The great-great grandchildren of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson have a message for those who adamantly want to preserve the Confederate leaders’ monuments: Let it go.
Their message, all issued separately in interviews and open letters, are particularly resonant in a climate when there’s so much controversy over the Civil War symbols and when the President of the United States himself said removing them is ripping apart the country.
A driver swerved a van onto a pedestrian area Thursday in Barcelona’s historic Las Ramblas district, ramming into crowds and leaving at least 13 people dead and more than 50 injured scattered along a stretch of tree-shaded sidewalk. Authorities described the incident as a terrorist attack.
Joaquim Forn, the interior minister of the Catalan regional government, confirmed the casualty toll in a Twitter message.
Some of those injured were in serious condition, raising the possibility that the death toll could rise.
Earlier, Spanish police described the carnage as “massive.”
Spanish police did not immediately give details on the driver or other aspects of the incident.
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Spanish police said an attack on a pedestrian area in Barcelona’s historic Las Ramblas district caused “massive” damage Aug. 17. (Sarah Parnass, William Neff/The Washington Post)
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Steve Bannon, a senior adviser to the president who was largely credited with shaping the strategy that got Donald Trump to the White House, is out from his role as the president’s chief strategist. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Bannon and Chief of Staff John Kelly agreed Friday would be his last day.
“We are grateful for his service and wish him the best,” Sanders said in a statement.
The details of Bannon’s departure remain unclear. The New York Times reported Trump had decided to remove Bannon, but also that a source close to Bannon said the adviser had submitted his resignation on Aug. 7 to be effective Aug. 14. MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle also tweeted Bannon is “out.”
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Images: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
In an interview with the American Prospect, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon offers an important insight into why Democrats lost the election and why they’re struggling with identity politics.
“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
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That is as succinct a reading of what happened in the 2016 as any. It is also a prediction about the enduring power of Trump’s strategy. And Bannon may in fact be right — Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, have made the same argument that the left focuses too much on identity politics, to its detriment.
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Yet, in mentioning “identity politics” on the left, and suggesting that no such thing exists on the right, Bannon argues that it’s the left alone that “is focused on race and identity,” and not Trump.
That’s the number of hate groups operating in the US, according to data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Alabama-based nonprofit activist group tracks civil rights and hate crimes and defines a hate group as an organization with “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
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“Over the course of a year, we have a team of investigators that scours the internet for racist publications and real world activities to find out which groups exist, which groups are still active and which groups come along,” said Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter for the SPLC’s Hatewatch project.
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Some are classified as anti-LGBT groups, and some are black separatists, who don’t believe in interracial marriage and want a nation only for black people, according to the group.
Former CIA director John Brennan slammed President Donald Trump’s “dangerous” and “ugly” comments on the deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — writing a personal letter to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer after “The Situation Room” anchor spoke publicly about the fact that he lost all four grandparents to the evils of Nazism.
In a rare move, top commanders in the US military are speaking out in the wake of the deadly violence that erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.
Five US Joint Chiefs are issuing public condemnations of white supremacist groups in the wake of the weekend’s racial unrest. President Donald Trump expanded the controversy Tuesday when he appeared to draw a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and counter-protesters by blaming “both sides” for contributing to violence.
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The statements are not directly addressing Trump’s comments but are instead presented as a message to the general public, their troops and potential recruits. But the messages are notable as US military leaders traditionally uphold an ironclad commitment to stay out of politics.
President Donald Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow recently told me that the investigation being led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, should focus on one question: whether there was “coördination between the Russian government and people on the Trump campaign.”Sekulow went on, “I want to be really specific. A real-estate deal would be outside the scope of legitimate inquiry.” If he senses “drift” in Mueller’s investigation, he said, he will warn the special counsel’s office that it is exceeding its mandate. The issue will first be raised “informally,” he noted. But if Mueller and his team persist, Sekulow said, he might lodge a formal objection with the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, who has the power to dismiss Mueller and end the inquiry. President Trump has been more blunt, hinting to the Times that he might fire Mueller if the investigation looks too closely at his business dealings.
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Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump, is looking at his past deals.
Illustration by Oliver Munday; photograph by Skynesher / Getty (hands)
On a late-spring evening in Boston, just as the sun was beginning to set, a group of mathematicians lingered over the remains of the dinner they had just shared. While some cleared plates from the table, others started transforming skewers and hunks of raw potato into wobbly geodesic forms. Justin Solomon, an assistant professor at M.I.T., lunged forward to keep his structure from collapsing. “That’s five years of Pixar right there,” he joked. (Solomon worked at the animation studio before moving to academia.) He and his collaborators were unwinding after a long day making preparations for a new program at Tufts University—a summer school at which mathematicians, along with data analysts, legal scholars, schoolteachers, and political scientists, will learn to use their expertise to combat gerrymandering.
The school, which began on Monday, is the brainchild of a young Tufts professor named Moon Duchin, who specializes in geometry. It has drawn participants from France, Israel, Japan, Singapore, and forty U.S. states. Some of Duchin’s students plan to train as expert witnesses, or to run for office. One mathematician enrolled out of a Christian sense of justice; another cited the day-to-day frustrations of living in a severely gerrymandered Florida district. Yet another applicant wrote, “Until very recently, I thought doing anything about this was a hopeless cause.” At the dinner, Duchin acknowledged that she was “kind of devastated by this election,” but both she and her colleagues were careful to point out that their venture is strictly nonpartisan. It was inspired by a simple question: What if there are well-researched areas of math that could simplify, or at least systematize, the fraught process of redistricting?
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Gerrymandering has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. political system since before the very first Congress was elected.
President Trump’s relationship with the American business community suffered a major setback on Wednesday as the president was forced to shut down his major business advisory councils after corporate leaders repudiated his comments on the violence in Charlottesville this weekend.
Trump announced the disbanding of the two councils — the Strategy & Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Council, which hosted many of the top corporate leaders in America — amid a growing uproar by chief executives furious over Trump’s decision to equate the actions of white supremacists and protesters in remarks he made at Tuesday at Trump Tower.
But those groups had already decided to dissolve on their own earlier in the day, a person familiar with the process said. JP Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, a member of the Strategy & Policy Forum, told employees in a note on Wednesday that his group decided to disband following Trump’s news conference on Tuesday, in which he appeared to show sympathy for some of the people who marched alongside the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville.
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President Trump, with senior adviser Jared Kushner, left, and Merck chief executive Kenneth Frazier, right, meets with manufacturing chief executives at the White House in February. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
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.
Confederate monuments that still exist in the US
Images: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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Ex-CIA head: Trumps words a national disgrace
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James' World 2 