Tag Archives: WorldNews

Ex-Trump adviser sold $31m in shares days before president announced steel tariffs

#TraitorTrump pays off buddy with insider trader/traitor!

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Carl Icahn sold $31.3m of shares in a company dependent on steel imports days before the commerce department mooted stiff tariffs on imports

Carl Icahn, a former special adviser to Donald Trump, sold $31.3m of shares in a company heavily dependent on steel imports last week, shortly before Trump’s announcement of new tariffs sent its shares plummeting.

Icahn, a billionaire investor who was a major Trump supporter, started selling shares in the crane and lifting equipment supplier Manitowoc Company on 12 February, days before the commerce department first mooted plans to impose stiff tariffs on foreign steel imports.

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In a Case of Awful Timing, Trump Administration Seeks Shutdown of New School Safety Research

by Ted Gest

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut at the end of 2012, Congress scrambled to do something in response to the nation’s worst school shooting.

Lacking agreement on gun control measures, lawmakers did what they do best in such situations: spend money on studying the problem.

Thus was born the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI), which aimed at throwing a large pot of federal funds to researchers to examine just about every aspect of what might lead people to commit violence against students of all ages.

The $75 million annually awarded to the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) was an especially large sum for a single crime problem, more than the agency normally spends on researching every other crime issue combined. (The appropriation dropped to about $50 million this year.)

In a case of bad timing, the Trump administration on Feb. 12 asked Congress to bring the program to a halt.

The Office of Management and Budget had no way of knowing that only two days later, a teenage gunman would enter a Florida high school from which he had been expelled and kill 17 students and staff members, an event that like the Newtown, CT, shooting more than five years earlier would start a new scramble in Congress and elsewhere to find ways of preventing a repeat episode.

The question now is whether Congress will pay attention to one of the latest Trump budget-cutting moves, which was buried at the bottom of page 719 of the lengthy spending plan sent to Capitol Hill.

The answer may not be as simple as it may seem at first glance.

That is because some insiders believe it was questionable for Congress to throw so much money at one crime and safety question and expect quick results.

What has happened is that hardly any of the research commissioned as a result of Congress’ 2013 spending action has been completed. That is not surprising, given that major research projects in criminal justice and many other fields of study take several years to complete.

That fact led officials of the Trump-led Justice Department to seek a pause in the school safety research.

Asked to comment on the budget request, which was not highlighted when the DOJ budget was released, the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which includes NIJ, noted that school safety research had received a total of $275 million in the last three fiscal years but that “this program was not intended to be a permanent funding stream.”

The agency added that, “The results of currently funded projects will continue to provide evidence about what works (and what does not) in keeping our schools safe and to inform future resource decisions. Almost all CSSI-funded projects are still active and final reports have not yet been published.”

Nearly a year ago, in its first budget message to Congress, the Trump White House sought to cut back but not eliminate the school safety research program. Lawmakers rejected the request and kept it going with about $50 million.

As The Crime Report reported last spring, at the time NIJ described the results of a few studies that had been completed. In one, the Rand Corp. made several recommendations, such as that “technology developers should turn their focus to the general area of communications, including devising low-cost ways to allow teachers to have direct, layered, two-way communication with a central command and control system.”

NIJ lists the ongoing school safety research on its website, at least some of which could provide information relating to the kind of shooting that hit Parkland, Fl., this month.

For example, a grant was given to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City to do several things, such as providing “a comprehensive understanding of the perpetrators of school shootings and test causal factors to assess if mass and non-mass shootings are comparable.”

Researcher Joshua Freilich said his work is not yet finished. He notes that because school crime encompasses disparate activities such as non-school related incidents such as a drug deal gone bad, workplace violence, suicide, and the intentional targeting of students and employees as happened in Florida, the John Jay project will provide “a typology of event types and their prevalence so as to provide policy makers an accurate assessment of the nature of the phenomenon.”

Examples of grants under the program last year include about $7 million to the Leidos Innovations Corporation of suburban Washington, D.C., to operate a “National Criminal Justice Technology Resource Center,” and another $7 million to the Rand Corp., with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the Nebraska Department of Education “to scale-up the Good Behavior Game (GBG),” described as “an evidence-based classroom behavior management approach emphasizing positive reinforcement.”

