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Labour won a strong majority of the seats where turnout increased by more than 5 per cent, with roughly 70 per cent of 18 — voting nationwide, according to early estimates. [Thursday night, for the fist time in decades, younger voters appear to have been overrepresented in contrast with previous elections, with turnout rising to its highest level in 20 years. The overall turnout is estimated to be 68. 7 per cent — up 2. 6 per cent on 2015. The youth turnout, meanwhile, was around three points higher than the overall — up around 27 per cent on 2015 to approximately 70 per cent, the Metro and others report. In the last four general elections — 2001, 2005, 2010, and 2015 — apathy was commonplace and youth turnout hovered around 40 per cent. In the last general election, a year and a half ago, just 43 per cent of 18 to 24s voted. In the European Union (EU) referendum, turnout amongst this group rose to just 64 per cent. Since 1997, the average turnout amongst young people has been consistently lower than the overall turnout. The overall turnout was 72 per cent for the Brexit vote and 66 per cent in the 2015 general election. A high turnout seems to have benefited Labour more than any other party, with an analysis by Sky News showing the vast majority of seats where it leapt by more than 5 per cent going to Labour. Record numbers of people signed up to vote on deadline day before registrations closed, with more than 600, 000 names added to the electoral roll in the final 24 hours. Labour, and in particular Jeremy Corbyn’s activist faction of the party, Momentum, were notably adept at winning celebrity endorsements and utilising social media to reach out to young voters and getting them to register. Countless musicians, rappers, actors, and reality TV stars endorsed the hard left candidate. There was even a “Grime for Corbyn” movement, with UK rappers almost unanimously backing, and campaigning for, Labour. The music press was also united behind labour, with Mr. Corbyn featuring on the front covers of NME (an Indy rock publication) and Kerrang (a heavy metal publication). Funniest part for the Tories is that rappers actually influenced the outcome NO ONE can deny this! @JmeBBK @Stormzy1 @Novelist Lowkey, — Akala (@akalamusic) June 9, 2017, Early reports suggest that 72% of voted. Some people are surprised. We are not. #GenerationVote, — Malia Bouattia (@MaliaBouattia) June 9, 2017, | 1 |
During this week’s “Saturday Night Live,” Alec Baldwin as President Donald Trump spoke with NBC’s Lester Holt, played by Michael Che, in an interview. In the skit, Baldwin admitted to firing FBI Director James Comey because he was investigating the alleged ties to Russia. Partial transcript as follows: CHE: Your staff has been insisting all week you didn’t fire [Comey] because of his Russian investigation. BALDWIN: No, I did. CHE: Wait, what? BALDWIN: I fired him because of Russia. I thought, “He’s investigating Russia. I don’t like that. I should fire him. ” CHE: And you’re just admitting that? BALDWIN: Uh huh. CHE: But that’s obstruction of justice. BALDWIN: Sure, OK. CHE: Wait, so did I get him? Is this all over? Oh, no, I didn’t? Nothing matters? Absolutely nothing matters anymore? All right. Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
This Guy Made an 84 Watt Death Star At Home # Grey 0
A mini “death star” was made at home by this experimenter and it works. Some spend their time teaching science and physics and others come up with tests and inventions. In the case of LaserGadgets, he does both. Not only does he have an archive of home experiments, he is kind enough to explain a lot of the processes involved. Here is a bit more on him:
German inventor and laser fanatic Patrick Priebe equipped a large, disco-ball-size model of the Galactic Empire’s planet eraser with enough laser power to actually do some real damage while also intensifying Sith-fueled nightmares worldwide.
Priebe isn’t a newcomer to the destructive power of lasers. Earlier this year the YouTuber worked up a real-life Iron Man laser glove, which itself seemed kind of like a reworking of another earlier project, his James Bond laser-shooting wristwatch. Tags | 0 |
Trump protest feed: Clinton supporters take to the streets because their team didn’t win Trump’s sweeping win of the electoral vote was a stunning blow to Hillary Clinton supporters By Daisy Luther - November 10, 2016
All across the country, the election of Donald Trump is being protested with increasing fervor. Despite all odds ( since all the public odds were rigged ) Trump’s sweeping win of the electoral vote was a stunning blow to Hillary Clinton supporters.
And they aren’t taking their loss gracefully. They’re shouting, swearing, crying, and, according to the most frequent word I’ve seen, absolutely terrified. They seem unaware of the irony that when they refer to Trump as a fascist, they’re actually the ones protesting a legitimately elected leader simply because their candidate didn’t win.
Protests began last night within hours of the announcement .
The First Amendment guarantees our right to peaceful assembly , but that isn’t what is happening. Injuries, obstruction of roadways, and destruction of property have begun to occur, and I strongly believe the violence will continue to escalate. If you can at all, stay home and away from areas with large gatherings – it doesn’t take much to turn a peaceful crowd into an angry mob. If you are unprepared for civil unrest on this scale, go here for guidance .
We’re a small operation here at DaisyLuther.com , and there are just too many people having hissies because their team didn’t win the trophy. Since we can’t write a new article for each one, I’m putting them into one feed that will be updated frequently. Check back for the latest temper tantrums updates frequently. Wednesday, 10:00 pm CST | 0 |
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 16:19 UTC © Khaled Abdullah / Reuters UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson claims if Britain did not sell arms to Saudi Arabia, other countries "would happily" take over the market. Johnson insisted the government is closely monitoring the situation in Yemen, where Saudi forces have been accused of war crimes over the course of their 19-month military intervention. He said boycotting the sale of arms to Riyadh would harm British interests in the region and diminish its diplomatic and political influence. Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry has called for an independent UN-led investigation into allegations of war crimes in Yemen, and the suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia while the inquiry takes place. Speaking in Parliament, Johnson said the Saudi government should conduct its own investigation first. "The Saudi government has approached this matter with great seriousness, and the seriousness it deserves," he said. "But the House should be in no doubt that we in this country are monitoring the situation minutely and meticulously, and will continue to apply our established criteria for granting licences with fairness and rigour, and in full accordance with UK law." Comment: And the UN must also be confident of Saudi Arabia's good intention by allowing a seat on the UNHRC board: What's wrong with the planet? Saudi Arabia to be reelected to UN Human Rights Council The Foreign Secretary added that other countries would "happily supply" weapons to the Gulf kingdom if the UK boycotted exports. "To those who say, as apparently they now do in this motion, that we should simply disregard those legal procedures, be in no doubt that we would be vacating a space that would rapidly be filled by other Western countries who would happily supply arms with nothing like the same compunctions or criteria or respect for humanitarian law. "And more importantly, we would at a stroke eliminate this country's positive ability to exercise our moderating, diplomatic and political influence on a crisis where there are massive UK interests at stake. " Comment: Boris means military industrial interests. A parliamentary motion calling for a boycott of arms to Saudi Arabia and an independent UN investigation was defeated in the House of Commons after more than 100 Labour MPs on the party's right wing failed to support it. MP John Woodcock defended Britain's role in arming and training the Saudi military as it carries out airstrikes in Yemen. "The coalition is precisely focused on training Saudis to be better able to be in compliance with international humanitarian law so that our interventions, if effective, will create fewer civilian casualties," he said. MP Toby Perkins said he could not back the motion because Britain has "significant economic interest in continuing to have positive relations with the Saudis." Comment: This is like saying it is better to be a war criminal and make money than forgo the money and not be a participant of war crimes. The damage has already been committed so why stop now? | 0 |
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WASHINGTON — When you are a United States senator running for who has to apologize for saying your nominee for president is a role model for children, things may be going subpar for you. And you also may have created trouble for fellow imperiled incumbents who will now also likely be asked whether they think Donald J. Trump sets a nice example. Senator Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, found herself in that thicket Tuesday as she continued to try to walk back the word she uttered in a debate when asked if she saw Mr. Trump as an exemplar for youth: “absolutely. ” Ms. Ayotte and her Democratic opponent, Gov. Maggie Hassan, are locked in one of the nation’s closest Senate races, a contest that could determine whether Republicans retain control of Capitol Hill. Like Ms. Ayotte, many Republican senators have struggled to reconcile their fortunes with those of Mr. Trump. “Welcome to the 2016 election, where most party loyalists on both sides feel they need to say publicly that their candidate is a good role model but privately don’t really believe it themselves,” said Brian Walsh, a Republican strategist. “What we see in New Hampshire this week is the same tortured Kabuki dance many Americans are undergoing this election season, just on a stage. ” Almost instantly after the debate Monday night, Ms. Ayotte’s campaign released an unusual statement saying: “I misspoke tonight. While I would hope all of our children would aspire to be president, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have set a good example and I wouldn’t hold up either of them as role models for my kids. ” Ms. Ayotte reiterated her comments while campaigning Tuesday morning. But in the world of digital advertising, the leavings made for good political breakfast. Ms. Hassan’s campaign quickly delivered a digital ad that captured the “absolutely” comment while trimming the portion of Ms. Ayotte’s response that emphasized Mr. Trump was among many people who could be considered role models. (It also removed Ms. Ayotte’s several “ums” as Ms. Hassan looked on with barely concealed amusement.) Ms. Ayotte has ample company in trying to fashion a response about how to regard Mr. Trump. One colleague, Senator Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, has gone the route, openly scorning Mr. Trump. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina has gone a different way, backing Mr. Trump in theory but expressing surprise at some of Mr. Trump’s remarks and requesting that he say them no more. Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has been the target of remarks by Mr. Trump, represents the grit teeth and glare caucus, more or less refusing to answer questions about Mr. Trump’s statements. He would likely pass on the role model thing, too. Ms. Ayotte has tried hard to avoid criticizing Mr. Trump — and by proxy his voters — saying several times that she “supports” him, but won’t go as far as to endorse him. In an election cycle with at least half a dozen close races, both sides are trying to pounce on any perceived mistakes in the waning weeks of the campaign. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee rushed Tuesday to do its own digital ad, as did Americans for Responsible Solutions, a gun safety advocacy group, which made a spot highlighting the senator’s comments and juxtaposing them with footage of Mr. Trump’s most incendiary comments on guns. “Republican senators and candidates will continue to get asked uncomfortable questions about Donald Trump for a very simple reason,” said Sadie Weiner, a spokeswoman for the committee. “They continue to support him even when he is pulling his most sexist, racist, unconscionable stunts, and their loyalty to party over common sense is quickly becoming a judgment question that is taking center stage in their races. ” Bob Salera, a spokesman for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, gets an A for effort on table turning. “To be honest, we ruled out asking House Democrats if Hillary Clinton is honest because the answer seemed too obvious,” he said in a statement, referring to Ms. Hassan’s flub this spring when she was asked if Mrs. Clinton was honest and declined to answer the question directly. “But Maggie Hassan has proved that there is no question too simple for congressional Democrats and Democrat challengers desperately trying to walk the line between Hillary Clinton supporters and the voters who are repelled by her. ” Some prominent supporters of Mrs. Clinton got in on the game. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who generally does not answer questions from reporters, conveyed her thoughts via Twitter: “Think about it: @realDonaldTrump calls Latinos rapists, African Americans thugs, women fat pigs, Kelly Ayotte thinks he’s a role model. ” Whether the role model remark adds up to more than two days of Twitter twaddle for Ms. Ayotte is a matter of mystery. “She’s done as good a job as one could separating herself from Trump for over a year,” said Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party. “She’s never appeared with him, not even during the primary season. She has condemned his most extreme remarks many times. “I don’t think voters are under any misimpression that she supports him or is glad he is the nominee. She didn’t answer the question artfully,” he added, “and the Democrats are trying to make it into a big deal, but I doubt it will stick. ” | 1 |
Asra Nomani, a former Georgetown University professor, of the Muslim Reform Movement, and author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily. [Marlow professed his admiration for Nomani’s recent column, “The ’s Cyber Jihad Against Trump and His Supporters,” which covered what Marlow described as “the most significant news event of the year so far, aside from the Trump inauguration”: the riots at U. C. Berkeley. “Being a journalist, I believe in the power of words, and I also study propaganda. I feel like we’re in the middle of a fierce propaganda war,” Nomani said. “The one word that I think is important for everyone to know is ‘agitprop.’ It’s an old word for agitation propaganda. As you know, working at Breitbart, the concept of ‘ ’ is thrown at you all the time. It’s being used today as a way to try to immediately discredit folks. I thought to myself, ‘Well, what do we have happening on the Left? ’” “I write in the piece about how I’ve been a lifelong liberal,” she explained. “Just to let your listeners know, I came from India at the age of four and grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, in a college town and absorbed all the strong liberal politics, really absorbed it into my heart. So I’ve been really distressed these last months. Another confession I had written a while ago in the Washington Post was that I had voted for Donald Trump, as a lifelong liberal. ” Nomani recalled the impact of seeing Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News under assault by at a speech in Chicago and then again at U. C. Berkeley. “I watched this happening on my TV screen, and I thought to myself, just like we do with anything in journalism, ‘Where did it begin? ’” she recalled. “I had the good fortune to have met this really great named Eric Feinberg, who works out of New York City, and basically what we noticed was the hashtag that was being used to bring people to the streets there in Berkeley was hashtag #ShutDownMilo. And so what Eric did was track it, track the hashtag back to months before the actual protest happened against Milo, to a kind of odd website called ItsGoingDown. org. ” As chronicled in her latest essay, Nomani worked from that website to trace the outlines of a “ radical movement that is causing mayhem in our streets today. ” “I call it a cyber jihad because, as a Muslim, I’ve been well familiar with the agitation propaganda by my Muslim extremists,” she explained. “I see how what’s happening here is this very dangerous intersection — ‘intersection politics’ is such a popular word — between the far Left in America and the far Right in my Muslim community. That’s why I now see this as a cyber jihad that’s now trying to really claim America. ” Marlow noted the grim irony that the new “Antifa” ( ) movement is “just about the most fascist force in the West,” and he argued this intersection of totalitarian ugliness and politics is more widespread than the “ ” fringe Nomani describes in her work. “I hear you, and you won’t get a fight from me on this one because, honestly the disturbing reality for me as a liberal is exactly this dynamic you’re talking about,” Nomani replied. “I use this concept of ‘ ’ really as a to the use of . It’s a linguistic tool on my part as a writer. But intellectually, absolutely what you’re saying has been my experience and my observation in my reporting. ” Marlow asked Nomani about the most controversial action taken to date by the president for whom she voted: his executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven countries. “I do call it a ‘ Muslim ban,’ as I also called the women’s march a ‘ women’s march,’” Nomani said. “They are all examples of ‘hashtag intifada,’ as I also talk about — an attempt to try to exaggerate reality, to make it agitprop. I as a Muslim and a member of the Muslim Reform Movement recognize the extremism problem that we have in the world and want us as a country to develop pragmatic solutions. ” “The ‘Muslim ban’ did not work because of this framing that was done, this propaganda that was done against the executive order,” she said, stressing that she uses the term ‘Muslim ban’ for Trump’s executive order sarcastically. “What I also ultimately think we have to do is, in your community and in America, really walk the middle path with solutions,” she urged, warning that extreme expressions from the far Right would lead to the same sort of angry but ineffectual dead end as the . “Everything that has to happen in our country going forward, I think, has to be done with sensibility but also a sense of compassion to each other as human beings. I hope that does not sound too far liberal to you, but I think you know what I mean, in terms of trying to draw people at their heart also,” she said. Nomani said it broke her heart to declare that America has become embroiled in a civil war, but she added, “There is an insurgency that’s trying to claim America from the far Left. ” “We have to have a balanced and rational response from all circles. And that’s what I just want to continue to appeal to people to be, is civil and human, remembering the humanity of each other — because where we see that lost from the far Left, we cannot replace it with inhumanity,” she said. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. LISTEN: | 1 |
Trey Gowdy Literally Walks Out After Dropping Hillary, Comey & Reporters During News Conference
Aide Cheryl Mills, who at the time was serving as Clinton’s chief of staff, reportedly replied in slightly over two hours, agreeing to help.
“Adding Nora (Toiv, who at the time was serving as a special assistant to the chief of staff) who will likely reach out to (redacted) to see what is possible — generally rejections make it harder to get over so flagging that this may be hard to undo but we’ll see what’s doable,” she wrote back.
Whether or not the friend, British citizen and YouGov editor-in-chief Freddie Sayers, ever received a visa was unclear, though it was also largely irrelevant. Advertisement - story continues below
Take a look at the original emails below:
What was far more concerning was that Clinton’s team had rushed to assist Chelsea’s friend within a couple of hours, but had done absolutely nothing to help the four men who died during the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Specifically, during the early stages of the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta emailed Clinton’s staff asking for them to approve the launch of a rescue team that he wrote at the time was “spinning up” and ready to assist. Advertisement - story continues below | 0 |
The United States will deploy about 6, 000 American soldiers to Europe and Afghanistan, according to the U. S. Army. [On Thursday, the largest branch of the U. S. armed forces announced that an estimated 4, 000 soldiers from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, will be sent to Europe beginning this fall in support of Operation Atlantic Resolve. The offensive refers to ongoing operations aimed at reassuring NATO allies concerned about Russia’s intentions in Eastern Europe. In a statement, Col. David Gardner, commander of 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, noted, “The Dagger Brigade is looking forward to deploying back to Europe. The brigade has served most of its history in support of our European allies and will arrive after a year of training ready to do so again. ” Moreover, the Army announced Thursday that 1, 500 soldiers from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, will deploy to Afghanistan this summer in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, the name for the U. S. mission in the country. “Since spearheading allied assaults in Sicily and Anzio in 1943, the Devil Brigade has accomplished its missions through disciplined initiative,” said Col. Toby Magsig, commander of 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, in a statement. “The same endures today. The ‘Devils in Baggy Pants’ are and ready to assist our Afghan partners as part of the Resolute Support mission. ” The Army also revealed that another 200 soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division Headquarters, stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, will be sent to the war zone in Afghanistan this summer in support of Freedom’s Sentinel. “The Marne Division is trained and ready to deploy in support of this important mission,” said Maj. Gen. James Rainey, commander of 3rd Infantry Division, in a statement. “The number one priority at the 3rd Infantry Division is readiness, and I am confident our soldiers are ready to serve our nation’s call. ” The U. S. Army announced the upcoming deployments to Afghanistan on the same day that Bill Roggio, an expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and editor of the Long War Journal, told American lawmakers that America is “losing in Afghanistan. ” He added that despite the more than U. S. military effort against and its Taliban ally, the two terrorist groups are growing stronger and remain a threat to America’s national security. The Islamic State ( ) has also established a branch in the country, but the Taliban and remain a bigger threat, noted the FDD expert. An estimated 300 U. S. Marines were recently deployed to the Taliban stronghold in the southern Afghanistan province located along the Pakistan border, Helmand, one of the deadliest regions of the ongoing war for coalition forces. Prior to the recent Marine deployment, there were an estimated 8, 300 U. S. forces serving in Afghanistan. | 1 |
Leon G. Cooperman, one of the early titans of the hedge fund industry, is gearing up for the biggest fight of his career: preserving his Wall Street legacy as regulators accuse him and his firm of insider trading. The stakes are high, too, for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which on Wednesday sued Mr. Cooperman, a billionaire, accusing his firm, Omega Advisors, of reaping $4 million in illegal profit by using nonpublic information about an energy deal in 2010. The case is the most prominent to be brought by the agency since a court ruling that narrowed the definition of insider trading. Hours after the civil complaint was filed, Mr. Cooperman fired back with a detailed rebuttal sent to investors. He followed with a defiant conference call, opening with an joke about an man bragging about having sex with an woman. He told investors on the call that he had refused to settle and that he would fight the S. E. C. in court. The stage is set for what is expected to be a legal battle between a gruff, outspoken investor and an agency that has come under criticism for not taking more cases to trial. Mr. Cooperman, the son of a South Bronx plumber, is known for not holding back. In 2011, he wrote a much publicized “open letter” accusing President Obama of “villainizing the American dream” and the wealthy. “It took me 50 years of hard work and playing by the rules to get where I got. I’m not going to let these people destroy my legacy,” Mr. Cooperman told investors on Wednesday. Regulators contend that Mr. Cooperman used his position as one of the biggest shareholders in Atlas Pipeline Partners to gain confidential information from an unidentified executive at the company about the sale of one of its facilities to another energy company in July 2010. Mr. Cooperman had assured the executive that he would not trade on the information, but regulators said that despite making that promise, he had his firm accumulate a bigger position and profited when Atlas’s stock jumped 31 percent after the sale was announced. The case also involves some family drama. Mr. Cooperman’s timely trades indirectly benefited a grandson, whose account Mr. Cooperman managed. Regulators said the money manager bought an Atlas Pipeline bond that rose in value after the deal. And in another twist, Mr. Cooperman’s son, Wayne, who runs another hedge fund, may get drawn into the fray because of his own trading in the same stock. In his letter, Mr. Cooperman said his son was prepared to testify on his behalf, noting that his son’s fund, Cobalt Capital Management, was betting against shares of Atlas Pipeline at the time and he is one of the biggest investors in his son’s firm. Mr. Cooperman said he did not share any information about the sale of the facility with his son. In the complaint, however, the S. E. C. quoted an email that Mr. Cooperman sent to an unidentified relative — described as the manager of another hedge fund — informing him of the $682 million deal. This same relative may have been the first to have sounded the alarm about unusual trading in shares and options of Atlas Pipeline the day the deal was announced, according to the S. E. C. In a separate email, the relative writes to an executive at Atlas Pipeline, calling the options trading before the sale announcement “fishy” and “shady. ” The relative goes on to say that “somebody should investigate” and then asks: “How do I become a . ” Mr. Cooperman’s son did not return a phone call seeking comment. But his firm did buy shares in Atlas Pipeline later in 2010, according to regulatory filings. Wayne Cooperman has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Regulators also contended that Mr. Cooperman tried to conceal his actions after Omega received a subpoena relating to the Atlas trades some 17 months later by contacting one of Atlas’s executives in an attempt to “fabricate” a cover story in the event that either man was questioned by regulators about the trade. Mr. Cooperman “allegedly undermined the public confidence in the securities markets and took advantage of other investors who did not have this information,” Andrew J. Ceresney, the S. E. C. ’s chief of enforcement, said in a statement. The civil case against Mr. Cooperman, filed in the Federal District Court in Philadelphia, would appear to sidestep a monkey wrench thrown into some insider trading prosecutions by a recent appellate court decision. That ruling made it more difficult to charge someone with insider trading if the person improperly leaking confidential information was not getting a personal benefit of some consequence. The personal benefit issue would not seem to arise in this matter because regulators contend that Mr. Cooperman “misappropriated” the confidential information about the impending sale from the unidentified executive at Atlas Pipeline. Ted Wells and Daniel Kramer, his lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton Garrison, issued a statement in which they called the allegations “entirely baseless. ” Mr. Cooperman said he was being charged with trading on paper gains and added that his firm never sold shares after the deal was announced. He said much of the firm’s trading was related to positions in a stock that the firm had been bullish on for many years. In some insider trading cases, hedge fund managers have been forced to shut their firms and return money to investors. On Wednesday, Mr. Cooperman emphasized that 35 percent of Omega Advisors’ $5. 4 billion in assets under management belonged to members of the firm and that business would continue as usual. He added, however, that if the firm concluded that the S. E. C. case had “become too much of a distraction,” it would voluntarily give back money. Omega is the second large hedge fund to be rocked by an insider trading investigation this year. In June, securities regulators and federal prosecutors charged a top manager at Visium Asset Management with insider trading. The manager, Sanjay Valvani, committed suicide a week later. Visium’s founder, Jacob Gottlieb, whom the authorities did not charge, is in the process of shuttering the hedge fund after selling some of its funds to AllianceBernstein. The two cases show that insider trading remains an issue in the nearly $3 trillion hedge fund industry even after a sweeping crackdown by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. That push led to convictions and guilty pleas from more than 80 people, including Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire of the Galleon Group. Another firm, SAC Capital Advisors, a $14 billion hedge fund, pleaded guilty to insider trading and paid $1. 8 billion in fines to federal authorities. In the civil complaint on Wednesday, the S. E. C. also accused Mr. Cooperman of failing to report in a timely manner information about his hedge fund’s holdings and other transactions in publicly traded companies in violation of federal securities laws more than 40 times. Regulators said Mr. Cooperman “repeatedly violated” federal securities laws requiring investors to disclose when their equity interest in a publicly traded company rises above either a 5 or 10 percent stake. Speaking at a private charity event in June at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan, Mr. Cooperman addressed the looming investigation, telling the Wall Street audience, “I call companies, that’s what I do for a living. ” He said: “Every time I speak with a company I say the same thing: Don’t disenfranchise me if I ask you a question. Don’t answer a question if you’re not prepared to give anyone else that information, just tell me it’s confidential and we’ll move on. ” | 1 |
Posted by Lindsay Hayward | Nov 2, 2016 | Liberal Corruption Assange exposes John Podesta and Hillary Clinton
From a young age, Americans learn what “basic behavior” is accepted in modern society. Part of that learning curve teaches children to never lie. These children grow up into successful, trustworthy adults, right? How To Make An Organic Super Food For Survial At Home - Watch Video Click Here
Lawyers, doctors, government officials, and so on are all supposed to be upstanding citizens. They are supposed to represent truth and freedom for our nation.
Where there is great responsibility, there is also opportunity to abuse this power. Hillary Clinton’s appointed chairman, John Podesta, is familiar with this all too well.
Truth seeker and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has released Hillary Clintons deleted emails from her private server to make Americans aware of what’s going on.
In a world where it’s difficult to tell what’s right and what’s wrong anymore, its natural to feel fear. However, “fear” is what people like Hillary Clinton thrive on.
The FBI is revisiting the initial Clinton email scandal and has provided newly declassified information about the Clinton Foundation via the FBI Vault .
In an email sent to Cheryl Mills from John Podesta the evening of March 2, 2015, hours after the New York Times reported that Clinton possibly violated federal record requirements by using the private server, a shocking revelation has been uncovered.
According to the latest batch of Podesta’s hacked emails, Podesta writes, “Not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later.”
Mills responded, “Think you just got your new nick name.”
The “Lanny” reference is to lawyer Lanny Davis, who served as special counsel to former President, Bill Clinton. Lawyers, unfortunately, are not always the most honest individuals and have been known to cover up for their guilty clients. Hillary Clinton is one of these lawyers.
Cheryl Mills is the same woman who oversaw the controversial construction of a South Korean sweat shop being built in Haiti. A week after this email exchange took place, Hillary Clinton announced that she would love nothing more than to share her emails with the general public, claiming she had nothing to hide. At least, she didn’t think she did.
After being subpoenaed by federal court, Hillary Clinton acid-washed her private server, deleting thousands of emails. She denied, under oath, that classified information was ever on the server or sent/discussed via her private email address. Do you think Hillary Clinton ever gets tired of lying, each lie covering up the next?
Acid-washing a server costs a pretty penny. If she truly had nothing to hide, why did she completely bleach her server free of everything?
Thanks to leaked emails from WikiLeaks, it has been proven that Hillary lied when she said no classified information had ever been involved with her private server- Not only was there classified information stored and talked about, but hackers were able to intercept the data and correspondence.
New York Post comments, “Democrats on the House Oversight Committee point to Clinton tweeting on March 4, 2015, calling on the State Department to release her 55,000 pages of work files.”
“I want the public to see my email,” Hillary wrote two days after the Podesta message.
At the time, the real Lanny Davis was in support of Clinton addressing her emails.
Another WikiLeaks email displays members of the Clinton Organization getting frustrated with Davis’ public voicing.
“We gotta zap Lanny out of our universe,” campaign manager Robby Mook wrote Podesta March 8, 2015. “Can’t believe he committed her to a private review of her hard drive on TV.”
Good thing for Lanny Davis, “zap” doesn’t equate to “wet-work.”
Although Davis may have been rash to announce and support Hillary Clinton’s innocence, the DNC had major issues with it.
Davis told Fox News host Chris Wallace, during a televised interview, about Hillary Clinton’s private email server- “there can be a neutral party to review all these records – nothing unlawful.”
Apparently, Davis wasn’t given the memo by Hillary Clinton’s team regarding her bleached server and it’s true contents.
“I think it is a reasonable idea if anybody has any doubts that there’s a delete on a hard drive- to have an independent go inspect her private e-mail?” Davis added.
Hillary Clinton is known for lying, her own chairman doesn’t even believe her when she claims she “forgets” things. Even Podesta Knows She Is A Liar
Hillary Clinton wouldn’t know honesty if it slapped her in the face. She is a psychopathic liar that thirsts for ways to obscenely scam on a global spectrum.
She calls out Donald Trump for “using the system” but in no way has he abused the system in the grand scale that the Clintons have. He’s a business man, he was simply following the laws that government had implemented.
Floods of emails and documents are being leaked every day by Anonymous, WikiLeaks and the FBI. These are desperate cries for help mostly from whistle blowers who have been intimately involved with the government, trying to warn American citizens of certain madness and despair that awaits us if Hillary Clinton wins presidency.
Donald J. Trump genuinely cares for the American people. He is a natural leader, he enjoys helping people because he believes in bettering America, not policies that encourage ‘pay for play’.
Hillary Clintons transparency is starting to become blurred. Shatter the busted deception and lock everyone involved with the Clinton scandals in prison.
Donald Trump recognizes the need for America to rebuild, which starts with depleting government corruption and replacing government officials. This is something Hillary could never accomplish. Hillary Clinton would just hire her friends and abuse her position of power, as she’s done for nearly four decades.
John Podesta suggested that Hillary Clinton delete her emails- he must believe she is capable of worse than sharing classified information and as president of the United States, who would stop her from committing even more crime? She would put each and every one of our lives on the line and not think twice.
John Podesta doesn’t even believe in her, why should America? | 0 |
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National Bugle Radio: The First Step towards Overthrowing Jewish Power
Farren Shoaf, host of The Alternative Media on RBN, interviews Dr. Slattery about the implications of the election of Donald Trump for the media, Jewish power, and the Jewish agenda of replacing the white majority in the United States. | 0 |
Mary Lyons Describes 'The We' Share on Facebook Caitlin Moran's Posthumous Advice for Her Daughter Caitlin Moran · 19,039 views today · My daughter is about to turn 13 and I’ve been smoking a lot recently, and so – in the wee small hours, when my lungs feel like there’s a small mouse inside them, scratching to... | 0 |
A former professor at Georgetown University was harassed online after penning an for The Washington Post in which she discussed being a Muslim immigrant and a Donald Trump supporter. [Asra Q. Nomani, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and professor at Georgetown University, has received online harassment after penning an for The Washington Post about supporting Donald Trump. This is my confession — and explanation: I — a a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash. ” Georgetown Professor Christine Fair took to social media to condemn Nomani’s suggesting that Nomani was helping to “normalize Nazis in DC. ” “Why? Like many women, I have PTSD from sex assault. YOU publicly voted for a sex assailant,” Fair exclaimed. As a result of Fair’s behavior, Nomani made public a formal complaint she filed with Georgetown in which she requested that “Fair receive training regarding how to engage in civil discourse in a way that is respectful and productive. ” In addition, Nomani asked Fair for “a public apology. ” “What don’t you understand, you clueless dolt?” Fair wrote, saying Nomani “helped bring this hell 2 [sic] our country. His hate is on your shoulders. Was it worth it? Don’t forget 2 [sic] register. ” “I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the ‘Islam’ in Islamic State,” Nomani added, much to the ire of her former Georgetown colleague, who exclaimed that she has “written [Nomani] off as a human being. ” After Fair attempted to claim that Nomani was an atheist rather than a Muslim, Nomani suggested that it’s not uncommon that someone tries to suggest she isn’t a true Muslim. She told the online conservative campus watchdog site Campus Reform that who stray from the progressive orthodoxy “hear all sorts of charges of not being Muslim from the extremists within our community. ” “They always want to out us and throw us out of the religion and declare us apostates so we have no credibility and so there is a target on our back. So for Christine Fair, a white liberal atheist to call me out as an atheist is not only dangerous but offensive,” Nomani said, adding that she does not think that “anyone should be in the position of educating others and be so abusive. ” | 1 |
White House press secretary Sean Spicer defended the pace of the Republican party on important issues like tax legislation and repealing Obamacare. [Online journalist Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report criticized Republicans on Twitter for their sluggish momentum in Washington D. C. suggesting that they be “sued for fraud” after promising immediate action on repealing Obamacare and important tax policy. Drudge also questioned the Trump administration’s committment to an “executive order targeting ‘conflict minerals’” but not getting rid of the Obamacare tax penalty. “I think it’s hardly stalling,” Spicer said, after Breitbart News asked him to react to Drudge’s assessment. He defended the Republican party’s pace on important issues like Obamacare. “I think it’s a mammoth thing to repeal and replace,” Spicer said, reassuring supporters that the president was still committed to his promise. He reminded reporters that Speaker Paul Ryan also promised to repeal Obamacare by the end of the year. Spicer explained that Republicans didn’t just want to jam through a repeal without taking time to do it right — as Democrats failed to do when they passed the legislation. “We can do it swiftly or do it right,” Spicer said. “He wants to do it right. ” | 1 |
Thursday, 3 November 2016 'VOTE FOR ME, WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOSE?"
Donald Trump has given an amazing closing speech about why he should be elected President in 2016. It can be broken down into different parts about why he should be elected according to Mr. Trump:
1) "People say I suffer from a pathological narcissistic disorder, am a megalomaniac, assault women, and am a sociopath. Well, suppose all of this is true. It mostly isn't true of Bill Clinton and Barak Obama and look where these lightweights have gotten us today! They are total losers who have destroyed the military and the middle class. Why not give a crazy person a chance? I'm bound to be better than they are. What have you got to lose?"
2) I'm a great entertainer. Elect me and you'll never be bored. If I threaten some country or the other with nuclear annihilation you'll hold your breaths to see if I carry it out. It will be amazingly exciting. You'll have nothing to lose!
3) Previous Presidents, from what I've read about only 4 of them, because of my limited attention span, have been relatively honest. Not me! I've engaged in many fraudulent business practices even cheating widows and orphans! Why not try a deceitful swindler like me? Politics is just one big con anyway! What have you got to lose with a guy like me on your side? What have you got to lose? Bing bing bong bong bing bing bing.
4) The PC people say that Presidents should be well read and educated. And the lightweight loses who have been in the Oval office have mostly been that way. Even though I've forgotten everything I've learned, I did go to one of the best Ivy League Schools. And, remember this folks, reading is for low energy people who don't have the best brains; they are the opposite of me. Education and reading, believe me, are overrated.
5) Hatred, bigotry, racism, strong immigration restrictions, Nativism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, advocacy of violence against one's political opponents and misogyny are part of our American heritage. I embody all of these. I am the true voice of the American people. I "tell it like it is," and say things millions of Americans are afraid to say. That is why hate groups support me.
6) People say I am a "walking Id." I say, so what? The id is very, very strong. It is the reptile in our brains. It's all about winning, being a celebrity and grabbing women's vaginas to show one's power. It's all about the strength and power that total losers don't have. I am an unbelievably strong winner just like my friend Putin. You need on your side. Vote for me. What have you got to lose? I truly am unbelievable."
With apologies to Nicholas Krisof whose 11/3/16 NYT's column sparked this. Make Keith Shirey's | 0 |
Monday 21 November 2016 by Tom Moore Man who hasn’t been clubbing in 9 years celebrating victory as Fabric nightclub to reopen
A man who has not been on a night out since 2007 is said to be delighted by the decision of Islington Council to grant a new licence to London nightclub, Fabric.
Simon Williams, who doesn’t even go to the pub with his friends anymore and is only ever seen at social occasions orchestrated by his wife, revealed his feelings on Facebook.
Simon posted, “So delighted to see Fabric is going to reopen. I spent many a top night there in my party days.
“People like me can find so much creativity and inspiration in places like Fabric, so I couldn’t be happier the council is changing its mind.”
A Friend of Simon’s who still has a social life and actually goes out clubbing on a semi-regular basis said “Yeah, Simon’s full of shit. He’s never been to Fabric in his life.
“He told me he tried to get in once in 2001 but was turned away because he was on a stag do dressed as a Smurf. Back in his so-called ‘party days’, he spent most of his time throwing up in various All Bar Ones.
“You could say his post was slightly fabricated.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently | 0 |
White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested that the media was downplaying the news revealing that former President Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice unmasked the identities of Trump campaign aides during the 2016 election. [“I’m somewhat surprised in terms of the level of interest that I’ve seen from the press corps, one set of developments versus another set of developments,” Spicer said during the White House press briefing on Monday. Since President Donald Trump accused former President Obama’s administration of spying on his campaign staff, journalists have demanded evidence to back up his claims. Spicer suggested that the media was approaching the issue with a double standard after Rice’s activity was exposed. “I’m somewhat more from a media standpoint somewhat intrigued by the lack of interest that we’ve seen in some of these public revelations and reporting that has gone in that direction that we’ve seen in some of the other directions that we’ve seen,” he said. Spicer declined to comment about the new revelations, citing the ongoing investigation. “There’s a troubling direction that some of this is going in, but we’re going to let this review go on before we jump to it,” he said. In the aftermath of the news, some reporters suggested that Rice was merely doing her job by unmasking Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. “If victim Flynn hadn’t been ‘unmasked’ — would Trump had fired him? Would it be better to have ‘masked’ man Flynn running NSC?” New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush asked on Twitter. “’Unmasking’ sounds better than ‘we picked a national security adviser who was on the payroll of 2 other countries. ’” Trump has not reacted to questions about the revelations in the press and has not shared his opinion about the news on Twitter. Spicer said that the administration would not try to assign a motive to Rice’s reported behavior, but wait to see the results of the investigation. “We’re not going to start going down guessing the motives of something that is not assumed in fact yet,” he said. | 1 |
Scotland’s The Herald TV reviewer Damien Love described Donald Trump’s inauguration as a return of the classic horror anthology series The Twilight Zone in a rundown of the week’s TV listings in the paper. [“After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history,” Love wrote in his review titled, “President Trump: The Inauguration. ” The classic series, from renowned screenwriter Rod Serling, aired on CBS from and featured science fiction stories that often ended with a bizarre twist. “ writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories — among the most common is the ‘What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War’ setting — but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present,” Love wrote. The satirical review has since gone viral on social media and is being shared and celebrated by noted celebrities like Star Trek star George Takei. “The Sunday Herald TV Section wins today,” Takei wrote on Twitter. The Sunday Herald TV Section wins today. pic. twitter. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) January 15, 2017, Trump is set to become the 45th president of the United States on Friday, January 20. Country music star Toby Keith is slated to perform at Trump’s inauguration along with rock band 3 Doors Down and country singer Lee Greenwood. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson | 1 |
Clinton’s “No-Fly Zone” over Syria Will Lead to War with Russia. Warning of JCS Chairman General Dunford October 27, 2016 at 10:18 am Global Research , October 23, 2016 The media has failed to address the confrontation between the U.S. State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Francis Dunford (image right) has warned both the US Senate as well Secretary of State John Kerry in no uncertain terms that a “No Fly Zone” over Syria would lead to war with both Syria and Russia, intimating a dangerous process of military escalation.
