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SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter may have to fix its problems on its own, at least for now. Salesforce. com, the enterprise software maker that had been the most likely bidder for the embattled social media company, has declined to pursue a takeover. “In this case we’ve walked away,” Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chief executive, told The Financial Times in an interview published on Friday. As Salesforce exits, virtually no other suitors seem likely to emerge. Rumors of potential other bidders — Google, Disney and Apple were among the names floated — quickly evaporated. That leaves Twitter largely on its own, at least in the near term. And the move will please Salesforce investors, many of whom detested the idea of a pricey and distracting bid for the social network. Shares of Twitter, which had stabilized on the hopes that Salesforce might still make a bid, dropped about 5 percent in afternoon trading on Friday, to $16. 88. And shares of Salesforce rose about 5 percent, to $74. 27. Mr. Benioff confirmed his remarks but declined to comment further. A spokeswoman for Twitter, Kristin Binns, declined to comment. The interview all but confirms that Twitter will need to pursue a plan rather than looking to a new owner that could shield it from the skepticism of stock market investors. Despite its prominence as a forum for public discussion — especially during the presidential race — Twitter has still lost ground to competitors old and new. Some Twitter users have been leaving the service, and the company has found it difficult to persuade people to join. Its advertising revenue growth is also on a path toward slowing down. Twitter has been emphasizing its mission around live events and commentary, stressing initiatives based on video, like its broadcasts of some N. F. L. games. Twitter executives and the board have tried to buy more time to show that they can refocus the company on those live events and increase its appeal. During the weeks when rumors of a Twitter deal reached fever pitch, speculation swirled around potential divides within the company’s board. Among those who opposed a sale, at least at first, was Jack Dorsey, its and chief executive. More recently, Mr. Dorsey had become increasingly open to selling the company. Without a deal, Mr. Dorsey and his team are more likely to face tough questions when earnings are reported on Oct. 27. Twitter executives have considered selling some units or laying off employees, as The New York Times reported last month. It could sell Vine, the mobile service, or MoPub, a mobile advertising business. The investment banks Goldman Sachs and Allen Company are advising it on its options. “There is declining advertising interest in Twitter,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “When you overlay that with the company’s current fundamentals, you’ll see very little top line revenue growth next year. ” At the same time, companies mooted as potential buyers had decided that Twitter at its current valuation — its market capitalization has surpassed $13 billion at certain points — was too expensive and required too much work to fix. Salesforce’s investors are probably feeling some relief. For much of its existence, Salesforce has relied on acquisitions to grow, augmenting its core management offerings. But 2016 has proved a particularly active time for at the company. Salesforce has bought 13 companies for more than $4. 4 billion. Shareholders were upset that in August, Mr. Benioff agreed to pay $582 million for a company called Quip, a maker of collaboration software that had negligible revenue. But Mr. Benioff said he needed its founders to rebuild his corporate architecture for the next new things in corporate software. A bid for Twitter — a company with significant challenges — represented to many investors an act of overweening ambition. At a $12 billion market cap, Twitter would have been the largest deal yet for Salesforce, which is worth $50 billion. It was Salesforce’s initial takeover approach that set off the flurry of speculation about a takeover, and as recently as early as this month, Mr. Benioff telegraphed his interest in buying what he called “an unpolished jewel. ” In an interview during his annual customer conference this month, he said he was attracted to Twitter as a way for companies to field customer complaints and promote themselves, and pursued the deal in part to learn more about the current tech market. Some of that may have been bluster. Mr. Benioff has often treated his company a bit like a both in his generous stock grants to employees and his . Yet many large Salesforce shareholders, including the mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, sent emails and other messages to Salesforce executives voicing their displeasure. The prospect of a shareholder revolt could have proved disastrous for the company, which relies heavily on its stock for its and to pay its employees. A sustained drop in Salesforce’s stock price would harm both activities. In a meeting with analysts last week, Mr. Benioff sounded unusually contrite and somewhat shocked that his impetuous style had riled his biggest shareholders. “We will think through everything, but we would never do a deal that would ever do the kind of things that I have been reading in the emails,” Mr. Benioff said at that meeting. By Friday, Mr. Benioff conceded that Twitter was a deal he could afford to pass up. “It’s not the right fit for us for many different reasons,” he said in the Financial Times interview. | 1 |
5 Reasons Why Belief in Authority is the Most Dangerous Superstition Belief in authority is dangerous, and doubly so when the majority is under its spell.
“Question authority, including the authority that told you to question authority.” — Sixth grade girl
Let’s get something straight, here at the outset. There’s nothing wrong with authority itself. It’s the belief part that messes everything up. Anyone can claim authority. But such authority only matters if others believe in it.
I can claim that I’m an authority on unicorns, but I better have the credentials to prove it. And it would also help if unicorns existed. But the point is this: If enough people “believe” that I’m an authority on unicorns, and they “believe” that I have dissected a unicorn and revealed the magical quality of its insides that causes it to shit rainbows, then I’ll not only have violated truth, I’ll have violated the minds of others and taken advantage of their ignorance. But, and here’s the rub, it’s their fault for not questioning my so-called authority. As Albert Einstein said (himself an authority in the field of physics), “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” So if we’re correct to question Einstein’s revolutionary theories, then we’re exponentially correct to question my unicorn theories.
Respecting a prestigious authority, or taking into consideration important knowledge gleaned by someone who is an authority in a particular domain of knowledge is fine. It’s even okay that sometimes we allow people to violate our minds. We allow artists to do it all the time. No, it’s when we “believe” in authority, when we blindly follow a perceived authority, that things go wrong.
Belief implies non-questioning. But let’s sail right past semantics and art and get down to brass tacks. Belief in authority is dangerous. And it’s doubly dangerous when the majority of people are under its spell. Here are five reasons why. 1.) It Can Cause Otherwise Good People to do Evil Things
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
MARK TWAIN
So back to my authority on unicorns. Did you know that unicorns also created the universe? Yup! Not only do they shit rainbows, they also puke universes. The last unicorn died for our sins in a forest of fiery crosses. And the only commandment that survived the test of time is this: “Anyone who questions the fact that unicorns created the universe are godless heathens and deserve to die and spend eternity in the fiery pits of a Tennessee summer afternoon.”
Now enter unquestioning idiots with hooked-on-authority soup for brains. They “believe” the Last Commandment of the Unicorns. They believe it so much that they refuse to question it, lest other believers think they are not true believers. Lest they get ostracized by the status quo. Lest they look “crazy” in the eyes of their fellow believers. Now just replace The Last Commandment of the Unicorns with the Bible or the Koran or the Constitution of the United States, or state-driven police enforcement , or the belief that “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
The problem is that people will fight, and kill, and murder, and commit both genocide and ecocide, for what they believe in. But they might not have fought so violently and thoughtlessly had they simply taken into consideration ALL those claims of authority and moved on smartly with their lives. The best way to maintain a healthy skepticism, and not devolve into an ignorant, sycophantic, violent mess, is to take things into consideration and question them rather than believe in them. 2.) It Leads to the Idea That We Need to Give a Group of People Permission to Control Us
“The multitudes have a tendency to accept whoever is master. Their very mass weighs them down with apathy. A mob easily adds up to obedience. You have to stir them up, push them, treat the men rough using the very advantage of their deliverance, hurt their eyes with the truth, throw light at them in terrible handfuls.”
VICTOR HUGO
By the way, the Church of the Last Unicorn is in charge of everything. It is the power behind all nation states. It pulls the strings of presidents. It whispers dark secret nothings into the ears of queens. It tugs the coattails of emperors. Its poison-soft invisible rainbow-powers saturate all things. You might as well just give into it. You might as well just let them pull your strings through the indirect authority of strategically placed men. It’s just the way things are, after all.
Or, you could question it all. You could question the almighty Unicorns. You could question the kings and queens and emperors and presidents and judges and lawyers and cops. You could question all authority, especially the so called authority of the state . It’s so easy even a sixth grader understands it (see opening quote).
The alternative is devolving into a statist. A statist is a person who believes that a group of people have the right to force, coerce, enslave, rob, and murder others. Statism is a mental disorder brought on by years of indoctrination. The problem is that the majority of the world’s population has been conditioned and brainwashed into believing in the almighty power of the state. The problem is that the majority of people are too afraid to question the state, lest they become ostracized by the statist-junky status quo. The problem is that most people don’t even know that they don’t know that there is an alternativ e. 3.) Power Given to Authority Tends to Corrupt
“I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.”
GEORGE CARLIN
Here’s a little secret: The Pope has unicorn powers. Then again, so does Colin Kaepernick . Keep in mind, the unicorn power is a righteous power. It’s a loving power that had, and has, the greatest of intentions. It created the universe, after all. And if you don’t believe it, then feel free to rot in Hades, Illinois, located directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis (according to Uncyclopedia: the content-free encyclopedia ).
But I digress, the problem with power isn’t its intent. The problem with power is that it tends to corrupt the one wielding it. And when it comes to absolute power –well, we all know where that leads. So since we all know that power tends to corrupt, and since we all want power anyway, it behooves us all to be circumspect both with it and against it.
So it stands to reason not to give power to authority by believing it, but to use the power of authority instead by undermining it. And the best way to use the power of authority is to use it against the authority by questioning that authority. It’s a social leveling mechanism par excellence, similar to the Native American concept of counting coup. As Elie Weisel said, “Every question possesses a power that does not lie within the answer.” We just need to use that power more effectively, especially against ourselves. Unicorns forbid! 4.) It Leads to An Ignorant and Apathetic Citizenry
“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
In the Unicorns we trust! Their powers are ubiquitous. Their symbols of control are hidden in all the world’s national flags, waiving influentially over the weakened masses. Their horns are the invisible bone funnels in everyone’s pie, siphoning power like it was blood pudding. Oh, I forgot to mention, blood pudding is a unicorn’s favorite dish. Obey, or go without!
When it comes down to it, obedience to authority is a disease of laziness and indifference. It hinders the progressive evolution of our species by undermining anything that might challenge the current system for the better. Forget “for the worst.” Fighting for the better at risk of the worst is far superior to shirking the better in fear of the worst. Similarly, worst case scenarios should not be avoided at the expense of healthy progress. Healthy progress should be embraced at the risk of worst case scenarios. Otherwise we don’t get anywhere but where we are. Which is great if “where we are” is perfect. But since perfection is not possible, we must be willing to risk upsetting the all-too-precious apple cart (or blood pudding cart, in this case) in order to progress.
If, as Jose Ortega y Gasset said, “Man, whether he likes it or not, is a being forced by his nature to seek some higher authority. If he succeeds in finding it of himself then he is a superior man; if not, he is a mass-man and must receive it from his superiors,” then it is incumbent upon us to have the courage to shirk our inner mass-man in order to discover self-authority through self-questioning. As long as we are responsible with our own power, and as long as we don’t allow anyone to hold too much power over us, then we might just be able to get out of our own way as a species.
Because, as it stands now, we are definitely in our own way. Especially since following authority in today’s world means giving into debt-slavery , kowtowing to an expropriating state, and being unwitting accomplices to genocides past and ecocides future. As the authors of The Fuck-it Point surmised,“Obedience to authority is not a valid excuse; not when doing what we’re “supposed to do” means letting this civilization-machine continue to kill life on earth just to make commodities out of living beings and life easy only for some.” Share: | 1 |
Newshour panelist cries in joy after being able to hear own voice and complete sentence fully Posted on
Frequent panelist on Times Then Now’s prime-time debate program, The Newshour, AAP spokesperson, The Ashutosh burst into tears on camera yet again, thanks to the sheer joy of being able to hear his own voice and the overwhelming feeling of being able to complete his sentence fully without being interrupted. (Image via intoday.in)
The former IBN7 editor described his emotional experience to The UnReal Times , but not before asking “The Modi” to answer for his own emotional outburst. “There is the Youtube video of the deff babie who is able to hear the human voices, including his own, for the first time, after being fitted with the hereing aide. The babie’s joy is just prizeless !!! That is exactly how I felt when I was able to hear my own voice on the Newshour for the first time !!! Not only that, I was also able to fully complite my sentence without any interruptions !!! It’s an unbelivable feeling !!! My wife told me that the Mogu and the Chhotu also started crying on seeing me crying on the TV !!!” The Ashutosh exclaimed.
Recounting his earlier experiences on the Arnab era Newshour, the AAP spokesperson said, “With the Arnab, I could not hear my own voice and I still used to talk. Once in a while, the audiance wud laugh after I said something and I used to realize that way that I had said something stupid, like filibusting or simply ‘the’ing random people or things. Also, I figured out that I would never really be able to complete any sentence, so I started shortening my sentences to 2-3 words, like in the bank-e-scam episoade. Of course, soon later, AAP boycoatted the Arnab. Now, thank the God, there is no need for all these struggles !!! The journalism is back in the Times Now !!!”
While being strong opponents in every other topic under the sun, in this regard, however, The Ashutosh found strong consonance from rival spokesperson, the BJP’s Sambit Patra. “I can fully understand what The Ashu went through and how he must’ve also finally felt yesterday. I too, could often never hear what I myself used to squeal but soon enough, even though the topic would be in our favor, the hot seat would somehow shift to mine and I would often be blasted for something the Congress or the AAP did. Even though I haven’t gone to the post-Arnab Newshour, I can fully feel what The Ashu feels,” Patra added.
According to sources, the Congress party too, is mulling a return to The Newshour. “Boy, I can’t wait to return to the Newshour and finally be able to talk about 2002 at length,” a thrilled Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha exclaimed. 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 |
A group of mostly white students at the University of is demanding that the school offer a wholly free education to black students, even if they are convicted criminals. [The group, the Associated Students of Madison, demanded that the school offer free tuition, free living expenses, and cancel all fees for all African American students as a form of “reparations” for the practice of slavery that ended 150 years ago, Fox News reported. “The university’s rhetoric suggests that it is committed to diversity and inclusion, so this legislation compels the university to move towards action — which is imperative,” said the resolution’s author, ASM Student Council Rep. Tyriek Mack. “If no one challenges the university’s empty promises, then the racial composition will remain stagnant. ” Calling it the “Cognitive Dissonance Resolution,” the ASM policy proposal demands free tuition for all black people, including formerly incarcerated criminals. Free tuition, free housing, and no fees would save a black student up to $20, 000 a year. The resolution also demands that universities spend ten percent of their donations on financial aid. Another provision called on the school to weigh admittance by geographical regions, instead of grades. While black students make up only two percent of the student body, University spokeswoman Meredith McGlone insisted that the proportion of students of color has grown from 11 to 15 percent under current administration policies, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. On the other hand, the State of Wisconsin itself is only six percent black, while the U. S. population is 12 percent black. In the end, McGlone said that some of the things the student group wants are not even legal. “It’s unclear that the methods that they’re suggesting are either legal or the best approach to accomplishing those goals,” McGlone said. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0 |
In all states that have legalized medical marijuana, there has been a 25% reduction in deaths related to the overdose of legally prescribed painkillers. There is still heated controversy in the United States about whether or not marijuana should be legalized for recreational use, let alone medicinal purposes.
Via HumansAreFree
After reviewing a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2014, you’ll likely agree that it’s much safer for cannabis to be doled out than most prescription opioids. For the study, researchers analyzed all deaths caused by opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2010 in the U.S.
Then, they determined the association between medical cannabis laws and opioid analgesic-related deaths using linear time-series regression models. The various models helped the researchers determine that in every state that legalized medical marijuana between the aforementioned years (a total of 13 states), there was a 25% reduction in deaths related to the overdose of legally prescribed painkillers. “The difference is quite striking,” said Colleen Barry, the study’s co-author and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, to Newsweek.
It is hypothesized by the researchers that in states where medical marijuana is legal, patients are opting to smoke cannabis to alleviate their pain rather than consume prescription opiates, as the latter tend to cause side effects.
In addition, marijuana accounts for 0 deaths per year, whereas overdose of opiates are responsible for over 14,000 deaths annually (source). While the statistics speak volumes, not everyone is in agreement with the findings.
Dr. Andrew Kolodny, chief medical officer at the national non-profit addiction treatment agency Phoenix House, says that the immediate reduction in overdose deaths is extremely unlikely to be a result of the herb being substituted. This, he says, is because physicians rarely prescribe marijuana for chronic pain.
“You don’t have primary care doctors in these states [prescribing] marijuana instead of Vicodin,” he argues.
The physician believes that the states that have legalized medical marijuana are more likely to actively treat and help prevent addiction. In his mind, this is a far more likely scenario for the decrease in overdose deaths. While more studies undoubtedly need to be carried out to pinpoint the cause of this phenomenon, this news is heartening at the very least.
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For the president’s many opponents, it was never just about derailing the peace deal. As Colombia debated how to end 52 years of war with the nation’s largest rebel group, there was the soccer player from the beloved national team who condemned the agreement, singled out President Juan Manuel Santos and accused him of practices that were “not of God. ” Then there were the angry marches across Colombia this summer against a gay education minister, which soon grew into a wellspring of opposition to Mr. Santos’s government and the peace deal he was championing. “My compatriots march in defense of family values,” declared Álvaro Uribe, the conservative former president who spearheaded the charge against the peace deal and rallied Colombia’s religious voters against it. Mr. Santos’s push to end the war has earned him enormous recognition internationally, culminating in the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. But he has faced stiff resistance in Colombia, where he is confronted by a growing cultural divide. When Colombians last weekend rejected the peace deal between Mr. Santos’s government and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the decision shocked the region and laid bare generations of anger at the rebels. Many Colombians felt the guerrillas would have gotten off too easily in a deal that would have allowed a vast majority of them to avoid prison. But critics of the agreement appear to have harnessed something else as well: a resurgent conservative movement, angered by Colombia’s socially liberal tilt in recent months. “The opposition used that argument regarding gay marriage, abortion, religion to attract and rally against the peace accords,” said Juan Carlos Garzón, a researcher at the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a research group in Colombia. “It was an effective strategy to drive the most conservative voters against the peace agreement. ” Colombia has long been one of the region’s most conservative countries. But the tone was beginning to change in the last year. In April, Colombia’s highest court legalized marriage, and last year it removed barriers to adopting children for gay individuals and couples. The country, torn by long drug wars, legalized medical marijuana late last year. A push to lift restrictions on abortions also emerged this year as the Zika virus spread. Then came the deal with the FARC. For some conservatives, it was bridge too far: a pact with a Marxist guerrilla organization that had terrorized Colombia for decades. “People have used the reaction to the peace agenda to talk about a larger conservative rollback in Colombia, a broadened cultural war,” said Winifred Tate, an anthropology professor at Colby College in Maine who studies Colombia. The accord’s defeat — aided by low turnout in regions that voted for the peace deal — allowed social conservatives to flex their muscle, as Mr. Santos was forced to court his opponents in an attempt to salvage what remained of the agreement. Two days after the vote, Mr. Santos took his negotiators to meet with a large group of evangelical Christian pastors to discuss their concerns. Mr. Santos must also negotiate with Mr. Uribe, his immediate predecessor, who has repeatedly called him a “traitor” for promoting a peace deal that includes reduced sentences for rebel war crimes. The two sparring leaders met on Wednesday, with Mr. Uribe outlining a list of demands like bans on political participation for rebels and punishments for those who had kidnapped children. And Mr. Uribe made a nod to his social conservative backers. “We presented our worries about family values,” he said. Even after Mr. Santos won the peace prize on Friday, Mr. Uribe remained defiant, calling the peace accord “damaging to democracy” and demanding that Mr. Santos change it. While the Nobel Prize may provide a morale boost for the peace camp, some observers warned that the country’s deep polarization would continue. “It’s not likely the agenda of the extreme right will change,” said Nazih Richani, a professor at Kean University in New Jersey who studies Colombia. Susana Correa, a lawmaker in Mr. Uribe’s Democratic Center Party, said she believed the deal contained a kind of subtext that undermined family values and supported nontraditional views on gender and sexual orientation. Hours after Mr. Santos won the peace prize, Ms. Correa said her party would still be using this “new era of modifications and corrections” to seek a more socially conservative text for the deal. “The Catholic and evangelical churches have joined us in complaining that in no part of the agreements God is even named,” she said. The fight between social conservatives and Mr. Santos’s government came to a boil this summer over education. Gina Parody, the country’s education minister, who is gay, proposed mixed bathrooms and changes to uniforms to put less emphasis on gender. She also proposed creating a manual for students related to sexual orientation, following an order by the country’s courts to do so. The proposed changes drew ire from the country’s far right. One politician accused Ms. Parody of “gay colonization. ” By thousands of protesters — supported by Mr. Uribe — gathered throughout Colombia, waving signs denouncing marriage and urging the country to defend the traditional family. As the controversy over the manuals continued, Ms. Parody temporarily stepped down from her post, taking a job as one of the central figures in the campaign to support the peace agreement in the national referendum. Soon the two issues — the peace deal and the fight over sexual orientation and gender — became linked in the eyes of many. “Colombians marched a month ago when the government tried to impose, through these manuals, gender ideology in Colombian education,” said Alejandro Ordoñez, Colombia’s inspector general at the time. Government officials, he argued, were “using peace as an excuse to impose their gender ideology. ” Evangelical Christian leaders were also starting to rally against the deal on moral terms, saying it did not offer justice to the victims. The war left more than 220, 000 dead and displaced five million. In a YouTube video posted last month, Johan Molina, a popular minister, complains that the agreement had not been “written in common language,” confusing its intent. He said a group of pastors and other experts had studied the terms and found that the deal conflicted with the Bible because of its leniency on the rebels. “There has been no repentance of any of FARC’s leaders, and the people can’t give forgiveness to those who have not asked for it,” Pastor Molina tells his congregation in the video. The religious message against the vote was gaining traction beyond Christian leaders. Before the vote, Daniel Torres, a Colombian soccer player, produced an online video in which he urged Christians to vote against the deal. “I want to tell you that what you have come up with, and the practices you are doing, are not of God nor come from God,” Mr. Torres said, speaking to Mr. Santos while the video showed a photo of the president bowed at an indigenous cleansing. “This will bring nothing good to our country. ” Other religious leaders made the argument that the deal would benefit gay and transgender residents directly. Pastor Marco Fidel Ramírez of the Family International Church in Bogotá, the capital, said he believed the architects of the deal planned to use the agreement to advance marriage, though he had no direct evidence to support that assertion. “This was a fundamental objection and a danger to the natural family in Colombia,” he said. “A family in Colombia consists of a man and a woman. ” Marcela Sánchez, the director of Diverse Colombia, a group representing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, said the accord contained no such provisions. But, she said, the right waged a fierce disinformation battle to convince people otherwise, especially on social media. The effect, in addition to derailing the peace deal, was increased homophobia, Ms. Sánchez said. After the failure in the referendum, Ms. Parody, the education minister who had campaigned for the deal, permanently resigned from her education post, leaving the country without its most prominent gay leader. “It’s sad in this country that there are people who have more fear of homosexuality than war,” Ms. Sánchez said. | 1 |
Good morning. Here’s what you need to know: • A deal to end the brutal assaults on the Syrian city of Aleppo fell through and artillery shelling resumed. It was the latest bitter whiplash for the thousands of civilians and medical staff members unable to flee the ruined city for territory held by the government. A nurse said he hoped the world would hear “our final scream. ” _____ • President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whose antidrug campaign has left more than 3, 000 people dead, made some of his most controversial comments to date. In his years as the mayor of the city of Davao, he said, he would patrol on a motorcycle, “looking for a confrontation, so I could kill,” he told a Manila newspaper. Killing suspects “personally,” he said, helped goad police officers — “just to show to the guys that if I can do it, why can’t you?” _____ • Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan welcomes President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for two days of talks, hoping for progress in a territorial dispute. The meetings come against a backdrop of uncertainty in relations between the U. S. and China, and tensions over the evidence of Russian interference in the U. S. election on behalf of Donald J. Trump. The top U. S. commander in the Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. speaking in Sydney, acknowledged threats from China, ISIS, North Korea and Russia, pledged continued commitment to the region and signed a deal to fly Raptor jets from the city of Darwin. _____ • The Federal Reserve, citing the steady growth of the American economy, raised its benchmark interest rate slightly, just the second increase since the global economic crisis of 2008. U. S. stocks rose briefly, and then slid as investors appeared to realize that the Fed was likely to be leaning against growth and inflation in the future. Here’s a snapshot of global markets. _____ • As part of his campaign to stimulate the economy, Mr. Trump and three of his children met with the leaders of the world’s most elite and successful technology companies: Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla and others. Before reporters were ushered out of the room, he said, “I’m here to help you folks do well,” adding, “And you’re doing well right now and I’m very honored by the bounce. ” _____ • “Can an American Dream sick with the American Disease last for long?” China’s state media outlets are having a field day since Mr. Trump’s election, depicting a nation blighted by corruption, social and political polarization, reckless debt and a weak news media. _____ • Yahoo disclosed that 1 billion user accounts were hacked in 2013 and sensitive information may have been stolen, the second major breach the company has disclosed. Here’s how you can protect yourself. • Japan removed a longstanding prohibition against gambling, amid projections of a $40 billion a year industry. “Japan is seen as the crown jewel of Asian gaming development outside of Macau,” an analyst said. • A giant American private equity group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, is among a group of investors offering $5. 5 billion for Tatts Group, the Australian gambling operator. Tatts shares jumped on anticipation of a bidding war. • Meitu, best known for an app that beautifies selfies, begins trading in Hong Kong with a valuation in the vicinity of $5 billion, offering a gauge of international interest in Chinese . • Amazon announced its first delivery by drone: an Amazon Fire streaming device and popcorn flown two miles from an English warehouse to a customer identified as Richard B. Aviation rules (and weather) still bar easy expansion. • Nintendo’s Mario goes mobile. The beloved plumber will be available on mobile devices in Super Mario Run, $9. 99 for full access to the game. • The U. S. blocked an arms deal to Saudi Arabia over concerns about civilian casualties in Yemen. [The New York Times] • The Pentagon tightened rules on combat for the second time this year, aiming to increase protections for civilians. [The New York Times] • Australia’s Defense Department failed to account for nearly $200 million in spending over and above the service contracts for military bases. [Sydney Morning Herald] • Japanese officials pushed the U. S. military to ground its troubled Osprey aircraft after one crashed off Okinawa. [Asahi Shimbun] • India’s demonetization is having a disastrous effect on Nepal’s already sagging economy. [Reuters] • Women from Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos account for almost 40 percent of the migrant construction workers in Thailand. [Associated Press] • French terrorism suspects were men in their 30s with no warning signs of radicalization. [The New York Times] • A wave more than 62 feet high was detected between Iceland and the United Kingdom, the World Meteorological Organization said. [BBC] • A visitor to Japan ponders what lessons the U. S. might take from a work culture that weathered long years of a painfully damaged economy without unleashing destabilizing resentment. • Al Franken, a Democratic senator who once made a living satirizing politicians, envisions an unfunny future under the Trump administration. • And meet the Michael Jordan of darts. Michael van Gerwen, a Dutchman, has won 25 tournaments this year and has been ranked No. 1 since 2014. Even so, he still has something to prove. The death of John Glenn has resurfaced memories of his famous orbit of Earth in 1962. Back then, there wasn’t much debris to block his view or threaten his spacecraft. Not so anymore. Humans have created millions of pieces of “space junk” during the past 60 years of space exploration. While most are less than 10 centimeters in diameter, even tiny objects can threaten spacecrafts and communications satellites. “Going at 17, 500 miles per hour, a little marble can wipe out a space station,” said John Crassidis, an University at Buffalo engineering professor. When bits of junk collide, they often break apart, creating more debris. Adding to the clutter are the abundance of satellites technology companies are launching these days. NASA has called for stronger international regulations. “It’s a political mess,” Dr. Crassidis said. Japan, though, is stepping forward to confront the challenge. Last week its national space agency launched a spacecraft featuring a cable that can safely guide debris into Earth’s atmosphere. If the mission works, it could lead to more innovative approaches, like one a Japanese entrepreneur, above, recently discussed with The Times. He wants his company to be the leader in extraterrestrial trash collection. Its slogan: Space Sweepers. Giovanni Russonello contributed reporting. _____ Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings. What would you like to see here? Contact us at asiabriefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
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Some eight to ten thousand refugees have been living in an improvised camp in Calais currently being demolished by French officials. All they’ve gotten from the French government so far has been tear gas and the bulldozers set to tear down the tents and shacks where they have survived amid the cold and mud thanks to the help of fellow refugees and humanitarian volunteers and organizations. The NGO Help Refugees said that as of 24 October it had a list of 1,028 “unaccompanied” children in the camp, 49 under the age of 13, one an 8-year-old boy. These are kids who lost their families at home, or were separated from them as they travelled across half the world thorough the most difficult and dangerous conditions imaginable.
Many of these children – about 40 percent, according to the NGO Terre d’Asile – came to Calais, on the English Channel, because they have family in the UK and are therefore legally entitled to asylum there. During the first ten months of this year, under public pressure, the UK admitted a grand total of 79. This came only after an enormous outcry among British people. A Parliamentary measure to admit all refugees under 13, sponsored by a prominent member of the House of Lords, who was himself given asylum in the UK as a 6-year-old fleeing the Nazi persecution of Jews, went largely ignored until the last week, when the British authorities finally let in 200. It took a strong protest from the British Dental Association to stop plans to x-ray the teeth of children claiming asylum to prove their age. Many other refugees in Calais are entitled to enter the UK because they have a spouse or other close relative to live with there, but neither the British nor French governments care to implement European Union laws and agreements.
This is, in fact, official UK government policy. Prime Minister Theresa May was infamous for her rabidly anti-foreigner positions when she was Home Minister. She took the lead among her European counterparts in cutting off funding to Italian-led search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean, calling saving lives a “pull factor” for “threats we face”.
When the French police attacked and destroyed about half the Calais camp earlier this year, 129 children simply went missing. A Help Refugees spokeswoman says she fears this will happen again, since no government will take responsibility for these children. One reason that many people do not want to leave the camp is that they have built up ties, mutual-help networks and other arrangements that enable them to survive. They have no reason to believe that the French and other authorities who have displayed nothing but alternating neglect and brutality will offer an acceptable solution to their predicament. These kids reached Calais after travelling through many other countries whose governments were no more welcoming than France.
What will happen to these refugees when their camp is bulldozed? The plan is for them to be herded into buses, split up into small groups and sent to hundreds of “welcome centres” scattered across the country. Five of these centres have already been fire-bombed. Right now there are about 500 media people in Calais – NGO members say they fear that when the camera lights go out, refugees who have refused to get on a bus “voluntarily” will be attacked by security forces or the small fascist bands that a thousand police mysteriously cannot hold back sometimes.
The biggest nationality group in the camp is people from Afghanistan, who literally crossed mountains and deserts to flee the mess the US and Nato made of their country. Under a recent agreement with the Western powers, the Afghan government is to accept the forcible return of its refugees in Europe, as many as hundreds of thousands. Ethiopians (whose government is closely allied with the US), Eritreans and other Africans are not generally considered deserving of refugee status. Trying to get by as an “illegal” immigrant is the most rational choice for many people, rather than applying for asylum, getting fingerprinted and maybe expelled. Some people have come to Calais seeking safety in numbers after being forced out of smaller camps in Paris and elsewhere.
The people in Calais are not just some unfortunate anomaly, an exception that proves the rule that the world is OK. Their desperate presence tells the truth about an unacceptable world dominated by a handful of countries that have prospered at the expense of the vast majority of the planet’s people, through both plunder and war, and the normal workings of a global system of exploitation. The fact that there are 63.5 million refugees and displaced people in today’s world, according to the UN, is an irrefutable proof – only one of too many – that the capitalist-imperialist system does not work for humanity and the planet.
While the British, French and other European governments squabble among themselves about who should help which immigrants, each taking in as few as possible as slowly as possible, some people not only refuse to accept this inhumanity but take responsibility to do something about it. A middle aged, middle class woman in the French city of Nice, near Italy, heard on her car radio that French police were blocking the city’s train station to keep out refugees who had walked across the border. She dropped her daily schedule, went to the station, invited refugees into her car and drove them to train stations where the police would not be expecting them. Someone snitched on her and she was arrested and hit with a huge fine. Overnight hundreds of people sent her enough money to pay it. A New York Times article refers to “a French underground railroad, moving African migrants”. While lots of “citizen collaborators tip off the French police”, “a low-key network of citizen smugglers are countering police efforts in a quasi-clandestine resistance, angered by what they see as the French government’s inhumane response to the crisis.” (4 October 2016) The “migrant crisis” that governments today consider a police problem could become part of a political crisis, with big questions at stake about what kind of society people want, or will accept.
What do the imperialists, fighting amongst themselves to run this world, mean by the words “migrant crisis”? For them, it is a “crisis” that a few people have slipped into Europe, the UK, the US, Australia and other imperialist fortresses. To promote racism, they call the Calais camp “the jungle,” when their capitalist system has turned our planet into the dog-eat-dog place it is today. The real crisis is not Calais but the world. The system’s own workings are generating vast upheavals that no wall can hold back, and that cry out for the overthrow of this system in country after country.
Postcript 28 October
The prefect in charge of evacuating the camp pronounced “Mission accomplished”, meaning that the site has been emptied and the riot police will not allow anyone to come back. The departure was hastened by massive fires consuming tents and shelters, which the prefect claimed trhe migrants themselves had set because it was a “custom” in their cultures. According to the 28 October Le Monde , about a hundred refugees are sleeping in the cold and rainy streets of Calais, some of them minors, with no place to go.
Some people who let seem to be very happy with their new lodgings, according to Le Monde and other media, but police are accompanying the buses taking them to nearly every corner of the country, with orders not to let anyone change their mind along the way. About 90 people were taken straight to jails, with no explanation as yet.
This article originally appeared in A World to Win News Service, to which Sam Alber is a regular contributor. ( Web site: aworldtowinns.co.uk | 1 |
Aditi Ashok is only 18 years old, but like any aspiring pro golfer, she knows the story of Ok Hee Ku and Se Ri Pak, who in the 1980s and ’90s changed women’s golf by starting the South Korean wave. Ashok may be that trailblazer for India. She was among the early leaders in the women’s tournament at the 2016 Rio Olympics and parlayed that experience into two victories in the fall on the Ladies European Tour, where she earned top rookie honors for 2016 and finished second in earnings with seven finishes. Golf is an emerging sport somewhere behind cricket, soccer, field hockey and tennis in India, a nation of more than 1. 3 billion people. But that may change soon, thanks to players like Ashok. Anirban Lahiri is the only native of India with full status on the PGA Tour. Currently ranked 86th in the world, Lahiri has been ranked as high as 33rd. Arjun Atwal, currently ranked 969th, remains the only Indian winner on the PGA Tour, with his victory at the 2010 Wyndham Championship. Daniel Chopra, winner of two PGA Tour titles, grew up in India but is a Swedish citizen. But no Indian woman has ever won an L. P. G. A. Tour event. Ashok, at No. 100, is the Indian woman since Simi Mehra, who played on the tour for several years beginning in 1997 and attained a ranking of No. 17 in 1998. Only six Indian women are currently world ranked, compared with 148 Indian men. “Golf is definitely growing in India, but for the number of people we have, we still don’t have enough players, especially women players,” said Ashok, who is from Bangalore. Ashok found herself in the spotlight when she returned home as an Olympian last summer. Weeks later, she won the Ladies European Tour event in India and added a second win the next week in Qatar. “There was clearly a huge sense of pride from the local crowd when Aditi won the Hero Women’s Indian Open,” said Bethan Cutler, who handles communications for the Ladies European Tour. Cutler called Ashok’s win a “game changer for female golfers” in India. When asked what she thought it would take for her country to embrace golf, Ashok was pragmatic. “It’s not just about golf, and it takes more than talent,” she said. “It’s the culture. It’s about sports in general, and once the changes and girls start picking up sports, there will be more players in golf. ” The Professional Golf Tour of India offered 25 tournaments last year for male professionals, many of whom also competed on the Asian Tour and the European Tour. But Indian women had fewer opportunities, with 16 tournaments on their Hero Women’s Professional Golf Tour. With significantly fewer women playing the game in India, it took more than a decade for the small professional Women’s Golf Association of India to grow to 30 members. Champika Sayal, secretary general of the association, and Mehra helped establish a professional tour for Indian women. Mehra organized a Skins Game in 2005, inviting three L. P. G. A. players to India to play an exhibition. A young Indian pro also competed in the event, alongside Mehra. “I remember it being quite historic and emotional for everyone involved,” said Heather one of the invited pros and now the L. P. G. A.’s chief tour operations officer. Mehra won 25 amateur tournaments throughout Asia before turning professional and becoming the L. P. G. A.’s first Indian player by qualifying for the tour in 1996. She won three times on what is now the Symetra Tour and posted two finishes on the L. P. G. A. tour, where she played until 2008. Professional sports for women was a foreign concept in India in the 1990s, when Mehra began her golf career. She had no support from her country on any level and was encouraged only by her peers on the L. P. G. A. Tour. “I felt completely alone and a bit lost during my first few years on tour,” said Mehra, now 44. “But I had amazing women as my idols and friends who made me feel like I belonged there. ” Those L. P. G. A. peers donated their used golf equipment and balls to Mehra, who shipped the golf gear to India to help girls get started in the game. She would travel back and forth between the United States and India, shuttling equipment, playing in tournaments to support fledgling Indian events, and reminding her compatriots that opportunity existed. “It’s a little easier when you see someone else do it,” Ashok said when asked about India’s history in golf. “I still listen to Simi because of all she’s gone through. ” The number of Indian women playing professional golf still lags behind the number of female pros in many other nations, but it has grown from Mehra’s early roster of one. At last year’s Hero Women’s Indian Open, now sanctioned by the Ladies European Tour, the field of 113 players included 17 Indians. The growth of the Women’s Indian Open has become a visible milestone since the first national championship for Indian women was started in 2007 by Sayal, Mehra and others — 43 years after the men’s inaugural national championship. Another sign is the increase in girls playing golf. “There were three or four girls between ages 7 to 12 when I was a junior,” Ashok said. “Now, there are between 15 to 20 girls. That’s not a lot, but it’s getting better. ” Access to golf is also an issue in India, Ashok said, adding that there were six courses within one hour of her Bangalore home. “We don’t have a lot of space in India, but even if there were more driving ranges, it would help make golf more accessible and help promote the game,” she said. Ashok embraced golf at 5½ while having breakfast with her parents at a golf club in Bangalore. Their breakfast table overlooked the driving range, where players were hitting balls. After breakfast, the family walked over to the practice green, where Ashok was handed a putter and some golf balls. Two hours later, she left in love with a new game. She and her parents began taking lessons and playing golf together. “We were very intrigued,” said her father, Pandit Gudlamani Ashok, who works in real estate. Aditi played her first round of golf when she was just over 6. Her father thought she would be tired, but was surprised when she wanted to play more. Her mother, Mash Ashok, said: “We played regularly as a family, but as soon as she was keen and started playing it competitively and started to set her goals, we couldn’t play as often because of her schedule. It was more about being her support than playing golf ourselves. ” India did not offer separate tournaments for girls when Ashok began playing, so from age 7 to 12, she competed with boys. She could not outhit the boys in distance, so she sharpened her short game as the equalizer. Ashok captured attention in her homeland for the first time at 13 when she went head to head against Mehra in a 2011 professional event. She beat Mehra in a playoff. “That was huge,” Ashok said. “Simi is a fierce competitor, but she encouraged me. When I won that event, I knew I wanted to be a professional. ” When Ashok won the Women’s Indian Open in November, she edged out the L. P. G. A. veterans Brittany Lincicome and Belen Mozo. In Qatar, she won by three shots over the European Solheim Cup player Caroline Hedwall. “Aditi has a bright future, and India has an iconic young female golfer,” Sayal said. “Golf is finally coming of age for women in India. ” Ashok passed another milestone in early December when she earned high conditional status at the L. P. G. A.’s annual qualifying tournament in Florida, which will allow her to play in a number of tour events and give her the opportunity to move up should she play well. Now the second Indian member of the L. P. G. A. Ashok plans to play at least six European Tour tournaments this year, and as many L. P. G. A. events as possible. “What she has achieved is truly remarkable,” Mehra said. “I wish her all the success in a wonderful journey. ” Others hoping to follow Ashok’s success include seven Indian women who competed in the recent Ladies European Tour qualifying tournament in Morocco. When Ashok won the 2015 event, there were only two Indians in the field. “I think our country never thought that we could have contenders in golf,” Ashok said. “But if golfers from a small country like Korea can have success, it can be done by top players from India. ” | 1 |
Foreign Policy Scotland's Secretary of State David Mundell (Photo by AFP)
Scottish Secretary of State David Mundell has warned about the consequences of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU), saying Brexit would cut access to the single market.
Mundell told members of the Scottish Parliament on Thursday that neither Scotland nor any other part of the UK was going to get a “special deal” during the negotiations with the EU.
"So there are very specific issues to specific industries, but there won't be special deals and it's absolutely wrong to characterize a suggestion that certain areas of the country will get a special deal and Scotland will not,” he said.
“I accept on one level, if we are leaving the EU then essentially we are leaving the single market but access to the single market can, I think, continue in a way that doesn't involve tariffs or barriers,” the secretary continued.
British and Scottish officials have long been engaged in a war of words over the Brexit process, with Scotland asking for an “equal” role in the negotiations.
During an EU referendum on June 23, Scotland voted 62 percent to 38 percent to remain in the 28-member bloc, but Britons voted to leave, 52 percent to 48 percent.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has made it clear that she will complete the Brexit process by 2019 and that Scotland holds no veto over it.
Scotland, in response, has threatened to secede from the UK in order to preserve its EU membership, which in turn guarantees the nation’s access to the EU single market.
Last year, Scotland’s first attempt for independence from the UK was blocked by voters in a referendum.
Mundell told MSPs that the possibility of a second referendum was already harming Scottish businesses, even more than Brexit.
“It is already evident, because I understand that the surveyors organization have said there is a drop off in the take up of commercial property in Scotland,” he said.
Experts warn that in case of a hard Brexit, the UK may lose its preferential access to the EU's single market and suffer from soured relations with other EU members. Loading ... | 0 |
Donald J. Trump fired his divisive campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Monday as he confronts urgent challenges heading into the general election — a strategic shift after months of concerns from party officials and donors about Mr. Lewandowski’s stewardship of the campaign. The exit occurred a month before Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is to secure the official nomination at the party’s convention in Cleveland. It reflected a broader adjustment by the campaign as it grapples with a late start to anxiety among party leaders and a skeletal staff — all while Mr. Trump’s likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, swiftly builds out her operations in swing states. Mr. Trump had faced increasing concerns from allies and donors, as well as his children, over whether Mr. Lewandowski, who had never before worked on a national race, was able to direct a battle against Mrs. Clinton. Among those who had voiced concern was Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who told Mr. Trump last week that relations between his committee and Mr. Lewandowski had become increasingly strained, and that a change would be welcome, according to three people briefed on the discussion. Republicans across the spectrum welcomed the firing as a positive step, but they suggested that it needed to be followed by consistent changes in performance from the candidate himself. Mr. Lewandowski was fired at a Monday morning meeting with Mr. Trump and Mr. Trump’s two older sons, Eric and Donald Jr. said two others briefed on the meeting, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Mr. Trump and Mr. Lewandowski had what was described as a “very open conversation. ” Mr. Lewandowski’s time was primarily spent on the campaign trail with the candidate, and aspects of the operation were largely handled by the chief strategist, Paul Manafort. For months, Mr. Lewandowski had been a lightning rod for controversy, making headlines about himself that overshadowed his boss. This included his being charged with misdemeanor battery — a charge later dropped — after he was accused of grabbing a reporter as she approached Mr. Trump in Florida in March. It was not immediately clear whether someone new would be named campaign manager, but it was clear that the existing Trump team believed most of the duties had already been assumed by other people, principally Mr. Manafort. “Ultimately, Paul is in charge,” Barry Bennett, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said. “He’s got the experience to help get Mr. Trump across the finish line. ” As a young Republican operative, Mr. Manafort helped manage the 1976 convention floor for Gerald Ford in his showdown with Ronald Reagan, the last time Republicans entered a convention with no candidate’s having clinched the nomination. He performed a similar function for Reagan in 1980, and played leading roles in the 1988 and 1996 conventions, for George Bush and Bob Dole. Trump allies and critics alike regarded Mr. Lewandowski as a fierce defender of Mr. Trump’s idiosyncratic approach to the presidential race. At a moment when many in the party have pressed Mr. Trump to soften his message and build a more conventional political operation, Mr. Lewandowski hewed closely to the mantra he had developed during the Republican primaries: “Let Trump be Trump. ” The limitations of that approach have been on vivid display in recent weeks. Mr. Trump has struggled to raise money from establishment donors, and he has drawn fresh criticism from Republicans and Democrats for his racial attacks on a federal judge and his revived proposal to bar Muslims from entering the United States in the wake of the gay nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla. With the Republican National Convention looming, he faces the task of broadening his team to include people with previous presidential campaign experience and uniting a party that is often not in lock step behind him. Mr. Trump has also been turning his attention to for the first time, a task over which Mr. Lewandowski had assumed oversight, and one that has gone slowly for the campaign. The campaign has aired no ads for the general election, and neither Mr. Trump or his advisers have yet to publicly bless a “super PAC” that could raise significant amounts of money to support his presidential bid. “It would be welcome if new people come in who have more experience and can move him to a more inclusive, more campaign,” said Fred Malek, a fixture in Republican Party . But he added: “How much the absence of a national kind of campaign is due to Corey and how much is due to Donald is kind of hard to tell. It looks to me like Trump drives his own train. ” In announcing Monday morning that Mr. Lewandowski “will no longer be working with the campaign,” Hope Hicks, the campaign’s spokeswoman, said in a statement that “the campaign is grateful to Corey for his hard work and dedication, and we wish him the best in the future. ” The firing followed regular reports of turmoil in the campaign. Mr. Lewandowski was often at odds with Mr. Manafort, who was brought on in March when the candidate seemed poised for a lengthy fight over Republican delegates. Mr. Lewandowski was said to have resisted certain moves that would have increased the number of staff members, at times blocking Mr. Manafort from making hires or later undoing them. But the people briefed on Mr. Lewandowski’s departure said the circumstances went well beyond any one episode or relationship. One stressed that the move had been in the works for many weeks, particularly since it had become clear that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. described the split as “amicable” in an interview with NBC. And Mr. Lewandowski gave a series of interviews Monday afternoon in which he tried to brush aside questions about the internal particulars of his departure. He said he wished nothing but the best for Mr. Trump, and suggested that Mr. Trump’s doing well could only be good for him. “If Donald Trump wins, that’s good for Corey Lewandowski,” Mr. Lewandowski said on CNN. He played down any suggestion of tension between him and Mr. Trump’s children, and said every campaign expanded its operations for a general election. Mr. Lewandowski, 42, a New Hampshire resident with deep ties to the state, had made himself a delegate to the convention months ago and is still the chairman of that state’s delegation. Few inside the campaign were given any warning about the dismissal of Mr. Lewandowski, who was on the campaign’s daily 8:30 a. m. conference call on Monday, according to a person briefed on the developments. Mr. Bennett, the senior Trump campaign adviser, declined to predict whether there would be other significant changes. But he said Mr. Lewandowski deserved credit for helping Mr. Trump get where he is. “There is no doubt what Corey did in the primary was amazing — helping him get more votes than anyone else has ever gotten, a record turnout in 45 out of the 50 states, record low expenditures,” Mr. Bennett said. “None of that’s ever been done before. ” | 1 |
Мир Ни взятые на себя обязательства по борьбе с террористической группировкой "Джебхат ан-Нусра"*, ни обещания оказать влияние на представителей оппозиционных групп с целью соблюдения ими режима прекращения огня в САР так и не выполнены полностью США. Об этом говорится в распространенном в четверг документе с фактами выполнения РФ своих обязательств по договоренностям с США по Сирии и их нарушений Вашингтоном. 0 комментариев 0 поделились Разрушенный Алеппо. Фото: AP
С текстом этого документа можно ознакомиться на сайте Министерства обороны России. Как ожидается, он будет внесен на рассмотрение в СБ ООН в Нью-Йорке в ближайшее время.
