Tag: Texas

Texas: 46 Found Dead in Truck Along US-Mexico Border; Human Smuggling Angle Suspected

A San Antonio fire department official said they found “stacks of bodies” and no signs of water in the truck, which was found next to railroad tracks in a remote area on the southern outskirts of the city.

San Antonio: The bodies of 46 dead migrants were discovered inside a tractor-trailer on Monday in San Antonio, Texas, city officials said, in one of the most deadly recent incidents of human smuggling along the US-Mexico border.

A San Antonio fire department official said they found “stacks of bodies” and no signs of water in the truck, which was found next to railroad tracks in a remote area on the city’s southern outskirts.

Sixteen other people found inside the trailer were transported to hospitals for heat stroke and exhaustion, including four minors, but no children were among the dead, the department said.

“The patients that we saw were hot to the touch, they were suffering from heat stroke, exhaustion,” San Antonio fire chief Charles Hood told a news conference. “It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer but there was no visible working A/C unit on that rig.”

Temperatures in San Antonio, which is about 160 miles (250 km) from the Mexican border, swelled to a high of 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39.4 degrees Celsius) on Monday with high humidity.

The city’s police chief William McManus said a person who worked in a nearby building heard a cry for help and came out to investigate. The worker found the trailer doors partially opened and looked inside and found a number of dead bodies.

McManus said this was the largest incident of its kind in the city and said three people were in custody following the incident, though their involvement is not yet clear.

A spokesperson for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said that its Homeland Security Investigations division was investigating “an alleged human smuggling event” in coordination with local police.

Christine and Michael Ybarra embrace at the scene where people were found dead inside a trailer truck in San Antonio, Texas, U.S. June 27, 2022. REUTERS/Kaylee Greenlee Beal.

Record crossings

The deaths once again highlight the challenge of controlling migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border, which have reached record highs.

The issue has proven difficult for US President Joe Biden, a Democrat who came into office in January 2021 pledging to reverse some of the hardline immigration policies of his Republican predecessor Donald Trump. Republicans have criticised Biden’s border strategy ahead of the midterm Congressional elections in November.

Mexico’s foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard called the suffocation of the migrants in the truck the “tragedy in Texas” on Twitter and said consular officials would go to the hospitals where victims had been taken to help “however possible.”

A spokesman for the Honduran foreign ministry told Reuters the country’s consulates in Houston and Dallas would be investigating the incident. Ebrard said two Guatemalans were hospitalised and Guatemala’s foreign ministry said on Twitter that consular officials were going to the hospital “to verify if there are two Guatemalan minors there and what condition they are in.”

The I-35 highway near where the truck was found runs through San Antonio from the Mexican border and is a popular smuggling corridor because of the large volume of truck traffic, according to Jack Staton, a former senior official with ICE’s investigative unit who retired in December.

In July 2017, 10 migrants died after being transported in a tractor-trailer that was discovered by San Antonio police in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The driver, James Matthew Bradley, Jr., was sentenced the following year to life in prison for his role in the smuggling operation.

Staton said migrants have regularly been intercepted in the area since the 2017 incident. “It was only a matter of time before a tragedy like this was going to happen again,” he said.

(Reuters)

Teenage Shooter Kills 19 Children, 2 Adults in Texas School; Suspect Killed By Police

“As a nation, we have to ask, when in god’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” US President Joe Biden asked.


At least 19 children were killed on Tuesday after a shooting at an elementary school in the southern US state of Texas, said State Senator Roland Gutierrez.

Gutierrez, citing Texas law enforcement officials, told broadcaster CNN that the shooter killed 18 children and three adults. The toll has since been revised.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said earlier that the suspect had also died, adding that “it is believed that responding officers killed him.”

US President Joe Biden ordered US flags to be flown at half-staff at the White House, military posts, naval vessels and US embassies as a “mark of respect for the victims of the senseless acts of violence.”

Biden, who was returning from a trip to Asia, delivered an emotional address later on Tuesday.

He said that he got the news while on his 17-hour flight back to Washington, when “it struck” him that “these kind of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world. Why?”

“As a nation, we have to ask, when in god’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” he said, as Congress has repeatedly failed to pass gun control legislation. The blocking of such bills is largely attributed to pressure from the powerful National Riffle Association lobby.

“It is to turn this pain into action,” Biden said.

What we know about the Uvalde shooting

The shooting took place at the small city of Uvalde, home to around 16,000 people.

The suspect, 18, was a local resident of the town and was believed to have had a handgun and a rifle with which he shot the victims, Abbott said.

DW correspondent in Washington, DC, Sumi Somaskanda said, “We have learned that the shooter drove up to the scene, abandoned his car and started the shooting.”

Law enforcement personnel guard the scene of a suspected shooting near Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, US May 24, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Marco Bello

Among the students killed there were second, third and fourth graders, meaning they were between the ages of 7 and 11, Somaskanda said.

A hospital had earlier reported the death of two people in the shooting. The Uvalde Memorial Hospital said it had received 13 children for treatment.

‘Another Sandy Hook’ 

Tuesday’s shooting was one of the deadliest attacks at a US grade school since 28 people were killed in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, almost a decade ago.

“It’s been 10 years since I stood up in a grade school in Connecticut… since then, there have been more than 900 incidents on school grounds,” Biden said.

“We have another Sandy Hook on our hands,” said US Senator Chris Murphy of the state of Connecticut. “Our kids are living in fear, every single time they set foot in a classroom, because they think they’re going to be next,” he added.

The attack came less than two weeks after a white gunman shot and killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in the second-largest city in the state of New York, Buffalo.

The US has suffered recurring mass-casualty shootings and gun violence. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 19,350 firearm homicides were reported in 2020, up nearly 35% compared to the year before.

People react outside the Ssgt Willie de Leon Civic Center, where students had been transported from Robb Elementary School after a shooting, in Uvalde, Texas, US May 24, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Marco Bello

‘I’ve had enough!’ — US basketball world leads searing response

The head coach of the Golden State Warriors, Steve Kerr, who was in Dallas on Tuesday night to play the Mavericks, seeking a spot in basketball’s NBA Finals, refused to answer questions on the game in his pre-match press conference.

“In the last 10 days, we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in southern California, and now we have children murdered at school. When are we going to do something?” he asked, before calling on US senators to reconsider a draft law on background checks for gun purchases called H.R.8 that has passed the House of Representatives twice in recent years.

“We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to put it to a vote despite what we, the American people, want,” Kerr said.

His opposing head coach, Jason Kidd of the Mavericks, also declined to answer questions on basketball, saying these things were not at the forefront of his mind even before the crucial game. The WNBA’s Dallas Wings issued a statement saying “Tonight we play for Uvalde.”

NBA veteran star LeBron James, meanwhile, asked, “Like when is enough enough man” on Twitter, saying that “these are kids and we keep putting them in harm’s way.”

The San Antonio Spurs, the closest team to Uvalde, also offered the city its condolences, saying “There are no right words.”

This article was originally published on DW.

US Justice Department Sues Texas Over Abortion Law

A lawsuit filed Thursday in a Texas federal court calls on judges to declare the law invalid, prevent it from being enforced and “protect the rights that Texas has violated.”


The US Justice Department is suing Texas over a new state law that bans most abortions, saying it was enacted “in open defiance of the constitution.”

A lawsuit filed Thursday in a Texas federal court calls on judges to declare the law invalid, prevent it from being enforced and “protect the rights that Texas has violated.”

The Texas law prohibits abortions after medical professionals detect cardiac activity – usually around six weeks after conception, a point at which some women do not know they are pregnant.

‘Clearly unconstitutional’

“The act is clearly unconstitutional,” attorney general Merrick Garland said, adding that a state may not prohibit any woman from making the decision to terminate her pregnancy before a viability.

