Joe Corré, the son of Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols manager who defined the band's direction in its brief heyday in the late 1970s, set fire to what he claimed was £5 million (about $6. 25 million) worth of punk memorabilia aboard a boat on the Thames River here on Saturday. "Punk has become another marketing tool to sell you something you don't need," Mr. Corré said to a crowd of dozens gathered on the shore in London's Chelsea district, as flames licked at a trunk of punk paraphernalia and fireworks shot from the boat into the late afternoon sky. "If you want to understand the potent values of punk, confront taboos. Do not tolerate hypocrisy. Investigate the truth for yourself. " Mr. Corré, a household name in Britain, is known as the son of McLaren and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and as a founder of the racy lingerie brand Agent Provocateur. He announced this spring that he would burn his personal punk collection to protest Punk London, a celebration of the genre, timed to the 40th anniversary of a 1976 Ramones concert in the city that is said to mark punk's arrival in Britain. Saturday's bonfire coincided with the anniversary of the release of the Sex Pistols' single "Anarchy in the U. K.," which put England's seminal punk band on the map. The items set on fire included a pair of bondage trousers that had been for Mr. Corré as a child rare posters live punk recordings and pants that had belonged to John Lydon, a. k. a. Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols, according to a news release sent by a publicist for Mr. Corré. Punk London, which includes exhibitions at venues like the British Library, has drawn protests from fans, who lament the movement's by mainstream culture. Mr. Corré has called the series a betrayal of punk's countercultural values and has claimed that Queen Elizabeth II endorses it. (The queen has issued no public statements on Punk London, and a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace reached by phone said the palace had no comment on the events.) As the blaze died down on Saturday, Ms. Westwood, a addition to the proceedings, poked her head out from a green bus carrying some members of Mr. Corré's crew. "By the end of this century, by 2100, there'll only be one billion people left," Ms. Westwood said to the crowd in a speech that argued that a of bankers and politicians was driving climate change. "We'll all be migrants, all trying to get to the green part. " As a wailing fire truck arrived, Ms. Westwood urged the crowd to support green energy. "It's the most important thing you could do in your life," she said. "Let's all have a laugh and stay alive. Bye," she added, before disappearing into the bus. Saturday's bonfire was heavily publicized by Mr. Corré, who earlier in the week in front of Buckingham Palace burned a featuring an image of the queen. On Thursday, he held a news conference about the bonfire, and announced that his mother would attend. (He also noted there that 80 percent of the proceeds from a planned documentary about the event would go to charity.) A crowd of journalists, punks and watched as the fire grew on Saturday, whooping when the first fireworks went off. In addition to the trunk of punk memorabilia, Mr. Corré incinerated several human effigies modeled on conservative politicians, like Boris Johnson, London's former mayor and an advocate for Britain's exit from the European Union, and the prime minister, Theresa May. A band on board the ship played music as the bonfire burned. A few leather jackets and heads bobbed about in the crowd gathered on the street, as did some more stereotypical Chelsea denizens: Early in the proceedings, a woman in a chic coat, sun hat and heavy red lipstick emerged from a Bentley to watch the fire. After the bonfire, Mr. Corré returned to shore to speak with journalists. When one reporter noted that the entire event could be a hoax, as the press was not able to verify the value of the materials on board, Mr. Corré dismissed the comment with an expletive and said: "You've seen it, you've seen it. What are you talking about, a hoax?" An hour after the event began, the green bus pulled away, carrying Mr. Corré, Ms. Westwood and their coterie. Some photographers and visitors lingered. Bajowoo Park, 32, a South Korean designer who lives in Tokyo, stood looking out at the boat. He had heavy, ghoulish mascara around his eyes and wore a surgical mask with a hole ripped through the mouth. Mr. Park had flown to London just for the event, he said. He had learned about it on the internet and explained he was disappointed that the crowd was so small. He noted that he had expected deeper interest from a country considered one of punk's homelands. "Not many people," Mr. Park said. The "world is very big," he added. "And punk started here. "


The differences between President Barack Obama and Donald Trump couldn t be greater and more obvious and that s why Americans all over the country are mourning the end of Obama s second term, knowing full well that Trump and the GOP are going to destroy his legacy.Earlier today, Jay Carney a former White House press secretary for Obama went on CNN s New Day and highlighted a massive difference between Obama and Trump, and it s one that will make Trump seriously pissed off. Host Alisyn Camerota brought up the fact that Obama s personal life has been scandal-free (unlike Trump s) and asked: Beyond having a scandal-free presidency in terms of personal-life scandals, what do you think President Obama s legacy is? Carney gave an answer that will have Republicans attacking Obama even more. Having worked with Obama personally, Carney said: I think that it was scandal-free beyond his personal life. The man s integrity, his decency and optimism about America that he embodied and pursued will be his legacy. Referring to the Obama administration as patriotic and pure, Carney said: It was an honest and sincere effort driven towards the idea of making America better and improving the lives of everyday Americans. Many of us would agree. You can watch Carney deliver every Republican s worst nightmare below:Obama demonstrated and lived America s values every day of his life, and every day of his presidency. Trump, on the other hand, has had several sexual assault cases filed against him, hasn t paid his taxes in well over a decade, is involved in several lawsuits over his scammy, fraudulent business dealings, and has more conflicts of interest incidents happening in his administration than is even Constitutional. Trump is shaping up to be America s most corrupt president, and even his supporters are losing faith in his campaign promises.


Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi returned to frontline Italian politics at the weekend, staking his claim to lead a resurgent center-right into national elections that are expected early next year. At exactly the same moment, Berlusconi s outspoken ally, Matteo Salvini, was addressing his Northern League party and laying down his own marker to become the next prime minister. Salvini Premier read a sign stuck to the lectern. In reality, neither man looks likely to head the next government if they pull off an election victory, and possible alternative candidates are already emerging. There is an apparent power struggle going on between Berlusconi and Salvini, but it will not get out of hand. They know a violent clash would be suicidal with voters, said Piero Ignazi, politics professor at Bologna University. The truth is both men will remain head of their respective parties, but they won t be the next prime minister, he said. This would open the way for a consensus candidate who would have to bridge the huge divergences between the three main rightist parties from the fierce anti-EU agenda put forward by both the Northern League and Brothers of Italy to the pro-European vision embraced by Berlusconi on Sunday. Latest opinion polls show this trio of long-standing allies are pulling ahead in the polls and predicted to win a combined 35 percent of the vote, with the anti-migrant Northern League just ahead of Berlusconi Forza Italia on some 15 percent. By contrast, the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and ruling center-left Democratic Party (PD) are seen on around 28 percent apiece. The 5-Star has ruled out any coalition alliances and the center-left pool of votes is shrinking as various leftist parties engage in ferocious infighting. Under the current electoral system no party or bloc looks like winning enough seats to govern alone. However, political analysts say the wind is filling the center-right s sails after years of adverse conditions, giving it pre-election momentum. Berlusconi ignominiously resigned from power in 2011 during a sovereign debt crisis. Mired in sex scandals and legal woes, he was subsequently expelled from the Senate and banned from running for office due to a 2013 tax fraud conviction. Open heart surgery last year left most analysts writing his political obituary. But not for the first time, the media tycoon, now 81, bounced back and has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the ban on seeking election. A hearing is scheduled for November, but a verdict is unlikely to come for several months, meaning he almost certainly will not be able to stand in the next national ballot, which is due by May 2018 and widely expected to be held in March. Despite his age, Berlusconi would love to be prime minister again. It would be his last hurrah. But realistically speaking, it is not about to happen, said a Forza Italia official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. Significantly, Berlusconi made his political comeback speech at an event organized by Forza Italia stalwart Antonio Tajani, the president of the European Parliament. Party sources said Tajani was in pole position to be Berlusconi s surrogate. While Berlusconi s name abroad evokes memories of bunga bunga sex parties and wisecracks, Tajani is a much less colorful character, whose pro-European instincts would make him a reassuring figure for international markets. Those very same instincts would pose a problem for Berlusconi s hardline allies, who have regularly denounced the European Union and have called for Italy to quit the euro. The leader of the center-right needs to be chosen through a clear process, perhaps a primary, Giorgia Meloni, the head of Brothers of Italy, told Sky Italia television on Sunday. I imagine that whatever grassroots method you decide, Tajani will not win out, she said. Brothers of Italy is a small, nationalist party, which is anti-migrant and anti-euro. It tries to differentiate itself from the League by saying it focuses on the whole country, not just the wealthy north. Buoyed by the League s strong poll numbers, Salvini says the leader of the party which wins the most votes next year should automatically be the prime ministerial candidate. But Berlusconi, a four-times premier, has ruled out handing over the baton of power to Salvini, who has embraced Europe s far-right and endorsed France s National Front. We created the center-right in Italy and we have always been its leader, laying out and fulfilling its program, Berlusconi said on Sunday. The two men have not spoken for months, saying they are in no hurry to discuss strategy. Political analysts have speculated that the pro-business Forza Italia might find it easier to create a government of national unity with former prime minister Matteo Renzi s PD party rather than the populist Northern League. Forza Italia loyalists reject this notion. We ruled with the Northern League for years in national government and we are ruling with them now in the regions and it is going well, said Forza Italia lawmaker Deborah Bergamini. One such regional coalition is in Liguria, headed by Forza Italia s Giovanni Toti. He attended both the Forza Italia and Northern League rallies at the weekend and is due to take part in a Brothers of Italy meeting this weekend. Toti has been carefully building bridges between the three parties and would be a natural choice to head any national coalition, Bologna University s Ignazi said.


