Alaska court: Borough prayer policy violates constitution

HOMER, Alaska – An Alaska court says a borough's policy on assembly meeting prayer violates the state constitution.

The Homer News reported Tuesday the Alaska Superior Court ruled the Kenai Peninsula Borough's policy violated a ban on the government establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another.

The borough had claimed a policy it adopted in 2016 was inclusive of all religious groups.

The policy said invocations could only be delivered by chaplains serving the military, law enforcement and other agencies or members of locally established religious organizations.

An atheist, a member of The Satantic Temple and a member of Homer's small Jewish community applied to give invocations after the policy was established. They were denied because they didn't belong to official organizations with an established presence on the peninsula.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/alaska-court-borough-prayer-policy-violates-constitution

Trump Campaign’s Rick Gates Yields New Data Point on Israeli Interference

Former Trump campaign official Rick Gates requested proposals from an Israeli intelligence firm to manipulate social media with fake accounts in order to help secure a favorable outcome for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries and later the general election.

The company — Psy-Group — is stacked with former Israeli intelligence operatives and offered up solutions using social media tactics traditionally alleged to have been employed by Russia during the election.

Gates, a deputy to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, was indicted in the special counsel probe into potential collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian Federation and later pleaded guilty to charges unrelated to Russia.

In the case of Psy-Group, "Rick Gates was approached by someone named Joel Zamel, who is very well connected to the Israeli lobby in the United States," investigative journalist Max Blumenthal told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear.

Psy-Group "focuses on elections around the world and specifically interfering in them," he added.

"What they pitched to Rick Gates — as a representative of the Trump campaign — at an August 3rd, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., was a $3 million persona management campaign that would have consisted of the creation of sock puppet accounts to influence Republican National Convention delegates against Ted Cruz and to carry out an intelligence operation — an unspecified intelligence operation, presumably including gray propaganda — against Hillary Clinton and her inner circle," Blumenthal said.

The news that Gates was willing to work with an Israeli firm to create a pro-Trump troll farm is the latest in the "Israelgate" saga, which some journalists have identified as more substantial than "Russiagate," the latter not having produced an ounce of evidence of collusion between Trump's team and the Kremlin.

What we have here is one of a dizzying array of cases of Israeli direct interference in America's political system and more specifically in the 2016 elections," Blumenthal told Loud & Clear hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker.

For example, Manafort colluded with an Israeli government official to spread allegations linking then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's rival Yulia Tymoshenko to antisemitism (although that was prior to the 2016 election).

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201810101068746157-Trump-Gates-Israeli-Interference/