THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Wells Fargo said on Thursday that an internal review of its potentially fraudulent bank accounts had uncovered a total of 3.5 million such accounts, some 1.4 million more than it had previously estimated.

The bank also raised a new issue: unauthorized enrollments of customers in the bank’s online bill payment service. Wells Fargo said that it had found 528,000 cases in which customers may have been signed up without their knowledge or consent, and will refund $910,000 to customers who incurred fees or charges.

“We are working hard to ensure this never happens again and to build a better bank for the future,” Timothy J. Sloan, Wells Fargo’s chief executive, said in a written statement announcing the review’s results. “We apologize to everyone who was harmed.”

Wells Fargo touched off a scandal last September when it agreed to pay $185 million to settle three government lawsuits over the bank’s creation of potentially millions of unauthorized customer accounts.

Wells Fargo has acknowledged that thousands of employees, trying to meet aggressive sales goals, created accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge. Employees received bonuses for meeting the bank’s sales targets — and risked losing their jobs if they fell short.

At the time, the bank said that 2.1 million suspect accounts had been opened from 2011 to mid-2015. The bank later expanded its review by three years and examined 165 million bank accounts that were created from January 2009 through September 2016.

That review turned up the additional accounts that may have been fraudulent — a nearly 70 percent increase over Wells Fargo’s initial estimate.

The review Wells Fargo concluded on Thursday focused on retail bank accounts, and did not expand into other areas in which the bank has been accused of wrongdoing, including improperly withholding refunds that were due to some car loan customers and charging some customers for auto insurance that they did not need. Wells Fargo has said previously that it would refund customers who were affected by those actions.

The bank has also been accused of handling mortgages improperly by making unauthorized changes to the loans of borrowers in bankruptcy (which it has denied) and charging customers fees to extend applications that it delayed (an issue the bank said it is looking into).

// posted by montag @ 1:24 PM 0 Comments

More than 400 trailers packed with water, food, tarps and generators line a vacant airstrip in the farmland just northeast of San Antonio that has been transformed into a bustling logistics hub. Crews from the Department of Defense and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are working to dispatch aid to storm victims.

But the difficulty of responding to a major natural disaster was apparent Tuesday afternoon as more trucks of supplies rolled in, and almost none rolled out. Roads were tied up, needs were still not known. Four semis sent to supply a massive shelter at NRG Field in Houston, where N.F.L. games and rodeos are usually held, were idling at a roadblock, unable to deliver food and water.

“It’s been a constant stream of trucks in,” Steven Bouie, a FEMA employee in an orange vest, said as he checked in a long line of trucks arriving. “Now we’re working on a big push to get it all out to people who need them.”

Disaster planners have been preparing for years for a storm like Hurricane Harvey, and repeated hurricanes on the Gulf Coast have given them plenty of practice, but the scale of this storm has pushed many emergency workers beyond their limits. Operators at the 911 system were overwhelmed, sending trapped residents to turn to social media. Police and firefighters got help from armada of citizen bass boats and Jet Skis.

More than 30,000 people are in 230 shelters across Texas, but FEMA cautioned that the number would likely rise sharply. More than 50 counties in Texas and Louisiana have been impacted in some way by flooding, FEMA said. The Coast Guard continues to receive more than 1,000 calls an hour for help. More than 200,000 people have registered for FEMA assistance.

The military has sent in helicopters, cargo planes, trucks, amphibious vehicles, even special operations Marines in inflatable rafts, and were mobilizing hundreds of other troops.

Federal authorities say lessons learned from the often glaring missteps in the response to Katrina in 2005 have helped them to better prepare for the disaster unfolding in Texas. But many were reluctant to tout the accomplishment with the storm still swirling off the coast.

“I think we don’t know what we don’t know.” said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, as he walked into the command briefing of Army North, the military command in charge of homeland defense. So far, he said, troops and federal aid workers were doing all they could.

At a long table surrounded by maps and video screens, an Army North team took turns briefing the general on the military response: 400 deep water trucks moving through Houston’s flooded neighborhoods; a fleet of Black Hawk helicopters running night rescues when civilian aircraft often cannot fly; satellite communications teams moving in to crucial locations.