Politicians have been known to do a lot of things to get elected. They usually cater and pander to a group of people who they think will have the best chance at casting a vote in their favor. In the case of Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz, those he s decided to cater to are the residents of Idiot America.Cruz has decided to go all in trying to get the ultra-religious, absent from reality, guns and God group of folks who love to hunt, hate gay people and live far away from populated areas. People otherwise known as extreme, right-wing Republicans.Perfectly pandering to this demographic, Cruz paired himself up with Duck Dynasty and their bigot-in-chief Phil Robertson. Robertson is about as anti-gay and bigoted as one could ever hope to be, so of course he s now endorsed one of the leading bigot candidates running for president Ted Cruz.In a new campaign commercial for Cruz, Robertson, with his face painting black camo for hunting, tells everyone the qualifications he wants to see in a president: Is he or she godly? Does he or she love us? Can he or she do the job? And finally, would they kill a duck and put em in a pot and make up a good duck gumbo? I ve looked at the candidates. Ted Cruz is my man. (Let s just pause for a second and acknowledge that Robertson said he or she. Got to at least give credit where credit is due)Now, as far as Cruz being the man for the job of President of the United States? Yeah, not so much. He s a smarmy man who will say or do anything to get his way. This includes, but is not limited to, likely not even being as religious as he says he is, or as constitutional as he claims to be.Cruz tends to do things for show, and no greater example of this can be seen than in this very commercial where he puts on blackface, pardon me, hunting camo paint that looks remarkably like blackface and someone should have told him that, and sits down to hold his gun and hunt with Robertson.Cruz is all like, Look at me! I m just like you! I like to hunt and play make-believe Rambo, too! Ignore the fact that I m insanely wealthy and married to Goldman Sachs! Vote for me! He knows exactly what he is doing. He s a smart guy, gotta give him that much, which also makes him irrefutably dangerous. He knows how to play the game, get what he wants, and he doesn t seem to care who might get hurt along the way.However, this ad right here, as funny as it may be, because it s pretty goddamn funny, also show to the depths he ll go to cater to a specific voter population. In this case, idiot America. Video/Featured image: YouTube


When Indira Islas was in third grade at Centennial Arts Academy, a public elementary school in Gainesville, Ga. she decided it was time to get serious. It was 2006, and she was in the lowest reading group in her class. She had been in that group since arriving two years earlier, speaking no English, in Gainesville, a city of 38, 000 just northeast of Atlanta's booming outer suburbs. But being at the bottom went against everything she believed about herself. "I wanted to be with the smart kids," she recalls. Starting the year before, in second grade, she read every volume of the "Magic Tree House" books in her library, a series about two ordinary siblings who climb into their backyard treehouse and to Pompeii, the Wild West, the ice age, feudal Japan and beyond. "I absolutely loved them," she says. "It was like going on adventures all over the world. " It was also the opposite of her own life. Indira left Mexico for the United States at age 6 with her parents and two younger sisters. Her mother cleaned houses when she wasn't caring for the children — there would eventually be seven of them — and her father worked in construction, and there was no money for lessons or soccer clubs, let alone traveling. "I'd hear about trips and experiences of my white friends, and I remember thinking: I'll never go to the beach or Disney World for spring break," Indira says. Her parents told her that education was all that mattered, and she had to spend all her free time inside, reading and writing. "I tell my children this country is a blessing to all the people living here," her mother told me. "If you have the opportunity to be good, it's very important to take it. " Indira took this advice to heart. By the time she was in fifth grade, her reading skills had improved so much that she tested into the top reading group. By middle school, she consistently got A's, which qualified her for a celebratory school trip every time report cards came out. "They rewarded us by taking us skating or bowling," she says. "I felt like I was so smart, just getting the chance to go out for the whole school day with friends. That's when I said: 'I can make it. ''u2009" Indira began to throw herself into everything. At recess, she played soccer and basketball, competing so fiercely that everyone took notice. Boys usually picked other boys for their teams, and white kids tended to favor other white kids. But everyone started picking Indira. In middle school, she was on the track team, running races. Her coach was stunned by her determination. In meets, even when she won her event, she scolded herself unless she broke her previous record. After practices ended, she would keep running. "I wanted to think," she says. "I'd stay after practice and run and run and run. " Indira remembers understanding vaguely that it wasn't just poverty that set her and her family apart. Her parents had been doctors in Mexico. She admired pictures in their dresser drawer of the two of them in their 20s standing together, tall and proud in their white coats — before they all fled the violence of drug gangs who were then taking over their home state, Guerrero. When she asked her parents why they were no longer doctors, they explained it was because they were not American citizens. It didn't make sense to Indira. Why would her father have shed that beautiful crisp white coat for the fraying pants and shirts he now wore? Soon after Indira turned 13, in 2011, she was riding home from track practice with her mother when another car sideswiped the family's Ford Expedition. The other driver, who was at fault, insisted on calling the police, according to Indira and a lawyer who assisted the family. Indira pleaded not to involve the police, explaining that her mother did not have a driver's license because she was not an American citizen. (In Georgia and most other states, undocumented immigrants cannot obtain driver's licenses.) But the driver said she needed a police report to get insurance to cover the damage to her car. A police officer arrived and asked for Indira's mother's license. When she said she did not have one — a state crime — she was told to get out of the car. Indira got out, too. She remembers two of her younger siblings sleeping in the back, one in a booster seat, one in a car seat. Two elders from the church they attended arrived to ask for mercy. She has seven children, they told the officer. He responded that he was simply enforcing the law. Indira's mother turned to her and began to cry. "Indira, I don't know what is going to happen," she said. "They're going to take me. " Indira remembers remaining strangely calm. "When she was being handcuffed, I said: 'Mom, everything is going to be O. K.''u2009" Indira's mother was held in Gainesville's Hall County jail for three days, but that wasn't the most frightening part for the family. Hall is one of four counties in Georgia that have a formal agreement to report arrests of undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security, which means that infractions as minor as a bulb above a license plate can spiral into deportation proceedings. Indira's mother says that her charge of driving without a license ultimately led to a referral to immigration court and a deportation order instructing her to leave the country within 30 days. She stayed, slipping into the shadows. Every day since, Indira says, she and her siblings have feared that their mother would be deported. It would take only one more traffic stop. "That woke me up," Indira says. "Until then, I thought the world was happy. " In fact, she now realized, it was only American citizens who seemed truly happy. "It must feel pretty good, I guess, to not have to worry about whether your family could be taken away any day. " Indira has wanted to be a doctor for almost as long as she can remember. When she was 10, her family was shopping for groceries at Sam's Club, and she spotted a large book about human anatomy. She became so excited about it that her parents bought it for her birthday, even though it was well above her reading level — and their price range. She began working her way through it, mesmerized, and when she got stuck, her mother would explain whatever had stumped her. She was determined to go to college and medical school and fulfill her parents' interrupted dream. In her junior year, Indira began researching college options. She would be a strong applicant. She was consistently at or near the top of her class she was on the track and soccer teams she volunteered over 1, 000 hours a year at the local hospital, a record in the history of the program and she led her school's chapter of the Hispanic Organization Promoting Education (HOPE) which encouraged Latino students — who made up just over half the district's population — to stay in school and graduate. She was distressed to discover that Georgia barred undocumented immigrants from attending its top public universities and charged them tuition at all others — triple the rate for citizen residents. She then turned to researching financial aid and learned that Congress barred her from accessing federal Pell grants, loans, scholarships and jobs — the most common forms of assistance for students. At first, she greeted this as just another set of obstacles to surmount, but as time went on, she began to despair. She would retreat to the classroom of her science teacher, Teresa Leach, who had become her mentor, in need of encouragement. "There were a couple of times when I just cried to her because I was tired," she said. "I questioned myself if it was all worth the effort. " All the while, Indira told me, she held onto her religious conviction that God had a plan, and that she must respect it. At a college fair attended by representatives of numerous Georgia colleges, she asked admissions officers what kind of help was available for undocumented students. No one had any to offer her. She switched her focus to private colleges and was admitted to Atlanta's Agnes Scott, which she says awarded her $20, 000 annually in financial aid, less than half of what she needed. She researched private scholarships and found two for undocumented students, but she was selected for neither. She was awarded seven small scholarships, which totaled $10, 000, enough to go to a nearby public commuter college for only one semester at the tuition rate. Last May, Indira attended her graduation ceremony at Gainesville High School, but she had nowhere to go next. In every picture from that day, she wears a wide smile, but she was in pain inside, particularly when she caught a glimpse of her mother in the crowd, looking distraught. Unable to bring herself to celebrate with friends, she went home to be with her family. Days later, a friend told her about a philanthropic organization called TheDream. US, which was offering undocumented students full scholarships