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Election Day is Nov. 8, but most states require voters to register well before then. Deadlines in the remaining states are rapidly approaching. We’re sorry. It is already too late to register for the presidential election in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia or West Virginia. Here’s a rundown of the remaining deadlines. The “mail” dates refer to the day by which an application must be postmarked. States that offer registration on Election Day often have special requirements. On a desktop computer, you may search for your state’s name with keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl F on a PC or Command F on a Mac. Tap on a state’s name for more detailed information. Wyoming: The deadline to register by mail was Oct. 25, but residents can register in person until Nov. 8. Nebraska: The deadline to register online or by mail was Oct. 21. Residents can register in person until Oct. 28. New Hampshire: The deadline to register by mail is Oct. 29. Residents cannot register online but can in person until Nov. 8. Iowa: The deadline to register online and in person is Oct. 29. Residents can register by mail until Oct. 24. Colorado: The deadline to register online and by mail is Oct. 31. Residents can register in person until Nov. 8. Washington State: The deadline to register online and by mail has passed. But residents can still register in person until Oct. 31. Connecticut: The deadline to register online, by mail and in person is Nov. 1. If you’re registering for the first time or have moved to a new town, registering in person on Election Day is possible. Utah: The deadline to register online or in person is Nov. 1. The deadline to register by mail has passed. Vermont: The deadline to register online, by mail and in person is Nov. 2. Illinois: The deadlines are slightly more complicated than in many other states. Although the deadline was technically Oct. 11, voters in Illinois were allowed to register in person during a “grace period” mandated by the state. Here’s more information about grace period registration. The deadline to register online or by mail has passed, but the deadline to register in person is Nov. 8. Wisconsin: The deadline to register online and by mail was Oct. 19, but residents can register in person until Nov. 8. Maine: The deadline to register by mail was Oct. 18, but residents can register in person until Nov. 8. District of Columbia: The deadline to register online and by mail was Oct. 11, but residents can register in person until Nov. 8. North Dakota: North Dakota is the only state in the country where you do not need to register in order to vote. | 1 |
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A dumbfounded Canadian — Richard Brunt of Victoria, British Columbia — wrote an open letter to Americans who don’t seem to realize how very good we actually have it. This image doesn’t need a lot of commentary, so I’ll let you just read it and allow it to sink in.
This has gone completely viral over the last few days and it needs to.
Transcribed: Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections. Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country’s adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs, gasoline prices are falling, there’s no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money. America is leading the world once again and respected internationally ? in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden. So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason. When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way? Richard Brunt Victoria, British Columbia About Tiffany Willis
Tiffany Willis is a fifth-generation Texan, a proponent of voluntary simplicity, a single mom, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with “the least of these" -- disadvantaged and oppressed populations, the elderly, people living in poverty, at-risk youth, and unemployed people. She is a Certified Workforce Expert with the National Workforce Institute , a NAWDP Certified Workforce Development Professional, and a certified instructor for Franklin Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens . Follow her on Twitter , Facebook , or LinkedIn . She also has a grossly neglected personal blog , a Time Travel blog , a site dedicated to encouraging people to read classic literature 15 minutes a day , and a literary quotes blog that is a labor of love . Find her somewhere and join the discussion. Click here to buy Tiff a mojito. Connect | 0 |
WASHINGTON — It was supposed to be a triumphant morning for Republicans on Capitol Hill — a moment to demonstrate the merits of unified party rule in the age of Donald J. Trump. By noon, party leaders had a message for their charges: It was not going smoothly. The day after House Republicans voted to eliminate an independent ethics body, members returned to work on Tuesday to find their offices inundated with angry missives from constituents amid a national uproar. By midmorning, Mr. Trump had weighed in, questioning the members’ priorities on Twitter. Shortly after, lawmakers were summoned to the basement of the Capitol for a hastily convened meeting with Republican leaders. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader — who, along with Speaker Paul D. Ryan, had opposed the proposal — lobbed a pointed question at his fellow Republicans, according to two people present: Had they campaigned on repealing the Affordable Care Act, or tinkering with an ethics office? Minutes later, members emerged to say the changes had been scrapped. The reversal came less than 24 hours after House Republicans, meeting in a secret session, voted to curtail the powers of the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent body created in 2008 after a series of scandals involving House lawmakers, including three who were sent to jail. It was part of a turbulent opening for the Trump era in Washington, marked by a Republican push in the Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act. House Republicans, led by Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, had sought on Monday to prevent the office from pursuing investigations that might result in criminal charges. Instead, they wanted to allow lawmakers on the more powerful House Ethics Committee to shut down inquiries. They even sought to block the small staff at the Office of Congressional Ethics, which would have been renamed and put under the oversight of House lawmakers, from speaking to the news media. “It has damaged or destroyed a lot of political careers in this place, and it’s cost members of Congress millions of dollars to defend themselves against anonymous allegations,” Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, said Tuesday, still defending the move. But such resolve crumbled Tuesday morning, as thousands of phone calls flooded lawmakers’ offices and both conservative and liberal ethics groups issued statements condemning the vote. Some Republicans joined in, saying the measure sent the wrong message to the public. (Internet searches for the words “Who is my representative” surged after news of the plan broke Monday night and peaked Tuesday morning, according to Google.) “It was a stumble,” said Representative Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, who opposed the measure and who was himself the subject of an ethics investigation while he was governor of South Carolina. “Probably not the way you want to start out. ” Mr. Trump had weighed in via a series of Twitter posts, suggesting that the House should be focused on domestic policy priorities such as health care and a tax overhaul. He called the Office of Congressional Ethics “unfair” but said focusing on it now was a case of misplaced priorities. He appended the hashtag “DTS,” an apparent allusion to his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Mr. Ryan and Mr. McCarthy had made clear on Monday that they, too, were opposed to the change. But amid boxes of pizza at a House office building, with the Rose Bowl playing on a nearby television, several members voiced support for the maneuver, including Representative Steve Pearce of New Mexico, whose office employed an aide who was ensnared in an ethics inquiry but later cleared. At first, on Tuesday morning, Mr. Ryan and Mr. McCarthy played down the changes. Mr. McCarthy suggested that he and Mr. Ryan did not have the power to simply order other Republicans to take their advice. “Welcome back,” he joked, referring to the start of the new session of Congress on Tuesday. Even at home, he said, “I usually don’t win what we watch on TV. ” About an hour later, before new members of Congress were to be sworn in — the point when the House adopts new rules that will govern how it conducts itself during the session — Mr. McCarthy told his fellow Republicans that they needed to reverse themselves quickly, or potentially face an even more embarrassing revolt on the House floor. By his estimation, he told them, the provision was going to be removed one way or another. This was not the first time that House lawmakers — Democrats or Republicans — had tried to curtail the powers or budget of the Office of Congressional Ethics, which some lawmakers see as being too aggressive in its investigations, even though it is routinely cheered by nonprofit ethics groups on both the left and the right. Perhaps most prominently, in 2011, Representative Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat who later left Congress to join the Obama administration, tried to cut the agency’s budget by 40 percent, a proposal that failed on a vote. The House Ethics Committee, the only body that has the power to actually punish lawmakers, also frequently clashed with the office, which serves more as a grand jury that investigates allegations and issues findings to the Ethics Committee of probable cause of misdeeds. For example, the committee tried in 2015 to force the Office of Congressional Ethics to shut down its investigation into allegations that nine House lawmakers’ trips to Azerbaijan in 2013 had been improperly paid for, in part, by a foreign government entity. Some of the lawmakers also accepted improper gifts during the trips, including rugs and crystal. The Office of Congressional Ethics refused to shut down its inquiry, and it published its findings on its own after the Ethics Committee voted to clear the lawmakers of wrongdoing (although the committee urged them to return the gifts). House rules require the Ethics Committee to act on recommendations by the Office of Congressional Ethics within 90 days, with the expectation that it will either formally clear the targeted lawmakers or create investigative committees to determine if rules or laws have been violated. But in recent years, the committee has increasingly relied on a loophole that allows it to informally continue to review allegations without closing a case, a step it has taken in 21 of the 68 cases referred since 2009. Most frequently, that means an end to the matter, at least as far as the public is aware, even though the Ethics Committee never formally announces that it has closed the investigation. As of this week, cases in such a limbo include allegations against Representatives Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina Roger Williams, Republican of Texas Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington Bobby L. Rush, Democrat of Illinois and Luis V. Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois. After their reversal on Tuesday, House Republicans agreed to ask the Ethics Committee to examine the Office of Congressional Ethics and recommend possible changes by this summer to address the concerns that some members have raised. Mr. Goodlatte, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, defended his proposal and called the reporting about it inaccurate. “Gross misrepresentation by opponents of my amendment, and the media willing to go along with this agenda, resulted in a flurry of misconceptions and unfounded claims about the true purpose of this amendment,” he said in a statement. But Mr. Goodlatte’s critics said he had simply been caught trying to sneak through a favor to help protect his fellow lawmakers. “We’re glad that the House Republicans listened to the public outrage about this proposal and came to their senses to reverse it, and not end real ethics enforcement in Congress,” Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said. | 1 |
YOU GO GIRL! Jayda Fransen of Britain First raises hell at a halal butcher shop She screams at the butchers for barbarically slaughtering fully conscious animals by cutting their throats so they bleed out dying in agony and tells the customers they are supporting Islamic terrorism by paying a special halal tax on everything they buy there. Even worse, a lot of the people working in the halal slaughter house don’t appear to be Muslims. | 0 |
Jerusalem (AFP) — Israeli ministers have approved measures aimed at improving the Palestinian economy and facilitating crossings, rare moves said to be at Donald Trump’s request hours ahead of the US president’s arrival. An Israeli official told AFP on condition of anonymity that ministers were responding to a Trump request to present him with “ measures” ahead of his talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Tuesday. In a statement, Trump’s administration welcomed the moves, saying he “has been encouraging both sides to take steps that improve the environment for peace making. ” “He has expressed particular interest in taking steps to improve the Palestinian economy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ” In what the Israeli official described as a “gesture for Trump’s visit, which does not harm Israel’s interests” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet on Sunday approved the enlargement of a Palestinian industrial zone on the edge of the southern West Bank. He said that the possibility of extending Israel Railways services to the northern West Bank city of Jenin would also be examined. They also gave the nod to streamlining transit procedures at Shaar Ephraim, a busy crossing point in the northern part of the occupied West Bank for Palestinian labourers with permits to work in Israel. The official said that opening hours for passage across the main Jordan River bridge linking the Palestinian territory and the neighbouring kingdom were to be extended to . There would also be reforms to Palestinian land use in urban areas in the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control. He did not elaborate but Israel’s Haaretz daily said the intention was to allow construction of “thousands of Palestinian homes” in the area where for years it has been almost impossible for Palestinians to get Israeli permits to build on their own land. Haaretz said that at Sunday night’s meeting Education Minister Naftali Bennett and justice minister Ayelet Shaked, of the Jewish Home party, “objected vehemently” to the building plans. In an apparent attempt to calm opposition from within Netanyahu’s coalition government, seen as the most in the country’s history, the security cabinet also approved setting up a committee to work for retroactive legalisation of wildcat Israeli construction in the West Bank, the official said. | 1 |
posted by Eddie Two people who were connected to the Flint water company investigation were both found dead in the space of a week this month. Water Treatment Plant Foreman, Matthew McFarland, and the woman leading the lead poisoning suit, Sasha Avonna Bell, were found dead within days of each other. Vigilantcitizen.com reports: The Flint water crisis began exactly two years ago, on April 2014, when Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water to the Flint River – to which officials had failed to apply corrosion inhibitors. Almost immediately, Flint residents complained about the water’s color, taste and odor. In the following months, numerous water issues arose, with little to no governmental action to fix them. August and September 2014 boil-water advisories were issued by the city due to coliform bacteria detection On August 21, 2014 test showed the city’s water tested high for THMs, a chlorine byproduct of disinfecting water, with which long term exposure has been linked to cancer and other diseases. Though the city stated that the water was safe, the employees of the Flint Public Library declared the water undrinkable after noticing that the water from the faucets and toilets was discolored. On March 2, 2016, it was reported that the state of Michigan blocked Flint from returning to Lake Huron water from the Detroit water system when it agreed to grant the city an emergency loan of $7 million in April 2015 It was discovered that the high levels of lead were due to orthophosphate being omitted from the water treatment process, while using a pH of 7.4 and that the orange water was due to the high concentration of chloride in the Flint River water, which caused excessive corrosion of the cast iron mains pipes. Far from taking decisive action, governments denied that the water was toxic. While the local outcry about Flint water quality was growing in early 2015, Flint water officials filed papers with state regulators purporting to show that “tests at Flint’s water treatment plant had detected no lead and testing in homes had registered lead at acceptable levels.” The documents falsely claimed that the city had tested tap water from homes with lead service lines, and therefore the highest lead-poisoning risks; in reality; the city does not know the locations of lead service lines, which city officials acknowledged in November 2015 after the Flint Journal/MLive published an article revealing the practice after obtaining documents through the Michigan Freedom of Information Act. – Robin Erb, Flint doctor makes state see light about lead in water The net result is that over 10,000 children (mostly Black) were exposed to water contaminated with lead. Lead poisoning has devastating effects on the brain: Childhood lead exposure causes a reduction in intellectual functioning and IQ, academic performance, and problem-solving skills, and an increased risk of attention deficit disorder, aggression, and hyperactivity. According to studies, children with elevated levels of lead in the blood are more likely as adults to commit crimes, be imprisoned, be unemployed or underemployed, or be dependent on government services. – Julie Mack, Lead levels elevated for thousands of Michigan children outside of Flint A massive investigation is now underway and lawsuits are being filed. And things are turning uglier. Cover Up Now that the federal government opened an investigation on the issue, news emerging from Flint are downright sordid. First, in March, important documents went missing, the police openly admits that it was an inside job, and that the crime will most likely remain unresolved. Days before the federal government opened an investigation into the Flint water crisis, someone broke into a vacant City Hall office full of documents related to the embattled Michigan city’s water system. Nearly three months later, officials have confirmed that a TV went missing, but little else is known, according to the Flint Journal . Without suspects or a firm handle on what else may have been swiped, authorities told the paper last week that the crime may remain unsolved. No warrants have been issued in the case, but officials don’t shy away from speculative statements that stop just short of conspiracy theories. “It was definitely an inside job,” police chief Tim Johnson told the Journal. “The power cord (to the TV) wasn’t even taken. The average drug user knows that you’d need the power cord to be able to pawn it.” “It was somebody that had knowledge of those documents that really wanted to keep them out of the right hands, out of the hands of someone who was going to tell the real story of what’s going on with Flint water.” Days before the federal government opened an investigation into the Flint water crisis, someone broke into a vacant City Hall office full of documents related to the embattled Michigan city’s water system. – Washington Post, The mystery surrounding missing water files at Flint City Hall: ‘It was definitely an inside job’ On April 16th, Water Treatment Plant Foreman Matthew McFarland (who had been interviewed regarding the water crisis) was found dead at the young age of 43. Cause of death? Unknown. Already reeling from the news of criminal charges against one of its workers in the wake of the Flint water crisis, city workers are now dealing with the sudden death of a foreman at the plant. Water Treatment Plant Foreman Matthew McFarland, 43, of Otter Lake died suddenly on on Saturday, April 16, according to his obituary. The Lapeer County Sheriff’s Department said a friend found McFarland unresponsive at a home in Otter Lake. There were no signs of foul play. An autopsy did not determine a cause of death and police are awaiting toxicology reports. The investigation remains open. “My thoughts and prayers go out to Matt’s co-workers, his family and especially his children,” said Flint Mayor Karen Weaver. “He worked for the City of Flint for more than 18 years and we thank him for his devotion and service.” We all have been brought together by this water crisis and we are all mourning his death,” Weaver said in a statement. “In lieu of flowers, the family has expressed they would appreciate donations to establish a fund for (his children) Vance and Ella’s college expenses.” McFarland’s death comes as Flint’s water plant deals with news that Flint Utilities Manager Michael Glasgow is one of three men facing criminal charges in connection with the city’s water crisis. Glasgow is accused of tampering with evidence when he allegedly changed testing results to show there was less lead in city water than there actually was. He is also charged with willful neglect of office. Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employees Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby are charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to tamper with evidence, tampering with evidence and violations of the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office confirmed that McFarland was previously interviewed as part of its ongoing investigation into the city’s water crisis. – mlive, Flint water plant continues to reel with sudden death of foreman A few days later, a 19-year old woman leading the Flint water crisis lawsuit was found shot dead in her home. A culprit was arrested. Was he a patsy? A woman at the center of a bellwether Flint water crisis lawsuit was one of two women who were shot to death inside a townhouse earlier this week. Sasha Avonna Bell was one of the first of a growing number of people to file a lawsuit in connection to the Flint water crisis after she claimed that her child had been lead poisoned. Bell was found dead April 19 in the 2600 block of Ridgecrest Drive at the Ridgecrest Village Townhouses. Sacorya Renee Reed was also found shot to death in the home. An unharmed 1-year-old child was also found inside of the Ridgecrest home when Bell’s body was discovered and was taken into custody by child protective services. Police declined to confirm if it was Bell’s child discovered in the home. “Sasha was a lovely young woman who cared deeply for her family, and especially for her young child,” said her attorney Corey M. Stern. “Her tragic and senseless death has created a void in the lives of so many people that loved her. Hopefully, her child will be lifted up by the love and support from everyone who cared deeply for Sasha.” Bell’s case was one of 64 lawsuits filed on behalf of 144 children by Stern’s firm, New York-based Levy Konigsberg, and Flint-based Robinson Carter & Crawford. The lawsuit named six companies that had various responsibilities with respect to the treatment, monitoring, and safety of the Flint water prior to and during the Flint water crisis, according to her attorneys. The case also named three individual government, or former government, employees who played significant roles in the alleged misconduct that led to the alleged poisoning of thousands of children in Flint, her attorneys claim. The Bell case, however, played an important role in determining the future of the more than five dozen other lawsuits that were filed. – mlive, Woman in leading Flint water crisis lawsuit slain in twin killing. Everything about this story is revolting and dirty facts are emerging from everywhere. However, mass media largely ignores this story. Those that do are flooded with comments about “tin foil hats” and “conspiracy nutters”. It is as if shills are paid kill that story online … or maybe that poisonous lead has already done its debilitating, mind-numbing job. source: | 0 |
Главная » News » Poroshenko arrives to EU for whipping Poroshenko arrives to EU for whipping Thursday, 24 November, 2016 - 16:45
The EU-Ukraine summit starts. The main topic of this meeting is the discussion of anti-corruption measures, which are necessary for adoption of the visa-free enter for Ukrainians in Europe. Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Franciszek Tusk are going to participate in this summit.
EU officials make no secret of the fact that Ukraine is clearly unable to cope with the task to extirpate the corruption. However, Poroshenko is expected to go on about his old, favorite issues. He thinks that the so-called, alleged Russian aggression and the situation in the Donbass, which were discussed yesterday at a meeting of the contact group in Minsk, would rouse the EU interest once again. But the problems and issues formulated by the EU are still waiting for a detailed discussion.
Meanwhile, at yesterday's meeting in Minsk Kiev refused the "Steinmeier’s formula". However, it would not make this summit more productive. | 0 |
The Department of Homeland Security has opened the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office to give victims of crime by illegal aliens more information on the cases and on the perpetrators’ deportation proceedings. [“There is nothing but goodness in what we’re doing today,” said John Kelly, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “My heart goes out to you. I do understand what you’ve been through,” he told family members of murder victims on Wednesday. Kelly, who lost his son when he was killed while serving in Afghanistan, continued: These crimes, in many ways, were preventable. But because of years and years of policies complicating immigration and enforcement efforts, and a approach to public safety, there are mothers who will never again receive a Mother’s Day card from a son. There are husbands who will never again kiss their wives. There are children who will never get to graduate from high school. These victims of illegal aliens aren’t data points. They’re people. And they and their families deserve to be treated fairly … While we can never fully heal them, we can give them a voice. ” Kelly took no questions after the briefing and shook hands with the families. The department has also launched a the Information and Notification Exchange ( ) an automated, national system to send automatic updates to changes in custody information regarding specific illegal aliens charged with or convicted of a crime. It will help victims, families, attorneys, victims’ advocates, and more navigate the federal immigration system. VINEs will also automatically send victims and families automatic updates on releasable criminal case information and other custody status updates. Plus, victims and families will be able to see where an illegal alien is being detained. Kelly’s announcement is the latest step the Trump administration has taken in its first 100 days to side with Americans over big business and the Democratic party seeking consumers and voters. Illegal aliens commit an extraordinary amount of almost entirely preventable crimes. In a 2011 report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that illegal aliens comprised a stunning 27 percent of the federal inmate prison population. (Republicans joining Democrats in opposing mythological “mass incarceration” might want to support immigration law to keep prison populations low.) When analyzing a large, random sample of illegal aliens incarcerated in 2009 and 2010, GAO found each criminal alien averaged seven arrests, with 50 percent being arrested for at least one drug offense. That’s significant, because heroin trafficking is a major consequence of allowing illegal immigration to go uncontrolled, and in 2010, heroin overdose deaths began to rise until they had tripled in only five years. According to a recent in TheHill by a retired California detective: Most states and our federal government have kept information and statistics about illegal immigration, crimes committed by illegals and the costs borne by you the U. S. payer out of public view. It is in fact difficult, but not impossible to locate accurate crime statistics involving illegal immigrants. The statistics are buried both to suit a political agenda and to avoid public outcry. Once you read this article, you will quickly understand why … The U. S. Department of Justice and the U. S. Sentencing Commission reported that as of 2014, illegal immigrants were convicted and sentenced for over 13 percent of all crimes committed in the U. S. According to the FBI, 67, 642 murders were committed in the U. S. from 2005 through 2008, and 115, 717 from 2003 through 2009. The General Accounting Office documents that criminal immigrants committed 25, 064 of these murders. To extrapolate out these statistics, this means that a population of just over 3. 5 percent residing in the U. S. unlawfully committed 22 percent to 37 percent of all murders in the nation. This is astounding. Those who have lost loved ones at the hands of illegal aliens have previously told Breitbart News how difficult it was to secure legal assistance. Legal immigrant Agnes Gibboney, whose son Ronald da Silva was murdered in 2002 by an illegal, told SiriusXM host Matthew Boyle she had only a prosecutor to look out for her interests in court — and it did not work out well for her. “Everything went wrong. I was not allowed to say my impact statement. I was not allowed to address the court. I was not allowed to get the probation hearing report. And when I called them to ask how come I didn’t get it, they said, ‘My boss told me not to talk to you,’ and hung up,” she said. Laura Wilkerson — who, as Breitbart News has reported, summoned the strength to publicly tell the story of her son Joshua’s violent, torturous death at the hands of an illegal alien classmate over and over again — said she had to pay for an attorney out of her own pocket. “They didn’t want me to sit in the trial, and I had to hire an attorney just to make that happen,” she said. It would have been unimaginable for her not to be present in the courtroom that day. Families are often “ ” by the court system and need help with funeral and counseling, said Maria Espinoza, head of the Remembrance Project. “[W]hat’s very important that people don’t understand that in so many cases, our families are being because they’re being misguided in the court system,” she said. “Either activist judges, or activist prosecutors — so we really need someone to help and guide our families. Who can afford an attorney for themselves? And here illegal aliens get one. If they murder an American, they are given two attorneys to protect them, to defend them. ” Listen to the Angel Moms’ stories of how difficult it was to secure adequate legal representation here. | 1 |
by Jon Rappoport — Jon Rappoport’s blog Oct 31, 2016 Vote fraud expert Bev Harris exposes electronic voting machines Okay. She finally did it. On Monday, Bev Harris ( blackboxvoting.org ), the great investigator of vote fraud, appeared on the Alex Jones show and laid it all out . The GEMS vote-fraud system, “fraction magic,” the way the vote is being stolen. Not just in theory, but in fact. Listen to the whole interview and get the word out. Bev’s findings are staggering. Below the video is the original piece I did on this earlier this month. —- High Alert: the election can still be rigged Votes counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers …[A]mazingly, the vote-rigging system it describes has not gotten widespread attention. The system can be used across the entire US. As we know, there are a number of ways to rig an election. Bev Harris, at blackboxvoting.org , is exploring a specific “cheat sheet” that has vast implications for the Trump vs. Hillary contest. It’s a vote-counting system called GEMS. I urge you to dive into her multi-part series, Fraction Magic (Part-1 here ). Here are key Harris quotes. They’re all shockers: “Our testing [of GEMS] shows that one vote can be counted 25 times, another only one one-thousandth of a time, effectively converting some votes to zero.” “This report summarizes the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds.” “GEMS vote-counting systems are and have been operated under five trade names: Global Election Systems, Diebold Election Systems, Premier Election Systems, Dominion Voting Systems, and Election Systems & Software, in addition to a number of private regional subcontractors. At the time of this writing, this system is used statewide in Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Utah and Vermont, and for counties in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. It is also used in Canada.” “Instead of ‘1’ the vote is allowed to be 1/2, or 1+7/8, or any other value that is not a whole number.” “Weighting a race [through the use of GEMS] removes the principle of ‘one person-one vote’ to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. Regardless of what the real votes are, candidates can receive a set percentage of votes. Results can be controlled. For example, Candidate A can be assigned 44% of the votes, Candidate B 51%, and Candidate C the rest.” “All evidence that [rigged] fractional values ever existed [in the GEMS system] can be removed instantly even from the underlying database using a setting in the GEMS data tables, in which case even instructing GEMS to show the [rigged] decimals will fail to reveal they were used.” “Source code: Instructions to treat votes as decimal values instead of whole numbers [i.e., rigging] are inserted multiple times in the GEMS source code itself; thus, this feature cannot have been created by accident.” A contact who, so far, apparently wishes to remain anonymous states the following about the history of the GEMS system: “The Fractional vote [rigging] portion traces directly to Jeffrey W. Dean , whose wife was primary stockholder of the company that developed GEMS. He ran the company but was prohibited from handling money or checks due to a criminal conviction for computer fraud, for which he spent 4 years in prison. Almost immediately after being released from prison he was granted intimate access to elections data and large government contracts for ballot printing and ballot processing.” I see no effort on the part of the federal government, state governments, or the mainstream press to investigate the GEMS system or respond to Bev Harris’ extensive analysis. It’s not as if media outlets are unaware of her. From shesource.org, here is an excerpt from her bio : “Harris has been referred to as ‘the godmother’ of the election reform movement. (Boston Globe). Vanity Fair magazine credits her with founding the movement to reform electronic voting. Time Magazine calls her book, Black Box Voting , ‘the bible’ of electronic voting… Harris’s investigations have led some to call her the ‘Erin Brockovich of elections.’ (Salon.com)… Harris has supervised five ‘hack demonstrations’ in the field, using real voting machines. These have been covered by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and in formal reports by the United States General Accounting Office…” So far, her analysis of GEMS seems to be labeled “too hot to handle.” Press outlets prefer to report the slinging of mud from both Presidential candidates’ camps. Meanwhile, the actual results of the coming elections—including Congressional races—appear to be up for grabs, depending on who controls GEMS. Update: From what I understand, each state government appoints a “consultant” to manage GEMS on election night. That person would be capable of rigging the vote. Jon Rappoport The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX , and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29 th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here . | 0 |
11 Very Depressing Economic Realities That Donald Trump Will Inherit From Barack Obama 15th, 2016
It would be a grave mistake to understate the amount of damage that has been done to the U.S. economy over the past eight years. In this article, I am going to share some economic numbers with you that are extremely sobering. Anyone that takes a cold, hard, honest look at the numbers should be able to see that our economy is in terrible shape. Unfortunately, the way that we see things is often clouded by our political views. Up until the election, Democrats were far more likely then Republicans to believe that the economy was improving, but now that is in the process of completely reversing. According to Gallup , only 16 percent of Republicans believed that the economy was getting better before the election, but that number has suddenly jumped to 49 percent after Trump’s election victory. And the percentage of Democrats that believe that the economy is getting better fell from 61 percent to 46 percent after the election. Here are some additional details from Gallup …
After Trump won last week’s election, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now have a much more optimistic view of the U.S. economy’s outlook than they did Just 16% of Republicans said the economy was getting better in the week before the election, while 81% said it was getting worse. Since the election, 49% say it is getting better and 44% worse.
Conversely, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents’ confidence in the economy plummeted after the election. Before the election, 61% of Democrats said the economy was getting better and 35% worse. Now, Democrats are evenly divided, with 46% saying it is getting better and 47% saying it is getting worse.
The truth, of course, is that the result of the election did not somehow magically alter the outlook for the U.S. economy.
We still have a giant mess on our hands, and the following are 11 very depressing economic realities that Donald Trump will inherit from Barack Obama…
#1 Nearly 7 out of every 10 Americans have less than $1,000 in savings . That means that about two-thirds of the country is essentially living paycheck to paycheck at this moment.
#2 Reuters is reporting that U.S. mall investors are poised to lose “billions” of dollars as the “ retail apocalypse ” in this nation deepens.
#3 Credit card delinquencies have hit the highest level that we have seen since 2012 .
#4 Approximately 35 percent of all Americans have a debt that is at least 180 days past due.
#5 The rate of homeownership has fallen for eight years in a row and is now hovering near a 50 year low .
#6 The total number of government employees now outnumbers the total number of manufacturing employees in this country by almost 10 million .
#7 The number of homeless people in New York City (where Donald Trump is from) has hit a brand new record high .
#8 About 20 percent of all young adults are currently living with their parents .
#9 Total household debt in the United States has now reached a grand total of 12.3 trillion dollars .
#10 The total amount of corporate debt in the U.S. has nearly doubled since the end of 2007.
#11 When Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. government was 10.6 trillion dollars in debt. Today, the U.S. national debt is currently sitting at a staggering total of $19,842,173,949,869.58 .
Despite nearly doubling the national debt during his eight years in the White House, Barack Obama is going to be the only president in United States history to never have a single year when U.S. GDP grew by at least three percent.
So will Donald Trump waltz in and suddenly turn everything around?
Just like when George W. Bush was elected, there is a lot of optimism about the future right now among Republicans.
And in 2017, Republicans are going to have control of the Senate and the House in addition to being in control of the White House.
But does that mean that they will actually get anything done?
For a moment, let’s review what didn’t happen the last time the Republicans were in this position. The following is an extended excerpt from an article by author Devvy Kidd … —– The Republicans had control of both houses of Congress part of the time during Bush, Jr.’s two terms. Did they lock down our borders? NO. Did they pass legislation to stop ALL funding for illegals which would self-deport millions of liars, cheats and thieves? NO. (READ, please: How to Self-Deport Millions of Illegals ) Did they stop trillions in unconstitutional spending? NO. Did they get rid of any of Clinton’s unconstitutional Executive Orders? One or two but otherwise let Comrade Bill Clinton crap in our faces. Did they get rid of one unconstitutional cabinet like HHS, Department of Education and EPA? NO. Did they stop the unconstitutional foreign aid? NO. Did they stop unconstitutional spending for Planned Parenthood? NO. Congress just continues to use borrowed money to spend more debt. Did they stop unconstitutional spending for the gigantic hoax called global warming or climate change? NO. Trump: The Left Just Lost The War On Climate Change Did Bush, Jr., get us out of all the destructive trade treaties killing American jobs? NO. Did they crack down on visas bringing in tens of thousands of foreign workers when American workers who want to work are left in the unemployment line? NO. Did they stop more and more federal regulations strangling America’s businesses? NO. Did they impeach one single activist judge destroying our freedom and liberty? NO. A Republican controlled Congress with a Republican in the White House and they did virtually NOTHING to restore America to a constitutional republic and constitutional spending. —–
So will things be any different under a Trump administration?
We shall see.
There will be tremendous pressure to maintain the status quo in many instances, because the process of fixing things would undoubtedly make conditions worse in the short-term.
A great example of this is the national debt. As I discussed yesterday , the only reason why we are able to enjoy such a massively inflated standard of living in this country federal government started spending only the money that it brought in through taxes, our ridiculous debt- would begin collapsing immediately.
We consume far more wealth than we produce, and the only way that we are able to do this is by borrowing insane amounts of money.
Either Donald Trump will continue to borrow money recklessly, or we will go into a major league economic downturn.
It really is that simple.
But when our politicians borrow money, they are literally destroying the future of this country. So the choice is pain in the short-term or greater pain in the long-term.
There is a way out, and that would involve shutting down the Federal Reserve and going to a completely debt-free form of money, but that is a topic for another article.
And unfortunately that is not something that is even on Donald Trump’s radar at this point.
No matter who won the election, the next president was going to be faced with some very harsh economic realities.
There are many out there that have faith that Donald Trump can pull off an unprecedented economic miracle, but there are others that are deeply skeptical.
Let us hope for the best, but let us also keep preparing for the worst. | 0 |
President Donald Trump dismissed Susan Rice’s assertion that she did not unmask General Michael Flynn for political reasons. [“Does anybody really believe that?” he asked during an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “Nobody believes that, even the people that try to protect her in the news media. ” Trump reasserted his claim, adding that he and “so many other people” were the victims of surveillance and boasted that he was correct when he accused the Obama administration of wiretapping his team at Trump Tower. “So many people are coming up to me and apologizing now. … Perhaps I didn’t know how right I was,” he said. To defend his claim, Trump again cited the New York Times article with the word “wiretapped” in the headline of the print edition, pointing out that it was a huge story. “What they did was horrible,” he said. | 1 |
CDC Vaccine Whistleblower On Dumping EVIDENCE of AUTISM in the TRASH Posted on Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » CDC Vaccine Whistleblower On Dumping EVIDENCE of AUTISM in the TRASH
More is at stake here than the danger of the MMR vaccine. The CDC has done hundreds of key studies on vaccine safety. They are all thrown into doubt by Thompson’s assertion — recently quoted by Congressman Bill Posey on the floor of the Congress—that Thompson and his colleagues brought a garbage can into a CDC office and threw out documents that would have shown the MMR connection to autism.
My previous article, “CDC commits new vaccine-autism crime,” details the CDC’s refusal to allow its own researcher and chief whistleblower, William Thompson, to testify in a court case involving a boy who was severely damaged by vaccinations.
TND Guest Contributor: Jon Rappoport
It’s time to remember William Thompson—again. Here are excerpts from two articles I wrote before the stunning film Vaxxed ( trailer ) was released. Vaxxed is all about Thompson’s revelations and their implications.
(August 2015) …William Thompson, long-time CDC researcher, publicly admitted he hid evidence that indicted the MMR vaccine for its connection to autism.
It’s been a year since Thompson publicly accused his colleagues at the CDC of doing the same thing. Two of those colleagues, Frank DeStefano and Collen Boyle, are high-ranking CDC executives in the area of vaccine safety.
During this past year, mainstream reporters and defenders of the realm have taken two approaches: silence; and vague claims that Thompson’s statements are false.
Both of these approaches are slimy and disingenuous, because the man we want to hear from is Thompson himself. And we have not.
We want to hear from him in a public setting, in front of a hearing where he can speak at length, where he can fill in details, where he can air all his claims without censorship.
At the moment, the possibility of such a hearing is remote, because the US Congress is bought and sold.
Short of a hearing, we want Thompson to sit down with a reporter and speak on camera, extensively, and submit himself to questions.
He has said he will not do this. He and his lawyer, Rick Morgan, know there are a number of reporters who will do a proper interview, without edits. I could easily name a dozen reporters who would conduct an in-depth interview, live, online, for the whole world to see.
What if there never is a full-blooded open Congressional hearing? What then? Will Thompson maintain silence for the rest of his life?
More is at stake here than the danger of the MMR vaccine. The CDC has done hundreds of key studies on vaccine safety. They are all thrown into doubt by Thompson’s assertion — recently quoted by Congressman Bill Posey on the floor of the Congress— that Thompson and his colleagues brought a garbage can into a CDC office and threw out documents that would have shown the MMR connection to autism.
This speaks of a massive indifference to human life and safety.
Thompson should also know, and certainly does know, that Congressional hearings have a way of soft-pedaling accusations against government agencies. There is no guarantee that, in such a setting, he would be able to air his confession and his grievances in full.
Whereas, in an interview with independent investigators/reporters, he would have complete latitude. Time constraints would not apply. He would be asked for many, many details. The full story, from his point of view, would emerge.
It is my conclusion that Thompson entered into an arrangement with his bosses at the CDC. After his public confession of a year ago, it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle and cork it. But damage control could be undertaken.
Thompson could say ( and he did ) t hat he was willing (and only willing) to work with Congress to present the truth. His CDC bosses were confident they could, with the help of powerful friends in government and in the pharmaceutical industry, prevent Congressional investigation and exposure.
And if Thompson maintained silence otherwise, refusing to talk to reporters, he would be off the hook.
The CDC assured Thompson that he could continue to work for them and retire and receive his full pension.
