The US applies Trump's new visa policy

The United States requires Syrian, Sudanese, Somali, Libyan, Iranian and Yemeni citizens to have close ties with a new US citizen or entity.

International passengers to Washington Dulles Airport in Dulles, Virginia, USA, June 26. Photo Reuters.

The US State Department on June 28 ruled that people from Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Iran and Yemen, when applying for visas to the United States, must prove they have a close relationship with an individual or group. Officials in the US, Reuters reported.

This agency defines a close relationship that includes parents, spouses, children, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, siblings, sibling and other relationships in the stepmother family or stepfather. Relationships that are not considered close include grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins, fiancées, fiancés.

The rule states that any relationship with a US organization "must be formal, documented, ordinarily created rather than purportedly to circumvent executive orders," referring to the decree that President Donald Trump Signed March 6.

According to the regulations, "a worker who accepts a job offer from a US company or a speaker invited to speak in the United States" is not prohibited entry. However, only one hotel reservation in the United States will not be counted as having a real relationship with the US organization.

President Trump signed a ban on entry into force in March following the first decree in January stumbling into protests. The revised decree temporarily forbade refugees and citizens of six Islamic countries, including Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, to come to the United States.

The decree was blocked by federal judges, prompting the Trump administration to take the case to the Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court today agreed to review the suit in October and issued a ruling allowing the refugee to be banned from the United States within 120 days.

water is life

Published: By: Unknown - 5:17 AM

Trump Obama Obama collusion with Russia

President Barack Obama trumped Barack Obama in collusion with Russia or hindered justice because he did not speak out loud to prevent Russia interfering with US elections.

"The reason Barack Obama did not act after being told by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that Russia intervenes is that he expects Clinton to win ... and does not want to 'mess up the situation'," Donald Trump wrote on his Twitter on June 26, according to Reuters. Mr. Trump charged his predecessor "collusion" with Russia or "hindered".

A White House official under Obama dismissed criticism from Trump and noted that Obama directly raised the issue of US electoral intervention with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

ABC News reported that Trump may be reacting to a recent Washington Post article. The article says the Obama administration has decided not to take an official measure of Russian response before the November 8 election.

"They are afraid that all actions will be considered political and that Russia can not only use fake news and attack emails ... Assume Hillary Clinton wins may be the cause of this urgent need," according to post write.

The White House moved all inquiries related to Russian investigations to Marc Kasowitz, Trump's lawyer. The spokesman for Kasowitz has yet to comment on Trump's announcement.

"After 4 months of looking at Russia ... they have no 'proof' of Trump people in collusion.I'll have no collusion or hindrance.I should be sorry!", Trump said on Twitter the same day.

The Obama administration in October 2016 accused Russia of assaulting its networks on Democratic affiliates before the November 8 presidential election. In December of the same year, Obama ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate cyberattacks and foreign interference, sending reports to him by 20 January.

The US intelligence community in January concluded that Russia sought to help Trump take advantage of Hillary Clinton by attacking the high-ranking Democrat e-mail box and revealing its content. Russia denies this allegation. Published: By: Unknown - 5:14 AM

With help from Native Americans - Trump seeks era of American energy dominance

President Donald Trump wants to liberate America's domestic energy reserves and help Native Americans in the process.

He put that intention at a round table with the Native American tribal leaders at the White House on Wednesday, June 28.

"Many of your lands have rich natural resources, which are beneficial for your people immensely." The untapped resources of wealth can help you build new schools, repair roads, improve Your community and job creation.

"All you want is the freedom to use them, and that's the problem. It's hard, is not it? It's going to be a lot easier under the Trump administration."

It was Trump's first public meeting with tribal leaders since taking office. Trump met with tribal leaders in December to hear requests for what they wanted from his administration.

Trump then bothered a number of Native Americans by signing an executive order in January to advance the Dakota Turnpike, which would cross Native American land.

On Wednesday the President focused on what his administration would do to help them reclaim control over resources on their territories.

“For too long the federal government has put up restrictions and regulations that put this energy wealth out of reach,” he said.

“It’s been really restricted, the development itself has been restricted, and vast amounts of deposits of coal and other resources have, in a way, been taken out of your hands. And we’re going to have that changed. We’re going to put it back in your hands.”