to Delaware State University or Eastern Connecticut State University. The application was demanding, and only 76 students would be chosen. She poured herself into the essays, spending hours composing them alongside an English teacher, Cindy Lloyd. She applied to Delaware State, a historically black college in Dover, five hours closer to home than Eastern Connecticut. In late June, she received an email from TheDream. US. "I saw 'Congratulations,''u2009" she remembers, "and I read no more. " In late August, Indira made the drive with her parents from Gainesville to Delaware State in unusual silence. She was thinking hard about each of her six younger siblings, wondering how they would fare without her. Over breakfast at a Cracker Barrel in South Carolina, when her mother pressed her about how she was feeling, she talked only of her concerns about not being at home to help everyone. When she arrived on campus — a flat expanse of grassy courtyards and buildings amid strip malls, auto dealers and chain restaurants just beyond Dover's historic capital area — she found 33 other "opportunity scholars," just as worried and hopeful as she was. All of them were assigned to a dorm about a quarter of a mile from the D. S. U. campus, a former Sheraton hotel acquired a few years earlier by the university as part of an expansion. They bonded instantly, traveling as a posse from classes to the library to the cafeteria, often ending up together late at night in the dorm lobby or in a lounge that had been a large hotel suite on the second floor. In their first month on campus, the opportunity scholars were invited to a welcoming ceremony in the school's Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center with Gov. Jack Markell the Democratic senator Tom Carper Donald Graham, a founder of TheDream. US and D. S. U. 's president, Harry Williams. "This is not just an opportunity for you it is an opportunity for the state of Delaware," Markell told them. "It is sad to see your own home state reject such talent and potential. " He pronounced himself "thrilled that you're here. " It was the first time many of the students could recall being welcomed anywhere. "We felt rejection our whole lives from our own states," Indira said. "We were here only three weeks, and we already met the governor and the senator. It felt like saying 'Haha!' to Georgia. " Of the 34 opportunity scholars enrolled at D. S. U. 28 are from Mexico and one each is from Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, Gabon, Gambia and Trinidad and Tobago. Their families are a composite portrait of the economic forces that have drawn undocumented immigrants to the nation's small towns and metropolitan heartland. Their parents work in poultry plants, on factory lines, in warehouses, on construction sites, in restaurants they clean and paint houses and schools, tend gardens. "They make everything look perfect for the tourists," Yulma Lopez, who left Mexico at age 3, said of her parents' work for a landscaping company in Charleston, S. C. Almost all their parents work illegally, but many pay income taxes, having obtained federal numbers. And some, including Indira's father, have secured temporary federal permission to work and drive lawfully. While most of the students are 18 or 19, typical for college freshmen, some have worked for years in hopes of one day saving enough for college. Olivia Bekale, who is 27 and grew up in Baton Rouge, arrived in Louisiana from Gabon as a child. She graduated from high school in 2008 with a 3. 9 G. P. A. from the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, a prestigious boarding school for top achievers. Unable to afford college, she cycled from one position to the next — server at the Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant retail sales consultant for Sprint agent for Marriott pharmacy tech for Walgreens. Olivia, who had wanted to be a doctor since an aunt died of AIDS when she was 5, had been out of high school for eight years when she learned of the opportunity scholarship she applied immediately. All but one of the students were enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA. Created in 2012 by an executive action, DACA allowed teenagers and young adults who came to the United States illegally as children with their parents to register with the government and in turn receive a renewable protection against deportation, along with work permits and Social Security numbers. Most of the students, like Indira, signed up at age 15, as soon as they were eligible. With DACA, Indira, who is now 18, was able to get a driver's license and a job at a Publix supermarket when she was in high school, working 20 hours a week as a cashier and bagger. Being able to work and drive legally, free of the fears her mother faced, and fitting in with her classmates, Indira says, was "living the American dream. " With her income from Publix, she even was able to get braces for her teeth. The starting point for all of their dreams was education, and the quest for it has been central to the experience of undocumented young people since long before Indira and her classmates were born. In the late 1970s, when undocumented immigrants had yet to move in large numbers beyond border states, Texas passed a law authorizing local school districts to ban them from public schools or charge them tuition. In a landmark decision in Plyler v. Doe in 1982, a narrowly divided Supreme Court struck down the law, finding that undocumented children had a constitutional right to free public education. The opinion blamed a dysfunctional immigration system for creating the crisis by failing to keep out undocumented immigrants or provide them a path to citizenship. "Already disadvantaged as a result of poverty, lack of ability and undeniable racial prejudices, these children, without an education, will become permanently locked into the lowest socioeconomic class," Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority, quoting the opinion. The case also introduced the argument that undocumented children were legally blameless, unlike their parents: "The classification at issue deprives a group of children of the opportunity for education afforded all other children simply because they have been assigned a legal status due to a violation of law by their parents," Justice Lewis Powell wrote in a concurring opinion. Undocumented children poured into the nation's schools over the next generation, and as they reached college age, they coalesced into a movement, advocating access to higher education as well as full citizenship. In 2001, they began calling themselves Dreamers, now an estimated 2. 1 million young immigrants who have grown up as Americans in almost every way except for their passports. The name came from the Dream Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) introduced in Congress in 2001 by Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, and Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, and for which activists fought for over a decade. The measure, which would have put undocumented children on a path to citizenship, never passed, but the vast network of Dreamers became a compelling political force. In 2001, hundreds of them turned out to testify in Texas in favor of legislation to allow undocumented residents to pay college tuition if they graduated from Texas high schools and lived in the state for three years. "Something magical happened when those kids told their stories," says the former Texas state representative Rick Noriega, a Democrat who sponsored the bill. "It was a humanizing of a very real issue dealing with children's dreams and hopes. Every heart on that committee was touched, Republicans and Democrats. " The legislation passed both houses almost unanimously and was signed by Rick Perry, then governor of Texas and now President Donald Trump's pick for energy secretary. Texas became the first state, followed quickly by California, to allow Dreamers to pay tuition. Today, 21 states charge Dreamers the same tuition as legal residents, including six carried by Trump — Florida, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah and Texas. In many of those states, however, the issue has turned politically treacherous. In Texas, efforts to repeal the tuition law come closer to passing every year, and Noriega says there is no chance the original measure would pass today. The leading national opponents of tuition for Dreamers include the Republican senator Jeff Sessions, Trump's choice for attorney general, and the secretary of state of Kansas, Kris Kobach, a Republican who was a leader of Trump's transition team on immigration. Each argues that students who are in the United States illegally should not get a public benefit in any state that is denied to a citizen from another state. In other words, if Dreamers pay tuition in Texas, citizen students next door in Arkansas and Oklahoma — or Massachusetts, for that matter — should have the same right. "How much sense does that make, to have people here illegally, and they have more benefits than those who are here legally?" Sessions asked in a Senate floor statement. Kobach used the same argument to bring lawsuits against tuition for Dreamers in Kansas and California. Judges found no legal basis for the claims and dismissed the cases. The larger debate over how to treat an estimated 11 million immigrants who came here illegally has been at a stalemate for decades, with advocates seeking a "path to citizenship" for families who have been in the country for years and opponents denouncing "amnesty" for people who broke the law to enter the country. Amid hardening resistance in Congress to immigration reform, Dreamers brought pressure on Obama — including and hunger strikes at his 2012 campaign offices — to use his executive power to create DACA. The program, announced on June 15, 2012, the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Plyler decision, proved transformative for Dreamers. They have entered college, taken jobs, received driver's licenses, bought cars. They now fly on planes, passing effortlessly through airport security. They still lack legal immigration status, but no longer are they exactly undocumented. "DACAmented," many have called themselves. Even in states where they pay tuition, Dreamers still struggle to afford college because they are disproportionately and have no access to federal financial aid. Fewer than 10 percent of Dreamers who graduate from high school enroll in college. At a time when college graduates earn 70 percent more than those without degrees, these numbers conjure the 1982 warning by the Supreme Court that undocumented children could become a permanent underclass. In response, a handful of philanthropies have adopted the cause of sending students with DACA status to college. The biggest of these, TheDream. US, has raised $90 million to eventually finance 4, 000 students at public colleges, with significant contributions from Donald Graham, former publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post, and his family Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Bill and Melinda Gates the executive William Ackman and Michael Bloomberg, among others. (I was a reporter at The Washington Post from 1980 to 2008.) In 2014, TheDream. US began offering Dreamers full scholarships in states that charge them tuition. Last year, in partnership with Delaware and Connecticut, the