text
stringlengths 1
134k
| label
int64 0
1
|
|---|---|
Bruce Springsteen blasts President Donald Trump as a “con man” and calls his administration “crooks” in a new protest song released this week. [“That’s What Makes Us Great” is a joint effort between The Boss and frequent collaborator Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers. “Don’t tell me a And sell it as a I’ve been down that road And I ain’t going back,” Springsteen sings on the track, which was released Wednesday morning on Grushecky’s website. “Don’t you brag to That you never read a I never put my In a con man and his crooks,” the song continues. Grushecky — whose 1995 album American Babylon was produced by Springsteen — told the Pittsburgh that he’d written the song before the Boss got involved. Springsteen reportedly sent his part to the musician over the Internet. “I had this song, and Bruce and I had been talking. I sent it to him and he liked it,” Grushecky told the paper. “I said, ‘What do you think about singing on it?’ He gave it the Bruce treatment. ” Springsteen was vocal supporter of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and a fierce critic of Trump during the 2016 campaign. In September, the E Street Band leader called Trump a “moron” in an interview with Rolling Stone. “The republic is under siege by a moron, basically. The whole thing is tragic,” he said. “Without overstating it, it’s a tragedy for our democracy. When you start talking about elections being rigged, you’re pushing people beyond democratic governance. And it’s a very, very dangerous thing to do. ” On the eve of the election, Springsteen performed at a campaign rally for Clinton in Philadelphia, where he predicted Trump and his campaign were “going down. ” “Let’s all do our part so that we can look back on 2016 and say, ‘We stood with Hillary Clinton on the right side of history,’” he said then. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
On Twitter Tuesday morning, Donald J. Trump was the firebrand many of his supporters adore, denouncing The New York Times as a “failing” institution that covered him inaccurately — “and with a nasty tone!” Eight hours later, after a lunchtime interview with editors and reporters for The Times — one that was briefly canceled, after Mr. Trump quarreled over the ground rules, then restored — the mood of the it seemed, had mellowed. “The Times is a great, great American jewel,” Mr. Trump declared as he prepared to leave the gathering in the newspaper’s boardroom, where portraits of former presidents adorn the walls. “A world jewel,” added Mr. Trump, who was seated next to Arthur Sulzberger Jr. the paper’s publisher. “And I hope we can all get along. ” In an extraordinary meeting — parrying, debating and, at times, joking with the leaders of a publication that has long been an object of Mr. Trump’s fascination and frustration — the ’s chameleonlike approach to the news media was on full display. Mr. Trump is inclined to label himself aggrieved and betrayed by a “dishonest” news media, barring some reporters from his rallies and claiming that news outlets were trying to rig the election. Only a day earlier, Mr. Trump assailed the nation’s most prominent television news anchors and producers in a tense meeting at Trump Tower. But the who arrived at The Times on Tuesday was more solicitous and measured, a handshaking businessman intent on finding common ground. He dismissed his earlier talk of strengthening libel laws, telling the assembled journalists, “I think you’ll be O. K. ” He expressed interest in improving his relationship with the paper, saying, “I think it would make the job I am doing much easier. ” “To me,” Mr. Trump said at one point, “it would be a great achievement if I could come back here in a year or two, and have a lot of folks here say, ‘You’ve done a great job. ’” Since his younger days as a Manhattan arriviste, Mr. Trump has cultivated a talent for both courting and condemning the press — sometimes in the same breath. The gossip columnist Liz Smith recalled Mr. Trump once threatening to buy her newspaper — “in order to have the pleasure of firing me” — before warmly inviting her to his wedding. It was clear on Tuesday, however, that any new conciliatory approach toward the news media would have its limits. “I think I’ve been treated very rough,” Mr. Trump said, as he spent the first several minutes of the session criticizing The Times’s coverage. “I’ve been treated extremely unfairly, in a sense, in a true sense. ” “I will say The Times is about the roughest of all,” Mr. Trump said. Then, referring to his relationship with the paper, he added: “I would like to turn it around. I think it would make the job I am doing much easier. ” The had sounded less gracious Tuesday morning when he abruptly called off his meeting at The Times in a Twitter post, contending that the paper had changed its terms for how the conversation could be reported. A Times spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, said the paper had made no such changes, and said that Mr. Trump’s team requested on Monday that the meeting be off the record — a request The Times declined. Three people with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s deliberations said that Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, had tried to scuttle the meeting at The Times by telling Mr. Trump, erroneously, that the newspaper was shifting its terms. Mr. Priebus had been among those urging the to cancel his interview because he could face questions he might not be prepared to answer, these people said. (A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment on Mr. Priebus’s role.) By midmorning, the meeting was back on, with both sides confirming that Mr. Trump and members of his staff would attend. The meeting coincided with the paper’s annual State of The Times address as the publisher and top executives presented the company’s strategy, Secret Service agents patrolled The Times’s lobby, which filled with people, including a throng of photographers, in anticipation of Mr. Trump’s arrival. Before the lunch, Mr. Trump met privately for about 15 minutes with Mr. Sulzberger, a meeting that Ms. Murphy described as short and cordial. At lunch — where salmon, beef tenderloin and squash were on the menu, although the and many of the journalists did not eat — Mr. Trump seemed unconcerned about criticism of Breitbart News, the conservative website that embraced his candidacy and whose former chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, is now his chief strategist. Breitbart, which features articles about violent migrants in Europe, has warned of a wave of “ crime,” and has been denounced as racist, and xenophobic. Mr. Trump called it “just a newspaper, essentially. ” Pressed about the concerns of Jewish groups and others about Breitbart’s coverage under Mr. Bannon, Mr. Trump seemed to sidestep the question. “Breitbart really is a news organization that has become quite successful,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s got readers, and it does cover subjects on the right, but it covers subjects on the left also. It’s a pretty big thing. ” The final question of the lunch carried implications for every news outlet that plans to cover the administration of a man who has boasted that he would change laws to make it easier for Americans to sue for libel: Is a President Trump committed to the First Amendment? “Oh, I was hoping he wasn’t going to ask that,” Mr. Trump replied with a smile. “Actually,” the added, “somebody said to me on that, they said, ‘You know, it’s a great idea softening up those laws, but you may get sued a lot more.’ I said, ‘You know, you’re right, I never thought of that. ’” “I think you’ll be O. K.,” Mr. Trump added, suggesting that he would not modify libel laws, although he did not offer a definitive stance one way or the other. By Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump had not yet posted on Twitter his opinion of how things went at The Times. But during the lunch, he made a confession: He remains a regular reader. “I do read it — unfortunately,” the said. “I’d live about 20 years longer if I didn’t. ” | 1 |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos — and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. You can listen to this playlist on Spotify here. Like this Playlist? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes. com, and sign up for our Louder newsletter (coming soon!) here. Pop minimalism inhabits a sliding scale, as the xx seem determined to illustrate. “On Hold” is the lead single from its third album, “I See You,” set for release in January. It opens in churchly quiet, with Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim exchanging rueful intimacies about the end of a love affair. “When and where did we go cold?” moans Mr. Sim. “I thought I had you on hold. ” None of this is a stretch. But then the texture of the track opens up: an beat burbles up, a bass line kicks in, and wait, is that a digitally manipulated sample of Hall and Oates? (Why yes, of course.) Jamie xx has been working in this vein as a D. J. and solo artist, and it’s promising to consider what it could mean for the group as it moves ahead. NATE CHINEN “Boy you shoulda got me you shoulda held the door”: exasperation is perhaps Bibi Bourelly’s peak mode, and it is bracing on the seething “Flowers,” from her new EP “Free the Real (Pt. #2). ” Ms. Bourelly, who has written songs for Rihanna and is still coming into her own as performer, can be unsteady — not in a performed way, but in the manner of someone who knows her destiny is to drive a beautiful tank but is still learning how to finesse the gears. Or maybe she never will: On “Perfect,” a duet with the Earl St. Clair, she dismantles regressive standards of beauty and : JON CARAMANICA One of the most formally ambitious, eerily pertinent albums to emerge in recent weeks was “Real Enemies,” by the ultramodern big band known as Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society. An adaptation of a multimedia piece presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year, it traffics brilliantly in the syntax of American conspiracy theories, drawing from historical episodes, speculative fiction and the political writing of Richard Hofstadter and others. Depending on your state of mind this week, it could be just what you need to hear or precisely the opposite either way, it’s sure to strike a chord. And while the piece is meant to be digested whole, it’s possible to find meaning in a single track — like “Apocalypse Is a Process,” which begins with a disquieting stir of flutes and woodwinds, and then features a fine tenor saxophone solo by Sam Sadigursky, along with a sampled voice making a remark both urgent and cryptic: “We can’t wait any longer. ” N. C. Look, maybe you just want to watch Shia LaBeouf freestyle for four minutes in which he boasts about replacing Tom Hanks, calls himself “Jewish ’Pac to this music with a twist of Whitman,” takes shots at Lil Yachty and announces, “Truth is, I’m a true white kid with B. I. G. in a Coogi tatted to me. ” And, hey, no judgment — comedy heals. J. C. Because what the world needs now is a gleaming track from Giorgio Moroder. Because the vocal performance, by Karen Harding, is soulful and sure. Because there’s something touchingly upbeat about the main hook in the chorus: “Sometimes it feels like you’re too good for me. ” N. C. “Haven’t seen my ex since we broke ‘cause he didn’t want to grow up,” Rena Lovelis, the lead singer of Hey Violet, sings at the top of the sinister single “Guys My Age. ” But then comes the twist: “Now I’m out here wearing something get attention from a . ” For the last couple of years, pop by young women has been tacking toward resistance — to gender norms, to the male gaze, to entrenched sexism. “Guys My Age” stands on the shoulders of those songs, embracing their mood, their musical approach — groaning, gloomy synthesized pop — and puts it in service of sexual authority, a whole different way of dismissing ignorance. J. C. The personal and the universal were already partly entwined on “Love Me Now,” the current single by John Legend. It’s a pledge of loving devotion, his specialty, that brushes against larger uncertainties. “I don’t know who’s gonna kiss you when I’m gone,” he sings in the chorus. “So I’m gonna love you now, like it’s all I have. ” Gone where? He doesn’t say exactly, but the tension in the song has to do with forces outside his control. Now a video for the song, directed by Nabil Elderkin, amplifies the idea: There’s Mr. Legend on a couch, singing to his wife, Chrissy Teigen, and their young daughter. But there, too, are couples against more troubled backdrops, like the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and a refugee camp in northern Iraq. The core message — love is universal, and all the more crucial in a difficult time — seems likely to resonate elsewhere on Mr. Legend’s next album, “Darkness and Light,” due on Dec. 2. N. C. Here is something offhandedly great: a club recording from Mike Watt’s first solo tour, in 1995. Mr. Watt, the punk workhorse and former bassist in the Minutemen, was working with material from “ or tugboat?” — his debut album, crowded with cameos from the postpunk and scenes. The tour recreated those conditions, mainly putting him in an power trio with Eddie Vedder on guitar and Dave Grohl on drums. (Mr. Grohl, then recently of Nirvana, had brought his new band, the Foo Fighters, on tour as an opening act Mr. Vedder, best known as Pearl Jam’s frontman, was there with another opener, Hovercraft.) The set has a looseness that squares well with its low center of gravity it’s satisfying just to hear Mr. Grohl and Mr. Watt lock into a heavy groove. But there’s also a quality to these songs, which valorize underground notions of integrity. Consider “Against the ’70s,” with an impassioned guest vocal by Mr. Vedder: “Baby boomers, selling you rumors of their history,” he sings. “Forcing youth away from the truth of what’s real today. ” N. C. In its original incarnation, on the most recent Coldplay album, “Everglow” is a piano ballad tastefully padded with sonic accouterments: electric bass, pealing guitars, stark and unobtrusive drums. The song has now been further pruned, to something resembling an unplugged solo performance by Chris Martin, on piano and vocals. Still, it wouldn’t be a Coldplay single without some earnest flicker of grandiosity, so here too is Muhammad Ali, talking in 1977. “We need somebody in the world to help us all make peace,” he says, referring to the example he hopes to set for himself. N. C. Julian Lage is a guitarist with spring in his step, the sort of improvising musician who radiates ease and good feeling even on tricky terrain. And he’s in emblematic form on “Live in Los Angeles,” a digital album now on iTunes and Apple Music. Recorded in June at the Blue Whale, it features Mr. Lage’s trio with Scott Colley on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums — the same players heard on “Arclight,” a studio album released this spring. Rather than an acoustic or guitar, Mr. Lage works in this trio with a Telecaster, which brings more grit and bite to his sound. His playing on “Nocturne,” a country waltz, puts him in roughly the same county as Bill Frisell, but with a touch and temperament entirely his own. N. C. | 1 |
RBTH Daily , syria , aviation , missiles Ka-52K attack helicopters. Source: Yuri Smityuk / TASS
Ka-52K attack helicopters deployed on the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier will test-fire test the latest Hermes extreme-range anti-tank guided missiles for the first time in Syria in the battle with Islamic State, the daily newspaper Izvestiya has reported .
"Tests in a combat environment will help finalize the missile system, which should become a standard weapon for Russia's Alligator military helicopters," the newspaper said, citing a source in the Russian military-industrial complex. "It was decided to test the Hermes in more difficult, shipborne air operations." What is the Hermes and what is it for?
According to Izvestiya, owing to the new weapon, the Ka-52K will be able to destroy enemy tanks, fortifications and manpower at a distance of 30 km (20 miles). The range of similar Russian and foreign systems (Ataka, Vikhr, Hellfire, and others) is less than 10 km.
According to Viktor Litovkin, a retired colonel and military expert for the TASS news agency, the Hermes will be used to attack well-protected militant targets – arms and IED production facilities as well as command posts and temporary firing points.
"Based on its combat use, it will be decided whether to send the system back for revision or to adopt it," said Litovkin. Features of the Hermes
As experts interviewed by RBTH noted, the missile's key feature is the ability to track and destroy over-the-horizon targets. Due to its infrared homing and laser guidance capabilities, it can hit enemy armored vehicles autonomously, even if they are out of sight of the helicopter crew.
"Similar tactical tasks can be performed by Israel's Spike-NLOS system, which is mounted on a wheeled chassis. However, Russia's Hermes can be deployed on ground tracked vehicles as well as on helicopters and ships. Ours is more universal," a source in the Russian Defense Ministry said in an interview with RBTH. Defense Minister: Russian arms pass Syria test, but there are problems
According to the source, the official data on the missile will be provided after its adoption.
"Now we can only say that its range is much greater than that of foreign anti-tank systems, the farthest of which hits targets 10 km away," said the RBTH source.
He added that the missile can be equipped with either a cumulative or high-explosive warhead. The shipborne Ka-52
The Ka-52 Katran attack helicopters were created for the French Mistral-class amphibious assault ships.
However, according to Vadim Kozyulina, a professor of the Academy of Military Science, Francois Hollande had to terminate the contract for the supply of the ships to Russia under pressure from NATO allies. Eventually, the Mistrals were acquired by Egypt, and immediately thereafter Cairo purchased a batch of 50 Russian Katrans from Moscow.
It was decided to deploy the remaining helicopters on the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, and they will have their "baptism of fire" at the end of the year.
As Kozyulina noted, the "ground" version of the Ka-52 has proved to be successful in the Syrian campaign. The new machines will also have to demonstrate their combat potential to future buyers.
Video by YouTube
The helicopters can use P-73 and Igla-V air-to-air missiles, unguided air-to-surface missiles and Hermes anti-tank guided missiles. Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook | 0 |
Next Swipe left/right 10 tips to improve your life #117
Together with Twop Twips we present you with another ten totally useless tips to help you live your life to the full.
1. | 0 |
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 21:10 UTC © Jonathan Ernst / Reuters The Kingdom of Bahrain's authoritarian ruler King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa visited British Prime Minister Theresa May at Downing Street on Wednesday, despite outcry from human rights and anti-arms trade groups. The Gulf regime is a close ally of both the UK and Saudi Arabia, as well as being a major UK arms customer, and is currently bearing much of the cost for building the Royal Navy's new Mina Salman naval base. Human rights groups have highlighted widespread abuses committed by Bahraini government forces against pro-democracy activists during the 2011 Arab Spring. The king's visit was met with protests by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, and Campaign against the Arms Trade (CAAT) on Wednesday afternoon. Two activists were escorted away by police. Already in 2016, senior British Royals, who are known for their closeness to the Gulf monarchies, have been criticized for meeting the Bahraini monarchy both in the UK and during trips to the nation. The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall will soon visit Bahrain on behalf of the UK government, despite long-standing concerns over human rights abuses and UK arms sales. In April, a report for the Foreign Affairs Select Committee blasted Bahrain's record on human rights abuses, not least during the violent crushing of Arab Spring protests with the direct support of another controversial UK ally, Saudi Arabia. The report also argued that human rights had effectively been downgraded by the UK government in a bid to shore up relations with the authoritarian state, which enjoys arms trading and security arrangements with Britain. A broad campaign is currently underway, including MPs, to put a halt to UK arms sales to the Saudi regime in light of repeated reports of war crimes in its UK-assisted aerial bombing campaign in Yemen. Comment: More on UK's close relationship with Bahrain: | 0 |
SAN FRANCISCO — As soon as President Trump signed his executive order on immigration, some of the biggest tech companies went quiet. Their executives did not sign legal briefs, brandish statements or dissent on Twitter. They strove for business as usual. This was the older, stodgier, less glamorous part of the tech universe. These executives are generally not household names. Most of the companies have little presence in the excitable consumer marketplace. Some are government contractors. Their workers tend to be more settled, less tempted by cool . Despite the companies’ sizable employment, the spotlight is not on them. Among these firms are IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Qualcomm, Cisco, Dell and Oracle. When 127 companies signed an amicus brief last week in a Seattle court that said the executive order “violates the immigration laws and the Constitution,” none of these six firms were on the list. Yet even at some of these companies, there are stirrings of defiance. In a few cases, workers have noisily quit. Many more have chosen to remain but are agitating for an explicit corporate morality even as Mr. Trump considers a new executive order on immigration. They want their companies to make clear not only what they support but also, perhaps even more important, what lines they will not cross. The activist push is being driven in significant measure by women, who are still fighting for their due in a industry. But in an unlikely twist, the chief executives they are trying to influence at two major companies are female. At IBM, a petition has been circulating that proclaims, “We have a moral and business imperative to uphold the pillars of a free society by declining any projects which undermine liberty. ” The organizers say nearly 1, 000 verified employees have signed. This is a delicate subject for big tech companies, none more than Big Blue. Mr. Trump during the campaign explored the idea of a Muslim database, although his remarks were inconclusive. IBM’s technology, as detailed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was used by the Nazis in 1939 to do a census. That data, in turn, led directly to Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish Registry. At Oracle, the Silicon Valley database giant whose first customer was the Central Intelligence Agency, three young women — none of whom has worked there for more than a handful of months — started a petition last week to encourage the company to join the amicus brief. Hundreds of Oracle employees have signed it. “In some instances it is notable for a company to take a stand on an issue,” said one of the women, Irene Scher, a regional vice president of sales. “In this case, it’s notable not to have taken a stand. ” A executive of Oracle, Safra Catz, and the chief executive of IBM, Virginia Rometty, became advisers to Mr. Trump during the transition. “I know that you are committed to help America’s economy grow in ways that are good for all its people,” Ms. Rometty wrote to him in November. Ms. Catz said in December, “We are with him and will help in any way we can. ” The three friends who created the Oracle petition joined the company in August, when it acquired the company they worked for, Opower. They emphasize they are not at odds with their employer. “This isn’t a criticism of Oracle,” said one of them, Rachel Kane, a sales executive at Oracle Utilities. “We’re giving them visibility into how individuals at the company feel. ” Oracle declined to comment. Both petitions echo the Never Again pledge, which nearly 3, 000 tech workers publicly committed to during eight days in December. Signers agreed not to participate in the creation of any government database that would target individuals based on race, religion or national origin. Five of the nine people listed on NeverAgain. tech as having worked to create the pledge, including the lead organizer, are women. Cauvery Patel, a corporate strategy associate at IBM, said she believed “workplaces have a responsibility to society — to the clients we serve, the employees we hire and the citizens who are impacted by our decisions. ” She said IBM had been “progressive” in encouraging women’s participation in technology and on other issues, but had not delivered on the immigration ban. “IBM’s decision not to actively stand up to the Trump administration and condemn this policy is extremely disturbing,” she said. At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, employees have been asking why it did not sign the amicus brief. Meg Whitman, the chief executive, responded Friday that “simply, we were not contacted to participate. ” She indicated the company would be taking a more assertive role: “You can expect to see us add our voice. ” Dell and Cisco declined to comment. Qualcomm did not respond to a request for comment. The internal debate at some of the big tech companies revolves around the question of engagement: Can you persuade more from the inside than the outside? The position has been expressed by Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and a member of the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum. In a handful of cases, people have said they are canceling new Teslas because they view him as working for the president. “Activists should be pushing for more moderates to advise President, not fewer,” Mr. Musk responded on Twitter. “How could having only extremists advise him possibly be good?” Mr. Musk said he had made sure that the travel ban was discussed “first and foremost” at a Feb. 3 White House meeting. A spokeswoman said no further details were available. The answer did not satisfy everyone. As one critic replied to Mr. Musk on Twitter: “You are not advising Trump, you are giving him cover and validating his nonsense. You can do more good by taking a stand. Please. ” IBM released a statement that said Ms. Rometty had “conveyed the company’s views directly to the president and the secretary of Homeland Security” on Feb. 3, “including suggestions for how technology can help to promote both national security and lawful immigration. ” Ed Barbini, vice president for corporate communications at IBM, said no further details were available. He noted that the company said in December that it would never participate in the building of a Muslim registry. He declined to comment on the petition. When a small group of IBM employees was drawing up the petition in November, it debated including a reference to the Nazis. IBM maintains that the accounts of its role in Hitler’s regime are overblown and incendiary. The employees decided to refer to the episode obliquely but focus on a more positive example — the company president Thomas J. Watson Jr. ’s Policy Letter No. 4, which resisted policies in the South in the 1950s. “Watson sacrificed business interests in order to be on the right side of history, something IBM takes pride in today,” the petition says. Daniel Hanley, one of the organizers, said the goal was “to build an organization inside the company that can hold IBM accountable to our values, and serve as a model for tech workers at other companies. ” George A. Polisner, who worked in cloud services at Oracle, took his stand in December. He posted a resignation letter on LinkedIn, saying that unlike Ms. Catz, he was not there to “help” Mr. Trump. “When his policies border on the unconstitutional, the criminal and the morally unjust,” he wrote, “I am here to oppose him in every possible and legal way. ” That was on a Monday. Mr. Polisner told his boss that he would work through Friday. After the letter became public, Mr. Polisner was fired immediately. At 56, he said, he probably would have worked at Oracle for a few more years if politics had not intervened. “There are different ways to influence,” Mr. Polisner said. “It’s a personal decision. I chose this one. ” Ms. Scher at Oracle and her friends chose another. “We all participated in the Women’s March,” she said. “I think it’s possible we’re feeling a heightened sense of civic responsibility. ” | 1 |
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/weinergate/
The name given to the latest Clinton Crime Family brouhaha by a Baltimore radio talk show host. 6:46 am on October 31, 2016 | 0 |
For the past 25 years — since the divorce — I’ve lived a good part of my life in diners. Without them I might be slimmer, but also crazier and more unhappy. Judging by the crowds at the Metro Diner, on 100th Street and Broadway, my current haunt, I suspect that other New Yorkers feel the same way. To say that the Metro has become my second home would be too vague and sentimental. Better to use the sociological term “the third place” (home and work being the first two) or to quote Robert Frost, the place “where, when you have to go They have to take you in. ” American coffee shops, like English pubs, Viennese coffee houses and Greek kaffenions, tend to engender klatches, informal clubs. At the old Key West Diner on 94th Street and Broadway, now known as the Manhattan Diner, the laughter of the comedian Anne Meara and her friends used to fill the room. And where would the sitcom classic “Seinfeld,” the idea of which was conceived in a coffee shop, have been without the regular scenes at Monk’s Café? The best days of the New York City diner, however, appear to be over. Among the 2016 casualties were the Lyric Diner in Gramercy and the Del Rio in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, while La Parisienne near Columbus Circle and the Market Diner in Hell’s Kitchen closed in 2015. Then there was Cafe Edison, a coffee shop that shut in 2014 to much sadness in the Broadway community. Manhattan has certainly seen more diner closings than other boroughs. That said, with rising costs in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, classic diners like the Neptune and Bel Aire, both in Astoria, Queens, could soon be under threat. In Downtown Brooklyn, the building that has housed the original Junior’s Restaurant since 1950 was almost sold. But after considering several offers, the owner Alan Rosen decided that the community still needed cheesecake more than luxury . Urban renewal, astronomical rents, changing eating habits and the preponderance of coffee places like Starbucks have all contributed to the demise of the New York diner. There are roughly half as many as there were 20 years ago, according to records from the health department. Losing New York diner culture would probably be a watershed in the city’s history. How will New Yorkers get along without these antidotes to urban loneliness? “The coffee shop orients us here, in this city and not another,” Jeremiah Moss, of the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, said. “If we are regulars, we become known, connected, to a network of people who remain over the span of years, even decades. In the anonymous city, these ties can be lifesavers, especially for the elderly, the poor, the marginal, but also for all of us. Without them, the city becomes evermore fragmented, disorienting and unrecognizable. ” The Metro is a treasure trove of local history. It is in one of the few buildings left in Manhattan. Built by the grocer Henry Grimm in 1871, it was bought in 1894 by the brewer Peter Doelger. He turned the ground floor into a restaurant and saloon, with families entering through the back while gentlemen drank beer in the front. (Around the same time, Mr. Doelger’s cousin Matilda married a prizefighter, John West, whose daughter Mae — yes, the Mae West — may have picked up some of her unconventional performance style from hanging around the Doelger bar.) Over the course of its existence, the Grimm building also housed a milliner’s shop, a tearoom and, in the 1950s, the rehearsal studio and offices of the Living Theater. The sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in “The Great Good Place,” a book about diners and taverns, suggests that the past is an essential element of all third places, which are usually in older sections of cities, and in those areas “exists the fading image of the city itself and the kind of human interaction, the easy and interesting mixing of strangers that made the city what it was. ” But not only what it was. One of the charms of the Metro, and of many other diners in the city, is that the employees’ backgrounds are as varied as the languages spoken by the tourists who have found their way here. Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico, Poland, Romania — these are just a few of the countries where staff members come from. Together they constitute a microcosm of the immigrant groups that continue to arrive in New York — who not only made the city what it was, but the best of what it is and could be. My first diner nesting place was Harvey’s Coffee Shop on 78th and Broadway, in Manhattan, where I would order matzo ball soup and a Coke after seeing my therapist across the street. Harvey was known for his Puerto Rican countermen and for serving deliciously seasoned chopped meat on white bread. After Harvey’s closed, I moved to the Utopia on 73rd and Amsterdam, a venerable place with a low ceiling, murals and waiters who seemed to never age. As my thighs outgrew the narrow booths, I moved to the Central Park at 97th and Columbus. In the 1990s, the Cafe replaced Mikell’s, a beloved jazz and club. This was the liveliest of my hangouts. Every morning a group of retired men in baseball caps, along with a spirited Jayne Mansfield heckled one another and batted sports statistics back and forth for hours. The music of their banter was pure Bach counterpoint. After the Cafe succumbed in 2005, I spent months looking for my next “third place. ” Diner regulars can be particular. The ambience has to be friendly but not intrusive, the sound level low but not funereal, the smell a little greasy but not cloying, and the décor more utilitarian than fussy. I eventually settled in at the Metro. Among diners, the Metro is quietly sophisticated. The décor is Art Deco, the booths spacious. There is a generous, though tasteful, use of diner decorator staples like vinyl, Formica and chrome. Politicians, including former Gov. David A. Paterson of New York and the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, have been spotted in the booths. The hostess, Jenny Bello, wears outfits that could rival the wardrobe collection from studios in the 1950s. Fanis Tsiamtsiouris, known as Frank, and Fotios Hilas own the Metro along with three other diners. They calculated that the Metro poured about 700 cups of coffee, made 150 hamburgers and used over 1, 200 eggs every day. The place opened in 1989, when Mr. Tsiamtsiouris consolidated five stores, among them a kosher butcher, a copy store and a restaurant. Though diners are sometimes bought by other enterprising immigrants, many of the surviving ones are still owned by . Historians differ on how and when Greek immigrants got into the business, but they agree that a growth spurt occurred right after World War II. Their story is a classic American one that combines entrepreneurs putting in long hours, families helping one another and informal associations creating a safety net of connections. “When my family came over in 1967, we had an $8, 000 debt to pay, so we all went to work,” Mr. Tsiamtsiouris said. “So first I was a cleanup guy, then busboy, then a waiter, then a manager. ” He had one uncle in the business when he started out, he recalled, and he met many other owners through Pan Gregorian, a food industry cooperative. In the back of the Metro’s long room, the area is set up with small tables for regulars like me who linger over breakfast. Rosa and Dumitra, Diana and John, and Enid and Fabiano know what we’re going to order, but pretend to let us decide. For years the unofficial queen of the Metro was Batyah Hyman, also known as Betty, a beautiful, Swedish and South African woman who sat at the head of the room. I don’t remember how we drifted into conversation — probably a political issue that we disagreed about. Somehow we sensed that we could be friends, or at least “affiliated,” the way Mr. Oldenburg, the sociologist, described friendship among regulars at a place like the Metro. She lives around the corner, but Ms. Hyman no longer eats breakfast at the Metro. She drops by from time to time, and the waitress Rosa Soto babysits her grandchildren. Nobody has dared to claim her table. A few years ago, one of my oldest friends, the political scientist and philosopher Marshall Berman, died in the Metro. An eloquent writer about New York neighborhoods, I think he would have appreciated his heart’s choice of where to expire. | 1 |
Comedian and talk show host Steve Harvey pushed back against critics he says attacked him for meeting and agreeing to work with Donald Trump’s administration. [“On a personal note, a lot of ya’ll hurt me. You really did. I didn’t expect the backlash to be so fierce,” Harvey told his radio audience Monday. “Change can only happen when we sit at the table. If we sit at the table, then we can have a say as to what’s to be eaten on the menu,” Harvey said defending his decision to work with Trump. “I have an obligation to take a seat at the table when invited. ” Harvey met with Donald Trump on Friday at Trump Tower in Manhattan, telling reporters, “I stepped from behind my microphone and I came and talked to the guy who is going to be the 45th president. ” The Family Feud host said he found Trump “both congenial and sincere,” and announced plans to partner with Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development nominee Dr. Ben Carson on restoring America’s inner cities. But not everyone was supportive of Harvey’s efforts to join forces with the incoming administration. Morehouse College professor and CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill said Harvey and other “mediocre negroes being dragged in front of TV as a ” are allowing themselves to be “being used by folk like Donald Trump. ” “Again, his intention is just to have a seat at the table. But when you’re at the table, you should have experts at the table,” Hill added. “You should have people who can challenge the president at the table. ” Harvey, however, said Monday “If I’m going to keep getting stabbed at, then at least while you’re stabbing me, you should understand my intent for taking the meeting in the first place. ” “When I walked away, [I was] feeling like there might be a real chance for some positive to come out of what so many people think is all gloom and doom,” he said. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson | 1 |
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 13:01 UTC Arsen Pavlov, or Motorola, was the leader of the Sparta battalion in the war for Donbass. The people of Novorossiya (aka the Donbass) have suffered a terrible loss. Arsen Pavlov better known to the world as Motorola was assassinated in a brutal terrorist bombing on October 16, 2016. He was a beloved commander and a hero to the people of the Donbass, to Russia, and to people all over the world who oppose the fascist junta in Ukraine and US imperialism. The murder was no doubt ordered by the empire in revenge for Russia's intervention in Syria which one year later appears to have decisively shifted the war. On every front the SAA are making advances and winning new victories especially in the battle to fully liberate Aleppo from NATO's terrorist death squads. Thankfully after the treacherous bombing at Deir Ezzor Russia was in no mood to give into the empty threats of full scale nuclear war the empire claimed it was prepared to launch in order to halt the liberation of Eastern Aleppo. Slowly the SAA are making gains on multiple fronts in Eastern Ghoutha, in Homs, in Aleppo. Arsen Pavlov was born in the Komi Republic at 15 he became an orphan and moved in with a grandmother. He joined the Russian Naval Infantry where he gained the callsign Motorola. He joined as a conscript but volunteered to reenlist and served in the 2nd Chechen War where he gained valuable experience, and they say became addicted to war. He was a bit of an adrenaline junky which added to his charisma since he was paradoxically cheerful in the most dangerous situations. He had a great sense of humor which came through even to non-russian speakers like myself but he was even more beloved in Russia and Ukraine for his hilarious narrations of the war in Ukraine. He was involved in the war in Ukraine from the start. He visited Maidan where he overheard some Ukrainian fascists saying that they would kill ten Russians for every Ukrainian they lost. He decided to join the anti-maidan movement participating in counter-protests in Eastern Ukraine in Karkov and other cities before heading to Crimea to aid the people in fulfilling their long held dream of reuniting with Russia. It was in Crimea that he met Igor Strelkov who was impressed with his military experience and cheerful daring. Thus Motorola was one of the small group of men he brought with him to Slavyansk where a handful of veterans worked with the brave locals managing keep the Ukrainian Military tied down for months allowing vital time for Donetsk and Lugansk to solidify their defenses . In Slavyansk Strelkov and Motorola would become legends. Motorola became well known early on because not only was he a brave fighter he was also a master of information war. It was Motorola who filmed many of the early battles of the war and also helped sympathetic journalists cover the war from the front lines. He well understood that the wars of today are fought not just on the battlefields but on the internet, on youtube, on social media. He helped mobilize Global support for Novorossia's war to remain independent of fascist Ukraine inspiring volunteers from around the world. He was also able wage psychological warfare on the Ukrainians using his instincts as a prankster. He managed to convince the Ukrainians that there were 300 Chechen special forces aiding the Novorossian's in the area by playing a recording of the Muslim call to prayer every day. The paranoid Ukrainians fell for it and did not dare to invade the area. Motorola would go on to fight in many of the major battles of the war. He was not one of those commanders who lead from behind. Instead Motorola often fought on the front lines with his men. How could he ask his fighters to risk their lives when he would not do the same he would explain when questioned. Thus like the legendary Mozgovoi Motorola was reported dead many times in the course of the war by the Ukrainian media always reappearing to make a mockery of such claims. To do justice to his heroic actions in the war in Ukraine would require writing a history of much of the war since he was at so many famous battles Nikolayevka Semyonuka, Ilovaisk, Debaltsevo, Donetsk. He became the commander of the Spartak Battalion and was instrumental in liberating Donetsk airport from the fascist self styled "cyborgs." He had a beautiful and courageous wife and three children. He was Officially declared a Hero of Novorossia and honored in Last years victory parade celebrating both the victory over fascism in "The Great Patriotic War" as World War 2 is known in Russia but also the victories in the 2014-2015 wars of independence that saw the NATO backed Fascist Ukrainian army and it's death squad allies thoroughly smashed. Arsen Pavlov with his wife Yelena Kolenkina Read the rest of the article here . Comment: Further reading: The commander of the Sparta battalion of the Donetsk People's Republic and famous defender of Donbass known by his callsign "Motorola," Arsen Pavlov, was killed today, October 16th, by a bomb in his apartment building's elevator. The incident has been officially confirmed as an assassination carried out by Ukrainian special forces. | 0 |
Homeland Security John Kelly will soon decide whether to send home roughly 50, 000 Haitians who have been living in the United States on temporary visas since 2010. [The foreign citizens will be required to go back home if Kelly agrees with an internal recommendation against renewing the Haitians’ temporary visas by their expiration date of July 22, according to USA Today. The visas, dubbed “Temporary Protected Status,” were granted to the Haitians 2010 by former President Barack Obama, after an earthquake hit the undeveloped island. Since then, Haitians’ TPS status has been extended multiple times by DHS, which also stopped repatriating illegal alien to Haiti in 2010. However, DHS officials began returning Haitian illegal aliens home in 2016, giving Kelly a Democratic precedent to end the TPS extensions. “Removal flights from the United States to Haiti have now resumed,” Obama’s DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, said in a November 2016 statement. “In the last several weeks ICE has removed over 200 Haitian nationals and plans to significantly expand removal operations in the coming weeks. ” According to USA Today: James McCament, acting director of U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, concluded in a letter last week that conditions in Haiti have improved enough to end “temporary protected status” for Haitians, according to a copy of the letter obtained by USA TODAY … McCament proposed an extension to January to allow for a “period of orderly transition” but said the program should not be extended beyond then … McCament said Haiti has not completely recovered from the earthquake, but enough progress has been made. He said the Obama administration started sending some Haitians home in 2016 … The U. S. is currently giving protection to those from 13 countries: El Salvador, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Liberia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen, Overall, roughly 300, 000 foreigners are living — and many are working — in the United States because they have gotten repeated extensions of TPS status. For example, in 2016, Obama extended TPS for 60, 000 Hondurans who got the status in 1998 because of an earthquake in their home country. Many Liberians who were given TPS in 1991 now have a different form of visa which allows them to remain in the United States until November 2017. TPS status for six national groups will expire in 2017. TPS for people from seven additional countries — including Somalia and Yemen — will expire in 2018. Each year, 4 million Americans turn 18 and enter the workforce, where they face job competition from roughly 1 million new temporary contract workers and 1 million legal immigrants, and from roughly 30 million unemployed Americans. But business groups want the government to keep importing additional customers and new, workers. Haitian activists say their home country is still too poor to accept the return of the 50, 000 Haitians. “Haiti is nowhere near ready to have anybody back — we just got hit by [Hurricane] Matthew,” said Nadine Dorcena, an aid worker at the Haitian Center Of Catholic Charities, in Dorchester, Mass. She continued: To me, in my personal opinion, Haitian people are a group of proud folks. If our country had provided the resources for them, they would stay home. The fact is that there is insecurity, there are no jobs, you have kids done with school and they have no hope of continuing or doing anything for the future, there are no jobs provided … [and we] keep getting hit with natural disasters. Democrat legislators and some GOP politicians want the DHS to extend the Haitians’ TPS status, said USA Today: “The recommendation upset Republican and Democratic members of Congress who have pleaded with Kelly to extend the protections … ‘Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world and right now it’s unable to support the roughly 50, 000 Haitians that are currently receiving protected status here in the U. S.,’ Sen. Bill Nelson, . said Thursday. ” | 1 |
Pat Summitt, who was at the forefront of a broad ascendance of women’s sports, winning eight national basketball championships at the University of Tennessee and more games than any other Division I college coach, male or female, died on Tuesday. She was 64. Her death was confirmed on the website of the Pat Summitt Foundation. Summitt stepped down after 38 seasons and 1, 098 victories at Tennessee in April 2012, at 59, less than a year after she learned she had Alzheimer’s disease. Over nearly four decades, Summitt helped transform women’s college basketball from a sport ignored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association into one that drew national television audiences and paid its most successful coaches more than $1 million a year. “In modern history, there are two figures that belong on the Mount Rushmore of women’s sports — Billie Jean King and Pat Summitt,” Mary Jo Kane, a sports sociologist at the University of Minnesota, said in 2011. “No one else is close to third. ” Summitt, who was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000, was a trailblazer, ambassador and missionary. She was a of the 1976 women’s Olympic team, which won a silver medal, then guided the United States to gold as head coach at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. All of her players who completed their eligibility at Tennessee also graduated, university officials said. Through much of her tenure at Tennessee, Summitt was willing to play any opponent, on any court, at any time. She opened her locker room to television cameras and gave viewers an unfiltered look at her demanding style, her steely glare and her unapologetically withering remarks to her players and to referees. Her hands pounded the court with such intensity that she sometimes flattened the rings on her fingers and had to have them rerounded in the . Her childhood on a Tennessee farm lent Summitt a rural hardiness. When she gave birth to her only child, Tyler, in 1990, she went into labor while on a recruiting trip in Pennsylvania and urged the pilots to fly her home so her son would be born in Tennessee. A month before she won her final championship, in 2008, Summitt dislocated her shoulder while shoving a raccoon off the deck of her home in Knoxville, then tried for two hours to reset her shoulder before calling a doctor. Her best teams displayed a similar toughness and determination, playing with ravenous attention to defense and rebounding. “There may be coaches that win more than Pat, but there will never be another Pat Summitt,” Baylor Coach Kim Mulkey said. She was born Patricia Sue Head on June 14, 1952, in Clarksville, Tenn. The fourth of five children, she slept in a baby bed until she was 6. Her farmer father, Richard Head, was a disciplinarian who, she recalled, admonished his children that “cows don’t take a day off. ” During the day, she joined her three older brothers in baling hay and chopping tobacco. At night, she played basketball against her brothers and neighbors. “I was the only girl,” Summitt once said. “They beat me up, but it made me tougher. ” Title IX, the federal law that prohibited discrimination in schools based on gender, was passed in 1972, but expanded opportunities for female athletes came haltingly. The N. C. A. A. did not begin sponsoring women’s basketball until 1982, 43 years after it held its first postseason tournament for men. Still, the women’s game thrived in rural enclaves in states like Tennessee and Texas, where girls who worked on farms could not be told with any seriousness that they lacked the endurance to play sports. Summitt attended the University of Tennessee at Martin and, upon graduating in 1974, became head coach at the University of Tennessee’s flagship campus in Knoxville. At 22, she was barely older than her players. In football country, she made $250 a month to coach basketball and attend graduate school. She held a doughnut sale to help pay for the team uniforms, which she washed herself. Her team once slept on mats at an opponent’s gym because there was no money for a hotel. She drove the team van to games, so intent on winning that “we never even stopped at McDonald’s,” said Holly Warlick, who played for Summitt at Tennessee, served as a longtime assistant and succeeded her as head coach. Summitt’s first game at Tennessee ended in a defeat. When she phoned her parents to give them the news, she recalled, her father offered a bit of advice: “Tricia, don’t take donkeys to the Kentucky Derby” — meaning that the best coaches recruited the top players. For most of 38 seasons, she did. Her two biggest stars, Chamique Holdsclaw of Queens and Candace Parker of suburban Chicago, led the Lady Vols to five of Summitt’s eight national titles and are considered two of the best women’s collegiate players of all time. Summitt’s best team, guided by Holdsclaw and reliant on relentless offense and aggressive defense, finished to win the national title in 1998. To that point, no women’s team had won as many games in a season. As the number of championships climbed, so did Summitt’s salary, eventually reaching $1. 25 million a year. She was once approached by Tennessee officials about coaching the men’s team. She dismissed the overture, asking, “Why is that considered a step up?” Summitt’s marriage of 27 years to R. B. Summitt, a banker, ended in divorce in 2008. Her survivors include her son, Tyler, who was the women’s coach at Louisiana Tech before resigning this year over what was described as “an inappropriate relationship,” widely reported to be with one of his players her mother, Hazel Albright Head her sister, Linda Atteberry and her brothers, Kenneth, Tommy and Charles Head. Summitt’s eighth and final national title came in 2008, three short of the 11 titles won by Geno Auriemma, who coaches the Connecticut women’s team. Summitt remained insatiable for victory, and defeat left her inconsolable. The low point of her career came with a stunning loss to Ball State in the first round of the 2009 N. C. A. A. tournament. At the time, Tennessee was the defending national champion. None of Summitt’s teams had left the tournament so early. Afterward, she returned to her hotel room and watched replays all night. “I didn’t sleep,” she later said. “I was so mad I threw things at the TV, yelled, screamed, cried. ” The next day, the Lady Vols returned to campus and Summitt made them practice, even though the season was over. Summitt received the only sustained criticism of her career in 2007, when she canceled the annual games between Tennessee and Connecticut, a rivalry matched in college basketball only by that between the Duke and North Carolina men’s teams. She cited her concern with UConn’s recruiting of Maya Moore, who led the Huskies to two national titles and a record winning streak. UConn did receive a slap on the wrist from the N. C. A. A. for arranging a tour for Moore of ESPN’s studios in Bristol, Conn. But that was considered a minor rules violation. Some sports commentators, and even some of Summitt’s former players, felt that she had put her personal conflict with Auriemma, the UConn coach, ahead of the overall good of women’s basketball. “I am who I am,” Summitt said. “I will not compromise. No one is going to talk me into doing something I don’t want to do, when I know what I have been doing is by the book. ” Summitt began to notice changes in herself during the season. She grew forgetful during games she lost track of meetings. After the season, she visited the Mayo Clinic, and doctors found that she had Alzheimer’s. Summitt coached through the season, although her three assistant coaches assumed most of her duties during practices and games. The Lady Vols struggled at times but still came within one victory of reaching the Final Four. Shortly after the season, Summitt retired as head coach. She started a foundation to raise awareness about dementia. Her memoir, “Sum It Up” (written with Sally Jenkins) was a best seller in 2013. | 1 |
in: Natural Medicine We all know that it’s important to eat our vegetables. At least, that’s what most of us have heard since we were kids. What our mother’s told us as when we were young, our doctors tell us as we get older. Sometimes though, it helps to have a more specific reason than high cholesterol, or even a motherly “because I said so.” Especially for people who aren’t big fans of eating organic greens. According to a study conducted at Oregon State University’s Linus Pauling Micronutrient Research Institute confirms that sulforaphane, a phytochemical found in broccoli and related cruciferous vegetables, such as cauliflower and cabbage , have a natural ability to target and attack prostate cancer cells without harming neighboring cells [ 1 ] . Unconnected studies suggest it may have similar promise for breast cancer. The active chemicals found in everyday foods – such as broccoli – are often much more potent than people would imagine. If fact, determining how to safely adapt these chemical ingredients for medical use is one of the biggest hurdles researchers face. Even edible plants that are considered “rich” in a given nutritional substance, contain relatively low amounts of it by volume. The vast majority of these compounds may also become toxic to humans if taken in large enough concentrations. While a number of previous investigations have proven that sulforaphane is able to attack both benign and malignant cancer cells, the Oregon State study is one of the first to prove that it is effective without disrupting otherwise healthy tissue. This gives researchers a tremendous tool for developing new, low-risk treatment options, and is likely to encourage additional research into the healing potential of other seemingly mundane edible plants. Realistically, it could be some time before these findings are applied to any sort of drug development or cancer treatment in a traditional hospital setting. Meanwhile though, the researchers behind the study recommend that we all eat more organic cruciferous vegetables. Besides broccoli, a number of readily available cruciferous vegetables contain naturally large amounts of sulforaphane. Some good examples of foods high in this important phytochemical include mild and spicy radishes, turnips, watercress, cabbage, arugula, kale, chard, and most other leafy greens. Unrelated studies also suggest a variety of other cancer-fighting compounds may be present in other herbs and garden vegetables. Celery and parsley , for instance, are especially rich in apigenin – a substance that has shown remarkable promise for fighting breast cancer. Trace amounts of apigenin are also found in oranges, apples, and some tree nuts. The problem is, it’s very difficult for the body to effectively extract it from any of these foods on its own. References: Oregon State University. Study confirms safety, cancer-targeting ability of nutrient in broccoli . News & Research Communications. 2011 June 9. Submit your review | 0 |
A federal judge in south Texas handed down an prison sentence to a Cuban national who posed as a U. S. Border Patrol agent. The Cuban man attempted to scam a confidential informant into giving him $7, 000 in exchange for permanent resident status documents. [U. S. District Court Judge Randy Crane said he needed to protect the community from Euginio Augustin a Cuban national with Legal Permanent Resident status in the U. S. because of his criminal history of theft and fraud. However, the judge only sentenced the man to 18 months in prison, according to a statement from the Department of Justices’ Southern District of Texas. The maximum penalty for the crime of impersonating a federal agent or officer (18 U. S. Code § 912) is three years in prison. Court records obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed that introduced himself to a confidential informant (CI) claiming to be an illegal alien. The Cuban man identified himself to the CI as a U. S. Border Patrol agent. He told the CI he could obtain Legal Permanent Resident (LPR) documents for him in exchange for $7, 000. During a call in advance of the meeting, told the CI he would need a copy of his Mexican visa and two passport photos, claiming those documents were what he needed to obtain the LPR documents. The CI gave the suspect a down payment of $2, 800 and the requested documents. U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agents from the Office of Professional Responsibility arrested as he left the meeting. The statement from the DOJ revealed that solicited bribes from multiple people seeking legal status in the U. S. Officials stated they expect ICE Enforcement Removal officer to deport to Cuba upon the completion of his sentence in a federal prison. 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 |
In an elaborate game of double-bluff respectable news outlets, with flour-based products in their name, have been forced to defend well-researched headlines like – Robert Mugabe declares himself the new Doctor Who and Ventnor man fails to acknowledge acknowledgement of traffic courtesy . Bizarrely some skeptical folk still question the facts behind – Universe in chaos as Pavlov’s dogs may or may not attack Schrödinger’s cat .