Crews had whisked hundreds of stranded people to dry land. Air Force planes were getting ready to evacuate hospitals in storm-crippled neighborhoods. Looting remained low, but the National Guard was ready to step in to help police if necessary.

“We’ve got Ospreys,” a Marine officer said, referring to tilt-rotor aircraft that flies like an airplane but can land vertically. “We’ll stage them in Florida in case we need them when the storm hits Louisiana.”

// posted by montag @ 1:45 PM 0 Comments

A wave of anti-American anger has swept Pakistan this past week, triggered both by President Trump’s threat to punish the country for harboring insurgents and by his invitation to India, Pakistan’s longtime rival, to become more involved in Afghanistan’s future.

Tribal and religious leaders have held protests at border crossings, and banners urging “Say no to America!” have appeared across the capital. Officials have canceled trips to Washington and asked a State Department official to postpone her planned visit here this week. Across the country’s fractious political spectrum, leaders have raised a collective fist at Trump.

In a stern speech Aug. 21, the U.S. president laid out a new militarized policy for the region, saying he would send more American troops to Afghanistan and insisting that Pakistan must “do more” to rein in Islamist militants or face possible sanctions, such as cutting aid or revoking its status as a major non-NATO ally.

Afghan officials welcomed Trump’s message, but Pakistanis accused him of “bullying” their country despite its history of cooperating with the United States in foreign conflicts. They said he had betrayed them by reaching out to India, which Pakistan views as a persistent threat to its existence.

“President Trump wants to portray us as a villain despite the huge losses we have suffered in the so-called anti-terrorism war,” said Hafiz Hamdullah, a conservative Muslim cleric and legislator. “Both India and the U.S. want to use Afghanistan against us. These charges of terrorist hideouts are just to destabilize Pakistan.”

Mian Raza Rabbani, the left-leaning chairman of Pakistan’s Senate, denounced Trump in similar terms. “No country in the world has done more than Pakistan to counter the menace of terrorism,” he declared. Invoking the “legacy of Vietnam,” he said that if Trump “wants Pakistan to become a graveyard for U.S. troops, let him do so.”

In tribal regions along the border, where U.S. drone strikes have killed hundreds of suspected militants and civilians, one crowd of tribesmen chanted, “Long live Pakistan.” In another spot, religious activists held up placards saying, “India, America and Afghanistan are conspiring against Pakistan.”

// posted by montag @ 1:56 PM 0 Comments

One of two major reservoirs in Houston began spilling over for the first time in history, despite efforts to prevent such “uncontrolled” overflow the day before, officials said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirmed Tuesday morning that water was spilling from around the dam gates of the Addicks Reservoir, which has been overwhelmed by extreme rainfall from Hurricane Harvey. Officials said they expect the Barker Reservoir, to the south of Addicks, to begin overflowing similarly at some point Tuesday.

A Harris County Flood Control District meteorologist said the overflow from the reservoirs would eventually flow into downtown Houston.

The reservoirs, which flank Interstate 10 on the west side of Houston, flow into the Buffalo Bayou and are surrounded by parks and residential areas. Water levels in the two reservoirs had already reached record levels Monday evening, measuring 105 feet at Addicks and 99 feet at Barker.

Engineers were unable to measure water levels at the Barker Reservoir on Tuesday because its gauge was flooded overnight, said Jeff Lindner, the Harris County flood control meteorologist.

Officials had hoped to prevent just such a spillover by releasing water — slowly, at first — from both the Addicks and Barker dams, starting early Monday morning. Water levels in both reservoirs had “increased dramatically” late Sunday night, rising more than half a foot per hour, leaving engineers with two choices: to begin releasing water through the dam gates earlier than expected — or risk it spilling out suddenly around the ends of the dams.

“If we don’t begin releasing now, the volume of uncontrolled water around the dams will be higher and have a greater impact on the surrounding communities,” Col. Lars Zetterstrom, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Galveston District commander, said in a statement about 2:30 a.m. Monday. “ … It’s going to be better to release the water through the gates directly into Buffalo Bayou as opposed to letting it go around the end and through additional neighborhoods and ultimately into the bayou.”