В документе, в частности, указывается, что США не осуществляли в Сирии борьбу с признанной СБ ООН террористической группировкой "Джебхат ан-Нусра" и не предоставляли РФ полной информации о расположении боевиков этой группировки в САР, что затрудняло их отделение от представителей умеренной оппозиции.
Вместо взятых на себя обязательств по организации гуманитарного доступа в г. Алеппо, США допустили заминирование силами оппозиции все подступы к Алеппо, а лидеры оппозиционных групп отказались пропустить гуманитарные конвои ООН.
Из-за вполне определенных указаний из Вашингтона американские специалисты, прибывшие в Сирию для создания совместного исполнительного центра (СИЦ) России и США, целью которого является планирование совместных ударов по объектам «Джабхат ан-Нусры» и ИГИЛ, так и не приступили к работе.
Также Вашингтон предоставил список из 138 умеренных оппозиционных групп, при этом две из них оказались принадлежащими к террористической группировке ИГ*, а 8 - к "Джебхат ан-Нусре"*.
28 июля 2016 года односторонним решением США прервали контакты по горячей линии между авиабазой Хмеймим группой своих политический и военных экспертов в Аммане (Иордания).
Напомним, как сообщала Правда.Ру, о том, что российская сторона подготовила документ с фактами, подтверждающими выполнение Москвой взятых на себя обязательств по договоренностям в контексте мирного урегулирования в Сирии и невыполнение этих обязательств Вашингтоном, который Россия намерена распространить в СБ ООН, сегодня в ходе брифинга сообщила официальный представитель МИД России Мария Захарова.
Сделано это будет для того, чтобы прекратить постоянные инсинуации на на тему о том, что РФ не выполняет свои обязательства в контексте мирного плана по Сирии.
*"Джебхат ан-Нусра" и "Исламское государство" - террористические организации, запрещенные в ряде стран мира, в том числе, и в России.
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2016 elections by Danny Haiphong
Fears of Trump should not obscure the fact that Barack Obama’s reign was a disaster. “Black America is in a worse condition than before, working class people as a whole have lost ground to a low-wage economy, and the world is closer to a World War III scenario than at any point prior.” The struggle continues, but “it is important to ensure that the protests against Trump are not allowed to be channeled back into the Democratic Party graveyard.” Obama's Departure is One Reason to Feel Optimism for Trump's Arrival by Danny Haiphong
“Only gridlock saved Social Security and Medicare from being privatized during his Presidency.”
Thousands have taken to the streets across the country to protest Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 elections. The protests have mainly centered on Trump's racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric spewed during his campaign. Protesters have yet to wrestle with Trump's positions on foreign policy and trade that made him a pariah to the majority of the ruling class. The struggle against capitalism and imperialism in the US remains immature even in the midst of positive growth in the movement against police brutality and racism in recent years. While Trump's overt bigotry gives cause for protest, there is one benefit of the Trump moment that should not be understated. That benefit is the much needed conclusion of the Obama era.
Democrats across the US are in a state of mourning over the departure of Obama. Democrats heralded Obama as the quintessential professional and consummate politician. His celebrity was peppered by the appearance of intelligence and rationality in the face of so-called Republican "obstructionism." Obama's rule was advertised as a victory for the Black Freedom movement. His Administration possessed a vast marketing apparatus that defended him as the lesser-evil alternative to the racist vitriol of the White Man's Republican Party.
“Obama's rule was advertised as a victory for the Black Freedom movement.”
Black Agenda Report was one of the few on the left that warned of the dangers of Obama in 2008. Once elected, Obama became virtually untouchable. Criticisms of his policies were condemned as racist and insensitive to the needs of Black America. The needs of Black America and the entire left for that matter suddenly became aligned with whatever Obama did. Obama moved forward to protect the banks, escalate war, and erect the largest national security state ever assembled. He instantly became the austerity President, waging a war of privatization on public education with the expressed plans to do the same to Social Security. Only gridlock saved Social Security and Medicare from being privatized during his Presidency.
The full scope of Obama's legacy has been discussed in earlier issues and will not be analyzed here. What is important is that the left will no longer have Obama to defend its alignment with US imperialism. No longer will the left be able to fall back on the first Black President to sanitize his record. Obama's immigration policies deported nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants with little protest. His Administration painted itself as a friend of women and LGBTQ identified people despite the fact that his policy of proxy and drone warfare murdered tens of thousands of women and children in Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Honduras.
“The left will no longer have Obama to defend its alignment with US imperialism.”
Obama was able to conduct a greater assault on oppressed people than the prior Bush Administration, making him the most effective evil Wall Street could buy. Obama took over as President in a period where the US was mired in two unpopular occupations abroad and an economic crisis at home. These conditions prompted the ruling class to choose Obama as the required form of counterinsurgency necessary to crush resistance before it started. After making a number of promises to end "dumb wars" and institute a single payer healthcare system, Obama entered office ready to the bidding of the ruling class. Eight years later, Black America is in a worse condition than before, working class people as a whole have lost ground to a low-wage economy , and the world is closer to a World War III scenario than at any point prior.
The massive protests to Trump's victory are in part a release of popular energy brought on by the departure of Obama. Unrest began with the formation of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements. However, neither of these movements articulated Obama's role in creating the conditions for social insurgency and movement. The 2016 elections changed the landscape dramatically. The Sanders and Trump campaigns set millions into motion in protest of the two-party establishment. Obama's departure will be another breath of fresh air into the internal rot of the imperialist system. It is thus important to ensure that the protests against Trump are not allowed to be channeled back into the Democratic Party graveyard.
“After making a number of promises to end "dumb wars" and institute a single payer healthcare system, Obama entered office ready to the bidding of the ruling class.”
Obama will leave Trump a set of conditions that he cannot possibly maintain without popular unrest. Obama departs office only inches from World War III with Russia and China. Poverty and wealth inequality worsened under his administration . Not even clever distortions of statistics could hide the large number of workers currently unemployed or underemployed in the low-wage economy. School closures, food stamp cuts, and bank bailouts have unleashed the neo-liberal wasteland that Trump spoke about in his campaign.
It appears early on that the left has rejected the viability of Trump's calls to regulate the banks and renegotiate trade deals in favor of working people. Many have ignored Trump’s “populist” rhetoric and have focused all the energy of resistance on his white supremacist proposals to ban Muslims and deport millions of undocumented people. However, this moment is just as much about Obama's departure as it is Trump's arrival. The US imperialist system is facing multiple crises that relate directly back to the economic stagnation of global capitalism. It would be a mistake not to demand Trump stay true to his “populism” just as it was a mistake when the left failed to demand Obama stay true to his promises. Whatever the case, the departure of Obama is a welcome site, and the left should use the room afforded by it to wage an intensified effort to build the organizational basis for social revolution in our time. Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He can be reached at [email protected] | 1 |
World wildlife ‘falls by 58% in 40 years’ 10/27/2016
BBC NEWS Global wildlife populations have fallen by 58% since 1970, a report says.
The Living Planet assessment, by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and WWF, suggests that if the trend continues that decline could reach two-thirds among vertebrates by 2020.
The figures suggest that animals living in lakes, rivers and wetlands are suffering the biggest losses.
Human activity, including habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution and climate change contributed to the declines.
Dr Mike Barrett. head of science and policy at WWF, said: “It’s pretty clear under ‘business as usual’ we will see continued declines in these wildlife populations. But I think now we’ve reached a point where there isn’t really any excuse to let this carry on.
“We know what the causes are and we know the scale of the impact that humans are having on nature and on wildlife populations – it really is now down to us to act.”
However the methodology of the report has been criticised. Image copyright CARLOS DREWS / WWF Image caption The report looked at data collected on 3,700 species of vertebrates over the last 40 years
The Living Planet Report is published every two years and aims to provide an assessment of the state of the world’s wildlife.
For freshwater species alone, the decline stands at 81% since 1970 Dr Mike Barrett, WWF
This analysis looked at 3,700 different species of birds, fish, mammals, amphibians and reptiles – about 6% of the total number of vertebrate species in the world.
The team collected data from peer-reviewed studies, government statistics and surveys collated by conservation groups and NGOs.
Any species with population data going back to 1970, with two or more time points (to show trends) was included in the study.
The researchers then analysed how the population sizes had changed over time.
Some of this information was weighted to take into account the groups of animals that had a great deal of data (there are many records on Arctic and near Arctic birds, for example) or very little data (tropical amphibians, for example). The report authors said this was to make sure a surplus of information about declines in some animals did not skew the overall picture.
The last report, published in 2014, estimated that the world’s wildlife populations had halved over the last 40 years.
This assessment suggests that the trend has continued: since 1970, populations have declined by an average of 58%.
Dr Barrett said some groups of animals had fared worse than others.
“We do see particularly strong declines in the freshwater environment – for freshwater species alone, the decline stands at 81% since 1970. This is related to the way water is used and taken out of fresh water systems, and also the fragmentation of freshwater systems through dam building, for example.”
It also highlighted other species, such as African elephants , which have suffered huge declines in recent years with the increase in poaching, and sharks, which are threatened by overfishing.
If pressures – overexploitation, illegal wildlife trade for example – increase or worsen, then that trend may be worse Dr Robin Freeman, ZSL
The researchers conclude that vertebrate populations are declining by an average of 2% each year, and warn that if nothing is done, wildlife populations could fall by 67% (below 1970 levels) by the end of the decade.
Dr Robin Freeman, head of ZSL’s Indicators & Assessments Unit, said: “But that’s assuming things continue as we expect. If pressures – overexploitation, illegal wildlife trade, for example – increase or worsen, then that trend may be worse.
“But one of the things I think is most important about these stats, these trends are declines in the number of animals in wildlife populations – they are not extinctions. By and large they are not vanishing, and that presents us with an opportunity to do something about it.” Image copyright SCOTT DICKERSON Image caption There are still many gaps in our knowledge of the world’s vertebrates
However, Living Planet reports have drawn some criticisms.
There are some numbers [in the report] that are sensible, but there are some numbers that are very very sketchy Stuart Pimm, Duke University
Stuart Pimm, professor of conservation ecology at Duke University in the United States, said that while wildlife was in decline, there were too many gaps in the data to boil population loss down to a single figure.
“There are some numbers [in the report] that are sensible, but there are some numbers that are very, very sketchy,” he told BBC News.
“For example, if you look at where the data comes from, not surprisingly, it is massively skewed towards western Europe.
“When you go elsewhere, not only do the data become far fewer, but in practice they become much, much sketchier… there is almost nothing from South America, from tropical Africa, there is not much from the tropics, period. Any time you are trying to mix stuff like that, it is is very very hard to know what the numbers mean.
“They’re trying to pull this stuff in a blender and spew out a single number…. It’s flawed.”
But Dr Freeman said the team had taken the best data possible from around the world.
“It’s completely true that in some regions and in some groups, like tropical amphibians for example, we do have a lack of data. But that’s because there is a lack of data.
“We’re confident that the method we are using is the best method to present an overall estimate of population decline.
“It’s entirely possible that species that aren’t being monitored as effectively may be doing much worse – but I’d be very surprised if they were doing much better than we observed. “ | 1 |
President Barack Obama is finishing his term with a lengthy essay on criminal justice reform in the Harvard Law Review, arguing that Americans should recognize systemic racism in the system. [“[W]e cannot deny the legacy of racism that continues to drive inequality in how the justice system is experienced by so many Americans,” Obama wrote in his 56 page essay. Obama cited studies from the NAACP showing that and Hispanics were more likely to be stopped by law enforcement officials and suffer stricter penalties in court. “If we are to chart honestly the path for criminal justice reform, we must confront the role of race and bias in shaping the policies that led us to this point,” Obama wrote. Obama defended his decision to free 1, 324 prisoners during his presidency, either through pardons or clemency. “While not a substitute for the lasting change that can be achieved by passage of legislation, the clemency power represents an important and underutilized tool for advancing reform,” Obama explained. Follow Charlie Spiering on Facebook | 0 |
Donald Trump likes to boast about the endorsement he’s received from military personnel, but he’ll have to work a lot harder to win over those who serve if he is elected as the next... | 0 |
Idi Diallo started playing soccer when he was 5, living in a small Ivory Coast village, kicking a ball on his family farm through two rocks that served as the goal. Even as he played, he could see troops fighting in the distance and hear gunfire ringing out in the civil wars that raged through his childhood. He practiced every day, dreaming of playing in professional European soccer leagues. He had never seen a soccer game on television — played on pristine fields with roaring fans — but at 11, he left his family for Abidjan, the country’s largest city, to play for a local team for the next three years. He also joined the Ivory Coast national team and traveled to Ghana, where the team made the semifinals in a tournament of African nations. In 2010, he got a chance to play in Italy for the AC Milan Football Academy Camp, a youth program sponsored by the elite Italian football league. But when a relative in Milan was unable to house him, he decided to pursue his dream in the United States. Then 15, Mr. Diallo boarded a plane with a friend of his brother’s and headed to New York. They settled in the Bronx, but when his companion returned to Africa a month later, Mr. Diallo found himself alone on the streets. A practicing Muslim, Mr. Diallo found refuge at the Musa Mosque Islamic Center in the Bronx, where he often slept in the prayer hall. He also informally played soccer with the Fordham University team. “He’d have played me, but I didn’t have a diploma,” Mr. Diallo said of the coach, recalling an interaction on the field. “He said, ‘Where do you come from?’ And I said, ‘You don’t want to know. ’” Then a friend at the university invited him to play in pickup games at Heritage Field, the site of the original Yankee Stadium. That is where Mr. Diallo met Fernando Rodriguez, a high school basketball coach battling advanced melanoma, who watched the games. Mr. Rodriguez approached Mr. Diallo after a game to compliment his performance. Mr. Diallo spoke little English, but he recognized Mr. Rodriguez’s accent and responded in Spanish — the language he had chosen to learn at the soccer academy in Ivory Coast. “So from then, we started talking,” Mr. Diallo said with a smile. “It was a good moment. As time went by, he asked me about my life. I don’t like talking about my problems the past is in the past. But he’d take me to eat at a nearby cafeteria, and he’d ask small questions. He asked where I lived, and I said, ‘No house for me,’ and he invited me to stay with him. ” A month after their initial meeting, Mr. Diallo accepted an invitation for a dinner and saw Mr. Rodriguez’s spare room. “There was no way I’d find something better than that,” he recalled thinking. Mr. Diallo, then 17, moved in and enrolled at Urban Assembly Media High School in Manhattan, starting as a 10th grader. He took classes to learn English and joined the soccer team, which won the championship in his first year. Mr. Rodriguez became Mr. Diallo’s legal guardian and started filling out paperwork to adopt him. But his health continued to decline, and a year after taking in Mr. Diallo, he was admitted to a hospital. This time, it was Mr. Diallo’s turn to take care of the man who had taken him in. He took warm meals to him and visited him often, updating him on his success at school. Mr. Rodriguez still managed to sponsor Mr. Diallo for his green card and help him apply for legal immigration status. Four months after Mr. Rodriguez died, Mr. Diallo learned that his immigration application had been approved. “When he passed away, it was hard,” Mr. Diallo said, shaking his head. “He’d become my father. ” He played a game the day of Mr. Rodriguez’s funeral. And he continued classes. “I had to stay in school,” he said. “I couldn’t give up on something he’d helped me work toward. ” On a cold November morning, Mr. Diallo sat inside Create Young Adult Residences, a transitional housing program serving men 18 to 25, where he has lived since February 2015. Create is affiliated with Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York, one of eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Mr. Diallo, now 20, recalls with pride the life he has lived after his mentor’s death. He graduated from high school in June and was accepted to both the College of Staten Island and LaGuardia Community College. It is a far different future from the one he imagined in Ivory Coast, where he spent few years getting a formal education schools were often closed during the wars. He received a $2, 000 scholarship from the National Association for Education and Homeless Children and Youth. The New York Public Library awarded him a laptop for academic excellence, and Catholic Charities used $350 from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund to pay for his schoolbooks. Financial aid will cover his academic costs for the first two years at both schools. It will not cover his room and board, but he qualifies for an $800 rental subsidy from the city. In addition to working part time as a waiter, bringing in about $600 a month, he plays midfielder for Boca Juniors affiliated with Argentina’s premier student soccer league. He travels to Long Island three days a week to practice, and has had tryouts with professional soccer clubs across the country, including the San Francisco Deltas and LA Galaxy II. Additional tryouts are scheduled for FC Miami City and Orlando City Soccer Club in January. He has also been invited for a return tryout in Los Angeles later in January but is unable to afford the plane fare. He laughed and shook his head, reflecting on the future, hopeful yet unwilling to wish too much. “If God gets me on a team — whatever team — this year, and I do well . ..,” he said, his words trailing off. “With agents watching those games, you never know. ” He is waiting to choose a college until he hears back from professional soccer teams, and plans to start classes after tryouts conclude in February, studying business accounting or physical therapy. If he makes a team this year, he said, he plans to continue school in that city. Regardless of where the next few months take him, Mr. Diallo said, he will keep working to become a professional soccer player. “I could do without anything — live on the street — to play soccer,” he said. “And I’ve done that. I’ve been dreaming about this day since I was born. ” | 1 |
Vincent Viola, a billionaire Wall Street trader and President Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Army, abruptly withdrew his name for the post on Friday night after concluding it would be too difficult to untangle himself from his business ties, two government officials said. Mr. Viola is an owner of the Florida Panthers hockey club and a majority shareholder in Virtu Financial and Eastern Air Lines, among a number of other business interests. This week The New York Times reported that Mr. Viola had been negotiating to swap his stake in Eastern Air Lines for a stake in Swift Air, an airline with government subcontracts. If his nomination had continued, he would have faced certain scrutiny for potentially becoming a government official who benefits from federal contracts. The Trump administration did not announce his withdrawal, which was reported earlier on Friday by Bloomberg News, but a senior administration official and a Pentagon official separately confirmed his decision, which the White House accepted Friday. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Viola is a 1977 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and he last served in the Army Reserves at the rank of major. He remained connected to the military through donations to West Point, including to the academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. A former Pentagon official and close friend said Mr. Viola was devastated over having to withdraw from what he described as a lifelong dream job. But the former official said Mr. Viola felt he was unable to sell his interest in some of his holdings because doing so could have destroyed those companies. His decision followed weeks of negotiations between his lawyers and the government as they sought to find a solution. Ultimately, they could not. Mr. Viola has a net worth of almost $1. 8 billion and is a of Virtu. Virtu had planned to go public in 2014, but pulled the plug on the move because of choppy markets and lingering questions around how trading firms like Virtu make money. In a regulatory filing at the time, Virtu said regulators were looking into its trading practices. It is not known if this issue played a role in Mr. Viola’s decision to withdraw his name for the Army secretary job, which is a post that requires Senate confirmation. His decision to withdraw comes the same week another of Mr. Trump’s appointees, Anthony Scaramucci, was told he would not get a top job at the White House amid concerns about the recent sale of his company to a large Chinese conglomerate. In an episode unrelated to the finances of Mr. Viola, it was recently revealed that he was involved in an altercation in August: He was accused of punching a concessions worker at a racehorse auction in Saratoga Springs, N. Y. No charges were brought against him. Mr. Viola was one of the first nominations Mr. Trump issued the day he was inaugurated. “Vincent Viola, everybody likes Vincent,” Mr. Trump said just hours after his as he signed orders nominating his cabinet. | 0 |
From the network that: Cannot (or will not) confirm the authenticity of the Project Veritas videos Cannot explain how Donna Brazile gave a primary debate question in advance to Hillary Clinton (that verbatim was provided by Roland Martin to CNN the next day). Brazile has since been let go from CNN after it was discovered she provided the Clinton campaign another question before a debate. Told us it is “illegal” to possess the stolen documents from Wikileaks. CNN anchor Chris Cuomo said, “It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.” Wrongly claimed Hillary did not laugh over defending a rapist Brushed off Clinton sex assaults as ‘Conspiracy Theory Land’ Misquoted Trump , then said he sounds like ‘Stalin or Hitler’ Intentionally removed critical audio from the footage of Keith Scott’s death, according to a law enforcement media company Ignored Clinton rape charges while bolstering Hillary
From CNN’s post : It’s time for a new rule on the web: Double, no, triple check before you share. Especially if it seems too good to be true.
Why? Look no further than Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Trump claimed Sunday morning that “Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton.”
Not only was there no proof of this, but it was pretty easy to disprove. The FBI email inquiry was at the top of Google News; FBI director James Comey’s name was at the top of Facebook’s “trending” box; and Twitter’s “moments” section had a prominent story about the controversy . (I guess I’ll have to take their word for it. I don’t use Google nor Facebook. As for Twitter, well, just ask Jack .) You can trust Facebook…
Nevertheless, Trump’s wrong-headed “burying” claim was his most popular tweet of the day. About 25,000 accounts retweeted it and almost 50,000 “liked” it, helping the falsehood spread far and wide.
The rise of social media has had many upsides, but one downside has been the spread of misinformation. Fake news has become a plague on the Web, especially on social networks like Facebook. As I said on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources” on CNN, unreliable sources about this election have become too numerous to count.
So that’s what I recommended a “triple check before you share” rule.
New web sites designed to trick and mislead people seem to pop up every single day. For their creators, the incentives are clear: more social shares mean more page views mean more ad dollars.
But the B.S. stories hurt the people who read and share them over and over again. Many of these fakes reinforce the views of conservative or liberal voters and insulate them from the truth. The stories prey on people who want to believe the worst about the opposition.
A recent BuzzFeed study of “hyperpartisan Facebook pages” found that these pages “are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information.” (There you have it. From the expert journalism of “BuzzFeed.”)
The less truthful the content, the more frequently it was shared — which does not bode well for the nation’s news literacy during a long, bitter election season. “Right-wing pages were more prone to sharing false or misleading information than left-wing pages,” the BuzzFeed reporting team said.
On a few occasions, made-up or highly misleading stories have even snuck into Facebook’s “trending” box — a problem that the company says it is trying to address.
In a few cases, Trump aides and family members have themselves been duped by fake news stories, including a hoax version of ABC News with a story headlined “Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: ‘I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally.'”
A close look at the web site reveals that it is not, in fact, the actual ABC News. But the site tricked Trump’s son Eric Trump in early October. “Finally, the truth comes out,” he tweeted, promoting a link to the bogus story.
As soon as I spoke about this on television on Sunday, CNN detractors filled my inbox with messages saying that CNN is the ultimate example of “fake news.” But that’s a deliberate attempt to confuse the issue. Whatever faults CNN has, news organizations small and large try very hard to report the truth.
Fake news sites and Facebook feeds, on the other hand, traffic in misinformation. My sense is that there are three buckets of these sites:
#1, Hoax sites with totally made-up news headlines that try to trick you;
#2, Hyperpartisan sites that aren’t lying, per se, but are misleading, because they only share good news about your political party and bad news about the other party;
#3, “Hybrids” that purposely mix a little bit of fact and then a lot of fiction.
These sites aren’t going away, so it’s up to Internet users to spot fake news and avoid spreading it. Fact-checking sites like Snopes can help — they are devoted to ferreting out hoaxes and tricks. Josh Stearns from Democracy Fund
Josh Stearns, a longtime media activist who now works at Democracy Fund, said newsrooms also have a role to play.
“Fact checking has taken center stage in this election, but newsrooms need to go beyond fact checking politicians statements and help debunk viral misinformation too,” he told me. “At a time when trust in media is at an all time low, journalists should call out these fake news stories and help citizens tell fact from fiction.”
Trump’s false claim about Google, Facebook and Twitter “burying” bad news about Clinton criticized what he called the “very dishonest media.” Ironically, he was using Twitter to blast Twitter.
Trump may have gotten the idea from an inaccurate Zero Hedge blog post alleging a “social media blackout.” The blog post contained false information. I asked the Trump campaign to provide a source for the wild claim, but no one has responded.
DCG | 1 |
Obama's DOJ Issued "Stand Down" Order on Clinton Foundation Investigation November 3, 2016
There have been various insider reports on the Clinton Foundation and the Hillary email scandal on FOX.
But the curious thing about this Wall Street Journal report is that it's clearly aimed at defending Hillary Clinton and smearing the FBI in the battle with Obama's DOJ officials who wanted to shut it down due to their support of Hillary Clinton.
Which means that its information that damns its own side gains more credibility.
Justice Department officials became increasingly frustrated that the agents seemed to be disregarding or disobeying their instructions.
Following the February meeting, officials at Justice Department headquarters sent a message to all the offices involved to “stand down,’’ a person familiar with the matter said.
A stand down order. Much like the one in Libya.
And remember McCabe, whose wife's Democratic political campaign received major cash from a Clinton ally?
Amid the internal finger-pointing on the Clinton Foundation matter, some have blamed the FBI’s No. 2 official, deputy director Andrew McCabe, claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation.
Not a surprise either.
The FBI had secretly recorded conversations of a suspect in a public-corruption case talking about alleged deals the Clintons made, these people said. The agents listening to the recordings couldn’t tell from the conversations if what the suspect was describing was accurate, but it was, they thought, worth checking out.
FBI investigators grew increasingly frustrated with resistance from the corruption prosecutors, and some executives at the bureau itself, to keep pursuing the case.
As prosecutors rebuffed their requests to proceed more overtly, those Justice Department officials became more annoyed that the investigators didn’t seem to understand or care about the instructions issued by their own bosses and prosecutors to act discreetly.
And that's what blew up when Team Hillary lashed out at the FBI. It was a covert war between Hillary's DOJ allies and the FBI coming out of the cold. And they pushed so hard even McCabe was disgusted.
As a result of those complaints, these people said, a senior Justice Department official called the FBI deputy director, Mr. McCabe, on Aug. 12 to say the agents in New York seemed to be disregarding or disobeying their instructions, these people said. The conversation was a tense one, they said, and at one point Mr. McCabe asked, “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?’’ The senior Justice Department official replied: ”Of course not.”
Of course. | 0 |
Its a work of GOD to prove His EXISTENCE.We must pray
for our sins.Praise JEHOVAH!!!! | 0 |
A new report reveals the number of refugees resettled monthly in 46 U. S. states declined sharply in Fiscal Year 2017. Refugee resettlement dropped abruptly following President Donald Trump’s January inauguration. The drop is most pronounced in Texas and California. [The nonpartisan Pew Research Center reviewed data from the U. S. State Department and reported Thursday that the numbers of refugees resettling in the U. S. had dropped nationwide from 9, 945 in October 2016 to 3, 316 in April 2017. Besides Texas and California in the first and second spots, Michigan and New York have also seen marked decreases. These states were followed by Arizona, Washington, Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. California, Texas, and New York were three of the 10 states that resettled the most refugees in the fiscal year 2016, and they have seen the biggest drop. Texas experienced a 68 percent reduction in the number of refugees received. That number in California was 58 percent. Michigan and New York saw a 70 and 68 percent cut respectively from October to April. Although there was an abatement during this period, the number of refugees that arrived in April rose 60 percent to 3, 315 when compared to the 2, 070 in March. Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch appeared skeptical of the report’s true meaning. She noted the decline is from a historical peak under the Obama Administration and said October was the “largest month (by far) of any fiscal year in the past 11. ” “I also had a chuckle as I read the Pew story about how the numbers are plummeting in Texas, but not a mention that the state withdrew from the program and that although it is up and running now (without the state government) the transition to the program did cause a slight slowdown,” Corcoran wrote in a post on Refugee Resettlement Watch’s website. “Texas is still the number 2 state behind California for refugee admissions this year. ” President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13780 on March 6 capping the number of refugees coming into the U. S. at 50, 000. The Obama Administration had set that number at 110, 000. The March executive order revoked and replaced the original order issued on January 27 which was signed by the president just seven days after he was sworn into office. As reported by Breitbart News, the new order was designed to also temporarily block migrants from six countries and to freeze arrivals for 120 days. Corcoran noted that had the President’s order been allowed to stand, “That would have caused ‘plummeting’ admission numbers. ” She reported the federal government is on pace to admit approximately 60, 000 refugees this fiscal year. “Compare that to Bush in 2007 and Obama in 2011 and 2012 — all three years under 60, 000,” she concluded. On Thursday, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sitting en banc issued an opinion and upheld a block from a federal district court in Maryland against the executive order. Three of the judges dissented. Judge Paul Niemeyer chastised the majority for impermissibly expanding its review from the text of the executive order itself, Breitbart News reported. Niemeyer stated the U. S. Supreme Court has prohibited such appellate review, and the intermediate appellate court looked to statements made by presidential candidate Donald Trump and other “extratextual search for evidence suggesting bad faith, which is exactly what three Supreme Court opinions have prohibited. ” Judge Niemeyer wrote, “The majority, now for the first time, rejects these holdings in favor of its politically desired outcome. The Pew report from Thursday noted, “If the new ceiling were in place, the U. S. could resettle a maximum of 7, 586 refugees during the final five months of the current fiscal year, which ends in September. ” The report by the Pew Research Center released on May 25 ends with the statement: For U. S. resettlement, the International Organization for Migration and the U. S. Office of Refugee Resettlement work with voluntary agencies such as the International Rescue Committee or Church World Service to resettle refugees. These agencies have offices across the country and resettle refugees across many states. After 90 to 180 days, financial assistance from federal agencies stops. Breitbart News reported in February that U. S. taxpayers would expend more than $4. 1 billion in the 2017 budget to support the 519, 018 refugees resettled in the country since October 2009. Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. | 1 |
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-sonia-kennebeck-on-the-drone-as-national-bird
Sonia Kennebeck is director and producwer of National Bird, an amazing new documentary about drones. Kennebeck is an independent documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist with more than 15 years of directing and producing experience. She has directed eight television documentaries and more than 50 investigative reports. She lives in New York where she runs her own production company (Ten Forward Films) that makes films about international politics and human rights. Filmmaker Magazine recently selected her as one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2016.” Sonia Kennebeck received a Master’s degree in International Affairs from American University in Washington, D.C. and was born in Malacca, Malaysia. National Bird is her first feature-length documentary film. | 0 |
Southern Poverty Law Center Names Florida-Based Now The End Begins As ‘Active Anti Government Group’ "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." - Declaration of Independence We are not against government , we are against bad government, oppressiv e government, corrupt government and anti-American government.
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:” Romans 13:1-3 (KJV)
This is what the Southern Poverty Law Center says about themselves on thier own website: “The SPLC is the premier U.S. non-profit organization monitoring the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists – including the Ku Klux Klan , the neo-Nazi movement, neo-Confederates , racist skinheads , black separatists , antigovernment militias , Christian Identity adherents and others.”
So it was with great amusement that I saw on page 60 of their yearly “ The Year In Hate And Extremism ” where they provide a state-by-state listing of anti government groups, Now The End Begins was included in their assessment of Florida. Hmmm…is NTEB really an “anti government” group?
No, we are not. My father was a vet of both WWII and Korea, my brother a US Marine, and I have lots of friends who are warfighters, police officers and first responders. I was raised to have a deep and abiding respect for the police and government officials. I have never advocated for any uprising against our government, and certainly never advocated for violence on any level. That being said, NTEB is in 100% agreement with the following statement by founding father Thomas Jefferson:
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence
NTEB has been very hard on the Obama administration for reasons listed here , here and here . As well as here , here and here . And here . And oh, here , here and here , too. Ugh, enough already! A short Compilation of Barack Obama’s blatant lies:
Now The End Begins is not “against government” , but we are against bad government, oppressiv e government, corrupt government and anti-American government. The Obama administration has been an 8 year experiment in white guilt, unvetted illegal immigration and a doubling of the National Debt just to name a few. Barack Obama is the anti-Reagan, a global citizen and the “ president of the world .” That’s not good government for America, that’s slop created for Socialists, Liberals and Communists by true anti-government troublemakers like Saul Alinsky . That’s not us, not by a long shot. Donald Trump: “My policy is America first”
In 2016, America is presented with a fantastic opportunity to elect as leader, not a politician, but a businessman whose platform is simple. Put America first , and work to restore our former greatness. Wow, that’s exactly right. That’s a government that I can wholeheartedly support. That’s a government that the founding fathers would support.
It’s time to Make America Great Again.
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The chairman of Britain’s oldest conservative think tank has slammed political strategist turned media pundit Steve Hilton for portraying himself as a Tea Party style figure, accusing him of being a liberal “moderniser” and RINO (Republican in name only). [Speaking to Breitbart London Editor in Chief Raheem Kassam on Breitbart News Daily, Bow Group Chairman Ben said Fox News’s new anchor Steve Hilton and his show The Next Revolution, with its focus on “how corrupt the establishment is” was far from a friend of the people. Explaining how Hilton has contributed to the collapse of Conservative grassroots in the United Kingdom before jumping ship to the U. S. to become a media pundit, said of Hilton and his long association with Britain’s former prime minister: Steve Hilton was really the original moderniser in the Conservative party … the original RINO. He worked with David Cameron going back 20, 25 years … came up with him through the ranks of the Conservative party. Their whole basis was to move the Conservative Party leftwards to the centre, to ape what [Labour Party Prime Minister] Tony Blair had done in British politics. It is extraordinary to now see him almost placing himself with the Tea Party movement in the United States. Listing the disastrous and unconservative policies pushed by Hilton in the UK, Kassam said: “Let us not forget this man is somebody who was behind implementing the ‘big green’ agenda in the United Kingdom, he was behind telling Conservative Members of Parliament that they could no longer espouse conservative views and that they had to hide behind these liberal left approaches to things. His big flagship policy was what they called the ‘big society’ which really meant big government, and using fluffy words to implement it. ” Both Bow Group Chairman and Breitbart host Kassam agreed they were glad Hilton had suddenly performed a and decided his decades of progressive politicking was a mistake as he looked to populism for a new career, but they also said it was time to hear him admit he had been wrong. said: “Everyone can change their views in politics, everyone can change their opinions. But what I’d like to hear from Steve Hilton is an address as to how he was wrong and why we were right. How did he change his views and why?” Kassam went further, demanding Hilton apologise to the public for the damage he had done. He said: “I’d like to have him look squarely down that Fox News camera and say: ‘I’m sorry for ruining the United Kingdom, I’m sorry for ruining the Conservative Party … I’m sorry for continuing the legacy of Tony Blair … I see one of my fellow countrymen masquerading as something that for so many years he was against. He was ridiculing us, he was mocking us. ’” remarked in reply that not only had Hilton and his fellow travellers damaged conservatism in Britain, they had also attacked those who sought to defend the old principles of the movement, including his own think tank which had been known as a favourite of former Prime Minister Baroness Margaret Thatcher. Explaining how that damage led to the disastrous result for the Conservative Party in last week’s general election, remarked: They took a very uncompromising attitude towards those who continued to defend conservatism. David Cameron personally tried to wipe both myself and the Bow Group out, and what happened with Steve Hilton and David Cameron was to totally disempower the grassroots membership, who tended to stick to traditional conservative values. All of that has actually led to the general election we just saw because the Conservative Party now has one sixth of the membership of the Labour Party because everyone got extremely annoyed that the leadership of the party held the membership in contempt, and left. That legacy is still having a major effect on British politics. I’m glad Steve Hilton has admitted he’s wrong, but he seems to want to rewrite that history. Steve Hilton worked with the Conservative Party on their failed 1997 general election campaign before becoming the director of strategy — known as the “ man” — to former British Prime Minister David Cameron, resigning in 2012. LISTEN: Bow Group Chairman Ben speaks to Breitbart London Editor in Chief Raheem Kassam on the Breitbart Daily Show on Sirius XM 125 Patriot: | 1 |
The weather in New York City saw a 62 degrees on Wednesday, but a significant snowstorm expected to move in overnight prompted Mayor Bill de Blasio to close schools on Thursday. The announcement came after the National Weather Service on Wednesday posted a winter storm warning for the city and a blizzard warning for the eastern part of Long Island. Forecasts called for 8 to 12 inches of snow throughout northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, Long Island, coastal Connecticut and the city. The heaviest snow was expected from early Thursday morning through afternoon, with wind gusts up to 35 m. p. h. the service said on its website. Nationwide, airports were reporting more than 2, 800 canceled flights for Thursday, according to FlightAware. com, a website. Newark Liberty International Airport had 603 canceled flights, La Guardia Airport, 566, and Kennedy International Airport, 480, the website reported on Thursday night. On Wednesday, the temperature reached 62 degrees in Central Park, beating the previous record of 61 degrees set in 1965. Around the city on Wednesday, people were taking advantage — walking around in and tank tops, sitting outdoors at cafes, enjoying parks and promenades. For children who longed for a snow day, the news of the snowstorm was a reason to cheer. Libby Courtemanche had taken her two sons, Christopher, 2, and Bradley, less than a year old, to a park in Huntington, Long Island, on Wednesday. “You know what’s gonna happen tomorrow?” she asked the . “It’s gonna snow. And we’re gonna get to play in the snow. ” And this roller coaster ride of extremes is sure to provide fuel for those who gripe about the weather. It will be unseasonably warm Wednesday and unpleasantly wintry Thursday, but neither will be just right, of course. Tim Morrin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the drastic shift in weather was “unusual, but it’s certainly not unprecedented. ” The extremes should not be seen as a sign that the gods are angry. Mr. Morrin said it could be explained by two competing weather patterns: cold air masses descending from the North that will push out a warm air mass in time to chill the city and turn precipitation to snow. “Air masses move,” he said. “It’s just the timing. ” At Cozy Coffee in Brooklyn, patrons headed straight for the back patio, where owner Migdalia Medina ran cups of coffee and small plates of food plates to people seated at picnic tables under a canopy of bare tree branches. “As soon as they feel it they start coming out,” Ms. Medina said of her customers. As for Thursday’s forecast, she said the patio seating “also looks good under snow. ” The New York weather historian Steve Fybish, who keeps records of the city’s weather dating to the 19th century, agreed that the weather swing was not unusual. He rifled through his records to find other days of similar extremes: a snowstorm and a afternoon within a couple of days in 1984 69 degrees on a November day followed by five inches of snow in 1896. In February 2014, when the Super Bowl was at the Meadowlands, in East Rutherford, N. J. the weather swung sharply. While there had been concerns that the outdoor game at MetLife Stadium would be affected by the cold, game day registered a mild 49 degrees at the stadium and 57 degrees in the city. But the next day, the temperature plunged to 27 degrees followed by a cold snap that was punctuated by eight inches of snow. On Thursday, the snowfall is likely to be heaviest during the morning commute, Mr. Morrin said. “I don’t think there’s going to be anyone rushing anywhere,” he said. “The commute time will be impacted. ” | 0 |
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I was living in New York City when Patty Hearst was kidnapped in February 1974. Like millions of others at the time, I followed the unfolding story with interest. At a time when news was relayed via the radio, newspapers and a daily evening news show, there was plenty of time to speculate what lay behind the actual story. In other words, there weren’t self-appointed experts on every 24-hour news channel telling the viewer what to think. A few months later, I watched the murder of six of the kidnappers on live television. Many media historians consider that event to be the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle we live with now. As Brad Schreiber points out in his newly published investigation of the group responsible for the Hearst kidnapping titled Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA , it was a new technology that first made this live coverage possible.
Yet, this is not the focus of Schreiber’s text. Indeed, Revolution’s End is about much more than the kidnapping or its coverage. Instead, it is an investigation into the creation of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), its roots in various law enforcement agencies and its intention to destroy the underground armed left of the early 1970s in the United States. While not a new theory by any means, Schreiber’s narrative is the first such attempt to examine this possibility for the general public.
From the moment the public—including the Left—became aware of the SLA’s existence; doubts about their origins were expressed. In large part, at least on the Left, this was due to the group’s confused and nebulous politics. Claiming to be an anti-racist organization, the first public attack they made was on the African-American superintendent of schools in Oakland, California, Marcus Foster. Popular among progressives for some of his pedagogical approaches and his relatively forward thinking on issues of race and class, the SLA gunned him down in 1973. Their rationale was that he was instituting a pass system for students similar to the pass system in use by the South African apartheid authorities. In reality, Foster was opposed to the plan and was working to limits its reach in terms of accessibility by the Oakland Police department. Schreiber describes the assassination, writing that the two men convicted of the murder were not actually the gunmen in the crime. In fact, according to Schreiber and his research, it was the leader of the SLA, Donald DeFreeze aka Cinque, who along with a female member, actually committed the murder.
The persona of DeFreeze is the linchpin to the claims about the SLA’s connection to law enforcement investigated in the book and previous investigations. The primary investigation was conducted by the Los Angeles-based Citizen’s Research and Investigation Committee in the 1970s. The Black Panther Party newspaper published some of this research, showing the connections between DeFreeze, well known LAPD informant/provocateur Louis Tackwood, and California law enforcement agencies in Sacramento. In addition, it is alleged that DeFreeze also worked for the FBI and was a participant in various drug and mind control experiments during his imprisonment in Vacaville California Prisons Medical Facility.
Like millions of others in the 1970s, I was fascinated by the story of the SLA as it played out in the media. From the kidnapping of Patty Hearst to the distribution of the food ransom to poor people in various California cities to Hearst’s conversion to an urban guerrilla, the unfolding drama was certainly better than most shows on TV. In addition, as a new left activist who was looking (along with many others) for an effective means to make a difference in a political milieu whose numbers were diminishing, I participated in numerous discussions about the SLA and its meaning for the rest of the left. While much of the Left dismissed the group as adventurists, crazy or police provocateurs, the fact of their existence left others wondering if maybe they weren’t sincere, albeit somewhat misreading the political climate both on the Left and in the greater public.
Even more fascinating than the publicly known story of the SLA, Schreiber’s text takes an extended and serious look at a possible deep narrative regarding the genesis of the SLA. As noted above, it is a narrative often suspected by many leftists and others regarding the group’s beginnings. By accepting Schreiber’s work, it makes it easier to understand why its members did some of what they did. In essence, Revolution’s End describes a covert operation undertaken by various law enforcement agencies that went off the rail. Succinctly put, Revolution’s End postulates (and does a fairly good job of proving) that the group that became the Symbionese Liberation Army was begun in part as an attempt to ferret out potential violent radicals in California while simultaneously attempting to discredit the revolutionary left. Donald DeFreeze played a role as both patsy and organizer while in Vacaville Prison. His role as provocateur raised suspicions, but somehow he was able to belay them. In the meantime, he took advantage of the leeway given him in the prison to sleep with various women on the outside. According to Schreiber, one of these women was Patty Hearst, who was involved in the prisoner rights movement in the period during which the SLA was originally formed. Schreiber describes the SLA as a group with three distinct phases. The first was set up by informants for the above reasons, the second went from this entity to a genuine, albeit confused political group, and the third came after the deaths of members in a police attack on their hideout. It was the last of the formations that included Patty in a more fundamental role than before, as she hid out in communes and hideouts around the United States until she was finally captured with Wendy Yoshimura in 1975 in San Francisco.
Schreiber’s text covers all the manifestations of the SLA except the last. In doing so, he provides the reader with a look at the nature of an element of the radical underground left in 1970s United States. Even more so, though, is the detailed and convincing examination he provides the reader of how police agencies can and do work to destroy the political enemies of the corporate state. It is this latter aspect that seems most important today, when the intelligence capabilities and legally granted powers to law enforcement agencies are so much greater than they were forty years ago. One need only look at the various entrapment schemes arranged by the FBI and other agencies that have cornered various folks into terror plots that would probably never have existed without the financial, logistical and motivational assistance of those government agencies. | 1 |
Ivana Says Young Donald Trump Was A Cry-Baby – Has Anything Changed? (VIDEO) By Carrie MacDonald on October 27, 2016 Subscribe
Ivana Trump, the first wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, confirmed what many of us have been thinking for a long time now: Trump is a childish buffoon. Her story of a young Donald Trump on the ski slopes is telling of the temperament we see in the nominee now. Ivana Trump: ‘He Could Not Take It’
Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio spoke with Ivana Trump about her marriage to The Donald, and she remembered a time he took her skiing. This was early on, before they married, and one would think Donald would want to show his best side, right?