The issues with ‘fake news’ spreading on social media have been solved according to Facebook: ‘We know everyone has been very concerned about fake news stories spreading, especially stories that exaggerate the number of murders committed by presidential candidates, but I can assure you we’ve fixed the problem now, don’t worry about it any more and move on with your lives. Please share this news with all your friends in case anyone tries to spread a story that it’s still a problem’. Bigglesworth | 0 |
percent of the world’s 1. 6 billion Muslims are not affected by President Donald Trump’s Friday decision to temporarily withhold visas from citizens of seven Middle Eastern countries. [Approximately thirteen percent of the world’s Muslims, or 199. 4 million out of up to 1. 6 billion, live in those seven countries, according to a 2015 Pew Research Report, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, . ” So Trump’s reform policy only impacts one of every eight Muslims worldwide. The Muslim population in each of these seven countries, estimated by Pew Research as of 2010, is: Iran (74 million) Sudan (33. 6 million) Iraq (31. 7 million) Yemen (24 million) Syria (20. 4 million) Somalia (9. 3 million) and Libya (6. 4 million). The temporary block on new visas does not apply to citizens of the six countries with the largest Muslim populations, as determined by Pew Research — Indonesia (209 million) India (176 million) Pakistan (167 million) Bangladesh (134 million) Nigeria (77 million) and Egypt (76 million). It does apply citizens of Iran, the country with the seventh largest Muslim population (74 million). But it does not apply to citizens of the other top ten Muslim population countries: Turkey (71 million) Algeria (35 million) and Morocco (32 million). None of the seven countries on which a temporary visa ban has been placed were listed by name in Friday’s, executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States. ” Instead, the order referenced previous laws and findings that designated three of these countries “state sponsors of terrorism” (Iran, Sudan, and Syria) and four of them (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen) as “countries of concern” who are ineligible to participate in the Visa Waiver Program, according to the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Improvement Act of 2015. The 2015 bill was made law once it was signed by President Barack Obama. Six of the seven countries to which the temporary visa issuance block applies were designated as “state sponsors of terrorism” or “countries of concern” by previous Democrat administrations. Only one — Iran in 1984 — was designated by a Republican administration. Syria was first designated as a state sponsor of terrorism during the Jimmy Carter administration on December 29, 1979. Iran was designated as a state sponsor of terrorism during the Ronald Reagan administration on January 19, 1984. Sudan was designated as a state sponsor of terrorism during the Bill Clinton administration on August 12, 1993. Syria and Iraq were labeled “countries of concern” ineligible to participate in the Visa Waiver Program in the original Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Improvement Act of 2015 signed into law by President Obama in December 2015. On Feb. 18, 2016, the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen to that list: The Department of Homeland Security today announced that it is continuing its implementation of the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 with the addition of Libya, Somalia, and Yemen as three countries of concern, limiting Visa Waiver Program travel for certain individuals who have traveled to these countries. Pursuant to the Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security had sixty days to determine whether additional countries or areas of concern should be subject to the travel or dual nationality restrictions under the Act. After careful consideration, and in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security has determined that Libya, Somalia, and Yemen be included as countries of concern, specifically for individuals who have traveled to these countries since March 1, 2011. At this time, the restriction on Visa Waiver Program travel will not apply to dual nationals of these three countries. DHS continues to consult with the Department of State and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to develop further criteria to determine whether other countries would be added to this list. The executive order also temporarily banned refugees from all countries for 120 days. | 1 |
November 1: Daily Contrarian Reads By David Stockman. Here It Comes----The Great Dollar Short That Will Shatter The Global Bubbles
Surging rates on dollar Libor contracts are rapidly tightening conditions across large parts of the global economy, incubating stress in the credit markets and ultimately threatening overvalued bourses....Fear that the US Federal Reserve may have to raise rates uncomfortably fast is leading to an acute dollar shortage, draining global liquidity. ETF Warning: Shift To Passive Investing Amplifies Systemic Risk----Will Make Crashes Worse
This unprecedented shift in capital away from active managers and toward passive strategies has resulted in not only a chilling effect on the hedge fund industry but also concerns about a market in which "passive", robotic, algo-driven decision makers are the marginal buyers and sellers of securities. And while it is the case that so far, the market has been spared an observation of how a largely passive investing crowd would respond during a downturn (and more importantly what happens to market liquidity), the time is drawing nearer with every passing day, and certainly as central bankers collectively try to prop up global yield curves. After Peak Monetary Stimulus----Look Out Below!
There’s deep complacency in the U.S. regarding vulnerability to reduced monetary stimulus. The Fed wound down QE and implemented a rate increase without major market instability. I believe this was only possible because of the extraordinary monetary stimulus measures in play globally. “Whatever it takes” central banking, in particular from the ECB and BOJ, unleashed Trillions of liquidity (and currency devaluation) that certainly underpinned U.S. securities and asset markets. Prices of sovereign debt, including Treasuries, have traded at levels that assume global central banker support will last indefinitely. Markets have begun reassessing this assumption. The Disaster of Inflation--For the Bottom 95%
Central banks are obsessed with boosting inflation, but the "why inflation is good" arguments make no sense for households being ravaged by inflation. The basic argument is that inflation makes it easier for debtors to service their debts. But this is only true if income rises along with costs. If income stays flat while costs rise, households lose ground--debt remains a burden as the purchasing power of income plummets. Hillary Clinton's Warped Notion Of American Exceptionalism And Indispensability
The unique moral revolution to which the Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor has little connection to the bastard term (usually capitalized as “American Exceptionalism”) that describes post-Cold War U.S. global behavior, by which policymakers in Washington assert both an exclusive “leadership” privilege and unsupportable obligation to undertake open-ended international missions in the name of the “Free World” and the “international community.” This is the counterfeit “Exceptionalism” of a tiny clique of bipartisan apparatchiki —GOP “neoconservatives” and Democrat “liberal interventionists” and their mainstream media mouthpieces—who have little regard for our country’s oldest traditions or the security and welfare of the American people. The So-Called OPEC Cartel Whiffs Again- | 0 |
In 2007, Maria Schneider said that she “felt a little raped” during the filming of an infamous rape scene with Marlon Brando in the 1972 film “Last Tango in Paris,” and that the tears she cried on screen were real. In 2013, Bernardo Bertolucci, the director of the film, confirmed that Ms. Schneider wasn’t told ahead of time that Mr. Brando would use butter as a lubricant for the simulated sex because he “wanted Maria to feel, not to act, the rage and the humiliation. ” Mr. Bertolucci’s comments did not receive widespread attention at the time, but rocketed into prominence over the weekend after they resurfaced in media reports about a Spanish nonprofit’s publicity campaign about violence against women. Several prominent figures in Hollywood responded on social media with anger toward Mr. Bertolucci and Mr. Brando, while wondering why Ms. Schneider’s story was not better known. “Inexcusable,’’ Ava DuVernay, a filmmaker, said on Twitter. “As a director, I can barely fathom this. As a woman, I am horrified, disgusted and enraged by it. ” Chris Evans, an actor, said on Twitter: “I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage. ” Ms. Schneider was an unknown French actress paid $4, 000 for her part in “Last Tango,” in which her torrid affair with an American businessman, played by a Mr. Brando, included explicit sex scenes that shocked audiences. The scene in which Mr. Brando pins her to the floor and appears to force anal intercourse remains one of the enduring images from the film, and was part of the reason The Motion Picture Association of America gave the film an X rating. It was critically acclaimed Mr. Brando, who died at 80 in 2004, received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, while Mr. Bertolucci, 76, was nominated for Best Director. Ms. Schneider was not nominated but emerged as a sex symbol she had several leading roles in the 1970s, but her acting career declined later in the decade, while her personal life was marred by drug abuse and at least one suicide attempt. In 2011, she died of cancer at age 58. In an interview with The Daily Mail in 2007, she said the rape scene, which was shot in one take, left her feeling humiliated and attacked by both Mr. Brando and Mr. Bertolucci. “That scene wasn’t in the original script. The truth is, it was Marlon who came up with the idea,” Ms. Schneider said. “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that. ” Mr. Bertolucci said in 2013 that he and Mr. Brando thought of including butter in the scene on the morning it was filmed and purposely kept Ms. Schneider in the dark. “I didn’t tell her what was going on because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” he said. He said that Ms. Schneider hated him until her death, but the tactic was necessary to obtain the effect. “I feel guilty,’’ he said, “but I do not regret. ” While Ms. Schneider’s statements in her 2007 interview did not go unnoticed — they figured prominently in her obituary in The New York Times — neither it nor Mr. Bertolucci’s 2013 interview instantly received the kind of widespread attention that both gained this weekend. El Mundo de Alycia, a Spanish nonprofit, posted the video of Mr. Bertolucci’s interview to YouTube as part of a protest against violence against women in November. It began appearing in outlets, including Elle, on Friday, and celebrities soon responded in force. In a statement on Monday, Mr. Bertolucci called the flap “a ridiculous misunderstanding. ” “Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her. That is false!” he said in the statement, according to Variety. “Maria knew everything because she had read the script, where it was all described,” he continued. “The only novelty was the idea of the butter. And that, as I learned many years later, offended Maria. Not the violence that she is subjected to in the scene, which was written in the screenplay. ” Those responding on Twitter included several actors in Hollywood. Others on Twitter wondered why it took so long for the outrage to form. | 1 |
Here’s another possible consequence of repealing the Affordable Care Act: It would be harder for many people to retire early. Americans reaching 65 become eligible for Medicare. Before reaching that age, some can get retiree coverage from their former employers. But not very many companies, especially small ones, offer medical insurance to retirees. If early retirees are poor enough, they could turn to Medicaid. To retire early, everybody else would need to turn to the individual health insurance market. Without the subsidies and protections the A. C. A. put in place, health care coverage would be more difficult to obtain, cost consumers more where available, and provide fewer benefits than it does today. That means that if the A. C. A. is repealed, retiring early would become less feasible for many Americans. This consequence is called job lock — the need to maintain a job to get health insurance. One of the arguments in favor of the A. C. A. was that it would reduce or eliminate job lock. With repeal of the law on the agenda of Congress and President Trump, there is renewed concern about how health insurance could affect employment and retirement decisions. These relationships have been examined extensively by scholars. Though not all studies have found evidence of job lock in the era, a majority of studies have. That’s the conclusion of systematic reviews conducted by the Government Accountability Office and several health economists. Because people approaching retirement age are more prone to illness and high health care costs, insurance is particularly valuable to older workers — so much so that many studies document that it influences retirement decisions. One study found that workers whose employers offered retiree health benefits were 68 percent more likely to retire early than those who lack retiree coverage. Another study found a smaller effect, 47 percent. But that study also found that workers in poor health who had retiree health benefits were 88 percent more likely to retire early compared with similar workers lacking retiree health benefits. Both those studies used data that are now several decades old. But a 2014 study that incorporated more recent data — though still . C. A. — also found that retiree health benefits encourage early retirement. The inference from these studies is that coverage options in the A. C. A. marketplaces would similarly encourage early retirement. Deferring retirement because of health benefits is just one form of job lock. Another example: Many studies show that spouses are much more likely to work if their partners do not have family coverage. Other studies show that workers with cancer are more likely to continue working if that’s how they get health insurance. Two studies led by Cathy Bradley of Virginia Commonwealth University examined working women with breast cancer diagnoses. Both studies found that those who depended on their employment for coverage were more likely to remain working. If not for job lock, we’d probably see greater job mobility and entrepreneurship. According to one analysis, two million more people would change jobs if it weren’t for job lock — presumably finding work that makes them happier or that is better suited for them. One study found that married men with no other coverage options are 22. 5 percent less likely to switch jobs compared with those who have alternatives. Another study, examining married men, estimated smaller effects, between 10 and 15 percent. The evidence of sticking with jobs instead of starting a business is mixed, but the preponderance of it suggests this kind of “entrepreneurship lock” exists, affecting up to four million people. Workers without coverage from a spouse — therefore, more reliant on their own employers’ coverage — are a few percentage points less likely to become according to one study. Similarly, spikes when workers turn 65 and obtain Medicare coverage. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, tax deductibility of policies for workers was phased in, making those policies more affordable. Two studies provide evidence that this change increased . One found that it rose 10 percent among women without health coverage from a spouse versus those with such coverage. Another found that the tax change explained as much as half the total increase in between 1999 and 2004. All of these studies suggest that job lock would be alleviated by more available and affordable coverage outside work. Whether Obamacare did that is less clear. Many policy experts expected the A. C. A. to reduce job lock. An analysis by the Urban Institute, conducted before the health insurance reforms were implemented, estimated that the would increase by about 1. 5 million individuals as a result of the law. In 2014, the Congressional Budget Office anticipated that the A. C. A. would reduce the size of the labor force by at least two million people by 2024. One . C. A. study found that the prohibition of condition exclusions for children increased job mobility for their parents. And in the months after the insurance market reforms rolled out, voluntary work increased and the growth in the number of workers over age 55 slowed, both consistent with alleviation of job lock. But more rigorous studies of work did not find an impact from the A. C. A. According to a review of scientific papers by the economists Jean Abraham and Anne Royalty, for the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, few other studies have found solid evidence that the A. C. A. reduced job lock or had other effects on the labor market. For instance, studies have not found that allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 has influenced the labor market choices of young adults. Nor have they found that the A. C. A. increased early retirement or employment more generally. One reason studies might not have found an impact on job lock could be because the law is relatively new, and there isn’t enough data available to researchers to tease out all its effects. It could also be because the law has been under siege on multiple fronts since passage, rendering its status uncertain. This may have raised doubts in workers’ minds about the wisdom of relying on it as a substitute for coverage. But it is clear that with A. C. A. repeal on the table, people contemplating early retirement may need to reconsider. | 1 |
Crimea’s Fate ( 163 ) 0 16 0 0 Kiev sent to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday its protest over the ongoing visit of Russia's President Vladimir Putin to Crimea, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Putin arrived to Crimea on Wednesday to take part in the regional forum of All-Russia People's Front called "Forum of action. Crimea." The two-day forum covered issues of energy, gas supplies, development of agricultural industry and other promising sectors of the economy. © Sputnik/ Vitaliy Belousov German Lawmaker Vows to Respond to Ukrainian Sanctions Threat With New Crimea Visits "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine expresses strong protest to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation on another non-consensual visit of President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin to the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine – the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which started on October 26, 2016," the statement read.
Crimea , Russia's historical southern region, seceded from Ukraine to rejoin Russia in March 2014. Almost 97 percent of the region's population voted for reunification in a referendum. Ukraine, the European Union and the United States did not recognize the move and consider the peninsula to be an occupied territory. ... | 0 |
November 03, 2016 Reward Clinton's Hawkishness Because Trump's Foreign Policy Is Uncertain?
For me, as a non U.S. person, the major issues of the U.S. presidential elections is always foreign policy. There Trump is not hawkish at all. He has somewhat confused, unlearned blustering positions on foreign policy but is basically a cautious, risk averse businessman. He consistently criticizes the war mongering in Washington DC. Hillary Clinton is a run-of-the-mill warmongering neoconservative compatible with the imperial "mainstream" of the power centers in Washington and elsewhere.
Trump has called up this contrast again and again (as do I ). In a speech (vid at 53:20 min) in Grand Rapids Michigan on October 31 he again highlights these points. Some excerpts (taken from this partial transcript part 9, 10): Hillary led us to disaster in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya. ... Hillary and our failed Washington establishment have spent $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East, and now it’s worse than it’s ever been before.
Had Obama and others gone to the beach, Obama could have gone to the golf course, we would have been in much better shape.
We shouldn’t have gone into the war, and she thinks I’m a hawk. Oh, Donald Trump. ... Imagine if some of the money had been spent, $6 trillion in the Middle East, on building new schools and roads and bridges right here in Michigan.
Now Hillary, trapped in her Washington bubble, that’s blind to the lessons, wants to start a shooting war in Syria in conflict with a nuclear armed Russia that could drag us into a World War III.
Okay, folks. She – I’ll tell you what. She will get us into World War III. She will get us into World War III. I will tell you that. She’s incompetent. She will get us into World War III.
The arrogant political class never learns. They keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. They keep telling the same lies. They keep producing the same failed results.
Trump may well be lying when he says he does not seek a conflict with Russia or anyone else. Trump surely lies on other issues. But those are mostly rather obvious lies and some are even a bit comical. He is playing Reagan on economic issues, promising tax cuts that can not be financed (and which Reagan had to take back in the end when he introduced the biggest tax hike ever). On many issues we do not know what Trump is really planning to do (or if he plans at all). But he has never given the impression that he is hawkish or willing to incite a war.
Clinton on the other hand has a proven record of being a proactive hawk. She is willing to go to war and to kill people because the U.S. can. bigger
She is a political animal totally dependent on her sponsors. Economically she is pro-banks, pro-big-business and for further deregulation. A neoliberal. The only "liberal" standpoints she has are on some hyped identity issues relevant only for a very tiny group of people like transgenders. She told her real voters, the people who pay her, that her public standpoint on many issues is different from the one she will pursue. She did not mean that what she will pursue will be less hawkish than her public stand, or that she will be more progressive on economic issues than she openly claims.
Clinton assures us that Trump is Putin's puppet who will start a nuclear World War III with Russia. She doesn't say how that computes. Will Putin order Trump to give him asylum in Washington while Moscow and Washington get nuked?
With Trump the U.S. would get a president who is a pretty unknown factor but, in my judgment, a less dangerous one to the U.S. and the world than Clinton. With her the next useless and deadly wars are practically guaranteed.
Micah Zenko , who's opinion I value, agrees with my diagnose, Trump is less hawkish , but has a different judgement: When it comes to foreign policy, Trump’s own positions make him the most immoral, poorly informed, and dangerous presidential candidate in recent American history.
If Clinton is elected, there will undoubtedly be troubling foreign-policy positions and actions which must be thoroughly questioned and scrutinized. I just deeply hope that citizens have the opportunity to hold a President Hillary Clinton to account.
The citizens of the United States now have an opportunity to hold Secretary of State Clinton to account for her " We came, we saw, he died " war on Libya and for escalating the war on Syria. The militaristic (and failed) pivot to Asia, the "regime changes" putsches in Honduras and Ukraine and the deterioration of relations with Russia are also to a large part her work. Should the voters reward her for all the death, misery and new dangers she created as Secretary of State by making her President?
Who would I vote for? Not Hillary. Not for Trump either. Some third party candidate - probably Stein of the Green Party. It would be a "useless and wasted" vote in the short term though such votes have some light influence on the programs of the big parties. In the long term the example of voting third parties will hopefully induce more people to do the same. If it becomes a more common, regular thing to do it might over time break the duopoly of today's consensus in Washington. It is a small chance, but possibly a big long-term reward. 3, 2016 at 03:22 PM | Permalink | 0 |
RALEIGH, N. C. — In the feverishly manicured spectacle that is electoral politics, there are few distractions quite as imposing to candidates as a small child. Just this week, Donald J. Trump earned a wave of negative headlines after he confronted a crying baby at a rally in Virginia. Mike Pence learned that lesson the hard — and perhaps revealing — way at a rally here on Thursday morning when he solicited a question from an boy, Matthew Schricker. “I’ve been watching the news lately, and I’ve been noticing that you’ve been kind of softening up on Mr. Trump’s policies and words,” Matthew said skeptically. “Is this going to be your role in the administration?” Mr. Pence stood for a moment before offering an uneasy chuckle. “What did you say I’ve been doing?” Mr. Pence asked over laughter from the crowd. “You’ve been kind of softening up on his words,” Matthew steadfastly replied. Many political analysts far Matthew’s senior have been pondering the same thought. In the past week and a half, Mr. Pence has taken divergent stances from (or cleaned up after) his running mate on a series of issues, including the possibility of Russia’s hacking Hillary Clinton’s email, the treatment of the Khan family and the candidacy of Speaker Paul D. Ryan. Mr. Pence tried to regain his footing by complimenting his interlocutor. “No. 1, this boy has a future,” Mr. Pence pronounced. “Nicely done. ” After predicting that Matthew would one day be governor of North Carolina, Mr. Pence tried to fill the gaps between some of his positions and those of his more bombastic running mate by attributing their differences to manner rather than matter. “Sometimes things don’t always come out like you mean, right?” Mr. Pence said. “And Donald Trump and I are absolutely determined to work together and we have different styles, you might have noticed that. ” Then Mr. Pence added, in a typical stroke of that has become a necessary weapon in his campaign arsenal, “You know, I said at our convention, I said we’d nominated someone who is larger than life, known for charisma, so they wanted to kind of balance the ticket. ” Mr. Pence said he wanted to make one thing clear to his young skeptic. “Differences in style, Matthew, should never be confused with differences in conviction,” he said. “And I will tell you right now Donald Trump has the right vision for America, he has the right policies for America and I’m going to fight every day to tell his story all across the United States. ” Matthew seemed persuaded. “I was a little worried about him, and I just wanted to make sure he was totally loyal to Mr. Trump and the Republican Party,” Matthew said after the event had ended. “And now I think he is. ” At future gatherings, Mr. Pence may wish to pick on someone his own size. | 1 |
Report Copyright Violation World's Oldest Person Had Smoked For 76 Years actually, i think i remember a few of these people over the years who had hit significant milestones had had at least some 'bad' habits, such as smoking or drinking (but probably not to excess). Guess it depends on the person.World's oldest person turns 115Aug. 22, 2006. 05:30 AMASSOCIATED PRESSISABELA, Puerto Rico — The world's oldest person celebrated his 115th birthday Monday, offering advice on healthy living at a party where he was serenaded by a well-known Puerto Rican singer.Emiliano Mercado del Toro, who was a boy when the United States seized Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, attributed his long life to a healthy diet and avoiding alcohol."I never damaged my body with liquor," said Mercado, who quit a 76-year smoking habit when he was 90.Mercado was declared the world's oldest person by the Guinness Book of Records last year."I never thought I would last so long," he said.An ambulance carried him to an outdoor plaza where family, friends and the mayor gathered for the party. His favourite performer, Iris Chacon, crooned a birthday tune set to mariachi music."I feel happy," said the wheelchair-bound Mercado, who has difficulty hearing and has been blind for four years. He lives with a niece in the northwestern coastal town of Isabela.Mercado was recruited into the U.S. army in 1918, during the last months of the First World War. He was still in training when the war ended in November of that year.As a young man, Mercado said he worked for 50 cents US a day driving animals loaded with sugar cane to processing centres.The mayor of Isabela, Charlie Delgado, said a residence for the elderly would be named for Mercado in honour of a man who "ate healthy, had no major vices and who has put this island on the world stage."Guinness had recognized another Puerto Rican as being the world's oldest person. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias Jordan died May 29, 2004, after a bout with pneumonia. She was 114.Get great home delivery subscription deals here! Anonymous Coward ( OP ) | 0 |
Calais Jungle already turned into luxury apartments 01-11-16 THE refugee camp in Calais has already become luxury apartments that only footballers and bankers can afford. The site, which housed some 2,000 refugees until last week, now contains 16 apartments that will never be used as the occupants already own at least four other properties each. Developer Julian Cook said: “We’re hoping to get some really rich people moved in here as soon as possible. “ We won’t be calling it the Calais Jungle any more either, because that might put some buyers off. It’ll be called Sunnyside Towers or the East Village or something stupidly nice instead. “Although there will be a club and cocktail bar in the basement called ‘Jungle Nites’, because when you build these places you have to respect local history.” “I t will have a massive wall built around it to make sure only rich people can get in.” He added: “ There will still be immigrants here, obviously. After all, the toilets won’t clean themselves.”
