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WASHINGTON — Vice Mike Pence will take over as the leader of Donald J. Trump’s transition effort, pushing aside Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, as Mr. Trump moves quickly to assemble a government after his stunning upset victory, the transition team said on Friday. The reorganization puts the urgent task of selecting cabinet officials and key West Wing posts in the hands of Mr. Pence, whose loyalty to Mr. Trump and deep contacts with the Republican establishment on Capitol Hill are seen as critical to navigating the often politically treacherous transition period. But in shuffling those responsible for shaping his administration, Mr. Trump is also keeping close the inner circle of campaign advisers who are deeply skeptical of Washington and who helped design an outsider campaign built on angry and often divisive rhetoric. Stephen K. Bannon, the conservative provocateur and chairman of the Breitbart News website, will be a top transition adviser. Three of Mr. Trump’s adult children and his who were among his closest campaign advisers, will join a advisory committee to help guide his choices. Rick Dearborn, the chief of staff to Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama and a fierce advocate for Mr. Trump, will move from the campaign’s Washington office to help direct the transition operations. Mr. Christie will become a vice chairman of the transition effort, the campaign said. The new inner circle at the transition offices will direct the activities of dozens of corporate consultants, lobbyists and other specialists who will be responsible for recommending candidates for agency jobs across the breadth of the federal government. Some of those advisers come from industries for which they are now in charge of finding top regulators. “The mission of our team will be clear: put together the most highly qualified group of successful leaders who will be able to implement our change agenda in Washington,” the transition team announced Friday afternoon. The surprise moves will sideline Mr. Christie, who had been in charge of the transition for several months. After Mr. Christie dropped out of the Republican primary race, he became a staunch supporter of Mr. Trump. But his standing has fallen recently as two former aides were convicted in the scandal involving the closing of access lanes at the George Washington Bridge in 2013. In a statement, Mr. Christie said that he is “proud to have run the phase of the transition team” and said that he looks forward to working with Mr. Pence. “I want to thank Trump for the opportunity to continue to help lead in this next phase,” Mr. Christie wrote. Two people familiar with the reorganization discussion said Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s had wanted to marginalize Mr. Christie, who had come to recognize that he was not in the running to serve as a top adviser in Mr. Trump’s White House. It was unclear whether concerns about his ability to be confirmed might prevent him from being offered a cabinet post. The changes will also push aside Richard H. Bagger, a former top aide to Mr. Christie who had been working on the transition. The transition team said Mr. Bagger will “return to the private sector” but will remain an adviser. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Michael T. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general who has been a top campaign supporter, will also serve as vice chairmen of the transition, the transition team said Friday afternoon. The advisory committee is made up of four women and 12 men. It will include several members of Congress Rebekah Mercer, a top Republican donor Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal Attorney General Pam Bondi of Florida Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive and Anthony Scaramucci, a manager and Trump supporter. Mr. Bannon will also serve on the committee. A political committee supporting Ms. Bondi received a $25, 000 donation from the Trump Foundation, raising questions because it was around the time her office was reviewing allegations against Mr. Trump’s education programs. “This team of experienced leaders will form the building blocks of our presidential transition team staff leadership roster, and will work with elected officials and tireless volunteers to prepare our government for the transfer of power on Jan. 20,” Mr. Pence said in a statement. There are some indications that the transition effort was slow to start, perhaps the result of Mr. Trump’s upset victory, which caught much of the political world by surprise. At least a few of the people helping organize the search for Mr. Trump were tapped at the last minute, while others have been preparing quietly for weeks. At the Pentagon and the State Department, officials of the Obama administration said on Thursday that they had not yet heard from Mr. Trump’s transition team about beginning the complex work of transferring responsibilities and authority. A spokesman for the State Department said he did not have “any firm word” on when briefings might begin for designated officials from the new government. Several people briefed on the transition process described it as somewhat chaotic after Mr. Trump’s surprise victory on Tuesday. His campaign was led by four leadership teams over 18 months, and most of those people were back in view on Thursday, including Corey Lewandowski, the campaign’s first manager. Mr. Lewandowski is said to have told people he would prefer a White House senior adviser role, although he has also been mentioned as a possible Republican National Committee chairman. Mr. Lewandowski resigned on Friday from his role as a CNN political commentator. One thing is clear already: those helping Mr. Trump make the decisions are the members of his campaign’s inner circle. On Friday morning at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the ’s closest aides arrived, one by one, waving to the press corps as they entered the elevators. Trump Tower, the ’s residence, has been transformed into a kind of fortress by the Secret Service and the New York police. The building has been ringed by Jersey barriers and concrete blocks marked with “NYPD. ” The Secret Service has set up checkpoints on each end of 56th Street near the tower, and pedestrian access has been restricted around the building. With just about 70 days left before the inauguration, Mr. Trump’s administration is largely being assembled behind the scenes. But like much else in the nation’s capital, little stays secret for long. The list of names being mentioned as possibilities for crucial posts in Mr. Trump’s cabinet is growing by the hour, giving official Washington what it craves most: a parlor game as speculation grows about who might actually get a nod. The latest to be swept into the speculation is Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, who was mentioned as a possible candidate for secretary of the Treasury by CNBC. Officials with the Trump transition team said they reached out informally to Mr. Dimon, who was clear he did not want the post. Aides to Mr. Trump have declined to confirm who is on the short list for cabinet posts. And despite the ’s return to Twitter on Thursday night, he has so far said nothing specific about his possible picks. The critical position of chief of staff — the gatekeeper for the president inside the West Wing — is expected to come down to a choice between Mr. Bannon and Mr. Priebus. The two men spent more than an hour in a meeting on Friday at Trump Tower. Mr. Giuliani told CNN on Thursday that he might accept an appointment as attorney general, saying that “there’s probably nobody that knows the Justice Department better than me. ” Mr. Mnuchin, who served as Mr. Trump’s campaign finance chairman, is said to be a serious contender for Treasury secretary (though Carl Icahn, the investor, and Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, have also been mentioned in the news media). | 1 |
Of all forms of homage, attention to detail is perhaps the most loving. It requires not just knowledge and dedication, but also thoughtfulness. It prizes accuracy both out of respect to the historical record, but also to those who wrote it. It celebrates the vision of the original creators more than the disruptive instincts of reinterpreters. By that measurement, “The New Edition Story,” a vibrant, fiercely committed that begins Tuesday on BET, is overflowing with love — a jubilant celebration of a group that was preternaturally talented and rivetingly tortured. Few groups in modern black pop are as deserving of this treatment as New Edition, which transported the elegance of the male vocal groups of the 1970s into the first wave of RB’s dance with in the late 1980s. The act released four essential albums, a couple more good ones, and spun off careers for all its members — solo work by Bobby Brown, Johnny Gill and Ralph Tresvant, and a group, Bell Biv DeVoe, made up of the others. None of this happened without conflict. New Edition, which hailed largely from the Orchard Park projects in the Roxbury section of Boston, was a black act that was chided by its label for not being mainstream enough. The members squabbled with executives, management and among themselves. This was in many ways the archetype of the modern boy band — so much so that when New Edition left Maurice Starr, who produced the group’s early songs, he created New Kids on the Block, essentially a white copy. For all of its musical influence, the group is probably best known for its internal dramas, its contractual nightmares and for the troubled adulthood of Mr. Brown. “The New Edition Story” isn’t hagiography. Friction was integral to the group’s mystique, but the show spends a good deal of time on its earliest days as preteens trying to forge a style. (For this part of the series, the members are played by younger actors. Tyler Williams as Mr. Brown and Jahi Winston as Mr. Tresvant are particularly dynamic). New Edition’s ascent was rapid: “Candy Girl,” the group’s 1983 debut single, went to No. 1 on the Billboard hot black singles chart, and the group had successful hits until the end of the decade. But in this that stretch of time is depicted as one of turmoil and dissatisfaction. Mr. Tresvant (Algee Smith, tender and limber) carries the disproportionate burdens of the lead singer, earning acclaim and resentment. And of course, there’s Mr. Brown (a combustible Woody McClain) who’s perpetually at war: with the other group members, with management, with law enforcement and, of course, with himself. “The New Edition Story” depicts a group of young men consistently slipping through the fingers of authority figures. That means their mothers (Sandi McCree as Carole Brown and Yvette Nicole Brown as Shirley Bivins are especially intense) their manager and choreographer Brooke Payne, played by Wood Harris, who conveys a swagger with the tiniest cock of the head or extinguishing of a cigarette and their manager (in this case Gary Evans, a fictional for the group’s manager in its late 1980s pop heyday) played by a manic Michael Rapaport. “The New Edition Story” is, by far, the best of the recent spate of black pop biopics, miles beyond the shoestring Lifetime entries about Toni Braxton and Aaliyah, films that have contributed to an air of lowered expectations for projects of this nature. Instead, “The New Edition Story” — written by Abdul Williams and directed by Chris Robinson — is more in keeping with the excellent “Unsung” about black musicians on TV One. It tells the group’s story, warts and all. (But not all the warts: Many of the details of Mr. Brown’s tumult have been left aside, and certain incidents, such as the quarrels with the RB group Guy that led to the shooting death of that group’s head of security, didn’t make the cut.) It undoubtedly helps the that the whole group — the original members Mr. Brown, Michael Bivins, Mr. Tresvant, Ricky Bell and Ronnie DeVoe, as well as Mr. Gill, who joined after Mr. Brown’s departure — signed on as . While that might mean some light sugarcoating, it also results in a historical narrative told with impressive detai l, particularly in regards to wardrobe and production design (kudos to the costume designer Rita McGhee). Album covers, dance routines and video shoots are remade down to the tiniest details (the remade videos for “If It Isn’t Love” and Mr. Brown’s “Every Little Step” are impressive). The clothing is a virtuosic symphony of sequined suits, flowing synthetic fabrics, graffitied overalls. And then there’s the music: “The New Edition Story” relies on effective rerecorded versions of the group’s many hits, sung by the actors (and mixed in places with original master recordings.) The music itself is handled by the duos of Babyface and Antonio Dixon, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who’ve rebuilt the New Edition sound (much of which they originally created) with rigor and affection. Approval and faithfulness have limits, though. The group’s founding is streamlined, and some slang slips into scenes. Comparatively little time is spent on the group members’ solo efforts, especially given that so much of the final installment focuses on the members’ reconciliation in the a reassurance that everyone ended up on the same page, putting their individual and collective troubles behind them. (The N. W. A biopic “Straight Outta Compton” took a similar, though more maudlin approach.) Here, some liberties have been taken with the timeline, placing an impromptu reunion at Mr. DeVoe’s wedding, in 2006, before the group’s participation at a BET 25th anniversary show, in 2005, so that the can effectively end with a performance and a BET infomercial. This is slick positioning and salesmanship, but also disingenuous. New Edition has been as fascinating for its valleys as its peaks. For this group, the most fitting tribute is always the truth. | 1 |
President Donald Trump’s deportation of hundreds of criminal illegal immigrants during his first month in office is “no so unusual,” according to The New York Times. [In analysis by the New York Times, Trump’s deportation effort to prioritize the removal of criminal illegal immigrants by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency shows that the enforcement actions are “not unprecedented”: Last week, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested more than 680 people in at least 12 states, shown below, stoking fears that the Trump administration is increasing the arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants. But a comparison of last week’s arrests and similar ones during the first four years of the Obama presidency show that the recent level of enforcement activity is not unprecedented. It is unclear, however, if the numbers are an actual increase in enforcement, because information on operations in only 12 states was disclosed. The New York Times analysis then described how Trump’s deportation efforts are on par with Obama’s, citing that the Obama administration “arrested an average of 675 immigrants a week in ‘community arrests’. ” In Obama’s first term in office, the analysis notes that ICE agents arrested over 35, 000 illegal immigrants, more arrests than any year in the previous four years of former President George W. Bush: The weekly average of such arrests made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement fugitive teams under President Obama rose to 771 in 2011 and declined slightly to 719 the next year. Data after 2012 are not readily available, but in more recent years, the number of ICE apprehensions and removals decreased overall, especially after the Obama administration began to focus on convicted criminals. In Mr. Obama’s two terms in office, there were at least six known operations in which more than 500 people were arrested, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Opponents of Trump’s plans, though, told the New York Times that the difference between Obama’s deportation efforts and the current model, is that Trump uses a “broader definition” when referring to criminal illegal immigrants. The Obama administration was careful to say that only people who had very serious charges or were recent arrivals were priorities for enforcement, but now, everyone is a priority, Mr. Capps said. Under Obama, nearly 90 percent of the illegal immigrants deported by ICE were convicted criminals. Trump, on the other hand, takes into consideration illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes, misdemeanors and those who have simply crossed the border. Some 75 percent of the 680 illegal immigrants arrested by ICE last week were convicted of crimes. The raids also included those who had illegally the U. S. and who had been ordered for removal. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
A suspect dressed in black allegedly kicked in a Marine veteran’s door just after 3 a. m. Thursday in Salt Lake City and was shot dead in the living room. [According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the deceased suspect, Puleaga Danny Tupu, was one of two men who allegedly forced their way into the apartment. Resident and Marine veteran Brian Sant was awake at the time, as he had just arrived home from working the third shift and was sitting in his living room. Sant fought with the men until his son emerged from a back room and shot both suspects. Tupu died at the scene, and the second suspect was taken to the hospital in critical condition. KSL reports that the surviving suspect “was shot multiple times. ” Sant did not know why the men targeted his apartment, but he said they made a mistake by doing it: “You got veterans living around in these apartments. You don’t know who’s got a gun. ” AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 1 |
Editor’s Note : Meanwhile, in countries that aren’t being distracted by the biggest bread and circuses election show you’ve ever seen…
Russian strategic missile troops reportedly launched an RS-18 ballistic missile on Tuesday. The launch may have been a test of the advanced hypersonic glider warhead, which would be able to defeat US anti-missile systems.
The test was conducted at midday from a site near the town of Yasny, Orenburg region, in the southern Urals, and the warhead reached the Kura test range in Kamchatka in Russia’s Far East.
“The test was a success. The warhead was delivered to Kura field,” the Defense Ministry reported.
Popular defense blog MilitaryRussia.ru says the launch was meant to test Russia’s hypersonic glider warhead, currently known by its developer designation, ‘object 4202’, or Aeroballistic Hypersonic Warhead.
A select few countries are currently developing the technology. The US has the HTV-2, a device developed by DARPA that has two partially successful tests under its belt. The Chinese warhead using the same technology is called DF-ZF, with Beijing first confirming a test in 2014. India is also studying hypersonic flight technology, but unlike Russia, the US and China, it is reportedly not developing a strategic missile warhead.
A hypersonic glider vehicle (HGV) is different from a conventional ballistic missile warhead in that it travels most of the time in the stratosphere rather than in space. It gives an HGV-tipped missile greater range and may give anti-missile systems a shorter window to respond to an attack.
More importantly, an HGV can maneuver during the approach to a target at high speed, making interception significantly harder, because it makes guiding an interceptor missile towards the attacking vehicle challenging and potentially impossible with current rocket technology.
Object 4202 is reportedly meant to be used with Russia’s next-gen heavy strategic missile the RS-28 Sarmat. Military experts estimate that the new ICBM, an image of which was first made public this week, may carry up to three HGVs as payload.
A previous possible test of object 4202 was reported in April. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
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With millions of eyes watching CNN for election results tonight, the network really couldn’t afford any high-profile screwups. But unfortunately, that’s exactly what they got when John King tapped his touchscreen electoral map too hard and plunged himself straight into a digital hellscape from which there seems to be no escape.
Ouch. That’s some major egg on CNN’s face!
The night appeared to be going smoothly in the network’s Washington studio, until King tried to zoom in on a breakdown map of crucial Ohio swing districts. When the map seemed to freeze up, a frustrated King tapped the Magic Wall with enough force that his whole arm plunged through the suddenly fluid surface of the screen. Before Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper could step in, he had been fully engulfed in a vast virtual expanse of colorful, swirling data.
With millions of Americans tuning in to watch the results of this historic election, CNN has been forced to press on even as they try to free John King from the computerized map. A noticeably emotional Wolf Blitzer mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to his imprisoned colleague before tapping the board to call up a gender breakdown of likely Oregon voters, the bar graph of which animated right into John King’s spine, launching nearly all the way to the mid-Atlantic states. If CNN producers thought that they had stabilized the situation by urging King to take refuge in the bottom corner of the screen, it did not take long for them to realize how wrong they were. When Connecticut was called for Hillary Clinton, the trapped John King was also turned entirely blue and let loose a horrible scream as if he were being burned alive. This level of panic was matched moments later when King tried to fend off a ravenous piece of malware with just his loafer, only for the shoe to shatter into pixels that the code devoured.
Yikes. CNN will be wondering for a while how this all went so wrong, and on their biggest night, too.
With plenty of states left to declare tonight, there’s still time for King to be rescued from the computerized nightmare. But with uploading a JPEG of a ladder for him to climb up and trying to shepherd him onto a thumb drive having already failed to return King to the studio, CNN may be running out of options.
No matter how this shakes out, it’s clear CNN has a MAJOR technology fail on their hands. Then again, this is just what happens when anchors play with tech toys without reading the instructions. Well, better luck in 2020, guys. | 0 |
WikiLeaks threatened to sue CNN for defamation after the network aired a clip of CNN counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of being a pedophile. [Tweeting from the official WikiLeaks Task Force account — a support account for the organisation — a tweet reads, “CNN airs of the CIA falsely calling Assange a ‘pedophile. ’” CNN airs of the CIA falsely calling Assange a ’pedophile’ https: . The plot: https: . — WikiLeaks Task Force (@WLTaskForce) January 4, 2017, The clip attached to the tweet shows Phil Mudd on CNN’s New Day program discussing the recent Fox News interview with Julian Assange. Mudd accuses Fox News’ Sean Hannity of “skirting the bottom line” in relation to questions about Russian interference in the US election, despite Assange openly stating that WikiLeaks’ source of DNC documents was in no way related to Russia. Mudd further stated that he thought there was an “effort by WikiLeaks to protect a pedophile that lives in the Ecuadorian embassy in London,” and further claimed that Julian Assange was “not credible. ” In response to this, the official WikiLeaks Twitter account has retweeted the Task Force tweet with the added quote, “We have issued instructions to sue CNN for defamation,” clarifying, “Unless within 48h they air a one hour expose of the plot. ” We have issued instructions to sue CNN for defamation:https: . Unless within 48h they air a one hour expose of the plot. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 4, 2017, CNN’s New Day twitter account has since deleted the tweet WikiLeaks Task Force cited and appears to have removed the segment of the video in which Mudd called Assange a pedophile from the story the tweet originally linked to. It also tweeted out a statement saying CNN had “no evidence” to support the accusation that Assange is a pedophile. We’ve deleted a tweet that included a video clip from New Day earlier this morning. Here’s our statement: pic. twitter. — New Day (@NewDay) January 4, 2017, Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart Tech covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart. com | 1 |
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 14:52 UTC From the University of Sheffield and "The Day After Tomorrow" department comes this climate disaster movie plot wherein global warming, er, climate change, cause the polar jet stream to go wacky and freeze us extra good in winter. Really. No mention of what caused similar weather during the " Little Ice Age " between roughly AD 1300 and 1850 , except that they are sure they've ruled out "natural variation" now. The movie plot from IMDB : As Paleoclimatologist named Jack Hall is in Antartica, he discovers that a huge ice sheet has sheared off. But what he does not know is that this event will trigger a massive climate shift that will affect the world population. Meanwhile, his son Sam is with friends in New York to attend an event. There they discover that it has been raining non-stop for the past 3 days, and after a series of weather-related disasters begin to occur over the world, everybody realizes the world is entering a new Ice Age and the world population begins trying to evacuate to the warmer climates of the south. Jack makes a daring attempt to rescue his son and his friends who are stuck in New York and who have managed to survive not only a massive wave but also freezing cold temperatures that could possibly kill them. The paper press release via Eurekalert, they even have a scientist named "Hall": Extreme cold winters fueled by jet stream and climate change: Scientists agree for first time that climate change may be intensifying the effects of the jet stream , causing extreme cold weather in the UK and US Study could improve long-term forecasting of winter weather in most populous parts of the world More accurate forecasting could help communities, businesses and economies prepare for severe weather and make life and cost-saving decisions Scientists have agreed for the first time that recent severe cold winter weather in the UK and US may have been influenced by climate change in the Arctic, according to a new study. The research, carried out by an international team of scientists including the University of Sheffield, has found that warming in the Arctic may be intensifying the effects of the jet stream's position, which in the winter can cause extreme cold weather , such as the winter of 2014/15 which saw record snowfall levels in New York. Scientists previously had two schools of thought. One group believe that natural variability in the jet stream's position has caused the recent severe cold winter weather seen in places such as the Eastern United States and the UK. The other camp includes scientists who are finding possible connections between the warming of the Arctic - such as melting sea ice, warming air temperatures, and rising sea surface temperatures - and the emerging pattern of severe cold winter weather. Now, Professor Edward Hanna and Dr Richard Hall from the University's Department of Geography, together with Professor. James E. Overland from the US Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have brought together a diverse group of researchers from both sides of the debate. The researchers have found that the recent pattern of cold winters is primarily caused by natural changes to the jet stream's position ; however, the warming of the Arctic appears to be exerting an influence on cold spells, but the location of these can vary from year to year. Previous studies have shown that when the jet stream is wavy there are more episodes of severe cold weather plunging south from the Arctic into the mid-latitudes, which persist for weeks at a time. But when the jet stream is flowing strongly from west to east and not very wavy, we tend to see more normal winter weather in countries within the mid-latitudes. "We've always had years with wavy and not so wavy jet stream winds, but in the last one to two decades the warming Arctic could well have been amplifying the effects of the wavy patterns," Professor Hanna said. He added: "This may have contributed to some recent extreme cold winter spells along the eastern seaboard of the United States, in eastern Asia, and at times over the UK (e.g. 2009/10 and 2010/11). "Improving our ability to predict how climate change is affecting the jet stream will help to improve our long-term prediction of winter weather in some of the most highly populated regions of the world. "This would be hugely beneficial for communities, businesses, and entire economies in the northern hemisphere. The public could better prepare for severe winter weather and have access to extra crucial information that could help make live-saving and cost-saving decisions." The study, Nonlinear response of mid-latitude weather to the changing Arctic, is published today (26 October 2016) in the journal Nature Climate Change on 26 October 2016. The research was partly sponsored by the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Climate and Cryosphere (CliC) project of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). It further cements the University's position at the forefront of climate change research and gives geography students at Sheffield access to the latest innovations in environmental science. Comment: In other words, "natural variations mostly account for the cold weather, but global warming causes cold weather"? Global warming stopped years ago, and is itself a natural variation over the long term. Humanity better face it: the global climate is self-regulating, and ice ages happen regularly. The Gulf Stream would probably be a better phenomenon to analyze in this regard: Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow . | 0 |
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Bangladeshi Army troops moved in on Saturday to end an standoff at a restaurant in Dhaka, the capital, after gunmen stormed into the building, detonated explosives and took at least 20 people hostage on Friday night. Gunfire and explosions could be heard as the soldiers, backed by armored vehicles, swept in to the restaurant in the city’s diplomatic district at 7:40 a. m. on Saturday. At least a dozen people were rescued, including several foreigners, the police said. Two police officers were killed in the initial standoff with the attackers, and 30 people were wounded, mostly from shrapnel, officials said. A police inspector said that at least five militants had been killed in the rescue operation. Details about other fatalities or injuries from the attack or the rescue operation were not immediately available. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on Friday. “Islamic State commandos attack a restaurant frequented by foreigners in the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh,” reported Amaq, an information outlet linked to the Islamic State. Outside the restaurant, more than 200 people waited all night beyond the police cordon in the diplomatic enclave, dozens of them relatives and friends of the hostages. Some of them communicated by text message and social media with the hostages inside. Several kitchen employees who had locked themselves in a bathroom inside the restaurant, the Holey Artisan Bakery, posted a picture of themselves on Facebook, bare chested against the stifling heat. Soumir Roy, 28, one of the employees, messaged his brother, saying, “We are here so if possible break the wall of the bathroom and rescue us. ” But after the gunfire and blasts from the rescue operations ceased, the messages from Mr. Roy stopped, and his brother and sister sat on the roadside weeping as they awaited news of whether he had survived. Ambulances could be seen leaving the scene. Eight to 10 armed men entered the restaurant, where about 20 foreigners were dining, around 8:45 p. m. according to Sumon Reza, a kitchen worker who escaped and spoke to reporters. The attackers shouted “God is great” before opening fire and detonating several explosives, Mr. Reza said. He said the attackers were armed with pistols, swords and bombs. Amaq later reported, “More than 20 individuals of varying nationalities killed after a commando attack on the Artisan restaurant. ” There was no way to confirm that claim. Early on Saturday, the group posted photographs of what it said were the bodies of foreigners killed in the attack and claimed that it was holding hostages, Amaq said. The attack was the latest in a series of killings by Islamist extremists that have rocked Bangladesh, a country, in recent months. The Islamic State is known to have claimed responsibility for 18 other attacks in the last year, most perpetrated against religious minorities, including Hindus, Buddhists and Christians. The increase in violence has raised fears that the country is in the grip of a wave of fanaticism that the government refuses to acknowledge. Despite months of attacks and subsequent claims of responsibility by the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, the government — which recently concluded a crackdown on extremists in which 10, 000 people were arrested — maintains that neither terrorist group has a presence in the country. “The continuous denial of the presence of local militant group connections with international terror groups has not been helpful,” said Ali Riaz, a professor of political science at Illinois State University and an expert on South Asian politics. “What we’re witnessing can’t be small groups coming together. It is clearly a very coordinated attack. If this doesn’t convince them to come out of denial, then I don’t know what will. ” As gunfire and explosions rang out across the upscale Gulshan neighborhood on Friday, witnesses posted images on Twitter of paramilitary officers surrounding the Holey Artisan Bakery, which is popular with expatriates, diplomats and families. Several foreigners worked at the restaurant, including an Italian who escaped and an Argentine, whose whereabouts is unknown, the local news media reported. Mr. Reza, the kitchen worker, said he and another employee were able to escape by jumping from the building’s second floor. “They blasted several crude bombs, causing panic among everyone,” Mr. Reza told a Bangladeshi newspaper, The Daily Star. “I managed to flee during this confusion. ” The total number of hostages, including restaurant employees, was not known. Neither were the identities of the attackers. “We are requesting the ones who are inside the restaurant to talk to us, relay us your demands,” Benazir Ahmed, director general of the Rapid Action Battalion, the country’s counterterrorism force, said Friday, according to The Dhaka Tribune. During the standoff, police erected a cordon around the restaurant, where family members of those inside gathered to await information. Fazley Rahim Khan, a businessman, waited on the edge of the police line, barely able to see the restaurant. He said he believed that his son Tahmid Hasib Khan, 22, was being held hostage. Mr. Khan said his son, a student in Canada, had just returned home on Friday for Ramadan. The family celebrated the iftar, the evening meal breaking the Ramadan fast, and then the son headed to the restaurant. “I’m just praying to get back my son,” he said. At least two Sri Lankans were among the hostages, Hari Kesha Wijesekara, a former president of the Sri Chamber of Commerce, and his wife, Shyama, according to the group’s current president, T. D. Packir. An Indian doctor, Sat Prakash, 43, who worked at a nearby clinic had been held hostage but escaped minutes before the army stormed the restaurant, said his friend Jahirul Islam Milton. Four diplomatic cars were parked outside the area all night. Foreign diplomats waiting to hear word of people inside refused to speak to reporters. The State Department advised Americans in the area to “shelter in place and monitor news. ” “The situation’s ongoing, obviously — too early for us to say who’s involved, motivation, any of that stuff,” said John Kirby, the State Department spokesman. Mr. Kirby said all Americans working for the United States Mission in Dhaka were safe, but officials were still trying to locate Bangladeshi employees. | 1 |
After traveling for five years and nearly 1. 8 billion miles, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will announce its arrival at Jupiter with the simplest of radio signals: a beep. NASA expects the beep, marking the end of a engine burn to slow the spacecraft down and allow it to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity, to arrive at Earth at 11:53 p. m. Eastern time next Monday. “I can tell you when that completes, you’re going to see a lot of celebration,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager, “because that means we’ll be in orbit around Jupiter, and that’ll be really cool. ” Juno’s mission is to explore the enigmas beneath the cloud tops of Jupiter. How far down does the Big Red Spot storm that has swirled for centuries extend? What is inside the solar system’s largest planet? “We still have questions, and Juno is poised to begin answering them,” Diane Brown, Juno’s program executive, said during a news conference this month. Juno will be the first craft to orbit Jupiter in more than a decade. NASA’s earlier robotic explorer, Galileo, spent eight years there and sent back astounding images of the planet and its many moons. It revealed features like a large ocean under the icy crust of the moon Europa, now considered one of the most promising places to look for life elsewhere in the solar system. This time, the focus will be on Jupiter itself, and in particular what cannot be seen beneath its colorful cloud stripes. “One of the primary goals of Juno is to learn the recipe for solar systems,” said Scott Bolton, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio who is the principal investigator for the $1. 1 billion mission. “How do you make the solar system? How do you make the planets in our solar system?” Jupiter is the titan among planets called the “gas giants,” with more than three times the mass of Saturn, the next largest. But it is far more than a bland ball of hydrogen and helium. What particularly piques scientists’ interest are the small amounts of heavier elements like lithium, carbon and nitrogen. “Jupiter is enriched with these elements compared to the sun,” Dr. Bolton said. “We don’t know exactly how that happened. But we know it’s really important. And the reason it’s important is the stuff that Jupiter has more of is what we’re all made out of. It’s what the Earth is made out of. It is what life comes from. ” On July 4, as the main engine on the spacecraft fires, in the control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. there will be nothing to control, and all anyone there will be able to do is wait and watch. If anything goes wrong, there is no way for anyone to intercede. The radio signals take 48 minutes to travel from Jupiter to Earth. By the time engineers receive word the engine firing has begun, the engine should have already switched off, with the spacecraft in orbit. If the engine shuts off prematurely, Juno might still end up in orbit, albeit in the wrong orbit. If the engine fails, “we don’t end up in a very exciting spot,” Mr. Nybakken said. “We haven’t studied that too much in terms of where we end up, because we’re focused on success and not failure. ” In other words, Juno would zip right past Jupiter and end up in a useless orbit around the sun. Through the evening of July 4, mission control will receive only a series of radio “tones” — bursts at different frequencies — telling the sequence of operations the spacecraft is performing. To point the engine in the correct direction, the main antenna will not be pointed at Earth, preventing more detailed telemetry. The spacecraft will also not send back any photographs or data from the instruments, which will be shut down on Wednesday, five days before its arrival, and will not be turned back on until a couple of days after its arrival. (NASA is holding back a series of photographs taken during the approach that it plans to release as a movie on July 4.) Juno is to make a series of 37 highly elliptical orbits passing over Jupiter’s north and south poles over 20 months. At its farthest, it will be about two million miles from Jupiter. For each orbit, it will accelerate inward, reaching 128, 000 miles per hour, and pass within 3, 100 miles of Jupiter’s cloud tops. The slight fluctuations in Jupiter’s gravitational pull, measured by shifts in the frequency of Juno’s radio signals, will tell the density of the planet’s interior and whether there is a rocky core within, where pressures might reach half a billion pounds per square inch. “We don’t really know if there is a core in the middle of Jupiter,” Dr. Bolton said. “If there is, it tells you sort of when and how and a little bit of where Jupiter must have formed. ” Juno’s science instruments include one to measure Jupiter’s powerful magnetic fields and an infrared camera to observe the glowing auroras around the poles. At depth, increasing pressures transform hydrogen from a gas into a liquid. At even greater depths, the hydrogen issqueezed so tightly that the electrons squirt out, changing it into a metal. It is probably the churning of liquid metallic hydrogen that generates the magnetic fields. Juno also carries a camera for taking the usual kind of photographs, not as part of its prime science mission but as a way to attract public participation. Anyone can sign in to the Southwest Research Institute’s Mission Juno website and suggest where the camera should be pointed and then vote on the choices. “It’s really a public camera,” Dr. Bolton said. “They can engage in the debate of which things are most important to photograph. ” Also on board Juno are three Lego custom minifigures made of aluminum. One is Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods. The second is Juno, wife and sister of Jupiter in Roman mythology, and the third is Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer who discovered the four large moons of Jupiter through a telescope he made. “We put these Lego minifigures on Juno in order to inspire and motivate and engage children, to help them share the excitement of space exploration,” Dr. Bolton said. After the first two orbits, during which engineers will check if the spacecraft and instruments are working properly, Juno is to fire its engine again to move into the orbit for making its scientific measurements. Although the craft are very different in appearance, much of Juno’s electronics and programming are based on the design of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, an earlier spacecraft also built by Lockheed Martin. “It’s just configured in a different format,” Guy Beutelschies, the director of interplanetary missions at Lockheed Martin, said in an interview. Instead of developing electronic circuits that could operate in Jupiter’s intense radiation, Lockheed Martin used the same circuitry as Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter but shielded it within the walls of a titanium vault measuring about one yard on each side. Unlike earlier missions to the outer solar system, Juno is powered by sunlight, not plutonium. Three solar panels 30 feet long with a total of 18, 698 solar cells gather the dim sunlight to produce about 500 watts. Even if everything goes better than planned, the mission will not last much beyond the planned 20 months. Despite the titanium armoring, “we know the radiation is going to kill us,” Mr. Beutelschies said. Juno is expected to receive a radiation dose equivalent to more than 100 million dental . One planet farther out, at Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is being readied for what its managers have called the grand finale. Almost 12 years after it arrived, Cassini is, through some slingshots past the moon Titan, swinging its orbit out of the plane of the moons and rings. Beginning next April, Cassini will begin a series of 22 close flybys of Saturn, threading a narrow gap between the planet and its innermost ring, measuring Saturn’s gravitational and magnetic fields. Saturn is thought to have a rocky core perhaps as massive as Earth or perhaps several Earths. Cassini will also take stunning images of the rings. “It’s like having a brand new mission,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini’s project scientist. Then, on Sept. 15 next year, with its maneuvering fuel almost used up, it will shift its trajectory and end its mission with a death dive straight into Saturn, sending back data about the atmosphere until it is torn apart. Five months later, Juno is scheduled to be similarly disposed at Jupiter. Then, for the first time in more than two decades, no NASA spacecraft will be orbiting any of the outer planets. The next mission to Jupiter, still on the drawing board, is to take a closer look at Europa. If it is built, it may not get there for a decade. | 1 |
Monopoly’s Indian version to be launched, real ₹500 and ₹1000 notes to be used Posted on Tweet
In a massive development in the world of board gaming, American toys and gaming brand Hasbro has announced that it will be coming up with its own Indian version of their child company Parker brothers’ cult classic business board game, Monopoly. Cashing in on PM Narendra Modi’s recent shell-shockingly bold move of invalidating currency notes of the ₹500 and ₹1000 denomination, Hasbro has announced that for the first time in the board game’s history, real notes of these denominations will be used. (Image via hasbro.com)
“HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT: India, we’re coming soon to you guys, with your own version of Monopoly! Say goodbye to Boardwalk, Vermont, Park Place, Ventnor etc etc. You will soon see Connaught Place, Park Street, Marine Drive, Anna Salai, Silk Board and so on, along with a dozen places that belong to Robert Vadra and DLF! And guess what? For the first time in the history of this classic board game, we will be using real notes for ₹500 and ₹1000! So this is an open offer to you all – please send us all your notes of these denominations and we will transfer the corresponding amount to you online! Avail this historic opportunity!” Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner announced.
Goldner added that it’s not just the properties that would be Indian. “There will be a ‘Go to Tihar Jail’ box at one of the corners. There will also be a ‘Get out of Tihar Jail free’ card with Sanjay Dutt’s face on it. As for the vehicles players would use, we will have a bullock cart, a Bajaj Chetak, a Maruti 800 and so on. And guess what – there will be no notes for denominations of ₹1 and ₹5! True to the Indian spirit, we will have Eclairs chocolates and 5-star bars in our game banks. The deal with Cadburys will be finalized soon. We’ll make this game as Indian as it can possibly get, all you folks as well as your illegal Bangladeshi immigrants are going to love it!” the CEO told The UnReal Times .
According to sources, Hasbro is likely to be helped by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd in the distribution of the game. “Oh I absolutely love Monopoly, I just can’t have enough of it!” Ambani reportedly smiled while discussing the deal with Goldner. Hasbro is also said to have been approached by NCP supremo Sharad Pawar for the supply of currency notes in the state of Maharashtra. Sources in Tamil Nadu added that the ruling AIADMK wanted special ‘Amma’ currency notes for the game packs distributed in Tamil Nadu, but their request was reportedly turned down by Goldner.
The announcement has drawn reactions from across the border too. While Pakistan has warned Hasbro of including any property from Kashmir in the game, China has issued a similar warning to not include any property from Arunachal Pradesh. From the center of the country, a letter by the Rashtreeya Swayamsevak Sangh has urged the brand to include other countries like Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka etc and make the game set in Akhand Bharat as opposed to being India-specific.
Regardless though, Monopoly India is all set to be officially launched soon at the office of the BJP’s Margdarshak Mandal. “Joshi bhai , Yashwant bhai and I are greatly looking forward to this! Will be quite a change from the usual Rummy or Bridge,” BJP patriarch LK Advani, who recently turned 89, sniffed. Tweet About Ashwin Kumar
1 of the proud columnists of URT, former co-editor of URT Tamil, amateur musician, Real Harris Jayaraj devotee, UnReal T. Rajendar fanatic, passionate about stopping female foeticide. | 0 |
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff ( ) lambasted former FBI Director James Comey’s judgment last week, but on Thursday he wrote an questioning why President Trump fired him. [He wrote Thursday in the Washington Post: In the wake of President Trump’s brazen interference with the independence of the FBI and the Justice Department, the country faces a crisis of confidence in the administration of justice not seen in more than four decades, and disturbing questions that demand immediate answers. He also said by firing Comey, Trump caused the public to wonder: By firing Comey, Trump again has caused the public to wonder whether there is more here than meets the eye. To the long list of questions about his former national security adviser, his attorney general’s flawed testimony before the Senate and his campaign’s contacts with Russia, we must now add one more: Why, really, did the president fire James Comey? However, last week Schiff blasted Comey, after the former FBI director defended his decision to announce the FBI was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton. He told CNN last Wednesday that Comey’s decision was “colossally poor exercise of his judgment that has had really significant consequences:” Consequences on how the country now views the FBI, how it views the Justice Department, I think it has cast a lot of doubt on the impartiality — the apolitical nature of the FBI, and he did the very same damage to the bureau that I think he was hoping to avoid. He added: “I think it was a very bad judgment that had a very substantial and adverse consequence. ” | 1 |
Hillary Spent $25 Million from Clinton Foundation on Private Jets
by Martin Armstrong
Bob Woodard , the journalist who broke the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign, has come out to say that Hillary’s Clinton Foundation is “corrupt” and “a scandal.” Hillary said she will continue the Clinton Foundation if president, meaning she would continue taking money from foreign governments, no doubt.
While the IRS documents show Hillary took in $500 million tax-free, she only paid out $75 million in charity and $25 million was spent traveling chartered jets. As long as she claims she went somewhere to talk to someone, all of her expenses are tax-free. I travel the world and have not spent even a half-million on travel. Of course, I am not hiring private jets. | 0 |
Montants des dégâts de la Coalition internationale sur les installations pétrolières et gazières syriennes par Bachar Ja’afari Réseau Voltaire | New York (États-Unis) | 7 novembre 2016 D’ordre de mon gouvernement et comme suite à de nombreuses lettres dans lesquelles nous avions appelé votre attention sur les attaques menées par la soi-disant coalition internationale contre les infrastructures et les installations économiques de la République arabe syrienne, je vous fais tenir ci-joint un tableau récapitulatif comprenant :
a) Les montants estimatifs des pertes subies à la suite des raids menés par la « coalition internationale » contre les installations pétrolières et gazières en République arabe syrienne au cours de la période allant du 1er août au 16 octobre 2016 (voir annexe I).
b) Les montants estimatifs des pertes subies à la suite des raids menés par la « coalition internationale » contre les installations pétrolières et gazières en République arabe syrienne depuis le début de ces attaques jusqu’au 16 octobre 2016 (voir annexe II).
Le Gouvernement syrien souligne à nouveau la position qui est la sienne concernant la lutte contre le terrorisme, qu’il avait exposée dans des lettres adressées au Secrétaire général et au Président du Conseil de sécurité, dont la plus récente porte la cote A/68/984-S/2014/642.
Le Gouvernement syrien demande une fois encore la cessation immédiate de ces violations et s’estime de nouveau en droit de réclamer des dédommagements aux États faisant partie de « coalition internationale », à la suite de la destruction délibérée des installations de services, de l’industrie, de la production et du gaz.
Je vous serais reconnaissant de bien vouloir faire distribuer le texte de la présente lettre comme document du Conseil de sécurité.
Annexe I : Tableau récapitulatif des montants estimatifs préliminaires des dégâts résultant des pilonnages effectués du 23 septembre 2014 au 16 octobre 2016 par les avions de la « coalition occidentale » contre les installations pétrolières et gazières Valeur des dégâts subis par des sociétés actives et d’autres, qui ont pu être évalués récemment pour la période allant du 1er août au 16 octobre 2016
Annexe II : Valeur cumulative des dégâts évalués depuis le début des pilonnages, le 23 septembre 2014, jusqu’au 16 octobre 2016 Bachar Ja’afari | 0 |
International disputes over territory can be ugly affairs, waged with all the nastiness of a divorce, backed with the force of armies. Just in the last few years, China has built islands topped with military bases to back its claim to vast stretches of ocean, in conflict with half a dozen other Asian countries, while Russia has forged a path of bloodshed and destruction in Ukraine over its annexation of Crimea. But that’s not how Canada and Denmark roll. Their way of contesting ownership of an uninhabited island in the Arctic would better suit a dinner party than a battlefield: It comes down to B. Y. O. B. Hans Island is really just a large rock, but it happens to lie smack dab in the middle of the Nares Strait, a channel of very cold water separating Canada and Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. The island falls within the territorial limit of either shore, allowing both sides to claim it under international law. Canada and Denmark set out to establish a definitive border through the strait in 1973, but they couldn’t agree on what to do about Hans Island, so they left the issue aside to be resolved later. The calm diplomatic waters grew choppy in 1984 when Canadian troops visited the island, planted their nation’s flag and left another symbolic marker as well: a bottle of Canadian whisky. The Danes couldn’t let that stand. The country’s minister of Greenland affairs soon arrived on the island to replace the offending Canadian symbols with a Danish flag and a bottle of Danish schnapps, along with a note saying “Welcome to the Danish island. ” And so began a spirited dispute, one that has lasted decades, with each side dropping by the island periodically to scoop up the other side’s patriotic bottle and replace it with their own. (What becomes of the evicted liquor? No one is — hic — saying.) Canada and Denmark agreed in 2005 on a process to resolve the status of Hans Island, but the diplomats have made little headway since then. Hoping to encourage the negotiations, two academics put forward a proposal in 2015 to blend realpolitik with real estate: Make the island a “condominium” of shared sovereignty under two flags — and presumably, two bottles. | 1 |
KABUL, Afghanistan — A Afghan police chief with deep experience in Afghanistan’s long conflict with the Taliban was killed in a blast on Sunday in the country’s eastern Nangarhar Province, which has been under threat from the Taliban and affiliates of the Islamic State. The police chief, Gen. Zarawar Zahid, was visiting an outpost in the Hisarak district when explosives placed near the outpost detonated, according to Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the governor of Nangarhar. One of General Zahid’s bodyguards was wounded, Mr. Khogyani said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing, according to a statement by the insurgency’s spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid. The attack came a week after twin bombings outside Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense killed at least 40 people, including several senior security officials. Nangarhar, which borders Pakistan, has faced mounting security perils over the past couple of years, with new Islamic State affiliates complicating the threat from the Taliban. Zabihullah Zmarai, a member of the provincial council, said the Islamic State posed a danger in five districts, despite repeated operations by the Afghan Army. “Out of the 22 districts, only six are secure,” he said. The Taliban’s presence across nearly a dozen districts varies, Mr. Zmarai said. But the Hisarak district faced a collapse in recent weeks. That drew the attention of General Zahid, who had gone there to supervise a counterattack. Over the past decade, he rose from a bodyguard to a police chief of several volatile provinces. His postings included two stints as the police chief of southeastern Ghazni Province, and one term each in Zabul and Paktika Provinces. General Zahid was seen as a commander, often arriving at the front lines unannounced. When a major cultural event drew world leaders to the ancient city of Ghazni, the general was photographed riding around the city on the back of a motorcycle to check on security measures. He had been wounded twice and had lost two brothers during the decades of war in Afghanistan. In June, he took part in clashes with Pakistani forces that erupted on the border. In a Facebook video that he posted, he appeared beside two mortars and shouted to his men, “Strike hard enough to blow up Nawaz Sharif’s home,” referring to the prime minister of Pakistan. Sediq Sediqqi, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior Affairs, called General Zahid “one of the bravest commanders of Afghan police. ” “He lost his life on the front line of duty in the fight against terrorism,” Mr. Sediqqi said. | 1 |
America and Lackeys Insult People of the World
By Finian Cunningham
SCF " - And its not just Russia that Washington is insulting it's the entire world. Such is the preposterous hypocrisy of US leaders and their international network of cronies.
