T-Mobile is now offering the budget-tier Galaxy J3 Prime, a smartphone with a 5-inch HD display alongside decent specifications and, perhaps more importantly, a mere $6/month price if purchased with a device payment plan. Those who choose to purchase the phone outright will be charged $150 USD, though there’s also the pesky (and somewhat ample) $25 SIM card fee to … Continue reading
WASHINGTON ― The Trump administration has fought a long campaign against so-called sanctuary cities, where local law enforcement limits its cooperation with deportation efforts.
A centerpiece of the campaign has been a focus on alleged victims of the “sanctuary” policy ― none more than Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old fatally shot in 2015 in San Francisco. The undocumented man charged in her murder had been released by San Francisco authorities a few months earlier, despite Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to hold him.
What happened was tragic. But what San Francisco did wasn’t illegal: Jurisdictions are allowed to deny ICE “detainer” requests, and they have good reasons for doing so.
On Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions seemed to suggest that it is illegal, contradicting his own department’s acknowledgement that it’s not.
“No jurisdiction has a right to violate federal law, especially when that violation leads to the death of innocent Americans, like Kate Steinle,” Sessions said in a speech, according to prepared remarks.
The Justice Department couldn’t say what law Sessions was referring to. “The AG didn’t say that San Francisco broke the law by not honoring a detainer request,” a spokesperson, who would not comment by name, said in an email. The official declined to provide further clarification on his remarks.
Creating this sort of confusion and ambiguity has been a hallmark of President Donald Trump’s administration, and it has served its goals. The strategy has been particularly striking during the fight on sanctuary cities, as Trump and Sessions have repeatedly misled about the law and court rulings in order to make a broader case that jurisdictions that don’t comply with ICE’s requests are putting Americans in danger.
It’s either that they don’t understand these issues at a very elementary level or that they’re intentionally inserting red herrings into their argument because they know that they can’t win on the merits.
Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project
There are only a few possibilities for why they’d do such a thing, and all of them are troubling.
“It’s either that they don’t understand these issues at a very elementary level or that they’re intentionally inserting red herrings into their argument because they know that they can’t win on the merits,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “Either way, it’s not what you would expect from the top law enforcement official in the country.”
The Trump administration seems to be taking advantage of the fact that immigration law is complicated. Officials throw out mentions of Statute 1373 of Title VIII of the U.S. Code and then immediately refer to detainers, a conflation that hides the fact that the law says nothing about jurisdictions holding people on ICE’s behalf. In fact, the law is relatively narrow: It prohibits local officials from preventing or restricting the sharing of immigration status with the federal government.
The statute came up in a civil case against the city and county of San Francisco filed by Steinle’s family over her death. In the ruling dismissing that case, the judge wrote that “no plausible reading of [the statute] encompasses the release date of an undocumented inmate” ― meaning San Francisco’s failure to notify ICE that it was set to release the man did not violate Statute 1373.
Trump’s executive order threatening funds for sanctuary cities targets not just jurisdictions that violate Statute 1373 but also those that have “in effect a statute, policy, or practice that prevents or hinders the enforcement of Federal law.” Sessions and Trump often use San Francisco and Steinle’s death as examples.
After legal challenges from San Francisco and the Bay Area’s Santa Clara County, Justice Department attorneys argued in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that it would in fact be applied narrowly based on the statute and acknowledged that detainers aren’t mandatory.
On Tuesday, the federal judge sided with the two sanctuary jurisdictions anyway and blocked the order, ruling that the government could enforce the statute regarding information-sharing but that the broad wording of the order was likely unconstitutional.
The federal government can’t legally force local governments to do its bidding. And local governments, including San Francisco’s, say sanctuary policies are important for both public safety and their budgets. Making immigrant communities fearful of police hurts their ability to work with them as witnesses or victims, they argue, and it’s expensive to hold people they’d otherwise release. There’s also legal liability: Courts have ruled that it’s unconstitutional to continue to detain people without a warrant and solely based on ICE’s requests.
That’s why the Trump administration’s efforts to force jurisdictions to honor detainer requests are unlikely to prevail in court. But there’s another way they could take down “sanctuary” policies: by convincing the public that the policies are dangerous and illegal so that local officials will be pressured into dropping them on their own.
“I think that what we’re seeing is there is a desire to scare cities and counties into cooperating with the federal government’s immigration practices, even when there is no legal requirement that those cities or counties do so,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law who specializes in immigration law.
“The attorney general has a large bully pulpit,” he said. “It’s not as big as the president’s, but it’s a megaphone nonetheless, and the saber-rattling that Attorney General Sessions is repeatedly engaging in has the power to bring some jurisdictions along.”
As the Trump administration attempts to ramp up its deportations, one way to do so will be by getting more help from local law enforcement. That means the administration has every incentive to cajole local officials into doing what it wants, even if it can’t back up its threats.
“The federal government can’t execute these mass deportations without the help of local law enforcement, and so they’re doing what they can to threaten these jurisdictions around the country to do their job for them and help them implement deportations,” said Angie Junck, an attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco. “They know that it’s critical, and their whole strategy is to bully because the law clearly has not been on their side.”
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The Working Families Party, a labor union-backed progressive party, notched its third state legislature victory ever on Tuesday.
WFP candidate Joshua Hall, a vice president of the Hartford Federation of Teachers, defeated Democrat Rickey Pinckney and independent Kenneth Green in a special election for the 7th District in the Connecticut House of Representatives.
“The 7th district made it clear tonight that they’re not satisfied with the direction that our economy and state are moving towards,” Hall said in a statement about his election win. “They’re concerned about the quality of education in our schools, having good jobs and vibrant neighborhoods, and making sure that we have a just budget that strengthens their ability to earn a good living and care for their families. That starts with eliminating backdoor tax increases on working families and setting budget policy that generates revenue without harmful cuts.”
Hall will caucus with Democrats, who have a majority in the state House.
The Working Families Party considers his win a major step forward in its efforts to become a major political force. Hall is only the third state legislator to get elected on the Working Families Party ticket alone.
Connecticut state Sen. Ed Gomes won as a Working Families Party candidate in a February 2015 special election after losing the Democratic nomination at a state convention. New York state assemblywoman Diana Richardson also won as a WFP candidate in a May 2015 special election.
Unlike the Green Party or other independent left-leaning parties, the WFP frequently functions as a progressive faction of the Democratic Party in the handful of states where it has a large presence. Progressive Democratic candidates that elicit the WFP’s endorsement are often listed on their election slate.
It is easier for the WFP to get candidates elected in races against Democrats in special elections where the two major parties’ influence often matters less.
It can sometimes serve as a way for them to pack the Democratic Party with more progressive figures. Both Gomes and Richardson were subsequently re-elected as Democrats.
In Connecticut’s 7th, Hall campaigned against a proposal by Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) to shift a portion of teacher pension contributions to local municipalities. The plan would cost Hartford alone $17 million, according to the Hartford Courant ― a sum that Hall said the city’s school system could not afford.
Joe Dinkin, national communications director of the Working Families Party, said the election of President Donald Trump likely played a role in Hall’s election given the enthusiasm it has awakened in the party’s progressive base.
“Right now voters are more hungry than ever for somebody with an aggressive approach to dealing with their problems and not somebody served up by the local establishment,” Dinkin said.
Hall’s election is “huge,” said Gary Rose, chair of the department of government at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
The Working Families Party win reflects a combination of progressive frustration with Malloy’s turn toward more fiscally conservative policies and the revival of the Democratic Party’s left wing nationally in the wake of the contentious primary between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), according to Rose. Malloy is seeking $1.6 billion in concessions from the state’s public-sector labor unions to patch a two-year budget deficit.
“The Democratic Party in Connecticut has been a machine for many, many years but right now it is a party that is suffering from an identity issue in terms of what its values are and what it represents,” he concluded. “It’s perhaps something that is on the horizon here in Connecticut.”
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There’s a new argument circulating on Capitol Hill, as conservative House Republicans try to win over more moderate colleagues who oppose the GOP’s bill to repeal Obamacare.
It goes like this: Thanks to an amendment to the American Health Care Act introduced this past week, states would ultimately have discretion over whether to keep two of the Affordable Care Act’s most popular and important provisions: a prohibition on charging higher premiums to people based on health status and a requirement that all plans cover an “essential” set of benefits.
Conservatives argue that these provisions make insurance premiums more expensive. Moderates worry that without these requirements, people with pre-existing conditions would lose access to comprehensive coverage.