Share: | 0 |
Betsy DeVos announced upon her nomination as U. S. education secretary that she is “certainly not a supporter” of Common Core, even though the organizations she funded and supported through her service are avid proponents of the controversial education reform. [Now that she is sworn in, establishment politicians of both parties and the mainstream media would have Americans believe there is nothing DeVos or President Donald Trump can do to eliminate Common Core because it was adopted by the states. Here are six actions DeVos could take to begin fulfilling Trump’s promise to get rid of the “disaster” he said is Common Core: #1: Assure states they can repeal Common Core without penalty from the federal government. President Trump and DeVos should not — and cannot — tell the states to repeal Common Core. To do so would mean they were accepting federal control of education — an area the Constitution reserves for the states and local governments. However, they can guarantee to states wanting to rid themselves of the boondoggle — and its affiliated standards programs — that they will not be penalized by the federal government for doing so. “I hope Mrs. DeVos will realize that too many states have remained in Common Core because of all the federal pressure and threats — yes, including under ESSA [Every Student Succeeds Act] — that incentivize them to do so,” American Principles Project (APP) senior fellow Jane Robbins tells Breitbart News. “She should vow to remove those pressure points and make it clear to states that the feds won’t penalize them in any way if they replace Common Core with good standards. If she does that, there may be a stampede for the exits. That would be a great thing for our students. ” #2: Issue guidance that says the Every Student Succeeds Act’s (ESSA) provision that gives the education secretary power over state curricula and tests is not enforceable due to its extremely vague language. Establishment politicians often claim that ESSA — the most recent federal education law — has repealed the federal mandate for use of Common Core in the states. They base their pronouncements on the portion of ESSA that states: “The federal government is prohibited from … Mandating, directing, controlling, coercing, or exercising any direction or supervision over academic standards that states develop or adopt, including Common Core State Standards. ” Education scholars who have studied the law, however, assert ESSA neither repeals the Common Core mandate, nor prohibits the education secretary from coercing states into adopting the standards. In fact, these experts say ESSA actually does the opposite: it keeps states anchored to the controversial education reform. “Within the other 1, 060 pages of ESSA lurk the provisions that will keep states in Common Core, or something that looks very much like Common Core,” Robbins and Indiana parent activist Erin Tuttle wrote at The Pulse 2016. “The Secretary won’t have to mandate anything, because the other parts of the bill contain the requirements for … ‘high standards,’” a phrase that has come to refer to Common Core. Robbins and Tuttle assert: [A state’s] plan must be “coordinated” with 11 federal statutes, including the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act passed a year ago the Education Sciences Reform Act, which is all about collecting student data for research the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act, which adds to the Head Start requirements on preschool standards and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Authorization Act, which governs the NAEP test that will almost certainly be aligned to Common Core to hide the fact that Common students perform poorly on NAEP. Requiring state plans and therefore state standards to coordinate with all these federal statutes means, as a practical matter, states will keep Common Core. “ESSA, which replaces NCLB, does mandate alignment,” the authors write, quoting the ESSA law and translating the Common Core rhetoric: “Each State shall demonstrate that the challenging academic standards are aligned with entrance requirements for coursework in the system of public higher education in the State and relevant State career and technical education standards. ” This is simply another way of saying states must have “ and ” standards. And as made clear by the U. S. Department of Education’s own materials, “ and ” means Common Core. With ESSA’s language decoded, the Federalist’s Joy Pullmann also observes DeVos could issue guidance that says since ESSA “gives the education secretary dictatorial power over state curricula and tests,” but “is so vague on its criteria for doing so, she finds the provision unenforceable until Congress specifies … ” Cato education director Neal McCluskey agrees Trump and a Republican Congress can ensure the regulations associated with ESSA don’t “coerce the use of the Core or any other specific standards or tests. ” “This has been a real concern,” he explains. “While the spirit and rhetoric surrounding the ESSA is about breaking down federal strictures … the statute includes language vague enough that it could allow federal control by education secretary veto. ” “A Trump administration would likely avoid that,” McCluskey says, and notes as well that Trump’s supporters “don’t seem inclined to do what Beltway types tell them. ” #3: Put forward a plan to eliminate her department. As DeVos was confirmed in the Senate, Rep. Thomas Massie ( ) introduced legislation in the House that would eliminate the federal department of education. “Neither Congress nor the President, through his appointees, has the constitutional authority to dictate how and what our children must learn,” Massie said in a press release announcing his bill that is only one sentence long. With legislation to that end already introduced, DeVos could reach out to Massie and work with him and the bill’s other sponsors to dismantle her department in an organized manner. Pullmann, author of the upcoming The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids, tells Breitbart News, “The way to end Common Core is to end the superstructures that made it not just possible but inevitable. ” She urges Trump to send the states’ education dollars back to them to allow parents and local citizens to manage them as they see fit. “Even though Common Core is technically for federal influence, its successors will soon arise, and they will be worse than Common Core — unless President Trump fulfills his promise to his voters to end Common Core once and for all,” she says. “Common Core is a hydra that consumes federal education dollars. The only way to kill it for good is to stop feeding it. Give us our own money and power back, and Common Core will never happen again. ” Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn recently confirmed to Breitbart News the ESSA still provides the education secretary with substantial power over the states’ education policy and standards. Arnn said he advises DeVos to devise a plan that ultimately addresses the question, “What are we even doing here anymore? Let’s get rid of this department. ” “If Betsy DeVos has a lot of power, then her successor would have that, too,” he observed. “So, it would be better to get rid of her successor. ” #4: Address local control of education before school choice. While school choice is a good concept in general, some financial mechanisms that bring about the “choice” — such as school vouchers — are associated with high levels of regulation for the schools that agree to accept them. If DeVos works to achieve a federal mandate for vouchers, private and religious schools and homeschooling families could be required to submit to the Common Core standards and tests, as well as other federal education mandates. In a column at The Hill, Heartland Institute senior fellow Robert Holland explains the “magnitude of the opposition” facing the new secretary from the grassroots parents’ groups opposing Common Core is not a factor to be ignored. Holland writes: As incongruous as it may seem, given DeVos’ championing of a parent’s right to select the best possible school for a child, parents organized in grassroots groups in all 50 states were among the most adamant critics of President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead federal education policy. On social media, these groups have names such as Stop Common Core in Florida (or New Jersey, or Oregon, or Michigan, or insert your own state). Their reach is enormous. The concern for many of these activists boils down to this: While choice may be desirable, it is not feasible when big government imposes uniform requirements on all schools for such central policies as curricula, testing, and teacher evaluation. Holland also urges DeVos to make local control of education a priority to pave the way for local school choice programs by announcing her intention to use her authority to free state and local governments from the oppression of federal control. “A push for federal school vouchers in the current regulatory climate could backfire either by flopping in Congress or, if enacted, drawing more private and religiously affiliated schools into the Common Core web,” he warns. “Having a dedicated school choice activist as U. S. education secretary does not alter the reality choices are properly made in communities and homes, not in Washington, DC. ” #5: Invite onto her staff education experts who are committed to the Constitution’s provision that the federal government has no authority in education. Holland calls attention to reports of Common Core supporters on DeVos’s staff and observes grassroots parent activists “see DeVos’s longstanding support of powerful organizations that pushed Common Core standards on schools nationwide as rendering null and void any ‘choice’ that might emanate from Washington, DC under her leadership. ” He urges the new secretary to invite onto her staff as well “education scholars who understand the federal government has no constitutional authority to dictate education policy,” and that the U. S. education department should be “phased out of existence. ” #6: Reverse the Obama administration’s regulatory gutting of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). In November of 2015, Trump promised to close the loopholes in the federal privacy law to ensure students’ personal information remains private. The Obama administration gutted FERPA in 2013, thus allowing private student and family information to leave schools without parental consent. In a Pioneer Institute paper titled “Cogs in the Machine: Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing,” authors Pullmann and Robbins joined APP education director Emmett McGroarty to reveal the reason for the Obama administration’s desire to place a “condition” of student data collection upon states when they applied for 2009 federal stimulus money in Race to the Top applications: Federal law prohibits USED [U. S. Education Department] from maintaining a national student database … Since the absence of a national database impedes efforts to track citizens and manage the economy by manipulating the workforce, the federal government has for years been building the statutory structure to evade this prohibition. In fact, the law that essentially created the federal role in education also called for databases to monitor compliance with federal law in exchange for federal funds … The federal structure now incentivizes states to build identical — and therefore sharable — data systems, enabling a de facto national database. “Parents may not sue a school that discloses their child’s PII [personally identifiable information] in violation of FERPA,” the authors say. | 1 |
Literally, dogs are too tasty. | 0 |
Breitbart Senior Editor MILO appeared on Judge Jeannine Pirro’s show on Saturday night to discuss the aftermath of the UC Berkeley riots.[ MILO appeared on Judge Jeannine Pirro’s show on the Fox News channel on Sunday night to discuss the protests that occurred this week at UC Berkeley. MILO called on President Trump to follow through on a tweet he put out in which he mentioned pulling funds from UC Berkeley for failing to protect MILO’s First Amendment protection to free speech. If U. C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017, | 1 |
Luther Helland stood on a platform in the middle of the river and surveyed his dam. It was in bad shape. Several of the panels that kept the water back were missing, while others were out of true. Weeks of work stretched before him, compounded by the vagaries of the river. Mr. Helland, 37, is master of Lock and Dam No. 52 on the Ohio River. That makes him responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of cargo and the operation of countless factories, power plants, farms and refineries east of the mighty Mississippi. By extension, then, he is responsible for the livelihoods of millions of Americans. Built in 1929, Lock No. 52 sits in a quiet corner of southern Illinois that happens to be the busiest spot on America’s inland waterways, where traffic from the eastern United States meets and passes traffic from the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River. More than 80 million tons of grain, coal, fuel and other goods — worth over $22 billion — move through here each year. “It wouldn’t seem like it, but this is more stressful than when I was in the military,” said Mr. Helland, a farm boy from Wisconsin who worked as an Army welder and machinist in South Korea before he took this job. Lock No. 52 is a serious bottleneck in innumerable supply chains nationwide. It is emblematic of the nation’s crumbling transportation infrastructure coast to coast — including locks, ports, highways and railroads. Donald J. Trump has said he will spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, but how the money will be raised remains unclear. To avoid raising taxes or increasing debt, his plan calls for much of the money to come from the private sector, with a proposed tax credit offered in return. Funding might also come from taxes on repatriated money, as companies receive incentives to return cash that they have been accumulating overseas. Even with a tax credit, though, companies building roads or locks would want a return on their investment — most likely in the form of toll collection, said Mike Toohey, president of the Waterways Council, an advocacy group for the river shipping industry. His industry is “not in favor of a toll,” he said. Still, he is optimistic that spending on inland waterways will increase under a new administration. The average delay at No. 52 in October and November was 15 to 20 hours. At the moment, No. 52’s sister dam downriver, No. 53, is adding 48 more hours to the wait. Dealing with both dams, it can take five days to travel just 100 miles on this stretch of the Ohio River. And if something goes wrong at either one — which does happen — the delay can build to a week or more. On Sept. 14, for instance, all river traffic stopped for an additional 15 hours while emergency repairs were made to No. 52’s dam. No. 52 and No. 53 have been waiting to be blown up since 1998, when a new near Olmsted, Ill. was supposed to be finished. Authorized in 1988, the project is now wildly over budget and decades behind schedule. What was supposed to cost $775 million and be finished in 1998 will now most likely cost $2. 9 billion and be operational in October 2018 at the earliest. Capt. David Stansbury was in the pilot house of the towboat William Hank, which was tied to a fleet of barges near Metropolis, Ill. waiting for its turn to pass through 52’s lock. “What would happen if both lanes of Interstate 95 were completely shut down for three or four days?” he asked. “You’re talking total gridlock in a major metropolitan area — this is the equivalent of that. ” Right now, the inland waterways are out of most Americans’ sights and minds. “If 52 does fail, or one of the other locks fails, and you cut off half the United States from their barge traffic, then you’ll see a public outcry,” Mr. Stansbury said. He explained: If corn cannot get to the factories, the price of any product will go up, and people will say, “What do you mean I’ve got to pay $10 for a box of cornflakes? Are you out of your mind?” A towboat and its barges need at least nine feet of water to stay afloat. To guarantee this depth from, say, Pittsburgh to Cairo, Ill. a distance of 980 miles, the United States Army Corps of Engineers built dams. The dams make pools. Each pool is like a step, climbing from sea level to the Appalachians, say, or St. Paul. To get from one step to another, boats use water elevators, called locks, that raise anything that floats from one pool to another. Before the locks and dams, many rivers in the United States were low enough to walk across during dry months. On an overcast September morning, the William Hank was pushing 13 barges — two tankers of soybean oil, one barge of dry cement, one barge of aluminum ingots, three barges of scrap steel, four barges of iron ingots, one barge of wheat and one of grain — a total of 19, 200 tons of cargo, worth around $6. 5 million. Most towboats push a tow, which holds the equivalent of 225 train cars or 1, 050 truckloads. There is a lot at stake when this much stuff is late. In a low building on the outskirts of Paducah, Ky. are the offices of Tennessee Valley Towing, which owns the William Hank. Gordon Southern, the company’s senior vice president, calculated that the river closure on Sept. 14 cost him around $80, 000. His company is just one of dozens. “We call that bleeding,” said Harley Hall, Tennessee Valley Towing’s vice president for operations. “If 52 failed, all that tonnage that passes through here each way, it would have to move on rail and road, and the rail cars aren’t there and there’s no room on the highways. There’s no way to bypass this. ” Domestically, trucks moved five times as many goods, by weight, as ships or barges did in 2013. Trains moved twice as much as was moved via water, and planes moved far less. But 72 percent of all international trade moved via water in 2014, compared with 10 percent by truck, 5 percent by rail, and less than 1 percent by air. Many supply chains rely on multiple modes of transportation, and no single mode has enough redundancy to accommodate the goods of another. “The corps does so much with so little,” Mr. Hall said. “This is the hub, holding all the spokes together,” he said of No. 52, but “until Olmsted is completed we have a ticking time bomb,” referring to the dam under construction in Illinois. The corps, an agency within the federal government, decided to build Olmsted with an experimental “in the wet” construction method: Hollow sections of the dam are built on the bank, skidded down to the river, towed into position and lowered into the water, where they are filled with concrete. Traditionally, a project like this would have used a coffer dam — a small temporary dam that keeps water out of the site while construction goes on in the dry. The “in the wet” method was supposed to save time and money and minimize delays, but it did the opposite. By the time the corps realized its folly, it was too late to alter course. The novel construction process and inadequate congressional funding, among other things, have dragged the project past the mark. Olmsted has been under construction for so long that the company contracted to build it has been bought and renamed three times, the new locks at the Panama Canal — Olmsted’s global equivalent — have been begun and finished, and grandchildren of the early workers have been hired. Meanwhile, the old locks and dams are costing the country $640 million a year in delays and closures, according to the Army corps. Little has changed at No. 52 and No. 53 since 1929. Each dam is made of over 400 steel or oak panels, called wickets, that sit in the river and hold back water. When the river is high — about 40 percent of the year for No. 52, more for No. 53 — the wickets can be lowered to the river bottom to let boats pass above them. When the water goes down, a crane from 1937, with a boiler the size of a car, is towed out into the river. A worker reaches into the seething current with a steel hook and feels around for an bar. When he has hooked it, the crane grabs the end of the hook, pulls the wicket up, and the force of the current sets it in place. This is repeated until all the wickets are up, which might take 24 hours. “This is all farmer work,” said Mr. Helland, the lockmaster. “If you grew up on a farm, what’s in your back pockets? Either a pair of pliers or a hammer — that one tool you always use to fix everything with. ” He sat on the steps of the old white frame house, on a hill above the lock, that serves as his office. “The lock is kept going with all the bubble gum and duct tape we’ve got left,” he said, but “we’re running out. She’s deteriorating so fast it makes it hard to keep up. ” The corps has identified 25 failure points at No. 52 and No. 53 — things that are on the verge of breaking, and shutting the locks down. Both are built on wood pilings driven into the river bottom sand. The lock walls are cracking and sagging, the hydraulic pipes are paper thin, concrete is crumbling, metal is rusted through, railings are gone, and seals are leaking. Mr. Helland worries about his dam every day. Last year, a family of six drove their pleasure boat down the spillway and four people died. Recently a contractor hit the dam and broke another wicket (cost: $20, 000) adding a hole to many holes and a hole. Each hole makes it harder for the dam to hold back water. After the contractor crash, the smaller lock chamber was shut for a few days because pipes carrying hydraulic fluid to the gate were leaking and about to burst. “These are old backbreaking places,” said Randy Robertson, the master of Lock and Dam No. 53. “Trying to keep these things going, it’s a struggle every day. We work a lot of overtime just to try and maintain junk — and that’s what it is. There are things we can’t get parts for anymore. You can’t just go to a boat store or a hardware store and get a drum for a 1937 steam engine. You have to go to a machine shop and have it machined. ” On a recent Friday, Mr. Robertson’s lock resembled ancient ruins, emerging from the river. It is still in working order, but it looked abandoned. Paint peeled, concrete cracked, and there was no reason to fix it. Each piece of Olmsted that is placed in the river is “one step closer to 53 being obsolete,” he said. “I’m getting phased out and I’m O. K. with that,” Mr. Robertson said. Earlier, Mr. Robertson was driving past Mound City, Ill. just downstream from Olmsted. The grain harvest was coming in, filling the huge elevators and making piles on the ground. Trucks carrying grain drove by every few minutes. All the farmers in the surrounding countryside depend on him, he said. If the locks fail, their corn doesn’t get to market. “You know that everybody pinpoints down to you. You see it firsthand, they’ve got a wife, kids, a paycheck,” he said. “If you mess up, you cost everybody. ” Mr. Robertson was lockmaster of No. 52 for five years. Because of the stress, he said, his doctor told him he needed to do something else if he wanted to live. When the job opened up, he was relieved to be transferred to No. 53, where the dam is down more and stress is lower. Even drinking water is at the mercy of the locks. When the corps lowered No. 52’s pool to work on the dam on Sept. 14, Paducah’s intake pipes — which suck water directly out of the river — could have risen above water. If the closing had persisted for 96 hours, as was predicted, the town of 25, 000 people would have had to find another source of water. A few days later, Mr. Helland stood above the dam on a steel box that would protect his divers from the fierce current when they dived into the river to fix the wickets. The maneuver boat lay against the dam, boiler hissing. The crane operator jiggled his foot on the pedals. Warm vapor rose from the roiling rapids below. On top of the dam, a milk crate, a dead fish, a bowling ball and hundreds of logs had come to rest. “Did you know bowling balls float?” asked Scott Davis, a lock operator. Earlier that week, it was starting to rain, and Mr. Davis and Sadie, his black dog, were leaving for the night. They walked past three retired wickets on the ground above the lock. The wood was gray, pockmarked and scoured from the river. “This is the thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Mr. Davis, 52. “The wood is spectacular — it’s the heartwood of white oak trees. ” He has been taking old wickets home, milling the wood, and making picture frames and coffee tables. “When somebody retires from here, I’m going to give them a picture of a sunset over the lock and a coffee table to put their feet on,” he said. By the time the William Hank was cleared to enter No. 52’s lock, the captain had gone to bed, and the pilot, Jackson Walker (universally called Bubba) was in the pilot house. “I have actually sat on both sides of this lock for a week to a week and a half before,” he said. “That’s money these companies are having to pay these guys just to sit. ” Slowly, the boat chugged toward the lock wall. One thousand feet in front of him, on the head of the tow, a deckhand called over the radio telling him how close he was: “All right, Bubba, four more feet you be looking at daylight on that long wall … about a foot or two to the good. ” Mr. Walker maneuvered the William Hank into the chamber, a temporary addition from 1969 that has long outlived its design life. Instead of a smooth wall, the chamber is made of poured concrete cylinders that almost seem designed to catch the front of a barge. “You can easily get quartered just enough that you can jam up in here and do a bunch of damage,” Mr. Walker said. His tow, like most, was 105 feet wide. The lock chamber is 110 feet wide. To park his craft, he had as much space as a car does in a crowded parking lot. Gently tapping the stainless steel levers that control the rudders and pulling back and forth on the two throttles, Mr. Walker steered, came ahead, and stopped in the center of the chamber. To his right, the bedraggled condition of the wickets was apparent. “It’s just like holding your fingers up against the water and letting it flow through,” he said. The William Hank had waited eight hours to get here. “This is one of the fastest I’ve seen it,” Mr. Walker said. A man in a neon green vest rode a little yellow scooter to the end of the lock wall. He got out and leaned back on a long metal lever. The lock gate began to creak and groan. A big red gear turned, a black steel arm stretched out, and the gate slowly closed. No. 52 is operated entirely by hydraulics, and Mr. Helland said he could tell by the sound if something was wrong. The lock operator can move a tow through the chamber in an hour by himself, using the levers and a set of buttons inside two sheet metal shacks a little bigger than portable toilets. At Olmsted, this will all be done with clicks of a mouse, but no matter how much money is invested in infrastructure by the Trump administration, Mr. Helland’s shoulders will feel the weight of 80 million tons for at least two more years. | 1 |
Singer John Legend ripped President Donald Trump in a feature for Fault magazine’s latest issue. [Asked how he’s raising his daughter, Luna, in the era of Trump, Legend said: “Hopefully ‘Trump’s America’ won’t last very long and we get him out of here within the next four years. ” “By the time Luna is old enough to be aware of what is happening, America would have elected a far better president,” the said. Legend was a fierce supporter of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy he performed last summer at an concert fundraiser for the former Democratic nominee. The “Darkness and Light” singer has also repeatedly attacked Trump on Twitter, calling him a “racist” and an “awful person. ” He’s married to supermodel Chrissy Teigen, who previously called Trump a “monumental asshole. ” Legend also told the Hollywood Reporter last November that Trump’s “ ” rhetoric could turn the United States into Nazi Germany. Now, nearly two months after Trump was sworn into office, Legend says he’s “just hoping for the best” to come out of the new administration. “Trump promised to do things which are really bad for the country and some which are good and the hope is he’ll just do the good parts but I don’t have a lot of faith in him,” he said. ” I’m just hoping for the best and when we need to resist and speak out, we need to hit the streets and do it. ” Legend continued: “For now, I’m more worried about the people less fortunate than my daughter, people who might lose their healthcare or get excluded because of the colour of their skin, their religion and country of origin. ” Read the full QA with Legend here. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson | 1 |
in: General Health Constipation can be incredibly painful; however, it can also take a big toll on the body. Fortunately, there is a 100% natural solution to constipation. Big pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know that some of the artificial medication for constipation significantly reduce the effectiveness of the intestines. As a result, some people report that without taking certain medication, they can’t visit the toilet. The good news is, you can solve constipation quite easily. But let’s delve deeply into what constipation can do to the body first. Bad Breath Firstly, constipation can cause bad breath (halitosis). Unfortunately, people who suffer from bad breath don’t always realize that they have a problem. People are unlikely to point out to a person that their breath stinks; therefore, they might miss out on social events and job opportunities due to bad breath. Constipation can cause bad breath because there is a build up of toxic waste and the gasses rise up through the body. Rectal Issues & Infection As stools spend more time in the bowels, water is reabsorbed. As a result, stools get hard and dry. Some constipation suffers report that passing bowels becomes very painful and can take many hours. As a result, the rectum is stretched beyond its limits. This can lead to rectal prolapse, which is a rectum which fails to close. Rectal prolapse sufferers usually wear diapers because stool leaks out of them. Moreover, they are more prone to infection. Increase Toxins The skin is the largest organ in the body and is a reflection of a person’s general health. Constipation typically increases the buildup of toxins in the body. As a result, the skin has to work harder to eliminate toxins. This can cause acne, skin discoloration etc. Therefore, if your skin is bad, don’t buy an expensive beauty product. Take a look at your diet, and whether you suffer from constipation. The skin is a reflection of inner health. Colon Cancer Constipation can also cause colon cancer. The colon is designed to hold a few pounds of stools. Think of it like a plastic bag. Overload with heavy items and it rips. It’s primary function is to transport stool. However, when an individual is constipated, it has to store stool. This puts a strain on the inner membrane and can cause ruptures and internal infections. Invasive surgery may be required in such instances. Loss Of Healthy Bacteria The intestines contain flora (healthy bacteria) which help with immunity and vitamin production. Constipation reduces the concentration of flora, thereby leaving sufferers more susceptible to infection and illness. Moreover, they help to keep stools soft. Therefore, constipation sufferers can go through a downward spiral whereby their condition worsens over time. As people age, they are more likely to get constipated. Moreover, it is more likely to have a serious effect on their health. This is because the body isn’t as resilient. Notably, constipation can have a big effect on quality of life; especially if it comes with one of the serious conditions above. Fortunately, there is a natural cure. Sufferers no longer have to be on a path to deteriorating health. What You Can Do A majority of constipation medication are filled with chemicals which can harm the body, and make constipation worse. Even a product like Metamucil contains ingredients no person should consume, like aspartame. Change your diet! This is one of the best ways to end constipation. Eat plenty of healthy fruits and vegetables and cut out processed foods as much as you can. Eating rancid fats (cooked meat) also doesn’t help with constipation and your digestive system so limiting that as much as possible is important. There are also some great products on the market that can assist you in ending constipation while you spend time changing your diet over time. Wholey Shit is a great example as it contains only a few natural, high quality ingredients -and it works great! You can get a free sample of Wholey Shit here. These types of remedies are a great way to get started and relief naturally and quickly while you further discover how to adjust your diet and lifestyle to reflect better digestion, eating habits and so forth. | 0 |
It’s Wednesday, the trash people picked up my trash at 5:30 this morning… this post is still way more interesting than whats on the news.. carry on.
This was Todd Kohlhepp’s first post to Facebook the day Kala Brown and Charlie David Carver went missing. A little over two months later, Brown was found alive, with a chain around her neck, in a metal storage container on property belonging to Kohlhepp, in Woodruff, South Carolina.
Carver’s 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix was located on the same property, covered with brush and in a ravine. Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger confirmed a body was also found, however, no identification was given. Greenville Online reported that Solicitor Barry Barnette, from the 7th Judicial Circuit Court, acknowledged that Brown saw Kohlhepp shoot and kill Carver.
Sheriff Chuck Wright of Spartanburg County appears to think that Kohlhepp is responsible for more than kidnapping. From the new information he received from Brown, Sheriff Wright believes there could be at least four bodies buried on Kohlhepp’s land. Wright told WYFF 4 News:
We’re trying to make sure we don’t have a serial killer on our hands. It very possibly could be what we have.
It was later confirmed that the body discovered was Carver. The couple was reportedly missing for two months before they were found.
Without any knowledge of his past, one can easily mistake Kohlhepp for a nice guy. However, recent reports of his history, paint a totally different picture of him.
The Past Life of Kohlhepp: November 1987, a year after he was charged with rape, Kohlhepp was sentenced to prison at 16 years old. He would not be released until 14 years later, at the age of 30. He has been described as incessantly aggressive to others and property since he was in nursery school. Seemingly without cause, he destroyed his own things, such as electronics, toys, clothing, and pets. These statements were made by the judge who had the rape case turned over to an adult court.
Around the age of 8, he was already seeing a counselor, due to behavioral issues at home. Reportedly, he shot a dog with a BB gun and was hitting other children. Kohlhepp’s father has stated that anger is the only emotion his son shows. This anger only progressed, even with more than a decade in prison and years of counseling. He is currently 45 years old.
The Future of Kohlhepp: Weapons and ammunition were found on Kohlhepp’s property, along with chains above his garage door. It may take weeks to cover the 95 acres of land, in the search for other possible victims. He is under suspicion for seven murders but has only been charged with four of them and kidnapping.
Allegedly, he often invited the waitresses from the Waffle House he frequented in Roebuck to his house. He would leave them large tips. A former cook at the restaurant said the women thought Kohlhepp was creepy. The frequent patron’s behavior became so disturbing, in 2015, the cook started taking his orders.
One of those waitresses was Meagan Coxie, age 26. She and her husband, Johnny Coxie, age 29, were found murdered on Kohlhepp’s property, in early November 2016. They were missing for almost a year. The Coxie’s had a history of panhandling. In December 2015, the waitress was charged with child neglect after their baby tested positive for heroin.
Kohlhepp has not been charged with the Coxie murders, despite the fact their bodies were found on his property.
He has been charged with four slayings committed in 2003, known as the “Superbike murders.” Beverly Guy, Scott Ponder, Brian Lucas, and Chris Sherbert were shot and killed, on Nov. 6, 2003, at Superbike Motorsports. This case remained cold until Kohlhepp offered his confession.
His admission to these four homicides came with his arrest on Nov. 3, 2016. He was taken into custody when police found Brown chained up in a storage container on his land.
In the meantime, Solicitor Barnette asserts that Kohlhepp is a dangerous individual. He is being held without bail and there is a court date scheduled for Jan. 19, 2017.
By Amy Weins
Edited by Jeanette Smith
Sources:
Facebook: Todd Kohlhepp
WYFF 4: Woman Missing Since August Found Held Captive, Man Still Missing Police Say
Fox Carolina: Court documents highlight troubled past of man accused of holding Anderson woman captive
Greenville Online: BREAKING: Kala Brown watch Kohlhepp shoot boyfriend, solicitor says
CBS News: The frequent patron’s behavior became so disturbing, the cook started taking his orders
Images Courtesy of micro.81’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License Charlie David Carver , Johnny Coxie , Kara Brown , Kohlhepp , Meagan Coxie , spot | 0 |
Comments
A suburban Detroit homeowner and Trump supporter just took the Republican Party platform and proudly displayed it on his front lawn, creating a despicably terrifying display of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton sitting in a mock electric chair, screaming in agony as she is executed.
The photo of the offensive display was taken by a reader in Waterford Township, a suburb northwest of Detroit which is 89% populated by white residents. It’s unknown if authorities have been alerted, but this display is the end result of months of extremist electioneering by the Trump and Republican Party, who have been hell-bent on dehumanizing
American politics never had a tradition of demanding the jailing of one’s political opponent, nor to encouragement of supporters to engage in political violence, but that’s today’s Republican Party under Donald Trump. His campaign has broken America’s political taboos with open calls for violence, even winding up under Secret Service investigation twice. Trump himself drew an unprecedented public scolding from the Secret Service for saying that “ second amendment people ” should take matters into their own hands if/when he Hillary beats him.
Trump’s sycophantic surrogates Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani completely debased the high titles of their former prosecutorial offices within the federal government by calling for Hillary Clinton to be “locked up.” Sadly, that has become the only policy proposal of the Republican Party — beyond Trump’s plans to kiss up to Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin and Mike Pence’s plan to manage women’s health with scripture.
Now, Trump’s followers have internalized the calls for political violence, and here is is the result in suburban Michigan:
It doesn’t get any more deplorable than this, folks. | 0 |
On a typical game day, Alex Rodriguez would ride to work up Broadway, through Harlem and Washington Heights — where he was born — and into the South Bronx. It was a quiet time when he could sit in the back, stare out the window at the city passing by him, and formulate a game plan. But on Friday, as Rodriguez made the journey for the last time as a Yankees player, it was a moment of nostalgia. He said he thought back to all his great memories, including the 2009 World Series championship, and perhaps other notable moments, like his two Most Valuable Player Awards as a Yankee, his 3, 000th hit, and even the drive home after losing Game 7 to the Red Sox in 2004. He also hit 196 home runs at Yankee Stadium heading into Friday night’s game, and 696 over all. For people who know Rodriguez well, the idea that he would retire from baseball before he became the fourth player to hit 700 home runs simply does not compute. It may be difficult, but over the last two years, a transformative period in his life, Rodriguez has come to the conclusion that there are more important things than baseball milestones. “Hal has given me an opportunity to stay in the organization,” Rodriguez said of Hal Steinbrenner, the Yankees owner who offered Rodriguez a job as a special adviser through 2017. “With all my and how badly I acted, the fact that I’m walking out the door and Hal wants me as part of the family — that’s hitting 800 home runs for me. That’s something I will be able to share with my daughters for a long time. ” Rodriguez’s contrition and acknowledgment that he behaved poorly during the Biogenesis scandal has been liberating and uplifting for him. There was a time in 2013 when he responded to drug accusations by filing lawsuits against Major League Baseball, the players’ union and members of the Yankees’ medical staff. But on the eve of spring training in 2015, after quietly serving a suspension for his admitted use of substances, he went with hat in hand to Yankee Stadium. Accompanied by Jim Sharp, his new lawyer and mentor, he personally apologized to Steinbrenner, the team president Randy Levine and General Manager Brian Cashman. Since then he has acted virtually without fault in public, and his metamorphosis into a respected elder statesman is what enabled him to leave with dignity intact, proud to tell his daughters that yes, he messed up, but he atoned, too. Still, it will be difficult to give up the game. Few have ever loved playing baseball more than Rodriguez, and some team may seek to sign him after the Yankees were to officially release him at the conclusion of Friday’s game. The Marlins, from Rodriguez’s hometown, Miami, could have interest. But Rodriguez, while not ruling anything out, sounded content with the idea that his time may be up. He went into Friday batting . 199, the lowest of his career, and he joked that merely making contact three times against the Red Sox on Thursday was an accomplishment. Exhausted from the tumult of the last week, he said he probably would not even take calls from anyone — unless it was Hal Steinbrenner — for a while. “Baseball has a funny way to tap you on the shoulder when you least expect it and tell you it’s the end,” he said. “I’m at peace, and I’m really excited. This is a happy day for me and my family. ” Rodriguez planned to go back to Miami to decompress. His mind could change, and the Yankees would not stand in his way. But there is also something to be said for retiring as a Yankee, his team since 2004. “For me, wearing the pinstripes is enough,” he said. His official duties as an adviser and instructor will not begin until next spring, although Rodriguez said he may visit Tampa to check in on some of the Yankees’ prospects. He also said he would vigorously support the team that was about to release him, as they pursue playoff position. The Yankees went into Friday’s game three and a half games out of the second American League spot. “Crazier things have happened, and there is a lot of talent in that clubhouse,” he said. “When you think about what Gary Sanchez has brought into our clubhouse just the last week, it’s exciting and fun to watch. This team can do some special things. It can surprise people, for sure. ” A baseball junkie who regularly watches late West Coast games in his home after Yankees games have ended, Rodriguez warned that he would not be able to watch his former team right away, though. “If I wake up on time tomorrow I would watch tomorrow’s game,” he said with a chuckle. “I may have a couple cocktails tonight, so I may not wake up at game time tomorrow. But I’ll definitely watch Sunday’s game. ” | 1 |
Undeterred and infuriated by Western accusations of war crimes and barbarity in the aerial assault on Aleppo, the Syrian government and its ally Russia intensively bombed the city in northern Syria on Monday for the fourth consecutive day. Residents and rescuers there described the bombardment as among the worst yet in the war. Both the Kremlin and the Syrian government appeared to harden their position that the United States and its partners had caused the disintegration of a fleeting last week. The Russians went as far as suggesting that the Western portrayal of them as war criminals in the Syria conflict risked a further alienation in relations. neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo were hit with dozens of air attacks in the predawn hours, killing and wounding many people, according to doctors, nurses and activists in the city. By some estimates the deaths totaled 100 or more for the fourth day. A number of monitor groups disseminated graphic photos and video clips portraying the medical mayhem wrought by the bombings. The Aleppo Media Center, a group of antigovernment activists and citizen journalists who have sought to document the conflict, posted video footage of civilian victims on a dirty hospital floor getting little more than simple bandages for wounds. Stockpiles of food and supplies have dwindled to near nothing on the side, according to a report from Aleppo by Agence . It also said a shortage of blood for transfusions had forced doctors at the few functioning hospitals to amputate limbs of the seriously wounded. Save the Children, the international charity, said children were “dying on the floors of hospitals” for lack of ventilators, anesthetics and antibiotics. The crisis in Aleppo has drastically worsened since Thursday, when Syrian and Russian warplanes sharply escalated the bombing of the divided city as the negotiated by the Russians and Americans, collapsed. The volume of bombings has increased, residents and rescue workers in Aleppo have said, and incendiary weapons and bombs that can destroy underground shelters have been used for the first time, wreaking havoc on crowded neighborhoods. One Syrian ambulance crew called Shafak said Sunday that half the dead it had collected over the weekend were children, according to Save the Children. Forty percent of the population in eastern Aleppo are children, Save the Children said, a statistic that helps to explain the high rates of young casualties. Ahmad Mustafa Makiyya, a volunteer with the ambulance team, said he had to pull his own family members from the rubble of their house, which was struck on Monday. The house was close to a gathering point for day laborers, he said, making the area especially crowded. At an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Sunday, the United States, Britain and other allies said that the Russians were abetting war crimes in Aleppo by the government of President Bashar . “ bombs, more suited to destroying military installations, are now destroying homes, decimating bomb shelters, crippling, maiming, killing dozens, if not hundreds,” Matthew Rycroft, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the Council session. Mr. Rycroft said that “in short, it is difficult to deny that Russia” is committing war crimes. Samantha Power, his American counterpart, accused the Russians of “barbarism. ” Russia’s government, which has called the military campaign a necessary response to terrorist groups in Syria, responded harshly on Monday to the criticism. “We note the overall unacceptable tone and rhetoric of the representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States, which can damage and harm our relations,” Dimitry S. Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, told reporters in Moscow. Mr. Peskov said moderate Syrian opposition groups backed by the United States and Western and Arab allies had not complied with the terms of the by failing to separate themselves from the jihadist fighters of the Nusra Front, which now calls itself the Levant Conquest Front. “Terrorists continue their encroachments, they continue offensives,” he said, so that “naturally the fight against terrorists is ongoing, and must not be stopped. ” International aid groups that have long denounced the indiscriminate brutality of the Syrian war were aghast at the intensified bombings in Aleppo. The city is home to roughly two million people, including at least 250, 000 who live in the eastern zones. The Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, a group that supports hospitals in Syria, said the use of bombs in recent days had made the crisis more desperate. “These bombs have the capacity to destroy fortified hospitals, medical points and underground shelters (where tens of thousands are taking shelter) at high risk,” the group said in a statement. The United Nations secretary general, Ban who has repeatedly denounced what he has called the Syrian government’s culpability in most civilian casualties of the war, also expressed shock at the use of bombs. “These bombs are not busting bunkers,” he said. “They are demolishing ordinary people looking for any last refuge of safety. International law is clear: The systematic use of indiscriminate weapons in densely populated areas is a war crime. ” The power of these bombs is far more destructive than the barrels stuffed with explosives and shrapnel that Syrian government forces have been dropping on areas, where they kill and maim indiscriminately. An ordinary building hit by the barrel bombs will crumble, but the bunker busters obliterate buildings and also leave deep and wide craters, said James Le Mesurier, director of the Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation, a group that supports the civil defense search and rescue crews known as the White Helmets. While underground bunkers in eastern Aleppo have afforded civilians some measure of protection from barrel bombs, Mr. Le Mesurier said, the bunker busters leave no place to hide. Caroline Anning, a spokeswoman for Save the Children in southern Turkey, said Syrian relief workers she had spoken to in recent days told her they no longer felt safe in underground bunkers. Schools — such as they are, operating in basements — have been shut since early July in eastern Aleppo. They were scheduled to resume on Saturday, though that now seems unlikely, Ms. Anning said. There was little indication Monday that diplomacy could be revived to stop the Aleppo assault, with each side blaming the other. Mr. Assad and his subordinates, emboldened by Russia’s assistance, have said over the past week that they intend to retake the entire city by force if necessary. Syria’s foreign minister, Walid said in a television interview that he considered the United States responsible for the collapse of the and that Mr. Ban’s comments on the Aleppo bombings were “shameful. ” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters in Washington that diplomacy remained for now the only viable option for reducing the fighting in Syria and ending the war. However, Mr. Earnest said, “it is hard to imagine the United States reaching any other negotiated agreement with the Russians until they have lived up to the commitments they have already made. ” | 1 |
Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr
Most sane people are horrified at the idea of a Donald Trump presidency. However, there’s a substantial portion of the electorate that seems not to see just how absolutely dangerous the guy is as just a presidential candidate, much less how dangerous he would be as president. However, it seems that some of Trump’s supporters DO recognize that he’s a total nutcase, but plan to vote for him anyway. One woman’s reason is truly out of this world. A lady named Crystal said of her choice to vote for Trump:
“Oh I think he’s crazy, and he may get us killed, but at least he’s going to be truthful with us.” Ultimate Trump Voter Quote, from Crystal: "Oh I think he's crazy, and he may get us killed, but at least he's going to be truthful with us." pic.twitter.com/Qz4u7OIzB0
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 29, 2016
Of course, Crystal’s reason for her choice prompted much ridicule on Twitter. Here are just a few of the more fun tweets laughing at the absurdity of this logic: @MikeLewisTO @ddale8 "I'm nuking Germany because that dog Angela Merkel said my hands were tiny. Believe me. Get affairs in order now." | 0 |
posted by Eddie Those who don’t believe in the spirit life after death may change their tune after checking this out. Usually it’s some sort of visual proof one needs, and this accident video certainly provides just that. A tragic accident occurs when a truck hits a woman on a motorcycle. The woman hits a telephone pole, dies right away. Then this happens. You’ll likely have to review it several times as it’s hard for even the believers out there to realize what they are witnessing. The bike gets hit and the woman goes right into the power pole. That’s when suddenly a black silhouette of a person can be seen, haven risen out from the woman’s body. This certainly gives a lot of thought about the idea of afterlife, spirits, and so forth. Rarely do we see a death on video, as it happens. Especially one where the person dies instantly. Often people can remain alive after horrific accidents, part of their vitals still operating. But here, it is more than clear, that a life has indeed ended in brutally instant fashion. And with that, be warned that indeed it is pretty graphic, though it goes by quick. It’s a death and it’s not pleasant to view, but many may believe the fascinating after-image is showing a new life of spirit beginning. Share with others who can handle such a video and start a discussion on whether it appears real and could in fact be footage of an actual spirit leaving one’s body!
source: | 0 |
The University of Minnesota football team on Saturday rescinded its threatened boycott of a bowl game, a protest that had been intended to persuade the administration to lift the suspensions of 10 players entangled in a sexual assault inquiry. Team leaders continued to say that the 10 players, whose suspensions remain in effect, were being punished without the benefit of due process. Minnesota will meet Washington State in the Holiday Bowl on Dec. 27 in San Diego, avoiding what would have been the first time a college football team had missed a game because of a player protest in at least decades. Team leaders gathered Saturday morning at a hastily arranged news conference in a team meeting room in the Bierman Field Athletic Building on campus to announce the decision, which came after a lengthy meeting on Friday night of team leaders with the university’s president, Eric W. Kaler, and Athletic Director Mark Coyle. Wide receiver Drew Wolitarsky, a senior, read a statement from the team, saying, “After many hours of discussion within our team, and after speaking with President Kaler, it became clear that our original request of having the 10 suspensions overturned was not going to happen. ” The statement continued, “We as a team will use our status as public figures to bring more exposure to the issue of sexual harassment and violence against women. ” The statement added that “sexual harassment and violence against women have no place on this campus, on our team, in society. ” The statement also said that the players had secured a promise that the suspended players would eventually be given a “fair hearing — which includes a diverse review panel. ” Though the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action concluded last week that the 10 players had violated the university’s code of conduct — with four committing sexual assault according to the university’s rules, which require affirmative consent — sanctions have yet to be determined. Kaler said those hearings would most likely be in January and could not be scheduled before the bowl game because of final exams. He had clarified in a statement Friday night that the suspensions, which were announced Tuesday, were an athletics department decision, separate from whatever consequences might stem from the university’s finding. Kaler had seemed to put the ball in the players’ court Friday night when he pledged in that statement not to “change our values or our code of conduct for the sake of a bowl game. ” On Saturday, Kaler said that his subsequent meeting with team leaders “was a very frank and candid conversation, and I’m glad it led to this resolution. ” The team’s threatened boycott highlighted the significant voice that ostensibly amateur athletes in sports in prominent conferences (Minnesota is a member of the Big Ten) have, by virtue of their popularity and impact on the athletics department’s bottom line. The episode also touched on a debate embroiling campuses nationwide over how universities must balance their legal obligation to investigate sexual assault with their need to be fair to all students, including those accused of sexual assault. It also displayed the quandary in which administrations find themselves given federal privacy laws. The players’ statement acknowledged as much, saying: “We also understand that they have requirements that they need to follow about sharing information. Yet at the same time, we observed how our teammates’ names and pictures were shared with the world, and reputations ruined. ” After a woman accused several men of sexual assault in September, a criminal investigation led to no prosecutions and a restraining order was dropped as part of a settlement, while four players served suspensions. The accused have insisted that there was only consensual sex. But the investigation, whose conclusions were obtained by a Minneapolis television station, used the “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof rather than the criminal justice system’s higher standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt. ” Coach Tracy Claeys, who led the Golden Gophers to an record in his first full season in the job, had backed the players’ protest on Twitter. He and several assistants reportedly sat in the back of the room while Wolitarsky read the statement. The investigation report, which relied on interviews, video and other documentation, contained graphic details about what happened the night of the episode. It also stated that a Gophers football recruit had been there he was underage, according to court records. Kaler said Saturday that “the football team action was in support of their teammates. ” “It was not in support of sexual violence,” he said. “The players are clear about their involvement in preventing sexual violence. Their values are in support of the victims of sexual violence. ” | 1 |
Email
The underpinnings of a decent society are neutral laws — laws that favor no particular individual or group — and the impartial enforcement of those laws. The U.S. Supreme Court's job is to ensure the impartial enforcement of our laws. But our two presidential candidates differ in their visions of court appointees. Hillary Clinton says that she would "look broadly and widely for people who represent the diversity of our country" and that "we need a Supreme Court that will stand up on behalf of women's rights (and) on behalf of the rights of the LGBT community." In contrast, Donald Trump says, "I will appoint justices who, like Justice (Antonin) Scalia, will protect our liberty with the highest regard for the Constitution." Limited government and rule of law are conflict-reducing, whereas diversity-oriented justices who stand up for the rights of particular individuals are conflict-enhancing. Let's look at a simple example of the benefit of neutral rules and their impartial enforcement.
Football teams spend four quarters battling each other. After the conflict, players and coaches shake hands and often hug one another. Their competitive struggle ends peacefully, as well as on friendly terms, because the referees, whom we can think of as justices, enforce neutral rules impartially. There would be a different outcome if referees exercised compassion instead of impartial rule enforcement. Let's be specific.
On Nov. 20, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cleveland Browns will play. So far this season, the Browns have not won a single game; their record is 0-9. On top of this sad record, the Browns have not had a winning season since 2007. By contrast, the Steelers haven't had a losing season since 2003. In anyone's book, this is a gross disparity. On Nov. 20, should the referees have the empathy to understand what it's like to be a perennial loser? What would you think of a referee whose decisions are guided by empathy? Let's be explicit.
In the name of compensatory justice, referees might stringently apply pass interference or roughing the passer violations against the Steelers and apply the rules less stringently against the Browns. Another question is: Would you support a referee who refuses to make defensive pass interference calls because he thinks it's a silly rule? You'd probably remind him that the league makes the rules, not referees. Most people would agree that football justice requires that referees apply the rules blindly and independent of the records or any other characteristic of the two teams. They would also agree that referees should impartially apply the rules of the game even if they personally disagree with some of the rules.
If referees exercised compassion, football games would not end so peaceably. Losing coaches and players would not feel a need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how they could improve themselves. Instead, they would focus their energies on choosing sympathetic referees.
The essence of a Supreme Court justice's job is just like that of a referee — namely, impartially enforcing the U.S. Constitution, our rules of the game. The status of a person appearing before the court should have absolutely nothing to do with the rendering of a decision. That's why Lady Justice, often appearing on court buildings, is shown wearing a blindfold. It's to indicate that justice should be meted out impartially, regardless of identity, power or weakness. Also, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "men should know the rules by which the game is played. Doubt as to the value of some of those rules is no sufficient reason why they should not be followed by the courts." In other words, the legislative branch makes the rules, not judges. True justice must be settled by process questions, such as: Were the rules unbiased and evenly applied? If so, any outcome of the game of life is just. Decisions based upon empathy would make it unjust.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com .
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment
Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted.
No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language.
No product advertisements.
Please post comments in English.
Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there. | 0 |
Who doesn’t like the idea of a luxury vacation? Ponying up the money for an upscale getaway, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as appealing as going on one. Fortunately, says Joel Widzer, an expert on saving money on travel and the author of the book “The Penny Pincher’s Guide to Luxury Travel,” there are ways to cut the cost of a fancy trip. Here, he shares tips for a lavish getaway on a limited budget. BE A HOTEL LOYALIST. Favoring one hotel brand, such as Marriott, Starwood, Hilton or Hyatt, has major saving benefits, according to Mr. Widzer. “Hotel brands reward frequent guests who sign up for their loyalty programs with room upgrades, free hotel nights and free breakfast, and they even waive annoying fees such as the cost of valet parking,” he said. Loyalty pays off at independently owned properties, too. If you’re a traveler who returns to the same destination often, say Paris or Lake Tahoe, it’s a good idea to keep staying at the same hotel there. Mr. Widzer, for example, used to stay at the same luxury boutique property on his frequent trips to Santiago, Chile, and by his third visit, he was treated to freebies such as a minifridge stocked with his favorite snacks, free airport transfers and upgrades to a suite — perks worth several thousand dollars over time. USE CREDIT CARD POINTS ON CHAIN HOTELS. Those points you accumulate every time you put a charge on your card aren’t just good for buying airline tickets, Mr. Widzer said. With certain credit cards, travelers can redeem the points they earn for accommodations at luxury hotels, like using points earned on a Chase Ultimate Rewards card toward stays at properties around the world. TRAVEL WHEN OTHERS AREN’T. When destinations have fewer travelers, prices are lower. Head to Sardinia in August, for example, and hotel rates and inflated prices are in store. But a trip in October means mild weather and prices at hotels and on services such as boat rentals that are up to 50 percent lower than during peak season. FOR AN EXOTIC DESTINATION OR A MULTICITY TRIP, CONSIDER A PACKAGE TOUR. Planning an upscale vacation without using a luxury tour provider for a major city or a popular destination such as Maui isn’t difficult, but it is logistically harder to pull off an affordable yet lavish getaway to less common destinations such as Ethiopia or on themed multicity trips, such as the capital cities of the Eastern Bloc. In instances like these, Mr. Widzer said, it’s cheaper to rely on a company that specializes in upscale tours (Abercrombie Kent and Tauck are two). “These trips can be either group or private, and since these companies can negotiate favorable prices through their local contacts, their tours have a lot of inclusions such as meals, tickets to cultural performances and access to tourist attractions,” he said. | 1 |
POTUS openly degraded him on the world stage because he believes Duerte shouldn't be killing drug dealers. POTUS should keep his mouth shut, that's a conversation that should've been in private. POTUS thinks he has a right to criticize freely without consequence. | 0 |
. Severe Allergies to Peanuts, Eggs and Dairy Directly Linked to Ingredients in Common Vaccines Have you read The Peanut Allergy Epidemic by historian Heather Fraser? She begins by asking us wh... http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/severe-allergies-to-peanuts-eggs-and.html Have you read The Peanut Allergy Epidemic by historian Heather Fraser? She begins by asking us why the peanut allergy epidemic is only found in Western cultures, where at least 4 million people experience the mysterious phenomenon, yet there are virtually no reported cases in India, where peanuts just so happen to be the main ingredient in most baby food products. Consider this: one century ago, you couldn't find anyone allergic to peanuts, but now it's commonplace for parents to send EpiPens to school for the teacher and nurse to keep near to their children, just in case someone so much as opens a snack in the room that contains peanuts, or even if someone opens a food product that was so much as manufactured in "a facility that processes peanuts." What's wrong with the human body that it would go into anaphylactic shock from a seemingly harmless food ingredient that couldn't harm a soul a hundred years ago? Today, peanuts cause the most common severe food allergy reactions , and are the number one cause of death from food reactions, and for good reason: Peanut oil was never meant to be put in a syringe and injected into muscle tissue. Peanut oil is a non-stated, hidden ingredient in children's vaccines Back in 2010, one family had their 6-month-old child taken away from them and were accused in court of shaken baby syndrome, until their attorney presented corroborating medical information about the child's anaphylactic reaction and swelling around the baby boy's brain (subdural hemorrhages) that occurred as an immediate response to vaccinations . Which vaccines were those, you may be wondering? DTaP, Prevnar7 (pneumococcal) and Rotateq (Rotavirus vaccine). Guess what? The administered vaccines contained unlabeled peanut oil, which was used as an adjuvant, but was not listed on the vaccine inserts. The doctor basically proved to the court that the child's allergic reaction to having peanut oil injected by vaccine had caused the massive brain swelling reaction that sent the boy into shock. False medical theory: The stronger the allergic reaction to vaccine ingredients, the longer the immunity lasts In the mid-1960s, peanut oils were first introduced into vaccines because scientists hypothesized they could "prolong" immunity. Somehow, they thought, the oil would act as a time release capsule. Within 20 years, peanut oil was the preferred "excipient" – meaning a substance formulated alongside the active ingredient of a medication for the purpose of long-term stabilization. The dangers of its use, however, were well-documented. The problem ? Doctors and scientists had lumped immune response with immunity, making a grave mistake that's still assumed to be true today. The myth is that the greater the allergic response to the vaccine, the greater the immunity that is conferred. Wrong! Today, anyone who challenges this myth is referred to as anti-science, anti-vaccine and a conspiracy theorist. There is no faster way for a doctor to lose their license to practice medicine than to challenge this commandment of vaccine mythology. 1980 to 2016: Correlating the massive surge in severe childhood allergies When did these childhood allergies experience a massive upsurge in number? Answer: When the mandated schedule of the number and frequency of vaccines for children under age 7 doubled, and then tripled. Take a look: 1980 – 20 vaccines 1995 – 40 vaccines 2016 – 70 vaccines What's the easiest way to send a child's body into anaphylactic shock and create severe food allergies for the rest of his/her life? Inject intact proteins from peanuts, eggs and dairy (casein) products directly into the infant's muscle tissue 36 times before the age of 18 months. When normal food becomes extremely toxic to children, the parents should review how those specific ingredients have been introduced to their infant's bodies, and what other dangerous "trace amounts" of carcinogens, antibiotics, adjuvants, emulsifiers, preservatives, additives, brewing agents, carriers and "immune response stimulants" are being injected into the body repeatedly for no logical reason. Vaccines have never been proven safe or effective ; only studies done by the manufacturers themselves, which have subsequently been proven fraudulent, altered and skewed, are published in order to fool the public. Do you really know what's in most vaccines? Have you ever read the ingredients, warnings, reactions and the documented side effects on a vaccine insert? Here is a summary of the most dangerous vaccine ingredients, for your convenience: 1. Bovine cow serum: Extracted from cow skin. When injected causes connective tissue disorders, arthritis and lupus; also shortness of breath, low blood pressure, chest pain and skin reactions. 2. Sorbitol: Synthetic sweetener which metabolizes very slowly and aggravates IBS and gastrointestinal issues. 3. Hydrolyzed gelatin: Derived from the collagen inside animals' skin and bones. Injecting gelatin poses the risk of infection from synthetic growth hormones and BSE infectivity (mad cow disease). 4. Sodium chloride: Raises blood pressure and inhibits muscle contraction and growth. 5. Egg protein: Vaccines are prepared in eggs (certainly not organic). May contain growth hormones, antibiotics, and salmonella bacteria. 6. Casein: Also known as cow's milk protein, many children experience severe allergic and life-threatening reactions to traces of casein, commonly found in the DTaP vaccine. 7. Thimerosal: A neurotoxic mercury which causes autism: There are 25 mcg in one average flu vaccine, and the EPA safety limit is 5 micrograms, so children who are vaccinated simultaneously with multiple vaccines receive over 10 times the safety limit of mercury in one day. 8. Human albumin: The protein portion of blood from pooled human venous plasma; when injected causes fever, chills, hives, rash, headache, nausea, breathing difficulty, and rapid heart rate. 9. Formaldehyde: Highly carcinogenic fluid used to embalm corpses. Ranked one of the most hazardous compounds to human health; can cause liver damage, gastrointestinal issues, reproductive deformation, respiratory distress and cancer. Peanut oil? Enough said! Source and references: Naturalnews.com ; TheDoctorWithin.com ; NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov ; VacTruth.com Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue.
Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related | 0 |
Donald J. Trump’s victory in the presidential race has presented some companies with a new challenge: how to find the right balance in their postelection messages to employees and customers. Matt Maloney, the chief executive of the online food delivery company GrubHub, found himself in a clash of business and politics this week after he sent an email to employees on Wednesday that appeared to say that anyone who disagreed with the company’s policy of inclusion and diversity should resign. “As we all try to understand what this vote means to us, I want to affirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and everyone else here at GrubHub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States,” Mr. Maloney wrote. “If you do not agree with this statement, then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here,” he said. But on Thursday, in a sign of the new political flash points on the corporate landscape, a message was posted to the company’s website with the original email attached. The new message said the message had been misconstrued. “I want to clarify that I did not ask for anyone to resign if they voted for Trump,” Mr. Maloney wrote. “I would never make such a demand. To the contrary, the message of the email is that we do not tolerate discriminatory activity or hateful commentary in the workplace, and that we will stand up for our employees. ” The footwear company New Balance also encountered a postelection backlash after its vice president for communications, Matt LeBretton, said after Mr. Trump’s victory that “we feel things are going to move in the right direction. ” The remarks were made in an interview with a Wall Street Journal reporter, Sara Germano, who published them on Twitter on Wednesday. The reporter also tweeted that the remarks were made within the context of global trade, noting that New Balance has publicly opposed the Partnership. New Balance says it makes more than four million pairs of athletic footwear in the United States per year, which represents a limited portion of its sales. Some interpreted the comments as supportive of Mr. Trump, and they drew a backlash. Online, images of New Balance footwear being burned or thrown in the garbage were posted, and there were calls for a boycott. On Thursday, New Balance emailed a message to other news media outlets and Sole Collector, which reports on the sneaker industry and its culture: “As the only major company that still makes athletic shoes in the United States, New Balance has a unique perspective on trade and trade policy in that we want to make more shoes in the United States, not less. ” “New Balance publicly supported the trade positions of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump prior to Election Day that focused on American manufacturing job creation and we continue to support them today,” it said. Another New Balance message was published on Twitter on Thursday that also seemed to allude to the controversy, saying it welcomed “all walks of life. ” Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, congratulated Mr. Trump on Twitter on Thursday. Mr. Bezos added that he had an “open mind” and wished Mr. Trump “great success in his service to the country. ” But comments below the message spoke of canceling Amazon Prime subscriptions and boycotting Amazon altogether, although some were supportive. The New York Times this week examined the views of some business leaders in the postelection climate here. Some American companies have a tradition of using their unique hold on consumer attention to express support for the causes they believe in. The ice cream company Ben Jerry’s posted statements on its website advocating for voting rights and climate change action. After Mr. Trump’s election, it published an open letter to Mr. Trump on Thursday that it described as a “challenge” to “hear the voices of all Americans. ” “Whoa, does your new title sound as weird to you as it does to us?” the letter said, addressing Mr. Trump. “Well, we’ll all get used to it quickly. ” “And while we recognize that this is the outcome that many wanted, this is also an outcome that leaves half of our country feeling sadness and shock,” it said. “We want to honor all of our nation’s experience. ” Chris Miller, the activism manager at Ben Jerry’s, said in an interview on Friday that the letter to Mr. Trump had reached about 350, 000 people on the company’s Facebook page and that the feedback had been “overwhelmingly positive. ” But he said the letter took longer to draft than the company’s other statements about causes it supports because more “eyeballs” were put on it as the company strove for balance between people who were saddened by the result and those whom “mainstream establishment candidates” did not reach. “We wanted to be part of setting the tone here,” Mr. Miller said. | 1 |
Chance events play a much larger role in life than many people once imagined. Most of us have no difficulty recognizing luck when it’s on conspicuous display, as when someone wins the lottery. But randomness often plays out in subtle ways, and it’s easy to construct narratives that portray success as having been inevitable. Those stories are almost invariably misleading, however, a simple fact that has surprising implications for public policy. Consider the history of the Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting in the world. After having languished in obscurity for most of its early existence, Leonardo da Vinci’s work was pushed into the spotlight in 1911 when it was stolen from the Louvre. The widely publicized theft remained unsolved for two years until Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian maintenance worker at the Louvre, was apprehended after trying to sell the painting to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. His arrest provoked a second wave of publicity, with images of the Mona Lisa splashed around the world. In the years since, the painting has come to represent Western culture itself. Yet had it never been stolen, most of us would know no more about it than we do of the two obscure Leonardo da Vinci canvases from the same period that hang in an adjacent gallery at the Louvre. Like Kim Kardashian, apparently, the Mona Lisa is famous largely for being famous. As in the art world, so too in the world of work. Almost every career trajectory entails a complex sequence of steps, each of which depends on those preceding it. If any of those earlier steps had been different, the entire trajectory would almost surely have been different, too. Inevitably, some of those initial steps will have been influenced by seemingly trivial random events. So it is reasonable to conclude that virtually all successful careers entail at least a modicum of luck. One’s date of birth can matter enormously, for example. According to a 2008 study, most children born in the summer tend to be among the youngest members of their class at school, which appears to explain why they are significantly less likely to hold leadership positions during high school and thus, another study indicates, less likely to land premium jobs later in life. Similarly, according to research published in the journal Economics Letters in 2012, the number of American chief executives who were born in June and July is almost lower than would be expected on the basis of chance alone. Even the first letter of a person’s last name can explain significant achievement gaps. Assistant professors in the 10 American economics departments, for instance, were more likely to be promoted to tenure the earlier the first letter of their last names fell in the alphabet, a 2006 study found. Researchers attributed this to the custom in economics of listing ’ names alphabetically on papers, noting that no similar effect existed for professors in psychology, whose names are not listed alphabetically. To acknowledge the importance of random events is not to suggest that success is independent of talent and effort. In highly competitive arenas, those who do well are almost always extremely talented and . As Charlie Munger, the vice chairman of Warren E. Buffett’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, has said, “The safest way to get what you want is to try and deserve what you want. ” Perhaps the most useful advice for someone who aspires to material success is to develop expertise at a task that others value. Such expertise comes not from luck but from thousands of hours of assiduous effort. But talent and effort are not enough. Luck also matters. Even the most able, industrious people in South Sudan have little chance at success. Success is not guaranteed for deserving people in wealthy countries with highly developed legal and educational institutions and other infrastructure, but it’s substantially more likely. Being born in a good environment is one of the few dimensions of luck we can control — that is, at least we can decide how lucky our children will be. But as a nation, we’ve been doing a bad job of it for at least a generation. The luckiest are getting luckier even as their numbers shrink. The unlucky population is growing, and its luck is getting worse. These changes have stemmed in part from sharply diminished public support for education. According to a 2015 report by the nonpartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, for example, state spending per student averaged about 20 percent less in than in the school year. More than 70 percent of students who graduated from colleges in 2015 had student loans that averaged $35, 000. It’s no surprise, then, that access to the benefits of a college degree continues to depend heavily on family income. According to a study from the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy, at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, 77 percent of offspring of families in the top income quartile had earned college degrees by age 24 in 2013, compared with only 9 percent of those from families. More troubling, the disparity persists even when controlling for precollege academic aptitude scores. The human tendency to underestimate luck’s role has contributed to this troubling state of affairs by reducing the electorate’s willingness to support the public investments that make economic success possible. But the taxes people want to avoid need not be personally painful. Evidence from the social sciences demonstrates that beyond a certain income threshold, people’s sense of depends much more on their relative purchasing power than on how much they spend in absolute terms. If top tax rates were a little higher, all homes would be a little smaller, all cars a little less expensive, all diamonds a little more modest and all celebrations a little less costly. The standards that define “special” would adjust accordingly, leaving most successful people quite satisfied. Happily, there is a simple remedy: Merely prompting people to reflect on their good fortune tends to make them more willing to contribute to the common good, according to a 2010 study published in the journal Emotion. So try to engage your successful friends in discussions about their experiences with luck. In the process, you may increase their willingness to support the kinds of public investments that will enhance the next generation’s odds of success. And you will almost surely hear some interesting stories. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — As Judge Neil M. Gorsuch prepares for his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, which starts Monday, he might want to review advice, reflections and criticism from former nominees who successfully navigated the process. In 1981, on his first day on the job, a Justice Department lawyer got a assignment. The lawyer, John G. Roberts Jr. was assigned to help prepare Sandra Day O’Connor, an Arizona judge nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, for her confirmation hearing. Mr. Roberts provided her with draft answers to likely questions and helped quiz her at the mock hearings — sometimes called murder boards. In a memorandum to a supervisor, Mr. Roberts described his philosophy: “The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court, but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments. ” He took his own advice when he was nominated to be chief justice in 2005. He showed an easy familiarity with constitutional doctrine in his hearing, effortlessly summoning the names and summarizing the details of old decisions without indicating how they would apply to new controversies. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, declared that Chief Justice Roberts “retired the trophy” for an outstanding performance by a judicial nominee. Then a law professor at the University of Chicago, Elena Kagan described the brilliant evasions that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had executed at her 1993 confirmation hearing in a 1995 book review: “Justice Ginsburg’s favored technique took the form of a pincer movement. When asked a specific question on a constitutional issue, Ginsburg replied that an answer might forecast a vote and thus contravene the norm of judicial impartiality. … But when asked a more general question, Ginsburg replied that a judge could deal in specifics only abstractions, even hypotheticals, took the good judge beyond her calling. ” “Some room may have remained in theory between these two responses perhaps a senator could learn something about Justice Ginsburg’s legal views if he pitched his question at precisely the right level of generality. But in practice, the potential gap closed to a sliver given Ginsburg’s understanding of what counted as ‘too specific’ (roughly, anything that might have some bearing on a case that might some day come before the court) and what counted as ‘too general’ (roughly, anything else worthy of mention). ” In 2010, at her own confirmation hearing, Justice Kagan employed her own pincer movements, executed with to avoid answering both specific questions and general ones. Her 1995 essay had been critical of modern confirmation hearings, which she had called “a vapid and hollow charade. ” At her hearing, she paid heed to another part of the essay. “The safest and surest route to the prize,” she wrote in 1995, “lay in alternating platitudinous statement and judicious silence. ” Justice Clarence Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearing is best remembered for its second act, an examination of accusations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill, his former subordinate at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which he ran from 1982 to 1990. But the first stage of the hearing, which focused on his qualifications and views, was also an ordeal, Justice Thomas wrote in his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son. ” Democratic senators, he wrote, were determined to find out what he thought about Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, and other cases. “Each day I left the caucus room tired, tormented and anxious. … My opponents were armed with long lists of trick questions prepared by law professors and activists I, on the other hand, had spent most of the preceding decade running a federal agency instead of studying two centuries’ worth of Supreme Court decisions. ” “My enemies weren’t looking for justices. All they cared about was keeping anyone off the Supreme Court who might vote to reverse Roe or water it down. As far as they were concerned, my was a disadvantage, not a qualification. ” A year later, Justice Thomas voted to overturn Roe. “By then I’d had ample time to study Roe in detail, and concluded that it was wrongly decided and should now be overruled,” he wrote in his memoir. In 1959, as a lawyer, William H. Rehnquist was harshly critical of the Senate for its superficial questioning of a recent nominee, Justice Charles Evans Whittaker, in an article in The Harvard Law Record. “The discussion of the new justice on the floor of the Senate succeeded in adducing only the following facts: (a) proceeds from skunk trapping in rural Kansas assisted him in obtaining his early education (b) he was both fair and able as a judge of the lower federal courts (c) he was the first Missourian ever appointed to the Supreme Court (d) since he had been born in Kansas but now resided in Missouri, his nomination honored two states. ” “What could have been more important to the Senate than Mr. Justice Whittaker’s views on equal protection and due process?” At his own first confirmation hearing in 1971, to become an associate justice, Judge Rehnquist retreated. “I think I did not fully appreciate the difficulty of the position that the nominee is in,” he said. “I say that not entirely facetiously, because the nominee is in an extraordinarily difficult position. He cannot answer a question which would try to engage him in predictions as to what he would do on a specific fact situation or a particular doctrine after it reaches the court. ” Chief Justice Rehnquist, who died in 2005, took much the same approach at his 1986 confirmation hearing to become chief justice. “I really had no idea what the problems confronting a nominee were then,” he said of his 1959 article. | 1 |
A man was taken into custody on Saturday night in connection with a shooting that killed five people on Friday at a mall north of Seattle, the authorities said. The authorities, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night, identified the suspect as Arcan Cetin of Oak Harbor, Wash. He was taken into custody without incident around 6:30 p. m. Officials said that they had received numerous tips about the gunman and that surveillance footage had helped locate him. Lt. Michael Hawley of the Island County Sheriff’s Office said he had received a report that Mr. Cetin’s car was less than a mile from his office and when he headed that way, he found Mr. Cetin walking on the sidewalk. Mr. Cetin was carrying a satchel with a computer inside and was in a “zombielike” state when he was taken into custody, the lieutenant said. Charges were pending, said the authorities, who said it was too early to say what led to the shootings. On his Facebook page, Mr. Cetin listed his hometown as Adana, Turkey. Officials said he was a legal permanent resident of the United States. He graduated last year from Oak Harbor High School and listed himself on Facebook as a bagger at the Whidbey Island Commissary. Little of his personality could be gleaned from his sparse social media presence, which included only 56 posts on Twitter. His Facebook page offered a glimpse of his life. A posting by a friend in 2011 described him as “really annoying,” “funny” and “sometimes really nasty. ” Mr. Cetin referred to lifting weights in high school and posted videos of the video game Call of Duty. Another Facebook posting, by a friend in 2012, said of Mr. Cetin: “Truth is: You are a very odd character. You were always going on about being Russian and stuff like that, but under that you really supported America (or so it seemed to me) and I always thought that was really cool. ” Mr. Cetin was active in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, said a former classmate, Uhlaine Finnigan, 19, of Port Angeles, Wash. She called Mr. Cetin “sexist” and said he would touch girls on their buttocks, “either slapping or grabbing them. ” “He did that to girls of all grades at the high school including my best friend and I, regardless of the blatant disgust from the girls and being told to stop,” she said in an interview by Facebook Messenger. She said he appeared to have few friends. The attacker at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Wash. killed four women in the cosmetics section of a Macy’s department store, the authorities said. A man was critically wounded in the shooting and was taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he died. The youngest female victim was a teenager, law enforcement officials said at a news conference on Saturday morning. The gunman, who was armed with a rifle, left the scene before the police arrived. Officials said they recovered the weapon at the scene. They declined to give details about the weapon or to say how many rounds were fired. Photographs of Mr. Cetin on a Myspace account showed him holding a handgun and a rifle. A spokesman for the F. B. I. ’s Seattle field office said on Saturday that there was no evidence to suggest that the shooting was an act of terrorism. At the news conference on Saturday night, Mayor Steve Sexton of Burlington said the shootings happened at a time and in a setting that were ordinary: a Friday night at a mall. Referring to the shootings, he said: “They changed those families forever. It changed our city, I’m afraid to some extent, forever. ” The names of the victims had not yet been released by officials. Security camera footage showed the man entering the mall without a weapon. Footage taken 10 minutes later showed him entering Macy’s with a rifle. At the news conference earlier on Saturday, the authorities described the tense moments after the shooting, as officers searched the roughly mall for the attacker, finding only store employees and shoppers. Police officers entered the mall in teams, unaware during the search, which lasted for hours, that the gunman had fled before their arrival. They searched “every room and every nook and cranny,” said Lt. Chris Cammock, the commander of the multiagency response team conducting the investigation. The F. B. I. said early Saturday that it had “no information to suggest that additional attacks” were planned in Washington State, and that it was coordinating intelligence efforts with the local authorities. More than 200 officers from at least 26 agencies responded to the shooting, the authorities said. One woman, Tari Caswell, told The Skagit Valley Herald that she had been in the Macy’s women’s dressing room when she heard four loud pops, followed by seven or eight more. “I just stayed quiet in the dressing room because it just didn’t feel right,” she said. “And it got very quiet. And then I heard a lady yelling for help, and a man came and got me and another lady, and we ran out of the store. ” Saturday’s shooting was at least the fifth in Washington this year in which three or more people died, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. | 1 |
Comments
The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC just aired a unique new poll must already have the Trump campaign reeling. O’donell reports that over a quarter of the state of Florida’s registered Republicans tell this that they’ve already voted early for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It’s actually the first poll that includes only actual early voters, surveyed by William and Mary College and TargetSmart. This new poll also shows that Hillary Clinton leads Florida 48-40 which TargetSmart says, “challenges conventional wisdom.” That’s not even the most shocking result…
“ Hillary Clinton is winning 28% of registered Republicans ,” said TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier, “ who have already voted already .” According to their surveys of early voters, Hillary Clinton has won 53% percent of early votes cast thus far in the 2016 election, and there’s more data in the video below. 28% of Florida early voting Republicans have voted for @HillaryClinton
— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) November 2, 2016
“This includes absentee ballot voters who tend to trend more Republican and 28% of those voters are crossing over, when we look at Democrats,” said TargetSmart’s Bonier, “there’s almost no crossing over. Trump has only won 6% of those voters. Yes. These are people that have already voted, and these Republicans are not just saying it to pollsters, but they’re doing it in Florida. These are voters that are not waiting for election day.”
If this poll result holds up, there’s absolutely no path to victory for the Republican campaign, as there is literally no likely scenario resulting in electoral victory for Trump when he loses Florida to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Take a look: | 0 |
Seven World-Historical 'Achievements' Of The Iraq Invasion Of 2003
Authored by Gary Leupp, originally posted at Strategic-Culture.org,
Here is a list of the noteworthy, ongoing results of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq beginning in March 2003. (Recall that invasion was denounced by the UN as illegal, based entirely on lies, and—given the U.S.’s hegemonic position in the world, allowing it to act with impunity—the crime’s architects have never punished.)
1) The principal achievement of the war and occupation was the dramatic expansion of the al-Qaeda network that had attacked the U.S. on January 11, 2001. An al-Qaeda franchise was established in Iraq for the first time, playing a key role in the Sunni “insurrection” against the occupiers and their Shiite allies, then expanding across the border into Syria where it split into the al-Nusra affiliate and its even more savage rival, ISIL. Iraq also served and serves as a training ground for jihadis now operating from Iraq to Libya and beyond.
2) The invasion and its consequences encouraged the cause of Kurdistan, an imagined state straddling Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Kurds are the largest stateless people in the world, victims of British and French colonialists who divided the region between them after World War I. After the Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. established a “no-fly” zone over northern Iraq to discourage Baghdad from deploying troops in the region. Iraqi Kurdistan had already obtained a degree of autonomy before the invasion but the status became official under the occupation and a referendum for independence is likely to pass soon. This would infuriate Iraq and perhaps provoke Turkey’s intervention. As it is, the autonomous region is locked in struggle with Baghdad over territorial claims and control over oil fields.
3) The invasion destroyed the Iraqi state, causing it to fracture into three: Kurdistan, the Sunni zone in the west, and the Shiite-majority areas around Baghdad. The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein had been extremely repressive and brutal. But it had maintained order; discouraged religion in politics; protected the Christian and other religious minorities; promoted women’s rights; imposed no dress code; enforced a criminal code modeled after the Napoleonic (not the Sharia); licensed rock n’ roll radio stations, allowed the brewing of beer and its sale etc. The Shiite-led regime boosted into power by the occupation has reversed much of this. (A bill to ban the production and sale of beer was just passed by Parliament last week.) But the regime’s power does not extend into much of Anbar Province, ISIL still governs Mosul, and again, Kurdistan has become autonomous.
4) Because Shiites are the majority in Iraq (60%), and dominate Iran next door; and because the leaders of Shiite parties have studied in Iran or lived their in exile and are sympathetic to Iran’s mullah-led regime; and because the U.S. was forced by peaceful mass protests to allow elections and the emergence of Shiites as the leaders of the country, Iran’s power and influence in the region has expanded dramatically. (Apparently no one in the State Department thought about that.) Since Iran has not attacked another country in centuries — but was savagely attacked by Saddam Hussein in 1981, sparking a long war killing over half a million people — and since Iran’s friendliness to its neighbor, one of the few Arab countries in which its co-coreligionists hold power, is entirely natural, one can ask why anyone might be alarmed by this. But it does alarm some, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, that crucial U.S. Arab ally governed by Wahhabi Sunnis, most of all.
5) The invasion produced a regional power struggle between Sunni Islamists on the one hand, and their Shiite (and other) enemies on the other. This is often portrayed as a contest between Saudi Arabia (whose government-backed clerics condemn Shiites as heretics, and who fear the prospects for rebellion in Saudi Arabia’s own oppressed Shiite minority) and Iran, depicted as the protector of Shiites in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen etc. (The so-called “Shiite Crescent” extending from Iran to Hizbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon in fact embraces states and movements that have little in common with the Islamic Republic of Iran. But they are all targeted by the medieval regime in Riyadh which tars them all with the Iranian brush.) The Saudis were keen advocates for a U.S. strike on Iran (on the false pretext of a nuclear threat); are major supporters of al-Nusra in Syria and have funded ISIL as well, preferring such Islamist forces to the secular if Alawite-led Syrian regime; and are bombing the hell out of Yemen with active U.S. and British assistance under the false pretext that the Shiite Houthi “rebels” are agents for an expanding Iran. These things would not be happening, had the U.S. not ripped the lid off Pandora’s box in Iraq in March 2003.
6/ The invasion has produced friction between the U.S. and its important NATO ally Turkey (which has the second largest military in the alliance). Turkish war planes are bombing Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) militia in Syria who constitute the U.S.’s most reliable allies, producing U.S. protests (which the Turks ignore, arguing straight-faced that the YPG are just as terrorist as ISIL). The Turks warned before the invasion of Iraq that it would likely produce regional instability. But Ankara would have allowed the U.S. to attack from Turkish soil if Turkish forces as part of the “coalition of the willing” could be stationed around Mosul, once part of Turkey—the idea being to contain Kurdish nationalism.
Fortunately the parliament rejected the deal. But the predicted instability has occurred. The Arab Spring of 2011 in Syria was not directly connected to the Iraq invasion, but gave the U.S. the opportunity to pontificate that “Assad has lost legitimacy,” demand his immediate resignation, and bankroll the armed opposition including the Kurds. The fact that U.S. efforts to find and recruit Syrian Arab forces as allies—who are not in bed with al-Nusra—to topple Assad have failed so dismally binds the Pentagon ever closer to forces that Turkey wants to wipe out. (The conflict and contradiction are embarrassing to Washington. Oh, by the way, did you notice that the Turkish foreign minister just announced that Turkey would invade Iraq if it “felt threatened”?)
Having declared in 2011 that Bashar al-Assad must go, the U.S. was faced in 2014 with the horrible embarrassment of ISIL (that toxic fruit of its Iraq invasion) winning lightening victories from Raqqa to Fallujah, obliterating the Sykes-Picot line dividing Syria and Iraq. The now-Syria based terrorists were approaching Baghdad. So now the U.S. having withdrawn all troops in Iraq was back in action, bombing to prevent such a disaster. And it started bombing ISIL positions in Syria (although with far less efficacy than the later Russian efforts) in league with a list of largely reluctant allies dragooned into formal membership in what Washington likes to call a “coalition” to make its unilateral program for the region sound like the will of what they like to call “the international community” regardless of how many key nations that imagined “community” includes.
The U.S. command that Assad step down was made in the summer of 2011. Turkey’s President Erdogan, hitherto a friend and even mentor of the Syrian leader, opportunistically took up the U.S. demand and demanded his resignation. And Ankara itself began to interfere big-time in the neighboring country it once dominated, targeting Kurds more than anyone else. Since the U.S. relies on these allies, how could there not be a sharp conflict here?
7/ The invasion of Iraq and aftermath resulted in four million Iraqi refugees fleeing the country as of 2007. Hundreds of thousands have poured into Europe, alongside people displaced by U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Libya, and by the turmoil in Syria exacerbated by U.S. actions, producing a massive continent-wide crisis. Many Europeans aptly blame the deluge on the U.S., pointing to the U.S.’s paltry record of admitting refugees from the Middle East and complaining of strained national resources to handle the humanitarian catastrophe. (Another embarrassment.)
* * *
This is all what Buddhists call “karmic retribution” for past acts. Or what the Hebrew prophet Hosea referred to when he said “Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind.” Or what the CIA meant when it invented the term “blowback.” It’s all heading towards something, unless decent people stop it.
But when I watch people like Michael Moore line up behind the foremost advocate of war in U.S. politics, joining (consciously, philosophical) amoral thugs hell-bent on maintaining and expanding the empire when it’s in a stage of precipitous decline, I am not optimistic. Not only will she win, but she will rival Dick Cheney as a cold-blooded latter-day Cold Warrior, cynically exploiting fear and stupidity to try to bring Russia to its knees.
Hillary doesn’t recognize any of these seven points, which to recapitulate are : US actions have greatly strengthened al-Qaeda US actions have encouraged Kurdish nationalism (with unpredictable ramifications) The US through its vicious illegal actions has destroyed the modern Iraqi state US actions have solidified ties between Iran and Iraq’s majority Shiite community, strengthening a country still targeted for “regime change” The invasion of Iraq and the regime change there exacerbated the historical Sunni-Shiite divide, and encouraged Saudi Arabia as the ultra-Islamist protector of the shrines to redouble its efforts to support extremist Sunnis everywhere in the region The results of the invasion place Turkey and the U.S. at loggerheads over the question of Kurdish nationalist movements in both Iraq and Syria US interventions in the Middle East and North Africa since 2001 have produced a massive refugee crisis, inflicted mainly on Europe
She does not acknowledge that George W. Bush’s invasion (that she so passionately endorsed, fully exposing her Valkyrie soul, was criminaland not somebody’s well-meaning “mistake”). She doesn’t have any analysis of the Kurdish question. (She is not—as sometimes alleged by supporters—a “policy wonk” but a lazy intellect who doesn’t know jack-shit about the real world.)
She has never expressed regret for the horrific destruction of Iraq, nor given any attention to the plight of its women, who were (as she surely knows) much better off under Saddam Hussein. (To acknowledge that would be to suggest that sometimes U.S. imperialism favors misogynist Islamists over relatively progressive secularists, for its own pragmatic empire-building purposes. She can’t mention that publicly.)
She deals with the rise of Iran—made inevitable by the U.S. invasion of Iraq—by doubling down on her crude clueless Iran rhetoric, which rests on the assumption—repeatedly debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies—that Iran might pose a nuclear weapons threat. She doesn’t understand the history of the Sunni-Shiite divide; I believe she rolls her eyes in irritation that these people have these differences so hard to understand, impeding the Exceptional Nation’s ability to straighten everything out by bombing, and conquering, and making people die. She doesn’t understand anything about the history of the Kurds and their fate in the region.
She feels no guilt at all about her orchestration of the ruin of Libya. She sees no reason to link her own actions to the flooding of Europe with refugees fleeing terror. But she will probably be the next president, with fellow shieldmaidens Michele Flournoy (as “secretary of defense”) and Victoria Nuland or Samantha Power (as secretary of state).
Never acknowledging what happened yesterday, never able to absorb historical lessons, determined to maintain and expend its global hegemony (just as that becomes absolutely impossible to do, because other nations rise too, and great nations like Spain and Britain actually get humbled over time), the U.S. under Clinton will likely head methodically towards a showdown with Russia. She wants so badly, to show she can do it. She’ll do it for women, everywhere, to show how strong a woman can be.
And then there will be a sudden strange change in your environment. As you wonder what’s going on you’ll be painlessly vaporized, on account of Hillary’s passion to topple Assad, or forcibly reintegrate the Donbass into Ukraine.
The brilliance of the 2003 invasion will be clarified as never before in that bright blast, as Hillary—a very strong woman—cackles in the background from her bunker about how she came, saw, and a million died. | 0 |
The Miami Herald stated that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) endorses Hilary Rodham. Clinton. The organization is also the largest LGBTQ political group. The HRC has endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Their new video advertisement features Clinton’s pledge to fight for the LGBT community’s equality. The ad was also released days before the election on Nov. 8.
The video titled “Hillary Clinton: Equality Is About Changing Hearts And Minds,” was released in Washington D.C., which is the HRC headquarters are located.
The organization has a section of their website dedicated to the group’s endorsement of the candidate. The HRC also stated that Clinton has stood with the LGBTQ community and the group will now stand with Clinton. The HRC concluded by saying that Clinton’s fight is with the community and that what the HRC advocates.
The HRC President Chad Griffin said that Clinton has shown through her words and actions that she is dedicated to fighting for the rights of the LGBT community. He also stated that all of the progress the community has made is at stake in the 2016 Presidential election as the HRC has endorsed a candidate in the 2016 election.
Griffin then continued to state that Donald Trump’s campaign is filled with hateful language that will reverse the LGBTQ movement’s gains. He also said that Clinton will tear down the walls of bigotry against people of alternative lifestyles. The HRC leader concluded by saying that it is very important that people who are pro-equality voters for Clinton in the next presidential election.
Breitbart stated that an artist from the Art Wing Conspiracy group said a lot of Trump supporters, especially amongst the LGBT community, are “in the closet.” The artistic group has painted several Think Different posters across the city of San Francisco near the offices of Twitter and Clinton’s campaign headquarters. The posters feature a rainbow Apple logo with a silhouette of Trump’s face on it. They were released on National Coming Out Day.
The Art Wing Conspiracy artist also stated that on National Coming Out Day the organization encourages people to “stop living a lie and come out.” He conveyed this idea, in a voting booth, i.e. a closet, no one has to know who supports Trump or Clinton.
The artist also said that the liberal community in San Francisco must know that there are many Trump supporters amongst the city’s LGBT community. The individual stated that having pride means to be true to oneself and one’s beliefs, even if it is against the mainstream. The artist concluded that is what the LGBT rights movement conveys.
The Stonewall Inn’s website stated that the historic inn was the birthplace of the historic LGBT rights movement. The patrons of the club retaliated against harassment from the local police department. Subsequently, a riot occurred on June 28, 1969.
The website also claimed that the patrons refused to accept the status quo of oppression for the first time. They then stood up for each other and the whole LGBT community.
The site continues to state that the riot at the Stonewall Inn sparked the lengthy battle for all members of the Gay and Lesbian community. The incident is often referred to as the Rosa Parks incident of the LGBT community. The site then stated that the incident led the government and society, in general, to look at members of the LBGT community as equals.
In 1969 the police raided gay clubs regularly. Eight police officers arrived at the Stonewall Inn on a Saturday morning at 1:20. Approximately 200 people were in the establishment that night. However, the raid was not conducted as planned. The patrons did not cooperate, resulting in the riot that led to the LGBT rights movement of the 1970s, which is why the HRC now exists and has endorsed a candidate for the 2016 election.
By John A. Federico
Edited by Cathy Milne
Sources:
Miami Herald : LGBTQ group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) releases video supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC)
Breitbart: Rainbow Trump Posters Appear in San Francisco on ‘National Coming Out Day’
The Stonewall Inn: THE HISTORIC STONEWALL INN
Featured Image Courtesy of Mobilus In Mobili’s Flickr HRC , HUman Rights Campaign | 0 |
VIENNA — The new oil minister in Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of the OPEC countries, had a message for the global market: Don’t expect us to influence the price of crude oil by adjusting supplies. “I think managing in the traditional way that we tried in the past may never come again,” the minister, Khalid said on Thursday. “Certainly we will not go with certain price targets. ” The message — which came after the decision on Thursday by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to maintain high levels of oil production — is central to the changing strategy of the Saudi complex. And it could foreshadow a period of volatility for oil prices because OPEC’s policies and the Saudis’ sway have long helped guide the markets. In a sweeping directive in April, Saudi Arabia set forth plans to diversify its economy, reduce its dependence on oil and pull back on its government handouts. And what Mr. Falih does with Saudi Arabia’s oil — how much the kingdom decides to pump and where the money goes — is the biggest piece of the puzzle. The global markets received a sneak peak at Thursday’s OPEC meeting, Mr. Falih’s first since his appointment last month as the head of an expanded energy, industry and mining ministry. While other OPEC members have been urging the freezing or lowering of oil production, Mr. Falih is pushing to keep it high and plow the money into other industries that might prove profitable for Saudi Arabia. He wants the cartel to rethink its longstanding approach and assumptions that it can manage global oil supplies and prices. It runs counter to the longtime stance of his predecessor, Ali who presided over an era when OPEC was largely content to restrain production to try to drive prices up. The Saudis’ shift is easier to justify because price pressures have abated of late. While oil initially dipped on Thursday, it recovered to around $50 a barrel, about twice what it was in January. Oil producers should “let the market forces continue to seek and find that equilibrium price between supply and demand,” said Mr. Falih, speaking to a small group of reporters in his penthouse hotel suite. The Saudis can increasingly afford to go their own way. Along with a wealth of oil reserves, Saudi Arabia invested tens of billions of dollars in building a competitive oil business at a time when other OPEC countries like Venezuela and Iran allowed their industries to deteriorate. Mr. Falih has been at the core of those moves. Mr. Falih a 1982 graduate of Texas AM, jumped onto the international oil scene in the early 2000s. Hoping to inject life and competition into the economy, King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s ruler at the time, invited overseas companies to look for natural gas after shutting them out in the 1970s. To the surprise of Western oil executives, the king tapped Mr. Falih, then a young executive at Saudi Aramco, to manage complex negotiations for a series of joint ventures with Royal Dutch Shell of Britain, Total of France and Lukoil of Russia. Although the ventures didn’t find much gas, Mr. Falih garnered credit for deftly juggling conflicting interests. “After a year or so, I had to accept that he was really good at what he was doing,” said Floris Ansingh, who was the head of Shell in Saudi Arabia at the time. “He understood the different . ” Mr. Falih’s international focus set the stage for the evolution of Saudi Aramco. After he was named chief executive of the company in 2009, he pushed for modernization, trying to turn the oil company into a global competitor that rivaled the private giants in the West. He expanded areas like oil trading and acquisitions and tried to lock up demand by investing in China and in other growing economies. Saudi Aramco has recently developed three giant oil fields, sharply increasing the amount of oil it can produce. The company earned an estimated $200 billion from oil production last year, according to the commercial intelligence firm Wood Mackenzie. “The view in the industry is that Aramco is one of the best oil companies in the world,” said J. Robinson West, a senior adviser on energy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization. “Khalid has been important in building that. ” Mr. Falih also seems unafraid to tread on sensitive ground. As the head of the national oil company, he warned that domestic fuel consumption risked eroding the exports that are the kingdom’s main source of cash. “We need to make sure that we use our precious oil and gas resources efficiently, wisely and minimizing waste,” Mr. Falih said at a dinner in 2010. At the time, rethinking the country’s energy use at home was a politically fraught issue. Government subsidies that kept fuel cheap were considered an untouchable piece of the Saudi social contract. And with oil prices surging back then, the kingdom’s oil wealth, it seemed, would only grow. Now, his warning is part of the new Saudi . “He is a very astute political player,” said Valérie Marcel, author of “Oil Titans,” a book about national oil companies. “He has been able to push back and create space to debate issues, while still keeping himself in good position with the ruler. ” Mr. Falih also recognized early on that growing concern for the climate could reduce demand for Saudi oil, creating a risk that a large portion of those resources might be left in the ground. On Thursday, Mr. Falih said that Saudi Arabia was now preparing for the worst case by moving aggressively to spur growth of industries. While he said he thought that demand for crude would last for generations, Mr. Falih added that “we as human beings cannot be complacent and assume that oil will continue to fuel the world forever. ” In recent years, Mr. Falih has taken on the role of trusted confidant, serving as adviser and troubleshooter for Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In 2015, the prince put Mr. Falih in charge of the kingdom’s troubled Health Ministry, which was struggling to contain a deadly respiratory virus called MERS. In his new role, Mr. Falih has significant oversight of a huge portion of the Saudi economy. The Oil Ministry absorbed the Ministry of Electricity and was renamed the Ministry of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources. He has also been appointed head of the mining company, a industrial fund, the geological survey, the atomic and renewable energy program and a number of other economic bodies. Mr. Falih faces a huge set of objectives, some in areas where his predecessor came up short. Despite its oil wealth, the kingdom struggles to produce sufficient natural gas to meet the needs of electricity generators and industry. Efforts to develop solar power and other renewable energy sources have also lagged some of Saudi Arabia’s neighbors, like the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Falih is part of the plan to refocus the country’s financial firepower to invest in areas other than oil. In a sign of the shifting strategy, the kingdom, traditionally conservative in its investment approach, recently invested $3. 5 billion in the Uber. It was one of the largest investments into a privately held . Mr. Falih is also in charge of the effort to sell a small stake in Saudi Aramco to investors with a target of 2018. He said the idea was to make the company more global as it looks to add investments in natural gas. A public listing might also improve the company’s performance. “If you have to face the analysts every quarter,” he said, “it gives you a bit of competitive tension. ” To make it all work, Mr. Falih will have to persuade the country’s stubborn constituents to adopt a more commercial focus and to participate in joint ventures with international companies. While some doubt whether Mr. Falih is the right person to lead this transition, others say only an insider has the credibility to do so. Either way, the oil market will be watching. | 1 |
Cop Fired After Shooting Own 11-year-old Daughter at a Halloween Party Home / BREAKING NEWS / Breaking: Podesta Told Mills ‘Dump All Those Emails’ on Day News of Clinton’s Private Email Server Broke Breaking: Podesta Told Mills ‘Dump All Those Emails’ on Day News of Clinton’s Private Email Server Broke Jay Syrmopoulos November 1, 2016 1 Comment
Washington, D.C. – In what could prove to be the proverbial nail in the coffin of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions, an email released by WikiLeaks this morning – the 25th batch of emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta – reveals potential criminal intent to violate a court order for subpoenaed documents.
John Podesta sent the message only hours after the New York Times reported that Clinton might have violated federal records requirements by using the server, according to the latest batch of Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks.
The email in question , sent by Podesta on March 2, 2015, reveals the Clinton campaign chair directing Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s attorney and Chief of Staff, to destroy emails that had already been subpoenaed.
The email exchange between Podesta and Mills came suspiciously on the same day that news broke regarding Clinton’s use of a private email server.
After news of Clinton’s private email server became public, Podesta wrote to Mills: “Not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later,” Podesta told Mills. Mills responded: “Think you just got your new nick name.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out exactly what Podesta meant by “dump” the emails, when taking into account the fact that this was transpiring just as news of the private server was breaking. What this email does is provide insight into the coverup process — and exposes a willful intent to break the law. Additionally, it reveals exactly how swiftly the Clinton camp moved to obscure the truth from both investigators and the public alike.