In a Senate Arms Services Committee hearing, Dunford said, responding to questions from Republican Senator Roger Whicker (Mississippi)
“Right now, Senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria it would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia,… That’s a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I’m not going to make.” ( Senate Armed Services Committee, September 22, 2016, emphasis added)
At the third presidential debate, Hillary Clinton reasserted her commitment that if elected president, she would implement a no-fly-zone, intimating that the objective was to “save lives”:
“I think a no-fly zone could save lives and could hasten the end of the conflict. I am well aware of the really legitimate concerns you have expressed from both the president and the general,” Clinton said in response to a question from Fox News debate moderator Chris Wallace.
“This would not be done just on the first day. This would take a lot of negotiation and would also take making it clear to the Russians and Syrians that our purpose here was to provide safe zones on the ground … I think we could strike a deal and make it clear to the Russians and the Syrians that this was something that we believe was in the best interest of the people on the ground in Syria.” (Fox News, emphasis added)
At present, under the Obama administration, the joint chiefs of staff are opposed to the “No Fly zone”.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff are appointed by the Secretary of Defense.
Under a Clinton presidency, a new Secretary of Defense as well as a new Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, firmly committed to “A No fly Zone” over Syria would be appointed.
Michèle Angelique Flournoy, a former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy is Hillary’s choice for the position of Secretary of Defense, who favors the “No Fly Zone” option.
According to Defense One: ”The woman expected to run the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton said she would direct U.S. troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region.”
Confirmed by the Leaked Emails Michele Flournoy is a crony of the Clintons. She has “called for “limited military coercion” to help remove Assad from power in Syria, including a “no bombing” zone over parts of Syria held by U.S.-backed rebels.” This is tantamount to a no fly zone to protect the terrorists including ISIS Daesh from actions by Syrian and Russian forces.
According to Defense One: Flournoy, and several of her colleagues at the Center for New American Security, or CNAS, have been making the case for sending more American troops into combat against ISIS and the Assad regime than the Obama administration has been willing to commit.
Since Russia’s increased involvement, the facts on the ground in Syria, she said, “Do not support the kind of negotiated conditions we would like to get to.” U.S. policy should be the removal of Assad even if that meant “using limited military coercion,” Flournoy said, at Monday’s annual CNAS conference in Washington.
Flournoy did not deny the entire report that she favors increased U.S. intervention; for instance, she acknowledged her support for U.S. “strikes using standoff weapons — to retaliate against Syrian military targets” to enforce the no-bomb zone.
The press reports, however, did not quote the details of the discussion and testimony of General Dunford and Secretary of Defense Carter at the Arms Services Committee Hearing: Let me see if the Chairman wants to add anything.
Senator Wicker: Well, let me just ask this, if you don’t mind, Secretary Carter. It would help if the barrel bombing ended. And I spoke to a Democratic colleague of mine today. I’ve been calling for a no-fly zone to stop the barrel bombing, and I asked this colleague of mine on the other side of the aisle if he would support that. And he said, “Yes.” He said, “I want to call it something else, rather than a no-fly zone,” but that this particular Senator it is a fact that this particular Senator has now changed his position and would like us to take action to present — to prevent the barrel bombing.
What is your position about that? And wouldn’t it help if we took decisive action and ended this carnage?
Secretary Carter: I don’t know the specific proposal which you’re discussing with your colleague. I’ll make one comment and see if the Chairman wants to add anything.
Senator Wicker: I think he was talking about a no-fly zone –
Secretary Carter: Well, okay.
Senator Wicker: — but described in more palatable terms.
Secretary Carter: There are — a number of different proposals have been made, but I — the one that I think it the focus on right now is the one Secretary Kerry’s trying to promote, namely a no-fly zone for the Russians and the Syrians who are attacking the Syrian people. If they’re talking about a no-fly zone for American aircraft fighting ISIL, needless to say, that — that’s not going to get any enthusiasm, get strong opposition from me.
Senator Wicker: I’m speaking about a –
Secretary Carter: But, I think that’s what a — but — it’s not called that, but Secretary Kerry is trying to get a standdown of the Syrian and Russian air force. And if he’s successful, that would be a good thing.
Let me ask the Chairman if he has anything to add.
General Dunford: Senator, the only thing I’d say is, you know, as the situation on the ground changes, I think I have a responsibility — we, the joint force, has a responsibility — to make sure the President has a full range of options. We have discussed that issue in the past under certain conditions. The conditions on the ground will change, and we’ll continue to look at those options and make sure they’re available to the President.
Senator Wicker: What about the option of controlling the airspace so that barrel bombs cannot be dropped?
General Dunford: All options –
Senator Wicker: What do you think of that option, sir?
General Dunford: Right now, Senator, for all of the airspace in Syria, it would require war against Syria and Russia. That’s a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I’m not going to make.
Concluding Remarks
From the above testimonies and statements, one thing is clear. Decision-makers at highest levels of the US government and the military believe in their own propaganda. They are not able to reflect on their actions outside the realm of propaganda. And this also applies to nuclear warfare which is presented as a “peace-making operation”.
It is unlikely that any drastic action regarding a “no fly zone” will be taken under the Obama administration prior to the November elections and the instatement of a new president of the US in January 2017.
Consequently, the next three months will be absolutely crucial for Syria. –i.e. During this period, the counterterrorism campaign waged by Syria with the support of Russia and Iran will seek to eliminate remaining terrorist pockets and pacify the entire country.
The foot-soldiers of the Western military alliance will be defeated on the ground. If this objective is achieved, it will inevitably have an impact on “US options” regarding the proposed deployment of ground-forces and the No Fly Zone. What prevails, however, is an attempt on the part of Washington to redeploy its ISIS terrorist foot-soldiers in Mosul by transferring them from Iraq to Syria. The original source of this article is Global Research | 0 |
Jane Fawcett, who was a reluctant London debutante when she went to work at Bletchley Park, the home of British during World War II, and was credited with identifying a message that led to a great Allied naval success, the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, died on May 21 at her home in Oxford, England. She was 95. The death was confirmed by her son, James Fawcett. After the war, Ms. Fawcett had a career as a singer, and later as a preservationist. But she played her most significant historical role as an decoder in British wartime intelligence. In May 1941, the Bismarck, Germany’s mightiest warship, had become a prime target after it sank one of England’s most powerful vessels, the battle cruiser Hood, in the battle of the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland. Much of the British fleet was in search of the Bismarck, which was presumed to have withdrawn to the North Atlantic around Norway. Ms. Fawcett, then known as Jane Hughes, had just turned 20 and had been working for a time at Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire estate north of London where the intelligence operation known as the Government Code and Cypher School was located. Thousands of young women worked there during the war many, like Ms. Fawcett, had been recruited and hired from the upper social strata. They performed a variety of tasks assisting the mostly male chess geniuses, linguists, mathematicians and rogue intellectuals struggling to unscramble German military communications written in the devilishly complex disguise generated by Enigma machines. Enigma generated new codes daily, and though by 1941 the Allies had achieved some success in decrypting German missives, it remained work that required vigilance by a chain of operatives. At Bletchley, Ms. Fawcett worked in Hut 6, where the focus was on breaking codes emitted by the German Army and the German air force, the Luftwaffe. As described in a 2015 book, “The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories,” by Michael Smith, her station was in the decoding room, where she sat with a machine called a Typex, which had been modified to replicate an Enigma. When a daily Enigma code was broken, the keys to the code were passed along to Ms. Fawcett or another young woman in the decoding room. She would then plug the keys into her own Typex machine and type out the encoded messages. The Typex machines fed out a decoded script on strips of paper tape, and the first thing Ms. Fawcett and her colleagues needed to do was check to see that the decoded messages were in fact in recognizable German she had spent time in Switzerland, where she learned the language. The German messages were passed along to Hut 3 next door, where they were featured in intelligence reports. On May 25, 1941, Ms. Fawcett was among those in Hut 6 briefed on the search for the Bismarck. “We all knew we’d got the fleet out in the Atlantic trying to locate her because she was the Germans’ most important, latest battleship and had better guns and so on than anybody else, and she’d already sunk the Hood,” Ms. Fawcett recalled in the book. “So it was vitally important to find where she was and try to get rid of her. ” She was just over an hour into her shift when she typed out a message from the main Luftwaffe Enigma. Reading the message, she recognized that a Luftwaffe general whose son was on the Bismarck had sought to find out if he was all right and had been informed that the ship, damaged in the previous battle, was on its way to France — to the port of Brest, in Brittany — for repair. The message, passed instantly along the chain of command, was instrumental in finding the Bismarck, which was first spotted from the air by a seaplane and subsequently attacked by aircraft carrier torpedo bombers and swarmed by Royal Navy battleships and cruisers. It was sunk in the Atlantic west of Brest on May 27. Janet Carolin Hughes was born on March 4, 1921 — probably in Cambridge, where her paternal grandmother lived, her son said, though her family lived in London. (There is some uncertainty about her middle name Mr. Smith said that it was Caroline at birth and that Ms. Fawcett dropped the e later on, just as she dropped the t in Janet.) Her father, George Ravensworth Hughes, was a lawyer for the guild known as the Goldsmiths’ Company her mother, the former Peggy Graham, did charitable work as a prison visitor. As a girl, Jane aspired to be a ballet dancer and trained for a year at Sadler’s Wells, but at 17 she was deemed too tall for the company as a consolation, her parents sent her to Switzerland, where she spent six months studying German. Her mother called her back for debutante season, insisting it was time for her to come out in society. Resentful of this turn of events, she applied to work at Bletchley after receiving a letter from a school friend who was already there. It was the winter of 1940, and she was 18. She signed the Official Secrets Act, compelling her to keep the nature of her work to herself, and was dispatched to Hut 6. She told her parents that she had joined the Foreign Office, the government agency supporting British interests abroad, though she was going only 50 miles or so from home. “It was very bad accommodation,” she recalled in “The Debs of Bletchley Park. ” “Very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. No insulation of any kind except for blackout curtains. “We had horrid little trestle tables, which were very wobbly, and collapsible chairs, which were also very wobbly, very hard. There was very poor lighting single light bulbs hanging down from the ceiling. So we were really in semidarkness, which I expect is what the authorities wanted, better security. ” After the war, Ms. Fawcett trained as a singer at the Royal Academy of Music, and through the early 1960s she toured as a recital and opera singer. She joined the Victorian Society, formed to protect buildings, and won a famous battle against British Railways — which denounced her as “the furious Mrs. Fawcett” — to save the St. Pancras train station in London and, alongside it, the Midland Grand Hotel. She later taught building preservation at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Ms. Fawcett met her future husband, Edward Fawcett, known as Ted, at a luncheon arranged for young naval officers to meet young women they married just after the war. Mr. Fawcett worked as director of publicity for the National Trust, a British charity devoted to conservation and protection of historic sites. He died in 2013. In addition to her son, Ms. Fawcett is survived by a daughter, Carolin Comberti, and five grandchildren. When Kate Middleton, the duchess of Cambridge, whose grandmother worked at Bletchley Park, appeared at the opening of the new museum there in 2014, Mr. Smith, who is an adviser to the Bletchley Park Trust, showed her around Hut 6 and introduced her to some of the women who had worked there during the war. “Jane, who was sat at a desk, was the first to be introduced,” Mr. Smith wrote in an email. When the duchess took her hand, to the horror of the chairman and the chief executive officer of the Bletchley Park Trust, Ms. Fawcett would not let go. “She kept the duchess talking and talking and talking while the C. E. O. was urging me to move the duchess on to the next lady, fearing his carefully planned schedule would fall apart. I don’t think many people ever managed to get Jane Fawcett to budge when she was in a determined mood. ” | 1 |
Wealth and influence in the technology business have always been about gaining the upper hand in software or the machines that software ran on. Now data — gathered in those immense pools of information that are at the heart of everything from artificial intelligence to online shopping recommendations — is increasingly a focus of technology competition. And academics and some policy makers, especially in Europe, are considering whether big internet companies like Google and Facebook might use their data resources as a barrier to new entrants and innovation. In recent years, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have all been targets of tax evasion, privacy or antitrust investigations. But in the coming years, who controls what data could be the next worldwide regulatory focus as governments strain to understand and sometimes rein in American tech giants. The European Commission and the British House of Lords both issued reports last year on digital “platform” companies that highlighted the essential role that data collection, analysis and distribution play in creating and shaping markets. And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development held a meeting in November to explore the subject, “Big Data: Bringing Competition Policy to the Digital Era. ” As government regulators dig into this new era of data competition, they may find that standard antitrust arguments are not so easy to make. Using more and more data to improve a service for users and more accurately target ads for merchants is a clear benefit, for example. And higher prices for consumers are not present with free internet services. “You certainly don’t want to punish companies because of what they might do,” said Annabelle Gawer, a professor of the digital economy at the University of Surrey in England, who made a presentation at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development meeting. “But you do need to be vigilant. It’s clear that enormous power is in the hands of a few companies. ” Maurice Stucke, a former Justice Department antitrust official and a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, who also spoke at the gathering, said one danger was that consumers might be afforded less privacy than they would choose in a more competitive market. The competition concerns echo those that gradually emerged in the 1990s about software and Microsoft. The worry is that as the big internet companies attract more users and advertisers, and gather more data, a powerful “network effect” effectively prevents users and advertisers from moving away from a dominant digital platform, like Google in search or Facebook in consumer social networks. Evidence of the rising importance of data can be seen from the frontiers of artificial intelligence to mainstream business software. And certain data sets can be remarkably valuable for companies working on those technologies. A prime example is Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, the business social network, for $26. 2 billion last year. LinkedIn has about 467 million members, and it houses their profiles and maps their connections. Microsoft is betting LinkedIn, combined with data on how hundreds of millions of workers use its Office 365 online software, and consumer data from search behavior on Bing, will “power a set of insights that we think is unprecedented,” said James Phillips, vice president for business applications at Microsoft. In an email to employees, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, described the LinkedIn deal as a linchpin in the company’s goal to “reinvent productivity and business processes” and to become the digital marketplace that defines “how people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done. ” IBM has also bet heavily on data for its future. Its acquisitions have tended to be in specific industries, like its $2. 6 billion purchase last year of Truven Health, which has data on the cost and treatment of more than 200 million patients, or in specialized data sets useful across several industries, like its $2 billion acquisition of the digital assets of the Weather Company. IBM estimates that 70 percent of the world’s data is not out on the public web, but in private databases, often to protect privacy or trade secrets. IBM’s strategy is to take the data it has acquired, add customer data and use that to train its Watson artificial intelligence software to pursue such tasks as helping medical researchers discover novel disease therapies, or flagging suspect financial transactions for independent auditors. “Our focus is mainly on nonpublic data sets and extending that advantage for clients in business and science,” said David Kenny, senior vice president for IBM’s Watson and cloud businesses. At Google, the company’s drive into business software is fueled by data, building on years of work done on its search and other consumer services, and its recent advances in image identification, speech recognition and language translation. For example, a new Google business offering — still in the test, or alpha, stage — is a software service to improve job finding and recruiting. Its data includes more than 17 million online job postings and the public profiles and résumés of more than 200 million people. Its algorithms distilled that to about four million unique job titles, ranked the most common ones and identified specific skills. The job sites CareerBuilder and Dice are using the Google technology to show job seekers more relevant openings. And FedEx, the giant package shipper, is adding the service to its recruiting site. That is just one case, said Diane Greene, senior vice president for Google’s cloud business, of what is becoming increasingly possible — using the tools of artificial intelligence, notably machine learning, to sift through huge quantities of data to provide data services. “You can turn this technology to whatever field you want, from manufacturing to medicine,” Ms. Greene said. Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is taking a sabbatical to become chief scientist for artificial intelligence at Google’s cloud unit. She sees working at Google as one path to pursue her career ambition to “democratize A. I.,” now that the software and data ingredients are ripe. “We wouldn’t have the current era of A. I. without the big data revolution,” Dr. Li said. “It’s the digital gold. ” In the A. I. race, better software algorithms can put you ahead for a year or so, but probably no more, said Andrew Ng, a former Google scientist and adjunct professor at Stanford. He is now chief scientist at Baidu, the Chinese internet search giant, and a leading figure in artificial intelligence research. Rivals, he added, cannot unlock or simulate your data. “Data is the defensible barrier, not algorithms,” Mr. Ng said. | 1 |
Hillary Clinton Waiting In Wings Of Stage Since 6 A.M. For DNC Speech PHILADELPHIA—Saying she arrived hours before any of the members of the production crew, sources confirmed Thursday that presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been waiting in the wings of the Wells Fargo Center stage since six o’clock this morning to deliver her speech at the Democratic National Convention. Depressed, Butter-Covered Tom Vilsack Enters Sixth Day Of Corn Bender After Losing VP Spot WASHINGTON—Saying she has grown increasingly concerned about her husband’s mental and physical well-being since last Friday, Christie Vilsack, the wife of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, told reporters Thursday that the despondent, butter-covered cabinet member has entered the sixth day of a destructive corn bender after being passed over for the Democratic vice presidential spot. DNC Speech: ‘I Am Proud To Say I Walked In On Bill And Hillary Having Sex’ A friend of the Clinton family describes a Hillary who America never gets to see: the one he saw having sex. Trump Sick And Tired Of Mainstream Media Always Trying To Put His Words Into Some Sort Of Context NEW YORK—Emphasizing that the practice was just more evidence of journalists’ bias against him, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stated Thursday that he was sick and tired of the mainstream media always attempting to place his words into some kind of context. Who’s Speaking At The DNC: Day 4 Here is a guide to the major speakers who will be addressing attendees on the final night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention Bound, Gagged Joaquin Castro Horrified By What His Identical Twin Brother Might Be Doing Out On DNC Floor PHILADELPHIA—Struggling to free himself from the tightly wound lengths of rope binding his wrists and ankles together, bruised and gagged Texas congressman Joaquin Castro was reportedly horrified by what his identical twin brother, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, might be out doing on the floor of the DNC Thursday. Obama: ‘Hillary Will Fight To Protect My Legacy, Even The Truly Detestable Parts’ PHILADELPHIA—Emphasizing the former secretary of state’s competence and tenacity during his Democratic National Convention address Wednesday night, President Barack Obama praised Hillary Clinton as someone who would work tirelessly to defend and advance the legacy he had built, even the “truly repugnant parts.” Tim Kaine Clearly Tuning Out In Middle Of Boring Vice Presidential Acceptance Speech PHILADELPHIA—Describing the look of total disinterest on his face and noting how he kept peering down at his watch as the speech progressed, sources at the Democratic National Convention said that Virginia senator Tim Kaine clearly began tuning out partway through the boring vice presidential acceptance address Wednesday night. Cannon Overshoots Tim Kaine Across Wells Fargo Center PHILADELPHIA—Noting that the vice presidential nominee had been launched nearly 100 feet into the air during his entrance into the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night, sources reported that the cannon at the back of the Wells Fargo Center had accidentally overshot Tim Kaine across the arena, sending him crashing to the stage several dozen feet beyond the erected safety net. Biden Regales DNC With Story Of ’80s Girl Band Vixen Breaking Hard Rock’s Glass Ceiling PHILADELPHIA—Devoting a large portion of his speech to the “pioneering, stiffy-inducing” all-female quartet, Vice President Joe Biden regaled the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night with the rousing story of the metal band Vixen breaking hard rock’s glass ceiling in the late 1980s. | 0 |
The first case of sexual transmission of the Zika virus has been documented in New York City, raising the prospect that the disease could spread more widely beyond the countries where it is already endemic and largely transmitted by mosquitoes. For months, there has been growing concern about the dangers of sexual transmission, but until now the virus has been thought to pass only from men to women or between two men. “This represents the first reported occurrence of sexual transmission of Zika virus,” said a report issued on Friday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The evidence of a previously undocumented transmission means is the latest twist in a viral outbreak that continues to baffle and surprise leading experts. It is prompting officials to rethink, once again, the guidance for health care providers and the general public on how to limit the danger of infection, as the pool of those who could be at risk widens. Much about how the virus works is a mystery, and it remains challenging to detect 80 percent of those infected show no symptoms. For those who do get sick, the illness is often mild, and there is no treatment. But Zika can pose a dire risk to pregnant women. It targets developing nerve cells in fetuses and can lead to a birth defect called microcephaly, in which babies are born with abnormally small heads and brain damage. It may also cause developmental problems after birth. Zika is primarily transmitted by the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, which thrives in warm, tropical climates. But 11 countries have documented cases of sexual transmission from a man to a woman. Among the 1, 130 people who have received a Zika diagnosis in the continental United States, including 320 pregnant women, the C. D. C. has reported 15 cases of sexual transmission. In a reflection of the urgency of the situation, White House officials joined with congressional leaders and public health officials this month to denounce the failure of lawmakers to provide funding to combat the virus. The legislative session in Congress ended on Thursday with lawmakers failing to provide money to fight it. “The more we learn about Zika, the more concerned we are,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the C. D. C. said during a recent conference call with reporters. At least seven children have been born with birth defects and five pregnancy losses related to Zika in the United States. The lifetime cost of care is estimated to be $10 million for each sick child. “Each case is a tragedy,” Dr. Frieden said. “A child that may never walk or live independently. ” The New York case is the first in which a man was infected by a woman, and it raises the prospect that other men — with no travel history to areas and no reason to suspect that they might have the virus — could become infected and pass the virus on, creating a new chain of transmission. In the report, researchers found that a man, who was in his 20s and did not travel outside the United States during the year before his illness, contracted the virus after one instance of vaginal intercourse, without a condom, with a woman who had recently returned from a country where the virus is endemic. Dr. Mary T. Bassett, the city’s health commissioner, said there were several factors in this case that might have raised the risk of infection: The man was uncircumcised, the woman was in the early stages of her illness when her viral load was high, and she was also at the beginning of her menstrual cycle. The woman, described as being in her 20s and not pregnant, had sex with her partner the day she returned to the city. The report does not name the country she visited, but the virus is now widespread in nearly 50 countries throughout South America and the Caribbean. “She reported having headache and abdominal cramping while in the airport before returning to N. Y. C. ,” the report said. The next day she developed a number of symptoms associated with Zika, including fever, fatigue, a rash, back pain, swelling of the extremities, and numbness and tingling in her hands and feet. She reported that her period, which began that day, was also heavier than usual. Her primary care physician sent blood and urine samples to the city and state health department laboratories for testing. The tests detected the virus but not antibodies to it, which suggested she was newly infected it takes four or five days for the body to begin producing antibodies. Seven days after intercourse, the woman’s partner developed a fever, followed by a rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis. The report said the man had not had any other recent sexual partners or been bitten by a mosquito within a week before his illness. Three days later, the man went to the same primary care physician who had diagnosed Zika in his partner. The physician sent samples of his urine to the same laboratories, and the virus was detected. According to the report, the man “did not report noticing any blood on his uncircumcised penis that could have been associated with vaginal bleeding or any open lesions on his genitals immediately following intercourse. ” It is unclear if the virus was transmitted to the man by the woman’s menstrual blood or by vaginal fluids. If the virus was passed along through vaginal fluid, there is very little information on how long it might persist there or how great the risk of transmission during intercourse is. The report cites a recent study of nonhuman primates where three nonpregnant females were found to have the virus present in vaginal fluid up to seven days after exposure. “Further studies are needed to determine if the virus is also found in the vaginal fluid of humans and, if so, for how long,” the report said. Zika has previously been known to be transmissible via semen, where it can persist for months. The current guidance from health officials is that men who may have been exposed either abstain from sex or use a condom for six months. Women who are pregnant or trying to conceive are warned not to have unprotected sex with men who have been in areas where the virus is spreading during that time. Even though it is just one case, the fact that the disease can be transmitted from women to men — widening the pool of those at risk — will have to be factored into the response from public health officials. The Aedes aegypti mosquito remains the major means of infection. In the United States, that species is found mostly in the South and the Southwest, though its range can spread in the summer. That mosquito is not present in New York, but a similar species, the Asian tiger mosquito, could theoretically pose a threat of transmission, health officials have said. In response, the city has stepped up its mosquito control and surveillance, and it will soon be starting a new public education campaign that will continue to highlight the risks posed by mosquitoes but with added emphasis on the risks of sexual transmission. | 1 |
Sarah Silverman joined in the Trump “Tax March” protest in New York City Saturday, where she demanded the president release his tax returns in a fiery speech. [“Show us your f*cking taxes, you emotional child,” the comedian and liberal addressed the president in comments delivered to the protesters. “You like being a superficial bully? Here’s one for you: you are a three at best,” Silverman added, apparently referring to Trump’s appearance. . @sarahsilverman tells the truth! #TaxMarch #WhatAreYouHiding pic. twitter. — Justice League NYC (@NYjusticeleague) April 15, 2017, In a interview with MSNBC, Silverman said she was raised to be an “active citizen. ” “I’m from New Hampshire, my parents are … and that’s what we do. Love America, you love your country. You have to speak out and speak up,” she said. “It’s time to fight for our country. ” “I was raised to know that it’s an honor to pay taxes and it’s important to pay taxes,” she added. “It’s part of being an American citizen, and helping each other. ” . @SarahKSilverman at Trump #TaxMarch: “When you love America … you have to speak out … it’s time to fight for our country” via @MorganRadford pic. twitter. — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) April 15, 2017, Silverman was one of Bernie Sanders’s earliest and most vocal celebrity supporters before getting behind former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election. The comedian has previously compared Trump’s electoral victory to the Great Depression, and suggested in February that the military could help overthrow him. Silverman was just one of numerous celebrities to participate in Saturday’s “Tax March” protests, which reportedly saw more than one hundred demonstrations take place simultaneously across the country. Other celebrities who participated in Saturday’s protests reportedly included actors Chris Evans, Debra Messing, Jon Cryer, Matt McGorry and Lea Thompson, Selma director Ava DuVernay, House of Cards creator Beau Willimon and Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
We understand that what happened on Tuesday is shocking to millions of people around the world. We’re here for you.
We encourage you to share this with friends and family who are having a difficult time adjusting to the election of Donald Trump.
…Whatever you’re feeling right now, you’re emotions are valid.
…You’re not alone.
…All over the world, people that you didn’t know are rooting for you.
…For every person that you run into who maybe believes it’s their right to treat you differently, you’re going to find so many other people who will treat you with kindness and respect.
…You have an inner strength you don’t even know is there
This is serious. Stop laughing.
( Watch At Youtube )
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XOCHIMILCO, Mexico — With their waters and blue herons, the canals and island farms of Xochimilco in southern Mexico City are all that remain of the extensive network of shimmering waterways that so awed Spanish invaders when they arrived here 500 years ago. But the fragility of this remnant of life was revealed last month, when a hole opened in the canal bed, draining water and alarming hundreds of tour boat operators and farmers who depend on the waterways for a living. The hole intensified a simmering conflict over nearby wells, which suck water from Xochimilco’s soil and pump it to other parts of Mexico City. It also revived worries about a process of decline, caused by pollution, urban encroachment and subsidence, that residents and experts fear may destroy the canals in a matter of years. “This is a warning,” said Sergio Raúl Rodríguez Elizarrarás, a geologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “We are driving the canals towards their extinction. ” Xochimilco (pronounced ) a municipality on the southeastern tip of Mexico City, is home to more than 6, 000 acres of protected wetlands, hemmed in by dense streets. Here, farmers grow rosemary, corn and chard on chinampas, islands formed using a technique dating from the Aztecs from willow trees, lilies and mud. Residents ply the area’s 100 or so miles of canals in canoes, much as they have for centuries. On weekends, thousands of tourists picnic and party on brightly painted barges, or trajineras. “This is the last thread that connects us to our past,” Ricardo Munguía, an artist and tour guide, said recently while chugging through the dawn mist in a motorboat. As he slid past a field of broken corn stalks, a pelican swooped by and skidded on the water, slowing itself with its wide wings. “It would be heartbreaking to lose this,” Mr. Munguía said. As bucolic as the canals appear, intense exploitation of the area’s aquifers over the last 50 years has depleted springs, prompting the authorities to replenish the waterways from a nearby sewage treatment plant. As the earth dries out, it sinks, cracking buildings and forming sudden craters like the one that appeared on Jan. 24, 50 yards from a barge mooring. Boatmen at the mooring, known as the Embarcadero Zacapa, said they noticed the hole when a whirlpool appeared, like water running down a bath drain. By the time engineers had dammed off that part of the canal with sandbags several hours later, the water level had dropped about 10 inches. Since then, the 80 or so trajineras at Zacapa have mostly been idle, as tourists head to rival moorings, boatmen said — even though they can still reach the canals in one direction. On a recent Sunday, the boats were lined up like rows of gaudy shoes, but none had customers. “We’re kind of shocked,” said Ivan Montiel Olivares, 18, who has worked on the barges for 10 years. “If things turn bad, what will we do?” Juan Velazquez, a boatman in his 50s who was cleaning his deck, said that on the weekends he normally made about $15 a day, plus tips. The last two weekends he had made just $2. 50 each day. “Nature is making us pay for what we have done,” he said. Built on a silty lake bed, Mexico City has been sinking for centuries. The Metropolitan Cathedral became so tilted that engineers reinforced the foundations so that it would, at least, sink evenly. To slow the collapse in the city center, parts of which dropped about 26 feet during the last century, officials in the 1960s shifted water extraction from downtown to wells near Xochimilco, a decision experts called a “death sentence” for the canals. José Felipe García, Xochimilco’s director of civil defense, said that the canal should be back to normal by the end of February. Speaking by telephone, he said that the hole — which was filled this week — was a product of subsidence and geological faults beneath the area. But Dr. Rodríguez, the geologist, said it was part of a grim pattern of collapses in the area whose cause was “man made. ” Half a mile from the Zacapa mooring, a crater opened in November, splitting a main road and trapping two small buses, residents said. Eduardo Sandoval, an architectural engineer who lives in the neighborhood, Santa María Nativitas, and leads an organization fighting for water rights, said the holes were a signal that problems were “accelerating. ” Water in Nativitas has been a source of endless tension, according to Mr. Sandoval, with 130 houses damaged by subsidence. Trucks fill up at the local well and sell water on the black market, but homes near the well can get water from their faucets for only a few hours a day. There are scattered government initiatives to increase the water supply, such as collecting rainwater in rooftop cisterns. But the feat of supplying the region’s 22 million people with water more than 7, 000 feet above sea level requires more creativity, experts said, like reusing dirty water. The water in Xochimilco’s canals is polluted. Treated water pumped into the canals from nearby Iztapalapa contains heavy metals, said María Guadalupe Figueroa, a biologist at the Autonomous Metropolitan University. Worse, she said, illegal dwellings on the chinampas dump raw sewage into the canals, affecting fish and crops. Today, much of the tilapia fished from the canals are used for cat food, and many farmers grow flowers rather than edible crops. Despite a ban on construction on the chinampas, more and more of the islands are being settled, experts and residents said, as farming becomes less competitive and demand for residential space grows. Cables droop across smaller canals, supplying electricity to houses that have no running water or sewers. Near one house, beer bottles stuck out of the mud, and a rusty bedspring served as a fence on the water’s edge. Juana Altamirano, who has lived for years in a plywood shack on what used to be a chinampa farmed by her father and grandparents, has outhouses with the Spanish words for “men” and “ladies” scrawled on the metal doors. The sewage, she said, “goes into the earth and doesn’t do any harm,” an improbable claim since she lives on an island of tangled roots and mud. Ms. Altamirano, 57, admits that the canal water is polluted. Her eldest grandchildren learned to swim in the canal, she said, but these days, the water gives swimmers a rash. “Still,” she said, “we breathe pure air. ” With every farmer who, like Ms. Altamirano’s father, stops cultivating the chinampas, “we lose a part of our identity,” said Félix Venancio, an activist trying to protect the chinampas and the communal land, or ejido, in San Gregorio, a district of Xochimilco. The knowledge of chinampa farming “goes from generation to generation,” Mr. Venancio said. “We’re losing that. ” Dr. Figueroa, the biologist, said that the authorities were working on a new plan for preserving the wetlands, pulling together academics, farmers, businesses and different branches of government. Xochimilco, which was designated a World Heritage site by the United Nations in 1987, has had no shortage of preservation plans over the years, but they remain and funds “get lost along the way,” Dr. Figueroa said. “There’s a huge amount of corruption. ” She figures that, without a serious conservation effort, the canals will be gone in 10 to 15 years. But much of the damage was reversible, she said, adding: “It’s still a little paradise. ” | 1 |
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Almost seven out 10 Democrats believe Islam “encourages violence … about the same as other religions,” according to a new CBS poll. [The trusting attitude towards Islam is revealed in the February 2017 poll follows 17 tumultuous years of attacks against Americans motivated or shaped by Islamic ideology throughout the United States — from the atrocity to the Pulse nightclub attack in Florida committed by an observant, orthodox Muslim man from a Muslim family. Merely Democrats believe that Islam is more violent than other religions, such as Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism, and Buddhism. Democrats believe that Islam is less violent that other religions, according to the poll of 1, 019 adults, which was taken Feb. 1 and Feb. 2. In contrast, Republicans have a far colder view of Islam. percent of Republicans view Islam as aggressive compared to other religions, and only two percent view Islam as more pacific than other faiths. Still, 25 percent of Republican voters believe Islam’s encouragement of violence is level with Christianity’s doctrines, including the Beatitudes passage, reported by Matthew: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. ” The Koran, in contrast, is deemed by Islam’s adherents to be a direct transcript of Allah’s many commands, including these belligerent commandments: I will cast terror into the hearts of those who have disbelieved, so strike them over the necks, and smite over all their fingers and toes. Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors. So when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle] strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens. Former President Barack Obama and other leaders in the Democratic Party have repeatedly suggested that Islam is not more violent than other religions. Obama told Muslims in February 2016 that Islam means “peace,” although it actually means “submission. ” Similarly, a Feb. 3 letter signed by three senior Democratic legislators in the House argued that “there are other three million Americans who practice Islam peacefully. The specter that there would be a Federal program that — in name and action — singles out people of a particular faith warrants immediate [critical] consideration by the Department of Justice. ” Progressive and activists say much violence is caused by Christians, although few make the argument that the violence is motivated Christian doctrines. “However, and this will probably shock many, so you might want to take a breath: Overwhelmingly, those who have committed terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe aren’t Muslims,” according to a Daily Beast column emphasizing the role of European nationalist groups in terrorism rates. “Conservatives claim that all terrorists are Muslim, but most violent attacks in the U. S. are carried out by white men,” claims an article at Salon. com, which emphasizes the murders of abortionists. Similarly, establishment media sites have played up the views of White House officials without even trying to address the truth or falsity of the views. In contrast, critics of Islam routinely argue that Islam’s mixture of religion and political ideology has a harmful impact on adherents and on societies. They argue that Islam is far more aggressive and harmful to societies that what they describe as the beneficial impact of Christianity’s mix of faith and reason, freedom and law. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans are preparing to abolish the final vestige of power that the minority has to block Supreme Court nominations through a filibuster. Many senators in both parties now worry that the final and biggest domino — the power to filibuster legislation — will be next. In recent years, as partisanship has escalated, the Senate has required a majority for almost any controversial legislation to overcome a filibuster. Gone, for the most part, are bipartisan quorums that used to pass large and complex laws with simple majorities. But as both parties have moved to do what was once unthinkable — eliminating the filibuster for judicial and cabinet nominees, known as the nuclear option — senators are now forced to consider if the final step could be in the offing, one that would fundamentally alter the character of the Senate and make it indistinguishable from the House in a crucial way. “Benjamin Franklin is somewhere turning over in his grave,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who has been a crucial player in the efforts to preserve the filibuster. “Why have a bicameral system?” While Democrats and Republicans have seen injury to the minority in losing the right to block nominees, both parties also understand the profound and lasting effect that a party with power unchecked by the minority could have when it comes to lawmaking. (The rationale behind the filibuster was that a threshold meant that a broader consensus would have to be reached for the most contentious legislation.) This is especially true now for Republicans in control over Washington who understand that the priority of Democrats tends to be increasing government programs that become very hard to end later, as demonstrated by the Republicans’ current inability to unravel the health care law, even with a majority in both chambers. Without the current filibuster rule on legislation, Democrats, should they dominate Washington again one day, could seek a large increase in the minimum wage, increased Social Security benefits, paid family leave or Medicare for all. And they would need only a simple majority to do it. Similarly, Republicans could pass large permanent tax cuts, oil drilling in the Arctic or a national gun law. Such power is something that President Trump might see as quite delicious, and something that he may well push for if Republicans confirm Judge Neil M. Gorsuch for the Supreme Court without meaningful support from Democrats. “There is not a single senator from the majority who thinks we ought to change the legislative filibuster,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader. He is expected to move this week to remove the threshold to proceed with a vote on Judge Gorsuch’s nomination. But, that, he insisted, would be the end of it. But many Democrats said they were skeptical of the claim. “I have seen the process deteriorate,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland. “So do I believe Mitch McConnell would change the rules again? Yes. ” Of course, both parties are complicit in getting the Senate to this stage and have changed their positions relative to their status. “Both parties have been on both sides of this issue, depending on whether they were in the majority,” said Donald A. Ritchie, the former Senate historian. “Bill Frist proposed it during the Bush years,” he said, referring to the former majority leader from Tennessee. “Mitch McConnell supported it, and Harry Reid opposed it. When Harry Reid invoked the nuclear option, McConnell protested against it,” he said, “but when McConnell became majority leader, he did not act to overturn the precedent, and has been making much use of it in this Congress. It’s hard to say what the impact will be, but majority leaders since George Mitchell have been protesting the almost routine filibustering of nominations, so maybe the process needs some resolution. ” Mr. Reid, the retired Nevada senator, moved to curtail the filibuster in 2013 when he removed the threshold to advance confirmations of federal judicial nominees and appointments after Republicans repeatedly blocked President Barack Obama’s nominees to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. While Republicans were highly critical of Mr. Reid, the rule change has come in handy as they have moved to confirm a bevy of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees, some of whom would almost certainly have been blocked if forced to face a procedural threshold. Many Democrats at the time also saw the danger of the move. “There has been an abuse of the rule,” Mr. Cardin said. “I thought it when Reid did it, but there is a question of who struck first. What Republicans did with the D. C. Circuit was wrong, that was an abuse, but there is blame on both sides. ” Even so, experts on Senate rules say that a change on legislation is a bridge that neither party wants to cross. “I would never deny that it was a significant moment,” said Martin B. Gold, a former senior staff member and an author of books on Senate procedures. “As was 2013. But I do not believe it has implications for legislation. I believe whatever trauma arises now will be enough. No one will want to take steps to decapitate the legislative filibuster. ” But both sides have made the same claims about changes to rules concerning nominees, and many see the slope as getting more and more slippery. Without the voice of the minority, they worry, legislation would fall prey to the extreme instincts of the base of both parties, as is often the case in the House. “That would dramatically change the character of the politics of America,” said Byron Dorgan, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota. “The filibuster is a set of brake pads of the speed of the passion of the moment. The Senate is the place where cooler heads prevail and you need a larger group of people to find common ground. It’s an unfortunate situation. ” | 1 |
The alleged driver of the van that killed one and injured ten people outside of a Finsbury mosque Sunday evening has been identified as father of four Cardiff resident Darren Osborne. [Mr Osborne is said to have been positively identified as the man arrested last night by police by a former schoolmate who attended Broadoak Mathematics and Computing College with Osborne. The unidentified man said that he had known Osborne for over 35 years and was sure that the man arrested was the father of four, the Daily Mail reports. “I’ve known him for 35 years, I grew up with him. It’s 100% him. He lives in Wales, he has four kids and his partner,” the man said. Earlier today police raided a residence in Cardiff, now thought to be that of Mr Osborne. Neighbours of the say they are “shocked” regarding the allegations. neighbour Pauline Tibbs said, “The police have been back and forth here all day. It’s a terrible shock,” and added, “I’ve seen him walking in the street but never spoken to him. He seemed normal enough. He has lived here a couple of years and kept himself to himself. ” Osborne is said to have grown up in Somerset but later moved to Wales. He is also said to have separated from his spouse around six months ago. The van used in the attack is allegedly said to have been rented from Pontyclun Van Hire for £ which is around 15 miles away from where Osborne lives. The company owners have expressed “shock and sadness” regarding the attack and called it “cowardly. ” Earlier Monday morning Osborne was arrested on terrorism and attempted murder charges. Witnesses say that after the attack he shouted, “I’m going to kill all Muslims — I did my bit. ” The UK domestic security service Mi5 have said that Osborne has never previously been on their radar, and has no known police record. Labour MP Jo Stevens, whose constituency Osborne resides in, commented on the case telling people with information to report it directly to police. She then added, “I am also appealing to everyone who uses social media, to please be aware that prejudicial tweets about the alleged attacker may constitute contempt of court, and could even lead to any prosecution or trial having to be abandoned. ” | 1 |
FLORIDA: Designated Terrorist Group CAIR demands ‘hate crime’ investigation of anti-Islam graffiti on mosque, blames Trump The entrance sign at the Al Amin Islamic Center in Boynton Beach was spray-painted with graffiti containing anti-Islamic and anti- Islamic terrorist messages. ABC News The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office said deputies responded to a report of vandalism this morning, and that it occurred sometime after midnight and was captured on surveillance video. CAIR officials said the video shows a car pulling up to the mosque about 12:40 a.m. Someone got out of the car, approached the entrance sign and wrote “Fuck Islam” and “Fuck ISIS” with spray paint. “Our community continues to suffer from an increase in hate crimes and hate incidents. We still have fresh in our memories the recent hate crime committed at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce that was attacked by an arsonist,” CAIR-Florida spokesman Wilfredo Amr Ruiz said in a statement. Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic group CAIR, has been designated a terrorist group by the United Arab Emirates. “The hate speech and rhetoric that has come along this presidential campaign is fueling these type of crimes that endanger not only the Muslim community but the Florida community in general.” (Nah, the Florida community is not the least bit endangered. Speak for yourself) | 0 |
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I stand with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline . We have witnessed inspiring and brave acts by Native Americans and their allies who are defending and trying to protect their sacred sites and the safety of their sole source of water.
