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Lawyer Who Alleged ‘Plot’ to Frame Trump Joins Legal Team

Photo: Tea Partier / YouTube
Photo: Tea Partier / YouTube

WASHINGTON — A lawyer who has suggested that FBI officials were part of a “brazen plot” to exonerate Hillary Clinton and frame Donald Trump has been added to the president’s legal team.

Joseph diGenova, a former United States attorney in the District of Columbia and a frequent television commentator, will join the team at a sensitive moment as Trump’s lawyers weigh whether to make the president available for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller and under what terms. As part of those ongoing discussions, the Trump legal team has provided Mueller’s team with written summaries of how they view certain key episodes being investigated, according to a person familiar with the matter.

He will work alongside attorneys John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, who said in a statement Monday that he was confident that diGenova will “be a great asset in our representation of the president.” Mueller is investigating potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign and possible obstruction of justice by the president.

DiGenova, who will start later this week, declined to comment to The Associated Press on Monday.

Though the White House and Trump legal team has spoken publicly of its cooperative relationship with Mueller’s office, that rapport appeared frayed over the weekend when Dowd said that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein – who appointed Mueller and oversees his work – should “bring an end” to the investigation.

Dowd said he was speaking for just himself, but his emailed statement appeared to reflect the frustration of the president, who lashed out at the investigation in a series of weekend tweets, including one in which he mentioned Mueller by name.

Trump has publicly said he wants to speak with Mueller’s team, but his lawyers have not committed to that and are continuing to negotiate about an interview. The person familiar with the matter, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation with The Associated Press, said the Trump legal team has provided written summaries of what they believe the evidence shows on certain matters.

Among the events being examined by Mueller’s prosecutors are the firing last year of FBI Director James Comey and the ouster of former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The Washington Post, which first reported on the documents, said they were drawn up and produced in an effort to curtail the scope of questioning.

As Mueller seeks an interview with the president, the addition of diGenova could signal a more combative stance, if past comments are any indication.

In a January interview on Fox News, for instance, he said that anti-Trump text messages exchanged between two FBI officials who were once on Mueller’s team reflect a “brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton, and if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime.

“Everything that we have seen from these texts, and from all of the facts developing, shows that the FBI and senior (Justice Department) officials conspired to violate the law and to deny Donald Trump his civil rights,” he added.

The addition of diGenova was first reported by The New York Times.

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Bottom Out: BTS Phaya Thai Escalator Fails

BANGKOK — BTS Skytrain management said late Monday safety inspections will be conducted at every station after a woman narrowly missed falling when an escalator failed.

An unidentified woman nearly fell into the mechanical pit when part of the moving stairway collapsed at about 3pm on Monday, according to a witness. Ananya Rittichai wrote online that she was behind a woman with a suitcase when she was about to use the escalator to go up to the BTS Phaya Thai platform when it broke.

“I was so shocked and scared to death. This is the first time in my life I felt close to death,” Ananya wrote.

The escalator resumed operation Tuesday morning. The Bangkok Mass Transit System, which operates the BTS, did not explain what caused the escalator to fail.

Asked to explain what happened, a spokeswoman referred inquiries to a statement posted online late last night said every escalator at every station would be checked without explaining what had happened. It noted that this was the first such incident since the system opened 18 years ago.

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Asian Shares Track US Tech Slump, Focus on Fed Meeting

An investor monitors stock prices at a brokerage house in Beijing in February. Photo: Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press
An investor monitors stock prices at a brokerage house in Beijing in February. Photo: Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press

TOKYO — Asian shares have skidded following an overnight decline on Wall Street after Facebook reported its worst loss in four years. Investors are awaiting the first Federal Reserve meeting under the new chairman, Jerome Powell, and anticipating the first rate increase of the year.

Keeping Score: Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 lost 0.7 percent in morning trading to 21,341.67. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.5 percent to 5,927.60, while South Korea’s Kospi shed 0.3 percent to 2,468.35. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.5 percent to 31,340.22, while the Shanghai Composite edged 0.4 percent lower to 3,270.82.

Facebook Drop: The technology rout on Wall Street on Monday was set off by Facebook’s worst loss in four years. The social media giant’s plunge followed reports that Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm working for President Donald Trump’s campaign, improperly obtained data on 50 million Facebook users without their permission. Legislators in the U.S. and Europe criticized Facebook, and investors are wondering if companies like Facebook and Alphabet will face tighter regulation.

Wall Street: The S&P 500 index sank 1.4 percent to 2,712.92. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 1.3 percent to 24,610.91. The Nasdaq composite gave up 1.8 percent to 7,344.24 and the Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks declined 1 percent to 1,570.56.