One expert with an insight into the program is Greg Ridgeway of the University of Pennsylvania’s criminology department, who was acting NIJ director when CSSI began.

Ridgeway says that the initial $75 million provided by Congress may have been an “overinvestment” and that eliminating the program now “would undercut the progress.”

A better way to fund such research, he suggests, would be a smaller but steadier amount each year. He gave the example of research on violence against women, which has received about $4 million annually for more than two decades.

“That modest but sustained investment has resulted in a large body of research, a cadre of researchers and students studying the problem, a comprehensive understanding of the issues, and findings on what works,” he says.

Applying that idea to schools, he says that reducing the funding to about $10 million a year for seven more years would save a lot of money “while still keeping the research community engaged in figuring out what works in school safety.”

Officers of the Crime and Justice Research Alliance, which represents two major criminology organizations, issued a statement Monday saying in part, “We were surprised and troubled to see that the President’s FY 2019 Budget Request–released just two days before the Parkland shooting–did not request a continuation of this funding.”

The group’s leaders added that, “Termination of the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative would result in less research and knowledge to improve school safety in our public schools, and detract from efforts to reduce/avoid future school shootings and violence.” They noted that “one year of funding for CSSI research projects represents approximately three tenths of one percent of the cost of the proposed $25 billion US/Mexico border wall.”

Not everyone will support a liberally funded school crime research program. Kenneth Trump, a Cleveland-based school safety advocate (who is not related to the president) said that the federal program should be continued “but not to the tune of the millions and millions that the Obama administration put into it.”

Kenneth Trump believes that federal funding on school safety “needs to be balanced out with programs putting resources directly into local schools.”

It is too early to say what will happen to the school safety research program now, but it is a fair bet that after the Florida school shooting, Congress will again spurn the Trump administration and keep it going, albeit at a more modest level.


Ted Gest is president of Criminal Justice Journalists and Washington bureau chief of The Crime Report where this first appeared. The Crime Report provides comprehensive reporting and analysis of criminal justice news and research in the U.S. and abroad.

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Photo from Columbine High School shooting security video, courtesy of Wikipedia 

‘It’s disgraceful’: Trump announces tariffs on steel, aluminium imports

Disgraceful is a proposal to push up costs for building in US, increase profits for a few companies that will not grow any jobs and lie about past industrialists in US who let Europe and Japan lead in innovation while they hid behind tariffs in 1950s and 1969s!

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After a “night of chaos” in the White House, Donald Trump catches top officials off guard as he declares the US will impose hefty tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, dramatically raising the possibility of a showdown with China and other key trading partners.

‘I dare you to tell me arming teachers will make us safe,’ says student after Georgia incident

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Jesse Randal Davidson, a popular teacher at Dalton high school, is accused of firing shots in class, prompting debate on arming educators

Police say they don’t know why a popular teacher allegedly fired a handgun inside his classroom, causing a chaotic lockdown and evacuation of his Georgia high school. But it immediately pierced the national debate over whether educators should be armed.

Related: Georgia police take teacher into custody after shots fired at school

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Steel and aluminum tariffs trigger sharp US stock market sell-off

Lazy steel industrialists used earlier tariffs of the 1950s and 1960s to let Europe and Japan out innovate the US steel industry. All this will do is up profits for stockholders of few US steel companies left, raise costs of housing, and will increase jobs by $00.00!

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The threat of a trade war with China led the Dow Jones to lose over 570 points and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both to drop close to 2%

US stock markets tumbled on Thursday after Donald Trump said the United States would impose tariffs of 25% on steel imports and 10% on imported aluminum next week.

The threat of a trade war with China and higher goods prices led to a sharp sell-off with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing over 570 points (2.23%) and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both dropping close to 2%.

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Head of Nation’s Biggest Teachers’ Union Says Arming School Teachers is “Insane”

“Firearm skills degrade quickly,” wrote the NASRO, “which is why most law enforcement agencies require their officers to practice on a shooting range frequently (as often as once per month), under simulated, high-stress conditions. Anyone without such frequent, ongoing practice will likely have difficulty using a firearm safely and effectively.”