The Corps planned Monday to release water at 4,000 cubic feet per second from each reservoir over a six- to 10-hour period. Officials said thousands of homes along the reservoirs could be affected, and by midmorning Monday, streets and houses in some surrounding neighborhoods had already begun flooding, ABC13 News reported.

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

But shipboard veterans had long seen signs of trouble. Factor in a shrinking Navy performing the same duties that a larger fleet did a decade ago, constant deployments that leave little time to train and relentless duties that require sailors driving 9,000-ton vessels to endure sleepless stretches that would be illegal for bus drivers, and avoidable accidents can happen, current and former officers said.

“What seems impossible — that two ships could hit in the middle of the ocean — becomes very real,” said Robert McFall, a former Navy lieutenant commander who served as the operations officer of the destroyer Fitzgerald in 2014. “If you are not at your best, events can start that lead to a disaster.”

Since the loss of 17 sailors after the Fitzgerald collided with a freighter near Tokyo in June, and a second destroyer, the John S. McCain, collided with a tanker last Monday while approaching Singapore, Navy investigators have been piecing together the causes of the fatal crashes. (On Sunday, the Navy said it had recovered the last of the bodies of the 10 sailors who died on the McCain.) Congress has scheduled hearings next month that will include top commanders and safety auditors.

While there could be some surprising findings, officers said the accidents — and two nonlethal mishaps earlier this year — were almost certainly influenced by systemic problems that persist despite repeated alarms from congressional watchdogs and the Navy’s own experts.

In interviews, more than a dozen current and former ship commanders who served in the western Pacific said the strain on the Navy’s fleet there had caused maintenance gaps and training shortfalls that had not been remedied or had received only cursory attention as leaders focused on immediate missions.

Compounding the stress, the officers and crew said, the Navy allows ships to rely on grueling watch schedules that leave captains and crews exhausted, even though the service ordered submarines to abandon similar schedules two years ago.

The Navy recognizes that safety problems may go beyond what occurred on the two destroyers, and its examination of whether systemic issues contributed to the accidents will also review ship operations and episodes at sea over the past decade, with a focus on the western Pacific.

Vice Adm. William Douglas Crowder, a retired commander of the Seventh Fleet and a former deputy chief of naval operations, agreed. “As the Navy conducts this broad look in its mirror, I suspect it will recognize many blemishes that are neither new nor previously unknown,” he said in an email.

“The key issue is whether the Navy will commit to the fundamental changes required to actually cure those shortfalls.”

// posted by montag @ 1:32 PM 0 Comments

President Trump “speaks for himself” on his values, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday.

The U.S. commitment to tolerance and equality is unchanged, Tillerson said, in the wake of controversy over Trump's response to racially tinged violence.

“We express America's values from the State Department — our commitment to freedom, our commitment to equal treatment of people the world over,” Tillerson said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding: “And that message has never changed.”

A United Nations committee last week criticized Trump for what it deemed his failure to fully condemn hatred and bigotry in the wake of deadly violence at a white supremacist march in Charlottesville earlier this month.

“I don't believe anyone doubts the American people's values,” or the U.S. government's willingness to defend them, Tillerson said.

Asked whether Trump's reaction, which included a statement that there was blame on “many sides” for the violence in Charlottesville, reflects American values, Tillerson answered evenly.

“The president speaks for himself,” he said.

When host Chris Wallace asked whether Tillerson was “separating himself” from Trump's remarks, Tillerson answered, “I've made my own comment as to our values.”

Tillerson's remarks followed pointed criticism of Trump's reaction from economic adviser Gary Cohn last week.

// posted by montag @ 1:48 PM 0 Comments

In recent years, government shutdowns have become so common that markets have either embraced them or shrugged them off. But as investors absorb the possibility of a closure this fall, market tremors are likely to intensify, experts say. The past will not necessarily be prologue this time around.

That’s the view of Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at Compass Point Research & Trading in Washington. Noting that during the past three shutdowns, the stock market was unfazed by the political gamesmanship, Mr. Boltansky said, “I think this time will be worse because of the uncertainty from President Trump.”

Investors are grappling with two matters right now: the need to raise the nation’s debt ceiling in September so the government can pay its obligations, and the desire to have a federal budget in place by Oct. 1 to avoid a shutdown.

Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tried to reassure investors on the first matter. “We’re going to get the debt ceiling passed,” Mr. Mnuchin vowed at an event in Louisville, Ky., on Monday. He also predicted that the ceiling would be raised cleanly — that is, without spending reforms attached to the increase that are intended to move the government toward a balanced budget.

But the next day Mr. Trump invoked the government shutdown, spooking Treasury investors. Faced with the possibility of problems with both the debt ceiling and a shutdown, investors holding T-bills maturing in early October began selling. Short-term Treasury investors, like the institutions that oversee money market funds, can’t afford to wait around to see if they’ll be paid on time. It’s easier to bail out of the holdings that could be affected.

Stocks also weakened on the prospect of a shutdown — a very different investor response than has been seen during recent government closures.

Mr. Boltansky looked back at the stock market’s performance during all 18 government shutdowns, starting in 1976. He found that the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index averaged just a 0.6 percent loss over the course of those closures.

Early on in shutdown history, investors reacted very negatively. Closures in 1976 and 1977 coincided with 3 percent declines in the S. & P. 500.

As investors grew more accustomed to shutdowns, they seemed to become more blasé about them. During the mid-1990s and the 2013 closure, for instance, stocks actually rose. They gained 3.1 percent during the 2013 stoppage.

Although stocks rose on Friday, investors should not expect such a performance this time, Mr. Boltansky said. One reason is that a government closure would raise serious doubts about the ability of the Republicans in Congress to get anything done.

“It will confirm one of the market’s fears that the Republicans are not a political party but a government coalition made up of leadership loyalists, conservatives and moderates,” Mr. Boltansky said. “If you have that dynamic, how can you get anything done legislatively?”

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

President Trump handed Democrats a gift this week with his vow to shut down the government if he doesn’t soon get money for his border wall.

Democrats may be only too happy to let him follow through on his threat since it will now be easy for them to blame the president for any government interruption, which would probably aggravate many Americans.

Rather than cowing Democrats, Mr. Trump’s tough talk is more likely to embolden the opposition in ongoing negotiations, particularly since he has now twice suggested he was willing to shutter government agencies if he didn’t get his way.

It also puts more pressure on Republicans to find the votes internally to pass spending bills and an increase in the federal debt limit — two things hard-right conservatives in the House and Senate have refused to support in the past. That Republican resistance provides Democrats leverage — Republicans can either grant concessions such as no wall money or produce all the votes for the spending bills and debt limit increase themselves.

Mr. Trump also has spent the past few weeks taunting and denigrating Republican leaders who will be responsible for navigating these formidable fiscal obstacles, providing them incentive to look out for themselves rather than the interests of the president.

On Thursday, the president again undercut Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, saying they had failed to embrace his proposed maneuver to raise the debt limit by tying it to a popular veteran benefits bill.

“Could have been so easy — now a mess!” the president tweeted.

Seizing the opening, Democrats wasted no time putting the onus squarely on Republicans for any economic upheaval to come.

“With the White House, House and Senate under one-party control, the American people expect and deserve a plan from Republicans to avert a catastrophic default and ensure the full faith and credit of the United States,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said Thursday. “With so much at risk for hard-working families, Republicans need to stop the chaos and sort themselves out in a hurry.”

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

President Trump reverted to his script as commander in chief here on Wednesday.

The morning after he delivered an aggrieved and impromptu defense of his comments on the violence in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump spoke in a more measured tone to the national convention of the American Legion, telling its members that “we are not defined by the color of our skin,” and that the country will overcome its challenges by reaffirming its common values.

“We are here to hold you up as an example of strength, courage and resolve that our country will need to overcome the many challenges that we face,” the president said, speaking slowly and gravely as he read from a teleprompter. “We are here to draw inspiration from you as we seek to renew the bonds of loyalty that bind us together as one people and one nation.”

It was a day-and-night contrast to Mr. Trump’s performance Tuesday night in Phoenix, where he lurched from subject to subject and accused the news media of ignoring what he insisted had been his message of unity in the aftermath of Charlottesville.