That’s my conclusion. If I’m in error, let Thompson or his lawyer, Rick Morgan, correct me. | 0 |
Donald J. Trump has reached into Western Michigan royalty to pick Betsy DeVos as his education secretary and is looking at Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Meantime, Hillary Clinton has widened her lead in the popular vote to 1. 5 percentage points, a spread not seen for a losing candidate since the disputed election of 1876. Mr. Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos to be his education secretary brings Western Michigan royalty into the Trump fold, but she was not always a fan. Mrs. DeVos sharply criticized Mr. Trump during the campaign, and spent much of the year raising money for other Republicans on the ballot. “Until we have a better reason to embrace and support the top of the ticket, and see an agenda that is truly an opportunity agenda, then we have lots of other options in which to invest and spend our time helping,” she said in May. The DeVos family, heirs to the Amway fortune, has long been a leading source of money for Republicans in Michigan and beyond. Just in the last three elections before 2016, members of the family gave nearly $9. 5 million to party committees and candidates. Mrs. DeVos had money of her own before she married Richard DeVos Jr. the Amway scion. Her father, Edgar Prince, built his own auto parts supplier, in Holland, Mich. Her brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater USA, a private security contractor whose guards were convicted of killing 14 civilians in Baghdad in 2007. The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, was quick to voice its opposition to Ms. DeVos. With nominees chosen for C. I. A. national security adviser, secretary of education and ambassador to the United Nations, the next pick is expected to be the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That could be official as early as Friday. Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that he was “seriously considering” Mr. Carson, a former rival in the Republican primaries, as housing secretary. The department is no small corner of the government. Its programs fund public housing, subsidize rent for the poor, promote homeownership and work to revitalize struggling cities. And housing policy has been in a deep freeze since the Great Recession, when the nominally independent mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed and fell under federal control. For nearly a decade, the mortgage industry has basically been government run, with much of its profits going right into the Treasury. Mr. Carson would have a big role in figuring out how to move forward. Writing in the conservative Washington Times last year, Mr. Carson let it be known that he is no fan of government intervention in the housing market, specifically to force racial integration. With new votes tallied from New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland and California, Mrs. Clinton’s popular vote lead reached 2, 017, 563 overnight, prompting new calls for an audit of voting machines in battleground states. Mrs. Clinton’s lead now exceeds the winning percentages of seven presidents, five of whom also won the Electoral College. And it has given rise to a push from liberal activists to demand audits in three states won narrowly by Mr. Trump: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman posted an extensive explanation on Wednesday. Nate Cohn, who wrote of voter projections and analyzed polls for The New York Times, isn’t buying it. Mainly, it would seem, Mrs. Clinton’s record losing lead is pointing toward a structural disadvantage Democrats have with the Electoral College: Their voters are too concentrated in the bright blue states of the West Coast and Northeast. Democrats have now won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but lost two of them (Al Gore in 2000, and Mrs. Clinton) in the Electoral College. After the created when Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry started hawking a bracelet worn by Ms. Trump during a “60 Minutes” appearance as part of the new first family, Ivanka and are beginning to disengage. At least on Instagram, Facebook and elsewhere. On Monday, a public letter from Ivanka Trump HQ noted (in part): The separation follows another public letter from the designer Sophie Theallet announcing that she would refrain from dressing Melania Trump and encouraging her fellow designers to do the same. One more such open missive and we will have a new fashion trend. When Anthony Scaramucci, the hedge fund titan and Trump adviser, floated Elton John as an inauguration performer to The New York Post, the singer’s response was swift: No way. He did, after all, say in October, “We need a humanitarian in the White House, not a barbarian. ” Pity. Mr. Scaramucci was counting on the diversity statement, telling The Post: Trump has chosen Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, the daughter of Indian immigrants, to be his ambassador to the United Nations, the transition team announced Wednesday. Mr. Trump, whose presidential run was buoyed by an uncompromising stance against immigration, has mostly chosen older white men for cabinet posts in assembling his new team. Her move would eventually elevate South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, an early and vocal supporter of Mr. Trump’s. Ms. Haley backed Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during the primaries. Mr. Trump arrived on Tuesday night in Florida to celebrate Thanksgiving at his private club, in Palm Beach, a visit intended to give the some time with his family, and he isn’t planning a packed schedule for Wednesday. But officials familiar with the transition process say that he will be busy deliberating his cabinet selections and may announce a domestic appointment before taking a quick break from work. The trip is the first time since Mr. Trump was elected president that he has visited his Florida club, which played host to a few primary night victory parties. President Obama will, for the last time, take part on Wednesday in one of our country’s odder Thanksgiving traditions: the annual pardoning of the turkeys at the White House. Two turkeys, named Tater and Tot, will get the ritual absolution and move on to a nice home at Virginia Tech, even though only one of them will become the official national Thanksgiving turkey. It will be up to President Trump to do the honors — or not, should he choose otherwise — next year. Democrats will try to weigh in legislatively on Mr. Trump’s business holdings next week. Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, says he will introduce a “sense of Congress” resolution stating that the new president should convert his substantial holdings in a way to avoid entanglements with foreign governments. If he does not do so, or unless Congress specifically authorizes his conduct, Mr. Trump would be considered in potential violation of the Constitution. The resolution is unlikely to see the light of day in the Senate, but it will be part of what is expected to be a effort by Democrats to shine a light on the ’s business dealings. As Mrs. Clinton’s lead in the popular vote grows, some of her most ardent supporters are clinging to hope that she could still win the election. A Change. org petition has garnered more than four million signatures urging Electoral College “electors” in some states to ignore the will of the voters and back Mrs. Clinton, reminding them that they could do so without any legal penalty. The electors will cast their ballots on Dec. 19. On Twitter, the hashtags #auditthevote and #audittheelection have become rallying cries for supporters of Mrs. Clinton who are directing people to flood the Justice Department with telephone calls about voting irregularities. The push is also taking place on Facebook, where calls are growing for a full investigation into Russia’s role in the election. Even the sister of Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, weighed in, noting the tantalizingly slim margin that Mrs. Clinton would need to make up in three swing states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — to come out on top in the Electoral College. “They are starting to recognize there really is something off about the election results as they come in,” Heba Abedin wrote. “Considering everything that is at stake, a vote audit should be done. ” | 1 |
Print There will be no end to History until there is an end to events. Current events are the History of the future. However, History can be lost. People can ignore their past, live only in the now, and leave their future to chance. History provides the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others, as well as the chance to build upon what others have learned. To ignore these two paths to success gives life to the notion that failure to plan is planning to fail. All Americans should cherish their History. We left a known and secure world for a new one. We turned an untamed land into one bustling with enterprise and development. We stood against the world’s greatest superpower to assert that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We made it through a sectarian war and clawed our way from the outskirts of an Atlantic culture to the pinnacle of global dominance. Our industry, our education, our health care system, our culture , and our military became the epitome of western civilization and the envy of the entire world. There was a time in America when every child was infused with the story of America rising from nothing to the apex of power, a time when everyone was taught in Civics class about the declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the melting pot that made us the embodiment of E pluribus unum : out of many, one. Today, after the Progressives and that destroyer of education, the Department of Education, has worked for generations to dumb us down from individuals using personal freedom to succeed to induhviduals using a pack mentality to follow the herd to a ride in the entitlement hammock . Now, we glory in being a smelting pot where the cheerleaders of fragmentation parrot, “Diversity is our strength,” as we unravel into warring factions. Hyphenated Americans of every color, creed, and ethnicity now jockey for their place in the queue as government goodies are doled out to preferred groups. Where we are today: A culture of death swallows a culture of life. A terminally ill Californian woman determined to be with her four young children for as long as she could was reportedly denied an expensive chemotherapy treatment — but won approval for a lethal drug to legally end her life. We even have a presidential candidate who says we have to ban guns to save the children, yet we need to keep partial birth abortions legal to kill the babies, and no one in the media has the insight or the integrity to call her on it. Not only is New York’s Sixth Crime Family guilty of pay to play, they are also guilty of bribe to walk: The charge - A Hillary Clinton ally donated almost $500,000 to the campaign of the wife of an FBI official who helped oversee the agency's probe of Clinton's email server. The particulars - Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, donated almost $500,000 to the campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, wife of Federal Bureau of Investigation deputy director Andrew McCabe. A serial liar, unindicted co-conspirator with a notoriously philandering husband is going to win the votes of millions of low information voters, government dependents, and dead people. Early voting has started, and not only is the expected fraud showing up immediately, the imported voters are turning out en mass for open borders and an end to America as America: Residents of at least two cities in Texas are complaining that they voted for Donald Trump , only to see the voting machine switch their ballot to Hillary Clinton . And illegal immigrants have been caught on tape stuffing ballot boxes during early voting. Corruption is accepted as the norm in today’s America, with a totally corrupt Hillary Clinton presented as a viable presidential candidate. Bill Clinton’s type of lewd behavior, once considered unacceptable, is swept under the rug as our culture sinks to its lowest common denominator. Life is being swallowed by death, and a shining city on the hill is being remade into a squalid third world hell hole that will use our grandchildren as beasts of burden to support the human debris of failed states. The America of “Give us liberty or give us death” has morphed into “Give me bread and circuses.” Throw a six pack over the fence and beam a game to the flat screen and the descendants of the pioneers are ready to roll over and cash their next government check. This may be the trail chosen for us by the blind guides of the left. This may be the end of western civilization and the death of life conjured up by the globalist puppet masters who pull the strings in this final act of the Progressive Putsch; however, I choose another way. I choose to vote for Donald Trump. I choose to vote for America first. Two things ring in my mind as I contemplate this election: “ I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; 20 that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days; and that you may dwell in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them.” And “ And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” shares | 0 |
In February, during New York Fashion Week, the audience at the Hood by Air show had a “moment,” one of those rare shocks that jolt you out of your catwalk stupor and stick with you long after the lights have dimmed. It came courtesy of a model named Hirakish, who careened down the runway in a suit and spiky bootees, and who proceeded to go and to spend the rest of the show running in and out of the stands, interrupting other models’ struts and otherwise joyfully, and challengingly, sticking his feet in our faces. I thought of this on Thursday when the news came that Prince Rogers Nelson, the diminutive musician with the oversize talent, had died. Unlike David Bowie, another musical icon who recently passed away, Prince was not often by designers as a collection reference. Though fashion played a big part in his image, as the many slide shows making their way around cyberspace attest, and though he made a surprise guest appearance in 2007 at Matthew Williamson’s 10th anniversary show, serenading the attendees and grinding with dancers and models (as one of the attendees, I can tell you, that was another “moment”) he wasn’t a aesthetic inspiration. Prince refused to adhere to genres in clothing, just as he refused to adhere to genres in music, which meant he tended to ooze into the designer imagination, instead of immediately leaping to mind. But in the way he assumed the tropes of kitsch femininity — lace, ruffles, sequins, peekaboo and high heels — and transformed them into the vehicles of an masculine sex appeal, Prince had enormous influence. Most of which can be summed up by the shoe. The high heel was the of his wardrobe for the four decades he was in the public eye, the consistent base upon which he layered all sorts of style and character changes. Prince wore heels when he barely wore anything at all (just bikini bottoms and a trench coat) he wore them in “Purple Rain” and with baroque brocade he paired them with pastel suits, jumpsuits he wore them with white hippie tunics at Coachella and slinky metallic gold at the Grammys he wore them offstage, out to dinner in Sweden in 2013, and, according to Mike Tyson’s memoir, “Undisputed Truth,” to play basketball. He wore them so much that there were rumors he needed hip surgery. And he wore them, he said, not because he wanted to be taller, but because “women like ’em. ” He wore them as they were originally designed to be worn, as demonstrated in “Standing Tall,” an exhibition last year at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto about men in high heels: as an expression of power and privilege reserved for male royalty, and only later by women in the 17th and 18th centuries. It made some sense. His name, after all, was Prince. And in doing so — in wearing them so regularly, unapologetically (he did not hide behind the acceptably masculine heels of cowboy boots) and effectively — he transformed the idea of men in heels to possibility from joke. On women, heels suggest sex Prince showed they could function the same way for men. It is a meaningful part of the equation that has added up to the current trend toward gender fluidity in fashion. Which, let’s face it, really means men in women’s wear, since women have been borrowing from men’s wear for decades. Put another way: There was Prince, and then there was Hedi Slimane’s fall 2015 men’s wear show for Saint Laurent, with its heels the heels in the men’s wear collections of Rick Owens and Gareth Pugh (and Hood by Air) and the black velvet midcalf heeled boots Kanye West wore in Paris last year, to name just some examples. In the end, his shoes were, as Prince once sang, a sign o’ the times. | 1 |
Country: China North Korea’s announcements of the completion of its Nuclear Weapons Development Programme have caused an outburst of discussion on “who is to blame”. More accurately, it concerns who is primarily responsible for the escalation of the situation to its current level. Against the backdrop of growing USA-China opposition, now Beijing has even been accused this, with accusations varying from “did nothing, although it could” to “actively assisted”. Let’s start with statements made by US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. On October 13, 2016 the Associated Press, referring to WikiLeaks, reported that in June, 2013, during a lecture to Goldman Sachs officials, Hillary Clinton pointed out that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the main sponsor of North Korea. It was at that time when she stated her position – if Beijing is not able to keep North Korea from creating an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons, the USA may encircle China with a ring of missile defence systems and naval bases. Sankei Shimbun (Japan) quotes the US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter: “China is a primarily responsible for North Korea’s current actions. It covers up the dangerous behaviour of this country”. It presents readers with the idea that Beijing is engaged in an obvious plot. Having been on the receiving end of criticism from Washington for its great-power policy, it has decided respond in this way. As proof, the Japanese refer to Chosun Ilbo, which reported that, according to a former employee of the United States Defense Intelligence Agency, Bruce Vector, whose opinion was published on September 1, the North Korean rocket is an exact copy of the Chinese Tszyuylan-1 two-stage solid-propellant ballistic missile, which is designed to be placed on submarines. Giving a lecture at the Seoul National University, the United States Deputy Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, also announced that the North Korean economy can not be discussed without mentioning China. Pyongyang is totally dependent on cooperation with Beijing, so China is particularly responsible for the implementation of sanctions against North Korea. The goal of such accusations is to force China to be “more constructive.” Meanwhile, Chinese politicians constantly state that the Nuclear Issue on the Korean Peninsula is not caused by Beijing’s actions, and China cannot wave a magic wand and resolve the situation. The roots of the issue stem from conflicts between the USA and North Korea, and it is America who should demonstrate a constructive approach. On September 12, 2016, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, noted that the core of the Nuclear Issue on the Korean Peninsula is in the conflict between the USA and North Korea, and it is America who should take responsibility. “We once again call upon all the parties to look at the overall situation, to act with caution, to avoid mutual provocations, as well as to jointly promote denuclearization, and to make real efforts to achieve peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula”, said the Chinese diplomat, noting that the current situation is testament to the real importance and urgency of returning to the six-party negotiations as soon as possible . On September 14, 2016, American suggestions that China should actively participate in isolating North Korea were rejected in Renmin Ribao Newspaper ( China ). The newspaper states that the prime responsibility for the current situation cannot be placed on North Korea, but on the United States. On September 21, in his speech at the UN, the Prime Minister of China, Li Keqiang, also did not mention sanctions. On November 2, 2016, Hua Chunying once again announced that it is not possible to achieve the fundamental solution of the Nuclear Issue on the Korean Peninsula by sanctions and pressure alone. Commenting on the recent meeting of the heads of delegations from the USA and the Republic of Korea at the six-party negotiations, during which there were repeated calls to tighten sanctions and increase pressure against North Korea in the hope that the new resolution of the UN Security Council would introduce the forced restriction of North Korean coal exports, Hua Chunying said that the UN Security Council was considering and discussing the North Korean nuclear issue. However, a substantial part of UN Security Council Resolution 2270 refers to the need to resume the six-party negotiations and to seek to reduce tension in North-East Asia via political and diplomatic means. This is how a meaningful solution to the North Korean nuclear issue can be found . Two days later, on November 4, she stated that the deployment of the US Missile Defense System on the Korean Peninsula would undermine the strategic balance of forces in the region, and Beijing reserves the right to take the necessary measures to protect its own safety. The actions of the USA run contrary to the efforts to ensure peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, said Hua Chunying, calling on relevant parties to take China’s legitimate concerns into account. The heart of China’s policy is both the THAAD issue (seen by China as aimed at containing its missile capabilities) and the broader perception that US military preparations against North Korea are actually directed against China. As a result, despite a number of serious differences between the countries, relations between Beijing and Pyongyang are based on the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. It is easier to support North Korea, rather than risking more serious consequences that may occur if it were pressed too hard. China’s willingness to investigate illegal trade links between a number of Chinese companies and North Korea shows that “the window is not completely closed”, and it can be seen as an attempt to weaken US efforts to impose sanctions against Chinese companies that do legal business with North Korea. China and North Korea are simultaneously expanding economic cooperation despite the effects of international sanctions. According to the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the third meeting of the Intergovernmental Commission of North Korea and China was held in Pyongyang on October 25 where border issues were discussed. The Chinese party headed by the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs – Liu Zhenmin, and the North Korean – the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs – Pak Myong-guk. Organising a new border crossing was discussed as a bridge between Sinuiju city (North Korea) and Hunchun city (China) was built this September. In addition, in the near future a bridge between Sinuiju city and Dandong city (China) will be opened. Besides, the trade turnover between North Korea and China in the third quarter of this year increased by 3.4% compared to the same period of last year. The Chinese are building new warehouses and offices in the Rason Special Economic Zone which means an inflow of investments. The import of cars from North Korea into China increased sharply. The import of Chinese rice also increased. According to the Customs Administration of China, in September 2016 18,477 tons of grain crops were delivered from China to North Korea. This is 2.7 times higher than in August, and 6 times higher than last September. In September, 16 thousand tons of rice were imported (2 thousand tons more than from January to August). Although South Korean experts explain this fact by the decision made by the North Korean leadership to stabilize prices for rice, as rice stocks in the past year have worn thin, any fact related to North Korea has been solely considered a sign of imminent starvation and collapse for some time now. In general, while one party is accusing the other and bearing its weapons, the other is looking for ways to resolve the issue, which clearly shows who could encourage dialogue but does not want to do so. Konstantin Asmolov, Ph.D. in History, Chief Research Fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook. ”
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The United States Open added a new $150 million retractable roof before this year’s tournament, so fans inside Arthur Ashe Stadium no longer need umbrellas. They might, however, need earplugs. Fans at the U. S. T. A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows have long been more raucous than those at the sport’s usually staid tournaments. But the retractable roof structure has produced new and unforeseen noise issues: Voices of fans in the upper reaches of Arthur Ashe Stadium, the showcase for the Open’s marquee matches, are reverberating off the roof and can be heard loudly and clearly down on the court during play. The U. S. Open trailed behind the Australian Open and Wimbledon in adding retractable roofs to allow play to continue during rain, long a disrupter of tennis. The rain stays out now, but the noise stays in — creating an echo chamber and a much louder experience for everyone. “Ladies and gentlemen, please, your voices are carrying to the court,” the chair umpire Eva told the crowd Thursday night in one of her many pleas for silence. has had to tamp down the noise at Ashe before. During last year’s men’s final, she deftly managed a rowdy Federer crowd that had turned on his opponent, Novak Djokovic, the eventual champion. But during the first week of the tournament this year, and other umpires have needed to manage even matches with repeated requests for silence and stillness. Even those announcements — and player interviews before and after matches — have been difficult to hear. The tournament that once rerouted air traffic from La Guardia Airport to create a more pastoral soundscape now has flawed acoustics. Even with the roof open, the structure still has enough reflective surface to generate cascading waves of sound. “I didn’t feel silence at any moment,” Garbiñe Muguruza said after her loss with the roof open. “It was continuously a noise. I think it’s very big, this stadium, also. It’s kind of echo. It’s just like continuously. ” Putting a cover on top of Ashe Stadium was an architectural and engineering challenge because the stadium sits on marshy land. But after years of deflecting pressure to build a roof that would prevent the almost inevitable rain delays, the United States Tennis Association relented. But the solution to one problem has made another one more acute. With a capacity of 23, 771, Ashe Stadium can hold nearly 9, 000 more people than two other showcase courts with retractable roofs: Centre Court at Wimbledon and Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open. And the concretelike hardcourts at the U. S. Open only magnify the problem. At most stadium sporting events, loudness is welcome, or even encouraged. At basketball arenas, football stadiums and baseball parks, video boards frequently implore, “Let’s make some noise!” In tennis, cheering is acceptable after points, but fans are expected to be quiet in the moments leading up to the action and the time during play. Fan behavior at Ashe Stadium has always been unusual when compared with the three other Grand Slam tournaments — the Australian Open, the French Open and Wimbledon. At the hallowed ground of Centre Court at Wimbledon, talking aloud during a point would probably get fans ejected. Francesca Castelli, a brand manager from London, said the music inside Ashe seemed louder than last year, perhaps because of the roof. But she blamed noisy fans more than the roof for the cacophony during points. “When play is on, it’s on,” she said, “so just shut up. It’s disrespectful to the players. But I suppose when it rains, everyone will be happy that the roof is there. ” But in the upper reaches of cavernous Ashe Stadium, fans never had to worry about their chatter affecting the play on the court. It is not unusual for fans to talk on cellphones in the middle of a match without getting shushed. There is an added dimension to the din that is unique to the Open among Grand Slam tournaments: the 90 luxury suites that circle the stadium. Their occupants, who often include celebrities and guests at corporate events, are often more interested in partying than and the owners of the suites pay top dollar. That most of the matches in Ashe Stadium, while have been routs may also have driven fans to distraction. Daniel Heischrek, a Swiss sports reporter, said he enjoyed the noisy atmosphere and even felt comfortable making a cellphone call during a match. “I think it’s part of the U. S. Open,” he said. “It’s New York. I mean, New York without noise wouldn’t be New York. It’s not Zurich, you know?” The increased noise presents a challenge to the television broadcaster ESPN, which employs software to learn, detect and even remove the din of sustained noises like the air ventilation system. But crowd noise is less predictable. “You want to get the blend of what the crowd influence might be, but not to the detriment of what the package is,” said an ESPN vice president, Jamie Reynolds. U. S. T. A. officials say it is too early to call the noise a problem. Gordon Smith, the U. S. T. A.’s executive director, said that the players and the fans would have to adjust to the new conditions, and that although many players have commented on the noise levels, few have outwardly complained. “The noise level in Ashe will be a discussion point after the 2016 tournament, for sure,” said Chris Widmaier, a spokesman for the U. S. T. A. “We will gather all the data and address what, if anything, needs to be done. ” Indeed, by Friday night, there were signs that fans may have already been sufficiently chastened by the umpires’ rebukes. The sound level was not quite as troublesome during Rafael Nadal’s victory over Andrey Kuznetsov, though there were moments when Nadal paused for the din to subside. John Storyk, an architect and acoustician who helped build Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studio in Manhattan in 1969, is an expert on noise control in venues large and small. His company, Walter Storyk Design Group, helped fashion the acoustic atmosphere at three venues at the Rio Olympics, including the Maracanã stadium. He said there were steps that could still be taken to dampen or absorb sound. “We’ve made a fortune fixing restaurants,” he said. “They don’t pay attention to it until someone complains. When someone complains, they call us. ” He has not seen the new roof and stressed that he did not know the specifics of the situation. But in general, he said, the first step would be to take measurements of what is happening when the roof is open and when it is closed, with people inside the stadium and when it is empty. “Once you have the data, then comes the art,” he said. “You have to determine how much absorptive material and where to put it. ” | 1 |
SYDNEY, Australia — That map of Australia you have? It’s wrong. And the whole country is going to officially relocate to correct the error. The trouble is caused by plate tectonics, the shifting of big chunks of the earth’s surface. Australia happens to be on one of the pieces of all, and by geological standards it’s practically flying: about 2. 7 inches northward a year, with a slight clockwise rotation as well. People on the ground may not notice, but the Global Positioning System does. So Australia needs to adjust its longitudes and latitudes so they line up with GPS coordinates. Four times in the last 50 years, Australia has reset the official coordinates of everything in the country to make them more accurate, correcting for other sources of error as well as continental drift. The last adjustment, in 1994, was a doozy: about 656 feet, enough to give the delivery driver an alibi for ringing your neighbor’s doorbell instead of yours. “You might think, ‘Where’s my pizza? ’” said Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia, the government agency that worries about the coordinates. But something bigger is at stake, he said: intelligent transportation systems that rely on the finer accuracy that will come with the next generation of GPS technology. The next adjustment, due at the end of the year, will be about 1. 5 meters (4. 9 feet) — not really enough of a discrepancy to throw off satellite navigation systems, which are generally accurate only to within 15 to 30 feet. But the next generation of GPS devices, using both satellites and ground stations, will be accurate to within an inch or less, and new technologies that depend on precise location will be important to Australia’s future. The mining company Rio Tinto already has 71 immense ore trucks rumbling around iron mines in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia that are guided remotely from an office in Perth, 930 miles away. Pilots who patrol the Anna Creek cattle ranch in South Australia must pick out small water bores in the ranch’s 8, 880 square miles of dry pasture, an area larger than Israel, where small errors can equate to big misses. “If we get a new pilot, he’s relying on GPS until he finds his way around landmarks,” said the ranch manager, Norm Sims. Not to mention driverless cars. “If you’re 1. 5 meters out,” Mr. Jaksa said, “you’re potentially on the wrong side of the road. ” | 1 |
Next Swipe left/right 7 Tory horror film posters to send a chill down your spine this Halloween In case Halloween isn’t scary enough, here are seven films made even more terrifying by the addition of Tories.
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Same people all the time , i dont know how you can fix this corruption http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/10_09_01_krongard.html | 0 |
Even by Pennsylvania’s unbuttoned standards, it was a scandal of exhausting length and tawdriness, a seemingly endless parade of pornography, personal and political vendettas, smear tactics, barely veiled threats, conspiracy and . So when the state’s attorney general, Kathleen G. Kane, announced on Tuesday that she was resigning, one day after her conviction for perjury and conspiracy, among other charges, even her supporters might have been excused for welcoming a sense of closure. Except that the scandal is not closed, not yet. More than two years after it began, the Kane affair may have a few more shoes to drop from its closet of improprieties. Ms. Kane, who had weathered indictment, the loss of her law license, threats of State House impeachment and Senate removal and a plea to resign from her fellow Democrat, Gov. Tom Wolf, said she would leave office on Wednesday, less than three months before voters will choose her successor. The announcement followed a jury’s decision to convict her on nine criminal charges, saying she had leaked secret grand jury information to a newspaper to discredit a rival prosecutor, Frank Fina, and then lied about it under oath. The first deputy attorney general, Bruce Castor, who has in effect run Ms. Kane’s office the last few months, said Tuesday that investigators were still working on the most lurid aspect of the scandal: a trove of lewd pictures and sexist and racist comments that Ms. Kane discovered when she exhumed emails of her Republican predecessor’s staff. He said that a law firm that Ms. Kane had hired to sift through the emails was flummoxed by the sheer number of them — 13 million, later winnowed to seven million by tossing out the correspondence of officials. The emails, which did not come up at Ms. Kane’s trial but some of which have trickled out of her office, have led to the resignation of two State Supreme Court justices and a bevy of other officials, with the prospect of more embarrassment to come. Douglas P. Gansler, the lawyer hired to lead the investigation, said Tuesday that he expected to release a report on the inquiry “in the next few weeks. ” The chairman of the state Democratic Party, Marcel Groen, said Tuesday that he believed the most salacious correspondence had already become public — and then, in an indication of just how dire the scandal has been, suggested that the emails were the lesser of the problems. “There’s a difference between inappropriate behavior by elected officials and illegal behavior,” he said. “I think the emails are inappropriate, and they’re wrong, but I don’t think they’re illegal, per se. ” They nevertheless played a starring role in the affair. And they may turn out to be Ms. Kane’s last word in a scandal that began with her desire to ruin a competitor, and wound up destroying her own career. Ms. Kane, 50, was hailed at the state’s most promising politician when she became the first Democrat to be elected attorney general in 2012. But she antagonized her Republican predecessor by opening an investigation into his office’s handling of the scandal at Penn State. After an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer suggested that she had improperly shut down a sting operation that had documented payments accepted by several Democrats, Ms. Kane concluded that Mr. Fina, who was deeply involved in the Penn State case, had smeared her. She struck back, giving The Philadelphia Daily News grand jury documents that left the impression Mr. Fina had mishandled a 2009 inquiry into grants given another politician. Mr. Fina demanded a criminal investigation of the grand jury leak, and that led to Ms. Kane’s indictment, followed by an extraordinary defense in which she claimed to have been framed by an “old boys’ group” that was involved in the email imbroglio — and wanted to stop more emails from surfacing. The scandal plumbed the depths of skulduggery in a state whose record of corruption is not proud. In one instance, an aide to Ms. Kane was convicted of intercepting email traffic from the grand jury investigating her. In another, Mr. Fina was found to have secured a court order barring Ms. Kane from releasing any “personal” emails. At another low point, the state’s chief justice was accused of trying to rig an inquiry into another justice’s receipt of lewd emails. Over it all hung Ms. Kane’s implicit threat that more damning emails were in the wings. Whether citizens will regain respect for law enforcement and Pennsylvania politics at this point is a tough call. The Senate majority leader, Jake Corman, said he was looking for the bright side. “I often joke, ‘Thank God for Illinois,’” he said, referring to a state with its own corruption superlatives. | 1 |
This time it's true no pantsTweetwave More Of Anthony Weiner's Greatest Hits Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests Display posts from previous: Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand
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GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election'
Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!'
Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism
News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota
Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith
Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page
Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment
White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria
Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent'
Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins
Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date
IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history
After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot
Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence'
Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program
US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration?
Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy
This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester
White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras
Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse
Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school
Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition
Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State
Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good'
Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners'
Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested
Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead
Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending
Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances
Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons
Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago
Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections
Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country
Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps'
White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out
New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen
White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class
To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead
State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations
Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward
President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward
Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects
World ends; S&P soars
Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood
Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes
Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway
Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013
Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama
As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list
Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves
Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium
Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future
Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs
Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet
Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt'
Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties
Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years
Obama attends church service, worships self
Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending
Historical revisionists: "Hey, you never know"
Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh
Israelis to Egyptian rioters: "don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"
Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness
Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears
Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke
Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights
Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse'
Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: "Too few words"
Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't
Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost
Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity "Religion of Peace," praises "moderate Christians," promises to send one into space
Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck
White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus
Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed
Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book "The Road to Smurfdom"
Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere
Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: "When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"
Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college
Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill!
Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!'
Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration'
Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome
People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies
Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, "only 1% allowed to reach Israel"
Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans
Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law
Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond
Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics
Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof
Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels
Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party
Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend
May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above
Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel "50 Shades of Hay"
Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name
Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich
Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag
Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its "President for Life"
Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off
Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named "Fat And Furious"
Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed
White House: "Let them eat statistics"
Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama | 0 |
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There has been a surge of immigrants illegally crossing into the United States leading up to next month’s presidential election.
CBS News reports dozens of immigrants have been streaming through the streets of McAllen, Texas, on a daily basis. They have been taken to a migrant center at Sacred Heart Catholic Church where they were released by Border Patrol, with ankle monitors, while they file for asylum.
Agent Chris Cabrera told CBS News that they’ve been seeing a spike in immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, thanks in part to the election.
“The smugglers are telling them if Hillary [Clinton] gets elected, that there’ll be some sort of amnesty, that they need to get here by a certain date,” Cabrera said. “They’re also being told that if [Donald] Trump gets elected, there’s going to be some magical wall that pops up overnight and once that wall gets up, nobody will ever get in again.”
Cabrera added that they’ve encountered up to 1,000 immigrants along McAllen’s stretch of the border some days. | 0 |
PARIS — You could say theirs is the Generation of Three E’s. There is Erasmus, the European Union program that organizes and subsidizes student exchanges among universities across its 28 countries and elsewhere. There is easyJet, the budget airline that lets them hop between European cities as simply and cheaply as it can be to trek across town. And there is the euro, the currency used in most of the member countries. Young adults are now grappling with what Britain’s vote to exit the European Union means for their profoundly European way of life. For them, it is perfectly normal to grow up in one country, study in another, work in a third, share a flat with people who have different passports and partner up without regard to nationality. “It means that we are not going to be sisters and brothers of a big project,” said Antoine Guéry, 24, a Frenchman whose résumé and network of friends provide a crash course in European geography. “At best, we are going to be allies” — friends, but no longer family. “It feels less like home. ” Mr. Guéry works at a firm in Paris but had been looking for job opportunities in London — an exercise he shelved immediately after the “Brexit” vote on June 23. His degree is from Sciences Po University in Paris, but he also studied at Stockholm University and Germany’s University of Potsdam. It was in Stockholm that two German women, Carolina Leersch, now 26, and Kim Seele, 28, joined his inner circle. In Berlin, Mr. Guéry lived with Ms. Seele’s aunt, had an Irish boyfriend and befriended Lauren Muscroft, who is British, and Marion Desbles, who is from Rennes, France. This group and others like it are, to be sure, a subset within a subset, part of a fourth E — the elite — who studied at the Continent’s top institutions and took advantage of the doors open to them. Splitting Britain from the European Union may put a damper on future changes important to this globalized generation, like the move toward a single European digital market for movie and music streaming, and the end, by next year, of cellphone roaming charges when crossing European Union borders. Days before the British referendum, Mr. Guéry, Ms. Muscroft and Ms. Desbles jokingly wondered, while waiting in the passport lines at the airport in Barcelona, Spain, whether Britons like Ms. Muscroft would soon be kicked out of the European Union lane. Now, the friends are wondering whether their children will be able to benefit from Erasmus as they did. If their European health insurance cards will still cover them in Britain. Whether France might soon follow with a Frexit vote, the Netherlands with a Nexit, and who knows what else? “My initial reaction when it happened was feeling like part of my identity had been stripped away,” said Ms. Muscroft, 24, who works in London for an online site. “One thing I’ve always really felt a strong connection to, with Europe, is a unified sense of fate — the fact that we are all in this together, and that we benefit each other through this union. ” Perhaps the most profound force in creating this European identity was Erasmus, now called Erasmus+ which was created in 1987 and had supported 3. 3 million students studying or training abroad by the end of academic year, according to a European Union report. (Yet, in the last five years, fewer than 5 percent of all university graduates in the participating countries were Erasmus students.) Magali Ballatore, a sociologist at the University of in France who wrote a book on the Erasmus program, said it would be hard to tease out whether Erasmus alumni were internationally minded because of the experience, or whether that prospect had attracted them to the program in the first place. But younger Europeans are more likely to report an attachment to the European Union than those 55 and over, according to the most recent Eurobarometer survey. In Britain before the balloting, surveys showed that 57 percent of voters ages 18 to 34 wanted it to remain in the bloc. (An identical percentage over age 55 supported the Leave campaign.) In the vote’s aftermath, many young voices have expressed fear and despair. “I’ve never been so angry,” Mr. Guéry said. “I was texting friends, people who did Erasmus, people who lived in Britain or Germany. We are disgusted that this might be the trigger for the destruction of the only good thing that these governments have done in 50 years: peace. ” It is still unclear what kind of relationship Britain will negotiate with the European Union, but trade is unlikely to screech to a halt and travelers are not likely to face stringent visa requirements. As for the union’s Erasmus program — in which Britain ranked fifth two years ago for students sent abroad and fourth for foreign students taken in — nonmembers like Iceland, Norway and Turkey are already allowed to participate. Until Britain officially leaves the union, the program will continue there, too. Britain had always stood apart in any case, having never adopted the euro or joined Europe’s Schengen zone. Ms. Leersch, the German whom Mr. Guéry met at Stockholm University, counted among the benefits of European Union membership the 500 euros per month (about $550) that Erasmus provided to cover living expenses in Sweden her internship at the European Parliament in 2011 and the European Capitals of Culture program, which has given a boost to artists and tourism in more than 40 cities. For Mr. Guéry, the list of advantages included environmental regulations and his European health insurance card, which gave him access to health care when he had mononucleosis in Berlin. Ms. Seele, who is studying for the bar exam in Berlin, said that for those and other reasons, she “really feels like a European. ” Many of her friends, as well as her brothers and sisters, have studied or worked abroad in Europe. “The fact that you don’t have to exchange money anymore, that you don’t have to go through border control and show your passport, it is part of the feeling that you are not leaving from one country to the other,” she said. “That you are still more or less in one community. ” For this generation, at least, that sense of community is easily fostered. Texting and social media like Facebook and Skype help people stay in touch, no matter how far away when they want to meet, discount airlines like easyJet and Ryanair make the borders further disappear. Mr. Guéry and his friends meet every three to six months — sometimes back in Berlin, but also in Brussels, Budapest and other cities. That also means more exposure to very different people and places. “I never had an opinion on Norway, for example, before I moved abroad,” Ms. Muscroft said. “And suddenly one of my closest friends is Norwegian. ” Even this staunchly group knows the union is far from perfect. (“Stop voting on stupid things like olive oil labeling, and answer the need for security and immigration policy,” Mr. Guéry said.) The friends hope that Britain’s departure will push the institution to reform itself, but there are also concerns that it will fuel political extremes at home. “What I’m most worried about is how Marine Le Pen and other leaders at the National Front are using these kinds of debates for their own political purposes,” said Ms. Desbles, a teacher, referring to the party and its leader, who favor a similar breakaway for France. Mr. Guéry has been thinking about his grandparents and who bore the brunt of both world wars. “So much of my family suffered from the stupidity of nationalism,” he said. “I can’t imagine my continent going back 50 years. ” When Mr. Guéry was 13, he refused to take German classes at school — “a Nazi language,” he thought at the time. His mother persuaded him to do otherwise, but the three E’s helped, too. “I lived in the heart of what destroyed my country,” he said of Germany. “But I learned the story of the people now I speak the language. I didn’t do that by myself. It’s because of Europe. ” | 1 |
Tweet Widget by MOVE People
The Philadelphia-based MOVE family was horribly victimized by police in 1978 and 1985. The first atrocity led to the mass imprisonment of MOVE members; the second assault killed five adults and six children and burned down a city block. No cops have ever been punished, but the MOVE 9 remain in prison, and were this year once again denied parole. “They couldn't kill us that day, so they are trying to finish the job in these prisons.” “When You Speak Up for the MOVE 9, You Speak Up for Yourself” by MOVE People
This article previously appeared on Move 9 blogspot .
“The District Attorney never proved MOVE had killed a police officer.”
The MOVE 9 Have been eligible for Parole since August 2008, After being in prison for 30 years. We have repeatedly been denied. In June of this year (2016) , we were denied parole again , for a total of ten years past the time we should have been released. One of the reasons the parole board gave to justify not releasing us is that we are a threat to the safety of the community. This is not true. People are not afraid of MOVE People. Move People ain't strangling people to death, shooting people in the back. It ain't MOVE that killed a man in front of his fiancé and four year old child. MOVE is not drive by shooting, or terrorizing folks in the community. It's the community who is faxing, emailing, and calling the parole board asking for our release on parole.
It is the Parole Board and D.A. John Straub who continue to deny our release for no valid reason. On August 8th 1978, hundreds of cops attacked our home at 3:00am in the morning trying to kill us. They couldn't kill us that day, so they are trying to finish the job in these prisons but understand: John Straub and the Parole Board are not justified. MOVE did not go out to the Police's house to do them harm. The Cops came to our house, because a judge sent them to our house to serve bench warrants for not appearing in court not for rape, murder, kidnapping or abuse but for not appearing in court for a civil matter. Understand this: hundreds of cops were sent to our home, while we were asleep, dressed in swat gear, armed with all type of weaponry, semi -automatic weapons, fire fighters, smoke bombs, tear gas, a deluge gun, a crane and a bulldozer to serve bench warrants, for a housing code violation.
“Move People ain't strangling people to death, shooting people in the back.”
It was the Police who came to Move’s premises. They came armed to the teeth and in their frenzy to kill MOVE, they killed one of their own, and condemned us for it. We are not making this up. The evidence is clear.
The whole world witnessed the attack on the MOVE house May 13th 1985, where the house was bombed into a blazing inferno, the six adults were shot and killed and the five children were shot back into the house by police as they tried to escape the burning flames where they died . These are proven Facts. During the city’s investigation hearing, it was ruled that the cops used excessive force and the killings were wrongful deaths. Those children were our children in that house that day, yet not one cop or official connected to the bombing of our family were held accountable, responsible for these deaths like the parole board is telling The MOVE 9 we have to take responsibility for a crime when the District Attorney never proved MOVE had killed a police officer.
We have no weapons charges and the judge admitted on public radio to the caller, Mumia Abu Jamal [a radio journalist at the time], that he didn't have the faintest idea who shot the police officer. It's a fact that world renowned forensic experts Dr. Ali Hameli and Claus Speth ruled the deaths of the children HOMICIDES in a scathing report against the city, submitted to the assistant District Attorney Joan Weimer, but the grand jury did nothing.
“It's time for everybody to start speaking freely in protest of all this free wheeling injustice.”
The Move 9 have spent almost 40 years in prison for killing a cop, with no real proof. The whole world saw the Philadelphia police murder our children and family, and they have not spent a day in prison for it. But, what is the difference in these lives? Does a MOVE child not bleed, when they are shot? Does a MOVE parent not feel pain when their baby is killed, just because they are not cops or officials? Does the murder of a MOVE child, the pain of MOVE parent, the heartache of a black person's suffering still fall on deaf ears like the slaves who cried out when their babies, women and men were sold, killed, and whipped by slave owners? Ask yourself. Things may seem to have changed since those awful days, but the mentality is still very much existing.
Just look around and listen. Black lives (Don't) Matter. That's why these cops are getting away with killing Black Men, Women, and Children. That's why The MOVE 9 are still in prison almost 40 years for killing a cop, and the cops responsible for killing 11 MOVE people, five of them children, are walking around like they are clean and without guilt. It's the mentality that makes them feel nothing after killing people. Because to them MOVE lives (Don't) matter. It's time for everybody to start speaking freely in protest of all this free wheeling injustice. People must understand this necessity of speaking out now.
We are asking for people to sign The Petition we have aimed at United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch demanding that The United States Justice Dept open up an investigation into the ongoing and wrongful imprisonment of The MOVE 9. People can sign the petition at Https://causes.com/92454-free-the-move-9 . Speak out with the understanding that when speaking of MOVE, you are speaking up for yourself. It can't get better for MOVE without getting better for you.
Looking Forward To The May 2017 MOVE Conference In Philadelphia.
