monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday the addition of roughly 8,000 new jobs for Americans, including 5,000 that telecommunications giant Sprint will bring from “all around the world.”

“They’re coming back to the United States, which is a nice change,” he said.

Trump isn't responsible for Sprint bringing 5,000 jobs to the US

The telco's announcement is the result of a pre-existing investment deal, not the president-elect.

[...]

Here's the problem: Despite what Trump and the press release from Sprint said (and what its CEO recently tweeted), these jobs were part of a previous announcement from Softbank (Sprint's parent company) CEO Masayoshi Son -- not the direct result of working with Trump.

In mid-October, Softbank announced that the company was sinking $100 billion into a tech-investment fund.

When I reached out to a Sprint spokeswoman asking if the announcement was a direct result of working with Trump or part of a pre-existing deal, she copy and pasted the press release I'd sent along with my first email. I responded saying I already had the press release and asked again if this was a direct result of working with Trump or part of a pre-existing deal in place. I tagged Sprint in a tweet about the situation, and it wasn't until after that started getting retweeted that the spokesperson responded.

"This is part of the 50,000 jobs that Masa previously announced," she said. "This total will be a combination of newly created jobs and bringing some existing jobs back to the U.S."

This is where we are, folks: Our president-elect is tying his name to something he didn't have anything to do with, much like he did with "saving" 1,100 jobs at HVAC company Carrier, including 300 that weren't moving to Mexico in the first place. In November, Trump exaggerated that he stopped Ford from moving a Kentucky production plant to Mexico. In reality Ford announced it wouldn't move production of one model line to Mexico.

I am trying to do a little more research on some of this, but it looks like he just gave Israel the finger, and Russia the finger, and Trump the finger.

Trump's been elected as our president. There's nothing more any one citizen can do but wait and see what happens during his tenure as president.

My only wish is that our country's economy continues to grow. At my age, not many other things matter.

“I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind, the security we need.”

President-elect Donald J. Trump edged away on Thursday from his dismissive stance on American assessments of Russian hacking, saying he would meet with intelligence officials next week “to be updated on the facts” after the Obama administration announced sanctions against Moscow.

In a brief written statement, Mr. Trump’s first response to President Obama’s sweeping action against Russia, the president-elect reiterated his call for “our country to move on to bigger and better things.” But he said that, “in the interest of our country and its great people,” he would get the briefing “nevertheless.”

Aleksandr B. Vyarya thought his job was to defend people from cyberattacks until, he says, his government approached him with a request to do the opposite.

Mr. Vyarya, 33, a bearded, bespectacled computer programmer who thwarted hackers, said he was suddenly being asked to join a sweeping overhaul of the Russian military last year. Under a new doctrine, the nation’s generals were redefining war as more than a contest of steel and gunpowder, making cyberwarfare a central tenet in expanding the Kremlin’s interests.

Following the Links From Russian
Hackers to the U.S. Election

Report on Russian Hacking
The F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security released a report on Thursday detailing the ways that Russia acted to influence the American election through cyberespionage.

In a head-spinning turn of events on Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia announced that he would not retaliate against the United States’ expulsion of Russian diplomats and new sanctions — hours after his foreign minister recommended doing just that.

Mr. Putin, apparently betting on improved relations with the next American president, said he would not eject 35 diplomats or close any diplomatic facilities, a proposed tit-for-tat response to actions taken by the Obama administration a day earlier.

American Jews Divided Over Strain in US-Israel Relations
...Yet the most influential and vocal organizations that represent Jews in Washington tend to be more conservative and supportive of Mr. Netanyahu, who has had a combative relationship with Mr. Obama, and has made little secret of his happiness over the changing of the guard that is about to take place in Washington.

...“These days the right wing has a louder voice in Israel, and, in some ways, it also has a louder voice in America, because the people who are most actively and publicly Jewish, sectarian Jewish, share the right wing point of view, and are very pro-settlement,” said Samuel Heilman, a sociology professor of at Queens College specializing in Jewish life. “But it’s not the mainstream point of view.”

Steven M. Cohen, a research professor at Hebrew Union College and a consultant to a recent Pew study of American Jews, said that Mr. Kerry’s speech represents the viewpoints of most American Jews. “On survey after survey, American Jews are opposed to Jewish settlement expansion. They tend to favor a two-state solution and their political identities are liberal or moderate,” he said.

...Steven M. Cohen, a research professor at Hebrew Union College and a consultant to a recent Pew study of American Jews, said that Mr. Kerry’s speech represents the viewpoints of most American Jews. “On survey after survey, American Jews are opposed to Jewish settlement expansion. They tend to favor a two-state solution and their political identities are liberal or moderate,” he said.

Anita Foeman’s students had just gotten the results from their genetic tests, and they couldn’t wait to talk.

One said her dad cheered when she told him she has Zulu roots. A girl with curly red hair said her family always gathers around a Nativity scene on Christmas Eve and sings carols over the baby Jesus, and this year, after learning that she’s 1 percent Jewish, she said: “We’re going to sing the dreidel song!”

When a white student said that 1 percent of his ancestry was African, two black students sitting next to him gave him a fist bump and said: “Yes! Brother.”

[‘I honestly thought of myself as simply American': DNA testing shocks college students]

“Some people have never had a happy conversation about race,” Foeman said. But in her class at West Chester University, there’s laughter. Eagerness. And easy connections where there might have been chasms. “Our differences are fascinating,” she said.

At a time when tensions over race and politics are so raw, the stakes, Foeman said, seem particularly high. Her students have been talking all fall about riots, building walls, terrorist attacks, immigration, the election. “You can feel it buzzing around the halls like electricity,” Foeman said.

Asking people to take DNA tests — an idea that has spread to a campuswide effort at this public university — grew out of consulting work Foeman does in race mediation. Instead of a confrontational approach, trying to provoke people into recognizing their own biases, she wanted something that would pull people together, or at least give them a neutral place from which to start to talk. And with racial divides so stark, she wanted to add some nuance and depth.