Tag Archives: Democrats

Battle over bathrooms looms large in North Carolina governors race

A sign protesting a recent North Carolina law restricting transgender bathroom access adorns the bathroom stalls at the 21C Museum Hotel in Durham, North Carolina

By Colleen Jenkins

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., Nov 4 (Reuters) – In a year of police shooting protests, historic hurricane flooding and voting rights clashes in North Carolina, it is the battle over bathrooms that could prove pivotal in the Tar Heel state’s gubernatorial race.

The election will effectively serve as a referendum on a state law that bans transgender people from using government-run restrooms that match their gender identity and limits protections for gays and lesbians. Signed by Republican Governor Pat McCrory in March, the law has been blamed for hundreds of
millions of dollars in economic losses and the relocation of major sporting events from the ninth largest U.S. state.

Opponents of the law say the vote on Tuesday also could have national implications. If McCrory loses to Democratic challenger Roy Cooper, they said, elected officials backing such measures in other states will face greater political risk.

“I believe a strong message already has been sent to lawmakers across the country,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) civil rights organization.

“I believe and hope on Election Day that an even stronger message will be sent.”

The advocacy group has joined with Equality North Carolina for a broad effort to boost voter turnout and unseat McCrory and other supporters of the law known as House Bill 2. The organizations are targeting about 400,000 pro-equality voters in the state, including an estimated 255,800 LGBT voters, Griffin said.

The Human Rights Campaign said that voting bloc could make a difference in a presidential swing state where Democrat Barack Obama won by about 14,000 votes in 2008 and Republican Mitt Romney led by about 92,000 votes in 2012.

“There’s no question this is going to be a very close race at the top of the ticket, and the LGBTQ voting bloc really has the ability to impact the outcome of this election,” said Chris Sgro, executive director of Equality North Carolina.

RACE A TOSS-UP

Elections experts consider the race between McCrory and Cooper, one of 12 U.S. gubernatorial seats being decided on Tuesday, to be among the country’s most competitive.

Public opinion polls have been tight most of the year, though the RealClearPolitics average of recent surveys shows
Cooper with a slight advantage.

A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll found that, among residents who expect to vote, 38 percent were less likely to support McCrory’s re-election bid as a result of the law and its fallout, compared with 32 percent who were more likely to support him.

The poll was conducted online in English between Oct. 6 and Oct. 19. It included 1,233 likely voters and had a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points.

Other polls have shown a majority of residents believe the law is hurting the state.

McCrory, who in 2012 became North Carolina’s first Republican governor in two decades, has blamed the backlash
against the law on national groups trying to redefine gender and “basic norms of privacy.”

Cooper says the law is discriminatory, and he has made McCrory’s support for it a central issue of his campaign.

An ad campaign launched last week by the conservative NC Values Coalition accuses Cooper, the state’s attorney general since 2001, of putting women and children at risk by refusing to defend H.B. 2.

“By not defending it, he’s allowing men into women’s bathrooms,” the group’s executive director, Tami Fitzgerald,
said in a phone interview. “We think that just goes too far.”

“Equality NC and HRC have made North Carolina ground zero for their radical LGBT agenda,” she added. “But I believe that their efforts will fail.”

At early voting sites in North Carolina this week, the issue appeared to be galvanizing people on both sides.

“I admire McCrory for standing behind H.B. 2,” said Republican Parker Umstead, 81, a certified public accountant who cast a ballot in Winston-Salem for the incumbent. “It takes
courage to stand up for your beliefs.”

But Holly Carpenter, a 41-year-old Republican from Cary who works in the medical field, cited the measure as the prime reason why she voted against McCrory, whom she supported in 2012.

“To lose so many economic opportunities over that was just a huge negative for me,” she said.

(Additional reporting by Marti Maguire in Cary, North Carolina,
and Chris Kahn in New York)

Party lines split U.S. on terror threat 15 years after 9/11: poll

An American flag flies near the base of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York on September 11 2001

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks nearing, Americans are sharply divided on party lines over the threat of a major terrorist attack on the United States, according to a poll released on Wednesday.

Forty percent of Americans say the ability of terrorists to strike the United States is greater than it was at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to the Pew Research Center survey of 1,201 adults.

That share is up 6 percentage points since November 2013 and marks the highest percentage with that view over the past 14 years. Thirty-one percent of respondents say terrorists’ abilities to attack are the same, and a quarter say it is less.

“The growth in the belief that terrorists are now better able to launch a major strike on the U.S. has come almost entirely among Republicans,” the Pew Research Center said.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans say terrorists’ ability to hit the United States in a major attack is greater than at the time of 9/11, up 18 points since 2013, it said.

The poll results marked the first time that a majority in either political party had expressed that opinion, the Pew center said.

About a third of independents, or 34 percent, and 31 percent of Democrats say terrorists are better able to strike the United States than they were then. Those views are up 2 percentage points each from three years ago, according to the survey.

The partisan divide is in line with other opinion sampling on the U.S. government’s ability to deal with terrorism, Pew said.

In an April Pew poll, three-quarters of Democrats said the government was doing very or fairly well in reducing the threat from terrorism, while 29 percent of Republicans said the same.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are a powerful memory for many Americans. Almost 3,000 people died when hijackers slammed airliners into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field

Ninety-one percent of the adults surveyed remember exactly where they were or what they were doing when they heard news about the attacks. Among those under 30, 83 percent said the same.

The Pew survey was conducted by telephone from Aug. 23 to Sept. 2. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points, meaning results could vary that much either way.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

FBI took months to warn Democrats of suspected Russian role in hack

A lock icon, signifying an encrypted Internet connection, is seen on an Internet Explorer browser in a photo illustration in Paris April

By Mark Hosenball, John Walcott and Joseph Menn

WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The FBI did not tell the Democratic National Committee that U.S officials suspected it was the target of a Russian government-backed cyber attack when agents first contacted the party last fall, three people with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters.

And in months of follow-up conversations about the DNC’s network security, the FBI did not warn party officials that the attack was being investigated as Russian espionage, the sources said.

The lack of full disclosure by the FBI prevented DNC staffers from taking steps that could have reduced the number of   confidential emails and documents stolen, one of the sources said. Instead, Russian hackers whom security experts believe are affiliated with the Russian government continued to have access to Democratic Party computers for months during a crucial phase in the U.S. presidential campaign, the source said.

As late as June, hackers had access to DNC systems and the network used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a group that raises money for Democratic candidates and shares an office with the DNC in Washington, people with knowledge of the cases have said.

A spokeswoman for the FBI said she could not comment on a current investigation. The DNC did not respond to requests for comment.

In its initial contact with the DNC last fall, the FBI instructed DNC personnel to look for signs of unusual activity on the group’s computer network, one person familiar with the matter said. DNC staff examined their logs and files without finding anything suspicious, that person said.

When DNC staffers requested further information from the FBI to help them track the incursion, they said the agency declined to provide it. In the months that followed, FBI officials spoke with DNC staffers on several other occasions but did not mention the suspicion of Russian involvement in an attack, sources said.

The DNC’s information technology team did not realize the seriousness of the incursion until late March, the sources said. It was unclear what prompted the IT team’s realization.

Emails captured in the DNC hack were leaked on the eve of the July 25-28 Democratic Party convention to name Hillary Clinton as the party’s presidential candidate in the Nov. 8 election against Republican Party nominee Donald Trump.

Those emails exposed bias in favor of Clinton on the part of DNC officials at a time when she was engaged in a close campaign against U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders for the party’s nomination.

The DNC said on Tuesday that three senior officials had resigned after the email embarrassment.

Last week, Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepped down as DNC chairwoman as criticism mounted of her management of the party committee, which is supposed to be neutral.

U.S. officials and private cyber security experts said last week they believed Russian hackers were behind the cyber attack on the DNC. The Obama administration has not yet publicly  declared who it believes is responsible.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said last week the U.S. intelligence community was not ready to “make the call on attribution.”

It was not immediately clear how the FBI had learned of the hack against the DNC. One U.S. official with knowledge of the investigation said the agency had withheld information about details of the hacking to protect classified intelligence operations.

“There is a fine line between warning people or companies or even other government agencies that they’re being hacked – especially if the intrusions are ongoing – and protecting intelligence operations that concern national security,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The first internal DNC emails alerting party officials to the seriousness of the suspected hacking were sent in late March, one person said. In May, the DNC contacted California-based cyber security firm CrowdStrike to analyze unusual activity on the group’s network.

The Brooklyn-based Clinton campaign operation was also the target of hacking, people with knowledge of the situation have said. The Clinton campaign has confirmed that a DNC-linked system the campaign used to analyze voter data was compromised.

Yahoo News reported last week that the FBI had warned the Clinton campaign that it was the target of a hack in March, just before the DNC discovered it had been hacked.

Glen Caplin, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said it had taken steps to safeguard its internal information systems.

“Multiple Democratic party organizations, including our campaign and staff, have been the subject of attempted cyber attacks that experts say are Russian intelligence agencies, which enlist some of the most sophisticated hackers in the world,” Caplin said.

(Reporting By Mark Hosenball amd John Walcott in Washington and Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Editing by David Rohde and Grant McCool)

Republicans, Democrats sharply divided over Muslims in America

Muslim men attend Eid al-Fitr prayers to mark the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan in the Queens borough of New York

By Emily Flitter and Chris Kahn

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Many Americans view Islam unfavorably, and supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are more than twice as likely to view the religion negatively as those backing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll of more than 7,000 Americans.

It shows that 37 percent of American adults have a “somewhat unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” view of Islam. This includes 58 percent of Trump supporters and 24 percent of Clinton supporters, a contrast largely mirrored by the breakdown between Republicans and Democrats.

