THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The majority-white Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black Sparta citizens — a fifth of the city’s registered voters — by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights. “When I read that letter, I was kind of nervous,” Mr. Flournoy said in an interview. “I didn’t know what to do.”

The board’s aim, a lawsuit later claimed, was to give an edge to white candidates in Sparta’s municipal elections — and that November, a white mayoral candidate won a narrow victory.

“A lot of those people that was challenged probably didn’t vote, even though they weren’t proven to be wrong,” said Marion Warren, a Sparta elections official who documented the purges and raised an alarm with voting-rights advocates. “People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena, especially if they haven’t committed any crime.”

The county attorney, Barry A. Fleming, a Republican state representative, said in an interview that the elections board was only trying to restore order to an electoral process tainted earlier by corruption and incompetence. The lawsuit is overblown, he suggested, because only a fraction of the targeted voters were ultimately scratched from the rolls.

“The allegations that people were denied the right to vote are the opposite of the truth,” he said. “This is probably more about politics and power than race.”

But the purge of Sparta voters is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. In Georgia and all or part of 14 other states, the 1965 Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to receive so-called preclearance before changing the way voter registration and elections were conducted.

// posted by montag @ 1:31 PM 0 Comments

The Colorado Springs Fire Department says that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had to be rescued from an elevator that was stuck between the first and second floors of a resort.

In a statement released Saturday, the department says that it was called at 1:30 p.m. Friday to rescue about 10 people, including Trump, trapped inside the elevator at The Mining Exchange, A Wyndham Grand Hotel & Spa resort.

The department says the firefighters opened the top elevator hatch and lowered a ladder into the elevator. Trump and the others used the ladder to climb out of the elevator to the second floor. The department says no injuries were reported.

Trump’s security team was given control of the hotel’s elevators during the event, said Perry Sanders Jr., an attorney who co-owns the hotel.

“The party were model guests but security insisted on having manual control of the elevators,” Sanders said.

After the occupants were rescued, technicians for the company that services the elevator determined that the machine became stuck because someone turned the manual key while the car was in motion, Sanders said.

// posted by montag @ 12:50 PM 0 Comments

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled North Carolina’s voter ID law is discriminatory, with justices saying it was designed and passed by state lawmakers with the intent of making it harder for African-Americans to vote. The law included provisions requiring photo IDs at the polls, shortened early voting periods and eliminated same-day voter registration.

The ruling is subject to appeal but comes just three months before the general election, meaning North Carolina officials will need to move quickly to get a stay in the case or the law will not be in effect Nov. 8.

Tillis, along with Republican N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory and others, has argued that the 2013 voter ID law serves to restore confidence in elections and guard against voting fraud, though state government records show cases of fraud are rare. Tillis’ office also noted Friday that several public opinion polls have shown that a majority of North Carolinians support the contested voter ID law.

Within hours of the Friday decision, Democratic candidates and liberal groups in North Carolina pounced on the court news, claiming a victory and saying the ruling proves GOP lawmakers intended to disenfranchise minority voters with the law.

Such a rebuke from a court, Rohde said, is damaging to the Republican brand and could influence how independents vote in North Carolina in November.

But Tillis himself – whose legacy as N.C. speaker of the House includes shepherding the contentious law through the Republican-controlled Legislature – isn’t on the ballot this year. He assumed office in the U.S. Senate in 2015 after defeating Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan.

A negative outcome for North Carolina’s voter ID law in the courts could give Tillis’ next challenger an opening to criticize him, Rohde said.

Already, one law Tillis championed in the state Legislature has been tossed out by the Supreme Court. Amendment One, a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, is no longer valid in North Carolina after the high court found such laws to be violations of the U.S. Constitution.

Tillis “was House speaker during a time in which many controversial laws passed,” said David McLennan, political science professor at Meredith College. “Both (the voter ID law and Amendment One) raise questions about Sen. Tillis’ support of civil rights, as well as his judgment in allowing legislation that he was warned might be ruled unconstitutional.”

// posted by montag @ 1:15 PM 0 Comments

Four cases of Zika infection in Miami are highly likely to have been caused by infected mosquitoes, the state Department of Health said Friday — the first documented instance of local transmission in the continental United States.

Officials in Florida believe that the area of active transmission is limited to a one-square-mile area just north of downtown Miami. No mosquitoes tested have been found carrying the Zika virus, and the department is going door to door in the neighborhood collecting urine samples to test residents.

Miami-Dade County is one of the busiest ports of entry into the United States from countries where the Zika virus is circulating. Health experts have long described it as one of the areas most at risk for an outbreak of the disease.

Gov. Rick Scott said in a statement that the four cases involve three men and one woman. He did not indicate whether the woman was pregnant.

“While no mosquitoes have tested positive for the Zika virus,” Mr. Scott said, the Health Department “is aggressively testing people in this area to ensure there are no other cases. If you live in this area and want to be tested, I urge you to contact the county health department.”

Of the four people infected, he said, “They are all active Zika cases and have not exhibited symptoms to be admitted to the hospital.”

The neighborhood that the authorities are focusing on is in the Wynwood area, bound by Northwest Fifth Avenue, U.S. 1, Northwest/Northeast 38th Street and Northwest/Northeast 20th Street.

