Hasta La Gadget!

AUSTIN, Texas ― After an immigration sweep this month led to dozens of arrests here, a group of elementary school students looked to their teacher for an explanation. The teacher, who is forbidden from taking political stances in the classroom, asked them to write or draw what they were feeling.

The children all drew and wrote about President Donald Trump or his first major deportation operation.

“I’m scared they’ll take my mother or my father,” one student wrote. “I hate you dunel trump [sic].”

“I am angry and sad because I thinck I am going to Mexico [sic],” wrote another student. “I don’t speak Spanish. I know English. i am frum Austin [sic].” Another child wrote in Spanish about feeling “very scared because Donal trump says Mexico will pay for the wall and Mexico doesn’t want to.” One student drew a sad face shedding tears.

This month’s wave of hundreds of immigration arrests across the country included dozens of people without criminal records — a break with recent practice that has increased anxiety in immigrant communities. Now children are bringing those fears into the classroom, Texas teachers and parents tell The Huffington Post. HuffPost is withholding the names of the teachers because they were not authorized to speak to the media and risk losing their jobs.

Any extensive ICE arrests will inevitably affect children — including U.S. citizens — Donald Kerwin, the executive director of the Center for Migration Studies in New York, said, emphasizing the uncertainty that Trump has injected into the immigration debate. His organization estimates that 5.7 million U.S. citizen children nationwide live in households with at least one undocumented parent or close relative.

“It’s difficult to think of a crueler fate for a child than to see their parent deported,” Kerwin told HuffPost. “It’s like their world turns upside down on them. Studies show they mourn, have trouble sleeping, their eating patterns change. Some cannot concentrate in school, they’re fearful and some withdraw, while others act out in anger. Beyond losing a parent, they’re often dealing with the sorrow and distress of another adult, typically a second parent.”

Earlier this month, a student in a second Central Texas classroom approached his teacher to say his mother was thinking of leaving the United States rather than face the possibility of deportation. The child’s parent left Central America five years ago and is seeking asylum here, but now fears she’ll be deported instead. She doesn’t want to bring her U.S.-born child to the violence-plagued country of her birth. And if she and her brother — the child’s uncle — were deported, her son would be left without an immediate family member to step in as a parent.

The parent now says she plans to stay in the United States while her case continues. But to put her mind at ease, her son’s 22-year-old teacher offered to become the child’s legal guardian.

“Without thinking, I was like ‘I’ll take him,’” the teacher told HuffPost. “I’d rather know that I did something to help, even if my own life is on pause or I have to take my own steps slower… If I’d done nothing, that would kill me.”

The second teacher’s other students and their parents face similar fears, she says. ICE operations in front of a local H-E-B supermarket had left some students too nervous to go shopping. Rather than venture outside and exposing themselves or their parents to ICE, they’re making do with what they have to eat in the house.

Some parents worry that ICE agents will follow them if they take their kids to class.

“What we’re seeing is a lot of parents who used to pick up their children from school and now they’re sending them on the bus,” a third teacher told HuffPost. “The parents are afraid to come to the school.”

One Mexican-born parent, who has legal U.S. permanent residency but worries that her citizenship application might be endangered by Trump’s immigration crackdown, said ICE parked a car within blocks of her daughter’s elementary school last week.  

“The kids were very scared,” the parent told HuffPost. “Why do they have to be in front of the school? A child shouldn’t have to be living through this.”

The anxiety at the schools extends to some of the teachers, according to Montserrat Garibay, the vice president of Education Austin, the teacher’s union.

Some Austin instructors are undocumented themselves, but they allowed to work in the school system through an Obama-era program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that shields undocumented immigrants who entered the country as minors from deportation and provides a renewable two-year work authorization.

But Trump has offered mixed signals about whether he’ll extend that program, cancel it or allow it to lapse. At least two people with DACA permits were arrested during the wave of immigration arrests over the last two weeks, though one has been released.

“It’s an issue that’s bigger than just the students,” Garibay told HuffPost. “We have DACA-mented teachers that are really worried about their jobs,” he said, referring to the work permit program.

In theory, schools should not become a focal point of deportation fears. A 2011 policy restricts ICE from arresting people at sensitive places, including churches, funerals and schools. ICE’s brazen actions over the last weeks, however, leave some wondering whether the agency continues to follow it.

“To my knowledge, [ICE agents] haven’t entered a school,” Barbara Hines, the former head of the University of Texas at Austin Immigration Law Clinic, said at a conference last week. “But parking next to a school is the same thing.”

Students are still concerned, the first teacher said. As ICE swept through Austin, rounding up 51 people in the area, she was teaching lessons about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement for Black History Month, which began Feb. 1. When her students learn about the subject, they see parallels to their own lives, she said. They feel targeted for their brown skin like African-Americans are targeted for being black.  