organization created the program for students from the other 29 states, financed by $41 million in philanthropy from Graham and his family and two anonymous donors. The governors of Delaware and Connecticut agreed to charge roughly tuition rates for the 34 scholars at Delaware State and the 42 at Eastern Connecticut State — a total of $80, 000 per student for tuition, room and board for four years. In an effort to political opposition, Graham says, the philanthropy works only with schools, like Delaware State and Eastern Connecticut State, that have excess capacity, so that undocumented students are not displacing citizens. And private donors pay all expenses, so that no state dollars are spent. Still, when The Delaware State News ran an article in September about the D. S. U. opportunity scholars, the online comments complained that undocumented immigrants, not citizens, were benefiting. "Trump isn't perfect, but I will vote for him because he puts Americans FIRST," wrote a reader named John Huff of Magnolia, Del. "There are plenty of kids who are citizens who have the same dream and should come first. " And as news of the scholarship spread on the Delaware campus this fall, a number of students told Dreamers that they resented that their own families had to go into debt for a portion of their education costs while the DACA students got full scholarships. By then, Trump had mobilized anger in large swaths of the country, having kicked off his campaign criticizing Mexican immigrants — "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists" — and vowing to build a wall on the border to keep them out. In stump speeches, he promised to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants and, in his first 100 days in office, to terminate DACA, labeling it "illegal amnesty. " Both vows became instant applause lines. Indira declared her major in biological sciences at the beginning of the semester and started a demanding curriculum with six classes, including biology and chemistry, both requiring labs. Her parents had insisted she not take a job, in order to devote herself to education, freeing up four hours a night that she had spent working in high school. With that extra time, she found the academic challenges manageable. Much harder was living apart from her family for the first time in her life. Her mother texted her daily. "Good morning, hija," she wrote one recent morning, using the Spanish word for daughter. "May God bless you today in school. Please be kind to everyone. " That night, over FaceTime, Indira talked with two of her younger sisters, who like her were born in Mexico and are undocumented. One, a junior in high school, is already on a quest for college scholarships. She and Indira came up with potential essay ideas and discussed her résumé. Then Indira helped the other, a freshman who is the smartest of all the family's children, Indira says, with physics homework. On weekends, she FaceTimes with her four youngest siblings — a sixth grader, a fourth grader, a third grader and a first grader — all of whom were born in Georgia and are citizens. Separation from family, from home, even from Mexican food made most of the opportunity scholars profoundly lonely. Estephany Martinez, a petite major with long black hair, couldn't stop thinking about her sisters in the first weeks. "Whenever we came home from school, all four sisters would sit in the living room and do our homework and talk and watch TV," she recalled wistfully of her life in Winder, Ga. In Delaware, "I didn't have anybody that cared for me. I didn't have anyone to come home to. " In early September, she summoned all the scholars to a gathering in the dorm's lounge. "All right, you guys, we're going to be here for each other," she said. "That part of our lives — being undocumented — is critical to who we are. We have to share our stories. " Everyone crowded in, sitting on the sofa, spilling onto the floor, sitting shoulder to shoulder on counters that once were part of a kitchenette, sprawling into one another's space. Carlos Gonzales of Manteo, N. C. a lanky and cheerful marketing major whose mother is a restaurant cook, broke down crying when he recalled the violence that drove his family from Mexico City. He, his mother and his younger sister moved to North Carolina when he was 7. It was his mother who encouraged him, beginning in elementary school, to reach for college. "I don't want you to live the life we're living now," she told him. In high school, he was an honor student and varsity wrestler and runner, working nights and weekends at McDonald's in his Outer Banks town. When he received the email telling him he was an opportunity scholar, he said: "I hugged my mom and cried for two hours. The only reason I stopped was I had to go to work. " Indira told the harrowing story that led to her own family's departure from Mexico. In 2004, when she was 6, three masked gunmen broke into their home, which housed her parents' clinic, and robbed them of everything — money, jewelry, a new computer, a television, cameras and medications. They filed a report with the police, they said, who didn't investigate, in deference to cartels then taking over Guerrero, now the most violent state in Mexico. An uncle of her father's already had been killed. In subsequent years, a cousin of her mother's, a veterinarian, was kidnapped and never found. Two nephews disappeared. Her mother's sister has been kidnapped twice — most recently this past November — and returned only after her family paid steep ransoms. Weeks after the robbery, Indira's family of five arrived in the United States on a tourist visa that her father procured a month earlier in hopes of taking everyone to Disney World. Instead, they went to Gainesville, where her father's brother worked in construction — one of thousands of Mexican workers who flocked to the north Georgia community in the last 25 years, swelling the Hispanic population to more than 40 percent in 2013 from 8 percent in 1990. Indira said her parents are certain they would have been killed had they stayed. They decided to forfeit their careers for their family's safety. "I no longer saw my future, but I saw my children's future," her father said to me. Antonio Patino, a major who is a lifeguard and plays bass and guitar in his spare time, told the group about riding with his family in their car in 2015 in Lawrenceville, Ga. when a police officer pulled them over, though none of them understood why. His father, who is undocumented and processes returns for a local manufacturer, was driving but did not have a license. Antonio and his mother, younger sister and brother all watched in terror as his father was handcuffed, placed in a police cruiser and driven off to jail. As it turned out, he was released the next day after paying a fine of more than $800 and was not referred to immigration court for further proceedings, but the incident shook Antonio's sense of belonging in America. "I felt like I got slapped in the face just for living, trying to be a normal person in this beautiful country," he said. "It feels like a hole inside me. " He said he now found himself gripped with fears for his parents' safety at random moments during his days at D. S. U. It is as if he has swapped roles with his mother and father. "Like I'm now the parent and they're the child, and I'm worried for them," he told me. "Not being there, all these swarm into my mind. What if out of nowhere they get pulled over again?" Calling them and hearing their voices usually comforts him. But after one such call, he said: "I went outside, and I had to cry a little. I was feeling like I couldn't help them. " A number of students shared the enormous sacrifices they had seen their parents make for them. Juan Chavez, 23, who grew up in Plymouth, Ind. and worked for five years after high school, told of his mother suffering a breakdown after her divorce from his father. He saw it as a response to the crushing instability of their lives, moving from one home to another in search of shelter. "She's the strongest person I'll ever know," he said. "She's my role model. My father figure as well as my mother. " He continued: "I felt so helpless to make things better. I decided almost right then I'll go to college and medical school if it takes me the rest of my life. " He is now a psychology and major, intending to become a psychiatrist. On and on the students went until almost 3 a. m. the common threads in their stories drawing them closer. It was the first time most of them had talked openly about being undocumented, but instead of feeling exposed, they felt safer. Until then, Antonio had gone out of his way to avoid conversations with at D. S. U. about his scholarship, not wanting to have to explain that he got it because he was undocumented. The next day, though, he fell into conversation with a student who asked him how he happened to come all the way from Georgia to D. S. U. and he said without hesitation: "I got a scholarship. " "What for?" "I'm undocumented," Antonio said, surprised at how comfortable this felt. "O. K. man, that's cool," the student said. After their long night talking, the scholars also better understood what had propelled them all for as long as they could remember. Throughout high school, the opportunity scholars watched undocumented friends and siblings give up and drop out, shamed and beaten down by public scorn over illegal immigration and the options awaiting even those who excelled in high school. But they kept on striving, steeled to the insults, positioning themselves for a breakthrough they couldn't yet see. Now this all made sense. "This pain — it pushes us," Estephany said. "It's motivation. It has made me who I am. It makes me go through every day. " "Now we know what drives us," Indira said. One morning in at 9:50 a. m. 10 minutes before Indira's class was scheduled to start, she and two other opportunity scholars were already ensconced in the three center seats, notebooks, pens and textbooks at the ready. Indira was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt that a classmate bought for her when their A. P. class visited Boston. (Indira couldn't afford to go.) "I'm going to get there one day," she said with a confident smile. Most of the other students didn't arrive until class was about to begin — or later — and there was little competition for the front rows. A similar scene unfolded that morning in the ultramodern science center, in class, where Antonio and Jose Reyes Rios, another major, sat front and center with an classmate named Hanqaamo Lintisio, who is from Maryland and has a track scholarship. The three had formed a study group and tutored one another so effectively that they all scored above 100 on the midterm. (They nailed the bonus question.) Theirs were the only A's in the class. The Dreamers gather daily at a long Formica table in a D. S. U. cafeteria for food and conversation. At lunch, Carla Moreno propped her English composition textbook, "Patterns for College Writing," against a napkin holder, securing it with an apple. She paged through a chapter while eating her salad and chili dog. "It's just a quiz," she said, "but I want to keep my A. " "I deal with a lot of students, and I feel like the Dreamers are at a different level," says Kevin Noriega, the adviser for their scholarships. "They're saying, 'I've got to make this happen because it's my only option. ''u2009" Of the 