The fossil fuel industry -- and the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline in particular -- have been proceeding with what appears to be a dangerous project in blatant disregard of obvious risks to the Missouri River and with disrespect to the Standing Rock Sioux.
In the process, those trying to force completion of this pipeline have -- according to independent news reports -- been using oppressive practices against this community. In response, Standing Rock Chairman David Archambault has requested that the Justice Department deploy observers to ensure that the First Amendment rights of those peacefully opposing this pipeline are protected. I hope his request is honored.
The non-violent resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline is also one of the front-line struggles that collectively mark a turning point in the decision by humanity to turn away from the destructive path we have been following and aim instead toward a clean energy future for all. | 0 |
I knew it would be bad the only question was how bad. After waiting outside a surgical ward at Jersey City Medical Center for what seemed like an eternity, the neurosurgeon emerged, introduced herself and explained that blood clots were forming in my husband’s brain, a result of multiple fractures to his skull. Even after an extensive operation, internal swelling and pressure on his brain were building to levels “inconsistent with life,” the doctor explained. To survive the night, he needed another operation. Less than 24 hours earlier, on Dec. 13, 2014, Steve — my husband and the father of our two young children — left our Brooklyn apartment for a networking trip in Atlantic City with four colleagues. Throughout the day, he sent me text updates, including a goofy selfie intended to amuse our daughter, then 3 years old. Around 6 a. m. I received a call from two of the colleagues who had been with him in Atlantic City. Steve had been in an accident, they said, and I should call the emergency room. They had been with him all day, but couldn’t explain what happened to him. At the hospital, I began to piece together the severity of Steve’s condition. The trauma staff members told me that his face was so disfigured and bruised that they had difficulty determining his race. His doctors concluded that he had been assaulted. (The story of his surgery, and the mystery of his injuries, were described in an article in The Atlantic last spring.) After that second brain surgery, his neurosurgeon, Dr. Lauren Schwartz, returned to tell me she had to remove significant chunks of Steve’s frontal lobe and temporal lobe — and that he might not be able to speak or function normally ever again. Even if he managed to emerge from the medically induced coma with his faculties intact, Steve had a long and arduous road ahead, most likely measured in years, with no guarantee that he would return to his former self. Many victims of a brain trauma become overwhelmed by anger, depression and frustration about the slow pace of their recovery and the memory of who they used to be. The severity of Steve’s trauma — and the apparent violence that caused it — were triggers for those emotions. But after Steve’s initial surgeries, I became increasingly confident about his chances for a successful recovery. “If I know one absolute truth about my husband, it is that he rises above and exceeds expectations,” I wrote in an email to Dr. Schwartz. In retrospect, a reflexive coping mechanism may have been kicking in — any reasonable analysis should have drastically lowered my expectations. But I believed I had reason for optimism. Steve’s brain was engineered to move forward. As a gifted mathematician, he saw the world as a series of equations to be solved. And like an elite athlete, he didn’t handicap goals with unhelpful emotions. Steve had been wiring his brain at an early age, partly out of necessity. Raised in a house beset by mental illness, he had to learn to protect himself from harmful emotions and focus on goals. It served him well academically, as he skipped a grade in middle school and went to college at 16. It was a risky social and emotional step for someone so young, but he graduated with honors and was recruited by Goldman Sachs as a programmer. I have always been drawn to his wit and his Olympic reasoning abilities. In an argument, Steve could keep his head while others lost theirs. I didn’t always appreciate his economy of emotion. In 2008, when our first child, Sophia, was stillborn at 39 weeks and four days, I carried around her memory, nearly crippled by the weight of the loss. Steve appeared set on moving forward from the very beginning. In the delivery room, I asked Steve to hold Sophia, which he did, but he quickly returned her to the bassinet, seemingly signaling his intent to move on. Over time, my anguish turned to resentment over how he could forge ahead, focus on his work and not share my pain. For years, even when we went on to have two healthy children, I still felt compelled to carry the emotional weight of Sophia’s memory. But after Steve’s horrific injuries, I knew I had to try to learn to do for my husband what I had been unable do for myself: keep my brain from dwelling on tragedy. Almost two years later, I can still allow myself to become furious about what happened to my husband, still an unsolved mystery. I want to know what happened and who was responsible and have the perpetrators admit their guilt. A part of me wants to linger daily on the unknowns. But Steve inspired me to follow his lead, as I witnessed his unrelenting drive to return to his former self — and his refusal to be consumed by what happened to him and why. One afternoon, a few days after he awoke from his coma, Steve received a visit from a former colleague he had not seen in more than a decade. Still suffering amnesia, Steve couldn’t speak coherently or remember my name. But when his colleague entered the room, Steve’s eyes widened. He wiggled upright and offered a handshake. It was a moment I celebrated for days. Weeks later, with parts of his speech returning, Steve made another leap when he gestured for a pen and notepad. He wanted to jot down the conversations he was having with the nursing staff. Jagged lines were all he could manage, but he remained unbowed, asking me to transcribe the conversations regarding his recovery plan. As the pace of Steve’s progress accelerated — in words and movements — I became consumed with planning for the next steps in his recovery, making arrangements for his rehabilitation, staging our apartment for his return. Looking backward was a luxury I could not afford. When Steve finally came home in early March, every daily event — going to the grocery store, walking the kids to school, reading the news, listening to our favorite pop songs — became a learning opportunity, a chance to regain words and memories that had been temporarily lost. At dinner, the kids played word games with Steve, each taking turns to contribute to a category. One evening, when the topic was zoo animals, Steve couldn’t locate the word lion. Instead of expressing frustration or embarrassment, he described its color, sound and habitat. When our daughter blurted the answer, Steve’s face lit up. “Yes, you got it!” he shouted, slyly giving the game a new dimension. We were witnessing Steve do what was second nature to him: finding the path forward. Researchers still have a lot to learn about what causes some victims to swiftly recover from brain traumas and others to stall. Steve’s doctors marvel that he is doing so well. His determination may have helped. Within 12 months of his trip to Atlantic City, Steve had secured a job as a business analyst with an international bank. Without any visible scars or speech impairments today, he doesn’t show any signs of brain trauma. Indeed, even with portions of his brain gone, he has somehow retained his intelligence and career skills, his ability to be a loving husband and father, and the core elements of his identity that let his lifelong habit of looking forward shine through. He’s taught me that true tragedy is letting misfortune rob you of the life and love you have. It’s a lesson I try to keep in my head as nourishment for my heart. | 1 |
By Shem El-Jamal
For almost a decade, many of us have heard about the concept and process of Disclosure . This is the complete release of formerly secret, official and governmental information through the public media. We have heard about the numerous possibilities of the truth of past events which exists behind closed doors—locked away in secret files protectively stamped with the word “Classified.” We know that to a very large extent, we as the common public know very little about the truth behind roughly a century of government and corporate secrecy on matters of high technology, ET life, and the heinous crimes committed for the sake of maintaining this secrecy.
The subjects within the topic of disclosure are extremely dense and weighty to consider. One could spend hours digesting just one of these topics, which are commonly considered fringe in today’s society. However, we are here to discuss a different and yet parallel subject. This is the subject of individual choice, or more specifically, the choice to know .
In order to see Disclosure, we must make the choice to be aware and have the courage to face the possibilities behind the truth which the disclosure will bring to light. Many of these truths will be unconventional, considering the fact that secrecy has defined convention for the past century. This does not mean that we should abandon our responsibility of thorough research and verification. It simply means that from vigorous research and diligent scrutiny, we must have the courage to face the information we encounter.
Conscious Life Expo – David Wilcock – Page 1 – New Intel, The Human Evolutionary Leap, Sacred Geometry, Illuminati Secrets, and More
This article is dedicated to examining the concept of the partial disclosure , or the hindrance of the Disclosure process for the sake of a few financial interests. It is my hope that this article will help each and every one of us to discern and to face the truth the moment it is revealed.
The Balance of Power There is one main reason for the need for a full-disclosure event to revolutionize the various societies of this planet. This Full Disclosure is to end the entirety of the secrecy for the sake of respect for the equality of all people. This disclosure is an acknowledgment to our right to know about all that affects our daily lives and represents the balancing of power among all people around the globe. With this balance in mind, it is important for us to know what power truly is.
When we speak of power , many ideas may come to mind. Some of us may believe this word refers to one’s ability to control others. Others may think of it as a matter of economic influence, and there are those who simply think of power as one’s own ability to make their own choices. The truth is that all of these are valid definitions.
To clarify, let’s check the definition from Merriam-Webster for the word “power.”
the ability or right to control people or things political control of a country or area a person or organization that has a lot of control and influence over other people or organizations http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/power
If we consider these definitions of this word, we may notice something. Aside from the definitions which refer to mathematical applications, there seems to be no reference to human equality of any kind. It seems that in this official definition, the modern English language has all but completely done away with the fact that true power comes from the individual, and in essence, is equally distributed among all people. Let’s consider a few examples.
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Most of us are familiar with the concept of governmental monarchy. This is of course, the form of centralized government in which a single figurehead holds complete control over an area, province, or country. Yet even though this one individual supposedly holds all of this power, they would have no control at all unless everyone else agreed to allow them that control.
Jacques Louis David – The-Coronation of Napoleon
In every ancient monarchical government structure, no single ruling figure could have held any such authority without the entire kingdom agreeing that they should. Generally speaking, if the people do not decide to follow, no authority can lead anyone in any way. A king or queen has dozens of servants, maids, butlers, cooks, groundskeepers and gardeners, craftsmen, and guards. They have advisers and clergymen who direct their political decisions, and armies of thousands who obey their every whim. However, not a single order of this monarchic figure would ever mean anything if the people chose not to follow them.
Full Disclosure and Ascension – Commentary of the Latest Article from David Wilcock
In the common social interaction in which equality of power is acknowledged, there is no hierarchy. When one person starts giving orders to another, they probably won’t get much from the person (except maybe the finger and/or some choice words). Now take these same two people—one giving the order and the other receiving that order—and place beside these two, five other people who are following the orders. Due to this situation, the compulsion to obey is somewhat increased. Now add in 10, 20, 50, or even an entire country of people doing as they are mandated to do by some unseen authority, and the compulsion to obey is compounded. Add in the ability of the authority to order punishment upon those who disobey, and this control is solidified.We as human beings have the conditioning to conform to whatever social situation we find ourselves in. This is not to say that this tendency cannot be overcome. It is merely to say that we are raised to conform to the collective of society. This social conformity may have a few positive aspects up to a certain point. However for those who appreciate independent thought and the freedom to choose for themselves, this pull to conform can be somewhat of an annoyance. The above example of this social tendency to conform demonstrates the psychological concept of social conditioning , or what many in modern days refer to as the sheep effect .
Psych Central – “Herd” Mentality Explained
The sheep effect could be described as the tendency of a person to automatically do whatever those around them are doing. This could simply be initiated by one person repeating an action, or it could be an entire group practicing . Eventually, you may have a large group of people doing the same thing over and over again without knowing why. The following clip comes from a show which airs on the National Geographic channel called Brain Games , and demonstrates a prime example of the sheep effect in action.
Brain Games — Social Conformity What Lies Beyond the Haze of Social Conditioning?
So as we can see, it seems fairly easy to subtly coerce a suggestible person into following a social norm even though they have no logical reason for doing so. To be fair, this woman most likely reasoned to herself that the bell had something to do with being called for her appointment. What is interesting to see is that she never actually asked about why the group kept standing. There seems to have simply been the rationalization, immediately followed by conformity.
This tendency of social conformity is a pervasive phenomenon which seems to grip the entirety of developed societies around the world. In fact, this conformity may be the one of the main reasons why large civilizations have developed in the way that they have. It is very likely that this coercion to conform has been used to create various facets of society, and to build that which has been built. However, as we may have seen, modern society doesn’t serve all people equally. Instead the supposedly civilized world appears to be designed to use the individual for their entire lifetime. When society has taken the best years of life of the individual, it discards them while at the same time, it grooms their children to be used in the exact same way.
Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – Illuminati Salvage Plan – The Cabal’s Attempt at Damage Control from the World of Entertainment
Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – “The Cabal’s Downward Spiral” – Assessing the Final Days of a Crumbling Cabal, and a Prelude to Breakthrough
This grossly exploitative societal structure appears to have been designed by those who benefit from it most. These benefactors don’t work. They don’t contribute, but in many ways they use and enjoy the spoils of everything that we the people work for. Due to their elitist mentality and upbringing, these manipulators have, in a sense, domesticated the rest of humanity to work as their own servants, and have collectively assumed the position of the monarch of ancient times—creating an oligarchy. So what’s the significance of these discoveries, and what do they have to do with to partial disclosure?
The Nature of Unbalanced Power The bottom line is that a partial disclosure would serve as a prime opportunity for more elitists to assume even more influential positions, and to seize more power than they deserve. Just like we have seen over the last century, any excess of power only compounds, and eventually corrupt those who hold it.
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Over time, the common people will typically adapt to their lower societal positions—becoming more and more comfortable and increasingly dependent upon the state to direct their lives. At the same time, the common people will become less and less self responsible. Eventually, the people become so dependent and the state becomes so domineering and power-drunk that the people will submit to any plan—no matter how foolish or ridiculous—simply so that they can avoid self-awareness and self-responsibility.
It is a historical trend that when ethical integrity of a government dips farthest, nationalistic propaganda is most heavily promoted.
Report: At least 50 teams were paid by Department of Defense for patriotic displays
Immature, centralized dependency upon the state can have some fairly horrendous results. As we have seen throughout history, this dependency has lead to the horrors of the Holocaust. This blind submission of the people led to one of the most notorious and most destructive governmental and military developments of the modern world. This blind conformity has also enabled virtually every war fought in the last century, and has lead the United States to its sad and violent role as world terrorist nation .
Four Unicorn Riot Journalists Face Charges for Covering #NoDAPL – Links and Commentary Included
Today in America, we have a state of social conformity that seems to have abandoned all common sense ages ago. The acting governance has become so overgrown, so over-privileged, overconfident, and self-consumed that many of those who hold positions of governmental and legal power have abandoned their actually duty entirely, and have instead used their positions to serve themselves.
Many of the citizenry of the United States have become so complacent, so inattentive to the real world, and so thoroughly dependent upon the State that they care nothing about what the State actually does. We have seen policies written to benefit only the banks and the corporation of America—receiving dozens of tax break—while the common people are left to pay the bill.
Controlled Demolition – A Peer-Reviewed Scientific Analysis of the World Trade Center Collapses by Europhysics News
We have seen dangerous trends of militarized law enforcement which have converted many of our police departments into domestic armies. These armies have shown themselves to be severely lacking in human decency, and who behave as storm-troopers who create just as many problems as they solve. We have also seen this domestic army assault the supposedly free people of this country for little more than speaking out against rampant, common-place injustice. The corporate criminals who orchestrated the societal problems and hired crooked police take further and further steps to increase their own power by taking more and more from the common people through fear and violence.
The Media and Emotional Manipulation We may have noticed how music and entertainment have become so negative, so centered on the idea of hopelessness, fatalism, and despair that it is difficult to find any other theme in music in modern times. These outlets used to have a wide verity of choices of themes and genres. Now entertainment seems to have become a gateway to clinical depression and perpetual fear. However, when observing these trends, we may wonder, “Why would any entertainment company choose to depress and demoralize its audience?” The answer is simple.
Studies have shown that the plethora of corporate media sources are actually a highly centralized conglomerate of corporations all with the same ownership at the very top. These corporations have close relationships with government interests who often use corporate media outlets as their own person mouthpiece to disseminate whatever message is most politically advantageous for the masses to believe.
Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – Business not as Usual – Examining Clear Signs of Progress toward Planetary Liberation
It seems that the people are conditioned to accept and maintain these corporately approved belief systems for as long of a time is necessary to achieve the intended political agenda. This message is maintained until it becomes convenient to change the corporate rhetoric to a different script. (This has been seen numerous times in the recent tendency of NASA to report on whatever hints at ET life when in the past, the subject of ETs was never communicated as anything but a joke.)
So corporate media pushes the message that is most advantageous to the corporate world—keeping the people dependent upon corporate sources for their sense of comfort and security. However, more often than not, this comfort is grossly misplaced. In modern times, we have an American governance which claims to spread peace around the world and to have a goal of defeating terrorism, but this governance is funding and aiding this terrorism while claiming the continued aid is accidental.
Unmasking Fascism – The United Nations Makes a Shocking Admission about Syria and Western Corruption – Commentary and Links Included
We see the United States waging war around the world—war which has lasted over a decade with no sign of ceasing. We have seen human rights all but completely abandoned in the United States, and we have seen nothing but empty promises for positive change from the mouths of these acting political parties. These officials have many nice things to say, but behind the words, they seem to have little or no desire to improve the status quo for the people. Time has proven that the addiction to wealth and power are just too strong to break without outside influence. So what does this mean for each of us?
Misplaced Power The key reason why a partial-disclosure scenario would not be to the greatest benefit of the planet its people is simple. This reason is that power in essence is equally distributed among all sentient beings. This individual power is an aspect of the equality of each individual, and represents our right to make our own choices and to act in ways that benefit us in the greatest way possible. (This power is, of course, exercised as we respect the rights of others.) This is the concept of Human Rights —the rights the United States Constitution claims to uphold.
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Each individual has the power to guide their own lives the way they see fit. However, in modern days this principle is ignored and substituted with something far less beneficial; something which holds little respect for human rights at all. This is the concept known as collectivism . Within a collectivist society, there is no such thing as the individual. There is only the sacrifice of individuality for the sake of the collective. Within collectivism, human rights are commonly ignored while the good of the collective is emphasized. However, within these types of societies, the people are rarely the true benefactors of the societal structure.
Just as we have seen in modern times, in a collectivist society, the rights of the people to life, freedom and prosperity are steadily eroded away by those who seek only to gain for themselves. These self-serving political and financial figures speak flowery words from behind the podium every chance they get, but their true nature is commonly seen in their actions. They work only toward their own gain and to the benefit of their elitist cohorts. This has been the state of America for over half a century. However, this debilitated condition of the country has not been so obvious until more recently.
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From the podium, freedom and liberty are praised as staples by politicians who set comfortably in the pockets of financial interests. These interests have done everything in their power to attack and destroy American freedom from the shadows. This condition has infuriated many among the population—causing them to speak out. Others become pacified by the propaganda and become agreeable to any and every ideology that this propaganda pushes onto them. This could be considered to be the doing of the acting American governance as well as the complacent among the population who allow such crimes against humanity to continue the same way German citizens did during the rise of the Nazi regime.There is little need to prove this is possible because Nazi ideals can easily be seen in our world at present. Due to the excessive psychopathic corruption of Western corporations, much of the world has become a wasteland of bombed-out structures, broken and/or murdered families, genocidal foreign leaders, and terror groups who wait for orders from their Western puppet masters. So with all this in mind, what could all of this have to do with partial disclosure?
The End of Ignorance The prospect of a disclosure comprised of little more than a laundry list of half-truths is not at all preferable in my view. This is because it would leave the door wide open for all of the violence, the violations of humanity and human rights, the war crimes, and all of the corruption to be reborn later on. These crimes would have the opportunity to gradually and subtly take root the exact same way they did during the last century. The only difference this time around would be that these crimes would have a new face.
Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – The Ceres Pyramid – A Brazen Statement from an Anxious Cabal
It is true that a partial disclosure which was composed of only the existence of ET life and alternative energy technology would be a step toward change. However, the world needs much, much more in order to ensure that the Nazi regimes that have come out of Germany, the United States, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia do not have a chance to rise again.
Crimes against humanity are no small issue to deal with. If we allow those responsible to escape without full restitution for their crimes, this leaves the door open for either them or their peers to attempt the same thing again. This is not to say that those guilty of these crimes should all be executed. It is to say that all of their crimes should be brought out into the open and the people of the world should learn 100% of the ways in which such criminals seize power.
This mass revelation of truth would also open the door to countless advancements in human and social development. The populations of the world have been under the hypnotic spell of commercial propaganda for over a century of time. Virtually everything the people presently believe has been twisted in some way by corporate powers to the advantage of those corporate powers alone. The rights of we the people to think and choose for ourselves has been all but completely ignored. To hand the people the respect we have always deserved would allow the equality and freedom (presently praised during live national speeches) to actually mean something.
Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – NASA’s Quiet Disclosure Part 1
As stated before, the main reason for the need for a full disclosure is to ensure that the true nature of power—the nature which the official definition seems to deliberately omit—is respected and upheld. This is the fact that each and every one of us possesses our own power to be used and enjoyed by ourselves and no one else. The only reason monarchs and figureheads ever had power is because they, their families, and their cohorts tricked their respective populations into thinking that the common people did not have any power. (This is the secret behind any large totalitarian regime.)It is the choice of the people to behave like sheep and to get in line without ever knowing why they are doing so. As the State encourages this thoughtless tendency of the people, manipulative leaders ensure their continued harvest of power from them.
The Disclosure Project – “The Lakenheath-Bentwaters Incident” – An Eye-Witness Account of one of the Most Significant Events in UFO and Military History
Full Disclosure is the only way to ensure that this world becomes and remains free. By my observation, there is no other way of preventing the Neo-Nazi, Zionistic, and genocidal barbarism that has plagued our world for centuries. Only when we the people observe, think and act by our own efforts will this world remain free. Only in a society where there is individual maturity and independent intellect can the people truly be free. The alternative is the continuation of some form of thoughtless dependency on whatever ideology is thrown at us. Only some form of collectivist conformity results for those who gradually agree to do less, to think less, and to accept less responsibility.
The choice is clear. Do we choose to know, or do we risk prolonging the age of ignorance? The only way to ensure that everyone becomes aware of this choice is to realize the variety of ways this choice has been denied. Only through a full disclosure can this full revelation be achieved, and only in a society of courageous people with open eyes can this realization be complete.
Source: Discerning the Mystery
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WASHINGTON — Picking themselves up after the bruising collapse of their health care plan, President Trump and Republicans in Congress will start this week on a legislative obstacle course that will be even more arduous: the first overhaul of the tax code in three decades. Mr. Trump’s inability to make good on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act has made the already daunting challenge of tax reform even more difficult. Not only has Mr. Trump’s aura of political invincibility been shattered, but without killing the Affordable Care Act, Republicans will be unable to rewrite the tax code in the sweeping fashion that the president has called for. The grand plans of lower rates, fewer loopholes and a tax on imports may have to be scaled back to a big corporate tax cut and possibly an individual tax cut. A lot of people think Mr. Trump might go for this to get an easy win. “They have to have a victory here,” said Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist who advised Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign. “But it is going to have to be a bit less ambitious rather than going for the big bang. ” Because of the arcane rules of lawmaking in Congress, there may be little choice. If Republicans intend to act again without the help of Democrats, they will need to use a procedure called budget reconciliation to have the Senate pass tax legislation with a simple majority. To make their changes to the tax code permanent, their plans cannot add to deficits over a period of 10 years. Eliminating the $1 trillion of Affordable Care Act taxes and the federal spending associated with that law would have made this easier. Because they failed, Republicans will struggle to reach their goal of cutting corporate tax rates without piling on debt. Speaker Paul D. Ryan acknowledged on Friday, “This does make tax reform more difficult. ” Under pressure to get something done, some Republican deficit hawks appear ready to abandon the fiscal rectitude that they embraced during the Obama administration to help salvage Mr. Trump’s agenda. In a rare shift, Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, whose House Freedom Caucus effectively torpedoed the health legislation, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that he would not protest if tax cuts were not offset by new spending cuts or new streams of revenue, such as an import tax. “I think there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of some of my contacts and conservatives in terms of not making it totally offset,” he said. “Does it have to be fully offset? My personal response is no. ” The health care failure also makes the tax overhaul more politically complex as the fissures within the Republican Party have been laid bare. Mr. Trump followed Mr. Ryan’s lead and lost, making it more likely that the White House will try to steer the direction of tax legislation. “I would be surprised given the health law debacle if the Trump administration sits back and lets Congress fashion the legislation without weighing in on the substance,” said Michael J. Graetz, a tax law professor at Columbia University. “That is one of the lessons that the administration will take from the failure of the health bill. ” It remains unclear whether Mr. Trump and Mr. Ryan are in agreement on taxes. Since last summer, Mr. Ryan and Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, have been aggressively pitching a reform blueprint that includes a “border adjustment tax. ” It would be a 20 percent tax on imports that, by making imports more expensive, would spur domestic production, they say. They think the plan would raise $1 trillion to compensate for the lower revenue that much lower tax rates would probably bring in. Mr. Ryan and Mr. Brady are unlikely to simply hand over tax policy to the White House. Mr. Brady said on Sunday that getting rid of the contentious border tax provision would have “severe consequences” and that he hoped to produce a bill based on the House plan this spring that would be passed later this year. Mr. Brady’s committee is expected to convene a meeting about an overhaul on Tuesday. “We have so much in common with the Trump administration, it wouldn’t make sense to have a separate tax bill from Secretary Mnuchin, a separate one from Gary Cohn, a third from whomever,” Mr. Brady said on Fox News, referring to the Treasury secretary, Steven T. Mnuchin, and to one of Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers. “Why not take the basis of the House plan?” Changing the tax code affects every person and industry. Lobbyists are already hoping to shape tax legislation. As plans become more concrete, business groups will be ready to pick them apart. Mr. Trump has at times expressed admiration for some form of border tax as a way to give an advantage to American producers. However, facing a backlash from retailers, energy companies and conservative think tanks that warn that consumer prices will soar under the House Republican plan, Mr. Trump and Mr. Mnuchin have sounded cool to the idea. Many Senate Republicans are also skeptical, raising the prospect that Mr. Ryan’s tax vision could suffer the same fate as his health plan, toppling under the weight of divisions within his party. If Mr. Trump does try to go his own way, he could propose a tax cut plan that disregards deficits and assumes that robust economic growth will make up for lost revenue. Another idea would be reforming taxes in pieces, with a focus on reducing business tax rates first and then addressing tax rates for individuals later. Or, as Mr. Moore advises, he could try to make a grand bargain with Democrats that combines a tax overhaul with a plan for more infrastructure spending. Mr. Trump is under added pressure not to again fail supporters who he promised would “get sick of all the winning. ” “They need to cut taxes, cut spending, and build the wall,” said Judson Phillips, the founder of the conservative group Tea Party Nation. “If they will do that, the base will be forever in love with them. ” He said he did not want Mr. Trump to get bogged down in Mr. Ryan’s complicated tax agenda. But after consuming the first two months of his presidency focused on health care, it is unclear how prepared Mr. Trump and his administration are to tackle taxes. The administration said last month that its tax plan was just weeks away, but nothing materialized. And the Treasury Department, which will take a leading role in crafting a plan, remains understaffed, with crucial policy positions unfilled and most of its leadership still awaiting Senate confirmation. Mr. Mnuchin said last week that he was ready to get going, predicting that a tax overhaul would be simpler than health care. The fact that no one has seriously tackled tax reform since 1986 suggests otherwise. “It’s like asking whether climbing Kilimanjaro or another mountain of equal height is harder,” said Mr. Graetz, who was a Treasury Department official in the early 1990s. “They are both very hard, very exhausting and seem to occur once in a generation. ” | 1 |
Google is a top target for European regulators and privacy watchdogs, who openly fear and distrust its dominance. The American tech giant’s search engine alone gobbles up roughly 90 percent of the European market. But a landmark court ruling intended to rein in Google has instead put it at the forefront of Europe’s enforcement of Internet privacy. That has upended conventional wisdom about the company and raised questions about the role of commercial interests in protecting people’s privacy, often with little or no transparency. In the almost two years since Europeans gained the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet, Google has passed judgment in over 418, 000 cases — roughly 572 a day — from people wanting links of certain search results to be removed, according to the company’’s records. It has approved fewer than half of those requests, all behind closed doors. Google’s total number of judgments is double those of most of Europe’s biggest individual national authorities over the same period, even though these public agencies address a wider range of data protection complaints. Despite a history of animosity toward the company, national regulators have handed over the review powers to Google with few complaints, saying they are merely following Europe’s complex data protection rules. Other search companies, including Microsoft, have been given the same authority, though their number of judgments pales by comparison. Some consumer groups and privacy experts are not satisfied with that arrangement. They have sounded alarm bells over a company — one that relies on tapping into people’s digital lives to make billions of dollars and that is the subject of multiple privacy and antitrust investigations — playing such a central role in protecting individuals’ data, and doing so in such a secretive manner. Google has not responded to requests, including an open letter last year from primarily European and American academics, to explain how its review process works. And since 2014, when “right to be forgotten” was enshrined, the company has declined to give any journalists access to its team of fewer than 50 employees — mostly lawyers and paralegals based at its Dublin offices — who review the demands. Google also did not respond to questions for this article about the decision process. “It’s a solution,” said Luciano Floridi, a University of Oxford professor who previously sat on an advisory council to help Google handle its role as a de facto privacy regulator. “If Europe really wanted to regain control over personal data, giving Google this type of power is an odd outcome. ” Less than 1 percent of Google’s decisions are appealed to Europe’s privacy authorities, according to the regulators’ statistics, and those authorities said they generally ruled in the company’s favor. But several individuals who sent requests to Google told The New York Times that the lack of detail over how these decisions were made left them frustrated and, in some cases, angry that a company adjudicated on such delicate matters. These people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicize their own privacy cases. “If governments were handling ‘right to be forgotten,’ they would have to publish data,” said Martin Husovec, a professor at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society in the Netherlands, and a signatory of the open letter to Google. “But with Google, we can’t see what’s happening behind the company’s closed doors. ” After Europe’s highest court ruled in May 2014 that people with connections to the Continent could ask search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing to remove links about themselves from online search results, the companies were handed the power to decide which of these requests were legitimate. Citing European privacy rules, the European Court of Justice mandated that search engines, and not a public body, should be the first port of call for the decisions. Europe’s top court did not require that companies make their process open to public scrutiny. People’s privacy requests must relate to online information, like personal circumstances or a past criminal conviction, that is no longer relevant or not in the public interest, definitions that privacy lawyers say are inherently fuzzy. Thus far, that has mostly involved people demanding mundane information like phone numbers or addresses be removed from links to online directories (the largest collective group of sites affected). Individuals have also requested that links to references about themselves on social media, including Facebook, be taken down. In some cases, however, newspaper articles, including one in The Times covering somewhat questionable business practices, have been removed from European search results. Elsewhere, a Romanian website that publishes court proceedings has been hit with complaints. People requesting the removal of links must submit an online form, attaching an official ID. Though Google would not comment publicly about the review process, two company executives gave some detail on how decisions were made. They spoke to The Times on the condition they not be named. Typically, requests are sent to Google’s legal team. Straightforward rulings, like those that involve a public figure who cannot legally apply for links to be removed, are handled by junior staff members. Tougher decisions are referred to senior lawyers who must weigh an individual’s privacy against the public’s right to information, the company officials said. When Google’s team accepts a request, it informs an individual that the privacy demand has been successful, while also notifying the website that links to certain European search results have been removed. The website cannot appeal the decision. If Google refuses the request, the company must tell an individual that the decision can be appealed, but does not specifically explain why the submission failed. Some European officials remain wary of handing Google the power to make privacy decisions, though they declined to comment publicly on the privacy process. But regulators acknowledge that the company’s system — which has so far dealt with removal requests for 1. 4 million links — has proved surprisingly straightforward. Some officials also remain satisfied that Google makes these initial privacy rulings despite a lack of openness over how decisions are made. “When it comes to appeals, we agree with Google most of the time,” said Mathias Moulin, a deputy director at the Commission National de l’Informatique et des Libertés, the French privacy authority. This muted official response — from both European regulators and politicians — is partly because agencies lack the financial, technical and human resources to handle the substantial influx of “right to be forgotten” requests, according to regulatory officials and legal experts. Still, for privacy campaigners and some regulators, Google’s regulatory track record remains outweighed by Europe’s effectively handing the policing of one of its fundamental rights to a company. “Is Google the right entity to have such power over these decisions?” said Johannes Caspar, supervisor at the Hamburg data protection authority, the primary regulator in Germany that oversees American tech companies such as Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Facebook. “We have to live by European law, and that says Google must decide. ” | 1 |
In 2009, Rayshell Byers was an ambitious with dreams of college and law school and a grand plan to pay for it with a modeling career. Seven years later, she is in her second year of college, and law school is in reach. (With a scholarship in hand, modeling is no longer a financial requirement.) In 2009, Curtis Byers was a shy with a halo of hair, an aptitude for science and an allergy to school. Seven years later, the halo has been buzzed short, but the love of science remains and he is aiming for a career in veterinary care. In 2009, the oldest of the three Byers siblings, Daniel, was 17 and a student at Park West High School in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, where he was preparing for a career in cooking. Seven years later, he is a professional cook, with a string of restaurant jobs and catering work on his résumé. His current goal: culinary school (and a way to pay for it). And from her Harlem apartment, Lynette Byers, now 85, keeps an eye on all three — the boys still at home and Rayshell in her second year at Salem College, an ’s university in N. C. That is a little too far for Ms. Byers’s complete comfort, even though Rayshell has provided her with an iPhone to keep in touch via text and FaceTime. “I can text her,” Ms. Byers said, “and if she doesn’t get back to me, I’m right on the phone. ” It was the goals, dreams and hopes of the Byerses that led the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, to give them $289 seven years ago — $110 for an electric mixer and baking tins for Daniel, $50 for Rayshell’s application fee to an arts program and $129 for a toolbox for Curtis. Ms. Byers and her sons are not sure where the mixer and toolbox went. “We put it in the bank,” she said. “And it went to good use. ” Strangers still mistake Ms. Byers for her children’s grandmother, which did not bother her in 2009 and does not bother her now. She took in all three as foster babies — they are genetic siblings — and formally adopted them when she was in her 60s, after her own son had grown. “I guess they keep me young,” she said. During a recent interview, it hardly seemed that seven years had passed, except that Ms. Byers’s sons are taller. (Daniel is 6 feet 6 inches, and Curtis is just a few inches shorter.) Daniel gets Rayshell on FaceTime, and the Byerses huddle around on Ms. Byers’s easy chair for a talk that defies both time and distance. Rayshell talks classes: criminal law, psychology, English, professional writing. “You can tell you’re going to be a lawyer,” her mother teases. “You keep talking. ” Daniel pulls out his personal phone, which is filled with photos of dishes he has created: his own spins on baked chicken, rice and cabbage, shrimp Alfredo, a variety of soul food dishes and lots of Mexican food. “I like spicy,” he said. Daniel added that he spends at least three hours a day cooking, even on days when he is not working. And that is fine with Ms. Byers, who is content to let Daniel do the shopping and the cooking, even if he is not as good with the cleaning up. Daniel’s restaurant jobs mean long hours — he sometimes leaves the house at 4 a. m. — and he is trying to save for culinary school. Right now, Ms. Byers said, “It costs too much, and he doesn’t want to go into debt. ” Curtis, then as now, is the quietest, and still does not like to talk about himself unless the subject is his skill at video games. Then he gets very technical in a blur of conversation about the tools he uses, the games he plays and the avatars he employs. “It started when I was young,” he said. “I got into it with the graphics. ” But when talk turns to the future, Curtis grows more serious: “I want to work with animals. ” Financing that education is a problem here, too. The family’s participation in the Neediest Cases campaign looms large in their memories. It goes beyond the money itself. “It made me realize,” Rayshell said, “that I wanted to be in a position where I could be the one to help. ” | 1 |
November 24 ,2016 BY AHT Staff Egypt Says No to Saudi, Drafts Generals and Pilots to Fight Alongside Syrian Army against ISIS Syria Finds New Partner in Fight against ISIS. 44 Shares 1
“The small jump needed for Egyptian-Syrian relations to go back to normal” that Syrian Prime Minister Walid al-Muallem spoke of has been achieved apparently. Mohammad Ballout, from Assafir Lebanese Daily , reported that some Egyptian military formations have recently arrived to Syria, signaling an end to the time where Egypt simply stood by, hands crossed, looking at the goings-on in Syria.
It seems that the Egyptians have sent 18 helicopter pilots to the Hamah Airbase, and it is hoped that they will see action in joint Egyptian-Syrian operations.
Four senior Egyptian military figures also joined the unit when it first came to Syria, and two Major Generals have been operating at the Armed Forces Staff Headquarters in Damascus, near the operations room. The two Major Generals have been touring the fronts since they arrived a month ago, and have been reviewing the efforts made at the fronts, most recently the Southern Front at Quneitra.
