Trump cabinet: Senate confirms Jeff Sessions as attorney general
The US Senate has confirmed President Donald Trump's nomination for attorney general, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, by a vote of 52 to 47.
The confirmation follows a series of divisive hearings during which Democrats attacked Mr Sessions's record on civil rights.
Democrat Elizabeth Warren was silenced after recalling historic allegations of racism against Mr Sessions.
The Alabama senator's nomination was among Mr Trump's most controversial.
Voting largely followed party lines, with just one Democratic senator - Joe Manchin of West Virginia - voting for Mr Sessions.
Mr Sessions's Republican colleagues in the chamber applauded him as their majority carried him over the line. He will now take charge of the justice department and its 113,000 employees, including 93 US attorneys.
More than 1,000 Rohingya feared killed in Myanmar crackdown, say UN officials
Aung San Suu Kyi criticised for failure to condemn army despite mounting evidence of atrocities on a huge scale
More than 1,000 Rohingya Muslims might have been killed in a Myanmar army crackdown, according to two senior United Nations officials dealing with refugees fleeing the violence, suggesting the death toll is far greater than previously reported.
The officials, from two separate UN agencies working in Bangladesh, where nearly 70,000 Rohingya have fled in recent months, said they were concerned the outside world had not fully grasped the severity of the crisis unfolding in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
“The talk until now has been of hundreds of deaths. This is probably an underestimation – we could be looking at thousands,” said one of the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. Both officials, in separate interviews, cited the weight of testimony gathered by their agencies from refugees over the past four months in concluding the death toll was likely to have exceeded 1,000.
Mississippi assembly opts for firing squads
A bill to hand executions to firing squads has been passed in Mississippi's state assembly. It wants the method used to thwart legal obstacles to lethal injections. Only two other US states have firing squads as options.
Mississippi lawmakers forwarded their executions amendment bill to their state's Senate on Wednesday, setting up three optional methods for 47 death row inmates, some of whom have waited decades.
The move follows last month's condemnation by the UN human rights commission of three firing squad killings in Bahrain, home of the US Navy's 5th Fleet, and outrage over executions in Indonesia and extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.
Doubts over lethal drugs
State executions came to a halt in Mississippi in 2012 amid nationwide legal challenges to lethal injection on the grounds that it is a cruel and unusual punishment violating the US Constitution.
Mississippi's Bill 638 submitted by Republican Robert Foster and backed by the chamber's judiciary committee chairman Andy Gibson, also a Republican, stipulates a legal sequence if methods are sequentially judged unconstitutional.
After police beating in Paris suburb, “All the youth feel humiliated”
OBSERVERS
Days of protests have been rocking the Parisian suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois after the alleged rape of a young black man in police custody. Elvis Zannou, a local resident, describes the recurring police violence in the “3000” projects.
On February 2, 2017, four officers arrested a 22-year-old youth worker named as Théo, with no criminal record, in projects known as “3000” located in the northeastern Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois.
Shortly thereafter, he was taken to the hospital, where medical tests confirmed that he had been sodomised with a police baton. The baton had been pushed in as far as 10 centimetres [about 4 inches].
The four officers have since been suspended. One has been charged with rape and three others with assault over the incident, which is just the latest in a long history of allegations of police brutality in the area.
Philippines’ Duterte berates policemen, delivers ultimatum
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte angrily dressed down more than 200 police officers on national television, calling them 'rotten to the core.'J Walker Glascock
In a televised address, President Duterte of the Philippines berated 228 police officers on Tuesday for a catalog of criminal and professional complaints, including corruption and drug use and distribution.
As a part of his latest tirade, the president delivered the group of officers from the National Police Force an ultimatum: either resign or prepare to be sent to Basilan Island, a Philippine province known as a stronghold of an Islamic terror group.
“I need policemen in the south. There is a lack of police officers in Basilan; that is why the police stations there are often under attack,” Duterte told the officers in his expletive-riddled oration, according to the Associated Press. “That is why all of you who are here, you are going to be part of Task Force South,” he continued. “If you don’t want to go there, go to your superior officer and tell them that you’re going to resign.”
“President Bannon,” explained
A narrative about who’s really in charge of the Trump administration is forming.
Updated by
On Monday morning, President Donald Trump decided that there was an urgent matter he needed to clear up for the public. “I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it,” he tweeted. “Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!”
It may seem odd that the president of the United States would feel compelled to remind the country that he is actually in charge. But over the past week and a half of Trump’s young presidency, a narrative has been gaining steam in the media and among political observers that it is not Trump but in fact White House chief strategist Steve Bannon who is actually running the show.
In the wake of the chaos following Trump’s order banning entry into the US from nationals of seven majority-Muslim countries — and in the wake of reports that Bannon was the chief architect of the policy — the hashtag #PresidentBannon began to spread on Twitter, and images of Bannon as a puppet master pulling Trump’s strings became commonplace. A Saturday Night Live skit concluded an Oval Office session with its version of Bannon asking Trump for the president’s desk back, and Alec Baldwin as Trump responding, “Yes, of course, Mr. President.”
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