WASHINGTON ― In a brief defending its ban on citizens from six Muslim-majority countries, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department approvingly cited a segregation-era Supreme Court decision that allowed Jackson, Mississippi, to close public pools rather than integrate them.

In the early 1960s, courts ordered Jackson to desegregate its public parks, which included five swimming pools. Instead, the city decided to close the pools. Black residents of Jackson sued. But in 1971, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, decided that closing the pools rather than integrating them was just fine.

The dissents, even at the time, were furious. “May a State in order to avoid integration of the races abolish all of its public schools?” Justice William O. Douglas asked in his dissent .

“I had thought official policies forbidding or discouraging joint use of public facilities by Negroes and whites were at war with the Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Byron White wrote in another dissent. “Our cases make it unquestionably clear, as all of us agree, that a city or State may not enforce such a policy by maintaining officially separate facilities for the two races. It is also my view, but apparently not that of the majority, that a State may not have an official stance against desegregating public facilities and implement it by closing those facilities in response to a desegregation order.”

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-administration-cites-segregation-era-ruling-to-defend-its-travel-ban/ar-BBATvQM?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=UE01DHP

Backlash is growing over where the world's top bottled water producer gets its supplies. Nestlé collects millions of gallons a year from springs in Southern California, an area prone to drought.

As the company tries to meet the rising demand, activists are voicing their concern.

In the San Bernardino Mountains outside Los Angeles, an intricate maze of pipes collects and funnels tens of millions of gallons of water each year, CBS News correspondent Mireya Villareal reports.

It's the original source for Nestlé's Arrowhead water, but the steep terrain, covered in thick brush is only easily accessible by helicopter.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/backlash-bottled-water-nestle/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

The purge accelerates

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is taking the unusual step of hunting for evidence of crimes committed by Haitian immigrants as it decides whether to allow them to continue participating in a humanitarian program that has shielded tens of thousands from deportation since an earthquake destroyed much of their country.

The inquiries into the community’s criminal history were made in internal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services emails obtained by The Associated Press. They show the agency’s newly appointed policy chief also wanted to know how many of the roughly 50,000 Haitians enrolled in the Temporary Protected Status program were taking advantage of public benefits, which they are not eligible to receive.

The emails don’t make clear if Haitian misdeeds will be used to determine whether they can remain in the United States. The program is intended to help people from places beset by war or disasters and, normally, the decision to extend it depends on whether conditions in the immigrants’ home country have improved enough for them to return. But emails suggest Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who will make the decision, is looking at other criteria.

https://apnews.com/740ed5b40ce84bb398c82c48884be616

All travelers (including U.S. citizens) should be advised, you many encounter:

- Illegal arrests
- Racial profiling
- Demands to show your papers

If your rights have been violated because of SB4, call the ACLU of Texas at 1-888-507-2970

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/861756356352557056

Of the many revelations from former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ Senate hearing on May 8, Naval War College professor Tom Nichols said in a series of tweets that President Donald Trump’s response might have been the most interesting.

The 14-tweet-long thread begins with Nichols explaining his background as a “Sovietologist”, and how he “would have given anything for Andropov or Gorbachev to give me a running narrative of their mood and inner thoughts in real time” the way Trump appears to have done with his tweets about Yates following her testimony.

He went on to say that the president’s Twitter feed “is basically a raw feed of POTUS thoughts to foreign analysts” because they are “pieces of the president’s moods and thoughts that day”.

“This only occurred to me today as I realized how easily POTUS tweets were giving me a minute by minute image of his reactions to Yates,” Nichols tweeted, and then added “this is the kind of instant leadership portrait that I wouldn’t want a foreign nation to have when gaming out a crisis with us.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/naval-war-college-prof-explains-how-trumps-stress-tweets-are-a-roadmap-for-americas-enemies/

For the Washington establishment, President Donald Trump's decision to make General H.R. McMaster his national security adviser in February was a masterstroke. Here is a well-respected defense intellectual, praised by both parties, lending a steady hand to a chaotic White House. The grown-ups are back.

But inside the White House, the McMaster pick has not gone over well with the one man who matters most. White House officials tell me Trump himself has clashed with McMaster in front of his staff.

On policy, the faction of the White House loyal to senior strategist Steve Bannon is convinced McMaster is trying to trick the president into the kind of nation building that Trump campaigned against. Meanwhile the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, is blocking McMaster on a key appointment.

McMaster's allies and adversaries inside the White House tell me that Trump is disillusioned with him. This professional military officer has failed to read the president -- by not giving him a chance to ask questions during briefings, at times even lecturing Trump.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-08/washington-loves-general-mcmaster-but-trump-doesn-t

https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/829849353867128832

Soil helps build up our defenses against disease and imparts a sense of the sacred—and we are killing it.

It’s estimated that children now spend less time outside than the average prisoner. This could have devastating effects: Kids need to be exposed to the microbes in the soil to build up their defenses against diseases that may attack them later. But it’s not just children, Paul Bogard explains in his new book, The Ground Beneath Us. The EPA estimates that the average American adult now spends 93 percent of their life indoors. As we retreat indoors, more and more of the earth is disappearing, with an estimated quarter of a million acres paved or repaved in the United States each year. [Find out why we are wired to be outside.]

When National Geographic caught up with Bogard by phone at his home in Minnesota, the author explained why Iowa is the most transformed state in the U.S., how soil is alive but we’re killing it, and how places where terrible things happened can become sacred ground.

You write, “We are only just now beginning to understand the vast life in the soil, what it does, and how our activities on the surface may affect it.” Talk us through some highlights of the new science—and how you became so passionate about dirt.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/soil-dirt-ground-beneath-us-bogard/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20170501news-booktalk&utm_campaign=Content&sf74959362=1

House Republicans are taking health services away from disabled children, women who give birth, and survivors of rape and sexual assault. They are consigning thousands of people with serious illnesses to death by making them uninsurable in an era of unaffordable treatment. Virtually every reputable medical organization in the country condemns the health care bill that passed the House Thursday, but the GOP clings to two reasons for passing it.

First, Republicans claim that the new legislation provides economic benefits. These benefits are unclear, though reports suggest that they entail a transfer of resources from vulnerable people to rich people. The bill passed the House without a score from the Congressional Budget Office, so we can dismiss any economic justification for it without further discussion. Passing the bill without a score from the CBO is a signal that Republican legislators are not taking the economic dimensions of this issue seriously, so we can follow their lead and move on to the heart of the matter.

The other explanation given by House Republicans for passing the bill is political. These congressmen felt they had to repeal the Affordable Care Act because they promised to do so. Most Americans have no quibble with Obamacare itself, but for Republicans, repealing it is and always has always been a way to repudiate former president Barack Obama. Since taking office, President Trump has done several things that he previously chastised Obama for, but these contradictions have had little impact on his party or their supporters. This is largely because GOP voters’ disdain for Obama and support for Trump cannot be separated from findings about racism. Studies conducted after the election confirm that racial resentment directed toward people of color predicted both overall support for Trump and voters’ propensity to switch from Obama to Trump.

GOP voters know they don’t like Obama, but they do not know Obama’s legislative record, whether it pertains to the economic recovery or health care legislation. A December 2016 poll showed that 67 percent of Trump voters believed that unemployment had risen during Obama’s tenure, even though it dramatically declined. A February 2017 poll found that one third of all Americans did not even know that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were the same thing. Over half of the Republicans in that poll did not know whether Medicaid would be impacted by repealing Obamacare. Medicaid will be gutted by the new bill.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/05/05/obamacare-repeal-based-racial-resentment/iVNtB9fpr3JNm7IKfYyorK/story.html

Source: REUTERS

Organizers barred journalists on Sunday from a publicly advertised event in Shanghai that offered Chinese investors the chance to get U.S. immigrant visas if they put money in a real estate project linked to the family of President Donald Trump's son-in-law.

The two-tower luxury apartment complex in New Jersey, One Journal Square, is being developed by KABR Group and the Kushner Companies, which until recently was headed by senior White House advisor Jared Kushner, the husband of Trump's daughter Ivanka.

The developers are seeking to raise $150 million, or 15.4 percent of funding for the project, from investors through the EB-5 visa program, according to marketing materials posted by the event's organizer, immigration agency Qiaowai.

The controversial EB-5 program allows wealthy foreigners to, in effect, buy U.S. immigration visas for themselves and families by investing at least $500,000 in certain development projects.



Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-kushner-idUSKBN1830E7?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=590f37a004d3017b59339f1b&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter