A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that President Donald Trump’s revised Muslim Ban, issued in March and lambasted by rights groups, is unconstitutional. 

The full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case earlier this month. In a 10-3 decision (pdf) on Thursday, the panel upheld a lower court’s nationwide preliminary injunction on Trump’s executive order, which blocked for 90 days people from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. The revised order, like the one it replaced, also suspended the nation’s refugee program for 120 days and reduced the annual number of refugees to 50,000 from 120,000.

Citing statements made by Trump and surrogates, the Fourth Circuit ruling said the majority was “unconvinced” that the order “has more to do with national security than it does with effectuating the president’s proposed Muslim ban.” On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

The ruling refers to an executive order “that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.”

It continues:

Rights groups celebrated the decision. 

“President Trump’s Muslim ban violates the Constitution, as this decision strongly reaffirms,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project, who argued the case. “The Constitution’s prohibition on actions disfavoring or condemning any religion is a fundamental protection for all of us, and we can all be glad that the court today rejected the government’s request to set that principle aside.”

Voting and civil rights advocates are ringing alarm bells on Thursday after it was learned that an election commission established by Donald Trump—one which critics feared from its inception would be used to suppress, not protect, voter access—had sent requests to all fifty states demanding personal and detailed information about voters.

“I certainly don’t trust the Trump Administration with that information, and people across the country should be outraged.” —Jason Kander, DNC

According to The Hill, a letter was sent from Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State in Kansas and vice chairman of Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, asking the states for “several pieces of information about voters, including their names, birthdays, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their voting history dating back to 2006.”

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights and voting protection watchdog, described the move as dangerous and called on states receiving the request not to comply.

“We fully condemn actions taken today by the President’s Election Integrity Commission seeking disclosure of data and personal information on virtually every voter across the country,” the group said in a statement. And continued:

Jason Kander, head of the Democratic National Committee’s Commission on Protecting American Democracy from the Trump Administration, also expressed his concern about the letter, which he called “very concerning.”

“It’s obviously very concerning when the federal government is attempting to get the name, address, birth date, political party and Social Security number of every voter in the country, Kander said in the statement. “I certainly don’t trust the Trump Administration with that information, and people across the country should be outraged.”

As climate scientists stress that climate change has contributed to the enormous size and strength recent storms including Hurricane Irma, which has killed at least ten people in the Caribbean and left the island of Barbuda “uninhabitable” as it heads toward Florida, a coalition of more than 220 organizations called for a “managed decline of fossil fuel production” on Thursday, with an immediate end to new oil, gas, and coal development.

“Leadership must come from countries that are high-income, have benefitted from fossil fuel extraction, and that are historically responsible for significant emissions.”—The Lofoten Declaration

The Lofoten Declaration, named for an archipelago in Norway where drilling by the oil industry has been successfully blocked by environmental groups, demands “unprecedented action to avoid the worst consequences of our dependence on oil, coal, and gas.” The document notes that new oil and gas exploration and production are “incompatible with limiting global warming to well below 2ºC,” the stated goal of the Paris climate agreement of 2016, and that countries that do not embrace clean energy will soon be left behind:

As the United States and Iran mark two years since reaching their landmark deal on nuclear weapons, analysts say Iran has met its obligations stipulated by the agreement—while the U.S. has failed to do so.

The deal, forged in July 2015 by Iran and the Obama administration along with Germany and the four other members of the U.N. National Security Council, stipulated that sanctions on Iran would be lifted in exchange for its halting of nuclear development for the next decade and its compliance with continuous surveillance of its nuclear enrichment and storage sites, among other requirements.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was tasked with making sure Iran complied with the deal, and has reported that the country has done so. But with the introduction of a Senate bill that would impose new sanctions on Iran aimed at its ballistic missile program, the language of which the nonpartisan Arms Control Association calls “overly broad and imprecise,” critics say the U.S. has not met the deal’s terms, endangering the agreement.

In an interview on Sunday on “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that President Donald Trump has failed to hold up the United States’ end of the bargain by urging its allies to cut business ties with Iran, effectively enacting more sanctions.

“When…President Trump used his presence in the G20 meeting in Hamburg in order to dissuade leaders from other counties to engage in business with Iran, that is a violation of not the spirit but the letter of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], of the nuclear deal,” Zarif said.

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, the Sinclair Broadcasting group cut a deal with Jared Kushner for “good” coverage of the Trump Administration, which seems to have paid off.

Politico reported last December:

Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said. Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience — around 250,000 viewers[sic]— than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000.

With Fox News suffering several major setbacks in the past year, Sinclair Broadcasting is making moves to become the new giant of right-wing media. Many are now calling Sinclair ‘Trump TV.’

David D. Smith built Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. into the largest owner of television stations in the U.S. after taking over his father’s television company (with his brothers) in the late 1980’s. With David as president and CEO, the Sinclair Broadcast Group blossomed to 59 stations in less than a decade. By 2014, that number had nearly tripled to 162. Smith stepped down earlier this year and became executive chairman. The Smith family has heavily funded conservative Republican candidates. David Smith’s Cape Elizabeth, Maine summer home, just 5 miles down the coast from Common Dreams’ Portland office, regularly serves as a meeting place for right-wing politicians like Trump’s HUD Secretary Ben Carson and conservative commentator Armstrong Williams.

Journalist David Zurawik, who has covered local television for roughly thirty years, is speaking out against Sinclair Broadcasting Group.  In a recent segment on CNN on Sunday, Zurawik said: “They come as close to classic propaganda as I think I’ve seen in thirty years of covering local television or national television. They’re outrageous! Whatever the White House says, you know, President Trump believes there was voter fraud and he sets up this commission to get data from the states and the states rightfully push back because it’s very intrusive data — Boris Ephsteyn’s piece on it ends with, the states should cooperate with President Trump.”

And John Oliver took aim at the Sinclair Broadcasting group earlier this month, examining the far right station’s ownership of many local TV news stations:

“National cable news gets a lot of attention with their big budgets and their fancy graphics packages. Meanwhile, local news often has to do a lot more with a lot less.”

“They come as close to classic propaganda as I think I’ve seen in thirty years of covering local television or national television. They’re outrageous!”
– Journalist David ZurawikThe Sinclair Broadcasting group has close ties to the Trump administration and is forcing local stations to air pro-Trump news segments. Trump’s FCC chairman, Ajit Pai rolled back a key Obama administration regulation that had prevented Sinclair from further expansion. The green light from the Trump administration allowed Sinclair to purchase 42 more local stations from the Tribune Media company, extending its reach to 72 percent of American households. 

Oliver went on to show clips of broadcaster Mark Hyman railing against “political correctness and multiculturalism”.

“Hyman is a commentator and former executive at Sinclair Broadcast Group, and Sinclair may be the most influential media company you’ve never heard of. Not only are they the largest owner of local TV stations in the country, they could soon get even bigger.”

“If the opinions were confined to just the commentary or the ad breaks, that would be one thing. But Sinclair can sometimes dictate the content of your local newscasts as well, and in contrast to Fox News, a conservative outlet where you basically know what you’re getting, with Sinclair, they’re injecting Fox-worthy content into the mouths of your local news anchors, the two people who you know, and who you trust, and whose on-screen chemistry can usually best be described as two people.

“You may not realize it’s happening because Sinclair and its digital news subsidiary Circa not only produce and send packages to their stations; they even write scripts that local anchors use to introduce the pieces. For example, this Tuesday night, anchors at Sinclair stations all over the country introduced a story about Michael Flynn like this.”

Immigrant rights advocates are staging protests in at least 40 cities across the country Tuesday, calling on lawmakers to uphold the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, ahead of a fast-approaching deadline that could mean an end to the Obama-era law.

Tuesday marks the fifth anniversary of DACA, which allows hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to receive work permits and live in the country without fear of deportation. After repeatedly threatening to round up undocumented immigrants during his 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump announced in June that he would keep the DACA program for the time being. Led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, ten Republican-led states have threatened to sue Trump unless he ends the program by September 5.

Indivisible, United We Dream, and other advocacy groups planned protests to demand continued protection for young immigrants who work, pay taxes, and contribute to the economy.

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In Washington, D.C., dozens of demonstrators marched down Pennsylvania Avenue despite rainy weather, chanting “Move, Trump, get out the way,” and “All these racist politicians, we don’t need them.”

Demonstrations were planned in Austin, Texas at Paxton’s office and in states with high populations of undocumented immigrants including California, Arizona, and New Jersey. Constituents showed up at the offices of Republican senators such as Rob Portman of Ohio, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Susan Collins of Maine.