5: MUSLIM STUDENTS SPEAK OUT AGAINST FBI INFORMANT PLAN EXPOSED BY THE INTERCEPT

WHEN IN LAST week’s presidential debate Donald Trump suggested that Muslims in the United States should “report when they see something going on,” he sparked a satirical backlash on Twitter mocking the idea that every Muslim has some secret knowledge of terrorism.

But the FBI has also aggressively sought terrorism leads from Muslim Americans; a presentation published by The Intercept last month suggested looking for informants in mosques and Muslim student associations, and that disclosure has prompted its own pushback. Several student leaders contacted us to decry the bureau’s invasion of spaces where young Muslims thought they could just be themselves.

Nabintou Doumbia, a sophomore at Wayne State University in Detroit, described her MSA as “a place where you hang out and feel comfortable, see friends, have real, raw discussions about anything, including controversial things, say, feminism, or very serious discussions about spirituality and your relationship to God.”

“You work so hard to build that trust, to have people open up in a space,” said Doumbia. The effect of government surveillance, she said, was that “you start to notice very subtle things, like being careful with the words that you use, and you notice your Muslim peers doing the same thing. There are times I’m not speaking, because I’m worried about how it might be heard.”

The Intercept

4:  Why Female Trump Fans Don’t Care About the Sexual Assault Allegations

For more than a week, the Trump campaign has been grappling with the now- infamous pussy-grabbing tape followed by the accusations that Donald Trump sexually harassed and assaulted women. Republican officials have been put in the awkward position of endorsing a scandal-ridden and erratic candidate or rejecting him and earning the ire of his supporters.

For hardcore Trump supporters, though, the real scandal is the way the media is hyping dubious, decades-old stories to tear down the one man who could rescue the country from doom.

Many of these supporters gathered this Saturday in a car-dealership parking lot in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for a Trump rally. The usual signifiers were there: “Deplorable Me” and “Trump that Bitch” T-shirts, an overwhelmingly white and mostly middle-aged or older crowd. The attendees were mostly men, but there were plenty of women as well, none of whom seemed to have an iota of doubt about their candidate.

“The media, they’re obsessed with sex, but the people are not,” said Ellie Martin, a volunteer with the Trump campaign.

Vice News

3:  WikiLeaks: Assange’s internet ‘severed’ by state actor

WikiLeaks says that founder Julian Assange’s internet access has been cut by an unidentified state actor.

The whistle-blowing organisation said on Twitter on Monday that they have activated their “contingency plans” after its co-founder’s internet service was intentionally cut off.

The internet is one of the few available means through which Assange can maintain contact with the outside world.

Aljazeera

2:  Amy Goodman Broadcasts from North Dakota Across from Court Where She Faces Riot Charge Today

We broadcast live from Mandan, North Dakota, across the street from the Morton County Courthouse, where more than a half-dozen people will appear in court today on charges related to the ongoing resistance to the construction of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. At least three people are due in court today on felony charges after locking themselves to heavy construction equipment. Morton County also issued an arrest warrant for Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman on September 8, five days after we released our on-the-ground video report from Labor Day weekend showing the Dakota Access pipeline company’s security guards physically assaulting nonviolent, mostly Native American land protectors, pepper-spraying them and unleashing attack dogs, one of which was shown with blood dripping from its nose and mouth. The original charge against Goodman was criminal trespass, but due to lack of evidence, State’s Attorney Ladd Erickson has filed a new charge against Goodman: “riot.” If Judge John Grinsteiner approves the new riot charge, she will be appearing in court today at 1:30 p.m. CT to challenge it.

Democracy Now

1:  Climate change could drive 122m more people into extreme poverty by 2030

Up to 122 million more people worldwide could be living in extreme poverty by 2030 as a result of climate change and its impacts on small-scale farmers’ incomes, a major UN report warned on Monday.

Climate change is “a major and growing threat to global food security”, said the report, warning that it could increase the global population living in extreme poverty by between 35 and 122 million by 2030, with farming communities in sub-Saharan Africa among the hardest hit.

