Thursday, Feb 26th
Last update08:17:58 AM GMT
Germany's parliament has voted by a wide margin to legalise same-sex marriage after Chancellor Angela Merkel changed her mind and said members of her ruling conservative bloc should follow their personal conscience rather than the party line.
The parliament voted by 393 to 226 on Friday in favour of same-sex marriage.
The reform gives full marital rights for same-sex couples and allows them to adopt children.
TVNL Comment: Great news. Better late than never...
Jared Kushner’s real estate company received a $285 million loan one month before Election Day from a German bank that has lent millions to President Trump in the past, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Kushner, who is married to first daughter Ivanka Trump, was acting as both an adviser to the Trump campaign and working at his real estate company when his firm received the loan from Deutsche Bank.
The White House told the Post that Kushner “will recuse from any particular matter involving specific parties in which Deutsche Bank is a party.” Kushner and Deutsche Bank declined to comment to The Post on Sunday.
TVNL Comment: Detusche Bank is deeply involved in the Russia investigation. The web to deceive becomes more and more tangled every day.
Chelsea Manning celebrated her freedom from a military prison by joining the NYC Pride March on Sunday.
Manning, a transgender U.S. army soldier, beamed in front of a giant rainbow colored heart sashayed with an American Civil Liberties Union banner. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison after admitting to leaking more than 700,000 classified documents in 2013.
President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from Fort Leavenworth prison in May.
A report Friday morning claims Russian President Vladimir Putin gave direct instructions to help elect Donald Trump president.
According to a Washington Post investigation, former President Obama received a secret CIA report in August.
That report "captured Putin's specific instructions on the operation's audacious objectives - defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton."
CBS News confirmed last year that U.S. intelligence officials knew that the Russian government operation to interfere in the U.S. election had been approved by Putin himself, but they were reluctant to reveal how much they knew out of concern that sources and methods could be compromised, CBS News justice and homeland security correspondent Jeff Pegues reports.
Western technology companies, including Cisco, IBM and SAP, are acceding to demands by Moscow for access to closely guarded product security secrets, at a time when Russia has been accused of a growing number of cyber attacks on the West, a Reuters investigation has found.
Russian authorities are asking Western tech companies to allow them to review source code for security products such as firewalls, anti-virus applications and software containing encryption before permitting the products to be imported and sold in the country. The requests, which have increased since 2014, are ostensibly done to ensure foreign spy agencies have not hidden any "backdoors" that would allow them to burrow into Russian systems.
A federal judge ruled Thursday that the 114 Iraqi immigrants facing deportation can stay in the U.S. for at least two more weeks as he sorts out whether the court has jurisdiction. Supporters say the immigrants would face persecution in Iraq since many of them are Christians.
The judge's decision was cheered by the ACLU of Michigan and attorneys for the Iraqi immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith said in a written opinion released Thursday: "The stay shall expire 14 days from today, unless otherwise ordered by the Court."
Two of the nation's top intelligence officials told Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team and Senate investigators, in separate meetings last week, that President Donald Trump suggested they say publicly there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians, according to multiple sources.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers described their interactions with the President about the Russia investigation as odd and uncomfortable, but said they did not believe the President gave them orders to interfere, according to multiple sources familiar with their accounts.
Senate GOP leaders on Thursday finally released their secret health-care reform bill, which would repeal Obamacare taxes, restructures subsidies to insurance customers based on their incomes and phase out Medicaid's expansion program.
The bill, if passed into law, would sharply reduce financial aid that currently helps millions of people obtain health coverage, while at the same time offering a tax break to primarily wealthy Americans.
Fifteen years after he helped devise the brutal interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects in secret C.I.A. prisons, John Bruce Jessen, a former military psychologist, expressed ambivalence about the program.
He described himself and a fellow military psychologist, James Mitchell, as reluctant participants in using the techniques, some of which are widely viewed as torture, but also justified the practices as effective in getting resistant detainees to cooperate.
“I think any normal, conscionable man would have to consider carefully doing something like this,” Dr. Jessen said in a newly disclosed deposition. “I deliberated with great, soulful torment about this, and obviously I concluded that it could be done safely or I wouldn’t have done it.”
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