Washington Post
President Trump on Thursday said he was thinking of “this Russia thing with Trump” when he decided to fire FBI Director James B. Comey, who had been leading the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Recounting his decision to dismiss Comey, Trump told NBC News, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”
Trump’s account flatly contradicts the White House’s initial account of how the president arrived at his decision, undercutting public denials by his aides that the move was influenced in any way by his growing fury with the ongoing Russia probe.
The deputy attorney general at the center of former FBI director James B. Comey’s firing made a surprise appearance on Capitol Hill on Thursday, arriving as Senate Democrats were demanding a reckoning over his role in the ouster but leaving more questions than answers in his wake.
Two weeks ago, Rod J. Rosenstein received the bipartisan confidence of the vast majority of the Senate during his confirmation as deputy attorney general. But a memo he drafted this week that has served as President Trump’s public justification for firing Comey has all but eviscerated that trust. […]
Later Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) excoriated the Trump administration for the mixed messaging surrounding Comey’s firing and Rosenstein’s role in it, noting on the Senate floor that “the story coming out of the White House about why Mr. Comey was fired continues to change, and there are no good explanations for the changes.”
Changes to a controversial visa program under consideration by the Trump administration could hurt a real estate project partially owned by the family of White House adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
The decision, which rests with Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, stands as an early test of how the Trump administration will handle matters that could carry significant consequences for the financial interests of the president’s extended family.
At the center of an ongoing controversy is the Kushner Cos.’ use of a federal visa program to raise $150 million from Chinese investors for two luxury towers in New Jersey. Under the EB-5 program, wealthy foreigners can get a fast-track visa if they invest at least $500,000 in an eligible project. Program critics have nicknamed it “visas for cash.”
President Trump set his sights on the Navy in a new interview, calling the service’s new electromagnetic catapult to launch planes off aircraft carriers “no good” and saying that the Navy needs to go back to “goddamned steam,” the method used for decades…
“It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out,” Trump said…
The Navy said Thursday that it was developing a response. A Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of speaking about the president, said that Trump’s comments caught defense officials off-guard and are inaccurate.
The Guardian
The acting head of the FBI has said that James Comey, the bureau’s director fired by Donald Trump, enjoyed broad support among its staff – directly contradicting the White House’s assertion that he had lost the confidence of the FBI rank and file.
When confronted with the Trump administration’s claim of Comey’s unpopularity, Andrew McCabe – who has been the FBI’s acting director since the sacking – told the Senate intelligence committee: “That is not accurate.”
The US justice department is refusing to disclose FBI documents relating to Donald Trump’s highly contentious election year call on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Senior DoJ officials have declined to release the documents on grounds that such disclosure could “interfere with enforcement proceedings”. In a filing to a federal court in Washington DC, the DoJ states that “because of the existence of an active, ongoing investigation, the FBI anticipates that it will … withhold all records”.
The statement suggests that Trump’s provocative comment last July is being seen by the FBI as relevant to its own ongoing investigation.
Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risk – something that, myth-making aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for.
This creates a problem. Companies need breakthroughs to build businesses on, but they generally can’t – or won’t – fund the development of those breakthroughs themselves. So where does the money come from? The government. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato has shown, nearly every major innovation since the second world war has required a big push from the public sector, for an obvious reason: the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t. […]
More recently, however, austerity has gutted the government’s capacity to innovate. As a share of the economy, funding for research has been falling for decades. Now it’s being cut to its lowest level as a percent of GDP in forty years. And Republicans want to see it fall even further: the budget blueprint that Trump released in March promises deep reductions in science funding. […]
As the public sector starves, the private sector grows ever more bloated and predatory. The economy becomes a mechanism for making the rich richer, and the money that might be used to finance the next internet is allocated to sports cars and superyachts. The result isn’t just fewer miraculous inventions, but substantially weaker growth. Since the 1970s, the American economy has grown far more slowly than during its mid-century golden age – and wages have flatlined. Wealth has been redistributed upwards, where it piles up wastefully while the mass of the people who created it continue their downward slide.
BBC News
The US will consider its interests first as it reviews its climate change policy, the secretary of state says.
Rex Tillerson told a meeting of the eight Arctic nations in Alaska that the US would not rush to make a decision and would consider their views.
President Donald Trump has expressed doubts over the human role in climate change and has said he may pull the US out of the Paris Accord to fight it.
A Mexican businesswoman who headed a group of 600 families searching for their disappeared relatives has been killed.
Miriam Rodriguez Martinez was shot in her home in the town of San Fernando in Tamaulipas state.
She was known for successfully investigating the kidnap and murder of her daughter by a local drug cartel, the Zetas.
Two big cats - the African lion and the Sunda clouded leopard - are most at risk from extinction caused by loss of prey, according to a new analysis.
Lack of food was a factor in why seven big cats, including sabre-toothed tigers, went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, say scientists.
The trend is continuing, threatening a range of modern big cats, they warn. If the prey of big cats continues to decline it will add to other pressures such as habitat loss, a study found.
Deutsche Welle
US District Judge Charles Breyer gave final approval to the VW plan to pay at least $1.22 billion (1.12 billion euros) to owners of the 80,000 3-liter vehicles in the US linked to the diesel emissions cheating scandal.
Breyer called the settlements "fair, reasonable and adequate." The agreement ends most of the litigation over VW's cheating scandal, which became public in 2015.
Owners of 3-liter models from 2009-2012 in the US will be offered a correction to their cars so they meet pollution standards. If the vehicles can not be fixed then they will be offered buybacks. Owners will also get compensation on a range of $7,755 to $13,880.
An investigation that turned up World War II German army helmets and other Nazi symbols stowed in the barracks has brought to light a legion of questions regarding possible far-right extremists in the German military. One of them is whether the Bundeswehr is a meeting place for right-wing extremists.
"The Bundeswehr fundamentally offers many things that appeal to right-wing extremists: Weapons, equipment, war, a harsh tone, hierarchy," said Captain Florian Kling, a spokesman for the Darmstädter Signal, a military watchdog group made up of active and retired soldiers.
NPR News
In response to President Trump's surprising firing Tuesday night of FBI Director James Comey, congressional Republicans largely maintained a united front and resisted calls for a special prosecutor to helm the ongoing investigation into Russia and the election.
However, cracks in that unity began to emerge in the day that followed, with key senators and some vulnerable House members voicing concern over how the White House handled Comey's dismissal…
Several of the most endangered House Republicans — including Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock, Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo, New York Rep. John Katko and Texas Rep. Will Hurd — also expressed concern about the timing of Trump's decision. All sit in districts that the president lost last November and are atop Democratic target lists in next year's midterm elections.
When the Senate was preparing to confirm President Trump's Cabinet and other top officials, the nominees negotiated ethics agreements, promising to rearrange their financial lives to avoid conflicts of interest.
Now the Office of Government Ethics wants to know if they kept their word.
OGE is requiring the Cabinet secretaries and other Senate-confirmed officials to fill out a new Certification of Ethics Agreement Compliance. NPR obtained a copy of the form before its release Thursday.
The form asks whether appointees followed through on pledges to resign from private-sector positions that posed conflicts of interest, divest financial holdings they had promised to sell and recuse themselves from any issues where they have had conflicts.
Now, 22 years later, the MP3 truly is dead, according to the people who invented it. The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a division of the state-funded German research institution that bankrolled the MP3's development in the late '80s, recently announced that its "licensing program for certain MP3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated."
Bernhard Grill, director of that Fraunhofer division and one of the principals in the development of the MP3, told NPR over email that another audio format, AAC — or "Advanced Audio Coding," which his organization also helped create — is now the "de facto standard for music download and videos on mobile phones." He said AAC is "more efficient than MP3 and offers a lot more functionality."
Baltimore Sun
The FBI raided a Republican campaign consultant's Annapolis office Thursday, leading Maryland Republican lawmakers to say they won't work with the firm.
Kelley Rogers, president of Strategic Campaign Group, said a half-dozen FBI agents arrived at his Main Street office at about 8:30 a.m. with a warrant to search and seize records…
According to Rogers, his firm settled a civil suit brought by the Cuccinelli campaign after the candidate lost the 2013 Virginia governor's race to Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Rogers said the investigation appears to stem from allegations brought in that suit.
Jezebel
Interior Secretary Orders Native American Activist to 'Be Nice'
This week, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has been on a “listening tour” across southeast Utah. Zinke is conducting the tour after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in late April instructing Zinke to review national monuments like Bears Ears. Bears Ears, which sits on Native American lands, was designated a national monument by President Obama in December 2016. Under Trump’s executive order, Zinke must decide whether to reduce the size of 1.35 million acres national monument or to reverse its designation entirely.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, Bears Ears has been a site of racial tension since the 19th century, and Zinke’s listening tour is a product of that tension even as the Interior Secretary refuses to acknowledge it. That was evident when, during a tour of Bears Ears, Native American activist Cassandra Begay asked Zinke if he was planning to meet with local tribe leaders. Zinke responded by putting a finger in her face and instructing, “Be nice, don’t be rude.” In a Facebook post, Begay, a member of PANDOS, a “Utah-based, Native and environmental rights organization,” said that Zinke is “not listening to tribes on this listening tour.”