5: Lobbyist Tied to Trump’s Transition Was Just Arrested on Child Porn Charges
WASHINGTON — A key witness in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation has been indicted for transporting child pornography, prosecutors said Monday.
George Nader, 60, a dual Lebanese-U.S. citizen, was apprehended in an airport near Washington D.C. in January 2018 while allegedly carrying a cellphone with images depicting minors engaged in “sexually explicit conduct,” prosecutors said in a statement.
Vice News
4: ‘Bloody massacre’: Sudan forces kill at least 30, protesters say
Sudanese protesters say more than 30 people have been killed after security forces stormed the main protest camp in the capital Khartoum in the worst violence since the overthrow of President Omar al-Bashir, drawing global condemnation.
The Sudanese Professionals’ Association (SPA), which spearheaded nationwide protests that started in December, said Monday’s crackdown amounted to a “bloody massacre”.
“We are holding the Transitional Military Council (TMC) responsible for what happened this morning,” the SPA said, referring to the ruling military council, which currently runs the country.
Aljazeera
3: AMAZON OFFERED JOB TO PENTAGON OFFICIAL INVOLVED WITH $10 BILLION CONTRACT IT SOUGHT
IN A FEDERAL lawsuit, the tech giant Oracle has provided new details to support its accusation that Amazon secretly negotiated a job offer with a then-Department of Defense official who helped shape the procurement process for a massive federal contract for which Amazon was a key bidder.
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are now the two finalists to win the highly contested $10 billion contract for what is known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The deal, one of the largest federal contracts in U.S. history, would pay one company to provide cloud computing services in support of Defense Department operations around the world.
But the contract has been hotly contested since the department began soliciting proposals last year. Two of Amazon’s competitors, IBM and Oracle, filed complaints with the Government Accountability Office saying that the winner-take-all process unfairly favored Amazon, which is seen as an industry leader in cloud computing. When its claim was rejected, Oracle sued the government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
The Intercept
2: How Voter Suppression & Gerrymandering Cleared the Path for Unprecedented Abortion Bans
As Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Ohio and Georgia attempt to outlaw abortions after six weeks, Missouri legislators approve an eight-week ban and Alabama passes a near total ban on abortions, we speak to journalist Ari Berman about how the widespread attack on abortion rights across the country is tied directly to voter suppression. He writes in a recent piece for Mother Jones, “These states have something else in common: a systematic effort to distort the democratic process through voter suppression and gerrymandering. These tactics have greased the way for near-total bans on abortion and for other extreme right-wing policies.”
Democracy Now
