Saturday, Dec 20th
Last update10:11:42 AM GMT
President Donald Trump on Thursday waived a federal law to allow relief shipments to reach Puerto Rico, as the island continues to struggle to provide life-sustaining services after Hurricane Maria.
Press secretary Sarah Sanders announced the waiver of the Jones Act, and said it will "go into effect immediately."
Trump granted the waiver after it was requested by Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello, who thanked the president Thursday morning.
Executives from Twitter are set to appear before the House and Senate intelligence committees on Thursday to answer questions about Russian election meddling.
The Senate's intelligence committee is expected to ask whether disinformation spread by Russian Twitter accounts -- meant to disparage Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign -- entered legitimate Twitter news stories.
One of Jared Kushner’s real estate companies has been sued.
A class action lawsuit filed in Maryland State Court this morning alleges that Westminster Management, a company owned by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, charged its tenants improper fees, and then used their failure to pay those fees as a basis to threaten them with eviction.
“Westminster is preying on poor and working class people, by extorting what may sound like small fees but is real money when you’re living paycheck to paycheck,” said Andrew Freeman, an attorney at the firm Brown, Goldstein & Levy, which is representing two plaintiffs who allege that Kushner’s company charged them unlawful fees.
TVNL Comment: Like father, like son....
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump expressed repeated frustration at Sessions over his March announcement that he would recuse himself from the Russia probe. “You could feel it dripping with venom,” one dinner guest reportedly told the Journal, of Trump’s criticism. “It was something else.”
It was September 1957, the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, and nine black pupils little guessed they were about to plant a milestone in the struggle for civil rights to follow those of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955, and Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Alabama later the same year.
Brown v Board of Education, the landmark 1954 supreme court ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional, should have meant she and fellow pupils could take their places at Central High. But Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas, in the deep south, remained defiant and used the national guard to block their enrollment. The African American children were left in limbo for three weeks.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has sought phone records concerning the statement written aboard Air Force One defending a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russians at Trump Tower last year that was set up by Donald Trump Jr., according to two people familiar with the investigation.
Mueller has also asked the White House for documents and emails connected to a May 3 press briefing where Sean Spicer said the president had confidence in James Comey as FBI director, these people said. The request seeks to determine what White House officials – particularly Spicer – knew about the president’s plans to fire Comey in the days before it happened, according to one of the people familiar with it.
Rescue workers backed by an army of untrained volunteers searched for survivors buried under mounds of rubble as the death toll from Tuesday’s powerful earthquake climbed to at least 223 across central Mexico.
The 7.1 magnitude earthquake left a chess board of destruction across the country’s capital, where almost a hundred deaths have been confirmed so far.
At least 44 buildings collapsed completely in Mexico City, according to official figures, with thousands more left damaged and unstable in the sprawling city, which is built on a drained lakebed.
A magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck the central Mexican state of Puebla on Tuesday afternoon, the US Geological Survey said.
Preliminary reports put the epicenter 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers) east-northeast of San Juan Raboso and 34.1 miles (55 km) south-southwest of the city of Puebla, according to the USGS.
Swiss prosecutors are investigating why tens of thousands of euros were flushed down toilets in Geneva.
The €500 (£440; $600) notes were cut up and found in the toilets of a branch of the bank UBS and in three nearby restaurants.
Thousands of francs have reportedly been spent on plumbing repairs to unclog the surrounding pipes. The high-value euro notes are due to be withdrawn in 2018 over fears they facilitate illegal activities.
TVNL Comment: This is a strange story that might be worth following. We'll keep you posted.
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