No.
You see, Ivana neglected to tell the young Donald Trump that she was a very accomplished skier. According to Ivana Trump, Donald skied down the slope first, and then: “… He goes and stops, and he says, ‘Come on, baby. Come on, baby.’ I went up. I went two flips up in the air, two flips in front of him. I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. He could not take it. He could not take it.”
She said he stormed off, saying: “I’m not going to do this for anybody, including Ivana.”
We all know by now that Donald Trump is a man who doesn’t like to lose. Ever. He is a man easily baited, easily goaded, and he has the temper of a petulant child. His outbursts have sparked the hashtag #trumpertantrum .
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was correct when she said, in her speech at the Democratic National Convention: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
Nor is a man who storms off in a huff when bested by his girlfriend on the ski slopes. Donald Trump: ‘I Loved To Fight’
D’Antonio also said that Donald told him how he loved a good fight. “I loved to fight. I always loved to fight. All types of fights. Any kind of fight, I loved it, including physical.”
There’s a word for people who act like that: Bully.
Of course, Trump has put his childish, bullying ways on display for the world during this election cycle. Ivana just happened to be one of his earlier victims.
Watch their appearance on Oprah in 1988, when Trump said she does what he tells her to do:
Featured image via screenshot from YouTube video About Carrie MacDonald
Carrie is a progressive mom and wife living in the upper Midwest. Connect | 0 |
White House deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders said that FBI Director James Comey’s inability to control leaks out of the bureau was “one of many” reasons why President Donald Trump decided to fire him. “I think that’s probably one of the many factors,” Sanders said in response to a question from Breitbart News during the White House press briefing. “I mean you can’t deny somebody that that wasn’t a problem, and so I think that was just another one of many reasons that he no longer had the confidence of the president or the rest of the FBI. ” Trump has repeatedly called attention to FBI leaks to the media about the investigation into his campaign for any collusion with Russia in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. Sanders said that director Comey had “essentially taken a stick of dynamite” to the Justice Department after commenting publicly on the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email investigation. When asked if the president was prepared to fire more officials from the Justice Department, Sanders replied, “Not that I’m aware of today. ” Sanders described a gradual “erosion of trust” surrounding Comey since Trump was inaugurated, and that the president wanted to give him a chance despite the reservations he had about the director. She asserted that it was not true that Trump asked the Justice Department to put together a rationale for Comey’s firing. “I did speak directly to the president and heard directly from him that he, again, had been considering letting Director Comey go pretty much since the day he took office, but that there was no request by him to have a review at the Department of Justice,” she said. She said she was “surprised” by Democrats rushing to defend Comey, despite their insistence that he directly contributed to Hillary Clinton’s failure to win the presidency. “If Hillary Clinton had won the election, which thank God she didn’t, but if she had and she had been in the same position, she had have fired Comey immediately and the very Democrats that are criticizing the president today would be dancing in the streets celebrating. ” | 0 |
Yemen This still shows Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, delivering a televised speech. (file photo)
The leader of Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement says Saudi Arabia commits crimes across the globe with the US green light.
Abdul-Malik al-Houthi said on Wednesday that the Al Saud family has adopted a hypocritical approach in the Muslim world, the proof of which is Takfiri violence gripping the region.
"When Washington gives the Riyadh regime the green light, sedition sparks in all countries, with the Saudi offensive being in line with such a trend," he added.
The Houthi leader also warned that Saudi Arabia is seeking to damage security in some Arab countries such as Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Iraq through petrodollars and deceptive propaganda works.
Instead of countering the enemies of Islam, including the US and Israel, the kingdom has been engaged in spreading Takfiri ideology and arming terrorists, Houthi noted.
'Saudi has Yemenis’ blood on its hands'
On October 8, in one of the deadliest attacks Yemen, Saudi warplanes bombarded a funeral hall packed with mourners in Sana’a, killing over 140 people and injuring at least 525 others.
Human Rights Watch, a New York-based rights group, said that the Sana’a bombing constitutes an apparent war crime, while Amnesty International said the attack was a reminder of the need for the suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. People inspect the aftermath of a Saudi airstrike in Sana’a, Yemen, October 8, 2016. (Photo by AP)
Saudi Arabia committed crimes by the Sana’a attack, but it tried to acquit itself of the assault, Houthi said, adding that there was no clear sign suggesting an end to the Saudi offensive.
He also stressed that Yemenis cannot rely on the United Nations as the world body has not adopted a position regarding the Saudi attack in Sana’a.
Houthi further wished victory for the Palestinian nation and the resistance front in Lebanon and Syria as well as the Iraqi people in their anti-terror operation in the city of Mosul.
The Riyadh regime resumed its deadly airstrikes on Yemen on Sunday hours after a three-day truce in the conflict-ridden country expired.
Yemen has seen almost daily military attacks by Saudi Arabia since late March 2015, with the UN putting the toll from the aggression at more than 10,000.
The offensive was launched to crush the Houthi Ansarullah movement and its allies and reinstate the former Yemeni government. The US has been providing logistic and surveillance support to the kingdom in the bloody military campaign. Loading ... | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The conventional Washington wisdom dictates that the end of the judicial filibuster is also the end of life as it is currently known in the Senate. In truth, it may not make that much of a difference at all. In an unexpected way, it may well herald the beginning of a better era for the Senate. The Senate Republicans’ successful effort on Thursday to end the threshold to proceed with confirmation of Supreme Court nominees was really only the final step in a process set in motion by Democrats in 2013, when they removed that threshold for other nominees. That set off a far bigger firestorm, and Republicans have now simply extended that precedent. Republicans are quick to point out — and many Democrats privately agree — that had former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the White House last year and Democrats taken the Senate, a similar confrontation would have been likely in the other direction, and that Democrats might have needed to take the same step Republicans took to confirm any Supreme Court nominee Mrs. Clinton had chosen. Congress has already been dwelling in the rubble for a while. A divisive showdown over a Supreme Court nominee was certainly not helpful in advancing comity, but it has not taken on the widespread acrimony that has consumed both houses of Congress in past fights, such as over government shutdown threats or the perpetual battles over the health care law. Then there is President Trump. Yes, Republicans have labored to promote some of his priorities and look away from his myriad controversies, but they have also shown signs of holding together with Democrats toward mutual goals that are not always in concert with Mr. Trump’s. To wit: Even as members of both parties railed against one another on the Senate floor on Thursday, appropriators and party leaders in the House and Senate were working to come up with a plan to fund the government for the rest of the year that would most likely ignore Mr. Trump’s request for a large pile of cash to build a wall on the border with Mexico and cut programs that have bipartisan support. While the White House and the House have struggled to find a way forward on health care, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have held largely together in defiance of changes to the law that would have left many people in their respective states uninsured. “I don’t want to sugarcoat what just happened here,” said Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, as he walked off the floor after the vote that crushed the minority input, turning the Supreme Court, in his view, into another “hyperpartisan” branch of government. But, he said, “we have to get past this — the American people expect us to find common ground. ” “The best way to do that,” Mr. Peters said, “is in a bipartisan way. ” Senate Republicans are eager to show that they are more functional than the House, where the chairman of the Intelligence Committee on Thursday had to remove himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the election, where an effort to repeal the health care law has embarrassingly blown up and where little prescriptive policy has been seeded in recent years. When it comes to national security, foreign affairs and the issues concerning Russia that are swirling around the White House, the Senate prides itself on bipartisanship, in contrast to the House. “I’ve been trying to keep the Russia investigation bipartisan, and I am proud of both sides here,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “I do think there is the sense that we need to get back to legislating,” he added. “Neither side has clean hands. ” Members from purple states are particularly aware of the need to cook up deals. “The place of bipartisan solutions come from the Senate,” said Senator Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado. “I think people will come together. ” If an alliance could be struck in the center, the fight for the 60 votes needed to pass might well be led by centrists such as moderate Democrats up for next year in states where Mr. Trump was victorious, and Republicans like Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The two last week forced Vice President Mike Pence to come to the Hill to break a tie on a bill that threatened the funding of some Planned Parenthood operators. Ms. Collins has written a letter to the leaders of the Senate seeking a pledge that they will maintain the filibuster rule for legislation, and was gathering signatures from members of both parties on the floor even as the nuclear option was being played by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. “This event has really sobered people up,” said Ms. Collins, who declined to provide further details on the letter. “It has made them realize we cannot continue to operate in such a polarized environment. ” Several members sent out news releases Thursday promoting bipartisan bills, such as a measure that would require congressional committees to hold oversight hearings on the Government Accountability Office and another that takes aim at sexual assault on college and university campuses. A recent study by the Political Research Quarterly found that even with control in Congress, leaders are often able to form majorities on legislation. Already, some Senate Republicans and Democrats are talking privately about a way forward, at least on the insurance exchanges on health care. “It’s very preliminary,” said Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming. “But it’s happening. ” As long as the filibuster remains a viable option for the minority on legislation — and Mr. McConnell swears it will not be removed — they may be able to get a few things done. “This just further intensifies the commitment of the Senate to maintain the legislative margins that have always been a part of the Senate,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, who has held leadership positions in both houses of Congress. “I would hope we can start compartmentalizing,” and start to get things done, he said. It is also true that Mr. McConnell and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, enjoy a better relationship than the one that helped pave the way to Thursday’s showdown: that of Mr. McConnell and former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Mr. Schumer expressed hope for a different future when he said to Mr. McConnell on the Senate floor on Thursday, “Let us go no further on this path. ” | 1 |
Former Tea Party congressman and conservative radio host Joe Walsh (R-IL) recently took to Twitter to announce his plans for armed insurrection against the government when Republican loses the election in a few weeks. On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump.
On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket.
You in?
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016
This is not the first time the outspoken radical has made controversial remarks. He responded to the tragic shootings of police officers in Dallas by a lone wolf sniper by openly calling for a race war. Before that, Walsh called for the journalists at MSNBC and CNN to be beheaded for refusing to show the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that provided the justification for the terrorist attacks committed by a cell claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) against the publication’s offices in January 2015.
The denizens of Twitter quickly responded with vicious mockery of the outrageous Tea Party demagogue: Joe Walsh, charging the Capitol steps
flintlock musket in hand
barks his shin real bad
thus the revolution died
— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom shouldn’t that musket be auctioned off to pay the child support you owe?
— jacqui rodham (@heyjdey) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom I would highly encourage you to take your musket and point it at the nearest armed police officer
— evil roy slade (spoo (@EvilRoySladeDS) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom Do you often invite people to joint musket-grabbing sessions? | 0 |
BEIJING — President Trump’s combative phone call with Australia’s prime minister over a refugee agreement has set off a political storm in that country, one that threatens to weaken support for a alliance with the United States just as many Australians say they want closer ties with China. Enthusiasm for the alliance in Australia, one of America’s closest partners, which hosts American spy facilities and rotations of American Marines, had already been under pressure from China, with which Australia conducts the most trade. Reports that Mr. Trump had scolded Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday, before abruptly ending the call, are likely to further undermine confidence in the United States, Australian analysts said. “Trump is needlessly damaging the deep trust that binds one of America’s closest alliances,” said Professor Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University in Canberra. “China and those wishing to weaken the strongest alliance in the Pacific will see opportunity in this moment. ” In less than two weeks in office, Mr. Trump’s actions have strained alliances and alienated potential partners of the United States, and his phone call with Mr. Turnbull seemed to be one more example, this time with a country that has fought on America’s side since World War I. His administration’s confrontational stance on Iran has undermined liberal voices in that country his restrictions on immigration from some predominantly Muslim countries have been widely criticized by allies and his rejection of the Partnership trade deal threatens to push countries in the region, including Australia, closer to China. Like many countries in the region, Australia depends on the United States for its security but looks to China for its economic and it does not want to choose definitively between the two as they wage a global contest for power. Experts said the American and Australian militaries were sufficiently intertwined — the Royal Australian Air Force has flown in Syria, and Australian soldiers have helped train the Iraqi Army — that the countries’ security arrangements would endure. But the trust and confidence underlying the longstanding alliance will be harmed by Mr. Trump’s apparent lack of respect, and his remarks will be very costly in the public domain, they said. The phone call on Saturday became contentious after Mr. Turnbull pressed Mr. Trump to honor a deal in which the United States had agreed to take in up to 1, 250 refugees being held by Australia at offshore detention centers. Under the terms of the deal, hurriedly worked out by Mr. Turnbull and former President Barack Obama in New York last year, Australia would also accept Central American refugees staying in a Costa Rican detention facility. Australia has been harshly criticized for its offshore detention policy, and the issue is politically delicate at home. Many of the refugees it holds, on the Pacific of Nauru and on the island of Manus in Papua New Guinea, are from Iran and Iraq. Both countries are among the seven whose citizens are barred from entering the United States for at least 90 days under the executive order Mr. Trump signed on Friday. In his conversation with Mr. Turnbull the next day, Mr. Trump said the deal with Australia was going to hurt him politically, according to a senior official in the Trump administration. Late Wednesday, hours after details of the call were reported, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that the agreement was “dumb. ” He said he would need to “study” it, leaving the door open to renege or to accept fewer refugees. The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters in Washington on Thursday that Mr. Trump would allow the deal to proceed as long as the refugees were subjected to “extreme vetting. ” Mr. Spicer also said Mr. Trump remained “extremely upset” over the deal arranged by his predecessor. Mr. Turnbull, whose popularity has been sagging over domestic issues, struggled on Thursday to cast the call in a positive light, fending off demands from the opposition Labor Party that he detail exactly what Mr. Trump had said. Even after Mr. Trump made his remarks on Twitter, Mr. Turnbull insisted in a radio interview that he had “a clear commitment from the president” that the resettlement plans would proceed. “The alliance is absolutely rock solid,” Mr. Turnbull said. “It is so strong. ” The United States Embassy in Canberra had tried to help Mr. Turnbull with his predicament earlier Thursday, saying the White House had confirmed that the agreement would be honored. But after Mr. Trump wrote about the refugee deal on Twitter, the embassy referred questions about the agreement to the White House. Mr. Turnbull’s Liberal Party is the more conservative of Australia’s two major parties, and it has been a stalwart supporter of close ties with the United States. The Labor Party has leaned slightly more toward China, but as the debate over relations with Washington has intensified in recent months, former leaders of the party have become outspoken critics of the United States and have argued for shifting toward Beijing. Australian attitudes toward relations with the United States, which have historically been favorable, are now under pressure from China and its trading weight, according to polls. That is largely because the enormous Chinese demand for Australia’s resources — particularly iron ore, natural gas and coal — has bolstered Australia’s economy for more than a decade. Chinese students also contribute substantially to Australian universities and schools, so much so that many of the institutions are dependent on the fees for survival. And under a new trade agreement, Australia is exporting large quantities of wine and meat to China. After Mr. Trump, in office just a few days, scrapped the Partnership — a regional trade pact that the Obama administration had hoped would be an economic counterweight to China — Mr. Turnbull announced that he would seek to reconstitute the deal without the United States, but possibly including China, another indication of Beijing’s clout. A 2016 survey conducted by the public policy group Lowy Institute asked respondents to identify the country that was more important to Australia 43 percent chose the United States, and 43 percent China. In 2014, 48 percent had answered the United States, and only 37 percent had chosen China, said Sam Roggeveen, a senior fellow at the institute. According to the 2016 survey, 45 percent said that Australia should distance itself from the United States if Mr. Trump became president, Mr. Roggeveen said. “We can assume that number will now rise,” said Mr. Medcalf, of Australian National University. “This incident will only intensify the damage done by Trump’s abandonment of the T. P. P. which would have been a pillar of strategic partnership as well as of trade. ” The United States operates signals intelligence and radar facilities in remote corners of Australia that are becoming more important as North Korea’s nuclear threat expands, said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “Australia shares raw and finished intelligence in the closest possible collaboration you can imagine,” Mr. Jennings said. “It is extremely high tech. It is something no countries can equal, and it is part of what is known as the Five Eyes intelligence operation. It has created the highest possible level of trusted collaboration between the five countries. ” The Five Eyes countries are Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Mr. Trump visited Australia in 2011, expressing a great liking for the country and entering the fray with China. On Twitter, he called it a “beautiful country with terrific people who love America. ” Then he added that Australia should “screw” China by raising its commodity prices. James Goldrick, a former rear admiral in the Australian Navy who served in Afghanistan, said that if Mr. Trump’s current abrasive attitude continued, it would probably make Australia a less publicly cooperative partner of the United States. “If the Trump administration pursues a less consultative approach, Australia will need to become more public in expressing its opinion on American initiatives that it does not wholly support,” Mr. Goldrick said. China’s role in Asia and North Korea’s nuclear efforts are far more important to the United alliance than any one telephone call, said Peter Hayes, an Australian who is the director of the Nautilus Institute, a research institute on security issues. But Mr. Trump’s “ability to create chaos” has placed those important strategic questions under a “dark cloud,” he said. “The United States has invested five decades in creating that system of alliances, and it is evident Trump is pretty ignorant of it and doesn’t care about it, to the extent he knows about it,” Mr. Hayes said. | 1 |
2013: 7,157 [4]
Virtually no one in the Zionist media is asking for the perpetrators to be trialed and punished accordingly. But there is more.
Scholar Rebecca Gordon, who has corresponded with this writer last summer, has recounted in her meticulously documented study Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States : “When I had occasion in Jordan in 2006 to meet an Iraqi sheik who had been tortured by U.S. forces, his first question to our little group was whether all American women were ‘promiscuous sluts,’ like the ones who had tormented him by forcing him to look at their naked breasts during his detention…The psychological trauma of sexual humiliation had damaged this man sufficiently so that polite conversation with American women, even those who were likely to be sympathetic, was beyond him.” [5]
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Gordon discusses one case after another and describes what happened when politicians deliberately abandoned the moral order and pursued perpetual wars in the Middle East at any cost. “Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped” was just a fair game. [6] “Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture” was also quite common. [7] Detainees were also sodomized with chemical lights and broom sticks. [8]
Gordon writes on the very first page: “For many years, the United States had secretly funded research on torture at U.S. and Canadian universities. One product of this research was the Central Intelligence Agency’s KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual with its sections covering ‘non-coercive’ and ‘coercive’ techniques, first printed in 1963…. “The United States had also provided covert training and support to torture regimes in other countries around the world—from Greece to Uruguay, Chile to El Salvador, Indonesia to Vietnam. The Phoenix Program, implemented during the Vietnam War by U.S. armed forces and the CIA, involved the torture and deaths of tens of thousands of Vietnamese, as part of the U.S. counterinsurgency project designed to break the will of the Viet Cong. In the testimony before Congress, military intelligence officer K. Milton Osborne provided some details of the methods used: “‘The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the 6-inch canal of one of my detainees’ ears and the tapping through the brain until he dies. The starving to death of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages. They simply starved her to death in one of the hooches at that very counterintelligence headquarters. “‘There were other methods of operation which they used for interrogation, such as the use of electronic gear such as sealed telephone attached to the genitals of both the men and women’s vagina and the man’s testicles, and wind the mechanism and create an electrical charge and shock them into submission.’” [9]
Between 1968 and 1971, the Phoenix Program was responsible for torturing and killing more than twenty thousand people, [10] many of whom had nothing to do with terrorism. These were not isolated cases. The CIA conducted these essentially diabolical operations “on several continents.” [11]
If history is not enough, what about the recent charge by Amnesty International that the US-led coalition in Syria has killed at least 300 civilians? [12] And what about Saudi Arabia (a US ally) “deliberately targeting impoverished Yemen’s farms and agricultural industry”? [13] Stephen Kinzer, a visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, has recently written: “Anyone who believes the United States is not fighting enough wars in the Middle East can be happy this week. We have just plunged into another one. Twice in recent days, cruise missiles fired from an American destroyer have rained down on Yemen. The Pentagon, a practiced master of Orwellian language, calls this bombing ‘limited self-defense.’ “Since 2002, our drone attacks have reportedly killed more than 500 Yemenis, including at least 65 civilians. We are also supplying weapons and intelligence to Saudi Arabia, which has killed thousands of Yemenis in bombing raids over the last year and a half — including last week’s attack on a funeral in which more than 100 mourners were killed.” [14]
So the logic is pretty simple: the New World Order ideology does not and cannot make sense at all. And if we have to fight ISIS, then we have to support the Assad government; if we have to support the Assad government, then the whole idea that Assad is a “brutal ruler” loses its political force; if that idea goes down the tube, then the New World Order propaganda against Assad is categorically false. In short, we can ignore flaming Neocon Charles Krauthammer when he said last November that Assad is a “dictator and a destroyer.” [15] This brings us to another vitally important issue: New World Order agents spent millions upon millions of tax dollars supporting ISIS or al-Nusra in Syria for absolutely nothing. Barnes-Dacey and Levy concluded their article by saying, “Western leaders have defined ISIS as a threat to their national security. That should now translate into a more nuanced Syria policy, including working with Iran and encouraging the nascent Saudi-Iranian opening.” [16]
I simply could not hold my laughter. For decades, New World Order agents in America and Israel have hammered the spurious idea that Iran is a terrorist state and that it wants to “wipe Israel off the map”; [17] they also spent millions upon millions of dollars trying to destabilize the country both politically and ideologically.
Remember how Obama “secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran ’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyber-weapons”? [18]
Remember how New World Order agents in America and Israel developed Stuxnet specifically to attack Iran, a country that has zero nuclear weapons? [19] The New York Times itself acknowledged then that the cyberattack was “aided by Israel.” [20]
In the same vein, the Washington Post reported that Stuxnet was the “work of U.S. and Israeli experts.” [21] And it was developed way back in 2007 .
Remember how Bush also made false accusations against Iran and even trained the terrorist group the MEK right here in America? [22] Remember how he worked with Israel to perform a covert operation in Iran? “Mr. Kissinger, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you.”
So, all the tax dollars that were spent on destabilizing Iran for more than a decade was a waste. At the same time, decent American military hospitals continued to lack funding:
“many of the hospitals are so small and the trickle of patients so thin that it compromises the ability of doctors and nurses to capably diagnose and treat serious illnesses, much less take on surgeries …
“Two-thirds of the hospitals last year served 30 or fewer inpatients a day — less than a third as many as the typical civilian hospital. Nine served 10 or fewer — so few that Dr. Lucian L. Leape, a leading patient-safety expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, said, ‘I think they should be outlawed.’” [23]
Obviously New World Order agents don’t care either about military hospitals and even soldiers. In fact, they don’t care about anyone at all. They just care about spreading their essentially diabolical system. Soldiers are just pawns. As Henry Kissinger diabolically declared, military men are “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” [24]
Once those “dumb, stupid animals” can no longer be of service to NWO agents, then they just dump them. They have already dumped at least 360,000 thousand veterans, who “may have brain injuries.” [25]
[1] Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy, “To Beat ISIS, Focus on Syria,” NY Times , September 1, 2014.
[2] In 2011, the Pentagon declared that the so-called “war on terror” could cost at least $5 trillion. “The $5 Trillion War on Terror,” Time , June 29, 2011.
[3] For a recent study on similar issues, see Rebecca Gordon, Mainstream Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[4] Dan Murphy, “Iraq Violence More Than Doubles in 2013: Is Country Headed Off the Cliff?,” Christian Science Monitor , December 20, 2013.
[5] Rebecca Gordon, Mainstream Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 53. | 1 |
Of the 860, 000 Nebraskans who cast ballots in last fall’s election, only two are suspected of casting fraudulent votes. But while the actual number of illegal voters may be minuscule, State Senator John Murante says, there is an even better reason for Nebraska’s Legislature to crack down on fraud at the ballot box. “First and foremost, we know the confidence that Americans and Nebraskans have in the election system is at an low,” said Mr. Murante, a Republican who is backing a constitutional amendment that would require all voters to display photo IDs. “The perception exists that voter fraud is a serious issue, and that perception itself has to be addressed. ” Nationwide, Republican state legislators are again sponsoring a sheaf of bills tightening requirements to register and to vote. And while they have traditionally argued that such laws are needed to police rampant voter fraud — a claim most experts call unfounded — some are now saying the perception of fraud, real or otherwise, is an equally serious problem, if not worse. Given Republicans’ history of raising undocumented claims of fraud, Democrats and voting rights advocates say that citing perceptions of tainted ballots as a reason for voting restrictions is disingenuous at best. “It seems strange that someone who created the problem of perception then says we have to solve the problem, when there is no problem,” said Lloyd Leonard, the advocacy director for the League of Women Voters, which has sued to block a number of restrictive voting laws. In states across the country, Republicans are echoing the Nebraska argument for measures. “It is true that there isn’t widespread voter fraud,” said State Representative Ken Rizer, who steered a bill requiring voters to display IDs through the Iowa House of Representatives this month. “But there is a perception that the system can be cheated. That’s one of the reasons for doing this. ” In Arkansas, State Representative Mark Lowery said his voter ID bill aimed to prevent fraud. But even more important, he added, is that “a large percentage of Americans do not trust the integrity of the electoral system, and that in and of itself is a problem that needs to be solved, because that undermines the basic tenet of democracy. ” There is history to this, said Allegra Chapman, the director of voting and elections at the advocacy group Common Cause. The first Supreme Court ruling to support voter ID laws, in an Indiana case called Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, acknowledged in 2008 that there was zero evidence of voter fraud in the state. But as long as the law inconvenienced everyone equally, it could be legal — even if it deterred “significant numbers” of voters from voting — if it had a “sufficiently weighty” justification. Trust in elections met that standard, the court added, because confidence could be low “if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud. ” As evidence of the laws’ impact on minorities has snowballed, the Crawford decision has come under growing criticism. Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit — a highly regarded conservative — wrote the 2007 decision on Crawford that the Supreme Court upheld. But by 2014 he had recanted, issuing a blistering dissent in a Wisconsin voter ID case that called ID laws a “fig leaf” for disenfranchising citizens, and specifically rejecting the claim that bolstering voters’ confidence justified them. Ms. Chapman said she suspected that the perception argument was a political talking point devised in the wake of several federal court rulings last year that the laws discriminated against minorities. “They’re being clever,” she said. “They’re trying to find some legitimate grounds for which to have these laws pass muster. ” After the Supreme Court handed victory in the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, furious Democrats called the vote deeply flawed. Since then, dubious charges of fraud have become a staple of Republican crusades for laws tightening the rules for registering and casting votes. Those charges reached a new peak when President Trump railed against “rigged” elections while a candidate and claimed without any evidence that he would have won the popular vote but for millions of illegal votes cast against him. Faith in the electoral process has markedly declined since 2000, surveys show. One poll, released in October, concluded that barely four in 10 Americans had great confidence in an accurate vote count. Voter fraud does happen, of course, sometimes in striking fashion. A former chairman of Colorado’s Republican Party, a radio host who stated on the air in October that “virtually every case of voter fraud I can remember in my lifetime was committed by Democrats,” was charged this month with voter fraud. The former chairman, Steve Curtis, was accused of filling out a ballot addressed to his who lives in South Carolina. But voting rights advocates say that widespread fraud is a myth, and that most restrictions are created to keep minorities and young adults away from the polls. Judges lately have agreed last year, federal courts ruled that voter ID laws in Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and North Dakota discriminated against minorities. Many academic studies conclude that laws depress turnout. But the conclusion is not unanimous this month, researchers at Stanford, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania took issue with one such study concluding that voter ID laws depress Democratic voter turnout far more than Republican turnout. The researchers evaluated the same data used in the study and found “no apparent relationship” between the laws and turnout. In the wake of Republican claims, bills have been filed in at least 27 state legislatures to stiffen rules or document requirements for registering and voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. At least 16 have proposed new or revised voter ID laws many more are tightening requirements to register. Iowa’s voter ID bill, which appears headed for passage in the State Senate, is typical of many, requiring voters to display a driver’s license or ’s license, a military or veteran identification card or a passport. Voters lacking those documents would be able to vote after signing an oath attesting to their identity. “We are not without fraud,” said Mr. Rizer, who noted that 41 disenfranchised felons cast ballots in November (all but five were discovered before being counted). Critics, including the state’s local election officials, say undetected fraud at the polls is so minuscule that it does not merit voters who already proved their identity when they registered. Among other states, New Hampshire is close to approving legislation to stiffen residency requirements for new voters, including a written warning that law enforcement officers may visit voters’ homes to verify residency. Mr. Trump was able to provide no documentation for a widely derided claim that Massachusetts residents were bused into New Hampshire to cast illegal ballots that contributed to his defeat there. “Nobody’s saying there’s evidence of widespread fraud,” said Regina Birdsell, a Republican state senator and the bill’s sponsor. “But our voter laws are so broad you could drive a Mack truck through them. ” She added, “There is a perception, as far as I am concerned, that the laws need to be tightened up. ” The Arkansas legislature has already voted to place a constitutional amendment on the state’s 2018 ballot that would require voters to display IDs. Mr. Lowery’s bill takes a different tack it would put in place the ID requirement more quickly and without a ballot initiative. Unlike many such bills, his takes an expansive view of acceptable identification — from IDs to employee badges to student identification cards. Voters without IDs can cast ballots if they swear they are who they say they are. “We’re trying to give them every chance,” he said, “but we want them to vouch for their identity. ” | 1 |
In recent years, one of the most important events on a prospective Republican presidential candidate’s calendar was the RedState Gathering, a summer convention for conservative activists from across the nation. Its host was Erick Erickson, a redheaded former election lawyer and city councilman in Macon, Ga. who began blogging in 2004 on a site called RedState. com. Erickson, who is now 41, is a conservative absolutist who made his name in the by “blowing up” — in the Twitter parlance he jovially employs — Republican leaders he viewed as insufficiently principled. In 2005, he played a role in torpedoing the Supreme Court nomination of the White House counsel Harriet Miers, publishing damaging admissions from White House sources that Miers had not been properly vetted. Five years later, he chided the National Rifle Association for being too willing to compromise, labeling it “a weak little girl of an organization. ” He was a critic of John McCain and Mitt Romney during their presidential runs, characterizing the former as “an angry old jackass” and the latter as “the Harriet Miers of 2012. ” Along the way, Erickson became one of the new kingmakers of the Tea G. O. P. A Florida legislator and Senate hopeful named Marco Rubio reached out to him in 2009 when he was at 3 percent in the polls. A former Texas solicitor general, Ted Cruz, did the same in 2011. Rick Perry announced his 2012 presidential candidacy at Erickson’s gathering. By 2015, a number of the coming cycle’s aspirants — Rubio, Cruz, Perry and Bobby Jindal — had given him their personal cellphone numbers, and he had traded emails with Jeb Bush. And two months before that August’s convention in Atlanta, a New Republican consultant named Sam Nunberg reached out to Erickson to ask if he could accommodate one more speaker: Donald Trump. Erickson watched coverage of Trump’s announcement at Trump Tower on June 16 and was not particularly impressed. On the syndicated radio show he broadcasts from Atlanta, he offered his assessment with a dismissive chuckle: “I guess he’s ready to be spoiler, not president. ” He had met Trump once before, in July 2011, when he visited the 26th floor of Trump Tower to interview the businessman and star. Trump had spent the past few months flirting with a presidential run only to decide, as he told Erickson that day, “I have a great show that’s a big success, and it’s hard to say, ‘I’m gonna leave two hours of television in order to get beat up by people that don’t know what they’re doing. ’’u2009” The hourlong conversation struck Erickson as pleasant but unmemorable. What did stick with him was their exchange as he was leaving Trump Tower. “Trump asked me if I played golf,” Erickson told me recently. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m terrible. ’’u2009” Then, he said, Trump asked if he would be interested in coming to Trump’s in West Palm Beach, Fla. to play. “I’m very flattered — I’ve never been to West Palm Beach before,” Erickson recalled. “Several times, his office reached out. So finally I asked my wife, ‘What do you think this is about?’ She said, ‘He wants to own your soul.’ So I never went. ” Erickson did not see much of a political future for Trump, but he imagined that he might be good for ticket sales, if nothing else, at the RedState Gathering. He informed Nunberg that Trump could have a slot on the convention’s second day. The evening before he was to speak in Atlanta, Trump went on CNN and denounced the Fox News host Megyn Kelly for her sharp questioning of him during a recent debate, speculating that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever. ” When Erickson saw the footage that evening, he called Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and rescinded Trump’s invitation on the grounds that he would be too much of a distraction. “And that was that,” Erickson would later recall with a sheepish grin. “Until the next day, when he’s blowing me up. ” On Twitter, Trump called Erickson “a major sleaze and buffoon” and said that the “small crowds” at the gathering were due to his absence. Trump’s supporters soon piled on. This was to be expected, but what surprised Erickson were the attacks from people he regarded as his fellow in the conservative revolution. On Twitter, the host and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham mocked “JebState. ” The author and provocateur Ann Coulter brought up some of Erickson’s own crass utterances, like his characterization of the former Supreme Court justice David Souter in 2009 as a “ [expletive] child molester. ” The next week, 30, 000 readers of Erickson’s email newsletter canceled their subscriptions. Erickson dug in, writing that Trump was “out of his depth” and lacking in “common decency. ” But he was drowned out by Trump sympathizers with even bigger audiences than his own, like The Drudge Report and the online outlet Breitbart. It was one of the first salvos in what would open up in the year that followed into a civil war within the conservative media, dividing some of the loudest voices on the right. Days earlier, Erickson had unimpeachable credentials in the conservative movement. But by crossing Trump, he was now, in the eyes of his former allies, “a tool of the establishment. ” The conservative media has always been a playground for outsize personalities with even more outsize political ambitions. The National Review founder William F. Buckley fashioned much of the intellectual genetic code of the Reagan Revolution, while also writing fringe groups like the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement and, for good measure, running for mayor of New York against the liberal Republican John Lindsay. In 1996, the former Nixon media consultant Roger Ailes brought his ethos to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel and built the network into a transformational power in Republican politics before his fall this year amid accusations of sexual harassment. But alongside the like Buckley and Ailes, the landscape has also produced a class of rowdy entrepreneurs who wield their influence in more personal, protean ways. The godfathers mostly came to power in the 1990s: antagonists like Rush Limbaugh, who began broadcasting nationally in 1988 and became talk radio’s hegemonic power in the Clinton years, and Matt Drudge, who started his pioneering Drudge Report online in 1996. If these figures defied the stuffy ceremony of the East Coast think tanks, opinion journals and columnists who traditionally defined the conservative intelligentsia, they rarely challenged the ideological principles of conservatism as they had existed since the Reagan era: small government, low taxes, hawkish foreign policy and traditional social values. What they mostly did was provide the Republican Party with a set of exceptionally loud megaphones, which liberals have often envied and tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Conservative talk radio and Fox News now collectively reach an audience of as many as 50 million — most of them elderly white Republicans with a high likelihood of turning out in election years. And this isn’t even counting the online outlets that have flourished during the Obama years, thanks to a growing economy and a presidency, particularly in the case of the Affordable Care Act, that gave conservatives common cause. Then came Trump. In a sense, the divide that he has opened up among conservative media figures is simply a function of the heartburn his ascent has caused among Republicans more generally, pitting voter against voter, congressman against congressman, Bob Dole against the Bushes. Some conservative media outlets threw themselves behind Trump from the beginning, explaining away his more radioactive statements and his record as a conservative. Breitbart, whose former chairman, Steve Bannon, is now Trump’s chief strategist, was an ardent early supporter, breathlessly covering Trump’s ascent in the polls and his smackdowns of “low energy” Jeb Bush and “little Marco” Rubio. But as Trump expanded into more sacrosanct targets — Fox News’s Kelly, George W. Bush’s performance in the war on terror and Cruz — the dissenting chorus among conservatism’s dons grew louder. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer warned in December that Trump “has managed to steer the entire G. O. P. campaign into absurdities. ” His Post colleague George Will predicted that a Trump nomination would mean the loss of conservatism “as a constant presence in U. S. politics. ” The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol floated the idea of a new “ party. ” And on the eve of the Iowa caucus, National Review devoted an entire issue to a single topic: “Against Trump. ” Since Trump clinched the nomination, the dividing lines have become starker, the individual dilemmas more agonizing. Mark Levin, an influential host, complains that among conservative commentators, Trump’s message is endlessly repeated by what he derisively refers to as “the Rockettes. ” But Levin, too, recently announced to his listeners that he intends to vote for Trump, if only to prevent another Clinton presidency. As he put it to me, “I’m not going to be throwing confetti in the air if Trump wins,” adding that he viewed the candidate as “a liberal with some conservative viewpoints that he’s not terribly reliable at sticking to. ” Others — Sean Hannity, Ingraham, the former Reagan official and “The Book of Virtues” author William Bennett — have thrown in for Trump with a brio that strikes some in the business as unseemly. “Look, we’re in the opinion business, but there’s a distinction between that and being a Sean Hannity fanboy,” the host Charlie Sykes told me. “It’s been genuinely stunning to watch how they’ve become tools of his campaign and rationalizing everything he’s done. ” “For 20 years I’ve been saying how it’s not true that talk radio is all about ratings and we don’t believe what we say,” he went on. “Then you watch how the media types rolled over for him. Obviously Donald Trump is very good for ratings, and at some point it’s hard not to conclude they decided the Trump train was the gravy train. I’ve been thoroughly disillusioned, and I’m not alone in that. It’s like watching ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’: Oh, my God, they got another one!” When Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, the part of his announcement speech that most clearly foreshadowed the campaign to come had to do with immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. ” The line struck Sykes as awfully familiar when he heard it. A month before, he had run a segment with Ann Coulter, who had just published her 11th book, an screed titled “¡Adios, America!” Sykes was well aware of Coulter’s views, but he was taken aback when she began a riff on Mexican rapists surging into the United States (a subject that takes up an entire chapter of “¡Adios, America! ”). “I remember looking at my producer and going, ‘Wow, this is rather extraordinary,’’u2009” he told me. “When Trump used that line, I instantly recognized it as Ann Coulter’s. ” In fact, Corey Lewandowski had reached out to Coulter for advice in the to Trump’s announcement speech. The address Trump delivered on June 16 bore no resemblance to his prepared text, which contained a mere two sentences about immigration. Instead, he what Coulter today calls “the Mexican rapist speech that won my heart. ” When Trump’s remarks provoked fury, Lewandowski called Coulter for backup. Three days later, she went on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” and, amid shrieks of laughter from the audience, predicted that Trump was the Republican candidate most likely to win the presidency. One evening this past March, Trump received Coulter at his in Palm Beach. Though in recent years the two had developed a rapport on Twitter, she had met him face to face only once before he declared his candidacy, a lunch date at Trump Tower in 2011. Over lunch, Trump gave Coulter the impression that he had read her books. He also gave her a few items from his wife’s line of costume jewelry and told Coulter, who keeps a house in Palm Beach, that she was welcome to use the pool at anytime. The golf resort was the chief staging ground for Trump’s charm offensives against the conservative media. Many of its members have visited at Trump’s invitation in recent years, joining the resident Gatsby for steak and lobster on the patio, where Trump squints and appears to listen intently while his guests dispense political wisdom — though it is never clear whether he is actually interested in it, simply flattering his guests or sizing them up. When I dined with him on the patio this spring, Trump asked me eagerly about how I liked his odds in the election. Later, on the campaign trail, I watched him solicit the same counsel from random stragglers on the rope line. Coulter, at any rate, appeared immune to the whole routine. A week earlier, Trump bragged during a Republican presidential debate in Detroit that “there’s no problem” with the size of his penis. On the patio, Coulter told the candidate that no one wanted to hear about his endowment. She told Lewandowski that he should buy a dozen teleprompters and put them in every room of Trump’s house until he learned how to use them. Reminding Trump that she had been his earliest and most dedicated advocate, she told him: “I’m the only one losing money trying to put you in the White House. You’re going to listen to me. ” This appeal to the bottom line seemed to tweak Trump’s conscience. He gave Coulter an open invitation to waiving the $100, 000 membership fee. The following evening at the next Republican debate, he exhibited considerably more restraint, for which Coulter, with characteristic modesty, claims credit. “Coulter delivers!” she told me. Some of Trump’s supporters within the conservative media are attracted to his actual positions on issues. One is his trade policy, on which many media personalities on the right are considerably more populist and protectionist than Republican Party leaders and Chamber of Commerce boosters. Throughout Obama’s presidency, Laura Ingraham has warned of China’s predations: “The trade war is on, and we’re losing it,” she has often said. For others, Trump’s assurance that he will appoint Antonin conservatives to the Supreme Court is reason enough for their support. But Trump also simply fulfills the ineffable urge many have to, as Michael Needham, the chief executive of the conservative policy group Heritage Action for America, puts it, “punch Washington in the face. ” This is true for Coulter, who, in her newly published paean to the candidate, “In Trump We Trust,” writes that Trump is fit for the presidency not in spite of his crudeness but because of it: “Only someone who brags about his airline’s seatbelt buckles being made of solid gold would have the balls to do what Trump is doing. ” But what really sold Coulter on Trump, she told me, was his hard line on immigration. Coulter told me that she had never given the issue much thought during her childhood in New Canaan, Conn. and her student days at Cornell. Then in 1992, the journalist Peter Brimelow wrote a essay for National Review titled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” which would later become a sort of for today’s the ascendant movement that has found its champion in Trump. Brimelow cast the current wave of American immigrants in dismal terms: less skilled, less European, less assimilated, less and less Republican than the previous newcomers. Coulter, who was 31 and a law clerk at the time, remembers reading it and thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been completely lied to!” years later, Coulter helped formulate Trump’s position, which she hailed on Twitter as “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta. ” (Her additional tweet on the subject — “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper” — prompted Mark Levin to tweet back, “These have to be among the most pathetic comments of anyone in a long time. ”) Coulter has not always gotten her way with the candidate. At that evening in March, she lobbied unsuccessfully for him to pick as his running mate Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, who is credited with selling Mitt Romney on “ . ” And her book tour for “In Trump We Trust” hit a momentary snag when Trump told Sean Hannity that he would be open to “softening” his immigration stance, though Coulter chose to believe that, as she told me, “it was Hannity badgering him. ” Still, she has become the Trump campaign’s most unrepentant brawler. When Khzir Khan, the father of a U. S. Army captain who was killed in combat in Iraq, spoke critically of Trump at the Democratic National Convention, Coulter wrote on Twitter: “You know what this convention really needed: An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria[sic]. ” That tweet provoked disgust from fellow conservatives, among them Erick Erickson, who tweeted: “What a terrible thing to say about a man whose son died for this country. ” When I reminded Coulter of Erickson’s scolding, she let out a hearty laugh. “I always hated him,” she said. “This is one of the fantastic things. In any political movement, there are many people you think are losers and dorks, but your friends talk you into liking them, because they’re on our side. Now all of those people are out. ” Sighing, she said, “Trump has made my life better in so many ways. ” You will not find copies of “¡Adios, America!” or “In Trump We Trust” on any of the many bookshelves in the home of the Washington Post columnist George Will. A week after Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race in early May, Will and his wife, Mari, a Republican political consultant, gave a catered dinner party for Cruz and his wife, Heidi. The other guests were conservative donors, activists and journalists, along with their spouses. The Wills have been hosting these encounters with political celebrities at their Maryland home for decades. In early 2009, Will’s fellow conservative columnists gathered there to meet Obama a week before his inauguration. Among the guests that evening in May was Laura Ingraham. Ingraham is of proudly heritage — her mother was a waitress for almost 30 years and her father owned and operated a carwash — and does not share Will’s reverence for decorum. She was an early defender of Trump’s willingness to say things “no one else is saying. ” While interviewing Cruz on her radio show six weeks before the Wills’ party, she interrupted him to mock his Harvard Law degree. Still, Cruz knew that his political future relied on conservative like Ingraham, and it was at his request that the Wills included her in the party. Over cocktails, the Cruzes spoke fondly of their experiences on the campaign trail, and the other guests listened politely, mindful of Cruz’s recent humiliating defeat. Then midway through dinner, at a table set with glasses once used by Abraham Lincoln, Ingraham insisted that Cruz needed to throw his weight behind the man who had branded him “Lyin’ Ted. ” “If you don’t endorse him, where does that leave you?” she said. “You don’t have the public and you don’t have the establishment. How can you be a leader of the conservative movement?” Cruz amiably replied that such a decision did not have to be made right away. Others at the table joined in to defend him, but Ingraham would hear nothing of it. “You can’t want Hillary Clinton elected,” she goaded him. Will sat fuming silently. “She was quite animated,” he would later recall. Cruz refused to offer his support to Trump that night or in the weeks to follow. Speaking at the Republican convention on July 20 moments before Cruz was to do the same, Ingraham taunted him: “We should all, even all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos — and we love you, we love you — but you must honor the pledge to support Donald Trump now, tonight!” The following morning on her radio show, Ingraham declared that Cruz’s refusal to endorse had “effectively ended his political career. ” Will was no more persuaded by Ingraham than Cruz was. The first and only time Will met Trump was in March 1995, when, at Trump’s invitation, he gave a speech at . Years later on Twitter, Trump would ascribe Will’s harsh view of him to Will’s having “totally bombed” with his performance that night. Will told me: “He started telling this story: ‘The reason Will doesn’t like me is I invited him to give a speech at and I knew it was going to be boring, so I waited out on the patio.’ Which raises two questions. First, if he knew it was going to be that boring, why did he invite me? And second, who would be the guy with the orange hair sitting in the front row?” Will said on ABC’s “This Week” in 2012 that Trump was “a bloviating ignoramus” and he has spent much of the past year predicting the candidate’s imminent political demise. “I thought even an entertaining bore could be a bore after a while,” he told me. By late December of last year, however, his contempt had given way to alarm. “Conservatives’ highest priority,” he wrote in a Post column, “must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination” — even if it meant Hillary Clinton’s election. Then on June 2, three weeks after his dinner party for Cruz, Will learned that his friend and fellow Republican Paul Ryan, the House speaker, had endorsed the nominee. Will considered the matter over martinis at home that evening. The next morning, he walked into his office and told his assistant: “Go change my registration. This is not my party anymore. ” Recently I visited Will at his office, a Georgetown brick rowhouse erected in 1811. Its walls are covered with framed photographs, several of them depicting the writer in his youth alongside Reagan and other titans of his former party. The dean of conservative pundits, now 75, wore a crisp pinstripe shirt and gray slacks, his customary owlish Mona Lisa expression a bit tighter than usual, owing to the subject matter. Will told me that he cast his first vote in 1964, for Barry Goldwater. He voted for the Republican candidate in every succeeding presidential election, until now. “I don’t use the word ‘frightening’ often,” he told me. “But it’s frightening to know this person” — Trump — “would have the codes. The world is getting really dangerous. His friend Mr. Putin is dismantling a nation in the center of Europe. Some captain of a Chinese boat with missiles might make a mistake in the next three years near the Spratly Islands. All kinds of things can go wrong. And the idea that this guy will be asked to respond in a sober, firm way? My goodness. ” He seemed genuinely despondent. “Given that, could you see yourself urging your readers to vote for Hillary Clinton?” I asked. Will’s lips pursed slightly. “Well,” he said, “it’s clear from everything I’ve written that I think she’d be a better president. That said, I’m not going to vote for her. First of all, I’m a Maryland voter. She couldn’t lose Maryland if she tried. ” “Then. . .. ” “I haven’t decided,” he said. “You can imagine — I get tons of emails: ‘I, too, have left the Republican Party. What should I do?’ Well, there are a number of legitimate options. Not voting is a legitimate expression of opinion. ” Ingraham and other conservative media personalities hailed Trump for having “tapped into” a shared and seething disquiet among predominantly white, voters. “What I don’t understand on the part of those being tapped into,” Will told me, “is: What exactly do they want? I can think of nothing the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly that they didn’t get. Took a while, but they got it. ” With a resigned he looked at the ground and intoned, in the manner of a monologue: “It’s gonna be yuge. And it’s all gonna get fixed. And we’re all gonna be winners. ” “If he doesn’t build that wall, I’m pissed,” Sean Hannity told me, reflecting on the prospects of a Trump presidency in the office of his radio show in Midtown Manhattan. “If he doesn’t repeal Obamacare, I’m gonna be pissed. If he appoints a liberal jurist to the Supreme Court, I’m gonna lose my mind. And by the way: I’ll be screaming. Not talking — screaming about it. But in fairness, if Trump doesn’t keep his promises, you can also blame me, because I believed him. ” Although Coulter was Trump’s earliest cheerleader among prominent personalities, Hannity’s stake in the election perhaps runs deepest of all, if only because of the size of his audience. He hosts the show (after Limbaugh) on talk radio and the program (after Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly) on cable news. More than 2. 4 million weekly viewers and 13 million listeners have witnessed Hannity sticking his neck out on behalf of a politician and sometime Republican who has voiced support for Planned Parenthood while vowing to limit America’s military footprint and shred trade deals that the G. O. P. has backed for decades. Hannity’s critics on the right have accused him of essentially running hourlong daily Trump infomercials. When I asked him about this, Hannity responded with a litany of sins perpetrated by the Republican establishment in concert with Obama: perilously low labor participation and homeownership rates, soaring national debt, Obamacare and so on. A Clinton presidency, he warned, would be “Obama on steroids. ” These were his motivations. “My conscience is clear. And I feel like Donald Trump would be a great president. ” Hannity told me that he had in fact never stayed at a Trump hotel property, played on a Trump golf course or visited . “I have my own place — on the other Florida coast, in Naples,” he said. “I don’t need his place. I always got the sense people were asking him for something. I don’t believe in asking for free stuff. ” Nonetheless, the two men have a mutual affinity that has spanned at least two decades. The MSNBC “Morning Joe” host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough theorized to me that their relationship has a psychological underpinning: “Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly all share the same resentment that they will never be accepted into Manhattan’s polite society no matter what they do. ” (Trump is from Queens Hannity and O’Reilly are from Long Island.) Trump, in a recent phone conversation, offered me a somewhat simpler explanation: “Sean likes having me on his show, and that has to do with ratings more than anything else. ” No presidential candidate in history, Hannity told me, understands television better than Trump — “not even close. ” On this score, I couldn’t disagree. One evening this past spring, on his plane after a campaign event in Buffalo, Trump told me that at rallies, he always made a point of finding the TV cameras at the back of the media pen and noticing whether a red light was flickering. “That means they’re airing it live,” he explained. “So I make sure to say something new” — by which he meant newsworthy, the better to own the next news cycle. Trump was a TV star for more than a decade before he became a politician he watches TV news incessantly and understands the medium intimately. He knows the optimal time slots on the morning shows. He the lighting. He is not only on speaking terms with every network chief executive but also knows their booking agents. He monitors the opinions of hosts and regular guests more avidly than most media critics do and works them obsessively, often directly. Scarborough told me that Trump’s family — particularly Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner — sometimes asked him for advice, and more than once “called me and asked me to get him off the ledge. I’ve said, ‘I can do that, but six hours later he’s going to revert to form.’ I told Jared at one point: ‘Jared, your listens to me more when I’m attacking him on television than when I’m trying to convince him to be rational for the sake of the party.’ I think he’s a creature of TV. ” TV networks, in the mainstream as well as conservative media, have profited handsomely from Trump’s theatrics, but some of their personalities like Hannity are drawn to him for reasons apart from ratings. The prospect of getting in on the ground floor of a Trump administration that is short on policy ideas and disdainful of old Washington hands amounts to a opportunity. By employing the Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon, and by including both Ingraham and Roger Ailes in his debate preparations, Trump has implicitly encouraged the conservative media to consider itself part of the campaign team. I asked Hannity if it was true that, as a Trump confidant had told me, he wished to be considered as a potential Trump White House chief of staff. “That’s news to me,” he insisted, adding a politician’s practiced nondenial denial: “I have radio and TV contracts that I will honor through December 2020. ” Nonetheless, Hannity’s service to the Trump campaign well exceeds that of ritually bashing Clinton and giving Trump free airtime. He has offered private strategic advice to the campaign. The same Trump confidant told me of at least one instance in which Hannity drafted an unsolicited memo outlining the message Trump should offer after the Orlando nightclub shooting in June. In public, Hannity has made it his mission to warn fellow conservatives — naming names, like the columnist Jonah Goldberg and the National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry — that if they do not soon climb aboard the Trump train they will, as the hashtag threatens, #OwnIt: Clinton’s picks for the Supreme Court, her response to the Islamic State, her trade deals, all of it. Hannity maintains that his scolding of Trump’s conservative dissenters derives from his fear of a Clinton presidency. “It’d be pretty much over,” he said. Taken alone, George Will or even National Review might have little impact on Trump’s standing in the race, Hannity argued, but “cumulatively they do. I can look at the poll numbers. If you go back to a month ago, he was garnering 73 percent of the Republican vote. The most recent, I think he had 88 percent. He needs to get to 93. ” And the key to the last 5 percent might very well lie with the noisy holdouts, like Erick Erickson. On Sept. 16, Erickson showed up at the National Press Club in Washington to participate in a debate sponsored by the National Religious Broadcasters. Erickson left RedState at the end of last year to concentrate on his radio show and his online opinion journal, The Resurgent, but he has remained influential among conservatives who do not support Trump. In July, when he learned that Ted Cruz was about to have a private meeting with the nominee on the eve of the convention, Erickson texted the senator: “Don’t endorse! Don’t endorse!” Later that evening, Erickson says, Cruz texted back: “Didn’t endorse! Didn’t endorse!” (Cruz finally announced that he would vote for Trump on Sept. 23.) The subject of the debate, inevitably, was Trump: specifically, whether evangelical Christians should support him. Being a lifelong evangelical himself, Erickson had some thoughts on the matter. Over the years, he had been condemned for his own offensive words, like the time he called the Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis “Abortion Barbie. ” But he had recently apologized for many (though not all) of these statements and had called upon Trump to affect a similar posture of Christian humility. “1 Corinthians is very explicit,” he told me. “If someone holds one’s self out to be a Christian and doesn’t behave that way, Christians are supposed to judge him. This is a guy who’s bragged about his affairs. ” This was Erickson’s principal argument during the debate. Trump was not merely a sinner, he said, but a gleefully unrepentant one. Erickson’s debate opponent, the Christian host and fervent Trump supporter Janet Parshall, responded by reciting a litany of sinners in chief — from Thomas Jefferson with the child he fathered with a slave, to Warren G. Harding with his multiple liaisons, to Richard Nixon with his foul language memorialized on the White House tapes. “We are not electing a messiah,” Parshall said. “Last time I checked, he was appointed to office and he is not . ” Erickson’s debating partner, the conservative activist Bill Wichterman, argued that Trump appealed to the worst in America: His bullying, his lying and his bigotry were “corrosive to our national character. ” Erickson could testify to this. At one point, he was receiving as many as 300 emails a day from Trump supporters. Some of them referred to him as a “cuck” or “ . ” The word — a derivative of “cuckold” — was new to Erickson, as were its originators in the . More than one of the emails predicted that Erickson would be shot to death. At the local grocery store, a man walked up to Erickson’s two young children “and told them they needed to know their father was destroying this country by supporting Hillary Clinton,” Erickson told me. And one evening, two people showed up on the Ericksons’ doorstep to deliver a threat — Erickson would not tell me what it was — explicit enough that he later hired security guards. “I’ve never had Obama or Romney or McCain or Clinton supporters come to my home or send me nasty letters,” he said. Did Trump beget all of this? If so, what begot Trump? Erickson argued that the fault lay with Beltway Republicans. “They’ve broken so many promises,” he said. “They promised to defund the president’s immigration plan. They promised to defund Obamacare. They promised to fight the president on raising the debt limit. At some point, the base of the party just wants to burn the house down and start over. ” But even Erickson did not seem convinced that this alone explained what he saw as a nihilistic turn among Republican voters. “I do think there are a lot of people that have just concluded that this is it — that if we don’t get the election right, the country’s over,” he said. As to where they might have gotten that idea, Erickson knew the answer. It was the apocalyptic hymn sung by hosts like his friend and mentor Rush Limbaugh, whose show Erickson once though in the time of Trump, it seemed unlikely he would receive another invitation. This February, Limbaugh, who has applauded Trump without endorsing him outright, posed to Erickson the question of whether a commentator should try to act as “the guardian of what it means to be a conservative. ” In effect, the legend of talk radio was laying down an unwritten commandment of the trade, which applies as well to cable TV: Do not attempt to lead your following. This was simple enough for an avowed Trump supporter like Ingraham. “Laura’s never missed an opportunity to build her career on the backs of others,” Erickson told me. He counted Hannity as another mentor and admired his entrepreneurial cunning, saying: “Sean reflects his audience. He’s not going to leave his audience. ” On his own radio show, Erickson found that the more he denounced Trump, the more female listeners he picked up. But most of the 300, 000 people who tuned in weekly during rush hour were men. While Erickson refused to abandon his principles, he did not wish to go broke, either. On Sept. 20, Erickson wrote a long post for The Resurgent titled “Reconsidering My Opposition to Donald Trump. ” He made no effort to disguise his moroseness. “I see the election of Hillary Clinton as the antithesis of all my values and ideas on what fosters sound civil society in this country,” he wrote, and described his manifold objections to her at great length. But, he went on, “I have to admit that while I may view Hillary Clinton’s campaign as I view Donald Trump’s campaign as . . .. While I see Clinton as having no virtue, I see Donald Trump corrupting the virtuous and fostering hatred, racism and dangerous strains of nationalism. ” The election left him adrift. “I am without a candidate. I just cannot vote for either one. ” And so Erickson’s conscience led him back to where he was 13 months ago. Nowadays, he told me, he was doing all he could to avoid discussing Trump and the election altogether — a tall order for a host. Responding to my look of bewilderment, he said, “Why dwell on the train wreck?” Erickson believed he was not alone. “People know where we’re headed, don’t like where we’re headed and would rather talk about something else,” he said. Erickson had won many fights. This one was the biggest yet, and he had lost. There was nothing left to do but step back from his megaphone, dwell on happier matters and wait for the next righteous cause. | 1 |
(Before It's News)
Tim Stanley wrote in The Spectator last week about American politics. Here is some of it. To anyone complaining that American politics in 2016 is uncivil, consider this: in 1804, the vice president of the United States shot the former Secretary of the Treasury in a duel. Alexander Hamilton, the retired secretary, probably fired first […]
Continue reading American politics at its most uncivil
. . . → Read More: American politics at its most uncivil | 0 |
CLEVELAND — On a warm June night in Cleveland, 20, 562 pairs of hands gathered to lift a curse. Quicken Loans Arena, home of the Cavaliers, was hosting an official Game 7 watch party. The place was gussied up in banners proclaiming, “ALL IN. ” In fact, most things were all out. The $5 tickets for the 20, 562 indoor seats sold out in less than a minute a like number of admissions for the outdoor plaza were also gobbled up in under a minute. The chosen ones (apologies, LeBron) shuffled past their ticketless brethren in an approximation of the Last Judgment, marching toward not the Pearly Gates but the Gateway Plaza security. “Anybody got a ticket to sell?” a tattooed man said. “One ticket?” Inside, your Ahmad and Nicole, a couple, took over the Humongotron. “The scoreboard has four enormous HD video screens that are tilted and uniquely curved to provide optimal viewing angles for all fans” is the way the Q’s website described it, and the Big H, replete with flaming sabers, could barely contain Ahmad’s enthusiasm. “It’s Game 7 of the N. B. A. finals with the Golden State Warriors” — we boo — “going against YOUR Cleveland Cavaliers!” High in the rafters — the uppermost stretches of the Q are dubbed Loudville — Nicole cornered Mark, a young fan. She asked what his plans were after the Cavs won. Mark’s eyes went saucers, as if the thought had never really occurred to him. Then the Humongotron filled with pregame live from Oakland. There was LeBron James’s face, broad and as impassive as the Sphinx. And the building lost its collective mind. Is this heaven? No, it’s Cleveland. “Do not engage in any fighting or throwing of objects,” the announcer reminded us. “Violators will be ejected and subject to arrest. ” It’s not easy being CLE. In most cities, sports failure is an occasional painful lesson in Cleveland, it has been the entire point. Futility here turned into an annual ritual: The (insert franchise name here) would start the season with high hopes, lose much of their steam via poor play and horrible miscalculations (see Johnny Football) and reload with a new crop of talent, only to reprise the outcome. The Cavs had seemingly followed the script, left for dead after the fourth game of the championship series as assorted talking heads proclaimed that no team had ever come back from a series deficit. Believeland would have none of it. “Cavs all the way,” Laurie Coduto said. Her husband, Mike, agreed. “You know the Cavs are going to win,” he said. The Codutos were here Sunday night because “we want to be part of history,” Laurie said. The music kicked in. Billy Idol was singing “Rebel Yell. ” Or it could have been “White Wedding. ” Heck, it could have been Pachelbel’s “Toccata in E Minor. ” No matter. It was the moment, and the moment is what set the wheelchairs in the Subway Fan Zone to dancing. A trio of young men passed, laden with enough nachos for a week in the North Woods. “Follow me,” one said. “Know where you’re going?” “No. ” You knew by the time of the player introductions that something was different. As the lights dimmed, and just before the Humongotron belched fire, a fan waved a sign: “LeBron the Real M. V. P. ” Maybe. The Warriors closed the half strong. Draymond Green ignited an run in the final four minutes of the second quarter, and Golden State took a lead into the locker room. No matter. “The Cavs are going to win,” said a woman who gave her name as Ophelia. Calm in the storm, she was here “to be part of the excitement. ” The elite craziness took place in deeper waters. The Cleveland Indians’ afternoon game against the Chicago White Sox provided the undercard, and Tribe fans wandered over from the ballpark to join the throng outside. The vibe was Spring Break North the dress — what there was of it — was casual, the conversation livelier. “Did you get him anything for Father’s Day?” a young woman asked her friend. “Who says he’s the father?” her friend answered, not looking up from her drink. Nearby, another young woman lectured a boy. “Don’t play for a team,” she scolded. “Be a lawyer and own the team. ” She added, “I dated a lawyer, and I should know. ” The boy was about 2 years old and tiny, riding on his father’s shoulders. Dad and son quickly moved away. With 1 minute 50 seconds left in the game, James uncoiled a block of an Andre Iguodala shot. Kyrie Irving hit a shot over Stephen Curry. Curry answered with a wildly errant attempt on the other end before James was fouled hard. He knocked down the second of two free throws for a Cleveland lead with 10 seconds on the clock. Chants of “M. V. P. !” rocked the Q. Please, no more about the Curse. Suffice to say, the Cavs put up a season that any thinking sports fan ought to have been proud to witness. Cleveland has beaten flawed teams, like Atlanta, and it has beaten young rosters just coming into their own, like Detroit and Toronto. The Cavs are smarter than any team that’s tougher, and there aren’t many of those. It could be argued, while listening to Wiz Khalifa rattle your molars, that sport has sucked the charm out of the contemporary game and replaced it with volume. Marketing is a simple villain. Hunger for karmic justice, and they will offer you a discounted hot dog. Shiver in the cold rain of a of disappointment, and they will hand you a FirstEnergy . That is the way the game is played now. It is easy to overlook the obvious even when it is flashed onto a video screen the size of an apartment building. The real power lies inside, coiled and remarkable. It always has. It is what causes the granny during the Irving to chair dance to mad beats. It is what causes the beanpole wearing a Matthew Dellavedova jersey as a belly shirt to lean to his left to misguide a Curry free throw, even if the hoop in question is 2, 200 miles away. And yes, it is what turns every “Brian on a car phone” into James Naismith this time of year. No maybes here. We’re going to win. Not “they” or “I. ” In the end, the Cavs played like a team with a chip on its shoulder, winning for a city full of people with a chip on theirs. Which brings us back to Mark, pondering a course of action for the final buzzer. “I’m going to go running in the street,” he said. It was a beautiful summer night, a gentle breeze finally coming over a Great Lake, past the glass pyramid of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. The Cavs were champs. A spell had been lifted without crystals, roosters or the intercession of Madame Zora. And there was nothing left to do except join 20, 562 of your closest friends and run in the street. | 1 |
U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants to Philippines
Region: East Asia and the Pacific
Income Group: Lower-Middle Income
Total (FY 2012): $197,036,510
sounds great! we'll be calling in those loans now why don't you just STFU. | 0 |
It was bad enough late last month when the Education Department, in a legal filing, informed the nation’s public servants that they shouldn’t trust its administrator’s word about whether their student loans qualify for its debt forgiveness program. But the panic among borrowers that the newfound uncertainty unleashed helps illuminate an additional problem with the public service loan forgiveness program: Many people who believe that they qualify — and entered graduate school, borrowed piles of money and chose employers accordingly — may not realize that they are not making qualifying payments or that certain loans are not eligible for forgiveness. The program, which began in 2007, was enacted with what was supposed to be a proposition: People who worked for 10 years in public service jobs and made regular payments would have the remainder of their federal student loans forgiven. A wide variety of jobs were supposed to qualify, from nonprofit work to teaching in a public school or practicing medicine at a public hospital. But now, 10 years later, the legal filing has sown all manner of confusion — which itself comes in the wake of a disheartening amount of misdirection given to borrowers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau receives plenty of complaints about loan servicers offering incorrect information. And employers may also pass along bad advice. “This is one of the most complex programs ever concocted by Congress,” said Rohit Chopra, a former Education Department employee who also served as the student loan ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “So many people who are counting on getting some help are going to be flatly rejected on a technicality. ” People who are in the loan forgiveness program, who think they are or who are contemplating trying to enter it ought to use this scare as an opportunity to step back and their assumptions. At least four basic things need to happen for someone to get in the program and stay in: He or she must make payments in the right way, have the right kind of employer, be in the right loan category and have the right kind of payment plan. What follows is a mere summary, and the pitfalls, tripwires and exceptions are legion. Mandatory additional reading includes the Education Department’s fact sheet, its list of 56 questions and answers, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s tool kits for employers and employees. Let’s take those four requirements in order: THE RIGHT WAY TO PAY For starters, you need to make 120 payments in order to qualify. They need to be made on time and in full, and you must be working full time. The count can get complicated for people in school, or just getting out, or in financial trouble, as well as for those with qualifying undergraduate loans who go back to school. Question 21 on the department’s list addresses some of these issues. THE RIGHT KIND OF EMPLOYER This is what the lawsuit is about. All of the Education Department’s guidance on the topic suggests that people who work for the government or for a nonprofit with 501( c) 3 status should be eligible for forgiveness. Anyone who wants to be certain that an employer qualifies can (and should) file an employment certification form with a loan servicer. Do it every year, and every time you change jobs or servicers. Also check to make sure your payments are going correctly toward that goal of 120. The lawsuit involved some employers with more esoteric nonprofit statuses, and the Education Department’s filing in response declared that approval of an employment certification form “does not reflect agency action on the borrower’s qualifications” for the public service loan forgiveness program. Additionally, the brief said that borrowers should not expect a truly final decision until after their 120 payments were made. Cross your fingers, everybody! And cue the justifiable panic. Dr. Jordan 33, an emergency room physician at a nonprofit hospital in New York City, fired off a letter to the Education Department demanding final word now about the fate of his more than $300, 000 in student loans. While he had previously received letters saying that his employer qualified, he was primed to be wary. At one point, his human resources person mistakenly told him that his hospital might not qualify. “I was going to throw up,” he said. Jessica Schreiber, 28, the founder and sole paid employee of a nonprofit, has her own concerns. She left New York City’s Sanitation Department last year to start Fabscrap, which helps local businesses recycle their fabric. Before starting graduate school, she plotted her loans, payments and career choices according to the rules of the loan forgiveness program. So when she heard the news about the lawsuit, she posted the following on Facebook: “THIS IS TERRIFYING. ” She has asked for her servicer’s blessing on the eligibility of her nonprofit, and has not heard back yet. Since the legal filing, the Education Department has told reporters that it cannot comment on pending litigation. I didn’t ask about that. Instead, I simply asked if its servicer’s letters about whether an employer was eligible were something that borrowers should believe. Its three spokesmen did not answer by my deadline for this article. Let’s call the Education Department’s refusal to clarify the matter exactly what it is: meanness. If the department has made mistakes with the litigants and misclassified their employers, it can fix them quickly and settle the suit without freaking out untold numbers of other borrowers. THE RIGHT KIND OF LOAN The Education Department’s instructions, via another information page on its website, are pretty clear: You need to have what the agency refers to as a “direct” loan. As the site explains, if the word “direct” isn’t in the title of your loan, it probably doesn’t qualify. If you aren’t sure what kinds of loans you have or whether your statement from your servicer describes them correctly, you can log into the department’s website and look them up. If you’re making payments on, say, a Federal Family Education Loan (F. F. E. L.) or a Perkins loan, those are not counted toward your 120 payments, even if you work for a qualifying employer (though the Perkins loan has its own cancellation program). You can fix this by consolidating your loans into a direct consolidation loan. Be careful, though: If you consolidate direct loans with nonqualifying loans, any payments you made on that old direct loan won’t count anymore. The count to 120 resets. When Dr. Darius Amjadi, a pathologist and Iraq war veteran in Portland, Ore. began his work with a veterans’ hospital, he thought he had a shot at loan forgiveness from the Veterans Affairs Department’s own program. At the same time, his employer informed him that his loans would be eligible for public service loan forgiveness. But the department’s forgiveness has not come through. And it turns out he had not been in the right kind of federal loan to qualify for forgiveness under the public service program, despite what his employer said. “If anyone had said, ‘Check your loans,’ it would have put me on notice,” Dr. Amjadi said. Now, he’s got a balance of $40, 000 and has missed out on years of eligibility for forgiveness. THE RIGHT KIND OF PAYMENTS This is the category that so worries Mr. Chopra, the former Education Department and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau student loan expert, who is now a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America. For starters, he points out that if you are not in some kind of repayment program (check the Education Department’s website for the names of all of the different ones) you’re not going to benefit from forgiveness and there’s a good chance that your payments don’t qualify. A standard repayment term for student loans is 10 years, or 120 payments. Those payments may be technically eligible if you have the right employer, but if you’re making them in full (and not on an plan) you’ll have paid off the loan in 10 years and there won’t be any loan left to forgive. Mr. Chopra worries about people working for eligible employers and making payments in something called graduated or extended repayment plans that are not income driven. If you think that sounds like you, call your servicer and ask, then ask again at a different time to be sure. He points to data in an Education Department presentation from late last year that is available online showing that about half of the people enrolled in public service loan forgiveness have not made a single payment that qualifies toward their goal of 120. He suspects that many just don’t realize they’re in the wrong kinds of payment plans. My inquiries to the Education Department about this matter yielded no replies. To review, we’ve promised to help our public servants by forgiving their student loan payments after a decade. But the program is confusing, the government’s legal filings contradict its websites, and its representatives aren’t answering questions. This is no way to treat the people who do some of the most important work in our country. But it’s also yet another reminder that as we build more complexity into our financial systems, we’re sending the message to those who must navigate them that they are on their own. It’s a shameful message at any time, but it’s particularly galling when it’s firefighters, librarians and nurses on the receiving end. | 1 |
At first glance, the sideline of a United London F. C. home game features exactly what one would expect from an soccer match on a rented field in England’s capital. Water bottles. A collection of balls. Substitutes warming up. A crowd that United London’s chairman, Mark North, describes as “one man and his dog. ” What is missing is more notable: a manager. At United London F. C. the position of a traditional coach is unnecessary. Instead, the lineup is selected by the team’s fans each week. Formed this year and currently playing in the Essex Alliance Premier League — the 12th tier of England’s competitive soccer pyramid — United London F. C. claims to be the world’s only managerless club. In place of a traditional coach, the team’s business model brings together elements of reality TV voting and player analytics similar to those used in video games and by scouts. It employs a fantasy system that awards points to or deducts points from the team’s fans (acting individually as managers) based on whether their selections make the starting 11, score or record an assist, or play a role in posting a shutout. “In nonleague football, there’s not much in the way of eyeballs, because the Premier League just takes over everything,” North, 38, said. “That’s where we want to be different, in that we are building an online fan base, rather than a localized one. ” To date, more than 2, 000 people have signed up with the club, which played its first competitive match in early September. The team claims support from fans in Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Sweden and the United States. Each week, those fans vote on United London’s starting lineup by reviewing player statistics, scouting reports and videos of previous weeks’ matches posted online by the club. After voting closes each Friday, the squad for Saturday’s match is announced. “I think it’s cool because it keeps the club’s supporters involved,” said John Frusciante, a from Aberdeen, N. J. who recently signed up. “The fans have more input than, say, at Real Madrid. Zidane isn’t going to ask you if Ronaldo should be starting or not” — as in Coach Zinedine Zidane and striker Cristiano Ronaldo. North said the idea behind the team came to him last year while he and his wife were watching TV on a Saturday night. Tired of ballroom dancing shows and singing contests, North, who worked in financial recruitment at the time, began devising ways to apply the reality TV voting model to soccer. Like the contestants on such shows, players for United London have something at stake in each week’s voting. While researching how to find players for a team, North realized he might be able to mine the large number of academy prospects that are released by English professional clubs each season. After this highly competitive annual cull, many players abandon their hopes of professional soccer, around age 18. United London has positioned itself as a second chance for such players the club’s badge depicts a phoenix rising from flames. “A lot of players, by the time they get to 18, 19, 20, they haven’t got a résumé,” said Jon Willis, the head of recruitment at the Football Careers Centre, an organization that helps place former academy players with new clubs. He helped organize United London F. C.’s summer trials. Willis said United London allowed players to reset their career path, or try to attract the attention of a new club. “This program is interesting,” Willis said, “because they record every game. It’s going to put people in the shop window. ” Already, United London F. C. has created a diverse squad of and even among them a Turkish youth international a player who, the club claims, was the soccer player in Britain last year and the nephew of an England international striker. “Right now, I don’t really think about it,” Georges Ketoka, who once played in the third tier of Belgian soccer, said of fans’ having the power to pick, or cut, players. At 26, Ketoka is one of the team’s oldest members. “If you play,” he said, “you know it’s because people like you, the way you play and what you bring to the team. ” For now, United London supporters can influence the team’s lineup only before matches. On a website — North admitted that it had had some growing pains — fans are met with a formation empty of players that they can fill by selecting names from menus beneath each position. Clicking on a star above a player selects him as the captain, earning the manager double points for that player’s performance. As technology improves, North said, the club would like to allow fans to make decisions on substitutions and other questions. For now, those decisions, and practice sessions, are handled by United London staff members. North would not reveal how many of those are active users. The reason, he said, is that knowing such information could allow him and his staff to manipulate voting for the players they prefer. However, North did joke that results so far had shown that he was perhaps not the best person to be making such decisions anyway. His role at the club includes tasks like putting up the nets before matches, but he also sits down every Sunday to count every pass, tackle and shot from the previous day’s match, so that fans have the information they need to vote during the week ahead. That has not lent him much of an insider advantage, though, when he picks his own lineup. Last week, he said: “I was only ranked seventh — some guy from Sweden was top of the leaderboard. And I should know everyone!” | 1 |
'Ayúdame': Captan fenómenos paranormales en la cámara de la muerte de una cárcel abandonada (Video) 21:26 GMT
Desde que la prisión norirlandesa fue cerrada en la década de 1990, se ha registrado una serie de avistamientos sobrenaturales en el lugar. Facebook / David O'Reilly
Un extraño fenómeno, presuntamente sobrenatural, ha sido grabado en los pasillos de una cárcel abandonada de Irlanda del Norte, donde décadas atrás fueron ejecutados muchos criminales, informa ' The Mirror' .
En las imágenes captadas dentro de Crumlin Road Gaol (Belfast) por David O'Reilly con su teléfono móvil, se puede ver lo que parece ser una luz flotando en los pasillos, que crece en intensidad a medida que se acerca a la cámara.
Crumlin Road Gaol fue inaugurada en 1845, y hasta su cierre en 1996 se llevaron a cabo decenas de ejecuciones. Desde que la prisión fue cerrada se ha registrado una serie de avistamientos paranormales, en particular en la cámara de esperas de ejecuciones y en la propia cámara de la muerte.
Según algunos testigos, en el interior de la prisión ocurren "algunas cosas muy extrañas", como que las puertas se cierran por sí solas o se pueden escuchar voces de personas pidiendo ayuda.
Recorded tonight on a Samsung phone. Slow motion. Figure on left then orb that heads straight for me then up. Creepy stuff!! Posted by David O'Reilly on viernes, 21 de octubre de 2016 | 0 |
Trump has an excuse now to audit any vote with these machines , trust the UN to be involved . He neds them to take a photo of their vote with phones , and be onto the polling booths for the bus loads of illegal voters going from booth to booth , he can bust this whole scam wide open if he is smart . Soros gave 10 million to Clinton , this must be ilegal surely ... | 0 |
Via Washington Examiner:
Democratic National Committee interim chairwoman Donna Brazile admonished the FBI Friday for telling Congress it found new emails related to Hillary Clinton’s private server, and called on the federal agency to state immediately that the Democratic nominee is in the clear.
“FBI Director Comey unequivocally cleared Hillary Clinton of any intentional wrongdoing three months ago, and said that no reasonable prosecutor would pursue the case in question further. Now, 11 days away from the election, he released a vague letter that immediately led to rampant speculation in the news media,” Brazile said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner. | 0 |
“Most people don’t think data management is sexy,” says Jared Auerbach, owner of Red’s Best, a seafood distributor in Boston. Most don’t associate it with fishing, either. But Mr. Auerbach and a few other seafood entrepreneurs are using technology to lift the curtain on the murky details surrounding where and how fish are caught in American waters. Beyond Maine lobster, Maryland crabs and Gulf shrimp, fish has been largely ignored by foodies obsessing over the provenance of their meals, even though seafood travels a complex path. Until recently, diners weren’t asking many questions about where it came from, which meant restaurants and retailers didn’t feel a need to provide the information. Much of what’s sold has been seen as “just a packaged, nondescript fish fillet with no skin,” says Beth Lowell, who works in the prevention department at Oceana, an international ocean conservation advocacy group. “Seafood has been behind the curve on both traceability and transparency. ” What’s worse is that many people have no idea what they’re eating even when they think they do. In a recent Oceana investigation of seafood fraud, the organization bought fish sold at restaurants, seafood markets, sushi places and grocery stores, and ran DNA tests. It discovered that 33 percent of the fish was mislabeled per federal guidelines. Fish labeled snapper and tuna were the least likely to be what their purveyors claimed they were. Several years ago, Red’s Best developed software to track the fish it procures from small local fishermen along the shores of New England. Sea to Table, a family business founded in the with headquarters in Brooklyn that supplies chefs and universities, has also developed its own software to let customers follow the path of their purchases. Wood’s Fisheries, in Port St. Joe, Fla. specializes in sustainably harvested shrimp and uses software called Trace Register. And starting this fall, the public will be able to glimpse the international fishing industry’s practices through a partnership of Oceana, Google and SkyTruth, a nonprofit group that uses aerial and satellite images to study changes in the landscape. The initiative, called Global Fishing Watch, uses satellite data to analyze fishing boat practices — including larger trends and information on individual vessels. From a young age, Mr. Auerbach had romantic notions about fishing, specifically the idea of catching fish to feed his family and neighbors. “It’s cool in this day and age that people wake up in the morning and go make a living interacting with nature and feeding their community,” he said. He went into commercial fishing straight out of college, taking a job on an Alaskan salmon boat and later returning to New England to work on lobster boats and learn more about the fishing industry there. Soon after Mr. Auerbach founded Red’s Best in 2008, he realized that a combination of government regulations and commercial fishing’s embrace of technology were effectively threatening the existence of small fishing boats. Yet smaller boats travel short distances and catch fewer fish, which Mr. Auerbach said improves their quality. “We try to push people to eat local, traceable fish,” he said. Like most other seafood distributors, he was relying on an antiquated, carbon copy system that was so cumbersome, he was routinely shuffling paperwork until 2 a. m. “The boat would get a copy at the point of unloading,” Mr. Auerbach said. “The government would get a copy. I’d file a copy. And then I’d write in the prices. ” As for paying the fishermen: “I’d have to get checks and then match the checks to the paperwork and mail them. It was an absolute nightmare that wasn’t scalable. ” Now the Red’s Best software does that work. For instance, a company driver backs a truck down to the long wooden pier in Woods Hole, Mass. each afternoon, so that fishermen can load their bluefish, striped bass, bonito, conch, horseshoe crabs and other seafood. But instead of a thick pad of paper and carbon sheets, the driver wields a waterproof wireless computer tablet with a Bluetooth mobile printer. “He’s putting their catch data directly onto the internet, and our whole staff all over the country can see in real time as fish is being unloaded onto our truck,” Mr. Auerbach said. When the fish arrives at Red’s Best’s Boston plant, it is instantly received into inventory and reported to the federal government. The company affixes a traceability label on each box of fish. The label has a bar code that can be scanned by smartphones to reveal who caught the fish, where and how. A unique web page is automatically created for that fish. Buyers, typically wholesalers throughout the country, and their customers can scan the code to learn the story behind the fish. Mr. Auerbach, who has 100 employees, projects the company will sell 20 million pounds of seafood this year, caught almost exclusively by 1, 000 small vessels. Eventually, Red’s Best hopes to sell directly to consumers. “Like, a bluefin tuna is being unloaded right this second in Provincetown, Mass. and you buy a pound of it to be delivered to your home tomorrow,” he said. “I want that tuna sold as deep into the supply chain as possible. ” By that he means ideally the fish will travel from the company’s Boston hub directly to home cooks’ refrigerators. Currently, people can buy Red’s Best fish at its store at the Boston Public Market, at several farmers’ markets, or shipped through AmazonFresh and, starting last week, FedEx. “I got the data,” he said. “I got the fish. I know people want it. ” Sea to Table hopes to sell fish directly to home chefs starting this year, too. But local seafood can cost more than many Americans are accustomed to paying, which partly accounts for the rampant seafood fraud in this country. “U. S. fisheries are very well managed and are actually growing nicely,” said Michael Dimin, the founder of Sea to Table. “But the U. S. consumer’s been trained to buy cheap food, and imported seafood is really cheap because of I. U. U. fishing. ” I. U. U. stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated. The result is unsustainably fished, cheap seafood flooding American fish markets and grocery chains. “To us, the secret is traceability,” Mr. Dimin said. “If you can shine a light on where it came from, you can make informed decisions. ” Mr. Auerbach concedes that some local fish is expensive, but he maintains that many varieties are affordable. “Maybe halibut and scallops are for the wealthy,” he says. “But dogfish, skate, porgy and mackerel are all very inexpensive, healthy and great tasting. ” | 1 |
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has hired two fundraisers from Florida, a sign he may be working toward a presidential bid, the New York Post reported. [One of the consultants he hired is former Hillary Clinton fundraiser Jon Adrabi, who “will help plan events and build relationships with Democratic donors in the key swing state. ” “Hiring fundraising staff, particularly in a battleground state, opens up money spigots beyond what would normally be available and is a key first step to laying the groundwork for a run,” a Democratic operative told the Post. The source says that Cuomo wants to “hire political consultants with experience outside of New York. ” Cuomo is planning several fundraisers next month to add to the $22 million he already has. One of those events includes “a dinner at the St. Regis where tickets cost $15, 000 per person,” and “sources say a South Florida event is also in the works. ” Cuomo has become very vocal about issues in the Trump administration, further “expanding his national profile. ” He announced a plan to fight antisemitism and hate crimes, spoke out against Trump’s executive order on immigration, and vowed to protect transgender students in New York after the Trump administration repealed guidelines allowing students to use the bathroom of their preferred gender identity. | 0 |
Raising the prospect of lasting fissures in the party, Senator Bernie Sanders rebuffed pressure on Tuesday to rein in his supporters after they disrupted a weekend Democratic convention in Nevada, throwing chairs and later threatening the state chairwoman in a fight over delegates. The uproar comes as Hillary Clinton is struggling to turn her and the party’s attention to the fall. Mr. Sanders’s supporters showed no sign of backing down on Tuesday. In interviews, several threatened to disrupt the party’s convention in Philadelphia in July with protests and nonviolent disobedience over a nominating system that they say has treated Mr. Sanders unfairly. In emails, on social media and on websites, his supporters have traded advice about protest tactics and legal services in case of mass arrests. Alarmed by the unrest in Nevada, Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, said that he spoke with Mr. Sanders on Tuesday and that the Vermont senator faced a “test of leadership” over his supporters’ actions. Mr. Reid, who represents Nevada, said he was confident that Mr. Sanders would “do the right thing. ” But Mr. Sanders showed no sign of backing down, releasing a statement that, while condemning violence, accused the Democratic leadership in Nevada of using “its power to prevent a fair and transparent process from taking place. ” The fight in Nevada underscored the determination of Mr. Sanders’s supporters to undermine Mrs. Clinton’s march to the nomination. On Tuesday she lost the Oregon primary but declared victory in Kentucky, where she held a edge according to complete but unofficial returns. Mrs. Clinton spent Monday campaigning in Kentucky, showing how the battle against Mr. Sanders continues to distract her campaign even as she turns her fire on Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. And leading Democrats have become increasingly vocal about the need to unify the party for the general election — while being careful not to anger Mr. Sanders by urging him to quit the race. Senator Barbara Boxer of California said she had reached out to Mr. Sanders about the need for unity. “I have placed a couple of calls to Bernie,” Ms. Boxer said. “He’s my friend. He’s been my friend for many, many, many years, and I haven’t heard back from Bernie, and I would hope that Bernie will be a leader and make sure that everybody understands what is at stake. And what is at stake is the future of our nation. Nothing less. ” Ms. Boxer, who was in Nevada for the convention on Saturday as Sanders supporters erupted in anger, called what she witnessed ”terrible. ” “We just can’t have a repeat of that in Philadelphia because it’s distressing,” Ms. Boxer said. “I have a message to the Bernie people who are planning to be disobedient because the system is rigged. Here is the thing: They should support the Democratic candidate who got the most votes. They should support the Democratic candidate who got the most delegates. There is nothing to protest. ” But Sanders supporters remained defiant, raising the possibility of unrest on the streets outside the convention. “You are going to see a variety of tactics,” said Elizabeth Arnold, 32, a former staff member for the Sanders campaign in Philadelphia who said she planned to demonstrate. “I personally don’t like being arrested. But it’s essential that we speak our minds and assert our First Amendment rights. Our system is terribly flawed and terribly unjust — so very just actions often end in arrests. ” Ms. Arnold, who helped found EDGE, an environmental justice group based in Philadelphia, said she did not condone violence and hoped that people would find a way to voice concerns peacefully. But she said that Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic leaders attending the convention “should worry about what is going to happen. ” Nina Turner, a prominent surrogate for Mr. Sanders, said that she had seen several emails from people planning acts of civil disobedience, and that talk of dissent in the Republican ranks over Mr. Trump masked the searing divisions among Democrats. “People are talking about the Republicans having a brokered convention. I think we are sleeping on the Democrats,” Ms. Turner said. “And if Democrats believe that that’s not going to happen, they are just sadly mistaken. They have blinders on. ” “It is going to be progressives who will disrupt,” she said. “And when I say disrupt, I don’t mean in a violent or a terrible way, but I just mean upset the apple cart. ” April Mellody, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Convention, said in a statement that the convention’s security team would work with the Philadelphia police and the Secret Service “to ensure the safety and security of all of our delegates and participants. ” After the meeting of Nevada Democrats on Saturday ended in mayhem when many potential Sanders delegates were deemed ineligible, Roberta Lange, the state party chairwoman, said she had received death threats against her and her family after Sanders supporters spread her cellphone number online. “The Sanders campaign helped incite everything that happened,” she said. “Instead of attacking me, they should be publicly apologizing to me for the part that they played. I’m really disappointed. It makes me feel like it is not being taken seriously. ” On Tuesday, the Nevada State Democratic Party issued a formal complaint to the Democratic National Committee in response to the behavior of Mr. Sanders’s supporters. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the national party chairwoman, also expressed her concern Tuesday. “We will be reaching out to the leadership of both of our campaigns to ask them to stand with the Democratic Party in denouncing and taking steps to prevent the type of behavior on display over the weekend in Las Vegas,” she said. But the protest effort enjoys some institutional support. RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, a union that has endorsed Mr. Sanders and that has been busing its members across the country to campaign for him, also said her group planned to take part in demonstrations at the convention. “We will be a significant force inside and a significant force outside,” she said. “The focus is going to be how disenfranchised the voters felt during this election by the D. N. C. ” | 1 |
The summer box office season kicked off with a bang last weekend as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 rocketed to a $146 million opening, but Hollywood could see its first big bomb of the season this weekend as Warner Bros.’ expensive tentpole King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is projected to open in the $25 million range. [Arthur, directed by Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes, Snatch) and starring Charlie Hunnam and Jude Law, reportedly cost Warner Bros. and production partner Village Roadshow $175 million to produce, according to the Hollywood Reporter. That number doesn’t count the studio’s marketing spend, which likely puts the final figure closer to $200 million. But Arthur is reportedly tracking to earn in the $25 million range when it premieres on more than 3, 600 screens on May 12. That won’t be nearly enough to knock Guardians from the top spot. The James superhero sequel starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista and Bradley Cooper is projected to remain number one this weekend with a $60 million second frame, which would add to its already hefty global gross of $494 million. King Arthur — which currently sits at a dismal 22 percent on ratings aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes — will need to make up ground overseas if it is to turn a profit for Warners and Village Roadshow. Meanwhile, the box office likely won’t get much help from the weekend’s other newcomer, the Amy Hawn kidnap caper Snatched. Snatched is projected to debut in the millions range for Fox and Chernin Entertainment. The Jonathan comedy — which reportedly cost $42 million to produce — hopes to benefit from a Mother’s Day weekend release and the return of Hawn after a absence from the big screen, but early reviews of the film have been highly negative, with critics singling out Hawn’s underwhelming performance and the film’s subtly racist undertones. Also opening this weekend is Attractions’ Iraq War psychological thriller The Wall, directed by Doug Liman and starring Aaron and John Cena, comedy Absolutely Anything with Simon Pegg and the Monty Python crew, and the indie drama Lowriders starring Melissa Beniost and Eva Longoria. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0 |
Happening Now: Police Facing Off Against Protesters in North Dakota (Multimedia)
11:30 a.m. PDT: Another Facebook user is sharing live stream of the confrontation:
11:17 a.m. PDT: The fight for clean water in the face of a proposed oil pipeline in North Dakota has escalated once again.
On Thursday, police dressed in riot gear began “ taking steps to remove ” protesters of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Very little information has become available but numerous social media accounts have provided glimpses into the conflict. One Facebook account went live to share video footage of the unfolding confrontation:
Website Unicorn Riot, which has provided on-the-ground coverage of the DAPL protests for weeks, has also put up a livestream , although the connection is weak.
