Ilhan Omar has had spike in death threats since Trump attack over 9/11 comment The Muslim American congresswoman Ilhan Omar has said she has received an increased number of death threats after Donald Trump repeatedly tweeted video footage of September 11 and accused Omar of downplaying the terror attacks. Omar issued a statement on Sunday night saying: “Since the president’s tweet Friday evening, I have experienced an increase in direct threats on my life – many directly referencing or replying to the president’s video.” Omar said the Capitol police, the FBI, the House sergeant at arms and the speaker of the House were all aware of the threats and she thanked them for their assistance. “Violent rhetoric and all forms of hate speech have no place in our society, much less from our country’s Commander in Chief,” she wrote. “I find her comments to be absolutely disgraceful and unbefitting of a member of Congress,” Sanders said, “and I think that it’s a good thing the president is calling her out.” “But I think his attack is beyond Congresswoman Omar.
Older Workers See Lower Response Rates From Recruiters Getty Images Boomer applicants receive a lower rate of response from employers than millennials. If you feel like submitting your résumé for a job is the equivalent of sending it into a black hole, the problem might be with how old your résumé makes you look. And if you’re a woman, the problem is even worse, according to research published this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. To test for age discrimination in the job application process, researchers created fake résumés for people in different age groups.
8 times the Mueller report shows Trump, White House spread false or misleading claims Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report provides a behind-the-scenes reconstruction of key events in the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency. The redacted version of the report, released April 18 by Attorney General Bill Bar, verifies and supports media reports about events that Trump dismissed as "fake news." And it highlights several instances where Trump aides told the press false information, including about the firing of former FBI director James Comey. Here’s an overview of some notable claims from Trump and his administration that turned out to be false. Trump publicly claimed Mueller had conflicts of interest and was turned down for FBI job. Trump tweeted on July 29, 2018: "Is Robert Mueller ever going to release his conflicts of interest with respect to President Trump, including the fact that we had a very nasty & contentious business relationship, I turned him down to head the FBI (one day before appointment as S.C.) & Comey is his close friend." Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Trapped in a hoax: survivors of conspiracy theories speak out | Technology Conspiracy theories used to be seen as bizarre expressions of harmless eccentrics. Not any more. Gone are the days of outlandish theories about Roswell’s UFOs, the “hoax” moon landings or grassy knolls. Instead, today’s iterations have morphed into political weapons. Turbocharged by social media, they spread with astonishing speed, using death threats as currency. Together with their first cousins, fake news, they are challenging society’s trust in facts. Their growing reach and scale is astonishing. The trend began on obscure online forums such as the alt-right playground 4chan. Now the conspiracy theorist-in-chief sits in the White House. Amid this explosive growth, one aspect has been underappreciated: the human cost. The Guardian talked to five people who can speak from bitter personal experience. Valentine’s Day 2018 was Marcel Fontaine’s day off. By the time they roused themselves, the deadliest high school shooting in US history was already over. Fontaine was horrified.
Why we need to talk about the media’s role in far-right hate | Owen Jones When it comes to the threat of Islamist terrorism, no one doubts the role of radicalisation. The internet, hate preachers such as Anjem Choudary and Abu Hamza, and the western-armed, extremism-exporting state of Saudi Arabia: all play their part in radicalising the impressionable. When it comes to the far right, however, this consensus is absent. The reason for this is as obvious as it is chilling: the hate preachers, recruiting sergeants and useful idiots of rightwing extremism are located in the heart of the British, European and American establishments. They are members of the political and media elite. Less than two weeks ago, dozens of Muslims were murdered in Christchurch. Days before the Christchurch atrocity, I interviewed Tore Bekkedal, a young Norwegian socialist. This week the Tory former Brexit minister Suella Braverman declared: “We are engaged in a war against cultural Marxism.” “Cultural Marxism is running rampant,” wrote Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath last year.
