Category Archives: Viva!

O’odham Ofelia Rivas ‘Welcome to Honduras Migrant Caravan’ — Censored News Live Video

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Above: Now on YouTube

Facebook live below:

Ofelia Rivas, O’odham, and Michelle Cook, Dine’, live from O’odham land. Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Censored News Live!
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O’odham Ofelia Rivas ‘Welcome to Honduras Migrant Caravan’ — Censored News Live Video

Ofelia Rivas, O’odham, to Honduras migrant caravan, “This is O’odham land. We do not recognize the foreign

Dance #children #atozchallenge

dance, dance, dance yass

penned in moon dust

feet joyfully tap

vocal chords follow

babies wiggle their feet

boys jump in the air

hard not to move to the beat

we’re in church

dancing

*

place in my heart

sun rises with daily greeting

smiling boy

The prompt at the wordpress photo challenge is Smile. Our friend’s boy Danny is a constant joy. We always want to bring him home with us when we leave Uganda.

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Kimmel on Trump v Amazon: ‘He’s jealous because Jeff Bezos is actually a billionaire’

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Comics discussed Trump’s attacks on Amazon and his statement about the state of US-Russia relations

Late-night hosts on Tuesday discussed president Trump’s attacks on Amazon and its owner Jeff Bezos, as well as his comments regarding the administration’s relationship with the Kremlin.

Related: Kimmel on Melania Trump: ‘all she’s been working on is an escape tunnel’

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As a Jewish Corbyn supporter, this antisemitism row feels like gaslighting | Rachel Shabi

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We have faced varying degrees of hostility and manipulation. But let’s not pretend Corbyn’s Labour invented antisemitism

It is utterly bewildering that Labour MPs and journalists thought it was fine to distinguish bad Jews from good this week, as a way to discredit Jeremy Corbyn’s Passover meeting with the radical London-based group Jewdas. These voices said the Jewish community organisation, friendly to the Labour leader, was the wrong kind of Jew. Yet other Jewish groups – those critical of the Labour leader – had until then refused to meet with him unconditionally. It wasn’t him refusing to meet them.

Related: Corbyn agrees to meet Jewish leaders for antisemitism talks

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Utah Prosecutor Drops Death Penalty in Prison Killing After Corrections Officials Withheld Evidence

A Utah judge has excoriated the Utah Department of Corrections for practices he called “sneaky” and “deceitful” and a state prosecutor has dropped the death penalty after learning that state prison officials had withheld nearly 1,600 pages of prison records from a defendant facing capital charges in a prison killing. Despite a court order to produce all prison records, the department had failed to disclose medical and mental health records detailing psychiatric medication Steven Douglas Crutcher (pictured, right) had been receiving in the months before he killed his prison cellmate. On March 28, 2018, following disclosure of the records, Sanpete County Attorney Kevin Daniels (pictured, left) withdrew the state’s notice to seek the death penalty and Judge Wallace Lee sentenced Crutcher to life. Preparing for an April 9 capital sentencing hearing, the defense learned in mid-February that the department had withheld medical and mental health records that Crutcher’s lawyer, Edward Brass, said “went to the heart” of the defense’s case. Brass alerted Daniels to the prison’s violation of the court order and Daniels, saying he was “irate” about the prison’s misconduct, withdrew the death penalty from the case. “I hold myself to the highest ethical standard,” he said, “and any withholding of information is an affront to justice. The whole concept of justice is that you put all the evidence, all the cards on the table, and if you go where the evidence leads you, it’s a just result.” “This could have been a disaster,” Brass told reporters. “If it wasn’t for the integrity of the county attorney, it would have been a disaster.” Judge Lee said he was “beyond angry” over the department’s behavior. “This was totally wrong and makes me doubt the credibility of everything I hear about the Department of Corrections,” he said. In a statement, the department blamed its failure to produce the records on a “misinterpretation” of Judge Lee’s October order, but defense lawyers said medical doctors at the prison had been so difficult to work with that one doctor even refused to tell them what medical school he had attended. The judge questioned how the department could have misunderstood an order that had directed it to produce Crutcher’s “entire file,” including all mental health records. “That is something I would expect from Russia or North Korea, not a society like we have under the Constitution,” Lee said. “It’s got to stop. I’ve worried that if it’s happened in this case, it’s happening in other cases out there.” A prison spokesperson told the media that the department has retrained its clinical services records staff on responding to court orders and records requests and has started reviewing other cases to determine whether court orders had been responded to appropriately. Utah Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers executive director Stewart Gollan said the department also has been uncooperative in releasing prisoners’ medical records in civil rights cases.

(Jessica Miller, Judge ‘beyond angry’ after Corrections workers withheld evidence, allowing Utah killer to avoid death penalty, Salt Lake Tribune, March 28, 2018; Jessica Miller, Could there be more cases where Utah Department of Corrections withheld medical records despite court orders?, Salt Lake Tribune, March 31, 2018.) See Utah and Official Misconduct

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On 50th anniversary of MLK assassination, ICE deports Khmer refugees to Cambodia

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By Sina Sam* and Soya Jung Today, the United States is scheduled to deport 43 Khmer refugees on a flight from El Paso, Texas to Cambodia. Some reportedly have significant mental and physical disabilities. The fact that these deportations are taking place today, on the 50th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. […]

When Robert F. Kennedy Told an Indianapolis Crowd of King’s Assassination

I have to say – 50 years later – I never really got over the deaths of Martin and Bobby. I was living and going to college at American University in Washington, D.C. at the time. In an improvised speech 50 years ago, Kennedy broke the news of King’s death to a largely black crowd. Two months later, he too was killed.

Wednesday Open Thread | Mueller preparing report about potential Trump obstruction of justice

Keep a Knocking till you get in!

Special counsel Robert Mueller is preparing a report on President Trump’s actions during his tenure in office and anything that could be considered obstruction of justice, according to The Washington Post.

Sources told the Post that Mueller relayed the information to Trump’s legal team, and emphasized his team’s need to sit down with the president in order to determine if he had any intent to foil the federal probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

More info: Mueller team wants to release report on Obstruction investigation, incidents during President’s time in office this June or July. AND THEN they continue with collusion probe. Hot Summer. pic.twitter.com/tFQHd9yZ4y

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 4, 2018

The publication also reported on Tuesday that Mueller told Trump’s lawyers last month that he does not consider the president to be a criminal target at this point in his probe.

Trump was reportedly relieved to hear that Mueller had not considered him to be a criminal target, and has expressed more willingness to agree to a future interview.

The president has said in the past that he would be willing to sit down with Mueller’s team.

However, the special counsel still considers the president to be a subject of his investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump’s advisers have warned that the special counsel could potentially put the president at risk of becoming a criminal target.

Trump has repeatedly denied that there was any collusion between his campaign and Russian election meddling and has referred to Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”

Opinion | For Russia, Trump Was a Vehicle, Not a Target

via aleksey godin

Last week, in a sentencing memorandum for the lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, the special counsel’s office noted that Rick Gates and “Person A” — an unnamed figure who has ties to a “Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016” — “were directly communicating in September and October 2016.”

What coverage there was of this staggering claim — evidence of a direct link between a member of Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence — and the Van Der Zwaan filing was quickly overtaken by controversy over the president’s relationship with an adult film star.

It’s been a year since I testified to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016. The revelations from Robert Mueller’s indictments since then have provided so much clarity on how Russia interfered in our democracy — yet Americans seem more confused about the question of possible collusion with Russia.

That is, in a way, by design — Russia’s design. Its infiltration and influence on America is difficult to understand, even with vastly more detail about Russia’s influence efforts.

A lot of the focus on the Mueller investigation has fallen on Donald Trump: Did he obstruct the investigation? Was he a “Manchurian Candidate” or just a Russian ally, by ideology or business interests?

In my view, as a former F.B.I. special agent who has watched the Kremlin’s infiltration of America since 2014, the answer may be neither. A standard Russian approach would have been to influence Mr. Trump through surrogates like Mr. Gates and Paul Manafort rather than through direct command through an individual — in this case, the candidate and then president.

Russian intelligence develops options and pathways over many years; as objectives arise — like the election of Mr. Trump — they focus and engage all available touch points.

The revelation last week about Mr. Gates’s connection is another piece of evidence to support that view. Russia’s efforts to influence, known by the Kremlin moniker Active Measures, did not seek a single pathway into the Trump team. Instead, they targeted a wide spectrum of influential Americans to subtly nudge their preferred policy into the mainstream and sideline foreign opponents. Russian intelligence services establish campaign objectives and compromise foreign targets through espionage, but their principal focus is to recruit agents of influence.

Typically, the Kremlin deploys layers of surrogates and proxies offering business inducements, information or threatened reprisals that can individually be explained away by coincidence while masking the strings and guiding hands of the Kremlin’s puppet masters and their objectives. When called upon by the Kremlin, oligarchs, contractors, criminals and spies (current or former) all provide levers for advancing President Vladimir Putin’s assault on democracies.

In Trump and his campaign, Mr. Putin spotted a golden opportunity — an easily ingratiated celebrity motivated by fame and fortune, a foreign policy novice surrounded by unscreened opportunists open to manipulation and unaware of Russia’s long run game of subversion.

Mr. Putin has succeeded where his Soviet forefathers failed by leveraging money and cyberspace to subtly infiltrate and influence Americans while maintaining plausible deniability of their efforts. And the Kremlin’s ground game “cut outs” — intermediaries who facilitate communication between agents — conducted a more complex game.

Each Mueller indictment and investigative lead illuminates more Kremlin influence avenues into President Trump’s inner circle. Mr. Van Der Zwaan, whose father-in-law is the Russian oligarch German Khan, lied to investigators about his conversations with Mr. Gates, the Trump deputy campaign manager, and a Person A, whom the F.B.I. assessed as a Russian intelligence agent and many believe to be Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of both Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort, a Trump campaign manager.

Evidence of Russia’s intent to interfere in the election is overwhelming, and documentation of Trump campaign members’ collusion not only exists but is growing. The special counsel’s investigation into collusion ultimately comes down to two questions. First, did President Trump or any member of his campaign willingly coordinate their actions with Russia? And did President Trump or any member of his campaign knowingly coordinate their action with Russia?

Trump campaign members certainly colluded with Russian influence efforts, some willingly, some possibly knowingly. The president denies the Kremlin’s hand, either still unaware or in denial of being manipulated by Mr. Putin’s minions. For Mr. Putin, it’s likely everything he hoped for — America riddled with political infighting and mired in investigations, a weakened NATO alliance vulnerable to aggression and a United States president seeking his adoration, obstinate and ignorant of the great caper the Kremlin just orchestrated.

The problem for the president is that ignorance is not immunity. The problem for America is that ignorance of Russian interference is vulnerability.