https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/20/nancy-pelosi-interview-088292

<snip>

And more than 30 House Republicans have already announced their retirements or left office, a sign that the GOP is not optimistic about taking back power. On Thursday, Rep, Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a top Trump ally and major force in the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, announced he wasn't going to run for reelection.

“It means that they know they’re gonna lose,” Pelosi declared. “And if you win, you’re going to serve in the minority under a Democratic president. You may want to spend more time with your family.”

</snip>

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/politics/naval-academy-hand-gesture/index.html

(CNN)The US Naval Academy and US Military Academy at West Point said Friday that the hand gesture some cadets and midshipmen were seen making on camera was part of a game known as the "circle game" and not a white supremacist symbol.

The circle game is commonly played when a person forms an "OK" with their hand below their waist to trick a second person into looking at it. If the second person is caught looking at the hand gesture, that person is then punched by the person who made the gesture.

The academies were investigating to see if the cadets and midshipmen were making a sign that can be associated with white nationalism, which is someone forming the "OK" sign with their fingers and thumb to symbolize the letters "WP" -- which stands for white power.

"We are confident the hand gestures used were not intended to be racist in any way. However, we are disappointed by the immature behavior of the two Fourth Class Midshipmen, and their actions will be appropriately addressed," Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Adm. Sean Buck said in a written statement. "The Naval Academy is fully committed to preparing young men and women to become professional officers of competence, character, and compassion in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps; in this case, we recognize there is more work to be done."

"We investigated this matter thoroughly," Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, 60th superintendent of the US Military Academy said in a separate written statement. "Last Saturday we had reason to believe these actions were an innocent game and not linked to extremism, but we must take allegations such as these very seriously. We are disappointed by the immature behavior of the cadets."

</snip>

https://twitter.com/RepDebDingell/status/1208047108261076995
Rep. Debbie Dingell ✔ @RepDebDingell

As an antidote to the last week, I found @JohnDingell’s own words from last December. His words were about him and his friend, George H.W. Bush, who both worried about the direction of this country. May we take their message to heart.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2018/12/02/john-dingell-may-bush-inspire-us-remember-our-history/2183581002/ …


John Dingell: May Bush inspire us to remember our history
Dingell writes to the late president, "Godspeed dear friend, I suspect I will be seeing you soon."
detroitnews.com

10:30 AM - Dec 20, 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Auschwitz_trials


Buergerhaus at Frankenalle in Frankfurt am Main-Gallus. Courthouse for the first Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1963-65, 2009 photo

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German as der Auschwitz-Prozess, or der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess, (the "second Auschwitz trial" ) was a series of trials running from 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965, charging 22 defendants under German criminal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower-level officials in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camp complex. Hans Hofmeyer led as Chief Judge the "criminal case against Mulka and others" (reference number 4 Ks 2/63).

Overall, only 789 individuals of the approximately 8,200 surviving SS personnel who served at Auschwitz and its sub-camps were ever tried, of whom 750 received sentences. Unlike the first trial in Poland held almost two decades earlier, the trials in Frankfurt were not based on the legal definition of crimes against humanity as recognized by international law, but according to the state laws of the Federal Republic.

Prior trial in Poland
Most of the senior leaders of the camp, including Rudolf Höss, the longest-standing commandant of the camp, were turned over to the Polish authorities in 1947 following their participation as witnesses in the Nuremberg Trial. Subsequently, the accused were tried in Kraków and many sentenced to death for violent crimes and torturing of prisoners.[4] Only SS-Untersturmführer Hans Münch was set free, having been acquitted of war crimes. That original trial in Poland is usually known as the first Auschwitz Trial.

Course of proceedings
SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer, the last camp commandant, died in detention while still under investigation as part of the trials. Defendants ranged from members of the SS to kapos, privileged prisoners responsible for low-level control of camp internees, and included some of those responsible for the process of "selection," or determination of who should be sent to the gas chambers directly from the "ramp" upon disembarking the trains that brought them from across Europe ("selection" generally entailed inclusion of all children held to be ineligible for work, generally under the age of 14, and any mothers unwilling to part with their "selected" children). In the course of the trial, approximately 360 witnesses were called, including around 210 survivors. Proceedings began in the "Bürgerhaus Gallus", in Frankfurt am Main, which was converted into a courthouse for that purpose, and remained there until their conclusion.


