The White House is denying President Donald Trump uttered a racial slur during an Oval Office event Monday honoring some Native American military veterans.

“I don’t think that it is and that certainly not was the president’s intent,” replied Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders when asked about Trump again referring to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” the name of the famous reputed daughter of an early 17th century tribal chief.

During an event to honor World War II code talkers from the Navajo tribe, Trump, in an ad-libbed remark, told the five elderly Marine Corps veterans “you were here long before any of us were here. Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”

Trump repeatedly called Warren by that name during his successful campaign for the presidency, saying she had lied about her genealogy.

Warren, in the past, had said her mother was “part Cherokee and part Delaware,” but acknowledged no documentation for her lineage.

Having proof of even a trace of Native American or other minority lineage in the United States can allow someone to claim preferred status in college and job applications. 

“I think what most people find offensive is Senator Warren lying about her heritage to advance her career,” retorted Sanders amid several questions on the subject at the daily press briefing just after Trump’s controversial repeating of the remark.

“It is deeply unfortunate that the President of the United States cannot even make it through a ceremony honoring these heroes without having to throw out a racial slur,” responded Warren when asked about Trump’s remarks during an live interview on the MSNBC cable television channel.

“We regret that the President’s use of the name Pocahontas as a slur to insult a political adversary is overshadowing the true purpose of today’s White House ceremony,” says Jefferson Keel, the president of the National Congress of American Indians.   

“We honor the contributions of Pocahontas, a hero to her people, the Pamunkey Indian Tribe in Virginia, who reached across uncertain boundaries and brought people together,” added Keel, who is a U.S. Army officer and Vietnam War combat veteran. “Once again, we call upon the president to refrain from using her name in a way that denigrates her legacy.”

Also upsetting to some was that the event took place under the gaze of President Andrew Jackson, whose portrait Trump has placed in the Oval Office.

Jackson, in 1830, signed the Indian Removal Act, which led to thousands of Native Americans being forced off their sovereign lands.

At Monday’s event, part of National Native American Heritage Month, Trump lavished praise on the code talkers, who all are now in their 90s. 

“You are special people, you are really incredible people,” the president said.

The code talkers, little known for decades after the war, until their mission was eventually declassified, first saw combat in August 1942 during the Pacific battle at Guadalcanal.

Using code words for military jargon, such as “turtle” for “tank,” these Marines used only Navajo language as a secure means of communication.

“Well, three weeks after the landing, General Van De Griff, Commander of the 1st Marine Division, sent word back to United States saying, ‘this Navajo code is terrific,’” recalled Peter MacDonald, who heads the group of surviving code talkers. “’The enemy never understood it,’ he said at Monday’s ceremony, ‘we don’t understand it either, but it works. Send us some more Navajos.’” 

Eventually there were 400 Native American code talkers and 600 code words.

“Their ability to outwit the Japanese who were listening to this wonderful language and had no idea that a language like this existed on the Earth,” said White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, noted that during the invasion of Iwo Jima, the Marines lost 6,000 men and saw another 25,000 wounded during 28 days of battle against the Japanese.

“It would have been a lot worse had we not had the Navajo code talkers,” said Kelly. 
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On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case that is widely seen as a test of just how far the government can go to pry personal data generated by cell phones and other digital devices.

The case, known as Carpenter v. United States, pits law enforcement interests against the privacy rights of individuals.  

At issue is whether law enforcement authorities need a search warrant to obtain historical cell-site records known as cell service location information (CSLI). The data are kept by phone companies to determine roaming charges and weak spots in their networks and show the cell tower a user connects with at any given time.

The facts of the Carpenter case are straightforward.

Between 2010 and March 2011, Timothy Carpenter engineered a series of robberies of several cell phone stores in Ohio and Michigan. After Carpenter and his accomplices were arrested, the FBI requested and received several months of Carpenter’s cell-site records.

Such requests are routinely granted by cell phone companies when law enforcement authorities can show that there are “reasonable grounds” the information is “relevant and material” to criminal investigation.

The information showed that Carpenter’s cell phone had connected with cell towers near the stores during the time of the robberies, leading to his conviction on 11 counts of armed robbery.

Carpenter appealed his conviction, arguing that the government had unlawfully obtained his cell phone records without a search warrant. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District ruled against him.

The court argued that that customers who voluntarily turn over their information to third parties such as cell phone companies, banks and other institutions have no “expectation of privacy.”

In two previous cases in the 1970s, United States v. Miller and Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court upheld the so-called “third party doctrine.”

But privacy advocates say the third party doctrine is not suitable for the digital age, arguing that increasingly sophisticated cell phones have become repositories of data that the government should not be able to access without probable cause.

Andrew Ferguson, a professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia, joined a group of 42 criminal procedure and privacy scholars who filed a brief in support of Carpenter.

In an interview with VOA, Ferguson discussed the case and its implications for privacy rights.

What is at issue in Carpenter v. US?

There is both a narrower issue and a broader issue that is potentially at play in Carpenter.  The narrower issue is whether an exception to the Fourth Amendment, called the Third Party Doctrine, should survive the digital age.  And the broader issue is, what does the Court do with a Fourth Amendment that was created in an era of small data when we are in a new world of surveillance?

If the court decides the Fourth Amendment doesn’t require a warrant for this data, it means police can actually, without any constitutional limitations, obtain all our personal data for really any reason they want.  There are obviously legislative restrictions but as a constitutional matter it wouldn’t be a Fourth Amendment requirement to get a warrant, to obtain any of this personal information, be it your  smart pacemaker, your smart Fitbit data that can tell whether you’re excited or not excited, and whether any of your information including where you’ve been via your cell phone and any other tracking technology.

What is the government’s argument?

The government essentially says you the consumer have no expectation of privacy  in the information you give up to the third party cell provider.  In fact, you probably don’t know how it works.  The records that are created by these companies, they’re not your records, they’re the companies’ records.

Why would you have an expectation of privacy on the records that these companies did?  If they were selling the data to other companies and made a profit, would you have a claim to the profit?

No.  So what’s the difference between getting the information to the government? The government is getting it like any other party. Why would you be able to claim any sort of expectation of privacy over that information? The government’s position is that the Third Party Doctrine makes sense. It works well for law enforcement and this should just be an easy case of expanding and extending the Third Party Doctrine to the next question, which is the cell site locations.

What is the counterargument?

The counterargument is that the precedent that the government is relying on deals with a different context. So the phone information that was at issue in the original Smith v. Maryland was not very revealing; it was basically the number you called. It wasn’t going to show where you’d been, who you’d visited, the places you’d gone the last few times. It was a situation where you at the time of the old fashioned phone calls voluntarily giving up the information.  You knew you were making phone calls. Here, whether or not you use your cell phone, your cell phone is giving off that information  so you can’t say it’s voluntary relinquishment of your expectation of privacy because if you’re on the phone, that’s the way it works. So there is something about the private nature of this data.

There is something about the Fourth Amendment controls locations and the ability to go places without the government surveillance and oversight.  And these old fashioned cases should be left in the past because the new world is too invasive, too revealing of digital clues, and the fourth amendment needs to adapt.

In the brief you and a group of scholars filed in the case, you argue that an extension of the so called Third Party Doctrine “could eliminate citizens’ privacy in the modern age.” Are the stakes that high?

I think they are. If you don’t require a warrant to get this kind of information, and there is not legislation protecting it, there is no constitutional barrier for police to obtain information even about the justices themselves or about individuals who they sort of suspect but don’t have great reason to suspect. It’s going to chill First Amendment association and the ability to get together for political activism.  And it’s going to reveal a whole host of intimate details that most of us would like to keep private from our government.

What if the court rules in favor of Carpenter?

If the court rules in favor of Carpenter, and says police are required to get a warrant before doing it, I think it will just settle into a status quo where police get warrants for their criminal investigation.

There may be some here they won’t be able to do that, and it will be an impediment to law enforcement, but by and large they’re doing it already. Right now, most private companies say, look we follow the law. If the law requires a warrant, we require a warrant, and if the law doesn’t require a warrant, we don’t require a warrant.

Are there any international ramifications?

Europe is far more protective of data privacy than the U.S. has ever been and has moved there quicker and in more robust fashion.  So in many cases, the U.S. has lessons to learn from Europe as opposed to if you care about data privacy and how to protect it.  So it may be in a case that people around the world will see this as an American phenomenon, wrestling with what the fourth amendment means.

Generally speaking, it raises big questions because most of the tech companies are global companies, most of the issues involved privacy, which is certainly not a uniquely American concern, and the technologies are going to be used and sought after by governments in lots of repressive governments that are going to see the ability to use big data surveillance technology, big data policing technologies, to control their citizens.  And one way you can see a lot of the rise of big data policing is as a  measure of social control.
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Senior Turkish ministers have strongly criticized the United States and its policies toward Turkey and the region. The criticisms come after Turkish officials said the Trump administration met a key Turkish demand to end the arming of a Syrian Kurdish militia.

U.S. officials have not confirmed the Turkish government’s claim and have only said that President Donald Trump informed Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan of “pending adjustments” to the military support provided to U.S. partners on the ground in Syria.

Turkey accuses the YPG militia of supporting Kurdish insurgents inside the country and officials were enraged by what they saw as U.S. support of a group Turkey considers a terrorist organization. Despite Turkish reports of a concession by Trump, Turkish ministers have continued to criticize Washington. On Sunday, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu issued a thinly veiled threat.

“I am talking to the Western powers who are trying to play games over Turkey. You are going to suffer a historic slap and you will be sorry; you cannot trick Turkey,” Soylu said.

The angry words followed remarks by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who spoke at a rally of party supporters Sunday and said the U.S. will, in his words, be educated on how to talk to Turkey. Anti-U.S. rhetoric plays well with ruling AK Party voters ahead of elections in two years; but, international relations expert Soli Ozel of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University sees the rhetoric as a sign of the deep distrust that exists between the NATO allies.

“Overall, there is a problem specifically between the U.S. and Turkey,” Ozel said. “Trust is a word that has been struck out of the shared vocabulary of the two countries, neither side trusts the other. And that is not really a good way of keeping an alliance or keeping a partnership.”

While several ministers have called for the U.S. leadership to honor what they interpret as Washington’s commitment to stop arming the Syrian Kurdish militia, observers say Ankara remains uneasy about what Washington has actually said, compared to Ankara’s takeaway from conversations between U.S. and Turkish leaders, which was that the U.S. would end support for the Kurdish militia immediately.

A White House statement last week said that consistent with previous U.S. policy, President Trump had “informed President Erdogan of pending adjustments to the military support provided to our partners on the ground in Syria,” a move the statement said was possible “now that the battle of Raqqa is complete” and the effort has progressed into a “stabilization phase to ensure that ISIS cannot return.”

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stepped up pressure on Washington, calling for it to take back the arms it has already given to the Kurdish group, something he said the U.S. had earlier promised.

Even if differences over Syria are resolved, other issues of tension remain.

Turkish government spokesman Bekir Bozdag on Monday alleged that an Iranian sanction-busting trial in New York against Turkish-Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab was a plot against Turkey.

“They want to impose certain sanctions on Turkey through the Zarrab case, but the trade between Iran and Turkey is in line with our laws and international laws,” Bozdag said.

Zarrab, along with a senior state Turkish banking official and former ministers, are accused of circumventing U.S. sanctions to avoid paying billions of dollars. Jury selection for the trial started Monday with proceedings scheduled to begin Dec. 4.

The trial comes as Ankara and Tehran are increasingly cooperating in Syria and the wider region. On Sunday, the two countries signed a deal to enhance trade with Qatar and help ease Saudi Arabia’s blockade of the Gulf state. Deepening Turkish-Iranian cooperation will cause unease in Washington, analysts say, especially as Turkey is seen as key to curbing Iran’s growing regional influence.

 
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Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters, who represented South Africa, won the Miss Universe crown Sunday.

The 22-year-old, who recently earned a business management degree, was crowned at The AXIS Theater at Planet Hollywood casino-resort on the Las Vegas Strip. The runner-up was Miss Colombia Laura Gonzalez, while the second runner-up was Miss Jamaica Davina Bennett.

Ninety-two women from around the world participated in the decades-old competition. This year’s edition had the most contestants ever, including the first representatives in its history of Cambodia, Laos and Nepal.

Along with the title, Nel-Peters earned a yearlong salary, a luxury apartment in New York City for the duration of her reign and more prizes. She is the second woman from her home country to earn the crown.

Fans of the pageant submitted the questions that the final five contestants were asked during the competition.

When asked to name the most important issue women face in the workplace, Nel-Peters said the lack of equal pay.

“In some places, women get paid 75 percent of what men earn for doing the same job, working the same hours, and I do not believe that is right,” she said. “I think we should have equal work for equal pay for women all over the world.”

Nel-Peters is from the South African coastal community of Sedgefield in the Western Cape province. She helped develop a program to train women in self-defense in various situations after she was robbed at gunpoint a month after she was crowned as Miss South Africa.

Steve Harvey returned as the show’s host despite botching the 2015 Miss Universe crowning. On Sunday, he poked fun at his mistake throughout the night. Three days after people in the U.S. celebrated Thanksgiving, Harvey told the audience he is “grateful for the Oscars,” referring to the best-picture flub at this year’s Academy Awards.

Grammy-Award winner Fergie performed her new song “A Little Work” while the contestants walked down the stage wearing evening gowns. This year’s judges included YouTube star Lele Pons, former judge of “America’s Next Top Model” Jay Manuel and Wendy Fitzwilliam, the 1998 Miss Universe winner from Trinidad and Tobago.

President Donald Trump offended Hispanics when he made anti-immigrant remarks in announcing his bid for the White House in 2015. At the time, he co-owned The Miss Universe Organization with NBCUniversal, but the network and the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision quickly cut ties with him, refusing to air the show. Trump sued both networks, eventually settling and selling off the entire pageant to talent management company WME/IMG.
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It was a telling setting for a decision on whether post-traumatic stress disorder patients could use medical marijuana.

Against the backdrop of the nation’s largest Veterans Day parade, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced this month he’d sign legislation making New York the latest in a fast-rising tide of states to OK therapeutic pot as a PTSD treatment, though it’s illegal under federal law and doesn’t boast extensive, conclusive medical research.

Twenty-eight states plus the District of Columbia now include PTSD in their medical marijuana programs, a tally that has more than doubled in the last two years, according to data compiled by the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project. A 29th state, Alaska, doesn’t incorporate PTSD in its medical marijuana program but allows everyone over 20 to buy pot legally.

The increase has come amid increasingly visible advocacy from veterans’ groups.

Retired Marine staff sergeant Mark DiPasquale says the drug freed him from the 17 opioids, anti-anxiety pills and other medications that were prescribed to him for migraines, post-traumatic stress and other injuries from service that included a hard helicopter landing in Iraq in 2005.

“I just felt like a zombie, and I wanted to hurt somebody,” says DiPasquale, a co-founder of the Rochester, New York-based Veterans Cannabis Collective Foundation. It aims to educate vets about the drug he pointedly calls by the scientific name cannabis.

DiPasquale pushed to extend New York’s nearly two-year-old medical marijuana program to include post-traumatic stress. He’d qualified because of other conditions but felt the drug ease his anxiety, sleeplessness and other PTSD symptoms and spur him to focus on wellness.

“Do I still have PTSD? Absolutely,” says DiPasquale, 42. But “I’m back to my old self. I love people again.”

Help for veterans

In a sign of how much the issue has taken hold among veterans, the 2.2-million-member American Legion began pressing the federal government this summer to let Department of Veterans Affairs doctors recommend medical marijuana where it’s legal . The Legion started advocating last year for easing federal constraints on medical pot research, a departure into drug policy for the nearly century-old organization.

“People ask, ‘Aren’t you the law-and-order group?’ Why, yes, we are,” Executive Director Verna Jones said at a Legion-arranged news conference early this month at the U.S. Capitol. But “when veterans come to us and say a particular treatment is working for them, we owe it to them to listen and to do scientific research required.”

Even Veterans Affairs Secretary Dr. David Shulkin recently said “there may be some evidence that this (medical marijuana) is beginning to be helpful,” while noting that his agency is barred from helping patients get the illegal drug. (A few prescription drugs containing a synthetic version of a key chemical in marijuana do have federal approval to treat chemotherapy-related nausea.)

