Addressing U.S. allies at the Munich Security Conference, Mike Pence is met with silence as he tells the audience: "I bring greetings from the 45th president of the United States of America, President Donald Trump."

POTUS just now, on declaring a national emergency: "I could do the wall over a much longer period of time... I didn't need to do this." That's plaintiffs' Exhibit A.

"It would be a pretty dramatic expansion of how this was used in the past," says GOP senator Ron Johnson of Trump declaring a state of emergency.

Marco Rubio: "It's a bad idea."

Republicans seem very caught off guard by this.

There are police here on the hill circling politicians when they come in for the vote, keeping reporters away from them. This is not normal.

An officer smashed right into NBC's Lee-Anne Caldwell who was walking with a senator. Another reporter, who is pregnant, says she was also shoved. Lots of yelling between reporters and cops here, who are clearly blocking reporters from getting near senators.

This is fucked. The police say they're just "escorting" the senators to the vote. In effect, they're shielding them from taking questions. Never seen this before.

I am undocumented, but I am not a violent criminal. Millions of immigrants like me live in the shadows, afraid to emerge because of Trump's rhetoric.

When I was a child, my father was murdered in front of me and my siblings. After I was married and had left Guatemala, my children also witnessed a similar tragedy when my husband’s father also was murdered in front of their eyes.

Violence, corruption and poverty: Perhaps you can see why I chose to flee to America. So I walked and bused to this great country from Guatemala in 1999.

My children, husband and I built a life in New Jersey, and, in 2013, I began working at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, cleaning suites and surrounding businesses, as well as cleaning Mr. Trump’s and Ivanka Trump’s houses. The hours were long, but I made friends, and I could feed my children. The club always knew I was undocumented; I told them so before I was hired. No matter, they said, your old false documents will do.

Once Mr. Trump's presidential campaign began, life at the club changed. I guess they were more concerned about our status, so my supervisor asked for a good set of papers in order to continue working there. When I reminded him that I was undocumented, he simply provided me with the documentation necessary to continue working. In fact, he had someone take my photograph in the laundry room of the club to use for the new identification card and lent me money to purchase new papers.

To make it even easier, he had his cousin, a fellow employee, drive me to a nearby town to get the new set of false documents. When I got the new set of documents, my supervisor told me to hide them, and said that if the police saw them, I’d be arrested.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/02/14/victorina-morales-donald-trump-golf-course-immigrant-column/2837895002/

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A Saudi mobile application that lets men track and restrict the movements of women in the kingdom has come under increased scrutiny this week with an American senator and rights groups urging Apple and Google to remove it from their platforms, accusing the technology giants of facilitating gender discrimination.

Saudi “guardianship laws” give women a legal status similar to that of minors in many areas of their lives. Every Saudi woman, regardless of age, has a male “guardian,” usually her father or husband, but sometimes her brother or son, who must give his permission for her to get a passport, have certain medical procedures or get married.

The app in question, called Absher, was launched in 2015 by the Saudi government. It allows men to manage the women under their guardianship by giving or revoking their right to travel through airports, tracking them by their national identity cards or passports. The men can turn on notifications that alert them with a text message any time a woman under their guardianship passes through an airport.

Absher, which roughly translates as “yes sir,” can be downloaded from both the Google Play store and Apple’s app store, which critics say makes the tech companies complicit in the repression of Saudi women.

The effort to pull Absher from the platforms got a boost this week when Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, demanded as much in a letter to the two companies.

“It is hardly news that the Saudi monarchy seeks to restrict and repress Saudi women, but American companies should not enable or facilitate the Saudi government’s patriarchy,” Mr. Wyden wrote in the letter, which was released on Monday.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-app-women.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes