The Iowa governor just signed the nation’s most extreme abortion ban into law – ThinkProgress

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Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed the country’s most restrictive abortion bill into law Friday, outlawing the procedure once a “heartbeat” is detected, which is usually at about six weeks — a time when many people do not yet know they are pregnant.

The bill has been dubbed the “heartbeat” bill, a highly loaded term, as one doctor pointed out in a HuffPost piece in 2016, asking instead that they be referred to as “fetal pole cardiac activity.”

The law has exceptions for cases of rape and incest. It was passed in the middle of the night earlier this week. Iowa had already banned abortions after 20 weeks. The law is sure to draw challenges in court, something the bill’s advocates say is actually part of their goal.

“It is time for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue of life,” state Rep. Shannon Lundgren (R), the bill’s floor manager, said.

Reynolds, who has in the past referred to abortion as “murder,” echoed that sentiment in a statement Friday.

“I understand and anticipate that this will likely be challenged in court, and that courts may even put a hold on the law until it reaches the Supreme Court,” Reynolds said in a statement. “This is bigger than just a law. This is about life.”

Reynolds and her allies did indeed draw a court challenge Friday, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Planned Parenthood confirmed they would be suing.

“Iowans can rest assured: [We] won’t let politicians get away with trying to block access to abortion,” the ACLU tweeted Friday evening.

North Dakota and Arkansas have both tried to pass “heartbeat” legislation in the past, but both attempts were blocked by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court declined to review each the cases after they were blocked by lower courts.

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Trump returns to original racist attack on Mexican immigrants at NRA convention – ThinkProgress

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President Donald Trump harkened back to the racist attack he made on Mexican immigrants on the first day of his campaign in the summer of 2015 during a speech at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention Friday.

“These countries send up their worst,” Trump said, addressing the crowd assembled in Dallas, Texas. “Remember in my opening speech, I got criticized for it. Remember? Well, guess what. They’re not sending their finest. That I can tell you.” 

In his opening speech nearly three years ago, Trump said Mexico was “not sending their best,” a racist attack that drove his campaign and eventually catapulted him into the White House.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said at the time. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

He resorted to the same dishonest smear Friday.

“We’re getting some real beauties in here,” he said. “But we’re taking MS-13 horrible killer gang members. We’re getting them out because our guys are much tougher than there is not even a little bit of a contest. And that’s the only language they understand. That’s the only language they understand. These are savage killers.”

That immigrants are more violent or commit crimes at a higher rate than non-immigrants is a lie Trump has used repeatedly to back up his racist, anti-immigrant policies.

He defended his original comments in 2015 saying, “What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.”

It’s simply not true.

As The Washington Post wrote at the time, “Data on immigrants and crime are incomplete, but a range of studies show there is no evidence immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, first-generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans.”

Immigration and crime have also had, as the Post noted, inverse trajectories since the 1990s: immigration has risen, while crime as fallen.

Trump’s address to the NRA convention comes just weeks after saying the powerful lobbying organization doesn’t have power over him.

“They [the NRA] have great power over you people,” he told a group of lawmakers gathered at the White House in February. “They have less power over me.”

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Fossil fuel groups and Big Ag team up to support a massive coal export terminal – ThinkProgress

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Good news has been hard to come by as of late for Lighthouse Resources Inc., a coal company that has been trying for years to build the largest coal export terminal in the United States. In the last year, state regulators in Washington have repeatedly denied the project key permits, leaving some to question whether the terminal will ever be built.

But now a few allies of Lighthouse Resources have stepped up to urge a court to overturn the state regulators’ denial. On Thursday, four major industry groups — the National Mining Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers — submitted a brief to a federal court in Washington urging the court to overturn the state regulators’ permit denials.

“To do otherwise would be an invitation to states across the country to begin legislating their own foreign policy, in flat contradiction of the Framers’ plans and Supreme Court’s teachings and disrupting national and international trade policies of all sorts,” the brief read.

The groups argue that by denying permits for the construction of the terminal, state regulators are effectively acting as a veto power over certain kinds of industry that they don’t like. The regulators, for their part, have defended their decisions by arguing that Lighthouse Resources Inc. and Millennium Bulk Terminals — a bulk materials port owned by Lighthouse — have failed to make a compelling economic and environmental case for the terminal.

“After extensive study and deliberation, I am denying Millennium’s proposed coal export project,” Washington Department of Ecology Director Maia Bellon said in a press statement last September, when the state announced its decision to deny the project a crucial water quality permit. “There are simply too many unavoidable and negative environmental impacts for the project to move forward.”

Lighthouse and Millennium have been trying to build the coal export terminal since 2012, as part of a wave of fossil fuel infrastructure proposals that hit the Pacific Northwest after 2010. The terminal, which would be located in southwest Washington along the Columbia River, and could handle 44 million tons of coal annually, is the last remaining active coal export terminal proposal in the Pacific Northwest.

In its final environmental impact study of the project, the Washington Department of Ecology found that the terminal would both significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and disproportionately impact low-income and minority communities that live near the proposed site.

According to the study, the terminal — which would greatly increase train traffic through the community of Longview, bringing as many as 16 coal trains a day to local lines — would significantly increase the risk the rate of cancer near the terminal, due to increased diesel emissions from rail cars . The proposed terminal site is located near a low-income and predominantly minority community, which the study estimated could see cancer rates increase from 30 cases for every million people annually to 50 cases for every million.

