NEWS OF THE DAY
From Across the Nation
_1 Migrant numbers: The number of migrants encountered by U.S. authorities at the southern border has dropped below 100,000 for the first time in five months amid increased collaboration with Mexico and Guatemala to crack down on the flow, government data released Thursday show. In July, there were 82,049 people encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, down 21% from June when there were 104,344 people and down 43% from May. The number of families and minors crossing the border also dropped. The monthly numbers have become a yardstick by which President Trump measures the success of his administration’s efforts to reduce immigration.
_2 GOP protests Twitter: The Republican Party, the Trump campaign and other GOP organizations said Thursday that they are freezing their spending on Twitter to protest the platform’s treatment of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Twitter temporarily locked McConnell’s campaign account Wednesday after it shared a video in which some protesters spoke of violence outside his Kentucky home, where he is recovering from a shoulder fracture. Twitter said users were locked out temporarily due to a tweet “that violated our violent threats policy, specifically threats involving physical safety.” The account was active Thursday, but no longer contained the tweet.
_3 ExFBI chief sues: Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe sued the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr, claiming he was illegally fired last year just before he would have retired for allegedly failing to fully disclose conversations he had with a reporter about pending investigations. McCabe asked a federal court in Washington Thursday to deem him to have retired as an agent in good standing, fully eligible for his pension and health benefits.
_4 Trump weighs pardon: President Trump says he’s “very strongly” considering commuting the sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is serving a 14year prison term for multiple federal corruption convictions. Trump told reporters Wednesday that he thought Blagojevich had been treated “unbelievably unfairly.” _5 NeoNazi fined: A judge in Montana on Thursday ordered the publisher of a neoNazi website to pay a Jewish real estate agent $14 million for inciting his readers to harass her family with hundreds of threatening and antiSemitic messages and calls. U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen entered Tanya Gersh a default judgment in her civil lawsuit after the Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin refused to appear for a scheduled deposition in the case. Anglin accused Gersh of trying to run the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer out of the mountain resort town of Whitefish, Mont., in 2016. He published the personal information of the Gersh family on his website and wrote to his readers, “Are y’all ready for an old fashioned troll storm?”