The two black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks last week have agreed to meet with Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson.
The timing of the meeting has not been set, according to a Starbucks spokesperson. The company said it hopes the meeting will occur this week while Johnson is in Philadelphia addressing the controversy over their arrests.
A store manager called the police because the two men were sitting in the store without placing an order. They were arrested for trespassing. The customers said they were waiting for another man to arrive. That person arrived at the store as they were being arrested.
In an interview Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Johnson said he hoped to meet with the two men in person to apologize face to face.
For seven decades, “never forget” has been a rallying cry of the Holocaust remembrance movement.
But a survey released Thursday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, found that many adults lack basic knowledge of what happened — and this lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34.
Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. And 52 percent of Americans wrongly think Hitler came to power through force.
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Survivors of Auschwitz returned to the camp in January 2017, on the 72nd anniversary of its liberation. In a recent survey, 41 percent of American adults did not know what Auschwitz was.Credit Agencja Gazeta/Reuters
Photographs of prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.Credit James Hill for The New York Times
President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Syrian facilities in response to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s reported use of chemical weapons against civilians fulfills Trump’s promise of being tougher than President Barack Obama.
But it’s unlikely to have much impact beyond that ― and will likely be historically judged as a failure on Trump’s own terms.
Trump’s military response alongside France and the U.K. is ostensibly an attempt to deter Assad’s murderous behavior and demonstrate American toughness to Assad’s patrons, Iran and Russia. It won’t serve either of those goals.
Former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, a man whose family was turned upside down by Scooter Libby and other President George W. Bush administration officials, sharply criticized President Donald Trump for pardoning Libby, saying it showed his disregard for America’s national security.
“It has nothing to do with Libby, and it has nothing to do with me,” Wilson told HuffPost Friday. “Libby’s problem was with the Justice Department. He was indicted, tried and convicted on obstruction of justice and perjury charges for basically violating the national security of the United States of America.”
“Now he’s being pardoned for it, which suggests of course that Mr. Trump is willing to allow people to violate the essence of our defense structure, our national security, our intelligence apparatus and essentially get away with it,” he added.
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Valerie Plame’s cover at the CIA was blown by the Bush administration. Her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, helped show that the administration fabricated intelligence to invade Iraq.
The National Rifle Association has launched a heated offensive in the weeks since the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Warning of the “freedom-hating left” impinging on Americans’ “fundamental rights” and spreading conspiracy theories about teenagers who survived the mass shooting, the gun group ramped up efforts to raise money, recruit members and drum up support for its agenda.
The strategy appears to be working.
Donations to the group spiked in the aftermath of the school shooting, in which a former student armed with an assault-style rifle killed 17 people. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA received “twice as much money from nearly five times as many donors” in the week after the shooting, compared with the week before.
Donations to the NRA’s Political Victory Fund, which contributes money to political campaigns for NRA-friendly candidates, tripled in February from the month earlier, reported CNN.
The latest departures include National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton and homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert, who were both forced out when John Bolton became Trump’s new national security advisor.
President Donald Trump’s administration has been marked by a series of exits from high-ranking officials. Appointments expected to last for years have only made it a matter of days, ending in chaotic departures. An analysis of the rate of departures by the Brookings Institution found that Trump’s staff turnover is higher than the five previous presidents.
In a White House known for chaos, the process of developing the U.S. response to the Syrian government’s alleged latest chemical attack was proceeding with uncharacteristic deliberation, including several national security briefings for President Trump.
But then Wednesday morning, Trump upended it all with a tweet — warning Russia, the Syrian government’s backer, to “get ready” because American missiles “will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ ”
White House advisers were surprised by the missive and found it “alarming” and “distracting,” in the words of one senior official. They quickly regrouped and, together with Pentagon brass, continued readying Syria options for Trump as if nothing had happened.
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In a series of tweets on the morning of April 8, President Trump condemned an apparent chemical attack near Damascus on April 7.(Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before a joint Senate panel Tuesday dragged on for hours, so if you missed much of it, we won’t blame you. But if you’re trying to catch up on the key points, we’ve drawn out a few important moments from the high-profile hearing. Here they are.
‘We’re responsible for the content’
Everyone knew that Zuckerberg would be entering the hearing with an apologetic tone; in his prepared remarks, Zuckerberg conceded that the Cambridge Analytica fiasco was “my mistake, and I’m sorry.” But Zuckerberg also went further, acknowledging for the first time that his platform is ultimately responsible for the content that appears there. That’s significant for a company that has historically presented itself as a neutral technology.
In clarifying his remarks later on, Zuckerberg highlighted how that view connects to the impression shared by some that Facebook should be considered a media company or a utility.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency/Shutterstock)
(The Borowitz Report)—Hoping to resolve the seemingly intractable conflict over immigration, Mexico surprised the world on Thursday by agreeing to pay for Donald J. Trump’s psychiatric care.
Speaking to reporters, the Mexican President, Enrique Peña Nieto, said that he had authorized funding for the psychiatry and proclaimed, “Work on Donald Trump could begin tomorrow.”
Peña Nieto displayed several photographs showing prototypes of therapists, including a bearded Freudian analyst who he said came highly recommended.
While some Mexican taxpayers argued that a full course of psychiatric treatment could prove more costly than a border wall, Peña Nieto warned against skimping on such a necessary expense.
The Trump administration took one of its most aggressive actions against Russia on Friday, announcing sweeping sanctions against members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, along with top officials and several businesses, including a state-owned weapons trading company.
Senior U.S. administration officials said the sanctions are not aimed to punish Moscow for any particular event, but are instead a broader measure aimed at the “totality of the Russian government’s ongoing and increasingly malign activities in the world.”
The Treasury Department, in connection with the State Department, targeted seven Russian oligarchs and 12 companies they own or control. It also issued sanctions on 17 senior government officials, along with a state-owned weapons trading company and its subsidiary, a Russian bank.
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin speaks with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian tycoon who was hit with U.S. sanctions on Friday, at an investment forum in Sochi in 2008.Ilia Pitalev / AFP-Getty Images file
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Parkland memorial
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency/Shutterstock)
Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty
James' World 2 