But the industry groups argue that since the export terminal is directly tied to both international and interstate trade — with coal coming from the Powder River Basin region of Wyoming and Montana and bound for overseas markets in Asia — state regulators are prohibited from intervening due to the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which holds that only Congress can regulate trade.

The brief also argues that the Department of Ecology overstepped its mandate in denying the water quality permit because it is only supposed to consider how the project would impact the state’s water quality, not other environmental factors.

“The American Farm Bureau Federation joined the amicus brief because the legal issues raised in this case are much broader than this export facility and coal, they are important to agriculture as well,” Danielle Hallcom Quist, senior counsel for public policy with the American Farm Bureau Federation, told ThinkProgress via email.

“Agriculture is heavily dependent on foreign trade and access to port facilities, particularly on the West coast,” Hallcom Quist continued. “If a state were to oppose the export of agricultural products … through its borders, that decision would be very harmful to farmers and ranchers and valuable export markets that are critical to the agricultural economy.”

So far, supporters of the terminal have had mixed success in challenging the denial of the two permits in court. In October, a judge with the Cowlitz County Superior Court told the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to either approve a lease permit that it had previously denied the project, or explain its reasoning for the denial. The DNR appealed that decision, and that case is set to be heard by the state Pollution Control Board in late September.

In late April, however, the state Shoreline Hearings Board — which hears appeals pertaining to decisions that impact the state’s shoreline — rejected Millennium’s appeal of the two permit denials, agreeing with the state’s conclusion that the project would create unavoidable ecological harm.

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Trump ends deportation protection for 57,000 Honduran immigrants – ThinkProgress

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The Department of Homeland Security ended temporary deportation protection for 57,000 Honduran immigrants on Friday, forcing them to either find another legal way to stay in the country or pack up their lives and leave.

DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced that the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program for Honduras will officially end on September 9, 2019. Until then, Honduran immigrants on TPS will either have to change their legal status or leave the country.

“The decision to terminate TPS for El Salvador was made after a review of the disaster-related conditions upon which the country’s original designation was based and an assessment of whether those originating conditions continue to exist as required by statute,” Nielsen’s office said in a statement.

Honduras was added to the list of TPS countries in 1999, after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country (along with Nicaragua, which was also added to TPS at the same time). Mitch was the deadliest hurricane in the Western Hemisphere in more than 200 years. More than 11,000 people across Central America died and millions were left homeless in the wake of the storm.

Honduras has one of the world’s highest murder rates outside of a war zone. The country has seen deadly protests since the disputed reelection of President Juan Orlando Hernandez last November. Security forces have used excessive and lethal force against protesters, and shot a majority of the people who were killed in protests, the U.N. human rights office reported.

The U.S. State Department has currently given Honduras a Level 3 Travel Advisory, urging Americans who wish to visit the country to reconsider travel due to violent crime and gang activity.

Honduras is also one of the most unequal countries in the world. More than half of the population lives below the national poverty line, according to the World Bank.

The TPS program was created by Congress in 1990 to offer refuge to immigrants  from 10 countries racked by violence, natural disasters, or “other extraordinary and temporary conditions” making it hard for people to return. Immigrants with TPS receive deportation protection, work authorization, and can even get driver’s licenses. The administration can only extend a TPS designation for 6 to 18 months at a time, meaning that people granted this status often live their lives on hold.

The program does not offer legal permanent residency or a path to citizenship, but many TPS immigrants have spent much of their life in the United States. More than half of Honduran immigrants with TPS have lived in the United States for more than 20 years. Nearly one-fourth of Honduran TPS beneficiaries were 15 years old or younger when they first arrived in the United States, according to a study from the Center for Migration Studies. More than 53,000 U.S.-born children have at least one parent who is a Honduran TPS beneficiary.

Many Hondurans were among the asylum-seekers crossing through Mexico in a caravan. At least 88 of them have been allowed into the United States thus far, but dozens more are still waiting at the border.

Last November, DHS extended TPS for Honduran immigrants for six months, changing the expiration date to July 5, 2018. At the time, DHS Acting Secretary said that additional time was needed to assess conditions in Honduras due to a “lack of definitive information regarding conditions on the ground compared to pre-Hurricane Mitch.”

Honduran immigrants are the sixth group of immigrants to lose TPS under the Trump administration — joining roughly 9,000 Nepalese immigrants, 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants, 50,000 Haitian immigrants, 2,500 Nicaraguan immigrants, and 1,000 Sudanese immigrants. In March, Liberian immigrants also lost a protected immigration status known as Deferred Enforced Departure.

The Honduran government was pressuring the White House to keep TPS for Honduran immigrants.

“We’ve demonstrated that we’re closely aligned with this country,” Gerardo Simon, the consul general of the Honduran Consulate in Miami, told USA Today last month. “We’ve taken all their advice. The U.S. knows the efforts we’ve made. Now we’re asking for a favor, for help, for Honduras.”

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Giuliani tries to fix disastrous interview tour, continues to make things worse – ThinkProgress

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After a series of disastrous media interviews, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s newly minted lead attorney, issued on Friday afternoon a new statement which he promised would “correct” his previous comments.

The three-point statement clarifies precisely nothing.