US client regime Saudi Arabia the world's most repressive being given a seat on the UN human rights council over the weekend while Russia was forced out of it is just one glaring insult among many.
Russias top diplomat was referring to US officials and Western allies accusing Russia of barbarism and war crimes in its ongoing military intervention in Syria.
Yet these unverified, hysterical charges that Washington levels against Moscow in Syria are proven against the US and its allies who have committed huge war crimes in dozens of countries over recent years. Crimes that go unaccounted for.
Lavrov cited the case of former Yugoslavia in particular where, in 1999, US-led NATO warplanes killed thousands of civilians in air strikes on public infrastructure. Since then, illegal overseas wars launched by Washington in brazen violation of international law have proliferated with a death toll counted in millions.
Currently, US forces are bombing seven countries, including Iraq, Syria and Yemen, inflicting civilian deaths on a daily basis. Yet it is Washington and its Western minions who have the audacity to condemn Russia over its military operations to salvage Syria from a US-led covert war for regime change. That the US has orchestrated a criminal covert war in Syria since March 2011 violating the human rights of millions of Syrians is a shocking reality that only the servile Western media continues to conceal.
Last week, the Western propaganda campaign to demonize Russia scored a dubious victory by having Russia dropped from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). That move was achieved on the back of a media-driven agenda claiming that Russian air strikes were indiscriminately targeting civilians in the northern Syria city of Aleppo.
Never mind that Russian (and Syrian) aircraft have not been carrying out combat missions around Aleppo for nearly two weeks in order to facilitate humanitarian aid efforts in the war-torn city. Never mind that those aid efforts have been continually sabotaged by foreign-backed terrorist groups holding civilians under siege in eastern Aleppo for the past four years.
Russias military intervention in Syria over the past year has helped Syrian government forces liberate hundreds of towns and villages from a reign of terror imposed by foreign-backed mercenaries, all of which are integrated with the internationally outlawed terrorist networks Islamic State (Daesh) and Nusra Front. None of this is given any acknowledgment by the West and its subservient news media, which instead inverts reality by amplifying spurious claims leveled against Russia by the terrorist sponsors.
The battle for Aleppo is fully consistent with the objective of liberating Syria from a US-led criminal conspiracy to destroy the country and to replace the elected government of President Bashar al-Assad with a pro-Western puppet regime.
Over the weekend, Western media strained credulity by referring to rebels breaking the regimes siege on Aleppo. These so-called rebels are none other than Al Qaeda-linked terrorists of Nusra Front and its myriad offshoots, like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Fatah. It isnt the Syrian army and its Russian ally that are holding the city siege. It is the terrorists. And over the weekend their shelling resulting in dozens of civilians being killed, including reportedly 14 children in government-held western Aleppo.
Even the abjectly one-sided Western media could not conceal the slaughter by terrorist rebels whom the United States and its allies have supported with money, weapons and training to do their geopolitical bidding in Syria since 2011.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Iraq, a US coalition that includes Britain, France and Turkey continued bombing the city of Mosul, ostensibly to defeat extremists holding a civilian population as human shields extremists whom the US and its partners have covertly supported next door in Syria. US-led aerial bombardment of Mosul has resulted in heavy civilian casualties since the offensive was launched on October 17, according to local sources.
Elsewhere over the weekend, Saudi warplanes, supported by the US, Britain and France, ratcheted up even more crimes against humanity. Some 10,000 people have been killed since the Saudi coalition began bombing the regions poorest country in March 2015. In an air strike on the Red Sea port city of Hodeida, Saudi warplanes attacked a prison, killing more than 60 inmates and security staff. It was just the latest atrocity in a litany of such deadly strikes on civilian centers, including hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, family homes and even funeral halls.
Last week, UN agencies reported that nearly half the Yemeni population of 24 million is facing starvation. Images of skeletal children are emerging, wracked by dysentery and cholera. This barbaric nationwide ordeal has been created by the Saudi regime and its Western patrons imposing a sea and air blockade on the country. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole Yemeni nation is an imprisoned population that is being bombed over and over without the slightest compunction for women and children being blown to pieces.
Without American, British and French military support the Saudi slaughter in Yemen would cease immediately. Western-backed Saudi claims of Iranian subversion in Yemen, from allegedly supporting Houthi rebels, are a risible pretext. Washington and its clients are destroying Yemen simply because they cant abide a popular, genuinely pro-democracy uprising succeeding in a vital oil-rich region that underpins US hegemony through despotic Arab rule, as in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchical dictatorships.
On the same weekend that Russia was sanctioned at the UNHRC, it was yet another blood-soaked orgy of state-sponsored terrorism carried out by the US, its allies and their mercenary surrogates.
The US, Britain, France and Saudi Arabia are among the 47 member states represented on the Geneva-based human rights council. The Saudi feudalist monarchy, which executes prisoners convicted of sorcery and other crimes by public beheading, and which bans women from driving cars, only obtained its seat on the UNHRC due to Britain fixing the votes.
Russia, which has stood against the terrorist-sponsoring aggression in Syria by Washington and its rogue-state partners, is singled out for sanction over allegations of committing violations.
This censure is insulting because not only is it a travesty of justice. It is an insult to common intelligence which can see through the preposterous lies of the US and its accomplices.
The utter disconnect and deception by Washington and other Western governments may fool some of the people some of the time, but over the long-run such corruption is coming unstuck. The turmoil, anger and disdain among ordinary people towards criminals in high office is reaching boiling point in the US, Europe and across the world.
The more that these illegitimate rulers seek to justify their existence and criminal enterprises the more it offends ordinary human intelligence.
Russia is right to be aggrieved by the public insults that emanate from Washington and its lackeys. But Russia is certainly not alone in being grotesquely wronged. The whole world is aggrieved by putting up so far with an international oligarchy of thieves, exploiters and sponsors of terrorism. So far. | 0 |
Deportation of illegal immigrants hit a low during President Obama’s last full fiscal year in office. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security also appeared to be cutting back on information provided about all three of its law enforcement agencies. [The administration waited until the last Friday of the year to release its final FY 2016 report on Immigration and Customs Enforcement removal operations. “It’s no wonder that they waited for a day when hardly a soul was paying attention the numbers for ICE are abysmal, even worse than 2015,” Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughn reported this week. If there were an award for government reports that aim to obfuscate and spin, I would nominate this one. ” Vaughn wrote that the annual reports have historically provided basic statistics from all three of the department’s law enforcement agencies. This year, the report sneaked out by DHS officials on the last working day of the month normally, in two versions, was scaled back to provide only a fraction of the information normally disclosed. The reported is compiled by the Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) which has a new director, Marc Rosenblum. Vaughn listed the following as key findings from the annual report: One of the priorities of the Obama Administration was supposed to be deporting criminal aliens and others designated under the Priority Enforcement Program introduced in November 2014. Breitbart Texas Managing Director Brandon Darby dubbed the program “Catch and Release 2. 0” in an article published in January 2015. “Before these changes,” a federal agent with U. S. Customs and Border Protection told Breitbart Texas at the time, “all illegal aliens arrested by Border Patrol were required to enter the deportation system where they would be scheduled for a deportation hearing at a future date. Under this new system, the illegal aliens are not even required to show up for a hearing ever. ” “Not only are we releasing these people with no hearings scheduled, no notice to appear, but the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] is forcing Border Patrol to prepare the initial paperwork for the illegal aliens’ work permits. ” The source added, “Americans really need to think about the implications of this. Illegal aliens who are suspected of having terrorism ties, but not convicted, could be permitted to stay in the country. ” The impact of the new program has been dramatic in a negative way. The charts below show the dramatic decline of interior deportations (called removals by the DHS) and the removal of criminal aliens from the U. S.: Vaughn reported that 98 percent of all interior deportations were convicted criminals. This means that other migrants who have been crossing the border in massive numbers for the past several years are simply allowed to stay. Even though the removal of criminal aliens made up nearly all of the interior deportations, the numbers of criminals being deported also continued to fall from previous years. This is not because the country is running out of criminal aliens to deport. “The main reason for the decline is the Obama administration’s prioritization scheme that has steadily narrowed the types of cases that ICE officers are permitted to pursue. The total number of removals (deportations and voluntary returns) increased by less than 5, 000 in FY 2016 compared to FY 2015. However, the total deportation number of 240, 000 aliens is 41 percent lower than the peak FY 2012 numbers. “Obama has the lowest rate of deportations since the Nixon Administration,” Vaughn stated. “The administration and its allies frequently point out that more than two million removals have occurred since 2009, an accomplishment that they characterize as . ” Vaughn explains why this is not true: But counting only removals as deportations presents a misleading picture of the level of enforcement. Removals are just one form of the deportation process that can be executed by any of the three DHS enforcement agencies (ICE, Border Patrol, and CBP officers at the port of entry). All three enforcement agencies also can process deportable aliens as a return (sometimes known as voluntary return) which is a lesser consequence. In general most border deportations are processed as returns and most interior deportations are processed as removals, but in recent years many more aliens apprehended at the border have been turned over to ICE for a brief period of detention and then removed in recent years, in a departure from the traditional “you catch ’em, you clean ’em” policies, where the arresting agency typically handles the deportation process. In addition, illegal who have been removed previously, or who are prosecuted for smuggling or other crimes are turned over to ICE for processing. Under these scenarios, the Border Patrol will count the case as an apprehension, which is their marquee enforcement metric, and ICE will count the case as a deportation. Under Obama, a much larger number of Border Patrol cases were transferred to ICE for processing than had been the case under prior administrations. In 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush administration, just over a third of deportations credited to ICE were border cases, and were interior cases. In 2016, more than of the deportation cases credited to ICE were border cases, and less than a third were interior cases. Rather than using removals as the measurement, Vaughn suggests that a more “ ” comparison can be made by examining interior deportations and border removals separately. “Neither the Border Patrol nor CBP publishes the total number of deportations executed, and many of the cases are transferred to ICE, so comparisons of border deportations alone are impossible using open source statistics,” she stated. Using these methods, Vaughn concluded that the Obama Administration has completed a total of 5. 3 million deportations (both interior and border removals. That number represents about half of those same actions under the administration of George W. Bush. It is not the Obama Administration that holds the record for deportations. Rather, it is the Clinton Administration record with 12. 3 million deportations reported. The following chart provided by the CIS reveals the average number of deportations reported annually: Vaughn was extremely critical of the content of the new annual report released by Director Rosenblum. ”The first set of reports prepared under the tenure of new OIS Director Marc Rosenblum, formerly of the Migration Policy Institute, are of dubious value,” she stated. She explained that the previous year’s reported provided numerous data tables and explanatory materials providing a more neutral view of actions taken by the department. Typically, those reports would provide data covering multiple years for comparison. “The new reports include only one set of actual enforcement statistics with only five numbers drawn from DHS systems — repeat, five enforcement statistics,” Vaughn reported. “Specifically, OIS is reporting: the number of inadmissibility determinations at the port of entry the number of Border Patrol apprehensions the number of ICE arrests, the number of to detention, and the total number of deportations. No numbers are provided for prior years, but percentage changes from 2015 are reported. ” Vaughn concluded that the immigration issue will continue to be one of the most important and contentious policy matters facing the new President and his administration. “The incoming Trump administration and Congress must insist that DHS return to a relatively standardized and apolitical manner of publishing the vital statistics of the immigration agencies in order to support this discussion. ” Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX. | 1 |
http://mediaarchives.gsradio.net/dduke/112116.mp3 Dr. Duke & Farren Shoaf: We are the Republican Party Now & We are Coming for You Zio-Commies!
Today Dr. Duke proclaimed that a new Republican Party is emerging. The days of a GOP that goes along with the tsunamigration of third worlders into the United States, endless Zionist wars, and the cultural undermining of our European Christian civilization are over. A new wave of Republicans are taking over and restoring our values and pursuing the interests of the American people.
Dr. Duke had radio talk show host Farren Shoaf as his guest. They discussed the increasingly futile efforts by the mainstream media and Jewish media oligarchs to brand alternative media as “Fake News,” as if the mainstream media’s narrative, from Saddam’s non-existant weapons of mass distruction to the bogus polls showing Hillary on the verge of a landslide, can be trusted.
This is another great show that you won’t want to miss. Please share it widely.
Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. | 0 |
Early last year, in an article in The New York Times Magazine, I defined what I called a “Megyn moment,” in a profile of the Fox News host Megyn Kelly: “When you, a Fox guest — maybe a regular guest or even an official contributor — are pursuing a line of argument that seems perfectly congruent with the Fox worldview, only to have Kelly seize on some part of it and call it out as nonsense, maybe even turn it back on you. ” When I wrote that article, the Megyn moment was notable because it was so unusual. Normally, if guests hewed close to Fox News’s perspective (President Obama, woefully incompetent or frighteningly efficient Democrats, bad, especially Hillary Clinton Republicans good, mostly all of them) they were pretty much safe from challenge. In letting Ms. Kelly break from that orthodoxy here and there, the Fox News chief Roger Ailes seemed to be experimenting with ways to expand his channel’s audience, which was older, whiter and in danger of atrophying despite its longtime perch atop the cable news ratings. Ms. Kelly’s youth and divergent approach had the potential to draw in new viewers. The question at the time was, how far would he be willing to let these Megyn moments go? And what did that mean for Fox? That question arose again after Ms. Kelly had another one of her moments on Tuesday night, with a longtime Fox guest and contributor, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker. But this time the question has taken on a more existential quality. The network’s longtime chairman, Mr. Ailes, was ousted over sexual harassment accusations last summer a potential new challenger is threatening to emerge from the right in Trump TV, however uncertain it might seem and Ms. Kelly and Fox’s other big star, Bill O’Reilly, are nearing the end of their contracts. Fox News’s very future is on the line. Ms. Kelly’s moment on Tuesday night initially fit the classic pattern. It began with Mr. Gingrich citing signs of positive news for Donald J. Trump from early voting counts, which he said augured a surprise victory for Mr. Trump. Ms. Kelly, clearly mindful of four years ago, when so many Fox News hosts doubted polls showing an Obama challenged him. “He’s been behind in virtually every one of the last 40 polls that we’ve seen over the past month, that’s the reality,” she said of Mr. Trump. But what really set Mr. Gingrich off was when Ms. Kelly said the sexual assault accusations against Mr. Trump were clearly taking a toll, raising questions about whether the candidate was “a sexual predator. ” Mr. Gingrich asked why Bill Clinton’s accusers weren’t getting covered, and Ms. Kelly replied by saying that on her show they were. The exchange became edgier, and more personal. Mr. Gingrich told her she was “fascinated with sex,” and she told him she was “fascinated by the protection of women. ” She signed off by telling him, “You can take your anger issues and spend some time working on them,” and he more or less said back atcha. (Mr. Trump provided his assessment of the exchange on Wednesday, saying “Congratulations, Newt, on last night. That was an amazing interview. ”) Although the pattern was typical, the rancor was not. And it represented a bigger split at Fox News. By all accounts, in the absence of Mr. Ailes, Ms. Kelly has been freer to pursue her show on her own terms, which are certainly not in line with those of either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump and therefore not in line with many in the Fox News core audience (let alone those of her old boss Mr. Ailes, who informally advised Mr. Trump before the debates). The same has held true for the Fox contributors who have not embraced Mr. Trump’s candidacy — like Dana Perino, the Republican of “The Five,” and the Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes. They have been given ample time and freedom to call it as they see it in ways that were not as obviously apparent earlier this year. In that vein, the Fox News host Chris Wallace emerged as an exceptional debate moderator in the third presidential debate, holding firm with both candidates and asking tough questions of each. But there’s a flip side. In this “Free( er) to Be You and Me” environment at Fox, network personalities have become even none more than Sean Hannity, the host whose show follows Ms. Kelly’s. An informal adviser to Mr. Trump, his rhetoric has grown as incendiary as that of his candidate. On the same day as Ms. Kelly’s confrontation with Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Hannity announced on his radio show that if Trump won, he would personally pay to fly President Obama to Canada or, for that matter, Kenya or Indonesia. It was a nod to the fake, old “birther” conspiracy that even Mr. Trump has eschewed after promoting it for years. So there, on Tuesday, were two distinct futures of Fox. Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, has so far mostly kept it in its Ailesian mode, which, after all, has made Fox News a major profit driver for its corporate parent and kept it atop the cable news ratings. And Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan recently said it would be “foolish of us” to depart from “a winning strategy. ” But CNN is nipping at Fox News’s heels, managing to beat it in the news demographic that advertisers care most about — people between the ages of 25 and 54 — over the last four weeks, the first such sustained victory in 15 years. Still, nothing forces decisions in television news like the hard deadlines of talent contracts. Ms. Kelly’s comes up later next year, followed by that of Mr. O’Reilly. Every rival network has expressed interest in picking her up, and Tuesday night’s Megyn moment can only help her in that regard. The Murdochs have made it clear they would like Ms. Kelly to stay, which they showed with the $6 million advance their book imprint HarperCollins paid for her coming memoir, “Settle for More. ” On Wednesday night, The Wall Street Journal — a Fox News corporate sibling — quoted Rupert Murdoch as saying he viewed Ms. Kelly as important to the network and was hoping to have her contract locked down “very soon. ” But, he added, the network has a “deep bench” of personalities, any of whom would “give their right arm for her spot. ” But if the Murdochs persuade Ms. Kelly to stay, will there be room for her, Mr. Hannity and Mr. O’Reilly? Both Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Hannity have openly feuded with her, though Mr. Hannity’s fights have been more bitter and more recent. If Ms. Kelly stays, will they? Who knows if Mr. Trump will pursue some sort of television venture (he says he has no interest). But if he does, he could conceivably hire Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Hannity, who has a contract provision that would allow him to follow Mr. Ailes out the door (though the window is tight and it would presumably have to happen in relatively short order). A Trump venture raises the prospect of a more moderate — if still plenty — Fox News combating not just CNN and MSNBC but also a challenger from the right. Television news would never be the same. | 1 |
Donald Trump kept his word, Mitch McConnell played hardball, and together they triumphed over Chuck Schumer and the liberal establishment. April 7 should be marked on every patriot’s calendar as a turning point in history. [How long has it been since we had a policy victory of this magnitude? America now has a chance to return to constitutional government. If you think I am exaggerating the importance of having a true originalist in the Scalia chair on the Supreme Court, consider this question: If Neil Gorsuch had been writing the majority opinion in the 2012 NFIB v. Sebelius challenge to Obamacare, would we still have Obamacare? No way, Jose. Adding Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is a historic turning point for three reasons besides the obvious one of having a strong conservative in Scalia’s chair. The Republican Party should heed the lessons taught by this victory if they want to actually govern the country instead of merely taking over the command of a doomed Titanic. First, the U. S. Senate Republicans showed unusual courage and uncharacteristic stamina. When Justice Scalia died suddenly in early 2016, President Obama moved swiftly to fill the vacancy. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley decided the vacancy on the court should be filled by the winner of the 2016 presidential election and not by a lame duck incumbent. Indeed, no less an authority on Supreme Court vacancies than Democrat leader Chuck Schumer had proposed the same thing back in 2008 when George Bush was the lame duck. McConnell and the Senate Republicans held their ground despite the onslaught of criticism from the new power trilogy of the mainstream media, Hollywood comedians, and Obama Legacy stockholders. Then, in the middle of his campaign in 2016, candidate Donald Trump drew up a list of 21 conservative judges, made it public, and promised to select his first Supreme Court nominee from that list. Publishing that list was in itself radically unconventional and a bold gamble. But then he did a really unconventional thing and kept that promise by selecting Neil Gorsuch, a 10th Circuit Court judge who was probably among the two or three most conservative judges on that list of . Golly, Batman, what next? !! And then came the coup de gras — not just ending opposition to Gorsuch but also giving Trump’s next Supreme Court nominee much better odds for confirmation. Democrats announced they would filibuster to block a full Senate vote on the Gorsuch appointment since it takes 60 votes to end a filibuster, not a simple majority of 51. Senate Republicans rose to the occasion by pulling the “nuclear trigger” ending the filibuster rule altogether, thereby not just stopping the filibuster against Gorsuch but also ending the filibuster threat against all future court nominees as well. Mitch McConnell had his finest hour as Senate Republican leader by holding that gang of 52 Republicans together and delivering on his promise to President Trump. All three elements of this miracle are worthy of praise — Trump’s courage in publishing the list, his wisdom in selecting Gorsuch, and McConnell’s stellar leadership and political craftsmanship in delivering the victory despite universal, virulent Democrat opposition. Why is this victory so pivotal and so monumental? The answer is simple: a conservative majority on the U. S. Supreme Court is absolutely central to the survival of our Republic. The rule of law has become the rule of judges, and the Supreme Court is the final check on the rule of bad judges — which we have a few hundred in our federal courts thanks to decades of poor judicial appointments. Let us recall that the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was written by a Republican nominee, Harry Blackman. More recently, Obamacare survived a court challenge because of the linguistic creativity of a Republican chief justice. The lessons to be learned from the Gorsuch victory are many, but this is the main one: We can restore the rule of law and true constitutionalism to the Supreme Court only if we have all three elements of the winning formula: a President with the wisdom to appoint the right judges, a Senate Republican leadership with the courage to fulfill its constitutional obligations, and a nation with a majority willing to support those choices. The Gorsuch appointment dwarfs in importance anything else Trump can or will do in the next four years and more than balances the inevitable disappointments and missteps he will send our way. Some people will think I am enthusiastic about Gorsuch only because he is likely to uphold Trump’s Executive Orders on immigration, but they are mistaken. I earnestly hope he will have the opportunity in the next few years to overturn bad precedents in Kelo (2005) Chevron (1984) and Roe (1973) decisions and many others. We can and will disagree with President Trump on some issues, such as trade policy, infrastructure boondoggles, and foreign policy mistakes like military involvement in Syria’s civil war. In fact, I may not agree with Trump’s every proposal or action on immigration and border security. But no matter: gaining conservative control of the Supreme Court makes the Trump presidency a success no matter what happens tomorrow. The Republican success in delivering the Gorsuch confirmation greatly overshadow the Republican Party’s many warts and weaknesses. I have decided to rejoin the Republican party as the best available vehicle for defending and sustaining our constitutional Republic. | 1 |
PHILADELPHIA — First a black president and now, just maybe, a woman. Karen Willis, an delegate to this week’s Democratic convention here, was exhilarated by the historic possibilities of Hillary Clinton’s election run, viewing it as a natural succession to Barack Obama’s eight years in power. But when it comes to persuading voters, she noted, Mrs. Clinton’s gender milestone was the one thing her party was likely to play down. “We don’t want to offend some of the white men out there who may not take too well to a first woman,” said Ms. Willis, who is from San Diego, citing internal party talking points. “We don’t want to rub it in their faces that she’s a woman, any more than we rubbed it in their faces that Barack Obama was black. It makes sense. ” As the United States kicks off an unprecedented presidential campaign contest this week, setting Mrs. Clinton against her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, the sensitivities of the country’s gender politics are bubbling to the surface. Americans find themselves confronted with an uncomfortable question: Are they really ready to accept a Madam President? The soaring optimism of Mrs. Clinton’s address to her party in Philadelphia, with its promises of breaking the world’s highest glass ceiling, comes against the backdrop of a contest notable for its misogynistic discourse. Casual prejudices once reserved for the locker room or the bar stool have been projected loudly onto a national stage, mostly from the podium of Mr. Trump, who has variously described women as fat pigs, dogs and slobs, and blamed their menstrual cycles for criticism of him. In particular, he has accused Mrs. Clinton of playing the “woman’s card. ” Beyond Mr. Trump’s schoolboy imprecations, the bilious environment has drawn attention to the more serious issue of the United States’ record of putting women in positions of power. American popular culture celebrates women who combine power and success, like Sheryl K. Sandberg, the Facebook executive whose prescriptions on balancing a career with family life are received with great solemnity. In government, American diplomats monitor human rights in other nations and can be outspoken against egregious abuses involving women, like acid attacks and honor killings, in poor countries. But despite progress toward gender equality in recent decades, women struggle to achieve equal pay or seniority to men of equivalent qualification in business, even in liberal bastions like Hollywood. The gap is most striking in politics. After a surge in female members of Congress in the early 1990s, rates have stalled or fallen back currently, 20 percent of representatives and senators are women, far below the 30 percent goal set by a United Nations conference on women. The World Economic Forum, in its latest Global Gender Gap report, ranked the United States 72nd of 145 countries for political empowerment, trailing countries like Cuba, Cape Verde and Kenya. In part, experts say, the American system is at fault. The presidential nominating process, with its long and ruinously expensive campaigns, is tougher on nonconventional candidates than the parliamentary system is in many countries. And American politicians are averse to the quotas that helped increase female participation in other countries. Badges and deriding Mrs. Clinton in obscene terms or using sexual slurs are common at Trump rallies. But women who have succeeded in Washington also point to deeply ingrained male chauvinism as a powerful impediment to success. Madeleine Albright, the United States’ first female secretary of state, recalled in an interview how she had often encountered more resistance from American colleagues than from the Arab heads of state she had been warned about. “It was the little things,” she said. When she raised her voice in meetings, “men would say, ‘Don’t be so emotional,’ or would drum their fingers on the table and say I was talking too long — when the men actually talked much longer. ” Similar attitudes endure today, powerful women say. Shamila N. Chaudhary, a former Obama administration official now at New America, a think tank in Washington, said she encountered workplace friction with male subordinates every day. “People don’t like women to be leaders,” she said. “They get angry. It’s always about my demeanor or my tone. I tell them I’m just trying to get the work done. ” Female politicians in other countries hope that Mrs. Clinton’s run will set an example for them, too. Joyce Laboso, the deputy speaker of Kenya’s Parliament, who was in Philadelphia this week, said she had followed Mrs. Clinton’s campaign with a mix of envy and empathy. Back home she, too, had endured taunts from men who questioned her suitability to run for office, or who said she had the wrong husband for the job (although in her case, it was because her spouse is from another ethnic group). “Men say that positions of authority are not our sphere,” she said. “But if Hillary becomes president, that myth will be shattered. ” If she wins, Mrs. Clinton promises more than symbolism. But away from the curated, environment of the convention, with its rousing slogans, the coming battle with Mr. Trump is likely to feature further ad hominem attacks. “I’m taking the gloves off,” he said at a rally in Colorado Springs on Friday. Just as Mr. Trump was accused of using tactics to attack Mr. Obama — by supporting, for instance, the “birther” conspiracy theories claiming that Mr. Obama had been born in Kenya — Mr. Trump could well return to attacks based on gender. It’s not just Mr. Trump, though. Mrs. Clinton suffers from unusually high negative ratings from voters, including many women, who see her as an impenetrable figure whose life has been framed by compromised politics and the ultimate power marriage. Some were uncomfortable with a convention speech this week by her husband, Bill Clinton, that tried to paint her as an object of desire. Surveys show that young people, in particular, do not trust her. Many young female supporters of her opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said they resented being pressured into supporting her on the basis of her sex. “I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me,” Mrs. Clinton admitted during the convention. The gender debate, both overt and coded, is part of the broader tumult of a campaign that has challenged many core notions of American political identity, and that has been filled with astonishing turns. In just the past week, Mr. Trump called for Russian intelligence agencies to find Mrs. Clinton’s missing emails, only to retract the statement as an apparent joke. At the Democratic convention, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York suggested that Mr. Trump was not sane. In an electrifying moment, the father of a fallen Muslim American soldier brandished a copy of the Constitution on stage and waved it at Mr. Trump. “You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” he said. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have debated how much they should focus on gender in the coming months. Many see parallels with the delicate balancing act of 2008, when the party sought to reassure some voters about Mr. Obama. Ms. Willis, the delegate, said she had been told then that “we can’t make race an issue, because there are some people out there who might not take well to that. ” But in Philadelphia, at least, Mrs. Clinton owned her historic achievement. Her first appearance, on a video screen, showed her surrounded by the shards of a shattering glass ceiling. During the speeches, some delegates — men as well as women — cried openly. “It’s the end of a long struggle,” Representative John Lewis, a civil rights champion from Georgia, told MSNBC just before Mrs. Clinton was officially nominated. “I cried when Barack Obama was nominated, cried when he was elected, cried when he was sworn in. And I may cry again tonight. ” | 1 |
Previous Eight Days to America’s Armageddon
We have eight days until America meets her ultimate fate and this is what we are about to inherit as a leader.
Hillary’s Epitaph
By hook, or crook, this is who we are about to elect into the White House. This is what she’s accomplished: Whitewater Sitting on the Board of LaFarge when the first payments were given to fund ISIS by LaFarge The first failed version of Obamacare when she was first lady Vince Foster The Travelgate scandal when she was the First Lady Selling 20% of America’s uranium to the Russian (NY Times) TREASON Stealing $2 billion of Haitian relief money. Posting Ambassador Stevens travel plans prior to Benghazi ACCOMPLICE TO MURDER Benghazi The drug and money laundering of the Clinton Foundation Paying out 5% of the total proceeds of the Clinton Foundation to charity while pocketing the rest Using foreign money in Presidential campaign Pay for play- Perpetuating arms arms deals with nations that sponsor terrorism, when serving s Secretary of State, in exchange for payments to the Clinton Foundation Preparing to run to a country who has no extradition agreement with the United States in order to escape the justice that is coming her way (eg Qatar). The ongoing email scandal in which she obstructed justice by deleting 33,000 emails that were under investigation by Congress The ongoing email scandal in which she sent out emails with security designations as “ABOVE TOP SECRET” and she did so 22 times ESPIONAGE Refusing to step down and creating a constitutional crisis in a nation that is hopelessly divided already
Hillary’s new administration will consist of the following goals and this is not even being kept secret. Enacting the largest tax increase on Americans at $1.3 trillion dollars. The elimination of the family structure as we know it though increased power given to CPS’ around the country though Health and Human Services. Remember? It take a Village to Raise a Child? Or, was it the Village Idiot to Raise a Child? The elimination of inheritance. The elimination of Christianity. The elimination of free speech and she has made this one abundantly clear with her comments toward the alt. media. The elimination of free speech. The creation of a borderless nation. Increasing the importation of possible terrorists without national security vetting. The elimination of the Second Amendment. A President who will never leave office until she dies.
We are witnessing the possible installation of the modern day version of Stalin as the President of the United States.
I could go on and on, but fortunately, I still have a life that is worth living.
The big question is this: Why aren’t Americans from every race, color and religion in the streets demanding an end to her candidacy?
I have written about this before, perhaps America is now ready to look at herself in the mirror.
The following represents why America has not had enough of the criminality. The following 3 psychological principles have manifested in the form of a self-created prison that over half the country finds itself in. The CNN Effect-Group Think
The world of psychological research provides the definitive answer as to whether we should fear our military in the coming storm ahead in the form of a phenomenon called group think . Group think is often described as a decision-making process whereby the group members go along with what they believe is the consensus. Group think has also been used to describe individual acquiescence to authority even when the authority has limited power to enforce compliance. Group think often causes groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s leadership and balance. The Migram Experiment
The controversial 1963 experiment, known as the Milgram Experiment demonstrated that with very minimal verbal pressure, and nothing else, approximately 65% of the population will put someone to death based upon the orders of a perceived authority figure. And this occurs when the authority figure, in the Milgram experiment was not allowed to apply any REAL threats. For a complete description of the Milgram Experiment, please click here .
The MSM tells America Trump cannot win, Hillary is good and Donald is bad. The political leaders, owned by the corporations who have been raping this country for 40 years tell us to vote for the criminal Clinton. And like good little sheep, we follow orders of the elite, just like the Nazis.
IF the Media Tells the Lie Often Enough, the People Will Come to Believe It: Confirmation Bias
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the public believes is false.”
William Casey, former CIA Director Confirmation bias is the same in any tyrannical form of government.
The social psychological term, confirmation bias, refers to the fact that the masses will believe even the biggest of lies, if they hear it often enough. Confirmation bias and group think work hand in hand to enslave Americans into believing in and accepting a self-destructive paradigm. Television MSM news has a filtering impact on the perception of reality . The psychological concept of confirmation bias means that when we hear a message often enough, we come to unquestionably accept the message as authentic and real. And the message is amazingly consistent because only six globalist corporate entities control over 95% of the media.
Donald Trump is racist! You have heard it before and you will keep hearing it until every nonwhite person in America believes that if he elected, America will see a race war.
Racist and sexist, that’s Donald Trump and we hear this over and over and over and the unaware masses in this country come to believe as the real facts fade into the background. Trump Cannot Win According to the Polls, Says the MSM and It Doesn’t Matter What You Do- Learned Helplessness
Why won’t America stand up for herself? Why is the country, once a country which possessed courage and conviction, now sitting idly while allowing itself to be taken to the slaughter without so much as a whimper?
The answer to the above question lies in the psychological concept known as “Learned Helplessness” as discovered by Martin Seligman in the 1960’s.
“Learned helplessness” occurs when an animal, or a person, is repeatedly subjected to an aversive stimulus that it cannot escape from. Eventually, the animal will stop trying to avoid the stimulus and behave as if it is utterly helpless to change the situation. Even when opportunities to escape are presented, this learned helplessness will prevent any action ”.
Phase One
In the first phase of the learned helplessness experiment, Seligman placed a dog on an electrical grid, shocked the dog and noted that the dog would demonstrate the ability to escape the aversive stimulus.
Phase Two
In the second phase, the dog was barricaded on the grid and was unable to escape the painful shocks. Eventually the dog laid down and passively accepted the shock.
Phase Three
Seligman then removed the barricades and the dog could have easily escaped the shocks. However, the dog, conditioned by the prior set of events, simply laid down and accepted the shocks, without mounting any resistance whatsoever. This, in large part, is where America is at today.
Trump has removed the barrier (phase three) and America has a chance to redeem herself in the eyes of God. We have a chance to reclaim a measure of respectability from the criminal enterprise system that we presently under.