488 scholars funded by TheDream. US who began college in 2014, 94 percent remain enrolled after their sophomore year research shows that only 66 percent of college students nationally return after one year. "This is a population with retention rates like Harvard's," Donald Graham says. Because beneficiaries of TheDream. US have full rides, they avoid a common problem faced by other disadvantaged students: running short of money for costs not covered by Pell grants or other forms of aid. One night in October before a biology exam, Indira went to the D. S. U. athletic center for a workout to relieve stress. She was armed with a stack of homemade flash cards and her iPhone, on which she had downloaded discussions of test topics from various websites. While pounding out three miles on the treadmill, she flipped through her study cards, then plugged in her earbuds for a YouTube lecture on glycolysis. Returning to her dorm, she sat down at her desk for a final review. Hanging on the wall in front of her was a collage of family photographs. One showed the whole family of nine around their dinner table. "When I'm struggling, I look at a picture of my mom or dad, and I say, 'I'm working for that person,''u2009" she said. That night, her studying complete, she took a last look at her parents' picture and fell asleep listening to recordings of her biology professor's lectures. She got an A on the exam. Indira's determination to become a doctor requires more than a little imagination, because under current law in Georgia and many other states, licenses to practice medicine are reserved for citizens and legal residents. "I'm not planning my life based on the way things are today," she said. "I'm thinking of the future. " In her eyes, America is a land of opportunity. Over Columbus Day weekend, she visited Washington for the first time with her roommate, Karen Baltazar, who is from Lawrenceville, Ga. and also wants to be a doctor. At the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Indira stood underneath Roosevelt's Four Freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear — her arms raised high above her head, as if exulting in the message. Her smile was radiant. Karen snapped a picture, and Indira posted it on her Facebook page along with the caption, "I have never forgotten the reasons my parents brought me to this great country. " Such unsinkable optimism, which I heard from many D. S. U. Dreamers in the early fall, is hard to maintain, and many of the estimated 65, 000 undocumented immigrants who graduate from high school every year — and thousands who drop out — simply can't muster it. In a recent book, "Lives in Limbo," Roberto G. Gonzales, an assistant professor at Harvard's graduate school of education, writes that academically successful Dreamers are far outnumbered by those who become casualties of "the deeper and more consequences of being undocumented: living in poverty, having parents and family members who also bear the burdens of being undocumented, watching friends moving forward but being unable to join them, watching opportunities pass you by, navigating a world of exclusions while constantly looking over your shoulder. " At least some of the opportunity scholars' optimism last fall came from their assumption, based on reported polls, that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. They were heartened by her speeches about keeping families together and pursuing comprehensive immigration reform. At the very least, they were confident that DACA would remain in effect under her leadership. Though they didn't believe Trump could win, he unnerved them with his speeches branding Mexicans criminals who stole Americans' jobs and lived off their tax dollars. They took this rhetoric as a personal affront and were horrified by the hatred they saw on the faces of those who cheered his words. "The only thing that depresses me is so many people support him," Jose Reyes Rios, the major, who aspires to work at Google one day, said in late September. On election night, a group of Dreamers gathered around the TV in the dorm lobby, many of them studying as they watched returns. Indira had exams the next day in math and biology and arrived equipped with her flash cards. The mood turned dark after Trump won Florida. Everyone's mind flooded with his vows that they had discounted until now — to revoke DACA, to deputize local police departments to enforce federal immigration laws. "We will issue detainers for all illegal immigrants who are arrested for any crime whatsoever, and they will be placed into immediate removal proceedings," Trump said last summer in Arizona. As all of them knew well, these crimes included one of their parents' daily activities — driving without a license. If DACA disappeared, and with it their Social Security numbers, their own driver's licenses would be worthless. So would their federal work authorization, meaning most would lose the jobs that paid for their books, phones, clothes, travel home and anything else they needed. By 1 a. m. Indira became too distressed to concentrate. Olivia Bekale was one of four opportunity scholars who watched until Trump was declared the . "We were just looking at each other and crying," she says. "We hugged each other and went to our rooms. " On the Sunday after the election, when they gathered in the dorm lobby, the opportunity scholars were struggling with something unfamiliar: despair. They had registered for DACA with the Department of Homeland Security, which now knew exactly where they were. "Life is going to be like it is for our parents," said Victor Hernandez of Coats, N. C. stunned and shaking his head. "They could come pick us up and take us away any time. " Social media brought aftershocks for all of them as they discovered that many of their best friends voted for Trump. Almost all of Antonio's swim teammates in Lawrenceville had Trump filters on their Facebook and Snapchat profile pictures. "All I could think was: You voted against me," he said. "What did I do to you?" The day after the election, Indira couldn't bear to call her mother until the afternoon. Instead, she confided her fears in text messages to her former science teacher, Teresa Leach. "I've never been so disappointed in this country," she wrote. "I've never felt so powerless. . .. I'm scared about my family, my mom. . .. Not sure if I'll even get my degree, much less go to medical school here. " When Indira finally did call home, her mother insisted she was not afraid and told Indira that education was now even more important. Several of Indira's friends back home told her they doubted Trump would follow through on all his campaign promises, and in any case, they couldn't imagine he would target her. "These are people who helped me get to where I am, who remind me they love me, and I love them," she said. "But they'll never understand what we feel. They say, 'He won't do that.' Do they think he's going to send back all the immigrants except Indira?" A lifeline of sorts arrived the week after the election, when the students received letters from TheDream. US, Governor Markell and the president of D. S. U. pledging to stand behind their scholarships no matter what became of DACA. Donald Graham lined up attorneys to represent them if anyone challenged their right to be in school. But their bigger fears were for their parents. Antonio and Indira went home for Christmas to find their families filled with trepidation. "We're trying to be invisible, trying to stay hidden," Antonio's father said, "do only the things we have to do to live, like go to work, go buy groceries. " During the 2015 holiday season, they took a driving tour of the Christmas lights and celebrated New Year's Eve in downtown Lawrenceville. "Now we can't go to any festivities because for us it's very dangerous," his mother told me in their apartment in a complex in Buford, Ga. "There are a lot of police there. " Antonio's father said he worries about driving his daughter, Litzy, 15, home from her practice at rush hour, when the police presence increases. Litzy was born in Georgia, and he thought of asking her to leave the team until she is old enough to drive because, as a citizen, she will be able to get a driver's license. "But then I said to myself: 'No! That's crazy. That's why we're here — for our kids. So they can take advantage of every opportunity. ''u2009" He continues to ferry her — carefully — during rush hour. Indira found her mother more frightened than at any time since receiving her deportation order. Her mother says she has no choice but to drive when someone at her church asks for help, when her children call for rides home and when she is needed at a charity medical clinic where she volunteers as a doctor's assistant and translator. "Life changed after the election," she told me in December, in her living room decorated with framed academic awards for each child. She was surrounded by her kids, who listened carefully. "The children know I don't have a driver's license. They know at any time maybe the police will take me again. 'If I can't come back,' I tell them, 'you have to go to school every day. You have to study hard — even harder. ''u2009" By the time Indira and the other opportunity scholars returned to campus in January, all of them had come to the same conclusion: There was now only one thing they could control — their education. "The only way we can fight back is to excel in school," Indira wrote to me in a text message. She felt weary in the aftermath of the election, but when she had this epiphany, she said: "I wasn't tired anymore. I had that drive, that hunger to just come out on top. I was angry. I was staying at the library longer, going to the gym a lot more. " Estephany Martinez focused on her life's mission. "My goal is being a police chief — something that makes my voice louder," said the major. "I have to educate myself to get there. I want to show people who don't believe in us: 'I got all the way here. I'm starting from the bottom with education, and I'm going to get there. ''u2009" As they settled into the semester, they monitored everything Trump and his close allies were saying about immigration, their moods shifting with each utterance. Back in December, they felt hopeful when Trump, in his interview as Time Magazine's Person of the Year, said approving things about Dreamers and indicated that he would deport serious criminals before other undocumented immigrants. They were discouraged in January when Jeff Sessions, in his confirmation hearing to become attorney general, appeared unconcerned about the consequences of revoking DACA. They took heart two days later when Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, said in a CNN meeting that he wanted Congress to pass legislation making Dreamers "right with the law. " Indira and other Georgia scholars were exhilarated in early January when a state court ordered the Board of Regents to allow DACA holders to pay tuition. But their hopes collapsed when a state appeals court stayed the decision Trump appeared likely to revoke DACA before Georgia Dreamers could reap the benefits. "I said: 'I don't know what'll happen next, but we're here in this place, and the only way we can win is to succeed in our education,''u2009" Indira told me. Soon after classes started, the opportunity scholars learned that their collective grade point average for the first semester was a 3. 76. Six of the 34 students had achieved a perfect 4. 0. Indira was one of them. "Succeeding for me is how I can get my revenge," she told me over the phone, interrupting her biology homework for a few minutes. "I want to break the stereotype of us being here taking jobs away and not helping the economy. I want Trump to see we're the total opposite of what he thinks. "


