Ted Berg, USA TODAY Sports
Published 11:14 p.m. ET Oct. 5, 2018 | Updated 12:05 a.m. ET Oct. 6, 2018
BOSTON — After four days off before Game 1 of the American League Division Series on Friday at Fenway Park, the Red Sox did not need long to remind the world why they won 108 games in the 2018 regular season.
The Boston club scored three runs in the bottom of the first inning on a J.D. Martinez homer over the Green Monster in left field and chased New York Yankees starter J.A. Happ two batters into the third inning in a rally that would extend their advantage to five runs in Boston’s eventual 5-4 win.
Red Sox starter Chris Sale quieted concerns over his late-season shoulder issues and ensuing drop in velocity, flashing his typical mid-90s fastball, flummoxing hitters with his sweeping slider, and keeping the potent Yankees offense off the board for the first five innings.
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Sale ran into trouble in the sixth, allowing a pair of singles to Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton before leaving the game with one out in the frame.
The pitchers called upon to relieve Sale made the inning more interesting than it should have been, allowing both inherited runners to score but escaping further damage when Brandon Workman fanned Gleyber Torres on a 3-2 cutter just below the bottom of the strike zone. The Yankees rallied for another run against the Boston bullpen in the seventh.
Turning point
The Fenway faithful had hardly found their seats when Martinez’s homer gave the Red Sox a lead they would never relinquish. The righty-swinging slugger led the majors in RBI and total bases in the regular season and finished second in homers with 43 in the first year of the five-year, $110 million free-agent deal he signed with Boston late in the offseason.
Man of the moment
Though the final line — two earned runs over 5 ⅓ innings — hardly does his effort justice, Sale showed why he ranks among the most dominant pitchers in the game when he’s healthy. Question marks surrounding Sale loomed large entering play Friday, especially given No. 2 starter David Price’s history of postseason struggles. Sale’s Game 1 effort makes the Sox appear stronger than they did coming into the series.
State of the Red Sox
With a 1-0 lead in the series, Boston now turns to Price for Game 2. Price was awful against the Yankees in the regular season, yielding a 10.34 ERA in four starts, and — despite some huge games in big spots in the past — has earned a reputation for struggling in the postseason. At his best, Price is one of the safest bets in the majors to pitch deep into a game, and the Sox will hope for length after needing five relievers to get through Friday’s win.
State of the Yankees
The Yanks’ fortunes undoubtedly looked more promising by the late innings of Friday’s game than they did in the early ones, as their patient approach exposed a soft underbelly in the Red Sox’ bullpen. Their Game 2 starter, Masahiro Tanaka, was dominant for most of the second half until two shaky outings to finish the season. Despite needing six innings from his bullpen, Aaron Boone managed to avoid using most of his best relievers — namely Aroldis Chapman and Dellin Betances — and will have options for keeping the Yankees in the game should Tanaka need a quick hook.
Nishal Sankat, the suspect in the attempted theft of an American Airlines airbus at the Orlando Melbourne International Airport, appears in court. Brevard Sheriff
Nishal Kiran Sankat wanted to go home.
In little ways, through conversation and his actions, the 22-year-old student pilot with less than a year to go on his studies to become a commercial pilot was sending that message to friends and family, according to his attorney.
“He was going to do something dramatic to draw attention to what he was saying. It would be something that said, ‘You should have paid attention to me when I said, “I want to leave,”‘ and that they would know after the fact,” said Greg Eisenmenger, Sankat’s attorney.
Nearly two weeks later, after federal agents dissected Sankat’s emotional struggles and ruled out terrorism, a plea deal was reached.
The part-time Florida Institute of Technology student — at times tearful during talks with his attorney — was released from the Brevard County Jail Complex on Wednesday and escorted by FBI agents to Fort Lauderdale.
There Sankat, who lived in a Melbourne condo his family owned, was placed on a flight to his Caribbean homeland accompanied by his father, president of the 4,000-student University of Belize.
Sankat, who often posted on social media about becoming a commercial pilot, was banned from re-entering the U.S. as part of his agreement with prosecutors.