These new developments are apparently the result of intensive, unannounced, high profile security meetings that began over a year ago between Cairo and Damascus. Arab sources also expect that these developments will go beyond these symbolic operations, and will see Egyptian task forces operating on a large scale in support of the Syrian army.
Moreover, a senior Syrian security official also said that the Egyptians have promised to send forces to Syria, and have schedule post-December 23rd as the Zero-Hour, whereupon Egyptian participation in Syria will escalate. Another official also revealed that after December, a large number of Egyptian forces will also participate in the Syrian operations, and their participation will not be limited to Aerial support. MORE... | 0 |
PARIS — The Italian director Saverio Costanzo has signed on to direct and to help write a television series based on the four Neapolitan novels by the author who publishes under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. The novels, published between 2012 and 2014, have developed a cult international following. They are “My Brilliant Friend,” “The Story of a New Name,” “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” and “The Story of the Lost Child,” and trace the lives of two friends, Elena and Lila, from their childhoods in postwar Naples to the present. Mr. Costanzo, best known for “Private” and “Hungry Hearts” (which Adam Driver) said in a telephone interview that the biggest challenge to adapting the novels for television was how “to convey the same emotions as the books in a cinematographic way. ” He added that he was writing the script with the Italian writers Francesco Piccolo and Laura Paolucci, and that Ms. Ferrante was also expected to contribute to the screenplay. (He expects to communicate with the author via email.) The series will be filmed in Italy in Italian. The first season will cover the first book, with eight episodes of 50 minutes each. Filming is expected to begin in Naples this year and the first season is expected to air in the fall of 2018. A spokeswoman for Wildside, an Italian producer making the series with Fandango, confirmed that talks were in the final stages with a major American producer, as well as with the RAI state broadcaster. Wildside also Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Young Pope,” starring Jude Law as the first American pope, a coproduction with HBO, Canal+ and Sky. Last fall, an Italian investigative journalist said financial records indicated that the Italian literary translator Anita Raja was behind Ms. Ferrante’s books, prompting an international outcry among the novelist’s protective fans. Ms. Raja has previously denied she was the author. Mr. Costanzo said he wasn’t interested in the author’s true identity. “It’s her literary reality that counts,” he said. “I’m one of those people who don’t care who she is. ” | 1 |
As some Democrats push harder for the impeachment of President Trump, with some threatening to bring it to the House floor, Democratic leaders are pushing back — apparently concerned about the risk of overreaching. [Rep. Brad Sherman ( ) and other members of the Democratic caucus have been pushing for a vote on impeachment — the natural consequence of months of claims about Trump’s actions in relation to alleged Russian interference in the election. Politico reported earlier this week that Sherman is prepared to buck his leadership in bringing a vote to the House floor. Sherman claims that Trump’s alleged request for former FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn amounts to an obstruction of justice and is, therefore, an impeachable offense. His motion would almost certainly be in the House. But Sherman isn’t the only Democratic lawmaker to float impeachment. Fellow California Rep. Maxine Waters was seen chanting “Impeach 45” on Sunday. Earlier this month, Rep. Al Green ( ) also called for impeachment and wants there to be a vote in the House. “Obstruction of justice by the president is the problem,” Green said. “Impeachment by Congress is the solution. ” Yet, while impeachment is always a popular word among Democrats’ base whenever a Republican is in the White House, Democratic leaders are concerned about something Republicans are frequently accused of when the tables are turned — overreaching. According to the Hill, leaders are worried that an aggressive push for impeachment will further politicize the investigation and undercut both the probe and Democrats’ midterm election chances. Famously, Republicans were stung in the late nineties by accusations of overreach when they sought the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Rep. Steny Hoyer ( ) the minority whip, said that talk of impeachment was “not timely,” according to the Hill. Meanwhile, Former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile was forced to deny Sunday that Democrats were overreaching. “First of all, I don’t think the Democrats are overreaching. I mean this is about the integrity of our democracy — democratic process. It’s about what happened in 2016,” she said on ABC’s This Week. Axios reported that Democratic leadership wants to be careful using the as the “investigations haven’t revealed enough yet” — a possible sign that Democrats were disappointed with Comey’s testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week and that it revealed no apparent obstruction of justice. Other Democrats believe that the way to political victory is by focusing on the issues likely to decide the midterm race and the issues they were beaten on in 2016 — such as jobs and health care reform. “We need to be looking at the issues that matter to families at home, and that starts with jobs, health care, addressing the opioid crisis,” Rep. Katherine Clark ( ) said earlier this month. “We can file articles of impeachment, we very well may have a basis, but Republicans have shown they’re unwilling to criticize, to hold this president accountable,” Clark said, according to the Boston Globe. “Let’s mobilize, get to the streets, register voters, and change the majority in the House. ” Other lawmakers though, while cautious for now, are still licking their lips at the chance of impeachment — even egging Trump on to do something to trigger such a push. “You want a car to impeachment? Fire Mueller,” Rep. Luis Gutiérrez ( ) according to the Hill. “I dare you to do it. ” Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY | 1 |
PALATINE, Ill. — Tall and sylphlike, an athlete with delicate features and a blond topknot, she changes clothes behind a privacy curtain in the girls’ locker room at her high school. But just being allowed to set foot in that locker room was a huge victory for the girl. She is transgender. She graduates in May — but the war over how to accommodate transgender students is far from over in her Chicago suburb. A new legal challenge is making its way through the courts. And a coalition of insurgent school board candidates, an evangelical church and conservative parents are looking to reshape district policy. The goal: preventing transgender girls and boys from sharing the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice with other girls and boys, on the grounds that they are “the opposite biological sex. ” Their presence, the opponents argue, violates community standards of decency. They cast the issue as one of basic modesty, but the transgender student says it goes far deeper than that. “Really, nobody’s getting naked,” said the girl, who is identified as Student A in court papers and asked not to be named to protect her privacy. “This fear that trans people exist and should not have the right to exist. That’s the driving force here. ” The school board election is set for Tuesday, only days after lawmakers in North Carolina, mired in a battle of its own, repealed a state law restricting bathroom use in public buildings. In February, after a dispute among his own cabinet officials, President Trump reversed federal protections allowing transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice, leaving those decisions to state and local authorities. That in turn prompted the Supreme Court not to take what advocates had hoped would be a defining transgender bathroom case. Student A has been a pioneer in Township High School District 211, which covers five schools in relatively affluent communities northwest of Chicago that have a patchwork of ad hoc policies for transgender students. She filed a complaint with the civil rights office of the federal Department of Education in 2013 that resulted in a 2015 settlement allowing her to use the girls’ locker room at William Fremd High School, in Palatine (and at other schools during school activities). The school had already been quietly allowing her to use the girls’ bathroom. But that agreement, essentially a contract between the district and the federal government, applies only to one person: Student A. It will expire when she graduates, making the district’s future policy unclear. Waiting in the wings: two transgender boys known as Student B, now in junior high, and Student C, a freshman at another high school, and a transgender girl identified as N. S. who has filed a state discrimination complaint. The township district settlement was one of several federal agreements on transgender students’ rights made under the Obama administration across the country in places like Summerville, S. C. and Broadalbin, N. Y. The repercussions are still playing out here. There is a slate of three insurgent candidates who oppose the district’s transgender practices, Ralph Bonatz, Katherine David and Jean Forrest, in the school board elections. The candidates call themselves Parents With Purpose, and if they win, they will probably tip the balance of the school board to their side. In a campaign flier, the candidates said they would not allow restroom access “to students of the opposite biological sex. ” At a recent candidates’ forum, Ms. David said that she would represent “our community’s beliefs and values. ” Mr. Bonatz, describing himself as a “regular guy,” said the district should not be “compromising the and dignity of 99 percent of the students. ” James Pittman Jr. pastor of New Hope Community Church, an evangelical congregation of about 50 active members in Palatine, has become a regular, along with members of his church, at school board meetings and candidates’ forums where transgender policy is discussed. Pastor Pittman has become a particularly effective foil against the argument often made that the transgender rights movement is heir to the civil rights movement. “I am black my family members are black,” he said in an interview in his church. “None of my family members nor friends would equate this movement to the civil rights movement. Matter of fact, that’s an insult. ” “We didn’t choose to be black,” he said, “and no matter what choice we make in the future, guess what? We’re still going to be black. ” A letter from the church says: “God created two distinct and complementary sexes in the very biology of the human race. A biological male is never female or vice versa. ” Many of the community members who oppose the school district’s transgender practices make a point of referring to transgender students by their birth sex, not by the sex that they identify with or that, in some instances, is written on their official documents. To them, Student A is a “he,” not a “she. ” The battle is also taking place in the courtroom. More than 50 families have signed on to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group based in Arizona, arguing that district policy toward Student A violates students’ right to privacy. They say that girls in the locker room are in a constant state of anxiety over the possibility that they will see Student A undressed, or that she will see them. The American Civil Liberties Union has taken up the other side. Dan Harrington, one of the plaintiffs, put his daughter, Sarah, in a Christian school in the fall rather than send her to a District 211 high school. “Regardless of what he thinks he is, he’s still a male,” Mr. Harrington said of Student A. Like many of the opponents, Mr. Harrington and his daughter have not met the transgender students they are talking about. Sarah suspects, but is not sure, that one of the younger transgender boys was in her Girl Scout troop. They say they are sympathetic to the students, whom the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Gary McCaleb, describes as “sincerely confused. ” But, Mr. Harrington said, “we have a lifestyle that we want to live, a modest lifestyle, a wholesome lifestyle. ” Referring to Student A, Sarah said, “He can do whatever he wants to do it’s his life. ” But her father said that people “do not want to pay taxes for this particular violation of people’s rights. ” Another plaintiff, Vicki Wilson, said she was acting purely on principle, not out of any personal hostility. “I have a daughter who — can’t get her into a dress for the life of me,” she said. Girls who complained, she said, were “belittled and bullied. ” And she said she worried that some girls who had been sexually abused would have their trauma rekindled by transgender students in the locker room. Student A said the fuss had been magnified by parents. Her classmates, she said, have long perceived her as feminine. She always liked jewelry and began wearing girls’ jeans in sixth grade. “They almost create this fictitious being,” she said. “When you humanize the issue, it becomes a nonissue. ” Most people, she said, “forget I’m even trans. ” At her school, her identity is an open secret. At the candidates’ forum, Bradley Posdal, 19, a college freshman, sat in a row near the front. He graduated from Fremd last year and attended the forum because he wanted to be an “informed voter,” he said. But it was often hard for him to tell which candidate stood where on the transgender issue because both sides seemed to be speaking in code. “They repeated the word ‘privacy’ a lot — and ‘dignity,’” Mr. Posdal said. Yes, he said, he knows Student A. He has since middle school, where she was bullied. And, he said with a smile, they attend the same church. “At least among my friend group,” he said, “it’s pretty well accepted that nobody really cares. ” | 1 |
North Korea’s fifth nuclear test produced an explosion fury and hysteria around the world, more empty threats against the Hermit Kingdom, and a giant sell-off in stock markets by foolish investors.
No wonder gleeful North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was having such a big laugh. It’s not often that a small nation of only 24.8 million can defy the mighty United States, Japan, South Korea and even its sole ally, China. But Kim did, and survived the experience.
North Korea fired off its fifth underground nuclear device estimated at 15-20 kilotons. The detonation was estimated at around the same size as the US nuclear devices that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
What made this test different was the announcement by Pyongyang that it had ‘standardized’ production of nuclear warheads and, even more important, reduced their size and weight so they could be fitted atop medium and long-ranged missiles. Previous North Korean nuclear devices were believed too heavy and bulky to be delivered by missiles.
Western experts believe North Korea will have 20 nuclear warheads by the end of this year, though how many of them can be delivered by missile is not known. The North has no long-ranged missiles that can hit North America, contrary to this week’s hysteria. Its new submarine-launched missile, a real potential threat to the US mainland, is still many years away from deployment. No one seems to care that India has ICBM’s and sea-launched SLBM’s that can hit the US today.
North Korea’s missile force is not designed to attack the United States but rather to deter any invasion or nuclear strike by US forces. The US Air Force underlined this potential threat by flying two nuclear-capable B-1 heavy bombers near the border with North Korea.
For North Korea, most of South Korea is too close for potential nuclear attack. Radiation would blow back over North Korea. Only the South’s most important southern port, Busan, through which any invading US forces would pass, might be a viable target.
Even if North Korean missiles could strike the mainland United States, there would be an immediate US nuclear riposte from Guam, Japan and the powerful 7th Fleet that would turn North Korea to radioactive dust. Kim Jong-un is neither mad nor suicidal.
But the North’s growing force of medium-ranged missiles could hit Japan’s home islands, Okinawa, and Guam, America’s primary Asian military bases. Three or four N Korean nuclear weapons could cripple Japan.
In effect, North Korea holds Japan a nuclear hostage. Japan has no leak-proof defense against nuclear missiles. Its lack of nuclear weapons means that Japan is naked before the North Korean threat and must rely on the uncertain US nuclear umbrella and unproven anti-missile systems.
That’s why presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed that Japan be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. It’s unacceptable for the world’s third largest economy to be held in thrall by pipsqueak but nasty North Korea.
Japan has considered developing nuclear weapons for decades but US pressure and anti-militarist public opinion have prevented Tokyo from doing so.
Japan could produce a nuclear weapon in three months if it so decided. But it won’t, and so remains vulnerable to North Korea and to nuclear-armed China with which Japan is in a serious confrontation in the South China Sea and off the Ryuku Islands.
The US and South Korea have staged their annual Fall military exercises that mimic an invasion of North Korea. Each year, North Korea blows its top when this provocation occurs. There’s no military need – it’s merely primitive chest-thumping by Washington and Seoul and tantrum-time for the North. Call it North Asian Primeval Scream Therapy.
Interestingly, this time South Korea’s conservative government led by PM Park Geun-hye joined the all-Korean threat-a-thon by vowing to turn Pyongyang ‘to ashes’ if it was seen preparing a nuclear attack on the South. In fact, South Korea lacks this military capability in spite of recent additions of new artillery missiles. Seoul’s threats were more designed to placate angry right-wing South Korean Christian voters than to intimidate the North.
But it’s also worth recalling that in the late 1970’s, the US forced the current prime minister’s father, President Park Chung-he, to halt his secret nuclear weapons program. Today, South Korea still has good reasons to develop a few nukes, though much of North Korea is too close for retaliatory strikes. Both sides in Korea would be better off with small, tactical nuclear weapons.
It’s always fun watching the hot-tempered Koreans hurl threats at one another and the US. Yet one of these days, threats could turn to real shooting on the Peninsula. Think of the Japanese nuclear melt-down at Fukushima…and then multiply by 150. | 0 |
“I’m a pretty good detective,” Jane Klain said, but she is no gumshoe. She is in charge of research services for a museum. The latest product of her sleuthing was playing on a computer on the desk behind her — a performance of “The Glass Menagerie” starring Shirley Booth, Hal Holbrook and Barbara Loden that was broadcast 50 years ago. As far as anyone knew, the master videotape was lost. Ms. Klain, who works for the Paley Center for Media, formerly the Museum of Broadcasting and the Museum of Television and Radio, is always on the lookout for lost programs that are sought by scholars and biographers. Late last year, she noticed a listing that led to four forgotten reels of videotape at the University of Southern California — the raw footage from which the original master tape of “The Glass Menagerie” was assembled. She turned to video restoration specialists, who created what amounted to a new master tape. It will be shown on Thursday on Turner Classic Movies, 50 years to the day after the original telecast. “She is one of the heroes of archiving and finding these lost treasures,” said Dan Wingate, who does video reconstructions and put together the new final version of “The Glass Menagerie. ” “It takes someone with real dedication and diligence and being willing to be said ‘no’ to over and over and keep going, and that’s what she has. ” Charles Tabesh, senior vice president for programming and production for TCM and the site FilmStruck, described her as “knowledgeable, passionate and eager to talk about anything that’s exciting that she has stumbled across or discovered. ” In 22 years with the museum, she has discovered dozens of video treasures, not all from the very earliest days of television. She mentions tracking down a broadcast of the musical “Junior Miss” that starred Don Ameche, Carol Lynley and Jill St. John in 1957, and a kinescope of a rehearsal of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” also from 1957. She kept after archivists at the University of Wisconsin until they checked an closet and found what she was looking for, a videotape of Edward Albee’s play “The American Dream,” recorded in 1963, but never broadcast. She had seen it on a listing of the places in which the producer David Susskind’s programs were housed. “The Glass Menagerie,” also produced by Mr. Susskind, had long been on her wish list, in part because the play is perennially popular and the 1966 telecast stuck in viewers’ minds. “Every time a production of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ bubbles up, people contact me: ‘What about the Shirley Booth one? ’” she said. “The answer has always been, ‘No, it doesn’t exist. ’” The disappearance of the tape was puzzling. The program was praised by Jack Gould, then the television critic for The New York Times. He called it “an evening of superb theater” and described Miss Booth as “fluttery” and “appropriately intrusive as the perennial Mrs. ” although he noted that at times, “her belle seemed a shade mechanized and not intuitively Southern. ” Ms. Klain located the raw footage from another list of Mr. Susskind’s programs. “I looked through it casually,” she recalled. “It said, ‘Glass Menagerie, U. S. C.’ I said, ‘What? ’” She called her counterparts in the university’s cinematic arts library, who found the reels. It turned out that they contained six hours, take after take. “Nowhere did it say they added up to the production,” Ms. Klain said. She arranged to have the tapes restored and digitized at DC Video in Burbank, Calif. Then she turned to Mr. Wingate. Along the way, she made another discovery, of an audio recording of the broadcast, apparently made on a home tape recorder. By comparing sound patterns from the tape recording with the audio from the takes, he could figure out exactly what had gone into the broadcast. “It was daunting,” he said. “Sometimes they would use a part of this take and then they would use a part of that take. You would find a piece of it, and then it would go out of sync and you’d realize you were hearing something from another take. ” Ms. Klain wanted the result seen and approached Mr. Tabesh of TCM. “When she calls and says ‘There’s this amazing program that only aired once and a lot of people are eager to see,’ I take that seriously,” he said, and he scheduled it without screening it himself: “I trust Jane’s judgment enough to feel comfortable putting it on. ” Ms. Klain has not found her program, a 1967 production of “Annie Get Your Gun” starring Ethel Merman. Some years ago, she found the box that the master tape had apparently once been in. The box — in a storage vault leased by NBC, which had broadcast the program — was empty. On the label, “‘Annie Get Your Gun’ with Ethel Merman” had been crossed out. As for “The Glass Menagerie,” Ms. Klain remembers watching the original broadcast in 1966, when she was a teenager. She disliked Miss Booth’s performance so much that she threw something at the TV — an apple. Her assessment has not changed. Her reaction has. “I’m a ” she said. “I don’t throw things anymore. Also, my sofa is further away from the TV than we were then. I’d really miss with an apple. ” | 1 |
All eyes were on Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as he accepted the vice presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, its third night, and made the case for Donald J. Trump as a Christian and a conservative. Keeping in the line of “Making America” something, the night’s theme was “Making America First Again,” and featured speeches by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker Eric Trump, one of Mr. Trump’s sons and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, one of his former rivals. The highlights: • If you were waiting for the usual kind of convention speech, you just saw it. Mr. Pence, the nominee for vice president, delivered what may have been the only speech that closely resembled the typical presentation at a nominating convention. He thanked his family, introduced his wife, lauded his ticked off policy ideas, made a few jokes and expressed optimism about the country and his party’s chances to win in November. “It’s change versus the status quo, and when Donald Trump is president, the change will be huge,” Mr. Pence said. He criticized Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, describing them as “entrenched in power. ” He closed out Day 3 of the convention by declaring, “We have but one choice” — to elect Donald Trump the 45th president. _____ • After an extended and often soaring speech focusing on notes of freedom and American conservative ideals, Mr. Cruz refused to specifically call for Mr. Trump’s election, despite repeated shouts from the crowd to endorse him, including “We want Trump!” He chided the crowd and said, “Don’t stay home in November,” but he also told them to “vote their conscience. ” As Mr. Cruz wrapped up his extended remarks, Mr. Trump emerged from a side entrance, waving to the crowd. He joined his family in the V. I. P. box, as both the crowd and every television camera cut from Mr. Cruz just as he was delivering the crescendo to his remarks. He closed saying, “God bless America” on a split screen, as the cameras had shifted to Mr. Trump, who in a rare spontaneous moment at the often orchestrated conventions, stole the show from Mr. Cruz once more. _____ • Mr. Gingrich took the stage after a brief introduction by his wife, Callista, and attempted to clean up the by Mr. Cruz that sent the night into momentary chaos. Citing Mr. Cruz’s line that “you can vote your conscience,” Mr. Gingrich offered “to paraphrase Ted Cruz: if you want to protect the Constitution of the United States, the only possible choice is the Republican ticket. ” He then transitioned to a long list of national security failures, portraying Mr. Trump as the only candidate who can handle the foreign policy threats facing the country, before returning to a closing call for unity. _____ • Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Trump rival, declared that Americans should choose Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton, repeating that “America deserves better!” Mr. Walker said he had always been clear that he would support any Republican against Mrs. Clinton in the general election. Fact Check: He was never an enthusiastic Trump fan. Mr. Walker endorsed Mr. Cruz ahead of the Wisconsin primary, and later expressed disappointment that Mr. Trump would be the party’s . “It’s just sad in America that we have such poor choices right now,” Mr. Walker said then. _____ • Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, another former Trump rival, once called Mr. Trump a “con man,” and worse, as he fought a bitter campaign. But on Wednesday, Mr. Rubio appeared in a brief video to concede that “the time for fighting each other is over. ” The video was hardly full of enthusiasm, but he did urge voters to choose Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton. _____ • Eric Trump, one of Mr. Trump’s sons, offered a passionate, energetic speech on behalf of his father, describing him as the candidate who is running to make the lives of ordinary Americans better. The elder Trump sat in the audience for his son’s remarks, clapping occasionally but appearing to express displeasure as the large screen behind Eric Trump appeared to malfunction. Eric Trump said his father ran for president because he could “no longer bear witness” to America’s decline. He urged people to vote for his father, a man who “can’t be bought, sold, purchased, bribed, coerced or intimidated. ” _____ • Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio host, energized the crowd with verbal attacks on two targets: Mrs. Clinton and the media. Ms. Ingraham called her the “woman who helped orchestrate America’s decline,” and she drew chants of “Lock her up!” when she said that “many in public office don’t enforce or respect the rule of law — isn’t that right, Mrs. Clinton?” She called the media her “friends,” but she accused journalists of not reporting on “the phonies, the frauds and the corruption that has gone unexposed and uncovered for too long. ” _____ • Pam Bondi, the attorney general of Florida, emphasized “laws” in her remarks, using that theme to call attention to the fatal shooting of three police officers in Baton Rouge, La. on Sunday. She drove home her riff by saying, “now more than ever, laws that back our law enforcement. They have our backs, and Donald Trump will have your backs. ” _____ • Eileen Collins, the first woman to lead a space shuttle mission, may be the only speaker at the convention to appear onstage without once mentioning the Republican Party, Mr. Trump, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama or any other politicians. Instead, on the 47th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Ms. Collins offered a gauzy appeal for America to be a “nation of explorers. ” One thing she never said: Support Mr. Trump for president. _____ • Mr. Trump is extremely unpopular with the Hispanic population, as numerous polls have shown, but he is not without support in the community. Ralph Alvarado, a state senator from Kentucky, took the stage to proclaim, in English and in Spanish, why Hispanics should back Mr. Trump against Mrs. Clinton. “Hispanics believe what Republicans believe,” he declared, listing off “religious liberty,” support of the Second Amendment and free speech as key examples. In Spanish, he addressed his “hermanos Hispanos,” or Hispanic brothers, saying that their families had fled countries that were plagued by corruption, and urging them to not let that corruption plague the United States. | 1 |
Some knew him for only a day. Others built friendships over months, even years, and introduced him to their mothers, an aunt, even a son, they say. But all 13 women say the same thing: Bill Cosby finally gave them a pill, or some other intoxicant, sometimes hidden at the bottom of a fizzing glass of champagne or a glass of wine or soda, and they awoke hours later having been sexually abused. Prosecutors in Montgomery County, Pa. announced this month that 13 women, selected from a larger pool of nearly 50 who say Mr. Cosby assaulted them, have now agreed to come forward and testify at a criminal trial next June. The prosecution has asked the court to allow the women to testify, and the judge’s ruling, expected in coming months, will be critical to Mr. Cosby’s fate. If the testimony is allowed, the prosecution’s case would be bolstered by its ability to bring forth accuser after accuser with accounts similar to that of Andrea Constand, the former Temple University basketball staff member whose accusations are at the center of the June trial. Prosecutors have charged Mr. Cosby with drugging and sexually assaulting Ms. Constand at his home near Philadelphia in 2004. “It could be the most important ruling in the case,” said Benjamin Brafman, a defense lawyer in New York who is not involved in the Cosby case. “It is no longer just one person making the allegations. ” For the women, their testimony could represent a final legal opportunity to address what they contend was Mr. Cosby’s criminal behavior. Most never came forward decades ago, when they say the episodes occurred. Even civil cases against him have largely been prevented by statutes of limitation. But this sort of evidence is not often admitted in criminal cases. Ordinarily, prosecutors in Pennsylvania and most other states cannot introduce evidence or accusations of prior bad behavior. It is viewed as too prejudicial for a jury as it sifts through the facts of the case that is actually before it. Mr. Cosby’s legal team said it would fight to block the women from testifying. There are circumstances, though, in Pennsylvania and other states where such evidence is permitted — for instance, when it shows conduct so similar it can be argued that it demonstrates a common scheme or plan, a kind of unique fingerprint of criminal behavior. In the Cosby case, prosecutors say in court papers that the women’s accounts form such a pattern — that he befriended each of them, mentoring some, drugging and assaulting them all, just as, they say, he did Ms. Constand. Twelve of the 13 women say Mr. Cosby offered them alcohol or pills or both. One woman said she drank a glass of soda, which she says she believes was laced with a drug. Ms. Constand says Mr. Cosby had evolved into her mentor, invited her to his home, gave her pills and wine, then molested her while she was incapacitated. Mr. Cosby has denied all of the women’s charges. Prosecutors did not name the women in their court papers. But 11 of them — Janice Baker Kinney, Therese Serignese, Linda Kirkpatrick, Heidi Thomas, Margie Shapiro, Lublin, Donna Motsinger, Rebecca Lynn Neal, Linda Brown, Cindra Ladd and a woman who identified herself only as Kacey — have previously come forward to publicly detail their allegations, and their identities are clear from the information made public in the court filing. One woman, Ms. Serignese, says Mr. Cosby assaulted her in 1975 or 1976 when she was 18 or 19 after they met in a hotel gift shop and he invited her to a show and gave her pills. Another, Ms. Motsinger, has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her in 1972, a time when she was working at a restaurant in Sausalito, Calif. He took her to one of his shows but then assaulted her after giving her wine and a pill, she said. Ms. Motsinger, now 75, said she could not discuss why she agreed to testify but said of the trial, “It’s one step closer to justice. ” While most of the women who have agreed to testify had once been public with their identities and accusations, even going so far as to participate in news conferences, they did not want to comment further at this point. Patricia Leary Steuer, 60, who has accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her but is not among the 13 women, said, “None of us want to jeopardize the outcome of the trial by speaking in a way that would make the prosecutor’s job more difficult. ” She added, “We’re all voluntarily being very quiet. ” Two of the 13 women, a former flight attendant and a woman identified in court papers as having worked at the Playboy Club in New York, do not appear to have ever come forward publicly. The decision on whether to admit the testimony of the women will be made by Judge Steven T. O’Neill, who, legal experts said, may choose to include the testimony of all 13, or fewer, or reject altogether any of their accounts as evidence. The judge may wait until Ms. Constand gives her own testimony at trial: If her own evidence is strong enough, he may decide that there is no need to include the other women’s accounts, the experts said. Efforts by prosecutors to introduce “prior bad acts” evidence are limited, said Lynne M. Abraham, a former Philadelphia district attorney and judge, because they can backfire. Even in cases in which defendants are convicted, there is the chance the decision will be overturned on appeal when a higher court rules that including other, prior evidence was, in fact, prejudicial. That happened in a recent case involving a senior official in the Roman Catholic Church in Philadelphia who was convicted on charges related to failing to stop child sexual abuse by some priests. Prosecutors introduced historical evidence, but appellate courts later decided that the evidence had impaired the jury’s ability to deliver a fair verdict. “It is sometimes successful, and sometimes it falls flat on its face,” Ms. Abraham said. Mr. Cosby’s lawyers say they will show that the women’s testimonies fail to meet the criteria for inclusion, because, they say, for example, the accusations are decades old or uncorroborated. Isabelle A. Kirshner, a criminal defense lawyer in New York, said a judge would also have to take into account the time and resources involved in so many accusers. “He will ask, ‘Do we really want to have in effect 13 separate trials? ’” she said. Detectives who reopened the investigation into Ms. Constand’s allegations last year interviewed nearly 50 women who brought accusations against Mr. Cosby, according to court documents. Kevin R. Steele, the Montgomery County district attorney, chose to offer the testimony of just 13 in the interests of “judicial economy,” the documents say. One of the 13 is a former masseuse another was a cocktail waitress. Some were models and aspiring actresses. According to prosecutors, the women often met Mr. Cosby through their work, and he would win their trust with career advice, or invitations to dinner — as, they say, happened in Ms. Constand’s case. At least nine of the 13 women are white, and Mr. Cosby’s legal team has complained that the prosecution is tainted by racial bias. A statement from his team this month took particular issue with Gloria Allred, a feminist lawyer with a knack for drawing media attention, who presided at news conferences in which many women aired their accusations against Mr. Cosby. Ms. Allred had at one time represented at least seven of the 13 women planning to testify. “She calls herself a civil rights attorney, but her campaign against Mr. Cosby builds on racial bias and prejudice,” the statement said. Ms. Allred responded with her own statement: “This is not an issue of racial bias. Instead, it is an issue of whether or not Mr. Cosby has committed acts of gender sexual violence. ” Joseph Cammarata, a lawyer for Ms. Serignese, said any effort to undermine the prosecution’s case by focusing on race or attacking the characters of the women would be quickly overshadowed by the facts. “There is a certain pattern here: It is very compelling and powerful,” he said. “At the end of the day, did it happen, or did this not happen?” | 1 |
Out with the old Future No. 1, in with the new Future No. 1. This week, the prolific Atlanta rapper Future has become the first artist in the history of the Billboard album chart to replace himself in the top spot with new albums. “HNDRXX,” his newest, opens at No. 1 with 48, 000 sales and 93 million streams in the United States in its debut week it bumps last week’s biggest seller, “Future,” to No. 2. Both albums were released by Epic. But Ed Sheeran is hot on his trail. After releasing two singles in early January that instantly became popular on streaming services, Mr. Sheeran on Friday issued his latest album “÷” (pronounced “divide”) which looks destined for No. 1 on next week’s chart, with yet more huge streaming numbers. (The accounting week for music sales runs Friday through Thursday.) Spotify announced that around the world, songs from “÷” racked up nearly 57 million streams on its first day, a record for that service. Also on this week’s chart, Bruno Mars is No. 3 with “24K Magic” (Atlantic) the country band Little Big Town opens at No. 4 with its new album, “The Breaker” (Capitol Nashville) and the soundtrack for “Trolls” (RCA) is in fifth place. | 1 |
It has been three weeks since Democrats gathered for their convention, and Hillary Clinton still holds a large and consistent lead in national and battleground state polls. Her national lead over Donald J. Trump of seven to eight percentage points could slip a bit over the next few weeks. But it has been long enough that much of her expected convention “bounce” should have faded. It leaves Mr. Trump in an unenviable position: No modern candidate who has trailed by this much a few weeks after the conventions has gone on to win the presidency. On that basis, you can expect a wave of articles about how the presidential race is basically “over. ” That’s probably a bit too strong, at least from a historical point of view. The Upshot’s model gives Mrs. Clinton an 88 percent chance of winning. It’s about the same probability of hitting a field goal from the line. That’s a pretty good way to think about it. If Mrs. Clinton ultimately wins, we will probably look back and say she had more or less already won it by this point. If she loses, these next two months will be talked about for decades. The analogy has one big weakness: She may win this by a lot more than a field goal. The possibility of a landslide victory for Mrs. Clinton — one larger than any since 1984 in the national popular vote — is larger than the chance that Mr. Trump will pull it out. According to The Upshot model, Mrs. Clinton has a better shot at winning the red state of South Carolina than Mr. Trump has at winning the presidency. In that sense, perhaps Mrs. Clinton’s position is more like having a lead at the beginning of the third quarter. At this point, it’s probably fair to say that Mrs. Clinton’s lead is real and durable. Gallup data indicates that the bounce is largely over: Both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton’s favorability ratings have returned to where they were before the conventions. Mrs. Clinton’s gains have proved relatively durable in part because they’ve come from voters who seem unlikely to defect to Mr. Trump. Recent polls have shown her with the support of up to 90 percent of Bernie Sanders’s supporters, and more than 90 percent of Democrats. There is one key respect in which Mrs. Clinton’s big lead doesn’t look so durable, at least in historical terms: She holds only around 48 percent of the vote, and has a commanding lead only because Mr. Trump is stuck around 40 percent. In today’s polarized electorate, he can be polling so low only because he hasn’t unified voters who traditionally lean Republican in presidential elections. Astonishingly, several surveys have shown Mr. Trump with less than 70 percent of Republican voters. This type of disunity is the basic story behind two of the biggest comebacks in modern history, Hubert Humphrey’s late surge in 1968 and Gerald Ford’s in 1976. Both candidates had divisive conventions, and they left without fully unified parties. Both trailed by double digits in August and September polls, often with less than 35 percent of the vote. But in the end, the Republican faithful returned to Mr. Ford, and most Northern Democrats returned to Mr. Humphrey. Mr. Ford lost by just two percentage points, and Mr. Humphrey by less than one point. The elections ended up as two of the three closest presidential contests of the 20th century. If you’re a fan of Mr. Trump looking for hope and a relevant precedent for a comeback, this is my best comparison. No, Mr. Humphrey and Mr. Ford didn’t win. But clearly they could have. The problem, though, is that there are unusually good reasons to question whether Mr. Trump will ever reunify voters. Many Republican voters have an unfavorable impression of him — worse still, many don’t even think he has the knowledge, temperament or qualifications to be president, according to polling. The most obvious sign that this year is different is the behavior of Republican politicians: Seven Senate Republicans have not yet endorsed Mr. Trump. This is highly unusual. It’s also a problem that could get worse. More Republicans could abandon him, especially if his big deficit in the polls holds, perhaps making it even more acceptable for Republican voters to follow suit. None of this information is incorporated into the statistical models used by The Upshot or other sites, like FiveThirtyEight. To extend the football analogy, the model has no idea whether the quarterback of the trailing team is Peyton Manning or Ryan Leaf. If Mr. Trump can’t reunify voters, Mrs. Clinton really could win in a landslide. Perhaps many Republicans would skip the presidential race on the ballot, vote for a candidate, or even stay home. A small but important number would vote for Mrs. Clinton. Maybe she could win by something like 54 to 42, and squeak out a win in South Carolina. But if Mr. Trump could make progress in reunifying Republicans, Mrs. Clinton would quickly find herself in a tighter race. She would still have the advantage — that 48 percent she currently holds in the polls doesn’t leave Mr. Trump very much room. To squeak out a win, Mr. Trump would need to win over enough white voters, particularly white men without a degree, to compensate for his weakness among voters and Hispanic and especially women. This is what the polls showed when Mr. Trump was in a close race or even ahead — as was the case in May or in July. Historically, neither a Clinton landslide nor a close Trump win can be ruled out with days to go. Then again, historically — based on fundamentals like the “time for a change” theory of presidential elections — one would expect the Republicans to be or even slight favorites to win this election. They are not favored anymore, in no small part because Mr. Trump has been performing a lot more like Mr. Leaf than Mr. Manning. If he keeps doing so over these final months, he could close off what few opportunities he might have left. | 1 |
7th international aerospace exhibition opens in Tehran Thu Oct 27, 2016 11:36PM 7th international aerospace exhibition, Tehran. © Press TV
Hamid JavaniPress TV, Tehran
The 7th edition of Iran’s aviation and aerospace exhibition is underway near the iconic Milad tower in the capital Tehran. Iranian and Foreign companies active in the aerospace industry have attended the 4-day event to showcase their products. As our correspondent Hamid Javani says, Iran has made eye-catching progress in civil air services in recent years. Loading ... | 0 |
When the leader of a flock goes the wrong way, what will the flock do? With human beings, nobody can be sure. But with homing pigeons, the answer is that they find their way home anyway. Either the lead pigeon recognizes that it has no clue and falls back into the flock, letting birds that know where they are going take over, or the flock collectively decides that the direction that it is taking just doesn’t feel right, and it doesn’t follow. Several European scientists report these findings in a stirring report in Biology Letters titled, “Misinformed Leaders Lose Influence Over Pigeon Flocks. ” Isobel Watts, a doctoral student in zoology at Oxford, conducted the study with her advisers, Theresa Burt de Perera and Dora Biro, and with the participation of Mate Nagy, a statistical physicist from Hungary, who is affiliated with several institutions, including Oxford and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Biro, who studies social behavior in primates as well as pigeons, said that the common questions that ran through her work were “about group living and what types of challenges and opportunities it brings. ” She and her colleagues at Oxford have pioneered a method of studying flock behavior that uses GPS units, which the birds wear in backpacks. The devices record a detailed position for each bird a number of times a second. Researchers in Budapest and Oxford developed software to analyze small movements and responses of every bird in a flock. With this method, the scientists can identify which pigeons are leading the way. They can build a picture of how each bird responds to changes in the flight of other birds. The consistent leaders were often fast fliers and occupied the first position in the group of flying birds. Other birds followed them. But what if one day, a leader flew in the wrong direction? The researchers arranged to feed the leaders misinformation by putting them in lofts with artificial light for a few days. By shifting when the lights went on and off, compared with the actual external schedule of light and dark, the researchers could shift the pigeons’ internal clocks a few hours forward or back. Pigeons navigate by using the position of the sun and an internal clock, so the change in the clock threw off their sense of direction and they didn’t fly toward home at all. But the pigeon flock corrected its flight path, and went the right way. Dr. Biro doesn’t know exactly how they corrected. The followers all had the right information, so they might have collectively said, “this guy’s wrong, let’s not follow him,” Dr. Biro said. “Or, the leader said, ‘Something’s wrong here,’” and fell back into the flock, “effectively choosing not to lead,” Dr. Biro said, and another pigeon, that knew the time of day, led the way. Sadly, these kinds of decisions by pigeon flocks offer no reassurance to humans who think political leaders are misinformed or misdirected. The pigeons don’t communicate directly about where they are flying. The flock changes its flight path because of reactions to position changes by other birds. There’s no process remotely similar to, say, an election. But knowledge of how the pigeons work might be useful in creating swarms of small robots for activities like search and rescue. If researchers can reduce the process of a flock to a few simple rules about who follows whom, and when, those rules might be applied to robot groups. Then the group of robots might be able to make some of its own decisions, at least about where to go or how to get there. | 1 |
Sberbank plans to introduce Samsung pay technology in near future October 28, 2016 TASS banks , apps Sberbank is going to introduce Samsung pay technology in the near future. Source: Reuters
Sberbank is going to introduce Samsung pay technology in the near future, Sberbank CEO German Gref told reporters on Oct. 28.