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Users on Twitter continue to provide updates as well:
— wes enzinna (@wesenzinna) October 27, 2016 Fire spreading through the straw bales pic.twitter.com/7AzsZM3UKJ — Caroline Grueskin (@cgrueskin) October 27, 2016 Flaming barricades as armored vehicles advance #NoDAPL pic.twitter.com/hYuOteXYkM — Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) October 27, 2016 Spoke to @dennisward moments ago. Here are his pics of police moving in on protestors at #standingrock #NoDAPL @APTNNews pic.twitter.com/ttFCYgwm8Q — Karyn Pugliese (@KarynPugliese) October 27, 2016 Part of the police presence on 1806 right now. "If you do not walk south you will be arrested." # #DAPL #NoDAPL pic.twitter.com/HbAlfB034v — wes enzinna (@wesenzinna) October 27, 2016
Truthdig will be going live later today to discuss the DAPL protests with documentary filmmaker Josh Fox. In the meantime, stay tuned for further updates on the situation currently unfolding in North Dakota. TAGS: | 0 |
Physicians urging health care say House Speaker Paul Ryan’s newly released proposal to repeal Obamacare does not actually repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and, therefore, is “doomed for failure. ”[“Since this does not completely repeal the ACA, we are still left with thousands of pages of regulations that will have unknown consequences in the future,” Dr. Gerard Gianoli, of the Ear and Balance Institute, tells Breitbart News. “The GOP plan is worse than a repeal with no replacement plan at all. ” Gianoli explains: It will not prevent the death spiral of the insurance industry, which will be now blamed on Republicans, and the march toward a system will continue. The GOP plan is doomed for failure. Instead of returning the insurance market to the vigor of a free market, the government will be supporting it with tax credits — the flip side of the ACA insurance penalty. Gianoli says the difference between Obama’s health insurance plan and Ryan’s proposal amounts to semantics: The difference is considering whether the bottle is half full or half empty. In other words, there really isn’t any difference. Further, the stipulation of preventing the insurance industry from premiums from initial policy inception will lead to continued gaming of the system that will not be adequately adjusted by the “30% penalty” for interrupted coverage. Hopefully, this plan will not be passed. Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, also observes to Breitbart News that the new proposal — kept secret by Ryan until its release — “is 57 pages with a number of ‘repeal this’ and ‘repeal that’ clauses, but no ‘repeal ACA. ’” “So to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, what is still in it?” Orient asks. “Was that the subject of secret meetings with special interests?” Orient continues: “Refundable” tax credits — for those who don’t owe taxes — are still a subsidy. It is still redistribution of wealth, with winners (those who get the subsidy) and losers (those who pay for it). And the chief winner is the “health plan. ” It gets money the supposed beneficiary may get nothing, or only rationed care from a narrow network. “The problem is comprehensive payment,” Orient adds. “The bill perpetuates this disastrous concept. A true bill — “there shall be a free market in health insurance” — would remove all federal mandates, subsidies, barriers to competition, or protections or advantages for cartels. ” Conservatives such as former House Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan and Virginia Rep. Dave Brat also object to Ryan’s proposed Obamacare repeal plan, asserting it is still Obamacare in a different form. “The bill maintains many of the federal features including a new entitlement program as well as most of the insurance regulations,” Brat said. “Now [they] are saying we’re going to do repeal and replace but the bill does nothing of the sort. [Speaker] Paul Ryan has always said the entire rationale for this bill is to bend the cost curve down, and so far I have seen no evidence that this bill will bring the cost curve down. ” | 0 |
| Charles Hugh Smith | Of Two Minds | 286 views
If there is any lesson to be learned from the ghosts of Watergate, it is that the big-money support of a leader who has lost the ability to deliver the goods crumbles very quickly as the endgame unfolds.
The parallels between Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon are not legal–they are political: specifically, how can a leader crippled by scandal and cover-ups govern?
In even blunter terms: how can a crippled politico deliver the goods to the special interests who bet their cash and political capital on the politico’s ability to deliver favors?
Among the many ghosts of Watergate, one specter especially haunts Hillary: once the special interests and party stalwarts who defended you through every scandal and every cover-up–month after month and year after year, on the promise that you would deliver the goods upon ascending to the presidency–realize you are too damaged to deliver anything of value to anyone, why would they continue supporting you?
Once a politico has to declare “I am not a crook” based on legalese rather than a moral foundation, that politico’s ability to lead has vanished. Hillary and her supporters rely entirely on legalese parsing of wrong-doing rather than on a self-explanatory, basic moral foundation of right and wrong.
Declaring “I am not a crook” because the wrongdoing escapes prosecution is the same as declaring “I am above the law.” If the foundation of one’s ability to lead is a reliance on legal parsing and allies in the Department of Justice squashing investigations while handing out immunity like candy on Halloween, the political capital required to lead no longer exists.
Ultimately, the President leads by moral suasion. Even the political act of delivering the goods to the special interests that funded your campaign and your wealth must be backed by the moral authority of personal integrity and a morally grounded appeal to the common good.
A politician who has effectively zero personal integrity is only as viable as his/her ability to deliver favors to the few (i.e. special interests) over the objections of the many. A reliance on cold-blooded horse-trading only works if the leader has enough political capital to arm-twist everyone into granting favors to allies and special interests.
But this political capital rests on moral suasion and support earned not by issuing promises but by leading the nation through thorny thickets to solutions that work for the many, not just the few.
Once the ability to lead has been lost, special interests can forget about getting favors. And once they realize their politico is a liability rather than an asset, self-preservation requires abandoning the liability as quickly as possible.
It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. Anyone who thinks Hillary has the personal integrity to build sufficient political capital to lead is delusional. Anyone who believes Hillary has the moral foundation to deliver the goods to the myriad special interests that have funded her campaign and her personal wealth is equally delusional.
Are Goldman Sachs et al. delusional? If there is any lesson to be learned from the ghosts of Watergate, it is that the big-money support of a leader who has lost the ability to deliver the goods crumbles very quickly as the endgame unfolds. | 0 |
Howard Hodgkin, a British artist whose lush, semiabstract paintings, aquiver with implicit drama, established him as one of the most admired artists of the postwar period, died on Thursday in London. He was 84. The Tate Galleries announced his death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Hodgkin was a relative latecomer to fame. A slow, methodical worker who could spend years building up a painting’s surface, he did not have a solo show until he was 30, and for years thereafter toiled against the grain, his work at odds with prevailing fashion. His globs and stipples and smears — seemingly brisk and impulsive, but painstakingly applied and endlessly revised — ravished. On the Tate’s website, Nicholas Serota, the departing director of the museums, called Mr. Hodgkin “one of the great artists and colorists of his generation. ” But his coded emotional settings seemed elusive, even baffling, as did his stylistic relationship to current art. In Britain he was seen as an abstract painter, in the United States as representational — a puzzle. “I never expected anyone to be interested in my pictures, and there were years when I couldn’t even get my friends to look at them,” Mr. Hodgkin told The New York Times in 1990. His paintings in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1984 propelled him into the top echelon of international artists. Seductive and arresting, they showed an artist at the height of his powers, and audiences responded. “Not since Robert Rauschenberg’s appearance at the Biennale 20 ago has a show by a single painter so hogged the attention of visitors, or looked so effortlessly superior to everything else on view by living artists,” the critic Robert Hughes wrote in Time magazine. He added: “Here the wearisome traits of much contemporary art, its honking rhetoric, its unconvincing urgency, its arid ‘appropriations’ of motifs, are left at the door, and the complexities of mature, articulate painting greet the eye. ” Mr. Hodgkin won the Turner Prize a year later, and as major gallery and museum exhibitions in Britain and the United States followed, one after the other, his distinctive blend of bravura brushwork, emotional depth and sense of mystery began to hold sway. He came to be seen as a highly original interpreter of the dramas that unfold in intimate, interior space, an heir to Bonnard and Vuillard. “On the subject of sitting rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms and balconies neither Hodgkin’s eye nor his hand has ever failed him,” the critic John Russell wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1990. “He is on the subject of hotels, restaurants, private collections, public parks, costume jewelry, human exchanges of all kinds and weather reporting. Manners and mores, ups and downs, ins and outs — all have their place in his paintings. “He can make a wet afternoon in summer feel like the most blissful thing that ever happened,” he continued, “and when he summons up the quintessence of a restaurant (in London, by the way, not in Paris) he makes us want to stand up and shout for the menu. ” Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born in London on Aug. 6, 1932, to a Quaker family with an illustrious pedigree in the arts and sciences. His father, Eliot, was a manager at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and a horticulturalist. His mother, the former Katharine Hewart, daughter of the Lord Chief Justice of England, Gordon Hewart, was a homemaker and botanical illustrator. With German air raids looming, Howard was evacuated in 1940 with his mother and sister to Long Island, where he stayed with family friends for three years. After returning to Britain, he attended a variety of expensive schools, including Eton, and ran away from most of them, finding little encouragement for his determination to become an artist — his goal since the age of 5. He painted on his own, and during a return visit to Long Island in 1947, he began going to galleries and museums in New York City, looking closely at the work of Matisse, Degas, Bonnard and Vuillard. One of his earliest works, the 1949 gouache “Memoirs,” served as a marker for the themes that would preoccupy him in the coming years. Judith Higgins wrote in Art News in 1985, “Highly stylized, fiercely outlined and angular, humming with erotic currents, ‘Memoirs’ announced the subject of all Hodgkin’s subsequent work: the great tradition in French painting — figures in an interior — transmuted, in Hodgkin’s case, by memory. ” In 1949 he gained admission to the Camberwell School of Art in London, where he studied briefly under Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream, the leading figures in the Euston Road School. He spent four years at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, where he studied with Clifford Ellis. In 1955 he married Julia Lane, a fellow student at Corsham. They later separated. He is survived by their two sons, Louis and Sam. Mr. Hodgkin was given a show at Arthur Tooth and Sons in 1962, but for years he depended on teaching to make a living. In the he began lecturing at Charterhouse School. He later taught at the Bath Academy of Art and the Chelsea School of Art. He produced mostly works until late in his career, on canvas at first but, beginning in the late 1960s, only on wood, usually old boards scavenged from London antique shops. In violation of the tenets of American abstraction, he embraced the frame, emphasizing its presence by painting on it directly, or including framing rectangles in the painting. The strongly geometric forms of the early painting evolved into looser, brushier images that teased the idea of figuration. In “Jealousy” (1977) a red mass, barely human, coils angrily within a rectangle. The leaning, spotted rectangles in “Dinner at Smith Square” ( ) suggest, just barely, two people conversing over a table. “I am a representational painter but not a painter of appearances,” Mr. Hodgkin told the critic David Sylvester in 1976. “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations. ” His reputation grew. He had his first show in New York in 1973, and in 1976 Mr. Serota organized his first museum exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. In 1995 the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized the traveling exhibition “Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975 — 1995,” and in 2006 Tate Britain mounted a survey of his work. If Mr. Hodgkin never quite rose to the celebrity rank of Lucian Freud or David Hockney, by the time he was knighted, in 1992, he stood at the threshold of “living treasure” status. “To be an honest artist now, you have to make your own language, and for me that has taken a very long time,” he told Mr. Sylvester for the catalog to “Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings, ” a traveling exhibition that incorporated many of the paintings from the Biennale. Mr. Hodgkin was an interviewer’s nightmare, notoriously reticent about his work and unhappy analyzing its meaning. He made it clear that art was a slow and painful business. At the same time, he confessed to feeling a sense of exhilaration in his final years. “I don’t care a damn about what happens when I’m dead, but I do have a sense of increased urgency,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “And I think it’s made me more courageous. ” | 1 |
41 mins ago 1 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes In this special US Election Day episode from New York City, Max and Stacy act as a medium to contact the dead media which died a gory death on November 8. They talk meme wars, the medium as the message and the failure of modern journalistic technique. Max interviews award-winning independent journalist and groundbreaking social media and mobile technology as journalism pioneer Tim Pool about the role of the media and meme wars in getting Trump elected. Check Keiser Report website for more: http://www.maxkeiser.com/ WATCH all Keiser Report shows here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL768A33676917AE90 (E1-E200) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC3F29DDAA1BABFCF (E201-E400) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K2ZtV_1KphSugBB7iZqbFyz (E401-600) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K1GpAv3ZKpNFoEvKaY2QFH_ (E601-E800) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K19wt4CP0tUgzIxpJDiQDyl (E801-Current) Subscribe Like | 0 |
STOCKHOLM (AFP) — Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Isabella Lovin, on Friday published a photograph of herself signing a climate bill surrounded by her closest female colleagues, mocking a photo of US President Donald Trump. [In the photo, Lovin, who also serves as environment and development aid minister, is seated at a desk as she signs the bill under the watchful eye of seven female colleagues, including one who is visibly pregnant. The shot parodies a photo taken of Donald Trump on January 23 in the White House, as he signs a decree barring US federal funding for foreign NGOs that support abortion, as his colleagues look on. Just signed referral of Swedish #climate law, binding all future governments to net zero emissions by 2045. For a safer and better future. pic. twitter. — Isabella Lövin (@IsabellaLovin) February 3, 2017, Sweden, a pioneer in women’s rights, is known for its high level of women in the workplace, including in parliament and government. “We are a feminist government, which shows in this photo. Ultimately it is up to the observer to interpret the photo,” the Swedish minister wrote in a comment to AFP. The climate bill she is signing in the photo aims to make Sweden carbon neutral by 2045 and “marks a new era in Swedish climate politics,” Lovin wrote. “There is a global demand for climate leadership. I want to show that Sweden is ready to take that leadership,” she added. The Trump photo elicited an avalanche of comments, many of them remarking that no woman was present for a decision concerning women. | 0 |
Project Veritas: Scott Foval Reveals Who Was Really Behind the Romney 47% Video Tweet
In this video, Scott Foval, the now former Field Director of Americans United For Change admits that the bartender who supposedly filmed Mitt Romney’s notorious 47% moment was not a bartender, but was a lawyer. “The lawyer took his phone and had the bartender walk around with it and set it up.”–Scott Foval | 0 |
If your digital photos are a mirror of your life, they may also serve as a reminder that there is only so much you can control and that at some point you just need to let things go. That was the lesson I learned after trying to create a guide to organizing and storing smartphone photos, based on interviews with professional photographers and a week of testing multiple services and gadgets. I spent days experimenting with neurotic tagging systems, tedious backup processes and album management, and finally turned to Brian Christian, a computer scientist and philosopher, for advice. The healthiest approach to managing photos, it turns out, is a Zen one: to not deal with them much at all. Mr. Christian said photo organization illustrates a principle known as the . If you spend tons of time rummaging for a specific photo, then sorting photos may be worthwhile. But if you hunt for a picture infrequently, sorting may be a waste of time. “If it would take you eight hours to tag all your friends, you should not undertake that until you’ve already wasted eight hours digging up photos of your friends,” said Mr. Christian, of “Algorithms to Live By,” a book about using algorithmic principles to improve your life. In other words, people need a method that saves time — and that allows them to essentially throw out the need to sort and tag their enormous photo sprawl. So I tried several services and devices to determine what that method might be. Over a week, I tested three backup services with my iPhone photo library of about 8, 000 images: Apple’s iCloud photo library, Dropbox and Google Photos, which automatically take your photos and store them in the cloud. I also tested two data backup devices from SanDisk and Synology. My conclusion: For smartphone shooters, the secret to photo nirvana is to take a deep breath and let Google back up and organize everything. Apple’s iCloud was straightforward. In the iPhone’s camera settings, flipping on iCloud Photo Library uploads all your photos to iCloud, which is accessible by Apple and Windows devices. Dropbox’s service uploads photos to your Dropbox folder, which is compatible with various devices like Windows PCs, iPhones and Android phones. For Google Photos, as soon as you set up the app, it starts backing everything up in Google’s cloud service called Drive, also accessible on various devices. All three services took several days to back up my entire library over a connection while I was asleep. Google Photos quickly set itself apart with its smarter features. It scans your photos and organizes them in several ways. For one, it can detect the face of a person and group all the photos of that person into an album, which you can name. With photos taken within a short time span, like your trip to a beach over the weekend, Google Photos might create a video montage or an album with a label like “A weekend in San Francisco. ” The service also managed to identify pictures of items, like receipts and food, and group them into their own albums with labels. Dropbox and Apple’s photo services had features, but not the smarts of Google’s service. Apple’s app groups photos into collections based on when and where photos were taken it can also organize photos by faces, similar to Google. Dropbox uploads photos into a folder labeled Camera Uploads and labels each file by the date and time it was taken. Another benefit of Google Photos is its free offering is the most generous — enough to let you try out the service thoroughly before deciding whether to pay. The service offers to store an unlimited number of compressed images at no cost. For images, you get 15 gigabytes of free storage and can pay at least $2 a month for 100 gigs. In contrast, Apple offers five gigabytes free and thereafter charges at least $1 a month for 50 gigs Dropbox offers two gigabytes of free storage before charging at least $10 a month for a terabyte. Anil Sabharwal, vice president of Google Photos, said the company built Google Photos to make it easy to keep, manage and share photos and videos. Apple and Dropbox did not immediately have comment. I also tested two physical devices for managing photos: the SanDisk iXpand, a small drive that plugs directly into the power port of an iPhone and automatically backs up photos, and Synology’s DS216+II, a new disk storage system that connects to your internet at home to create a personal cloud. The iXpand device was deeply flawed — it tried to back up all my photos for six hours before the iPhone ran out of battery and the backup failed entirely. Synology’s software backed up my photos quickly and had some features like face and location tagging, but organizing photo albums still required lots of manual labor. SanDisk said the issue I experienced was a known problem affecting a small number of devices and that an app update would be released next week to fix the bug. A Synology spokeswoman said that with its storage systems, customers could back up a broad array of media on a private cloud. In the end, Google Photos solves multiple problems: It handles organization, making the minimal. It creates a backup of photos, so you can free up space on your smartphone while safeguarding pictures in case the device is lost or stolen. Once all your photos are on Google Photos, they need not live on the phone. Unfortunately, there is no quick way to delete thousands of photos. I plugged my iPhone into a Mac, imported my older photos and checked the box that says “Delete items after import. ” Then I deleted them all from the computer. (In the future, it will be easier to delete smaller batches straight off the phone.) What about blurry, unwanted images? The most important lesson of Google Photos is to stop thinking of the digital photo album like a physical scrapbook. With a traditional photo album, you would spend time flipping through pages before landing on the right photo. With Google Photos, you can treat it like a giant searchable junk drawer: You can simply open the Google Photos app or Google Drive, type in a keyword for what you want to see, pull up that photo and ignore everything else. You can make some changes here and there — like renaming or adding photos to albums — but otherwise, why bother? One caveat: The Zen approach does not apply to those with professional cameras. For professional photographers, some organization is a plus and Google Photos and cloud services are not ideal because large photos would take too long to upload. Ben Long, a professional photographer in San Francisco, said he diligently tagged his photos with keywords using Adobe’s Lightroom app to make them easy to find later. “I put tagging up there with flossing and stretching: things you know you’re supposed to do and they’re really a drag to do, but you just get in the habit of it,” he said. For the rest of us, there’s another reason to not bother deleting photos in Google Photos: Google adds creative touches to images that you thought were previously unwanted. If you took multiple shots of a sun setting or your child smiling, for example, it stitches them into an animation. “The lower the cost is of searching, then the more one should ask the question of, should I be organizing this at all?” Mr. Christian said. After migrating my entire photo library to Google Photos, my answer is a resounding no. | 1 |
At some point along every wine drinker’s arc of discovery, the time comes to invest in a set of glasses. Choosing the right one may seem complicated, confusing and occasionally overwhelming. The process can be fraught with anxiety, as many different glass styles are available, and points of view clash on what is proper and necessary. Corkscrew aside, a stemmed glass is the only indispensable piece of equipment needed to enjoy the best a bottle has to offer, and the least expensive, easiest way to invest in better drinking is to buy a good set. Not that wine can’t be consumed without them. Tumblers can serve as informal wine glasses, and are perfectly appropriate for simple bottles in easygoing establishments. You could drink from a porrón, a traditional Spanish glass pitcher that was a modern adaptation of the leather wineskin, or bota bag, once carried by Spanish shepherds. You may even drink straight from the bottle, though I recommend reserving this method for celebrations. While fitting for certain occasions, these primitive vessels do not enhance the experience. Good stemmed glasses, on the other hand, are expressly designed to make an inherently delightful activity even better. Selecting a set is simple once you cut through the noise. Recently, I joined my colleagues at The Sweethome, a product review site owned by The New York Times Company, to test more than 50 different wine glasses. Among our recommendations was a glass, the Libbey Kentfield Estate Signature at $22. 99 for a set of four a more elegant set, the Riedel Vinum glass, $55 to $90 for a set of four and a glass, the Zalto Denk’Art Universal glass, at $59 a glass. Depending on your budget, any of these glasses would be excellent for all types of wine. For some time now, glass producers have promoted the idea that every sort of wine requires a distinctive glass to intensify the aromas and flavors of the particular variety. This is nonsense. Most households need only one set of glasses, which is perfectly fine for whites, reds, sparkling wines, rosés and fortified wines. A good, stemmed glass ought to be vertically shaped, with a tall bowl that opens wide at the stem and then tapers gently inward toward the lip. This taper channels aromas upward to the nose, amplifying them as you swirl and sniff. Over time, many wine lovers develop the habit of swirling the glass, believing that the action increases the wine’s exposure to air and activates the aromas. I believe it. I am an inveterate swirler, to the point where I unconsciously do it even with my water glass. In order to avoid sloshing the wine onto yourself or, worse, someone else, good glasses should be tall and capacious enough to contain a decent amount of wine when filled a third of the way up. They should not be so big that a third of a glass holds an absurd amount. The rule of thirds allows for swirling without fear of consequences. This desirable vertical shape is often called a Bordeaux glass, which is generally contrasted with a Burgundy glass, which has a shorter, wider, more rounded bowl. These are traditional terms but in no way binding. You can certainly drink Bordeaux from a Burgundy glass, and vice versa. Burgundy glasses are not bad, but I find the Bordeaux shape to be more versatile. It works well with any sort of wine. Good wine glasses must be clear, so that nothing interferes with a transparent display of the wine’s color. The glass should not be hued, beveled or decorated in any way that may interfere with its clarity. Nor should it flare outward like a martini glass. Many regions have used glasses that over generations became part of the area’s cultural tradition. The copita, for example, is a narrow, stubby glass that is used in the Andalusia region of Spain and elsewhere for sherry. Regardless of the tradition, it is a terrible glass for sherry. The glass is a far better choice. Similarly, German riesling is often served in small, narrow glasses with a slight flare outward. These, too, are not in the best interest of the wine. The glass is the better option. Even Champagne and sparkling wines, which have so often been consigned to vessels like the flute or the coupe, are better served by the glass. However, the aromas and flavors of the wine are not always the primary concern. Champagne served in a flute connotes elegance and festive celebration. At certain times, the occasion trumps everything else. No one should feel bad about using flutes for sparkling wines. My point is that special glasses like flutes are not a requirement. If the aim is to enhance the quality of the wine, the glass is better. At times, you may see general references to white wine glasses and red wine glasses. Invariably, the red wine glass is larger than the white wine glass. This, too, is pointless tradition, derived from the days when, as the old saw has it, “the first duty of wine is to be red. ” Nowadays, nothing about white wine is subordinate to red, so there is no need for smaller glasses unless, for some reason, it’s a preference. While having one set of glasses is sufficient, it may be the beginning, depending on your budget and your inclinations. If you can afford it, owning an exquisite set of glasses like the Zalto Universals can be a joy, even if you only use them for special occasions. Just as great tools can improve any experience, whether woodworking or playing guitar, so can great craftsmanship enhance the sensual pleasure of holding a glass in your hand, to say nothing of drinking the wine. The better the quality, the thinner the glass. The best glasses can seem sheer and ethereal in the hand. Lesser glasses may have a discernible ridge where the bowl joins the stem, and a thick lip at the rim. Better examples are smooth and continuous. You may have other reasons for owning more than one set of glasses. If you like to have dinner parties where several wines are served, you may want enough glasses so that two different wines can be contrasted and enjoyed at the same time. If both wines are the same color, you will need sets that are distinct enough to avoid pouring the wrong wine into the wrong glass. A few words about stemless glasses: I don’t like them. Sure, tumblers are fine for unremarkable wines in casual situations. But for good wines, stemmed glasses are ideal. They can be held by the stem so that the temperature of the wine won’t be altered by the warmth of the hands, and so fingerprints won’t smudge the glass. Stemless glasses intended for good wines seem to me the epitome of reverse snobbery. They were included in the Sweethome tests, and I found them unwieldy and unpleasant to use, even as I was asked to express preferences among them. I don’t recommend them. That said, if you are drawn to stemless glasses, follow your desires. The most important thing of all is to please yourself. In the end, let your taste be your guide. | 1 |
Friday, 11 November 2016 RIP to truly great man - Leonard spent his life singing about the real issues of being human
When one of Leonards friends told him about the Trumphole victory he had a heart attack and dropped dead on the spot.
It was well known he was ill and had to go back on the road after his manager ripped him off, but it seems the rise of Neo-Nazism in the US was the final straw for his saddened heart. He had not long completed his final album written about the US election called 'You want it darker' which now will become historically famous as a work of astonishing prescience.
He is best remembered for his magnificent song Hallelujah and his 60's 'tell it like it is sister' lyrics which inspired people to understand the voices in their own heart and not to project hatred upon others.
Who could ever forget KD Lang singing that song at the Montreal Olympics, it was the highlight of the games.
RIP to a great man, may his message that is needed ever more now resonate in the hearts of all, especially those that see pubescent hatred as a valid way of relating to the world. Make Jung in the Jungle's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!) | 0 |
Two days after an imam and his assistant were gunned down after afternoon prayers in Queens, the police said late Monday that a man they had in custody had been charged in the killings. The man, Oscar Morel of Brooklyn, 35, who was taken into custody late Sunday after the police connected him to a hit and run that occurred about a mile away from the fatal attack, faces two counts of murder and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon, the police said. A police official said investigators had found what they believe was the murder weapon in the man’s home as well as clothes matching the description of what the gunman had been wearing during the shootings. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the gun was found inside a wall in his apartment, on Miller Avenue in the East New York neighborhood, in a cavity that had apparently been cut open and resealed. A man who answered a phone listed for Mr. Morel’s family said that he was stunned by the arrest. “That is our relative,” the man said, his voice soft and shaking with emotion. “We are just finding out ourselves. We’re pulling together the pieces as well. ” In Bangladesh, the oldest of the imam’s seven children, Fayez Uddin Akonjee, 28, said he was relieved at the charges and expressed gratitude to the police. But in an interview in his native language, Bengali, he was still seething with anger. “We want to know as victims why he killed my father,” he said. “What was his motive behind killing my father? Whether he was hired or appointed by someone else to kill my father or did he himself plan and kill my father?” Earlier Monday evening, New York City officials sought to reassure members of the Muslim community in New York, saying that a “strong person of interest” was in police custody. At a news conference, Mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged the fear that had spread among members of the city’s Bangladeshi community over concerns that the two men, who were dressed in religious garb at the time of the attack, had been targeted because of their faith. “It’s a very rare thing to see a cleric killed, and the Muslim community has already been on edge,” Mr. de Blasio said. “I assured the members of the community the N. Y. P. D. would be out in force. ” The killings of the imam, Alauddin Akonjee, 55, and his assistant, Thara Miah, 64, have shaken those in the Bangladeshi community, many of whom reside in the area around Ozone Park where the men lived, worshiped and were killed. In that neighborhood, some have been calling the attack a hate crime, even though police officials said the motivation for the killings remained unclear. Investigators believe the gunman followed the two men to the corner of Liberty Avenue and 79th Street and shot each in the back of the head, police officials said. In surveillance footage captured by cameras nearby, investigators were able to see the assailant get into his car, a black GMC sport utility vehicle, and drive away, soon blending into traffic, Robert K. Boyce, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, told reporters on Monday. By tracking the make and model of the vehicle, he said, investigators found that the same kind of vehicle had been involved in a hit and run nearby, at the intersection of Pine Street and Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn. Investigators found the car parked on the street in East New York, where they waited for the driver to emerge. On Sunday night, officials said the man got into the car and rammed into a police vehicle as he tried to flee. The man was arrested in connection with the hit and run and hitting the police vehicle. Chief Boyce said investigators were searching his home on Monday night. “Because of the evidence so far, we strongly believe this is the individual,” Chief Boyce said. Still, Chief Boyce said investigators had not determined the motivation for the attack, and that it was unclear if the man had any connection to the two murder victims. “We’re still drilling down on it,” Chief Boyce said of the motive, adding that it was “certainly on the table that it’s a hate crime. “Right now,” he said, “we can’t explain why that person was there. ” Earlier in the day, the funeral prayers for Mr. Akonjee and Mr. Miah drew several hundred mourners along with Mr. de Blasio and other officials in a nondescript parking lot in East New York, bordering Ozone Park. The same people who had worshiped five times a day at Mr. Akonjee’s Jame Masjid, a modest house turned into a mosque, came to get a last look at their imam’s closed coffin, draped in fabric of gold and green and resting in the back of a hearse. The imam came to the United States in 2011 and moved his family to New York a year later to provide a better education for his children. Now his wife and two of his children will fly back with his body to Bangladesh. . At the funeral prayers, Mr. de Blasio said: “In Islam, the loss of a person is regarded not just as a loss for their family, but for the entire community. That’s something we as New Yorkers understand, again across all faiths, across all neighborhoods, when a loss is felt so deeply, when it affects us all. ” Several speakers implored the police to increase security efforts in the neighborhood, placing security cameras and patrols outside the mosques. People held signs declaring, “We Are Muslims, Not Terrorists,” “We Want Peace,” “We Want Justice” and “Muslim Lives Matter. ” “You will see in the Muslim communities in our city, the N. Y. P. D. will be there in support of this community,” Mr. de Blasio said. “You will see today and in the days thereafter extra N. Y. P. D. presence protecting our mosques and protecting the people of our Muslim community. ” Both Mr. Akonjee and Mr. Miah were known as quiet scholars, devoted to the mosque and to their families. Mr. Akonjee’s sermons on Friday attracted nearly 200 worshipers, who heard him speak about the role of Islam in a diverse society in the United States. “He conveyed a message of peace and harmony and quietness with your neighbors despite their religion, culture and race,” said Kobir Chowdhury, the president of Masjid a nearby mosque in Brooklyn. Mosharraft Hossain said: “The imam was our spiritual leader we worshiped with him five times a day. You can’t imagine what we’ve lost. ” Murders have been rare over the years within the Bangladeshi community in and around Ozone Park. In July 2014, an activist leader with ties to Bangladeshi politics, Nazmul Islam, 55, was beaten to death in a robbery at 76th Street and Atlantic Avenue. Nestor Rodriguez, 22, and Carlos Genno, 25, both of Queens, were indicted on charges of murder and are still awaiting trial. In August 2002, a photojournalist from Bangladesh, Mizanur Rahman, 37, was beaten to death in a midnight attack just over the county line in Brooklyn that appeared to have been the result of and fights. Hardy Marston, 18, and Rafael Santos, 27, were charged with murder, gang assault and criminal possession of a weapon. On Monday, many mourners expressed concern about an increasing climate in New York. “I don’t feel safe anymore,” Mr. Hossain said. “All of this hatred being propagated, especially by Donald Trump, it puts us at risk. People sometimes pass me on the street and call me Bin Laden. I just try to keep my head down and keep walking. ” | 1 |
Vice Presidential nominee Tim Kaine reveals that he thinks it’s “very troubling” that the FBI told the press that they are taking a look at some recently released Clinton emails to determine relevancy to her case.
Kaine believes that to do so this close to the election is inappropriate.
Breitbart reports:
During a portion of an interview set to air on Friday’s “VICE News Tonight” on HBO Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) reacted to the FBI’s announcement that it is taking another look at his running mate Hillary Clinton’s emails by saying that doing this 11 days before the election without “many details, but details are apparently being given by the FBI to the press, this is very, very troubling.”
Kaine said, “When you do this 11 days before a presidential election, and you don’t provide many details, but details are apparently being given by the FBI to the press, this is very, very troubling, and we hope that the director, and we really think that he should, give a clearer accounting of exactly what’s going on.”
So the FBI should have kept it a secret until after the election, if you want Kaine’s opinion. Sounds EXACTLY like the type of guy we want one breath from the presidency, right?
And what exactly does Kaine mean by saying that the FBI “isn’t providing many details, but details are apparently being given”?
This may sound inappropriate to Kaine, because anything that isn’t positive about Clinton is inappropriate.
Of course, it would be another matter altogether if this was about Trump. | 0 |
Half Of Russians Fear Syria Could Spark WW3 11/02/2016
RUSSIA TODAY Almost half of all respondents in a recent Russian opinion poll said they feared that the aggravation of relations between Russia and the West caused by the ongoing crisis in Syria could develop into a global military conflict.
The share of those who see the probability of World War Three in the near future as high or very high is now at 48 percent and those who appraise it as low or very low comprise 42 percent of society, the privately-owned public opinion research center Levada reported on Monday. The remaining 10 percent of respondents said they couldn’t give a simple answer to the question.
When researchers asked citizens if they considered it possible that Russia and the West would eventually find a mutually acceptable solution to the crisis, 35 percent answered that this scenario was likely or very likely. Thirty-nine percent evaluate the probability of such an outcome as low or very low and 26 percent said that they couldn’t answer the question.
Just over half – 52 percent – of Russians said they approve of their country’s involvement in the Syrian conflict and 26 percent said they had a negative or sharply negative attitude to this. Just under a quarter – 23 percent – couldn’t answer the question about their personal view on the subject. Those who thought that Russia should continue the operation and those who thought that airstrikes should be stopped were divided 49 percent against 28 percent respectively, with 24 percent finding the question too difficult to answer.
The level of awareness about the situation in Syria and the Russian Air Force operation against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists there remained fairly high. Eighteen percent said they were very closely following developments in Syria and 64 percent revealed partial familiarity with the issue. Just under a fifth – 17 percent – said that they were not interested in news about Syria.
A similar poll conducted a year ago by the independent Levada Center showed that over 70 percent of Russian citizens supported the air operations against IS terrorists in Syria, and almost a half of them agreed that it was right for Russia to support the government of Syria’s democratically-elected President Bashar Assad.
A different poll conducted earlier this month by the state-run research center VTSIOM showed that 73 percent of Russians believed that Western criticism of the air force’s counter-terrorism operation in Aleppo, Syria, was ungrounded and prejudiced. Only 6 percent said the allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Russian military have some basis in reality.
Russia first deployed an air force contingent in Syria in 2015, after receiving a request for military help from the Syrian government, which is currently battling Islamic State and affiliated groups. Russian war planes began launching airstrikes on terrorists in Syria on September 30, 2015. Their work has aided the Syrian military in achieving considerable success in driving jihadist forces out of the country. | 0 |
An American Airlines flight from Miami to Chicago was diverted to Jacksonville after takeoff Monday because of a soda spill. [American Airlines spokesman Matt Miller told the Florida that the soda splashed on an unspecified electronic device in the main cabin. Airline passenger Preston Wake, 43, said he was drenched after a flight attendant spilled a soda. “I can’t really tell you how far it went, but I was soaked,” Wake told the paper. “I had to change my clothes and everything. ” Wake praised the airport staff for their hospitality despite the inconvenience the incident caused. “They’ve been taking care of everybody and I’m very pleased with that,” Wake said. About 150 were aboard the Boeing 737 that landed at Jacksonville International Airport at 4:45 p. m. the Orlando Sentinel reported. The incident left passengers stranded at the airport until about 10 p. m. | 0 |
Here are the top 10 comments of the week on our digital platforms, as selected by our readers and the journalists who moderate nearly every comment. 1. As an female, I understand the plight for equality. However, I am severely offended by the continual comparison of a sexual preference, a gender preference, to the plight of an enslaved, raped, lynched, brutalized, oppressed people. Dare anyone compare choice of bathroom to the plight of blacks for the past 400 years? Isn’t that a bit ridiculous? First of all, it’s insulting to every black person in America. As blacks we were born as we are. No choice involved. Transgenders have to make a conscious choice to become a transgender. There is no comparison. People say that Christians force their beliefs on others. Well, people who take these actions and measures are forcing their beliefs on those who don’t agree. There is nothing wrong with a person who prefers to use the bathroom with people of the same gender by birth. Stop making it seem like it is. That’s judgmental and degrading. — Loves’ Redemption in Washington, reacting to an article about the Obama administration telling public schools to allow transgender students to use the restroom that corresponds to their gender identities. 2. It’s past time to admit that when it comes to upholding federal law, and even civil rights, many states have pretty much just flipped off the U. S. government, many federal rulings, and even the U. S. Constitution. It’s now necessary for the U. S. government to bring the hammer down and start insisting that civil rights rulings are not optional, nor are they open to debate, overruling, or corruption by any state. Either we are a nation with universal civil rights that are enforceable or we are not. It’s time to make them stick. — GWBear in Florida. This comment received over 200 reader recommendations. 3. As I listen to Mr. Sanders speak tonight — completely caught up in his own hubris — I am fascinated and repulsed by his angry entitlement to the Democratic nomination. As he was shouting about momentum and that he is the best candidate — despite the fact that three million more voters preferred Mrs. Clinton — I feel increasingly concerned that he is a huge liability to the party he adopted for his own convenience. — Dana in Santa Monica, Calif. reacting to an article about Senator Bernie Sanders’s victory in the West Virginia primary. This comment received over 1, 090 reader recommendations and 127 reader responses. 4. I am absolutely astounded at the way these analyses ignore the obvious: The Trump phenomenon is the backlash against our first black president. Come on! You go back decades dissecting American conservatism, and you somehow manage not to mention that Donald Trump headed the “Birther” movement, which gave racists the okay to assert that Barack Obama was not a real American — explicitly because he was alleged (falsely) to have been born in Africa? HELLO? Are we ever going to be allowed to discuss this elephant in the living room? Are we supposed to pretend FOREVER that the origins of this outburst of hatred are totally mysterious? — DW in Philadelphia, reacting to an article about the Republican Party’s failure to unite behind its presumptive nominee, Donald J. Trump. This comment received over 1, 680 reader recommendations and 33 reader responses. 5. Keep writing away. It doesn’t matter what you say, I am still going to vote for him. The more I read against him, the more I want to vote for him. — Chris in Louisville, Ky. reacting to a post about Mr. Trump refusing to release his tax returns. 6. How many of us believe that the Olympics and every other competition actually award medals for achievement, rather than for who cheats most successfully? Of course, athletes also train. For strength and skill and endurance. But who does it without drugs? It’s not just the cheating that bothers me, but the effect on young people who do it. The effect of that lifelong secrecy. The effect of knowing that their medal was gained by cheating. It’s very discouraging. — TheraP in the Midwest, reacting to an article about the former chief of Russia’s antidoping lab detailing a doping effort in the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. 7. Great, another special interest group to pander to. — MKM in New York, reacting to an article about Hillary Clinton vowing that as president she would unseal the government records about Area 51, reputed to contain classified information about aliens and U. F. O. s. 8. Colonialism was pretty rude too, Your Majesty. — Viraj Vaidya on The Times’s Facebook page, responding to an article about Queen Elizabeth II’s criticism of a visiting Chinese delegation, which was caught on a video. This comment received over 1, 700 likes. 9. I find it so ironic that people do these things to their body in the name of “individuality. ” The inked and pierced masses are the real sheep. — Lena in Ontario, Canada, reacting to an article about body modifications like tattoos, piercings and ear gauging becoming de rigueur on fashion runways. 10. Brazil will not change. The problem with our country and economy is not the president herself, but our senators and everyone else who’s been stealing, and ruining our country for their personal gain. I’m sad to say that, even though I don’t support Dilma and never voted for her, what’s coming is much, much worse than her. I fear for the future of my country. — Vitória Fernandes on The Times’s Facebook page, responding to an article about impeachment proceedings against Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff. | 1 |
(((Smithsonian))) Refuses to Include Judge in Black Museum Because He has Normal People Opinions
Eric Striker October 27, 2016 Dat nigga ain’t even smoke crack.
The Smithsonian Museum, run by American Jewish Committee award-winning mankind harasser (((David J. Skorton))), has decided to exclude Supreme Court Justice Judge Clarence Thomas from its African-American Museum, showing that Jews only want to empower certain kinds of blacks that advance Jew-specific agendas. This Jew gets to decide who gets into the black museum and who doesn’t.
While I don’t agree with Thomas’ conservative philosophy, he has long been a constitution-respecting thorn in the side of the Jewish activist judge bloc of Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan. Whenever these Jews (and Sotomayor, along with the Jew Merrick Garland if he gets confirmed) vote to get something insane through, Thomas has been a reliable voice of reason tempering and often downvoting them in defense of free speech, freedom of association, etc.
Coming from a background of poverty and homelessness, Thomas has genuinely worked hard and shown remarkable aptitude in the art of jurisprudence, he wasn’t appointed to fill an Affirmative Action quota. He is a member of the “talented tenth” of the black race and if there’s going to be an African-American museum, he has certainly earned his place in it, yet won’t be included , because he has refused to abuse his gavel in pursuit of violent anti-White discord. Rather than commending him for his legal ethic, Jews are punishing him by obliterating his memory as soon as he dies to serve as an example to any other unusually intelligent blacks out there.
It’s not a secret that Jews filter just who and what Negroes in America should aspire to, from founding the pro-race mixing NAACP and sabotaging black nationalist Marcus Garvey, to running virtually all media intended for black people (BET-owned by Sumner Redstone’s Viacom, or The Root  – run by Israeli citizen Haim Saban’s Univision), and now picking and choosing what individuals blacks should exemplary members of their race.
So who is being included?
Well, the African-American Museum has an entire section dedicated to the Jewish-financed and extreme anti-white Black Panthers , Black Lives Matter, convicted Cultural Marxist terrorist Angela Davis. Examples of some of the ideological indoctrination featured at this Jewseum. Is (((Gloria Steinem))) “African-American”? So why is she there?
Cracked out James Brown, famous for shuckin’ and jivin’ while smoking crack and not much else, is according to reports treated by the Smithsonian as the second coming of Christ.
Is that appropriate?
I won’t go as far as to claim that blacks would be astrophysicists if all Jews vanished tomorrow, but I will say that blacks would not only be far better off according to every metric, they also would instinctively respect and emulate the White man as Booker T. Washington believed they should, rather than lash out at us for no reason as Jews instruct them to.
Blacks in the 1930’s once had a crime rate lower than urban Italian and Irish in the law and order South, along with their own small businesses, farms, fairly in-tact families. But because the Jew capitalizes on dysfunctional societies full of dysfunctional people, James Brown is made immortal while they pretend Clarence Thomas ain’t a REAL nigga .
Jewish cultural mandate socializes some Whites into acting like low-lives as well. While the manifestations are different depending on natural temperament and abilities of race, one thing we can all agree on is that neither the White man nor the black man are living up to their full potential in this age of decline and decay. | 0 |
Tweet Widget by Yessenia Funes
The fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline isn’t only about water rights and sacred sites; it’s also about the U.S. government’s historical refusal to honor treaties—when “they interfered with Manifest Destiny.” Washington violated its treaty with the Sioux in 1877, and later declared its power to void all Native treaties. “There are now talks of using the treaty to legally regain land rights to end the pipeline's construction.” One Treaty Could Change the Fight to Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline by Yessenia Funes
This article previously appeared in ColorLines and Portside .
“ Highway 1806 has become the no surrender line.”
When activists talk about the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline [1] and the Native uprising surrounding its construction, they often frame it with regard to the environment. Water. Sacred burial grounds. Grandmother Earth.
Opponents site potential environmental risks to water resources like the Missouri and Mississippi rivers to defend their stance against the 1,172-mile long pipeline, which would have the capacity to transport up to 570,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota to markets across the U.S.
What many ignore, however, is another facet of the #NoDAPL [2] movement: Native sovereignty.
Most of the confrontations between water protectors and law enforcement are occurring near the Standing Rock Reservation. The reservation currently takes up roughly 3,625 square miles [3] across southeastern North Dakota and into South Dakota. More than 8,000 people [4] live in scattered communities, all connected by a common history—one which includes land theft and treaty violations.
The construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline has brought this history to the current day. “Our standoff is on treaty land, so we have every right to defend what is rightfully ours,” says Cody Hall, a Lakota civil rights activist with the Cheyenne River Tribe who has spent time on the frontlines in North Dakota.
When he speaks of “treaty land,” he’s referring to land allotted to the Great Sioux Nation by the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 and 1868.
“Our standoff is on treaty land, so we have every right to defend what is rightfully ours.”
The revised treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation in 1868, which the federal governement would eventually shrink to what became the Standing Rock Reservation. The treaty land crisscrossed between seven present-day states—North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana—including the reservation and unceded territories reserved for hunting.
These boundaries were created to ensure peace between Native people and colonizers. The temptations of gold, however, meant that travelers were soon in tribal territory. Almost immediately after its conception in 1851, the U.S. violated the treaty by not policing its citizens' entry onto Native land.
For Native Americans, treaties function as the law of the land. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution clearly states:
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
The U.S. government would honor treaties—until they interfered with Manifest Destiny. “It was all about colonial expansion,” says Frank Pommersheim, a professor at the University of South Dakota School of Law who specializes in Indian law. In 1877, without consent from the Sioux, the United States stole their sacred Black Hills. The land was the center of their world, their birthplace.
This act set in stone U.S.-tribal relations. From then on, the United States slowly diminished the land it left for tribal peoples. By 1889, the Great Sioux Reservation became what it is today: 3,625 square miles tucked between North and South Dakota, stripped of ancestral burial grounds and lush buffalo populations with which the Sioux used to coexist.
In 1903, fewer than 30 years after the Black Hills seizement, the Supreme Court ruled in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock [5] that Congress may unilaterally break treaties between the U.S. and Native Americans using its plenary power. “It is unfortunately a part of American law. That basic precept is totally unacceptable to Native people in the context of treaties,” Pommersheim explains. "It is just a collision between cultures and different understandings and interpretation of what treaties actually mean."
“Almost immediately after its conception in 1851, the U.S. violated the treaty by not policing its citizens' entry onto Native land.”
He is correct that a vast number of Native Americans find this unacceptable.
“To us [these treaties] are very much still alive and a part of our everyday life,” says Remi Bald Eagle, the intergovernmental affairs coordinator for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. “We still honor those treaties, and I know the chairman has said that he expects America to do the same.”
And while the U.S. has violated said treaties over the past century, it’s never declared the treaties null or void, Bald Eagle adds.
