South Korean Officials to Press for Iran Sanctions Waiver in United States

WASHINGTON—South Korean government officials are expected to press for extending a sanctions waiver on Iran’s petroleum exports that expires in May on a visit to Washington this week. South Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Economic Affairs Yoon Kang-hyun and other leaders will meet with U.S. State Department officials on March 27 and March 28 to discuss the waiver issued in November to keep buying Iranian oil in exchange for having reduced such purchases, the Seoul government said in a news release on March 25. The Trump administration has reimposed sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, the lifeblood of its economy, as it seeks to curb Tehran’s nuclear and missile ambitions and its funding of various terrorist groups and militias in the Middle East.

Washington issued sanctions waivers for eight economies in November, including for South Korea, Iran’s fourth largest oil customer in Asia. But the administration has said it wants the exports to go to zero as quickly as possible. The U.S. goal is to reduce the number of sanctions waivers and to cut Iran’s oil exports about 20 percent, to below 1 million barrels of oil per day from May, sources said this month.

The South Korean officials will meet with the State Department’s top energy diplomat Francis Fannon on March 28. On March 27 they will meet with Brian Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran, and David Peyman, the deputy assistant secretary of state for counter threat finance and sanctions. A State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the meeting with Peyman. Officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the other meetings.Peyman met with South Korean officials in Asia earlier this month. He offered “to continue to closely consult on the extension of sanctions exemption and Korean companies’ technical issues regarding trade with Iran,” a statement from Seoul’s foreign ministry said at the time.

South Korea is a large buyer of a light oil called condensates from Iran and has told a former U.S. official that there are few options for getting the same quality of condensate from other suppliers. South Korea’s oil imports from Iran fell 12.5 percent year-on-year in February, customs data showed this month. Yonhap news agency quoted a South Korean official as saying that Seoul has had discussions since November with Washington on gaining an extended exception and that ending the purchases of condensates would affect its economy. “No extension means no imports of Iranian condensate,” an official told Yonhap.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/south-korean-officials-to-press-for-iran-sanctions-waiver-in-united-states_2853170.html

Google Likely Shifted Undecided Voters in 2018 Election, Perhaps Millions, Researcher Says

Google may have skewed the results of the 2018 midterm elections by millions of votes, according to research by psychologist Robert Epstein. Epstein had about 130 anonymous “field agents” in Orange County, California, and about 30 more across the country who had all their election-related Google search results recorded, more than 47,000 of them, including nearly 400,000 web pages that the search results linked to. “We found significant pro-liberal bias on Google—enough, quite easily, to have flipped all three congressional districts in Orange County from Republican to Democrat,” Epstein said in an emailed statement. Democrats indeed flipped in 2018 the three congressional seats in the county that Epstein zeroed in for his study.

Compared to search engines Bing and Yahoo, Epstein and his team found the results from Google were “significantly more liberal than non-Google search results on all 10 days leading up to and including Election Day and in all 10 positions of search results on the first page of search results,” according to the summary of a paper Epstein plans to present at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association in Pasadena, California, in April. The summary was provided by Epstein to The Epoch Times. They estimated the bias, based on ratings collected from thousands of people crowdsourced through sites like MTurk, he explained. Epstein further looked at news sources in the search results and calculated their political bias, based on ideological media map published in 2017 by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.

On a scale of -1 to 1, from the most conservative to the most liberal, Google search results had an average bias of 0.14, while non-Google search results averaged -0.13. “If that level of bias had been present nationwide, at least 4.6 million undecided voters would have shifted toward Democratic candidates; that’s a modest estimate,” Epstein said. “In the extreme case, if all of those 4.6 million people had voted a straight Democratic ticket, that would have given Democratic candidates in different races 78.2 million votes.” He said extrapolating the Orange County results nationwide is “more than reasonable,” since the field agents in other areas experienced “the same level of bias nationwide.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/google-shifted-undecided-votes-in-2018-election-experiment-indicates_2851481.html

Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud

LEAKED VIDEO: Google Leadership’s Dismayed Reaction to Trump Election

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-google-leaderships-dismayed-reaction-to-trump-election/

Pence: ‘Anti-Semitism Has No Place in the Congress’

WASHINGTON—Vice President Mike Pence denounced Democrats on March 25 for their stance on Israel and anti-Semitism. He also criticized 2020 Democratic candidates for skipping the annual conference of the United States’ pro-Israel lobby.

Pence addressed this year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference, the largest gathering of pro-Israel Americans in the United States. All over the world, anti-Semitism is on the rise—on college campuses, in the marketplace, even in the halls of Congress,” Pence said. “It’s astonishing to think that the party of Harry Truman, which did so much to help create the State of Israel, has been co-opted by people who promote rank, anti-Semitic rhetoric, and work to undermine the broad American consensus of support for Israel.”

AIPAC made headlines recently when freshman Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, one of the first Muslim women in Congress, made controversial comments about Israel.

In a tweet in February, Omar wrote the song lyric, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” and she later suggested that money from AIPAC drove U.S. politicians to support Israel. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle condemned her comments, saying they play into anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Somali-born representative sparked another uproar when she said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” She also said she supported the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, contrary to what she voiced during her campaign. She accused Israel of having “hypnotized the world.” After fierce criticism, Omar apologized but also suggested she was being slated for speaking her mind.

Pence, a conservative Christian, took direct aim at Omar during his remarks, saying that anti-Semitism had no place in the U.S. Congress. “And, at a minimum, anyone who slanders those who support this historic alliance between the United States and Israel should never have a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States House of Representatives.”

Omar was appointed to the committee in January. Pence also criticized eight Democratic candidates for skipping the AIPAC conference. His speech was frequently interrupted by cheers and standing ovations. The conference brings nearly 18,000 participants to a three-day event in the nation’s capital to advance the U.S.–Israel relationship. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Washington, canceled a planned address to the AIPAC. He decided to cut his visit short after a rocket fired from Gaza injured at least seven people and destroyed a residential home in central Israel. Pence condemned the attack and said, “The United States will never negotiate with terrorist Hamas.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pence-anti-semitism-has-no-place-in-the-congress_2852672.html