He also said the Texas law deputises private citizens to serves as “bounty hunters” and that the Justice Department had filed the suit because it had the responsibility “to ensure no state can deprive individuals of their constitutional rights.”

Women’s choice is ‘not negotiable’

Vice president Kamala Harris said women’s rights and decisions involving their own bodies is not up for discussion.

“The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable,” Harris said.

“The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision, it is their body and no legislative institution has the right to circumvent the constitution of the United States.”

Court inaction prompts DOJ response

US President Joe Biden has said the law is “almost un-American.”

However, the US Supreme Court has refused to block the law.

DW’s Washington correspondent Stefan Simons said the Supreme Court’s decision has put it on a collision course with the Department of Justice.

“There was a five to four decision by the Supreme Court last week to not interfere, to not hear or honour the requests of pro-abortion institutions or NGOs asking this law to be stopped,” Simons told DW from the US capital.

“The Supreme Court decided five to four that it won’t do this, so now the DOJ, Department of Justice, federal department of justice is stepping in,” Simons said.

A challenge to a legal right

Many see the Texas law as the biggest curb to abortion in the United States since the 1973 Supreme Court affirmation of a constitutional right to an abortion set out in the Roe v. Wade decision.

Speaking to DW News’s Brent Goff, Simons said there is concern among pro-abortion groups that other states could follow Texas.

“It’s the most restrictive law in the entire United States, and you know what, the problem many people see or many observers and many pro-abortion organisations say is that other states will jump on this, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi,” Simons said.

Abortion providers have said they will comply with the law, but some of Texas’ roughly two dozen abortion clinics have temporarily stopped offering abortion services. Clinics in neighbouring states, meanwhile, said they have seen a surge in patients from Texas.

This article was first published on DW.

US Supreme Court Leaves Texas 6-Week Abortion Law in Place

The Texas law makes the state’s abortion rules the strictest in the US. Abortion campaigners failed in a court challenge to block the law. Texas dodged existing US abortion laws by using an unusual enforcement system.


Pro-choice campaigners have branded a Texan law prohibiting abortions six weeks after conception as “cruel” because they say it could impact 85% of terminations, including cases of rape or incest.

Originally signed by Texas governor Greg Abbot in May, the law — which went into effect Wednesday — forbids abortions in the state once a heartbeat is detected. Heartbeats can normally be heard around six weeks after conception, at roughly the same time or even before unplanned pregnancies tend to be discovered.

What does the law do?

The “Heartbeat Bill,” as it has come to be known, effectively made Texas the harshest state for abortions in the whole United States as of September 1.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights were among the groups that asked the Supreme Court to block the Bill. The country’s highest court did not take up the case, nor did judges rule on the constitutionality of the law.

“Approximately 85 to 90% of people who obtain an abortion in Texas are at least six weeks into pregnancy, meaning this law would prohibit nearly all abortions in the state,” an ACLU spokesperson said.

Most other US states that tried to restrict abortion earlier on in pregnancy have been stopped by the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that first made abortion legal across the country.

Also read: Why Amendments to Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill Don’t Go Far Enough

How did the law circumvent Roe V. Wade?

This new Texas law gets around that legal right by empowering private citizens to sue people who either provide or facilitate abortions, rather than calling on the government and law enforcement to police the restrictions. A previous anti-abortion law in Texas was quashed by the Supreme Court in 2016.

The ACLU argued that the law “creates a bounty hunting scheme that encourages the general public to bring costly and harassing lawsuits against anyone who they believe has violated the ban,” the ACLU said.

“Anyone who successfully sues a health center worker, an abortion provider, or any person who helps someone access an abortion after six weeks will be rewarded at least $10,000, to be paid by the person sued,” it said.

The ACLU also said that anti-abortion groups have already started to create websites to give Texans the chance to “submit ‘anonymous tips’ on doctors, clinics and others who violate the law.”

