Flanked by Attorney General Bill Barr, President Trump signed an executive order in the Oval Office on Thursday that interprets Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) as not providing statutory liability protections for tech companies that engage in censorship and political conduct.

The president’s order, which also cuts federal funding for social media platforms that censor users’ political views, came just two days after Twitter took the unprecedented step of slapping a “misleading” warning label on two of Trump’s tweets concerning the fraud risks of nationwide mail-in balloting. The move immediately backfired: Experts disputed that Trump’s tweet was actually misleading, in part because mail-in balloting has been linked to ongoing fraud; Twitter’s fact-check itself contained false statements; and Twitter failed to apply the standard of review to other users.

At Thursday’s signing ceremony, Trump called the fact-check “egregious,” and held up a photo of Twitter executive Yoel Roth, who heads up the site’s fact-checking and rules-making operation. Fox News reported on Wednesday that Roth has mocked Trump supporters, called Trump’s team “ACTUAL NAZIS,” slammed “scary trannies” in New York City, and called GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a “bag of farts.” (In a statement, Twitter did not dispute Fox News’ reporting, but called it “unfortunate.”)

“My executive order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make it so that social media companies that engage in censoring any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield,” the president said.

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He added: “My executive order further instructs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to prohibit social media companies from engaging in any deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce. This commerce resides in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. … Additionally, I’m directing the attorney general to work cooperatively with the states … to enforce their own laws against such deceptive business practices. The states have broad and powerful authority to regulate in this arena.”

Under the CDA, platforms are ordinarily not liable for users’ defamatory or otherwise problematic posts, while publishers that actively shape and create content do face liability. (Copyright law, which has a strong constitutional foundation, ordinarily does require sites like Twitter to remove offending content, or face liability.)

The CDA, which was drafted in the Internet’s early stages to guard against offensive material while also encouraging an open Internet, states: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. … No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of … any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

Although the “good faith” standard is ambiguous, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has noted that some case law suggests that “blocking material ostensibly because it’s offensive but really because it’s from your business rival might well be seen as being not in good faith,” while “blocking material that you really do think is offensive to many of your users (much like sexually themed or excessively violent or harassing material is offensive to many of your users) seems to be quite consistent with good faith.”

Trump’s order instructs the federal government to interpret and apply the CDA, as agencies typically do when laws give them that flexibility. “It is the policy of the United States that the scope of that immunity should be clarified: the immunity should not extend beyond its text and purpose to provide protection for those who purport to provide users a forum for free and open speech, but in reality use their power over a vital means of communication to engage in deceptive or pretextual actions stifling free and open debate by censoring certain viewpoints,” the order states.

Source: Fox News

A Black man who yelled “I cannot breathe” as a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him down with his knee in the US state of Minnesota died late on Monday, police confirmed, drawing outrage from community members and leaders, and leading to the officers’ termination.

Video of the incident shows the police officer pinning down George Floyd, believed to be in his 40s, to the pavement with his knee on the man’s neck for several minutes. Floyd was identified by prominent civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who said he had been retained by the Floyd family

Floyd can be heard saying in the video: “Please, please, I cannot breathe.”

The officer tells Floyd to “relax”.

Floyd responds: “I can’t breathe. Please, the knee in my neck.”

The officer continues to hold down Floyd with his knee for several minutes, with Floyd pleading and asking for water.

“My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Please, please. I can’t breathe,” Floyd cries out, while moaning and trying to cough.

Floyd eventually appears motionless under the officer’s knee.

Those who were watching the incident unfold can be heard begging police to move off Floyd.

“He’s not f****** moving,” an onlooker can be heard saying. “Get off of his f****** neck.”

It is unclear what happened before and after the video was taken.

FBI to investigate

Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said during a news conference on Tuesday that the four officers involved in the incident were now “former employees”.

The city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, confirmed that the officers had been terminated, saying “this is the right decision for our city”.

Floyd responds: “I can’t breathe. Please, the knee in my neck.”

The officer continues to hold down Floyd with his knee for several minutes, with Floyd pleading and asking for water.

“My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Please, please. I can’t breathe,” Floyd cries out, while moaning and trying to cough.

Floyd eventually appears motionless under the officer’s knee.

Those who were watching the incident unfold can be heard begging police to move off Floyd.

