NY Times reporter responds to Trump's story denial

HAMAS, ISLAMIC JIHAD AGAIN CELEBRATE ‘VICTORY’ - ANALYSIS

jpost

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials see the ceasefire agreement that was reached with Israel early on Monday as a “big achievement.”

In their view, the latest round of fighting – during which the two groups fired some 700 missiles toward Israel – has “deterred” Israel and forced it to commit to the implementation of previous Egyptian-sponsored understandings, which include easing restrictions imposed on the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave.

The Law of War Permits Israel to Destroy Hamas

nationalreview

As of this moment, a fragile truce holds in southern Israel. After Hamas volleyed 600 missiles at Israeli civilian targets on Saturday and Sunday, prompting Israel to attack hundreds of targets in Gaza, the air-raid sirens have fallen silent, for now.

But over the weekend, when the rockets fell, we saw all the old arguments against Israel’s acts of self-defense crop up. The air raids were “disproportionate,” we were told. There were arguments over individual civilian casualties, as if it would somehow discredit Israel if its precision strikes killed more than a handful of noncombatants. Yes, there were rote condemnations of Hamas’s efforts to kill as many civilians as it could, but once again all too many voices on the left rose at once, demanding that the nation under attack — the nation defending its schools, hospitals, and homes from an indiscriminate rocket barrage — exercise restraint.

Trump Would Have Been Charged With Obstruction If He Weren't President, 370 Former Prosecutors Say

time

Nearly 400 former federal prosecutors say in a new letter that President Donald Trump would have been charged with obstruction of justice for his acts if he were anyone other than president.

The letter was signed by more than 370 ex-prosecutors who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations. It was released by Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization critical of the Trump administration.

Finding a New Path Israel wakes up to the needs of ex-Haredim

Tabletmag

Leaving the ultra-Orthodox community is nothing new in Israel. Everyone, secular or religious, knows someone who used to be on, but is now “off the derech.” But the phenomenon hasn’t been well studied. Most of what we know comes from individual stories of people making the difficult transition from the insular Haredi world to mainstream Israeli society.

Now there is data to flesh out these stories, in the form of a report commissioned by the Israeli nonprofit Out For Change. The report provides a picture of ex-Haredim in unprecedented detail, estimating how many people leave Haredi communities each year, and describing who they are and why they leave. It also discusses new programs to serve the needs of ex-Haredim, many of them partnerships between nonprofits and the Israeli government. Still, it argues that much more must done to support ex-Haredim in the ways they deserve.

Previous attempts to study Haredi disaffiliation have been limited in scope. For example, a 2009 survey from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics included a single question asking whether respondents’ level of religious observance had increased, decreased, or remained unchanged over their lifetime. The new report, which Out For Change co-CEO Yossi Klar called “the first major research about this phenomenon in Israel,” takes a broader and deeper approach.

Neri Horowitz, author of the report and chairman of the Agora Policy Think Tank, took on the topic from many angles. He conducted in-depth interviews with former Haredim, about 100 individually and 100 in focus groups. He also spoke to “almost every person involved in supporting ex-Haredim” in Israel, said Klar. This included directors at Out For Change and Hillel: The Right To Choose, the other Israeli agency serving ex-Haredim, who provided data on the number of new people they serve each year. He interviewed less obvious sources, too, including welfare department employees in cities with large Haredi populations, who receive government subsidies based on the number of youth they’ve identified as “at risk,” many of whom are ex-Haredim.

Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

Scientificamerican

What do we really know about our universe?

Born out of a cosmic explosion 13.8 billion years ago, the universe rapidly inflated and then cooled, it is still expanding at an increasing rate and mostly made up of unknown dark matter and dark energy ... right?

This well-known story is usually taken as a self-evident scientific fact, despite the relative lack of empirical evidence—and despite a steady crop of discrepancies arising with observations of the distant universe.

In recent months, new measurements of the Hubble constant, the rate of universal expansion, suggested major differences between two independent methods of calculation. Discrepancies on the expansion rate have huge implications not simply for calculation but for the validity of cosmology's current standard model at the extreme scales of the cosmos.

Another recent probe found galaxies inconsistent with the theory of dark matter, which posits this hypothetical substance to be everywhere. But according to the latest measurements, it is not, suggesting the theory needs to be reexamined.

It's perhaps worth stopping to ask why astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter to be everywhere in the universe? The answer lies in a peculiar feature of cosmological physics that is not often remarked. For a crucial function of theories such as dark matter, dark energy and inflation, which each in its own way is tied to the big bang paradigm, is not to describe known empirical phenomena but rather to maintain the mathematical coherence of the framework itself while accounting for discrepant observations. Fundamentally, they are names for something that must exist insofar as the framework is assumed to be universally valid.

Donald Trump's 'Kentuky Derby' tweet makes literally no sense

CNN

 It's easy to dismiss any one of Donald Trump's tweets as ephemera because, well, there are just so many of them. That goes double for a Trump tweet about a sporting event given the fact that he, uh, isn't an expert in that arena.

hem. 

And yet, there's just something about the President's tweet on Sunday about the result of the Kentucky Derby that makes it impossible to simply ignore. Because it's about more than the tweet. It's about the man behind the tweet. A man who also happens to be the leader of the free world.

First, the tweet:

"The Kentuky Derby decision was not a good one. It was a rough & tumble race on a wet and sloppy track, actually, a beautiful thing to watch. Only in these days of political correctness could such an overturn occur. The best horse did NOT win the Kentucky Derby - not even close!?" (Trump later corrected his original tweet -- spelling "Kentucky" properly.)

Man freed from prison after 30 years faces new rape charge

Nypost

A Massachusetts man who spent roughly 30 years in prison for rape before being freed in 2016 is facing new charges in connection with a January sex assault, authorities said.

George Perrot, 51, was arraigned Monday in Salem Superior Court on charges of rape, assault and battery on a police officer, resisting arrest and open and gross lewdness after police said he was found unconscious on top of a partially naked woman who was also unconscious.

Perrot, according to the Boston Globe, became a “symbol for criminal justice reform advocates” after his release in 2016 based on flawed testimony about microscopic hair evidence. He was convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison for raping a 78-year-old woman in her Springfield home two years earlier when he was 17.

Perrot was then granted a new trial in 1990 after a court ruled that prosecutors improperly presented evidence during his trial, The Republican reported. Two years later, he was convicted a second time and was again sentenced to life in prison.

But he was later released on bail in 2016 after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that testimony during that second trial “exceeded the foundational science” of hair analysis, according to The Republican. The guilty verdict was overturned and a third trial was ordered, but prosecutors decided against it since the victim had died and other factors.

Perrot’s release at the time was lauded by criminal justice reform advocates, including those at The Innocence Project and the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and Brandeis University, according to The Republican.

On Venezuela, Trump sides with Putin over his own team

msnbc

A few months ago, Axios had an interesting report on Donald Trump’s perspective on Venezuela, which had been shaped in part on the president’s interactions with “the Venezuelan expats who frequent his golf club” in south Florida. As crises in the South American country mounted, this did not inspire confidence in the future of the administration’s policy.

Late last week, however, anxieties grew more acute. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the case that Russia had effectively “invaded” Venezuela, and as a consequence, Moscow was exerting undo control over developments in the country. It was a message Pompeo – the United States’ chief diplomat and the man responsible for executing the American president’s foreign policy – had pushed repeatedly in a variety of forums.

Similarly, White House National Security Advisor Michael Bolton thought it was his job to push back against Russian interference in Venezuelan affairs. All of which made this Oval Office exchange between a reporter and Donald Trump on Friday afternoon that much more notable.

Q: Mr. President, you spoke with Vladimir Putin earlier today.

TRUMP: Yes, I did.

Q: What options are you looking at to get humanitarian assistance to Venezuela?

TRUMP: Yeah, I had a very good talk with President Putin – probably over an hour. And we talked about many things. Venezuela was one of the topics. And he is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela.

President Trump Is Spending $20 Billion on an Aircraft Carrier. The Navy Wanted That Money for Cybersecurity

time

In March, a report to the Secretary of the Navy warned that the service is preparing for the wrong war, one fought not with bombs and artillery but with terabytes and artificial intelligence.

“We find the Department of the Navy preparing to win some future kinetic battle, while it is losing the current global, counter-force, counter-value, cyber war,” the report says.

President Donald Trump, however, this week ordered the Navy to continue preparing for the last war, surprising Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, Navy Secretary Richard Spencer and Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. John Richardson, on Tuesday by reversing his February decision to retire the 21-year-old nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman.

President Trump's Tariffs Will Hurt America More Than China

forbes

Let’s stop pretending. An import tariff is nothing but a tax on consumers and businesses. Not in the exporting country, but the importing one. So the 10% tariff on $200bn of Chinese imports that President Trump has just imposed is in reality a new tax on Americans. And it will hurt America much more than China.

Stocks tumble as Trump threatens to raise Chinese import tariffs

.ft

US stocks opened sharply lower on Monday after Donald Trump threatened to raise tariffs on all Chinese imports to 25 per cent, sharply ratcheting up pressure on Beijing to make concessions in trade talks and sending global equities markets sliding.  The US president made the threat in a number of tweets on Sunday and Monday just a few days ahead of a make-or-break round of trade negotiations scheduled to begin on Wednesday.

cbsnews

In renewing a threat to sharply raise tariffs this week on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods from China, President Trump said in a tweet on Sunday that the levies have had little impact on U.S. consumers -- it is the Chinese who are bearing the brunt of the trade war between the world's two biggest economies, he claimed.

Yet research suggests otherwise, showing that American consumers and businesses are taking the biggest hit in the form of higher prices and costs. That's especially true in areas of the country that typically vote for Republican candidates, like farming communities in the Midwest, according to one recent study by economists from UCLA, University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University and the World Bank.

bloomberg

Trade wars are good, and easy to win. So President Donald Trump said last year as he embarked on his first round of tariffs on foreign imports.

It seems that things have proven so good and easy that he’s readying for another bout. Trump is prepared to increase a 10 percent levy on $200 billion of imports from China to 25 percent on Friday, he tweeted on Sunday — instantly popping any hopes that trade talks were on their final approach toward an amicable resolution.

The president had a justification for casually slapping a $30 billion trade impost via tweet — the Chinese will pay anyway:

RASHIDA TLAIB SLAMS 'NYT' FOR HEADLINE ON GAZA VIOLENCE; OMAR SILENT

.jpost

  

Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. (photo credit: REUTERS/REBECCA COOK AND ERIC MILLER/REUTERS)

US Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib slammed a New York Times headline that framed the violence in Israel as being initiated by a barrage of rockets from Gaza.

"When will the world stop dehumanizing our Palestinian people who just want to be free?" she tweeted. "Headlines like this & framing it in this way just feeds into the continued lack of responsibility on Israel who unjustly oppress & target Palestinian children and families."