Medical marijuana first became legal in 1996 in California for a wide range of conditions; New Mexico in 2009 became the first state specifically to include PTSD patients. States have signed on in growing numbers particularly since 2014.

“It’s quite a sea change,” says Michael Krawitz, a disabled Air Force veteran who now runs Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access, an Elliston, Virginia-based group that’s pursued the issue in many states.

Still, there remain questions and qualms _ some from veterans _ about advocating for medical marijuana as a treatment for PTSD.

It was stripped out of legislation that added six other diseases and syndromes to Georgia’s law that allows certain medical cannabis oils. The chairman of the New York Senate veterans’ affairs committee voted against adding PTSD to the state’s program, suggesting the drug might just mask their symptoms.

“The sooner we allow them to live and experience the kind of emotions we do, in an abstinence-based paradigm, the sooner that they are returning home,” said Sen. Thomas Croci, a Republican, former Navy intelligence officer and current reservist who served in Afghanistan.

The American Psychiatric Association says there’s not enough evidence now to support using pot to treat PTSD. The 82,000-member Vietnam Veterans of America group agrees.

“You wouldn’t have cancer treatments that aren’t approved done to yourself or your family members,” and marijuana should be subjected to the same scrutiny, says Dr. Thomas Berger, who heads VVA’s Veterans Health Council.

A federal science advisory panel’s recent assessment of two decades’ worth of studies found limited evidence that a synthetic chemical cousin of marijuana might help relieve PTSD, but also some data suggesting pot use could worsen symptoms.

Medical marijuana advocates note it’s been tough to get evidence when testing is complicated by pot’s legal status in the U.S.

A federally approved clinical trial of marijuana as a PTSD treatment for veterans is now underway in Phoenix, and results from the current phase could be ready to submit for publication in a couple of years, says one of the researchers, Dr. Suzanne Sisley.
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This week could decide whether Republicans salvage one of President Donald Trump’s major agenda items during his first year in office or head into a midterm election year with no landmark legislative accomplishments to tout.

In coming days, Senate Republicans hope to pass a bill overhauling America’s tax code, but it is not clear they have the votes from their caucus to do so, given unified Democratic opposition.

As a candidate, Trump pledged to repeal Obamacare, build a wall spanning the U.S. border with Mexico, and cut the taxes Americans pay to the federal government.  Today, Obamacare remains the law of the land and not even the White House is predicting when border wall construction might begin in earnest.  So what about taxes?

As for tax reform, earlier this month the House of Representatives passed the first major tax bill in more than a decade.

“We need to restore growth, we need to restore opportunity,” said Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, marking the occasion. “We need to restore this beautiful thing we affectionately call “The American Idea’”.

Republicans propose cutting taxes across the board on wages for several years, while permanently slashing corporate taxes and adding $1.5 trillion to America’s national debt over a decade.

Democrats take issue with this plan.

“Republicans have brought forth a bill that is pillaging the middle class to pad the pockets of the wealthiest and hand tax breaks to corporations shipping jobs out of America and drastically increasing the national debt,” said House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Now, all eyes are on the Senate, where Republicans want to merge tax cuts with repealing an Obamacare requirement that forces Americans to purchase health care insurance or pay a penalty.

“They are just headed for failure … They are cutting taxes on the wealthy and taking health care away from millions,” said Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Even if Senate Republicans pass their tax plan, it would have to be reconciled with the House version and go back for votes in both chambers, a tall order with just weeks to go before Congress leaves Washington for the Christmas holiday recess.

“Well, I do believe in prayer, number one, and I hope that we get it done by Christmas,” said Republican Senator Tim Scott on the prospects of passing the legislation.

President Trump, too, continues to sound an optimistic note.

“We are going to give the American people a huge tax cut for Christmas, hopefully that will be a great big beautiful Christmas present,” he said.

Trump is expected to make a trip to the Capitol for the second time in as many weeks Tuesday to personally push his tax plan at a Senate Republican policy luncheon.

Republicans have a two-seat Senate majority, giving them a thin margin on legislation that fails to attract Democratic support.

 
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