Even a person who drives someone to an abortion clinic could be liable to be sued for having helped enable the procedure.

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court formally denied an emergency request by rights groups and abortion providers to block the law.

The court, which was sharply divided on the decision, cited “complex and novel procedural issues.” The court voted 5-4 to deny the emergency appeal.

“Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” wrote liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion.

How will it affect women?

Women, who often do not discover they are pregnant before six weeks, will now be left with the option to either go outside Texas to have an abortion, get an illegal abortion in Texas, or have an unwanted pregnancy.

Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights said it would make women “travel out of state — in the middle of a pandemic — to receive constitutionally guaranteed health care.

“Many will not be able to afford to,” Northup said. “It’s cruel, unconscionable, and unlawful.”

The Texan law could also force many abortion clinics to shut down.

This article was originally published on DW News.

Voting Along Party Lines, Senate Democrats Pass Biden’s $1.9 Trillion COVID-19 Relief Plan

The Bill, which passed with the support of every Democrat but no Republicans, gives Biden his first major legislative victory since taking office in January.

Washington: The US Senate on Saturday passed President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan in a party-line vote after an all-night session that was delayed repeatedly as the Republican minority tried but failed to push through around three dozen amendments.

The plan passed in a 50-49 vote with the support of every Democrat but no Republicans. It is one of the largest stimulus Bills in US history and gives Biden his first major legislative victory since taking office in January.

The partisan victory was made possible by Democrats winning two Senate seats in Georgia special elections in January, giving them narrow control of the chamber.

Biden said on Saturday he hoped for quick passage of the revised Bill by the House of Representatives so he could sign it and start sending $1,400 direct payments to Americans. “This plan will get checks out the door starting this month to the American people, who so desperately need the help,” Biden said at the White House after the vote.

The final Bill includes $400 billion in one-time payments of $1,400 to many Americans, with a phase-out starting for those with annual incomes above $75,000. It also includes $300 a week in extended jobless benefits for the 9.5 million people thrown out of work in the crisis.

Also read: US Senate to Hold Confirmation Hearing For Vivek Murthy as Surgeon General

Democrats agreed to reduce those benefits from $400 a week in order to secure passage in the Senate. They want the Bill signed into law before current unemployment benefits expire on March 15, 2021.

About $350 billion in aid was also set aside for state and local governments that have seen the pandemic blow a hole in their budgets.

Senate fist bumps

House of Representatives majority leader Steny Hoyer said on Twitter that the House will vote Tuesday on the Senate-passed Bill.

Democrats broke out in applause amid passage of the Bill in the Senate on Saturday and liberal independent Senator Bernie Sanders fist-bumped Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer.

Schumer said the Bill would help the country get the upper hand against a pandemic that has killed more than 5,20,000 people across the United States and upended most aspects of daily life. “I want the American people to know that we’re going to get through this and someday soon our businesses will reopen, our economy will reopen and life will reopen,” Schumer said.

Also read: Amid Storm of Backlash over Mexico Trip, Senator Ted Cruz Flies Back to Frozen Texas

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, however, had harsh words about the measure. “The Senate has never spent $2 trillion in a more haphazard way or through a less rigorous process,” he said.

Republicans had sought a new round of aid about one-third the size of Biden’s plan. McConnell argued that even without this legislation, “2021 is already set to be our comeback year” because of relief Bills enacted last year.

The measure comes as an increasing number of states have relaxed restrictions designed to curb the pandemic. Texas earlier this week allowed most businesses to operate at full capacity, and California said it would soon allow Disneyland and other theme parks as well as sports stadiums to reopen at limited capacity.

But even as more and more Americans get vaccinated against COVID-19, top infectious disease official Dr Anthony Fauci has said that “now is not the time to pull back”.

Twelve-hour standoff

Disagreements among Democrats over the jobless benefits and the all-night effort by Republicans to amend a Bill that polls show is popular with voters illustrated the difficulty Biden will face in pushing other policies through a Senate that Democrats control by the narrowest of majorities.

Also read: Indian-Americans Taking Over US, Jokes Biden as His Administration Appoints Many to Key Posts

The chamber set a record for its longest single vote in the modern era – 11 hours and 50 minutes – as Democrats negotiated a compromise on unemployment benefits to satisfy centrists such as Senator Joe Manchin, who walks a tightrope as a Democrat representing West Virginia, which backed Republican former President Donald Trump in the November election.

The extended unemployment payments, which are to be paid out on top of state jobless benefits, proved to be the most contentious part of the Bill. The House Bill had set the supplemental benefit at $400 a week, but Senate Democrats finally agreed to knock that down to $300.

The House Bill also featured a measure to more than double the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which the Senate rejected. Moderate Democrats had feared that the higher jobless benefits and minimum wage hike would overheat the economy and hurt businesses in rural states.

Asked if the changes would frustrate some Democrats who propelled him to office in the November elections, Biden said: “They’re not frustrated. As Senator Sanders said, this is the most progressive Bill since he’s been here.”

Senate Democrats used a process called reconciliation to pass the measure with a simple majority rather than the 60 of 100 votes normally required under the chamber’s rules. It was unclear whether Democrats will try to use that manoeuvre on other policy goals such as legislation dealing with climate change and immigration.

Also read: Facing Low Odds of Confirmation, Neera Tanden Withdraws From Nomination as Biden’s Budget Chief

One Republican, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, left Washington on Friday night for a family funeral, meaning that Democrats did not need vice president Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote in the normally 50-50 chamber.

Republicans broadly supported previous stimulus packages to fight the virus and revive the economy. But with Democrats in charge of the White House and both chambers of Congress, they criticised this Bill as too expensive.

The country has yet to replace 9.5 million jobs lost since last year, and the White House says it could take years to do so.

Washington got unexpected good news on Friday after data showed that US employment surged in February, adding 3,79,000 jobs, significantly higher than many economists had expected.

(Reuters)

Trump Campaign Will Once Again Ask US Supreme Court to Upend Election Results

The Supreme Court on December 11 rejected a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states, including Pennsylvania, that went for Biden.

President Donald Trump‘s campaign said, on Sunday, that it would ask the US Supreme Court again to overturn results from the November 3 election, its latest long-shot effort to subvert the electoral process and sow doubt over the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

In a statement issued by the campaign, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said the campaign had filed a petition asking the high court to reverse three rulings by a Pennsylvania state court interpreting the state’s rules for mail-in ballots.

“The Campaign’s petition seeks to reverse three decisions which eviscerated the Pennsylvania Legislature’s protections against mail ballot fraud,” Giuliani said in a statement.

Giuliani said the filing sought all “appropriate remedies,” including an order allowing Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature to award the state’s 20 electoral votes to Trump. Biden won the state by more than 80,000 votes.

The petition is “frivolous” and is not going to stop Biden from becoming president on January 20, said Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky.

Also read: SCOTUS Junking Trump’s Election Lawsuit Shows Judicial Independence is a Necessity

“The Court will shut it down quickly,” Douglas said.

The Supreme Court on December 11 rejected a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states, including Pennsylvania, that went for Biden.

Several senior Republican US senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have acknowledged Democrat Biden as the country’s president-elect after the Electoral College affirmed his victory, and have rejected the idea of overturning the 2020 presidential election in Congress.

A candidate needs 270 Electoral College votes to win the White House. Biden won 306 of those votes to Trump‘s 232 and defeated the Republican president by more than 7 million ballots in the popular vote. Congress will count the electoral votes on January 6th and Biden will take office on January 20th.

Trump has made unsubstantiated claims of widespread electoral fraud and has tried but failed to overturn Biden’s victory, challenging the outcome in court in multiple states, while pressing state officials, lawmakers and governors to throw the results out and simply declare Trump the winner.

