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Yahoo
4 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Laura Loomer meets with JD Vance at White House complex, sources say
Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who once posted a video claiming 9/11 was an 'inside job,' was back at the White House complex Tuesday morning, where she met privately with Vice President JD Vance, three sources familiar with the meeting tell CNN. The sources would not share the substance of the one-on-one closed-door meeting, which occurred in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, or what was discussed. Loomer did not meet with President Donald Trump and has since departed the White House complex, one of the sources said. After Loomer's last known visit to the White House in April, the White House fired several National Security Council staffers whom she labeled as disloyal. The administration also fired the director and deputy director of the National Security Agency. Loomer, who has a loyal online following, has been an influential figure in the Trump administration. She has a direct line to the president and has been known to influence personnel decisions, though she has not been able to secure a White House press credential. 'I do think there's a fear that I may ask questions about the loyalties of people in the White House,' she told CNN recently, 'and they fear me having a national and global microphone to ask those questions.' Loomer had publicly criticized then-national security adviser Michael Waltz before he was ousted from his position, accusing the former Florida congressman of making poor personnel choices. She weighed in more recently on the administration's move to withdraw Jared Isaacman as its nominee to be the next NASA administrator, touting Isaacman's professional accomplishments and questioning why the White House would not move forward on him. During the 2024 campaign, Trump's travels with Loomer on September 11 were illustrative of her influence with the then-candidate. But her proximity to Trump sparked some friction in part because she had previously posted a video claiming that the attack on the World Trade Center towers was an 'inside job.' Loomer told CNN at the time, 'I've never denied the fact that Islamic terrorists carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In fact, the media calls me anti Muslim precisely for the reason that I spend so much time focusing on talking about the threats of Islamic terrorism in America.'
The Irish Sun
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Irish Sun
Brit held by US after being accused of ‘spying and plotting' for China
A BRITISH businessman has been accused of spying and plotting to smuggle sensitive military technology to China. The FBI claim investigators intercepted phone calls in which John Miller, 63, called Chinese leader Xi Jinping as "The Boss'. The 63-year-old from Kent is also alleged to have tried to buy military hardware in the US for the People's Liberation Army. This included missile launchers, Other equipment he attempted to purchase included a hand-held device approved by America's National Security Agency for the secure communication of classified material. Mr Miller also suggested smuggling a device by glueing it inside a food blender so it could then be 'sent via DHL or Fedex to Hong Kong, according to US court papers. The FBI said Mr Miller calling Xi 'The Boss' showed his 'awareness that he was acting at the direction and control of the [Chinese] government'. He was arrested on April 24 after he was caught in a sting when the 'arms dealers' he was negotiating with turned out to be undercover FBI agents. Mr Miller was on a business trip to Belgrade, Serbia, at the time and is still being held last night facing extradition to the US. He is accused of conspiring with US-based Chinese national, Cui Guanghai, 43, and if convicted, both men face up to 40 years in prison. Most read in The Sun Neighbours at his five-bedroom £1.5million home in Tunbridge Wells described him a 'respectable family man', according to the Mail on Sunday. 1 The FBI claim investigators intercepted phone calls in which alleged spy John Miller called Chinese leader Xi Jinping 'The Boss' Credit: Alamy
Boston Globe
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Ronald Goldfarb, legal reformer who battled Mafia for RFK, dies at 91
Many of his nearly a dozen books stemmed from work done by his Washington law firm, which specialized in public interest cases, taking on subjects such as farm laborer rights in 'Migrant Farm Workers: A Caste of Despair' (1981) and the penal system in 'After Conviction: A Review of the American Correction System' (1973), written with law partner Linda Singer. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Following the leaks of National Security Agency files by contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, Mr. Goldfarb edited essays from policy experts and ethicists for the 2015 book 'After Snowden: Privacy, Secrecy and Security in the Information Age.' Advertisement 'National security and constitutional liberty are not an either-or proposition,' Mr. Goldfarb said at the Miami Book Fair that year, 'but we have to strike an exquisite balance.' His time in the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also came to represent competing priorities, he contended. Mr. Goldfarb was recruited in 1961 and assigned to the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section — a once tiny unit that grew to more than 70 members under RFK. Advertisement Meanwhile, President John F. Kennedy had ordered an all-out effort to depose Cuban leader Fidel Castro after the calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The anti-Castro plans, overseen by Robert Kennedy, included the CIA seeking possible hit men among mobsters, who were eager to bring back their gambling operations in Cuba, according to later disclosures by congressional investigations and leaked documents. 