Federal Reserve: The U.S. Federal Reserve’s first meeting under Jerome Powell’s leadership ends later this week, likely with an announcement that the Fed will resume modest interest rate hikes. A healthy U.S. job market and a relatively steady economy have given the Fed the confidence to think the economy can withstand further increases. And the financial markets have been edgy for weeks.

Energy: Benchmark U.S. crude rose 23 cents to USD$62.36 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It lost 28 cents on Monday. Brent crude, used to price international oils, gained 21 cents to USD$62.26 per barrel in London.

Currencies: The dollar recovered to 106.23 yen from 105.92 yen late Monday. The euro rose to USD$1.2345 from USD$1.2267.

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Self-Driving Vehicle Strikes, Kills Pedestrian in Arizona

An Uber driverless car heads out for a test drive in 2016 in San Francisco. Photo: Eric Risberg / Associated Press
An Uber driverless car heads out for a test drive in 2016 in San Francisco. Photo: Eric Risberg / Associated Press

A self-driving Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix in the first death involving a fully autonomous test vehicle – a crash that could have far-reaching consequences for the new technology.

The fatality Sunday night in Tempe was the event many in the auto and technology industries were dreading but knew was inevitable.

Uber immediately suspended all road-testing of such autos in the Phoenix area, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto. The testing has been going on for months as automakers and technology companies like the ride-hailing service compete to be the first with cars that operate on their own.

The Volvo was in self-driving mode with a human backup driver at the wheel when it hit 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she was walking a bicycle outside the lines of a crosswalk, police said. She died at a hospital.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi expressed condolences on his Twitter account and said the company is working with local law enforcement on the investigation.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which makes recommendations for preventing crashes, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which can enact regulations, sent investigators.

Tempe police Sgt. Ronald Elcock said local authorities haven’t drawn any conclusions about who is at fault but urged people to use crosswalks. He told reporters at a news conference Monday the Uber vehicle was traveling around 40 mph when it hit Helzberg immediately as she stepped on to the street.

Neither she nor the backup driver showed signs of impairment, he said.

The public’s image of the vehicles will be defined by stories like the crash in Tempe, said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies self-driving vehicles.

Although the Uber vehicle and its human backup could be at fault, it may turn out that there was nothing either could have done to stop the crash, he said.

Either way, the fatality could hurt the technology’s image and lead to a push for more regulations at the state and federal levels, Smith said.

Autonomous vehicles with laser, radar and camera sensors and sophisticated computers have been billed as the way to reduce the more than 40,000 traffic deaths a year in the U.S. alone. Ninety-four percent of crashes are caused by human error, the government says.

Autonomous vehicles don’t drive drunk, don’t get sleepy and aren’t easily distracted. But they do have faults.

“We should be concerned about automated driving,” Smith said. “We should be terrified about human driving.”

In 2016, the latest year available, more than 6,000 U.S. pedestrians were killed by vehicles.

The federal government has voluntary guidelines for companies that want to test autonomous vehicles, leaving much of the regulation up to states.

Many states, including Michigan and Arizona, have taken a largely hands-off approach, hoping to gain jobs from the new technology, while California and others have taken a harder line.

California is among states that require manufacturers to report any incidents during the testing phase. As of early March, the state’s motor vehicle agency had received 59 such reports.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey used light regulations to entice Uber to the state after the company had a shaky rollout of test cars in San Francisco. Arizona has no reporting requirements.

Hundreds of vehicles with automated driving systems have been on Arizona’s roads.

Ducey’s office expressed sympathy for Herzberg’s family and said safety is the top priority.

The crash in Arizona isn’t the first involving an Uber autonomous test vehicle. In March 2017, an Uber SUV flipped onto its side, also in Tempe. No serious injuries were reported, and the driver of the other car was cited for a violation.

Herzberg’s death is the first involving an autonomous test vehicle but not the first in a car with some self-driving features. The driver of a Tesla Model S was killed in 2016 when his car, operating on its Autopilot system, crashed into a tractor-trailer in Florida.

The NTSB said that driver inattention was to blame but that design limitations with the system played a major role in the crash.

The U.S. Transportation Department is considering further voluntary guidelines that it says would help foster innovation. Proposals also are pending in Congress, including one that would stop states from regulating autonomous vehicles, Smith said.

Peter Kurdock, director of regulatory affairs for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety in Washington, said the group sent a letter Monday to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao saying it is concerned about a lack of action and oversight by the department as autonomous vehicles are developed. That letter was planned before the crash.