(Reuters)

Irked by Election Loss, Trump Hunkers Down at the White House, Avoids Talk of Future

“He wants no conversation about what he’s going to do when he leaves the building,” the source said.

Washington: Hunkered down in what one former White House official called the “presidential man cave” of the Oval Office, President Donald Trump does not want to talk about what lies ahead once he leaves office next month.

Several people familiar with the situation say he knows his time is up even as he presses the fight against the election outcome, despite having failed in a series of court challenges to overturn the results of the November 3 election that made Democrat Joe Biden president-elect.

With Monday’s Electoral College vote certifying Biden’s win, White House staff members are looking for jobs and planning their post-administration futures. First lady Melania Trump has looked for a school in Florida, where the couple is expected to reside, for their son Barron, People magazine reported.

A source close to Trump says he does not want to talk about the future beyond his remaining days in office. Any suggestion that he begin laying the groundwork for another run for president in 2024 is shunted aside, at least for now.

“He wants no conversation about what he’s going to do when he leaves the building,” the source said, asking for anonymity to speak candidly. “He’s convinced he’s leaving, but he compartmentalizes things. As long as he’s the president, he wants to be the president.”

Although an extrovert through his four years in office, Trump has largely closed himself off from the public in recent weeks, communicating mostly through tweets. He has done little to show he is focused on governing other than speaking at an event to highlight the speed of coronavirus vaccine development.

He has not played a significant role in responding to the computer hack that targeted the US government, one administration official said. “This is not his wheelhouse, and it also involves the Russians, which complicates things.”

Trump confers with a coterie of advisers including Vice President Mike Pence and chief of staff Mark Meadows, who update him on vaccine distribution and stimulus talks under way in Congress.

Also read: With the Breakdown of Democracy Comes the Rise of ‘New Despotism’ Globally

No concession

The president has brought in members of his campaign team for updates and to urge them to keep fighting.

His refusal to concede the election is egged on by endless phone conversations with his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and what the former White House official called “a rag-tag collection of lawyers that has kept the torch lit.”

Trump has declined to concede the election. He spends long days in and out of the Oval Office, sometimes not retiring to the residence until after 8 pm, calling allies and aides to discuss strategy. He has spent weekends at his nearby golf property and done one trip to Georgia to campaign for Republican US Senate candidates.

He frequently emphasises to advisers that he got 74 million votes, 9 million more than Democrat Barack Obama did in his successful re-election bid in 2012. Biden’s 80 million, he tells them, points to fraud.

Trump is irked at his fellow Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for announcing on the US Senate floor this week that he considered Biden the president-elect, two of the sources said.

The sources said Trump has been brushing off aides urging him not to carry out a threat to veto a massive defense bill, because he does not feel like he should reward McConnell for what he regards as bad behaviour.

Trump opposes the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act because it does not repeal a law that gives big tech companies liability from lawsuits. Another source said Trump had been advised his veto would be overridden, though some in his circle still advised him to go through with it.

The White House declined to comment.

Rudy Giuliani, attorney to the US President. Photo: Reuters

Pardon rush

Trump and his legal team have been preparing a number of potential pardons for him to carry out before leaving office, including for some close allies who may face legal jeopardy, one of the sources said.

Along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, a cacophony of noise erupts daily from the construction of platforms for Biden’s Inauguration Day events on Jan. 20.

One source said it was hard to imagine Trump showing up for the inaugural ceremonies and sitting behind Biden, having derided his Democratic rival on the campaign trail as incompetent. Trump has declined to say whether he would take part in the long-standing custom of showing the world a peaceful transfer of power.

Also read: Interview: ‘Not Only on the Right but Also on the Left, There Is Now Racialised Thinking’

What comes next for Trump is a matter of speculation.

A source close to Trump said he has in the past toyed with the idea of announcing a 2024 run on Inauguration Day to divert attention from Biden. That person and another source said Trump is being advised to put off an announcement about running again, and instead simply tease the possibility, because being an official candidate would invite a level of scrutiny he might not want.