The virus, transmitted by mosquitoes or by sex with an infected person, causes brain damage and neurological disorders in babies born to mothers who contracted it in pregnancy. In rare cases, it can also cause a form of temporary paralysis.

// posted by montag @ 2:10 PM 0 Comments

The sweeping decision, by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, was unusually speedy: A judge in Winston-Salem, N.C., upheld the law in April. The appeals court, which sits in Richmond, Va., made its decision clear in the opening pages of a lengthy ruling, questioning the reasoning of the lower court judge.

“In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with discriminatory intent, the court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees,” the Fourth Circuit panel said of the district court ruling that upheld the law passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. “This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”

The appeals court added later, “Faced with this record, we can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent.”

In addition to an identification requirement, the law also abolished same-day voter registration and ended preregistration, which had permitted some teenagers to sign up for the voting rolls before they turned 18.

Republicans argued the law protected against fraud, but critics said it was an effort to disenfranchise certain voters, particularly black and Hispanic ones.

// posted by montag @ 2:01 PM 0 Comments

America’s about to endure the closest, nastiest, most unpredictable presidential election in more than three decades.

Not since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan ran against each other in 1980 has the choice been so stark, the warnings from each candidate about the other so dire, the likely outcome so murky.

As this year’s political conventions end, there’s no clear favorite. But watch the polls next week. The leader in the first polls conducted entirely after the convention ends has won the White House every time since 1948.

There’s potential for another sort of email drama. Republicans won’t let voters forget about Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

“We've known from the beginning of this campaign that Clinton's personal political history was going to be a drag on her candidacy,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in New Jersey.

Clinton will counter by painting Trump as inept, incompetent and all but insane.

“Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” she said in her convention speech Thursday. “I can't put it any better than Jackie Kennedy did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started – not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men – the ones moved by fear and pride.”

Stoking fear about an opponent is a time-tested tactic. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “daisy ad” suggested Republican Barry Goldwater would involve the nation in a nuclear war. In 1980, Jimmy Carter made the same insinuations. In his October, 1980, debate with Ronald Reagan, Carter used the word “dangerous” six times to describe his Republican opponent.

// posted by montag @ 1:17 PM 0 Comments

Donald J. Trump called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “a better leader” than President Obama, offering the praise in an interview with “Fox and Friends” on Thursday, just a day after saying he hoped Russian intelligence services had successfully hacked Hillary Clinton’s email.

Asked about comments he had made Wednesday at a news conference in Florida, where he said, “Putin has much better leadership qualities than Obama,” Mr. Trump reiterated his views in slightly starker terms.

“I said he’s a better leader than Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “I said he’s a better leader than Obama, because Obama’s not a leader, so he’s certainly doing a better job than Obama is, and that’s all.”

Mr. Trump also tried to walk back, in part, comments he made Wednesday about Russia hacking Mrs. Clinton’s emails — an extraordinary moment in which the Republican nominee basically urged Russia, an adversary, to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.

Mr. Trump seemed to be conflating the roughly 30,000 emails on Mrs. Clinton’s private server during her time as secretary of state, which her lawyers deleted as personal, and the roughly 20,000 emails Democratic National Committee emails that had been hacked.

Mr. Trump’s comments Wednesday about Russian hacking set off a firestorm of criticism, and his efforts to recalibrate his remarks began just hours after he looked into a bank of television cameras and declared, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

Mr. Trump posted on Twitter on Wednesday that he was simply urging Russia — if it had indeed hacked Mrs. Clinton — to hand her emails over to the proper authorities. “If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the F.B.I!” Mr. Trump wrote.

// posted by montag @ 1:36 PM 0 Comments

Every day across the country, hundreds, if not thousands, of people who overdose on opioids are being brought back to life with naloxone. Hailed as a miracle drug by many, it carries no health risk; it cannot be abused and, if given mistakenly to someone who has not overdosed on opioids, does no harm. More likely, it saves a life.

As a virulent opioid epidemic continues to ravage the country, with 78 people in the United States dying of overdoses every day, naloxone’s use has increasingly moved out of medical settings, where it has been available since the 1970s, and into the homes and hands of the general public.

But naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, has also had unintended consequences. Critics say that it gives drug users a safety net, allowing them to take more risks as they seek higher highs. Indeed, many users overdose more than once, some multiple times, and each time, naloxone brings them back.

Advocates argue that the drug gives people a chance to get into treatment and turn their lives around. And, they say, few addicts knowingly risk needing to be revived, since naloxone ruins their high and can make them violently ill.

With drug overdoses now killing more people than car crashes in most states, lawmakers in all but three — Kansas, Montana and Wyoming — have passed laws making naloxone easier to obtain. Its near-universal availability reflects the relatively humane response to the opioid epidemic, which is based largely in the nation’s white, middle-class suburbs and rural areas — a markedly different response from that of previous, urban-based drug epidemics, which prompted a “war on drugs” that led to mass incarceration, particularly of blacks and Hispanics.

Yet most users loathe naloxone’s effects. By blocking opiate receptors, it plunges them into withdrawal and makes them “dope sick,” craving more heroin or pills.

“I hate it,” said Melissa Tucci, 44, a heroin user here who has been revived seven times. “When I start withdrawing, I vomit, you get diarrhea, you sweat profusely, your nose will run, you sneeze and have runny eyes, and you ache so bad you can’t even walk.”

She said she has overdosed so often not because she relied on naloxone to save her, but rather because she underestimated how potent the heroin was. And she said she keeps using heroin to avoid the agony of withdrawal.

// posted by montag @ 1:42 PM 0 Comments

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump openly called on Russia to hack his opponent Hillary Clinton after speculation Moscow may be responsible for a security breach at the Democratic National Committee.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said in a press conference Wednesday. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Trump was referencing the approximately 30,000 emails Clinton deleted from the private server she used while secretary of state, which she said were personal in nature. The remaining emails were turned over for an FBI investigation over whether Clinton broke the law by dealing with classified information in unsecured emails.

When asked by a reporter on whether he has any qualms about asking a foreign country to hack his political opponent, Trump said definitively, “No, it gives me no pause.”

// posted by montag @ 12:51 PM 0 Comments

Health experts in Brazil have a word of advice for the Olympic marathon swimmers, sailors and windsurfers competing in Rio de Janeiro’s picture-postcard waters next month: Keep your mouth closed.

Despite the government’s promises seven years ago to stem the waste that fouls Rio’s expansive Guanabara Bay and the city’s fabled ocean beaches, officials acknowledge that their efforts to treat raw sewage and scoop up household garbage have fallen far short.

In fact, environmentalists and scientists say Rio’s waters are much more contaminated than previously thought.

Recent tests by government and independent scientists revealed a veritable petri dish of pathogens in many of the city’s waters, from rotaviruses that can cause diarrhea and vomiting to drug-resistant “super bacteria” that can be fatal to people with weakened immune systems.

Researchers at the Federal University of Rio also found serious contamination at the upscale beaches of Ipanema and Leblon, where many of the half-million Olympic spectators are expected to frolic between sporting events.

“Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap, and they risk getting sick from all those microorganisms,” said Dr. Daniel Becker, a local pediatrician who works in poor neighborhoods. “It’s sad, but also worrisome.”

Government officials and the International Olympic Committee acknowledge that, in many places, the city’s waters are filthy. But they say the areas where athletes will compete — like the waters off Copacabana Beach, where swimmers will race — meet World Health Organization safety standards.

Even some venues with higher levels of human waste, like Guanabara Bay, present only minimal risk because athletes sailing or windsurfing in them will have limited contact with potential contamination, they add.

// posted by montag @ 1:59 PM 0 Comments

Trying to protect one of the most biologically diverse places on earth from an army of illegal miners that has carved a toxic path through the rain forest, the Peruvian government is setting up outposts and stepping up raids along the Malinowski River in the Tambopata Nature Reserve.

But some experts wonder whether it is far too little too late.

To get here, a remote front line in Latin America’s battle against illegal mining, I hiked nine and a half hours through the jungle, at times in water up to my armpits. But any sense of being in a pristine wilderness was lost at the river’s edge. Already, the miners had done so much damage that the water ran the color of milky coffee. The landscape was worthy of a “Mad Max” movie. Huge sandy craters, mounds of pebbles and poisoned waterways were everywhere. Garbage — rags, plastic bags, plastic foam food containers — clung to the freshly cut tree branches piled up in the river’s nooks and crannies.

With the price of gold high for years, illegal mining has blossomed in many parts of Latin America, not just in Peru. But in this country, one of the world’s major gold producers, the problem has gotten particularly bad.

The amount of gold collected by unlicensed miners is far larger than elsewhere in Latin America. And it is ballooning so quickly that environmentalists fear that even a remote reserve like this one — home to thousands of species of plants and animals, some perhaps not even identified by humans — has little chance of survival.

For all the environmental damage done by corporate mining, illegal miners are far more destructive, experts say. While mining companies tend to concentrate on areas with rich underground veins of gold, illegal miners move swiftly across vast amounts of territory. They cut down broad swaths of jungle, sifting through perhaps 200 tons of topsoil to find enough flecks of gold for a single wedding ring.

Without help, some experts say, the areas they leave behind — robbed of all topsoil and loaded with mercury — could take 500 years to recover.

The miners use so much mercury to process the gold that the government declared a health emergency in much of the Madre de Dios region in May. Tests in 97 villages found that more than 40 percent of the people had absorbed dangerous levels of the heavy metal. Mercury poisoning affects people in many ways, from chronic headaches to kidney damage, but it is most harmful to children, who are likely to suffer permanent brain damage.

“The next generations will pay for what we are doing now,” said Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who heads the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment.

// posted by montag @ 1:46 PM 0 Comments

Last year, Ms. Hernandez and about two dozen other immigrants sued, saying they could not obtain the documents Texas officials were demanding to prove their identities. On Friday, Texas agreed to a settlement that will expand the types of documents parents can present, allowing those without legal immigration status to obtain certificates for their children again.

The babies whose parents brought the federal suit were born in Texas medical facilities, so it was not in doubt that they were citizens. Lawyers for the parents said the settlement would be “life-changing” for them.

“The bottom line is, there was a category of people who were being locked out of obtaining a birth certificate to which they are entitled constitutionally as citizens born in the United States just because of the immigration status of the parents,” said Efrén Olivares, the legal director of the Texas Civil Rights Project’s South Texas office and a lead lawyer in the lawsuit.

In the settlement, Texas made no changes to the basic rules for birth certificates, which it argued were designed to ensure that the essential documents were correctly issued. But the state agreed to accept several documents from parents that it had started to reject.

The change in practice by Texas registrars dated to 2013, when state leaders were taking steps to stem a surge in illegal border crossings by families from Central America. The next year, Texas sent National Guard troops to the border. Texas led 26 states in a federal lawsuit in 2014 to halt President Obama’s immigration programs to shield undocumented immigrants from deportation, which state officials said encouraged more illegal crossings. A tie decision by the Supreme Court in June effectively ended those programs.

The Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, added new fuel to the debate about the children of undocumented immigrants, saying he would cancel their right to citizenship if he became president.

// posted by montag @ 1:38 PM 0 Comments

When Israeli army commanders describe how the next war against Hezbollah could unfold, they often search for words not used in military manuals. The future conflict, they warn, will be “ferocious” and “terrible.”

For both sides, the Israelis fear.

Yet far worse for Hezbollah and the civilians of Lebanon, they promise.

Ten years after Israel and Hezbollah fought a bloody but inconclusive 34-day war that left more than 1,000 soldiers and civilians dead in July and August of 2006, the Lebanese Shiite militant group has been transformed.

Hezbollah is now a regional military power, a cross-border strike force, with thousands of soldiers hardened by four years of fighting on Syrian battlefields on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad. There are 7,000 Hezbollah fighters in Syria, Israeli commanders say.

Hezbollah troops have been schooled by Iranian commanders, funded by Tehran and have learned to use, in combat, some of the most sophisticated armaments available, such as fourth-generation Kornet guided anti-tank missiles. They pilot unmanned aircraft and fight alongside artillery and tanks. They have taken rebel-held villages with Russian air support.

More than 1,000 Hezbollah fighters have died, the Israelis say; they do not describe Hezbollah as “demoralized” but “tested.”

“In 2006, Hezbollah fought a guerrilla war. Today, Hezbollah is like a conventional army,” said Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese army general who teaches at the American University of Beirut.

// posted by montag @ 1:42 PM 0 Comments

Michael R. Bloomberg, who bypassed his own run for the presidency this election cycle, will endorse Hillary Clinton in a prime-time address at the Democratic convention and make the case for Mrs. Clinton as the best choice for moderate voters in 2016, an adviser to Mr. Bloomberg said.

The news is an unexpected move from Mr. Bloomberg, who has not been a member of the Democratic Party since 2000; was elected the mayor of New York City as a Republican; and later became an independent.

But it reflects Mr. Bloomberg’s increasing dismay about the rise of Donald J. Trump and a determination to see that the Republican nominee is defeated.

Mrs. Clinton is seeking to reach out to middle-of-the-road swing voters and even moderate Republicans uneasy about Mr. Trump. Polls show that significant numbers of Republicans remain wary of Mr. Trump, and question his fitness for the presidency.

Mr. Bloomberg will vouch for Mrs. Clinton “from the perspective of a business leader and an independent,” said Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has been sharply critical of Mr. Trump’s views on immigration and the economy, may fortify Mrs. Clinton’s appeal to the political center.

And with the Republican nominee basing his campaign on his background as a businessman, Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire media executive and philanthropist, may help counter the Trump sales pitch.

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for a speaker who is not a member of a political party to address that party’s convention. Mr. Bloomberg is expected to speak on Wednesday, the same evening as President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Bloomberg and Mrs. Clinton are not personally close, but had a positive working relationship when he served as mayor and she as a senator from New York.

// posted by montag @ 1:14 PM 0 Comments

Health officials on Friday reported the first baby born in New York City with the Zika-related birth defect known as microcephaly, a condition marked by an abnormally small head and impaired brain development.

The virus has caused more than 1,500 children to be born with birth defects around the world, mostly in Brazil. As it continues to spread, doctors are struggling to understand the virus and to prepare for its effects.

The baby in New York is one of a growing number of children born in the United States with microcephaly, a condition that requires intensive care and can lead to a variety of other problems, including seizures, vision and hearing loss and intellectual disability.

There have been reports of about a dozen children in the United States being born with Zika-related microcephaly since the spring, including cases in New Jersey and Florida.

As in those instances, the mother in New York is believed to have been infected while traveling to one of the roughly 50 countries where Zika is endemic.

Health officials said that the baby with microcephaly tested positive for the virus after being born at a hospital in the city this month. They declined to provide additional details about the case, including whether the virus had been previously diagnosed in the mother, or if she was monitored as part of a national registry created to track pregnancy outcomes for those who become infected.

At a news conference on Friday, officials said the case should serve as warning to anyone who considered the virus to be just a theoretical threat and once again urged all pregnant women not to travel to countries where Zika is endemic.

“While not surprising, given the travel trends of our global city, this case is a strong reminder of the tragic consequences of the Zika virus,” Dr. Mary T. Bassett, New York City’s health commissioner, said in a statement. “We are monitoring the baby’s health closely and connecting the family with the necessary services to take care of their child.”

// posted by montag @ 1:44 PM 0 Comments

Two explosions rocked a peaceful demonstration in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, on Saturday, organizers and eyewitnesses said, with the government reporting at least 80 dead.

The Afghan ministry of the interior, in a statement, reported the casualties and said 231 had been wounded in the blasts.

The Islamic State, in a statement through the group’s Amaq News Agency, claimed the carnage as a “martyrdom attack on Shias.” The Taliban, who are often behind major assaults in Afghanistan, denied any involvement.

Afghan security officials said that while Kabul remained under constant insurgent threat, they had no prior intelligence on a particular threat to the protest.

Much of the city was already under lockdown; the government had stacked shipping containers to block routes to the presidential palace in anticipation of the demonstration by Hazaras, an ethnic minority group. They had gathered in the west of the city to demand that a proposed electricity transmission line be routed through the Hazara-dominated central province of Bamian.

The Hazaras have only in the past decade tried to shake off a long history of oppression. The protest leaders claimed the government remained rife with “systematic bias” against the Hazaras, and had routed the electricity transmission line elsewhere, depriving the central Afghan region not only of electric power but also of the roads and other infrastructure that would come with it...

Muhammad Ali, a protester at the site of the blast whose clothes were covered in blood, said he had loaded dozens of dead bodies into trucks.

“People were going toward a prayer break when two explosions happened — one near the truck where speeches were given,” Mr. Ali said.

Hundreds of protesters returned to the site immediately after the carnage, cordoning off the area with a large Afghan flag they had carried in their march earlier, lowering the cordon only to allow ambulances to pass. When the armored vehicle of a government official approached, angry men chased it away.

As tempers flared at the government, protesters also pushed away anti-riot police forces who had provided security earlier in the day.

Saturday’s attack was the deadliest of the past 15 years on the Hazaras, a largely Shia group. In December 2011, a suicide-bombing in a Shia shrine in Kabul killed at least 63 people, mostly Hazaras.

// posted by montag @ 1:31 PM 0 Comments

Turkey will temporarily suspend the European Convention on Human rights as it implements a three-month state of emergency, the country's deputy prime minister said.

The emergency state was implemented following a failed coup last weekend during which over 250 were killed.

Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Thursday that the state of emergency could end before the three months are up and may only last for one to one and a half month, according to broadcaster NTV.

Turkey will follow in the footsteps of France, which also opted out of some of the convention's aspects during an emergency state implemented in November 2015 after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people.

President Tayyip Erdogan said the state of emergency, which he announced on Wednesday, would enable the authorities to act more efficiently to bring those responsible to justice.

Turkey tried to assure its citizens and the outside world on Thursday that there will be no return to the deep repression of the past, even though Erdogan has imposed the first nationwide state of emergency since the 1980s.

With Erdogan cracking down on thousands of people in the judiciary, education, military, and civil service after last weekend's failed coup, a lawmaker from the main opposition party warned that the state of emergency created "a way of ruling that paves the way for abuse".

// posted by montag @ 2:10 PM 0 Comments

The National Basketball Association on Thursday dealt a blow to the economy and prestige of North Carolina by pulling next February’s All-Star Game from Charlotte to protest a state law that eliminated anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The move was among the most prominent consequences since the law, which also bars transgender people from using bathrooms in public buildings that do not correspond with their birth gender, was passed in March.

The league, which has become increasingly involved in social issues, said that both it and the Hornets, the N.B.A. team based in Charlotte, had been talking to state officials about changing the law but that time had run out because of the long lead time needed to stage the game. The N.B.A. said it hoped the game could be played in Charlotte in 2019, with the clear implication that the law would have to be changed before then.

“While we recognize that the N.B.A. cannot choose the law in every city, state and country in which we do business, we do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by the current law,” a statement by the league said...

In taking the action it did, the N.B.A. is following the path already taken by others. A number of musicians, including Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Itzhak Perlman, canceled concerts in North Carolina to protest the law, and there have been calls for repeal of the legislation by a number of businesses, some of which have canceled plans to create new jobs in the state.

All-Star weekend is one of the flashiest and most lucrative events on the league’s annual schedule. In addition to the game, the league arranges three days full of activities for fans. There is a separate game for the league’s rising stars, a dunk contest and a 3-point contest.

// posted by montag @ 1:44 PM 0 Comments

The U.S. Navy’s newest aircraft carrier isn’t ready for warfare.
The $12.9 billion USS Gerald R. Ford -- the most expensive warship ever built -- may struggle to launch and recover aircraft, mount a defense and move munitions, according to the Pentagon’s top weapons tester. On-board systems for those tasks have poor or unknown reliability issues, according to a June 28 memo obtained by Bloomberg News.

“These four systems affect major areas of flight operations,” Michael Gilmore, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, wrote Pentagon and Navy weapons buyers Frank Kendall and Sean Stackley. “Unless these issues are resolved, which would likely require redesigning” of the aircraft launch and recovery systems “they will significantly limit the CVN-78’s ability to conduct combat operations,” Gilmore wrote, using a technical name for the carrier.

More Delays
The reliability woes mean that delivery of the Ford -- the first of three carriers ordered up in a $42 billion program -- will probably slip further behind schedule. The Navy announced last week that the ship, originally due by September 2014, wouldn’t be delivered before November this year because of continuing unspecified testing issues.
The service has operated 10 carriers since the retirement of the USS Enterprise in 2012. Extended deployments of the remaining ships have placed stress on crews and meant added strain meeting global commitments from the battle against Islamic State to ensuring freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, home to $5 trillion in annual trade.

A prolonged delay could also hamper the military if a new conflict arises.

“Based on current reliability estimates, the CVN-78 is unlikely to conduct high-intensity flight operations” such as a requirement for four days of 24-hour surge operations “at the outset of a war,” Gilmore wrote.

As delivery of the Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. vessel approaches, “my concerns about the reliability of these systems remain and the risk to the ship’s ability to succeed in combat grows as these reliability issues remain unresolved,” Gilmore said.

// posted by montag @ 1:50 PM 0 Comments

Donald J. Trump, on the eve of accepting the Republican nomination for president, explicitly raised new questions on Wednesday about his commitment to automatically defending NATO allies if they are attacked, saying he would first look at their contributions to the alliance.

Asked about Russia’s threatening activities, which have unnerved the small Baltic States that are among the more recent entrants into NATO, Mr. Trump said that if Russia attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing if those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”

“If they fulfill their obligations to us,” he added, “the answer is yes.”

Mr. Trump’s statement appeared to be the first time that a major candidate for president had suggested conditioning the United States’ defense of its major allies. It was consistent, however, with his previous threat to withdraw American forces from Europe and Asia if those allies fail to pay more for American protection.

Mr. Trump also said he would not pressure Turkey or other authoritarian allies about conducting purges of their political adversaries or cracking down on civil liberties. The United States, he said, has to “fix our own mess” before trying to alter the behavior of other nations.

“I don’t think we have a right to lecture,” Mr. Trump said in a wide-ranging interview in his suite in a downtown hotel here, while keeping an eye on television broadcasts from the Republican National Convention. “Look at what is happening in our country,” he said. “How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?”

// posted by montag @ 1:28 PM 0 Comments

Chris Christie ‘turned over his political testicles long ago,’ Cruz campaign manager says

// posted by montag @ 12:41 PM 0 Comments

Papers filed in a Washington DC federal court on Tuesday allege that DynCorp, a fixture of wartime US contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, knowingly inflated costs during a four-year stretch when the company held a contract with the US state department for training Iraqi police.

Since 2010, DynCorp has held a contract with the US defense department for training Afghanistan’s ministry of defense and its own national police. DynCorp essentially inherited that contract thanks to a prior deal for the same Afghan police training with the state department that began in 2003.

The company received an extension on that contract in March under limited competition. Although in the past the contract was worth approximately $1bn over three years, the dollar value on the reaward, a far shorter period, was redacted.

The fraud allegation against DynCorp stems from a subcontractor it used, Corporate Bank, during a period from 2004 to 2008 when it held the Iraqi police training contract. According to the justice department complaint, DynCorp was aware that rates from the subcontractor – for hotels for US government officials, local security personnel, drivers and interpreters – were “unreasonable”, yet the firm billed them to the state department anyway.

“DynCorp’s invoices, which reflected these inflated subcontractor rates, and DynCorp’s own fees and mark-ups, were false and fraudulent claims,” the complaint alleges.

DynCorp, which provides private security guards as well as aviation and logistics services, was not among seven contractors awarded state department contracts in February to protect its diplomats. It was a departure for state, which has included the security company on its previous awards of its Worldwide Protective Services contract, most recently in 2010.

Yet the firm currently holds contracts with the US department of defense, according to a federal contracting database, atop the Afghanistan interior ministry training deal.

Among them is an air force contract for supplying materiel relevant to a training aircraft for which DynCorp was the sole bidder, and an army contract for support services at a base in Honduras. A different contract, with the navy for maintenance on test aircraft, is set to expire on 31 July.

According to the justice department complaint, DynCorp management called its subcontractor Corporate Bank’s labor and hotel rates “expensive” during an internal presentation, without the subcontractor providing evidence justifying the costs. DynCorp allegedly presented those rates to the state department as justified by “historical data” or a “vendor quote”, and is alleged to have billed the government for unoccupied hotel rooms.

// posted by montag @ 5:32 PM 0 Comments

A longtime employee of the Trump Organization took responsibility for lifting two passages, from a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama, for Melania Trump’s address on Monday at the Republican National Convention, saying that it was an innocent mistake.

The employee, Meredith McIver, who has worked on some of Mr. Trump’s books, is the first person to publicly apologize for an error at any point during the Trump campaign. The New York Times on Tuesday night identified Ms. McIver as playing a role in the speech, although the extent of her involvement was unclear, and the Trump campaign declined to answer questions. Ms. McIver was brought in after Ms. Trump discarded the majority of a draft written by two professional speechwriters.

Ms. McIver identified herself in an unusual statement posted on the Trump campaign’s website, hours after the chief strategist, Paul Manafort, said the issue was manufactured by the news media. And it breathed new life into a story now in its third day.

“In working with Melania on her recent first lady speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people,” Ms. McIver wrote.

“A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama,” she added. “Over the phone,” Ms. Trump “read me some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech as examples. I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant.”

She said that she had “offered my resignation to Mr. Trump and the Trump family but they rejected it,” and that “Mr. Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and we learn and grow from these experiences.”

// posted by montag @ 1:26 PM 0 Comments

In this deeply conservative part of Ohio, full of cornfields and horse-drawn Amish buggies, people know all about Donald Trump’s two very public divorces, his extramarital affair with a beauty queen who became his second wife and his five children from three marriages.

But more surprising to many voters than the complexity of Trump’s “Modern Family” personal life is that it is not stopping them from voting for him.

“The other day I was thinking: Why doesn’t it bother me that he has had three wives?” said Carole Shetler, 66, a pastor of a Christian church who also works at the Wholesome Valley Farm store. “We have been desensitized.”

Only one other president, Ronald Reagan, had ever been divorced when he sought the White House. But Reagan had only one ex-wife. And unlike Trump, he did not have women publicly feuding over him — nor appear on the cover of Playboy magazine.

A messy private life — at least, when it’s known — has long been viewed as a disqualifier for a run for the highest office. Just ask former senator John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat whose 2008 White House bid imploded following revelations that he’d had an affair.

But in 2016, millions of voters are merely shrugging about personal lives that once seemed scandalous.

Many ordinary Americans wind up divorced. Then there’s the fact that the marriage of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is viewed as far from perfect. Both are key reasons people gave in interviews here that explain why they no longer weigh a candidate’s personal life as seriously as they once did.

“Let’s face it — there is not a lot of choice,” said Shetler, a Trump supporter who recalled the sex scandals around former president Bill Clinton. “We have to have change. I know other pastors, and they are for Trump, too.”

// posted by montag @ 1:44 PM 0 Comments

But the New York civil complaint, drawing on internal Volkswagen documents, emails and witness statements, depicts a corporate culture that allowed a “willful and systematic scheme of cheating.” The evidence paints the most detailed picture yet about how the deception unfolded and who was responsible.

For the first time, the New York complaint connects Volkswagen’s chief executive, Matthias Müller, to the scandal. Mr. Müller, according to the suit, was aware of a 2006 decision to not equip Audi vehicles with equipment needed to meet American clean-air standards. To save money, the company opted instead to install defeat devices in the cars. The suit stops short of accusing Mr. Müller of having specific knowledge of the device.

At the time, Mr. Müller was head of project management at Audi, Volkswagen’s luxury car division. He became chief executive of Volkswagen in September, replacing Martin Winterkorn, who resigned days after the Environmental Protection Agency accused the company of the diesel deception in September.

The New York complaint claims that more than two dozen Volkswagen engineers and managers were involved in the deception, including Wolfgang Hatz, the former head of engine and transmission development at Volkswagen and Audi; Ulrich Hackenberg, former head of development for Audi; and Heinz-Jakob Neusser, former head of development for the Volkswagen brand. While several executives have been identified by the news media, German prosecutors, because of the country’s strict privacy laws, have named only one suspect, Mr. Winterkorn.

The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Albany, also criticized Volkswagen’s supervisory board for awarding 63 million euros (about $70 million) in salary and bonuses to Mr. Müller and other members of the management board last year. “Recent actions,” the complaint said, “demonstrate that the company’s culture that incentivizes cheating and denies accountability comes from the very top and, even now, remains unchecked.”

The deception, the complaint described, was an “iterative process,” saying there were six separate defeat devices in more than a decade.

While scrutiny has focused on the Volkswagen brand, the use of defeat devices was pioneered by Audi, according to the complaint. Engineers at Audi had developed a way to eliminate the clattering sound that diesel engines tend to make after starting. But the solution increased pollution to impermissible levels.

So Audi in 2004 programmed its diesels in Europe to turn off the noise reduction technology when software recognized that the cars were undergoing emissions tests, the complaint said. The defeat device was euphemistically labeled the “acoustic function.” The same software was later adapted after engineers determined that a new generation of diesel motors could not meet American emissions standards, according to the complaint.

The New York complaint is the first to explicitly present evidence that top managers, at the very least, were aware of the engineering problems that led to the use of defeat devices.

According to the New York suit, Mr. Müller and Mr. Winterkorn were informed in 2006 that Audis with 3-liter diesel engines needed additional equipment to meet American standards. Specifically, they needed a larger tank to hold the chemical solution used to neutralize nitrogen oxide emissions in the exhaust.

But Volkswagen and Audi, the complaint said, did not want to spend the money necessary to redesign the cars to accommodate larger tanks. Instead, the company decided to deploy defeat devices. Both Mr. Winterkorn and Mr. Müller held senior positions at the Audi unit at the time.

// posted by montag @ 1:29 PM 0 Comments

Donald J. Trump has regularly boasted about “The Art of the Deal,” his best-selling autobiography, as a business bible that demonstrates the sharp negotiating prowess he would bring to the presidency. The book, released in 1987, details his rise to the top of New York’s real estate world; it helped spawn his career as a reality television star and cemented his image as a winner with a golden touch.

But Tony Schwartz, the book’s ghostwriter, who spent 18 months in the 1980s interviewing and shadowing Mr. Trump, says that it is really a work of fiction.

