The Committee to Investigate Russia offers the Russia-NRA-Trump Connection Explained Again:

Vanity Fair‘s latest article about the possibility that Russia funneled money to the Trump campaign through the National Rifle Association does not contain much new information, but it does an excellent job of piecing together what we already know about the connections Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating and members of Congress continue to probe.

An excerpt:

The F.B.I. and special counsel Robert Mueller are investigating meetings between N.R.A. officials and powerful Russian operatives, trying to determine if those contacts had anything to do with the gun group spending $30 million to help elect Donald Trump—triple what it invested on behalf of Mitt Romney in 2012. The use of foreign money in American political campaigns is illegal. One encounter of particular interest to investigators is between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian banker at an N.R.A. dinner.

The Russian wooing of N.R.A. executives goes back to at least 2011, when that same banker and politician, Alexander Torshin, befriended David Keene, who was then president of the gun-rights organization. Torshin soon became a “life member,” attending the N.R.A.’s annual conventions and introducing comrades to other gun-group officials. In 2015, Torshin welcomed an N.R.A. delegation to Moscow that included Keene and Joe Gregory, then head of the “Ring of Freedom” program, which is reserved for top donors to the N.R.A. Among the other hosts were Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month was the deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov, head of the Saint Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, one of Russia’s wealthiest philanthropies.

It’s possible that the men were merely bonding over a shared love of firearms. Mike Carpenter, a Russian specialist who worked in the Pentagon during the Obama administration, laughs at the notion. “The Russian state is run by a K.G.B. elite that wants nothing less than to have an armed citizenry,” Carpenter says. “Rogozin is a heavyweight in Russian politics. . . . Torshin has a direct line to Putin . . . and also has possible ties to organized crime. Rudov is the right-hand man of Konstantin Malofeev, who is sort of a paleo-conservative, ultra-nationalist figure who bankrolls a lot of projects involving mercenaries in Ukraine.” Carpenter sees how a dark money trail could connect the Kremlin to the gun lobby. “Those three would only meet with N.R.A. officials if there were some concerted effort by senior members of the Russian government to try and co-opt the N.R.A. politically,” he continues. “And they are all money men. They can throw tens of millions around.”

Full story: “COINCIDENCE NUMBER 395”: THE N.R.A. SPENT $30 MILLION TO ELECT TRUMP. WAS IT RUSSIAN MONEY? (Vanity Fair)

Great Big Story looks Inside World Cup’s Sticker Collecting Craze:

BROWNSVILLE, Tex. — The mayor of this Texas border city has been dealing with a crisis.

This week, he declared a state of emergency. Drones filled the skies and emergency vehicles raced down the streets. But none of it had anything to do with illegal immigration.

It had to do with the weather.

A severe thunderstorm caused widespread flooding throughout the Rio Grande Valley in recent days. That other crisis — the one President Trump says has been unfolding on the border because of illegal immigration — is largely a fiction, the mayor, Tony Martinez, and other Brownsville residents and leaders said.

“There is not a crisis in the city of Brownsville with regards to safety and security,” said Mr. Martinez, who has lived in Brownsville since the late 1970s. “There’s no gunfire. Most of the people that are migrating are from Central America. It’s not like they’re coming over here to try to take anybody’s job. They’re trying to just save their own lives. We’re doing fine, quite frankly.”

Mr. Martinez is a Democrat in a mainly conservative state, and many Republicans in Texas, like Mr. Trump, have raised an alarm over the numbers of migrants still flowing into Texas. But there is evidence, in federal data and on the ground in places like Brownsville that the immigration crisis Mr. Trump has cited over the past week to justify the separation of families is actually no crisis at all.

Stephanie Leutert explains Who’s Really Crossing the U.S. Border, and Why They’re Coming:

Despite what the president says, the situation at the border is much more nuanced. There’s not a flood of people racing across the border. The majority of migrants aren’t dangerous criminals. Many are women and families—and many are fleeing gang violence rather than seeking to spread that violence farther north.

For the past two years, I’ve worked to document these issues at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, and also in the Beyond the Border column for Lawfare—based in part on my fieldwork from across Mexico. There are few straightforward and easy answers to what often feel like basic questions for Central American migration. So it’s worth taking a step back and asking: who are the people arriving at the border? Why are they coming? And how does the current situation compare to migration in the past?