The former White House official noted that Trump’s musings about running again would only give Democrats fodder to investigate him in years to come.

Trump faces a range of civil and criminal legal actions related to his family’s businesses and his activities before he took office, which could accelerate once he loses the legal protections granted the occupant of the Oval Office.

“If you want to lessen the chances of there being congressional investigations into 2021 and 2022, the best thing he can do for himself would be to stop these trial balloons,” the former official said.

(Reuters)

Google Secretly Gave Facebook Perks, Data in Illegal Ad Deal, 10 US States Allege

“Facebook decided to dangle the threat of competition in Google’s face and then cut a deal to manipulate the auction,” the complaint said, citing internal communications.

Facebook Inc and Alphabet’s Google, the two biggest players in online advertising, used a series of deals to consolidate their market power illegally, Texas and nine other states alleged in a lawsuit against Google on Wednesday.

Google and Facebook compete heavily in internet ad sales, together capturing over half of the market globally. The two players agreed in a publicised deal in 2018 to start giving Facebook’s advertiser clients the option to place ads within Google’s network of publishing partners, the complaint alleged. Executives at the highest level of the companies signed off on the deal, according to the complaint.

For example, a sneaker blog that uses software from Google to sell ads could end up generating revenue from a footwear retailer that bought ads on Facebook.

Google reached similar partnerships with other advertising companies as part of an effort to maintain market share that was internally codenamed Project Jedi, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.

What Google did not announce publicly is that it gave Facebook preferential treatment. Facebook agreed to back down from supporting competing software, which publishers had developed to dent Google’s market power, the complain alleged.

“Facebook decided to dangle the threat of competition in Google’s face and then cut a deal to manipulate the auction,” it said, citing internal communications.

In exchange, the states said, Facebook received various benefits, including access to Google data and policy exceptions that enabled its clients to unfairly get more ads placed than clients of other Google partners could.

Google spokesman, Peter Schottenfels, described the states’ accusations about the ongoing partnership as inaccurate and said that Facebook does not receive special data. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.

The complaint also alleged that Google and Facebook engaged in fixing prices of ads and have continued to cooperate, though the section was heavily redacted and left it unclear just how and when the companies allegedly used their “market allocation agreement.”

However, it said that “given the scope and extensive nature of cooperation between the two companies, Google and Facebook were highly aware that their agreement could trigger antitrust violations. The two companies discussed, negotiated, and memorialised how they would cooperate with one another.”

The states did not accuse Facebook of wrongdoing in the complaint.

The U.S. Department of Justice also has been investigating the agreement between the companies as part of its antitrust probe into Google, six people familiar with the investigation said. However, the Justice Department, which sued Google over separate conduct in October, has yet to bring any allegations related to the 2018 deal.

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

(Reuters)

US Supreme Court Dismisses Texas Suit Seeking to Overturn Trump Election Loss

In a brief order, the justices said Texas did not have legal standing to bring the case, abruptly ending what Trump had touted this week as his best hope for overturning the election.

Washington The U.S. Supreme Court, on Friday, rejected a longshot lawsuit by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states, dealing him a likely fatal blow in his quest to undo his election loss to President-elect Joe Biden.

The decision allows the U.S. electoral college to press ahead with a meeting on Monday, where it is expected to formally cast its votes and make Biden’s victory official. Biden, a Democrat, has amassed 306 votes to Trump‘s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College, which allots votes to all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on population.

The four states in question – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – contributed a combined 62 votes to Biden’s total. To win the White House, 270 votes are needed.

In a brief order, the justices said Texas did not have legal standing to bring the case, abruptly ending what Trump had touted this week as his best hope for overturning the election.

After midnight, Trump said on Twitter, “The Supreme Court really let us down. No Wisdom, no Courage!” Complaining that the court had rejected the case “in a flash” despite his winning more votes than any other sitting president, Trump wrote: “A Rigged Election, fight on!”