During his remarks, the president said it wasn’t enough to be energy free, perhaps referring to energy independence. Instead, the president said he wanted the United States to be “energy dominant.”

Trump said he was confident that working together they could usher in “a golden age of American energy dominance.”

The financial and security benefits of that success, he said, would benefit the entire country, including Native Americans.

Matthew Little for NTD

stand with standing rock

Published: By: Unknown - 5:11 AM

Red Warrior Camp

With so much celebration in Seven Councils Camp, people hardly noticed that crews were still bulldozing away just miles from the site where they’d been turned back. But the Red Warriors noticed. Before dawn on August 31, two young Lakota men chained themselves to heavy machinery at a pipeline site about 25 miles from camp.

State and county police quickly arrived, blocked the highway, and began trying to extract the men. Dale American Horse Jr., 26, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who went by the excellent nickname of Happy, was perched seven feet off the ground, his arms chained to a hydraulic rod that towered high above him. He was a big handsome guy, clean-shaven, with a thick red bandanna tied just above his eyes, covering his black braid. He said little as the firemen attempted to remove him or as a crowd of about 50 supporters sang and drummed and taunted the baby-faced cops.

“Did you ever wear a uniform to defend that Constitution?” jeered an older Indian man, a long gray braid beneath a headband. He sucked a cigarette and blew smoke into the wind, and when the police prevented supporters from smudging American Horse with burning sage, his voice rose. “That’s a religious right we paid for with blood, with the red stripe on the flag! We all wore uniforms! We won wars for you!”

Happy American Horse was extracted and arrested after being locked to the excavator for six hours. Red Warrior spokesperson Clay Hall called the action a success, halting construction for a day and costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in delays. “In the Lakota way, we call that counting coup,” he told me. “We took them with an action when they weren’t expecting it.” It’s too soon to say how it will affect the eventual outcome, the relationship between Red Warrior Camp and the Standing Rock tribal government, or what penalty American Horse will pay. Hall said that his group wasn’t merely interested in rerouting the project; they wanted to kill the Black Snake altogether.

But in the short term, the Red Warriors had staged a stunning bit of guerilla theater. Thirteen thousand people watched the action live on Facebook. The picture of Happy American Horse bear-hugging that steel boom went viral. Locked to the pole with a free country behind him, arms bound, eyes cast down serenely, a brown man being handled by white guards: the image that was beamed from America to the world looked all too much like a condemned warrior being led to the gallows. Or to the cross.

Outside correspondent Mark Sundeen is the author of The Man Who Quit Money. His next book, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America, will be published by Riverhead Books in January 2017.

stading rock water is life Published: By: Unknown - 5:05 AM

What's going on in Standing roclk? p4

There was singing and dancing and praying, sweat lodges and kayaks and swimming—a regular Native America paradise.

For all its notoriety as climate crusaders, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe did not ask for that mantle. Their lawsuit, in which they are represented by the environmental group Earthjustice, does not mention carbon or fossil fuels. For that matter, it doesn’t mention racism. It focuses strictly on two issues: potential pollution of their water source in the event of a spill and the disturbance of sacred sites. And yet their defiance has stirred the pot, and in this moment of galvanization, other indigenous Americans are bringing to the table ideas that combine the often-estranged progressive causes of ecology and racial justice.

“Climate change is inherently racist,” said Nick Estes, co-founder of activist organization the Red Nation and a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. “The Anthropocene began with fossil fuel extraction, which began with colonization. The rise of temperatures began with the industrial revolution. And the damage was done to ‘expendable people,’ exploiting the labor of black people and the land of indigenous people.”

Gone is the 19th-century attempt to defeat Europeans or the 20th-century attempt to assimilate. The strategy now is to marshal attorneys, money, land, and political clout to outlast them. “I call us the weebee people,” said Brian Cladoosby, president of the National Congress of American Indians. “We be here when they came, we be here when they gone.”

Perhaps the most startling idea to emerge is a full upending of the narrative of the benevolent—perhaps paternalistic—white liberal uplifting the oppressed minority. People I met here felt that white people had strayed so far from their spiritual core that it was the Indian who would have to rescue them. A Pawnee hip-hop artist who calls himself Quese IMC (born Marcus Frejo Little Eagle), with black beard, hoop earrings, thick-rimmed glasses, and a cocked ball cap, told me that both racism and exploitation of the earth came from the same sickness: a lack of spirituality, which breeds a lack of compassion for other beings. “The earth is a spirit, the water is a spirit, and if you have no spirit, and you have no connection to those things, it will be easy to destroy them and not even care.”