And then there was this point:

“Anyone who hasn’t received the extensive training provided to law enforcement officers will likely be mentally unprepared to take a life, especially the life of a student assailant.”

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump hosted another meeting pertaining to the frightening and tragic issue of school shootings, and what the nation ought to be doing to prevent them. The president has hosted a series of such meetings in the two weeks since the Feb. 14 killing of seventeen students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida.

At each meeting, POTUS has suggested a slightly different combination of possible policy changes, the most controversial and consistent being his notion of arming a significant percentage of school teachers with guns.

Also on Wednesday, Randi Weingarten the head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), sent a polite but firmly-worded letter to President Trump to explain why his recent proposal to arm teachers, most of whom are members of her union, was….well…insane.

Actually, Ms. Weingarten, who has held the top position of the powerful 1.7 million member union since 2008, didn’t use the word “insane” in her letter. She did, however, use it on C-SPAN a few days earlier.

Instead, Weingarten told Mr.Trump what she’d heard when she held “a telephone town hall” about the matter in which 600,000 educators participated, and also what she said she’d learned in talking to hundreds of educators in Broward County after the school massacre in Parkland.

“The response we have heard,” she wrote, “is universal. Teachers don’t want to be armed. We want to teach. Our first instinct is to protect kids, not engage in a shootout that would place more children in danger.”

This don’t-arm-teachers message was most notably expressed, according to the union leader, “from educators who are gun owners, military veterans and National Rifle Association members.”

Trump’s call to arms for teachers, Weingarten also pointed out, brings up a host of logistical questions.

First of all, how exactly would this work? Would every classroom now need a gun closet? If so, “where would the key be stored?”

Most armed professionals are expected to regularly recertify for proficiency, she pointed out. So what what about teachers? And what kind of guns are we talking about, Weingarten asked. Would teachers get firearms “similar to the military-style AR-15 weapons” that so many school shooters seemed to favor?

What about funding? Who would provide the billions of dollars it would take to pay for guns, ammunition and training, “when so many schools currently lack nurses, guidance counselors, and school resource officers and have a multitude of other unmet needs?” Surely those needs should come first.

And in the seconds after an active shooter alert, “are teachers supposed to get their guns or get their students to safety?”

Last of all, she wanted to know if teachers would be “held liable for their actions and decisions?”

Weingarten is also an attorney.

As fate would have it, a few hours after Weingarten’s letter went off to the president and was forwarded to the press, the point of view that the majority of her union members seemed to share was scarily illustrated when a well-liked 53-year-old social studies teacher at Dalton High School in northwest Georgia, locked his classroom door, and proceeded to terrify students by firing a shot through his classroom window.

Although, according to Dalton police, the teacher, whose name is Jesse Randall Davidson, ultimately surrendered to officers peacefully, the incident was sobering.

It is also interesting to note that, like the majority of teachers, school resource officers are dead against the idea of arming educators. The National Association of School Resource Officers said as much in detail a week ago, with a press release that listed six very specific reasons why.

One of the reasons made the same point that Weingarten made about recertification:

“Firearm skills degrade quickly,” wrote the NASRO, “which is why most law enforcement agencies require their officers to practice on a shooting range frequently (as often as once per month), under simulated, high-stress conditions. Anyone without such frequent, ongoing practice will likely have difficulty using a firearm safely and effectively.”

And then there was this point:

“Anyone who hasn’t received the extensive training provided to law enforcement officers will likely be mentally unprepared to take a life, especially the life of a student assailant.”

One might hope that teachers and school cops would have the last word on this issue. Yet, this week, Florida’s Republican-controlled state House and Senate moved bills forward that would train teachers to carry guns in classrooms.

Lawmakers in Michigan, Alabama, and Tennessee have their own similar bills moving through the legislative process.

Interestingly, several of the Tennessee lawmakers who strongly favored the bill in question argued, without any apparent irony, that the proposed law to arm educators was particularly necessary because the state had not allocated funds to hire school resource officers.