JUST IN: Rudy Giuliani issues statement "intended to clarify the views I expressed over the past few days." https://t.co/usoHflZShm pic.twitter.com/cHKwDvhMnq

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 4, 2018

Giuliani’s first point

Giuliani starts by making a a conclusory statement about campaign law. He then says the payment was made to Stormy Daniels to “resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the president’s family.” Giuliani claims the payment would have been made whether or not Trump was a candidate for president.

But on Thursday on Fox and Friends, Giuliani had a much different story. “Imagine if that came out of October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton…Cohen made it go away. He did his job,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani did not explain why, yesterday, he claimed the payment was influenced by the election.

He also did not explain how he knows the purpose of the payment at all. According to Giuliani and others, the payment was made by Cohen without consulting Trump. Giuliani says he has not spoken to Cohen about the payment, so it’s unclear how he would know the actual motivation for the initial payment.

Giuliani’s second point

Giuliani claimed on Wednesday and throughout the day on Thursday that Trump first learned that he reimbursed Cohen for the Stormy Daniels payment a few days ago, even though Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017. This was hard to believe.

Friday morning on MSNBC, advertising executive Donny Deutsch said that he spoke to Cohen on Thursday night and Cohen told him that Giuliani had no idea what he was talking about.

Then, Trump threw Giuliani under the bus and said he was not familiar with the facts.

Now Giuliani is saying his understanding of when Trump found out about the payments might be wrong. But he’s not saying it is wrong or what is right.

In other words, we still have no idea of when Cohen first discussed his payments to Stormy Daniels, or Trump’s reimbursement, with Trump.

Giuliani’s third point

Giuliani strengthened a potential obstruction case against Trump by offering a third, contradictory explanation for why Trump fired Comey. As ThinkProgress reported:

Early in the interview, Giuliani said that Trump fired James Comey as FBI director because “Comey would not — among other things — say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation.” Giuliani said Trump was “entitled to that.” 

This rationale was not mentioned either in the official memo explaining Comey’s dismissal or Trump’s statements to NBC’s Lester Holt. Avoiding an obstruction charge requires Trump to present a “a consistent, and legal, explanation for the firing.”

In his statement, Giuliani skirts around the issue by claiming Trump had the ability to fire Comey for any purpose, even if his motives were corrupt. This is a legal argument many experts reject.

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Anti-LGBTQ group claims Amazon is marginalizing Christians – ThinkProgress

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One of the nation’s largest anti-LGBTQ organizations claims that it’s been treated unfairly because of its homophobic, transphobic, and other derogatory positions.

This week, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) became upset after learning that Amazon would not allow customers to make donations to the group through the AmazonSmile program, which gives a small percentage from the  purchase price of eligible products to a customer’s chosen charity.

ADF is using that complaint to fuel its ongoing conservative campaign to deligitimize the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which — among other things — tracks various hate groups. ADF is one of many organizations the SPLC has designated as an anti-LGBTQ hate group for its long record of demonizing queer people and advocating for discrimination against them.

Amazon has traditionally relied on SPLC’s designations to disqualify these hate groups from the AmazonSmile program. This isn’t new. The Family Research Council, another SPLC-designated hate group, complained about its own disqualification over three years ago. Last year, D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM), another hate group, sued Amazon along with GuideStar for relying on the SPLC’s designations. Guidestar had already relented, but Amazon didn’t.

Right-leaning Fox News was more than happy to give ADF a platform Friday morning to share its story of persecution, just as it did last year when ABC News identified the organization as a hate group. In neither case did Fox News attempt to parse why the SPLC designates ADF a hate group. Instead, the network simply described it as a “religious freedom” group and let ADF attorney Kristen Waggoner attack Amazon and the SPLC.

“Amazon needs to realize it’s marginalizing not just those of the Christian faith, but those of the Jewish, Islamic faiths who share similar beliefs,” Waggoner said. “We stand for the fundamental freedoms of all Americans, even those we disagree with and those from all walks of life.”

This is untrue. Indeed, Waggoner is the attorney who presented oral arguments to the Supreme Court on behalf of Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who refused to sell wedding cakes to same-sex couples.

American Atheists noted this hypocrisy on Friday, tweeting, “Funny how the same people who think that they shouldn’t have to sell cakes to same sex couples seem to want to force a private business to give them money directly. Last I checked, Amazon will still sell stuff to ADF.”

ADF has a long record of advocacy against LGBTQ equality. A recent article in the Colorado Times Record, for instance, documented the extent to which ADF has been involved in anti-LGBTQ efforts in Colorado over the past year. Those efforts include:

• A so-called “Live and Let Live” bill like Mississippi’s that would allow discrimination on the basis of one’s beliefs in marriage. ADF not only drafted the language, but also submitted several witnesses to testify in its favor.


• A so-called “Children First” bill that would allow adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples without risking their state funding — not unlike bills that passed this week in Kansas and Oklahoma.


• ADF is also continuing to pursue a lawsuit that would overturn Colorado’s LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections.

ADF also drafts policies for schools to discriminate against transgender students, drafts bills to mandate public discrimination against transgender people, has  represented parents who wanted to intervene when schools affirm transgender students, and has represented schools that wanted to maintain discrimination against transgender students.

And none of those actions are even among the top reasons the SPLC designates ADF a hate group:

Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of homosexuality in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has linked homosexuality to pedophilia and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society. ADF also works to develop “religious liberty” legislation and case law that will allow the denial of goods and services to LGBT people on the basis of religion.