When I asked Chief LittleSun what was so great about the gathering, he said, “The spiritual part of this movement. This ground is the holiest place on earth right now.” This was the first time in his entire life that he’d taken part in any sort of protest or movement. I asked if he considered himself an environmentalist. LittleSun shook his head. “I don’t even know what that is.” It was as if I’d asked him if he were if a “skin-ist” or a “body-ist.” He simply didn’t think of himself as an entity separate from the earth.

Speaking to the main camp circle, Begaye compared the Navajo code talkers who helped defeat Hitler to Native Americans today leading the fight to protect land and water. “We have always saved the white people from themselves!” he declared, and the crowd roared its approval. Published: By: Unknown - 5:03 AM

What's going on in Standing roclk? p3

“When we need help, they say we are sovereign,” said Mossett. “But when it comes to development of our resources—oil, gas, coal, uranium, water—then they step in see how much money the state can get.”

The only note of standoffishness I detected at Seven Councils was a settlement in a grove of cottonwoods called Red Warrior Camp that had erected a fence around itself and hung signs that read: NO MEDIA. NO TOURISTS. CHECK IN WITH SECURITY. An organizer told me the camp was trained in direct nonviolent action. “Whatever happens in Red Warrior Camp stays in Red Warrior Camp,” she said. When they held an open mic outside the gate, their rhetoric included the same message of togetherness and spirit but with a more militant tone. Its people were younger, quite a few of them white, some wearing camo fatigues and bandannas over their faces. I was told that many of the activists came from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and uprising in 1973, still bearing a stamp of badassery from the days of the American Indian Movement. Unlike the Standing Rock Tribe, which courted mainstream reporters, Red Warrior pumped out its own message on Facebook. I didn’t attempt to penetrate the place but met some young native guys staying there. “For a place calling itself Red Warrior Camp,” one of them quipped, “there sure are a lot of white warriors.”

Nonetheless, in five days I witnessed no violence, lawlessness, alcohol, or even hostility. A couple speakers even welcomed “European relatives” such as myself. The days were filled with peaceful marches and prayers at the idle construction site, ceremonial welcoming of newly arrived tribes, and as afternoon temps rose to the nineties, flinging ourselves into the cool waters of the once-mighty Cannonball. “River” is the incorrect word to describe this body of water. With its currentless murk and silty mud, the thing is a reservoir, an arm of the man-made lake impounded by the Oahe Dam.

I met Nick Estes, a Lower Brule Sioux from South Dakota who remembered that when he was a child, his grandparents told stories about the wonderful Missouri River. “But after the 1940s, the stories stopped.” The Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program authorized nine dams—five on Indian land, displacing those who lived along the banks. Standing Rock lost 55,000 acres, while adjacent Cheyenne River Reservation lost 150,000 acres.

“If Dakota Access kills this river,” said Estes, “it will be its second death.”
According to historian Michael Lawson, author of Dammed Indians, “The Oahe Dam destroyed more Indian land than any other public works project in America.” Estes said his elders “died of heartache.”

Indian nations, with their ample resources and limited political power, have often borne the brunt of resource extraction. For the Lakota, the “Black Snake,” as many call the Dakota Pipeline, feels like just one more case of whittling away of their land—which is to say, breaking their treaties. And Indians can’t help but notice that although the reason they keep getting screwed is never acknowledged to be racism, the victims of the various ecological catastrophes through the decades are often members of their race. Between dams, toxic dumps, fracking, oil spills, and atomic bomb tests, the list of injustices against native communities could fill pages.
In 2014, the proposed route of DAPL went through Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, with roughly 61,000 residents, 92 percent of them white. After the Corps determined that the pipeline could contaminate drinking water, it was rerouted to pass by Standing Rock. “That’s environmental racism,” said Kandi Mossett, of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation in North Dakota and an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network.

This type of outrage is not limited to activists. Jetting in from Arizona was Russell Begaye, president of the 360,000-member Navajo Nation, by far the country’s largest. As the only man on the grounds in a coat and tie (a giant turquoise bolo, to be precise), he looked every bit like the most politically powerful American Indian in the country. When I asked if he thought the placement of projects like DAPL on native land were evidence of racism, Begaye said, “Of course, because they could put this further north, but they are not going to do that because the population up there is not Indian.” He cited the 2015 Gold King Mine wastewater spill on the Animas River in Colorado, which polluted Navajo water and farms.

Much of this debate hinges on a concept to which most non-Native Americans give little thought: sovereignty. According to the treaties, Indians were to be treated as autonomous nations and dealt with diplomatically, like foreign governments. That didn’t happen. Reservations were ruled by unelected white agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who outlawed native language and religion. But in past decades, reservations have established their own governments and, with bands of lawyers, have fought for—and, in many cases, won back—their treaty rights. The Standing Rock lawsuit may hinge on the definition of sovereignty. The law required the Army Corps of Engineers to consult with the tribe before it permitted the pipeline, but it didn’t require that the tribe approve. So Standing Rock contends that its wishes were overruled.

“When we need help, they say we are sovereign,” said Mossett. “But when it comes to development of our resources—oil, gas, coal, uranium, water—then they step in see how much money the state can get.”

The United Nations appears to agree. On Wednesday, its Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues released a statement that the failure to consult with the Sioux on DAPL violated the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a resolution President Obama signed in 2010.

Published: By: Unknown - 4:59 AM

What's going on in Standing roclk? p2

As soon as the sun went down, I climbed a hill above the Cannonball, and at the bottom of the grass, at the bottom of the grass, saw an American statue: two dozen teepees and tents lit by headlights and campfire, Wood smoke, the driver of the zebra horse on the horse painted horse. At the central fire ring, I saw the men banging the barrel, surrounded by women who wept with them in the ancient Lakota song, sang very well through the middle of the night, thanks to cigarettes, coffee and cough drops. .

I parked next to a towering teepee on the waterfront, slept in the car, and in the morning met my neighbors, a delegation of senior elders drove 18 hours from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. . The extent to which I did not know what I was doing was clarified when Chief Morgan LittleSun, 58, a warm and kind welder and teepee builder, told me that his greatest concern came This is not the police - it's the Sioux Tribe.

"Pawnee and Sioux hate each other forever," he said. Although the tribes have signed a peace treaty, LittleSun has seen hostility at phawows, and even fighting.

I asked when the captives and the Sioux people made peace uncomfortable.
"150 years ago."

According to LittleSun, it is the first time since that that Pawnee leaders have traveled throughout Sioux. While war dates and treaties in India are historical oddities, most whites tend to forget, LittleSun is one of many Native Americans I've been to. Meet with anyone whose past does not really die, as words say, not even over. They rattled out the 19th century events as they happened yesterday, and this gathering at Standing Rock is the occasion for a new round of history made. This site called Seven Camp Councils, said that for the first time all Lakota bands had gathered in one place for over a century. Crow that entered the camp during the war, waving flags, singing and singing, brought a peace conduit and some buffalo meat that gave the first real reconciliation since 1876, when Crows Is to investigate Custer at Little Bighorn, US soldiers have received their loving love bait by Lakota. Finally, representatives from more than 120 tribal nations came from Hawaii, Maine, California, and Mississippi.

But when I asked LittleSun, there was a history-stealing tribe of horses, if he felt uncomfortable here, he shook his head decisively, and a smile spread across his face. "This is the best thing I've ever seen," he said. All day, strangers entered his camp, fed food and firewood and asked which tribe he belonged to, and when he told them, they did not hesitate but still hugged him like brother. Uncle, elders "But when I took Pawnee's flag on a pillar," LittleSun added with a laugh, "people move their horses to the other side of the camp!"

A range of kitchens is open 24 hours to accommodate about 1,000 people for free. A microphone was open to anyone, and during hot days, one after another described how wonderful it was here, what it meant to see Native Americans. From all nations focus on common purpose. While I see passion, anger and solemnity, the main thing that I see is joy. Tourists reunite with long-lost relatives. Parents bring small children, and a neat little house teaches them to ride a carriage and make fried bread. T-shirts and banners with slogan slogans like NATIVES WITHTTSTUDE and STRAIGHT OUTTA PINE RIDGE allude to youth, pride and drowning in pop culture politics. A young man rolled over three beautiful girls and shouted, "friends from any tribe." There are singing and dancing and prayers, sweat lodges and kayaks and swimming - an American paradise. Native indigenous.

Between the obvious joy they see is not a minority, but the overwhelming majority, like a white reporter I feel like a buzzkill with the thought of putting up a pen and pads to ask questions. I often go camping in Pawnee, every morning to make coffee for my neighbors forget to bring the jar. Unlike many other tribal nations, the number of people has increased over the last century, the kidnappers traveled from the Missouri River to Oklahoma, with only 3,482 registered members. The leaders told me that going through the rolls after several months when the death toll over birth was heartbreaking.
A few days before I arrived, state officials unloaded a water truck that was available to the protesters. Maybe they think they are dealing with a group of hungry starved hunters who may fear easily instead of a sovereign state with the government, police, EMS and radio own. they.

Within hours, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe had hauled in its own infrastructure: banks of Porta-Potties, water tankers, a disaster response trailer, Dumpsters, ambulances, a refrigerated semi truck. Meanwhile, each delegation arrived with cash and food. Tons of food. I spent a day cooking meatball stew in the main kitchen and discovered, among other abundances, a four-person tent stacked to the ceiling with bags of flour. The tribe also had its own beef production enterprise. The Yakima Nation in Washington chartered a tractor trailer filled with pallets of fresh fruit and bottled water. Small donations were also received: somebody mailed four packets of Lipton noodles. When I asked how long they planned to the stay, most said, “Till the end.”

One day, it got so hot that I drove up the road to check email under the air conditioner of the Prairie Knights Casino and Resort, owned by the tribe. After days talking about spirit and justice under the big open skies, it came as a shock to hedgehog into the chilly dark cave of the casinos, ABBA tunes piped through the speakers, a television twice the size of my car. I watched 58 senior citizens disembark from a motor coach from Bismarck, 58 of them Caucasian, and as they plunked their pensions into the one-armed bandits, I wondered if they knew they were underwriting the civil disobedience down the road.

Published: By: Unknown - 4:54 AM

What's going on in Rock Stand?

Two of the country's biggest problems, racism and climate change, have crashed into a booking in North Dakota. This week, I transported my train wagon with water and supplies and drove down to see a historic demonstration that could shape the forthcoming national dialogue.

Last week, North Dakota's Sioux Tribe tribe emerged as heroes of climate change, with little or no political or media attention, and they stopped building the Dakota Access oil pipeline worth $ 3 , $ 7 billion. After tribal president David Archambault II and others were arrested for overcoming obstacles to block excavating machines, Leonardo DiCaprio tweeted that he was inspired, and Bill McKibben offered American products. Geography is the "pioneer of the movement." According to the tribe sued the United States Army of Engineers to stop the crew from buried under the Missouri River immediately upstream from their lands, the hashtag was casual, undetectable. #NoDAPL was Rise - short for Dakota Drainage Pipeline.

Meanwhile, the challenge evokes the past ugly past of the United States in the past and present. "It felt like 1875 because the natives were still fighting for our land," writes author Alexey Sherman. Archambault may have described Ferguson and Baltimore when he was in the New York Times, who spoke out against racial issues and declared that "the state has militarized my reservation." In a touch of the epic derp may be funny if it does not actually reveal colored people are assumed to be violent, when Lakota invites their loved ones to pack their peace pipeline and link it to They in solidarity, the county police (white) think they mean pipe bombs.

By the end of the week, thousands of Native Americans across the country had come to Standing Rock, a 3,500-square-mile reserve with 8,250 residents. They were joined by a curious white soil folk and a crew of Black Lives Matters activists from Minneapolis. The camp is located just outside the boundary on land managed by the Army Corps. Police forces blocked the highway to Bismarck, allowing demonstrators - or "defenders" as they insisted on being called - to leave but not to return. At the District Court of the District of Columbia, tribal lawyers argue that the pipeline would contaminate their water and clean up sacred burial grounds. Judge James E. Boasberg said he would decide in the coming weeks to order the pipeline construction company, Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Phillips 66 and a Texas company called Energy Transfer.

Recognizing the wildness of the two most volatile issues of the United States - racism and climate change - I pulled people behind me from my wagon, loaded it with a mattress , 5 gallons of water, and 5 days worth of goods, and drive up to Standing Rock. Published: By: Unknown - 4:46 AM