“They’ve asked questions like, ‘Why us?’” the teacher, who gave her elementary class the drawing assignment, told HuffPost. “And there’s a lot of talk of Donald Trump. Like, ‘Is he the one doing this? Why does he hate us?’”

Since politics are off limits, she answers in the most neutral way she can.

“I tell them that just because a person is a leader doesn’t mean that they’re right,” she said. “It’s up to us to make sure that we tell other people so that they know it’s also not right. I tell them even though you think you’re little, it doesn’t mean you can’t teach others.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Feb 27 (Reuters) – A Georgia judge sentenced a man and a woman to spend years in prison on Monday for their roles in a 2015 Confederate flag display that disturbed a group of black people attending a child’s birthday party, prosecutors said.

Defendants Jose Torres, 26, and Kayla Norton, 25, were convicted earlier this month of charges that include making “terroristic threats” during the confrontation in Douglas County near Atlanta, which occurred at a time of heated national debate about a flag that many consider a symbol of racism.

Georgia Superior Court Judge William McClain sentenced Torres to serve 13 years in prison, and Norton to serve 6 years in prison, Douglas County District Attorney Brian Fortner said in a phone interview. Both face probation after their release, and were banished from Douglas County.

Attorneys for Torres and Norton could not immediately be reached for comment.

The sentences were a year longer than prosecutors had asked for, said Fortner, noting the crimes went beyond disagreements over the battle flag used by the pro-slavery South during the U.S. Civil War, which some defend as part of its heritage.

“This was a case where these people pulled out a shotgun and threatened to kill people at a party, including children,” he said.

The incident played out during heightened debate over the symbolism of the flag, triggered by the racially-motivated shooting deaths of nine black churchgoers in South Carolina weeks earlier.

Prosecutors said witnesses attending the birthday party, featuring a bouncy castle and snow cone machine, testified that people in a convoy of trucks displaying the flag shouted racial slurs as they drove by, stopping next to the party.

Torres was accused of pointing a shotgun at the predominately black party-goers and threatening to kill them, prosecutors said in a news release. Norton loaded the shotgun and gave it to him, they said.

The pair faced some of the most serious charges out of 15 members of the group “Respect the Flag” indicted over the incident, Fortner said. Two others facing similar charges pleaded guilty and were sentenced to lesser prison sentences. 

(Reporting by Letitia Stein; editing by Grant McCool)

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Whenever cable news broadcasts the regular White House press briefings these days, there’s a moment you’re likely to catch if you’re able to maintain interest in the proceedings. Sean Spicer will get animated ― shoutish and emotional ― and begin to weave away from whatever the message of the day might be. He’ll pick fights, he’ll air grievances ― mostly he’ll fall back on some flailing, superficial appearance of toughness and feigned stability. Poker players ― and fans of hacky poker movies ― have a name for this condition: tilt.

This is the quality that “Saturday Night Live” and its guest portrayer of Spicer, Melissa McCarthy, mined for great comedic effects. It’s also what The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noticed, detailed in a Sunday piece titled “Sean Spicer Is Losing His Grip.” Chances are you’ve noticed it too.

Spicer is hardly the first person to run the press room for a Republican president. He’s not the first press secretary who’s faced an unruly press corps. That he may hold to the opinion that the media is untrustworthy, or “the opposition,” hardly makes him unique in American politics, either. And as near as I can tell, he faced all of these challenges when he repped the Republican National Committee ― all without these regular lapses into emotional confusion and needless over-aggression.

But lately Spicer has been scoring own goals, getting into pointless dust-ups and burning his political capital with all of the fervor of a pyromaniac. And based upon Monday’s news, there’s no end in sight, unless he is the victim (or beneficiary?) of some soon-to-come “staff shakeup,” of which rumors abound.

Monday, Axios’ Mike Allen returned to the White House’s efforts to attempt to push back on a New York Times story that reported that Trump’s campaign aides “had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.” This effort involved literally putting rival reporters from The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal on the phone with, among others, CIA Director Mike Pompeo ― an unusual breach of protocol. Reporters were also provided with contact information for Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

On these calls, reporters weren’t given much to go on ― they were just told that the Times story was not accurate. While this didn’t do much to advance the story, the fact that these calls happened was subsequently leaked ― a backdoor way of getting Pompeo’s dispute into the public record. It was also a backdoor way of magnifying the similar assessment of an unknown FBI official, who referred to the Times’ story as “bullshit.” Notably, this FBI official declined to offer this assessment for public consumption ― it, too, was leaked to the press by the White House.

According to Allen’s report, it was Spicer who “personally picked up the phone and connected outside officials with reporters to try to discredit” the Times story, according to an unnamed “senior administration official.”