Ona Move | 0 |
An illegal immigrant from El Salvador is being accused of sexually assaulting a 5 girl in Fullerton, California. [Rigoberto Arevalo Cubias, 30, is being accused by the Fullerton Police Department of “engaging in sexual intercourse of sodomy” with a as Fox News reported. Cubias, according to Fullerton police, goes by a number of aliases, including Jose Cubias, Jose Cubias Arevalo, Jose Riberto Cubias and Jose Alfonso Cubias Arevalo. Cubias also has an outstanding $50, 000 arrest warrant from 2014 when he got a DUI for drunk driving. Fullerton police expect that Cubias may have gotten rid of his vehicle and cellphone in order to evade capture. “Detectives believe that Cubias now knows he is wanted by police and he is on the run from law enforcement,” Fullerton police said in a news release. Cubias is described by police as a Hispanic male with black hair and brown eyes, weighing about 185 pounds and approximately 5’7”. Fullerton police are encouraging anyone with information on Cubias’ whereabouts to contact Detective Carin Wright at (714) . The news of Cubias’ accusations against him comes just a couple days after the Santa Maria Joint High School District announced that they would make their public schools a “safe haven” for illegal immigrants and their families, as Breitbart Texas reported. District Board President Carol Karamitsos said the policy was “super important for our students, our families and our community as a whole. ” John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
DHAKA, Bangladesh — The young man, inching past a crowded checkpoint near a truck stand in Bangladesh’s capital, caught the attention of an alert police officer. His backpack, together with his appearance, from the unshaven beard to the long Punjabi tunic over baggy pants, set off the suspicion that he was an Islamist militant. The man was arrested after he was found to be carrying a machete, an unregistered pistol and six bullets. The discovery of the weapons raised alarms. For the last three years, atheist writers, freethinkers, foreigners, religious minorities, gay rights activists and others have been terrorized and killed in Bangladesh by shadowy figures who have struck with machetes and sped off on motorbikes. Little was known about the attackers, except that they were Islamist radicals, and that their assaults have been coming with frequency this year. The detained man refused to discuss much, saying only that he was Saiful Islam, 23 years old and a teacher at a local madrasa, or Islamic school. But the picture filled in six days later, when two men, arrested after running from the site of another fatal attack, identified the madrasa teacher as a fellow conspirator. That touched off a cascade of revelations that, for the first time, has allowed the Bangladeshi authorities to penetrate the murky world of the attackers and answer questions about the planning, execution and purpose of the attacks that have baffled the country — and, indeed, the world — since the violence began. At least 39 people have been killed in attacks with machetes, guns and bombs since February 2013. The killings, mostly with machete blows to the back of the victim’s neck, have been accelerating lately, with five people murdered in April, four in May and at least three so far in June. On Sunday, a Christian grocer and the wife of a police superintendent who had been cracking down on militant attacks were killed in separate strikes. On Tuesday, a Hindu priest was killed in southwestern Bangladesh. In a lengthy interview, the chief of the police counterterrorism unit, Monirul Islam, who assumed his post in February, laid out the findings of his investigation in minute detail. The killings were organized by two militant Islamic groups that have gathered volunteers and recruits, trained them and eventually seeded them into cells run by a commander, Mr. Islam said. They have tried to pick their targets with care, with the aim of gaining support from the public, he said, and trained teams of killers. Their goal was to convert Bangladesh’s mixed secular and religious culture to an Islamist one, the chief investigator said. The Bangladeshi authorities say that they now believe they have identified the top leadership of the two groups they say are responsible, and that they are preparing to round them up. Only when the leaders are caught, they caution, will the attacks be stopped, and at that, only for a while if the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism is not blunted. Bangladesh, a nation with a Muslim majority adjoining eastern India, gained independence from Pakistan in a vicious war in 1971 and established a secular, democratic government. A military coup in 1975 led to more than three decades of mostly governments sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalists, until a secular government returned to power in 2009 with an overwhelming majority. But secularism is far from universally accepted in Bangladesh, and has always had to contend with a conservative Islamic culture. To a surprising extent, the militants have succeeded in their aim of discrediting secularism, the chief investigator said. “In general, people think they have done the right thing, that it’s not unjustifiable to kill” the bloggers, gay people and other secularists, he added. They have also put the secular government on the defensive. As a result, even as the government has condemned the killings, it has urged writers not to criticize Islam and warned that advocating “unnatural sex” is a criminal offense. Some experts say that only a more widespread crackdown will stop the killings, but that the government has held back, fearful of creating a backlash. “The politics has been turned into the secular versus the Islamists,” said Abdur Rashid, a retired army major general and executive director of the Institute of Conflict, Law and Development Studies in Dhaka. “Therefore the government is cautious. ” While the killers’ strikes often appear random, Mr. Islam says the terrorism campaign was conceived by the militant groups quite deliberately as a response to mass protests in early 2013, known collectively as the Shahbag movement. Inspired by a group of bloggers who led the protests, the demonstrators advocated an end to politics and the prosecution of war crimes dating to the 1971 war for independence. War crimes prosecutions have been a particular source of anger for Islamists. They were shelved during the period of rule but revived under the new democratic government in 2009. Four of the five convicted and executed in the latest round of trials were leaders in the country’s largest Islamist political party, outraging Muslim fundamentalists and others. Two groups in particular took up the fight against secularism, Mr. Islam said. One, Ansar is led by a fiery cleric and a charismatic, operational commander, both of whom Mr. Islam declined to identify because they are being watched. Its leaders command about 25 trained killers, some of whom have been involved in three or four attacks, Mr. Islam said. The second, the Jama’atul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, is the reorganized offshoot of a group banned in 2005 for setting off nearly 500 bombs simultaneously around the country. While both are radical Islamist groups, Mr. Islam said, neither seems to have direct links to larger terrorist networks like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, though those groups have occasionally claimed credit for the attacks. The Islamist groups appear to have reacted quickly to the Shahbag movement, mounting their first fatal attack on Feb. 15, 2013, against a blogger who wrote critically of Islam under the pseudonym Thaba Baba. It was carried out by a group of students from North South University in Dhaka, who were incited by the sermons of the spiritual leader of Ansar at the time, a cleric named Jasim Uddin Rahmani. The students used to attend his Friday speeches at a local mosque where Mr. Rahmani, who has since been arrested, declared a fatwa on bloggers critical of Islam, calling for them to be killed, Mr. Islam said. As it happened, one of the students, a senior named Redwanul Azad Rana, was also a leader in Ansar Mr. Islam said. He invited the younger students to Mr. Rahmani’s sermons and introduced them to the writings of Thaba Baba. “Being a believer, it is your duty to kill” Thaba Baba, Mr. Rana told the students, one of them said in his confession in court. Prodded by Mr. Rana, “we made a plan to kill Islam’s and Prophet Muhammad’s insulter Thaba Baba by identifying him,” the student, Faisal Bin Nayeem, 24, said in the statement. He said they found Thaba Baba’s picture on Facebook, then searched for someone matching it at the Shahbag protest, still underway at the time. Eventually, they identified a architect, Ahmed Rajib Haider, as Thaba Baba. After studying Mr. Haider’s routines, three of them surprised him outside his house around 9 p. m. Mr. Nayeem said he drove his machete into the back of Mr. Haider’s neck and hit him twice more as he fell forward. Ansar with the help of mainstream Islamist groups, then began to publicize Mr. Haider’s writings, casting the killers as defenders of Islam against “atheist bloggers. ” The writings, published in at least two national dailies, enraged large segments of the population, who had previously been sympathetic to the Shahbag movement, Mr. Islam said. During the next two months, two more bloggers were killed. The police began arresting the North South University students who were involved in killing Mr. Haider, and also caught Mr. Rahmani, the cleric who inspired them. But Mr. Rana, the student leader, remains at large and is thought to have left the country. Mr. Islam said he believes these arrests stopped Ansar — also known as the Ansarullah Bangla Team — from killing more people in 2013 and 2014. But the group reorganized the terrorist cells, he said, and the killing resumed. In February of last year, Mr. Islam said, Ansar attackers killed Avijit Roy, 42, an American citizen of Bangladeshi origin. Mr. Roy worked by day in the biotechnology industry in the United States and by night as a writer of books on science, homosexuality and religion, in addition to founding a website called Bengali for freethinker. From the growing number of attackers in detention, the police learned that the newly reconstituted Ansar had changed its tactics, now recruiting madrasa students and teachers instead of university students to carry out killings. Mr. Islam said a violent protest by the madrasa students in May 2013 convinced Ansar leaders that they were a more promising source of fanatical recruits than their university counterparts. The training and indoctrination of the recruits became more rigorous and systematic at that time, Mr. Islam said. The cell that assassinated another blogger, Oyasiqur Rahman Babu, 27, just a month after Mr. Roy’s killing rented an apartment where two senior operatives worked with the group of killers. One, an operations expert, taught them how to kill with a machete and use a pistol to scatter anyone interrupting the attack. Armed with Mr. Babu’s picture and his address, the assassins were sent to his home to assess the situation and returned to a barrage of questions from the trainer. “What happens if you are stopped? What will you do?” he asked them, Mr. Islam said. Close to the planned date of the attack, the other operative, an ideologist, introduced the killers to Mr. Babu’s writings. The students were given samples calculated to stir them up. “What is the punishment for someone who writes these insults?” the trainer asked them. The group answered in unison, day after day, “Only death,” the arrested students told investigators. Mr. Islam said the hardest part for the police was identifying the leaders, who were so concerned about security that they would not give their real names to the madrasa students they were training. Still, the police have now identified a trainer involved in planning the attack on Mr. Babu. Last month they printed the suspect’s picture, along with those of five others accused of participating in the killings, in local dailies, offering rewards of up to 500, 000 takas, about $6, 400, for information leading to their arrests. The other militant group, the reorganized Jama’atul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, works independently of Ansar and almost exclusively in northern Bangladesh, the chief investigator said. But the group is less professional than Ansar he said, making mistakes that are costing it public support. The group has trained 50 to 100 madrasa students as killers, he said, organizing them into cells of four or five. But through shoddy research, many of the victims have turned out to be popular local figures. Among them: a homeopathic doctor who used to give free treatment to villagers, and an English professor at Rajshahi University who was not known to have written critically of Islam. When detained militants learned that a Japanese man they had slaughtered had converted to Islam in 2015, they told investigators they were upset over their mistake. With all the the communities turned against them. With the public’s support, Mr. Islam said, the police quickly rounded up the suspected hit men and several of their handlers in most of the Jama’atul Mujahedeen Bangladesh killings, and were in pursuit of the senior leadership. Many in Bangladesh continue to live in terror. associates of one victim, a gay rights activist, have taken refuge in safe houses provided by diplomatic missions. Several dozen bloggers have fled the country. Those who remain have grown fatalistic. “On this journey, we’ll lose our lives,” Arif Jebtik, 39, one of the leaders of the Shahbag movement, said in an interview in his Dhaka apartment, which he rarely leaves. He has quit his job, closed his blog and stopped dropping his children off at school. “This is the price we have to pay to history,” he said. | 1 |
That brewed up well and good | 0 |
One evening in February, a man entering the subway at Barclays Center in Brooklyn was detained by the police for using a discounted student MetroCard — his daughter’s, it turned out. It was, he would say later, a stupid mistake that would lead to absurd consequences: The man, Blerim Skoro, a citizen of Kosovo, now sits in jail, facing potential deportation. But Mr. Skoro was no mere hapless . “I was working for U. S. government,” he told a United States asylum officer in May, explaining his past life overseas and why he was now afraid of being sent back to Kosovo, a transcript shows. “I was trained for Washington. I was a spy. ” A native of the old Yugoslavia, Mr. Skoro, 45, appears to have lived a remarkable, if hidden, life that sprang from his arrest in 2000 on federal drug charges he began cooperating with prosecutors in his case and others, pleaded guilty and received a sentence. After Sept. 11, 2001, he says in an affidavit, he became a prison informer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, providing leads on fellow inmates with terrorist ties. After completing his sentence, he said, he was deported in 2007, but agreed to continue working for the government overseas. He says he posed as a willing operative and insinuated himself with members of Al Qaeda in the Balkans, secretly supplying the Central Intelligence Agency with information about plots and the people behind them. After the C. I. A. cut ties with him in 2010, he says, he eventually returned to the United States via Canada — illegally, he admits — and last year, with the help of a lawyer, met separately with the F. B. I. and counterterrorism officials with the New York Police Department, trying unsuccessfully to offer clandestine assistance in the fight against the Islamic State. Spy stories, by their nature, are often unverifiable, and government officials are typically loath to discuss such accounts. Indeed, a bureau spokesman, asked about Mr. Skoro, said he could not “confirm or deny” any part of the story. The C. I. A. the Police Department and the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn also declined to comment. Mr. Skoro, in several hours of interviews at the Bergen County Jail in northern New Jersey and by phone, showed a deep command of people, places and other facts, and said his information was corroborated through videos, photographs and copies of texts he had given his lawyers. Mr. Skoro, whose wife and three children, all American citizens, live in New York City, said he still had much to offer the authorities. “I dealt with the most ruthless, dangerous terrorists in Balkans and Middle East,” he said. Mr. Skoro, a practicing Muslim, said others of his faith should be willing to covertly assist in the fight against ISIS. But he suggested that his detention would send the opposite message. Muslims, he said, will ask, “How we can trust our government when you’re going to put the spies in the prison?” Mr. Skoro first entered the United States in 1994. In the 2000 drug importation case that led to his cooperation with the government, he transported at least 14 kilograms of heroin and cocaine and laundered about $670, 000 in drug proceeds, the judge said at his sentencing. Prosecutors recommended leniency, citing his assistance and noting he had provided significant intelligence about drug traffickers in the city’s Albanian community. Mr. Skoro says the F. B. I. promised he would be allowed to stay in the country after serving his sentence and acting as a prison informer. But after being told in 2007 that he would be deported, he said he left his bitterness behind and agreed to work for the agency abroad. He received training in a safe house in Macedonia, and took on assignments in Pakistan, the Balkans, Syria and elsewhere, he said, posing as a jihadist who had become radicalized in prison. “Nobody was ever suspicious of me,” he said. “I was . ” In Egypt, Mr. Skoro says in his affidavit, he befriended Betim Kaziu, a man who later told him of his plans to attack United States troops stationed in Kosovo, and had even recorded a martyrdom video. Mr. Skoro said he passed the information to the C. I. A. and Mr. Kaziu was later arrested, tried and convicted in Brooklyn and sentenced to 27 years. In 2010, Mr. Skoro says, he was shot and wounded on the way to a C. I. A. debriefing in Macedonia. He managed to escape, but the agency ended the relationship, paying him the equivalent of about $35, 000 to $40, 000 in euros, he said. The next year, while seeking asylum in Canada, Mr. Skoro was interviewed by the journalist Vincent Larouche for the online publication Rue Frontenac. The article, titled “The Fugitive With 1, 000 Secrets,” referred to him by the pseudonym Abu it characterized his story as “convincing” but noted that much of his account could not be confirmed. Aspects of his story also emerged in a 2015 court decision in Canada, related to an asylum request he had made that used his actual name, and cited his claim to have been a C. I. A. spy who had infiltrated Islamic terror cells. Stéphane Handfield, a Montreal lawyer who represented Mr. Skoro in Canada, said his asylum request was rejected in 2013, and a request to a federal court for review was dismissed in 2015. But Mr. Skoro had already slipped into the United States illegally in November 2014. In New York, he says, he made contact with several lawyers who said recently that they found his story to be credible. One, Rene A. Kathawala, who leads the pro bono practice at Orrick, Herrington Sutcliff, said his firm would do everything possible to assist Mr. Skoro and his immigration lawyer, Irwin Berowitz, in his deportation case. Mr. Berowitz said an asylum officer who recently interviewed Mr. Skoro found him credible and that he had established a “reasonable fear of persecution” if deported to Kosovo. That finding allowed the case to be sent to an immigration judge for further proceedings, Mr. Berowitz said. Mr. Skoro was also referred to Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer who has developed a national security practice. Mr. Skoro approached him in April 2015, intent on providing “proactive undercover assistance to law enforcement” with respect to ISIS, Mr. Dratel said in a declaration that is also part of the immigration case. Mr. Skoro initially told Mr. Dratel that he would be receiving a call from an American official, who would refer to Mr. Skoro by a code name, the declaration says. Mr. Dratel said he received such a call. The caller asked whether Mr. Skoro was overseas, in which case he could “use him. ” But if he was in the United States, he was “off limits,” the caller said. When Mr. Dratel said Mr. Skoro was in the United States, the caller gave Mr. Dratel the name and number of a senior F. B. I. counterterrorism official in Washington. In June 2015, Mr. Dratel said, Mr. Skoro eventually met at his office with two F. B. I. agents one agent, Mr. Dratel recalled, said the C. I. A. had confirmed to the bureau that Mr. Skoro had a former relationship with the agency. In November, Mr. Dratel arranged for Mr. Skoro to meet with New York police officials, including John J. Miller, the deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism. But the bureau and the police ultimately declined to use Mr. Skoro. One senior government official said that officials who met with Mr. Skoro had questioned his reliability. The official declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case. Jack Cloonan, a retired F. B. I. counterterrorism agent who was involved in the bureau’s investigation of Al Qaeda in the 1990s, said he had never heard of Mr. Skoro and had no idea if his claims were authentic. But he said the case underscored how important it was for the government to have someone who was Muslim and operational who could carry out acts that the intelligence agencies need. Mr. Cloonan also surmised that Mr. Skoro might have been considered unusable by the authorities because his identity had been divulged in Canada, or because there were questions about whether he could be trusted. But Mr. Cloonan said he also understood why officials would have wanted to meet with him. “There’s a clear indication that everybody is scrambling,” Mr. Cloonan said. “Everyone is trying to get information, because we don’t know if there’s going to be another attack on the homeland. ” After Mr. Skoro’s illegal arrest in March, he was jailed without bond after federal prosecutors in Brooklyn argued he might flee. But on March 23, one day after ISIS’ deadly attacks in Brussels, a prosecutor called Mr. Dratel and said the government was now interested in meeting with Mr. Skoro to determine whether he could be of assistance. Mr. Dratel said he met with prosecutors alone, outlining what his client knew and providing copies of screen shots of certain text messages between Mr. Skoro and a purported ISIS operative in Syria. Two days later, the government, without elaboration, moved to dismiss Mr. Skoro’s illegal charge. The prosecutors did not pursue a meeting with him directly, Mr. Dratel said. He was then moved into immigration custody, where he remains today. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — A team of prominent constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators and former White House ethics lawyers intends to file a lawsuit Monday morning alleging that President Trump is violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business operations to accept payments from foreign governments. The lawsuit is among a barrage of legal actions against the Trump administration that have been initiated or are being planned by major liberal advocacy organizations. Such suits are among the few outlets they have to challenge the administration now that Republicans are in control of the government. In the new case, the lawyers argue that a provision in the Constitution known as the Emoluments Clause bans payments from foreign powers like the ones to Mr. Trump’s companies. They cite fears among the framers of the Constitution that United States officials could be corrupted by gifts or payments. The suit, which will not seek any monetary damages, will ask a federal court in New York to order Mr. Trump to stop taking payments from foreign government entities. Such payments, it says, include those from patrons at Trump hotels and golf courses loans for his office buildings from certain banks controlled by foreign governments and leases with tenants like the Abu Dhabi tourism office, a government enterprise. “The framers of the Constitution were students of history,” said Deepak Gupta, one of the lawyers behind the suit. “And they understood that one way a republic could fail is if foreign powers could corrupt our elected leaders. ” The president’s son Eric Trump, who is an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said the company had taken more steps than required by law to avoid legal exposure, such as agreeing to donate any profits collected at hotels that come from foreign government guests to the United States Treasury. “This is purely harassment for political gain, and, frankly, I find it very, very sad,” he said in an interview on Sunday. The president’s lawyers have argued that the constitutional provision does not apply to payments, such as a standard hotel room bill, and is intended only to prevent federal officials from accepting a special consideration or gift from a foreign power. “No one would have thought when the Constitution was written that paying your hotel bill was an emolument,” one of the lawyers, Sheri A. Dillon, a partner at Morgan Lewis, said at a news conference this month. The legal team filing the lawsuit includes Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard constitutional scholar Norman L. Eisen, an Obama administration ethics lawyer and Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. Among the others are Richard W. Painter, an ethics counsel in the administration of George W. Bush Mr. Gupta, a Supreme Court litigator who has three cases pending before the court and Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor and former congressional candidate who has been studying and writing about the Emoluments Clause for nearly a decade. Ms. Teachout said the one place of potential concern was a nation like China, which rents space at Trump Tower in New York and is a major lender to an office building in New York that Mr. Trump controls in part. Foreign governments, Ms. Teachout and other ethics experts warn, could rent out rooms in Trump hotels as a way to send a message to the Trump family. “If you think other countries are not going to try to leverage relationships with Trump’s companies to influence trade or military policy, that is naïve,” she said. But Andy Grewal, a University of Iowa law school professor, argued in an academic paper published last week that a payment to a hotel owned by the Trump family, like the Trump International Hotel in Washington, would not violate the Emoluments Clause because the money is paid to a corporate entity and not to Mr. Trump directly. “There is no connection between the payment and performance of services by the president personally,” Mr. Grewal said. “It would be a lot of fun to watch,” he said of the lawsuit, “but I imagine it will be kicked out. ” Mr. Eisen said the legal team intended to use the lawsuit to try to get a copy of Mr. Trump’s federal tax returns, which are needed to properly assess what income or other payments or loans Mr. Trump has received from foreign governments. The plaintiff in the lawsuit is a liberal group known as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which until recently was controlled by David Brock, a Democratic Party operative and fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Eisen now serves as chairman of the organization’s board, and Mr. Painter is vice chairman. The lawsuit may run into trouble, other legal experts said, given that CREW, as the organization is known, must demonstrate that it would suffer direct and concrete injury to give it standing to sue. The group says it has suffered harm by having to divert resources from other work to monitor and respond to Mr. Trump’s activities. For example, the group said, it has answered hundreds of questions from news organizations. In a 1982 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a civil rights organization had standing to sue because its use of black “testers” to see whether landlords and home sellers were abiding by federal law had hurt its ability to conduct other activities. But in recent decades, and outside the context of civil rights violations, the court has often been skeptical of broad assertions of standing. Regardless of the lawsuit’s fate, it is just the first hint of the legal assault that the Trump administration will face. Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was separately looking for plaintiffs to file a lawsuit alleging that Mr. Trump is violating the Emoluments Clause. It hopes to find a hotel or that might compete against a Trump hotel as a party with standing to sue. The A. C. L. U. filed an extensive Freedom of Information Act request on Thursday asking the Justice Department, the General Services Administration and the Office of Government Ethics for all legal opinions and memos they have prepared addressing financial or ethical conflicts that Mr. Trump might face. It could potentially use those documents in litigation against the Trump administration. CREW filed a separate complaint with the General Services Administration on Friday over a provision that appears to prohibit the leasing of the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington to an elected federal official. The building is the site of Mr. Trump’s hotel. Perhaps more important, the legal groups said they might challenge executive actions Mr. Trump is expected to take on topics like international trade deals, illegal immigration and climate change. | 1 |
LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals that will soon be bought by Microsoft, is to be blocked in Russia after a local court ruled on Thursday that it had breached the country’s data protection rules, a sign of growing tensions for American tech companies operating in the country. The case in the Moscow city courts arose at a time of debate in Washington over how the United States might retaliate for what American security officials said was the Russian government’s hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee and other digital interference in the presidential election. Russia has a history of increasing regulatory pressure on businesses in political disputes. The case began in August, before Donald J. Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election, and there is currently no connection between the LinkedIn case and the hacking scandal. The country’s push to gain greater control over its internet users is one of a number of attempts by governments worldwide to dictate how people use digital services. From China’s blocking of whole swaths of the internet to Europe’s efforts to regulate what can and cannot be viewed online, different regions and countries are in a battle with companies and other governments to decide how the internet will expand. Russia imposed its ban — a rare occasion of LinkedIn being blocked in a country — after lawmakers passed new rules last year that required any personal digital data on Russian citizens collected by companies to be stored within the country. Officials said the rules were aimed at protecting people’s online privacy from hackers, but critics have claimed the legislation could allow Russian authorities to force companies — both local and international — to hand over sensitive information about their users. Many of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies, like Facebook and Twitter, also do not store data locally within Russia, but Roskomnadzor, the country’s telecommunications watchdog, targeted LinkedIn for its failure to comply with the new data rules. It was unclear why LinkedIn was targeted in particular, rather than any other major social networking site. Analysts have suggested that the Russian authorities focused on the company, an in the country’s social networking market, as a warning to larger tech companies. The Moscow court decision, upholding a previous ruling against LinkedIn, means the company will now be blocked from operating across the country. The ban could take effect as early as Monday, with internet service providers in Russia blocking access to LinkedIn’s web address. The company, which has fewer than five million Russian users among its 467 million global users, could still appeal the court’s decision. “The Russian court’s decision has the potential to deny access to LinkedIn for the millions of members we have in Russia and the companies that use LinkedIn to grow their businesses,” Anoek Eckhardt, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We remain interested in a meeting with Roskomnadzor to discuss their data localization request. ” LinkedIn is being bought by Microsoft — a Silicon Valley tech giant with deep links in Russia — for $26. 2 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. A number of other American tech companies like Facebook and Twitter have made efforts to expand their footprints within the country, though they have had to balance people’s use of these social networks with the government’s often efforts to gain control of digital information. Facebook, for instance, rejected all five requests from the Russian government last year for access to specific data on people’s online accounts, according to the company’s latest transparency report. Twitter also rejected four requests from local officials for individuals’ account information over the same period, according to its own report. Despite LinkedIn’s current problems in Russia, the company has often been willing to bend to local pressures, particularly in China, where it has agreed to abide by the country’s strict censorship rules to build a significant presence there. Other American tech companies like Google and Facebook remain blocked in China. The current standoff over data in Russia started in 2012, when local campaigners in Moscow used social networks to organize widespread protests against the of the country’s current president, Vladimir V. Putin. The same year, Russian hackers breached LinkedIn and stole more than six million of its customers’ passwords. Despite criticism of Russia’s data protection rules, other countries, including Germany, have passed similar legislation that forces tech companies to store people’s digital information on local servers. A number of American tech companies are investing billions of dollars combined to build data centers across Europe to comply with such rules. In Brazil, a judge also blocked WhatsApp, the internet messaging service, after the company, which is owned by Facebook, refused to hand over data to help in a criminal investigation. The efforts have been aimed at safeguarding individuals’ personal data, though companies have been quick to voice their skepticism over such practices. In Russia, companies like Google have also faced other challenges from local incumbents like Yandex, the country’s largest search engine, which have often outmuscled international rivals in their home market. This year, Yandex won a legal challenge against Google over antitrust claims that the American search giant has unfairly favored some of its own mobile services over those of rivals. Eventually, the Silicon Valley company was fined $6. 8 million in the case. | 1 |
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has suggested that the people who voted for Donald Trump and Brexit are a bunch of fascists. [Good. Thank you, Your Grace! It’s always nice when someone of such eminent ecclesiastical authority confirms from on high something which many of us long suspected: that the Establishment really just does not have a fucking clue — and that that’s why we were so right to vote for Trump and Brexit. If Welby had wanted to play a clever game, what he would have done in his speech to the General Synod is keep resolutely schtum about his position on contentious political matters. Sure, many of us could have predicted where his politics probably lay: he is, after all, an Old Etonian and a former corporatist stooge (yes, oil industry — but most of them swing left, I’m afraid) evidently gifted with the emollience and the views which are the only way a churchman can climb up the greasy poll of the Church of England these days. So yes, we could have guessed he was probably a man and an Trump man, as pretty much every Establishment type is. But up until the moment at the General Synod when he called us all out as fascists, we couldn’t be absolutely sure … How good does it feel to know that the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks I’m a fascist and that the people who voted for Donald Trump are fascists and that the ones who are going to vote for Geert Wilders are fascists? It feels absolutely brilliant, actually, because what it does is help put these most extraordinary times we’re living through in their proper context. Think about it: even a reasonably educated with the most rudimentary historical knowledge knows that fascism was about Il Duce, Blackshirts stomping the streets of thirties Italy, about poison gas dropped on Abyssinian villagers, about ethnic cleansing in Libya, about the terrifying enlargement of the State, about rapid militarisation, about aggressive nationalism, about the sacrifice of young men in pointless wars Italy was to win … So clearly, the “f” word could scarcely be further to describe the movements which led to Brexit and the Donald Trump. These weren’t endorsements of the kind of arbitrary authority and abuse of state power we saw in the 1930s but rather very explicit rejections of them. If you really want to use the word “fascistic” in a modern context, you could more aptly apply it to, say, the remoteness and democratic unaccountability of the European Commission, to the corruption and profligacy of the D. C. Establishment, to the businesses ruined and the lives broken by overregulation and Big Government meddling which have led to mass unemployment and poverty in what were once thriving first world nation states, to the ordinary citizens all over Europe being told by their governments, “Here is some cultural enrichment for you from some new friends from the Middle East — and if you don’t like it, tough, because that’s the future we’ve decided to impose on you” … The fact that an intelligent, man like the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot see the good in Trump and Brexit and the fundamental evil in the systems they have overthrown speaks more eloquently than a thousand clever articles by people like me as to why the revolutions we experienced in 2016 and the ones we’re going to go on experiencing in 2017 are so very, very necessary. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a decent, man with a very lofty position in the global hierarchy: but then, so are large numbers of many of the other Establishment types who fought so hard for Remain and so hard against Donald Trump. What they all have in common is that they’re trapped in a bubble, they’ve held on to the reins of power for far too long, and their hegemony is now quite properly being overthrown by a demos who’ve had frankly quite enough of this shit. Justin Welby, you are part of the problem, not the solution. Thank you, your Grace, for reminding us just how deeply the rottenness in our culture is entrenched — and just how much work lies ahead of us before it is excised. | 1 |
With just four days left until election day, many Americans are still perplexed. Who should the people cast their vote for on November 8? 2016 has brought a variety of topics to the surface for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. However, Americans seem to miss a lot of information from both parties during the debates and rallies. Each person is preoccupied with defending themselves or offending the other. Believe it or not, during all the drama there are clear proposals from both Clinton and Trump on several concerns.
A Few Prominent Proposals: Education: When it comes to higher education, Clinton and Trump cannot be more opposites. Clinton introduced the New College Compact. This would allow students entering a four-year college, within their state, not have to borrow money for tuition, books, and fees.
Trump has opposed the New College Compact and claims he would fight any proposal for debt-free public higher education.
Taxes: However, both do see eye to eye on many tax related problems. Clinton and Trump promised the working middle-class Americans a massive tax reduction. Also, they both ensure that the wealthy will pay their fair share in taxes.
Gun Control: Another area that Clinton and Trump agree upon is gun control. This may come as a surprise for many, yet the similarities cannot be ignored. They both want to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals and the severely mentally ill. They also want to expand background checks. Trump goes as far as suggesting “that we empower all law-abiding gun owners to defend themselves because the police cannot be everywhere all the time.” With either candidate, all gun owners rightfully able to bear arms will be entitled to do so, no-one is threatening to disarm anyone.
Immigration: This is one of the most talked about topics among the presidential nominees. Within the first 100 days of office, Clinton says she will set forth a plan that will treat people with respect, fix the family visa backlog, end the three and ten-year bars, and protect American borders.
Trump claims he will have Mexico pay for a wall on the Southern borders and end the catch and release process. Trump also explained that he will deport illegal immigrants, who have committed a crime, in one day.
By going to each of the candidate’s website, people can see a complete copy of their goals, as president of the United States. Determining which nominee would be a better fit as the commander in chief, is an opinion based on how much or how little voters relate to each candidate’s ideas.
Unfortunately, getting acquainted with Clinton and Trump’s prospective plans is not an easy task. There has been chaos from the very beginning with these campaigns. There has never been a dull moment, that is for sure. However, now is the time to become serious and to remember that the world is watching.
By Amy Weins
Edited by Jeanette Smith
Sources:
NASFAA: 2016 Presidential Candidates’ Higher Education Proposals
Hillary Clinton.com: A Fair Tax System; Gun Violence Prevention; Immigration Reform
Donald Trump.com: Tax Plan; Second Amendment Rights; Immigration
Featured Image Courtesy of Steven Bevacqua’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Top Image Courtesy of Matt Wade’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License clinton , hillary , presidential election , Trump | 0 |
Wed, 26 Oct 2016 14:10 UTC © Getty Images A lawyer for Gary Byrne, whose book " Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate , " has sent notices to Media Matters for America and David Brock informing them that he intends to file suit. "Officer Byrne will bring legal action against you, in your personal capacity, and against Media Matters," a lawyer for the former Secret Service officer wrote to Brock, a loyal Clinton ally and the founder of the liberal advocacy group Media Matters. The letter requests Brock and Media Matters to "hold" all records and communications associated with their communications regarding Byrne — including "Any communication(s) between David Brock and The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton" regarding the former Secret Service officer, suggesting there might be collusion between the campaign and her defenders. It also demands Brock "immediately and publicly retract any statement or inference by yourself and/or Media Matters to the effect that Officer Byrne was not fully truthful in recounting within 'Crisis of Character' details from any previous testimony." Additionally, Byrne's attorney demanded a retraction for "the utterly false statement(s) that Officer Byrne was not in close proximity to President William Jefferson Clinton." His lawyer states that "some of our best witnesses to such immediacy are George Stephanopoulos, John Podesta, Leon Panetta, Bruce Lindsey, Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Clinton himself — who appear to have already confirmed ... under oath ... the regular proximity of Officer Byrne to the President for many years." Byrne claims the liberal advocacy group tried to hurt his credibility to defend the Clintons. Lawyers for Brock and Media Matters, Marc Elias and Ezra Reese, acknowledged receiving the letter from Byrne's lawyer. Elias is also a lawyer for Hillary Clinton's presidential election campaign. Byrne, who has been a surrogate for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, told The Post , "We're moving forward with the suit regardless" of whether retractions are issued. My goal here is to get the message out - that everything in my book is true." Byrne has sent a similar letter — and has threatened similar legal action — to Jan Gilhooly, president of the Association of Former Agents of the United States Secret Service, who also questioned the claims made in " Crisis of Character. " Byrne expects the legal filings to come after the November presidential election. | 0 |
Ubisoft’s E3 2017 press conference was an uneven showing of new and old with a few standout titles hogging the spotlight. [First on the stage was Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Legendary Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, effusive about Ubisoft’s “passion,” said that when he spoke to them regarding the new title, he had one request above all. Rather than recycling the Mario license into another 2D platformer, “try to make a Mario game that has never been done before. ” It seems the team took that challenge to heart. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a tactics game, like a slapstick starring a mix of Nintendo characters and Ubisoft’s screeching Rabbids. I’m still not certain what marketing department is responsible for these demented rabbits’ continued existence, but I feel as if they make a strong case for the reinstatement of public floggings. Despite that, the game itself looks great. I should have known better than to doubt the merit of a title which earned Miyamoto’s personal endorsement. Color me interested. In the words of my editor: Do not doubt you heathen. https: . — Noah Dulis (@Marshal_Dov) June 12, 2017, Next came Ashraf Ismail to introduce Assassin’s Creed Origins, the first main entry in the series since the release of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in 2015. Our “taste of Egypt” was a cinematic trailer and then approximately 10 seconds of footage from a camera looking at a dim monitor. The demonstration was jarring and reeked of some sort of unexpected technical difficulty. They promised 30 minutes of gameplay footage once the press conference was over — we’ll get to that later. We had a glimpse of racing title The Crew 2, though no real gameplay was shown. In addition to geographic expansion, the sequel expands into the air and sea. And while it was certainly very pretty, there was little way to know how the game will actually play out when the rubber hits the figurative and digital road. Twisting stunt planes around skyscrapers does look thrilling, but the original The Crew didn’t lack ambition either — it just wasn’t much fun to play. Hopefully, we’ll get a clearer picture of the game on the show floor. South Park: The Fractured But Whole returned to the show after its unfortunate delay and now officially has a release date of October 17th, 2017. The RPG looked typically crude and hilarious, and I don’t doubt that it will be one of Ubisoft’s stronger releases for the holiday season. #UbiE3 Is this the first time ”butt f***ing” has been used at an E3 press conference? I mean, besides annual franchise references. — Nate Church @E3 2017 (@Get2Church) June 12, 2017, After the ***ing came ***ing, by way of a VR experience led by Elijah Wood. Transference takes the player on what is pitched as a virtual reality trip into the memory and emotion of a test subject that has had their experiences digitally recorded by a computer. It was difficult to tell exactly what we might expect, but it’s an adventure that Ubisoft hopes will leave you “still [feeling] unsettled” even after you’ve taken off your headset. Transference is due to launch in 2018. After that we took a trip back in time to 2013 with pirate title Skull Bones which looks similar to Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. Ubisoft Singapore has extracted the excellent naval combat for a game that is obvious for their fans. Skull Bones is a piracy game where you’ll swashbuckle and hoist mainsails alongside friends and enemies, competing for booty while attempting to evade 1720’s justice on the end of a cutlass. The game certainly has potential — Black Flag’s design was just begging for a dedicated pirate adventure — but with boarding that seems to be entirely automated and seemingly little to do beyond multiplayer matches, Skull Bones has a lot to do to prove it can stand on its own. I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about it on the way to its release in Fall 2018. We left the seas for a brief aside into Just Dance and a South Park mobile game, both given little more than token attention en route to Starlink: Battle for Atlas. Think “No Man’s Skylanders. ” This hybrid will see you customizing and piloting a transforming ship through various missions both in space and on the planet’s surface. If you can’t find your ideal craft on store shelves, this time around you can simply purchase the digital version. It’s another solid idea that will depend on how heavily Ubisoft leans on customers for more collectible content. Skylanders was notorious for locking just about every corner of every level behind walls that could only be breached by heading to your local toy store. Ubisoft finished their presser in grand fashion with Far Cry 5, which looked absolutely stunning. It doubled down on the series’ brutal violence, bringing it to fictional Hope County, Montana to the tune of Amazing Grace. Recruitable pets, characters, and multiplayer were confirmed as features, as well as some limited form of tactical command over the AI. We will definitely be diving as deep as we can go into this one — but hopefully not climbing too many towers in between. Finally, Beyond Good Evil 2 was debuted with a massive cinematic trailer that left most in attendance — myself included — with goosebumps. There’s no word on what the game will be, but they’ve nailed an epic aesthetic. If nothing else, they did a phenomenal job of whetting appetites for whatever information is planned next. After the main show, we saw Assassins Creed Origins in full. It was, in a word, devastating. The proposed rejuvenation of the franchise has turned it into a shambling mash of mechanics from Far Cry and Watch Dogs, with an Assassin’s Creed aesthetic smeared over the same things we’ve seen countless times before. You are a Medjay, a guardian of Egypt. RPG elements take center stage here, with loot rarities and statistics that will help you advance as you level up. A branching skill tree allows you to specialize in stealth or assault approaches to the massive world’s challenges. Senu, your eagle friend, functions like a Watch Dogs 2 drone. You’ll use him to tag enemies in order to see their level, role, and behavior. Meanwhile, your ability to actually assassinate them is almost wholly dependent on your respective level, and crafting is based on the same hunting mechanic we’ve seen reused in every Far Cry release since Far Cry 3. The game was beautiful and polished but lacked any sense of the lethality present in earlier Assassin’s Creed titles. Seeing the protagonist drive his hidden blade into the skull of a foe, then that foe turn and charge him because his hidden blade hadn’t been crafted to a high enough level did nothing but completely destroy the fantasy around which the franchise was built. If anything, Assassin’s Creed Origins drives home the point that Ubisoft simply doesn’t seem to understand the franchise or its loyal fans. The 30 minute demo felt bloated, unfocused, and more than anything else, like Assassin’s Creed in name only. We’ll sit down with each of these titles in the next few days. I’m sure that the developers will have a lot to say and that we’ll have even more complete impressions once we’ve had some time to get our hands dirty. Stay tuned for our ongoing coverage of E3 2017. Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both. | 1 |
Search form Search From Bad to Worse : Obama’s Ransom Payment to Iran is Just the Tip of the Iceberg In his bid to pursue a legacy, Obama charts disastrous course with reckless abandon. November 2, 2016 Ari Lieberman
Most of us, including several democratic lawmakers, cringed when Obama inked the Iran deal but those of us who are familiar with the malevolent nature of the Iranian regime, recoiled in horror when we learned that Obama transferred $400 million to the Iranians in exchange for four American citizens held captive by the mullahs on trumped up charges. The $400 million was part of a larger installment totaling $1.7 billion, ostensibly to settle claims Iran had against the United States stemming from aborted Iranian arms purchases dating back to the Shah. Obama claimed that this was money that was “owed” to Iran and the settlement, which included $1.3 billion in interest, saved the U.S. taxpayer “billions” because the Iranians were demanding even more at the Hague tribunal, where the claim was being adjudicated.
The timing and method of the cash transfers were disquieting to say the least and raised serious questions of legality as well as broader geo-political concerns. The Americans were freed only after Iran received its $400 million. The payment, which was airlifted in the dead of night in an unmarked cargo plane, was made in untraceable cash, stacked on wooden pallets. The Iranians demanded Swiss Francs and Euros rather than Dollars and a pliant Obama agreed to the Islamic Republic’s dictates. Gleeful Iranian leaders were quick to announce victory and claimed that the payment was indeed a ransom, contradicting the administration’s adamant denials.
Even within the administration there was confusion about whether the payment was in fact a ransom. State Department spokesman Mark Toner came very close to acknowledging this fact when he noted that the $400 million was used as “leverage” to ensure the Americans’ safe return. The White House however, quickly repudiated the State Department’s characterization.
Even if one were to believe the story peddled by the administration, the mere appearance of a quid pro quo payment potentially exposes the U.S. to extortion and hostage-taking. The Iranians certainly believed it was a ransom payment and more likely than not, every two-bit dictator on the planet saw it that way as well.
But there are deeper more troubling aspects to this convoluted story. In his January 17, 2016 address to the American people, Obama tried to put a positive spin on his dealings with the Islamic Republic but as noted by Rick Richman in an excellent article featured in Mosaic , the deal struck with the Iranians was rotten to its core and the administration deliberately kept the American people in the dark about various aspects of the shady arrangement.
The $400 million that the U.S. transferred to Iran came from Iran’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) account with the Pentagon. The balance of 1.3 billion ostensibly represented interest accrued since 1979. But Obama neglected to note that when Iran filed its lawsuit, the U.S. filed counterclaim against Iran for $817 million for Iranian breaches of its obligations under the FMS program. The U.S. could have conceivably won that counterclaim which would have meant wooden pallets of cash for the American treasury, courtesy of the Islamic Republic.
Moreover, American plaintiffs maintained sixteen U.S. court judgments against the Islamic Republic stemming from that regime’s involvement in terrorist activities. Those judgments totaled $3.9 billion in compensatory and punitive damages.
Some plaintiffs sought to recover their Judgments directly from Iran’s FMS account but their efforts were stymied by the Clinton administration. Instead, under a convoluted deal struck between Congress and the Clinton administration in 2,000, the U.S. treasury was to pay the holders of the judgments against Iran for the amount of their compensatory damages and 10 percent of their punitive damages up to the amount in the FMS fund. The judgments would then be subrogated to the United States, which meant that judgments became direct U.S claims against the Iranian government.
Iran ignored the Judgments and never paid any of the plaintiffs. Under U.S. law, the $400 million sitting in the FMS account should have gone back to the U.S. treasury, which had already paid the judgment holders. But the U.S. treasury never collected a dime on the subrogated claims since Obama shipped the money off on wooden pallets to Iran. Essentially, the U.S. taxpayer ended up footing the bill for Iran’s terrorism while the Iranians were never held accountable for their maleficence.
Obama’s actions represented blatant disregard for the law, for the victims of terrorism and for the American taxpayer. His claim of saving the taxpayer “billions” represents the zenith of mendacity.
Obama claimed that the payments had to be made in cash because existing sanctions prohibited normal banking procedures. But as noted by Richman, the sanctions regimen expressly permits payments made to settle Iranian claims instituted at The Hague, exposing yet another lie by the Obama administration.
There was one, and only one reason why the Iranians requested cash and all but the most disingenuous know what that reason is. The Iranians are the world’s foremost state-sponsors of international terrorism. They finance terrorist groups and proxy militias throughout the region and internationally but can only do so through illicit means that circumvent normal methods of financing. Hence, they demanded untraceable cash. The misery that we are currently witnessing in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere is due in no small part to the Obama administration which provided the Iranians with the cash necessary to keep operations flowing.
In addition to the $1.7 billion in cash, Obama also authorized the release of seven convicted Iranian felons and expunged warrants on 14 others. But this aspect of the transaction seems almost trivial when considering the sheer mendacity and illegality of nearly every other aspect of the deal.
Lastly, the transfer of such a large sum to Iran in “settlement” of an alleged legal claim required the attorney general’s approval but the administration has yet to produce any document bearing Loretta Lynch’s signature authorizing such payment. On October 7, Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) presented Lynch with a series of questions seeking clarification of various aspects of the deal. Lynch, whose tenure as attorney general is proving to be as corrupt and partisan as her predecessor, has inexplicably refused to answer the lawmakers’ queries.
In a desperate attempt to establish a legacy, Obama pursued the Iran deal with reckless abandon, forfeiting positions previously regarded as red lines and signing the worst deal in U.S. diplomatic history. The ancillary deal struck with the Iranians concerning American hostages was laced with outright lies and enabled the Iranians to continue their reign or regional terror. More importantly, it may also have been in violation of existing U.S. law and Lynch’s stonewalling only lends credence to that notion. | 0 |
Panic across country for a day after govt doesn’t introduce any new rule on demonetisation Posted on Tweet
Panic and confusion grew widespread across the country after the Modi government did not introduce any new rule pertaining to the ongoing demonetisation drive. Thousands of anxious citizens thronged the Reserve Bank of India offices in their cities inquiring about the latest alteration to the rules, or rather the absence of one, after no such rider was introduced for one whole day. (Image via intoday.in)
“Ever since Nov 8th, this whole demonetisation saga has been like a reality show – with sudden, new riders being introduced every day as twists to the existing format. We got used to these fluctuations being the norm. But yesterday was different – one whole day went by without Shaktikanta Das or Arun Jaitley or anyone announcing any exception to the rules. I waited and waited till night. After all, this is a government which introduced a rule to be applied for the next day even at 8 pm on the present day. Finally, I reconciled myself to the shock – that there was no new rider for one whole day. That got me worried and here I am, standing outside the RBI office waiting for an appointment, to make sure that it is indeed real!” Chinta Sagar, an anxious gentleman told The UnReal Times .
“First, it was the exception for those with weddings happening. Then came the inedible ink announcement. Then the reduction of exchange limit to 2000 per day. Then of course, the announcement that Saturday would be a senior citizens only day, as far as exchanges are concerned. Now, there’s another announcement about banks only catering to their own customers hereafter. So, following the natural train of action, we weren’t wrong in anticipating another new rule today as well. But we were stunned on not hearing any. I hope the RBI clarifies on this,” another tense youngster cried.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, however, assured citizens not to worry and added that to maintain status quo, the government will continue to announce some random new rule or the other every day. “We have always been a government for the people and we would do nothing that would throw them off the hook. It has come to my attention that a number of them were anxious yesterday after we didn’t announce any sudden change, so I would like to reassure them and state that for their convenience, the government will continue to announce random changes to the rules every day, until the 31st of December,” Jaitley told The UnReal Times NDTV’s Barkha Dutt.
Addressing a more recent problem, the Finance Minister also announced a new “Sonam Gupta Bewafa Cess” on old currency notes that have the “Sonam Gupta Bewafa Hai” slogan inscribed on them. Tweet About Ashwin Kumar
1 of the proud columnists of URT, former co-editor of URT Tamil, amateur musician, Real Harris Jayaraj devotee, UnReal T. Rajendar fanatic, passionate about stopping female foeticide. | 0 |
This Will Change The Way You Watch ‘Apocalypse Now’ Posted today Get ClickHole delivered straight to your spam folder. Follow Us Get ClickHole delivered straight to your spam folder. Follow Us Click Counter 0 0 0 0 ClickHole uses invented names in all of its stories, except in cases where public figures are being satirized. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental. ClickHole is not intended for readers under 18 years of age. © Copyright 2016 Onion Inc. All Rights Reserved. | 0 |
LONDON — If British plans for leaving the European Union have been a dance of the seven veils, the British government removed one of them on Sunday, letting slip to news media that Prime Minister Theresa May is likely to choose to exit Europe’s single market and its customs union — a hard Brexit. Mrs. May is scheduled to make a speech on her plans on Tuesday, but the British weekend papers and Sunday news programs were briefed by Downing Street about the main lines of the policy, and some published selected quotations of what Mrs. May is scheduled to say. Officially, a government spokesman on Sunday called the reports “speculation” and emphasized only the extracts of the speech that were leaked by Downing Street itself, with Mrs. May calling for British unity “to make a success of Brexit and build a truly global Britain. ” Those extracts were not explicit on the single market or the customs union, but the Sunday newspapers, which receive their own briefings from the government before publication, took much the same line: that Britain is headed for a sharp break with Europe after a transitional period. Downing Street dislikes the term “hard Brexit,” but an outcome along those lines is not unexpected, because it flows logically from the priorities Mrs. May has set out, particularly about controlling the country’s borders. Being outside the single market could damage Britain’s important financial services sector and is likely to hit the value of the pound again, at least temporarily. A week ago, Mrs. May said in a television interview that Britain would not be able to keep “bits” of its European Union membership. That, too, was interpreted as a break with the single market, which requires freedom of movement and labor for all citizens of the bloc. “Often people talk in terms as if somehow we are leaving the E. U. but we still want to kind of keep bits of membership,” she said then. “We are leaving. We are coming out. We are not going to be a member of the E. U. any longer. ” She added, “We will be able to have control of our borders, control of our laws. ” She and her officials have made it clear that her two main priorities are ending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over British law, and restoring British control over its borders and immigration, including from the European Union. Those decisions mean that Britain could no longer be a part of the single market for goods, capital, people and services of the European Union, because the rules for that market are adjudicated by the European Court of Justice. The situation is similar for the customs union, which applies only to goods. Membership in the customs union would mean that Britain would have to obey European Union regulations on manufacturing standards and would be banned from making separate trade deals with countries — two of the most important reasons forces have cited for leaving the bloc. Another implication of leaving the single market and the customs union would be Britain’s desire to negotiate a new trade deal with the European Union as a special partner of some kind, but one different from those held by countries like Norway and Turkey. It would also seem to mean trying to negotiate a transitional deal with Brussels while the larger trade deal is being haggled out, which could take many years. Under a transitional deal, which would extend beyond the limit for negotiating the exit, Britain would presumably continue to have a relationship much like the current one, including paying into the European Union’s budget. In an article in The Sunday Times of London, David Davis, the minister in charge of the new Department for Exiting the European Union, wrote that Britain would consider ways to extend or smooth the exit process to provide certainty for businesses. “If it proves necessary, we have said we will consider time for implementation of new arrangements,” he wrote. “We don’t want the E. U. to fail, we want it to prosper economically and politically, and we need to persuade our allies that a strong new partnership with the U. K. will help the E. U. to do that. ” In a combative interview published on Sunday, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, warned that, if no agreement could be reached on market access, Britain could change its economic model from “European style” taxation and regulation to regain competitiveness. “The British people are not going to lie down and say, ‘Too bad, we’ve been wounded,’” he said. “We will change our model and we will come back, and we will be competitively engaged. ” Those comments, from an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, were interpreted as a warning that Britain could use its corporate tax as a form of leverage in Brexit negotiations. In a television interview on Sunday, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, said that Mr. Hammond “appears to be making a sort of threat to the European community,” calling it “a recipe for some kind of trade war with Europe in the future. ” But Mrs. May’s speech on Tuesday, judging from the excerpts, is also meant to assuage European Union colleagues by committing Britain to a close, friendly and constructive future relationship. Britain would prefer a customs relationship with the European Union if one can be negotiated on British terms, which would mean limits on the bloc’s citizens working in Britain and the ability to do separate trade deals. European Union leaders have been largely dismissive of such efforts, but both sides are setting out hard positions before the real negotiations begin, sometime after Britain invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to officially begin the process of leaving the bloc. Mrs. May insists that that will take place before the end of March, even if it requires a vote of Parliament, setting off two years of complicated talks on extracting Britain from a union it joined more than 40 years ago. Mr. Hammond is known to have argued strongly inside the government for Britain to keep its access to the single market to protect its financial sector, which accounts for 10 to 12 percent of Britain’s economic output. Bankers and brokers in the City of London are sometimes reviled by many Britons but are also highly paid, so their tax receipts are important to the Treasury. If a significant number of them moved their operations to European Union cities or New York, the pressure on the British government’s budget to pay for health care, pensions, welfare benefits and military spending would increase substantially. Britain already runs a significantly higher yearly deficit than most European countries, about 4. 4 percent of gross domestic product, and its cumulative debt is estimated at nearly 85 percent of G. D. P. Mainstream economists — under fire for wrongly predicting an immediate recession after the Brexit vote last June — say those figures are likely to worsen as the pound falls and the economy slows from the delayed effects of Brexit and the uncertainty around it. Mrs. May has also emphasized an interest in working with the incoming American administration of Donald J. Trump, and her government trumpeted its success in arranging a Washington meeting with the new president before the end of February. But her officials were not likely to be happy to discover that Michael Gove, who strongly favored Brexit and whom she fired from the cabinet, had secured the first British interview with Mr. Trump, scheduled to be printed in The Times of London on Monday. That interview comes after Mr. Trump had a series of meetings with Brexit advocates like Nigel Farage, the former leader of the U. K. Independence Party, and Arron Banks, who gave millions to fund UKIP and an alternative “Leave” campaign in the June referendum. Both men are expected to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration. | 1 |
Your daily reality snack Georgia Abandons Ukraine's Anti-Russian Obsession
After a brief period in which both Ukraine and Georgia appeared to be united against Russia, it now appears that the two nations are moving along very different paths Originally appeared at Russia Direct
In October, Georgia didn’t support any of Ukraine’s resolutions denouncing the Kremlin’s foreign policy within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). That is surprising, given how many analysts had by now assumed that Georgia and Ukraine were on the same page when it came to Russia.
The two resolutions deal with “the political implications of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine” and human rights abuses “on the occupied Ukrainian territories.” By supporting them, PACE recognized the military conflict in Ukraine as “Russian aggression” for the first time and called on the Kremlin to withdraw its forces from the eastern part of Ukraine. Moreover, it denounced the parliamentary elections , recently conducted by Russia in Crimea .
When the Georgian delegation in PACE didn’t support these resolutions, the nation’s pro-Western parties reacted strongly. For example, the United National Movement lambasted the Georgian government and accused the country’s former Prime Minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, of supporting Russia. Moreover, Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president and now the governor of the Odessa region in Ukraine, described such a stance as a “disgraceful” move.
However, an immediate response came from one of the members of the Georgian delegation in PACE, Eka Beselia. She retorted that Tbilisi needed to defend its own national interests. Even though this statement seems to have alleviated the increasing conflict, the video of Russian-Ukrainian journalist Matwey Ganapolsky, who accuses Georgia of betraying Ukraine in favor of Russia, fuelled the tensions. In contrast, Russian pundits see the unwillingness of Georgia to vote for the PACE resolution as a sign of improvement in Tbilisi-Moscow relations.
In reality, the reluctance of the Georgian Dream, the ruling party in Georgia, to approve these resolutions is just the logical conclusion of complicated relations with Kiev. Since the start of the color revolutions in the post-Soviet space , Georgia and Ukraine were largely in the same boat.
After the success of the Rose Revolution in Tbilisi and the Orange Revolution in Kiev, the newly elected governments were closely connected with each other and teamed up against Russia. This resulted from friendly relations between Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko and former president Viktor Yushchenko on the one hand, and Georgia’s Saakashvili on the other hand.
However, their relationship was rather pragmatic in its nature, although officially Tbilisi recognized Ukraine as one of its closest allies. Since 2007 the democratic processes in the two countries have started moving in a reverse direction. Saakashvili’s penchant for conducting an aggressive policy as well as his authoritarian inclinations was increasing, while Ukraine faced the corruption and the political rivalry between Timoshenko and Yushchenko.
The more impact this had on the countries’ stability and development, the more obvious became the fact that the ruling elites from both sides did not support democratic reforms, but only the regimes that were friendly to them. Thus, Georgian-Ukrainian relations could be seen as a form of cooperation between governments, not between the people.
And this trend became relevant until the 2010 presidential elections, when Georgia’s civil society and population called on the government to support democratic processes and regime change in its “brother” country. From then on, Georgia has been shying away from supporting the political regime in Ukraine and focusing more on the support of the country’s own population.
However, Ukraine refused to consider such tactics, with its official representatives criticizing the Georgian Dream coalition for supporting Russia during the 2012 parliamentary elections. Moreover, Kiev cooperated with Georgia’s United National Movement, which was openly accused of building an authoritarian regime and egregious human rights abuses.
Logically, the new Georgian government under Ivanishvili cannot help paying attention to this fact. But it was relatively reticent and didn’t respond, even when Georgian volunteers came to fight in Eastern Ukraine to support Kiev and accused Tbilisi of supporting Russia. That had some implications for the Georgian Dream: It was seen as a political force that is capable of defending the country’s national interests.
Moreover, Georgian voters also saw the fact that Saakashvili was appointed as the governor of the Odessa region as an unfriendly move from Ukraine, as a slap in the face, because the former Georgian president was legally prosecuted in his home country, which meant that Ivanishvili couldn’t fulfill his pledges and restore justice [During the election campaign he promised to put Saakashvili in jail for corruption and the abuse of power — Editor’s note]. The problem was exacerbated when Kiev granted Saakashvili Ukrainian citizenship, which made it impossible to imprison the former Georgian president.
Saakashvili crossed the red line during the latest parliamentary elections in Georgia during the campaign. First, his colleagues from the United National Movement visited Ukraine. Second, he openly called for a coup d’état against the Georgian government, which he sees as pro-Russian. In fact, he threatened to conduct a new revolution in Georgia. This was the last straw for the Georgian Dream.
It is safe to say that the current Georgian political elites started seeing Ukraine as a real headache and the shelter for dubious and controversial Georgian politicians from the United National Movement accused of different wrongdoings and legal violations.
However, with the victory of the Georgian Dream in the 2016 parliamentary elections, a lot has changed. Moreover, the odds of the party of winning the constitutional majority are really high. It means that the influence of the party is growing in the Georgian parliament and even more could change.
As a result, the government won’t necessarily have to take into account the views of other political forces to take decisions. It can be pretty outspoken now that it won’t put up with anti-government moves and initiatives like the ones promoted by Saakashvili. Moreover, the Georgian voters, who are seeking to have those involved in the violations during Saakashvili’s tenure prosecuted. So, in this regard, the electorate supports the Georgian Dream.
