The Russian government sent more than $1.4 million to a Florida-based company airing Kremlin propaganda in the nation’s capital over the last two years, according to recent foreign agent registration records.

Florida-based company RM Broadcasting LLC has officially registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department after a federal judge ordered it to do so in May.

Marking DOJ’s first successful civil enforcement action under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in more than two decades, U.S. District Court Judge Robin Rosenberg ruled that RM Broadcasting should be registered as a foreign agent under FARA due to its relationship with Rossiya Segodnya, the Russian government’s media enterprise that owns Sputnik International and was created by Vladimir Putin to advance Russia’s interests abroad.

A 2017 U.S. intelligence report found that Sputnik was part of “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” that facilitated Russian interference and influence in the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump.
Starting shortly after Trump’s election, RM Broadcasting agreed to act as the Russian media enterprise’s middleman brokering airtime on WZHF 1390, a Washington, D.C., area radio station owned by Way Broadcasting.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has signed a series of laws meant to protect immigrants in Illinois. The Democrat says it’s a direct response to the rhetoric and actions of President Donald Trump.

Pritzker signed three bills. One prohibits state and local police from working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to remove people who are undocumented.

Another bans private immigrant detention centers from being built in Illinois — officials in the town of Dwight were moving to allow such a facility earlier this year.

“We will not allow private entities to profit off of the intolerance of this president,” Pritzker said Friday.

The third piece of legislation will allow undocumented and transgender college students to apply for state financial aid. (Federal financial aid still requires proof of citizenship and, for people whose gender at birth was male, registration for the draft.)

Citing the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, the governor’s office says that could open up Illinois college grants to an additional 3,500 people.

The legislation is House Bill 1637 (barring ICE cooperation), House Bill 2040 (banning private detention centers), and House Bill 2691 (financial aid, known as the RISE Act).

I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday. According to McConnell, the historic racism stemming from slavery had largely ended with the Civil Rights Act and the election of the first African American president.

Rejecting McConnell’s central argument that slavery took place during a historical period with little relevance today, much less the ability for the modern government to address, Coates continued his impassioned testimony by listing the racial injustices McConnell had indeed been alive for.

This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations,” Coates said in his opening remarks at the first congressional hearing in a decade on reparations. “But well into this century, the United States was still paying our pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years despite no one being alive who signed those treaties.

The unifying charactieristic of concentration camps around the world is that they are used to lock up men, women and children of all ages who pose no threat to the people who lock them up ... people will always die in concentration camps ...