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January 2016

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Data Breach You Haven’t Heard About Foreign hackers may be reading encrypted U.S. government communications, yet basic information about what happened still isn’t available.By Will Hurd

By on January 27th, 2016

Rep. Hurd, a Republican from Texas, sits on the House Homeland Security Committee and is chairman of the IT Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Reform.
A security breach recently discovered at software developer Juniper Networks has U.S. officials worried that foreign hackers have been reading the encrypted communications of U.S. government agencies for the past three years. Yet compared with the uproar over the Office of Personnel Management breach, first disclosed last June, this recent breach has gone largely unnoticed.

On Dec. 17 the California-based Juniper Networks announced that an unauthorized backdoor had been placed in its ScreenOS software, and a breach was possible since 2013. This allowed an outside actor to monitor network traffic, potentially decrypt information, and even take control of firewalls. Days later the company provided its clients—which include various U.S. intelligence entities—with an “emergency security patch” to close the backdoor.

The federal government has yet to determine which agencies are using the affected software or if any agencies have used the patch to close the backdoor. Without a complete inventory of compromised systems, lawmakers are unable to determine what adversaries stole or could have stolen.

If government systems have yet to be fixed then adversaries could still be stealing sensitive information crucial to national security. The Department of Homeland Security is furiously working to determine the extent to which the federal government used ScreenOS. But Congress still doesn’t know the basic details of the breach.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Donald Trump to Skip GOP Debate Front-runner to boycott final forum before Iowa caucuses due to fight with Fox News By Aaron Zitner and Rebecca Ballhaus

By on January 27th, 2016

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa— Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said the GOP front-runner plans to skip the Fox News debate Thursday in Des Moines, the final one before the Iowa caucuses, in the latest turn in its long-running dispute with the TV network.

Mr. Trump told reporters Tuesday he would likely skip the televised event. Shortly afterward, his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said the candidate had decided to bypass the debate.

“He is definitely not participating in the Fox News debate on Thursday,” Mr. Lewandowski said.
The announcement came amid a long-running public spat between Mr. Trump and the network. The billionaire businessman had threatened to boycott the debate if Fox’s Megyn Kelly served as a moderator, calling her “biased.”

A Fox News spokesman later Tuesday criticized Mr. Trump’s decision not to participate in the debate, calling it “near unprecedented.”

“We’re not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing—Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage,” the spokesman said.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pope Francis Welcomes Iran’s President to the Vatican Meeting between the pontiff and Hassan Rouhani highlights close ties between Vatican and Iran By Deborah Ball And Francis X. Rocca

By on January 27th, 2016

ROME—Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s campaign to reintroduce Tehran to the West took a step forward with a high-profile audience with Pope Francis that focused on human rights and Iran’s role in Middle East conflicts.

The meeting—the first between a pontiff and an Iranian leader since 1999—came Tuesday on the second day of a four-day visit by Mr. Rouhani to Italy and France that is meant to cement the country’s ties with the West. The trip is the first by the Iranian president since sanctions on Iran were loosened this month in the wake of an agreement to implement key restrictions on its nuclear program.

Most of Mr. Rouhani’s visit, including meetings with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and French President François Hollande, is focused on jump-starting Iran’s economic relations with Europe.

But the meeting with Pope Francis is particularly significant because of the close ties the Vatican and Iran have enjoyed for decades and Iran’s desire to project an image of a tolerant country in a region beset by strife.

The pontiff and Mr. Rouhani met for 40 minutes—extraordinarily long compared with typical state meetings held by the pope. Mr. Rouhani was accompanied by a 12-person entourage, including Iran’s foreign minister

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BOOKS Comments turned off

When Holocaust Refugees Almost Found a Caribbean Haven Efforts to aid Jews fleeing Europe with shelter in the U.S. Virgin Islands ran into bureaucratic hostility.By Richard Hurowitz see note please

By on January 27th, 2016

Some Jews did find refuge in the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic, when the dictator Trujillo offered rescue to 100,000 Jews…at the Evian conference in 1938. He was alone among 32 nations that huffed and puffed but limited their offer to only handfuls of desperate Jews. Alas, only three thousand Jews made their way to Sosua in the north of the country, and about 1,000 remained to farm there. Agricultural experts from Palestine came to help them learn farming techniques. In 1985 I attended services in the synagogue with the handful of Jewish immigrants and their children who remained there. Dominicans are very proud of their effort and their early recognition of Israel. They have issued many stamps with portraits of Ben Gurion and the Israeli flags…rsk
With immigration matters of all kinds in the news, International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 brings to mind the plight of Jewish refugees during World War II, when the world offered too little help. America’s record on this subject is often considered marred by the Roosevelt administration’s indifference, if not outright hostility, to the refugees, but some members of the American government stand out for efforts that could have put them in the company of Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and others who saved many innocent lives.

The honor-roll-that-might-have-been includes then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, whose wartime humanitarian efforts are fairly well known, and—less familiarly— Lawrence W. Cramer, the Columbia-educated academic who served as governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The members of the archipelago’s legislature also deserve mention.

On Nov. 18, 1938, nine days after the attacks on Jews throughout Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, Cramer proclaimed the bucolic island chain a refuge for those fleeing Hitler. The territory’s legislature in St. Thomas unanimously declared that refugee peoples “shall find surcease from misfortune in the Virgin Islands of the United States.”

The idea had originated in the late 1930s with Interior Secretary Ickes as a way to circumvent the notoriously anti-Semitic State Department’s opposition to accepting the refugees. Ickes resolved to provide a haven in the territories under his jurisdiction. The U.S. Virgin Islands—home to 25,000 people but covering more than 130 square miles—could easily accommodate tens of thousands of refugees.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Why Vote for Trump? Part of the electorate thinks it has nothing to lose. Most of us do.

By on January 27th, 2016

Can Republicans and conservatives bring themselves to maybe support Donald Trump after all?

The question has come up as people like Bob Dole and Rudy Giuliani have begun to express themselves on the preferability of Mr. Trump to Ted Cruz, though it’s far from obvious that the choice comes down to those two. At the other end are the conservative writers at National Review who’ve tried to excommunicate Trump from themselves, or vice versa.

Mr. Trump calls himself a conservative because it is convenient to do so when stumping for GOP primary votes. He has adopted positions on abortion and guns that nobody believes.

He’s an avatar of New York values, goes the slur, but that’s a way of saying he fits the mold that umpty-million upscale voters say they want; a socially liberal, fiscally conservative candidate.

Indeed, if Mr. Trump bothered to know what he really thinks, as a lifelong New Yorker, business person and multiple divorcee, he probably slots right in with GOPers who aren’t social conservatives or evangelicals. And yet his success so far has been almost entirely with the social conservatives and evangelicals.

If angry white populists can make the unlikely Mr. Trump a vessel for their hopes, why not economic conservatives with NYC values? Coalition building!

Immigration has been central to his campaign but try to figure out what he’s saying. A respected social scientist like Christopher Jencks can admit that low-skill migrants may undermine the earnings of low-skill workers. The phrase downward assimilation has been adopted for the fact that not all second- and third-generation immigrant kids climb the educational and income ladder; some expand the ranks of the underclass.

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