"We are currently working on Samsung pay. I think we will introduce it in the near future," he said.
Gref also noted that the bank is working to make Samsung pay and Apple pay available for cards of all payment systems, including Visa and Mir.
In early October, Sberbank and MasterCard launched Apple Pay system on the Russian market.
According to Sberbank, Apple Pay can be easily set up in the Sberbank Online mobile application, which is familiar to all Sberbank cardholders. Users can enjoy contactless payment service while continuing to receive all the benefits from using their credit and debit cards.
Apple Pay works with iPhone SE, iPhone 6 and later, and Apple Watch. | 0 |
In this most contentious of elections, you wouldn’t think that a soda tax would be the issue to attract the big bucks. But measures in just two California cities have drawn more money than that state’s Senate race and statewide referendums on marijuana legalization and gun control — combined. Soda taxes are on the ballots in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. and spending to persuade citizens to vote for or against them has topped $50 million — enough to buy every person in those two cities about 100 cans of Coke, at least if you bought them in bulk. On the side are big donations from billionaires: Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, and Laura and John Arnold. And opposing them are the companies in the beverage industry, which is outspending them by a ratio of about 3 to 2. The battle is the biggest so far by health advocates in their efforts to reduce the consumption of sugary carbonated soft drinks that they say leads to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. The idea of taxing beverages, which the measures would do, was initially an esoteric idea hashed out in medical journals. Some municipal officials showed interest, but, until recently, no soda tax got far. The failure of 40 tax measures around the country reflected public skepticism about the idea, often seen as a intrusion. But it also reflected the lopsided investment of industry to defeat them. Recently, the tide has begun to turn, helped in part by big donations from Mr. Bloomberg. Two years ago, Berkeley, Calif. became the first city in the country to pass such a tax. Mr. Bloomberg got involved late in the effort, when it became clear the law had a chance of passing. (San Francisco had its own failed initiative that year it won a majority of votes but failed to clear a supermajority threshold, a bar it won’t need to clear this time.) In June, Philadelphia passed its own soda tax through the City Council. The beverage industry spent about $10 million there, but Mr. Bloomberg weighed in too, contributing about $1. 6 million of the $2. 5 million spent to support the bill. Albany, Calif. another community in the Bay Area, is also voting Tuesday, though there has been less direct spending there. Boulder, Colo. will vote on a soda tax measure Tuesday. And Cook County, Ill. which includes Chicago, is to consider a soda tax measure later this month. Public sentiment on soda is also shifting. Many Americans now say they are trying to avoid the products, and national sales of such drinks have been slipping. The Bay Area initiatives are expensive prizes. Unlike Philadelphia, where much of the battle was fought through lobbying, both California tax proposals must win passage by a majority of voters. That means both sides have invested in big public outreach campaigns. Citizens have been inundated with and tax TV and radio commercials, and mailboxes are filled with direct mail from both sides. Canvassers are making phone calls and going door to door in the final days of the campaign. Dan Newman, a political consultant with SCN Strategies, who is working on the campaign, said the volume of messages about the measures dwarfs the 2014 effort. “It was intense and expensive, and folks were amazed in talking about it,” he said of 2014. “And it was nothing like this. ” The tax battle has also prompted accusations of skulduggery. The soda industry enlisted the help of several local grocers to pose for mailers and state their opposition to the tax. Several of them, later approached by advocates and reporters, said they had been misled about the nature of the tax proposal. Others have become the subjects of negative Yelp reviews and threatened with boycotts, what an campaigner described as “intimidation. ” The measures are similar in both cities: They would impose a tax of one cent per ounce of any drink with added sugar, including sugary soft drinks, iced teas and smoothies. The taxes would be imposed on beverage distributors, not at the checkout registers. The emerging evidence from existing soda taxes suggests those higher prices will be passed through to retailers and then to shoppers. If they are, they could result in a price increase of 67 cents on a bottle, or $1. 44 for a . Those higher prices are intended to discourage shoppers from consuming so many sugary drinks, which have been linked to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. The side has been emphasizing the negative health effects of consumption, and arguing the tax will make the city’s children healthier. Research from Mexico, which passed a national soda tax in 2014, shows that the taxes can drive down soda consumption. But it is not known yet whether those reductions will result in better health. The industry argues that the taxes have no clear connection to public health and that they will fall disproportionately on shoppers. In California, they have also been arguing that the taxes could result in higher prices for other items at the grocery store as retailers try to spread the rising wholesale cost of soft drinks over other products. But there is no research from Berkeley or Mexico that advocates could cite to support the notion. A local coalition of advocates, led by the American Beverage Association, a trade group for began sending direct mail months earlier than is typical for a ballot initiative. Susan Neely, the association’s president, said her organization was committed to fighting soda taxes on every front. “We oppose them wherever they are introduced — that is a clear position that we have staked out,” she said. “That is not going to change. ” There has been little public polling on the measures, though consultants on both sides said they have been polling privately, and the vote will be close. The complexity of the city’s ballots this year makes predicting a result hard. In San Francisco, voters are considering more than 40 initiatives, including two separate measures about plastic shopping bags. The beverage tax is fairly far down on both ballots, which means some voters may grow fatigued and fail to weigh in. | 1 |
Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Mika Brzezinski unloaded on President Donald Trump, questioning his mental stability and whether or not he was capable of performing the duties of president of the United States. “As I said at the beginning of this show, I thought this presidency could happen,” she said. “I thought [Trump] could win. It’s certainly not my first choice. But, I wanted to have hope. And I wanted to have an open mind so that, perhaps, the weight of this office, of this presidency, might guide him in a better direction than in his previous life. It is not. ” Later, Brzezinski described Trump as “possibly unfit mentally. ” “Sorry, I’m just saying what everyone is thinking, so,” she said. Joe Scarborough criticized the people with which Trump had surrounded himself in the White House and cited a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming a lost trust in government. “Let’s put it this way — I believe in his ability to communicate with people, and I believe in how he won,” Brzezinski replied. “I get why he won. I don’t believe in his ability to be able to do this job well. It’s past time that we lower the bar so low that we’re in the ditch. ” After Hearst Magazines’ Joanna Cole had said people were watching abroad what was happening in the United States, Brzezinski implied Trump was taking the country down the path of totalitarianism. “We hear, Joanna [Coles] from people from other countries who say this is how it starts,” she added. “So, I think we are at that point where we have to have that conversation. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
One night nearly 140 years ago, Samuel Clemens told his young daughters Clara and Susie a bedtime story about a poor boy who eats a magic flower that gives him the ability to talk to animals. Storytelling was a nightly ritual in the Clemens home. But something about this particular tale must have stuck with Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, because he decided to jot down some notes about it. The story might have ended there, lost to history. But decades later, the scholar John Bird was searching the Twain archives at the University of California, Berkeley, when he came across the notes for the story, which Twain titled “Oleomargarine. ” Mr. Bird was astonished to find a richly imagined fable, in Twain’s inimitable voice. He and other scholars believe it may be the only written remnant of a children’s fairy tale from Twain, though he told his daughters stories constantly. It’s impossible to know why Twain did not finish the tale, or if he ever intended it for a wider audience. Now, more than a century after Twain dreamed it up, “Oleomargarine” has taken on a strange new afterlife. After consulting a few other scholars, Mr. Bird brought the text to the attention of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, which sold it to Doubleday Books for Young Readers. This fall, Doubleday will release “The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine,” an expanded version of the story that was fleshed out and reimagined by the children’s book team of Philip and Erin Stead. From Twain’s spare the Steads created a illustrated story featuring talking animals, giants, dragons, a kidnapped prince and a wicked king. While the original work has a timeless quality, the Steads added a postmodern twist: Twain himself makes an appearance in the book, to argue with the author, Philip Stead, about the direction the story takes. Finishing a partial manuscript by one of the country’s most revered writers was terrifying at times, the Steads said. “We said yes before our brains could tell us it was a terrible idea and we would never be able to do it,” Mr. Stead said in a telephone interview from the couple’s home studio in Northern Michigan. Erin Stead, who did the illustrations, said they were very aware of the creative risks involved in taking on the work of such a towering literary figure. “We both just tried to approach the text respectfully and with as much reverence as possible,” she said. “No one’s qualified to write for Mark Twain. ” “Oleomargarine” is the latest abandoned children’s tale to resurface decades after a revered writer’s death. In recent years, publishers and estates have dug deep into the archives of beloved children’s book authors in search of partial manuscripts and castoff gems, and have released previously unpublished works by Dr. Seuss, Beatrix Potter and Margaret Wise Brown. Twain’s story may hold even greater literary significance for scholars and fans, because it represents a new genre for him. While he wrote fiction, essays, journalism, travelogues, short stories and satire, he never published fiction for very young children, apart from his translation of a German fable. It certainly wasn’t for a lack of ideas. As Twain describes in his journals, his daughters constantly demanded he make up stories on the spot. They often gave him an image from a magazine or another visual prompt to use as inspiration. Sometimes they would insist that his stories mention every knickknack on their living room mantel, beginning with a painting of a cat and ending with a portrait of a young girl. “They were a difficult and exacting audience — those little creatures,” he wrote of his daughters in his journal. “The stories had to be absolutely original and fresh. ” Like an artifact from a lost civilization, “Oleomargarine” gives a tantalizing glimpse of the wild, ephemeral tales that Twain spontaneously created for his daughters each night, in the period when he was working on “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ” Scholars haven’t found any written remnants of those stories, apart from “Oleomargarine,” which suggests Twain thought it might hold lasting appeal for a wider audience. “He had at least some inkling that it might be publishable,” said Robert Hirst, the editor of “Who Is Mark Twain?” and the curator of Twain’s papers at Berkeley, a vast archive of more than 500 manuscripts. Mr. Bird stumbled on the manuscript in 2011, when he was searching the Twain archives for food references, for a Mark Twain cookbook. The word “oleomargarine” sounded as if it could be part of a recipe. “What I found is what seems to be the only remaining record of these bedtime stories that he told his kids,” Mr. Bird said. The manuscript was just 16 handwritten pages long, and unfinished. It opens as a poor starving boy named Johnny is given a magic seed, which grows into a flower. He eats it and discovers he can understand animals. Johnny and the animals go on a quest to rescue Prince Oleomargarine, who has been kidnapped by giants and taken to a cave guarded by dragons. At one point, Twain scribbled down a suggestion that his daughter Susie made, when she asked if the kangaroo was the hostess. After finding references to bedtime stories about a boy named Johnny in Twain’s journals, Mr. Bird theorized that Twain had probably told this story to his daughters while the family was in Paris in 1879. Johnny was a recurring character in the nightly tales for the Clemens girls, at least for a while. In a diary that Twain kept about his daughters, he described how they lost interest in Johnny after the character told a lie. “Johnny’s days of usefulness were over he was up a stump, I had to leave him there,” Twain wrote. At first, Mr. Bird was unsure what to do with the fragmentary text. After talking to Mr. Hirst and a few other scholars, he decided that the story offered a significant new perspective on Twain’s domestic life and work, and that it should be published. “It’s a testament to his incredible powers of invention,” said Mr. Bird, a professor of English at Winthrop University in South Carolina. He wrote his own version, which closely followed Twain’s blueprint and incorporated his language, and took the idea of publishing it to Cindy Lovell, who was then the executive director of the Mark Twain House and Museum. But Mr. Bird’s version, which hewed to the original, was never published. Doubleday, which acquired rights to the story from the Twain House, decided to hire the Steads, who are stars in children’s publishing, to finish the story. “What we ended up with is this wonderful story inspired by Twain’s unfinished manuscript, which makes any Twain purist uneasy,” Ms. Lovell said. Mr. Stead secluded himself in a cabin on Beaver Island, in the middle of Lake Michigan, and wrote the first draft of the story in a feverish nine days. He often found himself arguing with Twain about the changes he wanted to make and found the imagined conversations so compelling that he put them in the book. To capture a rhythm that mirrored Twain’s natural speaking voice, Mr. Stead read the first and second volume of Twain’s autobiography, which Twain had dictated. “I tried to approach the project as a piece of oral history,” Mr. Stead said. “This was a story that Twain told his daughters, and now he’s going to tell it to me, and now I’m going to tell it. ” | 1 |
Crunched for time but still want to see a show in New York? Here are five productions this month that will take about a “Homeland” episode of your time, with room enough for dinner — or a “Walking Dead” binge — afterward. Running time 1 hour I don’t know about you, but I’m way too busy to spend more than an hour a day contemplating my own death. That’s where this show fits in nicely. Written by the Pulitzer playwright Will Eno, “Wakey, Wakey” stars Michael Emerson as a man in a wheelchair who reflects on his life knowing that death is around the corner. There are existential echoes of Beckett and Albee in this contemplative work that’s part TED talk, part show and tell. Our critic praised it as a “glowingly dark, profoundly moving new play. ” [Read the review] At the Pershing Square Signature Center, through March 26 Running time 1 hour 10 minutes Yeah, yeah, yeah: You want to see “Hamilton. ” But you don’t have A) the time, B) the connections or C) the tickets. This “Hamilton” parody, from Gerard Alessandrini, the creator of the “Forbidden Broadway,” is the next best thing. (O. K. maybe more like the next available thing.) If the lyric “In New York, you can be a real ham” sounds like a sidesplitter, this one’s for you. (If not, stay far away.) Our critic called it a “smart, silly and often convulsively funny thesis, performed by a cast that is fluent in many tongues. ” At Stage 72, the Triad, through May 14 spamilton. com Running time 1 hour Marin Ireland, of Amazon’s “Sneaky Pete,” stars in Martín Zimmerman’s drama about a university professor whose child is killed. Inspired by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings of 2012, it’s a solo show on a bare stage, with a story that takes a surprising direction. The play “approaches the subject of American gun violence from a startlingly original perspective,” according to our critic. [Read the review.] [Watch our Facebook Live chat.] At the Black Box Theater, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, through April 2 Running time 45 minutes For parents of small children, this one’s a . Based on Oliver Jeffers’s book of the same title, “The Way Back Home” is about an adventurous boy who makes an unexpected landing on the moon and has to summon the courage to find his way home. Told with puppets, it’s a great way to introduce children as young as 3 to the visual treats of the theater. And tired parents can do it in less time than it might take to put their kids to bed. At the New Victory Theater, March Running time 1 hour 20 minutes Ok, so the reviews for David Mamet’s new play weren’t great. “Cynical and morose” is how our critic put it. But if you’ve never seen the dark work of this provocative American playwright (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) now’s your chance. This one’s about a psychiatrist who refuses to testify on behalf of a gay client accused of a horrific crime. If you don’t like it, soothe yourself with a killer cupcake from Billy’s Bakery around the corner from the theater. At the Atlantic Theater through March 26 | 1 |
Email Ever wonder what’s on the mind of today’s most notable people? Well, don’t miss our unbelievable roundup of the best and most talked about quotes of the day: “ The government likes to get a bunch of people in a room and decide what’s best for us. If I were running the show, I’d have way less people and let them each have their own room. ” —Reba McEntire On government “ People ask me if I would do another Sister Act movie. All the time they ask me, pleading with me to do the film. They storm my dressing room on The View to throw the nun costume in my face. I find DVDs of Sister Act in my trunk, in my mail, sometimes in my drawers! I want to give the people what they want, but sometimes I’m not sure they really want what they think they want, you know? ” —Whoopi Goldberg On the responsibility of fame “ We hold our hands together in prayer in the hopes that God will put a dollar bill—which we signed beforehand—in between our palms, so that when we open them we can be amazed and delighted. So far it seems this privilege has only been granted to the pope. ” —Pope Francis | 0 |
Vladimir The Great: Russia’s Refurbished Empire November 01, 2016 NEW BOSS: A mural of Russia’s president covers the wall of a residential building in Simferopol, Crimea, August 19, 2015. The message reads: "Ours". REUTERS/Pavel Rebrov
Russia has begun rebuilding a chain of military installations from Crimea to Kaliningrad, with 18 new sites near Sevastopol alone. Russia has reoccupied the missile bunkers that dot the verdant hills along Crimea’s southern coast. Villager who worked at Crimea base: “It is a functioning military base with an anti-ship missile system.” Russia is creating a chain of radar stations on rocky hilltops around Crimea. Local villager: “There is a military base here, air defense system and missiles. There are air defense systems on every cape here.” On the outskirts of the port city of Sevastopol sits another radar station called “Dnepr.” Russian newspaper Izvestiya: Moscow will restore the Dnepr station so it can “detect launches of ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea area.” In Crimea region Russia has 18 sites, including naval bases, radar stations and airfields. Refurbished Russian military facilities now stretch north in an arc through western Russia to Kaliningrad. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Feb: “We have, in effect, slid into a new Cold War.” Britain’s Defense Minister Michael Fallon in Sep: London was concerned about military buildup in Crimea “and indeed the militarization of the Black Sea region generally. Both Bulgaria and Romania feel very threatened.” Since May: Romania has hosted a U.S.-controlled international missile shield, operational by late 2018. Poland is hosting the other main land-based component in the shield. Washington: The shield is designed as a defense against Iranian missile strikes. Russian President Vladimir Putin: The system and NATO are both threats to Russia’s security, our country will retaliate.
(SIMFEROPOL, CRIMEA) The missile bunkers that dot the verdant hills along Crimea’s southern coast are known locally as Object 100. Until recently, tourists paid $50 to visit the crumbling and abandoned former Soviet sites, which served during the Cold War as a defense against naval attack from the Black Sea.
Now the bunkers are coming back online. After Russia took control of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, signs went up in the woods around the sites warning visitors against entering a “forbidden zone of the Russian Ministry of Defense.” A resident of a nearby village who said he was employed at the base last year said Russian soldiers had re-occupied the sites and blocked roads leading into the area. He was unable to say when the Russian soldiers arrived.
“It is a functioning military base with an anti-ship missile system,” the villager told a Reuters reporter who visited the area in July.
The bunkers are just one small part of a new Russian program to militarize the Crimean peninsula. Based on recent site observations by Reuters, accounts from locals, media reports and official Russian data, Moscow has reanimated multiple Soviet-built facilities in the region, built new bases and stationed soldiers there.
Crimea sits at the southern end of a line of new and refurbished Russian military facilities that stretches north in an arc through western Russia and ends in the country’s Baltic outpost of Kaliningrad.
The military buildup is echoed in NATO countries such as Poland and the Baltic states, where U.S. forces are beefing up patrols and conducting more frequent exercises. | 0 |
Gruesome Video Shows Turkish Soldiers Execute Female Kurdish PKK Fighters by Shooting in Their Heads 2 Shares 1
Amateur footage emerged on Saturday showing what appears to be Turkish soldiers executing two female PKK insurgents at point-blank range.
Al-Masdar News that released the footage says they are not able to independently verify it.
A ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK ended last year and clashes have since claimed hundreds of lives on both sides.
The PKK operates primarily in the mountanious terrain of southeastern Turkey and often uploads footage of its Kurdish fighters ambushing Turkish government troops. MORE... Erdogan vows heavy price for coup plotters
The tension between Kurdish fighters and Turkish government have always been high in past years. In yet one of the most recent cases, a Turkish court banned the co-leader of Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition from traveling abroad as part of a court case in which she has been accused of being a member of an armed terrorist group, Hurriyet daily reported on Saturday, Reuters reported.
Figen Yuksekdag, co-chair of Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), is facing jail time up to 15 years over comments she made last year in the southeastern border town of Suruc. The prosecutor of the case requested the ban.
HDP described the court's decision to bar Yuksekdag from foreign travel as 'political and arbitrary', saying in a statement that it will make a formal appeal for its overturn.
The move comes days after the co-mayors of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, were detained as part of a security crackdown. Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast has been rocked by violence following the collapse of a ceasefire between the state and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) last year.
President Tayyip Erdogan has accused the HDP of being a political extension of the outlawed PKK and repeatedly called for the prosecution of its members. He has also said the removal of elected officials and civil servants accused of links to the PKK was a vital part of the battle against it.
Several other HDP lawmakers including co-chair Selahattin Demirtas are also being prosecuted, largely over terrorism charges, after the parliament earlier this year lifted the immunity of HDP deputies, along with the immunity of MPs from other parties.
Meanwhile three Turkish soldiers were killed and five others were wounded by mortar fire from PKK militants near the southeastern town of Cukurca, security sources said.
Soldiers who were on an operation in Cukurca in Hakkari province bordering Iraq and Iraq returned the fire, sources said. Operations were under way to hunt down the militants.
The autonomy-seeking PKK took up arms in 1984, and more than 40,000 people have died in the conflict. It is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. | 0 |
Cuban dissident leaders who protested President Barack Obama’s “normalization” concessions to the Castro regime are eagerly awaiting President Donald Trump’s anticipated rollback of these reforms, expecting Trump to be “fair to dissidents and the exile community. ”[Trump will arrive in Miami, the capital of America’s Cuban exile community, on Friday to issue an address on America’s diplomatic stance with Cuba. Reports suggest Trump will limit U. S. travel to the country and restrict the ability of business interests to exploit the Cuban people in negotiations with the Castro regime. Speaking to the Spanish newswire service EFE, Antonio Rodiles, the leader of the dissident group Estado de SATS, said he expected the Trump Cuba policy to “point in a different direction than what has happened, which has been concessions, concessions with nothing in return, and the result has been more repression and more control on behalf of the regime in Havana. ” Rodiles called Trump’s announcement, “without a doubt a positive step for us,” expressing confidence that Trump would make the respect for human rights on the island a key provision of any deal with dictator Raúl Castro. He particularly lauded reports that the Trump administration would make it more difficult for the Castro regime to benefit from American businesses. “It is tremendously contradictory that the armed forces are to receive most of the benefit of the new relationship with the United States, and at the same time are tasked with repressing those of us who defend human rights and liberties in the country,” he argued. Rodiles had called President Obama’s visit to the island in 2016 a “pat on the back” to the Castro regime and firmly opposed “normalization. ” Rodiles is not alone in his anticipation of the positive results of a Trump era policy that would undo the damage Obama’s “normalization” has caused. The head of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) dissident group, José Daniel Ferrer, wrote an open letter to President Trump this week urging an aggressive rejection of Obama’s policies. “It is the moment to revert as much as possible these policies that only benefit the Castro regime and do not [benefit] the oppressed people at all or very little,” he wrote. “It is time to impose strong sanctions on Raúl Castro’s regime, and on Nicolás Maduro’s,” he added, noting that the Cuban regime controls the highest levels of the socialist dictatorship in Venezuela and the freedom of one country is directly linked to the freedom of the other. “Due to its outstanding position in the free world, the United States should not remain indifferent before the crimes that both regimes commit against their people,” the letter continued. While noting that UNPACU initially supported the Obama “normalization” process, the letter concluded that the implications of the policy, particularly the increase in human rights violations against dissidents, has forced them to rescind their support. Among the specific instances of this mentioned in the letter are “the tripling of the number of political prisoners on the island,” the beatings dissidents regularly receive from government agents, and robberies of dissident homes. A third prominent dissident, Agustín López Canino, told EFE, according to the U. S. Martí news network, that he expects Trump to “be fair to dissidents and the exile community and condition the situation on human rights in Cuba, that facilitate a true presence of civil society” in the government. López Canino decried Cuba as suffering under “ferocious capitalism,” where corporations are getting rich without the existence of a truly free market. The Ladies in White — a Cuban dissident group consisting of wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of political prisoners — have not explicitly weighed in on the new Trump policy. This week, however, they sent a letter to the European Union, signed by their leader Berta Soler, calling for Europe to cut the Cuban regime off economically. Soler writes that, in response to the EU seeking a bilateral economic agreement with the Castro regime, “far from changing its attitude and understanding these negotiations as the beginning of an agreement that would pull it towards becoming a part of the international democratic community, has taken it as a legitimization of its power and since then has acted with total impunity. ” The letter requests an EU resolution condemning the Castro regime and a firm stance in favor of respecting human rights on the island. The Ladies in White have received the EU’s Sakharov Prize for Human Rights Advocacy. Few details are currently public about the Trump Cuba policy scheduled for reveal Friday. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the U. S. Senate that the policy would undo “concerning” moves by the Obama administration that had provided “financial aid” to the Castro regime. “We believe that we have achieved very little when it comes to changing the behavior of the regime and its treatment of the people, they have little incentive to change,” he said. Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that evidence found by police officers after illegal stops may be used in court if the officers conducted their searches after learning that the defendants had outstanding arrest warrants. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority in the decision, said such searches do not violate the Fourth Amendment when the warrant is valid and unconnected to the conduct that prompted the stop. Justice Thomas’s opinion drew a fiery dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said that “it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. ” “This case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time,” she wrote. “It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. ” The case, Utah v. Strieff, No. arose from police surveillance of a house in South Salt Lake based on an anonymous tip of “narcotics activity” there. A police officer, Douglas Fackrell, stopped Edward Strieff after he had left the house based on what the state later conceded were insufficient grounds, making the stop unlawful. Officer Fackrell then ran a check and discovered a warrant for a minor traffic violation. He arrested Mr. Strieff, searched him and found a baggie containing methamphetamines and drug paraphernalia. The question for the justices was whether the drugs must be suppressed given the unlawful stop or whether they could be used as evidence given the arrest warrant. “Officer Fackrell was at most negligent,” Justice Thomas wrote, adding that “there is no evidence that Officer Fackrell’s illegal stop reflected flagrantly unlawful police misconduct. ” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion. In a dissent that cited W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and Coates, Justice Sotomayor said the court had vastly expanded police power. “The court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights,” she wrote. “Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification and check it for outstanding traffic warrants — even if you are doing nothing wrong. “If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay,” she continued, “courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant. ” Justice Sotomayor added that many people were at risk. Federal and state databases show more than 7. 8 million outstanding warrants, she wrote, “the vast majority of which appear to be for minor offenses. ” There are, she added, 180, 000 misdemeanor warrants in Utah. And according to the Justice Department, about 16, 000 of the 21, 000 residents of Ferguson, Mo. are subject to arrest warrants. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined most of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, along with all of a separate dissent from Justice Elena Kagan. But Justice Sotomayor reserved her most personal reflection for a part of her dissent in which she wrote only for herself, setting out in detail the dangers and indignities that often accompany police stops. “For generations,” she wrote, “black and brown parents have given their children ‘the talk’ — instructing them never to run down the street always keep your hands where they can be seen do not even think of talking back to a stranger — all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. ” “We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are ‘isolated,’” she wrote. “They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter, too, our justice system will continue to be anything but. ” Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was remarkable. It is, he said, “the strongest indication we have yet that the Black Lives Matter movement has made a difference at the Supreme Court — at least with one justice. ” | 1 |
Tuesday on Fox Sports 1’s “Speak for Yourself,” Colin Cowherd and Jason Whitlock weighed in on the politicism of the NBA, questioning where studies show that fans want to see politics mixed in with sports. “Show me the study — I’ve been doing this 30 years — where people want their sports and politics together,” Cowherd stated. “I love tuna fish. And I love ice cream. I don’t love tuna fish ice cream. ” “Show me the study where fans and consumers are demanding they’re together,” he continued. “I think the NBA ratings are down 15 percent. They are down 28 percent in Ohio. So, show me where everybody loves — [ESPN] is down 50 percent across the board. The audience is telling you, ‘We like politics, but we turn to Fox News for it. And we like sports and we turn to you for it.’ show where the consumer is demanding we mix sports and politics. I’d like to see the study where it’s effective. Whitlock agreed, but added that “traditional sports fans” do not want “ politics” in sports. “I think there’s some truth in what you’re saying. I think traditional sports fans and most sports fans don’t want politics in their sports. I think there is consistency and synergy between conservative values, which are taught in sports. And so much of it has been left that I think it is bad business,” Whitlock said. Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
ST. LOUIS — At first, the funeral for the rock ’n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry followed a traditional format. There were prayers and readings of formal condolences from officeholders and congregations. A pianist played “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and the soprano Marlissa Hudson, a St. Louis native, sang “Ave Maria. ” Then Billy Peek pulled out his guitar and belted “Johnny B. Goode. ” Mr. Peek, a local blues musician who played alongside Mr. Berry for decades, earned loud cheers from the roughly 1, 000 mourners. Many rose to their feet and danced as he mimicked Mr. Berry’s strut, known as the duck walk. Mr. Berry died on March 18 of natural causes at age 90 in his home near Wentzville, an outer suburb of St. Louis. The funeral on Sunday afternoon honored a musician who helped forge rock ’n’ roll but never moved away from his hometown and continued faithfully playing gigs there until he was in his late 80s. The service took place at the Pageant, a music hall in the city’s west end less than three miles from the family home where Mr. Berry was born. Many appreciative fans paid their respects during a viewing before the funeral. Mr. Berry was laid out in a polished mahogany coffin and dressed in a vintage glittery purple shirt, white jacket and ’s hat. His red Gibson guitar rested on the white inner lining of the coffin lid. Two funeral directors in white gloves stood guard, . A row of floral displays included an arrangement of white blooms shaped like a guitar. “Thanks for the inspiration,” read the accompanying card, from the Rolling Stones. The service included laudatory letters from Paul McCartney (“As you know, Chuck was a huge influence on me and my companions”) Little Richard the Smithsonian Institution and the Rock Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which included Mr. Berry in its first class of honorees. Representative William Lacy Clay, Democrat of Missouri, read a statement from former President Bill Clinton that praised the musician as a uniter: “He drew from many different traditions yet his music was innovative in spirit, and he spoke of the joy, hopes, and dreams we all have in common. ” Gene Simmons of Kiss, who was in St. Louis for a convention, attended the service and took the stage for impromptu remarks. Mr. Simmons said he was riveted by Mr. Berry’s music when he was an newcomer to America from Israel. “He changed more little white boys’ and girls’ lives than all the politicians by making them move like this,” Mr. Simmons said as he gyrated at the podium. “Rock ’n’ roll was started by a guy who just wanted to make people feel better. ” After the service, the family departed for a private burial as a local New brass band outside played mournful renditions of the “St. Louis Blues” and “Just a Closer Walk With Thee. ” The Pageant is part of a revived entertainment strip on Delmar Boulevard, known simply as the Loop from streetcar days. Three blocks to its west is Blueberry Hill, a tavern that was Mr. Berry’s main venue for 18 years, until 2014. He played monthly there in the Duck Room, named in his honor. Joe Edwards, a longtime friend of Mr. Berry, owns Blueberry Hill and founded the St. Louis Walk of Fame, a line of bronze stars in the Delmar sidewalk that honors St. Louisans, including the poet T. S. Eliot, the dancer Josephine Baker, the singer Tina Turner, the actor John Goodman and the Cardinals’ baseball greats Stan Musial and Ozzie Smith. Mr. Berry’s star, the first to be installed, is near the tavern’s front door. On the night before the funeral, Mr. Edwards and about 120 fans gathered there to toast Mr. Berry with Johnny Rivers, one of the musician’s contemporaries. Mr. Edwards led the crowd in a countdown to 10 p. m. the usual start time for Mr. Berry’s shows. Mr. Edwards called for a moment of silence, which was drowned by cheering and shouted lines from Mr. Berry’s hits — exuberance that testifies to Mr. Berry’s staying power in his hometown. “He was proud of this city and we were proud of him for sticking around,” said Ralph Morse, 66, who said he had attended 91 Berry concerts. “He kept on playing for us. You could sit down and talk with him after a show, and he’d say, ‘Thank you. ’” Mr. Edwards said Mr. Berry’s commitment solidified his legacy. “He could have gone to the East or West Coasts, but he was determined to do it on his own terms,” he said. “That is very meaningful to the musicians and people of St. Louis. And he could have stopped playing years ago, but he loved that connection with the audience. ” Ethel Peebles, 63, whose parents grew up with Mr. Berry, said she had enjoyed his music since she childhood: “When you are down and out, the music will lift you up. ” Most of the people who attended the events were teenagers when Mr. Berry started releasing records in the late 1950s. Then there was Amanda Weinstein, 19, a Floridian who attends Washington University south of the Loop. “I completely grew up on classic rock, the Stones and the Beatles,” Ms. Weinstein said. “I came to understand that it all started with Chuck Berry. So I had to be here. ” | 1 |
The United States women’s soccer team pressed its fight for equal pay not in one dramatic moment at the negotiating table, but in a thousand small ones away from it. In text messages and phone calls, in hotel rooms and on bus rides, and at their homes in cities, the players their needs and their arguments and their solidarity. Sometimes the suggestions arrived in an overnight email from forward Alex Morgan in France, or a one from midfielder Megan Rapinoe on the West Coast. They sent out anonymous surveys to their teammates, to better gauge what people prioritized but might not want to say aloud, and weighed in on legal language and PowerPoint slides in a cache of shared Google Docs. As the talks intensified in recent weeks, players like Becky Sauerbrunn and Meghan Klingenberg conferred with teammates like Kelley O’Hara and Christen Press to propose changes as small as a single word in page after page of precise contract language. Then they would rehearse what they would say at each negotiating session, and even decide who would say it. The result of all those long days and late nights is the team’s new collective bargaining agreement with U. S. Soccer, which was announced on Wednesday morning. The agreement includes a sizable increase in base pay for the players — more than 30 percent, initially — and improved match bonuses that could double some of their incomes, to $200, 000 to $300, 000 in any given year, and even more in a year that includes a World Cup or Olympic campaign. Yet while the women’s players can claim significant gains, including on noneconomic issues like travel and working conditions, the new deal does not guarantee them equal pay with the men’s national team, which the women had made the cornerstone of their campaign for much of the past year. For the union, that reality — a consequence of the teams’ different pay structures and an gap in FIFA bonus payouts to U. S. Soccer for the men’s and women’s World Cup — was balanced by progress elsewhere. It is those changes, including control of some licensing and marketing rights, which the union views as an opening to test the team’s value on the open market, that the players and their lawyers feel could pay off in future negotiations. “We tried to completely change the methodology for how to define our value, and we made progress in that regard, and it changes the equation for the future,” said Becca Roux, the union’s executive director. Sunil Gulati, the president of U. S. Soccer, portrayed the agreement as a shared victory, an “equitable” deal that he said recognized the team’s achievements and kept U. S. Soccer at the forefront of the continuing fight for gender equity in soccer worldwide. “We’ve always had the most highly compensated women’s team in the world, and this puts them at even higher level,” Gulati said. “Their performance over all over the last has put them at the top of their game. Financially the agreement gives the players security in a way that they haven’t had before and adds a number of other things that were very important to them. “So we’re very pleased to continue being at the forefront of the women’s game internationally. ” Gulati noted that the deal’s term, through 2021, ensured that the next negotiation would not become an issue for the team in its next major competitions, the 2019 World Cup in France and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He also revealed that U. S. Soccer had agreed to pay the players for two years’ worth of unequal payments, the result of improvements in the men’s C. B. A. that were not accounted for in the women’s version. But while the deal was completed this week, it was forged over the past four months, during which the players took active control of their side of the negotiations with a team of U. S. Soccer negotiators — including Gulati — who had long been eager to do what they called an equitable deal but had bristled at the way the union went about it. Initially, the talks had been framed as a simple debate, a powerful wedge issue that hung over the talks from the start. It resulted in a lawsuit against the players’ union by the federation to enforce the old collective bargaining agreement but also in a federal complaint signed by five top players that will continue even with the new C. B. A. complete. Those legal fights were the most public salvos in what the top women’s players had come to view as a yearslong fight for respect and equal treatment. After the United States won the Women’s World Cup in 2015, in the richest year in team history, a group of players fueled by simmering resentments — artificial turf fields, travel in coach class, unequal payments — demanded that the union fight to win the richer contracts the group felt the players had earned. The cause of equal pay seemed a successful strategy it put U. S. Soccer in the awkward position of defending what was effectively unequal pay for the same work, and it received wide news media coverage as well as the support of athletes and celebrities and even Hillary Clinton, who tweeted her support during the 2016 presidential campaign. But the tactic also proved divisive, forcing fans of the national teams to take sides in an increasingly nasty fight, and it hurt feelings inside the world of U. S. Soccer, especially after some women’s players — riding high after their World Cup title — denigrated the record of the men’s team while pushing their cause. With the union’s negotiators and U. S. Soccer barely on speaking terms late last year, the women’s players fired their lawyer and restructured the union’s leadership. The goal was to change the tone of the talks and, with the players more involved, to pivot toward a solution that veteran voices on the team soon came to call “equitable and fair” pay — a subtle but important shift. Gulati, in a telephone interview on Wednesday morning, said the change in leadership, and in tone, had quickly opened the door to the discussions that produced a deal. In addition to seeking improved, but not necessarily equal, pay, the players began to press for changes that they saw as vital to the growth of their game. Those changes, they argued in detailed slide presentations during increasingly frequent negotiating sessions, would improve the game outside the narrow ecosystem of the national team and also establish a structure to support both their careers and those of the next generation of American women. As a result, the new agreement includes commitments from U. S. Soccer for its continued support of the domestic professional league, the N. W. S. L. as well as requirements that the federation improve standards in the league and — through sizable increases in camp and roster bonuses for players not under contract with U. S. Soccer — transfer money to players who exist on the periphery of the more established national team pool. The agreement also reinforces the national team players’ commitment to the N. W. S. L. through their league salaries, while at the same time establishing a mechanism for them to pursue opportunities abroad, as players like Carli Lloyd and Crystal Dunn (in England) and Morgan (in France) have done in recent months. The final breakthrough came last weekend in Dallas, when as many as 16 players — dressed in matching team gear in a row of chairs only feet from the negotiating table — took part in two days of marathon discussions with Gulati and U. S. Soccer representatives. Helpful timing — the players were together in camp ahead of two friendlies against Russia this week — and the looming start of the N. W. S. L. season provided another needed nudge. On Tuesday night, the players gathered in a drab conference room to hear the details of the agreement from their lawyers, including some benefits that had come to pass only in the final days. “Oh, we got that, too,” one player remarked, according to Roux. Then the completed document was shared electronically with all 22 voting members for ratification, while U. S. Soccer’s board met on a conference call to give its assent. “I am incredibly proud of this team and the commitment we have shown through this entire process,” Rapinoe, a player and a member of the union’s C. B. A. committee, said in a statement provided by the union. “While I think there is still much progress to be made for us and for women more broadly, I think the W. N. T. P. A. should be very proud of this deal and feel empowered moving forward. ” | 1 |
Americans, what is the worst that can happen? The old bag somehow gets in power in less than a month.Anyone willing to put a timeline of events that will come after?A Lot of us in UK. Want Mr Trump in Power as much as we wanted Brexit. To Be honest, I think its going be a lot more important for the whole world.So tell us like el5 what to expect in a worst case scenario. | 0 |
TIME TRAVELA HistoryBy James GleickIllustrated. 336 pp. Pantheon Books. $26. 95. I was 10 years old when my brother handed me Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” with the endorsement that it was “probably the raddest story ever. ” The action opens in 2055, and the United States has just elected a moderate presidential candidate named Keith over a strongman named Deutscher, “an man for you, a militarist, Antichrist, . ” Hmmm. In the story a hubristic hunter named Eckels pays Time Safari Inc. $10, 000 to ride a time machine 60 million years back in time to shoot a rather vividly rendered T. rex. But there’s a Red Riding catch: Eckels must stay on “the Path,” an antigravity sidewalk Time Safari Inc. has suspended over the jungle floor. Why? Because, the lead hunter explains, “the stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our Earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. ” Eckels, of course, stumbles off the Path and squashes a butterfly, “a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. ” When the hunting party gets back to the future, guess who the is? “Not that fool weakling Keith,” declares the desk jockey at Time Safari Inc. “We got an iron man now, a man with guts!” (All of which makes one worry that a from 2055 has recently been mucking around in the underbrush of the Mesozoic.) At age 10, I was gripped by Bradbury’s dramatization. I read the story a times, then stepped gingerly through the yard, wondering if every ant I squashed spelled doom for civilization in 3924. As I grew, so did the number of time travel stories I devoured. I watched Superman spin the Earth backward I watched John Connor send a young soldier (who was somehow also his dad?) back in time to protect his mom from a Terminator I watched Keanu Reeves offer Genghis Khan a Twinkie in Bill and Ted’s (not so) Excellent Adventure. Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis’s “Time’s Arrow” wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to . Indeed, as a world culture, we have indulged in so many time travel stories that, in 2011, China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television officially denounced them, charging that they “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation. ” That’s enough to start any storyteller building her time machine. Enter James Gleick’s “Time Travel: A History. ” Bad news first: Though the title might suggest otherwise, this is not a book sent through a wormhole from the future to detail the glorious evolution of time travel. Darn it. Gleick even goes so far as to declare that literal time travel, as imagined and reimagined by writers over the decades, “does not exist. It cannot. ” The good news? “Time Travel,” like all of Gleick’s work, is a fascinating of philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation. It’s witty (“Regret is the time traveler’s energy bar”) pithy (“What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track”) and regularly manages to twist its reader’s mind into those Gordian knots I so loved as a boy. “Time Travel” begins at what Gleick believes is the beginning, H. G. Wells’s 1895 “The Time Machine. ” “When Wells in his room imagined a time machine,” Gleick argues, “he also invented a new mode of thought. ” Western science was undergoing a sea change at the same time, of course: Lyell and Darwin had exploded older conceptions of the age of the Earth, locomotives and telegraphs were transforming space, and Einstein was about to punch a major hole in Newton’s theory of absolute time. Meanwhile, in literature, Marcel Proust was using memory to complicate more straightforward storytelling, and it wouldn’t be long before modernists like Woolf and Joyce were compressing, dilating, and folding time in half. But according to Gleick, Wells was the first to marry the words “time” and “travel,” and in doing so, “The Time Machine” initiated a kind of butterfly effect, the novel fluttering with each passing decade through the souls of more and more storytellers, who in turn influenced more and more of their successors, forking from Robert Heinlein to Jorge Luis Borges to Isaac Asimov to William Gibson to Woody Allen to Kate Atkinson to Charles Yu, until, to use Bradbury’s metaphor, the gigantic dominoes fell. Nowadays, Gleick writes, “Time travel is in the pop songs, the TV commercials, the wallpaper. From morning to night, children’s cartoons and adult fantasies invent and reinvent time machines, gates, doorways and windows, not to mention time ships and special closets, DeLoreans and police boxes. ” It’s also in the science. Gleick is a polymathic thinker who can quote from David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate thesis as readily as from Kurt Gödel or Lord Kelvin, and like many of the storytellers he thumbnails, he employs time travel to initiate engrossing discussions of causation, fatalism, predestination and even consciousness itself. He includes a humorously derisive chapter on people who bury time capsules (“If time capsulists are enacting reverse archaeology, they are also engaging in reverse nostalgia”) he tackles cyberspace (“Every hyperlink is a time gate”) and throughout the book he displays an acute and playful sensitivity to how quickly language gets slippery when we talk about time. Why, for example, do English speakers say the future lies ahead and the past lies behind, while Mandarin speakers say future events are below and earlier events are above? “If you say,” he writes, “that an activity wastes time, implying a substance in finite supply, and then you say that it fills time, implying a sort of container, have you contradicted yourself?” (A footnote here: Gleick is a brilliant footnoter never more than in this book have I been reminded of how footnotes can function as breaks in the time of a writer’s sentences, wormholes in the of a paragraph.) As in his 2011 exploration of information theory, “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,” Gleick’s greatest skill in “Time Travel” is to synthesize: He sees practice in theory, literature in science, Augustine in Rivka Galchen. If this new book can sometimes feel like a catalog of literary and filmic references to time travel, it’s also a wonderful reminder that the most potent technology we have is also the oldest technology we have: storytelling. Read a verse of Homer and you can walk the walls of Troy alongside Hector fall into a paragraph by Fitzgerald and your Now entangles with Gatsby’s Now open a 1953 book by Bradbury and go hunting T. rexes with Eckels. Gleick’s epigraph to his penultimate chapter comes from Ursula Le Guin: “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time,” and she’s right, of course. The shelves of every library in the world brim with time machines. Step into one, and off you go. | 1 |
1. Paula Jones Paula Corbin Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, sued President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment. Jones accused Clinton of sexually harassing her in a Little Rock hotel room in... | 0 |
By: Arjun Walia via collective-evolution.com
WikiLeaks just released their newest batch of leaked emails, and they contain messages sent to and from Barack Obama prior to his presidential inauguration.
The most interesting of the emails in this batch involves a message from John Podesta to Obama regarding an invitation from President George W. Bush to then ‘President-Elect’. It alluded to a transition plan that was being worked on before the election took place.
According to the memo, Obama was already discussing his transition into office with the then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Here is a statement taken from a memo sent from the transition board to Barack Obama:
As you have observed in your interactions with Secretary Paulson, he is apparently eager to involve you and your transition team extensively in his policy choices following the election.
Immediately after the election Secretary Paulson and other members of the Administration will likely seek to involve you and your transition team in their ongoing policy responses to the financial and housing crises. We also expect relentless interest from the press and public about your intended level of engagement with the Administration on these matters during the transition.
Think about this for a second, Obama’s transition was already being discussed with certain members of the Bush administration. Also, judging by the email, it’s clear that it was known that Obama was going to be the president.
Another telling email, dated October 30, 2008, came from John Podesta to the then Senator Obama discussing an economic transition team, and why Obama needed to get the wheels in motion before his term begins. | 0 |
House Speaker Paul Ryan ( ) identified two Capitol Police officers who stopped a shooter from massacring Republican congressmen at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia. [He identified them as Special Agent David Bailey and Special Agent Crystal Griner. Both were wounded, however Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa said they are in good condition and their injuries are not . “Without these two heroes, Agent Bailey and Agent Griner, many lives would have been lost,” Ryan said, addressing the House. Officers Bailey and Griner were providing security for House Majority Whip Steve Scalise ( ) when shooter James T. Hodgkinson, 66, of Belleville, Ill. opened fire on the congressmen who were practicing for an annual charity baseball game on Thursday. Scalise was shagging balls at second base when the gunman opened fire, according to eyewitnesses. Scalise was shot in the hip, and dragged himself from the infield to the outfield. As a member of House leadership, he is provided with a security detail. We must never take for granted the heroism of @CapitolPolice, who risk their lives every day to protect our nation’s Capitol. https: . — Michael F. Bennet (@SenBennetCO) June 14, 2017, I am so grateful for our brave @CapitolPolice officers first responders who were on scene and acted quickly — they literally saved lives. — Sean Patrick Maloney (@RepSeanMaloney) June 14, 2017, | 1 |
Donald J. Trump is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but he is also keenly aware that many in his own party — and many Americans, frankly — are scared and anxious about the idea of him in the Oval Office. Even he is not sure how a deeply divided nation would adjust to the first 100 days of a Trump presidency. What he does know, however, is what he wants to do in those early months. In a series of recent interviews, he sketched out plans that include showdowns with business leaders over jobs and key roles for military generals, executives and possibly even family members in advising him about running the country. Shortly after the Nov. 8 election, Trump and his vice president — most likely a governor or member of Congress — would begin interviewing candidates for the open Supreme Court seat and quickly settle on a nominee in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia. He would start “building a government based on relationships,” perhaps inviting the Republican leaders Paul D. Ryan and Mitch McConnell to escape the chilly Washington fall and schmooze at over golf and lobsters. On Inauguration Day, he would go to a “beautiful” gala ball or two, but focus mostly on rescinding Obama executive orders on immigration and calling up corporate executives to threaten punitive measures if they shift jobs out of the United States. And by the end of his first 100 days as the nation’s 45th leader, the wall with Mexico would be designed, the immigration ban on Muslims would be in place, the audit of the Federal Reserve would be underway and plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act would be in motion. “I know people aren’t sure right now what a President Trump will be like,” he said. “But things will be fine. I’m not running for president to make things unstable for the country. ” The New York Times interviewed Mr. Trump three times over the past two months, most recently on Saturday, as well as several campaign advisers and Trump confidants. The possibility of Mr. Trump in the Oval Office — an outcome that once seemed fanciful — became less remote on Tuesday night when his main challenger, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, quit the race. On Wednesday, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio said he would withdraw too. Despite his radical vision of how to remake America, and all his outrageous talk on juvenile subjects like his anatomy — to say nothing of the polls showing him behind Hillary Clinton — Jan. 20 may find the most underestimated politician in America assuming the presidency. While professing some surprise at his success, Mr. Trump increasingly sounds like a man who thinks he knows where he will be eight months from now, and the unrivaled power he will hold. He talked of turning the Oval Office into a board room, empowering military leaders over foreign affairs specialists in national security debates, and continuing to speak harshly about adversaries. He may post on Twitter less, but everyone will still know what he thinks. “As president, I’ll be working from the first day with my vice president and staff to make clear that America will be changing in major ways for the better,” Mr. Trump said in a telephone interview on Saturday. “We can’t afford to waste time. I want a vice president who will help me have a major impact quickly on Capitol Hill, and the message will be clear to the nation and to people abroad that the American government will be using its power differently. ” But he also acknowledged that he might face significant and incessant protests — even thousands of demonstrators massing on the National Mall as he takes the oath of office nearby at the Capitol. Mr. Trump said he would try to unite Republicans and disaffected Democrats and independents over the next six months before the November election, and then work in office to show Americans that his chief interest was fighting for their needs. He argued that the fact that he would not have to rely on wealthy donors to finance his campaign would ultimately prove appealing to many voters as they realize he is not “bought and paid for. ” “I know everyone won’t like everything I do, but I’m not running to be everyone’s favorite president,” Mr. Trump said. “Things are seriously wrong in this country. People are hurting, business is hurting. I’m running to move quickly to make big changes. ” Several friends and allies of Mr. Trump said that “negotiating” was the word he used the most to encapsulate his first 100 days in office. He wants to put people — business executives and generals are mentioned most often — in charge of cabinet agencies and throughout his senior staff, and direct them to negotiate deals and plans with congressional leaders and state officials, as well as insurance companies and others in the private sector. They say he will accomplish the things he has promised or else keep trying, well aware that his supporters will have his head if he does not. “He’s not going to depart from the agenda he’s laid out, not a bit,” said Roger Stone, a longtime adviser and confidant. Mr. Stone declined to describe details of his private conversations with Mr. Trump, except to say: “Having gone out a thousand times to say ‘I’m going to build a wall,’ he has to build a wall. He has said he would scrap trade deals his voters will demand he scrap trade deals. He knows that. ” Modern America has never seen anything like a Trump administration. Business leaders and even entertainment figures new to politics have been elected governors, of course, and insurgents like Newt Gingrich rose to power. But this is different. A Manhattan real estate developer and bombastic reality television star, Mr. Trump would be a president like no other. Yet historians suggest the country would adjust: He would quickly find himself consumed with the urgent and normalizing tasks of building a cabinet, assembling senior staff and reassuring Wall Street and the public that he was capable of governing America. “Trump is predicting he’ll be able to do all these things, but his workload will be pretty enormous and his power would be so limited by precedent, by the bureaucracy, by the Constitution,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian. “Even in trade and immigration, where Trump says he will make revolutionary changes, Congress has a say on those things. A lot of people have a say. The president is not king. ” But Mr. Trump pledged in the interviews to deliver on his campaign promises, even if they prove disruptive or explosive. On his first day in office, he said, he would meet with Homeland Security officials, generals, and others — he did not mention diplomats — to take steps to seal the southern border and assign more security agents along it. He would also call the heads of companies like Pfizer, the Carrier Corporation, Ford and Nabisco and warn them that their products face 35 percent tariffs because they are moving jobs out of the country. Democrats and some Republicans have warned that financial markets would react poorly and that Mr. Trump’s protectionist stances might plunge the country into recession, but he insisted that trade is “killing the country” and “the markets would be fine. ” “Bilateral talks with Mexico would start pretty quickly on the wall, and I would have chief executives into the Oval Office soon, too,” he said. “The Oval Office would be an amazing place to negotiate. It would command immediate respect from the other side, immediate understanding about the nation’s priorities. ” As for which foreign leader he would call first as president, he said “they would not necessarily be a priority. ” “We have to take a tougher stand with foreign countries,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re like the policemen of the world right now. So I wouldn’t be calling them up right away and getting more entangled. ” For good or ill, he would command the nation’s attention unlike any modern president, and not simply because of his penchant for redecorating in gold and renaming planes and buildings after himself. (For the record, he said he had no ambitious renovation plans.) “His first 100 days would be riveting,” said Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary for President George W. Bush. “The question would be whether he is capable of downshifting from the hot rhetoric of his campaign to the serious business of building a presidency based on sound judgment and necessary coalition building. ” Mr. Fleischer said it was possible that Mr. Trump would make the adjustment, given his frequent comments about negotiating with Democrats and Republicans to reach compromises. “That side of him intrigues me,” Mr. Fleischer said. “He keeps alluding to how well he gets along with people. It’s almost like Trump is playing a shrewd game. Tough campaigner today. Great deal maker later. ” He added, “Of course, if he wins he’ll have some level of strength and momentum akin to a mandate. That would help. ” Mr. Trump did seem aware that his early months could be consumed with trying to win confirmation for his cabinet and perhaps a new Supreme Court justice and with making appointments throughout the bureaucracy. He made it clear that he was not interested in delegating these tasks and that he wanted to make sure his appointees shared his governing philosophy. One of his closest advisers, his daughter Ivanka, would probably stay with his company, but he said he would seek counsel from her and her husband, the businessman Jared Kushner, and noted that family members had served in administrations before. Even jobs that might seem incidental in a Trump universe, like a United States ambassador to the United Nations, have apparently crossed his mind. “I think about a U. N. ambassador, about a secretary of defense and secretary of treasury, but I think more about winning first,” Mr. Trump said. “Otherwise I’m wasting time. I want people in those jobs who care about winning. The U. N. isn’t doing anything to end the big conflicts in the world, so you need an ambassador who would win by really shaking up the U. N. ” | 1 |
— Kombiz Lavasany (@kombiz) October 29, 2016
Here’s Star Wars actor Mark Hamill with some advice for scared Democrats over the news that the FBI is still investigating Hillary Clinton: Don't panic- VOTE! https://t.co/GtvOHEqgut
— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) October 28, 2016
Yeah, like we’ll fall for a Jedi mind trick with 10 days to go. Hokey religions and ancient candidates are no match for the FBI (hopefully). Trending | 0 |
We Are Change
FBI finds new emails related to Clinton investigation — and they came from investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting. The new emails were reportedly uncovered after the FBI seized devices belong to Huma Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner. Prosecutors issued a subpoena for Weiner’s cell phone and other records in late September amid allegations that he had been sexting with a 15-year-old girl. AP Photo
The FBI will reopen its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server after learning of “the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” FBI Director James Comey wrote in a letter to congressional leaders on Friday.
Comey said the team in charge of looking into Clinton’s server briefed him on Thursday on new emails it found “in connection with an unrelated case.”
“The FBI cannot assess whether or not this material may be significant,” Comey wrote, adding, “I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work.”
Here’s the full letter:
The emails were reportedly uncovered after the FBI seized devices belong to Huma Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner, the New York Times reported , citing law enforcement officials. Prosecutors issued a subpoena for Weiner’s cell phone and other records in late September amid allegations that he had been sexting with a 15-year-old girl.
Previous reports indicated that only three relevant emails were found, but a federal official told the Times on Friday afternoon that the number of emails uncovered through Abedin’s and Weiner’s devices numbered in the thousands.
Clinton gave a rally on Friday after the news broke, but did not mention the FBI’s announcement.
Stocks fell sharply after the FBI’s announcement.
Donald Trump responded to the news at a rally Friday, saying, “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is not on a scale we have ever seen … The FBI and the Justice Department now have the chance to right the horrible mistake that they made” in not previously recommending that Clinton be charged with criminal wrongdoing.
House Speaker Paul Ryan released a statement renewing his call for the Director of National Intelligence to suspend classified intelligence briefings for Clinton, who, he said, “was entrusted with some of our nation’s most important secrets, and betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information.”
Many on Twitter have condemned the FBI’s handling of the announcement that it would reopen the investigation.
“It’s bad enough having the media do the ‘raises questions,’ substance-free innuendo thing. Worse when the FBI director does it. Disgraceful,” economist Paul Krugman tweeted on Friday . “Comey needs to provide full info immediately. Otherwise he has clearly made a partisan intervention, betraying his office.”
“I have zero faith that anyone will handle this responsibly,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote . “It’s insane. He [Comey] at least owes the country a press briefing — anything more than a vague letter.”
“Director Comey should give a more complete explanation. Is this reviewing newly found emails? Is this reopening? Too much at stake,” wrote John Weaver , the former campaign strategist for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.
Clinton’s email scandal has dogged the Democratic presidential nominee for more than a year. In March 2015, she first admitted to exclusively using a private email account to send and receive work-related emails while she served as secretary of state. The controversy compelled her to hand over roughly 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department, which have been released in batches since last year.
But she deleted about 30,000 additional emails from her server that she said were “personal” in nature before handing it over to the FBI in August, five months after she gave individual emails to the State Department.
NBC’s Pete Williams reported Friday that the newly discovered emails were not among those originally withheld by Clinton or her campaign and were found on a “device” in a separate investigation. The decision to reopen the investigation was not related to emails released by WikiLeaks or to Russian hacking, Williams said.
A US official also told the Associated Press that the newly discovered emails relating to the FBI’s Clinton investigation did not come from her private server.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton looks at her mobile phone as she leaves her house to attend Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Phoenix Awards Dinner at the Washington convention center in Washington Thomson Reuters
After examining her emails for more than a year, the State Department issued a scathing report in May concluding that she “did not comply” with its policies when she chose to use a personal email account to conduct government business.
The State Department faulted Clinton and previous secretaries of state for poorly managing email and other computer information and for slowly responding to new cyber-security risks.
Two months later, the FBI decided not to recommend that the Justice Department bring charges against Clinton, saying Clinton’s conduct did not meet the threshold used to prosecute past violators who shared classified information over unclassified channels.
“In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts,” Comey said in July, after the FBI interviewed Clinton for three hours about her use of the server while at the State Department.
Trump has called the FBI’s determination “very unfair” and has said that if he were elected president, he would “lock her up” over her email scandal.
Clinton’s unusual email system was originally set up by a staffer during Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. It replaced another private server used by her husband, Bill Clinton.
The new server was run by Bryan Pagliano, who had worked as the IT director on Hillary Clinton’s campaign before she joined the State Department in May 2009. In 2013 — the same year she left the State Department — Clinton hired a small Denver-based IT firm named Platte River Networks to oversee the system.
Clinton has since apologized for using the email server while insisting she never sent or received information marked “classified” using her private email account.
The news tops off a particularly bad week for the Clinton campaign, which included both the release of a hacked memo published by WikiLeaks titled “Bill Clinton, Inc.” that raised questions about the blurring of lines between the Clinton Foundation charity and the Clintons’ personal finances and news that health-insurance premiums on the exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act were set to increase significantly in 2017.
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It appears that the transcript of the NFL’s Opening Night media event for the upcoming Super Bowl omitted most of the questions reporters asked about President Trump and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. [According to a hostile report by The New York Times, the NFL “built a virtual wall” around the New England Patriots to shield them from the discussion of the friendships that quarterback Tom Brady, coach Bill Belichick, and team owner Robert Kraft have with the President of the United States. But that “wall” also extended around questions reporters asked about Goodell. The Times report notes that many reporters quizzed players about politics, not just Brady but others as well, and asked their opinions on Commissioner Goodell. But those questions are absent in the NFL’s official transcript of the media event. The transcripts feature “almost no references to Trump or Goodell,” the paper notes. A spokesman for the NFL told the Times that these transcripts are not meant to be full, transcripts of the events. The paper further notes that the NFL has “sanitized its Super Bowl transcripts in past years,” with a reminder that two years ago the league also left controversial comments by Seattle Seahawks’ Richard Sherman out of transcripts. Andrew Bucholtz of AwfulAnnouncing. com points out that the questions missing from the NFL transcripts aren’t necessarily excised from the historical record, because reporters make their own recordings at these events. He also points out that the NFL is under no obligation to offer any transcripts regardless. Bucholtz concludes that those journalists who write about the controversies will write about them whether the NFL adds the comments to the transcripts or not. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
November 16, 2016
The President-erect has rewarded Nigel Farage, the People’s Prime Minister, with a significant portion of real estate and the keys to Ivana Trump. Addressing a packed crowd of cowering press, Mr. Trump said: ‘To thank Mr Farage for being a really great guy and good people, very good people, I have decided to give him the state of Idaho, for his own use and which he can pass on to whoever he wishes should he not be like me and immortal’.
‘He can do whatever he fancies to it. My advice would be to turn it into a golf course. And if you see any Canadians on it, shoot them. Only kidding there folks. Canadians never bother to go to Idaho, it’s too nondescript even for them. Anyway, Neil, go ahead. The state is all yours. You can twirl it around by the fuzzy bits for all I care. We’ve got plenty more states, 50 of them. You may need it to retire to, if what Mr Putin tells me is true. And I don’t care what all you carpet munching communists of the press say, Mr Putin’s great people, believe me.’
Mr Farage, 37, clearly delighted, said: ‘I am clearly delighted. This is the greatest day of my life apart from the one where we left Europe, the one where I asked the head of the European Commission, ‘Who are ya, who are ya?’, and when I won eight per cent of the vote in Bromley & Chislehurst, pushing Labour into fourth place. I shall be delighted to own Idaho, and thanks to a loan from Trumpfinance Inc, will be building a palace, the Farage Tower, in the state capital. Uh, what is the state capital of Idaho again?’
‘Who’s got the last laugh, eh? And I shall be advising President Trump that the sooner he leaves this treacherous union of states that is ruining America, the better. It’s time for Amexit.’ immacagain | 0 |
Braunschweiger Criminal Police chief Ulf Küche has claimed many migrants are “tricking” the German government when they convert to Christianity and others have called for more stringent standards regarding migrant conversions. [Police chief and of the Federal German Criminal Police Office Ulf Küche made the remarks after the news of the brutal killing of a child in an asylum home over the weekend, Tag 24 reports. The asylum seeker who killed the child, and was later shot by police, turned out to have converted to Christianity to avoid deportation after having committed arson years before. Küche said: “If the deportation of the offender has failed because he has changed his faith, then one has to put two and two together. ” He claimed that asylum seekers were just using Christianity as a cover to avoid being deported from Germany. “Muslim’s aren’t allowed to change their faith,” he added. “A lot has to happen that Muslims would abandon their religion. ” The evangelical regional bishop of Hannover, Ralf Meister agrees with Küche and has made it clear that more needs to be done to confirm that conversions are legitimate and not just done to avoid expulsion. “Abusive, frail baptisms can not be tolerated,” Meister said. “It is the task of state courts to take decisive action against this form of abuse,” the bishop added but did not state any proposals to identify abuses in the system. Viktor Pfaff, of the charity said the case of the migrant who killed the was “extreme” and cited the European human rights rules saying that no migrant should be deported to their homeland if they will face possible persecution due to their religious beliefs. Adult baptisms in neighbouring Austria have also increased largely due to the many migrants who have converted from Islam to Christianity over the course of the migrant crisis. The Austrian Roman Catholic church said the figure had doubled since last year. Whilst many migrants have fled to Europe specifically because they wanted to convert to Christianity, others have admitted they converted to help their chances at an asylum claim. Earlier this year, Muslim Syrians living at a refugee camp in Lebanon said they knew many migrants converting for asylum reasons. One Syrian named Ibrahim Ali said: “A lot of people are doing it to get to Europe, the U. S. and Canada. While I plan to stay in Lebanon, I know hundreds who been baptised just to help their applications. They would do anything to have security for their family. ” | 1 |
posted by Eddie At an Italian port in the Bay of Naples, construction on a wider dock is underway. But as workers build on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, they begin to discover something incredible buried beneath the waves… The first evidence of a lost underwater city off the western coast of Italy emerged in the 1920s. Fishermen from Naples began discovering strange, ancient artifacts caught up in their fishing nets. They alerted archaeologists to their finds. Later, workers widening docks at nearby Porto Venero discovered a haul of treasures languishing on the seabed. Statues, architectural remains and mechanisms featuring imperial insignias were all recovered. During the 1940s, pilot Raimondo Baucher snapped some aerial photographs of the region. The images revealed extensive archaeological ruins submerged beneath the surface. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that researchers began properly investigating the site. Surveys revealed that the ruins and artifacts belonged to what once would’ve been a grand and extensive city. A paved road was discovered with buildings either side, and cement jetties were seen to stretch out into the sea. A few years later, in 1969, a scuba diver made a startling discovery. Some 1,500 feet from the spot that had been previously identified as the sunken city’s center, a Roman sculpture was pulled from the water. Experts deduced it was part of the decor for a grand villa. Over the years, many more objects, such as marble statues and household items, have been recovered from the site. One by one, they’ve allowed archaeologists to construct a vivid picture of what life was like in the city, before it disappeared beneath the waves. Back in the days of the Roman Republic, Baiae was a lively, popular seaside resort. Its main draw was its bathhouses filled with warm mineral water from underground springs. The Romans believed the water had therapeutic powers, and many physicians would advise their patients to visit the area. Apparently, Baiae served a similar role in Roman society as Las Vegas does today. Brimming with glitzy facilities like casinos and swimming pools, it became known as a hedonistic hideaway for the Republic’s elite. In Baiae, wine-fuelled beach parties and loose sexual morals were considered the norm. Apparently, Roman dictator Julius Caesar once owned a villa in the city. Several celebrities of the day – Nero and Cicero, for example – were believed to make visits, too. The city also played an important role in some of the most celebrated events in Roman history. When the astrologer Thrasyllus predicted that Caligula had as much chance of becoming emperor as he did of riding a horse across the Gulf of Baiae, Caligula is said to have ordered the building of a three-mile bridge across the water here. He then proceeded to cross it on his favorite horse, proving the astrologer wrong. For centuries Baiae remained the resort of choice among the upper echelons of Roman society. Then, in the first millennia AD, its fortunes began to change. The widespread migration known to Romans as the Barbarian Invasions had begun, and the city was attacked and looted for the first time. Later, in the 8th century, Saracen invaders wreaked further havoc on the streets of Baiae. Then, in 1500, the city’s remaining inhabitants abandoned it after malaria became prevalent in the region. Finally, later that century, the very geological features that had made Baiae such a hit led to its ultimate demise. The volcanic activity that had fed Baiae’s popular bathhouses with warm water eventually caused a seismic shift in the land. The result? It sent the city and all of its buildings straight into the Mediterranean Sea. By the time the dust had settled, the coastline had receded by up to 200 feet. Now under around 16 feet of water, Baiae seemed destined to be forever lost to the annals of history. However, all that changed in the 20th century, when one by one the city started to give up its treasures to the outside world. In 1980 the first official dig took place in the sea. Underwater archaeologists were able to identify a nymphaeum – a type of shrine dedicated to the nymphs or nature spirits – believed to belong to Emperor Claudius. Archaeologists were also able to build a clear picture of the city’s imperial palace, a vast structure filled with many statues and works of art. Some of the artifacts, including the nymphaeum, were brought to shore and displayed in the Phlegraean Fields Archaeological Museum in modern-day Baia, Italy. In the year 2000, a ferry ran aground and seriously damaged the underwater ruins. Because of this, all commercial ships were barred from sailing in the area. Then, two years later, the Baia Archaeological Park was formed. Designated a protected marine area, the park exists to preserve the ruined city for future generations to enjoy. Today, those keen to catch a glimpse of this lost underwater civilization are in luck. A company called BaiaSommersa runs regular sightseeing trips from Naples aboard a glass-bottomed boat. Braver souls can also don scuba diving gear and explore the ruins at their own pace. Source: | 0 |
By Smoking Mirrors on October 29, 2016 Smoking Mirrors — Oct 29, 2016 Dog Poet Transmitting……. Chances are better than not that Trump might win this election. Of course, with the Soros voting machines and the collective hatred of the privileged toward those being ground to dust beneath their hobnailed boots, it’s a no brainer that the election will be hijacked no matter what. The biggest enemy of humanities liberation from the cesspools of manufactured darkness has been human ignorance. For whatever the reason, in this apocalypse, people are waking up and becoming angry. They are seeing Clinton for the international mass murderer and criminal that she is. It turns out to be less a vote for Trump than it is a vote against Hillary. The key evidence to support this particular argument is that few people are showing up for Hillary rallies and speeches and large crowds are attending Trumps. The degree of anti-Trump bias in the media is beyond anything previously seen and the polls, as we know, are bullshit. I haven’t spoken to a single person here, on our aborted trip, or anywhere that was not for Trump and… I have spoken to a lot of people. It’s pretty good crowd sampling as it covers several states and pedestrian locations in those states. An associate of mine named Bill Juhas tells me that as he sees it, Obama plans on pardoning Hillary for all of her crimes and in return, Hillary will appoint him to the Supreme Court. That makes a strange kind of sense. I do not doubt the possibility of anything these fiends might attempt to throw at us. What Obama has done to American culture is about as obscene as it gets. He should be locked in a very small gender neutral bathroom with a bipolar tranny for all eternity. My only hesitation in passing this on to the authorities who control these placement duties is that he might like it. Our trip was aborted because the psychic and ethereal, material ethers were vibrating with a type of manic panic, the like of which I have not previously encountered. Turning around and heading back the way we came had an immediate salutary effect on all of our senses of well being and the potential lack thereof. Your friendly author has not always exercised the common sense and native judgment that was available to him. We’re trying transform that tendency into something useful out of the shards of former stupidities. There have been a few dustups in these environs of late and some amount of crazy email spamming as well (these are not connected). We didn’t bother to read the emails and we tried to exercise detachment in respect of the former. Now we will turn to the point of this exercise which is only tangentially associated with the garbage time antics of a handful of dysfunctional psychopaths, or what they may be planning to do to screw things up for the rest of us; not the least of which is to generate an economic disaster of Godzilla like proportions, to render us terrified and malleable. Economic disasters do not come about on their own. They are manufactured by Satanists and as we have said here on more than one occasion, one does not have to be an initiated Satanist to be a Satanist. Anyone who behaves like one is one. What we would like to talk about, here, in the waning moments of same old same old, is a most subjective thing. It has to do with my own intuition. It has to do with what I am feeling, as I scan what I am able to see of the world around me; close at hand and at a further remove. It has to do with the way information feeds into my consciousness and then reassembles itself into projections for the future. As we know, there really is no such thing as the future but… for the sake of argument… I feel no apprehension whatsoever. I feel as if it is all in the process of working itself out in a most wonderful and serendipitous way. This does not mean that millions will not die, due to this possible schematic or that possible schematic. We live in a collected universe in which we are all a universe unto ourselves and the possibilities of what might and might not happen are endless, as is the pointlessness of speculation. We live in a time of experts who can’t find their ass with both hands. Let us consider that hundreds of millions, billions will die whether anything happens or not because that is the nature of mortal terms of being. That is the nature of each of our individual leases on life. A catastrophe can sweep the planet. A ruinous war can escalate to the point of no return, by which few or none return from it. Anything might and might not happen in this unpredictable world but what I do know is that it is all under control and in the hands of the most far seeing and benevolent power; the most absolute and unassailable power that there is or ever was. I had been told this a long time ago; a long time ago in relative terms and a tiny blip of time otherwise. I heard it but I did not hear it because I did not understand it but now I do. I have come to understand the meaning of it. The experience of comfort that I take from this is immense. Everything is under control!!! Surely we all remember the scripture that says; “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father’s consent.” Nothing takes place here that is not permitted or engineered by the master of all things. It is a peculiar disconnect in this life that we can hear and not hear. We can understand the intellectual meaning of a statement but the force of it escapes our awareness. Of course, an atheistic would dismiss the validity of this. They believe that there is nothing beyond our presence here and once we are gone we are gone forever. They believe that life is an accident of some form of evolution of consciousness and form. There is not a great deal that I know but… I know that this is not true. I have direct experience otherwise and that has occurred more times than I can remember. I know that God is real. My perception of God is most certainly flawed but the existence of God is beyond any doubt in my heart and in my mind. I feel a terrible sense of loss when I consider the fate of an atheist, as I do when I think of all the wasted lives that pass like drunken marionettes before my eyes. I am powerless to effect a change in their destinies since in the majority of cases our paths will never cross. You and I and anyone can only affect those that fortune has put in our way. Usually we influence others through the operation of our desires and appetites, or through the various traumas that we visit on one another. Occasionally we might inspire another, if we ourselves are inspired and therein lies the heart of the matter. It is up to us who and what we seek out for inspiration. If we are dedicated and determined we will attract the attention of an angel of light, who is employed by the origin of light and we will be influenced by that light and we will transmit that light into the lives of others. I can think of no greater and more meaningful employment of our energies in this life. Nothing else seems to contain anything of value. It is just the rotating wheel of endless futility. It is the dance of Sisyphus. I look at all the alternatives in life and these options fill me with horror. To me, Hell is a consciousness devoid of the almighty. Hell is the absence of God. I do not intend to define what God is. That is beyond the capacity of any human mind and it is the source of never ending contention as well as immeasurable cruelties that take place each day because so many of us have made presumptions upon the nature of the ineffable. It is not our job to delineate the composition of the divine. It is our job to ‘host’ the divine and the result of that hosting is that we are filled with the spirit and presence of the divine and thereby the divine is inclined to express through us to the degree that we permit this to occur. The divine is present, after a fashion in every one of us because we could not be alive otherwise but… we preempt this with the shadow of the false self and it is thicker or thinner depending on the individual involved and what they get up to. This shadow is made denser and less dense according to the manner in which it is employed. Some activities are dark indeed. I believe that nothing positive is served by worry and fear. Fear displaces Love and without Love one has no guidance and no protection. Love not only casts out fear but it arrests the potential of all of the events that fear exists in the apprehension of. We each have some understanding of the meaning of love but the meaning of Love it far too deep for us to comprehend more than a fragment. If Love is housed in our being and allowed to guide and direct us, it will drive everything that is not Love far away from it. You will walk and live and breathe in confidence and every moment you will come closer to Love and Love will come closer to you. Let us turn our minds away from every specter that this world generates in order to confound and distress us. Focus on the great and unassailable power of the ineffable and let the rest of it go its way according to the people and situations it applies to. These other phantasms are of no concern to us, unless we make them so. End Transmission……. | 0 |
ZACHARY, La. — For Linda Fernandez, this summer has been one long disaster tour. In July, her daughter died in Baton Rouge, while her infant mysteriously ailed in Houston. It was at a hospital there, a week and a half ago, where Ms. Fernandez learned she had lost her home, too, to flooding. She explained this to President Obama on Tuesday afternoon as he walked through that house, emptied of all the furniture except for what was too heavy to haul outside. He hugged her four times and they had their picture taken. Others may have debated the timing of Mr. Obama’s visit and whether he was too late in coming to this state, but Ms. Fernandez wiped tears from her eyes and said she had not been following any of that. “Really I don’t have time to think when I go home — I mean, go to my place in the corner,” said Ms. Fernandez, who turned 69 on Saturday and is staying at a friend’s house. “I’ve been busy. I haven’t watched the news. I’ve been doing all this by myself. ” Nearly 11 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Mr. Obama came to meet with flood victims in a visit that required him to navigate a delicate mix of compassion and politics. The president landed in Baton Rouge to see the devastation left by flooding in the last week, and to demonstrate, in part by his presence, that the federal government will deliver help to those who lost everything. Standing amid rubble in front of flooded homes, he lamented that so many people’s lives were “upended” by the floodwaters that swept through communities with devastating force. But he praised the disaster relief response and expressed optimism that the people of Baton Rouge would recover and thrive. “I know how resilient the people of Louisiana are and I know you will rebuild again,” Mr. Obama, dressed in a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, said after touring several homes. He pledged that the federal government would support the victims of the community for the long run. “These are some good people down here,” he said. “They got a lot of work to do and they shouldn’t have to do it alone. ” Local and state officials from both political parties have praised the federal response in Baton Rouge, drawing a sharp contrast with the delays by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Katrina. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, a Republican who frequently criticizes Mr. Obama, said in an interview that federal officials had done “an excellent job” responding to the floods. “They actually do care,” he said. But Mr. Obama arrived four days after Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, visited areas around Baton Rouge. In a Twitter message on Tuesday, Mr. Trump mocked the president for failing to cut short his Martha’s Vineyard vacation last week. “Too little, too late!” he wrote. Some Republicans and distraught locals have also criticized the president for waiting more than a week to visit the tens of thousands of residents affected by the floods. More than 7, 000 people were forced into 37 shelters across a vast stretch of the state by the rainfall, which has been blamed for 13 deaths. The Advocate, a local newspaper, mocked the president in an editorial last week. And on Tuesday, Representative Charles Boustany, a Louisiana Republican, added, “It’s a shame it took the president so long to come to Louisiana, but we are glad he is here. ” Frustration over the president’s absence, merging with a widespread sense that the disaster has been unjustly overshadowed in media coverage of the Summer Olympics and the presidential election, has ranged from the hot anger of The Advocate editorial to a more subdued disappointment. Some here said the president had been callously detached for vacationing during a catastrophe, while others said he was respectfully keeping his distance during rescue efforts. But for those most intensely affected, the political debate is a luxury they can hardly afford. “I didn’t even know he was here,” said Nita Case, 75, sitting wearily on a folded camp chair inside her gutted home, 11 miles from the neighborhood Mr. Obama had just visited. Florence Lucas, 79, had lost everything in Hurricane Betsy in 1965, lost her home during Hurricane Katrina and then had her home flooded this summer. She stood in the kitchen as a contractor discussed the rebuilding timeline, a needlepoint Home Sweet Home sign still hanging above the door to the hallway. “Politics should be out of this,” Ms. Lucas said, adding that an earlier visit by the president would have just complicated the work of local responders and the police. “What can he do? He can’t come and get rid of the water. ” The president praised W. Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator, for overhauling the agency to make it work better, and he announced that the federal government had already distributed $127 million in aid to the flooded communities. Still, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, issued a statement after meeting with the president saying that he had formally requested additional help for his state. Mr. Edwards, who had urged the president not to visit the state when the rescue operation was in full swing, said the federal government so far has been “responsive to all of our requests. ” Mr. Obama was in Baton Rouge for about three hours before heading back to Washington. White House officials said the president also planned to meet briefly with the family of Alton B. Sterling, the who was shot while being held on the ground by Baton Rouge police officers, as well as families of officers killed and injured in an ambush in July. In the long run, the success of Mr. Obama’s visit will be judged in two different contexts: first, the political imagery that has become a vital part of White House planning since President George W. Bush was photographed gazing down on New Orleans from Air Force One, and second, the gritty reality on the ground for people struggling to rebuild. As a candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama was eager to focus on the politics of Mr. Bush’s flyover, denouncing him during a rally for being “a president who only saw the people from the window of an airplane instead of down here on the ground, trying to provide comfort and aid. ” Now the spotlight has shifted to Mr. Obama’s actions. After touring the damage, Mr. Obama pledged continued help “even after the TV cameras leave” and waved aside questions about politics. “I guarantee you,” he said, “nobody on this block, none of those first responders, nobody gives a hoot whether you’re Democrat or Republican. ” He could have been referring to Nita Case’s husband, Dennis, 78. A fan of Bill O’Reilly, the conservative talk show host, he had few good words for the government, saying, it “ain’t never done enough. ” But he also said he had paid little attention to the politics surrounding Mr. Obama’s visit on Tuesday. “I haven’t watched the news for two weeks,” he said. “I’ve been busy. ” | 1 |
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Don’t be deceived by Hillary Clinton’s lie that she’ll fix Obamacare. She already tried to fix healthcare in 1994 when President Bill Clinton put her in charge of transforming our healthcare and insurance plans. She called it Hillarycare, and like Obamacare, it failed miserably. Now, her plans for Obamacare have been exposed — along with how millions of Americans will end up dead thanks to her “fix.”
