Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
AP’s Today in History for February 19th
U.S. Marines begin landing on Iwo Jima; President Franklin D. Roosevelt gives the U.S. Military the authority to relocate and detain Japanese-Americans.
Breakfast Tune Moscow Nights
Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below
‘Sweden, who would believe this?’: Trump cites non-existent terror attack
Alexandra Topping, The Guardian
Donald Trump appeared to invent a terrorist attack in Sweden during a campaign-style rally in Florida on Saturday, inviting questions that he may have confused the Scandinavian country with a city in Pakistan.
With thousands of supporters gathered in an aircraft hangar in Melbourne, Florida, Trump used his speech to talk about migration in Europe and linked it to terror attacks in Brussels, Nice and Paris. He then added Sweden to the list, incorrectly stating that an attack had happened there on Friday.
Trump told supporters: “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden.”
“Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. …
Eight people flee U.S. border patrol to seek asylum in Canada
Christinne Muschi, Reuters
Eight asylum-seekers, including four children, barely made it across the Canadian border on Friday as a U.S. border patrol officer tried to stop them and a Reuters photographer captured the scene.
As a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer seized their passports and questioned a man in the front passenger seat of a taxi that had pulled up to the border in Champlain, New York, four adults and four young children fled the cab and ran to Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the other side.
One by one they scrambled across the snowy gully separating the two countries. RCMP officers watching from the other side helped them up, lifting the younger children and asking a woman, who leaned on her fellow passenger as she walked, if she needed medical care.
The children looked back from where they had come as the U.S. officer held the first man, saying his papers needed to be verified. …
Iraq launches west Mosul offensive as torture videos emerge
Emma Graham-Harrison, Fazel Hawramy and Matthew Taylor, The Guardian
Iraqi government forces have launched an offensive to capture the western part of the city of Mosul from Islamic State.
Hundreds of military vehicles, backed by air power, were filmed travelling across the desert towards the jihadis’ positions in the city early on Sunday.
Government forces retook the eastern side of Mosul, the last major Isis stronghold in Iraq, last month. But military officials say the western side of the city, with its narrow, winding streets, may prove a bigger challenge.
According to Lt Gen Abdulamir Yarallah the latest attack began well, with the rapid response units capturing the villages of Athbah and al-Lazzagah near Mosul airport.
However, the launch of the new offensive was overshadowed by graphic videos of men in Iraqi security force uniforms carrying out beatings and killings of unarmed people on the streets of Mosul. …
VAGUE RULES LET ICE DEPORT UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS AS GANG MEMBERS
Ali Winston, The Intercept
OF THE MORE than 680 people swept up during last week’s nationwide raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, none has attracted more attention than 23-year-old Daniel Ramirez Medina. Although he crossed into the United States illegally when he was a child, Ramirez Medina twice applied successfully for permission to stay in the country under the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Program.
The former California resident, who recently moved north to Des Moines, Washington, was detained on Friday when ICE went to his family’s home looking for his father, who is also undocumented and in removal proceedings.
ICE claims Ramirez Medina’s DACA status is null and void due to evidence of gang involvement outlined by government attorneys in a brief filed earlier this week. The sum of the evidence is a tattoo on his arm that immigration officials believe is gang related, and statements that he allegedly made in custody that “he used to hang out with the Sureno[s] in California,” that he “fled California to escape the gangs,” and that he “still hangs out with the Paizas in Washington State.”
While his defense attorneys and government lawyers contested claims about unconstitutional detention and doctored evidence in court this morning, Ramirez Medina’s case sheds light on ICE’s broad criteria for identifying gang members, which dates from George W. Bush’s presidency and has been used to deport thousands of individuals — including DACA recipients — over the past decade. …
48 QUESTIONS THE FBI USES TO DETERMINE IF SOMEONE IS A LIKELY TERRORIST
Cora Currier, Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept
FOR THE PAST year and a half, the FBI has been using a secret scoring system to judge the likelihood that someone will carry out a violent attack. The survey, called “Indicators of Mobilization to Violence,” assigns points based on factors like religious observance, travel history, financial transactions, and physical appearance.
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The survey itself consists of 48 questions that agents are supposed to answer about terror suspects as part of an investigation. The document also includes a set of frequently asked questions about the scoring system aimed at agents working counterterrorism investigations.
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Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Texas A&M University and expert on programs aimed at countering violent extremism, told The Intercept that some of the questions are subject to bias by FBI agents.“Any effort to create ideological prototypes of people that are presumed to be susceptible to violence can have a chilling effect on constitutionally protected free speech,” Aziz said. “When government agents are screening people based on ideological beliefs or lifestyles that are not directly associated with criminal activity, it casts a wide net, and that can create serious consequences for targeted communities.” …
AS CONSTRUCTION NEAR STANDING ROCK RESTARTS, PIPELINE FIGHTS FLARE ACROSS THE U.S.
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
UNDER ORDERS FROM President Donald Trump, the Army Corps of Engineers on February 7 approved a final easement allowing Energy Transfer Partners to drill under the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Construction has re-started, and lawyers for the company say it could take as little as 30 days for oil to flow through the Dakota Access pipeline.
While the Standing Rock Sioux and neighboring tribes attempt to halt the project in court, other opponents of the pipeline have launched what they’re calling a “last stand,” holding protests and disruptive actions across the U.S. In North Dakota, where it all began, a few hundred people continue to live at camps on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, using them as bases for prayer and for direct actions to block construction. Last week, camps were served eviction notices from Governor Doug Burgum and from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, demanding that they clear the biggest camp, Oceti Sakowin, by Wednesday and a smaller camp, Sacred Stone, within 10 days.
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Now, most of the thousands of people that visited Standing Rock last fall have returned home, and some have taken up long-shot local fights against the oil and gas industry. In Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee it’s the Diamond pipeline; in Louisiana, the Bayou Bridge. In Wisconsin, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa actually voted to decommission and remove the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline from their reservation.Many communities have turned to direct action as a last resort. The city of Lafayette, Colorado, which has long attempted to block fracking in the area, has even proposed a climate bill of rights, enforceable via nonviolent direct action if the legal system fails.
In at least four states, encampments built as bases for pipeline resistance have emerged. They face corporations emboldened by Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress, which have used their first weeks in power to grant fossil fuel industry wishes, overturning environmental protections, appointing Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, and reviving the halted Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipeline projects. …
- Staples Removed: How Postal Workers Defeated a Privatization Scheme
Alexandra Bradbury
- The Trouble With Trade: People Understand It
Dean Baker
- Will the CIA Restart Its Torture Program?
Laura Durkay
- Party Unity or Bust: An Open Letter to the DNC
Chris O’Hara
Something to think about over coffee prozac
Woolly Mammoth Could Be ‘De-Extinct’ In 2 Years, Scientist Says
Did we learn nothing from “Jurassic Park?”
A Harvard University scientist told The Guardian this week that his team is only two years from resurrecting some traits of the woolly mammoth, which went extinct during the last ice age. The goal is to create an embryo that’s a hybrid of the woolly mammoth and its closest living relative, the Asian elephant.
“Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” researcher George Church told The Guardian. “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits.” …
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