{"articles":[{"id":268,"title":"Trump Aims for 'Historic' Military Budget Increase and More In Politics Today","html_content":"

by Causes | 3.20.17

It’s difficult to stay up-to-date on what’s happening in this country and to break through the clutter, so we’re here to make it easier. Here’s what we at Countable are reading today:

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1. \"Trump seeks 'historic' increase of 9 percent in U.S. military's budget\"

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\"President Donald Trump is seeking what he called a \"historic\" 9 percent increase in military spending, even as the United States has wound down major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and remains the world's strongest military power.\"

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\"Trump will ask Congress to boost Pentagon spending in the next fiscal year by $54 billion in his first budget proposal and slash the same amount from non-defense spending, including a large reduction in foreign aid, a White House budget official said on Monday.\"

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Read more at Reuters.

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2. \"House intel head: ‘No evidence’ of Trump campaign contact with Russia\"

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\"The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Monday rejected reports that members of President Trump’s campaign team had regular contact with Russian officials. “There is no evidence that I’ve been presented [by the intelligence community] of regular contact with anybody in the Trump campaign,\" Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told reporters.”

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\"Nunes's committee is investigating Russian efforts to influence U.S. presidential election, including any links between campaign officials and Moscow. The scope of the review has been under fierce scrutiny following Trump's dismissal of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who misled Vice President Pence about the subject of a pre-inauguration call with the Russian ambassador, which included talk of sanctions against the country.\"

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Read more at The Hill.

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3. \"WikiLeaks' Assange facing eviction from London's Ecuadorean embassy in June\"

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\"The die seems cast for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as it becomes increasingly likely that the next Ecuadorean president will be Guillermo Lasso, a conservative former banker now holding the lead for the April 2 runoff election. Lasso has vowed repeatedly that as president he would evict the alleged whistle-blower from their embassy in London, where Assange has lived for the last four and a half years.\"

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\"The Ecuadorean people have been paying a cost that we should not have to bear,\" Lasso told The Guardian a few weeks ago. “We will cordially ask Mr. Assange to leave within 30 days of assuming a mandate.” Assange, who is Australian, is wanted by U.S. authorities for publishing scores of classified documents back in 2010.”

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Read more at Fox News.

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4. \"A constitutional right to Facebook and Twitter? Supreme court weighs in\"

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\"A Supreme Court argument on Monday about whether North Carolina may bar registered sex offenders from using Facebook, Twitter and similar services turned into a discussion of how thoroughly social media have transformed American civic discourse.\"

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\"The justices’ remarks, which indicated easy familiarity with the major social media services, suggested that they would strike down the North Carolina law under the First Amendment. The North Carolina law makes it a crime for registered sex offenders to use many commercial websites that allow the exchange of information and do not limit their membership to adults.\"

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Read more at the New York Times.

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5. \"Mexico warns U.S. it'll cut off Nafta talks if tariffs added\"

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\"Mexico’s top trade negotiator doubled down on threats to break off talks to rework Nafta, saying his country will walk away if the U.S. insists on slapping duties or quotas on any products from south of the border. “The moment that they say, ‘We’re going to put a 20 percent tariff on cars,’ I

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get up from the table,\" Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said in an interview. \"Bye-bye.””

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\"This doesn’t mean, Guajardo emphasized, that Mexico would be looking to scrap Nafta. But by saying it refuses to even discuss the kind of tariffs President Donald Trump has long trumpeted, the country is ratcheting up the pressure on U.S. negotiators and effectively daring them to pull out of the 23-year-old pact.\"

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*Read more at Bloomberg. *

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6. \"Justice Department changes position on Texas’ discriminatory voter ID law\"

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\"After arguing for nearly six years that Texas’ voter ID law intentionally discriminated against minorities, the U.S. Department of Justice has informed the other plaintiffs in the case it has abandoned that position. The decision comes one day before the DOJ and the other plaintiffs were scheduled to make their latest arguments against the ID law.\"

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\"“I think it is clearly a retreat from voting rights,\" said Danielle Lang, deputy director of voting rights for The Campaign Legal Center, which represents plaintiffs in the case. She said her organization has been “raising alarm bells” about new Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ willingness to protect voting rights since he was nominated.””

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Read more at ProPublica.

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— Erin Wright

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(Photo Credit: U.S. Missile Defense Agency via Flickr / Creative Commons)

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