According to a report by the New York Post :
In December 2014, Hillary Clinton — now the Democratic presidential nominee — turned over about 55,000 pages of work-related email to the State Department, but that fact wasn’t revealed until the Times reported on her use of the private server.
On March 10, 2015 — a week after the Podesta-Mills exchange — Clinton addressed the email scandal, and announced she had deleted about 30,000 personal emails.
The email’s reference to “Lanny” is likely in reference to lawyer Lanny Davis, who served as special counsel to then-President Bill Clinton, as well as spokesperson for the President and the White House on matters regarding campaign-finance investigations and other legal issues.
Interestingly, Zero Hedge reports that a search for Lanny Davis reveals a suspicious exchange between Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and Podesta from March 8, 2015, just days after the above mentioned exchange in which Mook tells Podesta:
“We gotta zap Lanny out of our universe. Can’t believe he committed her to a private review of her hard drive on TV.”
Hillary’s team was apparently upset that Bill Clinton’s special counsel was engaging in a transparent course of action, and moved to “zap Lanny out of our universe.”
While it isn’t clearly spelled out exactly which emails Podesta is referring to in his email, the fact that he wrote “better do so sooner than later,” on the day news broke publicly regarding Clinton’s email server, strongly indicates that the actions were a responsive measure meant to obscure any investigation into the matter.
Clinton’s entire narrative regarding her private email server has seemingly unraveled, and her methodical plan to strategically impede the State Department/FBI investigation, by deleting the evidence, is now on full display for the public to see.
Hopefully WikiLeaks’ next upcoming Podesta email dumps can provide even further context to this already damning email. Of course, Hillary’s spin doctors are hard at work thinking up a new narrative to work around this latest revelation regarding the willful attempt by Clinton’s team to usurp a federal investigation.
Mainstream media is trying to censor this information, so please share this story to overcome corporate censorship and to expose the truth! Share Google + T. Mohr
Thank God! The whole lot of them will go down together. Liers the lot of them, proven today. | 0 |
From the start of season three of “The Strain” the group has been scattered; divided over their attempt to escape the fallen city of New York.
After inadvertently causing the death of Nora, Zach was captured by the enemy. Eph was alone and wandering while self-medicating with any available bottle. Meanwhile, Quinlan and Setrakian continued the good fight against the Strigoi, while they deciphered the Occido Lumen. Fet was making waves in the battle for the city , as he worked closely with anti-Strigoi forces as a mentor for police forces. On the other side of the fight, The Master continued lurking and plotting in his new host body. Eichorst and Palmer further delved into their bitter partnership as the two made subtle jabs at each other like high school frenemies.
Overall, the tone and feel of “The Strain” was much different from Season 2. Considering that the season was minimized to 10 episodes (instead of the usual 13) and has experienced dwindling ratings, writers flushed out many of the subplots that led the main focus of the show to nowhere. The first couple of episodes rehashed the state of the group and where each character’s new motivations lay. Once again, writers were falling into the same trap of forcing viewers to care about minor characters; Zach and Dutch.
It seems that Dutch’s departure from her former lover was short-lived, as the heroine joined a new group of wanderers to explore the city. Considering that long-term relationships do not seem to be her forte, she parted ways with her hacker group, within a few episodes into the season. It is understandable that the writers wanted to set up her return as the forefront by moderately exploring her past and her hacker friends, but there was nothing compelling or intriguing to discover or watch. Dutch making her way back to Eph did spark the beginning of his motivation to continue the good fight and helped save him from his depression. It was no surprise that she would later take over the role of Nora, in the series, as both his lab partner and lover.
By the third episode of “The Strain,” it appeared that the writers were back on track with creating an entertaining story. The ultimate showdown between Quinlan and The Master was one of the highlights of the series. The made for a great watch and interesting turn of events. Season 3 followed the same path by introducing more action into the show. The battle ended with the villain making a narrow escape, although, the tone of the “The Strain” shifted from the slow lane to a fast-paced, action-driven plot, as writers began taking viewers on a more thrilling ride.
This concept became more apparent in Episode 3, “Madness,” as the timeline moved forward two weeks. The epidemic had spread across the globe and the pressure was on for the group to succeed in ending The Master’s reign. Councilwoman Feraldo was still leading the good fight but could not overturn The Master’s forces. Even with her ambitious attack on Grand Central’s nest, Feraldo was outmatched and outnumbered. Thousands of Strigoi overran the city and destroyed many of her safe posts. By the time she threw in the towel and abandon the city, it was too late. The Master’s forces had closed in. This was one of the most emotional battles for viewers to watch.
With news that the fourth season was going to be the last for “The Strain,” it seemed that the writers were cleaning house and tying up many loose storylines. In Episode 8, “White Light,” viewers were privileged to witness a glimpse of The Master’s ultimate plan. The audience was also able to see the ancients do more than simply lay there and twitch, as they fought for their lives against The Master’s forces. The battle proved in vain, as they too met their end, with the detonation of a nuclear bomb inside their lair.
It seemed that as the heroes were gaining support, The Master was already one step ahead of them. Palmer finally came to his senses and decided to turn his resources toward the help protagonists in”The Strain,” when The Master forcibly made Palmer his new host body.
During the final episode, “The Fall,” writers saved the best twist for last. Even after The Master’s rouse to regain control of the nuclear bomb, the team proved successful in finally trapping him in his silver tomb. Unfortunately, their plans failed when Zach detonated the nuclear weapon planted in the Statue of Liberty, blanketing the sky in darkness in the aftermath. The Master was able to escape his tomb during the aftershock. It seems that this is the recurring theme in every season finale of the series; once the team comes close to success, they inadvertently become thwarted by the villain to a new catastrophic beginning for the next season.
This was a strong and jaw-dropping way to end the season, which proved to be one of “The Strain’s” most eventful episodes. Overall, the season was one of the strongest in the series. Viewers delved into the back-story of many of the major characters, like Palmer and Quinlan. Adding more dimension and depth to both, the writers plucked at the viewer’s heartstrings, with compelling narratives of each character’s history. One of the strongest storytelling qualities of “The Strain” is the flashback moments. It is almost as if the writers took George Santayana’s Quote: , “To know your future, you must know your past” literally, while writing Season 3. Many of the flashback scenes helped foreshadow the events that unfolded in each episode.
It is unfortunate that the show is meeting its end, in the fourth installment. This is a bittersweet moment for viewers. The season had its ups and downs, highlights and rushed finishes but was still a great ride. The closing of the “The Strain,” has created a faster paced narrative and a more thrilling turn of events that may have come a little too late. The tone of the show has now shifted from the beginning of a vampire apocalypse, to a full-blown post-apocalyptic plot, as the Strigoi flooded the streets of New York City in the Season 3 finale.
Opinion by Tyler Cole
Edited by Jeanette Smith
Sources:
FX Networks : The Strain
Imdb : The Strain
Deadline Hollywood : The Strain
Images Courtesy of FX Networks Fox Entertainment Group – Used With Permission the strain | 0 |
Report: Friend Has Been Going By Middle Name This Whole Fucking Time CALABASAS, CA—Astounded that it had never come up at any point in the six years they had known each other, local woman Lucy Reed, 25, reported Tuesday that her friend Nicole Silberthau had apparently been going by her middle name this whole fucking time. Teary-Eyed Tim Kaine Asks Clinton If His Hair Will Grow Back In Time For Election Day NEW YORK—His lower lip quivering while showing his running mate the uneven patches on his head where he attempted to give himself a trim, a teary-eyed Tim Kaine reportedly asked Hillary Clinton this morning if his hair would grow back in time for Election Day. | 0 |
Forget Wikileaks...this is the real October Surprise that is going to stop Hillary page: 1 link People have a hard time wading through all of the twists and turns, and convoluted political intrigue, that are the devastating stream of revelations about just how corrupt the Democratic Party...and its supreme leader Hillary Clinton...is. Most people don't have the time, or the attention span, to pour over the tens of thousands of documents being released by Wikileaks - and the MSM is trying their hardest to ignore the subject. Having said that, my father once told me that, "There are two things you don't mess with. A man's wife, or a man's paycheque...and not necessarily in that order." Substitute "woman" and "husband" if you like, but the message is very clear. And now...even CNN cannot ignore it...we have the issue that directly affects people's pocketbooks. Plain and simple. The pain and the impacts are very real and very personal. Obamacare Premiums... Just watch the Polls swing on this issue leading up to November 8...and watch as State after State goes from Blue to Red - just like the American peoples' bank accounts, due to the astonishing increases in Obamacare Premiums! edit on 27-10-2016 by mobiusmale because: link not working edit on 27-10-2016 by mobiusmale because: typo link a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. link a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. People will vote with their wallets. Looks like the people least likely to afford it get hit the hardest. time.com... Yet it’s also true that for Americans who don’t get insurance through work, and who make too much money to qualify for federal subsidies, the cost of health coverage is about to soar dramatically, with premiums sometimes rising $1,000, even over $2,000 for the year. If one were making 45k per year and the cost of a service increased 1k-2k for THAT year one would find other service providers or not use the service at all. But if you did not pay for health insurance you would owe the irs a penalty of 2k. Damned if you do Damned if you do not. 5% of someones income is alot, enough to make them think about who to vote for. a reply to: kruphix I am 27, never get ill, have low blood pressure, and am in good shape. My premiums doubled since this mess. So I ditched it. This was a redistribution of health care. link I don't understand why Trump hasn't been all over this opportunity. He should stop with the nonsense shooting himself in the foot crap and focus on this news to sway more voters to his side. Instead he has been babbling about his awesome golf course. It is times like these that make me think he must be taking a dive on purpose. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. link a reply to: kruphix The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. Yeah the people in the "basket of deplorables" are a small minority as well. Perhaps in your opinion they are all in the same basket. Nice to be told "you're a amall minority" your fate won't effect an election. originally posted by: kruphix a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. cool, then abolishing the abortion that is "Obamacare" should be quick and easy. Then we can get insurance companies back to competing for our business and maybe get insurance back to where most people can afford it and not just those making less than $23k a year. You do realize that Obamacare is the single biggest failure in the history of the US last 8 years right? Much like a monkey #ing a football. link a reply to: mobiusmale It's going to cost Hilary some votes but is NOT going turn a blue state red. Might sway a poorer purple one toward red, but I'm unsure of what state fits that bill exactly. Fl maybe? a reply to: Greggers Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. "Work with her"? really kind of like the dems worked with the gop to pass the ACA to begin with? Pass it before you read it? Like your plan keep your plan? That kind of cooperation? originally posted by: kruphix a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. Considering you're talking about small and medium business owners who the current administration (and HRC) says they want to support, I am fairly certain the OP is accurate. The price hikes are a direct slap in the face to those of us that own our own small businesses and pay for insurance on our own. Shows how out of touch the top is with the middle. Employer sponsored rates are high too. It's cutting into employees' pay. Wake up voters !!! originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. yes, the young ones who are also making minimum wage or close. If they make any money at all, they will miss the subsidies and be paying the $500 to $800 a month the rest of us have to pay. The way it was before Obamacare was much much better for everyone except the one's with pre-existing conditions. It's a shame we couldn't have someone who was smart enough to grasp that. Then they could have just tried to fix that tiny slice of the population instead of jamming a broomstick up the rest of us. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. "More Federal Funding" is just code for, "we are going to increase taxes"...so Hillary's solution for high Health insurance Premiums, is to move the taxpayer drain a little farther to left and call it something else. I mean what choice would she have, if she wants to keep some semblance of this disaster intact? The Obama/Clinton regime doubled the National Debt to over $20 trillion dollars in 8 yearts...how much deeper can that go before the whole bubble bursts? a reply to: Vasa Croe The price hikes are a direct slap in the face to those of us that own our own small businesses and pay for insurance on our own. That's right they forgot if you have less than 50 people employed you do not have to provide insurance to your employees. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because "OBAMACARE," so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. And where exactly does federal funding come from? *looks at wallet* No such thing as a free lunch. My healthcare costs have gone up almost 50% while benefits have gone down, and I'm on an employer provided plan. I'm 33yo and healthy as a horse. Healthcare is not a right, quit treating it as such. Get some actual competition in the system as well as some tort reform and maybe you'll see some improvement. Start jailing cronies and letting unprofitable companies fail you'll see some improvement. I feel sorry for anyone who believes that Democrats/Republicans are one dimes worth of different from each other... edit on 10-27-2016 by cynicalheathen because: (no reason given) | 0 |
Over the last year, we’ve been plunged into the alternate reality of Trumpland, as though we were caught in the maze of his old board game, “Trump: The Game,” with no exit in sight. It’s a Darwinian, world where greed is good, insults are the lingua franca, and winning is everything (or, in tangled Trumpian syntax, “It’s not whether you win or lose, but whether you win! ”). To read a stack of new and reissued books about Mr. Trump, as well as a bunch of his own works, is to be plunged into a kind of Bizarro World version of Dante’s “Inferno,” where arrogance, acquisitiveness and the sowing of discord are not sins, but attributes of leadership a place where lies, contradictions and outrageous remarks spring up in such thickets that the sort of moral exhaustion associated with bad soap operas quickly threatens to ensue. That the subject of these books is not a fictional character but the Republican nominee for president can only remind the reader of Philip Roth’s observation, made more than 50 years ago, that American reality is so stupefying, “so weird and astonishing,” that it poses an embarrassment to the novelist’s “meager imagination. ” Books about Mr. Trump tend to fall into two categories. There are funny ones that focus on Trump the Celebrity of the 1980s and ’90s — a cartoony avatar of greed and wretched excess and what Garry Trudeau (“Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump”) calls “big, honking hubris. ” And there are serious biographies that try to shed light on Mr. Trump’s life and complex, highly opaque business dealings as a real estate magnate, which are vital to understanding the judgment, abilities and financial entanglements he would bring to the Oval Office. Because of Mr. Trump’s lack of transparency surrounding his business interests (he has even declined to disclose his tax returns) and because of his loose handling of facts and love of hyperbole, serious books are obligated to spend a lot of time sifting through business and court documents. (USA Today recently reported that there are “about 3, 500 legal actions involving Trump, including 1, 900 where he or his companies were a plaintiff and about 1, 300 in which he was the defendant. ”) And they must also his assertions (PolitiFact rates 35 percent of his statements False, and 18 percent “Pants on Fire” Lies). Perhaps because they were written rapidly as Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy gained traction, the latest of these books rarely step back to analyze in detail the larger implications and repercussions of the Trump phenomenon. Nor do they really map the landscape in which he has risen to popularity and is himself reshaping through his carelessness with facts, polarizing remarks and disregard for political rules. For that matter, these books shed little new light on controversial stands taken by Mr. Trump which, many legal scholars and historians note, threaten constitutional guarantees and American democratic traditions. Those include his call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and the “extreme vetting” of immigrants his talk of revising libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations over critical coverage an attack on a federal judge that raises questions about his commitment to an independent judiciary and his incendiary use of nativist and bigoted language that is fueling racial tensions and helping to mainstream views on race. Some of these books touch fleetingly on Mr. Trump’s use of inflammatory language and emotional appeal to feelings of fear and anger, but they do not delve deeply into the consequences of his nativist rhetoric or his contempt for the rules of civil discourse. They do, however, provide some sense of history, reminding us that while Mr. Trump’s craving for attention and use of controversy as an instrument of publicity have remained the same over the years, the surreal switch of venues — from the New York tabloid universe and the world of reality TV to the arena of national and global politics — has turned formerly “ stakes,” as one writer put it, into something profoundly more troubling. From insults aimed at fellow celebrities, Mr. Trump now denigrates whole racial and religious groups and questions the legitimacy of the electoral system. A “ buffoon” in Manhattan in the waning decades of the 20th century — as the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, terms the businessman in a foreword to Mark Singer’s book “Trump and Me” — has metamorphosed into a political candidate whom 50 senior Republican national security officials recently said “would be the most reckless president in American history,” putting “at risk our country’s national security and well being. ” Two new books provide useful, vigorously reported overviews of Mr. Trump’s life and career. “Trump Revealed,” by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher of The Washington Post, draws heavily on work by reporters of The Post and more than 20 hours of interviews with the candidate. Much of its material will be familiar to readers — thanks to newspaper articles and Michael D’Antonio’s 2015 biography (“Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success”) — but “Trump Revealed” deftly charts his building of his gaudy brand and his often masterful manipulation of the media. It provides a succinct account of Mr. Trump’s childhood, when he says he punched a teacher, giving him a black eye. It also recounts his apprenticeship to a demanding father, who told him he needed to become a “killer” in anything he did, and how he learned the art of the counterattack from Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s former man, whom Mr. Trump hired to countersue the federal government after the Justice Department brought a case against the Trump family firm in 1973 for violating the Fair Housing Act. “The Making of Donald Trump” by David Cay Johnston — a former reporter for The New York Times who has written extensively about Mr. Trump — zeros in on Mr. Trump’s business practices, arguing that while he presents himself as “a modern Midas,” much “of what he touches” has often turned “to dross. ” Mr. Johnston, who has followed the real estate impresario for nearly three decades, offers a searing indictment of his business practices and creative accounting. He examines Mr. Trump’s taste for debt, what associates have described as his startling capacity for recklessness, multiple corporate bankruptcies, dealings with reputed mobsters and accusations of fraud. The portrait of Mr. Trump that emerges from these books, old or new, serious or satirical, is remarkably consistent: a narcissist, almost comically a “hyperbole addict who prevaricates for fun and profit,” as Mr. Singer wrote in The New Yorker in 1997. Mr. Singer also describes Mr. Trump as an “insatiable publicity hound who courts the press on a daily basis and, when he doesn’t like what he reads, attacks the messengers as ‘human garbage,’” “a fellow both slippery and naïve, artfully calculating and recklessly heedless of consequences. ” At the same time, Mr. Singer and other writers discern an emptiness underneath the armor. In “Trump and Me,” Mr. Singer describes his subject as a man “who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul. ” Mr. Kranish and Mr. Fisher likewise suggest that Mr. Trump “had walled off” any pain he experienced growing up and “hid it behind a show about himself. ” When they ask him about friends, they write, he gives them — off the record — the names of three men “he had had business dealings with two or more decades before, men he had only rarely seen in recent years. ” Mr. Trump likes to boast about going it alone — an impulse that helps explain the rapid turnover among advisers in his campaign, and that has raised serious concerns among national security experts and foreign policy observers, who note that his extreme and certainty (“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain”) come coupled with a startling ignorance about global affairs and an impatience with policy and details. Passages in his books help illuminate Mr. Trump’s admiration for the strongman style of autocratic leaders like Russia’s Vladimir V. Putin, and his own astonishing “I alone can fix it” moment during his Republican convention speech. In his 2004 book, “Think Like a Billionaire,” Mr. Trump wrote: “You must plan and execute your plan alone. ” He also advised: “Have a short attention span,” adding “quite often, I’ll be talking to someone and I’ll know what they’re going to say before they say it. After the first three words are out of their mouth, I can tell what the next 40 are going to be, so I try to pick up the pace and move it along. You can get more done faster that way. ” In many respects, Mr. Trump’s own quotes and writings provide the most vivid and alarming picture of his values, modus operandi and relentlessly dark outlook focused on revenge. “Be paranoid,” he advises in one book. And in another: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades. ” The grim, dystopian view of America, articulated in Mr. Trump’s Republican convention speech, is previewed in his 2015 book, “Crippled America” (republished with the cheerier title of “Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America”) in which he contends that “everyone is eating” America’s lunch. And a similarly nihilistic vision surfaces in other remarks he’s made over the years: “I always get even” “For the most part, you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect” and: “The world is a horrible place. Lions kill for food, but people kill for sport. ” Once upon a time, such remarks made Mr. Trump perfect fodder for comedians. Though some writers noted that he was already a caricature of a caricature — difficult to parody or satirize — Mr. Trudeau recalled that he provided cartoonists with “an embarrassment of follies. ” And the businessman, who seems to live by the conviction that any publicity is good publicity, apparently embraced this celebrity, writing: “My cartoon is real. I am the creator of my own comic book. ” In a 1990 cartoon, Doonesbury characters argued over what they disliked more about Mr. Trump: “the boasting, the piggish consumption” or “the hideous décor of his casinos. ” Sadly, the stakes today are infinitely so much huger. Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani | 1 |
Curious, Letita, what specifically causes you such angst? The country has problems but must can be administered away and Hillary, Obama, or any body really can lead an effort to do that. The real problem is that, at the end of the day, we have a country where 40% of the population believes Trump is a viable leader. | 0 |
0 |
|
From Roanoke.com :
Getachew Fekede, 53, a former employee at FreightCar America, shot three workers — one fatally — and grazed a fourth before killing himself, Roanoke police have said.
All of the victims were found close to each other, police said. Daniel Wesley Brown, 56, of Montvale, died at the scene. Keith Dwayne Law, 31, of Rocky Mount and Gary David Koran, 32, of Roanoke remain hospitalized at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, where they were listed in fair condition as of Wednesday morning, according to a hospital spokesman.
Valderrama, 31, of Catawba was released from the hospital Tuesday. He’s a welder at FreightCar America, where he’s worked for three and a half years.
Brown, who was from New York, was a 14-year U.S. Army veteran who served as an engineer during Desert Storm in a non-combat role, said his girlfriend, Vickie Hawkins. He worked at FreightCar America for eight years, most recently as a fitter. She said he knew who Fekede was but never talked about him.
“He liked his job,” she said. “He liked the people he worked with. From what I gather, he didn’t seem to have any issues with anybody there.”
Employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions from the company, said they were shocked that anyone would hurt Brown. One man who worked at FreightCar America with Brown said he said “had a really good heart.”
“Daniel always had a lot to say and he was never shy about telling you how he felt or what he thought, even if it wasn’t complimentary,” the man said.
Another employee said he couldn’t imagine that someone would want to target Brown.
“It had to be a stray bullet, because there’s no way anyone could have ill will towards him,” he said.
Police are still investigating whether Fekede targeted the victims and are determining a possible motive for the shooting, although Jones said it was likely work-related. Information about where Fekede got the gun has not been released by police, who said he fired 10 rounds from a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun.
Fekede’s neighbors at Brandon Manor Apartments near Towers Shopping Center have described him as friendly and generous and said he was often working. A few neighbors noted that he spoke about another employee “messing with him,” a problem that he said he’d raised with the human resources department at the company.
… Fekede came to Roanoke in 2011 through a refugee program, police have said. Hannah Whitt, a 23-year-old Roanoke resident, said she helped resettle him while interning with Commonwealth Catholic Charities. The agency has not responded to requests for comment about whether it had contact with Fekede.
Whitt said Fekede lived in a house on Moorman Avenue with three other men. They were from Ethiopia but had been staying in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, she said. None of the men had family in the U.S. when they moved to Roanoke, Whitt said.
We gave this “refugee” asylum and a job in our country and this is how he repays us.
Hillary Clinton wants to bring in hundreds of thousands more just like him.
Courtesy of Information Liberation Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this: | 0 |
The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against a city in Eastern Michigan, saying it discriminated against a Muslim group by rejecting its application to build a mosque there. The government’s lawsuit, filed on Thursday, said the denial of the application from the group, the American Islamic Community Center, was the first time in a decade that the planning commission in Sterling Heights, about 16 miles from downtown Detroit, has denied a land use application for a house of worship. It noted that the city’s decision came after residents spoke in opposition to the mosque in public meetings. It quoted some who said “remember ” and others who claimed Christians would face difficulty in trying to build a church in Iraq. “We are alleging that Sterling Heights discriminated against the American Islamic Community Center on the basis of religion and placed a substantial burden on the community’s ability to exercise its religion by denying approval to build a mosque,” Barbara L. McQuade, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said in a statement published with a copy of the lawsuit. The department, through its civil rights division, based its lawsuit on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which is meant to prohibit religious discrimination and prevent unjustified burdens on people exercising their religion. Vanita Gupta, head of the civil rights division, said in the announcement of the lawsuit that the Justice Department would continue to “aggressively protect” the rights of communities to live, pray and worship. “We have definitely seen a spike in these cases, in problems when it comes to minority religions,” Azzam Elder, the lead lawyer for the community center, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “It is a sign of the times. ” On Friday, a spokeswoman for Sterling Heights, Bridget Doyle, said in an email that there would be no comment beyond the statement released on Thursday that said the city was “surprised and disappointed” by the lawsuit. “The city welcomes the A. I. C. C. along with any other religious groups to Sterling Heights, and we will continue an open dialog to address areas of disagreement with respect to land use,” the city’s statement said. It said the city had a reputation for tolerance — with two mosques Sikh, Buddhist and Hindu temples and Christian churches. The city’s statement said the community center’s application for a new mosque was denied because it was incompatible with adjoining uses and offered insufficient parking and because of concerns over the size and height of the building. The city denied that “emotional feelings tied to religious beliefs either for or against the applicant” played a part. But the Department of Justice lawsuit claimed that the planning commission’s decision was “inconsistent” with others it had made on places of worship, and that the rejection was “based on bias. ” Last year, the community center, a nonprofit Muslim group in neighboring Madison Heights, had sought permission to develop 4. 35 acres of land in Sterling Heights, because most of its members lived there and because its facility in Madison Heights was too small, the lawsuit said. The proposed building would have been approximately 20, 500 square feet with 130 parking spaces, a dome about 58 feet high and two spires — lower than features on nearby churches. Jaafar Chehab, a community center board member and trustee of the land, worked with city planners to address some of the concerns, including agreeing not to oppose liquor license applications in nearby areas, and agreeing not to have an external call to prayer, the lawsuit said. In August 2015, city planners held a heavily attended public meeting. Fifty people who spoke were opposed to the project, and seven were in favor, the lawsuit said. Many of the public comments were directed at Mr. Chehab’s religion, the lawsuit said, included a plea to “remember ” statements that Christians would not be allowed to build a church in Iraq and statements that property values would drop if the mosque were built. One resident held up a picture of a woman wearing a head covering and said he did not want to “be near people like this,” the lawsuit said. Another said the mosque might be used to store weapons, and another said Homeland Security should investigate the community center because “they’re cutting people’s heads off, they kill our soldiers,” the lawsuit said. The lawsuit noted that the mosque had become an issue in City Council elections. In September 2015, the application was denied, based on the size of the building, parking and lack of “harmony” with the neighborhood, the lawsuit said. The community center has its own lawsuit pending against the city’s decision, Mr. Elder said. “The politicians caved toward the loud voices,” he said. “All this came as a shock. ” | 1 |
Individuals who have been hired to be a part of the Justice Department team investigating Russian influence in the U. S. 2016 presidential election have made thousands of dollars in donations to Democrat political campaigns. [Three members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team made the donations to Democrats, including to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, according to a CNN analysis using Federal Election Commission records. CNN reported: More than half of the more than $56, 000 came from just one lawyer and more than half of it was donated before the 2016 election, but two of the lawyers gave the maximum $2, 700 donation to Hillary Clinton last year. Over the weekend, news outlets including CNN identified five attorneys that Mueller has already brought on board to help investigate potential collusion between associates of President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. The attorneys on the team have worked on other cases, including Watergate and the Enron fraud scandal, as well as representing U. S. companies in legal dealings, according to CNN. Three of the five lawyers gave overwhelmingly to Democrats, totaling more than $53, 000 since 1988, and more than half of those donations came from just one lawyer, James Quarles, who works at the same firm where Mueller worked, WilmerHale. Quarles gave nearly $33, 000 to political campaigns, including presidential candidates Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Quarles also gave more than $10, 000 to help Democrats running for the House and another $10, 000 to candidates running for Senate seats, including money to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, CNN reported. Ironically, Quarles is also the only lawyer among Mueller’s team who donated to Republicans, giving $2, 500 to Rep. Jason Chaffetz ( ) in 2015 and $250 to . George Allen ( ) back in 2005. Only about 30 percent of the donations were for 2016 elections, according to CNN, including Quarles’s and Jeannie Rhee’s, who both gave the maximum $2, 700 contribution to Clinton’s campaign last year. Rhee has donated more than $16, 000 since 2008, all to Democrats, including the maximum allowed contribution to the Clinton campaign in 2016 and 2015, totaling $5, 400. She also gave $7, 300 to both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. Perhaps more importantly, Rhee has already been in the spotlight for representing the Clinton Foundation in a racketeering lawsuit brought by a conservative advocacy group, and also representing Clinton herself in a lawsuit seeking access to her private emails. Mueller, who was FBI director under by President George W. Bush, also hired Andrew Weissmann, who led the Enron investigation, gave $2, 300 to Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, and $2, 000 to the Democratic National Committee in 2006. FEC records do not show any donations by Weissman in the 2016 election cycle, according to CNN. There also are no FEC records for Aaron Zebley, who left WilmerHale to work on the Russia investigation. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who endorsed Trump, said on Monday that Mueller’s team can’t be impartial given their political activism. “Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair,” Gingrich tweeted. “Look who he is hiring. Check FEC reports. Time to rethink. ” Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair. Look who he is hiring. check fec reports. Time to rethink. — Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) June 12, 2017, “There aren’t any records of political donations from Mueller himself,” CNN reported. “A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment Monday afternoon about the political donations from his legal team and the criticism some of the team were partisan. ” | 1 |
Five men from Rotherham, allegedly part of “Asian grooming gangs” are facing 23 charges of sexually abusing two girls, aged 12 and 13, over a period. [In the first of two cases, a woman, now 28, claims she was forced to take drugs and drink alcohol before being raped by brothers Basharat Dad, now 32, and Nassar, now 36. She met the men after skipping school, and the alleged attacks 16 years ago left her unable to identify the father of her child when it was born. The crimes are alleged to have taken place in a flat owned by the brothers’ family. Prosecutor Sophie Drake told the court that the men had targeted “vulnerable young girls,” according to the Daily Mail. “She was scared so she let them do what they wanted. They both raped her and she submitted to them,” added Mrs. Drake, “The brothers knew she was only 12 at the time. They gave her alcohol and drugs and were aggressive to her and she felt she had no choice. ” A third brother, Tayab Dad, is standing trial separately for raping a who was attacked in the same flat. “As young teenagers in Rotherham they were sexually exploited by a number of men, they were vulnerable and given alcohol and cannabis and told to perform sexual acts,” Mrs. Drake said. The police were involved at the time, with the naming her attackers after she fell pregnant. The brothers were arrested in 2001, along with Matloob Hussain, a takeaway delivery driver, and Mohammed Sadiq, then 24. However, no charges were brought, despite the seriousness of the allegations. The government’s Jay Report describes how Rotherham authorities failed to intervene in numerous similar cases for fear of being labelled “racist”. Muslim rape gangs blighted the town Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, with more than 1, 200 girls affected according to a government report. However, the religion of this latest group of “Asian” attackers has not been reported. The alleged offences only resurfaced when South Yorkshire Police began investigating the sexual exploitation of young girls in Rotherham in 2014, shortly before the Jay Report was published. The victim said she remembers waking up naked in bed, arguing that this proves she could not have consented to sex, even if of age, as she was asleep. Mrs. Drake said: “The brothers were aware she was under 16 and knew she was at school. They supplied her with alcohol and cannabis so that they could do what they wanted to. ” | 1 |
Páginas Libres
SNIP creó mercado negro e informal Socios | 2 de noviembre de 2016 por Germán Lench Cáceres*
2-11-2016
Por fin se piensa hacer algo realista, reestructurar como sosteníamos desde esta columna, el Sistema Nacional de Inversión Pública (SNIP) que ha creado un mercado negro e informal sin sentido técnico para beneficiar la aprobación de estudios de pre inversión beneficiando “estudios” copiados y/o mal elaborados, que son condición para que muchas oficinas de Programación e Inversiones del Sector Público a nivel del Gobierno Central, Regional y Local le otorguen viabilidad pidiendo prebendas (pagos por debajo para darles pase en algunos casos).
La inversión pública complementa a la privada y se le debe acelerar, año 2014 -2.4%; 2015 -2.7%, esto con la finalidad de ayudar al crecimiento económico y aumentar el PBI nacional. El país requiere un shock de inversiones públicas para disminuir brechas de infraestructura y reactivar la economía.
El concepto de SNIP fue traído el 2000 por los tecnócratas que aún son dueños del MEF y que enseñan diplomados en universidades y sobre la metodología, perdiendo el objetivo del sistema de evitar el despilfarro en los gastos de inversión del Estado.
La idea con el SNIP era tener un sistema administrativo, utilizado para mejorar la calidad de los proyectos, a través de principios, métodos, procedimientos y normas técnicas que tienen relación con las fases de estos. Con su aplicación se ha ampliado el ciclo del proyecto con la implementación de los estudios de pre inversión (perfil y factibilidad) lo que en algún momento exigía la pre factibilidad y se busca: a) Eficiencia en la utilización de recursos, b) Sostenibilidad en la mejora de la calidad o ampliación de la provisión de los servicios relacionados a los proyectos, c) Mayor impacto socio-económico para la población.
La pregunta es si con la aplicación del SNIP se incrementó la inversión pública, o mejoró la rentabilidad para la sociedad en su conjunto con el incremento del gasto público.
Una clara observación es que el SNIP no debió aplicarse a los proyectos de inversión pública por igual. Otra es que los “profesionales” que se consideran expertos en formular proyectos del SNIP, empiezan a ofrecer sus servicios principalmente a los gobiernos regionales y lo único que cambian es la ubicación del proyecto y los análisis respectivos son los mismos cuando es sabido que cada pueblo tiene una realidad distinta. Un PIP que debe desarrollarse en 60 días, demora 90 días, lo terminan desarrollando en 210 días, 7 meses por la incapacidad en formular proyectos.
En el SNIP cuando se ha eliminado los estudios de prefactibilidad, quedando perfil y factibilidad, tampoco contribuye a agilizarlo, el año 2015 se incrementó el techo para los estudios a nivel de perfil, hasta 20 millones de soles, pero nada de lo técnico, aquí debemos ser claros, qué tipo de proyectos deben pasar la evaluación económica requerida, por ello los proyectos que tienen que ver con la producción, su mejora, ampliación, entre otros, deben pasar esta prueba, como los del sector agricultura, producción, transportes, pero no los de educación, salud, investigación, saneamiento, estos últimos pasan mucho tiempo en una evaluación interminable, siendo aprobados por cansancio, o por presiones de los políticos, pero dejando lo técnico, ¿es necesario realizar una evaluación costo-efectividad para decidir si se hace o no una infraestructura educativa?, aquí debe primar los lineamientos de política, o los proyectos para investigación deben pasar por una evaluación beneficio costo, por eso no se aprovecha nuestra biodiversidad, pasamos más tiempo tratando de demostrar lo que es evidente para intervenir, por ello algo del puede ser necesario para proyectos relacionados a la producción.
Con la aplicación del SNIP tal como está, no se ha incrementado la inversión pública, y no se ha mejorado la rentabilidad para la sociedad en su conjunto con el incremento del gasto público.
Actualmente hay baja eficiencia en la inversión pública y lo hubo antes del SNIP, pero este sistema se utilizó únicamente para frenar el gasto público y generar un superávit fiscal.
El sistema que se implante no debe facilitar la corrupción, ni tener tufo populista. Como decía un profesor, “El bypass nunca se hubiera hecho, si hubiese habido el SNIP”.
Es hora de reestructurar este instrumento de control cuasi colonial que impone el MEF al resto de la administración pública.
..
[email protected]
Tomado de http://senaldealerta.pe/econom%C3%A... | 0 |
Pope Francis has sent a telegram condemning Monday night’s terror attack in Manchester, England, while expressing his condolences and prayers for victims and their families. [“His Holiness Pope Francis was deeply saddened to learn of the injury and tragic loss of life caused by the barbaric attack in Manchester, and he expresses his heartfelt solidarity with all those affected by this senseless act of violence,” the telegram reads. The terror attack, which has been claimed by the Islamic State terror group, took the lives of at least 22 people Monday night and left at least another 60 wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up after a concert by pop star Ariana Grande. The Pope “commends the generous efforts of the emergency and security personnel, and offers the assurance of his prayers for the injured, and for all who have died,” the papal text states. “Mindful in a particular way of those children and young people who have lost their lives, and of their grieving families, Pope Francis invokes God’s blessings of peace, healing and strength upon the nation,” it concludes. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, calling the Ariana Grande concert a “gathering of the Crusaders in the British city of Manchester. ” The ISIS press release referred to the children attending the show as “worshippers of the cross” while calling the attacker “a soldier of the Khalifa. ” According to British Prime Minister Theresa May, police have determined the identity of the suspected suicide bomber but cannot yet announce the attacker’s name. May condemned the suicide bombing as a “callous terrorist attack,” and said that it was “among the worst terrorism we have experienced in the United Kingdom. ” Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 1 |
Print
Douglas Band, one of former President Bill Clinton’s closest advisors, boasted to outside auditors that his for-profit corporation had a “historical role in carrying the majority of the fundraising burden” for the nonprofit Clinton Foundation.
A Nov. 16, 2011 memo Band authored , which WikiLeaks made public Wednesday, raises disturbing questions about charitable law violations due to mixing for-profit activities with the nonprofit foundation.
Band authored the extraordinary memo for the law firm of Simpson Thacher, in which he bragged that his for-profit Teneo raised “well over $150 million, much of it from people who did not know President Clinton when he was in office.”
Band co-founded Teneo with Declan Kelley who then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had appointed to serve as the U.S. Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland in 2009.
“This is a confession of widespread fraud that must have sent Simpson Thacher into overdrive,” Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst who has reviewed multiple documents related to the Clinton Foundation controversy, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
When he wrote the memo in 2011, Band was under pressure to defend his fundraising work to the law firm, which had been retained by Chelsea Clinton to conduct a “ governance review” of the Clinton Foundation. The law firm is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on ethical nonprofit management and regulation.
Band described Teneo as devoted to “merchant and investment banking services, corporate restructuring, public relations and communication services, and strategic advising services.”
But he said he “leveraged” his business activities to raise millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation.
“Throughout the past almost 11 years since President Clinton left office, I have sought to leverage my activities, including my partner role at Teneo, to support and to raise funds for the foundation,” Band wrote.
Band admitted in the memo the “unorthodox nature of my roles” at the foundation, but he defiantly defended his work, saying:
[R]ightly or wrongly, I believe – given the foundation’s need to raise funds, the willingness of the partner owners of Teneo to help fundraise, and my historical role in carrying the majority of the fundraising burden – that Teneo should help raise funds for the Foundation, which it has.
Ortel told TheDCNF that neither Band “nor any of the Teneo folks ever bothered to register as professional solicitation agents in NY, or anywhere else.” The revelation could put Band and the foundation in legal jeopardy with the New York state attorney general’s office, which regulate charities.
Band also revealed for the first time the wide-ranging for-profit activities he undertook that helped enrich the Clintons. The conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch has described Teneo as “Clinton, Inc.”
Band said in his memo that “independent of our fundraising and decision-making activities on behalf of the Foundation, we have dedicated ourselves to helping the President secure and engage in for-profit activities – including speeches, books, and advisory service engagements,” adding:
In that context, we have in effect served as agents, lawyers, managers and implementers to secure speaking, business and advisory service deals. In support of the President’s for-profit activity, we also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.
Former President Clinton has frequently used free corporate jets for himself and his family, including those owned by people like convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein .
At the time Band authored his memo, Chelsea Clinton was disturbed about the ethics of mixing Band’s for-profit activities with the foundation’s non-profit fundraising. She retained Simpson Thacher — one of the top law firms in nonprofit management – to review all of the foundation’s activities, including those of Band.
Band lashed out against Chelsea Clinton in a number of emails to John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff under former President Clinton who is now Hillary Clinton’s national presidential campaign manager.
This report, by Richard Pollock, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation. | 0 |
By Sarah Jones on Sat, Oct 29th, 2016 at 12:03 pm Donald Trump uses sexual shaming and humiliation of women as simplistic revenge for the slightest felt spurn. A newly surfaced video via Ryan Grim shows the Trump Humiliation game in action, which I walk everyone through from the POV of the woman. Share on Twitter Print This Post
If you’re a woman who’s worked in any business where you’re forced to try to appease the massively sensitive ego of a sexually aggressive, vulgar man in power, you will know exactly what’s about to happen in this video.
Donald Trump uses sexual shaming and humiliation of women as simplistic revenge for the slightest felt spurn. And there’s a newly surfaced video via Ryan Grim at Huffington Post that shows the Trump Humiliation game in action.
In the video, Trump publicly sexualizes and shames the 2004 Miss Universe winner from Australia, Jennifer Hawkins as revenge. Before he does it, Trump tells the audience, “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe that.”
Watch this newly surfaced 2011 corporate speech here via Huffington Post (major trigger warning if you’ve been there):
Watching this you see the Trump modus operandi in action. This is the sting felt by numerous women who report spurning Trump’s advances. The harassment as revenge. The sexual shaming.
Trump sets the audience up for the Roman Gladiator moment of public sexual offering by priming them with his belief that you should “screw” people back if they “screw” you. The sexually angry verb foreshadows what’s to come, because he is going to “screw” Jennifer Hawkins in public, when she realizes that because it’s public, she can’t further humiliate him by saying no or objecting without facing huge repercussions.
Trump says he’s going to give them an example of his revenge theory, “Jennifer Hawkins.”
Trump orders Hawkins to the stage. The audience cheers and jeers, delighting in the upcoming shaming of the beautiful girl. It’s to be a public spanking. So much fun.
“First of all, how beautiful is Jennifer,” Trump asks, claiming ownership of Jennifer as an object while playing magnanimous daddy who dishes out praise and approval before the spanking. The message: He can make or break her. She better play nice.
Warning shot, “This is about getting even.”
Trump tells the audience that he was mad at Hawkins because she allegedly dissed him by declining to introduce him at the event in Sydney. He tells the audience how mad he was, and then says, as she’s crossing the stage, “She’s my favorite Miss Universe.” So she thinks maybe this isn’t going to be as bad as she fears.
But then he stabs her publicly for the first time, “But I think I like the new one better.”
The audience loves it. He is going to feed them the sexual humiliation of a beautiful woman because she wasn’t a good girl. She reaches him and they clasp hands while she smiles through the shame knowing she has no choice and wanting to be a good sport.
Hawkins tries to make light of the situation while appeasing Trump, playing along with his game because she has to, but there will be no easy way out of this one. It won’t be enough to fawn over him in front of the audience. She will have to pay.
“I was actually going to get up and tell you that Jennifer is a beautiful girl on the outside, but she’s not very bright,” Trump tells the audience, signaling that Hawkins is a piece of meat to be dissected by him publicly for her refusal to give him anything he asks for.
“That wouldn’t have been true, but I would have said it anyway,” Trump proudly tells the audience. This is his alpha male routine, except in real life, the alpha male doesn’t have to abuse money and power he inherited in order to win the girl. But in the mind of little men like Trump, this makes him a winner.
Trump points out that Hawkins is a big star now, but he helped her make it and then dissed him. He owns her. She must comply or face his wrath. Hawkins tries to say that she did introduce him, but Trump pushes her away from the microphone. This public shaming will be done from Trump’s POV only. No need for Hawkins to assert her personhood.There will be no defense allowed, because she’s already guilty.
“And you know what? She came tonight, she came — came, she came, she came,” Trump says gleefully like the drunk pervy uncle everyone tries to avoid at Christmas. He waits for the audience to join him in his sexual shaming, and they do. They get it. Hee heee. So clever. Came. Knuckles dragging on the floor clever.
“See, so they have the same filthy minds in Australia,” Trump says.
Trump grabs Hawkins around the waist and forces a kiss on her, just like he bragged about doing on the Bush tape.
Hawkins reflexively turns away and puts her arm between them. The kiss misses its mark and lands on her cheek. She is hoping this is good enough humiliation for him, but putting her foot down on actual mouth contact. She’s allowed herself to be publicly humiliated to appease him, and pretended to fawn over him as required, but she will not, cannot, allow the kiss. The repulsive kiss.
I’m telling this story as I imagine it to be from her point of view, although she has refused to comment. Of course she refused to comment, women are told they will be blackballed if they comment. The world is full of men like Trump, and they stick together. See Roger Ailes. Women have to play along and appease and if that doesn’t work, they have to allow themselves to be sexually assaulted and humiliated just a little bit in public, especially if they said no in private.
I can only do this because I have lived it, somewhat like this, in public. And I have tried to appease the ego of the assaulter in order to keep my job, while denying him his assumed entitlement to my body.
From talking to so many women during this election, I know that I’m not alone. I know that many other women will watch this and know. They will feel the creep of fear and revulsion, the deer in the headlights cringe that takes over when you know that you are about to be humiliated as a sexual object because you refused him or refused to appease the ego of the powerful man in charge by behaving like a sexual conquest. How dare Hawkins have her own life and be unwilling to change all of her plans in order to introduce Trump.
And other people will watch this humiliation and enjoy it, setting you up to be humiliated even more. They will laugh about it and gossip about it, which is the social punishment women face when they reject a man like Trump. Ironically, if you give in you’re not humiliated. It’s only if you say no that you are set up to be publicly flogged as a sex object.
It’s not just the unwanted kiss, although that is disgusting and assault, much like Donald Trump bragged about doing on the Billy Bush bus tape. It’s the public humiliation and denigration.
It’s the way the woman is forced, in front of thousands of people, to try to smile her way through his ambush of verbal and physical assaults as he takes revenge.
It’s the way she tries to make it okay, to sweet-smooth his ego in order to get out of the line of fire, and in return he shames her by suggesting he made her “come” and then grabs her for an unwanted kiss.
If there is any good to come out of the total crapfest of the Trump candidacy, perhaps it is a raised awareness that women are people, and that this kind of thing is horrific but it’s not all Trump’s fault. It’s the culture’s fault because it takes a willing audience to successfully publicly sexually shame a woman.
In fact, this is shades of what Trump did to Hillary Clinton in the stalking debate, after which he announced that looking at her from behind he was not impressed.
Neither are we by you, Mr. Trump. Neither are we. | 0 |
Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs: ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The "Live Preview" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name: | 0 |
Editors’ note: Here’s one of our favorite stories from the archives, now being featured in our Smarter Living collection. Confidence, at least in the American workplace, means never having to say you’re sorry. I know that now, but early in my career I found myself apologizing over and over as my confidence and were tested on every level — from my job function to performance reviews, from networking to winning clients. I grew up in a family with strong Confucian values my parents had emigrated to the United States from China. My father was a principled man who sought to preserve and enforce Chinese cultural values over Western ones. I think he was frightened by American pop culture in the 1960s: he was sure that without his vigilance, my sister and I would grow up to be brash, hippies. So he wanted us to demonstrate humility, one of the most cherished Confucian ideals. “Don’t ever talk about yourself,” he would mandate. “Let your teacher say good things about you. It’s not for you to say. ” Even when others complimented me, I learned to play down and even be the first to criticize my accomplishments. And I gradually started thinking that I didn’t have worth unless someone in authority said I did. It just wasn’t my place to question that. I would often start and end my conversations with the word “sorry” — sorry for bothering you, sorry for the bad news, sorry this issue came up, sorry for asking questions. As the youngest girl in the family, I felt that I didn’t have as much to offer as my elders, and that what I had to say wasn’t worth a whole lot. Blame and shame usually trickled down the hierarchy in my family, and usually landed at my feet. A broken vase? Spilled milk? Mistakes? All eyes were on me. So from early on, I started apologizing first, just to get it out of the way. I found that it often mitigated heated situations. But that approach didn’t work as well when I entered the workplace, especially in my job at a company where I had to interact with many teams and senior managers. I remember skulking around corners on the way to my boss’s door and then knocking sheepishly: “Very sorry to interrupt you. Can I ask a question about this project? Sorry. ” “Sure come in. No need to apologize. ” “O. K. Sorry. ” I heard similar reassurances from a product manager, who told me that I should stand up for myself and stop apologizing. And, finally, I heard this exclamation from an executive: “Stop saying ‘sorry’! You don’t need to unless you really did do something wrong, O. K.? The team and customers will think that you aren’t confident when you always apologize!” Change didn’t happen right away. It took a long time to internalize their message. Much of one’s worth is equated to compensation and promotions in the workplace. And for years, bringing up these topics and taking credit for my own work were still uncomfortable and even embarrassing. But I realized I had to stretch myself to succeed in an environment that was so different from my cultural upbringing. Confidence was expected. And I knew it wouldn’t just spring up from a brand of puffery, but from a deeper understanding of worth and how it could be communicated in the workplace. As I examined my background and core values, I discovered that having a perpetually apologetic stance didn’t necessarily represent true humility. I found that I could offer an honest without being arrogant, so others would see how I could make a difference. This was a style of confidence that felt congruent and authentic to me. The process of gave me a framework that has allowed me to go outside my comfort zone and to work in an increasingly diverse workplace. Throughout my career, I’ve met many other professionals who have struggled to find their worth on the job. Women and members of minority groups, especially, are often raised with one set of values and expectations, and then suddenly need to excel in a new environment where the path to success is much different. My journey has allowed me to help such professionals understand and voice their worth to others while remaining true to themselves. I have to acknowledge that, to this day, I still find myself needing to suppress the urge to be . But I did learn this: how to give myself permission to claim my own worth. “No,” I said definitively one day, as I was gunning for a new role with a better salary. “I think I’m going to have to stick with this number. ” I had done my research and knew my proposed valuation was in line with others who were equally qualified. “That’s fine,” my future boss responded. “You’re the right fit — I look forward to getting started. ” Just like that. And I realized I had proved my worth without once saying I was sorry. | 1 |
The authorities in Idaho charged a transgender woman this week with secretly taking pictures of an woman changing in a Target fitting room. The national retail chain drew praise from transgender advocates and condemnation from conservative groups when it announced in April that it would allow customers to use the restroom or fitting room corresponding to their gender identity. An officer from the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office was called to a Target in Ammon, Idaho, on Monday evening by a woman who said she saw someone reach over the wall separating the fitting rooms there with an iPhone taking pictures or a video, according to a court document. While a majority of Target locations have unisex fitting rooms, the Ammon store does not, a spokeswoman said. Based on a review of surveillance footage and interviews with witnesses, the suspect and her roommate, a detective on Tuesday arrested Shauna Smith, 43, on one felony count of voyeurism. She was booked into Bonneville County Jail as a man, using her legal name, Sean Patrick Smith. The victim told the authorities she had been trying on swimwear when she spotted the iPhone. Her mother confronted the suspect, who fled on foot. Both later identified the voyeur as a white man wearing a dress and a blond wig, according to the document. Another witness reported seeing the suspect leave in a vehicle that was later discovered to be registered to Ms. Smith. Ms. Smith’s roommate confirmed to the police that she is, indeed, a transgender woman and identified clothes worn by the suspect in surveillance footage as belonging to Ms. Smith, according to the document, posted online earlier by EastIdahoNews. com and obtained separately by The New York Times. According to the document, an affidavit of probable cause for warrantless arrest, Ms. Smith told a detective that she had made videos in the past of women undressing for the “same reason men go online to look at pornography” and allowed the detective to unlock the iPhone. Ms. Smith is represented by a public defender. Target, which has 1, 792 stores nationwide, said in a statement that it was committed to creating “a safe and secure shopping environment” and that it immediately cooperated with local law enforcement as soon as it learned of the case. The retailer has been the subject of a boycott petition created by the American Family Association, which contends the transgender fitting room and bathroom policy would give sexual predators access to victims. The petition has collected nearly 1. 4 million signatures since April, according to the group’s website. In a statement, Greg Scott, a spokesman for the conservative Christian group the Alliance Defending Freedom, said that while the group recognizes that most transgender men and women have no bad intentions, policies granting them access to the bathroom of their choosing “make girls and women more vulnerable to those who do have bad intentions. ” Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy and education organization based in Washington, said such arguments are distractions. “This has nothing to do with whether or not I should be allowed to use the bathroom in a restaurant, whether a first grader can use the bathroom, whether a high schooler can play school sports,” Ms. Keisling said. “If this person was a voyeur, they will be dealt with by the legal justice system the way they deal with voyeurs. ” | 1 |
If one were to count up the number of times any American — or maybe anyone anywhere — laughed in the last the person responsible for more of those laughs than anyone else might well be Garry Marshall, who died at 81 on Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. It would be difficult to overstate Mr. Marshall’s effect on American entertainment. His work in network television and Hollywood movies fattened the archive of romantic, family and buddy comedies and consistently found the sweet spot smack dab in the middle of the mainstream. Indeed, Mr. Marshall was one of the forces directing that mainstream, working with stars from the 1960s (Lucille Ball and Danny Thomas, among others) into the early years of the 21st century (Anne Hathaway, for instance, whom he directed in the film “The Princess Diaries”). Beginning in the ‘60s, his television work alone included writing scripts for the comedies “Make Room for Daddy” (with Mr. Thomas) “The Lucy Show” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show. ” In 1970, with Jerry Belson, a frequent early writing partner, he adapted Neil Simon’s play “The Odd Couple” into the ABC television series of the same name, starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman as the mismatched roommates, the neatnik Felix and the slob Oscar. Mr. Marshall went on to create, in 1974, “Happy Days,” a fondly nostalgic parody of life in the 1950s and early ’60s featuring a roster of stereotypical young people, including Ron Howard as Richie, the straight arrow, and Henry Winkler as the rebellious, charmer known as the Fonz. (The lawyer Martin Garbus, who was a friend of Mr. Marshall’s from their early teens, and who confirmed the death, said in an interview that he was the model for Richie and that the other characters in the show were generally based on Mr. Marshall’s friends from the Bronx, though “Happy Days” was set in Milwaukee.) A hit in itself, the show begat other hits. One featured the charmingly innocent, logorrheic space alien Mork, from Ork, played by Robin Williams, who appeared in a “Happy Days” episode in early 1978 and became the central character in “Mork Mindy,” a show created by Mr. Marshall with Joe Glauberg and Dale McRaven. They set Mork down in Boulder, Colo. where he befriends a young woman, played by Pam Dawber, who patiently teaches him the ways of earthlings and eventually marries him. “Happy Days” lent another show, “Laverne Shirley,” both a setting and its main characters. Created by Mr. Marshall with Lowell Ganz and Mark Rothman, it was about a pair of single women — Laverne DeFazio, played by Mr. Marshall’s younger sister Penny, and Shirley Feeney, played by Cindy Williams — who work at a brewery. They had been introduced to the “Happy Days” audience when they went on a double date with the Fonz and Richie. “Garry Marshall had a feel for Everyman, comedy that matched exactly the young, audience that made up the base of ABC’s appeal,” Bill Carter, the former longtime television reporter for The New York Times and now a commentator for CNN, said in an email. “He was the dominant figure in the rise of that long downtrodden network to a run of ratings supremacy in the 1970s. It was the first time ABC had ever ascended to the top of television. ” Mr. Marshall began directing movies in the 1980s. Several were star vehicles that dealt with mismatched pairs: “Nothing in Common” (1986) a reconciliation story with Jackie Gleason and Tom Hanks as cantankerous father and resentful son “Overboard” (1987) which proposes that a meanspirited heiress with amnesia (Goldie Hawn) can be persuaded to believe she is the wife of a carpenter (Kurt Russell) and, most famously, “Pretty Woman” (1990) a Cinderella tale — and a gigantic hit — set in contemporary Los Angeles, about a hooker with a heart of gold (Julia Roberts) and her Prince Charming, a ruthless corporate raider (Richard Gere). Mr. Marshall once confessed that he wanted to be “the Norman Rockwell of television. ” “I like to do very romantic, sentimental type of work,” he told The Times as “Pretty Woman” was being released. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. ” As an actor, Mr. Marshall appeared frequently in small roles, cast usually to take advantage of his casually blunt manner and distinctly nasal Bronx accent, perhaps best exemplified by a scene in Albert Brooks’s comedy “Lost in America” (1985) in which he played a Las Vegas casino manager whom Mr. Brooks harangues in an attempt to get him to return the money he lost gambling. When Mr. Brooks says the casino could be like the Gimbels department store in the Christmas movie “Miracle on 34th Street,” profiting from an act of beneficence, Mr. Marshall is the personification of flabbergasted. “In that movie, Santy Claus took care of everything,” he says in the film. “There was Macy’s, Gimbels, but Santy Claus came and he fixed the whole thing. We don’t have Santy Claus. ” Garry Kent Marshall was born in the Bronx on Nov. 13, 1934. His father, who was born Anthony Masciarelli but changed the family name, made industrial films. Mr. Marshall recalled them in an interview in 2000 with the Archive of American Television. “‘The Story of Zinc,’ ‘Smelting in the Pittsburgh Mill’ — we watched them,” he said. “Not one laugh. ” His mother, the former Marjorie Ward, taught dance classes in the basement of their apartment building. She was also the family wit, Mr. Marshall said, who introduced him to humor, “which became one of the great tools of humor throughout my career. ” “My mother was funnier than anybody I ever worked for,” he said in the 2000 interview, fingering his sport jacket. “My father was as funny as this coat. Not a laugh a minute, my father. ” As a boy, Mr. Marshall learned to play the drums, and he was a good athlete a shortstop, he admired Phil Rizzuto of the Yankees and was known as Flip, he said, for the way he tossed the ball. He used that nickname later when he performed in nightclubs. Adding his father’s former surname, he called himself Flip Masciarelli — a creative hiccup away from the name of one of his characters, Arthur Fonzarelli, a. k. a. the Fonz. Mr. Marshall attended Public School 80 and DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and graduated from Northwestern University, where, he recalled in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in May, “I realized words mattered and I studied journalism. ” When his mother died in 1983, Mr. Marshall and his family donated $1 million to Northwestern to name a building in his mother’s name: The Marjorie Ward Marshall Dance Center. Mr. Marshall joined the Army in 1956 and served in South Korea before returning to New York, where he worked briefly for The Daily News, did his comedy routines at night and wrote jokes for the comedian Joey Bishop and others. In the early 1960s he moved to Los Angeles, where he met a nurse, Barbara Sue Wells they married in 1963. In addition to her, his survivors include a son, Scott two daughters, Lori and Kathleen two sisters, Ms. Marshall, the actor and director, and Ronny Hallin, a producer and six grandchildren. Mr. Marshall wrote episodes for many of the shows he created, and he contributed to other series, including “Gomer Pyle: U. S. M. C.,” a spinoff of “The Andy Griffith Show,” starring Jim Nabors the buddy adventure drama “I Spy,” with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby and the omnibus sitcom “Love, American Style. ” Not all of his series were big winners. Among his and less successful were “Hey Landlord,” about a young man from Ohio who inherits a New York apartment building “Me and the Chimp,” about a dentist (Ted Bessell) and his family, who adopt, well, a chimp “Angie,” about a waitress (Donna Pescow) who marries a wealthy young doctor (Robert Hays) and “Joanie Loves Chachi,” another “Happy Days” spinoff, starring Erin Moran and Scott Baio. Mr. Marshall’s other films include “Beaches” (1988) a melodrama about the trials and tribulations of a friendship between two women, played by Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler “Frankie and Johnny” (1991) based on a play by Terrence McNally, about the courtship of a waitress (Michelle Pfeiffer) by a persistent cook (Al Pacino) “Runaway Bride” (1999) a reuniting Ms. Roberts and Mr. Gere as a repeat offender and the journalist who writes about her and, in his last few years, a handful of comedies with ensembles telling a variety of stories revolving around holidays: “Valentine’s Day” (2010) New Year’s Eve” (2011) and “Mother’s Day” (2016). A theater buff, Mr. Marshall built a performance space in Burbank, Calif. and opened it as the Falcon Theater in 1997 it began a subscription series in 2002. He also tried his hand at playwriting, with limited success. His play, “Wrong Turn at Lungfish,” written with Lowell Ganz, was a bittersweet comedy about a dying, sightless and cantankerous old intellectual, a perky, uneducated young woman who volunteers to read to him, and her lunkhead of a boyfriend. It was presented at Steppenwolf in Chicago and in 1993 Off Broadway, directed by Mr. Marshall with George C. Scott, Jami Gertz and Tony Danza in the leading roles. Mr. Marshall is the author of two memoirs, both written with his daughter Lori: “Wake Me When It’s Funny: How to Break Into Show Business and Stay” (1995) and “My Happy Days in Hollywood” (2012). “Critics have knocked me for targeting society’s lowest common denominator,” Mr. Marshall said in the earlier book. “I believe that television was, and still is, the only medium that can truly reach society’s lowest common denominator and entertain those people who maybe can’t afford a movie or a play. So why not reach them and do it well? “When I produced a television show I didn’t just roll out of bed each morning and say, ‘I’m going to make some rich, smart and successful people laugh.’ I thought, ‘Let them get their own laughs.’ They have the money to pay for it. ” | 1 |
Good morning. We’re trying something new for our readers in Asia and the Pacific region: a morning briefing to your day. What do you like? What do you want to see here? Email us with your feedback at asiabriefing@nytimes. com. Here’s what you need to know: • Donald J. Trump’s first appointment put a Washington insider — Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee — in the crucial gatekeeping role of chief of staff. He also named Stephen K. Bannon, the media mogul, chief strategist. As Mr. Trump fills out his administration, the appointees will lend shape to a chaotic agenda, offering the strongest signals yet on whether and how he will carry out campaign promises like deporting millions of illegal immigrants, scrapping trade pacts and traditional alliances. An immediate question is how Mr. Trump will handle potential overlaps between his vast business dealings and his political role, given that his adult children are leading his transition team and also running his businesses. _____ • Protests against Mr. Trump’s election continued. In one of the largest, on Saturday, masses of marchers descended on Trump Tower in Manhattan, Mr. Trump’s headquarters and home, some chanting, “Not my president!” More protests are planned, including one aimed at Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January. Facebook’s executives held meetings with staff members and the company’s policy team to try to assuage concerns that misinformation and fake news articles shared on the platform had influenced the election’s outcome. _____ • President Obama is on his way to Europe, where he will face leaders he had long assured that Mr. Trump could not be elected. Their meetings will now be shadowed by uncertainty over the United States’ commitment to NATO. Mr. Obama will visit Athens and Berlin before heading to Lima, Peru, for a summit meeting of the Economic Cooperation forum. For about half the member states, the gathering will be clouded by the death of the Partnership trade deal. Mr. Obama is expected to meet on the sidelines with President Xi Jinping of China, a major beneficiary of the pact’s demise, and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia. _____ • New Zealand is assessing the damage from a 7. earthquake that hit near Christchurch, triggering multiple tsunami waves and forcing evacuations along a stretch of the coastline. At least two people were killed. Military helicopters have been deployed to coastal towns, such as Kaikoura, that have been cut off. _____ • “Did you vote for me to abolish corruption?” Prime Minister Narendra Modi bellowed in a speech, furious over criticism of his abrupt ban on India’s two largest bank notes. “If you asked me, should I do it or not?” His move crippled commerce at markets around the country and left millions standing in line for hours at banks and A. T. M. s. depositing about $45 billion in the devalued notes and taking out $7. 5 billion in new currency. _____ • Interviews with more than two dozen military medical personnel who served or consulted at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reveal how secrecy, mistrust and the shadow of interrogation limited doctors’ ability to treat detainees who became mentally ill, some after being subjected to torture or other harsh coercive practices. One was Ramzi bin an admitted and unapologetic in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. _____ • Alibaba reported $17. 73 billion in sales on Singles Day on Friday. The total was a 32 percent increase from 2015, about half the previous year’s increase, largely because consumers spent less per purchase. • Toyota Motors agreed to pay up to $3. 4 billion to settle a federal class action lawsuit accusing the company of inadequate rust protection on 1. 5 million pickups and sport utility vehicles sold in the United States. • Japan said its economy grew an annualized 2. 2 percent in the third quarter, exceeding estimates. • Here’s a snapshot of global markets. • Prosecutors are preparing to question President Park over an scandal, a first for a sitting South Korean president. [Yonhap] • The first female pilot of China’s fighter jet, who was reported killed in a training accident, was remembered as a “golden peacock. ” [South China Morning Post] • Myanmar government troops burned Rohingya villages as tensions between Buddhists and Muslims escalated in restive Rakhine State. [The New York Times] • Analysts in Indonesia see the enormous Muslim protest this month against the governor of Jakarta as the camouflaged opening salvo in a political campaign to unseat President Joko Widodo. [The New York Times] • China recycles just 20 percent of its packaging material, leaving landfills overloaded in the aftermath of Singles Day. [Caixin] • The United States has agreed to take in refugees currently being housed on the Pacific island nation of Nauru in a agreement with the Australian government. [The New York Times] • A year after the Islamic State attacks in Paris that killed 130 people and wounded nearly 500, survivors and witnesses shared their stories. [The New York Times] • Chinese women traditionally retain their surnames at marriage, but doing so is an expression of powerful patriarchal values, not, as in the West, of female empowerment. • Less than a week ago, it appeared that a woman would break the gender barrier to the United States presidency. Here is a collection of stories from American women about the barriers they’ve faced. • Leon Russell, the rock ’n’ roll songwriter and star, died in Nashville. He was 74. The baseball World Series and the United States presidential election were two possible events this month. Look to tonight’s sky and you’ll be in for one more. The supermoon makes a beaming return to the night sky. It’s the closest full moon to Earth since 1948. If you missed it early this morning, you can catch tonight’s rise in spectacular fashion. The moon tonight will appear significantly larger and brighter than usual. (Though some people, our science writer included, argue that the event is overhyped.) You may also hear references to the Beaver Moon, a moniker that the Old Farmer’s Almanac traces to Native Americans’ naming moons to track the seasons. In August, there’s the Sturgeon Moon, when the fish were readily available in the Great Lakes region of the United States. The Strawberry Moon rises in June when the fruit is at its ripest. This week’s moon rise coincides with the time of year beaver traps were set out, before the first freeze. “There are a lot of cool things to find in the night sky these days,” a NASA researcher, Noah Petro said, but tonight is the night “to enjoy the moon. ” Remy Tumin contributed reporting. _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings. What would you like to see here? Contact us at asiabriefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Only weeks after 70 million Americans chose a black man for president, shattering a racial barrier that had stood for the entirety of the nation’s history, no one in the White House, especially the man in the Oval Office, wanted to talk about race. President Obama had made a pragmatic calculation in January 2009, as the financial crisis drove communities across the United States toward economic collapse. Whatever he did for whose neighborhoods were suffering more than others, he would not describe as efforts to specifically help Black America. Mr. Obama made the decision knowing how powerfully his election had raised the hopes of — and knowing that no matter what he did, it would not be seen as enough. “I remember thinking, ‘They are going to hate us one day,’” said Melody Barnes, who is black and served as Mr. Obama’s first domestic policy adviser, recalling her sadness when she stood in an auditorium in those early months as a crowd cheered for the success of the new president. “I knew that we couldn’t do everything that people wanted to meet those expectations. ” The fear inside the West Wing was that promoting a “black agenda” and aiming programs directly at at a time of widespread economic anxiety would provoke a white backlash — the kind that, years later, White House officials would view as helping to elect Donald J. Trump. “At a minimum, that would have been tone deaf,” said Eric H. Holder Jr. who served as the nation’s first attorney general during much of Mr. Obama’s presidency, “and at worst, would have created a reaction in the larger community that would have prevented the things you wanted to do. ” Mr. Obama, who had grown up straddling two worlds as the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, wanted to be the president of all America. Framing his efforts in racial terms could exacerbate something that was already simmering, he thought. “The most important thing I can do is to lift the economy over all,” Mr. Obama told reporters in the summer of 2009 when he was asked about doing more to help recover economically. But over the next seven and a half years, racial tensions across the country forced Mr. Obama to abandon his early reticence on race again and again. Ultimately he led a national conversation on race ignited by spasms of violence — police shootings and protests in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri and elsewhere. Inside the White House, aides recall them as among his most painful moments as president. “After my election there was talk of a America,” Mr. Obama said in his farewell speech on Tuesday in Chicago, reflecting on the threat that racial strife poses for the country’s democratic ideals. “Such a vision, however well intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society. ” After he leaves office, Mr. Obama will continue that conversation in work for My Brother’s Keeper and other programs to help black youths. There is plenty to do. As much as his presidency has inspired and empowered black unemployment is still about double that for whites. Nearly a quarter of blacks are living in poverty, almost the same as in 1976. “He made it seem like everything was all good, and it’s not,” said Thelonious Stokes, 21, a black artist whose experiences of being racially profiled in Chicago left him jaded about the state of race relations. “We almost needed Trump to show the true state of America. ” Mr. Obama’s earliest public reflection about race as president backfired. Asked about a black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. a friend of Mr. Obama’s who was arrested in July 2009 trying to enter his own house by a white officer, Mr. Obama immediately took sides. “It is fair to say,” the president said six days after the arrest at a news conference, “that the Cambridge police acted stupidly. ” Those words — and the frenzied reaction to them — helped deepen the caution about racial issues inside the White House. For days, the president’s critique of the arresting officer dominated the news and the morning staff meetings in the West Wing. Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, was especially agitated, his colleagues recalled, and argued that the White House had to do something to change the subject. Mr. Gibbs succeeded in pushing for what the news media quickly labeled a “beer summit” on the edge of the Rose Garden in the White House, where Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, joined Mr. Obama over beer for a discussion. “It had to be cauterized in a way that it would stop leading the news,” Valerie Jarrett, Mr. Obama’s closest adviser, conceded. Professor Gates, for one, was pleased. “I don’t think anybody but Barack Obama would have thought about bringing us together,” he said at the time. As a candidate for president in 2008, Mr. Obama had drawn praise for confronting racial divisions during a powerful speech he delivered about his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. who had characterized the United States as fundamentally racist and the government as corrupt. “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static as if no progress had been made,” Mr. Obama said that March day in Philadelphia, urging people to move beyond old racial wounds. “Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well. ” But the beer summit was deeply disturbing to many of the president’s advisers, who thought he should not have backed down. The officer had acted stupidly, they thought, and the nation’s first black president ought to be able to say so. The meeting “was demeaning and diminished his leadership and his voice at that moment,” one of them recalled, asking for anonymity to bluntly discuss the topic. “People thought we were being punked. I got so many emails, so many phone calls from people I respected: ‘He was right. Why are you backpedaling? ’” Inside the West Wing, the impact was clear. Mr. Obama would have to be more cautious when it came to racial issues, particularly ahead of the 2012 campaign. The issue of race was too divisive at a time when Mr. Obama needed to emphasize inclusion. “What it did teach us is that you just have to be careful about the words that you choose,” Ms. Jarrett said. “It doesn’t mean you shy away from issues that arise that deal with race, just as he didn’t shy away from Reverend Wright. But you have to be sensitive to a long history of people reacting strongly to the topic. ” Outside the White House, people noticed, too: “He plainly arrested him because he was black,” said Edward G. Robinson Sr. who is black and works at a box factory in Cleveland. Mr. Obama “backtracked because he wanted to be everybody’s president. ” Like others, Mr. Robinson said the president was met with racially motivated disrespect in Washington, and pointed to the moment when a white Republican lawmaker yelled, “You lie!” at the president during a congressional address. The White House would go on to publish reports about its efforts to help including details about the impact that the Affordable Care Act was having to help poor blacks. But Mr. Obama rarely talked about race publicly during the next few years. The president’s voice was shaking with emotion. “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin,” Mr. Obama told Ms. Jarrett and David Plouffe, his senior adviser and former campaign manager, as the three talked in the Oval Office about what the president should say publicly about the death of the at the hands of a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. “I am going to say that. ” It was March 2012, nearly three years after the beer summit. The specter of that meeting still hovered and Mr. Obama was, in a sense, taking sides again. But in personalizing the shooting, his aides recalled, Mr. Obama’s hope was that people might view boys differently if they saw Trayvon through the president’s own eyes. Mr. Obama headed out to the Rose Garden, announced his nomination of a new World Bank president, then took the question from a reporter that everyone knew was coming: “Can you comment on the Trayvon Martin case, sir?” Mr. Obama called it a tragedy, said he was glad the Justice Department was looking into it, reflected on how the nation was doing necessary soul searching and then concluded: “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. ’’ Moments after Mr. Obama returned to the Oval Office, Gene Sperling, one of his top economic advisers, stopped by with tears in his eyes. “You can’t imagine what that will mean to my son,” Mr. Sperling, who is white and is married to an woman, told the president, according to a colleague who was there at the time. This time, the president’s comments were embraced by many outside the White House, too. Media reports focused on the emotion Mr. Obama had displayed — rare for a politician whose usual demeanor was cool and professorial. “For him to say things like that in front of the entire country and the world, I think sends a strong message to people,” Ryan Shultz, 33, an art teacher in Chicago who is white, said in a recent interview. But others viewed the president’s comments that day as a continuing affront to police officers and a saw in them a willingness to take sides in the racial debate. For at least one person, it went further. Dylann S. Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine parishioners in Charleston, S. C. in 2015, later said he was inspired to kill because of media coverage of Trayvon’s shooting. “Crime is still bad and police are still shooting black people left and right,” Mr. Shultz said. “I live in Chicago — a murder capital of the United States — and it’s crazy and it hasn’t gotten that much better, I don’t think. ” Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Mo. shortly after noon on Aug. 9, 2014. Only minutes before, Mr. Obama had arrived on Martha’s Vineyard for his summer vacation, which would soon be dominated by how to respond to the racial violence that Mr. Brown’s death unleashed. The president and his aides, including Mr. Holder and Ms. Jarrett, who were also vacationing on the island, made urgent calls to Missouri’s governor, state police officials and civil rights leaders. They debated whether Mr. Obama should go to Ferguson, and decided against it, knowing that a presidential visit would be disruptive. Mr. Holder would go instead. But the more urgent question for the three of them was how to weigh in. The president was wary of putting his thumb on the scale in a case destined to be investigated by the federal authorities. But it was just as clear that tensions between the police and were increasing — not only in Ferguson, but also around the country. If Mr. Obama wasn’t the right person to step into that issue, who was? “You want to try to calm the situation,” Mr. Holder said, recalling the discussions he had with the president and Ms. Jarrett about what to say. “You want to reassure the community that an investigation will be done and done fully. But you want to make sure that the people in law enforcement know it is done fairly. ” “There was that trust gap,” he added. “That was something that had to be dealt with. ” As the violence worsened, Mr. Holder, Mr. Obama and Ms. Jarrett concluded that the president needed to denounce the violence — and at the same time criticize the police for their conduct during the protests. “There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting,” the president said in a televised statement on Aug. 14 from Edgartown, Mass. But he added, “There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. ” For the rest of his presidency, Mr. Obama would strive for the balance he struck in his remarks that day: empathy and understanding for and support for the police and the rule of law. But however he weighed in, the events in Ferguson made clear that he could no longer hang back and instead had to lead a national debate about race, violence and unity. “Once it was so in America’s face, police brutality, it blew the circuit,” said Bill Burton, an who served as deputy White House press secretary during the first term. “It made it possible to have that conversation that our country had actively not been having. ” Inevitably, Mr. Obama’s striving for balance often left him vilified by both sides. Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, rebuked Mr. Obama for not being “helpful” in discussing police tactics from his vacation. Years later, Mr. Pasco told NPR that the president often struck the wrong tone when he talked about race and policing. “The president has never been a police officer. He’s never walked in a police officer’s shoes,” Mr. Pasco said last July. “There’s kind of a breakdown in communication more than there is a breakdown in insincerity or intent. ” Ja’Mal Green, a Black Lives Matter activist based in Chicago, said he thought Mr. Obama “ignored” the calls of organizers for federal policy and funding aimed at stopping police brutality. Mr. Green said he also grew tired of hearing Mr. Obama couple his grief for families in racially charged shooting episodes with statements supporting white police officers. “He is trying to walk a neutral line and he wants to please both sides,” Mr. Green said. “He wants to please black people and then he wants to please police supporters and police officers and police unions. But sometimes you have to pick a side in situations. You need to pick your time when you fight for home or you’ll just have everybody hating you. ’” Mr. Stokes, the artist from Chicago, felt similarly disappointed. “Chicago is the exact same,” Mr. Stokes said. “He simply opened up, maybe, a lane for young men like me to just maybe be accepted a little bit more to people that don’t accept educated black people. But that’s it, literally. White America is still running everything, and that means that nothing is changing. ” Less than a year after Mr. Brown’s death in Ferguson, on June 17, 2015, nine parishioners, including a pastor, were gunned down by a white supremacist during a church meeting in Charleston. Two days later, the victims’ families addressed Mr. Roof, the gunman, at a court hearing, where one by one they forgave him. “You took something very precious away from me,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of Ethel Lance, told Mr. Roof, as her voice rose in anguish. “I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul. ” It was an extraordinary scene, broadcast live on television, which moved many who saw it to tears. Mr. Obama was traveling and did not see it in real time, but when Eric Schultz, the deputy press secretary, read Ms. Collier’s words out loud to Mr. Obama on Marine One, the presidential helicopter, the president was awed by what he heard. “He said, ‘That’s what we need to recognize here, the ability of people to forgive on the worst day of their lives.’ It really struck him,” Ms Jarrett recalled. “We sat there and talked about it on the helicopter. About that quality, the amazing grace. ” Later, in the Oval Office, Mr. Obama struggled with his chief speechwriter, Cody Keenan, to come up with the right words for a eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor of the Charleston church and a friend of the president’s. “I’ve got nothing to say,” Mr. Keenan told Mr. Obama, according to Ms. Jarrett. “You’ve said everything that one could possibly say on the subject. ” Eventually, the president decided that instead of talking about guns he would talk about what black churches stood for and the meaning of grace. “It would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again,” the president told a hushed audience at the memorial service. “Once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual — that’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society. To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change — that’s how we lose our way again. ” The week before, during a podcast interview with Marc Maron, the comedian, Mr. Obama had caused a minor stir by using the word “nigger” in answering a question about race relations. He knew it would cause a ripple, an aide with him recalled, but he shrugged. At the beginning of his term, the podcast could have caused a fury and Mr. Obama might have pulled back again. But events in the country — especially the deaths of young black men — had given him more opportunities to engage the topic. Mr. Pinckney’s funeral was one of them. “He’s not going to just whistle in the wind,” Ms. Jarrett said. “He’s looking for a chance to talk to people when they are ready to hear him. He doesn’t ignore moments. ” One of those moments came this past May. Mr. Obama had a little more than eight months left in office, and he had already said plenty about race. But as he headed to deliver the 2016 commencement address at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, Mr. Obama said he had something he wanted to add. It was a message to young the ones who wanted to protest the injustices they saw around them. The president had invited some of them to the White House to talk with him about their cause, and in a few cases, they refused the invitation. People close to him said that made him burn. “You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you,” Mr. Obama told the students that day, speaking more to members of the Black Lives Matter movement than to the graduates before him. Being “as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. ” For the president, a onetime community organizer in Chicago, it was a crucial distinction. Mr. Obama had tilted against the powerful and connected — he called his time as an organizer “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School. ” His approach had always been more strategic than confrontational and foreshadowed his cautious, meticulous attitude in the White House. In the speech, Mr. Obama recalled working as a young Illinois state senator to fight racial profiling, not by calling the police racist, but by sitting down and negotiating a new law. “So we engaged and we listened, and we kept working until we built consensus,” he said. By the time he became president, people close to Mr. Obama said, he was frustrated by the idea that young activists would view themselves as tainted if they came into the White House to talk to him. In the speech, he urged the young protesters not to give in to the idea that the system is rigged. “That will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair,” he said. “And that’s never been the source of our progress. That’s how we cheat ourselves of progress. ” “Listen,” he told the students. “Engage. If the other side has a point, learn from them. If they’re wrong, rebut them. Teach them. ” Mr. Obama has told people that he avoided framing his early White House efforts in overtly racial terms because he wanted to avoid a white backlash — but acknowledges that he got one anyway. Still, the president repeatedly tells crowds like the students at Howard that race relations are better since he graduated from college. “To deny how far we’ve come would do a disservice to the cause of justice, to the legions of foot soldiers,” he told them last May. Two days after the 2016 election, Mr. Obama took his own advice about engaging adversaries by sitting down in the Oval Office for 90 minutes with Mr. Trump. Many in his party were still in shock about the election’s results, and wanted to see fury from their president. Instead, he offered a hand. In Atlanta, Latonda Henderson, a marketing consultant, watched Mr. Obama’s meeting with Mr. Trump with admiration as the president she loved sat down with the man who had led the movement questioning the legitimacy of his birth certificate. “You sit down with people who opposed you,” said Ms. Henderson, who is black. “You sit down and try to find a common ground with people who were attacking your family, spitting on your family. That’s President Obama’s legacy. ” | 1 |
By wmw_admin on October 29, 2016 Richard Brandt — Russia Insider Aug 14, 2016
The recent George Soros hacks show plans/conspiracy to subvert Russia’s traditional values.
George Soros’ Open Society’s Foundation is responsible for funding many “civil rights organization” that promote “Western values” in Russia.
Soros is one of the 30 richest people in the world, known for supporting Cultural Marxist organizations around the world, using his billion dollar wealth to wield enormous influence in society.
Here is a damning quote from the leaked files of Soros’ Open Society Foundation:
“Our inclination is to engage in activities that will … counter Russian support to movements defending traditional values”
The language in Soros’ internal communication read as if his Foundation sees itself as a full-scale warrior in a global conflict, “the stakes are high”, and “we should avoid entering directly into the geo-strategic warfare…”
Enjoy these choice excerpts from the leaks”
Full leaks here: http://dcleaks.com/index.php/srs_reserves/ Click to enlarge
Seems Uncle Vlad has been supporting traditional values around the world…Time to start a colored revolution to bring liberalism and cultural decline to Russia! Click to enlarge
And they said the 5th column was a myth! Click to enlarge
The rise of Patriotic resistance in the West is a problem for Soros and his foundation | 0 |
I'm not horrified she's with the Washington Post. She's typical of what you get with that paper. Left wing bias. I'm glad O'rilley called her out. | 0 |
BRACE YOURSELF: End Times War of Gog and Magog Has Already Begun, Says Mystic Rabbi Oct 28, 2016 Previous post
“And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy your old men shall dream dreams your young men shall see visions.” Joel 3:1 (The Israel Bible™)
Just a few days prior to the Jewish New Year, Rabbi Nir Ben Artzi , a noted kabbalist with thousands of followers in Israel, has revealed a divine redemptive plan for the world which will see Europe overrun with Muslims, Syria’s chaos spilling into the West, the US elections spelling disaster for American Jews, and Israel’s importance becoming greater than ever.
But the end result of all this strife is closer, and more rewarding, than anyone can imagine: Messiah.
“Everyone is ready, waiting for the public revelation of the Messiah!” the rabbi last week began a post on his webpage. “Everyone understands and knows that the Messiah is active right now,” he wrote, noting that all of the world events this year are
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK | 0 |
Research could ‘potentially serve as a curative approach for patients with HIV’, scientist says
Scientists have managed to remove DNA of the HIV virus from living tissue for the first time in a breakthrough that could lead to an outright cure.
At the moment, treating the disease involves the use of drugs that suppress levels of the virus so the body’s immune system can cope.
Now researchers in the US have revealed they used gene-editing technology to remove DNA of the commonest HIV-1 strain from several organs of infected mice and rats.
In April, the same team reported that they had successfully eliminated the virus from human cells in the laboratory, but a paper in the journal Nature Gene Editing revealed they had managed to do the same thing in live animals for the first time.
The researchers’ team leader, Professor Kamel Khalili, of Temple University, said: “In a proof-of-concept study, we show[ed] that our gene-editing technology can be effectively delivered to many organs of two small animal models and excise large fragments of viral DNA from the host cell genome.”
The current antiretroviral drugs for HIV are not able to eliminate HIV-1 from the infected cells.
And if treatment is interrupted, the virus can start replicating quickly, putting patients of risk of getting full-blow AIDS.
This is because it is able to persist in immune system T-cells and other places where it is not actually active and is unaffected by the current treatments.