Amazon, like many other big tech companies, has a history of supporting LGBTQ equality, and it may even be a factor in deciding the location of its new headquarters. The company has no obligation help a hate group raise money.

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Coal and nuclear plant owners wrap themselves in ‘resilience flag’ to draw Trump’s attention – ThinkProgress

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Until 2017, the “resilience” of the electric power sector had referred to the power grid’s ability to withstand and recover from extreme weather and other threats.

But the Trump administration, as it has with so many other issues, succeeded in distorting the meaning of the word and changing the conservation to reflect the priorities of the president and his political benefactors. Integral to this effort was when President Trump’s Department of Energy began equating grid resilience to a region’s ability to ensure there would be a plentiful amount of coal and nuclear generating capacity.

A new report, commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Natural Resources Defense Council, (NRDC), seeks to debunk claims made by the Trump administration about the relationship between grid resilience and coal and nuclear plants.

This comes at the same time as electric grid operator PJM Interconnection announced it will be conducting a study over the next few months “to understand the fuel-supply risks in an environment trending towards greater reliance on natural gas.”

One of the main takeaways from this week’s report by EDF and NRDC — “A Customer-Focused Framework for Electric System Resilience” — is that generation-related solutions, like keeping dirty coal and uneconomic nuclear plants online past their retirement dates, are the least-effective for improving resilience.

Generation and fuel supply shortages rarely cause customer outages and are not good at providing many essential reliability services, according to the report. Instead of wasting time and customers’ money using grid resilience as a reason to keep uneconomic coal and nuclear generators afloat, policy-makers should focus attention on creating more durable distribution systems, the report said.

In conjunction with the release of the report, John Moore and Gillian Giannetti, two attorneys at the NRDC, wrote Thursday in a blog post that coal and power plant owners have “wrapped themselves in the resilience flag” in an attempt to justify profit guarantees for their financially struggling resources.

Moore and Giannetti, who also work for the Sustainable FERC Project, said that issues with fuel supply — coal, uranium, natural gas, water, wind, and solar, for example — account for only 0.00007 percent of total grid disruptions. The Sustainable FERC Project is a coalition of state, regional, and environmental organizations pushing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to support policies that benefit clean energy resources.

We agree — the study is a fantastic read. https://t.co/oASmcArltm https://t.co/6TAm08WqYP

— Gillian Giannetti (@GillianEnergy) May 3, 2018

So far, President Trump and his industry supporters have failed in their effort to reverse the fortunes of the coal and nuclear generation sectors. But Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the president still have certain powers at their disposal to help owners of coal and nuclear plants.

Perry, for example, could use his authority as head of the Department of Energy to spur emergency compensation for coal and nuclear plants run by FirstEnergy Solutions that may be at risk of shutting.

The Trump administration also reportedly has been exploring using the Defense Production Act of 1950 to help coal and nuclear plant owners. The law gives the president broad powers to require businesses to prioritize contracts for materials deemed vital to national security. In this case, electric grid operators and utilities could be forced to purchase power from coal and nuclear plants if Trump invokes the act.

As the administration ponders whether it should take drastic measures to help the owners of these power plants, the new report attempts to pull the conversation back to what it sees as the most relevant factors behind grid resilience.

Throughout the report, its authors emphasize that since most outages occur due to problems at the distribution level and since long-duration outages are caused primarily by severe weather events, measures that strengthen distribution and hasten recovery are highly cost-effective.

In contrast, measures to make power generation more resilient “are likely to have little impact on outage frequency, duration or magnitude,” according to the report.

The report was prepared by a trio of consultants: Alison Silverstein of Alison Silverstein Consluting, and Rob Gramlich and Michael Goggin of Grid Strategies LLC.

The authors seek to bring a “customer-centric framework” to the conversation on grid resilience, one that includes customer-sited energy efficiency and distributed generation and storage.

“Power system resilience should be measured from the end user’s perspective — how many outages happen (frequency), the number of customers affected by an outage (scale), and the length of time before interrupted service can be restored (duration),” the authors write. “And since long outages do occur, we should also consider customer survivability as an important element of resilience preparations.”

As the debate raged in 2017 over Perry’s proposal to get federal regulators to approve subsidies for troubled coal and nuclear plants, confusion emerged over the definition of grid resilience. The report’s authors aim to clear up any misunderstanding.

Power system reliability and resilience are deeply intertwined. According to the authors, reliability covers those long-term and operational steps that reduce the probability of power interruptions and prevent loss of customer demand, while resilience measures reduce damage from outages and hasten restoration and recovery to shorten outage durations.

Utility performance will define resilience

The primary factor defining grid resilience will not be the availability of coal or nuclear plants, according to the report. Grid resilience will be determined by the performance of electric utility operations at the distribution level.

Damage to power lines, poles, and transformers — major components of an electric distribution system — are what cause 90 percent of electricity service interruptions, according to DOE data.

Over a two-year period in the mid-2000s, for example, Florida was slammed by one major hurricane after another. The storms wreaked havoc on the state’s electric power system. In response, the state’s electric utilities made a commitment to hardening their systems to prevent similar widespread outages the next time a storm hit the peninsula.

Since 2006, Florida Power & Light has invested more than $3 billion to build a more resilient grid. After a decade of limited hurricane activity in the state, last year’s Hurricane Irma was the first major test for the company since Hurricane Wilma hit in 2005.