Kurdock said the deadly crash should serve as a “startling reminder” to members of Congress that they need to “think through all the issues to put together the best bill they can to hopefully prevent more of these tragedies from occurring.”

Story: Felicia Fonseca, Tom Krisher

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Muslim Engineer Sues After Kansas Flap Over Malaysian Flag

Photo: Spirit AeroSystems / Flickr
Photo: Spirit AeroSystems / Flickr

WICHITA, Kansas — A Muslim aerospace engineer has sued the Spirit Boeing Employees Association for religious discrimination stemming from a party at a lake in Wichita, Kansas.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit Friday on behalf of Munir Zanial, a Malaysian national of Indian ancestry.

The association declined to comment.

Zanial rented the group’s lake last year to host a party to celebrate Malaysian Independence Day. The lawsuit alleges the association reported him out of fear he used the lake to hold an Islamic State meeting.

It alleged an American flag that had been “desecrated ISIS symbols.” But the flag was actually a Malaysian flag and the guests included people of Malaysian Indian ancestry, some wearing hijabs.

Spirit filed a complaint with the FBI, and the association terminated his rental benefits.

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Commoner Party Seeks to Put the Poor in Parliament

A photo of Kittichai Ngamchaipisit on Monday in Bangkok.
A photo of Kittichai Ngamchaipisit on Monday in Bangkok.

BANGKOK — Seeking an interview with Kittichai Ngamchaipisit, electrician, university dropout and co-founder of the Commoner Party, was a very low-profile affair.

Unlike so-called high-profile progressive political movements, his has held no press conferences, the mass media has overlooked it and it doesn’t even have headquarters yet. But Kittichai’s party – which seeks to put the poor in parliament – is arguably one of the most serious and ambitious in term of ideology.

“Every party says they will represent the poor. The Commoner Party says the poor will speak for themselves [in parliament]. How about that?” 47-year-old Kittichai, a veteran NGO worker and rights trainer, said Monday.

Known in Thai as Pak Samanchon, the movement – whose ideology roughly coincides with that of the social democrats and the greens – talks not just about representing the voices of the grassroots, but about attempting to get them in power via the party so that they may speak for themselves alongside committed NGO workers.

That means the annual 100 baht membership fee will be a sacrifice for poor people wanting to become members, but the groundwork has been laid, as key founders – himself included – have worked to improve the poor’s rights and welfare for decades.

The party’s founders share a lot in common with the much more media-savvy Future Forward Party led by multi-billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit and the two parties previously discussed the possibility of merging.

Thanathorn sat on the executive board of Matichon Group, which owns Khaosod and Khaosod English, until he resigned from the board on Wednesday.

In the end, Kittichai said his party wants to secure an exclusive space for the poor, making the merger a no deal.

“Our stress is in getting the voices of the commoners into parliament,” Kittichai said, adding that the meeting ended amicably.

He added that besides the goal of pushing to see the underprivileged in the National Assembly, issues close to the party’s heart include LGBT rights, women’s rights, educational reform in the deep south, rights to local natural resources, better universal healthcare, labor rights for both Thai and migrant workers, decentralization and local self-determination.

Other names revealed among the dozen-plus co-founders include environmentalist Pathanin Klom-iang, veteran LGBT rights activist Chumaporn Taengkiang, human rights activist and Dao Din group founder Kornchanok Saenprasert and youth activist Panida Boonthep.

True to its name, the party symbol is an equal sign.

The Commoner Party's logo.
The Commoner Party’s logo.

Kittichai said the movement is committed to at least stay in the fray – regardless of the electoral result of elections slated for next year – for at least a decade and hopes to eventually have five party MPs and a minister.

Those who know about the party cautioned any such optimism, saying that as an alternative, they will have to face-off with not just political juggernauts such as the Pheu Thai Party but much more endowed parties such as the Future Forward Party.

While the Future Forward Party co-founder is a multi-billionaire and a subject of widespread media attention, Kittichai said thinking about his own network “depresses” him, as most media simply ignored his movement when it registered its name at the Election Commission on March 2.

Marxist political activist Chotisak Onsoong said the Kittichai’s movement is more linked to the grassroots than the Future Forward Party – which he said has the image of being a middle-class hipster party for the new generation. Nevertheless, Chotisak said it’s yet to be seen how villagers and the urban poor will truly play a meaningful role in Commoner Party.

Asked whether they could compete for the vote of the poor, Chotisak said it depends on their policy.

