Joining today's show are Mike Barnicle, Nicolle Wallace, Sam Stein, Rev. Al Sharpton, Mark Halperin, Vali Nasr, Chuck Todd, Shawn Henry, Jake Silverstein, Naveed Jamali, Alana Simmons, Sara Eisen, Megan Rapinoe and more
S.C. governor signs bill to remove Confederate flag from Capitol grounds. South Carolina's governor used nine pens Thursday to sign a law that will remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds and send it to a museum.
Each pen, Gov. Nikki Haley said, will go to the families of the nine victims of last month's massacre at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
By showing forgiveness after the shooting, she said, they caused the change of heart that led to passage of the history-making bill.
"This is a story about the history of South Carolina and how the action of nine individuals laid out this long chain of events that forever showed the state of South Carolina what love and forgiveness looks like," she said.
Crowds wanting to be part of the event gathered around the flag on the State House grounds and jammed the lobby to witness the signing.
The flag, a fixture on Capitol grounds for half a century, will be lowered at 10 a.m. Friday, Haley said.
The legislation calls for the flag to be taken down within 24 hours of her signing of the bill and moved to the state's Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum for display.
"We're a state that believes in tradition. We're a state that believes in history. We're a state that believes in respect," Haley said before signing the bill. "So we will bring it down with dignity, and we will make sure that it is put in its rightful place."
Early Thursday morning, the S.C. House of Representatives voted 94 to 20 to take down the flag, giving final approval to a bill that passed the state Senate earlier in the week.
The vote count was more than the two-thirds needed, but it came after a handful of lawmakers mounted a tenacious last stand, proposing amendment after amendment that led the debate to drag on more than 12 hours.
"It's bittersweet, because it took a tragedy to bring this body to this decision," South Carolina state Rep. Jenny Horne told CNN"s "New Day" on Thursday morning, referring to the slayings of nine black churchgoers in Charleston three weeks ago. "I am so proud to be a South Carolinian and proud of what South Carolina has done to move this state forward."
Horne, a Republican, delivered an emotional speech on the House floor in favor of removing the flag.
"I felt like ... someone needed to change the course of the debate, because no one had mentioned ... the Charleston Nine," she said. "I would like to think that my remark helped change the course of the debate."
The House vote may even bring immediate benefits to South Carolina. NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said the group will move to lift its five-year economic boycott against the state during a national convention this weekend.
"When the flag comes down, we lift the boycott," he told CNN's "The Situation Room" Thursday. Removing the flag in South Carolina is an important symbolic victory, he said. But he added that there are battles still to be fought in other states where "emblems of bigotry and bias" still fly.
Decades-long battle
For decades, African-Americans and others have demanded the flag come down. To them, it's a racist symbol that represents a war to uphold slavery and, later, a battle to oppose civil rights advances.
But their voices were drowned out by supporters who argued it is a symbol of Southern culture.
That all changed last month when a white gunman, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, killed nine African-American worshipers in a historic Charleston church.
After the massacre, photos quickly surfaced of Roof holding the Confederate battle flag, which he apparently revered as a symbol of white supremacy.
The racially motivated attack triggered a national wave of sympathy, outrage and renewed calls to have the battle flag removed.
On Tuesday, the South Carolina Senate voted 36-3 to bring down the flag and handed a clean bill to the House, but things didn't go as smoothly there.
68 amendments proposed
When debate started in the House around noon Wednesday, the flag's supporters proposed a flood of amendments.
And proceedings dragged on into early Thursday, as the amendments were declared out of order or legislators voted to knock them down, 68 in all.
Some proposals were designed to delay action: One suggested holding a referendum on the flag issue during the 2016 presidential election. Another proposed having a museum calculate costs of displaying the flag and return a budget for legislators to consider in January.
Other proposed amendments took up lawmakers' time with minutiae: Replace the flag pole with a pole honoring black soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. Dig up the state flower bed. Protect or remove about a dozen other state monuments.
Each proposal put lawmakers further away from a vote on the bill itself.
Tearful outburst
It was too much for Horne, who unleashed a tearful admonition on her colleagues. She had been to the funerals of the nine worshipers shot dead inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. And she was still bereft.
"I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body ..." she paused, swallowing her sobs and then raising her voice to shout, "to do something meaningful, such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds."
She thrust her finger at fellow representatives with every word of her demand.
Potentially long delays
Had one amendment passed, it would have meant more debate, more bureaucracy and the battle flag would have continued to flap in the wind yards away for weeks, maybe months, Horne said.
"We are going to be doing this all summer long," she protested.