The researchers used a specially adapted virus to deliver the gene-editing system into the cells.
“The ability of the rAAV delivery system to enter many organs containing the HIV-1 genome and edit the viral DNA is an important indication that this strategy can also overcome viral reactivation from latently infected cells and potentially serve as a curative approach for patients with HIV,” Professor Khalili said. In a statement, Temple University said the implications of the new study were “far-reaching”.
“The gene-editing platform by itself may be able to eradicate HIV-1 DNA from patients, but it is also highly flexible and potentially could be used in combination with existing antiretroviral drugs to further suppress viral RNA. It also could be adapted to target mutated strains of HIV-1,” it added. Professor Khalili said a clinical trial could happen within the next few years, but he first planned to carry out a similar study involving a larger group of animals.
TMZ Breaking
SOURCE | 0 |
A video from Mexico alleges to show the moment a woman was possessed by a demon while recording a video message and eating cookies. The woman appears to have a seizure in the video before an unseen force slams the door.
The video, which is reportedly from the Aguascalientes in south Mexico, shows a woman lying on a bed recording a video message for her boyfriend. As she bites down on a cookie she says she feels strange before dropping her phone and appearing to have a seizure.
After a few terrifying seconds the door to the room slams shut, seemingly by itself, before the woman breaks out of the alleged possession and runs out of the room screaming.
Strange noises can then be heard after she leaves the room, which could possibly be interpreted as spine-chilling screams from hell, or maybe a friendly elephant squealing on a nearby television.
According to the Yucatan Informa the woman is doing fine and doesn’t appear to be “possessed” any more.
WATCH THE VIDEO:
RT SOURCE | 0 |
BNI Store Nov 7 2016 HERE THEY GO AGAIN! Muslims trying to claim that the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls are Arab Muslim in origin So, let me get this straight. The Dead Sea Scrolls are demonstrably written in Hebrew. But the Palestinians are now saying these ancient documents are, like Jerusalem’s Temple Mount , the holiest site in Judaism, Arab Muslim in origin.That is how ridiculous the campaign to delegitimize Israel has become. Israel Today Carmel Shama-Hacohen – Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – said the Palestinians raised the matter informally during a recent meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin. JERUSALEM POST The dead Sea Scrolls are about 900 documents and Biblical texts, discovered in one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century in the 1940’s and 50’s in caves in and around Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. The texts include some of the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before 100 B.C.E., and preserve evidence of Jewish life during the Second Temple period. According to the ambassador and to representatives of the Israel Antiquities Authority who were present at the meeting, the Palestinians intend to make a formal claim to the Dead Sea Scrolls when the committee next convenes in 2017. “This is another provocative and audacious attempt by the Palestinians to rewrite history and to erase our connection to our land,” Shama-Hacohen told The Jerusalem Post . “The Dead Sea Scrolls are factual and weighty archeological evidence of the presence of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.” “[The accusation is] part of an ongoing effort to deny the continuous Jewish presence in Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide incontrovertible proof of the historical facts that underpin the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state,” David Koschitzky, chairman of the UJA Federation in Toronto. “As such, they pose a threat to the ongoing attempts to obscure the unique relationship of the Jewish people with the land of Israel. | 0 |
A Hillary Clinton Indictment Is Coming By Michael Snyder, on November 3rd, 2016
Doesn’t it seem like most of us are collectively holding our breath as we wait to see what will happen with this election? We are now only a handful of days away from election day and the polls have really tightened up , there are unprecedented concerns about post-election violence , and the Democratic nominee for president could be indicted literally any day now. The American people are going to be absolutely shocked when the FBI finally reveals what they have discovered regarding Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials, corruption at the Clinton Foundation, and other “stomach churning” matters that normally aren’t topics of polite conversation. Without a doubt, a Hillary Clinton indictment is coming. The only question now is when it will happen.
The moment that FBI Director James Comey sent his letter to Congress, he knew that someone’s head was going on the chopping block. If Hillary Clinton does not get indicted, Comey’s career is over and there is a very good chance that he will be going to prison instead. There is no way that he would have ever put himself on the line like this if extremely powerful evidence had not already been found against Clinton.
Because without a doubt, the vultures are circling. Just consider what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently told CNN about Comey…
…Nancy Pelosi has claimed that FBI Director Comey is “not in the right job,” following his decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of a private email server.
“Maybe he’s not in the right job,” Pelosi said in an interview with CNN .
“I think that we have to just get through this election and just see what the casualties are along the way,” she continued, refusing to answer a question on whether she thought the FBI director should resign.
If it turns out that this investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was renewed for no good reason, Comey is going to be strung out to dry, and he knows this.
Fortunately for Comey, there are reports that indicate that the evidence the FBI is compiling in this case is absolutely overwhelming. The following comes from Infowars …
According to other uncovered emails, Abedin and Clinton both sent and received thousands of classified and top secret documents to personal email accounts including Weiner’s unsecured campaign web site which is managed by Democratic political consultants in Washington D.C.
Weiner maintained little known email accounts that the couple shared on the website anthonyweiner.com. Weiner, a former seven-term Democratic Congressman from New York, primarily used that domain to campaign for Congress and for his failed mayoral bid of New York City.
At one point, FBI sources said, Abedin and Clinton’s classified and top secret State Department documents and emails were stored in Weiner’s email on a server shared with a dog grooming service and a western Canadian bicycle shop.
If you even send a single classified document outside of a secure channel that is a major criminal offense.
So if there are “thousands” of these emails as some reports are indicating, that should be enough to lock Hillary Clinton up for the rest of her life. According to investigative journalist Jerome Corsi , what Clinton and her close associates have done is “an obvious violation of the law”…
“The rules for handling classified materials is you’ve got to handle them on secured channels. You can’t let them go on an insecure channel,” Corsi said. “Clearly, sending these emails to Yahoo.com – and we know some of them had classified material because they’ve been marked classified – is a violation of the law, and it doesn’t require intent.”
He said Clinton and Abedin could have avoided this entire scandal by establishing secure government accounts and not sending any of it to private accounts.
“This was such an obvious violation of law, and perhaps leading to an espionage case or a treason case, that when presented to Comey, he really had no alternative than to go forward,” Corsi said.
But this isn’t the only investigation that could lead to a Hillary Clinton indictment. According to Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier , the FBI investigation into corruption at the Clinton Foundation is also “likely to lead to an indictment”…
Two sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI’s investigations told Fox News Wednesday that a probe of the Clinton Foundation is likely to lead to an indictment . Fox News’s Bret Baier said Wednesday that the FBI probe into a possible pay-to-play scheme between Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation has been going on for over a year. Sources told the news network that the investigation, which is conducted by the White Collar Crime division of the FBI, is a “very high priority.”
One of the anonymous sources told Baier that the amount of evidence now being uncovered is equivalent to “an avalanche coming in every day.”
If what these two sources have told Baier is true, then this changes everything. The following is how Real Clear Politics summarized the most important pieces of information from this report…
1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.
2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.
3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.
4. Sources within the FBI have told Baier that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.
5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information have been taken from it.
It is also being reported that the Department of Justice tried unsuccessfully to stop the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
At this point, the struggle between the FBI and the Department of Justice is being described as “a civil war”. The Department of Justice is obviously extremely pro-Clinton, and meanwhile over at the FBI many agents consider Hillary Clinton to be “the antichrist personified” …
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.
Perhaps if Hillary Clinton had not made it a habit to regularly cuss out Secret Service agents and other law enforcement personnel over the past several decades she would have more friends in the FBI.
To a certain extent, this is simply a case of the chickens coming home to roost.
And at this point, even some of Hillary’s biggest supporters in the media are turning on her. Just consider what Chris Matthews of CNBC is saying about her…
“You know what I think? I’m going to be more judgmental than Beth who’s a straight reporter. I’ll make a judgment. Every time I watch a politician engage in a certain pattern of behavior before they go to the White House, they continue to engage in that pattern afterwards. People don’t change because we swear them into the White House. They become that person big-time. And the Clintons were raising money like this hand over hand, hand over fist, back in 1996, using—we called it Motel 6. They were hoarding them in, pulling them in by train loads of contributors and then letting them sit in the Lincoln bedroom for a while and charging them by the hour. You can still vote for Hillary Clinton, but remember, you’re getting this as part of the package, because that’s been their pattern. “
Voting has already begun in most states, and Americans are facing a historic choice.
If they choose to elect the most wicked politician of this generation despite everything that has been revealed about her, I think that will speak volumes about where we stand as a nation.
Our leaders in Washington D.C. reflect who we are as a country. If if we willingly send Hillary Clinton to the White House, the truth is that we will fully deserve everything that happens to us afterwards. November 3rd, 2016 | Tags: Clinton , Election , Election 2016 , Hillary Clinton , Hillary Clinton Charged , Hillary Clinton Indicted , Pain , Painful , Stomach , Stomach Churning , Tightened Up | Category: Commentary If Donald Trump Wins, He Will Be 70 Years, 7 Months And 7 Days Old On His First Full Day In Office » | 0 |
Getty - Chip Somodevilla
Approximately 300 members of the media today followed Donald Trump to his Washington, D.C., hotel to watch the candidate and his family officially cut the ribbon on the Pennsylvania Avenue property.
Prior to the ceremonial cutting, the ever-effusive Trump had high praise ... for the scissors.
“I've never seen scissors that look this beautiful before,” he said, gazing at the gilded, oversized cutters. Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Tiffany Trump cut the ribbon at the Trump International Hotel, Washington, D.C. today. Image Credit: Getty Images
Trump was taking a brief break from the campaign trail before heading to North Carolina Wednesday afternoon for a rally.
The 263-room Washington Trump hotel is in the historic Old Post Office Building, which Trump's organization, led primarily by his eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, overhauled in a two-year, $200 million redevelopment. Ivanka Trump gets a congratulatory kiss from her father Wednesday at the official opening of the Trump's Washington, D.C. luxury hotel. Image Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Trump's speech today was focused mainly on the new property, but he did take a moment to needle the seeming demise of Obamacare, which was come under scrutiny this week for anticipated monstrous premium hikes. Trump talks politics: "it was just announced #ObamaCare is in free fall … unaffordable, unusable, and cant use it if you can afford" — Chris Snyder (@ChrisSnyderFox) October 26, 2016
Trump also made sure to note the presence of Newt Gingrich in the audience at the event, congratulating him by name for the on-air verbal scuffle he had with Fox News host Megyn Kelly last night on the talk show host's program.
“Congratulations, Newt, on last night. That was an amazing interview. We don't play games, Newt, right?”
Gingrich sparred with Kelly over her referring to accusations against Trump by several women claiming various degrees of sexual harassment and other incidents. Kelly shot back that Gingrich, former GOP Speaker of the House, should take care of his “anger issues.” For the record, @megynkelly was wrong, i don't have anger management issues. I do have media bias issues! — Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) October 26, 2016
Meanwhile, the White House also weighed in on the new Trump International Hotel in Washington—press secretary Josh Earnest was asked at the daily briefing about his thoughts on the proximity to the White House of Trump's property.
“[It's] not too far away. Well, in some ways, it's a really long way away, depending how you look at it.”
The hotel is literally a handful of blocks from Presidential headquarters at the White House. Earnest, however, was speaking metaphorically. | 0 |
NEWARK — The man who has admitted orchestrating the mysterious lane closings at the George Washington Bridge in 2013 testified on Tuesday that he was told that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had agreed to falsely explain the closings as part of a traffic study to try to “put an end” to a growing scandal surrounding them. The confessed culprit, David Wildstein, testified that he had heard from two top Christie appointees at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the bridge, that the governors had hoped to stop the catastrophic traffic jams caused by the lane closings from hurting Mr. Christie’s campaign. Mr. Wildstein, who is cooperating with federal prosecutors in the trial of two former Christie aides accused of approving and directing the scheme, agreed that Mr. Cuomo had told the Port Authority’s executive director to “stand down” from trying to publicly blame Mr. Christie and his aides for the closings, at least until Mr. Christie had won in November 2013. A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo issued a statement sternly denying that the governor and Mr. Christie had discussed a false story and denouncing Mr. Wildstein’s motivations. Mr. Christie, a Republican, and Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, have previously denied that such a conversation occurred. Both have said they had no role in covering up the cause of the lane closings. The testimony by Mr. Wildstein, a former Christie administration official at the Port Authority, left open the possibility that Mr. Cuomo did not know the true reason for the closings. Mr. Wildstein has said they were meant to punish a mayor who did not endorse Mr. Christie’s . But Mr. Wildstein testified previously that Mr. Christie knew about the closings and their punitive intent as they happened, and that the governor laughed when he heard about the traffic jam and that the mayor’s calls about public safety risks were being ignored. On Tuesday, his seventh day on the witness stand, Mr. Wildstein was by a lawyer for Bridget Anne Kelly, a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie who is on trial with Bill Baroni, Mr. Christie’s former top staff appointee at the Port Authority. Mr. Wildstein testified that top officials in the governor’s office and David Samson, Mr. Christie’s appointee as Port Authority chairman, had decided that New Jersey officials at the agency would write a report trying to legitimize the traffic study story. The report, Mr. Wildstein said, would seek to dismiss the mayor’s complaints by saying there had been a “failure of communication. ” Mr. Christie’s office would review the report, he said, and the authority’s executive director, Patrick J. Foye, appointed by Mr. Cuomo, would approve it. Mr. Foye had ordered the lanes reopened when he learned about the shutdown four days after it began and had never been a fan of Mr. Wildstein. Mr. Foye knew the lane closings were not related to a traffic study, and at least one of his staff members had called reporters to say so, generating intense coverage of the closings and why they happened. But Mr. Foye agreed to sign off on the report, Mr. Wildstein said in court on Tuesday, as long as New Jersey took responsibility. “My understanding at the time was that this would put an end to this issue,” Mr. Wildstein testified, referring to the report by the two governors. “Pat Foye would sign off on a false report?” Ms. Kelly’s lawyer, Michael Critchley, asked him. “Yes, sir, that was my understanding,” Mr. Wildstein said. “And that was a result of conversations with Cuomo and Christie?” Mr. Critchley said. “Yes, sir,” Mr. Wildstein said. Mr. Cuomo’s office, Mr. Wildstein said, had told Mr. Foye to “lay off Christie. ” Mr. Wildstein, who has pleaded guilty to his role in the lane closings, acknowledged that his account was secondhand. He said he had heard about the conversations from Mr. Samson and Mr. Baroni. Mr. Cuomo’s office on Tuesday denied that any such conversation had taken place. “Whatever the admitted Bridgegate architect thought or dreamt about New York’s involvement has no basis in fact,” John P. L. Kelly, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said in a statement. “Anyone can say anything, especially a convicted felon spinning a tale, but it’s just false and delusional. ” No report was ever issued. Federal prosecutors and Mr. Wildstein have said that was because Mr. Baroni was asked to give testimony to a New Jersey legislative committee, and he read a version of the report there. Mr. Wildstein also testified that Mr. Baroni told him that Kevin O’Dowd, Mr. Christie’s chief of staff, had had a conversation with his counterpart in Mr. Cuomo’s office, Lawrence S. Schwartz, in which they agreed that Mr. Foye, who had also been invited to testify at that hearing, would not. Mr. Wildstein said he was also told by Mr. Christie’s spokesman, Michael Drewniak, that he had briefed Mr. O’Dowd on what New Jersey officials took to be Mr. Foye’s meddling in their business. Ms. Kelly’s lawyer asked what that meant. “That Governor Christie was in the middle of an election, that Mr. Foye was becoming involved and could potentially hurt Governor Christie, and that Mr. O’Dowd now understood and had reached out to Albany to get Foye to back off,” Mr. Wildstein replied. Mr. Foye did not testify at the legislative hearing, but later accepted another invitation to speak to the Legislature. Eric Corngold, a lawyer for Mr. Foye, said on Tuesday that “Mr. Wildstein’s testimony on this topic is not accurate. ” “Mr. Foye never had any such conversations or was given any such direction by the governor or any of his staff,” Mr. Corngold continued. The day after Mr. Christie won The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Wildstein had been behind the order to close the lanes. Mr. Wildstein testified that he believed Mr. Cuomo’s direction to “stand down,” as Mr. Critchley said, did not extend past Election Day. “I did not believe it was a coincidence that I had been told that Governor Cuomo had spoken to Mr. Foye during the election campaign and then suddenly comments from Mr. Foye went away,” Mr. Wildstein said, “and the day after the election a reporter called the Port Authority, called me, to talk about my involvement. ” | 1 |
Posted on July 15, 2015 by Dr. Eowyn | 33 Comments
It’s a topsy-turvy world when law-breakers — those who illegally enter and stay in the United States — are sacred cows, while those who criticize the law-breakers are ostracized and demonized.
On June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump announced that he’s entering the crowded race to become the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, he made some remarks about illegal immigration which brought the wrath of the PC Left on his head. Trump said:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
For saying that, one business after another severed their ties with Trump. Univision and Comcast’s NBCUniversal cancelled plans to broadcast Trump’s Miss Universe beauty pageant. Mattress giant Serta said it will stop selling Trump-branded products. Department store giant Macy’s also cut its ties with Trump.
Such righteous indignation! You would think Trump were a heinous mass murderer or a child-molester or serial rapist or bestialist!
But Macy’s anti-Trump move has backfired.
TMZ reports, July 13, 2015:
Macy’s is paying the price for sacking Donald Trump, because we’ve learned thousands of customers are cutting up their Macy’s credit card in protest.
Sources connected to the department store tell TMZ, Macy’s has received complaints from approximately 30,000 customers since ending its relationship with Trump nearly 2 weeks ago.
We’re told the store has been “inundated with complaints” from customers who believe the department store is unfairly punishing Trump for his views on immigration.
Our sources say thousands of customers have vowed never to shop at Macy’s again and many of them say they’re cutting up their Macy’s credit card to make a statement.
We’re told the complaints have come in various ways, including phone, Facebook and email. A Macy’s spokesperson would only say, “Our Facebook page is often times used by our customers to express their feelings or points of view. Many times it does not correlate to any action.” Join the boycott against Macy’s! | 0 |
How can so many people believe things that are demonstrably false? The question has taken on new urgency as the Trump administration propagates falsehoods about voter fraud, climate change and crime statistics that large swaths of the population have bought into. But collective delusion is not new, nor is it the sole province of the political right. Plenty of liberals believe, counter to scientific consensus, that G. M. O.s are poisonous, and that vaccines cause autism. The situation is vexing because it seems so easy to solve. The truth is obvious if you bother to look for it, right? This line of thinking leads to explanations of the hoodwinked masses that amount to little more than name calling: “Those people are foolish” or “Those people are monsters. ” Such accounts may make us feel good about ourselves, but they are misguided and simplistic: They reflect a misunderstanding of knowledge that focuses too narrowly on what goes on between our ears. Here is the humbler truth: On their own, individuals are not well equipped to separate fact from fiction, and they never will be. Ignorance is our natural state it is a product of the way the mind works. What really sets human beings apart is not our individual mental capacity. The secret to our success is our ability to jointly pursue complex goals by dividing cognitive labor. Hunting, trade, agriculture, manufacturing — all of our innovations — were made possible by this ability. Chimpanzees can surpass young children on numerical and spatial reasoning tasks, but they cannot come close on tasks that require collaborating with another individual to achieve a goal. Each of us knows only a little bit, but together we can achieve remarkable feats. Knowledge isn’t in my head or in your head. It’s shared. Consider some simple examples. You know that the earth revolves around the sun. But can you rehearse the astronomical observations and calculations that led to that conclusion? You know that smoking causes cancer. But can you articulate what smoke does to our cells, how cancers form and why some kinds of smoke are more dangerous than others? We’re guessing no. Most of what you “know” — most of what anyone knows — about any topic is a placeholder for information stored elsewhere, in a textbook or in some expert’s head. One consequence of the fact that knowledge is distributed this way is that being part of a community of knowledge can make people feel as if they understand things they don’t. Recently, one of us ran a series of studies in which we told people about some new scientific discoveries that we fabricated, like rocks that glow. When we said that scientists had not yet explained the glowing rocks and then asked our respondents how well they understood how such rocks glow, they reported not understanding at all — a very natural response given that they knew nothing about the rocks. But when we told another group about the same discovery, only this time claiming that scientists had explained how the rocks glowed, our respondents reported a little bit more understanding. It was as if the scientists’ knowledge (which we never described) had been directly transmitted to them. The sense of understanding is contagious. The understanding that others have, or claim to have, makes us feel smarter. This happens only when people believe they have access to the relevant information: When our experimental story indicated that the scientists worked for the Army and were keeping the explanation secret, people no longer felt that they had any understanding of why the rocks glowed. The key point here is not that people are irrational it’s that this irrationality comes from a very rational place. People fail to distinguish what they know from what others know because it is often impossible to draw sharp boundaries between what knowledge resides in our heads and what resides elsewhere. This is especially true of divisive political issues. Your mind cannot master and retain sufficiently detailed knowledge about many of them. You must rely on your community. But if you are not aware that you are piggybacking on the knowledge of others, it can lead to hubris. Recently, for example, there was a vociferous outcry when President Trump and Congress rolled back regulations on the dumping of mining waste in waterways. This may be bad policy, but most people don’t have sufficient expertise to draw that conclusion because evaluating the policy is complicated. Environmental policy is about balancing costs and benefits. In this case, you need to know something about what mining waste does to waterways and in what quantities these effects occur, how much economic activity depends on being able to dump freely, how a decrease in mining activity would be made up for from other energy sources and how environmentally damaging those are, and on and on. We suspect that most of those people expressing outrage lacked the detailed knowledge necessary to assess the policy. We also suspect that many in Congress who voted for the rollback were equally in the dark. But people seemed pretty confident. Such collective delusions illustrate both the power and the deep flaw of human thinking. It is remarkable that large groups of people can coalesce around a common belief when few of them individually possess the requisite knowledge to support it. This is how we discovered the Higgs boson and increased the human life span by 30 years in the last century. But the same underlying forces explain why we can come to believe outrageous things, which can lead to equally consequential but disastrous outcomes. That individual ignorance is our natural state is a bitter pill to swallow. But if we take this medicine, it can be empowering. It can help us differentiate the questions that merit real investigation from those that invite a reactive and superficial analysis. It also can prompt us to demand expertise and nuanced analysis from our leaders, which is the only tried and true way to make effective policy. A better understanding of how little is actually inside our own heads would serve us well. | 1 |
Scott Walker may be the governor of Wisconsin but Scott Walker is not a smart man.
Just one week until Election Day, Walker decided he would use his social media account to help get Donald Trump elected. Instead, he gave every single Democrat in the country more than enough of a reason to vote for Hillary. Oops.
On his Twitter account, Walker tweeted a photo of Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama embracing, he captioned the moment “If you like the past 8 years, vote Hillary Clinton.” If you like the past 8 years, vote @HillaryClinton . pic.twitter.com/cQEtIgPsEz
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) November 1, 2016
In Walker’s right-wing bubble that may be a stinging critique. To most of America, that’s a great reason to vote Hillary. President Obama is currently seeing his favorability ratings surging. His presidency, and the accomplishments he’s made during it, are very popular. At this moment, Gallup found 54 percent of Americans said they approved of Obama. His popularity outstrips Republican icon Ronald Reagan at the same time during his presidency.
Lots of people like the past 8 years under Obama .
The internet was bemused by Walker’s tone-deaf plea. It seems like this could literally be a Clinton campaign tweet given Obama’s approval rating. https://t.co/oHi573bllj | 0 |
Email
An informed source in Yemen's AnsarAllah stated, last night, missile strikes by Yemen Houthis aimed to annihilate the Saudi's invading air force base in Jeddah.
Saudis have repeatedly targeted the cities and Yemeni defenseless people by their air strikes through this airport.
He said: we have admonished Saudis several times so far and urged them to put an end to their attacks, otherwise we would prevent them from committing tortures and crimes through our attacks. A ballistic missile Berkane was fired at King Abdulaziz airport, which is the Saudi's Royal air force position. This attack caused wide damages to the airport, leading to its closure.
Jeddah is located 65 kilometers from Mecca, and Al-Arabiya news network announced that a ballistic missile belonging to Yemen Houthis was fired from Yemeni Sa'dah to the Holy city, Mecca. However, this missile was traced and intercepted at a distance of 65 kilometres from Mecca. | 0 |
A Texas jury convicted a Mexican national for the crime of “illegal voting” on Wednesday and was sentenced to eight years in prison. At trial, she claimed she did not know the difference between being a resident and a citizen. [Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Tarrant County officials put Rosa Maria Ortega to trial for voting in two Texas elections. Texas legislators enacted the law in 2011 and it became effective on January 1, 2012. Breitbart Texas reported that Ortega would face trial on Monday. The woman was indicted in November 2015. The Tarrant County indictment stated that she voted in the November 2012 General Election and the May 2014 Primary knowing she was not eligible to vote because she is not a U. S. citizen. Ortega had previously applied to vote, but Tarrant County officials rejected her application because she admitted on the form to status when asked. She filled out an application five months later and alleged she was a citizen. A release distributed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday noted that Ortega “cast ballots five times between 2004 and 2014. ” The bulk of these instances occurred before Texas began enforcement of its photo voter identification law. Ortega did not vote in the 2016 General Election. During the trial, Sergeant Joseph Cadwell with the attorney general’s public integrity unit, testified that Ortega confirmed she was not a citizen but said she would be “marrying her husband” (a U. S. citizen) in the near future. Sgt. Cadwell, who interviewed Ortega at her home in October 2015 along with Sgt. Wayne Rubio, showed Ortega seven Dallas County forms she had signed. In all, there were five voter registration applications. Two of them had the citizenship box checked “YES” the others were blank, but all were signed with the affirmation about U. S. citizenship. Ortega also confirmed that she sent a registration application to Tarrant County in October 2014 with the “NO” box checked and received a rejection letter because she said she was not a citizen. She also told the sergeant she had registered for food stamps. Ortega’s main defense witness at trial was herself. She said she had not pursued being a citizen because she lacked the necessary funds. The jury took a few hours to find her guilty on both counts. General Paxton lauded the case’s conclusion Thursday, saying, “This case shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure, and the outcome sends a message that violators of the state’s election law will be prosecuted to the fullest. ” The Ortega case has been prosecuted amid legislative activity in states like Texas and Virginia, which are actively pursuing legal reforms that would require individuals seeking to become registered voters to prove U. S. citizenship as a prerequisite. In Austin, House Bill 1079, authored by Rep. Mike Schofield ( ) and SB 136, submitted by Sen. Van Taylor ( ) would require election clerks to verify citizenship with documents such as passports, birth certificates, and naturalization forms. The Public Interest Legal Foundation recently released a report documenting more than 1, 000 cases of voters being removed from Virginia’s rolls for reasons related to citizen eligibility. Similar legislation is under consideration in that state as well. Only one state, Kansas, currently requires prospective voters to prove citizenship. The offense of “Illegal Voting” in Texas is a felony of the second degree. Lana Shadwick is a contributing writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. She has served as a prosecutor and associate judge in Texas. Follow her on Twitter @LanaShadwick2. This article has been updated to reflect additional information. | 1 |
The Times of Israel reports: JTA — Ezra Schwartz, who was killed by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel in November 2015, was inducted posthumously into the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity at Rutgers University. [The induction ceremony was held Sunday night, at the start of Memorial Day in Israel, which commemorates fallen soldiers as well as victims of terror. At the Sunday ceremony, Ari Schwartz, the father of Ezra, was inducted as an honorary brother of the Rho Upsilon chapter of the Jewish fraternity, which has chapters throughout the United States and around the world. Ari Schwartz said at the ceremony that unlike others in his son’s memory since he died, the fraternity ceremony “represents who he could have been,” the news website MycentralJersey reported. Read more here. | 1 |
Giants to Cowboys: Not yet. Dallas, riding an winning streak, had a chance at securing the N. F. C. East division title with a win, but a pair of interceptions thrown by Dak Prescott — doubling his season total to four — ended the winning streak and dropped Prescott to against Big Blue while he is against everyone else. More important for the Giants, the victory solidified the team’s standing as the top wild card contender in the N. F. C. Here’s how the rest of the N. F. L. playoff picture shapes up after Week 14: ■ Earl Thomas is very important. The safety for the Seattle Seahawks is out for the rest of the season with a broken leg and the team’s vaunted secondary seemed lost without him in a blowout loss to the Green Bay Packers. Seattle still has a commanding lead in the N. F. C. West but will have to learn how to play without Thomas quickly if the team has any hope of competing in the playoffs. ■ A game can happen without Jameis Winston accounting for a touchdown. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback had either a passing or rushing touchdown in all 27 of his college games and his first 28 games in the N. F. L. but he was shut out in his team’s win over New Orleans. Considering he went from winning 96. 3 percent of his games in college to losing 13 of his first 24 games in the N. F. L. he was probably just happy with the win, which kept the Buccaneers in line for one of the N. F. C. ’s two wild card spots. ■ The biggest N. F. C. North game of the 2016 season may come in 2017. With the Green Bay Packers having won three consecutive games after a start to the season, and having winnable games in each of the next two weeks, a season finale on Jan. 1 against the Detroit Lions suddenly seems like a game. The Lions have a lead, so they would need another loss before the game to make things interesting, but with road games against the Giants and Cowboys that is certainly possible if not likely. ■ The Houston Texans picked a good time to end the team’s losing streak. Houston may been losers of three straight, but in a vital division matchup against the Indianapolis Colts they rode a touchdown run by Lamar Miller and five field goals by Nick Novak to victory, keeping them in a tie with the Tennessee Titans for first place in the A. F. C. South, while the Colts are now a game behind both teams. ■ Teams should have emergency in mind before the game. Because of injuries on the offensive line, the Philadelphia Eagles were forced into the awkward position of holding sideline tryouts for the underappreciated position. Brent Celek was a bust, with his snap on an attempt being fumbled, but Trey Burton did better, with his snap landing cleanly for a field goal by Caleb Sturgis. For good measure, Burton also had 7 catches for 65 yards in the game, but the loss likely dropped Philadelphia from any serious playoff discussion while keeping the Washington Redskins in the hunt. Odell Beckham Jr. only needed one play to steal the spotlight from the Dallas Cowboys’ pair of celebrated rookies, sprinting to a touchdown late in the third quarter to give the New York Giants a victory. The Cowboys’ attempt to avenge the only loss of rookie Dak Prescott’s N. F. L. career sputtered to a a lead that was delivered on the team’s second offensive possession of the game. Prescott showed off a veteran’s ability to remain focused, just missing on a potential touchdown pass and then following it by rolling out on a bootleg that he sold so well that the entire Giants defense bit, leaving Terrance Williams wide open for a touchdown. But the Giants’ defense stiffened, forcing turnovers and frustrating Prescott the rest of the way. Dallas has already qualified for a playoff spot, but will have to work hard to maintain the No. 1 seed and a bye as they close the season with difficult matchups against Tampa Bay, Detroit and Philadelphia. The Giants, meanwhile, held onto the top wild card spot in the N. F. C. and will finish the season with a home game against Detroit and then road games in Philadelphia and Washington. Life without Earl Thomas may be quite a learning experience for the Seattle Seahawks. In Seattle’s first game without Thomas since 2009, the Packers exploited the absence of the safety, who broke his leg last week. That, combined with an uncharacteristic game from Russell Wilson led to an easy win for the Packers on a cold night at Lambeau Field. Things for Seattle’s defense were bad from the start. On just the third play of the game, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers rolled slightly to his right before seeing Davante Adams in against Jeremy Lane. Rodgers, relying on Adams’ ability to outrun the cornerback, launched the ball downfield with Adams catching it in stride as Lane hit the turf. Adams cruised into the end zone untouched for a touchdown. Perhaps more important than Lane’s failure in coverage was Steven Terrell, the safety charged with filling in for Thomas, not being able to provide any help on the play, trailing hopelessly behind as Adams crossed the goal line. Green Bay added to their lead with a touchdown run from Ty Montgomery, the team’s wide receiver turned running back, and two touchdown receptions by Jordy Nelson, giving the receiver an N. F. L. 12 for the season. Rodgers, who set a goal for the Packers to “run the table” after a start to the season, completed 18 of 23 passes for 246 yards and 3 touchdowns despite hobbling around for much of the game with an injury that may have been related to the hamstring issues he has been working through. With the score out of reach, Rodgers sat out almost the entire fourth quarter, but finished the game with a stellar passer rating of 150. 8, which was quite a contrast with Wilson’s 43. 7, as the Seattle quarterback, who spent much of the game running away from a relentless Green Bay had perhaps the worst game of his career. The only other time Wilson had thrown four interceptions in a game was in the 2014 N. F. C. championship against the Packers, but the Seahawks went on to win that game in overtime. It was the worst margin of defeat of Wilson’s career, as he had never lost by more than 10 points in a regular season or postseason game, but with an record, the Seahawks still have a wide lead over the Arizona Cardinals in the N. F. C. West. The road to the playoffs is far more complex for the Packers, who still trail the Giants, Buccaneers and Redskins in the hunt for one of the conference’s two wild card spots. The Washington Redskins had blown a lead in the fourth quarter and the Philadelphia Eagles, playing at home, seemed to have momentum on their side. But Washington kept pushing and Chris Thompson broke free for a touchdown run in what proved to be a Redskins victory. The Redskins, having regained the team’s lost lead, held strong against Carson Wentz on Philadelphia’s final drive, forcing a fumble that secured the team’s seventh win of the season. It was a wild second half, made even wilder as the Eagles resorted to sideline tryouts for a new longsnapper after a series of injuries. Brent Celek, a tight end, was sent out for one attempt but his snap was fumbled by Donnie Jones resulting in a turnover on downs that Washington converted into a touchdown. Trey Burton, also a tight end, then got a shot and found more success, with his snap being handled cleanly by Jones, who got it down for a field goal by Caleb Sturgis. It was not one of Kirk Cousins’ prettier games. The Washington quarterback completed 14 of 21 passes for 234 yards and 2 touchdowns, and his early in the fourth quarter initially appeared to be disastrous. But thanks to rushing touchdowns by Robert Kelly and Thompson, the game did not require Cousins to carry the entire offense. Philadelphia, meanwhile, continued a theme of looking great at times but ultimately falling short as Wentz continues to try to adjust to life in the N. F. L. With the conditions in Buffalo getting brutal, and Ben Roethlisberger struggling with turnovers, the Pittsburgh Steelers put the ball in Le’Veon Bell’s hands and the star running back carried the team to a victory over the Bills. Snow fell steadily in the game, with the condition of the field causing a significant delay to start the second half, but the Steelers, after initially showing a commitment to the passing game, let the weather and Roethlisberger’s three interceptions convince them to go back to basics. Bell was more than up to the task, carrying the ball 38 times for a 236 yards and 3 touchdowns, while also catching 4 passes for 62 yards. His 298 yards from scrimmage fell just short of Antonio Brown’s franchise record of 306. Playing in just his tenth game of the season following a suspension, Bell’s efforts put him over 1, 000 rushing yards in a season for just the second time in his career, with his average of 105. 3 yards a game representing a career high. The three touchdowns doubled his output for the season. With Bell shouldering the load for his team’s offense, Pittsburgh’s defense struggled some to contain the Buffalo offense in the second half, but ultimately did enough to secure the Steelers’ eighth win of the season while dropping Buffalo’s record below . 500. Here’s what else happened so far in N. F. L. Week 14: ■ Lions Hang On: Matthew Stafford scrambled for a touchdown in the fourth quarter to give the Detroit Lions victory over the Chicago Bears. On the Lions’ previous drive, Cre’Von LeBlanc intercepted Stafford and returned the pick for a touchdown to give the Bears a brief lead. ■ Jets Rally: Bilal Powell ran for 145 yards, including the touchdown in overtime, to help Bryce Petty and the Jets rally from 14 points down on Sunday and beat the San Francisco 49ers, . Petty threw an interception on his first pass of the game, and the Jets ( ) trailed by less than five minutes into the game. San Francisco ( ) led, at halftime but fell flat after that and lost a 12th straight game. ■ Texans Top Colts: Lamar Miller scored Houston’s only touchdown and the Texans defense stopped Andrew Luck on Indy’s final drive of the game to preserve a victory on Sunday. Houston ( ) retained a share of the AFC South lead with by ending its losing streak. The Texans won for the second straight year in Indy, have won nine straight against division foes and got their first sweep of the Colts in franchise history. — Associated Press ■ Tannehill Hurt as Dolphins Beat Cardinals: Ryan Tannehill threw three touchdown passes before being sidelined with a knee injury, and Andrew Franks kicked a field goal as time expired to help the Miami Dolphins beat the Arizona Cardinals Sunday. Tannehill limped to the locker room late in the third quarter after being hit around the legs by defensive tackle Calais Campbell as he released a completion. The Dolphins led when Tannehill departed, and backup Matt Moore failed to lead Miami to a first down in his first three series. — Associated Press ■ Winston Scoreless in Bucs’ Victory: Jameis Winston and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers came away with a victory over the New Orleans Saints that helped them stay in position for a berth, but the game saw an end to an incredible streak from the young quarterback. After throwing or rushing for a touchdown in each of 27 games in college and his first 28 games in the N. F. L. Winston was kept out of the end zone, with Tampa Bay’s scoring coming off a Doug Martin run and three field goals. ■ Panthers Beat Chargers: Carolina’s defense forced a five turnovers by Chargers’ quarterback Philip Rivers, recorded five sacks and a crucial safety in a win over San Diego. — Associated Press ■ Tickets for the underwhelming matchup between the Bengals ( ) and the Browns ( ) were listed on Stubhub for as little as $6 before the game, with the cold weather, snow, and awful football all contributing to keeping fans away. Those who stayed home seem smart as Cleveland lost to Cincinnati, . It was an underwhelming return for Browns quarterback Robert Griffin III, who was for just 104 yards. | 1 |
ASHTON HAYES, England — This small village of about 1, 000 people looks like any other nestled in the countryside. But Ashton Hayes is different in an important way when it comes to one of the world’s most pressing issues: climate change. Hundreds of residents have banded together to cut greenhouse emissions — they use clotheslines instead of dryers, take fewer flights, install solar panels and glaze windows to better insulate their homes. The effort, reaching its 10th anniversary this year, has led to a 24 percent cut in emissions, according to surveys by a professor of environmental sustainability who lives here. But what makes Ashton Hayes unusual is its approach — the residents have done it themselves, without prodding from government. About 200 towns, cities and counties around the world — including Notteroy, Norway Upper Saddle River, N. J. and Changhua County, Taiwan — have reached out to learn how the villagers here did it. As climate science has become more accepted, and the effects of a warming planet are becoming increasingly clear, Ashton Hayes is a case study for the next phase of battling climate change: getting people to change their habits. “We just think everyone should try to clean up their patch,” said Rosemary Dossett, a resident of the village. “And rather than going out and shouting about it, we just do it. ” One of their secrets, it seems, is that the people of Ashton Hayes feel in charge, rather than following government policies. When the member of Parliament who represents the village showed up at their first public meeting in January 2006, he was told he could not make any speeches. “We said, ‘This is not about you tonight, this is about us, and you can listen to what we’ve got to say for a change,’” said Kate Harrison, a resident and early member of the group. No politician has been allowed to address the group since. The village has kept the effort separate from party politics, which residents thought would only divide them along ideological lines. The project was started by Garry Charnock, a former journalist who trained as a hydrologist and has lived in the village for about 30 years. He got the idea a little more than a decade ago after attending a lecture about climate change at the Hay Festival, an annual literary gathering in Wales. He decided to try to get Ashton Hayes to become, as he put it, “Britain’s first village. ” “But even if we don’t,” he recalls thinking at the time, “let’s try to have a little fun. ” Sometimes, efforts to reduce greenhouse gases involve or doomsday scenarios that make people feel as if the problem is too overwhelming to tackle. In Ashton Hayes — about 25 miles southeast of Liverpool, with a Anglican church and a shop that doubles as a post office — the villagers have lightened the mood. They hold public meetings in the biggest houses in town, “so everyone can have a look around,” and see how the wealthier people live, said Mr. Charnock, the executive director of RSK, an environmental consulting company. “We don’t ever in Ashton Hayes. ” About 650 people — more than half of the village’s residents — showed up to the first meeting, Mr. Charnock said. Some in the village were less keen, but little by little, they began to participate. Some have gone further. When they were looking to build their home and heard about Ashton Hayes’s project, Ms. Dossett and her husband, Ian, thought it might be the perfect village for them. They moved from nearby South Warrington and found two old farm cottages, which they converted into a brick house, and installed huge windows, photovoltaic cells on the roof, a geothermal heat pump that heats the home and its water, and an underground cistern to hold rainwater for toilets and the garden. “I wouldn’t want anyone to think we live in a mud hut,” Ms. Dossett said, sitting on a couch in her warm, living room. The Dossetts also have a vegetable garden, grow grapes for wine, brew beer and keep two cows, which mow the lawn and may also eventually become food in a few years. They pay about 500 pounds (about $650) a year for electricity and heating. The success of the project seems to have inspired other community efforts in Ashton Hayes. The residents, for example, have built a new playing field with a pavilion, which is the home of a community cafe three days a week. They have also put photovoltaic solar panels on the roof of the primary school. Other towns and cities around the world hope to copy Ashton Hayes. Their representatives have contacted the project’s leaders, asking for help in setting up similar initiatives, according to the diary the Ashton Hayes group keeps about the project, chronicling almost everything they have done over the past 10 years. Eden Mills, a small community in Ontario, Canada, is one of them. Charles Simon traveled to Ashton Hayes in 2007 to learn how to translate their approach to his town, adopting the apolitical, voluntary, fun method. “Some of the changes are so easy,” Mr. Simon said. “Just put on a sweater instead of turning on the heat. ” Eden Mills has cut emissions by about 14 percent, Mr. Simon said, and has plans to do more. Residents have been working with experts from the nearby University of Guelph, planting trees in the village forest to help absorb the carbon dioxide the town emits, Mr. Simon said. Janet Gullvaag, a councilwoman in Notteroy, Norway, an island municipality of about 21, 000 people, reached out to Ashton Hayes about nine years ago after her political party decided to include reducing carbon dioxide emissions in its platform. “I think that the idea that Ashton Hayes had — to make caring for the environment fun, without pointing fingers — was quite revolutionary,” Ms. Gullvaag said. Though her community’s approach is decidedly more political, Ms. Gullvaag said that adopting Ashton Hayes’s mantra of fun had paid dividends: She has seen changes in her community, she said, as people buy more electric cars and bicycles, and convert their home heating from oil to more environmentally friendly sources. “Whatever you’re trying to do, if you can create enthusiasm and spread knowledge, normally, people will react in a positive way,” she added. Though deep cuts across the globe are still required to make broader progress, actions to reduce emissions, even by small towns, are a step in the right direction, say experts who study community action on climate change. “The element of all this has been as important as the environmental impact so far,” said Sarah Darby, a researcher at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute. She added that Ashton Hayes was in a good position to take on these kinds of projects — it is a small village of and people, so simply taking fewer flights each year can have a big effect. Residents were able to cut emissions by about 20 percent in the first year alone, according to surveys used to calculate carbon footprints that were developed by Roy Alexander, a local professor, and his students. Some have had even more significant reductions: Households that participated in surveys in both the first and 10th years shrank their energy use by about 40 percent. Mr. Charnock said he thought the village could get the cuts in its 2006 carbon footprint to 80 percent in the next few years with the help of grant money to buy and install solar panels on the local school and other buildings. The next thing they have to do, he said, is to get the county government to be as committed to cutting emissions as Ashton Hayes is. “There’s so much apathy,” Mr. Charnock said. “We need to squeeze that layer of apathy jelly and get it out. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve officials expect Donald J. Trump’s election to result in somewhat faster economic growth over the next several years, but they see little chance of the boom Mr. Trump has promised, according to an account of the Fed’s most recent meeting in . That is in part because the Fed plans to raise interest rates more quickly if growth accelerates. For now, however, Fed officials plan to wait and see what happens next, the account said. “While the Fed signaled that it would likely respond to expansionary fiscal policies with a faster pace of rate hikes, the Fed believes it is too early to embed this into its baseline,” Michael Gapen, chief United States economist at Barclays, wrote on Wednesday following the release of the minutes. “Any real shift in the stance of monetary policy will require more clarity on the stance of fiscal policy. ” At the December meeting, the Fed raised its benchmark rate for just the second time since 2008, citing the continued expansion of the economy and the steady decline of unemployment. The Fed debated and delayed that increase for most of last year, but the account published on Wednesday — after a standard delay — described the final decision as uncontroversial. Officials instead spent the meeting talking about what comes next. Mr. Trump has promised a bevy of major changes in economic policy, including tax cuts and spending increases, reductions in regulation, and restrictions on trade and immigration. As a result, the account said, Fed officials regard both faster growth and slower growth as more likely than before the election, when the economy seemed locked into its longstanding pattern of slow and steady growth. “The job of conducting U. S. monetary policy has not become any easier over recent months,” said James Marple, senior economist at TD Bank, referring to the increased uncertainty. The Fed, led by Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman, predicted in December that it would raise rates three times this year. The account said officials were not yet ready to predict how the pace of rate increases might change as a result of new policies pursued by Mr. Trump and Congress. “Participants emphasized their uncertainty about the timing, size and composition of any future fiscal and other economic policy initiatives as well as about how those policies might affect aggregate demand and supply,” the minutes said. The Fed’s committee, the Federal Open Market Committee, has 17 members, 10 of whom cast votes on monetary policy. The Fed’s caution amounts to a bias in favor of growth. The economy is expanding at roughly the pace Fed officials regard as sustainable. The work force is growing slowly as more baby boomers retire, and productivity is rising slowly. Two percent growth may be about as good as it gets. Ms. Yellen has warned that fiscal stimulus, like a tax cut or a spending increase, could increase economic growth to an unsustainable pace in the near term, resulting in increased inflation. The Fed quite likely would seek to offset such policies by raising interest rates more quickly. Instead of acting the Fed is choosing to wait for more information. But the minutes said officials were concerned about the challenge of communicating their increased uncertainty. They want to be clear that the Fed’s prediction about the pace of rate increases depends on its prediction about economic growth. Faster growth will mean faster increases. The account said Fed officials were confident in their ability to raise rates quickly enough to prevent overheating, seeing “only a modest risk” of a “sharp acceleration in prices. ” By holding rates at low levels, the Fed has sought to increase economic growth by encouraging borrowing and higher rates reduce the stimulative effect. The benchmark rate now sits in a range from 0. 5 percent to 0. 75 percent, still very low by historical standards. “Consumers have no reason to panic about the rate hike last month, or even about additional rate increases in 2017,” said Alan MacEachin, chief corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. He noted that the last rate hike would add $1 to the monthly payment on a $5, 000 credit card balance. The economic forecast prepared by the Fed’s staff for the December meeting anticipated that Mr. Trump’s election would result in “slightly higher” growth over the next several years. It said a likely increase in fiscal stimulus would be “substantially counterbalanced” by higher interest rates and a stronger dollar, which would reduce exports of American goods and services. Several Fed officials reported that Mr. Trump’s election had increased optimism among business executives in their districts. “Some contacts thought that their businesses could benefit from possible changes in federal spending, tax and regulatory policies,” the minutes said. The minutes also noted, however, that some executives were concerned about the negative impact of proposed policy changes. In a recent interview, John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said many executives in his district, which encompasses the western United States, worried about the potential impact of restrictions on immigration and on foreign trade, both of which have been important drivers of regional growth. Businesses across the country also reported increased difficulty in hiring qualified workers, the minutes said. The unemployment rate fell to just 4. 6 percent in November. The lack of readily available workers could further limit the benefits of a fiscal stimulus. | 1 |
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, announced Monday that she would not vote for Donald J. Trump in the presidential election, dealing another blow to Mr. Trump as he tries to unite his party and win more support from women. Ms. Collins revealed her decision in an opinion column for The Washington Post published Monday evening, saying that Mr. Trump’s proclivity for bullying and invective made it impossible for her to support him. She said she believed having Mr. Trump as president would make “an already perilous world” even more dangerous. Ms. Collins is the most senior senator to split publicly with Mr. Trump, and her message of censure could send a message to other Republicans that it is safe to shun the party’s presidential nominee. She is one of the few moderate Republicans remaining in the Senate and one of only two from New England, along with Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, whom Mr. Trump, after some hesitancy, endorsed late last week. Now in her fourth term, Ms. Collins also led the Senate committee that oversees homeland security, adding additional weight to her criticism of Mr. Trump, who has strained to convince voters that he is prepared to serve as the country’s commander in chief. While Ms. Collins described Mr. Trump as a person who would menace the country’s security, she hit him hardest for playing on the country’s racial and cultural divisions in the course of the presidential campaign. Faulting Mr. Trump for a “constant stream of cruel comments and his inability to admit error or apologize,” Ms. Collins specifically mentioned his attacks on Gonzalo P. Curiel, a federal judge born in Indiana whom Mr. Trump derided for his “Mexican heritage” Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a slain soldier and a New York Times reporter whom Mr. Trump seemed to mock for a physical disability. “My conclusion about Mr. Trump’s unsuitability for office is based on his disregard for the precept of treating others with respect, an idea that should transcend politics,” Ms. Collins wrote. “Instead, he opts to mock the vulnerable and inflame prejudices by attacking ethnic and religious minorities,” she continued. A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not immediately comment on Ms. Collins’s decision. The rebuke from Ms. Collins comes as Mr. Trump seeks to refocus his message in the presidential race, emphasizing themes of economic growth and nationalism rather than narrow political feuds with his own party. Mr. Trump delivered a speech on Monday in Detroit pledging to cut taxes and renegotiate American trade agreements, in an attempt to recover his footing after a debilitating start to the month. Within hours of his address, however, Ms. Collins and a collection of other Republicans had answered Mr. Trump’s grand address with an embarrassing signal of rejection. On Monday, 50 national security leaders who served in Republican administrations signed a letter rejecting his candidacy. In recent weeks, Republicans including Meg Whitman, a executive and Republican and Henry M. Paulson Jr. the former Treasury secretary, have broken ranks to back Hillary Clinton. In addition to Ms. Collins, multiple other Republican senators, including Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, have said that they will not vote for Mr. Trump under any circumstances. Several other lawmakers, including Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Mike Lee of Utah, have withheld their support from Mr. Trump without saying definitively that they will never cast their ballots for him. Ms. Collins’s opposition will probably make it far more difficult for Mr. Trump to compete in Maine, where he campaigned last week in an effort to scoop up at least one Electoral College vote. Ms. Collins is a popular figure there and her denunciation can be expected to land with force. Ms. Collins did not say whom she would vote for. | 1 |
Sean Adl-Tabatabai in News , US // 0 Comments
Hillary Clinton has kicked longtime aide Huma Abedin from her campaign plane in Florida, fuelling rumors that Abedin is about to give the FBI information that could lead to an indictment for Hillary. #Hillarysemail Huma Abedin is not on the plane with #HillaryClinton today. She must be freaking out especially since she signed this doc. pic.twitter.com/KOwI5rN1pW
— Trump Street Team FL (@ChatRevolve) October 29, 2016 RELATED CONTENT Treason: Clinton Sold State Secrets To Middle East Via Huma Abedin
The news comes on the same day that the FBI obtained a warrant to search emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
Law enforcement sources say that the emails were sent and received through Huma Abedin’s laptop – the same device used to send thousands of emails to Clinton.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Golden, Colo. yesterday, Donald Trump questioned whether Hillary would fire Huma, given the news that she was so heavily implicated in the email scandal.