Thus, all this indicates that Georgian-Ukrainian relations have always been more complex and nuanced than they seemed to be at first glance. During Saakashvili’s tenure, there was cooperation between his government and the ones of Timoshenko and Yushchenko. However, eventually, Tbilisi shifted its priority from supporting top political officials to supporting society and people.
Ukrainian politicians should keep in mind that the Russian factor is not the only one that determines the Ukrainian-Georgian agenda. Providing shelter to Saakashvili also does matter. So, to improve the relations with Tbilisi, Kiev should take into account its national interest and support the Georgian people instead of the country’s politicians. | 0 |
Dear MILO — I’m not one to write fan letters, but I realized I wouldn’t get my (completely unnecessary) beauty sleep unless I took some time to say: thank you. [I know you are deluged with fan mail from the college students, military personnel and even grandmothers whose lives you’ve touched, but I hope you take a few minutes to read this letter. After all, it isn’t very often you receive correspondence from someone as fabulous and talented as you. I’m going to get right to the heart of the matter by skipping the requisite part of fan mail that claims you go “too far” in one area or another. I won’t skip the other requisite part — mentioning that your hair and brain are both amazing! In short, thank you for helping Donald Trump to be elected President of the United States. As a fellow foreigner, I know you will recognize that America is often a bit nuts, but seems to regain sanity at key turning points throughout history. We are at just such a turning point, but the good guys winning was, for much of 2016, far from guaranteed. America was on the brink of electing Sick Hillary and devolving completely into a kleptocracy. Without any doubt, you have helped America, a country you love as deeply as your native England, to make the right decision. I will admit, as your biggest fan, that watching the bad guys get upset at you has been just as entertaining as your writing and speaking. The fake news media has gone into overdrive printing lies about you. The campus crybabies have moved past protesting you they now are threatening to stab you. And the bitcoin brownshirt wing of the continues to hate your guts. Without question, your voice is the one that reached millennials on campus, in military service, and, yes, even those currently living in their mom’s basement thanks to the Obama economy. While other leading lights of conservatism were busy arguing policy points or foolishly throwing their weight behind the #NeverTrump movement, you reached young people with a message of free speech, free expression and spread Donald Trump’s message of unleashing hell on the liberal status quo. You completely called it when you wrote in June of 2015 that Donald Trump should be the Internet’s candidate for President. He was. He was also America’s choice. You were one of the vanishingly few people in public life never to doubt his victory — or the power of the internet to propel him to the most powerful elected office on the face of the Earth. Meme magic is real. You’ve waged a vast war for free speech on campuses practically … and won! You’re like a skinny Rambo, with better hair and diction. Your Dangerous Faggot Tour showed young conservatives that they don’t have to furtively hide in the shadows on campus — leading to them expressing themselves as vociferously as their liberal classmates. Can anyone imagine conservative students chalking messages about their candidate in any other situation? Congratulations for inspiring and entertaining an entire generation of young and . Your tour had other effects on voters besides emboldening young conservatives. Your speeches frequently exposed Americans to the ugly underbelly of identity politics. Without a doubt, tens of thousands of voters who would have otherwise voted for Crooked Hillary chose to vote third party or stay home after seeing videos of the hysterical crybabies who have replaced classical liberals in the Democrat power structure. They have been left pondering how their party became the party of hatred and violence. Not to mention many thousands of undecided voters who chose Trump based on the protestors and university administrations who bent over backwards apologizing for allowing you to speak on their campus. Can you blame undecided voters for rejecting four years of the country being run by the most boring nannies and scolds in history? Joyless, soulless schoolmarms may run many American universities, but they won’t run America, in part thanks to you, Milo. I know you could read this forever, because I could write it forever. But both of us need to get back to work, because electing Donald Trump was just the first step in the coming culture war — a war we will win. Maybe my second book will be one long fan letter to myself. In the meantime, I will wrap this up with a few more important MILO moments. Your war with Twitter in 2016 exposed just how far Silicon Valley had descended into liberal activism. You made a convincing case for gay voters to support Donald Trump by speaking outside the Pulse nightclub following the terrorist attack in Orlando. Your speech underscored the betrayal of LGBT citizens by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in their rush to embrace Islam. You twisted the knife in trademark MILO fashion by hosting a Gays for Trump party at the RNC. It was the hottest event of the entire RNC — a convention of which you were the undisputed star. And this is just the beginning. You have recently hit a million fans on Facebook and achieved a dollar book deal with a major publisher for a book that shot to #1 on the Amazon Best Seller list within a day of its announcement, two months from publication. You’re the hottest thing in media, and everyone knows it — even the journalists who continually lie about you to their readers, to no effect. To sum things up, thank you for being you. America and indeed the entire world is a better, safer place with Daddy in charge and with you keeping the world entertained. It took someone as handsome, intelligent, fashionable, talented, popular, stunning and brave as you — me — to write this letter, so you know your contributions to culture and western civilization have not gone overlooked. Here’s to a stunning, successful, winning 2017, packed to the gills with cultural, commercial and journalistic success. You are what young conservatism looks like now — and it’s fabulous. Love forever, MILO, DANGEROUS is available to now via Amazon, in hardcover and Kindle editions. And yes, MILO is reading the audiobook version himself! Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Hear him every Friday on The Milo Yiannopoulos Show. Write to Milo at milo@breitbart. com. | 1 |
World-famous singer Cherilyn “Cher” Sarkisian took to Twitter recently to give her two cents on the re-ignition of the email scandal Republican witch-hunt of Hillary Clinton.
FBI director James Comey bowed to pressure from House Republicans and released a letter informing them of “updates” to the investigation, which was the discovery of emails on disgraced Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner’s personal email devices that were not from or to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Cher vented the frustration that many of us are feeling in this tweet: TIRED OF BULLOUTRAGE‼️ GW BUSH’‘S W.H DID TRASH 22 MILLION FKNG EMAILS‼️HIS WARS KILLED &MAIMED THOUSANDS ,& HE &BANKRUPTED ANSWER THAT
— Cher (@cher) October 29, 2016
The George Bush White House launched two multinational invasions and orchestrated the construction of secret detention centers around the world for the specific intention of committing crimes against humanity – but nobody seems to care about the information that might have been contained in THOSE emails.
The double standard that is applied to Hillary Clinton is outrageous. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, both war criminals, walk free while the nation obsesses over John Podesta’s risotto recipe and a rabble-rousing Russophile rapist draws closer to the White House. Where have our priorities gone? | 0 |
One of the top selling new books on Amazon. com is entitled, Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide. [It purports to list all the many reasons why Americans should vote for Democrats. The book is a fast read, though, as buyers will quickly discover that after its table of contents, the book is filled with blank pages. On its Amazon. com page, the new book “written” by Michael J. Knowles, the managing editor at the Daily Wire, is described as the “most exhaustively researched and coherently argued Democrat Party apologia to date. ” Conservative writer Ben Shapiro endorsed the book with a review: “Thorough. ” Coming soon to Amazon #WorldBookDay pic. twitter. — Michael Knowles 🇺🇸 (@michaeljknowles) March 3, 2017, At the time this story was published on March 9, the book ranked as the top selling book at Amazon. com. It was also featured as the number one political humor book. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
First Lady Melania Trump and son Barron will move to the White House this summer when Barron finishes school, according to a new report. [Melania and Barron will head to Washington once Barron, 11, finishes the school year at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York, Fox News reported Saturday. Author Serafin Gómez cited a “senior White House official” as the source for this claim. Melania and Barron decided that they would not move into the White House on Inauguration Day back in November. There were rumors that they would remain at Trump Tower indefinitely and not move into the White House at all, according to the New York Post, but the White House quashed those rumors Saturday. Gómez’s source said that the first lady has been actively involved in arranging the East Wing residence ahead of the move. Barron will be the first son of a president to live in the White House in more than 50 years, since John F. Kennedy Jr. arrived as a toddler in 1961. Barron’s new living quarters will be small compared to Trump Tower, where he reportedly has an entire floor to himself. | 1 |
LOS ANGELES — Girding for four years of potential battles with Donald J. Trump, Democratic leaders of the California Legislature announced Wednesday that they had hired Eric H. Holder Jr. who was attorney general under President Obama, to represent them in any legal fights against the new Republican White House. The decision by the Legislature to retain Mr. Holder, who is now a prominent Washington lawyer, is the latest sign of the ideological battle that may play out over the next four years between this predominantly Democratic state and Washington. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, defeated Mr. Trump by more than four million votes here. “Having the former attorney general of the United States brings us a lot of firepower in order to prepare to safeguard the values of the people of California,” Kevin de León, the Democratic leader of the Senate, said in an interview. “This means we are very, very serious. ” Mr. de León said he expected California to challenge Washington — and defend itself from policies instituted in Washington — on issues including the environment, immigration and criminal justice. He said California Democrats decided to turn to Mr. Holder as they watched Mr. Trump assemble his cabinet and begin to set the tone for his presidency. “It was very clear that it wasn’t just campaign rhetoric,” Mr. de León said of Mr. Trump’s proposals over the past year. “He was surrounding himself with people who are a very clear and present danger to the economic prosperity of California. ” Mr. Trump did not immediately return requests for comment. The move by Mr. de León and his Democratic counterpart in the Assembly, Anthony Rendon, follows Gov. Jerry Brown’s appointment of Representative Xavier Becerra as attorney general last month, to succeed Kamala D. Harris, who was elected to the United States Senate. That appointment made Mr. Becerra one of the Latino officials in this state, and he is expected to be instrumental in battling with the Trump White House over any attempt to enforce stringent measures aimed at immigrants. Mr. Brown has made clear that he intends to challenge the administration on global warming and that his attorney general will be a key to that battle. The Democratic Party controls of both the Assembly and the Senate in California. Every statewide elected official is a Democrat. Mr. Holder was Mr. Obama’s attorney general from 2009 to 2015. He was the first to hold that position. He is a partner at Covington Burling, a law firm in Washington that specializes in representing states and companies against the federal government. “I am honored that the Legislature chose Covington to serve as its legal adviser as it considers how to respond to potential changes in federal law that could impact California’s residents and policy priorities,” Mr. Holder said in a statement. “I am confident that our expertise across a wide array of federal legal and regulatory issues will be a great resource to the Legislature. ” The Legislature has an ample stable of lawyers on staff, but officials said Mr. Holder and his firm brought specific litigation and political skills that could be needed in the coming years. Mr. de León said the final compensation for the firm had not been set, but would be publicly disclosed once it was. “The cost will be very minimal compared to the billions of dollars at stake if California doesn’t adequately make its case,” he said. | 1 |
Videos Wikileaks: CNN’s Donna Brazile Shared More Debate Questions With Hillary Clinton We can't imagine that Bernie supporters are very happy that this is the person chosen to takeover the leadership position at the DNC after Schultz was pushed out for showing favoritism toward the Clinton campaign. | October 31, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile speaks during the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia , Tuesday, July 26, 2016.
Over the past several weeks DNC Chair Donna Brazile has been pummeled in the media after Podesta’s emails revealed that she provided a debate question to Hillary in advance of a March 13, 2016 debate with Bernie Sanders.
Now, the latest WikiLeaks dump reveals that it wasn’t just a one-off thing. The following email from Brazile, sent one day prior to a March 6th debate with Bernie, shows yet another occasion of her providing an advanced peak at debate questions to the Hillary campaign. We can’t imagine that Bernie supporters are very happy that this is the person chosen to takeover the leadership position at the DNC after Schultz was pushed out for showing favoritism toward the Clinton campaign.
And, sure enough, according to the following transcript from the New York Times , Hillary was well prepared for a question from Lee-Anne Walters about lead poisoning…she even had a handy stat about 500k children having “lead in their bodies”….but those are just stats that most people have on the top of their minds.
COOPER: I want to go to Lee-Anne Walters. This is Lee-Anne Walters. She was one of the first people to report problems with the water in Flint. One of her twin boys stopped growing. Her daughter lost her hair.
She says she’s undecided, and has a question for both of you to answer, but we’ll start with Senator Sanders. Ms. Walters?
QUESTION: A fter my family, the city of Flint and the children in D.C. were poisoned by lead , will you make a personal promise to me right now that, as president, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems must remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States, and notification made to the — the citizens that have said service lines.
SANDERS: I will make a personal promise to you that the EPA and the EPA director that I appoint will make sure that every water system in the United States of America is tested, and that the people of those communities know the quality of the water that they are drinking, and that we are gonna have a plan to rebuild water systems in this country that are unsafe for drinking. COOPER: Let me just point out for accuracy’s sake, there is 10 million lead service pipes delivering water to people all across this country tonight. Secretary Clinton?
CLINTON: Well, I agree completely. I want to go further though. I want us to have an absolute commitment to getting rid of lead wherever it is because it’s not only in water systems, it’s also in soil, and it’s in lead paint that is found mostly in older homes. That’s why 500,000 children today have lead — lead in their bodies.
So, I want to do exactly what you said. We will commit to a priority to change the water systems, and we will commit within five years to remove lead from everywhere.
We were making progress on this in the 1990’s. I worked with then Senator Obama to get more money, more support to do more to remove lead.
And then there is also this follow-up to a previous email in which Brazile promises even more debate questions.
Donna Brazile was noticeably uncomfortable for every second of the following 10-minute interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Kelly pushed hard on the recent Project Veritas undercover videos showing DNC operatives plotting to incite violence at Trump rallies and commit massive voter fraud and over Brazile’s leaked email showing that she provided a CNN debate question to Hillary ahead of a March 2016 debate with Bernie. Brazile tried every trick in the book to deflect and pivot but Kelly held her feet to the fire.
Brazile’s response on the Project Veritas videos were mostly nonsensical though she did summon the typical democrat argument that O’Keefe is a criminal and has a history of doctoring videos. But the real fireworks came when she was pressed on her leaked email revealing that she shared a debate question with Hillary in advance of a debate.
“ I did not receive any questions from CNN , let’s just be very clear.”
“First of all what information are you providing to me that will let me see what you are talking about?”
“ As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted because your information is totally false. ”
“Podesta’s emails were stolen. You’re like the thief that wants to bring into the night what you found in the gutter. ”
“ I am not going to try to validate falsified information. I have my documents, I have my files.
Because Donna seems to be afflicted with the same disease that haunted Hillary during her tenure as Secretary of State, an awful condition the causes the host to “not recall” significant life events, below is a refresher of the email in question.
And here is a similar interview by Jordan Chariton of The Young Turks :
Yeah, but Russia.
This article originally appeared on ZeroHedge.com . Be Sociable, Share! | 0 |
Share on Facebook This man loses pulse for 45 minutes, but then wakes up with an incredible vision of afterlife! A trucker in Ohio shocked hospital staff after coming back to life nearly an hour after he lost his pulse following a massive heart attack — but it's what he claims to have seen during those tense moments that has him sure there's an afterlife. Brian Miller, 41, was opening the lid of a container when he knew something felt wrong — he immediately called 911 and told the operator, “I'm a truck driver and I think I'm having a heart attack.” Sure enough, his main artery was completely blocked — causing what's known as a “widow-maker” heart attack, Fox 8 Cleveland reported . He was rushed to a local hospital where doctors managed to revive him and clear the blockage, but after regaining consciousness and feeling the pain dissipate, he developed ventricular fibrillation, when the heart starts quivering wildly and is unable to pump blood. “He had no heart rate, he had no blood pressure, he had no pulse,” said ICU nurse Emily Bishop. “I mean think about that.” Doctor's performed “strong, hard, fast CPR” and shocked Miller four times to try to revive him, but had no luck. It was during that time that Miller said he slipped away into a celestial world, “The only thing I remember I started seeing the light, and started walking toward the light.” He described walking down a flower-lined path into white light — until he came upon his step mother, who had died recently, “She was the most beautiful thing when I seen her, it was like the first day I met her, (she) looked so happy.” Miller remembered, “She grabbed ahold of my arm and told me, ‘It's not your time, you don't need to be here, we've got to take you back you've got things to go and do.’” After 45 minutes, his pulse returned “out of nowhere,” Bishop said. ”His brain had no oxygen for 45 minutes, the fact that he's up walking, talking, laughing, everything is amazing.” Glad to be back amongst the living, Miller now says there is one thing he is sure of, “There is an afterlife and people need to believe in it, big time.” Related: | 0 |
So this is new.
Via the Financial Times , New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet is coming out hot against CNN and Fox News:
“This mix of entertainment and news, and news masquerading as entertainment, is kind of funny except that we now have a guy who is a product of that world nominated as Republican presidential nominee."
Politico noted that Baquet also called out CNN for hiring Corey Lewandowski, and called Fox News “not a journalistic institution” at heart. He did compliment Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, calling them great journalists.
Earlier this week, the Times published a major story detailing Trump's Twitter insults, which are also available on Twitter: Get the magnifying glass: 2 full pages in 3-pt type of NYT listing hundreds of Trump's insults pic.twitter.com/AylrTa2ScJ — Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) October 24, 2016
Not to be deterred, Baquet also dropped a fun burn, claiming cable news coverage in 2016 has been:
“bad for democracy and those institutions.”
Ouch! | 0 |
Gingrich Infuriates Libs With MASSIVE Call to Trump Voters on Election Day
You can watch the video here:
It is no secret that under the direction of President Barack Obama, Perez directed the challenge of South Carolina’s 2011 Voter ID Law , asserting that the estimated 81,000 South Carolina voters without any photo identification were helpless, hapless victims and not simply irresponsible. Advertisement - story continues below
He also blocked voter ID requirements in Texas, and was well known for testifying that political leadership did not play a factor in the decision to dismiss three of the four defendants in the criminal voter intimidation case of the New Black Panther Party, a radicalized faction considered by virtually every other advocacy organization to be a hate group.
More than an isolated incident, this systemic disconnect from the concern Americans have for their children, their families and their communities is typical of the Clinton administration, and since Hillary Clinton has been literally at the center of U.S. power for 8 years, that term isn’t a stretch.
Despite four years of backpedaling on Benghazi and eight years of excuses for the loss of hope and confidence in America’s strength and power to provide for our children and generations to come, Hillary Clinton has no answers beyond empty rhetoric.
If Hillary Clinton won’t stand up for our children, won’t make them and their future her first priority, we must turn to a leader who will: her Republican rival Donald Trump. Advertisement - story continues below | 0 |
Forget the standard hangout by the beach or sightseeing through a city vacation. Hiking, walking and biking are less common ways to explore a destination, according to Susan Sparks, a travel adviser at Points of Interest Travel in Aspen, Colo. who specializes in customized active trips. “When you take an active trip, you’re out in nature and get a perspective on a place that most travelers don’t. Plus, you’re moving a lot and burn plenty of calories to balance out all the eating and drinking that are typical on vacations,” she said. But she cautions that all active getaways aren’t created equal and offers tips on planning one that’s best for you. Yes, you can plan an active vacation on your own, but Ms. Sparks said that booking with an outfitter is a smarter way to go. “A seamless active vacation can be logistically complicated to plan, and trip outfitters have done the groundwork of mapping out routes, vetting out good hotels along these routes and buying the right equipment,” she said. Reliable outfitters for walking, hiking and biking trips include Backroads, Butterfield Robinson, Gray Co. Mountain Travel Sobek, DuVine Cycling Adventure Co. and Trek Travel. Most offer private and group trips, and all have specialists who can help you choose a trip based on your interests, budget and fitness level. Your idea of an active vacation could mean waking up early to embark on a full day of movement. For another traveler, however, a of leisurely walking with breaks built in for long lunches and cultural tours constitutes activity. Pick a trip according to your definition of active. Ms. Sparks also advises choosing a trip that matches your fitness level. If you’re looking for a week of challenging hiking, for example, the flat and even terrain in Mallorca won’t cut it, but the steep inclines in Italy’s Dolomites will. “If you take a trip that’s too easy or too difficult,” she said, “you may feel like it was a waste of money and time. ” Are you a biker, or are walking and hiking your activities of choice? Keep in mind that not every destination is suited to every kind of activity. Tuscany, for example, is a haven for bikers, but the busy roads and lack of walking trails make it less ideal for a walking holiday. Similarly, El Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route in northern Spain, is a hiker’s dream, but the narrow trails don’t offer the ease of open roads for biking. Multisport trips offer more variety than a trip that’s solely walking or biking. “There are many fun trip options that combine walking and biking and also have rafting and kayaking thrown in,” Ms. Sparks said. One example is a Backroads trip to Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast that includes walking, biking and kayaking. | 1 |
Last week, members of the group Veterans Assisting Veterans (VAV) penned an open letter to “all Americans” criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren ( ) and many of her fellow Democrats for their support of illegal immigrants and calling for these politicians to put United States veterans first. [“Senator Warren and others like her should know the difference between legal and illegal activity and chose instead to act out negatively in selfish political theater,” the letter reads. It asks, “Where’s your rally for US Veterans, Senator Warren?” The group wrote they are “deeply troubled by the continued lack of prioritization by some prominent elected members of our government. ” John MacDonald, a board member and VAV spokesman, signed the letter. He and fellow VAV member Dennis Moschella appeared on “Fox Friends Weekend” Sunday and were invited back on again Monday morning. During Sunday’s interview, MacDonald reminded Warren, “Illegal immigrants didn’t vote for her. ” According to the Boston Herald, the group has funded the purchase of wheelchairs for local veterans and horse therapy at Ironstone Farm in Andover, Massachusetts. “A message we have for every politician in this country: There are between 15 and 20 million veterans,” MacDonald said in Monday’s interview. “If we get all our veterans together, people that are serving currently in the armed forces, and call our representatives, we have an unbelievable voting bloc. ” The letter also criticizes Sen. Ed Markey ( ) Reps. Michael Capuano ( ) and Seth Moulton ( ) and Boston’s Democrat Mayor Martin Walsh for not doing enough for veterans issues. Moulton served in the Iraq War. The sole Republican mentioned in the letter is Sen. John McCain ( ). “Even Republican Senator and US Veteran John McCain has seemed to forget about his fellow veterans and the deep troubles at the VA … and its extremely sad,” the letter notes. Last December, Breitbart News reported that some employees at the hospice unit of the Veterans Affairs medical center (VAMC) in Bay Pines, Florida, left the body of a deceased veteran in a shower room for over nine hours. In 2015, a damning report published by the Inspector General for Veterans Affairs revealed that a number of former combatants’ documents at the Los Angeles VA Regional Office (VARO) were placed in employee shred boxes without being processed. All but one of the documents labeled for shredding had the potential to affect veterans’ benefits. According to the Boston Herald, Warren spokeswoman Lacey Rose said the of veterans is of “utmost importance” to the senator. “She also knows that standing up for our veterans and rejecting President Trump’s unlawful, immoral, and irresponsible attacks on immigrants are not mutually exclusive issues. ” Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter and Periscope @AdelleNaz | 1 |
Long time Trump opponent Sen. John McCain ( ) said in an interview aired Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin represents more of a threat to the world than Islamic State — although he conceded that he has seen ‘no evidence’ Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election. [McCain made the remarks during an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7:30” program, where he was asked how much of a threat he believed Vladimir Putin to be to global security. . @PutinRF_Eng a bigger threat than ISIS @SenJohnMcCain tells #abc730 @abbydphillip @peterbakernyt @abwrig @jaketapper @jonathanvswan pic. twitter. — abc730 (@abc730) May 29, 2017, “I think he is the premier and most important threat, more so than ISIS,” he said. “I think ISIS can do terrible things and I worry a lot what is happening with the Muslim faith and I worry about a whole lot of things about it. ” “But it’s the Russians who tried to destroy the very fundamental of democracy, and that is to change the outcome of an American election,” he said. McCain, an outspoken opponent of President Trump, has frequently dipped his toe in theories about alleged Russian influence in the 2016 election. In the interview, he called the controversy surrounding Russia and the firing of FBI Director James Comey a “scandal of significant proportions. ” However, he conceded that there is “no evidence” the Russians affected the outcome of the election. “I’ve seen seen no evidence they succeeded, but they tried, and they are still trying to change elections, they just tried to affect the outcome of the French elections,” he said. “I view the Russians as the far greatest challenge we have. ” In the interview, McCain also said Trump makes him “nervous from time to time” but that he knows that the president frequently takes the advice of his national security team. “Can I tell you that he does all the time? No. Does it bother me? Yes, it bothers me. ” Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY | 1 |
NICE, France — He lived on the 12th floor of a high rise in a heavily immigrant housing project and was known to his neighbors only as a moody and aggressive oddball. He never went to the local mosque, often grunted in response to greetings of “bonjour” and sometimes beat his wife — until she threw him out. The French authorities had much the same view of the man, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a heavyset from Tunisia — definitely trouble but not a grave menace to the security of the nation. At 10:45 on Thursday evening, however, Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel was starting an attack that would stun and horrify his old neighbors, the French security forces and much of the world: stepping on the accelerator of a refrigerated truck he had rented, he turned the vehicle into a highly efficient instrument of mass murder. Zigzagging so as to hit as many people as possible as the vehicle careered down the Promenade des Anglais, alongside the Mediterranean, Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel transformed the celebrated French Riviera boulevard, crammed with people who had just watched a fireworks show celebrating Bastille Day, into a vast tableau of carnage and panic. By the end of his murderous drive, when he was shot to death by the police, 84 lifeless bodies were left scattered behind him and scores of others lay gravely wounded. “We were all like zombies, just running and screaming,” recalled Alexia Carbonne, a who had gone out Thursday evening with a girlfriend to watch the fireworks. The dead included 10 children and teenagers, François Molins, the prosecutor who oversees terrorism cases, said on Friday. Among the victims were two German students and their teacher two Americans two Tunisians, and one Russian. Of the 202 people wounded, 52 had serious injuries and 25 were in intensive care, Mr. Molins said. His the third act of terrorism in France in a year and a half, highlighted the difficulties of guarding against unconventional attacks. Yet it also left the French government facing uncomfortable questions about whether it had provided sufficient security in Nice even as it urged citizens to recognize that the terrorist threat would not be eradicated quickly or easily. “I want to tell my fellow countrymen that we will win this war, but that we might be faced with new retaliations, that there will probably be more innocent victims,” said Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel appeared not to have left behind any public declaration of his motive or indicated any allegiance to the Islamic State or another extremist group. On Saturday morning, the Islamic State said Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel was a “soldier” for its cause and had “carried out the attack to answer the calls for targeting the nationals of countries in the coalition” fighting the extremist group in Syria and Iraq. But it remained unclear whether the claim of support was an effort by the Islamic State, also know as ISIS or ISIL, to associate itself with a attack without having been involved in its planning or having any direct contact with Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel. He had a history of petty crime, including a suspended sentence for assaulting a motorist this year. But he was never flagged as a potential jihadist radical and, Mr. Molins said, he was “completely unknown by intelligence services, both at the national and local levels. ” Still, French officials labeled the attack terrorism and cast the episode as the latest in a series that have made France a battlefield in the violent clash between Islamic extremists and the West. The tool he chose for his attack, a speeding vehicle, also fits with a 2014 exhortation by Abu Muhammad the spokesman for the Islamic State, to jihadists who wanted to kill French or American citizens but did not have any bombs to hand. “Smash his head with a rock or slaughter him with a knife or run him over with your car,” Mr. Adnani advised. Mr. Valls said the attacker in all likelihood had ties to radical Islamist circles. “He is a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam one way or another,” Mr. Valls told France 2 television. Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, was more cautious. “We have an individual who was not at all known by the intelligence services for activities linked to radical Islamism,” Mr. Cazeneuve said, noting that he was not in any French intelligence databases for those suspected of radicalization. He said that the ongoing investigation would determine whether the suspect had acted alone, possibly because of he was psychologically “unbalanced,” or whether he was linked to a terrorist network. Residents in his former apartment building on a hill overlooking the city said they had never seen him at the local mosque and never heard him mention religion. Indeed, they said he rarely spoke at all and seemed to be in a permanent haze of anger, particularly after his marriage fell apart. Samir Boufet, an resident in the building, remembered him as a “big guy who clearly had lots of problems. He never spoke with anyone. ” A friend of Mr. Boufet’s, who gave his name as Walid Ben, said Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had a reputation in the neighborhood as a wife beater and always seemed in a foul mood. The French police on Thursday raided two locations in Nice looking for clues to his motivations and possible links to extremist groups. One was the apartment building where Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlal had lived with his wife and three children. The other was a small apartment in the east of Nice — near the city’s former slaughterhouse — to which he moved about a year ago after his wife demanded they live separately. Near the second residence, forensic experts in chemical hazard suits clambered in and out of a truck parked by the side of the road. Painted on its back was the address of a showroom in St. a town adjacent to the Nice airport. Local residents said the truck had been used by Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel for his work as a delivery man at the showroom. But the manager there, John Neto, said the terrorist had never worked for him and that the truck was used by an entirely different man whom he declined to name. Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel rented the refrigerated truck he deployed as a killing machine on Monday at a rental company just down the road from the showroom. A female manager on duty at the company said Friday he had provided all the required documents, including a special permit allowing him to use a heavy vehicle. The woman, who declined to give her name, said that Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had aroused no suspicions. But she said she had grown increasingly worried that her truck was being used as a weapon while watching television reports of Thursday evening of the scene on the Promenade des Anglais. She then got a call from the police asking her to give information about who had rented the truck and how. At 9:34 p. m. on Thursday, according to surveillance footage, Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel arrived by bicycle to collect the rented truck and then drove it into the center of Nice, arriving at 10:30 p. m. in the Magnan neighborhood, just north of the Promenade des Anglais. His deadly rampage began around 15 minutes later, when he drove the truck south and, after passing a children’s hospital where his young victims now lie, he then turned onto the promenade, which was packed with spectators watching the end of the Bastille Day fireworks. Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel initially ran over two people, including a Muslim woman, on the sidewalk, and then continued driving for 1. 1 miles eastward, running over people left and right as he swerved on and off the sidewalk. Outside the Negresco Hotel, Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel fired at three police officers they returned fire, and then pursued him for about 1, 000 feet, until they shot and killed him outside a Hyatt hotel and casino. He was found dead in the passenger seat. In the truck’s cab, police found an automatic 7. pistol, a cartridge clip, and several cartridges. They also found a fake automatic pistol two fake assault rifles, a Kalashnikov and an a nonfunctioning grenade and a mobile phone and documents. On a visit to Nice, President François Hollande defended his government against mounting criticism that it had slipped up. Praising security services, he said they had “taken all necessary measures so that this fireworks show might be as protected as possible — as had been the case during the European Championship soccer tournament. ” “Why Nice?” Mr. Hollande asked. “Because it is a city that is known worldwide, one of the most beautiful cities on the planet,” he said. “Why on the 14th of July? Because it is a celebration of freedom. It was, therefore, indeed to affect France that the individual committed this terrorist attack. ” Hours before the attack Thursday evening, Mr. Hollande had said that a state of emergency put in place after the Nov. 13 attacks in and around Paris would end soon. The government will now seek to extend the state of emergency for three months. As France announced three days of national mourning, starting on Saturday, world leaders — from Pope Francis and President Obama to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May — expressed sympathy and outrage. It was a sadly familiar ritual for France, where a total of 147 people were killed in terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January and November of last year, and it raised new questions throughout the world about the ability of extremists to sow terror. The internet reverberated with calls for prayer for victims of attacks in Brussels, Istanbul, Orlando, Fla. Baghdad and other cities struck by mass terrorism attributed to Islamist extremists this year. Struck down at the height of the summer tourism season, Nice on Friday stumbled on as if in a daze, its normally crowded seaside restaurants and luxury hotels mostly closed as armed police officers blocked entry to much of the Promenade des Anglais, still littered in places with surgical gloves, bloody clothing, and other detritus of the previous night’s terror. Late on Friday evening, a long caravan of police vehicles drove slowly down the promenade away from the city center, leaving the wide, boulevard open to pedestrians and cars once again. Makeshift memorials set up where Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s victims had fallen drew groups of silent mourners and ever growing piles of white carnations. “The horror, the horror has, once again, hit France,” Mr. Hollande told the nation early Friday morning before leaving for Nice. “France has been struck on the day of her national holiday,” he said. “Human rights are denied by fanatics, and France is clearly their target. ” | 1 |
For the last 20 years, if you were in the bar business and knew one thing about the bartender Adam Seger, it was that he was the man behind the Seelbach cocktail. The Seelbach is named after the Seelbach Hotel (today the Seelbach Hilton) a storied lodging in downtown Louisville, Ky. that is mentioned briefly in “The Great Gatsby. ” Shortly after being put in charge of the hotel’s bar and restaurant operations in 1995, Mr. Seger declared that he had discovered a recipe for a cocktail that was once the hotel’s signature drink. He tested it, liked it and put it on the menu. The news media soon picked up on the tale, and within a few years, the Seelbach cocktail was regarded as a rescued classic. It’s a tantalizing back story, one that has charmed cocktail writers and aficionados for years, and there’s only one thing wrong with it: None of it is true. After two decades of Mr. Seger, 47, who left the hotel in 2001 and recently helped open the Tuck Room in downtown Manhattan, has decided to come clean that he concocted not only the drink but also the story behind it. “I was nobody,” Mr. Seger said of his standing as a bartender then. “I had no previous accolades in the bar world. I knew I could make a great drink. I wanted it to be this promotion for the hotel, and I felt the hotel needed a signature cocktail. How could you have a place that F. Scott Fitzgerald hung out in that doesn’t have a damn cocktail?” Mr. Seger’s sin is hardly an original one bartenders have been telling tales since there have been bars to tend. It is, however, an unusual instance of legerdemain in an era when mixologists have made an effort to be more scrupulous about cocktail history. The Seelbach cocktail story began when Mr. Seger started digging into the hotel’s history. “We found old menus,” he said. “I was convinced there had to be a Seelbach cocktail. ” Except there wasn’t. So he created one, mixing bourbon, triple sec and Angostura and Peychaud’s bitters, and topping it all with sparkling white wine. He then came up with an elaborate origin story involving a couple from New Orleans who had honeymooned at the hotel in 1912. The man ordered a manhattan, the woman a Champagne cocktail. The clumsy bartender, spilling the bubbly into the manhattan, set the mess aside and made the drinks anew. But the accidental mélange got the barman thinking. Soon, the Seelbach cocktail was born. The Louisville was the first to write about the drink. Soon, it was included in “New Classic Cocktails,” a 1997 book by Gaz Regan and Mardee Haidin Regan. Later, it found its way into “Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails,” an influential book by the drinks historian Ted Haigh, known as Dr. Cocktail. To Mr. Seger’s amazement, no one ever asked him to produce an old menu with the drink on it. “When Ted’s book came out, I thought, ‘Oh, now this is getting too serious, because this is a history book,’” Mr. Seger said. Mr. Seger, who talked of how he had “carried this around” for years, recently confessed his transgression to Mr. Regan. “To be honest,” Mr. Regan said, “I always suspected that Adam had created the drink, but I really, really loved it, his story was almost plausible, and I needed recipes for ‘New Classic Cocktails. ’” When informed by a reporter of the drink’s new birth date, Matthew Willinger, the hotel’s director of public relations, replied that the cocktail “has certainly been a tradition of the hotel and will remain part of its future. ” Recipe: The Seelbach Cocktail | 1 |
Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Sign up.) Let’s turn it over to Adam Nagourney, our Los Angeles bureau chief, for today’s introduction. No one saw it coming. When Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday appointed Xavier Becerra, the Democratic congressman from Los Angeles, to fill the position of California attorney general, the move roiled the state’s political establishment. (Much of the speculation had centered around the possibility that Mr. Brown would choose his wife and close adviser, Anne Gust Brown, to replace Kamala Harris, the attorney general who was just elected to the United States Senate.) Mr. Brown likes to surprise. And after the drubbing Democrats took in Washington this year — and the defeat of Hillary Clinton, who Mr. Becerra campaigned for so intensely that he even entertained the idea she might pick him as his running mate — it’s hardly a shock that Mr. Becerra is eager to return to California. “Most insiders believed he wanted to move back to California, so all in all it was a pretty elegant political play,” said Peter Ragone, a political consultant in San Francisco who is advising Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor who is running for governor in 2018. But the appointment shakes up a Democratic political world that had already been girding for fundamental changes as its three most senior elected officials, all of whom are over 70 — Mr. Brown, Senator Barbara Boxer and Senator Dianne Feinstein — prepare to exit from the scene. Mr. Becerra joins a very crowded list of Democrats angling for some of those jobs. And now he has the advantage of a perch, the office of attorney general, that historically has afforded its occupant a lot of exposure. Mr. Becerra, 58, will now be one of the Latino officials in the state at a time when California is gearing up for clashes with Donald J. Trump on immigration. He could run for attorney general again and make a career out of that. But he now has a platform that will allow him to run for governor, or for that matter senator. But not too soon. “I don’t think it’s viable to get appointed and then quit immediately to run for something else, but he will run for something else down the road,” Mr. Ragone said. • Joe McKnight, 28, who was a standout football player at U. S. C. was fatally shot in Louisiana in a possible episode of road rage. [The New York Times] • Los Angeles police officers were legally justified in shooting a homeless man last year on skid row, prosecutors said. [Los Angeles Times] • California faces a looming teacher shortage, and the problem is getting worse. [Los Angeles Times] • The tax man cometh: Officials look to get a hand into the emerging marijuana economy. [The Associated Press] • The U. F. C. ’s Conor McGregor is developing a reputation as someone who can do anything. But can he box? [The New York Times] • A reprieve for : A Malibu woman said she would not act on a permit giving her the right to kill the mountain lion. [The Associated Press] • SpaceX hopes to resume rocket launches soon, after a fiery explosion grounded its missions. [The New York Times] • The remains of an ancient elephant were found during construction on a new subway corridor in Los Angeles. [Los Angeles Times] • Honorees are crying foul as Hollywood Walk of Fame stars fall into disrepair. [Hollywood Reporter] • Most Muslim characters are on television shows that rely on terrorism as a story line. Can that change? [The New York Times] • Emma Watson and Miles Teller were set to be the leads in the critically acclaimed “La La Land. ” Then they weren’t. [The New York Times] • Book Review: “Let There Be Laughter” by Michael Krasny, the San Francisco radio host, is a celebration of Jewish humor. [The New York Times] See a pothole in San Diego? There’s an app for that. Over the summer, the city introduced “Get it Done San Diego,” an app and companion website that allows residents to report problems along the streets and sidewalks using their smartphones. After six months of operation, we checked in with city officials to see how it’s going. Almis Udrys, San Diego’s director of performance and analytics, said the app had been downloaded roughly 9, 500 times and was used to send more than 38, 500 reports to the city. About half of those reports have been resolved, either fixed or determined to be a nonissue, he said. The rest were referred to other agencies, like a utility company, or remain open. The most common complaint? Graffiti, followed by potholes and broken streetlights. According to Mr. Udrys, the fix time has averaged around 10 days, but longer in the case of a big repair like a bent traffic light pole. There are still kinks to work out. Some app users have expressed frustration after reporting problems that fall under the responsibility of other agencies — for example, a bridge managed by Caltrans. The city refers those reports to the agencies, but whether they get addressed is anyone’s guess, some users said. What’s more, for residents uninterested in downloading yet another app, San Diego does not offer the convenient 311 phone reporting system used in other cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mr. Udrys said San Diego hoped to introduce one in the “next few years. ” Reviews of the “Get it Done” app in the iPhone store and Android website, as well as in a recent discussion on Reddit, the online forum, have been generally positive. Karl Decker, 38, said he used the app to report a curb that needed a fresh coat of red paint outside his house. Workers took care of it in less than a week. “I was just really, really impressed,” he said. California Today goes live at 6 a. m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes. com. The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U. C. Berkeley. | 1 |
Ralph Branca, the pitcher who had three consecutive seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers but who was never allowed to forget one pitch that crushed them, died early Wednesday in Rye Brook, N. Y. He was 90. Branca’s unforgivable offense (at least to Dodger fans) came on the afternoon of Oct. 3, 1951, when, in a final game with the New York Giants to determine the National League championship, he served up Bobby Thomson’s electrifying (at least to Giants fans) home run — the “Shot Heard Round the World” — probably the most memorable in baseball history. The Dodgers had been in first place by 13½ games in but the Giants had come back to tie for first on the season’s final weekend. “A guy commits murder and he gets pardoned after 20 years,” Branca once said at an ’ game. “I didn’t get pardoned. ” His daughter Patti Barnes said he was pronounced dead shortly after midnight at a rehabilitation center near his home. In baseball lore the Thomson homer has been preserved in amber. It sits alongside Lou Gehrig’s farewell at Yankee Stadium, Don Larsen’s perfect game in a World Series and “the Catch,” Willie Mays’s spectacular snare of a Series blast at the same Polo Grounds, three years after Thomson’s “shot. ” It was also immortalized in American literature by Don DeLillo, who opened his 1997 novel, “Underworld,” with an extended, lyrical of that Wednesday at Coogan’s Bluff, complete with echoes of the radio announcer Russ Hodges’s disbelieving call as the ball headed for the fence and sailed over the Dodgers’ left fielder, Andy Pafko, culminating, as pandemonium erupted, with the joyous, repeated declaration, “The Giants win the pennant!” “Pafko at the wall,” DeLillo wrote. “Then he’s looking up. People thinking where’s the ball. The scant delay, the stay in time that lasts a hairsbreadth. And Cotter standing in section 35 watching the ball come in his direction. He feels his body turn to smoke. He loses sight of the ball when it climbs above the overhang and he thinks it will land in the upper deck. But before he can smile or shout or bash his neighbor on the arm. Before the moment can overwhelm him, the ball appears again, stitches visibly spinning, that’s how near it hits, banging at an angle off a flashing everywhere. “Russ feels the crowd around him, a shudder passing through the stands, and then he is shouting into the mike and there is a surge of color and motion, a crash that occurs upward, hands and faces and shirts, bands of rippling men, and he is outright shouting, his voice has a power he’d thought long gone — it may lift the top of his head like a cartoon rocket. “He says, ‘The Giants win the pennant.’ ” As for the unlucky pitcher, DeLillo wrote: “Branca turns and picks up the rosin bag and throws it down, heading toward the clubhouse now, his shoulders aligned at a slant — he begins the long dead trudge. Paper falling everywhere. ” Branca, a strapping who had won 13 games in the regular season, had started and lost the opener of a playoff series, yielding home runs by Thomson and Monte Irvin in the Giants’ victory at Ebbets Field. But the Dodgers won the next day at the Giants’ home turf, the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, setting the scene for the climactic game. The Dodgers took a lead into the bottom of the ninth inning behind the starting pitcher, Don Newcombe, who was still on the mound. Then the Giants struck, scoring a run and putting men on second and third with only one out. Thomson, who had hit 31 home runs that season, was coming to bat. Dodgers Manager Charlie Dressen phoned his bullpen, where a coach, Clyde Sukeforth, was watching Branca and another of the team’s leading pitchers, Carl Erskine, warm up. Dressen asked who was ready. Erskine had just bounced a curveball, Sukeforth told the manager. Dressen summoned Branca. Branca threw a fastball, and Thomson took a strike. Branca then delivered a second fastball, this one high and perhaps a bit inside. The ball flew off Thomson’s bat on a line toward the green wall in left field. “Sink, sink, sink,” Branca told himself. Hodges, the Giants’ announcer, made the call: “There’s a long drive … it’s gonna be … I believe — the Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” Thomson had delivered a homer to give the Giants a victory, capping a pennant drive known as “the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff” and sending them into the World Series against the Yankees. (In that Series, the Yankees doused the Giants’ hopes for a title in six games.) After the loss, Branca sat on the wooden stairs of the clubhouse, a affair, his head bowed, his shoulders hunched. In the Polo Grounds parking lot, his fiancée, Ann Mulvey, the daughter of James and Dearie Mulvey, part owners of the Dodgers, had been waiting for him. She was accompanied by her cousin, the Rev. Pat Rowley, a Jesuit priest. When Branca emerged, he asked Father Rowley, “Why me?” The priest told him, “Ralph, God chose you because he knew you’d be strong enough to bear this cross. ” Branca bore that burden without complaint even after learning a few years later that Giants players had been tipped to forthcoming pitches for much of the 1951 season through a scheme in which the Giants used a telescope in the Polo Grounds’ clubhouse to pick up opposing catchers’ signals. Details of the were publicly revealed by Joshua Prager in The Wall Street Journal in 2001 and in his book “The Echoing Green” in 2006. Thomson, who died at age 86 in August 2010, always maintained he was not tipped that Branca would be throwing a fastball on what became that fateful home run pitch. But Branca was convinced otherwise. “When you took signs all year, and when you had a chance to hit a bloop or hit a home run, would you ignore that sign?” Branca said in an interview weeks before Thomson’s death. “He knew it was coming. Absolutely. ” Ralph Theodore Joseph Branca was born on Jan. 6, 1926, in Mount Vernon, N. Y. the 15th of 17 children of John Branca, a conductor, and his wife, Katherine. After pitching for New York University as a freshman in spring 1944, he made his debut for the Dodgers in June. At 6 feet 3 inches and 220 pounds, with an outstanding fastball, Branca flourished in 1947 when he went . He was and the following seasons, making the National League team all three years. After a losing season in 1950, he rebounded to go — until that playoff series with the Giants. Branca encountered more misfortune at the Dodgers’ spring training camp in 1952. A chair he was sitting on tipped over on a newly waxed floor and he fell backward onto a bottle. His back was thrown out of alignment, tilting his pelvis and affecting his leg motion. He never regained his form, winning only 12 more games with the Dodgers, the Detroit Tigers, the Yankees and the Dodgers again, finishing his career in 1956 with an record. Branca rejected speculation that the Thomson homer had affected his psyche. “They were saying that Bobby’s home run was such a trauma that I couldn’t go on,” he told Sports Illustrated 40 years later. “That’s ridiculous. If you play sports, you expect to lose some. If I hadn’t been hurt, that home run wouldn’t have affected me at all. ” After retiring from baseball, Branca became an insurance salesman and served as president of the Baseball Assistance Team, which provides financial aid to needy baseball figures. Branca and his 16 brothers and sisters were raised Roman Catholic. But in 2011, Prager, the author of the book on Thomson’s home run, told Branca that genealogical research had determined that his mother, who arrived in America from Hungary at age 16, was born Jewish, that her birth name was Kati Berger, and that two of her siblings had died in concentration camps. According to traditional Jewish law, Branca and his siblings were Jewish. “Maybe that’s why God’s mad at me — that I didn’t practice my mother’s religion,” Prager quoted Branca as saying with a smile that perhaps betrayed newfound reflection on his baseball fate. “He made me throw that home run pitch. He made me get injured the next year. ” Before entering the nursing home, Branca lived at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, N. Y. Besides his daughter Patti, he is survived by his wife, Ann another daughter, Mary Ellen Valentine and three grandsons. Ms. Valentine is married to Bobby Valentine, the former major league player and manager who became a broadcaster and is now the athletic director at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. Of his 16 siblings, Branca was the last surviving one. Through the years, Branca appeared with Thomson at ’ games, baseball dinners and cruises. They turned over a portion of their earnings from joint appearances to charity and became friends. And Branca grew resigned to being known solely as a classic goat of baseball history. “Nobody remembers that at 21, I won 21 games,” he once said. “Nobody remembers that at 25, I had 75 wins. All they remember is the homer. ” | 1 |
Ever wonder what would happen if the U.S. was nuked? While there are numerous factors to take into consideration in the event of a nuclear war on U.S. soil, we’ve done our best to answer some of the most commonly asked questions, in the simplest and most understandable of terms.