Sankat, a dual-citizen of Canada, also lost his pilot’s license — issued in January — and placed on a no-fly list. However, Eisenmenger sees the deal as a second chance for Sankat.
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Orlando Melbourne International Airport was briefly on lockdown following a student pilot’s attempt to steal a plane from there. Malcolm Denemark, FLORIDA TODAY
It was a dramatic fall for a promising student whose dreams of flying gave way to the pressures of student life, family expectations and an unfulfilled relationship with a friend, investigators said. When he arrived at the college in 2014, his father introduced him to other members of Brevard’s Caribbean community. The judge he faced during his initial appearance, Rhonda Babb, is also from Trinidad and is part of the tight-knit community.
“I don’t think we’ll fully understand. It may have been the pressures of academic life that overwhelmed him, the expectations of family. He had a close female friend that he thought of as a girlfriend. But she thought of it as a friendship,” Eisenmenger said.
“He internalized it all,” said Eisenmenger, adding that his client was expected to receive counseling in Trinidad where he could also potentially finish his degree.
There are no indications of whether Sankat sought out counseling while a Florida Tech. Such services are available to students at the international university. “He was a semester away from graduating. His family was also, very, very supportive,” Eisenmenger said, adding that money did not appear to be a factor in the build-up of problems for Sankat.
Florida Tech confirmed Sankat’s status as a student but did not discuss the case.
The plea, however, likely means the end of his life’s dream, at least for now, Eisenmenger said.
“I don’t know if he could fly. Likely, he won’t be given pilot privileges in the U.S. and based on the current political climate, he may never be allowed to come back.”
‘Impulse’
On Sept. 20, Sankat’s impulses overtook him, say state and federal investigators. At about 1:40 a.m., he drove up to a security gate at the Orlando Melbourne International Airport, and in flip-flops, shorts and t-shirt hopped the fences and sprinted toward an American Airlines Airbus sitting near a maintenance hangar.
Sankat made it onto the tarmac, losing a flip-flop in the dash on the way to stepping aboard the $114 million airliner.
Shayny Graves, an avionics engineer working the late shift, was in the plane’s cockpit working on a vent blower. He thought he saw a shadow, turned and came nearly face to face with Sankat.
“I questioned (Sankat) on where he came from, why he did not have an airport badge and why he was missing his right shoe,” Graves said in a statement to airport police.
“He did not answer.”
At that point, Graves escorted Sankat off the plane and onto the tarmac where he was told to sit on the ground. Moments later, as airport police arrived, Sankat got up and bolted toward the Airbus, this time the workers blocked his path with a golf cart and he was tackled. “It was clear that he was attempting to get back to the airliner,” said Michael Hutchens, another airport employee who was at the hangar.
The men held Sankat to the ground until authorities arrived.
Minutes later, as he was being placed in the back of a patrol car, Sankat said that he “wanted to steal a plane,” reports show.
Airport officials hailed the efforts of Graves and the other worker as heroic.
Airport police immediately placed the airport — which has about 500,000 people pass through its gates each year — on lockdown. A sweep of the facility found Sankat’s car still running. The airport reopened at 7 a.m.
Airport officials also praised the response to the security breach but would not discuss the case further, pointing out that its training and protocols were carried out.
Questions
Almost from the beginning, FBI agents took over the investigation, questioning Sankat for hours. Background checks were conducted. No criminal records were found. On social media, agents came across an otherwise unassuming student who joked about gaming and posted pictures of himself from prep school making a common, but obscene, hand gesture with classmates. Authorities searched his condo, located less than two miles from the university. Inside agents found his laptop. There were also a variety of sleep-aid type medications, a troubling sign, his attorney said.
“I don’t know if that was a factor in any of this,” Eisenmenger said of the over-the-counter drugs. “I do know that I had someone who was not thinking clearly, whether that was a result of emotional stress or a mental condition. It was like he was in a fog,” he said.
After several days on suicide watch at the Brevard County jail, a hard reality seemed to settle in for Sankat, Eisenmenger said. Sankat was facing up to 30 years in state prison for burglary, trespass and grand theft. In the glass-enclosed cell, he sat alone in a padded suicide-prevention suit with little privacy. “He began to see the impact of what he had done on his education, on his family. He was remorseful on many different levels,” Eisenmenger said.
In Trinidad, the incident captured headlines and sparked discussion of depression. Sankat’s family issued a statement early on to the island’s media about the incident asking for privacy.
“As expected, their focus right now is on providing all the legal, mental, emotional and parental support possible,” the family statement read.
“What has occurred acutely underscores to the family the need to be aware of the challenges young students face, especially those living away from home and family.”
Eisenmenger believes Sankat has a strong support system that will help him as he works to rebound.
“This is a chance at rehabilitation,” Eisenmenger said. “He accepted the idea and understood that. He wasn’t being a threat to anyone but himself. Now perhaps he can get the treatment he needs.”
The Orlando Melbourne airport was on lockdown after authorities say a student pilot breached security by boarding a passenger jet in a maintenance area. USA TODAY
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Orlando Melbourne International Airport was on lockdown Sept. 20, 2018. Spokeswoman Lori Booker said the airport shut down due to a “security breach” Malcolm Denemark, FLORIDA TODAY
Collins was one of the undecided votes in the judge’s controversial nomination. In an effort to convince Collins that there would be consequences if she voted to support him, a group of people from Maine launched a crowdfunding campaign on a site called Crowdpac.
The campaign asked people to pledge money to back the person who will challenge Collins in 2020 if she voted to confirm Kavanaugh. If she doesn’t vote for Kavanaugh, the pledges would be void.
The site was so overwhelmed with people rushing to donate to the campaign that its internet connection couldn’t take the traffic, pushing it offline, Crowdpac confirmed to Business Insider.
As of September 12, when The Washington Post reported on the fundraising effort, it had raised more than $1 million from 37,000 pledges. Some had questioned whether the campaign violated federal bribery statutes, which prohibit giving or offering anything of value to government officials in exchange for any acts or votes.
A Twitter user named Marty Loughlin said that he donated to the campaign right before the site crashed on Friday and that it had raised $2 million in pledges.
The site was back up later Friday and said it had raised nearly $2.2 million from more than 75,000 pledges.
Another page that vows to support Collins’ eventual Democratic challenger was up and accepting donations on Friday afternoon, though it wasn’t clear how many donations it had racked up.
A representative for Collins told The Post last month that the senator wouldn’t be swayed by any fundraising tactic.
“Senator Collins will make up her mind based on the merits of the nomination,” the representative said. “Threats or other attempts to bully her will not play a factor in her decision making whatsoever.”
Here’s Crowdpac CEO Gisel Kordestani’s statement on why the site went down:
“Today’s actions motivated more people to donate than we have ever seen before — and they turned to Crowdpac to make their voices heard. Leading up to Senator Collins’ announcement that she will be voting ‘yes’ on Judge Kavanaugh, the Crowdpac campaign to fund her challenger surpassed $2 million in pledges from over 70,000 Mainers and Americans across the country.
“During Collins’ floor speech, our site received 90 times the average amount of traffic we see hourly. This incredible and immediate response to Collins’ decision overwhelmed our servers, and our team is worked as quickly as possible to get Crowdpac.com back up and running.”
Sabrina Spellman and Archie Andrews are both owned by the same comic publisher, Archie Comics. They’re from very similarly-named hometowns: Greendale and Riverdale, respectively. Now that Sabrina is coming to TV for the second time in Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (out later this month), she’s being adapted by showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who also executive produces The CW’s Riverdale. So when Aguirre-Sacasa and the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina cast took the stage at the “Netflix & Chills” panel at New York Comic Con Friday, moderator Josh Horowitz asked an obvious question: Is there any chance these characters will meet each other on screen?
In fact, there were plans at one point; Aguirre-Sacasa previously told EW that he had originally planned to end season 1 of Riverdale with the arrival of Sabrina. After that, season 2 of Riverdale would have done “a big genre switch” into horror. Those plans were obviously scuttled, but Aguirre-Sacasa still considers a crossover a possibility in the future.
“I’m first and foremost a fan of these two towns, Riverdale and Greendale,” Aguirre-Sacasa said. “I love when comic book characters cross over, so it’s a dream. Right now, we’re focused on getting Sabrina out there and making sure Riverdale is as good as it can be. So, I’m hopeful!”
Diyah Pera/Netflix; Jack Rowand/The CW
Sabrina Spellman has obviously starred on TV once before, in the ’90s show Sabrina the Teenage Witch starring Melissa Joan Hart. Though a lot of the characters have returned for Kiernan Shipka’s turn as the teenage witch, they’re all quite different this time. Perhaps the most noticeable change is that Sabrina’s cat Salem doesn’t talk this time around — at least not yet.
“The ’90s sitcom Salem is iconic. He’s a meme, he’s sassy Salem,” Shipka said. “So we did something different. We have three cats playing Salem: Shaq, Boomer, and Edward. The vibe is hard to describe if you haven’t seen the show.”
On that note, the panelists screened the first episode of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for panel attendees. Everyone else can see it when the first season hits Netflix on Oct. 26.
Michael Avenatti exploring Presidential run at the Iowa State Fair Zachary Boyden-Holmes, DesMoines
EVENDALE, Ohio – Attorney Michael Avenatti wanted to clear the air when he took the stage Friday night before 300 Democrats in a union hall just north of Cincinnati.
“Some of you may be asking, what is some porn lawyer doing here in Cincinnati talking to us about our republic?” said Avenatti. “Well, in normal times, I’d be at home in L.A. enjoying my life. But these are not normal times.”
It’s times like these that has Avenatti, who’s the lawyer for adult film actress Stormy Daniels, considering a presidential run in 2020. Avenatti, amid a tour of the country, spoke at the Hamilton County Democratic Party’s fall fundraiser. He brought in one of the largest crowds many Democrats in attendance said they can ever remember for the fall fundraiser.
Avenatti said he hasn’t decided whether he’d run for president against President Trump, but he predicted the outcome if he did.
“There’s no question I can beat him in a general election,” Avenatti said. “A lot of people say that’s arrogant. I say it. I believe it. I believe Donald Trump wants to run against other nominees. I don’t think he wants to run against me.”
Avenatti further laid the foundation for a presidential run with a fiery speech that slammed Republicans and called for Democrats to “fight fire with fire.”
He warned Democrats “too often we bring nail clippers to a gunfight.”
Trump was the target of most of Avenatti’s fury. He called him the worst president in history, a “conman” and a “Dumpster fire.”
He also targeted Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. Collins long floor speech today explained why she was voting yes to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. When he mentioned her name, the union hall erupted in boos.
“She deserves all the heckles and boos,” Avenatti said. “This woman should be thrown out of office. She’s a disgrace. She had the audacity to attack my client, who risked her life to allege what she alleged.”
Avenatti is representing Julie Swetnick who has alleged in a sworn statement that Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge, tried to get teenage girls drunk so they could be “gang-raped” by multiple boys.
As the vote to approve Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court has moved forward, Avenatti has taken an increasing defiant tone. In a tweet, he invited Kavanaugh to sue his accusers. “I hope he does so we can prove the truth!” Avenatti tweeted.
If Brett Kavanaugh & his supporters are so convinced that all of the scores of women (inc my client) are lying, he is innocent, he has been so wronged, & his reputation has been damaged for no reason, then he should sue us all-TODAY. I hope that he does so we can prove the truth!
.@SenatorCollins should be ashamed of herself for attacking my client and Dr. Ford. How did she make a credibility determination as to my client? How is she qualified to do that without ANY investigation? She did ZERO to determine whether my client and her witnesses were credible
At the end of his 20-minute speech, Avenatti received a standing ovation. Many in attendance said they were undecided on whether they’d support Avenatti if he runs for president. But many wouldn’t rule it out.
“I agree with him that whoever it is shouldn’t be a nice guy,” said Shawntee Brown of College Hill. “It is going to take someone really tough.”
Lori Krafte, of Anderson Township, wants whoever the Democrats nominate in 2020 to have more experience in government. Krafte said she does admire Avenatti’s courage in standing up to the president.
“We’ve had enough with Trump and people who don’t have the required experience,” Krafte said.
Avenatti joins two other possible 2020 Democratic presidential candidates who have or will visit Cincinnati this year.
Sen. Kamala Harris, seen by some as the frontrunner, was scheduled to speak Saturday to the NAACP in Cincinnati but had to cancel so she could vote on the Kavanaugh confirmation.
Hamilton County Republican Chairman Alex Triantafilou dismissed Avenatti’s comments.
“Michael Avenatti has been wholly discredited, and Democrats who choose to embrace his style of politics will not be successful in a midwestern state like Ohio,” Triantafilou said in a statement to The Enquirer. “His over-heated rhetoric, well-documented financial problems, and salacious clients should be condemned by Democrats and not celebrated.”
Associated Press
Published 7:48 p.m. ET Oct. 5, 2018 | Updated 10:59 p.m. ET Oct. 5, 2018
Audrey Wells, who wrote and directed the 2003 romantic comedy “Under the Tuscan Sun” as well as the screenplay for the new film “The Hate U Give,” has died after a five-year battle with cancer. She was 58.
A representative from United Talent Agency says Wells died Thursday.
The San Francisco native had early jobs as a disc jockey at a local jazz station and in public radio before making the transition to film, armed with a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles.
She wrote the screenplays for films like “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac tale starring Uma Thurman, and “Shall We Dance,” with Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere. She made her directorial debut with the 1999 indie “Guinevere,” starring Sarah Polley as a young woman and her relationship with an older mentor.
Wells also wrote the script for the critically-acclaimed new film “The Hate U Give,” an adaptation of Angie Thomas’ young adult novel about a police shooting of a young black man. The film starring Amandla Stenberg is now playing in limited release before it expands nationwide Oct. 19.
UTA Co-President David Kramer said in a statement that Wells was “truly special.”
“The strong, independent female characters she shaped resonate today more than ever and will be a part of her legacy always,” Kramer said. “We will miss her amazing, spirit, creativity and the love she gave us.”
Wells is survived by her husband Brian Larky and her daughter Tatiana. Larky said in a statement that Wells “fought valiantly against her illness” and died “surrounded by love.”
The family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Wells’ favorite nonprofits, The Feminist Majority Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood.
Poppy Gustafsson may have just helped her cybersecurity company Darktrace achieve unicorn status, but she still admits to making mistakes all the time.
“I’m trying to cut down my mistakes from every day to every week,” she told Business Insider after being named among the 100 most influential people in the UK tech industry.
It’s come a long way since Gustafsson spent £15 to incorporate Darktrace five years ago. Not that she is particularly bothered by achieving unicorn status. “It’s not something, if I’m honest, that we really benchmark ourselves against internally,” she said.
Darktrace, which uses artificial intelligence to fight cybercrime for its clients, traces its roots back to British tech billionaire Mike Lynch. Both Gustafsson and her co-chief executive Nicole Eagan worked at Lynch’s $11 billion software company and later his venture capital firm Invoke Capital.
Mike Lynch is a director and early investor at Darktrace. Ben Gurr/WPA Pool/ Getty Images
Darktrace was essentially spun out of a piece of Cambridge University maths research, with& mathematicians working alongside cyber intelligence experts in the US and the UK to develop the technology. While neither Gustafsson and Eagan are listed among the original directors, they helped set the company up through Invoke.
Darktrace’s big idea was that instead of doing cybersecurity like a medieval fortress by erecting a big wall to keep people out, it’s better to do it like espionage — track people who break in to find out what they’re after, who they are, and how they got in.
Darktrace now uses the human body as a metaphor for its technology. The company calls its tech the “enterprise immune system,” taking inspiration from the way the humans fight off disease. It is officially named Antigena.
Gustafsson’s partnership with Eagan is the engine room of Darktrace’s growth. Eagan’s background is in marketing, whereas Gustafsson is an accountant by training. “We tend to say that anything with words in is Nicole, anything with numbers in is me, and it works well,” she said, adding that Eagan was instrumental in honing Antigena to make it able to respond to threats, rather than just detect them.
She’s also straightforward about Lynch’s role in the company. “Mike is a brilliant mind, he’s got incredible experience at growing organisations from nothing to something very significant,” she said.
He is embroiled in a legal wrangle after selling Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for more than $11 billion in 2011. HP filed a lawsuit in 2015 alleging that Autonomy fraudulently inflated its earnings ahead of the sale. Lynch launched a countersuit, saying HP invented the fraud claim to hide its own incompetence.
“The internet of things is this huge maze of interconnectivity between us and our environments and the devices that occupy them. And it could be something like a fish tank, it can be your internet-connected coffee machine, but these things are here to stay,” she continued.
“As individuals, we rely on them all, and business is nothing but a collection of individuals. And so, therefore, it was inevitable that businesses were going to get swept up.”
Darktrace detected hackers had used an internet-connected thermometer in a fish tank to gain access to a casino’s systems. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty
Darktrace’s size has exploded recently — its workforce has grown by 60% in the past 12 months to just under 800 employees and it has an unusual hiring strategy for a tech company.
Darktrace’s unusual hiring strategy
Firstly, it employs more salespeople than engineers. Gustafsson said this is because its development team has already built a tried-and-tested product, and so now the company needs more people in sales to meet demand.
“This next stage of growth, our focus is very much we need to be able to hit the market demand as it’s hitting us, so that tends to be sales and marketing that we’re hiring in to meet that demand,” she said.
“We are absolutely hiring in the technical skills as well, so we continue to expand our dev team, but that real acceleration of growth is going to be in the sales and marketing function.”
Darktrace also has a reputation for hiring young graduates, which according to Gustafsson is plugging a hole in the cybersecurity jobs market.
Nicole Eagan, Gustafsson’s co-CEO at Darktrace. Darktrace
“There’s a massive skills deficit in cybersecurity. Organisations internally are really battling with the fact that they just don’t have enough threat analysts out there to keep on top of the problem,” she explained.
“It’s very important for us instead that we create those cyber specialists. So what we do is we bring in bright graduates from a range of disciplines and we train them up very quickly into the particular area that they’re interested in, whether it’s a technical pre-sales role or a sales role, or marketing. So hopefully we’re helping to contribute to some of that resource deficit as well in the long term.”
Gustafsson also said a creative approach to recruitment has been key to training up specialists. “Some of our brilliant cyber writers that we have are linguists by background,” she said.
What Darktrace would do differently
For all of Darktrace’s growth, there are a few things Gustafsson says she would do differently if she could turn back time.
“It’s tempting to want to go and sell [your product] to the big banks and all the high-end value names,” she said. “But these big organisations, they’re a massive time-sink and you can get very easily distracted by trying to slay one of the big banks or something very early on in your lifecycle. So my advice would be: Just go out there and sell it in a way that’s repeatable and practical.”
As a female CEO in the predominantly male cybersecurity industry, Gustafsson also had a few words for women who want to get into the field. “My advice would be: Change is afoot, the future is what you make of it, just don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do it.”
And as Gustafsson has shown, making mistakes is not necessarily a bad thing.
Sometimes, superheroes need to be taken down a peg.
During Friday’s New York Comic Con panel, Amazon’s upcoming seriesThe Boys released its first teaser, which introduces viewers to Madelyn Stillwell of Vought International. Vought is the company behind a number of well-known superheroes, including The Seven. But as the end of the trailer shows, The Boys aren’t big fans of Vought.
According to the show’s official description, “The Boys centers on a group of vigilantes known informally as The Boys, who set out to take down corrupt superheroes with no more than their blue-collar grit and a willingness to fight dirty … It’s the powerless against the super powerful as The Boys embark on a heroic quest to expose the truth about The Seven, and Vought — the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that manages these superheroes.”
The show, which is based on the comic book by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, comes from creator Eric Kripke (Supernatural) and producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. It stars Karl Urban, Chace Crawford, Simon Pegg, Erin Moriarty, and more.
The Boys, which was given an eight-episode order at Amazon, is expected in 2019.
Republican leaders are showing increasing confidence in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. (Oct. 4) AP
WASHINGTON – Embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh answered senators’ questions last month on high-profile issues ranging from abortion to gun control to presidential power.
Kavanaugh, an appeals court judge nominated for the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee his views on some of the high court’s most important cases.
Here’s a look at what the judge had to say on some of the most controversial issues:
Presidential power
Kavanaugh could become the deciding vote on whether Trump can be indicted or forced to testify as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“Can a sitting president be required to respond to a subpoena?” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked the judge.
Kavanaugh replied: “I can’t give you an answer on that hypothetical question.” He noted that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other justices – when they were nominees –refused to answer hypothetical questions because they didn’t want to prejudge future cases.
However, Kavanaugh praised the Supreme Court’s landmark 1974 decision in United States vs. Nixon. The court ruled unanimously in that case that President Richard Nixon had to turn over tape recordings and other evidence related to the Watergate scandal.
Kavanaugh called that ruling “one of the greatest moments in Supreme Court history” because the court stood up at a “crisis moment” and showed its independence.
He refused to answer a question about whether the president can pardon himself, as Trump has said he has the right to do. Kavanaugh called it a “hypothetical question that I can’t begin to answer in this context as a sitting judge and nominee.”
Abortion
Kavnaugh is a devout Catholic and some abortion rights advocates fear he might try to overturn Roe vs. Wade – the landmark 1973 case that decided women have a constitutional right to an abortion.
“It has been reported that you have said that Roe is now settled law,” Feinstein said to the judge. “What do you mean by settled law? Do you believe it is correct law?”
Kavanaugh said the case “is an important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times.”
He said the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey had created “precedent upon precedent” by clearly reaffirming Roe in ruling that “matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime … are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Kavanaugh also told Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that “my personal beliefs are not relevant to how I decide cases.”
Kavanaugh defended his dissent in a key 2011 gun control case before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The majority of judges upheld Washington, D.C.’s, gun registration law and its ban on semi-automatic weapons, which the city classified as assault weapons.
Kavanaugh said he based his dissent on a Supreme Court ruling that “dangerous and unusual weapons” – such as machine guns – could be banned. But he said he didn’t see semi-automatic rifles as “unusual.”
“Handguns and semi-automatic rifles are weapons used for hunting and self-defense,” he said. “That’s what makes this issue difficult.”
A Canadian father says a school worksheet about the “political spectrum” assigned to his 10th-grade son amounted to “propaganda” in its characterization of right-wing politics.
The worksheet, as shared by Matt DeFouw on Monday, asked students to characterize various statements as right, left or “centre” on the political spectrum.
Statement No. 3: “A person who is a racist.”
The teacher’s answer: That person would be on the political “right.”
School District No. 73 – located in Kamloops, British Columbia – said in an emailed statement that the assignment was given to students in a social studies class as they were learning how world views lead to different perspectives in society.
“The teacher realizes that Monday’s lesson was not balanced and was an oversimplification of a very complex topic and will revisit the lesson with the students to explore the topic more thoroughly,” the statement says.
The worksheet had other characterizations that DeFouw took issue with. He wrote on social media that the worksheet was “essentially molding the next generation of voters to believe that Conservatives or people ‘on the right’ are misogynist racists who hate immigrants and want to enact a brutal police state,”
That post has gained national attention, prompting British Columbia’s education minister to criticize the worksheet as “offensive,” according to Global News.
“A teacher made a mistake. They used a resource that didn’t do a good job and didn’t teach the curriculum well,” Rob Fleming is quoted by the publication as saying.
Other questions on the worksheet labeled government wiretaps, expanded military spending and restricted immigration as right-wing opinions. The worksheet also taught that right-wing conservatives believed that women should “stay home and be mothers.”
Among the views labeled left-wing: expanded international aid and a higher minimum wage.
The school says it is investigating the context of the worksheet. The school district says DeFouw was satisfied with their response to the situation.
In an interview with Global News, Assistant Superintendent Bill Hamblett said he was critical of the worksheet’s characterization of racism: “Racism knows no political stripe.”
The worksheet will no longer be used in the school district, and multiple agencies are looking into the matter, CTV Vancouver reports.
Viral Eyes 