Portside

Inauguration Day demonstrators potentially face decades in prison on charges they say are all ‘Trumped’ up. The arrests and subsequent indictments appear to correspond to the Trump Era pattern of a shock-and-awe gambit followed by a lot of confusion and disarray. Advocates are concerned President Trump’s ‘law and order’ message, combined with his contempt for dissent, could mean an intensified police and prosecutorial response to demonstrations.

In his perverse fixation on overturning all things Barack Obama, President Donald Trump now turns his attention to Cuba, the island located 90 miles off our shore. Reports are that the president plans to travel to Florida to announce that he will reverse Obama’s opening to Cuba, reinstate restrictions on the right of U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba and curtail business opportunities that Obama had opened up by executive order.

Aside from California’s obedient Republican congressional delegation, Stanford is perhaps the most powerful locus of Trump’s support in the state with close ties to the energy industry and its lobbyists, the center of an even more powerful web of connections to Donald Trump, whose administration has moved to help industry in general, and Big Oil in particular—doing away with climate and environmental protections, opening public lands up to mining and drilling, and so on.

At the end of February immigration agents descended on a handful of Japanese and Chinese restaurants in the suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi, and in nearby Meridian. Fifty-five immigrant cooks, dishwashers, servers and bussers were loaded into vans and taken to a detention center about 160 miles away in Jena, Louisiana.

Cities, counties and even one state are working to push legislation that would force police agencies to disclose their acquisition and use of surveillance technologies to local lawmakers and communities.

The Trump administration today pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change. That pits the U.S. against the world and the scientific consensus on global warming. Trump's comments on climate change during his meeting with European leaders prompted German leader Angela Merkel to conclude that Europe must increasingly go it alone. The Obama administration could have done more, while the Trump administration couldn't have done less. (John Feffer, FPIF)

Millions are threatened by famine, as Riyadh prepares an assault on the country’s key port.

Motivated by his deep-seated biases and those of President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pursuing a draconian agenda on voting rights, immigration, crime, policing, the drug war, federal sentencing and the privatization of prisons.

Voters got a package deal with Trump - the whole clan. First daughter Ivanka who, along with her husband, Jared Kushner, are key political advisers to the president. Both have offices in the White House. They have multiple security clearances, access to high-level leaders whenever they visit, and the perfect formula for the sort of brand-enhancement that now seems to come with such eminence. President Trump sees the Presidency like a business... a family business.