It does not matter if you vote. Trump cannot win, says the globalist controlled media. The research shows us that one factor, and only one factor, can move the masses to action. When people see their loved ones in danger (ie cannot feed their children), they will act with purpose. This is the angle that the awake must use to awaken the sleeping sheep in this country. Do I think it is going to happen, I don’t think so. However, if we all get on our knees and pray to God for forgiveness and deliverance, we might be surprised at what happens. There are only 8 days to America’s Armageddon | 0 |
A federal judge in Seattle on Friday temporarily blocked President Trump’s immigration order from being enforced nationwide, reopening America’s door to visa holders from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dealing the administration a humbling defeat. The White House vowed late Friday to fight what it called an “outrageous” ruling, saying it would seek an emergency halt to the judge’s order as soon as possible and restore the president’s “lawful and appropriate order. ” “The president’s order is intended to protect the homeland and he has the constitutional authority and responsibility to protect the American people,” the White House said. A revised statement released later omitted the word “outrageous. ” And early Saturday morning, Mr. Trump tweeted in defense of his stand. Courts around the country have halted aspects of Mr. Trump’s temporary ban on travel from the seven countries, but the Seattle ruling was the most to date. Airlines that had been stopping travelers from boarding planes to the United States were told by the government in a conference call Friday night to begin allowing them to fly, according to a person familiar with the call but who declined to be identified because it was a private discussion. The Trump administration, however, could again block the travelers if it were to win an emergency stay. The federal government was “arguing that we have to protect the U. S. from individuals from these countries, and there’s no support for that,” said the judge, James Robart of Federal District Court for the Western District of Washington, an appointee of President George W. Bush, in a decision delivered from the bench. The judge’s ruling was temporary, putting Mr. Trump’s policy on hold at least until the government and opponents of the order had a chance to make full arguments, or until the administration won a stay. “What we’re seeing here is the courts standing up to the unconstitutional ban that President Trump imposed,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the A. C. L. U. “There’s obviously more litigation to come, but this is truly good news for the many people both in this country and abroad who have been unfairly targeted on the basis of their religion by this ban. ” It is not unusual for district courts to issue nationwide injunctions blocking executive actions, and the federal government must obey such injunctions even when other district courts have declined to issue injunctions in similar cases. Judge Robart temporarily barred the administration from enforcing two parts of Mr. Trump’s order: its suspension of entry into the United States of people from the seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — and its limits on accepting refugees, including “any action that prioritizes the refugee claims of certain religious minorities. ” The order had suspended admissions of any refugees for 120 days, and of Syrian refugees indefinitely. The goal, the president said, was to evaluate the process for vetting refugees and other immigrants in order to safeguard the country against terrorism. The order said that when immigration from the seven countries resumed, persecuted religious minorities would be given preference, and in an interview the day of the signing, Mr. Trump said the United States would give Christians from those countries priority because they had suffered “more so than others. ” Judge Robart made clear that his order applied nationwide, citing a similar nationwide injunction from a federal district court in Texas that had blocked President Barack Obama’s plan to shield some undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to legally work in the United States. Since Mr. Trump signed his order on Jan. 27, there has been widespread confusion over the policy and disagreement over how it was being carried out, flummoxing immigration lawyers, government officials and travelers. Shortly before the Seattle ruling, a different federal judge, Nathaniel M. Gorton in Boston, ruled in favor of the government by declining to extend a temporary halt to the order in that jurisdiction. Judge Gorton, who was appointed to the bench by the first President George Bush, said that while the nation’s immigration history was a source of great pride and that the plaintiffs in that case — Iranian nationals who are academics — had compelling stories, “the public interest in safety and security in this ever more dangerous world is strong as well. ” But that ruling was soon rendered moot, at least for now, by the Seattle ruling. The administration has been criticized for issuing its order without any warning to refugees and visa holders who were on their way to the United States. Some arrived at airports for flights and were turned away. The president’s order allowed for exceptions in the “national interest,” but lawyers for some travelers had described getting one as a Kafkaesque exercise, with the State Department’s website warning that no emergency applications would be heard, and Customs and Border Protection agents at United States airports all but unreachable because their clients were not being allowed to board planes. “It’s quite clear it was not all that thought out,” Judge Leonie Brinkema of Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va. said in yet another court hearing held Friday. “As a result there has been chaos. ” Protests over the policy continued on Friday, including a large group that gathered in a parking lot of Kennedy International Airport in New York for the Friday Prayer. One big question surrounded the number of people who were affected by the travel ban. Besides barring refugees and other visa holders from the seven countries from entering the United States, the administration also revoked, at least temporarily, all visas from the seven countries, including those for people currently living in the United States. The revocations, which were not publicly announced but were revealed during court proceedings, meant that anyone who lost their visa would be unable to the United States if they left. In the Virginia courtroom, spectators gasped when a lawyer for the government told Judge Brinkema, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, that more than 100, 000 visas had been revoked as part of Mr. Trump’s order. A State Department official later contradicted that number, saying that it mistakenly included diplomatic visas that were untouched by the ban as well as expired visas. The true figure was “fewer than 60, 000,” said William Cocks, a spokesman for the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. “To put that number in context, we issued over 11 million immigrant and nonimmigrant visas in fiscal year 2015,” he said in a statement. Because the court fights so far have centered on whether judges should impose and keep in place temporary restraining orders, the legal arguments in the last few days have centered on the government’s contention that there is “no potential irreparable harm” to justify keeping the extraordinary orders in place pending fuller briefing and arguments. But Bob Ferguson, the Washington attorney general, who opposed the Trump administration in the Seattle case, said the decision Friday “shuts down the executive order nationwide and immediately. ” “I hope the federal government will understand what they did was unconstitutional and unlawful,” he said. | 1 |
Chelsea Clinton will receive a “Lifetime Impact Award” as one of Variety magazine’s Lifetime Impact Honorees for humanitarian work. [Variety magazine and the Lifetime television network will honor Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, along with five other women April 18 at its annual “Women in Power” luncheon at Cipriani in midtown Manhattan, the Hill reported. “At the heart of New York City is a vibrant community of strong women in entertainment, media, and politics whose commitment to philanthropy is inspirational,” said Michelle Sobrino Stearns, Group Revenue Officer of Variety, in a statement released Monday. “We are delighted to be celebrating these women along with the women profiled in our annual New York Women’s Impact List with our partners at Lifetime. ” The other women being recognized at the event include CBS This Morning’s Gayle King, actresses Jessica Chastain, Blake Lively, and Audra McDonald, as well as media executive Shari Redstone. Clinton will be honored “for her work with Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which empowers kids to develop lifelong healthy habits,” according to Variety. Event organizers say more than 400 “entertainment and media insiders” are expected to attend. Saturday Night Live cast member Vanessa Bayer will host the event. The luncheon will take place just days after the Clinton Global Initiative is expected to shut down. While Clinton has stoked speculation that she will run for public office for a House or Senate seat, she has not announced a run, and sources close to her say she is not running for office. | 1 |
Four globalist newspapers have teamed up to work on an 18 month project they hope will “show the human side” of mass migration to Europe. [Each of the four European newspapers, one each from France, Germany, the UK and Spain, will follow a group of migrants in their respective countries seeking to answer questions including: “Will Europe change them or will they change Europe?” Le Monde has reported. Topics to be explored reportedly include how newcomers feel about a “rising tide of resentment that they encounter in this populist age” and which countries in Europe are “best at helping refugees settle”. During the project, entitled ‘The New Arrivals’ The Guardian says that papers will “work closely” together to report on “how Europe looks through immigrant eyes”. Both Le Monde and The Guardian say the 18 month project will look at the question of “whether European society is changing the new arrivals — and vice versa”. El País journalists will be looking at the daily lives of a football team of Africans who illegally entered Spain individually via methods including arriving by boat and scaling the nation’s border wall. Le Monde has chosen to follow a family of nine from South Sudan who are due to be moved to a village of just 850 people in Corrèze, France, after having lived in Israel for several years. In Germany, Der Spiegel will chronicle the lives of a large Syrian family who relocated from Damascus to Lüneburg, while The Guardian will follow a farmer from Afghanistan and his son who are living in Luton. “We will produce a series of films about our subjects in an attempt to find out what is the best way to handle refugees, what these uprooted people value in their new homes, and whether their new neighbourhoods welcome or reject them,” writes The Guardian. Managing editor at El País, David Alandete, said that with the project his newspaper: “Aim[s] to tell [migrants’] stories: their pain, fears, wishes and projects. By following a soccer team in Spain we hope to reveal what the human side of the crisis is. ” Decrying “stereotypes and prejudices” as Bundestag elections are due to take place in Germany later this year, editor Eva Thöne added that Spiegel Online “hope[s] to find a way to combine moving stories and portraits with a differentiated view on immigration”. Funding the project is the European Journalism Centre, whose partners include several projects funded by Hungarian billionaire George Soros including the Open Society Foundations and Open Society Georgia Foundation, via a grant by the globalist Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In January, José Manuel Sanz Mingote, director of the world’s largest news agency EFE, said that media corporations need to collaborate in order to “combat populism”. | 1 |
MOSCOW — Aleksandr B. Vyarya thought his job was to defend people from cyberattacks — until, he says, his government approached him with a request to do the opposite. Mr. Vyarya, 33, a bearded, bespectacled computer programmer who thwarted hackers, said he was suddenly being asked to join a sweeping overhaul of the Russian military last year. Under a new doctrine, the nation’s generals were redefining war as more than a contest of steel and gunpowder, making cyberwarfare a central tenet in expanding the Kremlin’s interests. “Sorry, I can’t,” Mr. Vyarya said he told an executive at a Russian military contracting firm who had offered him the hacking job. But Mr. Vyarya was worried about the consequences of his refusal, so he abruptly fled to Finland last year, he and his former employer said. It was a rare example of a Russian who sought asylum in the face of the country’s push to recruit hackers. “This is against my principles — and illegal,” he said of the Russian military’s hacking effort. While much about Russia’s cyberwarfare program is shrouded in secrecy, details of the government’s effort to recruit programmers in recent years — whether professionals like Mr. Vyarya, college students, or even criminals — are shedding some light on the Kremlin’s plan to create elite teams of computer hackers. American intelligence agencies say that a team of Russian hackers stole data from the Democratic National Committee during the presidential campaign. On Thursday, the Obama administration imposed sanctions against Russia for interfering in the election, the bedrock of the American political system. The sanctions take aim at Russia’s main intelligence agencies and specific individuals, striking at one part of a sprawling cyberespionage operation that also includes the military, military contractors and teams of civilian recruits. For more than three years, rather than rely on military officers working out of isolated bunkers, Russian government recruiters have scouted a wide range of programmers, placing prominent ads on social media sites, offering jobs to college students and professional coders, and even speaking openly about looking in Russia’s criminal underworld for potential talent. Those recruits were intended to cycle through military contracting companies and newly formed units called science squadrons established on military bases around the country. As early as 2013, Sergei K. Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, told university rectors at a meeting in Moscow that he was on a “head hunt in the positive meaning of the word” for coders. The Defense Ministry bought advertising on Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social network. One video shows a man clanging a military rifle on a table beside a laptop computer, then starting to type. “If you graduated from college, if you are a technical specialist, if you are ready to use your knowledge, we give you an opportunity,” the ad intoned. Members of the science squadrons, the video said, live in “comfortable accommodation,” shown as an apartment furnished with a washing machine. University students subject to mandatory conscription in the nation’s armed forces, but who wanted to avoid brutal stints as enlistees, could opt instead to join a science squadron. A government questionnaire asks draftees about their knowledge of programming languages. The ministry posted openings on job forums, according to an investigation by Meduza, a Russian news site based in Riga, Latvia, that first disclosed the recruitment effort. One post from 2014 advertised for a computer scientist with knowledge of “patches, vulnerabilities and exploits,” which refers to sabotage used to alter a computer. Given the size of Russia’s cybercrime underworld, it was not long before the military considered recruiting those it described as “hackers who have problems with the law. ” In an article titled “Enlisted Hacker” in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the government newspaper, a deputy minister of defense, Gen. Oleg Ostapenko, said the science squadrons might include hackers with criminal histories. “From the point of view of using scientific potential, this is a matter for discussion,” he was quoted as saying in 2013. Experts say the strategy was more than just talk. “There have been cases where cybercriminals are arrested but never ended up in prison,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company that first identified the group known as Fancy Bear as the perpetrator of the Democratic National Committee hacking. Mr. Vyarya, the programmer who turned down the government’s job offer, was an attractive recruit from the opposite end of the spectrum: someone with a career protecting people against hackers. Specifically, he had experience shielding websites from a maneuver called a distributed denial of service, or DDoS attack, in which the sites are overwhelmed and disabled by a torrent of fake traffic. Among his clients were Vedomosti, an independent newspaper TV Rain, an television station and the website of Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader. Mr. Vyarya said that in 2015 he was invited to accompany Vasily Brovko, an executive at the military contracting company Rostec, on a trip to Sofia, Bulgaria. But he said it turned out to be a demonstration of a new software suite capable of staging DDoS attacks. The Bulgarian firm demonstrating the software briefly crashed the website of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and Slon. ru, a Russian news website, Mr. Vyarya said. Slon. ru has confirmed its site went down inexplicably for about two minutes that day, Feb. 5, 2015. After the demonstration, Mr. Vyarya said Mr. Brovko asked him how the program might be improved. Then, according to Mr. Vyarya, Mr. Brovko offered him a job running the DDoS software, which he said the Russians planned to buy from the Bulgarians for about $1 million. Mr. Vyarya said his problems began when he turned down the offer: He was surveilled, and an acquaintance in law enforcement advised him to flee the country. He left in August 2015 for Finland to seek asylum, he and his former employer said. The Finnish government, citing safety and privacy concerns, would not comment on the asylum application. “As soon as we saw what was on the table, Sasha was given direct instructions to return to his hotel and stop all contacts,” said his former boss, Aleksandr V. Lyamin of Qrator, a cyberdefense company in Moscow, using Mr. Vyarya’s Russian nickname. But the overtures from the military contractor persisted, Mr. Lyamin said, and Mr. Vyarya fled. Rostec strongly denied Mr. Vyarya’s account. Mr. Brovko did travel to Bulgaria with Mr. Vyarya, the company said, but to evaluate software for defensive, not offensive, cybersystems. A spokeswoman for Mr. Brovko called the account of crashing sites in a product demonstration the imagination of a “mentally unstable” man. The military’s push into cyberwarfare had intensified in 2012, with the appointment of a new minister of defense, Mr. Shoigu. The next year, a senior defense official, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov published what became known as the Gerasimov Doctrine. It posited that in the world today, the lines between war and peace had blurred and that covert tactics, such as working through proxies or otherwise in the shadows, would rise in importance. He called it “nonlinear war. ” His critics called it “guerrilla geopolitics. ” But Russia is certainly not alone. “Almost all developed countries in the world, unfortunately, are creating offensive capabilities, and many have confirmed this,” said Anton M. Shingarev, a vice president at Kaspersky, a Russian antivirus company. Recruitment by Russia’s military should be expected, he said. “You or I might be angry about it, but, unfortunately, it’s just reality. Many countries are doing it. This is the reality. ” American intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, have for decades recruited on college campuses. In 2015, the N. S. A. offered a free summer camp to 1, 400 high school and middle school students, where they were taught the basics of hacking, cracking and cyberdefense. In Russia, recruiters have looked well beyond the nation’s school system. In 2013, as Russia’s recruitment drive was picking up, Dmitry A. Artimovich, a physicist, was awaiting trial in a Moscow jail for designing a computer program that spammed email users with advertisements for male sexual enhancement products. One day a cellmate, who had been convicted of selling narcotics online, sidled up to him with some news. The cellmate said that people incarcerated for cybercrimes could get out before trial, in exchange for working for the government. Another inmate had already taken a deal, he said. “It was an offer to cooperate,” Mr. Artimovich said. “Why else would you work for the government?” he added. “The salaries are tiny. But if you do something illegal, and go to prison for eight or nine years, the F. S. B. can help you,” he said, using a Russian abbreviation for the Federal Security Service. Mr. Artimovich said he decided to take his chances at trial, and served a year in a penal colony. As Russia ramped up its abilities, government agencies were also in the market for surveillance and hacking software, including some from legal suppliers in the West. In 2014, a Russian company called Advanced Monitoring that has a license to work with the F. S. B. the agency that succeeded the K. G. B. after the fall of the Soviet Union, bought iPhone hacking software from an Italian company called Hacking Team, according to invoices published by WikiLeaks. Hacking Team has since lost its export license. Western cybersecurity analysts believe they have identified the one responsible for the breaching the Democratic National Committee: a group nicknamed Fancy Bear. First known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28, the group has been active since 2007 but its abilities evolved to emphasize attacks, rather than gather intelligence, after the military placed a priority on cyberwarfare. It stepped up “faketivist” actions that released stolen data through contrived online personalities like Guccifer 2 and websites like DCLeaks, according to Kyle Ehmke, a senior intelligence researcher at ThreatConnect, a cybersecurity company. The group had been called Pawn Storm, named for a chess maneuver. It was nicknamed Fancy Bear in 2014. This year, the group appropriated the nickname for its own use, setting up the website fancybear. net and publishing hacked data from the World Agency, which showed that many American athletes, including the American tennis star Serena Williams, had medical exemptions to take banned substances. The hacking was apparently in retaliation for revelations of Russian doping in sports. President Vladimir V. Putin has said repeatedly, most recently at his annual news conference, that the information released in the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee was more important than who was behind them. “The main thing, to my mind, is the information the hackers provided,” Mr. Putin said of this summer’s cyberattack. Democratic Party members and the Obama administration should not look abroad for someone to blame for losing the election, Mr. Putin said. “You need to learn how to lose gracefully,” he said. | 1 |
Border Patrol agents from the Yuma and El Centro Sectors teamed up to arrest a human smuggler. The suspect fled and eventually crashed — rolling the vehicle and injuring his passengers. [At about 4:25 a. m. on January 16, the agents observed six illegal aliens scale the international boundary fence located by a plant in southern California, information obtained by Breitbart Texas from U. S. Customs and Border Protection officials revealed. The illegal entry was detected and witnessed by agents utilizing a monitoring camera system. The six migrants climbed into a white Acura Integra alongside Interstate 8. The responding agents observed the suspected smuggler driving eastbound on the interstate. The driver of the white Acura suddenly took the Greys Well exit and abruptly under an overpass. One of the agents from the Yuma Sector attempted to stop the Acura. The driver failed to yield and sped off. The agents from the Yuma Sector and the Calexico Stations eventually lost sight of the suspect’s vehicle. A continued search revealed the suspect had lost control of his car and rolled over. While the driver of the Acura refused medical attention, the six illegal aliens were transported to an area hospital. The migrants sustained minor, threatening injuries. The driver, a U. S. citizen, was arrested and could face prosecution for human smuggling. The six illegal immigrants were turned over to the Yuma Sector agents. They will be processed according to the guidelines of the Yuma Sector, CBP officials stated. While the illegal aliens were able to scale the fence near the plant, technology enabled agents respond tactically. The use of fencing and camera technology enables agents to more efficiently be dispatched to actual illegal border crossings and drug smuggling incidents. Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX. | 1 |
By Heather Callaghan, Editor Despite the public ire growing against monolithic chemcial corporations like Bayer; the chemical and seed companies are merging to become an even bigger force of... | 0 |
Last summer, early in the morning, I stood out in the main square of Florence to watch the tourists come in. It was quiet. A street cleaner drove its rounds, leaving wet circles on the paving stones. A vendor unpacked souvenirs from the back of his white van. When the crowds began to arrive — tour groups from Japan, China, Germany, Spain — they seemed less like people than like weather. They surged into the square, pooling and drifting. They clicked selfies in front of the statues. A small herd of Segways rolled past, one rider singing fake opera at the top of his lungs. I watched a tour group from Arizona (clearly identifiable by their neck badges) approach the white figure of Michelangelo’s David, towering on a pedestal in front of City Hall. One of the tourists pointed to it and said, in a tone of amused contempt: “It’s the most famous statue in the world, and they just leave it outside. No big deal — just hose off the pigeon crap. ” The implication was clear: Italy was a backward country, incapable of protecting its cultural treasures. To be fair, the tourist was not the first person to make this accusation. In his history “The Italians,” Luigi Barzini writes that one of the basic pleasures Italy reliably provides for visitors is “that of feeling morally superior to the natives. ” I sometimes felt this pleasure myself. The inefficiency of the Italian bureaucracy, whether selling you a postage stamp or fixing a street, was often marvelous to behold. And indeed, the statue the man was pointing at had obviously suffered from standing outside: The marble was striped with dirt. But the tourist was, in one very important respect, wrong. He was pointing not at the actual David but at a marble replica. Michelangelo’s real statue did once stand in this spot, but it was moved, for its own protection, 143 years ago. The original is now in a museum across town, shielded from the elements, perfectly safe. Or at least that’s how we like to think of it. We are conditioned to believe that art is safe, beyond the reach of the grimy world. We don’t hang the Mona Lisa next to an archery range. We put her in a fortress: walls, checkpoints, lasers, guards, bulletproof glass. There are scholars, textbooks, posters — a whole collective mythology suggesting that the work will live forever. But safety is largely an illusion, and permanence a fiction. Empires hemorrhage wealth, bombs fall on cities, religious radicals decimate ancient temples. Destruction happens in any number of ways, for any number of reasons, at any number of speeds — and it will happen, and no amount of reverence will stop it. Few humans on earth know this melancholy truth better than the citizens of Florence. They are born into a profound intimacy with decay. The city was the epicenter of the Renaissance — home to such superheroes as Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci — and the relics of that period have been under siege, more or less constantly, ever since. In 1497, the fanatical monk Savonarola sent his followers door to door to gather the city’s nonreligious art, books, clothing, musical instruments, then piled it all 50 feet high in the central square and set it on fire: the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities. (The spectacle was such a success that he repeated it the following year.) In 1895, earthquakes shook Florence so hard that citizens, fearing aftershocks, spent the night sleeping out in the streets. The 20th century brought Nazis and Mafia car bombs. This November will mark the 50th anniversary of the great Florentine flood of 1966, an inundation that overtook much of the city center, killing dozens of people and destroying old masterpieces. Today, the perpetual engine of Florentine destruction seems only to be getting bolder. Its latest target is its most ambitious yet: the mascot of the Renaissance, shining ideal of the human form, one of the most celebrated artworks in this or any other city — Michelangelo’s David. The trouble is the David’s ankles. They are cracked. Italians first discovered this weakness back in the 19th century, and modern scientists have mapped the cracks extensively, but until recently no one claimed to know just how enfeebled the ankles might be. This changed in 2014, when a team of Italian geoscientists published a paper called “Modeling the Failure Mechanisms of Michelangelo’s David Through Centrifuge Experiments. ” That dry title concealed a terrifying story. The paper describes an experiment designed to measure, in a novel way, the weakness in the David’s ankles: by creating a small army of tiny David replicas and spinning them in a centrifuge, at various angles, to simulate different levels of stress. What the researchers found was grim. If the David were to be tilted 15 degrees, his ankles would fail. The seed of the problem is a tiny imperfection in the statue’s design. The center of gravity in the base doesn’t align with the center of gravity in the figure itself when the base is level, in other words, the David’s body is slightly . There is, as the article nicely puts it, “an eccentricity of the loads. ” This places extra pressure on the David’s narrowest part: his ankles. As long as the statue is perfectly upright, the eccentricity of the loads is tolerable. But there is very little margin for error. If you tilt the base even slightly, the stress on the ankles sharply increases. Now it just so happens that, for a very long time, before he was moved into his protective museum, the David was leaning slightly. No one is sure exactly why. He stood, for more than 300 years, in the spot where I saw the tourist from Arizona scoff at the dirty replica. Popular legend says the lean was caused by a thunderclap in 1511, part of a violent storm that Florentines interpreted as a bad political omen, but more likely it was a result of the ground shifting slightly, for regular reasons — something like the force that tilts the famous tower of Pisa or the one that sucks constantly at the city of Venice. For several hundred years, the David leaned at an angle of several degrees. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re dealing with six tons bearing down every second of every minute of every day of every year of every century, it is plenty. Hairline fractures worked their way slowly through the stone. The right leg is significantly worse than the left. As the tilt of the statue increases, the stress will move higher and higher up that leg, until — at the moment of failure — it will break off just below the knee. But what would make the David tilt? The big fear is tremors, tremors of all kinds: traffic rumbling, the nearby construction of a train tunnel, the steady concussion of tourists’ feet and — most of all — earthquakes. Florence sits near several active fault lines, and every so often the city takes a seismic hit. In December 2014, a rash of 250 earthquakes rattled the countryside around Florence. Most were minor, and none hit the city directly, but still — Florentines could feel the motion. My mind could not stop imagining it. An earthquake hits the center of Florence. Liquid waves roll under the rigid city: The church bells ring out of time, terra cotta tiles rain down from the Renaissance rooftops, priceless paintings rattle off the walls of the Uffizi. Meanwhile, inside the Accademia Gallery, the David’s pedestal begins to tilt. Slightly at first, just enough to shift the statue’s gaze, so that he looks not at his old enemy anymore — the implied Goliath off in the distance — but at a new one: the floor he’s been standing on for 134 years. As the ground continues to roll, the David’s tilt accelerates. Five degrees, six degrees, seven, eight, nine. Gravity begins to act not just on the top of the David’s head but on his back, pushing him forward. Ten degrees, 11, 12. Finally, the compromised ankles reach their angle of maximum stress. They begin to slide along the old microfracture faults — an earthquake within the earthquake — and the David’s legs and ankles are crushed by the weight of the body above. He begins to truly fall. The first thing to hit the floor is his bent left elbow, the arm that holds the heroic sling, and it bursts along the lines of its previous breaks, old scars left over from an incident in the 16th century involving an unruly mob and a bench. Then the rest of the marble will meet the floor, and the physics from there will be fast and simple: force, resistance, the brittleness of calcite crystals, the shearing of microscopic grains along the axes on which they align. Michelangelo’s David will explode. When I first saw the David in person, the only word that came to mind was “perfect. ” Why hadn’t anyone ever told me he was perfect? I was 20 years old, exhausted, unwashed, traveling for the first time ever, ignorant of almost everything worth knowing. “Perfect,” I know now, is not a terribly original response to the statue, nor a very precise one, but in that moment it filled my mind. It felt like a revolution — urgent, deep, vital, true. Standing in front of the David was, by far, the most powerful experience I had ever had with a work of art. The statue is gigantic: 17 feet tall, three times the size of an actual man, the height of a mature giraffe — another fact that no one had ever told me. I had always assumed, based on the images, that the David was . To find otherwise seemed like a category error, like arriving at the Taj Mahal to discover that it is actually the size of a walnut. There was an existential snap in my brain, a sudden adjustment of the relative values and proportions of every other object in the world, including me. He towered over me in his iconic pose: back foot flat, front foot tipped, shoulders cocked, left arm raised to hold the sling, huge right hand hanging down by his side, head turned fiercely toward the glorious future. He was a giant marble god, except he wasn’t a god he was a man, but then of course he wasn’t really a man either he was white stone — but the stone looked somehow soft, like flesh, and the marble curved and rippled into muscles and veins, tiny and large, subtle and blunt, each feature easing inevitably into the next, all the way around. My eye kept roaming, looking for imperfections, not finding any. My mind ran in silly loops. The only word it would settle on, again and again, was “perfect. ” I stood there in my filthy Birkenstocks feeling a sense of religious transcendental soaring: the promise that my true self was not bound by the constraints of my childhood — by freeway exits, office parks, programs, laundry rooms at dingy apartment complexes, vineyards plowed under and converted into Walmarts, instability, change, dead dogs, divorce. No. The David suggested that my true self existed most fully in some interstellar superhistorical realm in which all the ideal things of the universe commingled in a perpetual ecstasy of harmonizing trumpet blasts. If such perfection could exist in the world, I felt, then so many other things were suddenly possible: to live a perfect life creating perfect things, to find an ideal way to be. What was the point of anything less? Again, I was 20. My girlfriend and I were in the middle of a grand tour of Europe. We slept every night in teeming hostels, ate meat with our hands in public parks, frightened people with our terrible German. But it was all worth it for moments like this — moments in which I could truly believe that perfection was real, as real as a train station a few hours away, and that my life was heading toward it. A huge crowd swarmed around the David, gawking and chatting, but I hardly noticed them. My girlfriend and I stood in the museum for an extremely long time, until the crowds began to thin. Eventually we left and moved on to another museum, another city, and then we went home and — as the years rolled up their sleeves and marched Americanly by — we got married, had children, found jobs. I fantasized about perfection while crashing, again and again, into what I discovered were the extremely solid walls of my own limitations. Just on the other side of those walls, I knew, stood the David on his special pedestal: an impossible destination that I was nevertheless determined to reach. But the meeting between my head and that wall began to take up more and more of my attention, and after a while I started to wonder if the perfection on the other side actually existed, if there had ever really been anything there to begin with. The David began, in 1464, with a mistake. Several mistakes, actually. In fact, so many mistakes, and such serious ones, that the whole project seemed to be ruined from the start. The source and precise extent of the mistakes have been disputed over the centuries, but what we know for sure is that none of the mistakes were Michelangelo’s fault, because he wasn’t born yet. The block that would become the David was cut out of the mountains 11 years before its eventual sculptor’s birth. The first mistake was the stone itself. The community in and around Carrara was, and remains today, practically a sovereign nation, with its own dialect and politics and lore and hierarchies of technical expertise. Michelangelo was a native of the quarrying world, fluent in its ways, but the sculptor who chose the block, Agostino di Duccio, was largely ignorant of them. He had been selected by one of Florence’s most influential groups, the Wool Guild, to carve a monumental marble statue of the biblical David. It would sit high on the edge of the city’s great cathedral, the Duomo, to serve as a show of strength, an artistic boast and a warning to the city’s enemies. But Agostino was in over his head. He had no experience carving marble on this scale — nobody alive did. The block he chose was huge but flawed. The power of marble, after all, is supposed to be in its perfection: a pure white chunk cut, at almost impossible expense, out of the dirty, ragged mountains. But this slab was marred by little holes, discolored by veins. It was not only Agostino di Duccio who was overmatched — the quarriers were, too. The block was 18 feet tall and something like 25, 000 pounds. No one had harvested a stone this large in close to 1, 000 years. The whole process was one ordeal after another. Because statuary marble tends to form up near the tops of mountains, it took months of labor to get it down to the quarry floor. The trip from Carrara to Florence — an journey that takes around two hours in a modern car — took two more arduous years. There were teams of men, teams of oxen, big ocean ships, flat river barges, inclement weather, monthslong delays. At one point, the giant block fell into a muddy ditch and had to be laboriously extracted. One scholar has speculated that this accident caused the cracks that now plague the ankles. When the block finally arrived in Florence, it was greeted as a wonder. Its size, to the public, would have been more apparent than its imperfections. It was deposited in a courtyard behind the cathedral — a huge white apparition in the middle of the small brown city. People came from all over just to stare. City leaders went to inspect the block, and they were dismayed. It had not only been badly chosen it had also been badly carved. Agostino, as was traditional, had “roughed out” the block at the quarry — a quick whittling down to leave only what was necessary for the eventual statue. In doing so, however, he had compounded his previous mistake. The block had been strangely narrow to begin with, and Agostino had made it even narrower. He created an awkward hole in its middle. It was hard to see how this stone was ever going to become a plausible human form. Some believed that it was ruined, that the city’s investment was already lost. Agostino was fired. The block was abandoned. It sat there, on its side, getting rained on, hailed on, fouled by birds, for more than 30 years. After a while, it became a fixed part of the landscape of Florence. People and buildings changed all around it, regimes rose and fell, but the monumental block never moved. Residents began to call it, with some mixture of respect and mockery, “the Giant. ” I didn’t get back to Florence, after my initial visit, for nearly 20 years. When I did finally return, it was as an adult man on the brink of middle age. I was not quite 40 but felt, in many ways, older. My hair, once as heroically thick as the David’s, had begun to thin visibly, and I felt sad about this, and I also considered my sadness to be its own failure, because I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t care about superficial, things. Every morning, when I stepped out of bed, my joints hurt, especially my ankles, which a doctor had recently diagnosed with arthritis — they were 20 years older than the rest of me, he said. My youthful pursuit of perfection had gone, shall we say, not terribly well. I had turned out to be a strange person, not anything like an ideal. My life was littered with awkwardnesses, estrangements, mutual disillusionments, abandoned projects. Recently, I had begun to notice an odd tic in my interpersonal style — a problem with my gaze. I would be speaking with someone, a friend or a shopkeeper, all very normally (how are you good thanks how are you how’s your summer) and then, for no discernible reason, my eyes would dart away from my interlocutor, urgently, right over one of his or her shoulders, and the shift would be so sudden that the person would whip his or her head around to see what on earth I was looking at — a policeman or an exotic bird or a runaway train — but it would turn out that there was nothing there at all. My gaze had been flicked away by a little spasm of social discomfort. And so the person would look back at me, confused, and I would manage to hold his or her gaze for another few seconds until the social energy built back up between us to an intolerable level, at which point I would suddenly break the circuit again by looking away — and the person would look, one more time, back over his or her shoulder to confirm that nothing was there, and then our relationship would be altered forever. Perfection, it turns out, is no way to try to live. It is a child’s idea, a cartoon — this desire not to be merely good, not to do merely well, but to be faultless, to transcend everything, including the limits of yourself. It is less heroic than neurotic, and it doesn’t take much analysis to get to its ugly side: a lust for control, pseudofascist purity, . Perfection makes you flinch at yourself, flinch at the world, flinch at any contact between the two. Soon what you want, above all, is escape: to be gone, elsewhere, annihilated. By the time I returned to Florence, I had grown accustomed to spending solid weeks in a state of high anxiety — my hands would turn freezing, like a corpse, and I would sit at my desk wishing I could cry, and my wife would tell me, with increasing urgency, that she was afraid I was going to have a heart attack. Eventually, after many years of this, I was prescribed a daily pill intended to stabilize an imbalance in my brain chemistry, and this solution has worked, more or less. Yet I am still plagued by this eccentricity of the loads: an impossible tension between the fantasies in my head and the realities on the ground. And so, on my bad ankles and with my broken gaze, I returned to see the David. Things in Florence seemed essentially the same. Crowds still waited for hours in the brutal heat to enter the churchlike museum. Inside, the David stood exactly as I last saw him. I experienced the same moment of revelation: the sudden improbability of his size, his excellence. He still dominated the space, still held the light on his impossibly subtle musculature. In fact, he was looking better than ever, because in the intervening years he had been cleaned, millimeter by millimeter, at great expense and with some controversy — the grit and dust of 500 years scrubbed off. The marble seemed to glow. Once again, my brain reached for the word “perfect. ” But “perfect” no longer seemed adequate. Although I couldn’t see the cracks inside the David’s ankles and legs, I knew they were there. I knew other things too: that the marble of his face was pocked with holes, for instance, which restorers had filled in, and that he was missing a small chip of stone from one of his lower eyelids, and that his right little toe had been lost multiple times, and that a crazy man had taken a hammer to his left foot in 1991. Although the David’s maladies were mostly patched up over the centuries, you could still see all the scars. In the year 1501, amid fresh political spasms, the leaders of Florence decided to rehabilitate the Giant. But who could possibly save it? There was some talk of giving the project to Leonardo da Vinci, the city’s (and Europe’s) reigning genius. But Leonardo was an intellectual, nearly 50 years old, who openly disdained the process of sculpture — that sweaty blunt hacking at stone. In the end, the commission went to a less famous Florentine, Michelangelo Buonarroti, a eccentric who had just made his reputation in Rome by carving a marble Pietà for St. Peter’s — a statue of astonishing grace and maturity and polish. Michelangelo hurried home to take the commission. The first step had been to stand the Giant up. This, in itself, was a production. Once again, all of Florence came out to watch. The block had been sitting there for 35 years, almost the entire life expectancy of a human, and it was now in worse shape than ever. Marble is best to carve when it is freshly cut from the mountain. The longer it sits out, the more brittle it becomes. The Giant was now thoroughly “cooked,” in the local parlance — dried out by decades of sun. Some people said it was beyond salvaging. Many wanted to attach extra marble blocks to it. They said it would be impossible to get a proper figure out of the misshapen mess that was left. This would become one of the feats that would elevate Michelangelo to mythic status: that he not only salvaged the ruined block but also turned it into a masterpiece. As the Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari put it: “And truly it was a miracle on the part of Michelangelo to restore to life a thing that was dead. ” The miracle took some time. First, Michelangelo decided that he needed to carve the David in private, so workers came and built a roofless shed around the Giant. For many months, inside his shed, Michelangelo toiled away unseen, using a series of finer and finer chisels in an attempt to rescue every centimeter of the stone. He was a savant of marble, so he would have understood everything about the block, all of its grains and flaws and possibilities. The figure of the David began to emerge little by little, as A. Victor Coonin puts it in his definitive recent history of the statue, “From Marble to Flesh,” “like a person being slowly revealed as water drains from a bath. ” When the shed was finally opened for a public viewing, in the summer of 1503, the David really must have seemed like a miracle. The dirty old cooked Giant had become a smooth, enormous, naked man, paused just on the brink of heroic motion. The young sculptor had not run from the odd dimensions of the block he embraced them, turning them into his figure’s signature elements. The block’s narrowness yielded the lean, twisting body (as opposed to an overmuscled superman) with its huge head and hands. Michelangelo gave the David a grotesquely furrowed brow — a shelf of a forehead closer to a Neanderthal’s than a modern human’s — because he knew that anything more “realistic” would fail to scan for a viewer on the ground. The figure was unreal but real, stylized but natural. It would come to define the city. A debate raged over where to put the David. The statue was so powerful, so impressive, that it seemed a waste (and perhaps even impossible, engineeringwise) to install it in its intended destination, way up on the cathedral. Instead, after rounds of conferences among the Florentine intelligentsia, it was decided that the sculpture would be installed in the city’s central square, the Piazza della Signoria, where everyone could see it. A special machine had to be invented to move it: a huge wooden frame inside of which the David was suspended in a net of ropes, rocking gently, as a crew of men rolled it across the city on greased beams. At night, it had to be protected by armed guards from rowdy kids who were throwing rocks at it. The David’s journey took four days, at the end of which it was installed, to much fanfare, out in the public square. It would stand in that same spot for the next 369 years, a period during which it would be shaken by thunder, hit by carts and smeared with bird feces. In 1527, a riotous mob tried to storm City Hall, and another mob, in defense of the public order, threw heavy objects out the windows: stones, tiles, furniture. A bench hit the David, breaking his left arm in half. Michelangelo went off to Rome, where he painted the Sistine Chapel designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, at the time the largest in the history of the world and eventually died, wealthy and famous beyond measure, at age 88. He would never see his David again. The Giant continued its slow decline. Although the broken arm was eventually mended and reattached, the statue remained outside, exposed to rain, ice, hail, wind and vandals. Its surface began to visibly degrade. In the 19th century, the statue’s restorers tended only to make things worse — they used wax, which discolored the marble, and acid, which ate at its surface. Before long, the David needed restoring from his restoration. A broken rain gutter on the Palazzo Vecchio poured torrents of water directly onto the statue. Concerned citizens began to agitate for him to be moved indoors. They built a protective wooden shed over him, isolating him in a bubble of safety. This brought the public life of the David full circle. He was carved in a shed he was hidden in a shed. Eventually, the statue’s protectors were able to move him, on train tracks laid laboriously across Florence, to a room in the Accademia. But the room still wasn’t finished, so the David sat inside a crate for years, growing colonies of microorganisms like a huge piece of cheese. The Accademia attracts well over a million visitors a year, and they all end up in one room: the David’s rotunda. I stood there, in the summer of 2015, watching the crowd watch the David. The air in the room was perfectly still. The tourists fanned themselves with maps of Florence. Guides, speaking directly into their followers’ ears via microphones, led large groups into the center of the crowd like battalions into battle. I watched a woman take a short nap while leaning against a stone column. A couple from Holland sat down next to me and fired streams of Dutch at each other, the only word of which I could make out was the English “ . ” Most of all, people took pictures. For almost its entire history, the Accademia has been a strict zone, but the rise of smartphones made that impossible, and now the phones have taken over. Tourists spend their time in front of the David poking a version of him on their touch screens. I witnessed the execution of many, many selfies: the jockeying for a proper angle, the sudden smile, the brisk walk away. (There always seemed to be something furtive, something almost criminal, about a selfie.) Often, through a trick of perspective, the ’s own head would appear on the screen twice as big as the David. The most popular target for photographers was the David’s genitals. People were obsessed with them. I watched a very American man (Tommy Hilfiger shirt, Oakley sunglasses, BMW baseball hat) pretend to cup the statue’s testicles while his wife took his picture — and then his wife pretended to cup the David’s testicles while he took her picture. Two women posed for a photo pretending to hold the David’s penis simultaneously, as if it were a trophy fish. A serious man his iPhone camera, with delicate precision, on the David’s foreskin. At the back of the crowd, I found the David’s security guard. He sat sideways on a folding chair, chin in hand, a model of relaxed uninterest he seemed to watch the room without even looking. When he spoke, his mustache moved over a mouth that was missing several teeth. He was a native Florentine, and he told me stories about crazy tourists (weeping, thongs) and about the great flood of 1966, in which his family’s house was underwater up to the second floor. I asked him if, after all this time, he had any personal feeling of awe left for the David. He said he did not. “If you eat chocolate every day for 20 years,” he said, “you will get bored of it. ” If looking at Michelangelo’s David is the equivalent of eating chocolate, then walking the streets of Florence is like drowning in Willy Wonka’s gushing chocolate river. The image of the David is everywhere. There are bookmarks, mouse pads, posters, watches, key chains, mugs, ballpoint pens, commemorative plates, pie servers, snow globes, sugar spoons, USB sticks and Christmas ornaments. There are leather shops and pizzerias and even parking garages named after him. Tourists can buy aprons that make them look as if they have the David’s body: the lean, muscular torso, the naked little penis. And then there are the statuettes: a vast army of miniature imitation Davids that stand in shop windows and on hawkers’ carts in all the famous piazzas. Near the Accademia I found a store called, in English, “David Shop. ” It was a bonanza, more Davids than I have ever seen in one place before. The smallest was the size of my pinkie, the biggest slightly taller than an average Italian woman. I bought a postcard that was also a jigsaw puzzle featuring the David’s penis wearing sunglasses and saying “Ciao!” Next to the Duomo, for an exorbitant price, I bought a bobblehead David his giant head, attached by a spring, waggled ridiculously as I walked. He waggled past many other versions of himself — hundreds, thousands, infinity Davids. From a distance, many of the replicas looked acceptably but up close most of them were laughably bad. The replicas are like a systematic exploration of all the possible ways to distort Michelangelo’s design. Their faces are squashed, their heads are flat, their noses are pointed, they look like goblins. Some of them seem to have breasts. Others have rib cages jutting out in high relief, like cartoons of shipwreck survivors. One David stood several feet tall and cost more than $200 — a serious investment that would have taken up major space in any buyer’s home. Its face looked like a emaciated elf’s. Its muscles were lumpy and gnarled. Its feet were long and bony, like the feet of an ancient witch in a fairy tale. Its hair looked like a pile of spaghetti. It seemed more a parody of the David than a tribute. In the Accademia gift shop, I bought a sticker that read, simply, “DAVID MANIA. ” This, I decided, was the epitome of David souvenirs — a tribute not to the actual David but to our mass enthusiasm for him. Sometimes, when I found myself fed up with Florence and its crowds, overwhelmed by the kitsch, the heat, the vendors, the constant eruptions of Renaissance cosplay, my walks took me across the river, away from the old bridge, toward a plain yellow building with a stationery shop on its ground floor. Twenty feet up, where no one ever seemed to look, was a small historical plaque identifying it as the temporary home of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This is where he agonized over the writing of his novel “The Idiot,” which I was rereading. Dostoyevsky was, in many ways, the : ugly, short, hairy, awkward, nervous, ill, angry, a prophet of spite and . I found him incredibly inspiring. He spoke to me beyond the kitsch, above the crowds, from the other side of my old simplistic understanding of the David. He gestured toward something more complex, more inclusive, more sustainable. Dostoyevsky moved to Florence with his wife in 1868, during a miserable swing through Europe, and he detested the city at times with a degree of comic loathing that only he could have mustered for such a beautiful place. He complained about the humidity, the rain, the crowds, the heat. He never learned Italian, preferring to sit in his room, alone, wrestling with his novel. He stayed, for nearly a year, only because he was too poor to leave — he had compulsively blown much of his money at the roulette tables of Europe. As I looked at the David, I thought about “The Idiot,” and as I read “The Idiot,” I thought about the David. They existed at opposite poles, and yet they also spoke deeply to each other. “The Idiot” was Dostoyevsky’s attempt to create an ideal man, a modern Christ — what he called “a completely beautiful human being. ” He was forced to try to write this perfect book, however, in humiliatingly imperfect conditions: isolated far from home, in intense poverty and grief — the Dostoyevskys’ young daughter had died just months earlier — and delayed by fits of epilepsy. Up in his cramped apartment above the paper store, Dostoyevsky flogged his unruly book. “The Idiot” is full of wild crowds bursting into rooms out of nowhere. Its plot is strange, lurching, unbalanced. Its hero is seen by everyone as a fool, and his presence seems to cause trouble wherever he goes. The book is, in both theme and execution, one of the great artistic statements of the impossibility of human perfection. Rereading it during the visit to Florence made me feel, somehow, spiritually itchy. Unlike Michelangelo, Dostoyevsky was missing from the official lore of the city — you couldn’t buy postcards bearing his image or visit a museum devoted to his life and work. This made him even more of a refuge, a small secret I shared with no one. One afternoon I walked into a part of the Accademia that most people never see, down a labyrinth of staircases and hallways, to a small office tucked into the very back of the building. This belonged to Angelo Tartuferi, director of the museum — the official protector of the David. The walls were hung with medieval paintings. Tartuferi wore a green Umbro polo shirt. He was relaxed, animated, candid he spoke in long streams of Italian punctuated occasionally by roars of laughter. We talked about the David’s cracked ankles, a topic with which Tartuferi was very familiar. I asked him about the geoscientists’ terrifying paper. He rolled his eyes. It was, he said, mainly a publicity grab: We have known about these cracks for more than 100 years, he pointed out, and they aren’t getting any worse. The David is now perfectly upright, and he is one of the most closely monitored artworks in the world. There are maps not only of the cracks themselves but also of every stain and blemish on the surface of the marble, of every repair that has ever been made, even of the patterns in which dust tends to fall. Visitors to the Accademia will notice a large, inelegant plastic brick mounted behind the David to monitor all of its vital signs: temperature, motion, angle of inclination. It is labeled “SMARTBRICK. New. Fast. Easy. Smart. ” Tartuferi conceded, however, that he was still worried about an earthquake. Sometimes he had bad dreams. All of that monitoring can only warn us — it can’t protect anything. And while it seems to be true that the cracks aren’t getting worse, they are not getting better either. As long as they exist, the David will be vulnerable. What, then, is to be done? In fact, a relatively simple solution to the ankle problem already exists. Although we can’t fix the cracks, we can mitigate the stress that makes them dangerous. There is a special kind of antiseismic base that allows a marble statue to move along with any tectonic disturbance. It’s similar to the kind of technology you’d find under buildings in San Francisco. Many less illustrious statues in earthquake zones are already protected by such bases. They are not terribly complex and, considering the potential consequences of leaving it undone, not terribly expensive: about 250, 000 euros, according to Tartuferi, a tiny fraction of the revenues the David earns the museum in a single year. In 2014, after the earthquakes rocked the countryside around Florence, after the global media fretted about the possible destruction of the David, Italy’s minister of culture said that an antiseismic base would be installed under the statue within a year. But a year passed, and nothing happened. When I arrived in the summer of 2015 — six months after that statement — I to find men in hard hats working around the David’s pedestal. Instead, there were only the usual tourists. The David, meanwhile, stood there in his old precarious rigidity, vulnerable as ever to the tremors. I asked Tartuferi what was happening with the antiseismic base. The delay was only bureaucratic, he said. He had met, long ago, with a company that did this sort of stabilizing work. Tartuferi had told the Italian press that the job was underway. The base could, hypothetically, go in at any moment. But the Italian government, Tartuferi said, refused to allow him to install the base. The nation was in the middle of an elaborate restructuring of its museum system, and it was planning to put new leaders — some of whom would be known as “supermanagers” — into Florence’s (and therefore most lucrative) museums. This made Tartuferi a director, and the Italian government was not going to allow him, on his way out the door, to execute a project as important as saving the David. Italy, in the midst of its own economic collapse, wanted to be the hero that stepped forward to save the David from collapsing. The problem was that no one could say exactly when this power transfer might occur, and — even after it did — if and when the base would be installed. When Tartuferi departed, he told me, he was planning to pass the project of the antiseismic base off to his successor. This, he said, is what the new director would have to deal with first. Meanwhile, every day, the David would remain at risk. In fact, Tartuferi told me, the monitoring device on the back of the David’s pedestal, the smart brick, had recently been turned off. There was no point in monitoring anymore, he said — everyone knew what needed to be done. Now they just needed to do it. Tartuferi was not the only one who told me a story like this. I met with a woman named Contessa Simonetta Brandolini d’Adda, one of the most powerful figures in Florence’s art world. Eighteen years ago, the contessa founded a nonprofit organization called Friends of Florence, which has financed and overseen the restoration of many of the city’s endangered masterpieces, from sculptures in the central square to Botticelli oil paintings in the Uffizi to Mannerist frescoes in a popular local church. The organization fills a crucial lack in Italy, helping to make up for the increasingly government’s inability to take proper care of its decaying cultural heritage. In 2004, Friends of Florence raised half a million dollars to help fund the cleaning and restoration of the David, and they continue to pay for the statue’s regular monitoring and upkeep. A family of spiders, Brandolini told me, had been discovered living in the giant caverns of the David’s hair. Every few months they covered his body with dusty webs that needed to be vacuumed off. Friends of Florence would dearly love to raise the funds to pay for the David’s antiseismic base. But the Italian government, again and again, has insisted that the state will take care of it. It seemed they believed that an outside organization rescuing the David would be improper. She was an and practical woman, but while relating this to me, she grew visibly frustrated. There was simply nothing she could do against the overwhelming force of official Italian national pride. Destruction takes many forms, not just the sudden apocalyptic crash or the degradation of rain and ice and wind. There is death by inaction, death by neglect. There is also death by reverence, death by ubiquity, death by subtle humiliation. The David’s superfame struck me as another eccentricity of the loads: the tension between the actual statue — the original physical thing, unique in the world — and the statue’s ubiquitous image. The thing itself was hopelessly outnumbered by its own reproductions. We knew the David so well, and our own knowledge of our knowledge of that image, that we could hardly see the David at all. There was a part of me — a part I never mentioned to the museum directors or the contessa or anyone else in Florence — that was titillated by the possibility of the David falling over. It was a perverse, adolescent, iconoclastic streak, a dark troll that lived under the otherwise serviceable bridge of my conscious mind. It was something like what Freud called the death drive: an urge toward failure and collapse, especially of the things we want most in life. If perfection in life truly isn’t possible, croaked my troll — and it isn’t! It isn’t! — then perhaps we should move on to the relative perfection of destruction. My inner troll worshiped not the David but the cracks in the David’s ankles. They were, as a fatal flaw, so deliciously humiliating — such a perfectly ironic undercutting of the statue’s otherwise heroic stature. The David’s destiny, said my troll, was not to stand but to break. This put me in mind, once again, of Dostoyevsky — the grumpy outcast seething in Florence, the . My troll could easily have been one of his characters. It could have been the splenetic narrator of “Notes From Underground,” who recoils against the notion of rational utopia, of the perfectibility of mankind: “Two times two is four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. ” The real power of Dostoyevsky’s work, though, is that despite all the misery his characters endure, his vision is not actually miserable. It is redemptive, celebratory, powerfully totalizing. Humans are compulsive, irrational and petty, yes, but they are also selfless, intelligent and idealistic. In Dostoyevsky, there is a radical acceptance that strikes me as, in its own way, a new, more perfect vision of perfection: an envelope of understanding that can hold the entire universe. I began to think of the David not as a traditional hero but as a Dostoyevsky character. Like the Idiot, he was an ideal man with no real place in the world — misunderstood, assaulted by crowds, drawn into all sorts of unheroic shenanigans. There was, God knows, much that was insane about our relationship to the statue: the compulsive selfies, the inertia of the Italian bureaucracy, the DAVID MANIA. But as a character in “The Idiot” puts it: “To attain perfection, one must first of all be able not to understand many things. ” As I walked around Florence, I was exposed to hundreds and thousands of horrible David replicas. At a certain point, I began to actually love them. They were so awkward, so bad and so numerous, that they were, in the aggregate, somehow good — a perfect tribute to Michelangelo’s strange genius, and to the gnarled history of the statue itself. They were, themselves, little trolls: the David’s imperfections made flesh, sprung fully formed out of the cracks in his ankles and set loose upon the world. At home, on my mantle, I keep a small crowd of them: a green one, the bobblehead, a white one that looks like an elf. One of them, a tiny keychain, recently fell over and broke — his head cracked clean off. I keep its pieces there with the rest. A month after I met with him, Angelo Tartuferi was removed from his position as director of the Accademia. The project, needless to say, had not yet commenced. Tartuferi’s replacement was one of Florence’s new supermanagers, a medieval scholar from Germany named Cecilie Hollberg. I met her in June, at a lush hotel bar overlooking the Arno River. I had expected someone stern and formal, but Hollberg was, in fact, relaxed and unpretentious and congenial, with a sly humor that rushed into all the gaps in our conversation. She seemed perpetually amused to have been plucked out of her small German town and imported to watch over the most famous statue in the world. She referred to the David, jokingly, as her husband. We drank spritzes and had a wonderful time. I asked Hollberg about her husband’s ankles. Had there been any progress, under her watch, on the David’s antiseismic base? This was six months after Hollberg took charge and a year and a half after the culture minister’s initial promise to place the David on the base. There had not been any progress. Hollberg, in fact, seemed surprisingly calm. After all, an earthquake was still hypothetical, and she had inherited plenty of other, more pressing problems. There were holes in the museum’s roof that let rainwater through. There were illegal vendors who hassled the tourists while they waited outside in line. There was the problem of finding space, in the clotted center of Florence, to expand the undersized museum. After her arrival, Hollberg said, people emerged from everywhere to tell her how to save the David. Everyone claimed to be an expert. Everyone seemed to have something to sell. But Hollberg wanted to take her time, to consider all the options. She wanted the right solution, not just the fastest or easiest. At some point in the future, she said, she would probably travel to Los Angeles to consult experts at the Getty Center about how they protect their statues. In the meantime, Hollberg said, if a major earthquake were to hit Florence directly, every museum in the city would endure some destruction, not just the Accademia. I found this, somehow, not comforting at all. For now, and for the foreseeable future, we would just have to trust the David to keep standing. | 1 |
Democrats were seething Tuesday night over President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U. S. Supreme Court, claiming that Trump “stole” the seat from President Barack Obama. [In a fundraising email, the Democratic National Committee said (original emphasis): Judge Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, has a legal history that shows a deep sympathy for corporate interests and an apparent disdain for workers. Donald wants to put Judge Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat the GOP stole from President Obama. Add your name to tell the Senate to reject his nomination. As an attorney, Judge Gorsuch routinely represented big businesses in class action lawsuits. As a judge on the Tenth Circuit, he wrote a concurring opinion in Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius — the case that allowed employers to deny basic health care coverage to women by ruling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate was unconstitutional. He upheld a decision that denied insurance benefits to a worker who sustained a injury that required spinal surgery. He even dissented from a ruling in favor of a truck driver whose employer illegally fired him for abandoning a trailer with locked brakes — so he wouldn’t freeze to death. And as a member of the “Federalist Society,” Gorsuch believes in severely restricting the power that federal agencies like the EPA have to regulate businesses. It’s not hard to see why Trump loves him so much — but from where we’re sitting, Joel, Judge Gorsuch has no business on the Supreme Court bench. Republicans declined to move Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, through the Senate, based on the principle — articulated by . Joe Biden ( ) decades before — that a Supreme Court Justice should not be confirmed in the last year of a lame duck administration. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. | 1 |
UPPER DARBY, Pa. — Last Thursday afternoon, at the Tower Theater outside Philadelphia, the five members of Temple of the Dog were onstage grappling with a common problem faced by men in their early 50s: trying to remember just how they did things in their 20s. The next night, the roughly hall would be packed, the rock band’s first headlining concert appearance since, well, pretty much ever, but in rehearsal the band’s only audience was stagehands and lighting techs. After plowing through the crunching riffs of “Pushin Forward Back,” however, something didn’t sound quite right. “I don’t think we go into that long of a breakdown on the record,” said the guitarist Stone Gossard, noting the extended solo by his fellow guitarist, Mike McCready. “I’ll solo all night,” Mr. McCready admitted. After a brief discussion, the musicians set down their instruments and huddled in front of the drummer Matt Cameron’s kit, listening over a smartphone to the song as it appeared on their 1991 album, “Temple of the Dog. ” Memories refreshed, they returned to their stations, and resumed pushing “Pushin Forward Back” to its conclusion. Not that the band members are unfamiliar with one another: Mr. Gossard, Mr. McCready and Mr. Cameron, along with the bassist Jeff Ament, are all longtime members of Pearl Jam, while the singer Chris Cornell is known primarily for his work leading Soundgarden. Rather, it was the material that was somewhat alien, Mr. Gossard said during a conversation in the theater’s dressing room, describing the challenge of “learning songs that we literally played maybe 10 times 25 years ago. ” Despite the rust, tickets for the group’s first tour, eight shows in five cities (including Madison Square Garden on Monday night) sold out in minutes, all the more remarkable for a band, as Mr. Cameron points out, “that doesn’t exist. ” Temple of the Dog was originally convened a ago, in tribute to their friend and colleague Andrew Wood, lead singer of the Seattle bands Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone, who died in March 1990 of a heroin overdose shortly before the release of Mother Love Bone’s debut album, “Apple. ” At the band’s inception, Soundgarden was preparing for its second major label album and Pearl Jam was just beginning to coalesce. To help deal with his grief, Mr. Cornell had written two songs, “Say Hello 2 Heaven” and “Reach Down,” in which he tried to channel Mr. Wood’s influence. “I thought, well, this is one thing that I can do to remind myself and maybe other people of who this guy is and was and keep his story and in a way his life with us,” Mr. Cornell said. He made demos of the songs, and approached Mr. Ament and Mr. Gossard, both of whom had been in Mother Love Bone with Mr. Wood, about properly recording them. The project soon evolved into an entire album, with the trio joined by Mr. Cameron, Soundgarden’s drummer, and Mr. McCready, a childhood friend of Mr. Gossard’s. “I think that was a healing process for us all and you can certainly still hear it in the record,” Mr. Cameron said. The name Temple of the Dog came from a lyric by Mr. Wood in the Mother Love Bone song “Man of Golden Words” (also on the set list for the current tour). The group played two short opening sets in Seattle in 1990, and has occasionally performed Temple of the Dog songs with Mr. Cornell at Pearl Jam concerts, but otherwise the band has never played together live since recording the album. “It was never intended to be like a big promoted rock record,” Mr. Cameron said. AM released the album in April 1991 and 70, 000 copies sold that year, but not until 1992 did sales explode. After the success of Pearl Jam’s debut, “Ten,” and Soundgarden’s “Badmotorfinger,” AM reissued “Temple of the Dog” and promoted the video for “Hunger Strike,” featuring the band and the Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder. “It didn’t really get that broad attention,” Mr. Cornell said, “until someone at MTV put it together that ‘Oh, there’s this one video that we have that has members of both bands in it let’s play it all day! ’” “Hunger Strike” shot up the charts and the album went platinum, but a tour for Temple at the time would have been “impossible,” Mr. Cornell said, given the busy road schedules of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. “You had to be out there beating the drum all the time,” he said. “Now it’s sort of a luxury. It’s a different world and a different time in the life spans of our respective bands, where we’ve written our own tickets, we sort of do whatever we want, so we’re fortunate that we can do this now. ” The current tour is accompanied by the recent release of a “25th Anniversary Mix” of the album, available in several permutations, including a CD, DVD and collection. Also arriving this week is a Mother Love Bone box set, “On Earth as It Is: The Complete Works” (on the Pearl Monkeywrench label) offering a new opportunity to examine the talents of Mr. Wood, a flamboyant figure in the Seattle scene who idolized Freddie Mercury, Paul Stanley and Elton John. “He had this way of looking at life that just made you laugh while you were around him,” Mr. Gossard said. Mr. Cornell was Mr. Wood’s roommate for about a year during the late 1980s in a dilapidated house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle perched right over Interstate 5. The freeway noise was so loud it permitted Soundgarden and Malfunkshun to rehearse in the living room. “We had bands that were influenced by each other,” Mr. Cornell said, “and there was kind of a rivalry between us as songwriters, but literally like five feet apart — through the doors to the bedrooms we could hear each other. ” In the lyrics to “Reach Down,” Mr. Cornell depicted Mr. Wood “wearing a long white leather Purple glasses and glitter in your hair. ” “There was an aspect of him that was always performing all the time,” Mr. Cornell said. “He had sort of invented himself as this character. The first time I ever saw him he had this entourage. He was a rock star, really, because he was it didn’t have anything to do with anything else. ” The idea of a Temple reunion began percolating around five years ago, during Pearl Jam’s 20th anniversary festival, after Mr. Cornell joined the other musicians onstage (Mr. Cameron having signed up as Pearl Jam’s drummer in 1998) to play five Temple songs. It took a while to coordinate schedules, but time has finally been set aside. “I always think about where Andy would want these songs to be played,” Mr. Ament said. “The Garden and the Forum were like the two places he probably wanted to play more than anywhere, so from that standpoint it’s awesome. ” Mr. Cameron hopes the reissues and the tour can elevate Mr. Wood’s presence in the legacy of Seattle’s music scene. “He wasn’t a footnote in our history,” Mr. Cameron said. “He was a real big influence for us all. ” | 1 |
Trump Raises Concern Over Members Of Urban Communities Voting More Than Zero Times ATKINSON, NH—Warning supporters that the troubling practice could affect the outcome of the election, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expressed strong concern Friday that members of urban communities were voting more than zero times, sources reported. Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Most Hotly Contested Down-Ballot Measures Of 2016 As Americans head to the polls, they will be presented with a number of issues to vote on besides choosing their representatives. The Onion gives voters an advance look at which measures will be included on the ballots in which states. New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. Clinton Staff Readies EMP Launch To Disable All Nation’s Electronic Devices NEW YORK—In an effort to prepare for any new revelations that might emerge about her emails during her tenure as secretary of state, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reportedly told her staff Tuesday to ready the launch of several electromagnetic pulses to disable all of the nation’s electronic devices. End Of Section More News Up Next | 0 |
We Are Change
Thousands of wild American Bison appear from no where at Standing Rock http://wearechange.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/1-bisons.mp4 Words Of ”Brave Buffalo”… Teton Sioux Medicine Man I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what is best in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are so attracted, they might have dreams that would purify their lives. Let a man decide upon his favorite animal and make a study of it, learning its innocent ways. Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man, but the Great Father does not intend they shall do so directly, man must do the greater part in securing an understanding. The Tatanka Oyate were called upon and gave us courage. Pilamiya Maske for your vision. Stay strong Water Protectors!
The great bison or buffalo of North America is a very powerful symbol to American Indians. Though best suited to cooler climates, bison roamed virtually in entire continent.
The smaller woodlands bison and its bigger cousin, the plains bison were revered and honored in ceremony and every day life. To the plains Indian, our Bison Brother meant sacred life and the abundance of the Creator’s blessing on Mother Earth.
The bison is powerful medicine that is a symbol of sacrifice and service to the community. The bison people agreed to give their lives so the American Indian could have food, shelter and clothing.
The bison is also a symbol of gratitude and honor as it is happy to accept its meager existence as it stands proud against the winds of adversity.
The bison represents abundance of the Creator’s bounty and respect for all creation knowing that all things are sacred.
The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe criticized law enforcement’s “militarized” response to the camp and called for demonstrations to remain peaceful, but stressed that activists would not give up their cause.
“Militarized law enforcement agencies moved in on water protectors with tanks and riot gear today. We continue to pray for peace,” Dave Archambault II said in a statement Thursday evening.
“We won’t step down from this fight,” he added. “As peoples of this earth, we all need water. This is about our water, our rights, and our dignity as human beings.”
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SEOUL, South Korea — The North Korean leader, Kim has executed his deputy premier for education and purged two other senior officials, sending them to camps, the South Korean government said on Wednesday. Jeong a spokesman for the South’s Unification Ministry, said at a news briefing that the South Korean government had used various means to confirm the execution of Kim the deputy premier, and the purge of Kim the head of the United Front Department of the ruling Workers’ Party, which handles relations with, as well as spying operations against, South Korea. Choe Hui, a deputy chief of the party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, was also banished for Mr. Jeong said. Mr. Jeong provided no further details, including when the reported punishments were believed to have taken place or how South Korea had learned of them. But in a later briefing, a senior Unification Ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said that Kim had found fault with the deputy premier’s “disrespectful posture” during a meeting that Mr. Kim oversaw in late June. A subsequent investigation found the deputy premier to be an “ reactionary” guilty of “ factionalism,” and he was executed by firing squad in July, the official said. Kim would be the official known to have been executed since 2013, when North Korea confirmed in a rare announcement that Kim had executed his own uncle and No. 2 official, Jang on charges of factionalism, corruption and plotting to overthrow his government. The ministry official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Kim the leader of the United Front Department, had spent a month at a camp on suspicion of abuse of power and that he had been released in . Kim is seen as a by South Korean officials. He was accused of helping orchestrate recent armed provocations by the North along the border, including an artillery barrage against a South Korean island in 2010, when he was the army’s intelligence chief. The Unification Ministry official said Mr. Kim would now need to prove his loyalty, which the official said raised the possibility that the North could take more aggressive actions toward South Korea. Since taking power in 2011, Kim has frequently reshuffled the party and military elites as he has consolidated his authority in North Korea, which his family has ruled for seven decades. Mr. Kim has also executed dozens of top officials in what President Park of South Korea has called a “reign of terror,” according to South Korean intelligence officials. It remains difficult to independently verify reports of executions and purges in the secretive North. North Korea rarely announces them. It was unusual for a South Korean government spokesman to make them public in an open news briefing, though intelligence officials have often briefed lawmakers in parliamentary sessions. In one such briefing last year, lawmakers were told that Gen. Hyon the defense minister, had been executed with an antiaircraft gun in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, after dozing off during military events and Mr. Kim’s orders. Mr. Jeong, the government spokesman, said that he was responding to recent reports in the South Korean news media. On Tuesday, the daily JoongAng Ilbo, citing an anonymous source, reported that Hwang Min, a former North Korean agriculture minister, and Ri a senior Education Ministry official, had been executed with antiaircraft guns in early August. The newspaper reported that Mr. Ri had been arrested after dozing off during a meeting supervised by Mr. Kim and that Mr. Hwang had proposed a policy that was deemed to represent a challenge to Mr. Kim’s leadership. Mr. Jeong did not comment on the fates of those two officials in his briefing on Wednesday. JoongAng Ilbo reported that the officials’ reported executions might have been aimed at tightening Mr. Kim’s control after a senior North Korean diplomat’s recent defection to the South. South Korean officials often cite such defections, and purges like those announced Wednesday, as potential sources of instability in Mr. Kim’s totalitarian regime. But some analysts dispute such conclusions. Purges and executions remain a key feature of political life in the North, said Cheong a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute, a South Korean research organization. But he said such persecutions, while barbaric, had become less frequent and “relatively restrained” under Kim . Mr. Kim’s father, Kim was estimated to have purged more than 2, 000 officials from 1994 to 2000, he said. | 1 |
Federal regulators have barred Elizabeth Holmes, chief executive of Theranos, from owning or operating a medical laboratory for at least two years, raising new questions about the future of the embattled and its founder, once a Silicon Valley phenomenon. In a letter sent to Theranos that was made public on Friday, regulators said they were revoking the certification of its flagship laboratory in Newark, Calif. effective Sept. 5. They also said the laboratory would be prohibited from taking Medicare and Medicaid payments. The government scrutiny stemmed from questions about the effectiveness of Theranos’s technology and the way the company operated its labs. The company faces a fine of $10, 000 for every day it is out of compliance with regulations, effective July 12. Such stern sanctions are “virtually in my 40 years’ experience in the industry,” said David Nichols, president of the Nichols Management Group, a consultant to and operator of clinical laboratories. “I don’t see a path forward for the company. ” What Theranos and Ms. Holmes will do next is not clear. The company said in its statement that it would continue to operate a laboratory it owns in Arizona, at least for now. But if the license of the California lab is indeed revoked, then Ms. Holmes and Theranos could not own or operate any laboratory, and the Arizona facility would also have to be shut, according to both Theranos and a spokesman for the regulator. Theranos represents the promise and the pitfalls of the era, as money floods into young companies with new technologies in an effort to find a “unicorn” — a business that transforms its industry and makes its backers rich in the process. Theranos and Ms. Holmes in particular offered a compelling narrative: a brilliant student who dropped out of college to pursue an audacious idea that would upend the medical testing business, performing multiple tests at low prices using only a finger prick of blood. By last year, Theranos had a valuation of about $9 billion. Ms. Holmes invited comparisons with the Apple Steve Jobs because of her youth, her tight control of the company she founded, and even her customary black turtlenecks. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates laboratories, reviewed its practices last year and found numerous deficiencies, including one that posed “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety. ” That apparently referred to erroneous results in a test of blood clotting used for patients who take the blood thinner warfarin. Theranos made two submissions to the agency of corrective actions. But in its letter to Theranos, dated Thursday, the regulator said the company’s second submission “again does not constitute a credible allegation of compliance” and had not “abated the immediate jeopardy. ” The letter cited numerous examples of the company’s failing to demonstrate that it had corrected a problem. Theranos said late Thursday and again on Friday that it was shutting down and rebuilding its California lab “from the ground up,” and bolstering its personnel and training there. Theranos said it would stop patient testing at the facility immediately, even before the sanctions take effect, but would continue to work with regulators to resolve the issues. “We accept full responsibility for the issues at our laboratory in Newark, Calif. and have already worked to undertake comprehensive remedial actions,” Ms. Holmes said in a statement. Jane Pine Wood, a lawyer specializing in the regulations of laboratories, said companies could appeal such sanctions and typically do. In most cases, that leads to a settlement that allows the laboratory to continue to operate. But this case may be unique, she said. Ms. Wood, a partner at the firm McDonald Hopkins, said that in cases in which there was no settlement and the appeal went to a hearing before an administrative judge, laboratories “almost never win. ” But Theranos would not lose its license for the California lab, or its ability to operate the Arizona lab, until after the appeals process is exhausted, buying it some time. Even if the company can continue to operate the Arizona lab, the business there has shrunk. Walgreens, with which Theranos had a deal to perform tests, pulled out of the partnership last month and closed the Theranos blood collection centers that were in about 40 of its drugstores in the Phoenix area. Now Theranos must rely on a handful of collection sites it owns itself. The sanctions could put pressure on Ms. Holmes to step aside, though it was not clear if that could happen without her consent, given her control of the company. Even if she stepped aside as chief executive, the ban on Theranos operating laboratories might still apply. It is also unclear who could or would take her job. “The company was so tightly controlled by her and Sunny Balwani that there is no clear executive you can name who can take over while she is banned for two years,” said Jondavid Klipp, publisher of Laboratory Economics, an industry newsletter. Mr. Balwani was the chief operating officer at Theranos until he resigned in May. Mr. Klipp said that even if Theranos continued to operate its laboratory, “it’s hard to imagine why a physician would send a patient to a Theranos lab when there are established, reputable choices. ” One option for the company would be to sell machines to other laboratories, rather than operate its own laboratories. It hinted at this on Friday, saying the laboratory was just one of its business units and that “its research and development unit has developed many technologies that are not dependent on running a laboratory. ’’ It said that the problems found by regulators were primarily in the laboratory operations, not with the company’s proprietary blood testing technology. Still, if it wants to sell equipment to other labs, Theranos would have to prove that its technology really worked. There is great skepticism on that front because Theranos has not published data about its technology’s performance. Ms. Holmes is scheduled to present such data at a laboratory conference on Aug. 1. Ms. Holmes began the company in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford at the age of 19. Eventually she settled on the goal of creating a new way to perform blood tests that relied on a few drops of blood rather than the larger amounts medical testing often required. Tests would be cheaper, the argument went, and more people would be inclined to get them. In interviews focused on Theranos’s success, she said the idea came from her fear of needles. The idea had appeal. Theranos won backing from tech luminaries like the software mogul Lawrence J. Ellison, and the company counted Henry A. Kissinger, a former secretary of state, and a former Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, among its advisers and directors. But some people questioned the reliability of the tests, including former Theranos employees who took their concerns to federal regulators. Ms. Holmes defended the company publicly, especially after articles last year in The Wall Street Journal enumerated those concerns. Still, federal inspectors found deficiencies in the Newark laboratory that could lead to inaccurate results, including inadequately trained employees and samples stored at the wrong temperature. Theranos promised to overhaul the plant and bring in a new slate of experts to fix its problems. It also voided or corrected numerous results from many tests it performed in the past. In April, Theranos said it was under criminal investigation from the Justice Department and disclosed another inquiry from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ms. Holmes said in the statement that the company was committed “to demonstrating our dedication to the highest standards of quality and compliance. ” | 1 |
movies , syria , RBTH Daily , refugees Russian filmmaker Maria Ivanova. Source: Elena Kern / press-photo
Where did you find the courage to go to the Middle East to make a film on migrants?
Maria Ivanova: I began making my film in Berlin, in a camp for refugees. I was searching for a female protagonist. But when I arrived, I was told that girls do not flee Syria alone, only with their husbands or relatives.
In the end I visually began "capturing" interesting faces. I found my protagonist – 14-year-old Muhammad, who was sent by his parents to Germany alone. He did the whole journey alone so that later he could get his relatives out of Syria through the legal process of family reunification.
During the shooting I understood that next I needed to go to Damascus, where this boy's parents remained. Due to the hassle in obtaining a Syrian visa my cameraman and I traveled to Syria through Beirut. In Lebanon you don't need a visa. Russian journalist in Syria: We came within a whisker of death
As we were driving along the road I knew that ISIS was only 10 kilometers [6 miles] away, very near. We were driving incredibly fast, 200 kilometers per hour, and when the driver saw a motorcycle coming, the car quickly turned around and headed in the opposite direction. “Why?” I asked later. Because terrorists often drive around at night on motorcycles.
That’s how we got to Damascus. There was no heating in the apartment we were taken to. No electricity and hot water. We slept on something similar to a couch. There are no real beds in the real East. And at three in the morning I heard bombing.
Is all of Damascus in this state?
M.I.: I was in the south and there it was frightening to walk out on the street. People have fear in their eyes, the atmosphere is very heavy.
In the end did you meet the parents of your protagonist Muhammad? How did you contact them?
M.I.: They welcomed us with open arms. They fed us. They have all means of communication, they use social networks. After meeting with them we returned to Beirut and went to the refugee camps in Lebanon's mountains, filming there for two weeks.
Were the Lebanese camps different from the German ones?
M.I.: Of course. Lebanon doesn’t have special conditions. There’s a character in our film, a man who has 17 children. He lives in a tent that he has divided into several parts. He patches up the holes. They all sleep on the floor. Despite their horrible position, these people offered us food and played the oud for us [an Arabian musical instrument – RBTH]. They joked… Their life is based on the hope that they will return home. Of course, many want to go to Europe. They fill out applications. But Europe does not accept everyone.
In general, Lebanon is an unusual country. Just think, there are 18 religious confessions on a territory that is smaller than the Moscow Region. There are four million residents and one and a half million Syrian refugees. And yet, I never saw a conflict between, say, Christians and Muslims. They all go to the same restaurants, the same movie theaters, everyone is friendly.
Which films are you taking to the festival in Lebanon?
M.I.: We finished this documentary film just a few days ago and I decided to hold the premiere in Lebanon, where we shot most of the material. Moreover, our partner, the TV channel RT, is producing two documentary films: Women against ISIS and Sector of Contradiction . The directors of these films are coming to answer questions and hold master classes.
How much is Russian culture present in Lebanon? Do people speak Russian there?
M.I.: Many Lebanese studied in the Soviet Union. There is even an association of Soviet university graduates. These people speak Russian, many even married Russian citizens. Furthermore, there are 30,000 Russians living there. There are Lebanese who attend classes and study Russian. Sure, you mostly hear Arabic, English, French. Russian culture is not well known. So we sort of filled a vacuum.
Is the war in the neighboring country felt in Lebanon?
M.I.: You still feel the previous war, the civil war. There are buildings scarred by bombings. There are many military personnel, roadblocks, armored personnel carriers, patrols. But next to a destroyed building you can find a modern art gallery, which is followed by soldiers again, and then a modern theater. This is a patchwork country, it is very heterogeneous. Can a low-budget Russian disaster film look like a Hollywood blockbuster?
Once I was at the Sarajevo Film Festival, which had a really heavy atmosphere. There were no stadiums there. They had turned into cemeteries since there was no space for burying people. While in Lebanon you feel very light. You want to live, despite certain moments… The presence of soldiers, on the contrary, creates the feeling of security.
I traveled there by car with a driver, saw beautiful cities, mountains, wine production. I went to an apple festival. I wasn’t afraid. The country has a modern airport, taxis, hotels, wonderful restaurants, beaches and movie theaters. But the thing is that no one anywhere will give you 100-percent guaranteed security, including when you're driving through France or Germany. In terms of security, Lebanon is no different than Europe.
The full interview can be found on RIA Novosti . Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook | 0 |
A video has surfaced on social media apparently produced by the Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency depicting jihadists fighting in Marawi, southern Philippines, where foreign fighters are attempting to establish a caliphate. [Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte — who lives on Mindanao, the island Marawi is located on — has imposed a state of martial law on all of Mindanao in an attempt to quell the jihadist insurgency. The short video shows jihadists darting around the and severely damaged streets of Marawi. As The Long War Journal notes, the terrorists also appear to take control of armored vehicles and show the bodies of some of those killed. One jihadist can be heard saying, “Allahu akbar” to a colleague on camera. The video surfaced online shortly before the U. S. coalition against the Islamic State in Syria confirmed the death of a terrorist known as Rayan Mashaal or Baraa Kadek, the founder of the Amaq News Agency: https: . almasdarnews. . mp4, This is the second video to surface from Marawi. Terrorists published another video this week showcasing Father Teresito “Chito” Suganob, whom they took hostage during the early part of the siege last week. Suganob and a dozen other civilians who were present in the city’s Cathedral of St. Mary remain hostages, and in the video, Suganob pleaded with President Duterte to ensure their safety by obeying the demands of the terrorists, particularly to end the airstrikes against terrorist targets. In addition to taking hostages, images that have appeared on the encrypted messaging app Telegram appear to show jihadists forcing the Christians still trapped in the city to convert to Islam. Eyewitnesses who fled the city have told media outlets that terrorists were forcing civilians to recite Quranic verses and Islamic prayers and killing anyone who did not pass their tests. Many of these jihadists, the witnesses say, are extremely young — many teenagers and some as young as thirteen. The men on camera appear to be Southeast Asian the Philippine National Police and Armed Forces have confirmed that some of those fighting in Marawi are not Filipinos, however, but Saudis, Yemenis, Indonesians, and Malaysians. The presence of foreigners suggests that the Islamic State’s Mideast leadership is involved in the attempt to take over Marawi, not just local groups. The siege began last week as police attempted to raid the hideout of Isnilon Hapilon, the head of Abu Sayyaf, and the terrorists who initially attacked the city were members of the Maute group. Both these jihadist groups have pledged allegiance to Islamic State caliph, Abu Bakr . Both Duterte and Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana have told reporters that the terrorists in Marawi are not indigenous to the Philippines but part of a foreign ISIS invasion. “They are already recognized and the occupation of Marawi is another step to prove worth as part of ISIS. They intended to raise the ISIS flag in the provincial capital,” Lorenzana told the Philippine website Rappler on Friday. He added that Isnilon Hapilon was “ordered to Lanao Sur (Butig) in early January to set up a wilayat (Islamic province) there. ” “ISIS thought that Lanao Sur was a better place for expansion because the area is bigger than Basilan and there are more Muslims there,” he added in his statements to Rappler. Marawi is the nation’s only “Islamic city” the Philippines is over 90 percent Christian. Duterte had previously stated that the Marawi crisis was “not Maute. It’s purely ISIS with different branches. ” He added that jihadist groups have profited from soaring methamphetamine (shabu) sales in the Philippines, offering drug traffickers protection in exchange for money. The government is denying, however, that a raid on a luxury resort in Manila is related to the Islamic State. Late Thursday night, gunmen stormed the Resorts World Manila, killing at least 36 and burning down a casino within the complex. National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) chief Oscar Albayalde blamed the incident on a “mentally disturbed,” “ ” lone gunmen, refuting a report from the SITE Intelligence Group that ISIS had claimed responsibility. Officials dismissed the ISIS claim as an attempt to generate momentum in the global jihadist movement. Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter. | 1 |
WASHINGTON, D. C. — In a stunning rebuke to House Speaker Paul Ryan, House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen ( ) announced his public opposition to Obamacare 2. 0 on Friday morning. [“Seven years after enactment of Obamacare, I wanted to support legislation that made positive changes to rescue healthcare in America,” Frelinhguysen, who has been lauded as the Garden State’s most powerful congressman, wrote in a Facebook post. Unfortunately, the legislation before the House today is currently unacceptable as it would place significant new costs and barriers to care on my constituents in New Jersey. In addition to the loss of Medicaid coverage for so many people in my state, the denial of essential health benefits in the individual market raise serious coverage and cost issues. I remain hopeful that the American Health Care Act will be further modified. We need to get this right for all Americans. The House Speaker almost never loses the Appropriations Chairman on major pieces of legislation. The fact Frelinghuysen is against the bill calls into question Ryan’s ability to lead the conference — including his own committee chairs — in the future on other pieces of legislation. It shows just how unpopular this legislation really is and further demonstrates Ryan’s inability to bring together the different factions of the House Republican conference. Many more Republicans are expected to vote against Speaker Ryan’s bill, the American Health Care Act — or “Obamacare 2. 0” or “Obamacare Lite” or “RyanCare” or “ ” — as it has become known. Other Republicans who are expected to vote against the revised version of the Affordable Healthcare Act include Rep. Mark Amodei ( ) Rep. Tom Budd ( ) Rep. David Brat ( ) Rep. Mark Meadows ( ) Rep. Mo Brooks ( ) and Rep. Louie Gohmert ( ). Now that Ryan has lost Frelinghuysen — the chairman of a powerful committee that controls government spending — it is highly unlikely Ryan will be able to deliver the votes on this. That means Ryan is delivering a loss to President Trump, after failing to control his members. Follow Adelle Nazarian on Facebook and Twitter @AdelleNaz | 1 |
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Question: Are we all angels who were cast down from our first estate?
One of the most renown scriptures containing the Parable of the Sower of Seed is Matthew 13. Let’s have a closer look at each and every planted seed that fell and use only the definition of the Word of God itself to interpret the scripture.
You are an angel who fell from grace and was birthed into the vesica pisces (flesh host body) to live out a refinement of faith unto the redemption of your soul.
Is this the answer? Let us know what you think after considering the information presented within this short video. :) Tags | 0 |
SAN JUAN, P. R. — In March 1954, Rafael Cancel Miranda smuggled a gun into the United States Capitol and, with three other Puerto Rican nationalists, opened fire from the visitors’ gallery. Five members of Congress were wounded. The attackers, three men and one woman, were swiftly arrested and tried. Mr. Cancel Miranda, then 23, received the longest sentence, 85 years. He served 25 years before his sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. Today, Mr. Cancel Miranda is the last surviving attacker. He lives with his wife, Angie, on a quiet lane of bungalows in a part of San Juan where the streets take their names from stars and constellations. His eyesight is failing, but he still turns out for the occasional independence event, where younger people receive him as a legend. His ancient enmities are now fresher than ever because of the island’s catastrophic $72 billion debt, which has placed Puerto Rico into what amounts to federal receivership. A panel appointed by Congress and President Obama will soon hold sway over the island and its finances, which collapsed after years of borrowing to cover rising costs. To longtime nationalists like Mr. Cancel Miranda, it is yet more proof that colonialism is alive and well here. This helps Mr. Cancel Miranda explain something odd that happened this summer. In June, the governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro J. García Padilla, traveled to New York City and told a special committee of the United Nations that despite all appearances, Puerto Rico was still a colony of the United States. He sought the United Nations’ help in achieving for the island, which is a territory of the United States. “Puerto Rico is hungry and thirsty for justice,” Mr. García Padilla said. The special committee has called on Washington to “allow the Puerto Rican people fully to exercise their inalienable right to and independence. ” To understand why Mr. García Padilla’s remarks were so unusual, it helps to know that his Popular Democratic Party claims to have already freed Puerto Rico from the colonial yoke. The island’s independence is a signature issue: The party takes credit for negotiating a unique status for Puerto Rico — that of an “associated free state” — which is said to provide the best of both worlds, statehood and independence, without forcing Puerto Rico to choose. The party says it achieved that in 1954, and that Puerto Rico has been an “associated free state” since. “It’s a lie!” Mr. Cancel Miranda said in a recent interview. “We never controlled our own country. ” Unusual events this year have brought many Puerto Ricans to much the same conclusion. In January, in a double jeopardy case, the United States Supreme Court held that Puerto Rico had no independent prosecutorial authority — just the authority bestowed on it by the United States Congress. Few on the mainland may have paid attention, but in Puerto Rico, the decision prompted the Popular Democratic Party’s president, David Bernier, a candidate for governor, to call for “an urgent review of the structure of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. ” The party that invented the “associated free state” was now questioning it. Next, Mr. Obama’s administration invoked the territories clause of the Constitution as it pushed for a law allowing Puerto Rico to restructure its big debt. The clause gives Congress the power to enact “all needful rules and regulations” for United States territories, and its use sent a strong signal to Puerto Rico that the island had no power to carry out its own law. When Congress passed the law in June, it placed Puerto Rico’s financial affairs under federal oversight, handled by a board. This was widely seen as proof that “associated free state” was a meaningless term. “Seven unelected people are going to be controlling our lives,” said María de Lourdes Santiago, a senator from the Puerto Rican Independence Party who, like Mr. Bernier, is running for governor. “It’s a dictatorship. ” She said the debt crisis had set profound changes in motion and she hoped Puerto Rico could finally “have a legitimate process of decolonization. ” A White House spokeswoman, Brandi S. Hoffine, said it was clear that “the people of Puerto Rico want the issue of status to be resolved,” and referred to the recommendations of a presidential task force for how that might happen. “The president remains committed to the principle of for the people of Puerto Rico,” she said. In an interview at his home, Mr. Cancel Miranda said the previous decolonization — the one carried out by the Popular Democrats — had been a sham, and had provoked the attack on Congress. He played grainy video footage of himself as a young man, refusing to apologize for the shooting during questioning. Then he filled in some details. The United Nations had declared the 1950s a “decade of decolonization,” he said, and Puerto Rico was put on a list of colonies to be freed. But, he said, Washington had merely appeared to go along with the proceedings — its main preoccupation was the Cold War. It wanted to remove Puerto Rico from the list of colonies, but not give it full autonomy, Mr. Cancel Miranda said, which might have meant losing the island’s ports, airfields and other strategic assets. Historians say United States officials helped to draft Puerto Rico’s first Constitution, adding a provision — now in dispute — that bonds be paid before everything else if money was tight. Washington also poured money into infrastructure on the island and offered tax breaks to American companies that came to Puerto Rico and created jobs. For better or worse, those programs won over some elected island officials who had previously favored independence. They devised the term “associated free state,” which was said to mean that Puerto Rico was a sovereign coequal of the United States, pursuing common interests by mutual agreement. The term in Spanish, “estado libre asociado,” is used in Puerto Rico’s Constitution. (The version calls Puerto Rico a commonwealth.) In 1953, a United Nations special committee held hearings on whether Puerto Rico’s name could be removed from the list of colonies. Mr. Cancel Miranda said he was there, listening as American delegates testified that Puerto Rico now had free elections, a Constitution and other essentials of . Other witnesses, however, said it was all . When the committee reconvened and voted, Mr. Cancel Miranda said, Washington’s view prevailed. “That’s when the nationalists said, ‘We have to send a message,’” Mr. Cancel Miranda said. “That was the reason for the attack on Congress. ” Their message was silenced for decades by long prison sentences. Over the years, memories of the attack faded on the mainland. And in Puerto Rico, the ballot replaced armed insurgency. The Independence Party is respected but has not earned many votes — though its popularity is growing, Ms. Santiago said. Now, it seems that most Puerto Ricans believe the associated free state was a sham, even if it is not clear what they will do about it. “You saw what I said in 1954: ‘I’m not sorry,’” Mr. Cancel Miranda said. “And 62 years later, I’m still not sorry. ” | 1 |
Posted on October 30, 2016 by Edmondo Burr in Sci/Environment // 0 Comments A new scientific theory claims our universe was born from an Event Horizon event as part of a second dimension in an enormous black hole gobbling up other universes in the fourth dimension.
At the very beginning of time, around 13.8 billion years ago, there was a hot dense energetic point where the laws of physics did not apply – something scientists today refer to as a ‘singularity’.
The only other place where a singularity occurs in the Universe and all the known laws of physics are temporarily abandoned is at the event horizon of a black hole – which scientists cannot explain.
What is odd about black holes is that the even horizon is two-dimensional in an otherwise completely three-dimensional universe. related content
Sunday Express reports:
This means that there is something that we are unable to perceive and the theory, which was first suggested in 2014 and is now under serious scrutinisation, claims that our Universe is the result of a singularity of a huge black hole.
In simpler terms, there is a possibility that our three-dimensional Universe is surrounding the event horizon of a four-dimensional Universe.
A 2014 study from the Perimeter Institute and University of Waterloo stated: “In this scenario, our Universe burst into being when a star in a four-dimensional universe collapsed into a black hole.
Re-visiting the theory recently, Ethan Siegel, a professor of physics and astronomy at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, explained how a black hole could have formed in another universe which led matter to “fall” into our Universe.
Dr Siegel wrote for Forbes: “As the black hole first formed, from a star’s core imploding and collapsing, the event horizon first came to be, then rapidly expanded and continued to grow in area as more and more matter continued to fall in. related content Supermassive Black Holes Mysteriously Align In Distant Universe
“If you were to put a coordinate grid down on this two-dimensional wrapping, you would find that it originated where the gridlines were very close together, then expanded rapidly as the black hole formed, and then expanded more and more slowly as matter fell in at a much lower rate.
“This matches, at least conceptually, what we observe for the expansion rate of our three-dimensional Universe.” | 0 |
posted by Eddie Diamond miners working off the coast of Africa stumbled across a 500-year-old shipwreck loaded with £9 million of gold and coins. The Bom Jesus – or Good Jesus – was first discovered along the Namibian coast near Oranjemund by geologists from the mining company De Beers in April 2008. It was a Portuguese ship which set sail from Lisbon in 1533 captained by Sir Francisco de Noronha, and vanished, along with its entire crew, while on a voyage to India. The Bom Jesus – or Good Jesus – and its treasure trove contents were first discovered along the Namibian coast near Oranjemund by geologists from the mining company De Beers in April 2008 (Pictured: Some of the Spanish coins) A selection of items from the ship with a trowel below them for scale. The best preserved astrolabe is in the middle, a frying pan on the right, some pottery on left, a pewter plate above and a section of a pewter bowl It was found by the miners as they drained a man-made salt water lake along the Skeleton Coast, and while plenty of shipwrecks have been discovered along the stretch, this was the oldest and the first to be loaded down with coin and ivory tusks. They did not immediately find the treasure it contained – first, they discovered strange pieces of wood and metal along the beach, before discovering the shipwreck buried under the sand. It was not until the sixth day that they found a treasure chest full of gold. It has been named as one of the most significant shipwreck finds of all time and the discovery led to the site being placed under the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Some rosary beads and a silver Portuguese coin that were found among the haul of the Bom Jesus Archaeologist Dr Dieter Noli demonstrating the use of an astrolabe found among the ship’s wreckage The Bom Jesus cargo contained German copper ingots, West African ivory, Portuguese, Spanish, Florentine and Venetian gold and silver currency, weapons, including swords an knives, clothing, and, of course, skeletons. The miners also discovered bronze bowls, and long metal poles which were used in the ship’s canona, as well as a musket compasses and astrological tools. Archaeologist Dr Dieter Noli told FoxNews.com that the Namibian government will keep the gold. He said: ‘That is the normal procedure when a ship is found on a beach. ‘The only exception is when it is a ship of state – then the country under whose flag the ship was sailing gets it and all its contents. ‘And in this case the ship belonged to the King of Portugal, making it a ship of state – with the ship and its entire contents belonging to Portugal. ‘The Portuguese government, however, very generously waived that right, allowing Namibia to keep the lot.’ How the ship would have looked. It was a Portuguese ship which set sail from Lisbon in 1533 captained by Sir Francisco de Noronha, and vanished, along with its entire crew, while on a voyage to India Source: | 0 |
Already President Trump is set to move decisively on the economy, but he must scale huge hurdles to accomplish 3 to 4 percent economic growth. Radical policy changes are required — tough to do even in this era of aggressive executive orders. [House leaders are working on corporate tax reform that will close loopholes, lower rates to internationally competitive levels, and shift part of the tax burden onto imports. It has a decent chance of winning enough bipartisan support in the Senate, but much more needs to be done. Still many large businesses and most small ones are organized as limited liability corporations and pay taxes through the personal tax code — after corporate tax reform they would be saddled with effective rates above 40 percent while their corporate rivals pay half that rate or less. Congress only has so much tax writing bandwidth, and personal tax reform may be booted into next year. Also, Treasury Steven Mnuchin has stated that upper income individuals will not see a reduction in their overall tax burden, but they pay more than 80 percent of the personal income taxes. Hence it remains a puzzle as to how taxes can be meaningfully cut to stimulate growth. Whenever and whatever congress ultimately decides, genuine tax relief will require bigger deficits. Those are an anathema to many Republicans and in any case don’t guarantee growth. George W. Bush slashed personal income taxes, Barack Obama expanded entitlements, and both relied in some considerable measure on bigger deficits as opposed to pruning spending elsewhere. Yet, each presided over moribund recoveries. Trade deficits with China and on oil directly subtract $500 billion annually from the demand for American made goods and services, kill millions of jobs, stifle RD, and tax growth. Confronting China on trade with a 45 percent tariff alone won’t get Beijing to stop undervaluing its currency, subsidizing exports, and cease blocking market access for goods and services. It can push back by harassing U. S. companies with operations in China and imposing new barriers on U. S. products, and more broadly by squeezing Taiwan, upping the ante on militarization of the South China Sea, and further enabling North Korea. Trump must gird for a broad crisis with China, deploy the full range of America’s geopolitical and economic assets, and compel Beijing to reckon with the fact that their shaky economy cannot withstand an all front confrontation with the United States without risking the Communist Party’s grip on power. Energy and Interior Departments committed to opening up drilling in the eastern Gulf and off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts — and ending the endless federal harassment of shale producers — could make America energy independent. However, as with many other issues, the lack of 60 Republican votes in the Senate will require guerrilla warfare to accomplish the results American voters deserve for awarding Trump the presidency. On the supply side, it’s a lot more expensive to start a business and make things in America than in the 1980s and 90s, because of the growth of the regulatory state. Just compliance with labor market, health care, financial, environmental regulations and the like require hundreds of thousands of employees and cost businesses billions of dollars. Imposing an efficacy test on regulations — requiring just what is absolutely needed to accomplish legitimate goals for protecting workers, the environment, consumers and financial stability, and then jettisoning the rest — should be the overarching objective as Trump’s cabinet goes to work at Labor, EPA, Treasury and elsewhere in the far flung federal regulatory apparatus. A good deal of what Obama imposed was by fiat — executive orders that can now be repealed. However, he also imposed overly aggressive and burdensome regulations established under statutes, and those are more difficult and time consuming to nix. Just as the law required the Obama administration to publish and take public comment on proposed regulations before imposing new rules — and then endure legal challenges from businesses and Republican state officials — the Trump administration will have to repeat those steps and face litigation from environmental groups, labor unions, and Democratic governors. All can be axed or reshaped by congress, but the Trump administration can expect a pitched battle from progressive Senate Democrats dedicated to remaking the American economy in the high unemployment model of continental Europe. After losing the presidential election, muffing the opportunity to capture the Senate, and managing to hold only 16 state governorships — not to mention their minority standing in the House and most state legislatures — we likely won’t be hearing Obama pontificating on the sidelines that elections have consequences. Instead, we can expect the only remaining consequential Democrats — those who can filibuster against the popular will in the Senate — to rely on the 60 vote rule to try to run out the clock until the 2020 presidential elections. In the end, Republicans in congress may have to resort to a grand budget reconciliation bill — or for their senators to reluctantly vote to suspend the 60 vote rule — to push through a panoply of reforms, and Trump will have to marshal public support for radical measures to overcome a barrage of criticism and protests from liberal politicians and the media. Bigger than his vision and knack for picking competent executives will be his salesmanship. America’s first dealmaker is not a man inclined to small deeds, and these will be the measure of his presidency. Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist. | 1 |
Russia 'puzzled' by Norway's decision to host US Marines page: 1 link Norway is to break a decades-old commitment not to host foreign troops on its soil by accommodating 330 US Marines next year. Russia, the apparent target of the buildup, said it was puzzled by the move. The Marines will be stationed at the Vaernes military base in central Norway from January, the Norwegian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Monday. The agreement for the deployment will be reviewed in the course of the year, it added. SOURCE I was one of the few posters on this forum who expressed that Norway's decision to have Marines deployed on its home soil was significant. Part of the reason I believe it is significant is Russia's reaction to the move. Our opinions mean nothing in this matter. If Russia considers the move to be significant then it's significant. I wonder if posters will be able to put aside their egos for this thread and not focus on their view of this issue but focus on Russia's view. Quoting from the article linked above: "The deployment appears to be in line with NATO's strategy to boost its military presence close to Russia’s borders. The alliance decided to send four 1,000-strong battalions each to Poland and the Baltic states, claiming it was needed to deter Russia." Please put it all in context from Russia's point of view. edit on 26-10-2016 by Profusion because: (no reason given) | 0 |
(Before It's News)
InSight Crime reports on sailboats transporting cocaine by towing packages tied with dead weights, Why Colombia Traffickers Love High-Tech ‘Narco Torpedoes’. As the article points out, reports of trafficking by underwater towing have been circulating for several years, in addition to submarines used since the 1990s and the ever-present speedboats. Here’s their graphic (click to go […] | 0 |
Mon, 24 Oct 2016 18:05 UTC Criminal defense attorney says both DNC and Clinton campaign guilty of 'numerous' crimes Undercover videos, released this week by conservative activist group Project Veritas, show Democratic operatives conspiring to incite violence at Trump rallies — and may be enough to warrant a federal investigation. Hillary Clinton has already faced one FBI investigation for her use of a private server to transmit and store emails while she was secretary of state, and now her campaign could face a second one into the Democrats' long tradition of violent agitation. "This is not just about inciting riots, which is bad enough, it is also about a confessed conspiracy to try to steal an election through violence." "There is sufficient factual predicate to open an investigation" into the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign's involvement in the conspiracies described in the videos, Brady Toensing, a white-collar criminal defense attorney, told LifeZette. " The potential crimes admitted to on the tapes are numerous," Toensing said. "There are civil rights violations and the crime of inciting a riot. But all you need is one, and then a conspiracy to commit any of these crimes is itself a federal felony, which on its own comes with up to five years in prison," he added. "There are also numerous potential state law violations and civil causes of action." © Project Veritas Scott Foval In one of the videos, Democratic consultant and Field Director for Americans United for Change Scott Foval admitted to paying people to incite violence at Trump events. "The bird-dogging. The aggressive bird-dogging. What I call it is 'conflict engagement,'" Foval said. "Conflict engagement in the lines at Trump rallies? We're starting anarchy. And he needs to understand that we're starting anarchy, " he continued. "We have mentally ill people that we pay to do sh**, make no mistake," Foval added. "If you're there and you're protesting and you do these actions, you will be attacked at Trump rallies. That's what we want." "Foval is describing what is called conduct laundering, but they got sloppy," said Toensing, a former U.S. Senate legislative aide for campaign financing who has represented clients in multiple state and federal campaign finance investigations. "In their arrogance, they bragged about the scheme on tape and, as part of that scheme, engaged a convicted felon, having him visit the White House more than three hundred times. It raises serious questions that call out for compelled answers given under oath," Toensing continued. © Project Veritas "Wherever Trumps and Pence are going to be, we have events and we have a whole team across the country that does both consultants and people from the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party apparatus and the people from the campaign, the Clinton campaign and my role with the campaign is to manage all that." - Robert Creamer The felon to whom Toensing refers is Robert Creamer, a Democratic operative, DNC member, and head of the Democracy Partners organization, who spent five months in prison in 2006 on bank fraud and tax evasion charges. Creamer is the link between the campaign and Foval. "We are contracted directly to the DNC and the campaign," Foval said in the video. "I am contracted to [Creamer] but I answer to the head [of] special events for the DNC and the head of the special events and political for the campaign," he explained. Ultimately the campaign is responsible for his "rapid response" operations, Foval claimed. "The campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, the Foval Group goes and executes the sh** on the ground," he said. Another man caught on the video, Aaron Black, confirmed this relationship. Black identified himself as the "deputy rapid response director for the DNC for all things Trump on the ground," and claimed his role is secret. "Nobody's really supposed to know about me," Black said. Black also said it was this conspiracy that orchestrated the violence in Chicago. "So the Chicago protest, when they shut all that, that was us. It was more [Creamer] than me, but none of this is supposed to come back to us because we want it coming from people. We don't want it to come from the party." Creamer himself implicated Clinton directly in this nefarious scheme. "I mean, Hillary knows through the chain of command what's going on," he said. "The campaign is fully in it." © Project Veritas Aaron Black aka Aaron Minter This activity is a clear violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 2101, which forbids the use of "any facility of interstate or foreign commerce, including, but not limited to, the mail, telegraph, telephone, radio, or television with intent to incite a riot; or to organize promote, encourage, or carry on a riot; or to ... aid or abet any person in inciting or participating in or carrying on a riot or committing any act of violence in furtherance of a riot." "The shredding machines and BleachBit were probably put to work right after the release of these tapes. So time is of the essence," Toensing said. "The Republican Party should demand that state and federal authorities immediately open an investigation. They should demand that a grand jury be convened, that forthwith subpoenas be served, and that search warrants be executed," he suggested. There are other ways an investigation could be initiated, according to Toensing. "Congress can do its own investigation," said Toensing. "There's talk about that but they're out of session right now," he added. "Someone could [also] go to a local U.S. attorney where the offence occurred," Toensing continued. "If conduct spreads to a certain area, the local authorities have jurisdiction and the local district attorney can convene a jury," he said. "The FBI could [also] open an investigation on its own," Toensing noted. He also pointed out that the Secret Service has grounds to open an investigation into "people who are intentionally fomenting violence and creating a hazard for [a] candidate." In either case, however, "the U.S. attorney would then decide whether to proceed." Unfortunately, as Toensing observed, "the U.S. attorneys are appointed by Obama." The way Obama's Justice Department handled the Clinton email investigation — not to mention the implications for Obama if the DNC and Clinton campaign are prosecuted for a federal conspiracy — doesn't exactly breed confidence that the administration will take action. "I wouldn't hold my breath," Toensing said. Even if the Obama administration refuses to act, however, it is likely others involved will face consequences for their actions. "This is not just about inciting riots, which is bad enough," said Toensing. "It is also about a confessed conspiracy to try to steal an election through violence." The Left has been conspiring to bring about political change through violence since its very inception. Foval himself expresses this truth perfectly in the recording. Conservatives "have fewer guys willing to step out on the line for what they believe in," Foval said. "There is a level of adherence to rules on the other side." Comment: "In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems." ― Saul D. Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals." Killary was one of Alinsky's protégés and actually wrote her thesis on his political model. | 0 |
DAPL Protesters Proven Right as Largest Gas Pipeline in U.S. Experiences Massive and Deadly Explosion Home / Badge Abuse / Dashcam: Chief Caught Doing Over 100 mph Only for Fellow Cops to Stop Him and Laugh About It Dashcam: Chief Caught Doing Over 100 mph Only for Fellow Cops to Stop Him and Laugh About It Claire Bernish November 1, 2016 Leave a comment
Brinkley, AR — Dashcam video showing preferential treatment of an Arkansas police chief has him scrambling to defend himself for being let off easy — without so much as a warning — after speeding to an off-duty job as a referee at a football game.
Footage obtained by THV11 from Arkansas State Police following a viewer tip, shows Brinkley Police Chief Edward Randle being pulled over in his personal vehicle, a red pickup truck, near Clarendon on Friday, October 21.
A state trooper assisted an officer from the Brinkley force upon request, and makes a U-turn after witnessing the speeding red pickup driving in the opposite direction, to make the stop.
As the trooper approaches the driver’s side, dashcam video shows he immediately recognized the Brinkley chief of police, and laughingly asks, “Where are you going so fast?”
Randle — obviously familiar to the state trooper — isn’t asked to produce identification, and tells the officer he’s headed for the game, which he later clarified for THV11 was the Clarendon-Marvell football game.
At that point, the Brinkley officer, who had summoned state police for assistance with the stop, also approaches Randle — as the trooper tells the chief the officer had been tailing him for miles when he finally called for assistance.
“I know you didn’t call the State Police!” Randle quips to the Brinkley officer.
“I didn’t have your plate,” the officer replies, “so it didn’t go over.”
As THV11 posits, that statement “could indicate that, since the officer did not announce the truck’s license plate number into his radio, nobody else would know the chief had been pulled over.”
The trio laughs about the chief’s excessive speed, and the officer tells him, “I had you locked in at 107.”
“It won’t do 107. It’ll only do 95,” Randle responds, referring to a governor capping his truck’s speed, as he later explained to THV11 in an unrecorded interview.
After a few more laughs, the officer tells Randle he measured the truck’s speed over 90 miles an hour — and the chief was still pulling away at the time.
Despite the obvious dangers of such high speeds on the narrow, curvy road, both the trooper and Brinkley officer simply walk away from the truck, as the officer says dismissively, “See you later, Chief.”
Video captures the last exchange between the two cops as Randle pulls away — the state trooper notes he clocked the chief doing “71 at the curve.”
In two phone interviews with THV11 — which were not recorded, by request — Randle disputes he ever came close to the truck’s alleged top possible speed of 95, as well as the trooper’s claim in dashcam footage he had been rounding the curve at 71 mph.
Additionally, “Though the state trooper claimed that the officer had been pursuing Randle for miles, Randle told THV11 that the officer was on his way to Clarendon to get fingerprints from someone at the county jail.”
THV11 spoke with local business owner, Benjamin Martin, who first noticed the stop by a Brinkley officer inside Clarendon city limits.
“I find it, you know, very disheartening, that anyone, public official or not, would show such blatant disregard for the speed limit, and put the lives of innocent others at risk,” Martin told the station in a video interview.
“I just feel that no one’s above the law, and you know, if it was me, I would’ve gotten a ticket.”
Indeed, the public might be lucky the off-duty Brinkley police chief didn’t lose control of his vehicle while traveling at such a high rate of speed — simply to make it to a football game.
Neither the Brinkley officer nor the state trooper are being investigated for wrongdoing — despite giving the chief a free pass. Arkansas State Police told THV11 the incident fell under control of the Brinkley Police Department as soon as the officer arrived on scene, even though the trooper affected the stop.
“As a chief of police, and as a law enforcement officer, you’re sworn to protect and serve,” Martin asserted, “which is the opposite of putting the lives of others at risk.”
Although nothing serious resulted from Randle’s excessive speeds, it was notorious blue privilege that allowed him to drive away without even a warning.
These seemingly small favors afforded to police by police on a constant basis highlight the divide civilians feel in their encounters with law enforcement. Indeed, the idea police belong to an exclusive club of impunity — simply because of their chosen occupation — only increases tension and resentment in their communities.
If police don’t uphold and enforce the laws they enforce against civilians, the law becomes an arbitrary, exploitive method for generating revenue — and nothing more. Share Social Trending | 0 |
You may have heard the theory that Silicon Valley has been instrumental in the rise of Donald J. Trump. The idea goes like this: Unlike many of his political rivals, Mr. Trump seems to understand that social media has become the nervous system of the American news business. On Twitter, where he regularly regales his millions of followers with bursts of id, Mr. Trump’s posts are mainlined and amplified by the rest of the media with one or two tweets, he can dominate cable TV, the web, newspapers and talk radio for an entire day. The pattern was on display again this week, when Mr. Trump blasted The New York Times over a critical story about his treatment of women. This theory is not exactly bunk. It’s true that Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed, with its staccato cadences and unending exclamation marks, can be irresistible even to his critics. He is among a handful of politicians who use Twitter as real people do — casually, bitingly and free of the jargon that clogs up most other pols’ tweets. Mr. Trump has also cultivated a Twitter fan base that can be domineering in its attempts to harangue and silence critics, another force multiplier in the war for media dominance. But don’t bet that Mr. Trump’s mastery over social media will help him in November. He has used Twitter as a tool to foment culturewide rage — it’s his big, inescapable bullhorn. Yet winning a presidential campaign involves more than simply whipping up unfocused outrage. It also requires more discrete, personalized messaging targeted to specific sets of voters and potential volunteers, a goal for which Twitter is spectacularly ill suited. The point of a modern American presidential campaign is to inspire and turn out as many of your voters as possible while avoiding inspiring similar passion for your opponent. In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign pioneered some of the most effective ways to use social media and organizing to win political campaigns. The Obama operation turned unfocused online passion into a operation whose effectiveness surprised longtime political observers. Mr. Trump has eschewed many of the Obama team’s efforts. In contrast, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has doubled down on the approach. Veterans of the Obama campaign say this could be Mr. Trump’s costliest mistake in the election. If the Internet has been Mr. Trump’s secret weapon so far, it may soon turn into his Achilles’ heel. “The biggest mistake he can make is thinking that the general is going to be like the primary,” said David Plouffe, who managed Mr. Obama’s first presidential campaign and is now an executive at Uber. Mr. Trump will need to attract voters who previously voted for Mr. Obama and those who don’t usually vote at all. Compared to voters in the Republican primary, these general election voters hold more moderate views, and may be less plugged in to — and perhaps even repulsed by — the hurricane of news that Mr. Trump has so far succeeded in creating. Yet Twitter, by its very nature, won’t let Mr. Trump pivot to some gentler version of himself. With its character limit and an interface that’s inscrutable to nonusers, Twitter tends to penalize nuance and moderation, while rewarding hot takes and bombast. Just about every discussion on the platform turns into a preening flame war, and just about any attempt to dive into substance is mocked by the platform’s cool kids. In other words, Twitter is like a partisan primary election. From Mr. Trump’s slogan to many of his policy ideas — build a wall, ban Muslims — his message has been perfectly tailored to the medium. But now, if he tries to expand his message beyond issues for the right, Mr. Trump may feel caged in by a platform that takes a dim view of . We’re already seeing signs of this dynamic playing out. Consider Mr. Trump’s Twitter post to celebrate Cinco de Mayo — a picture of himself eating a taco bowl made at Trump Tower with a caption proclaiming, “I love Hispanics!” That tweet ricocheted across the media — it’s his post in months — but not for the reasons Mr. Trump might have intended. Rather than being greeted as an honest attempt to reach out to a voting group that overwhelmingly dislikes him, the taco bowl post was widely mocked as an obvious, pander. The failure makes sense: If there’s a chance that Mr. Trump’s views about Latinos are indeed more inclusive than we’ve been led to believe, Twitter is the worst place for him to explain the complexities of his ideas. Twitter doesn’t allow for complexity to express a move toward inclusiveness on Twitter, “I love [insert demographic group]!” may be the best you can do. This gets to the larger problem with Mr. Trump’s reliance on social media. Twitter is effectively a mass medium in an election that may be decided by a far more personalized approach. “For example, Hillary Clinton’s campaign will know every voter in Hamilton County, Ohio, who is certain to vote for her, and every voter who might vote for her but hasn’t decided yet,” Mr. Plouffe said. The campaign has collected and analyzed reams of data about those voters from public records, online interactions and events. It can turn all that data into action. “We found out that the more you know about who voters actually are, the better you can figure out the right person to talk to them to persuade them to go to the polls,” Mr. Plouffe said. Mr. Obama won the 2012 election by 4 percentage points nationally. Mr. Plouffe estimated that without the effort, the race would have ended in an effective tie, and Mr. Obama would have lost a few huge states, including Florida. Mr. Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request to discuss how the candidate will use the Internet in his general election campaign. But in a recent interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Trump dismissed the Obama approach. “I’ve always felt it was overrated,” Mr. Trump told The A. P. “Obama got the votes much more so than his machine. And I think the same is true with me. ” He said he would stick to the strategy that has worked for him so far, including holding more of his trademark crowded rallies. Buzz Jacobs, a Republican political consultant who worked on John McCain’s campaign in 2008 and on Marco Rubio’s run this year, said Mr. Trump would benefit from the Republican Party’s effort. But he was puzzled by Mr. Trump’s comments on the Obama field operation. “If it’s true that the campaign is going to disregard data wholesale, that would be alarming, and would leave them way behind the Clinton campaign, then we’ll lose,” Mr. Jacobs said. Sasha Issenberg, a journalist who chronicled the rise of electioneering in his book “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns,” argued Mr. Trump’s approach could easily backfire. The key danger in Mr. Trump’s style of campaigning, Mr. Issenberg said, was the risk of inflaming his opponents as he pushes his own message. “Trump is very much a creature of mass media, and his use of Twitter fits that paradigm,” Mr. Issenberg said. “He’s put together as large an audience as possible. He doesn’t distinguish whether these are people who vote or don’t vote, whether they’re in the U. S. whether they’re over 18, and whether they support him or Hillary Clinton. His goal seems to be to produce content there that lands in front of as large an audience as possible. ” But throwing out content haphazardly is the last thing a campaign should do. “It’s immensely counterproductive for him to put out a message in front of a Hillary Clinton supporter,” Mr. Issenberg said. Yet every day from now until Election Day, there’s a chance that Mr. Trump will do just that. Last week, he got into a flame war with Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and lefty heroine, who was clearly trying to bait him into a fight that would energize the Democratic base. A more sober candidate might have resisted. But not a denizen of Twitter, where restraint is tantamount to defeat. Better than anyone else, Mr. Trump knows that on Twitter, you’ve got to always amp it up — even if it means turning everyone off. | 1 |
Baxter Dmitry in Health // 0 Comments
Flu shots are the greatest medical fraud in history. They contain formaldehyde and mercury – two powerful neurotoxins – and the vaccine industry even admits that laboratory tests prove the popular jab does not work.
Why is a toxic, medical hoax, backed by nothing but voodoo faith-based dogma and clever marketing, pushed on the whole population every year?
Vaccines are the one medicine where no scientific evidence of safety or efficacy is required by anyone: not the FDA, not the CDC and not the media. Congress even passed a law protecting the vaccine industry with absolute legal immunity, even when they manufacture and sell defective products that injure and kill people.
And vaccine manufacturers have been lying to us for years about toxic levels of mercury in flu shots. Everybody knows mercury is toxic to inject into the human body. That’s not debated except by irrational anti-science denialists. So why won’t manufacturers remove the mercury
SEE THE EVIDENCE FOR YOURSELF
Mike Adams reports :
To prove the presence of mercury in influenza vaccines, I’m going to show you four irrefutable pieces of evidence:
1) Photographs of a 2013 / 2014 influenza vaccine box admitting, in very small print, to the addition of mercury to the vaccine as a preservative.
2) Photographs of the influenza vaccine insert once again repeating the admission that the vaccine contains mercury.
3) A screen shot from the Centers for Disease Control website which admits that vaccines still contain the following ingredients: Aluminum, Antibiotics, Egg Protein, Formaldehyde, Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) and Thimerosal, a mercury-containing chemical compound.
4) Lab results from the Natural News Forensic Food Lab which confirmed almost precisely the same level of mercury claimed by the manufacturer (GlaxoSmithKline).
Before I show you the irrefutable evidence, there is some good news in all this testing. As part of this investigation, I tested several different vaccines, including an HPV vaccine. Mercury levels were extremely low in these other vaccines. Only the flu shot contained extremely high mercury levels.
INFLUENZA VACCINE BOX ADMITS SAFETY NEVER ESTABLISHED FOR PREGNANT WOMEN
As you can see below, the box for this Flulaval Influenza Virus Vaccine readily admits the use of thimerosal which contains mercury. (Of course, you have to use a magnifying glass to see this.) In microscopic text on the package insert, it says straight out, “Register women who receive Flulaval while pregnant in the pregnancy registry by calling 1-888-452-9622.”
Yet, at the same time, the insert also admits that “safety and efficacy have not been established in pregnant women.”
In other words, this vaccine containing mercury is being promoted for use in pregnant women even when no safety in pregnant women has ever been established.
It’s also important to note that when people are being given flu shots, they are never handed the package or the insert , so they have no opportunity to read any of this information unless they specifically ask for it.
It’s not like a food item with a “Nutrition Facts” label. Vaccines are sold in “stealth” mode where patients have no idea what’s in them and no opportunity to read possible warnings.
As further proof of this point, consider the fact that this flu vaccine comes with only one insert , yet it’s a 10-dose vial intended to be injected into 10 different people. Clearly, if there’s only one insert but 10 people, then 9 out of 10 people can’t possibly be handed the insert.
UNETHICAL MEDICINE ADMINISTERED WITHOUT INFORMED CONSENT (A VIOLATION OF MEDICAL ETHICS)
In fact, from a legal perspective, vaccines are routinely injected into people without informed consent. Virtually no one administering vaccines ever explains the risks vs. benefits of vaccines as is required under medical ethics and state medical law. In nearly all cases, patients are simply hoodwinked and told there are no risks at all.
The second piece of evidence to reveal here is the package insert for the influenza vaccine, a document printed in microscopic text that’s almost impossible to read without a magnifying glass.
Of course, the intention is that no one ever read this document, because it contains shocking admissions of the total quackery and marketing deception behind flu shots.
As you can see from this snapshot, the package insert readily admits that each vaccine dose “contains 50 mcg thimerosal (<25 mcg mercury).”
In case you’re wondering, “mcg” means micrograms. A microgram is 1/1000th of a milligram. Mercury is toxic at any dose when injected into the body, even in micrograms. There is no such thing as a “safe” form of mercury when injected. In fact, the ethyl form of mercury used in vaccines is many times more toxic than methyl form once it enters human cells. Click here for a fascinating interview with mercury toxicity expert Dr. Chris Shade who explains this extremely important concept.
The same paragraph shown above also admits the vaccine contains formaldehyde, a potent neurotoxic chemical.
VACCINE INSERT ADMITS SAFETY AND EFFECTIVENESS HAVE NEVER BEEN ESTABLISHED
What’s even more astonishing about this insert is that it openly admits the flu shot is a complete medical hoax, backed by nothing but voodoo woo woo faith-based dogma (and clever marketing).
Here are actual words from the insert (which is much more lengthy than the snapshot shown above):
“There have been no controlled trials adequately demonstrating a decrease in influenza disease after vaccination with Flulaval.”
“Safety and effectiveness of Flulaval have not been established in pregnant women, nursing mothers or children.”
“Safety and effectiveness of Flulaval in pediatric patients have not been established.”
“Flulaval has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential, or for impairment of fertility.”
“Do not administer Flulaval to anyone… following previous administration of any influenza vaccine.”
CDC ADMITS USE OF MERCURY, MSG, FORMALDEHYDE
For those “mercury denialists” who still can’t believe flu shots given to pregnant women contain high concentrations of toxic mercury, even the CDC reluctantly admits this fact on its own website.
Here’s a screen shot from the CDC’s vaccine additives page , which miraculously hasn’t yet been removed from their site:
LABORATORY RESULTS FROM THE FORENSIC FOOD LAB
The final piece of irrefutable evidence on all this comes from my own scientific laboratory, where I run ICP-MS instrumentation to test foods, beverages, dietary supplements and other items for heavy metals contamination.
I was the first food researcher to document high levels of tungsten in brown rice protein, and I’ve exposed alarming levels of lead in pet treats. I’ve also exposed high lead in ginkgo biloba herbal supplements imported from China.
When I finally got around to testing vaccines, I was shocked to find over 51,000 ppb mercury in the Influenza Virus Vaccine.
Why was I shocked? Because I don’t recall ever seeing anything run through my ICP-MS instrument with that high a concentration of mercury. The mercury in this flu vaccine was the HIGHEST concentration of mercury I’ve ever seen in anything, period!
And this is a product that’s injected directly into the bodies of pregnant women, where mercury goes right into the developing fetus.
What’s even more interesting is that this finding once again confirms the accuracy of my lab instrumentation because it’s almost in perfect agreement with the level of mercury detailed on the vaccine package insert.
Let’s do the math:
* Each dose of an influenza vaccine is 0.5 mL in volume * My lab found just over 50 ppm of mercury in the vaccine liquid. * 50 ppm (concentration) x 0.5 mL (volume) equals 25 mcg of mercury.
Guess what the package insert says? (Up to) 25 mcg of mercury per dose. Near-perfect agreement, in other words. My finding of 51 ppm rather than 50 ppm either means my own tests were off by about 2% (which is still considered very accurate for ICP-MS testing) or that GSK put 2% extra mercury into the vaccine.
And just so you know I actually did the tests, here’s what else we found with other analytes:
Aluminum: 0.4 ppm Cadmium: zero Lead: zero
So, I can confidently say that the flu vaccine won’t poison you with lead, cadmium or arsenic because it contains none of those things. Even the aluminum level is quite low and not a concern at this very low level. The real problem is just the mercury, at least as far as elements go.
WHY WON’T VACCINE MAKERS REMOVE THE MERCURY?
Good question. Everybody knows mercury is toxic to inject into the human body. That’s not debated except by irrational anti-science denialists who refuse to acknowledge the Table of Elements.
You have to wonder: why choose mercury as a preservative? And why do both the CDC and FDA continue to look the other way as an entire branch of modern medicine poisons our women and children with a neurotoxic heavy metal?
And if vaccine promoters, propagandists and patent holders want the world to accept all their vaccines, why don’t they just remove the mercury and be done with it? If they take out all the toxic elements, resistance to vaccines would all but evaporate.
WHY VACCINES ARE THE “ANTI-SCIENCE” MEDICAL VOODOO OF THE MODERN WORLD
Ever wonder why they don’t conduct legitimate clinical trials on flu vaccine efficacy? Probably because they know the results would have to be faked to show any efficacy at all. That’s what Merck did with its mumps vaccines, according to two former virologists who worked there. They spiked human blood samples with animal antibodies to fabricate positive results. Yep, vaccines work so poorly that even the manufacturers have to fake their own results to show any efficacy.
Vaccines are the one medicine where no scientific evidence of safety or efficacy is required by anyone: not the FDA, not the CDC and not the media. Congress even passed a law protecting the vaccine industry with absolute legal immunity, even when they manufacture and sell defective products that injure and kill people.
How’s that for medicine we can all trust? Think about it: this is a product that contains multiple neurotoxins in very high concentrations; a product backed by no safety trials or efficacy data; a product linked to numerous serious adverse reactions; and yet a product that enjoys absolute legal immunity thanks to the U.S. government.
If that’s not outright medical quackery, I don’t know what is.
For the record, I’m not an opponent of all vaccines. But I do believe — as do a rapidly increasing number of other clear-thinking people — that medicine should not poison our women and children . It’s time for mercury to be removed from all vaccines, once and for all. Anything less is medical negligence.
NEW VIDEO INTERVIEW ABOUT FLU SHOT FAILURES
Ultimately, We the People will be victorious in the removal of mercury from all vaccines — an idea that’s already well accepted across much of Europe. And when that day comes, it will be yet another victory for the amazing community of millions of remarkable people working together for the protection of our children, our health and our world. | 0 |
Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox Friends First,” Rep. Louie Gohmert ( ) argued now that we know there is no collusion between the Trump administration and the Russian government, we can drop the special counsel probe headed up by former FBI Director Robert Mueller. “[W]e now know there is no collusion between this administration and Russia — so we can drop the Independent Counsel, the Special Counsel — there is no further need,” he said. Gohmert argued instead that a spotlight should be shined on the collusion within the Department of Justice. “And now that we know the collusion between Comey and Mueller,” he continued. “He ran things by Mueller before he testified. He also ran things by other people in the Justice Department when he did the memo. There is so much collusion — real collusion in the Justice Department. ” “[Mueller] needs to recuse himself from this matter,” Gohmert added. “We don’t need a special counsel. That was a ruse, once again, by the dishonest Comey. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s weekend Twitter message asserting that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phones forced the White House into ever more verbal contortions on Thursday as aides struggled to defend the president’s charge. In the latest iteration, the Justice Department declined to comment on whether Mr. Trump is — or is not — the subject of an investigation. “No comment,” a department official said. In normal circumstances, a “no comment” from the Justice Department on the status of any investigation would be standard practice. And certainly there has never been any indication that Mr. Trump himself was the target of inquiries by the department and congressional intelligence committees into possible contacts between his associates and members of the Russian government. But by venting his ire against Mr. Obama in a series of Twitter messages at dawn on Saturday, Mr. Trump awkwardly raised that possibility himself, since any wiretapping could have been the direct result of an investigation targeting him. One presidential tweet in particular — “how low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process” — clearly portrayed Mr. Trump as the victim of surveillance. Thursday’s verbal gymnastics actually started on Wednesday when Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, insisted to reporters that the president is not the target of a counterintelligence investigation involving contacts with Russia. He said, flatly, that “there is no reason to believe there is any type of investigation with respect to the Department of Justice. ” That prompted Thursday’s comments from a Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. The official said that Mr. Spicer had not relied on any information from the department in denying the existence of an investigation targeting the president. Which led a few hours later to an by Mr. Spicer, who was asked how he knew, definitively, that the president was not a target. Mr. Spicer conceded that the White House does not know whether the Justice Department has targeted the president in a investigation. “I said I’m not aware and we’re not aware and that’s why we want the House and Senate to do what the president has asked of them, to look into this,” Mr. Spicer said. “But no, we’re not aware. ” When reporters asked him to reconcile the difference between his statements, Mr. Spicer insisted that there was none. “Right, I mean I don’t know that they’re not interchangeable,” Mr. Spicer told reporters. “I’m not aware, I don’t believe. Look up in a thesaurus and find some other ways, but I don’t know that there’s a distinction there that’s noteworthy. But we’re not aware, I don’t believe that that exists. ” In his tweets, Mr. Trump appeared to be lashing out at what he views as a politically motivated effort to uncover the facts about Russia’s activities in the presidential election, including contacts between people linked to his campaign and Russian officials. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting a counterintelligence investigation into Russian campaign interference, and into the question of whether anyone in the Trump administration may have had knowledge of it. While investigators have found multiple contacts between Russia and people involved in the Trump campaign, no clear evidence of collusion has emerged publicly. But the White House’s frequent denials of any contact — followed by its public reversals — have only fueled questions in Congress and elsewhere. Committees in both the Senate and the House are examining Russia’s and possible ties to the Trump campaign, but House Democrats pushed Thursday to go further. They introduced a bill — almost certain to die in the face of Republican opposition — requiring the Trump administration to turn over all documents on Russian campaign contacts. “There must be a full accounting of any and all ties between Russia, President Trump, his administration and his associates,” said Representative Ted Lieu of California, one of the Democratic sponsors. After Mr. Trump’s Twitter messages on Saturday morning alleging wiretapping, a spokesman for Mr. Obama vigorously denied the charge, saying in a statement that any suggestion that the former president ordered wiretaps on an American are “simply false. ” James B. Comey, the F. B. I. director, urged counterparts at the Justice Department to publicly refute Mr. Trump’s charge, officials said. Department officials have declined to do so, and Mr. Comey has remained silent on the issue publicly. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from investigations involving Mr. Trump’s campaign after it was disclosed he met twice with the Russian ambassador. The man who would oversee any such investigations, Rod J. Rosenstein, is still awaiting Senate confirmation as deputy attorney general. At a confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Rosenstein repeatedly declined to say whether he would appoint a special counsel to handle the Russia investigation. “I am simply not in a position to answer the question because I don’t know the information,” he said. | 1 |
TORONTO — In 2016 the Toronto Blue Jays enjoyed, by far, the largest attendance increase in Major League Baseball. In what was a natural result of last year’s riveting playoff run by the club, almost 600, 000 additional fans poured through the turnstiles at Rogers Centre, leaving the Blue Jays with the attendance figure in the majors this season, behind only the Los Angeles Dodgers and the St. Louis Cardinals. For many years before that, the Toronto stadium was often a concrete shell (or more than ) a place where the crack of ball on bat echoed around the cavernous confines. But as the Blue Jays regained their swagger last season and this, the building has sprung to life again. With that has come more noise and more excitement but also some unruly behavior and even claims of verbal abuse directed at opposing players. “It’s hockey fans,” said Jason Kipnis, the second baseman for the Cleveland Indians, who played the Blue Jays in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series on Monday night. “And I mean that in the best way, because I’m a hockey fan, too. But that’s exactly what you want out of the fans. You want that little feeling, like that 1 percent feeling where I’m not sure I’m safe right here. ” That was actually the case in the Blue Jays’ playoff game against the Baltimore Orioles. During that tense contest, a spectator threw a can of beer onto the field as the Orioles’ Hyun Soo Kim settled under a fly ball in the seventh inning. The can flew about a foot behind Kim’s head and landed on the field, its sudsy contents spewing out. Kim’s teammate Adam Jones, playing center field, was irate and later said that he and Kim were victims of racial abuse from spectators, a claim corroborated by at least one fan in attendance. It was not the first time a projectile had been thrown onto the field at Rogers Centre. In 2013, a drink was hurled during a game involving the Orioles. And last year, after a disputed umpiring call in Game 5 of an A. L. division series between the Blue Jays and the Texas Rangers, spectators showered the Rogers Centre field with plastic water bottles, beer cans and other items. It was a rowdy and unsettling scene, and it drew rebukes from both the Rangers and the Blue Jays. Bottles even came close to hitting Toronto Manager John Gibbons as he went out to argue the call. At the time, Gibbons made remarks about almost getting hit on the head, but after the recent game, his patience had run its course. “Enough already,” he said after that game. “Let us handle things on the field. ” After the beer can was thrown at Kim, the atmosphere in the stadium intensified, and at least a few fans said they heard others yelling racially abusive remarks at Jones and Kim. Avi Miller, a Orioles fan, said in a telephone interview Monday that he was at the game and had heard people yelling at Kim, who is South Korean, to go back to his country, and other things directed at Jones that he said he was not comfortable repeating. “I am convinced that 99 percent of the people who were booing were booing the person that threw the can of beer,” Miller said. “But some people around me took a very low approach and they were yelling at Kim. “It was disappointing to hear,” he added. Miller, who said he had been to games at more than 20 major league stadiums, said he had heard similar invective in other venues. But at the recent game, it was worse, he said, even if it lasted only a few minutes. Miller said he was sitting in Section 130 down the line, in foul territory, facing the direction from which the can was thrown. After the episode, he said, fans began yelling back and forth, and he suspected that alcohol might have played a role. “It was basically happening after the incident,” he said. “Most of the people around me were very disappointed by it. They were annoyed by it, too. ” Asked if he heard racial abuse directed at Jones, he said, “Yes. ” On Oct. 7, three days after the game, the police in Toronto charged Ken Pagan with mischief, saying he had thrown the can of beer. The arrest was made based on video and photographic evidence. Tyler Smith, Pagan’s lawyer, said his client faced a court date Nov. 10, when the state will turn over the evidence. Smith also said Pagan had stopped working at the media outlet Postmedia in the aftermath of the arrest. Smith said that he could not comment on the case until he saw the evidence. “This has had a huge impact on him,” Smith said Monday. “He was a guy who was well respected in his community, and now everyone is blaming him for the fact that beer is no longer served in cans at the games. He has a lot of enemies out there. ” The Blue Jays announced that for the remainder of the postseason, all beer would be poured into cups when sold to customers. Before Monday night’s game, there had been one playoff game played at Rogers Centre since the contest — the Game 3 clincher in which the Blue Jays ousted the Rangers in a rematch from last year — and no trouble was reported. In their announcement, the Blue Jays said enhanced security measures would be in place to prove a “safe and enjoyable atmosphere. ” But it is also an atmosphere that has become a lot louder as the Blue Jays have revived on the field. “It’s definitely changed here the last couple of years,” Gibbons said. “There’s something to it. We feel it. And I don’t think it’s an easy place to play for an opponent. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump and his advisers, venturing for the first time into the fraught world of Middle East peacemaking, are developing a strategy on the conflict that would enlist Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to break years of deadlock. The emerging approach mirrors the thinking of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who will visit the United States next week, and would build on his de facto alignment with Sunni Muslim countries in trying to counter the rise of Iran. But Arab officials have warned Mr. Trump and his advisers that if they want cooperation, the United States cannot make life harder for them with provocative moves. The White House seems to be taking the advice. Mr. Trump delayed his plan to move the United States Embassy to Jerusalem after Arab leaders told him that doing so would cause angry protests among Palestinians, who also claim the city as the capital of a future state. And after meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan last week, Mr. Trump authorized a statement that, for the first time, cautioned Israel against building new West Bank settlements beyond existing lines. “There are some quite interesting ideas circulating on the potential for U. S. discussions on regional security in which issues would play a significant role,” said Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I don’t know if this is going to ripen by next week, but this stuff is out there. ” The discussions underscore the evolution of the new president’s attitude toward the conflict as he delves deeper into the issue. During the campaign and the postelection transition, Mr. Trump presented himself as an unstinting supporter of Israel who would quickly move the embassy and support new settlement construction without reservation. But he has tempered that to a degree. The notion of recruiting Arab countries to help forge an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians — known as the “ ” approach — is not a new one. As secretary of state under President George Bush, James A. Baker III organized the first regional conference in 1991 at which Arab leaders sat down with Israel’s prime minister. President George W. Bush invited Arab leaders to a summit meeting with Israel in Annapolis, Md. in 2007. And President Barack Obama’s first special envoy, George Mitchell, spent months in 2009 trying to enlist Arab partners in a joint effort. The difference is that in the last eight years, Israel has grown closer to Sunni Arab nations because of their shared concern about Iranian hegemony in the region, opening the possibility that this newfound, if not always public, affiliation could change the dynamics. “The logic of is that because the Palestinians are so weak and divided — and because there’s a new, tacit relationship between the Sunni Arabs and Israel — there’s the hope the Arabs would be prepared to do more,” said Dennis B. Ross, a Middle East peace negotiator under several presidents, including Mr. Obama. That is a departure from the countervailing assumption that if Israel first made peace with the Palestinians, it would lead to peace with the larger Arab world — the “ ” approach. That was at the core of President Bill Clinton’s attempts to bring the two sides together and was Mr. Obama’s fallback position after his efforts to find Arab partners failed. Mr. Netanyahu, who is due at the White House on Wednesday, has been talking about an approach for a while. His theory is that the approach has failed. And so, he argues, if Israel can transform its relationship with Sunni Arab nations, they can ultimately lead the way toward a resolution with the Palestinians. Jared Kushner, the senior White House adviser whom Mr. Trump has assigned a major role in negotiations, has been intrigued by this logic, according to people who have spoken with him. Mr. Kushner has grown close to Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador and a close confidant of Mr. Netanyahu’s. Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner also had dinner at the White House on Thursday night with Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, who is a key supporter of Mr. Netanyahu. A series of telephone conversations and personal meetings with Arab and regional leaders in recent weeks have also shaped Mr. Kushner’s thinking and that of the president. Mr. Trump has talked with President Abdel Fattah of Egypt King Salman of Saudi Arabia Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Mr. Kushner has also met with Arab officials, including Yousef Al Otaiba, the ambassador from the United Arab Emirates. King Abdullah II of Jordan seems to have played a particularly pivotal role. Concerned that an embassy move would anger the many Palestinians living in his country, the king rushed to Washington without an invitation, in a gamble that he could see Mr. Trump. He visited first with Vice President Mike Pence, who had him over for breakfast at his official residence last week. The king appealed to the administration’s fixation with the Islamic State, arguing that the United States should not alienate Arab allies who could help. Several days later, the king buttonholed Mr. Trump on the sidelines of the National Prayer Breakfast and made a similar case. He advised against a radical shift in American policy and emphasized the risks that Jordan would face if Israel were to become even more assertive about building settlements, according to people who spoke with Mr. Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, the chief White House strategist. Mr. Trump had already decided by that point to slow down the embassy move — a decision that did not especially trouble Mr. Netanyahu and his team, who, while publicly supporting a move, privately urged caution to avoid a violent backlash. The administration had also received reports from American diplomats in Jordan that the threat level for a terrorist attack there had been raised to the highest level in years. But a series of announcements of new settlement construction worried some White House officials, who thought Mr. Netanyahu was taking action without first meeting with Mr. Trump. Within hours of Mr. Trump’s meeting with King Abdullah, the administration leaked a statement to The Jerusalem Post saying, “We urge all parties from taking unilateral actions that could undermine our ability to make progress, including settlement announcements. ” After that was posted online, the White House issued a public statement with softened language: “While we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal. ” It was worded in a way that let different parties focus on different parts. The “may not be helpful” phrase was the first time Mr. Trump had warned against new housing in the West Bank. But the “beyond their current borders” phrase suggested a return to George W. Bush’s policy of essentially acquiescing to additional construction within existing settlement blocs as long as Israel did not expand their geographical reach or build entirely new settlements. Elliott Abrams, one of the authors of that policy under Mr. Bush, is poised to become deputy secretary of state under Mr. Trump. Mr. Netanyahu’s team focused on that part of the statement. “I happen to know they were very pleased with the statement because it was such a contrast from Obama,” said Morton A. Klein, the national president of the Zionist Organization of America, who has been supportive of the Trump administration. Indeed, undeterred, Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition pushed through Parliament a bill to retroactively authorize thousands of homes in the West Bank that even under Israeli law had been built illegally on land. Mr. Klein, who argues that settlements are not an obstacle to peace, said the White House had made the statement too confusing to provide clear direction. “I did find it ambiguous, and not as clear as I would like it to be,” he said. The challenge now is whether Mr. Trump can use this ambiguity to his benefit. If the United States can extract gestures from the Arabs, then that could provide a basis for Israelis and Palestinians to make compromises that they could not do by themselves, Mr. Ross said. “You’d have to have some kind of parallel approach,” he said. “This would be a serious investment of diplomacy to probe what is possible. ” | 1 |
For months, activists supporting the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota have been protesting the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline in an effort to protect sacred burial grounds and the... | 0 |
One of the largest universities in the country, Pennsylvania State University, will not become a sanctuary campus for illegal immigrants to be shielded from federal immigration law. [In a new statement by Penn State President Eric Barron, the sanctuary campus proposal was shut down for holding “no legal validity” and for being “ambiguous,” according to The Inquirer. “If used, it could imply that our university has the authority to exempt our campus from federal immigration laws, when in fact no university has that authority,” Barron said in the statement. “It also implies incorrectly a university is able to provide special protections to undocumented individuals beyond the law. That also is not the case. ” Barron’s statement shutting down talks of a sanctuary campus came after student social justice groups demanded the university be involved in shielding illegal immigrant students from federal immigration law. The decision by Penn State to not accept the sanctuary campus status also comes after State Rep. Jerry Knowles ( ) announced that he would be introducing legislation to strip funding from any sanctuary campuses in the state. If Penn State had taken up the banner of a being sanctuary campus, the university would have risked nearly $300 million in state funds per year. Neighboring universities, though, have designated themselves sanctuary campuses. Expensive, private colleges such as the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College have already pledged their sanctuary campus policy, announcing that federal immigration officials would be barred from campus without a warrant and faculty and staff are not to comply with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. The moves by some universities to try to exempt themselves from federal immigration law come as Donald Trump is set to enforce the country’s immigration system. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
By the time David Sweat spoke to investigators from the office of New York State’s inspector general last year, he had spent three weeks on the run, been shot by a state trooper, and was facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in solitary confinement for pulling off a prison break that riveted the country. But Mr. Sweat, a convicted murderer, was apparently eager to talk. And talk he did. In the report on the escape by the inspector general’s office released on Monday, Mr. Sweat comes off as unrepentant and smug, describing prison guards as lazy and incompetent and his sidekick, Richard W. Matt, as a bumbling, overweight . Mr. Matt was shot and killed by law enforcement authorities during the manhunt. Here, in Mr. Sweat’s own words quoted in the report, are five key factors that were crucial to the success of his plot to break out of the Clinton Correctional Facility, a prison in the far northern part of the state. Mr. Sweat needed tools, and to get them he needed to find a willing accomplice among the prison’s employees. Enter Joyce E. Mitchell, the civilian supervisor in the prison tailor shop, whose loneliness Mr. Sweat said he exploited, writing “love lust” notes to “placate her. ” The plan worked. In the months before the escape, Ms. Mitchell gave Mr. Sweat and his partner at least eight hacksaw blades, two chisels, a steel punch and two concrete drill bits, often smuggled in frozen hamburger meat. Ms. Mitchell proved less reliable in the second phase of the plot when she was supposed to pick up the two inmates in her car after they emerged from a manhole outside the prison walls. Mr. Sweat described his final instructions to Ms. Mitchell before the escape: She never showed up, and the inmates had to flee on foot. It took Mr. Sweat 85 nights to cut, dig and hammer his way through the brick, steel and concrete blocking his path to freedom. He had no blueprints or maps of the tunnels behind and beneath the prison walls to guide him, so he had to rely on trial and error to plot his route. Mr. Sweat lost perhaps 30 pounds working on the escape route, “letting myself down and pulling myself back up, you know, three flights every night … crawling through all the pipes. ” By the time of the escape, Mr. Sweat said, he was “probably about the best physical shape I been in. ” “There was a couple of times … I got quite discouraged,” he said, but he understood that once he started there was no turning back. At times, Mr. Sweat had to get creative, both to avoid detection and to speed his progress. Breaking through a wall with a sledgehammer he found in the tunnels and a makeshift pry bar, he said he timed his blows to coincide with loud sounds that emanated from the surrounding pipes. “So I wait until they start banging, and then I would bang,” he said. After about two weeks, he said, “I knocked the wall out. ” To cool the sweltering air inside the steam pipe that ultimately led the two inmates to freedom, he devised a ventilation system out of a fan and a tube made of several plastic garbage bags. This allowed him to remain in the pipe, cutting for three hours at a time, he said, stopping only to “eat a candy bar, drink a little water. ” Mr. Sweat and Mr. Matt could never have pulled off their escape had corrections officers and their supervisors followed basic security protocols, the report said. Officers rarely if ever conducted rounds at night and almost never inspected the catwalks and tunnels where Mr. Sweat spent night after night working. In his testimony, Mr. Sweat said he had counted on guards’ not doing their jobs and had never worried about being found out. Of the guards, he said, “They’re lazy, to be honest. ” He said he studied the guards and got to know their habits. Even Mr. Sweat was surprised, though, when he first crawled out of his cell and discovered how easy it was to move around the catwalks and tunnels. There were no locking doors or gates, which he anticipated having to break through. He was free to roam. “Nothing ended up being anything like either one of us expected it to be,” he said. During his time in the tunnels, Mr. Sweat said he never encountered an officer, though there were a few close calls. He said he would occasionally see officers on the catwalks above him, and one night he was nearly struck by a lit cigarette tossed out by a guard. The biggest scare came when the two inmates first emerged from the manhole into a residential neighborhood. An approaching car spooked Mr. Matt, who ran into the backyard of a nearby home and attracted the attention of the driver. When confronted, Mr. Sweat had to talk their way out of the fix, explaining to the driver that they were just cutting through the yard. Mr. Matt’s jitters continued, according to Mr. Sweat. He “kept running in people’s yards when he would see a car. ” “I said, ‘Dude, nobody knows you’re out,’” he told investigators, cursing at his partner to “just walk like a normal person. ” | 1 |
Las imágenes libres de derechos más destacadas de la semana EL BLACK FRIDAY, LA LOTERÍA DE NAVIDAD Y EL #MANNEQUINCHALLENGE 1. Los expertos alertan de las ofertas estafa de cara al Black Friday, tras detectar varios casos de falsas gafas Oculus Rift.
2. El anuncio de la Lotería de Navidad conmueve a los españoles. Este año, una señora cree haber ganado el premio, y todo el pueblo le sigue la corriente, haciéndola sentir joven de nuevo.
3. El equipo de gobierno de Donald Trump reacciona con indiferencia a la noticia de que la mujer y la hija del futuro presidente no se mudarán a la Casa Blanca.
4. La Familia Real inglesa se suma a la moda del #MannequinChallenge. 5. Manifestación de nostálgicos de Franco, en el aniversario de su muerte.