“Our investments were invaluable,” Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy wrote in an article published in the January/February 2018 issue of the Edison Electric Institute’s Electric Perspectives magazine. “Fewer than half as many substations were affected and those that were impacted came back online more quickly.”

Even though Irma was a larger and stronger storm than Wilma, the company’s new automated switching system avoided nearly 600,000 customer interruptions. The fury of Irma knocked out power to 90 percent of FPL’s customers, but all of its customers had their power restored within 10 days compared to 18 days following Wilma.

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What the EPA exodus means for Scott Pruitt – ThinkProgress

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Staff departures from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have become so common that they rarely make news anymore — since Administrator Scott Pruitt took control of the EPA in 2017, more than 700 employees have left the agency.

But this week, as federal investigations surrounding Pruitt’s ethical scandals continue to mount, four departures in particular made headlines, as officials with close ties to the administrator announced they would be moving on from the agency.

The high-profile departures come at a time when Pruitt appears to be fighting for his job in both public and private arenas. The departures are especially notable because three of the top officials appear — at least in some way — connected to one of the ethical scandals that have dogged Pruitt over the last month.

“Administrator Pruitt has repeatedly and unapologetically blamed his own staff for the crisis of leadership that he has created at EPA,” Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY), the ranking Democratic lawmaker on the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on the Environment and a vocal critic of Pruitt’s, said in a statement emailed to ThinkProgress. “I don’t know why senior officials are abandoning him now in such great numbers, but many of these departing staff have overseen or directly contributed to mismanagement that has undermined public trust and the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission to protect public health.”

On Tuesday, both Pruitt’s head of security Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta, and the head of the EPA’s Superfund program Albert “Kell” Kelly announced that they would be leaving the agency.

Perrotta’s resignation came just a day before he was scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee regarding Pruitt’s spending on first-class travel and other expenses that the EPA has defended as necessary for security. According to Politico, Perrotta was a “driving force” behind much of Pruitt’s lavish spending on security measures, “goading” him into spending more for security and travel.

Kelly, who came to the EPA after being banned for life from the banking industry by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, had also been facing scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers over his appointment to streamline the EPA’s Superfund program, which handles cleanup of polluted sites across the country. Kelly also declined to testify before Congress regarding the EPA’s Superfund cleanup program.

But Kelly has long been a loyal supporter of Pruitt’s. In 2003, Kelly helped Pruitt finance a mortgage on a house that Pruitt bought from a retiring telecommunications lobbyist. Kelly reportedly also cancelled a trip to West Virginia — where he was scheduled to visit a town contaminated by toxic chemicals — to stay in D.C. and help Pruitt handle fallout from numerous controversies.

During oversight hearings before two Congressional committees last week, Pruitt was repeatedly asked questions about Kelly’s appointment to the EPA and whether Kelly would agree to testify before Congress.

Two days after Kelly and Perrotta announced their resignations, Liz Bowman, the top communications official at the EPA, announced that she would also be leaving the agency to take a job as communications director for Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA).

Bowman was one of the agency employees who received a sizable raise last year via a provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act, which allows the EPA administrator to hire up to 30 employees without Congressional approval.

Pruitt has come under scrutiny for using the loophole to give raises to political appointees without approval from the White House. Initially, Pruitt said he did not know about the raises, but later admitted that he had given his chief of staff authority to authorize the pay increases. The raises are part of an ongoing investigation by the House Oversight Committee.

On Friday, an administration official told the Washington Examiner that John Konkus, the agency’s second highest-ranking communications official, would also be leaving the agency. Konkus was a political aide who had received approval to work as a media consultant for outside groups including a Republican firm.

Publicly, the EPA has been adamant that these departures do not reflect any kind of internal issues within the agency. Bowman, like Kelly and Perrotta, told reporters that her departure has nothing to do with the ongoing investigations and scandals surrounding her boss. But at least one Democratic representative — Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) — points to the stream of resignations as proof of Pruitt’s failures as an EPA administrator.

“Scott Pruitt’s toxicity has infected the upper echelons of EPA leadership, and the process of cleaning this mess must begin with Pruitt’s dismissal,” Beyer said in a statement on Friday.

But what if instead of signaling a weakening of Pruitt’s leadership, the resignations are in fact a gambit to secure his position?

During his Congressional oversight hearings, Pruitt made a point of placing blame for a number of scandals squarely on the shoulders of EPA employees, rather than taking the blame himself.

By shedding himself of people associated with these scandals — particularly Perrotta, who has been implicated in the issues with taxpayer funds being spent on security, and Bowman, who is part of the raise scandal — Pruitt is effectively creating a firewall between himself and controversy that, at certain points, has seemed to threaten both his future as EPA administrator and his well-documented political aspirations.

The string of high-profile departures might be bad optics for Pruitt, at least in the short term, but they will allow the administrator to further remove himself from culpability with respect to various ethical scandals. It’s certainly a gamble — especially when Pruitt is trying to impress a boss who appears concerned with appearances above all else — but one that could ultimately help Pruitt cement his position at the helm of the EPA for years to come.

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President Trump offers empty promises on Rohingya humanitarian crisis – ThinkProgress

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President Donald Trump has sent a letter to Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, assuring her that the United States will support the country with its refugee crisis, while continuing to “pressure Myanmar” to safely repatriate the nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing military crackdowns, Reuters reported  Friday.

President Trump has made the offer several times in the past, but so far, but nothing has changed.