Richard Baer, camp commandant at Dora-Mittelbau

State Attorney General (Hessian Generalstaatsanwalt) Fritz Bauer, himself briefly interned in 1933 at the Heuberg concentration camp, led the prosecution. Bauer was concerned with pursuing individual defendants serving at Auschwitz-Birkenau; only 22 SS members were charged of an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 thought to have been involved in the administration and operation of the camp. The men on trial in Frankfurt were tried only for murders and other crimes that they committed on their own initiative at Auschwitz and were not tried for genocidal actions perpetrated "when following orders", considered by the courts to be the lesser crime of accomplice to murder.

At a 1963 trial, KGB assassin Bohdan Stashynsky, who had committed several murders in the Federal Republic in the 1950s, was found by a German court not legally guilty of murder. Instead, Stashynsky was found to be only an accomplice to murder as the courts ruled that the responsibility for his murders rested only with his superiors in the KGB who had given him his orders.

The legal implication of the Stashynsky case were that the courts had ruled that in a totalitarian system only executive decision-makers could be convicted of murder and that anyone who followed orders and killed someone could be convicted only of being accomplices to murder. The term executive decision-maker was so defined by the courts to apply only to the highest levels of the Reich leadership during the National Socialist period, and that all who just followed orders when killing were just accomplices to murder. Someone could be only convicted of murder if it was shown that they had killed someone on their own initiative, and thus all of the accused of murder at the Auschwitz trial were tried only for murders that they had done on their own initiative.

Thus, Bauer could only indict for murder those who killed when not following orders, and those who had killed while following orders could be indicted as accomplices to murder. Moreover, because of the legal distinction between murderers and accomplices to murder, this meant that an SS man who killed thousands while operating the gas chambers at Auschwitz could only be found guilty of being accomplice to murder because he had been following orders, while an SS man who had beaten one inmate to death on his own initiative could be convicted of murder because he had not been following orders.

Bauer is said to have been opposed in the former purpose by the young Helmut Kohl, then a junior member of the Christian Democratic Union. In furtherance of that purpose Bauer sought and received support from the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.[citation needed] The following historians from the Institute served as expert witnesses for the prosecution; Helmut Krausnick, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Hans Buchheim, and Martin Broszat. Subsequently, the information the four historians gathered for the prosecution served as the basis for their 1968 book, Anatomy of the SS State, the first thorough survey of the SS based on SS records.

Information about the actions of those accused and their whereabouts had been in the possession of West German authorities since 1958, but action on their cases was delayed by jurisdictional disputes, among other considerations. The court's proceedings were largely public and served to bring many details of the Holocaust to the attention of the public in the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as abroad. Six defendants were given life sentences and several others received the maximum prison sentences possible for the charges brought against them.

Documentation
The trial comprised 183 days of hearings held from 1963-1965. The 430 hours of the testimony of 319 witnesses, including 181 survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp and 80 members of the camp staff, the SS, and the police were recorded on 103 tapes, and 454 volumes of files that were stored at the Hessian State Archives in Wiesbaden.

In 2017, the original magnetic tapes recording the main proceedings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, which focused the world's attention on the systemic industrialized mass-murder of the Holocaust, were submitted by Germany and included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Outcomes
The trial attracted much publicity in Germany, but was considered by Bauer to be a failure. Bauer complained that the media treated the accused in such a manner as to imply that they were all freakish monsters, which allowed the German public to distance themselves from feeling any moral guilt about what had happened at Auschwitz, which was instead presented as the work of a few sick people who were not at all like normal Germans. Moreover, Bauer felt that because the law treated those who had followed orders when killing as accomplices to murder it implied that the policy of genocide and the Nazi rules for treating inmates at Auschwitz were in fact legitimate.