6. Rita Barberá y su callista, preparándose para declarar este lunes ante el Supremo. 7. Angela Merkel se presentará por cuarta vez a las elecciones alemanas. Aunque no es la favorita, dice sentirse preparada. 8. Manuela Carmena sigue su lucha contra la contaminación y creará una empresa pública de servicios ambientales. 9. Discovery Max estrenó su documental “La Guerra Civil en color”, una serie de imágenes de la guerra coloreadas para la ocasión. Aquí vemos un fotograma de Franco tras un día de pesca en un pantano. 10. El mentalista David Blaine consigue su truco más impactante hasta la fecha: volver borrosas a las suegras. Etiquetas | 0 |
The American Voter The American Voter
Every four years, against anyone’s better judgment, the American people are entrusted to elect the next president. The Onion lets them tell their stories. The One Percenter MICHELLE CLARK, 22
“I know exactly what I want in our next president, but look, we both know what’s going to happen if this interview ends up online: my Twitter account will be flooded with vulgar, misogynistic comments and brutal attacks on my appearance. I could talk about my thoughts on the economy or immigration, but the more thoughts I share, the more material I’m giving to some Reddit user who will tell me to perform the most perverse act he can think of and then tear into me for having an opinion—any opinion. So what’s the point of saying anything? Let’s just end this interview now.” The Millennial ZIAD AYOUB, 37
“I don’t like those presidential candidates. Not a single one of them. They just don’t value human life like you and I do. I ask myself all the time how anyone could believe all the barbaric things these people believe. They refuse to see any point of view other than their own, and they have no problem going around and blowing up people that aren’t like them. I know they’re out there plotting horrible things right now. I don’t want them anywhere near me. I’ve got a wife and kids—think of what they might do to my family.” The Senior Citizen COURTNEY YOUNG, 36
“I’m a single mom juggling three kids and a full-time job, so I don’t have time to listen to any long policy speeches. I know life’s going to get worse over the next four years, so the candidates need to just cut to the chase and tell me how shitty it’s going to get. Are you going to dick me over on my taxes? Dick me over on my kids’ medical bills? Dick me over on gas prices? I’m voting for whoever has the sack to come right out and say it.” The Immigrant Voter Voices The Onion asks ordinary citizens to share their thoughts, concerns, and staggering ignorance about the 2016 election. 1 What’s the most important quality for the next president to have? Scott Pullman | 0 |
MOSCOW — A multicolored chaos reigned across Russia on Wednesday, as crowds jostled for bouquets of all sizes and hues for a holiday that celebrates women. Russians love International Women’s Day, a holdover sometimes called the Russian St. Valentine’s Day. And flower sellers love the holiday, with March 8 ranking as the largest single sales day in Russia for shops, wholesale markets and Dutch farmers. On March 8, the need for bouquets quickly adds up. Although Valentine’s Day is also celebrated here, it is viewed as a foreign import and too cloyingly romantic to encompass the full range of ways that women should be appreciated. On International Women’s Day, men and women give flowers to mothers, sisters, daughters, along with wives and girlfriends. “St. Valentine’s Day is for lovers, and Women’s Day is for women,” said Maria Mamedova, a saleswoman at a flower stall outside the Tsvetnoy Boulevard subway station in Moscow. “Women really value March 8,” added Ms. Mamedova, peeling leaves from lisianthus stems and clipping the stems to form gigantic bouquets. As in the United States, the Russian floral market is buoyed by holidays like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. People in the Netherlands and some other European countries tend to give flowers year round, creating steadier demand. International Women’s Day is especially important for the Dutch flower industry. Dutch flower farmers grow and export tulips and lilies. The Netherlands is also the first point of arrival for many roses from Africa and South America, which are traded in Dutch flower auctions before being elsewhere, including to Russia. The Netherlands exported 120 million euros’ worth of flowers to Russia last year, according to Matthieu ter Haar, a spokesman for Royal FloraHolland, a flower industry trade association. The March 8 holiday typically accounts for 10 percent of the annual total. “It’s always a beautiful day, and flowers always bring a lot of happiness to people,” Mr. ter Haar said. “On International Women’s Day in Russia you see lines of people at the shops. It’s a very positive thing. ” Like so much in Russia, the flower business has even been a source of geopolitical tension. When investigators from the Netherlands looked into the downing of a civilian plane over Ukraine in 2014 that killed nearly 200 Dutch people, Russian authorities for a time banned — and in some cases burned — Dutch flowers. The authorities denied the moves were related, saying they were prompted by a pest threat. The tension subsided and the trade is again open. Nicolas Megrelis, a French owner of 13 flower shops across Moscow, sells exclusively imported roses for $2. 40 to $3. 40 per stem. Like all in the flower business in Russia, his business pivots around Women’s Day when the shops typically sell 150, 000 stems, or more than $400, 000 worth of roses, as much as a month of sales. The flower business in Russia, as elsewhere, is composed mostly of small, individual sellers rather than chains of flower shops, making wholesale markets like Rizhsky in Moscow important links in the floral supply chain. About 70 percent of the roses, chrysanthemums, carnations and ornamental greenery sold in the Rizhsky market are imported, with most coming from Holland, Ecuador, Colombia and Israel, Taras Belozyorov, the spokesman for the Moscow city department of trade and services, said in a statement. “Growing flowers in the Moscow region is accompanied by certain difficulties,” he said, notably the cost of heating and illuminating greenhouses during the bitter Russian winter. But Russians still love flowers. The market is a tableau of pink, yellow and orange pastels of tulips, gigantic bundles of red roses. The gentle beauty contrasts with the bustle of buyers as lovers, fathers, sons and bosses set about doing something kind for the women in their lives. Out on the frosty streets of Moscow on Wednesday, Dmitri Makhno, a restaurant owner, was buying white tulips for his female employees. “I love my employees,” he said. “I give flowers to every woman today. Today is their day. ” | 1 |
Recipient Email =>
It is not hard to think of reasons why Hillary Clinton should not be President. Yesterday Wikileaks founder Julian Assange cited one of the best: Libya.
In an interview with John Pilger, a noted Australian-born documentary maker and veteran critic of American military adventurism, he commented: “Libya more that anyone else’s war was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails. There’s more than 1,700 emails out of the 33,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails we published just about Libya.
“She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state as something that she would use to run in the general election for president. So late 2011, there’s an internal document called the ‘Libya Tick Tock’ that is produced for Hillary Clinton, and… it’s a chronological description of how Hillary Clinton was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state.”
Things did not quite follow the script, however. For a start, U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and several other U.S. citizens were massacred when U.S. facilities in Benghazi were ransacked. The attacks were facilitated by security lapses for which Clinton was forced to take responsibility.
Observing that Libya remains to this day ravaged by civil war, Assange added: “As a result, there [have been] around 40,000 deaths within Libya. Jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in. That led to the European refugee and migrant crisis, because not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people then fleeing Syria, destabilization of other African countries as a result of arms flows.”
The interview, which was made in association with London-based Dartmouth Films and broadcast by RT, ranged widely over Clinton’s vulnerabilities. It can be viewed here . | 0 |
Snow reports from around the Northland through 3 p.m. Saturday By Andrew Krueger on Nov 19, 2016 at 3:15 p.m. Brian Parendo of Esko shovels heavy, wet show from his driveway Friday morning. "I'm happy it lasted this long," he said, referring to the long spell of warm weather that preceded the storm. Bob King / [email protected] Snow reports from around the Northland as of 3 p.m. Saturday, as relayed by the National Weather Service in Duluth. The greatest total was near Leader in Cass County; the total at the Duluth airport was corrected on Saturday from a higher total that had been reported Friday night. Recommended for you | 0 |
A question has been posed in a puzzled whisper in many of the nation’s living rooms and newsrooms ever since Donald J. Trump’s triumph in this month’s presidential election: What, exactly, is white nationalism? white nationalists have happily embraced Mr. Trump’s victory and, particularly, his choice of Stephen K. Bannon as chief strategist, as a win for their agenda. A barrage of groups that fight discrimination and hate speech have, in turn, criticized Mr. Bannon’s appointment, warning that his embrace of the “ ” movement was little more than an attempt to rebrand racism and white nationalism into something palatable enough for mass consumption. And much of the rest of the country has been left to wonder what this unfamiliar term actually means. While white nationalism certainly overlaps with white supremacy and racism, many political scientists say it is a distinct phenomenon — one that was a powerful but force during the presidential election and will most likely remain a potent factor in American and European politics in coming years. Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck University in London, has spent years studying the ways that ethnicity intersects with politics. While most researchers in that field focus on ethnic minorities, Professor Kaufmann does the opposite: He studies the behavior of ethnic majorities, particularly whites in the United States and Britain. White nationalism, he said, is the belief that national identity should be built around white ethnicity, and that white people should therefore maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of the nation’s culture and public life. So, like white supremacy, white nationalism places the interests of white people over those of other racial groups. White supremacists and white nationalists both believe that racial discrimination should be incorporated into law and policy. Some will see the distinction between white nationalism and white supremacy as a semantic sleight of hand. But although many white supremacists are also white nationalists, and vice versa, Professor Kaufmann says the terms are not synonyms: White supremacy is based on a racist belief that white people are innately superior to people of other races white nationalism is about maintaining political and economic dominance, not just a numerical majority or cultural hegemony. For a long time, he said, white nationalism was less an ideology than the default presumption of American life. Until quite recently, white Americans could easily see the nation as essentially an extension of their own ethnic group. But the country’s changing demographics, the civil rights movement and a push for multiculturalism in many quarters mean that white Americans are now confronting the prospect of a nation that is no longer built solely around their own identity. For many white people, of course, the growing diversity is something to celebrate. But for others it is a source of stress. The white nationalist movement has drawn support from that latter group. Its supporters argue that the United States should protect its white majority by sharply limiting immigration, and perhaps even by compelling nonwhite citizens to leave. Mr. Trump’s appointment of Mr. Bannon as his senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist has, more than anything, brought white nationalism to the forefront of conversation. He is the former editor of Breitbart News, a site he described in August to Mother Jones as “the platform of the . ” Although the is ideologically broader than white nationalism — it also includes neoreactionaries, monarchists, and internet trolls — white nationalism makes up a significant part of its appeal. For instance, Richard B. Spencer, who runs the website AlternativeRight. com, is also the director of the National Policy Institute, an organization that says it is devoted to protecting the “heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world. ” Mr. Spencer argues that immigration and multiculturalism are threats to America’s white population, and has said his ideal is a white “ . ” He has avoided discussing the details of how this might be achieved, saying it is still just a “dream,” but has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” to remove nonwhite people from American soil. Mr. Bannon, the Trump adviser, told The New York Times upon his appointment that he does not share those views. But under his leadership, Breitbart News has gone to considerable lengths to cater to an audience that does. And in a 2015 radio interview that was resurfaced this week by The Washington Post, Mr. Bannon opposed even highly skilled immigration, implying he believed it was a threat to American culture. “When or of the C. E. O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think … ” he said, trailing off midsentence before continuing a moment later, “a country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society. ” White nationalists, including Mr. Spencer, have rejoiced at Mr. Bannon’s appointment to such a senior position in the Trump White House. But focusing on figures like Mr. Bannon may obscure the more significant way that white nationalist ideas are affecting politics — and fueling the rise of politicians like Mr. Trump in the United States as well as populist movements in Britain and continental Europe. Several studies of other countries have found that a desire to protect traditional values and culture is the strongest predictor of support for the sort of populism that propelled Mr. Trump to power in the United States. Many of those voters would not think of themselves as white nationalists, and the cultural values and traditions they seek to protect are not necessarily explicitly racial. However, those traditions formed when national identity and culture were essentially synonymous with whiteness. So the impulse to protect them from social and demographic change is essentially an attempt to turn back the clock to a time. A recent working paper by Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, concluded, based on an analysis of survey data, that populists have succeeded by appealing to the cultural anxiety of groups like older white men, who once formed the cultural majority in Western societies “but have recently seen their predominance and privilege eroded. ” Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a professor of politics at the University of Bergen in Norway, came to a similar conclusion after studying policies in Europe. Their supporters, she found, were motivated by a desire to protect their national culture — suggesting they believed that immigrants posed a threat to it. Mr. Trump’s criticism of immigrants and promise to “make America great again” may have tapped into those same cultural anxieties, fueling his success with older and white voters. (Over all, he won white voters by 21 percentage points.) Professor Kaufmann argues that anxiety over white identity and populist politicians can have a symbiotic relationship, each strengthening the other. When populist politicians gain mainstream success, that can make white nationalist ideas more socially acceptable. “It’s not just a question of ethnic change and people being alarmed over it,” he said. “It’s also a question of what people see as the boundaries of acceptable opposition. It’s about what counts as racism, and whether it’s racist to vote for a party. ” “This is all about the norm,” Professor Kaufmann continued. “If it’s weakening or eroding because people think the boundaries have shifted. ” | 1 |
The mogul Russell Simmons is teaming up with Universal Music Group to produce “The Scenario,” a musical set to three decades of . The show, originally announced in 2015, is to premiere in New York during the season before embarking on a tour of “traditional and nontraditional venues,” according to the Universal Music Group. “I want everyone to see it,” Mr. Simmons said in a phone interview on Saturday. “I want kids in the ’hood in Detroit to see it. I want sophisticated theatergoers in New York to see it. And they’re going love it whether they’re 50 or 14. ” Mr. Simmons, 59, emphasized the intended appeal of “The Scenario,” which he said would include songs from Universal’s catalog that cover rap’s ascension as a dominant force. “The difference between Rakim and Kendrick Lamar is minimal,” Mr. Simmons said, referring to two artists whose rises occurred nearly three decades apart. Tracks by Drake, Mr. Lamar, Kurtis Blow and the Sugarhill Gang are among those being strongly considered for the production, Mr. Simmons said. Universal owns Def Jam Recordings, which Mr. Simmons founded in 1984 with the producer Rick Rubin. The label, whose artists have included Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and Kanye West, is credited with helping to bring to the mainstream. Named for a song by A Tribe Called Quest, “The Scenario” will follow a few artists as they “struggle and evolve,” according to Mr. Simmons, and he said the production would more closely resemble a concert than a Broadway musical. The audience will have a sizable role, playing on a tactic often used in . “There’s a lot of technology that we’ll be using to connect the audience and the stage in a way that Broadway hasn’t done,” Mr. Simmons said. “The Scenario” will pair Mr. Simmons with Universal’s Scott Landis, Def Pictures’ Jake Stein and the “Rock of Ages” producers Scott Prisand and Jamie Bendell. The author and historian Dan Charnas (“The Big Payback”) is writing the show’s book. “The Scenario” follows the breakout success of “Hamilton,” the musical that set a record for the most money ever made in a single week by a Broadway show. On Saturday, Mr. Simmons said that he loved that show and was thrilled about its success, but he bristled at the idea that its popularity has been surprising given the omnipresence of in American life. “There’s a lack of insight on the part of the gatekeepers and the producers of content,” he said. “I can go anywhere and hear . I think ‘Hamilton’ does help them buy in, but it’s overdue. It’s long overdue, and I’m excited that I’m part of it. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — For a fifth consecutive night, American warplanes and drones on Monday pummeled suspected Qaeda targets in Yemen as the Pentagon said an earlier attack in the country had killed a former prisoner held at the United States detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said an airstrike last Thursday — the first night of a larger Pentagon campaign to roll back gains made by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or A. Q. A. P. — killed the former detainee, who was using the name Yasir Ali Abdallah al Silmi. While at Guantánamo, he was held as Detainee No. 679 and went by the name Mohammed Tahar, according to military records. Including an airstrike overnight on Monday that Captain Davis said killed seven Qaeda fighters, the United States has conducted more than 40 attacks across central and southern Yemen in the past week. By comparison, the military carried out 41 strikes in all of 2012, the most in a single year against the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. Soon after taking office, President Trump authorized the air campaign against the Qaeda branch, one of the deadliest in the world, at the same time he approved the Special Operations raid in January that left one member of Navy SEAL Team 6 dead and three others wounded. An estimated two dozen civilians were killed in that raid. “It’s a reflection of growing concern about the reconstitution of A. Q. A. P. in Yemen,” Gerald M. Feierstein, a former United States ambassador to Yemen who is now at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said of the flurry of airstrikes. “The key issue is how they identify targets, the fidelity of the intelligence, and the care they take to maintain the standard of near certainty on no collateral damage,” Mr. Feierstein said, referring to civilian casualties. “I don’t know the answer to those questions. ” The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled a hearing for Thursday on Yemen, the first since the raid in January. Mr. Tahar was imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay from 2002 to 2009. Because Yemen was in chaos at that time, officials were reluctant to repatriate detainees there. But Mr. Tahar was among a small group the Obama administration repatriated in December 2009 as part of an experiment. Later that month, however, after the attempted bombing of a airliner by Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch, President Barack Obama halted further repatriations to Yemen. Years later, the Obama administration resettled many Yemenis in other countries. Military records show that Mr. Tahar’s brother, who went by the name Ali Abdullah Ahmed, was also a Guantánamo detainee. He was among three detainees who died in June 2006 in what the military said was a coordinated suicide. Captain Davis said that Usayd whom he described as a “longtime explosives expert who served as the organization’s emir” within Abyan Province, was killed in the same March 2 strike as Mr. Tahar. Yemeni civilians in three provinces where Al Qaeda has strongholds described the American bombing campaign as unrelenting. For three days beginning Friday, American drones and attack planes extensively hit the rugged mountains and valleys in central Baydha Province, where Qaeda military camps have long existed outside the control of the weak central government in Sana, the capital, according to residents reached by phone. “They appear on the sky at nearly the same time and quickly launched heavy fire against Al Qaeda gatherings,” said Nayef, a resident who for security reasons preferred to be identified only by his first name. “The U. S. planes become more aggressive when Al Qaeda militants fire back,” he said. “We can see balls of fire on the sky when the Americans exchange fire with Al Qaeda. ” Abdul Aziz Awadh, a resident of Abyan Province in the south, the birthplace of Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, said that an American drone struck a taxi carrying a number of Qaeda militants on Thursday afternoon. “The airstrike completely burned the car and killed at least four Al Qaeda,” he said. “We later learned that they came from Aden to Abyan. The U. S. drone chased them until they passed through a farm and hit them. ” | 1 |
Iran has reached an agreement with the Boeing Company for the acquisition of new passenger planes to help modernize its outdated fleet, Iranian news media reported on Tuesday. Such an agreement, if completed, would potentially be worth many billions of dollars to Boeing and amount to the most prominent commercial transaction between an American company and Iran since sanctions linked to Iran’s nuclear program were lifted six months ago. It also would send a strong signal that Iran and the United States, despite decades of antipathy, might be moving toward normalized ties. Numerous obstacles remain to such an agreement, most notably other American sanctions on Iran that are not related to the Tehran’s nuclear program, including a ban on using dollars in trade with the country. The restraints have dissuaded many international banks and financial companies, fearful of running afoul of American laws, from venturing into the Iranian market. Many Republican lawmakers and others who opposed the nuclear agreement, and who have long warned of any reconciliation with Iran, could object to a Boeing deal. Also unclear is whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who often describes the United States as his country’s most dangerous threat, would countenance such an agreement. Nonetheless, Boeing, with the United States government’s permission, has been in discussions for months with Iranian aviation officials about their dire needs for new airplanes. Iranian officials have said they will need to acquire at least 400 planes in coming years to replace their commercial fleet, one of the world’s oldest. It includes some Boeing models that predate the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah. Iran’s minister of roads and urban development, Abbas Akhoundi, was quoted by Iranian news agencies on Tuesday as saying that a deal with Boeing had been completed and that details would be “announced within the next few days. ” Asked about Mr. Akhoundi’s assertion, a spokesman for Boeing at the company’s Chicago headquarters, John Dern, did not deny it. In an emailed response, Mr. Dern said, “We do not discuss details of ongoing conversations we are having with customers, and our standard practice is to let customers announce any agreements that are reached. ” Mr. Dern’s statement also cautioned: “Any agreements reached will be contingent on U. S. government approval. ” Boeing’s most important foreign competitor, Airbus, announced a deal worth roughly $27 billion in January to sell Iran 118 aircraft. There has been speculation that Boeing has been negotiating a similar transaction involving roughly 100 planes. But the Airbus agreement has not been completed, partly because it also requires United States regulatory approval since a significant portion of Airbus plane components are American. Asked about the status of the Airbus deal, a spokesman, Justin Dubon, said in an emailed response, “As with any agreement, it takes some time to finalize. ” Some American critics of Iran expressed skepticism about the Iranian reports of a Boeing deal, describing them as an exaggeration and part of what they called Iran’s attempts to portray itself as a legitimate economic partner. “These deals are more aspirational than a reality,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that is highly critical of Iran. Mr. Dubowitz said aircraft deals with Iran were tricky in part because some areas of the country’s civilian aviation industry were controlled by Iranian businesses linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which remain subject to American sanctions. “It’s a nightmare,” he said, “not just for the companies but for the banks that finance the deals. ” At the same time, Mr. Dubowitz and others also noted that President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, an architect of the nuclear agreement, will be up for next year and needs to show that the agreement has been economically beneficial. Under that agreement, completed in January with the United States and other world powers, many economic restraints on Iran were rescinded or relaxed in exchange for verifiable guarantees by Iran that it is engaged in only peaceful atomic work. Mr. Rouhani’s promised benefits, however, have been slow in coming. Iranian officials have complained that nonnuclear American sanctions remain a major impediment, dissuading many foreign companies from investing in and trading with Iran. “The Boeing deal would be really important,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting company. Proponents of the nuclear deal, Mr. Kupchan said, have been wagering that it will help Iran evolve in a direction less hostile to the United States and other Western powers. “For that, Iranian elites have to know that the U. S. wants constructive interaction,” he said. “If Boeing sells 100 planes to Iran, it would send exactly the right vibe. ” United Against Nuclear Iran, a based advocacy organization, has claimed some responsibility for Iran’s frustration, through a campaign that warns companies that they could risk incurring American legal problems by engaging in business with Iranian entities. The organization claimed responsibility for the cancellation of an international forum on opportunities in Iran’s natural gas industry that had been scheduled for Thursday and Friday in Barcelona, Spain. Anthony Bright, operations manager for INconnect, a Czech company that had organized the forum, said in an emailed statement that it had been postponed until December. Mr. Bright did not provide a reason. | 1 |
Facebook admitted in a statement that they “need to do better,” after a violent video of the Easter Sunday Cleveland shooting remained on the platform for hours without removal. [“As a result of this terrible series of events, we are reviewing our reporting flows to be sure people can report videos and other material that violates our standards as easily and quickly as possible,” said Facebook in their statement. “We disabled the suspect’s account within 23 minutes of receiving the first report about the murder video, and two hours after receiving a report of any kind … But we know we need to do better. ” “Keeping our global community safe is an important part of our mission,” they continued, adding “We are grateful to everyone who reported these videos and other offensive content to us, and to those who are helping us keep Facebook safe every day. ” Suspect Steve Stephens recorded himself approaching and then fatally shooting Robert Godwin Sr. before he fled the scene and managed to evade police until Tuesday, when a standoff with police officers led to his suicide. | 1 |
South Korea’s Park has become the first president in its history to be ousted from power via impeachment following allegations of granting inappropriate government access to a senior member of a organization. [Koreans took to the streets after the announcement of the impeachment both to protest and celebrate, with one Seoul rally leaving two dead and two critically injured. Koreans took to the streets after the announcement of the impeachment both to protest and celebrate, with one Seoul rally leaving two dead and two critically injured. After an extended investigation process, the nation’s Constitutional Court ruled that Park would be immediately stripped of her power as chief executive. South Korea will hold a presidential election within 60 days to replace her, one that many believe will benefit the leftist opposition party. Park is the first South Korean president to be removed in such a way. The announcement triggered assemblies — both protests and rallies — almost immediately, as some had begun congregating before the ouster became public to share the moment. In Seoul, two senior citizens were killed amid the chaos. According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, the victims were two men named Kim (no relation) one aged 72 and the other, 66. The elder Kim died after being bludgeoned in the head with a large speaker. “Kim was found bleeding from his head near the court at around 1 p. m.,” Yonhap reports. The younger Kim “was found unconscious at a subway station,” but police have not identified a cause of death publicly yet. Police arrested one man in relation to the death of the elder Kim, who was seen ramming a vehicle into the police car carrying that speaker that ultimately hit Kim. Yonhap reports that two others are “in critical condition” but has not revealed any more information. The outlet added that, while one of the deaths appears accidental, many protesters took the streets of Seoul carrying “makeshift weapons, such as wooden sticks” to use against police. CNN reports that Seoul placed 21, 000 police officers on standby in case protests turned violent. That reality appeared to materialize rapidly, as dozens of protesters attempted to break police lines to storm into the courthouse where the impeachment decision was announced. While many lamented the end of Park’s tenure as president, leftists took Seoul’s streets to celebrate. Yonhap reports that some businesses offered free food and drink to celebrate, while a movie theater offered free viewings. Leftist did not appear fully satisfied, however, as they chanted “Arrest Park !” following the impeachment announcement. Also among those celebrating is the government of North Korea. Pyongyang had long reviled Park, an aggressive opponent of the Communist dictatorship whose parents were both assassinated by North Korean agents. On Friday, the government propaganda newspaper Rodong Sinmun published a final farewell to Park, addressing her as the “witch of Chongwadae [the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential palace]. ” “Nothing is more foolish than the efforts of the traitor and her group to stem the trend of the times,” a Rodong editorial read. “With the publication of the special investigation results, Park is fated to be recorded as the worst ‘president’ and meet the most shameless end in the south Korean history of politics. ” What Park’s ouster means for the volatile relations between North and South Korea remains unclear. The leftist opposition in Seoul has long called for more diplomacy with Pyongyang and less cooperation with allies like the United States. America began deploying the first parts of a defense system known as THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) this week, intended to protect from rogue North Korean rockets. Should South Korea elect a leftist president, such defenses may no longer be in the cards for that nation. The South Korean Unification Ministry issued a statement Friday insisting it would “maintain steady preparedness” following her removal. Park was impeached following the revelation that a close friend of hers, Choi had been privy to classified information and given the opportunity to edit Park’s nationals security speeches. Choi has ties to a group called the “Eternal Life Church,” which many in South Korea consider a cult. Park issued multiple apologies following the revelation, while Choi issued a statement insisting that her illicit government involvement “deserves death. ” | 1 |
BRASÍLIA — One of Brazil’s spectacles features a dizzying array of characters whose theatrics appear on millions of television sets most nights. The cast of 594 includes suspects accused of murder and drug trafficking, aging former soccer players, a judo champion, a country music star and a collection of bearded men who have adopted roles as leaders of a women’s movement. The cast even includes a clown who goes by the name Grumpy. But these are not actors. They are the men and women who serve in the national legislature. Democracy can be a mystifying, affair anywhere, but Brazil’s Congress has few equals. As the nation endures its worst political upheaval in a generation, the lawmakers orchestrating the ouster of President Dilma Rousseff — who was suspended on Thursday and faces an impeachment trial on charges of manipulating the budget — are coming under renewed scrutiny. More than half of the members of Congress face legal challenges, from cases in auditing court involving public contracts to serious counts like kidnapping or murder, according to Transparency Brazil, a corruption monitoring group. The figures under investigation include the president of the Senate and the new speaker of the lower house. Just this month, the previous speaker, an evangelical Christian radio commentator fond of posting biblical verse on Twitter, was ejected to face trial on charges that he secreted as much as $40 million in bribes into Swiss bank accounts. Many of the legislature’s problems stem from the generous rewards to be found in Brazil’s party system, an unwieldy collection of dozens of political organizations whose names and agendas often leave Brazilians scratching their heads. There is the Party of the Brazilian Woman, for instance — a group whose elected members in Congress are all men. “The electoral process allows many distortions,” said Suêd Haidar, the party’s founder and president. She sighed, acknowledging that many of the men who join have little interest in promoting women’s rights. One of those who joined the party, Senator Hélio José da Silva Lima, was accused of sexually abusing a young niece last year, though charges were later dropped. “What would become of us men if there were no women by our side, to bring us joy and pleasure?” he was quoted as saying in the Brazilian news media when asked about his decision to join the women’s party. The same public fury over endemic corruption and governmental mismanagement that helped drive Ms. Rousseff from power has long been directed at the cabal of politicians, most of them white men, whose penchant for deals and has become part of Brazilian lore. “The reputation of the political class in Brazil really can’t go any lower,” said Timothy J. Power, a professor of Brazilian studies at Oxford University. “People compare the legislature to the ‘House of Cards,’” he said, referring to the Netflix political drama, “but I disagree. ‘House of Cards’ is actually more believable. ” With 28 parties holding seats, the Brazilian Congress is the world’s most fractured, according to Mr. Power. The Indonesia’s legislature, has a third fewer parties. “Brazil is not an outlier, it’s a freak,” said Gregory Michener, the director of the public transparency program at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a university in Rio de Janeiro. The parties tend to use words like “Democratic,” “Christian” and “Republican” in their names, though “Labor” has them all beat. Among them are the Labor Party of Brazil, the Christian Labor Party, the Brazilian Labor Renewal Party and the National Labor Party. For the sake of variety, there are also the Workers’ Cause Party and Ms. Rousseff’s Workers’ Party. “The entire system is a monster,” said Juremir Machado da Silva, a columnist at Correio do Povo, a newspaper in the southern city of Pôrto Alegre. Polling has shown that more than 70 percent of Brazilians cannot recall what parties the candidates they elect belong to, and that of the electorate has no preference for any party. More important, experts say, is that most of the parties embrace no ideology or agenda and are simply vehicles for patronage and graft. In a typical term, one in three federal legislators will switch parties, some more than once, according to a tally by Marcus André Melo, a political scientist at the Federal University of Pernambuco. Brazilian lawmakers are among the world’s highest paid, scholars say, with generous stipends that go well beyond their monthly salaries. They also receive free housing, health care and large staffs and enjoy special immunity from prosecution. Only the overworked Supreme Court can try them on criminal charges, a process that can take years. “The only thing that’s better than being a political party in Brazil is to be a church,” said Heni Ozi Cukier, a political scientist at the university E. S. P. M. in São Paulo. “They’re opportunists who are looking for something that gives them power, influence, protection. ” Forming a party requires collecting 500, 000 signatures. Mr. Cukier said 62 parties were seeking official recognition, including one named after a soccer team. Although Brazil’s president leads one of the world’s largest countries, he or she must forge coalitions with up to a dozen parties to get legislation passed in Congress. The price of loyalty is often a ministerial post, or three, depending on how many votes the party can deliver. In some instances, cooperation involves the illicit exchange of cash. In 2005, a scandal known as mensalão, or big monthly payment, revealed the pervasiveness of such arrangements. To win votes in Congress, the party of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Ms. Rousseff’s mentor and the of the Workers’ Party, had been paying compliant lawmakers a monthly stipend of $12, 000. The most recent graft scandal — known as Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash — has proved even bigger, with billions of dollars in bribes directed to political parties from the national oil company, Petrobras. More than 200 people, from business tycoons to party leaders, have been implicated in the scandal, and their numbers are expected to grow. Public fury over the scheme played a pivotal role in the ouster of Ms. Rousseff, who was chairwoman of Petrobras when the kickback arrangement was hatched, though she has not been accused of any wrongdoing. In her impeachment trial, she is accused of a budgetary sleight of hand in an effort to conceal Brazil’s economic troubles and win in 2014 — not of stealing to enrich herself. The need to form alliances of convenience in Congress can lead to legislative chaos, especially when disgruntled partners bolt from the president’s coalition. Ms. Rousseff, who once enjoyed a wide majority in the lower house, was ultimately knocked aside by the house’s now deposed speaker, Eduardo Cunha, a onetime ally who faces a graft trial. Mr. Cunha’s party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, called the P. M. D. B. has become a particular source of outrage in Brazil. Critics say the party, founded five decades ago as an opposition party but tolerated by the nation’s military dictatorship, has become a vast patronage trough for its members, who embrace a wide spectrum of ideologies. The party’s ace is its size, which means that presidents have to enter into a partnership that involves doling out coveted cabinet posts. Ms. Rousseff chose Michel Temer of the P. M. D. B. to be her vice president. This year, he turned against her and withdrew his party from her coalition, paving the way for Ms. Rousseff’s impeachment trial. Mr. Temer, who has been convicted of violating campaign finance limits, is now the nation’s president. Political reform can be challenging, given that legislators must approve undoing the system that protects them. There have been some changes, including a recent law that bars candidates with criminal records from running for office for eight years, and a campaign finance law, scheduled to take effect this year, that limits the influence of corporate money. The crush of Brazilian parties tends to favor celebrity candidates, whose name recognition helps vault them to the top of the ballot heap during elections. The most curious example is Tiririca the Clown, whose stage name translates as Grumpy. In 2010, he ran for the lower house on a lark with the slogan “It can’t get any worse,” and his campaign literature included this tagline: “What does a congressman do? The truth is I don’t know, but vote for me and I’ll tell you. ” He prevailed with more than 1. 3 million votes — nearly twice as many as the next candidate. In an interview, Tiririca — whose real name is Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva, though Deputy Tiririca is the name on the house website — said he was often disappointed by the disarray in Congress. “At first it was a joke,” he said of his candidacy. “So I decided that if so many people believe in me, I would have to give it my best, and that’s what I’m doing. ” | 1 |
A global warming research study in Canada has been cancelled because of “unprecedented” thick summer ice. [Naturally, the scientist in charge has blamed it on ‘climate change.’ According to Vice: The study, entitled BaySys, is a $ program headed by the University of Manitoba. It was planning to conduct the third leg of its research by sending 40 scientists from five Canadian universities out into the Bay on the Canadian Research Icebreaker CCGS Amundsen to study “contributions of climate change and regulation on the Hudson Bay system. ” But it had to be cancelled because the scientists’ icebreaker was required by the Canadian Coast Guard for a rather more urgent purpose — rescuing fishing boats and supply ships which had got stuck in the “unprecedented ice conditions”. “It became clear to me very quickly that these weren’t just heavy ice conditions, these were unprecedented ice conditions,” Dr. David Barber, the lead scientist on the study, told VICE. “We were finding thick sea ice floes which on level ice were five metres thick … it was much, much thicker and much, much heavier than anything you would expect at that latitude and at that time of year. ” Clearly not one to let a crisis go to waste, Barber seized the opportunity to perform the usual alarmist clown dance for the media, explaining why this incident definitely shows that global warming is a major problem and deserving of our urgent attention. He told Vice: “It was clear it was from the Arctic, I just needed to be among the ice to see it,” said Dr. Barber. “What was also clear to me was that climate change has caused this event to happen. ” [Don’t you just love that “I just needed to be among the ice”? I think what he’s trying in his subtle way to tell us is: “Not all superheroes wear capes”] Warming to his theme, he told Global News: “This is climate change fully in action — affecting our ability to make use of marine resources and transport things. ” and, “This is a call for all of us in the country. ” Of course it is. Now Barber has the perfect excuse to share his war stories with all the other global warming experts who have had their research stunts stymied by unseasonal bouts of global warming. There was the Ship of Fools expedition in which an Australian climate researcher called Chris Turkey had to call an expedition to the melting Antarctic after his ship got stuck in the ice. The Caitlin Expedition — supported by the Prince of Wales — in which Pen Haddow and his team had to abandon their trip to the North Pole because it was colder than they’d expected. Most recently there was Ship of Fools II, in which a global warming research voyage by David Hempleman Adams had to be curtailed because of unexpected ice. What on earth can Mother Gaia be trying to tell them? Possibly the same message she’s trying to send out to the Greenies in California with this unexpected fall of white global warming. Why, if you didn’t know better you’d almost think unseasonal bouts of snow and ice were nothing to do with “global warming” but were a natural phenomenon which had been with us since time immemorial … . | 1 |
Breitbart October 27, 2016
U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s plan for Syria would “lead to World War Three,” because of the potential for conflict with military forces from nuclear-armed Russia.
In an interview focused largely on foreign policy, Trump said defeating Islamic State is a higher priority than persuading Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, playing down a long-held goal of U.S. policy.
…
“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” said Trump as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.
“You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk,” he said. | 0 |
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While the mainstream media has been working day and night promoting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, it has largely ignored or downplayed violent attacks against supporters of Donald Trump.
But assaults on Trump supporters appear to be growing increasingly common as Election Day approaches and tensions intensify. Reports of Trump lawn signs and banners being stolen and defaced are everywhere on social media.
Making matters worse, undercover video evidence emerged showing senior Democrat operatives Robert Creamer and Scott Foval acknowledging using dirty, likely illegal tricks against the Trump campaign. Their goal was to generate negative media coverage of Trump rallies by fomenting violence at them. The media eagerly used the various fisticuffs and melees the Democrats created to attempt to discredit Trump by depicting his supporters as violent, knuckle-dragging crazies.
The videos, shot by ACORN slayer James O’Keefe’s group Project Veritas Action, show Foval on camera saying his agents “infiltrate” Trump events. “It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherf****er.” He adds, “we’re starting anarchy here.” | 0 |
LIMA, Peru — President Obama said here on Saturday that, while Donald J. Trump was unlikely to reverse the warming of ties with Cuba, he would almost certainly trade deals in Latin America. “There are going to be tensions that arise, probably around trade more than anything,” Mr. Obama told an audience of students and young leaders from Latin America. “Because the campaigned on looking at every trade policy and potentially reversing those policies. ” Even on trade, though, Mr. Trump will have a tough time making drastic changes to United States policy, Mr. Obama said. “But once they look at how it’s working, I think they’ll actually determine that it’s working for both the United States and our partners,” Mr. Obama said. “The friendships we’ve established with countries like Peru, the reopening of diplomatic relations with Cuba, investments we’re making in trade, environmental policies and so forth — all those things I expect to continue,” he added. Mr. Trump has offered contradictory views on Cuban relations. Early in his campaign, Mr. Trump claimed to support restoring ties, but he said more recently in Miami that Mr. Obama should have gotten a better deal. Mr. Obama was speaking to aspiring entrepreneurs and civil society leaders about how to improve their lives and countries — one of his preferred activities — during the last stop of his final overseas trip as president. He began his trip on Tuesday in Greece, went to Germany on Wednesday and flew to Peru on Friday to attend the Economic Cooperation summit meeting. Along the way, he has tried, with limited success, to reassure audiences that Mr. Trump will not discard the agreements and priorities that Mr. Obama has devoted much of his presidency to advancing. His toughest task was here at a summit meeting of an organization that helped birth the Partnership trade agreement, an accord that is almost certainly dead as a result of Mr. Trump’s victory. Also, one of Mr. Trump’s signature campaign strategies was to demonize immigrants from Latin America, and he referred to those crossing the border from Mexico as rapists and criminals. Just about every question posed to Mr. Obama from the audience here had to do with the anxiety Mr. Trump has stirred in this part of the world. “The United States is such a big country that, after any election, people are uncertain,” Mr. Obama said. “I think it will be important for people around the world to not make immediate judgments. ” He also predicted that relations between Latin America and the United States would not change much. “The main message I want you to know is that you have a partner in me and you have a partner in the United States government,” Mr. Obama said to applause. “And we are going to work together. ” Part of the reason relations are unlikely to change dramatically, he said, is that the United States’ security depends on Latin American nations’ faring well enough that their people decide to remain home instead of attempting the arduous journey to enter the United States illegally. “The best way for my daughters to be secure in America is to make sure that people in Guatemala or El Salvador are also feeling secure because, if they’re not, that may spill over the borders to us,” he said. While the illegal migration of Mexicans has largely halted in recent years, gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala has combined with economic desperation to drive migrants from those countries to seek safety in other countries, mainly the United States. Answering a question on Saturday from a Venezuelan audience member, Mr. Obama painted a dark portrait of the progress of freedom around the world, and said the wave of countries adopting democratic governance had reversed itself. “You’re seeing some countries that are going backward rather than forwards in terms of freedom of press, freedom of the internet, in terms of respecting political opposition and civil society,” he said. Venezuela’s economy is nearing collapse as its government cracks down on opposition leaders in an increasingly desperate effort to cling to power. Mr. Obama also said a growing number of people were now arguing that democracy is incompatible with development. China’s success over the past 30 years in creating a manufacturing colossus through its authoritarian measures has some leaders, particularly in Asia, insisting that too much democracy can be detrimental. But Mr. Obama said that, over the long term, countries that pursue democracy, transparency and accountability fare far better than those that do not. “In this time that we live in, development is based on knowledge and innovation and education and new thinking and sharing of ideas,” Mr. Obama said. In authoritarian systems, economies respond poorly to change because their populations are not as or as flexible, he said. “You can maintain order for a while with repressive nondemocratic governance, but it will rot from within,” Mr. Obama said. “Over time, those governments fail and those economies fail. ” Mr. Obama told the crowd here to avoid fervent nationalism and identity politics, which he said could lead to conflicts. “If the most important thing about you is that you are an American,” Mr. Obama began, drawing an implicit contrast with Mr. Trump, “if that’s the one thing that defines you, then you may end up being threatened by people from other places, when in fact you may have a lot in common and you may miss opportunities. ” Mr. Trump has defined his governing philosophy as “America First,” and has already appointed avowed nationalists to top positions in his administration. Mr. Obama described himself as a proud American, but said the world was far too interconnected for leaders to be wholly focused on their own nations. “If there’s pollution in China, then that affects you here in Peru,” he said. | 1 |
at 11:08 am 1 Comment
The Podesta family seems particularly adept at earning extraordinary sums of money via selling out the American public. Earlier this year, I highlighted how John Podesta’s brother Tony was paid $140,000 per month by the medieval monarchy of Saudi Arabia. After all, who cares about women’s rights when the pay is good?
Here’s a excerpt from the post, “Getting Things Done” – The Brother of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Chair is a Major Lobbyist for Saudi Arabia : The kingdom employs a total of eight American firms that perform lobbying, consulting, public relations and legal work. Five of the firms work for the Saudi Arabia Embassy, while another two — Podesta Group and BGR Group — have registered to represent the Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, an arm of the government. PR giant Edelman, meanwhile, is working for the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority to encourage international investment. The Podesta Group is billing Saudi Arabia $140,000 a month for its public relations services. During the last few months of 2015, it sent 27 emails, had two phone calls and one meeting with lawmakers and staffers, journalists, and organizations including Human Rights Watch and the Center for American Progress, disclosure forms show. DLA Piper receives $50,000 a month from the kingdom and sent hundreds of emails to top congressional staffers between September and the end of February regarding meeting requests and, more generally, “issues affecting U.S.-Saudi Arabia national security interests.”
Notice the firm DLA Piper mentioned above. You’ll want to remember that for later.
Moving along, the Podestas are diligent about making sure everyone gets to feed at the trough, including extended family.
As James Rosen of Fox News uncovers:
Amid the tumult of the 2016 presidential campaign, John Podesta is best known as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the individual from whose private account WikiLeaks is presently publishing some 50,000 hacked emails.
For several months in 2012, Clinton’s final year as secretary of state, Raytheon, the leading defense contractor, hired Podesta’s sister-in-law, Heather Podesta, as a lobbyist, federal records show.
Raytheon was looking to enlarge its share of foreign military sales – transfers of advanced weapons systems to other countries that are reviewed and approved by the Department of State, then implemented by the Department of Defense – and was beefing up its lobbying operation to accomplish that goal before Secretary Clinton left office.
At the same time, Raytheon retained two other lobbyists, John Merrigan and Matt Bernstein, both associated with the powerhouse D.C. law firm DLA Piper. All three of these lobbyists, including Ms. Podesta, were major donors or bundlers to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 campaigns. Federal records show they have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton’s campaigns and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying her State Department.
There’s DLA Piper again. They appears to have their fingers in all realms of the military-industrial complex cookie jar.
In the final three quarters of 2012, DLA Piper earned some $360,000 in lobbying fees from Raytheon, courting the State Department and other agencies, while Ms. Podesta, within that same time frame, received $100,000 from Raytheon for the same purpose.
The gambit appears to have worked: Records maintained by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arm of the Defense Department that coordinates the transfers of weapons systems once they have received State’s approval, show Raytheon as a prime contractor in at least seventeen foreign military sales in 2012, worth an estimated total of $26 billion. Of those contracts, three with the Gulf nation of Qatar – for missile defense, Apache attack helicopters and other materiel – accounted for $19 billion.
The individual at the State Department who was statutorily entrusted to approve foreign military sales was Andrew Shapiro, the assistant secretary of state for political and military affairs. Prior to his nomination to that job, Shapiro had served as Clinton’s national security adviser in her Senate office. Today, Shapiro is a partner in a Washington consulting firm whose other co-founders include Philippe Reines, Clinton’s longtime press aide.
You starting to see how all this works?
The firm mentioned above is Beacon Global Strategies, and I covered them in this summer’s post: New York Times Fails to Disclose Op-Ed Writer’s Ties to Hillary Clinton’s ‘Principal Gatekeeper’ .
After Clinton stepped down as secretary of state in February 2013, Raytheon discontinued the services of Heather Podesta + Partners, and ceased its use of DLA Piper at State.
While experts do not believe any laws were broken, the affair illustrates how Washington worked in the first Obama term, and particularly at the Clinton State Department. The Raytheon operation bears some similarity to a pop-up store that materializes to serve a seasonal need, such as Halloween candy or July Fourth fireworks, then vanishes once that need has been met.
Simply incredible.
“I think this is as close an example of pay-to-play as we’ve seen,” said Raj Shah, deputy communications director at the Republican National Committee. “And that’s why [Raytheon] made these hires [of Heather Podesta, Merrigan and Bernstein]. … Their experience was getting access to Hillary Clinton and raising money for her.”
But hey… | 0 |
After the explosion on West 23rd Street on Saturday night, the police did what they typically do when they suspect a bomb has gone off. They spread out and began looking for unexploded bombs — what those on the New York Police Department’s bomb squad call “secondaries. ” Officers began searching block by block, going as far south as 14th Street and as far north as 34th Street. A few hours into the effort, two state troopers participating in the search found what appeared to be one, on West 27th Street, about four blocks above the explosion. On the sidewalk on the north side of the street, there was a pressure cooker with a cellphone attached to it, law enforcement officials said. A photograph of the device shared on social media shows the cookware, with wires and the cellphone. The authorities confirmed that the photo was authentic. The police have not said whether a tip helped lead the troopers to the device or whether the officers discovered it entirely unaided. “They circled the block and they parked their vehicle and actually walked down the block, and that’s how they found it,” the city’s new police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said at a news conference on Sunday. “They did a great job. ” The police used a robot to inspect the device and place it in what is called a “total containment vessel,” a spherical chamber hitched to a police truck. The vehicle set off east on West 27th Street around 2:25 a. m. turning north on Avenue of the Americas and then heading toward the Bronx. The total containment vessel is essentially an diving vessel, Lt. Mark Torre, the commanding officer of the department’s bomb squad, said in an interview in July. “Instead of keeping the pressure out and keeping you alive in five fathoms of water, it keeps the pressure in,” he explained. Should a bomb explode inside, tiny vents allow pressure to escape. “It sounds like a hammer hitting a piece of steel,” he said. It was not clear how many such vessels the department has, but it appears to be at least three. In 2014, the department put out an advertisement in search of a company that “feels it can provide services necessary to refurbish three existing total containment vessels,” according to contracting records. Such vessels are often capable of containing a blast of 25 pounds of TNT or more, and they are increasingly a common piece of equipment for police agencies across the country. Even the campus force for the University of Georgia has one. Because the purpose of the vessel is to contain the blast, the bomb squad does not typically close streets when it drives through the city with a bomb in the containment vessel. The police brought the device to Rodman’s Neck, a peninsula in the Bronx where the police have a facility. It is where many suspicious packages and much unexploded ordnance ends up, for the bomb squad to disassemble or blow up in a controlled environment. The police have said little about what the bomb squad has learned about the device found on West 27th Street. It appeared to resemble in some ways the devices used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. The Boston Marathon bombers, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, appeared to have gotten their plans for the two bombs they placed at the finishing line from Inspire, the magazine published online by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Each issue includes instructions on building bombs and mounting attacks. By Sunday afternoon, the bomb squad was struggling to find a way to open the device that minimized the risk of an explosion, a law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the continuing investigation. Much about the device remained unknown. But if it was similar to the one that exploded on West 23rd Street, it was powerful. That explosion sent a Dumpster well over 100 feet down the street, the official said. On Sunday, after the police used a small controlled explosion to disable the device, it was being sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s laboratory in Quantico, Va. | 1 |
South Carolina’s win over Duke was not only a surprise to fans. In the postgame revelry, Coach Frank Martin had to ask an assistant whom his team would face next. “Who we got?” Martin said. The answer was that the Gamecocks would face Baylor in New York, at Madison Square Garden. A tide of emotions swept over the coach. Martin knows the deep roots that the South Carolina program has here, the pipeline that the former coach Frank McGuire once established out of the boroughs, busing a city’s flair to the southern countryside. First, Bobby Cremins, then Kevin Joyce, Mike Dunleavy and Brian Winters. Those last three were on the team in 1973, the last one from South Carolina to win in the N. C. A. A. tournament. Before this one. This team followed its upset of Duke with a complete thrashing of Baylor, and now goes zooming into the round of 8 to face Florida, propelled by a victory that McGuire, who died in 1994, would unquestionably have adored. “It all starts with our mindset,” Martin said. “We have got guys that are completely bought into what we do. ” Baylor, a team whose individual talent can leave N. B. A. scouts drooling, one that rose to No. 1 in the nation earlier this season, learned the hard way on Friday. South Carolina’s defense has made many teams look bad this season, including, in certain moments, Duke. But for nearly eight minutes in the first half, there was a point when Baylor’s offense seemed actually to be deserving of some pity. After taking a lead, with 9 minutes 58 seconds left in the half, the Bears stopped scoring. Minutes ticked by. Misses piled up. The momentum turned into a landslide. It was as dry a spell as any in Madison Square Garden this season — and that is saying something in the home of the woeful Knicks. The Gamecocks capitalized on the Bears’ incompetence — they missed 11 straight shots — by scoring 18 unanswered points. A by Jake Lindsey ended the drought, 7:37 after it began. Trailing by at halftime, Baylor slumped off to its locker room looking shellshocked. “When you miss the first couple,” Baylor Coach Scott Drew said, “instead of the basket getting bigger, it gets smaller. ” South Carolina’s defense only seemed to intensify in the second half, as did its effect on the Bears. Baylor’s players dropped easy passes, dribbled off their own feet, and stepped mindlessly out of the bounds. “I felt like we were in their heads the whole game,” said Sindarius Thornwell, the Gamecocks’ senior forward. South Carolina’s players said Thursday that it was easy to pinpoint from where their defensive prowess stems. It is from Martin, who calls the defense his “baby” and designed it in his image, an image he projects as he prowls the sidelines with a glare that could melt ice. When asked how this team had managed to beat two of its last three opponents by 20 points each, sophomore guard P. J. Dozier had the answer immediately. “Defense,” he said. “That’s what we hang our hats on. That’s what this coaching staff instilled in us. ” Against a team with more size, with long arms and lean torsos, the Gamecocks crashed the defensive glass, limiting Baylor’s putback opportunities. The senior guard Justin McKie called it “gang rebounding,” and it worked: South Carolina outrebounded Baylor, and held the Bears to only 13 points. “We knew when the shot went up, we all had to find a body and put our body on somebody,” Thornwell said. “We had to limit their second chances. ” A run by the Bears midway through the second half pulled Baylor within 11. But a by Thornwell calmed things. Within a few minutes, the Gamecocks were back ahead by 20. Now only 40 minutes stand between them and the Final Four. | 1 |
Here are the week’s top stories, and a look ahead. 1. The whiplash legal drama over President Trump’s immigration actions highlighted swirling confusion as his White House team tried to find its footing in a chaotic first few weeks on the job. Mr. Trump said that he might sign “a order” as soon as Monday to replace the travel ban a appeals panel unanimously refused to reinstate. For now, refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries can continue to enter the U. S. _____ 2. Undocumented immigrants are bracing for a surge in deportations as the federal government prepares to follow through on Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to crack down on illegal immigration. A case in Phoenix illustrated their fears: Guadalupe García de Rayos, 35, a married mother of two who sneaked across the border 21 years ago, was deported to Nogales, Mexico, after a routine with the federal immigration agency. Her abrupt removal “illustrates the new reality,” the Mexican government said, warning its citizens in the U. S. to “take precautions and to keep in touch with their nearest consulate. ” _____ 3. Senate battles and unexpected revelations about nominees — undocumented household workers, questionable stock trades, undisclosed financial holdings — slowed the formation of the Trump cabinet to a crawl. Betsy DeVos became education secretary only after a historic tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence — and an acrimonious, vigil on the Senate floor by the chamber’s Democrats. Tom Price was confirmed as secretary of health and human services after another marathon. This week, the Senate holds confirmation votes on Steven Mnuchin for Treasury secretary, David Shulkin to head veterans affairs and Linda McMahon for administrator of the Small Business Administration. It will also hold a hearing on Andrew Puzder, whose nomination to be labor secretary has been opposed by labor groups concerned about his heavy opposition to workplace regulation. _____ 4. #LetLizSpeak became a rallying cry after Republican senators chided and formally silenced Senator Elizabeth Warren for impugning a peer, Senator Jeff Sessions, as she opposed his nomination for attorney general by reading a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King. The move unleashed a powerful backlash, not least among women who know what it’s like to be told to hold their tongues. As our reporter wrote: “Republicans seized her microphone. And gave her a megaphone. ” Outside Washington, Republicans in state capitals are swiftly using their newfound power — control in 25 states — to advance a wave of legislation aiming to curtail union powers and abortion rights, loosen gun regulations, expand programs and slash taxes and spending. _____ 5. Mr. Trump made further forays into foreign relations, tempering some of his harsher statements. To secure a phone call with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, he made conciliatory comments and affirmed his commitment to America’s “One China” policy. He also pulled toward the center on Israel, saying that the nation’s move to expand its West Bank settlements is not “a good thing for peace. ” North Korea tested a ballistic missile, prompting statements of solidarity from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and Mr. Trump, who were at the president’s resort in Florida for a outing. Above, the Trumps with Mr. Abe and his wife, Akie Abe, and Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots. The president meets this week with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Monday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday. _____ 6. Nordstrom became the latest business to wander into the president’s sights when it decided to drop Ivanka Trump’s retail brand from its stores, citing poor performance. The fallout: a critical presidential tweet, a “boycott Nordstrom” movement from Trump supporters, a “support Nordstrom” push from Trump opponents, and a dizzying example of the partisan tightrope companies now walk. _____ 7. The 59th Grammy Awards are tonight (CBS, 8 p. m. Eastern, red carpet a earlier) and the race to watch is Adele versus Beyoncé, facing off in each of the top three categories: album, record and song of the year. James Corden, a Grammy host, is planning to make the most of his 15 minutes (literally that’s all he gets) and our writers have tips on five artists to watch. Not interested in the music showdown? You might still be fascinated by this tale of how the 350 Grammy trophies are made by a craftsman who has been at it for nearly 30 years. _____ 8. The arc of women’s working lives is changing. Compared with past generations, women are now more likely to work at every stage of their lives, including into their 60s and even 70s. Some older workers keep their jobs out of financial necessity, but economic research indicates that a growing number of women stay employed longer because they find their careers fulfilling. “I feel 40,” said Lee Ann Monfredini, above, 68 and a broker in San Francisco. “I’m really not that good at the retirement thing. And I love the joy of getting that big commission check. ” _____ 9. On TV, “Girls” returns tonight for its final season (HBO, 10 p. m. Eastern) and John Oliver will also be back in action after a long break (HBO, 11 p. m. Eastern). If you’re on the hunt for weekend viewing suggestions, our Watching team has some ideas. You can also catch up on the week’s best quips and sketches with our curated cull of comedy shows. _____ 10. Moving on to happier thoughts, it’s nearly Valentine’s Day. Romantics can check out our latest Modern Love podcast or revisit one of the column’s perennially entries: “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love. ” Those on the verge of a permanent pairing might want to also consult “13 Questions to Ask Before Getting Married. ” Our “Committed” series explores the history of wedding announcements in The New York Times, with updates on noteworthy couples like the Gibbses, one of the first pairs featured. Sixty years later, they are still happily together. _____ 11. And finally, more optimistic news on aging well, from a new scientific study of a cyclist. You can take advantage of his workout approach — brief bursts of strenuous activity mixed with exercise — in as little as one minute. In other fun news from our friends in science: hip action is the key to being a dancing queen, geckos have a really freaky way of dodging danger, and a fiery meteor last week blazed a trail visible all the way from New York to Nebraska. Have a great week. _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Weekend Briefing is published Sundays at 6 a. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Evening Briefing, weeknights at 6 p. m. Eastern. Want to look back? Here’s Friday’s Evening Briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Exposing the I.S.I.S. Lie: How President Obama & Hillary Clinton Created I.S.I.S.
Scott Bennett, former Army intelligence officer, once private contractor to CIA financier Booz Allen Hamilton, and author of the book Shell Game, a military whistleblowing report to the U.S. Congress, stated he gave Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings information about Swiss bank accounts which directly implicated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama in the formation of I.S.I.S., just prior to Hastings being killed in a suspicious auto accident.
Shell Game: NSA - CIA - UBS - Booz Allen Hamilton Scandal
Synopsis: A true story, originally submitted as a TOP SECRET/SCI military whistleblowing report to U.S. Civil Affairs - Psychological Operations Command in 2012, by an American Army Officer and State Department contractor working at the highest levels of American military intelligence, counterterrorism, and psychological warfare. This report to Congress exposed the betrayal and cover-up by the U.S. government of the Union Bank of Switzerland - Brad Birkenfeld - terrorist threat finance connection to Edward Snowden's intelligence on the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Booz Allen Hamilton, and U.S. Central Command. This report exposed new links to Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim, his son Roger Zakheim, and the Pentagon and WTC 9-11 attacks. http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/shellgame
Buzzsaw: Money Trails, Whistleblowers & Government Secrets + Lies with Scott Bennett
PROJECT CAMELOT: SCOTT BENNETT : CIA, SWISS BANKS FUND ISIS
SHELL GAME: An affidavit by Scott Bennett and Michael Jay | 0 |
PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Coahuila — A recently captured Mexican cartel boss managed to purchase multiple properties in this border city at an estimated value of $2. 5 million dollars. [Last week, Mexican federal authorities arrested Antonio “La Hamburguesa or the Hamburger” Romo Lopez, a lieutenant within the Gulf Cartel. The capture was carried out after a gun battle and chase through a mountain region with Mexican authorities in Zacatecas. Romo Lopez was arrested with his two bodyguards Armando N “Huevotes or Big Testicles” and Ernesto N “Garrotas or Big Claws”. According to Mexican authorities, Romo Lopez was the regional boss in Zacatecas for the Gulf Cartel and was one of the individuals largely responsible for the escalating violence in the state. Mexican and American law enforcement officials revealed to Breitbart Texas that Romo Lopez was operating in Zacatecas, Tamaulipas, and Sonora. After Romo’s arrest, Fernando Purón the mayor of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, made a public announcement claiming the cartel leader had multiple properties with an estimated value of $50 million pesos or approximately $2. 5 million USD. Piedras Negras is a border city immediately south of Eagle Pass, Texas. According to public statements made by Purón, he turned over various documents that indicate Romo’s possession of various properties in Piedras Negras. The recently captured cartel leader in the past worked as the regional boss and purchased multiple properties during his time there. After Romo left Piedras Negras, rivals vandalized some of the buildings. Purón claimed he demolished some of the buildings and painted over others at the outset of his administration. The Mexican mayor claimed to have asked federal authorities to seize Romo’s properties and others to keep cartels from holding their assets after their eventual release. Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “J. M. Martinez” from Piedras Negras, Coahuila. | 1 |
During a Friday HBO “Real Time” conversation with Sen. Ben Sasse ( ) host Bill Maher joked that he is not a “house n**ga” when the senator suggested he come work in the fields of Nebraska. Partial transcript as follows: MAHER: Halloween used to be a kid thing. SASSE: It’s not anymore? MAHER: Not out here. Adults dress up for Halloween. They don’t do that in Nebraska? SASSE: It’s frowned upon. Yeah, we don’t do that quite as much. MAHER: I’ve got to get to Nebraska more. SASSE: You’re welcome. We’d love to have you work in the fields for us. MAHER: Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigga [applause]. It’s a joke! Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone will know on Tuesday whether he still has a future in the UK Labour Party when a disciplinary hearing sparked by comments he made about Hitler resumes. [Mr. Livingstone has been giving evidence behind closed doors as he fights to stay a member of the party after his controversial claim that Adolf Hitler supported the creation of a Jewish state. The allegation was made in a radio interview last May when he said the Nazi leader had supported Zionism in the 1930s before he “went mad and ended up killing six million Jews. ” He was suspended immediately thereafter. Mr. Livingstone also claimed there was a “ campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as ”. His case is being heard by Labour’s national constitution committee which will decide if he engaged in conduct which was “grossly detrimental” to the party. Before entering the tribunal on Friday, the veteran expressed his hope that he would be allowed to remain in the Labour fold. “I’m always hopeful. It’s pretty fair. The injustice was actually suspending me for something I hadn’t said,” Mr. Livingstone said. “Have I said anything that wasn’t true? All the Jewish activists who spoke on my behalf yesterday, all actually confirmed what I said was true. “The big difference is that, though I said that Hitler supported Zionism, MPs like John Mann were immediately claiming that I said Hitler was a Zionist. “That was repeated on the Jewish Chronicle website with appalling other stories saying that I said Jews were like Nazis, none of this is true. “So, as long as the truth prevails, we will be OK. ” Afterwards Mr. Livingstone said he had been questioned for four hours. Asked if the case was “all about Palestine” he said: “No it’s about a smear against supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. If the charge is upheld, he could be expelled from the party. | 1 |
California Gov. Jerry Brown cited the disaster relief and infrastructure needs of his state as he told reporters on Monday in Washington, D. C. that there are areas where he is seeking to work with the Trump Administration. [“I find complexity and contradiction very congenial to my bent of mind,” Brown said, in response to questions of whether he felt “conflicted and torn” under pressures to oppose or cooperate with the Trump administration. Brown met with Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) Agency acting Administrator Bob Fenton on Monday, according to the Sacramento Bee which posted video of Brown’s comments to reporters. Brown has estimated storm damage at over $500 million dollars. On Sunday Brown, sought a fourth federal disaster declaration from President Donald Trump according to KTLA. Brown was told in the meeting of Trump’s great concern for disaster relief in California. While Brown expressed a positive response to Trump’s words, he did not relent in his criticism of the administration’s choice to review greenhouse gas standards, according to the report. California is still dealing with the damaged Oroville Dam spillway. Storms have brought welcome water to the state, while at the same time further stressing critical infrastructure. Brown has continued to slam GOP and Trump administration aims, including the repeal and replacement of Obamacare. But under the pressure of the needs of California, he seemed more willing to work with the administration on Monday. Asked again about pressure to be the “voice of the resistance,” Brown replied, “I will pursue my own rhetorical paths. ” He continued: I will do so in the spirit of advancing the interest of California and recognizing that we’re a part of the union and there’s a lot to be, that we’re not going our totally separate way. we are distinct. we have a sovereignty. we will pursue that. but we also have a commonality with other states and with the national government … Brown said he is seeking to “find common ground” and that he “wouldn’t rule anything out or anything in. ” Brown faces the heavy needs of his state as well as the left’s strong calls to “resist” the Trump administration. As the concluded his comments to reporters Monday, Brown stated there “could be cause for alarm” or for “some optimism” as he said, “[n]othing’s all that predictable in the current administration. ” Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana | 1 |
Email
This exceptionally enervating election is almost over but its political and social implications will last into the future, even if, as expected, Donald Trump loses to Hillary Clinton.
The conditions that created this shocking national event will continue regardless. “Trumpism,” if not the disgraceful Trump himself, will remain part of the Republican party — and, of course, he still has a slight chance of winning. Clinton, for her part, has some dangerous goals in the Middle East and toward Russia and China
Both the successful uprising in the far right Republican party and the failed but nearly successful liberal uprising in the center-right Democratic party shocked the ruling establishments of both organizations. Who guessed the American people were so upset with the status quo? The government had mentioned nothing about it beforehand. The two parties had said and evidently knew nothing. The corporate mass media was silent.
Those to the left of the Democratic party were surprised as well but they had long been publicly critical of the conditions that finally drove much of the predominantly white working class and sectors of the poor, middle class and millennials to demand a new deal from their respective two political associations.
The biggest cause is a capitalist economic system that privileges the top 10% at the expense of the bottom 90%, particularly those in the lower 70%. A lesser but real factor is America’s continual warfare. Why else does the white working class behind Trump tolerate his call for peace with Russia as Clinton becomes ever more threatening to Moscow? Another cause is the extreme dislike of Clinton by Republicans that allows misogynist Trump to treat so outrageously the first woman presidential candidate of a major party.
For 40 years the U.S. working class has increasingly experienced lower wages and benefits as well as fewer jobs at all due to the free trade and neoliberal policies of the ruling class and its business component. Hardest hit are workers without a college education or worst of all those who did not graduate from high school. This writer is old enough to remember when white students who left high school at 16 without a diploma were employed fairly quickly, and when they were fired got another job I also know young college graduates today (with large student debts) in low paying retail or other jobs no matter how energetically they seek more remunerative positions.
White Anger
Various studies indicate that the white working class is especially disturbed by the lack of jobs and better pay. An article titled “The Great White Nope” by Jefferson Cowie in the (November-December) issue of Foreign Affairs notes:
“…. According to a recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution, poor Hispanics are almost a third more likely than their white counterparts to imagine a better future. And poor African Americans — who face far higher rates of incarceration and unemployment and who fall victim far more frequently to both violent crime and police brutality — are nearly three times as optimistic as poor whites. Carol Graham, the economist who oversaw the analysis, concluded that poor whites suffer less from direct material deprivation than from the intangible but profound problems of ‘unhappiness, stress, and lack of hope….’
“A stunning U-turn in the fortunes of poor and working-class whites began in the 1970s, as deindustrialization, automation, globalization, and the growth of the high-technology and service sectors transformed the U.S. economy. In the decades since, many blue-collar jobs have vanished, wages have stagnated for less educated Americans, wealth has accumulated at the top of the economic food chain, and social mobility has become vastly harder to achieve.
“Technological and financial innovations have fostered economic and social vitality in urban centers on the coasts. But those changes have brought far fewer benefits to the formerly industrial South and Midwest. As economic decline has hollowed out civic life and the national political conversation has focused on other issues, many people in ‘flyover country’ have sought solace in opioids and methamphetamine; some have lashed out by embracing white nationalist rage. As whites come closer to becoming a plurality in the United States (or a “white minority,” in more paranoid terms), many have become receptive to nativist or bigoted appeals and thinly veiled promises to protect their endangered racial privilege: think of Trump’s promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and his invocation of an unspecified bygone era when the United States was ‘great,’ which many white Trump supporters seem to understand as a reference to a time when they felt themselves to be more firmly at the center of civic and economic life.”
Trump And Russia
Trump has said he wants to create a better relationship between the U.S. and Russia, and that as president he would engage President Vladimir Putin about this matter. He has also remarked that there is no proof yet that that the Russian government is responsible for hacking a Democratic party computer and that of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. Both included some embarrassing Emails from Clinton that were distributed by WikiLeaks, including the contents of her “secret” speeches to Wall Street and other venues.
I agree with Trump on the matter of improving relations with Russia (although there is no telling what a Trump presidency would actually do — and a reversal is hardly impossible for such a an individual) and the lack of proof that the Russian government hacked the Emails.
Anti-Russia Clinton
The Clinton campaign has turned Trump’s comments on Russia into its main target. On Oct.20, the day after the third and last debate, the New York Times reported that if she wins the election “she will enter the White House with the most contentious relationship with Russia of any president in more than three decades, and with a visceral, personal animus toward Vladimir V. Putin, its leader…. In a reversal of political roles, Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, is the one portraying Mr. Putin as America’s newest archenemy….
“Much of the Democratic foreign policy establishment has become as hawkish as Mrs. Clinton on the subject of Russia, a view that seems almost certain to outlast the campaign. Privately, some of her longtime advisers are already thinking about what mix of sanctions, diplomatic isolation and international condemnation they might put together if they take office to deal with Mr. Putin and the fragile economic state he runs, an update of the ‘containment’ strategy that George F. Kennan formulated for President Harry S. Truman in 1947.”
That strategy was the basis of the Cold War. Who wants a new Cold War — this time between two capitalist countries with massive arsenals of nuclear weapons? And we suspect that Clinton’s real goal is regime change in Moscow.
In general Clinton is recognized as a war hawk. As secretary of state she argued with President Obama about taking greater military action against the government of Syria and conviced him to bomb and invade Libya. She plans to be tougher on both Russia and China.
Regarding the allegations of Russian hacking, Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, a longtime Russia expert, said Oct. 18: “In fact no actual evidence for this allegation has been produced, only suppositions or, as Glenn Greenwald has argued, ‘unproven assertions.'”
He noted that MIT expert, Professor Theodore Postol, has written that there is “no technical way that the U.S. intelligence community could know who did the hacking if it was done by sophisticated nation-state actors.”
Cohen suggested, “the charges, leveled daily by the Clinton campaign as part of its ‘McCarthyite Kremlin-baiting’ of Donald Trump, are mostly political.” He also pointed out it is far from clear that the Kremlin actually favors Trump, despite Clinton’s campaign claims.”
Trump’s Disgraceful Campaign
Trump’s campaign has been the most disgraceful in U.S. history, replete with climate change denial, outrageous conspiracy theories, allegations against Muslims and Mexicans, frequent lies, outright racism, America-first nationalism, distrust of immigrants, false accusations of ballot rigging and extreme contempt toward his opponent, among other failings. It finally took a video of Trump bragging about his of sexual harassment of women to do him in.
If Clinton wins, it will be an advance for the United States to finally elect a woman president. She remains a powerful part of the anti-liberal Democratic center right wing and a servant of Wall Street but has pledged to fight for some of the liberal policies advocated by her primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders. She did so to defeat him, of course, and her efforts in this case will be superficial.
A Clinton presidency will be haunted by the Republican party and by defeated Trump and his constituency of millions of fanatics who think “crooked Hillary” belongs in prison.
Much depends on the composition of the post-election Congress. It’s doubtful the Democrats can win the House given the large number of gerrymandered GOP seats — a product of Republican control of so many state legislatures. . But there is a possibility Democrats will gain a majority in the Senate. This will make a difference in terms of the Supreme Court and other matters that do not require House approval. If both houses of Congress remain in the hands of the right wing very little can be done
Assuming Trump is defeated, the temporarily displaced Republican leadership will largely return to power after making concessions to his devoted followers. After that it’s probably going to be total war against the Clinton government for the next four years, even worse than the GOP’s sabotage during the nearly eight years of gridlocked Obama’s leadership. | 0 |
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(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. President Obama commuted most of the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst sentenced to 35 years in prison for giving a massive trove of secret documents to WikiLeaks. Ms. Manning, already jailed for nearly seven years, will be freed in May. That rescues Ms. Manning, who has tried to commit suicide twice in prison, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman in a male prison. A White House spokesman stressed the differences between Ms. Manning’s clemency application and the pardon application of Edward Snowden, the security contractor who disclosed archives of top secret surveillance files and is living in exile in Russia. _____ 2. Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, is on Capitol Hill this week for his Senate confirmation hearing. He’ll face hard questions over his trades of medical stocks. If confirmed, he’ll lead the effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office said the repeal would cost 18 million people their insurance in the first year. _____ 3. Nigerian fighter jets hunting for Boko Haram militants mistakenly bombed a refugee camp. The medical organization Doctors Without Borders said at least 52 people were killed and 200 injured. “This attack on vulnerable people who have already fled from extreme violence is shocking and unacceptable,” said an official with the group. _____ 4. A sense of uncertainty is taking hold around the globe as the U. S. prepares for the inauguration of Mr. Trump on Friday. The predictably unpredictable upset the leaders of China and various European nations with provocative comments in newly published interviews. The inauguration and related events could cost more than $200 million — possibly more than half of it for security. In Washington, which Mr. Trump calls “the swamp” and where 91 percent of voters went for Hillary Clinton, “ panic” is setting in. _____ 5. Britain’s leader backed a clean break from the European Union, its single market and its court system. In a speech on “Brexit,” Prime Minister Theresa May said she wanted a “new and equal partnership” with European nations that would allow Britain to regain control of immigration. _____ 6. The Turkish authorities say the Uzbek man accused of killing 39 people at an Istanbul nightclub on New Year’s Day, above, confessed after being captured. The Islamic State had claimed responsibility for the attack. And the widow of Omar Mateen, who pledged allegiance to Islamic State as he killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub last year, appeared in court. She is charged with aiding and abetting in the attack, and obstructing the investigation. _____ 7. Almost three years after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared with 239 people on board, officials called off the search in the southern Indian Ocean, the largest and costliest search in aviation history. Relatives of those lost were distraught. “I can’t imagine living the rest of my life accepting that people just disappeared into thin air,” said a woman whose mother was on board. Above, debris was recovered on an island near Madagascar in 2015. _____ 8. We visited the Office of Presidential Correspondence, where a small army of employees and interns read the letters sent by millions of Americans to President Obama. There are tales of woe, joy, pleas for pardons or help with medical bills, a teenager’s report card — all sorts of writings. The team sifts through them, and hands Mr. Obama 10 to read each night. And in the last installment of our series on Mr. Obama’s legacy, we took a look at how the presidency changed him. _____ 9. A small triangular pendant found during the excavation of a Nazi death camp has intrigued Anne Frank experts. It’s engraved with the words “good luck” in Hebrew. Researchers determined that it likely belonged to a girl: Karoline Cohn, born in Frankfurt in 1929. It was almost identical to one owned by Anne, who was born there the same year. Now they’re trying to determine if the girls could have been friends, or even relatives. _____ 10. Finally, Americans tend to take less time off than their counterparts in industrialized countries. One survey found the average respondent took 12 vacation days when they had 15. (In Spain, they were 30 for 30.) “Guilt and worry” were common rationales. So here are some tips to make sure you take that break you earned: plan early, get organized, and remember what you’re owed. _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s our last briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
As a ferocious, blizzard pummeled our windows, ushering in yet another month of Moscow’s winter, we began a sudden, frantic search for a sunny refuge, someplace to both defrost on the beach and absorb a little culture over the course of four days. It had to be within a few hours’ flying time and free of the Islamic State or Al Qaeda. That is getting harder for Russian and European travelers. Places that used to provide short getaways — Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Kenya — are plagued by either war or random extremist violence. And going to a relatively stable region like the Caribbean involves too much flying time for a quick trip. Ultimately we settled on a choice: the slightly Musandam Peninsula in the Sultanate of Oman. There has been a surge in tourism in recent years, in part because of its attractive, quiet shores and warm, seas. Our springboard into the region would not be the beach, exactly: Our first stop after flying into the United Arab Emirates was the Emirate of Sharjah, an emerging center for contemporary art. Since we both had reported from the Arab world for years, the trip was partly tinged with nostalgia. Sharjah positions itself as the offbeat brother to the slick commercial art market next door in far richer Dubai. A third option is developing farther down the road in Abu Dhabi, where a cornucopia of museum projects is finally coming to fruition. A branch of the Louvre should open within the coming year, to be followed by a national museum and then Guggenheim Abu Dhabi by 2020. Sultan 38, from a branch of the local ruling family, volunteered to be our guide for our visit. Sultan, who shot to Twitter stardom during the Arab uprisings for his manic coverage, runs his own foundation, the Barjeel Art Foundation, as well as a photography studio and a commercial art gallery in Dubai. He met us at Shababeek, a tasty Lebanese restaurant in a cultural and business center downtown. He proved to be an energetic, enthusiastic and erudite guide, rather like his tweets. “It is a tale of this incredible shift in the cultural dynamics of the region,” Sultan told us over a lunch of Lebanese mezze. “Before, you had to go to traditional capitals of the Arab world to experience culture and art. ” That shift is even more pronounced since the Islamic State began leveling some of the region’s priceless antiquities. “The destruction of the culture pains all Middle Easterners, but it adds emphasis to our work, to share the culture that we have, to show the world that yes, there is destruction, but there is also creativity,” Sultan said. The Gulf region has come a long way from the days when public art consisted mainly of giant sculptures of traditional Arab coffee pots. (There are still plenty of those on major traffic circles.) Sharjah’s ruler, Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad planted the seed that transformed his emirate into a creative hub when he founded the Sharjah Biennial 13 of contemporary art in 1993. (Sultan’s branch of the family transliterates its name slightly differently.) The number of museums, galleries and cultural institutions has since blossomed with the emirate itself establishing more than a dozen, including a museum of Islamic civilization and a small heritage museum. The next biennial opens in March. Key places to see contemporary art include the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Sharjah Art Museum and the Maraya Art Centre. Visitors were sparse but enthusiastic on the day we toured. On the top floor of the airy Maraya center we ran into Manuel Rabaté, who will be the first director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. “There is always something to do in Sharjah,” said Mr. Rabaté, out for a Saturday busman’s holiday with his wife and two small daughters. “You have to stop here this is a great place! I love it. ” One floor down, Sultan’s Barjeel Art Foundation was presenting “Home Ground,” an exposition of contemporary Middle Eastern art on the theme of displacement. Some of it was about the Palestinian diaspora. The Australian artist Raafat Ishak’s work “Responses to an Immigration Request From One Hundred and Governments” intersected poignantly with the refugee crisis. Mr. Ishak applied to immigrate to every country on earth at the time of the project, and the responses, or lack thereof, inspired the work. Sharjah’s crown jewel of contemporary art is the Sharjah Art Foundation, the brainchild of Sheikha Hoor its president and the ruler’s daughter. It occupies the heart of old Sharjah, a small knot of early buildings made of bricks hewed from coral, including a modest fort and a tiny mosque. In empty spaces the foundation constructed plain, square white buildings. The overall effect is negotiating a sunny labyrinth that opens periodically into expansive, cool spaces filled with art. From the foundation you can walk through what is left of the old Sharjah, including scattered cafes and a restored covered bazaar selling souvenirs. We stopped for an espresso at a cafe overlooking the harbor with its dhows, the Gulf’s traditional seafaring vessels. The end of the walk brought us to a series of artists’ studios and the Sharjah Art Museum. Its permanent collection is built around painting and sculpture by Gulf artists, some of it leaning toward the nostalgic. Many art spaces in Sharjah are designed in the Islamic architectural style that the emirate favors for official buildings. One delightful anomaly is the Flying Saucer, a funky, spaceship opened in 1978 as a French patisserie. It has the air of an old Los Angeles restaurant. Its exhibitions feature both local and foreign artists. As a young generation of art professionals breaks unprecedented ground, they are gingerly balancing an Islamic society’s conservative values with freewheeling art. It is taboo to criticize political leaders or religion, or to show nudity, although we found discreet examples. Sharjah also bans alcohol according to Islamic tradition, which prompts many visitors to visit the bars of neighboring Dubai or Ajman before returning to Sharjah’s less expensive beach hotels to sleep. After spending the better part of a day exploring the museums, we headed toward Oman and the Musandam Peninsula, but not without one final reminder of the emirate’s Islamic ways. Our destination, the Six Senses Zighy Bay Resort, a drive from Sharjah, lies just over the border in Oman. The hotel arranges a border pass for guests lacking an Omani visa. Just as we pulled into the Sharjah border post in downtown Dibba, the driver said casually, “They search your luggage for liquor and take away any they find. ” Three champagne splits in one suitcase were duly confiscated even though we were leaving the country. “This time we will let you go, but next time we will open a case against you,” growled the border guard. There are various versions of the story about how the Musandam Peninsula, which juts into the Straits of Hormuz like a rhino horn, ended up in Oman’s hands. Some say the British colonial rulers divided up the territory of the Emirates in the 1960s according to tribal loyalties, or in the case of Musandam, because Oman agreed to give the British access to this strategic location on the Strait of Hormuz. Musandam consists mostly of rocky, crags that tumble abruptly down into white sandy beaches. There are few hotels — either way upscale or downscale with limited water access. We chose the Six Senses resort for its splendid isolation on its own cove, although the price caused some hesitation. The final stretch of gravel road to the beach goes from the drab to the dramatic, with a steep ascent filled with hairpin turns up one side of a mountain. At the crest a breathtaking sea vista opened at our feet. The hotel’s 82 stone villas are nestled in a beachfront oasis of more than 1, 000 palm trees on the cove’s left end. To the right stands the old fishing village of Zighy, rebuilt by the hotel and the government to match the resort. Zighy means hot in the local dialect during the low season from June to September, the temperature can hit 130 degrees. At the hotel, we hopped on the bikes available at each villa and pedaled past the spa, the saltwater pool and the organic garden. A large freshwater pool, two restaurants and a bar constitute the heart of the resort. We found our villa extremely comfortable. It had beamed ceilings, plaster walls and large flagstone floors. It had two drawbacks, however. No screens meant we could not sleep with the windows open because of random mosquitoes, and it flooded badly in a rare rainstorm. But for our first night, it was clear. We opted for a romantic barbecue outdoors in our own little walled compound, lit by scattered candles. The resort offers distractions for the whole family, ranging from face painting to water sports to a grueling bike ride up the mountain. So first thing the next day, we went on a dhow snorkeling cruise. We launched from the local marina, which lies through the village of Zighy, population 300. (Hotel guests are discouraged from wandering through it, especially in bathing suits. Signs on the tracks leading to it read: “Please respect Zighy’s local traditions by covering up appropriately beyond this point. ”) After boarding, as we glided out of the cove across waters, the captain, Humaid Abdulla 29, explained that the area was no longer the string of impoverished fishing villages as it had been when the hotel was built nine years ago. He was one of the first men hired from the initially hostile village. “It is a simple life, eating and sleeping and feeding their goats,” said Captain Shehi. “They have lived like this for hundreds of years. They don’t know anything about fighting or what is going on in the rest of the world. ” The day started sunny and bright, so we snorkeled around admiring the fish. On the way home the sky darkened and began pelting the sea with hailstones. It rains about nine days a year around Musandam, and we had the poor luck to be there for about a third of them. Oman has been comparatively quiet, but not entirely immune to the wave of political Islam sweeping the region. The government keeps strict — critics say harsh — control over mosque sermons and other religious practices. Greg Kocsis, then the resort manager, acknowledged that some guests asked how safe the resort is against attacks. The hotel has its own security, he said, including a substantial checkpoint monitoring who drives over the mountain, the lone access. We slept soundly after a day on the water. Early the next morning, walking along the deserted paths to the pool felt like being in an isolated Arab village. Goats bleated in the distance, while swallows and myna birds darted out of the palm trees. With its raked sand pathways it was rather better groomed than an ordinary village, however. It was not dolphin season, but we were determined to see them. We decided to visit the fjords of Khasab, the peninsula’s port, three hours and two border crossings away by car. It is a bit of a long trek for a day’s outing, since Oman bars nonresidents from crossing the peninsula through the mountains. We set out at 6 a. m. The coastal road is dramatic, winding along the curves of the mountains. Khasab boasts a small, handsome fort, built by the Portuguese to control the nearby Strait of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf meets the Indian Ocean. We opted for a dolphin cruise. Propped up on oriental cushions and carpets at the bow of the boat, we had a sweeping view of the harbor and realized that the most exotic sight around might not be the dolphins. Dozens of small, powerful motorboats were skimming across the harbor, driven by tanned, men who our captain explained were Iranian smugglers. It is a trip across the strait, one of the world’s major oil transit points. The men legally load between 150 and 200 motorboats daily with all manner of goods in Oman — cigarettes, small electronics and even an occasional car — then sneak across to Iran at night to avoid paying customs duty there. While our dhow motored out into the strait, we were treated to fresh fruit and cardamom coffee. As the boat gathered speed, the dolphins emerged, frolicking playfully all around the dhow. At one point we had a pair on each side — and their bubbling effervescence proved infectious. The captain steered into a khor (narrow fjord) where the dolphins vanished and we made several stops to swim and admire the stark cliffs. On the way back we anchored in a quiet inlet. The captain turned off the engine, allowing for a delicious snooze in the splendid serenity. We had found the warmth and utter peace we sought. | 1 |
It’s almost statistically impossible that you haven’t heard at least one person threaten to move to Canada if Donald Trump won the presidential election. Well, he did. And it appears that at least some of those would-be emigrants weren’t kidding. At around 11 pm Tuesday night – just as things really went to hell for Hillary Clinton – Canada’s immigration website began to receive record breaking traffic. It then crashed completely.
In case you were wondering, moving to Canada can be quite difficult . It may even take years. To some degree it depends on what profession you’re in and how desired the work you do would be to the nation of Canada. Upon writing this the website still will not load reliably; but in the off chance it’s running properly by the time you read this I’ve included a link ( HERE ).
The world’s stock markets have been sent into turmoil at the shocking news that reality tv star Donald Trump actually pulled off the win. But if you’re thinking of moving to Canada just because of the impending stock market Armageddon, don’t bother. It’s likely that the whole world will go into another recession if Trump really scraps the trade deals he’s promising to. Sort of like a Brexit on a much bigger scale. In fact, many are saying that the combined influence of the UK’s departure from the EU and ours from the majority of our trade relationships might spell a very wide-spread fiscal crisis.
Trump, for one, tried to calm these fears in his victory speech. He said that he plans to deal with everyone “fairly.” But this is unlikely to work. The market ultimately responds cautiously to change and whether that change is going to be fair or not doesn’t really make much difference. Trump has promised to do away with the establishment. And that’s likely to scare economists. One can only hope that as our new president, he proceeds with the cautious tone he could not find during the campaign. Or we could just all move to Canada.
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MADRID (AFP) — Troublemakers sparked panic sparked at Seville’s nighttime Good Friday processions, famed for their religious floats, hooded penitents and crowds of spectators, seriously injuring one person, Spanish authorities said. [Emergency services said eight people were detained in connection with the incidents, from 04:00 local time (0200GMT) on Friday, which sent people running in panic and leaving children in tears along procession routes throughout the city . One man was later released, though he could still face charges, authorities in the southern Spanish city said. In a statement, the Cecop centre that oversees security during the annual processions said those detained had “shouted” used metallic objects to make loud noise or made “wild gesticulations” to create panic in the crowds. An AFP photographer present said she heard what sounded like a stampede of galloping animals, and then a mass of people pushed towards her. Standing on the Isabel II bridge that straddles Seville’s Guadalquivir River, she climbed onto a lamppost. “There were children, women with prams,” she said, adding that some people rushed down steps towards the river, falling over themselves in panic. “The first thing people think is that there is a terrorist attack. ” Spanish media reported that some of those later detained shouted “Allah is great” as well as slogans in favour of the Basque separatist group ETA. But Ricardo the central government’s representative in Seville, said there was no link to extremism. “It’s got nothing to do with Islamist groups, ETA, or any known terrorist group,” he told reporters in comments broadcast on Spanish television. “They wanted to create the utmost panic with their shouting,” he added. An initial probe showed that there were three initial movements of panic, which sparked a “domino effect” in other parts of the city, Cecop said. “These are isolated cases without any apparent connection that are similar to cases of vandalism and hooliganism,” it said. The situation was later brought back under control and the processions continued. Cecop said three of those arrested were “common delinquents”. Some 17 people were taken to hospital for injuries and panic attacks, it said. One of them was in intensive care in a serious condition with a head injury. Organised by religious brotherhoods and featuring huge floats of wooden sculptures of religious scenes accompanied by hooded penitents, the processions known as “La Madruga” are the high point of Easter Week festivities in Seville. This morning’s early incident mirrors a similar outbreak of panic in 2000 in Seville’s Good Friday processions, which left 52 people injured. Good Friday is the second of four intensive days in the Christian calendar culminating in Easter Sunday, which commemorates Christ’s resurrection. | 1 |
Over the past week, the internet has been getting excited over a lake in the heart of Melbourne. And despite what science fiction nostalgia it may conjure up, this is not a scene from “Ghostbusters” or “The . ” This is very much a real, natural phenomenon that occurs all over the planet. It’s what happens when the only thing living in a supersalty lake is a microbe that makes pigments called carotenoids. “It’s the equivalent of having a desert, pink lake right in Central Park,” said Mark Norman, a conservation biologist for Parks Victoria, which manages the lake. “It’s quirky and fascinating, and I love it when natural systems do something that is so large scale that it just blows everybody away. ” The lake turned pink last week, and is expected to return to its normal color when the weather cools down and rains return for Australia’s winter, which starts in June. Dr. Norman said that when the weather gets warm and dry, this is an annual occurrence. As water evaporates from the saltwater lake, its salinity increases to eight or 10 times that of the ocean, creating an extreme habitat where few organisms can live. In Westgate Park’s lake, the only living thing is a algae. When salt concentrations are incredibly high, it starts producing carotenoids, the pigments that give the lake its color. “The carotenoid also acts as a filter to protect their chlorophyll, almost like a pair of sunglasses that goes over the chlorophyll cells and aids in photosynthesis,” he said. Australia’s dry landscape provides other opportunities to see pink lakes fueled by this organism, like in National Park or near Dimboola in Victoria and the Hutt Lagoon and Lake Hillier in Western Australia among others. In the rest of the world, pink or red lakes exist in Spain, Senegal, the Crimean Peninsula, Azerbaijan, Tanzania, Bolivia, Kenya, Mexico and other countries. In some cases, salts or the carotenoid pigments are harvested from the lakes and used for many purposes, including flavoring, melting ice or dyeing foods and pharmaceuticals. According to Dr. Norman, salt lakes turn pink only when the right combination of factors exists: high salinity and the right salt and organisms. The lake at Westgate Park most likely gets sodium chloride, or sea salt, underground from the nearby bay and estuarine river. Other lakes in Australia that have, for example, gypsum salt, don’t turn pink. Sediment, salinity and other organisms can also affect a lake’s pinkness. And a pink lake is different from pink water coming from a sink, like the stuff that spewed from some Canadian taps on Thursday. That was the result of a disinfectant called potassium permanganate that leaked into the system, not algae, salt or aliens. In other lakes where brine shrimp live alongside the algae, the shrimp turn pink after eating the algae and its carotenoids, Dr. Norman said. The pigments stick to the shrimp’s fat and the color travels up the food chain. Such brine shrimp are important to a flamingo’s diet — remove the carotenoids, and its feathers go white. The lakes that pink flamingos eat from may not appear as pink as the one in Melbourne because the algae aren’t the only things that live there. Spain’s Las Salinas de Torrevieja, is one of these lakes. On sunny days, the salt lake blushes — more rose than hot pink. It can host thousands of flamingos during breeding season as well as a few other plants and animals, including some orchids on occasion. And so is the Laguna Colorada, in Bolivia, which attracts Chilean flamingos, James’s flamingos and Andean flamingos, one of the rarest breeds in the world. In Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve, which it is a part of, you can find pumas, foxes, llamas, reptiles and other animals. This shallow but large lake, high in the Andes Mountains, is blood red because of algae and sediments. Minerals or algae give other lakes in the reserve signature colors too, like the turquoise Laguna Verde. For the urban experience in Australia, the best way to see Westgate Park’s pink lake is to drive a car across the bridge, catch a taxi or walk — it’s only about two and a half miles from the city center. To see the pink water in all its glory, look from above, in the middle of the day. But to watch the pink water blend into pink skies, go at sunset. Just next door is a freshwater lake, which isn’t pink but can host more than 140 species of birds. Dr. Norman said the water is so salty that swimming wouldn’t be pleasant: Getting water in your eyes would be like squirting soy sauce into them, and when it dried, it would crystallize on your eyelids: “It’s better to look at it than to jump in it. ” | 1 |
Thing that proves it’s a dream must happen soon, reckons everyone 09-11-16 PEOPLE are hoping for a clear sign that they are in a dream such as being able to fly or copping off with a celebrity, they have revealed. The US election result has convinced many Britons they are dreaming but something even more bizarre and implausible will happen soon and make them wake up. Office worker Tom Logan said: “Trump’s the president apparently, so I expect some proper dream weirdness will happen soon, like being chased through Asda by a cyberman. “It’s an odd dream though because I’m at work and it’s all very detailed, almost like real life. Still, at least I’m not naked or I’ve got some stressful task to do that’s really illogical. “I’m sure any minute now I’ll be able to laugh at this whole Trump business when Holly Willoughby turns up and takes me for a sexy ride in her helicopter.” Accountant Donna Sheridan said: “This is a long dream but nothing totally incongruous has happened yet like taking my childhood dog to get his nails clipped by Coldplay’s Chris Martin. “Trump can’t have won the election though because that’s insane. Frankly I’ll feel better if it turns into a proper nightmare where I’m being made to re-sit my A-levels by a witch. “He hasn’t won, has he? Maybe I should wait a bit before going for a fly out of the window.”
