Ann Coulter is taking her criticism of President Trump to the next level following his national emergency declaration, with the conservative commentator declaring Friday, "the country is over."
Coulter hammered Trump in a Friday interview with KABC after he announced he would sign Congress' funding deal and declare a national emergency. "The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot," she said, per Mediaite. She also fumed that Trump is just "fooling the rubes" with this national emergency declaration.
The root of Coulter's criticism isn't that Trump is bypassing Congress, as she argued that Trump never needed Congress to build the wall at all. Instead, she suggested the president is actually "hoping" the national emergency declaration will just be blocked by the courts "because for some reason, he really doesn't want to build the wall."
On Twitter, Coulter said that responsibility for the border wall deal, which the president has said he is unhappy with, is "100% his," and she responded to Trump saying in his press conference that he barely knows Coulter by writing, "THANK YOU, Mr. President for admitting that your total capitulation on campaign promises has nothing to do with me."
Don't expect this criticism from Coulter to slow down anytime soon, considering she told KABC that she is "going to spend the rest of my columns denouncing the president, for the rest of my life." Brendan Morrow
The Espionage Act just became relevant again.
For the first time in the law's 100-year history, the Department of Justice has accused a journalist of violating it, charging Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with 16 counts of receiving or publishing classified information. Thursday's indictment also charges Assange with one count of conspiracy to receive the leaked documents from Chelsea Manning, and reinstates Assange's April charge of conspiring to violate computer hacking laws, The Daily Beast reports.
Assange's charges stem back to 2010, when then-Army intelligence analyst Manning allegedly leaked classified Department of Defense information to Assange for publication. Assange was charged in April with conspiring to help Manning hack those computers after London's Ecuadorian embassy revoked his asylum claim.
Thursday's charges immediately rang alarm bells for journalists, with The Daily Beast writing that it is a "stunning escalation of the Trump administration's war on the press." "Legal scholars believe that prosecuting reporters over their work would violate the First Amendment," The New York Times continues, which is partly why former President Barack Obama's administration never charged Assange under the Espionage Act. The DOJ's National Security Division head John Demers countered those concerns by saying "the department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy ... But Julian Assange is no journalist."
Assange was also sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail in the U.K., and Sweden has reopened a 2010 rape investigation into him. Sweden and the U.S. have both moved to extradite Assange after his prison stay. Kathryn Krawczyk
Kids who are the victims of racially-motivated bullying may be at risk in more ways than one, a new report has found.
The report analyzed data from the California Healthy Kids Survey, a voluntary survey administered to children through their schools. The results point to a worrying link between bullying and drugs and alcohol for children in California high schools from 2013 to 2018, U.S. News reported on Thursday. The data suggests that children who were bullied for their race, ethnicity, or origin were 11 percent more likely to drink alcohol, 9 percent more likely to use marijuana, and 8 percent more likely to use opioids or other medication not as prescribed.
The study found that black and Asian students were the most targeted for bullying, with 22 percent and 20 percent of each group reporting having been bullied at least once in the 2017-2018 school year. White students were the least affected by bullying, but that figure was still at 11 percent.
Being under stress can lead to risky or unhealthy habits even in adults. So the fact that it's affecting adolescents in schools is concerning, given that the still-developing brains of teenagers are already "more likely to engage in risky behavior," explained Virginia Huynh, a professor in child and adolescent development.
Read more about the survey and its results U.S. News. Shivani Ishwar
Facebook removed nearly as many fake accounts in the first quarter of 2019 as it has monthly active users, and it estimates fake accounts make up a growing percentage of the platform.
The company in its Community Standards Enforcement Report released on Thursday revealed that from January to March of this year, it removed a staggering 2.19 billion fake accounts. To put that record number in perspective, Facebook in the first quarter of this year said it had 2.3 billion monthly active users, The Washington Post reports.
The number of fake accounts deleted in this first quarter was up significantly from Q4 2018, when Facebook says it removed 1.2 billion accounts. Facebook on Thursday explained it has seen a "steep increase in the creation of abusive, fake accounts" in the past six months, especially because of "automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at onetime."
Facebook said that most of these accounts are deleted "within minutes of registration" and not counted as part of its number of monthly active users. But in its report, the company also said that "we estimated that 5 percent of monthly active accounts are fake," which The Associated Press reports is up from from between 3 and 4 percent in the previous report.
Facebook VP of Analytics Alex Schultz on Thursday said the "prevalence number for fake accounts includes both abusive and user-misclassified accounts," with an example of the latter being "when a person sets their pet up with a profile, instead of a Page." Overall, he said the company is "confident that the vast majority of people and activity on Facebook are genuine." Brendan Morrow
A Chicago judge has just ordered the unsealing of Empire star Jussie Smollet's criminal case file, NBC News reports.
Judge Steven G. Watkins said on Thursday that although Smollett's lawyers had argued the court documents should remain sealed to protect Smollett's privacy, this is inconsistent with Smollett's decision to speak publicly to the media about the case after the charges against him were dropped. "These are not the actions of a person seeking to maintain his privacy or simply be let alone," CNN reports.
Watkins also said that the "court cannot credit his privacy interest as good cause to keep the case records sealed." It remains unclear when the Smollett case file will be made publicly available, as multiple media outlets had been requesting.
Smollett in January claimed he was the victim of a hate crime, telling police that two men attacked him in Chicago. After an investigation, police accused Smollett of orchestrating the attack against himself because he was dissatisfied with his salary on Empire, and he was hit with criminal charges. But in March, those charges were suddenly dropped. Numerous questions remained about what led to that stunning turn of events, but the case file was sealed. Now that they've been ordered unsealed, once the documents are released, this could help elucidate prosecutors' decision to drop the charges, The New York Times notes.
Smollett has continued to maintain his innocence, saying that he only paid the two men who attacked him for personal training but not to help orchestrate the attack. After the charges were dropped, Chicago police and then Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted the decision, with Emanuel saying the situation is "making a fool of all of us." Brendan Morrow