U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, second right in front,
walks with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir after arriving in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2018.
(AP)
U.S. Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo landed Tuesday in Saudi Arabia to meet with King Salman over
the disappearance of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, who is believed to
be dead.
Pompeo landed in Riyadh and was to speak Salman over the
crisis surrounding Khashoggi and his alleged slaying. Pompeo was greeted
by Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir.
Khashoggi vanished two
weeks ago during a visit to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Pompeo is
set to also visit the place where Khashoggi was last seen.
"The
effort behind the scenes is focused on avoiding a diplomatic crisis
between the two countries and has succeeded in finding a pathway to
de-escalate tensions," said Ayham Kamel, the head of the Eurasia Group's
Mideast and North African practice. "Riyadh will have to provide some
explanation of the journalist's disappearance, but in a manner that
distances the leadership from any claim that a decision was made at
senior levels to assassinate the prominent journalist."
Turkish
officials said they fear Khashoggi was killed and dismembered inside the
consulate. Saudis have called the allegations “baseless.”
Media reports indicate that the Kingdom may acknowledge the writer was killed in the consulate.
Meanwhile, Turkish investigators were allowed to search the consulate on Monday, according to The Washington Post.
But hours before the Turkish forensic team arrived, journalists
photographed a cleaning crew entering the consulate, the paper reported.
The
crew hauled buckets, mops and what appeared to be bottles of cleaning
solution, The Post reported. Turkish investigators said they “smelled
chemicals had been used,” two officials in contact with the
investigators said, according to the paper.
“They are trying to make fun of us and our willingness to cooperate,” one of the officials said.
Forensics
tests like spraying luminol, a chemical mixture, can expose blood left
behind, said Mechthild Prinz, an associate professor at the John Jay
College of Criminal Justice who previously worked at the New York City's
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
"It depends on how well
they cleaned it up," Prinz told the AP. "Obviously, you don't want
anybody to have a chance to clean it up, but very often people do miss
blood."
President Donald Trump, after speaking with King Salman,
had dispatched Pompeo on Monday to speak to the monarch of the world's
top oil exporter over Khashoggi's disappearance.
“I am immediately sending our Secretary of State to meet with King!” Trump tweeted Monday.
Khashoggi
had written critically about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,
son of King Salman, for The Washington Post. The prince is next in the
line to the throne, and his rise to power prompted the writer’s
self-imposed exile in the U.S.
Khashoggi has criticized Saudi
Arabia’s war in Yemen, its recent diplomatic spat with Canada and its
arrest of women's rights activists after the lifting of a driving ban
for women—policies seen as initiatives of the crown prince. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Jimmy Kimmel appears in a campaign video to support his longtime friend Jimmy Vega for North Las Vegas constable.
(Jimmy Vega for North Las Vegas Constable)
Who says Jimmy Kimmel doesn't support Republicans?
Late
night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel announced his support for a
Republican (a lifelong friend) who is running for constable in North Las
Vegas.
Kimmel appeared in a campaign video endorsing Jimmy Vega,
who he's known since they were 12 years old. The host of “Jimmy Kimmel
Live!” said he was proud of Vega for running.
Vega, 51, had been in the military for 25 years, and is currently in the naval reserves, he said.
“For
me it was an integrity issue, is that, you know, you work hard, not
everybody is meant to be a cop, not everybody is meant to be a
firefighter, not everybody is meant to be in the military. You have to
go through your prospective boot camps or academies to earn it, and
that’s how I feel, I feel you just have to earn everything in life,”
Vega said.
Kimmel has been vocal about his criticism of President
Donald Trump and many Republican policies. But Vega said it’s not about
partisanship.
“It’s just doing the right thing and helping the
people, and that’s what I plan to do,” he said. “This race shouldn’t be a
partisan race anyway. We’re law enforcement, we don’t create law, we
just enforce law.”
North Las Vegas is “saturated” with veterans,
according to Vega, and he has a passion to support veterans, he said.
