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'Ghost gun' kits targeted by anti-gun group

A gun control group on Friday asked two web hosting companies to shut down websites selling devices that are used to make untraceable homemade firearms -- also known as ghost guns.

The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence asked that Shopify and DreamHost -- hosts of GhostGunner.net and GhostGuns.com -- disable the websites for violating the hosting companies’ terms of service.

The sites sell kits that help create homemade semi-automatic weapons and can be purchased legally for a few hundred dollars without the kind of background check required for traditional gun purchases.
But Cody Wilson, who runs GhostGunner.net, said the products he sells on his website are legal and in compliance with federal regulations. He said although there is no legal requirement that he conduct background checks, he tries to take precautions to make sure the weapons aren’t used nefariously.
“This is an attempt to apply pressure to deplatform a legal, American business selling legal products to law-abiding customers,” he said.

"This is an attempt to apply pressure to deplatform a legal, American business selling legal products to law-abiding customers."

- Cody Wilson, operator of GhostGunner.net

The Giffords Law Center was founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, an Arizona Democrat who made headlines in January 2011 when she survived an assassination attempt in Tuscon, Ariz.
Attorneys for the gun control group said that homemade weapons are increasingly being used in crimes and asked each of the companies to “invoke its policies to help stem the tide of this illegal, deadly behavior.”
They argue that Shopify and DreamHost should use their ability to terminate the websites, arguing that the two sites sell “the sort of products that have already caused scores of senseless deaths — and are likely to cause many more, unless taken off the market.”
Authorities say that the gunman who killed his wife and four others earlier this month in Northern California built two semi-automatic rifles at his home despite having been barred from owning guns.
Representatives for GhostGuns.com, Shopify and DreamHost did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

Trump says he passed on being TIME's 'Person of the Year'

In a tweet on Friday, President Trump claimed he “took a pass” on being TIME Magazine’s 2017 “Person of the Year” after the publication reportedly called and said they’d “probably” offer him the spot.

“Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photoshoot,” Trump said in the tweet. “I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!”

But in a tweet from TIME Friday night, the company said, "The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year," and that the recipient will not be announced until Dec. 6.
Trump was awarded the title last year after he won the 2016 presidential election.
The magazine’s managing editor, Nancy Gibbs, said last year that the choice of Trump was “straightforward.”
In 2015, Trump made the short-list for the award but it was instead offered to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. At the time, Trump said in a tweet that he had predicted he wouldn’t win and referred to Merkel as the “person who is ruining Germany.”
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TIME recently defined its “Person of the Year” as “a person (or people) who has had the most influence over the news in the last 12 months.”
While the magazine’s editors make the final choice, they reportedly take into consideration the opinions of their readers and let them vote, TIME said.
According to their posted results as of Friday night, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, was leading the pack, followed by Trump, “The Dreamers” and “#MeToo.”

Earliest Trump mention in Panama Papers dates to 1990s: Report

A reference to a Trump Corporation condo purchase and sale in the 1990s appears in the Panama Papers, a report says.  (Reuters)

A reference to a mysterious condominium purchase and sale in the 1990s is the earliest mention of Donald Trump in the notorious Panama Papers, according to a report published Friday.

A Panamanian company called Process Consultants Inc., which was owned through bearer shares, purchased a residential unit in the Trump Palace skyscraper in New York City in 1991, investigative journalist Jake Bernstein reported, citing the documents.

Bernstein is the author of "Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite."
Bearer shares, which provide a convenient means to transfer property anonymously, have been tightly regulated in recent years because they are frequently used in money-laundering and other illicit ventures.
The directors of Process Consultants (which is sometimes spelled “Process Consultans” in the documents) were employed by Mossack Fonseca, the once-obscure law firm whose clients were exposed by the massive Panama Papers leak.
But these directors were in reality “nominee directors,” Bernstein wrote, meaning that they were not the real decision-makers. Companies sometimes name nominee directors to obfuscate who is really running operations.
Jürgen Mossack, founder of the firm, was one of the nominee directors of Process Consultants, Bernstein reported.
In 1994, Process Consultants sold the apartment for $355,000 to a woman from Hong Kong, using the Trump Corporation as its broker.
While there is no indication that the sale was illegal, the quick turnaround on the condo and the secretive nature of Process Consultants spurred some concern that money laundering may have been involved, the New York Daily News reported.
Trump's name pops up elsewhere in the Panama Papers, but Bernstein’s find marks the president's earliest known appearance.
The 2016 leak of the Panama Papers, a trove of nearly 12 million financial documents tracing Mossack Fonseca's efforts to help politicians and celebrities shield their money from taxes, led to the removal of Pakistan and Iceland’s prime ministers and numerous high-level investigations around the world.
Early in November, Trump's Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was revealed in the so-called “Paradise Papers” to have conducted large business deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law.

