.
5: Hit with water cannons Clashes between protesters and police escalated overnight at Standing Rock
Police hit hundreds of unarmed protestors who gathered to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota with water cannons Sunday night. Protestors also reported being hit with rubber bullets, teargas, pepper spray, and percussion grenades during the clashes.
Vice News
4: Fears grow in east Aleppo as government forces close in
Syrian government forces and allied fighters advanced further into rebel-held Aleppo on Monday, pressing an offensive in defiance of international concern for the fate of the city and its beleaguered civilians.
“At least 36 people were killed in Monday’s bombing,” rescue worker Ibrahim Abu Leith told Al Jazeera. “These are the most violent attacks we’ve seen in five years.”
The recapture of the rebel-held east, which fell from government control in 2012, would be the government’s most significant victory since the conflict began more than five years ago.
The international community appeared unlikely to halt the government’s advance, despite expressing outrage over rising civilian deaths and the targeting of hospitals and rescue-worker facilities in the east.
Geert Cappelaere, regional director for the UN’s children’s agency, said more than 100,000 children were trapped. “Children should not be dying in hospitals because of bombs, and they should not be dying in schools.”
Aljazeera
3: Jeff Sessions: Trump’s attorney general pick accused of racial slur in 1981
Donald Trump’s nominee for US attorney general was once accused of calling a black official in Alabama a “nigger”, and then gave a false explanation to the US Senate when testifying about the allegation.
Senator Jeff Sessions was said to have used the racist term in November 1981, when talking about the first black man to be elected as a county commissioner in Mobile, where Sessions was a Republican party official and a federal prosecutor.
Asked about the alleged remark five years later, during Senate hearings on his ill-fated nomination by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship, Sessions denied saying it and claimed the alleged timing did not stand up to scrutiny.
“My point is there was not a black county commissioner at that time,” Sessions said, in response to questions from Joe Biden, then a senator for Delaware. “The black was only elected later.”
We spend the hour looking at the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, a candidate who ran on a platform of open bigotry, threats against immigrants and Muslims, and blatant misogyny. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, is often portrayed as a counterbalance to Trump and called a “bridge to the establishment.” But our guest Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, says Pence’s ascendance to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a “tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence—and his fellow Christian supremacist militants—would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend.”
Democracy Now
1: MIKE PENCE WILL BE THE MOST POWERFUL CHRISTIAN SUPREMACIST IN U.S. HISTORY
THE ELECTION OF Donald Trump has sent shockwaves through the souls of compassionate, humane people across the country and the world. Horror that a candidate who ran on a platform of open bigotry, threats against immigrants and Muslims, and blatant misogyny will soon be president is now sinking in. Trump appointed a white nationalist, Steve Bannon, as chief White House strategist — which was promptly celebrated by the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Bannon and other possible extremist Trump appointees, such as John Bolton, a neocon who believes the U.S. should “bomb Iran,” and the authoritarian Rudy Giuliani, are now receiving much deserved public scrutiny.
The incoming vice president, Mike Pence, has not elicited the same reaction, instead often painted as the reasonable adult on the ticket, a “counterbalance” to Trump and a “bridge to the establishment.” However, there is every reason to regard him as, if anything, even more terrifying than the president-elect.
Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants — would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend. “This may not be our preferred candidate, but that doesn’t mean it may not be God’s candidate to do something that we don’t see,” said David Barton, a prominent Christian-right activist and president of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.” In June, Barton prophesied: “We may look back in a few years and say, ‘Wow, [Trump] really did some things that none of us expected.’”
Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.
The Intercept