Vega said he wants to grow the department.
“There’s a lot of things that the current constable is not doing that I intend to do,” he said.
Jimmy Kimmel and longtime friend Jimmy Vega.
(Jimmy Vega for North Las Vegas Constable)
According to Nevada law, Constables are considered peace officers, according to Nevada law. Their duties include evictions and summoning juries for justices of the peace.
Kimmel
and Vega chuckle throughout the video, with the comedian throwing in a
few jokes, including some about the eviction part of the constable job.
They both graduated from Clark High School, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, speaking at the Economic Club of Washington's Milestone Celebration in Washington.
(AP)
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
has distinguished his company from other big tech firms in declaring its
willingness to work with the United States Department of Defense.
“If
big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of
Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” Bezos cautioned in
San Francisco Monday at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the
tech magazine Wired. AMAZON FOUNDER JEFF BEZOS GIVES $10 MILLION TO SUPER PAC IN FIRST MAJOR POLITICAL CONTRIBUTION
Amazon
is bidding for a 10-year contract with the Defense Department known as
the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, JEDI, to offer
cloud computing services worth up to $10 billion.
“We are going to continue to support the DoD, and I think we should,” Bezos said.
This is a great country and it does need to be defended. — Jeff Bezos
Earlier this month, Google said it had removed its bid for JEDI because the contract went against the company's "A.I. Principles." On Friday, Microsoft employees published an open letter on Medium, urging the company not to take the contract.
"Many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war," the letter read. AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS TOUTS BLUE ORIGIN ROCKETS, WEB SERVICES AT AIR FORCE EVENT
Bezos acknowledged his unpopular stance.
“One
of the jobs of the senior leadership team is to make the right
decision, even when it’s unpopular,” Bezos said. "This is a great
country and it does need to be defended."
"I know everybody is very conflicted about the current politics and so on,” he said, but, “This country is a gem.”
Attorney
General Jeff Sessions on Monday lit into federal judges for what he
called a dramatic uptick in "outrageous" decisions threatening to
interfere with the separation of powers by exposing internal White House
deliberations.
In a fiery speech to the conservative Heritage
Foundation in Washington, Sessions warned that "once we go down this
road in American government, there is no turning back." He vowed to take
"these discovery fights to the Supreme Court in emergency postures. ...
We intend to fight this, and we intend to win."
Sessions
specifically singled out New York district court judge Jesse M. Furman,
who ruled that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross could be questioned in an
ongoing lawsuit concerning the legality of the Trump administration's
decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
Furman's
decision, Sessions said, contradicts longstanding statutory provisions
that protect certain executive branch discussions from disclosure, in
order to encourage free and open deliberations by executive branch
officials. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including several liberal
states, are arguing in part that the White House added the citizenship
question for political reasons.
The judge wants "to hold a trial
over the inner workings of a Cabinet secretary’s mind," and
inappropriately allow inquiry into the motivations for the Trump
administration's decisions, Sessions said.
Furman's order, which
was upheld by a New York federal appellate court, has been stayed by
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The full Supreme Court is
expected to decide the issue soon.
"Once we go down this road in American government, there is no turning back." — Attorney General Jeff Sessions
The
pending court challenges against the Trump administration's decision to
add a citizenship question, legal experts tell Fox News, face an uphill
battle not only because conservatives now command a 5-4 majority on the
Supreme Court, but also because traditionally it's been the White
House's prerogative to decide whether to inquire about citizenship on
the census.
Former President Barack Obama's administration didn't ask the question in the 2010 census amid
fears it would cause illegal immigrants to avoid answering their census
questions -- and thus not count toward population totals used to
determine the number of seats each state receives in the House of
Representatives. (The citizenship question was last asked on the census
in 1950, but beginning in 1970, a citizenship question was asked in a
long-form questionnaire sent to a relatively small number of households,
alongside the main census. In 2010, there was no long-form
questionnaire.)
Democrats would lose out because the citizenship
question would affect predominately liberal districts, but that's not a
legally sufficient objection, legal analysts say. TRUMP CENSUS BUREAU NOMINEE QUIZZED BY SENATORS ON CITIZENSHIP QUESTION
"There
is no credible argument to be made that asking about citizenship
subverts the Constitution and federal law," Chapman University law
professor and constitutional law expert John Eastman told Fox News. "The
recent move is simply to restore what had long been the case."
Nevertheless,
Sessions said Monday, liberal states and nonprofits have continued to
push even longshot legal challenges in order to dig around in executive
branch deliberations.
"This is not the first time we’ve had to
seek emergency appellate intervention to stop outrageous discovery,"
Sessions said. Last year, the government filed a successful emergency
motion to stop a district court's ruling that permitted plaintiffs to
question a Department of Homeland Security counselor about advice
relating to the contentious Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
(DACA) program.
Sessions called that lower court ruling a "blatant
violation of deliberative process and attorney-client privileges" and
warned that it would have a "chilling effect" on deliberations in the
White House.
He added, "Too many judges believe it is their right, their duty, to act upon their sympathies and policy preferences."
The
attorney general blamed Obama for encouraging that approach. "One
argument for activism was advocated openly by President Obama when he
declared his judicial nominees must judge with 'empathy.' It is a
seductive argument. But whatever empathy is, it’s more akin to emotion,
bias, and politics than law," Sessions said.
"In the recent DACA litigation, for example, a judge last year told one of our DOJ litigators, 'You can’t come into court to espouse a position that is heartless,'"
Sessions continued. "Not illegal. Not unlawful. Heartless. And later,
after I responded in a speech that it isn’t a judge’s job to decide
whether a policy is 'heartless,' the judge again scolded the DOJ lawyer
by stating that I 'seem to think the courts cannot have an opinion.'"
Judge Nicholas Garaufis denied the government's motion to dismiss a
DACA lawsuit, citing President Trump's "bigoted" comments.
(Reuters, FIle)
That judge, U.S. District
Judge Nicholas Garaufis, was appointed to the bench by former President
Bill Clinton. He ruled in March that a lawsuit seeking to preserve the
federal DACA program can continue -- citing candidate Donald Trump's
"racial slurs" and "epithets."
“One might reasonably infer,”
Garaufis said in his politically charged ruling, “that a candidate who
makes overtly bigoted statements on the campaign trail might be more
likely to engage in similarly bigoted action in office.”
Separately,
Sessions also said the 27 nationwide federal injunctions issued by
individual judges during the Trump administration so far -- which
brought temporary halts to high-profile policies like his ban on travel from Muslim-majority nations -- constitute an unprecedented "judicial encroachment."
"It
is emphatically not the duty of the courts to manage the government or
to pass judgment on every policy action the Executive branch takes,"
Sessions said. "In the first 175 years of this Republic, not a single
judge issued one of these orders."
In his confirmation hearings
for the Supreme Court in September, then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh was
asked by Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy about the
constitutionality of individual federal judges issuing nationwide
injunctions against presidential action, a recent phenomenon. Kavanaugh
demurred, saying he could not discuss potential pending issues before
the Supreme Court.
Sessions noted that Associate Justice Clarence
Thomas, who concurred in the high court's decision earlier this year to
reinstate Trump's travel ban, wrote that such injunctions “take a toll
on the federal court system—preventing legal questions from percolating
through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping, and making every
case a national emergency for the courts and for the executive branch.”
He
added: "Executive branch officers do not work for the judiciary. We
work for the president of the United States. Respect runs both ways."
Judge Nicholas Garaufis denied the government's motion to dismiss a
DACA lawsuit, citing President Trump's "bigoted" comments.
(Reuters, FIle)
That judge, U.S. District
Judge Nicholas Garaufis, was appointed to the bench by former President
Bill Clinton. He ruled in March that a lawsuit seeking to preserve the
federal DACA program can continue -- citing candidate Donald Trump's
"racial slurs" and "epithets."