Bauer wrote that the way that the media had portrayed the trial had supported the

wishful fantasy that there were only a few people with responsibility ... and the rest were merely terrorized, violated hangers-on, compelled to do things completely contrary to their true nature.

Furthermore, Bauer charged that the judges, in convicting the accused, had made it appear that Germany in the Nazi era had been an occupied country, with most Germans having no choice but to follow orders. He said,

But this... had nothing to do with historical reality. There were virulent nationalists, imperialists, anti-Semites and Jew-haters. Without them, Hitler was unthinkable.

A public opinion poll conducted after the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials indicated that 57% of the German public were not in favor of additional Nazi trials.

</snip>

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2019/12/19/ice-detention-private-prisons-expands-under-trump-administration/4393366002/

Private prison companies have detained immigrants for decades, but that business has exploded under President Trump.

Monsy Alvarado, Ashley Balcerzak, Stacey Barchenger, Jon Campbell, Rafael Carranza, Maria Clark, Alan Gomez, Daniel Gonzalez, Trevor Hughes, Rick Jervis, Dan Keemahill, Rebecca Plevin, Jeremy Schwartz, Sarah Taddeo, Lauren Villagran, Dennis Wagner, Elizabeth Weise, Alissa Zhu, USA TODAY Network

Updated 11 hours ago

Billy McConnell was attending the grand opening of a Louisiana prison in 1997 when a sheriff mentioned he’d like a new jail but didn’t want to operate it. McConnell saw money in that moment.

He co-founded LaSalle Corrections and began cutting deals to build and operate jails in rural towns across the South. Then states throughout the USA, including McConnell’s home state of Louisiana, started reducing inmate populations to save money.

That’s when President Donald Trump swept into office, promising to crack down on immigrants. McConnell saw his next opportunity: the business of immigration detention. LaSalle Corrections quickly opened six more facilities in Louisiana. His detention centers hold more than 7,000 immigration detainees.

McConnell is aware of critics who condemn the rapidly growing use of jails and prisons to detain immigrants – many of them asylum seekers – whose detention and proceedings are supposed to be civil in nature, not criminal.

“What somebody else thinks about Billy McConnell compared with what God thinks of Billy McConnell is almost irrelevant,” he said, noting that he carries a crucifix at all times and ministers to detainees locked inside detention centers. “We don’t arrest ’em. We don’t try ’em. I know what the laws on the books say, and I’m a guy who goes by the rules.”

The use of private prisons to detain immigrants is not new, but the business has exploded under Trump. At least 24 immigration detention centers and more than 17,000 beds were added in the past three years to the sprawling detention system run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A USA TODAY Network investigation found that the companies operating those centers have generated record-setting revenue since 2016 while making record-setting political donations – primarily to Republicans, including Trump – as political figures moved freely between government policy roles and jobs in the private immigration industry.

The booming business spends $3 billion a year housing a record high of roughly 50,000 people, the majority of whom have no criminal record. The investigation revealed more than 400 allegations of sexual assault or abuse, inadequate medical care, regular hunger strikes, frequent use of solitary confinement, more than 800 instances of physical force against detainees, nearly 20,000 grievances filed by detainees and at least 29 fatalities, including seven suicides, since Trump took office in January 2017 and launched an overhaul of U.S. immigration policies.

Network reporters interviewed 35 current or former detainees and reviewed hundreds of documents from lawsuits, financial records and government contracts and toured seven ICE facilities from Colorado to Texas to Florida. They found that private prison companies established close ties with officials from the very top of the federal government all the way down to the local level, currying favor with sheriffs and city officials who often serve as middlemen to secure big-money ICE contracts.

</snip>

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-pulled-plug-on-pompeos-november-ukraine-trip-over-impeachment-heat

The secretary of state will visit Kyiv in January. But he was supposed to make a trip there in November—until the plans were abruptly canceled.

Erin Banco
National Security Reporter
Updated Dec. 20, 2019 8:43AM ET / Published Dec. 20, 2019 4:21AM ET

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was scheduled to visit Ukraine in November following his trip to Germany to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling. But President Donald Trump, in coordination with the State Department, cut the Kyiv trip from Pompeo’s schedule at the last minute amid the ongoing impeachment process, according to a U.S. official and two other individuals familiar with the matter.

In the lead-up to the trip, the State Department had solidified most of the details of the travel to Ukraine, but in the final stages of planning the secretary’s office notified officials and staffers inside the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv that the visit would not go forward. Trump had pulled the plug, according to those same sources, in part because the White House did not want administration officials landing in Ukraine during the impeachment investigation.

Pompeo also wanted to refrain from visiting the embassy in Kyiv because the top diplomat there, Bill Taylor, had told impeachment investigators that Rudy Giuliani pushed Ukraine to “intervene in domestic policy,” two individuals with knowledge of the State Department’s thinking said. Taylor also said he was aware that the delivery of U.S. military aid to Ukraine was contingent upon President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration launching investigations sought by the White House. His deposition transcript was released the day Pompeo landed in Germany.

“I told Ambassador Sondland that President Trump should have more respect for another head of state,” Taylor said in his deposition, referring to U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, one of the U.S. officials who helped establish a backchannel with Ukraine. “At that point, I asked Ambassador Sondland to push back on President Trump’s demand.”

The White House and the State Department did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

</snip>

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1208012228735176712

Reuters ✔ @Reuters

· 4m
JUST IN: Boeing's CST-100 Starliner astronaut capsule has not yet reached its intended orbit - #Boeing spokeswoman

Reuters ✔ @Reuters

MORE: Boeing's CST-100 Starliner astronaut capsule is not in planned orbit but is in stable position - NASA



8:12 AM - Dec 20, 2019

https://twitter.com/BoeingSpace/status/1208000412080656386
Boeing Space ✔ @BoeingSpace

Starliner has an off-nominal insertion, but we have spacecraft control. The guidance and control team is assessing their next maneuver.

7:25 AM - Dec 20, 2019

https://twitter.com/Commercial_Crew/status/1208008783638736896
NASA Commercial Crew ✔ @Commercial_Crew

Despite launching successfully on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from SLC-41, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner is not in its planned orbit.

The spacecraft currently is in a stable configuration while flight controllers are troubleshooting. https://go.nasa.gov/2Q61FnS

7:58 AM - Dec 20, 2019

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1208004815483260933
Jim Bridenstine ✔ @JimBridenstine

More information at 9am ET news conference. Watch live:

http://NASA.gov/live
NASA Live
NASA launches, landings, and events. Watch live broadcasts from NASA Television and NASA's social media channels, and a schedule of upcoming live events including news briefings, launches and...

Jim Bridenstine ✔ @JimBridenstine

Starliner in stable orbit. The burn needed for a rendezvous with the ISS did not happen. Working the issue.

7:42 AM - Dec 20, 2019

https://www.boston25news.com/news/franklin-police-dog-stealing-toys-donation-bin/3PZDTKQJWVGTZFOWVWJ7I6AW4I/



By: Elysia Rodriguez
Updated: December 19, 2019 - 8:47 PM

FRANKLIN — The Franklin Police Department has been collecting toys for children ahead of the holidays for the Santa Foundation.

“We’ve has several officers that have worked very hard to make sure that some of the kids in town and the community that have needs will have something to open on Christmas,” said Franklin Police Deputy Chief James Mill.

When a couple of toys went missing, they quickly identified a suspect, and even caught him on camera in the act.

“When they saw him walking out of the classroom, they were like: ‘What is he doing?’" Mill said.

Officers recorded as Ben Franklin, their therapy Golden Retriever, tried to evade officers holding a stolen baby doll.

Officers pursued him and found evidence of past crimes.

“The facility is locked down so we knew it was pretty simple to figure out it was Ben,” Mill said. “When Ben saw the toys, he thought they all belonged to him."

It’s unlikely he will face charges. Rather than punish the accused thief, officers came up with a better idea.

“It was an easy solution. Ben here is now banned from this room. I mean, he’s gotten his slobber all over them at this point so the police department has replaced them,” Mill said.

</snip>