In an interview with The New Yorker magazine for its July 25 issue, Mr. Schwartz explained publicly, and for the first time, what he learned from living in Mr. Trump’s world.

Mr. Schwartz, a former magazine writer who said he worked on the book because he needed the money, told the writer Jane Mayer that he painted Mr. Trump in the most positive light that he could, thinking that a sympathetic character would be better for the book’s sales than a story about a cruel tycoon. If he could do it over again, however, Mr. Schwartz said the book would be titled “The Sociopath.”

“I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

“He’s a living black hole!” Mr. Schwartz said he used to tell his wife after long days with Mr. Trump. He described Mr. Trump as a painful interview subject who could not handle questions that required any depth to answer and who had little recollection of his youth. When pressed, Mr. Schwartz said, Mr. Trump would grow fidgety, angry and sometimes quit despite the fact that they were ostensibly working together on the book. He had no attention span, Mr. Schwartz said.

“If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” Mr. Schwartz said of Mr. Trump’s inability to focus.

// posted by montag @ 1:47 PM 0 Comments

In December 2014, a middle-aged man driving a car in Dijon, France, mowed down more than a dozen pedestrians within 30 minutes, occasionally shouting Islamic slogans from his window.

The chief prosecutor in Dijon described the attacks, which left 13 injured but no one dead, as the work of a mentally unbalanced man whose motivations were vague and “hardly coherent.”

A year and a half later, after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel slaughtered dozens of people when he drove a 19-ton refrigerated truck through a Bastille Day celebration on Thursday in Nice, France, the authorities did not hesitate to call it an act of Islamic terrorism. The attacker had a record of petty crime but no obvious ties to a terrorist group, yet the French prime minister swiftly said Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel was “a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam one way or another.”

The age of the Islamic State, in which the tools of terrorism appear increasingly crude and haphazard, has led to a re-imagining of the common notion of who is and who is not a terrorist.

Instances of wanton violence by deranged attackers — whether in Nice or in Orlando, Fla. — are swiftly judged to be the work of terrorists. These judgments occur even when there is little immediate evidence that the attackers had direct ties to terrorist groups and when they do not fit a classic definition of terrorists as those who use violence to advance a political agenda.

“A lot of this stuff is at the fringes of what we would historically think of as terrorism,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a professor at Dartmouth College. But, he said, “the Islamic State and jihadism has become a kind of refuge for some unstable people who are at the end of their rope and decide they can redeem their screwed-up lives” by dying in the name of a cause.

Mr. Benjamin said this also led the news media and government officials to treat violence like the Nice attack differently from other mass attacks, like shootings at schools and churches that have been carried out by non-Muslims.

“If there is a mass killing and there is a Muslim involved, all of a sudden it is by definition terrorism,” he said.

The spectrum of terrorism is widening and now includes attacks loosely inspired by the Islamic State, those carried out by its affiliate groups and attacks directed by the group’s leadership. All have drawn public condemnation and concern, but the plots organized and executed by the Islamic State usually prompt greater concern from the authorities.

// posted by montag @ 1:35 PM 0 Comments

As Mr. Trump prepares to claim the Republican nomination for president this week, he and his supporters are sure to laud his main calling card — his long, operatic record as a swaggering business tycoon. And without question, there will be successes aplenty to highlight, from his gleaming golden high-rises to his well-regarded golf resorts, hit TV shows and best-selling books.

But a survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago first extolled the business advantages of “truthful hyperbole.” Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.

Under the intense scrutiny of a presidential election, many of those allegations have already become familiar campaign fodder: the Trump University students and Trump condo buyers who say they were fleeced; the public servants from New Jersey to Scotland who now say they rue the zoning approvals, licenses or tax breaks they gave based on Mr. Trump’s promises; the small-time contractors who say Mr. Trump concocted complaints about their work to avoid paying them; the infuriated business partners who say Mr. Trump concealed profits or ignored contractual obligations; the business journalists and stock analysts who say Mr. Trump smeared them for critical coverage.

Taken as a whole, though, an examination of Mr. Trump’s business career reveals persistent patterns in the way Mr. Trump bends or breaks the truth — patterns that may already feel familiar to those watching his campaign.

First and foremost is Mr. Trump’s tendency toward the self-aggrandizing fib — as if it were not impressive enough to be paid $400,000 for a speech. What also emerges is a nearly reflexive habit of telling his target audience precisely what he thinks it wants to hear — such as promising Trump University students they will learn all his real estate secrets from his “handpicked” instructors. And finally, there is the pattern already deeply familiar to his political opponents — making spurious claims against adversaries under Mr. Trump’s oft-stated theory that the best defense is a scorched-earth offense.

Equally striking is his Houdiniesque ability to wiggle away from all but the most skilled and determined efforts to corner him in an apparent lie. In interviews, lawyers who have tangled with Mr. Trump in court cases are sometimes reduced to sputtering, astonished rage, calling him “borderline pathological” and “the Michelangelo of deception” as they attempt to describe the ease with which Mr. Trump weaves his own versions of reality.

“He’s a bully, and bullies aren’t known for their veracity,” said Richard C. Seltzer, a retired senior partner at the law firm Kaye Scholer who confronted Mr. Trump in three real estate lawsuits.

// posted by montag @ 1:41 PM 0 Comments