In September, for instance, Trump urged “strong and swift action” against Myanmar by the U.N. Security Council. In November, when he was on his tour of five Asian countries, he vowed, “The United States supports efforts to end the violence, to ensure accountability for atrocities committed, and to facilitate the safe and voluntary return of refugees. We welcome the commitments by the government of Myanmar, and we are ready to support the implementation of the [Rakhine] recommendations.”

Rakhine state in Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country of around 53 million people, was previously home to roughly 1.1. million Rohingya, however, the government refuses to recognize the Rohingya as citizens. After insurgents launched deadly attacks on several police posts in August, the government responded with what rights groups and the United Nations have described as “crimes against humanity” and disproportionate force.

The scores of Rohingya fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh have prompted humanitarian groups to call their plight the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world right now.

Witnesses have described military raids of villages, during which unarmed residents, including children, are killed, women and girls are gang-raped and homes are burned down. Indeed, satellite images have documented the razing of hundreds of villages, the land reclaimed by the government for “redevelopment” purposes under local law.

Thousands of people have been killed.

While the United States has pulled some military support from Myanmar and donated to money to help the Rohingya in Bangladesh (though not enough — the U.N. has requested $951 million from member states for Rohingya relief), it has yet  to pressure Myanmar in any meaningful way, which would involve going after Russia and China in the U.N. Security Council.

When it comes to Iran and North Korea, the Trump administration does not flinch in threatening to re-impose sanctions on those countries, adding new ones or slapping secondary sanctions against any country — including China and Russia — that does not comply with those sanctions.

In Myanmar, where the U.S. president could restore sanctions by executive order, such a move would be complicated, but doable. Still, Trump has yet to take things that far. The European Union, by contrast, is attempting to implement an arms embargo there.

After the United Nations declared the operation against the Rohingya “ethnic cleansing” last September, it inexplicably took the State Department more than two months to say the same. “After a careful and thorough analysis of available facts, it is clear that the situation in northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson finally stated in November.

The Trump administration has also made no moves to grant even temporary visas to Rohingya, who are currently living through flood season in over-crowded camps in Bangladesh, which, while currently experiencing a boom (due largely to the improvement in women’s rights there), still experience high levels of poverty.

Myanmar is not included in the president’s travel ban, which targets several Muslim-majority nations.

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Michigan State determines that Larry Nassar’s decades of abuse didn’t run afoul of any NCAA bylaws – ThinkProgress

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Another day, another head-scratching move by Michigan State University as it continues to bungle the fallout from Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse.

This week, the Lansing State Journal reported that a law firm representing Michigan State sent a letter to the NCAA in March notifying them that Nassar, under the guise of medical treatment, sexually assaulted at least 25 MSU student-athletes between 1997-2016, including six student-athletes since 2014, when MSU botched its Title IX investigation into Nassar’s abuse.

Commendable transparency by Michigan State? Oh no: the letter was sent to make it clear that, despite rampant sexual assaults, “no violations of NCAA rules occurred with regard to the criminal conduct of Dr. Larry Nassar, a former employee at the University.”

Never mind that Nassar is a former MSU and USA Gymnastics doctor who sexually abused hundreds of people — primarily young women and girls — sometimes with their parents in the room. Never mind that a lot of his sexual abuse occurred on MSU’s campus, where he regularly saw patients, including student-athletes from across MSU’s athletics department. Never mind that MSU employees, including athletic department employees, were told about Nassar’s abuse multiple times over the last 20 years, and failed to take the allegations seriously.

Never mind the fact that the Michigan legislature concluded, with “absolutely no doubt,” that MSU failed to adequately protect students and patients — including the school’s NCAA athletes — who visited Nassar on campus. Never mind that former MSU gymnastics head coach Kathy Klages asked her team, which included survivors of Nassar’s abuse, to sign a card of support for him after he was fired from MSU due to the allegations of sexual abuse in 2016.

No, what really matters, according to MSU, is that Nassar refrained from buying lunch for any athletes during recruiting visits. Or that he declined to help pay an electricity bill for a family member of a Spartan athlete. Those, you see, would be clear violations of NCAA bylaws. Nassar isn’t a case that should concern the NCAA, according to Michigan State.

MSU’s letter was in response to an inquiry the NCAA began in January, when Nassar’s crimes gained wide attention thanks to the more than 150 survivors who provided victim impact statements at his sentencing hearings in Michigan.

But the NCAA has not shown urgency in its response to Nassar’s abuse. In fact, in mid January, after days of televised, heart-wrenching testimony by dozens of Nassar’s victims, NCAA president Mark Emmert told reporters he didn’t have an opinion on what occurred at MSU because he didn’t “have enough information on the details of what transpired at the school right now.” At that point, the allegations against Nassar had been public knowledge for 18 months, and Nassar had pleaded guilty to sexual abuse. Ignorance was not an excuse.

We’ll have to wait and see if the NCAA agrees with MSU’s claim that all NCAA guidelines were followed. Their argument hinges on technicalities — that Nassar didn’t provide any benefits to MSU student-athletes that were against NCAA bylaws; that he didn’t commit any recruitment violations; and that he didn’t violate the “unethical conduct legislation” bylaw, which deals specifically with banned substances and medications. MSU says it is “unaware of any evidence that Nassar provided banned substances, impermissible supplements, or medication to student-athletes contrary to approved guidelines and standards.”