“He’s not f****** moving,” an onlooker can be heard saying. “Get off of his f****** neck.”

It is unclear what happened before and after the video was taken.

FBI to investigate

Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said during a news conference on Tuesday that the four officers involved in the incident were now “former employees”.

The city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, confirmed that the officers had been terminated, saying “this is the right decision for our city”.

In a statement earlier on Tuesday, the Minneapolis Police Department said its officers were responding to a “report of a forgery in progress”.

“After [the suspect] got out [of his car], he physically resisted officers,” the statement said. “Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and note he appeared to be suffering medical distress.”

He was then transported to a nearby medical centre where he died a short time later, the department said.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehensive (BCA) said it was “investigating the circumstances surrounding an incident”.

It added that it was sharing information with the FBI, which “is conducting a separate federal civil rights investigation at the request of the Minneapolis Police Department.”

Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo has said he requested the FBI involvement after receiving additional information “from a community source”. He did not elaborate.

The police officers involved in the incident were wearing body cameras, the Minneapolis police department said. The footage has not been made publicly available.

‘Trauma on trauma’

Community members and leaders have expressed outrage over the incident, with many drawing comparisons to Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man who died in 2014 after being placed in a chokehold by New York City police and pleading: “I can’t breathe.” That incident sparked nationwide protests.

“We all watched the horrific death of George Floyd on video as witnesses begged the police officer to take him to the police car and get off his neck,” Crump, the Floyd’s lawyer, said in a statement on Tuesday.

“This abusive, excessive and inhumane use of force cost the life of a man who was being detained by the police for questioning about a non-violent charge,” he added. “How many ‘while Black’ deaths will it take until the racial profiling and undervaluing of black lives by police finally ends?”

Nekima Levy Armstrong, a local lawyer and prominent activist, wrote on Facebook that this “is trauma on trauma on trauma”.

“We can’t escape police violence even in a global pandemic,” she added

Minneapolis Mayor Frey called the incident “wrong on every level”.

“Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” he said in a Facebook post.

“This officer failed in the most basic, human sense,” he added. All I keep coming back to is this: this man should not have died … To our Black community, to the family: I’m so sorry.”

A protest is scheduled in Minneapolis on Tuesday, with organisers urging participants to wear masks and adhere to social distancing guidelines due to the coronavirus pandemic.

String of police killings

Monday night’s incident comes on the heels of several cases of Black men and women being killed by police or former law enforcement across the US.

The FBI is investigating the police shooting death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor, a Louisville emergency medical technician, was killed by police in the early hours of March 13 as she laid in her bed. Police said they were serving a warrant as part of a drug investigation when they returned fire from the apartment. Taylor’s boyfriend said he was firing in self-defence, believing his home was being broken into. No drugs were found in the apartment. One officer was injured.

The US Department of Justice is weighing possible hate crime charges in the US state of Georgia over the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black man, and the police handling of the case.

Arbery was killed in February as he ran through a predominantly white neighbourhood in Glynn County, Georgia. The arrests of Gregory McMichael, a retired investigator for the local prosecutor’s office, and his son, both of whom are white, came more than two months after the incident and only after a video of the shooting went viral, raising questions about the handling of the case. Police have also since arrested the man who filmed the incident.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is also investigating the shooting death of Yassin Mohamed, a Sudanese American man, who was killed by police on May 9 after having “several altercations” with law enforcement in the 24 hours before his death. Police say they fired on Mohamed after he charged officers with a large rock. The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Georgia has condemned the incident and called for answers, including whether Mohamed was suffering from mental health issues.

According to the Washington Post Fatal Force database, more than 1,000 people have been shot and killed by police in the last year. According to the database, Black Americans are killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

African American adults are nearly six times as likely to be imprisoned or jailed than white adults, according to the Sentencing Project watchdog group.

These racial disparities have given rise to Black Lives Matter, which was founded in 2013 and seeks to end police violence and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities.

A BBC report says the four officers have been dismissed.

Source: Aljazeerah

Wilson Roosevelt Jerman, a former White House butler who served 11 presidents in various roles across seven decades, has died. He was 91.

The cause of death was COVID-19, Fox 5 DC reported

Jerman joined the White House staff in 1957. From former presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama, he held roles first as a housekeeper then later a doorman and butler.

During the Eisenhower administration, he started off as a cleaner,” his eldest granddaughter, Jamila Garrett, told Fox 5.

During the Kennedy administration, it was first lady Jacqueline Kennedy who promoted him to White House butler, according to Garrett.

“She was instrumental in ensuring that that happened,” she said.

Jerman’s position at the White House spanned decades of changes, as security efforts increased and 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. evolved from an official residence into a major catering facility, according to the White House Historical Association.

Near the end of his career, he stepped into a part-time role. He was one of the White House’s longest-serving employees.

Part of his longevity there, serving at the pleasure of presidents from both political parties, might have been his habit of keeping mum about his job outside of the workplace.

There would be too many questions asked,” he told Vanity Fair in 2017. “You see, you never see. You hear, you never hear. And you don’t know nothing.”

The coronavirus has surpassed 1.5 million confirmed cases in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 92,000 people have died from the illness domestically.

Worldwide, the case total was approaching 5 million as of Wednesday afternoon, with over 325,000 deaths.

Older adults and people with underlying medical conditions are at higher risk for severe cases of the illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Source: Fox News

Andriy Derkach, an independent member of Ukraine’s parliament, said at a press conference on Tuesday that he had received recorded phone call conversations between presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, then-vice president in the Obama administration, and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which Derkach reportedly played at the press conference.

The Washington Post reported that the “recordings of private phone calls between former vice president Joe Biden and former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko” were “a new broadside against the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. president.”

The Post reports that Derkach has past links to Russian intelligence and that he claimed that the tapes were made by Poroshenko. The Post noted that the clips consisted of “edited fragments of phone conversations [between] Biden and Poroshenko” but did not dispute that the clips were authentic.

The Post said that recordings “shed relatively little new light on Biden’s actions in Ukraine,” which were hotly contested last year.

However, one particular exchange stood out as being potentially newsworthy.

It was widely reported last year that Biden bragged to a group of people in 2018 that he threatened Poroshenko that if he did not fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was on the board of, that the U.S. would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees from Ukraine.

In one of the audio clips that Derkach allegedly released dated February 18, 2016, Poroshenko appeared to tell Biden [emphasis added]:

I have some positive and negative news. I will start with positive news. … Yesterday, I met with the General Prosecutor Shokin. And despite the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I specifically asked him – no, it was a day before yesterday – I specifically asked him to resign … as his position as a state person. And despite of the fact that he has a support in the power and as a finish of meeting with him, he promised me to give me the statement on resignation. And one hour ago he bring me the written statement of his resignation. And this is my second step for keeping my promises.

USA Today reported last year that, according to former Obama administration officials and an anti-corruption advocate in Ukraine, the reason that Biden pushed for Shokin to be fired was that “Shokin wasn’t pursuing corruption among the country’s politicians.” The Post cites a scandal that “erupted under [Shokin’s] watch in which prosecutors were found with bags of diamonds and stashes of cash” and Shokin having “clashed with two young prosecutors whom Western officials hoped would clean up what has long been a corrupt office.”

Biden spokesman Andrew Bates responded to the release of the tapes by claiming, “They heavily edited this, and it’s still a nothingburger that landed with a thud.”

Here is how The Post summarized the aforementioned phone call:

In one call, Poroshenko reported to Biden that he had met with Shokin and asked for his resignation and that Shokin had, an hour before the call, complied and written a letter resigning from his post. Poroshenko described the move as the “second step of keeping my promises.”

The Post did not mention that Poroshenko allegedly told Biden that he didn’t “have any information about [Shokin] doing something wrong” when he asked Shokin to resign from his position, which Biden had said must happen in order for Ukraine to get the $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.

It is not clear whether there is any missing context or comments in the alleged remarks that Poroshenko made to Biden that could change the meaning of what was said between the two.

President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., highlighted another leaked audio clip that allegedly showed portions of a private phone call between Biden and Poroshenko from a conversation that supposedly took place on May 13, 2016. Transcript of that clip below:

THEN-VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Hey Mr. President, Joe Biden. How are you?

THEN-UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT PETRO POROSHENKO: Very well indeed, as usual, when I hear your voice. Thank you very much.

