5: IBM EMPLOYEES LAUNCH PETITION PROTESTING COOPERATION WITH DONALD TRUMP
IBM EMPLOYEES ARE taking a public stand following a personal pitch to Donald Trump from CEO Ginni Rometty and the company’s initial refusal to rule out participating in the creation of a national Muslim registry.
In November, Rometty wrote Trump directly, congratulating him on his electoral victory and detailing various services the company could sell his administration. The letter was published on an internal IBM blog along with a personal note from Rometty to her enormous global staff. “As IBMers, we believe that innovation improves the human condition. … We support, tolerance, diversity, the development of expertise, and the open exchange of ideas,” she wrote in the context of lending material support to a man who won the election by rejecting all of those values. Employee comments were a mix of support and horror. Now, some of those who were horrified are going public, denouncing Rometty’s letter and asserting “our right to refuse participation in any U.S. government contracts that violate constitutionally protected civil liberties.”
The Intercept
4: Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov shot dead in Ankara
Russia’s ambassador to Ankara has been killed in a gun attack in the Turkish capital, Ankara, Russia’s foreign ministry said.
Police later killed the assailant, Turkish station NTV reported.
Andrey Karlov, 62, was several minutes into a speech at an embassy-sponsored photo exhibition when a man in a suit shot the diplomat in the back from close range multiple times on Monday evening.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova made the announcement of Karlov’s death in a live televised statement.
The assailant was a 22-year-old off-duty police officer who worked in the Turkish capital, said Ankara’s mayor Melih Gokcek.
Aljazeera
President-elect Donald Trump is facing widespread criticism for picking David Friedman to be the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. For years, Friedman has served as president of American Friends of Beit El Institutions, which has raised millions of dollars to support illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. Friedman, who has no diplomatic experience, has also worked as a bankruptcy attorney for Trump for the past 15 years. He supports Israel’s Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank and says he doesn’t think it would be illegal for Israel to annex the entire Palestinian territory, despite the fact that it would be blatantly illegal under international law. During the presidential campaign, Friedman also said he opposes a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. For more, we’re joined by Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, and Mustafa Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian National Initiative and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Democracy Now
2: Berlin truck crash: ‘suspicious person’ arrested after nine killed at Christmas market
Unclear whether incident at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz in which ‘many’ also injured is terrorist-related, according to reports
The Guardian
1: It’s Time to Deal with the Reality of a Trump Presidency
Today in the US, Monday, December 19, electors will be meeting in the 50 state capitols to go through the formality of casting their ballots and officially making Donald J. Trump the president of the United States. It is almost certainly too late to stop Trump, though groups of protesters were still trying as late as last night at candle-lit “vigils” all over the country where people called upon red-state electors to break ranks and vote against Trump, as a few already have sworn they would do. It’s just the latest, and likely last, expression of a sentiment shared by anti-Trump conservatives and liberals alike: This guy can’t be president, right?
Trump’s entire year-and-a-half-long campaign unfolded in a bubble of unreality. Before the primaries, when he was leading in the polls, it was dismissed as a blip. When he won a whole bunch of primaries, people noted he still wasn’t on track to secure a majority of GOP convention delegates. When he did win a majority of the delegates, anti-Trump Republicans talked about using last-ditch maneuvers at the convention to stop him. After he accepted the nomination, everyone who knew about such things looked at the polls and figured he couldn’t win. I sure didn’t think he could win. Then he won. Fuck.
In such a close election—Hillary Clinton won 2.8 million more votes nationwide than Trump, but lost thanks to a combined margin of less than 100,000 in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—breaking down the causes can be tricky. But Trump was aided at every turn in the process by a pervasive attitude that he couldn’t become president. The establishment Republican candidates didn’t realize the threat he posed to them fast enough to coordinate any kind of response; instead, he took advantage of a crowded field, building a sizable delegate lead without winning a majority of votes until the New York primary in April. Clinton’s campaign was so convinced of Trump’s vulnerability that they looked forward to facing him (or Ted Cruz or Ben Carson) rather than someone like Jeb Bush. The media didn’t take Trump seriously until he had steamrolled the Republican Party—important stories about Trump’s lack of proven charitable giving and his habit of not paying contractors didn’t come out until he had the nomination locked up. Before then, Trump was regarded as a sideshow and given heaps of coverage, most embarrassingly when he got major coverage of a fundraiser he put on for veterans instead of participating in a primary debate. And in maybe the most damning example of overconfidence dooming Clinton, her campaign failed to pay enough attention to Michigan because it was certain of victory there.
Vice News
