President-elect Donald J. Trump has offered the post of national security adviser to Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, potentially elevating a retired intelligence officer who believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global scale to one of the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy, according to a top official on Mr. Trump’s transition team.
It was not clear whether General Flynn, 57, a registered Democrat who was fired as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 by President Obama, had accepted the position. General Flynn advised Mr. Trump throughout his campaign, and as national security adviser, he would be a critical gatekeeper to the president, overseeing a staff of roughly 400 people.
In the role, he would often have the last word on how Mr. Trump should handle crises that could range from a showdown with China over the South China Sea to an international health crisis like the Ebola epidemic.
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Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn accused former secretary of state Colin L. Powell of writing “really mean things” in his private emails late Wednesday, after Powell’s emails were leaked online and showed him lambasting Flynn as “right-wing nutty” and a poor leader before retiring…
“I spoke at DIA last month,” Powell wrote to his son, Michael, on July 19 before relaying a story he apparently heard from Marine Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, the current DIA director. “Flynn got fired as head of DIA. His replacement is a black Marine 3-star. I asked why Flynn got fired. Abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since.”
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… The appearance was only the latest eyebrow-raising episode involving Flynn, 56, who was one of the most respected military intelligence officers of his generation but who has spurned the decorum traditionally expected of retired U.S. flag officers and become the only national security figure of his rank and experience to publicly align himself with Trump, the Republican nominee. […]
He has called President Obama a “liar,” declared the U.S. justice system “corrupt” and insisted that he was pushed out of his assignment as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency because of his views on radical Islam. The claim has left former superiors seething, including Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to current and former officials who said Flynn was removed because of management problems. […]
He sees the nation as beset by darkness and corruption, with voters split between “centrist nationalists” and “socialists.” […]
Former subordinates at the DIA said Flynn was so prone to dubious pronouncements that senior aides coined a term — “Flynn facts” — for assertions that seemed questionable or inaccurate. […].
Asked on Al Jazeera in May whether he would allow the military to carry out Trump’s threat to kill any families of suspected terrorists, Flynn replied, “I would have to see the circumstances of that situation.”
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David Petraeus – the former US army general and CIA director who was prosecuted for mishandling classified information – has entered the race to become Donald Trump’s secretary of state, diplomatic sources said on Thursday.
Petraeus resigned in November 2012 after the FBI discovered he had had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and had shared classified information with her. He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for mishandling the information. People who have seen him recently say he is anxious to return to public life and has privately refused to rule out serving in a Trump administration.
Petraeus, who was also a US commander in Afghanistan and Iraq, has made flattering remarks about Trump since the election.
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A prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump set off concern and condemnation on behalf of Muslims on Wednesday after citing World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps as a “precedent” for an immigrant registry suggested by a member of the president-elect’s transition team.
The supporter, Carl Higbie, a former spokesman for Great America PAC, an independent fund-raising committee, made the comments in an appearance on “The Kelly File” on Fox News.
He was referring to a suggestion by Kris Kobach, a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, that the new administration could reinstate a national registry for immigrants from countries where terrorist groups were active.
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Since the election of Donald Trump as president, the 32-year-old mother of four has struggled to calm her children's fears, especially those of her 11-year-old daughter.
As an undocumented immigrant with children in Metro Nashville Public Schools, staying strong has been top priority. The woman has been living in the United States for more than 15 years — all her children are U.S. citizens. She knows she could face deportation at any time, leaving her kids on their own.
"She’s having nightmares," the woman said of her daughter, who attends Liberty Collegiate Academy. "She doesn’t want to live alone. She doesn’t want to be adopted. She tells me, ‘I don’t want to have new parents.’ ”
The woman asked that she not be identified because of her immigration status and concerns over a potential backlash.
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In his first televised interview as president-elect, Donald Trump gave a glimpse into his plans for large-scale deportations. He suggested his administration would initially target 2-3 million undocumented immigrants for removal, people who he branded criminals, “gang members, drugs dealers”. But even a cursory analysis of Trump’s target number of deportations shows that he will have to deport far more than undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes.
The incoming Trump administration will try to implement the harshest immigration regime in presidential history, with his closest advisers making clear they will seek to expedite these deportations. And those deported are likely to include a far greater number of those who have lived in the US for years – perhaps, experts warn, even those who are in the US on temporary visas or green cards. […]
Trump’s advisers have now acknowledged their net will need to widen and have started explaining that the administration will seek to deport not just convicted criminals but also those accused of a crime or gang affiliation as well as those charged with minor immigration violations, such as illegal re-entry.
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More than a week after the election of Donald Trump, educators are struggling to contain a cauldron of tensions bubbling up at many schools in the form of racial incidents and bullying.
Just as the 2016 presidential election emboldened aggressive and sometimes hate-filled displays among adults, teachers say students have shown some of the same behaviors.
"Those kids are terrified," says Maureen Costello, director of the Teaching Tolerance project at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). "There's something very, very ugly, and it is erupting at schools, which are places where we just can't afford to let that happen."
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He is 93 now, old enough to remember gleefully casting a vote for Franklin Roosevelt in the fall of 1944. But George Sakheim has no trouble calling upon memories from even earlier in life, revisiting his childhood with the ease of a man flipping through a photo album. […]
Sakheim immigrated to the U.S. in 1938, served in the 104th Infantry Division during World War II, and later worked as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. He didn’t hesitate to offer his opinion. “People aren’t going to want to hear it, but as [Trump] talked more and more, he sounded more and more like Hitler,” he said. “There’s that grandiosity, that self-importance, that feeling that he knows everything, that he knows more than the generals.”
Some will howl at such a comment and say it’s unfair to make that comparison, that this is all just sour grapes because Hillary Clinton didn’t win the damned election. Sakheim cautions that it’s too early to know what kind of shape Trump’s administration will take, what kinds of policies it will truly enact. He was encouraged by Trump’s more demure tone during an interview on 60 Minutes. But Sakheim and the ever-dwindling number of Holocaust survivors also lived through the history that you only vaguely paid attention to in school. They know what can happen when hate is allowed to thrive.
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The dramatic increase in anti-Semitism and hate crimes since Election Day is a horrifying flashback for veteran Jewish Americans. As one says, ‘I lived through one Hitler, I don’t want to live through another.’
Residents at the New School’s Kerrey Hall usually scrawl uplifting messages on their doors to cheer each other on. But last Saturday, residents on the 15th floor awoke not to smiley faces but swastikas, etched on the doors of Jewish, minority and LGBT women. It was just one of 400 instances of hate registered through the Southern Poverty Law Center in the week following the upset win of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
“I grew up knowing my grandmother survived the Nazis as a small child in France,” said Kerrey resident Claire Cohen, 20. She is a sophomore at the private New York university, which was once a refuge for Jewish professors purged from German academia during Hitler’s rise to power. “Though I’ve never experienced the type of hate my grandmother did,” Cohen added, “I never thought I would see something like this happen at a liberal school known for being a safe haven.”
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The U.S. Geological Survey recently discovered the largest continuous oil and gas deposit ever found in the United States, officials said Tuesday.
The agency announced that the Wolfcamp shale, located in the Midland Basin portion of Texas’ Permian Basin, contains 20 billion barrels of oil and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquid. […]
“The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more,” said Walter Guidroz, program coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Energy Resources Program.
The oil is worth around $900 billion at current prices, Bloomberg News reported.
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Hundreds of businesses such as Starbucks, General Mills and Hewlett Packard are asking President-elect Donald Trump to follow through on U.S. commitments to combat climate change. They argue it's good for business.
More than 360 companies and investors made their plea in an open letter to Trump, President Obama and members of Congress. They called on Trump to "continue U.S. participation in the Paris agreement," which he has threatened to scrap, and invest in the "low carbon economy at home and abroad."
The signatories also include DuPont, eBay, Nike, Unilever, Levi Strauss & Co. and Hilton. They issued the letter Wednesday during a major U.N. climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco, where representatives of nearly 200 countries were gathered to hash out the details of the Paris climate deal. […]
"Failure to build a low-carbon economy puts American prosperity at risk. But the right action now will create jobs and boost US competitiveness," the letter states
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During the campaign, Donald Trump pledged to curb regulations on fossil fuel exploration, decimate the EPA, and bring back the coal industry. He's called climate change a "hoax." His environmental transition team is led by a climate change denier, and names being floated for secretary of energy and interior include an oil industry executive, a billionaire fracking entrepreneur, and Sarah Palin.
But environmental groups are bracing to fight back, and they insist the American public is behind them. Debbie Sease, senior lobbying and advocacy director at the Sierra Club, says her organization's strategy lies in playing defense by filing legal challenges, galvanizing the public, and using the marketplace. […]
Any efforts by Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to roll back the Clean Power Plan, Obama's signature climate initiative, will be met with resistance, say the advocates. Trump will not be able to "snap his fingers and wish away regulations," David Goldston of the Natural Resources Defense Council said at a press conference last week. "There'll be a backlash if he tries to do that."
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Donald Trump will be embarking on a “victory tour” to the states he carried, a campaign aide told reporters Thursday.
“We’re working on a victory tour now; it will happen in the next couple of weeks,” said George Gigicos, the campaign’s advance team director, who briefly talked about Trump’s first trip, according to pool reports.
The tour will bring Trump “obviously to the states that we won and the swing states we flipped over,” Gigicos said.
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It's 2016 going on 1984. The UK has just passed a massive expansion in surveillance powers, which critics have called "terrifying" and "dangerous".
The new law, dubbed the "snoopers' charter", was introduced by then-home secretary Theresa May in 2012, and took two attempts to get passed into law following breakdowns in the previous coalition government.
Four years and a general election later -- May is now prime minister -- the bill was finalized and passed on Wednesday by both parliamentary houses.
But civil liberties groups have long criticized the bill, with some arguing that the law will let the UK government "document everything we do online". It's no wonder, because it basically does.
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Britain faces a £100 billion black hole in its finances because of Brexit, Chancellor Philip Hammond will reportedly tell MPs in next week’s Autumn Statement.
Official forecasts produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest low tax revenues, slower growth and reduced investment after Britain's vote to leave the EU mean the UK’s budget deficit will soar in the next five years, according to reports in the Financial Times.
Mr Hammond’s predecessor as chancellor, George Osborne, had promised the UK would be in surplus by 2019-20 and made this a core part of his economic policy. But a combination of Brexit, weak growth and recent government pledges to scrap or delay some planned spending reductions mean this is now almost certain to be missed.
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A new study raises the terrifying possibility that the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa may have been larger than anyone realized.
During the height of the crisis, the military quarantined whole villages, and so many people were dying very painful and very visible deaths that there wasn't enough time to bury them. At the time, the idea that there might be a significant number of people infected with the virus but with minimal or even no symptoms was not something that public health officials had much time to think about. This may have been an important oversight.
Researchers writing in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week reported that they had found evidence of a cluster of people infected with a type of “walking” or invisible Ebola.
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The United States and Iran on Thursday clashed openly at the U.N. atomic watchdog for the first time since they signed a landmark nuclear deal last year, differing over Tehran's repeated testing of one of the deal's less strictly defined limits.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is policing the deal, said Iran's overstepping of the limit on its stock of a sensitive material for the second time this year risked undermining countries' support for the agreement.
The victory of Donald Trump - a vocal critic of the deal - in the U.S. presidential election also raised the question of whether his country would continue to support the accord, which restricts Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
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Russian diplomats are in contact with Donald Trump’s transition team to discuss the war in Syria as the Kremlin weighs up the implications of his unexpected victory for its Middle Eastern strategy.
Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian deputy foreign minister with a portfolio for the Middle East, said on Thursday that Russia was hoping the new president would take a “new approach” to the Syria crisis. […]
“We hope the outgoing and incoming administration will accept that without Russia it is impossible to solve the Syrian issue, we are ready for open dialogue,” he said.
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Eight hospitals bombed in the past week, five of them within the last 48 hours. Food stores running out of supplies. Scores of people killed in a single day.
By Wednesday night, it was clear that the escalation feared for weeks in rebel-held parts of northern Syria was underway, as Russian and Syrian government warplanes carried out a second straight day of intense bombardment.
The attacks have stretched across several provinces, shattering a rare interval of several weeks without airstrikes in the rebel-held districts of Aleppo. The respite there ended after the Syrian and Russian governments announced that the last chance for civilians and fighters to leave east Aleppo or surrender had expired.
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The Iraqi government has asked the UK to help its military obtain powerful thermobaric weapons to drive Islamic State fighters out of tunnels in their northern Iraqi stronghold of Mosul. The request is understood to have been put to the Ministry of Defence on Monday.
The MoD confirmed that defence minister Mike Penning met Iraqi officials but says the British military does not hold such weapons, adding that a formal written request could be put to the 67-nation coalition fighting Isis. All requests for weapons are supposed to be processed centrally by the coalition.
The Iraqi army has admitted it is facing fierce resistance from Isis fighters inside Mosul. After weeks of deadly street-by-street fighting, it says it has liberated a third of the east of the city, meaning that Isis has been removed from a sixth of the city’s area.
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An International Criminal Court investigation of possible war crimes by US forces in Afghanistan is not "warranted or appropriate", the US state department has said after prosecutors in The Hague found initial grounds for such a probe.
Elizabeth Trudeau, a state department spokesperson, said on Tuesday that the US was not a party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC and had not consented to its jurisdiction.
She also said the US had a robust justice system able to deal with such complaints. "The United States is deeply committed to complying with the law of war," Trudeau said.
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When US President Barack Obama sits down with Xi Jinping and other Pacific Rim leaders in Peru this weekend, he may feel he is handing the Chinese leader the keys to the global economy.
For years Mr Obama’s efforts to hammer out the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact with Japan and 10 other countries that together account for 40 per cent of the world economy, have dominated discussions at gatherings such as this weekend’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Through the TPP, as well as mooted deals with the EU and others that excluded China, his administration pushed to erect a strategic ring of trade alliances to contain Beijing’s rise.
But Donald Trump’s presidential victory — and the antitrade rhetoric of a campaign pitched to disgruntled blue-collar voters in rust-belt states — have brought that to an end. China is wasting no time in moving to seize the role of lead advocate of economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region from the US.
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Japan's PM Shinzo Abe has said he has "great confidence" in US President-elect Donald Trump and he believes they can build a relationship of trust.
Mr Abe described the 90-minute meeting in Trump Tower, New York, as "candid", with a "warm atmosphere".
Some of Mr Trump's campaign rhetoric cast doubt over long-standing US alliances, including with Japan.
The meeting was Mr Trump's first face-to-face with a world leader since winning the presidential election.
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One week after Donald Trump’s election as the next U.S. president, Mexico has issued a message of support for Mexican immigrants living in the United States: “We are with you.”
On Wednesday, the Mexican government instructed its embassy and consulates in the U.S. to step up measures to protect Mexican immigrants. The measures include a 24-hour hotline that will allow people to report harassment and immigration raids, as well as the expansion of deportation-defense work at 50 consulates.
“These are uncertain times,” said Foreign Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu in an online video introducing the new measures. “The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto and all Mexicans are with you. We are going to be closer than ever.”
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A series of hate crimes in the U.S. linked to supporters of Donald Trump has raised questions about whether the perpetrators of a handful of racist incidents in Canada have been emboldened by such acts south of the border.
"I think what has happened at this point, sad to say, is that Trump has given permission for the racists ... who have been hiding in garbage cans, to pop their heads up and say, 'Look, wow, fresh air here, time to get busy,'" said Bernie Farber, executive director of the Mosaic Institute, a Toronto-based think tank that promotes intercultural dialogue, and former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
"So, it's not new, it's just a shot of adrenalin for them."
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