Black Lives Matter Cartoon

Black Lives Matter protesters blocked from Mall of America as some stores close

Police officers blocked protesters from entering the Mall of America Wednesday during a planned demonstration by the activist group Black Lives Matter at the shopping hub.
Officers and security guards formed a line outside the mall, extending into a nearby parking garage. A crowd was heard chanting, "We shut it down." The number of protesters who'd arrived was unclear.
More than a dozen stores at the nation's largest mall closed beforehand. Some are near the mall's rotunda, a central gathering point at the massive retail center in suburban Minneapolis.
A message projected on an indoor monitor read, "This demonstration is not authorized and is in clear violation of Mall of America policies."
The protest two days before Christmas was aimed at drawing attention to the police shooting last month of a black Minneapolis man, Jamar Clark. The 24-year-old died the day after he was shot by police responding to an assault complaint.
A similar demonstration last December drew hundreds of demonstrators angry over the absence of charges following the police killings of unarmed black men in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri. Dozens of people were arrested.
The privately owned mall said another demonstration would mean lost sales. The massive retail center houses an amusement park and more than 500 shops spread across four floors, attracting shoppers from around the globe.
The mall sought a court order blocking the planned protest. A judge on Tuesday barred three organizers from attending the demonstration, but said she doesn't have the power to block unidentified protesters associated with Black Lives Matter -- or the movement as a whole -- from showing up.
"Our number one priority is the safety of everybody out at the Mall of America today," Bloomington Police Deputy Chief Denis Otterness said.
Gov. Mark Dayton said he sympathizes with protesters' concerns, but he stressed that the mall is private property.
Kandace Montgomery, one of three organizers barred by the judge's order, said the group wasn't deterred by the ban. She declined to say if she or her fellow organizers still planned to go to the mall, but she said she expected at least 700 people to show up -- including some who were prepared to be arrested.
On one of the busiest shopping days of the year, Montgomery said the retail mecca was the perfect venue for their demonstration to pressure authorities involved in the investigation of Clark's death to release video footage.
"When you disrupt their flow of capital ... they actually start paying attention," she said. "That's the only way that they'll hear us."

Watchdog says secret US, Cuba programs pose plenty of problems

Once-secret U.S. government programs in Cuba that included a Twitter-like messaging service and an HIV-prevention workshop contained inadequate monitoring, conflicts of interest and questions of legal responsibility for those involved, according to an agency watchdog report this week.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversaw the now-defunct "Cuban Twitter" program and other efforts, also didn't have a policy in place to protect sensitive work from subversion by Cuban intelligence officials, the report stated. ZunZuneo, as the text-messaging program was called, was among several of the agency's Cuban civil-society programs designed to bring about democratic change.
The USAID inspector general's report follows a months-long investigation by The Associated Press last year into concealed U.S. government work on the island. Those disclosures revealed how one of those companies — working under USAID's supervision — developed ZunZuneo, staged an HIV-prevention workshop to recruit activists in Cuba and infiltrated the nation's hip-hop community.
The report also faulted conflicts of interest, including how family members received grant awards. In one case, an operations manager for Creative Associates International — a Washington-based firm central to the efforts — looked to a family member's technical company, Nimesa, for consulting.
"Government agencies are subject to public scrutiny," the report stated. "As a government agency, USAID should not tolerate, much less approve, awards that constitute conflicts of interest. Such conflicts, which in ZunZuneo amounted to nepotism, increased the program's vulnerability to fraud, waste and abuse."
The programs run by Creative received sharp criticism from some U.S. lawmakers, who called them "reckless," ''boneheaded" and "downright irresponsible." The AP found Cuban artists swept up in the program were detained or interrogated by Cuban authorities, and a secret U.S. hip-hop operation backfired after Cuban authorities found that an independent music festival — one of the largest on the island — was really backed by the Obama administration.
The inspector general's probe found some program documents were missing, including emails sent and received outside of government accounts or on a secure-messaging service called Hushmail. The report found officials also lost messages when USAID employees switched email providers, and the agency's IT staff said "it would be time-consuming to retrieve them."
"As a result," the inspector general found, "we may be missing relevant communications." The AP had previously obtained thousands of pages of documents, including some of those messages, as part of its investigation.
The report also found USAID shifted its approach in Cuba following the December 2009 arrest of agency contractor and U.S. citizen Alan Gross, who was accused of bringing in illegal technology by the Cuban government. Gross was released from prison in December 2014.
USAID spokesman Ben Edwards said in a statement the agency has already completed several recommendations from the report, with the remaining to be finished by March 2016. The 89-page report contained 16 recommendations to improve accountability and prevent conflicts of interest.