Medicaid work requirements: Where do they stand after the blue wave? The 2018 midterm elections have dealt a significant setback to President Trump’s agenda in the legislative arena. However, there are still many ways for the Trump administration to keep swinging away at the Affordable Care Act. One particularly effective unilateral instrument is the regulatory process – that is, the implementation of statutory law by executive agencies. This may prove particularly consequential for Medicaid, the health coverage program for those with low incomes or disabilities. While still in litigation, the Trump administration has indicated its strong commitment to moving forward with these efforts. Helping individuals leave poverty is a worthwhile cause. Work for coverage: What the evidence from welfare reform tells us Work requirements have been implemented in a variety of public assistance programs outside of Medicaid. Proponents of work requirements have hailed these developments as vindication of the policy. Work requirements and the Trump administration
Anti-vaxers and Facebook: The four subgroups that fuel online attacks Dr. Paul Offit keeps a fat folder of nasty messages he's received so that "if someone kills me, my wife can give it to the police." He does not laugh when he says this. "Rot in hell you baby killer," one Facebook user wrote in an email to Offit, who is director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "Go [f**king] kill yourself," another wrote. Dr. "You have no morals whatsoever and you know that you are a [f**king] liar. A CNN investigation published on Tuesday revealed such online attacks have become a growing part of the online vaccination debate. Yet it turns out that the anti-vax sentiments frequently made on Facebook tend to remain consistent in their messaging and arguments -- but are diverse, as they often fit within four distinct subgroups, according to a study published in the journal Vaccine on Thursday. Decoding anti-vax content on Facebook
Senate reports find millions of social media posts by Russians aimed at helping Trump, GOP WASHINGTON – The Senate released Monday a pair of reports that found Russia engaged in an all-out social media campaign on Donald Trump's behalf during the 2016 election and continued to support him after he took office. One report, compiled by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and a social media analysis firm called Graphika, looked at millions of posts on every popular social media platform from Facebook to Pinterest that were provided to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The second report – written by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm specializing in protection from "social media disinformation attacks" – found that in addition to a "sweeping and sustained social influence operation," the Russians also tried to hack online voting systems and stole Clinton campaign emails, "which led to a controlled leak via Wikileaks." The campaign had two strategies, the report said. In contrast, conservatives "were actively encouraged to get behind Trump’s campaign."
Paula White: the pastor who helps Trump hear 'what God has to say' Paula White, Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser and personal pastor, re-enacted a moment at a private White House dinner last month which would eventually make headlines for showing the president’s hardline stance on abortion. The evening before the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump approached the US senator Chris Coons, a Democrat and Presbyterian, about an expansion of abortion rights in New York state. The law is reviled by evangelicals like White. Trump thrust his face over the Democrat’s shoulder, so they were nearly cheek to cheek, and said in his ear: “So, you can do that to a baby … And that’s not a human, is it? And you have no problem?” Trump was “just right in his face, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’” said White, leaning over the ornate dining room table in her nearly 6,000-sq-ft home in Florida. White runs a megachurch in Florida, and is a link between the evangelical community, which she has navigated for decades, and a president whom she describes as not speaking “Christian-ese”.
Did Scott Walker and Donald Trump Deal Away the Wisconsin Governor’s Race to Foxconn? In September of 2017, Governor Scott Walker, Republican of Wisconsin, signed a contract that would make his state the home of the first U.S. factory of Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer. The company, which is based in Taiwan and makes products for Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, among others, would build a 21.5-million-square-foot manufacturing campus, invest up to ten billion dollars in Wisconsin, and hire as many as thirteen thousand workers at an average wage of fifty-four thousand dollars a year. For Walker, whose approval had fallen to the mid-thirties after his aborted Presidential run, the deal was seen as a crucial boost to his reëlection prospects. “The Foxconn initiative looked like something that could be a hallmark of Walker’s reëlection campaign,” Charles Franklin, a professor and pollster at Marquette University Law School, told me. The project moved quickly. Last June, a groundbreaking ceremony was held in Mt. Mt.