But such contrasts have become a recurring motif of his presidency: Mr. Trump has toggled between Teleprompter Trump and Unplugged Trump every day since the deadly clashes in Virginia, leaving Washington and the rest of the nation with a chronic case of rhetorical whiplash.

The split speaking personality is not new. Mr. Trump spent years mocking President Barack Obama for using a teleprompter.

There were obvious differences between the venue and audience for the Phoenix speech and those here on Wednesday. The first was a campaign-style rally for his most boisterous supporters, against a thumping soundtrack of the Rolling Stones; the second was an official presidential event for an audience of veterans, complete with a bill-signing ceremony.

There were many reasons to believe that the president’s angry performance in Phoenix was the real Donald J. Trump. It was consistent with the way he has reacted to all sorts of setbacks since he took office, including the Senate’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the multiple investigations of his links to Russia.

His advisers had actually anticipated the possibility that he would go off-script after The New York Times reported earlier Tuesday on his toxic relationship with Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader. The article was referred to frequently on the cable television shows that the president likes to watch.

While reporters declared his rally one of his most caustic in the past two years, some White House aides said privately on Wednesday that they found some comfort in the fact that it could have been worse.

Many presidents, of course, have complained bitterly behind closed doors about their treatment at the hands of the news media or their political opponents. Robert Dallek, a historian, said Franklin D. Roosevelt lashed out at the news media with his aides, while John F. Kennedy canceled a White House subscription to The New York Herald Tribune after a string of negative coverage.

“There was a difference between how they performed in public and private,” Mr. Dallek said.

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

President Trump issued an extraordinary challenge to his own party late Tuesday, threatening to shut down the government in a matter of weeks if Congress did not fund a wall on the southern border that was a signature promise of his campaign for the White House.

Mr. Trump followed up on that threat on Wednesday by going after a key Republican senator on Twitter who has been skeptical of building a border wall between the United States and Mexico. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona is also one of two Republican senators up for re-election next year in a swing state, and the president has put his finger on the scale toward a primary challenger, Kelli Ward.

On Tuesday night, he told a rowdy crowd in Phoenix, “If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.”

“We’re going to have our wall,” he added. “The American people voted for immigration control. We’re going to get that wall.”

Tuesday’s admonition sharpened a suggestion that Mr. Trump made early this year, in the wake of a budget agreement he grudgingly accepted even though it omitted money for the wall, that the United States needed “a good ‘shutdown’” this fall to force a partisan confrontation over federal spending. His campaign promise stressed that Mexico would pay for the border barrier, but that part of the promise seems to have dropped away.

The president wants to push through a tax overhaul by year’s end, which would require Republicans to approve a budget to trigger special procedures — known as reconciliation — that would allow the package to pass the Senate with only 51 votes, instead of the 60 required to bring most legislation to an up-or-down vote.

A budget resolution is always difficult, but it will probably become entangled in another divisive issue, the debt ceiling: The Treasury Department has estimated that the government will reach its borrowing limit sometime in October, at which point Congress will have to vote to increase the debt limit to avoid a default.

Most pressing, the government will run out of money on Oct. 1 unless Congress acts to approve new government spending bills. It would probably the first time a government shut down while under complete control of one party. But in that conflict, the president may have handed Senate Democrats the whip. They can now filibuster any spending bill that contains wall funding, forcing Republicans to strip out the money and challenge Mr. Trump to veto it.

// posted by montag @ 3:51 PM 0 Comments

President Trump put forward on Monday a long-awaited strategy for resolving the nearly 16-year-old conflict in Afghanistan, but he declined to specify either the number of troops that would be committed, or the conditions by which he would judge the success of their mission there.

In a nationally televised prime-time speech to troops at Fort Myer, Va., Mr. Trump said there would be no “blank check” for the American engagement in Afghanistan. But in announcing his plan, Mr. Trump deepened American involvement in a military mission that has bedeviled his predecessors and that he once called futile.

“My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts,” Mr. Trump said. “But all my life, I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.”

After what he described as a lengthy and exhaustive deliberation culminating in a meeting with his war cabinet at Camp David, Mr. Trump said that he had been convinced that “a hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum for terrorists, including ISIS and Al Qaeda.”

Speaking to a military audience at a base outside Washington, Mr. Trump declared, “In the end, we will win.”

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

Not since 2002, as the United States built a case for war in Iraq, has there been so much debate inside the White House about the merits — and the enormous risks — of pre-emptive military action against an adversary nation.

Like its predecessors, the Trump administration is trying to pressure North Korea through sanctions to dismantle its nuclear program. But both President Trump and his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, have talked openly about a last-resort option if diplomacy fails and the nuclear threat mounts: what General McMaster describes as “preventive war.”

Though the Pentagon has prepared options to pre-emptively strike North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites for more than a decade and the past four presidents declared that “all options are on the table,” the rote phrase barely seemed credible, given the potential for a North Korean counterstrike against Seoul, South Korea, that could result in tremendous casualties in a metropolitan area of 25 million people.

But as the Trump administration moves ahead on Monday with a new round of long-planned military exercises that involve tens of thousands of American and South Korean troops, computer simulations of escalating conflict and perhaps overflights of nuclear-capable aircraft, the White House is determined to leave the impression the military option is real.

“Are we preparing plans for a preventive war?” General McMaster asked recently in a television interview, defining the term as “a war that would prevent North Korea from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon.”

He answered his own question: “The president’s been very clear about it. He said he’s not going to tolerate North Korea being able to threaten the United States.”

Much of this could be posturing, designed to convince the North’s unpredictable dictator, Kim Jong-un, and Chinese leaders who are eager to preserve the status quo, that they are dealing with a different American president who is determined to “solve” the North Korean problem, as Mr. Trump puts it, rather than hope that sanctions will eventually take their toll.

But even if Mr. Trump has no real intention of using military force, convincing adversaries and allies that he is willing to make a move that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all considered too dangerous has significant value.

Whether Mr. Trump is truly prepared or bluffing, presidential advisers, military officials and experts whom the White House has consulted leave little doubt in conversations that the Trump administration is confronting North Korea’s nuclear program with a different set of assumptions than its three immediate predecessors.

// posted by montag @ 1:25 PM 0 Comments

President Trump, who has been accused by lawmakers of dragging his feet on Afghanistan, has settled on a new strategy to carry on the nearly 16-year-old conflict there, administration officials said Sunday. The move, following a detailed review, is likely to open the door to the deployment of several thousand troops.

“The president has made a decision,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters on an overnight flight that arrived in Amman, Jordan, on Sunday. “I am very comfortable that the strategic process was sufficiently rigorous.”

Mr. Mattis declined to say what steps the president had ordered, including on troop levels, saying that the president wanted to outline the new approach himself.

The defense secretary received the authority in June to send as many as 3,900 troops to Afghanistan so that the United States military could expand its efforts to advise Afghan forces and support them with American artillery and airpower. But Mr. Mattis has refrained from building up the American force there until the Trump administration agreed on a broader strategy.

The White House said in a statement that Mr. Trump would address the American public and American troops “on a path forward for America’s engagement in Afghanistan and South Asia” in a speech at Fort Myer, Va., Monday night.

American military commanders have argued during the monthslong policy assessment that the additional troops would enable the United States to reverse gains made by the Taliban and militant groups like the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, the Islamic State in Khorasan.

Administration aides, under orders to let Mr. Trump announce the details, hinted that any American commitment to increase force levels would require steps by the Afghans, like doing more to fight corruption.

Mr. Trump’s Monday evening speech will be his first nationally televised prime-time address since he spoke before Congress in January and follows a week of controversy over his reaction to the racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Va.

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

In the weeks before the Environmental Protection Agency decided to reject its own scientists’ advice to ban a potentially harmful pesticide, Scott Pruitt, the agency’s head, promised farming industry executives who wanted to keep using the pesticide that it is “a new day, and a new future,” and that he was listening to their pleas.

Details on this meeting and dozens of other meetings in the weeks leading up to the late March decision by Mr. Pruitt are contained in more than 700 pages of internal agency documents obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information request.

Though hundreds of pages describing the deliberations were redacted from the documents, the internal memos show how the E.P.A.’s new staff, appointed by President Trump, pushed the agency’s career staff to draft a ruling that would deny the decade-old petition by environmentalists to ban the pesticide, chlorpyrifos.