Under the amendment, the two requirements would technically remain in place, but states could seek permission from the federal government to waive them.
The measure was formally introduced by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), who negotiated the terms with Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), head of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus.
“If a governor of New Jersey wants to keep Obamacare just like it is, with the very few exceptions that were in the base bill, they can do that,” said Meadows on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday. “But a governor of another state, whether it be Texas or Nebraska or Florida, can waive out some of those things that drive up premiums. It’s the best of both worlds.”
In other words, states that like Obamacare would get to keep its best parts.
But could they really?
In the old days, before Obamacare, only a small handful of states had laws prohibiting insurers from charging higher premiums to people with pre-existing medical problems. None mandated that all plans cover a set of essential benefits.
A big reason for that was a recognition that these requirements don’t work well on their own. They need generous subsidies (so lower-income people can afford coverage with reasonable benefits) and financial penalties for declining coverage (so people won’t wait until they get sick before they buy insurance). In states that introduced the requirements on their own (without the subsidies and penalties), premiums skyrocketed ― leading states like Kentucky to abandon the reforms and others like New York to end up with deeply dysfunctional insurance markets.
That experience loomed large in the minds of the Affordable Care Act’s architects. It’s why the law introduced both an individual mandate to obtain insurance and a set of subsidies that offer the most help to people who would otherwise struggle the most with insurance costs. The GOP replacement would eliminate the mandate, while shifting financial assistance away from people with low incomes or high insurance costs. And it would do that in all states, not just the ones seeking waivers.
The cumulative effect of all these changes is far from clear-cut. Chris Jacobs, a former Heritage Foundation analyst who is now CEO of Juniper Research Group, is among those experts who doubt that many states would even try for waivers from the pre-existing conditions and essential benefits requirements. But other analysts believe states would find it difficult to resist the pressure from insurers, who would fear a replay of what happened in Kentucky and New York.
If “you dramatically scale back subsidies and have no individual mandate to avoid adverse selection and keep premiums down,” said Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, then states would be under “immediate pressures to roll back more and more” of those protections.
More important, even states that didn’t seek waivers would be subject to the rest of the American Health Care Act’s changes ― which would be every bit as severe as they were a month ago, when support for the bill crumbled following a Congressional Budget Office estimate of its likely effects on health insurance.
It’s gotten a bit lost in the last few weeks, with all the focus on pre-existing conditions, but the most consequential part of the GOP bill is arguably the way it yanks financial aid away from people who can’t get health insurance simply because they can’t afford it on their own.
This includes the proposed change in the formula for calculating tax credits, which currently offer much more assistance to people with lower incomes, higher insurance costs or both. It also includes a massive cut to Medicaid that, according to the CBO, would reduce federal spending by $839 billion over 10 years ― and drive up the number of people without coverage by 14 million.
These cuts would devastate not just poor people who, without Medicaid, have no way to pay their medical bills. They would also devastate hospitals, which depend on those Medicaid dollars to finance care for the poor.
Consider how this would play out in a state like New York, where the number of uninsured residents fell by 259,000 because of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. New Yorkers might think their state officials could protect them from the worst effects of the GOP bill. But they couldn’t. The state would lose the federal support it gets for expanded Medicaid, forcing it either to come up with a lot of extra money or (more likely) to cut the program, so that many more people would end up uninsured.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers buying coverage on their own would face total annual costs ― that is, premiums plus out-of-pocket costs ― that were $2,708 higher on average, according to a report from the Center on American Progress. That’s because of the way the GOP bill’s changes to insurance regulations and financial assistance would interact with each other: There would be savings for some people, particularly the young and the healthy, but big new costs for others.
Earlier this week, when Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) appeared on CNN to defend his support of the GOP bill, he said, “Some aspects of this are troublesome to a few of our members ― not me, because this would not impact New York in the least.”
It wasn’t clear whether Collins was speaking specifically about the new amendment or the bill as a whole. But the idea that people in districts like his could avoid serious pain from the American Health Care Act is fanciful ― as he and his fellow Republicans will discover if it becomes law.
