half of 2019.
The uptick in civilian deaths comes amid a US-led effort to draw down the international military presence in Afghanistan and end the 18-year war.
Key UN figures:
- 1,366 civilians were killed during the first six months of 2019, marking a 30% drop from last year.
- Pro-government forces, including the US and its international allies, killed 717 civilians.
- The Taliban, “Islamic State” and other militant groups killed 531 civilians.
- In total, 2,446 civilians were injured.
‘Shocking and unacceptable’
UNAMA said that while it welcomed the drop in civilian casualties, it “continues to regard the level of harm done to civilians as shocking and unacceptable.”
Tadamichi Yamamoto, who heads UNAMA, said: “We urge all parties to heed this imperative, to answer the call of Afghans for immediate steps to be taken to reduce the terrible harm being inflicted.”
End in sight?
In 2001, the US led an international mission to oust the Taliban after the militant group refused to hand over al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.
Since then, international forces have maintained a military presence in the country to shore up support for the government. The Taliban has refused to cease attacks unless the US winds down its deployment.
Peace talks have gained traction, according to the White House. However, previous efforts to secure a political solution to the conflict have failed to go beyond talks.
The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs.
The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement).
“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. It also goes on to say the FBI believes conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to increase during the 2020 presidential election cycle.
The FBI said another factor driving the intensity of this threat is “the uncovering of real conspiracies or cover-ups involving illegal, harmful, or unconstitutional activities by government officials or leading political figures.” The FBI does not specify which political leaders or which cover-ups it was referring to.
President Trump is mentioned by name briefly in the latest FBI document, which notes that the origins of QAnon is the conspiratorial belief that “Q,” allegedly a government official, “posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.”
This recent intelligence bulletin comes as the FBI is facing pressure to explain who it considers an extremist, and how the government prosecutes domestic terrorists. In recent weeks the FBI director has addressed domestic terrorism multiple times but did not publicly mention this new conspiracy theorist threat.
The FBI is already under fire for its approach to domestic extremism. In a contentious hearing last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray faced criticism from Democrats who said the bureau was not focusing enough on white supremacist violence. “The term ‘white supremacist,’ ‘white nationalist’ is not included in your statement to the committee when you talk about threats to America,” Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said. “There is a reference to racism, which I think probably was meant to include that, but nothing more specific.”
Wray told lawmakers the FBI had done away with separate categories for black identity extremists and white supremacists, and said the bureau was instead now focusing on “racially motivated” violence. But he added, “I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”