With the Treaty of Fort Laramie in mind, water protectors opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline have tried to take action. On October 23, pipeline opponents declared eminent domain [6] over land owned by Energy Transfer, the company behind the pipeline, by citing the treaty. Joye Braun, an Indigenous Environmental Network organizer, said in a statement:
We have never ceded this land. If DAPL can go through and claim eminent domain on landowners and Native peoples on their own land, then we as sovereign nations can then declare eminent domain on our own aboriginal homeland. We are here to protect the burial sites here. Highway 1806 has become the no surrender line.
The Sacred Ground Camp had already existed for over a month with about 300 people camped out, but occupiers extended the camp on October 23 by creating three road blockades to prevent militarized law enforcement from entering. (This came just a day after police arrested roughly 127 water protectors [7] directly across the road from where private security for Energy Transfer had unleashed dogs [8] on activists one month earlier.) The camp also intended to halt construction where the remaining proposed pipeline route would connect with the Missouri River.
Four days after declaring eminent domain for the camp, on October 27, law enforcement from seven states arrived there fully equipped with riot gear, all-terrain vehicles, armored vehicles and helicopters. They arrested 141 water protectors [9]—after beating them with batons and issuing pepper spray. Law enforcement ultimately destroyed the camp, along with its tipis and sweat lodges.
“We did everything in our power that we could do to defend our camp in a nonviolent approach,” says Cody Hall of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. “Because the only way to really defend it would have became a violent approach because you're meeting officers with a force of weaponry.”
“We still honor those treaties, and I know the chairman has said that he expects America to do the same.”
There are now talks of using the treaty to legally regain land rights to end the pipeline's construction, according to Hall and others on-site. There is a precedent for taking this approach: In May, the Lummi in Washington state called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reject a coal terminal permit on the premise that it would harm Lummi fishing grounds, which the federal government is legally mandated to protect per an 1855 treaty. The Lummi won [10]. No terminal was built, fishing grounds were not harmed and the treaty was honored.
“[DAPL] brings to the surface all the issues dealing with treaties," says Bald Eagle. "It brings up all the wrongdoings that have been happening in the past. The American government has repeatedly shoved all of their wrongdoings underneath the rug, and the issue with the Dakota Access Pipeline has pulled that rug off, and now we have to look at everything that’s been done wrong.”
He lays out three choices for the U.S. government: correct its wrongs, put the rug back or commit another wrong.
President Barack Obama [11], when interviewed by social media news site NowThis, stated that the Corps is figuring out [12] how to reroute the pipeline over the next several weeks, saying, "There is a way for us to accommodate sacred lands of Native Americans." But construction has nearly reached the Missouri River, sacred water for the Sioux. Several more weeks may be too late. Yessenia Funes is the climate justice reporter for Colorlines. She was previously an editor at YES! Magazine, where she covered racial justice with a solutions lens. Her work has appeared in Grist, AlterNet, Public Radio International, and Truthout. | 1 |
The FBI's Clinton Investigation Is Wider Than Assumed
The Washington Post editors today added to their hypocrisy with three additional anti-Comey op-eds: Comey’s mistaken quest for transparency
I interpret that as naked fear that their candidate Hillary Clinton may now loose. That fear is justified.
The Wall Street Journal today added to its so far excellent reporting on the Clinton issues by revealing the much bigger story behind it: FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe - Laptop may contain thousands of messages sent to or from Mrs. Clinton’s private server (open copy here ).
According to the reporting, based on FBI sources, FBI agents in New York and elsewhere have been looking into the Clinton Foundation for several months. They suspect that this "charity" was selling political favors by then Secretary of State Clinton in exchange for donations that personally benefited the Clinton family.
The Justice Department blocked further aggressive investigations into the issue, allegedly because of the ongoing election. A high FBI official, Andrew McCabe, also showed disinterest in a further pursuit of the issue. McCabe's wife had just tried to get elected as state senator and had receive a campaign donation of nearly $500,000 from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton friend and at times board member of the Clinton Foundation. The FBI agents pursuing the investigation into the Clinton Foundation were not amused.
The separate investigation into former Congressman Weiner for sexual contacts with minors was looking for pedophile stuff on Weiner's electronic devices. It didn't find any as far as we can tell, but found some 650,000 emails archived on a laptop. Several thousand of these emails were sent or received by Weiner's spouse, the intimate Clinton aide Huma Abedin. They came through Clinton's private email server. At least some of these thousands of emails are likely copies of those that were deleted from Clinton's server when the (separate) investigation into it started. They may be evidence that Clinton sent and received classified documents through her unsecured system. Some of these emails may also contain serious dirt related to the Clinton Foundation.
Thus we have three ongoing FBI investigations: into Clinton's private email-server used illegally for official State Department business; into the Clinton Foundation and its role in peddling political influence in exchange for donations; into the personal conduct of Anthony Weiner.
Additional investigations that may come up are on: the mixing of donations to the Clinton Foundation and personal compensation for Bill Clinton for holding highly paid speeches; for profit activities by the group of people running Bill Clinton's businesses as well as the Clinton Foundation financing; inappropriate hindering of the FBI investigations by the Justice Department and/or by McCabe.
With such a list of potentially very serious scandals pending it is highly understandable that FBI director Comey went public and did not follow the advice from the Justice Department to pursue these issues only on a reduced level. It would have been political suicide to try to keep this silent. Way too many FBI agents eager to pursue these case were in the known and would have talked, as they do now, to the media.
If Clinton gets elected she will be hampered by these scandals for the next two years. The Republicans in Congress will jump on these issues as soon as possible. There will be endless hearings with large media coverage. The only question is when the first attempts at an impeachment process will be made - before or after she moves back into the White House. She and her family may be better off with her losing the campaign. Posted by b on October 31, 2016 at 03:19 PM | Permalink | 0 |
It’s all up to Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos, a lab started and led by Ms. Holmes that promised to revolutionize the industry, is now under criminal investigation and faces increasing skepticism about whether its core technology works. Several federal agencies are looking into the company’s operations. Ms. Holmes herself may have to answer to federal regulators about what she told investors. Just last year, Theranos was a Silicon Valley favorite with a $9 billion valuation. Now, depending on the outcome of the investigations, including the threat of crippling sanctions by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the company could be forced out of business and Ms. Holmes could lose her position as chief executive. The troubles have led to a cascade of questions about what changes Theranos might make to rebuild its reputation and business prospects. Some have even said that Ms. Holmes should step aside. After more than six months of intense questions, though, changes have been limited. And whatever future moves the company makes are up to Ms. Holmes. She — not the investors, and not even the board — controls the switches. Ms. Holmes, a Stanford University dropout, owns a majority interest in Theranos, a privately held company she founded in 2003. She is also the company’s chairwoman and chief executive. What she wants done at her company, she can demand. Ms. Holmes declined to be interviewed. But in an extended interview, David Boies, a heavyweight lawyer who is one of three outside directors on the Theranos board, hinted that some management changes may be coming soon. “The board is right now in the process, and Elizabeth Holmes is in the process, of adding significant talent to the company,” he said. But an adviser to the company, Richard Kovacevich, a former chief executive at Wells Fargo, acknowledged the limited role played by anyone other than Ms. Holmes. “She doesn’t have to answer anything she doesn’t want to,” he said. The situation at Theranos offers a stark reminder of the perils of investing in Silicon Valley, where it is common for founders to control a company, leaving boards with little real power, including over who should be chief executive. The examples are legion, including huge success stories like Google and Facebook. The upside for venture capitalists is that betting on an individual and getting in early can lead to riches. But if trouble brews, it is nearly impossible for a board or anyone but the founder to make any changes — a risk that, for now at least, investors remain willing to make. “For every Theranos, there’s a Facebook,” said Bryan Roberts, a partner at Venrock, a leading venture capital firm. Even in a case like Zenefits, where its founder, Parker Conrad, stepped down as chief executive in February after regulatory problems emerged, the decision to resign was ultimately his. Theranos’s board, which in its early years included some of its large investors, was later composed of an array of diplomatic, military and political leaders, including former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and former Senator Bill Frist. Last year, the company divided the directors into advisers and an actual governing board, which includes Mr. Boies, whose law firm represents Theranos. While critics have pointed to the board’s lack of industry expertise and the advanced age of some advisers, Mr. Boies defended it as “extraordinarily qualified. ” But legal experts say that while the directors are responsible for representing the interests of all investors, Ms. Holmes does not have to listen. A founder with controlling interest can replace the board, so directors are ultimately left with the choice of being fired or resigning if they strongly disagree with the executive. Supervoting shares, another common practice among grant founders like Ms. Holmes even more power. “You’re practically a paper tiger and have fiduciary responsibility,” said Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert at the University of Delaware. Mr. Boies says Ms. Holmes has the board’s backing. “I think the board has complete confidence in Elizabeth Holmes as a founder of the company, as a scientist and as an administrator,” he said. The board is represented by an independent law firm, Mr. Boies said, which is answering queries from the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as conducting an independent investigation into whether Theranos made proper disclosures to investors. No formal accusations have been made. While Theranos is privately held, its investors still have protections, said Joseph Grundfest, a law professor at Stanford. “The federal securities laws have very strict provisions, and they apply to sophisticated investors, not just unsophisticated ones. ” But Mr. Kovacevich, who is also an investor, emphasized that Theranos was not a publicly held company with the same responsibilities and that the shareholders understood this. “Not only is this a private company, but it has also been stated to the world, to the board and stockholders, that she has no intentions of ever going public,” he said of Ms. Holmes. “The intention, and a strong intention, is that this company is going to be private forever. ” The Medicare investigation is the most pressing threat, and Mr. Boies is largely mum about what Theranos is planning and how the board is reacting. Theranos has been the subject of scathing coverage in The Wall Street Journal, which has relentlessly questioned the reliability and safety of its blood tests, and it is under intense regulatory scrutiny. “The exact focus of what needs to be done keeps changing,” Mr. Boies said. Medicare, concerned about the company’s California operations, has said Theranos could face severe sanctions if the company does not adequately address the deficiencies uncovered last year. Theranos’s California lab certification could be revoked, and Ms. Holmes and the company’s chief operating officer could be barred from the industry for two years. The lab and its procedures have been overhauled, Mr. Boies said. Ms. Holmes has hired new management to run the lab, and because the people who ran it previously did not report directly to her, he said he hoped the agency would not take punitive action against her. The company’s other lab, in Arizona, which performs more traditional tests, continues to draw customers, he noted. But Theranos still faces extraordinary skepticism about whether its main technology works, especially given its history of secretiveness, and Mr. Boies said Theranos was taking steps to address the doubts. He pointed to plans to finally publish its results in journals and the addition of some individuals to its scientific advisory board. “We’ve got to reveal much more about the proprietary technology than is desirable,” given the risk of companies’ and countries’ copying what Theranos does, Mr. Boies said. The company’s intellectual property is essentially its main asset, and if the technology works, some observers say, the company could remain a viable business. “I don’t think they’re beyond salvage, beyond redemption,” said Lakshman Ramamurthy, an industry consultant with extensive regulatory experience. But while he did not rule out a sale, Mr. Boies dismissed the idea of handing Theranos over to the highest bidder. “This technology is not going to be sold to somebody who wants to just make more profits from it and charge what is charged today,” he said. And, as Mr. Kovacevich emphasized, Ms. Holmes will ultimately determine what happens next. “You have to ask Ms. Holmes what the steps are,” he said. | 1 |
We’re 11 weeks into the Trump administration. What’s the Senate like these days? I think that the institution — and I do mean all 535 people, but particularly the hundred in the Senate — is filled with really nice and people. I’ve been there 27 months. But who’s counting? My average duration in a job is more like six months, because I’ve done crisis and turnaround stuff for two decades. I’ve been in a lot of companies and and institutions that were really on fire in a lot of ways, the Senate is the least urgent, least serious institution I’ve ever worked in. There’s this constant fighting. You should agree on what you’re arguing about before you argue: We are either going to work at our house tonight or we’re going to make dinner together and play music in the living room or we’re going to go out to eat and go to a movie. But the problem is that, at this particular juncture, there’s also a question of whether this hypothetical movie theater even exists. Why are you playing to this outdated, modernist idea that there are objective facts? [Laughs.] What is wrong with you? We do have to agree on some basic facts, despite this general reluctance to grant them legitimacy. Yeah, it’s a huge problem. I sit in the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s seat on the Senate floor. He’s the author of the saying, Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we’re going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime. That isn’t true. Do you think that infighting creates a situation in which everyday Americans write off all politicians as cheaters and liars? It might explain how Donald Trump won, because it didn’t make any difference to anybody that he seemed immoral — they thought of him as no worse than every other politician. I would argue pretty vociferously that it’s also because of who his opponent was. If Joe Biden would have run against Donald Trump, Biden would have won in a landslide. You have been a constant critic of Trump, even during the primaries. I campaigned with pretty much anybody not named Trump or Huckabee. Including Ted Cruz. Your book, which argues that America’s youths are largely coddled and ill equipped to compete in the global economy, is full of references to ancient history and philosophy. Are you trying to unseat Cruz as the intellectual of the Senate? I don’t see what I’m trying to do as trying to be the intellectual in the Senate. What is it that you’re trying to do? I’m the third or fourth most conservative guy by voting record in the institution, and yet most of the stuff I care about is not really partisan. We have had no foreign policy for the past 28 years for dealing with a War world. And now you layer on nonstate actors, like jihadis, who have a presence in a quarter to a third of all the countries in the world, and the governments in those countries aren’t the main source of power anymore. But that isn’t anywhere near what keeps the spies and generals up at night, about how cyberattacks will transform war and create all these gray areas that aren’t quite war but are warlike. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine what the obvious answer looks like, with the divide between the two parties in trying to figure out a strategy in this new age. | 0 |
Delfin Polanco waits on Thursday morning for a lawyer to help him stay in the country where he raised his son and has lived for 22 years. Like about 40 others, he arrived by 5 a. m. in Lower Manhattan for a legal clinic offered for immigrants by Catholic Charities. It will be hours before he is seen. To pass the time, Mr. Polanco thumbs through pictures on his phone and cards in his wallet. There he is outside the old Yankee Stadium in 2008, behind two men carrying championship trophies, part of the crew that was moving the team into its new home down the block. Here he is on the Teamsters union card that he got in 1999, which lets him work as a mover. And there is his medical card, listing him as a patient of a clinic at Bellevue Hospital Center, where he goes for treatment of the breathing ailments that he got after working on the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. “Look,” Mr. Polanco says. “I had hair. ” Now he is 47 and not much is left. Mr. Polanco moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1995 when he married an American citizen. Along the way, they divorced. “They stamped ‘deport’ on my work paper seven years ago and tell me to come back every year for the inspection,” he said. More people live in New York City in 2017 than at any time in its history nearly half were born outside the United States. The city’s white population has declined by 3. 5 million since 1950. They have been replaced by immigrants. A tribe of people from all over the world saved the city by moving here and going to work. The Trump family made fortunes in New York, thanks to them. With or without permission to be in the country, immigrants drove pistons in the city and national economy — in the service industry, in agriculture, in universities and in jobs. Inevitably, some large, uncountable number are here without permission. The enforcement of immigration laws depends on a cat’s cradle of rules and policies strung together by successive presidential administrations. Over time, the population of people in the United States who do not have citizenship, working papers or other visas is thought to have grown to 11 million. Many national Republicans once advocated comprehensive immigration reform, but such views became heresy with the rise of the Tea Party after the 2008 financial crisis. The political stalemate meant the continued growth of a system that allowed tacit acceptance of people who were apart from their immigration status. Like, for instance, Mr. Polanco. This week, President Trump’s administration announced plans to enforce the laws aggressively by deporting people who are in the country illegally, regardless of their behavior. Those plans may be limited by the sheer logistics, and in public statements the administration has said it will use its resources to find and deport the most dangerous criminals, which was the practice of the Obama administration. Nevertheless, worries about expanded enforcement are driving throngs to clinics like the one held by Catholic Charities every Thursday in the financial district beginning at 8 a. m. according to Mario Russell, the director of immigrant and refugee services for the archdiocese. Many people were turned away, advised to call a hotline, . The first people arrived at the clinic this week at 4:30 a. m. to make sure they could see one of the five lawyers and three counselors. Dionne Raymon, 42, a mother of three who was born in Jamaica and has been in the United States for 24 years, was there by 5. “Last week, I couldn’t see anyone because I didn’t get here until 8:30,” Ms. Raymon said. “I had to get the kids out to school. They are off this week. ” Others spoke about boarding subways at 4 a. m. of getting waylaid in the unfamiliar canyons of Lower Manhattan on previous trips. Ms. Raymon said she had never had a minute’s trouble with the police. Studies have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. “But to live outside the law, you must be honest,” Bob Dylan wrote. “I’ve never been to jail,” Mr. Polanco said. “Tickets, nothing. ” His son, born in the United States, is about to start college, but is still too young to “claim” his father under kinship citizenship eligibility. Mr. Polanco frets that returning to the Dominican Republic will put medical care for his lung problems beyond his means. “I came here, I was young,” Mr. Polanco said. “Now I am old. Old and sick. ” | 1 |
Bernie Sanders Could Replace President Trump With Little-Known Loophole Read this article and then share with your friends. By Matt Masur / huffingtonpost.com
Here is exactly what we need to do to save our great society. The information here is what we’ve all been waiting for. By doing this we can make Bernie the president on Inauguration day rather than President-elect Donald Trump .
Actually, no we can’t. There is no loophole that allows a random person to assume the office of president. That’s pretty basic common sense but yet you clicked or even shared this article anyway. Now that right there is the real point of this post…
Our social media sites have been flooded with misinformation in the past few months. While this has always been a problem, it now appears to have exploded over this election season. We are seeing post after post stating just plain illogical things and this is not a problem unique to any one side.
Even more dangerous are the posts that don’t appear to be far-fetched until you dig into the details. The big problem with that… People don’t dig for the details.
There will be many people who clicked share on this post because of its headline. They may not even click to open the story. They will never actually read these words. Ironically these are the folks who need to hear it the most.
As John Oliver correctly pointed out Sunday night, folks are being fed what they want to hear and they’re eating it up like a starving person. The most important thing in a functional society is a well-informed public. What we have now is not only uninformed but misinformed masses. That’s something that should scare us all. The most important thing in a functional society is a well-informed public. What we have now is not only uninformed but misinformed masses.
How do we combat this problem? Easy, we have to do some work. While I could give a long dissertation on what exactly that means, no one has the patience to read it all, so here are five quick steps that’ll fit in a meme…
1. Read first. Then share. I myself am guilty of basing comments or even clicking share based on the headline. This is the worst thing any of us could do. Stop being lazy.
2. Check the source (and their sources). In the age of new media true and valid information comes from non-traditional sources but so does a lot of garbage. Any article that posts facts, figures or quotes should provide a source for that information. If there is no backup for their claims, move on.
3. Watch out for recycled stories. One thing that seems to be feeding into the misinformation problem is when old stories are being presented as happening now. Check the date on the story before you read on. You’ll be shocked to see how many are from another time and aren’t applicable to the current event you thought they were talking about.
4. If you care about facts, ignore the blatantly slanted. Having a slant or taking a position on a story is not wrong in itself. What is wrong is when these ideas are taken as unbiased fact. You can avoid all of this by simply avoiding those sites to start with. Any website with the words: Conservative, Liberal, Democrat, Republican, etc. in the title are just advertising how slanted they are. That’s ok if you choose to live in your side’s bubble but please don’t have any delusions that these stories reflect the whole picture.
5. Google it. God (and Sergey ) gave us Google for a reason. If you see a story that’s unbelievable or has no sources or even if it does, verify. See if the same facts are reported across multiple outlets. See if anyone disputes these facts. Read these pieces and then make up your mind.
If we could all take these simple steps our society would be a better place. We all have opinions and leanings. There is nothing wrong with that but could we at least all come from a starting point based on facts and reality?
The truth is, sharing illogical things begins to erode YOUR credibility and it makes you look foolish. Trust me, I speak from experience.
Now go share this, please. 0.0 · | 1 |
Students at the University of California Berkeley may not be able to hear conservative commentator Ann Coulter speak on campus — however, they can take a course on a language used in a popular HBO fantasy show. [The university, already embroiled in a free speech controversy, reportedly plans to offer a course inspired by the fictional Dothraki and High Valyrian languages used by characters on the HBO series Game of Thrones. David J. Peterson, who was hired to create the show’s languages, will teach the course titled “The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention. ” Peterson told Berkeley News that the Game of Thrones world created by author George R. R. Martin “will serve as a kind of framing device for the course so students can focus on the linguistic details of their creations, not the fictional side. ” Peterson will teach the course, which is being offered during the May 22 to June 30 summer session. No stranger to the Hollywood language scene, Peterson has helped develop languages for such shows as the Syfy channel’s Defiance series, Marvel’s Thor, and NBC’s Emerald City. The UC Berkeley fight song “Sons of California” has already been remixed in the Dothraki language. The Game of Thrones language course announcement comes on the heels of conservative commentator Ann Coulter’s decision to cancel her speech at UC Berkley, after law enforcement sources told Fox News that there was a “99% chance” of violent attacks on campus by activists if the speech went ahead. The university had initially canceled Coulter’s speech and then rescheduled it for a week later, when the majority of its students did not have class. The two student groups who invited Coulter filed a lawsuit against the school on Monday, alleging its initial cancelation of the event was discriminatory and a violation of First Amendment rights. The seventh season of Game of Thrones returns to HBO on July 16. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson | 0 |
President Donald Trump revealed to reporters that he is close to announcing his choice to fill the Supreme Court justice seat that has been vacant since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. [“I’ll be making my decision this week. We’ll be announcing next week,” Trump told reporters after signing five executive orders Tuesday morning. “We have outstanding candidates, and we will pick a truly great Supreme Court justice. ” Trump’s announcement caught reporters by surprise, as Senate Democrats have already vowed to stall the process as long as possible. “If the nominee is not bipartisan and mainstream, we absolutely will keep the seat open,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Trump announced a list of potential Supreme Court nominees in May 2016 when he was campaigning in the Republican primary: Steven Colloton, Steven Colloton of Iowa is a judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, a position he has held since President George W. Bush appointed him in 2003. Judge Colloton has a résumé that also includes distinguished service as the U. S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, a special assistant to the attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and a lecturer of law at the University of Iowa. He received his law degree from Yale, and he clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Judge Colloton is an Iowa native. Allison Eid, Allison Eid of Colorado is an associate justice of the Colorado Supreme Court. Colorado Governor Bill Owens appointed her to the seat in 2006 she was later retained for a full term by the voters (with 75 percent of voters favoring retention). Prior to her judicial service, Justice Eid served as Colorado’s solicitor general and as a law professor at the University of Colorado. Justice Eid attended the University of Chicago Law School, and she clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Raymond Gruender, Raymond Gruender of Missouri has been a judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit since his 2004 appointment by President George W. Bush. Judge Gruender, who sits in St. Louis, Missouri, has extensive prosecutorial experience, culminating with his time as the U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. Judge Gruender received a law degree and an M. B. A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Thomas Hardiman, Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania has been a judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit since 2007. Prior to serving as a circuit judge, he served as a judge of the U. S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania since 2003. Before his judicial service, Judge Hardiman worked in private practice in Washington, D. C. and Pittsburgh. Judge Hardiman was the first in his family to attend college, graduating from Notre Dame. Raymond Kethledge, Raymond Kethledge of Michigan has been a judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit since 2008. Before his judicial service, Judge Kethledge served as judiciary counsel to Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham, worked as a partner in two law firms, and worked as an counsel for the Ford Motor Company. Judge Kethledge obtained his law degree from the University of Michigan and clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy. Joan Larsen, Joan Larsen of Michigan is an associate justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Justice Larsen was a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law from 1998 until her appointment to the bench. In 2002, she temporarily left academia to work as an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Justice Larsen received her law degree from Northwestern and clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. Thomas Lee, Thomas Lee of Utah has been an Associate Justice of the Utah Supreme Court since 2010. Beginning in 1997, he served on the faculty of Brigham Young University Law School, where he still teaches in an adjunct capacity. Justice Lee was deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Division from 2004 to 2005. Justice Lee attended the University of Chicago Law School, and he clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Lee is also the son of former U. S. Solicitor General Rex Lee and the brother of current U. S. Senator Mike Lee. William Pryor, William H. Pryor, Jr. of Alabama is a judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He has served on the court since 2004. Judge Pryor became the Alabama attorney general in 1997 upon Jeff Sessions’s election to the U. S. Senate. Judge Pryor was then elected in his own right in 1998 and reelected in 2002. In 2013, Judge Pryor was confirmed to a term on the United States Sentencing Commission. Judge Pryor received his law degree from Tulane, and he clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. David Stras, David Stras of Minnesota has been an associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court since 2010. After his initial appointment, he was elected to a term in 2012. Prior to his judicial service, Judge Stras worked as a legal academic at the University of Minnesota Law School. In his time there, he wrote extensively about the function and structure of the judiciary. Justice Stras received his law degree and an M. B. A. from the University of Kansas. He clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Diane Sykes, Diane Sykes of Wisconsin has served as a judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since 2004. Prior to her federal appointment, Judge Sykes had been a Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court since 1999 and a Wisconsin trial court judge of both civil and criminal matters before that. Judge Sykes received her law degree from Marquette. Don Willett, Don Willett of Texas has been a Justice of the Texas Supreme Court since 2005. He was initially appointed by Governor Rick Perry and has been reelected by the voters twice. Prior to his judicial service, Judge Willett worked as a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, as an adviser in George W. Bush’s gubernatorial and presidential administrations, as deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, and as a deputy attorney general under Attorney General Greg Abbott. Justice Willett received his law degree and a master’s degree from Duke. Big Government, Donald Trump, Supreme Court | 1 |
Time for FBI director Comey to go ‹ › Ian Greenhalgh is a photographer and historian with a particular interest in military history and the real causes of conflicts. His studies in history and background in the media industry have given him a keen insight into the use of mass media as a creator of conflict in the modern world. His favored areas of study include state sponsored terrorism, media manufactured reality and the role of intelligence services in manipulation of populations and the perception of events. Gamechanger: Russia successfully tests its first-ever hypersonic weapon By Ian Greenhalgh on October 30, 2016 Russia successfully tests its first-ever hypersonic weapon
The hypersonic aircraft, known as “article 4202” or “15U71” was successfully tested on October 25 for the first time. All avionics and electronic systems, as well as the control system of the vehicle are entirely of Russian production.
The weapon is capable of speeding up to 15 Max, or 7 km/sec. The vehicle was designed to be installed at prospective intercontinental ballistic missiles, instead of conventional warheads. The “4202” vehicle starts working at an altitude of about 100 km and flies to the target at the speed of 5-7 km/s. Before entering dense layers of the atmosphere, directly above the target, the hypersonic aircraft performs a complex maneuver that makes it difficult to interception by missile defense systems of the enemy.
Noteworthy, the project of hypersonic warheads called “Albatross” appeared in the USSR in the mid-1980s, as a response to USA’s attempts to create a missile defense system within the concept of “star wars.” However, due to the technical difficulties, the project was shut down. In the mid-1990s, the Scientific and Production Association (NPO) resumed the development of the new weapon under the number “4202.”
According to sources at Roscosmos state corporation, the successful tests of the new hypersonic aircraft were made possible with the help of the intensive import substitution program. For instance, Russian engineers had to get rid of the control system, previously manufactured by Ukrainian company Hartron. The successfully implemented program provided an opportunity to resume the tests. As a result, all the avionics and electronic systems, as well as the control system now completely consist of Russian components.
The Russian Army is to receive new hypersonic weapons by 2020. The development of high-speed anti-aircraft missiles has made it possible to intercept and destroy any modern aircraft or missile at any altitude. The way out is to create the aircraft capable of flying faster than interceptor missiles.
For this particular reason, major powers of the world, such as the USA, Russia and China, rushed to develop hypersonic flight vehicles of different types and purposes.
China, for example, tested the hypersonic WU-14 glider on 9 January 2015. The Chinese aircraft is launched into outer space with the help of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then, the vehicle develops the speed of 10M, that is, more than 12,300 km/h, and dives onto the target. State-of-the-art air defense systems are unable to detect and intercept a target flying at this speed.
China has thus become the third country in the world, after Russia and the United States, which has the technology of hypersonic vehicles for both nuclear and conventional weapons. In fact, the Chinese have created a warhead with control surfaces that can maneuver in flight thus becoming practically invulnerable. However, this vehicle does not have its own engine, so the Chinese creation has become another weapon for “the poorest.”
Russia currently works on different types of hypersonic scramjet missiles, which can be launched from land, ships or aircraft.
Pravda.Ru requested an expert opinion from chief editor of “Arms Export” magazine, Andrey Frolov.
“How competitive is Russia in the development of hypersonic aircraft?”
“Russia is at the forefront. This is not the first test, I think that in the near future these systems will be passed into service at the army. The Americans do not have such weapons yet, the Chinese are in the development process.”
“Are there any other details available?”
“This is a secret subject. We know that such weapons have been created – and this is a lot to know already.” Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Ian Greenhalgh on October 30, 2016, With 385 Reads Filed under Military . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . Both comments and pings are currently closed. | 1 |
Susie Breitbart, the widow of Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, talked to Greg Gutfeld of Fox News on “The One with Greg Gutfeld” about her husband’s storied career in an interview last week. [Gutfeld began with a story of his own: how he met first met Andrew Breitbart while writing for the Huffington Post, which Andrew helped launch and edit. It was when Andrew encouraged Gutfeld to follow his own instincts (as opposed to micromanaging his talent) that the Fox News personality realized that Breitbart had “major balls. ” “I remember that, and I remember hearing about you long before I met you because he was fascinated with what you were doing, and what you were writing,” Susie Breitbart said with a chuckle. “He loved your style, he loved your humor and your insight. He was, I think at that time, also really trying to own who he was, and become his own person, and no longer be in the shadows of people like Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington. ” “The way you described him saying ‘Can you change that?’ and then calling you back and saying ‘no, wait, keep it the way it is,’ I think that was him sort of coming into his own at the same time and going, ‘Let’s own this, let’s be who we are,’” she told Gutfeld. Gutfeld credited Andrew Breitbart with writing half of his best jokes. “I would send a piece that would be like, let’s say 1500 words. It would come back 3000 words because he added so many jokes, and some of them were so absurd and surreal and like from another planet that it would take a while to understand what he was doing. Then I would edit it out and I would go, ‘No, wait, I can’t edit this out, it’s too good!” Gutfeld reminisced. “He used to call those your double secret blog posts,” Susie Breitbart said. “You were kind of sneaking in through a back door of the Huffington Post and writing things you weren’t really supposed to. ” Gutfeld compared the “unusual group of friends” around Andrew and Susie to the eclectic cast of a “1970s talk show. ” “That was a really interesting group,” Susie agreed. “I can’t remember who initially formed that group. I want to say I think it was Dale Launer, a screenwriter. He wrote My Cousin Vinny, among other things. That group was just an eclectic group of writers and journalists, and not necessarily politically people. Andrew was always just fascinated with storytellers, loved being around all types of people. ” Gutfeld recalled his surprise at learning Susie’s father is prolific actor Orson Bean, “who was for me kind of a Sixties and Seventies legend because he was on everything. ” “He was!” she agreed. “To some people my dad was a household name, and some people had never heard of him. He’s so many things to so many different people, because he has done so much. He’s a raconteur, most notably. He hosted The Tonight Show over a hundred times when Johnny Carson was absent, or he was a guest on The Tonight Show within those appearances. He’s been on Broadway, television, movies. He often gets recognized, and it kind of spans across various generations. ” “When we were growing up, game shows were huge, and they’re making a comeback, a lot of them,” she said, remembering her father’s many appearances on classic shows. “The Match Game, Tattletales — which he did with my mom, Caroline, which was like a couples’ game show. He did To Tell the Truth, and I think Hollywood Squares, all of those were a huge part of my growing up too. ” Gutfeld recalled visiting Orson Bean’s house and discovering he kept a news clipping about the terror attack pinned to his refrigerator door, because he said it was something that should be remembered every day. Susie Bean Breitbart said she believes the clipping holds that position on her father’s refrigerator to this very day. She hastened to add that her father is hardly a brooding man. “He just finished doing a show about his life. His life was very heavy and tragic as a child. Throughout the show, he would tell some really, really tragic story — and then follow it up immediately with a magic trick and a joke, to sort of lighten the mood,” she said. “You can watch his show, it’s on YouTube. That’s his style. ” Susie said she was never a political person herself, although her father and later her husband became major political presences. “I always had my opinions, of course, but I was a registered independent from the first time I was old enough to vote. The first time I did vote was for H. Ross Perot, because Andrew and I were just kind of fascinated, and amused, and just trying to figure it all out,” she recalled. “At that time Andrew was becoming increasingly obsessed with the Clarence Thomas hearings, and politics became more prominent in his life. He became more interested in all of that,” she said. “I was never political in the way he was. He started to be aware of the effect it was having. He would think, ‘Susie never signed up for this,’ because as he became more of a public figure people would approach us and say things at dinner parties, and at schools. It’s not something I had really been prepared for,” said Susie Breitbart. “I think I always knew that Andrew was going to make a name for himself. When we met and started dating, he was a waiter. I looked at him and I said, ‘This guy’s going to do something.’ He wanted to be a comedy writer, so I figured it was going to be that. He always was very funny. I never figured it would be this, but actually it doesn’t surprise me. It was only a matter of, ‘What’s he going to do next? What’s he going to be?’ Because it was going to be something,” she said. Gutfeld recalled that politics was almost never the topic of discussion when he hung around with the Andrew Breitbart. “He wasn’t angry,” he said. “I remember we all went on the National Review cruise together, and you and Andrew were both panelists, but other than the work you were doing there and the reason we were there, it was really just a vacation with friends. He was a lighthearted person. He could talk to anyone about anything. It didn’t have to be politics,” she said. “At some point that became difficult to navigate sometimes. I came home to our first apartment, when we first started dating, to find Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to get out, because they were literally trapped in there. He was so fascinated with exploring people, and stories, and ideas. He could talk to anyone about anything, and he knew something about everything,” she said. Of course, politics came to dominate Andrew Breitbart’s later career, becoming “the reason people wanted to talk to him in some instances. ” Gutfeld remembered Andrew’s particularly strong feelings about 80s New Wave music. “He had this Friday night Twitter DJ thing that he would do with 80s music,” Susie said. “I’m still not on Twitter, so I wasn’t able to really follow it when it was happening, but he loved it. He was obsessed with New Wave, British pop. ” Gutfeld asked for Susie’s take on the most facet of Andrew’s personality. “I think because he considered himself to be somewhat of a warrior, people assume that he was an instigator,” she observed. “He really wasn’t a . He liked people to a fault. It was pretty easy to ingratiate yourself to Andrew. He was someone who felt that he needed to stand up for what was right, and stand up to bullies. There was this very intense side of him, but the side that people didn’t really get to see when he became more of a public figure was that he was such a lighthearted, funny, crazy, smart, sensitive guy. ” “There is some of that out there,” she added. “He went on your show Red Eye, and I think tweaked his nipples after snorting a powdered form of red wine or something. ” “That’s true!” Gutfeld laughed. “That’s out there, but I don’t think most people are Googling ‘Breitbart’ along with the terms ‘goofy, lighthearted, silly.’ They’re more Googling ‘controversy, Trump,’ you know,” said Susie. Gutfeld recalled how Andrew was once thrown off his game before a Red Eye appearance because he was worried his daughter was mad at him for leaving a slumber party early. “That was a bigger deal to him than anything,” Gutfeld said. “And he always used to say that he was so lucky he was married to you. He would say to me, ‘I can’t believe she married me.’ Because we would sit and commiserate over stuff, and he would say that. He would just laugh and go, ‘How did I get this lucky? ’” Gutfeld laughed as he recalled the great downside to Andrew’s easy affection for people: “He would introduce you to somebody that is not a good person, but he was so forgiving … he took in stray dogs, you know what I mean?” “He did,” Susie agreed. “My dad always says about his wife Alley when he’s ready to leave a party, he says, ‘She has a character flaw: She likes people.’ Andrew and I had to develop a kind of shorthand at some point that meant — me looking at him which said, ‘I love you, but I’m ready to go home. I’ll be taking the car, and you can take a taxi in three hours when you’re done talking to this guy. ’” “And sometimes that guy would come home with him, and he would stay at our house for a weekend,” she added. “I’m not kidding. He would bring people home, and just the way he opens my dad’s guest house to you … ” “Yes! I was one of those stray dogs!” Gutfeld cried. “Sometimes we got lucky and the stray dog was Greg Gutfeld. Sometimes it wasn’t so lucky,” said Susie. “He was really interested in just exploring people’s character and personalities. Sometimes he would delve in without really vetting the situation, I would say. He was a nice person, too. He didn’t want to turn people away, I suppose,” she said. Susie Breitbart said writing has been part of her healing process. “Initially I started writing for my kids, because I want them to remember who he was as a person. It’s so easy, I think of my own childhood so I can conjure up stories when I’m asked, like what was it like growing up with my dad, or whatever,” she recalled. “Really I feel like most of the time I’m just culling through like a shoebox full of Polaroid pictures, and I have to really make myself remember. So I want to put down these stories on paper for my kids, and I want to collect stories from other people who had personal interactions with Andrew, because I don’t want them to just see the biased tidbits that are out there on the Internet, that really only capture his persona,” she said. “They don’t necessarily capture who he was, this whole other side of him,” she maintained. “He was this intense, and thoughtful, and intelligent person — but he was also, like you said, a goofball. I think you referred to him recently as just a big hairy dad. And he was that! He was so many things. He was such a good friend to so many people, and so many people who disagreed with him. He was all of those things. I want them to remember that. ” | 1 |
Canada and EU sign ‘thoroughly undemocratic’ CETA trade deal Opposition groups note that the deal could still fail legal scrutiny and ratification in Europe By Nadia Prupis
Canada and the European Union signed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) on Sunday amid widespread protests against the controversial deal that came back to life after negotiations stalled over objections from Wallonia, Belgium.
Environmental and democracy groups who opposed the agreement issued cautious statements condemning the signing but noting that CETA was not a done deal.
“This agreement will probably not survive the democratic and legal scrutiny of the ratification process over the coming months. It’s time for our governments to break rank with corporate lobbyists and redesign a trade policy that respects democracy and promotes the public interest,” said Shira Stanton, trade policy adviser at Greenpeace EU.
CETA now faces a vote in the European Parliament and ratification by the parliaments of the EU’s 28 countries.
If it passes, CETA would create a legal system that allows corporations to sue governments for perceived loss of profit. That framework will also be put to scrutiny by the European Court of Justice and the German constitutional court, and if it fails to stand up would invalidate CETA.
The deal has long been opposed on the grounds that it would harm human rights, democracy, and the climate, among other risks.
Alfred de Zayas, the United Nations independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, said in a statement Saturday that each country should hold a referendum on signing the deal before doing so, warning that it was a “corporate-driven, fundamentally flawed treaty.”
“There is a legitimate fear that CETA will dilute environmental standards, food security, and health and labor protection,” he said. “A treaty that strengthens the position of investors, transnational corporations, and monopolies at the expense of the public interest conflicts with the duty of states to protect all people under their jurisdiction from internal and external threats.”
Global Justice Now (GJN) trade and migration campaigner Guido Tallman tweeted a picture of the massive deal and wrote, “Here’s CETA. Any MEP planning to vote for it, should be sure to read it first. All of it. So they know what they’re voting for.”
Throughout Europe this weekend, CETA opponents took to the streets to protest the signing. In London on Saturday, many posed outside the European Commission office dressed as zombies to symbolize CETA’s seeming resurrection, urging commissioners to “stop CETA rising from the dead.”
In Brussels, some protesters broke through a barricade and attempted to storm the European Commission building before being dragged away by police.
GJN executive director Nick Dearden said Saturday , “The signing ceremony . . . means that CETA has been brought back from the dead for now—but it is a ticking time bomb. The Wallonia parliament has a promise that they will be able to stop the ratification of CETA when they get a formal vote on it, and unless there are substantial changes, they—and hopefully other parliaments—will use that veto.”
“CETA would open up our government to a deluge of court cases by North American multinational corporations and investors,” Dearden continued. “It presents a threat to our ability to protect the environment, to protect the public and to limit the power of big banks. It’s thoroughly undemocratic and must be stopped.”
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Nadia Prupis is a Common Dreams staff writer. Special Reports . Bookmark the permalink . | 0 |
on November 6, 2016 3:40 pm ·
Trying to catch the liar of liars in a lie isn’t hard. Getting him and his campaign to acknowledge that Trump is the liar of liars is. Same thing with bullying, but The New York Times put together a spread of all the bullyish things Trump has said and tweeted, and to whom. Now, the Toronto Star ‘s Daniel Dale has been tracking Trump’s lies for just six weeks, and the paper has compiled a complete list of those lies, which you can find here .
There are literally hundreds of lies in Trump’s speeches. They’re not all 100% unique, but this is probably the final and ultimate proof that Trump will say anything to smear anyone, including his enemies, while keeping his supporters happy.
Is there any presidential candidate in history that has lied this much? Tons of people claim Hillary is a master liar, but first, she’s actually more honest than most politicians. Second, even if she could be considered anything like a master liar, she still could not compete with Trump the Liar in any way, shape or form.
The Star put the lies into a whopping 20 categories: Clinton’s policies, WTF, Daesh/Middle East, Clinton’s record, African Americans/Inner cities, The Clintons’ corruption, Rigged election, Trade/Economy, Health care, Trump’s endorsements, Refugees/Immigration, Polls, Obama’s record, The campaign, Russia, Trump’s record, Taxes, Sex assault allegations, Clinton’s health and Government corruption.
They also compiled a list of the top 10 types of lies Trump has told and gave more detailed analysis, beginning with, “The electoral system is rigged.” Of course, it’s rigged against him:
“After plummeting in the polls after the first two debates, Trump began to repeatedly question the fairness of the election. ‘Rigged’ became his catchword.
He claimed Hillary Clinton campaign workers hired ‘thugs’ to cause violence at his rallies, twisting the evidence from an undercover video to unfairly disparage Clinton. He claimed there was widespread voter fraud in Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis — cities with large black populations that heavily favour Democrats.
In Greeley, Colo., Trump told his supporters if they don’t trust mail-in ballots, they should vote again in person. So, one did. Trump supporter Terri Lynn Rote, a 55-year-old from Iowa, was charged by police for suspicion of voting twice.”
Nobody’s committing voter suppression and fraud quite like Trumpsters and Republicans.
Another is, “Muslims are risky.” This touches on his assertions that we know nothing about refugees coming from Syria, who could be the great Trojan Horse of our time:
“His claims that Syrian refugees — 99 per cent are Muslim — are terrorists plays to the fears of the “other,” even though they are extensively vetted and are predominantly women and children. And their numbers is nowhere near Trump’s claims — about 13,000 have been admitted to the United States in 2016.”
“The polls favour Trump.” Har de har har – Trump only looks at the polls he likes, and they’re usually unscientific online polls or other dubious polls. Very few of the established, scientific polls favor him. Nevertheless:
“It seems clear Trump manipulates, exaggerates or makes up polls that make it sound as if he is doing better than he actually is. This ‘poll denialism’ gives his supporters licence to dismiss negative polling data, suggests CNN.
His false claims cast doubt on the legitimacy of mainstream polling — and perhaps even the vote itself. If supporters feel Trump should be doing better, then the idea of a rigged election seems more credible.
On Oct. 24, he said ‘I won the last two debates, and every poll showed it.’ In fact, every scientific poll showed that he lost.
Of course, when unscientific online polls came out in his favour, Trump was quick to promote — and exaggerate — those numbers.”
But these are just a few of his biggest, most repeated lies. He has also: Falsely said on Twitter, “The failing NYTimes reporters don’t even call us anymore, they just write whatever they want to write, making up sources along the way!” Falsely said, “By ‘open borders,’ [Hillary] means totally unlimited immigration.” Falsely said, “Hillary’s plan includes an open border with the Middle East.” Falsely called NBC anchor Lester Holt, the moderator of the first debate, “a Democrat.” Falsely said, “Wow, just came out on secret tape that Crooked Hillary wants to take in as many Syrians as possible.” Falsely said the U.S. provided Iran “$150 billion” as part of the nuclear deal. Falsely said, “In San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment of the two people that killed 14 and wounded many, many people…Muslims have to report the problems when they see them.” Falsely asserted that Clinton has “been fighting ISIS (her) entire adult life.” Falsely said, “All together, the Hillary Clinton plan would bring in 620,000 refugees in her first term.” Falsely claimed he had been acknowledged to be correct in declaring NATO “obsolete because it doesn’t cover terror;” falsely suggested NATO created an anti-terror position because of his comments. Falsely claimed Clinton didn’t release cholesterol or EKG information Falsely said sexual assault allegations against him “have been largely debunked.” Falsely said, apparently of sexual assault accuser Summer Zervos, “The one young lady has five family members saying what she said is absolute nonsense.” Falsely said “I did not. I did not” to Clinton’s charge that he thinks Climate change is a “hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.” Falsely said, “I was against going into Iraq. And it’s so well-documented.” Falsely said, “Our taxes are so high. Just about the highest in the world.”
And so many more, just in the last six weeks! Yes, many of them are repeats, but lies are lies. If Trump sees this, he’ll likely throw a livid fit about it and claim that the paper’s lying, and continue to sell the myth that he’s not the liar of liars being caught in a squillion lies.
To see the full list and detailed analysis, click here .
Featured image by Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images Share this Article! Author: Rika Christensen Rika Christensen is an experienced writer and loves debating politics. Engage with her and see more of her work by following her on Facebook and Twitter . Search | 1 |
It was a stunning act of terror, an assault on the World Trade Center that shook New York City. The long wake of its memory still slices through those who were there and the families of those who died. That was 1993. Roughly eight years before the twin towers were destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, the buildings were badly damaged on a snowy afternoon by a truck bomb in a basement garage that killed six people. On Saturday, Omar Abdel Rahman — a blind cleric whose fiery speech exhorted violence and galvanized those who executed the attack, according to prosecutors — died at 78 in a federal prison in North Carolina. He was serving a life sentence for plotting a series of assaults never carried out: bombs to be set in tunnels and buildings in an attack designed to bring New York to its knees. In the city, news of his death, from complications of diabetes and coronary artery disease, has caused many who experienced the bombing, whether as rescuers, government officials or witnesses, to recall the smoke and the gaping crater. They have also been led to consider something more existential: a February afternoon when, in an instant, the city experienced a sensation now all too familiar but then quite new — vulnerability. “Those who went through the ’93 experience remember it as the beginning of the loss of innocence,” said Anthony E. Shorris, then the first deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. After the blast, Mr. Shorris spent a month inside the crater in the garage beneath the World Trade Center plaza as teams shored it up and the police dug for bodies. “Remembering a time when we didn’t think things like this could happen, and now we think about it all the time,” Mr. Shorris, now the deputy mayor of New York City, said. He paused. “All the time. ” The explosion, on Feb. 26, 1993, injured about 1, 000 people and could be heard on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The percussion was felt, some said, even farther north than Harlem. But New Yorkers thought of vehicle bombings as something that happened elsewhere. At first, the city sought more innocent explanations. Stanley Brezenoff, then the executive director of the Port Authority, which owned the World Trade Center property and had offices on the 65th floor, said: “People walked out of their offices and looked at each other. ‘Did something happen? Did a generator go out? Was there some kind of a storm that we weren’t aware of? ’” He made the call to evacuate, and staff members carried a colleague in a wheelchair down more than 20 flights. “I don’t think we stopped to reflect on the enormity of what happened,” said Mr. Brezenoff, now the interim head of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. The Port Authority launched an effort to repair the stricken tower, reopening it in a month. “A lot of the response was, ‘They can’t do that to us,’” Mr. Brezenoff said. “It sounds almost quaint now. ” Raymond W. Kelly, who was then at the start of the first of his two stints as police commissioner, said, “In terms of modern terrorism, the threat was there, but I don’t think it was seen as a threat to this country. ” The sense was, he said, “it was going on in other places. ” It took about a day to definitively determine the blast was terrorism, and even then, the city was unsure who its enemies were, Mr. Kelly said. Speculation about their origin included the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. The office of the governor at the time, Mario M. Cuomo, was on the 57th floor of 2 World Trade Center. After the boom, no one there panicked, mostly because it “never occurred to us that it would be a bomb,” said Deborah Sale, who was chief of staff to Stan Lundine, then the lieutenant governor. Using their limited knowledge from infrequent fire drills and holding on to handrails, employees gingerly crept down the stairs, Ms. Sale said. “There was no power at all, and it was pitch black,” she said, recalling that she had used a scarf to cover her nose and mouth in the smoky stairwell. The new reality of terrorism led to changes in the towers themselves. Afterward, emergency lights were installed, and screenings were added for people entering the building. Norman Steisel, who was first deputy mayor at the time, said the safety improvements saved lives on Sept. 11. “Those buildings were evacuated pretty quickly,” he said, referring to the floors below where the planes had hit. “Just imagine if more and more people were trapped downstairs. ” In 1995, Mr. Abdel Rahman was convicted, along with nine others, on charges of seditious conspiracy in Federal District Court in Manhattan for a plot to bomb landmarks and infrastructure hubs, although the plans were never carried out. While prosecutors asserted he had been involved in the 1993 attack, six other men were convicted after the vehicle identification number from a rental van linked to the perpetrators was found in the rubble. Mr. Kelly said he believed the conspirators’ web of connections to groups like Al Qaeda had not been fully mined, even though data was discovered linking some to a somewhat obscure leader. His name was Osama bin Laden. “It should have been a huge call for the federal government and the city, and it wasn’t,” he said. “And we paid the price on Sept. 11. ” Although Mr. Abdel Rahman’s name has over time become linked in many minds to the 1993 attack, it has not for Lynne F. Stewart, his defense lawyer in his 1995 trial. She believes he is innocent. Ms. Stewart was convicted in 2005 of smuggling messages on behalf of the imprisoned sheikh and sentenced to a decade in prison, which she began serving about seven years ago. She was released in 2014 when a judge reduced her sentence after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Speaking from her hospital bed in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan a few days after the sheikh’s death, Ms. Stewart expressed the view that Mr. Abdel Rahman’s fiery rhetoric was a matter of free speech, a belief shared by many in the Arab world. “We can name a lot of names in American history where people were convicted of not doing anything, and he is just the latest in a long line of American heroes who were convicted wrongfully,” she said. | 1 |
Condé Nast Publications might be sitting on a gold mine: its archive of some eight million photographs and illustrations from Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue, Architectural Digest and other magazines. Now, given the tenuous state of the media industry, the company has plans to exploit it. The archive is housed on the 15th floor of a building not far from Condé Nast’s headquarters at One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. Photographs and magazines, some going back more than 100 years, are stored in plastic slips and stacked in folders or tucked away in cabinets. Down the hall from the main room is a locker, where original slides and transparencies are cataloged out of harm’s way. Here you will find the first cover of Vogue, from Dec. 17, 1892, a sketch of a debutante clad in a ball gown and floating on what appears to be a cloud pillow. And here is a photograph of Coco Chanel lounging on a sofa, taken by the Vogue photographer Horst P. Horst, who died in 1999. Binders stand on metal shelves, packed with transparencies from runway shows in New York and Paris, a chronicle of shifting necklines, hems and bejeweled bodices. “This is the history of fashion,” said Ivan Shaw, 48, the former executive photo director of Vogue, who was named Condé Nast’s photography director for the archive in June. If all goes according to plan, much of this material will soon be the stuff of prints, coffee mugs, tote bags, pillows and such. Further, the company will invite the known as influencers to explore the archive — videographers in tow — to discuss their favorite pieces and grab the interest of their audiences. Mr. Shaw is part of a team charged with expanding sales of the archival goods. Since his appointment, as a major part of the initiative, he has been readying an online store, to be called Condé Nast Editions. Until recently, the archive team’s priority was preservation. But given the industrywide losses in print advertising, Condé Nast and other media companies are turning to new sources of revenue. “These images have unprecedented value,” said Cathy Hoffman Glosser, who was hired as the company’s senior vice president for licensing in 2015. “And we want these assets to become more accessible. ” Mr. Shaw calls the trove a time machine. “There is a story about every picture from an artist, what he or she has taken,” he said. He mentioned Edward Steichen, who worked for Vogue and Vanity Fair for 15 years beginning in the 1920s. “When I’m holding a photograph by Edward Steichen, for that moment, I am there. ” One of the photographers whose work has gained new attention since the opening of the archive is Horst, a favorite of Mr. Shaw’s, whose Vogue career flourished under the editor Diana Vreeland in the 1960s. In October, Condé Nast published a Horst volume, “Around That Time: Horst at Home in Vogue,” edited by Hamish Bowles. In addition to producing the book, Mr. Shaw curated exhibitions of Horst’s work at SOCO Gallery in Charlotte, N. C. and Venus Over Los Angeles in California. Others of note whose work sits in the archive and may soon be available to the wider world include Arthur Elgort, Robert Frank, George Herbert Matter, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, John Rawlings and Bert Stern, and the illustrators Miguel Covarrubias and Bob Staake. Condé Nast is not free to make commercial use of all its artists’ works, however Annie Leibovitz, who shoots for Vanity Fair and Vogue, owns the rights to her photographs. In a of the archive’s appeal, Paddle8 recently offered three limited editions of The New Yorker’s May 2, 2016, “Purple Rain” cover illustration, a tribute to Prince by the artist Bob Staake, for $2, 700 apiece. (One has sold thus far.) Buyers with lighter wallets paid $95 for prints of the same cover at The New Yorker online store (189 were sold, Mr. Shaw said) or $325 for a signed, version of the magazine cover (fans bought 121 of those). Mr. Shaw said he had two exhibitions and book projects in development on 1970s fashion photography, drawing on Vogue’s library, and a documentary in the works on Mr. Elgort, 76, the Vogue photographer. Camilla Nickerson, a fashion editor at Vogue who worked with Mr. Shaw, said, “He has had to deal with a lot personalities and egos and he is good at being able to cope with their enormous needs. ” But Mr. Shaw seems most interested in the images themselves. While flipping through a 1957 copy of Architectural Digest, he lingered over a picture by Julius Shulman, whose photographs of Southern California architecture captured midcentury style. “You really feel like what the room would be like,” Mr. Shaw said, gazing at a Shulman photograph of a chic living room. “It’s not just a document. Look at the reproduction quality. I could look at these pictures all day long. ” | 1 |
Bill White November 10, 2016 Here, On The Other Side
I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve just stepped out of H. G. Wells’ famous time machine and I’m standing on the other side of a great gulf in time.
After over a year of grueling, divisive political campaigning, Donald Trump has finally won the election to become the 45th president of these United States.
If anything, this election has divided this country even more than the last eight years of Obama’s presidency.
Democrats and Republicans have always been opposites, but since the makeup of these two parties has split along liberal/conservative lines, their opposition to one another has become even more obvious. No longer is it just that they support opposite sides of the same issue, now they don’t even see it as the same issue.
What I mean by this is well illustrated by the recent controversy over transgender bathroom rights .
To liberals, the issue is fair treatment for what is clearly a minority group. They apparently can’t even see that giving that fair treatment puts women and girls at risk. But to the conservatives, the issue is all about protecting those girls and women. If the transgenders feel slighted by that, sorry, but safety has to come before their feelings.
So now we have a new president elect, who somehow has to unite this divided nation and govern for all. That will be a monumental task, even without Obama having spent the last eight years trying to create division along whatever lines he could.
The question is, is Trump up to the challenge? For that matter, is anyone capable of uniting us once again?
The White House?
Of course, I have to say that winning the election doesn’t guarantee much of anything, right now. While Trump is the president elect, Obama is still in office. With all the election fraud that’s been going on this election, I have to wonder if the Democrats have some plan to keep him out of office, even if they have to break the law to do so.
George Soros, the Democrat sugar daddy and puppet master all but said that they do. In a televised interview, he said that Trump would win the popular election, but that Hillary would ultimately occupy the White House. How can that be? What did he mean by that remark?
Until inauguration day in January, things are still at risk. The Democrats could try to raise legal issues, saying that the count was inaccurate, as they did in the 2000 presidential elections. This seems to have become standard policy for the Dems, who seem to think that there’s no way that they could lose an election. After all, they’re the “elect.”
There’s also the possibility of something happening with the Electoral College vote on December 19th, or for that matter, when they deliver their votes to the Senate President, Joe Biden on December 28th.
There could even be problems when Congress meets to do their official count of the votes on January 6th. With all the election fraud that’s come to light in the primaries and general election, the possibility of fraud in the Electoral College can’t be ignored.
Then there’s Obama himself. Someone wrote an article about how Obama will stay in office, “impeaching” the citizens of the United States for not voting in Hillary Clinton. While I’m fairly sure that the article in question was a gag piece, it has made its way around social media a couple of times.
But there is something that Obama could do, and I’ve written about it before. That is, he could declare martial law, suspending the Constitution. All he would need is a good enough excuse to pass scrutiny.
That excuse could come from widespread violence or social unrest; and he’s got the means to make that happen. The police in Los Angeles and other major cities are preparing for mass riots (which liberals call “demonstrations”) in the wake of the election.
ISIS has also called for violence, specifically on election day. While I haven’t heard any reports of terrorist incidents happening, that’s not to say that they still can’t. They have already shown their ability to infiltrate the United States and their capability to operate here. The big question is how many people there are here who claim an affiliation with ISIS and how well they can organize themselves to sweep the country with violence.
Should either of these groups rise up and fulfill their promises, we could see a bloodbath in the streets. That would be all the excuse that Obama would need, in order to declare martial law and keep Trump out of office.
Whether he could get away with that, or whether he would be forcibly removed from the White House in such an event is yet to be seen. At that point, it would be up to the military and the Secret Service to remember their vows and decide to take action.
The President Elect
But let’s assume for a moment that none of this happens and the transition of governmental power goes through smoothly, as it has so many times before. What then can we expect?
The first big question that’s in everyone’s mind is whether Trump will live up to his campaign promises or not. The mainstream media has been calling him a liar for months now, even if that required them lying to do so. They’ve painted him with the same brush used on any politician, that of bending the truth to meet their needs and telling the people what they want to hear, just so that they can garner votes.
The real question is whether Trump is just another politician or if he’s who he claims to be; and the kicker is that nobody truly knows. Since the mainstream media has done everything they can to paint him in a negative light, the picture of Trump that we’ve seen is a clouded one, at best.
But Trump has been a public figure for more than just his campaign. For years, he’s been one of America’s most-recognized citizens. While that has not always been good, it has given us some insight into who the man is, what he believes and how he operates.
Throughout the campaign, there have been people coming forth who have known Trump through the years. Some were employees who praised him as a boss. Others were ordinary citizens who talked about kind deeds that he did for them. But other than the attempts to paint him as a sexual abuser right before the elections, few have come forth to say anything negative about their dealings with the Trump.
Considering how much of a public figure he has been, I would think that if he was anything like what the mainstream media has tried to paint him to be, we would have all seen it by now.
The one truly worrying thing about Trump is that for most of his life he’s been a Democrat. He’s supported the Democrat Party and Democrat candidates; he’s even reportedly friends with the Clintons. So it’s a bit hard to accept that he is now a staunch conservative, committed to conservative ideals.
Yet, he’s making all the right noises and all the right moves to show himself as a conservative. The list of Supreme Court Justice candidates that he’s put together is impressively conservative. He also came forth with the most conservative platform that the Republican Party has seen in 20 years.
Then there’s his “contract” with the American People. The actions he’s promised to undertake in his first 100 days in office are clearly conservative, hitting on all the high points of his campaign and many of the silent majority’s biggest concerns.
The Transition
Over the next several weeks, we will be able to see Trump in action as a leader. His first big job is to select his cabinet, something that is traditionally announced by Thanksgiving. This should be interesting. One of the ways that Trump has been successful in business is in his selection of managers. He has always sought out the most qualified and competent, giving them the authority and responsibility to do whatever was necessary.
This even came through in his hit television show, “The Apprentice.” At its core, that show was about picking the best possible person to run a business. The various tests and challenges the candidates faced were all about testing their ability to effectively run a business. Who cares about theory; Trump wanted people who could think outside the box and get things done.
So we can expect the same out of his cabinet selections. No, I’m not saying that he’s going to run it like a game show. What I’m saying is that he’s going to look for competence. For people who can think outside the box, and for people who can get things done.
The country is in need of such people. We are a country in crisis, and it’s going to take some new ideas and some out of box thinking to straighten it out. We can’t expect Trump to do it all himself, he’s going to have to select the right people and let them do their jobs. So the people he selects in the next few weeks are critical to the effectiveness of his presidency.
From the few positions that have been announced so far, it looks like Trump is going to be putting together a dream team. Trey Goudy has been mentioned for Attorney General, Ben Carson as the Surgeon General and Newt Gingrich as a possibility for the Secretary of State.
While none of these is definite yet, they show the caliber of people who Trump is looking at. He wants the best, not just some political figure who’s looking to get their ticket punched.
While I’m sure that some top spots will go to political figures, especially those who have hopped aboard Trump’s bandwagon, he’s looking more to the business sector, than he is to the normal pool of politicians only. This fits with the whole tone of his campaign, which has been about the American people taking our government back from the political class.
The Election
If anything, this election has shown how sick and tired the average American is with what has become the political ruling class. The Founding Fathers never envisioned such a group for our country and did everything in their power to prevent it. Yet, even with the constraints of the Constitution to guide us, we have drifted that way more and more for over a century.
The American people are a fiercely independent people, and this election has shown that we haven’t lost that independence. This isn’t a partisan move, but one that has been clearly shown in both major political parties.
Millions of Democrats abandoned the party’s chosen candidate and followed Bernie Sanders, who came close to winning, even with all the voter fraud that was used to defeat him. On the Republican side, the electorate has abandoned a wide-ranging field of establishment candidates, in favor of Trump, a political outsider.
But the truly amazing thing was that both Democrats and Republicans voted for Trump, many abandoning their lifelong party affiliation to do so.
This is a clear mandate to Washington that We the People are tired of business as normal. We are tired of a political ruling class. We are tired of our elected leaders treating us like nothing more than peasants. We are tired of being lied to, and we are tired of being mistreated by those who are supposed to serve us.
This election has been a breakwater; leaving behind the old system and its corruption, in favor of a new order.
One that returns back to the values this country was founded upon and back to running the country according to the Constitution. Not an adulterated version of the Constitution; not a modified version; not even a version that’s been twisted and tortured by the various laws passed through the years; but the Constitution itself.
It’s up to Trump to ensure that he follows through on his promises and doesn’t let things go back to the old way. But it’s up to you and I as well. We have our part in this presidency; that of keeping an eye on our President Elect and making sure that he does what he said he’d do. If not, we need to get rid of him.
Hopefully, Washington will get the message, and the political class will stop acting like our masters and start acting like public servants once again. If that doesn’t happen, then the breakwater has been nothing more than a symbol; and a worthless symbol at that.
If change is going to happen in Washington, it can’t just happen in the White House, it has to happen in both houses of Congress as well. But it needs to go farther than that; it needs to permeate every department of the federal government as well.
We the People have spoken. We’ve used our voice in the voting booth, selecting an outsider to take control of our government and give it back to the people. But we can’t stop now.
That message needs to keep going forth, to make sure that the politicians and bureaucrats hear it, and that they fear us and the power we wield over them. Until they do, it is we who fear them.
Bill White for Survivopedia.
Refrences: | 1 |
Reuters/Ipsos: Clinton +4 Monmouth: Clinton +12 There is a 14 point swing between the polls that show Trump up by 2 points and the polls that show Clinton up by 12 points. This should not be happening. There is no way in the world that there should be a 14 point difference between scientific polls at this stage in the game. On November 8th the polling organizations that were way off are going to be exposed, and it will be exceedingly difficult for them to regain their credibility afterwards. At this point, some of the largest news organizations in the country are openly projecting a Clinton landslide. For example, Reuters says that Clinton now has a 95 percent chance of winning … Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is on a definite path to the White House, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation poll. The survey, released Saturday, found that Clinton is on track to win more than 300 votes in the Electoral College, which would solidly secure her the presidency. If the election were held this week, Clinton would win 326 Electoral College votes while Trump would win only 212, the poll said. According to Reuters, Clinton currently has a 95 percent chance of winning the White House . If Reuters isn’t right about this they are going to end up looking awfully foolish. An analysis by the Associated Press also has Clinton as the overwhelming favorite. And it is true that the poll results coming out of individual states seem to show Clinton with a seemingly insurmountable lead on the electoral map . But once again, can we trust those polls? Trump has regularly dismissed the national polls, but on Sunday his campaign manager did admit on national television that they are losing. The following comes from the New York Post … Donald Trump’s campaign manager on Sunday acknowledged something her boss hates to do — losing. “We are behind,” Kellyanne Conway admitted on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The GOP nominee routinely brushes off negative polling as untrustworthy but Conway said Democrat Hillary Clinton does have an edge. However, it is important to remember that the big national polls have been very wrong in the past. Back in 1980, a Gallup survey that was released on October 26th showed Ronald Reagan trailing Jimmy Carter by 8 points, but of course Reagan went on to win the election by a landslide … “For weeks before the presidential election, the gurus of public opinion polling were nearly unanimous in their findings,” wrote John F. Stacks for TIME in April 1980. “In survey after survey, they agreed that the coming choice between President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan was ‘too close to call.’ A few points at most, they said, separated the two major contenders. “But when the votes were counted, the former California Governor had defeated Carter by a margin of 51% to 41% in the popular vote — a rout for a U.S. presidential race. In the electoral college, the Reagan victory was a 10-to-1 avalanche that left the President holding only six states and the District of Columbia.” Could a similar thing happen on November 8th? Without a doubt, Trump supporters are far more enthusiastic than Clinton supporters are, and that matters. The key on election day is to get your voters to turn out in large numbers, and the fact that Donald Trump is drawing record crowds to his rallies is a very good sign. But even if Donald Trump legitimately wins the election, it could still be stolen from him via election fraud. In recent days Democrats have been playing down the idea that this could possibly happen, but the truth is that even Barack Obama has admitted that election fraud is a major problem in the past. For instance, just consider what he said about this back in 2008 … “Well, I tell you what it helps in Ohio, that we got Democrats in charge of the machines,” Obama said regarding the threat of election-rigging. He continued, “Whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to tilt things in their direction. That’s why we’ve got to have, I believe, a voting rights division in the Justice Department that is nonpartisan, and that is serious about investigating cases of voter fraud.” “That’s why we need paper trails on these new electronic machines so that you actually have something that you can hang on to after you’ve punched that letter—make sure it hasn’t been hacked into,” he added, admitting that even Democrats have “monkeyed around” with election results: “I want to be honest, it’s not as if it’s just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past. Sometimes, Democrats have, too.” I know that these comments almost sound too good to be true, but you can actually watch video of Obama making these comments right here . And it is odd that he specifically mentioned Democrats having control of the voting machines in Ohio, because I documented extreme voting irregularities in Ohio in the last election during a recent visit to Morningside . And an increasing number of Americans are starting to become concerned about election fraud. In fact, a brand new Reuters survey found that 70 percent of Republicans believe that if Hillary Clinton wins the election it will be “ because of illegal voting or vote rigging”. So even if Hillary Clinton gets into the White House, she may find that she has an exceedingly difficult time trying to govern the nation. A lot of people have made a lot of predictions about the outcome of this election, and we don’t have very long until we find out who was right and who was wrong. At this point, voting has already begun in many states, and the early results in Nevada don’t look encouraging for the Trump campaign … According to the estimable Nevada journalist Jon Ralston , Democrats have a 20-percentage-point turnout edge so far based on early and absentee voting in Clark County (home to Las Vegas), Nevada. And they have a 10-point edge in Washoe County (home to Reno). But in the key swing state of Florida, so far 498,153 Republicans have voted compared to just 478,175 Democrats . So that would seem to be some very good news for the Trump campaign, because Trump cannot win without carrying the state of Florida . To me it seems as though Americans are more emotionally invested in this campaign than they have been in any presidential campaign in decades. The stakes are incredibly high, and in just over two weeks we will find out what happens. Let us just hope and pray that America makes the right choice. Submit your review | 1 |
Iraq’s government forces said on Wednesday that they had gained control of the eastern half of Mosul, three months after they began an assault to retake the northern city from Islamic State militants. The Iraqi advance — the biggest military operation in the years since the United States ended its occupation of the country in 2011 — was aided by American air support and military advisers. But after weeks of heavy fighting and high casualties in areas of Mosul east of the Tigris River, the older and more densely populated western neighborhoods of the city remain in Islamic State hands. Mosul, which was Iraq’s city when the Islamic State seized it in 2014, has become a focal point in the broader battle to crush the Islamic State, the Sunni extremist group that claimed to have established a new Islamic caliphate in areas of Iraq and Syria. Tens of thousands of Mosul residents have fled since the Iraqi military began the recapturing operation in October, beginning with sparsely populated outer districts. Roughly a million civilians are believed to still be in the city. Members of Iraq’s counterterrorism service were the lead fighters in seizing eastern Mosul, and they faced ferocious resistance from Islamic State defenders who had planted booby traps and sent suicide bombers to stop them. American warplanes sought to block the Islamic State from reinforcing fighters in the east by bombing the Tigris bridges linking it to the western side. Lt. Gen. Talib Shaghati of the Iraqi Army said on Wednesday that his forces had effectively taken control of the eastern side, declaring that “important lines and important areas are finished. ” He spoke at a news conference in Bartella, a town east of Mosul. Prime Minister Haider of Iraq, in a statement posted on his Twitter account, extolled what he described as “the efforts of our brave forces” to retake Mosul. It remains unclear how long it may take to clear the western half, which is characterized by narrow streets that could make the fight against entrenched Islamic State fighters even more treacherous. The triumphal moment on Wednesday was tempered by growing exasperation in the western city of Falluja, where Iraqi forces and allied militias routed Islamic State fighters more than six months ago. Many neighborhoods were destroyed in that battle, and residents have increasingly complained that much of the city remains uninhabitable. In a dispatch from the Falluja, Agence quoted civilians as saying the lack of reconstruction, services and jobs threatened to rekindle the resentment toward the government in Baghdad that had helped incubate support for the Islamic State among some members of the Sunni Arab minority. Iraqi officials have said they lack money for reconstruction, hobbled by the country’s overreliance on its oil industry, which has been repeatedly disrupted by war and depressed by low prices. | 0 |
The Energy Minister of Iran Hamid Chitchian.
Amir Mehdi Kazemi Press TV, Tehran
Iran’s energy ministry says some 25 billion dollars of investment would be required by 2021 to materialize the planned 5.5 percent annual growth in the country’s electricity sector. Hamid Chitchian says improving environmental standards and increasing renewable energy power stations are high on the agenda of Iran’s energy policy. Loading ... | 0 |
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Join us May 25 at CUNY offices on 42nd street to protest the invitation to BDS leader Linda Sarsour to keynote CUNY’s Commencement ceremony. Sarsour was invited by Ayman the dean of CUNY’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. CUNY is standing by its decision to honor the Muslim activist. Such sanction is so malignant and so evil, it cannot be ignored. There is a responsibility for the time we are living in. [We had to reschedule the protest from June 1 (the day of Sarsour’s keynote speech at CUNY) because it is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, and so many proud Jews wanted to attend. It was wrong for CUNY to schedule the commencement ceremonies on Shavuot — the day that the Torah was given by G‑d to the Jewish people. Over 25% of the student body is Jewish. The fact that the commencement address is on Shavuot is another reason CUNY should cancel Sarsour and the commencement. What are Jewish students supposed to do? They either violate their holiday or miss their graduation. JUST ANNOUNCED: MILO WILL BE SPEAKING. Speakers at our event include: Universities have disinvited Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Ann Coulter, Milo, and legions of conservative thinkers and voices in defense of freedom, but a and activist they will defend to the death. We will be there. We will protest — this will not stand. Be there — MAY 25TH, CUNY Center, 217 E 42nd St, New York, NY United States, from 12 — 2:00pm. RSVP on Facebook. An outspoken critic of Israel, Sarsour avidly supports the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, a initiative that uses various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and lawsuits to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish . the ongoing conflict, Sarsour favors a solution where an Arab majority and a Jewish minority would live together within the borders of a single country. In October 2012 she tweeted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism. ” In 2004, Sarsour acknowledged that a friend of hers, as well as a cousin, were both serving long sentences in Israeli jails because of their efforts to recruit jihadists to murder Jews. Moreover, she revealed that her was serving a prison term because of his affiliation with Hamas. In October 2011, Linda Sarsour, who holds economics in low regard, expressed, on behalf of “Muslim New Yorkers,” “solidarity and support” for the Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2011 as well, the Obama Administration honored Sarsour as a “champion of change. ” Not surprisingly, Sarsour visited the White House on at least seven different occasions during Obama’s tenure. In May 2012 Sarsour tweeted that the “underwear bomber,” an operative who in 2009 had tried to blow up a passenger jet in was actually a CIA agent participating in America’s “war on Islam. ” In November 2012 in Baltimore, Sarsour — ever eager to peddle her woeful tale of Islamic victimhood — spoke at a Muslim Public Affairs Council conference titled “Facing Race: Xenophobic Hate Crimes. ” This is the same Council that views the murderous of Hezbollah as members of “a liberation movement” that is “fighting for freedom. ” Sarsour was outraged when a police officer and an FBI agent shot and killed a young black Muslim named Usaama Rahim in Boston on June 2, 2015, when Rahim lunged at them with a knife as they attempted to question him about suspected activities. Naturally, Sarsour’s assessment of the incident confidently traced everything back to race: “At the end of the day, a Black man was shot on a bus stop on his way to work and we should treat this like any other case of police violence. ” In August 2015 Sarsour spoke out in support of the incarcerated Palestinian Islamic Jihad member Muhammad Allan, a known recruiter of suicide bombers. According to CounterJihad. com, Sarsour has attended and spoken at numerous rallies sponsored by a group that views Israel as a terrorist, genocidal state whose very creation was a “catastrophe” for Arab peoples. Sarsour has also solicited donations for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which had worked with the Holy Land Foundation. There’s more. She also initially portrayed the killing of Shaima Alawadi by her husband as a killing instead. The left’s chokehold on the nation’s most powerful institutions continues, despite a Trump presidency and a Republican Congress, but this is a step too far. Sarsour being given the honor of commencement speaker is so malignant and so evil, it cannot be ignored. There is a responsibility for the time we are living in. Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) publisher of PamelaGeller. com and author of The Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here. | 1 |
By Kadir A. Mohmand on October 30, 2016
“SEARCH FOR THE AFGHAN GIRL”© Steve McCurry
I am writing on behalf of the Afghan villagers like Sharbat Gula because the U. S. installed Afghan administration only works on behalf of the occupiers and war profiteers. The Afghan administration does not care about Sharbat Gula.
Shame on you Pakistan for imprisoning the national Afghan war hero, Sharbat Gula , who is again suffering because of the foreign occupier’s and its Afghan puppets’ bombardment of her village in Afghanistan. Sharbat Gula is now suffering at the greedy hands of Pakistan, who financially benefits from the U.S. war against the Afghans/Pashtun.
In the 1980s, her young face on the cover of National Geographic embodied the strength, dignity and honor of the Afghan Pashtun women, who suffered for a decade at the hands of the Soviet invaders and Afghan communist puppets.
During both wars, Pakistan has profited from the Afghans’ suffering. After 9/11, the National Geographic editor/photographer located Sharbat Gula. He told her a lot of money had been made from the edition with her cover and what did she want. She did not want money. Sharbat Gula only wanted an education for her children and no bombardment of her village. She wanted education and peace without foreign invasion.
Her village has been bombarded by the U.S. and its puppets, her village’s water poisoned and her family has had to flee to Pakistan. Instead of honoring her, Pakistan imprisons her for not having the right papers. Also Pakistan punishes the Afghan Pashtun refugees because the Afghan Freedom fighters do not want Pakistan involved in peace negotiations. . The Afghan Freedom Fighters d o not want a repeat of the mistakes that occurred in the 1980s when Pakistan was involved in the peace talks between the Soviet Union and the Afghan Resistance.
Sharbat Gula is again the face of the Afghan Pashtun women,. Despite the indignities of war, she keeps her honor and dignity.
Pakistan needs to release her immediately. Perpetrators of war crimes committed against the Afghan Pashtun women need to be prosecuted and stopped. She is a victim. Sharbat Gula has human rights. The illegal war in Afghanistan must end now. Sharbat Gula has the right to live with dignity and security in her village in Afghanistan. She does not want to be forced to live in Pakistan. Enough of these greedy profiteers and this ugly war scape goating honorable Afghan Pashtun women like Sharbat Gula, who are the true national heroes. Sharbat Gula is an Afghan National Hero and not a criminal. The war criminals and war profiteers need to be imprisoned and not her. Free her now.
Sincerely, | 0 |
Newsweek have published a conspiracy theory written by UC Berkeley’s Professor of Public Policy and former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, questioning whether the rioters at Berkeley last week were paid by Breitbart News. [“Thursday night, Yiannopoulos had a friendly interview on Fox News’s ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ — a show that, according to the Washington Post, has ridden anger at activism into prime time ratings,” wrote Reich on Saturday. “Yiannopoulos wasn’t asked about the content of the speech that was shut down. The conversation focused instead on how Berkeley proved the point that the Left was ceding its right to federal grants by cracking down on free speech. Which raises the possibility that Yiannopoulos and Brietbart were in cahoots with the agitators, in order to lay the groundwork for a Trump crackdown on universities and their federal funding. ” After repeatedly misspelling “Breitbart,” Reich then asked his readers to “connect these dots,” in typical conspiracy theory form, before adding “I don’t want to add to the conspiratorial musings of so many about this very conspiratorial administration, but it strikes me there may be something worrying going on here. ” Reich, who works directly for the college administration at Berkeley, has repeatedly floated this conspiracy theory since the riot last week. He first suggested it in a CNN segment with host Don Lemon. In addition to not shutting down Reich when he made his baseless allegation, CNN’s Lemon egged him on from the start, opening his segment by saying that the violence at Berkeley “played right into the hands of the white supremacist … someone like Milo Yiannopoulos. ” Then, instead of challenging Reich’s allegations, Lemon asked him to expand on them. “You think this was a strategy by Yiannopoulos or ? They put this on in an effort to show that there’s no free speech on a college campus like UC Berkeley?” Reich went on to say that he “wouldn’t bet against it. ” “Despite admitting explicitly that the claim was not based on facts, Reich charged ahead in claiming that Breitbart News had an affiliation with the violent rioters that lit fires around campus and beat and pepper sprayed the MILO supporters who were waiting to get into the venue,” reported Breitbart News’ Tom Ciccotta last week, after Reich initially pitched the conspiracy. Rush Limbaugh also mocked Reich’s claims on his own show. The riot started at UC Berkeley on Wednesday after protesters against Breitbart Senior Editor MILO became increasingly violent outside of his show. “ ” started several fires, smashed windows and ATMs, looted downtown stores, attacked cars, and assaulted dozens of MILO fans, male and female, who they falsely accused of being “Nazis. ” Despite the large amount of violence, numerous reports indicate that police officers refused to intervene, and only one suspect was arrested. On Sunday, Breitbart News reported that one of the groups behind the riot, Refuse Fascism, had received $50, 000 from a group backed by socialist billionaire George Soros. DANGEROUS is available to now via Amazon, in hardcover and Kindle editions. And yes, MILO is reading the audiobook version himself! Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0 |
Danny Cahill stood, slightly dazed, in a blizzard of confetti as the audience screamed and his family ran on stage. He had won Season 8 of NBC’s reality television show “The Biggest Loser,” shedding more weight than anyone ever had on the program — an astonishing 239 pounds in seven months. When he got on the scale for all to see that evening, Dec. 8, 2009, he weighed just 191 pounds, down from 430. Dressed in a and shorts, he was lean, athletic and as handsome as a model. “I’ve got my life back,” he declared. “I mean, I feel like a million bucks. ” Mr. Cahill left the show’s stage in Hollywood and flew directly to New York to start a triumphal tour of the talk shows, chatting with Jay Leno, Regis Philbin and Joy Behar. As he heard from fans all over the world, his elation knew no bounds. But in the years since, more than 100 pounds have crept back onto his frame despite his best efforts. In fact, most of that season’s 16 contestants have regained much if not all the weight they lost so arduously. Some are even heavier now. Yet their experiences, while a bitter personal disappointment, have been a gift to science. A study of Season 8’s contestants has yielded surprising new discoveries about the physiology of obesity that help explain why so many people struggle unsuccessfully to keep off the weight they lose. Kevin Hall, a scientist at a federal research center who admits to a weakness for reality TV, had the idea to follow the “Biggest Loser” contestants for six years after that victorious night. The project was the first to measure what happened to people over as long as six years after they had lost large amounts of weight with intensive dieting and exercise. The results, the researchers said, were stunning. They showed just how hard the body fights back against weight loss. “It is frightening and amazing,” said Dr. Hall, an expert on metabolism at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. “I am just blown away. ” It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes. Researchers knew that just about anyone who deliberately loses weight — even if they start at a normal weight or even underweight — will have a slower metabolism when the diet ends. So they were not surprised to see that “The Biggest Loser” contestants had slow metabolisms when the show ended. What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight. Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat. The struggles the contestants went through help explain why it has been so hard to make headway against the nation’s obesity problem, which afflicts more than a third of American adults. Despite spending billions of dollars on drugs and dieting programs, even the most motivated are working against their own biology. Their experience shows that the body will fight back for years. And that, said Dr. Michael Schwartz, an obesity and diabetes researcher who is a professor of medicine at the University of Washington, is “new and important. ” “The key point is that you can be on TV, you can lose enormous amounts of weight, you can go on for six years, but you can’t get away from a basic biological reality,” said Dr. Schwartz, who was not involved in the study. “As long as you are below your initial weight, your body is going to try to get you back. ” The show’s doctor, Robert Huizenga, says he expected the contestants’ metabolic rates to fall just after the show, but was hoping for a smaller drop. He questioned, though, whether the measurements six years later were accurate. But maintaining weight loss is difficult, he said, which is why he tells contestants that they should exercise at least nine hours a week and monitor their diets to keep the weight off. “Unfortunately, many contestants are unable to find or afford adequate ongoing support with exercise doctors, psychologists, sleep specialists, and trainers — and that’s something we all need to work hard to change,” he said in an email. The study’s findings, to be published on Monday in the journal Obesity, are part of a scientific push to answer some of the most fundamental questions about obesity. Researchers are figuring out why being fat makes so many people develop diabetes and other medical conditions, and they are searching for new ways to block the poison in fat. They are starting to unravel the reasons bariatric surgery allows most people to lose significant amounts of weight when dieting so often fails. And they are looking afresh at medical care for obese people. The hope is that this work will eventually lead to new therapies that treat obesity as a chronic disease and can help keep weight under control for life. Most people who have tried to lose weight know how hard it is to keep the weight off, but many blame themselves when the pounds come back. But what obesity research has consistently shown is that dieters are at the mercy of their own bodies, which muster hormones and an altered metabolic rate to pull them back to their old weights, whether that is hundreds of pounds more or that extra 10 or 15 that many people are trying to keep off. There is always a weight a person’s body maintains without any effort. And while it is not known why that weight can change over the years — it may be an effect of aging — at any point, there is a weight that is easy to maintain, and that is the weight the body fights to defend. Finding a way to thwart these mechanisms is the goal scientists are striving for. First, though, they are trying to understand them in greater detail. Dr. David Ludwig, the director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, who was not involved in the research, said the findings showed the need for new approaches to weight control. He cautioned that the study was limited by its small size and the lack of a control group of obese people who did not lose weight. But, he added, the findings made sense. “This is a subset of the most successful” dieters, he said. “If they don’t show a return to normal in metabolism, what hope is there for the rest of us?” Still, he added, “that shouldn’t be interpreted to mean we are doomed to battle our biology or remain fat. It means we need to explore other approaches. ” Some scientists say weight maintenance has to be treated as an issue separate from weight loss. Only when that challenge is solved, they say, can progress truly be made against obesity. “There is a lot of basic research we still need to do,” said Dr. Margaret Jackson, who is directing a project at Pfizer. Her group is testing a drug that, in animals at least, acts like leptin, a hormone that controls hunger. With weight loss, leptin levels fall and people become hungry. The idea is to trick the brains of people who have lost weight so they do not become ravenous for lack of leptin. While many of the contestants kept enough weight off to improve their health and became more physically active, the low weights they strived to keep eluded all but one of them: Erinn Egbert, a caregiver for her mother in Versailles, Ky. And she struggles mightily to keep the pounds off because her metabolism burns 552 fewer calories a day than would be expected for someone her size. “What people don’t understand is that a treat is like a drug,” said Ms. Egbert, who went from 263 pounds to just under 176 on the show, and now weighs between 152 and 157. “Two treats can turn into a binge over a period. That is what I struggle with. ” Six years after Season 8 ended, 14 of the 16 contestants went to the N. I. H. last fall for three days of testing. The researchers were concerned that the contestants might try to frantically lose weight before coming in, so they shipped equipment to them that would measure their physical activity and weight before their visit, and had the information sent remotely to the N. I. H. The contestants received their metabolic results last week. They were shocked, but on further reflection, decided the numbers explained a lot. “All my friends were drinking beer and not gaining massive amounts of weight,” Mr. Cahill said. “The moment I started drinking beer, there goes another 20 pounds. I said, ‘This is not right. Something is wrong with my body. ’” Sean Algaier, 36, a pastor from Charlotte, N. C. feels cheated. He went from 444 pounds to 289 as a contestant on the show. Now his weight is up to 450 again, and he is burning 458 fewer calories a day than would be expected for a man his size. “It’s kind of like hearing you have a life sentence,” he said. Slower metabolisms were not the only reason the contestants regained weight, though. They constantly battled hunger, cravings and binges. The investigators found at least one reason: plummeting levels of leptin. The contestants started out with normal levels of leptin. By the season’s finale, they had almost no leptin at all, which would have made them ravenous all the time. As their weight returned, their leptin levels drifted up again, but only to about half of what they had been when the season began, the researchers found, thus helping to explain their urges to eat. Leptin is just one of a cluster of hormones that control hunger, and although Dr. Hall and his colleagues did not measure the rest of them, another group of researchers, in a different project, did. In a study funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, Dr. Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne and his colleagues recruited 50 overweight people who agreed to consume just 550 calories a day for eight or nine weeks. They lost an average of nearly 30 pounds, but over the next year, the pounds started coming back. Dr. Proietto and his colleagues looked at leptin and four other hormones that satiate people. Levels of most of them fell in their study subjects. They also looked at a hormone that makes people want to eat. Its level rose. “What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is,” Dr. Proietto said. “The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time. We desperately need agents that will suppress hunger and that are safe with use. ” Mr. Cahill, 46, said his weight problem began when he was in the third grade. He got fat, then fatter. He would starve himself, and then eat a whole can of cake frosting with a spoon. Afterward, he would cower in the pantry off the kitchen, feeling overwhelmed with shame. Over the years, his insatiable urge to eat kept overcoming him, and his weight climbed: 370 pounds, 400, 460, 485. “I used to look at myself and think, ‘I am horrible, I am a monster, subhuman,’” he said. He began sleeping in a recliner because he was too heavy to sleep lying down. Walking hurt stairs were agony. Buying clothes with a 68 waist was humiliating. “I remember sitting in a dressing room one day, and nothing would fit. I looked at the traffic outside on the street and thought, ‘I should just run out in front of a car. ’” He eventually seized on “The Biggest Loser” as his best chance to lose enough weight to live a normal life. He tried three times and was finally selected. Before the show began, the contestants underwent medical tests to be sure they could endure the rigorous schedule that lay ahead. And rigorous it was. Sequestered on the “Biggest Loser” ranch with the other contestants, Mr. Cahill exercised seven hours a day, burning 8, 000 to 9, 000 calories according to a calorie tracker the show gave him. He took electrolyte tablets to help replace the salts he lost through sweating, consuming many fewer calories than before. Eventually, he and the others were sent home for four months to try to keep losing weight on their own. Mr. Cahill set a goal of a deficit per day. The idea was to lose a pound a day. He quit his job as a land surveyor to do it. His routine went like this: Wake up at 5 a. m. and run on a treadmill for 45 minutes. Have breakfast — typically one egg and two egg whites, half a grapefruit and a piece of sprouted grain toast. Run on the treadmill for another 45 minutes. Rest for 40 minutes bike ride nine miles to a gym. Work out for two and a half hours. Shower, ride home, eat lunch — typically a grilled skinless chicken breast, a cup of broccoli and 10 spears of asparagus. Rest for an hour. Drive to the gym for another round of exercise. If he had not burned enough calories to hit his goal, he went back to the gym after dinner to work out some more. At times, he found himself running around his neighborhood in the dark until his indicator reset to zero at midnight. On the day of the on the show’s finale, Mr. Cahill and the others dressed carefully to hide the rolls of loose skin that remained, to their surprise and horror, after they had lost weight. They wore compression undergarments to hold it in. Mr. Cahill knew he could not maintain his finale weight of 191 pounds. He was so mentally and physically exhausted he barely moved for two weeks after his publicity tour ended. But he had started a new career giving motivational speeches as the biggest loser ever, and for the next four years, he managed to keep his weight below 255 pounds by exercising two to three hours a day. But two years ago, he went back to his job as a surveyor, and the pounds started coming back. Soon the scale hit 265. Mr. Cahill started weighing and measuring his food again and stepped up his exercise. He got back down to 235 to 240 pounds. But his weight edged up again, to 275, then 295. His slow metabolism is part of the problem, and so are his food cravings. He opens a bag of chips, thinking he will have just a few. “I’d eat five bites. Then I’d black out and eat the whole bag of chips and say, ‘What did I do? ’” Dr. Lee Kaplan, an obesity researcher at Harvard, says the brain sets the number of calories we consume, and it can be easy for people to miss that how much they eat matters less than the fact that their bodies want to hold on to more of those calories. Dr. Michael Rosenbaum, an obesity researcher at Columbia University who has collaborated with Dr. Hall in previous studies, said the body’s systems for regulating how many calories are consumed and how many are burned are tightly coupled when people are not strenuously trying to lose weight or to maintain a significant weight loss. Still, pounds can insidiously creep on. “We eat about 900, 000 to a million calories a year, and burn them all except those annoying 3, 000 to 5, 000 calories that result in an average annual weight gain of about one to two pounds,” he said. “These very small differences between intake and output average out to only about 10 to 20 calories per day — less than one Starburst candy — but the cumulative consequences over time can be devastating. ” “It is not clear whether this small imbalance and the resultant weight gain that most of us experience as we age are the consequences of changes in lifestyle, the environment or just the biology of aging,” Dr. Rosenbaum added. The effects of small imbalances between calories eaten and calories burned are more pronounced when people deliberately lose weight, Dr. Hall said. Yes, there are signals to regain weight, but he wondered how many extra calories people were driven to eat. He found a way to figure that out. He analyzed data from a clinical trial in which people took a diabetes drug, canagliflozin, that makes them spill 360 calories a day into their urine, or took a placebo. The drug has no known effect on the brain, and the person does not realize those calories are being spilled. Those taking the drug gradually lost weight. But for every five pounds they lost, they were, without realizing it, eating an additional 200 calories a day. Those extra calories, Dr. Hall said, were a bigger driver of weight regained than the slowing of the metabolism. And, he added, if people fought the urge to eat those calories, they would be hungry. “Unless they continue to fight it constantly, they will regain the weight,” he said. All this does not mean that modest weight loss is hopeless, experts say. Individuals respond differently to diet manipulations — or diets, for example — and to exercise and drugs, among other interventions. But Dr. Ludwig said that simply cutting calories was not the answer. “There are no doubt exceptional individuals who can ignore primal biological signals and maintain weight loss for the long term by restricting calories,” he said, but he added that “for most people, the combination of incessant hunger and slowing metabolism is a recipe for weight regain — explaining why so few individuals can maintain weight loss for more than a few months. ” Dr. Rosenbaum agreed. “The difficulty in keeping weight off reflects biology, not a pathological lack of willpower affecting of the U. S. A. ,” he said. Mr. Cahill knows that now. And with his report from Dr. Hall’s group showing just how much his metabolism had slowed, he stopped blaming himself for his weight gain. “That shame that was on my shoulders went off,” he said. | 1 |
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on November 3, 2016 Hoover and Tolson
When Supreme Court Justice John Scalia died, under mysterious circumstances, FBI officials were there. It was the FBI that blocked the autopsy of a Supreme Court Justice, required by law to be supervised by the Surgeon General of the United States.
The organization Scalia belonged to and was with when he died, or was murdered as some assert, includes top leaders of all American business sectors along with government officials, both elected and “career,” who regularly meet and plan the overthrow of the American government.
The Trump team includes the public persona of Rudy Guiliani, tasked with organizing the FBI revolt, wielding bushels of cash from the Saudis and the Adelson gambling/trafficking empire. Guiliani and his friends control most post-retirement employment for FBI agents, all of which filters through firms connected to or represented by his law firm. The FBI is, in fact, controlled by Rudy Guiliani, according to some sources.
We saw the tip of that this week when Rudy Guiliani, according to the Daily Beast , reached inside the FBI and moved them clearly into the Trump campaign. Illegal though these acts are, as you may read below, they openly bragged about it. You see, with Congress and the FBI under control, investigations are a tool of punishment and intimidation only:
“Two days before FBI director James Comey rocked the world last week, Rudy Giuliani was on Fox, where he volunteered, un-prodded by any question: “I think he’s [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” Pressed for specifics, he said: “We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around.”
The man who now leads “lock-her-up” chants at Trump rallies spent decades of his life as a federal prosecutor and then mayor working closely with the FBI, and especially its New York office. One of Giuliani’s security firms employed a former head of the New York FBI office, and other alumni of it. It was agents of that office, probing Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting of a minor, who pressed Comey to authorize the review of possible Hillary Clinton-related emails on a Weiner device that led to the explosive letter the director wrote Congress.
Hours after Comey’s letter about the renewed probe was leaked on Friday, Giuliani went on a radio show and attributed the director’s surprise action to “the pressure of a group of FBI agents who don’t look at it politically.”
‘The other rumor that I get is that there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion [not to charge Clinton] being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face to the FBI’s integrity,” said Giuliani. “I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents.'”
Key to understanding the problem is understanding the nature of the “independence” of the FBI. Established at a time when organized crime ran rampant across the nation, the FBI, operating outside any constitutional authority and in direct contravention of constitutional law, grew from small number of unarmed legal consultants to a government within the government.
With the advent of World War II, the FBI grew to massive strength and began operating around the world. They were given broad powers to mete out justice, unlimited powers of search and arrest, of surveillance and even summary execution when they deemed in the national interest.
With the Cold War, the FBI rode the Red Menace scare to infinite power while partnering with organized crime. J. Edgar Hoover often denied that organized crime existed and was later to have been discovered a victim of blackmail at the hands of Meyer Lansky. From VT:
“No provision was established within the constitution to regulate or oversee a national police force, it didn’t take long for the FBI to become the Cheka within a short period after it’s creation, J. Edgar Hoover, turned ‘the bureau’ into a monstrosity blackmailing politicians and cozying up to crime figures while Hoover’s FBI chased ‘commies’ both real and imaginary, it protected not only the mafia but powerful international crime cartels as well, becoming the real ‘Murder Inc.’ Taxpayer financed strong-arm thugs supported by a disinformation campaign.
Hoover gained control of the press almost immediately, keeping files on his press enemies, threatening and blackmailing; some of this was to protect his own secrets – mob ties and his notorious penchant for sexual deviance, now long in the public domain, but it went further – it was all about power.
‘Mary’ Hoover liked to dress as a woman and was infamously covertly photographed along with his longtime companion and lover Clyde Tolson in flagrante delicto; those photographs came into the possession of mob kingpin Meyer Lansky, thus ensnaring Hoover, and by extension the entire FBI in a dangerous marriage with the mob. There is no evidence they ever got divorced, though from time to time the relationship may have been somewhat rocky.”
With the Watergate scandals, the FBI made the case for being made “unanswerable” to executive authority, even the President or Attorney General. Instead, their only oversight is within the House of Representatives.
However, with the Tea Party takeover of the House, financed by gambling boss Sheldon Adelson, and based on illegal reapportionment of the House districts, defended by a radicalized Supreme Court in continual 5/4 deadlock, the House got out of control, running continual investigations based on internet rumors and conspiracy theories.
Too offset their zeal and insanity, a well run FBI might well have investigated the House itself, finding drug and gambling/human trafficking funds filling its coffers, opened and placed above the law by the 5/4 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that legalized unlimited unaccounted offshore funds used to bribe officials.
According to informants, this cabal, including FBI and Pentagon officials, has discussed assassinations of American leaders, military and intelligence support for terror groups and maintains strong ties, through Cuba, with the drug cartels of Mexico and Columbia.
When the Oregon “Standoff” defendants were found “not guilty,” it was the FBI that scuttled the case because it was the FBI, through informants that run the majority of the violent anti-government supremacist/anti-Semitic groups, that planned the takeover of Federal land at gunpoint.
From a Spencer Ackerman article in the UK Guardian, November 3, 2016
One agent called the bureau ‘Trumplandia,’ with some colleagues openly discussing voting for the Republican nominee.
Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election. Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July public decision not to recommend indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia,” with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national-security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.
On the other side is the Pentagon. The conspiracy theories and rumors are still flying about “Barksdale/Minot.” Back in 2006, a B52 took off from Minot Air Force Base with a full load of hydrogen bombs. They were “illegally” or “improperly” authorized and were being flown out of the United States, we are told, to Diego Garcia.
Since that time, hundreds of officers, including the entire American nuclear command, have been replaced. We have it on reliable authority, at the highest levels, that officers inside the Pentagon, many recruited into religious extremist organizations operating at the service academies, West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, had been channeled into positions of authority by a religious cult that sprung up in the early 1980s at the Presidio, a one time Army base in San Francisco, California.
Among the founders of that movement were General Paul Vallely, who along with Michael Aquino (rank unknown at this time), founded America’s psychological warfare capability but also founded the Temple of Set, a Satanic cult that spread through the American military. Remember, it was the FBI that in 1992 declared that the ritual satanic killings of the 1970s and 80s including the alleged abuses on 15 military bases tied to the Temple of Set, were only “conspiracy theories.”
It is Vallely’s group, Stand Up America, that has attracted so many pro-Trump FBI agents. This is one of the paths that tie the FBI to the Pentagon, through Montana’s “patriot elites,” many military and intelligence contractors, all right wing, many anti-government and all closet militia backers.
Before that, it was the FBI’s SSAIC (Supervising Special Agent In Charge) from the FBI’s massive Los Angeles office, Ted Gunderson, that the fight against ritual abuse and human trafficking that led to a series of quashed investigations that led into the highest levels of Washington. After his retirement,Gunderson went on a personal crusade against the FBI for covering up ritual child abuse. Gunderson was approached by a number of informants and volunteers, who turned out to be his undoing. Two came to live with him, Tim XXXX and Stew XXXX, who looted his files and turned them over to the FBI.
These individuals, who still work with the InfoWars organization run by Alex Jones, a Trump advisor and confidant, who also helped organize the Oregon Standoff.
Conclusion
We are told that we have at least 100 FBI agents who have submitted resignations if Hillary Clinton is not arrested. They claim, we are told by former Representative Tom Delay, they have extensive knowledge of her case and a coverup within the FBI.
Only a few short years ago, the same story of FBI resignations was based on another assertion, that the FBI was involved in a criminal coverup of President Obama’s foreign birth.
What we do know is this, the FBI is not just politicized. They are working hand in hand with obstructionists in congress, adding to the legislative abuses of separation of powers something far more sinister. The FBI is abusing the justice system as well, fabricating evidence, planting emails, intimidating witnesses, quashing investigations and openly involving themselves in the political process.
There is currently NO public confidence in the FBI, in its director and, similarly, there is no public confidence in rank and file agents as well. The barrel is all rotten apples, there is nothing else but.
President Obama has cited the FBI for politically oriented leaks. We fear that Obama, who should be obligated to act, with do nothing out of fear of being accused of “leadership.”
We wonder what he has to lose. | 1 |
This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics. com, politicians: Marine Le Pen of France, and Brexit champion Nigel Farage of Britain (AFP) Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Front National party is still considered to be a very long shot to become the next president of France, but it is no longer considered an impossibility, mainly because of three factors: the unexpected passage of the Brexit referendum in Britain last year, the unexpected election of Donald Trump in the US last year, and a trend of rising nationalistic political parties in countries across Europe in recent years. The first round of the presidential elections will be held on Sunday, April 23. There are 11 candidates, so it is almost impossible for anyone to win by getting over 50% of the vote. The top two candidates will then take part in a runoff election on May 7, to determine the final winner. President François Hollande, a Socialist, has had abysmal popularity ratings and so has chosen not to run for a second term, a decision unprecedented in modern times. The polls put the top four candidates at around 20% each. Emmanuel Macron is the youngest, a former investment banker, and former economy minister under Hollande. He is considered to be the favorite among the mainstream “globalist” European politicians. The early favorite was Republican François Fillon, but his support has crashed because of a scandal where he allegedly arranged for his wife to receive a large salary for a job that required little or no work. Mélenchon is the candidate, a kind of political mirror image of Marine Le Pen, though not entirely. Le Pen is while Mélenchon is but the two candidates do agree on one important issue: Neither of them likes the euro currency. Although Le Pen could flame out in the first round, it is widely expected that she will be one of the two leading candidates. Mainstream politicians are hoping a second round matching Le Pen with Macron. In that case, it is expected that Macron pick up voters from the candidates that have dropped out, while Le Pen’s core group of supporters would stay the same, with the result that Macron would defeat Le Pen by a wide margin. The scenario that most fear is that in the first round on Sunday, the two winners would be the two extremes, the Le Pen and the Mélenchon. This would be considered a disaster for the eurozone, as either one would like to return to the original French franc currency. After last year’s unexpected Brexit and Trump victories, there’s a great deal of anxiety among European politicians who fear that anything could happened. BBC and Market Pulse and Foreign Policy and Euro News and Daily Signal, Marine Le Pen is the current leader of the Front National party, which had a strong history of under its previous leader and founder, Marine Le Pen’s father, Le Pen, a Holocaust denier. At some point, she came to the conclusion that she and the Front National party could not become successful without completely breaking its past. She did so by breaking with her father and banning him from the party. She has not repeated any of her father’s remarks and has even condemned them. But in interviews, she is always asked about Jewish issues, and her answers are always heavily scrutinized by a mainstream press that is as consumed with hostility to her as with Donald Trump. One of the most controversial examples occurred in a recent interview where she insisted that France was not responsible for a July 1942 atrocity known as “Vel d’Hiv,” where French officials rounded up 13, 000 Jews and turned them over to the Nazis to be deported to Auschwitz. She had scrambled to explain that the “real” French government at that time was in exile, while the perpetrators of the atrocity were the puppet government in Paris under Nazi control. From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, there are two important things to be noted here, things that I’ve written about many times. First, nationalism and xenophobia do not come from the politicians. They come from the people. If Marine Le Pen had not stepped forward to represent and possibly voters, then someone else would have done so, because the people were demanding it. What a politician can do is represent nationalistic and xenophobic voters, but then do everything possible to ameliorate the worst abuses of those attitudes. As I’ve noted in the past, Donald Trump has backed off from his early remarks Mexicans and Muslims, and appears to have adopted a course that takes into account the anxieties of his supporters, while preventing any abuses from taking place. Theresa May in Britain is similarly trying to chart a course that accommodates Brexit supporters, while avoiding total disaster for Britain’s economy. The second important point is that nationalism and xenophobia are growing around the world. Whether it’s Chinese vs Japanese, Chinese vs Vietnamese, Buddhists vs Rohingyas in Myanmar, Hindus vs Muslims in Kashmir, or Sunnis vs Shias in the Mideast, nationalism and xenophobia have been growing around the world, in one country after another. This is what always happens in a generational Crisis era, and it always leads to major wars or world wars. The Local (France) and Books and Ideas and Atlantic and News Max, The phrase “European Project” refers to the efforts, begun in the 1950s, to take steps to prevent another massive war in Europe. It’s hard today to remember the mood of the public in those days. Here’s what Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1950 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism: Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers [America and the Soviet Union]. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena — homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. The purpose of the European Project was to prove that mankind was not completely powerless after all. If Europe could set up a new world order that would prevent the “sheer insanity” of another world war, then the European Project would succeed. This lead to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and eventually to the formation of the European Union. What we see today is huge centrifugal forces pulling the European Project apart. Whether it is the Brexit referendum in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, the “True Finns” in Finland, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, the Golden Dawn party in Greece, the Jobbik party in Hungary, or any of the nationalistic movements in other European countries, what’s become clear is that people, particularly young people, have no fear or concerns about the lessons learned in World War II. This is what Generational Dynamics tells us always happens. In the last century, there were two world wars that destroyed Europe. The first World War was also devastating for Russia and the Mideast, while the second World War was also devastating for Japan and the Pacific. However, there were other massive wars in the last century, in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas. These wars of the last century are not well remembered by Americans, since Americans were not as heavily involved, but they’re well remembered by the people of the countries that fought in them. And that is just the last century. If you look at the earlier centuries — the 1800s, the 1700s, the 1600s, the 1500s, and so forth — there were also massive wars in Asia, Europe, the Mideast, Africa and the Americas in those centuries as well. No century has ever escaped this. The point is that these huge, massive wars have not yet begun to occur in this century, and so people, especially young people, have come to believe that they never will. And yet, there is absolutely no hope of avoiding them. Anyone can see that the world has become increasingly unstable in the last 10 or 15 years and that countries around the world have become increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic. It’s like the world is a pressure cooker, ready to explode. France enjoyed “La Belle Époque” starting in 1871, with advances in the arts rather than wars. That was the “Old World Order” that Hannah Arendt was talking about in the quote above. And yet, World War I exploded in 1914 completely without warning, when a high school student decided to shoot an Archduke of another country. From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, Hannah Arendt was right — that powerlessness is the major experience of our lives. Politicians are powerless to stop the flow of generations, as young, foolish generations displace older, traumatized, experienced generations, and repeat all the mistakes of the past, once again, over and over. BBC and Washington Post and AFP, Related Articles, KEYS: Generational Dynamics, France, Marine Le Pen, Front National, François Hollande, Emmanuel Macron, François Fillon, Mélenchon, Le Pen, Donald Trump, Britain, Brexit, Theresa May, Vel d’Hiv, Auschwitz, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, European Project, La Belle Époque Permanent web link to this article Receive daily World View columns by | 1 |
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The New York Times headline article sums up Comey's dilemma aptly enough.
"Mr. Comey could immediately inform Congress about the emails, which were found in an investigation into former Representative Anthony D. Weiner. That unusual step, months after Mr. Comey had cleared Mrs. Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing in the email case, would risk accusations that he was unfairly harming her presidential campaign less than two weeks before the election.
"Or he could delay any announcement and examine the new emails more closely, risking criticism that he had suppressed important new information if it came out after the election, despite his pledges of "transparency" in the investigation."
And with that, the choice should have been obvious -- Comey shouldn't have made any announcement. There shouldn't have been a decision to make. - Advertisement -
That there was even a choice in Comey's mind comes back to the same thing that's caused the FBI Director to err at every single stage of this investigation. It's not that "Jim Comey is an apolitical straight shooter," as every talking head is eager to tell you. It's that Jim Comey is very concerned that he be seen as an apolitical straight shooter. Because of that, he has, repeatedly, put preservation of his own reputation ahead of both justice and the good of the nation.
From his ludicrous, finger-wagging press gaggle in announcing Clinton's innocence, to his ham-fisted intrusion into the final act of the election, Comey has felt compelled to insert Jim Comey, straight-shooter, into every moment.
As a result he's caused serious harm to the FBI, to the election, and to the nation. And, just incidentally, he's ruined his reputation in the process.
Across the nation, prosecuting attorneys are not exactly the most modest or retiring of public servants. It's a position of unique power, and often engages the most vaunting egos. And yet, Comey has managed to shock those people whose responsibilities are most like his own.
"'It is not the function of the FBI director to be making public pronouncements about an investigation, never mind about an investigation based on evidence that he acknowledges may not be significant,' [former assistant U.S. attorney] Akerman added. 'The job of the FBI is simply to investigate and to provide the results of its investigation to the prosecutorial arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. His job is not to give a running commentary about any investigation or his opinion about any investigation. This is particularly egregious since Secretary Clinton has no way to respond to what amounts to nebulous and speculative innuendo.'" - Advertisement -
It's not enough for Comey to do his job. He wants to be seen doing his job. He worries about the eyes of history, the verdict of time. Which is exactly where, and why, Comey failed.
Doing the right thing means doing what you believe is proper even if the verdict of history comes against you. It means being willing to be seen as biased, or not transparent, or simply wrong. Doing the right thing risks finding that what you did was actually wrong. You must act on what you know, and do the best regardless.
But Comey was more concerned that he be seen as doing the right thing. And that's ... a completely different thing.
In essence, James Comey set his ego above the good of the country. That's not illegal, but it's certainly not right. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats will attempt to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ( ) announced on Thursday during a speech on the Senate floor. [This is the fourth day of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Gorsuch, who currently serves on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Although the more liberal members of the committee tried to provoke Gorsuch, the Colorado judge remained poised and disciplined during his testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday, avoiding any missteps. That part of the hearing process is now over, and senators are now listening to witnesses for and against the nomination. Gorsuch appears to continue headed toward a successful confirmation in the Senate. But today Schumer criticized what he called Gorsuch’s “lack of candor and desire to answer” questions before the committee. He then announced, “After careful deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot support Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court. ” While it only takes a simple majority of 51 votes in the Senate to confirm a nominee, Schumer then went on to say that Gorsuch “will have to earn 60 votes for confirmation. ” This means a filibuster. Under Senate Rule 22, for any question involving debate, if senators wish to continue speaking, it takes a vote of the full Senate (60 out of 100) to invoke a motion for cloture, which limits debate to no more than 30 additional hours, after which a final vote must be held. When senators insist on continuing debate until cloture shuts them down, it’s called a filibuster. Filibusters have historically been for legislative debates only, not judicial nominations. The first time in American history that a filibuster was used to stop any judicial nomination was 2003, when Senate Democrats filibustered President George W. Bush’s nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit, followed soon thereafter by other Bush judicial nominees. The only previous filibuster attempt ever made over a judge was in 1968 against the nomination of Justice Abe Fortas to become chief justice and replace Earl Warren. However, a majority of senators went on record saying they would vote against Fortas in any event, so it was not the filibuster that stopped Fortas. It was instead lacking enough votes to confirm him. For Estrada, by contrast, a majority of the Senate went on record supporting his confirmation, so it was the threshold for cloture obstructing an vote that defeated his nomination. The architect of the strategy of using a filibuster to block an vote on judicial nominations was none other than Schumer, who at the time had only been in the Senate for less than five years, and was not in a leadership position. In November 2014, Leader Harry Reid ( ) reinterpreted the rules of the Senate so that the filibuster could not be used on any presidential nominations except the Supreme Court, clearing the way for Democrats to confirm several nominations that Republicans had blocked. This tactic has been called the “constitutional option” by some, and the “nuclear option” by others. With Schumer’s announcement that he will lead a filibuster of Gorsuch’s nomination, Republicans must either pick up eight Democrats to join Republicans in voting for cloture, or Republicans must hold together at least 50 of their 52 members (with Vice President Mike Pence as a ) to extend the constitutional option to Supreme Court nominations. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote Gorsuch out of committee on April 3, sending the nomination to the Senate floor for this filibuster showdown. Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski. | 0 |
(Before It's News)
Elena Toledo reports that Nearly 50,000 Haitian immigrants have been stranded in Brazil, and in the coming months will pass through Mexico in order to reach the United States. President of Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) Luis Raul Gonzalez said that the flow of Haitian immigrants to Mexico has become an issue over recent months […] | 0 |
Amid the modern skyscrapers of Shanghai, the parties to a treaty are at war. At stake are the spoils of a industry and a minority group’s ability to retain its customs in a China. Also, noodles. When Xian Gulin opened a halal restaurant in Shanghai last month that serves beef noodles, he hoped patrons would line up at his door. What he got instead was an entrance blocked for weeks by protesters. The protesters, like Mr. Xian, were Hui, a Muslim ethnic minority, originally from China’s northwest. They accused the restaurateur of violating the Treaty, a social pact that prohibits the Hui from opening halal noodle shops within 400 meters of each other — roughly 1, 300 feet. To appease the protesters, Mr. Xian eventually agreed to take down the halal insignia from his storefront. The origins of the treaty are unknown, but restaurateurs say it originally capped the number of noodle shops in a Hui village at one. As more Hui began moving eastward into China’s growing coastal cities, they brought a variant of the treaty with them. “For the Hui as a community, maintaining their halal traditions and restaurants has been critical to their survival, so it’s not surprising that in a highly capitalized society, these rivalries would bubble to the surface,” said Dru Gladney, an anthropology professor at Pomona College in California and an expert on Chinese ethnic minorities. The halal food industry has flourished in China as the country has pursued closer economic relations with Middle Eastern nations. In Qinghai Province alone, sales of halal food products in 2014 totaled about $2. 8 billion. On Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, online commenters condemned the protests. Even the Islamic Association of Qinghai got involved, declaring the boycott of Mr. Xian’s restaurant a violation of “fair competition” that caused “social instability. ” Still, Hui restaurateurs insist that the treaty is more necessary than ever. “We worked so hard to climb our way up, so we can’t tolerate people who do not respect the treaty,” said Ma Yi Buo La, 37, who owns a halal noodle shop in Shanghai. “People who don’t abide by the treaty, they’re not good people,” he said. Yet enforcement of the treaty is increasingly difficult as halal cuisine becomes more popular across China. “It was a tradition in our villages back home, but I don’t think anyone really respects this treaty anymore in large cities,” said Ma Kefu, 19, a Gansu native who now works at a halal restaurant in Beijing. To make his point, he gestured across the street. No more than 15 feet away stood another halal restaurant, its intricate halal insignia prominently on display. | 0 |
LGBT writer Skylar refused to accept homosexuals who “come out” as supporters of President Trump in a new article for The Independent, encouraging others in the LGBT community to cut ties with gay conservatives. [In the article, responded to OUT magazine’s Chadwick Moore, who came out as a conservative on Saturday and explained how the LGBT community started to ignore, reject, and cut ties with him after he wrote a neutral profile on Breitbart Senior Editor MILO and expressed conservative political beliefs. “Gay conservatives aren’t welcome in gay spaces because the people they support are an existential threat to our rights and our community,” claimed condemning homosexual conservatives including Moore and MILO. “After all, queer spaces (such as bars, bathhouses, community centres, and even bookstores) were founded and instrumental in radical sexual politics and political engagement. You can’t divorce that from the social aspect, because doing so would deny the history of our community and the present reality of so many vulnerable LGBT people. ” “Asking that the gay community embrace you and your politics is like one turkey asking another to be okay that he voted for the farmer and Thanksgiving,” he continued. “I don’t care if this hurts someone’s feelings I’m more concerned with the harm their vote causes. So until American conservatism welcomes queer people, queer people shouldn’t welcome American conservatives. Even if they’re queer themselves. Sorry, Chad. Maybe Milo will buy you a drink. ” further attacked homosexual conservatives on his Twitter account, where he added: “I have no time for gay American conservatives. Go cry your tears elsewhere. ” I have no time for gay American conservatives. Go cry your tears elsewhere. My latest for the Independent: https: . — Skylar (@SkylarJordan) February 13, 2017, During his article coming out as a conservative on Saturday, Chadwick Moore explained how he had been ousted from LGBT circles and cut off from his best friend, who no longer wanted to have anything to do with him. “I decided to go out to my local gay bar in Williamsburg, where I’ve been a regular for 11 years. I ordered a drink but nothing felt the same half the place — people with whom I’d shared many laughs — seemed to be giving me the cold shoulder,” Moore recalled. “Upon seeing me, a friend who normally greets me with a hug and kiss pivoted and turned away … My best friend, with whom I typically hung out multiple times per week, was suddenly perpetually unavailable. Finally, on Christmas Eve, he sent me a long text, calling me a monster, asking where my heart and soul went, and saying that all our other friends are laughing at me. ” “I began to realize that maybe my opinions just didn’t fit in with the liberal status quo, which seems to mean that you must absolutely hate Trump, his supporters and everything they believe,” he concluded, adding, “It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore. ” Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — A week ago, President Trump was accused of being a tool for the Russians, an unwitting agent of influence, so full of admiration that he defended President Vladimir V. Putin against critics who called him a killer. Now, Mr. Trump is in a diplomatic clash with Mr. Putin’s Russia, his administration accusing Moscow of trying to cover up a Syrian chemical weapons attack on civilians and his secretary of state delivering ultimatums. Even in a presidency marked by unpredictability, the shift from coziness to confrontation has left Washington and other capitals with a case of geopolitical whiplash. The prospects of improving relations were already slim given the atmosphere of suspicion stemming from Kremlin meddling in last year’s election, but the détente once envisioned by Mr. Trump has instead deteriorated into the latest cold war. For Mr. Trump’s camp, the abrupt turnaround simply proved how false the conspiracy narrative was from the start. “If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie,” said Eric Trump, the president’s son. For some critics, it seemed to be a cynical way of distracting attention from the multiple investigations into possible contacts between associates of Mr. Trump and Russia even as Moscow was trying to help Mr. Trump win the presidency. Either way, it suggested that the relationship between the two powers could be volatile in the months to come, subject to the impulsive reactions of a president with no prior experience in foreign policy, the often strident responses of a Russian leader given to his own moments of pique and the clashing national interests of both countries in key areas around the world. “I was skeptical from the beginning that it would be possible for the United States and Russia, after all that happened in the last few years, to engage in a successful reset,” said Angela Stent, a former national intelligence officer on Russia now at Georgetown University. “What’s surprising is how quickly we returned to the status quo ante we had at the end of the Obama administration. ” John R. Beyrle, a former ambassador to Moscow, said the extremes of the relationship were being exaggerated and it would probably settle back into the middle. “Levels of trust have deteriorated so much that these initial meetings will produce little in the way of agreements and the investigations into likely Russian interference in the election cast a huge shadow that both sides need to acknowledge,” he said. Mr. Trump is the fourth president in a row who came into office determined to reboot the relationship with Moscow, an ambition that often eluded the other three. The difference is that the hacking of Democratic email during last year’s election, for which intelligence agencies blamed Russia, made Mr. Trump’s embrace of Mr. Putin politically problematic. His willingness to overlook Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its armed intervention in eastern Ukraine and, until now, its support for President Bashar ’s government in Syria mystified many experts. He called Mr. Putin “a stronger leader” than President Barack Obama, praised him for “doing a great job” and expressed hope that he would be “my new best friend. ” Michael Morell, a former acting C. I. A. director, wrote last fall that Mr. Trump seemed to be an “unwitting agent of influence” for Moscow. By Tuesday, after Mr. Trump ordered a missile strike against Syria in retaliation for using chemical weapons on its own people, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson arrived in Moscow with a harsh warning that Russia had better give up its support of Mr. Assad. He was greeted with a cold shoulder, denied a meeting with Mr. Putin as no secretary of state has been on a first visit to Moscow going back to the days of Cordell Hull in World War II. Back in Washington, the White House held a briefing accusing Russia of shielding Syria’s chemical weapons attack on civilians. The Russians have responded with harsh language of their own. On Tuesday, Mr. Putin compared Mr. Trump’s action in Syria to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. And Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev suggested that Mr. Trump has turned out not to be what he presented himself to be during last year’s campaign. “That’s it,” he wrote on Facebook last week. “The last remaining election fog has lifted. ” In the end, he said, Mr. Trump was “broken by the existing power machine” in Washington. Mr. Morell said on Tuesday that despite calling Mr. Trump a virtual Russian agent, he always believed Russian behavior would lead to a parting of the ways. “This seems to be happening now,” he said. But he noted that Mr. Trump has left it to Mr. Tillerson and others rather than speaking out himself. “He needs to do that, and he needs to be critical of the large number of other aggressive actions that Putin has undertaken over the past two years,” Mr. Morell said. Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign last year, said the shift in tone in recent days did not mean there was not collusion during the election. “Everything we believed happened in the election could be true — Putin wanted him to be president and the administration took the action it took last week,” she said. “It could all be part of the master ruse — or Putin could be upset about it. ” Either way, she said, “There’s no evidence that it changes anything I think happened in the election or that Democrats should back off investigations. And moreover, it’s really weird that he himself hasn’t said anything. ” Mr. Trump will have the opportunity on Wednesday when he hosts NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg. European leaders will be listening to what Mr. Trump has to say, given that during the campaign he criticized NATO even as he praised Mr. Putin. Aides to Mr. Trump have been frustrated at the focus on the Russia investigations and the assumptions that the president’s associates did something wrong even though several officials have said no evidence has emerged that proves collusion with Russia. They blame the media for creating a false narrative that they see as now disproved. How, they ask, could Mr. Trump’s team have made secret deals with Russia if his own secretary of state cannot even get a meeting? “It’s interesting that we went from all of these direct links to Russia to now are we disappointed that we can’t even get a meeting with him,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. “There is a bit of irony in the question. ” Eric Trump voiced that sentiment in an interview with London’s Daily Telegraph published on Tuesday. The younger Mr. Trump said his father was influenced to retaliate against Syria for using chemical weapons on civilians in part by his sister Ivanka, who was “heartbroken and outraged” by the atrocity. Even though some question the president’s approach to Russia, Eric Trump said his father would not be “pushed around” by Mr. Putin. “He is not a guy who gets intimidated,” he said. The over Russia left lawmakers trying to make sense of it. “It speaks to the broader incoherence of this administration’s foreign policy,” said Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “The change in rhetoric on Russia is . I’m glad to see it and I hope it continues, but so far the only thing we know about this administration’s foreign policy is that it will probably change in a week or two. ” But Mr. Murphy said the congressional intelligence committees still need to investigate what happened in last year’s election. If the shift in tone from the administration happened two months ago, he said, it might have undercut that determination. But since then, he said, more evidence has emerged. “There’s now some pretty important meat on the bones of this story,” he said. “The imperative remains to get to the bottom of it. ” | 1 |
The Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) the largest trade show for the gaming industry, will open its doors to 15, 000 of its most devoted consumers in 2017. [On Monday, February 13, the Entertainment Software Association will open limited ticket sales to what is arguably the most important trade show in the gaming industry. E3 will welcome fifteen thousand fans to join developers, publicists, and members of the media in June. The first 1, 000 to purchase their tickets will gain access for $150. The remainder will need to pay $250 to gain entrance to the ESA’s chaotic digital wonderland. While E3 attendance has never been officially public, prior to 2007 the credentials needed for entry were relatively broad. 2007’s restructuring attempted to curtail the growing crowd but culled much of the event’s excitement along with the vast majority of its attendees. This year’s expo looks to capture the enthusiasm of eager consumers while taking reasonable precautions not to flood the show floor to the point of obstruction. ESA Senior VP of Communications Rich Taylor called it “a strategic decision” for “a changing industry,” made possible “thanks to our members and their vision and leadership. ” According to Taylor, they’ve been listening: The feedback we heard was clear — they wanted to play the games inside the convention center. In addition, exhibitors inside the convention center wanted to have access to the fans. So this year we’re bringing the two together. Is this a step in the right direction for the world’s most famous industry event? Will it bring back some of the major publishers that have decided to host their own separate shows in the recent past? And, most importantly, will I see you at this year’s E3? Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both. | 0 |
TEHRAN — A employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, arrested in Iran more than two months ago for unexplained reasons, has been accused of plotting to overthrow the government, Iranian news media reported Wednesday. The detainee, Nazanin 37, is a program coordinator for the foundation, the independent charitable arm of the Thomson Reuters news agency. Both the foundation and Ms. ’s British husband, Richard Ratcliffe, denied the accusations. Ms. was arrested on April 3 in Tehran and taken to the provincial city of Kerman in southern Iran, according to a statement by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps provided to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. Her daughter, Gabriella, who had accompanied her to Iran for a visit with family, is staying with maternal grandparents. The child’s passport was confiscated by the Iranian authorities, severely complicating any possibility of reuniting her with Mr. Ratcliffe. “The British national, Nazanin Zaghari, who was arrested by the intelligence department of the Sarallah Corps of Kerman, has participated in coup plots,” the Revolutionary Guards statement read. “Through membership in foreign companies and institutions, she has participated in designing and executing media and cyberplots with the aim of the peaceful overthrow of the Islamic Republic establishment. ” The statement also accused Ms. of being “one of the chief members of networks of adversary institutions, who — with the direction and support of foreign media and espionage services — has committed her criminal acts over the past few years. ” Mr. Ratcliffe was quoted by Reuters as calling the accusations against his wife “preposterous” charges that appeared to be a political case. He has been outspoken in calling for her release and started an online petition that now has more than 764, 000 signatures. The Revolutionary Guards statement seemed directed at the Thomson Reuters company, a global media powerhouse regarded with suspicion and hostility in Iran because of its British foundations. Reuters merged with Canada’s Thomson company in 2008. “The media corporations of hegemonic governments, especially the British media, have made their best efforts in the recent months to support her in order to weaken the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ determination but this false hope will never come true,” the statement added. In 2012 Thomson Reuters’ press accreditation was suspended in Iran after the news agency was accused of having lied in a video report that asserted Iranian housewives were training to become ninja assassins. (A misleading headline in the report was corrected.) The suspended accreditation followed the closing of the British Embassy in Tehran after it had been attacked by protesters. The government of President Hassan Rouhani has reportedly been in discussions to allow a Thomson Reuters bureau to reopen. are opposed to what they view as increased influence by Westerners. Ms. has never worked inside Iran, according to a statement released on Wednesday by the Thomson Reuters Foundation chief executive, Monique Villa. “Nazanin has been working at the Thomson Reuters Foundation for the past four years as a project coordinator in charge of grants applications and training, and had no dealing with Iran in her professional capacity,” the statement said. “The Thomson Reuters Foundation has no dealings with Iran whatsoever, does not operate and does not plan to operate in the country. ” The intelligence unit of the Revolutionary Guards has arrested several dual citizens over recent months. The latest such arrest was last week, when a professor researching women, Homa Hoodfar, was arrested on undisclosed charges. The semiofficial Mashregh news organization reported Wednesday that she was accused of collaborating with two organizations that “are working to diminish religiosity and equal gender rights. ” Mashregh criticized the two organizations, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, and Hivos, a human rights advocacy group based in The Hague, for “emphasizing women’s control of their own bodies and choosing to live single. ” | 0 |
vodka , beer , russians Visitors at the bar "Aist" (Stork) on Lubyansky Proyezd in Moscow Source:Alexey Kudenko / RIA Novosti
The volume of retail trade turnover in Russia continues to decrease. In August, it fell by 0.1 percent compared to the previous month, compared to January-August last year, when it fell by 5.7 per cent, said analysts from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). They were citing data from the state statistical agency Rosstat and a survey conducted by the Institute for Social Analysis and Forecasting.
The turnover is decreasing because Russians are not only eating less and cutting back on spending on services, but they are also drinking fewer alcoholic beverages. Sales of vodka dropped catastrophically’
From January to August 2016, vodka, liqueurs and brandies accounted for 42 percent of sales volume. Beer amounted to 44-45 percent of total sales of alcohol. Another 12-13 percent was wine production.
Other beverages (cider, mead, etc.) made up less than 1 percent of alcohol products bought by people, according to RANEPA's monitoring data.
Whiskey or vodka: Which drink will dominate?
The range of sales is clearly seasonal. Retailers usually sell more wine, champagne and vodka in December while sales of beer increase by 15-20 percent in mid-summer compared to the beginning of the year.
"Retail sales of alcohol have significantly decreased over the past two years. 10.6 percent fewer alcoholic beverages were sold between January and August this year than during the same eight months of 2014," the survey report stated. Retail sales of alcoholic beverages bottomed out in January and April 2016.
"Sales of vodka have dropped catastrophically," Alexandra Burdyak, a senior researcher at RANEPA and one of the authors of the study, said. "The drop was 13.4 percent against the same period of last year. The main decline occurred last year, when sales of vodka decreased by 12.6 percent compared to 2014."
However, the wine production sector showed a different trend. The traditional New Year increase in sales of wine and champagne dragged on, with wine sales remaining at 2015 levels until May 2016.
Burdyak said consumers first finished their earlier stored wine and then, as stocks in cabinets dried out, and lovers of wine and sparkling wines made sure that nothing was happening in the economy, the ruble was not strengthening and the prices of imported alcohol were not decreasing, they began to buy this type of alcohol again. The new generation of consumers
According to Burdyak, the decrease in consumption of vodka and other alcoholic beverages has been steady since 2013. Strong alcohol consumption peaked in 2007, and it has been in decline since then.
The taste of Russians, born in 1985 and later, has been shaped by western, primarily European influences; they prefer wine, beer and other light alcoholic beverages.
However, Vadim Drobiz, director of the Centre for Federal and Regional Alcohol Market Studies (TSIFRRA), believes it is a little too early to talk about a reduction in alcohol consumption in Russia.
"Because of the crisis, the main consumers of alcoholic drinks could have switched to cheaper options, this is possible," he said. "But few people are capable of seriously saving on alcohol."
Despite falling production, vodka consumption increasing in Russia Drinking away the crisis
Vodka consumption fell from 53 percent of retail sales, measured in terms of absolute alcohol content, in 2007-2009 to 39 percent in 2015. During the same period, the share of beer increased from 31-32 percent to 43 percent of total sales of alcoholic beverages.
The total volume of retail sales is calculated in terms of absolute alcohol content as follows: Half a litre of vodka (40 percent alcohol) is equal to 200 grams of ethanol; one litre of beer (4 percent) is equivalent to 40 grams, and one litre of wine (12 percent) contains 120 grams of ethanol.
These trends appear likely to continue over the next few years, though some analysts have reservations.
"It should be borne in mind that consumers, and the Russians certainly in my experience, consider strong alcohol to be an antidepressant," Drobiz said. "And that means that consumption of vodka and other spirits in the context of the ongoing economic crisis is not likely to fall."
First published in Russian by Gazeta.ru . Facebook | 1 |
Stephen Colbert has come under fire on social media for a crude joke he made about President Donald Trump on Monday’s broadcast of The Late Show that some critics claimed was bigoted and homophobic. [While attempting to defend his CBS colleague John Dickerson, Colbert said Trump’s mouth is only “good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster. ” Outraged by the remark, social media users quickly made the hashtag #FireColbert a top trending topic on Twitter Tuesday. “Colbert’s homophobic rant was disgusting and we won’t tolerate this behavior,” one user wrote. “Liberals ruin the careers of conservatives all the time, so the #FireColbert campaign is just giving libs a taste of their own medicine,” argued another. Some called Colbert a “homophobe” and a “bigot. ” #FireColbert Colbert is a . Here’s all of advertisers Contact them tell them stop funding him https: . pic. twitter. — Red Pill⏳ (@RedPillDropper) May 2, 2017, Liberals ruin the careers of conservatives all the time, so the #FireColbert campaign is just giving libs a taste of their own medicine. — Mark Dice (@MarkDice) May 3, 2017, Hey @CBS #StephenColbert is NOT a comic. I NEVER tune in because of his attitude towards @POTUS @realDonaldTrump #FireColbert, — Rep. B. J. Nikkel (@RepBJNikkel) May 3, 2017, #firecolbert CBS STAND UP AND DO THE RIGHT THING FIRE COLBERT THIS SHOULD NOT BE TOLERATED, IF IT WAS SAID ABOUT OBAMA HE WOULD BE GONE, — MIKEM (@09BRAININJURY) May 2, 2017, So, Colbert is saying homophobic things again? Disappointing that CBS supports and empowers this. #firecolbert, — Michael Oxley (@Truthchampion16) May 2, 2017, I don’t know that it was homophobic, but Colbert’s comment was very inappropriate and not funny enough to be worth the risk #firecolbert, — Kimbro13 (@kimbro1360) May 2, 2017, Some social media users called for a boycott of CBS and the network’s advertisers. Time for him to go. Total trash. I will boycott advertisers. #FireColbert, — hank_1972 (@Hank_1972) May 3, 2017, Boycott CBS #FireColbert, — Tricia Ann (@TriciaC0324) May 3, 2017, German Lopez, a reporter for news outlet Vox, wrote that Colbert’s joke pointedly mocked gay people. “In a setting in which Colbert is deliberately trying to find a way to insult Trump, it’s telling that he resorts to suggesting that Trump is engaging in sexual acts with another man. The suggestion is that the worst thing that could happen for these men is if they engaged in homosexual acts together, as if that devalues them as men or emasculates them. ” Colbert’s monologue also included fat jokes about President Trump. “Mr. President, I love your presidency. I call it ‘Disgrace the Nation,’” he began. “You’re not the POTUS you’re the ‘BLOTUS.’ You’re the glutton with the button. You’re a regular ‘Gorge Washington.’ You’re the ‘ ’ but you’re turning into a real ‘ . ’” “Sir, you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine,” Colbert continued. “You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a gorilla that got hit in the head. ” Tonight: Stephen tells the President everything journalists, restrained by their dignity, wish they could say. #LSSC pic. twitter. — The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) May 1, 2017, Colbert did not address the firestorm surrounding his comments during Tuesday night’s episode of The Late Show, opting instead to continue to blast Trump and Putin. The CBS host compared the president to author Stephen King, saying Trump just “makes things up. ” He also aired a clip of Trump’s quotes taken out of context. Colbert’s ratings have risen steadily since Inauguration Day. The CBS host has regularly beaten rival Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show since January, though Fallon still usually leads in the adults demographic. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson | 0 |
Vladimir Putin: Who will protect young boys from pedophiles and rapists in Europe? ‹ › Ian Greenhalgh is a photographer and historian with a particular interest in military history and the real causes of conflicts. His studies in history and background in the media industry have given him a keen insight into the use of mass media as a creator of conflict in the modern world. His favored areas of study include state sponsored terrorism, media manufactured reality and the role of intelligence services in manipulation of populations and the perception of events. Trump rape accuser skips press conference, citing threats By Ian Greenhalgh on November 4, 2016 Woman known only as ‘Jane Doe’ alleges Republican presidential nominee sexually assaulted her when she was 13 Attorney Lisa Bloom announces the cancellation of a press conference for Trump accuser ‘Jane Doe’ in Woodland Hills, California, November 2, 2016. Trump rape accuser skips press conference, citing threats
A woman who claims she was raped as a teenager by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump failed to show up for a Wednesday press conference during which she was to reveal her identity, citing threats against her.
The woman, known in the media by the pseudonym Jane Doe, alleges Trump sexually assaulted her four times in 1994, when she was just 13, during parties organized by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In 2008 Epstein was sentenced to 13 months in prison for soliciting sex with an underage girl.
Reporters packed into the office of Doe’s lawyer in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she was expected to speak publicly about her allegations for the first time. However, her lawyer Lisa Bloom appeared alone and explained that the media event was canceled because her client feared for her safety.
“Jane Doe has received numerous threats today as have all the Trump accusers that I have represented,” Bloom said. “She has decided she is too afraid to show her face. She has been here all day, ready to do it, but unfortunately she is in terrible fear. We’re going to have to reschedule. I apologize to all of you who came. I have nothing further.”
Bloom, who has a court TV show and is a legal analyst for NBC News, is the daughter of Gloria Allred, a civil rights attorney representing three other women making claims against Trump.
According to court papers, the woman claims she was offered money to attend the parties and that Trump, who knew her age to be just 13, initiated the sex.
On the fourth occasion, Trump allegedly tied her to a bed, exposed himself, and then raped her despite her loud protestations. Trump, she claims, hit her in the face and told her he could do whatever he wanted. He then warned her that if she revealed the abuse, she and her family would be “physically harmed if not killed.” She claims there are witnesses to the assaults and that Epstein also raped her.
Trump, who has faced a recent series of claims by women alleging sexual assaults, has categorically denied Jane Doe’s story as a fabrication, part of a smear campaign against him.
On Wednesday Bloom tweeted that her firm’s website and emails had been hacked, saying the hacker group Anonymous had taken responsibility.
The UK’s Guardian newspaper, which in recent months has been investigating the claims by Doe, reported that she first tried to file a complaint against Trump in April but the paperwork was dismissed due to filing errors. A second lawsuit was submitted in June in New York and California, and then apparently amended again in September.
The newspaper noted that the claims have mostly been ignored by mainstream media because they “appeared to have been orchestrated by an eccentric anti-Trump campaigner with a record of making outlandish claims about celebrities,” referring to Norm Lubow, a former producer on the Jerry Springer television show.
The Guardian said that in June it discovered a publicist known as “Al Taylor” who tried to sell a videotape of Doe talking about her allegations for $1 million. Taylor, the report said, was linked to Lubow.
However, when the Guardian contacted “Al Taylor” to uncover his identity, he replied, “Just be warned, we’ll sue you if we don’t like what you write. We’ll sue your ass, own your ass and own your newspaper’s ass as well, punk.”
An initial status conference in Doe’s civil lawsuit against Trump has been scheduled for December 16 in a New York district court, just over a month after the November 8 US presidential elections. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Ian Greenhalgh on November 4, 2016, With 6 Reads Filed under Politics . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . Both comments and pings are currently closed. | 1 |
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