It is, of course, only natural that Spicer, as press secretary, would try to enable pushback by putting reporters in touch with those who could dispute the story. But many of these specific moves Spicer made will have the unintended effect of diminishing the perceived integrity of these sources. Considering that these efforts ended up only “frustrating the competing reporters” on these calls, as Allen reports, that’s a lot to give up for so very little.

Letting it be known that an FBI official has termed the Times story “bullshit” when that official specifically declined to let that be known is going to make the bureau seem less credible. Getting Burr and Nunes mixed up in the matter will make those committee chairmen look like water carriers for the Trump administration instead of independent actors. (Of course, in Spicer’s defense, Burr and Nunes could have declined to participate. Perhaps Nunes, who ended up being “in and out of an event” and unable to respond to reporters’ requests for comment, found a convenient means to have it both ways.)

Another thing Spicer enabled? This Axios article! Which means this story is just back in the news churn for another indeterminate period of time.

And this is just part of Spicer’s recent woes as he has attempted to ply his trade for the Trump White House. On Feb. 18, CBS News’ Major Garrett tweeted that two of his sources had told him that President Donald Trump’s nominee to be secretary of the Navy, Philip Bilden, was likely to withdraw from consideration ― the latest such person to decline to serve in a national security capacity for the administration. Spicer was on Twitter eight minutes later to forcefully dispute Garrett:

Maybe you’ve heard the punchline to this joke already. Per the Washington Post’s Missy Ryan:

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced that Philip Bilden, a private equity fund manager, had withdrawn his name in a decision “driven by privacy concerns and significant challenges he faced in separating himself from his business interests.”

“While I am disappointed, I understand and respect his decision, and know that he will continue to support our nation in other ways,” Mattis said in a statement.

In his own statement made public by the Pentagon, Bilden said he concluded that he would not be able to fulfill U.S. ethics rules “without undue disruption and materially adverse divestment of my family’s private financial interests.”

Read between the lines and you’ll see a Trump nominee who clearly didn’t like what he heard during his meeting with the Office of Government Ethics, which makes you wonder why Spicer would so confidently refute Garrett’s tweet. Did he not foresee how a private equity fund manager might not particularly fancy totally divesting from his assets? Either way, this episode had a familiar “Baghdad Bob” ring to it.

In another strange conflict between Spicer and reporters covering the president, the press secretary was at the center of a bizarre dust-up over the weekend that began with news leaking out about how he was contending with … news leaking out all the damned time. A Politico story by Annie Karni and Alex Isenstadt described how Spicer was making “random phone checks of White House staffers.”

According to the story, “after Spicer became aware that information had leaked out of a planning meeting with about a dozen of his communication staffers,” he convened an “emergency meeting” at which he ordered his staffers to relinquish their phones for a “phone check,” a move that would definitely root out the amateur leakers in his midst. Obviously, this wasn’t enough of a deterrent to keep Karni and Isenstadt from widely breaking the news of this unusual step.

But what happened afterward made the “phone check” look positively rational.

Late Sunday, the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner published a Paul Bedard story that essentially accuses Politico’s Isenstadt of callously chuckling as Spicer described Deputy Communications Director Jessica Ditto’s “emotional” response to the death of Navy SEAL Ryan Owens. But the evidence contained therein is tissue thin ― it’s solely the characterization of one unnamed “informed official” from the White House. Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring called the account a “patently false characterization of the conversation,” adding that Isenstadt was instead chuckling at Spicer’s heated response. And, after the fact, Isenstadt’s colleague Carrie Budoff Brown went on Twitter to essentially assail the White House for committing a malicious act of deceit:

It was a pretty ironic act as well, given the fact that Trump had, only days before, complained about White House leaks and specious sourcing as he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Was Spicer Bedard’s source? A few winks and a nudge or two are probably in order, at the very least.

As Wemple noted Sunday, Spicer’s cup of gripes has lately runneth over. It was only last week that the press secretary was sowing animosity anew by barring a number of news organizations (including CNN and The New York Times) from a closed-door gaggle of White House reporters.

A day later, Spicer ended up crosswise with another New York Times story, about how deftly Trump has historically used New York City’s tabloids to serve his ends. Spicer’s objection? The story misreported where he was born.

Of course, the paper subsequently endeavored to correct this matter. But after calling out the Times for not asking him for the correct information, Spicer then declined to go on the record and set the matter straight. Wemple’s succinct evaluation cannot be improved upon: “Leave it to Sean Spicer to request a correction and obstruct it in one breath.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper got in a quality zing, though:

At least Tapper is having a good time. The same cannot be said for Spicer, however. Frankly, it’s getting tough to watch him at work and not imagine that he’s constantly thinking, “This isn’t the job I signed up for.”

And maybe he didn’t. After all, Spicer has been serving the White House as both press secretary and White House communications director. That’s a herculean amount of work for anyone. Adding to Spicer’s woes, however, is the fact that he’s doing both jobs for a president who can be described as ― and I’m using the most charitable terms at my disposal ― a mercurial micromanager, one who apparently subjects Spicer to regular critiques.