MSU also told the NCAA that it could not find a case precedent that showed the “unethical conduct legislation” would apply to “sexually abusive conduct.” And, while there is an NCAA bylaw that “identifies the well-being of student-athletes as an imperative for Division I members,” MSU noted that particular bylaw was meant to serve merely as a guide, and is not subject to enforcement procedures.

“I trust that you will see that the University is in no way attempting to sidestep the issues facing it, and that if the University had any reason to believe the criminal conduct of Nassar also implicated NCAA rules violations, the University would accept responsibility in that area as well,” attorney Mike Glazier, of the law firm Bond, Schoeneck & King, PLLC wrote in the letter.

One thing is certain: if the NCAA agrees with MSU — that the sexual abuse of more than two dozen student-athletes by a team doctor, and multiple mishandled reports and investigations into that doctor’s behavior by MSU officials over an 18-year period, isn’t a violation of NCAA guidelines — then a new set of guidelines are decades overdue.

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Lawmakers demand answers over FEMA’s omission of climate change from key document – ThinkProgress

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says its decision to omit any mention of climate change from the agency’s strategic plan was essentially an oversight. Lawmakers want to know if any experts were consulted in drawing up the document itself, which is meant to guide the agency’s work over the next four years.

In a letter sent Wednesday to FEMA Director Brock Long, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) asked for more information regarding the agency’s 2018-2022 Strategic Plan. FEMA has come under fire for the document, which did not contain a single reference to climate change despite the agency being responsible for overseeing recovery from hurricanes and wildfires, both of which are being affected more and more by rising temperatures.

“What statistical, scientific, or mathematical analyses were used in formulating the plan?” asked Ellison. “What scientific frameworks were used to identify the strategic goals and strategic objectives?”

“What individuals or offices within FEMA or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were involved in the plan?” he continued, going on to inquire about White House involvement as well as any input from outside organizations or other individuals who may have consulted on the document.

“Did FEMA consult with any scientists or climate experts on the strategic plan?” he underscored.

The congressman requested a response to the queries by May 14.

Ellison’s Wednesday letter is the latest move in an ongoing back-and-forth. FEMA released its strategic plan on March 15 with no mention of climate change contained anywhere in the 37-page document. In an initial March 29 letter to FEMA, Ellison queried the agency tasked with coordinating disaster responses and mitigating such occurrences about why references to climate change did not appear in its strategic plan.

“Given the extraordinary devastation caused by natural disasters last year, I was surprised to find that FEMA removed all mentions of climate change from its 2018-2022 Strategic Plan,” Ellison wrote, going on to call the shift “inexplicable” in light of devastating catastrophes linked to climate change in 2017.

“It is puzzling to understand how FEMA could meet the emerging challenges of 21st century disasters while ignoring the mounting evidence of the link between climate change and weather events,” he continued.

FEMA director Long responded on April 12, essentially informing the congressman that the agency had simply forgotten to include any mention of the phenomenon, according to the Huffington Post.

“There was no decision, and no direction, to deliberately avoid or omit any particular term in the writing of the 2018-2022 Strategic Plan,” Long replied to Ellison.

Last year was the most expensive year on record for U.S. natural disasters since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) first began monitoring such trends in 1980. In 2017, natural disasters racked up $306 billion in costs across the country.

Virtually every region in the United States suffered some form of natural disaster in 2017, ranging from hailstorms and drought in the Midwest to blazing fires on the West Coast. A series of devastating hurricanes also left numerous islands and the Gulf Coast reeling last fall.

Texas is still recovering from Hurricane Harvey and the island of Puerto Rico has endured the longest blackout in U.S. history. Puerto Ricans still do not have full access to electricity or many basic necessities following Hurricane Maria, which struck the island as a Category 4 hurricane on September 20 last year.

Scientists and climate experts have said that hurricanes like Maria and Harvey were likely made worse by climate change. They say warming waters allowed for the storms to gain power quickly, exacerbating the damage they caused. An onslaught of pouring rain, flooding cities, and destroying dams, has also been directly linked to climate change.

“While hurricanes are a natural part of our climate system, recent research suggests that there has been an increase in intense hurricane activity in the North Atlantic since the 1970s,” wrote the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) last December. “In the future, there may not necessarily be more hurricanes, but there will likely be more intense hurricanes that carry higher wind speeds and more precipitation as a result of global warming.”

The White House has downplayed the extent of the damage caused by hurricanes last fall, especially with regards to Puerto Rico. Before a month had even passed after Hurricane Maria, President Trump emphasized that FEMA’s workers could not stay “forever” to help the island recover. Traditionally, parts of the United States far more equipped to deal with hurricanes than Puerto Rico have taken many years to rebound after hurricanes less powerful than Maria.

FEMA has already faced considerable criticism over its handling of post-disaster relief in Puerto Rico. Island residents have slammed FEMA over food shortages as well as back-and-forth over food and water aid, which the agency indicated it would end in January only to walk back that decision after public outcry. In March, Puerto Ricans rallied at FEMA headquarters demanding increased aid to the island and accountability over the agency’s failures.

But the agency does seem to have acknowledged that flooding is a national problem. In April, FEMA asked Congress to make national flood insurance more affordable, addressing a large income gap prevalent in communities vulnerable to flooding. Of those areas in Texas hardest hit by Harvey, upwards of 80 percent of residents lacked flood insurance.

FEMA’s flood insurance request to Congress notably contained no reference to climate change, going only so far as to note that disaster costs are expected to rise in coming years due to “rising natural hazard risk, decaying critical infrastructure, and economic pressures that limit investments in risk resilience.”

Climate change skepticism is a theme which runs deep throughout the Trump administration. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt has repeatedly denied and downplayed climate science, as has Sec. of the Interior Ryan Zinke. Newly-appointed Sec. of State Mike Pompeo has called the Paris climate agreement a “costly burden” and is himself a climate skeptic.

References to climate change have also disappeared from a number of government websites. A report released last month indicated that one EPA website has removed mentions of the phenomenon from its international priorities page. An EPA spokesperson told ThinkProgress at the time that the move was in keeping with “the current administration’s priorities” and that information from prior presidencies is still available through an archive on the website.

Congressional Democrats have also called on the Department of the Interior’s inspector general to look into whether the National Park Service (NPS) has violated its scientific integrity in removing mentions of climate change from a report on sea level rise. Zinke has claimed his department does not change so much as “a comma” in such reports.

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Black teens targeted by 4chan trolls win grant for NASA competition – ThinkProgress

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NASA officials intervened in the agency’s high school competition earlier this week, after racist 4chan trolls targeted three Black teens, in an attempt to stop them from winning. Now, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser is giving those teens a grant to continue their work.

India Skinner, Mikayla Sharrieff, and Bria Snell, 11th grade students at Banneker High School, entered the NASA OPSPARC competition with their ingenious method for purifying lead-contaminated drinking fountain water in their school and others across the district: a simple and cost-effective filter that uses fans and filtering floss to extract metals and other impurities, like chlorine and copper.

“In older structured homes and buildings, lead pipes have been an issue in the media,” the trio — the only all-Black, all-girls team in the competition — explained in a statement last month. “In D.C. they’re currently renovating many public schools. As a result, we have a mission to be a part of the community activism and history in the making. Our water filtration system can help aid in that mission.”

The D.C. mayor’s office announced on Thursday that it would be assisting the students in their challenge, giving them a $4,000 grant “to build on their innovative project.”

“Through their brilliance and passion, Mikayla, India, and Bria are bringing our vision for In3 to life and making our city proud,” Bowser said in a statement, referencing the Inclusive Innovation Incubator, a co-working tech space housed at Howard University, where the three students first developed their idea and where they volunteer once a week.

She added, “Mikayla, India, and Bria are just the type of people and scientists our world needs more of and we are proud to support their dreams.”

The students’ engineering prowess was enough to carry them all the way to the final round of competition last month, along with seven other finalists. It was at that point that the trolls descended.

On 4chan, an anonymous internet forum and white supremacist haven, users were upset that Skinner, Sharrieff, and Snell had advanced to the OPSPARC finals. According to the Washington Post,

The anonymous posters used racial epithets, argued that the students’ project did not deserve to be a finalist and said that the black community was voting for the teens only because of their race. They urged people to vote against the Banneker trio, and one user offered to put the topic on an Internet thread about President Trump to garner more attention. They recommended computer programs that would hack the voting system to give a team of teenage boys a boost.

3 black D.C. students who faced racist comments when they used social media to encourage voting for them in a NASA competition have been awarded a $4,000 grant https://t.co/fZS1xEgRHl pic.twitter.com/VKAZuL3QxA

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 4, 2018

The 4chan attack eventually lead NASA to intervene, shutting down the public vote early and issuing a statement on the official OPSPARC website, saying that officials had “decided to end public voting to protect the integrity of the results.”

“Before the voting ended, members of the public were using social media to generate support for particular teams in the public voting,” officials wrote. “…Unfortunately, it was brought to NASA’s attention…that some members of the public used social media, not to encourage students and support STEM, but to attack a particular student team based on their race and encouraged others to disrupt the contest and manipulate the vote, and the attempt to manipulate the vote occurred shortly after those posts. NASA continues to support outreach and education for all Americans, and encourages all of our children to reach for the stars.”

Skinner, Sharrieff, and Snell — who compared themselves to the protagonists of the 2016 film Hidden Figures, which tells the story of the Black female mathematicians working for NASA in the 1960s who calculated flight trajectories for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon — were popular on social media, winning a large portion of the public vote for the water filter system.

“In3’s trio…are proud to have made it to the [final round] on their first attempt, and proud of the thousands of votes they received from you all,” the group wrote in a statement last week. “Words cannot express how enjoyable this academic project has been from start til now. The ladies are extremely satisfied with their showing in their challenge, regardless of any final outcomes.”

The statement noted that the three students had also recently been inducted in the National Honor Society.

Thank you so much for your support ❤️ pic.twitter.com/NVBzyydmbj

— mikayla. (@Mmmikaylaaa__) April 30, 2018

Advancing to the final round of competition with the Banneker High School trio are teams from Texas, Nevada, and California, as well as one after-school program, responsible for creations like a self-cleaning phone protector; a process for cleaning microalgae and using it for fuel; a more effective cooler for transporting anything, from drinks and condiments, to human organs for transplant; a new method of aeroponic gardening; a film-spray capable of blocking UV rays; and a durable, lightweight, phone-skin case. One team also published the results of an experiment that showed extracting ethylene from plants provided more power than solar energy.

The winning team receives an invitation to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where they’ll participate in a two-day behind-the-scenes workshop with NASA scientists and astronauts, as well as a $4,000 stipend to cover their expenses.

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