Hillary Clinton is a very dangerous woman. The one thing that scares healthcare professionals is her plans to fix Obamacare, which is falling apart with premiums going through the roof. It was always going to fail.
As a Registered Nurse for over 20 years, working in the inner city in Los Angeles, I saw firsthand how health care works. When Barack Obama and his Democratic minions passed Obamacare in 2010, I freaked out, knowing this would bring untimely deaths to many of my fellow Americans, and now that Hillary says she’ll fix Obamacare, I can be silent no more. Hillary promises to fix Obamacare with full blown socialized medicine
The first thing you need to realize is that Obamacare was never the ultimate plan. It was meant to be a step toward total socialized medicine. Hillary will put Obamacare on steroids, and the goal is for a complete government controlled system that every American is enrolled in, where that is the only choice you have.
This is the same system that plagues Canada and Great Britain, and it means Americans will die. Instead of your doctor deciding what type of care you get, there are strict guidelines which all doctors must follow. If you are a woman diagnosed with ovarian cancer, you will only be given one path to take. You will not be allowed to find out about cutting edge drugs or treatments. You will be sent home to die. Kathleen Sebelius said, under Obamacare, “someone lives and someone dies.”
Under socialized medicine, it’s all about cost effectiveness, and ovarian cancer has a high death rate. So, you’re not worth the expensive treatment that may cure you or help you live longer. You won’t even know those treatments exist. They’ll pat you on the head, say how sorry they are, and tell you that they will do everything they can to keep you “comfortable.”
This won’t affect the ultra-rich. This will affect the lower and middle class, who can’t afford to seek treatment on their own.
Socialized medicine will affect even happy events like having a baby. In keeping with the culture of death that surrounds socialized medicine, here’s what happened to one mother in Great Britain whose baby was born at 22 weeks — an age at which some infants have survived when life-saving measures were used. Tracy Goodwin watched in horror as they let her baby die.
Forty-six minutes later [after he was born], and despite her desperate pleas to midwives for assistance, Miss Godwin’s son died as she held him.
She has since been told that the hospital has a policy not to resuscitate babies born earlier than 24 weeks into pregnancy. [via Daily Mail ] Tracy Goodwin (left) holds her baby boy, born at 22 weeks (right).
If you need to see a doctor, good luck. In Canada, they have to wait 3-4 months just to see their “primary care physician.” Canadians wait on average 35 weeks, or 6 months, to see a specialist after getting a referral, according to the Fraser Institue . If you have cancer, you could be dead by the time you can see an oncologist.
This is why most doctors and nurses are fleeing healthcare. We can no longer help our patients the right way, with clear consciences, and those doctors and nurses who support this kind of system are lying to themselves into believing that this system is healthcare. It’s managed deathcare, and that is what Big Brother does best.
What’s the answer? Donald Trump . He will repeal Obamacare, and even if he does nothing else, it’s a win. He is putting healthcare back into the free market where it belongs. What drives insurance prices down? Competition — and that is what he will do when he opens up buying healthcare across state lines.
Lastly, a brain surgeon should be paid more than a truck driver, no offense to truck drivers. Yet, under socialized medicine, doctors are made to take a salary which is capped. This, in itself, does not give our smartest kids any incentive to become a brain surgeon. Making a lot of money drives those interested in medicine to become doctors. It’s just a fact, and it made our healthcare system the best in the world before Obama came along.
Back in 1994, Hillary tried to pass socialized medicine called Hillarycare, and it failed. Now, she is back, promising to fix Obamacare with Hillarycare, but if you value your loved ones’ lives, there is only one thing to do. Make sure people realize what is at stake in this election. Literally, their lives are on the line if Donald Trump doesn’t win. | 0 |
Men whose prostate cancer comes back after surgery are more likely to survive if, along with the usual radiation, they also take drugs to block male hormones. The finding, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, comes from a study that experts say will help clarify treatment for many patients. After surgery to remove the prostate, more than 30 percent of men have a recurrence, and until now there has not been clear evidence about the best way to stop the disease from killing them. Most are given radiation, but prescribing drugs to counter the effects of male hormones has been inconsistent. The study, paid for by the National Cancer Institute, showed that among men who received radiation and hormonal treatment, 76. 3 percent were still alive after 12 years, compared to 71. 3 percent who had radiation alone. At 12 years, the men who had both treatments were also much less likely to have died from their prostate cancer — 5. 8 percent versus 13. 4 percent — or to have the cancer spread around their bodies — 14. 5 percent versus 23 percent. “This is a big deal,” said Dr. Ian M. Thompson Jr. of the Christus Santa Rosa Health System in San Antonio, who was not part of the study but wrote an editorial accompanying it. “There are so many things we do in prostate cancer that we don’t know if they make a big difference in survival. This is one of the things where now we can say for sure. ” He added that he hoped the findings would change medical practice. The medical term for blocking male hormones is chemical castration, and the treatments can cause hot flashes, sexual problems and other side effects. So to put a man through it, said Dr. Anthony L. Zietman, an author of the study, “you’d better have some decent justification. ” Dr. David F. Penson, the chairman of urologic surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said the study “gives more credence to the concept that you have to treat the whole patient,” rather than just irradiating the area where the cancer used to be. He said the idea of blocking hormones in men like those in the study was finding its way into medical practice. About 161, 360 new cases of prostate cancer and 26, 730 deaths are expected in the United States in 2017, according to the American Cancer Society. The average age at diagnosis is 66. Globally, there were 1. 1 million cases and 307, 000 deaths in 2012, the most recent data available from the World Health Organization. The study, begun in 1998 and led by Dr. William U. Shipley, a radiation oncologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, had an ambitious goal: to follow the patients long enough to find out whether treatment would affect their survival. Prostate cancer grows slowly, so it took well over a decade for answers to emerge. Researchers and patients from 150 sites in North America participated. The patients were 760 men who had their prostates removed for cancer that had not spread, but who then had a sign of recurrence — a rise in their blood levels of antigen, or PSA, a protein associated with prostate cancer. The men in the study had PSAs of 0. 2 to 4 nanograms per milliliter. “That’s just like the first wisp of smoke,” said Dr. Zietman, who is a professor of radiation oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “There’ll be fire someday. ” The fire might take five, 10 or 15 years to break out, but Dr. Zietman said, “Many are in their 50s or 60s, and will live long enough to get into trouble. ” The traditional practice for a rising PSA after surgery has been to give radiation, which targets only the pelvis. The idea of the study was to add hormonal treatment, which might stop minute clumps of cancer that had spread to other parts of the body. All the men in the study had radiation for six and a half weeks. For two years, half also received a drug, bicalutamide, and the other half were given placebos. They were followed, on average, for about 13 years. “This is the first trial that’s shown, if you follow these patients long enough, there is a real difference,” Dr. Zietman said. “More people survive 15 years later. ” Men who had more aggressive cancers — reflected by higher PSA readings after surgery and by the pathology and surgical reports on their tumors — had the most to gain from the treatment. The results do not mean that every man with a rising PSA after surgery should have hormone treatment, Dr. Zietman said. Men 75 or older may not need it, because they may die from other causes before the cancer can catch up with them. “But if they’re younger and with a longer life expectancy, treatment is reasonable,” he said. Bicalutamide causes men to develop breasts and potentially other problems, and the high dose given in the study is no longer used in the United States. Other drugs like Lupron have mostly taken its place, and may be even more effective, Dr. Zietman said. The study proved the concept that hormone blocking increases survival, he added, so other drugs that do the same thing should also help patients live longer. Another study in progress in Canada and Europe uses the newer drugs, and is trying to determine whether taking them for six months, rather than two years, might be enough. | 1 |
White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney emerged from a meeting with House Republicans with an ultimatum. If the effort to replace Obamacare fails, the United States is stuck with Obamacare, according to several Congressional reporters on Twitter. [Mulvaney was joined by a group of administration officials including senior advisors Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Kellyanne Conway for an evening meeting with House Republicans in an effort to break the logjam on the bill. Most House Freedom Caucus members refuse to vote for the bill without major changes. Moderate House Republicans have also protested the bill. But the message from the White House was that, pass or fail, it was time to move the votes forward. “We’re going to vote,” Bannon told reporters on Capitol Hill as he left the meeting. “Let’s vote. ” When reporters asked if Bannon thought the bill would pass, he said, “We’ll see. ” At this point, both the White House and House Republicans don’t have enough votes to pass the bill. The vote will take place Friday morning. | 1 |
Pat Caddell talked all things media and President Trump with Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Monday. [Caddell said, “I think they are united in a narrative. And that narrative is, somebody did something wrong. It was Donald Trump and therefore, at the end of the day, he must not be president. ” “They’re still fighting the campaign that they lost,” he added, meaning the media. “They will not put out things that disagree with their narrative,” said Caddell. “That’s when they stop being a press. They’ve become propagandists and this is really dangerous stuff. It is really scary because for many voters, they don’t know where to turn, necessarily, to get a view that gives them both sides. ” Caddell said it started the day after the election when Democrats declared, “we’re not going to be a loyal opposition, we’re going to be a resistance, as though we were being occupied. When rational voices take that stand, when the heat becomes so great in the kitchen, let me tell you something, if the rest of us are getting a temperature, the people who are unbalanced are getting a raging fever. ” Caddell was linking both Democrat rhetoric and the bias present in media related to the recent shooting in D. C.. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. LISTEN: | 1 |
It’s Moosewood’s world. We’re just eating in it. Consider granola: The word used to be a derogatory term. Now it’s a supermarket category worth nearly $2 billion a year. Kombucha was something your art teacher might have made in her basement. The company GT’s Kombucha brews more than a million bottles annually and sells many of them at Walmart and Safeway. And almond milk? You can add it to your drink at 15, 000 Starbucks locations for 60 cents. Just as yoga and meditation have gone mainstream (and let’s not get started on designer Birkenstocks) so have ideas and products surrounding health, wellness and eating that play like a flashback to the early 1970s. staples of that time — the miso, tahini, dates, seeds, turmeric and ginger that were absorbed from other cultures and populated the Moosewood restaurant cookbooks — now make appearances at some of the most innovative restaurants in the country, where menus are built around vegetables and heritage grains. Vegetarianism and veganism are on the rise and kale, the bacon of the moment, is now routinely heaped on salad plates across the land. The hippies may not have won the election, but they are winning the plate. (Or rather, the bowl.) “The counterculture is always ahead of what’s happening in mainstream culture,” said Peter Meehan, the editorial director of Lucky Peach magazine. “It’s as true in any creative field as it is in food. ” Deborah Madison, the author and chef who made vegetarian cooking sophisticated with her 1987 cookbook, “Greens,” has seen this food before: She cooked it in the 1960s and ’70s, as one of “a growing number of people who were trying to cook differently from our parents,” she said. “Our intentions were good,” Ms. Madison continued. “We were using wholesome foods in contrast to our mothers’ new reliance on cake mixes, white flour, TV dinners and that sort of thing. ” The problem, she said, was that her generation didn’t know much about cooking. “What we cooked was very much on the stodgy side,” she said. “Today the same foods are now seen as interesting and delicious and worth eating. We can appreciate their flavors, textures and general possibilities because we — that is, the big collective we — know so much more about cooking foods of all kinds. ” The current food mood may also be a reaction to the more exhausting aspects of life in the digital era. “It’s a weird mixture of technology and palo santo” — iPhones and incense — said the chef Gerardo Gonzalez, suggesting that people who live online may be moved to seek out the restorative properties of natural foods. “You’re constantly in this thing that’s not reality, and eating food can be the most real act you can partake in. ” At Lalito, his restaurant in Manhattan, Mr. Gonzalez serves food he describes as “hippie Chicano,” like vegan chicharrones and the brown goddess cucumber salad, with brown mole vinaigrette, mint and candied pepitas, as well as dishes like eggplant topped with tahini, lemon juice and Japanese gomasio seasoning. (The restaurant opened in late 2016 as Lalo it was recently renamed to avoid conflict with a similarly named restaurant.) Growing up with chain restaurants and living with the “mental fog” that comes from regularly eating meat, dairy and starch, said Mr. Gonzalez, 34, has led him and his peers to seek an alternative. “I think people are now more likely to turn to açai bowls than a bacon cheeseburger for their hangover,” he said. “For a lot of people who gravitate toward this lifestyle, it’s not hypocritical. ” As one of the owners of Dimes, a restaurant that opened three years ago in Manhattan, Alissa Wagner is partly responsible for bringing those açai bowls to the Instagram set. Ms. Wagner believes that diners are a lot more knowledgeable about where and how to eat better than they were when she graduated from the Natural Gourmet Institute, a mostly vegetarian cooking school in Manhattan, in 2010. “There was a huge awakening that happened in the last couple of years with the way that New Yorkers approach food,” she said. “The restaurants that were became outdated and were overtaken by a much more vibrant and menu. ” Some of the most anticipated restaurant openings of the past year have had a crunchy vibe. Tartine Manufactory in San Francisco is never without a line for its rustic sourdough bread, pastries and turmeric kefir. At Destroyer in Culver City, Calif. the chef Jordan Kahn incorporates elements like puffed rice and pickled mushrooms into his precise and visually arresting cooking. For his avocado toast — a dish that is the spiritual descendant of the ’70s avocado sandwich, smashed on health bread and topped with a handful of alfalfa sprouts — the avocado is confited. Brunch at the “ ” Bad Hunter in Chicago includes sticky buns and sourdough porridge with walnut butter. In New York, Vongerichten recently opened abcV, an organic, restaurant that serves dishes like “stems and sprouts” with sunflower seeds, and traffics in ayurvedic tonics, which have captivated millennials hunting for the next thing after juice. At L’estudio, the pottery is fired in the cafe’s adjoining ceramics studio. And while the landmark vegan restaurant Angelica Kitchen in Manhattan is closing this week, its legacy is vast — veggie burgers and grain bowls, once a menu rarity, can be had at chains like Hillstone and Sweetgreen. (The chef Camille Becerra, who just opened De Maria, which is heavy on bowls, cooked at Angelica Kitchen — a formative experience.) Even the elegant French restaurant Le Coucou serves avocado toast at breakfast and brunch, charging $18 for the winkingly named “Le Californien. ” Despite the often extragavant price tag attached to many staples and the Vitamix required to prepare them, this is food that is easy to make at home, with plenty of cookbooks for guidance. The last several months have seen the release of many and cookbooks, including ones from Lucky Peach Martha Stewart Wolfgang Puck the vegan website Thug Kitchen Sarah Britton, of the website My New Roots, whose Instagram feed of bowls and sprouts has over 330, 000 followers and Amanda Chantal Bacon of Moon Juice, a small chain of juice shops that started in Venice, in Los Angeles. In her book and at her shops, Ms. Bacon, a former line cook at Lucques in Los Angeles — and the subject of a Twitter storm last summer, after a crystal was stolen from her Silver Lake location — spreads the gospel of coconut yogurt, reishi mushroom powder and meditation, while selling $10 Moon Dusted Milks made with brown rice protein, chia seeds and blue spirulina. Her plans for Moon Dust expansion are global. Last week, Ms. Madison released “In My Kitchen: A Collection of New Vegetarian Recipes. ” Her elegant has given rise to a generation of chefs, cookbook authors and bloggers focused on vegetables and whole foods, like Anna Jones, who wrote the vegetarian cookbook “A Modern Way to Cook. ” (Ms. Madison, like a baby boomer who is both tickled and horrified to see come back in style, said she always found it “amusing that foods like the brown rice have come around to being seen as good to eat, and preferable even to white rice. ”) For amateur picklers and there is a new edition of “Wild Fermentation,” the 2003 manual that helped its author, Sandor Katz, become a heroic figure among cooks who ferment their own foods. Like the landers and Whole Earth Catalog readers before them, a new generation is once again becoming interested in fermentation, especially projects, a shift that Mr. Katz attributes to people becoming more critical of the industrial food system and seeking alternatives. “Once you start asking questions about how this food was produced, then fermentation is just part of the answer,” he said. He also cited recent scientific findings on the microbiome and the notion that health may be affected by bacteria and other microbes living in your intestinal tract, which are in turn influenced by what you eat. “People are recognizing that this important biodiversity inside of us has been diminished and are seeking strategies to restore it for immune function, digestion, mental health and everything else,” he said. “So people are seeking out foods. ” In fact, a and business just opened near Mr. Katz’s home in Cannon County, Tenn. population 16, 000. “It’s not just happening in New York, San Francisco and Portland,” he said. (For the record, Mr. Katz bristles at the association of fermentation with hippiedom. “In terms of countercultural movements, I feel like punk is much more resonant,” he said. “The punk movement was all about D. I. Y. and publishing your own zine, and figuring out how to make things yourself and improvise. ”) Mr. Gonzalez has noticed a change in diners’ palates toward flavors that are brighter and more acidic, like those produced by fermentation, as well as earthier and flavors, like nutritional yeast. “People are starting to realize that these ingredients are a whole new color palette,” he said. This group of Americans has also developed a tooth and an appreciation of the textures imparted by grains like buckwheat and rye. “I was in a meeting last night where one person suggested making a chocolate cake recipe with fermented cabbage in it,” Ms. Madison said. As with anything counterculture edging toward the mainstream, the threat of looms. Alice Waters, the Berkeley queen of local and seasonal cooking, applauds the movement away from fast and processed food, but said she was wary of how its language had been appropriated by mainstream brands. “There’s a lot of hijacking going on right now that is very disturbing,” Ms. Waters said. “I mean, they can’t quite take ‘organic,’ but they’re taking everything else. ” At the restaurant level, though, hippie fare has long been “a lifestyle and a brand,” Mr. Gonzalez conceded. “You’re not just selling food,” he said. “You’re giving the promise of a healthier life, or a more enlightened meal. ” Recipe: Sweet Potatoes With Sauce Follow NYT Food on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. | 1 |
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After Thursday’s Bundy verdict and Standing Rock response, the judicial system seems to be communicating loud and clear that white lives matter more.
On the same day that Ammon Bundy and his gang of domestic terrorists were acquitted for taking over federal property while armed to the teeth , over 100 Native Americans protecting their own land were arrested, gassed, beaten with batons, and shot with rubber bullets . The difference in how each group was treated couldn’t be more stark.
From the very beginning, the system was set up to favor the Bundys. Shortly after the takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon took place earlier this year, the police response was muted .
“During Saturday’s rally, not a police officer was visible. And so far law enforcement agencies have not approached the refuge or blocked access to the territory,” The Oregonian reported in January.
Even though the wildlife refuge was on federal property, no FBI agents or military units were deployed to remove the Bundy militia from the building. The Bundys’ acquittal came from an all-white jury , who took just 6 hours of deliberation to find the gang not guilty of the crimes they were charged for, despite the Bundys livestreaming the event to the world . And as the Associated Press reported, the threat of violence was very real, as federal authorities recovered nearly 17,000 live rounds of ammunition at the bird sanctuary, as well as almost 2,000 shell casings from rounds previously fired.
To contrast, the response from both state law enforcement and private security to the nonviolent civil disobedience exercised by the Standing Rock Sioux at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline was incredibly heavy-handed. As water protector Dallas Goldtooth wrote on his Facebook profile , Native Americans protesting pipeline construction were dragged out of a religious ceremony at gunpoint, one of their horses was so badly injured by private security that it had to be put down, and national guardsmen were used to clear the protest site despite an order from President Obama’s Department of Justice halting pipeline construction within 20 miles of the Missouri River.
The Sacred Stone Camp further described the violence carried out against unarmed indigenous protesters in a post to their website :
In addition to pepper spray and percussion grenades, shotguns were fired into the crowd with less lethal ammunition and a sound cannon was used (see images below). At least one person was tased and the barbed hook lodged in his face, just outside his eye. Another was hit in the face by a rubber bullet… A member of the International Indigenous Youth Council (IIYC) that had her wrist broken during a mass-arrest on October 22nd was hurt again after an officer gripped her visibly injured wrist and twisted it during an attempted arrest. At least six other members of the youth council verified that they had been maced up to five times and were also shot and hit with bean bags.
German Lopez, a writer for Vox.com, summed up the injustice of the Bundy verdict :
“It is impossible to ignore race here. This was a group of armed white people, mostly men, taking over a facility. Just imagine: What would happen if a group of armed black men, protesting police brutality, tried to take over a police facility and hold it hostage for more than a month?” Lopez wrote. “Would they even come out alive and get to trial? Would a jury find them and their cause relatable, making it easier to send them back home with no prison time?”
Zach Cartwright is an activist and author from Richmond, Virginia. He enjoys writing about politics, government, and the media. Send him an email at [email protected] , and follow his work on the Public Banking Institute blog . 16934 | 0 |
On Election Day the enthusiasm of receiving an I Voted sticker never came for many Massachusetts voters. The oval sticker that never came for many voters bears an American flag.
Woburn resident Elisabeth Sweeny, who was rejected, stated that she did not get one. Sweeny also said that she was a little bit excited because it is entertaining to post the sticker on social media. She also declared that to wear it shows people that it is important to vote and that she was also extremely disappointed that she did not receive one.
Daniel Stiffler who answered the phones at the city clerk’s office said that due to budget cuts the local government of Woburn decided not to give voters the stickers. Stiffler also stated that because the state government does not supply the stickers for the cities and towns when the local budget is cut.
Elections Division spokesman, Brian McNiff, said it is the responsibility of the individual city and town to stock up on the stickers for election day. However, it is not an obligation to pass out an emblematic tag to any voter who passes through the door.
Written by John A. Federico
Edited by Cathy Milne
Source:
Boston.com: Some people are upset they didn’t get an ‘I Voted’ sticker
Featured Image Courtesy of Thomas Hawk’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License election | 0 |
A new survey finds the wait time for new patients seeking an appointment with a physician in 15 major cities in the United States has risen 30 percent since 2014. [The survey, conducted by national physician search firm Merritt Hawkins, analyzed the responses from 1, 414 doctors’ offices. Wait times for appointments were observed in five medical specialty areas: cardiology, dermatology, orthopedic surgery, and family medicine. According to a press release from Merritt Hawkins, a company of AMN Healthcare, “It now takes an average of 24 days to schedule a new patient physician appointment in 15 of the largest cities in the U. S. up from 18. 5 days in 2014, 20. 5 days in 2009 and 21 days in 2004, previous years the survey was conducted. ” “Physician appointment wait times are the longest they have been since we began conducting the survey,” said Mark Smith, president of Merritt Hawkins, in a statement. “Growing physician appointment wait times are a significant indicator that the nation is experiencing a shortage of physicians. ” The survey indicates that Boston, Massachusetts, is encountering the longest average wait time of the 15 metropolitan areas: 109 days to see a family physician 52 days to see a dermatologist 45 days to see an 45 days to see a cardiologist and 11 days to see an orthopedic surgeon. The data suggest the average in general for new patients in Boston is 52 days. Average wait times for new patients in other major U. S. cities are: Dallas — 15 days Philadelphia — 37 days Portland — 28 days Seattle — 28 days Denver — 27 days Los Angeles — 24 days. The 2017 survey also studied wait times for new patients in cities. Data show the average wait time in cities with approximately 90, 000 to 140, 000 people is 32 days, or 33 percent longer than in the largest cities. A list of all cities included in the survey can be viewed in the report. “Finding a physician who can see you today, or three weeks from today, can be a challenge, even in large urban areas where there is a relatively robust supply of doctors,” said Smith. “The challenge becomes even more difficult in smaller communities that have fewer physicians per population. ” Merritt Hawkins suggests the onset of Obamacare — which is essentially an expansion of Medicaid — is tied to the failure of many Americans to obtain prompt health care. The survey also found that physicians accepting Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement as payment is not in keeping with the number of patients who expect to use government health insurance as their payer. In the largest cities, the average rate of Medicare acceptance among doctors is 85 percent, while the rate is 81 percent in the cities. Physicians in the largest metropolitan areas are accepting Medicaid at a rate of only 53 percent, and, in the cities, 60 percent. The data suggest that many Americans who are living in cities and have purchased insurance plans through Obamacare are therefore not having access to health care, even though they have insurance coverage. “More physicians will need to be trained, access to other types of providers expanded, and emerging technologies employed to ensure that health care delayed does not become health care denied,” Smith said. However, Dr. Gerard Gianoli, a specialist in and skull base surgery, recently observed to Breitbart News that Obamacare’s increase in the number of Americans on health insurance is not an achievement. “The vast majority — 85 percent — of those who have signed up for insurance through the Obamacare exchanges are individuals who would have previously qualified for Medicaid but hadn’t applied,” he said. “Why? Because they simply didn’t need it. They weren’t sick. ” “So, to claim that this is some huge accomplishment to have these folks sign up for insurance and forcing the taxpayers to foot the bill is a travesty,” Gianoli added. “It is simply sending money to the insurance companies for no purpose other than to improve their bottom line at the expense of the taxpayer. ” | 1 |
Republican Senator hawks quickly praised President Donald Trump for ordering a strike in Syria last night in retaliation for the chemical weapons attack ordered by dictator Bashar . [Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John McCain, two of the biggest critics of President Barack Obama’s failure to act in Syria, issued a joint statement in favor of Trump’s decision. “Unlike the previous administration, President Trump confronted a pivotal moment in Syria and took action,” they said. “For that, he deserves the support of the American people. ” McCain and Graham urged Trump to consider further action, calling for a strategy to take out Assad’s Air Force, the establishment of safe zones, and supporting Syrian rebels. “Building on tonight’s credible first step, we must finally learn the lessons of history and ensure that tactical success leads to strategic progress,” he said. Senator Marco Rubio also supported the action. “By acting decisively against the very facility from which Assad launched his murderous chemical weapons attack, President Trump has made it clear to Assad and those who empower him that the days of committing war crimes with impunity are over,” he said in a statement. Rubio wrote on Twitter that Trump was “deeply moved” by the images of children suffering the effects of the chemical weapon attack. “Be sure of this: The wicked will not go unpunished,” he wrote, quoting Proverbs 11:21. Senator Tom Cotton issued a statement of support as well. “I commend President Trump for taking swift, decisive action against Bashar ’s outlaw regime,” he said. “Any country that violates agreements with the U. S. develops illicit or programs, or supports those countries that do ought to take note. ” | 1 |
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Mohsen Abdelmoumen : Don't you think that we are in a continuation of the cold war between the USA and its allies in NATO on one side and China and Russia on the other, and who has interest to provoke a confrontation between these superpowers?
Brian Cloughley: It’s not so much a continuation as a resurrection of the Cold War. After the Warsaw Pact disbanded in March 1991, NATO, although deprived of any reason to continue in existence, managed to keep going, and in 1999 added Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to its 16 members. As the BBC noted, these countries became “the first former Soviet bloc states to join NATO, taking the alliance’s borders some 400 miles towards Russia.” With good reason Moscow wondered what on earth the US-NATO military alliance might be planning.
In spite of facing no threat whatever from any country in the world, NATO continued to expand around Russia’s borders, inviting Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia to join in 2002, which they did two years later.
As President Putin observed in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera “we are not expanding anywhere; it is NATO infrastructure, including military infrastructure, that is moving towards our borders. Is this a manifestation of our aggression?”
The US is also implacably hostile to China and does what it can to provoke it in the South China Sea, but NATO has not yet ventured into Eastern waters.
MORE... Arise President Trump (or Why it's not the End of the World as We Know it) Trump's sexual predator characteristics - His Grandfather was a pimp, but at least he paid the women he hired The significance of the GOP's attempted purge of Donald Trump Trump, Turkey, and police tyranny: The crisis of Imperialism finds political expression There is certainly confrontation — but it was originated by the western powers at the behest of Washington. It is dangerous to indulge in military menaces, but the US appears determined to continue such a policy, and the world as a whole will certainly not benefit from its posture.
How do you explain the silence of the media and Western Governments on the infamous war led by Saudi Arabia against the people of the Yemen?
The most important things are money and oil. Western governments and mainstream media may from time to time make statements that “regret” the Saudi war on Yemen, but they will never take action against the Riyadh royal dictatorship that might make it cease its merciless blitz on the Yemeni people. The US State Department records that in Saudi Arabia its “citizens lack the right and legal means to change their government” while there are “pervasive restrictions on universal rights such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and freedom of assembly, association, movement and religion; and a lack of equal rights for women . . .”, but Washington takes no action to encourage the Saudi monarchy to relax or even modify its domestic tyranny.
Saudi Arabia is a valued ally of the United States and indulges in “torture and other abuses [and] arbitrary arrest and detention,” while “freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law.” It might be imagined that the President of the United States might feel it proper to indicate his disapproval of the fact that in Saudi Arabia “civil law does not protect human rights, including freedom of the speech and of the press.” — but no US president will ever do anything to discourage the Saudi monarchy from continuing its domestic tyranny and murder of so many innocents in Yemen.
Don’t you think that, with Hillary Clinton President of the USA, we’ll have a total war, knowing that she is supported by the neocons and the military-industrial complex?
Under a Clinton administration there would have been no cessation of US havoc-wreaking wars around the world, and desperate refugees would have died in their thousands. Her regime would have ensured that the Pentagon’s fleets continue to go down to the seas in confrontation, and the bombers would have streaked across the skies, deliberately provoking China and Russia. Remember that she is one of the Washington-Brussels war-drum beaters who planned the 2011 aerial blitz on Libya to destroy the government of President Gaddafi, about whose murder she giggled that “ We came; We saw; He died. ” The US-NATO attacks on Libya caused massive suffering and destruction, opened the way for feuding bands of militants to fight each other for control of parts of the country, and created a haven for the lunatic extremists of Islamic State [aka ISIS].
Hillary Clinton has not criticised or questioned Obama’s years of aerial bombardment around the world and her foreign policy adviser, Jeremy Bash, told London’s Daily Telegraph that she would order a “full review” of US strategy on Syria as a “first key task” of her presidency, resetting the policy to emphasise the “murderous” nature of the government. He said that Mrs. Clinton would work to get Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, “out of there.”
President Assad has been selected as another target for the Clinton policy of “We came; We Saw; He died,” and his country appears doomed to a rerun of the Libya fiasco.
If Hillary Clinton had become President of the United States, as seemed only too likely, there would have been even greater emphasis on global airstrikes and military confrontation. Greater turmoil, chaos and catastrophe were to come.
Several reports mention deliveries of Western arms to groups activated in Syria, weapons that ended up in the hands of terrorist groups, such as ISIS-Daesh and al-Nusra. How do you explain the miscalculation of governments that have delivered weapons to terrorists to find these weapons turned against them, as we have seen in various attacks on European soil?
The US supplies weapons to many rebels and insurrectionists around the world. One of the most absurd of these supply chains was in the 1980s when they gave hundreds of Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, then had to buy them back for half a million dollars each when it was realised that the Mujahideen were about to use them against civilian airliners. The British have also supplied ground-to-air missiles to insurrectionists groups, with much less publicity but on occasions with serious results. The only explanation for the motives of western governments in doing this sort of thing is that they are poorly informed by their vastly expensive intelligence agencies.
The Americans destroyed Iraq with their ally Tony Blair, Sarkozy made the same thing in Libya with David Cameron, how do you explain that these personalities are not judged, in particular via ICC, authority which judges only African despots?
The International Criminal Court (ICC) “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” But the United States “is not at present a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court” and although Britain and France are in theory supportive of the ICC, there will never — ever — be a political leader of these countries arraigned before the Court for war crimes or anything else. The African despots it judges are no doubt guilty of heinous crimes, but they are also easy to arraign.
How do you explain that Hillary Clinton's candidacy was maintained while she does not stop making headlines with multiple scandals?
Because the Democrat Party desperately wanted a Democrat president. Members of the Party was prepared to hold their noses with one hand to keep out the stink of Hillary’s scandals while with the other hand pressing the button to Vote Hillary.
In your opinion, why do Western Governments continue to support old leaders and despotic regimes and to destabilize others according to their interests under the pretext of "human rights", "democracy", etc.? Who gave them this right?
Nobody gave them the right to support or destroy any government, anywhere, but Western politicians and generals continues to believe that, as in the old colonial days, they have a mission to alter the lives of those they consider inferior. There is flexibility in this policy, however, because if dictators are important for the economies of the West, they are permitted to torture detainees, treat women as chattels, forbid freedom of religion and imprison critics.
Some of our European intelligence sources tell us that there was a mass movement of Daesh towards some countries of Northern Europe, result of the offensive on Daesh in Syria and Iraq. How do you explain that such redeployment towards Europe is possible with all the risks of attack that entails? Don’t you think that the coordination between European intelligence fails?
I do not believe that there has been mass movement of Daesh/IS adherents to northern Europe.
Libya is a terrorist sanctuary a few kilometers away from Europe. You have an experience in both military and diplomatic, how do you see the resolution of the Libyan equation, is a crisis that can only be resolved militarily or is the policy which should prevail?
Unlike in Saudi Arabia, for example, in Gaddafi’s prosperous Libya there was freedom of religion and women were regarded as human beings. The entire population received free education and medical care. Then the country was reduced to anarchy by the US-NATO aerial blitz of March-October 2011 (Germany refused to join in), during which, among other devastation, water and oil pipelines and pumping stations were deliberately destroyed. Militia bands took over various parts of the country and continue to fight against each other, while extremist Islamic [Wahhabi] groups have grown in size and influence and the “Government of National Accord” is powerless.
Many of those who energetically supported the war, such as the former secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, continue to claim that it was a success — “a model intervention” — and that it is the fault of “the international community” that the country is a shambles. But even US President Obama admitted that the war on Libya “didn’t work” and that failure to have a plan for the future of the country after the murder of President Gaddafi was “the worst mistake” of his presidency.
Given that the Obama presidency is in its last months, it is unlikely he will order an invasion of Libya to try to eradicate the Islamic [aka Takfiri] terrorists and rebuild the country he and his allies destroyed. He and his supporters in Europe, notably France and Britain, will continue clandestine ground operations, drone attacks and conventional airstrikes to try to assassinate extremist leaders and destroy their gangs, but these will fail. It is difficult to predict the future in Libya, other than to say that it is most likely that its people will continue suffering the appalling effects of the US-NATO war, and that there will be no peaceful resolution of its problems.
Is the era of the American domination a fatality? Doesn ' t humanity may find it beneficial to see the emergence of a multipolar world ?
It should be remembered that in an August 2014 interview with the New York Times President Obama said “Our participation in the coalition that overthrew Qaddafi [emphasis added] in Libya. I absolutely believed that it was the right thing to do.” The name of the game is regime change, but America, the “indispensable nation” has failed in its military adventures all over the world and has created widening instability which in turn has led to growth in extremism and terrorism. Unipolarity, with the US possessing and exercising most military power, has not worked.
It appears that multipolarity might be a better alternative, with other nations restraining Washington from unilateral intervention aimed at overthrowing governments, but it is apparent that the US is determined to do all it can to prevent interference in its world domination strategies. In consequence it has engaged in a deliberate policy of confrontation with China and Russia that is entirely counter-productive and could well lead to war. Multipolarity would probably benefit humanity, but that is irrelevant to the indispensable nation.
What do you think of the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the victory of Donald Trump?
Mr. Trump has not elucidated a foreign policy as such, and we can only hope that he will build on the positive indications he has given about America ceasing to meddle militarily all round the world. His greatest achievement would be engage in positive discussions with Russia and China, which would result in vastly diminished tension in east and west. The defeat of Clinton has meant that the threat of US international confrontation has at least diminished, because the world would have been a very dangerous place if she had got in to the White House.
Interview realized by Mohsen Abdelmoumen
Who is Brian Cloughley?
Brian Cloughley is a British and Australian armies’ veteran, former deputy head of the UN military mission in Kashmir and Australian defense attaché in Pakistan.
He studied South Asian affairs for forty years and is South Asia defense analyst for IHS/Jane's Sentinel, covering Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, updating material regularly. Other evaluations include updating of nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological developments in the region for IHS Global. He has a weekly column in Strategic Culture Foundation and contribute pieces elsewhere, including Counterpunch , Pakistan's Army Journal Hilal and the business magazine Blue Chip .
Brian Cloughley wrote books including A History of The Pakistan Army: Wars and Insurrections; War, Coups & Terror: Pakistan’s Army in Years of Turmoil; Trumpeters: The Story of the Royal Artillery’s Boy Trumpeters; From Fabric Wings to Supersonic Fighters and Drones: A History of Military Aviation on both sides of the Northwest Frontier.