BIDEN: Well you are doing very well, congratulations on getting the new Prosecutor General. I know there is a lot more that has to be done, but I really, I really think that’s, I think that’s good. And I understand your working with Rada in the coming days on a number of additional laws to secure the IMF. But congratulations on installing the new Prosecutor General, it’s going to be critical for him to work quickly to repair the damage Shokin did. And I’m a man of my word and now that the new Prosecutor General is in place, we’re ready to forward to signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee. And I don’t know how you want to go about that. I’m not going to be able to get to Kyiv anytime soon, I mean, next month or so. And, and I don’t know whether you could either sign it with our ambassador or if you came here, we could sign or if you want, we’re inviting Groysman here later. I’m going to be talking to him later this morning, not for that purpose, we’re inviting him to Washington and so I’ll leave it up to you as to how you want that done and when you want it done.

POROSHENKO: First of all, thank you very much indeed for these words of support. Believe me, that it was a very tough challenge and a very difficult job and Mrs. Tymoshenko and Mr. Lyashko fraction tried to break this because we not only voted for the new Prosecutor General, which we do in a very short period of time, within one day we changed the law. By the way, in this law we are presenting the set, the new structure of the General Prosecutor’s Office, including the General Inspection as we agreed with you. And the second thing, I immediately invited Lutsenko and said that he should contact your embassy and I would be very pleased if you will have certain person, who can come either from Washington or whatever. We have here – I don’t remember his name – the Ukrainian origin American prosecutor. He is a little bit old. I sent to the Jeffrey his name, and he was ready to come and to be assistant and adviser. He has a very good experience in the American system and he can be the person of trust within new prosecution system. I think this is exactly the right time to do that. And if he’s still ready to come and to cooperate from the very first step, from the very first minute of the new Prosecutor, that is exactly what I’m looking for.

BIDEN: Well, let me, let me get in contact with the Justice Department and pursue that. I’ll get his name and let me find out where that is, because it is in our interest, obviously, to provide professional assistance as quick as we can. So this gets up and started it in the right direction. So, I will move on that as soon as we hang up. I’ll put that in train and I’ll get back to you as to what we are, what I am able to do.

POROSHENKO: Absolutely. Second, thank you very much indeed, this is exactly what I am looking for. The second thing is that I want to thank you that you give me your word that immediately when we change the legislation and I appoint the new Prosecutor General, and it would be Yuriy Lutsenko as we agreed on our previous meeting in Washington and when it happen, we can have this loan guarantee and thank you very much…

Source: Daily Wire

Former Army Staff Sgt. Ronald Shurer II, who received the Medal of Honor in 2018 for braving heavy gunfire to save lives in Afghanistan, has died of cancer. He was 41.

Miranda Shurer said her husband died Thursday in Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. She said he was diagnosed with cancer three years ago.

Ronald Shurer II received the nation’s highest military honor from President Donald Trump in a formal White House ceremony attended by 250 people.

“He was an amazing man. Obviously, he is known for being an amazing soldier,” Miranda Shurer said. “The same characteristics that made him a great teammate in Special Forces also made him a great husband and a great father and a great friend. He was very loved.”

A native of Fairbanks, Alaska, Shurer was a senior medical sergeant in the special forces on April 6, 2008, when his team encountered machine gun and sniper fire and rocket-propelled grenades from militants.

Shurer stabilized one soldier, then fought his way amid gunfire up a mountain to the lead members of the unit. There, he treated and stabilized four more soldiers. Shurer helped evacuate them. He lowered the wounded down the steep mountainside while using his body to shield them from enemy fire.

After he had loaded the wounded in an evacuation helicopter, Shurer went back up the mountain to fight.

Initially rejected by the military because of a medical condition, Shurer successfully enlisted a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He was promoted from sergeant to staff sergeant in late 2006 and served with the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan from late November 2007 to late May 2008. He was honorably discharged a year later.

Shurer then began a career with the Secret Service as a special agent assigned to a field office in Phoenix, Arizona, in September 2009. He was selected for the Secret Service’s counter assault team and assigned to the Special Operations Division in June 2014.

“Today, we lost an American Hero: Husband, Father, Son, Medal of Honor Recipient – Special Agent Ronald J. Shurer II. From a grateful Nation and Agency – your memory and legacy will live on forever,” the U.S. Secret Service said in a tweet.

Miranda Shurer, citing restrictions from the coronavirus pandemic, said her husband will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery near the nation’s capital at a future date.

Source: Washington Times