Native Americans took to social media Monday to celebrate the pending “death” of Chief Wahoo, the longtime logo of the Cleveland Indians baseball team which features a garish “Indian” caricature that is offensive to America’s first peoples.

But the victory is only a small one for Twitter users, using the hashtag #NotYourMascot: The Cleveland Indians won’t be changing the team’s name; the team will still be able to sell Chief Wahoo merchandise; and fans won’t be blocked from wearing clothing bearing the logo.

In a statement released Monday, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said he told team owner Paul Dolan that the time had come to remove the caricature that has appeared on players’ caps and uniforms since 1948.

“Over the past year, we encouraged dialogue with the Indians organization about the club’s use of the Chief Wahoo logo,” Manfred said. “During our constructive conversations, Paul Dolan made clear that there are fans who have a longstanding attachment to the logo and its place in the history of the team.

“Nonetheless, the club ultimately agreed with my position that the logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball, and I appreciate Mr. Dolan’s acknowledgement that removing it from the on-field uniform by the start of the 2019 season is the right course.”

For decades, Native American activists and their supporters have protested the logo, a cartoon of a grinning red-skinned man in a feathered headband.  They have complained that the image is offensive and perpetuates racist stereotypes about America’s first peoples.

In 2014, a group called People Not Mascots filed a federal lawsuit seeking $9 billion in damages.  Two years later, a Canadian man sued the team in an attempt to prevent it from wearing the Chief Wahoo logo during games in Toronto.

In recent years, many schools and universities across the country have stopped using Native Americans in their team names or as mascots.  But according to MascotDB, a database of sports team names and mascots, many hundreds of American teams retain Indian imagery, ranging from local high schools to major teams like the Washington Redskins.

“Today’s announcement marks an important turning point for Indian Country and the harmful legacy of Indian mascots,” said Jefferson Keel, president of the National Congress of American Indians. “These mascots reduce all Native people into a single outdated stereotype that harms the way Native people, especially youth, view themselves.”
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The U.S. military says it is evaluating its policies after a global map of fitness activity drew attention to possible security concerns regarding locations of overseas bases and soldier movements.

Strava published its so-called heat map of user activity in November showing the routes millions of users walked, ran and biked, with the most frequent routes showing up in brighter colors. The company says it excluded activities that users marked as private or ones that took place in areas people did not want to make public.

The activities were tracked using GPS-enabled devices from manufacturers like Fitbit, Garmin and Polar, and even with the exclusions, Strava said its map included 1 billion activities between 2015 and September 2017.

The Washington Post reported on the heat map and its implications, highlighting a Twitter post by Australian student Nathan Ruser who shared the link to the Strava site Saturday.

“It looks very pretty, but not amazing for Op-Sec [operational security]. US Bases are clearly identifiable and mappable,” Ruser wrote.

The map shows the most activity in places like the United States, Western Europe, Japan and Brazil. In Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, activities show up bright against otherwise dark terrain, including in multiple places where the U.S. military is known to have bases or be active.

The devices that transmit the data can be used in several ways, including for example a short run or keeping track of the steps a person takes throughout the day. The result can be lines on the heat map showing loops around the perimeter of a military installation where people exercise or showing where they move from place to place throughout the facility, or elsewhere.

“DoD takes matter like these very seriously and is reviewing the situation to determine if any additional training or guidance is required, and if any additional policy must be developed to ensure the continued safety of DoD personnel at home and abroad,” Department of Defense spokeswoman Maj. Audricia Harris said.
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Key Republicans voiced strong support Sunday for special counsel Robert Mueller’s handling of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but split on whether Congress needs to approve legislation to block President Donald Trump from firing Mueller.

Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine, breaking with some of their Republican colleagues in Congress, stated in separate Sunday news shows that they support legislation, mostly favored by Democratic lawmakers, to require a judicial review if Trump were to attempt to dismiss Mueller.

Two prominent Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives — Kevin McCarthy of California and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina — both said they approve of Mueller’s performance in the ongoing criminal investigation. But McCarthy said he sees no need to enact a law to prevent Mueller, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Mueller’s fate is at the forefront of the Russia investigation after news accounts surfaced in recent days that Trump ordered White House lawyer Don McGahn to fire Mueller last June. but backed off after McGahn threatened to quit over the would-be ouster.

Trump has denied on several occasions in recent months that he had even thought about firing Mueller and branded last week’s story, first reported by The New York Times, as “fake news,” his favorite censure for stories he does not like.

Graham said he would be glad to pass legislation to prevent Trump from trying to oust Mueller, who is in the midst of negotiations with Trump’s lawyers over terms of Trump’s possible testimony under oath about the Russian election interference and whether Trump obstructed justice by firing former FBI director James Comey, who at the time was heading the law enforcement agency’s Russia probe before Mueller took it over.

But Graham said regardless of whether legislation is approved or not, “I see no evidence that President Trump wants to fire Mr. Mueller now. It’s pretty clear to me that everybody at the White House knows that it would be the end of President Trump’s presidency if he fired Mr. Mueller.”

Gowdy said he supports Mueller’s handling of the probe “100 percent, particularly if he’s given the time, the resources and the independence to do his job.”

Trump last week reiterated his long-standing contention that there was “no collusion” between him and Russian interests to help him defeat his Democratic challenger, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and also said there was “no obstruction” of the investigation. He attributed his actions in trying to limit the investigation to “fighting back.”