"And if any of you vote to amend, you are ensuring that this flag will fly beyond Friday. And for the widow of Sen. Pinckney and his two young daughters, that would be adding insult to injury, and I will not be a part of it."
Clementa Pinckney was a state senator and was leading the Bible study class at the church when the shooting began. He was among those killed.
Horne left the speaker's podium to land in the tight embrace of an African-American lawmaker colleague standing on the House floor.
Outside pressure
The tenacity behind the fight to delay the flag's removal had been fanned outside the House chamber.
The State newspaper reported that pro-Confederate flag robocalls urged voters last week to call their representatives and to tell them to "not stand with leftist fanatics who want to destroy the South we love."
"What's next? This attack on our values is sick and un-American, and it has to stop right here and right now in South Carolina," the call said.
Jeb Bush criticized for saying Americans want to work 'longer hours'. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are trading barbs on Twitter after Bush said in an interview Wednesday that "people need to work longer hours." The Democratic frontrunner for the presidential nomination quickly seized on her Republican counterpart's comments, tweeting: "Anyone who believes Americans aren't working hard enough hasn't met enough American workers."
She attached a graph showing productivity shooting up over the last several decades while hourly compensation has barely risen.
It's the second attack Clinton has leveled against Bush this week as Clinton is pivoting into the next phase of her campaign and showing she is willing to swipe at the top Republican hopefuls.
Bush later sought to clarify what his remarks -- which he made in an interview with the New Hampshire Union-Leader -- during a town hall event in Hudson, New Hampshire, later on Wednesday, explaining that he was referring to Americans who aren't working full-time.
"You can take it out of context all you want, but high sustained growth means people work 40 hours rather than 30 hours and that by our success they have disposable income for their families to decide how they want to spend it rather than standing in line and being dependent upon government," Bush said.
Turns out Americans work really hard ... but some want to work harder
And early Thursday morning, Bush leveled a comeback at Clinton on Twitter.
"Anyone who discounts 6.5 million people stuck in part-time work & seeking full-time jobs hasnt listened to working Americans @hillaryclinton," Bush tweeted.
Bush's initial remarks came as he was discussing economic growth, saying that he aims to bring the U.S. economy to 4% annual growth.
"(That) means we have to be a lot more productive. Workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families. That's the only way we are going to get out of this rut that we're in," Bush had said.
Jeb Bush is worth up to $22 million.
After a 12-year decline, crime in L.A. surges in first half of 2015. By ime surged across Los Angeles in the first six months of this year despite a campaign by the Los Angeles Police Department to place more officers on the streets and target certain types of offenses.
Los Angeles recorded a 12.7% increase in overall crime, ending more than a decade of declines and raising concerns about what more officials can do to reverse the trend.
Mayor Eric Garcetti and Police Chief Charlie Beck attributed the increases to several possible factors, including gang violence, rising homelessness and a November ballot measure that downgraded many theft and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
“This is bad news,” Garcetti said Wednesday as the city released the latest LAPD crime numbers. “Let me be clear: Any uptick in crime is unacceptable.” The surge in crime was felt across the city. Violent offenses rose 20.6%, propelled by increases in aggravated assaults and robberies. Property crime rose 10.9%, driven by across-the-board increases in burglaries, thefts and motor vehicle thefts. Overall, crime was up 12.7%.
The sharpest increases occurred in the LAPD's Central Division, which includes parts of downtown, Chinatown and skid row. Violent crime there has risen 67%, according to a Times analysis of LAPD data through June 27. Property crime increased 26%.
Beck and Garcetti emphasized they had seen some progress in recent months — crime is still up, but not as much as it was during the first three months of the year.
Several new initiatives — including the deployment of Metropolitan Division officers to crime hot spots and strengthening gang outreach efforts — appear to be having an effect, they said. They said they hoped continued expansion of the programs would help drive down the numbers.
“This is what keeps me awake at night,” Beck said. “I do take this personally. I've spent 40 years of my life trying to keep this city safe, and even though it is safer than in all those 40 years, I still worry about this.”
Crime in Los Angeles has dropped steadily since 2003, the first full year former Chief William J. Bratton — who pioneered data-driven policing — led the LAPD.
But the uptick, particularly in violent crimes, has drawn significant attention in recent months. Public safety was a keystone of Garcetti's State of the City address in April, as well as this year's budget.
John Eterno, criminology professor at Molloy College in Long Island, N.Y., said big-city mayors such as Garcetti are under tremendous pressure to report declining crime on their watch.
“He clearly has a political hot potato to deal with,” said Eterno, a retired New York City police captain.
Neighborhood council leaders in the areas most affected by the increased crime said many residents are alarmed.
Patti Berman, president of the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, said local residents have complained about increased street attacks. Serious assaults in the LAPD's Central Division, which covers part of downtown, are up more than 80% so far this year compared to the same period in 2014, department data show.
“Many people are just concerned because it doesn't seem to be as safe as it was a year ago,” Berman said.
Beck said the city's rising homeless population contributed to the increase. He said most of the crime in the LAPD's Central Division could be attributed to “homeless-on-homeless” incidents.
Jay Handal, chairman of the West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, said he hears daily reports from neighbors about home burglaries, car break-ins and automobile thefts. In West Los Angeles, property crime increased more than 21%.
“It's a major problem,” Handal said. “The city really needs to refocus its energy on this. These property crimes are all quality-of-life crimes that affect us every day.”
Part of that property crime increase, Garcetti said, may be linked to Proposition 47, the ballot measure that downgraded felony drug possession and thefts and resulted in the release of about 3,700 inmates from state prison.
Peter Moskos, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said it was too soon to say whether Proposition 47 was behind the increase in property crimes. Even if the initiative has contributed to the rise in property crimes, he said, the result may be an acceptable trade-off for taking a less strict approach toward relatively minor crimes.
“If there is huge money saved in incarceration, I think we can take an increase in property crimes,” Moskos said. Also fueling the crime trend is increased gang activity, Beck said. Department statistics showed gang-related crimes rose 18.3%. The number of people shot in gang-related incidents climbed to 409 from 307 last year, a 33.2% increase.
Except for homicide — which was down about 6.7% — all categories of violent crimes and property crimes increased in the first six months of the year.
Aggravated assaults saw the largest spike — up more than 26% compared to the same period in 2014. Following a Times investigation last year, the LAPD improved how it classified serious assaults, which officials said has resulted in more serious assault cases on the books.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reported more modest increases, with a 4.1% rise in violent crime and a 6.3% increase in property crime through July 6.
Beck and Garcetti emphasized that even with the increase, Los Angeles was a safe city that had made significant strides since the crime waves of the 1980s and 1990s. But, Beck acknowledged, when the numbers came in from the first three months of the year, “it was obvious that dramatic action was necessary.”
Garcetti poured more funding into gang outreach efforts, allocating an extra $5.5 million for the city's Gang Reduction & Youth Development program. He directed the expansion of Domestic Abuse Response Teams, groups of civilian workers who accompany police officers on domestic violence calls.
Perhaps the most controversial effort to quell rising crime was the decision to double the size of the LAPD's Metropolitan Division, a squad of officers with a reputation for hard-charging tactics. Beck emphasized that the officers would be deployed to crime hot spots, not with the goal of making more arrests, but to signal that the LAPD was nearby and ready to respond.
Garcetti said 125 officers had been added to Metro with the remaining 75 expected to join by September. When asked what effect the expanded unit has had on crime numbers, Beck noted that the increase in crime had slowed but said it was difficult to attribute that to one action.
Capt. Cory Palka, who heads the LAPD's 77th Street Division in South Los Angeles, said Metro officers have helped reduce retaliation shootings that take place in gang-ridden neighborhoods. When a shooting occurs, Palka said, he is able to deploy the officers to potential trouble spots, where their presence can reduce the chances of more gunfire. Follow @katemather and @bposton for more crime coverage.
Syrian refugees: four million people forced to flee as crisis deepens. Largest exodus from a single conflict in a generation places humanitarian system under increasing financial strain.
The conflict in Syria has now driven more than four million people – a sixth of the population – to seek sanctuary in neighbouring countries, making it the largest refugee crisis for a quarter of a century, according to the UN.
On Thursday, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said the total number of Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and other parts of north Africa stood at 4,013,000 people.
With at least 7.6 million people forced from their homes within Syria, almost half the country’s people are either refugees or internally displaced. The conflict, now in its fifth year, has killed more than 220,000 people. António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, said the exodus was the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation and called on the international community to step up.
He said: “It is a population that needs the support of the world but is instead living in dire conditions and sinking deeper into poverty.
“Worsening conditions are driving growing numbers towards Europe and further afield, but the overwhelming majority remain in the region. We cannot afford to let them and the communities hosting them slide further into desperation.”
Turkey is now the largest refugee-hosting country in the world, sheltering 1,805,255 Syrians. Lebanon has taken in 1,172,735 Syrian refugees, Jordan 629,128, Iraq 249,726 and Egypt 132,375. About 24,055 Syrians are refugees elsewhere in north Africa. The latest UN figures do not include the more than 270,000 Syrians applying for asylum in Europe, nor the thousands resettled from the region elsewhere.
The milestone of four million comes just 10 months after the number of Syrian refugees hit three million, and the UN predicts there will be 4.27 million in the region by the end of this year. At the end of 2014, one in every five displaced people worldwide was Syrian.
Despite being the world’s single largest refugee crisis, the number of people fleeing is still far lower than the number of Afghans who were forced from their country following the Soviet withdrawal. According to the UNHCR, there were 6.3 million Afghans living in Pakistan and Iran in 1990. The sheer number of Syrian refugees that have fled the war in their homeland is putting the international humanitarian system under huge financial strain.
At the end of June, UN aid agencies warned that a $5.5bn (£3.6bn) appeal to tackle the Syrian refugee crisis this year was less than 25% funded, putting millions of vulnerable people at risk – a situation that has already led to cuts in vital assistance.
Last week, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned once again that it was running out of money to feed the refugees and could be forced to cut all help for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians in Jordan as soon as next month.
Muhannad Hadi, the WFP’s regional director for the Middle East, north Africa, central Asia and eastern Europe, said: “Just when we thought things couldn’t get worse, we are forced yet again to make yet more cuts.
“Refugees were already struggling to cope with what little we could provide.”
According to the agencies and their partner organisations, the shortfall has meant 1.6 million refugees have already had food assistance cut this year and 750,000 children are not attending school. Most of Syria’s refugees have no prospect of returning home in the near future amid a conflict that has become increasingly complex and intractable.
In the north and north-east, Kurdish militias are fighting Islamic State in see-saw battles that continue to drive civilians across the border into Turkey. Turkey’s reluctance to absorb more refugees often leaves people stranded for days at the border.
In Aleppo and Daraa, two of Syria’s largest cities, rebels fighting the regime of the president, Bashar al-Assad, have pressed on with offensives that have encountered stiff resistance from loyalist troops, stalling the attacks.
But even if they were to seize the coveted territory, or begin an assault on the capital, Damascus, the country would be faced with the collapse of state institutions and services as the opposition attempts to manage a large metropolis such as Aleppo under unforgiving air strikes.
The regime’s collapse there would likely drive more refugees into neighbouring states, particularly Lebanon, where displaced Syrians already make up a fifth of the population, upsetting the delicate sectarian balance and stretching infrastructure past its breaking point. Lebanon has responded with increasingly stringent entry conditions.
Assad’s government and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah are fighting to secure the border region that straddles the two countries after a series of defeats that exposed the growing fragility of the Syrian army.
A recent global trends study by the UNHCR found that the level of worldwide displacement is higher than ever before, with a record 59.5 million people living exiled from their homes at the end of 2014.
The UNHCR estimates that an average of 42,500 men, women and children became refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced people every day last year – a fourfold increase in just four years.
By the end of last year, there were 19.5 million refugees – more than half of them children – as well as 38.2 million internally displaced people and 1.8 million asylum seekers.
With war, violence and persecution leaving one in every 122 humans on the planet a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum at the end of 2014, the UNHCR warned that the world was experiencing an “age of unprecedented mass displacement”.
Decades of displacement
According to UNHCR, there were 6.3 million Afghans living in Pakistan and Iran in 1990 following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 forced 2.7 million people to flee, making it it the largest displacement of people in Europe since the second world war.
Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, two million people fled to neighbouring countries. The refugees, who were mainly Hutus, sought refuge in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Tanzania, Burundi and Uganda.
In 1999, more than 867,000 people fled the war in Kosovo, most of them heading to Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia.
The 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the violence that followed is estimated to have pushed about two million Iraqis into countries including Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon.
The Federal Aviation Administration is dumping Donald Trump. The agency said Thursday it intends to rename three navigation points near Palm Beach International Airport in Florida that currently are named for the billionaire and Republican presidential candidate.
It’s fairly common for the FAA to name such points, which are used by pilots and air traffic controllers, for local figures. Trump has a home in Palm Beach. In 2010, a local air traffic controller named the points DONLD, TRMMP and UFIRED. The last is a reference to the catchphrase “You’re fired” from Trump’s reality TV show “The Apprentice.”
The FAA said in a statement that the agency generally chooses names that are non-controversial.
Trump has been under fire for recent statements accusing many immigrants of being drug dealers and rapists.
Regardless of it all this week, please stay in touch!