Which Areas Would be Hit, and How Far Would the Fallout Reach? On the topic of which regions of the U.S. would be hit; part of it is left up to guess work, as we are unable to fully predict the aggressing nation’s tactics, but then much of it is also based on logic. For example, any nation that strikes the U.S. will want to disable their nukes, so we can easily surmise that areas such as North Dakota would be obliterated.
Active nuclear energy plants would also make good targets, as the added nuclear energy from the reactors would maximize destruction. And then of course, there are the major government facilities that would be targeted, at least, those that are known of – unfortunately, it’s safe to assume an aggressing nation’s intelligence would have a better idea of the U.S. government’s “soft spots” than the average American citizen.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, however, let’s go with what we know; what kind of targets would the U.S. go for? In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, numerous military personnel, politicians, and now historians claim that the first bomb was dropped to prove it could be done, and the second bomb was dropped to display the United States’ strength to Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, who was originally aligned with the U.S. and Britain during WWII, but who the U.S. knew would become a problem once the war was over, (Foner, 2014, p. 887-949).
While we are aware there are numerous citizens who, to this day, refuse to believe any other version of events than the original government narrative, the point is, we can’t use the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an accurate indicator of the type of targets the U.S. would choose. Fortunately though, we do have a detailed list of targets the U.S. created in 1956 – in the event of war with the Soviet Union – that was released through the National Archives and Records Administration . The list includes major cities for “ systematic destruction ,” including areas that contain “ Agricultural Equipment ” and “ Transformers, Heavy .” Most horridly though, was a target simply titled “ Population .”
Yep. The almighty, all wise, glorious, wholesome and righteous, baseball-loving, apple pie-eating, land of the free, and home of the brave, planned to target large populations of innocent civilians, and it’s with that in mind we can surmise that largely populated areas would be potential targets here in the States, as well.
Provided below are two maps created by FEMA, the first of which is from 1990, and shows the presumed targets the Soviets would have hit in the event of a nuclear attack. “Fallout,” according to the University of Notre Dame , is described as the mixture of earth and/or water that has entered the rising fireball caused from the detonation of a nuclear bomb near the Earth’s surface. This mixes with the radioactive debris of the explosion at an early stage, and is then blown into the troposphere and lower stratosphere, creating fallout. The most lethal fallout is indicated by the darkest coloration, while the lesser lethal fallout is indicated with yellow:
Source: FEMA
In this map, FEMA shows a sample fallout pattern we could expect in a nuclear attack:
Source: FEMA
How Long Would the Fallout Last? After being blown into the troposphere and lower stratosphere, “ the material is then re-distributed over polar (3-12 months) or equatorial regions (8-24 months). Fall-out removal times (defined in terms of half-life) ranges from 10 to 24 months depending upon seasonal conditions, most rapid during spring, slow in summer ,” again, this is according to the University of Notre Dame, (source above).
Where Would Government Officials and the “Elite” Go in the Event of a Nuclear Attack? | 0 |
troll…ignore the ignorant and blatantly dumb “Alfi”. | 0 |
BEIJING — For generations, the “ War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression” has been ingrained in the minds of Chinese schoolchildren. Revolutionary hymns evoked the bloody years, from 1937 to 1945, of what is known outside China as the Second War. Chinese documentaries denounced Japan’s “eight years of belligerence. ” Now the war is getting a new name, and an extended time frame. In a move aimed at stirring up nationalism and support for the ruling Communist Party, President Xi Jinping’s government has ordered educators to rewrite textbooks to describe the conflict as the “ War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression,” lasting from 1931 to 1945, the authorities said in a statement on Wednesday. Under the decision, the Second War will be described as having started in the fall of 1931, when the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Manchuria. Previously, the war’s beginning had been traced to the Marco Polo Bridge incident, a skirmish in 1937 between Japanese forces and Chinese troops along a rail line southwest of Beijing that represented the beginning of conflict. The Chinese Ministry of Education said the decision to add six years to the war sought to promote patriotic education and to highlight the Communist Party’s “core role” in resisting Japanese fascism in the prelude to World War II. It also seemed intended to rally support for the party among young people as Mr. Xi vigorously promotes Communist history and thought in schools. Zhang Lifan, a historian in Beijing, said the decision to revise the length of the war was justified from a historical perspective. But he said it would also have political benefits for the party and would encourage sentiment. “Chinese leaders still have a Cold War mentality,” he said. “They’ve tried to conjure up imaginary enemies in the world. ” Mr. Xi has worked in recent years to enhance the image of the Communists and their achievements in World War II, even though many historians believe it was the Chinese Nationalists, not the Communists, who did most of the fighting. The party had not previously emphasized the fight against the Japanese from 1931 to 1937, when Communist forces were in disarray as they fought a civil war with the Nationalists. During that time, the Nationalists led efforts to resist the Japanese and negotiate truces. It was not until 1937 that the Communists joined forces with the Nationalists to fight an increasingly belligerent Imperial Japanese Army. Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese politics at King’s College London, called the textbook revision a “tidying up of history. ” He said the revised account exaggerated the Communists’ accomplishments. “It demonstrates this continuing keenness by the party now to seek sources of legitimacy wherever it can,” he said, “and reveals more insecurity than real strength. ” The change will probably ruffle feathers in Japan, China’s longtime rival, as the countries jockey for influence in Asia and struggle to overcome the legacy of World War II, more than 70 years after the global conflict ended. Yasuhisa Kawamura, press secretary for the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on Thursday that it was not up to the Chinese government to decide the length of the war. “It is important that Japan and China should demonstrate they do not focus excessively on the unfortunate past,” he added. Mr. Xi has accused Japan of distorting history, and the Chinese state news media has criticized Tokyo’s efforts to revise textbooks, saying it has played down atrocities by Japanese soldiers. When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan visited Pearl Harbor last month, Chinese internet users brimmed with outrage, saying Mr. Abe had not done enough to apologize to China for Japan’s actions during the war. In Beijing, many people applauded the government’s decision to revise the textbooks, which are filled with references to wars against “aggression” by foreign forces. The Korean War, for example, is known as the war to resist United States aggression and aid Korea. “The Japanese have also altered their textbooks, why can’t we?” said Wang Yalin, 30, a musician. Still, he said, the change would most likely fuel sentiment in China. Zhao Feng, 38, a tailor, acknowledged that the relationship between the countries had deteriorated. But he said it was important to note the earlier date of Japan’s invasion of China. “The occupation started much earlier,” he said. On social media, some people were more skeptical of the government’s motives for making the change. “Don’t use history education for political ends,” one person wrote on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. “The most important thing is to learn the truth. ” | 1 |
0 комментариев 7 поделились
"Это полный бред и полная чушь, это просто способ внутриполитической борьбы, способ манипулирования общественным мнением накануне президентских выборов в самих Соединенных Штатах", - сказал Путин.
По мнению российского лидера, образ предпочтительности Трампа для России создан СМИ не случайно. "Я вообще редко вижу, когда что-то случайно создается ведущими СМИ, - сказал Путин. - Эта сама идея вброшена в общественное сознание в ходе президентской кампании США, на мой взгляд, только с одной целью - с целью борьбы тех, кто защищает кандидата Демократической партии госпожу Клинтон в борьбе с представителем Республиканской партии, в данном случае, в борьбе с господином Трампом".
Глава государства напомнил слушателям о том, как работает эта схема. Сначала создается образ врага, которым назначается Россия, а потом Трамп объявляется "российским фаворитом". При этом, на самом деле, никто не может сказать, как в дальнейшем поведет себя кандидат, став президентом. Какие свои обещания он выполнит, а про какие просто забудет.
"Поэтому, по большому счету, это для нас более менее безразлично, - сказал президент. - Но, конечно, мы не можем не приветствовать слова, мысли, намерения, в которых публично говорится о нормализации отношений между США и Россией".
Подобного рода риторика приветствуется вне зависимости от того, от какой из сторон она исходит, подчеркнул Владимир Путин.
"Экстравагантность Трампа", по мнению президента России, это хорошо продуманный политический шаг. "Что касается самого господина Трампа - он выбрал свой способ достучаться до сердец избирателей, - сказал президент. - Он, конечно, ведет себя экстравагантно, мы все это видим, но, я думаю, что не так уж это все бессмысленно".
Республиканец Трамп, считает Владимир Путин, сегодня представляет интересы значительной части американского общества, которое устало о тех самых элит, которые десятилетиями находятся у власти.
"Он просто представляет интересы таких вот простых людей и сам изображает из себя такого простого парня, который критикует тех, кто десятилетиями находится у власти, тех, кому не нравится передача власти по наследству", - пояснил свою точку зрения глава государства.
Президент добавил, что насколько такая стратегия эффективна, покажут выборы в ближайшее время. При этом он в очередной раз повторил, что российские власти будут работать с любым президентом, которого выберет американский народ и который захочет сотрудничать с Россией.
Вмешательство в избирательную систему одной страны другим государством, в том числе, с помощью кибератак, недопустимо, сказал российский лидер, отвечая на вопрос о кибератаках, направленных на избирательные системы за рубежом.
"Вмешательство во внутриполитические процессы одной страны в другой недопустимы вне зависимости от того, каким способом такие попытки могут предприниматься - с помощью кибератак, либо с помощью каких-то других инструментов, подконтрольных организаций внутри той или другой страны", уверен президент России.
Напомним, сегодня глава государства принимает участие в итоговой пленарной сессии XIII ежегодного заседания Международного дискуссионного клуба "Валдай". Тема заседания в этом году - "Будущее начинается сегодня: контуры завтрашнего мира".
Читайте последние новости Pravda. Ru на сегодня | 0 |
in: Mainstream Media , Politics , Propaganda , Sleuth Journal Yes, Virginia, there really IS a poll fairy skewing the polls in favor of Hillary Clinton. Yesterday, I wrote about a brand new leak that had come my way. I read through the first 5 pages, confirmed that the two entities in the document were genuine and were really in cahoots, and quickly got out the information that the polls we are seeing with Clinton in the lead are fake. But, in full disclosure, I made a mistake. I really should have read the last 3 pages, because if I had, I wouldn’t have published the document as a legitimate leak. It was full of outrageous Hollywood sci-fi “salvage options” for the campaign that included magnetized mind control and a fake alien invasion. It’s interesting to note that all of those options actually do exist – DARPA experiments on things like that , and things even creepier . However, it seems far-fetched that the Clinton campaign would/could go that far, and even more so that a business that does polls and analyzes them would have experimented with the tactics. So, I removed the post. There are enough lies and rumors going around the internet without me adding to them. That isn’t the end of the story, though, because part of that document was legit. I began to do further research and discovered that the gist of the fake document was accurate. The polls in the MSM that show Hillary in the lead are being faked, and they’re being bought and paid for. We’re all being manipulated by the collusion of Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the media. Their attempts at predictive programming through fake polls is so blatant that even the most oblivious people have noticed that something seems awry. It has long been a successful method of propaganda to leave in just enough truth to make the lie seem viable. In Mein Kampf , Adolf Hitler wrote (emphasis mine): All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—t hat in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility ; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously . Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying . First of all, I found a copy of the disbursements from a Clinton-aligned SuperPac called Priorities USA Action on the website Red State Watcher . (click image to enlarge) This shows that the SuperPac paid the princely (or should I say, presidential?) sum of $391,250.00 for polls that were overwhelmingly positive to Clinton. These documents appear to be legitimate. The website Conservative Treehouse did a great analysis and posted links to the FEC(Federal Election Commission) filing PDFs from the SuperPac, as well as screenshots. Here are links to the PDF – pages 92 and 118 show that they did indeed make the payments shown above. But… When I did a reverse image search, I found the same thing on the following sites. And by the same thing, I mean exactly the same. And, these sites with conservative sounding names are all relatively new sites. I checked on Alexa.com to see how long they’d been around. Aside from Red State Watcher, which is definitely legit and has been around for a long time, here’s the rundown on a few of the others. http://usapoliticsnow.com/ – since May 2016 http://incredibleusanews.com/ not long enough for statistics to be available http://truthfeed.com/ – since May 2016 Now, this doesn’t say for certain these sites are fake ones, put up by the opposition, but it does cast some questions on the credibility. These stories are all based on a video alleged to be by Anonymous, but in actuality, the YouTube channel is Anonymous Patriots. Their first video was posted 7 months ago – March 16, 2016. Other sources concur that the polls being broadcast by the mainstream are skewed or outright fake. A professor at SUNY has been saying all along that Donald Trump was strongly in the lead. Back in February, Fortune magazine published an article by Dr. Northrup that showed, based on his analysis, Trump had a 97% chance of winning the election. He still stands by this opinion. Dr. Helmut Norpoth wrote a post for The Hill explaining how these polls published by the MSM are misleading. To start with something basic, opinion polls are really about “opinions,” not actions. At their best, they can tell us how people feel about political issues and personalities. Do voters, for instance, like or dislike candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? Yet having an opinion and acting on it are two different things. Barely 6 in 10 voting-age American citizens turn out for presidential elections. Ascertaining the opinions of 100 citizens is just a start. Now you have to determine which 60 of them actually take the time to mark a ballot. They are the “likely voters.” They are the only ones that count. But to find them is no easy chore. It is ingrained in all of us that voting is civic duty. So nearly all of us say, oh yes, I’ll vote, and then many will not follow through. Dr. Northrup is not alone in his claims that Trump is far, far ahead of Hillary Clinton. The website Govt. Slaves reported on a polling app called Zip back in August. Despite a majority of opinion polls showing the 2016 presidential election going to Democrat Hillary Clinton, a smartphone app developer says his data suggests challenger Donald Trump will be the victor. “Based on the stats we see, he looks strong,” says Ric Militi, co-founder of San Diego-based Crazy Raccoons, maker of the Zip question and answer app. His app poses questions and polls responses based on an average of 100,000 daily users. “I go with Trump, based on what we see.” Breitbart showed evidence of Reuters “ back rigging” the polls in Georgia to indicate a Clinton victory. Speaking exclusively to Breitbart News, political polling pioneer Pat Caddell said the Reuters news service was guilty of an unprecedented act of professional malpractice…”This comes as close as I have ever seen to cooking the results ,” said the legendary pollster and political consultant. “I suppose you can get away with it in polling because there are no laws. But, if this was accounting, they would put them in jail.” … “The looks to me, are far as I can indicate, they have merely decided to go back and revise their numbers in a formula that removes voters or allocates them–I am not sure how they are doing this–proportionately,” he said. Reuters has rejiggered its methods in order to get the results they want, said the man , whose out-of-the-box interpretations of the American electorate were the brain-work behind the insurgent presidential campaigns of Sen. George McGovern (D.-S.D.) in 1972, Georgia Gov. James E. “Jimmy” Carter in 1976, President Carter 1980 and Sen. Gary Hart (D.-Colo.) in 1984 . Millenium Report concurs about the poll-rigging. In view of so much fake poll data that is systematically dumped into the public domain by the MSM, the American people being gradually conditioned to believe that Clinton is really ahead in this race. With each passing week the Clinton numbers increase by 5 or 10% which should put her with 175% of the populace by now. Yes, there contrivance of poll numbers is that ridiculous. 2016 Election Being Rigged By The Hour, Polls Fraudulent, Clinton Popularity Grossly Exaggerated These same fraudulent tactics were utilized during the democratic primary with much success. Bernie Sanders’ loss was the direct result os so much fixing and rigging, manipulating and scheming. That Sanders himself permitted all the fraud is the biggest scandal of all, particularly after he heartily endorsed Comrade Clinton for president. Such a transparent betrayal of his once loyal will most assuredly push many voters over to Trump. But here’s the real conspiracy. I think there is a Clinton-based conspiracy to cast doubt on everything coming out of the opposition, which in turn reinforces everything coming from them. First of all, vet your sources. Here’s how. When you see an article from a source you don’t recognize, go over to Alexa.com and paste in the homepage address. You’ll see a chart that shows you how long the website has been around, and below that will be the global and national ranking of the site. This isn’t conclusive, of course. There are legitimate new websites popping up all the time, but I have to think that some of these more outrageous, allegedly “conservative” websites could be new websites started by those who want Hillary Clinton to be in office. These sites can perpetrate all sorts of wild rumors and fake documents and this has a two-fold effect. Most importantly, these types of stories cast doubt on the real leaks that are out there. What better way to discredit the massive information being provided by Wikileaks than to mix in a bunch of fake leaks? People without critical thinking skills will extrapolate from this: “This leak is fake, so all the leaks must be fake. Holy cow, they’re lying about our Queen Hillary.” Secondly, crazy rumors being spread through conservative and libertarian sources make us all look…well, crazy. If we are dispensing inaccurate information from questionable sources, then everything we say becomes subject to more doubt. The Gateway Pundit shows an actuarial review that determined Trump could possibly be looking at a landslide victory. With all the liberal distortions and dishonesty we decided to have a small team of actuarial and statistics professionals take a look at a couple of the recent polls to get their take on the reliability of these polls. They selected the recent FOX poll from October 14 showing Hillary up by 7 and the WSJ/NBC poll from October 16 showing Hillary with an 11 point lead. The first observation is that both polls are heavily skewed towards Democrats. At a high level, the FOX poll consists of 43 Dems to 36 Reps to 21 Other while the NBC poll shows 44 Dems to 37 Reps to 19 Other. By selecting more Dems the polls are designed to provide a Dem result. Our experts next analyzed the data and calculated results using the same data from the two surveys on a split of 40 Dems, 40 Reps and 20 Other. The results show that using either sets of data Trump comes out ahead with a larger margin of victory using the FOX data. Clearly the polls using data that is heavily weighted towards Democrat voters is incorrectly skewed. … it is difficult to determine what the independent voters will do but many independent voters partook in the primaries to vote for Trump. Therefore it is more likely that Independent voters vote for Trump as well. If more Democratic voters vote for Trump than Republicans vote for Hillary and more Independents vote for Trump than Hillary, both scenarios which are highly likely, then the results of the general election will likely be a Trump landslide . It’s easy to see how this supports the possibility of a stolen election. Remember during the debate when Donald Trump refused to say that he would accept the outcome of the election if it wasn’t in his favor? Not only has Camp Clinton been caught more than once rigging the election, they’re redoubling their efforts in social perception. Here are a few ways they’re doing it: The discrediting of websites who are open about their dislike of Hillary Clinton. The fake polls that assure everyone that Clinton’s victory is guaranteed. The manipulation of public opinion through false reporting in the MSM. Potentially putting up websites with fake conservative names in order to spread misinformation in the hopes that other conservative websites will make the posts go viral, then “disproving” the rumor they started themselves. Coincidentally (or not), I’ve spent hundreds of dollars over the past few weeks because my websites have been hacked. I’d love to know if any other alternative media sites are having these issues. If you have information on this, drop me a quick private message on Facebook. Submit your review | 0 |
Joachim Neander was a Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood everything around him as a manifestation of the Lord’s will and work. There was no room in his worldview for randomness, only purpose and praise. “See how God this rolling with beauty as a robe,” one of his verses goes. “Forests, fields, and living its Master’s glory sings. ” He wrote dozens of hymns like this — and . Then he caught tuberculosis and died at 30. Almost two centuries later, in the summer of 1856, workers quarrying limestone in that valley dug up an unusual skull. It was elongated and almost chinless, and the fossilized bones found alongside it were extra thick and fit together oddly. This was three years before Darwin published “The Origin of Species. ” The science of human origins was not a science the assumption was that our ancestors had always looked like us, all the way back to Adam. (Even distinguishing fossils from ordinary rock was beyond the grasp of many scientists. One popular method involved licking them if the material had animal matter in it, it stuck to your tongue.) And so, as anomalous as these German bones seemed, most scholars had no trouble finding satisfying explanations. A leading theory held that this was the skeleton of a lost, bowlegged Cossack with rickets. The peculiar bony ridge over the man’s eyes was a result of the poor Cossack’s perpetually furrowing his brow in pain — because of the rickets. One British geologist, William King, suspected something more radical. Instead of being the remains of an atypical human, they might have belonged to a typical member of an alternate humanity. In 1864, he published a paper introducing it as such — an extinct human species, the first ever discovered. King named this species after the valley where it was found, which itself had been named for the ecstatic poet who once wandered it. He called it Homo neanderthalensis: Neanderthal Man. Who was Neanderthal Man? King felt obligated to describe him. But with no established techniques for interpreting archaeological material like the skull, he fell back on racism and phrenology. He focused on the peculiarities of the Neanderthal’s skull, including the “enormously projecting brow. ” No living humans had skeletal features remotely like these, but King was under the impression that the skulls of contemporary African and Australian aboriginals resembled the Neanderthals’ more than “ordinary” skulls. So extrapolating from his low opinion of what he called these “savage” races, he explained that the Neanderthal’s skull alone was proof of its moral “darkness” and stupidity. “The thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a brute,” he wrote. Other scientists piled on. So did the popular press. We knew almost nothing about Neanderthals, but already we assumed they were ogres and losers. The genesis of this idea, the historian Paige Madison notes, largely comes down to flukes of “timing and luck. ” While King was working, another British scientist, George Busk, had the same suspicions about the Neander skull. He had received a comparable one, too, from the tiny British territory of Gibraltar. The Gibraltar skull was dug up long before the Neander Valley specimen surfaced, but local hobbyists simply labeled it “human skull” and forgot about it for the next 16 years. Its brow ridge wasn’t as prominent as the Neander skull’s, and its features were less imposing it was a woman’s skull, it turns out. Busk dashed off a quick report but stopped short of naming the new creature. He hoped to study additional fossils and learn more. Privately, he considered calling it Homo calpicus, or Gibraltar Man. So, what if Busk — “a conscientious naturalist too cautious to make premature claims,” as Madison describes him — had beaten King to publication? Consider how different our first impressions of a Gibraltar Woman might have been from those of Neanderthal Man: what feelings of sympathy, or even kinship, this other skull might have stirred. There is a worldview, the opposite of Joachim Neander’s, that sees our planet as a product of only tumult and indifference. In such a world, it’s possible for an entire species to be ground into extinction by forces beyond its control and then, 40, 000 years later, be dug up and made to endure an additional century and a half of bad luck and abuse. That’s what happened to the Neanderthals. And it’s what we did to them. But recently, after we’d snickered over their skulls for so long, it stopped being clear who the boneheads were. I’ll start with a confession, an embarrassing but relevant one, because I would come to see our history with Neanderthals as continually distorted by an unfortunate human tendency to believe in ideas that are, in reality, incorrect — and then to leverage that conviction into a feeling of superiority over other people. And in retrospect, I realize I demonstrated that same tendency myself at the beginning of this project. Because I don’t want to come off as or as pointing fingers, here goes: Before traveling to Gibraltar last summer, I had no idea what Gibraltar was. Or rather, I was sure I knew what Gibraltar was, but I was wrong. I thought it was just that famous Rock — an unpopulated hunk of geology, which, if I’m being honest, I recognized mostly from the Prudential logo: that limestone protuberance at the mouth of the Mediterranean, that elephantine white molar jutting into the sky. True, I was traveling to Gibraltar on short notice when I the director of the Gibraltar Museum, Clive Finlayson, he told me the museum happened to be starting its annual excavation of a Neanderthal cave there the following week and invited me to join. Still, even a couple of days before I left, when a friend told me she faintly remembered spending an afternoon in Gibraltar once as a teenager, I gently mansplained to her that I was pretty sure she was mistaken: Gibraltar, I told her, wasn’t somewhere you could just go. In my mind, I had privileged access. I pictured myself and Finlayson taking a special little boat. In fact, Gibraltar is a peninsula connected to Spain. It’s a lively British overseas territory, with 30, 000 citizens living in a city on its western side — a city with bakeries and clothing stores and tourists buying all the usual kitsch. Some unusual kitsch, too — like a laminated child’s place mat I spotted that, in a typical tourist destination, might say something unexceptional like SOMEONE WHO LOVES ME WENT TO GIBRALTAR, but here read WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER! BRITISH FOREVER! The history of Gibraltar, given its strategic location, is a grinding saga of military sieges and ruthlessly contested changes in ownership. The residue of that strife, today, is a pronounced British patriotism and a exchange of slights with Spain, which still disputes Britain’s claim to the territory. After Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, in 2012, when Gibraltar projected towering images of Her Majesty on a side of the Rock — “a clear act of provocation,” one reporter called it — Spain began inspecting vehicle after vehicle at the border, backing up the line for hours, stranding the bulk of Gibraltar’s work force, who commute in every day. The afternoon I showed up, activists from a Spanish political party had crossed into Gibraltar and hung an enormous Spanish flag high up on the Rock. This wasn’t just mischief. It was regarded as an act of symbolic terrorism. When one of the men appeared in court two days later, I read, a woman screamed at him, “Gibraltar will never be Spanish!” She sounded like that defiant place mat come to life. I happened to arrive in Gibraltar the week of the Brexit vote. Up in England, people were thundering about the working class versus elites, sovereignty and immigration, warning that British identity was being fouled by the European project. But in Gibraltar — a fully detached nib of Britain, flanked by water on two sides and Spain on the third — the question was less philosophical: If the United Kingdom left the European Union, Spain might seize the opportunity to isolate Gibraltar, leaving the territory to shrivel up, like a flap of dead skin. The Gibraltarian government had already called on the House of Commons for help. There was concern that Spain would jam up the border again and that it might happen right away. Around town, “Remain” signs hung everywhere. The atmosphere was edgy, as though everyone was holding hands, waiting to see whether a meteor would hit. It was like the hairline cracks between so many and Thems seemed to be widening, and some corrosive, molten goop was seeping out: mutual dependence curdled with contempt. Clearly it was happening back home in America too. All in all, it was a good week to spend in a cave. Gorham’s Cave is on Gibraltar’s eastern coast: a tremendous opening at the bottom of the sheer face of the Rock, shadowy and like a cathedral. Its mouth is 200 feet across at the base and 120 feet tall. It tapers asymmetrically like a crumpled wizard’s hat. Neanderthals inhabited Gorham’s Cave on and off for 100, 000 years, as well as a second cave next to it, called Vanguard Cave. The artifacts they left behind were buried as wind pushed sand into the cave. This created a high sloping dune, composed of hundreds of distinct layers of sand, each of which was once the surface of the dune, the floor of the cave. The dune is enormous. It reaches about of the way up Gorham’s walls, spilling out of the cave’s mouth and onto the rocky beach, like a colossal cat’s tongue lapping at the Mediterranean. Every summer, since 1989, a team of archaeologists has returned to meticulously clear that sand away and recover the material inside. “I realized a long time ago, I won’t live to see the end of this project,” Finlayson, who leads the excavation, told me. “But I think we’re in a great moment. We’re beginning to understand these people after a century of putting them down as apelike brutes. ” Neanderthals are people, too — a separate, branch of our family tree. We last shared an ancestor at some point between 500, 000 and 750, 000 years ago. Then our evolutionary trajectory split. We evolved in Africa, while the Neanderthals would live in Europe and Asia for 300, 000 years. Or as little as 60, 000 years. It depends whom you ask. It always does: The study of human origins, I found, is riddled with vehement disagreements and scientists who readily dismantle the premises of even the most questions. (In this case, the uncertainty rests, in part, on when, in this long evolutionary process, Neanderthals officially became “Neanderthals. ”) What is clearer is that roughly 40, 000 years ago, just as our own lineage expanded from Africa and took over Eurasia, the Neanderthals disappeared. Scientists have always assumed that the timing wasn’t coincidental. Maybe we used our superior intellects to outcompete the Neanderthals for resources maybe we clubbed them all to death. Whatever the mechanism of this replacement, it seemed to imply that our kind was somehow better than their kind. We’re still here, after all, and their path ended as soon as we crossed paths. But Neanderthals weren’t the louts we’ve imagined them to be — not just a bunch of Neanderthals. As a review of findings published last year put it, they were actually “very similar” to their contemporary Homo sapiens in Africa, in terms of “standard markers of modern cognitive and behavioral capacities. ” We’ve always classified Neanderthals, technically, as human — part of the genus Homo. But it turns out they also did the stuff that, you know, makes us human. Neanderthals buried their dead. They made jewelry and specialized tools. They made ocher and other pigments, perhaps to paint their faces or bodies — evidence of a “symbolically mediated worldview,” as archaeologists call it. Their tracheal anatomy suggests that they were capable of language and probably had raspy voices, like Julia Child. They manufactured glue from birch bark, which required heating the bark to at least 644 degrees Fahrenheit — a feat scientists find difficult to duplicate without a ceramic container. In Gibraltar, there’s evidence that Neanderthals extracted the feathers of certain birds — only dark feathers — possibly for aesthetic or ceremonial purposes. And while Neanderthals were once presumed to be crude scavengers, we now know they exploited the different terrains on which they lived. They took down dangerous game, including an extinct species of rhinoceros. Some ate seals and other marine mammals. Some ate shellfish. Some ate chamomile. (They had regional cuisines.) They used toothpicks. Wearing feathers, eating seals — maybe none of this sounds particularly impressive. But it’s what our human ancestors were capable of back then too, and scientists have always considered such behavioral flexibility and complexity as signs of our specialness. When it came to Neanderthals, though, many researchers literally couldn’t see the evidence sitting in front of them. A lot of the new thinking about Neanderthals comes from revisiting material in museum collections, excavated decades ago, and it with new technology or simply with open minds. The real surprise of these discoveries may not be the competence of Neanderthals but how obnoxiously low our expectations for them have been — the bias with which too many scientists approached that other Us. One archaeologist called these researchers “modern human supremacists. ” Inside Gorham’s Cave, archaeologists were excavating what they called a hearth — not a physical fireplace but a spot in the sand where, around 50, 000 years ago, Neanderthals lit a fire. Each summer, the Gibraltar Museum employs students from universities in England and Spain to work the dig, and now two young women — one from each country — sat under work lights, clearing sand away with the edge of a trowel and a brush to leave a cube. A black band of charcoal ran through it. The students worked scrupulously, watching for small animal bones or artifacts. They’d pulled out a butchered ibex mandible, a number of mollusk shells and husks. They’d also found six chunks of fossilized hyena dung, as well as “débitage,” distinctive shards of flint left over when Neanderthals shattered larger pieces to make axes. The cube of sand would eventually be wrapped in plaster and sent for analysis. The sand the two women were sweeping into their dustpans was transferred into plastic bags and marched out of the cave, down to the beach, where other students sieved it. Smaller bones caught in the sieve were bagged and labeled. Even the sand that passed through the sieve was saved and driven back to a lab at the museum, where I would later find three other students picking through it with magnifying glasses and tweezers, searching for tinier stuff — rodent teeth, spines — while listening to “Call Me Maybe. ” To an outsider, it looked preposterous. The archaeologists were cataloging and storing absolutely everything, treating this physical material as though it were digital information — JPEGs of itself. And yet they couldn’t afford not to: Everything a Neanderthal came into contact with was a valuable clue. (In 28 years of excavations here, archaeologists have yet to find a fossil of an actual Neanderthal.) “This is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where you only have five pieces,” Finlayson said. He somehow made this analogy sound exciting instead of hopeless. By that point, the enormousness of what they didn’t know — what they could never know — had become a distraction for me. One of the dig’s lead archaeologists, Richard Jennings of Liverpool John Moores University, listed the many items they had found around that hearth. “And this is literally just from two squares!” he said. (A “square,” in archaeology, is one meter by one meter sites are divided into grids of squares.) Then Jennings waved wordlessly at the rest of the cave. Look at the big picture, he was saying imagine what else we’ll find! There was also Vanguard Cave next door, an even more promising site, because while Gorham’s had been partly excavated by less meticulous scientists in the 1940s and ’50s, Finlayson’s team was the first to touch Vanguard. Already they had uncovered a layer of perfectly preserved mud there. (“We suspect, if there’s a place where you’re going to find the first Neanderthal footprint, it will be here,” Finlayson said.) The “resolution” of the caves was incredible the wind blew sand in so fast that it preserved short periods, faithfully, like entries in a diary. Finlayson has described it as “the longest and most detailed record of [Neanderthals’] way of life that is currently available. ” This was the good news. And yet there were more than 20 other nearby caves that the Gibraltar Neanderthals might have used, and they were now underwater, behind us. When sea levels rose around 20, 000 years ago, the Mediterranean drowned them. It also drowned the wooded savanna between Gorham’s and the former coastline — where, presumably, the Neanderthals had spent an even larger share of their lives and left even more artifacts. So yes, Jennings was right: There was a lot of cave left to dig through. But it was like looking for needles in a haystack, and the entire haystack was merely the one needle they had managed to find in an astronomically larger haystack. And most of that haystack was now inaccessible forever. I could tell it wasn’t productive to dwell on the problem at this scale, while picking husks from the hearth, but there it was. “Look, you can almost see what’s happening,” Finlayson eventually said. “The fire and the charcoal, the embers scattering. ” It was true. If you followed that stratum of sand away from the hearth, you could see, embedded in the wall behind us, black flecks where the smoke and cinders from this fire had blown. Suddenly, it struck me — though it should have earlier — that what we were looking at were the remnants of a single event: a specific fire, on a specific night, made by specific Neanderthals. Maybe this won’t sound that profound, but it snapped that prehistoric abstraction into focus. This wasn’t just a “hearth,” I realized it was a campfire. Finlayson began narrating the scene for me. A few Neanderthals cooked the ibex they had hunted and the mussels and nuts they had foraged and then, after dinner, made some tools around the fire. After they went to sleep and the fire died out, a hyena slinked in to scavenge scraps from the ashes and took a poop. Then — perhaps that same night — the wind picked up and covered everything with the fine layer of sand that these students were now brushing away. While we stood talking, one of the women uncovered a small flint ax, called a Levallois flake. After 50, 000 years, the edge was still sharp. They let me touch it. One of the earliest authorities on Neanderthals was a Frenchman named Marcellin Boule. A lot of what he said was wrong. In 1911, Boule began publishing his analysis of the first nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton ever discovered, which he named Old Man of La Chapelle, after the limestone cave where it was found. Laboring to reconstruct the Old Man’s anatomy, he deduced that its head must have been slouched forward, its spine hunched and its toes spread like an ape’s. Then, having reassembled the Neanderthal this way, Boule insulted it. This “brutish” and “clumsy” posture, he wrote, clearly indicated a lack of morals and a lifestyle dominated by “functions of a purely vegetative or bestial kind. ” A colleague of Boule’s went further, claiming that Neanderthals usually walked on all fours and never laughed: “ had no smile. ” Boule was part of a movement trying to reconcile natural selection with religion by portraying Neanderthals as closer to animals than to us, he could protect the ideal of a separate, immaculate human lineage. When he consulted with an artist to make a rendering of the Neanderthal, it came out looking like a furry, mean gorilla. Neanderthal fossils kept surfacing in Europe, and scholars like Boule were scrambling to make sense of them, improvising what would later grow into a new interdisciplinary field, now known as paleoanthropology. The evolution of that science was haphazard and often comically unscientific. An exhaustive history by Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman describes how Neanderthals became “mirrors that reflected, in all their awfulness and awesomeness, the nature and humanity of those who touched them. ” That included a lot of human blundering. It became clear only in 1957, for example — 46 years after Boule, and after several of the Old Man’s skeleton — that Boule’s particular Neanderthal, which led him to imagine all Neanderthals as oafs, actually just had several deforming injuries and severe osteoarthritis. Still, Boule’s influence was . Over the years, his ideologically tainted image of Neanderthals was often refracted through the lens of other ideologies, occasionally racist ones. In 1930, the prominent British anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, writing in The New York Times, channeled Boule’s work to justify colonialism. For Keith, the replacement of an ancient, inferior species like Neanderthals by newer, heartier Homo sapiens proved that Britain’s actions in Australia — “The white man . .. replacing the most ancient type of brown man known to us” — was part of a natural order that had been operating for millenniums. It’s easy to get snooty about all this unenlightened paleoanthropology of the past. But all sciences operate by trying to fit new data into existing theories. And this particular science, for which the “data” has always consisted of scant and somewhat inscrutable bits of rock and fossil, often has to lean on those even more heavily. “Assumptions, theories, expectations,” the University of Barcelona archaeologist João Zilhão says, “all must come into play a lot, because you are interpreting data that do not speak for themselves. ” Imagine, for example, working in a cave without any skulls or other easily distinguishable fossils and trying to figure out if you’re looking at a Neanderthal settlement or a more recent, modern human one. In the past, scientists might turn to the surrounding artifacts, interpreting more tools as evidence of Neanderthals and more tools as evidence of early modern humans. But working that way, it’s easy to miss evidence of Neanderthals’ resemblance to us, because, as soon as you see it, you assume they were us. So many techniques similarly hinge on interpretation and judgment, even perfectly ones, like “morphometric analysis” — identifying fossils as belonging to one species rather than another by comparing particular parts of their anatomy — and radiocarbon dating. How the material to be dated is sampled and how results are calibrated are susceptible to drastic revision and bitter disagreement. (What’s more, because of an infuriating quirk of physics, the effectiveness of radiocarbon dating happens to break down around 40, 000 years ago — right around the time of the Neanderthal extinction. One of our best tools for looking into the past becomes unreliable at exactly the moment we’re most interested in examining.) Ultimately, a bottomless relativism can creep in: tenuous interpretations held up by webs of other interpretations, each strung from still more interpretations. Almost every archaeologist I interviewed complained that the field has become “overinterpreted” — that the ratio of physical evidence to speculation about that evidence is out of whack. Good stories can generate their own momentum. Starting in the 1920s, older and more exciting hominid fossils, like Homo erectus, began surfacing in Africa and Asia, and the field soon shifted its focus there. The Washington University anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, who began his career in the early ’70s, told me, “When I started working on Neanderthals, nobody really cared about them. ” The liveliest question about Neanderthals was still the first one: Were they our direct ancestors or the endpoint of a separate evolutionary track? Scientists called this question “the Neanderthal Problem. ” Some of the theories worked up to answer it encouraged different visions of Neanderthal intelligence and behavior. The “Multiregional Model,” for example, which had us descending from Neanderthals, was more inclined to see them as capable, sympathetic and fundamentally human the opposing “Out of Africa” hypothesis, which held that we moved in and replaced them, cast them as comparatively inferior. For decades, when evidence of a more advanced Neanderthal way of life turned up, it was often explained away, or mobbed by enough contrary or undermining interpretations that, over time, it never found real purchase. Some findings broke through more than others, however, like the discovery of what was essentially a small Neanderthal cemetery, in Shanidar Cave, in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. There had been many compelling instances of Neanderthals’ burying their dead, but Shanidar was harder to ignore, especially after soil samples revealed the presence of huge amounts of pollen. This was interpreted as the remains of a funerary floral arrangement. An archaeologist at the center of this work, Ralph Solecki, published a book called “Shanidar: The First Flower People. ” It was 1971 — the Age of Aquarius. Those flowers, he’d go on to write, proved that Neanderthals “had ‘soul. ’’u2009” Then again, Solecki’s idea was eventually discredited. In 1999, a more thorough analysis of the Shanidar grave site found that Neanderthals almost certainly did not leave flowers there. The pollen had been tracked in, thousands of years later, by burrowing, rodents. (That said, even a later, there are still paleoanthropologists at work on this question. It might not have been gerbils it may have been bees.) As more supposed anomalies surfaced, they became harder to brush off. In 1996, the paleoanthropologist Hublin and others used CT scanning technology to a bone fragment found in a French cave decades earlier, alongside a raft of advanced tools and artifacts, associated with the Châtelperronian industry, which archaeologists always presumed was the work of early modern humans. Now Hublin’s analysis identified the bone as belonging to a Neanderthal. But rather than reascribe the Châtelperronian industry to Neanderthals, Hublin chalked up his findings to “acculturation”: Surely the Neanderthals must have learned how to make this stuff by watching us. “To me,” says Zilhão, the University of Barcelona archaeologist, “there was a logical shock: If the paradigm forces you to say something like this, there must be something wrong with the paradigm. ” Zilhão published a stinging critique challenging the field to shake off its “ prejudice. ” Papers were fired back and forth, igniting what Zilhão calls “a war” and counting. Then, in the middle of that war, geneticists shook up the paradigm completely. A group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led by Svante Paabo, had been assembling a draft sequence of a Neanderthal genome, using DNA recovered from bones. Their findings were published in 2010. It had already become clear by then that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals appeared in Eurasia separately — “Out of Africa was essentially right” — but Paabo’s work revealed that before the Neanderthals disappeared, the two groups mated. Even today, 40, 000 years after our gene pools stopped mixing, most living humans still carry Neanderthal DNA, making up roughly 1 to 2 percent of our total genomes. The data shows that we also apparently bred with other hominids, like the Denisovans, about which very little is known. It was staggering even Paabo couldn’t bring himself to believe it at first. But the results were the results, and they carried a sort of empirical magnetism that archaeological evidence lacks. “Geneticists are much more powerful, numerous and incomparably better funded than anyone else dealing with this stuff,” Zilhão said. He joked: “Their aura is kind of miraculous. It’s a bit like receiving the Ten Commandments from God. ” Paabo’s work, and a continuing wave of genomic research, has provided clarity but also complexity, recasting our oppositional, relationship into something more communal and collaborative — and perhaps not just on the genetic level. The extent of the interbreeding supported previous speculation, by a minority of paleoanthropologists, that there might have been cases of Neanderthals and modern humans living alongside each other, intermeshed, for centuries, and that generations of their offspring had found places in those communities, too. Then again, it’s also possible that some of the interbreeding was forced. Paabo now recommends against imagining separate species of human evolution altogether: not an Us and a Them, but one enormous “metapopulation” composed of shifting clusters of essentially things that periodically coincided in time and space and, when they happened to bump into one another, occasionally had sex. Lunch happened at the mouth of Gorham’s Cave, out in the sun. I ate a sandwich on a log, facing the sea, alongside Jennings and a few of his Liverpool students, while the young men and women from Spain mingled behind us, laughing and stretching and helping one another crack their backs. The language barrier seemed to discourage the two cohorts from talking much. And yet the students lived together during the excavation and had somehow achieved a muffled camaraderie. Even Jennings and his counterpart, José María Gutiérrez López, a veteran archaeologist from a museum in Cádiz, had a somewhat similar dynamic, despite working closely together for many summers at Gorham’s. Neither was terribly fluent in the other’s language, but their silence, by this point, seemed warm and knowing. Waiting for our ride at the end of one workday, I noticed them staring at a plastic bag snagged in the concertina wire above an old military gate. The bag had been there for a long, long time, Jennings told me. Then he turned and uttered, “Cinco años?” Gutiérrez López smiled. “Sí,” he said, nodding. I, meanwhile, felt compelled to test out all of this as a model for relations. That contact obsessed me: What would it have been like to look out over a grassy plain and watch parallel humanity pass by? Scientists often turn to historical first contacts as frames of reference, like the arrival of Europeans among Native Americans, or Captain Cook landing in Australia — largely histories of violence and subjugation. But as Zilhão points out, typically one of those two cultures set out to conquer the other. “Those people were conscious that they’d come from somewhere else,” he told me. “They were a product of a civilization that had books, that had studied their past. ” Homo sapiens encountering Neanderthals would have been different: They met uncoupled from politics and history neither identified as part of a network of millions of supposedly more advanced people. And so, as Finlayson put it to me: “Each valley could have told a different story. In one, they may have hit each other over the head. In another, they may have made love. In another, they ignored each other. ” It’s a kind of coexistence that our modern imaginations may no longer be sensitive enough to envision. So much of our identity as a species is tied up in our anomalousness, in our dominion over others. But that narcissistic is an exceedingly recent privilege. (“Outside the world of Tolkienesque fantasy literature, we tend to think that it is normal for there to be just one human species on Earth at a time,” the writers Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse explain. “The past 20 or 30 millennia, however, have been the exception. ”) Now, eating lunch, I considered that the of humans and Neanderthals hadn’t been so trippy or profound after all. Maybe it looked as mundane as this: two groups, lingering on a beach, only sort of acknowledging each other. Maybe the many millenniums during which we shared Eurasia was, much of the time, like a superlong elevator ride with strangers. Some paleoanthropologists are starting to reimagine the extinction of Neanderthals as equally prosaic: not the culmination of some epic clash of civilizations but an aggregate result of a long, ecological muddle. Strictly speaking, extinction is what happens after a species fails to maintain a higher proportion of births to deaths — it’s a numbers game. And so the real competition between Neanderthals and early modern humans wasn’t localized quarrels for food or territory but a quiet, demographic marathon: each species repopulating itself, until one fell so far behind that it vanished. And we had a big head start. “When modern humans came,” notes Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at Britain’s Natural History Museum, “there just weren’t that many Neanderthals around. ” For millenniums, some scientists believe, before modern humans poured in from Africa, the climate in Europe was exceptionally unstable. The landscape kept flipping between temperate forest and cold, treeless steppe. The fauna that Neanderthals subsisted on kept migrating away, faster than they could. Though Neanderthals survived this turbulence, they were never able to build up their numbers. (Across all of Eurasia, at any point in history, says John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of “there probably weren’t enough of them to fill an N. F. L. stadium. ”) With the demographics so skewed, Stringer went on, even the slightest modern human advantage would be amplified tremendously: a single innovation, something like sewing needles, might protect just enough babies from the elements to lower the infant mortality rate and allow modern humans to conclusively overtake the Neanderthals. And yet Stringer is careful not to conflate innovation with superior intelligence. Innovation, too, can be a function of population size. “We live in an age where information, where good ideas, spread like wildfire, and we build on them,” Stringer told me. “But it wasn’t like that 50, 000 years ago. ” The more members your species has, the more likely one member will stumble on a useful new technology — and that, once stumbled upon, the innovation will spread you need sufficient human tinder for those sparks of culture to catch. “There was nothing inevitable about modern human success,” Stringer says. “It was luck. ” We didn’t defeat the Neanderthals we just swamped them. Trinkaus compares it to how European wildcats are currently disappearing, absorbed into much larger populations of house cats gone feral. It wasn’t a flattering analogy — we are the house cats — but that was Trinkaus’s point: “I think a lot of this is basically banal,” he says. Showing me around the Gibraltar Museum one morning, Finlayson described the petering out of Neanderthals on the Rock with unnerving pathos. Gibraltar, with its comparatively stable climate, would have been one of their last refuges, he explained, and he likened the population there to critically endangered species today, like snow leopards or imperiled butterflies: living relics carrying on in small, fragmented populations long after they’ve passed a genetic point of no return. “They became a ghost species,” Finlayson said. We happened to be standing in front of two Neanderthals, exquisitely lifelike sculptures the museum unveiled last spring, on a sweep of sand in their own austere gallery. They were scientific reconstructions, extrapolated by artists from casts of actual fossils. (These two were based on the only Neanderthal skulls ever recovered in Gibraltar: that first woman’s skull, sent to George Busk in 1864, and another, of a child, unearthed in 1926.) They were called Nana and Flint. Finlayson’s wife, Geraldine, and son, Stewart — both scientists who work closely with him at the museum — had helped him come up with the names. The boy had his arms thrown around Nana’s waist, his cheek on her thigh. He was himself behind her leg, as kids do, but also stared out, straight at us, slightly alarmed, or helpless. “I don’t get tired of looking at them,” Finlayson said. He had commissioned the Neanderthals from Dutch artists known as Kennis Kennis, and he was initially taken aback by the woman’s posture in their sketches. She stood oddly, with her arms crossed in front of her chest, resting on opposite shoulders, as if she were . But Kennis Kennis barraged him with ethnographic photos: real people standing just like this, or even more strangely, their hands behind their necks or slung over their heads. As it happens, the artists had an intense personal interest in where human beings leave their hands when they don’t have pockets. I’d never thought about this before — I’ve always had pockets — and I wondered if artists might expose these perceptual bubbles more pointedly than archaeologists. Kennis Kennis appeared to be major players in the tiny field of Paleolithic reconstruction. Scientists who had worked with them encouraged me to seek them out. “They’re great people,” one archaeologist told me. “Hyperactive. Like rubber balls. ” The Kennis brothers, Adrie and Alfons, are each 50 years old: identical twins. They are sturdy, attractive men, with dark, wildly swirling hair, and live in the small Dutch city of Arnhem, southeast of Amsterdam. When I arrived at Adrie’s house last summer, I found Alfons at the end of the driveway, glasses sliding down his nose, carefully filling a crack in the robin’ butt cheek of a silicon Neanderthal mold. Kennis Kennis had gradually Adrie’s house as a second studio. Most of their work and materials were here: headless bodies of various human species and a wall of shelves filled with skulls and heads. The heads were frighteningly realistic, with glass eyes and fleshy faces that begged to be touched. When the brothers fly around Europe to pitch to museums, they take these heads with them, like salesmen’s samples. “On the airplane! We have heads!” Adrie shouted. “They scan things!” Alfons shouted. And slowly I understood: The brothers thought it was hilarious that airport security never questioned them about their duffel bags full of heads. “I never have to open my bags!” Adrie said, then he scampered to the wall, where a particular head had caught his eye: very with a rough, bushy beard and rawness in its upper lip — a reconstruction of a primitive Homo sapiens skull found in Morocco. Adrie held the head in his palm and hollered, “Bowling!” while pretending to bowl with it. Then he laughed and laughed and laughed. That was how it went for the rest of the day. They spoke in a bifurcated riot, seldom finishing sentences, just skipping ahead once they had spit out the key words. And if a thought escaped them or their English faltered, they didn’t go silent instead, they repeated the last word, or made a strange guttural drone, as if thrusting some heavy weight over their heads, to fill the space. Their first big commission came in 2006, for the Neanderthal Museum, on the site of Neander Valley. It emerged as a jovial, old man, with woefulness, or maybe just exhaustion, behind his eyes. That jolt of Neanderthal individuality has been a trademark of their work ever since. It elevates Neanderthals out of a single homogeneous abstraction and endows them with personhood. (At one point, Adrie described watching a neighbor spend an entire day each brick of his driveway. He had an epiphany: “All the types of people around us, there must have been Neanderthals just like them. ” Alfons added: “Neanderthal neat freaks! Neanderthal Bill Gates! ”) What the brothers want, they told me, is for the viewer to catch herself relating to the Neanderthal — to recognize, in a visceral way, that Neanderthals sit at the fragile edge of our own identities. To feel that, Adrie explained, “they need to look you in the eye. ” They were obsessed — the only word for it — and have been since age 7, when Alfons found a picture of a Neanderthal skeleton in a book, and it instantly possessed them both. They spent a lot of time at their parents’ restaurant, after school and on weekends: With nothing to do, they started drawing Neanderthals. They drew feverishly, combatively, each brother keenly aware of whose rib cage looked brawnier, who had rendered more beautiful shadows on his Neanderthal’s upper lip. “We were both the dumbest guys in the whole school!” Alfons said. “We couldn’t count!” Drawing was all they knew how to do. As young men, they tried to teach art but couldn’t find steady employment. Their family told them to give up their crazy preoccupation. They wouldn’t. They made art at night and took custodial jobs at a psychiatric hospital. They organized the Christmas talent show and played with the residents. Initially they were painters, not sculptors. They made reconstructions only to have lifelike models to paint: They were that meticulous, that fixated on knowing how the musculature of a Neanderthal hung off its skeleton. Because they had to produce a individual, the brothers were forced to make decisions about what paleoanthropologists had the luxury of describing as spectra of variation. Geneticists can suggest a probable scope of skin and hair colors. But the brothers must imagine the wear on a particular Neanderthal’s skin after a hard life outside, or the abuse his toenails would take. And would Neanderthals wear ponytails? Would they shear their bangs away, to get their hair out of their faces? “Every culture does something with their hair!” Alfons insisted. “There’s no culture that does nothing with their hair. ” This uncorked a frantic seminar on known global hairstyles of the last several thousand years. They began pulling up photos on Adrie’s laptop, dozens of them, from anthropological archives or stills from old ethnographic films. These were some of the same photos they had shown Finlayson. The brothers had pored over them for years but still gasped or bellowed now as each new, improbable human form materialized. The pictures showed a panorama of divergent body types and grooming: spiky eyebrows astonishingly asymmetrical breasts a towering aboriginal man with the chiseled torso of an American underwear model, but two twigs for legs a Hottentot woman with an extraordinarily convex rear end. “People would never let us make buttocks like this!” Alfons said regretfully. “All this variation! It’s beautiful!” shouted Adrie, refusing to look away from the screen. He had to look: These were reaches of reality that our minds didn’t travel to on their own. “If you live in the West, you’d never imagine,” he went on. The brothers’ delight seemed to come from feeling all these superficial differences quiver against a profound, sameness. Finally, Adrie turned to me and said very seriously, “These are all Homo sapiens. ” They showed me more photos. “It’s real, it’s real, it’s real!” Alfons kept shouting. Adrie said, “Unimaginable, unimaginable, unimaginable!” It only registered later: I had spent the day with identical twins who, since childhood, have been stupefied by how different human beings can be. At the rear of Gorham’s Cave, past the hearth the team was excavating, there was a tall metal staircase. It led up to a long catwalk, which led to a locked steel gate. I waited there one morning while Finlayson fumbled around in his pocket. Then he turned his key. The excavation had worked through this narrowed rear chamber of the cave years earlier and discovered, at the end of the 2012 season, an engraving on the floor: a crosshatched pattern of 13 grooves in the bedrock. A tide of specialists flowed into Gorham’s. They determined that the engraving was made at least 39, 000 years ago and ruled out its having been created inadvertently — left over after skinning an animal, say. In controlled experiments, it took between 188 and 317 strokes with a flint tool to create the entire figure. “What we’ve always said,” Finlayson explained, “is it’s intentional and it’s not functional. You can call that art, if you like. ” The finding was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. The news media called the engraving “the hashtag. ” One scientist described the elaborate crosshatch as watershed evidence of Neanderthals’ capacity for “complex symbolic thought” and “abstract expression. ” But several archaeologists told me they believe that there are many clearer signs of Neanderthals’ capacity for complex cognition and symbolism, including a discovery in Southern France last year that seemed to dwarf the hashtag’s significance. (More than 1, 000 feet into the Bruniquel Cave, Neanderthals assembled two rings of 400 deliberately broken stalagmites, with other material piled and propped around it — like a labyrinth, or a shrine.) But Finlayson was undaunted. He turned the hashtag into a logo for the rebranding of his museum. There was a hashtag decal on the van he picked me up in every morning. We stood and talked for a while until, finally, with Richard aplomb, Finlayson lifted a tarp and showed it to me. It did not make a tremendous impact at first — it was lines in rock. But Finlayson went on, pointing to a spot near the entrance to this isolated anteroom, a few feet across from the engraving, where the team had excavated another hearth. Neanderthals built fires in that exact spot, on and off, for 8, 000 years, he said — until their disappearance from Gibraltar. But few animal bones were recovered here it wasn’t a place they cooked. And the location of the fire was also puzzling: Neanderthals usually situated fires at the fronts of caves, to control smoke. And yet, Finlayson explained, “if you look up, this has a natural chimney. ” We flung our heads back: A chute coursed through the high, craggy ceiling above us. It seemed, Finlayson explained, that the Neanderthals did their butchering and cooking at the front of Gorham’s, then retired here at night. Lighting a fire at this hearth would block the narrowest point in the cave, sealing off this chamber from predators. You could hang out here, Finlayson said, “have a snack or something,” then head to bed. “See there?” he said, motioning to a smaller opening to our right. It led to a second room, similar to this one. “This,” Finlayson said, “is the bedroom. ” I looked again at the hashtag. It wasn’t on the cave floor, exactly, as it was usually described, but on a broad ledge, a foot or two off the ground. It made for a perfect bench, and it was suddenly easy to imagine a Neanderthal sitting on it, in ideal proximity to the fire. For all I knew, the hashtag marked his or her favorite seat. But Finlayson wasn’t done. After the Neanderthal artifacts disappear from Gorham’s sediment layers, there’s a gap of many thousand years — a thick stack of empty sand. Then other artifacts appear: Modern humans occupied the cave and built a fire here, too, just a couple of feet from the Neanderthals’ hearth. They used the bedroom annex as well. They left a cave painting on the wall in there: a gorgeous red stag, indisputably recognizable to us — their descendants — as art. Another 18, 000 years passed, give or take. The Phoenicians came. And they left offerings back here there were shards of their ceramics under the catwalk we had just crossed. Then, 2, 000 years after that, in 1907, a certain Captain A. Gorham of Britain’s Second Battalion Royal Munster Fusiliers arrived. Gorham didn’t discover Gorham’s Cave, Finlayson told me it had always been impossible to miss. “That’s what he found,” Finlayson said. “That’s really Gorham’s Cave. ” He pointed to the bedroom, and we both turned, bathing it with our headlamps. Beside the entrance was written, in big block letters, GORHAM’S CAVE 1907, with a chunky black arrow pointing to the doorway. Gorham had written his name directly over the spot where, some 39, 000 years earlier, a Neanderthal had made his or her own mark. The full sweep and synchronicity of this history hadn’t seemed to occur to Finlayson before. Hesitantly, he said, “Maybe there are special places in the world that have universal human appeal. ” I felt a similar, uncanny rush when I noticed that, at some point while he talked, we had each instinctually taken a seat on the rock ledge, next to the hashtag, and were now sitting side by side, staring into space where the two ancient campfires once burned. It’s not an especially spiritual experience when one human being walks into another human being’s kitchen for the first time and simply knows where the silverware drawer is. At the back of Gorham’s, though, that intuition was spread across two distinct kinds of humans and tens of thousands of years. Ultimately, why we are here and the Neanderthals are not can no longer be explained in a way that implies that our existence is particularly meaningful or secure. But at least moments like this placed our existence inside some longer, continuity. It was the day of the Brexit vote. After from the cave with Finlayson, I would spend the rest of the afternoon rejiggering my travel plans in a mild panic, trying to catch a ride out of Gibraltar and into Spain that night, so that if the Spanish exacted a retaliatory after the results were announced, I could still make my flight home from Malaga the next day. I won’t describe the scenes I saw that morning — the blankness on people’s faces at the airport, phone calls I overheard — except to say that when I woke up on Nov. 9, after our own election, I felt equipped with at least a faint frame of reference. Reality seemed heightened and a little dangerous, because for so many people, including me, it had broken away from our expectations. We had misunderstood the present in the same way archaeologists can misunderstand the past. What was possible was suddenly exposed as grossly insufficient, because, to borrow Finlayson’s metaphor, we never imagined that the few jigsaw puzzle pieces we based it on constituted such a tiny part of the whole. Even some on the winning sides seemed similarly stunned and adrift. Many, though, just felt vindicated. Later that summer, I came across an essay for a British weekly by the actress Elizabeth Hurley, a fervent Leave supporter, who was now doubling down. “Knock yourselves out calling us Neanderthals,” she wrote, “and spit a bit more venom and vitriol our way. You are showing yourselves in all your meanspirited, elitist glory. ” When I read that, I took genuine umbrage — but on the Neanderthals’ behalf. And while I hate to admit it, I also felt a cheap but delicious tingle of smugness, because I now knew that “Neanderthal” wasn’t the insult Hurley thought it was — though this, I simultaneously realized, also closed a certain loop and promoted, in me, the very elitist glory Hurley was incensed by, thus deepening the divide. It was dizzying and sad and maybe inevitably human, but still no help to us at all. | 1 |
On Thursday, a senior Russian diplomat revealed that the Russian government did meet with members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the election. This disclosure reopens scrutiny concerning what role the Kremlin might have played in the president-elect’s close and contentious race against Hillary Clinton.
Trump repeatedly said during the campaign that he never had contact with the Russian government.
“I can tell you I think if I came up with that they’d say, ‘Oh, it’s a conspiracy theory, it’s ridiculous,’” Trump told CBS4’s Jim DeFede during an interview at his golf resort in Doral. “I mean I have nothing to do with Russia. I don’t have any jobs in Russia. I’m all over the world but we’re not involved in Russia.”
When asked about outstanding loans with Russian banks or investors, Trump replied in July:
“Absolutely not. It’s ridiculous.”
Meanwhile, during his campaign, Trump repeatedly refused requests to disclose his tax returns to the American people.
Experts still speculate that Trump’s tax returns could contain damaging information regarding his relationship with a foreign government or business interest.
During an interview with Russia’s state-run Interfax News, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov confirmed that “there were contacts” with Trump’s team during the election.
“Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” Rybakov said. “Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions. I cannot say that all of them but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives.”
“We have just begun to consider ways of building dialogue with the future Donald Trump administration and channels we will be using for those purposes,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying.
“We continue this work of course,” he added .
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Bloomberg that it’s “normal practice” for Russian Embassy staff to meet with U.S. presidential campaigns.
Zakharova added that Clinton rejected similar requests to meet during the campaign.
From Moscow with love comrade Trump.
Featured image via Russia-Insider | 0 |
ReadyNutrition Guys and Gals, as you know we’re down to the wire just before the U.S. presidential election: an election that will shape the face of the country for a long time. But will we make it there? And if so, will we make it through it, and the transition period? With the contrived “Russian Cyber threat,” along with the very real threat of nuclear war, an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack, a true Cyberattack, an economic and societal collapse, or a grid down scenario, we have enough things to look out for. When things of this nature make the mainstream news media, it may be time to start preparing if you have not done so.
It’s time to prepare for the worst-case scenario with this best-selling preparedness manual People are Planning for Unrest Following the Election Emergency food sales and preparedness related supplies have soared due to the upcoming election. Here are excerpts from this article:
“What’s feeding this new urgency? Survivalist consumers say they’re preparing for post-election unrest that could involve everything from massive riots, to power grid outages, to the total collapse of the financial system where a can of food becomes currency.
Nor is it limited to just rural areas. Frederick Reddie, a 41-year-old ‘urban prepper’ from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is stocking upon staples like rice and peanut butter and working on expanding his 6-month supply of emergency food to two years. He has to use a pseudonym to protect his supply from any future hungry neighbors, he told NBC News.”
Well, it seems as if “Freddie Reddie” may have read my article about neighbors and “The Shelter” episode of the Twilight Zone. In any event, he has the right idea. Certainly, if you can afford it and wish to invest, then by all means (and by your choice), indulge as best fits into your budget and storage plans. The aforementioned article reported that several companies that sell freeze-dried and dehydrated foods in Mylar that are packed in buckets are being bought akin to a wildfire. Telephone orders are through the roof, and the companies reported they have needed extra staff to take care of the purchases.
Why Canned Goods are a Good SHTF Investment I personally like the canned goods. They’re within my budget (no, JJ is not a millionaire or even close), and they are the basis for my logistical needs. I don’t normally eat a lot of canned goods, and for a survival situation, I’m not overly concerned with the food being organic, or any “ leaching ” that may occur out of the can liners. My focus is on complete nutrition : protein, carbohydrates, fats, and vitamins. Canned foods have been time-tested with me: I have had cans of vegetables and meats that I had in New Orleans during Katrina that (after ten years) were still just fine when tested.
Indeed, they found canned meat from Arctic and Antarctic missions such as Scott’s and Amundsen’s that had been almost a hundred years old with the contents still edible. Canned goods can take tremendous changes in temperature and still be perfectly edible. Canned goods are also pretty affordable and can even be found at dollar stores . Everyone has undoubtedly concentrated on the basics, as follows:
Soups, prepared dinners (pasta dishes, chili), stews, canned meat (chicken and fish), canned beans and vegetables.
Be Careful of Tricky Manufacturers You have to watch out: they’re starting to shrink not only portion size but portion content. I just picked up the last case of ready-made mini beef ravioli with meatballs. My sneaky grocers kept the same label on the cans but removed the “with meatballs” from the label…and (as you may have guessed) the meatballs, as well. The can with the meatballs has a protein content of 22 grams (g), or 11 g per serving. The one without the meatballs only has 16 g per can (8 g per serving), and they “phased” out the ones with the meatballs, but left the same price…79 cents per can.
Doesn’t sound as if it’s much, but when you buy 20 cans, that’s 120 grams of protein less in the variety sans meatballs. Same for peanut butter, where they conveniently shrank the portion size but kept the same sized jar. In addition to the canned goods, you can still find some case lot sales on dry goods, such as pasta, rice, peanut butter, crackers, and so forth. With canned goods, don’t write off canned mackerel or sardines from your preps. They’re high in protein and Omega-3 fatty acids.
We’re getting close to “crunch time” with all of these things happening. Now is the time for you to stretch your dollars and prepare according to the many tips and articles you’ve read and researched here on ReadyNutrition. Use those Gatorade and 2-liter soda bottles to build up as much of a bottled water supply as you can. For your canned goods, if you can put them in bins, all the better. If not, try out some cardboard boxes, and be sure to label them or mark them on the outside with a magic marker for what the general contents are.
Staying Organized Inventory sheets (as I’ve mentioned in articles past) go a long way in rotating your supplies and also for keeping track of their contents. For canned vegetables, concentrate on the ones you can get the most for your money with. Examples would be canned, whole potatoes, spinach, kale, beans (such as baked or black…not the green beans that are almost devoid of nutrition), sauerkraut (excellent vitamin C source), canned fruit high in vitamin C (grapefruit, mandarin oranges, etc.). Other prepared foods in cans are macaroni and cheese that you can add meat to if you wish.
They last a long time, come precooked (therefore can be eaten right out of the can), and they can take a beating. Let’s not also forget canned juices, such as fruit juices and vegetable juices (tomato, V-8, etc.) Stick with the non-carbonated stuff, as it’s better for you and will be less prone to burst on a fall or impact. Here is a good list to follow .
In a nutshell, these canned goods and dry goods can help you boost up your supplies, or provide you with a base if you have not been preparing. All of the advice in the world will not help you unless you put it to use with actions. As things occur both in the U.S. and the world, now is the time to take advantage and do all that you can, and the canned goods can be found within your budget that fulfills your basic needs. Keep in that good fight, and fight it all the way! JJ out!
Related Material: 11 Emergency Foods That Last Forever
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Five Family Friendly Food Pantry Organizing Tips Anyone Can Do
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5 Ways to Stretch Your Meals SHTF Style
Food Pantry: Take Care of Your Basic Needs
72 Hours Without This Will Kill You: Survival Water Fundamentals
Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne). Mr. Johnson was a Special Forces Medic, EMT and ACLS-certified, with comprehensive training in wilderness survival, rescue, and patient-extraction. He is a Certified Master Herbalist and a graduate of the Global College of Natural Medicine of Santa Ana, CA. A graduate of the U.S. Army’s survival course of SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), Mr. Johnson also successfully completed the Montana Master Food Preserver Course for home-canning, smoking, and dehydrating foods.
Mr. Johnson dries and tinctures a wide variety of medicinal herbs taken by wild crafting and cultivation, in addition to preserving and canning his own food. An expert in land navigation, survival, mountaineering, and parachuting as trained by the United States Army, Mr. Johnson is an ardent advocate for preparedness, self-sufficiency, and long-term disaster sustainability for families. He and his wife survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Cross-trained as a Special Forces Engineer, he is an expert in supply, logistics, transport, and long-term storage of perishable materials, having incorporated many of these techniques plus some unique innovations in his own homestead.
Mr. Johnson brings practical, tested experience firmly rooted in formal education to his writings and to our team. He and his wife live in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with their three cats.
This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition
Originally published November 7th, 2016 Ask Tess: Do I need to rotate my canned vegetables and… 15 Items to Start Your Food Prep Off Right Frugal Prepping: 30 Survival Items You Can Get at the Dollar Oven Canning for Long Term Storage How to Stock a Prepper Pantry | 0 |
Australia Admits Gun Control Failure! Offers Amnesty to “Offenders”
Gallup has been asking Americans about their opinion on the assault weapons ban since 1996 — two years after President Bill Clinton signed a federal assault weapons ban. That year, 57 percent of those polled said they favored the ban.
But in 2006, the poll found for the first time that more Americans opposed the ban than favored it, and that opposition has typically increased over the past 10 years.
What was most interesting about the results, however, was that the sharp uptick in those who opposed the ban came from Democrats, 50 percent of whom said they would not support a ban on assault weapons.
Less surprisingly, 75 percent of those who identified as Republican said they opposed the ban.
These numbers are detrimental to the progressive agenda of Obama and Clinton, who have made gun control , particularly a ban on assault weapons, a key issue.
The truth is that most Americans know that our constitutional right to bear arms is imperative to our continued prosperity as a nation and that an infringement upon that right is dangerous. | 0 |
Malala Yousufzai is a remarkable young woman who has made headlines and is known globally for the brave work she does in Pakistan, her home country. Her fight for the right for everyone to have a... | 0 |
I like Trey Gowdy's prosecution of Hillary but I don't know how egalitarian he is. He supported Marco Rubio and is a religious conservative but is he Republican-Lite on economics? | 0 |
10 Signs Western Society is a Satanic Cult Many Jews, Freemasons, liberals, socialists and feminists have unwittingly been inducted into a sata... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/10-signs-western-society-is-satanic-cult.html Many Jews, Freemasons, liberals, socialists and feminists have unwittingly been inducted into a satanic cult based on the Jewish Cabala. Society increasingly resembles this ruling cult, the Illuminati. A satanic cult inverts healthy and unhealthy, natural and unnatural... it inverts beauty and ugliness, truth and lies, justice and injustice, making evil seem good. It controls its members by corrupting and making them sick (Pharmaceuticals alone are an annual $1.2 trillion industry ). Its members are dysfunctional and identify with their condition. The real occult meaning of "revolution," is supplanting God with Lucifer, turning reality upside down. Christ depicted screwing God. Note the Illuminati pyramid and eye in Christ's behind ( Charlie Hebdo ) Ten Signs Western Society is a Satanic Cult 1. There is a distinction between the "initiated" and the general population which is kept in the dark. They are not told the cult's true objectives (to exploit and enslave them) but are deceived instead with noble sounding platitudes. Leaders (part of the "initiated") routinely lie to the people as in the case of false flags, assassinations and wars. False flags are a form of mass brainwashing, arousing mass sympathy for the alleged victim and hatred for the alleged perpetrator. 2. The symbols of the cult are everywhere and its monuments (obelisks) dot our cities. Illuminati motifs are also prominent in corporate logos . Illuminati bankers control most corporations. 3. They deny that humans have a divine soul that is connected with a spiritual and moral order. Mention of "God" and a universal design and intelligence are suppressed . "God" is a dirty word. Instead of God, (conscience) we are required to obey the cult leaders and their factotums. Believers in God are persecuted . By denying our Divine soul, they define us as simply animals who can be domesticated or culled. They encourage us to degrade ourselves by indulging our animal nature. 4. They attempt to overrule nature and encourage unnatural and perverse behavior. A prime example is the bizarre occult hatred of gender (masculine and feminine), and their encouragement of gender confusion, homosexuality, transgenderism and androgyny. They teach school children to experiment with sex toys and homosexuality . This is state-sanctioned child sex abuse. Homosexuality is a developmental disorder . Its official promotion is proof society has gone over to the dark side. 5. Western society is a sex cult i.e. it is besotted with sex and "hot" women. The Illuminati promote promiscuous and anonymous sex in order to degrade people to animals. Tongue Tied video Miley Cyrus — Cry for help? Bombshell: Obama, Clinton, Podesta, Soros, Epstein, Alefantis — All Connected to Pedophilia Claims by 'Podesta Emails' They normalize sexual deviance to defy God and serve their god Lucifer. The sex cult's sex obsession is surpassed only by its love of money. Millions are engaged in stock market gambling. The cult (society) encourages both addictions, and addictive behavior in general. The cult controls us by making us sick, physically and/or psychologically. The cult makes its members sick and then sells them a "cure." Healthcare is a $1.7 trillion industry in the US, surpassing even "Defence." One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication ; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four. 6. They attempt to destroy the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family so that the cult (society) will be our first loyalty, and ultimately will take over procreation and child rearing. 7. They create a climate of fear and use this as an excuse to remove civil rights and create a police state capable of ensuring cult control. 8. There is extensive surveillance to control every individual by blackmail . Thought criminals are shamed and expelled. The CEO of Mozilla was forced to resign after giving a donation to a group that opposes gay marriage. This enforced conformity, which is becoming commonplace, is characteristic of Communism, which is Illuminati in origin and character. The term " politically correct " originated in the Communist Party. 9. They suppress the truth. True history, art,music and literature are suppressed. They even deny that objective truth exists and is knowable. They use entertainment as occult ritual . They degrade and distract us from reality by creating an alternate fantasy world. Entertainers are often mind-controlled agents of the cult . New " Common Core " school curriculum is turning people into widgets. 10. There's also a relentless focus on dysfunctional people, minorities and "underdogs" rather than the strong, effective, happy and truly healthy. Deprived of family supports, more people can't cope and resemble zombies, disheveled, eyes focused on smart phones, head phones in ears, nose rings and tattoos. Finally, a cult usually has a charismatic God-like leader whose judgment is never questioned. Think Hitler or Stalin. In the West, we are still waiting for this figure to emerge. When he (or she) does emerge, the cult will be complete. By Henry Makow Ph.D. — author of Illuminati3: Satanic Possession: There is only one Conspiracy Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue.
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In this new weekly feature, we will surface some of the more thoughtful and provocative concerns that come into our office. The public editor’s column can only address so much and, though we’ll reply to many of your comments, we unfortunately aren’t unable to reply personally to everything that lands in our inbox. By giving a weekly glimpse into our mailbag, we hope to give exposure to the fluctuating concerns of The Times’s audience — and in doing so, help facilitate a better conversation between the Gray Lady and her readers. This week, as you probably would guess, our inbox is inundated with readers reacting to one of the more astonishing presidential election surprises in modern history. As the returns were coming in Tuesday night, readers became increasingly concerned over how The Times could have so incorrectly forecasted the outcome. The public editor’s column addressed the issue on Wednesday, and the letters continue to stream in. Some complained of The Times’s perceived liberal bias and think its New York newsroom is out of touch with much of America. Here are some of the letters: Comments on Wednesday’s public editor column generally echoed the sentiment. Pamela Colloff, executive editor of Texas Monthly had this to say, on Twitter: The Times’s national editor, Marc Lacey, pointed out that The Times has national correspondents who live across the country. And earlier Friday, The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. sent a note to the newsroom on the topic of covering the Trump White House. The Times will “approach the incoming Trump administration without bias,” he wrote. “We will cover his policies and his agenda fairly. We will bring expert analysis and thoughtful commentary to the changes we see in government, and to their ramifications on the ground. ” He added: “We will look within and beyond Washington to explore the roots of the anger that has roiled red and blue America. If many Americans no longer seem to understand each other, let’s make it our job to interpret and explain. ” Some readers blamed the Democrats for not stepping up. The following reader email came in before the votes were tallied, but we thought it was worth noting. It’s about political coverage on the editorial pages: The public editor’s take: Sexism, subtle and otherwise, is a recurring theme that, I can assure you, has my attention. I encourage any readers to write with concerns, or anything specific they notice on the topic. Another reader took issue with a headline on a piece that predicted how Trump would end up pulling off his shock win: “Donald Trump’s Big Bet on Less Educated Whites. ” The election wasn’t the only subject on readers’ minds this week. A Times investigation into genetically modified foods sparked controversy, with much of the dissent landing in our inbox. The investigation’s claim: “Genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides. ” Here are a couple of the reader responses: A commentator on Twitter shared Mr. Wanzek’s concern. We shared these concerns with The Times’s business editor, Dean Murphy. Here’s his reply. On The Times carrying out such studies: On the complaint that The Times views farmers as less intelligent: The public editor’s take: Over all, I found the piece to be a thorough, educational read on a complex subject. But I thought readers had some interesting feedback. First, it’s true that big news organizations like The Times often produce their own studies and independent analysis. In this case, given how many questions that were raised about the methodology, it’s clear that the piece would have benefited from more explanation of how the data was assembled and used. On the issue of the story’s tone toward farmers, I didn’t see anything that struck me as intentionally talking down to farmers. But then, I’m not a farmer, and I would have enjoyed hearing more from those who are. Another story this week that drew pointed reader replies was headlined, in print and on the home page: “Locker Room Talk Becomes the Talk of Harvard. ” The public editor’s column addressed the issue, which prompted readers who agreed with the headline choice to come to its defense. And finally, one Trump rally attendee wrote to apologize for how he treated the media. See you next week. — Updated, 2:30 pm, Tuesday, November 15. | 1 |
. Mainstream Media Crashed — The Scapegoat is 'Fake News' They kept telling the American people Hillary Clinton was going to win the election; and in every wa... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/mainstream-media-crashed-scapegoat-is.html They kept telling the American people Hillary Clinton was going to win the election; and in every way they could think of, they told the American people this was a good idea. Then, on election night, they, the media, crashed. The results came in. The media went into deep shock. As protests and riots then spread across America, the media neglected to mention: a) they’d been bashing Trump because he said he might not accept the outcome of the vote, and b) here were large numbers of people on the Democrat side who weren’t accepting the outcome of the vote.A new campaign had to be launched. Suddenly, on cue, it was: Hillary Clinton lost because “fake news” about her had been spread around during the campaign. Fake news sites. That was the reason. These “fake sites” had to be punished. Somehow. They had to be defamed. Blocked. Censored. Here is an excerpt from a list of “fake news” sites suggested by one professor. The list is circulating widely on the Web: Project Veritas; Obama put in his two cents : “Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television… If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.” Excuse me. “We won’t know what to protect?” Meaning what to favor, what to promote, what to lie about? Meaning only some speech is free? Obama is way, way behind the curve. Thousands of websites and blogs have been exposing major media as fake for years. I started nomorefakenews.com in 2001. If Google, Facebook, and Twitter keep expanding their censorship of “disfavored messages,” they’re going to pay a price. More and more users will go elsewhere. The facade of the major media is getting thinner. You can see a glow of rage and resentment behind it. They’re desperately looking for revenge on the millions and millions of people who are deserting them and laughing at them. They presumed too much. They presumed they had us in the palm of their hand. We were their property. We were transfixed by their authority. All that is going away. Bye, bye. The big shift is accelerating. Independent media are in the ascendance. Understand that. Recognize it. The impossible is happening. Fake news sites? Please. The major media are the biggest fakes the world has ever seen. Their anchors and star reporters are bloviating cranks. They’re dinner-theater actors. The Mainstream Media has been caught faking news countless times, which had serious consequences worldwide: 9. BBC Journalist Comes Clean: 'Believe Nothing You Read Or Watch' Over the years, I’ve talked to some of them. I’ve warned them of their coming troubles. They were miles away from believing me. Now, they’re starting to sweat blood. Major media news for America is still basically manufactured in New York and Washington — plus occasional outbursts from Hollywood creatures who bemoan the decline of inclusive liberalism, as they expand their gun-toting security staffs and dig deeper bunkers. The New York-Washington axis exists in a self-serving bubble, which has now taken serious punctures. The delusional attacks against “fake sites” underlines how out of touch these elites are with the rest of the country. Independent media outlets are winning. They won’t be stopped. When the people who now head the tech giants were growing up, they were heralding the Internet as a new era of free information-exchange. But now that they find themselves working with the government in the Surveillance State, they’re fronting for censorship. In fact, they’re showing they were never for freedom. That was a pose all along. They were, from the beginning, agents of repression. They can try to stop independent media now, but they will fail. Fake web sites? What about fake companies? What about Google, Facebook, Twitter? Behind their happy-happy messages, they were built to propagandize, profile, and control. Understand this: major media have a rock-bottom article of faith. It is: “We own the news.” They can’t give it up. They’ll never give it up. It fuels everything they do. It’s the substance and core of their attitude. As their ship goes down below the waves, they’ll be chanting it. “We own the news.” But they don’t. In truth, they never did. For a time, they managed to sell that delusion to the people. That time is drawing to a close. The elite political class and their media minions fear more than independent news countering their own news. For obvious reasons, every civilization down through history has had its own monopolistic media, its central “broadcasting system.” Its controlled outlet. But now, The One has become Many. That is the threat. The rapid proliferation of The Many is an unpredictable X-factor. The population is waking up to decentralized media. Instead of the hypnotic attachment to one basic information source — the habit of a lifetime — the public is learning to handle multiple sources. Therefore, the hypnotic spell is being broken and dissolved. This is the basic problem for the elites. How can they reinstate the trance? By trying to censor the Internet? By creating a sudden war or other disaster, briefly “unifying” the country? These are not permanent solutions, particularly since more and more people understand such maneuvers and their true aims. Awake is awake. Putting the genie back in the bottle — particularly when major media denizens aren’t very bright, as evidenced by their latest “fake news” scam — is on the order of trying to perform a piece of stage magic after the audience has already learned how it’s done. Of course, the media clowns will try. And in the process, they’ll further expose themselves and actually assist in the awakening. Boom. By Jon Rappoport Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue.
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During Saturday’s Women’s March in Washington, DC, Ashley Judd ranted, “I am not as nasty as your own daughter being your favorite sex symbol, like your wet dreams infused with your own genes. ”[Judd said, “I am not as nasty as racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege. I’m not as nasty as using little girls like Pokemon before their bodies have even developed. I am not as nasty as your own daughter being your favorite sex symbol, like your wet dreams infused with your own genes. But, yeah, I’m a nasty woman, a loud, vulgar proud woman. I’m not nasty, like the combo of Trump and Pence being served up to me in my voting booth. I’m nasty like the battles my grandmothers fought to get me into that voting booth. I’m nasty, like the fight for wage equality. Scarlett Johansson, why were the female actors paid less than half of what the male actors earned last year? See, even when we do go into higher paying jobs, our wages are still cut with blades sharpened by testosterone. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” Obamacare architect and Chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Medical Ethics, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel stated that while “costs have gone up,” under Obamacare, “they’ve gone up much more slowly than they did under President Bush, and they’ve moderated. ” He also stated that “young, healthy people” were most of the “losers” under the law. “I mean, on any one of the three major criteria, how you would evaluate the ACA: Did it improve coverage? Yes, 22 million people got insurance through the ACA. So, that’s a plus. Our uninsurance rate now hovers around 10% and if all the states had expanded Medicaid, it would be even lower. On costs, yes costs have gone up, but they’ve gone up much more slowly than they did under President Bush, and they’ve moderated. For example, under President Bush, insurance premiums for employers went up 80% while under President Obama, they went up 35% a substantial reduction in the growth of healthcare costs. So, cost control has actually been significantly improved. And then in terms of quality, we’ve seen hospital readmission rates within 30 days of discharge going down. We’ve seen improvements in infections in hospitals, in no thromboemboli, no falls. So, whether it’s access, cost, or coverage, the Affordable Care Act has been an improvement. That doesn’t mean it’s been a home run on every one of them, but a significant improvement. ” He added that “in any big piece of legislation, for 300 million Americans, there are going to be some winners and losers. And mostly those losers were young, healthy people who were getting a great deal by the insurance companies, because they were young and healthy. ” He added that “Young healthy families of people who were in their 30s with two young kids, who don’t use a lot of healthcare, got a great deal. But people who needed healthcare didn’t get a great deal. Remember, if we’re going to cover everyone, including people with illnesses, it’s — the cost is going to have to be spread out over people. Some people actually, unfortunately, did get price increases. The best solution to the price increases is to moderate healthcare cost growth, and the Affordable Care Act began us on a process to do that, and it is unfortunate that deductibles have gone up. I would note, the Republicans want to increase deductibles even more, and so, that’s not a solution to the problem. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
US, Japan, South Korea agree to put more pressure on North Korea US, Japan, South Korea agree to put more pressure on North Korea By 0 50
Senior officials from the United States, Japan and South Korea have agreed to step up pressure on North Korea to get it to abandon its nuclear and missile programs.
The three deputy foreign ministers meeting in Tokyo on Thursday made clear that North Korea now requires broader international pressure and tougher sanctions because it poses a new level of threat.
“We will not accept North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons, period,” US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters after meeting with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.
Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Shinsuke Sugiyama echoed Blinken’s comments. “We reaffirmed the necessity to increase pressure against North Korea to have it give up its nuclear and missile development and realize the denuclearization of the peninsula,” Sugiyama said.
China, North Korea’s lone major ally, and Russia have pushed for a resumption of six-party talks on denuclearization in North Korea. The… | 0 |
Pew: 8 Million Illegal Immigrant Workers in the U.S. in 2014 Joseph Lawler, Washington Examiner, November 3, 2016
There were about 8 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. workforce in 2014, a number that didn’t change significantly since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, according to the Pew Research Center.
But as a share of the overall labor force, illegal immigrants have declined slightly from 2009 to 2014, from 5.2 percent to 5 percent.
Thursday’s report, written by researchers Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn and based on U.S. Census figures, indicates that the country’s reliance on unauthorized labor hasn’t changed much since the 2008 financial crisis, which drastically slowed or even reversed migration from Mexico. The report examines the illegal immigrant workforce up through 2014.
Before the crisis, especially as the housing bubble inflated, the share of unauthorized labor soared, from below 3 percent of the labor force in the 1990s to 5.4 percent just prior to the crash.
{snip}
About 10 percent of the illegal immigrant workforce has been protected from deportation, according to Pew, by executive orders from President Obama . Hillary Clinton has said that she will expand on those orders. {snip}
{snip} | 0 |
On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor,” radio host Jamila Bey argued, “Milo has made millions of dollars on going and bringing violence and bringing terror to individuals he doesn’t like. ”[Bey said that it is “absolutely” the case that the First Amendment only protects freedom of assembly. She added, “[T]hese young students at Berkeley, who are among the smartest in the world put themselves on the line in defense of their fellow students. One of the highest things that we hope our people do in battle and they’re doing it already at school, to say we do not accept the violence that Milo … brings to the people he chooses to out, bringing out their names of people who — . ” When asked about the Berkeley praising the violence, Bey said the students are “young people, and I’m sure that they may even change their minds, but the arguments they made were sound. ” She later added, “Milo has made millions of dollars on going and bringing violence and bringing terror to individuals he doesn’t like. ” ( Grabien) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
Leading a coalition, the Texas attorney general filed a brief with the U. S. Supreme Court on Monday supporting President Donald Trump’s temporary travel stay. Attorneys general from 14 other states and the governor of Mississippi joined to urge the nation’s highest court to reinstate the executive order. [State officials urge that President Trump was acting within his lawful authority given to him by Congress when national security, foreign affairs, and immigration policy judgments require him to exercise it. Last month the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed a lower district court’s order blocking the executive action, as reported by Breitbart News. The opinion of the court was issued on May 25. The decision upheld the halt of the executive order by the federal district court in the District of Maryland. The U. S. Department of Justice filed a petition for writ of certiorari on June 1 asking the court to decide whether the president acted within his authority in issuing the temporary travel ban from six countries. The Supreme Court took the rare step on June 3, as reported by Breitbart News, in expediting review of the case. “The executive order is a tailored response to a very real threat to our national security,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement obtained by Breitbart Texas. “A temporary pause on entry from countries with heightened security concerns is necessary to shore up our nation’s vetting procedures. The president is fulfilling his solemn duty to protect Texans and all Americans. ” The states of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, have joined the state of Texas in filing the friend of the court brief (amicus curiae) in the U. S. Supreme Court. A summary of the arguments made in the brief are as follows: The district court’s injunction of the President’s temporary suspension of entry for specified classes of nonresident aliens is remarkable. The injunction was issued despite three longstanding doctrines limiting the availability of judicial remedies for disagreement with policy decisions like the Executive Order here. First, the Constitution does not apply extraterritorially to nonresident aliens abroad seeking entry. And this Court has specifically recognized that there is no “judicial remedy” to override the Executive’s use of its delegated 8 U. S. C. § 1182( f) power to deny classes of nonresident aliens entry into this country. Second, the Order must be accorded “the strongest of presumptions and the widest latitude of judicial interpretation,” because it is in [the U. S. Supreme Court opinion of] Youngstown’s first zone of executive action pursuant to congressionally delegated power. Third, the Court has long accorded facially neutral government actions a presumption of validity and good faith, so those actions can be invalidated under a analysis only if there is the clearest proof of pretext. This longstanding, exacting standard for judicial scrutiny of government motives has been recognized by this Court in multiple types of constitutional challenges. This limit respects institutional roles by precluding courts from engaging in a tenuous “judicial psychoanalysis of a drafter’s heart of hearts. ” Moreover, they urge: Plaintiffs cannot satisfy this Court’s exacting standards for showing that the Executive Order is pretext masking a religious classification. The Order classifies aliens according to nationality based on concerns about the government’s ability to adequately vet nationals of six covered countries who seek entry. Not only that, but these six countries covered by the Order were previously identified by Congress and the Obama Administration, under the program, as national security “countries of concern. ” The Order is therefore valid, as it provides a “facially legitimate and bona fide reason” for exercising 8 U. S. C. § 1182( f) national security and powers to restrict entry. The states also argued that any “ statements regarding a potential future policy” are “far from the clearest proof” required to overcome the strong legal presumption of validity, especially as to a different policy adopted by the president after he took office after conferring with other government officials. Lana Shadwick is a writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. She has served as a prosecutor and associate judge in Texas. Follow her on Twitter @LanaShadwick2. State of Texas et al. Brief at U. S. Supreme Court in Support of President’s Temporary Travel Halt, | 1 |
On Tuesday’s “MTP Daily,” Senator Joe Manchin ( ) stated that the commutation of Chelsea Manning is “dead wrong,” and giving “a green light to people basically, with all the hacking going on now, and all the cyber attacks we’ve got going on. ” Manchin said, “I think it’s dead wrong, absolutely dead wrong. This is treason, espionage at the highest level. What the Private Manning done, — what Chelsea did is — absolutely found guilty, 35 year sentence … should basically serve that sentence out. You’re going to — we’re going to give a green light to people basically, with all the hacking going on now, and all the cyber attacks we’ve got going on. My goodness, you’ve got Snowden out there, and you’ve got Assange, you’ve got all these people, it’s just wrong. We’re not going to — I’m for one, not going to be supportive of these types of commutes whatsoever, or pardons. I think they’re wrong. ” ( Washington Free Beacon) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
Washinton’s Blog – by David Swanson
Officially, of course, the national bird of the United States is that half-a-peace-sign that Philadelphia sports fans like to hold up at opposing teams. But unofficially, the film National Bird has it right: the national bird is a killer drone.
Finally, finally, finally, somebody allowed me to see this movie. And finally somebody made this movie. There have been several drone movies worth seeing , most of them fictional drama , and one very much worth avoiding ( Eye in the Sky ). But National Bird is raw truth, not entirely unlike what you might fantasize media news reports would be in a magical world in which media outlets gave a damn about human life.
The first half of National Bird is the stories of three participants in the U.S. military’s drone murder program, as told by them. And then, just as you’re starting to think you’ll have to write that old familiar review that praises how well the stories of the victims among the aggressors were told but asks in exasperation whether any of the victims of the actual missiles have any stories, National Bird expands to include just what is so often missing, and even to combine the two narratives in a powerful way.
Heather Linebaugh wanted to protect people, benefit the world, travel, see the world, and use super cool technology. Apparently our society did not explain to her in time what it means to join the military. Now she suffers guilt, anxiety, moral injury, PTSD, sleep disorder, despair, and a sense of responsibility to speak out on behalf of friends, other veterans, who have killed themselves or become too alcoholic to speak for themselves. Linebaugh helped murder people with missiles from drones, and watched them die, and identified body parts or watched loved ones gather up body parts.
Even while still in the Air Force, Linebaugh was on a suicide watch list and had a psychologist recommend moving her to a different sort of job, but the Air Force refused. She has episodes. She sees things. She hears things. But she’s forbidden to discuss her work with friends or even with a therapist who doesn’t have the proper “security clearance.”
We let Daniel down even more than Heather. He says he actually opposed militarism but was homeless and desperate, so he joined the military. We could have given him a house for much less than we paid him to help murder people at Fort Meade.
Lisa Ling worked on a database filled by drone surveillance that compiled information on 121,000 “targets” in two years. Multiply that by a dozen years. With 90% of victims not among the targets, add up how many people would die in the targeting of the whole list. That’d be over 7 million. But it’s not numbers that have poisoned the souls of these three veterans; it’s children and mothers and brothers and uncles lying in pieces on the ground.
Ling travels to Afghanistan to see the place at ground level and to meet with drone victims. She meets a little boy who lost his leg and his 4-year-old brother and his sister and his father. On February 2, 2010, drone “pilots” at Creech Air Base murdered 23 innocent members of one family.
The filmmakers have voices read the written transcript of what the drone operators said to each other before, during, and after sending in the missiles that did the damage. This is worse than Collateral Murder . The people whose job it is to identify children and others who should not be murdered have identified children among the group of people being targeted. The “pilots” at Creech are eager to reject this information and to get onto killing as many people as they can. Their lust for blood drives the decision process. Only after they’ve killed 23 people do they recognize children among the survivors, and the lack of guns.
We see the bodies brought home to bury. Those injured describe their suffering, physical as well as mental. We see people being fitted with artificial legs. We hear Afghans describe their perception of drones. They imagine, just as many Americans may imagine, and just as viewers of Eye in the Sky would imagine, that drone operators have a clear, high resolution view of everything. In fact, they have a view of fuzzy little blobs on a computer screen that looks like it was created in the 1980s.
Linebaugh says there is no way to distinguish the little “civilian” blobs from little “militant” blobs. When Daniel hears President Obama claim that there is always near certainty that no civilians will be killed, Daniel explains that such knowledge is simply not possible. Linebaugh says she was often on the side of the conversation telling the “pilots” at Creech not to murder innocents, but that they always pushed for permission to kill.
Jesselyn Radack, attorney for whistleblowers, says in the film that the FBI told two whistleblowers that a terrorist group had put them on a kill list. She said that the FBI has also contacted Linebaugh’s family and warned her that “terrorists” have been searching for her name online, suggesting that she fix this problem by shutting up. (She had written an op-ed in the Guardian ).
The FBI also raids Daniel’s house, arriving with 30 to 50 agents, badges, guns, cameras, and search warrants. They take away his papers, electronics, and phone. They tell him he is under investigation for a possible indictment under the Espionage Act. This is the World War I-era law for targeting foreign enemies that President Obama has made a routine of using to target domestic whistleblowers. While Obama has prosecuted more people under this law than did all previous presidents combined, we probably have no way of knowing how many people have been explicitly threatened with the possibility.
While we should be apologizing to, comforting, and aiding these young people rather than denying them the right to speak to anybody and threatening them with decades in prison, Lisa Ling did manage to find some kindness. Victims of drone strikes in Afghanistan told her that they forgave her. As the film ends, she’s planning another trip to Afghanistan. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — In his first, rocky week as President Trump’s press secretary, Sean M. Spicer was scolded by his boss, pilloried as a liar, hammered by journalists, mocked by Stephen Colbert, taunted by the ice cream brand Dippin’ Dots and held up as the poster child for an administration that can play fast and loose with the facts. No wonder he was looking for his flak jacket. “Is this bulletproof?” Mr. Spicer asked one afternoon last week, peering into a closet in his sparse West Wing office as he hunted for the combat vest that, by cheeky tradition, is passed down from one presidential spokesman to the next. Until recently, Mr. Spicer was the public voice and chief strategist of the Republican National Committee, the epitome of establishment Washington. Now he is the face of an administration bent on upending the status quo and waging war on the news media, surprising colleagues here with how comfortably he has embraced Mr. Trump’s ire toward the press. The day after the inauguration, he marched into the White House briefing room on Mr. Trump’s orders and lambasted stunned reporters as “dishonest” while claiming, against available evidence, that the inauguration had been the most attended in history. (He later said his count included viewers watching online.) The ironic hashtag #spicerfacts was soon trending online. Days later, Mr. Spicer defended Mr. Trump’s false claims about rampant voter fraud, referring to studies that do not back up the assertion and saying the president “believes what he believes. ” On Thursday, he had to walk back his suggestion that Mr. Trump would impose a major tax on Mexican imports, jolting global markets. The reaction has been harsh. “There’s no learning curve on a moral compass,” said John Weaver, a Republican strategist who has advised Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio. “You don’t need a learning curve to tell the truth from fiction. ” If he’s bothered by the blowback, Mr. Spicer, 45, who had long dreamed of standing behind the White House lectern, is not showing it. “We have a free press — I get it,” Mr. Spicer said last week during an interview in his office, where a giant television broadcasts four stations at once. “But the press doesn’t like it when you call out their errors the same way they call out everyone else’s. ” Statements from the White House, Mr. Spicer argued, should be given the same leeway afforded a news organization. “I don’t know how many corrections are in The New York Times any given day,” Mr. Spicer said. “But I don’t wake up every day and go, ‘O. K. you’re all liars. ’” Over a conversation, Mr. Spicer — who ate ice cream from a cup branded with the presidential seal — was by turns defensive and relaxed, and still excited by the novelty of working in the West Wing. Grabbing a history book, he flipped to a page with a list of previous press aides. “Diane Sawyer had that office!” he said, proudly. A framed photograph of himself at the White House lectern, taken days earlier, was displayed on a mantel. A note from Barack Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, was nearby. “It was very, ‘What an amazing honor it is,’” Mr. Spicer said of the letter. Asked if he was bothered by Mr. Trump’s unpredictable Twitter posts, Mr. Spicer shrugged. “You get the ability to wake up and have an issue or an idea become front and center in a second,” he said. “That’s a huge thing. ” The president “drives the news,” Mr. Spicer said. “I help provide updates. ” A stocky Navy reservist who grew up in Rhode Island, Mr. Spicer prides himself on persistence. He attended a prestigious Catholic high school on a scholarship, sending away for brochures for the school without his parents’ knowledge. After graduating from Connecticut College, he bounced around working on campaigns, briefly living in an R. V. without heat or hot water. Years ago, a line drive at a softball game smacked into Mr. Spicer’s jaw, leaving his mouth wired shut for weeks. “Be careful,” his teammate told doctors on the way to the hospital. “He talks for a living. ” He climbed his way up the Washington ladder, representing Republicans in Congress before landing in the office of the United States trade representative in the George W. Bush administration. His jaw has since recovered: The Washington Post reported that Mr. Spicer chews, and swallows whole, more than 20 pieces of Orbitz cinnamon gum a day. He is still finding his place in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. A Washington insider among political outsiders, Mr. Spicer joined the Trump campaign in August, against the advice of friends who warned against tying himself to an unpredictable candidate. On the eve of the election, Mr. Spicer privately told several journalists that Mr. Trump’s odds of victory were slim. Expressing those misgivings may have been a move to soften the blow to the party in case of a Trump defeat, but was the sort of disloyalty that is anathema in Trump World. “Sometimes he was a little less enthusiastic about our direction than other times,” said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist. “But he hung in there. ” Mr. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, rarely speaks to reporters on the record. But he reached out to a reporter unprompted to praise Mr. Spicer after learning of this profile, a sign of the Trump White House’s support for Mr. Spicer after a tumultuous first week. Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Spicer’s initial fiery appearance in the White House briefing room, urging him to wear a sharper suit and appear more confident, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations. (“He was disappointed with how the overall news cycle was going,” Mr. Spicer said in the interview, declining to elaborate.) But Mr. Trump was pleased with Mr. Spicer’s briefing on Monday, calling Mr. Spicer a “superstar. ” “He’s a fighter,” Mr. Bannon said in a telephone interview, during which he also urged the news media to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while. ” “Sean Spicer is much too polite to the media,” Mr. Bannon added. “I’m the guy who wanted them out of the building. ” (He was referring to a proposal, scrapped for now, to move the White House briefing room from its current West Wing home.) Mr. Spicer has also heard from supporters who say his of the news media was long overdue. “Accountability goes both ways,” said former Representative Mike Pappas, a New Jersey Republican who hired Mr. Spicer in the 1990s, adding that Mr. Spicer’s complaints were . “There’s a clear bias against people like me, and people like him, and people like the man he works for,” Mr. Pappas said. “You have a right to your bias, but don’t report it as factual. ” Clifford Hobbins, Mr. Spicer’s high school history teacher, dismissed questions about his former student’s integrity. “He is as honest as the day is long,” said Mr. Hobbins, who said he had voted for Mr. Trump. “I’ve been very proud of the way he handled himself. ” Mr. Spicer, who was barely known outside Washington, is still adjusting to national fame. More than five million people tuned in for his first formal press briefing last week, with cable news channels and some broadcast networks taking the proceedings live. The discovery that he had posted on Twitter multiple times about his disdain for Dippin’ Dots, and its slogan, “The Ice Cream of the Future,” prompted the company to send him an open letter that went viral. Mr. Spicer sounded exasperated when the subject came up. ”It’s a joke,” he said. “How long can they be ‘the ice cream of the future’? You can’t actually be the future forever. ” Finishing his ice cream — which was not — Mr. Spicer shrugged. “You’re not here to be someone’s buddy. You’re here to enact the president’s agenda,” he said of his job. “And if you think it’s going to be anything bad, then this isn’t the job for you. ” Still, when asked about his first weekend, when he blasted the news media on instructions from an aggrieved boss, Mr. Spicer allowed himself a grimace. “That wasn’t the Saturday I thought I was waking up to,” he said. | 1 |
”I’m rooting against Tim Tebow to walk into baseball and flourish.” — @ColinCowherd pic. twitter. During his Friday Fox Sports Radio show “The Herd,” Colin Cowherd ripped Tim Tebow’s decision to play baseball after 10 years of focusing on football in college and the NFL. Cowherd said he’s rooting against Tebow to make a major league roster because he does not want to see someone make it without putting in the work. “Why would we root for Tebow to be able to just step into baseball, which he didn’t play for 10 years, and excel?” Cowherd asked. “He’s a crappy player, and that’s great because what it shows you, Michael Jordan was a crappy player, is you can’t just mail it in. ” He went on to note how people in other professions put in the time and effort to become good at their jobs. “I’m rooting against Tim Tebow to walk into baseball and flourish, and I rooted against Michael Jordan to walk into baseball and flourish. They’ve both been exposed as dreamers and lousy once they got out of their lane,” Cowherd continued. Cowherd then accused Tebow of not working hard enough and being “not willing to take the steps to be great” because he refused to play in the Canadian Football League and took contracts with the New York Jets and New England Patriots over the Jacksonville Jaguars. He concluded, “[Tebow] doesn’t deserve to play Major League Baseball or be a franchise quarterback. ” Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
Eine Kapelle für die Zarenfamilie Max Vetrov / RIA Novosti
Die Abgeordnete der russischen Staatsduma Natalja Poklonskaja während der Eröffnungszeremonie einer Kapelle in Simferopol: Die Kapelle ist den Leidensduldern der Zarenfamilie gewidmet. Facebook | 0 |
LONDON — When Alan Rusbridger retired last year after two decades as the editor of The Guardian, he was lauded as one of the finest journalists of his generation, having transformed a midsize British newspaper into an international digital media giant. He racked up a string of investigative scoops and made the organization a darling of readers around the world. But Mr. Rusbridger on Friday departed the organization to which he had devoted his career. With mounting financial losses that threatened The Guardian, he was forced to give up the plum role he was set to assume in September, as chairman of the Scott Trust, the nonprofit organization that owns The Guardian. Mr. Rusbridger’s decision to cut ties with The Guardian follows a series of events that made his presence seem increasingly untenable: lingering resentments from a battle over his replacement as editor a string of articles detailing the paper’s deteriorating finances and, finally, a clash with his successor, Katharine Viner, who helped spearhead his strategy for international growth but now faces a period of retrenchment. The tensions, playing out on a public stage, deviate from the familiar news media angst in the digital world, where print’s changing fortunes can create upheaval at the top. In his resignation statement, Mr. Rusbridger, 62, seemed to imply at times that he had been undone by the new regime — which he helped put in place — as well as a rapidly shifting environment in which even news organizations hemorrhage money while titans like Facebook and Google devour advertising revenue. The Guardian lost an estimated 45 million pounds, or $65 million, last year. It is seeking to cut its annual budget of $380 million by 20 percent over the next three years. It is cutting its British work force by 310 positions — 250 job cuts and 60 vacant positions that will not be filled — or 18 percent of the total. “Much has changed in the year since I stepped down,” Mr. Rusbridger wrote in a memo to The Guardian’s staff members on Friday, stating that the leadership of The Guardian — David Pemsel, the chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, and Ms. Viner, the editor — no longer wanted him to take over the Scott Trust. “We all currently do our journalism in the teeth of a digital hurricane,” Mr. Rusbridger said in the memo. The leaders of The Guardian “clearly believe they would like to plot a route into the future with a new chair,” he said, adding, “I understand their reasoning. ” A central point of disagreement within The Guardian has been its refusal — for Mr. Rusbridger, virtually an ideology — to charge online subscribers, as news organizations like The Financial Times, The Times of London, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have come around to doing. The Guardian has recently experimented with a membership model that amounts to seeking donations, but Mr. Rusbridger insisted that a digital pay wall would be at odds with the newspaper’s editorial mission. Under Mr. Rusbridger, The Guardian invested hundreds of millions of dollars in expansion, fueled in part by proceeds from the sale of a trade publication, Auto Trader. The Guardian Media Group’s investment fund had been shrinking recently at an alarming rate — to £740 million in January, from £838. 3 million in July. The Guardian, which started in Manchester, England, in 1821, built a presence in Australia and the United States beginning in 2011. It seemed to move easily into the digital realm, staffing 10 bureaus in the two countries and hiring more than 50 reporters. Along the way, Mr. Rusbridger racked up an investigative hat trick, with electrifying scoops on illegal phone hacking by British tabloids, the WikiLeaks trove of diplomatic cables, and leaks from Edward J. Snowden describing the vast electronic surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency. The Guardian won its first Pulitzer Prize in 2014, shared with The Washington Post, for the surveillance articles. The Guardian succeeded in significantly expanding its international readership — the company says traffic from outside Britain now represents of its digital audience. But its resistance to charging readers for content came at a significant cost. “He made The Guardian’s mark, and made it an international brand,” said Dominic Ponsford, the editor of Press Gazette, which covers the British news industry. But it was an expensive proposition, and Mr. Ponsford said, “That cost is one of the reasons that its losses are so high now. ” In a statement on Friday, Ms. Viner lauded Mr. Rusbridger as “a truly towering figure at The Guardian over the last three decades. ” But she added: “In his email to staff, Alan recognized how much has changed in the year since he stepped down as editor, and that it is right that we all plot a new route to the future. We face a formidable challenge over the coming months in a digital environment that is shifting all the time. ” Current and former colleagues of Mr. Rusbridger’s, who acknowledged criticism of his business decisions, characterized him as a brilliant journalist — not to mention a talented pianist, an affinity he explored in a 2013 book — and nearly universally declined to discuss his departure for attribution, describing it as a sad way to end his affiliation with the institution. Mr. Rusbridger, who was born in Zambia and graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1976 with a degree in English, started as a journalist at The Cambridge Evening News. He joined The Guardian in 1979, and in 1988 became an editor there. In 1994, he was promoted to deputy editor, before taking over the next year as editor in chief, a position he held until his departure last spring. Cerebral and academic, with often unruly hair, Mr. Rusbridger had an inner steel that won him admiration and devotion. Early in his career at The Guardian, Mr. Rusbridger led the newspaper’s tenacious investigation of what became known as the scandal in Parliament, which contributed to the fall of the Conservative government of Prime Minister John Major in 1997. Mr. Rusbridger stared down a libel suit against the newspaper by a powerful former minister involved in the scandal, Jonathan Aitken, who was ultimately jailed for perjury. In the hypercompetitive and partisan world of British journalism, Mr. Rusbridger was sometimes a lonely figure, often more admired in the United States than among his rivals at home. As Mr. Rusbridger’s vision for the newsroom played out, the strategy appeared to have the full support of the top brass. Shortly after Mr. Rusbridger retired in 2015, Mr. Pemsel, the chief executive, said he was “hugely excited at the prospect of managing the next phase of growth at The Guardian, building on our international audience, capitalizing on the many commercial and digital opportunities. ” Around that time, another top executive said the company’s finances had been good that year. Then the bottom fell out. Print advertising cratered, and expected digital money never materialized. Support for Mr. Rusbridger suddenly shifted, as he was cast as a negligent manager who had saddled the paper with a slew of problems. Janine Gibson, a favorite of Mr. Rusbridger’s who lost out in the race to succeed him, left with other senior Guardian journalists, further shifting the way his legacy was viewed in the newsroom. In January, Mr. Rusbridger’s choice as The Guardian’s opinion editor, Jonathan Freedland, stepped down in what was seen as a leftward shift in the organization’s editorial stance. And Ms. Viner’s plans for the newsroom seemed increasingly at odds with Mr. Rusbridger’s, making the idea that he would soon return, as essentially her boss, increasingly unsavory. The negative sentiment started to rise in recent months, as several news media reports detailed a rising tide of internal discord, quoting insiders who placed the blame for the company’s woes on Mr. Rusbridger’s policies and what they saw as his intractability. A critical article in Prospect Magazine took aim at Mr. Rusbridger’s decisions to “lavish money on new presses and delightful new offices. ” It prompted Mr. Rusbridger to strike back, defending the move to make a “significant investment in digital today” in the hope of having a “sustainable business tomorrow. ” It all reached a head on Thursday when the board of the trust met to discuss Mr. Rusbridger’s future. The meeting ended without a decision. Mr. Rusbridger was by all accounts apparently dismayed by the public and the sour tone at the institution he dominated for so many years. While his supporters framed the decision to go as his, others said he had lost the battle with the trust and had no choice but to leave. In his memo, Mr. Rusbridger, who is currently the principal, or head, of Lady Margaret Hall, a college at the University of Oxford, wished his colleagues well. In September, he will also become the chairman of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, also at Oxford. | 1 |
Не верьте больше в Санту, дети, он хуже всех врагов на свете! 25 ноября 2016 Общество
Американские психологи рекомендовали родителям не скрывать от своих детей правду о том, что Санта Клауса не существует. Исследование опубликовано в Lancet Psychiatry, о нем сообщает издание EurekAlert.
Проблема британских учёных в том, что никто им больше не верит. Как прочитает недоверчивый обыватель: «Британские учёные сделали очередное открытие», — так немедленно злобно усмехнётся и использует газетку на бытовые нужды. Поэтому британские учёные мигрируют и мимикрируют, чтобы по-прежнему сеять неразумное, злобное, но желательно все же вечное в умы неблагодарных землян.
Очевидно, именно такие вот бывшие «британские учёные», заброшенные волею судеб на берега Нового Света, и сделали ошарашивающее открытие: Санта Клауса не существует. Я понимаю, что эта новость повергла вас в шок. Вы стоите? Тогда сядьте. Вывод, который сделали эти светочи науки, ещё ужаснее, чем факт наличия отсутствия белобородого добряка в кафтане: нельзя говорить детям, что Санта есть, поскольку это ставит их (цитирую) «в трудную моральную ситуацию».
По формулировке вы сразу поняли, что речь идёт о психологах, окопавшихся в уютных кабинетах с целью отъёма максимально высоких гонораров у доверчивого населения. Именно они решили, что веру в Санта Клауса (Деда Мороза, Бабу Ягу, эльфов, фей, гоблинов и кикимор) навязывают детям бессовестные, потерявшие всякую связь с реальностью родители, желающие таким образом вернуться в детство. В результате родительского разгильдяйства вырастают циничные, наглые, жадные, расчётливые особи, привыкшие получать подарки в обмен на хорошее поведение.
Подумать только, сколько поколений выросло на развращающем отрицательном примере подозрительного толстого старикашки, коротающего 364 дня в году среди льдов, айсбергов и белых медведей! Но теперь американские психологи сорвали маску с этого маньяка. Теперь он не уйдёт от суда общественности. Теперь мы знаем, в чём кроется корень всех бед и преступлений нашего времени. Отныне любому преступнику на суде достаточно будет сказать: “В детстве родители заставляли меня верить в Санта Клауса, Ваша честь!” и зарыдать, чтобы получить полное оправдание.
Ну а нам, господа, ещё легче. Дед Мороз — он вообще тип явно уголовный. Посмотрите на его красный нос и несовершеннолетнюю внучку неизвестного происхождения. Так что не стоит вздыхать, читая криминальные новости: теперь-то мы в курсе, кто виноват!
Источники информации: eurekalert.org , картинок prikol.ru и prikolov.net . Теги: | 0 |
The giant panda has long languished on the endangered species list, but an international monitoring group finally had some good news for it over the weekend. The pandas were removed from the endangered list, along with the Tibetan antelope. But the monitors issued a grim warning about the fate of the eastern gorilla, which has moved one step closer to extinction. It also said that the plains zebra has become “near threatened” because of hunting. The new designations were announced on Sunday in a report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading environmental group that tracks the status of plant and animal species. Giant pandas are national symbol in China, their native habitat, and the I. U. C. N. said on Sunday that efforts by the Chinese government to reverse the slide of the population, using forest protection and reforestation, had been successful. The panda’s new designation is “vulnerable. ” The conservation union said researchers have cautiously increased estimates of the panda population in every study since 1985, but data from the most recent survey conducted between 2011 and 2014 removed any uncertainty about the rebound by the species. That study found an estimated 1, 864 giant pandas in the wild, not counting cubs under the age of 18 months. The one remaining source of concern, however, is a big one. The I. U. C. N. warned that climate change could destroy more than 35 percent of the animal’s bamboo habitat in the next 80 years, leaving its future in doubt. “Whereas the decision to downlist the giant panda to vulnerable is a positive sign confirming that the Chinese government’s efforts to conserve this species are effective, it is critically important that these protective measures are continued, and that emerging threats are addressed,” the group wrote in its giant panda assessment. China said it was less optimistic about the animal’s progress, however. The State Forestry Administration disputed the conservation group’s decision in a statement to The Associated Press, saying pandas struggle to reproduce in the wild and live in small groups spread widely apart. “If we downgrade their conservation status, or neglect or relax our conservation work, the populations and habitats of giant pandas could still suffer irreversible loss, and our achievements would be quickly lost,” the forestry administration told the A. P. “Therefore, we’re not being alarmist by continuing to emphasize the panda species’ endangered status. ” The eastern gorilla has been a lot less lucky. The group changed the status of the species, one of the six great apes, from endangered to critically endangered after what it called “a devastating population decline” of more than 70 percent in the last 20 years. The species lives in the mountains and jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, northwest Rwanda and southwest Uganda, and the group said conflict in that part of Africa was responsible for the sharp decline in the gorilla’s numbers. The spread of firearms and militants in the wider region has also lead to an uptick in poaching and made it dangerous for conservation groups to access the area. The eastern gorilla is composed of two subspecies whose combined population is now estimated to be fewer than 5, 000, the group said. One subspecies has fared better than the other. The estimated population of Grauer’s gorilla has declined by 77 percent since 1994, from 16, 900 individuals to just 3, 800 in 2015. The second subspecies, the mountain gorilla, has actually added to its numbers in recent years, the group said, but its population is still only estimated to be 880. “To see the Eastern gorilla — one of our closest cousins — slide toward extinction is truly distressing,” Inger Andersen, the Director General of the I. U. C. N. said in a statement. “Conservation action does work and we have increasing evidence of it. It is our responsibility to enhance our efforts to turn the tide and protect the future of our planet. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it had deadlocked in a case challenging President Obama’s immigration plan, effectively ending what Mr. Obama had hoped would become one of his central legacies. The program would have shielded as many as five million undocumented immigrants from deportation and allowed them to legally work in the United States. The tie, which left in place an appeals court ruling blocking the plan, amplified the contentious debate over the nation’s immigration policy and presidential power. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in January, it seemed poised to issue a major ruling on presidential power. That did not materialize, but the court’s action, which established no precedent and included no reasoning, was nonetheless perhaps its most important statement this term. The decision was just nine words long: “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court. ” But its consequences will be vast, said Walter Dellinger, who was acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration. “Seldom have the hopes of so many been crushed by so few words,” he said. Speaking at the White House, Mr. Obama described the ruling as a deep disappointment for immigrants who would not be able to emerge from the threat of deportation for at least the balance of his term. “Today’s decision is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system,” he said before heading to the West Coast for a trip. “It is heartbreaking for the millions of immigrants who have made their lives here. ” The decision was one of two determined by tie votes Thursday — the other concerned Indian tribal courts — and one of four so far this term. The court is scheduled to issue its final three decisions of the term, including one on a restrictive Texas abortion law, on Monday. Mr. Obama said the court’s immigration ruling was a stark reminder of the consequences of Republicans’ refusal to consider Judge Merrick B. Garland, the president’s nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. “If you keep on blocking judges from getting on the bench, then courts can’t issue decisions,” Mr. Obama said. “And what that means is then you are going to have the status quo frozen, and we are not able to make progress on some very important issues. ” The case, United States v. Texas, No. concerned a 2014 executive action by the president to allow as many as five million unauthorized immigrants who were the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program that would spare them from deportation and provide them with work permits. The program was called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA. Mr. Obama has said he took the action after years of frustration with Republicans in Congress who had repeatedly refused to support bipartisan Senate legislation to update immigration laws. A coalition of 26 states, led by Texas, promptly challenged the plan, accusing the president of ignoring administrative procedures for changing rules and of abusing the power of his office by circumventing Congress. “Today’s decision keeps in place what we have maintained from the very start: One person, even a president, cannot unilaterally change the law,” Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said in a statement after the ruling. “This is a major setback to President Obama’s attempts to expand executive power, and a victory for those who believe in the separation of powers and the rule of law. ” The court did not disclose how the justices had voted, but they were almost certainly split along ideological lines. Administration officials had hoped that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would join the court’s liberal wing to save the program. The case hinged in part on whether Texas had suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gave it standing to sue. Texas said it had standing because it would be costly for the state to give driver’s licenses to immigrants affected by the federal policy. Chief Justice Roberts is often skeptical of expansive standing arguments. But it seemed plain when the case was argued in April that he was satisfied that Texas had standing, paving the way for a deadlock. Mr. Obama said the White House did not believe the terse ruling from the court had any effect on the president’s authority to act unilaterally. But he said the practical effect would be to freeze his efforts on behalf of immigrants until after the November election. He also predicted that lawmakers would eventually act to overhaul the nation’s immigration system. “Congress is not going to be able to ignore America forever,” he said. “It’s not a matter of if it’s a matter of when. We get these spasms of politics around immigration and and then our traditions and our history and our better impulses kick in. ” White House officials had repeatedly argued that presidents in both parties had used similar executive authority in applying the nation’s immigration laws. And they said Congress had granted federal law enforcement wide discretion over how those laws should be carried out. But the court’s ruling may mean that the next president will again need to seek a congressional compromise to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. And it left immigration activists deeply disappointed. “This is personal,” Rocio Saenz, the executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, said in a statement. “We will remain at the front lines, committed to defending the immigration initiatives and paving the path to lasting immigration reform. ” The lower court rulings in the case were provisional, and the litigation will now continue and may again reach the Supreme Court when it is back at full strength. In the meantime, it seems unlikely that the program will be revived. In February 2015, Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, Tex. entered a preliminary injunction shutting down the program while the legal case proceeded. The government appealed, and a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans affirmed the injunction. In their Supreme Court briefs, the states acknowledged that the president had wide authority over immigration matters, telling the justices that “the executive does have enforcement discretion to forbear from removing aliens on an individual basis. ” Their quarrel, they said, was with what they called a blanket grant of “lawful presence” to millions of immigrants, entitling them to various benefits. In response, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. told the justices that this “lawful presence” was merely what had always followed from the executive branch’s decision not to deport someone for a given period of time. “Deferred action does not provide these individuals with any lawful status under the immigration laws,” he said. “But it provides some measure of dignity and decent treatment. ” “It recognizes the damage that would be wreaked by tearing apart families,” Mr. Verrilli added, “and it allows individuals to leave the shadow economy and work on the books to provide for their families, thereby reducing exploitation and distortion in our labor markets. ” The states said they had suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gave them standing to sue. Judge Jerry E. Smith, writing for the majority in the appeals court, focused on an injury said to have been suffered by Texas, which he said would have to spend millions of dollars to provide driver’s licenses to immigrants as a consequence of the federal program. Mr. Verrilli told the justices that Texas’ injury was a product of its decision to offer driver’s licenses for less than they cost to produce and to tie eligibility for them to federal standards. Texas responded that being required to change its laws was itself the sort of harm that conferred standing. “Such a forced change in Texas law would impair Texas’ sovereign interest in ‘the power to create and enforce a legal code,’” the state’s lawyers wrote in a brief. Judge Hanen grounded his injunction on the Obama administration’s failure to give notice and seek public comments on its new program. He found that notice and comment were required because the program gave blanket relief to entire categories of people, notwithstanding the administration’s assertion that it required determinations about who was eligible for the program. The appeals court affirmed that ruling and added a broader one. The program, it said, also exceeded Mr. Obama’s statutory authority. | 1 |
By Claire Bernish In no surprise to anyone paying even marginal attention, the FBI’s clearing Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in its briefly reopened investigation —... | 0 |
TEL AVIV — The of the United Nations was roundly condemned Tuesday by both and Israeli leaders for a statement slamming the ongoing “occupation” of Palestinian territories. [Marking the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, António Guterres issued a statement saying that the 1967 defensive war “resulted in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Syrian Golan and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Syrians” that “fueled recurring cycles of violence and retribution,” while making no mention of Israel’s right to defend itself at the time against the threat of annihilation from combined Arab armies. “Ending the occupation that began in 1967 and achieving a negotiated outcome is the only way to lay the foundations for enduring peace that meets Israeli security needs and Palestinian aspirations for statehood and sovereignty. It is the only way to achieve the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” Guterres said. “This occupation has imposed a heavy humanitarian and development burden on the Palestinian people,” he added. “Among them are generation after generation of Palestinians who have been compelled to grow up and live in ever more crowded refugee camps, many in abject poverty, and with little or no prospect of a better life for their children. ” Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, accused the of disseminating “Palestinian misinformation. ” “Any attempt at a moral equivalency between killing innocent people and the building of homes is absurd,” he said. “It is preposterous to blame terror and violence in the Middle East on the one true democracy in the region,” he said. “The moment the Palestinian leadership abandons terror, ceases to incite against our people and finally returns to direct negotiations, then real progress can be made towards peace. ” Danon later slammed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad for opening a session of the UN Human Rights Council by decrying Palestinian suffering. “It comes as no surprise that he chose to spread lies about Israel before he even mentioned the massacres in Syria. The Commissioner has forgotten that it is his job to care for human rights throughout the world, not to incite against Israel,” Danon said in a statement. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely called on Guterres to “correct the [UN’s] distortion” of “occupation. ” “On the day when the UN sticks to the facts and ceases the misguided use of the term ‘occupation’ it will restore its credibility as an organization founded to uphold justice and truth,” she said in a statement. Israel is celebrating the 50th anniversary of “the liberation of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, and these are the facts,” she added. The League (ADL) also slammed Guterres for what it described as an “incomplete and misleading” statement. “We are troubled by the ’s incomplete statement on the anniversary of the War and urge him to clarify his remarks,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “While we share his desire for a return to negotiations to achieve a solution, this anniversary cannot be viewed in a vacuum. It is grossly misleading to examine only the enduring effects of the war while ignoring the context in which the war took place — the belligerence of the Arab states in the spring of 1967, and the silence of the international community in the face of these threats and its failure to ensure the rights to free passage of international waterways. ” Greenblatt added his appreciation for Guterres’ “supportive statements on Israel, including recognizing the double standard with which Israel is treated at the UN, and his labeling as the delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist. ” “We would have hoped that he would use this anniversary to address the Palestinian condition and call for peace and resolution in a and historically accurate manner,” Greenblatt concluded. The UN coordinator for humanitarian aid and development also marked the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War by condemning Israel. “It should be obvious, but it bears repeating, that occupation is ugly,” Robert Piper said in a statement released Tuesday. “Living under foreign military rule for years on end, generates despair, suffocates initiative and leaves generations in a kind of political and economic limbo,” he said. | 1 |
The Trump White House seems quietly to be enjoying the Russia hacking “scandal. ”[Certainly it has its frustrations, especially for Sean Spicer, who has to face the press corps and its obsession with meaningless minutiae. But the joke is on the journalists. They are spending so much time on the that they are missing what President Donald Trump is actually doing. He complains on Twitter about the coverage, but the truth is that the distraction is very useful. The “scandal” is no longer about Russia. Now it is about how House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes ( ) found information backing up Trump’s claims that his team was under surveillance by the Obama administration. Was Nunes approached by whistleblowers who came to his congressional office? Or were the whistleblowers sent by the White House to Nunes? It makes no difference at all, but the media think they are onto something very important. CNN called it a “” without specifying what, exactly, Nunes was supposed to be “covering up. ” And the answer is: nothing. Even if — for argument’s sake — the White House had approached Nunes rather than the other way around, the worst that could be said about it is that Nunes behaved like a partisan Republican. If so, he is no more partisan than ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff ( ) who is abusing his position to launch conspiracy theories against the GOP. The core of Schiff’s case, as presented at the House Intelligence Committee last Monday, is a lie — namely, the false claim that the Republican Party altered its platform at the behest of Trump aides in order to appease the Russians. As Byron York of the Washington Examiner has demonstrated, the Republican platform was “was actually strengthened, not weakened” against Russia. Schiff is still pretending that some other evidence will emerge on ties. But the idea Russia colluded with the Trump campaign is ludicrous, for three reasons. The first is there is no evidence whatsoever to support that claim. Obama’s own James Clapper and Mike Morell even said so — though it took Trump’s tweets about “wiretapping” to flush them out of hiding. Second, the Russians could not have known that Trump would win, and would not have targeted Clinton alone when it seemed that she could exact punishment once she took office. The third reason is that Hillary Rodham Clinton was arguably the most official since Alger Hiss. From the Russian “reset,” to giving up missile defense, to the New START treaty, to the uranium giveaway, to the loss of the Middle East, and to the loss of the Crimea (which happened on her successor’s watch, while she remained silent) Clinton ran the State Department almost like a satellite. Indeed, if Donald Trump really wanted to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin, it would be hard to find anything left with which to appease him. The Russians saw Trump’s criticism of NATO as useful, and applauded him. But they likely preferred Clinton. Already, Trump has been much tougher on Russia than Obama ever was. From blasting Russia at the UN Security Council over the eastern Ukraine, to threatening to tear up the New START treaty, Trump has opposed Putin — and it shows. Trump foreign policy adviser Sebastian Gorka, formerly of Breitbart News, is also a vociferous critic of Russia. So the Russia “scandal” is much ado about nothing. But it keeps the media distracted from what Trump is really doing — such as taking a chainsaw to Obama’s regulations — and it keeps the Democrats from developing an actual message. The beauty of it all? Aside from Trump’s tweets, the media and the Democrats are creating this distraction themselves. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. | 1 |
Share This: Dispatches from Eric Zuesse World War III — the first (and final) nuclear war — has never been so likely as it is now. Crossposted at strategic-culture.org PHOTO ABOVE: George H.W. Bush: Because of this man’s duplicity and the malignancy of his breed the world could end up in a heap of radioactive ashes. This plutocrat—along with his ilk— is a traitor to the human race. Here is the reason why we are currently even closer to a civilization-ending nuclear war than was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: During the Cold War, the two sides agreed that any war between the capitalist side and the communist side would escalate to nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR and constitute Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.). Therefore, because of this mutual acceptance of M.A.D., hot war didn’t develop during that entire period, from 1945 till the Soviet Union dissolved and ended its military alliance the Warsaw Pact, both of which ended in 1991.
Throughout that 45-year period, called “the Cold War,” there was no hot war between the two nuclear superpowers, because both sides believed that any hot war would end in M.A.D. — mutual annihilation, and the end of civilization. It would end that way because any hot war between the two sides would terminate either in one side surrendering to the other, or else in at least one of the two sides (presumably to be started by the one that’s on the brink of defeat in the traditional hot war) nuclear-attacking the other (as being its only alternative to defeat). In other words, M.A.D. recognized and accepted the fact that for a nuclear power to attack a nuclear power with non-nuclear weaponry will almost certainly provoke a nuclear war at the moment when one of the two is losing (or about to lose) the conventional conflict to the other. Nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort, but they exist in order to prevent defeat. That’s what they exist for. If Japan had had deliverable nuclear weapons, then the end of World War II would have been considerably delayed. Japan would have lost because it had no allies, but the end of WW II would have been very different than it was. Only M.A.D. avoided the Cold War becoming a hot war.
B ut M.A.D. is not just a physical reality but equally importantly a mutually-shared belief-system , a belief-system that becomes no longer operative if one of the two sides switches to believe that a way exists actually to win a nuclear war — in other words, to believe that conquest of a nuclear power by another nuclear power is a real possibility. During the years prior to 2006, there was an increasing though unspoken belief at the top of the U.S. aristocracy (the people who control the U.S. government — or at least have controlled it since 1981 ), that the United States would be able to win a nuclear war against Russia; and, suddenly, in 2006, the belief was published, and virtually no one who possessed power or influence challenged it; and, from that time forward, M.A.D. was ended on the American side, and nuclear weapons became, in the U.S., strategized within a new framework (called “nuclear primacy” ) — the framework of nuclear weapons as constituting the ultimate weapons of conquest by the U.S. government. A fter 1991, when the Warsaw Pact no longer existed, the U.S. military alliance NATO invited into its membership all of the former states of the USSR except Russia (thereby indicating NATO’s continuing hostility toward that particular nation and the fraudulence of NATO’s peace with it), and also invited in all of the USSR’s former Warsaw Pact allies, and so NATO (a now clearly anti-Russian, no longer at all anti-communist, alliance) has come to extend right up to Russia’s own borders — something that the U.S. had refused to allow the USSR to do to the U.S. in 1962, when the Soviet leader Khrushchev wanted to place nuclear missiles in Cuba just 90 miles from America’s border.
I n the new era during which the U.S. government and its allies believe that nuclear primacy is about to be achieved, the framework in which the use of ‘nuclear primacy’ would be ‘justified’ is that, as soon as such ‘primacy’ is believed to have been obtained (such as by means of anti-ballistic missiles having been installed that would supposedly annihilate Russia’s nuclear arsenal before their warheads could even be released to retaliate against the U.S.-and-allied nuclear invasion), the U.S. side’s ‘defensive’ traditional-weapons invasion of Russia is being defeated by the Russians, and so the only way available to prevent the defeat of the U.S.-and-allied forces is by the use of nuclear weapons (the ‘taking-advantage’ of America’s ‘nuclear primacy’). That’s how the nuclear attack would be ’justified’, as a ‘necessary defensive response’ against Russia.
C onsequently, in the current U.S.-NATO operation on and near Russia’s borders , the Alliance is starting the buildup of its traditional invasion forces. This includes even some U.S. allies that aren’t in NATO . The supposed ‘justification’ for this amassing of invasion-forces on Russia’s borders is to ‘defend’ against ‘Russia’s aggression’ when (in March 2014 just weeks after the bloody U.S. coup in Ukraine ) Russia enabled the residents of Crimea to rejoin Crimea as part of Russia, of which Crimea had been until the Soviet dictator Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 . That disagreement (entirely hypocritical on the US/NATO side) about Crimea is the supposed root-cause for NATO’s involvement, even though Ukraine still isn’t (and previously didn’t want to be) a member of the NATO alliance. Anyway: this is the rationalization for NATO’s buildup toward what could become WW III. The cult film On the Beach (1959) addressed the issue of a terminal nuclear war between the USA and the Soviets. Hollywood at least had some semi-worthwhile artists working to alert humanity to the expanding insanity. Today the main fare is chauvinist vehicles and rank childish escapism.
Ever since 19 February 2016, the U.S. has been storing tanks and artillery , sufficient “to support 15,000 Marines” in undisclosed “confidential” Norwegian caves. Norway has a 200-mile border with Russia. CNN’s news-report on that was accompanied by a video headlined “Russia Reveals Aggressive Military Plans” . It reported that Russia’s (democratically elected, though not mentioned as such) President, Vladimir Putin, was moving troops and weapons toward Norway’s border. (How would the U.S. respond if Russia were to be storing invasion-equipment and troops in Mexico near the U.S. border? Would the U.S. be moving troops and weapons near the Mexican border to protect against an invasion of America; and, if so, then how accurate would it be if Russia’s media then headlined “America Reveals Aggressive Military Plans”? Hitler’s Germany used those sorts of media-tactics, but this time Obama’s America is doing that.) Marine Corps Times headlined on October 24th, “More than 300 Marines heading to Norway in January” . … U.S. President Barack Obama means business: he’s getting things set up for Hillary Clinton to finish as his successor. This kind of boldness exceeds anything during the Cold War. … America, and its greatly expanded NATO, thus now surrounds Russia not just with its tanks etc., but with its missiles and bombers, on and near Russia’s borders, and so the flight-time from launch to the nuclear-bombing (if the ground-invasion of Russia encounters defeat) will be less than ten minutes, sometimes even less than the time for Russia to get its own missiles launched in retaliation against ours; and so a U.S. blitz nuclear attack against Russia could conceivably be an entirely one-sided war. Here is how that scenario — the end of physical M.A.D. — has actually become the objective sought by the U.S. government (and the necessary backstory for America’s war-drills on Russia’s borders): SANCTIMONIOUS EXCEPTIONALISM STRIKES AGAIN— Obviously the assumption is that the world has to trust America’s “inherent goodness” in its use of nuclear supremacy… In 2006, the U.S. aristocracy published in the journal Foreign Affairs, from their Council on Foreign Relations, the first article which said that the U.S. goal should no longer be a continuation of M.A.D., but instead “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy” , by which the U.S. aristocracy meant the rise of America’s ability to win a nuclear war against Russia. It established this stunning goal merely by saying that such an objective could be achieved and that it should be achieved, and by the article’s being published by the U.S. aristocracy itself (the people who control this country), and by furthermore the U.S. aristocracy not condemning and rejecting and repudiating it but simply letting that article stand with little to no public discussion (and no public debate) about it, much less with the chorus of public condemnations of it in the U.S. press, such as would have happened if America were a democracy — but this nation no longer is a democracy, it has become an aristocracy , and this aristocracy had now published the “Nuclear Primacy” article. (By contrast, in the obscure journal China Security was published in the Autumn 2006 issue the main critique against it, “The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy” . That article had no impact.) The Foreign Affairs article even was so bold as to assert that “U.S. leaders have always aspired to this goal” (nuclear primacy) — a wild and unsupported allegation that’s not much different from alleging that not only George W. Bush but all U.S. Presidents after World War II were aspiring to have the ability to conquer Russia (and the authors were asserting that only now was this supposedly terrific ability coming within reach). It was explicit about G.W. Bush’s having this desire: “The intentional pursuit of nuclear primacy is, moreover, entirely consistent with the United States’ declared policy of expanding its global dominance. The Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy explicitly states that the United States aims to establish military primacy.” That allegation was tragically true, which is one of the reasons why Bush (like his father, who actually started the determined policy to achieve nuclear primacy) was so dangerous and harmful a President. His invasion of Iraq was merely a symptom of that deeper disease. … And, so, this article about “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy” and “The End of” M.A.D., was now — since it was published by the CFR and not rejected by any influential group — accepted within the U.S. as a goal, “Nuclear Primacy,” which the U.S. government could and should strive for. That idea, of a winnable nuclear war (winnable by the U.S., of course), was no longer heretical, no longer viewed as repugnant. In fact, this article had been introduced and accepted by Harvard University simultaneously in its longer form and simultaneously published by their scholarly journal International Security , which is the leading (it’s the world’s most influential) scholarly journal dealing with that subject, and its title there was “The End of MAD?” . (The periods are customarily removed from the acronym “M.A.D.”, perhaps in order to associate the M.A.D. concept with the pejorative term, insanity. So — at least in the United States — the termination of M.A.D. has always had a favorable ring to it, even before that goal became effectively U.S. policy, which it has been at least ever since 2006.) And no one was saying that Harvard and its journal and the CFR were the ones who were at all “mad” or anything similar, such as “insane.”
The aristocracy’s stamp of approval upon the concept of nuclear primacy was clear, from at least 2006 on. Although M.A.D. continued as regards Russia’s side, it no longer remained operative thinking on America’s side. That’s now clear, and this is Russia’s predicament — and the world’s (because a nuclear war involving even just one of the two nuclear superpowers would destroy the world ). …
U.S. President Barack Obama is putting the goal of nuclear primacy into place, starting with implementation of Ronald Reagan’s proposed “Star Wars” Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense system, now called the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, and technically called by the name of its current embodiment: Lockheed Martin’s, Boeing’s, and Raytheon’s, Aegis Ashore system, which Obama first made operational in Romania on 12 May 2016 . It’s designed so as to enable a surprise nuclear attack against Russia in which any missiles that Russia might be able to launch in retaliation will supposedly (if the system works 100%) be annihilated during their launch-phase. Officially , however, its purpose is to defend Europe from being attacked by Iranian missiles. Any public U.S. admission that this ‘defensive’ system is actually preparation for a blitz U.S. nuclear assault on Russia is obviously out of the question. And, obviously, Russians know that Obama is lying and that this is preparation by the U.S. for a blitz nuclear attack against Russia. The West’s ‘news’ media might be such ‘fools’ as not to be aware of that fact, but Putin has made quite clear that he is not, and he is preparing Russia to deal with it. O bama’s action here was made possible by U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2002 unilateral termination of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty with Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union. Bush rushed forward with Reagan’s “Star Wars” program even despite there having been no successful tests of the necessary technology: the existing technology consistently failed but Bush decided to invest $53 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money in it . Bush in 2004 received British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s participation and provisioning of locations and facilities to implement the plan , and Bush was also pressing both Poland and the Czech Republic to allow the U.S. to position ABMs there . Obama came into office criticizing the ABM plan and pretending not to be hostile toward Russia. He deceived Vladimir Putin into thinking that Obama sincerely wanted to pursue peace and cooperation with Russia. As soon as Obama became re-elected, his verbal smiling teeth immediately became actual glaring fangs. Then, soon after his regime overthrew in a bloody February 2014 coup the Moscow-friendly democratically elected President of Ukraine, bordering Russia , Russia started in the summer of 2014 to ignore the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, because for Washington the next step (beyond Ukraine) clearly now would be Moscow and so all bets were off. The installation of the Aegis Ashore in Romania likewise violates that Treaty , which is one important reason why Obama lies to say that all of the Aegis Ashore facilities will be targeted against Iran — and maybe also North Korea — but never against Russia. … The full Aegis Ashore system, which will require several such sites, isn’t yet operational. NATO’s PR-arm the Atlantic Council, has mentioned among the Aegis Ashore’s benefits, that for the next such site, in Poland, “Poland announced in late April that it would buy eight Patriot missile batteries from Virginia-based Raytheon Co. in a deal that could generate at least $2.5 billion in US export content.” The U.S. government officials and their friends who have invested in Raytheon and the other ‘defense’ firms didn’t need to be informed of this by any PR person. They already knew of it from more reliable sources, and perhaps they even have invested in nuclear bunkers for themselves and their friends and their friends’ friends . Lots of money is changing hands during this build-up. … Also in 2006, later in that year, specifically on 18 November 2006, was published at Global Research, which is an independent Canadian online international site dealing with geostrategy, a superb summary of the connection that this plan has to America’s string of invasions in the Middle East. It’s titled “Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a ‘New Middle East’,” by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, who explains: … It should be noted that in his book, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he, Brzezinski, calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran and Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the Middle East (excluding the Caucasus4) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union. The Map of the “New Middle East”
A relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and military circles since mid-2006. It has been casually allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the “New Middle East.”
MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006). Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles. … Brzezinski’s advocacy of “American Primacy” fits perfectly with the aristocracy’s support of “Nuclear Primacy,” and appeared eight years before it. His 1998 book was seminal also in many other ways. And, as that Nazemroaya article made clear, Brzezinski’s plan was already being put into effect by the U.S. government, even before 2006. … However, the person who actually made the seminal decision behind all of this, the decision to conquer Russia, was U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush, on the night of 24 February 1990, just before the Soviet Union ended. He was the person who decided that after the USSR and its Warsaw Pact terminated, NATO would continue that cold war until Russia has been surrounded by U.S. allies, who are Russia’s enemies, when Russia will ultimately either surrender or else be destroyed by the U.S. and its friends. … Even if Russia assumes that any such nuclear war would be M.A.D., the government of the U.S. no longer does. That’s Russia’s predicament — and the world’s . … However, military planners in the U.S. and its vassal nations, do not include in their calculations the world: the impacts that such nuclear winter and all the rest will have if their dream of ‘nuclear primacy’ amounts to anything more than merely the vicious hoax that it is. This fact, of their ignoring the world, is scandalous — against our military planners. They are so obsessed with ‘victory’, that they are willing to participate in this false and potentially mega-catastrophic dream, of ‘nuclear primacy’. … Unless and until nuclear weapons are totally eliminated (which might never happen), their constructive function, of preventing WW III, must continue, not end as a result of ‘nuclear primacy’ and other such lies and delusions. However, the ‘news’ media, especially in ‘The West’, are not pointing out those lies and distortions, but instead reinforcing them. … If there is to be a WW III, it will end the world . That is the key fact, which is ignored by ‘The West’s’ military planners. [And the media prostitutes that serve the American empire’s criminal objectives.] … NATO needs to end now, just as the Warsaw Pact did in 1991 — when an indecent, oligarchic , ‘The West’ —continued the Cold War despite the Warsaw Pact’s end, and now is making it hot. About the author | 0 |
SANTA ANA, Calif. — Vicente Sarmiento remembers when the local Republican Party here posted uniformed guards at polling stations in a closely fought State Assembly race three decades ago and they hoisted signs in English and Spanish warning that noncitizens were prohibited from voting. The guards were removed after state elections officials threatened legal action. Such tactics would never take place today in this city 35 miles southeast of Los Angeles, where Mr. Sarmiento is now the mayor pro tem. All seven members of the City Council, including Mr. Sarmiento, are Latino, as are 78 percent of the 343, 000 people who live here. (Leer en español) » These days, Santa Ana stands as the face of a new California, a state where Latinos have more influence in everyday life — electorally, culturally and demographically — than almost anywhere else in the country. There are limits to the transformation here, both in economics, where Latinos still lag far behind the state as a whole, and in politics, where remarkable gains in Latino power have not yet translated to the most powerful statewide offices. But the Latino progress in this state offers a glimpse of how much of the country will probably look in coming decades. Immigrants living illegally in California are entitled to driver’s licenses. Their children can receive health insurance. Local law enforcement officials generally do not provide information to federal immigration authorities, as they do in many other parts of the country. On a smaller, if no less symbolic, level, the first thing the Santa Ana City Council did when it went in 2006 was pass a law requiring simultaneous translation of all of its meetings to Spanish. “There is now — unlike before — a comfort level with knowing there’s a lot of Latinos living here and Latino leadership here,” said Mr. Sarmiento, 52, sitting in the law office he keeps in his house. The signs of demographic and political change are everywhere in a city that is an easy drive from Disneyland. The historic downtown is clustered around what the official city map calls “Fourth Street,” but everyone here knows as “Calle Cuatro. ” A twirl of the dial on a car radio reveals a choice of stations. The sidewalks of Calle Cuatro are lined with stands selling churritos and tostilocos. “There’s no attempt to whitewash the city anymore,” said Aurelia Rivas, 26, a student working at her parents’ fruit and snack stand one afternoon. Referring to the annual Day of the Dead celebration, she added, “It’s like everyone knows that Día de los Muertos is going to be just as big and important of a celebration as the Fourth of July. ” The power and presence of Latinos in this community in Orange County — itself once a bastion of Republicanism — is echoed up and down the California coast. Latinos now make up just under 40 percent of the state’s population, projected to increase to 47 percent by 2050. The leaders of both houses of the Legislature are Latino, as is the secretary of state, the current mayor of Los Angeles and the previous mayor. More than 25 percent of Latino voters in the nation live in California, said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center. There are 1, 377 Latinos holding state, local and federal office in California, second only to Texas. But Hispanics in Texas are overwhelmingly Democrats in a state dominated by Republicans. In California, the Democrats are solidly in control, and Hispanics are a crucial and growing part of their base and help explain why Hillary Clinton has a huge advantage over Donald J. Trump. “Over the last 10 years, we have really solidified the power, especially in the Legislature,” said Lorena Gonzalez, a Democratic member of the State Assembly from San Diego. “People are more afraid of being seen as not supporting Latinos than supporting them. You see this most clearly with the rhetoric of Republicans here — they are falling all over themselves to support Latino candidates. ” The limits to the gains can be glaring, too. The Latino unemployment rate in California was at 6. 7 percent in August, compared to 5. 5 percent overall. More than 23 percent of Latinos in the state live below the poverty level, significantly higher than the 16 percent overall. The disparities are shown in education, as well: 8 percent of Latinos 25 years old or older have bachelor’s degrees, compared to 20 percent overall. And 42 percent of Latino households own their home, well below the statewide homeownership figure of 54 percent. “Latino political power is not the panacea nor does it equate to instant gains overall or lifting people out of poverty,” said Kevin de León, a Democrat and the leader of the State Senate. “The fact that we have political power, I think, means we’ve started that journey. ” Prominent Latinos say that even though the climate has changed markedly, they still encounter reminders of lingering prejudice: in the way some feel they are treated by the police or are scrutinized as they travel through wealthier and whiter parts of Orange County. Anthony Rendon, the Democratic Assembly speaker, said that prejudice can include dismissive stereotypes about Latinos in politics. “There’s a tendency to think that I am only going to focus on certain types of issues, that I am only going to focus on certain types of population,” Mr. Rendon said. “It’s sometimes a surprise that I am concerned about environmental issues. ” And the political successes have their limits. There have only been two Latinos elected to statewide office in California’s modern history, including the current secretary of state, Alex Padilla. Mr. Padilla said the absence of Latinos in statewide elected posts reflected the challenges of running in a state as large as California, rather than evidence of sentiment. “We’re past that,” he said. “California is a big state. It’s a populous state. It’s difficult and expensive to run in. ” One lingering issue is voting rules. Although Santa Ana has an City Council, there are no Latino Council members in neighboring Anaheim, even though the city is almost half Latino. Anaheim, like several other communities, elects its Council at large, rather than by district, which tends to put Latinos, who turn out smaller numbers than the general electorate, at a disadvantage. Still, job postings across California routinely require applicants to speak Spanish. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, who is fluent in Spanish, said he makes a point at news conferences of setting aside time to speak to media. “We are well past the tipping point — everywhere,” Mr. Garcetti said. “The shift within 20 years from being the most state to being the most embracing state for the integration of immigrants has been pretty breathtaking. ” When Cruz Bustamante, a former lieutenant governor, ran for governor in 2003, he came under fire because he would not renounce ties to a Chicano student group, Mecha, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Atzlan. “That would just not happen now,” Ms. Gonzalez of the State Assembly said. In Santa Ana, the change has stirred debate over what Latino lawmakers should do with their power, and the challenges of dealing with a new minority — . About 9 percent of residents here are white, 10 percent are Asian and 1 percent are . “We also have to be sensitive to voters,” said Miguel Pulido, the mayor, whose family immigrated from Mexico City in 1961. “We have a case now when the majority became the minority. ’’ But Michele Martinez, a Santa Ana councilwoman since 2007, said the City Council has not done enough to promote the city’s Latino identity. “A lot of my friends, my colleagues, they grew up here in a time when they weren’t allowed to speak Spanish,” she said. “Well, now we’re more than allowed, but we don’t throw it in your face. We’re a little reluctant to be seen as too Latino, and I don’t get that. ” She has tried without success to persuade her colleagues to funnel more money to a local Mexican cultural and art center and help fund the center’s annual Día de los Muertos celebration. This year, local activists pressed the Council to end a longstanding contract with federal immigration authorities to house immigrants who entered the country illegally in the city jail. While the Council voted to phase the contract out over years, Ms. Martinez was the only Council member who voted to end the contract immediately. Mr. Sarmiento argued that one sign of Latinos’ growing power is that elected officials are moving on to broader issues. “We as an City Council are probably no different from an Council in that sense that we both want good things for our communities,” he said. “We all want better schools. We all want improved public safety. ” Many date the beginnings of California’s political transformation to a 1994 initiative, pressed by the Republican governor at the time, Pete Wilson, to cut off benefits to immigrants here illegally. The tone of that campaign — which many Democrats and Republicans say has been echoed by the appeal of Mr. Trump in this year’s presidential race — had the effect of energizing Latino voters and placing this state decisively in the Democratic column. “California has come a long way since then,” Mr. Padilla said. “Political opinion has come a long way since then. Public policy has come a long way from there. I hope the rest of the country will follow that soon. ” | 1 |
CONSERVATIVE TRIBUNE
President-elect Donald Trump ran for office on a promise of securing the nation’s southern border, partially through the construction of a border wall, with the added caveat that Mexico would somehow pay for it .
The Mexican government has consistently stated that it had no intention of paying for any such wall, and it didn’t waste any time after Trump’s victory to reiterate that.
According to Newsmax , Mexico’s foreign minister made clear that paying for a border wall was not on her country’s agenda.
“Paying for a wall is not part of our vision,” said Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu to a local television station.
Ruiz Massieu added that her government had remained in contact with Trump’s campaign team ever since his much-discussed visit to Mexico in August.
“There has been a fluid, daily communication with different members of the campaign,” she stated.
Obviously Trump and the Mexican government don’t see eye to eye on this issue at the moment, but with the admission that the two sides are talking on a regular basis, it stands to reason that something could be worked out.
Considering how adamant Trump has been about building the wall and having Mexico pay for it in some way, he may just need to be a bit more persuasive with Mexican leaders to help them adjust their “vision” to include a border wall. | 0 |
sowjetunion Möchte Moskau die Sowjetunion wiederauferstehen lassen? Quelle:Panthermedia / Vostock-photo
Führende Experten des politischen Lebens, die von Montag bis Donnerstag am Waldai-Klub in Sotschi teilnahmen, diskutierten die aktuelle russische Außenpolitik und verglichen sie mit jener der Sowjetunion. Derzeit würden dem modernen Russland sowjetische Ambitionen nachgesagt. Vor diesem Hintergrund versuchten die Experten, die wichtigsten Mythen über die sowjetische Vergangenheit aufzulisten und die Zukunft Russlands vorherzusagen. Der Zerfall der Sowjetunion war nicht prädestiniert
“Ich glaube, dass der Zerfall der Sowjetunion 1991 vermeidbar war. Es gab genauso gute Gründe, warum sie hätte weiterexistieren können”, sagte Robert Legwold, Ehrenprofessor des Lehrstuhls für Politikwissenschaft an der Columbia University und ehemaliger Leiter der Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative. Laut Legwold lasse sich der Zerfall nicht hundertprozentig auf einen bestimmten Grund zurückführen: Weder politische oder wirtschaftliche Probleme, noch das Streben der Völker nach Unabhängigkeit könnten dieses Phänomen erklären. Wandmosaiken: Ikonen der Sowjetzeit in Russlands Städten “In Russland ist die Meinung verbreitet, dass die Sowjetunion von außen zerstört wurde”, erklärte Andrej Zygankow, Professor am Lehrstuhl für Politikwissenschaft und Internationale Beziehungen der San Francisco State University, im Interview mit RBTH. Diese Meinung werde auch dadurch gerechtfertigt, dass sich die wirtschaftliche Situation 1988 verbessert habe, sagte Zygankow. “Eine andere Politik hätte die Situation ändern können”, vermutet der Experte. „Russland ist mit sich selbst beschäftigt“
Aber noch interessanter sei die Tatsache, dass man dem modernen Russland die Methoden der sowjetischen Außenpolitik zuschreibe, so Zygankow. “Das ist aber Schnee von gestern”, glaubt auch Richard Sakwa, Professor für russische und europäische Politik an der University of Kent, zu. Man liege falsch, wenn man jede Aktivität Russlands im postsowjetischen Raum als Versuch betrachte, die Sowjetunion wiederzubeleben, sagt der Experte.
Das moderne Russland habe nicht die Absicht, benachbarte Länder in einen neuen Kalten Krieg zu verwickeln, meint Legwold. Russland wolle genau wie jeder andere Staat auch seinen Einfluss auf Entscheidungen in der Region wahren, wann immer die eigenen Interessen betroffen seien, so der Experte. Genau deswegen sei Russland für den Westen keine potenzielle Gefahr. John Mearsheimer, Professor an der University of Chicago, stimmte zu und sagte, Russland sei derzeit mit der Verbesserung der eigenen wirtschaftlichen und demografischen Situation beschäftigt. Russische Politik ist eine Antwort auf die USA
Die Experten erklären die Kritik an den Integrationsinitiativen Russlands damit, dass diese Initiativen den westlichen Glauben an die alternativlose moderne Weltordnung ins Wanken brächten. „Das vom Westen nach 1991 aufgebaute, universelle System versucht, den politischen Raum weltweit zu homogenisieren. Die Entwicklung der Brics-Staaten sowie die Ausweitung anderer Initiativen ist ein Zeichen dafür, dass es Alternativen gibt und die monopolare Weltordnung der Vergangenheit angehört”, sagte Sakwa. Das Erbe der Sowjetunion Dabei habe Russland nicht die Absicht, der westlichen Welt eine alternative Weltordnung zu präsentieren, meinen die Experten. Man sei überzeugt, dass russische außenpolitische Initiativen, darunter auch eine engere Zusammenarbeit mit China, eine Folge der amerikanischen und europäischen Politik gegenüber Russland seien. “Russland gibt in der Regel eine Antwort auf amerikanische Handlungen. Es sind die Amerikaner, die Russland motivieren, sich in Richtung Chinas zu bewegen. Das ist jedoch nicht im Interesse der USA, oder?”, fragte Mearsheimer.
Solange Russland und der Westen einander als Aggressoren und Welteroberer betrachteten, werde es keine Normalisierung der Beziehungen und keine gegenseitig vorteilhafte Zusammenarbeit geben, sind sich die Experten einig. Alle Rechte vorbehalten | 0 |
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi ( ) passed blame on to the press for giving attention to revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, which made public emails by top Clinton aide John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. When asked by host Jake Tapper if Barack Obama could have done more to strike back against Russia, who is widely believed to be responsible for the WikiLeaks material, Pelosi called the press “accomplices. ” “Well, I think that President Obama handled it as he received information of that — of the highest confidence,” she said. “I do think, with all due respect in the world for the press, that the press could have done a better job, instead of printing every email that came out, and saying this comes to you from Vladimir Putin, they were, hah, hah, hah, John Podesta said this or that. I think the press were accomplices in the undermining of our election by the Russians by not pointing out this stuff is worthless because it comes from an undermining of our election, or at least reminding the public where this — these emails, the leaking of these emails came from. So, I can’t speak to the timing of what President Obama said. I wish he — it had all happened in a time where the public could know that this had an impact on the election. A lot of things have an impact on the election. This certainly was one of them. “So, I can’t speak to the timing of what President Obama said. I wish he — it had all happened in a time where the public could know that this had an impact on the election,” Pelosi continued. “A lot of things have an impact on the election. This certainly was one of them. But what’s important to note is that it doesn’t happen again and that people in other countries are — realize what they are going to be susceptible to when the Russians come in to undermine their elections. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
One argument Trump supporters and conservatives are making is that there has been a lefward shift at Fox News. 3. TrumpTV @ShaneKPolitics Breitbart & alt-right is laying the groundwork for TrumpTV so naturally they’re throwing FoxNews under the bus.
— ErciTall Vote4HRC (@ercitall) October 28, 2016
As mentioned in a recent story about Megyn Kelly on The Wildfire, if TrumpTV becomes a reality, a media war will loom over who is the real “conservative” leader in cable news. Prepping the terrain would mean starting to carve out a hard right audience and yank it away from Fox News. 4. Ailes Departure Fox News ‘Imploding’ probably has more to do with Roger Ailes leaving than Trump. It was founded as the news arm of the GOP. (Not kidding.)
— Dave Wollyung (@daveisnotfunny) October 28, 2016
Since Ailes has stepped down, there are two interim co-presidents at Fox News: Bill Shine and Jack Aberneth. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, it is believed by some that CNN’s Jeff Zucker could be in line to fill Ailes’ shoes, due to a merger between AT&T and Time Warner. 5. Murdoch Sons Total agree Fox News Imploding. The network has taken a left turn since the Murdoch sons took the reins.
— DJ Ellis (@Djell4jc) October 28, 2016 “I think it is fair to say the Fox News Channel is imploding,” Levin said. “I think it is fair to say the Murdoch… https://t.co/QSrxbRrrpf
— Jim Brown (@Menorahblog) October 28, 2016
The would-be successors to the Murdoch empire are believed to be much less conservative than their father Rupert Murdoch. 6. More Like Mainstream Media I’m glad to see Fox News imploding. It’s almost as bad as the rest of the mainstream media. Especially Megyn Kelly. Good riddance.
— Deplorable Carl (@CarlKenner) October 28, 2016
The news channel’s mantra to be “fair and balanced” is not sitting well with all viewers. 7. Megyn Kelly, Megyn Kelly, Megyn Kelly . @FoxNews , What r the odds. #Outnumbered / #TheFive / #KellyFile , will cover “Fox News ‘Imploding'” story? After all . @megynkelly , IT’S NEWS. pic.twitter.com/YQTnaTaLaj
— Deplorable osPatriot (@osPatriot) October 28, 2016 TOTALLY AGREE! FOX IS LIKE THE REST OF MSM! Levin: Fox News ‘Imploding’ https://t.co/1YH4RXGZay MEGYN KELLY IS NOT A JOURNALIST! Remove kelly from fox news coverage election night #Trumptrain Levin: Fox News ‘Imploding’ https://t.co/o67t8ssK72 via @BreitbartNews | 0 |
Celebrities took to their social media accounts over the weekend to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily suspending the U. S. Refugee Admissions Program. [On Friday, the President signed an executive order titled, “Protection Of The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States,” which Trump says established “new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America. ” It didn’t take long for some of Hollywood biggest stars and most outspoken political activists to jump on their Twitter accounts to express outrage at Trump’s latest actions. Below is a roundup of Hollywood’s reactions to the executive order. He doesn’t understand that this will lead to people in America becoming radicalized as a result of his ignorance and cruelty. https: . — Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) January 28, 2017, To our Muslim neighbors in the world: I tens of millions of others are so very sorry. The majority of Americans did not vote 4 this man. — Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 28, 2017, What’s happening is repugnant. We’re supposed to be unique, a haven. We’re betraying our heroes. — Andy Richter (@AndyRichter) January 28, 2017, USA Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies. Trump signs order banning Syrian refugees. https: . — Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) January 27, 2017, Can 240 Years of FREEDOM BeUndone In One Week⁉️#Resist, — Cher (@cher) January 28, 2017, Obviously we must prioritize keeping Americans safe. But we mustn’t become in the process. — Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) January 29, 2017, Statistics pic. twitter. — Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) January 29, 2017, LA Protest on #Muslimban TODAY at Federal Immigration Office, 300 N. Los Angeles St. https: . — Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) January 28, 2017, It’s like we’re watching history repeat itself but only half the population know how bad it turns out. — Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) January 28, 2017, We might need to think about returning this beauty to France Now pic. twitter. — Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) January 28, 2017, All the indignation is fine. But we gotta get him out! We must demand a competency test! He is ill! Mentally ill! — ABFoundation (@ABFalecbaldwin) January 29, 2017, ❤💛💙💚 pic. twitter. — Miley Ray Cyrus (@MileyCyrus) January 28, 2017, Protest happening at LAX ( airports around the country)! Let’s stand up 4 one another LA! #NoBanNoWall #RefugeesWelcome #ImmigrantsWelcome pic. twitter. — America Ferrera (@AmericaFerrera) January 28, 2017, THESE are the HUMAN BEINGS Trump banned today. REFUGEES fleeing ISIS. Children. Their families. Shame on him. May God help us. https: . — Sophia Bush (@SophiaBush) January 28, 2017, Paul Ryan’s office address. Go show upJanesville: 20 South Main ST, Suite 10, Janesville, WI 53545. 608. 752. 4050. — Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) January 29, 2017, Along with the Muslim ban we can now add heartless evil to DT’s repertoire. — Rob Reiner (@robreiner) January 28, 2017, The attackers were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt UAE — not the 7 nations in the immigration ban. These all do have Trump properties though. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) January 28, 2017, 130 million people from 7 country are being denied entry if you were on a plane and landed you are not allowed in where’s the outrage ? — George Lopez (@georgelopez) January 28, 2017, the #MuslimBan is dehumanizing beyond words … im in shock. THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE, — Camila Cabello (@camilacabello97) January 29, 2017, #protest #NoBanNoWall @realDonaldTrump @POTUS @SenateMajLdr @SpeakerRyan @jasoninthehouse @GOP @foxnews https: . — John Leguizamo (@JohnLeguizamo) January 28, 2017, My 13 yr. old, daughter is at her 8th grade dance right now. What are Muslim parents saying to their daughters tonight? https: . — Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) January 28, 2017, This #MuslimBan is also messing up attendance at our ”Undermine Western Civilization” meetings. — Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) January 28, 2017, I have worked for decades on religious tolerance. @realDonaldTrump’s Muslim ban is against everything this country was founded on. Shameful. — Russell Simmons (@UncleRUSH) January 28, 2017, Theresa May should come out against these executive orders, apologise to British Muslims for not doing so earlier and resign. Truly shameful. — lily allen (@lilyallen) January 28, 2017, My best friend, Alaa Mohammad Khaled, is Muslim. His parents were Palestinian refugees. His brother is DJ Khaled. #RefugeesWelcome pic. twitter. — Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) January 28, 2017, Really want to smack the hell out of folk lamenting what Trump ”is doing.” He told every1 his plan from jump! https: . # — Star Jones (@StarJonesEsq) January 28, 2017, #muslimban is making me cry LIBERAL TEARS for our country and its future, and you know what that means? COMPASSION, YOU MOFOS!! 😥😥😥😥😥😥😥😥😥😥😥 — Rachel Dratch (@TheRealDratch) January 28, 2017, Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson | 1 |
READ MORE: US-led coalition killed 300 Syrian civilians in 11 probed strikes – Amnesty
The ambassador added that the UN work with various opposition groups in Aleppo and the local council was “left to take care of itself.” He stressed that the UN personnel did not “exert the necessary pressure” on “sponsors” of illegal armed groups to convince them to cooperate with the aid workers on the ground.
Besides criticizing the UN team, the Russian envoy also accused entities that have influence over fighters in besieged neighborhoods of Aleppo of not applying enough pressure on the militants to make the most of the Russian-Syrian humanitarian pause.
“External patrons of entrenched groups in eastern Aleppo could not or did not want positively influence the fighters and convince them to stop the shooting, to release civilians or leave the city themselves,” Churkin said.
The ambassador noted that militants in Aleppo continue to get supplies and arms, including portable surface-to-air shoulder launchers (MANPADs) and missiles.
READ MORE: No Russian, Syrian flights around Aleppo for 8 days – Moscow
The humanitarian pause was introduced in Aleppo on October 20, as Syrian and Russian jets halted all strikes in the vicinity of the city. While only an estimated ten percent of the city’s populace live in terrorist-held Eastern Aleppo, Moscow is doing everything possible to secure the evacuation of civilians.
Those civilians who want to leave jihadist-held areas may use six humanitarian corridors. Fighters can also leave the city with their weapons by using two other corridors established by the Russians and the Syrians. However, terrorists have refused to leave and instead resorted to shelling the civilian escape routes.
Russian and Syrian planes have stayed out of the city for eight consecutive days. In that time, only a few dozen civilians managed to escape the terrorist-held areas. Meanwhile, the Russian reconciliation centers continued to pour aid into Aleppo. Our colleague @ISedkeyICRC shot this video in Ramousseh, on her way to western #Aleppo . The level of destruction is staggering. pic.twitter.com/fqwNChL45E — ICRC (@ICRC) October 26, 2016
During the Security Council session, the UN official in charge of humanitarian aid defended the world organization’s actions in Syria, laying blame at both the rebels, Damascus, and Moscow for not allowing the UN humanitarian assistance to take place.
“The United Nations were ready to launch our operations on Sunday, 23 October. However, objections by two non-State armed opposition groups, namely Ahrar as-Sham and Nureddin Zenki, scuppered these plans. The United Nations made every effort to get assurances from all parties, only for the parties to then fail to agree on each other’s conditions about how evacuations should proceed,” said Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Stepen O’Brien.
In the meantime, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent teams working in Aleppo have complained that delivering the humanitarian aid and treating the wounded has been a challenge, as the ICRC failed to “secure the security guarantees of some armed groups.” محاولات إجلاء الجرحى والمرضى من #حلب لم تنجح. هذا ما تحتاج أن تعرفه عن الأمر: pic.twitter.com/hsdfmqLVRK — اللجنة الدولية (@ICRC_ar) October 26, 2016
Back at the UNSC, O'Brien painted a clear picture for the members of the UN Security Council of human suffering in Eastern Aleppo where terrorists use civilians as human shields.
In a graphic yet poetic account, O’Brien said that civilians – mostly children and elderly – are stuck in basements where “the stench of urine and the vomit caused by unrelieved fear never leaving your nostrils” is omnipresent. Read more No Russian, Syrian flights around Aleppo for 8 days – Moscow
“Or scrabbling with your bare hands in the street above to reach under concrete rubble, lethal steel reinforcing bars jutting at you as you hysterically try to reach your young child screaming unseen in the dust and dirt below your feet, you choking to catch your breath in the toxic dust and the smell of gas ever-ready to ignite and explode over you.”
“These are constant, harrowing reports and images of people detained, tortured, forcibly displaced, maimed and executed,” O’Brien added.
While mentioning the destructive role of terrorist on the ground, the UN envoy to Syria went out of his way to blame Damascus and Moscow for their air raids.
“Aleppo has essentially become a kill zone. Since my last report to this Council less than a month ago, 400 more people have been killed and nearly 2,000 injured in eastern Aleppo. So many of them – too many of them – were children,” O'Brien said.
“Never has the phrase by poet Robert Burns, of ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ been as apt. It can be stopped but you the Security Council have to choose to make it stop,” the envoy added.
Taking the mic at the UNSC meeting, Churkin criticized O'Brien’s report, which he said lacked factual information and failed to stress the cessation of Syrian and Russian air raids on the city. He asked O’Brian not to recite poetry but base his reports on concrete facts.
“If we wanted to hear a sermon, we would go to church. If we wanted to hear poetry, we would go to a theater,” Churkin said.
READ MORE: 60 civilians killed, 200 injured as US-led coalition strikes Mosul residential areas – Russian MoD
Security Council members wanted to hear “objective analysis” of the situation on the ground from O’Brien, the Russian ambassador stressed.
“You clearly did not achieve this,” Churkin said, reminding O'Brien that no strikes have been conducted over Aleppo since October 18. Calling O'Brian's statement “provocative and unacceptable,” Churkin pointed that in the past eight days Syrian and Russian planes had not flown over Aleppo, staying at least 10 km away from the city.
“This moratorium on the flight lasted eight days [now]. Mr. O 'Brian, you did not mention a single word about it. You have built your speech so to paint a picture that aerial bombardment did not stop for one day and that it is happening now, as we speak,” said Churkin. | 0 |
shorty BY PETER LEE I ’ve written a couple pieces of the smoking hot issue in Pivotland, Philippine president Duterte’s swerve toward a pro-PRC foreign policy, and what the U.S. and pro-American sector of the Manila elite are going to do about it. The first piece, Reports of death of US-Philippine alliance may be exaggerated, addresses the fact that Duterte’s freedom of movement is constrained by the need to keep the Philippine military happy, and notes that ex-prez and retired general Fidel Ramos, who facilitated Duterte’s entrance on the national political stage, is signaling dissatisfaction with Duterte. The second piece, Duterte Plays the ‘Mamasapano’ Card, covers a Duterte counter-attack: a threat to relitigate the death of 44 Philippine National Police commandos at Mamasapano in Mindanao, a 2014 special ops fiasco conducted under the aegis of the United States which a) exposes ex-president Aquino to serious legal jeopardy b) posits that the US alliance is doing a better job of killing Filipinos than the PRC can ever hope to do. The US seems to be embedded in a colonial mindset when it comes to the Philippines, something along the lines of “we’ve been selflessly looking after the Philippines for a century, and that thug Duterte won’t be allowed to screw that up during his brief (maybe curtailed) presidency.” It takes a pretty superficial view of Philippine history, one that accepts the US self-definition as the Philippines’ security savior while ignoring the distortions and shortcomings of the colonial and neo-colonial relationship. For me this tunnel vision was typified by the US media crowing over the formal delivery of a refurbished C-130 transport to the Philippine government by outgoing ambo Philip Goldberg. Message: here’s the US making provisions for Philippine defense at the same time Duterte’s selling out the country to China. To me, the inadvertent message was 1) here’s the US blindly stroking the pivot fetish while Duterte tries to solve the Mindanao insurgency that has cost at least 400,000 lives over the last century, win his drug war, and find a place for the Philippines in Asia that doesn’t give primacy to the US preoccupation confronting the PRC and 2) the U.S., in my opinion, pretty much has a policy of keeping the Philippines flat on its behind as an independent military force by trickling out second-hand gear to the Philippine military while the sweet stuff is dangled in front of it during US joint military maneuvers and port calls. But the United States is trying to find political leverage wherever it can and the Western media will, I’m sure, put its shoulder to the wheel to help out. Feelings of nationalism are pervasive in the US, but Americans have difficulty understanding why people in other nations may harbor animosity toward them on account of their colonialist and imperialist experiences. P hilip Goldberg sat down for a 45-minute exit interview with Rappler. As befitting Rappler’s origins in the Soros/Omidyar network of pro-US globalization advocacy, the interview was a stream of softballs about what to do about Duterte’s disregard of the awesomeness of the American relationship, an awesomeness that is acknowledged by virtually all Filipinos who inexplicably (and, if the US has anything to do about it, temporarily) at the same time give Duterte approval ratings of over 80%. It’s worth watching if you have the patience. Goldberg is a smooth cat, and the Rappler tonguebath gives you no inkling of the fact that he intimately familiar with the wet work of end-arounding national governments to cultivate secessionist movements, you know, like what he did in Bolivia (declared persona non grata as a result) and Kosovo, and like that thing in Duterte’s home province of Mindanao, which in my opinion probably the main reason why Duterte wanted him out of the Philippines. Goldberg also discretely plays the economic threat card, concern-trolling that anti-US attitudes will dismay “foreign investors”. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in subsequent weeks. As far as I can tell, the biggest U.S. factor in the domestic Philippine economy is the call-center industry. I doubt US corporations are interested in actually pulling their operations out and subjecting them to the English-language mercies of India, but certainly a call from the State Department or White House would convince them of the wisdom of at least making the threat. And I also wonder if expected President Hillary Clinton will find it necessary to drop the hammer on Duterte, in order to demonstrate to a rather dubious Asia that there is no alternative to loyalty to the pivot. I expect the next few months, in other words, to be very interesting. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS | 0 |
Health experts share the top home remedies for fighting a cold
Tuesday, November 01, 2016 by: Amy Goodrich Tags: cold symptoms , natural remedies , immune booster (NaturalNews) Stay well during the colder months with these simple, time-tested home remedies to prevent a common cold, help shorten the duration and get you feeling better in no time. A common cold is caused by a virus, so there is no point in taking antibiotics which only kill bacteria. While there is a host of over-the-counter remedies available to soothe the symptoms of a common cold, nature offers far better and safer solutions.We all know the prevention drill. Load up on immune boosting foods rich in vitamin C , exercise regularly and wash your hands often. But what else is there you can do to avoid a runny nose, sore throat or a cough? Seven Health editors reveal their sickness-preventing secrets. Gargle salt water If you feel the first signs of a scratchy throat, Jeannie Kim, executive deputy editor, recommends a salt-water gargle. She is convinced that it has stopped countless of her colds. To soothe a sore throat and kill the sick-making germs, combine half a teaspoon salt with one cup of water and gargle. Repeat several times a day until scratchiness disappears. Create some heat According to Clare McHugh, editor-in-chief, a hot bath or shower is the thing you need. She explains that viruses that cause a common cold don't like the heat and are discouraged to multiply if you keep your body warm. And why not add immune boosting and cold fighting essential oils to your bathtub to enhance the healing effect?Furthermore, you could try the good old hot water bottle to help loosen phlegm and deep congestions in the chest. Swallow raw garlic If you don't mind to sweat it out and have a garlic breath, Lisa Lombardi, executive editor, recommends eating or swallowing raw garlic. While the next day her symptoms usually get worse, she feels better in 3 days.If you cannot stomach garlic's taste and spiciness, then you might want to go with the traditional garlic cure which consists of garlic, lemon, and honey. Crush one clove of garlic and add it to a cup of warm water with one teaspoon of honey and the juice of one lemon. Give it a good stir and repeat this remedy two to three times a day for the duration of your symptoms. Take Echinacea Michael Gollust, the research editor, swears by echinacea lozenges. He says that while they don't stop a cold in its tracks, they definitely reduce the severity of the symptoms. The BBC, however, reports on a comprehensive review that scanned the literature and included only the very best studies, showing that people who use echinacea may also have 10 to 20 percent less chance to catch a common cold. Stay hydrated Most Health experts agree that hydration is essential for a speedy recovery. Anthea Levi, the editorial assistant, adds that if you are struggling with blocked sinuses, adding lemon juice and cayenne pepper to your glass of water is all you need to breathe freely again. Go to bed early They often say sleep is one the best natural doctors. Tomoko Takeda Canel, the acting beauty director, couldn't agree more. When she gets sick, she cancels all her plans, has a light meal and then prioritizes an early bedtime to get better.Next time you get a cold, keep these tips and tricks in mind, and you won't need over-the-counter drugs that can do more harm than good. Sources: | 0 |
At least 5, 300 Wells Fargo employees have been fired for ethics violations like setting up illicit accounts without customers’ knowledge to meet sales targets. Now there’s another group of aggrieved Wells Fargo workers: people who say they were fired or demoted for staying honest and falling short of sales goals they say were unrealistic. That second group of workers, who claim that they played by the rules and were punished for it, are starting to coalesce around two lawsuits that were just filed and that seek status. The first was filed in Los Angeles last week by former Wells Fargo workers who say that while their colleagues created unauthorized accounts to meet quotas, they were penalized or terminated for refusing to do the same. The bank’s chief executive, John Stumpf, has often stated his goal that each Wells customer should have at least eight accounts with the company. That aggressive target has made the bank’s stock a darling on Wall Street, the lawsuit notes. On Monday, a federal lawsuit with analogous claims was filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, seeking to create a class of current and former Wells employees across the country who had similar experiences. “These are the people who have been left holding the bag,” said Jonathan Delshad, the lawyer representing the workers in both suits. “It was a revolving door. If you weren’t willing to engage in these types of illegal practices, they just booted you out the door and replaced you. ” In a statement on Monday, Wells Fargo said: “We disagree with the allegations in the complaint and will vigorously defend against the misrepresentations it contains about Wells Fargo and all of the Wells Fargo team members whose careers have been built on doing the right thing by our customers every day. ” One former employee planning to join the lawsuit is Dennis Russell, 62, who said he was fired in 2010 after a career as a telephone banker at Wells Fargo’s call center in Orange County, Calif. Mr. Russell handled incoming customer service calls and was expected to refer 23 percent of his callers to a sales representative for additional product sales, he said. But the customers Mr. Russell spoke with were usually in dire financial shape, he said in a telephone interview on Monday. Looking at their accounts, he could see mortgages in foreclosure, credit cards in collections and cars being repossessed for overdue loan payments. “The people calling didn’t have assets to speak of,” Mr. Russell said. “What products could you possibly offer them in a legitimate way?” The two fresh lawsuits echo many of the allegations in a 2015 lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles city attorney’s office. Wells Fargo settled the case this month, agreeing to pay $185 million in fines, including a $100 million penalty levied by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog agency that conducted its own investigation. But some Wells Fargo employees tried, years earlier, to sound the alarm — with personally disastrous results. Yesenia Guitron, a former banker, sued Wells Fargo in 2010 — three years earlier than the bank has admitted it knew about the sham accounts. Ms. Guitron became alarmed when, two months into her job at Wells Fargo, she noticed that a fellow banker at the company’s St. Helena, Calif. branch was opening and closing customers’ accounts without their permission. Intense sales pressure and unrealistic quotas drove employees to falsify documents and game the system to meet their sales goals, she wrote in her legal filing. Ms. Guitron said she did everything the company had taught employees to do to report such misconduct internally. She told her manager about her concerns. She called Wells Fargo’s ethics hotline. When those steps yielded no results, she went up the chain, contacting a human resources representative and the bank’s regional manager. Wells Fargo’s response? After months of what Ms. Guitron described as retaliatory harassment, she was called into a meeting and told she was being fired for insubordination. In 2012, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California sided with Wells Fargo and ruled that even if its sales targets were unreasonable, the bank had the right to use them as an employment yardstick. Ms. Guitron appealed the decision and lost again — leaving her with a bill for more than $18, 000 in court costs. “She put her neck on the line” and they punished her, said Yosef Peretz, the lawyer who represented Ms. Guitron. “She’s a single mom with two kids, barely making it, and her reputation was poisoned. No one would hire her. ” Ms. Guitron left the banking industry and now works in property management, he said. Christopher Johnson, 38, a plaintiff in the lawsuit filed on Monday, said he hesitated to get involved in the legal case because it brought back memories of “a very dark time in my life. ” He was fired in 2008 after working for Wells Fargo for five months. In trainings, the company repeatedly emphasized the importance of its ethics code and urged employees to call its confidential hotline if they observed anything inappropriate, Mr. Johnson said. But just two weeks after he started working as a business banker in a Wells Fargo branch in Malibu, Calif. his manager began pressuring him to open accounts for his friends and family — with or without their knowledge. When he refused, he was criticized for not being a team player. Mr. Johnson soon learned that his colleagues routinely opened unauthorized accounts for customers who they thought wouldn’t notice, like elderly clients or those who didn’t speak English well. Disturbed by this practice, he did as he was instructed during training and called the company’s ethics hotline. Three days later, he was fired for “not meeting expectations,” he said. Broke, Mr. Johnson was evicted from his house and spent the next seven months living out of his truck. He put all of his possessions in a storage unit, then lost them to auction when he was unable to pay the storage bill. Mr. Johnson, who now works as a writer, said he had stepped forward at his mother’s urging: “She was like, ‘Your story needs to be told. You got fired because you tried to do the right thing. ’” Mr. Russell also lost his home after he lost his Wells Fargo job. Unable to find a new position in the industry, he now works part time for a church in Costa Mesa, Calif. helping with its outreach programs for the homeless. Last week, he watched — in disbelief, he says — as Mr. Stumpf was grilled by the Senate Banking Committee and insisted that Wells Fargo never wanted its employees to do anything unethical to meet their sales goals. “It’s a crock,” Mr. Russell said. “They established the culture that made this happen — it comes down from the top. ” During the hearing, Mr. Russell said, “I was sitting there in a rage. The people who had a conscience, the employees who refused to go along, they deserve vindication. ” Workers’ efforts to band together to litigate cases against employers are often derailed by mandatory arbitration clauses that require them to address disputes privately and individually. Wells Fargo has such a clause in some of its employment agreements, but it was added only recently, in December 2015, according to Mark Folk, a spokesman for the bank. Mr. Delshad, the lawyer pursuing the workers’ cases, said he thought the covered class could grow to “tens of thousands of people” nationwide. “We’ve had former workers, and some current ones, calling our office all weekend,” he said. “We have a whole bunch of new plaintiffs to be added to the suit. It’s just unbelievable, the amount and scope of this fraud. ” Although Wells Fargo settled the civil cases with Los Angeles and its federal regulators, more fallout could be coming. Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, strongly hinted that the agency had referred the case on to other federal bureaus for criminal investigation, and multiple federal prosecutors have sent subpoenas to Wells Fargo seeking information on the misconduct. On Thursday, the House Financial Services Committee will hold its own hearing on the scandal. Mr. Stumpf, who has been invited to speak, plans to appear, Wells Fargo said. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — A retired United States Navy admiral and eight other officers were indicted on Tuesday in a widening bribery scandal in which prosecutors say a foreign contractor traded luxury travel, lavish gifts and prostitutes for inside intelligence. A total of 25 military officers and executives have now been prosecuted in one of the worst corruption scandals to hit the military in years. Prosecutors, laying out in unsparing detail a plot that stretched from Singapore to Washington, accused the officers — all with the Seventh Fleet in the Pacific, the Navy’s largest — of betraying the public trust for bribes from a military contractor in Singapore, Leonard Glenn Francis, known as Fat Leonard. The scheme cost the Navy “tens of millions of dollars” in overbillings to Mr. Francis’ firm, as he relied on sensitive and sometimes classified information the officers had given them to game the system, according to the indictment. The yearslong bribery scheme “amounts to a staggering degree of corruption by the most prominent leaders of the Seventh Fleet,” said Alana W. Robinson, the acting United States attorney in San Diego, where the charges were brought. The officers “actively worked together as a team to trade secrets for sex, serving the interests of a greedy foreign defense contractor, and not those of their own country,” Ms. Robinson said. The most prominent official charged on Tuesday was Bruce Loveless, a retired rear admiral who was taken into custody that day at his home in Coronado, Calif. outside San Diego. The admiral was knocked down a rank after he came under investigation in 2013 with two stars before the demotion, he was the officer to be charged in the scandal. Another admiral, Robert Gilbeau, was charged earlier in the case. The indictment dates Admiral Loveless’s involvement in the scheme to 2007, when he was a Navy captain involved in assessing foreign intelligence threats for the Seventh Fleet. In one of many lavish events cataloged in the indictment, prosecutors said Mr. Francis, the military contractor, took Admiral Loveless and another defendant, Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Shedd, out for a $5, 000 night of wining and dining in Singapore and gave Commander Shedd and his wife $25, 000 watches at the end of the night. Prosecutors contend that Commander Shedd then gave classified intelligence about Navy contracts and fleet movements to Mr. Francis, who was chief executive of a contractor called Glenn Defense Marine Asia, which had extensive United States military contracts. At the contractor’s behest, Commander Shedd passed on “cigars and fine wine” to Admiral Loveless and other Navy officers involved in the exchange, prosecutors said. According to the indictment, after a night of fine dining and prostitutes in Bangkok, Commander Shedd emailed Mr. Francis to say that Admiral Loveless and two other officers who were hosted for the event “were all smiles on the drive home over their ‘one night in Bangkok.’ ” The indictment also accuses Admiral Loveless of obstructing the bribery investigation by denying knowledge of the scheme. Asked by Navy investigators in 2013 whether he had ever received anything of value from Mr. Francis, Admiral Loveless responded “never,” prosecutors said. And he said he did not recall ever staying in a hotel room that he had not paid for, the prosecutors said, despite evidence that Mr. Francis had paid the bill for numerous stays for him and others at lavish hotels around Asia where ships from the Seventh Fleet were docked. Mr. Francis pleaded guilty in 2015 in San Diego, as have 10 former military officers previously charged in the case. | 1 |
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