The strangest thing about all of this is that it is impossible to know if Spicer isn’t a man more sinned against than sinning. Multiple sources have described the Trump White House to this reporter in the same consistent ways: an organization riven by factions, competing agendas and poor communication. It’s really no wonder why this White House is so leaky. It’s also not clear that Spicer, acting on his own, could solve this problem. That he’s taken to randomly checking his underlings’ phones suggests that the moves he could make are extremely limited.

In another presidency, Spicer would probably make a fine press secretary. For now, he’s the guy you’d be only too happy to see at the poker table.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

When it comes to bragging, no one does it like Donald J. Trump.

His constant bragging can seem pretty one-note at times, but not when it’s matched to the music of bassist Dywane “MonoNeon” Thomas Jr.

The Memphis, Tennessee, musician previously collaborated with Prince and Ne-Yo. In his latest project, he’s put music to 24 of Trump’s most outrageous brags.

The 26-year-old musician is playing bass to each of Trump’s brags and matching the president’s rhythm and cadence.

“I’m not a fan of his, but his brags sound like today’s mumble hip-hop,” Thomas told The Huffington Post. “I heard them and put musical pitches and notes to them.”

Although Thomas’ masterful playing makes Trump sound, well, musical, he has no plans of collaborating for reals.

“It’s a satire of how ridiculous he is,” Thomas said.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Sloppy data security practices at a toy company that sells a line of internet-connected stuffed animals has exposed the personal information of more than 800,000 customers, and some 2 million voice recordings ― many of them from children.

The toy animals, manufactured by CloudPets, have the ability to store and replay voice messages sent to them via the internet. Ideally, that means traveling parents ― for instance, a deployed military member ― could send a heartfelt message to their child’s teddy bear at home, to be replayed when their child interacts with the bear:

But since at least Christmas Day of last year, information on the CloudPets server ― including customers’ login and password information and voice recordings ― was stored in an exposed database easily accessible to anyone on the internet who knew where to look.

Online security expert Troy Hunt is one of the first to have noticed the issue. He and several others attempted to alert CloudPets to the security oversight numerous times, yet never heard back.

CloudPets also did not respond to a request for comment from The Huffington Post.

With a little sleuthing, and some help from CloudPets users willing to serve as guinea pigs, Hunt tracked down some surprisingly personal information on the CloudPets servers. Kids’ names, birthdays (minus the year) and their relationship with authorized users (i.e., parents, grandparents, friends, etc.) were all accessible.

So, too, were audio clips on the toys themselves. Hunt, who only accessed the information after obtaining permission from CloudPets users, describes on his website:

One little girl who sounded about the same age as my own 4-year-old daughter left a message to her parents: Hello mommy and daddy, I love you so much.

Another one has her singing a short song, others have precisely the sorts of messages you’d expect a young child to share with her parents. I didn’t download either pictures or recordings from other parties, only those I was specifically granted access to by HIBP subscribers, but the risk was clear.

It’s also entirely possible a hacker could use that information to push messages to the toys themselves.

The below video below ― which a Twitter user who goes by MisterZoomer told The Huffington Post his wife filmed as a lighthearted prank ― is a terrifying example of what’s actually possible with the technology:

“Parents need to work on the assumption that if they have a CloudPet, multiple unauthorized parties could have accessed their voice recordings,” Hunt told The Huffington Post in an email. “Because the service is still online today and account details were also leaked, those recordings could still potentially be accessed today.”

Those recordings don’t necessarily present a security threat in and of themselves, Hunt said, but parents should certainly be aware of what’s out there. And CloudPet users should be sure to change their passwords, especially if they’ve reused them for other internet accounts.

“Many of the same problems are present we have in other data breaches: email addresses could be used for spam or phishing, and reused passwords could be used to exploit other accounts,” added Hunt. “There’s little practical value for children’s voice recordings, but of course as parents we’d feel very uneasy knowing that other people could have them.”

The main takeaway? Think twice before you welcome any internet-connected device into your home, particularly ones that children may interact with on a regular basis.

“The bigger picture here is to think very carefully before giving a child a connected device like this,” Hunt concluded. “By all means, get them involved early with computers and responsible internet use, but in my view connected toys like this pose too great a risk.”

Hackers haven’t just accessed the data, according to Hunt. He says there’s clear evidence cybercriminals have held the database for ransom, at least twice, demanding money from the company in exchange for the data’s safe return.

The database was no longer publicly accessible as of Jan. 13, Hunt said, but anyone who obtained the data while it was live could still use it for nefarious purposes, including accessing a victim’s account.

“This service ― and the files ― really need to be taken offline ASAP until everything can be properly secured,” Hunt said.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.