US officials secretly communicated with Assad regime for years, report says

Assad

 U.S. and Arab officials say the White House secretly communicated for years with members of the Syrian regime in an effort to end the country's ongoing civil war and get President Bashar al-Assad to step down, according to a published report.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday the Obama administration’s effort to communicate with Damascus was extremely limited. Sometimes, senior U.S. and Syrian officials would speak directly to each other; other times, they would speak through intermediaries such as Russia and Iran.
Assad also tried to reach out to the U.S. to entice them to join what he described as Syria’s fight against terrorism, according to the paper.
As anti-Assad demonstrations mushroomed into civil war in 2011, U.S. intelligence began to identify possible replacements for Assad, according to former U.S. and European officials.
“The White House’s policy in 2011 was to get to the point of a transition in Syria by finding cracks in the regime and offering incentives for people to abandon Assad,” a former senior U.S. official told the Journal.
According to the paper, The secret contacts between U.S. and Syrian officials may have hampered the effort to get Assad to step down and ultimately detracted from the fight against ISIS. By 2012, the Obama administration’s plan to get Assad to step down failed and the U.S. moved to support the rebels.
The Obama administration's effort to apply political and military pressure on Assad's regime often hit a wall, according to a former U.S. ambassador to Syria.
“This is a regime that is very supple politically. They’re very smart,” said Robert Ford, former U.S. ambassador to Damascus. “They’re always testing for weaknesses and pushing the envelope.”
As the fighting intensified, the White House issued warnings through Assad’s allies – Russia and Iran – to not use chemical weapons on a large scale, according to U.S. officials. Despite the warnings and the now-infamous red line drawn by President Barack Obama, chemical attacks in August 2013 killed nearly 1,500 people, according to the Journal.
Despite the regime's defiance, the lines of communication between Washington and Damascus reportedly have remained open. The Journal reported that Assistant Secretary of State Anne Patterson has talked with Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad at least twice about the fate of five Americans who are missing or detained in Syria. 
Washington's point man to talk with Assad is often Khaled Ahmad, an Assad confidante. Then-Ambassador Ford and Ahmad planned to meet in Geneva, Switzerland ahead of planned peace talks there in 2013. At the time, Ford told Ahmad the U.S. was still seeking a political transition that would allow Assad to step down.
Ahmad, in turn, told Ford the U.S. should help Syria fight extremism. And as ISIS rose to power in Syria and Iraq, Assad found himself with more leverage in negotiations with the West.
The Journal reported as the U.S. expanded airstrikes against ISIS in Syria in 2014, U.S. officials told Syrian forces to stay away from U.S. warplanes.
Now, when Washington wants to notify Damascus where it’s placed U.S.-backed Syrian rebels to fight ISIS, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations calls upon a deputy to talk to Syrian envoy Bashar Jaafari, officials said.
The White House insists the heads-ups to Syria doesn’t mean the sides are collaborating together. However, not everyone views them that way 
“The regime was re-legitimized,” Ibrahim Hamidi, a Syrian journalist who until 2013 ran the Damascus bureau for pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat told the Wall Street Journal. “Any communication with the U.S.—even the perception of it—gives them the upper hand.”
Earlier this year, former White House official Steve Simon met with Assad and Ahmad in Damascus. Officials familiar with the meetings insisted the meeting wasn’t scheduled on behalf of the U.S., according to the paper. Simon himself also said he planned the meeting without any help from the administration.
The Journal reports Simon outlined plans for Assad to step down and to start making Syria look better in the eyes of the global community.
Assad is reportedly more open to local cease-fires, but insists the focus of the war turn to fighting ISIS.

#NotMiAbuela: Clinton compares herself to Latina grandmas, Twitter responds with outrage

A GIF-filled campaign post aimed at winning over Latino voters has backfired and instead is drawing the ire of many social media users for purportedly playing up ethnic stereotypes.
The campaign's "7 ways Hillary Clinton is just like your abuela" (the Spanish word for grandmother), which came on the same day Clinton's daughter Chelsea announced she is pregnant with what will be Clinton's second grandchild, was quickly derided by many online users as using vague stereotypes, basic Spanish vocabulary and even a photo of the candidate with singer Marc Anthony to show she is in touch with a younger generation.
"It's no secret that Hillary is loving her role as grandma," the campaign post says. "And she was thrilled to learn that next summer, her granddaughter Charlotte will have a sibling to play with."
The post then goes on to make numerous uses of the word respeto (Spanish for respect) paired with numerous GIFs, including one where she goes after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump by saying she had one word for him: "Basta! Enough!" The post ends with "Everybody loves abuela—even this guy," which shows a picture of Clinton alongside Anthony.
The post was quickly met with derision. Twitter users expressed their outrage using the hashtag #NotMiAbuela or #NotMyAbuela.
Activist Marisol Ramos tweeted: "Hilary is #NotMiAbuela #NotMyAbuela because I was separated by mine by many miles, and a militarized border."
Another Twitter user, Laura Cristal Magaña, wrote: "Abuela couldn't visit me in USA because she didn't have ‘papers;' #NotMyAbuela #notmiabuela."
Back in October, Clinton also played up her "abuela" status – and used the same photo of her and Anthony – in another post called "6 cosas que no sabías sobre Hillary Clinton" — or, "6 things you didn't know about Hillary Clinton."
Despite the post, Hillary Clinton is still popular among Hispanics. A recent poll shows 62 percent of Latino voters view her favorably, according to a impreMedia and Latino Decisions poll. Republican Jeb Bush pulled in 42 percent, and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump garnered 15 percent.