The 2016 State of Food and Agriculture report, published by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), calls for “deep transformations in agriculture and food systems” and for the world’s half-billion small-scale farms to receive particular support.

The report warns that without “widespread adoption of sustainable land, water, fisheries and forestry practices, global poverty cannot be eradicated”.

The Guardian

5: Is Trump’s Rise a Result of America Declaring War on Institutions That Make Democracy Possible?

In his new book, scholar Henry Giroux examines “America at War with Itself.” From poisoned water in Flint and other cities to the police deaths of African Americans to hatemongering on the presidential campaign trail, Henry Giroux critiques what he believes is a slide toward authoritarianism and other failings that led to the current political climate and rise of Donald Trump. Giroux is the McMaster University professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest.

Democracy Now

4: Iraq PM declares offensive to retake Mosul from ISIL

Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has announced the start of a major offensive to retake Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city and the last urban centre still under ISIL control in Iraq after a series of government offensives to reverse the group’s lightning-quick seizure of territory in 2014.

According to UN estimates, up to one million people could be displaced from Mosul during the operation, exacerbating the humanitarian situation in the country.

Aljazeera

3: Trump calls for pre-debate drug tests, says Clinton enhanced her performance

If Hillary Clinton seemed energetic at the start of the last presidential debate, that’s probably because she’s taking performance-enhancing drugs, according to her Republican opponent Donald Trump, who called for drug tests before Wednesday’s presidential debate in Las Vegas.

“I think she’s actually getting pumped, you want to know the truth? She’s getting pumped up,” Trump said, speaking at a campaign event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Saturday.

Vice News

 

2: Freed From Gag Order, Google Reveals It Received Secret FBI Subpoena

GOOGLE REVEALED WEDNESDAY it had been released from an FBI gag order that came with a secret demand for its customers’ personal information.

The FBI secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, does not require a court approval. Investigators simply need to clear a low internal bar demonstrating that the information is “relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

The national security letter issued to Google was mentioned without fanfare in Google’s latest bi-annual transparency report, which includes information on government requests for data the company received from around the world in the first half of 2016.

Google received the secret subpoena in first half of 2015, according to the report.

An accompanying blog post titled “Building on Surveillance Reform,” also identified new countries that made requests — Algeria, Belarus, and Saudi Arabia among them — and reveals that Google saw an increase in requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Intercept

1: Trump warns of ‘rigged’ election as Giuliani makes racially charged claims

Donald Trump’s campaign allies joined his baseless accusation of a “rigged election” on Sunday, with Rudy Giuliani speaking in racially charged terms amidst growing fears of a violent backlash from supporters of the Republican presidential nominee.

Trump himself furthered the charge, tweeting: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD.”

A request for clarification from the Trump campaign about which polling places he meant was not immediately returned.

The Guardian

5: Breaking: ND Prosecutor Seeks “Riot” Charges Against Amy Goodman For Reporting On Pipeline Protest

A North Dakota state prosecutor has sought to charge award-winning journalist Amy Goodman with participating in a “riot” for filming an attack on Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters. The new charge comes after the prosecutor dropped criminal trespassing charges.

State’s Attorney Ladd R Erickson filed the new charges on Friday before District Judge John Grinsteiner who will decide on Monday (October 17) whether probable cause exists for the riot charge.

Goodman has travelled to North Dakota to face the charges and will appear at Morton County court on Monday at 1:30 pm local time (CDT) if the charges are approved.

“I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting, ” said Goodman. “I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters.”

In an e-mail to Goodman’s attorney Tom Dickson on October 12, State’s Attorney Erickson admitted that there were “legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute.” In an earlier email on October 12, Erickson wrote that Goodman “was not acting as a journalist,” despite that fact that the state’s criminal complaint recognized that, “Amy Goodman can be seen on the video …interviewing protesters.” In that email Erikson justified his quote in the Bismarck Tribune in which he had said that “She’s [Amy Goodman] a protester, basically. Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.” The First Amendment, of course, applies irrespective of the content of a reporter’s story.