On the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the staff of the White House chief technology officer has been virtually deleted, down from 24 members before the election to, by Friday, only one. Scores of departures by scientists and Silicon Valley technology experts who advised President Trump's predecessor have all but wiped out the larger White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Mr. Trump has not yet named his top advisers on technology or science, and so far, has made just one hire: Michael Kratsios, the former chief of staff for Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor and one of the president's wealthiest supporters, as the deputy chief technology officer. Neither Mr. Kratsios, who has a bachelor's degree in political science from Princeton, nor anyone else still working in the science and technology office regularly participates in Mr. Trump's daily briefings, as they did for President Barack Obama. "The impression this leaves is that Trump isn't interested in science and that scientific matters are a low priority at the White House," said Vinton G. Cerf, a computer scientist, vice president of Google and one of the chief architects of the internet. The dwindling of the White House science and technology staff for scientific research could have consequences, Mr. Cerf said. It is unclear whether the vacancies are the result of the Trump administration's overall slowness in hiring or a signal that the president places less importance on science and technology than Mr. Obama did. A White House official who asked not to be identified cast the issue as one of timing: Mr. Trump, the official said, is still reviewing candidates to be his chief science adviser, considers the science and technology office important and will soon have a new staff for it. But critics see the empty offices as part of a devaluation of science throughout the Trump administration, including the reversal of Mr. Obama's climate change policies and proposals to sharply reduce spending for research on climate change, science and health. They note that Mr. Obama appointed his top science adviser, John P. Holdren, a Harvard physicist and expert, in December 2008, weeks before his inauguration. At the same time, conservatives — including a member of Mr. Trump's transition team — have called for getting rid of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. (The chief technology officer is a part of that larger office.) They argue that the office, created by Congress in 1976, is a bloated bureaucracy that duplicates expertise already found at government agencies. "Eliminating the O. S. T. P. (or at least electing not to staff it until Congress can act) would not block the president from access to science and technology advice," James Jay Carafano, who advised Mr. Trump's transition team, wrote in a report issued last summer by the conservative Heritage Foundation. "Rather, it eliminates a formal office whose purpose is unclear and whose capabilities are largely redundant. " Mr. Trump has echoed that sentiment, at least when it comes to government jobs over all. Last month he responded to criticism about the high number of vacancies across his administration by telling Fox News that "a lot of those jobs, I don't want to appoint, because they're unnecessary to have. " "You know, we have so many people in government, even me," Mr. Trump said. "I look at some of the jobs and it's people over people over people. I say, 'What do all these people do?' You don't need all those jobs. " If Mr. Trump applies that logic to the science and technology office, he will end decades of tradition in which the president increasingly relied on his own advisers for expertise on federal research budgets, emerging trends and technical crises. Mr. Trump's first budget proposes slashing $5. 8 billion, or 18 percent, from the National Institutes of Health and $900 million, or about 20 percent, from the Energy Department's Office of Science, which runs basic research at the national laboratories. The Environmental Protection Agency would be cut by 31 percent. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump issued executive orders that roll back Mr. Obama's Clean Power Plan, which would have closed hundreds of power plants in an effort to curb carbon dioxide emissions. Those actions have been taken without advice or guidance from scientists and engineers inside the White House. The few remaining policy advisers have ceased distributing daily memos on policy issues like climate change, regulation, or the ethics of big data collection. "They are flying blind when it comes to science and tech issues," said Kumar Garg, who left the Office of Science and Technology Policy as a senior adviser after the election. There is no question that the science and technology bureaucracy at the White House expanded in recent years. In the George W. Bush administration, there were 50 people in the office, but Mr. Obama more than doubled the staff, to 130, and moved the office into a building on the White House grounds. Mr. Obama turned to the science office during crises like the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa the 2011 nuclear spill in Fukushima, Japan and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The staff of the science office developed the White House's recommendations for regulation of commercial drones and driverless cars at the Transportation Department. Last year, the staff produced an report that raised concerns about the threat that robots posed to employment and that advocated retraining Americans for jobs. The staff also put on the annual White House science fair. In 2011, when lawmakers proposed an online piracy bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, internet architecture engineers on the team advised the president to veto the bill because of security and privacy issues it would create. "The agenda was always huge in scope and ambition, and something was always happening," said Nicole Wong, a former deputy chief technology officer under Mr. Obama. The departure of science and technology experts from the White House means dozens of science and technology programs begun under Mr. Obama have gone untended in the weeks since Inauguration Day. "The O. S. T. P. is the conduit for scientific perspective and scrutiny to the president and is a priority in White House decision making," said Danny Weitzner, a former deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration and now the director of internet policy research at M. I. T. Under Mr. Obama, the science and technology office included 19 policy advisers in the environment and energy division, 14 in the national security and international affairs division, nine in the science division and 20 in the technology and innovation division. "We are all sitting on the edge of our seats hoping nothing catastrophic happens in the world," said Phil Larson, a former senior science and technology adviser to Mr. Obama. "But if it does, who is going to be advising him?" Current White House officials declined to say how many people remained in each division. But four former officials who recently left the office said that a wave of departures scheduled for Friday could potentially reduce the number of people left to a handful, not counting about eight administrative staff members.


Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton received a big convention bounce. A new CNN poll has her leading GOP rival Donald Trump 52 percent to 43 percent in a two-way matchup. The Republican nominee is still under fire for how he reacted over the weekend to the parents of Humayun Khan, a Muslim U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq. Khizr Khan blasted Trump at the Democratic convention, noting that unlike his fallen son, Trump has "sacrificed nothing and no one." Unwilling to the let the insult pass, Trump hit back, implying that Khan's wife wasn't allowed to speak during her husband's DNC address because of the family's Muslim faith. The GOP nominee's remarks have sparked outrage from veterans and members of his own party. "While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us," war hero Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said. Trump's campaign is now appealing to GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill to help quell the controversy. Meanwhile, a mother whose son was killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is also speaking out. Patricia Smith criticized Clinton at the Republican convention, noting that she has received much different treatment than the Khan family. "I was treated like dirt. I don't think the Khan family was treated that way. I was treated like dirt. I was called a liar… I don't imagine my son getting killed. I don't imagine that at all," Smith said. Meanwhile on the campaign trail, Clinton attacked Trump's tax cut plan, and again called on him to release his tax returns. "And while we're at it, we would like to see those tax returns wouldn't we? My husband and I put out, I think about 33 or 34 years' worth, if you're interested," Clinton pointed out. Trump alleges that former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., made a deal with the devil to endorse Clinton. "If he would have just not done anything, just go home, go to sleep, relaxed, he would have been a hero, but he made a deal with the devil. She's the devil. He made a deal with the devil," Trump said. There's still a long way to go until Election Day and many of today's controversies could easily be forgotten by November. Clinton's poll bounce could fade as bounces often do, turning this into a tight race once again.


Insists Russia Defines Itself by Opposition to the West  The first time a top British spy has ever given a newspaper interview, MI5 chief Andrew Parker has spoken with the Guardian , playing up the "growing threat" posed by Russia against British interests around the world.  Parker claimed a "whole range of state organs and powers" in Russia are being brought to bear against Britain and the US, claiming that the advent of cyberwarfare has increased the number of ways in which Russia can move against them.  Parker went on to claim that Russia defines itself by opposition to the West and, despite being a "covert threat for decades" has been increasingly hostile, citing their operations in Ukraine and Syria as proof that they are acting to just spite the West.  This has been a common western talking point, but in practice Western (read: US) policy in both Ukraine and Syria appears to have itself been built with an eye toward being on the opposite side from Russia in the first place, and Russia is then condemned for acting in their own interests.  This was particularly glaring in Syria, where Russia's interest was obviously in the survival of a friendly Syrian government to host their naval base, and where "countering" Russia has brought the US "anti-ISIS coalition" into increasingly overt support for al-Qaeda's Nusra Front, simply because they're the ones most directly fighting against Russia.


