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Showing posts from December, 2017

U.S. vetoes UN call for withdrawal of Trump Jerusalem decision

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States was further isolated on Monday over President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital when it blocked a United Nations Security Council call for the declaration to be withdrawn. The remaining 14 council members voted in favour of the Egyptian-drafted resolution, which did not specifically mention the United States or Trump but which expressed "deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem." "What we witnessed here in the Security Council is an insult. It won't be forgotten," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said after the vote, adding that it was the first veto cast by the United States in more than six years. "The fact that this veto is being done in defence of American sovereignty and in defence of America's role in the Middle East peace process is not a source of embarrassment for us; it should be an embarrassment to the re

Email sent to Trumps included public WikiLeaks information

WASHINGTON (AP) — An email sent to President Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. before the 2016 election included a decryption key for hacked documents that the website WikiLeaks had already made public a day earlier. The email obtained by The Associated Press on Friday disputes an earlier news report by CNN that Trump and his eldest son had received the information before the hacked data had been made public. In fact, the email was sent to Trump and his son on Sept. 14, 2016, the day after WikiLeaks had released the documents publicly on its website and Twitter account. CNN later corrected its report. The email message was also sent to members of the Trump campaign and Trump's company, including lawyer Michael Cohen and an email address once used by Hope Hicks, a campaign communications aide who is now a senior aide in the White House. "I hope this information help (sic) you," the email said, with the writer noting that the "huge" archive of emails st

I study liars. I've never seen one like Donald Trump.

I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Donald Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people's. In research beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. They handed them in to us with no names attached. We calculated participants' rates of lying and categorized each lie as either self-serving (told to advantage the liar or protect the liar from embarrassment, blame or other undesired outcomes) or kind (told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else). At The Washington Post, the Fact Checker feature has been tracking every false and misleading claim and flip-flop made by Trump this year. The inclusion of mi

Ex-priest gets life in prison for 1960 parishioner slaying

EDINBURG, Texas (AP) — A jury on Friday sentenced an 85-year-old former priest to life in prison for the 1960 killing of a schoolteacher and former beauty queen who was a member of the parish he served. The same jurors in Hidalgo County in South Texas found John Bernard Feit guilty of murder Thursday night. Prosecutors asked jurors Friday for a 57-year prison term — one year for each year he had walked free since killing Irene Garza after she went to him for confession at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas. The 25-year-old Garza disappeared April 16, 1960. Her bludgeoned body was found days later. An autopsy revealed she had been raped while unconscious, and beaten and suffocated. Prosecutor Michael Garza, who is not related to the victim, had asked the jury not to view the now elderly and weak Feit as he is today, but to try to imagine him as a 28-year-old man capable of subduing the woman. The jury deliberated just over four hours Friday before deciding on the ma