He said he is looking forward to testifying before Mueller’s lawyers and would do it under oath. But his lawyers subsequently said discussions with Mueller’s team are still ongoing about the terms of any interview of Trump and what topics would be discussed.

Comey, in notes he compiled from several meetings with Trump, says that the president urged him to drop his investigation of former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired by Trump after less than a month on the job for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russia’s then-ambassador to Washington in the weeks before Trump assumed power. Trump has denied Comey’s account of their talks.

Trump, who unsuccessfully asked Comey for a loyalty pledge, dismissed him in May. A day later, Trump told Russian officials in a White House meeting he had relieved himself of “great pressure,” describing Comey as “crazy, a real nut job.” A few days later, Trump told Lester Holt of NBC News that he ousted Comey because of “this Russia thing,” saying the investigation was “a hoax” perpetrated by Democrats to explain his upset election victory.

White House legislative affairs director Marc Short told Fox News he knows that Trump is “frustrated” by the investigation, that “millions of dollars have been spent with no evidence of collusion.”

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming he would take a “tougher” attitude toward Brexit negotiations with the European Union than the approach now being used by British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Without providing specifics, Trump says in an ITV interview to be broadcast Sunday night that he would have used different tactics.

“Would it be the way I negotiate? No, I wouldn’t negotiate it the way it’s [being] negotiated… I would have had a different attitude,” he said. “I would have said that the European Union is not cracked up to what it’s supposed to be.”

Britain is preparing to leave 28-nation bloc in March 2019. The complex negotiations have moved slowly and May’s Cabinet seems deeply divided over how best to separate.

In the interview with Piers Morgan, Trump says he looks forward to visiting Britain – where he has been invited sometime for a state visit to be hosted by Queen Elizabeth II – and apologizes for retweeting videos by a far-right group in Britain, which exacerbated tensions with May and drew complaints in Parliament.He also said Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle look like a “lovely couple” but he doesn’t know if he’s been invited to their May 19 nuptials at Windsor Castle. Trump was unperturbed when told that Markle backed his rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 U.S. election and has described him as “divisive.”

“Well, I still hope they’re happy,” he says.

Trump also says his administration might not withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord if terms more favorable to the United States are reached, in part because he likes French President Emmanuel Macron, a driving force behind implementing the accord.

The interview was conducted Thursday during Trump’s visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The guest list for Harry and Markle’s wedding has not been made public and the prince’s press team said invitations have not been sent out yet.

The British press has been filled with speculation that Harry and Markle might snub Trump and invite former U.S. President Barack Obama instead. Obama gave Harry a rare interview last year that was broadcast on the BBC.

Trump, in contrast, has angered many in Britain with his crackdown on immigration and his climate change policies.

Yet during the ITV interview, he seemed open to revisiting his pledge to withdraw from Paris climate accord, in which nations set their own goals to reduce the emissions of heat-trapping gases. Because of legal technicalities, America can’t get out of the pact until November 2020.

“If somebody said, `Go back into the Paris accord,’ it would have to be a completely different deal, because we had a horrible deal,” Trump said.

“Would I go back in? Yeah, I’d go back in. I like, as you know, I like Emmanuel [Macron]. I would love to, but it’s got to be a good deal for the United States,” he added.

Trump also said the Earth’s climate has been cooling as well as warming and asserted that ice caps have not been shrinking as predicted.

Scientists, however, report that the world hasn’t been cooling except for normal day-to-day weather variations; it has been warming instead. And there have been far more records for shrinking polar ice than growing ice, despite what the president claimed.
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The political network backed by conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch plans to spend $20 million to promote the tax overhaul recently signed into law by President Donald Trump.

The investment marks an early focus of the Koch brothers’ 2018 political strategy. It comes as the conservative billionaires work to expand their sweeping efforts to promote a “free society” in America.

Charles Koch and his chief lieutenants previewed their strategy on Saturday, the first day of a three-day private donor retreat at a luxury resort in the California desert. They previously announced plans to spend between $300 million and $400 million on politics and policy heading into the midterms when the GOP’s House and Senate majorities are at stake.

‘Increase the scale … 10 fold’

At an evening welcome reception, Koch called on his biggest donors to “increase the scale and effectiveness of this network by an order of magnitude — by another 10 fold.”

“If we can do that,” he said, “I’m convinced we can change the directory of this country.”

In addition to roughly 550 donors in attendance, each pledged an annual donation to the network of at least $100,000, the guest list featured a slate of Republican elected officials: Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, Sens. John Cornyn of Texas, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Todd Young of Indiana, and House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C.

Despite Koch’s optimism, there was concern about the midterm elections. Historical trends suggest that GOP majorities in the House and Senate could be in jeopardy, said Tim Phillips, who leads the network’s political arm, Americans For Prosperity.

‘Energized’ left

“The left is energized,” Phillips said, noting that the party that holds the White House typically loses congressional seats in its first midterm election. “You’re going against the tide. You’re going against history.”

For now, at least, the conservative powerhouse will focus on the tax overhaul to help protect the Republican majorities. Phillips said the Koch network would host rallies and phone banks and run television and internet ads in the coming months.

“Our job is to make sure we shine a spotlight on those benefits that are occurring because of this law,” Phillips said. “Over time, that should overwhelm what has been a lot of demagoguery and rhetorical nonsense.”

Several reporters, including one from The Associated Press, were invited to attend some of the forums in the private weekend retreat. As a condition of attending, reporters were not permitted to identify any donors without their permission. No photographs were allowed.
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