Stories you shouldn’t miss for March 13, 2018:
1. ICE spokesperson James Schwab resigned from his job because he said Trump administration officials wanted him to falsely inflate the number of undocumented immigrants who avoided capture after Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s warning about ICE sweeps, KTVU, CNN, and the San Francisco Chronicle report. Schwab, who was the chief Northern California spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, said President Trump’s claim that “close to 1,000” people avoided arrest because of Schaaf was false. Schwab said the agency never had any expectation of capturing that many people.
2. President Trump fired his secretary of the state, Rex Tillerson, one day after Tillerson strongly criticized Russia following a nerve-agent attack on a former Russian spy in London, CNN reports. The White House contends that the president was planning to fire Tillerson for months. Last year, the secretary of state had called Trump a “moron.” Trump fired Tillerson via a tweet this morning and announced that he’s replacing him with CIA Chief Mike Pompeo.
3. Trump’s new CIA chief appointee, Gina Haspel, is expected to face tough questioning because she oversaw a so-called black site where suspected terrorists were tortured during the George W. Bush administration, Politico reports.
4. The number of women who have accused famed Oakland restaurateur Charlie Hallowell of sexual harassment now stands at 31, the San Francisco Chronicle$ reports in an investigation. In addition, 10 women say the man who replaced Hallowell after he stepped away from day-to-day operations of his restaurants – Richard Weinstein – sexually harassed them as well.
5. ICYMI: The Oakland cafe that is refusing to serve uniformed police officers – Hasta Muerte Coffee – has become super popular with lines out the door.
6. And “a whopping 99 percent of mussels collected from the San Francisco Bay were contaminated with at least one algal toxin, while more than a third contained four different kinds of algal toxins, according to a study published in the March issue of the scientific journal, Harmful Algae,” KQED reports.
$ = news stories that may require payment to read.