Democracy Now

4:  Tony Abbott Takes to Twitter in Defence of Donald Trump

Just when you thought you’d never have to see an elected politician use the term “haters,” former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has come to the defence of Donald Trump on Twitter.

“Before the Trump haters get too excited,” Abbott tweeted after a controversial interview with Sky News’ Paul Murray Live on Thursday night, labelling Trump’s economic and national defence policies as “classic conservatism.” While the former PM acknowledged some of Trump’s views are “OTT” he was firm that boosting defence spending and lowering taxes were central tenets to conservative politics.

Abbott was hugely critical of a motion that passed through New South Wales’ state Senate, which labelled Trump a “revolting slug.” The former PM told Sky that “many of the Trump positions are reasonable enough.”

Vice News

3: Life after Trump: Republicans brace for betrayal and civil war after 2016

Accusations of betrayal. Demagoguery and hatred. The bunker in Berlin. Comparisons with Adolf Hitler have been tempting throughout Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency – never more so than at its mad, destructive climax.

The Republican’s presidential bid appears to have become the campaign equivalent of the last days of the reich, when Germany’s leadership raged at bearers of bad news from the battlefield, ordered non-existent divisions to launch counteroffensives, and embraced a nihilistic plan to burn it all down and take everyone along.

The difference is, unlike then, there seems to be little awareness of impending defeat or understanding of how it came to be. Instead, attitudes are like those after the first world war when Germans on the far right coined a word for their myth of betrayal: Dolchstoßlegende.

The Guardian

2: D.C. Hivemind Mulls How Clinton Can Pass Huge Corporate Tax Cut

TREATING THE WHOLE voting thing as a formality, serious political players are now pondering how exactly President Hillary Clinton can pass what Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called “a giant wet kiss for tax dodgers.”

This discussion isn’t happening on television, where normal people would hear about it. Or on Reddit, where people would freak out about it. To the degree it’s taking place in public at all, it surfaces in elite publications, where only elites are paying attention.

For instance, Peter Orszag, a top Obama economic official before he left to cash in with Citigroup, just wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times on how to make the wet kiss happen.

Few regular Americans read the Financial Times, and even if they did, what Orszag says requires a little deciphering:

What, then, are the prospects for new initiatives in a Clinton administration? … Mrs Clinton has … proposed $275bn in new infrastructure spending over five years, $250bn in direct federal spending and $25bn to set up an infrastructure bank. The question is how to finance this spending.

Deficit financing may be sensible but is anathema to House Republicans. So additional revenue from corporate income tax is commonly proposed. And that is where things become difficult.

There is some bipartisan agreement — for example, that profits already accumulated overseas by US companies should be subject to a tax rate well below the statutory 35 per cent, regardless of whether those profits are repatriated. But there is little consensus on whether such a tax should also apply in future and what the rate should be. …

To create room for the necessary compromises, Mrs Clinton would do well to avoid too many fights with her own party about whom she appoints to her administration. Some senior congressional Democrats on the left are already preparing to oppose “hell no” candidates who have worked in finance. If Mrs Clinton largely defers to them, however misguided their approach, she may end up with more flexibility to negotiate later with a Republican Congress.

The Intercept

1: Syria’s war: Lausanne meeting fails to break deadlock

A new round of diplomatic talks has failed once again to break a tense deadlock on how to end fighting in Syria, as a nine-nation meeting in the Swiss city of Lausanne did not agree on any concrete action to stop the violence.

With clashes still raging in Aleppo, Saturday’s talks, convened by US Secretary of State John Kerry, concluded after more than four hours without any joint statement from the participating countries.
Inside Story – More peace talks over Syria, but can they end the war?
Kerry was seeking a new path to peace after failing to secure a ceasefire in direct talks with Russia amid increasing international outrage over the Russian and Syrian bombardment of Aleppo’s rebel-held east.

Aljazeera