Saturday after Montgomery County, PA Judge Steven O'Neill declared a mistrial in the Bill Cosby criminal rape case, Cosby's spokesman Andrew Wyatt took aim at Gloria Allred, the lawyer for 33 of Cosby's accusers. Speaking to reporters outside of the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, PA, Wyatt first quoted Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party. "In the words of Huey P. Newton, power is the ability to define phenomenon, making it act in a designed manner," he said. After that, he offered Allred and attorneys "who conspired" advice. "For all those attorneys, who conspired like Gloria Allred, tell them to go back to law school and take another class," Wyatt added. Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor


US abstains from UN vote calling for end to Cuban embargo Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 21:10 Get short URL U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro gesture after a news conference as part of President Obama's three-day visit to Cuba, in Havana March 21, 2016. © Carlos Barria / Reuters The US government abstained from the UN vote on a resolution calling for an end to the US economic embargo against Cuba, for the first time in 24 years.  The 193-member General Assembly adopted the resolution with 191 votes in favor on Wednesday. The only other abstention, besides the US, was Israel. The vote is non-binding but it can have political weight. U.S. decision to abstain in UN vote condemning Cuba embargo is small but meaningful. The cold war is over, Congress must lift embargo pic.twitter.com/lvjq8JlvNE — Charles Rangel (@cbrangel) October 26, 2016  Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez described the abstention as a "positive step for the future of improving relations between the United States and Cuba," according to Reuters. In case you missed it: Full speech delivered by #Cuba FM at today's vote against #US blockade #YoVotoVsBloqueo https://t.co/EJnmmyvS8J — José Ramón Cabañas (@JoseRCabanas) October 26, 2016  Rodriguez said in September that the embargo cost Cuba $4.6 billion last year, and the full damage over the length of the 50-year embargo was estimated at $125.9 billion.  When it was first announced that the US government would abstain from the vote, the entire General Assembly applauded.  "Abstaining on this resolution does not mean that the United States agrees with all of the policies and practices of the Cuban government. We do not," Samantha Power the US Ambassador to the United Nations told the General Assembly on Tuesday.  "We are profoundly concerned by the serious human rights violations that the Cuban government continues to commit with impunity against its own people," she said, according to AP. US abstains from UN vote to condemn Cuba embargo for the first time https://t.co/BMLy4VPAYm — The Guardian (@guardian) October 26, 2016  The Obama administration began normalizing relations with the Communist-run country in at the end of 2014, easing trade and travel restrictions. On July 20, 2015, diplomatic relations were restored, and embassies in the two countries were reopened. US approves airlines to fly to Cuba https://t.co/46qAzoxt6u pic.twitter.com/GN9lelYGcE — RT America (@RT_America) June 10, 2016  Lifting the full embargo will take the support of the Republican-run Congress, which remains critical of the administration's efforts, arguing it offered too many concessions to Cuba and accepted little in return, especially on human rights and the restoration of expropriated property. 'Making history': First US cruise ship in nearly 40 years reaches Cuba (PHOTOS) https://t.co/xqu6jbAgBq pic.twitter.com/K9OE5OMaz4 — RT America (@RT_America) May 2, 2016  Obama made the first visit to Havana by a US president in 88 years in March.


Donald Trump tweeted Sunday morning about his visit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. While most were his standard complaining about the media and trying to bolster his controversial meeting with the Russian strongman, one, in particular, stood out. According to Trump, he s ready to partner, yes, partner, in cyber security. No, that s not a joke.I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I ve already given my opinion .. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017Um, sure. We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives. Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017The most notable tweet, though, was this one, which essentially said he s giving the fox the key to the hen house:Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017And then more deflection: and safe. Questions were asked about why the CIA & FBI had to ask the DNC 13 times for their SERVER, and were rejected, still don t . Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017 have it. Fake News said 17 intel agencies when actually 4 (had to apologize). Why did Obama do NOTHING when he had info before election? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017The irony of partnering with Putin on securing the electoral system he s accused of hacking hasn t even escaped some Republicans. Sen. Marco Rubio is raising alarms:While reality & pragmatism requires that we engage Vladimir Putin, he will never be a trusted ally or a reliable constructive partner. 1/3 Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 9, 2017Partnering with Putin on a Cyber Security Unit is akin to partnering with Assad on a Chemical Weapons Unit . 2/3 Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 9, 2017We have no quarrel with Russia or the Russian people. Problem is with Putin & his oppression, war crimes & interference in our elections 1/3 Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 9, 2017GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher agrees:Coordinating w/ Russia also risks glossing over serious US concerns re: Russian behavior, such as Ukraine invasion & cyber aggression. 6/10 Rep. Mike Gallagher (@RepGallagher) July 9, 2017John McCain handled with snark:During an interview on CBS s Face The Nation, McCain was asked about President Trump s earlier tweet in which the president said he talked with Putin during their meeting about creating an impenetrable Cyber Security unit to guard against election hacking. I m sure that Vladimir Putin could be of enormous assistance in that effort since he is doing the hacking, McCain said, laughing.It is somewhat comforting to know that elections are run by states, not the federal government and they are VERY reluctant to hand over that power. That doesn t mean, though, that Trump isn t going to do everything in his power to assist Putin in taking over our government and our internet.


Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards withstood nearly five hours of Republican attacks at a House hearing Tuesday. It wasn't just about those recent controversial tapes released by David Daledian's Center for Medical Progress showing possible wrongdoing. It was also about whether the abortion giant should keep receiving more federal taxpayer dollars. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said definitely not – especially with the cuts in care Planned Parenthood has made in the last decade. "There's a 53 percent reduction in cancer screenings, 42 percent reduction in breast exams and breast care," Chaffetz noted. Republicans on the panel proposed moving those federal dollars to more worthy recipients. "We simply want to shift the money from an organization caught doing what they were caught doing and give it to the community health centers," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said. "Shift it from the 700 Planned Parenthood clinics; give it to the 13,000 federally-approved community health centers," he continued. "Take the money from the guys doing the bad things and give it to the ones who aren't." But Richards begged to differ – not just about the abortion provider's worthiness to receive federal funds, but about the validity of the secretly recorded videotapes used against her organization. "The outrageous accusations leveled against Planned Parenthood based on heavily doctored videos are offensive and categorically untrue," Richards told the lawmakers. She went on to say, "This isn't really an attack on Planned Parenthood. This is an attack on 2.7 million patients who each year choose Planned Parenthood as their health care provider." "The facts are on our side," she said. "We're proud of the health care that we deliver every single year despite the animosity by some." Richards suggested Planned Parenthood deserves federal funding because of the services it provides more than 2 million visitors a year. Live Action's Lila Rose responds to Cecile Richards' defense of Planned Parenthood at the Congressional hearing. But while Richards was arguing how valuable Planned Parenthood is, there was a news conference nearby completely contradicting that claim. A number of pro-life groups announced they're launching GetYourCare.org – a site showing Americans where they can easily find nearby low-cost health alternatives -- far more centers than Planned Parenthood offers. "On the website you'll see that for every one Planned Parenthood, there are 20 federally qualified health care centers," Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said. Just like Richards, congressional defenders of Planned Parenthood in the undercover video scandal attacked the undercover video production. "This hearing today is promoted by a series of deceptively edited and purposely misleading videos," Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., charged. But at the same news conference where GetYourCare.org was launched, the Alliance Defending Freedom announced that a highly regarded forensics firm, Coalfire Systems, has studied Daledian's videos in-depth. "The videos are not edited; they're not manipulated," asserted Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Casey Mattox, summing up the findings on the videos. "The full version of these videos is posted online," he said. "And the only part that the world is being spared are moments like where David Daledian goes to the bathroom." The committee holding the Tuesday hearing with Richards is one of four congressional panels scrutinizing Planned Parenthood and the more than $500 million it gets every year from the federal government.


