Update: Court of Appeals: The law is clear.
For previous story, see here; for updates, see here and here.
In a recent update on the court’s temporary injunction to stay the Trump administration’s asylum ban, the DOJ’s request to the Court of Appeals to allow the administration’s ban to go into effect until the lower court’s hearing on Dec 19 has been denied, holding that “the Trump administration’s proclamation is “likely inconsistent with existing United States law,” CNN reported on Friday.
The 9th Circuit panel sympathized at times with some of the government’s arguments but said that the law is clear.
“We are acutely aware of the crisis in the enforcement of our immigration laws,” the panel said. “The burden of dealing with these issues has fallen disproportionately on the courts of our circuit. And as much as we might be tempted to revise the law as we think wise, revision of the laws is left with the branch that enacted the laws in the first place—Congress.”
The panel also emphasized that the litigation was at an early stage.
CNN; Dec 7 2018
“The 2-1 opinion was penned by Jay Bybee, a George W. Bush appointee, joined by Andrew Hurwitz, an Obama appointee. Edward Leavy, a Reagan appointee, dissented.”
In a video interview, CNN also reported on Friday that the port of entry south of San Diego, California at San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, Mexico has been closed, saying that during a protest on the Mexico side migrants, “in the hundreds overpowered the Mexican federal police lines and started running towards the US side and the decision was made that they needed to cross [close] the bridge, vehicular traffic and also pedestrian traffic at the border.”
Opinion: Taxing Churches to Own the Libs
You would be forgiven for thinking this is a headline from the Onion or the fantasy of some left-wing website. But it’s exactly what happened in the big corporate tax cut the GOP passed last year.
Now — under pressure from churches, synagogues and other nonprofits — embarrassed leaders of a party that casts itself as religious liberty’s last line of defense are trying to fix a provision that is a monument to both their carelessness and their hypocrisy.
Washington Post
At stake is a provision in the $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that directed not-for-profits of all kinds — houses of worship but also, for example, universities, museums and orchestras — to pay a 21 percent tax on certain fringe benefits for their employees, such as parking and meals.
The new levy on the “armies of compassion” former president George W. Bush liked to extol would raise an estimated $1.7 billion over a decade.
Washington Post
Failing to remember.
Anti-Semitic stereotypes are alive and well in Europe, while the memory of the Holocaust is starting to fade, a sweeping new survey by CNN reveals. More than a quarter of Europeans polled believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in four said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars across the world.
One in five said they have too much influence in the media and the same number believe they have too much influence in politics.
Meanwhile, a third of Europeans in the poll said they knew just a little or nothing at all about the Holocaust, the mass murder of some six million Jews in lands controlled by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s.
Those are among the key findings of a survey carried out by pollster ComRes for CNN. The CNN/ComRes poll interviewed more than 7,000 people across Europe, with more than 1,000 respondents each in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden.
CNN
Breaking News: In case you missed it, the president of Nigeria is not, I repeat, not a clone.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is not a clone. At least he says he’s not a clone. Buhari made the assertion in a Facebook post on Sunday to counter rumors that he actually died and was secretly replaced by a lookalike. Which is exactly what a clone would say, right? I mean, come on. That’s textbook clone behavior.
Gizmodo; Dec 3 2018
For further reporting on this breaking news, see, here.
What are the claims?
Andrej Babis Jr told investigative reporters from the Seznam news site that he was taken against his will to Russian-annexed Crimea.
His disappearance coincided with a police investigation into allegations that his father had concealed his ownership of a farm and conference centre known as “Stork Nest” (Capi hnizdo in Czech) so that it would qualify for EU small business subsidies.
Andrej Babis senior had said that at the time the funds were obtained, the centre belonged to his adult children, of whom one was Andrej Jr.
According to the website, the prime minister’s son said his father wanted him out of the way of the criminal inquiry and that he had been given the choice of “taking an extended holiday” in Crimea or being locked up in a mental home.He said the husband of a psychiatrist who had treated him in Prague had taken him to Crimea. Neither were available for comment in the Seznam report.
BBC; Nov 13 2018