“Although they have worked with local people for a long period, it’s no guarantee that those they worked with will definitely vote for them,” said Chotisak, member of left-wing political activist movement Group of Comrades.

Sweden-based former union leader Jittra Cotchadet said both the Commoner Party and the Future Forward Party stand a good chance of being the voice of the poor, adding  it would require both parties to work closely with local people.

Kittichai said this reflected the Commoner Party’s values, adding that it wanted the poor to play a prominent role in determining its policies. He added that he hopes the party’s four regional branches will be strong – and not dominated by its future Bangkok headquarters.

“Stupidity is relative and not absolute. Our target [voters] are not based on any particular generation. Do ask yourself whether you want to see justice in society or not,” Kittichai said when asked why the more privileged and well-educated should vote for the poor and less-formally educated.

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Election Commission Rejects ‘Communist Party of Thailand’

The logo of the Communist Party of Thailand submitted Monday to the Election Commissioner. Image: Sukom Srinuan / Facebook

BANGKOK — The election commission on Monday rejected the formation of a communist party on grounds that it was unconstitutional.

Election Commissioner Somchai Srisuthiyakorn on Monday rejected the formation of the “Communist Party of Thailand” saying the name violates the law and the constitution, said Sawaeng Boonmee, the commissioner’s secretary.

The request and application forms were submitted and signed by a person identified as Pathom Tanthiti.

Somchai could not immediately be reached for comment.

Maj. Gen. Peerawat Saengthong of the Internal Security Operations Command said any activity that could divide the country must be closely monitored.

It’s unclear whether the movement is connected to the party of the same name active between 1942 through the 1990s, which launched a guerrilla war against the government in 1965.

Thailand’s Anti-Communist Activities Act of 1952 – banning acts linked to communist activities and ideology – was repealed in 2000 under former prime minister Chuan Leekpai.

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The political party request form submitted by Pathom Tanthiti. Image: Sukom Srinuan / Facebook
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Bangkok to Hold Its First Transgender Job Fair

BANGKOK — To mark International Transgender Day of Visibility, the capital’s communities will break through discriminatory barriers by holding a job fair for LGBT job seekers.

The Trans Friendly Job Fair, billed as Bangkok’s first transgender job fair, will take place the last day of the month to help transgender individuals into the country’s workforce.

Apart from booths from nearly a dozen companies, the event will also offer a short film screening, workshops and talks by representatives from LGBT communities among which will be transmen group FTM 101, Non Binary Thailand, Sisters Pattaya and more.

Despite Thailand being widely-known for its acceptance of transgender people, many often find it challenging to secure employment or sometimes face job discrimination.

The event, organized by Teak Trans Empowerment, will start at 1pm on March 31 at Museum Siam, located on Sanam Chai Road in Phra Nakhon area. It can be reached from the Yodpiman River Walk or Tha Tien piers. Motorists can park at the Royal Thai Navy Club House or Yodpiman River Walk then reach by foot or take a motorbike.

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84 ‘Dumb Bombs’ Found in Bangkok’s Dusit Area

BANGKOK — More than 80 bombs were discovered Monday afternoon at a construction site on Ratchawithi Road.

Police were alerted at about 1pm to investigate a construction site near the Krung Thon Bridge where they found 84 conventional dumb bombs lodged about five meters underground.

Col. Samart Promchat of Samsen Police said the explosives are BDU33 model bombs, adding that they each measure 45 centimeters in length and weigh 11 kilograms.

They were discovered by workers digging the land for a construction project.

Police said they are investigating the provenance of the explosives.

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6 Deaths From Rabies Since Start of 2018: Officials

A dog undergoes a medical examination Friday at the Small Animal Hospital at Chulalongkorn University.

BANGKOK — The death toll from rabies has increased to six while the epidemic remains present in 24 provinces, the health ministry said Monday.

The Ministry of Public Health said six people had died from the disease since January, the most recent of which occured Sunday in Buriram province in northeast Thailand.

Jetsada Chokdumrongsuk, the permanent secretary of the Public Health Ministry said the number of rabies red zones has risen from 13 provinces to 24 provinces.

They include Bangkok, Surin, Chonburi, Samut Prakan, Chachoengsao, Nan, Buriram, Ubon Ratchathani, Chiang Rai, Roi Et, Songkhla, Rayong, Tak and Srisaket.

According to livestock officials, 14 people died from rabies across 13 provinces in 2017, up from 11 people in 2016.

Related stories:

Bangkok’s Doggos and Kittehs Vaccinated For Rabies (Photos)

Deaths from Rabies Rise to 14 in 2017: Officials

 

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