Prime Minister Narendra Modi led his party to a landslide victory in India's largest state on Saturday, consolidating his power and putting him in a strong position to win in 2019. The scale of the victory in Uttar Pradesh's legislative elections was all the more stunning because it followed Mr. Modi's politically risky decision to eliminate most of India's cash. The vote was seen as a referendum on the prime minister, who campaigned vigorously in recent days in Uttar Pradesh, which, with a population of more than 200 million, would be the world's sixth largest country if it were independent. "This is a stupendous achievement," said Ashok Malik, a fellow with the Observer Research Foundation, based in New Delhi. "Here you had a prime minister making himself the face of the election in the absence of a local leader and stitching together a coalition across the state. " The margin of victory in Uttar Pradesh was the largest seen by any party in more than 30 years. It gives Mr. Modi a significant advantage in the national elections in 2019, which in turn would bring him closer to his goal of becoming a leader of historic significance, steering India away from its more socialist, secular past. Mr. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, commonly called the B. J. P. also won at least one of four other state elections in which ballots were being counted on Saturday. The weakening India National Congress party, which once dominated the nation's politics, won in Punjab, a powerful farming state, and remained in contention in two smaller states, showing that it was still a factor nationally, though less so than in years past. The Aam Aadmi Party, born of the anticorruption movement that has arisen in India in recent years, failed to win any state, suggesting that it was not yet ready to take over from the Congress party as the main opposition to Mr. Modi. Mr. Modi said on Twitter that his party's victories were "humbling and overwhelming. " In Uttar Pradesh, the Election Commission of India said the Bharatiya Janata Party had won or was leading in voting for 308 of the 403 seats in the state legislature, decimating the coalition cobbled together by Congress and the local governing party, the Samajwadi Party. By Saturday afternoon, that coalition had garnered only 57 seats. The coalition had appeared to be gaining steam after it was formed early this year, led by the dynamic, relatively young leader of the Samajwadi Party, Akhilesh Yadav, 43, whose father founded the party and presided over it for decades. That party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, commonly known as the B. S. P. have taken turns governing Uttar Pradesh in recent decades, in each case putting together coalitions that consisted mainly of the party leader's caste group along with Muslims. But on Saturday afternoon, the B. S. P. led by Kumari Mayawati, a leader of the Dalit caste, won or was leading in only 20 seats, the election commission said. The scale of the Bharatiya Janata Party's victory suggested that it had bridged such caste allegiances, some experts said, although it had yet to cross religious lines to attract large numbers of Muslims. While Mr. Modi has largely steered clear of divisive language on religion as prime minister, his party has a Hindu nationalist philosophy, and he was accused of complicity in violence as the leader of his home state of Gujarat. "This is the beginning of a new chapter in the history of India," Jitendra Singh, a minister of state in Mr. Modi's office, told the television station Times Now. "The Indian voter has learned to rise above caste and creed and vote for development and the future of India. " In fact, although Mr. Modi won the 2014 national elections on a platform of jobs and development, his economic record is mixed. He has lured more foreign investment and is close to achieving a tax overhaul, but new job creation has been slow and domestic private investment remains stagnant. The International Monetary Fund this year cut its projected growth rate for India by one percentage point, to 6. 6 percent, in large part because of Mr. Modi's sudden ban on the country's largest currency notes in November. Saturday's results come less than four months after Mr. Modi's Nov. 8 announcement that India's largest notes, which made up 86 percent of the currency, would be banned starting the next day in a bid to fight corruption. A cash shortfall persisted for weeks as the government rushed to print enough new notes to replace the banned ones, slowing many of the country's businesses and leaving many poor people struggling to make ends meet. As the cash crunch persisted, with millions waiting in line for notes, Mr. Modi faced criticism that his policy had hurt people, and many predicted that voters would punish him at the polls. But his big win in Uttar Pradesh — coupled with victory in another state, Uttarakhand, and gains in the eastern state of Manipur, where his party had not been a contender in the recent past — suggests that despite the pain the currency ban caused, voters believed Mr. Modi when he said it was needed to reduce corruption, some experts said. "The narrative became less about whether it was right or wrong on economics, but more about the political narrative, the way Modi was able to shape it," said Harsh Pant, a professor of international relations specializing in India at King's College in London. "He said, 'I am a crusader against corruption, and you have to rise above your mundane economic realities and support me.' And people did," Mr. Pant said. Votes were still being counted in the smaller states of Goa and Manipur on Saturday afternoon, and the margins were so close that it was not clear who would form the state governments. Experts said Mr. Modi's win in Uttar Pradesh meant his party would be able to take control of the upper house of India's Parliament next year. They expected him to have a freer hand in making the economic policy overhauls that he has long sought to spur development, including changes in the law to make it easier for companies to acquire farmland and to fire workers. But many experts cautioned that it was unlikely Mr. Modi would make major changes before the 2019 election. When he previously tried to ease land acquisition rules, he found himself pilloried as the "suit boot" prime minister, or guardian of the corporate class, the experts noted. "He'll have the space, but he'll also be concerned about " Mr. Malik said. The prime minister may tinker with the laws, perhaps allowing states to change some labor laws to attract industry, but "he's not suddenly going to shift gears in terms of policies," Mr. Malik said.


Prominent Jesuit James Martin S. J. argues that "the morality of capitalism" is to blame for the horrible incident on United Airlines that involved a man being violently dragged off of a plane after the airline overbooked the flight, in a column for America magazine this week.[ grad argues that capitalism is to blame for United incident — but how would state correct problem better than the market? pic. twitter. — Tommy (@tciccotta) April 11, 2017, "A toxic cocktail of capitalism and corporate culture led to a man being dragged along the floor," Father James Martin argues. Martin, a Jesuit priest, and the of the Jesuit Magazine, America, has appeared on such television shows as The Colbert Report to discuss the Jesuit brand of Catholicism. This week, Martin suggests in a new column that the anarchic nature of capitalism has led to such a chaotic society that a firm could instruct a large, imposing, man to drag a passenger down the aisle of their airliner, leaving him bloodied and disoriented without financial or professional repercussion. But is this an accurate reflection of reality? First, the men who removed the passenger from the aircraft were officers with the Chicago Department of Aviation, a state entity under the direction of the government of the city of Chicago. This distinction is important because it reveals that the violence on United Flight 3411 was committed at the hands of the state, rather than at the hands of a private firm. Perhaps more importantly, in response to the incident, United shareholders democratically decided with their dollars that the firm should have to answer for the incident. The company's market capitalization (the total dollar market value of a firm) dropped by a whopping $1. 4 billion on the day following a video of the incident went viral. Thousands signed petitions calling for the resignation of United CEO Oscar Munoz. There are already policies ingrained in America's capitalistic society that protect consumers from being mistreated by the firms with whom they choose to do business. As a result, the passenger will likely wage a successful lawsuit, resulting in further financial and public relation repercussions for United and the Chicago Department of Aviation. This raises the question that I posed to Father Martin in a tweet yesterday: how would the state correct this issue better than the market? What economic system would prevent such an incident from occurring? Martin tries to argue that the pursuit of profit led to the incident and that capitalism promotes a corporate culture in which money is more important than respecting human dignity. What is the solution, then, to a system that gave rise to such treatment? To recognize that profits are not the sole measure of a good decision in the corporate world. To realize that human beings are more important than money, no matter how much a economist might object. To act morally. And to respect human dignity. Except that the United incident shows that businesses cannot afford to disrespect human dignity. Firms that respect their passengers are rewarded by investors and customers those that do not get crushed. Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart. com


In contrast to Obamacare, the Bush health plan envisions a much smaller role for government and a much bigger role for individual choice and competition in the marketplace. Bush health care differs from Obama health care in five significant ways: Without the employer mandate, all of the anti-job provisions in Obamacare would be gone. Right now employers have perverse incentives to keep the number of employees small, to reduce their hours of work and to use independent contractors and temp labor instead of full time employees. Under the Bush plan, no employer would be punished for creating jobs. Without the individual mandate, families would be free to buy insurance that meets individual and family needs rather than the needs of politicians. What woman would willingly choose to buy health insurance that offers free mammograms while she is healthy but makes her pay full price if there is a symptom of something wrong? That's only one of the many needlessly wasteful and expensive consequences of letting health insurance benefits be determined by the political system. Also, without the individual mandate there is no reason for anybody to remain uninsured. The Bush tax credit is equal to the average tax subsidy received by employees who get their heath insurance at work. Let's say a family, for whatever reason, had no additional disposable income. It would still be able to buy a health plan with its tax credit. Lower income families could qualify for additional help. I suspect they would always be able to buy Medicaid-like insurance with no additional cash outlay. But don't we need mandates in order to keep people from gaming the system? We have found better ways in Medicare Part B, Medicare Part D and with Medigap insurance. In those markets, if you don't buy when you are eligible, you can face penalties. In most places, if you don't sign up for Medigap insurance when you are first eligible, you can be individually underwritten. The uniform tax credit is also a huge improvement. Because Obamacare conditions its subsidies on income, it raises the marginal tax rate for middle income families by six percentage points and in some cases far more. At 400 percent of poverty, a family can lose more than $10,000 in subsidies if it earns one additional dollar. At other "cliff" points, families can be subjected to thousands of dollars of additional exposure (higher deductibles and copayments) as a result of earning one more dollar. All these perversions vanish if everyone gets the same subsidy regardless of income. Also, if the subsidy doesn't vary by income, all kinds of technical problems with healthcare.gov would vanish in a heartbeat. Virtually all the technical problems in the exchanges stem from the need to verify income. That means that the computers run by the exchanges have to interface with the computers of the IRS and other government agencies. Yet, in the main government, computer systems don't know how to talk to each other and that's a problem that may never be solved. If every one of the same age gets the same subsidy, the exchange doesn't have to check with the IRS to verify income. Next April 15, there won't be a plethora of additional taxes and refunds because almost everyone wrongly predicted his income for the previous year. According to H&R Block, as many as 3.4 million people got reduced refunds this year because they underestimated their income when they enrolled in ObamaCare insurance plans. The portability provision is another huge improvement over the current system. Right now if employers give employees pre-tax dollars to buy their own insurance in the individual market, the Obama administration is threatening to fine them $100 per employee per day. If you think that's overkill, it tells you just how much the current administration dislikes employees buying and owning their own insurance. With the Bush plan, all the anti-portability provisions in current law will be gone.