“ Huma’s been a problem … I wonder if Huma is going to stay there and I hope they haven’t given Huma immunity because she knows the real story — she knows what’s going on, ” Trump said.
“ How can you have all of this incredible confidential, secret information and have your top person married to this guy? ” Trump asked. “ Everyone said one thing has nothing to do with another — well, it turns out it does .”
Nbcnews.com reports:
Agents will now compare the latest batch of messages with those that have already been investigated to determine whether any classified information was sent from Clinton’s server.
Clinton called the move an “unprecedented” departure from FBI policy, and on Sunday, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid scolded Comey for potentially breaking the law.
“Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be clear intent to aid one political party over another,” the letter says. “I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act.”
The act bars government officials from using their authority to influence elections.
— Jeff Pegues (@jeffpeguescbs) October 30, 2016 Image surfaces of Huma Abedin crying on plane as Clinton Campaign finds out the FBI has re-opened the email investigation. #HillarysEmails pic.twitter.com/2yIUgiYOsV | 0 |
0 Add Comment
THE STAR of a heartwarming Christmas ad which is bringing joy to countless millions, Buster the boxer was thrust into the limelight and our hearts earlier this week.
Despite being universally loved ever since he leapt onto a trampoline on our TV screens, Buster hides a terrible struggle which still affects him to this day.
Barking exclusively to WWN through an interpreter, Buster told us that there was more to his trampoline hijinks than meets the eye.
“It’s an addiction,” the adorable dog explained, “you’re always chasing the buzz of your first bounce. I loved it, I still can’t enough of it. But it’s tearing my life apart”.
Such was Buster’s preoccupation with the trampoline, he lost interest in walks and even stopped marking his territory.
“There was a time you couldn’t stop me from pissing on a tree. You name a tree in my area and I’ve cocked a leg over it, but once I took to bouncing nothing else mattered, I even lost contact with my mates in the dog park. My life is being controlled by this addiction,” woofed Buster, flanked by his owners.
Distraught, his owners contemplated removing the trampoline, but Buster would growl at any mention of it.
Cautioning all owners and dogs not to make the mistakes he has made, Buster warned that there are many gateway hobbies which can lead to an all out trampoline addiction.
“Tennis balls, they seemed fun at the time, but I see now that my constant fetching of them was a troubling sign of things to come”. | 0 |
Sudan This file photo shows people in the Jreif district of the Sudanese capital Khartoum protesting against the government's land policies.
Clashes involving police have erupted in the Sudanese capital Khartoum as hundreds of people demonstrated in protest against the government's land policies.
The peaceful protest turned violent after riot police fired tear gas canisters at the demonstrators in East Jreif district.
“Our land belongs to our ancestors and the government wants to give it to investors. We are protesting to save our land,” a protester said, regretting that the government had shown no intention of compensating the land owners in case their property was seized.
Some protesters pelted police officers and members of security forces with rocks. Others burned tires and tried to close off all the streets in East Jreif.
Police had a heavy presence with reports saying that 15 trucks of riot policemen armed with batons were deployed in the area.
People stage routine protests in Sudan, complaining about local grievances, but most of the demonstrations are crushed by security forces. A similar demonstration in East Jreif last year led to the death of a protester. Anti-government rallies in April also left two students dead.
There was no immediate report of possible casualties during the Wednesday rally in Khartoum.
A government decision to slash fuel subsidies in September 2013 sparked mass protests in Sudan. Thousands of people took to the streets in the capital and some other towns, calling for President Omar al-Bashir to step down. Human rights groups say about 200 people were killed, hundreds were wounded and more than 800 were arrested in the protests. The government challenges the figures. Loading ... | 0 |
At birth, the least weasel is as small and light as a paper clip, and the tiny ribs that press visibly against its silvery pink skin give it a segmented look, like that of an insect. A newborn kit is exceptionally underdeveloped, with sealed eyes and ears that won’t open for five or six weeks, an age when puppies and kittens are ready to be weaned. A mother weasel, it seems, has no choice but to deliver her young . As a member of the mustelid clan — a noble but often misunderstood family of carnivorous mammals that includes ferrets, badgers, minks and wolverines — she holds to a slender, elongated body plan, the better to pursue prey through tight spaces that most carnivores can’t penetrate. Bulging baby bumps would jeopardize that sylphish hunting physique. The solution? Give birth to the equivalent of fetuses and then finish gestating them externally on mother’s milk. “If you want access to small environments, you can’t have a big belly,” said William J. Zielinski, a mustelid researcher with the United States Forest Service in Arcata, Calif. “You don’t see fat weasels. ” For Dr. Zielinski and other scientists, weasels exemplify evolutionary genius and compromise in equal measure, the piecing together of exaggerated and often contradictory traits to yield a lineage of fierce, fleet, carnivores that can compete for food against larger celebrity predators like the big cats, wolves and bears. Researchers admit that wild mustelids can be maddening to study. Most species are secretive loners, shrug off standard radio collars with ease, and run close to the ground “like small bolts of brown lightning,” as one team noted. Now you see them, no, you didn’t. Nevertheless, through a mix of dogged field and laboratory studies, scientists have lately made progress in delineating the weasel playbook, and it’s a page turner, or a page burner. Researchers have been astonished to discover that the average mustelid is like a furnace, its metabolic rate exceeding not only that of other carnivorous mammals but also that of its twitchy, rodent prey. “If you compare a least weasel to a meadow mouse, they’re the same weight, but the weasel has the higher metabolic rate,” said Roger Powell, an emeritus professor at North Carolina State University and doyen of weasel studies. “The weasel heart beats at up to 400 pulses per minute,” said Mark Linnell, a faculty research assistant who studies mustelids at Oregon State University. “They’re geared to run at full speed, and they’re always . ” That metabolism is another example of a grand mustelidian compromise. “If you have a high metabolic rate, you can be more active and search farther for food in more places and in more diverse ways,” Dr. Powell said. “But you have to catch more food in order to do that. ” Big cats must eat the equivalent of roughly a third of their weight each week weasels must eat a third or more of their weight each day. “They’re living life on the edge,” Dr. Powell said. Weasels also have big brains relative to body mass, and they apply their neuronal bounty to continuously their movements during a hunt, a strategy that allows them to attack prey up to 10 times their size. The fisher, a particularly fearless weasel in the marten branch, may be the only North American carnivore to have mastered the art of dining on adult porcupine — a large rodent that, in addition to being protected by a formidable quill sheath, weighs a good 12 pounds more than the fisher. “It’s got to be one of the great matchups in history,” said Roland Kays, a biologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State. The fisher must encounter the porcupine on open ground, at which point it can start running circles around its quarry. The fisher tries to dart in and bite the porcupine’s vulnerable face the porcupine pivots to turn its shielded back toward its attacker. Dart and spin, dart and bite. After several deep wounds to its face, the porcupine grows weak, loses its footing and — match over. The fisher will then flip the punctured, pincushioned animal onto its back and carefully tear into a patch of belly, gaining access to desirable organs like the small intestine, which is not only rich in protein and lipids, but also contains the partially digested plant matter that even carnivores need. Dr. Kays and a former student, Scott LaPoint, have found that fishers are far more behaviorally flexible than biologists had thought possible, at least in the Northeast. Hunted and trapped to near extinction until the 1930s, fishers — a misleading name derived from Dutch colonists’ word for polecat, a European weasel — began recovering in their traditional setting of deep forests, where they could easily avoid humans. In the last few years, though, the weasels have apparently shaken off their reserve and begun showing up in suburban and urban areas — a shopping mall in Schenectady, N. Y. a parking lot in downtown Albany. Two years ago, a sizable male fisher made its way to the Bronx, startling anybody who saw it slinking along the sidewalk and raising hope that a solution to the city’s rat problem might have finally arrived. The fisher, alas, soon disappeared. “I don’t know how that one ended up in the Bronx in the first place,” Dr. Powell said, “but it’s no place for a fisher, and I’m sure he wished he’d turned left when he turned right. ” For their part, researchers wish they could overturn the public’s generally poor opinion of weaseldom. To call someone a weasel means the person is shifty, untrustworthy. Weasel words are those squishy, defensive qualifiers beloved by, well, journalists. In a recent “Brewster Rockit: Space Guy” comic strip, a “closet of nightmares” is opened to reveal, “AAHHH! !! clowns!” Researchers speculate that the negative image may result partly from the mustelid’s serpentine silhouette: In some parts of Central America, weasels are called “furry snakes. ” Or maybe it’s the distinctive mustelid musk. Most weasel species communicate with one another over large home ranges through frequent daubs of a pungent fluid excreted by their anal glands. Shihab Shamma, who uses ferrets to study the mammalian auditory system at the University of Maryland and Descartes University in Paris, said of the ferrets at his Paris lab, “We give them the names of smelly French cheeses. ” But mustelid enthusiasts emphasize the family’s beauty and diversity: some 60 living species across all continents except Antarctica and Australia, ranging in size from the least weasel, the world’s smallest carnivore (weighing less than half a stick of butter as an adult) to the mighty wolverine, which can weigh up to 70 pounds. Many weasels spend time in water, and one species, the sea otter, is a marine mammal that rarely comes on land. Sea otters are also among the only nonprimate mammals to use tools, cracking open a recalcitrant mollusk shell by banging it with a stone. Most of the time, though, the sea otter’s teeth do the job. “Their teeth are amazing, like no other living carnivore,” said Adam who studies mammalian bite forces at the University of South Carolina. “They’re big and rounded and with no pointy cusps that might break off. They look like pillows or gum drops. ” But the teeth, with their thick coat of enamel, can easily crush open a crab, clam or snail. Most weasels have dentition more typical of carnivores, with a few sharp, slicing teeth and fewer, smaller molars, which other animals use to grind plants. As a result of their compact dental layout, many weasels have foreshortened snouts that make them look young and cute. They can also act young: Weasels are among the few animals that play as adults. If they’re well fed, Dr. Powell said, “they’ll bounce and ricochet around, pounce, stalk, wiggle and change shape and just about turn themselves inside out. They put kittens to shame. ” Many weasels live in cold places, and because their long, thin shape has a high surface area relative to volume, they lose heat easily. To tackle the cold without relying on fat as an insulator, many weasels grow luxurious fur coats, some of the densest in nature. A good head of human hair has about 350 hairs per square inch. On a mink, the fiber count per square inch is 44, 000. Small wonder that people have historically coveted weasel pelts — mink, sable and ermine, the fur of pomp and royalty taken from the animals in winter, when their coats turn white. Weasels also appreciate the value of fur. In winter, voles and mice build little nests under the snow. When a weasel finds one of these nests, it’s a genuine jackpot: lunch and lodging combined. Better still with a few tweaks: After eating the residents, the weasel lines its new dwelling in rodent fur to improve insulation. “If you pop open one of these nests in springtime, you discover a macabre scene,” Dr. Zielinski said. “What was once occupied by a vole is now covered with wallpaper. ” A rodent’s closet of nightmares: no clowns, no juggling, just one cold and hungry weasel, knocking at the door. | 1 |
For Megyn Kelly, the shift from Fox News to NBC — where she will host a daily daytime show and a Sunday newsmagazine program — will be a test of whether she can connect with a broader audience in a different format and reach another level of television stardom. But her move, announced Tuesday, has broader implications for the television news industry, raising new questions about the future of Fox News, where she was a countervailing presence in an opinion lineup heavy with ideology, and of NBC News, which has been a longtime bête noire for conservative press critics. And it comes as all news organizations gird for a new era of media coverage that arrives Jan. 20 with the inauguration of Donald J. Trump. The Murdoch family, which controls Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, had become so invested in Ms. Kelly as a franchise that they were prepared to pay her a salary of more than $20 million a year. People inside and outside the network widely took that to mean the Murdochs were staking the network’s future on a journalist who effectively made her name by upending the expectations for a Fox News anchor — for instance, by publicly taking on the Republican nominee for president. But now Fox News, long the cable news ratings leader and an influential voice in the national political debate, is on course to begin coverage of a new administration with no anchor with Ms. Kelly’s history of challenging Mr. Trump. Her show, “The Kelly File,” was sandwiched between the program of Bill O’Reilly — she was regularly second to him in the cable news ratings — and that of Mr. Trump’s major booster, Sean Hannity. Her departure, coming after that of Greta Van Susteren, also means that Fox faces the prospect of having no female host in prime time. That is a potentially troubling development for the network as its seeks to move past last summer‘s sexual harassment scandal involving its and former chairman, Roger Ailes, in which many women described experiencing harassment or intimidation. (Fox is said to be looking at several potential female successors for Ms. Kelly.) For NBC, the addition of Ms. Kelly, 46, may help address a challenge confronting many major news organizations: connecting with a politically diverse audience. In bringing Ms. Kelly to NBC, Andrew Lack, the chairman of the news division, is adding a journalist schooled in the preferences and worldviews of the conservative Americans who helped elect Mr. Trump, and whose anger so many news organizations failed to appreciate. Ms. Kelly’s closely watched career move capped months of drama in the political sphere, in which she was often at the center of Mr. Trump’s intense, campaign, and in the media world, where she became a key figure in the events that led to Mr. Ailes’s ouster. Ms. Kelly was the most prominent among a group of women at the network who told internal investigators that Mr. Ailes had engaged in inappropriate behavior. (Mr. Ailes has denied all the accusations.) Despite having made a generous offer to Ms. Kelly, Rupert Murdoch, an executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, whose negotiation tactics are legendary, offered a supportive statement about her decision to leave. “We thank Megyn Kelly for her 12 years of contributions to Fox News,” the statement read. “We hope she enjoys tremendous success in her career and wish her and her family the best. ” Though the loss of Ms. Kelly is a blow to Fox News, the network has a winning formula that has kept it atop the ratings for many years, and helped it to avoid the its rivals experienced in the weeks after Election Day, as The Associated Press reported. And now the nation has a new Republican president whose approach speaks to the sensibilities of many of Fox’s viewers. Company executives said the Murdochs knew Ms. Kelly was a flight risk their offer included keeping her in prime time, and she had made it clear she was seeking a job that would give her more time for her family. Ms. Kelly had spoken with top executives at ABC News, CNN and in the syndication industry, as well as NBC News, but NBC remained largely under the radar as a landing spot. One person briefed on Ms. Kelly’s deliberations said that Mr. Lack won her over by starting the talks with a question about what she was seeking, instead of flatly offering possibilities. He then came back with a deal that was tailored to her preferences. A daytime show would give her a schedule that would allow her to see her children off to school and to have dinner with them and her husband, Douglas Brunt, a novelist. People briefed on the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, declined to disclose what Ms. Kelly’s new annual salary would be at NBC. Fox News rivals who sought to hire Ms. Kelly away, including NBC News, had indicated that they could not match the $20 million offer from Fox, the cable news leader for the last 15 years running. But even a modest raise for Ms. Kelly would place her among television’s journalists. The Wall Street Journal recently reported she was to collect $15 million for the final year of her contract. Her high price tag was worth it for Mr. Lack, who took over leadership of NBC News and MSNBC in 2015, 14 years after he had ended an tenure running the divisions. Executives at NBC Universal turned to him to stabilize the network after the suspension of the nightly news anchor Brian Williams for embellishing accounts of his reporting in Iraq, and as MSNBC floundered in the ratings. Among his moves since returning has been to direct MSNBC back toward more traditional, hard news coverage during its daytime hours — like its cable news rivals, it hit record ratings highs last year — and away from its yearslong market position as a answer to Fox News, which at times colored the reputation of its sister, NBC News. Ms. Kelly will not be reporting for MSNBC, which still has hosts like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell. In a brief interview, Mr. Lack said he would be closely involved in the creation of Ms. Kelly’s daytime show, which will run Monday through Friday at a time to be determined, as well as the one she will anchor on Sunday nights. That show will be in the vein of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” where Mr. Lack worked early in his career. “The thing about this that is challenging but exciting as hell is that we love making new shows,” he said. “You don’t get that opportunity that often any more, and you don’t get the opportunity to do that with a talent like Megyn. ” Yet the move has its risks for all involved, especially the daytime program. Daytime television has been notoriously difficult for news stars. People involved in the discussions said that the program was not planned to be in the mold of a traditional daytime talk show, nor much like the special Ms. Kelly hosted last May on the Fox broadcast network, which drew some harsh criticism (some of which Ms. Kelly dismissed as liberal disappointment over a friendly interview with Mr. Trump). In an interview with Charlie Rose on “CBS Sunday Morning” last year, Ms. Kelly described the television show of her fantasies. “How about if we merge a little Charlie Rose, a little Oprah, and a little me all together,’’ she said. “And we serve that up as an hour? Wouldn’t you watch that?” Ms. Kelly kept a relatively low profile on Tuesday, addressing her own news at the end of that night’s edition of “The Kelly File. ” “This was a tough decision for me,” Ms. Kelly said, thanking the Murdochs and attributing the move in part to her desire for more time with her children. Her last show on Fox is on Friday. | 1 |
No-fly zone would ‘require war with Syria and Russia’ – top US general Published time: 22 Sep, 2016 20:34 Edited time: 23 Sep, 2016 15:08 Get short URL US Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, September 22, 2016 © Yuri Gripas / Reuters Speaking to the US Senate, the Pentagon’s leaders blamed Russia for the Aleppo aid convoy attack, but admitted they “had no facts.” Only US coalition planes should be allowed over Syria, they said, though that would require war against both Syria and Russia.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter and General Joseph Dunford , Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, faced the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday to report on the ongoing military operations and “national security challenges” faced by the US. They also asked the senators for more reliable funding, saying the uncertainty was hurting the defense industry.
“Not only our people – our defense industry partners, too, need stability and longer-term plans to be as efficient and cutting-edge as we need them to be,” Carter told the senators. Speaking about #sequester at #SASC , Ash Carter said it was unfair to "defense industry partners" too. pic.twitter.com/tQvNE4FWRc — Nebojsa Malic (@NebojsaMalic) September 22, 2016
The lawmakers were far less interested in the war against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) than about the future of the Syrian government, Iran’s “malign influence,” and “aggression” by China and Russia – all ranked far ahead of terrorism on Carter and Dunford’s list of security challenges.
The Pentagon had “no intention” of sharing intelligence with Russia when it came to Syria, Dunford told the lawmakers unequivocally. Secretary Carter explained that the joint implementation councils envisioned by the ceasefire proposal negotiated in Geneva wouldn’t share intelligence, just coordinate efforts – but that they were a moot point anyway, since the ceasefire was effectively dead.
READ MORE: AP leaks one of the 5 Syria ceasefire docs, Moscow says always wanted them public
Both the lawmakers and the Pentagon chiefs blamed that development on Russia, focusing on the alleged airstrike against the humanitarian convoy in east Aleppo while the US-led airstrike against the Syrian Army fighting IS in Deir ez-Zor went unmentioned.
“I don’t have the facts,” Dunford said, when asked about the convoy attack by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut). “It was either the Russians or the regime,” he added.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the Russians are responsible,” whether directly or because they backed the government in Damascus, Dunford said, describing the attack as “an unacceptable atrocity.”
Carter explained Dunford’s logic in a response to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), saying that “the Russians are responsible for this strike whether they conducted it or not, because they took responsibility for the conduct of the Syrians by associating themselves with the Syrian regime.” Read more US airstrikes on Syrian troops were ‘intentional,’ lasted nearly 1 hour – Assad to AP
The latest proposal by Secretary of State John Kerry involves grounding only Syrian and Russian airplanes, Carter told Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire).
“There can be no question of grounding US aircraft” over Syria, he said, adding that US jets conduct their strikes “with exceptional precision… that no other country can match.”
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) asked about what it would take for the US to impose a no-fly zone over Syria, using the phrase “control the airspace.”
“Right now… for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia,” Dunford replied, drawing a rebuke from committee chairman John McCain (R-Arizona), who argued a no-fly zone was possible without war.
Asked about the video of US-backed Syrian rebels insulting US Special Forces in Al-Rai and running them out of the northern Syrian town, Carter and Dunford shrugged it off.
READ MORE: ‘Crusaders! Infidels! Dogs! Get out!’ US-backed rebels force US commandos to leave Syrian town
A “very small minority took verbal action” against US troops, said Dunford, who admitted he did not watch the video but had discussed it with US commanders. He said the incident was “irrelevant” because the US-backed forces and Turkey were making “great progress” along Syria’s northern border. — RT America (@RT_America) September 21, 2016
In their exchange with Graham, Carter and Dunford confirmed there is a plan to arm the Kurdish militia in Syria, over Turkish objections, as a way of advancing on the IS stronghold of Raqqa. Once Raqqa is taken, however, an Arab force would be required to hold it. “We have a plan,” Dunford said, but described it as “not resourced.”
Dunford agreed with Graham’s assertion that the US had two objectives – to destroy IS and to “remove Assad,” referring to the Syrian president – but admitted the Kurds were not interested in the latter.
“If the main fighting force inside of Syria is not signed up to take Assad out, where does that force come from?” Graham asked. Neither Dunford nor Carter had an answer to that.
Both the Pentagon heads and the lawmakers agreed throughout the hearing that caps on military spending mandated by sequestration were harmful and needed to be repealed. Lack of funding posed a significant threat to readiness and maintenance, Carter and Dunford argued, before pointing out that the US military was still the strongest, most powerful and most competent in the world. | 0 |
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has published a pamphlet asking educators to “show sensitivity” to Muslims during the month of Ramadan as GCSE and exams approach. [The body, which represents some 18, 000 headteachers and college leaders, according to the MailOnline, recommends schools reschedule revision classes and redesign physical education lesson plans in order to take the religious sensibilities of Muslim pupils into account. Islam forbids eating and drinking during daylight hours during the month of Ramadan. “School and college leaders will also want to consider the possible impact fasting and late night prayers during Ramadan may have on Muslim children when setting dates for other activities, such as sports days, trips and celebrations,” the document adds. ASCL also advises invigilators not to recommend pupils in hot exam rooms take even a “tiny sip of water” unless they appear to be suffering from dehydration, in case this offends Muslims undertaking the fast. “If a student taking an exam is showing any signs that they may be dehydrated, such as a headache or drowsiness, they should be advised to terminate the fast immediately by drinking some water,” the pamphlet cautions. Invigilators are told they should familiarise themselves with the rules governing Ramadan so they can “inform pupils of the allowances Islam gives for them to break the fast and make it up later if they feel fasting will in any way jeopardise their performance”. The report, authored by an “inclusion expert” in consultation with various Islamic scholars, imams and other “experts” notes that “Ramadan may bring many benefits to individuals and communities, but also has the potential to cause the individual temporary hardship through hunger and lack of liquids during fasting hours which may impact on physical wellbeing and cognitive performance. ” Ramadan, like the Christian festival of Easter, falls on slightly different dates every year, in accordance with a traditional lunar calendar. | 1 |
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its service was resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been banned. The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials who were trying to clamp down on the service. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities like Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China and South Korea. Greyball was part of a program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The program, including Greyball, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team. Greyball and the VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees, who also provided documents. The four spoke on the condition of anonymity because the tools and their use are confidential and because of fear of retaliation by Uber. Uber’s use of Greyball was recorded on video in late 2014, when Erich England, a code enforcement inspector in Portland, Ore. tried to hail an Uber car downtown in a sting operation against the company. At the time, Uber had just started its service in Portland without seeking permission from the city, which later declared the service illegal. To build a case against the company, officers like Mr. England posed as riders, opening the Uber app to hail a car and watching as miniature vehicles on the screen made their way toward the potential fares. But unknown to Mr. England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in the app did not represent actual vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues — essentially Greyballing them as city officials — based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app, populated with ghost cars, to evade capture. At a time when Uber is already under scrutiny for its workplace culture, its use of the Greyball tool underscores the lengths to which the company will go to dominate its market. Uber has long flouted laws and regulations to gain an edge against entrenched transportation providers, a modus operandi that has helped propel it into more than 70 countries and to a valuation close to $70 billion. Yet using its app to identify and sidestep the authorities where regulators said Uber was breaking the law goes further toward skirting ethical lines — and, potentially, legal ones. Some at Uber who knew of the VTOS program and how the Greyball tool was being used were troubled by it. In a statement, Uber said, “This program denies ride requests to users who are violating our terms of service — whether that’s people aiming to physically harm drivers, competitors looking to disrupt our operations, or opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers. ” The mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, said in a statement, “I am very concerned that Uber may have purposefully worked to thwart the city’s job to protect the public. ” Uber, which lets people hail rides using a smartphone app, operates multiple types of services, including a luxury Black Car offering in which drivers are commercially licensed. But an Uber service that many regulators have had problems with is the version, known in the United States as UberX. UberX essentially lets people who have passed a background check and vehicle inspection become Uber drivers quickly. In the past, many cities have banned the service and declared it illegal. That is because the ability to summon a noncommercial driver — which is how UberX drivers using private vehicles are typically categorized — was often unregulated. In barreling into new markets, Uber capitalized on this lack of regulation to quickly enlist UberX drivers and put them to work before local regulators could stop them. After the authorities caught on to what was happening, Uber and local officials often clashed. Uber has encountered legal problems over UberX in cities including Austin, Tex. Philadelphia and Tampa, Fla. as well as internationally. Eventually, agreements were reached under which regulators developed a legal framework for the service. That approach has been costly. Law enforcement officials in some cities have impounded vehicles or issued tickets to UberX drivers, with Uber generally picking up those costs on the drivers’ behalf. The company has estimated thousands of dollars in lost revenue for every vehicle impounded and ticket received. This is where the VTOS program and the use of the Greyball tool came in. When Uber moved into a new city, it appointed a general manager to lead the charge. This person, using various technologies and techniques, would try to spot enforcement officers. One technique involved drawing a digital perimeter, or “geofence,” around the government offices on a digital map of a city that Uber was monitoring. The company watched which people were frequently opening and closing the app — a process known internally as eyeballing — near such locations as evidence that the users might be associated with city agencies. Other techniques included looking at a user’s credit card information and determining whether the card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union. Enforcement officials involved in sting operations meant to catch Uber drivers would sometimes buy dozens of cellphones to create different accounts. To circumvent that tactic, Uber employees would go to local electronics stores to look up device numbers of the cheapest mobile phones for sale, which were often the ones bought by city officials working with budgets that were not large. In all, there were at least a dozen or so signifiers in the VTOS program that Uber employees could use to assess whether users were regular new riders or probably city officials. If such clues did not confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other information available online. If users were identified as being linked to law enforcement, Uber Greyballed them by tagging them with a small piece of code that read “Greyball” followed by a string of numbers. When someone tagged this way called a car, Uber could scramble a set of ghost cars in a fake version of the app for that person to see, or show that no cars were available. Occasionally, if a driver accidentally picked up someone tagged as an officer, Uber called the driver with instructions to end the ride. Uber employees said the practices and tools were born in part out of safety measures meant to protect drivers in some countries. In France, India and Kenya, for instance, taxi companies and workers targeted and attacked new Uber drivers. “They’re beating the cars with metal bats,” the singer Courtney Love posted on Twitter from an Uber car in Paris at a time of clashes between the company and taxi drivers in 2015. Ms. Love said that protesters had ambushed her Uber ride and had held her driver hostage. “This is France? I’m safer in Baghdad. ” Uber has said it was also at risk from tactics used by taxi and limousine companies in some markets. In Tampa, for instance, Uber cited collusion between the local transportation authority and taxi companies in fighting services. In those areas, Greyballing started as a way to scramble the locations of UberX drivers to prevent competitors from finding them. Uber said that was still the tool’s primary use. But as Uber moved into new markets, its engineers saw that the same methods could be used to evade law enforcement. Once the Greyball tool was put in place and tested, Uber engineers created a playbook with a list of tactics and distributed it to general managers in more than a dozen countries on five continents. At least 50 people inside Uber knew about Greyball, and some had qualms about whether it was ethical or legal. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team, led by Salle Yoo, the company’s general counsel. Ryan Graves, an early hire who became senior vice president of global operations and a board member, was also aware of the program. Ms. Yoo and Mr. Graves did not respond to requests for comment. Outside legal specialists said they were uncertain about the legality of the program. Greyball could be considered a violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or possibly intentional obstruction of justice, depending on local laws and jurisdictions, said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University who also writes for The New York Times. “With any type of systematic thwarting of the law, you’re flirting with disaster,” Professor Henning said. “We all take our foot off the gas when we see the police car at the intersection up ahead, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But this goes far beyond avoiding a speed trap. ” On Friday, Marietje Schaake, a member of the European Parliament for the Dutch Democratic Party in the Netherlands, wrote that she had written to the European Commission asking, among other things, if it planned to investigate the legality of Greyball. To date, Greyballing has been effective. In Portland on that day in late 2014, Mr. England, the enforcement officer, did not catch an Uber, according to local reports. And two weeks after Uber began dispatching drivers in Portland, the company reached an agreement with local officials that said that after a suspension, UberX would eventually be legally available in the city. | 1 |
Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/americas-secret-government-unaffected.html “Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. “We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state.... “The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government.... “This group ... is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law. Say hello to America’s shadow government. A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government — also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group” — may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year.To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.The first shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.”COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances — a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown — to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.Yet it is the second shadow government — also referred to as the Deep State — that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government.The Deep State, which “ operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power ,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government. So who or what is the Deep State? It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances , “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.”It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “ a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies ”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.These are the key players that drive the shadow government . This is the hidden face of the American police state that will continue long past Election Day.Just consider some of the key programs and policies advanced by the shadow government that will continue no matter who occupies the Oval Office. Domestic surveillance No matter who wins the presidential popularity contest, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. Thus, on any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Local police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike — including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Global spying The NSA’s massive surveillance network, what the Washington Post refers to as a $500 billion “ espionage empire ,” will continue to span the globe and target every single person on the planet who uses a phone or a computer. The NSA’s Echelon program intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. In addition to carrying out domestic surveillance on peaceful political groups such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several religious groups, Echelon has also been a keystone in the government’s attempts at political and corporate espionage . Roving TSA searches The American taxpayer will continue to get ripped off by government agencies in the dubious name of national security. One of the greatest culprits when it comes to swindling taxpayers has been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with its questionable deployment of and complete mismanagement of millions of dollars’ worth of airport full-body X-ray scanners, punitive patdowns by TSA agents and thefts of travelers’ valuables. Considered essential to national security, TSA programs will continue in airports and at transportation hubs around the country. USA Patriot Act, NDAA America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the rights of American citizens. In so doing, they re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States. These laws will continue to be enforced no matter who gets elected. Militarized police state Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. SWAT team raids With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams will continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. Domestic drones The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. An Inspector General report revealed that the Dept. of Justice has already spent nearly $4 million on drones domestically, largely for use by the FBI , with grants for another $1.26 million so police departments and nonprofits can acquire their own drones. School-to-prison pipeline The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. School districts will continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. Overcriminalization The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal. Consequently, small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community will continue to have their farms raided. Privatized Prisons States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations , resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit.In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years. The Private Prisons Conspiracy: A Secret Meeting That Changed Rap Music Forever Endless wars America’s expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour).The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. Read: USA Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 'Victim Nations' Since World War II Are you getting the message yet? The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what’s really going on.As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “ concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue ,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds.It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats.As Lofgren concludes: "[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change… "If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda." In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , as long as government officials — elected and unelected alike — are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished.So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it’s just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America's shadow government. By John W. Whitehead — Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People . Whitehead can be contacted at . Dear | 0 |
We live in a brave new world and change is coming whether we like it or not. Economies around the world are being centrally managed, technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and the human population continues to expand by the billions. The next 40 years could see super powers turn to third world countries, while formerly third world countries rise to become global influencers. We’re already seeing these effects around the world.
The time to prepare for these changes is now. Those who refuse to see the future or fail to understand the signs will be relegated to what Wealth Research Group calls the “perpetual poor.”
Like all tectonic changes in human history, there will be life altering ramifications for those who can’t or won’t adapt to new realities…No one is sure how this will all play out… what is certain is that you can’t afford to bury your head in the sand… Assuming responsibility and taking massive action is the only way to avoid being added to the perpetually poor who won’t have jobs, income or assets as this wave shifts the power structure of world finance in the next few years.
No matter your age – whether you are approaching retirement or just entering the workforce – the future will be difficult to navigate. Watch the following micro-documentary to understand what’s coming and how to position yourself for a global paradigm shift:
( Watch At Youtube )
Article posted with permission from SHTFPlan Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares | 0 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.