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LONDON — Against a backdrop of rising political acrimony, Theresa May, the British prime minister, warned critics on Sunday not to thwart her timetable for withdrawal from the European Union, as she prepared for a standoff with lawmakers that could prompt calls for an early general election here. Mrs. May, who wants to start the formal process of leaving the bloc by the end of March, now has a serious fight on her hands, after several months of facing relatively little challenge over her plans for British withdrawal, known as “Brexit. ” Judges on Britain’s High Court ruled last week that she could not start exit negotiations by invoking Article 50 of the European Union’s treaty without first consulting Parliament, where the government’s majority is slim. The government is appealing the case to the Supreme Court, but if it loses, and then finds itself constrained by lawmakers, the temptation to seek an early general election may become overwhelming for Mrs. May. For now, the government is playing down that prospect. Mrs. May insisted on Sunday that she had a mandate to pursue Britain’s exit without consulting Parliament. In a referendum in June, about 52 percent of voters elected to quit the bloc. “The British people, the majority of the British people, voted to leave the European Union,” Mrs. May said at Heathrow Airport as she left for a trade mission to India. “The government is now getting on with that. ” After the court ruling, however, Mrs. May now knows there is a good chance that she may not be able to do so with the free hand that she wants. So far she has specified almost no detail about her objectives, arguing that she wants to keep her negotiating position as strong as possible. At the heart of the dispute lies an ambiguity inherent in a referendum that asked voters to say whether they wanted to quit the European Union but that did not seek their views on what relationship should replace it. Supporters of Brexit contend that opponents now want to thwart the will of the people as expressed in the referendum. Critics fear that the government has no coherent Brexit strategy, and worry that the country may lurch into a damaging economic rupture with the bloc, which voters did not endorse. On Sunday, Gina Miller, the founder of an investment management firm who was the lead claimant in the legal case against the government, told the BBC that Mrs. May must take the decision to Parliament “because we do not live in a dictatorship. ” Ms. Miller said she had faced online death and rape threats over the case. Nigel Farage, the interim leader of the U. K. Independence Party, which campaigned for British withdrawal, warned of protests in the streets if the decision in favor of Brexit was ignored. “Believe you me, if the people in this country think they’re going to be cheated, they’re going to be betrayed, then we will see political anger the likes of which none of us in our lifetimes have ever witnessed in this country,” he said. The court ruling has unleashed an ugly political discourse, with one tabloid newspaper that supported Brexit describing the judges who delivered the verdict as “Enemies of the People. ” While the government has said it defends the independence of the judiciary, it has not rushed to condemn the newspaper coverage, prompting criticism from some senior legal figures. More worrisome for Mrs. May is the parliamentary math should she be forced to take her case for British withdrawal to lawmakers. Last week, David Davis, the secretary of state for exiting the European Union, conceded that if the appeal to the Supreme Court failed, the government would probably have to put forward legislation to trigger Article 50. That could give opponents the possibility to amend it, and tie down its negotiating stance. In an interview with The Sunday Mirror, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, said he would push for Mrs. May to adopt his “Brexit bottom lines. ” “We are not challenging the referendum,” he said. “We are not calling for a second referendum. We’re calling for market access for British industry to Europe. ” The party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, took a more lenient position. He told the BBC that Labour was “not going to hold this up,” and that “Article 50 will be triggered when it comes to Westminster. ” Asked about the possibility of a general election, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, told the BBC on Sunday that it was “the last thing the government wants” — a formulation that does not specifically exclude it happening. | 1 |
Though many expected WikiLeaks or a similar group to make the final weeks of the US presidential campaign hell for Hillary, few expected the FBI to take center stage in the movement against Hillary... | 0 |
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"Уважаемый модератор (сессии) пожелал мне благополучно выйти на пенсию, я тоже себе этого желаю. Когда время придет, это (будет) очень правильно, нужно сделать. Пока я еще не на пенсии, действующий руководитель большой державы, я должен быть сдержанным, не проявлять в своих выражениях излишнюю агрессивность. Я, собственно говоря, и не думаю, что это мой стиль", — сказал Путин на итоговой пленарной сессии ежегодного заседания Международного дискуссионного клуба "Валдай".
Президент также отметил, что хотя все атрибуты демократии в современных ведущих государствах налицо, реально у большинства граждан нет влияния на власть.
"Выборы перестают быть инструментом перемен, а сводятся к скандалам, к обсуждению компроматов, простите меня, к обсуждению того, кто кого за что ущипнул, кто с кем спит. Но это просто переходит всякие границы. Да и, честно говоря, если посмотреть на программы кандидатов, то такое впечатление, что они скроены по одним и тем же лекалам", — отметил российский лидер.
"Граждане чувствуют, что их интересы и представление элит о единственно правильном курсе, который эти элиты выбирают, все чаще и больше расходятся между собой. Как следствие, референдумы, выборы, все чаще и больше преподносят сюрпризы для власти. Люди голосуют совсем не так, как им советовали официальные респектабельные СМИ, не так это рекомендуют так называемые "системные партии". А общественные движения, которые еще совсем недавно считались слишком левыми или слишком правыми, выходят на авансцену, оттесняя политических тяжеловесов", — цитирую Владимира Путина РИА Новости.
Он отметил, что сперва такие неудобные результаты пытались объявить некой аномалией. А когда они стали повторяться, "заговорили о том, что общество не понимает тех, кто находится на Олимпе власти, не доросло до того, чтобы оценить устремления властных структур, заботу о народном благе, а то и вовсе доходит до истерики, мол, это следствие зарубежной, как правило, российской пропаганды".
Говоря об актуальных проблемах современности, глава государства отметил, что правила в мировой политике и экономике постоянно меняются.
"Противоречия, связанные с перераспределением экономической мощи и политического влияния, только нарастают. Груз взаимного недоверия сужает наши возможности эффективно отвечать на стоящие перед мировым сообществом реальные вызовы и реальные угрозы. По сути, в кризисе оказался сам проект глобализации, а в Европе говорят уже, мы это хорошо знаем и слышим, о несостоятельности мультикультурализма", — отметил Владимир Путин.
"Считаю, что такая ситуация — во многом следствие ошибочного, поспешного, а в чем-то и самоуверенного выбора, сделанного элитами некоторых государств четверть века назад. Тогда… был шанс не просто ускорить процессы глобализации, а принять при этом качественно иной, гармоничный, устойчивый характер", — подчеркнул президент.
Владимир Путин также отметил, что санкции используются сейчас для политического давления, при этом создаются закрытые торговые альянсы в обход ВТО. Поделиться: | 0 |
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ESCADA, Brazil — Not a soul was in sight on the narrow dusty street, except for a cat skittering under a moon. It was 2:30 a. m. and in a small pink house up 29 steps carved jaggedly into a red clay embankment, Vera Lúcia da Silva was readying her baby for a journey to the city of Recife, two and a half hours away. Cradling Sophia Valentina, she walked through the town, then climbed into a government van for the jostling ride, arriving just after sunrise. They make the arduous trip several times a week. It is the only way to get the treatment and therapy Sophia needs for an ominous array of problems caused by the Zika virus. Now more than a year old, Sophia is a child of the Zika epidemic, one of nearly 2, 500 babies in Brazil born to infected mothers, with brain damage so profound the consequences are only beginning to be understood. Thirteen months after the World Health Organization declared Zika a global health emergency, some of the public alarm over the virus that swept through Latin America is receding. In November, the W. H. O. lifted its emergency designation, but Zika has hardly disappeared. Thousands of new Zika infections continue to be reported throughout Latin America, and W. H. O. officials said that their action simply signals that, like malaria or yellow fever, Zika is a continuing threat in the region rather than an urgent pandemic. For families of Zika babies, however, the disastrous effects are only deepening. That is especially true in the impoverished cities and villages of northeastern Brazil, where the connection between the mysterious virus and infants born with tiny misshapen heads was first detected and where hundreds of families are struggling to give these babies the best lives possible. Family relationships have been upended, precarious livelihoods shattered. Some parents have had to leave jobs to devote themselves to their child’s care. High rates of teenage pregnancy in Brazil add another layer of hardship, as adolescents with braces on their teeth and homework to finish find themselves the mothers of afflicted infants. And doctors and researchers are just starting to grasp the medical consequences of Zika. Besides the alarmingly small heads characteristic of microcephaly, many babies have a long list of varied symptoms, leading experts to rename their condition “congenital Zika syndrome. ” They can have seizures, breathing problems, trouble swallowing, weakness and stiffness in muscles and joints preventing them from even lifting their heads, clubbed feet, vision and hearing problems, and ferocious irritability. Some have passed their first birthdays, but have neurological development closer to that of infants, doctors say. Some microcephaly cases appear so dire that experts liken them to a previously rare variant called “fetal brain disruption sequence. ” And new issues keep cropping up, including hydrocephalus, excess fluid in the brain. Now, new waves of impaired children, who appeared normal at birth, are being identified. For some, microcephaly and other symptoms are emerging months later, as their brains, with malformations or debilitated or destroyed cells, fail to develop enough to match their physical growth. Experts predict there will be more children who still seem unaffected, but whose problems will surface in toddlerhood or their school years. Doctors don’t yet know the extent of the disease, said Dr. Vanessa Van der Linden, a neuropediatrician in Recife who helped discover the link between Zika and microcephaly. “We only know what’s easy to see. ” Dr. Van der Linden is one of scores of devoted doctors and therapists helping families at public and nonprofit hospitals and clinics. Brazil’s government is drawing on its overstretched resources, including providing modest disability payments to poor families. Many families are on waiting lists for services. Therapy programs sometimes drop children because their development is too stunted for therapy to help any further. For older babies who still cannot make eye contact or interact, Dr. Van der Linden said, “if you did physical therapy every day, it doesn’t mean they will be better. ” For Zika families, the difficulties are only beginning. The children are still small enough to be held, fed and carried. But ultimately, many may be unable to walk, attend regular schools, or live on their own as adults. “These babies, most of them or all of them, they’re going to live very long lives, you can keep them alive a long time, and they will need assistance from someone 24 hours a day,” said Dr. Ernesto Marques, an infectious disease expert at the University of Pittsburgh and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Recife. “The consequences to the society are huge. ” These are the stories of three families: a couple persevering with ingenuity and grit despite their baby’s frequent medical setbacks a girl who became a Zika mother at 14, forcing her to mature well beyond her years newlyweds whose relationship could not withstand the pressures of caring for their disabled baby. “Grave risk of aspiration,” read the piece of paper near the bed where Ms. da Silva was wrapping Sophia in a pink hooded fleece for their walk to the van. A doctor had explained what that medical report meant. “She is going to choke,” Ms. da Silva said, twisting her fingers anxiously. “Food is going to go to her lungs. ” Sophia had serious dysphagia, swallowing problems afflicting older Zika babies whose brains cannot coordinate skills for eating. Doctors advised adding thickener to her formula, but if unsuccessful, she would need a feeding tube threaded through her nose. A previous feeding tube had caused Sophia to vomit black blood. “I am asking God that she will not have to use the feeding tube,” Ms. da Silva, 32, implored, as outside, roosters crowed in the darkness and dogs barked like town criers. Her husband, Ronaldo, 34, tried to reassure her. “God,” he said, “would never give us 100 kilos if we could only carry 50 kilos. ” But the weight keeps piling on. After another van ride to Recife and hours of waiting on hard plastic chairs, Sophia, in a ruffled top with pink hearts and “Love” spelled in rhinestones, was placed on an elevated mat at the Altino Ventura Foundation clinic. Five therapists examined her. One shook a yellow rattle by her ear. Another removed Sophia’s tiny lavender eyeglasses, waved a shiny silver pompom and flickered a flashlight, but her eyes seemed barely able to follow the stimuli. “Sophia is a child with very compromised visual, auditory and motor skills,” concluded Kyrla Melo, a physical therapist. “She has no head control, she does not roll over, she does not sit. ” Already, another clinic had discharged Sophia from its physical therapy group. “The doctor said Sophia was not developing,” Ms. da Silva said. “Children who are not developing are getting dropped from the therapies. ” She was upset. “I think it is very wrong. Their duty was to work so our babies would develop. ” Sophia’s parents provide any support they can. They fashioned homemade versions of the physical therapy equipment clinics use: They made rattles of Coke bottles filled with beans they placed colorful plastic balls in a tiny inflatable pool they stuffed a pair of Mr. da Silva’s jeans with plastic foam, to prop Sophia into a sitting position. A doctor told them bright colors might stimulate Sophia’s vision, so they painted their gray door and shutters pumpkin orange, changed curtains and sofa covers to cherry red, and draped sunny yellow fabric in the kitchen. Resourcefulness is second nature to them. Before they married, Mr. da Silva, who works painting oil refinery pipes, spent a year of evenings and leveling a plot atop a cliff strewn with scraggly plants, preparing ground for their house, with its corrugated red tile roof and laundry lines spangling the sides. The cliff borders one side of a narrow cobblestone street. On the other side, houses are at or below ground level, with barred windows to deter thieves and drug dealers. After their first child, Richarlisson, was born, Ms. da Silva, a former teacher, tried five years for another pregnancy, losing one to miscarriage. At three months pregnant with Sophia, near a neighbor’s well, a mosquito bit her arm. She developed diarrhea and a rash on her arm, belly and face. A doctor said it could be chikungunya, a illness that seldom has lasting effects and is not transmitted to a fetus. Zika, carried by the same mosquito, was barely known in Brazil then. Things seemed fine until a ultrasound. “Your daughter has microcephaly,” a doctor told Ms. da Silva. “A smaller head, and the child’s brain has not developed. ” Ms. da Silva despaired. Still, two weeks later, when a doctor said, “If you don’t want a child with microcephaly, you are not obligated to have it,” she rejected abortion. “No, even if she has microcephaly, I am going to love her the way she comes,” she said. At birth, Sophia’s left leg hooked across her body and a doctor announced, “Sophia Valentina is not going to walk. ” Ms. da Silva got angry. “You think you know more than God, huh?” she chastised the doctor. “My daughter is not even 24 hours old. ” Using baths to relax the leg and gently manipulating it in a cloth diaper sling, Ms. da Silva and her sister coaxed it into normal position. Another doctor said Sophia’s hands were “not going to hold anything” the da Silvas trained her fingers to grasp lollipops and shake rattles. When neighbors gossiped, one saying Sophia had “a deformed head and a crippled leg,” Mr. da Silva talked his wife out of confronting them. Some people are kind, he said, like his boss, who kept him on when difficulties forced the company to lay off all but seven of 300 employees. Still, Ms. da Silva spent five months arguing with city officials who kept denying her government van rides to Recife. She called one employee “Satan,” and finally landed a seat after threatening to alert a newspaper and embarrass the mayor in an election year. But whenever Sophia’s doctors schedule new appointments, Ms. da Silva must walk 40 minutes to reserve a van seat in person with the health department during certain hours. They sometimes miss previously scheduled appointments to reserve a van for another appointment. One morning, Sophia stopped moving. She was breathing, her eyes were open, but her body seemed frozen. Ms. da Silva wept, “afraid of losing my little doll. ” Sophia was weak and undernourished because she had not adapted to the nasal feeding tube inserted two weeks earlier. Doctors said she would need a new tube every 15 days. The next month, November, Sophia was hospitalized for 10 days for pneumonia. In December, a shunt was inserted in her brain, which had filled with excess fluid, causing 32 seizures in one day. January brought another hospitalization for pneumonia. Sophia, now 14 months old, is on a waiting list for an abdominal feeding tube. “My daughter is a warrior,” Mr. da Silva said. On the red sofa behind the orange shutters, Ms. da Silva gazed in anguished wonder at her baby girl. “Sophia Valentina,” she murmured. “She is going to surprise me. ” Alícia Isabela do Nascimento Martins was born two months premature, delivered by emergency cesarean section. She was hospitalized for 70 days, until her lungs could breathe on their own, her heart could beat steadily, and her body no longer needed a feeding tube. But doctors could not fix the brain damage she suffered when her mother was infected with Zika during pregnancy. Alícia, now nearly 18 months old, has microcephaly, rigid muscles, seizures, and problems with vision, breathing and swallowing. Raising such a baby would challenge anyone, but Alícia’s mother, Íris Adriane do Nascimento Santos, is practically a child herself. She gave birth at 14. Nearly 450 teenagers have given birth to babies with microcephaly in Brazil’s epidemic, Health Ministry officials said. Some juggle school with caring for these infants. Some rely on their parents. “I never imagined that situation,” Íris said, braces on her teeth glinting as she struggled to quiet Alícia with one of her only successful methods, repeatedly playing a musical cartoon on her cellphone. “This feeling, this reality,” she said, voice strained. “It was devastating. ” Her pregnancy so young angered her mother, who nonetheless rushed Íris to the hospital at seven months, rather than let her lose the baby. From the beginning, Íris endured scare after scare. Once, Alícia’s heart stopped “in front of me,” she said. She cried because Alícia had “such a little head,” but doctors waited a month to tell her Alícia had microcephaly and brain calcifications, confirmed by a brain scan. When Alícia was finally discharged from the hospital, Íris sank into a deep depression, enveloped, she said, by “a feeling of rejection” toward her baby. “I did not have that ‘daughter love. ’” They moved in with Alícia’s father, Túlio Martins de Cristo, 20, in the house where his mother lived. He and his mother fed, diapered and did almost everything for Alícia. “Íris would sleep,” said her mother, Enilsa José do Nascimento, 45, a nurse technician. “And her baby would be next to her bed, crying, screaming. ” Íris didn’t even go to the hospital when, twice, Alícia stopped breathing from apnea. Íris was “unlit to life,” her mother said. Without her boyfriend and his mother, “I think her baby would have died. ” Her mother brought Íris salads and juices, urging her to eat. “You have a baby that depends on you,” she said. “Look, she is not ugly, your baby is so pretty. ” Finally, her boyfriend’s mother urged Íris to attend a meeting of the Union of Mothers of Angels (U. M. A.) a group of around 350 Zika mothers. “There were mothers in the same situation as me and even others in worse situations,” Íris marveled. Suddenly, Íris was overcome with urgency to improve Alícia’s chances. “Jeez, get up, Íris!” she told herself. “My God, I am losing time!” She told her mother: “I have to make my daughter walk. If she cannot walk, she is going to be able to see. ” Everything changed. Through rigorous exams, she had qualified for a competitive school, but she switched to a night school. She now takes Alícia to at least two therapy and doctors’ appointments daily, usually in Recife, two hours and at least two bus rides from her hometown, Paulista. She moved in with her mother and sister, who watch Alícia while Íris attends classes from 7 p. m. to 10 p. m. Afterward, she does homework, then rises when Alícia wakes, often at 4 a. m. On Alícia’s first birthday, Íris had planned visits to three clinics for vision, touch and physical therapy. They also visited Dr. Cristiane Marcela Santos, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Agamenon Magalhães Hospital. “Fifteen?” Dr. Santos exclaimed, stunned that Íris was so knowledgeable. “You are 15 years old?” Everywhere, Íris said, “I ask a lot of questions. ” In pink shorts and lavender top, Alícia’s body resembled a ’s, but her head was 36 centimeters in circumference, well below normal. Her good hearing and diminished irritability are positive developments, but other symptoms include tight muscles. To keep her hands unclenched, her fingers were splayed open with bright pink tape, which is sometimes also applied to relax her back and chin. Dr. Santos asked about Alícia’s early brain scans. “Calcification in almost all of her brain,” Íris replied. “Has she ever gotten so suffocated that she turned purple and you had to tap her back?” “It happens a lot,” Íris said. “Very serious,” Dr. Santos said. As a mother, Íris seemed “very secure and mature,” Dr. Santos said. “Life made her like this. They stop their own lives so they can live their children’s lives. ” Now just past her 16th birthday, Íris has no time for angst. “I changed my life for Alícia,” she said. “It was me for her and her for me. ” Benches were filling with Zika mothers outside the Association for the Assistance of Disabled Children in Recife when Jaqueline Vieira arrived, cradling her son Daniel, his head too small for his body, his fingers folded into fists. Blue eyeglasses were strapped to his head, and blue braces decorated with pictures of Mickey Mouse were strapped to his legs. The braces were supposed to be worn all day to fix his “ballerina feet,” Ms. Vieira knew. But the metal scratched her and made cuddling Daniel uncomfortable, so she mostly put them on for public outings. It was the kind of balancing act she’d become used to. Raising Zika babies is hard enough for families with stable marriages and incomes. But Zika has ripped some marriages apart and torn economic safety nets. Since Daniel’s birth 16 months ago, Ms. Vieira has separated from her husband, lost monthly government assistance, relinquished a job and now patches together a livelihood with other government help. On the bench that Monday, Ms. Vieira barely registered that it was her 26th birthday. Over the weekend in Olinda, their hometown up the coast from Recife, Daniel had convulsed in seizures for three hours straight, his lips purple. Ms. Vieira feared he would stop breathing, but couldn’t get to a hospital with doctors on duty from her downtrodden neighborhood at that late hour, when rats scurry on the rutted roads but no buses were running. She and the other mothers compared notes. One said she briefly couldn’t find her baby that morning, then noticed he’d rolled off the bed. “That’s good,” another said. “He moved. I wish I had a baby like that. ” Suddenly, a van appeared, transporting them to a beauty parlor for pampering paid for by a local singer. At the Velvet Salon, the air was gauzy with mist. Mothers rested their babies on settees. Ms. Vieira left Daniel with a cousin because being inside too long agitated him. She chose a manicure: “She Said Yes” as a base coat, “Kitty White” on top. A hairstylist turned her unruly dark curls straight and shiny. Gazing into a mirror, she snapped a selfie. “Look at me!” she crowed. The respite was . That afternoon, Daniel’s medicine ran out and Ms. Vieira had no money for more. Daniel’s very conception defied the odds. Ms. Vieira developed uterine cancer when her other child was a toddler. She had resisted doctors’ advice to have her uterus removed, even though they said her chances of having another child were slim. While undergoing chemotherapy, she began dating Dalton Douglas de Oliveira, five years her junior, who attended her evangelical church. They rushed marriage so their church wouldn’t learn of their premarital sex. A month after the wedding, she learned she was three months pregnant. “It was the biggest joy of my life,” she said. Her husband was excited, too. “We wanted to have our child,” he said. Still, “the belly condemned us,” he said, causing stress because what had clearly been a conception prompted the church to bar them from communion for months. Five months into pregnancy, Ms. Vieira became distraught when a doctor said that an ultrasound showed hydrocephalus, a brain, and that the baby might die, she recalled. But at seven months, another doctor disagreed, saying, “Look, your son is special, he has a small problem, but what he has is microcephaly,” Ms. Vieira said. “It was good news. ” Her relief evaporated after Daniel’s birth. “I thought it was God’s punishment because I got pregnant even though I was not supposed to,” she said. Caring for a sick child strained the couple’s relationship. Daniel cried so inconsolably that “I thought my life would end,” Ms. Vieira said. Mr. de Oliveira said his wife would not ask him for help and admitted he was too angry at her to offer. “My problem was direct with her and not with the baby,” he said. At two months, Daniel awoke laboring for breath. At the hospital, Ms. Vieira recalled, doctors suspected mold or dust at home was aggravating his lungs, and recommended improving their home’s air quality or moving. Mr. de Oliveira thought his wife, long embarrassed by their home, was exaggerating. She found another house he declined to move. Things exploded after that. Ms. Vieira gave television interviews claiming her husband “would not give attention to the boy,” she said, adding that the publicity prompted donations from abroad. He retaliated, posting a video insulting her. She began dating and told him, “You are not going to see your son,” he said. After technical disputes about child support, he stopped paying. And when he ignored her on the street, she told people he was really shunning Daniel’s illness. Ms. Vieira, a former supermarket bakery worker receiving government assistance for cancer, struggled to afford Daniel’s seizure medicine, Sabril, about 300 reais ($97) a month. To help, a group of police officers began buying it, and she and other mothers sometimes shared pills. But Daniel’s seizures worsened, seemingly weakening his ability to support his head. She made a cellphone video documenting one episode. “Do you see his little shoes shaking?” she asked. Ms. Vieira started giving Daniel more Sabril — three daily instead of the prescribed two. After his seizure crisis, she gave him four. Then she ran out. “I had this crazy feeling,” she said. “He had to take the medication, no matter how. ” She called the police officers, but they couldn’t gather enough money. She texted 319 U. M. A. members on WhatsApp. Hours passed. Nobody had extra Sabril. Desperate, she called her estranged husband at his plaster business, demanding the unpaid child support. “If I had it, I would have given it to you,” he said. Borrowing his mother’s credit card, he visited five pharmacies before finding Sabril. Ms. Vieira, in a turquoise U. M. A. that said “Microcephaly, it’s not the end,” made him pass the medicine through the window bars of her mint green, house. Soon after, the government stopped Ms. Vieira’s cancer assistance, concluding that she could work. But she felt unable to handle a job, and now collects unemployment and will apply for government Zika benefits. Mr. de Oliveira, 21, resumed paying child support, and increased the amount. Ms. Vieira now allows him to see Daniel. “I still pray to God so that he can be a healthy and perfect child,” he said. “I keep asking, keep asking, keep asking. ” The afternoon after the medication crisis, Ms. Vieira, sifting among pregnancy ultrasounds showing Daniel’s underdeveloped head, found a photo of him smiling. “I love this smile,” she said. Because of Daniel, “I am a better human being,” she said, adding that “if I had had a normal baby, I would not have given as much attention. ” She worries about being inattentive to her João Pedro. Even while walking him home from school, she carries Daniel, shielding him from sun with a turquoise umbrella. One day, João Pedro playfully covered Daniel’s face with his hand, chanting, “Are you smiling?” When Daniel didn’t respond, João Pedro scampered to a rusty playground, near weathered horses nibbling meager grass. Later, when his neurologist, Dr. Maria Durce Costa Gomes Carvalho, squeezed Daniel into her packed schedule, his rare smile was still absent. He cried and cried. “Look at this tantrum, Daniel, oh my God!” Dr. Gomes exclaimed. “He did not used to be like this,” Ms. Vieira said. Dr. Gomes asked if Daniel looked at things. “Not a lot,” Ms. Vieira said. “Even with glasses?” “No. ” Daniel’s medication was adjusted, reducing his seizures. Dr. Gomes couldn’t predict if he would walk or talk. “What matters — right, Jaqueline? — is their every achievement. ” Ms. Vieira sighed. “I cannot wait,” she said, “until he falls out of bed. ” Fluffy clouds fluttered over Maria Farinha Beach one Sunday morning and vendors traipsed through the coconut palms selling quail eggs. The sand was soft, and Ms. Vieira brushed Daniel’s hand through it, trying to awaken his sense of touch, supporting his stiff torso while his head slumped forward. Just days after the salon outing, her hair had reverted to springy curls. She looked tired. She took Daniel to the water, filled with romping children. She dipped him in the ocean, jumped him over a wave, swung him high, and dipped him again. | 1 |
A group of New York’s wealthiest residents is asking the state to raise their taxes. [Eighty people, including George Soros, Steven Rockefeller, and Abigail Disney, wrote to New York state lawmakers and Gov. Andrew Cuomo saying they and other millionaires should be taxed more to support infrastructure, schools, and programs to help the poor and homeless, the New York Daily News reported. “Now is the time to invest in the economic viability of New York,” the letter reads. “We need to invest in pathways out of poverty and up the economic ladder for all of our fellow citizens, including strong public education from to college. And, we need to invest in the fragile bridges, tunnels, waterlines, public buildings, and roads that we all depend on. ” The letter endorses a plan called the “1 Percent Tax Plan for Tax Fairness,” which would create new, higher income tax brackets for the state’s wealthiest individuals to raise a projected $2 billion. The Fiscal Policy Institute, a think tank focused on economic policy, and the Responsible Wealth project, a group of America’s wealthiest individuals who support “fair taxes and corporate accountability,” helped formulate the proposal, Ron Deutsch, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, called it “refreshing” that the state’s wealthiest were willing to pay more. The state legislature, however, is not as supportive of the proposal. While the Democratic majority in the Assembly has its own plan to raise taxes on the wealthy, the Senate does not support the idea. “Whether it’s income taxes, property taxes, business taxes, user fees or tolls, we don’t support raising taxes or asking New Yorkers to dig deeper into their pockets to pay more,” Senate leader John Flanagan ( ) said, according to the Guardian. Lawmakers are currently working out the details of the state’s budget and hope to have a deal in place by April 1. Lawmakers largely ignored a similar letter sent to them last year. | 1 |
doctors in training will now be permitted to work shifts lasting as long as 24 hours, eight hours longer than the current limit, according to a professional organization that sets work rules for graduates from medical schools in the United States. In setting the new standard, which goes into effect on July 1, officials at the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education said on Friday that they hoped to avoid confusion and disruptions in care that can result when a patient is handed off to one doctor from another whose shift is ending. The rules do not change for residents after the first year, who have been permitted to work shifts if necessary. The new rules also leave in place a requirement that all residents work no more than 80 hours a week. But the new guidelines roused the ire of critics who say that exhausted and inexperienced residents will be working too many hours to remain alert and focus on the critical decisions they make. The issue has been a focus of controversy for at least 30 years, after a patient named Libby Zion died under the care of residents in a New York hospital. “We know people can have impaired motor skills and their memory can deteriorate,” said Dr. Michael A. Carome, director of health research at Public Citizen, an advocacy group. Accreditation officials said they once believed as much, too, and had tried to protect students from working too many hours. In 2011, the council required that residents, unlike more experienced residents, work no longer than 16 hours in one stretch. The hope was that shorter shifts would improve patient care. Those hopes, the group wrote in a new report, “have not been realized. ” Instead, the council said, patient care was disrupted when residents’ shifts ended after 16 hours. residents do not have to work for 24 hours straight — their shifts can be shorter — but if needed they may be asked or may choose to continue to work for that length of time. Whether a longer shift can be better for patients, and for the training of young doctors, has been rigorously studied in two randomized trials, the accrediting council noted — one involving surgeons in training, and the other involving specialists in internal medicine. The study involving internal medicine residents is still underway, but the study of surgical residents, published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that shorter shifts had no effect on patient care. Continuity of care was also better with the longer shifts. Surgical residents in the study reported that they “strongly prefer” the option to work longer shifts, the council said. The task force held a meeting last year, about the time the randomized study was published, in which representatives of medical organizations told them what, if anything, they would like to change about the rules for residents. “Everyone agreed that the maximum was appropriate, but we heard from a large number of organizations that 16 hours was not successful,” said Dr. Rowen K. Zetterman, of the task force, referring to the maximum shifts for doctors. Such shifts have “had a significant negative impact on the professional education of the residents, and effectiveness of care delivery of the team as a whole,” the council wrote in its report, which also said that residents’ physical and mental health should be monitored carefully, as well. Dr. Anai Kothari, a surgical resident at Loyola University Medical Center who served on the task force, said he had had a maximum shift when he was a student, and much preferred the maximum for residents in subsequent years. “Most people want to be there for the patient if the patient needs them,” he said. No one, Dr. Kothari added, wants to leave in the middle of an operation. Dr. Stephen Evans, past chairman of the American Board of Surgery and chief medical officer for MedStar Health, a hospital system in the Washington area, also favored giving residents the option to work a longer shift. “If you are a pediatric resident taking care of a critically ill patient, and the child dies, do you just walk away from the family because the 16 hours are up?” he asked. Dr. Carome, however, said that if the problem is the handoff from a doctor whose shift is ending, then it is the procedure that needs fixing, not residents’ shifts and sleep. | 1 |
Videos Anti-War Movement Anticipates More War Under A Clinton Presidency ‘Clinton is one of the biggest war-mongers the country has,’ an anti-war organizer tells MintPress News as the candidate’s popularity sinks to record lows ahead of Election Day. | November 7, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, December 5, 2012.
NEW YORK — As the bizarre 2016 presidential election nears its end, activists in the United States are considering the prospects for war and peace under the next administration.
And with Hillary Clinton leading comfortably in most polls, the Democratic nominee’s militaristic record, as well as her promises to expand the use of force, are sparking concern.
“Clinton is one of the biggest war-mongers the country has,” Joe Lombardo, co-coordinator of the United National Antiwar Coalition , told MintPress News.
“She pushed for the bombing of Libya and the regime change in that country. She has supported a no-fly zone in Syria, which can put the U.S. in direct conflict with Russia.”
On the campaign trail, Clinton has repeatedly advocated a “no-fly zone” in Syria, an aggressive move necessarily accompanied by a widespread bombing campaign, similar to those in Iraq and Libya, which were followed by expanded interventions to impose regime change.
Senior U.S. military pilots have warned that the proposal could plunge the United States into direct conflict with Russia, whose air force is currently deployed over Syria.
In September, Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate that the prospect “requires us to go to war against Syria and Russia.”
‘Kill a lot of Syrians’
“It is critical that we not be confused about what Clinton’s promise of a no-fly zone will mean,” Meredith Aby of the Minneapolis-based Anti-War Committee told MintPress.
“It is an escalation of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war and it will mean an increase in casualties.”
In 2013, Clinton herself admitted in a paid speech to Goldman Sachs, obtained and released by WikiLeaks in September, that her proposal would “kill a lot of Syrians.”
“To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas,” she said.
Beyond Syria, Clinton has also threatened to attack and “totally obliterate” Iran , and she has repeatedly promised to take the United States’ ties with Israel “to the next level.”
In August, after accusing Russia and China of hacking U.S. computer systems, she warned : “We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses.”
‘A voice for war since 2002’ US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, left, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk in Jerusalem, Israel, Monday, July 16, 2012.
These statements, along with Clinton’s long, unbroken record of supporting military interventions, have anti-war activists eying the future warily.
“Many in the anti-war movement understand the dangers of a Clinton presidency,” Aby said.
“From her resume it is fairly obvious she will be a hawk, more so than President Obama and President Clinton. She has been a voice for war since 2002 when she voted for war in Iraq.”
Beyond Clinton’s explicit threats of wars, her administration may also seek to expand the use of “soft power,” ranging from diplomatic assistance and military aid to subversion and coups, in pursuit of its foreign policy goals.
“She has called for boosting U.S. support for Israeli missile defense systems and supports helping Israel with technology to fight in Gaza,” Aby said, adding: “On the campaign trail, she has denounced the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a threat to Israel. And while she hasn’t campaigned on it, she is no friend of Latin America. Her own emails show the role she played in helping provide support for the coup in Honduras.”
Lombardo also noted that regions further removed from the headlines than flashpoints like Syria could face similar threats from a Hillary Clinton administration.
“The Philippines is heating up and Clinton has a history in Latin America, where there are many places that the U.S. would like to see regime change,” he said.
‘A very unpopular president from day one’
In the waning months of the campaign, both Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, have emerged as historically unpopular candidates , more so than others in the era of scientific polling.
Indeed, while Trump’s aggression has kept his popularity below Clinton’s, she recently surpassed the bellicose billionaire as the least-liked candidate in history.
A poll released by ABC News and the Washington Post on Tuesday showed Clinton’s unpopularity had reached a record-breaking 60 percent, while Trump’s stood at 58 percent.
Despite her jingoism and promises to expand U.S. military efforts far beyond those of Barack Obama, organizers hope this public disdain may give them room to maneuver.
“Although Clinton will win the presidency, she will be a very unpopular president from day one, which will give us the political space to organize opposition to her foreign policy,” Aby said.
Lombardo agreed. “Clinton is very unpopular, and while the election of Obama put a damper on the anti-war movement, I believe we will see that turn around under Clinton.”
He also noted the growth of domestic social movements, like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, that could herald a resurgence in mobilization.
“There is a downturn in the economy, distrust of the government and the system as a whole,” Lombardo said. “The connections with the wars abroad and the wars at home is clear to more and more people. I think a movement against increased war can be explosive and powerful during a Clinton administration.”
But he added that there was much work to be done. “Although anti-war sentiment in the U.S. is high, the anti-war movement in weak compared to where it was in the past.”
‘No optimism, only apprehension’ A woman with the words “hands off” painted on her face takes part in a protest organized by the Stop the War coalition calling for no military attack on Syria from the U.S., Britain or France, across the road from the entrance of Downing Street in London, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013.
As the clock ticks down to the election, numerous organizations have launched new efforts they hope will preempt the war drive expected to start soon after Jan. 20.
Along with other groups and individual supporters, the United National Antiwar Coalition launched a “Hands Off Syria Coalition” and accompanying statement against further U.S. intervention in the war-torn country.
The effort “is getting a tremendous response,” Lombardo said.
Other organizations, including the ANSWER Coalition and International Action Center , have called for protests against the inauguration in Washington.
“There’s no optimism, only apprehension,” International Action Center co-director Sara Flounders told MintPress. “People know in their bones that a larger war is coming. From the first day of a new administration, we need to send an angry warning.”
But with the United States fatigued from a grueling election season that has left few residents with positive impressions of either candidate, widespread distrust of the political system may deny the new president the mandate he or she would need to embark on new military adventures.
“I think people are less naive now then they were eight years ago,” Aby said. “People understand that foreign policy is not an issue that truly separates the two major party candidates.” Be Sociable, Share! | 0 |
This is one of Sean’s most powerful videos. It is most definitely worth the 11 minutes it takes to listen. – G Grannum SF Source SGTreport.com Nov. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Republicans are rarely as exercised as when they are fighting with themselves. And as the House debates how to best dismantle the Affordable Care Act, a familiar array of interest groups with deep pockets, incensed talk radio hosts and online agitators is again assuming its posture of aggression toward the House Republican leadership. “Swampcare,” the writer and radio personality Erick Erickson scoffed at the new American Health Care Act, the culmination of seven years of promises to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement. “Obamacare 2. 0,” declared Breitbart. com. “RINOCARE,” Mark Levin wrote on Twitter, using the acronym for Republican in Name Only. Political groups backed by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch and other powerful players on the right, such as Club for Growth and Heritage Action for America, have come out quickly and strongly against the bill. Some have threatened to punish lawmakers by docking their conservative ratings on the influential “scorecards” they distribute to voters. Activists are already swarming Capitol Hill and demanding that Congress take a harder line and pass a repeal measure that would leave no trace of the Affordable Care Act. “I feel lied to,” said Anna Beavon Gravely, the deputy state director of the North Carolina chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a group that is funding a push against Republicans in Congress who want to stop short of an outright repeal. “We trusted you because you said you were going to do something about this. And this is not it. Not even close,” she added as she prepared to set out for the offices of North Carolina lawmakers with other activists from her state. The displeasure is forcing an uncomfortable reckoning in the Republican Party much earlier and in a much more disruptive way than many think is constructive. And it has many conservatives asking why — now that they control both houses of Congress and the White House and have remained largely united so far — they are picking a fight with each other. The criticism from the right has grown so harsh that President Trump asked leaders of several conservative groups in an Oval Office meeting on Wednesday to tone it down. He was especially troubled, one participant said, by the comparisons of the plan to “Obamacare lite,” which he said was inaccurate and harmful to their shared cause of gutting the current law. One senior White House official described the meeting as “tough. ” Referring to the president, the official said: “He listened. They vented. ” After the meeting, the White House appeared more confident about the prospects in the House for the health care overhaul. In a meeting with conservative leaders in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he anticipated the most trouble in the Senate, where Republican moderates and conservatives are opposing the plan for different reasons. He said he was prepared to pressure holdout senators by having the kind of rallies he had during his presidential campaign. Unified government was supposed to eliminate some of the infighting that plagued the Republicans during the Obama years, when the party’s right flank brought down a House speaker, defeated a House majority leader and blocked another majority leader’s ascent. Instead, it is underlining the difficulties of running Washington now that their party bears full responsibility. “For a while, it did seem like Trump’s victory had transcended the old political battles,” said Matt Lewis, a conservative author, who added that the fighting was doubly odd because the repeal was not an issue central to Mr. Trump’s and campaign. “This is not why people elected Donald Trump. And yet here we are. ” As they find themselves sudden targets of a and opposition from within, some Republicans are beginning to question whether the squabbling is ultimately . And their doubts raise a new question for this Republican faction that has been mocked as the “Party of No”: Can they ever get to yes? “I fully respect people on the outside — who don’t have to take a vote or produce an outcome — who strive for perfect,” said Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the Republicans who found activists in their offices this week. Perfect, he said, is never as attainable as people think. “But we’re going to get good here. ” Stopping health care has been a cause unifying conservatives since Mr. Obama began talking about it as a presidential candidate nine years ago. Perhaps no other issue created as much energy among conservative voters, helping Republicans make historic gains in Congress as they railed against the law as an egregious government overreaching into a vast part of the economy. But differences over how exactly to unravel the Affordable Care Act have long divided Republicans, even when the stakes were low and they knew that whatever they passed in Congress would be vetoed by Mr. Obama. In 2013, differences within the Republican Party over defunding it led to a government shutdown. Back then, the fault lines in the debate were largely the same: conservatives butting up against the party leadership, which they accused of not acting aggressively enough. But as much as the squabbling seems the same, there is one crucial difference: They are firing with real bullets now. “We’re on the hook this time,” said Representative Dave Brat, Republican of Virginia, who is part of the group of conservatives pushing for an outright repeal. “This one counts. ” That they are firing some of those bullets at one another seems to be less of a concern the more conservative you are. Representative Raul Labrador of Idaho, an opponent of the House bill who along with Mr. Brat is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, the driving force on Capitol Hill behind the resistance, said that any Republicans who will not vote to fully repeal the law will not be keeping a promise they made to voters. “And they can go back to their districts and explain to the American people why they lied,” he said. Conservatives see many of the same problems in the Republican leadership plan today that bothered them about the Democrats’ 2010 health care bill: It extends a subsidy to help individuals buy insurance though it revokes the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that nearly all Americans have insurance, it replaces the mandate with a new penalty if a consumer buys insurance after letting coverage lapse it was negotiated largely without consulting the rank and file and, they insist, its benefits could go toward people who should not receive them, like undocumented immigrants. Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, echoed a concern that many conservative activists have voiced about not being briefed or consulted on the plan. “It goes a long way when you hear people out,” he said. “And there are a lot of natural allies that this caught by surprise as much as it did Democrats. ” The unhappiness on the right could be especially worrisome for Speaker Paul D. Ryan, whose status as a favorite target of the conservative base seemed to fade in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election. Now, many conservatives appear willing to reopen the wounds of old leadership fights. Some of them have already taken to mocking the repeal plan with what they consider to be the most damning of pejoratives — not “Trumpcare,” as Democrats call it, but “Ryancare. ” | 1 |
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