'They thought they could burn their candle at both ends, and both work with the Mafia at the same time that we were harassing them, and prosecuting them, and investigating them and making their lives miserable,' Mr. Goldfarb told an audience in Alexandria, Va., in 2002. This double standard became one of subplots in Mr. Goldfarb's 'Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes: Robert F. Kennedy's War Against Organized Crime' (1995), a part memoir and part analysis of RFK's single-minded drive to mobilize federal law enforcement agencies against the Cosa Nostra and others. Mr. Goldfarb's path to the Justice Department began with a chance meeting. He had come to Washington to pay a social visit to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. On the way, Mr. Goldfarb stopped to see a law school friend, who introduced him to a recruiter for RFK's team. His pitch to Mr. Goldfarb was direct: Toss out your plans to go into academia and stay in the courtroom. Mr. Goldfarb had served in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG Corps, in the Air Force defending airmen in court-martial hearings and other cases. 'And I ended up in the 'New Frontier,'' he said, using a term coined to describe the youthful President Kennedy and his policies. Advertisement Mr. Goldfarb, however, was initially wary of RFK over his past work. In the early 1950s, Robert Kennedy was assistant counsel for the 'Red Scare' subcommittee led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, that waged career-crushing inquests into suspected communist sympathizers. 'I just thought, like other people, that he was brash, and a bully, and that it was strictly nepotism that he was made attorney general,' Mr. Goldfarb told the Washington City Paper. But he soon began to admire Robert Kennedy's uncompromising style, he said. Mr. Goldfarb was sent to Newport, Ky., a Cincinnati suburb he described as a 'classic sin city' that at the time was notorious for its political corruption and mob-run vice. Mr. Goldfarb aided in investigations that led to the conviction of nearly the entire Newport city government and dozens of others. He also worked closely with the county's reform-minded sheriff, George Ratterman, a former professional football player who had been drugged and photographed in bed with a stripper in a blackmail attempt during the campaign for sheriff in 1961. The caper was exposed and Ratterman surged to victory. The crime syndicates in northern Kentucky eventually moved out. In his book, Mr. Goldfarb adopted much of RFK's views that organized crime was a direct threat to the rule of law and confidence in the political system. 'These were predators, often totally asocial animals, who preyed on society, had no socially redeeming ends, who used the vilest means to get their way, and whose actions, if unchecked, would lead to anarchy,' he wrote. 'They were perfect villains.' Advertisement Yet Mr. Goldfarb also recounted RFK's shortcomings, which included an obsessive pursuit of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was convicted in 1964 of jury tampering and other charges and began serving a 13-year sentence in 1967. (The sentence was commuted in 1971 by President Richard M. Nixon and Hoffa was last seen in 1975, but details of his presumed slaying remained unsolved.) On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Goldfarb was part of a meeting with Robert Kennedy that ended shortly before lunch. About an hour later, news broke that President Kennedy had been shot while his motorcade drove through Dallas. For decades, Mr. Goldfarb staked out a position at odds with the Warren Commission's conclusion that the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone in a self-hatched plot. In his book and later articles, Mr. Goldfarb left open the possibility that organized crime bosses — angered by RFK's crusading fervor — had a hand in planning the JFK assassination. 'The most compelling evidence concerns conversations among leading organized crime figures in 1962 and 1963 who were outraged by [Robert] Kennedy's crusade against them,' Mr. Goldfarb wrote in a 1995 opinion piece in The Washington Post. 'There was a conspiracy to kill the attorney general; there is ominous evidence that they switched their wrath to the president.' His stance brought some derision from book reviewers even as his profile was raised among JFK conspiracy theorists. Mr. Goldfarb remained unmoved but conceded that too much time had passed to either validate or debunk his speculation. 'There is a haunting credibility to the theory that our organized crime drive prompted a plan to strike back at the Kennedy brothers,' he wrote, 'and that Robert Kennedy went to his grave at least wondering whether — and perhaps believing — there was a real connection between the plan and his brother's assassination.' Advertisement Ronald Lawrence Goldfarb was born in Jersey City on Oct. 16, 1933, and was raised in North Bergen. His father was a building manager, and his mother cared for their home. At Syracuse University, Mr. Goldfarb was part of a law-school-track program, finishing his undergraduate studies in 1954 and receiving a law degree in 1956. After serving in the Air Force JAG Corps for three years, he enrolled at Yale Law School for advanced legal degrees. Robert Kennedy resigned as attorney general in September 1964, and Mr. Goldfarb joined him as speechwriter in a long-shot — but ultimately successful — run for US Senate in New York, defeating the incumbent Republican, Kenneth Keating, that November. 'My personal contacts with him, especially after his brother was killed, showed him to be a very tortured human being feeling very human things and not at all the machinelike person that he was depicted as,' Mr. Goldfarb said in a 1981 oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library. Mr. Goldfarb formed his law practice, Goldfarb & Associates, in 1966. Two years later, as Kennedy campaigned in the Democratic presidential primaries, Mr. Goldfarb planned to seek a seat as a New Jersey delegate for Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. 'And before I could do anything,' Mr. Goldfarb recalled, 'he was killed.' Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, as he was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shortly after winning California's Democratic presidential primary. He died the next day. The gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, remains in prison. Advertisement Mr. Goldfarb's other books include 'The Contempt Power' (1963) about use of contempt of court provisions; 'Ransom: A Critique of the American Bail System' (1966) and 'TV or Not TV: Television, Justice, and the Courts' (1998). As a documentary producer, he helped develop 'Desperate Hours' (2001), an account of Turkey's role in rescuing Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, directed by Victoria Barrett. Survivors include his wife of 68 years, Joanne Jacob Goldfarb; sons Nick and Matt; daughter Jody; and seven grandchildren. In 1963, the Mississippi governor, Ross R. Barnett, was charged with federal criminal contempt for obstructing court orders to desegregate the University of Mississippi. Barnett's supporters in Congress cited passages from Mr. Goldfarb's book 'The Contempt Power' to claim judicial overreach. Mr. Goldfarb was so troubled that he asked for a meeting with Robert Kennedy to apologize. Kennedy listened and then asked Mr. Goldfarb to sign a copy of his book. (The charges against Barnett were dropped years later.) 'Instead of it being a heavy moment where conceivably he was going to ask for my resignation,' he recalled in the 1981 oral history, 'it converted into an act of friendship.'
The Star
17-05-2025
- Politics
- The Star
In over four years, 77 education workers in Myanmar killed, educational buildings bombed 560 times, and burned 123 times
YANGON: The State Planning and Administrative Council Press Office reported that from Feb 1, 2021 to the end of April 2025, 77 education workers were killed, educational buildings were bombed 560 times, and burned 123 times. The National Security Council's press release team responded to a media inquiry regarding the number of schools damaged and education personnel affected and killed by the actions of PDFs from Feb 1, 2021 to the present. As of the end of April 2025, educational institutions (schools, etc.) have been burned down 123 times, education staff have been threatened 449 times, and 77 education staff and teachers have been killed, according to the National Security Agency (NSA) press release. The Ministry of Education has announced that primary schools will start accepting applications from May 22, and that the enrolment week for the 2025-2026 academic year will start from May 22 and end on June 1. - Eleven Media/ANN
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Business Standard
15-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Hidden communication devices found in Chinese power inverters in US
US energy officials are re-evaluating security risks associated with Chinese-made devices that play an essential role in renewable energy infrastructure after discovering unexplained communication equipment within some components, according to a report by Reuters. Security experts examining grid-connected equipment have discovered unauthorised communication devices that are not documented in product specifications inside some Chinese solar power inverters. Undocumented components found in power inverters Power inverters, predominantly manufactured in China and used globally to connect solar panels and wind turbines to power grids, as well as in batteries, heat pumps and EV chargers, are under scrutiny. While inverters are designed with remote access capabilities for updates and maintenance, utility companies typically implement firewalls to block direct communication with China. Also Read Undocumented communication components, including cellular radios, have also been identified in batteries from several Chinese suppliers in the past nine months. The exact number of solar inverters and batteries examined remains unclear, according to the report by Reuters. These undisclosed components could potentially create backdoor communication channels that bypass firewalls remotely, with potentially devastating effects. Mike Rogers, former director of the National Security Agency (NSA), stated that the Chinese could be hoping that the extensive use of inverters limits the options that the West has to deal with the security issue. "We know that China believes there is value in placing at least some elements of our core infrastructure at risk of destruction or disruption." A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington criticised the broad use of national security as a justification to target China. "We oppose the generalisation of the concept of national security, distorting and smearing China's infrastructure achievements," the spokesperson said. The US government has not publicly acknowledged the findings. The US Department of Energy (DOE) stated that it regularly evaluates risks linked to emerging technologies. "While this functionality may not have malicious intent, it is critical for those procuring to have a full understanding of the capabilities of the products received," a spokesperson said. Amid rising US-China tensions, the US and other nations are re-evaluating China's involvement in critical infrastructure due to fears of possible security risks, according to two former government officials. In February, two US Senators introduced the Decoupling from Foreign Adversarial Battery Dependence Act, which would prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from buying batteries from certain Chinese companies starting in October 2027, citing national security risks. The bill, referred to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on 11 March, is not yet law and targets six Chinese firms — CATL, BYD, Envision Energy, EVE Energy, Hithium and Gotion High-tech — allegedly linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