First off, while the current administration has tried to tie Central American migrants to MS-13, government data reveals that gang members crossing irregularly are the rare exceptions. Since the Trump administration took office, the Border Patrol has detected fewer gang members crossing irregularly than during the Obama administration. In FY2017, these detections amounted to 0.075 percent of the total number of migrants (228 MS-13 members out of 303,916 total migrants). When combined with MS-13’s rival, the Barrio 18 gang, the number rises only slightly to 0.095 percent. This is far from the “infestation” of violent gang members described by the president.

The current crisis hasn’t been caused by a sudden influx of migration, either. The peak in apprehensions of irregular migrants actually took place some 17 years ago, in FY2000. At that point, U.S. Border Patrol agents caught 1,643,679 migrants attempting to enter the United States without the appropriate papers, compared to 303,916 apprehensions in this past fiscal year. But this decreasing number of apprehensions should not be confused with a gentler, kinder approach to border security—in fact, just the opposite. Since 2001, the number of Border Patrol agents along the southwest border has nearly doubled from 9,147 agents to 16,605. Border fencing also increased: to date, there are 705 miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile long U.S.-Mexico border.

The face of migration has also changed. Back in 2000, Mexican nationals made up 98 percent of the total migrants and Central Americans (referring to Honduran, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran migrants) only one percent. Today, Central Americans make up closer to 50 percent.

 Catherine Rampell describes The real hoax about the border crisis:

It’s all a hoax. A great big hoax.

Not the family separations, the babies alone in cages, the drugged immigrant children, the stolen toddlers too traumatized to speak, the wailing children whom Ann Coulter slanders as “child actors.”

Sadly, those cruelties are all too real.

The hoax is the premise that President Trump’s administration has invented to rationalize such crimes against humanity: his narrative that America has been “ infest[ed]” with hordes of crime-committing, culture-diluting, job-stealing, tax-shirking, benefits-draining “aliens.”

No part of that description is remotely true. Yet the Trump administration seems to have successfully shifted the national dialogue away from “Do we have a border immigration problem?” to “What’s the right way to fix our border immigration problem?”

Truly, it’s bizarre. Unauthorized border crossings have been falling over time. In fact, apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants along the Southwest border last fiscal year declined to about 300,000, the lowest level since 1971, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They’ve risen in recent months, though year-to-date they’re still below historical levels.

An internal government report commissioned by Trump found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in tax revenue over the past decade than they cost the government. Finding those results inconvenient, the administration suppressed them, though they were ultimately leaked to the New York Times last year.

RetroPod describes The first shark attacks:

A reader who has spent five decades as a clinical child psychologist has made a brilliant suggestion to mitigate the harm being done to innocent, defenseless children under President Trump’s inhumane child separation policy.

The Children’s Bureau, an office of the Administration for Children and Families within the Department of Health and Human Services, has a handy website to explain the rules regarding the reporting of suspected mistreatment or abuse of children:

All States, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have statutes identifying persons who are required to report suspected child maltreatment to an appropriate agency, such as child protective services, a law enforcement agency, or a State’s toll-free child abuse reporting hotline.

In fact, all the doctors and other professionals inside these facilities have a legal obligation to report abuse and mistreatment. (“Approximately 48 States, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands designate professions whose members are mandated by law to report child maltreatment.”) The people who must report abuse or mistreatment include teachers, counselors, law enforcement and child-care providers. When must they report?

The circumstances under which a mandatory reporter must make a report vary from State to State. Typically, a report must be made when the reporter, in his or her official capacity, suspects or has reason to believe that a child has been abused or neglected. Another standard frequently used is in situations in which the reporter has knowledge of, or observes a child being subjected to, conditions that would reasonably result in harm to the child.

 Rosie Gray cautions Don’t Blame Trump’s Advisers for Trump (“The tendency to look for a puppet master behind Trump’s actions is misguided.”):

And Trump is also charting his own course on his Twitter feed, where he can sway the outcome of events without consulting anyone beforehand. House Republican leaders delayed a vote on an immigration bill that would give a pathway to citizenship for the so-called “Dreamers,” or undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, while also funding Trump’s border wall, after a more conservative bill failed to pass. The move to delay the vote came after Trump, who backs the legislation, undermined it in a tweet on Thursday morning. “What is the purpose of the House doing good immigration bills when you need 9 votes by Democrats in the Senate, and the Dems are only looking to Obstruct (which they feel is good for them in the Mid-Terms). Republicans must get rid of the stupid Filibuster Rule-it is killing you!” Trump tweeted.

“I think the president is a little all over the place when it comes the legislative process,” Nunberg said. “And partly that’s the failure of his White House staff.  They tell him one thing and then it’s another thing.”

If the White House sometimes seems at odds with itself, well, that’s partly the president’s doing too, the former White House official said. “He loves watching people fight.”

Gina Barton and Ashley Luthern report A killer left DNA evidence behind. But Milwaukee police destroyed it:

The body of Deborah Lynn Oberg was found under the Hoan Bridge on July 11, 1983.

The 28-year-old single mother struggled with the man who assaulted and stabbed her outside the Summerfest grounds.

At autopsy, the medical examiner discovered the assailant had left pubic hairs behind.

But even with continuing advances in DNA technology, Oberg’s killer likely will never be caught.

That’s because the Milwaukee Police Department destroyed the evidence in her case — along with at least 50 other homicides. Police trashed the evidence in the 1990s, well after authorities became aware of DNA’s value in solving crimes. While most of the homicide cases were closed, some remained open and unsolved, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found.

The department’s reason for the destruction? Making more room in a storage facility.

Oberg isn’t the only victim deprived of justice because of the purge. In another case, a man who killed a 34-year-oldmother on a playground is still free. In a third, four children were molested after a pedophile avoided conviction for murdering a 9-year-old girl.

  A Tiger Slowly Creeps Up Behind Visitors:

“It’s not like an auto body shop where you fix the dent and everything looks like new. We’re talking about children’s minds,” said Luis H. Zayas, professor of social work and psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin. “Our government should be paying for this. We did the harm; we should be responsible for fixing the damage. But the sad thing for most of these kids is this trauma is likely to go untreated.”

Children who have undergone traumatic separation often cling desperately to their parents after they are reunited and refuse to let them out of their sight, say therapists and child psychologists. Many suffer from separation anxiety, cry uncontrollably and have trouble sleeping because of recurring nightmares.

Others develop eating disorders, problems with trust and unresolved anger, in some cases against their parents.

Chris Geidner reports No Immediate Changes Planned For Children Already Separated Under Trump Policy, HHS Officials Say (“It is still very early and we are awaiting further guidance on the matter”):

Although the executive order signing followed days of national outcry over the policy, it was not immediately clear what effect the order would have on new migrant families crossing the border — and federal officials were unclear Wednesday night about whether there would be any changes for those families already separated.

On the question of what happens to the more than 2,000 children already separated from their parent or parents over the past two months, the initial answer from the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for “unaccompanied” minors, was that nothing would change immediately.

“For the minors currently in the unaccompanied alien children program, the sponsorship process will proceed as usual,” HHS spokesperson Kenneth Wolfe told BuzzFeed News.

Hours later, a more senior spokesperson said in a statement that Wolfe “misspoke earlier regarding the Executive Order signed today by the President.” That spokesperson, Brian Marriott, went on to say, “It is still very early and we are awaiting further guidance on the matter” — while noting that “[r]eunification is always the ultimate goal.”

Philip Rucker writes of ‘A blowtorch to the tinder’: Stoking racial tensions is a feature of Trump’s presidency:

President Trump this week likened Hispanic immigrants to vermin. He warned that they would “pour into and infest our country.” And he defended his administration’s family separation policy by alleging that parents crossing the southern border with their children were poised to commit crime and murder.

For him, this language is not new.

Echoing the words and images of the white nationalist movement to dehumanize immigrants and inflame racial tensions has become a defining feature of Donald Trump’s presidency and of the Republican Party’s brand.

Trump has stirred supporters at rallies by reading “The Snake,”a parable about a tenderhearted woman who takes in an ailing snake but is later killed when the revived creature bites her. It should be heard as a metaphor for immigration, he says.

The president referred to some African nations as “shithole countries.” He posited that “both sides” were to blame for last summer’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And, again and again, he has accused black football players who took a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest police discrimination of being un-American.

 Consider The Elephant’s Superb Nose:

“I am a fan of doing something to combat poor behavior from China, relative to intellectual property theft and other things they do to prop up their domestic industries … I just think this tariffs policy is a terrible, counterproductive way to get after it,” said Austin Ramirez, chief executive officer of Husco International, a Waukesha manufacturer of engine controls for the automotive industry.

In addition to its U.S. factories, Husco has plants in China and other countries. About half of the company’s business is in automotive components, and the other half is in components for off-highway equipment such as excavators and mining trucks.

Like most manufacturers, Husco’s supply chain crosses many borders.

 “The biggest impact that these tariffs have is it puts us at a disadvantage to our global competitors” in Germany and Japan, Ramirez said.

