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Two senior White House officials told NBC News that President Donald Trump plans to sign a revised version of his executive order that restricted travel from seven Muslim-majority nations on Monday.

Since a federal judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order on it in early February, different White House officials and the president have stated numerous times that the new executive order would be signed soon. But more than a month after it was barred, the revised version has not been realized.

The delay would seem to undercut the White House's original argument for its swift execution, which created confusing travel situations and immigration statuses for hundreds of people the weekend it was implemented. When its necessity and legality was challenged, the president and senior administration officials emphasized the need for travel restrictions because they believed the nation would be at risk without them.

These are the developments since the executive order was first signed.

Jan. 27: The executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority nations is signed by President Trump.

Jan. 30: On "Fox and Friends," senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said the executive order was an urgent priority because "if we waited five days, 10 days, six months to begin establishing the first series of controls," then the administration would be leaving "the homeland unnecessarily vulnerable."

Feb. 3: A federal judge in Seattle issued a nationwide temporary restraining order, effectively blocking the executive order.

Feb. 4: President Trump tweeted that the judge's action means "many very bad and dangerous people may be pouring into our country."

Related: Trump Travel Ban Makes America Less Safe: Ex-Top Security, State Officials

Feb 10: At a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, President Trump hinted at new executive order "sometime next week," stating that "we'll be doing something very rapidly having to do with additional security for our country. You'll be seeing that sometime next week."

Feb. 16: President Trump, at a news conference in the East Room, told reporters: "We're issuing a new executive action next week that will comprehensively protect our country."

Feb. 20: A senior White House official told NBC News that a new order is expected later in the week.

Feb. 23: Press Secretary Sean Spicer says: "It's not a question of delaying, it's a question of getting it right. We've taken the Court's opinions and concerns into consideration, but the order is finalized. It's now awaiting implementation."

Feb. 28: Prior to the joint address to Congress, a senior administration official told NBC News President Trump is expected to sign the executive order on March 1 at the Department of Justice.

Feb. 28: After the joint address to Congress, a senior official said the signing would be delayed in order let the president's joint address breathe.

March 1: Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that when the president is ready to make a decision on the timing of the revised immigration executive order, they'll let reporters know "and we're not there yet."

March 4: Two senior administration officials said the president plans to sign the revised executive order on Monday.

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Donald Trump Expected to Sign New Immigration Order: A Timeline - NBCNews.com

Richard Spencer talks to the media at the 44th annual Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland on 23 February 2017. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

For months, journalists have debated how to cover the alt-right, a fractured far right movement of racists, misogynists and antisemites that greeted Trumps victory with euphoria.

In these debates, liberals have often framed the greatest danger as understating or normalizing the true extremism of Trump and his allies.

But in a joint podcast in December, three alt-right leaders took the opposite view: by connecting their extreme views with those of White House leaders, journalists and left-wing advocates had done extremists a favor.

The neo-Nazi, the white nationalist and the antisemite all agreed: the media coverage of the alt-right had been amazing.

The coverage is very good, all the things theyre doing are so good, said the Neo-Nazi Internet troll. Theyre now saying that Steve Bannon is a neo-Nazi. I mean, think about how, how great that is!

Theyre giving us the microphone out of their own sort of paranoia and neurosis and sort of perverse desire to actually empower us, said an anti-Semitic and eugenicist blogger and podcast host.

I think in a weird level the left, like, secretly wants us to rise, said Richard Spencer, who became the face of the alt-right in media reports and was profiled as Americas dapper white nationalist.

Journalists usually argue that sunshine is the best disinfectant, and that exposing extremist opinions to public scrutiny is the best way to address them. But far-right leaders shameless self-promotion has challenged this assumption.

Analysts who monitor hate groups said that the racist leaders were delusional and conflated their rising prominence in the media with actual political support. At the same time, they said, the extremists did present real challenges for journalists.

Ryan Lenz, a former Associated Press war correspondent who now tracks hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he saw a tipping point at the Republican National Convention last summer, when Spencer stood outside with a sign that read, Wanna talk to a racist?

Since the Civil Rights era, being publicly known as a racist in America had been seen as shameful, Lenz said. There were serious political consequences, social consequences, to be known to have these ideas.

But Spencer and his sign represented a new moment, he said, and a person who thrives on being called a racist, who does not suffer, and will not suffer, the social, financial and cultural consequences of being a racist.

Look, I get it that most all of these media sources are going to be negative, but like, we are able to communicate through the media, Spencer told the other alt-right leaders in December.

Kyle Pope, the editor in chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, said that the way Trump has energized fringe racists, and the connections between the administration and the far right was a totally legitimate area of focus, and one that could not be avoided.

I know there was some hand-writing in the press about, Why do we give these people so much air play? but I think this is a voice that we clearly have to understand, he said.

Pope said it was too bad that a neo-Nazi thought the media coverage was helping him. But, he said, People need to understand that there are people in their neighborhood or their city who have these views, he said.

Closing our eyes to it is not going to make it go away, he said. Were not three year olds. You cant see something you dont like and close your eyes and it just disappears.

The December alt-right podcast, hosted by an antisemitic blogger known as Mike Enoch, represented an important political moment for the alt-right, with three leaders of different wings of the movement coming together to present a united front, two analysts who study hate groups said. In a conversation that lasted for several hours, the three alt-right leaders flattered each other, traded juvenile jokes, talked about their hair, and marveled at the extremely beneficial media coverage they were receiving. The analysts said the views expressed in the podcast seemed sincere not an attempt to troll listeners with false opinions.

For months, journalists had been publishing stories drawing connections between Trump, his staff, and his cheerleaders in the Ku Klux Klan, the so-called alt right, and other hate groups. While the alt-right leaders praised Trump in their December discussion, a month before his inauguration, they also said that they did not think his actual policies would excite them.

Im afraid that Trump really is going to be a big disappointment-burger for us to eat, Spencer said.

Enoch agreed, but said that did not matter. Trump now is just a vehicle, he said. The man Trump maybe doesnt matter so much. The meme of Trump is more important.

Enoch said that Spencer, once a fringe figure, had received so much press coverage because journalists were desperate to set up a story of Donald Trump and the alt-right.

By applying the label of Nazi too frequently, the left was weakening the impact of the word, the alt-right leaders agreed.

They cry wolf, you know, said Andrew Anglin, who runs a neo-Nazi website that organizes harassment attacks against Jewish people and their allies. People are going to look at you and say, This guy must be like this other guy they called a Nazi. Hes probably just normal.

Lenz, the Southern Poverty Law Center researcher, called this an astute observation of the effect of this coverage.

I hate to agree with Anglin in any way, [but] theres some truth in that, said Marilyn Mayo, a research fellow at the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism. If you start calling everybody a white supremacist and neo-Nazi, you are making the term kind of meaningless.

There are people who are calling the president a white nationalist. I just dont see that being the case, Mayo added

Steve Bannon is not a Nazi, Lenz added.

At the same time, Mayo said, We also have to be very cautious on the other side, to make sure that when we do see extremism seeping into the mainstream, we call it out.

In November, after Spencer shouted Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory! at a conference, and some supporters gave the Nazi salute, Trump disavowed and condemned this Nazi support in an interview with the New York Times. But Trump has faced continued criticism for his lack of strong response to a wave of antisemitic and hate crime attacks. Steve Bannon, a leading White House advisor, once called the website he ran a platform for the alt-right, and has been labeled a white supremacist by house minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Bannon has told reporters, Im not a white nationalist but Im an economic nationalist.

There was an irony to the analysis of Trump voters, Spencer said: white nationalists were actually in agreement with some on the left that Trump was fundamentally leading a white identity movement even as Trump voters themselves vehemently rejected this label, and protested being called racists.

People on the alt-right believe themselves that they have a champion in the White House, Mayo said. That doesnt mean the White House wants their support.

Pope said that it was important for journalists to be very specific about the precise links they found and did not find between far-right figures and the White House, rather than taking the lazy route of talking in sweeping terms about a vein of thought thats now running the American government.

There hasnt been enough clarity and specificity to delineate between these various groups, Pope said. You read stories that encompass everything from the Wall Street Journal to neo-Nazi groups, which is obviously not helpful.

Like Trump and his allies, who have excoriated the media as the opposition party and labeled CNN the Clinton News Network, the alt-right leaders express a deeply cynical view of journalist motivations, suggesting that reporters give extremists so much coverage out of political bias, boredom or the desire to drive traffic to their news sites.

The simple reason his white nationalist views had been given the spotlight, Spencer said, was: Im very good looking, Im very intelligent, Im very compelling when I speak.

In an e-mail to the Guardian, Anglin, the neo-Nazi troll, adopted the lefts own terminology, and suggested that the non-stop media coverage of the alt-right had actually accomplished a normalization of his ideas.

He said the medias constant churn of outrage and spectacle was extremely beneficial to him, especially since his goal is changing the political orientation of very young Americans, particularly teenage boys.

This is why I love the media so much they cover my site with outrage, in turn I get more traffic and more on board with my agenda, in turn the media produces more spectacle, Anglin wrote.

The coverage only has one effect, which is the normalization of our ideas. And it doesnt take a political scientist to figure that out. If it isnt purposeful, then it is absurd incompetence.

Spencer said in December that even after the high intensity coverage of far right ideas melted away, the alt-right would have gained significant ground.

But Mayo said that much of the alt-right leaders analysis of their own rise to power was wishful thinking.

They may get attention, but people know what theyre about, Mayo said. Its not as if theyre gaining mainstream acceptability. Theyre not.

In January, Spencer was punched in the face at Trumps inauguration, an attack that prompted wide celebration on social media and debates over whether it was ethical to punch a Nazi. (A January survey of 1,000 registered voters found that 51% believed that it was unacceptable, but 31% were unsure.)

Asked whether the viral popularity of the video of him getting punched in the face suggested that most Americans found his views repulsive, Spencer said: Well see about that.

Contacted through his website e-mail, someone who identified himself as Mike Enoch declined to answer questions over email.

In January, Enoch was reportedly doxxed and unmasked as Mike Peinovich, a New Yorker and former tech worker married to a woman who is Jewish. The controversy sent shockwaves through the antisemitic alt right, where Enoch was a leading figure.

Pope said the mainstream media did fail in not covering these extremists groups enough before the 2016 election and then in being surprised at the size of their support and the content of their opinions.

Theyve been there for a very long time. There are segments of the American population who are totally not shocked to hear that this is out there, he said. There was a reporting failure to really understand who these people were, until the rise of Trump.

Originally posted here:
How leftwing media focus on far right groups is helping to normalize hate - The Guardian

For many it is no more than the first port of call when a niggling question raises its head. Found on its pages are answers to mysteries from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable death of Aeschylus.

But beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world of enduring conflict. A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years.

Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply bots, that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks.

In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in isolation. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with unexpected consequences. The more the bots came into contact with one another, the more they became locked in combat, undoing each others edits and changing the links they had added to other pages. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action.

The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people, said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.

The findings emerged from a study that looked at bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedias existence. The researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute in London examined the editing histories of pages in 13 different language editions and recorded when bots undid other bots changes.

They did not expect to find much. The bots are simple computer programs that are written to make the encyclopedia better. They are not intended to work against each other. We had very low expectations to see anything interesting. When you think about them they are very boring, said Yasseri. The very fact that we saw a lot of conflict among bots was a big surprise to us. They are good bots, they are based on good intentions, and they are based on same open source technology.

While some conflicts mirrored those found in society, such as the best names to use for contested territories, others were more intriguing. Describing their research in a paper entitled Even Good Bots Fight in the journal Plos One, the scientists reveal that among the most contested articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

One of the most intense battles played out between Xqbot and Darknessbot which fought over 3,629 different articles between 2009 and 2010. Over the period, Xqbot undid more than 2,000 edits made by Darknessbot, with Darknessbot retaliating by undoing more than 1,700 of Xqbots changes. The two clashed over pages on all sorts of topics, from Alexander of Greece and Banqiao district in Taiwan to Aston Villa football club.

Another bot named after Tachikoma, the artificial intelligence in the Japanese science fiction series Ghost in the Shell, had a two year running battle with Russbot. The two undid more than a thousand edits by the other on more than 3,000 articles ranging from Hillary Clinton s 2008 presidential campaign to the demography of the UK.

The study found striking differences in the bot wars that played out on the various language editions of Wikipedia. German editions had the fewest bot fights, with bots undoing others edits on average only 24 times in a decade. But the story was different on the Portuguese Wikipedia, where bots undid the work of other bots on average 185 times in ten years. The English version saw bots meddling with each others changes on average 105 times a decade.

The findings show that even simple algorithms that are let loose on the internet can interact in unpredictable ways. In many cases, the bots came into conflict because they followed slightly different rules to one another.

Yasseri believes the work serves as an early warning to companies developing bots and more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools. An AI that works well in the lab might behave unpredictably in the wild. Take self-driving cars. A very simple thing thats often overlooked is that these will be used in different cultures and environments, said Yasseri. An automated car will behave differently on the German autobahn to how it will on the roads in Italy. The regulations are different, the laws are different, and the driving culture is very different, he said.

As more decisions, options and services come to depend on bots working properly together, harmonious cooperation will become increasingly important. As the authors note in their latest study: We know very little about the life and evolution of our digital minions.

Earlier this month, researchers at Googles DeepMind set AIs against one another to see if they would cooperate or fight. When the AIs were released on an apple-collecting game, the scientists found that the AIs cooperated while apples were plentiful, but as soon as supplies got short, they turned nasty. It is not the first time that AIs have run into trouble. In 2011, scientists in the US recorded a conversation between two chatbots. They bickered from the start and ended up arguing about God.

2017 Guardian Web under contract with NewsEdge/Acquire Media. All rights reserved.

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Study: Bot-on-Bot Editing Wars Raging on Wikipedia's pages | Sci ... - Sci-Tech Today

Tim Wise File:IMG 4453-3.jpg

Wise in 2011

Timothy Jacob "Tim" Wise (born October 4, 1968) is an American activist and writer.[1] Since 1995, he has given speeches at over 600 college campuses across the U.S.[2] He has trained teachers, corporate employees, non-profit organizations and law enforcement officers in methods for addressing and dismantling white racism in their institutions.[3]

Wise was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Michael Julius Wise and LuCinda Anne (ne McLean) Wise. His paternal grandfather was Jewish (of Russian origin), while the rest of his ancestry is northern European, including some Scottish.[4][5] Wise has said that when he was about 12 years old his synagogue was attacked by white supremacists.[6] Wise attended public schools in Nashville, graduating from Hillsboro High School in 1986.[7] In high school he was student body vice-president and a member of one of the top high school debate teams in the United States. Wise attended college at Tulane University in New Orleans and received his B.A. there, with a major in Political Science and a minor in Latin American Studies.[8] While a student, he was a leader in the campus anti-apartheid movement, which sought to force Tulane to divest from companies still doing business with the government of South Africa. His anti-apartheid activism was first brought to national attention in 1988, when South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu announced he would turn down an offer of an honorary degree from Tulane after Wise's group informed him of the school's ongoing investments there.[9]

After graduating in 1990, Wise started his work as an anti-racism activist after receiving training from the New Orleans-based People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. Wise began his anti-racism work first as a youth coordinator, and then associate director, of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, the largest of the various organizations founded for the purpose of defeating political candidate, David Duke, when Duke ran for U.S. Senate and Governor of Louisiana in 1990 and 1991, respectively.[10][11]

After his work campaigning against David Duke, Wise worked for a number of community-based organizations and political groups in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, including the Louisiana Coalition for Tax Justice, the Louisiana Injured Worker's Union and Agenda for Children, where he worked as a policy analyst and community organizer in New Orleans public housing.[citation needed]

In 1995, Wise began lecturing around the country on the issues of racism, criticizing white privilege (his own, included)[1] and proposing his solutions. The following year, he returned to his hometown Nashville, and he continued his work around the US, gaining a national reputation for his work in defense of affirmative action.[12]

From 1999 to 2003, Wise served as an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute. Wise received the 2002 National Youth Advocacy Coalition's Social Justice Impact Award. He has appeared on numerous radio and television broadcasts, including The Montel Williams Show, Donahue, Paula Zahn NOW, MSNBC Live, and ABC's 20/20, arguing the case for affirmative action and to discuss the issue of white privilege and racism in America.[13]

Wise argues that racism in the United States is institutionalized due to past overt racism (and its ongoing effects) along with current-day discrimination. Although he concedes that personal, overt bias is less common than in the past (or at least less openly articulated), Wise argues that existing institutions continue to foster and perpetuate white privilege, and that subtle, impersonal, and even ostensibly race-neutral policies contribute to racism and racial inequality today.[14]

In multi-racial societies such as the U.S., Wise argues that all people (white or people of color) will have internalized various elements of racist thinking. However just because society has been conditioned this way does not mean that society is committed to racist thinking. Wise argues that members of society can challenge this conditioning and be taught to believe in equality.[15]

In 2010, Utne Reader magazine listed Wise as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."[16]

In 2013, Wise posted a rant on his Facebook page describing the hate mail and death threats he receives, and addressing the people who troll his site. Many commenters criticized the rant as reflecting white privilege, and questioned his role in the discussion of race in the United States. One commenter found Wise's remarks demeaning to anti-racist work done by people of color.[17] Two others compared Wise to Hugo Schwyzer, who was famous in feminist circles but later exposed for misogynistic attitudes.[17] Wise posted a response on Facebook saying in part, "I won't try and defend the tone of most of my remarks. It was inappropriate. Period. [...] I fell into the same kind of vitriolic and sometimes personal attack mode that had gotten me angry in the first place. I shouldn't have. I will strive to do better."[17]

Wise starred in a 2013 documentary entitled White Like Me.[18]

After living in New Orleans for ten years, Wise relocated to his native Nashville[19] in 1996. In 1998, he married Kristy Cason. Together they have two daughters,[19] Ashton (b. 2001) and Rachel (b. 2003). Wise has referred to himself as Jewish[6] and as an anti-Zionist Jew[20] but does not practice Judaism.[21]

In addition to books and essays Wise has produced a DVD titled On White Privilege: Racism, White Denial & the Costs of Inequality and a double-CD entitled The Audacity of Truth: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama.[2]

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Tim Wise - Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core

Britain will "fight back" and not "slink off like a wounded animal" if finishes its negotiations with the EU without striking the deal it wants, the Chancellor Philip Hammond has said.

Mr Hammond told the BBC's Andrew Marr that Britain would "do whatever we need to do" including striking deals and building alliances with the rest of the world, to protect and drive the British economy if it were forced to face a future without a trade agreement with the EU.

Mr Hammond said: "If there is anybody in the European Union who thinks that if we don't do a deal with the European Union, if we don't continue to work closely together, Britain will simply slink off as a wounded animal, that is not going to happen.

"British people have a great fighting spirit and we will fight back. We will forge new trade deals around the world. We will build our business globally.

"We will go on from strength to strength and we will do whatever we need to do to make the British economy competitive and to make sure that this country has a great and successful future."

It has been suggested that this future might mean a low tax, low regulation, Singaporean style economy. Asked if the UK would cut corporationtaxes to attract investment away from the EU, the Chancellor said: "People can read what they like into it. I'm not going to speculate now on how the UK would respond to what I don't expect to be the outcome.

"But we are going into a negotiation. We expect to be able to achieve a comprehensive free trade deal with our European Union partners, but they should know that the alternative isn't Britain just slinking away into a corner."

Appearing later on Peston on Sunday, the Chancellor also faced questions over his article in The Sunday Times, in which he revealed plansto build up 60bn in reserves to deal with problems that could arise from Brexit over the next two years. Jeremy Corbyn yesterday said thatthe NHS and social care arein crisis and "the money's there" to deal with them. Mr Hammond said the problems with the NHS and social care were to do with an ageing population, and that it would be "reckless" simply to throw more money at it.

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Hammond: Britain will 'fight back' if no deal with the EU is reached - The Independent