By comparison, respondents overall had an equally unfavorable view of atheism at 38 percent, compared with 21 percent for Hinduism, 16 percent for Judaism and 8 percent for Christianity.

Spokespeople for Trump and Clinton declined to comment.

The poll took place before an attacker on Thursday drove his truck into a holiday crowd in Nice, France, killing more than 80 people in what President Francois Hollande called a terrorist act. Police sources said the driver, while linked to common crimes, was not on a watch list of intelligence services and no Islamist militant group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The race for the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election has put a spotlight on Americans’ views of Muslims with Trump proposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. He repeated the proposal after Omar Mateen, a New York-born Muslim armed with an assault rifle, killed 49 people in an attack on a Florida gay nightclub last month.

The ideological divide between Trump and Clinton supporters is set against a backdrop of increasing violence and discrimination against Muslims in the United States.

The poll shows 78 percent of Trump supporters and 36 percent of Clinton supporters said that when compared to other religions, Islam was more likely to encourage acts of terrorism. Trump supporters were also about twice as likely as Clinton supporters to say that Islam was more encouraging of violence toward Americans, women and gay people. Polling on none of the other belief systems and their perceived connection to terrorism or violence came close to matching those numbers.

Clinton has called for a more inclusive environment within American society and for a joint effort between the U.S. government and Muslim countries to battle the spread of Islamist militancy.

She has criticized Trump’s harsh statements about Muslims and Mexicans while Trump has bemoaned what he calls American society’s devotion to political correctness.

TRUMP, REPUBLICANS ALIGNED

Party affiliation accounted for the deepest division among Americans where their views on Muslims were concerned. Respondents’ status as rich or poor, young or old, or male or female did not offer as pronounced an overall view as did their identification as Democrats or Republicans.

“If it was true that Trump did not represent Republicans broadly defined, you would think Republicans would look different; they don’t,” said Douglas McAdam, a sociology professor at Stanford University who studies American politics.

“It goes against the claims of the (former presidential candidate) Mitt Romneys of the world, that Trump is not really a Republican, that he doesn’t represent the Republican party. He seems to be resonating with Republicans generally.”

According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, attacks on American Muslims and on mosques in the United States rose in 2015 to their highest level ever recorded.

The group said 31 incidents of damage or destruction of mosques were reported; there were 11 incidents in which a Muslim person was the target of a slur or another kind of harassment.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll ran in all 50 states from June 14 to July 6. It included 7,473 American adults and has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 1 percentage point.

(Reporting By Emily Flitter; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Howard Goller)

Russian spies hack U.S. Democratic Party computers

A woman is silhouetted during the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting in Washington

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

“The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system they also were able to read all e-mail and chat traffic,” the paper said, citing committee officials and security experts.

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, confirmed the breach.

“When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is …,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. “Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network.”

The Post quoted U.S. officials as saying Russian spies also targeted the networks of Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, as well as computers of some Republican political action committees.

It said some of the hackers had access to the Democratic National Committee network for about a year “but all were expelled over the past weekend in a major computer clean-up campaign.”

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Writing by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by James Dalgleish)

Many Senate Democrats frustrated with slow U.S. Syrian refugee admissions

Syrian refugee children play as they wait with their families to register their information at the U.S. processing centre for Syrian refugees, during a media tour held by the U.S. Embassy in Jordan,

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than half the Democrats in the Senate, including many of President Barack Obama’s strongest supporters, signed a letter to him on Wednesday urging him to move more quickly to admit Syrian refugees into the United States.

Despite Obama’s pledge to admit 10,000 of the people fleeing Syria’s civil war in the year ending this September, only 1,736 have been allowed into the country so far. In contrast, more than 6,000 have been admitted from Myanmar and more than 5,000 have been admitted from Iraq.

“We urge your Administration to devote the necessary resources to expeditiously and safely resettle refugees from Syria,” the 27 senators wrote in the letter, which was seen by Reuters.

“We are deeply concerned about the slow pace of admissions for Syrian refugees in the first seven months of the fiscal year,” the letter said.

The lead signers on the letter included Senator Richard Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, and Senator Amy Klobuchar. The letter was signed by 25 other members of the Democratic caucus, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders

It requested an update on specific measures the administration plans to take to fulfill its commitment to resettle the remaining 8,264 Syrians within five months.

Obama said in late April that he expected the United States to meet his goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees before Sept. 30, the end of the federal fiscal year.

But Obama’s promise sparked a firestorm of criticism in the United States, mostly from Republicans who say that violent militants could enter the country by posing as refugees. More than 30 governors, most of them Republicans, have tried to block refugees from coming to their states.

The United States has offered refuge to far fewer of the millions fleeing war in Syria and Iraq than many of its closest allies. Germany has taken in hundreds of thousands. Canada admitted 26,859 Syrian refugees between Nov. 4, 2015, and May 1, 2016.

“Other nations, including ours, can and should do much more,” the senators said in the letter.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)