Two Koch Insiders Are Creating a New Office Inside the FCC - TYT Network Federal Communication Commission Chairman Ajit Pai at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), February, 2018. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. By Alex Kotch Two recent employees from key groups financially supported by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are creating a new office within the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that will provide economic data and analysis relating to FCC policy initiatives. The office could provide FCC Chairman Ajit Pai with analytical justification for slashing regulations.
I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 There’s one thing everyone can agree with President Donald Trump on about the street gang MS-13: The group specializes in spectacular violence. Its members attack in groups, in the woods, at night, luring teens to their deaths with the promise of girls or weed. One Long Island boy told me he doesn’t go to parties anymore because he worries any invitation could be a trap. A victim’s father showed me a death certificate that said his son’s head had been bashed in, then lowered his voice and added that the boy’s bones had been marked by machete slashes, but he didn’t want the mother to know that. A teenager who has left the gang told me he considers himself dead already, and is just trying to make sure MS-13 doesn’t kill his family. I’m spending the year reporting on MS-13 members and their associates.
True romance? The intriguing tale of the Russian agent and her Republican lover Most romances don’t end in indictment – but then again, the relationship between Maria Butina and Paul Erickson isn’t like most romances. If anything, the love story between a gun-loving Russian covert agent and a conservative activist-cum-alleged fraudster, reads like a Coen brothers movie. There’s the intrigue of a legal thriller (Bridge of Spies), the self-defeating scheming of a crime drama (Fargo), the excess of a cult classic (The Big Lebowski), and even a bit of romance (just about everything, really, ever). But Butina will be in no mood for plot twists when she appears in court on Thursday for what she hopes will be the last hearing in a saga that has had her sitting in solitary confinement since her arrest in Washington last summer, and on FBI watchlists for years. Butina was arrested last July, the same month that Robert Mueller indicted a dozen other alleged Kremlin-linked intelligence agents in Russia for hacking Democratic computers in 2016.
DeVos reinstated for-profit college accreditor despite staff objections, report shows Education Secretary Betsy DeVos earlier this year reinstated an accreditor of for-profit colleges despite findings by her agency’s career staff that the organization failed to meet federal standards, an internal document shows. The report, released by the Education Department on Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, shows that career department analysts had serious concerns about restoring the federal recognition of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools just a month before DeVos issued an order reinstating the accreditor’s federal status. Story Continued Below Career analysts wrote in the report that ACICS failed to meet 57 of the 93 criteria that accreditors are required to meet under federal law. The Obama administration’s termination of ACICS in 2016 was based on its findings that the accreditor had not followed 21 of the standards, though its review was more limited in scope.
Fact-checking an immigration meme that's been circulating for more than a decade A viral image on social media -- one that’s critical of illegal immigration -- has been circulating for years. The list of claims first circulated in the form of a chain email in 2006, according to Snopes.com. Six years later, we checked several of the claims ourselves. With immigration in the headlines today, these claims are popular again. Inside Syria’s Secret Torture Prisons: How Bashar al-Assad Crushed Dissent On the 12th day he wrote a confession. “Make it convincing,” a Capt. Maher told him. “There is someone who drove you. Nearly half of tenants who make complaint face 'revenge eviction' Nearly half of all tenants who make a formal complaint about their housing suffer a “revenge eviction” by private landlords, according to research by Citizens Advice. It estimated that 141,000 tenants have been subject to “complain and you’re out” evictions since 2015. The evictions are possible because section 21 notices under the 1988 Housing Act allow landlords to force out tenants on a no-fault basis. Citizens Advice found that tenants who had received a section 21 notice were twice as likely to have complained to their landlord – and eight times more likely to have complained to an official redress scheme. Gillian Guy, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: “The chance of a family being evicted from their home for complaining about a problem shouldn’t carry the same odds as the toss of a coin.
Sorting the Real Sandy Photos From the Fakes With Hurricane Sandy approaching the New York metro area, the nation's eyes are turning to its largest city. Photos of storms and flooding are popping up all over Twitter, and while many are real, some of them -- especially the really eye-popping ones -- are fake. This post, which will be updated over the next couple of days, is an effort to sort the real from the unreal. It's a photograph verification service, you might say, or a pictorial investigation bureau. Bank CEO Stephen M. Calk Charged With Corruptly Soliciting A Presidential Administration Position In Exchange For Approving $16 Million In Loans Audrey Strauss, the Attorney for the United States, Acting Under Authority Conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 515, William F. Sweeney Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and Patricia Tarasca, the Special Agent-in-Charge of the New York Region for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General (“FDIC OIG”), announced today the unsealing of an indictment charging STEPHEN M. CALK with financial institution bribery for corruptly using his position as the head of a federally insured bank to issue millions of dollars in high-risk loans to a borrower in exchange for a personal benefit: assistance from the borrower in obtaining a senior position with an incoming presidential administration.
Billionaires v teachers: the Koch brothers' plan to starve public education Arizona has become the hotbed for an experiment rightwing activists hope will redefine America’s schools – an experiment that has pitched the conservative billionaires the Koch brothers and Donald Trump’s controversial education secretary, Betsy DeVos, against teachers’ unions, teachers and parents. Neither side is giving up without a fight. With groups funded by the Koch brothers and DeVos nudging things along, Arizona lawmakers enacted the nation’s broadest school vouchers law, state-funded vouchers that are supposed to give parents more school choice and can be spent on private or religiously affiliated schools. For opponents, the system is not about choice but about further weakening the public school system. A half-dozen women who had battled for months against the legislation were angry as hell. “We walked outside the Capitol Building, and we looked at each other, and said, ‘What now?”
Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. Trump Takes Credit for Obama's Gains for Vets WASHINGTON (AP) — Boastful on the occasion of Memorial Day, President Donald Trump and his Veterans Affairs secretary are claiming full credit for health care improvements that were underway before they took office. Trump said he passed a private-sector health care program, Veterans Choice, after failed attempts by past presidents for the last “45 years.” That’s not true. The Choice program, which allows veterans to see doctors outside the government-run VA system at taxpayer expense, was first passed in 2014 under President Barack Obama. Trump’s VA secretary, Robert Wilkie, also is distorting the facts.
Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not. To afford basic necessities, the federal government estimates that Vanessa’s family would need to bring in $29,420 a year. Vanessa is not even close — and she is one of the lucky ones, at least among the poor. The nation’s safety net now strongly favors the employed, with benefits like the earned-income tax credit, a once-a-year cash boost that applies only to people who work. Last year, Vanessa received a tax return of around $5,000, which included earned-income and child tax credits.