Conyers accused of taking staff meeting in his underwear, ordering subordinate to babysit his kid

No one had to guess whether Rep. John Conyers wore boxers or briefs, according to a former key staffer, who said the embattled Michigan lawmaker once called her into a meeting while sporting only his skivvies.

Melanie Sloan, a lawyer who worked with Conyers on the House Judiciary Committee, said she was called up to the long-serving congressman's office to discuss an issue only to find him “walking  around in his underwear.”

Sloan is the third woman to accuse Conyers of inappropriate behavior.
“It made me increasingly anxious and depressed about going to work every day,” she said, adding that “there was no way to fix it.”

“It made me increasingly anxious and depressed about going to work every day."

“There was no mechanism I could use, no person I could go to,” she said.
Sloan was a well-known Washington lawyer when she worked as Democratic counsel on the House Judiciary Committee in the 1990s. It was not clear exactly when the strange encounter with the lawmaker, now 88, occurred.
During her time working for the committee, she claims Conyers often screamed at her, fired her then re-hired her, criticized her for not wearing stockings and once even ordered her to babysit one of his children.
While those revelations came out earlier this week, word of Conyers, who was first elected to Congress in 1964, taking a meeting in his underwear came this week in a Detroit Free Press article.
Though Sloan maintains Conyers did not sexually assault her, she told the Detroit Free Press that “his constant stream of abuse was difficult to handle and it was certainly damaging to my self-respect and self-esteem.”
Conyers’ hometown newspaper earlier this week called for his resignation in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against him as well as a questionable payout to one alleged victim.
Conyers is accused of using taxpayer dollars to settle a claim in secret, after a former staff reportedly claimed she was fired for rejecting his advances.
In a scathing editorial published late Tuesday, the Detroit Free Press demanded the Democrat step down immediately.
The paper called Conyers' actions “the kind of behavior that can never be tolerated in a public official, much less an elected representative of the people.”
“He should resign his position and allow the investigation into his behavior to unfold without the threat that it would render him, and the people he now represents, effectively voiceless,” the board wrote.
BuzzFeed reported Monday that Conyers settled a wrongful termination complaint in 2015 with a staffer who claimed she was dismissed because she did not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.”
Conyers acknowledged in a statement that his office paid his accuser the money -- reportedly a $27,000 sum -- but “vehemently” denied the underlying claims.
“I expressly and vehemently denied the allegations made against me, and continue to do so,” Conyers, who has spent 53 years in Congress, said. “My office resolved the allegations – with an express denial of liability – to save all involved from the rigors of protracted litigation. That should not be lost in the narrative.”
But the Detroit Free Press, which described Conyers as an “undisputed hero of the civil rights movement,” took issue with how Conyers’ office chose to handle the issue.
After the alleged victim made a formal complaint through Congress' Office of Compliance, Conyers’ office reportedly pushed to handle the situation on its own. If the woman dropped her complaint, signed a legal document saying Conyers had done nothing wrong and promised not to make any additional claims against him, she would be re-hired as a temporary “no-show” employee and paid $27,111.75 for three months, according to reports. The accuser agreed to the terms.
Conyers’ office defended the agreement as a way to avoid litigation – though House ethics rules bar lawmakers from keeping an employee on the payroll who isn’t doing anything.
"A House member can’t retain an employee who isn’t performing work commensurate with the pay, and regardless, can’t give back pay for work that stretches further than a month," the editorial board wrote.
While acknowledging that payoffs happen in the private sector, the board said “it should never, ever happen where public dollars (and public accountability) are concerned.”
Calling it a “public betrayal,” the board wrote it’s impossible to know how often the practice takes places in Congress but added Conyers should have known better.
Even though resigning would end his otherwise “stellar career,” the paper wrote that it’s “the appropriate consequence for the stunning subterfuge his office has indulged here, and a needed warning to other members of Congress that this can never be tolerated.”
The House Ethics Committee announced Tuesday it has opened an investigation into the matter.