A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – The United States will no longer provide more than a quarter of the funding for the United Nations’s peacekeeping efforts, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley told the organization Wednesday.

“The United States has long been the largest financial contributor to U.N. peacekeeping by far. That will not change,” Haley said.

But Haley cautioned that “peacekeeping is a shared responsibility.”

“With shared responsibility comes shared burdens and shared costs. One country should not shoulder more than one-quarter of the U.N. peacekeeping budget.” [ Source: The Hill (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The U.S. military has confirmed that a senior leader of an al Qaeda branch in Africa was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Libya on Saturday.

Musa Abu Dawud, a high-ranking al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) official, was one of two militants killed in the precision strike near Ubari in southwestern Libya, Africa Command (Africom) said in a statement Wednesday.

“Now that operational reporting and the battle damage assessment is fully complete, the command is able to confirm the death of Dawud,” Africom said. [ Source: The Hill (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The internal watchdog at the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday he is launching a review into allegations by Republican lawmakers that the FBI made serious missteps when it sought a warrant to monitor a former adviser to President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

Michael Horowitz, the department’s inspector general, said in a statement his review will examine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department followed proper procedures when they applied for a warrant with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to secretly conduct surveillance on Carter Page and his ties to Russia.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told reporters last month he planned to ask Horowitz to investigate the alleged surveillance abuses. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Top-level officials from North and South Korea met near the border to prepare for an upcoming summit between the leaders of the two countries, the South confirmed on Thursday. The officials were discussing the details and possible dates for the inter-Korea talks.

North Korea’s Ri Son Gwon welcomed Southern officials to the North Korea-controlled Tongilgak building, saying that the past 80 days saw “unprecedented historic events” between Seoul and Pyongyang.

Ri, who heads Pyongyang’s agency in charge of inter-Korean ties, also said he hoped for an outcome that matches the “hope and desire of the nation.” [ Source Deutche Welle (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – France, Britain and Germany sought on Wednesday to persuade their EU partners to back new sanctions on Iran to preserve a nuclear deal with Tehran that U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of in May, diplomats said.

The new measures proposed by London, Paris and Berlin were discussed by the EU’s 28 ambassadors and could include members of Iran’s most powerful security force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), diplomats said.

Trump has given the European signatories a May 12 deadline to “fix the terrible flaws” of the 2015 nuclear deal, which was agreed under his predecessor Barack Obama, or he will refuse to extend U.S. sanctions relief on Iran. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – President Trump is hyping the economic boost from a massive infrastructure program, applying pressure on Capitol Hill Democrats to get on board or risk missing out as they did on tax cuts that are increasingly popular with voters.

Armed with a study from his Council of Economic Advisers that forecasts significant job growth from the $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan, Mr. Trump will make the pitch Thursday in front of a crowd of construction workers in Richfield, Ohio.

It kicks off a series of road trips to whip up public support and spur Congress, particularly Democrats, to begin moving the plan this year with piecemeal legislation. [ Source: Washington Times (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – A U.S. judge on Wednesday rejected Saudi Arabia’s bid to dismiss lawsuits claiming that it helped plan the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and should pay billions of dollars in damages to victims.

U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan said the plaintiffs’ allegations “narrowly articulate a reasonable basis” for him to assert jurisdiction over Saudi Arabia under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), a 2016 federal law.

The Saudi government has long denied involvement in the attacks in which hijacked airplanes crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and a Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 people died. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Two Department of Justice officials defended the CLOUD Act, legislation buried in last week’s $1.3 trillion spending bill that could upend both the tech industry and a U.S. Supreme Court case.

Speaking Wednesday afternoon at the International Association of Privacy Professionals Conference in Washington, D.C., Justice Department representatives said the CLOUD Act will make it easier to collect evidence stored electronically in other countries.

The Cloud Act allows U.S. law enforcement at all levels — from local police to federal agents — to force tech companies to turn over user data even if it is stored on servers located outside the United States.

It also gives the executive branch the ability to negotiate one-on-one agreements with foreign governments permitting those nations to access user data stored in the United States. Under a reciprocity agreement, the U.S. could then get the data stored in that country as well. [ Source: Washington Times (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The Orlando nightclub shooter’s dad – revealed to be an FBI informant – told authorities who were investigating Omar Mateen before the attack that pro-terror comments the would-be gunman made to coworkers were just examples of him “being stupid,” an agent testified Monday.

FBI Special Agent Juvenal Martin, who was on the stand in the terrorism trial of Noor Salman, Omar Mateen’s wife, said Omar’s father, Seddique, had called him while his son was being investigated for the comments in 2006, a decade before the Pulse attack, and was upset.

Martin testified Seddique told him something like “if he had done those things he was being stupid,” the Orlando Sentinel reported. [ Source: Fox News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday considers for the second time in recent months whether to rein in politicians who draw state electoral maps with the aim of entrenching their party in power in a case involving a Maryland congressional district.

The justices heard a similar case on Oct. 3 in which Democratic voters challenged state legislative district boundaries drawn by Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin, and have not yet issued a ruling. On Wednesday, they are set to hear an hour-long argument in a challenge by Republican voters to a U.S. House of Representatives district drawn by Maryland Democrats.

Both cases center on a practice known as partisan gerrymandering that involves manipulating boundaries of legislative districts to benefit one party and diminish another. The Supreme Court for decades has been willing to invalidate state electoral maps due to racial discrimination but never those created just for partisan advantage. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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