While Biden has moved forward with a wave of appointments for his incoming administration ahead of assuming office on January 20th, Trump and his legal team have filed a flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits in several states baselessly claiming voter fraud and challenging the results.

Trump‘s goal had long been for a case to reach the Supreme Court, where he had placed three new justices in his first term and where conservatives hold a 6-3 majority. The lawsuit brought by Texas and supported by 17 other states and more than 100 Republican members of Congress gave him that opportunity.

In the run-up the November 3rd election, Trump had pushed for the swift confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, with the publicly stated hope that she could be in a position to help rule on an election challenge. However, Barrett and the two other justices appointed by Trump – Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – signed onto the court’s order derailing the Texas suit without comment.

“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” the court’s order said.

Two of the court’s conservatives, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, said they would have allowed Texas to sue but would not have blocked the four states from finalizing their election results.

‘Nation of laws’

Together with a case from Pennsylvania it was the second time this week that the court spurned the attempt to overturn the will of voters.

The Texas case was filed on Tuesday by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of the state and a Trump ally. The Republican president on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene and become a plaintiff.

“There’s no way to say it other than they dodged,” White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said of the justices on Fox News Channel. “They dodged, they hid behind procedure, and they refused to use their authority to enforce the constitution.”

A Biden spokesman said it was “no surprise” the high court rejected “baseless attempts” to deny Trump lost the election. “Our nation’s highest court saw through this seditious abuse of our electoral process,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said on Twitter.

Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, also a Democrat, said in a statement that the ruling was “an important reminder that we are a nation of laws, and though some may bend to the desire of a single individual, the courts will not.”

The Texas lawsuit argued that changes made by the four states to voting procedures amid the pandemic to expand mail-in voting were unlawful.

“It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court decided not to take this case and determine the constitutionality of these four states’ failure to follow federal and state election law,” Paxton said in a statement.

Trump and many of his fellow Republicans have made unfounded claims that the expansion of mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic led to Biden fraudulently winning in election battleground states. State election officials have said they have found no evidence of fraud. Lawyers for Trump and his allies have failed to present evidence in court of the type of fraud he has alleged.

Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of seeking to shatter public belief in the integrity of U.S. elections and sabotage American democracy by trying to subvert the will of the voters. Trump advisers in and out of the White House have long been resigned to Trump‘s defeat despite the president’s quixotic quest to overturn the results. Trump has refused to concede the election and advisers expect him to continue to do so.

Trump‘s top legal advisers, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, said the president’s legal remedies were not exhausted and they would continue to work to invalidate the election ahead of January 6th, when Congress formally adopts the Electoral College results. Its role in doing so is largely ceremonial.

(Reuters)

Indian-Origin Democratic Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi Wins US House Race

Krishnamoorthi easily defeated Preston Nelson of the Libertarian Party. This is going to be his third consecutive term.

Washington: Indian-origin Democratic Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi has been re-elected to the US House of Representatives for the third consecutive term.

Krishnamoorthi, 47, who was born in New Delhi, easily defeated Preston Nelson of the Libertarian Party. When last reports came in, he had accounted for nearly 71% of the total votes counted.

Krishnamoorthi, whose parents are from Tamil Nadu, was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2016.

Meanwhile, Congressman Ami Bera is seeking his fifth consecutive win from California and Ro Khanna his third term in the House of Representatives from California.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is seeking her third consecutive term from Washington state.

Also read: US Election Results: Trump Ahead in Battleground States, Biden Expresses Confidence

Voting in both California and Washington states continues and results are expected to be declared in the wee hours.

Dr Hiral Tipirneni is seeking her third consecutive attempt from the sixth Congressional District of Arizona. Sri Kulkarni from the Democratic Party was giving a tough fight to the Republican Party’s Troy Nehls from the 22nd Congressional District of Texas.

Republican Manga Anantatmula was trailing by nearly 15 percentage points against Democratic incumbent Gerry Connolly from the 11th Congressional District of Virginia.

(PTI)