His website: http://www.beecluff.com/ | 0 |
What is the real state of affairs in the Russian economy? 01.11.2016 Print version Font Size Economist Yakov Mirkin gave another pessimistic forecast about the state of affairs in the Russian economy . According to him, Russia will face a decline in living standards, an economic setback and fluctuations in GDP growth on minimal levels. At the same time, international experts say that the Russian economy has been stabilizing , whereas S&P and Fitch have upgraded the ratings of major Russian companies.What is happening in reality? Pravda.Ru requested an expert opinion from Vice-Rector of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Doctor of Economic Sciences, Professor, Honored Economist of the Russian Federation, Sergei Silvestrov. "Who is closer to the truth about the current state of affairs in the Russian economy? Can Russia boast of any success in overcoming the crisis?" "There are no large-scale changes at this point. It is only agriculture that shows some improvement, and this is largely a consequence of the allocation of state credits and tax incentives from the government. All other sectors of the Russian economy are, unfortunately, stagnating."Unfortunately, Vnesheconomicbank (the Russian Foreign Economic Bank) and the Russian Corporation for Development have found themselves in a difficult situation. This bank is one of the main institutions that promotes the modernization of industry and supports the development of breakthrough projects. If such corporations are unable to work, then there is no development." "What can give an incentive to development?" "One could mobilize sources of investment activity - the funds of insurance, pension and various reserve funds, bank capitals, surplus earnings on deposits of companies, people's savings."Russia's economic "breakthrough" has to rely on a technological forecast to enter new global markets in 10-15 years. At the same time, there should be strict financial and tax control established. "Russia has very good scientific achievements that should be introduced into practice. This requires an annual investment of up to two trillion rubles at least for several years. The optimal amount would be from five to seven trillion, and one has to think how to concentrate this money in the country," the expert told Pravda.Ru. On October 31, the head of the Duma Committee on Financial Markets, Anatoly Aksakov, said that the budget for 2017-2019 was less focused on oil prices. According to him, the budget was drawn up around the oil price of $40 per barrel, while industries such as agriculture, agro-processing and food production came to the forefront. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru For USA, Russian economic growth is aggression | 0 |
I hope this is in the right place. If it is not, then neither am I. Here goes nothing, No matter how hard he climbed, Still some how he fell, No matter how close to Heavens gates, He still wound up in Hell, He fell so deep the rope ran out, After a while, That he had ever left, Or ever been, So long was it since he was seen, Here goes nothing, | 0 |
Written by Michael Scheuer Although Obama’s effort to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign by taking Mosul on the eve of the election failed, there is a good chance that Mosul will fall to the heterogeneous coalition that is attacking it. Be that event in six weeks, six months, or a year, the United States and its allies will rejoice over the event as if it is the death knell of the Islamic State (IS). They will be wrong to do so, showing again how deeply ignorant they are of the Islamist enemy and the religious war it is waging against them. IS has lost in Palmyra, Anbar, Ramadi, and other territories, and yet its troops are putting up their hardest fight yet in Mosul. Why? Two reasons: (a) IS leaders prematurely declared the caliphate, ignoring Osama bin Laden’s guidance that the lasting re-creation of caliphate was impossible until the United States was driven from the Arab World; if he was alive, he would probably add Russia to that guidance; and (b) because in the minds of IS leaders, fighters, and their supporters, everything, good or bad, comes from Allah; victory is from Allah, and defeat is a trial sent by Allah to test His followers’ faith and perseverance. While far from irrelevant, IS’s defeats in 2016, in Islamist minds, are in part a consequence of a IS leadership mistakes, but overwhelmingly because Allah did not grant them victory at this time. The stubborn defense of Mosul and other places in Syria and Iraq, as well as the not infrequent, often unexpected IS offensive actions occurring in tandem, are mujahedin operations meant to prove to Allah that they are working through His test and trying to prove that they are fighting His fight and are worthy of His assistance. This is not a new phenomenon. Between 1979 and 1991, the Afghan Islamists were constantly beaten up, tactically defeated, and generally beleaguered by the Red Army and Air Force, but they stayed in the field, fought the Soviets and their Afghan allies, and Allah ultimately gave them victory. More recently, the West and its African allies have twice dealt the Somali Islamists heavy blows and declared victory. Today, however, Al-Shabaab remains in the field and is advancing, and a nascent Islamic State outfit has joined the war. Faced with an enemy that thinks in this manner, victory for the United States, Russia, and their respective allies requires nothing less than as a complete annihilation of the mujahedin and their supporters as is militarily possible. As noted here previously, the loss of the cities that IS held or holds in Syria and Iraq is a blow to the organization’s prestige, and is costly in financial and manpower terms. It does not destroy the eternal goal of recreating the caliphate, or the IS organization. Indeed, in the counter-intuitive ways of insurgent warfare – where losses are often wins — those defeats will make IS stronger, more elusive, and more appealing to young Muslims. The latter due to its fierce resistance against what is irrefutably the strongest Crusader force that has ever taken the field against Islam. Without the cities, IS will no longer need to supply food, electricity, water, roads, health, education, and social services, or law-and-order for urban populations, all of which are expensive and manpower-intensive. Shed of this burden, IS forces will be reapplied. Much of IS’s remaining force will return to what they do best, which is to base in remote areas of Syria and Iraq and conduct a patient insurgent campaign, which will be fought by small groups, in a hit-and-run manner, and will be punctuated by ambushes, IEDs, and car-bombs in urban areas. IS’s loss of the cities and return to its main fighting skills will coincide with a gradual recognition on the part of the US-Russia-Iran-NATO coalition that its string of urban victories have yielded a catastrophic result. In the space of a year, for example, the coalition will have lost the only kind of targets in which it has prevailed against Islamists since 2001 – cities – and will then confront an enemy that requires quite large numbers of infantrymen for use in undertaking the long, bloody, costly, and usually unsuccessful counter-insurgency campaign needed to have any chance of annihilating IS and the other Islamist fighting groups. Oh yes, the Western members coalition also will have to pay through the nose – given that Syria, Russia, and Iraq do not have a pot to piss in – to rebuild the urban areas and infrastructure its air forces and IS have destroyed. They also will have to feed the hundreds of thousands who have lost their homes and jobs; who largely blame the current coalition’s Westerners, Russians, and Shias for their dire predicament; and who hold an enduring hatred for the US government for invading Iraq in 2003. An Islamist insurgency being waged from Damascus eastward to the Iranian border, however, will be only one part of the catastrophe which will be delivered by the coalition’s successful campaign to drive IS from the cities. As noted, IS will return to its strongest military skill, and it also will return to kind of warfare that requires less manpower. IS leaders, therefore, will be free to redeploy their fighters to areas of its choosing, and, as the history of the last 20 years has shown, the arrival of even a few veteran mujahedin can make a notable difference to the quality and lethality of local jihadi operations. The European governments are already in a public and cowardly tizzy about IS’s foreign fighters returning to their home countries. Some will certainly return to Europe and stage attacks, but they will only serve as icing on the Islamists’ cake. The Europeans have already sealed their well-deserved fate by letting in a tidal wave of Arab refugees – in the name “Merkelism”, which is an insane, Western civilization-destroying brand of humanitarianism – in whose ranks were untold numbers of mujahedin in the guise of innocent refuge seekers. Indeed, the greatest threat posed by IS fighters returning home probably lies not in Europe, but in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Jordan, India, and western China, where the ample local supplies of would-be Salafi mujahedin are in dire need of military trainers, combat-experienced leaders, explosives experts, and talented organization-builders and logisticians. The real rub for the victorious US-Russia-NATO-Shia coalition will come when IS leaders deploy – as they now are – fighters to countries where other jihad struggles are ongoing. IS fighters from Syria and Iraq, for example, have been and will be sent to Afghanistan, among them Pakistanis and Afghans going home with significant combat experience and organizational and leadership abilities. This move will strengthen IS’s foothold in Afghanistan, and begin to pave the way for the priority IS goal of entering Central Asia and opening another front against Russia. Other IS fighters will be deployed to Gaza to strengthen the growing Salafi movement, as well as to be filtered by HAMAS’s military wing into the Sinai Peninsula to fight the Egyptian military and attack Israel. IS fighters also will be sent to assist the growth of Salafi organizations and military capabilities in the Tripoli region of northern Lebanon. IS leaders will continue deploying fighters, munitions, and explosives into Iran, and will surely move some troops to Yemen, either to fight there or to move across the Red Sea to serve in Somalia and East Africa, to reinforce IS fighters in Libya and the rest of North Africa, and to join IS-allies in Mali, where the regional Islamist tide again appears to be rising. In this religious war, US and NATO “victories” – such as the deposing of Saddam, killing Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gadhafi, and backing the coup that overthrew Muhammad Morsi — have very often led to more, rather than less war, as well as to sky-rocketing expenditures by that effete gang of war-without-killing bankrupts. The retaking of the Syrian and Iraq cities from IS seems likely to yield the same kind of result, only this time perhaps on a much broader international scale. In view of the foregoing budding reality, and the long string of disasters that have preceded it, there never has been a better time for the US national government to make a clearly America-First decision to complete the Mosul operation and then withdraw all US troops, aircraft, and private contractors from Syria and Iraq. That action will let the nations from Europe, the Levant, and the Arab Peninsula who have what America has not — genuine life-and-death national interests in the ultimate outcome there – continue the war until they are successful or until they perish. While that melodrama plays out, Americans can work on defending US interests, in all of their dimensions, in the place it matters most, in North America. That is, after all, the clearest and most important of all the constitutional responsibilities assigned to the US national government, as well as the one that won Mr. Trump the recent election. Reprinted with permission from Non-Intervention.com. Related | 0 |
LOS ANGELES — YouTube Red, the paid streaming service, has acquired its first television drama, moving it into more direct competition with players like Netflix and traditional cable networks. Fittingly, given YouTube’s ambitions, the scripted series will be based on “Step Up,” the dance movie franchise that started Channing Tatum’s acting career and has taken in more than $650 million at the worldwide box office. Lionsgate will supply a full season of 10 episodes, each running about 45 minutes — a long way from the quickie cat videos for which YouTube was once known. “Bigger, bolder” and an offering that will “drive subscription” is how Susanne Daniels, YouTube’s global head of original content, described the series in an interview. Kevin Beggs, Lionsgate’s television chairman, called it “a distinctive, noisy, series” that “multiple networks wanted. ” Mr. Tatum will be an executive producer of the drama, expected to arrive next year. It will cost several million dollars per episode to make, signaling the arrival of YouTube Red as a buyer of content. The series, which will feature YouTube stars as dancers and actors, will be set at a performing arts high school and be most similar in tone to the first of the five “Step Up” movies. For $10 a month, YouTube Red offers viewing of videos, exclusive programming and a vast selection of music. Ms. Daniels, best known for turning the WB network into a youth powerhouse in the 1990s, joined the company a year ago and is charged with finding YouTube Red’s version of Amazon’s “Transparent” or Netflix’s “House of Cards” — a breakout series that will sell subscriptions and send a message to Hollywood’s creative community: This is a viable place for your best show pitches. The verdict is still out. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, said in an conference call in April that YouTube Red had been “very well received. ” But the company has not released user numbers, and some analysts have been unenthusiastic, especially as more streaming competition has arisen. Hulu, HBO, Netflix, Fullscreen, Go90, Seeso and Amazon, among others, are all pursuing this turf. “It is hard to tell whether the effort is succeeding or will succeed,” Carlos Kirjner, an analyst at Bernstein Research, wrote in a client report last month. “It is possible that it might be too little too late. ” Notably, Mr. Kirjner cited a lack of “ content” as one of YouTube Red’s shortcomings. Ms. Daniels acknowledged in an interview that she was walking “a fine line” with programming decisions. YouTube Red’s original lineup must feel familiar to ardent users of the site (teenagers and young adults) while offering something distinctive enough to convince them to upgrade from YouTube’s free service. So far, efforts have included “A Trip to Unicorn Island,” a documentary about a world tour taken by a YouTube personality, Lilly Singh, and “Foursome,” a high school comedy. “We still don’t know for sure what’s going to resonate,” Ms. Daniels said. “You just have to sort of jump in the water. ” Still, the “Step Up” project represents a very educated guess. “Dance videos on YouTube drive millions of hours of watch time every month,” Ms. Daniels said, adding that dance is a popular genre for YouTube around the world. YouTube Red is available in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and has plans for overseas expansion, particularly in Europe. Music videos are also enormously popular on YouTube — the “Step Up” movies are known for their montages — and some of the biggest traditional television hits of the last decade, including “Empire,” “Glee” and NBC’s live musicals, have been rooted in song. Mr. Beggs of Lionsgate said that Ms. Daniels was able to nab the series in part because she was willing to commit to a full season without first making a pilot episode as a test. “That got everyone’s attention,” he said. The deal got its start at a New Year’s Eve party at the Los Angeles home of Erik Feig, of Lionsgate’s movie division. Ms. Daniels was among the guests. That night, “Erik said the studio was getting ready to talk to distributors about a ‘Step Up’ TV show, and so I immediately started my hot pursuit,” she said. More than most other Hollywood studios, Lionsgate has been early to spot the promise of streaming services as buyers of television shows. Lionsgate’s production roster includes “Orange Is the New Black” for Netflix and “Casual,” which was renewed on Hulu for a third season. (The “Mad Men” is still Lionsgate’s series, however.) Will “Step Up” provide the studio with another television hit, the kind that mints money by running multiple seasons? It is too early to say, of course, but Mr. Feig, who has been involved with the “Step Up” franchise from its beginning, has high hopes. “‘Step Up’ has always relied on a relatively simple formula, one that has managed to work again and again in different contexts, with different actors,” Mr. Feig said in an email. Combine innovative choreography with “the most current tracks and an dollop of fantasy, and it’s an instant party,” he said. “One that is destined to leave you maybe not all that wiser, but definitely in a better mood. ” | 1 |
The beverage giants and PepsiCo have given millions of dollars to nearly 100 prominent health groups in recent years, while simultaneously spending millions to defeat public health legislation that would reduce Americans’ soda intake, according to public health researchers. The findings, published on Monday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, document the beverage industry’s deep financial ties to the health community over the past five years, as part of a strategy to silence health critics and gain unlikely allies against soda regulations. The study’s authors, Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University school of public health, and Daniel Aaron, a student at Boston University’s medical school, scoured public records including news releases, newspaper databases, lobbying reports, the medical literature and information released by the beverage giants themselves. While some of the incidents cited in the study already have been reported by news organizations, the medical journal report is the first to take a comprehensive look at the industry’s strategy of donating to health organizations while at the same time lobbying against public health measures. The study tracked industry donations and lobbying spending from 2011 through 2015, at a time when many cities were mulling soda taxes or other regulations to combat obesity. “We wanted to look at what these companies really stand for,” said Mr. Aaron, the study’s . “And it looks like they are not helping public health at all — in fact they’re opposing it almost across the board, which calls these sponsorships into question. ” Mr. Aaron said that the industry donations created “ conflicts of interest” for the health groups that accepted them. The report found a number of instances in which influential health groups accepted beverage industry donations and then backed away from supporting soda taxes or remained noticeably silent about the initiatives. In one instance cited in the study, the nonprofit group Save the Children, which had actively supported soda tax campaigns in several states, did an about face and withdrew its support in 2010. The group had accepted a $5 million grant from Pepsi and was seeking a major grant from Coke to help pay for its health and education programs for children. Responding to the new research, Save the Children said, in a statement, that the group in 2010 had decided to focus on early childhood education, and that its decision to stop supporting soda taxes “was unrelated to any corporate support that Save the Children received. ” When New York proposed a ban on sodas in 2012, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics cited “conflicting research” and didn’t support the effort. The academy accepted $525, 000 in donations from Coke in 2012. The following year it took a $350, 000 donation from the company. The academy said it no longer has a sponsorship relationship with the beverage firms. The N. A. A. C. P. and the Hispanic Federation have publicly opposed initiatives despite disproportionately high rates of obesity in black and Hispanic communities. Coke made more than $1 million in donations to the N. A. A. C. P. between 2010 and 2015, and more than $600, 000 to the Hispanic Federation between 2012 and 2015. The groups did not respond to requests for comment. “The beverage industry is using corporate philanthropy to undermine public health measures,” said Kelly D. Brownell, dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke, who was not involved in the new research. The American Diabetes Association accepted $140, 000 from the company between 2012 and 2014. The American Heart Association received more than $400, 000 from Coke between 2010 and 2015. And the National Institutes of Health received nearly $2 million from Coke between 2010 and 2014. In a statement, the heart association said the group is “leading efforts to reduce consumption of sugary drinks,” and the group has advocated for increased taxes on sugary drinks. “To achieve our goals, we must engage a wide variety of food and beverage companies to be part of the solution,” the statement said. The soda sponsorship does not have “ any influence on our science and the public policy positions we advocate for. ” Coke referred questions about the study to their trade group, the American Beverage Association. “We believe our actions in communities and the marketplace are contributing to addressing the complex challenge of obesity,” the beverage association said. “We stand strongly for our need, and right, to partner with organizations that strengthen our communities. ” The beverage association said it disagreed with public health advocates “on discriminatory and regressive taxes and policies on our products. ” In a statement PepsiCo said it is “incorrectly painted as a ‘soda company,’ when only a quarter of our global revenue comes from carbonated soft drinks. ” “We believe that obesity is a complex, multifaceted issue and that our company has an important role to play in addressing it which includes engaging with public health organizations and responding to consumers’ demand for healthier products,” the statement said. The New York Times last year reported that Coke had paid for scientific research that downplayed the link between sugary drinks and obesity. After that article was published, the beverage giant released a database showing that since 2010 it had spent more than $120 million on academic research and partnerships with health organizations involved in curbing obesity. From 2011 to 2015, Coke spent on average more than $6 million per year lobbying against public health measures aimed at curbing soda consumption, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Pepsi spent about $3 million per year during that period, and the American Beverage Association spent more than $1 million each year, the study found. In 2009 alone, when the government proposed a federal soda tax to curb obesity that would help finance health care reform, Coke, Pepsi and the American Beverage Association spent a combined $38 million lobbying against the measure, which ultimately failed. When the mayor of Philadelphia proposed a soda tax in 2010, the beverage industry offered $10 million to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia if the tax proposal was dropped. The City Council voted down the measure, and the beverage association later made the donation. Philadelphia did ultimately impose a soda tax this year. The beverage industry filed a lawsuit in September, calling the tax illegal. The industry also is spending millions on advertising campaigns against soda taxes that are on the ballot in at least four cities this November — three in Northern California, and one in Boulder, Colo. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said the paper shows that soda companies “want to have it both ways — appear as socially responsible corporate citizens and lobby against public health measures every chance they get. ” | 1 |
Ramzy Baroud | 0 |
Social Media Blackout? FBI Emails Are Not 'Trending' On Twitter, Facebook, Buzzfeed, Or Snapchat
They are not known as 'weapons of mass distraction' for nothing...
In the 24 hours since FBI Director Comey dropped perhaps the biggest bombshell of the entire Presidential campaign, sending Democrats (and media) scrambling headless-chicken-like for answers (and blame-scaping), does anyone else find it odd that 'FBI Emails' does not appear to be a hot topic, trending, big deal on any social media? Snapchat..."Hot" Buzzfeed... "Trending Now"
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As Liberty Blitzkrieg's Mike Krieger recently asked (and answered) , why are these things happening in the first place?
Apple claims not to endorse candidates, but their actions suggest otherwise, and some of their executives - including CEO Tim Cook - actively support Clinton’s campaign. Buzzfeed recently obtained an invitation to a private $50,000-per-plate fundraiser Cook is hosting for Clinton with his Apple colleague, Lisa Jackson, at the end of this month.
Apple isn’t the only corporation doing Clinton’s bidding. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is “directly engaged” in her campaign. It’s been widely reported Clinton hired Eric Schmidt —chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—to set up a tech company called The Groundwork. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.” He also pointed out that many members of Clinton’s staff have worked for Google, and some of her former employees now work at Google.
Twitter is another culprit. The company has gotten a lot of slack for banning conservatives and Trump supporters such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and, most recently, rapper Azealia Banks after she came out in support of Trump. Twitter has provided vague answers as to why conservative voices have been banned while they’ve allowed other users to call for the killing of cops.
Just yesterday, Buzzfeed revealed that the social media giant’s top executive personally protected the President from seeing critical messages last year. “In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama.”
The founders of some of the most popular pro-Trump Twitter handles - including @USAforTrump2016 and @WeNeedTrump—insist Twitter is censoring their content. They’ve pointed out that Twitter changes trending hashtags associated with negative tweets about Clinton (which has been reported before ). On August 4, shortly after the hashtag “HillaryAccomplishment” began trending, it was taken over by anti-Clinton users, who used it to mention Benghazi or Emailgate. Eric Spracklen, @USAforTrump2016 founder, noticed the hashtag was quickly changed—pluralized to #HillarysAccomplishments.
Many people have pointed out the exact shenanigans described above for other Clinton-related hashtags. In fact, it’s been my self-described progressive friends who have been most up in arms about it.
“They take away the hashtag that has negative tweets for Clinton and replace it with something that doesn’t so the average person doesn’t see what was really trending,” Spracklen said. “This happens every day.”
This new strand, where one cannot even search for alternative viewpoints amid technology companies who stand to benefit from the free-trade policies and eased immigration regulations of a Clinton presidence, represents a dangerous sea change. There’s absolutely no question the digital forums we use every day are censoring conservatives and favoring Clinton. You can’t simply scroll through photos on Instagram, look for a video game in the App Store or do a quick Google search without being fed anti-Trump and pro-Clinton propaganda.
Personally, I’ve definitely noticed a big-time pro-Clinton bias in my Twitter stream on a daily basis, and I don’t follow people/organizations that would define themselves as overtly pro-Clinton. That’s my honest perception, and I don’t have a dog in this fight.
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President Donald Trump’s aides have reportedly found at least two ways to quietly repeal the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program without placing Trump’s signature on it. [Trump has stated that he does not intend to target “Dreamers” — illegal aliens who entered the United States as minors — and may allow them to stay and work in the country legally. But according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, senior Trump aides and two immigration policy advisers have examined at least two options for ending DACA that would not directly involve Trump. One of the options is a legal guide that provides detailed information about which people are priorities for deportation. The Times writes, “Under that option, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, a vocal critic of deportation relief as a senator, would direct Department of Justice lawyers to review the program, which issues work permits to people who qualify and keeps them from being categorized as deportation priorities. ” After that, if the Department of Justice (DOJ) determines that DACA is illegal, they would reportedly instruct the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop providing and renewing those work permits. A second option would involve the courts. The Times writes, “A handful of governors are considering a challenge patterned on the 2014 lawsuit filed by several conservative state officials against the Obama administration’s expansion of deportation protections. If they sue, Sessions could instruct his lawyers not to defend the program in court, exposing it to indefinite suspension by a federal judge. ” During Thursday’s press conference, President Trump said, “We’re gonna show great heart. DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me, I will tell you. ” He added, “To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have because you have these incredible kids. ” Trump said, “I love these kids. I love kids. I have kids and grandkids. And I find it very, very hard doing what the law says exactly to do and you know, the law is rough. ” Last week, approximately 680 illegal immigrants were swept up for repatriation as part of a crackdown on criminal illegal aliens living in the United States 161 of them were arrested throughout Southern California. A February 13 statement from the Department of Homeland Security indicated that 75 percent of the 680 illegal immigrants who were taken in by authorities had committed crimes inside the United States. The Times notes that as these options are being worked out, work permits are still being issued. Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter and Periscope @AdelleNaz | 1 |
Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 4 + 7 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom | 0 |
Moshen Abdelmoumen Interviews Ann Garrison Editor's Note Mohsen Abdelmoumen is a journalist who writes for The American Herald Tribune, and has his own blog, Algérie Résistance. In this interview he queries Ann Garrison about American democracy, and Hillary Clinton.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Do you think the United States can claim to be democratic simply by electing a woman president? Also, what are your thoughts about the status of democracy in the USA with a candidate like Hillary Clinton who caters to the financial lobbies and AIPAC?
Ann Garrison: In response to the first question, no, of course not. No more than we could claim to be a democracy because we elected a Black president. These two elections signify nothing more than the inclusion of previously excluded classes of people in the super elite. The United States is an oligarchy of the .01%, 1% of the 1%. Any president who is not already among the .01%, like Bill Clinton, becomes part of the .01% by serving its interests and then peddling influence after leaving office. No one has developed an influence peddling machine as well-oiled as the Clintons, with Bill working the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative while Hillary was Secretary of State. Just imagine the new depths of corruption that the next eight years and beyond could bring. Obama has said he’s now considering a move from the White House to venture capitalism that has Silicon Valley slathering at the opportunity.
Every four years Americans are given the illusion of choice between oligarchs and/or aspiring oligarchs who will serve the interests of oligarchy. Candidates who aspire to actually represent the interests of the people are marginalized by the corporate media and the pay-to-play campaign contributions of the oligarchs.
In municipal and county elections and ballot measures, Americans often do have real choices, but the higher and more powerful the office, the greater the corruption and oligarchic control. Nevertheless, only a small minority of Americans actually vote n local elections; The Atlantic’s CityLab reporting project recently concluded that fewer than 20% vote in mayoral elections in 15 of the 30 most populous cites. Disengagement is one of the most fundamental facts of American political life.
Regarding federal elections, this concept of democracy within the largest, most lethal military power the world has ever seen is bogus to begin with. When U.S. citizens cast ballots to elect a new commander-in-chief who will continue the project of perpetual war, military industrial profits, and global hegemony, how democratic is that? The vast majority of those who will suffer and die don’t get to vote; the only exceptions are members of the U.S. Armed Services who die in U.S. wars. If those on the other side of the Pentagon’s crosshairs were able to vote, I’m sure they would elect our Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who said, “We say to Trump, we don’t need no friggin’ wall! We just need to stop invading other countries.” Her running mate, vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka has called the humanitarian interventionist argument a new version of the white man’s burden and said, “You have to ask yourself, when was the last time the U.S. has been on the side of the people? And the answer is: NEVER. ”
How do you explain the dynastic governance of the Clintons? Is this the American dream in all its glory?
I’m not sure I can explain the Clinton dynasty except to agree that it is one. Chelsea has been very involved in the Clinton Foundation and is quite likely to enter political life and even run for president one day. We have had other political dynasties, most notably the Roosevelts, the Kennedys and the Bushes, and there are many lower level dynasties, like the Browns in California. Jerry Brown, the current governor of California, is the son of former California governor Pat Brown. New York State has the Cuomos; Governor Andrew Cuomo is the son of former Governor Mario Cuomo, and his brother Chris Cuomo is a prominent corporate television host.
Regarding the American dream, I assume you’re referring to the dream that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can achieve some proportionate degree of status, security and prosperity. If so, the Clintons certainly aren’t living the American dream because, although they did well in school, they’ve hardly played by the rules. They’ve enriched themselves with that well-oiled influence peddling operation I mentioned earlier, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. We’re all wondering whether Hillary Clinton, and maybe even Bill Clinton, might finally be indicted now that the FBI has reopened its investigation of Clinton e-mail because more of it was discovered on the laptop that Anthony Weiner – a former Congressman under FBI investigation for sex offense – shared with his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin. If Hillary Clinton is elected, she’ll have to be impeached, convicted and removed from office, but that’s extremely unlikely – no matter what’s in the newly discovered e-mail – if her party, the Democrats, win a majority in the House and more than a one- third minority in the Senate. It takes a majority in the House to impeach a president and a two-thirds majority in the Senate to then convict and remove a president. So Hillary Clinton is at a Berlusconi moment in her sordid career; her best chance of avoiding indictment is getting elected. Getting back to the American dream that you can get ahead by working hard and playing by the rules, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives, for perjury and obstruction of justice regarding his affair with a 19-year-old White House intern and his testimony in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by another former employee. However, his own party held a majority in the Senate and they acquitted him. This was all legal, according to the U.S. Constitution, but does it really sound like he was “playing by the rules”? During the final days of his presidency, Clinton acquitted Glencore International founder Mark Rich, an international fugitive who had fled to Switzerland. His ex-wife had donated to the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton Presidential Library and Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign.
According to the law, President Clinton had the authority to acquit Rich, but how would any rational person consider that anything but bribery and corruption?
In 2006, Clinton polished the reputation of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s autocratic leader and human rights offender, who then gave a uranium mining lease to Canadian businessman Frank Giustra’s Shell Company, making it worth tens of millions of dollars overnight. Giustra then made a big contribution to the Clinton Foundation. No one has claimed that this was illegal, but is it “playing by the rules”?
When Guistra sold a majority stake in his company, Uranium One, to Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency, it was approved by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Giustra then contributed $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton was offered a $500,000 speaking engagement with a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin. Does that sound like playing by the rules? And now Hillary’s trying to make us believe that Russia’s meddling in our elections and threatening confrontation with Russia over Syria. I don’t think she’s kidding about the confrontation, but the Clinton Foundation rarely passes up the chance to make another million dollars or more in any circumstances.
Meanwhile, most of the rest of us are not living the American dream. Sixty-three percent of Americans are living on the edge of financial catastrophe, unable to handle a $500 car repair or a $1000 emergency room bill . The Clintons, as I said, serve the oligarchy they have also managed to join. When Bill Clinton was on his way out, in the last months of his presidency, he worked with Republicans in the lame duck Congress to deregulate the banking industry. By 2008, its dishonest, excessive and abusive financialization scams had crashed the economy, costing millions of Americans their jobs and/or homes. Then, as a New York Senator, Hillary Clinton voted to bail out the big banks who committed the crime while many of the rest of us struggled in the crash’s wake.
How do you explain that candidate Clinton, with all the negative baggage she brings (the death of the US Ambassador in Libya, her rumored health problems, the scandal of emails, etc) is the Democratic candidate?
Again, Clinton serves the interests of the oligarchy that she herself has joined. Many people believe that the nomination was stolen from Bernie Sanders, the Democratic candidate who spoke out against oligarchy, growing income inequality, and even the Israeli lobby’s dominance in American politics.
But there’s one other important element to this. Americans who identify as liberals, supporters of women’s rights, and/or anti-racists have such a longstanding allegiance to the Democratic Party that supporting its nominee every four years is their knee-jerk reaction. Ever escalating foreign wars don’t seem to penetrate their consciousness or conscience, especially when those wars are waged primarily with drones and proxy armies instead of U.S. troops. And once the Republicans nominated the openly racist and misogynistic Donald Trump, defeating Trump became a liberal crusade.
There are, of course, glimmers of rationality and hope. Yesterday I was out canvassing for an Oakland, California ballot measure with a young Black man, a college sophomore. Despite Trump’s overt racism, he told me that he considers Clinton even more dangerous because he understands that she has essentially promised confrontation with Russia over Syria. He understands that such escalation increases the chance of a nuclear war, accidental or not, and that Trump, for all his faults, says that the Cold War is over, that NATO is largely obsolete, and that Clinton is recklessly risking confrontation with Russia by promising to remove Bashar Al-Assad.
Our Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is reported to be polling at 16% among voters under 35, and much of Bernie Sanders’s support was quite visibly from the same age group. Local, grassroots organizing is also empowering people to create institutions free of oligarchic and corporate control. They include community gardens, renewable energy buyers’ co-operatives, and GMO-free zones. If a ballot initiative to make California’s Sonoma County GMO-free passes, the whole northwest coast of California will be a GMO-free zone, from Santa Cruz to Humboldt Counties and including one inland county, Trinity.
Don’t you think that the two-party American system, with the candidates of two traditional parties, Democratic and Republican, is out of breath?
I wouldn’t say it’s out of breath because it’s still very much in control. However, Trump has left the Republican Party in disarray, with many Republican luminaries and funders defecting to Clinton, who is welcoming them with open arms. As Black Agenda Report Editor Glen Ford has written :
(the Clintons) “have succeeded in assembling under one party roof nearly the whole of the U.S. ruling class and their hordes of attendants and goons. The scam that undergirded the duopoly system that has served the Lords of Capital so well for so long, has come undone. Thanks to a white nationalist billionaire who was too spoiled to play by the corporate rules, the two parties of the ruling class have become one.”
It’s hard to say whether or not the Republican Party will survive this election or what it will be in another four years if it does.
One possibility could significantly change this. If Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein wins 5% in this election, the Green Party will become an official national party eligible for 5% of the federal funds made available to official national parties to host their presidential nominating conventions and support their nominee. This year all federal funds went to the two official national parties, Republicans and Democrats, who also have access to huge amounts of plutocratic and corporate money. The Greens take no corporate money.
Five percent of the vote and five percent of the federal funding for elections may not sound like much, but it would be a huge watershed for the U.S. Greens. It would be a big psychological and visibility boost, and it would mean starting the next presidential campaign year with more than twice the funds that Jill Stein’s campaign has been able to raise.
Winning 5% would also ensure ballot access for the Greens in most states, not only in federal elections but also in down ballot races. As it is, Greens are required to spend much of their time and money just gathering enough signatures to satisfy all the byzantine ballot access requirements that vary in each of the 50 states.
Everyone knows that Clinton is the future president of the USA. In your opinion, who has facilitated her task and who has interest in seeing Clinton in the Oval Office?
She is backed by the oligarchy, corporate and dynastic, particularly the investment bankers, the oil industry, and the weapons manufacturers who not only profit but also lobby for foreign wars. They are advancing their own interests by promoting a candidate who will serve them. Liberals have been conditioned to function as unpaid Clinton operatives in this election, and the corporate media, like the cops, serve as protectors of the oligarchy. And again, the majority of Americans are politically disengaged.
You are close to Jill Stein, head of the Green party, who emerged late in the campaign. Why was this alternative sabotaged?
Well, I wouldn’t say I’m close to Jill personally, but she knows who I am and I, of course, know who she is. I’ve reported on her campaign and on the U.S. Greens for the past year, on radio and in print and online outlets, and I’m always honored when she shares those reports on her social media pages. I write for the Black Agenda Report and feel politically and intellectually close to its editors, who have given their full support to the Green Party this year, even as Bernie Sanders surged in the polls and many imagined he might actually win the Democratic nomination. In these times that are so easy to see as the end times, shared rationality and humanity are the closest bonds that many of us have, regardless of the geographic distance between us.
Jill’s campaign could hardly compete with the Republicans’ and Democrats’ because neither she nor any other Greens solicit or accept corporate money. We stand behind the slogan, “People and Planet before Profits.” And we call for a halt to the death march led by the weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel giants, and agro-chemical companies who profit from it. Jill calls for immediately cutting the military budget by half, closing all the U.S. military bases in foreign countries and launching a “peace offensive.” She proposes free public education from kindergarten through college, the abolition of student debt, national health insurance and a “Green New Deal” that would reinvest the resources now squandered on weapons manufacture and all the illegal, immoral, lethal and environmentally catastrophic U.S. wars. The Green New Deal would create a renewable energy infrastructure and sustainable agriculture before it’s too late to stop the climate meltdown – if it isn’t too late already. And it would fully employ Americans in meaningful, dignified and cooperative work for the common good.
Of course that all makes far too much sense and threatens the highly concentrated wealth and power of the death-march industries. I would not be surprised if there were voter fraud to prevent Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka from winning the 5% that would make us an official national party.
I have also seen enormous oligarchic determination to stop Greens at the local level. In 2003, Matt Gonzalez, the Green Party’s mayoral candidate in San Francisco, seemed to have a good chance of winning. That so alarmed the Democratic Party that it sent all its best known, most powerful names and faces to San Francisco to campaign for the Democratic candidate. They sent Hillary and Bill. They sent Jesse Jackson. They sent many Democratic Party superstars more than once. They seemed to be more concerned about defeating Matt Gonzalez and the Greens in San Francisco than they were about defeating George Bush and the Republicans in the following year’s presidential election.
One of the founders of the San Francisco Green Party was elected to the City and County Board of Supervisors twice, but when he ran for Sheriff, an executive office, Democrats pulled him aside and said they could not allow his election unless he left the Greens and joined the Democratic Party, which he did. They still got rid of him after his first term, with a really ugly campaign, but that’s another complicated story in itself. The City and County of San Francisco once had more elected Greens than any city or county in the country, but many of those that Greens worked so hard to elect have since defected to the Democratic Party for the sake of their political careers.
Is Hillary Clinton a danger for humanity?
Hell yes. I agree with Congolese author and political activist Patrick Mbeko, who said she’s more dangerous than ISIS, for all the reasons I’ve already mentioned. Like her dark alliance with the death-march industries, and her seeming eagerness to confront Russia over Syria and/or on Russia’s borders in the interest of global hegemony. Russian uranium deal aside, I think that Diana Johnstone was most likely right when she wrote that “her strategic ambition in a nutshell is regime change in Russia ”.
And I have to mention my friends from the African Great Lakes Region – particularly Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – which became the killing grounds of the 1990s, as the U.S., using African proxies, established itself as the dominant power there. Most of my friends from that part of the world are horrified by the Clintons’ all but certain return to the White House. The Clintons are deeply committed to the false history of the Rwandan war and massacres that was used to justify the First and Second Congo Wars and later the “humanitarian” interventions in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. If the truth about Rwanda and DR Congo were known, Bill Clinton would be implicated in mass murder, but that’s true of every U.S. president in office in my lifetime and probably long before that. No one’s going to try to refer the most lethal military power in history to an international criminal court with more than symbolic authority.
Libya lives total chaos. How do you analyze the situation in Libya and Clinton’s role in it?
It’s horrible. Like so much else, it makes me deeply ashamed to be an American. If you read Hillary Clinton’s e-mail, it’s easy to see that the U.S.-NATO war on Libya was, for one, another Western war against another defiant resource nationalist, Muammar Gaddafi. Regardless of whatever human rights offenses Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein were guilty of, both were resource nationalists, as was Mohammed Mossadegh, the secular, democratically elected prime minister of Iran who nationalized Iranian oil before our CIA and the UK’s M16 ousted him in the 1953 coup. I wrote about how this played out in Libya in “ Clinton E-Mail: We came, we saw, we got oil .”
Obama says that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the Libyan War was the greatest mistake of his presidency, but I’d say his greatest mistake was waging the Libyan War in the first place. Like the Iraq War, it has created chaos and perpetual war that continues to spread through the Middle East and North Africa.
Ann Garrison is an independent journalist who contributes to the San Francisco Bay View, Global Research, the Black Agenda Report and the Black Star News, and produces radio for KPFA-Berkeley and WBAI-New York City. In 2014, she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize by the Womens International Network for Democracy and Peace . She can be reached through twitter @AnnGarrison .
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We apologize for this inconvenience. Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation? | 0 |
LOL, gotta use the fireplace log holder as a stand. Shows the attention to detail.
Hold on let me get my daughters slingshot and see if can withstand that. | 0 |
Muslims Terrorize Hindus Because It's Wednesday November 4, 2016 Daniel Greenfield
The official media narrative is that Muslims are the world's greatest victims. The truth, especially in majority Muslim countries, is rather strikingly different .
Crowds of Muslims attacked Hindu homes and temples in eastern Bangladesh this week, raising concerns that the authorities are not taking steps to curb rising religious tensions.
Attacks on Hindus are not unusual in Bangladesh, but it is rare to see multiple crowds targeting temples in an organized way as they did on Sunday and Monday.
Note the casual language of the Times. Muslim religious violence is commonplace in Bangladesh. It's just not common for it to be happening on this scale.
But how could it be otherwise? Islam is structurally xenophobic, violently bigoted and racist down to its origins. Islam's faith is expressed in a violent campaign against non-Muslims. This is Jihad.
Muslims attacking Hindus, Christians, Jews, Yazidis or any other group? That just means it must be Wednesday. Or any other day of the week.
On Sunday, hundreds of Muslims entered a Hindu neighborhood, where they ransacked 15 temples and the homes of more than 100 families, Mr. Deb said. He said that the mob “used long, hard sticks and locally made sharp weapons” to assault Hindus they found there, and that at least 20 people, including a priest, were wounded.
This is Islam in its purest and truest form. | 0 |
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