TDB Top 5 International Stories: Saturday 18th February 2017

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5: In First Solo Press Conference, Trump Attacks Media, Claims Admin Running Like “Fine-Tuned Machine”

On Thursday, Donald Trump held his first solo press conference as president. He began by announcing he had nominated Alexander Acosta to be labor secretary nominee, but then soon began an extended attack on the media, accusing CNN and other outlets of peddling fake news. We air excerpts of the press conference, which went on for 77 minutes.

Democracy Now

4: We Asked an Expert if Trump’s Russia Scandal Could Lead to Prosecution

Even if there was improper or illegal communication between Trump staffers and Russian intelligence, criminal charges seem like a distant possibility.

On Monday night, the Trump administration lost a staffer to scandal for the first time when Michael Flynn resigned as national security advisor. The former general has not been charged with any crimes, but he did lie to (or at least mislead) Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador about sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s government. Besides the not telling the truth part—reportedly the reason he was sacked—there are questions about whether Flynn conducted illegal diplomacy when he talked to the ambassador, since the call in question occurred before Donald Trump became president.

Vice News

3: AS SENATE RUSHES TO INSTALL SCOTT PRUITT AT EPA, EXILED CLIMATE SCIENTISTS SURVEY THE DAMAGE

The Senate voted to confirm Donald Trump’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency today over the objections of Democratic senators, hundreds of former EPA officials, and hundreds of current EPA employees. Although an Oklahoma judge had ruled on Thursday that Pruitt’s office had to release more than 2,500 emails he had exchanged with energy and gas companies and industry groups, Republicans crammed through his confirmation in a 52-46 vote (with Democrats Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp voting with the Republican majority) before anyone had a chance to review the emails exchanged with the companies he’s now in charge of regulating.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, while Republicans in Washington were holding the first of two votes to confirm an EPA chief who will roll back regulations on the oil and gas companies responsible for most global warming, hundreds of climate scientists gathered in Atlanta to talk about the way climate change is already sickening and killing people around the country and the world.

The Climate and Health meeting, which was organized in January after the CDC cancelled a similar conference, was far from being a litany of the gloom and doom predictions and statistics that you might expect from the scientists studying increases in temperature, rising sea levels, and extreme weather. Those things were present, of course, summed up perhaps most frighteningly by former vice president Al Gore, the meeting’s host, who noted that humans emit 110 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours ­­­­— and that the heat energy trapped by this daily dump is the equivalent of “exploding 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs.” Or the graph that showed how the continued release of these greenhouse gases could lead to a 12-degree temperature rise by 2300, a change that would render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable.

The Intercept

2: Donald Trump considered using national guard to round up immigrants, memo suggests

The Trump administration considered a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 national guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft memo obtained by the Associated Press.

The 11-page document calls for the unprecedented militarization of immigration enforcement as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as far east as New Orleans, Louisiana. Four states that border on Mexico are included in the proposal – California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas – but it also encompasses seven states contiguous to those four: Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Governors in the 11 states would have a choice regarding whether to have their guard troops participate, according to the memo, written by the US homeland security secretary, John Kelly, a retired four-star marine general.

The Guardian 

1: Tony Blair urges Britons to ‘rise up’ against Brexit

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, has called on voters, businesses and campaigners in the UK to “rise up” and back a coordinated effort to temper the terms of, or even halt, Britain’s EU exit.

Blair said on Friday that the Conservative government’s drive to leave the European Union “at any cost” would hurt future generations and damage the unity of the country itself.

Last year’s vote to leave the 28-nation bloc was “based on imperfect knowledge” and Britons made their decision without knowing the true terms of Brexit, he said in a speech in London.

“As these terms become clear, it is their right to change their mind,” said Blair, the former Labour leader.

Aljazeera