The Daily Populous

Monday February 17th, 2020 night edition

image for White House Memo Admits There Was No “Imminent Threat” Before Soleimani Assassination

In a legally-mandated memo to Congress, the Trump White House outlined its legal rationale for carrying out the January drone strike to kill top Iranian commander Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani in Baghdad.

The two-page unclassified memo comes after a series of evolving justifications from the White House that predicated the need to carry out the brazen assassination attempt outside the constitutional war-making powers of Congress on what Trump officials described as an “imminent threat” to American lives.

That language mirrors the vagueness of the Trump administration in the days and weeks following the Jan. 3 attack.

“Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act,” Trump told reporters at the time.

When pushed, Pompeo and the rest of the Trump White House began walking back the “imminent threat” claim, saying: “It’s never one thing.

The answer to both is a strong YES., but it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!

The Senate passed a measure 55-to-45 last week that would curtail Trump’s powers to carry out a military operation in Iran. »

Molecular characterization and safety assessment of biofortified provitamin A rice

Authored by nature.com

The T-DNA contains a single AscI restriction site located at position 199 and a single XmaI site at position 8946 (Supplementary Fig.

Hybridizing fragments were not detected when backbone probes were tested against samples of AscI + XmaI-digested GR2E genomic DNA (Supplementary Fig.

3, lanes 6–8, panels A and B, adapted from GR2E-FFP submitted study reports), confirming the absence of plasmid backbone sequences. »

Another Mississippi inmate dies; no foul play suspected

Authored by apnews.com

An inmate in Mississippi died Saturday, making him at least the 17th inmate in the state’s troubled prison system to have died in less than two months.

No foul play is suspected in the death of Bobby Lewis Vance, 54, the Mississippi Department of Corrections said in a news release.

At least 17 Mississippi inmates have died since late December, most of them in outbursts of violence. »

Caroline Flack’s Death Prompts U.K. Petition Demanding Media Inquiry

Authored by variety.com

A petition calling on the U.K. government to launch an inquiry into British media coverage of public figures has garnered close to 206,000 signatures.

The inquiry looked to investigate the practices and ethics of the press, and ultimately recommended a new, legally recognized media regulator – the formation of which is still in process.

“The reality is her death may not change accountability in journalism and the words behind the trolling and the bullying. »