Chlorpyrifos is still widely used in agriculture — on apples, oranges, strawberries, almonds and many other fruits — though it was barred from residential use in 2000. The E.P.A.’s scientists have recommended it be banned from use on farms and produce because it has been linked to lower I.Q.s and developmental delays among agricultural workers and their children.

At a March 1 meeting at E.P.A. headquarters with members of the American Farm Bureau Federation from Washington State, industry representatives pressed the E.P.A. not to reduce the number of pesticides available. They said there were not enough alternative pesticides to chlorpyrifos. They also said there was a need for “a reasonable approach to regulate this pesticide,” which is widely used in Washington State, and that they wanted “the farming community to be more involved in the process.”

According to the documents, Mr. Pruitt “stressed that this is a new day, a new future, for a common-sense approach to environmental protection.” He said the new administration “is looking forward to working closely with the agricultural community.”

Three days before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, Dow Chemical had separately submitted a request to the agency to reject the petition to ban chlorpyrifos, calling the scientific link between the childhood health issues and the pesticide unclear, agency records show.

// posted by montag @ 1:52 PM 0 Comments

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that President Trump, who had been accused by lawmakers of dragging his feet on Afghanistan, had settled on a new strategy after a “rigorous” review.

“The president has made a decision,” Mr. Mattis told reporters on an overnight flight that arrived in Amman, Jordan, on Sunday. “I am very comfortable that the strategic process was sufficiently rigorous.”

Mr. Mattis received the authority in June to send nearly 4,000 troops to Afghanistan so that the United States military could expand its efforts to advise Afghan forces and support them with American artillery and air power. But Mr. Mattis had refrained from building up the American force there until the Trump administration settled on a broader strategy.

Mr. Mattis declined to say what steps the president had ordered, including troop levels. He added that Mr. Trump wanted to announce the details to the American people, and that the president was expected to do so in coming days.

The decision to send troops is just one component of a strategy that is also expected to outline ways to pressure Pakistan to shut down the sanctuaries that the Taliban and other extremist groups have maintained on its territory.

// posted by montag @ 1:23 PM 0 Comments

The war-on-terror prison’s oldest captive, a former Pakistani businessmen, turned 70 Thursday. Like President Trump, he once lived in Queens.

Forever prisoner Saifullah Paracha was captured in Thailand in July 2003. After being taken to a U.S. detention site in Afghanistan, he was brought to this island prison in September 2004.

“I never thought I’d be here at the age of 70,” he said in remarks released Thursday by his legal defense team from the London-based nonprofit Reprieve. “I always expected that by the time I was 70, I would be home with my wife and family.”

He also observed that long before his capture he lived in New York, “in Queens, Jamaica Estates — Donald Trump’s old neighborhood. Our houses were on the same road. I am going to write to him to ask him to release me.”

Paracha has never been charged with a crime. But the inter-agency U.S. Periodic Review Board has repeatedly upheld his status as an indefinite Law of War detainee, citing his “continued refusal to take responsibility for his involvement with al-Qaida,” including having had contacts with Osama bin Laden and the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

In March he told the parole board: “I deeply regret becoming involved with individuals who turned out to be al-Qaida. It horrifies me to think that I may have helped to enable indirectly, unwittingly to carry out their terrorist attacks on the U.S This will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

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

President Trump has told senior aides that he has decided to remove Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled White House chief strategist who helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, according to two administration officials briefed on the discussion.

The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.

As of Friday morning, the two men were still discussing Mr. Bannon’s future, the officials said. A person close to Mr. Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on Aug. 7, to be announced at the start of this week, but the move was delayed after the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Va.

Mr. Bannon had clashed for months with other senior West Wing advisers and members of the president’s family.

But the loss of Mr. Bannon, the right-wing nationalist who helped propel some of Mr. Trump’s campaign promises into policy reality, raises the potential for the president to face criticism from the conservative news media base that supported him over the past year.