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In the past few weeks, we’ve started to see an increase in the number of leaks regarding the iPhone 8. Most of them come in the form of schematics and drawings, and for the most part they depict an iPhone where the dual rear-facing cameras are stacked vertically instead of horizontally like we’ve seen in the iPhone 7 Plus.
In case you’re wondering how legit those schematics are, your guess is as good as ours, but it seems that they’re slowly gaining a fair bit of traction because a recent tweet from Benjamin Geskin (via 9to5Mac) has revealed alleged photos of the mold for the iPhone 8 that confirms some of its design. Geskin links to Slashleaks where there are additional photos, one of which is allegedly for the front portion and one for the back.
#iPhone8 mold and diagram leaked.
(source: https://t.co/csp57Y1iMk) pic.twitter.com/XzXDZmqQlL
— Benjamin Geskin (@VenyaGeskin1) April 28, 2017
The back portion seems to confirm the new dual-lens camera design, while the front shows off a couple of holes which seems to be in line with an earlier schematic that suggested dual front-facing cameras, which we speculated could be used for the rumored 3D laser scanner feature.
Also the mold’s design seems to suggest that a rear-facing Touch ID is no longer an option, which for some fans is probably good news. That being said, it’s hard to tell if these molds are the real deal or if they’re fake, or maybe for a different device, so obviously the best thing to do now is take it with a grain of salt.
Alleged iPhone 8 Mold ‘Confirms’ Its Design , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
The other day thanks to Xbox achievements that were spotted online, it was suggested that the Joker could be an upcoming character for Injustice 2 that the folks at NetherRealm had yet to announce. For those wondering about whether or not it was true, you’ll be pleased to learn that it is true and that the Joker will be officially part of the Injustice 2 roster.
According to the YouTube description of the character, “Though killed by Superman, the Joker continues to haunt the lives of all those touched by his madness. By destroying Metropolis, he set the events in motion which made enemies of Superman and Batman. If he were alive to see the chaos he’d created, he would surely be smiling.”
To be fair given how prominent the Joker has been in the DC universe as well as the movies in recent times, the character doesn’t really need an introduction. However Injustice 2’s version of the Joker is a bit different from what you might have expected from the comics and movies (although we guess it comes pretty close to Suicide Squad’s version) as well as the previous Injustice game.
In any case you can check out the character’s gameplay trailer in the video above if you are interested. Injustice 2 is set for a release on the 16th of May where it will arrive on both the Xbox One and PS4.
Joker Officially Announced For Injustice 2 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Nintendo is a company that makes rather odd decisions, and sometimes it works out for them, and sometimes it doesn’t. An example of this would be the company’s decision to discontinue the NES Classic Edition which is basically a modern revival of the console in a $60 package. It came preloaded with classic games and has proven to be a huge hit.
In fact recently during an interview with TIME, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime revealed that they had managed to sell 2.3 million units of the console to date, which is an increase from the 1.5 million units we heard about back in February. Given that figure it sounds like if anything Nintendo should continue with it, right? However according to Fils-Aime, he reiterated that the console was only meant to be a temporary thing.
The Nintendo exec was quoted as saying, “We had originally planned for this to be a product for last holiday. We just didn’t anticipate how incredible the response would be. Once we saw that response, we added shipments and extended the product for as long as we could to meet more of that consumer demand.”
He also offered up a reason why the company decided to discontinue it, saying that there were other areas that they wanted to focus on. “But from our perspective, it’s important to recognize where our future is and the key areas that we need to drive. We’ve got a lot going on right now and we don’t have unlimited resources.” That being said, we have heard the rumors of a possible SNES Mini in the works that could replace the NES Classic Edition, so here’s hoping that’s true.
2.3 Million NES Classic Editions Have Been Sold , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
NASA has published a series of images showcasing the prototype of an inflatable greenhouse that may one day be used to grow food in Earth-like conditions…while on Mars. The greenhouse and others like it would exist to provide food for human astronauts who eventually make their way to the Red Planet. This prototype joins numerous studies conducted by the space … Continue reading
Poor Samsung. Following its fix for that we-swear-it’s-not-a-bug reddish screen tint issue comes the realization of another growing problem: an increasing number of handset owners say their phone keeps restarting on its own. The issue has affected many upset owners who have taken to Reddit, Samsung’s own forums, and other online destinations to complain. Some report the handset failing to … Continue reading
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