5: The Attorney General Defied Trump’s Muslim Ban. He Did One Thing He Knows How to Do: He Fired Her
President Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates on Monday night, just hours after she announced the Justice Department would not defend Trump’s executive order temporarily banning all refugees, as well as citizens, from seven Muslim-majority nations. Yates had served in the Justice Department for 27 years. The White House issued a statement last night reading: “The acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.”
Democracy Now
4: Last Night’s London Protest Shows How to Fight Trump
There’s always something faintly weird about the cops guarding Downing Street. These are, presumably, the best of the best, but (maybe as a result) they always look faintly inhuman – not even in the usual way cops might look inhuman (body armour and visors and the cold menace of implacable authority), but more like pug dogs or garden gnomes, clutching their guns and staring with sad, uncomprehending eyes at traffic and tourists through the slits on the gate that separates them from the world. They have their job, and everything else is either baffling or irrelevant. I saw that look on quite a few of the cops standing around yesterday’s vast and sudden protest against Trump’s Muslim travel ban and our own government’s complicity in it: the look of someone not sure if they’re meant to join in with the demonstration or wade into the mass of people, clubs swinging. The look of a creature that doesn’t know what it’s supposed to do.
They’re not alone; so few of the old rules make sense any more. In America, the cops are staging a slow and piecemeal riot. Executive orders are telling them to refuse entry to anyone from a list of seven Muslim-majority nations; rulings by federal judges are telling them to let the people they’re holding free immediately. The state is no longer speaking with one voice, and in the gaps surplus sadism trickles through. Are dual nationals exempt? Our government says yes; the US Embassy says no. In some airports Yemenis and Iranians are being sent back on the next available flight; in others they’re being detained for long hours, aggressively questioned and then released.
Vice News
3: Ukraine: Fighting flares up in eastern town of Avdiivka
Intense fighting between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russia rebels has escalated in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 13 civilians and fighters on both sides in the worst outbreak of violence in several weeks.
The warring sides were locked in heavy battles for a third day on Tuesday at the government-held town of Avdiivka, accusing each other of launching attacks and firing heavy artillery in violation of a two-year truce agreement.
The fighting damaged infrastructure and left residents with power and heating outages amid freezing conditions, in which temperatures drop as low as -20C at night.
As a result, authorities in the industrial town, in the region of Donbass, declared a state of emergency.
Aljazeera
2: SECRET DOCS REVEAL: PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS INHERITED AN FBI WITH VAST HIDDEN POWERS
IN THE WAKE of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI assumes an importance and influence it has not wielded since J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972. That is what makes today’s batch of stories from The Intercept, The FBI’s Secret Rules, based on a trove of long-sought confidential FBI documents, so critical: It shines a bright light on the vast powers of this law enforcement agency, particularly when it comes to its ability to monitor dissent and carry out a domestic war on terror, at the beginning of an era highly likely to be marked by vociferous protest and reactionary state repression.
In order to understand how the FBI makes decisions about matters such as infiltrating religious or political organizations, civil liberties advocates have sued the government for access to crucial FBI manuals — but thanks to a federal judiciary highly subservient to government interests, those attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Because their disclosure is squarely in the public interest, The Intercept is publishing this series of reports along with annotated versions of the documents we obtained.
The Intercept
1: Parliament to debate Trump state visit after 1.6m sign petition
The British parliament will hold a debate on calls to cancel Donald Trump’s state visit, due to be hosted by the Queen this year, after 1.6 million people signed a petition in support of scrapping or downgrading the invitation.
The debate will be held in Westminster Hall on 20 February and will also consider a rival petition in support of the US president’s visit, which has 114,000 signatures.
The petition committee announced the debate after protests around the country over Trump’s controversial executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from travelling to the US and suspending the nation’s refugee programme.
The Guardian