Mr. Bannon’s many critics bore down after the violence in Charlottesville. Outraged over Mr. Trump’s insistence that “both sides” were to blame for the violence that erupted at a white nationalist rally, leaving one woman dead, human rights activists demanded that the president fire so-called nationalists working in the West Wing. That group of hard-right populists in the White House is led by Mr. Bannon.

On Tuesday at Trump Tower in New York, Mr. Trump refused to guarantee Mr. Bannon’s job security but defended him as “not a racist” and “a friend.”

“We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Bannon’s dismissal followed an Aug. 16 interview he initiated with a writer with whom he had never spoken, with the progressive publication The American Prospect. In it, Mr. Bannon mockingly played down the American military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

// posted by montag @ 1:23 PM 0 Comments

Juror No 144: “I heard through the news of how the defendant changed the price of a pill by up-selling it. I heard he bought an album from the Wu-Tang Clan for a million dollars.”

The court: “The question is, have you heard anything that would affect your ability to decide this case with an open mind? Can you do that?”

Juror No 144: “I don’t think I can because he kind of looks like a dick.”

// posted by montag @ 12:26 PM 0 Comments

A bill to restrict which bathroom transgender people can use in public buildings and schools died in the Texas Legislature on Tuesday evening, a rare defeat for social conservatives in a state they usually dominate.

The failure of the so-called bathroom bill at the end of a special legislative session was the second time in three months that the bill had fallen short, and it deepened the ideological discord within the Texas Republican Party. But it did not kill the issue entirely.

The Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who pushed for the bill’s North Carolina-style restrictions on transgender bathroom use, virtually guaranteed that the issue would arise again in future legislative sessions. And it is still possible that Gov. Greg Abbott, who supported the bill, will recall lawmakers for a second special session to give the bill another chance at passage.

“You know why it’s going to be back next session? Because the people will demand it,” Mr. Patrick told reporters Tuesday night. “The issue is not going to go away.”

Opponents of the measure, including gay rights activists, corporate executives, transgender Texans and both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, hailed the bill’s demise in the special session as a significant achievement, even if it proves to be short-lived. The Legislature had previously failed to pass it during the regular session that ended in May.

“Defeating this discriminatory and dangerous legislation in Texas is a huge victory that will have an impact far beyond the Lone Star State,” Kasey Suffredini, the acting chief executive of Freedom for All Americans, a national gay rights and transgender rights group, said in a statement.

In the special session, conservative lawmakers passed a version of the bill in the Texas Senate, where Mr. Patrick presides, but the moderate Republicans who lead the Texas House never referred it to a House committee, so it was effectively dead on arrival in the chamber. Another version, written by a House lawmaker, was never given a hearing.

// posted by montag @ 1:54 PM 0 Comments

President Trump found himself increasingly isolated in a racial crisis of his own making on Wednesday, abandoned by the nation’s top business executives, contradicted by military leaders and shunned by Republicans outraged by his defense of white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Va.

The breach with the business community was the most striking. Titans of American industry and finance revolted against a man they had seen as one of their own, concluding Wednesday morning they could no longer serve on two of Mr. Trump’s advisory panels.

But before Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group and one of Mr. Trump’s closest business confidants, could announce a decision to disband Mr. Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum — in a prepared statement calling “intolerance, racism and violence” an “affront to core American values” — the president undercut him and did it himself, in a tweet.

“Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Thank you all!”

The condemnation descended on the president a day after he told reporters in a defiant news conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan that “alt-left” demonstrators were just as responsible for the violence in Charlottesville last weekend as the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who instigated protests that led to the death of a 32-year-old woman, struck down by a car driven by a right-wing activist.

Five armed services chiefs — of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines and the National Guard Bureau — posted statements on social media condemning neo-Nazis and racism in uncompromising terms. They did not mention Mr. Trump by name, but their messages were a highly unusual counter to the commander in chief.

Republicans, too, issued new denunciations of the hatred on display in Charlottesville, although some remained vague about Mr. Trump’s remarks.

No one from the president’s team has resigned as of yet, but some spoke candidly on Wednesday about whether they could continue to work much longer for a man who has expressed such sentiments. Most incensed among Mr. Trump’s top advisers, according to three people familiar with the situation, was Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, who told people around him that he was offended, as a Jew and as an American, by the president’s reaction to the violence in Charlottesville.

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