World News

>Two former intelligence heads bragged about how the deep state is engaged in a coup to remove President Trump Thursday, with one even praising God for the existence of the deep state.

>“Thank God for the ‘Deep State,’” -Former CIA director under G.W.Bush McLaughlin

>Caracas, September 25, 2019 (venezuelanalysis.com) - Self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaido and the Venezuelan opposition have been given US $52 million by the Trump administration.

>According to a Tuesday statement from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the funding will be destined for independent media, civil society, the health sector and the opposition-controlled National Assembly.

>In addition, USAID administrator Mark Green announced on Wednesday that the US will commit $36 million in aid to Venezuela, as part of a relief program led by the United Nations. It is not clear at the present time whether this sum is part of the $52 million or an additional disbursement.

>The Trump administration had previously diverted over $40 million in aid destined for Central America to fund the Venezuelan opposition. According to a USAID memo seen by the LA Times, the money was destined for salaries, airfare, training, propaganda, among other budget items.

>Guaido proclaimed himself president in January and has since led several attempts to oust the Maduro government, including a failed military putsch on April 30.

>The new aid package dovetails with a fresh round of US sanctions against Venezuela’s oil sector.

>Mark Zuckerberg faced a grueling examination from the Democratic lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday, with questions over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s reluctance to police political advertising.

>Ocasio-Cortez and other lawmakers grilled the Facebook CEO during a hearing in front of the US House of Representatives financial services committee regarding the launch of Facebook’s cryptocurrency project, Libra.

>“In order for us to make decisions about Libra, I think we need to kind of dig into your past behavior and Facebook’s past behavior with respect to our democracy,” the New York congresswoman said, before asking Zuckerberg when he had first learned of Cambridge Analytica’s operations.

>Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives have declined to disclose when they found out the company was harvesting and selling user data to influence elections.

>Internal Facebook correspondence uncovered in 2019 as part of a lawsuit revealed executives knew of potentially improper data collection by Cambridge Analytica as early as September 2015. The Guardian first reported on the existence of the firm in December 2015.

>The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has just updated its policy on firearms, moving from a recommendation that lethal weapons, including guns, were considered “inappropriate” on church property to an outright prohibition of them.

>This marks the latest in a series of small steps the church has taken away from the Republican Party, either by tweaking its own policies or by simply upholding its usual position to the right of center, while members of the GOP swing ever further to the right.

>Merely by doubling down on the church’s prior stance on weapons in church, changing the one word “inappropriate” to “prohibited,” LDS leaders are signaling that they’re not blindly following the direction that many in the GOP are embracing, despite the fact that a majority of U.S. Mormons identify with the Republican Party.

>Gun violence is not the only issue; Mormons are also charting their own path on immigration. The GOP in general has followed Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Studies by the Pew Research Center show that Republicans are statistically much more likely than Democrats to believe that immigration is a major problem facing the country and that a border wall will be an effective way to solve the problem — both key elements of President Trump’s platform. Mormons, however, are noticeably more pro-immigrant than other Republicans.

>According to research from the 2016 Next Mormons Survey, a majority of U.S. Mormons feel that immigrants “strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents,” while Pew finds that a majority of Republicans believe that immigrants “are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care.”

>This is evident not just in the beliefs of the rank-and-file but in recent statements of the church, such as one decrying then-candidate Trump’s proposed “Muslim ban” in favor of religious freedom for all people (December 2015). Other statements have been pressing for compassionate solutions for refugees (January 2017), recommending that the federal government allow young DACA immigrants to remain in the country (January 2018) and urging that immigrant families be allowed to stay together rather than separating parents from children at the border (June 2018, and reiterated by church President Russell Nelson in April 2019).

>Abortion is a third issue where Mormons’ views are diverging from the GOP’s.

>Aircraft carrier sent to Middle East after indications Iran planned attack on US forces

>Police used tear gas and water cannon when the march diverged from the official route and lined up their vans in a blockade when a contingent of firefighters refused to call it quits at the Place de la Nation in eastern Paris. Some firefighters apparently wanted to block the nearby beltway.

>Andre Goretti, president of the Union of Professional Firefighters, noted that the firefighters had been on strike since June, but had won only “total disdain” from authorities.

>Union leader Goretti, speaking on BFMTV, said firefighters want an increase in their ranks and improved risk compensation.

>The Toulouse march was over within minutes, as thick clouds of tear gas filled the main streets, breaking up the protest into smaller groups that spread through the city’s streets, an AFP journalist witnessed.

>Toulouse is a stronghold of the yellow vest movement, named by some as its “national capital”, and has been the scene of clashes between police and protesters in previous weekends.

>“The police treat us like cockroaches and ban us from protesting,” said Nathalie, a 60-year-old unemployed woman, as street medics treated her for a cut to her finger.

>“But the more scared I am, the more I will come,” she added.

>This is not justice but revenge.” So read the statement by Catalonia’s imprisoned former vice president, Oriol Junqueras, in response to news this Monday that he would face a thirteen-year prison sentence for charges of sedition and misuse of public funds, as a result of his work organizing October 2017’s outlawed independence referendum. Most of the eleven other defendants at the center of the four-month-long trial that began this February received similarly heavy sentences, including civil society leaders Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sánchez, who were each handed nine years of jail time.

>Catalans responded angrily, taking to the streets in a wave of mass protests in the hours following the verdict. Thousands of people occupied Barcelona’s El Prat airport, in addition to blockades of train lines and motorways across the region. The protestors’ decision to target the airport on Monday night was inspired by the ongoing anti-government demonstrations in Hong Kong — and they met with a violent response from regional police. Demonstrations continued in Barcelona and other parts of Catalonia for a third consecutive night on Wednesday as the independence movement gears up for a general strike on Friday.

>The sentence comes almost two years after the accused were arrested on the orders of the Spanish judiciary, near simultaneous to the application of direct rule by the central government in Madrid. Regional autonomy was restored in June 2018, but arrested leaders have remained in “preventative detention” since that point, while others including former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont have fled the country.