“When a tariff structure like this is put in place, it adds to my costs, but they don’t have it in their costs. So they are automatically, overnight, 25 percent more competitive.”

(All that support over the years for the GOP, and money from Walker’s WEDC, and all Austin Ramierez got was this lousy trade war.  Live by state intervention, perish by state intervention.)

Paul Farhi asks Propaganda or news: Should media publish government’s child-detention photos?:

Based on the photographic evidence, living conditions inside government-run detention centers for immigrant children separated from their parents in south Texas look reasonably orderly and clean.

But there’s a major catch: All of the photographs depicting life inside the facilities have been supplied by the government itself. There’s been no independent documentation; federal officials, citing the children’s privacy, have barred journalists from taking photographs or video when they’ve been permitted inside.

This has left news organizations with a quandary: Do they publish the handouts supplied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — which has an incentive to make its facilities look as humane and comfortable as possible — or do they reject the photos as essentially propaganda?

  AJ Dellinger reports Scott Walker Finally Gave Foxconn Enough Handouts to Get the Company’s US Headquarters in Wisconsin:

Foxconn’s decision to set up shop in Wisconsin is a score for the state only achieved by completing favor after favor in order to woo the manufacturing giant. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the majority-Republican state legislature agreed in 2016 to provide Foxconn with a $3 billion package of tax breaks and incentives if the company would build a plant in the state.

The original deal included $1.5 billion in state income tax credits for job creation, another $1.35 billion for capital investment, and $150 million for sales and use tax exemptions—all in exchange for 3,000 jobs. (Foxconn has claimed it could bring as many as 13,000 to the factory, but the company announced a $4 billion investment in automation earlier this year and bragged about replacing 60,000 factory workers with robots in 2016. That will likely keep a cap on just how many people it actually employs.)

Governor Walker has happily played up the 13,000 figure but even if Foxconn managed to hit that high ceiling, Wisconsin would still be paying out a massive amount to create those jobs. Per CNN, the state will pay between $15,000 and $19,000 per job per year in incentives, assuming 13,000 positions are created—well above the standard cost of $2,400 per job per year, according to a report from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

(The Wisconsin Foxconn project is economic development for confidence men and easy marks – it won’t work, and it dupes only the gullible or desperate.)

  So, Can Anyone Try to Climb Everest?:

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported on a previously unknown point of contact between the 2016 Donald Trump campaign and a Russian offering negative information about Hillary Clinton. That new report, involving a Trump campaign staff member and longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, means that at least six members of Trump’s broader team knew about offers of dirt from Russians during that campaign — and, depending on how that information was shared, as many as 10 may have, including Trump.

In March, we looked at the various ways in which members of Trump’s extended teams had been approached by agents of the Russian government during the campaign. It was a complicated web at that point — a web that has since grown only more intricate. In the graphic below, the gray box indicates the connections between Russians (top) and Trump’s team (bottom), arrayed relative to when they occurred in 2016. Individuals at the top and the bottom are arrayed in relative proximity to Trump and the Russian government.

Juliette Michel reports US farmers stressed, angry at trade wars:

US farmers find themselves in the crosshairs of a trade war with China and others launched by President Donald Trump, who was elected with the support of many in rural America.

On Friday, Trump announced long-threatened trade tariffs on tens of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods, sparking an immediate retaliation from Beijing on an equivalent of US products including agricultural goods, notably soy.

“For American farmers, this isn’t theoretical anymore, it’s downright scary,” the Farmers for Free Trade lobbying group said of the prospects for escalating tariffs.

Mark Mazzetti and Mark Landler report North Korea’s Overture to Jared Kushner (“An American businessman who lives in Singapore took advantage of an unusual opening in an administration where matters of policy and business often seem to blur”):

WASHINGTON — An American financier approached the Trump administration last summer with an unusual proposition: The North Korean government wanted to talk to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

The financier, Gabriel Schulze, explained that a top North Korean official was seeking a back channel to explore a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, who for months had traded threats of military confrontation. Mr. Schulze, who lives in Singapore, had built a network of contacts in North Korea on trips he had taken to develop business opportunities in the isolated state.

For some in North Korea, which has been ruled since its founding by a family dynasty, Mr. Kushner appeared to be a promising contact. As a member of the president’s family, officials in Pyongyang judged, Mr. Kushner would have the ear of his father-in-law and be immune from the personnel changes that had convulsed the early months of the administration.

Tech Insider shows How Prosthetic Skin Is Made For Bionic Limbs: