“2018 saw the fourth straight year of growth in the number of hate groups in the US … The 30 percent increase coincides with Trump’s campaign and presidency. It comes on the heels of three consecutive years of decline near the end of former President Obama’s time in office.”
Looking at this one month snapshot including after Iowa, it looks like Buttigieg is eating Biden’s lunch, both Sanders and Klobuchar have been on a consistent gain, and Warren looks a little down but mostly flat.
“The Department of Justice revealed in a court filing late Friday that it has two dozen emails related to President Donald Trump’s involvement in the withholding of millions in security assistance to Ukraine — a disclosure that came just hours after the Senate voted against subpoenaing additional documents and witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial, paving the way for his acquittal.
“The filing, released near midnight Friday, marks the first official acknowledgment from the Trump administration that emails about the President’s thinking related to the aid exist, and that he was directly involved in asking about and deciding on the aid as early as June. The administration is still blocking those emails from the public and has successfully kept them from Congress.”
(https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/01/politics/trump-ukraine-aid-emails-omb-justice-department/index.html)
“With the House bill, legislators seem to be trying to take NASA’s human exploration program and give it over to the Boeing Company, going back to an era of cost-plus contracting.”
“Trump impeachment defense team members Ken Starr and Robert Ray gave large campaign contributions to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last year.”
(www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/01/senators-overseeing-impeachment-got-campaign-cash-from-trump-team/)
“The worst outbreak of desert locusts in Kenya in 70 years has seen hundreds of millions of the bugs swarm into the East African nation from Somalia and Ethiopia. Those two countries have not had an infestation like this in a quarter-century, destroying farmland and threatening an already vulnerable region with devastating hunger.”
“About 70,000 hectares (172,973 acres) of land in Kenya are already infested.”
“They are now heading toward Uganda and fragile South Sudan, where almost half the country faces hunger as it emerges from civil war. Uganda has not had such an outbreak since the 1960s and is already on alert.”
“The locusts also are moving steadily toward Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, the breadbasket for Africa’s second-most populous country, the U.N. says.”
“Even before this outbreak, nearly 20 million people faced high levels of food insecurity across the East African region long challenged by periodic droughts and floods.”
“A 46 per cent fall in suicides among people in same-sex marriages was recorded by comparing two time periods in Denmark and Sweden – from 1989 to 2002, and 2003 to 2016.”
“Defense Secretary Mark Esper explicitly said Sunday that he had seen no hard evidence that four American embassies had been under possible threat when President Donald Trump authorized the targeting of Iran’s top commander, raising questions about the scale of the threat described by Trump last week.”
But in response to a court order that it swiftly process those pages in response to a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, lawsuit filed by The New York Times, the Office of Management and Budget delivered a terse letter saying it would not turn over any of the 40 pages of emails — not even with redactions.
“All 20 documents are being withheld in full,” wrote Dionne Hardy, the office’s Freedom of Information Act officer.
www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/us/politics/trump-ukraine-military-aid.html
danelabonte 